In this podcast Stan discusses the newly available Ed Jackson Collection at GHS, Freddie Mercury’s handwritten lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Ed Ames’ tomahawk throw, and college students giving up their cellphones to take a vow of silence.
Notes from my recent reading….
“There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren’t writers. I can write perfectly well—anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. It’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.”
Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life
“He never squandered an hour or a good impulse.”
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
“She had an immense power of accepting people as they were.”
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
“If you can be indifferent passionately enough it almost has the virtue of a positive creed.”
Christopher Morley, Streamlines
“Treacherous are standards adopted by public or self-appointed censors. It is part of the American philosophy as expressed in the Constitution—that, except in the most extreme cases, people should be allowed to express their opinions, and that the result of this is to stir up thought and controversy, out of which will emerge the Truth. It is only what is false that is killed by discussion, not what is true.”
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins
“We are not a nation of children. Our citizens are presumed to be able to judge for themselves, to draw their own conclusions from what they read. In a republic, people are entitled to express their opinions.”
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author
“It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world.”
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows.”
Socrates, quoted in Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
“I’ve never been one for the ‘take your medicine’ school of culture. I read what I read, for the most part, because I like it.”
Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet
“I am extra-big. I have been out in the weather. I look lazy and am. In the words of a Texas chick one time, I look as if I had been there and back.”
John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox
“I didn’t leave any visible marks. But I left the other kind. They last longer.”
John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox
“Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber—36 hours of it—sleep that soaked like rain after drought.”
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
“The usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.”
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
“It be a bad night, doctor, for riding; the kind o’ night when dead things come out o’ their graves.”
Dick Donovan, “The Corpse Light”
“Though we are desirous to be cured of our faults, we are loath to part with them.”
James Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife
“I have learned, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content.”
James Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife
“Consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes.”
James Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife
“Sleeping well is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve all of your brain functions, as well as your ability to learn and remember new knowledge.”
Sanjay Gupta, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age
“Be assured, and experience will convince you, that there is no truth more certain than that all our enjoyments fall short of our expectations, and to none does it apply with more force than to the gratification of the passions.”
George Washington, quoted in James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793-1799
“Bugles and drums may come here [to Washington’s tomb] sometimes but they are out of place. Here lies greatness without ostentation, the dust of a man who denied the temptations of power as few other men in history have done. A man who desired from his fellow men not awe, not obedience, but love.”
James Thomas Flexner, George Washington
“He came expectant, with the pleasurable anticipation of disaster, and he was not disappointed.”
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale
“He said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper.”
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale
Hitler “had no friends, no close confidants. It was, after all, difficult to be on familiar terms with a deity.”
Thomas Childers, The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
“Only weaklings cannot tolerate criticism.”
Thomas Childers, The Third Reich
“Every profession has its growing arsenal of jargon to fire at the layman and hurl him back from its walls.”
William Zinsser, On Writing Well
“The fact that the irresistible tidal forces in history are moral forces always escapes a man of dim moral perceptions.”
Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2: A House Dividing, 1852-1857
“He was ignorant, narrow-minded, fanatically prejudiced on many issues, highly tenacious, a thoroughly selfish egotist, ready to commit acts that others would term unscrupulous and to justify them by devious psychological processes, and a man with a vein of hard cruelty.”
Allan Nevins on John Brown, in Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2
“Many people hate to be disillusioned. They are frightened when cherished beliefs are taken from them. Naivete of this sort makes people vulnerable to quacks, to confidence men, to political tricksters, and to anybody who offers them shiny promises.”
Horace Coon, Speak Better—Write Better English
“We want gross miracles and miss the thousand daily wonders that lie all about us. We have forgotten how and where to look.”
The Journal of Samuel Martin
“It is from our wounds that our compassion flows. One cannot claim compassion and feel no pain.”
M.C. Richards, The Crossing Point
“All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming.”
Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
“Do you have hope for the future?
Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was”
David Ray, “Thanks, Robert Frost”
Do unexpected calls on your smart phone send you into panic mode? Should people text before calling? Do you hate text messages too? Is AI the end of the world as we know it? Stan discusses these pressing issues and more, including this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners, the travails of our beloved Braves, and the goings-on in the Fraternal Order of Tall People in Shorts.
President Joe Biden announced last week that he will seek a second term. For some, the power of the presidency is irresistible. Almost no one walks away voluntarily from seeking a second term. Lyndon Johnson was the last man who did in 1968, but only after Vietnam and domestic unrest combined to nearly destroy his presidency. And he was swept into office in one of the greatest landslides in history just four years earlier.
Many presidents seek a second term to complete what they consider the unfinished business of the first term; in fact, the current incumbent used almost this exact language in announcing his bid for re-election. Only one president, James K. Polk, felt that he had completed everything he set out to accomplish when he stepped down willingly in 1849 after one term. His four years encompassed the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, and the violent controversy over the westward expansion of slavery. The stress of it all contributed to Polk’s death at age 53, just three months after his term ended.
Historically, second terms are almost always disasters. From Washington to Barack Obama, almost every president who has served beyond four years came to grief on the rocky shoals of a second term. Political scandals, wars, assassinations, economic blunders, natural disasters, and foreign affairs (and sometimes domestic ones too, a la Bill Clinton) can quickly diminish popularity and political power, limiting a president’s leadership and ability to govern effectively.
Second-term woes go all the way back to our nation’s first president. George Washington agreed to seek a second term only after being persuaded to do so by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Both men then promptly resigned and left Washington to preside over an increasingly divided country polarized by Jefferson’s Republicans and Hamilton’s Federalists.
Washington’s second term was bedeviled by diplomatic troubles with Great Britain—most notably the controversial Jay Treaty—and Revolutionary France. The day Washington left office he saw this vitriol directed at him in a Republican paper: “Would to God you had retired to private life four years ago. If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by you.”
Thomas Jefferson’s first term was one of the most successful in American history—the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country and hastened the Federalist party into extinction—and his popularity propelled him into a second term. But it was a disaster, again thanks to the diplomatic tangle of European affairs. Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, which basically stopped American shipping abroad, nearly ruined the American economy and was enormously unpopular. Jefferson practically fled the White House in 1809.
Most other presidents who served two terms fared no better. The British army chased James Madison out of Washington before burning the city during the War of 1812. Andrew Jackson was censured by the Senate in his second term during the Bank War, the one and only time that has happened.
Lincoln was assassinated in his second term (as was McKinley), but had he lived his reputation might have foundered on the shoals of Reconstruction, just as Andrew Johnson’s did.
U.S. Grant was a war hero but the scandals of his second term marked his presidency as one of the worst in history.
World War I and the fight over the League of Nations nearly killed Woodrow Wilson in his second term. FDR’s ill-advised court-packing scheme during his second term nearly derailed his presidency and had World War II not been looming on the horizon, his political fortunes would have dropped considerably. Civil rights unrest, Sputnik, the Cold War, and Castro’s rise in Cuba all managed to douse Dwight Eisenhower’s popularity in the last years of his second term.
During the last 50 years, second terms have all been fraught with peril: the afore-mentioned LBJ (technically not a second term, but close, after finishing out JFK’s term); Nixon and Watergate; Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair; Clinton’s impeachment; while the Iraq war, the fumbled response to Katrina, and the economic meltdown eroded George W. Bush’s popularity to record-setting lows. And while Obama’s second term was not marked by outright scandal, it is not difficult to see Donald Trump’s 2016 election as a stinging rebuke to his administration.
Perhaps the Confederates got this part right: they limited their President to one six-year term, period. No worries about re-election, and the Congress knows it will have to deal with the same president for the next six years.
So why seek a second term at all? There is something about the power of the presidency, the pinnacle of political power, that is hard to give up voluntarily. Only time will tell if the current occupant succeeds where others have not. But history is not on his side.
As Thomas Jefferson said about the presidency from personal experience: “No man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.”
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
Gordon Lightfoot died on Monday, May 1, a transcendent singer and songwriter and one of the most talented and iconic musicians in the second half of the 20th century. I have loved his music from the moment I first heard him 50 years ago. His songs, like “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Rainy Day People,” “Early Morning Rain,” “The Watchman’s Gone,” were all lyrical and deeply poetic, sung in that rich baritone voice, so easily imitable but impossible to replicate.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was nothing less than an epic poem set to music and served as the unofficial soundtrack to that time of year “when the skies of November turn gloomy.” It rose to number 2 on the American Billboard charts, defying all norms of Top 40 standards with its length and arcane references to Lake Superior, Great Lakes shipping, and the legend that “lives on from the Chippewa on down.” I have listened to the song a thousand times, with its haunting guitar riffs and the mesmerizing story of the fateful ship that sank in the “face of a hurricane west wind” on November 10, 1975, on the “big lake they call Gitche Gumee.” Lightfoot, and many others, considered it his finest work.
He described himself as a songwriter in search of the “perfect poem” and to my mind, of all his compositions, “Song for a Winter’s Night” stands alone as a supreme achievement, a beautiful portrait of the aching loneliness of a dark night of longing:
The lamp is burnin’ low upon my tabletop
The snow is softly falling
The air is still in the silence of my room
I hear your voice softly calling
If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you.
(You should also check out this moving rendition by the Wichita State University School of Music.)
He was often hailed as a Canadian treasure—Geddy Lee, the lead singer of the Canadian rock band Rush, called him “our poet laureate,” while musician Tom Cochrane said that “if there was a Mount Rushmore in Canada, Gordon would be on it.”
But he really belonged to the world. As one critic noted, “It is impossible to explain the huge impact of Gordon Lightfoot on 20th century music. His songs were covered by everyone from Dylan to Elvis. His writing, imagery, and ability to create mood was without parallel.”
His songs were deceptively complex, layered with symbolism that belied the lyrics about mundane relationships, wandering spirits, or the beauty of the Canadian woodlands. “Don Quixote,” the heartbreaking “Bitter Green,” “The Watchman’s Gone,” and so many others, lent themselves to deeper meanings for anyone who cared to find them.
There’s a train down at the station
It’s come to carry my bones away
Two engines on
Twenty-one coaches long…
As I leave you in the sunset
Got one more nothin’ I’d like to say
‘You don’t know me
A son of the sea am I’
As I say to you, my brother
If you live to follow the golden sun
You better beware
Knowin’ the watchman’s always there.
If you find me feedin’ daisies
Please turn my face up to the sky
And leave me be
Watchin’ the moon roll by…
Drink Your Glasses Empty to this son of Orillia, Ontario, with the unmatched voice, who brought joy to so many with the gift of his song. Farewell and Godspeed, Gordon Lightfoot. We too have followed the golden sun.
The fire is dying
Now my lamp is growing dim
The shades of night are lifting
The morning light steals across my windowpane
Where webs of snow are drifting
If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winter night with you
And to be once again with you.