Flowers and Bees

You can buy a print of this at the artist's online shop, HERE.

What a drag it is, getting old…

In this journal entry from 1959, George Kennan (age 55) laments the passage of time.  Excerpted from Sketches From A Life :

A man’s life, I reflected, is too long a span today for the pace of change. If he lives more than half a century, his familiar world, the world of his youth, fails him like a horse dying under its rider, and he finds himself dealing with a new one which is not really his. A curious contradiction, this: that as medicine prolongs a man’s span of life, the headlong pace of technological change tends to deprive him, at an earlier age than was ever before the case, of the only world he understands and the only one to which he can be fully oriented. For it is only the world of one’s youth, the nature of which is absorbed with that tremendous sensitivity and thirst for impression that only childhood and early youth provide-- it is only this world that answers to the description. The Western world, at least, must today be populated in a very great part by people like myself who have outlived their own intellectual and emotional environment, and who are old not only in the physical and emotional sense but also in relation to the time. We older people are the guests of this age, permitted to haunt its strange and somewhat terrifying halls-- in a way part of its life, like the guests in a summer hotel, yet in a similar way detached from it. We sometimes talk with the hotel staff. We are listened to with interest, amusement, or boredom, depending on the relevance of our words. Occasionally, whether by officiousness or indiscretion, we get fouled up in the life of the place. But guests we remain: it is not our hotel; we do not work there; we never fully understand what goes on in the pantries and the kitchens; we shall be leaving it; the personnel, who will remain, is youth. And the faces of the personnel, while sometime cheerful, sometimes competent, sometimes strong, are nevertheless terrifying to us for the things that are not written on them.

This reminded me of one of the more poignant Bellamy Brothers' songs, Old Hippie, which contains the lines

Now this world may change around him
But he just can't change no more…

Listen to the song HERE, and read the lyrics HERE.

Haribol

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If you don't have thirty minutes to spare (pity), just compare the first minute to the final minute.  (via KrishnaDrop)

Hey, Baby!

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It's hard not to get discouraged this election cycle.  We have two self-serving pro-war anti-labor candidates, so there's little cause for celebration or optimism.  We're looking at a really bleak future,  just hoping things won't be as bad as the forecast says they'll be.

I'm trying really hard to keep this world from draggin' me down.

Thus far, the results are mixed.

Full lyrics HERE.

Way

"The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives – the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods."  ~Thích Nhất Hạnh

Appendages

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”  ~Kurt Vonnegut, in Player Piano

"Apathy and detachment, combined with acceptance."

In this excerpt from Sketches From A Life, George F. Kennan is discussing Stalinist Russia in 1952.  It does not take very much imagination to believe he is talking about America in 2016:

The spiritual breach between the rulers and the ruled is one of the things that most strongly strikes a person returning to Russia at this juncture after a long absence. Somehow or other, the betterment of material conditions for the mass of the people seems to go hand in hand with a certain sort of withdrawal of these masses from emotional participation in the announced purposes of the regime. This is not to be confused with political discontent. On the contrary, it is attended by the steady disappearance of those age groups which have any sort of recollection of prerevolutionary times or any ability to imagine any other sort of government than this one. It even is attended, I think, by an increasing acceptance of Soviet power and, in general, Soviet institutions as a natural condition of life, not always agreeable or pleasant, sometimes even dangerous, but nevertheless something that is simply “there,” like the weather or the soil, and not to be removed by anything the individual could possibly do-- something that simply has to be accepted and put up with.

But in this very acceptance of Soviet power as a sort of unchangeable condition of nature, there is also implied the very lack of living emotional and political relationship to it, about which I am speaking. Thirty years ago people were violently for it or against it, because all of them felt Soviet power as something springing from human action, capable of alteration by human action, and affecting their own lives in ways that raised issues of great immediacy and importance with respect to their own behavior. Today most of them do not have this feeling. Their attitude is one of increasing apathy and detachment, combined with acceptance-- acceptance sometimes resigned, sometimes vaguely approving, sometimes unthinkingly enthusiastic. In general, I think it fair to say that the enthusiasm varies in reverse relationship to the thoughtfulness of the person and to his immediate personal experience with the more terrible sides of Soviet power-- such things as the experiences of collectivization, recollections of the purges, or personal unhappiness as a victim of the harshness of the bureaucracy.

It is my feeling that the regime is itself in a large measure responsible for this growing emotional detachment of large masses of the people. For one thing it has rendered itself physically and personally remote from the rest of the population to an extraordinary degree. One had a feeling fifteen or twenty years ago of a much greater personal impact of the members of the Politburo on the actual running of the country, an impact which created a certain sense of intimacy between them and their subjects, and even such of their subjects as were suffering at their hands. More was known and felt by people of the personalities, the views, and the moods of the top rulers. Today these rulers sit in inscrutable isolation behind their Kremlin walls. For most people they are only names, and names with a slightly mythical quality at that. The relatively few changes in personnel at the top bodies in the past fifteen years have meant that even that link with the public which is provided by the normal flow of advancement into prominent position of people who once had normal ties with friends and neighbors and coworkers is now largely missing.

With the Left Hand

In this excerpt from Sketches From A Life, George F. Kennan's journals, he describes a diplomatic reception in Mexico City in 1950:

Washington’s Birthday reception-- spilling out from the main hall onto the veranda, and thence into the garden. It all seemed achingly familiar. We stood there in the garden, clutching our drinks with the left hand to keep the right one dry and available for hand-shaking. Those who finished drinks looked desperately for some place to put the empty glasses…

It will probably not surprise you to learn that the left the diplomatic services soon after.

Our Church is Made of Shipwrecks

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Full lyrics HERE -- but listen to it, first.  The Southern accent was unexpected in a spoken-word piece, but it's hard to imagine the poem without it.

(via Ron Davison, who has a blog HERE.)

"What's the plan, Phil?"

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, it wasn’t a spontaneous act of resistance.  It was planned.  She deliberately pushed over the first domino to set off a chain of events.

Her arrest was a galvanizing point meant to solidify the boycott against the municipal bus system, with the specific goal of ending segregation on the buses- and it worked.

That’s what’s missing when “Black Lives Matter” shuts down an interstate.  Okay, you have inconvenienced thousands of people, making them late to work and doctor’s appointments; you’ve forced ambulances and fire trucks to take take slower, more crowded alternate routes; you’ve probably caused a few minor fender-benders as cars unexpectedly slam on their brakes to slow from highway speeds to a dead stop; you’ve got everybody looking at you- just like you wanted- and now what?

And here’s where we’re getting crickets. I’m not seeing a plan or piece of legislation being promoted.  It all seems rather pointless.

A protest without a plan is just a tantrum.

The wretched refuse

Donald Trump supporters are not idiots.

When someone buys a lottery ticket, it's not because they don't understand math. They know. But life has beaten them down so badly that they believe a long-shot is their only shot.

Trump's supporters have seen their good-paying Union jobs replaced with low-paying McJobs. In America, less money doesn't just mean downsizing from a Lexus to a Kia- it means you've lost your power, your status, and respect.

Trump is telling them he can get those things back for them. He can't. Win or lose in November, he can't.

But his supporters aren't going away. Until a charismatic leader emerges and gives them a real, viable path to regain that which they have lost, they are going to be out there, grasping at straws; refugees in their own country.

Maximize

Tom the Dancing Bug is on the web HERE.

Thou Shalt Not Be Afraid

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This'll renew ya.

"of a world which refuses to understand."

In this journal entry from Sketches From A Life , written in June of 1945,  George F. Kennan discusses how best to deal with Stalinist Russia.

My first thought was to wonder if his framework could be used by America to deal with the current despotic rulers of the Middle East; my second, more disturbing thought, was to wonder if this could be a framework for other countries to deal with us:

But the fact is, there is no way of helping the Russian people. When a people finds itself in the hands of a ruthless authoritarian regime which will stop at nothing, it finds itself beyond the power of others to help. Gifts presented to it can be given only to the regime, which promptly uses them as weapons for the strengthening of its own power. If these gifts are passed on to the people at all, it is with the innuendo they were concessions the regime was clever enough to extract from a crafty outside world while foiling the evil designs which lay behind them, and that those who would share in the benefits of them had better keep on the good side of that omniscient power which was so ably defending their interests. On the other hand, blows aimed in exasperation at the regime itself are no help to the people it dominates. Such injuries are promptly ducked and passed on to the people, while the regime, breathing sympathetic indignation, strikes one fiery attitude after another as the protector of a noble nation from the vicious envy of a world which refuses to understand. And if then, in the train of policies of arrogance and provocation, real catastrophe finally overtakes the nation, the regime promptly identifies itself beyond all point of distinction with the sufferings of the people and takes refuge behind that astounding and seemingly inexhaustible fund of patriotic heroism and loyalty which human nature seems to reserve for all such occasions. The benevolent foreigner, in other words, cannot help the Russian people; he can only help the Kremlin. And conversely, he cannot harm the Kremlin, he can only harm the Russian people. That is the way system is geared.

This being the case, what does he do? The answer is anybody’s. But I, for my part, should have thought, with the sights and sounds of Siberia still vivid in my mind, that in these circumstances he would be wisest to try neither to help nor to harm-- to make plain to Soviet policy-makers the character of his own aspirations, the limits of his patience, and the minimum conditions on which he can envisage polite neighborly relations with them-- and then to leave the Russian people-- encumbered neither by foreign sentimentality nor foreign antagonism-- to work out their destiny in their own peculiar way.

"Gone before we have time to consider them."

This journal entry is excerpted from Sketches From A Life by George F. Kennan, ©1989:

December 20, 1927

Reading Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann), this Forsyte Saga of old Lübeck, I cannot help but regret that I did not live fifty or a hundred years sooner. Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches-- they are too common. Similarly, we have too many friends to have any friendships, too many books to know any of them well; and the quality of our impressions gives way to quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception-- gone before we have time to consider them.

I should like to have lived in days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called “liberal” and “conservative,” when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshiping.

A Part of Ourselves

Excerpted from Sketches From A Life by George F. Kennan, ©1989:

For one of the keys to the understanding of the human predicament is the recognition that there is, for the human individual, no reality-- no comprehensible and useful reality, at any rate-- other that that of an object as perceived by the human eye and the human mind-- no abstract reality, in other words, detached from the eye of the beholder.  All that we see around us may be considered to some extent as a part of ourselves, the reflection of our own astigmatisms, our own individual perspectives, and-- sometimes-- our intuitions.  Unless it is taken that way, we cannot recognize its reality, or even know it to be real.

He was humming the words of some old song…

By subtly changing a pronoun, the poet tells two stories:

Killed at the Ford
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He is dead, the beautiful youth,
The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,
He, the life and light of us all,
Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,
Whom all eyes followed with one consent,
The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,
Hushed all murmurs of discontent.

Only last night, as we rode along,
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,
He was humming the words of some old song:
"Two red roses he had on his cap,
And another he bore at the point of his sword."

Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill;
I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks
In a room where some one is lying dead;
But he made no answer to what I said.

We lifted him up to his saddle again,
And through the mire and the mist and the rain
Carried him back to the silent camp,
And laid him as if asleep on his bed;
And I saw by the light of the surgeon's lamp
Two white roses upon his cheeks,
And one, just over his heart, blood-red!

And I saw in a vision how far and fleet
That fatal bullet went speeding forth,
Till it reached a town in the distant North,
Till it reached a house in a sunny street,
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry;
And a bell was tolled, in that far-off town,
For one who had passed from cross to crown,
And the neighbors wondered that she should die.

Best and Worst

George W. Bush surprised me by giving a nice little speech at the Dallas memorial service.  Transcript via Time:

Thank you all. Thank you, Senator. I, too, am really pleased that President Obama and Mrs. Obama have come down to Dallas. I also want to welcome vice president, Mrs. Biden, Mr. Mayor, Chief Brown, elected officials, members of the law enforcement community. Today, the nation grieves, but those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family. Laura and I see members of law enforcement every day. We count them as our friends. And we know, like for every other American, that their courage is our protection and shield.

We’re proud [of] the men we mourn and the community that has rallied to honor them and support the wounded. Our mayor, and police chief and our police departments have been mighty inspirations for the rest of the nation.

These slain officers were the best among us. Lorne Ahrens, beloved husband to detective Katrina Ahrens and father of two. Michael Krol, caring son, brother, uncle, nephew and friend. Michael Smith, U.S. Army veteran, devoted husband and father of two.

Brent Thompson, Marine Corps vet, recently married. Patrick Zamarippa, U.S. Navy Reserve combat veteran, proud father and loyal Texas Rangers fan.

With their deaths, we have lost so much. We are grief stricken, heartbroken and forever grateful. Every officer has accepted a calling that sets them apart.

Most of us imagine if the moment called for, that we would risk our lives to protect a spouse or a child. Those wearing the uniform assume that risk for the safety of strangers. They and their families share the unspoken knowledge that each new day can bring new dangers.

But none of us were prepared, or could be prepared, for an ambush by hatred and malice. The shock of this evil still has not faded. At times, it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates too quickly into de-humanization.

Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions…  And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose. But Americans, I think, have a great advantage. To renew our unity, we only need to remember our values.

We have never been held together by blood or background. We are bound by things of the spirit, by shared commitments to common ideals.

At our best, we practice empathy, imagining ourselves in the lives and circumstances of others. This is the bridge across our nation’s deepest divisions.

And it is not merely a matter of tolerance, but of learning from the struggles and stories of our fellow citizens and finding our better selves in the process.

At our best, we honor the image of God we see in one another. We recognize that we are brothers and sisters, sharing the same brief moment on Earth and owing each other the loyalty of our shared humanity.

At our best, we know we have one country, one future, one destiny. We do not want the unity of grief, nor do we want the unity of fear. We want the unity of hope, affection and high purpose.

We know that the kind of just, humane country we want to build, that we have seen in our best dreams, is made possible when men and women in uniform stand guard. At their best, when they’re trained and trusted and accountable, they free us from fear.

The Apostle Paul said, “For God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of strength and love and self-control.” Those are the best responses to fear in the life of our country and they’re the code of the peace officer.

Today, all of us feel a sense of loss, but not equally. I’d like to conclude with the word of the families, the spouses, and especially the children of the fallen. Your loved one’s time with you was too short. They did not get a chance to properly say goodbye. But they went where duty called. They defended us, even to the end. They finished well. We will not forget what they did for us.

Your loss is unfair. We cannot explain it. We can stand beside you and share your grief. And we can pray that God will comfort you with a hope deeper than sorrow and stronger than death.

May God bless you.

Emptiness that Plagues Them

"People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is that the only place they ever needed to search was within."  ~Ramona L. Anderson

Manifestation

“Trump is the manifestation of people’s anger. People all around the country want to send Washington the bird, and they see him as the gigantic middle finger.”  ~Haley Barbour  (source)

I think that's accurate; not healthy, not good, but accurate.

That fence is too high…

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It's not a very good video, really, so close your eyes and let your imagination make its own.

Full lyrics HERE.

(As an aside:  I wish Johnny Paycheck were alive to do a cover version.)

Non-Upgraded

Excerpted from Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig ©2016 (via ExistentialQuagmire):

The World is increasingly designed to depress us.  Happiness isn't very good for the economy.  If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more?  How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturizer?  You make someone worry about ageing.  How do you get people to vote for a political party?  You make them worry about immigration.  How do you get them to buy insurance?  By making them worry about everything.  How do you get them to have plastic surgery?  By highlighting their physical flaws.  How do you get them to watch a TV show?  By making them worry about missing out.  How do you get them to buy a new smartphone?  By making them feel like that are being left behind.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act.  To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence.  To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

 

Shine On

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I love this.  :)

In the middle of the movie they suddenly insert a little song-and-dance number.  It doesn’t advance the plot, there was no real reason for it, they just thought it would be fun- and it was.

(By the way:  you can watch the full movie on YouTube HERE.)

Are we there yet?

"…we are heading into a time when it will be called 'American' to preach hatred of races and religions and nations; and 'un-American' to practice and preach brotherhood and Christianity."  ~Henry Wallace, 1947

1948, I'd like you to meet 2016:

In this excerpt from Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War by Richard J. Walton ©1976, try (just for fun) replacing "Harry Truman" with "Hillary Clinton," and "Henry Wallace" with "Bernie Sanders":

This was a serious man raising serious questions and this is as good a time as any to deal with them. (J. Raymond) Walsh, and (Henry) Wallace, had to face two age-old political dilemmas: do you fight more effectively from within than from without; is it better to accept the lesser evil or refuse to accept either? As to the first part of the question, many prominent American political figures in recent decades have had to make that choice. All chose to stay, none was effective in changing policy, and they deprived the American people of the healthful public debate that would have resulted had they quit in protest. Dozens of upper-level figures in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, for example, claimed or let it be understood that they were doing all they could to change policy regarding Vietnam, but none was willing to sacrifice his political future my making a public fight. To put personal future above political conscience is, sad to say, a long American tradition. Unlike these other men, Wallace felt, as Josiah Gitt put it, that he was “honor bound” to force a public debate.

Wallace had tried within the party to cause Truman to modify his “get-tough” policy (with Russia). There was nothing more he could do by remaining within the party than to become an increasingly ignored scold. As to domestic policy, Truman had already begun to move back toward FDR’s policies, whether in response to Wallace or as a pragmatic, bread-and-butter strategy, once cannot be certain, possibly both.

As to the lesser-evil theory, it was a tough question for Wallace sympathizers and was a more difficult philosophical and practical question than the choice between forcing a public debate and keeping quiet. It is an impossible dilemma for a progressive when both parties nominate unacceptable men. If he elects the marginally superior man, he prevents necessary change. If he does not, he gets the worse candidate and still no change. That was the dilemma faced by such progressives as J. Raymond Walsh in 1948. They did not want Truman and they did not want a Republican. But in 1948 party loyalty, with the memory of FDR still fresh, was much stronger among Democrats than it has been in recent years. So these progressives thought wistfully of Wallace, swallowed hard, and supported Truman. There were not unprincipled men and women copping out, but people making the only choice they thought they could make. To them, whose last Republican Presidents were Hoover and Coolidge, it was simply unthinkable to do anything that might result in a Republican victory.

Ask the Horse

"There is a Zen story about a man riding a horse that is galloping very quickly. Another man, standing alongside the road, yells at him, 'Where are you going?' and the man on the horse yells back, 'I don’t know. Ask the horse.' I think that is our situation. We are riding many horses that we cannot control."  ~Thich Nhat Hanh