Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Presidential Rock

No president has performed heavy metal or even any good rock. Or rap. We have had some insipid piano playing, some mediocre saxophone, and a good version of Amazing Grace. But no real rock ‘n’ roll. Or rap. And I believe the country would be better if the president rocked. Or rapped. However, after extensive, made-up research, I have found that many presidents did make music. Some examples:

Of course, the hits began with George Washington and his surprising novelty, Does the Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor in the Dentures Overnight?

This was followed by Thomas Jefferson’s unclassifiable, but revealing, song that was huge in the South, Love in Chains. The third president had a follow-up success in the North, Set My Love Free?  

It was Dolley Madison who had a hit that referred to her husband’s constitutional amendment career with a refrain still resonating today: “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy Mad, Are those rights just a fad?”

Andrew Jackson sang now forgotten plaintive Appalachian songs accompanying himself on the acoustic dulcimer.

Then there was Millard Fillmore.  No one knew who he was, so no one knew if he sang anything.

Abraham Lincoln accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln on the concertina as she sang, Re-United. Lincoln himself on the late-night tavern circuit tried to set With Malice Toward None to music, but, of course, he never finished it.

Rutherford B. Hayes performed with disastrous consequences still felt today, Reconstruction is for Suckas.

The insomniac William McKinley sang with some success his Mr. Tariffing Man. It was only after the full effects of Smoot-Hawley were seen in the Depression that the lyrics were expanded to include: “that evenings empire has returned into sand/Vanished from my hand/Left me blindly here to stand. . . .”

William Taft, who could not lie, was too obvious when he sang,”I like big butts.” The country back then, however, apparently did not.

Woodrow Wilson seemed convincing when in 1916 he sang “War! What is it good for?” And then he led us into war.

Warren Harding sang old family “darky” songs that would be considered offensive by many today but would be banned by others as DEI.

Calvin Coolidge did not sing but he was a trained mime. He did not get enough recognition for his Man Walking Backwards Against Heavy Wind although he was overpraised for miming handcuffing the Boston Police strikers.

Not surprisingly, FDR could not rock. His only memorable song was The Wheels on the Chair Go ‘Round and ‘Round.

Eisenhower avoided music. He thought that the public would demand from him martial tunes, which he hated.

Kennedy largely spared us those Irish jigs where four or eight bars are endlessly repeated until the fiddler gets tired and stops.

Not many people know that W wrote many lyrics, but they were so filled with malapropisms that no one could understand them.

And now under Trump we have endlessly repeated I Am Just a Fool (in Love) ((with Myself.))

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

It’s been a long time. In 1841, fifty-two years after the Constitution went into effect, John Tyler became the first vice-president to ascend to a vacant presidency. Only two dozen years later, Andrew Johnson succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln. In 1881, Vice-President Chester A. Arthur became President as the result of the murder of James A. Garfield. Two decades later, Theodore Roosevelt became President because of the assassination of William McKinley. Twenty-two years later, Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency after Warren G. Harding’s death. After another twenty-two years, Harry S. Truman became President upon the death of FDR. Eighteen years later, in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson became President after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And only eleven years later, after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Vice-President Gerald Ford became President. Since then, however, no Veep has moved up to a vacant presidency, the longest stretch in our history since Tyler took the high office. With the possibility of an aged president who seems to indicate declining cognitive powers and a gun-toting population, are we due again for a vice-present to become president?

The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution lists procedures for declaring a president unable to carry out the powers and duties of the office. The Vice-President then becomes Acting President. Rumor has it that people around JD Vance, perhaps funded by Peter Thiel, are already studying this provision so if Trump wins, six months later Vance can be president.

A perceptive analyst said: “The people for public trusts are the people who can be trusted in private.”

Some Trump supporters, who, when asked about some of Trump’s problematic, sometimes frightening statements, say that Trump does not really mean it when he says that he will use the army against Americans, get rid of Obamacare, impose 100% or higher tariffs, etc. In other words, these Trumpistas support Trump because theyse don’t believe what he says. Amazing.

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” Bertrand Russell.

I have friends and acquaintances who ask how, at this point, anyone could vote for Trump. Many of these people, however, would find it close to impossible to vote for a Republican even if the Democratic candidate were Bob Menendez or Eric Adams. Of course, there are many people who truly support Trump, but there are many who simply can’t vote for a Democrat. Some are voters who we might call hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Trump, but since Trump heads the Republican ticket, they will vote for him. The crucial time is not now. It was in 2016 when he became the Republican standard bearer. Trump did get more votes than any other single candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries, but he did not get a majority of the ballots cast. However, under Republican rules, he got the majority of the delegates. Eight years ago, a majority of Republicans did not want Trump, and since then, a majority of Americans overall have not wanted him. But he may be our president again.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Tax Season

A news story a few months back suggested that some of our President’s fortune was amassed by cheating on taxes. Another story suggested that although Jared Kushner has an income significantly higher than mine (ha ha), he has not paid any federal income tax in a while and that his failure to do so may have been legal. The stories made few waves. If you even noticed them, you may have quickly forgotten them. Stories about the rich cheating on taxes or avoiding them are commonplace. Every so often, we learn of someone prosecuted for cheating on taxes, but a common reaction is that person simply got too greedy, and we don’t give it much thought.

On the other hand, legal tax dodging is expected. People are chumps if they don’t seek to pay the least amount of taxes legally required, right? And if they push the envelope too far, and the IRS determined that they underpaid, we don’t normally think of them as bad guys. We expect people to walk on that tax-no-tax line. (Of course, with the big cuts to the IRS over the last decade, the chances of being caught for underpayment is increasingly unlikely.) We certainly don’t want our “public servants” to be chumps, and therefore we don’t criticize them for seeking to avoid taxes. It would probably count against candidates for public office if we saw their tax returns and they “stupidly” paid too much to the government.

But when I hear about the tax dodgers, I think of the famous passage from John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

I have mixed feelings about this oft-praised statement. It just isn’t right, or at least it is misleading. It suggests a dangerous false dichotomy, and it comes close to presenting a totalitarian sentiment that the overriding responsibility of citizens is to serve the state.

Our country does not exist simply to be supported by its populace, or at least our government does not. Our government was formed not for the citizens to serve it but for it to aid its citizens in leading productive, happy, prosperous, and safe lives. Kennedy was wrong to suggest that you were doing something wrong if you asked what the country was doing for you. It was almost as if JFK forgot the Preamble to the Constitution, which states that the United States was being formed to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty. . . .” The government is there to serve the people.

There is nothing wrong in asking what your country does for you, but it should be asked with open eyes. Many, because they don’t use food stamps or grow federally subsidized crops, think that the government does nothing for them. Presumably they don’t work in a defense industry, don’t have government assisted flood insurance, don’t get social security or medicare, don’t have federal student loans, don’t work for the federal government, don’t drive on the interstate highway system, and don’t bank at an FDIC institution. And, of course, neither do they benefit from our national defense.

Our government helps us in so many ways that we seldom think about it. Try a thought experiment: However successful you are, imagine that you have the same intelligence and skills but had been born and raised in Cambodia. How successful, how prosperous, how happy, how safe would you be compared to now? Doesn’t the United States and its government give you a lot?

President Kennedy really should have said that it was all right to ask what the country does for you, but only if you accept honest answers to the question. With the blessings we get from living in the United States in mind, then we should ask what we can do for our country. If we get much from the country–and we do–we should give back to the country.

How does one give back to the country? Too often all we think about is military service, but there are many different means of governmental and non-governmental public service. And we also give to our country when we obey the law and when we pay our taxes. So why our cynical attitudes about taxes? If you volunteer for the military, you are patriot. If you volunteer extra taxes, you are weird. If you evade the military when there is conscription, you are considered unpatriotic. An art dealer, Mary Boone, was recently sentenced to 30 months for evading taxes of more than $3 million between 2009 and 2011.  (In case you are wondering, tax evasion prosecutions are rare and seldom severely punished. In 2017, 584 tax evaders were sentenced to prison with an average prison term of 17 months, according to a recent report in Axios.) Many in the art world and beyond gave support to her. Would she have received this support if they had seen her crime as an act to intentionally harm the United States, one that showed that she was deemed unpatriotic, one that made her akin to an Army deserter? A person who evades taxes, however, while having made a misstep, is not labeled unpatriotic. Military deserters may provoke the cry that they should lose their citizenship but not the tax evader.

And the tax avoider we actually applaud.

So. What can you do for your country?

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Supposedly when Margot Asquith met Jean Harlow, Harlow kept pronouncing all the letters in Margot.  In exasperation, Asquith finally said, “The ‘t’ in Margot is silent just like the ‘t’ in Harlow.”

“That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of desire.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The ad for a New York City restaurant said: “Farm to table Greek food.” I had some questions.

Because of recent movies and documentaries, clips are being played of the most famous passage from President John F. Kennedy’s Let’s-Go-Mooning Speech: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” Memorable. Inspirational. But piffle. No country, no one, should choose to do something because it is hard. Building a perpetual motion machine is hard. Turning lead into gold is hard. Hopping on one foot for twenty-four straight hours is hard. Their difficulty is not a reason to commit to attempting them. The easiness of doing something is also not a reason to do or not to do it. The starting point should not be the difficulty or ease of a project. The starting point should be whether the goal is worth the effort.

I sporadically post First Sentences. For whatever the reason, these are sentences that attract me. My standard is that it be the first sentence, and not more, of the introduction or the initial chapter of a book I am reading or one that I have read that is on my shelves. I don’t do research and find books that I have read but no longer have. If any such opening passages have intrigued you, please feel free to send them to me through the contact link so that I can post them.

A hurricane pummels a state rife with conservative politicians. These are the officeholders who, when running for office, label opponents as devoted to tax-and-spend, who decry Washington, who almost weep over Big Government. But in the aftermath of the storm they beseech Washington for tax dollars to be spent on them by big government agencies. Hypocrisy never seems to occur to them. Irony is beyond them.

The academic paper’s “basic premise appears to be that if you are truly stupid you not only do things stupidly but are in all likelihood too stupid to realize how stupidly you are doing them.” Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain.