Tag: Thomas Jefferson

A Salute to Stan Freberg

 

Stan Freberg and Gong
An ABC television publicity photo of Stan Freberg and a gong. This photo promoted a February 1962 special, Stan Freberg Presents the Chun King Chow Mein Hour: Salute to the Chinese New Year.

Stan Freberg ( 1926-2015) was an innovator in radio production in the 1950s and later in television advertisements, and his achievements were in technique as well as in content. He wrote, produced, and acted in his own works and contributed to those of others. His radio skits in particular were well designed soundscapes which were ahead of their time at the same time that they were the last of their kind. With his short-lived radio show of the late 1950s, Mr. Freberg rang out the end of radio’s golden age of original programming.

The technical limitations of most radio playback equipment of the 1950s probably did not do justice to the skill of Mr. Freberg and his colleagues at evoking an ambience capable of putting listeners in an imaginary, but convincing place. The care Mr. Freberg and crew took in production helped set up the listener for off kilter and absurdist content, making it all the funnier. Where their professionalism truly shined was in the stereophonic comedy albums they produced, which stood a much better chance of being played back on equipment capable of faithfully reproducing every nuance of sound effects and comic voice acting than the radio shows.


Probably Stan Freberg’s best remembered work is the 1961 album Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years. This track is “Declaration of Independence: A Man Can’t Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days”, with Stan Freberg as Benjamin Franklin, Byron Kane as Thomas Jefferson, and Colleen Collins as Sylvia, a fictional character.

 

Had Stan Freberg been in his prime during the current age of podcasting he no doubt would have found the new medium well suited to his comic and technical skills. Similar limitations would apply for playback equipment, however, in that listeners using a smartphone without stereo ear pieces would not get the full effect of his satirical skits. Be that as it may, we are fortunate to have Mr. Freberg’s original recordings, and now with more ways than ever of listening to them. His brilliant satire shines through any medium, and his spirit of poking fun at our pretensions and reminding us not to take ourselves too seriously is the true Spirit of ’76, not any of the militaristic nonsense currently going on in the nation’s capital.
— Techly

An animation of “Yankee Doodle Go Home (Spirit of ’76)”, from Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years. Stan Freberg as Yankee Doodle and as Bix, the Hip Fife Player, Walter Tetley as the Young Second Drummer, and Shepard Menken as the Officer. Paul Frees was the Narrator.

 

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Heritage of Hate

 

The evening before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist marchers wound their way across the Grounds of the University of Virginia (UVA) in a torchlight parade. That demonstration caught city and university officials by surprise. The “Unite the Right” rally organizers had a permit from the city for a demonstration on Saturday, August 12, at a city park, ostensibly to protest the imminent removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. They made no formal arrangements with the university for their torchlight parade the evening before, on August 11. It was at the rally on UVA grounds that the marchers showed their true colors.

German American Bund NYWTS
German American Bund parade in New York City on East 86th Street on 30 October 1939; photo by New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer.

 

Chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jew will not replace us”, neither of which bear the slightest relationship to Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy, or the often disingenuously used slogan “Heritage not Hate”, but everything to do with Nazism, the marchers dropped any pretense they were gathered from around the country to promote a positive program of support for white culture in general, and for southern heritage in particular. They were gathered to instill fear and to vent hatred in the manner of the white supremacists of Nazi Germany before them.
The “Blood and Soil” slogan was telling because it came directly from the Nazi policy of promoting pure Aryan blood heritage over all others, and exalting ties to the native land, or soil, of which the Nazis had an expansive vision, since it included the grain fields of the Ukraine. That expansionism, seen by the Nazis as their birthright, was known as “Lebensraum”, or Living Space. All that has not even a tenuous relationship to issues of southern pride, for which the marchers were supposedly gathered. The anti-Semitic slogan speaks for itself.

The opening scene of the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, introducing a farmer, Mr. Cunningham, portrayed by Crahan Denton, when he visits Scout and her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, to partially repay his debt for Mr. Finch’s legal help.

The white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville this past weekend had no business being there other than the convenient rallying point of the removal of symbols of the Confederacy from public spaces. They wanted to vent their own petty grievances and hatred against a culture that is leaving them behind. They pretend that America was and is theirs to do with as they please, and that everyone else who has other ideas is an interloper and an enemy to be intimidated, beaten, and ultimately disposed of. The Native American tribes would have something to say about who belongs here and who are the interlopers. Hitler, for whom the American theft of land and expulsion and genocide of native peoples served as a model for what he wanted to accomplish in the Ukraine and in eastern Europe, would no doubt support this past weekend’s white supremacist warriors.

Later in the film, Atticus Finch, portrayed by Gregory Peck, holds off a lynch mob intent on dragging out of jail his client, a black man named Tom Robinson accused of raping a white woman. Mr. Finch receives inadvertent but effective help from Scout, portrayed by Mary Badham, who singles out Mr. Cunningham from the crowd, talking to him about personal matters like his property entailment. Mr. Cunningham is embarrassed by Scout bringing up his financial embarrassment in public, the matter which Mr. Finch has been helping him resolve, and Mr. Cunningham can no longer remain a faceless part of the lynch mob. Unlike the white supremacist mob gathered in Charlottesville, chanting “Blood and Soil”, Mr. Cunningham was a true man of the soil, and he was tied by family blood to his entailed property in rural Alabama during the hard scrabble times of the Great Depression. He was also capable of feeling shame, and therefore capable of redemption.

 

Robert E. Lee, the forgotten man supposedly at the center of all this, would have been befuddled by the slogans expressed at the torchlight rally. Thomas Jefferson, whose statue in front of the Rotunda at UVA was the focal point for the end of the evening’s march, would have been disgusted by the slogans and the people expressing them. Yes, both men owned slaves and were in that sense white supremacists themselves, but they had a grander idea of the world than to shrink it down to hating others as they might have hated themselves. It would have been beyond their dignity to portray themselves as victims and whine about the erosion of their privileged position, as those people supposedly gathered in Charlottesville to worship their graven images have done. Those people have a more fitting recipient for their craven idolatry, a man who died amid the ruins of his bigotry in Berlin on 30 April 1945.
― Izzy

 

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We the People

Tuesday the nation celebrates independence from the British Crown and eventual establishment of a democratic republic. That’s the story, at least. Of the independence part there is no doubt, because that is pretty straightforward. It’s the democratic republic part that doesn’t quite coincide with historical reality, and certainly not with what the United States of America has become today. Today it is an oligarchy, and looking back over the history of the country it becomes clear the inclination was always present.

 

The Founding Fathers were never for a broadly based democracy, instead leaning toward governance by a limited set of people – white males with property. Some Founding Fathers, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Washington among them, believed the democratic republic would be stronger if more people owned property, or capital, and therefore had a say and a stake in governance. Though they were rather wealthy men themselves, they would probably be horrified at the current state of income inequality in this country and how that has wrought havoc on the democratic republic they established.

Sprit of '76.2
Originally entitled Yankee Doodle, this is one of several versions of a scene painted by Archibald Willard (1836-1918) in the late nineteenth century that came to be known as The Spirit of ’76.

Suffrage has broadened greatly since the eighteenth century, but a vote for candidate A over candidate B makes little difference when both candidates are backed by the same small clique of financiers and corporate boards. Once the candidate is in office, he or she tunes in the oligarchy and tunes out the voters, at least until the next election. Of what use then is a vote when the person voted for doesn’t represent your interests when in office, will often in fact work against your interests? Strangely, people will vote for that person again two, four, or six years later.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood there is no real political power without economic power. Enactment of his proposed Second Bill of Rights is long overdue.

To regain political power, the people need to take back wealth; to regain wealth, the people need to take back political power. Hand in hand. Remember the capitalist credo: Money talks. We have the honesty of the Supreme Court to thank for enshrining in the 2010 Citizens United decision what everyone has always known, going back to the days of the Founding Fathers, it’s just that Washington, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson had the wisdom to understand the money should be spread around a lot more in order for the government to listen to we the people.
― Vita

 

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A Good Day for Swearing

 

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”  ― Abraham Lincoln*

Today is Inauguration Day in the United States, and a new president will be sworn into office by Chief Justice John Roberts with the following words from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”



“Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones.
A cry of protest from long ago that is just as relevant today.

It has become a tradition for presidents to use a Judeo-Christian Bible when taking the oath of office. There is no demand in the Constitution or other legislation to swear on the Bible, or on any book. People taking an official oath may legally place their hand on their heart, and many do just that. The third paragraph of Article 6 of the Constitution implies that an oath taker could use any holy book he or she desires:

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

When Keith Ellison, a Muslim, was elected to Congress from Minnesota’s 5th District in 2006, conservatives raised a fuss about whether the nation’s first Muslim elected to Congress should be allowed to take his oath of office using the Koran. In the end Ellison, a Democrat, used an English translation of the Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson.

What should be self-evident is that the words are what matter most about an oath of office, not the manner of taking it. How then to account for today’s outgoing President, a constitutional law scholar, signing into law the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, one section of which authorizes the president to order the military to arrest and indefinitely imprison people anywhere in the world, including American citizens? Today’s outgoing President now bequeaths that unconstitutional authority to the incoming President, a thin-skinned narcissist with a vengeful streak, the Tweeter-in-Chief. God DAMN it!
― Vita


“Dreams” by The Cranberries.
Like all dreams, this one is open to interpretation.

 

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