Like Rose Syracuse, retiring at 92 after 73 years working at Macy’s:
Jefferson and Hemmings revisited
Many people think it’s virtually certain that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with slave Sally Hemmings and fathered at least one child by her. After all, wasn’t it proven by DNA testing?
No, no, a thousand times no, says this new book on the subject. The DNA testing involved merely implicated some male in the Jefferson clan:
But there are approximately 25 known potential male candidates…Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, a widower and regular visitor to Monticello who was ignored in the initial research of Annette Gordon-Reed, was in better health than Jefferson and said to “play the fiddle and dance half the night” with the slaves, while the president was not known to do so. A tradition among descendents of Eston Hemings held that an “Uncle Randolph” was Eston’s father””that being a name by which Randolph Jefferson was known at Monticello. A surviving letter from Thomas invites Randolph to come to the house shortly before Hemings became pregnant with Eston. Randolph was reported to have fathered children with other slaves: Might he be a more probable father than Thomas?
There’s much, much more. And actually, the fact that a different male Jefferson might have been a better candidate as Eston’s father was well known right along. A combination of ignorance of science on the part of readers, and politically correct hype (Founding Fathers as hypocritical exploiters) on the part of theory-populizers, conspired to make the Thomas Jefferson fatherhood narrative seem more certain than it should have seemed to the general public.
Last night’s debate
Comment of the evening:
Two weeks left; I say, fix bayonets!!
Those picayune military details are hardly Obama’s forte, although that doesn’t keep him from mocking Mitt Romney. Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think what Obama’s forte might be: snark, perhaps? It’s sure beginning to look that way.
I didn’t watch the debate and I got back too late to join in the comments. But from my perusal of the blogosphere it seemed that Romney was trying to run out the clock and appear presidential and above the fray, whereas Obama was his now-familiar petty debate self, nasty and small.
That Obama is the same Obama most of us have seen for four long years. For some reason Romney’s personality works to bring out that side of Obama even more than usual, and it’s not a pretty sight.
To Obama, Romney must seem like a big fat hanging curveball right smack in his wheelhouse, and Obama can’t resist taking a good hard swing at it. But apparently the pitch that looks so eminently hittable is really a dancing knuckleball after all.
The third debate
Here’s a thread for discussing debate number three, which takes place tonight at 9:00 PM Eastern Time.
I have a family event to attend and won’t be watching, although I might be home in time to see the very end and to comment afterward. But you all have a go at it here.
You know how I hate debates anyway. I don’t feel as nervous as I did before debate number one. But whatever the polls say, I will be anxious and worried right up through election evening—and then depending on the results, I will be either exceedingly distressed or quite elated and relieved.
So in the meantime:
:
Donategate
But I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people neither know nor care at this point. The media’s inattention is just as powerful—perhaps even more so—than its attention.
Lance Armstrong’s guilt
So, what do you think about this? Was Lance Armstrong guilty, despite having passed a gazillion doping tests at the time? Is the testimony of former teammates under the following circumstances convincing enough?:
Former Armstrong team mates at his U.S. Postal and Discovery Channel outfits, where he won his seven successive Tour titles from 1999 to 2005, testified against him and themselves and were given reduced bans by the American authorities.
“It wasn’t until the intervention of federal agents…they called these riders in and they put down a gun and badge on the table in front of them and said ‘you’re now facing a grand jury you must tell the truth’ that those riders broke down,” McQuaid added.
I confess I haven’t followed this story—or cycling itself—much. Its practitioners at the highest level, like those in so many other sports, are driven to be the very best, and many are willing to cut corners to do so. The more people who dope, the more the others will feel it necessary that they do it too to keep up, even though it’s wrong.
That means the sport will probably always be a race between the doping detection commissions and the cheaters to see who’s more technically advanced.
And if everybody was doing it, why focus on Armstrong? Is it because he started it, or because he perfected it, or because he did it more often? Or is it just because he was the very best—at cycling and at doping?
Ah, those fickle women voters
That’s what Obama must be thinking.
What struck me when I read this article was how many of the women interviewed focused on bits and pieces of things without looking at the whole picture or even the bigger picture, and how little understanding they seemed to have of even the small picture. It was hardly a large or random sample of women, but nevertheless the responses were disturbing.
At least as disturbing was the ignorance (or purposeful misleading?) of the article’s author, Molly Ball, who first describes Romney’s position on abortion as wanting to repeal Roe v. Wade, then mentions several women she interviewed who are “pro-life and staunchly Republican,” and then describes some “undecided” women interviewees this way:
Unlike their more conservative cohorts, these women agreed that abortion is not any of the federal government’s business.
The fact that this is precisely the stance of so many people who are personally pro-life (like Romney, and possibly the “conservative cohorts” she had interviewed) and would also like to see Roe v. Wade overturned seems to be lost on Ms. Ball. Does she—or any of the women she interviewed—even know that the slogan “overturn Roe v. Wade” is not at all the same as “ban abortion,” especially at the federal level? That overturning Roe v. Wade would merely throw the entire issue back to the states, and take it out of the hands of the federal government?
Depressingly abysmal ignorance.
RIP George McGovern
George McGovern, the man Nixon trounced in 1972, has died at the age of 90.
McGovern was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for. Yes, he was a liberal, but of the more old-fashioned kind, without nastiness and with a fair amount of collegiality between the parties.
McGovern may have gotten his clock cleaned in 1972, but voters in Massachusetts—the only state that had gone for McGovern—got to display bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me; I’m from Massachusetts” after the Watergate scandal.
And remember this?
RIP, George McGovern.
Best seafood restaurants in the US…NOT
No New England restaurants on the list?
Fahgettaboutit.
A suggestion to Romney for the 3rd debate
In the second debate Obama ordered somebody—Crowley, Romney, all of us?—to “get the transcript” of his Rose Garden speech.
So maybe Romney should oblige, and say something like this:
Mr President, last week during our debate you told the American people that you had called what happened in Benghazi an “act of terror” in your Rose Garden speech. When I said that you had actually taken much longer than that to call it an act of terror, you said “get the transcript.”
Well, I took you up on that.
Mr. President, you are an excellent speaker with a good command of the English language. If you had meant to call them acts of terror you had plenty of opportunity to do so. But according to the transcript, you did not.
And then he should describe what the president did say.
I doubt that Romney will do it. And maybe that’s for the best. Perhaps it’s best to not go over that territory again, because at this point it may seem like repetitive nit-picking. But if Obama decides to revisit the topic, it needs to be countered.
Yes, there are a lot more important things than this fussing over words and their meaning. The are extremely vital issues of foresight, protection, and veracity involved. But it is galling to see Obama get away with his fake outrage.
For all the verbiage around this incident, how many people have actually done what Obama told them (or told someone, perhaps Crowley) to do: get the transcript? And how many people have actually read the whole thing?
Dance teachers I have known: Finis Jhung
I came across a video that was touted as amazing, featuring a 75-year-old man who still teaches ballet.
My first thought was, “That’s not the least bit amazing.” Quite a few of the ballet teachers of my youth reached that sort of advanced age without retiring—an age which, by the way, no longer sounds all that advanced.
My second thought was, “I bet it’s Finis Jhung.”
And sure enough, it was (here’s the video, which can’t be embedded).
Finis Jhung was one of many teachers with whom I studied back in the day. The place: New York. The time: the early 70s, which would have made him a relatively young man somewhere in his mid-thirties. He was phenomenal even then, having committed the single most astonishing physical feat I’ve ever seen a dance teacher perform.
A small, slight man, he was unimpressive-looking for the most part, although pleasant enough. His studio had a peculiarity that I assume he had constructed to his specifications: a loft-like platform way above the large airy high-ceilinged room where we ballet students labored.
From his superior perch he could see us all; there was no hiding from his sharp eyes. He never demonstrated the steps, but sat in a chair the entire time and explained the movements he wanted.
Jhung was unfailingly soft-spoken and yet demanding. Towards the end of one particular class, we just could not understand a combination of jumps he was trying to set on us. As he repeated himself and we floundered, he showed a rare spark of exasperation. Throwing his hands up, he asked, “Do I have to come down there and show it to you?
The idea that he might actually come down from his perch was as strange as the notion that he might actually be feeling a bit of anger. But sure enough, he descended (a ladder? a small staircase? I can’t remember) and came down to the floor, level with us.
I need to make it clear that he’d been sitting up there for about an hour and a half, perhaps more; this was towards the end of a very long class. In order to dance, a person needs to be warmed up with a series of graduated moves designed to get the muscles loose and the juices properly flowing. Otherwise it is highly likely a muscle will be pulled. And it is almost a given that the dancing will be highly substandard even if the dancer manages to get by without injury.
In short, it shouldn’t be done, and most people couldn’t do it. But Jhung immediately began the combination, which featured huge and difficult jumps (the ones most likely to lead to injury under these circumstances). He performed them with such finesse, flair, and elevation that it was like watching a bravura stage performance.
It seemed Jhung was made of different material than the rest of us—stretchier, more resilient, more graceful, springy, and powerful. So it surprises me not at all that he’s still moving fluidly at seventy-five, although not anything like he did at thirty-five.
Alas, I can find no videos of Finis Jhung performing or teaching in his prime. Perhaps there are none; dancing is an ephemeral art, and used to be more so before the days of the ubiquitous video camera. There are plenty of recent videos of him teaching, though. Here’s a typical one, made just a couple of years ago:
Bringing them to justice
Apparently the wheels of justice grind slow:
Witnesses and the authorities have called Ahmed Abu Khattala one of the ringleaders of the Sept. 11 attack on the American diplomatic mission [in Benghazi]. But just days after President Obama reasserted his vow to bring those responsible to justice, Mr. Abu Khattala spent two leisurely hours on Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments.
Libya’s fledgling national army is a “national chicken,” Mr. Abu Khattala said, using an Arabic rhyme. Asked who should take responsibility for apprehending the mission’s attackers, he smirked at the idea that the weak Libyan government could possibly do it. And he accused the leaders of the United States of “playing with the emotions of the American people” and “using the consulate attack just to gather votes for their elections.”…
…[N]o authority has even questioned him about the attack, he said, and he has no plans to go into hiding…Mr. Abu Khattala, 41, wearing a red fez and sandals, added his own spin. Contradicting the accounts of many witnesses and the most recent account of the Obama administration, he contended that the attack had grown out of a peaceful protest against a video made in the United States that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and Islam…
I continue to wonder how it is that more than 15% of the population can still be planning to vote for Obama.