Taking the Fifth, Part 2

As a public service follow-on to my original Taking the Fifth posting, I present the following two videos. They are both from the law class of James Duane at Regent University. Professor Duane tells why he advises never to talk to the police. He then turns his class over to a police officer to give the other view of the Fifth Amendment. Hilarity ensues.

The videos are about 25 minutes apiece, but move very quickly.

The Return of "The America I Knew"

Barak Obama is shown here using the "America I Knew" meme.




Let me plagiarize myself:

What I am annoyed about is that [this is] being intellectually and historically dishonest about where America is and where it used to be. [This is] attempting to appropriate a conservative, even reactionary, meme and use it to advance a point of view that is radically unconservative....

A few years ago John Stossel...played a couple of television commercials from the late 1950s and early 1960s for various products, laundry soap and canned coffee. I was aghast at their sexist bias and insensitivity. What was worse, I remember seeing the commercials when they first aired, and they were completely unremarkable in the cultural context of their day. Younger people who don't remember this time could fall into the "America I Knew" meme because they have no direct memory of those times. I do. Shame on those, conservative and liberal, who trot that old warhorse out.

America is a wonderful country. My favorite! And I have wonderful nostalgic memories of my boyhood. But I cannot generalize from the specific of my own experiences to say that America was better back then.

Look, if you are a progressive at least espouse a doctrine of progress. It is conservative to look back. It is silly, politically, for progressives to engage in nostalgia.

This is especially true if you are trying to sell a "post-racial" message!

Taking the Fifth

Beethoven's 5th symphony in C minor is such a workhorse (or warhorse) that it has become a symbol of Western concert music and it has been been drafted into many uses. Most often it appears musically as a straw man with a sign hanging from it's neck that reads, "Dead White European Music."

But occasionally the genius of the composer calls forth some genius from the adapter. Two treatments come to mind. First is Peter Schickele's "New Horizons in Music Appreciation: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony" to this: Sid Ceasar and Nanette Fabray having an argument to the Fifth Symphony's first movement.

Two points that strike me: They used the entire first movement of nearly six minutes. I don't think a television programmer today would let a skit develop that long. Though the movements seem to be repetitive, they develop the story with the music and let the music dictate the pace of the skit. This would be very daring whenever it was done.

Carry On, My Wayward Son

So I have admitted I am a prog-rocker. I can do that, I'm strong.

But what is it about Japanese kids blasting out western music? Whether it's cute 5-year olds with ¾-size violins all over Mozart or sitting at small pianos laying down some Scott Joplin they are plain on it.

Wow

Tom Leher had a line in one of his concerts:

"It is sobering to realize that by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years. It's those kind of people that make you realize how little you have accomplished."

Forty years ago I studied the (French) Horn. I even had ideas about turning pro and saw myself doing studio work, staying up all night for recording sessions, saying goodbye to fellow musicians over waffles before sleeping all day.

But I made different choices.

I still love horn music though; and this kind of thing makes me wonder how good I could have been:

Let me note that she is, as my Texan relatives would say, a little bitty thing. But the sound she puts out is wonderfully full.

I Miss Fred

My Washington State primary ballot arrived. I could do nothing but mark in Fred Thompson.

Debates?

Anyone who understands the meaning of the word debate knows that what are heralded as "Candidate's Debates" are anything but. They are really more of a joint press conference where the point isn't to exchange ideas or test ideas against one another, but to provide a pulpit for a recital of sound bites and stump-speech homilies to the media. (Any real give-and-take occurs later in the spin rooms.)

This Monday, the Democratic Party is holding a debate with the most foolish of premises: that one-shot questions from average folks will penetrate the hard shells of candidate's handlers, PR flacks and advisers, and will actually provoke them to say something honest and unguarded.

Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit, has submitted his hard-hitting, no-holds-barred question. In fact, he's zeroed in on what's been keeping me awake at nights as I contemplate the question "Who will next steer this mighty ship of state?"

Braaaains!

Several bloggers have posted this video by the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace of their attempts to block a shipment of military equipment from the Port of Tacoma to Iraq.

The opening seconds of the video have someone (perhaps the camera operator?) chanting "No justice, no peace," so lifelessly that it sounds like a George A. Romero movie.