Running for Your Life: The Underappreciated Value of Being Smart

In his remarks during the unveiling of the Triborough Bridge (Now call the RFK Bridge), super-bureaucrat Robert Moses took pains to note writings from Samuel Johnson in delivering a five-star diss to Washington, DC, counterpart, Harold Ickes, in 1936.

Moses referred to the “finest pieces of polite vituperation in the annals of English literature” when alluding to the “help” he received from Ickes …

Here’s what Moses was getting at, as per “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro:

Johnson to Lord Chesterfield, after Chesterfield sought to represent himself as Johnson’s patron seven years after rebuffing the scholar’s request for financial support for his great dictionary project:

“Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when has reached ground, encumbers him with help?

“I hope it is no very cynical asperity to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.”

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Late 60’s?

Running for Your Life: Kind Approaches to Humanity? Really?

Notes on the road, from a diary note, June 10, 2019:

Kind approaches to humanity are not in keeping with commercial publishing.

So call it vanity publishing, the private realm.

How the “other” will never have purchase in secular life.

If I have a “calling,” it is in the spiritual realm. What I feel when running, doing tai chi, drawing, writing poetry.

To give is to give away parts of yourself on a spectrum that runs from bright visibility – think brightness on a mobile phone screen – and invisibility.

It is not lost on me that what I’ve done in my writing is to entertain the idea of honoring those who keep the faith, hold the center, be not the resume one but the order of service one, he/she whose destiny is to give until they vanish into sweetly, scented summer air.

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Mid- to Late Sixties?

Running for Your Life: Warning Labels in Politics

We have warning labels on cigarettes, vaping gizmos, where hot coffee is served in cafés. These things will be harmful to your health.

We tell buyers of packaged goods what’s in them. Are they gluten-free? How many calories? Is that “natural” product, well, made from whole foods? Or loaded with preservatives and sugar? We care about what we consume.

I’ve encountered few arguments across the political spectrum that these kinds of regulations are unnecessary. Indeed, they’ve become “normalized,” as the kids like to say. We expect to be informed, in minute detail, about the stuff we eat and drink.

Okay, so let’s take this example and apply it to what we consume in political advertising. If we are serious about keeping our democracy healthy, as in, insuring that when a vast majority supports basic rights, like, access to reasonably priced health care, good, fully funded schools for our children, assault weapons off the streets, then we should pay to regulate political advertising, using a nonpartisan government agency that issues warning labels on political advertising.

Soon, we are going to be bombarded like never before by political advertising. Untold millions will be spent through “dark money” channels in order to attempt to shape public opinion.

And, yet, there is no way of assigning a “democracy health” grade to the message. It’s not the place here to detail how the warning classifications would work, although fact-checking of the message(s) would be involved, and similarly, a label that assigns a tag like “rhetoric” or “bombast” could be entertained. Say  a message contains 5 percent fact, 80 percent rhetoric and 15 percent bombast would be one way to go.

You get the idea. No matter what, something needs to be done. And a nonpartisan regulatory agency to try to get to the truth in political advertising would be the place to start.

Next: Running for Your Life: Kind Approaches to Humanity? Really?

Running for Your Life: Joseph Campbell in 1955 … !

Joseph Campbell offered graduating seniors at Sarah Larry College more than sixty years ago these uplifting words:

“To know that you are a sparrow and not a swan; or, on the contrary, a swan and not a sparrow...gives great security, stability and quality of harmony and peace to the psyche...”  If you are always wondering what you will become, "you will soon become so profoundly implicated in your own psychological agony that you will have little time or energy for whatever else, and certainly no sense whatsoever of the bliss and wonder of being alive."

Now those are words to live by …

Next: Running for Your Life: Warning Labels in Politics

Running for Your Life: Country Lines

The idea is to keep your eyes, your ears open … What did Henry James say? Strive to be someone upon whom nothing is lost …

“In the morning light, a caterpillar is hanging by a thread,

bobbing and squirming and zig-zagging in the summer heat.

‘now that’s core strength,’ K says, then

‘poison, don’t touch it,’

with your finger, exposed flesh.”

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“We’ve slashed, machete’d dead

limbs, rangy branches, topped by thin-point leaves,

like a desert plant, but no, this is too true north for olive trees,

And behind, the hidden figures of (his/her) place,

Mustard-yellow willow and the dead-spacey little green apple tree,

Two hummingbirds touch down, flit to orange blossoms, a gold finch, fat cardinal,

the telltale ‘cheep,’ what was covered, enmeshed, the mountain stream bank,

a wand touch upon the River Styx, where darkness, fright had spilled, before we cleared the brush

and let the light in.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Joseph Campbell in 1958 … !