httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO1uMjz3n3w
Louis performing “Umbrella Man” with Dizzy Gillespie
On this date the incomparable Louis Armstrong died (1901-1971).
Louis Armstrong
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Quote of the Day
So how is Stephen Harper’s self-declared “Canadian-led plan” to have governments slash deficits rather than spend to stimulate the economy going so far? Recall that the plan is to have the do-no-wrong private sector take up the slack with the necessary investments.
From CNBC.com, “Dow Repeats Great Depression Pattern“:
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it…there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,” Guppy said.
The Dow retreated 457.33 points, or 4.5 percent last week, to close at 9,686 Friday. Guppy said a Dow fall below 9,800 confirmed the head and shoulders pattern.
Dawn Arnold: Frye Sculpture Update
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47PGGjiLd54
Thank you for all the support! The “Feed Your imagination” project to create a bronze sculpture of Northrop Frye is now #4 of 243 projects…please keep voting!
Go to www.refresheverything.ca daily and click on the Arts and Culture section. Once there, click on the $25,000 box in order to vote for the “Feed Your Imagination” project.
Remember: you can vote once a day, every day till August 31st!
War of 1812
Burning the White House, August 14, 1814
Today is the anniversary of the beginning of three weeks of British raids on Fort Schlosser, Black Rock and Plattsburgh, New York in 1813, which provided victories for the Brits, the latter short-term.
It is also the anniversary a year later of the Battle of Chippawa in 1814, which proved to be only a nominal victory for the Brits.
Frye in an interview with Bill Moyers:
Moyers: There’s an old saw about a culture that thrives on Valium — that although the United States and Canada share a 3,968-mile border, Canada doesn’t keep troops on that border because Canadians know that if the United States invaded, you would win by simply boring us to death in three days.
Frye: Yes, or scaring you to death. After all, we won several battles in the War of 1812 with about thirty Indians scattered through the woods. (CW 24, 888-9)
Gay Pride / Video of the Day
Today is the 30th annual Gay Pride Parade in Toronto. Our prime minister is not attending it, but he no doubt supports it in spirit.
Then again, a fully grown man dressed up as a cowboy may not be what he seems. After the jump, Stephen Harper speaking at an anti-gay-marriage — or, as he winningly puts it, “real Canadian values” — rally on Parliament Hill in April 2005. Harper can claim to know about “real Canadian values” because his government represents as many as one in three Canadian voters.
The Glorious Fourth
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38VioxnBaI
Teabaggers as oligarchically driven mob
It’s America’s birthday. Like Canada, it doesn’t get a pass today either. Here’s Frye in “America: True or False?”:
The economic development of America has been intensely competitive, and so has developed an oligarchic direction, taking advantage of everything that increases social inequality, like racism. Exclusiveness breeds hysteria, because of the constant fear of revolt from “below,” and the hysteria is increased by an economy that depends on advertising, and so tries to create a gullible and uncritical public. Advertising absorbs propaganda as the economic expansion goes beyond the limits of America and turns imperialist, and the two merge into the category of “public relations,” where one throws oneself into a dramatic role, and says, not what one means, but what the tactics of the situation are supposed to demand. In so insane a context the question of whether or not murdering a prominent figure or planting a bomb would be good publicity for one’s cause becomes almost a rational question. Hysteria breeds counter-hysteria, racism counter-racism, and American capitalism is now facing various opposed forces who may turn out to be stronger than it is, because they fight with the same weapons but believe in them more intensely. On both sides of the social unit is the organized mob. An appalling crash in the near future seems to be at least a possibility for American society, and Canada could no more avoid such a conflict than Belgium could avoid a war between Germany and France…
I do not see how America can find its identity, much less avoid chaos, unless a massive citizens’ resistance develops which is opposed to exploitation and imperialism on the one hand, and to jack-booted radicalism on the other. It would not be a new movement, but simply the will of the people, the people as a genuine society strong enough to contain and dissolve all mobs. It would be based on a conception of freedom as the social expression of tolerance, and on the understanding that violence and lying cannot produce anything except more violence and lies. It would be politically active, because democracy has to do with majority rule and not merely with enduring the tyranny of organized minorities. It would not be conservative or radical in its direction, but both at once. (CW 12, 404-5)
What’s Wrong with the New York Times, Ctd
Bill Keller of the New York Times weasel-words around the Kennedy School study confirming that the Times and other mass-circulation dailies did not use the word “torture” to describe waterboarding when it became apparent that the Bush administration practiced it.
This of course does not add anything to what we already know, but it is a remarkably candid manifestation of the editorial cowardice of the mainstream media when confronting the power it is supposed to challenge. The issue of waterboarding was never, as Keller puts it, a “political dispute” — it was and is a matter of law, and the law has never been ambiguous.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that “I think this Kennedy School study — by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories — is somewhat misleading and tendentious.”
In an e-mail message on Thursday, Mr. Keller said that defenders of the practice of water-boarding, “including senior officials of the Bush administration,” insisted that it did not constitute torture.
“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves,” Mr. Keller wrote. “Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and human rights advocates as a form of torture. Nobody reading The Times’ coverage could be ignorant of the extent of the practice (much of that from information we broke) or mistake it for something benign (we usually use the word ‘brutal.’)”
Saturday Night at the Movies: “Medea”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGPd411gOYA
Maria Callas, in her only film role (and in which she does not sing), in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s film adaptation of Medea.
Frye cites Medea in a couple of places in notebook 13a to clarify his thinking on tragedy:
The sense of tragedy comes from the emphasis on causality in the plot. Thus Medea begins with the Nurse wishing that a lot of things hadn’t happened which in fact had happened. The sense of causality is in its turn derived from the primary contract, the sense of the natural law, which operates morally as nemesis. This is all in AC: what I didn’t get so clear there was the sense of two contrasting falls, one tragic, Adam into the wilderness, & one ironic, Israel into Egypt. The ironic contract is the social contract properly speaking, an imitation of natural law but without its certainty, hence the arbitrary quality, which being social rather than natural is not genuine fatality. Hence hamartia, which is really a loophole that prevents fatality: character cooperating with events. (CW 20, 290)
Jason blandly tell Medea, when she’s reproaching him for deserting her that she’s had all the advantages of a Hellenic education, & learning what justice & fair dealing are. Good e.g. of the way tragedy concentrates on the natural & primitive & not the social contract. (CW 20, 293)
The rest of the film after the jump.
Quebec City
On this date in 1608 the City of Quebec was founded by Samuel de Champlain.
Frye in an interview with Bill Moyers in 1988:
Moyers: So much of American history has taken on mythological proportions in our society — the city set upon a hill, frontier, the manifest destiny to make the world safe for democracy. Mythology plays a powerful role in the American consciousness.
Frye: I rather regret that the same mythological patterns are present in Canada and yet are paid so little attention to. We have our city on the hill, namely Quebec, the fort where the river narrows, a fort that was taken and retaken about five or six times. And we also have our Maccabean victories in the War of 1812 and the Fenian raids later, and so on. We have all that mythology potentially. But because the Americans started with a revolution and a Constitution, they brought the myth right into the foreground of their lives in a way that has never happened with Canada. (CW 24, 892)
TGIF: “A Man’s Gotta Eat”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJZCHZ2wV7U
Now that the pride of Nova Scotia’s Trailer Park Boys really is history, it just gets easier and easier to identify the very best episodes. “A Man’s Gotta Eat” has gotta be one of them: “Drunk and pissing on a dumpster behind The King of Donair.” Sigh. They just don’t write dialogue like that anymore.