Fresh baked this morning

Cheesy Corn Bread w/Hot Banana Pepper Rings in a “JIFFY“

[thx Mom]

Ronnie’s America

 

Framed, typed letter on White House stationary, signed by Ronald Reagan in black ink, dated February 1, 1984 reading in full:

Dear Michael,

I was pleased to learn that you were not seriously hurt in your recent accident. I know from experience that these things can happen on the set—no matter how much caution is exercised.

All over America, millions of people look up to you as an example. Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us, especially young people searching for something real to believe in.

You’ve gained quite a number of fans along the road since “I Want You Back” and Nancy and I are among them.

Keep up the good work, Michael. We’re very happy for you.

 

Sincerely,

Ronald Reagan

Reagan Did It

Heterosexuality isn’t normal, it’s just common.

When I moved to New York in the early seventies. I was astonished to meet intellectuals, who, in the fifties, had actually believed that Adlai Stevenson could defeat Eisenhower for the presidency—a wishful misconception that was surely a measure of their psychological and social distance from ordinary Americans in the nation’s heartland. My parents, grandparents, and most of their friends had voted for both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but all I ever heard about Stevenson when I was growing up in a small town in Michigan was that he was too much of an egghead to have any understanding of ordinary people and their problems. Stevenson’s cultivated speech, such a strong point in his favor among his fellow intellectuals, was seen as a liability by most of the adults who inhabited my childhood world. My grandmother, who before her death at the age of ninety-nine boasted that she had never voted for a Republican, was able to overcome her distaste for Stevenson’s syntax and elevated vocabulary only by recalling the Depression and her beloved FDR. “Adlai talked down to people,” she recalled, “and he didn’t have the common touch. Ike had the common touch and I loved him, but in the end, remembering which party gave us Social Security and which party couldn’t care less about starving old people, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote Republican.”

SUSAN JACOBY, The Age of American Unreason

“The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee”

The invention of heterosexuality

Photo: D. Winter, NYTimes

The time had come for action.

“History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.” – James Baldwin

Is the government of the United States suicidal? I think so.

I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment [The power structure, based on the economic infrastructure, propped up and reinforced by the media and all the secondary educational and cultural institutions.], which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all—Black and white alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.

The greater, more immediate problem is the survival of the entire world. If the world does not change, all its people will be threatened by the greed, exploitation, and violence of the power structure in the American empire. The handwriting is on the wall. The United States is jeopardizing its own existence and the existence of all humanity. If Americans knew the disasters that lay ahead, they would transform this society tomorrow for their own preservation.

HUEY P. NEWTON, Revolutionary Suicide (1973)

____

Hitchens: Vote Obama
Dowd: Palin in 2012?

The american Way.

A few days later, on the train down to Washington, somewhere south of Trenton, I pass another cemetery … And there, at the southern end of this unmenacing strip, is a cheery American moment: a sign proclaiming BRISTOL CEMETERY — LOTS AVAILABLE. It reads as if the puns ‘lots’ is intended: come join us, we have much more space than our rivals.

Lots available. Advertise, even in death — it’s the American way. Whereas in Western Europe the old religion is in terminal decline, America remains a Christian country, and it makes sense that the creed still flourishes there. Christianity, which cleared up the old Jewish doctrinal dispute about whether or not there was life after death, which centralized personal immortality as a theological selling-point, is well suited to this can-do, reward driven society. And since in America all tendencies are taken to the extreme, they have currently installed Extreme Christianity. Old Europe took a more leisurely approach to the final arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven — a long mouldering in the grave before resurrection and judgement, all in God’s good time. America, and Extreme Christianity, likes to hurry things along. Why shouldn’t product delivery follow promised order sooner rather than later? Hence such fantasies as The Rapture, in which the righteous, while going about their daily business, are instantly taken up the Heaven, there to watch Jesus and the antichrist duke it out down below on the battleground of planet Earth. The action-man, X-rated, disaster-movie version of the world’s end.

JULIAN BARNES, Nothing To Be Frightened Of

60/40

Photo: American Evangelicals’ new cross-bearer, Sarah Palin.

We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.

What will happen to all that beauty?

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

. . . in the realm of morals the role of Christianity has been, at best ambivalent. It is not to much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself, from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She’s coming home. It is the singer’s incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been when she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing “Lonesome in My Bedroom,” or insisting, “Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it alright? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.” White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more then they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

Did I mention you must read this book? The fire next time is now.

Photo: NYTimes.

“Sugar is sweet.”

Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I’m so glad it works.

Does this old poop have any advice for young people in times of such awful trouble? Well, I’m sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has the death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around?

But listen: if anyone here should wind up on a gurney in the lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: “This will certainly teach me a lesson.”

If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas were just too liberal.

[Karl Marx] did invent Communism, which we have long been taught to hate, because we are so in love with Capitalism, which is what we call the casinos on Wall Street.

And I think maybe we might want to stop bad-mouthing Communism so much, not because we think it’s a good idea, but because our children and great-grandchildren are now in hock up to their eyeballs to the Communist Chinese.

And the Chinese Communists also have a big and superbly equipped army, something we don’t have. We’re too cheap. We just want to nuke everybody.

Back to Karl Marx: How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840s, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion?* They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren’t going to let women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty years.

I got a letter a while back from a man who had been a captive in the American penal system since he was sixteen years old. He is now forty-two, and about to get out. He asked me what he should do. I told him what Karl Marx would have told him: “Join a church.”

And now please note that I have raised my right hand. And that means I’m not kidding, that whatever I say next I believe to be true. So here goes: The most spiritually splendid American phenomenon of my lifetime wasn’t our contribution to defeat the Nazis, in which I played such a large part, or Ronald Reagan’s overthrow of Godless Communism, in Russia at least.

The most spiritually splendid American phenomenon of my lifetime is how African-American citizens have maintained their dignity and self-respect, despite their having been treated by white Americans, both in and out of government, and simply because of their skin color, as though they were contemptible and loathsome, and even diseased.

Their churches have surely helped them to do that. So there’s Karl Marx again. There’s Jesus again.

And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African-American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? “Safe sex of the highest order.”

KURT VONNEGUT, At Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007

All butter all the time.

*He said it was the opium of the lower classes; opium Marx himself had used as the painkiller of the day.

Some people call it a “fairy tale” . . .

. . . millons of others, including myself, the American Dream.

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Caroline Kennedy, “A President Like My Father”, New York Times, January 27, 2008

Yes We Can.