‘Give Us A Kiss’
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This evening 30 years ago, John Lennon was shot dead — a shock end to an era.
In this an iconic anniversary for an icon, a lot of media attention will focus on Lennon’s years as a Beatle, but at the time of his death, he stood alone, a solo musical performer, and, to the US government, a national security risk. (Read a mash-up of Lennon and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange here).
From Lennon’s last print interview: “What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean…I’m not interested in being a dead fuckin’ hero … so forget ‘em, forget ‘em.” (And a return to touring). “We just might do it, but there will be no smoke bombs, no lipstick, no flashing lights. It just has to be comfy. But we could have a laugh. We’re born-again rockers, and we’re starting over … There’s plenty of time, right? Plenty of time.”
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, that last interview — conducted Dec. 5, 1980 — will be published for the first time this Friday by Rolling Stone magazine.
The above blurb came from Reuters news service.
Lennon was a major player in the revolution of the 1960s — even more so after the Beatles became history.
Coincidentally, just a bit more than a month before Lennon’s death, Ronald Reagan was elected president and ushered in the end — all the 1960s protests, songs and chaos were finished and life would at first grind slowly, then gather speed over the years to culminate in the horror that’s nowadays.
In Lennon, though, there was always hope.
And with the Beatles — a place in the sun for nerdy, nit-witted teenagers like myself (among millions and millions of others).
I never saw the boys live in concert, but the first viewing of their first film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ was as close to the massive-adrenaline rush supposedly encountered when the Beatles jammed on a stage.
The little movie theater on Florida’s panhandle circa July 1964 was packed to the very gills with teenagers, including a shitload of screaming female teenagers — every time Paul appeared on screen, a horrendous screaming melee — and with the boys’ Liverpool accent, the dialogue was sometimes extremely hard to follow.
Who really gave a shit — it was an experience still vividly remembered nearly 50 years later.
This little scene from the ‘Hard Day’s Night’ script has always seemed to me the illustrative moment where angry youth clashed with a stodgy, loser generation.
And copped Lennon’s attitude toward authority — his straight-faced, eye-to-eye command, “Give us a kiss,” reflected giving peace a chance later on, and National Guard flower power during 60s demonstrations.
Peace never really got a fair shake.
(Older, agitated train passenger sitting with four smart-ass, quick-witted youngsters)
Hello. Morning.
All right.
Do you mind if we have it open?Yes, I do.
Four of us want it open, if it’s all the same to you.It isn’t. I travel on this train regularly twice a week……so I suppose I have some rights.
So have we.
We’ll have that thing off as well.
Knowledge of the Railway Acts tell you I’m within my rights.But we want to hear it. We’re a community, majority vote, up the workers and all that stuff.
Then I suggest you take that damn thing into the corridor……or some other part of the train where you obviously belong.
Give us a kiss.
Look, we paid for our seats too, you know.
I travel on this train regularly, twice a week.
Knock it off, Paul. You can’t win with his sort.
After all, it’s his train.
Isn’t it, mister?And don’t take that tone with me, young man.
I fought the war for your sort.I bet you’re sorry you won.
I shall call the guard.
Ah, but what?
They don’t take kindly to insults, you know.
Let’s go have some coffee and leave
the kennel to Lassie.Hey, mister, can we have our ball back?
Look, mister, Mister, can we have our ball back?
Generations clashing in a historical place so far, far away and so freakin’ long, long ago it seems now just a fantasy.
In the Sweet By-and-By
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The future has been downloaded into just about right now.
“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.“
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Technology is in reality a double-edged sword with a fatal flaw — there’s no favorable side.
Hence, technology is the greatest, most-perfect Trojan Horse ever produced, and mankind, thinking of such wondrous wonders and always dreaming of building that perpetual better mousetrap, pulled the wooden horse within the walls of ourselves and proceeded to party like there’s no tomorrow.
(Illustration found here).
Despite the science, all the innovative thoughts and blissfully-ignorant knowledge, technology is about the machines — the end product.
Mankind has flourished with the advent of machines — big, huge crude ones in the beginning and now down to the iPod (such a description: an iPod in its very sound testifies to its small size) and the rock-bed foundation for technology is the concept of how these machines so facilitate human “progress,” combining a physical-technical with a metaphysical-knowledge (the-ology), creating through so-many devices a peculiar and false vision of security and well being.
Fifty years ago, when I was in elementary school and “Leave It to Beaver” was a TV favorite — June/mom Barbara Billingsley died just this past week — summer vacation stretched out before my friends and I as an endless period of time with September just a word.
Although only 90 days (or less) time then appeared much-much slower, running in what now would be considered slo-mo — and now three months (or less) ain’t shit for any kind of time.
Which in itself (time) is one weird-assed sonofabitch.
(Illustration found here).
Going beyond the hypnosis of time and aging — So, first memories are dense. The routines of later life are sketchy. The past wasn’t really slower than the present. It just feels that way. — including all of Einstein’s bullshit, thank-you — the sense of what/when/where of time nowadays is completely whacked.
Our current standard for telling time is a a kind of recent experience — until the Prime Meridian Conference in October 1884 there were 144 different time zones in the US, mostly on what was called “railroad time,” but also just about every town had its own time:
One only has to imagine New Year’s Eve in let’s say 1850 to get the idea.
While revelers in Time’s Square in Manhattan joyously cried Happy New Year!, across the Hudson River in Newark, it was still 11:59, and party goers in Boston had already been celebrating the new year for 12 minutes before the bell chimed for those waiting to greet the new year in New York City.
In our modern era, an increase in technology has created this odd, but all encompassing “time compression” — time and place are the same in an ever-moving, ever-increasing flash-forward of near precocious behavior.
And because of a size-variety of different machines, time is measured now in smaller and smaller increments.
History was on a crawl, however, until the technical mated with the philosophical and bred a concept — technology — in the late 1400s as mankind turned inward to create outwardly new machines that in appearance assisted mankind in its endeavors.
Even the very word ‘technology‘ did not exist — prior to the 1400s it was scholarly works on the mechanical arts — and it really hyped itself during the Industrial Age, starting from the late 1700s, then recharging itself in the so-called Second Industrial Revolution a hundred years later.
Of all inventions, there are only three in the modern era from which all others came — Printing, cannons(gunpowder) and the compass.
And the evolution of those devices spanned years, sometimes hundreds of years, as one aspect of the machine was adapted, re-tooled and improved upon just as other so-called useful machines were also being contrived for just about every kind of reason.
These machines quickened time: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, for example, saved hundreds of man-hours in labor — alas, also due to technology, Whitney never really made much money off his contraption as others quickly copied the machine.
Yet even with all this speed, it still took years and years from one major event to another, with many misfires and draw-backs along the way for all techno-inspired devices.
Of 101 gadgets that changed the world — in all of world history — nearly half of them came in the last 100 years.
Wrapping together techno-future and time, science fiction writer William Gibson — who came up with the term, “cyberspace,” way before the expression became old hat — says technology has quickened itself to the point where tomorrow is barreling well into this afternoon.
We’re living the reality of science fiction right now.
“In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was actually about three or four years long,” he said, “because in three or four years relatively little would change.”
That stood in sharp contrast to late 2010, he said, when big changes had become a daily occurrence.
“Now the present is the length of a news cycle some days,” he said in an interview with BBC News.
That ferocious rate of change made writing about the present day exciting, he said, and explained why his current novel, Zero History, is set around about now.
“The present is really of no width whatever,” he said.
And the reality of the future is badly, horridly complicated.
“If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain how humanity got there and that’s becoming quite a big job,” he said.
When one of the most assured writers in his field doesn’t/can’t untangle the entanglements facing humanity in the extreme-near future, there’s some shit in store for us and strengthens the old axiom when describing unusual things, ‘you can’t make this up.’
And how does a creative science fiction writer describe a future with something out of this world.
From Agence France-Presse:
Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth’s natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday.
In 2007, Earth’s 6.8 billion humans were living 50 percent beyond the planet’s threshold of sustainability, according to its report, issued ahead of a UN biodiversity conference.
“Even with modest UN projections for population growth, consumption and climate change, by 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two Earths to absorb CO2 waste and keep up with natural resource consumption,” it warned.
I mentioned this in my post yesterday, but since it teems with science fiction reality, it’s appropriate here.
And even time supposedly has an end: “Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50 percent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years,” according to the team of US and Japanese scientists, who are challenging a long-standing theory of the universe.
Their timing is off by some 3.7 billion years — get ready.
Crying on the Toilet — ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy…’
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Nearly 50 years have passed since that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, and now some new insights have surfaced into those few precious moments in the abrupt transition of presidential power — and it ain’t macho.
In a new book on the November 1963 event, The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President, by Steven Gillon, paints LBJ as near the break-down point.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, JFK’s military aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, could not find LBJ on Air Force One after people had told him Johnson was on board — everyone figured he had departed already on Air Force Two as Kennedy and Johnson arrived in Dallas on separate aircraft — until the general checked the shitter in the presidential bedroom.
Via a piece by Gillon at HuffPost:
What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking.
“I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled.
He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978.
“McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee.
Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”
Author Christopher Anderson claimed that McHugh shared a similar, although slightly more dramatic, version of this story when he interviewed the General for his book Jackie after Jack, published in 1998.
In complete contrast to LBJ’s blubberings, Jackie Kennedy was stoic and strong, seemingly in control despite the horror blowing around her.
She was only 34 then, the youngest First Lady in US presidential history.
In an interview (pdf) with historian Theodore White about a week after the shooting (Nov. 29, 1963), Jackie had this to say about the chaos on-board Air Force One, spinning the tale “one brief shinning moment that was known as Camelot”:
“…History…, everybody kept saying to me put a cold towel around my head” (and wipe the blood off: she is referring to the swearing-in scene at the plane, when Johnson is sworn in at the plant at Love Field and she was beside him)… “later, I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face spattered with blood and hair…I wiped it off with Kleenex.
History. I thought no one really wants me there.
Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off?
I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done…If I’d just had blood and caked hair when” (they took pictures of swearing in).
“Then later I said to Bobby what’s the line between histrionics and drama.
I should have left the blood on.”
In 1995, a year after Jackie’s death, The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston released the interview notes.
Another strange, little-known incident that day — US District Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Johnson, and JFK’s Bible and a three-by-five-inch file card containing the oath.
According to the National Archives:
Judge Hughes, in the process of stepping down the boarding steps, was hailed by a self-assured man who inquired if she wanted the two items she held in her hand.
Assuming he was a security man and because the items did not belong to her, Judge Hughes transferred to the man the file card and the President’s Bible, neither of which were ever located.
Kennedy’s assassination will always be clouded in conspiracy, pity and…romance.
Words and the Looneytune GOP
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This morning a note on words misplaced by right-wing, wingnuts suffering intently from schizophasia in a most non-oblique fashion.
An ex-Detroit Lions coach had to apologize for being nasty and petulent last month after saying “Good-bye, ladies,” to three male Detroit sports writers.
Reminds one of California’s Governator proclaiming members of the state legislature as “girly-men” during budget battles.
Marinelli and Schwarzenegger are just big-mouthed public oafs, linked through failure, one the fall guy for a win-less season, and the other, the big burrio roasting on such a financial hotplate the good times are over for the Golden State.
(Illustration found here).
A lot of words, and a lot of words linked together as phrases, are floating around out there in the ether, this being the age of capture-the-moment words, like Big Al Greenspan’s usage of just two of them last fall, “shocked disbelief,” to describe how he felt about helping bring down the global financial markets.
Or the locution sprouting last week from repugnant blowhard Rush Limbaugh setting the number of words he needs to explain President Obama: “…I need four: I hope he fails.”
And speaking of seven words — the late comedian George Carlin’s FBI file was recently released and not many words were contained therein:
- There’s also a letter from Hoover himself thanking one of Carlin’s critics for defending his honor, and an internal FBI memo that quotes the director as asking: “What do we know of Carlin?”
Not much, as it turned out. The memo notes the FBI has “no data concerning Carlin” other than the two letters from his critics.
“Which kind of disappoints me,” laughed Carlin’s daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall, who provided the file to The Associated Press. “It doesn’t really cover any of his more radical 1970s stuff.”
Carlin’s famous monologue: “The original seven words … that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and (laughter) maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor (laughter) um, and a bourbon.”
See the original stand-up performance here.
Politics operates by words, which once spoken still mean nothing.
In this vast churning mesh of words, one wonders how Republicans can currently look themselves in the mirror (or maybe die-hard GOPers can’t be seen in mirrors) and not see the obvious — a clueless face with nasty, cruel eyes.
Even amongst themselves they ain’t pretty.
From ABC News‘ The Note blog comes word of Sarah Palin snubbing US House Republicans:
- Retreat organizers tell ABC News that Palin politely declined, giving a perfectly understandable reason. According to the Congressional Institute, which hosted the conference, Palin said she simply could not make it to the retreat because pressing state business made it impossible for her to leave Alaska this weekend.
So where is Palin this weekend? She’s in Washington, D.C., attending the super-elite Alfalfa Dinner.
“She lied to us,” said a Republican at the retreat.
Asked why Palin told the Republicans she could not leave Alaska this weekend, Palin spokesman Bill McAllister offered this non-responsive answer:
“My understanding is that the governor has not scheduled any partisan events on her current trip to D.C.,” McAllister told ABC News.
Operative word there, Bill, is partisan — apt usage to describe a political entity that has descended into a kind of mental-snow-blindness, lashing out without any kind of rhyme or reason, and doing it with a strange, though, really-sad, slap-stick stupidity.
One goofball GOPer, Dick Armey (the GOP seems to have an inordinate — great word — amount of ‘dicks’ in its ranks) used a marvelous, but ancient word to describe the argument of salon.com’s Joan Walsh on MSNBC’s Hardball last week as prattle, but of course he inadvertently described the entire Republican party’s line of rhetoric since Jan. 20.
Armey also slapped Walsh for her gender.
See and read about the whole, ugly mess at Think Progress.
This political-crap scene was focused on the above mentioned Mr. Limbaugh and the near-treasonous shit (another great word — as Carlin once noted, a word usually not used in its original form, feces, but instead, is used to explain a shitload of other stuff having nothing to do with going poo — that has blubbered out of Rush’s shit-hole of a mouth just since Jan. 20.
Read a recap here.
And in an even more obvious stunt: A black was elected head of the RNC — a first in its 155-year history — an apparent mirror-like opposition to the first-ever black president.
Michael Steele is indeed black, but he’s just another Lindsey Graham loaded with the bloated lips of a Rush Limbaugh.
Steele quickly added another new word into the GOP gutter trap: Goose egg.
He praised House Republicans for their refusal to pony-up one single vote for Obama’s stimulus package: “The goose egg you laid on the president’s desk was just beautiful,” he said.
And step forward, open big mouth, insert big foot and Blago! New word: Fraud:
- The recent allegations outlined four specific transactions.
In addition to the payment to Steele’s sister, Fabian said that the candidate used money from his state campaign improperly; that Steele paid $75,000 from the state campaign to a law firm for work that was never performed; and that he or an aide transferred more than $500,000 in campaign cash from one bank to another without authorization.
This Fabian guy isn’t cool, either. He was sentenced last October in another unrelated fraud case.
The GOP has become a corrupt-infested organization, but still swinging the bat hard for the fence.
Last Wednesday, the GOP added the word, “insurgency” to its mounting nitwit vocabulary to describe how Repubs should fight the Obama administration.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, rolled deep into muddied waters and almost drowned before a quick-thinking aide saved his ass.
- “Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors.
“And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes.
And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban.
No, that’s not what we’re saying.
I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”
…
When pressed to clarify, Sessions said he was not comparing the House Republican caucus to the Taliban, the Muslim fundamentalist group.
“I simply said one can see that there’s a model out there for insurgency,” Sessions said before being interrupted by an aide.
The staffer said Sessions was trying to convey that the Republicans need to start thinking about how to act strategically from their perch in the minority.
No, the Taliban is not who we is — The Taliban is alive and very well, thank-you, driving Afghanistan to the brink of an-even-bigger disaster, a situation the GOP-led and bled.
In other words, or word, Shithead Sessions “misspoke,” another Republican word-origin from Tricky-Dick days, making all Nixon’s statements on Watergate “inoperative:” Not incorrect, not misinformed, not untrue—simply inoperative, like batteries gone dead.
And Repubs have now jumped on a feckless use of words.
Yesterday, it was concluded Obama was attempting scare tactics:
- “In discussing with the American people his approach to the stimulus of our economy, he has first really used some dangerous words,” said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican.
Mr. Kyl added, “It seems to me that the president is rather casually throwing out some careless language.”
Kyl was blubbering about Obama’s weekly address yesterday where he emphasized speed is needed for passage of his stimlus package: “Because if we don’t move swiftly to put this plan in motion, our economic crisis could become a national catastrophe.”
A mindless, clueless word thrasher — Kyl called Obama’s inaugural address not “high-brow, it was more low-brow” and even last month had already set up the current thrashing on the stimulus bill because it didn’t meet the GOP’s high standards.
The financial/economic situation — and the lying, blubber-mouth Kyle and the rest of the GOP sewage patrol knows fully well — is already in a catastrophe mode, just ask the 600,000+ people thrown out of work in January.
The anger among US peoples is getting wacko.
Frank Rich touches upon this national slow-boiling indignation in a piece this morning in the New York Times.
People are pissed at the way-overly obvious spreading of wealth — and it’s not just elitist:
- The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred.
As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.”
But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long.
The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.
Bad news on the doorstep.
Not to be out GOPed, the US military tossed in its $1 trillion word last week after stats showed US GIs are killing themselves faster than any insurgent — 24 committed suicide last month with only 16 killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Col. Kathy Platoni said that a major risk factor for soldiers is the multiple deployments most have experienced.
“When people are apart you have infidelity, financial problems, substance abuse and child behavioral problems,” Platoni said. “The more deployments, the more it is exacerbated.”
Yes, Kathy Colonel, IEDs, shattered Humvees, four or five more-than-a-year tours in a urban slaughterhouse-5-to-the-10th-power that is Iraq could indeed exacerbate problems back home, but what can you do, huh?
As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.