Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 1, 2010Still More on "Cool"On March 11 I wrote about a correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement about the word "cool". It began when I responded to a review of a translation of a European novel from 1937, in which the reviewer had queried the "contemporary" meaning of the word. I had spotted it in Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel The Moonstone used in its modern sense as a burst of enthusiastic approval: "Cool!"
Readers of the TLS established that Abraham Lincoln had used the word in his famous Cooper Union speech in 1860, and T.E. Lawrence used it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935), describing an Arab leader called Zeid as "too cool". Graham Chainey wrote in from Brighton on March 12 to say that Lawrence actually quite liked Zeid, and a few pages later had described him as "calm and flippant, no zealot for the revolt", and that indeed on account of his upbringing "he could hardly feel great sympathy for the Arab revival." All of these usages seem to be of a piece with the advice given to the staff in lunatic asylums, according to John Wood of Saxtons River, Vermont, writing on March 26, in Boston in 1848 and in Tennessee in 1859, to "keep cool" if abused by patients.
But finally, also on March 26, Alan Peskin of Cleveland Heights presented another modern usage to match that of Wilkie in England. Mr Peskin writes, "In 1881, President James A. Garfield's teenaged daughter, Mollie, wrote to a friend about her girlish crush on her father's private secretary, Joseph Stanley-Brown. 'Isn't he cool!' she gushed."
Mollie was 14 at the time, but Stanley-Brown must have been a cool cat, because she married him in 1888, and the marriage lasted until his death in 1941.
April 1, 2010The Rollicking USAThere has been the most extraordinary hubbub in the media since the health care reform bill finally passed. In today's Wall Street Journal, James M. LeMunyon, a Republican in the Virginia state legislature, proposes a Constitutional Convention, while Daniel Henninger writes that "the Democratic Party has disconnected itself from the average American's sense of political modesty." Speaking of political modesty, the Sarah Palin show starts tonight on Fox; Ethne and I are thinking of tuning in to watch her tongue get in front of her eyeteeth so she can't see what she's saying.
But the average American might not be as dumb as a box of rocks. The Journal also prints an article today by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, who points out that Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and the global financial management firm UBS are all saying that concern about the taxation aspect of the health reform bill is "noise" and that it will have "no impact whatsoever". The status quo was completely unsustainable; the bill is undeniably pro-jobs and pro-business, because it will slow down the skyrocketing cost of health care. On the same line, David Wessel's in-house Capital column in the Journal points out that Congress has established an Independent Payment Advisory Board with teeth, to craft ways of slowing Medicare spending that will take effect automatically unless Congress votes to reject them. When House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel told the President that House Democrats were uneasy about surrendering their power over the purse, Wessel writes, Obama replied that "There'll be no health care bill if I don't have the ability to control costs."
There is more going on here than meets the brain of the average tea partier. And even if the Wall Street Journal gives Karl Rove leave to waste a chunk of op-ed space every Thursday (giving the tea parties advice is like, I don't know, shoveling sand against the tide, which is bound to go out again), it's still the best newspaper read of all.
Meanwhile, Obama has spent more than a year trying to be nice to everybody and hoping for some bipartisanship. Now it's time for him to take the gloves off.