Author Archives: Elaine

more neocon flim-flam

Posted on by
5

From FactCheck.org:

Bush supporters falsely quote Lincoln as advocating arresting, exiling or hanging members of Congress who damage military morale in wartime.
Summary
Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale in wartime “are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.”
Republican candidate Diana Irey used the “quote” recently in her campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.
But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.

the not wanting

Posted on by
6

There was a time when I wanted. And what I wanted, I worked to get. Or played to get. Whatever it was, the wanting of it fired my spirit, made me make the moves toward the pleasure of getting.

But there is no point in wanting these days because wanting without the freedom to go after what I want hurts more than not wanting anything at all.
And so I don’t want anything at all. Nothing.

words and music

Posted on by
1

This is about two movies with words and music — two very different movies, yet I have to admit that I was enthralled by both..

The first is actually called “Words and Music,” and I tuned into the Turner Classic Movies channel because I thought my mother would like it. Of course, as usual, her attention span ended in a half-hour, and I was the one who became thoroughly engrossed in the words and music of this 1948 musical.
A fictionalized look at the lives of the famous songwriting team, Rodgers and Hart, it’s a film filled with famous Hollywood names, many of them playing themselves: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Mel Torme, Perry Como, Lena Horne, June Allyson….. Gene Kelly dancing “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue!” [ DROOL!] Mickey Rooney plays Lorenzo Hart, giving lots of (I’m sure fictionalized but neverthless fascinating) insights into how the lyrics for some of his most famous songs might have originated.
The other movie, filled with a totally different genre of words and music is “The Lost City,” beautifully (I think) directed by and starring Andy Garcia. This movie is a love song to the city and the country of his heart and soul — Havana, Cuba. The cruelties of Batista, Castro, and Che Guevera rip into the tapestry of 1950s Cuba, a land richly textured by the music, dancing, and culture of its diverse people. One of the comments about this movie is that it offers A Dialog that’s been lacking for 50 years. While the “dialog” to which this comment refers is about the politics of that time and place, the writing itself is also full of compelling dialog.
Words and music. Love those movies.

Harper’s Tipsy Tuesday

Posted on by
2

To hell with Hezbollah and its daily headlining. Sometimes it’s important in keeping one’s spirits up to be reminded about life’s more fun-damental absurdities.. The following are excerpted from Harper’s Weekly Review:

Colombia began exporting its big-butt queen ants (Hormiga culona), which taste like juicy popcorn when toasted.
Venezuelans were spending their oil money on Scotch whiskey, [The New York Times] and American guitars were dominating Japan. [MSN]
In Thailand, a preoperative transsexual named John M. Karr claimed to have been present for JonBenet Ramsey’s 1996 death, which he called “an accident.” [The New York Times]
Benedict XVI complained that being pope is “really tiring” and emphasized that “seeing the funny side of life” is crucial to his ministry. [Yahoo! News]
It was reported that U.S. military recruiting violations rose in 2005, as did the number of troops discharged for homosexuality.[Washington Post]
Houston’s rising crime rate was blamed on refugees from New Orleans, which has been gripped by a baby boom.[The New York Times][Breitbart.com]
Officials in Canton, Ohio, decided that a 13 percent pregnancy rate among its high schools’ females justified moving beyond an abstinence-only approach to sex education, [LA Times][Local6.com] and a secretly pregnant 21-year-old in Florida went into labor, sneaked out of her parents’ house, crashed her car into a canal, then delivered standing up in the wreckage. She named the baby Myracle.[Palm Beach Post]
Doctors in India speculated that the birth of a one-eyed girl might be attributable to her mother’s exposure to Cyclopamine, a cancer drug derived from wild corn lily that causes cyclopia in sheep.[Wired News]
South Korean DNA tests on tissues obtained during a 2003 hysterectomy indicated that a Frenchwoman was the mother of two rotting infant corpses found in a freezer at her home in Seoul, but she and her husband denied any relationship to the dead babies.[Digital Chosunilbo]
Sir Mick Jagger lost his voice, [The Daily Mail] a Chicago ice-cream-truck driver was shot dead behind the wheel,[Local6.com] and a tree in Texas was mysteriously spouting water from its bark.


And, on the home front here in the mountains, at various times during the day, I found that mom had dressed herself in two pairs of slacks, three blouses, and two different shoes. She never sits down for more than 15 minutes. She walks. And walks. And rearranges dresser drawers and closets. Her language center seems to be affected most of all; she thinks she’s using the correct word for what she wants, but, for example, when she wanted a “kleenex today”, she asked for a “cushion.” It’s getting more and more frustrating for both of us.
I feel the need for a respite coming on.

those small miracles

Posted on by
Reply

skink2.jpg
 It’s those small miracles that keep me going.
The one enchantingly irridescent baby skink who lives somewhere near our cement steps and who somehow survived the snake who prowled the area not too long ago.
The new green growth at the tip of the one piece I broke off and stuck in dirt from the 35-year old cactus (inherited from a former lover who was moving) that I had carted along on my last four moves and finally chucked into the woods because I was sure it was dead.
The avocado plant I grew from a pit whose tips I had pinched back and thought I killed that is now sprouting two new branches.
My garden’s yellow pepper plants nipped early in the bud by deer? squirrels? now two feet tall and budding again.
My spunky chubby cat who comes when I call her, no matter where she is outside, and who continues to try to teach me her meowy language.
Life responds to patience and tenacity. So I order lily bulbs to plant in the fall, seeds to start indoors in winter.
My mother has two days of partial awareness, responding to both a visit to a priest staying briefly in the area who was a close friend of both parents and also to a visit from our cousins from Florida. And then she has two days of rummaging through her closets taking out all of her clothes, forgetting who we are, wandering around her three small rooms looking for ……. something. First she’s cold and puts on layers of blouses. Then she’s hot and tries to take off all of her clothes.
We have eaten the last of the tomatoes that I was able to salvage from the beleaguered plants. They were deliciously satisfying small miracles. I am awaiting the blooming of the resurrected peppers.
I have always been tenacious. Now, I am learning patience. A small miracle.

aging fast

Posted on by
2

A.jpgs I was uploading photos from my cousins’ visit, I took a good look at my own image and realized just how many more lines and wrinkles I’ve developed in the past year, how much older I look, how much more tired — how fat my upper arms have gotten.
So I took a look at how I’ve changed over the past half-dozen years. I am quickly developing the face of an old lady, and I don’t like it one bit. Feh on caregiving!!
six years.jpg

George Soros calls me friend

Posted on by
1

W.jpgell, me and the millions of others who got his email asking me to share his message with my colleagues. Since it’s a message the point of which I share, I will share it. Here:

“Wall Street Journal
”A Self-Defeating War”
By George Soros
By George Soros — The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts — Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia — a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence.
Unfortunately, the “war on terror” metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense.
What makes the war on terror self-defeating?
• First, war by its very nature creates innocent victims. A war waged against terrorists is even more likely to claim innocent victims because terrorists tend to keep their whereabouts hidden. The deaths, injuries and humiliation of civilians generate rage and resentment among their families and communities that in turn serves to build support for terrorists.
• Second, terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but President Bush’s global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups.
• Third, the war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown, al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing attacks like the one foiled in England.
• Fourth, the war on terror drives a wedge between “us” and “them.” We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world.
Taken together, these four factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money. Most importantly, it has diverted attention from other urgent tasks that require American leadership, such as finishing the job we so correctly began in Afghanistan, addressing the looming global energy crisis, and dealing with nuclear proliferation.
With American influence at low ebb, the world is in danger of sliding into a vicious circle of escalating violence. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor. If we persevere on the wrong course, the situation will continue to deteriorate. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. It is painful to admit that our current predicaments are brought about by our own misconceptions. However, not admitting it is bound to prove even more painful in the long run. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes. This is the test that confronts us.
Mr. Soros, a financier, is author of “The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror” (Public Affairs, 2006.

will she or won’t she

Posted on by
Reply

R.jpgemember, that is. Remember the cousins who are coming to visit on Wednesday. Last month, she remembered them. Tonight, she doesn’t seem to.
She hasn’t seen the couple in more than 20 years. They are in their 80s now and live in Florida — are stopping by on their annual drive to visit the wife’s family.
On Friday, we will take her to visit the Polish priest who was a good friend of my dad’s — gave him those Last Rites. The priest is filling for a colleague who is on vacation this week and whose parish is in the next town. My mother says that she doesn’t remember him either.
I’m hoping that she’ll remember them all when she sees them — when they talk to her in Polish and anchor her in the past that they shared.
We never know, morning by morning, whether she will wake up remembering or not. “Where’s my mother,” she sometimes asks, sometimes asks in tears.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask her on those vacant mornings. “You’re my mother,” she says. “Where’s my brother, Teddy?” she wants to know. She always remembers her brother Teddy. And her husband. The people who took care of her before her memory began its dulling decline.
rayt.jpg I remember well that young man cousin (he was eighteen when I was three), holding me by the hand, showing me the cows and chickens, giving me rides on the tractor, and letting me pick strawberries that I would eat still warm from the ripe fields. We have been emailing as of late, getting to know each other again for the first time.
I’ll bet our cousins can make her remember. They will make her laugh and tell her the stories she has forgotten about the good times on the old farm, where all the uncles and aunts and cousins would gather at least once a summer for a week out of the stifling city. And the adults would sit around at night and sing all of the old Polish songs about a homeland far away but not forgotten.
What I remember most are the smells — fresh hay piled in the barn, hot strawberry jam being ladled by Ciocia Steffa into the dozens of Mason jars she sealed with melted wax, warm milk straight from the cow, tilled fields wet from a day of rain.
What, I wonder, will she remember.