CSotD: Humpday in the Committee Room
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Lyndon Johnson liked to use a phrase from Isaiah, “Come, let us reason together.” It seems a very long time ago, and I suppose it was. LBJ left office nearly 60 years ago, and I’m not sure how often we’ve tried to reason together since.
I have recalled here before that chants of “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” broke his heart, which gave out a month before the war ended. Here, he listens to a tape from his son-in-law, who was serving there.
Two years later, in the wake of Kent State, Richard Nixon left the White House around 4 a.m. and went to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to protesters. Imagine that happening today.
When Jacob Riis wrote How The Other Half Lives in 1890, there was no television, no radio, not even movies, and his use of photography in media was relatively new. The top half had an excuse for not knowing how the other half lived.
It’s harder to ignore reality these days, but, by golly, with sufficient effort, you can keep from understanding science, just as you can avoid learning anything about civics, or knowing how the other half lives.
And the whole of that book of Isaiah remains as relevant, and as ignored, as it was when it was written.
Your princes are rebellious,
And companions of thieves;
Everyone loves bribes,
And follows after rewards.
They do not defend the fatherless,
Nor does the cause of the widow come before them.
Well, never mind. We’ll talk politics tomorrow. This is Humpday, so let’s put it aside and breathe a bit.
lugubrious Gloomy, mournful or dismal, especially to an exaggerated degree.
The 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald brought forth a lot of references to the 1976 song, but, though I’m a Lightfoot fan, this wasn’t his best, and it was really, really overplayed on radio. If they’d played the Canadian Railroad Trilogy that often, I think I’d even have gotten sick of that.
Dator’s combining of that dreary song with a very good movie brings us to another term:
Bathos has come to refer to rhetorical anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one.
And very well done, too.
Trudeau is 21 years older than he was when he depicted this pair of 20-somethings, though, at this distance in time, I already detect some “Get off my lawn” creeping into his vision. But it reminded me of something from when he and I were undergrads at different schools, because, as part of empowering students, I helped try to overthrow the honor code under which exams were not proctored.
It sounds empowering to let students be responsible, but we saw it more in a sense of “We’ll do our jobs and you do yours,” especially those of us who didn’t feel that learning should involve competing for grades. Thus I wrote, and sang (I think the tune is obvious),
Oh, they built the Honor Council to protect the Rights of Man
Saying “Watch out for the cheaters, and catch’em if you can.”
Well, it’s not that noone dared, it’s that noone really cared.
I’ll be glad when the Honor Code goes down!
I’ll be glad! I’ll be glad! I’ll be glad when the Honor Code goes down
(To the bottom of the …)
Freshmen, and sophs, juniors, seniors and the profs
Will be glad when the Honor Code goes down!
To be honest, I can’t remember how the issue was resolved, but I graduated in the top 85% of my class, so I’m being honest when I say grades didn’t much matter to me.
However, being right did, and does, matter a great deal to me. My mother amassed — not “collected” — books and she knew what was in them, so that when a question arose, she’d say, “Well, let’s see …” and dig into her trove.
It’s easier today, and while I mostly use my phone as a phone, I’m among any number of people at the dog park who whip out their phones not to win an argument but to find something out. The big difference is that Mom didn’t store books of nonsense, so that while she was more tethered to her library, she was also more tethered to reality.
One thing you can’t teach is curiosity. However, you can model it, particularly if your desire to be right is not based on wanting to make someone else wrong. It’s not a competition.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This pair falls into the funny/not funny basket, and if it weren’t Humpday, I’d go off into a discourse about Medicare For All and so forth. But both cartoons employ the dark humor that is a part of joking among oppressed people and while Americans are wildly privileged among many in the world, health care isn’t one of our best categories.
Working for small papers was a great job in many ways, but I’ve sat in department head meetings where the new rates were being pondered and know how, in a small company, one person getting cancer can send premiums through the ceiling.
At one of those little papers, my mother having urged me to get a colonoscopy, I signed up but, when I went to pick up the prep, the nurse said, “Do you realize your policy has a $5,000 deductible?”
I canceled the exam, the good thing being that it wouldn’t have detected the cancer I eventually developed, which was discovered in time because the ACA had since been passed.
As for Mr. Boffo, I remember hearing about “orphan diseases” that were too rare for research into cures to be economically feasible on Quincy ME, which went off the air more than 40 years ago.
What fabulous progress we’ve made!
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Two voices about authenticity, and Labelle not only makes the point but elaborates on how much more loss of heart matters than loss of jobs.
I’ve written for children, I read to my children, I cooked with my children and I’ve been in love. Nothing to add except
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