Random Notes from a Crank

If there is no one in the porn industry working on a spoof of Moscow Don and the Stormy Daniels affair, filmmakers should be ashamed of themselves. 

And that statement begs the question: Are there any porn filmmakers who can be shamed? 

This much is clear: Moscow Don is a consummate buffoon. 

I have about 130 pages to go to finish Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It's quite good and provides a much needed history of Reconstruction that K-12 and college classes neglected from me. 

I'm not entirely through the whole of the biographer's coverage of his presidency, but one of my only gripes about the book is that perhaps it needed to cover more about what was going on with Native Americans during his administration. The horrible crap happened late in his second term, but I wanted more analysis of why Grant acted the way he did toward Natives and why his decisions led to destruction of their lives and culture. 

I did learn that Grant was a big proponent of the separation of church and state, a principle I have in common with him. Here are two statements from speeches he gave in 1875 that should clearly show where he stands on public education:

• "Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school ... Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church and the private school support[ed] entirely by private contribution. Keep the church and state forever separate."
• The US should "establish and forever maintain free public schools adequate to the education of all the children ... irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions; forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school-funds, or school-taxes ... in aid ... of any religious sect or denomination."

These intelligent statements, however, conflict directly with how Grant wanted to Christianize Native Americans.

Regardless, if I were a voter in the 1860s-70s, I would have voted Republican because they (mainly the "Radical Republicans") cared about voting rights and protections for black folks. Democrats, in contrast at that time, were for the hokum that was/is states' rights, which was just cover for returning the US to white supremacy. 

Music Friday: "Never Mind" & "Shooting Dirty Pool"

I'm halfway through Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements, which I'll probably prattle on about in a "Stay Postive" post in the future. 

The only other music artist biography I've read is one about Woody Guthrie, so it's not often I read major long form work about musicians. But The Replacements are one of my favorite bands of all time, a fact you'd know if you've been reading this blog for some time. 

See the following: 

• Random Thoughts on Music, 2009
• Music Friday, 2009
• Left of the Dial, 2010
• Music Friday, 2010
• Music Friday, 2012
• Music Friday, 2013
• Music Friday, 2013
• Music Friday, 2014

Anyway, here's a couple of tunes from Pleased to Meet Me. The first is mostly about Westerberg trying to apologize to Bob Stinson, one of the founding members of the band who was kicked out the band prior to recording that album. The second song is about sleazy music venue owners. 

Enjoy.

Random Notes from a Crank

One method the Cubs' owners might get around having trouble with the ridiculous rooftop owners is purchasing the rooftop businesses. 

While I'm still skeptical the Cubs will make the playoffs, they sure are more interesting to watch this season. The past few seasons were brutal. They weren't fun to watch. 

I'm currently in the midst of reading Bill Pennington's Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius. When Martin was manager of the Twins, he pulled off a triple steal. I wonder if Joe Maddon has ever thought about doing that. 

The past few years I've gotten into a routine of reading a trio of biographies during late spring/early summer, and the Billy Martin book is the last of the trio. Madison's Gift and a biography of Thomas Hart Benton preceded the Martin biography. 

Here's Benton's controversial Persephone. I viewed this painting when I visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum when I lived in Kansas City. 

If you're a fan of wolves like me, you'll enjoy this video about the wolves in Yellowstone and how their introduction to the park helped improve forests, increased the songbird population, attracted beavers, helped the rivers, and in general improved biodiversity.

Stay Positive: Biographies

I've gotten into biographies again. This week I finished Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie: A Life, which by most critics' accounts appears to be the definitive biography of that troubled bard. I've always enjoyed his lyrics, but I had little knowledge about his life story. He was a typical example of the genius type who people quickly recognized as a powerful artist, but God he was a horrible father and husband. 

One quotation from Guthrie that Klein uses at an opportune time in the book is this one: "A man's most basic character, most basic wants, hopes, and needs come out of him in words that are poems and explosions." 

Now I'm on to Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. While I'm only about a third of the way through the book, I wish Meacham would have provided more details about his work in the Virginia House of Burgesses and his ill-fated tenure as Governor of Virginia, but I realize that the author only wrote a one-volume biography. If he gave me the kind of detail I'm hankering for, I would probably need to read a multiple-volume biography of Jefferson. 

As founding fathers go, I've always been drawn to Jefferson. Over a decade ago, I read the entire Notes on the State of Virginia and selected letters in a large volume edition that collected a big chunk of Jefferson's writing. I've found it interesting how people from various political stripes interpret Jefferson how they want to interpret him. 

For the left, he's a protector of individual freedoms, especially his various statements that lean toward a strict separation between church and state. He valued reason above everything else, a man of the Enlightenment to his bones. As he wrote his nephew, "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear" (qtd in Meacham p. 169). Since Jefferson was essentially a deist, he was friendly with Thomas Paine after that fellow published The Age of Reason, a book that showed Paine as an apostate. 

As much as folks today take umbrage that Jefferson owned slaves, considering that he was part of the wealthy planter class in Virginia in the 18th century, I think it's highly improbable that he wouldn't have owned slaves considering his position and means of wealth. It's not like he tried, as a Virginian no less, to root out slavery through various moves early on in his political career, all moves that didn't work at all. In 1769 in the House of Burgesses, he tried to make it legal for individual slave owners to be able to free slaves. They put the kibosh on that idea quickly. He also tried to persuade leaders for gradual emancipation and deportation back to Africa (an idea Lincoln considered heavily if I remember right), which was a very progressive position for its time, but that didn't happen. Of course, if anyone has read the early drafts of the Declaration of the Independence, he didn't have good things to say about the peculiar institution of slavery and slave owning (and also made similar statements in Notes on the State of Virginia) and laid the blame on England and George III. They cut all that out of the Declaration, of course. Later on he fully supported the Ordinance of 1784, which would have terminated the expansion of slavery into new US territories, but the bill didn't pass because a Congressman from New Jersey didn't vote because he was sick.  

Of course, there's his relationship with Sally Hemings that we can mostly speculate about. And it's a shame we don't know more about it. Jefferson burned a great deal of the  correspondence between him and his wife, so it's no surprise historians don't have much to go on about the Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship other than that she traveled with him to France and back and all that DNA evidence. But there's also the creepy fact that Sally Hemings was his wife's half-sister. I'd have to drink a lot of Madeira wine, Jefferson's favorite, to make that seem right. Even with such lubrication, I still don't think it would. 

With all that out of the way though, I'm looking forward to reading about his work and arguments with Hamilton during Washington's presidency, his disputes with his friend John Adams (who was painted a little more positively than he deserved in the HBO series for my liking), and his trials and tribulations as President. 

Vote Jefferson in 1800.