Real Green Shoots

Thanks go to Tim Sharp, Executive Director of American Choral Directors Association, for sharing this with his world:



CBS, for all its failings, does not spend major money and time on stories they don't believe have much audience. There are too many people pitching too many stories to them on a daily basis, and limited airtime.

Here and there, we see green shoots in the culture. If we water, fertilize, and keep pulling the weeds, who knows what might happen?

What if, instead of installing that MongoSantaMaria! flatscreen home theatre system with the Wii game installed, MomAndDad decide to enroll the kids in the local university's community choral program? How about a year of music lessons instead of three days in The Land of The Mouse? Or a year of language or math tutoring? Or a year of the local community theatre?

What if MomAndDad decide to sign themselves up for the local university choral program?

What if?

What would the culture look like if this became normative?

Then, and only then--what would the economy begin to look like?

Real green shoots.

John Ruskin's Appeal To Our Better Angels

We occasionally run across pithy quotes from John Ruskin(1819-1900), the Victorian essayist. The final paragraph below may be familiar to a number of readers. Like so many Victorians (such as Dickens and MacDonald) the language sounds flowery and archaic to our post-Hemingway, media-saturated world. It's worth the effort to dig through and learn the rhythm of Ruskin's verbal craft.

The words preceding that famous quote deserve consideration: What would our culture look like if these words guided our behavior?


'The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practicing present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendents may live under their shade, of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was within our power to bequeath.

Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.'


From The Seven Lamps of Architecture: The Lamp of Memory

Monday Morning Morality Moment

Always good to begin the week with a strong cup of coffee laced with a dose of sober reality.

It's the account of one Harry Markopolos, the financial analyst from Boston who uncovered the Madoff Ponzi scheme a decade before Bernie turned himself in to the FBI.

Culture creates economy...

If You Live Long Enough, And Remain Patient....

... you get to see the thugs that took over Iran confronted in the streets by a young populace that is fed up with rule by the mullahs.

For those of us who agonized through 1979's hostage crisis, this is really, really sweet.

The BBC points us to Tehran 24, updating news from the streets.

Maybe, with a million mobile devices uploading images to the rest of the world, the goons that run Iran won't be able to crush this uprising as the Chinese government did in Tiennamen Square in 1989. Those brave reformers only had fax machines, a few phones, and film to smuggle out. The true story there may never be known.

Here's wishing the young people of Tehran well.

Listening to the Baptists Sing

Last night I visited a buddy engineering a live recording session at First Baptist Nashville, the venerable grand dame of the once-mighty Southern Baptist Convention.

I arrived to find he was recording a live concert, featuring some 150 men assembled in a choir, all of them church music directors from across the South, all of them with music degrees of some variety, and thrilled to be there with one another for the occasion. They are the remnant of a fabulous tradition of church music, forged in both revival meeting tents of the 1800's and conservatories and seminaries of the 1900's. An audience showed up as well, to sing along on the hymns.

What started out as a visit to check out mic placement and pre-amplifiers became a poignant revisit of the world I grew up in. The sound of that choir and that congregation singing those stolid tent-meeting hymns like 'Come Christians, Join to Sing', and 'The Solid Rock' is indescribable. It was a warm evening, and the folks in the balcony were occupied fanning themselves, singing, and daubing tears from their eyes.

Somewhere along the way, most of the Baptists decided that it wasn't that important to sing hymns anymore, and they settled for listening to inane 'praise choruses' sung to them with the words projected to them on a screen. They decided to abandon the glowing theology and inspiring poetry of the hymnal, and settle for bad prose and angry theology from the pulpit.

Now they wonder why things seem to be falling apart.

It was a wonderful evening, an occasion to be grateful for what I was given growing up.

I wish the remnant well, and hope we all find a way to recover and transmit last night's spirit to the next generations.

We are running out of time, as most everyone in the room was over fifty years of age.

To Quote Austin Powers...'Yeah, Baby, Yeah'!

Dan Hannan wisely chose to refrain from Shakespeare tonight. Gordon Brown doesn't deserve to have good words like that wasted on his sorry self.

Hannan instead called upon Dr. Suess.

How very appropriate. Even Gordon Brown and his followers can understand the good Doctor.

In Celebration of June 6, a few words from Daniel Hannan

I think we may yet have another Churchill.

While he still has the freedom to speak, and we have the freedom to listen, both privileges bought for us at unimaginable cost, I hope we all take his words to heart.

June 6, 1944/June 6, 2009

I awoke this morning to one of the most insightful comments I have ever heard on radio, compliments of NPR's Scott Simon.

I wish I could persuade the world to visit his words and take them to heart, especially these quoted from his interview with historian John Keegan, responding to the question:

'What if D-Day had failed?'

"America would be marooned," said John Keegan, sweeping a hand over a globe. "Alone on a vast planet flooded by fascism." Hitler might have let America alone for a while, he said. But every Jew in Europe, every Roma, every gay, Jehovah's Witness, disabled or retarded person, and millions more Poles and Russians would have been executed or worked to death.

How many millions would we allow to be killed, he asked, so that Americans could live in an isolation some would call peace? And what kind of Hell would be left to our children in a world dominated by the creators of the Nuremberg Laws and death camps?"

It is sobering to remember that Hitler was only fifty-one years old when he took his own life the following May. Had he and his regime prevailed, he and his could have been in power well into the 1960's and beyond. It beggars the imagination.

So, here I sit on June 6, 2009, drinking coffee, watching the Memorial Golf Tournament (hosted by Mr. Nicklaus), catching up on the laundry. My bride and children are thriving, each in their own corner of the world. Business, although down somewhat, is good. We get to follow our dreams and make a living at it. How many people have that privilege?

We have this, in great part, because of what these brave souls accomplished on June 6, 1944.

One of those boys who did not survive that day hailed from a small town in central Kentucky, one of my mother's dearest high school friends. Her eyes still well up when she recalls him, these sixty-five years later. My father, recently passed, fought in the Pacific. In his final years, he shared memories of boys who never made it home. He arrived home with a lifelong case of survivor's guilt, and his adulthood friends were mostly boys from his Marine company who all settled within two miles of one another. He was the last to depart, and his loneliness was profound.

What if we lived our lives a bit more deliberately in the shadow of these men and women?

Would we have hit songs like 'Blame It On The Alcohol' all over the radio?

Would we conduct our politics with knives and poison?
Would we tolerate mayoral races featuring wrestling midgets?

Would we embrace business practices based on the notion that the person on the other end of any transaction is a sheep to be fleeced? Would a Bernie Madoff even be possible?

Would we look at the world outside our borders and say 'Never again' (and mean it!) to the new flock of facists who think it's perfectly acceptable to massacre entire classes of people in the name of some twisted utopian ideology?

Would we not look harder at ourselves, and make certain we are not headed down the slippery slope toward despotism ourselves?

What would we do with our lives and our culture if we lived a bit more in the shadow of June 6, 1944?

So, How Does The Real Estate Mess Play Locally?

This is a local example of the bigger problem.

You'll see the local bank's front page, quaint as it is, with a list of properties for sale. This has been a recent addition to the web site, by the way.

Look at listing #7, asking $108,000. I walk into the bank, and it's advertised in a circular on the table where customers fill out their deposit slips--zero money down, bank financing at 5%, 8K tax credit for first-time home buyers, the whole shooting match. No takers, the flyer has been there for many weeks, updated with the tax credit offer.

Visit the house, and you find it's a block off a busy highway, overlooking used car lots, the back side of the former Wal-Mart location, a tattoo parlor, surrounded by weedy lots, eroding at a healthy clip. A true Jim-the-Realtor moment.

This could never have been intended as an owner-occupant property. With mortgage, insurance and taxes totalling well over $750 a month, no one can rent it for a profit.

Something will have to give, (like about $50,000 off the asking price), and it will be a rental for some person of very modest income, or it will have to be torn down.

The list on the bank's site is growing.

And this is Tennessee, not California.

And the Winner Is...

In the hotly-contested race for mayor in Burns, Tennessee:

The incumbent, Mayor Bishop, who recently launched his new career as a wrasslin' referee overseeing wrestling midgets.

Words fail...