A Gerson Column, Gary Johnson, Reading, Hillary's Health, the Great American Songbook and What Comes Out of Donald's Mouth

Gerson on the Conservative Media ... Gary Johnson's Brain, If He Has One

  Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson is no liberal.  Last week he wrote a column about how right wing media has throttled the traditional conservatism of the Republican Party.  Quite properly, the G.O.P.’s goals have always been involved in governance.  That is the arena in which political parties operate.  But right wing media (Fox, Limbaugh, Drudge, Breitbart, etc.) operate in the arena where ratings and profits are the goals.  They’re actually in the entertainment business, not the political arena!  Historically, such media has been useful in mustering support for the G.O.P., but this time around, they have overwhelmed and taken over the Party, nominating one of their own creations as the Republican Presidential nominee.  Read Gerson’s column by clicking here.

The next time you hear someone call Hillary Clinton “corrupt” or “crooked,” confront them with the question of what basis they have for such insults.  Corrupt and crooked people break laws and Secretary Clinton has not done that.  Repeated investigations by Congress and by the FBI, spurred on by Republicans, have failed to prove that. 

Contrast her behavior with the frequently sued, adulterous real estate developer who admits to contributing to politicians in order to get special treatment, who doesn’t pay his bills, and uses every trick in the book to try to get around the law.  For months, while Hillary Clinton has been held to the fire over emails and her family's charitable foundation, Trump has been given a pass on his shady financial background.  I don't know if his debt, his companies' bankruptcies and his financial dealings involve the man in the moon, the Mafia, China or Russia, whose leader he seems eager not to offend.  Until his tax returns are made public, these questions remain unanswered, and no one is really putting the heat on him about it.

Sadly, because of the extreme conservative media Gerson writes about, enough naïve and gullible people accept these baseless insults to Secretary Clinton as believable facts.  And if you ask them where they got their information, they will cite the kind of highly questionable sources Gerson writes about and express a distrust of all other media. 

  

The tragedy of this is that the hijacking of the Republican Party by these scoundrels, who really have no experience nor interest in governance, has left it with few outlets through which it might voice its traditional conservative values.  He’ll never admit it, but Gerson will probably vote for Clinton or stay home on Election Day, as will millions of self-respecting conservatives. Read the column.  Click here.

And as for the alternative for anti-Trump Republicans of voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for President, he totally disqualified himself from consideration for the Presidency when he was asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, “What would you do about Aleppo?”  He stupidly replied, “What’s Aleppo?”  Most charitably, he might have heard the question wrongly, thinking it to be “What would you do about a leppo?”  Well, I don’t know what a “leppo” is either, even possibly an acronym for something with which Johnson wasn’t familiar, as he later suggested, but it would have taken me about two seconds to recognize that I had misheard the question about the Syrian city which is being bombed into smithereens by the Syrian army and air force, killing thousands of Syrian civilians.

 
 Aleppo Street Scene

Johnson either had never heard of the place or has a mind too dull to quickly recognize that he had misheard the question. No one, even Libertarians, want that kind of person in the White House.  Either way, from this I conclude that once made aware of this revelation of his shortcomings, anyone who votes for Gary Johnson is even more naive than those who are voting for Donald Trump.  

Indeed, we have a lot of naive and gullible people in this country and they are the target of those in the media about whom Michael Gerson is writing.  So please read Gerson's column if you have not already done so. Click here to do so.  And I am not throwing these words around loosely.  They fit.  Go find yourself a Trump supporter to talk to.  That will prove it.  

I am far more forgiving than Hillary Clinton who referred to these same Trump supporters I am talking about as "a basket of deplorables."  A very small minority are indeed "deplorable" but the vast majority are simply gullible and naive. There's a difference and it is unfortunate that Secretary Clinton did not grasp it last week when she spoke these  words.  But we now find out (see below) that she was under medication when she said so.  But what were her speechwriters on?  Certainly not on their toes.
Jack Lippman

                                    

                                           

The Phone Call I Won't Get

Hillary Clinton’s campaign blew it when she practically collapsed at the scene of the 9/11 Memorial program in New York on Sunday.   We all know she was hoarse and coughing last week, but what we didn't know was that two days earlier, she had been diagnosed with pneumonia for which she was being medicated and that she was ignoring her doctor's instructions to stay home on Sunday.

  

Hillary will recover from this, but the real damage is not any question about her health which is and will continue to be a matter of open public record (contrary to her opponent's), but rather in her campaign’s loss of credibility because of their silence about the pneumonia diagnosis for two days, their permitting her to attend the event against doctor's orders in the first place and maintaining six hours of silence after the episode.

I may not be a highly paid professional (I work for free) but I could have done better than whoever is calling the shots for her.  The same thing goes for her stupidly calling a bunch of naive and gullible people "deplorable" as I pointed out just above.  But I am not holding my breath waiting for a call from Chappaqua..

 The Clinton residence in Chappaqua

JL 

                                             
 

An Historic Book Plate - Reading!    

The other day, I happened to glance at a copy of the Alumni Magazine from my son’s college.  The issue was totally devoted to books, the value of reading, books that the college’s faculty had written, the college’s library and reading resources available to people today. That reminded me of growing up in Newark, N.J., where anyone who frequented the Newark Public Library during the middle of the last century might remember the book plate that was on the inside front cover of every book in the Library and its branches.  

  

Newark Public Library as it looks today

A few years ago, I actually had contacted the Newark Public Library to see if I could get a copy of that book plate.  It turned out that they aren’t using it any longer, and most of the staff didn’t even remember it.  One “old timer,” however, did and went into the “stacks” and came up with a copy for me, which I now pass on to you.

    John Cotton Dana, incidentally, was the Librarian brought into Newark by that Library’s founders in 1901 and who established the Newark Library system with which I and many others grew up.  Here’s the book plate.  Good advice, huh?

JOHN COTTON DANA’S

TWELVE FAMOUS RULES

ABOUT READING

                      1   Read

                      2   Read

                      3   Read some more

                      4   Read anything

                      5   Read about everything

                      6   Read enjoyable things

                      7   Read things you yourself enjoy

                      8   Read, and talk about it

                      9   Read very carefully, -- some things

                     10  Read on the run, most things

                     11  Don’t think about reading, but

                     12  Just read

___________

The Public Library

Newark N.J.

  

JL
                                    

A Premature (?) Obituary

We like to think that the “Great American Songbook,” that melodic collection of music from the memorable Broadway shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Lerner and Lowe, Cole Porter ... and innumerable other composers who wrote songs made famous by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole, will live forever.

But will it?

  

Right now, there are very few radio stations carrying that kind of music (only one down here in Palm Beach County – Legends Radio at 101.3 FM) and when I drive out of town, there are usually none.  That may not really matter anymore because nowadays, people listen to music on many other kinds of electronic media.  Oh, there are channels on Sirius radio which carry it, but they are lost among the many other choices available via satellite. For me, seeking out this kind of music on the internet and listening to it there is more of a historical research project than an exercise in enjoyment.  I still have my CDs which I can play at home, but the newest cars on the road only handle one disc rather than six like the older ones did.  What we thought of as something eternal, that would always be around, is getting harder and harder to find.

Here in South Florida, we once had a pianist and conductor named Bob Lapin who led the Palm Beach Pops Orchestra, which was dedicated to the preservation of the “Great American Songbook,” but he has passed on.  Michael Feinstein, pianist, singer, chronicler of Gershwin brothers’ music and acolyte of the late, great Rosemary Clooney, now heads that orchestra, but it is in conspicuous decline as are the remaining groups that still play these tunes, often in the “big band” format made famous by Glen Miller and the Dorsey brothers.   Sadly, to the last couple of generations, Millennials and Generation Xers, the “Great American Songbook” is practically unknown.  Today’s “musicians” have even stolen or "appropriated," probably out of ignorance, the titles of songs from the “Great American Songbook” and used them as names for their grossly inferior offerings.  Examples are “Dancing in the Dark,” ‘Time After Time” and “I Know that You Know.”  I am sure there are many more.

  

Let’s digress for a moment.  Current pop singer Rihanna sings a song called “Dancing in the Dark” which you can hear by clicking right here.  Bruce Springsteen has a memorable one too, which clicking right here will bring to you.   But neither is anywhere close to the wonderful, original “Dancing in the Dark” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz from the 1931 Broadway show, The Bandwagon. I guess the copyright on the title has run out.  Hear this great song sung by Tony Bennett by clicking here.  

   You tell me which on the three is filled with lasting truth and beauty and which are merely transient “garbage” soon to fade away? 

Same thing goes for Cyndi Lauper’s bombshell hit, “Time After Time,” which can’t hold a candle to the Sammy Cahn/Julie Styne 1946 song of the same name.  Check out Frank Sinatra’s rendition of it by clicking right here.

    If you insist on listening to the Cyndi Lauper song, it easy to find on the internet, far easier than the Sinatra rendition of the 1946 song which I hope you have listened to by now.  

This is what “The Great American Songbook” was all about, and it looks like we are losing it.

The Broadway musical stage, source of much of the “Songbook,” has not really contributed anything to it since the final decades of the last century.  Go ahead, hum a tune from “Hamilton” or any of the last dozen Tony winners for Broadway musicals. Chances are that you probably have drawn a blank.  Now try one from “South Pacific.” See?  And the concept of a “band” being something more than two or three electric guitars and a drummer and perhaps an electric keyboard has been lost.  Trumpets? Clarinets?  Saxophones?  Don’t ask.

Try to remember the popular music of the first three decades of the Twentieth century.  You can’t.  It has disappeared into oblivion, along with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. I am afraid that is where the “Great American Songbook” is headed too.  Its disappearance would be a sad occasion.  But if you can manage to find it, so long as it is around, please listen to it and to enjoy it. 

I know that at least one of the followers of this blog is an executive in the music business.  I hope she will share some of her thoughts on this subject with us.

A footnote:  Opera, on the other hand, has managed to survive and thrive over the centuries.  The last hope for the “Great American Songbook” is that some of its classic Broadway musicals like Porgy and Bess, Kiss Me Kate, Showboat, South Pacific, West Side Story and The King and I might have a rebirth as part of the operatic repertoire.  Then, at least, songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” might survive as arias.

JL

                                    

Analyzing What Comes Out of Trump's Mouth

Here’s a video which is well worth watching, Jimmy Kimmel interviewing Donald Trump on his late night show in December of 2015.  But also, in this video, the language Trump uses to answer a question by Kimmel is dissected and meticulously analyzed. 

It looks to me like the language any salesperson is trained to use to establish rapport with and win over the person to whom he is making a pitch.  Something like what a shady real estate developer might use to sell some property which is underwater.  The analysis even breaks down his language showing at what school grade level his words are appropriate, and compares it to the language used by other candidates at the time.  The grade level scores of the candidates’ language ranged from the fourth grade to the high school level.  Check out the video at by clicking right here.  It is a very educational six minutes and 53 seconds.

JL 
                                                  

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