I Can Read With My Eyes Shut

By Dr. Seuss

 

I can read in red. I can read in blue.
I can read in pickle color too.
I can read in bed, and in purple. and in brown.
I can read in a circle and upside down!
I can read with my left eye. I can read with my right.
I can read Mississippi with my eyes shut tight!

There are so many things you can learn about.
But...you'll miss the best things
If you keep your eyes shut.
The more that you read, the more things you will know
The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

If you read with your eyes shut you're likely to find
That the place where you're going is far, far behind
SO...that's why I tell you to keep your eyes wide.
Keep them wide open...at least on one side.

In 1980 a great event took place. A search went out throughout the nation to find the greatest actors who ever lived and to bring them to one set to make a grand movie about grand events that took place a hundred years prior in a place called Wyoming.  

Great men and women appeared on that set including:

Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Joseph Cotten, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Masur, Terry O'Quinn, Mickey Rourke, and Willem Dafoe in his first film role.

There are more recognizable faces in this epic than just those listed too.

That epic was entitled Heaven's Gate and due to insomnia I was given the opportunity to see all four hours of it on Turner's Classic Movie Channel. And you know what? The events it depicted are known as the Johnson County War. Supposedly some of them European Immigrants had been attempting to claim a home under the Federal Homestead Acts and the big, rotten, no good cattle barons were trying to drive them off.

The beauty about this movie is that the viewer is able to go to the bathroom anytime he wishes. He can wander the kitchen looking for snacks. He can see what else is on at three in the morning as far as entertainment. You can even make your bed and paint the living room.

And yet, when that viewer comes back to the smaller more portable cinematic screen, he misses nothing of consequence.

There are three scenes he will constantly come back to.  One scene is set in a grand pole barn with no ceiling with immigrants yelling at each other in strange tongues and Jeff Bridges shoots bullets into the sky. I think Jeff was attempting to provide some order to the proceedings.

In another scene, you will catch sight of Sam Waterston riding around the frontier in some sort of hat that must be a cross between a coon skin cap and a Russian pelt thingy.

The third scene, which is much more prevalent, presents a circle of some wagons with the immigrants inside of the circle shooting at the robber barons and their Hessians who are riding around the circle. Hard to really catch the action though because evidently there is a lot of dust in Wyoming and the horses kind of kick it up a bit.

Now to be fair, there are some scenes where the robber barons appear to be inside of the circle of wagons while the immigrants ride around it. At least I think so; a lot of dirt and dust in the air so it was difficult to make things out that clearly.

But the movie was evidently based on real characters. But some of the characters appear to be added as color. And the time was the late 1880's and the 1890's.

Now Jeff Bridges plays John Bridges. As far as my research, there was no John Bridges. I think the director forgot Jeff's name and just called him John.

But Kristopherson plays a guy known as James Averill and he has a thing going with Ella Watson. Both of their characters existed.  And they were both small homesteaders in Wyoming while these immigrants were moving into the state seeking the American Dream, or the Wyoming Dream or just a place to put up an outhouse.

Waterston plays Frank Canton, a real wildwest gun for hire with a bio that reads a lot like Wyatt Earp's.

Now in real life, Canton gets his crew to lynch Ella and James.

In the epic movie, Canton and his bunch ambush Ella and James and Jeff (er John). James shoots and kills Canton and Ella and Jeff are killed.

Now in real life Canton goes on to live a long and healthy life dying in 1927 (Earp died in 1929). And like Earp, Canton had been an outlaw and a marshall and a sheriff and a businessman and a gold seeker in the Alaskan Frontier. Canton even writes his own bio. A fascinating character really.

Instead the movie has James on some boat cruising around Alaska (like Costner's Earp) with a woman who looks just like Ella.  And Canton of course is long dead and gone.

I want to get into this Johnson County War at another time. As a morality play it symbolizes to me anyway, just about everything that is truly American.

But this also demonstrates the difference between art and history, at times anyway.  Of interest is a book that was written not long after the Johnson Country Wars. It disappeared. The Robber Barons tracked down all the copies of this book and destroyed them. Hahahahaahah Kind of like what Fox News does today.

Palin's accusations have prompted dismissive responses from former top McCain aides including Steve Schmidt, who slammed her account of the campaign as "total fiction." Though Schmidt was referring specifically to Palin's criticisms of his behavior, like her allegation that he used profane language in the presence of her youngest daughter, he appears to be onto something. (Schmidt should be grateful Palin did not characterize him as harshly as she did Alaska state Sen. Bert Stedman, a rock-ribbed Republican, who she wrongly labeled in Going Rogue as a "Democratic lawmaker.")

Indeed, scoring a kill in an aerial wolf hunt with a helicopter full of cluster munitions would be more challenging than finding the errors, baseless accusations and paranoid statements that riddle the pages of Going Rogue. While politicians routinely resort to spin when the truth becomes inconvenient, Palin has taken misleading to new heights, crafting an autobiography that reads like the literary version of the Balloon Boy hoax. But unlike the boy's publicity starved parents, who momentarily duped America, Palin can't fool anyone. Beginning with her specious claim that Alaskans "don't do" hunts by helicopter, Palin's deceptions were instantly debunked by the crack researchers of Right-Wing Book Watch, a joint project of Media Matters for America and the Progressive Book Club.

During the 2008 presidential campaign Palin, through a scattershot of accusations, sought to convince voters that Democratic candidate Barack Obama was a leftist radical who did not share their values. In one instance, during her October 2008 interview with Couric, Palin alleged that Obama believed children born alive after botched abortions should "not receive medical help to save that child's life." The claim, which referred to Obama's vote in the Illinois Senate against a bill to amend the state's abortion law, was, as Palin likes to say, bogus.

As Obama and other opponents of the bill pointed out at the time, Illinois law already unequivocally prohibited the killing of children. Nevertheless, Palin repeats the discredited charge in Going Rogue, flatly asserting that "Obama opposed laws that would protect babies born alive after botched abortions." By supposedly allowing babies to die slowly on cold slabs, Obama revealed his "real extremism," Palin declared. Even after Time magazine and The Washington Post debunked her claim, Palin saw no need to retract or even modify it. The press holds her to "a different standard," after all, so why bother?

While Palin heaped resentment on Obama, who she accused misleadingly of "palling around with terrorists" like the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, she apparently brimmed with frustration at McCain and his campaign staff for failing to orchestrate more negative attacks. Her anger boiled over in the pages of Going Rogue, as she accused the McCain camp of a failure to go after Obama for his "close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists."

"We did not elaborate on any of that [Obama's ACORN connections] during the campaign," Palin claimed in her memoir.

In fact, McCain leveled conspiracy theories about ACORN against Obama for extended periods of a nationally televised October 15, 2008, presidential debate. Two days later, McCain's then-campaign manager Rick Davis hosted a conference call with reporters about Obama's supposed ties to ACORN. Davis arranged another call on October 30 to allege an "ongoing scandal ... related to ACORN and the Obama campaign." Where was Palin while McCain and Davis lashed out the Democratic nominee on his alleged ACORN ties? Unless she had entered an Iditarod race that took her across the frozen tundra during the last month of the campaign, Palin has no excuse.  http://mediamatters.org/research/200911170038

Now we have really only known this money grubbing Ferret from Alaska for a year. She really is only attempting to rewrite one year of history really.  After all it is really only recent history that she is attempting to screw up since she has no grasp of real history anyway. And at least we have repubs who can read and write disputing her accounts for the most part.

But Rover, now he presents us with a book. I actually think that if he had written the script for Heaven's Gate it might have flowed better as a movie. He could have had the robber barons waterboard all the immigrants and he could have made Canton President of the United States of America.

"He's trying to salvage the Bush legacy and, by extension, his own," says Rove biographer and Dallas Morning News senior political reporter Wayne Slater, co-author of The Architect and Bush's Brain. "There's no question that George Bush would never have been president or governor without Karl Rove. But now that the presidency is over and so tarnished, Rove is doing his best--working with the Bush Library and on Fox News--to basically justify the mistakes and the problems of the Bush years...I expect there will also be plenty of score-settling."

In one deliciously wacky instance, reported by the Associated Press which obtained an advance copy, Rove attempts to shift blame for the botched handling of Katrina from the Bush White House and Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael ("Heckuva job, Brownie") Brown to Louisiana's Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco, and New Orleans' Democratic mayor, Ray Nagin. He also derides President Obama, according to the A.P., as "a stereotypical Chicago politician who plays fast and loose with the facts."

Republican activist Grover Norquist, the impresario of the famed Wednesday Group meeting of Washington's top conservative lobbyists, says Rove is at a crossroads, turning from the grubby business of politicking for a single client, Dubya, to something finer and more substantial.

"Think of the George Stephanopoulos model--he was the guy who worked for Bill Clinton and now has carved out an independent career. I almost never hear anyone say, 'There's that Clinton guy.' In the same way, Karl was Bush's Brain for a long period and now he's becoming just Karl Rove."

There are some, of course, who are skeptical that Rove is capable of such a transformation--not that this will stop him from making a fortune and getting a good table at a trendy restaurant. "This is a country," says Joe Wilson, "that welcomes the Elmer Gantrys and the snake-oil salesman."

Now I did an earlier piece on rover and his view of history months and months ago.  Rover had trotted out these messages in a WSJ opinion piece last year where he basically:

Praised w bush for keeping us safe for 8 years.  A lie

Praised w bush's economic success in providing 52 months of growth in this country. Hahahaha

Praised w bush for not going to war in South America.

Oh who cares?

Anybody can write a book.  And rover and palin have proven one thing.

I would rather watch Heaven's Gate every night for a month than read either of their books.

Crossposted at http://digitallusion.com/2010/03/05/book-learnin/