the clarity of the sixties

Yes validation, you have hit the nail on the head Beagles.  It's not the money, but the fact that somebody would actually pay money for it that makes me think I am doing something worthwhile.  Why should that matter, if it's all about to my own self being true?  It shouldn't, but it does.

People generally don't like portraits of themselves, they generally think it doesn't look like them, Maybe they suspect the artist is making fun of them in some subtle way.  Cats are always good because, although they have different patterns in their fur, otherwise they look alike.  Somebody is always saying something like, oh that looks like my cat.  Cats are the best sellers.  I did a whole bunch of portraits once from photographs by a Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron.  People liked them well enough but nobody bought any.  Later somebody told me something like, nobody likes a bunch of strangers hanging from their walls.

I don't like the idea of using art to promote some way of thinking.,  It's kind of a sneaky thing to do, and somebody who thinks the opposite can use it to promote the opposite way of thinking.  You know me, I think appeals to a new way of thinking should be grounded in logic and discussions.


Even in a small town, if people didn't drive cars, there would be enough of them to support a mass transit system.  I expect Cheboygan had streetcars before it had a lot of cars, maybe even an interurban to carry people between all the towns around it.


I watched the Falcon and the Snowman Saturday night.  It began with a montage of videos from the sixties, LBJ, Nixon, bombs falling from a great silver plane.  Ah the sixties, all it takes is a grainy photo to take you right back, right back Jack.

It struck me that it was a time of such clarity.  Everybody knew where they stood on the unpopular war.  My ilk (foolishly I'll admit in the fullness of time) thought it was a war of independence, not unlike the one our brave colonists fought back in 1776.  The other ilk (foolishly again I'll assert) thought of it in turn of dominoes, if we don't stop the commies there next thing you know we will be fighting them at the front gate of our freeholds.  But the point is everybody knew where they stood, and everybody was damn sure that they were right,

Anymore these mideast wars, nobody even knows where we are fighting.  We are still in Afghanistan but we don't hear much about our guys getting killed anymore so I think we are just hanging back.  We are out of Iraq, but we have some guys there who are doing something.  Then we have our jets flying all over, and we have those drones, and those special ops teams that pop up now and again.

There are some people who want us to get out, and there are some who want to double down, but most people just don't know.  Those ISIS guys, pretty bad dudes, we should do something about them, but we don't want to have our guys in there like we once did.  Generally the republicans wanted to do more than what the prez was doing, but they didn't care to specify what that something was.  The big girl and the prez claim they are doing plenty, but it's complicated blah, blah, blah.

And it is complicated.  That busted up dirty and bloody kid was all over the news tugging at our hearts, how can we let this happen?  It was Syrian government bombs that did it, and surely that Assad is a bad bad man, but also against him is ISIS who are badder men.  So if we are fighting Assad we are helping ISIS and if we are fighting ISIS we are helping Assad.

There is just no clarity any more.