... I want to state my belief that the most beautiful First Lady was Frances Cleveland (and what a strange romance!).
Noticed while watching this survey of First Ladies:
Showing posts with label Grover Cleveland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grover Cleveland. Show all posts
September 7, 2021
"One person who has discussed Trump’s plans but declined to comment on the record... said that 'he really hasn’t decided, but we all think he’ll run … he wants to get in a position to where it’s a turnkey operation once he says yes....'"
"Only one former president, Grover Cleveland in 1892, has ever returned from defeat to reclaim his old office. Trump would turn 78 years old during the 2024 campaign, making him even older than Ronald Reagan when he left office at the end of his second term.... '[Biden] started bleeding, and Trump is like a shark. He smelled blood,' said one confidante with whom Trump has recently spoken. But another cautioned that 'he was running before the Afghanistan debacle. It’s nothing new.'... Former presidents have at times criticized their predecessor, but none have shattered the norms of post-presidential decorum like Trump, who has taken swipes at Biden and offered his own daily commentary."
Why did Politico bring up Reagan like that, noting that at 78, Trump would be "even older than Ronald Reagan when he left office at the end of his second term"? Biden is 78 right now, in the first year of his term. Isn't Biden the proper comparison?
Anyway, I guess we all know that Trump is running. How can he not, being who he is? Are you happy with that?
May 3, 2020
"In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse."
Said Stillwater City Manager Norman McNickle, quoted in "Oklahoma city ends face mask rule for shoppers after store employees are threatened" (NBC).
The city government made the rule, but it was left to workers in stores and restaurants to do the enforcement, so they were the ones who got the abuse from citizens who didn't like the rule. Apparently, there were threats of violence against the employees, so the city abandoned the rule.
When I first read that headline, I thought the problem was that people in masks were threatening violence, and the mask rule was ended so the malefactors could be identified. But, no, citizens intent on showing their face were going ahead and threatening violence.
I wonder what kind of a place Stillwater is. Wikipedia:
AND: About those boomers:
The city government made the rule, but it was left to workers in stores and restaurants to do the enforcement, so they were the ones who got the abuse from citizens who didn't like the rule. Apparently, there were threats of violence against the employees, so the city abandoned the rule.
When I first read that headline, I thought the problem was that people in masks were threatening violence, and the mask rule was ended so the malefactors could be identified. But, no, citizens intent on showing their face were going ahead and threatening violence.
I wonder what kind of a place Stillwater is. Wikipedia:
The north-central region of Oklahoma became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. In 1832, author and traveler Washington Irving provided the first recorded description of the area around Stillwater in his book A Tour on the Prairies. He wrote of “a glorious prairie spreading out beneath the golden beams of an autumnal sun. The deep and frequent traces of buffalo, showed it to be a one of their favorite grazing grounds.”
According to one legend, local Native American tribes — Ponca, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee — called the creek “Still Water” because the water was always still. A second legend states that cattlemen driving herds from Texas to railways back east always found water "still there". A third legend holds that David L. Payne walked up to Stillwater Creek and said, “This town should be named Still Water”. Members of the board thought he was crazy, but the name stuck.I like that Washington Irving showed up. And the term "boomer colony."
Stillwater Creek received its official name in 1884 when William L. Couch established his “boomer colony” on its banks. While the creek itself was tranquil, the next few years saw turmoil as pioneers sought free, fertile land and soldiers held them off while complicated legal issues and land titles with Creek and Seminole tribes were hashed out....
AND: About those boomers:
"Boomers" is the name given to settlers in the Southern United States who attempted to enter the Unassigned Lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma in 1879, prior to President Grover Cleveland opening them to settlement by signing the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 on March 2, 1889. The Sooners, settlers who entered the Unassigned Lands just prior to the April 22, 1889 official opening, were preceded by Boomers by a decade.
The term "Boomer," in relation to Oklahoma, refers to participants in the "Boomer Movement." These participants were white settlers who believed the Unassigned Lands were public property and open to anyone for settlement, not just Indian tribes. Their belief was based on a clause in the Homestead Act of 1862 which said that any settler could claim 160 acres (0.65 km2; 0.25 sq mi) of "public land." Some Boomers entered the Unassigned Lands and were removed more than once by the United States Army....
August 4, 2017
The President Benjamin Harrison Memorial Window.
Seen in the previous post, but I just wanted to close in on the image:
It's the Archangel Michael:
Harrison's widow commissioned Tiffany to make the window for the First Presbyterian Church, where Harrison had been an elder for 40 years.
Michael's medieval armor is — according to the wall card at the museum — intended to represent his "martial role in Heaven as a defender of God" and to refer to President Harrison's service in the Civil War.
Another interesting thing about Benjamin Harrison is that 6 states joined the union in his 4 year term. That's the same number of states that joined the union in all of the years since then.
It's the Archangel Michael:
Harrison's widow commissioned Tiffany to make the window for the First Presbyterian Church, where Harrison had been an elder for 40 years.
Michael's medieval armor is — according to the wall card at the museum — intended to represent his "martial role in Heaven as a defender of God" and to refer to President Harrison's service in the Civil War.
[Harrison] commanded the brigade at the battles of Resaca, Cassville, New Hope Church, Lost Mountain, Kennesaw Mountain, Marietta, Peachtree Creek and Atlanta. When Sherman's main force began its March to the Sea, Harrison's brigade was transferred to the District of Etowah and participated in the Battle of Nashville.Harrison was President from 1889 to 1893. He had the unique experience of defeating a President who was seeking re-election and having that man defeat him when he sought re-election. (The other President was Grover Cleveland, who is considered the 22nd and 24th President of the United States.) Harrison was also unique as the only President whose grandfather was President.
Another interesting thing about Benjamin Harrison is that 6 states joined the union in his 4 year term. That's the same number of states that joined the union in all of the years since then.
April 17, 2017
There's nothing substantial to read about the series finale episode of "Girls"...
... so I'll just make a list of my thoughts on the subject.
1. I laughed when Hannah (the Lena Dunham character) got mad at Marnie (the Allison Williams character) for letting the song "Fast Car" play on the car radio and singing along. "Fast Car" is that 1988 Tracy Chapman recording that — in my experience — comes on the "Coffeehouse"-type channels of satellite radio far too often. The Wikipedia article on the song suggests why XM programmers think that's what will work on listeners who hang out on that part of the dial:
2. Meade — who tends to sit with me when I watch one of my shows — had a different reaction to "Fast Car." He thought it meant that Marnie — who was driving the car — was going to crash and kill them all. I said: "That's how they're going to end the series — just randomly kill everybody?!"
3. The story arc of the last season has been: Hannah got pregnant. In the final episode, the baby has arrived. We were spared having to endure an episode with labor pains, getting-to-the-hospital high jinks, pushing and screaming, umbilical cord twirling — all the theater of childbirth. But perhaps that was only because an earlier season had already given us a childbirth episode. We had many episodes of pregnant Hannah, and now, in the final episode, the baby is suddenly here. The drama/comedy is all about breastfeeding — the mechanics of breastfeeding and breastfeeding to represent everything about mother-and-child bonding. The story is really about the end of Hannah's life as the child to the recognition of herself as the mother. If the breasts repurpose themselves as milk dispensers — voila!
4. The baby appears to be black. Here's a picture of Hannah and Paul-Louis, the father of the baby. The actor playing the role is Riz Ahmed, a British man of Pakistani descent. It's as if the show's producers see race in terms of white and nonwhite. I suspect they thought it was racially enlightened to give the white main character a dark-skinned baby, but I found it distracting. How did the baby come out much darker than either parent? Maybe there's a scientific answer to how that could happen. I'm just saying it's distracting, and not just because I had to drift off into contemplating genetics. It's that I'm trying to imagine what they were thinking and how it related to the perennial criticism of the show that it is too much about the little problems of white people. Now, a little nonwhite baby comes into the world and saves Hannah. There's a lot of racial politics there to analyze, but the show didn't analyze it. My mind ran way off the track they wanted me to pay attention to. It was like the fast car in Meade's ideation.
5. The baby's name is Grover. That was the name Paul-Louis suggested over the telephone, when Hannah told him he was going to be a father and he wished her good luck. Why accept the absent father's weird name suggestion? She doesn't even know if the guy was thinking of President Grover Cleveland or Grover on "Sesame Street." Maybe there's some idea that if you don't get the last name from the father — the baby gets Hannah's last name (Horvath) — you should get the first name from the father. Some kind of feminist compromise. Grover's as good as any other name, isn't it? You can, for short, call him Gro, pronounced "grow." If you take out the verhorva, you've got gro[w]th. This series has been all about growth... and the lack of it. 6 seasons of lack of growth, and a final episode with a big magical growth spurt. Because: baby!
6. Each of Hannah's friends had made a pitch to be the baby's co-parent. (The show is not realistic.) In the final episode, Marnie is the one living in the charming upstate house with Hannah and the magical baby. She exults that she won — she is the best friend. As for that perfect house: Don't get distracted wondering how do these people get these houses? The show is not realistic.
7. But Marnie's only going to be in that house for a while. The stories of the other girls of "Girls" were wrapped up in the second-to-last episode, and this episode is concentrated on resolving the story of Hannah. But Marnie needs a send off too. We're prompted to understand that she won't stay in that house co-parenting with Hannah throughout Grover's childhood. That's Hannah's story to complete, which we're supposed to believe will happen because in the end the baby latches onto the nipple — the episode is titled "Latching" — and the screen goes black, the credits roll over sucking sounds, and Hannah is heard singing "Fast Car." The prompt for where Marnie's life story will go is her musing that she's always wanted to go to law school.
8. Law school! So this is the end of Marnie, going to law school?! Well, she was into reading those books about breastfeeding and she did swaddle the baby effectively. And then she proclaimed — right after saying law school was her heart's desire — that she loved rules. Ah, is that what drives people to law school, a love for rules? Maybe that's why I had a nightmare last night about being a terrible law professor. The students hate me because I won't stop all the nonsense and just tell them what the damned rules are already.
I'm stopping now. I started this list as my first post at about 6 a.m., but it was taking too long and wrote 4 other posts before coming back to this. And I think now the title of the post may be inapt. Surely, somebody else is opining on line, dealing with some of these themes — feminism, racial politics, names, law school. It's time to release this blog post out into the world — let it live a life of its own. I can't be coddling and swaddling this forever. Yes, there are only 8 points, and I could tweak it up to 10 for a round number. In fact, I could break up a couple points and get it up to 10 — or 3 and get it up to 11 — but I don't care. That would be Marnie-ish of me, and I'm not the Marnie....
1. I laughed when Hannah (the Lena Dunham character) got mad at Marnie (the Allison Williams character) for letting the song "Fast Car" play on the car radio and singing along. "Fast Car" is that 1988 Tracy Chapman recording that — in my experience — comes on the "Coffeehouse"-type channels of satellite radio far too often. The Wikipedia article on the song suggests why XM programmers think that's what will work on listeners who hang out on that part of the dial:
According to Metro Weekly critic Chris Gerard, "Fast Car" tells a grittily realistic story of a working poor woman trying to escape the cycle of poverty, set to folk rock music. The song's arrangement was described by Orlando Sentinel writer Thom Duffy as "subtle folk-rock," while Billboard magazine's Gary Trust deemed the record a "folk/pop" song. Dave Marsh said it was perhaps an "optimistic folk-rock narrative," whose characters are in a homeless shelter. American culture critic Jim Cullen believed that with songs like "Fast Car", Chapman brought a uniquely Black and feminist perspective to acoustic folk-rock's generally White, middle-class audience.When I hear the song, which I've heard way too many times over the last 30 years, I think of the well-off white people who love themselves too much for loving it. So I delighted at Hannah's annoyance at Marnie's loving the song. And I was crushed when absolutely the last thing that happened in the series was Hannah — as she got her baby to breastfeed at last — manifesting her long-awaited ascendance into adulthood by softly singing "Fast Car." My favorite thing about the episode — Hannah's irritation at Marnie's lame self-love at loving "Fast Car" — got ruined.
2. Meade — who tends to sit with me when I watch one of my shows — had a different reaction to "Fast Car." He thought it meant that Marnie — who was driving the car — was going to crash and kill them all. I said: "That's how they're going to end the series — just randomly kill everybody?!"
3. The story arc of the last season has been: Hannah got pregnant. In the final episode, the baby has arrived. We were spared having to endure an episode with labor pains, getting-to-the-hospital high jinks, pushing and screaming, umbilical cord twirling — all the theater of childbirth. But perhaps that was only because an earlier season had already given us a childbirth episode. We had many episodes of pregnant Hannah, and now, in the final episode, the baby is suddenly here. The drama/comedy is all about breastfeeding — the mechanics of breastfeeding and breastfeeding to represent everything about mother-and-child bonding. The story is really about the end of Hannah's life as the child to the recognition of herself as the mother. If the breasts repurpose themselves as milk dispensers — voila!
4. The baby appears to be black. Here's a picture of Hannah and Paul-Louis, the father of the baby. The actor playing the role is Riz Ahmed, a British man of Pakistani descent. It's as if the show's producers see race in terms of white and nonwhite. I suspect they thought it was racially enlightened to give the white main character a dark-skinned baby, but I found it distracting. How did the baby come out much darker than either parent? Maybe there's a scientific answer to how that could happen. I'm just saying it's distracting, and not just because I had to drift off into contemplating genetics. It's that I'm trying to imagine what they were thinking and how it related to the perennial criticism of the show that it is too much about the little problems of white people. Now, a little nonwhite baby comes into the world and saves Hannah. There's a lot of racial politics there to analyze, but the show didn't analyze it. My mind ran way off the track they wanted me to pay attention to. It was like the fast car in Meade's ideation.
5. The baby's name is Grover. That was the name Paul-Louis suggested over the telephone, when Hannah told him he was going to be a father and he wished her good luck. Why accept the absent father's weird name suggestion? She doesn't even know if the guy was thinking of President Grover Cleveland or Grover on "Sesame Street." Maybe there's some idea that if you don't get the last name from the father — the baby gets Hannah's last name (Horvath) — you should get the first name from the father. Some kind of feminist compromise. Grover's as good as any other name, isn't it? You can, for short, call him Gro, pronounced "grow." If you take out the verhorva, you've got gro[w]th. This series has been all about growth... and the lack of it. 6 seasons of lack of growth, and a final episode with a big magical growth spurt. Because: baby!
6. Each of Hannah's friends had made a pitch to be the baby's co-parent. (The show is not realistic.) In the final episode, Marnie is the one living in the charming upstate house with Hannah and the magical baby. She exults that she won — she is the best friend. As for that perfect house: Don't get distracted wondering how do these people get these houses? The show is not realistic.
7. But Marnie's only going to be in that house for a while. The stories of the other girls of "Girls" were wrapped up in the second-to-last episode, and this episode is concentrated on resolving the story of Hannah. But Marnie needs a send off too. We're prompted to understand that she won't stay in that house co-parenting with Hannah throughout Grover's childhood. That's Hannah's story to complete, which we're supposed to believe will happen because in the end the baby latches onto the nipple — the episode is titled "Latching" — and the screen goes black, the credits roll over sucking sounds, and Hannah is heard singing "Fast Car." The prompt for where Marnie's life story will go is her musing that she's always wanted to go to law school.
8. Law school! So this is the end of Marnie, going to law school?! Well, she was into reading those books about breastfeeding and she did swaddle the baby effectively. And then she proclaimed — right after saying law school was her heart's desire — that she loved rules. Ah, is that what drives people to law school, a love for rules? Maybe that's why I had a nightmare last night about being a terrible law professor. The students hate me because I won't stop all the nonsense and just tell them what the damned rules are already.
I'm stopping now. I started this list as my first post at about 6 a.m., but it was taking too long and wrote 4 other posts before coming back to this. And I think now the title of the post may be inapt. Surely, somebody else is opining on line, dealing with some of these themes — feminism, racial politics, names, law school. It's time to release this blog post out into the world — let it live a life of its own. I can't be coddling and swaddling this forever. Yes, there are only 8 points, and I could tweak it up to 10 for a round number. In fact, I could break up a couple points and get it up to 10 — or 3 and get it up to 11 — but I don't care. That would be Marnie-ish of me, and I'm not the Marnie....
September 6, 2016
"You know how Trump is always saying inappropriate and violent-sounding things?"
"Most people see that type of language as offensive and even dangerous. The exception is people who grew up in New York. We see it as 'talking.'"
ADDED: Can we have a President from New York City? "New York" in the quote above, means New York City. People from NYC say "New York State" when they mean the state. We've had some Presidents from New York State already. But were they from NYC?
1. Martin Van Buren. No. He was from Kinderhook, New York, which is near Albany.
2. Millard Fillmore. No. He was from the Finger Lakes region.
3. Grover Cleveland. No. Born in New Jersey, some childhood time in upstate New York, and an upstate New York career, including mayor of Buffalo.
4. Chester A. Arthur. Not really. Born in Vermont, later lived in lots of different New York towns — York, Perry, Greenwich, Lansingburgh, Schenectady, and Hoosick. "The family's frequent moves later spawned accusations that Chester Arthur was not a native-born citizen of the United States." Eventually practiced law in NYC.
5. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eh. He was born in the Hudson Valley town of Hyde Park, but he subsequently lived in NYC, in a high-society setting.
6. Theodore Roosevelt. Yes! Born on East 20th Street in New York City. What did he sound like? Listen:
ADDED: Can we have a President from New York City? "New York" in the quote above, means New York City. People from NYC say "New York State" when they mean the state. We've had some Presidents from New York State already. But were they from NYC?
1. Martin Van Buren. No. He was from Kinderhook, New York, which is near Albany.
2. Millard Fillmore. No. He was from the Finger Lakes region.
3. Grover Cleveland. No. Born in New Jersey, some childhood time in upstate New York, and an upstate New York career, including mayor of Buffalo.
4. Chester A. Arthur. Not really. Born in Vermont, later lived in lots of different New York towns — York, Perry, Greenwich, Lansingburgh, Schenectady, and Hoosick. "The family's frequent moves later spawned accusations that Chester Arthur was not a native-born citizen of the United States." Eventually practiced law in NYC.
5. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eh. He was born in the Hudson Valley town of Hyde Park, but he subsequently lived in NYC, in a high-society setting.
6. Theodore Roosevelt. Yes! Born on East 20th Street in New York City. What did he sound like? Listen:
June 10, 2015
"We’ll have a rotating first lady."
Said Lindsey Graham, who's running for President in the strange condition of being unmarried. I'm saying strange, because we haven't had an unmarried President since Woodrow Wilson's wife died, while he was President, and he got a new wife a year later. So Wilson was the opposite of a celibate kind of man. For that, we must go back to James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland.
Buchanan, President from 1857 to 1861, is the only President to remain unmarried his whole life, though he did have a close relationship with another man, William Rufus King:
They had 5 children, including "Baby" Ruth...
... who was not the source of the name for the Baby Ruth candy bar, though the Curtiss Candy Company claimed she was when they renamed their Kandy Kake bar in 1921, right when baseball's Babe Ruth was huge. An epic denial.
But let's return to the denial that is celibacy. Is it denial to eschew marriage? Have you ever read the notes Charles Darwin wrote to himself as he pondered the pros and cons of marriage? From the "pro" column:
Buchanan, President from 1857 to 1861, is the only President to remain unmarried his whole life, though he did have a close relationship with another man, William Rufus King:
The two men lived together in a Washington boardinghouse for 10 years from 1834 until King's departure for France in 1844. King referred to the relationship as a "communion", and the two attended social functions together.... Andrew Jackson called them "Miss Nancy" and "Aunt Fancy" (the former being a 19th-century euphemism for an effeminate man), while Aaron V. Brown referred to King as Buchanan's "better half"....Cleveland is more recent. President from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897, he was unmarried when first elected, but, after using his sister in the First Lady role for the first 2 years, he got married to a woman who was only 21. He was 49 and President of the United States. How's that for a power imbalance in marriage? The woman, Frances Folsom, was the daughter of his friend Oscar Folsom:
In May 1844, Buchanan wrote to Cornelia Roosevelt, "I am now 'solitary and alone', having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone, and [I] should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection."
This marriage was unusual, since Cleveland was the executor of Oscar Folsom's estate and had supervised Frances' upbringing after her father's death; nevertheless, the public took no exception to the match.Just imagine how the media would react today.
They had 5 children, including "Baby" Ruth...
... who was not the source of the name for the Baby Ruth candy bar, though the Curtiss Candy Company claimed she was when they renamed their Kandy Kake bar in 1921, right when baseball's Babe Ruth was huge. An epic denial.
But let's return to the denial that is celibacy. Is it denial to eschew marriage? Have you ever read the notes Charles Darwin wrote to himself as he pondered the pros and cons of marriage? From the "pro" column:
Constant companion,(& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,— object to be beloved & played with.— —better than a dog anyhow.— Home, & someone to take care of house— Charms of music & female chit-chat.— These things good for one’s health.— but terrible loss of time. —Better than a dog anyhow.... Lindsey could just get a rotating dog....
May 12, 2015
Those terrible mountebanks.
I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive — all the way back to 1852 — and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").
Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."
One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."
I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"
Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."
One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."
I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"
January 19, 2013
"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."
"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants."
Joanna Johnston, movie costume designer.
"But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."
Bob Dylan.
"How many Bob Dylan songs have the word 'naked' and how many of them can you name?" I challenge Meade with a Bob Dylan test, as I tend to do when I've done a search at bobdylan.com (as I did for the "It's Alright Ma" quote, above).
Meade immediately says "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," then none of the others — not even "You see somebody naked and you say who is that man?" — and makes 2 wrong guesses:
Beards. Fidel Castro made a beard as off limits to an American president — in spite of Lincoln — as Hitler made the mustache. And here I want to go back to that "Becoming Adolf" article by Rich Cohen that were were talking about a couple days ago:
Pick one:
Joanna Johnston, movie costume designer.
***
"But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."
Bob Dylan.
***
"How many Bob Dylan songs have the word 'naked' and how many of them can you name?" I challenge Meade with a Bob Dylan test, as I tend to do when I've done a search at bobdylan.com (as I did for the "It's Alright Ma" quote, above).
Meade immediately says "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," then none of the others — not even "You see somebody naked and you say who is that man?" — and makes 2 wrong guesses:
MEADE: "'Mr. Tambourine Man'... just to dance beneath the naked sky..."In "Motorpsycho Nightmare," Bob Dylan is just trying to get some sleep — no sign that he's sleeping naked — when Rita — "Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins" (i.e., the murderer in "Psycho") importunes him to take a shower. He's freaked out: "Oh, no! no! I’ve been through this [movie] before." Afraid of getting knifed to death, but unwilling to run off unless her father (the farmer) throws him out (because he promised the farmer he'd milk the cows in the morning), his sees his only option as saying "something to strike him very weird." What he says is: "I like Fidel Castro and his beard."
ME: "That's 'diamond sky.'"
MEADE: "The one where the farmer is chasing him out of his house."
ME: "'Motorpsycho Nightmare?' No."
Beards. Fidel Castro made a beard as off limits to an American president — in spite of Lincoln — as Hitler made the mustache. And here I want to go back to that "Becoming Adolf" article by Rich Cohen that were were talking about a couple days ago:
[Y]ou could not wear any kind of mustache after [WWII], because, running from Hitler, you might run into Stalin. Hitler plus Stalin ended the career of the mustache in Western political life. Before the war, all kinds of American presidents wore a mustache and/or beard. You had John Quincy Adams, with his muttonchops...Are we going to decide who deserves out trust based on they look? Come on, Abe. Lose the beard. Okay.
You had Abe Lincoln, whose facial hair...
... like his politics, was the opposite of Hitler's: beard full, lip bare. You had James Garfield, who had the sort of vast rabbinical beard into which whole pages of legislation could vanish.
You had Rutherford B. Hayes...
Grover Cleveland...
... and Teddy Roosevelt, whose asthma and elephant gun were just a frame for his mustache.
You had William Howard Taft — the man wore a Walrus!
After the war, the few American politicians who still wore a mustache were those who had made their name before Hitler and so had been grandfathered in. Like Thomas Dewey.
Dewey was Eliot Spitzer. He was a prosecutor in New York in the 1930s (and later governor), the only guy with the guts to take on the Mob. For Dewey, the rise of Hitler was a fashion disaster. Because Dewey wore a neat little mustache. Dewey ran for president twice — losing to F.D.R., losing to Truman. In my opinion, without the mustache, the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune (Dewey Defeats Truman) turns true. One of the few prominent American politicians to wear facial hair in recent memory is Al Gore, who grew a Grizzly Adams beard after he lost to George Bush, in 2000. The appearance of this beard was taken to mean either (1) Gore would never again run for office, or (2) Gore had gone completely mental.
The decision to grow a mustache or a beard is all by itself reason to keep a man away from the nuclear trigger.
Pick one:
February 11, 2012
If Obama loses he will have something which, if he wins, he will lose and never be able to recover.
An observation from a discussion, here at Meadhouse, about what the Obamas, Michelle and Barack, will do after he is out of office. What set off the discussion was this news story about Michelle Obama going on the TV show "Top Chef" and judging a competition about school lunches. She'll be around forever — won't she? — doing things about kids and health and food. Women's TV. Books for women. The traditional woman gig. (It's for liberals too.)
And Barack? He'll be fine. He'll do analysis. Distanced observation. Comfort and critique. I say. Meade says: "Not if he loses." At which point I said what I've got quoted there in the post title. You see what it is, of course.
And Barack? He'll be fine. He'll do analysis. Distanced observation. Comfort and critique. I say. Meade says: "Not if he loses." At which point I said what I've got quoted there in the post title. You see what it is, of course.
November 6, 2006
"The most sophisticated right-wing reactionary to run on a Democratic ticket since Grover Cleveland."
It's Jim Webb!
Webb's trick is to adapt this history of white folk to the categories of contemporary multiculturalism. He turns liberalism's assumptions of ethnic grievance and victimization to the service of people who, in more conventional accounts, have themselves been seen as the victimizers. Webb rails against "the wielders of cultural power such as Hollywood, academia, and major media [who] chip away at the core principles that have defined the traditions and history of [Scots-Irish] people." And now his people are fighting back. "In a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation. My culture needs to rediscover itself, and in doing so to regain its power to shape the direction of America." Using diversity dogma to put the white man back on top--it is a marvelous inversion...Yes... but isn't that a good thing? I find myself rooting for Webb. I want to see what he will do to the Democrats, who are so deeply invested right now in what he might do for them.
[T]he use of multiculturalism to advance the ethnic interests of white people, and the use of warrior rhetoric to discredit the Bush administration's war--might be extremely valuable to Democrats, if they knew what they were doing.
But that's never a safe bet. Webb's right-wing populism and the liberalism of today's Democratic party make for an abrasive fit...
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