From Robert A. Heinlein's
classic novel, Glory Road:

Today's birthday:

Esther Dyson

In
response to this morning's Wizard-of-Id example (see 1:22 PM entry) of
a political Bob-Hope-style Christian wisecrack (a style more apt to
make me gag than laugh), some further quotations:

I need a photo-opportunity, I want a shot at redemption. Don't want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard. — Paul Simon

Laurance Rockefeller

The Washington Post on the gigolo candidate in Boston Monday:

"In
a lunch speech to more than 1,000 women who had donated $500 to $2,000
to his campaign or the Democratic Party, Kerry was joined on stage by
his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry....  He focused his comments on
improving health care and creating more jobs -- notions that he said
'are not Democratic values. They're not Republican values. They are
American values.' "

Let us pass over Kerry's ignorance of the difference between desiderata (things considered desirable) and values (principles, standards, or qualities considered desirable).

A definition of "values" in a different sense, one that might appeal to the late St. Laurance Rockefeller, dead on 7/11, who majored in philosophy at Princeton:

"In
an artistical composition, the character of any one part in its
relation to other parts and to the whole — often used in the plural:
as, the values are well given, or well maintained."

-- Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

Rockefeller
is, I hope, now in a place where he can discuss this definition with
Bach as it applies to, say, that composer's "Goldberg Variations."

Here below, another sort of Goldberg Variations seems appropriate to the times we live in ...

The following composition was inspired by Whoopi Goldberg's remarks at last Thursday's Radio City Music Hall Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Sources:

Ike Turner, Bad Dreams album,
Mom's Apple Pie album (X-rated),
and Log24 entries of
July 9-10 and July 12.

Update of 3:17 AM July 13, 2004:

A place in Heaven next to St. Laurance
seems to have been reserved:

Sequel

"J. S. Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' is a self-contained world, immersion
in which is transformative....

At the end of Variation 30, Bach writes simply 'Aria da capo.' I have written
it out for the convenience of the players. This recurrence of the Aria, after its
long journey through thirty variations and especially coming immediately after
the exuberant Quodlibet (Variation 30), is magical. It is the same Aria, yet subtly different: transformed."

Campaign Song

"All things return to the One.
 What does the One return to?"

-- Zen koan, epigraph to
   The Footprints of God,
by Greg Iles of
Natchez, Mississippi

"Literature begins with geography."

-- attributed to Robert Frost

Los Angeles Times
2:38 PM PDT, July 9, 2004 --

Boyz N the Hood:   
    
Kerry, Edwards Emphasize Values


    
By Matea Gold, Times Staff Writer

BEAVER, W. Va. -- Anticipating a full-frontal attack by President Bush, Sens. John Edwards and John Kerry offered a vigorous defense of their character today, arguing they are more aligned with the concerns of the middle class as they accused the administration of having hollow values.

For further details, see Ann Coulter
on the Shyster and the Gigolo.

For a more philosophical approach to
culture and politics, see a Log24 entry
from October 29, 2002:

From today's obituary in The New York Times of R. W. Burchfield, editor of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary:

"Robert William Burchfield was born Jan. 27, 1923, in Wanganui, New
Zealand. In 1949, after earning an undergraduate degree at Victoria
University College in Wellington, he accepted a Rhodes scholarship to
Oxford.

There, he read Medieval English literature with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien."

For more on literature and Wanganui, see my entry of Jan. 19. 2003, from which the following is taken.

Wrestling with Words


"Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something
a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...."

-- Bernard Holland, The New York Times of  Monday, May 20, 1996 

From today's New York Times obituaries:

R. W. Burchfield died Monday. He was "an internationally renowned lexicographer who wrestled
the Oxford English Dictionary into the era of 'sexploitation.' "

In other news....

"Although Mr. Kerry had told the crowd at the New York fund-raiser that
'every single performer' on the bill had 'conveyed to you the heart and
soul of our country,' his campaign on Friday sought to distance Mr.
Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, from the anti-Bush jokes, lyrics and statements of some of the entertainers.

But it declined to release a videotape of the performance at which Ms.
Goldberg, a bottle of wine in hand, made an extended sexual pun out of
the president's surname.

[Also on Friday...]

At an afternoon airport rally in Beaver, W. Va., a town of 1,378 people,
Mr. Kerry attached the word 'value' to virtually every line of his
standard stump speech...."

Somehow, a different word comes to mind.