DOES A PRESIDENT RUN A COUNTRY?

Every once in a while I read something and say to myself, the writer is reading my mind! Sometimes the people who comment and aren't professional writers, like Sam Davis of Maryland who commented in a most profound way (I have to call it profound because he thinks as I think....picture a wink here). One of the major points is that the media is going along with the fantasy that the politician running for office and making promises will, once elected, may think he/she will actually be able to carry out those promises.

Ask Google "Who makes laws." After a law has been passed, in many cases an administrative agency makes regulations to administer that law. See How Federal Agencies Make Regulations. Next, ask "What is the role of the President of the US?" Next, "What is the role of the US Supreme Court?"

At this point, as a citizen of the United States, having been born here too many years ago, I asked what went wrong in the past eight years in the US. Living in this lifetime here and now, it made me wonder how the varying answers will be heard by those who did not live it. The first response to 9/11/2001 by the talking heads was to blame Clinton. As far as I can determine, the point has really been seen since by the media.

Why is it that finding someone to blame is seen as a solution to a problem by the media, who then can dissect it all day, fill air space, and the confused, bored people watching get counted. If enough get counted at "Sweeps" time, the talking head gets to keep their jobs. After all, the media is all about money earned by advertising and paid disproportionately to media 'stars' for saying what the media owners want them to say...to sway elections, manipulate information to the public at large and keep the masses docile and silent.

For those truly interested, looking at media ownership then begins to fit more congruently with what is feared by many as to how propaganda is spread over our air. Groups like stopbigmedia.com and freepress.com tried to hold the tide back, but none have succeeded with the iineffectual, rubber-stamping and do-little Congress for too many years. The present Congress is trying to clean out the Augean Stables but, as we all know, it is a mammoth task that will take a long time unless you are Herakles (Hercules). Great minds make difficult tasks easier with intelligent solutions. Running this country takes such minds, though few have been present and counted in the last eight years. If the Constitution of the United States can be returned to functioning as it was meant to be, and the Legislative and Administrative branches did the same, there would be three, not two, rivers to clean out the Augean Stables of the US government of today. We can only have the "Audacity to Hope" that great minds will work more than just spout catchy rhetoric. We can hope that more substance than charisma, getting a 6 year old interviewee to give reasons why Senator Obama should be the next President of the US, as was heard on a News broadcast today. Whatever can they be thinking? Does the opinion of a parroting child who won't even see a voting booth for another 12 or 13 years need to be heard nationally? Or I am being blinded by age and assuming that wisdom comes with it?

DISTORTIONS

One of the most painful frustrations for me today is to have to tolerate the many distortions one hears and can do nothing to correct. For months we have been hearing that we are not in a recession when everything points to the fact that we are. Numbers are presented by the media as fact which frequently are not accurate and give a very biased or skewed picture which is then seen as some sort of standard.

Today I heard that a local town was fighting over the fact that a firefighter had been called to active duty and had been given full pay for as long as the town could afford it beyond the period required by law, what ever that time is. I believe it was an official of the firefighter's Union who gave a speech calling council members the worst politicians possible because they had stopped paying him full salary due to budgetary problems. This man described the fireman in Iraq as serving in our International Guard. I struggle to understand when our National Guard became the International Guard. The United States National Guard is authorized by the Constitution of the United States. As originally drafted,''the Constitution limited the mustering of state militias: without the consent of Congress, states could not "keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace,...or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." (Article I, Section 10; Clause 3) Congress, however, had a duty to protect states from invasion and domestic violence (Article IV, Section 4)." National or International? Is there a majority in the US who really believe that we were in imminent danger of attack from Iraq other than the Administration who lied so many times to us that people believed them? How do families subsist? Was this an unconscious (or Freudian ) slip? I'll probably never know. It was just a brief spot in the news when I did not know the time or station.

I HOPE FOR NOTHING. I FEAR NOTHING. I AM FREE

Epitaph on the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis in Heraklion: Δεν ελπίζω τίποτε. Δεν φοβούμαι τίποτε. Είμαι λεύτερος; I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. Kazantzakis was an amazing man who lived from 1883 to 1957. He is probably universally, best known for his novel Zorba the Greek. While his philosophy reflected the religious and psychological times in which he lived, he left us with an epitaph of inspiration to us all.

In these trying political times in the United States, as I have stopped watching our American media, for the most part, other than our local news, because of the biases that are just too infuriating to bear, the epitaph seems most fitting. The three thoughts all have to be seen in connected fashion. People have embraced an Audicity of Hope. It is not clear what it means that audacity and hope are seen as mutually inclusive. Hope is best when ingested with reality. Kazantzakis freed himself of the two greatest elements to pull one down, disillusionment and fear. Indeed, freedom comes with knowing yourself, being independent and unafraid. To stay unafraid, one must accept reality in the same way one can accept what is now known as the Serenity Prayer. The most famously known part is the first paragraph: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

This has brought on parodies like the Senility Prayer:

Lord, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the people I do like and the eyesight to tell the difference.

To me, the central theme in all of this: we all long and wish for some control of our lives, the quality with which we live them, the gratifications we require to carry on living with a sense of self-esteem, and freedom from fear, panic and anxiety. While Kazantzakis has this on his epitaph, we assume that all of us might reach this state upon our deaths. However, to achieve this in life is a real challenge, a goal for which we may all strive.

RANDY PAUSCH

Randy Pausch, a computer professor at Carnegie Mellon, is dying. He has only a couple of months of life left. He gave one last lecture to his class, which made it to the Internet. On YouTube, alone, it has been watched over 6 million times. Recently, he gave the same lecture on the Oprah show. The audience had the cameras trained on it frequently to show how many people were wiping tears away.



I, too, had tears and asked myself what made me cry. My thoughts led to a very complicated sequence. I teared for my loss of my own husband, seven years ago, though all the while thinking about this wonderful father of three who was leaving his children orphaned long before they were ready to fly the nest. He didn't mention his wife, but I identified with this woman I knew nothing about, as I recalled having to take on raising my own children alone at the same approximate ages from the picture he showed. Already nearly twice this man's age, I am not ready to die and thought about his energy for living and my wanting more of life even though my children are grown and independent and I have achieved much of the life for which I had aimed.

Not once in his talk did he mention religion or afterlife. I do not believe there is an afterlife and speculated on whether he, as I, believes there is only oblivion after death. I thought about whether his children would remember him and long for his wisdom as I longed for my parents' and husband's. I had them around me for so many more years than they will have their father.
I teared at the thought of the wonderful legacy he was leaving his children in this speech and the film they would have of it to watch and how they would always see him as young as he will never age for them.

I remember hospice asking me, after my husband's death, to write down all the things I wished I had said to him when he was alive but didn't get to say. The truth was, there was nothing I hadn't said to him while he was alive. It is things that came up after his death made him unavailable and that I missed being able to share with him. I suspect Randy Pausch's children might feel similarly. They will not be able to ask him to help them solve a computer problem or talk to them about things he had never had an opportunity to share with them at their young ages; things that will come up for them later in life. The tragedy is that all he had learned and was stored in his brain will be lost except for things shared while he was alive, wrote, or any pictures and video they may have of him.

Just as you cannot take anything with you but yourself when you die, you cannot leave anything of yourself but memories and memorabilia.

PRIVACY- SHOULD IT MATTER ?

We in America feel violated by our government's abuse of our previously respected constitutional rights to privacy. While there is a legitimate complaint there, the nature of the situation presents a dilemma. Do you tell the people on whom you want to spy they are being spied upon? I presume that is the reason we used to have a judicial system we could trust, which was contacted for the 'special permissions' to keep our citizenry safe from those who do not play by the rules. Many voices are being raised in many areas, though the media, which collectively seems hesitant to report truth and reality rather than opinion, and follow the general bias of the owners dictates, if not the pundits own. Already, the media and politicians, for the most part, are too anxious to keep their jobs than do them properly.

The book 1984 made it clear how privacy lost, to an extreme, causes paranoia in the people who are the target of the government's disregard for personal privacy. There are enough people alive who remember when the book came out, when the threat of nuclear bombing of the US by Russia was a fear. Some schools still use this book as required reading. Others in the world have banned it. It seems we are heading the dystopian way, not only in the US, but elsewhere, as well. The term dystopia (the opposite of utopia) should raise some chills in all of us. If we trusted our governmental leaders, it would not. It is said that anyone who has nothing to hide should not worry about surveillance. However, recalling the days in Russia when dissidents were sent to mental hospitals and drugged or lobotomized to keep them quiet, when we hear that Karl Rove has been able to railroad a Southern governor to jail by virtue of his power condoned by our inept President, all of us should be frightened. Innocence no longer represents safety, unfortunately, in our judicial system today.

So far, being against the current Administration, has not caused any overt, dire consequences that are visible to average people. However, it harkens back to Senator McCarthy's paranoia about Communism and Communists, which should be frightening to all Americans because a strong voice can cause such damage before people get wise to the pathology level reached about the supposed danger. Many individual lives and careers can be ruined. We currently hear hints of this sort of thing today such as the 60 Minutes episode about former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. There are many more instances that have appeared in the news but are quickly obfuscated by trivial news of pop stars and athletes.

There should be tests before people are voted into office about their biases and ability to be objective, about their intelligence and powers of logic and deductive reasoning, and about their mental health in general. These should be administered by competent psychological professionals and not left to the 'wisdom' of voters not educated to weigh out these factors.

Should our constitutional rights to privacy matter....yes indeed! We should guard them diligently, especially by our vote for those who represent us in Washington.

FINDING OLD FRIENDS ON THE INTERNET

Areal howler I had read a few years ago was lost to me until I thought to look for it on the Internet, not expecting to find it but stubbornly determined to try. It was called the Texas Chili Contest and had me doubled over as I had first read it, thrilled to find it again. As children, my sister and I sang about Lydia Pinkham's Compound. We had a few additional verses, but this one is pretty close to what we knew in the 1940s. A beautiful walk back to the nostalgic duets sung by my sister and me. How wonderful to be able to hear and watch Vladimir Horowitz playing in Moscow. What a thrill to be able to find people, long gone from this world, preserved to entertain us once again, by modern technology.

As a child, I grew up about a half mile away from the Fenno House, built in 1704. Grown and away from there for a few years, I moved to Chicago and for many years was away from where I grew up. In the mid-60s, when I returned to the East again, I found the house had been moved to Sturbridge Village. It had been changed to accommodate the tourist traffic pattern but it was the same house we crawled into as children and stood in awe of its sparseness and different world. Now I don't even have to leave home to see it again. It is nicely placed now with a fence in front of it, not on a sharp corner of the road with no fence to protect it.

Raised on a farm and hanging out with an older brother, and sister, who used to go fishing for pickerel in Ponkapoag Pond, I wore no flotation device (nor was even aware of such a lifesaver). I couldn't swim a stroke and luckily didn't fall out of that flat bottom boat my oldest brother had built. This was no small, shallow body of water but, as children, we were typically unaware of the dangers and were without fear.

Childhood book treasures that I thought were written by a woman named Laura Lee Hope, I later learned were really written by a man. The Bobbsey Twins, Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue, and many other series I learned to read on apparently were all written by pseudonyms of this same man. Some think he also wrote the Nancy Drew series and The Hardy Boys. He was Stratemeyer. However, he founded a syndicate. It produced books for children and young people until quite late in the 20th Century.

Internet surfing has never been a habit of mine. Nevertheless, when an answer to something is needed, it is the place to go to keep informed about the new and the old.

VOLUNTEERING

My time is my most precious commodity and I try to guard it well. Since I am acutely aware that there are so many people who have given their time and teaching to me, I resolved many years ago to give as much back as I could, while keeping my life in balance. Recently I have begun to realize that there are many interesting volunteering opportunities.

Retired executives and businessmen do a wonderful job giving business advice. This is invaluable to people trying to start up in business, save a faltering business, or learn the things that experience, not most textbooks, can teach. People with math skills are invaluable as treasurers of non-profits, like churches, charitable organizations, and in assisting seniors, as well as others. Hospice, emotionally painful for most, has 400,000 volunteers in America.

Non-scientists can represent research subjects as community representatives on research boards. The list of possibilities requires only willingness on the part of the volunteer to share their time and talents. It is an 'everyone wins' situation. There would be far less boredom in the world if people believed that no one is without the capacity to make life easier for others by taking bit of time out of their own.

Being with others, vicariously experiencing the gratitude felt by recipients, opportunity to meet vibrant people, continued contact in settings where learning gets shared, and other wonderful reasons for volunteering exist. Take a bite of the apple that helps keep the doctor away and gives so much to so many others.

MAESTRO LEVINE of BSO AND ALBAN BERG

Last night I had the privilege to be taken to the Saturday evening performance at Symphony Hall in Boston. Clearly, much of the orchestra was given the night off due to the three works chosen. The first, Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in A, (though not one of his more inspiring compositions) featured the principal violinist (on the loaned to BSO Stradivarius) and his second violinist as well as good sized sections of violins, violas, cellos, etc. The second number, by Alban Berg, a pupil of Schoenberg, was Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments. This cleared the stage pretty much. The last number, Serenade No. 2 in A, Opus 16 by Brahms did not require too many more musicians back, leaving the players sitting in a rather sparse configuration and the music soporific.

While the Brahms was lovely, it lacked the emotionality of some of the rest of his works. Thus, preceded and followed by somewhat benign music, the Alban Berg was spectacular for the damage it did to eardrums for much of its entirety. Schoenberg, who seems to have not only wanted to write 'new sounds of music' but to throw out all pleasing-to-the-human ear theory built by civilization to date . From his biography, Schoenberg attempted to strengthen the structural powers of tonal music, but in the process began to create a musical armature that would replace tonality. This is expressed by another biographer, "The Second Quartet of Schoenberg is truly a turning point in Western Music. The first three movements are fully tonal, though they use extravagant means of extending tonality. In the final movement, "the concept of a tonal center as represented in the major-minor system is discarded, its rejection explicitly indicated by the absence of a key signature." (Perle 1980:4)": The lovely sounds of Nature and most music would seem to have tonality but Maestro Levine insists on forcing the unappreciative Boston audience to listen to this, perhaps mistakenly assuming they will begin to like it, rather than look for a different musical experience for which to pay huge ticket prices.

Berg’s Chamber concert for Piano and Violin with thirteen Wind Instruments, totally unrecognizable as music to my ears, began with Thema scherzoso con Variaszioni followed by an Adagio movement, and ending with Rondo ritmico con Introduzione. The Chamber Orchestra score called for piano, violin and thirteen wind instruments, namely flute, piccolo (doubling as second flute), oboe, English horn, e-flat Clarinet, Clarinet in A, Bass Clarintet, Bassoon, Contrabassoon, Trumpet, Two Horns and Trombone (tenor and bass).

Throughout, my mind was stuck on pitying the waste of instrumental talent of these two fine musicians soloing, at times, wildly. Occasionally the trombone, another wonderful BSO musician, came in with the few flatulent sounding accompaniments written into the score. Other brass and wind instruments added the dissonance of a terminally ill Greek chorus, while fingers on keyboard or violin flew wildly and would have been better in a silent movie where the skill, more than the sound, could have been appreciated.

After the performance, I spoke with several people who hated it. Only one man commented, “Well, it is complicated” seeming to imply “you wouldn’t understand it” which I readily confessed was true. Another commented wryly, "It is obviously an acquired taste!" We agreed we would both be unlikely to acquire that taste. Many in the audience walked out after the piece and did not return following intermission. If anyone took an exit poll, the results were not shared. As I read up more on Berg I realized that he had also written the opera Lulu. It was probably the first piece of music I had heard (somewhere in the 70s) that made me want to leave the theater, as I did last night had it been possible and less rude to others around me.