Each year right before Xmas, I digitally leaf through my blog posts and select what I think are the best ones (or most representative) and repost them in the hopes of selfishly boosting my hits and visitor numbers. Her are the all-time stats:
Views 281,304
Visitors 174,752
Posts 1,140
Comments 1,816
The exercise also provides me with touchstones to what was going on in my life. For example, I appeared on a few podcasts, but that seems like it was two years ago, not this year.
Anyway, fun ahoy, let’s get started.(Hit the headline in the box to trigger the link).
January
I love the blues and jazz, so that means I love Etta James.
I’ve been reading Ariel and Will Durant’s short collection of essays entitled Lessons of History, a remarkable condensation of 5,000 years of various civilizations’ modi operandi. The Durants organize their treatise according to twelve categories: History and the Earth, Biology and History, Race and History, Character and History, Morals and History, Economics and History, Socialism and History, Government and History, History and War, Growth and Decay, ending with the question: Is Progress Real?
Some of this seems dated, especially the chapter on race; however, I found the chapters on Economics and Socialism to be especially eye-opening. I’d really never considered the distribution of wealth in pre-industrial cultures, but as it turns out, the battle between oligarchs and peasants, the haves and have-nots, is as old as the pyramids, stretching from ancient Greece to China.
Here’s the last paragraph of their essay “Economics and History”:
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceful partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
In the United States, a country that doesn’t provide affordable healthcare for many of its citizens, the top 1% of households (or penthouseholds) control 30%, or about a third, of the country’s wealth. Counterintuitively, the working class overwhelmingly opted to elect billionaire Donald Trump who has joined forces with Elon Musk to continue the redistribution of wealth upward, threatening to cut social security and replace the ACA with something or another. There would seem to be no agitation among what used to be called the proletariat about the inequities of current wealth distribution. These voters eschewed Kamala Harris’s plans for free in-home care for the elderly and voted for even more tax cuts for the super wealthy.
But bam! (excuse the bad taste in diction) the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has generated a tsunami of vitriol from citizens who actually approve of the murder.[1] Often when a murderer somehow slips through the Orwellian ubiquity of surveillance cameras, on-line sleuths attempt to aid authorities in apprehending the assailant. However, according to the New York Times, “in a macabre turn, some people seem to be more interested in rooting for the gunman and thwarting the police’s efforts,” and “civilian efforts to find Mr. Thompson’s killer have appeared muted.”
In fact, a look alike contest based on surveillance photos of the murderer was held in Lower Manhattan yesterday, and the winner (see below) said he celebrated the killer’s action.
The words “deny, defend, depose,” which were etched on the bullet casings and are presumed to refer to insurance companies’ tactics in withholding benefits, have become a sort of rallying cry. According to the Times, a jacket similar to the one worn by the killer “is flying off the shelf.”
More from the Times: “Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks online threats, said the internet rhetoric had left experts ‘pretty disturbed’ by the glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and the ‘lionization of the shooter.’
““It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war, which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence,’ Mr. Goldenberg said.”
No doubt the murderer’s James-Bond-like ability to slip through the sieves of our contemporary spying-on-each-other network of cameras and microphones has something to do with his lionization.
Perhaps as I type this he is undergoing plastic surgery in some underground bunker.
[1] Presumedly even opponents of capital punishment are applauding the killing of this father of two.
The other night Caroline and I stumbled across the 1928 silent film Our Dancing Daughters on TCM and watched the whole damn thing. As the hepped up actors herky-jerkyed across the screen, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind living within the confines of a silent movie. For one thing, I’m practically deaf, so how convenient it would be to have utterances appear in writing, floating in the air long enough for even the slowest of readers to decipher.
Also, facial cues are a breeze to pick up on in a silent flick. In my adulthood, on more than one occasion, I’ve had a highschool friend tell me that she had a crush on me back in the day. Well, in a silent movie, picking up on flirting is less of a problem.
On the other hand, music in silent films is generally melodramatic, a solo piano tinkling or a muted orchestra holding forth. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in showbiz, would be wasted in a silent movie, though his amped-up dancing might give Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin a run for his money.
The Godfather came up in conversation last night at the Blind Tiger Porter-Gaud alumni party. I was chatting with former student Jamie Ewing, reminiscing about driving his cousin Willy Hutcheson to school in the 90s with the late Erin Burton and my two sons. On our trip from the IOP and Sullivan’s Island, we listened to various CDs Monday thru Thursday, but Friday mornings were dedicated to JB.
I told Jamie that I saw the Godfather live in ’75 at the Carolina Coliseum, one of the few white folks to attend that extravaganza. Then Jamie floored me with this revelation: he waited in line at the Apollo Theater in Harlem[1] to see James Brown lying in state, one of the hundreds to file past the coffin.
I mean, one of the greatest albums of all time is Brown’s 1963 Live at the Apollo, and Jamie can boast that he saw James Brown dead at the Apollo.
Bravo, Jamie, and RIP Barnwell, South Carolina’s, most famous citizen, the hitmaker who gave us “Pass the Peas,” “Gimme Some More,” “It’s a Man’s World,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” . . .
[1] I know “in Harlem” is redundant, but ain’t everybody as hip as you and me.
It’s a rare Saturday after Thanksgiving when I can celebrate a South Carolina Gamecock victory over the Clemson Tigers in the so-called Palmetto Bowl.[1] In two weeks I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and in that span of time, which began in the last month of the Truman Administration and ends in the last month of the Biden Administration, a sizable chunk of two centuries that includes the Korean Conflict, McCarthyism; the British pop invasion, Viet Nam, the King and Kennedy assassinations, the Carter malaise, the Reagan Revolution, the Fall of the Soviet Union, William Jefferson Clinton, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, no drama Obama, way-too-much-drama Trump, COVID, not to mention a whole lotta of other shit.
Anyway, during this span of my existence, the Gamecocks have only managed to beat Clem[p]son on 27 occasions, i.e., .375% of the time.[2]
I’ve actually written a parody of the USC alma mater, which some of my fellow alums find distasteful:
We curse thee, Carolina,
And sing our dismay.
Heart-breaking losses
Haunting our days.
Anyway, fair weather fan that I am, during abysmal Gamecock stretches — they lost 21 consecutive games in 1998 and 1999 — I don’t squander precious moments fretting over my alma mater’s dismal war record. However, when they’re doing well, like this year, I tune in.
And this year’s game was a big, big deal with both teams ranked in the top 15 with a chance of being included in the inaugural 12-team National Championship playoffs.
At least for me, it’s difficult to cull any positive expectations when it comes to the Clemson game with all those muffed punts, pass interference penalties, and missed arm tackles festering beneath the pond scum of my consciousness. Nevertheless, this year, I did feel a pang of hopefulness. After all, we had one five in a row, three against ranked opponents, and three on the road in hostile environments. And Clemson didn’t look all that great against Louisville and Pitt.
I thought it might even be a blowout.
It wasn’t. We turned the ball over three times, racked up 67 yards of penalties in typical Gamecock fashion — and yet, and yet — we pulled it off in the last five minutes, scoring the winning TD and intercepting a pass deep in Gamecock territory with 16 seconds left on the clock.
Though many attribute the victory to the heroics of LaNorris Sellers, who off the field resembles a Black Clark Kent, but on the gridiron is a superhero, a Fran Tarkenton/Harry Houdini escape artist clone, I’m fairly certain we won because fellow long-sufferer Harvey Rodgers donned his magic hat at the beginning of the fourth quarter when we outscored the Tigers 10-zip.
So thank you, Harvey (and LaNorris and Coach Beamer and everyone else on the staff).
Yay, us, for a change.
PS. And, dear reader, if you’re lucky enough to be the area, here’s an invitation for you. Please RSVP, though. Cheers!
[1] For those unfamiliar with the upstate South Carolina agricultural university, “Clemson” is pronounced CLEMP-son, not CLEMS- son. The P is invisible.
[2] To paraphrase one of my muses, Mary Flannery O’Connor, “Don’t ever overestimate the intelligence of your readers,” I included that rather tedious catalogue of historical events to suggest that the outcome of annual football games are not matters of serious discourse. But I lie. I spent almost the same degree of worry about yesterday’s contest as I did about this month’s presidential election.
You Do Hoodoo 