"OUR NATIONAL ANTHEM

     "The Star-Spangled Banner" is not really a very good anthem.  Not only is is too hard for
most people to sing--the range is to great--but it's a war song.  And we have had more than
enough wars. And more than enough boasting, too:  "the land of the free, and the home of
the brave."  Don't forget slavery, and what we did--and are still doing--to Native American's.
We have not only slavery in our past; we have genocide.

     "God Bless America" is not much better, though it is shorter.  We sure don't want "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," or "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (borrowed from the unmusical English).

     How about "America the Beautiful"?  The first verse will remind us of how beautiful this
continent we occupy once was.  And what it asks--of God--is that he "crown our good / with brotherhood."  In such a murderous country as ours is, we could use more "brotherhood"--and "sisterhood."

     The second verse is even better--if you forget the racism of "pilgrims' feet"  which marked a "thoroughfare for freedom" across what our white ancestors saw as "wilderness" but the Native Americans knew as "home."  Of course "freedom"---the same word as "friendship," historically
--would not have let us massacre Native Americans along that thoroughfare.  But the last lines
of the second stanza of "America the Beautiful" are very, very good--and we need them:

                                America! America!
                                Amend thine every flaw!
                                     Confirm thy soul
                                     In self-control,
                                Thy liberty in law!

       That would be a wonderful anthem.  Even a prayer--a prayer I would be very happy to pray, fervently.
                               


                 

New Books!

Dear friends,

I do have lots of things to say--and a bunch of new essays that I need to post.  But I have been busy
with two new books, just out.

           ANEMONES MY FOOTSTOOL:  ESSAYS LITERARY,
               SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND POLEMICAL

                                               and 

                              OH, TO BE A 'CELLO!

The first book contains ten essays, mostly literary--but then literature is usually social, and both concerned with and a part of culture, and it is sometimes--maybe often--polemical.

The second book contains thirteen essays, variously "about" music, and thirteen poems--by
Yeats, Masefield, Lewis Carroll, Donne, Tennyson, Hardy, Wordsworth, and Mrs. Leo Hunter.

They should be available through bookstores and internet bookstores like Amazon.

And beware:  there is another book of Dickens essays in the offing, to be called  In the World to be of It.

                                                                       Yours,

                                                                       Bert Hornback

COMMONWEALTH IS A GOOD WORD

COMMONWEALTH IS A GOOD WORD

Commonwealth is a word that has been in use in the English language since the late fifteenth century. And it has been a good word: good being itself a social word, from the same root as gather and together. Massachusetts and Kentucky are commonwealths, not just states. As commonwealths, they are dedicated to the common good. The motto of the Commonwealth of Kentucky is “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”

We have perverted the idea of wealth, however. Wealth these days is what every American is supposed to pursue for himself or herself--and to hell (or poverty) with everybody else. And thus we get Donald Trump.

Of course, Trump is a minor leaguer. His bragging about having $9,000,000,000 is silly, in the grand scale of American greed. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are each worth ten times that. They sit on fortunes of $90,000,000,000 each.

There are currently 45,000,000 Americans living in poverty. That's 15,000,000 households or families. Suppose Buffett and Gates gave each of those 15,000,000 families a thousand dollars. That would cost them $15,000,000,000 each--and they would still have $75,000,000,000 each, which would earn as much as the $15,000,000,000 that each of them gave away.

But neither Buffett nor Gates is going to live forever, so they can afford to give a lot more than 16.5% of their hoardings. Let's have them give away 90% of their hoardings--and they will each still have more than the bragging peanut-vendor Donald Trump.

Or let's give them three years. The first year Buffett and Gates can each give $3,000 per household to the Americans living in poverty. That will cost them $45,000,000,000 each--half their wealth. And those poor families will have an extra $6,000 each.

The second year, Buffett and Gates will have $45,000,000,000 each plus the $5,000,000,000 that their fortunes have earned for them--without their doing any work at all! So they can each give $2,000 per household to those living in poverty. That will cost each of them $30,000,000,000--and leave each of them with $20,000,000,000.

The third year they can each give $1,000 per household to those living in poverty. That will cost them $15,000,000,000 each--and still leave each of them with more money than Donald Trump has!

Of course, even this kind of giving won't eradicate American poverty. But if we use it as a model--for all American billionaires, and maybe even for millionaires, in threee years' time we could make the United States a commonwealth, and even a functioning society.

 And if we could do that, then maybe we could all turn in our guns!

HOW TO MAKE A HORSE RUN FAST?


When American Phaorah was just a colt, another horse bit half his tail off.  

Ever since American Phaorah has been afraid of other horses behind him:  It might happen again!  So he runs--and he runs fast, to keep them off his tail.

                                   

FEED MY LAMBS, BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN PAY

FEED MY LAMBS, BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN PAY

Aurora, Colorado is an American city of 345,000. It has a 5% unemployment rate. It has a six-week free summer concert program annually. Its best hotels have rooms for $500.00 per night. And at Dakota Valley Elementary School in the Cherry Creek School District, Della Curry was fired from her job in the school's lunch room for giving a free school lunch to an elementary school child who didn't have money to buy lunch.

Isn't there something ABSOLUTELY wrong with a city with a new “resort and convention hotel” and boasting of having a dozen colleges and universities, but which can't allow a city employee to give a hungry kid a school lunch?

Isn't there something ABSOLUTELY wrong with the school managers who fired
Della Curry at Dakota Valley Elementary School for giving a hungry kid a school lunch?

Couldn't the principal have paid for it? Or one of the seven vice-principals? Or even maybe a teacher?

Not to mention President O'Bama, who has billions of dollars a day to spent on bombs and drones and other weapons and surveillance devices.

Maybe President Obama should use some of his expensive surveillance devices to discover how ABSOLUTELY wrong this whole country is.

Maybe Warren Buffet could pay for a few school lunches. He could feed all the hungry kids in America, every day, and not spent even the interest he earns every day. And Bill Gates likewise.

Isn't wealth like theirs ABSOLUTELY wrong?

Instead of contributing to politicans and their election campaigns, Americans should give their money to feed poor children school lunches.

Why don't we just NOT ELECT anybody to office this year? As a nation, we would save enough money to bring everybody up out of poverty. And if we did away with high-tech weapons of mass destruction we could have mass assistance--and good instruction--for all of our school children, and for their parents as well.

If we actuaally need a president, let's have Donna Curry, formerly of Dakota Valley Elementary School in the Cherry Creek School District in Aurora, Colorado. She wants to feed the hungry. Let's let her lead us.

Or are we all too stupid--and too stupidly selfish and mean--to want to change? Are we as greedy as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates--or the person in Aurora, Colorado, who fired Donna Curry?

3 June 2015  

Academin Nuts

ACADEMIA NUTS

 

News from the Department of Nutritional and Intellectual Science

 at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought

 

            Saarbruecken, 2 June 2015.  Working in cooperation with Artificial Intelligence and Distraction scientists at MIT and Infectious Disease researchers at PSI, scientists in the Department of Nutritional and Intellectual Science at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought have discovered a potential cure for the most ravaging of academic diseases, Ismism.  In its various forms, Ismism incapacitates thousands of academics--mostly in the Humanities--every year.  Now there may be a cure for this debilitating and obfuscating disease.

            Severe acadismal academicism and exponentially infectious ismism among academismists lead to scholaritis, pseudoscholaritis, and acute pseudoscholarly ismism and ismitis. 

             Researchers wearing earplugs have developed a cure for these maladies by electroshock elimination of bollyglobs of fructifying ismgism and a simultaneous infusion of intravenous literature.

             Preliminary results indicate that this treatment results in more than 99.44% speechlessness among ismism-addicted academismists treated for more than thirty consecutive days.  Chief researcher Prof. Dr. Clarence Peach, though pleased by the general success of this regimen of treatment, says that the most seriously infected ismists may have to spend the rest of their lives in treatment. 

            Daisy-Belle Monitor at the World Air Pollution Control Center welcomed the news.  “Most academic speech can be classified as useless noise,” she said; “some of it is listed by the Bad Language Institute as grade one anti-communicational nonsense.” 

 

                                                                   -0-

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

            “Speaking in tongues” is an old trick.  The ancient Greeks must have done it, since they used the word:  a word for babbling with the tongue.   “Babble”  is either an onamatopoeic word like “blab” or “burble”—a nonsense sound—or it has as its source the Tower of Babel in the Western Bible.  Jesus’s apostles supposedly spoke in tongues when the Holy Ghost sat on their heads on Pentecost. In later Christian times, it has been associated with inspired talk, presumably in a language only God can understand, and is reverenced. 

            Religions often reverence things that can’t be understood:  like Athena being born out of Zeus’s forehead, or the virgin birth of Jesus, or the Christian idea of three persons in the one god.  Those are all imaginable, even if they are illogical or unnatural.  But speaking in tongues—babble—is well beyond that.  It doesn’t communicate anything, and nobody ever bothers to write it down.  Still, in some traditions it is reverenced.

            But speaking of  tongues, maybe we should think about the ways the animal world—not including humans, for the most part—speaks with tongues.

            Humans use their tongues to turn the noises that breathing and the voice box make into various different sounds, which become words and language.  And human have become clever enough to translate those mostly tongue-differentiated and tongue-controlled sounds into symbols, and sometimes to write them out.  Many children use their tongues—unconsciously—when they are learning to write, making lingual gestures which might be linguistic gestures

            Western languages share an “alphabet”—which, as a word, must be the most absurd bit of babble ever recorded.  It gets its name from the first two letters  for the ancient Greeks, alpha and beta.  There is no reason, of course, why they should be the first two letters.  “O”—or “OM”--has a long tradition of being considered the first sound, the original word of the God.  “I” is a straight line, a simple part of the circle:  it might have been a good place to start, especially as it is the me-word.  And all language comes from a self.  It isn’t a separate creation.

            The oldest of the Western languages, Sanskrit, from maybe five or six thousand years ago, has a very carefully logical ordering of sounds and the letters that represent them.  (In the West, with a nice blend of ignorance and arrogance,  we call the Sanskrit letters an “alphabet.”)  And the Korean language has a similar ordering of its sounds, thanks to King Sejong, a fifteenth century king, who learned the Sanskrit lettering system from Buddhist monks in China.

         But animals—or some of them, anyway—speak with their tongues, or with their wet noses.   Being kissed by a dog may be sloppy, but it’s reliable.  Dogs don’t do Judas kisses.  And though cats licking each other at bath time isn’t kissing, it is both friendly and seemingly pleasurable both for the licker and the licked.

            Humans say that snakes are not trustworthy:  they “speak with forked tongues.”  But snakes lie on their bellies, not with their tongues.  Snakes aren’t talkers at all.  Human tongues are the ones that lie—so why do we malign reptiles for having forked tongues?

            When humans say that someone speaks “with a crooked tongue,” they mean that the crooked-tongued person can’t be trusted.  Although there are untrustworthy animals of various kinds, we don’t identify them as being so by their having crooked tongues.  Even monkeys don’t use their tongues to play tricks.

            With the exception of humans, the animal world seems to have honest, trustworthy tongues.   Does our more elaborate intelligence enable us to misuse our tongues?   Sure.  It’s not just a matter of our giving false kisses.  Look at all the dishonest things we say!

            “I love you” frequently doesn’t mean what it says.  Indeed:  as saying go it’s about as trustworthy as     “I O U,”  among humans.   And the saying “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” doesn’t suggest that what we say is worth much, or to be trusted.  And “Telling lies,” we say, “is easier than telling  truths.”  Our language is so full of sayings that promote dishonesty that we should probably call tongue a dirty word.

             Speaking of tongues, perhaps what we should say is that maybe we would be better off if we didn't.