Cold

Snow on the Coburg Hills.

Brrr.

A Date That Will Live in Symphony

1970 - The Beatles record as a band for the last time.

Happy Birthday Cindy Lee

1961.

Natal felicitations.

No Blog Today

Spent all day tweaking the blog template, which might be called 'blog facilitation' (if such were needed as résumé filler). Matching typeface on "Recent posts" was not the easiest task ... switched to Park Avenue font, below the salt.

Courage.
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One Door Closes One Door Opens

Janus, our two-faced Host -- greeting us in the foyer of 2007 -- bids us look back and forward.

For me, I have passed my thirtieth year as a pro. I am suffused with odd minutiae of that time: a new Cat Stevens CD, a "new" Steeleye Span CD that I picked up on Amazon UK. The remembrance of Gerald R. Ford's ascension and presidential campaign. Of Richard Nixon's internal exile, and Watergaiety.

I saw the "tall boats" footage of the Bicentennial, and recalled the late reporter Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On [- Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic; Penguin, 640 pp., Trade Paperback], and his deduction that AIDS had reached New York City on those tall boats, during the Bicentennial festivities. The plague ships in our harbor. The Masque of the Red Death.

America has changed a lot since I headed for Los Angeles in the spring of 1976. But there is a resonance that begins 2007 for me.

And for the USA, there is that resonance of Watergate and Pardons and Plumbers, oh my. And Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who were Ford's Chiefs of Staff. This whole Bush mess really is Nixon's revenge.

A lot of people think that it's over. Think that the election decided something. No. These Bushies have never obeyed the law, and have dared anyone to stop them. We have given our assent to putting the brakes on.

If you study your history, this is a very dangerous time. No American president has failed to gracefully step down when the time came, but then again, no American president has ever been a convicted felon before, either.

Those three funerals seem to have emphatically punctuated the end of an era. What end that may be, we will know in the fullness of time, but we're too close to it right now. Still, with the funerals of James Brown, Gerald R. Ford and Saddam Hussein, a period has ended. Another begins.

What that will be, I cannot say. But we can't go back and we can't stay where we are. So we might as well go forward.

Courage.
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Shauld Auld Auldquaintence Be Fauldgot

Yesterday's wall-to-wall funerary festivities was like Bowl Games on New Years' Day.

Saddam videos teasingly released. Recovered from the Internet.

All three cable news outlets carried the James Brown Memorial from Augusta, Georgia. Fox dropped out first, then MSNBC. CNN carried it through the end of the Jesse Jackson speech, just as Dick Gregory was striding forward to the podium, leonine in his white mane.

And then Gerald Ford -- with the Twilight Zone moment of Dick Cheney talking about integrity as the catafalque was again resurrected in what seems more akin to the burial of a Roman Emperor than a former U.S. President. The coffin's surreal tour through the capitol building. A spectator collapsing during the choir's rendition of "America the Beautiful." Evil Dick and Evil Lynne Cheney looking suitably out of place amongst decent folk.

And I realized -- as Speaker Hastert and Veep Cheney and Senate President Pro Tem Ted Stevens eulogized -- that it was also the funeral of the congressional Republican majority.

A sea change, like the James Brown funerary. And, compare and contrast the openness and warmth of the Brown service to the tight-assedness (and lily-whiteness, now that I think of it) of the Ford Extravaganza.

Don't get me wrong. Gerald Ford was, finally, a decent man. But I think he'd have blanched at the imperial fuss they're making. The bloody funerary that commenced in 2006 won't finish up until 2007, for crying out loud.

And then Saddam was buried within 24 hours, as religious law decrees.

And that ended an era as well.

But I couldn't help but watch the almost gleeful bloodlust of the talking heads and recall the Roman arena.

Saddam has been strangled. And in a particularly shabby and almost chaotic manner, as the footage comes out. CNN, true to its word, censored the clip at the moment that Saddam dropped on the end of the rope.

The White House issued a statement that Bush had already gone to bed by (what was in Austin 8 pm, but in Washington, D.C. was 10 pm) the time of the execution and issued some kind of statement that a tough road lay ahead.

And if he thinks that anyone in the world believes that he, G Dubya Bush, who has obsessed about killing Saddam for at least six years now, went to bed, bored, etc. etc. , well, perhaps there are people who believe that.

There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, as well, I'm told.

But I have a strange intuition that the whole casual garroting of Saddam was an ugly event that we'll all look back on and say, "Dear Ghod, what were we thinking?" as 2006 ended with a sepulchral chime that yet reverberates with funereal chill.

I hope that 2007 will be a better year than 2006.

But I'm stocking up on provisions and flashlight batteries, just in case.

Courage.
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