Mr President,
In the early days of the presidential campaign season of 2008 I remember looking at the available choices and wondering who, among a fairly impressive cast, would be the man or woman who could stimulate a bit of interest – or even enthusiasm – in an electorate exhausted by disappointments.
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In light of all the recent revelations about government agencies spying on American citizens — and more importantly, all the government’s prevarications and half-truths about the level of detail and the purposes to which that information is being put — I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a reasonably surveillance-proof browser on my computer.
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When I was in the fourth grade, we studied Alabama history from a textbook that would probably raise a few eyebrows, were it to reappear today.
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Some time ago I heard about a couple of guys who were going to use helium balloons to send up disposable cameras with instructions for whoever finds the cameras to use them to take pictures of themselves and their lives and then send the cameras back.
Then, as now, I thought the idea was a singularly bad one, mainly for environmental reasons: the balloons were almost certainly going to end up choking a sea turtle or an albatross when they blew out to sea and came to rest somewhere in the Atlantic.
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When I was a child in Montgomery, Alabama, during the very early sixties, I can remember certain areas around town that spent much of the year buried under a green and hairy shroud that covered telephone poles, buildings, billboards, trees, parked cars, slow-moving pedestrians: the dreaded kudzu.
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Today I’m doing something a little different, in recognition of Memorial Day: I’m inviting a guest to speak to my readers. My mother was a child living at Hickam Field on the Hawaiian island of Oahu when it was bombed by Japanese planes on December 7, 1941. Needless to say, she remembers the occasion well, and has offered to write about it here. I’ve added a few sidebar notes for historical context, and edited very slightly for length, but otherwise, these are her own words. Enjoy!
I’ve recently been browsing through various online resources for artists — how-to’s, advice about materials, online portfolios, etc. — and I’ve noticed something that disturbs me: When did “Learn How to Draw” come to mean “Learn How to Draw Natalie Portman in Star Wars Makeup”?
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Years ago, while living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, my partner and I made the acquaintance of a gentleman who was considered throughout the neighborhood to be a gardener of some skill. When we finally received an invitation to venture past the ten-foot privacy fencing into his little slice of paradise, we jumped at the chance to see what a Florida garden was supposed to look like.
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Today, May 11, is the anniversary of the birth of painter Salvador Domènec Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol — better known to most of us as Salvador Dalí. Had he lived, he would be 108 years old today, an accomplishment that he might have celebrated in some way involving camels, scuba gear, an IBM Selectric typewriter, and oregano.
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I’ve always considered myself something of a political animal, but I think this time I’ve wandered into the wrong zoo.
I admit that there’s a tendency, at my age, to find all kinds of unfavorable comparisons between life today and in my youth: the movies are not as exciting, the music is not as original, the tomatoes are not as tomato-ey — and the politicians I see today all seem to have come right out of the same factory somewhere on the outskirts of Shanghai.
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