It was Bush v. Gore, which ended the Florida recount and decided the 2000 presidential election.
Looking back, O'Connor said, she isn't sure the high court should have taken the case.
"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," O'Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"
The case, she said, "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."
"Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," she said. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."
April 10, 1963 A bullet from a high-powered rifle was shot through the window of Major General Edwin A. Walker's home, narrowly missing the General. The Warren Commission Report would later claim Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shot with the same rifle he would use to assassinate Presdient Kennedy in November. Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly wrote a two page note to his wife (written in Russian) implicating himself in the General's assassination attempt.
April 17, 1963 "We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving.
We believe the Communists will continue to wage a war of attrition, hoping for some break in the situation which will lead to victory.
We do not believe that it is possible at this time to project the future course of the war with any confidence."
National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA and U.S. Military
April 24, 1963 "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to re-elect me." - President Kennedy to journalist Charles Bartlett.
April 24 Lee Harvey Oswald moves to New Orleans. His wife, Marina Oswald moves in with Ruth Paine.
Events, mysteries, enigmas, movements, meetings, lies and planning begin to swirl and foam into the maelstrom.
You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps....
Their power is the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves. -Thomas Jefferson
Catching up with the Oswalds: Lee and his Russian wife go on the move and evidence starts to mount for the Warren Commission to later discover and use to claim he is the lone gunman.
MARCH 1963
March 2, 1963: The Oswalds move to 214 West Neely Street.
March 9-10, 1963: LHO takes photographs of the home of General Edwin Walker, a right-wing activist.
March 11, 1963: The Militant, a prominent left-wing publication, publishes a letter signed L.H., probably written by LHO.
March 12, 1963: Ruth Paine visits Marina at the new apartment. Also that day, LHO orders a rifle from Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago.
March 20, 1963: The rifle and the revolver are shipped.
March 25, 1963: LHO picks up the weapons.
March 31, 1963: Marina takes the infamous "Backyard Photos" of LHO.
President Obama is spending the 10 anniversary of the Bush, Jr./Cheney invasion of Iraq visiting Israel.I don’t blame him for wanting to be out of the country. At least he is not in Oslo, Norway reminiscing about his Nobel Peace Prize.
If we think back and try to write an accurate history of the war, we will be lost in a quagmire similar to trying to explain the Vietnam War to ourselves. For the most part, Americans don’t want to hear it. And for those that do, it is very difficult to research the truth, because American foreign policy has very rarely been about the truth.
So, as your typical spoiled American, I ask: Where is my 25¢ a gallon gas? If that was a benefit I could see and feel in my wallet, then maybe I would be okay. But instead, I don’t pay 25¢ a gallon. I don’t pay $1 or $2 or $3 or $4 a gallon.
And all I am sure about is that somewhere between the collapse of the World Trade Centers in 2001 and now, I have lost most of the Bill of Rights under the Constitution. The Federal Government can do whatever it wants, to whomever it wants, whenever it wants and doesn’t have to tell justify it or even tell anyone about it… and this includes killing Americans.
So what do I have ten years after the start of the Iraq War? Not much and a lot less of it.
No one is heating up the tar, plucking the feathers off chickens and gathering the rails, either.
Oh, and no Corporate Person is paying taxes this year, including our national addiction, Facebook.
But you are.
This is the tinder for barricades, brothers and sisters.
A bon-bon from The Atlantic: "U.S. banks celebrated their second-most-profitable year in 2012 with a whopping $141 billion in net income last year. That's scarcely smaller than the record, $145 billion, set just before the crash, in 2006, according to the FDIC."
Just wait 'til the sequestration kicks in. Won't that be an "Aha!" moment.
You don't get more progressive than KPFA in Berkeley or KPFK in Los Angeles. So when those radio stations stopped begging for money for an hour and broadcast Peter Staudenmaier flapping his mouth about the harm conspiracy theorist do to the liberal and progressive agenda, I felt he was in need of a response.
It took the self proclaimed anarchist a while to get to his main point. He doesn't like Michael Moore documentaries, especially Fahrenheit 9/11. This in itself fires off a conspiracy theory: Any negative media about 9/11 must get beat down. Even our liberal icons must pay the piper and insult and, not try to refute, but mock any 9/11 conspiracy theory.
Mr. Staudenmaier warms us up to his theory with some really bad examples: The Reichstag Fire was a government conspiracy, you asshole. The Nazi Party was caught and called out, so it wasn't the Jews after all.
The Assassination of President Kennedy was not a random act of some 24 year old loner who decided to bring a rifle to work and shot the President as he drove down Main Street.
Lee Harvey Oswald was proven to be on the CIA payroll. He was a Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, changed his mind and moved back to the United States with a Russian wife, no questions asked. AND... the Dallas newspaper published the Presidential parade routed , unbeknownst to any loner who worked in the Texas School Book Depository, that routed was changed from whisking the President safely on to the Stemsons Freeway to making the right turn and left turn down a little side street and stopping directly in the line of fire… whatever that may have been.
50 witnesses said the bullets came from behind them on the infamous grassy knoll… 50 is a lot of people. (Mr. Staudenmaier really hates when conspiracy theorists use …)
Staudenmaier mumbles insults at Michael Moore's film and conspiracy theorists in general and says we are all simplistic and think the world would be a better place if the 'cabal' could be stopped.
Well, I do believe the world would be a better place if the conspiracy to steal the election of 2000 did not work and Bush, Jr. /Cheney did not enter the White House. Any arguments from the left?
I also think the nation would be a better place if Bush, Sr. never got anywhere near the White House and was not allowed to take part in any secret hostage negotiations with the Iranian Fanatical Islamic Government in 1979…
And yes, I believe the entire world would have been better served had JFK not been assassinated.
History is on the side of those labeled conspiracy theorists. It is amusing that even these liberal, left-wing radio stations felt obliged or were 'tricked' into broadcasting Mr. Staudenmaier's self immolation.
President Obama causes hysteria in over-reported fringe circles in this country, those force fed on FOX News and hate radio. He is a President that wanted to stop the divisive politics in America. He wanted to be transformational. He didn’t know what he was up against. But he does now.
A conspiracy about the events in Sandy Hook can be aired on radio, TV and on the internet, but a conspiracy about 911 and the Government can’t be discussed on even Pacifica Radio or Bill Maher’s Show; and that was from a President who stole his elections and lied our nation into war… but Obama is the one who can’t be trusted… he wants our guns to make us a socialist state.
Even this blog post gives too much credence to the right-wing fools, but they are dangerous fools. They were slightly diminished in the 2012 elections, but not destroyed. They will continue to try to wreck our Republic and lynch President Obama. They are evil, racist and wrong about everything. The ills of the America economic system started with the election of President Reagan and that spectacular failure culminated in President Bush, Jr.’s disastrous power grab. Republicans are evil.
President Obama inherited the American Nightmare. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to react. He listened to the bankers and to Wall Street. They told him to be careful how he tread or the entire system could collapse….but it had already collapsed and President Obama’s inability to see that is his great failure. FDR closed the banks and opened them back up when he was good and ready and when the banks were good and ready… the American economic system, capitalism survived. Our nation came through the Great Depression and fought a two front World War… and that was followed by an economic system, guided on the principals of fairness set up during the New Deal that led us to our only true economic boom last century… ending in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration and the Republican takeover of Congress. So Obama kept the thieves in his cabinet and in charge on Wall Street. No one went to jail. No lessons learned.
President Obama also listened too closely to the tired, old military industrial complex and kept some of the same players from previous times in his administration, who whispered in his ear all kinds of bad things only a President can hear about American security. President Obama was not equipped to understand what was being said to him and so he continued and expanded the military direction and drive that has gone around in circles since 911. No lessons learned.
As for Health Care, that is a story still unfolding, an example of what President Obama called his ‘long game’. What does that mean…? We will eventually be fooled into single payer national health care by this brilliant Affordable Care Act? Once again, I believe President Obama wasn’t equipped to understand and take on such an endeavor as national health care, so he listened to the experts… the Insurance Industry… check-mate.
And like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, the loonies and traitors in our society are just not going to cooperate and they will throw sand in the gears of the Obama Administration… waiting for 2016. So as for the Second Term, I am worried because now we know President Obama and there is no game plan. He will not stop war. He will not stop Wall Street. He will not stop quibbling with the Republicans in Congress and before you know it… 2016.
Progressives, middle of the road Democrats, left-wing kooks all voted for President Obama, not because they believed in his policies, and wanted his First Term to continue, but because we were scared shitless of a Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan Administration. We knew instinctively that we wouldn’t have survived it. The Second Term will be the same as the First. President Obama had his moment; his magic moment during his first 100 Days to change America for the better, be transformative and his actions spoke much louder than his words. The moment passed. I dread 2016.
Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the 88th Congress:
I congratulate you all--not merely on your electoral victory but on your selected role in history. For you and I are privileged to serve the great Republic in what could be the most decisive decade in its long history. The choices we make, for good or ill, may well shape the state of the Union for generations yet to come.
Little more than 100 weeks ago I assumed the office of President of the United States. In seeking the help of the Congress and our countrymen, I pledged no easy answers. I pledged--and asked--only toil and dedication. These the Congress and the people have given in good measure. And today, having witnessed in recent months a heightened respect for our national purpose and power--having seen the courageous calm of a united people in a perilous hour--and having observed a steady improvement in the opportunities and well-being of our citizens--I can report to you that the state of this old but youthful Union, in the 175th year of its life, is good.
In the world beyond our borders, steady progress has been made in building a world of order. The people of West Berlin remain both free and secure. A settlement, though still precarious, has been reached in Laos. The spearpoint of aggression has been blunted in Viet-Nam. The end of agony may be in sight in the Congo. The doctrine of troika is dead. And, while danger continues, a deadly threat has been removed in Cuba.
At home, the recession is behind us. Well over a million more men and women are working today than were working 2 years ago. The average factory work week is once again more than 40 hours; our industries are turning out more goods than ever before; and more than half of the manufacturing capacity that lay silent and wasted 100 weeks ago is humming with activity.
In short, both at home and abroad, there may now be a temptation to relax. For the road has been long, the burden heavy, and the pace consistently urgent.
But we cannot be satisfied to rest here. This is the side of the hill, not the top. The mere absence of war is not peace. The mere absence of recession is not growth. We have made a beginning--but we have only begun.
Now the time has come to make the most of our gains--to translate the renewal of our national strength into the achievement of our national purpose.
I.
America has enjoyed 22 months of uninterrupted economic recovery. But recovery is not enough. If we are to prevail in the long run, we must expand the long-run strength of our economy. We must move along the path to a higher rate of growth and full employment.
For this would mean tens of billions of dollars more each year in production, profits, wages, and public revenues. It would mean an end to the persistent slack which has kept our unemployment at or above 5 percent for 61 out of the past 62 months--and an end to the growing pressures for such restrictive measures as the 35-hour week, which alone could increase hourly labor costs by as much as 14 percent, start a new wage-price spiral of inflation, and undercut our efforts to compete with other nations.
To achieve these greater gains, one step, above all, is essential--the enactment this year of a substantial reduction and revision in Federal income taxes.
For it is increasingly clear--to those in Government, business, and labor who are responsible for our economy's success--that our obsolete tax system exerts too heavy a drag on private purchasing power, profits, and employment. Designed to check inflation in earlier years, it now checks growth instead. It discourages extra effort and risk. It distorts the use of resources. It invites recurrent recessions, depresses our Federal revenues, and causes chronic budget deficits.
Now, when the inflationary pressures of the war and the post-war years no longer threaten, and the dollar commands new respect--now, when no military crisis strains our resources--now is the time to act. We cannot afford to be timid or slow. For this is the most urgent task confronting the Congress in 1963.
In an early message, I shall propose a permanent reduction in tax rates which will lower liabilities by $13.5 billion. Of this, $11 billion results from reducing individual tax rates, which now range between 20 and 91 percent, to a more sensible range of 14 to 65 percent, with a split in the present first bracket. Two and one-half billion dollars results from reducing corporate tax rates, from 52 percent--which gives the Government today a majority interest in profits--to the permanent pre-Korean level of 47 percent. This is in addition to the more than $2 billion cut in corporate tax liabilities resulting from last year's investment credit and depreciation reform.
To achieve this reduction within the limits of a manageable budgetary deficit, I urge: first, that these cuts be phased over 3 calendar years, beginning in 1963 with a cut of some $6 billion at annual rates; second, that these reductions be coupled with selected structural changes, beginning in 1964, which will broaden the tax base, end unfair or unnecessary preferences, remove or lighten certain hardships, and in the net offset some $3.5 billion of the revenue loss; and third, that budgetary receipts at the outset be increased by $1.5 billion a year, without any change in tax liabilities, by gradually shifting the tax payments of large corporations to a more current time schedule. This combined program, by increasing the amount of our national income, will in time result in still higher Federal revenues. It is a fiscally responsible program--the surest and the soundest way of achieving in time a balanced budget in a balanced full employment economy.
This net reduction in tax liabilities of $10 billion will increase the purchasing power of American families and business enterprises in every tax bracket, with greatest increase going to our low-income consumers. It will, in addition, encourage the initiative and risk-taking on which our free system depends--induce more investment, production, and capacity use--help provide the 2 million new jobs we need every year--and reinforce the American principle of additional reward for additional effort.
I do not say that a measure for tax reduction and reform is the only way to achieve these goals.
No doubt a massive increase in Federal spending could also create jobs and growth, but in today's setting, private consumers, employers, and investors should be given a full opportunity first.
No doubt a temporary tax cut could provide a spur to our economy--but a long-run problem compels a long-run solution.
No doubt a reduction in either individual or corporation taxes alone would be of great help--but corporations need customers and job seekers need jobs.
No doubt tax reduction without reform would sound simpler and more attractive to many--but our growth is also hampered by a host of tax inequities and special preferences which have distorted the flow of investment.
And finally, there are no doubt some who would prefer to put off a tax cut in the hope that ultimately an end to the cold war would make possible an equivalent cut in expenditures--but that end is not in view and to wait for it would be costly and self-defeating.
In submitting a tax program which will, of course, temporarily increase the deficit but can ultimately end it--and in recognition of the need to control expenditures--I will shortly submit a fiscal 1964 administrative budget which, while allowing for needed rises in defense, space, and fixed interest charges, holds total expenditures for all other purposes below this year's level.
This requires the reduction or postponement of many desirable programs, the absorption of a large part of last year's Federal pay raise through personnel and other economies, the termination of certain installations and projects, and the substitution in several programs of private for public credit. But I am convinced that the enactment this year of tax reduction and tax reform overshadows all other domestic problems in this Congress. For we cannot for long lead the cause of peace and freedom, if we ever cease to set the pace here at home.
II.
Tax reduction alone, however, is not enough to strengthen our society, to provide opportunities for the four million Americans who are born every year, to improve the lives of 32 million Americans who live on the outskirts of poverty.
The quality of American life must keep pace with the quantity of American goods.
This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.
Therefore, by holding down the budgetary cost of existing programs to keep within the limitations I have set, it is both possible and imperative to adopt other new measures that we cannot afford to postpone.
These measures are based on a series of fundamental premises, grouped under four related headings:
First, we need to strengthen our Nation by investing in our youth.
The future of any country which is dependent upon the will and wisdom of its citizens is damaged, and irreparably damaged, whenever any of its children is not educated to the full extent of his talent, from grade school through graduate school. Today, an estimated 4 out of every 10 students in the 5th grade will not even finish high school--and that is a waste we cannot afford.
In addition, there is no reason why one million young Americans, out of school and out of work, should all remain unwanted and often untrained on our city streets when their energies can be put to good use.
Finally, the overseas success of our Peace Corps volunteers, most of them young men and women carrying skills and ideas to needy people, suggests the merit of a similar corps serving our own community needs: in mental hospitals, on Indian reservations, in centers for the aged or for young delinquents, in schools for the illiterate or the handicapped. As the idealism of our youth has served world peace, so can it serve the domestic tranquility.
Second, we need to strengthen our Nation by safeguarding its health.
Our working men and women, instead of being forced to beg for help from public charity once they are old and ill, should start contributing now to their own retirement health program through the Social Security System.
Moreover, all our miracles of medical research will count for little if we cannot reverse the growing nationwide shortage of doctors, dentists, and nurses, and the widespread shortages of nursing homes and modern urban hospital facilities. Merely to keep the present ratio of doctors and dentists from declining any further, we must over the next 10 years increase the capacity of our medical schools by 50 percent and our dental schools by 100 percent.
Finally, and of deep concern, I believe that the abandonment of the mentally ill and the mentally retarded to the grim mercy of custodial institutions too often inflicts on them and on their families a needless cruelty which this Nation should not endure. The incidence of mental retardation in this country is three times as high as that of Sweden, for example--and that figure can and must be reduced.
Third, we need to strengthen our Nation by protecting the basic rights of its citizens.
The right to competent counsel must be assured to every man accused of crime in Federal court, regardless of his means.
And the most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote in a free American election, must not be denied to any citizen on grounds of his race or color. I wish that all qualified Americans permitted to vote were willing to vote, but surely in this centennial year of Emancipation all those who are willing to vote should always be permitted.
Fourth, we need to strengthen our Nation by making the best and the most economical use of its resources and facilities.
Our economic health depends on healthy transportation arteries; and I believe the way to a more modern, economical choice of national transportation service is through increased competition and decreased regulation. Local mass transit, faring even worse, is as essential a community service as hospitals and highways. Nearly three-fourths of our citizens live in urban areas, which occupy only 2 percent of our land--and if local transit is to survive and relieve the congestion of these cities, it needs Federal stimulation and assistance.
Next, this Government is in the storage and stockpile business to the melancholy tune of more than $16 billion. We must continue to support farm income, but we should not pile more farm surpluses on top of the $7.5 billion we already own. We must maintain a stockpile of strategic materials, but the $8.5 billion we have acquired--for reasons both good and bad--is much more than we need; and we should be empowered to dispose of the excess in ways which will not cause market disruption.
Finally, our already overcrowded national parks and recreation areas will have twice as many visitors 10 years from now as they do today. If we do not plan today for the future growth of these and other great natural assets--not only parks and forests but wildlife and wilderness preserves, and water projects of all kinds--our children and their children will be poorer in every sense of the word.
These are not domestic concerns alone. For upon our achievement of greater vitality and strength here at home hang our fate and future in the world: our ability to sustain and supply the security of free men and nations, our ability to command their respect for our leadership, our ability to expand our trade without threat to our balance of payments, and our ability to adjust to the changing demands of cold war competition and challenge.
We shall be judged more by what we do at home than by what we preach abroad. Nothing we could do to help the developing countries would help them half as much as a booming U.S. economy. And nothing our opponents could do to encourage their own ambitions would encourage them half as much as a chronic, lagging U.S. economy. These domestic tasks do not divert energy from our security--they provide the very foundation for freedom's survival and success.
III.
Turning to the world outside, it was only a few years ago--in Southeast Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, even outer space--that communism sought to convey the image of a unified, confident, and expanding empire, closing in on a sluggish America and a free world in disarray. But few people would hold to that picture today.
In these past months we have reaffirmed the scientific and military superiority of freedom. We have doubled our efforts in space, to assure us of being first in the future. We have undertaken the most far-reaching defense improvements in the peacetime history of this country. And we have maintained the frontiers of freedom from Viet-Nam to West Berlin.
But complacency or self-congratulation can imperil our security as much as the weapons of tyranny. A moment of pause is not a promise of peace. Dangerous problems remain from Cuba to the South China Sea. The world's prognosis prescribes, in short, not a year's vacation for us, but a year of obligation and opportunity.
Four special avenues of opportunity stand out: the Atlantic Alliance, the developing nations, the new Sino-Soviet difficulties, and the search for worldwide peace.
IV.
First, how fares the grand alliance? Free Europe is entering into a new phase of its long and brilliant history. The era of colonial expansion has passed; the era of national rivalries is fading; and a new era of interdependence and unity is taking shape. Defying the old prophecies of Marx, consenting to what no conqueror could ever compel, the free nations of Europe are moving toward a unity of purpose and power and policy in every sphere of activity.
For 17 years this movement has had our consistent support, both political and economic. Far from resenting the new Europe, we regard her as a welcome partner, not a rival. For the road to world peace and freedom is still long, and there are burdens which only full partners can share--in supporting the common defense, in expanding world trade, in aligning our balance of payments, in aiding the emergent nations, in concerting political and economic policies, and in welcoming to our common effort other industrialized nations, notably Japan, whose remarkable economic and political development of the 1950's permits it now to play on the world scene a major constructive role.
No doubt differences of opinion will continue to get more attention than agreements on action, as Europe moves from independence to more formal interdependence. But these are honest differences among honorable associates--more real and frequent, in fact, among our Western European allies than between them and the United States. For the unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion. But the basic agreement of this alliance on fundamental issues continues.
The first task of the alliance remains the common defense. Last month Prime Minister Macmillan and I laid plans for a new stage in our long cooperative effort, one which aims to assist in the wider task of framing a common nuclear defense for the whole alliance.
The Nassau agreement recognizes that the security of the West is indivisible, and so must be our defense. But it also recognizes that this is an alliance of proud and sovereign nations, and works best when we do not forget it. It recognizes further that the nuclear defense of the West is not a matter for the present nuclear powers alone--that France will be such a power in the future--and that ways must be found without increasing the hazards of nuclear diffusion, to increase the role of our other partners in planning, manning, and directing a truly multilateral nuclear force within an increasingly intimate NATO alliance. Finally, the Nassau agreement recognizes that nuclear defense is not enough, that the agreed NATO levels of conventional strength must be met, and that the alliance cannot afford to be in a position of having to answer every threat with nuclear weapons or nothing.
We remain too near the Nassau decisions, and too far from their full realization, to know their place in history. But I believe that, for the first time, the door is open for the nuclear defense of the alliance to become a source of confidence, instead of a cause of contention.
The next most pressing concern of the alliance is our common economic goals of trade and growth. This Nation continues to be concerned about its balance-of-payments deficit, which, despite its decline, remains a stubborn and troublesome problem. We believe, moreover, that closer economic ties among all free nations are essential to prosperity and peace. And neither we nor the members of the European Common Market are so affluent that we can long afford to shelter high cost farms or factories from the winds of foreign competition, or to restrict the channels of trade with other nations of the free world. If the Common Market should move toward protectionism and restrictionism, it would undermine its own basic principles. This Government means to use the authority conferred on it last year by the Congress to encourage trade expansion on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world.
V.
Second, what of the developing and non-aligned nations? They were shocked by the Soviets' sudden and secret attempt to transform Cuba into a nuclear striking base--and by Communist China's arrogant invasion of India. They have been reassured by our prompt assistance to India, by our support through the United Nations of the Congo's unification, by our patient search for disarmament, and by the improvement in our treatment of citizens and visitors whose skins do not happen to be white. And as the older colonialism recedes, and the neo-colonialism of the Communist powers stands out more starkly than ever, they realize more clearly that the issue in the world struggle is not communism versus capitalism, but coercion versus free choice.
They are beginning to realize that the longing for independence is the same the world over, whether it is the independence of West Berlin or Viet-Nam. They are beginning to realize that such independence runs athwart all Communist ambitions but is in keeping with our own--and that our approach to their diverse needs is resilient and resourceful, while the Communists are still relying on ancient doctrines and dogmas.
Nevertheless it is hard for any nation to focus on an external or subversive threat to its independence when its energies are drained in daily combat with the forces of poverty and despair. It makes little sense for us to assail, in speeches and resolutions, the horrors of communism, to spend $50 billion a year to prevent its military advance--and then to begrudge spending, largely on American products, less than one-tenth of that amount to help other nations strengthen their independence and cure the social chaos in which communism has always thrived.
I am proud--and I think most Americans are proud--of a mutual defense and assistance program, evolved with bipartisan support in three administrations, which has, with all its recognized problems, contributed to the fact that not a single one of the nearly fifty U.N. members to gain independence since the Second World War has succumbed to Communist control.
I am proud of a program that has helped to arm and feed and clothe millions of people who live on the front lines of freedom.
I am especially proud that this country has put forward for the 60's a vast cooperative effort to achieve economic growth and social progress throughout the Americas--the Alliance for Progress.
I do not underestimate the difficulties that we face in this mutual effort among our close neighbors, but the free states of this hemisphere, working in close collaboration, have begun to make this alliance a living reality. Today it is feeding one out of every four school age children in Latin America an extra food ration from our farm surplus. It has distributed 1.5 million school books and is building 17,000 classrooms. It has helped resettle tens of thousands of farm families on land they can call their own. It is stimulating our good neighbors to more self-help and self-reform--fiscal, social, institutional, and land reforms. It is bringing new housing and hope, new health and dignity, to millions who were forgotten. The men and women of this hemisphere know that the alliance cannot succeed if it is only another name for United States handouts--that it can succeed only as the Latin American nations themselves devote their best effort to fulfilling its goals.
This story is the same in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Asia. Wherever nations are willing to help themselves, we stand ready to help them build new bulwarks of freedom. We are not purchasing votes for the cold war; we have gone to the aid of imperiled nations, neutrals and allies alike. What we do ask--and all that we ask--is that our help be used to best advantage, and that their own efforts not be diverted by needless quarrels with other independent nations.
Despite all its past achievements, the continued progress of the Mutual Assistance Program requires a persistent discontent with present performance. We have been reorganizing this program to make it a more effective, efficient instrument--and that process will continue this year.
But free world development will still be an uphill struggle. Government aid can only supplement the role of private investment, trade expansion, commodity stabilization, and, above all, internal self-improvement. The processes of growth are gradual--bearing fruit in a decade, not a day. Our successes will be neither quick nor dramatic. But if these programs were ever to be ended, our failures in a dozen countries would be sudden and certain.
Neither money nor technical assistance, however, can be our only weapon against poverty. In the end, the crucial effort is one of purpose, requiring the fuel of finance but also a torch of idealism. And nothing carries the spirit of this American idealism more effectively to the far corners of the earth than the American Peace Corps.
A year ago, less than 900 Peace Corps volunteers were on the job. A year from now they will number more than 9,000--men and women, aged 18 to 79, willing to give 2 years of their lives to helping people in other lands.
There are, in fact, nearly a million Americans serving their country and the cause of freedom in overseas posts, a record no other people can match. Surely those of us who stay at home should be glad to help indirectly; by supporting our aid programs; .by opening our doors to foreign visitors and diplomats and students; and by proving, day by day, by deed as well as word, that we are a just and generous people.
VI.
Third, what comfort can we take from the increasing strains and tensions within the Communist bloc? Here hope must be tempered with caution. For the Soviet-Chinese disagreement is over means, not ends. A dispute over how best to bury the free world is no grounds for Western rejoicing.
Nevertheless, while a strain is not a fracture, it is clear that the forces of diversity are at work inside the Communist camp, despite all the iron disciplines of regimentation and all the iron dogmatisms of ideology. Marx is proven wrong once again: for it is the closed Communist societies, not the free and open societies which carry within themselves the seeds of internal disintegration.
The disarray of the Communist empire has been heightened by two other formidable forces. One is the historical force of nationalism--and the yearning of all men to be free. The other is the gross inefficiency of their economies. For a closed society is not open to ideas of progress--and a police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.
New nations asked to choose between two competing systems need only compare conditions in East and West Germany, Eastern and Western Europe, North and South Viet-Nam. They need only compare the disillusionment of Communist Cuba with the promise of the Alliance for Progress. And all the world knows that no successful system builds a wall to keep its people in and freedom out--and the wall of shame dividing Berlin is a symbol of Communist failure.
VII.
Finally, what can we do to move from the present pause toward enduring peace? Again I would counsel caution. I foresee no spectacular reversal in Communist methods or goals. But if all these trends and developments can persuade the Soviet Union to walk the path of peace, then let her know that all free nations will journey with her. But until that choice is made, and until the world can develop a reliable system of international security, the free peoples have no choice but to keep their arms nearby.
This country, therefore, continues to require the best defense in the world--a defense which is suited to the sixties. This means, unfortunately, a rising defense budget--for there is no substitute for adequate defense, and no "bargain basement" way of achieving it. It means the expenditure of more than $15 billion this year on nuclear weapons systems alone, a sum which is about equal to the combined defense budgets of our European Allies.
But it also means improved air and missile defenses, improved civil defense, a strengthened anti-guerrilla capacity and, of prime importance, more powerful and flexible non-nuclear forces. For threats of massive retaliation may not deter piecemeal aggression--and a line of destroyers in a quarantine, or a division of well-equipped men on a border, may be more useful to our real security than the multiplication of awesome weapons beyond all rational need.
But our commitment to national safety is not a commitment to expand our military establishment indefinitely. We do not dismiss disarmament as merely an idle dream. For we believe that, in the end, it is the only way to assure the security of all without impairing the interests of any. Nor do we mistake honorable negotiation for appeasement. While we shall never weary in the defense of freedom, neither shall we ever abandon the pursuit of peace.
In this quest, the United Nations requires our full and continued support. Its value in serving the cause of peace has been shown anew in its role in the West New Guinea settlement, in its use as a forum for the Cuban crisis, and in its task of unification in the Congo. Today the United Nations is primarily the protector of the small and the weak, and a safety valve for the strong. Tomorrow it can form the framework for a world of law--a world in which no nation dictates the destiny of another, and in which the vast resources now devoted to destructive means will serve constructive ends.
In short, let our adversaries choose. If they choose peaceful competition, they shall have it. If they come to realize that their ambitions cannot succeed--if they see their "wars of liberation" and subversion will ultimately fail--if they recognize that there is more security in accepting inspection than in permitting new nations to master the black arts of nuclear war--and if they are willing to turn their energies, as we are, to the great unfinished tasks of our own peoples--then, surely, the areas of agreement can be very wide indeed: a clear understanding about Berlin, stability in Southeast Asia, an end to nuclear testing, new checks on surprise or accidental attack, and, ultimately, general and complete disarmament.
VIII.
For we seek not the worldwide victory of one nation or system but a worldwide victory of man. The modern globe is too small, its weapons are too destructive, and its disorders are too contagious to permit any other kind of victory.
To achieve this end, the United States will continue to spend a greater portion of its national production than any other people in the free world. For 15 years no other free nation has demanded so much of itself. Through hot wars and cold, through recession and prosperity, through the ages of the atom and outer space, the American people have never faltered and their faith has never flagged. If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all.
But difficult days need not be dark. I think these are proud and memorable days in the cause of peace and freedom. We are proud, for example, of Major Rudolf Anderson who gave his life over the island of Cuba. We salute Specialist James Allen Johnson who died on the border of South Korea. We pay honor to Sergeant Gerald Pendell who was killed in Viet-Nam. They are among the many who in this century, far from home, have died for our country. Our task now, and the task of all Americans is to live up to their commitment.
My friends: I close on a note of hope. We are not lulled by the momentary calm of the sea or the somewhat clearer skies above. We know the turbulence that lies below, and the storms that are beyond the horizon this year. But now the winds of change appear to be blowing more strongly than ever, in the world of communism as well as our own. For 175 years we have sailed with those winds at our back, and with the tides of human freedom in our favor. We steer our ship with hope, as Thomas Jefferson said, "leaving Fear astern."
Today we still welcome those winds of change--and we have every reason to believe that our tide is running strong. With thanks to Almighty God for seeing us through a perilous passage, we ask His help anew in guiding the "Good Ship Union."
State of the Union Address: John F. Kennedy (January 14, 1963)
In July 1862, Lincoln decided on a major change in national strategy. Instead of deferring to the border states and Northern Democrats, he would activate the Northern antislavery majority that had elected him and mobilize the potential of black manpower by issuing a proclamation of freedom for slaves in rebellious states—the Emancipation Proclamation. "Decisive and extreme measures must be adopted," Lincoln told members of his cabinet, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Emancipation was "a military necessity, absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued."
By trying to convert a Confederate resource to Union advantage, emancipation thus became a crucial part of the North's national strategy. But the idea of putting arms in the hands of black men provoked even greater hostility among Democrats and border state Unionists than emancipation itself. In August 1862, Lincoln told delegates from Indiana who offered to raise two black regiments that "the nation could not afford to lose Kentucky at this crisis" and that "to arm the negroes would turn 50,000 bayonets from the loyal border States against us that were for us."
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And it was time to call in General Grant to kick some ass.
President Obama's two major achievements so far has been to keep us from a a McCain/Palin Presidency and a Romney/Ryan Presidency.
It looks like his long game is going to be more of his mind-boggling attempts at bipartisanship with Evil.
Here is a piece of American history, full of American heros and of course... hero-villlians based on your Fair & Balanced world view: The Bonus Army and President Hoover's decision to attack.
Guy Fawkes Day: November 5th marks the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy to blow up the English Parliament and King James I in 1605, the day set for the king to open Parliament. The anniversary was named after Guy Fawkes, the most famous of the conspirators.
The day is celebrated like Halloween. A cake is part of the tradition.
Here is a modern interpretation of a very old cake.
Guy Fawkes Day Cake
(recipe inspired by Le Cordon Bleu)
Ingredients: 1/4 cup molasses 1/3 cup unsalted butter 1/4 cup dark corn syrup 1/2 cup soft light brown sugar 2/3 cup milk 1/3 cup rolled oats, blitzed to powder in coffee grinder 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 2 eggs
Instructions: 1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Line an 8 inch cake pan with waxed paper. Grease the paper with butter and dust with flour. 2. Melt the molasses, butter, corn syrup, brown sugar and milk in a saucepan. Remove from heat and cool. 3.
Put dry ingredients into a separate bowl: oat powder, flour, spices and
baking soda. Pour in the butter mixture and beat. Beat in the eggs, one
at a time. Continue beating until mixture becomes a smooth paste. 4.
Pour the mixture into the prepared cake pan and bake for 35 minutes.
Poke the center with a tooth pick. If it comes out clean, it is done.
Leave in pan to cool for 5 minutes. 5. Turn the cake out onto a cooling wire rack, peel off the waxed paper and leave to cool. 6. Frost with ready-made dark chocolate icing. Cut cake into squares and serve.
Once again, the young President shows the world how to be President of the United States of America.
He had little more than one year to live... but during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he kept the Military Industrial Complex from taking over our government... at the time.
"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what," Romney said.
It is sickening to hear Mitt Romney speak like this. He should step down as the Republican Party Presidential Nominee. He can not put his hand on a Book of Mormon and take the oath of office at this point.
I don't know what the procedure would be... Would Paul Ryan be elevated to Presidential Nominee and then appoint another Vice-Presidential nominee?
In 1972 George McGovern replaced his Vice-Presidential running mate, Senator Eagleton with Sargent Shriver, so there is some precedent for such a high-level maneuver.
Cokie (Coked-Up) Roberts was pitching for the Romney/Ryan ticket this morning on NPR, continuing the Jimmy Carter comparisons to President Obama’s first term.
She left out the treasonous trip George Bush, Sr. made on behalf of the Reagan campaign to keep the American Hostages until after Election Day, although the Iranians were trying to give them back in exchange for the freeing up of their financial assets so they could fight the Iran/Iraq war... but maybe the segment didn't have enough time to cover that with her.
Our Imperial Presidency is partly to blame for our Republic's demise, especially when we chose bad Presidents.
For future historians, the end of the Republic can probably be traced back to the assassination of President John Kennedy almost 50 years ago at the hands of his friends, yes Caesar-like. Is Ed Lansdale that different from Brutus?
Who set that motorcade route in Dallas?
Lyndon Johnson followed, a man whose internal corruption betrayed his dreams of being a noble imperial president like FDR, and instead transformed into a Caligula-creature, on his knees, mouth wide open to the assassins of his predecessor.
LBJ was followed by Richard Nixon, just five short years after JFK was shot in Dallas, and five months after Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. His political comeback corroded the office, taking good men like George McGovern and Sargent Shriver out of play. Nixon’s resignation fooled us into believing that our Constitution’s Checks & Balances were working. They were not. Nixon was the first, worst example of the Imperial Presidency gone wrong... but he wouldn't be our last.
Gerald Ford carried the football of deception as far down field as he was able before fumbling the ball to Jimmy Carter. Carter was a decent man, becoming aware of his imperial powers too late, and betrayed by the forces that never seem to leave our Republic's corridors of power... forces very jealous of usurpers to the thrown.
Then of course we had Ronald Reagan and the parade of ghouls, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to a Hollywood soundtrack. He was the most imperial of the Imperial Presidents, leaving us torn and frayed after eight long years of bad policy, deregulation and an exhausted economy. The Imperial Presidency seemed to have a big stick again, and was using it to bludgeon, not our enemies, but us.
History becomes blurry at this point... I don’t understand how George Bush, Sr. let go of the Presidency. Did democracy actually work in 1992? Poor George Bush, Sr. who somehow was taken down by Bill Clinton before being able to manifest into the Anti-Christ.
When it was George, Sr.'s time to unlock the Gates of Hell, did his hand quiver, as it did so many times in his life during moments that required great personal courage, moral fortitude and a steady hand? He let the Ship of State be taken by that pirate, Bill Clinton.
But I remember below $1 gasoline and a huge Federal Budget Surplus…Gone now of course as is the stupid son, George Bush, Jr. and the king of the Horribles, Dick Cheney, who stole the White House and all the money, as America yawned… oh what horrors they unleashed as they finally brought the Republic crumbling to its knees in a smoking heap of lies and thievery and betrayal... Imperial indeed.
Now we have our second Happy Warrior, Barack Obama, a man of whom the press loves to print and repeat every vile slur his enemies can dare call him. He bailed out the banks and Wall Street. He saved the automotive industry. He tried to give us Health Care; he even hedged his bets and gave the next generation of Presidential assassins everything they asked for, two, decades-long wars, drones, torture chambers and fuck habeas corpus...and he killed Osama Bin Laden... It doesn't get more imperial than that!
But the evil eye of Mordor is upon President Obama now, the Republicans have staggered to their feet once again, Pheonix-like from the ashes… and Cokie Roberts wants to talk about Jimmy Carter.
Obama = Carter...
We need a new Reagan...
Embassy attacks...
Free Markets...
Let the free market stampede down the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan once again, like the explosive, collapsing dust of the World Trade Centers (including Building Seven), engulfing everyone and everything it meets in its grey, pungent, blinding cloud of death and dishonor.
The enemies of the Republic do not believe a few American lives are a small price to pay for just four more years of demagoguery. Four more years of war and corruption and economic suicide. They hate Americans. They hate you and me. They hate the Greatest Generation most of all for allowing an Imperial Presidency to save the nation and foil their free market dreams of an American Century of Corporate Facism.
They love money and power and greed. They believe corporations are people. They hate unions and the middle and lower classes who should not be allowed to gather in large crowds, or vote. Arbeit Macht Frei.
Are the Republicans and their supporters setting up America and President Obama for an October Surprise before Election Day?
Jimmy Carter comparisons repeated at the Republican National Convention and U.S. Embassy attacks. .. the foul political winds of desperate Republican politics are on the rise.
I fear for America. Who will stop the debris falling from the crumbling Republic? There is an October Surprise in the air...
Our Party's second Happy Warrior, Barack Obama, a man of whom the press loves to print and repeat every vile slur his enemies can think to call him. He bailed out the banks and Wall Street. He saved the automotive industry. He tried to give us Health Care; he even hedged his bets and gave the the bad guys everything they asked for, two decades-long wars, drones, torture chambers and fuck habeas corpus...
But the evil eye of Mordor is upon President Obama now, the Republicans have staggered to their feet once again and a new October is approaching.
Obama = Carter...
We need a new Reagan...
Embassy attacks...
Let the free market stampede down the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan once again, like the explosive, collapsing dust of the World Trade Centers (including Building Seven), engulfing everyone and everything it meets in its grey, pungent, blinding cloud of death and dishonor.
The enemies of the Republic do not believe a few American lives are too high a price to pay for just four more years of demagoguery. Four more years of war and corruption and economic suicide. They hate you and me. They love money and power and greed.
There is something evil hidden in the wind blowing through the streets of our Nation’s Capital this fall and I fear it will bring forth an October Surprise.
New York Times:...The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that "a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be "imminent," although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives' suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.
In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real...
Neil Armstrong, American hero, astronaut, pilot, first man on the Moon, was buried this past Friday on Earth. I waited until after Mr. Armstrong's funeral to post this two part documentary.
There is a touch of the tin foil hat to Part One, but Part Two is more based around radiation and rocket science. Dark Moon Parts One & Two are lots of fun and despite the conspiracy agenda, there are thought provoking facts in the film... I didn't know that there is only one picture of Neil Armstrong on the Moon... and he is trying to walk out of frame.
Lots of interesting stuff, taken with a grain of salt, but in total it adds up to a forceful questioning of the Apollo Space Program as well as the overall history of the Cold War Era Space Race.
And you have to admit, our Government has lied to us more than they have told the truth. In America, the conspiracy theories are usually closer to the truth than the official history.
Dark Mission: Part One - Analysis of the Lunar Photography
Dark Mission: Part Two - Environmental Dangers & The Trouble With Rockets
New York Time Obit for Neil Armstrong: "A quiet, private man, at heart an engineer and crack test pilot, Mr. Armstrong made history on July 20, 1969, as the commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the mission that culminated the Soviet-American space race in the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy had committed the nation “to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” It was done with more than five months to spare..."
We never looked at our Moon the same way again, or the Earth.
When astronauts were on the Moon when I was a kid, me and my brother and sisters would run outside and look up into the night sky to try and see them. Our old neighbor next store worried that when astronauts were walking on the Moon it always seemed to rain. She didn't gain the global perspective the astronauts did, she was concerned with our street in Philadelphia and her lawn, but our young minds were blown.
The Republican Party is shot through now with an impulse to disunion that is almost an autonomic reflex at this point. Every solution they can offer has behind it the iron certainty that we are better off as individuals, that the nation best operates as a simple, loose framework within which those individuals can operate, and not as something we create together so that our individual achievements can be rooted in something greater than ourselves...
The walking, talking asshole, Mitt Romney, a man who incorporates everything wrong and horrible that Americans can become, has made a 'Birther" comment in Michigan... his Home State... but not the Home State of his father... and what is the reason for that? Why was Mitt Romney's father born in Mexico...?! and how exactly does a Mormon Bishop serve his Church and his Government?
Gore Vidal would have been very pleased by the response to his death. Newspapers, radio, television all mourned him and eulogized him for days following his passing. His acerbic wit was quoted and tweeted. His television appearances from the 1960s were edited down to the “crypto-Nazi” vs. the “queer” sound bites and dominated YouTube. Pundits proselytized 'for and against', for a week.
No recent author has garnished so much sustained attention from the modern media at their death as Gore Vidal. The one thing the media did not talk about, but I think the reason he was so well liked and well known, and therefore mourned in passing, was his novels. Over the last fifty years, people read them.
Burr, Lincoln, Empire, Hollywood, The Golden Age, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge, Julian. They were popular novels and people, over different generations, talked about them and shared them with friends and relatives. They made great gifts.
He had multiple audiences for his writing, there were the historical novels, but then he had the odd, fantasy fiction: The Smithsonian Institution, Live from Golgotha: The Gospel according to Gore Vidal, Duluth.
There were his novels that prophesied, or should I say warned about false prophets: Kalki, Messiah, and Creation.
And all these various themes and styles threaded their way throughout his 25 novels.
Even his early books, written fast and furious after World War Two: Williwaw, In A Yellow Wood, Dark Green, Bright Red and The City and The Pillar were uniquely Gore Vidal novels, although I will admit, his lesser books. He seemed in such a hurry, some of these books are more novellas than novels. But he certainly was thinking and making his readers think. (Except for The City and The Pillar, they are all out of print in America. I bought them from Amazon UK.)
In A Yellow Wood is a slim, yet an interesting look at Post World War Two New York City, when the financial industry was getting back on its feet after the War and the Great Depression. It was America’s time and when offered choices of Old Europe, or lighting out for California, our hero decides to stray no further than Wall Street. People didn’t believe it.
Dark Green, Bright Red is the first novel to lift the rock on America’s illegal, illicit interventionist activities in Central America before anyone in post War America even knew we were still interested in the place, let alone active. People didn’t believe it.
The City and The Pillar is a much written and talked about novel about two young men and their homosexual relationship, such as it was, and what becomes of it as they grow past adolescence and begin to have adult lives. People didn’t believe it.
A few more ‘at bats’ (A Search For The King, The Season of Comfort, The Judgment of Paris) and Gore Vidal struck out at the plate and his novels were not reviewed nor sold much by the early 1950s.
He went into television writing and then Broadway and Hollywood. Places where people will believe anything. He was quite successful in all three areas of our mass, visual entertainment mediums. He had a hit revival of one of his plays on Broadway when he died.
Vidal stepped into the ring and ran for Congress in 1960, but lost. He was financially secure enough after 10 years of writing for TV and the movies to stop and pick up his career as a novelist… and thus in a short time gave us Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge, Burr… and we were off and running.
“All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.” - Gore Vidal
When the “greatest novels of the century’ lists were written up in 1999… Gore Vidal did not appear on any of them. He noticed and was not happy about that. I have read most of his novels and I must admit I am not sure which Vidal novel would replace any of the books that made the lists.
He did not write a The Naked and The Dead, or a From Here To Eternity or a For Whom The Bell Tolls. But the totality of his Narratives of Empire books should stand tall on the serious reader’s bookshelf. Are they great literature? No. Are they interesting history? Yes. Are they good reads? You better believe it.
The website The Gore Vidal Index always held the fort down for the author. Take a look around. There is plenty there to enjoy. It is an amazing Gore Vidal website.
George Bush, Jr. was the worst President in the history of the United States... his father, George Bush, Sr. is a close second, only becasue that treasonous bastard lost his election to a second term to President Clinton.
Hell, Jefferson Davis ranks higher...
James Buchanan is Mount Rushmore material compared to the Bushes.
If the American Corporate Media wants to try and rewritie history so the Bush Family are not responsible for the destruction of democracy and the end of the United States of America... bring it on. I am ready for the rebuttal.
The novel takes place in Italy during World War Two. It shows how and why America fought that war and why we were a better people and nation for it. When the term Greatest Generation is thrown around by our celebrity pundits this weekend, Major Victor Joppolo is who and what they are talking about.
America did have its day and A Bell For Adano is an example of that. A little crude, a little tough, a little violent, and a lot of common sense and human decency and hard work.
The second half of the 20th Century saw the great betrayal, of folks like Joppolo... but there was a time...
London sources said yesterday that Secretary of State Rusk would canvass French and West German views on the status to be accorded East Germany in case his negotiations with Moscow approach a Berlin settlement. Mr. Rusk intends to raise the topic at the NATO meeting this week in Athens. Washington and London have already agreed that no trace of legality should be conferred on the East German regime, but Mr. Rusk wants to work out a full Allied position on East Germany before negotiating the subject with the Russians.
President Kennedy got a cool response when he addressed the annual meeting of the United States Chamber of Commerce and told the business men that his Administration did not want to set prices. In an effort to ease bitterness aroused by the steel price episode, he said he hoped it would mark a turn for the better in Government-business relations. But the only time he was interrupted by applause was when he said: "We in the National Government have a large stake in your profits." And the chamber's president, Richard Wagner, said pointedly that both business and labor must be free to make decisions without Government intervention.
The Atomic Energy Commission has become the first Federal unit to give its employees and job applicants the right to confront their accusers in security cases. The step could lead to revised security policies in other agencies.
The Justice Department brought its first action to have a Southern voting official held in contempt for failing to register qualified Negroes despite a court order barring discrimination.
A belief is growing within the Administration that the United States should not hold further atmospheric nuclear tests after the current series. These tests are expected to have a total explosive force equal to about one-fifth of all the nuclear energy unleashed by American blasts since 1945.
Maj. Gherman S. Titov, a man of relatively few words, directed some of them at earth-bound diplomats, frantic stockbrokers and New York traffic. The Soviet astronaut visited the United Nations, where Adlai E. Stevenson asked him whether it would be feasible for the Security Council to tour outer space. "Have you got things settled here on earth?" Major Titov countered. At the Stock Exchange (where he was both cheered and booed) he commented: "Everything was very clear in outer space. Here, nothing is clear."
May 2, 1962
The East Germans, displayed some new military equipment as their troops goose-stepped in Berlin's Marx-Engels Platz. The parade included a squad of ground-to-air missiles said to be of the type that allegedly downed Francis Gary Powers' U-2 plane. This was the first indication that Moscow had given such arms to a satellite state.
The Yugoslavs sprang a surprise, too, by parading twenty new Soviet-made T-54 tanks. Belgrade sources suggested they had been purchased in a straight commercial deal.
The West made an arms deal of its own. Britain, West Germany, and the United States will finance the development of Britain's revolutionary P-1127 strike and reconnaissance plane, which would be able to take off and land vertically.
President Kennedy's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy recommended greater Government activity, influence and power in collective bargaining. The panel proposed rewriting a section of the Taft-Hartley Act to give the President more authority and flexibility to deal with industrial conflicts that threaten national interests. Specifically, an emergency dispute board would be empowered to recommend settlement terms and the President would be allowed to require a resumption of work for eighty days without going to court.
President Kennedy's relations with the American Medical Association were less than harmonious. He and seven A.M.A. leaders discussed the best way to finance old-age medical care, but both sides agreed later that neither had made the slightest dent in the other's views.
Mr. Kennedy signed a bill authorizing $32,000,000 for expanded educational television.
Mayor Wagner called at the White House to give President Kennedy a list of suggested Democratic nominees for New York's fall election.
Thurgood Marshall finally gets Senate hearing.
May 3, 1962
India accused Communist China of creating conflict and tension among Asian nations. It was believed to be the first time in the Chinese-Indian Himalayan border dispute that India had openly criticized Chinese relations with other Asian nations. An Indian note to Peiping sharply rejected the often-repeated contention by the Chinese that they were non-aggressive.
President Kennedy's free trade proposals created a heated debate and a policy reversal at the United States Chamber of Commerce convention in Washington. A resolution on the domestic-relief provisions of the President's bill was killed by protectionist-minded delegates, but then reinstated.
The first megaton-range explosion was set off by the United States in the current Pacific nuclear tests. The Atomic Energy Commission said that a detonation in the "low megaton yield range" took place at about 2 P.M. (E.D.T.) in the vicinity of Christmas Island. A megaton is equivalent to the explosive force of 1,000,000 tons of TNT. It was believed that the explosion had the force of a few megatons. The two previous explosions were of less than a megaton.
Stahr quits Army post to head Indiana University.
Kennedy intervenes in fight over food agency.
Kennedy farm bill stalled again in committee.
Titov and Glenn to call on Kennedy today.
May 4, 1962
The dispute between the United States and West Germany over American talks with the Soviet Union appeared to be nearing a solution. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted at Athens, that the West Germans must agree to negotiate with East Germans. They agreed it would be "well worth exploring."
President Kennedy ordered the military to cut back orders for nuclear warheads by several thousands, according to Pentagon sources. Existing stockpiles will not be altered and the reduction will mostly affect small, battlefield-type weapons.
A Presidential emergency board recommended wage increases for 500,000 non-operating employees of the nation's railroads. It classified the increases as "non-inflationary." It also asked for a change in the spirit with which railroads and non-operating unions had been facing labor problems.
Major Gherman S. Titov and Lieut. Col. John H, Glenn, Jr. discussed their space experiences in Washington before a group of international scientists. Major Titov provided some new details of his twenty-five-hour flight.
Congressional Republican leaders called for a Congressional investigation of the Department of Agriculture. The Billie Sol Estes scandal of Texas was mentioned prominently. Senator Everett Dirksen told a news conference that the Estes scandal was only a symptom of a basic sickness in the department.
Senator John Tower of Texas gave the Peace Corps its first blast on Capitol Hill since the Nigeria post-card incident eight months ago. He charged that a 65-year-old constituent, Mrs. Janie F. Clethcer, had been subjected to abuse and dropped without justification from training in Puerto Rico.
President hears Gorbach on Austria's aims.
Kennedy moves to quiet Reserve-cut fears.
Kennedy urges stronger attack on school segregation.
May 5, 1962
The United States fired a middle-size nuclear device, its fourth in the Pacific tests.
New Orleans gave President Kennedy an enthusiastic welcome on his arrival to deliver two addresses. Almost a quarter million people cheered him. Fears that his civil rights policies might provoke hostility proved groundless.
The President chose the ceremonial opening of a huge New Orleans wharf as a dramatic setting to promote his plans for liberalized trade. He said the country was moving toward full trade partnership with all free nations. To facilitate this, he urged Congress to pass the Trade Expansion bill intact. The United States, he warned, faced an economic choice: "trade or fade."
An Agriculture Department employee confronted his superiors at a news conference and charged that officials had shown "favoritism" to the indicted Texas financier, Billie Sol Estes. To the employee's face, a key official immediately branded the story "a complete lie." The department had called the conference to let the employee speak.
United States ordered G.I.ís in Vietnam to lie.
U. S. worried by reports of India's buying MIG's.
May 6, 1962
The United States committed five fully equipped Polaris missile-firing submarines to the North Atlantic alliance yesterday. At a secret session of the NATO Council meeting in Athens, Secretary of Defense McNamara also said that the entire Atlantic Polaris force--expected to total forty-one submarines--would be pledged to NATO. The five already committed carry eighty nuclear missiles. The immediate effect of the Administration's action was to create a NATO nuclear deterrent.
American military sources supported Laotian charges that Communist Chinese troops temporarily invaded northern Laos last week to help Pathet Lao forces capture Muong Sing.
A leading House Republican said that the Administration's Trade Expansion bill must be revised "in many details" to win broad bipartisan support. Representative John W. Byrnes of Wisconsin said he believed the Ways and Means Committee--of which he is the second-ranking G.O.P. member--would go a long way toward making needed changes. President Kennedy called Friday for passage of the bill undiminished by crippling amendments in order to forge a true trade partnership among free nations.
John B. Connally, Jr., former Secretary of the Navy in the Kennedy Administration, led a field of six Democrats in the Texas gubernatorial primary. Former Major General Edwin A. Walker was running last.
Kennedy to name W.C. Battle envoy to Australia.
May 7, 1962
The United States yesterday exploded the nuclear warhead of a Polaris missile fired by a submarine in the Pacific. It was the fifth test in the current series and the first time this country had set off an atomic warhead carried by a long-range missile. Its force was not disclosed, but a regular Polaris is said to have the explosive power of 500,000 tons of TNT.
Americans at the NATO talks in Athens said France, which has been at odds with Washington on nuclear policy, would share fully in a new system of Allied consultations on the uses of American atomic forces in Europe. French acceptance of United States proposals for sharing nuclear information was called one of the meeting's major results.
At the NATO parley, it was disclosed that American World War II Victory ships loaded with tanks and other arms had been stationed off Southeast Asia, where they could give support to any United States action in South Vietnam.
In Laos, royal troops were reported quitting the provincial capital of Nam Tha after major attacks by pro-Communist units.
Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march By land or sea from the town to-night, Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch Of the North Church tower as a signal light,-- One if by land, and two if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm, For the country folk to be up and to arm."
Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, Just as the moon rose over the bay, Where swinging wide at her moorings lay The Somerset, British man-of-war; A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon like a prison bar, And a huge black hulk, that was magnified By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street Wanders and watches, with eager ears, Till in the silence around him he hears The muster of men at the barrack door, The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet, And the measured tread of the grenadiers, Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church, By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread, To the belfry chamber overhead, And startled the pigeons from their perch On the sombre rafters, that round him made Masses and moving shapes of shade,-- By the trembling ladder, steep and tall, To the highest window in the wall, Where he paused to listen and look down A moment on the roofs of the town And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead, In their night encampment on the hill, Wrapped in silence so deep and still That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread, The watchful night-wind, as it went Creeping along from tent to tent, And seeming to whisper, "All is well!" A moment only he feels the spell Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread Of the lonely belfry and the dead; For suddenly all his thoughts are bent On a shadowy something far away, Where the river widens to meet the bay,-- A line of black that bends and floats On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. Now he patted his horse's side, Now he gazed at the landscape far and near, Then, impetuous, stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry tower of the Old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely and spectral and sombre and still. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height A glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in the belfry burns.
A hurry of hoofs in a village street, A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet; That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night; And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight, Kindled the land into flame with its heat. He has left the village and mounted the steep, And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep, Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides; And under the alders that skirt its edge, Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge, Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock When he crossed the bridge into Medford town. He heard the crowing of the cock, And the barking of the farmer's dog, And felt the damp of the river fog, That rises after the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock, When he galloped into Lexington. He saw the gilded weathercock Swim in the moonlight as he passed, And the meeting-house windows, black and bare, Gaze at him with a spectral glare, As if they already stood aghast At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock, When he came to the bridge in Concord town. He heard the bleating of the flock, And the twitter of birds among the trees, And felt the breath of the morning breeze Blowing over the meadow brown. And one was safe and asleep in his bed Who at the bridge would be first to fall, Who that day would be lying dead, Pierced by a British musket ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read How the British Regulars fired and fled,--- How the farmers gave them ball for ball, >From behind each fence and farmyard wall, Chasing the redcoats down the lane, Then crossing the fields to emerge again Under the trees at the turn of the road, And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm,--- A cry of defiance, and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo for evermore! For, borne on the night-wind of the Past, Through all our history, to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
"To mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the BBC's Sean Coughlan narrates one of the most authentic versions of events in existence. Using voice synthesis to re-create the strange, twitter-like, mechanical brevity of the original Morse code, this programme brings to life the tragedy through the ears of the wireless operators in the area that night.
On the night of the disaster, the network of young Marconi wireless operators on different ships and land stations frantically communicated with each other across the cold expanses of the North Atlantic in an effort to mount a rescue for the doomed vessel."
“Attempting to debate with a person who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to the dead.” ― Thomas Paine
One of Andrew Breitbart's nemeses, (and there were many) Max Blumenthal wrote once of The Powell Memo (a smoking gun of Hilary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy") ...
"...To roll back the surge of democracy that supposedly threatened corporate predominance, Powell urged the Chamber of Commerce to finance the creation of a new political and cultural infrastructure — a “counter-establishment” capable of unraveling the liberal establishment. The infrastructure would consist of pseudo-scholarly journals, “experts” promoted through speakers bureaus, campus pressure groups, publishing houses, lobbyists and partisan idea factories masquerading as think tanks. He wrote that operatives of the network would have to affect a “more aggressive attitude,” leveling relentless personal attacks against the perceived enemies of big business. By the last days of the Nixon administration, Attorney General John Mitchell was boasting that his conservative friends were going to take the country “so far to the right we won’t recognize it.”
This is of course the exact opposite of what Breitbart wailed about for the last twenty years of his life... the left-leaning conspiracy of modern media... his personal justification for pushing and bullying a right-wing agenda that he believed was being held back from the American people...
Well, the right seems to have captured the podium and where has it gotten the United States? How is our financial situation? How is our health? How is our environment? How is the education system? How is the global empire faring?
Conservatism in this country has done more damage to America that the Empire of Japan, Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union and International Terrorism combined.
Where is our manufacturing infrastructure?
Where have pensions, and unemployment compensation gone?
Where are the Savings & Loans institutions?
Why has our military spent twice as long fighting in Afghanistan than it did in World War Two?
The list goes on. What made America great in the eyes of the world and in the lives of Americans has been attacked, beaten, derided and bombed.
Who polluted the Susquehanna River?
Who stole the consumer's money from MF Global?
The answers to questions like these and what we do about them, will determine if we survive as a free nation this century. And this is precisely where the right-wing media is betraying us.
If terrorist attacks made as many people homeless in the United States as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we would have nuked Saudi Arabia by now.
Conservatives are wrong. Republicans, yes even your neighbors, friends and family members are right-wing enablers and enemies of the American way of life. Sadly, most aren't even aware of their role in the end of the American Republic. They are dupes of the media, Breibart's media, but he doesn't have to live with the consequences anymore. He left that to us.
Lauded as one of the most influential events in the history of American art, the Armory Show has a mythic legacy that rivals the raucous opening of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring in Paris.
...From February 17th to March 15th, 1913, New York's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th streets was home to approximately 1250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 European and American artists...
A pending measure, which passed the state Senate last week, would offer 13 additional weeks of benefits to the state's jobless residents. The federal funding was approved by Congress in December but requires the state to tweak its unemployment compensation rules in order to receive those dollars.
That bill is awaiting consideration by a House panel, which has a vote scheduled for Monday. Legislative staffers say the belatedly approved benefits would be retroactive, but pressures to also enact broader changes to the state's unemployment compensation system could further hold up that assistance.
Approximately 17,000 residents would be affected if the benefit extension is not approved, according to the state's Department of Labor & Industry.
It's unclear whether House lawmakers will quickly vote on the bill, which would then go to Gov. Tom Corbett's desk for his signature, or insert additional changes. The General Assembly approved a sweeping overhaul of the unemployment compensation system in June, when it also extended federal benefits by 13 weeks.
Those changes, which required the unemployed to actively seek work to receive their benefit checks and froze the maximum amount of weekly benefits, should be expanded further, says the state's Chamber of Business and Industry. Those business leaders wrote to lawmakers urging them to insert provisions to help address the insolvency of Pennsylvania's unemployment compensation trust fund.
Once his name was cleared, he wrote many movies including, Fail Safe, The Front, and the Emmy award-winning Miss Evers’ Boy s. The interview was conducted by Sunny Parich on April 20, 1998.
Some officials, including Susan Bies, a Fed governor, suggested that a housing downturn actually could bolster the economy by redirecting money to other kinds of investments.
And there was general acclaim for Alan Greenspan, who stepped down as chairman at the beginning of the year, for presiding over one of the longest economic expansions in the nation’s history. Mr. Geithner suggested that Mr. Greenspan’s greatness still was not fully appreciated, an opinion now held by a much smaller number of people..."
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” -- Henry Adams
men·tor: [men-tawr, -ter], noun 1. a wise and trusted counselor or teacher. 2.an influential senior sponsor or supporter.
A friend of mine died this past week. She was 91 years old. She was a teacher, a filmmaker, a chemist and pharmacist, a dancer, a communist and atheist, a lousy cook and one hell of a person. They don’t make them like that in New York City anymore.
I met Eleanor Hamerow when I attended NYU’s Graduate Film Program back in the 1980s. She was my teacher and we were terrified of her gruff New York accent and attitude which was only a veneer for a caring and intelligent woman.
The heyday of the NYU Program was slipping fast, mostly due to the enormous popularity of film schools across the country. NYU was becoming a money-making corporate entity and some of the old timers like Ellie seemed to be in the way of a new image the school wanted to portray. Her last years at the school were a constant political battle for students and the art of film.
She hung in there as long as she could showing Orson Welles and John Ford movies and La Belle et la Bête and teaching film editing. She was a film editor and documentary filmmaker of some renowned.
(CBS News (She was fired for including President Eisenhower's "beware the military, industrial complex" speech in their televised documentary of his life.), Martha Graham: An American Original in Performance, A Dancer’s World, An American Family...)
Film Editing was her second profession after her early years as a chemist. Teaching was her Third Act.
She got a small auditorium named after her at NYU...but when she finally retired, the soul went out of the school along with all the increasingly antiquated film equipment, like hand-cranked sound synchronizers, moviolas and film splicing blocks...and the old projectors that chewed up old French new wave or Italian neo-realist film prints...
After I finished school, Ellie gave me a job working for her to help me pay off my student loans and I was able to work on her last documentary...appropriately about a teacher.
Somehow...and it is probably worth a novel in itself, I travelled to Moscow with her in 1989 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the VGIK Film School started by Eisenstein in 1919. One brief story I’ll share is we went in search of the Moscow Arts Theater...home of ‘The Method’ and Stanislavsky...the mythical directing and acting philosophy that breathed life into Marlon Brando, James Dean, Lazlo Benedict, and Elia Kazan...and the NYU Gradate Film Program under Ellie Hamerow.
We found the old theater in the early afternoon and walked into the empty lobby. The doors were open, but the place seemed deserted. A man in a dark suit handed Ellie a rose and escorted us into the theater...on the stage was a casket with a large photo next to it of one of the actors from the theater troupe. They assumed Ellie had come to pay respects...she looked born and bred...her boots, her head popping out the top of a heavily-scarfed, long black coat...all 5' 1" of her...so we joined the line of mourners.
We had a young interpreter from the school with us and he found the administrator of the theater and told him that Martin Scorsese (me) and a famous American film producer (Ellie) were here. So he came to see us and though we didn’t fool him, we scored some tickets to the theater the next night, and Ihe gave me a poster for the 100th anniversary of The Seagull.
The next night, we got to see a play that was banned since the 1930s by Stalin himself. Ellie was in heaven. There we were sitting in the front row at the Moscow Arts Theater watching a play in Russian. Our translator was there, kind of filling us in on what was being said and of course there was Ellie's running commentary as though the performance was taking place back at NYU in one of her classes...
Again, a story for another time...but Ellie had written a speech for the VGIK Film School celebration in which she was going to scold the Russians for Stalin and ruining the promise of communism...
After Ellie retired and the years started piling up, some of her contemporary friends began to get ill or even pass away. I would get a phone call from her telling me that Mimi or Ruby couldn't make the performance tonight at Lincoln Center and would I like to go...I saw my first Shostakovich with her and my first Tudor ballet...and my first opera...(a four-hour Semiramede where I didn’t realize that Marilyn Horne was supposed to be playing a man).
She introduced me to the Manhattan cocktail...she couldn't drink anymore, but she wanted me to order one so it sat on the table through dinner so she could smell it...she ordered it the way she liked it: gin, dry vermouth, a dask of bitters and a twist lemon peel.
She was a teacher, but also, always a scholar. Into her eighties she was taking classes at Columbia University. In her late seventies she decided she needed to read the Bible and took a class. I would get a call from her. “What do you know about The First Nicene Council?” or “Have you read Aquinas? Let’s have a nosh and talk about it.” So I would wrap up in a scarf and coat and gloves and take a cab from my East 55th Street apartment to her West 89th Street penthouse and we’d get coffee and something to eat and discuss religion and inevitably movies.
I moved to Los Angeles over twelve years ago and only corresponded with Ellie at first by phone and letters and then dwindling to a few emails and a long Holiday card.
I wasn’t there for the dementia or the need to put her in a home, or for the end where I am told she simply refused food and shortly after, died.
To live such a life and to take it to age 91...Not bad Ellie, not bad at all. You are remembered and cherished...tonight over a Manhattan, Ellie-style.
It is apparently good men like Tom Wicker that frustrate me most and I can not understand... over time, they had to know what they reported about the Assassination of President Kennedy was wrong... but they never said anything... and I understand if they were fed false info, etc... but at some point... they had to look in the mirror and admit that the officail story just does not work...
Wicker's reporting for the New York Times on 11/22/63 was what he hung his reputation on... I know it was not his entire life... but his life was certianly lived in the shadow of that day... as all of our lives have been... so in the end... he did more harm that good with his reporting.
The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.
Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.
Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and he turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.
From the time he had gotten down off the train and the baggage man had thrown his pack out of the open car door things had been different. Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter. It could not all be burned. He hiked along the road, sweating in the sun, climbing to cross the range of hills that separated the railway from the pine plains.
The road ran on, dipping occasionally, but always climbing. He went on up. Finally after going parallel to the burnt hill, he reached the top. Nick leaned back against a stump and slipped out of the pack harness. Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was the pine plain. The burned country stopped off at the left of a range of hills. All ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain. Far off to the left was the line of the river. Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun.
There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land. He could hardly see them faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain. If he looked too steadily they were gone. But if he only half-looked they were there, the far-off hills of the height of land.
Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.
As he smoked his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started grasshoppers from with dust. They were all black. They were not the big grasshoppers with yellow and black or red and black wings whirring out from their black wing sheathing as they fly up. These were just ordinary hoppers, but all a sooty black in color. Nick had wondered about them as he walked without really thinking about them. Now, as he watched the black hopper that was nibbling at the wool of his sock with its fourway lip he realized that they had all turned black from living in the burned-over land. He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way.
Carefully he reached his hand down and took hold of the hopper by the wings. He turned him up, all his legs walking in the air, and looked at his jointed belly. Yes, it was black too, iridescent where the back and head were dusty.
"Go on, hopper," Nick said, speaking out loud for the first time. "Fly away somewhere."
He tossed the grasshopper up into the air and watched him sail away to a charcoal stump across the road.
Nick stood up. He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps. He stood with the pack on his back on the brow of the hill looking out across the country, toward the distant river and then struck down the hillside away from the road. Underfoot the ground was good walking. Two hundred yards down the fire line stopped. Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again.
Nick kept his direction by the sun. He knew where he wanted to strike the river and he kept on through the pine plain, mounting small rises to see other rises ahead of him and sometimes from the top of a rise a great solid island of pines off to his right or his left. He broke off some sprigs of the leathery sweet fern, and put them under his pack straps. The chafing crushed it and he smelled it as he walked.
He was tired and very hot, walking across the uneven, shadeless pine pram. At any time he knew he could strike the river by turning off to his left. It could not be more than a mile away. But he kept on toward the north to hit the river as far upstream as he could go in one day's walking. For some time as he walked Nick had been in sight of one of the big islands of pine standing out above the rolling high ground he was crossing. He dipped down and then as he came slowly up to the crest of the bridge he turned and made toward the pine trees. There was no underbrush in the island of pine trees. The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches. The branches were high above. Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor. Around the grove of trees was a bare space. It was brown and soft underfoot as Nick walked on it. This was the over-lapping of the pine needle floor, extending out beyond the width of the high branches. The trees had grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this bare space they had once covered with shadow. Sharp at the edge of this extension of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern.
Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees. His neck and back and the small of his back rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes again and went to sleep.
Nick woke stiff and cramped. The sun was nearly down. His pack was heavy and the straps painful as he lifted it on. He leaned over with the pack on and picked up the leather rod-case and started out from the pine trees across the sweet fern swale, toward the river. He knew it could not be more than a mile.
He came down a hillside covered with stumps into a meadow. At the edge of the meadow flowed the river. Nick was glad to get to the river. He walked upstream through the meadow. His trousers were soaked with the dew as he walked. After the hot day, the dew halt come quickly and heavily. The river made no sound. It was too fast and smooth. At the edge of the meadow, before he mounted to a piece of high ground to make camp, Nick looked down the river at the trout rising. They were rising to insects come from the swamp on the other side of the stream when the sun went down. The trout jumped out of water to take them. While Nick walked through the little stretch of meadow alongside the stream, trout had jumped high out of water. Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface, for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream. As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.
The ground rose, wooded and sandy, to overlook the meadow, the stretch of river and the swamp. Nick dropped his pack and rod case and looked for a level piece of ground. He was very hungry and he wanted to make his camp before he cooked. Between two jack pines, the ground was quite level. He took the ax out of the pack and chopped out two projecting roots. That leveled a piece of ground large enough to sleep on. He smoothed out the sandy soil with his hand and pulled all the sweet fern bushes by their roots. His hands smelled good from the sweet fern. He smoothed the uprooted earth. He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets. When he had the ground smooth, he spread his blankets. One he folded double, next to the ground. The other two he spread on top.
With the ax he slit off a bright slab of pine from one of the stumps and split it into pegs for the tent. He wanted them long and solid to hold in the ground. With the tent unpacked and spread on the ground, the pack, leaning against a jack pine, looked much smaller. Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridgepole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the ground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine. The tent hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on a clothesline. Nick poked a pole he had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by pegging out the sides. He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight.
Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes. He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas. Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.
He came out, crawling under the cheesecloth. It was quite dark outside. It was lighter in the tent.
Nick went over to the pack and found, with his fingers, a long nail in a paper sack of nails, in the bottom of the pack. He drove it into the pine tree, holding it close and hitting it gently with the flat of the ax. He hung the pack up on the nail. All his supplies were in the pack. They were off the ground and sheltered now.
Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can at pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.
"I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it," Nick said.
His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.
He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the tour legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan and a can of spaghetti on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato ketchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato ketchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent; he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate. "Chrise," Nick said, "Geezus Chrise," he said happily.
He ate the whole plateful before he remembered the bread. Nick finished the second plateful with the bread, mopping the plate shiny. He had not eaten since a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich in the station restaurant at St. Ignace. It had been a very fine experience. He had been that hungry before, but had not been able to stand it. He could have made camp hours before if he had wanted to. There were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But this was good.
Nick tucked two big chips of pine under the grill. The fire flared up. He had forgotten to get water for the coffee. Out of the pack he got a folding canvas bucket and walked down the hill, across the edge of the meadow, to the stream. The other bank was in the white mist. The grass was wet and cold as he knelt on the bank and dipped the canvas bucket into the stream. It bellied and pulled held in the current. The water was ice cold. Nick rinsed the bucket and carried it full up to the camp. Up away from the stream it was not so cold.
Nick drove another big nail and hung up the bucket full of water. He dipped the coffee pot half full, put some more chips under the grill onto the fire and put the pot oil. He could not remember which way he made coffee. He could remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he had taken. He decided to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that was Hopkins's way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins. While he waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a small can of apricots. He liked to open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the juice syrup of the apricots, carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the apricots down. They were better than fresh apricots.
The coffee boiled as he watched. The lid came up and coffee and grounds ran down the side of the pot. Nick took it off the grill. It was a triumph for Hopkins. He put sugar in the empty apricot cup and poured some of the coffee out to cool. It was too hot to pour and he used his hat to hold the handle of the coffee pot. He would not let it steep in the pot at all. Not the first cup. It should be straight. Hopkins deserved that. Hop was a very serious coffee drinker. He was the most serious man Nick had ever known. Not heavy, serious. That was a long time ago Hopkins spoke without moving his lips. He had played polo. He made millions of dollars in Texas. He had borrowed carfare to go to Chicago when the wire came that his first big well had come in. He could have wired for money. That would have been too slow. They called Hop's girl the Blonde Venus. Hop did not mind because she was not his real girl. Hopkins said very confidently that none of them would make fun of his real girl. He was right. Hopkins went away when the telegram came. That was on the Black River. It took eight days for the telegram to reach him. Hopkins gave away his 22-caliber Colt automatic pistol to Nick. He gave his camera to Bill, It was to remember him always by. They were all going fishing again next summer. The Hop Head was rich. He would get a yacht and they would all cruise along the north shore of Lake Superior. He was excited but serious. They said good-bye and all felt bad. It broke up the trip. They never saw Hopkins again. That was a long time ago on the Black River.
Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blanket. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.
PART II
In the morning the sun was up and the tent was starting to get hot. Nick crawled out under the mosquito netting stretched across the mouth of the tent, to look at the morning. The grass was wet on his hands as he came out. The sun was just up over the hill. There was the meadow, the river and the swamp. There were birch trees in the green of the swamp on the other side of the river.
The river was clear and smoothly fast in the early morning. Down about two hundred yards were three logs all the way across the stream. They made the water smooth and deep above them. As Nick watched, a mink crossed the river on the logs and went into the swamp. Nick was excited. He was excited by the early morning and the river. He was really too hurried to eat breakfast, but he knew he must. He built a little fire and put on the coffee pot.
While the water was heating in the pot he took an empty bottle and went down over the edge of the high ground to the meadow. The meadow was wet with dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried the grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers. They were at the base of the grass stems. Sometimes they clung to a grass stem. They were cold and wet with the dew, and could not jump until the sun warmed them. Nick picked them up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle. He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about fifty of the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the hoppers the others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They flew when they hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as though they were dead.
Nick knew that by the time he was through with breakfast they would be as lively as ever. Without dew in the grass it would take him all day to catch a bottle full of good grasshoppers and he would have to crush many of them, slamming at them with his hat. He washed his hands at the stream. He was excited to be near it. Then he walked up to the tent. The hoppers were already jumping stiffly in the grass. In the bottle, warmed by the sun, they were jumping in a mass. Nick put in a pine stick as a cork. It plugged the mouth of the bottle enough, so the hoppers could not get out and left plenty of air passage.
He had rolled the log back and knew he could get grasshoppers there every morning.
Nick laid the bottle full of jumping grasshoppers against a pine trunk. Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it smooth, one cup of flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of coffee in the pot and dipped a lump of grease out of a can and slid it sputtering across the hot skillet. In the smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. It spread like lava, the grease spitting sharply. Around the edges the buckwheat cake began to firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was bubbling slowly to porousness. Nick pushed under the browned under surface with a fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose on the surface. I won't try and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip of clean wood all the way under the cake, and flopped it over onto its face. It sputtered in the pan.
When it was cooked Nick regreased the skillet. He used all the batter. It made another big flapjack and one smaller one.
Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple butter. He put apple butter on the third cake, folded it over twice, wrapped it in oiled paper and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the apple butter jar back in the pack and cut bread for two sandwiches.
In the pack he found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled the silky outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion sandwiches. He wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them in the other pocket of his khaki shirt. He turned the skillet upside down on the grill, drank the coffee, sweetened and yellow brown with the condensed milk in it, and tidied up the camp. It was a good camp.
Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod-case, jointed it, and shoved the rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded it, or it would slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double tapered fly line. Nick had paid eight dollars for it a long time ago. It was made heavy to lift back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and straight to make it possible to cast a fly which has no weight. Nick opened the aluminum leader box. The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel pads. Nick had wet the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St. Ignace. In the damp pads the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one and tied it by a loop at the end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook on the end of the leader. It was a small hook, very thin and springy.
Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his lap. He tested the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line taut. It was a good feeling. He was careful not to let the hook bite into his finger.
He started down to the stream, holding his rod, the bottle of grasshoppers hung from his neck by a thong tied in half hitches around the neck of the bottle. His landing net hung by a hook from his belt. Over his shoulder was a long flour sack tied at each corner into an ear. The cord went over his shoulder. The sack slapped against his legs.
Nick felt awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment hanging from him. The grasshopper bottle swung against his chest. In his shirt the breast pockets bulged against him with the lunch and the fly book.
He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.
Rushing, the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, the water was over his knees. He waded with the current. The gravel slipped under his shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water below each leg and tipped up the bottle to get a grasshopper. The first grasshopper gave a jump in the neck of the bottle and went out into the water. He was sucked under in the whirl by Nick's right leg and came to the surface a little way down stream. He floated rapidly, kicking. In a quick circle, breaking the smooth surface of the water, he disappeared. A trout had taken him.
Another hopper poked his face out of the bottle. His antennas wavered. He was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. Nick took him by the head and held him while he threaded the slim hook under his chin, down through his thorax and into the last segments of his abdomen. The grasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet, spitting tobacco juice on it. Nick dropped him into the water.
Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of the grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his left hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little waves of the current. It went out of sight.
There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he hauled in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pulling against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod straight up in the air. It bowed with the pull.
He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against the shifting tangent of the line in the stream.
Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping tiredly against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the clear, water-over-gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his right arm, Nick stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream.
“What is right and what is practicable are two different things." - President James Buchanan
Pundits on the left and right are going to be wasting our time comparing President Obama to various U.S. Presidents from Herbert Hoover to John Kennedy... well here is my vote.
