Blithe Spirit, the Blog

Rev. Jeremiah Wright came to poet Maya Angelou’s birthday party at Chicago’s black Catholic cathedral and made a big hit:

“When he came out, people literally went wild,” said St. Sabina’s pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger.

Did they have far to go?

That said, how wild did they get literally?  Lost all control?  Began to thrash about and chew on things?  Did Father Pfleger go literally wild with them, and if so, doing what?

Chicago is a toddlin’ town, we know that.  But just how literally wild can you get and get away with it?

Before there was Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School on Boul Wash, there was Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High, and before that, Emerson grade school. There still is the Emerson Library at Brooks. Old names fade away. This Emerson fellow bears looking into.

He was America’s chief public intellectual, to use a hot phrase of a few years ago, in the first half of the 19th century-”America’s greatest idealist thinker, America’s most peculiar thinker,” said the late James Tuttleton of New York University. He gave speeches and wrote essays, and people paid attention to him. So should we, especially Emerson students, teachers, alumni, parents, and anyone else who lives or ever lived or will live in Oak Park.

There’s more more more of this by me at the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest.

In a crazy, mixed-up world, good advice from Refdesk’s thought of the day, something from the eminently quotable Emerson:

“Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, or accept another’s dogmatism.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Open mind but not so open that everything falls out. Something like that.

Congr. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D) on Don & Roma this morning (WLS-AM) presents the Obama campaign as engine of black empowerment, citing 400,000 unregistered black voters in S. Carolina and another 400G+ in Florida and counting on black identification with O.  SC, “historically red,” will become blue, he expects, benefiting Dems in process of arousing (coralling) black electorate.  Having his father’s worldview a la 60s activism, he sees this as a movement, even when it’s politics.

He’s still his father’s son in another respect, mangling the language with such solecisms as being careful not to enter “delicate waters” and noting the impulse to “lob Howitzers” at one’s political opponent.  He’s had top-drawer exclusive Eastern prep school education but still uses words as ideograms or Rorschach blots, sounding genteely ignorant as he does it.

Those delicate waters recall the ladies repairing to Bath for bodily restoration in the 19^th century.  As for lobbing a Howitzer, that’s Incredible Hulk stuff.  Can’t be done.

The perils of blogging for mainstream reporters is demonstrated here, not in the conclusion but in the spelling of — what?

If the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s 100 Club dinner is any bell weather – Barack Obama will handily win here.

What kind of weather?

Sarkozy of France as risk-taker who relishes life on the edge, a “human bomb,” in the New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik serves up edgy writing such as is relished by the magazine-reading intelligentsia cum cultured despisers:

This makes his aura in France very different from his aura in America, where no French personality since Brigitte Bardot has been such a projection screen for wishful dreams and onanistic fantasies.

Onan, we hardly knew ye.

Everything’s alleged these days, as newspapers try to be even-handed but are ham-handed instead.  But Terry Armour on Comcast sports just spoke of “alleged dogfighting allegations” regarding NFL star Michael Vick.  That’s what I call being cautious.

Update: It’s catching.  Reader B. reports that an hour later, a woman on CNN said much the same thing.  Or so Reader B. alleges.

From Hit and Run, Reason Mag’s staff blog, “What Does ‘Homeland’ Mean to You?”: Listener complained on NPR about use of “protecting the homeland.”

I wasn’t alive during World War II, but I associate “the homeland” with Nazi propaganda. It’s fascistic and offensive.

Better to say “U.S” or “America,” she said.

For science writer Ron Bailey,

the word “homeland” conjures a kind of antediluvian primitive nationalism (tribalism) based on blood and soil, not a people united by their devotion to political ideals like liberty and free speech.

Not enough is made of this volk culture that led Germans to the national-socialism trough.  Comments on the blog include favoring “domestic” instead.  Opposing it to what, however?  Defending or protecting America is the point.

Asked if he would write about Virginia Tech, Christopher Hitchens avowed “no interest in it,” but said he might (he did, at Slate).  More to the point, I think, is his comment about us:

My heart sinks when yellow-ribbon events occur, if that doesn’t sound too cynical. What one needs in this society is less sentimentality and more stoicism.

Perfect.

A recent online (members only) discussion of how to save newspapers in our digital age considered perils and advantages of digitilization. Left out, and maybe irrelevant considering the Decline of Taste and Reason in our time, was an editorial rather than technical solution to the decline of newspaperdom, namely to write tighter.

Newspapers such as Chi Trib, what I’m most familiar with, lets people go on and on, leaving unedited and uncut the writer who knows what people ought to know and will tell them regardless of people’s willingness to be told, or at least told so much. The writer knows what’s best for people and supplies it. He must have space or his professional dignity is compromised.

This is not counting those who very carefully use much ink saying something that requires it, which is of course where editorial judgment comes in, i.e. taste. 

Meanwhile, however, readers have turned the page and it’s readers one, newspaper nothing.