Every summer, I remember taking my youngest brother and daughter to Cedar City to see the Shakespeare Festival, kidnapping her from college, in a whirl-wind weekend tour of the area, seeing Hamlet, the play she'd studied in high school.
Our driving over Hell's Backbone at midnight! Our talks about life, and where we were all going in the next ten years.
With wistful longing, I yearn for the plays, the slot canyons, the red rock cliffs, the Pink Cliffs, Kanab, St. George, Zion Canyon, the 1930's Depression era WPA tunnel carved through Vermillion rock and sandstone, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Calf Creek, Hell's Backbone, the quiet and solitude, the family and friends.
And so I drove down to see Taming of the Shrew and Cyrano de Bergerac, yearning in my heart - seeing in my mind's eye the future settlement of the Great Basin in and around Fillmore.
What yearning this is I cannot explain. But it has to do with solitude and place.
Go see the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. Go to http://www.bard.org/ for a great weekend. Their Fall Season starts September 15 and runs till October 31.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Go Elsewhere for the Political
In order to not muddy these waters, you can find all political entries at this site:
http://countrymenlendmeyourears.blogspot.com/
This will retain the spirit of all things virtuous, lovely and of good report that you will find here.
http://countrymenlendmeyourears.blogspot.com/
This will retain the spirit of all things virtuous, lovely and of good report that you will find here.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Don't Be Fooled by the Communist Party's PR Blitz
With the opening of the Beijing Olympics, the Communist Party wants the image of Tianamen Square, the Gates of Heavenly Peace, to be remembered not as a place of brutal repressive murder, but of a new openness.
However, the Communist Party, rarely mentioned in news reports in favor of mentioning China and its people, has never fully acknowledged its culpability in the murder of student protestors.
If it were truly open, it would acknowledge to its citizens and to the world the ugly naked horror that was that night attack on students.
The most famous image of Tianamen Square is of the young man with a white shirt and briefcase standing and blocking the line of tanks rolling into the Square. This image smacks the face of those Chinese who think that the brutal view of Tianamen is merely a foreign image.
Ask those related to the students who never came home that night, whose bodies were helicoptered quickly at night in mass bundles to be deposited somewhere in mass graves, if the brutality of Tianamen Square is a foreign image!
Amid the glitz of orchestrated euphoria and celebration, let us remember the thousands of young people who sculpted a Lady Liberty and wrote on banners the words of Thomas Jefferson - that All Men are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
All men and women yearn to breathe free, unless you're one of the millions of urbane, Communist free who value security of the People over freedom of the Individual.
Repressive regimes are always about mass graves, secrecy and buried truth.
However, the Communist Party, rarely mentioned in news reports in favor of mentioning China and its people, has never fully acknowledged its culpability in the murder of student protestors.
If it were truly open, it would acknowledge to its citizens and to the world the ugly naked horror that was that night attack on students.
The most famous image of Tianamen Square is of the young man with a white shirt and briefcase standing and blocking the line of tanks rolling into the Square. This image smacks the face of those Chinese who think that the brutal view of Tianamen is merely a foreign image.
Ask those related to the students who never came home that night, whose bodies were helicoptered quickly at night in mass bundles to be deposited somewhere in mass graves, if the brutality of Tianamen Square is a foreign image!
Amid the glitz of orchestrated euphoria and celebration, let us remember the thousands of young people who sculpted a Lady Liberty and wrote on banners the words of Thomas Jefferson - that All Men are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
All men and women yearn to breathe free, unless you're one of the millions of urbane, Communist free who value security of the People over freedom of the Individual.
Repressive regimes are always about mass graves, secrecy and buried truth.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn - Farewell Friend
In the early years of the 70's, after barely surviving the turbulent excesses of the 60's, we heard a lone voice crying in the wilderness that was Harvard College, et al.
In the college's 1978 commencement speech a Russian "prophet" excoriated the West for its decadence and weakness.
That Russian was the Nobel Prize winning writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
He said there were real battles being fought for personal freedom and that we in the West weren't fully engaged. We were lazy, soft - we who should have been the guardians of the chalice.
His book The Gulag Archipelago was written because he sensed that those murdered by Stalin were crying from the dust, pleading not to be forgotten.
When I first opened the book, the number of dead he reported was staggering - tens of millions! Lost in the prisons, worked to death, tortured, shot and thrown in unmarked graves.
Millions disappeared in the middle of the night, never to return to their families.
For a small percentage (3-4%) of Communist Party members to rule the masses, that minority had to be willing to murder on a large scale to keep power.
That is the reason Saddaam Hussein so admired Stalin, and filled his personal library with every book about the Communist dictator available. Hussein's Baathist Party numbered only 3-4% of the Iraqui population.
His long beard, his dissident status, his anti-communist and anti-democracy position of paradox, calling on the West for an awakening to vigilance.
Not some few of us heard him, stiffened the sinews, and entered the fray.
In the college's 1978 commencement speech a Russian "prophet" excoriated the West for its decadence and weakness.
That Russian was the Nobel Prize winning writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
He said there were real battles being fought for personal freedom and that we in the West weren't fully engaged. We were lazy, soft - we who should have been the guardians of the chalice.
His book The Gulag Archipelago was written because he sensed that those murdered by Stalin were crying from the dust, pleading not to be forgotten.
When I first opened the book, the number of dead he reported was staggering - tens of millions! Lost in the prisons, worked to death, tortured, shot and thrown in unmarked graves.
Millions disappeared in the middle of the night, never to return to their families.
For a small percentage (3-4%) of Communist Party members to rule the masses, that minority had to be willing to murder on a large scale to keep power.
That is the reason Saddaam Hussein so admired Stalin, and filled his personal library with every book about the Communist dictator available. Hussein's Baathist Party numbered only 3-4% of the Iraqui population.
His long beard, his dissident status, his anti-communist and anti-democracy position of paradox, calling on the West for an awakening to vigilance.
Not some few of us heard him, stiffened the sinews, and entered the fray.
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