[Rhodes22-list] test

[mtroy at atlanticbb.net]

We wimped out. We got up this morning early, checked the 
forecasts and decided Sat. might be a better day. Hope you 
had a good boat show anyway.

Mary Lou


On Fri, 6 Oct 2006 18:32:30 -0700 (PDT)
  "L. Sailor" <watermusic38 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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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