dreaminginthedeepsouth

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“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: one day, the black will swallow the red”

~ Mark Rothko

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Pete Townshend | Let My Love Open the Door (HQ)

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[From a plane]

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"How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?"

~ St. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213-268)

[Ian Sanders]

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Etienne-Jules Mare: Vol de Héron (1883)

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“He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot … He found himself flying among stars and planets …”

― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist

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So Nice (Samba de Verao) :: Eliane Elias

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Today marks the 85th Birthday of “In The Mood”- Glenn Miller’s signature tune. This, the definitive version of it, was recorded August 1st, 1939 by Miller and his Orchestra at the RCA Victor Studio in New York. The song was written by Wingy Manone, based on his own “Tar Paper Stomp”. with lyrics later by Andy Razaf, and this track was arranged for Miller by Joe Garland. It was recorded before Miller, in 1938, by Wingy Manone, then by Edgar Hayes, but nobody much remembers those versions. Miller’s version is THE version and again, his signature song. It is in the Grammy Hall of Fame and was selected by the Library of Congress to be in the registry of significant recordings. The single, with “I Want To Be Happy” as the B side, was the all time best-selling swing instrumental. “In The Mood” is a track full of horn riffs, sometimes battling… saxes and trumpets and trombones… HUGE hit for Miller… high energy and with that risqué title…. It became emblematic of the swing era… a standard, and very much of that time… but it is also timeless… enduring.

[Mary Elaine LeBey]

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The prescient wisdom of Octavia Butler. I was happy to learn that her final resting place in Altadena was not destroyed by the Eaton Fire.

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New York Magazine

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Benoît Ferradini

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“This is the answer! The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving. The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing. The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go. The answer is not in covering and hiding, but in touching and sharing. The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling. The answer is not in death, but love. Not death, but life. Not death!”

― Theodore Sturgeon, Godbody

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 16, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 17, 2025

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was "the single most important economic issue of the day." But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

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“National Geographic” :: Award Winning photograph of the year.

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“the / mercy of perfect sunlight after days // of dark,will climb; will blossom: will sing (like / april’s own april and awake’s awake)”

— E. E. Cummings, from “precisely as unbig a why as i’m,” E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962, Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition (Liveright, 1994)

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This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.

—Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, July 4, 1861

[Robert Scott Horton]

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Photo by John Cohen

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“I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don't believe that anymore. There's myself and there's my song, which I hope is everybody's song.” –Bob Dylan

[Memphis Muse]

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Every Grain Of Sand

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In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear Like criminals, they’ve choked the breath of conscience & good cheer The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay

I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame And every time I pass that way I always hear my name Then onward in my journey I come to understand That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

[Not Dark Yet]

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Yama holding the wheel of life ::  wellcomecollection.org

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All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

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The Temptations - The Way You Do The Things You Do