sisu

The soul of wit

Where have all the blogposts gone? First time we've gone over a week without blogging since launching our little flagship into the blogosphere 5 3/4 years ago on December 12, 2003, with "The tidings that dare not speak their name." We've never veered far off the pro-freedom-of-speech course set for that first outing, but why now the silence? Has the cat got our tongue? Tiny, above and below atop the dining room table the other day in the countdown to supper, isn't talking.

We've been twittering up a storm of late (check out the column at right just below "Pope Teddy Mug" for a running stream of our latest tweets). As suggested in one of the questions in Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere Survey," which we took this morning, twittering itself — often referred to as microblogging — may be a culprit. Both our own and others' tweets can be a catalyst for expansion of whatever's festering in the febrile blogging brain, but just as easily, Twitter's requirement that the writer condense expression of her ideas into 140 or fewer characters can be a refiner's fire that leaves ideas clarified with no need of further exposition. One example from a series of tweets plucking out highlights of Sarah Palin's historic keynote yesterday before a room full of world-class investors at a conference sponsored by investment firm CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, her first public-speaking engagement outside North America:

"There is no justice in taking from one person and giving to another," she said. "History shows it simply does not work."

I loved Sarah Palin from the first day: "We're not interested in government fixes, we're interested in freedom."

"We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place," says Sarah Palin in Hong Kong speech.

A gratifying contrast to President Obama's usual "now-is-the-time" —  first time? — speech before the UN this morning, also billed as historic. We agreed with twitterer Zener39's assessment:

Bolton: Obama's speech "unpresidential."

As we said in a retweet, "The man with the mustache that repels bullets has Obama's number."

Update: More delicious and nutritious Bolton fare: “a post-American speech by our first post-American president. It was a speech high on the personality of Barack Obama and high on multilateralism, but very short in advocating American interests … It was a very naïve, Wilsonian speech, and very revealing of Obama’s foreign policy,” said Bolton.

Update II: "Good one, doll, but you leave us non-twitterers lonely," writes our imail correspondent:

We: I will try to get back into things. So many worries the last period of time. A breather today. Just got word from vet that Tiny's bloodwork is normal. With her being on steroids, one has to keep watch. I've gotten the dose down as low as possible. [Goomp's pussycat] Purrky is fine. Cold almost gone. Freezer now working again with new timer.The little things add up.

She: Yes, constant low-level anxiety is a real energy-drainer.

Sigh.

Update III: "I am out of touch since the advent of the tweet," imails Goomp poignantly. "I'm hoping to get things back on an even keel," we imail back.

Update IV: Unholy alliances: The Anchoress is in the same boat. "She cannot come out to play until she has finished her work":

Apparently, she spent an unholy amount of time last night, playing on something called Twitter, which sounds insipid, flightly, unhealthy, sinful and vulgar. She did this, furthermore, after being expressly forbidden to enjoy herself until her assignments were completed. Because she is a slothful, inattentive, disobedient and lazy flittertigibbet of a girl, she will not be permitted to play here with you on this devil’s machine until she has done her work, or I will beat her until you hear her high c’s from Shanghai to the Aran Islands!

And you get to work, too, young masters and mistresses, or I will find you! Don’t make me use this ruler!

Lord help us.

Update: All things bright and beautiful now boarding Modulator's Friday Ark #262.

To sleep, perchance to scream

Tiny spoke to us in a dream last night. Not her usual meows, maos, prrts and purrs, but in The King's English. Tuck asked what she sounded like. Don't remember a sound. Were her lips moving? More like reading her thoughts.

The cat as incubus called to mind Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," ("The Incubus") 1790, Goethe Museum, Frankfurt, Germany.

What did she say? Tuck wanted to know. It all made sense at the time, our inner cat giving expression to what we barely dare think of during waking hours.

All we remember is "I don't know whether we'll have another New Year's together." Anxiety because we lost her brother — our irreplaceable Baby Cakes — unexpectedly late last year and because she has "airway disease" (AKA feline asthma), a constant source of low-level concern. She's had it since kittenhood, although we didn't recognize it as such — thought it was furball-related coughing —till years later when it became severe, and she ended up in the hospital. Since then she's been on medications, adjusted through the years. Currently it's methylprednisolone — our cat's on steroids! — 1/4 pill every other day, Flovent administered by Aerokat inhaler twice a day and Albuterol by inhaler as needed to stop attacks. Needless to say, she hates the inhaler, gives us a dirty look and tries to leave the premises whenever we approach with Aerokat in hand. And yet she forgives us, boundlessly generous in her silky attentiveness and affection. Does some part of her sense we are doing it for her own good? Probably not. We think she just likes us despite our inexplicable behavior.

"Mad as Hell, Not Taking It Anymore," Lucianne captions this thrilling image of "my people," the Tea Partiers, taking their grievances to the seat of national government yesterday. We participated via Twitter and are enjoying the afterglow in the blogosphere, on Fox News and through the LDotters' comments today: "Do you hear us now?" Photo source unknown although it's all over the blogosphere and Twitter.

Back to the dream, is it too much of a stretch to link the talking Tiny's words with anxieties related to implications of Obamacare, should that fair imitation of socialized medicine be "rammed down our throats" as the President threatens to do, even as he disses Tea Partiers like us and tells us to shut up? Not very presidential, Mr. President. This nighmarish presidency haunts us night and day.

Update: Wake up refreshed at Modulator's Friday Ark #261.

The warring tribes of post-9/11

Republication of our September 11, 2006 post "A virtual lamp beside the golden door, revisited": "It’s been nearly three years since 9/11," wrote Michele of A Small Victory two years back, inviting her readers to add their own two cents' worth to her Voices 2004. "Where do you stand right now as far as emotional recovery goes? Have you moved on? Healed? How does your emotional view of 9/11 differ now from three years ago? Do you find yourself more hopeful than you were then?" We're republishing our response, which seems to have stood the test of time, in that we still agree with ourselves.

How would Osama answer the question "Do you find yourself more hopeful than you were then?" We think he would be of two minds: 1) Yes and 2) No.

1) Yes. Surely the evil genius whose own demons made him wake the sleeping giant* must be gratified to see the Orwellian inversion that has taken place in some large portion of the popular imagination, where the lunatic ravings of homegrown academics blinded by their hatred of America — the Susan Sontags and Noam Chomskys of this world — have metastacized into a toxic worldwide anti-American hysteria that threatens to derail the War on Islamic Extremism (Condi Rice's term for the War on Terror). We could write volumes about that. We have, in fact, written blog volumes about that. Listen to Sontag's solipsistic, a-historical, hyperventilating pontifications from her New Yorker essay published in the aftermath of 9/11:

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. [Note to Ms. Sontag: Our response was our own. It was visceral. We didn't wait for some public figure to tell us what to think or how to feel.] Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? [Note to Ms. Sontag: You haven't a clue re the terrorists' motives. See Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer et al.]

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall.

2) No. Despite the appeal of Sontag & Company's "arguments" to all who would blame America first, Osama must be worried about our country's pesky refusal to cut and run.  9/11 was, in fact, like Pearl Harbor in that the enemy realized he had awakened a sleeping giant.* In fact, the enemy has awakened two sleeping giants. America stands taller than ever on the world stage, staring down the nattering appeasement crowd on the one hand, and tearing down the terrorist networks and support systems on the other, thanks to the great leadership of President George W. Bush, his remarkable team of seasoned advisors, our superb military and the Coalition of the Willing.

But 9/11 awoke another sleeping giant, one that may have been slouching towards some kind of cyberBethlehem waiting to be born even as world attention was focused elsewhere. We're speaking, of course, of the blogosphere. A virtual lamp beside the golden door, this new medium was a beacon to the virtual "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" in the wake of 9/11, giving voice to those who had been voiceless — Iraqi bloggers, milbloggers, homefront bloggers and bloggers of every stripe, seekers of wisdom and truth who weren't buying what effete academic elites and mainstream media pack journalists were selling anymore

Update: Antivenin links.

*Note. "In the movies Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor, [Japanese naval commander] Yamamoto's character says, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 'I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.' Considerable doubt exists, though, whether he actually ever said (or wrote) anything like that; it was probably invented for the movies, although it may well have encapsulated some of his real feelings about it," according to Nationmaster Encyclopedia. Update post 2004 election: False but accurate?

Berry Berenson Perkins: "Making her statement in a grand manner"

“She was just this angel that landed on this planet for a short amount of time,” a heartbroken Marisa Berenson told CBS News shortly after she lost her little sister, Berry, on American Flight 11, the first plane to fly into one of the Twin Towers September 11, 2001. (Photoshopped image of Berry Berenson Perkins at her Jamaica getaway based upon an original color photo by Amy Gottlieb).

In Memorium: Republication of our 9/11/06 tribute to Berinthia Berenson Perkins, presented on this eighth anniversary of that awful day as part of "Project 2,996: Remembering the Victims of 9/11." Click here for part one, "The bride wore barefoot":

"People who met her once feel like she was their best friend," photographer Paul Jasmin was quoted in Simon Doonan's New York Observer society-column tribute to 53-year-old Berinthia Berenson Perkins, who was en route from her Wellfleet summer place on Cape Cod to visit her two sons in L.A. as she boarded American Flight 11 out of Logan on the morning of September 11, 2001. As we blogged in our earlier post, "The bride wore barefoot," the "glamorous and tragic Berry was randomly assigned to us as part of D. Challener Roe's '2,996 Project: A Tribute to the Victims of 9/11.'" Doonan's Observer piece suggests the free spirit that shines through the many other tributes:

The tomboy photographer and sister of model and actress Marisa Berenson, granddaughter of couturière Elsa Schiaparelli and widow of the late Anthony Perkins . . . Berry had the beauty and provenance to propel her, unwittingly, into Beautiful People-dom. She was, without ever intending to be, something of a founding member.

"She was an extraordinary woman who lived life fully," said Pam Mandel of Provincetown — who was "working with Berenson on her memoirs" that last summer, according to the Cape Cod Times — "She was quite a force, with a smoky voice and an alive, funny, sultry persona," ever the tomboy on into a vibrant middle age:

Friends said she preferred her Wellfleet home over others, choosing to live there year-round, out of the spotlight of Los Angeles.

Her sons attended Wellfleet Elementary School. It was a reflection, said friends, of her very down-to-earth personality, despite being exposed all her life to celebrity.

Time had this to say in the 1973 obituary of her famous maternal grandmother, the "formidable couturière who dominated the high-fashion world of the 1930s with her art deco- and surrealism-inspired collections":

From her salon beside the Ritz, she scored many fashion firsts, among them tailored evening jackets, the use of synthetic fabrics and the color, shocking pink. Schiaparelli closed her couture house — where her designs had been sold for as much as $5,000 — in 1954, and later reappeared in the spotlight as the grandmother of Celebrities Marisa and Berry Berenson.

"It wasn't surprising that in 1972 Berry and her sister, Marisa, were drawn into Andy Warhol and Interview's orbit," noted Interview's breezy tribute, "Interview Salutes Interview":

The Berenson sisters had a creative pedigree that Andy loved: their granduncle was art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, and one grandmother was iconoclastic fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. At the time she came to Interview, Berry showed a talent for photography; mentioning she had a longtime crush on actor Tony Perkins, the magazine sent her to interview and photograph him. The encounter went even better than everyone hoped: Interview got a great story, and Berry not only met her idol, she married him.

According to Wikipedia, the 1962 international film Phaedra, starring the seasoned Melina Mercouri opposite a very young Tony Perkins, "was a smash hit in Europe, but a box-office failure in the USA . . . because of Perkins's vulnerability."

Legend had it that 12-year-old Berry had fallen in love with Tony Perkins, 12 years her senior, when she saw him play opposite Melina Mercouri in the steamy Jules Dassin classic, Phaedra:

Thus I was suddenly initiated into a world of foreign emotions and wild fantasies, and began to feel he was my closest companion within this sphere.

After nearly twenty years of marriage, blessed with two sons -- Osgood and Elvis -- tragedy struck in 1990, explains Berenson's Guardian obituary, when "Perkins was tested positive for HIV":

He decided that he wanted the knowledge kept secret even from their intimates, which heaped a tremendous burden on Berenson. When Perkins got AIDS, she finally decided to tell a few of their closest friends — "to share this grief with us." On September 2 1992, Perkins died with Berenson clutching her husband's hand. "We had a very satisfying life together. It was a wonderful love affair."

''She had a joie de vivre like no one else I've known,'' said Susan Hartzler, a friend of 20 years, quoted in the Boston Globe obituary:

She loved animals, especially her dogs. She was my life mentor. Anywhere you went with Berry, even getting a haircut, was an experience you'd never forget.'

A touching anecdote from Hartzler in a personal tribute at Prayers For Peace:

Berry Berenson Perkins was one of my best friends for more than 20 years. I miss her every single day. She was the most generous, gracious and loving person on earth. The last time I saw her was in LA right before July 4th, 2001. I was going to visit children at County USC Hospital where I take my dog for pet therapy. She asked if she could come with me and what the children needed. I told her they needed art supplies and when I picked her up at her hotel that morning, she had bags and bags of everything a child could want in the way of art supplies. She was like that. Always caring and thinking of others and making her statement in a grand manner! I wish she was here so I could tell her how much I love her and miss her.

Writer Eleanor Munro, also quoted by the Globe, taught a memoir-writing seminar Berry took during those last few weeks on the Cape in Truro:

[Berry was] a dynamic presence in the class. [She] was so beautiful, so decorative, so unusual for a scruffy-looking community like this. She also had an incredibly rich story to tell.

Living her "incredibly rich story" was the best revenge.

Update: Continue reading part one, "The bride wore barefoot."

Obama's National Day of Forgetfulness

"As if anticipating the left's insidious attempts to steal their fire — by turning their sacred precinct into an anti-American bully pulpit — the angry gods of Ground Zero blew up a sandstorm of warning on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attack," we captioned this image in "The grave robbers of Ground Zero." (Merlin-Net Photo)

It calls to mind the "sympathetic magic" of cannibals who believe they take on the strength of slain enemies by eating them," we wrote in our June 2005 post "The grave robbers of Ground Zero." Back then leftists were plotting to "appropriate the spiritual power of this hallowed ground" with an America-bashing museum themed on man's inhumanity to man. That particular project stalled, but not to worry. The Obama White House is on the case with its cheery "National Day of Service and Remembrance," an attempt to "erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry," as The American Spectator's Matthew Vadum explains:

The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service … The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism … that helps the left …

On Aug. 4, the White House offered a glimpse into its plans to desecrate 9/11 for political advantage. [The now disgraced Van] Jones appeared in a largely ignored 33-minute video posted on the official blog of the White House to discuss the administration's plan to flush 9/11 down the memory hole just as it has tried to do by rechristening the Global War on Terror the "Overseas Contingency Operations."

"The first milestone for Green the Block will be on our National Day of Service, September 11, 2009, where we will organize Green the Block service events around the country in coordination with the President's initiative, United We Serve," said Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus. Click on image for "Open for Questions: Green the Block with [Under-the-Bus former Green Czar] Van Jones August 4, 2009."

Just as Obama "robbed the 'War on Terror' of its poetic fire by dubbing it the bloodless 'Overseas Contingency Operation,'" he's trying to rob the grave of Ground Zero of its spiritual power by officially promulgating 9/11 as the pallid patchwork "Patriot Day [the original designation under GW] and National Day of Service and Remembrance." Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? As the Spectator's Vadum notes, "At no time does anyone explain why this National Day of Service has to be held — of all the 365 days in a year — on Sept. 11." Here's how they try to spin it:

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 inspired Americans to come together in a remarkable spirit of unity and compassion …

Eight years later, September 11 continues to evoke strong emotion and is an homage to sacrifice and a call to action.

In fact, "It wasn't tragic at all. It was outrageous," writes Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien, who notes "the 'unity' we witnessed among Americans then was actually righteous anger [and] the 'compassion' … mourning." As for 9/11's being a "call to action," it's quite a stretch to equate the gravitas of GWs life-or-death call back then for a boots-on-the-ground War on Terror with the relative weightlessness of Obama's poll-tested, feel-good call today for a renewed commitment to community service. Not to mention the irony of sly-as-a-fox "Truther" Van Jones being put in charge of the henhouse.

"It compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies"

Sunrise at Camelot-by-the-Sea from Goomp's terrace this morning.

L'heure bleu. Tuesday morning after Labor Day meant the first day of school for us children of the Fifties, a day of trepidation for ourselves, a smartie pants with social-skill issues. We were great at reading, writing and 'rithmetic but borderline pathologically shy. 'Wonder how we'd have taken a presidential "live cable-cast speech on values and education" piped into the classroom back then? We were still wet behind the ears when our radar screen began to pick up blips of the insidious Big Lie behind the Gramscian march through the institutions. As we blogged back on Flag Day of 2005: 

We remember the first inklings of the emasculating Marx-lite mindset beginning to infiltrate our elementary and high school classrooms in the fifties and sixties, when reflexively p.c. teachers -- before anyone really knew what p.c. was -- told us there was no such thing as human nature and keened that we shouldn't have a battle hymn for a national anthem.  We should change it to "America the Beautiful," they told us. While we love the poetry and religious fervor of "Oh, beautiful for spacious skies," with its unspoken recognition of what used to be called "Manifest Destiny," as a national anthem it falls short, missing the point that came crashing into our consciousness on that awful 9/11: Freedom isn't free.

Last gasps of summer. Tiny attends Ellen's plate for a Sunday bookend to our season-opening lobster bake with all the fixin's last May.

The light fantastic caught in the folds of a little linen shirt hung out to dry.

L'heure bleu, last gasps, hung out to dry. And now Tiny, above, sucking out the juices of a lobster carapace. The psychological landscape closes in. Intimations of creeping statism. We jumped into the Medicare maelstrom last week as our 65th approaches, waiting an hour (but we brought Jonah's Liberal Fascism, so no time wasted) to register at the local Social Security office, only to find they had us listed by our maiden name. That meant going back home to fetch the marriage license and then back for more waiting. Their error but our time. Unnerving inklings of things to come with the President's and Congress's medical-insurance meddling? In related frustrations, Goomp had asked us to help him switch from pro-Obamacare AARP to Humana for his Medicare supplemental. We duly researched, called and made an appointment for today, turned our schedule upside down to accommodate, but the rep never showed. Arggghhhhh! Public insurance, private insurance. Where's the competition to keep 'em honest? Rudy Giuliani had the libertarian's answer to an attempted Tom Brokaw gotcha the other day:

BROKAW: "What's been interesting to me is that the Republicans have raised the public option as some kind of Orwellian monster. Half the health care in America is already delivered by the government ... Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, Federal Employees insurance ..."

GIULIANI: "That's part of the problem. Part of the problem is that half of it is already in the hands of one massive monopoly. You make that monopoly greater and you destroy private insurance."

The rest of the problem with the dark cloud of "universal coverage" looming on the horizon is Tocqueville's "network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd":

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Baa!

Update: "The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subued to man, its presence refreshes him," wrote Thoreau. Head on over to Modulator's Friday Ark #260 and be refreshed.

Update II: The News Junkie at Maggie's links.