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Exhausting, Exhausted Before Trump took his golden escalator ride, life was different. Then, even if I thought a candidate would make a terrible office holder, I rarely thought he or she was objectively a bad person. Even LBJ, and he was pretty bad on a personal level, or Nixon, who was pretty bad as a leader. One consequence was, while I might have thought folks who supported “the other guy” naive or misguided, I didn’t think of them as bad either.
But Trump by any measure is actually a bad, bad man. And he’s bad in many, many ways. So, that makes my response to his supporters quite a problem. In my life, there are folks I love who definitely will vote for that bad, bad man. I know those folks are not themselves irredeemably bad. But I cannot help but wonder, “What is wrong with them?”
And that is one important reason this is all so exhausting.
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RepublicBank A nice appreciation of Dallas' Republic National Bank building. I enjoyed working there for many years.
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RIP, Kris Kristofferson Well, I woke up Sunday morning With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad So I had one more for dessert Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes And found my cleanest dirty shirt And I shaved my face and combed my hair And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day I'd smoked my brain the night before On cigarettes and songs that I'd been pickin' But I lit my first and watched a small kid Cussin' at a can that he was kickin' Then I crossed the empty street And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken And it took me back to somethin' That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way On a Sunday morning sidewalk Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there's something in a Sunday That makes a body feel alone And there's nothin' short of dyin' Half as lonesome as the sound As a sleepin' city sidewalk Sunday mornin' comin' down In the park, I saw a daddy With a laughing little girl who he was swingin' And I stopped beside a Sunday school And listened to the song that they were singin' Then I headed back for home And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin' And it echoed through the canyons Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday On a Sunday morning sidewalk Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there's something in a Sunday Makes a body feel alone And there's nothin' short of dyin' Half as lonesome as the sound As a sleepin' city sidewalk Sunday mornin' comin' down
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Zac Crain, RIP. What a writer. What a loss. “He laughs, staccato, huh huh huh, like the engine of a lawn mower trying to catch.”
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Audere est Facere Micro.blogger Tottenham Hotspur fans (if any, besides @frjon and me), might take some heart from this article in the Evening Standard. COYS ⚽
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O Liverwurst, Where Art Thou? Sad memorial in the NYT. I loved liverwurst on rye with mustard and red onion slices from the late ’70s Stanford Coffee House. I still wonder why people crossed to the other side of the street after I’d enjoyed one.
At Zabar’s, 1970 - Credit: Michael Gold/Getty Image
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Cahokia Jazz Loved the audiobook of Francis Spufford’s amazing novel, read by Andy Ingalls. It’s a great listen, and Ingalls is an excellent reader. But I recommend also getting a print copy for the great maps, family trees, etc. (Check your library!) Dynamite as a pair.
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The Finder Found | Edwin Muir
Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek
Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,
Catch sight some ordinary month or week
Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—
The gatherer gathered and the finder found,
The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—
And perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,
And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?
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More Mysterious
“By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins….
The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagines, the future far more mysterious than they know.”
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Preach, Jaroslav
Tradition is a good thing. It is traditionalism that is bad. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.
—Jaroslav Pelikan
(h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)
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Wild Wombats in the White House
... his entire industry is on pins and needles, terribly anxious about a Trump victory. I asked him if it’s because Trump is opposed to his industry on specific policy issues. He said no.
“That’s not it. It’s that Trump is crazy. That’s what we worry about.”
My friend’s business involves putting big chunks of money into long-range investments that already involve plenty of risk. The added risk of wild wombats in the White House with regulatory power over their deal is way too much.
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