Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Thursday, June 1, 2023

Here's a question:

 

Will Trump's cultists remain loyal to a man who blatantly breaks the law and flouts it before the American people?

I think I know the answer.

Trump cultists will stay loyal to a man who violated the United States Espionage Act.










Trump Was Taped Discussing Sensitive Document He Had Kept After Leaving Office 

"Federal prosecutors obtained the recording as part of their investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents. 

Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified material have a recording of Mr. Trump from 2021 discussing a sensitive military document he had kept after leaving the White House, two people briefed on the matter said. In the recording, 

Mr. Trump suggested he knew the document was secret and had not declassified it, one person briefed on the matter said. The existence of the recording could undermine Mr. Trump’s repeated claim that he had already declassified material that remained in his possession after he left office."






Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Remember When Kayleigh McEnany Was His White House Press Secretary?

 

She was very loyal to him.

And this is what he has to say about her for the unforgivable act of misstating a poll number:








There is no one Trump will not throw under the bus if it serves him. He gives loyalty to NO ONE but demands it of all.

Poor Kayleigh? Nah. She should have known this was inevitable. 

This is how he treats everyone. 

This is the miserable human being that his cultists want back in the White House.





Tuesday, May 30, 2023

DeSantis this weekend said:

 


 




So this guy wants to be POTUS and get rid of millions and millions of Americans who believe in an ideology that he does not like. (An entire group of people that has served in government -- state and federal -- for years, and many with honor.)

Where have we heard threats like this before? 

How will DeSantis "destroy" leftism?

DeSantis doesn't say, he just threatens to annihilate an ideology he doesn't like. Will he round us up and send us to the firing squads? Does this jackass not read history? He's threatening to destroy thinking he doesn't agree with.

Anyone?

Yeah. When someone tells you who he is, believe him. 


PS.

Imagine the pearl clutching if a prominent Democratic presidential candidate publicly said, “I want to destroy conservatism in this country."

Monday, May 29, 2023

Memorial Day, Boston, 2023


In the past, I've usually posted a photo of one of my favorite sculptures in Boston, The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, which is installed across the street from the Massachusetts State House, on Boston Common.

"Commissioned from the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the early 1880s and dedicated as a monument in 1897, the Shaw Memorial has been acclaimed as the greatest American sculpture of the nineteenth century.

The relief masterfully depicts Colonel Shaw and the first African American infantry unit from the North to fight for the Union during the Civil War. The sculpture combines the real and allegorical, and presents a balance of restraint and vitality."






I also have included with the post Robert Lowell's moving poem about the Shaw Memorial in which Lowell ties in the yet unresolved issues of the Civil War with the mindless consumerism that grips the nation in his poem “For the Union Dead”.  It is one of my favorite poems; and when I visit the Shaw Memorial, as I often do, I think of Lowell's poem that so perfectly limns the relief and its setting in the Boston Common.



FOR THE UNION DEAD

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
 
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
 
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.


                                    --Robert Lowell






Sunday, May 28, 2023

YOUR SUNDAY MOMENT OF ZEN

 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. 

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. 

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. 

Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. 

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. 

Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. 

Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. 

As Huxley remarked in "Brave New World Revisited," the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." 

In "1984", Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain."

In "Brave New World," they are controlled by "inflicting pleasure." 

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. 

Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. ~Neil Postman