[Rhodes22-list] test

[L. Sailor]

Brad,
Thank you for that enviable weather report...in
contrast to that, up here  and in Annapolis (at the
Boat Show) we had @2" of rain, blustery (winds to
20k), chilly. Not so many people...but a goodly
number, many in flipflops & shorts.. (?).
Elton & Stan were soaked & huddled in the cabin w/the
pop-top cover on...but cheery as usual .

elle

--- Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bill,
> 
> Let me be the one to break the silence.  Today is an
> absolutely beautiful
> day in Tennessee, a perfect day for sailing.  The
> sun is shining, the wind
> is blowing, and the temps are in the 70's, but alas,
> I'm playing Mr. Mom.
> Since when did Fall Break start?  I don't remember
> that one as a kid.
> 
> Here is something from the morning's reading that
> summarizes my thoughts
> quite well (from the WSJ) about this whole Foley
> mess.  Why should anything
> shock anyone anymore?
> 
> I feel so sorry for those Amish parents.  A long
> time ago when I was into
> raising Haflingers (an Austrian draft pony) I met a
> lot of Amish at the
> national shows.  Good People!
> 
> Brad
> 
> ---------------------
> 
> 
> Return to the
>
Article<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/tides_of_confusion_have_washed.html>
> 
> October 06, 2006 Is This Mark Foley Thing Really
> Happening?*By* *Daniel
>
Henninger*<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/daniel_henninger/>
> 
> <http://www.opinionjournal.com/>Is this Mark Foley
> thing really happening?
> 
> I woke up early the other morning after a bad dream
> about Muslims routinely
> blowing up and torturing other innocent Muslims. You
> know the world has
> turned upside down when your dreams spill over with
> real problems and your
> working hours are filled with the most fantastic
> stories.
> 
> It's hard to believe that the Foley/instant
> message/congressional-page/GOP
> meltdown story has run for a week. Other than the
> slaughter in Amish
> country, is anyone aware of anything else of note in
> the world that happened
> the past seven days? Dive deep enough beneath the
> Foley flotsam and you
> discover reports that North Korea may be preparing
> to conduct an underground
> nuclear test. China and South Korea are at this hour
> trying to forestall the
> Hermit Kingdom's nuke test and no doubt could use an
> expression of support
> and outrage from the American political
> establishment. Sorry, they're busy
> reading Congressman Foley's 1995 email traffic.
> 
> We see also where Europe's envoy to Iran, Javier
> Solana, threw in the towel
> after "endless hours" of talks with Iranian
> President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
> who on Wednesday told a crowd screaming "Death to
> America" that sanctions
> wouldn't stop Iran from enriching uranium. Whatever.
> The big news in
> Washington yesterday morning was that the House
> Ethics Committee sat down
> "behind closed doors" to think about Mark Foley.
> 
> We know when we're beaten. Bowing to the gods of the
> news cycle, let us
> undertake the great questions of the moment. Where
> does post-modern American
> ethics place Mark Foley's homosexuality on a scale
> of 1 to 10--a 1 being
> just another gay guy and a 10 being a compulsive,
> predatory sex offender?
> What might fall in between seems to have confused
> Denny Hastert, two
> newspapers, one TV network and the FBI. In the
> event, Mr. Hastert, as the
> point man, is being driven from office for having
> failed, in hindsight, to
> recognize the obvious.
> 
> On this score, Mr. Hastert has our sympathy. There
> is much in American life
> that doesn't seem "obvious" anymore. Call it the
> transgendering of reality.
> 
> This compulsion to ambiguity is the reason that both
> the politicians and the
> reporters writing about the Foley affair have been
> describing what the
> congressman did as "inappropriate." Inappropriate is
> the word you use when
> describing behavior that falls on the scale between
> 3 to 7. Mark Foley seems
> to be the kind of guy who runs up a high phone bill
> calling 1-800-SEX-GUYS.
> That might have qualified as a 10 some 50 years, but
> not anymore. Former
> Congressman Gerry Studds had sex in 1973 with a
> House page. He said it was
> consensual. Even now, this is a 10. In Florida,
> doing a 10 probably earns
> you a johnboat trip to the swamps. But in Mr.
> Studds's Massachusetts
> district, it earned him five more trips to Congress.
> 
> Mark Foley is on his way to oblivion after his 15
> minutes of infamy. As luck
> would have it, the originator of the increasingly
> true prediction that in
> the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes,
> Andy Warhol, was the
> subject of an excellent American Masters documentary
> a few weeks ago. It was
> impossible to watch this unsparingly honest account
> of Warhol's career and
> the era spawned from the 1960s onward without
> thinking about the culture we
> inhabit today.
> 
> Andy Warhol didn't create the culture we have today.
> He was merely among the
> first to recognize that the magic carpets were
> arriving, and always a fast
> learner, he knew how to ride them. Whatever older,
> earthly restraints on
> personal behavior existed, they were falling away
> fast back then. You could
> get away with things. So you did. And did. And did.
> 
> As a result, we live now in an era awash in cultural
> confusions. The tides
> bring in weird phenomena, like the Mark Foley story,
> leave them on the beach
> overnight, then drag them back out to sea before
> there's time to make much
> sense of what we saw. As often as not, we don't even
> try. The Web and
> digital technology have ramped up the cultural
> velocity to warp speed.
> MySpace, YouTube--the once-bright line between the
> private and public
> spheres has evaporated.
> 
> This has had an effect on the way we think, or
> don't. Clarity--thinking
> clearly--is harder than ever to achieve, because
> clarity assumes a degree of
> general social agreement about things. For instance,
> time was that most
> people would agree that putting a crucifix in urine
> and calling it art
> doesn't qualify as anything but bad thinking. But
> no, we had to have a big
> argument over that. At the end of her current stage
> act, Madonna makes
> herself the central figure in a crucifixion scene.
> No problem. Most
> reviewers simply describe it, and move on.
> 
> Challenge over the past 40 years became a more
> powerful social value than
> clarity. One of the byproducts of challenge is that
> you don't have to think
> very much--about the point or the consequences. Just
> do it. The act of
> challenge is its own justification. And one of the
> byproducts of constant
> challenge is aggressive confusion. Another seer of
> the Sixties, Bob Dylan,
> saw what was happening by 1967: "There's too much
> confusion here, I can't
> get no relief." Denny Hastert, meet the joker.
> 
> Looking back again at Ric Burns's Warhol
> documentary, it is hard not to see
> in retrospect the inexorable dominance over time of
> the cultural
> frivolousness that emerged in those years. Politics
> is especially
> vulnerable. A political culture--the politicians and
> their attendant
> media--that would allow itself to set aside
> everything else to spend a week
> with the Mark Foley "scandal" is frivolous. They
> look like dupes.
> 
> So the Foley comet hurtles forward, no doubt into
> the weekend, like some
> 
=== message truncated ===


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