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Today is Tuesday, January 9, the 9th
day of 2007. There are 356 to go. The Sun is
at 18-19 Capricorn. The moon is waning.
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From A.J.
When I Whine
~~~~~~~
Today, upon a bus, I saw a girl with golden
hair
I looked at her and sighed and wished I was
as fair.
When suddenly she rose to leave,
I saw her hobble down the aisle.
She had one leg and used a crutch
But as she passed, she passed a smile.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine
I have 2 legs, the world is mine.
~~~
I stopped to buy some candy
The lad who sold it had such charm
I talked with him a while, he seemed so very
glad
If I were late, it'd do no harm.
And as I left, he said to me,
"I thank you, you've been so kind.
It's nice to talk with folks like you.
You see," he said, "I'm blind."
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I have 2 eyes, the world is mine.
~~~
Later while walking down the street,
I saw a child with eyes of blue
He stood and watched the others play
He did not know what to do.
I stopped a moment and then I said,
"Why don't you join the others, dear?"
He looked ahead without a word.
And then I knew, he couldn't hear.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I have 2 ears, the world is mine.
~~~
With feet to take me where I'd go.
With eyes to see the sunset's glow.
With ears to hear what I would know.
Oh, God, forgive me when I whine.
I've been blessed indeed, The world is mine.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sorrow looks back,
Worry looks around,
Faith looks up.
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Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Ivy Blindness
A Foray into
Psycho-political Ophthalmology
It occurs to me that a
surfeit of money, and the associated life within an invisible plastic
bubble that seems to accompany it, may explain much of our curious
political lunges. I have nothing against money (you can test this by
sending me a lot) or people who have it. But it has side effects.
Two incidents come to mind, of no shattering
import but serving as windsocks. First, a politician I barely know, but
of import in the making of national policy, told me recently that he
had never been in Washington’s subway, though he lives in Washington.
Second, there was the astonishment of the senior Bush on observing the
technology of a checkout line in a supermarket, into none of which had
he apparently been. He didn’t know how to buy groceries.
I wondered: How much of the dysfunction of
national policy can be explained by our rulers’ never having been in
the subway? Never having encountered the world in which the rest of us,
here and abroad, live? Sure, things other than insular innocence play a
part: ambition, greed, idealism, vanity, good intentions, bad
intentions. But…how do you manage a world you haven’t seen?
I grew up mostly in the South of small towns
surrounded by woods. In such places you learn about school-yard fights,
in particular that you need either to avoid them or win them, and about
hunting rats at the dump with a .410, and working late shift at an Esso
station on a lonely highway, and that country boys from poor families
don’t think like nice suburban people. You still have to deal with
them.
Most of us have learned these things, though in
different ways and places. A high school in Brooklyn or Casper is
different from mine in Virginia, yet very much the same. The young find
themselves with a slice of humanity, not all of it agreeable, and have
to figure it out on their own. When you learn a high school in
Brooklyn, in a sense you learn the United States. I wonder what you
learn going to Andover with your chauffeur.
There are experiences, of which few have had
all but most have had some, by which people learn how life works. The
very rich do not seem to have these. I wonder whether they really know
where they live.
During the sixties, I spent time on the big
roads, thumbing from coast to coast and from wherever to wherever else.
So did countless other kids. (This isn’t a column about how special I
am, but about how special I’m not.) We learned much about truck stops
at three in the morning, about taking care of ourselves on a deserted
road at dusk with rain coming on, about the wild variety of people that
make up a country and, particularly, about people without a lot of
money.
We also learned that there are men who will
beat you senseless with a pool cue just because they don’t like your
looks, and no, they won’t listen to reason. Life is not an embassy
party.
Do the delicate flowers of National Review know
these things? Has George Bush even been on the road? Have they seen
America from a dying coal camp in West Virginia? A great deal of money
is a good thing, or at least one I would like to try. But I suspect it
isolates you from the world beyond Yale.
The military is another such adventure, common
among the generation which now manages the country. Literally millions
passed through the military, many of them through the war of their
time. In the enlisted military you come to know…many things. You learn
how armies work and think, meet black kids from the slums of Chicago
and white kids from shadowed valleys of Tennessee, learn what it is to
be hungry and exhausted and never able to sleep. You see what a war
really is, and what people look like who have been badly hit.
In the White House they don’t know these
things, or at the slick policy-shop magazines manned by bright
Fauntleroys. I am not sure what they do know, other than board rooms
and good hotels.
There is the simple matter of working for a
living other in an ermine-lined sinecure. Tending bar, for example,
driving an eighteen-wheeler, working summers in a saw mill, or doing
construction. Starting your own business without daddy’s millions. When
you know the woman pushing seventy who is waitressing long hours with
swollen ankles—“I’m too tired to work, and too poor to quit”—you might
change your ideas about, well, lots of things. Some folk don’t have
silver tea services.
Who in the White House understands any of this?
There is travel of the sort that shows you the
planet as it is. If you look in the back streets of Asia and South
America, or of Europe for that matter, you will find people, mostly
from their late teens to early thirties, who are traveling on a low
budget. Sometimes they stay in one place for six months or a year and
work on the language. Sometimes they keep moving, backpacking it,
grabbing the tramp freighters or rattletrap goat-and-chicken buses.
Many are well educated. Not infrequently they are professionals who
don’t want the Hilton.
On the third-class buses in Michoacan, in the
ramshackle motor launches in the pampas of Bolivia, they learn…it’s
hard to say exactly what. A sense of humanity, perhaps, that people in
other countries are not dinks, slopes, sand-niggers, zipperheads,
spics, dot-niggers, or gooks. They learn, however strange it may seem
from Crawford, Texas, that the Laos, Thais, Mexicans and Colombians
actually like their countries and cultures, and fiercely resent
meddling. This latter has consequences. Consult your newspaper.
They don’t know these things in the White
House, or at the rattling little policy magazines. I watch as if
contemplating idiot children as the current administration consistently
and needlessly infuriates other countries by its moral lectures to
sovereign states, as it miscalculates over and over the reactions of
other nations, as it publicly announces that it is seeking “regime
change” here and there. The effect of course is to make people rally
around the regime. But in the White House they have no idea.
How could they? They have never been in the
real world. How many speak—I’ll be kind and say “another language”
instead of “any language”?
Again in that strange real world where most of
us live, there are the street trades—police, fire, and ambulance.
Granted, these are accessible only to their practitioners and to the
occasional reporter. Here you see another United States, that of the
huge hermetic slums, and how they work and their intractable misery.
You see the ghastly car wrecks and the paramedics who try desperately
to get to shock-trauma with something other than a corpse. Have those
who set policy for society seen this? Have they seen anything?
A rich friend once invited me to his house in
the West End of Richmond, Virginia. At supper when you wanted the
mashed potatoes, you didn’t say, “Pass the potatoes, please.” No. You
rang a little bell and a black guy came out and held the bowl while you
scooped potatoes. It was hugely embarrassing. I suspect that he felt
like a fool. I know I did. I wanted to scream, “What’s wrong with these
people?” and go have a beer with the black guy.
It doesn’t matter whether an investment banker
has seen a barracks or a pair of work gloves. It bothers me to have
policy made, and wars started, by those who have never seen the country
they rule, or the world they play with, who have never had to make a
living, to carry a rifle or worry about snipers, who have never run the
back alleys of Taipei or anywhere else and, god help us, can’t serve
their own potatoes.
©Fred Reed \
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The makers of French's
Mustard made the following recent statement:
"We at the French's Company wish to put an end
to statements that our product is manufactured in France. There is no
relationship, nor has there ever been a relationship, between our
mustard and the country of France. Indeed, our mustard is manufactured
in Rochester, NY. The only thing we have in common is that we are both
yellow."
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A man approaches a beautiful woman, and says,
"Want a little company?"
And the woman says, "Why? Do you have one to
sell?"
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Abe was well known for his cheapness and his
'eye for a bargain'. One day he was looking for a cheap wedding present
for his niece, so he went into a thrift shop.
As he was walking around, he noticed what was
previously an expensive glass crystal vase lying in the corner. It was
in 3 pieces. After some haggling with the owner, Abe bought the broken
vase for $5.
He then filled in the congratulations card,
wrote out his niece's name and address and gave the owner another $3 so
that the broken vase could be gift wrapped and mailed. Abe then left
the shop feeling quite pleased with himself. He expected his niece to
think the vase had broken in the mail.
A few days later, he called his niece to see if
the present had arrived.
"Yes, Uncle Abe, but unfortunately, it was in 3
pieces when it was delivered."
"What terrible luck." said Abe, "The Post
Office is getting worse all the time."
"It's really a shame," she replied. "It was so
beautifully wrapped. Each piece separately."
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BEER TROUBLESHOOTING
|
SYMPTOM
|
FAULT
|
ACTION
|
|
Feet cold and wet.
|
Glass being held at
incorrect angle.
|
Rotate glass so
that open end points toward ceiling.
|
|
Feet warm and wet.
|
Improper bladder
control.
|
Stand next to
nearest dog, complain about house training.
|
|
Beer unusually pale
and tasteless.
|
Glass empty.
|
Get someone to buy
you another beer.
|
|
Opposite wall
covered with fluorescent lights.
|
You have fallen
over backward.
|
Have yourself
leashed to bar.
|
|
Mouth contains
cigarette butts.
|
You have fallen
forward.
|
See above.
|
|
Beer tasteless,
front of your shirt is wet.
|
Mouth not open, or
glass applied to wrong part of face.
|
Retire to restroom,
practice in mirror.
|
|
Floor blurred.
|
You are looking
through bottom of empty glass.
|
Get someone to buy
you another beer.
|
|
Floor moving.
|
You are being
carried out.
|
Find out if you are
being taken to another bar.
|
|
Room seems
unusually dark.
|
Bar has closed.
|
Confirm home
address with bartender.
|
|
Taxi suddenly takes
on colorful aspect and textures.
|
Beer consumption
has exceeded personal limitations.
|
Cover mouth.
|
|
Everyone looks up
to you and smiles.
|
You are dancing on
the table.
|
Fall on somebody
cushy-looking.
|
|
Beer is
crystal-clear.
|
It's water.
Somebody is trying to sober you up.
|
Punch him.
|
|
Hands hurt, nose
hurts, mind unusually clear.
|
You have been in a
fight.
|
Apologize to
everyone you see, just in case it was them.
|
|
Don't recognize
anyone, don't recognize the room you're in.
|
You've wandered
into the wrong party.
|
See if they have
free beer.
|
|
Your singing sounds
distorted.
|
The beer is too
weak.
|
Have more beer
until your voice improves.
|
|
Don't remember the
words to the song.
|
Beer is just right.
|
Play air guitar.
|
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OK, move along, that's all
there is, move along please ....
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The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who
think.
Horace Walpole
Home is where the grab
bars are.