A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
-Ambrose Bierce
… a man that goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged; if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound to hit something by and by.
If you have a half-hour to spend, the movie returns a dividend on your investment.
A logging river is in sight from my kitchen window. They haven’t allowed the logs to float down the Androscoggin for half a century, so the trucks rattle by day and night on Route 2 instead, hard by the river. Some call this progress.
A long time ago, a man with vision and verve tramped into the wilderness here, and decided to build a whole city out in the wilderness based on nothing but logs and the river. There is a big, granite shrine at the foot of the big falls — the falls that caught his eye in the first place.
The shrine is to a politician famous for crying, not the founder of the town.
Partway through the film, they show the hobnailed boots used by the river drivers. I’ve been in the factory they refer to that made them. The factory itself is converted into shabby cubes filled with holistic healing mountebanks and tax accountants. Next door there’s a moth-eaten museum dedicated to the work that used to happen there. You have to have a museum dedicated to work now so people won’t confuse it with dinosaurs or pharoahs or cuneiform writing. We were the only people interested in the museum that day, and I know all about work.
There’s a mordant tidbit of humor at 12:45
The green men — which we sometimes call “auger handles” — will work on the shore, while experts like the man with the vest on, Mr. Everett Scott of Bering, will work on the outside next to the stream.
“Auger handles.” Oh, how Twain or Bierce would have loved that. Some auger handles at a university compiled this video from the original 1930 film, and read a script that was written to accompany it. Another bunch of auger handles watch it in some other shabby museum dedicated to work, I expect.
It occurs to me that we’re pretty much all auger handles now. Standing on the shore, clueless and timid, waiting for someone –someone else, mind you — to risk his hide out in the torrent while we stand on the shore and pretend to work, wait for lunch, and tell them they’re doing it wrong once they’re done and we’ve picked them clean.
The pretending to work isn’t working so well anymore, is it? I’ll pretend to work and you pretend to pay me never does. The Mr. Everett Scotts of the world are thin on the ground right now. They seem to have grown weary of dragging along dozens behind them like some undeserved Marley’s chains; of being depended upon and excoriated and cheated at the same time; of being milked and kicked like a barnyard animal with a cruel master; and so have given up even trying to cadge anything useful from the mob of hands full of gimme and mouths full of much obliged lolling on the shore.
So we’re all standing on the shore looking at the logs (a little) and each other (a lot) and wondering if maybe we should pass another law, or cadge another exaction from Mr. Scott — dig up his corpse and go through his pockets one last time if we have to — or just pass a law forbidding logs from public assembly to break up the log jams.
The meek didn’t inherit the earth. The cowardly did.
It’s astonishing how many people are playing, and how quiet the whole thing is. Aretha is still fairly young here, the seventies running out of gas, this whole big-band orchestra extravaganza circling the drain already; but damn — she is entirely in control of herself, singing the way she wants to, not forcing it in any way, the material (Stevie Wonder wrote it) worthy of her effort.
Singing is athletic. I never want to see old singers perform much. They are shells of their former selves, usually, and it makes me sad to see them.
In her introduction, Aretha seemed to be laboring under the impression that the Canadian audience was going to sing along or get up and groove or form a wild, impromptu rave or something.
Wait a minute; kids these days are exactly what you made them. They are saying what you taught them. They are doing what was demanded of them.
If they spend all their time looking for the wart on the Mona Lisa, who do I call to register my complaint? Not them. Who told them it’s the only activity worth a fart?
If they grub around the periphery of everything, desperately avoiding the calumny that comes from honest work that produces tangible things, looking for some gimmick, some pixel they can rent or some misspelled Intertunnel script they can concatenate a life from, who do I ring up? They’re texting — their phones don’t ring anyway — maybe I’ll call you.
They got a whiff of the greasy diesel smoke puffing from the locomotive of congenital obligation you’ve got planned for them, their knuckles still smarting from the rough justice they got for even putting pennies on the rails, and maybe they don’t like it. They’ll be big adults some day, and maybe think for themselves if you didn’t smother it out of them entirely, and it’ll be a wonder if they don’t stake us all out for the crows instead of paying our Medicare.
Kids these days; sheesh. I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter, if I were you.
Month: May 2011
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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