Water Song

From Hot Tuna, the Jorma Kaukonen (guitar) - Jack Casady (bass) collaboration.  Former bandmates in Jefferson Airplane, they are still playing together.  Listen to the guitar/bass interaction throughout this instrumental.

The Way Things Work, Or Don't

Burn After Reading, the very funny Coen Brothers movie, provides a users guide to how things really work in a bureaucracy.  Two scenes, featuring the great JK Simmons as a CIA executive, and David Rasche (1), as his beleaguered deputy who just wants to make it through the day, as they sort through a baffling mess which they don't understand and just want to make go away.

Or, as cultural observer Joseph Fidler Walsh tells us in words featured on THC's masthead columns; 

You know, there's a philosopher who says, "As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it's overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on. And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don't".

At the other end of the spectrum from the random events theory are reductionist theories which increasingly dominate the political arena; one idea which explains everything.  On the left it is critical race theory and its spawn, DEI, which are simply sociology for stupid people.  On the right we now often see it claimed the reason for any mishap, miscalculation, or fiasco in the public or private sector is DEI and dismissing any other potential factor(s). 

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(1) Rasche is one of those guys who you realize has been in a lot of stuff you've seen, but you can't place him.  According to his wikipedia page, since the late 70s he's been in 49 movies, 313 TV episodes and a dozen TV movies, along with 22 on and off-Broadway plays.

The Vessel

Reuben Rodriquez, the pseudonym for a Florida Democrat political observer, has some astute observations on Donald Trump.  I've been reading Reuben on Twitter since 2020 and find he has remained true to his political beliefs, while avoiding the stampede to insanity of mainline Democrats.

Trump exists as a flawed, powerful & impotent, VESSEL for a cornucopia of grievance. He is a revolt against a global economy, cloying feminism & a subconscious revolt against the victory of post-material liberalism. That he can not even comprehend this ADDs to the appeal.

Say it weekly: Trump being fully unable to articulate his value prop allows HUGE swaths of the pop to project on him their *own* amorphous grievances Grievances they can’t even say aloud. Trump is an inadvertent masterpiece of channeling desperate groups & desires.

I don't think this completely captures Trump or his appeal but does account for a certain amount of it.

His observations were prompted by tweets from Matt Stoller (a leftist and no relation to THC), including this scathing and accurate assessment.

There's this belief that JD Vance was 'radicalized' by something, as if it's weird to lose faith in institutional leaders, academics and journalists who are clearly inept and totally full of shit all the time.

Andrew Sullivan, who will not be voting for Trump, provides another perspective on the man and his political resurrection, while pondering the collapse of the liberal establishment.

What makes this narrative feel like something deeper than a mere looming electoral college landslide is that, simultaneously, the entire liberal establishment seems to be imploding. The Democrats’ Biden formula — impose radical social, economic, and cultural change by fronting it with a moderate, easy-to-bully old man — has unraveled as obviously as Biden’s health. One reason is that the president is simply incapable of catching the attention of the country — except in universal cringe — and has singularly failed to construct a compelling narrative of his own.

Another is the incoherence of the Resistance. If you want to protest potential abuse of the justice system by a future president Trump, don’t bring an obviously flimsy, political case in New York City that merely helped Trump sweep back to dominance in the GOP. If you want a saner GOP, don’t demonize every other possibility, from DeSantis to Vance. If you emphasize the danger of political violence, don’t turn a blind eye as BLM burns America’s cities to the ground, or ignore Antifa. If you want to accuse Fox News of propaganda, don’t push out equal and opposite propaganda on toxic MSNBC. If you think democracy dies in darkness, why try to get Trump legally excluded from some state ballots, and prevent any real primary among Democrats?

More saliently, if one of your main lines of attack on Trump is his mendacity, it was probably not a great idea to tell the entire country that Biden was, in Joe Scarborough’s words, “far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, analytically…”

The lies the Democrats have been telling us these past few years are legion: inflation won’t happen/is temporary/is good for you; the Southern border is secure; “equity” is “fairness”; biological sex is a “spectrum”; Ukraine is about to win the war; Russia’s economy can be sanctioned to death; political violence is entirely on the far right; children can meaningfully consent to sex changes; the only thing holding black Americans back is white bigotry; the mainstream media is fair; and women have penises. Yes, Trump is a shameless liar. But the left’s propaganda has muddied the waters. When NBC’s higher-ups took Morning Joe off the air this week, it was a real moment. Even the muckety-mucks couldn’t take the lucrative propaganda anymore.

I will never vote for Trump — because he is so psychologically disturbed and so contemptuous of the rule of law that he remains a danger to us and the world. But I can see the logic of Trumpism. Those who feel left behind — culturally, economically — need at least one party to represent them and their values. As Biden has proven, protectionism is not all bad, especially when related to supply chains and national security. Mass immigration is out of control, and only one party gets it. Support for those who have lost the most from globalization seems to me a defensible conservative position, after migrant winners like me have had such a good run of it. And the madness of the neocon war machine demands a president able to spurn it.

Neither Rodriguez or Sullivan focus on the authoritarian turn of the Democrats, for whom a danger to democracy is anyone who does not vote for Democrats and, as a party, are doing all they can to ensure that the opposition never attains power again.  The radical social, economic, and cultural change referenced by Sullivan can only occur if accompanied by the repression needed to impose and maintain that change.

As for THC, he remains committed to leaving the presidential line on the ballot blank in 2024. 

Friends

With the passing of Bob Newhart at 94, he joins his wife Ginnie, and Don and Barbara Rickles, their best friends.  Judd Apatow produced this piece, devoted to their long friendship, prior to Bob's death.

Remnants

But it’s weird to be a Jew in Prague. While there is a remnant of Jews still living there, you can't help but be struck by the museum-like nature of the Jewish presence in the city.

You should read this Substack article by Russ Roberts on his recent trip to Prague.

Jewish life may not be vibrant but tourism for Jews and about Jews is quite healthy. The Jewish part of town is thronged with visitors eager to see those old synagogues, the Holocaust memorial, and the Jewish cemetery.

And yes, some Jews still live in Europe 80 years after the Holocaust. But the Jewishness of Prague and Vienna and similar capitals is in the past rather than the present. There is something macabre about savoring the Jewishness of Prague’s past knowing how the story ended.  

I knew this of course before I went to Prague, at least in some abstract sense. Visiting in person makes vivid what has been lost.

We visited Prague in 2014.  Lovely city.  We also visited the Jewish sites, including the memorial with the names of the tens of thousands transported to their death by the Nazis. 

I had an experience similar to Roberts' more than thirty years ago while visiting Worms, Germany in the early 90s.  I had a business trip to Europe which was to start with a meeting at our plant in Worms on a Monday and I decided to fly over early to help with the time adjustment, arriving on Saturday morning.

It was January when the daylight was already very limited and a gray mass hung low over the city during those nominal daylight hours creating a penetrating gloom on my walks.  The Nibelungen Hotel was my residence, decorated in a palate of grays, browns, and blacks, very appropriate to Worms and the time of year.  I visited the cemetery, the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe with its origins in the 11th century.  The Nazis destroyed all of the other Jewish cemeteries in Germany but were persuaded to keep the one in Worms for historical purposes.  It resembles the photo of the Prague cemetery (below) except that the trees are much older, thicker, taller, and more twisted.

Though the Jewish community was wiped out during the time of the Third Reich, there is a Jewish museum in Worms which I also visited.  It was a strange experience, leaving me feeling like a spectral figure peering into a lost past, the member of a lost tribe.  Perhaps it would be like an American Indian descendant from one of the New England tribes that exist today only in memory.

Roberts goes on to note another absence in Prague.

But one night in Prague, I realized that the lost Jewishness of Prague has a very strange bedfellow. I was sitting in St. Clement’s Cathedral listening to an hour-long concert of classical music’s greatest hits—Mozart, Bach, Pachelbel, Schubert, Vivaldi, and others. I realized that Judaism is not the only religion that is a shell of its former self in the sense of its role in the daily life and culture of a great city. The same would be true of Christianity. 

The Christian impulse that built such magnificent cathedrals and inspired some of the finest music human beings have ever composed, plays no role in the current culture of Prague any more than Judaism does.

 It was a strange moment for me, this realization of kinship between the two sister religions. It does make a difference that Christians were not herded into railroad cars and murdered as the Jews were. But both religions are essentially being kept alive by a remnant, a remnant that is not embedded in a serious way in the life of the city other than as a tourist attraction. I don't remember who made the observation but it is a deep one, that some of the greatest creations of human beings--the cathedrals in particular, but you could also include the music--were inspired by something very few Europeans believe in any longer—Christianity. 

As a Jew thinking about Christianity in Europe, what comes to mind is the Inquisition, the blood libels, the pogroms, and the church-driven expulsions from country after country. It’s harder to remember that Christianity was a revolution in how we human beings see ourselves. The post-Christian attempts to inspire a new way of seeing ourselves, communism and fascism, dwarf Christianity in their cruelty to the Jews and to humankind generally. 

Though not as dramatic as in Europe, we are also seeing an ebbing in Christian belief in the United States.  But people always need to believe in something.  Something will fill, and may already be filling, that need.

It's part of the new world that is emerging.  The Cold War ended in 1991 in a way that no one, other than Ronald Reagan, would have predicted a decade earlier.  Since then a new world has been struggling to emerge, an emergence accelerated, in retrospect, by the 2008 financial crisis, and which has been accelerating even more rapidly in recent years.  What the shape of that world will ultimately be is unpredictable.

Diary Entry

 Left the hotel at the usual side entrance and headed for the car—suddenly there was a burst of gun fire from the left. S.S. Agent pushed me onto the floor of the car & jumped on top. I felt a blow in my upper back that was unbelievably painful. I was sure he’d broken my rib. The car took off. I sat up on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain. Then I began coughing up blood which made both of us think—yes I had a broken rib & it had punctured a lung. He switched orders from W.H. to Geo. Wash. U. Hosp.

By the time we arrived I was having great trouble getting enough air. We did not know that Tim McCarthy (S.S.) had been shot in the chest, Jim Brady in the head & a policemen Tom Delahanty in the neck.

I walked into the emergency room and was hoisted onto a cart where I was stripped of my clothes. It was then we learned I’d been shot & had a bullet in my lung.

Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air. I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for Gods help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all Gods children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.

I opened my eyes once to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there. Of all the ways God has blessed me giving her to me is the greatest and beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.

- Excerpt from diary of President Ronald Reagan.  This is his entry for March 31, 1981, written on April 11, 1981, after his release from the hospital and return to the White House.

It was only years after Reagan left the presidency that we became aware he kept a daily diary throughout his two terms, in which he made entries almost every evening.  In addition, after retiring upstairs, he carried on voluminous correspondence and read extensively.  His Secretary of State, George Schultz, was surprised by the revelations, joking that he thought after the president ended his working day that he and Nancy were watching old movies.

Along with letters to the well-known, President Reagan also became a pen pal to a six year old boy in Washington DC, which you can read about here.

Nature Boy

There was a boy

A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far
Over land and sea

 

A little shy
And sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day

A magic day he passed my way
And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings

 
This he said to me

The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved in return

 

A surprise million-selling hit, his first, for Nat King Cole in 1948. Composed by Eden Ahbez, a world class eccentric.  The recorded version below.  You can watch a differently arranged live performance here.

How Green Was My Valley

John Ford wanted to make the film in Wales, where the story is set in a small mining town at the end of the 19th century, and in Technicolor, but a world war intervened along with a shortage of color film, so 20th Century Fox built an 80 acre replica of a Welsh village in the Santa Monica mountains and the movie was black & white.

The movie won the Academy Award for Best Film of 1941, beating out Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon.

For anyone who has viewed How Green Was My Valley, the striking images are unforgettable.

 

The most indelible image occurs near the end.  You can watch it in the video below, starting around 1:30.  After a disaster in the mine, see the lift emerge with the body of family patriarch Gwilym Morgan (Donald Crisp), cradled by his young son Huw (Roddy McDowell), both under the gaze of pastor Merddyn Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon).  Staged with Christian symbolism and the adult Huw's narration, "Men like my father cannot die, they are with me still", it never fails to move me.

Till All Success Be Nobleness

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country love
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

Fox Hunt

From West Virginia, we give you Sierra Ferrell, one of the new country and bluegrass artists on the scene.  And here is a live studio version.

The Ghosts Of The Riven

On this 108th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme in which 60,000 soldiers of the British Empire were killed or wounded, this is film restored by Peter Jackson for They Shall Not Grow Old and narrated by Stuart Humphryes of BabelColour with a poem he's written.  This link takes you to the YouTube video, which is age-restricted.