When The Queen Of The World voyaged on the SS United States

So they sank the SS United States off the Florida coast in the Gulf of America.  For those who haven't been following along at home, the SS United States was the fastest ocean liner ever built, reaching an astonishing 37 knots.  That's for a 990 foot, 50,000 ton ship.  It not only set a transatlantic crossing speed record (a little faster than 3 1/2 days), it obliterated the previous record by over half a day, basically 15% of the old total.

And now she's gone, as the largest artificial reef in the world.  We are still awaiting reports on how she is resting on the sea floor - she heeled over almost 90 degrees just before her final plunge.  The weather has been too bad to send divers down to inspect her.  Fingers crossed that she's upright, because it will be much less safe to dive her if she's on her side.

The Queen Of The World and I watched the livestream of her sinking.  You see, TQOTW was once a passenger on her.

TQOTW was a military brat.  My Father-in-Law was career Air Force, ending as a Master Sargent.  He was once stationed at RAF/USAFB Upper Hayford in England.  When they were deployed back Stateside, they went not via commercial air but rather on the SS United States from Southampton to New York.

The livestream brought out all sorts of memories from her 7 year old self: the great blast of the ship's horn, walking her dog Duke on the fantail (he came over in one of the ship's kennels), sitting with her mom on Steamer Chairs wrapped in blankets against the December chill while Stewards brought them mugs of broth.  Watching a submarine periscope come up and go back down, over and over again.  She thinks that the sub crew was bored and so was messing with the passengers.

And being seasick.  It was December in the North Atlantic, and this was in the day before stabilizer fins.  In fact, had there been fins available they probably wouldn't have been built onto the ship because the added drag would have cost speed, and with the United States it was speed uber alles.  The Navy financed much of her cost so she could be used as a troop ship if needed; her top speed was actually classified until the 1980s.  But the Navy continued subsidizing the US Lines by shipping troops during the off season which is why TQOTW sailed rather than flew.

And so it was a bitter sweet evening watching the sinking.  It made me think that there should be a song about the end of the ocean liner era, like Arlo Guthrie's City of New Orleans sang the disappearing railroad blues.

It doesn't seem that there is; at least I couldn't think of a song like that, and a search of Al Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway didn't turn up anything either.  So we will play her off with this from Bing and Rosemary which was popular during the ship's heyday.  Fair winds and following seas. 

And all of a sudden, I was ten years old

I am surprised at my reaction to the Artemis II mission.  I mean, it's a huge bucket of money to throw at well connected aerospace contractors - and one that imperils the astronauts because it's so expensive that they couldn't really test the heat shield.

And yet suddenly it's 1968 and the teachers are rolling televisions into the classroom so we can watch the spaceships return to Earth.

Sure, it's crazy expensive, but we just sent men people around the damn Moon.

And we did it without that ridiculous Metric System ... 

For a moment, America is the Old America that can do things.

The photo of the year for America's 250th birthday

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.

Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor.  Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.

But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago.  And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40. 

Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.

Jeremy Clarkson on the USS Eisenhower

This is Jeremy Clarkson from 1998, four years before he rebooted the Top Gear show.  They still had F-14s on the carrier.  This is a very cool look back to Old America when it still was America. 

Nat 'King' Cole - The Christmas Song

This is perhaps the Platonic Christmas song. 

Aaron Copeland - Appalachian Spring

This week is Thanksgiving* and so calls for what is perhaps the most American of all classical music, Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring.  Most of the composers we see here on Sunday Classical were child prodigies, going to the Paris Conservatoire before they were 12 years old or such.  Not so with Copeland, who was a distinctly American self-made-man story.

His family wasn't musical, and when he was young you would have thought that his older brother was the only musical talent in the family.  He got his first piano lessons from his older sister, who he was very close to - but that only took him so far.  And so he signed up for a Music Correspondence Course and got lucky.  His teacher was a no-nonsense German who schooled him in Romantic era composers.  As he said later in life, "This was a stroke of luck for me. I was spared the floundering that so many musicians have suffered through incompetent teaching."

What stuck ended up making him hugely popular with general audiences in the USA.  His Fanfare For The Common Man is perhaps his most recognizable work.  Artistically, you can compare this with Norman Rockwell's famous Freedom Of Speech painting:

Artistically, you can pair Appalachian Spring with Rockwell's Freedom From Want painting.  You cannot find a more iconic portrait of Thanksgiving than this:

Of course the "Serious" Art Establishment hated both Rockwell and Copeland.  Audiences didn't care, since both artists captured the essence of America itself.  And so spend some time with this music which is accompanied with a lovely series of photographs of the Appalachian Mountains.  They too, capture the essence of America itself.

*Offer void in Canada. 

Rest in Peace, Colonel

 

If you are of a certain age, you will remember this Pultizer Prize winning photograph of a US Air Force officer returning from the Hanoi Hilton in 1974.

Dwight has the details, and it is quite a sad story.  Rest In Peace, COL Stirm.  I hope you now truly have the opportunity to put out your hand and touch the face of God.
 

Notes from Old America : Arlo Guthrie - City of New Orleans

This song is an anthem from Old America.  I listened to this as a teenager, and you (Old Farts) know how old I am.  This is from a time when politics was not Uber Alles, and when  Americans could have civil conversations even if they were in opposite parties.

ASM836 has been posting about how he went  on a road trip and found that Old America is sill here.  This song sings to that, even if Arlo was a Commie Bastard - and son of a Commie Bastard - but he endorsed Ron Paul (!).  Because back then we were always America First, even back in the 1970s.  I think that this proves my point, that we shouldn't hate Americans because they are in the other political party.

Arlo Guthrie, City Of New Orleans (Songwriter: Steve Goodman):

City Of New Orleans (Songwriter: Steve Goodman)

Riding on the City of New Orleans
Illinois Central, Monday morning rail;
There are fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors, twenty five sacks of mail.
They're all out on a southbound odyssey
The train rolls out of Kankakee
Rolling past the houses, farms and fields,
Passing trains that have no names
Freight yards full of old black men,
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

Singing, "Good morning, America, how are you?
Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans.
And I'll be gone five hundred miles when day is done."

I was dealing cards with the old men in the club car,
It's a penny a point, there ain't no-one keeping score.
Won't you pass the paper bag that holds that bottle,
You can feel the wheels a-rumbling through the floor.
And the sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers
Ride their fathers' magic carpet made of steam;
Mothers with their babes asleep, rocking to the gentle beat,
The rhythm of the rails is all they dream.

Singing, "Good morning, America, how are you?
Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans.
And I'll be gone five hundred miles when day is done."

Nighttime on the City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
It's halfway home, and we'll be there by morning,
Through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea.
But all the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream,
The old steel rail it ain't heard the news,
The conductor sings his song again, it's, "Passengers will please refrain..."
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Singing, "Good night, America, how are you?
Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans.
And I'll be gone five hundred miles when day is done."

Singing, "Good night, America, how are you?
Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans.
And I'll be gone a long, long time when the day is done."

As with all great songs about America, this is bitter sweet.  This was once the artery that pumped blood between America's different regions.  Now - in the 1970s - it was dying as a passenger system.

But people remembered what it was.  Here's the Highwaymen who did this almost as well as Arlo.  Waylon makes this almost what it was. Sure, Willie carries this, but watch Waylon.

 

America is not gone.  Art tells us what it was, and is, and can be.  

That's what ASM826 is telling us. America is here.  Just look around.  

Recommended Reading: Empire of the Summer Moon

The most Bad Ass Indian tribe in the old west was not the Lakota that did in the 7th Cavalry, but rather the Comanche.  S. C. Gwynne tells their tale well in The Empire Of The Summer Moon.

Essentially they were ferocious and highly mobile guerillas who thought nothing of raiding a thousand miles (from Kansas into Mexico), often - maybe usually - riding at night by the light of the moon.

To this day a summertime full moon is often referred to (at least in Texas) as a "Comanche Moon).  In fact, that was the title of a miniseries set in the old west not so very long ago. 

The book does a great job describing the rise of the Comanche from obscure beginning to their domination of the central Great Plains.  They were the best horsemen in North America and the masters of the hit-and-run.  They put so much pressure on settled tribes (not to mention Spanish colonists) that they essentially stopped Spanish advancement north of the Rio Grande.  The book makes the case that the Mexican government invited the Americans into Texas to act as a buffer between Mexico and the Comanches.  The Texas border with them was bloody and settlement was slow.

The end of the Civil War and the introduction of repeating firearms (and light horse artillery), combined with the slaughter of the bison herds was a problem that the Comanches could never solve.  Even so, Kit Carson admitted that their chief Quanah Parker (son of a kidnapped Texas girl who went native in the tribe)  almost wiped out his entire command.  The second half of the book is Quanah's story, from the greatest war chief of the Plains to the Reservation, and ultimately to his unlikely friendship with Teddy Roosevelt.

Highly, highly recommended. 

The book left out what I think is perhaps the most unlikely Comanche story, that of David Pendleton Okenhater. Born as O-kun-ha-tuh (Making Medicine) in the 1840s, he was in the thick of the Comanche wars of the 1860s - he was with Quanah at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.  In prison at Ft. Marion in Florida in the 1870s he ended up as First Sergeant of the prisoners (really!) and was noticed by Capt. Pratt for the art he was creating (really!).  Pratt encouraged his art career and one of his pieces came into the collection of Mrs. Alice Key Pendleton, wife of a Senator from Ohio (really!).  The Pendletons paid for Okenhater to be sent to live at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in New York.   He took their name out of respect and gratitude.

He was baptized there in 1878 and ordained a deacon in 1881.  As a Deacon he was sent essentially as a missionary back to the Cheyenne.  He lived out his life as a Deacon and a Cheyenne Chief until his death in 1931.  That was a long way from a taker of scalps.  A long way.

In 1985, the Episcopal Church declared David Pendleton Okenhater a saint.  His feast day is September 1.  That's quite some Medicine for O-Kun-Ha-Tuh to make.

How the USA won the Cold War

We did it by treated German POWs held in the USA well.  Not just the US Government, but the American people treated them well.  They had been told by the Nazis that America was weak, divided, and a mongrel race.  The POWs saw the American people and society with their own eyes and then went home after the war.

And then built modern Germany.

We came to America as enemies, as Nazis, as believers in a lie.  We left as friends, as democrats, as men who had seen the truth.   

Many of the POWs who were employed on Kansas farms corresponded for decades with the families who showed them friendship as POW workers.

Playback has been disabled for this video (from which I got the quote above), but I encourage every reader to go watch it.  If you don't - like I did - end up with watery eyes then we just cant be friends anymore.  And to those who think this video is a one-off, there are more.  So many more.  You can watch them at the link (from Youtube suggestions) or you can watch this: 

And a note to the Usual Suspects who fancy themselves as "Anti Nazi": this is what anti-Nazi is really about.  This is how you turn actual, you know - Nazis - into anti-Nazis.  It must really bust your chops to have Primary Sources telling you that your philosophy of life is full of shiest.  You Commie Bastards.

Oh, this will too (note the substitution of the word freiheit - freedom - for freunde -  I could translate for you but I wouldn't want to insult you; me, I think that Schiller would have approved of Bernstein's substitution at the fall of the Berlin Wall).

Art Carney and Johnny Carson jam together

I never knew he could play the piano, or that Johnny could play drums.  Or that Sid Caesar could play sax.

George Gershwin and DuBose Hayward - "Summertime" from Porgy & Bess (sung by Ella Fitzgerald)

Porgy & Bess was first performed in 1935 and sadly has peaked.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was popular in the Soviet Union during the Cold War as a display of American repression - the 1980s film White Nights showcased this..  It seems that the Usual Suspects who control popular culture are not subtle enough to line this into their repertoire of  anti-American art, but whatever.

This is without doubt the most famous song from that opera, and has been recorded by pretty much everybody - Janis Joplin & The Holding Company may have been the most unexpected of these.  Here's Ella Fitzgerald with what approaches the Platonic Ideal performance of the song. 

Happy Birthday, America

I was born by God's dear Grace in an extraordinary place.  Happy Birthday to that place.

I pledge allegiance to that flag, and if that bothers you, well that's too bad.

But if you have pride and you're proud you do, we could use a some more like me and you. Glen Filthie, this means you.  You're already half way thrown out of your current place.  The air smells of freedom here ...

Aaron Tippin: Where The Stars And Stripes And The Eagle Fly

Well, if you ask me where I come from
Here's what I tell everyone
I was born by God's dear grace
In an extraordinary place
Where the stars and stripes and the eagle fly

It's a big ol' land with countless dreams
Happiness ain't out of reach
Hard work pays off the way it should
Yeah, I've seen enough to know that we've got it good
Where the stars and stripes and the eagle fly

There's a lady that stands in a harbor for what we believe
And there's a bell that still echoes the price that it cost to be free

I pledge allegiance to this flag
And if that bothers you, well, that's too bad
But if you got pride and you're proud you do
Hey, we could use some more like me and you
Where the stars and stripes and the eagle fly

Yes, there's a lady that stands in a harbor for what we believe
And there's a bell that still echoes the price that it cost to be free

No, it ain't the only place on earth
But it's the only place that I prefer
To love my wife and raise my kids
Hey, the same way that my daddy did
Where the stars and stripes and the eagle fly
Where the stars and stripes and the eagle fly 

This song sums up the current Cold Civil War here on the shores of the New World*.  It also sums up the increasing Cold War between Western Europe** and the USA under the Trump Administration.  It's a fundamental disconnect between world views - us vs. them***.

All I can say is that God spared Donald Trump last summer for a purpose.  That statement probably bothers some people.

Well, that's too bad****. 

* I only use the term to bother the Usual Suspects.

** Ibid 

*** Well, except for the European oppressed political minorities, like the AfD, Marine Le Pen, Tommy Robinson, et al.

**** Damn, this has turned into a rant.  I guess that calls for a clarification.  Maybe it's not a rant, it's a desire for a Reckoning: 

The S.S. United States reaches Florida

There are some great video shots of the ship under tow in this video.

Tim Conway as the Fashion Police

And then the *real* police show up.  Pure gold.

Old tools are gold

So this guy has a hydraulic press and he runs both a 100 year old American sledge hammer and a new (Harbor Freight looking) Chinese one through it.  The old one was unscathed; the new one gets squished.

A sledge hammer gets squished. 

But then the guy returns the old one into like new condition.  If you like old tools, this is 8 minutes worth your while.

Oldest photo of a First Lady

The National Portrait Gallery has acquired the oldest photo of a First Lady, an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolly Madison.  This is a very cool picture, as it captures some of her personality - people chose very formal poses back then.  No smiling.  Except for a hint of a smile from Dolly.

Aaron Tippin - Where The Stars And Stripes And The Eagle Fly

The Queen of the World and I were talking today, remembering the bicentennial celebration in 1976.  She pointed out that two years from now will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Wow.

It's still worth celebrating.

S.S. United States to be evicted from its pier?

The Queen Of The World sent me this sad story:

The ship's remarkable speed earned it the coveted Blue Riband award from Great Britain upon its maiden voyage in 1952. Partially sponsored by the U.S. government during the Cold War era, it was designed as a potential rapid troop carrier if geopolitical tensions escalated, according to the website for the SS United States Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that has overseen the vessel since 2011.

Despite its high level of regard and rich history, the ship faces an uncertain future as it languishes at Pier 82 in south Philadelphia. Its retirement has been fraught with challenges, including the recent threat of eviction due to a lawsuit from Pier 82's landlord, Penn Warehousing, according to an NPR report on Monday, March 11.

The lawsuit alleges the SS United States Conservancy owes between $700,000 and $800,000 in back rent, Warren Jones, one of the conservancy's board members, told the radio station. He said the organization entered into the agreement more than a decade ago, and during the pandemic, the rent was unjustly doubled.

This story is of interest to TQOTW, since she actually was a passenger on that ship.  Her dad was in the Air Force and posted to the UK in the early 1960s; they returned from PCS on this.  It's sad to see what the ship has become from what it used to be.  TQOTW watched this with me and remembered all sorts of things, like the signal flags at the swimming pool.

That was a different world, and people would rather spend 8 hours on a plane than 5 days on a ship, even one as grand as the United States.

 

Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops Orchestra, Pops Christmas Party 1959

The mid-20th Century was the high point of the much appreciated and much lamented in its passing "Mid-Brow"* culture: a set of societal expectations that a properly educated man or woman should know certain (respectable) things and behave in certain (respectable) ways.  One of these things that people were expected to know was classical music.  There were two great popularizers of mid-brow music: Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Fiedler.

Bernstein was a musical genius, who wrote fabulous music.  "West Side Story" is perhaps most famous, but "Candide" is perhaps his greatest composition.  Of course he was a dirty commie bastard, but there's no denying his influence on the Mid-Brow public.

Arthur Fiedler was the long time conductor of the Boston Symphony and (more famously) the Boston Pops which became perhaps the most famous Mid-Brow orchestra ever.  Fiedler joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1915 (!) and graduated to cunductor in 1930.  He remained conductor of the Symphony and the Pops for the next half century.

His career was the apogee of Mid-Brow culture in America.  All 3 networks plus PBS covered the July 4, 1976 Pops concert from Boston live.  All of them.  After all, people were expected to behave in particular (respectable) ways.

Alas for the America of my youth.  Here's a delightful musical album of the 1959 Boston Pops Christmas.  Sadly, Youtube tells me that this has only 173 views.  Alas for the America of my youth, indeed.

* Not the hoity-toity High Brow set, and certainly not the Low Brow set.  Mid-Brow, the sweet spot.