THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE 1%

Most of us drain the significance and beauty of everything and everyone around us. We point up the paltriness of existence, leaving everyone we encounter closer to suicide, numb with horror, and ready for the cemetery (even our stones won't look nice). Jesus, on the other hand, gave us a different experience. He gave us the beauty of the poor, the loveliness of the Samaritan, he allowed the blind
to see, and regenerated the morally degenerate (turning prostitutes into virtuous women), and changing the Roman Empire into a civilization that could produce a Tertullian or an Augustine. He changed the little town of Bethlehem into something that rivals Paris. He turned weddings and mustard seeds into potentially miraculous events which have held the interest of humanity long past the gladiatorial spectacles. Jesus showed us that capital punishment could have symbolic significance almost surpassing human understanding (it surpasseth mine). As such, Jesus, like Marcel Duchamp (I'm equating them but only in one sense) or like William Carlos Williams (on a smaller scale, no doubt) was an avatar of the avant-garde. While most of us destroy the value of everything we touch, ruining experiences, and making everyone sorry we came to the party, Jesus provided us with a way to see beauty and significance in the sublime countenance of a tax collector or a Roman soldier.  In a similar way, most business people destroy the value of everything they touch. A very few have a Midas touch in which what they manufacture turns to gold. This 1% of the population (the successful entrepreneur) has a kind of parallel grace to that of Christ. While most of us are ashes in human form who make everyone and everything around us numb with distaste, a very few can make a Marriott, a Honda, an elegant jump shot or wonderful pirouette in ballet, or run up and down the keys of a piano in a way that parallels the Olympic champion who runs a slalom course, or a clothes salesman a successful sales pitch in spite of our rumpled silhouette in the mirror that would leave most gasping with hopelessness.  God wants us all to join the 1%, and to turn with revulsion from the grasping Marxist hordes blinded by resentment and bitterness, as they transform everything they touch into horror and numbness (accompanied by the cheerful breaking of the ten commandments), crumbling every sacred thing around them to dust.

MEDIOCRITY

Without looking it up, write a definition of mediocrity. You can use "excellence" and "trashy" as boundaries, or as Venn circles to define it against. What is mediocrity?  How would you define a mediocre poem?  Is it possible to write one?  In what ways is mediocrity good?  Is mediocrity the default?  Is earth a mediocre planet?  Are you a mediocre person?  In what ways (if any) are you mediocre?  Is it better to be mediocre than to be spectacularly (and memorably) bad?  Can you be famous for being mediocre?  Does someone or something epitomize mediocrity?  Can an entire city be termed "mediocre"?  Can an entire nation be termed "mediocre"?  Does mediocrity have a shelf life?

Obama's Chances AND YOURS

Since 1932, only Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush have failed in their bids for re-election to a second presidential term.

This would seem on the face of it to indicate that Obama has a good chance to win.  But let's first take out Roosevelt's four terms.  That gets us up to 1948.  This means the sitting president has won most of the time over the last sixty years.  Why not?  After all, he's sitting, and the guy who's running against him has to run twice as fast just to catch up to the solitary chaise longue in which the president flies over Washington with aviation balloons attached as he swills pink lemonade laced with gingerale and bourbon while reciting wisdom from his teleprompter.

Also, why is it that Peanut Breath and Bush Baby's dad did not triumph?  As I recall, Ross Perot goofed up the Bush Baby's dad's chances by taking four percent of the vote.  And John Anderson among others wrecked Carter's chances by taking 5%.  I voted for Barry Commoner in that election.

So, if it's a sizable third-party cutting into the vote, we have problems for Bam Bam BAM BAM.  I weep at this.  Imagine Bam Bam all unemployed.  What will he do with himself?  He can always become a commentator on Pat Robertson's news channel.  But the only third party I see looming is that of a run by that other Texan, Ron Paul.  Many are devoted to that pol, Paul.  I care not much for him. I would like to see him get a cabinet post under Romney. Perhaps the czar of czar annullment, or the satrap of claptrap, or just a sinecure that buys him off and perhaps puts him on the next shuttle to one of Jupiter's moons.  Which one?  Euterpe?

Without a sizable third party to siphon votes, it may be that Obama will win.

Could we be that third party? I know it's late, and I know we have little money (I have two dollars in my wallet!), but what if we suddenly became the media's darlings?

It could happen, People.  Pray for a miracle.  Wendy and I could issue hurricane warnings and disaster claims for every good reason. I could have a national fish (the Siamese fighting fish).  What about the bluegill?  We could jump up and down on a Tuesday and get the nation to move.  How moving.  We could paint the White House camouflage to disguise it from terrorists.  My novel would sell not so much in the single digits per year as in the tens or twenties.  The opening, in which Milhouse Moot dreams of finding a permanent position, could be assessed by pundits.  Rachel Madcow could bite her lip and scream as if with bovine disease.
  

Fox could have me on every night while I explained why we had to take Canada, since I cannot take their pronunciation of "about," and launch soap bubbles at Mexico.

I could explain the campaign to undermine the Ming Dynasty (better late than never).

I could launch a space shuttle to Houston thus saving billions since the rocket would not have to leave its foundation.

TV could consist of me just staring blankly out at the viewers.  (See East German TV ca. 1964 or John Cage's 4'.)

Don't just not think of this presidency!  Do nothing and we'll call it something, for something is nothing, and nothing is something.

There's still time, people, even if there's no money and lots of gumption.  (Well, I do have have two dollars.  I need to buy a booger.  There, I picked one and bought it, proving my ability to make a quick buck.)

What would be our official drink?  How about Postum?  It's no longer available which would increase production of the noxious substance.

What would be our official mascot?  Let's bring back the pet rock: the best pet I've ever had (and the most satisfying).

We could let loose a plague of grasshoppers and call the nation an official disaster area, thus loosing lots of federal money to take care of the problem, and creating a new job:  the grasshopper-after.

With that, we could erase the unemployment problem.  Everyone would be on the run for grasshoppers.  On the other hand, a plague on it.  Let's just all sit down and watercolor a platypus.  Worst watercolorist gets to be the next president of the Yoo-nited States.  All presidents should be painters.  And we should judge them by their watercolors of platypii.

William Congreve's The Way of the World, at Franklin Stage Company

We live in the western Catskills where Jewish theatre once thrived as part of the Borscht Belt. Since flights to Miami are now quicker than a drive to these mountains (2.5 hours from NYC), we no longer have such a thriving theatrical scene. However, there are a few surviving theatres. One of them is the Franklin Stage Company in tiny Franklin, NY (pop. 300?).  Aside from a gas station, a few antique shops, a pizza place and a tiny grocery store, there's nothing here. Except a classical theatre, run by a woman named Carmela Marner, and her parents, Eugene and Carole Marner.  Every summer they put on a new play, generally a classic, and they hire Equity actors and a few locals and bring in a director (lately it's been Mollye Maxner from North Carolina School of the Arts).  This summer my daughter (LOLA OLSON enters stage right and bows) was hired to play Peg, a maid.  It is William Congreve's The Way of the World -- a Restoration Comedy that itself requires quite a bit of restoration.

First off, it flopped when it premiered in the year 1700.  There were so many characters it was bewildering. The language, too, is bewildering.  On opening night a week back I watched it with considerable dizziness. I couldn't understand much of the plot but was dazzled by the pyrotechnical verbiage, the astounding acting (as physical comedy goes, this cast is hard to top), and by a sense that this classic had enough to it that I should buckle down and put in the work required to get to the top of the steep learning curve.

Suffice it to say that even the basic rudiments of this play have complicated recursive minuets and silhouettes and echoes.  In a nutshell, here is what I can pass on for starters:

ACT I

The play opens with a sauna scene in which Mirabel and Mr. Fainall face off over a game of backgammon. Mirabel and Mr. Fainall are the movers and shakers in the play. Mirabel is more sympathetic. He's about thirty five or forty, and intends to marry a young woman named Millamont.  The names throughout the play are unfortunate as Mirabel sounds like a woman's name.  Fainall is more obviously a man.  Fain means to fake, and Mr. Fainall does just that. He's a fraud and out to cash in.  The two lay down their claims and show that they are going to be worthy adversaries, using wit, rather than swords, to get the money and the women.  The scene has two other characters -- a wit named Petulant and a fop named Witwoud.  These latter characters are diverting but do nothing instrumental.  They are too busy being witty to accomplish much of anything except shooting off verbal fireworks.

ACT II

In this act we see the women of the play lining up their own rivalries.  Part of the play is about the strategic war between men and women. Both want love and money. No mention much is made of children (there is one exception).  These players are swingers who belong to the upper classes of what's left of Caroline England.  In this scene, Mrs. Fainall (she's married to Mr. Fainall, but they have no love between them, and the marriage appears to be for the benefit of Mr. Fainall who wants Mrs. Fainall's dowry?) -- is playing croquet with Mrs. Marwood (not married, but back then any woman in her majority was called Mrs.) and they are discussing Mirabel and Mr. Fainall, among others. Both of them love Mirabel, but have settled for Mr. Fainall.  Mrs. Fainall and Mrs. Marwood are playing croquet for blood.  Mrs. Fainall and Mrs. Marwood will vie throughout the play for what they can get, as this scene is a parallel to the face-off in Act I.


ACT III

In this act we meet the giant of the play (played remarkably by Peter Gaitens, an Equity actor who makes Lady Wishfort as strange as Shakespeare's King Lear).  Lady Wishfort is nominally a Christian, but is a bully when we first meet her. She is handed a teeny cup by her maid Peg (played by LOLA OLSON) and berates the child with scorn, and asks her, "Do you think I'm a fairy who can drink out of an acorn?"  Peg stands outside of striking distance and squirms.  Wishfort is 55 but is somewhat shaky in terms of mental ability and physique.  She is gullible and uncannily sharp.  She is a widow and the plot turns on who will get the 6000 pounds her husband has left her  (how much is that in contemporary terms?).  Wishfort believes she may still be desirable and young fops taunt her with the possibility of impregnating her.  She has no idea who's who, and is easily puffed up with pride if not a child.  One of her maids' husbands dresses himself up as a Lord and attempts to marry her.But this is apparently part of a very farsighted strategem by Mirabel (the sympathetic mover in Act I) to catch her in an embarrassment so that he can blackmail her.  He would like to marry Wishfort's niece, the nubile and witty Millamont.  Confused?

ACT IV

By the intermission, almost everyone in the audience is dismayed.  Even reading this summary, you are dismayed.  And I haven't told you one quarter of what's going on.  Nor have I addressed the difficult language of the play that uses words no longer extant, and words such as "conventicle," which referred to meeting places of suppressed Protestant sects (the Church of England had attempted a monopoly on religious life, banning the competition -- but the word conventicle -- which is used twice in the play -- is used to refer to gossip sessions among upper class women in one instance -- and to refer to a gang of cutthroat lawyers in the second).  Finally,  Mirabel and Millamont meet, and thrash out their expectations of the marriage to come. They stalk each other, in love, but holding on to their wits.  She says she wants her own tea table, and he can't enter her room without knocking. He says fine to tea, but no hard liquor. You can only drink tea or coffee, and there is to be no presumption that you are men. 

ACT V

This purports to wrap up the loose ends.  Mr. Fainall launches his claim at Lady Wishfort's money, claiming that he's going to divorce Mrs. Fainall (who I forgot to mention is Lady Wishfort's daughter), and drag her through the yellow press.  Adultery was still a crime in 1700 (what were the penalties?), and the upper classes could apparently be nailed if caught with a scullery maid or parson.  The yellow press was flaring, and if you were caught in its glare, you could be the talk of London.  Lady Wishfort is mortified for her daughter's reputation. Just then, Mirabel launches his counter claim, showing a deed that allows him the right to Millamont and her money.

Thus The Way of the World ends. 

I've seen the play now five times in the last week (it is three hours long) and each time I am able to understand 400% more.  The Way of the World must be read, with notes. I've read it and read about five critical articles in the last week. I've sent for Cliff's Notes, as I want to get the minor points right. 

Shakespeare's MacBeth stages guilt from bloodletting in lieu of hospitality (Out, Damned Spot!), and Lear's attempt to give away his kingdom is easy to follow and the final reconciliation scene with Cordelia (which occurs only after she's dead), but in Congreve's The Way of the World the plot is about manners.  That is, Mirabel understands the culture of his bride-to-be Millamont (wit, and memorization of the minor wits such as Sir John Suckling).  For those who haven't majored in this period, as I haven't (though I've read everything by Suckling including several biographies and two critical books), the learning curve may be frustrating. 

Mirabel tells Millamont what he expects from her in a legalesque discourse concerning their nuptials,

"Item, I article, that you continue to like your own face, as long as I shall: and while it passes current with me, that you endeavor not to new-coin it.  To which end, together with all vizards for the day, I prohibit all masks for the night, made of oiled-skins, and I know not what -- hogs' bones, hares' gall, pig-water, and the marrow of a roasted cat. In short, I forbid all commerce with the gentlewoman in what d'ye call it court. Item, I shut my doors against all bawds with baskets and pennyworths of muslin, china, fans, atlases, etc.  Item, when you shall be breeding...."

This is some of the more accessible language in the play -- but it has many difficult words. What is a vizard?  What are all these night masks? They are apparently make-overs for dried up skin.  He also outlaws the buying of trinkets and is about to tell her how to be preggers. 

How did this play appear in a village of 300 in the western Catskills?  who cares?  Go see it, not once, but every night. Read the play, too, twice. You can download it for free at Amazon.com (I did).  Even better, get a copy at Bibliobarn or somewhere, and read through the criticism.  Give it some time and energy as it will amply reward your investment.  As a humor scholar, it's the one play in the English canon that has always eluded my full comprehension. I now see why it's a classic.  But Congreve is not like taking The Plunge at Zum Flum.  It's less visceral and more mental. You have to work at reading it.  Shows W-Sunday at 8 pm. Admission free, but donations accepted.  (Shows on Sunday are at 5 pm.)

Pictured above: Liz Kimball as Mrs. Marwood in FSC's The Way of the World.

Chic Fil A Shooting: Hate Crime or Crime of Love?

The recent shooting by an activist in the Family Studies Institute in Washington DC was discussed last night on talk radio while I was going to pick up my daughter from her role in Franklin Stage Company's The Way of the World.

A caller said that he wondered whether or not this was a hate crime. A comprehensive hate crimes bill was passed a few years ago by the Obama team.  It outlaws any crime committed with a bias against some group.  This was apparently historic legislation that took 45 years to complete, but is something that has been off the radar as we tend to think of Obamacare as the biggest coup of the Obama administration.  Eric Holder has argued we need even tougher laws against hate crimes.  However, the US Supreme Court has come out against the need to prosecute what George Orwell called in 1984 "thought crimes," which were prosecuted under the gag orders of the "Ministry of Love," whose surveillance tactics resembled those of the East Bloc during Stalin's heyday.  This is from the Wikipedia article on Thought Crime:

"The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance amounted to viewpoint-based discrimination is in conflict with rights of free speech, because it selectively criminalized bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech for disfavored topics while permitting such speech for other topics.[60] Many critics further assert that it conflicts with an even more fundamental right: free thought. The claim is that hate-crime legislation effectively makes certain ideas or beliefs, including religious ones, illegal, in other words, thought crimes.[61][62][63][64][65][66][67]."



Hate crimes seemingly use a redundant verbiage insofar as all crimes against persons or corporations seemingly involve hate. If love is what the Good Samaritan did, then hate is what those who knocked the traveller into the gutter in the first place did:
"In their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter criticize hate crime legislation for exacerbating conflicts between groups. They assert that by defining crimes as being committed by one group against another, rather than as being committed by individuals against their society, the labeling of crimes as “hate crimes” causes groups to feel persecuted by one another, and that this impression of persecution can incite a backlash and thus lead to an actual increase in crime.[68] Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced.[69] Some have argued that if it is true that all violent crimes are the result of the perpetrator's contempt for the victim, then all crimes are hate crimes. Thus, if there is no alternate rationale for prosecuting some people more harshly for the same crime based on who the victim is, then different defendants are treated unequally under the law, which violates the United States Constitution.[70]."

The recent shooting at The Family Research Council in Washington DC hows how difficult it is to establish hate or love as the basis of a crime.  Floyd Corkins III shot Leonardo Johnson.  Johnson was a security guard in the lobby of the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative think tank.  Before Corkins shot Johnson, he said, "I don't like your politics."  Bam.

Bam came out against the shooting, as did his veep. Mormon Romney also came out against it. 

But what if Corkins was motivated by love for gay men and women, rather than by hatred of those whose love for God and family causes them to stand against homosexual rights?  Is love then a consideration?

What if Hitler's love of the Aryan race, rather than his hatred for Jews, was his motivation?

What if George Zimmerman's love of his community stood above his supposed hatred of Trayvon Martin?

Love is exclusive and could possibly be described as hatred by someone else.  Love and hate form a kind of golden braid. 

If the American Revolutionists loved freedom, then they hated Great Britain,which prevented it.  Was the American Revolution a hate crime?  Or was it prosecuted in the name of love?

If America attacked the Nazis and the Japanese in the name of human rights and freedom, then couldn't it still be seen as hatred by those who didn't like human rights and freedom? 

Who is to say what is hatred and what is love?  They are so often mixed together. 

When I picked up my daughter, who is now 13, I had no idea whether the ride home would be smooth or pleasant. It was pleasant. She was pleased that in her role as Peg, a maid, she had discovered what to do in her scene with Foible and Fainall.  Precisely what this was is still unclear to me, but she said she had tried something new, and it had fallen into place. I want to go and see.  Peg is hated by Lady Wishfort for her clumsiness. But Lady Wishfort is also hated by Peg.  Love and hate alternate throughout the play, as the various characters fight for love and money, and try to nail down contracts which will secure this to themselves.  This kind of territoriality is overridden by the Good Samaritan who urges us to love out-groups and to rise above hatred, into a universal love. 

Is anything less than this something that should be prosecuted by the Ministry of Love?

Is this something we should try for, but should not mandate or legislate?  I have no idea.  I don't like the idea of thought crimes or hate crimes either as legislation or as reality. It simply seems like another way to turn the world back twenty years to 1984.  I'd prefer to move on, and to leave the Constitution as is, with the Bill of Rights, and the first amendment, pertaining not only to the left, but also to the right, and the second amendment, too, in place. At the same time, I'd like to keep the ten commandments, especially the one against killing.  Seems kind of important to get all these in place, and to keep a precious balance between church and state, between realism and idealism.

(Pictured: Floyd Corkins III, under arrest, for shooting Leonardo Johnson.  Was it love, or was it hate, that motivated the shooting?)

Venn diagrams/ Politics

Many people think the Standard Venn Diagram for politics should consist of two circles that overlap.  The middle would be the independents.

I think people are more complex.

When you think of the Cavaliers and Roundheads of Shakespeare's day, and how the Cavaliers believed in the aesthetic truth of drama, and the Roundheads wanted to close the theatre down, we see that there is more to it than this. The universalism of the Christians, and the relativism of the Cavaliers, is also called into question.

There has always been a sophisticated viewpoint that there is no truth.  This is the truth of the relativists and reaches back at least to the Sophists. But on the other side there is the relativism of the Calvinists. If "total depravity" is their version of humanity, how can we be good?

Romney (a Mormon) and Ryan (a Catholic), versus Obama (whose background shall remain X), and Biden (a Catholic Democrat who's as slippery as the day is long), are difficult to place into any standard Venn diagram. One senses instead that the right is built on certain truths about human nature (complete depravity) while the left is more or less on the side of human nature is perfectible, and we can build equitable systems that yet push us toward excellence.

The Cavaliers believed in the truth of sexuality as a play instinct.  This is now what many Dems believe, and believe as well that sexual diseases and unwanted babies should be dealt with by the CDC and the hospitals as a way to correct the fallout.  Can truth be established on lies?  The other side is for sexuality only within traditional marriages and don't want to correct the fallout as they believe the fallout itself will correct the lie of cheap relationships built on temporary models of desire and instead force people to work out a marriage built on truth, and consecrated within the church.

But the Cavaliers were originally the upper classes of England and defenders of the King in Cromwell's time.  How did the Roundheads under Cromwell morph into a working class that believes in the ludic instinct as opposed to a transcendent structure of truth based on marriage?

Our models are too stable, and don't allow for Mobius strip teases of thought in which truth is not stationary but constantly in motion, threatening to sweep us along in a perpetual motion machine of political thought in which everything is susceptible of becoming everything else, and no signs are stable?

If sexuality is to remain pure, as it was for the Puritans, then we have as a result Miles Standoffish.

If sexuality is to roll, away from marriage into the backseats of Buicks, and into the barnyards of moral mayhem, then those who participate will too often end up in the cemeteries staring skywards at the Truth.

Truth cannot be built on lies.  If we posit that everything is a lie, and there is no truth, then we have a rolling system of sophisticated barnyard truths in which Animal Farm underlies all attempts at Utopian tomfoolery.  If we posit that there is a truth, and that we know it, we stand susceptible to the countercharge that truth is a lie posited by those in power.  I believe instead that there is a truth, but we can't know it, and if we did know it, we wouldn't be able to communicate it, and if we could communicate it, no one would understand it, which is a basic retelling of the sophist Gorgias' principal ideas.  Where I would differ with Gorgias is to argue that truth DOES exist, and that it is objective and pure.  And if we don't align ourselves with it as well as we can, life will be meaningless, and all our actions the flailing of someone in quicksand who is trying not to be dragged into Hell, and the more the flailing, the swifter we descend, taking all in our presence down with us.

The truth is firm ground.  I posit that it's to be found in the Bible, especially in the OT book of Leviticus, and in the NT book of Revelation but there are glimmers of it all around us, too.  It's to be found in Fox News more likely than on MSNBC, and in the WSJ rather than in the NYT.  Truth is a foundation that doesn't move.  All things are said to be in motion by the sophists.  But Heraclitus argued that beyond all this movement there is something that doesn't change. That something is God.  In the Venn diagram above this is the vanishing point at the center of the revolving diagram.  It's something that is infinite while we are only finite, and our heads can't quite hold it, and if it could hold it, it couldn't express it, and if it could express it, no one could understand it.  But, it's there, just the same.

SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING AT THE OLYMPICS/ SENATOR PAUL RYAN

It's true I have been watching the Olympics. I have seen a bunch of runners and some soccer, volleyball, and water polo.  Winners, losers, and also-rans.  But yesterday morning I watched the finals for Synchronized Swimming.  This consisted of four groups of synchronized swimmers from places as far afield as Canada, Russia, China, and Spain.

First, what is synchronized swimming?  How is it scored?

Half of the score is technical, and the other half is aesthetic. This alone makes it unlike most of the Olympic sports, because no one cares HOW you get across the finish line, or HOW you manage to pole vault over the horizontal bar.  It just matters THAT you get'er done.

But in Synchronized Swimming, grace is part of the score.  I've seen this kind of thing in other "sports," such as Rhythmic Gymnastics, where originality plays a role. Even in regular gymnastics floor routines require something new.  Is it then an art or a sport?

(My 3rd grader kept asking me about different sports such as bowling, poker, car racing, and so on, all week, whether or not they were sports.  The notion of a "game," versus a "sport," is difficult to circumscribe, I told him, and one could say that the exact boundaries into which forms of play fall are difficult if not impossible to discern.  Suffice it to say that Synchonized Swimming is the platypus of sport, being part ballet, part can-can, partially holding your breath, and partially leaving the audience breathless.)

I watched the four or five routines.  Of these, the Canadian routine was very fun and enjoyable, even sassy.  They had rubber caps made of flowers and they made me laugh. But their score was low.  Then the Egyptian team (who knew they had swimming pools?) went.  I find it hard to say what they did but the very fact that they could find ten lady swimmers in Egypt, the land of the pyramids, was hard for me to fathom, and flew in the face of expectation.  Then went Spain. Now Spain had a unique Byzantine routine with lots of arabesque shapeliness.  I'd have to think carefully about how to describe the ziggurats they built, or how they threw the tinier women off the top.  But the Russians won the gold with a violent mechanized routine that meant the swimmers went down the pool like a frightening machine with their legs kicking and hands waving.  I was shocked by how Bolshevik it seemed, how it reminded me of the tank breakout at the battle of Kurtsk, and that they won meant the scoring was largely technical, or even militantly technical, even within the categories of the aesthetic. The Chinese appeared to flounder and yet still got the silver for a routine that I can also only describe as militant or militarized as opposed to playful.

Aesthetics can't be about sheer aggressive motion down a territorial grid. It has to be about individual creation of meaning and thus has to fly in the face of all standards. On my scorecard therefore it was the Canadians that won. They were warned by judges not to wear the flamboyant hats. But they did it anyhoo.  I salute the Canadian Synchronized Swimming team for originality and flying in the face of all precedent.  I salute the Egyptians simply for existing. I boo the Russians for their Bolshevism. I boo the Communist Chinese women for being Communist Chinese.  They apparently trained 14 hours a day in secluded circumstances far from their families.  Lousy communists!  Family first, in my book.  If there's something you are doing 14 hours a day that keeps you from seeing your family for two years at a trot, stop.

I didn't either hate the Spanish or love them. I'm still trying to heal from the Inquisition.  I'm still trying to get over the Counter-Reformation.  The extinction of the anarchists at Barcelona is still something I struggle with. And so I found myself unable to like the Spanish.  Canadians on the other hand have always struck me as sensible and peaceful almost to a fault. So I was open to their hilarity and quirkiness.

The very notion of an Olympic sport in which aesthetics is given a full 50% judgement is something that resonated with me.  It's true, I didn't like all the yellow shoes in the Olympics.  Yellow is not an Olympic color. I don't associate it with Athens.  I think shoes should be white, or perhaps black, with a white stripe.  The garish yellow that designated feet was a putrid tint that ruined the Olympics' track and field events for me.  I wanted something more classical, and in lieu of that, something else I could never have foreseen  (puce, no).  What I did get in this Olympics that I may possibly remember is a sport I had never thought about: synchronized swimming is a kind of underwater chorus line in which the feet pop up out of the water, as if the real life of the sport is taking place in another dimension.

Synchronized swimming is the only Olympic sport that was completely sold out.

Castro's Personal Fortune Estimated at 500 Million

I found this article at Forbes through the link of a philosophy student in my summer class.  It estimates Fidel Castro's personal fortune at 500 million.

The average annual salary of a doctor in Cuba is about 100 American dollars.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/04/rich-kings-dictators_cz_lk_0504royals.html