Island Passage

Tony Woodlief comments on Sunday's Inaugural concert : Sunday's inauguration concert was designed to evoke strong emotion. It was certainly held in a dramatic setting, cast at the feet of Lincoln, in the place where Reverend King gave his nation-changing speech. The danger of standing where giants have tread, of course, is that doing so invites comparison. There was certainly little to be compared, this day, between the transformative words of these great men and the canned lines of the very small playactors selected to give speeches between the concert's musical acts... ...It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker , was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech , an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr....

Ace offers three haiku for the inauguration: Po-TUS Obama America the best Bush goes to jail now Trust in Obama All your worries gone forever Bush goes to jail now Barack is dreamy Sorry Iraq we leave soon Bush goes to jail now I'm going to have to think to meet that challenge.

In Inaugural News, Bishop T.D. Jakes, senior pastor from Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, spoke at an inaugural morning service. Bishop Jakes taught from the book of Daniel and shared this thought: “The problems are mighty and the solutions are not simple,” Jakes said, “and everywhere you turn there will be a critic waiting to attack every decision that you make. But you are all fired up, Sir, and you are ready to go. And this nation goes with you. God goes with you. “I say to you as my son who is here today, my 14-year-old son – he probably would not quote scripture. He probably would use Star Trek instead, and so I say, ‘May the force be with you.” Ahem. It's not enough that the good bishop uses some sketchy, Hollywood, faux-Tao saying, but he can't get the series attribution right. Ah, well. As Admiral Adama used to say: "Beam me outta here!"

I spent some of the last two weeks snowed in, going through stuff in boxes in the basement. One of the things I found was an old memoranda book with just a few pages filled with notes. I offer two of these entries without comment: "Forgiveness sounds like a lovely idea--until we have something to forgive." And "Some people reject Einstein's Special and General Relativity on an emotional basis, saying that those theories remove fixed standards, which leads to complete relativism. In fact, what Einstein did was to move absolutes from frames of reference to the laws that describe the relationships between frames of reference." That's all.