Music

Recess from Eternity

Hunter S. Thompson summons the devils of Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand and Crazy Horse from an American baseball game in hell for a listening party at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. There eating crab cakes are Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. The album to be listened to is Eric in Outerspace LP titled ‘Later Days’. Before the party begins GK Chesterton and Winston Churchill come through the door after spending the afternoon playing bridge.

GKC: what a crowd!

AR: you are right on time.

TDR: have a crab cake and a cigar

GKC: thank you 

The room fills with even more smoke as the album begins to play

Hitler: very catchy

CH: never been a better time to have a bad woman

AR: there hasn’t. it’s all the rage

AJ: men have got there kicks from bad women since before 2019

WC: I think I hate someone

Hitler: very noisy 

HST: the sandlot in a song

TDR: ah yes the sandlot

AJ: nothing compares to the live show. This band is for gathering around and remembering the world is still a warm, good place. Like we are now I suppose.

WC: good record for a summer bbq

HST: I could listen to this record alone

AR: it’s not a pop record

HST: it’s not supposed to be

TDR: sounds like pop to me

CH: garage rock is dead. 

AR: so what genre is this Hunter?

HST: friend rock

WC: similar to pet rock?

CH: (guffaws)

TDR: those words

HST: I could do some serious driving alone to this record

AJ: is it third wave rock and roll?

GK: This is the frayed ends of rock and roll.

Presidential II

Home is the Bull Moose

He always wanted the Republicans to be a party that was competitive morally for the common people. He had a determination to offer the common man a ‘square deal’. His Bull Moose party platform was a much more aggressive stance than he had ever taken as president or previous for progressive social policy. Most, if not all, were later introduced and passed by Democrats in the future. He commented that he sympathized more with Woodrow Wilson’s policy than Taft’s in the end. Early on in politics he had decided to push for the right idea even if it meant something more socialist rather than the traditional republican stance of laizzes faire. It would take a real expert on TDR and today’s issues to know how he would feel about the programs being pushed today. A writer from a book from 2002 wrote that if he was alive today, ‘he would slit his wrists’.
I would like to research and write more about the issue of republican principles being a good thing when they are lived up to. Which was his goal.

       Before Ayn Rand and Adolf Hitler there was the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. This new noble line had a heir named Theodore Roosevelt Jr. TDR’s prodigy was William Howard Taft. TDR refuses to run for a third term. Instead he campaigns successfully to get Taft elected. After his trip to Africa he is ill at ease with the tree he planted. He curses it for not producing figs and the tree dies.

       The bull moose party was formed by Teddie as a progressive third party with him as candidate to combat the machine politics of the two party system. Former President William H. Taft led the Republicans while Woodrow Wilson was at the helm for the Democrats. In an election Teddy nearly won, the fallout was his running took votes from Taft and left the gate open for Wilson’s Democratic victory.

       It was a big deal in the Roosevelt family to not be the kind of privileged people who only did things to show off how privileged they were. The Dad was a child at heart and consistently was active with business, charitable efforts and his family. Like all of the children, Theodore Roosevelt loved his Father, being with him and being loved by him.

      Theodore liked best going on adventures with his Dad. His Father was impressed with his sons ability and he trusted his son. Once when Theodore Roosevelt was away on a trip he remembers his childhood friend Edith Carow and he said it, “stirred up in me homesickness and longing for the past which will come again never, a lack never”.

      Asthma plagued Teedie’s development. He seemed unable to shake the strange ailment until his ranching days in North Dakota. Amidst a most happy childhood, surrounded by a loving Father, mother, siblings and select friends like Edith Carow, he was plunged into the depths of despair and anguish physically, mentally and spiritually by these attacks. When his Father dies he turns to his new wife and when his new wife and mother died on the same day he turns inward and goes west.

       His 2nd marriage to Edith Carow, his success in politics, his children and his failure in politics all seem to come from a different individual than the developing TDR he was in his youth. He is true to a secret plan that he hatched with his Father. He follows the plan to a T.

       Roosevelt begins his political life as a Republican reformer and recruits the able William Howard Taft to be his Vice President. TDR meets ‘muckrakers’ who want to do the same good things as Teddie wants to do and it creates the ‘progressive movement’. Roosevelt becomes a Republican Progressive and comes to see Taft as a ‘machine Republican’. Finally Roosevelt, after being a successful Republican president, cements his status as a folk hero by leaving the Republican Party after failing to wrench the nomination from Taft and becomes simply a Progressive, who is fit as a Bull Moose. Thus fulfilling his Father's charge, “You must build your body”.

       Teddy is known today not for his failure to win a third term as president under his self-made Bull Moose progressive party, the closest a third party has ever come to winning, or his act of snubbing the Republican Party when they did not give him the nomination for his third term but rather he lives on in the cult of personality. His toothy grin, large mustache and spectacles seem to still have life in 2019. He made conservation and fitness an American tradition. The morality that his father told him to always put first even before health and studies is certainly his biggest contribution to American politics. Each culture has its own idea of morals and TDR gave America the Western cowboy kind, “if given the choice between peace, justice and righteousness, I choose justice and righteousness.”

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The bully pulpit : Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the golden age of journalism. 2013. Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, New York.

McCullough, David. Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt. 1981. Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, New York.

Presidential

The inherent value on the face of a twenty dollar bill

A book report on Andrew Burstein’s the Passions of Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is not a face on Mt Rushmore but neither is Crazy Horse. Washington and Jefferson had their slaves, Lincoln had his fighting boys, and TDR had his debasing of the Republican Party. The great men of traditional American democracy crowd the modern intellectuals mind of being the bad boy of modern American society.
      

Andrew Jackson was a mason which means he met the requirements of the society of his time and then some. However he is completely elusive to the modern mind. He had slaves, ordered the slaughter and suffering of many native Americans and consistently engaged in street violence and slander.
      

AJ would rather die than let himself be insulted. He was raised to be his own man. He owned slaves and never backed down. He wanted to be wealthy. Proud of his heritage and adaptable he imitates the savagery of the Native American while maintaining a personal code of civility.
      

A land acquired and cultivated for profit he thinks his way into a military and then political career through actions. Consistently and actively he seeks advancement and investment. He leaves the bench to manage his plantation and business. With each social promotion he becomes more vigilant of defending his personal honor.
      

In the military Jackson steals the political hour through his interpretation of patriotic masculinity as something hard, violent, and sacrificial. Seeing the administration as softened by money since John Adams took office after George Washington up to the current James Madison during the War of 1812 he wins New Orleans in the West while Washington, DC burns in the east.
    

Politically he consistently meets success only to abandon the public sector to pursue his more lucrative private interests. He is elected to Congress and works as a senator and a judge before returning to his estate, the Hermitage, which is not only a plantation and port of trade but by now has a shop, a bar, a horse racetrack and a landing dock for boats within its management.
    

The only thing to bring Andrew Jackson out of his version of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is the Presidency after the war of 1812. His Election ends the Virginian dynasty that Washington and Jefferson enacted and led with the exception of John Adams. Democrat is the name of Andrew Jackson’s party which is a new title for a new party while the opposition party is termed the whigs and represents the last of the old guard. 
    

 The cabinet is full of cronies but Jackson put them there because he thought they would think like him and would follow what he said. He becomes political enemies with two of the most famous senators of the time, Henry Clay and John Calhoun for two different reasons. First Clay did not want a military chieftain unacquainted with republican theory to succeed him in power and Calhoun did not want a man who he perceived to be and act as a tyrant to succeed him in power.
    

The point of view of Jackson saw the game of politics in Washington as schemes, plots and deception that he wanted nothing to do with. He was there to drain the swamp. Calhoun irked Jackson so much that by the end of his life he thought that not having Calhoun hung for Treason was his biggest regret. Calhoun labels Jackson as a tyrant in the same manner that the entire south labeled Lincoln a tyrant.


The South wanted nullification. Andrew Jackson was appalled. The issue to the South was retaining their rights and their slaves. The issue to Andrew Jackson, although he also had rights and slaves he wanted to retain, was preserving the Union. Although John Calhoun was AJ’s Vice President he resigns his post and returns to his senate in South Carolina to pursue his fiery leadership of the nullification of the Southern states.


In the textbooks of yesterday Jackson was a hero of white democracy and white expansion. The modern mind does not see victory in anything that is racial so that the scholar must reconsider if there is any value in Jackson’s legacy. The scholar must also find value in Washington and Jefferson amidst their slaves, for Lincoln and his slaughter, for Roosevelt and his debasement of the Republican Party.
      

Andrew Jackson is essentially the trailblazer of the civil war and western expansion. With Abraham Lincoln he thought the restraint of Southern Secession most important and its success as madness. With Washington and Jefferson he believed western expansion inevitable and vital by any means. He was a common man like Lincoln but held to a standard of gentility like his founding father predecessors. Only Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore looks down into the crowds beneath Mt. Rushmore and sees the legacy of Crazy Horse and Andrew Jackson combined into a new people that knows neither class nor race. In the light of day Theodore Roosevelt looks down from his stone monument stoic and thoughtful but in the night he broods alone and shrieks with echoes.