Scout Oath

 

(Clicking Imbiggens)

This was my father's, and dates to the late 1930s/early 1940s.

Monastic

 

(clicking imbiggens)

They found a 1,400 year old Christian monastery in the United Arab Emirates.  You can read about it HERE.

There's something about that story that gives me pause.

This was a site that would have been very important to the people who lived there, and in a relatively short period of time, at least geologically, there's nothing left but the foundation.

A few stones arranged rectangularly.  Nothing left at all of the men who worshiped there, laughed there, cried there.  No record of what thoughts they had, what lessons they learned, what friendships they formed.  

Did they love the sea?  Did they love the sand?  Were they awed by the sunrises and sunsets?

Someone would have been the last one to leave.  Did he look back?  Did he intend to return?

There's just something unspeakably sad about it all.

We Carry It Within Us

"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations."  ~James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket ©1985

Rah Rah Rasputin

 

 

Clicking Imbiggens

 

Gee, he doesn't look completely insane.  I'd certainly trust him to babysit the kids.

 

And, of course, that reminded me of this:

 Full lyrics HERE.

Can Can

 

Wikipedia notes two interesting things about the can-can.  It was originally sort of a French square-dance engaging four couples, which is a little hard to imagine, and then there's this:

The dance was considered scandalous, and for a while there were attempts to suppress it. This may have been partly because in the 19th century, women wore pantalettes, which had an open crotch, and the high kicks were intentionally revealing.

Um, "partly?"

You can read the entry yourself HERE.

Joyous Immediacy of the Human Experience

"Both [Dionysus and Jesus] upheld what has been called a hedonic vision of community, based on egalitarianism and the joyous immediacy of human experience – as against the agonic reality of the cruelly unequal and warlike societies they briefly favored with their presence."  ~Barbara Ehrenreich,in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy ©2006

If Jesus does come back, it will be to save us from His followers.

That's kind of ironic.

 

Justiniani

For A Hermit
by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Honeybee, ©2008

   1.
The hermit Justiniani walked across Europe
after refusing to take his final vows.
He walked across the colonial United States,
coming to live in a cave in southern New Mexico.
Once he walked from Las Cruces
to San Antonio
for a little visit.

Justiniani led mystical prayer gatherings,
conducted healings in living rooms,
then walked 20 miles home
to his dwelling in the cave.
People worried he might not be safe,
living alone in those wild times,
as opposed to these,
sleeping without a lock,
or even a door.

He promised to light a fire every Friday night.
They could see it from town.
When the fire didn't appear,
he was found with a knife through his back,
wearing a thorny girdle of the penitentes,
"another unsolved murder" of those days.

Justiniani, pray for us,
our secret sorrows,
our inability to walk so far.
Pray for the signal fires we fail to light,
that we will have the power to light them.
Pray for the battered, unchosen people.
We have not come far at all
from your time.

   2.
Your diary sleeps in untranslated Italian
in a locked glass case.

When I found out about it
I went a little crazy.

I need to know
what you knew.

   3.
The ceiling of your cave is charred.
Along the path, clumps of cactus, desert flowers,
   chips of flint.
I stood inside, trying to imagine which way
   you slept in there,
pointed out or in, listening to the echo of the birds
over Dripping Springs Road.
Please grant us the depth of your silence.
We are lost inside our world.

―•―

Don Juan Maria de Justiniani was a real person who lived from 1800 to 1869.  There isn't much known about him, and the things we do know are all laid out in the poem above.

He doesn't have a Wikipedia page.  The only online resource I found was Find-A-Grave, HERE.

I kind of like that.

Signature Style

Excerpted from A Geography of Time by Robert Levine, ©1997:

The Chinese developed an incense clock. This wooden device consisted of a series of connected small same-sized boxes. Each box held a different fragrance of incense. By knowing the time it took for a box to burn its supply, and the order in which the scents burned, observers could recognize the time of day by the smell in the air.

If he hadn't told already told you that it was the Chinese who invented an incense clock, I bet you would have guessed it.  That just seems like the sort of thing they'd do.

 

Consequences

This was excerpted from The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick, ©2010.  He was writing about the difficulty in finding accurate historical depictions when taken years after an event, but he could just as easily have been writing a treatise on karma:

"We interact with one another as individuals responding to a complex haze of factors: professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least some instances, genuine altruism. Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time."

 

The Pinnacle of Evolution

"Each people is, I believe, inclined to believe it is the purpose of history, that all that has happened is leading to the now, to this world, this country. Few of us see ourselves as fleeting phantoms on a much wider screen, or that our great cities may someday be dug from the ruins by archeologists of the future."  ~from Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir by Louis L’Amour ©1989

I had bought this autobiography for my father, who was a fan of L'Amour's books, and he hated it.  I am not a fan of L'Amour's books, but loved it.

"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell."  :)

Changes

Adolf Hitler wasn't born evil, he became evil.

He didn't always want to be a dictator. When they left him alone, he wanted to be a painter.

Then World War I happened. He was drafted and assigned the job of litter-bearer, and spent the next several years searching among anguished and mutilated bodies for the wounded ones who might still have a chance to be saved at hospital.

Sometimes there weren't any.

That experience would change anybody. It changed him.

I wonder sometimes about my own future. Will my present or future circumstances change me into something I don't want to be? How much can I control my own destiny?

And did a young Adolph have these thoughts?

Obey

"Historically, the most terrible things-- war, genocide, and slavery-- have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience." ~Howard Zinn

Chang and Eng

Excerpted from The Two, the biography of the original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, by Irving and Amy Wallace, ©1978:

On another visit to Philadelphia, the fact that the twins were genuinely united saved them from a fine or jail. A spectator, shaking hands with Chang, squeezed his hand painfully hard. Immediately, Chang punched him, knocking him off his feet. The man rose, summoned the law, and the twins were hauled before a magistrate on charge of assault and battery. The magistrate, after studying the twins connecting band, addressed the complainant. The judge agreed that Chang could be jailed for assault, but added that if Eng were also jailed it would amount to false arrest and the complainant himself would have to be prosecuted. Needless to say, the injured party dropped his charges.

It's a strange thing to think about, but I've wondered what would happen if one person, conjoined with another, committed a crime.  This judge didn't really answer that question, he just found a clever way to avoid making the decision himself.

The book was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be.  The brothers were far more than just sideshow freaks.  They retired from show business at an early age, married sisters and fathered 21 (!) children, owned slaves and ran a successful farm, met Abraham Lincoln; they led full and happy lives.

The Outward Sign Of Inward Grace

In this excerpt from Americans: A Book of Lives, ©1946, Hermann Hagedorn describes the business environment of Theodore Roosevelt's America:

To these men the rapid development of the country seemed a definite good in itself and became, indeed, a kind of religion, not superseding so much as fulfilling the Christian principles on which most of them had been brought up. Like the capitalists of the Old World, they had been taught that thrift was among the noblest of the Christian virtues. Financial success, which could be regarded as the effect of thrift (though actually it was more often its direct antithesis, the profit of a shrewd gamble), was therefore regarded by them as the outward sign of inward grace. If their methods were challenged, they answered that progress could not wait on fine ethical distinction, very certain that the increase of the material comforts which they promoted, was progress, and therefore of God.

I wish I could say, "What a strange and incomprehensible time!"

But I can't.

Lens

"Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him."  ~Booker T. Washington (source)

That's an actual quote by Booker Washington.  You can read more of his words at Wikiquote, or download his books from Project Gutenberg.

It's important to note how he really spoke.

I'm reading a biography of him written during the 40s, and it's somewhat confusing.  The author is lavish with his praise and unflinching in describing the myriad obstacles Washington was forced to overcome, yet read this sample of dialogue:

"O Lawd, de cotton am so grassy, de work am so hard, and the sun am so hot dat I b'lieve this darky am called to preach!"

That's racist, demeaning, dehumanizing, and based on the works Booker Washington created in his lifetime, it's not historically accurate-- yet that's the way every Black person speaks in this book.

I'm sure the author thought of himself as progressive and impartial, and never saw the log in his eye.  He didn't think of himself as a bad person with bad thoughts, nor did his neighbors, his editor, or his publishers, or his audience.  That was the way Amos 'n' Andy talked on the radio, they way Blacks were portrayed in movies, and I'm sure he considered this an accurate representation of Black speech patterns.

And that's a lesson we should all take to heart.  In the lens of his own time, he was ahead of the curve; that's why we all have to be on guard against the ingrained preconceptions and prejudices of or own times, and do our best to recognize and break patterns that don't serve the greater good.

 

Phonograph

In this excerpt from Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946. Hermann Hagedorn describes the moment Thomas Edison first tested his new invention to record and play back sounds:

Three weeks after his interest had first been stirred, he (Thomas Edison) handed his chief mechanic a rough sketch of a queer-looking instrument, including a metal cylinder spirally ground and mounted on a long shaft, running in two upright bearings.

The mechanic wondered. Most of the apparatus he head hitherto constructed had been electrical, but this one called for no coils, no magnets, no wires. He kept his mouth shut and followed the sketch. The instrument he subsequently brought to Edison for his approval was a cylinder covered with tinfoil and turned with a hand-crank. "What's it supposed to do, chief?" asked the mechanic without enthusiasm.

"The thing must talk," answered Edison.

The mechanic smiled dubiously. The bookkeeper, standing near, offered to bet a handful of cigars in support of his skepticism, whereupon the mechanic laid two dollars against the chief's faith. Edison, lacking the two dollars, matched his bet with a barrel of apples.

Thereupon he turned the crank and in a loud voice recited, ("shouted," he told Henry Ford):

"Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go."

He adjusted the reproducer, restored the cylinder to its original position, and again turned the crank.

"Mary had a little lamb…"

came the words in a strange voice, unlike his own, but unmistakably clear.

The mechanic nearly fainted for fright. Edison himself admitted that he was "a little scared"; partly of the machine he had created, partly because success had come so easily. "I was always afraid of things that worked the first time."

It's hard to imagine a time when hearing a human voice coming from a machine would inspire fear and awe.  The incredible has become commonplace.

Special

If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler as an infant, would you?

I've been asked that question before, and my answer is always "It wouldn't matter."

The question presupposes that Hitler was a remarkable, irreplaceable human being, and I don't think that's accurate. I think he was an idiot.

And in an alternate time-line, where infant Adolf is murdered in his crib, I believe the same societal forces that forced that idiot to the front would just force some other idiot to the front.

He wasn't that special.

The Fan

[embed]https://youtu.be/QTEIWK9CaEs[/embed]

In an interview with H. Allen Smith, recounted in his book Low Man On A Totem Pole, ©1941, Sally Rand said she invented the Fan Dance as a way to skirt obscenity laws.  Nudity was allowed on stage as long as the person was motionless, but nude dancing was prohibited.  Her plan was to conceal herself as she danced, then periodically strike a pose with the fans open- "vogueing" sixty years before Madonna.

For the most part the police weren't concerned with the finer points of the law, so she was still arrested pretty regularly.

(In this clip she is wearing a swimsuit, so nobody should be scandalized.)

If

"It will be important, if the Democratic party succumbs to Wall Street domination, to have a new party to let the people of the world know that those who believe in peace and understanding still have some means of expression... It would provide evidence that the United States has not gone completely imperialistic and psychopathic."  ~Henry A. Wallace, 1947

90

"If you treat people right they will treat you right — ninety percent of the time."  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt  (source)

I like the little disclaimer at the end.  :)