News Notebook Friday 9.17.21
A Week-in-Quotes "Skinny" Edition
Weekend greetings and welcome to this Week-in-Quotes “Skinny” version of newShrink. This is where I list — without much comment or “connective tissue” — some quoted passages that caught my ear as interesting, inspiring or fun from this week’s haul of news and feature material.
Later, when I’m fresher, I will post revisits with some of them to connect-the-dots on news issues and soul/psychology perspectives. On the mom-eldercare front this week, we are dealing with some non-emergency hospitalizations to try and get several issues resolved and re-stabilized. She’s not delighted but OK, and for me the extra time and personal-care attention involved are manageable. My brain, however, is still too fried and full of healthcare admin., logistics and finance/insurance stuff to yet attempt connecting of ideas, complex thought… (or even many complete sentences?!)
A note: Something Week-in-Quotes “Skinny” editions won’t do is lift and include isolated quotes without depth perspective or broader context on complex, significant or even traumatically sensitive news events and issues. Such coverage and soul-psychological perspectives as this week’s important Senate hearings with elite gymnasts regarding the FBI’s (mis)handling of the Ray Nassar sex-abuse cases merit, and will appear with, more appropriate gravitas — either as single-topic Shrink-wrap pieces or as major focus in a full weekly Notebook.
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Now leading off the Week-in-Quotes:
stranger things…
As in, I am sure there are stranger things than my quoting former President George W. Bush favorably as inspiring, or much at all on purpose. But the last time I can imagine would have been with his 2007, ultimately unsuccessful, comprehensive immigration reform policy initiative. Yet here we are, with his appearance and speech I found moving on the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at the Shanksville, PA, site of Flight 93.
“As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home.
But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
[Now let’s “hold the tension of both opposites” on this and consider one scathing historic perspective.]
President George W. Bush’s now-ironic (and worse) victory photo op aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. — From columnist Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times, ”George W. Bush 2021, Meet George W. Bush, 2001”:
“Bush was noteworthy for the partisanship of his White House and the ruthlessness of his political tactics, for using the politics of fear to pound his opponents into submission. For turning, as he put it on Saturday, ‘every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures.’
Bush won some praise on Saturday. A typical response came from Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian and frequent fixture of cable news, who said it was an ‘important speech…’
… In his eight years as president, George W. Bush launched two destructive wars (including one on the basis of outright lies), embraced torture, radically expanded the power of the national security state and defended all of it by dividing the public into two camps. You were either with him or you were against him.
As much as he has been rehabilitated in the eyes of many Americans — as much as his defenders might want to separate him and his administration from Donald Trump — the truth is that Bush is one of the leading architects of our present crisis. We may not be able to hold him accountable, but we certainly shouldn’t forget his starring role in making this country more damaged and dysfunctional than it ought to be.”
[A shift in tone to the art world…]
“‘I can’t seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses.’
From the late Paul Cézanne, explaining his habit of filling his sketchbooks again and again to draw and paint the same subjects and themes.”
— Transcript from CBS News, 9.12.21.
“Still Life with Cut Watermelon” (c. 1900) by Paul Cezanne. Pencil and watercolor on paper. (Copyright Peter Schibli: Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.) “For him it was all about the effort. He would return to the same subjects again and again, forests and trees, fruit and faces, bathers in and out of water.”
The New York Museum of Modern Art is to host a new landmark exhibit of Cézanne’s drawings and watercolors this fall.
[On to the recall election of the week…]
“‘No’ is not the only thing that was expressed tonight…We said ‘yes’ to science. We said ‘yes’ to vaccines. We said ‘yes’ to ending this pandemic… We said ‘yes’ to diversity.”
— CA Governor Gavin Newsom’s acceptance speech after overcoming a GOP-led recall effort. (From CNN.)
[For the easy laugh on the above…]
“…Yes, and nothing says ‘diversity’ like a rich white guy named ‘Gavin.’”
— Stephen Colbert, The Late Show, Wednesday, 9.15.21.)
[A young widow, an annually worn wedding gown, and a Ground Zero cause…]
“We don’t build over crying souls. This is hallowed ground.”
Monica Iken, widowed after only 11 months’ marriage, became a devoted, bulldozer-facing Ground Zero Memorial advocate after her bond-trader first husband, Michael, died in the second tower on 9/11. Now remarried with children, each year she repeats the ritual of ironing her original wedding dress and wearing it to the memorial site she helped to create. Iken warned in 2002 that any use of the land besides a memorial would be unacceptable.
“I think wearing the [wedding] dress makes a statement, that I was happily married the day he died…”
— From CBS News 9.12.21.
[About that highest bench in the land…]
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer talks with Stephen Colbert about lasting harm from politicization of the Court and future hope for our institutions — the themes of his new “very small” book: The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.
— Browsable under the Justice’s name and “It’s Up to the High School Students” (Late Show segment on 9.15.21.)
“I think people, particularly younger people — because the future is in their hands, not mine; it’s up to high school students, college students — I think that they look at many of our institutions and they lack confidence. I can understand that; there are reasons.
But if there is too much distrust… of the institutions, people cannot live together in society. So they have to work out ways where they can improve the institutions, ways they can talk to other people, ways they can bring their arguments forward…”
[And what’s hopeful:]
“In the Court, gradually over time — over lots of time… I have come to realize: This a big country. There are 331 million people. There’s every race, every religion, and they have learned to come together and live together in one country. And [before the Court] we see all of those people in front of us, working out their major differences — under law, and not with guns and other things that would be really inappropriate.”
[And, Dante…]
From Judith Thurman’s excellent essay on current times and new Dante translation and biography in The New Yorker, “Reading Dante’s Purgatory While the World Hangs in the Balance.”
“Dante was a good companion for the pandemic, a dark wood from which the escape route remains uncertain. The plagues he describes are still with us: Of sectarian violence, and of the greed for power that corrupts a regime. His medieval theology isn’t much consolation to a modern nonbeliever, yet his art and its truths feel more necessary than ever: that greater love for others is an antidote to the world’s barbarities, that evil may be understood as a sin against love, and that a soul can’t hope to dispel its anguish without first plumbing it.”
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lend me your ears… for quotes?
This harvesting of the week-in-quotes has me thinking of how much power the well-crafted spoken word has to move minds, hearts and literal action. That’s why journalists, speechwriters, and many of us readers so value writing (and reading) that’s “for the ear.”
So here’s a call for you: Please capture and send me anything you hear/see in print, speech or visual that catches your ear and says something vital for you. (This includes when the lure is just the sounds and images of the words.) No need to say much, just an idea what grabs you about it (and please try to include the source I can browse if not the full link.)
Which brings me to recall the astonishing “writer’s ear” that animates the entire body of work — for example, a long-beloved annual Charlotte Observer New Years’ tradition — by a gifted veteran journalist, friend and reader:
Kudos to Lew Powell!
Each New Year’s week for years, maybe decades, section fronts of then-still-fat and satisfying Sunday Observers would serve up Lew-collected and curated annual treasure. With Lew doing the writing, after scouting about the newsroom for material all year long, each item in these “year-in-quotes” and “the year’s wackiest or most memorable stories” pieces became a hilarious or piercing little gem far outshining whatever the original story or context had been. (Low-key Lew may not know what a thrill and score it was for reporters to have stuff mined from our stories ever show up in his year-end creations.)
Lacking anything like his magic at this, with this call for quotes I hope Lew will take the hint and send over some nuggets — or maybe a New Year’s batch of them?!
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Finally, in a week where belly-laughs are especially welcome I’ll close with this piece I found hilarious, news-timely and creatively about pitch-perfect. This one may call for some caveats (or maybe a plain brown wrapper):
If you’re offended, unamused or upset by crude sexual innuendo, with a LOT of sophomoric plays on male body parts, even if they are newsworthy and well-executed, you’ll want to NOT GO HERE!
However, if you have raised or lived with teenage boys for any length of time over the past couple of decades, you’re likely fine to enjoy and may even find it tame.
— Browsable as “Nicki Minaj Presents ‘Super Balls,” The Late Show Tuesday 9.14.21.
And, that is all I have. Talk to you soon!
🦋💙tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
Post Notes.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/11/politics/transcript-george-w-bush-speech-09-11-2021/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3FhBuo8WyG4iMP2fbIkaFQ_LBPmLIT8C87fu9WfX0yW3XFMbrf6hcr7uY
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/paul-cezanne-exhibit-museum-of-modern-art-cezanne-drawing/
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/videos/politics/2021/09/15/gavin-newsom-california-recall-election-night-speech-sot-vpx.cnn
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (9.15.21) browsable on You Tube.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/september-11-monica-iken-wedding-dress/