Can We Talk to Our Friends or Do We Have to Include the WORLD Too?

but fust a little ketch up . . .
   Had an “interesting” Sunday. Wrote the review for the Springfield Classical Guitar Society web site, grabbed some groceries and brought my space heater back to the office from summer storage in the basement. Enjoyed the PBS Nature program and the recruiting video PBS ran about life on a US Navy carrier. It seemed an hour of “gee whiz, this is kewl” directed to high school sophomores to keep them from dropping out before visiting their recruiter.  After a short nap starting 30 minutes into it, I resumed work in the office, made decent progress and hit a brick wall. I couldn’t send email! After fiddling with it for more than an hour — NOT the work I intended to engage — I picked up my phone headset and found NO DIAL TONE! More fiddling and no joy.

So I missed the chance to sub teach today DANG IT! FInally made it to bed about 5 am and slept until 9:10 this morning. Drove in the rain to a public phone at Handy Pantry to call AT&T repair in a drizzling rain. I was moderately drenched by the time my button punching was done. Internet service was restored by 1:30 today, but I still have no phone, DANG IT!

Barack’s preacher made a lot of sense today, judging from sound bites from his National Press Club address.. It’s time some thinking hummin’ beans from all colors of the rainbow acknowlege that. I’ll go first.

If you think #43 violates our privacy by tapping our phone lines, that’s not the tip of the iceboig. We have lost the freedom to say what we believe when we are talking with people we consider friends, brothers and sisters of our culture and members of our clubs. Can ANY American speak the thoughts which are the product of his or her life so far to people considered his or her “own” without being assailed by people from outside the circle? Are we entltled to circles of our own?  You would demand the freedom for your circle. Why not allow me the same freedom for mine?

When I hear a poet or aspiring poet make fun of poets who write rhyming poetry, I hold him accountable only to those he was epeaking to at the club meeting. If a prose writer who doesn’t like poetry assails the bloke for disparaging rhymers, I am inclined to say, “You were not invited to this conversation, so please get the fring-frang away from our dialogue because —  though your rampaging vanity tells you otherwise —  we are not having our discussion  so you can bullywhank it.”

Reverend Wright said words to the effect. “I have been called unpatriotic. I served in the (service) four years. Does that make me a patriot?  Dick Cheney never served in the military. Is he a patriot?”

To NOT permit us — Methodists, poets, classical musicians, gardeners, Dale Ernhart, Jr. fans — to talk about our subculture to those who embrace it is to censor us in a way that not even #43 would support, at least as long as we’re all evanglists and like hai lai. Reverend Wright is more correct about more than politicians and spectators have conceded so far. Has he said some really idiotic things? Absolutely. Though he claimed to be a preacher in his remarks and separated that profession from “politicians,” he is very much the politician who must balance people the way judges balance the perceived intent of the Constitutiion. Unless we live in a cave, we are all politicians. He addresses his constituents from the pulpit. The rest of us address our intended audiences from pulpits of our own making.

Walt Whitman wrote, “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, or look through the eyes of the dead, or feed on specters in books. You shall not look through my eyes, either, nor take things from me. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”  John Wesley said almost the same.

Here’s an idea. You can talk to your friends without a Spanish Inquisition if I can talk to my friends as freely as you. Deal?

Seems like a deal to me. To you as well?

Live long . . . . . . and proper.