Letters to the Editor
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From Yertle the Turtle, by Dr. Seuss
The book was dedicated to the Bartletts of Norwich, Vermont and for the Sagmasters who lived in Ohio~
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On the far-away Island of Sala-ma-Sond,
Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond. A nice little pond. It was clean. It was neat. The water was warm. There was plenty to eat. The turtles had everything turtles might need. And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed. (skip to the last page)
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Then the little old worm gave his head a small jerk. And he dived in his hole and went back to his work. from the Big Brag story.
Good night.
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A favorite poet
on women:
No More Clichés
Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.
Enchanting smile
Any man would be under your spell,
Oh, beauty of a magazine.
How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
To your obsessive illusion
To your manufactured fantasy.
But today I won't make one more Cliché
And write this poem to you.
No, no more clichés.
This poem is dedicated to those women
Whose beauty is in their charm,
In their intelligence,
In their character,
Not on their fabricated looks.
This poem is to you women,
That like a Shahrazade wake up
Everyday with a new story to tell,
A story that sings for change
That hopes for battles:
Battles for the love of the united flesh
Battles for passions aroused by a new day
Battle for the neglected rights
Or just battles to survive one more night.
Yes, to you women in a world of pain
To you, bright star in this ever-spending universe
To you, fighter of a thousand-and-one fights
To you, friend of my heart.
From now on, my head won't look down to a magazine
Rather, it will contemplate the night
And its bright stars,
And so, no more clichés.
Octavio Paz
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Anonymust
Ages ago, I posted something about this theory that I have that it's really women who want sex and men who want intimacy, even though the culture says it's the opposite. If you look at it all inside-out, it seems clear that women are conditioned by the culture to think that the only way they can "legitimately" have sex is by having an intimate relationship, and that men have been conditioned that the only way they are "allowed" to have intimacy is through sex. Unfortunately, one requires a longer relationship than the other... and there we are.
Those members of each sex who don't play by these rules are usually considered traitors to their sex, or subversive, at a minimum.
Very thought-provoking approach. I don't know if it's my unusual upbringing, but racial and gender conflicts have always struck me as just so incredibly... pointless and tiresome. A lot of it really does have to be learned. Luckily, this means that much of it can erode with the progressing eras. I know a few people who have at least one blatantly racist parent, and yet have rejected those attitudes, to the best of their ability.
I don't consider myself "enlightened." "Enlightened" implies some kind of achievement. I just lived by my mother's example (marrying and dating outside her race, and defying gender stereotypes), and the rest just is. I know I'm tempting cheesy/partisan here, but this is a lot of the reason why Obama really resonates with me. I'm not the same exact combination of races as he is, but I can definitely empathize with growing up straddling lines. I also think he represents, in the best of ways, a healing, merging spirit.
I have gay friends, lesbian friends, and am married to a woman of a different race (the benefits of living in an urban area). The same-sex couples I know are the most ordinary, loving couple I know. My marriage is as loving and full as any other. I just don't see what is the big F-ing deal about any of these "issues."
Not to trivialize people who struggle with them. Everyone is, to some extent, a product of their own experiences. I only pray that people at least try to see the common humanity in each other.
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I love Dr. Seuss
And Yurtle was one of my favorites.
Can you imagine the book Geisel would write about the current press?
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anonymust@6:56
as a parent of children from ages 9-22 ( (what was i thinking?) your take on the focus of educators to teach down resounds. this is a distincly liberal position that has this old boy questioning his politics at times.
my family is hosting a german exchange student, bright kid. but he immediately affected the compton banger look. he did not understand when i tried to explain the origins. in fact he wears a belt!
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jaklos: I love paz
WOW!!
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Distinctly
there!
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@ jkalos
It's a good question. My answer is that the one doesn't preclude the other. There's no doubt that statistical predictions of human behavior in the aggregate are accurate. That's how polls work, and I suspect that's also why old geezers like myself are often willing to listen to certain kinds of earnest discussions -- between two teenagers puzzling over the motivations of a member of the opposite sex, for example -- only part way of the way through before moving on.
On the other hand, mysteries remain at the level of individual behavior, and surprises like the collapse of the Soviet Union can occur when the statisticians working for the manipulators and propagandists outsmart themselves by measuring the wrong things, or in the wrong places; when there is, if you like, no intelligence in the intelligence. Oddly, this occurs because the measurer is almost always forbidden by his employers to measure himself, that is to say the ideological nexus in which both he and his employer are embedded.
As I've said before, this is why we still need philosophers as well as social scientists. For ages, philosophers have been tormented by the infinite regression implicit in human consciousness. Studying it has given them insights social scientists are reluctant to credit, because, I think, doing so would unnecessarily complicate their findings.
Or, as a French sociology graduate student said to me some 45 years ago, Really, whatever you may think, these sociologists are just a département of the police.