Liss is a better soul than I, but of course she’s right.
Category: Higher Ground
‘Make interesting mistakes’
Neil Gainman was in town to give the commencement address at the University of the Arts, and it was one of the best I’ve ever heard. If you have even an ounce of creativity in you, you should watch this:
Chris Hayes, heroes, and ‘Catch-22’
Erik Kain at Mother Jones, defending MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who was bombarded with insults after questioning the wisdom of automatically referring to Americans soldiers who fall in battle as heroes:
In transforming our soldiers or police automatically into “heroes” we ignore the atrocities our own side commits. In doing so we also ignore the real moments of heroism. We give a free pass to anyone with a uniform and a gun regardless of their individual merit, and lend unwitting support to every war, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the War on Drugs, in the process.
I’m with Kain. What we need these days are more anti-heroes — people who rebel against the “my country right or wrong mentality” that allows us to be manipulated by lying politicians who all too often take the country into unnecessary wars to enrich “defense” contractors while dodging serious domestic problems.
We need more people like Yossarian, in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. More here.
Regarding Dylan’s latest award
From Rolling Stone:
Bob Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, at a ceremony at the White House [Tuesday] afternoon.
At the ceremony, President Obama said of Dylan, “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music,” adding that the “unique gravel-y power” of his voice helped redefine “not just what music sounded like, but the message it carried and how it made people feel.”
When the White House announced that Dylan would be one of this year’s recipients, they wrote in a statement that the rock & roll pioneer had “considerable influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and has had significant impact on American culture over the past five decades.”
Dylan also had considerable influence on the anti-war movement — you know, protests against the undeclared Vietnam war, the war that made it so easy for future presidents to send young Americans into equally unnecessary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep them there long after it was obvious there was nothing to be gained.
Too bad Dylan didn’t get to sing a few verses of “Masters of War,” although I don’t think Obama would have been amused by the irony.
In memoriam
Pots and pans
A video of protesters banging pots and pans on Quebec streets is going viral on social networks.
Posted on Friday afternoon, the beautiful black and white film shows protesters of all ages taking to the streets to protest the emergency law Bill 78. The Vimeo video quickly began showing up all over Twitter and Facebook.
Bill 78 is being called a draconian attempt to quell massive student protests that have taken over Quebec streets for more than 100 days. The bill limits the ability to protest by requiring groups to get police approval for demonstrations and restricting where they can take place, among other provisions.
People took up the percussive protest Thursday night in several towns and cities including Sorel, Longueuil, Chambly, Repentigny, Trois-Rivieres and even in Abitibi — several hundred kilometres away from the hot spot of Montreal.
They were still loudest in Montreal, where a chorus of metallic clanks rang out in neighbourhoods around the city, spilling into the main demonstrations and sounding like aluminum symphonies.
The pots-and-pans protest has its roots in Chile, where people have used it for years as an effective, peaceful tool to express civil disobedience. The noisy cacerolazo tradition actually predates the Pinochet regime in Chile, but has endured there and spread to other countries as a method of showing popular defiance.
Thursday’s protest in Montreal was immediately declared illegal by police, who said it violated a municipal bylaw because they hadn’t been informed of the route. They allowed it to continue as long as it remained peaceful.
Best. Proposal. Ever.
Isaac wanted to propose to his girlfriend, so he enlisted over 60 friends to stage a Busby Berkeley street-show lip-dub extravaganza ambush. What follows is five minutes of heart-stoppingly sweet and romantic wedding proposal. I mean: Z. O. M. F.G.
On Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012, I told my girlfriend to meet me at my parent’s house for dinner. When she arrived I had stationed my brother to sit her in the back of an open Honda CRV and give her some headphones. He “wanted to play her a song”…
What she got instead was the world’s first Live Lip-Dub Proposal.
For each death, a hole in the world
This is something I wrote for Memorial Day 2005 and I run it every year:
Soldiers are not chunks of identical clay; each of them has a story, their own reasons for being caught in a war.
Brave? Maybe – sometimes, under some conditions. Scared, mostly. The younger they are, the more likely their presence had to do with restlessness, cockiness. The need to be part of a winning team, the desire to even a score. Kick ass, take names. Kill them all, let God sort them out.
The older they are, the more realistic they are. This was a steady paycheck, or a way to supplement the one they already had. When they join, it’s with their eyes on the future benefit. When they’re in the middle of a war, they think only of surviving the next five minutes. Please, God, please. Let me see my family again.
And when they die in the war, each death leaves a hole in the world. It’s important to remember that, to not see them as a monolithic casualty list or as an acceptable loss.
No loss is acceptable. Ask the parents, the spouses, the children. They try. They tell themselves stories of nobility, sacrifice, a greater cause. They cover it up with the ritual rhetoric. But deep down, they must wonder.
Here is how to count the cost: In high school graduation pictures that will never be replaced with wedding pictures. In wedding rings that will never be worn smooth by years. By the daughters who will walk down the aisle with an uncle or brother instead of Dad. By the sons who will find themselves angry and lost, not understanding why. The children who will hear about their mother’s eyes, their father’s chin but won’t ever see themselves reflected in that face.
By the parents who now understand the quiet obscenity of outliving their own children.
Each and every one of these deaths left a hole in the world. That is why we count them.
They mattered.
Not all wealthy people are dickheads
And here’s one inspiring example:
WINCHESTER, Ky. (WHDH) — It may be spring, but one man is already playing the role of Santa for one Kentucky town, purchasing the remaining inventory at his local Kmart and proceeded to donate all the goods to a local charity.
“This is the largest donation we’ve ever received,” Clark County Community Services director Judy Crow said.
The person playing summer Santa is local businessman Rankin Paynter.
“It was $200,000 at retail,” Paynter said.
He was at the Kmart in Winchester a few weeks ago, buying things for his business.
“I said to the lady, ‘what are you going to do with all this stuff that’s leftover two days before you close?’” Paynter recalls.
They told him everything goes to Kmart power buyers, so he became one; six and a half hours and four cash registers later, Paynter had his fortune.
“To be honest with you, I could have made $30,000-$40,000 on it,” he said.
Instead, he paid it forward.
“Certainly unexpected. Very unexpected,” Judy Crowe said. “A businessman are in business to make money.”
Paynter’s road to success wasn’t always so smooth.
“It was hard sometime,” he said. “Tied rags around my feet sometimes too. I only had summer slippers.” Now at his age, he’s also in the business of making people smile.
“This will be the first year we have enough hats and gloves for all the children we serve during Operation Happiness,” Crowe said.