"Isn’t there something creepy about Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz having... 'asked his Washington-area employees to write "Come Together" on each customer cup today, tomorrow and Friday, as a gesture to urge leaders to resolve the fiscal cliff'?"

Asks Mickey Kaus.

Did Schultz take a poll of his employees–sorry, “partners,” he calls them–before ordering pressuring asking them to join in this lobbying effort? What if he were, say, the CEO of Chick-fil-A and he “asked” his “partners” to write “Preserve the Family” on the outside of cups and containers?

I’m not saying what Schultz did is or should be illegal, certainly not in a Citizen’s United world. If he wants to run a hybrid coffee-shop-political-organization, that’s fine with me. But maybe he should have made that clear to his workers when they signed up.

What troubles me about the slogan "Come Together" is that it's a pretty obvious reference to the Beatles song that begins with Lennon saying "shoot me" over and over. Given the recent massacre — and the fact that Lennon himself was shot to death — it's not good resonance.

As for an employer telling employees what to say to customers, I've got no legalistic problem with that. The first job I ever had was as a waitress, and I was required to greet the customers with the lengthy "Hello, my name is Ann, and I will be your waitress tonight." How do you give that wooden line a good reading?

I'd much rather say "Come Together," especially if I was serving muddy water, brewed with a mojo filter.

Danny Boyle has declined a knighthood.

He's about being "an equal citizen," he says.

Who else has declined a knighthood? Among others:

David Bowie, musician
Francis Crick, physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Michael Faraday, scientist
Albert Finney, actor
E. M. Forster, author and essayist
Michael Frayn, novelist and dramatist
John Galsworthy, playwright and novelist
Graham Greene, novelist
Stephen Hawking, scientist
David Hockney, CH, RA, artist
Aldous Huxley, author
Rudyard Kipling, author
Henry Moore, sculptor
J.B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
Paul Scofield, actor
Ralph Vaughan Williams composer
H.G. Wells, writer

Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."

The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?

Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Said Thomas Paine.

"The Drug War is about control."

"Obama likes control."

And here's the NYT reporting on the way the Obama administration is supposedly mulling over what to do about Colorado and Washington.

Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him.

It's all about Obama!

(Why didn't I have a tag "Obama and drugs" before? All that "choom" stuff and so on....)

ADDED: Meade riffs on Obama and hope and segues into "pocketful of hope... money for dope... money for rope..." and I find the old John Lennon song in my iTunes:

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky
Is gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope 

That makes me think about and "10 For 2: John Sinclair Freedom Rally" which took place in Ann Arbor in 1971 — where I was in town, listening to the live feed on the radio — and John Lennon himself showed up and that "inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2012."

40 years ago. Obama was 10. It was the year Obama returned from Indonesia to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and go to prep school. As David Maraniss tells it:

A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. 180 Choom is a verb, meaning “to smoke marijuana.” As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.” To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled. When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning “numbing tobacco”) instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,” explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.

Obama likes control!

"If everybody could love Alfred Hitchcock, I think it would be a better world."

Odd intro, by Cat Stevens (in 1976), to "Peace Train."

Yesterday, we were talking about Sun Myung Moon's idea for peace: marriage across national and cultural boundaries.

I ran into the Cat Stevens peace suggestion just now, by chance and unrelated to Sun Myung Moon (even by marriage). I was over on YouTube, clicking on the next song after "Longer Boats," a song we were talking about and trying to fathom:

Mary dropped her pants by the sand
And let a parson come and take her hand
But the soul of nobody knows
Where the parson goes, where does the parson go?

Please spare me the usual Cat Stevens hating. That's been talked to death. (Here's an elaborate Wikipedia page on your favorite Cat Stevens topic.) The subjects of this post are: 1. odd suggestions for world peace and 2. what is the song "Longer Boats" about? 

I'll start you off on the right track:

Topic #1: In 1969, right after they married, Yoko Ono and John Lennon sat in bed together for world peace. And — take note! — John Lennon and Yoko Ono had married across national and cultural boundaries.

Topic #2: The suggestion from Stevens is that he was imagining aliens in spaceships coming to earth and bringing us a better world, apparently free of the inferior traditional religions of human beings. In that view, there's no parson molesting Mary. Mary and the parson are simply traipsing off into a new way of life, liberated by the philosophy of the aliens.

IN THE COMMENTS: Now, this is smart, from creeley23:

I take Stevens' Hitchcock remark before "Peace Train" as a reference to the train-into-the-tunnel ending of North By Northwest, i.e. it was a coded reference to the "make love, not war" sentiment of the time.

Well, then. I wasn't going to say it, but I thought the "longer boats" were longer cocks! That's why it was so telling that Mary dropped her pants. And I thought "the parson" was some wags name for his waggler: Where does the parson go? I thought I had it all figured out!

It's "easy" to answer the question what would John Lennon be like if he were alive today.

"He would love today’s TV with all the channels that are available."

Says May Pang, laughing (and reminiscing about how Yoko assigned her the task of being John Lennon's girlfriend).

ADDED: Oh, yeah, Paul McCartney got married again. That didn't interest me as something to blog about, but having jumped at that Pang bit — portraying John as a guy who would mainly like to watch a lot of television — I find it amusing that Paul's wedding didn't register on my bloggable-o-meter.

IN THE COMMENTS: ndspenelli says:

John Lennon channel surfing...Imagine.

Imagine there's 2,000 channels/It isn't hard to do/Most of them are HD/Video on Demand too...

"The End of the Jerry Lewis Telethon—It's About Time."

Says history prof Jon Wiener:

Every year it was the same. Jerry did his telethon shtick, parading little kids in wheelchairs across the Las Vegas stage, making maudlin appeals for cash, alternatively mugging and weeping, and generally claiming to be a friend to the doomed.

The pitch was always for “Jerry’s kids.” But two-thirds of the clients of the Muscular Dystrophy Association were adults, and they didn’t like being referred to as “Jerry’s kids.”

Time passed. The "kids" kept growing up. And Jerry got more and more outmoded.

For me, the worst moment of the telethon came in 1972 when John and Yoko appeared. They played some good music—“Imagine,” and a reggae version of “Give Peace a Chance.” But they were there for a political reason: President Nixon had been trying to deport them for almost a year, and they were desperate to say in the USA. So to prove they were deserving of residency, they stopped hanging out with Jerry Rubin and instead embraced Jerry Lewis. That’s why Lennon told the telethon audience “Jerry is one of our favorite comedians.”

Nixon! Still railing about Nixon over there in The Nation, where this article is published.

Elsewhere, in the same old lefty journal there's another Labor Day piece, "Top Ten Labor Day Songs," and there's John Lennon again, holding down the 2 position with "Working Class Hero." John Lennon, John Lennon, John Lennon. I wonder how he'd feel if he could know how closely American lefties would cuddle him 30 years after his death.

"Working Class Hero" is not one of the labor songs sung by the Solidarity Singers who do their singalongs every weekday at the Wisconsin Capitol. And it's not surprising. The unions that were fought for in the Great Wisconsin Protests of 2011 were public employee unions, especially teachers unions. Picture the teacher-folk singing these lyrics:

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.

There's really nothing in that song stoking enthusiasm for labor unions. There's nothing about working. It's about a disabling fear of work. And it's not the boss who tortures and scares you in those first 20 years. It's the parents and the teachers.

Slate's June Thomas thinks Dan Savage is "bullying" Marcus Bachmann.

June Thomas's Dan Savage is the "it gets better" guy:

[T]he man who launched the “It Gets Better Project,” an effort to stop the bullying of gay teens, was acting like a big bully. As Savage always notes, the kind of smear-the-queer taunts that can cause so much pain to young people aren’t aimed only at kids who are gay, they’re often aimed at boys who don’t live up to some mythical standard of masculinity and girls who just aren’t girly enough. I can only imagine how listeners who happen to have the kind of lisping, effeminate speech and affect that Savage was ridiculing felt upon hearing the attack.

Marcus Bachmann makes money in what I consider to be a reprehensible way: offering “reparative therapy” to “cure” gay people. Judging from the testimony of people who have sought Bachmann’s help, it’s no exaggeration to say that he tries to “pray the gay away.” But that doesn’t justify bullying, and it’s not a good message to send.

I cut Savage some slack. He is a proud gay man who has done amazing work for the community, and I know from having watched the It Gets Better video that he made with his husband, Terry, that he has been bullied and victimized.

Oh, spare me! Thomas's warm, fuzzy Savage is bullshit. Savage is sharp, merciless, and aggressive against homophobia, hypocrisy, and puritanism wherever he thinks he finds it. Based on listening to dozens of his podcasts, I think he bristles at "It Gets Better" as the thing he's famous for, that it irritates him to be reduced to that middle-America-friendly PR campaign.

June Thomas reminds me of people who think John Lennon is all about "Imagine." 

"Rep. Weiner Used Congressional Gym As Backdrop."

And he used his cock as a frontdrop.

And photos of his D.C. condo — which is for sale — are up on line too. It's awfully neat and clean, I must say. And I love the "H" and "A" throw pillows on the bed. You can spell "HA" or "AH," depending on your mood.

(Links via Memeorandum.)

ADDED: I'll bet the pillows were both Huma's from her single days. It's just by chance that his first name begins with the same letter as her last name, Abedin.

By the way, add spaces to the name Abedin and you get a bed in. Remember when John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a bed in?



Ah! (Ha!) Back then "acorn" meant something else.

Maybe Anthony and Huma could have a bed in.... if they need another idea of how to redirect the public dialogue. Imagine!

"Ask me for a flower, and I will show you a Light."

At yesterday's protest, some people did their own thing. Here's a friendly gentleman in a "PEACE" hat, with a framed picture of John Lennon, a scattering of sayings, a small "Recall Gov. Scott Walker" sticker, and a lot of postage stamps. The stamps, he told me, were his contribution to the government.

Also in the photograph:

Right side: The man-in-tights blogged here.

Top left: Corrugated cardboard signs, readable in the super-enlargement. Why do people do signs on sorry-ass broken-open cardboard boxes?

Top right: The lined-up police who were keeping the pro- and anti-Scott Walker people apart. I suspected that there was an official police policy to keep the Tea Party crowd from getting big. We were forced to enter the Tea Party group at corner of the block and blocked from walking across the lawn. I expressed my theory to a woman standing next to me, and she said: What do you expect? Whose side do you think the police are on? Meaning: They're all public service employees too.

I said that I wanted to get over to the Tea Party group and complained about the difficulty of getting through the crowd to the entrance point at the corner. Her attitude toward me suddenly changed. She snapped: "You're a Republican?" Pussy that I am, I said: "I just want to get into the Tea Party group." Actually, I'm not a Republican, but I backed away from the challenge so reflexively — a habit of 25 years in Madison — that my conscious rational processes never crystallized into the lucidity that would have produced a simple "no." 

"[T]he worst pop song designed to reflect a profound moral conscience. I.e. the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."

Andrew Sullivan sets up a poll for what he (a bit inaptly) calls the "Shut Up and Sing" award. You can't really shut up and sing. He's just looking for bad lyrics of a particular sort.

I only know 4 of the 10 songs on his list, and they don't really bother me. I mean, it's fun to knock Sting, but other than that, who cares what Madonna was actually saying in "American Life"? And if Stevie Wonder wants to sing with Paul McCartney about racial harmony using a piano keyboard metaphor, that's too sweet to get upset about. As for "Okie From Muskogee," that song has aged fabulously well. I was around in the 1960s when we hippies loved hating Merle Haggard for the things he said in that song, but it's nuts to take it the way we did back then:

"Okie From Muskogee," 1969's apparent political statement, was actually written as an abjectly humorous character portrait. Haggard called the song a "documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time."... "I wrote it when I recently got out of the joint. I knew what it was like to lose my freedom, and I was getting really mad at these protesters. They didn't know anything more about the war in Vietnam than I did. I thought how my dad, who was from Oklahoma, would have felt. I felt I knew how those boys fighting in Vietnam felt."

That text is from Wikipedia. "Abjectly humorous character portrait"? Somebody doesn't know the meaning of "abjectly." But I'm inclined to say that Andrew Sullivan is abjectly humorless... at least when it comes to marijuana....

"We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee..."



Smug? Pretentious? Absurd!

You know what deserves to win the award Sullivan defines. It's damned obvious and it's not on the list. Imagine all the peeepull....

Really, this award is no fun if you take shots at lightweights like The Partridge Family and the New Kids on the Block — as Sullivan does. Get the guys who've been taken seriously, like Bob Dylan. ("He that gets hurt will be he who has stalled...") Pick a worthy target or... as they say... shut up.

If you're thinking of saying something about Elizabeth Edwards in the comments to the previous post....

... you need to put it here instead.

ADDED: Let me front-page something Clyde said in the comments to yesterday's post noting the death of Elizabeth Edwards:

This is probably an inappropriate question, but if as some have speculated, she knew the end was near and stopped taking the drugs: Did she decide to check out in December before the Death Tax kicks back in in 2011? Dying before January would be very lucrative for heirs, as opposed to hanging on until January 1st and having her estate get slammed with a 55% tax (or I think 35% if the deal Obama made with the Republicans goes through)...

AND: Irene said:

Rich people like Elizabeth Edwards plan for death, and their lawyers draft dispositions that minimize the impact of the estate tax. She knew she was dying, and she probably had a plan that gave a good chunk to charity. She also had plenty of warning since her initial diagnosis, and she could take advantage of making lifetime gifts to her children.

If she didn't plan, then everything passes to John Edwards without any tax implications. They're still married, and there is an unlimited marital deduction for spouses.

I didn't realize they were still married. Did they stay married as a tax-planning scheme?

"An unspeakable tragedy..."

30 years ago....

"I don't believe in magic..."

Waking up in a red state, the lyric "The dream is over" played in my head. That song, that John Lennon song, you may know, is called "God." It begins: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain" — and that seems like an apt rebuke in a political world in which we imagined our President to be some kind of God. Idolatry is not a good thing, and we — not just the President, but we — got our comeuppance. Lennon's song continues...

I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha

Maybe, like me, you exclaimed: But maybe I believe in Aqua Buddha!

Let's hope last night's revolution was a revolution toward reality, away from government, and a return to belief in what individual human beings can do on their own, without magical dreams about government.

Waking up in a red state.

Good morning, from Wisconsin.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over....

Or maybe just... The dream is over...And so, dear friends, you'll just have to carry on...

John Lennon is 70.

There's a nice tribute to Lennon in today's Google logo. An animated line drawing, with exactly what you'd expect in the audio track. Must it always be "Imagine"?

Imagine no "Imagine"
What song would they use
For every Lennon tribute
In the annual Lennon news
Imagine all the people
Freed from that old song...

You may say I'm a dreamer
Like some crazy peacenik dove
I hope someday you'll join me
And the new song would be Love.

"Here's the famous banned butcher cover. You can sell it for $11m dollars."

So wrote John Lennon. And now, the item is offered for sale, at $11 million, naturally.

(If John Lennon really wrote "$11m dollars," he made a common redundancy error.)

The photograph — which, btw, is offal — may top the list of the most expensive Beatles memorabilia, which currently looks like this:

#5, John Lennon's talisman necklace...

#4, Gibson SG guitar played by George Harrison and John Lennon...

#3, A hand painted Beatles Sgt. Pepper's drum skin...

#2, John Lennon's Steinway piano...

#1, John Lennon's hand painted Rolls Royce Phantom V...

Heavy on the John Lennon. Light on the Paul McCartney.

At the Amaryllis Café...

... amour is real.

Bob Dylan, unrecognized, took an ordinary tourist tour of John Lennon's childhood home.

"He could have booked a private tour but he was happy to go on the bus with everyone else."

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some talk about running into celebrities and Palladian says:

I once ran into Woody Allen. Literally. He was coming out the in door at Lincoln Center and I smacked right into him. He was wearing Woody Allen clothes, his trademark glasses and a fishing hat. I didn't knock him over or anything but he was obviously shaken up. The funny thing was, I automatically, instinctively reacted to him in a Woody Allen way. I started mumbling and saying "My God! I'm... I'm sorry, I'm really... My G-god, are you alright? Wow, I'm... shocked... shocked? I'm... surprised. I-I- are you ok? I mean, can I... can you... are you alright? Geez!" He mumbled right back in a Woody Allen way as he composed himself and then he took off into the plaza. It was really, really surreal because for a brief few moments I was basically in a scene from a Woody Allen movie.

Then this Trooper York comment slips in next:

I do think it is a shame and a crime that he has not yet been elected to the Overrated Hall of Fame.

Well maybe the veterans committee will correct that injustice.

He adds:

Oh and that goes for the Woodsman too.

And Palladian's all:

It's the Academy of the Overrated, along with such notables as... Gustav Mahler and Carl Jung and Isaac Dinesen... and Van Gock.

With video:

"But it grieves my heart, love/To see you tryin' to be a part of/A world that just don't exist ..."

"It’s all just a dream, babe/a vacuum, a scheme, babe/that sucks you into feelin’ like this."

Is "To Ramona" really the 24th best Bob Dylan song ever? I don't know, but it's meant a lot to me over the years.

It remains one of the best songs based on a woman’s first name, up there with Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and John Lennon’s “Julia.”

See the muddy waters rise.

Thanks to Jason for pointing me to The Beatles Search Machine, after I tweeted about wanting a place to search Beatles lyrics, the way you can search Bob Dylan's lyrics at his official website. I wanted to know:

Is the only reference to "water" in the Beatles' lyrics "muddy water"? (Typical of the kind of thing I need to know to blog.)

Don't you think it's interesting that the word "water" appears only once in all those lyrics, and it's muddy water? The "he" of "Come Together" "got muddy water." (I'm not sure how well the "mojo filter" works to clarify said water.) Presumably, the reference is to the musician Muddy Waters, though surely he is not the "he" of the song. (It's Timothy Leary, right?)

The Beatles Search Machine also returned "Mother Nature's Son," but there, the word actually is "waters," so it does not undo the conclusion that the only "water" in a Beatles song is "muddy water." But the "waters" of "Mother Nature's Son" look sparkling clear:

Sit beside a mountain stream — see her waters rise
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.

The usual things that are said about the difference between Paul and John can be said here. John's dark "shoot me" song has muddy water, and Paul's sweet happy song has us listening to the pretty music of a mountain stream. But I must add that "see her waters rise" today makes me think about global warming. Now, I hear that song and picture Paul, Mother Nature's son, in his field of grass, with his swaying daisies, and the mental picture is ruined by big old Al Gore lumbering up and harshing his mellow.