Friday, October 11, 2013

Fresh Local Music



People love fresh, local food. They say it tastes better than canned or frozen produce that was grown a thousand miles away and shipped by long-distance truck and then stored in a huge warehouse for who knows how long. Fresh, locally grown food is better -- everybody knows that.
But isn't it the same with music? Why do you listen to canned music? Why do you listen to the radio or iTunes, hearing music that was recorded last year in a studio a thousand miles away. Turn off that canned music for a while, and listen to the fresh music of your habitat, listen for the sounds in your life -- a dog barking, a door closing, footsteps, traffic, the rustle of paper as you turn the page on the book you're reading, the song of birds, the sound of wind, and that most blessed silence.
After a while you will begin to prefer "fresh, local music" and you might sing a song out loud now and then. You might carry a harmonica in your pocket. You might ask your co-workers to join you in a song, a work chanty perhaps, as the work gangs did in days of old. Turn off the canned music -- listen to the fresh sounds of your real life, the sounds of where you live and who you live with -- that's the true beautiful music that makes your soul sing.

Obamacare. Obamacare is a powerful medicine with deleterious side effects.

Let me try a metaphor.
Obamacare is a good and useful medicine, but it has a serious side effect -- the dosage drives a substantial minority of Americans bonkers.
To say that it is not supposed to have side effects is no argument in its favor. What an objective observer from outer space would surely notice is that when the medicine of Obamacare is applied, the result is that a large number of people break out in a rash.

Obamacare. "Obamacare" is the wrong name and unfortunately everybody uses it. It bodes ill to call this program so wrongly. "Obamacare" personalizes a law and an issue that effects all Americans. FDR established Social Security, but we did not put his name on it. It is a bit of a mouthful to say the Affordable Health Care Act, and I won't use that longer, correct term, but we are stuck with "Obamacare" for now and we urgently need a better name.

Bernie Sanders Respectfully Debates His Right Wing Foes. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a through and through socialist and yet he manages to debate and challenge right-wing foes without resorting to gutter language. He treats his opponents respectfully and for two reasons -- because it is the decent thing to do and also because in the sometime future he will be working with them on other legislative projects.
Look at the language he uses -- the underlined phrases
From a recent interview
And how worried are you that there actually would be a debt default?

"Well, you’ve got a lot of factors going. Am I worried? Yes, I am worried. I can’t tell you that it will happen or not. But you really have people who live in another, in an ideological world which is very far removed from where I think most Americans are. And they believe so strongly, they hate Obama so much, and they believe so strongly in their views that if it means driving this country or the world into a recession or a depression, that from their point of view is a small price to pay to continue their efforts."

I maybe making too fine point, but Sanders does not describe his opponents as insane, deranged, mentally ill, anarchist, bomb-throwing, reactionary Neanderthals. Instead he uses language that we can live with.
Invective is an important part of political strife, but it needs to be respectful, and it if it's not respectful then it must be funny or creative.
There's no point in calling someone a horse's ass unless you can say it with a certain flair.


Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois. We could really use a man like Dirksen now. There was a time when senators looked like senators -- before the tanning lamps, before plastic surgery and hair weaves. Dirksen was a man who know how to hand out gov't. contracts. Rewarding his faithful supporters and often taking care of his foes as well, he got things done and made few enemies.

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We'll Meet Again. Johnny Cash sings it just right.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when
But I'm sure we'll meet again some sunny day
Keep smiling through, just the way you used to do
Till the blue skies chase the dark clouds far away.

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