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The Greatest Gifts
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Hillary Barry - We Can Never See Too Much of You!
Seven Sharp's Hilary Barry responds to 'dress properly' complaint with swimsuit snap
NZ Herald, 19 June 2020
Hilary Barry has shared a photo of herself at the beach to take a stand against men who ask women to "cover up".
The Seven Sharp presenter posted a photo on Instagram showing off her incredible figure and encouraging her followers to be confident in their own skin.
"This is for every Geoff who ever told a woman what to wear or what part of her body to cover up.
"We will not be told. Not now. Not ever."
The post was sparked after a Facebook user named Geoff took offence to Barry's off-the-shoulder top, so the presenter made sure to post a photo of herself in a strapless swimsuit.
He wrote on the Seven Sharp page: "Please encourage Hilary to dress properly. Exposed shoulders are for the young."
Barry responded to the comment in an Instagram post, writing: "Some classic age shaming from Geoff. Just for the record, I'll wear what I like, when I like."
Her followers loved the post.
….
And back in 2016, in a remarkable piece of epicurean, erotic, investigative journalism, we published Higgs, au naturel, in a story promoting the Auckland Restaurant 'Momento City' which specialises in Nude Dining [and Nude Waiters and Waitresses].
Any excuse it seems.
Asked for contemporary comment in the wake of NZ's ongoing battle against the Covid-19 pandemic, prominent epidemiologist Michael Baker has advised diners to still maintain full social distancing and cautioned against 'too much finger-lickin when the chips are down'.
CAUGHT BY THE SHORT AND CURLIES?
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Living on to Dissolution
LUCKY FOR SOME?
Ah Man Proposes - God Disposes!
It now looks as though I will be extremely fortunate to live to 77-78 years of age - and I have become increasingly aware that very few make it into Older Old Age unscathed.
Back in mid-February, I presented at the Emergency Department of Wellington Hospital and finally got catheterised after failing to pee for around 8 hours. And, after an X-ray of my pelvis, it was confirmed that I had a worst case scenario for Prostate Cancer of 5:5 on the Gleason Scale, my advanced and aggressive tumour having metastasized to the point of threatening my spinal column.
Search Results
I had passed the normally reliable Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) Test on a number of occasions, being a highly aberrant 'No Response' case - and months had passed exploring other options for my symptoms - such is life.Anyhow, I now find myself having undergone the 4th of 6 chemo treatments at our excellent Blood and Cancer Day Clinic, after having been given a modal or most likely initial survival of 3 weeks. And following holding treatments to slow the cancer - and surviving - I started my chemo course on the 21st April.
The modal or most likely initial survival period of this second phase is 3 months. Successful completion of the course and follow-up suggest this moving out to 18 months:
Which brings me back to my reflections of 2014.
Since then I have become more observant and more conscious of the uncertainties faced as people move into Older Old Age - noting the presence of chronic and intractable conditions like heart failure and dementia.
I have also seen a number of colleagues and friends die over the last six years - sometimes of extraordinary events like allergies to jelly-fish stings by a very fit 68-year old long-distance sea swimmer; one from a more predictable lung cancer death by a heavy smoker of my age; and in another case the stretch from diagnosis to death from pancreatic cancer well within my diagnosis-to-current-survival window.
And my 16-year old son is currently in the After Hours Clinic having a wrist X-ray after having had to take avoiding action on his moped in heavy traffic.
All of which reinforces the realisation that we all wish to avoid - life is tenuous.
And I am not of course immune to accidents and other medical events, even though I can play with the survival profiles.
But having thought things over though through the last four and a half months, I have to say that I am reasonably reconciled to being bracketed with a deadline, for one dimension of my life, rather than being faced with an open-ended but more debatable guaranteed obsolescence.
SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD
Now a second testing adolescence
Now a second testing adolescence
Beckons with its trials and pitfalls
Of rage and loss and acquiescence
As alertness ebbs and presence fails.
Seventy now - immaturity ahead -
I look to my elders for consolation
On how ten or twenty years are shed
Purposefully to dissolution.
Across the threshold of obsolescence
I pay court in admiration
To those who deny decay deference
And live on with quiet determination
Their indignities suffered and withstood,
In sovereignty the end makes good.
But man is more severely condemned:
He knows about this death sentence,
It was signed when he was born.
But, aware of the transience of life,
He lives obliviously - contrary to everything -
As if his life is forever
And this world belongs to him.
Samuil Marshak [Russian Poet 1887-1964]
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The Dow - Down and Down ... and Down!
GOING GOING GONE!
Like many economists I have been fascinated by the Dow.
Back in mid-March it was down to around the level that it stood at when Obama handed over the Trump - the immediate cause being attributable to financial fears over the impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Then it shot back up - reflecting successful lobbying by Corporate Big Business [bolstered by 'Libertarian Populism', 'Rabid Alt-Rightism' and 'Religious Cranks'] for 'Re-Opening'.
Now though there is realization that things will actually deteriorate rapidly, as it is proven that killing more people will not revive growth. The I.M.F's most recent take is that the global economy will shrink by 4.9 percent over the next 12 months, compared with a 3 percent prediction in April. The recovery will also be slower than earlier expected, the fund said.
Expect the Dow then to start reflecting reality - testing altogether New Lows!
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Old Media Goes For Spite - not News or Truth! 'This deterioration of media scruples, plain decency and kindness, makes today a sad day.'
GREAT COMMENTARY FROM MARIA LOW ON FACEBOOK
Wise, smart, hilarious and a GREAT writer... I just friended Maria Low from Te Awamutu on FB in response to this fabulous account ... hope she accepts my request, she seems like a wonderful human xx:
‘New Zealand, what is wrong with us as a nation that we put people up on a pedestal only to tear them down as if we’re rabid dogs in a slaughterhouse. I'm embarrassed. Take a trip down Memory Lane with me.
3 Feb: NZ govt. restricts foreign nationals travelling here or transiting through mainland China. Those who make it through (or home) must self-isolate for 14 days.
6 Feb: 193 New Zealanders being evacuated from Wuhan arrive in Auckland - straight into 14-day quarantine.
28 Feb: First case of Covid in NZ; a person in their 60s who has travelled to Auckland from Iran. The government places restrictions on people travelling to NZ from Iran.
29 Feb: More travel restrictions and health staff hightail it out to the borders to meet and greet incoming flights. In the meantime, New Zealanders join the rest of the western world in their assessment that Covid-19 will somehow cause the mega-shits, and buy up all the toilet paper they can find, as well as hand sanitiser and tinned food including lentils, which no one but me ate before all of this. Eventually we all decide we're going to bake more bread and muffins than we've ever eaten in our lives, and so we also strip the supermarket shelves of flour, sugar, baking powder and cocoa.
• Isolations continue.
• Cases and deaths around the world skyrocket.
• New Zealand's cases slowly rise.
• Cases and deaths around the world skyrocket.
• New Zealand's cases slowly rise.
We have seen the global trend and we know our economy is going to take a hit – some armchair commentators and media are furious about this, specifically they are angry at the government for not doing enough to protect the economy right now. But they offer no actual solutions.
The virus and the travel ban will take no prisoners, not even our much beloved national carrier Air New Zealand – itself a victim of public anger and frenzy when they don’t get their response to this once in a gazillion lifetime event quite right. They cut a third of their workforce, and to try to make us happy, they are prepared to do what it takes to cut more.
16 March: PM Jacinda deports some tourists and announces that if tourists entering the country don't self-quarantine subject to Ministry of Health scrutiny and checks, they can piss off back home. Fair call.
Meanwhile, at the daily pressers, media and onliners are screaming "CLOSE THE BORDERS, CLOSE THE SCHOOLS". The govt. continues with a firm, disciplined approach - more cases are popping up, mass gatherings are cancelled, NZ is building its arsenal of tests and ramping up contact tracing, and CBACs are operating across the country.
19 March: The borders are closed. Only returning citizens and permanent residents will be allowed in.
21 March: The government introduces the four-level alert system. For those in the back seats, this means shit's getting even more real! We’re advised by govt and supermarket chains that we don’t need to stockpile toilet paper and other goods, because our supply chain is robust. In response, we rush to stockpile more toilet paper and other goods.
23 March: While young people think they're invincible, people like my father who are over 70 are asked to stay home to keep safe. He does this willingly, even though since his wife died a year ago his daily outings to the post office, the supermarket, and his local for a glass of wine, have kept him sane. Older people are not whinging as much as the rest of us are about lockdown or doing things tough. They’ve been there - they’ve done things tough - many times in their lifetimes already. They will leave the bitching and complaining about every single thing to us younger ones.
We've become accustomed to an unassuming, mild-mannered, caring and intelligent disseminator of daily updates. Ashley Bloomfield is close to my age. But where I've collected money for Daffodil Day, the Blind Foundation, and Pink Ribbon Day, this guy's in charge of making the decisions about what we need to do to keep all 5 million of us alive. He's got the PM's backing. She hasn't even seen her 40th birthday yet, whereas I remember on my 40th birthday drinking way too much Chardonnay and taking over the drums; the actual drummer pleading with me to stop hoofing the pedal drum and just keep the beat (the one in my head anyway), with the sticks.
26 March: New Zealand goes into Alert Level 4 lockdown. There hasn't been a single death yet. No other leadership has locked down an entire country without even one Covid fatality. While our total number of cases is 283, Ashley knows the behaviour of this virus and warns us the number will likely rise into the thousands before it turns back around.
As we were forewarned, cases do indeed continue to rise, but despite the daily warnings that this would be the trajectory before the fall, people online and in the media are melting down. "It’s too late. We are doomed!!" And they are also screaming about the economy. Ashley, Jacinda, Grant and co are between a rock and a hard place. They have to just shut out the noise and stick with the science, the facts, the modelling, the lessons from overseas chaos, to ensure the care and protection (including financial) of our 'team of 5 million'. Their plan is to deal with the virus now, save lives, provide as much funding and support as is needed to protect as many jobs as possible, support our welfare system, prop up our businesses, and then we will deal with the economy and revitalisation of NZ later on.
To his own complete surprise, Ashley becomes our newest sex symbol. He’s Superman with a stethoscope. Tote bags, t-shirts and jewellery are made in homage to his superhero status. He's good looking (come on, he is!), he's intelligent, he's calm, patient and unflappable at the 1pm pressers when, frankly, certainly journos - particularly those whose names begin with Tova and Jessica’s relentless asking of the same stupid questions would push me to diving off the stage to tackle them to the ground and rip off their press passes.
Meantime, our Covid numbers are falling. New Zealand delights. We are so happy, well, most of us. Back in online world and fuelled by this embarrassing new wave of GOTCHA journalists, people are screaming, “Let us get back to work! Give people compassionate leave! This lockdown is illegal! Open up the economy. We’re doomed if you don’t. Don’t you care? Let us out! You're fkng up our country!"
Ashley et al stay the course. They can’t make that move just yet. They know what will happen if we don't have a proven track record of zero cases and we’re not in a manageable state of no community transmission. The virus can survive quite some time before it shows up in a test. They wait despite the furore, and they even hold firm on the heartbreaking restrictions on funerals and tangihanga. Jacinda and Ashley like us are also weeping for people who are losing loved ones during this time and are unable to properly support, then mourn or farewell them.
Days of no new cases stretch into weeks. Level 2. People celebrate, but online and in the media, the screams are escalating from those who clearly have all the answers and would do things wayyyy better ... "GO TO LEVEL 1, NOW, THE ECONOMY HAS SUFFERED ENOUGH, LET US BACK TO WORK! OPEN THE BORDERS! CREATE A TRANS-TASMAN BUBBLE! WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?”
Ashley and Jacinda explain every single day that Level 1 will expose us once again to this virus. It is still in the world, once we open the borders, Covid WILL enter. We must expect that! So we need to be certain we can manage that when (not if) it happens. It makes perfect sense to me.
Zero cases in NZ. The nation collectively rejoices. Jacinda does a wee dance, Ashley allows himself a broad smile. We are the envy of the world. How did we do it? They all want to know how we have achieved the impossible. Jacinda responds that it’s only been possible because of the sacrifices made by our team of 5 million. Ashley and Jacinda will be crowned King and Queen, surely. But the media and online haters will have none of this. The demands to move to Level 1 immediately become even louder.
Opening themselves up for more fury from the haters, Ashley and Jacinda wait. Just a little longer, so they can be absolutely sure we've got this. Protocols are in place. Everyone in the chain has a job to do. OK, announcement day.
Level 1. Happy days. The country buzzes with excitement - even the birds’ chirps are chirpier. We can pile into the bars and restaurants now, shop without fear of coming within 2-metres of fellow shoppers, we're back in business. New Zealanders who have been in lockdown overseas can now come home. We open the borders oh so slightly to let them back in, but the quarantine rules are still very much in place.
Cue scary music. Someone or some persons in some part of the chain somewhere has stuffed up and two women from the UK leave quarantine before their 12-day test. Eventually, when they've travelled from Auckland to Wellington (by all accounts from media and Nat MPs - who were sitting on vital information, might I add - they somehow manage to infect pretty much the entire North Island population on their trip down) they return a positive test result. Then a third person. Today’s tally is five. There will be more. A quarantine process with rigorous testing of those entering the country guarantees this.
We were always told the threat would still be at the border. Ashley and Jacinda move as fast as anyone could possibly hope for. They plug the gaps, ensure this human error will not be repeated, they reassure the NZ public that we have got this. Cases at the border were always expected. They do all they can. But for the NZ public and the crazed media - who really do not seem to know what they want based on the to’ing and fro’ing and what is clearly never going to be good enough because good enough doesn’t make a good story - saving the country of 5 million from a mass death count and getting NZ rolling within a few months of the first case, are inexcusablly insufficient. No, they must pay for these two cases, dearly! Heads must roll. We want resignations! Public stonings aren’t good enough! The media and the onliners go crazy .... "Liars! Useless! Why did you allow compassionate leave?! We've done the hard yards and suffered through lockdown and all the economic challenges only to let you terrible, arrogant, lying, useless leaders bring Covid back into our country!" It is relentless.
A guy with a pretty impressive title, Air Commodore Darryn Webb, is brought in to oversee the logistical nightmare that is border/quarantine/process control. I'm happy with this ... it's a sound solution, plus he isn't at all hard to look at. (Hey, don't throw sexist stones ... you know it's true!!)
Mike Hosking - who most of you probably know for his humanitarian and charitable work, solutions-based approach, leadership and fair and balanced political reporting (yes, I'm speaking tongue in fkng cheek) opens his interview with Ashley with, "Have you quit yet?" And Stuff Media presents the most disgraceful headline I have seen in a long time, "Coronavirus: The road trip that turned Ashley Bloomfield from hero to zero."
In summary:
• I'm appalled at how quickly we as a nation of people who should bloody well know by now to "be kind', are tearing down those who headed up our Covid Army and saved our ungrateful asses!
• I'm embarrassed to admit the tall poppy syndrome is fertilised and abundant here. I thought/hoped we were better than this.
• I feel ashamed that the two highest profile public servants who devoted almost every waking moment to helping us through this worldwide calamity are now being hung, drawn and quartered.
• How quickly we forget!
• Lesson – in New Zealand, “building the plane while learning to fly it”, doing the very best you can in an unprecedented time, making incredibly difficult decisions to save a nation, achieving what no other country has achieved, acknowledging a glitch in a wide-scale system but immediately fixing whatever didn’t work so that it doesn’t happen again - simply isn’t good enough! Oh no, not here.
• I'm appalled at how quickly we as a nation of people who should bloody well know by now to "be kind', are tearing down those who headed up our Covid Army and saved our ungrateful asses!
• I'm embarrassed to admit the tall poppy syndrome is fertilised and abundant here. I thought/hoped we were better than this.
• I feel ashamed that the two highest profile public servants who devoted almost every waking moment to helping us through this worldwide calamity are now being hung, drawn and quartered.
• How quickly we forget!
• Lesson – in New Zealand, “building the plane while learning to fly it”, doing the very best you can in an unprecedented time, making incredibly difficult decisions to save a nation, achieving what no other country has achieved, acknowledging a glitch in a wide-scale system but immediately fixing whatever didn’t work so that it doesn’t happen again - simply isn’t good enough! Oh no, not here.
This deterioration of media scruples, plain decency and kindness, makes today a sad day. At least we have our toilet paper. Enjoy your muffins.’
- Maria Low
SOME COMMENTS FROM ME:
It is important to remember here that there are basically three categories of people seeking fast-track/priority entry into contemporary 'Covid-19 Free New Zealand':
1. Corporate Business Leaders and their Minions who are desperate to complete international projects where production is centred in New Zealand [like the Avatar 2 film production outfit from Los Angeles];
2.Family members split by overseas/NZ lock-downs and air-flight cutbacks, where some are NZ citizens but other members of the families are overseas nationals without full NZ Citizenship;
3. Regular NZ Citizens who are seeking to return home, perhaps those facing unemployment in their former host countries [e.g. Australia] or simply returning to jobs and families that would have otherwise been left temporarily in the normal course of events.
It is perfectly reasonable to resent giving Category 1 applicants short shrift - though these are the people that the National Party would seek to fast-track on the grounds that they are 'Re-opening NZ'.
As for Category 3 entrants, these are NZ citizens and denying them entry raises Citizenship and Civil Rights issues. And in their case, making them pay for their quarantining might be perceived as unjust - though some form of means testing could be introduced and rebates offered for those who tested clear when they left their host country - or tested clear when they entered/left quarantine in NZ.
What was always unclear and in doubt/confusion is how many people would seek early entry into 'Covid-19 Free New Zealand' - and how many airlines would be prepared to fly the routes.
Not altogether surprisingly then, NZ Health Authorities have been left flat-footed with what appears to be a flood - a flood that has every likelihood of swelling as conditions overseas worsen in terms of both health security and job security,
And we are reaching the sad situation where, for example in the USA, the Government is actually pushing lying on such matters as testing as a means of asserting political identity and facilitating 'Re-opening'. Doubtless this is also encouraging lying about such matters as healthiness and testing by re-entrants.
The NZ Govt has therefore done the right thing by almost immediately asking the Armed Forces to police the border.
And very fortunately NZ does seem to have put in place a fairly comprehensive Test, Track and Trace system here at home.
But all kinds of hard decisions will have to be made [not least on a case-by-case basis for Category 2 applicants], suggesting that a dedicated agency should be set up to deal with Entry/Re-entry in a comprehensive manner - as this type of work is clearly beyond the existing remit and competence of the NZ Ministry of Health - and as it requires the active participation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade..
Not only that, decisions will have to be made on the levels and sharing of applicant and agency cost covering/recovery that are appropriate, just and feasible in respect to the new policies and their implementation - agreed and monitored ultimately by the Ministry of Finance.
POSTSCRIPT ON OUR SHOCK-JOCK IMPERSONATORS
Like Limited Brain Lemmings NZs Mike Hosking and Duncan Garner have been following the Shock Jocks of Fox News in supposedly representing a Persecuted Majority composed of Self-Interested Right-Wing Libertarians, Moneyed Interests, Rampant Alt-Right Proto-Fascists, Rednecks and Religious Cranks – mostly male and now increasingly despised by women and the young.
And these Limited Brain Lemmings Hosking and Garner are following their US leaders over the cliff! A majority of voters in countries like NZ and the USA has become aware of what in essence is a conspiracy by Big Business, Oligarchs and Corporate Interests. Regardless of how the 2016 Elections in NZ and the USA play out, history will favour the alert and thinking Ground Squirrels and not the Limited Brain Lemmings.
And – let's hope - Messrs Hosking and Garner and the Foxes will descend together flailing into the Canyon of Obscurity!
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Fanny Kemble - and the contrast between the lives of mechanics under slavery and those of their white counterparts in the North
FANNY KEMBLE
Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble (27 November 1809 – 15 January 1893) was a notable British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer, whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing and works about the theatre.
In 1834, Kemble married an American, Pierce Mease Butler, grandson of U.S. Senator Pierce Butler, whom she had met on an American acting tour with her father in 1832. After living in Philadelphia for a time, Butler became heir to the cotton, tobacco and rice plantations of his grandfather on Butler Island, just south of Darien, Georgia, and to the hundreds of slaves who worked them. He made trips to the plantations during the early years of their marriage, but never took Kemble or their children with him.
At Kemble's insistence, they finally spent the winter of 1838–1839 there and Kemble kept a diary of her observations, flavored strongly by abolitionist sentiment.
Butler disapproved of Kemble's outspokenness, forbidding her to publish. The relationship grew abusive, and Kemble eventually returned to England with her two daughters. Butler filed for a divorce in 1847, after they had been separated for some time, citing abandonment and misdeed by Kemble.
She returned to the theatre and toured major US cities, giving successful readings of Shakespeare plays. Her memoir circulated in American abolitionist circles, but she waited until 1863, during the American Civil War, to publish her anti-slavery Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It has become her best-known work in the United States: she published several other volumes of journals. In 1877, she returned to England with her second daughter and son-in-law. She lived in London and was active in society, befriending the writer Henry James.
In 1847, Kemble returned to the stage in the United States, as she needed to make a living. Following her father's example, she appeared with success as a Shakespearean reader, rather than acting in plays. She toured the United States. The couple endured a bitter and protracted divorce in 1849, with Butler retaining custody of their two daughters. At that time, with divorce rare, the father was customarily awarded custody in the patriarchal society. Other than brief visits, Kemble was not reunited with her daughters until each came of age at 21.
Her ex-husband squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000 - but was saved from bankruptcy by a sale on 2–3 March 1859 of 436 people he held in slavery. The Great Slave Auction, at Ten Broeck racetrack outside Savannah, Georgia, was the largest single slave auction in United States history. As such, it was covered by national reporters.
After the American Civil War, Butler tried to run his plantations with free labour, but failed to make a profit. He died of malaria in Georgia in 1867. Neither Butler nor Kemble remarried.
Extracts from:
OF A RESIDENCE ON A GEORGIAN PLANTATION 1838-1839.
By FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE
FANNY KEMBLE ON THE ‘HORRIBLE INJUSTICES’ OF SLAVERY
Dearest E——.
Passing the rice-mill this morning in my walk, I went in to look at the machinery, the large steam mortars which shell the rice, and which work under the intelligent and reliable supervision of Engineer Ned.
I was much surprised, in the course of conversation with him this morning, to find how much older a man he was than he appeared. Indeed his youthful appearance had hitherto puzzled me much in accounting for his very superior intelligence and the important duties confided to him.
He is, however, a man upwards of forty years old, although he looks ten years younger. He attributed his own uncommonly youthful appearance to the fact of his never having done what he called field work, or been exposed, as the common gang negroes are, to the hardships of their all but brutish existence.
He said his former master had brought him up very kindly, and he had learnt to tend the engines, and had never been put to any other work, but he said this was not the case with his poor wife. He wished she was as well off as he was, but she had to work in the rice-fields and was 'most broke in two' with labour and exposure and hard work while with child, and hard work just directly after child-bearing; he said she could hardly crawl, and he urged me very much to speak a kind word for her to massa. She was almost all the time in hospital, and he thought she could not live long.
Now, E——,
here is another instance of the horrible injustice of this system of slavery. In my country or in yours, a man endowed with sufficient knowledge and capacity to be an engineer would, of course, be in the receipt of considerable wages; his wife would, together with himself, reap the advantages of his ability, and share the well-being his labour earned; he would be able to procure for her comfort in sickness or in health, and beyond the necessary household work, which the wives of most artisans are inured to, she would have no labour to encounter; in case of sickness even these would be alleviated by the assistance of some stout girl of all work, or kindly neighbour, and the tidy parlour or snug bed-room would be her retreat if unequal to the daily duties of her own kitchen.
Think of such a lot compared with that of the head engineer of Mr. ——'s plantation, whose sole wages are his coarse food and raiment and miserable hovel, and whose wife, covered with one filthy garment of ragged texture and dingy colour, bare-footed and bare-headed, is daily driven a-field to labour with aching pain-racked joints, under the lash of a driver, or lies languishing on the earthen floor of the dismal plantation hospital in a condition of utter physical destitution and degradation such as the most miserable dwelling of the poorest inhabitant of your free Northern villages never beheld the like of.
Think of the rows of tidy tiny houses in the long suburbs of Boston and Philadelphia, inhabited by artisans of just the same grade as this poor Ned, with their white doors and steps, their hydrants of inexhaustible fresh flowing water, the innumerable appliances for decent comfort of their cheerful rooms, the gay wardrobe of the wife, her cotton prints for daily use, her silk for Sunday church-going; the careful comfort of the children's clothing, the books and newspapers in the little parlour, the daily district school, the weekly parish church: imagine if you can—but you are happy that you cannot—the contrast between such an existence and that of the best mechanic on a Southern plantation.
FANNY KEMBLE TEMPTS A SLAVE WITH THE NOTION OF ‘FREEDOM’
I had a conversation that interested me a good deal, during my walk to-day, with my peculiar slave Jack. This lad, whom Mr. —— has appointed to attend me in my roamings about the island, and rowing expeditions on the river, is the son of the last head driver, a man of very extraordinary intelligence and faithfulness—such, at least, is the account given of him by his employers (in the burial-ground of the negroes is a stone dedicated to his memory, a mark of distinction accorded by his masters, which his son never failed to point out to me, when we passed that way).
Jack appears to inherit his quickness of apprehension; his questions, like those of an intelligent child, are absolutely inexhaustible; his curiosity about all things beyond this island, the prison-house of his existence, is perfectly intense; his countenance is very pleasing, mild, and not otherwise than thoughtful; he is, in common with the rest of them, a stupendous flatterer, and, like the rest of them, also seems devoid of physical and moral courage. To-day, in the midst of his torrent of enquiries about places and things, I suddenly asked him if he would like to be free.
A gleam of light absolutely shot over his whole countenance, like the vivid and instantaneous lightning—he stammered, hesitated, became excessively confused, and at length replied—'Free, missis? what for me wish to be free? Oh! no, missis, me no wish to be free, if massa only let we keep pig.'
The fear of offending, by uttering that forbidden wish—the dread of admitting, by its expression, the slightest discontent with his present situation—the desire to conciliate my favour, even at the expense of strangling the intense natural longing that absolutely glowed in his every feature—it was a sad spectacle, and I repented my question.
As for the pitiful request which he reiterated several times adding, 'No, missis, me no want to be free—me work till me die for missis and massa,' with increased emphasis; it amounted only to this, that the negroes once were, but no longer are, permitted to keep pigs.
The increase of filth and foul smells, consequent upon their being raised, is, of course, very great; and, moreover, Mr. —— told me, when I preferred poor Jack's request to him, that their allowance was no more than would suffice their own necessity, and that they had not the means of feeding the animals.
With a little good management they might very easily obtain them, however; their little 'kail-yard' alone would suffice to it, and the pork and bacon would prove a most welcome addition to their farinaceous diet.
You perceive at once (or if you could have seen the boy's face, you would have perceived at once), that his situation was no mystery to him, that his value to Mr. ——, and, as he supposed, to me, was perfectly well known to him, and that he comprehended immediately that his expressing even the desire to be free, might be construed by me into an offence, and sought by eager protestations of his delighted acquiescence in slavery, to conceal his soul's natural yearning, lest I should resent it.
'T was a sad passage between us, and sent me home full of the most painful thoughts. I told Mr. ——, with much indignation, of poor Harriet's flogging, and represented that if the people were to be chastised for anything they said to me, I must leave the place, as I could not but hear their complaints, and endeavour, by all my miserable limited means, to better their condition while I was here. He said he would ask Mr. O—— about it, assuring me, at the same time, that it was impossible to believe a single word any of these people said.
At dinner, accordingly, the enquiry was made as to the cause of her punishment, and Mr. O—— then said it was not at all for what she had told me, that he had flogged her, but for having answered him impertinently, that he had ordered her into the field, whereupon she had said she was ill and could not work, that he retorted he knew better, and bade her get up and go to work; she replied, 'Very well, I'll go, but I shall just come back again!' meaning, that when in the field, she would be unable to work, and obliged, to return to the hospital.
'For this reply,' Mr. O—— said, 'I gave her a good lashing; it was her business to have gone into the field without answering me, and then we should have soon seen whether she could work or not; I gave it to Chloe too, for some such impudence.' I give you the words of the conversation, which was prolonged to a great length, the overseer complaining of sham sicknesses of the slaves, and detailing the most disgusting struggle which is going on the whole time, on the one hand to inflict, and on the other, to evade oppression and injustice.
With this sauce I ate my dinner, and truly it tasted bitter.
BEN HORRY
Ben was born into slavery around 1852 – his father had been an overseer or head man on the Alderley rice plantation, South Carolina owned by Colonel Josh Ward – Ward owned the largest expanse of plantation land in the USA.
BEN HORRY AND ‘FREEDOM’
But it was life as they knew, told by them, in their own words.
"Fore freedom? Fore freedom? Well now, fore freedom we were treated by our former owners I will say good–cording to situation of time," said Daise, reading Horry's words. "Every year when Massa and Missus gone mountains, they call up obersheer (overseer) and say, 'Don't treat them anyway severe. Don't beat them. Don't maul them.' Some these white people that day something! They either manage you or kill you."
After freedom, a term commonly used during his time, Horry, who was born on Brookgreen Plantation, now the site of the gardens, lived in his own cabin, on his own land, with his second wife Stella.
"After freedom, from my behavior wid my former owner, I wuz pinted (appointed) head man on Brookgreen Plantation," said Daise, reading Horry's words.
Horry estimated that he was about 89.
"I the oldest liver left on Waccamaw Neck that belong to Brookgreen, Prospect, Longwood, Alderly plantations," said Daise, reading Horry's words. "I been here! I seen things! I tell you. Thousand of them things happen but I try to forget 'em."
According to Horry, rice was just the same as having money during that time.
"My father fore he dead been the head man for old Colonel Josh Ward," said Daise, reading Horry's words. "Lived to Brookgreen. They say Colonel Ward the biggest rice man been on Waccamaw. He start that big gold rice in the country. He the head rice cap'n in dem time. My father the head man, he tote the barn key. Rice been money dem day and time."
And while Horry's father may have been the head man, it was the cruelty of an overseer that left horrific images of his own mother seared in his memory.
"The worst thing I members was the colored oberseer," said Daise, reading Horry's words. "He was the one straight from Africa. He the boss over all the mens and womens and if omans don't do all he say, he lay task on 'em they ain't able to do. My mother won't do all he say. When he say, 'You go barn and stay till I come,' she ain't do dem. So he have it in for my mother and lay task on 'em she ain't able for do.
Then for punishment my mother is take to the barn and strapped down on thing called the 'pony.' Hands spread like this and strapped to the floor and all two both she feet been tie like this. And she been give 25 to 50 lashes till the blood flow. And my father and me stand right there and look and ain't able to lift a hand! Blood on floor in that rice barn when barn tear down by Huntingdon."
Then for punishment my mother is take to the barn and strapped down on thing called the 'pony.' Hands spread like this and strapped to the floor and all two both she feet been tie like this. And she been give 25 to 50 lashes till the blood flow. And my father and me stand right there and look and ain't able to lift a hand! Blood on floor in that rice barn when barn tear down by Huntingdon."
The blood of Horry's mother was still on the barn floor when it was torn down decades later.
For those who look through the pages, they will find dozens of stories like that of Horry, Mariah Heywood, Margaret Brown, Welcome Bees and Sabe Gutledge, all former slaves that spent their lives on the very ground locals walk on today.
Veronica Gerald heads the new institute for Gullah studies at Coastal Carolina University. Her great-great-great-great aunt was a woman named Hagar Brown, another former slave who Chandler spoke with in the 1930s about her memories of slavery and the violence that came along with it.
"Ma say some dem plan to run way," said Gerald, reading Hagar Brown's words. "Say, 'Less run! Less run!' Master ketch dem and fetch dem in. Lay 'em cross barrel. Beat dem till they wash in blood. Fetch 'em back. Place 'em cross the barrel — hogsket barrel — Christ! They ramp wash in blood! Beat ma sister. He sister sickly. Never could clear task like he want. My ma have to work he self to death to help Henritta so sickly."
Brown was born on the Oaks Plantation and, according to family stories, was kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan for being too close to white people.
"I remember them Klu Kluh (klux) would come getcha out of church and they take you to some place," said Gerald, reading Brown's words. "They do tings to you, you ain't wanna been tell nobody bout 'em. And you tink to yourself 'bout dem people that hate ya so bad. Then you look 'round and you sing the song like them old people use sa sing, 'Stay in the field! Stay in the field!
Stay in the field till the war been end!'"
Aunt Hagar, as she was called, remembered when that war did end and she was freed.
"Eberybody in church been sing, been a sing, 'Freedom! Freedom! Freedom ta come!,'" said Gerald, reading Brown's words. "And everybody been so glad for Yettie bout that time when they all over. Today I be sit down and think to myself that there been a time that I ain't been free but now I free. And now I look back on 'em and I think about what it use to be and what it is today. And I thank God and I truss God for havin' meke (make) me come this far by feeth (faith)."
For further reading, click here for "Gullah: The Voice of an Island," produced by the Athenaeum Press at CCU.
Further information about former slaves Hagar Brown, Ben Horry and others can be found in "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves," from the Library of Congress.
AND SOME OF FANNY'S POETRY:
A Wish
Let me not die for ever, when I'm gone
To the cold earth! but let my memory
Live like the gorgeous western light that shone
Over the clouds where sank day's majesty.
Let me not be forgotten! though the grave
Has clasped its hideous arms around my brow.
Let me not be forgotten! though the wave
Of time's dark current rolls above me now.
Yet not in tears remembered be my name;
Weep over those ye loved; for me, for me,
Give me the wreath of glory, and let fame
Over my tomb spread immortality!
To the cold earth! but let my memory
Live like the gorgeous western light that shone
Over the clouds where sank day's majesty.
Let me not be forgotten! though the grave
Has clasped its hideous arms around my brow.
Let me not be forgotten! though the wave
Of time's dark current rolls above me now.
Yet not in tears remembered be my name;
Weep over those ye loved; for me, for me,
Give me the wreath of glory, and let fame
Over my tomb spread immortality!
Faith
BY FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE
Better trust all, and be deceived,
And weep that trust, and that deceiving;
Than doubt one heart, that, if believed,
Had blessed one’s life with true believing.
Oh, in this mocking world, too fast
The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth!
Better be cheated to the last,
Than lose the blessèd hope of truth.
↧
It is enough to delight
IT IS ENOUGH TO DELIGHT
My dear one is mine
As mirrors are lonely
Look into the glass
And tell the face you see
Of how the lens gives power without purpose
Reversed to purpose that no power redeems
Look more deeply
Into the dark glass
Matching devilry
Against the angel
And how the spirit, so easily betrayed
To cruelty, becomes so undermined
Then set aside the mirror and its meaning
It is enough to delight without believing
For I will love the spring
And cry to dream again
My magic is my own
I dance for death alone
Listen - new voyagers are seeking landfall
They will awaken to the sweetness of the island
Water into the well
Music into the air
For the high green hill
Sits always by the sea.
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Old Media Dinosaurs downed by Anti-Hero Velocireporters
DIGITAL RAPTORS COME OUT ON TOP
As a poor unfortunate who has been the butt of scorn for a decade or more for ‘blogging’ [generally articulated with a snide snarl], I have long learned to largely ignore critics. I do what I do – that is up to me surely? I make no money from my writing - and I write because love to write.
I could write my thoughts down in exercise books and store them in shoe boxes ready to be taken to the tip when I pop my clogs [lots of old farts still do this] – but I can share now online – so I do. And I can prepare my own graphics [lots of fun], find space for my poetry and literary criticism, link widely across the global commons to other media sources regarding social, economic and political issues, and draw on my now extensive archive to substantiate the evolution of my stances and stands.
And nowadays I get more than enough quiet, personal, one-to-one appreciation to offset the backbiting.
So, I have a somewhat grudging view of the Old Media of the Press for whom respectability, readership and public recognition come so easily [or perhaps I should say ‘came so easily’].
But life it seems has not been that simple – or scorn-free – it seems for the trailblazers of digital presentation within and on behalf of the Old Media. And I now find myself feeling twinges of sympathy and collegiality for the new CEO of NZ Stuff Sinead Boucher - as she reflects on the recent ravening of the Fairfax Print T-Rex by the more adaptive and agile velociraptors of Digital Stuff:
For most of its life, Stuff.co.nz was the unwanted internal disruptor with a ridiculous name, blamed for cannibalising print and ruining the newspaper business (a charge often levelled at me). Now Stuff has become so central to our business that we have named the whole company after it.
And I am delighted to learn that Stuff, as a reputable source of news and comment, has evolved into the biggest domestic digital site in the country – in what is likely a world first for a professional digital news agency. Hopefully, fostered by reasonable Old Media traditions and credentials, Stuff will combine the best of both worlds – being both venerable and nimble.
Sinead goes on – and I wish her the Very Best of Luck:
And now here we are in a real pandemic, one that has resulted in record audiences for Stuff and reawakened a wider sense of the value of journalism, the need for trusted, independent news in an era where it has never been easier to spread misinformation, undermine democracies and inflame hatred.
What will the next 20 years bring? I hope that we can still have fun, try new things and surprise people, but also ensure we are able to sustain and nourish the journalism at the heart of everything we do.
We no longer celebrate milestones of audience growth as we did in the early years. Instead, we celebrate the messages from people who say our stories have changed a life. We are focussed on building public trust as our number one measure of success.
The recent sale of the business into our hands gives us a chance to really do something bold, to recapture that entrepreneurial spirit from Stuff’s early years, and to redefine the model for a news business after years of disruption. It is hugely exciting and, to be honest, I feel an interactive graphic coming on...
YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE!!
Addicted to digital news: Sinead Boucher's history with Stuff
Sinead Boucher, NZ Stuff, 27 June 2020
Sinead Boucher has overseen Stuff's growth from unwanted disruptor to centre of the company.
...
SOME OF MY PREVIOUS ARTICLES:
PRINT DINOSAURS FACE EXTINCTION
The joke in Australia is that Maserati-driving Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood has arranged to buy the Twelve Apostles Rocks offshore of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia - and that he plans to restructure and downsize them as Bail-Out Judas and the Seven Offshore Dwarfs ...
Posted 28th February 2017 by Keith Shorrocks Johnson
CROSSROADS AT FAIRFAX
The following newspaper headline recently caught my eye: ‘Fairfax plans further editorial restructuring as part of digital news focus’ [Dominion Post Business Section of Friday 29 May 2015]. It is yet more evidence that the Fairfax Group, which runs the Dominion Post, is at sixes and sevens in red ink in terms of its print-digital strategy - being very much a laggard rather than a leader in moving to:
... ‘digital-first, socially driven newsrooms that are structured to produce quality journalism for different audiences and across platforms - an exciting structure geared towards building a dynamic, responsive newsroom’ providing ‘an entirely different way of operating that puts our journalists even closer to the communities they cover’. See:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/68938640/fairfax-plans-further-editorial-restructure
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/68938640/fairfax-plans-further-editorial-restructure
This has all been very predictable – as has been set out in this magazine. Some of my fairly voluminous comments in the past on trends in the Old Media and the threats that their vested interests represent to Internet Freedom and Freedom of Expression can be found at:
Disappointingly, but not altogether surprisingly, Old Labour has come out in defence of the Old Media, with prominent NZ Labour Party activist and EPMU ‘Organizer’ Paul Tolich commenting on the proposed cuts and restructuring at Fairfax as follows:
‘This is a very sad occasion for a lot of people who have spent their lives in service to journalism. Media companies were increasingly using technology and this, coupled with declining print revenue, meant the Fairfax plan was an 'inevitable consequence.
'It all goes back to the decision that was made to give digital news away for free. This is going to be repeated at other publications.’
As I commented on the RNZ timeline:
‘All this puts Tolich [and by implication Andrew Little’s NZ Labour Party] on the same page [but not page view] as Rupert Murdoch. Paul needs to be reminded that Fairfax does not have to publish online - it chooses to do so. Having chosen to do so, it cannot then expect the Web to be configured to its need to retain profitability and jobs.
‘This can only be done by applying draconian copyright laws policed by internet providers - something perhaps on which Paul Tolich and Rupert Murdoch would find common ground - but something that strikes at the heart of Internet Freedom.
‘If Fairfax wants to trial voluntary pay-walls, all well and good - except that this approach is extremely unlikely to work in a small market like that of New Zealand. The NZ Print Media has previously been protected by a natural geographical monopoly - this no longer applies.
‘One possible answer to maintaining (insofar as it actually exists) quality local investigative journalism is to set up an independent agency that can service both Old and New Media outlets on a pay-for-story basis.
‘I am thinking mainly here of 'pay-for-story' by the media not by readers - so that conventional newspapers and websites could buy the results of investigations (or preferential access). One could envisage different access / payment plans / bids for prime stories, subscriptions for different types of stories, purchases of bundles etc.
‘The whole problem with the current model is that it treats investigative journalism the same as comment.
As a website operator, I might well buy from Nicky Hager but definitely not from Rosemary McLeod - as I can cover the latter kind of commentary myself’.
There is further irony here in the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the loss of Campbell Live [a somewhat more independent and occasionally investigative / combative TV programme here in NZ] as this has been canned mainly as a result of falling audiences, even though many came to regard John Campbell’s programme as a public good.
Both NZ's Press and its TV stations are at very low ebbs in terms of questioning the status quo – but if I had to choose, I would choose to intervene to safeguard the best TV rather than Dom Post newspaper reporting - given past form.
FOR MORE ON RUPERT MURDOCH’S DIRTY JOURNALISM AND MEDIA MANIPULATION SEE FOR EXAMPLE:
Posted 30th May 2015 by Keith Shorrocks Johnson
HARLOTS' WEBS
Let’s start by noting that our Dominion Post newspaper here in Wellington has carried little, lurid or not, about the revelations, allegations and innuendos made in Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Politics [see my previous article] - this despite the fact that the Dom’s well-regarded political commentator Tracey Watkins was on to the story 6 weeks ago.
One can only assume that the Editor Bernadette Courtney and Fairfax CEO Greg Hyland have decided to keep their heads below the parapet as the group continues to suffer severe financial challenges in running the Wellington-based newspaper. The group as a whole continues to spend around $100 million per year on redundancies, saw a 24 percent decline in print revenues in 2013/14 and has had to forego independent printing in New Zealand (shifting print runs to rival APN's Auckland plant).
The way things are going Fairfax may need all the political friends on the Right that it can ring in.
So it remains for the other serious newspaper in the North Island the NZ Herald to pick up the baton – with which it has galloped off with abandon. See for example:
Some of the revelations are sordid to say the least and I do not for a minute believe that our Prime Minister John Key is just a nice regular guy who is unjustly plagued by left wing conspiracy theorists.
But perhaps I should perhaps explain in more detail why I haven’t been prepared to allocate all the moral high ground to the Left Coalition in its Crusade against the Dastardly Government of John Key.
First, Hager was surely dissimulating when he denied he had a political agenda in releasing the book so close to the election. Mounting an ethical high horse Hager tilts: "That's what the job is - to tell people before the election." And even though he could have taken more time with the book, he ‘worked like a dog because I believe that people have a total right to know this before the election’.
"So have I hurried it out before the election - totally. Is it politically motivated? It's motivated by the public interest that I think people have in knowing what's going on."
To me this is spin. And if Hager sounds like a spin doctor, then he probably is a spin doctor.
While few who watch politics in New Zealand will doubt Hager’s statement that John Key ‘has cultivated a very respectable image of being friendly and relaxed’, even less I suspect will subscribe, on the other side of the coin, to having been unaware of the ‘unseen side of Mr Key's political management’.
Key is an excellent politician with all that description implies. He is multi-facetted, artful in dodging and two-faced - but that does not mean that he is the only ‘good’ politician of this type in New Zealand or that none aspire to this mantle among the politicos of the Left Coalition. In fact one of the things that distress me most looking across the political spectrum is a general slide away from principle and policies towards muck, spin and commitments to win at all costs. And I am especially hurt when the Green Party [to which Hager is allied] covers itself in slurry of this type.
Secondly, one of the big issues raised by Hager relates to the supposed ‘hacking’ of the NZ Labour Party’s computer files. He claims that Prime Ministerial Adviser Jason Ede and Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater conspired over information relating to Labour Party membership details, including credit card records, after a security flaw was discovered on the Labour website in 2011.
Now I am not at all surprised to learn that NZ Labour’s computer files were a shambles in 2011. In 2010 I stood as a candidate for Labour in Wellington’s Southern Ward Local Elections. I could not, try as I might, get access to the voter contact records held by the Party – though I always thought it rather strange that my fellow Labour candidate Paul Eagle had perfect access through the Victoria University Student ‘Geek’ who ran the system [I was not Grant Robertson's 'Man'].
Getting back to Hager he apparently reports on an email between Jason Ede and Cameron Slater in which the former boasts of evading detection:
‘It had been a close shave. The next day, June 14, Ede and Slater exchanged several emails expressing their relief that Labour had not discovered Ede's role [going inside the Labour Party computer]. Ede wrote: "An interesting sidebar ... is that they're chasing us by matching IP neighbourhoods and the types of computer we use. You stand out like dogs balls because of your damn Mac!!!!!"
‘He continued, "In my case, I wish to offer a hearty sigh of relief and celebrate dynamic IP addresses." He meant his computer regularly changed its IP address, which ensured he could not be identified by its IP address. If Ede had had a static IP address like Slater, the Labour Party might have been able to prove he had been inside their computer system. Ede titled his email, "Thank You for dynamic IP addresses".
The problem with this from an ethical viewpoint is that the emails in question were hacked early in 2014 by someone with similar skills but a Left-Leaning political philosophy - who then delivered them to Hager. ‘Thank G’, Hager must have thought, ‘Now I have a book to sell.’
What we have a right to know now is the name of the hacker. Without that, Hager + X is down one to Slater + Ede as far as I am concerned.
Third, we have a situation where Hager’s book is being slopped into the ethical quagmire in which Kim Dotcom wallows.
Rather endearingly Slater has averred: ''if you wrestle with pigs ... two things are certain - one is that you will get dirty and the second is that the pig, me, enjoys it''. Here he has a lot in common with convicted criminal and ‘Wanted List’ Kim Dotcom who appears to be totally immune to questions of ethics and is, as they would say where I come from in Northern England as ‘happy as a pig in shit’ to suborn and subvert the coming NZ General Election.
As far as I am concerned, Dotcom and Internet-Mana have absolutely no standing on issues of political propriety and internet freedom. After all this was the man who gave an anonymous donation to ACT’s John Banks and who, after this flirtation with the Right failed, proceeds to debauch Lefty Pro Laila Harré (on the wet patch without changing the sheets).
He appears to treat NZ Democracy with the level of respect accorded by an amateur magician to a kindergarten audience during a fancy dress Xmas Party.
He appears to treat NZ Democracy with the level of respect accorded by an amateur magician to a kindergarten audience during a fancy dress Xmas Party.
And this man now has the cheek to withhold information from the NZ Public until such time as he calculates that it can do maximum damage to informed debate. In July, he promised to reveal new information about Prime Minister, John Key, and the Government Communications Security Bureau, five days before the general election in September.
"I don't think he would resign, I think he is going to put a spin on it as he usually does and I have no expectation of him doing the honourable thing."
The honourable thing Mr Dotcom is for you to put the information forward into the public arena as soon as possible so that it can be validated, assessed and debated.
CLEANING OUT THE COBWEBS AND SWILLING THE STIES
Can any good come of all this?
Possibly it can as the national council public relations body PRINZ meets on Monday to reconsider its Code of Ethics in the light of the aggressive, threatening and potentially corrupt actions of some of the members of the Royal College of Spin Doctors.
PRINZ President Bruce Fraser admits "It's true that (allegations in Hager’s book) are not a good look for public relations" and that they "reinforce all the negative views people have about what we do."
You can read about it here – and wish them luck:
As for the politicians, there is no Code of Ethics – no real surprise there!
But Ross Robertson (Labour MP for Manukau East) has been promoting a Private Member’s Bill in the ballot that addresses MP ethics and behaviour for some years.
You can read about it here – and insist that your MP abides by the Code and votes for its enactment:
Posted 20th August 2014 by Keith Shorrocks Johnson
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Melania Grabs Don by the Dome Piece Merkin
With Her Bunker Mentality, Melania Trump Wants to Win Just as Much as Husband Donald
Washington Post journalist Mary Jordan rejects criticism that she was too soft on the first lady in her new book about Melania Trump, and reveals several aspects of her personality that would surprise people
Yossi Melman, Haaretz, 29 June 2020
…
About a month before the 2016 election, the Trumps were hit by the greatest crisis in their relationship, with a leaked recording of an old “Access Hollywood” tape catching Trump say of women, “You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” The revelation left scars, but they eventually healed and, according to Jordan, Melania even took advantage of the situation in a manner that confirmed her sophistication and guile.
The writer said that Melania began a kind of “strike” when she decided not to move into the White House and to reduce her duties as first lady to a minimum. She was also caught on film refusing her husband’s request to hold her hand after they arrived in Israel in May 2017. Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu were there to greet them.
At the time, pundits believed that Melania’s distancing stemmed from her fear of being in the political spotlight, a basic lack of confidence and her murky relationship with her husband. But Jordan reveals in the book that Melania behaved like this because she wanted to renegotiate her financial arrangement with Trump, “to ensure the financial future of herself and their son, Barron.”
After a while, apparently after getting what she wanted, Melania returned to her full-time duties. The details of the amended prenuptial agreement, like those of the original one, were not publicized.
“It seemed like a form of blackmail” I tell Mary Jordan. “And maybe like a smart move,” Jordan responded. “His two previous wives fought with him. People said he was stingy. Now people give Melania credit for being good with her art of the deal.
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Meng Haoran's 'Spring Dawn'
NOTES
The poem 'Spring Dawn' was written by 孟浩然 Meng Haoran (689-740 CE) of the Tang Dynasty [reputedly when he was in bed]. Translation by John Turner.
Thinking partly of the lashing-howling mid-winter storm that has beset Wellington now for days - and partly with great regret for the suppression of dissent and democracy in Hong Kong.
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For Hong Kong: Essence
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The Goodies return to save Britain - yet again!
It is the early 2020s and The Goodies have returned to the UK's TV screens, having been lost in a time warp behind Elton John's glasses. Skint, they try to make it big as pop stars. However, at every turn, they find that their ideas have already been ripped off by acts from the past - and that Modern Britain has become a pastiche of the Magic Roundabout.
Despondent and on Skid Row, they decide to get their own back by stealing the most famous characteristics of some of the most successful con-artists around - Theresa May's Geography Degree, Nigel Farage's Bottomless Pint, Boris Johnson's Bit-Of-Crumpet + Baby ... Dominic Cummings' Sat-Nav etc.
They are so successful, the Top 10 is packed wall to wall with Goodies singles. The trio play Wembley Stadium, although to avoid crowd trouble, the audience is made up entirely of police. Having saved the pop business single-handedly, The Goodies are awarded OBEs at a spectacularly waterlogged royal garden party. To distract the nation from the appalling state of the economy, The Goodies are employed to cheer up the nation and they oblige with an irritating song and dance craze called "The Virus".
With the nation in chaos due to a Real Mysterious Virus, a General Election is called but is won by a party advocating no enjoyment whatsoever, populated by shop window dummies. With entertainment now illegal, The Goodies become Robin Hood-style outlaws, travelling the nation giving impromptu variety shows and hanging out in "jokeeasies" where they plot to overthrow the government. However, it is not that easy – the entertainers have been banned for so long that they cannot remember their old routines. Finally, The Goodies manage to oust the dummies and the entertainers take power – but with their memories gone, Bill suggests another option – a Puppet Government from the Past.
Taking this literally, popular puppets Sooty and Sweep become the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, and the Houses of Parliament are now full of screeching hand puppets. With their government at risk from these stuffed pretenders, The Goodies sneak into the Prime Minister's residence, Chequers, to remonstrate with the puppets. However, they are immediately attacked and pursued by various giant versions of famous puppets from television in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
They are threatened by a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) Andy Pandy, Teddy and Looby Loo; Tim eats up a giant hybrid of Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, and the Cookie Monster (from American television series Sesame Street); he and Graeme are challenged to a sword fight by Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men; and Bill is roughly beaten up by The Wombles (a sly nod to the chart rivalry between The Goodies and Mike Batt's Wombles singles).
Having vanquished their foes, The Goodies relax...but charging up behind them is a 20-foot-long (6.1 m) Dougal, the dog from The Magic Roundabout. As Graeme tries to ride the mighty "beast" and Tim is run over by the thing, Bill grapples with an enormous Zebedee, from the same programme. The trio guide Dougal and Zebedee back to the country house, where they appear to comprehensively destroy the building and the puppet government.
Having hidden down a handy manhole, The Goodies return following this coup to their woodland retreat and look on as the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties agree to form a coalition government. All seems well until the camera pulls back and reveals that The Tories are actually puppets being worked by...The Goodies. They smirk knowingly.
But when the New Prime Minister demands a Bigger Bone [and the 'Dom' returns in disguise with a Bertolini Custom Built Tray-mount Sprayer to administer a Flea Treatment] - and doubts arise about the authenticity of the Tim Brooke-Taylor's Hair, with it starting to look suspiciously like BoJo's Afro - the remaining 'Goodie Goodies' Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie start to think again about Exactly Who Is Pulling The Strings?
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Americans hoping to visit 'Shit-hole Countries' like Rwanda to see Gorillas advised to Stay-At-Home
BBC, 1 July 2020
The US is buying up almost all of the next three months' projected production of Covid-19 treatment remdesivir by US manufacturer/monopoly supplier Gilead. While some European Countries like Germany and the UK appear to have sufficient stocks for the next quarter, the American buy-out is likely to make the drug unavailable elsewhere - especially in Developing Countries.
Daniel Boffey in Brussels, The Guardian, 1 July 2020
Most visitors from the US are set to remain banned from entering the European Union because of the country’s rising infection rate in a move that risks antagonising Donald Trump.
In an attempt to save the European tourism season, a list of 15 countries from where people should be allowed into the EU from 1 July has been agreed by representatives of the 27 member states.
Travellers from China will be among those permitted entry if Beijing reciprocates despite doubts over the accuracy of the information coming out of the country.
The other countries from where the EU agrees travel should be permitted into the bloc are Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and Uruguay.
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↧
The US Economy: 'Collapsageddon' - No Other Word For It?
Lemming Economists have got used to NOT using the word 'Recession' out of loyalty to the notion of Perpetual Growth Neo-Liberalism.
In fact I would wager that these Pollyanna Cheerleaders for 'More Corporate Profit - More Natural Resource Mining - More Community Immiseration' have been using the term more to describe the possible state of their gums and oral health than they have to point out threats to the current World Economic System.
As for the term Depression, this has been carefully cordoned off to describe the historic 1929-1937-1942 collapse of the world economy - until recently viewed as a historic curiosity - and our Lemmings have in all probability used it more to characterize personal angst or clinical mental distress than to flag impending Massive Economic Correction.
But the way things are going [particularly in the USA], the current Covid-19 Downturn is much worse than the 2008 'Great Recession' [see top diagram]. And for what it is worth, comparing early stages, the Covid-19 Downturn is also greater than that of the 1929 'Great Depression' [lower diagram].
By analogy with the Great Depression, employment in the USA may yet fall by 25 percent from its January 2020 level - and it is not impossible that it could take up to 12 years to achieve a Full Recovery [to 2032].
And Things Could Get Even Worse - such that neither of the terms Recession nor Depression fit the bill for what is going on!
Hence my coining of the word 'Collapsageddon'?
RawStory’s Economics columnist Sarah K. Burris says above chart proves the economy is ‘so much worse’ than anyone realizes
Economics columnist Catherine Rampell wrote in the Washington Post Thursday that she sees a ticking timebomb ready to explode on the American economy.
It was revealed that the U.S. was able to add 4.8 million payroll jobs in the month of June, but there’s a question of whether those jobs were merely people who were laid off or furloughed and whether those are new jobs or just existing ones. Either way, it shows a slight reduction in an unemployment rate that hit 14.7 percent in April.
“Unfortunately,” Rampell wrote, the new employment numbers mean “diddly squat for those still out of work.”
To explain just how bad things are and how it compares with previous depressions, Rampell showed what she said is the scariest jobs chart you’ll see all day.
“The horizontal axis shows months since the most recent employment peak of a given business cycle,” she explained. “The teal line plots the Great Recession. Until recently, the depth, duration and sluggish recovery from the Great Recession had put all other post-war downturns to shame. Take a look at the red line, which represents the awful situation the country is now going through.”
She called things “so much worse” than most truly understand. In fact, they’re worse than even the Great Recession in 2007-2008. The red line above almost doesn’t even fit in the chart, she noted.
Americans should all be thankful to see numbers go up, but there are still 14.7 million Americans, or about 10 percent of the country, still struggling. There’s a fear that 1 in 5 renters in the country will be evicted by Sept. 30.
“Even if job growth continues at what President Trump calls ‘rocket ship’ pace, the country still has a long way to go before reaching an acceptable altitude — that is, until U.S. payrolls are anywhere near pre-pandemic levels.”
Then there’s the fear that the so-called “rocket-ship” could actually slow down as the pandemic surges to even greater levels.
“Since mid-June, confirmed coronavirus cases have surged, especially across the Sun Belt,” she wrote. “Some states have halted or even reversed their reopening plans, especially in the industries that reported the greatest job gains at mid-June: Leisure and hospitality, which according to Thursday’s jobs report shows as adding 2.1 million positions in June, accounted for two-fifths of the overall gain in total payroll jobs. But Florida and Texas, for instance, once again shut down on-site bar drinking. On Wednesday, California’s governor directed 19 counties to shut down indoor family entertainment venues (bowling alleys, arcades, etc.) as well as indoor dining at restaurants. In the near term, this will hurt the industry’s business activity and hiring.”
She noted that there is evidence that shows consumer confidence is what is sustaining the economy far more than government action. Meaning, no matter what President Donald Trump does, if people are too afraid to get out of quarantine, it won’t matter whether bars and businesses reopen or not.
She cited a University of Chicago working paper from economists that used cell phone data from SafeGraph to show that consumer traffic fell by 60 percent, but “legal restrictions explain only 7 percentage points of this. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection.”
The data shows that foot traffic to businesses has leveled off and consumer spending not only stopped increasing, it has actually started to decrease.
A troubling sign for the recovery: consumer spending has not only lost momentum but according to JPMorgan, the pullback “appears surprisingly widespread across states and demographic groups and has only been moderately correlated with the resurgence of COVID-19”.
“While cities like New York and San Francisco had lower troughs, they’ve steadily improved, while cities like Houston and Phoenix have plateaued or given back some of their early gains,” Homebase analysts said in a June report. “These plateaus suggest we may have ~20% permanent closures on Main Street.”
Read the full shocking details at the Washington Post.
↧
Happy 244th Birthday America!
America - Don't be Downcast, Storms Can Never Last
FOR AMERICA 2016
Are you downcast? Be brave, stop to listen
To a young woman playing her guitar,
Singing as the freeway car lights glisten
Misted windows on the bus to Georgia
For rich and poor she has no preference
This is a girl who loves the earth and sun
And will not shift her gaze in deference.
She is your poem and it has just begun:
She hates tyrants, she lives for others,
Knows justice is always in jeopardy,
Verses the hopes of children and mothers,
Marks time for the stupid and crazy.
She respects hard work and intelligence
Gives freely of her income and effort
Treats all with patience and indulgence
Believes only what life itself has taught.
Open and light-hearted, she earns her way.
She despises easy riches and wealth
Disputes with none yet has her say,
Values each season, rejoices in health.
Listen again as rain falls and signs pass.
Even at her worst, she aims for the best -
She knows defeat and storms can never last
And riding home she settles back to rest.
For America 2016: First posted 11th November 2016 by Keith Shorrocks Johnson
↧
More on 'Collapsageddon'
Some jobs are coming back, but economy will need years to heal
By David J. Lynch, Washington Post, 3 July 2020
July 3, 2020 at 10:00 p.m. GMT+12
Sales were stronger than expected when Macy’s reopened its first stores in early May, after a nearly seven-week coronavirus shutdown. But that initial surge soon fizzled, leaving the retailer’s brick-and-mortar business down more than one-third.
Some stores reopened in malls where restaurants and movie theaters remained closed, limiting foot traffic. Outlets in major cities suffered from the absence of foreign tourists. And recent coronavirus flare-ups across the South and West convinced executives they faced a grueling recovery that could take until 2022.
“The situation is really fluid. And it changes day by day,” Jeff Gennette, Macy’s chief executive, told investors this week on an earnings call.
The same could be said of the entire U.S. economy, which has defied the most pessimistic forecasts yet still faces an uncertain trek back to its former heights. With the unemployment rate at 11.1 percent, worse than at any point during the Great Recession, and output continuing to decline, the healing could go on for years.
Employers are rehiring workers faster than economists anticipated, at least as of mid-June when the latest Labor Department survey was taken. But more recent setbacks in the economic reopening, as the daily number of coronavirus cases topped 50,000 for the first time, have blackened the outlook.
“It’s going to be pretty slow going. The bottom line is this is all about public health, public health, public health,” said Narayana Kocherlakota, a former Federal Reserve Bank president. “This is absolutely a multiyear recovery.”
More than half of the country has now paused or reversed plans to reopen for business, according to Goldman Sachs. Almost four months after the first shutdowns, the health situation is getting worse, not better, in states such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and California. New national data on credit card spending, restaurant reservations and small-business hours show that the recovery from the recession that began in February may already be losing steam.
On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office released its new forecast, calling for the economy to expand at an annual rate of 12.4 percent in the second half of the year, down from the 15.8 percent it projected in May. That represents unusually rapid growth, but it will follow a three-month period that is widely expected to be the worst in modern history.
The Atlanta Fed’s real-time model estimates that the economy shrank in the quarter that ended June 30 at a rate of 35 percent.
Still, the situation is not as bad as many economists feared. In March, as the economy plunged into the deepest recession in decades, many warned that the unemployment rate would hit 20 percent by summer.
On Thursday, in contrast, the Labor Department reported that the economy created 4.8 million jobs in June, shattering the record set in May. At the White House, President Trump took a victory lap, heralding the development as “spectacular … record setting … astonishing.”
The president boasted of the rising stock market, robust retail sales, and a revival of consumer confidence. With customary bravado, he took credit for the rebound while laying the blame elsewhere for the plummet that had preceded it.
“This is not just luck, what's happening; this is a lot of talent,” Trump said. “All of this incredible news is the result of historic actions my administration has taken working with our partners in Congress to rescue the U.S. economy from a horrible event that was formed, took place in China, and came here.”
Indeed, Congress approved spending $3 trillion to rescue the economy while the Fed expanded its balance sheet by an additional $3 trillion to support lending to businesses, households and local governments.
Yet Democrats have charged that the president’s failure to combat the coronavirus by encouraging the use of masks and implementing a national testing program helped fuel the latest surge in cases.
The economy remains badly wounded. Nearly 19.3 million Americans are receiving unemployment benefits, almost three times the peak during the worst of the 2008-09 financial crisis and up from just 1.7 million in early March.
The situation is still so dire that the Fed for the first time in its 107-year history has created a program to buy the corporate bonds of blue-chip companies such as Apple, Walmart and AT&T to facilitate lending.
Trump’s salesmanship also risks opening a credibility gap between his rosy comments and reality. In a Fox Business interview on Wednesday, he again predicted a swift “V-shaped” recovery, an expectation that few economists outside his administration share. And he repeated his unfounded claim that the coronavirus will “just disappear” one day.
“We’re headed back in a very strong fashion with a ‘V,’ and I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus,” the president said. “I think that at some point that is going to sort of just disappear.”
Instead, the outlook is a start-and-stop recovery with the economy held hostage by a failure to contain the pandemic, some economists said. Adjusted for inflation, the economy will be smaller than it was at the end of 2019 until the middle of 2022, according to the CBO.
Megan Greene, an economist with Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, expects the unemployment rate to increase in July. Many small businesses that took advantage of a government loan program for small businesses may exhaust their borrowings next month, and enhanced unemployment insurance payments will also expire unless Congress acts.
“It’s a massive cash cliff for the economy,” she said.
Elsewhere, Apple, which had been among the first retailers to close during the initial pandemic shutdown, this week shuttered 77 stores in seven states for a second time. Credit and debit card spending, which had recovered steadily since mid-April, fell back in the week ending June 27, according to JP Morgan.
The investment bank cited findings from a panel of 30 million Chase cardholders and said the decline was “surprisingly widespread across states and demographic groups.”
Restaurant reservations also have lost ground in recent days. On July 1, bookings were down 64.7 percent from one year ago, having worsened from the 57 percent decline on June 27, according to the online dining service Open Table.
And Homebase, a provider of scheduling software, warned that small businesses were hitting a “reopening plateau.” After a rush to reopen in May, progress in cities such as Houston and Phoenix has stalled, the company said. Up to 20 percent of small businesses might not survive, it added.
“Going forward, my expectation is it will be more mixed,” said Nathan Sheets, chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income. “The biggest question is what happens with the virus. If we could get the virus out of the way, we have an economy that is itching to get back to normal.”
There is ample evidence that the pandemic retains its iron grip on the $21 trillion economy.
In Texas, United Auto Workers Local 276 last week asked General Motors to halt production at its Arlington assembly plant out of concern over the spreading virus, a request the automaker refused as unnecessary in light of company safety protocols. “Every day we are setting new records in the number of people who are testing positive in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” the union said on its website.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio halted indefinitely plans to allow restaurants and bars to resume indoor dining.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered mandatory business closures in 19 counties where the coronavirus is raging.
While the stock market gives off a scent of euphoria — the tech-heavy Nasdaq sits at a record high — bond investors are sending a different signal. The yield on the 10-year Treasury security sits at 0.67 percent, little different from where it traded in late March, and proof that traders anticipate anemic growth.
Continued cause for concern was evident in the 1.4 million Americans who filed for first-time unemployment benefits in the week ending June 27. That marked the 16th consecutive week that jobless claims have topped 1 million. Before March, the previous record had been 695,000 in 1982.
Companies in some of the states struggling amid the worst coronavirus outbreaks continue to let workers go, contrary to the president’s cheery forecast. In Florida, Levy Premium Foodservice, which handles concessions at sports facilities that are home to the NBA’s Miami Heat and Orlando Magic and Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, notified the state of plans to lay off or reduce by more than 50 percent the hours worked for more than 1,400 employees.
It may be years before many Americans can count on complete recovery.
Over the past 70 years, the unemployment rate has declined from its recession peaks by 0.85 percentage points per year, according to a recent paper by Robert Hall, an economics professor at Stanford University, and Marianna Kudlyak, a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
The Fed expects the unemployment rate to be 9.3 percent at the end of this year. If the economy replays its previous performance, it would take nearly seven years for the economy to get back to February’s 3.5 percent jobless rate.
↧
Trump: Children Sacrificed to Circumstance
By Tom Boggioni, RawStory, 4 July 2020
First daughter Ivanka Trump was thoroughly raked over the coals late Friday night after she posted advice on Twitter about wearing masks at the same time that her father, Donald Trump, was holding a rally at Mt. Rushmore before a crowd of shoulder-to-shoulder fans, few of whom were wearing masks.
Making things worse, within minutes of Ivanka’s tweet it was announced that Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign official and girlfriend of Don Trump Jr., tested positive for the coronavirus.
IPHIGENIA AND THE SACRED DEER
Cutting down reason and resolution
Her father slew the sacred deer Telos
Impiously coursing to negation
The milk-white hind beloved of Artemis.
This end of innocence presaged slaughter
When the goddess pressed reparation
From the father demanding his daughter
Dead to call the readied fleet to action.
So wars are born of foolishness and pride
And children sacrificed to circumstance,
And dreadful means are often justified
By chains of error, hubris and mischance.
Being so bloodied at the altar stone,
Betrayed by her reckless, heedless elder,
Did she perceive the fouling of the throne
Must bring the dearest to disaster?
↧
↧
For Summer Taylor: 'I’m not saying that any kind of rage is good - and I would hate to be misunderstood'
... 'but thy eternal summer shall not fade'
SUMMER DIED PROTESTING THAT ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ Whether or not her death was the direct result of politically motivated counter action or arose from mischance is yet to be decided. Having said that, the driver of the car that killed Summer - Dawit Kalete – is ‘black’. And it seems unlikely that he was motivated to attack the BLM demonstration or that he deliberately sought the assassination of demonstrators. My response in this case does not assume therefore that Alt-Right Violence is responsible for Summer Taylor’s death - and it is vitally important that we avoid premature judgments that inflame public opinion. But she did die protesting in support of what I believe is a good cause. |
Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare - 1564-1616
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
![]()
Blutmai - another conversation with Auden
'That girl of nineteen who was shot in the knees
From 4 July 2018 - for Heather Heyer:
![]()
BACKGROUND
William Shakespeare - 1564-1616
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Blutmai - another conversation with Auden
'That girl of nineteen who was shot in the knees
And thrown down the concrete stairs in Berlin
Whose fate raised a righteous anger
That pleased you in its excitement -
What happened to her, I’m asking you now?’
‘Her death was a necessary condition
For the subsequent seasons’, you answer.
‘Are you not aware, looking back to her death,
That nothing has changed, barricades erected
Shootings in the streets, organized fear?’
‘That being so perfunctorily incited
And then weeping, mouth helpless and ugly,
Are inevitable conditions in coming to terms
With political passion, violence and betrayal
In the shifting seasons of lovers and writers?’
‘Another girl has been shot and thrown down:
This time in Baghdad, Santiago, Hong Kong
Cochabamba … Charlottesville … Birstall
As recent particulars come to mind.
You didn’t expect the last of these did you?’
From 4 July 2018 - for Heather Heyer:
THE DAY THEY DROVE THAT SWEET GIRL DOWN
Titus Caine is the name
I was just eighteen when I was slain
In the winter of ‘64
Knocking hard on Nashville’s door.
Holding fast for my carbine’s aim
When Steedman’s troop formed up again.
...
After his time with Robert E. Lee
My brother came back to Tennessee
He raised me up and took the family farm
Or what was left from the brigands' harm
There he sang of Dixie driven down
And regrets that he let the whiskey drown.
...
But we were down and poor and white
Long before the people owners' fight
This could have been a paradise of plenty
A promised land of milk and honey:
It wasn’t war that broke the honest heart
But power and greed which tore the land apart
...
Where hate divides and privilege rides high
And skin’s the mark of those who live or die
Where twisted history condemns the young
And news is fake or spun or simply wrong
Where the few but rich hold powerful sway
And the many hold their say and then give way.
...
Those who lie and steal will gut the land
And seize their moment with a bloodied hand:
But truth and love are there in black and white
And they will bring the shadows into light
When justice burns a brighter, fiercer flame
And sears each dreadful wrong with shame.
...
From where I lie, I see so clearly who is free
And how the rich raised dupes to swindle me:
I’m not saying that any kind of rage is good
And I would hate to be misunderstood
Take just what you need and leave the rest
And when all's done don't take the very best:
…
Like the day they drove that sweet girl down
The finest that Dixie’s ever raised and grown:
The day they killed that sweet girl in the street
Where liberty and decency and death would meet
While people sang that love and truth will set us free
Walking hand in hand in peace and on to victory.BACKGROUND
↧
'Key Largo' [Film 1948]: The shape and substance of Public Morality reviewed
2016 - WHEN ROCCO WON THE PRESIDENCY?
Those of us from the then ‘mainstream majority’ of people [in what became The Western World], who were exposed to WW2 and its immediate aftermath, were well-tutored in explicit cultural Judgments about Good and Evil.
So - I watched a video copy of the 1948 film Key Largo recently with fascination.
The main messages were clear: the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and from those to whom much is given, much will be expected.
That the messages were dedicated to, laid upon and shouldered by ‘Real White Americans’ with names like Temple and McCloud was central to the times – heroism looked and sounded like Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) and Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall).
The chief baddies, the gangster counterfeiters, Rocco and Ziggy, were of Italian and Jewish ancestry [presumably] - and they came to suitably bad ends – and the Seminole Amerindians who were shot by mistake by Sherriff Wade were easily written off in passing as collateral damage.
So there is no arguing that the film was aimed principally at white middle-class audiences in the USA and associated countries like the UK – the classes who, as implied by President Roosevelt in his 1942 State of the Union Address, had become [almost willy-nilly] ‘the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith’ at the global level.
And while the necessity of broadening the diversity of players portraying such parables [both Good and Evil] is now obvious, it is perhaps less well recognized that privileged ‘Real White Americans’ [and Brits etc.] have increasingly set aside the Necessity of Honour / Noblesse Oblige required for adherence to such shared values as:
… the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and from those to whom much is given, much will be expected.
That the current POTUS Donald Trump appears to many of us to be more Rocco than McCloud is also doubly ironic – as is the fact that his mother was a MacLeod!
Key Largo Film 1948 Plot
Army veteran Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) arrives at the Hotel Largo in Key Largo, Florida, visiting the family of George Temple, a friend who served under him and was killed in the Italian campaign several years before. He meets with the friend's widow Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall) and father James (Lionel Barrymore), who owns the hotel. Because the winter vacation season has ended and a hurricane is approaching, the hotel has only six guests: dapper Toots (Harry Lewis), boorish Curly (Thomas Gomez), stone-faced Ralph (William Haade), servant Angel (Dan Seymour), attractive but aging alcoholic Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor), and a sixth man who remains secluded in his room. The visitors claim to be in the Florida Keys for fishing.
Frank tells Nora and James about George's heroism under fire and shares some small and cherished details that George had spoken of. Nora and her father-in-law seem taken with Frank, stating that George frequently mentioned Frank in his letters.
While preparing the hotel for the hurricane, the three are interrupted by Sheriff Ben Wade (Monte Blue) and his deputy Sawyer (John Rodney). They are searching for the Osceola brothers, a pair of fugitive American Indians. Soon after the police leave, the local Seminoles seek shelter at the hotel, among them the Osceola brothers.
As the storm approaches, Curly, Ralph, Angel, and Toots pull guns and take the Temples and Frank hostage. They explain that the sixth member of their party is notorious gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), who was exiled to Cuba some years before. Rocco is waiting for his Miami contacts to arrive to conclude a deal. The gang discover Deputy Sawyer looking about and capture him. A tense standoff ensues. Frank declines to fight a duel with Rocco, stating his belief in self-preservation over heroics and that "one Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for”. Rocco shoots Sawyer, and Rocco's men take Sawyer's body out on a rowboat in the approaching storm and drop it in the ocean.
The storm rages outside. Inside, Rocco forces his former moll, Gaye, to sing for them but then demeans her. In contrast, Frank politely gives her the promised drink and ignores Rocco's slaps. Nora understands that Frank's heroism matches her husband's, who was killed around Monte Cassino in Italy. Mr. Temple invites Frank to live with them at the hotel, a prospect that intrigues Nora.
The storm finally subsides. Sheriff Wade returns looking for Deputy Sawyer. When the sheriff discovers his deputy's body washed up by the storm on the hotel driveway in his car's headlights, Rocco blames Sawyer's death on the Osceola brothers. Wade confronts and kills them both before leaving with Sawyer's body. Rocco's contact Ziggy (Marc Lawrence) arrives to buy a large amount of counterfeit money. Rocco then forces Frank, who is a skilled seaman, to take him and his henchmen back to Cuba on the smaller hotel boat. As the gang prepares to board the boat, Gaye steals Rocco's gun and covertly passes it to Frank.
Out on the Straits of Florida, Frank uses seamanship, trickery, and the stolen gun to kill the gang members one by one. He then heads back to Key Largo, while radioing for Coast Guard help and to get a message to the hotel. Meanwhile, Gaye tells Wade that Rocco bears the blame for Deputy Sawyer's murder. Wade mentions that Ziggy's gang has been captured and leaves with Gaye to identify them.
The phone rings: James and Nora are delighted to hear that Frank is returning safely. Nora opens the shutters to the sun while out at sea Frank steers the boat towards shore.
CLEANSING THE WORLD OF ANCIENT ILLS
Rocco[Edward G. Robinson]
Nobody was as big as Rocco!
It'll be like that again,
only more so!
I'll be back up there one day.
Then you'll really see something!
Old Man Temple [Lionel Barrymore]
If the time ever comes
when your kind. . .
. . .can walk a city street
in daylight. . .
. . .with nothing to fear
from the people--
Rocco
The time has come, Mr. Temple.
It's here.
You know all about me.
Now, what's with you, wise guy? [to McCloud]
Well, give.
In the war, weren't you?
-Get any medals?
Frank McCloud [Humphrey Bogart]
-A couple
-------
-Brave? [Rocco]
-Not very. [McCloud]
-Why'd you stick your neck out? [Rocco]
-No good reason. [McCloud]
What are you saying? [Rocco]
I believed some words. [McCloud]
Words? What words? [Rocco]
Frank McCloud [Humphrey Bogart]
Well, they went like this:
"But we aren't making all this
sacrifice of human effort and lives. . .
. . .to return to the kind of a world
we had after the last world war.
We're fighting to cleanse
the world of ancient evils.
Ancient ills. "
What's that about? [Rocco]
I remember those words [Old Man Temple]
That makes two of us.
We rid ourselves of your kind
once and for all!
You ain't coming back!
Who's gonna stop me, old man? [Rocco]
If l wasn't a cripple — [Old Man Temple]
You wouldn't be talking this way.
Right, Pop? [Rocco]
Filth! You filth! [Old Man Temple]
Temple tries to get up out of his wheelchair to fight with Rocco
Get him, will you!
-Sic him, Pop!
-Stand your ground!
You're killing me, Pop!
Come on, Pop!
You're not quitting, are you?
My boy, George, never quit,
and l ain't quitting! [Old Man Temple]
That's the spirit, Pop!
Never say die! [Rocco]
Nora Temple [Lauren Bacall] seizes the moment and assaults Rocco, scratching his face with her nails.
You little wildcat!
Smelled blood, huh?
Got your appetite up, huh? [Rocco].
State of the Union Address: Franklin D. Roosevelt (January 6, 1942)
Extract - finale:
Many people ask, "When will this war end?" There is only one answer to that. It will end just as soon as we make it end, by our combined efforts, our combined strength, our combined determination to fight through and work through until the end—the end of militarism in Germany and Italy and Japan. Most certainly we shall not settle for less.
That is the spirit in which discussions have been conducted during the visit of the British Prime Minister to Washington. Mr. Churchill and I understand each other, our motives and our purposes. Together, during the past two weeks, we have faced squarely the major military and economic problems of this greatest world war.
All in our Nation have been cheered by Mr. Churchill's visit. We have been deeply stirred by his great message to us. He is welcome in our midst, and we unite in wishing him a safe return to his home.
For we are fighting on the same side with the British people, who fought alone for long, terrible months, and withstood the enemy with fortitude and tenacity and skill.
We are fighting on the same side with the Russian people who have seen the Nazi hordes swarm up to the very gates of Moscow, and who with almost superhuman will and courage have forced the invaders back into retreat.
We are fighting on the same side as the brave people of China—those millions who for four and a half long years have withstood bombs and starvation and have whipped the invaders time and again in spite of the superior Japanese equipment and arms. Yes, we are fighting on the same side as the indomitable Dutch. We are fighting on the same side as all the other Governments in exile, whom Hitler and all his armies and all his Gestapo have not been able to conquer.
But we of the United Nations are not making all this sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of world we had after the last world war.
We are fighting today for security, for progress, and for peace, not only for ourselves but for all men, not only for one generation but for all generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills.
Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: "God created man in His own image."
We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage. We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image—a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom.
That is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives.
No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.
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American Terror about Not Being 'Top Dog' also part of Trump Pathology
English Poet A.E. Housman (1859-1946) reflects
Mary Trump’s Book Accuses the President of Embracing ‘Cheating as a Way of Life’
The president’s niece, Mary L. Trump, is the first to break ranks with the family and release a tell-all memoir.
By Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer, New York Times, 7 July 2020
Mary L. Trump, President Trump’s niece, plans to publish a tell-all family memoir next week, describing how a decades long history of darkness, dysfunction and brutality turned her uncle into a reckless leader who, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, “now threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric.”
The book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” depicts a multigenerational saga of greed, betrayal and internecine tension and seeks to explain how President Trump’s position in one of New York’s wealthiest and most infamous real-estate empires helped him acquire what Ms. Trump has referred to as “twisted behaviors” — attributes like seeing other people in “monetary terms” and practicing “cheating as a way of life.”
Ms. Trump, who at 55 has long been estranged from President Trump, is the first member of the Trump clan to break ranks with her relatives by writing a book about their secrets. Since late June, her family — led by the president’s younger brother, Robert S. Trump — has been trying to stop the publication of the book, citing a confidentiality agreement that she signed nearly 20 years ago during a dispute over the will of the family patriarch, Fred Trump Sr., the president’s father.
But a judge in New York has refused to enjoin Simon & Schuster from releasing the memoir and is expected to soon rule on whether Ms. Trump herself violated the confidentiality agreement.
Here are some of the highlights from her manuscript:
Cheating on a College Entrance Test
As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance when he transferred as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.
Mr. Trump has often boasted about attending Wharton, which he has referred to as “the best school in the world” and “super genius stuff.”
Sending a Brother to the Hospital Alone
It has long been part of the Trump family’s lore that the eldest child of Fred Trump Sr., Fred Trump Jr., who was better known as Freddy, was the black sheep of the dynasty. Freddy Trump was a handsome, garrulous man and a heavy drinker who, after a miserable experience working for his father, left his job in real estate to pursue a passion for flying, becoming a pilot for Trans World Airlines.
Donald Trump has often remarked that his brother’s departure from the family business opened space for him to move into and succeed. “For me, it worked very well,” Mr. Trump told The New York Times during his presidential campaign about serving under his father. “For Fred, it wasn’t something that was going to work.”
Freddy Trump died in 1981 from an alcohol-induced heart attack when he was 42, and Ms. Trump tells the story in her book about how his family sent him to the hospital alone on the night of his death. No one went with him, Ms. Trump writes.
Donald Trump, she added, went to see a movie.
“No Principles,” a Sister Says
Even at the start of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge, had deep reservations about his fitness for office, Ms. Trump writes.
“He’s a clown — this will never happen,” she quotes her aunt as saying during one of their regular lunches in 2015, just after Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president.
Maryanne Trump was particularly baffled by support for her brother among evangelical Christians, according to the book.
“The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there,” Ms. Trump quotes her aunt as saying. “It’s mind boggling. But that’s all about his base. He has no principles. None!”
Ms. Trump, a clinical psychologist, asserts that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for being a narcissist. And yet, she notes, even that label does not capture the full array of the president’s psychological troubles.
“The fact is,” she writes, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.”
At another point she says: “Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”
Like other critics of the president, Ms. Trump takes issue in the book with the notion that Mr. Trump is a strategic thinker who operates according to specific agendas or organizing principles.
“He doesn’t,” she writes. “Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself.”
SEE ALSO:
Charles Hawley has just published an interesting article in Der Spiegel on the Creation Myth that has defined American Culture, arguing:
In America, the founding myth does not focus on a particular ethnic attribute, rather it centers on a single document: the Constitution. All it takes to be an American is to believe in the democracy outlined in the Constitution, no matter where you come from. Race, religion, ethnicity - all of that is, according to the narrative, unimportant.
...
To be American means to believe in the Constitution: This narrative, despite its obvious flaws, has kept the country together over the centuries. Now, though, Donald Trump is presenting an altogether different identity for the United States. And the consequences are potentially horrific:
But the evidence is clear: Donald Trump's vision of America is not one rooted in the Constitution, but one rooted in the notion that White America is under fire from all sides and must be rescued from the establishment. His Patriotic Movement is an identitarian crusade, open to those who dream of an America not for freedom loving democrats, but for those who seek a white male revolution to take the power back.
...
Having unleashed the promise of a white-power America, it seems doubtful that his followers will slide back into the background after this election. Even if Trump declines the strongman roll he has developed for himself, the movement, the alternative definition of America, will continue.
History has taught us that changing definitions, altering national myths, is an extremely difficult and often bloody proposition. That though -- that and the consequences such a shift necessarily engenders -- will be the true Trump legacy. And it is a horrifying one to contemplate.
All of which sets me thinking again about the cultural anthropology of the USA and its archetypes. And in particular, about what Margaret Mead had to say back in ‘The American Character’ (1944) [published originally in the USA in 1942 under the title ‘And Keep Your Powder Dry'].
Written partly to help Americans bridge the gap between Pre-WW2 Isolationism and the need for the country to take war-time centre stage Post-Pearl Harbour, and partly to help officer-material Americans understand the mind-sets of their new counterpart British Allies, Mead focuses on how both cultures had tended at that time to justify the use of violence as ‘a last resort’ – shrinking from at least the overt appearance of ‘bullying’.
She contrasts the masculine upbringing of the British officer class, many of whom were ‘sent away to school to be made a man of’, or for whom fathers took a patriarchal role in the home expecting deference from ‘little women wives’, with that of American young men who were subjected to much more female nurturing due to local schooling and late-working fathers.
With American mothers being over-protective about the threats posed by the inter-racial, multi-cultural societies in which young men had to find their way - but nevertheless intent on preparing their sons to stand up and be counted.
Secondly, Mead considers the very different ways in which the two societies deal with self-expression and exhibitionism.
She sees the British [she is of course widely generalising here about Upper Middle Class norms] as creating patriarchal families within which the growing boy is the submissive recipient of cultural memes like ‘fair play’, ‘stand firm’ and ‘stiff upper lip’, essentially moulding their young men to the concepts of ‘the white man’s burden’ and noblesse oblige.
By contrast, the young American [often having superior English speaking skills to his parents and a better understanding of his status and opportunities] is a ‘Little Star’ at home around the dinner table, with his mother encouraging him to demonstrate his achievements and declaim his gifts and ambitions.
The problem though for the young white American is that he has to function in a much less predictable wider world [where for example, young Blacks may follow completely different mores and harbour deep-seated misunderstandings and resentments]. So he puts ‘a chip on his shoulder’ and challenges [obviously with the tacit support of authority] all comers to ‘take him down’. In doing so, he avoids being overtly aggressive but parades and enhances his status.
Hence, what often seems so unattractive to non-Americans about ‘Yanks’ – their tendency to ritual braggadocio and talking big.
And what seems so unappealing and confusing about ‘Brits’ – their smug superiority, bolstered by in-jokes and nods-and-winks.
But as Mead has it, both societies function on notions of implicit superiority – the British in administering an external Empire and the Americans in ruling a Continent.
The question then is: ‘What happens when international and domestic power structures shift radically and both cultures face diversity, disrespect and even defeat at home and abroad?’
WHICH BRINGS ME TO DONALD TRUMP
Mead’s use of the term ‘chip on the shoulder’ is especially interesting – and one that it not understood by speakers on non-American English. Apparently, the term, as used here, refers to the literal shouldering of a wood cut as a provocation to potential bullies and challengers in 19th Century North American schoolyards:
"When two churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip would be placed on the shoulder of one, and the other demanded to knock it off at his peril" [from the New York newspaper The Long Island Telegraph (1830)].
In British English [though the phrase probably has the same source in the naval dockyards of Restoration England] having a ‘chip on one’s shoulder is a sign of what used to be widely called an ‘inferiority complex’ that leads boys that are insecure in their social standing and achievements to negative and aggressive behaviour.
So let’s move on to Donald Trump and the fascinating tapes that were made during conversations that he held in 2014 with Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter [who later wrote a biography called “The Truth About Trump”], as reported by Michael Barbaro for the NYT:
What Drives Donald Trump? Fear of Losing Status, Tapes Show
Some snippets:
Recordings of Donald J. Trump reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.
But he always seems to return, in one form or another, to the theme of humiliation.
He reserves special scorn for people who embarrass themselves in front of their peers. He tells the story of an unnamed bank president who became inebriated during an award dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, a ritual of New York society. By the end of the night, he recalls, the man was incapable of walking and had to be carried out, to Mr. Trump’s disapproval.
There is little trace of sympathy or understanding. When people lose face, Mr. Trump’s reaction is swift and unforgiving.
In the interviews, Mr. Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.
On the tapes, Mr. Trump describes an almost passionate enjoyment of fighting, which started during his adolescence in Queens. It did not matter, he said, whether an altercation was verbal or physical. He loved it all the same.
His behavior was so belligerent that his parents sent him off around age 13 to the all-boys New York Military Academy, a highly regimented school about an hour north of Manhattan. He seemed to revel in the masculine culture of confrontation there. In the interview, he sounds nostalgic for the time when roughness and physical conflict were more acceptable.
During his final interview with Mr. D’Antonio, as their relationship had warmed and deepened, Mr. Trump turned philosophical. He recalled a favorite song, performed by Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?” — a poignant ballad about unfulfilled dreams and dissatisfaction with life.
But he quickly retreats from the moment, declining Mr. D’Antonio’s invitation to further explain how the song makes him feel about himself, saying he might not like what he discovers.
Of this, however, Mr. Trump is certain: He needs the world’s attention and its embrace, a life force that has sustained him for decades.
He recalled the feeling of walking into a giant room and watching as the crowd surrounded him, as if he were a magnet attracting everything around him.
Did it ever unnerve him?
“No,” Mr. Trump said. “I think what would unnerve me is if it didn’t happen”.
So it makes more sense to see Trump as something of a hero in the eyes of many Americans for having the strength to constantly mount a chip on his shoulder and face all-comers – he is part archetype, part grotesquely exaggerated caricature of something that is very American.
And given the alternative British interpretation of the chip-on-the-shoulder image, it is hardly surprising that he is seen outside the States as an insecure and bullying person who is compensating through his aggressive behaviour for some deep-seated and troubling inadequacies.
REVERSION TO TYPE - CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK
My argument then, in brief, is that for many White Americans [particularly those outside the more ‘European’ North East and the more open societies of the Pacific Coast] Trump represents something very basic and appealing - as an American man who takes on all challengers and faces down threats and criticisms with necessary and understandable braggadocio.
That he should give the US Constitution short shrift occasions no real surprise. He is a product of the American schoolyard in the Melting Pot and not a son of the Age of Enlightenment.
And so it seems, faced by rising domestic challenges of race, religion, ethnicity and feminism - and conscious of America’s declining relative economic and military strength – many white male Americans are simply reverting to type in their attitudes and political choices.
So much so it seems that a bust-up between Trump and VP Joe Biden behind the school gym is not out of the question.
It would be interesting to know what cultural anthropoligists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson would have thought about all this.
But remember, what Mead has to say about both the American and British stereotypes of the 1940s refers to two very highly successful societies still at or close to the top of their game. Societies whose strength could be held back in general because they could afford availing themselves of the moral advantage of avoiding pre-emptive strikes - thanks to their superior wealth and technologies.
And they were societies which had the luxury to assume the responsibility to guard and mould lesser nations and cultures.
Clearly, the pre-conditions and circumstances no longer apply that gave us uneasy relations between a terse, brittle, British patrician ‘Monty’ [Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, KG, GCB, DSO, PC (1887 – 1976), nicknamed the "Spartan General"] and America’s ‘dashing, courageous, wild and unbalanced crazy cowboy Bandito General’ George S. Patton.
But as far as Britain is concerned, things may even be worse than is unfolding in the USA, with a reversion beyond the stiff upper lip of the Upper Middle Class Empire Builders to the affected aristocrats of the 18th Century – thanks to the extraordinary re-ascendancy of the Etonian Elite and bounders like Boris Johnson who model themselves on Lord Flashheart.
Expect more futile charges into the face of Russian cannonades, like those of Lord Cardigan at the Battle of Balaclava, whose life in politics and long military career characterised the arrogant and extravagant aristocrat of the period – with his progression through the Army being marked by many episodes of extraordinary incompetence.
We are left then with archetypes that apparently appeal to large sections of the public but which have potentially parlous relationships to the real world now faced by the leading Anglophone societies.
Let’s let Peggy Lee have the last words [this is for you Donald]:
"Is That All There Is?"
(originally by Dan Daniels)
I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.
I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up
In his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement.
I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames.
And when it was all over I said to myself,
"Is that all there is to a fire?"
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends
Then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
And when I was 12 years old, my daddy took me to a circus.
"The Greatest Show On Earth."
There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears.
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads.
And as I sat there watching, I had the feeling that something was missing.
I don't know what, but when it was over,
I said to myself,
"Is that all there is to a circus?"
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends
Then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
And then I fell in love, with the most wonderful boy in the world.
We would take long walks by the river
Or just sit for hours gazing into each other's eyes.
We were so very much in love.
Then one day, he went away and I thought I'd die.
But I didn't.
And when I didn't I said to myself,
"Is that all there is to love?"
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep-
I know what you must be saying to yourselves.
"If that's the way she feels about it why doesn't she just end it all?"
Oh, no, not me.
I'm in no hurry for that final disappointment.
'Cause I know just as well as I'm standing here talking to you,
That when that final moment comes and I'm breathing my last breath
I'll be saying to myself-
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends
Then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is.
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