An Exchange of Words: David B. Coe’s Weblog

Well, I just spent an hour or so writing up my BOW Award entry for this week.  I’ve been on vacation and I missed last week’s BOW Award, and I didn’t get to write this week’s yesterday, when I usually would have because we were driving home from the beach. (Topsail Island in North Carolina.  Great place.)  Anyway I had a good entry going and was nearing the end of the post — it was a long one, too.  But my browser closed unexpectedly and the autosave restore thing didn’t work, so I lost the whole entry.  I just don’t have the energy to write the whole thing over again.

Suffice it so say that I mentioned the McCain campaign worker, whoever it might have been, who allowed McCain to go on television Tuesday night without makeup and then had him stand before that horribly garish green backdrop.  McCain’s delivery is bad enough — wooden, boring, and that fake smile of his gives me the creeps — but add in the venue and the lack of makeup and he looked awful.  When Fox News comments on how bad the Republican Presidential nominee’s appearance went you know you’ve got problems.

I mentioned Fox News’ E.D. Hill, who referred to a little fist pump Barack and Michelle Obama shared at Obama’s speech that same night, as “a terrorist fist jab.”  A terrorist fist jab?  Are you kidding me?

Right wing radio host Mike Gallagher interviewed disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, the other day, and the two of them agreed that Barack Obama is a Marxist.  Yep.  I blogged about this sort of thing the other day and there’s a long discussion of it on my WordPress blog for June 3 (http://davidbcoe.wordpress.com) so I won’t go into it in much depth here, except to say that if this is the best the Right can do in their campaign against Obama, they don’t have a prayer come November. 

Then of course, we have the McCain campaign advisor who, apparently tired of hearing a possible McCain Presidency referred to as “a third term for George Bush” suggested that actually Barack Obama’s fiscal policies were much closer to George Bush’s than are McCain’s.  A couple of thoughts on this one:  Apparently this advisor is ignoring McCain’s willingness to expand and make permanent the disastrous Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as Obama’s promise to end those tax cuts, which we can’t afford.  This person is also ignoring the fact that while McCain wants to keep on spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq War, Obama has promised to end the war.  Also, I wonder how Delay, Gallagher, and others who are calling Obama a Marxist feel about this….

There were a couple of other nominees, too.  I’ve forgotten them.  I’m giving the award for this week to Republican Senator Pat Roberts (Kansas) who had been chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2006.  As chair of the committee, Roberts managed to exert influence over the committee’s report on the Bush Adminstration’s misuse of pre-war intelligence in the buildup to the Iraq War.  He never counted on the GOP losing control of the Senate though.  The second round of reports on pre-war intelligence has now come out, and it not only shows that the Bush Administration misused intelligence leading up to the war, and that the Administration embarked on a carefully orchestrated campaign to deceive the American public about Iraq (just as former WHite House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in his recently published memoir), but it also shows how much Roberts did to keep these facts from coming to light.  So this week’s BOW Award goes to Senator Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, for his role in deceiving the nation about the Administration’s Iraq policy.  Take a BOW there, Senator.  You’ve earned it.  And good luck with that reelection campaign…..

Still on vacation.  One more full day at the beach and then it’s back home to summer camp and research and writing and swim team, and all the other stuff that makes up our summer.

The beach has been amazing.  Beautiful house, gorgeous weather, a beach with a sand bar, which I LOVE.  Sand bar meaning that about 30 yards from shore there is a second shelf of sand where the water is only about ankle or knee deep.  So you can wade out 60, 70, 80 yards from the shore and still be standing comfortably while the breakers roll by.  Just lovely. 

We’ve found shells and sea glass and sharks’ teeth.  We’ve seen pelicans and terns and sandpipers and ospreys.  We’ve done puzzles and read and played in the waves.  We’ve played miniature golf and had ice cream, and we even managed to track down an aunt and uncle of Nancy’s who none of us had ever met before.  The girls and Nancy are tanned and beautiful.  I’m burned in spots but tanned as well, though not nearly as beautiful.  I am relaxed, though.  More than I’ve been at any time since we left Australia.

A glorious week.

Not going to post today except to say that you should read my comment to yesterday’s post.  It was long enough and impassioned enough to count for a post….

It’s 9:00 Eastern.  Polls are about to close in South Dakota, and within a few minutes, the networks will be able to proclaim Barack Obama the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.  

Yes, I’m an Obama supporter, but this is not about gloating or self-congratulation.  The talking heads on TV often use the phrase “historic moment”.  They use it to talk about baseball games and golf tournaments and, yes, political events.  But this truly is a momentous occasion, one that, quite honestly, I never believed I’d see.  Our nation is only three generations removed from Brown v. Board of Education, two generations removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And as of tonight, we have an African American representing one of our two major political parties.  Remarkable. 

To my many friends (among them my closent friends in my home town and my wife) who supported Hillary Clinton, I’m not going to go through all the “Clinton ran a spirited campaign” and “Clinton has broken down gender barriers” stuff.  She did and she has.  I began the campaign as a Clinton supporter.  But Obama changed my mind.  I feared that he couldn’t win.  He proved he could.  I feared that he wasn’t tough enough.  He proved he was.  I wondered if there was more to him than great speeches.  I believe with all my heart that there is.

I do want to say though, that I feel Senator Clinton was treated terribly by the media throughout the campaign.  She has been on the receiving end of a disgusting and sustained assault from misogynist elements in the press including not only Fox News and the right-wing bloggers, radio hosts, and commentators, but also such “mainstream” media figures as Chris Matthews and the crew at CNN.  They use different language to speak of her campaign — comparing her to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, dissecting her laugh, her tears, her clothing, her figure, her voice, using gender-loaded terms like “shrill” to describe her.  She didn’t lose because of any of this, but she did have to put up with it.  It was shameful and she and her female supporters have every right to be offended.   Further, she was the presumptive nominee, and so the press was looking for a story, trying to figure out who was going to be her main challenger, and when it turned out to be Obama, they gave him a great deal of positive press.  Only when he actually became the frontrunner, did they turn on him, and then they did so with gusto.

Today’s post can be found at http://magicalwords.net.  Enjoy!

Today’s post, “Pre-Trip Ramblings,” can be found at http://magicalwords.net.  Check out the site and enjoy!

Today is the birthday of one of my musical heroes.  Jerry Douglas turns 52 today, and though he has no idea who I am, I’d like to give him a big old birthday shout out.  

How to explain to the uninitiated who and what Jerry Douglas is.  Jerry is a bluegrass musician.  He plays dobro, an acoustic guitar equipped with a metallic resonator that gives the instrument a distinctive sound.  Dobro is generally played with the instrument lying flat on one’s lap.  Rather than pressing the strings to the instrument’s frets to make notes, as is done with a guitar, a dobro player uses a metal slide that glides along the strings.  Douglas has played with the likes of Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Del McCoury, Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, Tony Rice, and other bluegrass giants.  He has also played on the albums of countless rock and folk and blues musicians ranging from James Taylor to Phish to Ray Charles.  In all, he has appeared on over 1600 albums.  For the past several years he has been playing with Alison Krauss and Union Station.  He’s won a dozen Grammy awards, as well as awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association, the Country Music Association, and the Americana Music Association.  He has also been awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

So there you have it.  Except that saying Jerry Douglas plays dobro is about the same as saying that Tiger Woods plays golf.  It’s true, but it totally misses the point.  Jerry Douglas is not merely the best dobro player in the world (though he is).  He is not merely the greatest dobro player who has ever lived (though many believe that this is true as well).  He has completely redefined the instrument, allowing him to transcend the boundaries of musical genre and make his mark not only on bluegrass and country, but also on jazz, rock, folk, and blues.  In doing so, he has maintained a surprising level of anonymity.  He usually works with others, allowing his talents to enhance their music, taking the spotlight to play yet another mind-boggling riff, and then stepping back to give others their turn.  In looking over the albums I own that he has put out under his own name, or that have been made by one of the many ensembles of which he’s been part, I find it hard to choose just a few to recommend.  I have too many favorites.  But here goes:

My Five Favorite Jerry Douglas Albums

1.  “Skip, Hop and Wobble” — Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer, and Russ Barenberg
2.  “The Telluride Sessions” — Strength in Numbers (Douglas, Meyer, Bela Fleck, Mark O’Connor, Sam Bush)
3.  “The Best Kept Secret”  — Jerry Douglas
4.  “Lonely Runs Both Ways” — Allison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas
5.  “Restless on the Farm” — Jerry Douglas

Today’s music:  Jerry Douglas (Restless on the Farm)

One of my favorite directors has passed away.  Sydney Pollack, who directed The Way We Were, Out of Africa, Tootsie, The Firm, Absence of Malice, The Electric Horseman, Three Days of the Condor, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, among his many credits, died yesterday of cancer.  Different directors excel at different things, of course.  I think that no one does spectacle like Spielberg (for instance, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saving Private Ryan); Peter Weir excels at bringing striking imagery to his films (Think Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, Galipoli).  Sydney Pollack was simply a terrific storyteller.  His filmmaking was never flashy, but never once in watching one of his films did I find myself questioning any of his artistic choices.  His films were seemless.

Pollack also produced many well-known films, and he got his start as an actor.  And in fact, whenever I think of Pollack, the first thing that comes to mind is a scene that Dustin Hoffman prevailed upon him to act in Tootsie.  Those of you who have seen the movie might remember the scene in which Hoffman’s character barges into the office of his agent, played by Pollack, and demands to know why he hasn’t been getting any acting jobs.  The resulting argument over how difficult Michael is to work with, remains one of the funniest five minutes you’ll ever see in any movie.

In any case, I’ll miss Sydney Pollack the actor and Sydney Pollack the producer.  And I believe that Hollywood will be poorer for the loss of Sydney Pollack the storyteller.

Nancy and I went to a wedding today, which we hadn’t done in some time.  For a while there, everyone we knew was getting married (us, too).  Then everyone was having babies (us, too).  Now, perhaps we’re entering second wedding territory (hopefully not us, too…).  Today’s wedding was a second time around for one of them, first for the other.  It was a lovely ceremony, followed by a simple and very pleasant reception.

Naturally it all reminded me vividly of our wedding, which took place seventeen years ago tomorrow.  A year ago today we had our rehearsal and rehearsal lunch (my father managed to get lost driving to both events and wound up being late to each by nearly an hour).  And then we had our pre-wedding softball game.  Great fun:  one team for the groom and one team for the bride — friends of each were evenly distributed among both teams, so as not to create the appearance of a grudge match.  Nancy had special privileges as the bride.  She was allowed to leave the field to chat with whomever she wanted, and could choose to bat at any time, regardless of which team was batting.

To this day, it remains one of the most wonderful weekends I’ve ever had, probably in part because the seventeen years since have been pretty cool.  In any case, to all of you celebrating Memorial Day weekend anniversaries or weddings, congratulations.

Time to give away this week’s BOW (Buffoon Of the Week) Award.  Unlike last week, which seemed to be filled with actos of buffoonery, this week was a bit quiet.  And in fact, I’d like to start by acknowledging an act of political courage that deserves some sincere recognition.  

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