Keep them coming. We have three new entries:
“Drawing is taking a line for a walk.” – Paul Klee:
“Architecture is frozen music.” – Goethe
“Poetry is the music of what’s happening.” -Seamus Heaney.
A reader takes issue with my Larkin quote:
When it comes to jazz, is there a better one-line description than (New Yorker) jazz critic Whitney Balliett’s famous observation that jazz is “the sound of surprise”? I don’t think so. Larkin’s description falls a bit short because he describes how jazz works, i.e., what jazz does. Balliett, however, describes what jazz is.
IT’S NOT SATIRE FOR ADULTS: The debate over “Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed” continues. I am accused of being one the most humorless people on earth. By John Podhoretz. But it isn’t satire. It’s indoctrination. (Yes, lefty idiots ruin their case by posting fake parodies of the illustrations, but lefty idiots have been makng Sean Hannity’s job easy for years now.) From the blurb:
This news-making book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.
Chairman Mao, anyone? It has caricatures of Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. It has a Democratic donkey under the bed, posing as a member of the press. Jonah thinks the left does the same thing. I’m sure there are examples out there, but they are generally fuzzy tracts about saving the earth or explaining why over a hundred thousand kids have two parents of the same gender. I haven’t yet seen or heard of any 4 – 8 year old kiddies’ books which caricature George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Bill Frist, or get into the details of tax policy or the liberal media. This is also not a fringe book. It’s #44 on Amazon! In a word, it’s creepy, in the way all ideological fanaticism is creepy. From one Amazon reviewer:
Our children need to know that there are those in our country who desire to limit our freedom, such as our freedom of religion, our freedom from governmental control, and the freedom of our markets. The extreme, elitist, liberal minority in the U.S. starts foisting its agenda on our children from kindergarten. But, with more educational materials like this book, perhaps we can teach our kids to truly be free thinkers and help them to recognize the elitist liberal bias in all its forms.
So the culture war is now in Kindergarten. The author, by the way, is not a humorist:
Katharine DeBrecht is a mother of three. A freelance newspaper reporter who previously worked in Washington, D.C., she is a member of the South Carolina Federation of Republican Women and served as that state’s co-captain of “Security Moms for Bush.” Ms. DeBrecht graduated cum laude from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, where she studied political science and history.
Whatever else this kind of ideological indoctrination is about, the notion that it is promoting freedom of thought is risible.
The Dish 