Let The River Run

In 1988, Carly Simon won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Let the River Run, sometimes titled The New Jerusalem, which was featured in the movie Working Girl. I remember hearing this song for the first time and being thrilled by its pure spiritual content and its gospel style. It is about personal rebirth--but it's also about rebirth of the nation. After eight years of Reagan, and four of Bush 1, during the height of the AIDs crisis and the avarice of Wall Street, Let the River Run evokes the spirit of individuality, the vision of poets and dreamers that was missing from the nation's soul. In the gospel style, it is a cri d'coeur of the poet's grief, as well as hope for the future. This is Carly Simon's hymn for America and joins such poems as Leaves of Grass and Wichita Vortex Sutra by Allen Ginsberg in its theme.

Let the river run,
let all the dreamers
wake the nation.
Come, the New Jerusalem.

Silver cities rise,
the morning lights
the streets that meet them,
and sirens call them on
with a song.

It's asking for the taking.
Trembling, shaking.
Oh, my heart is aching.
We're coming to the edge,
running on the water,
coming through the fog,
your sons and daughters.

We the great and small
stand on a star
and blazea trail of desire
through the dark'ning dawn.

It's asking for the taking.
Come run with me now,
the sky is the color of blue
you've never even seen
in the eyes of your lover.

Oh, my heart is aching.
We're coming to the edge,
running on the water,
coming through the fog,
your sons and daughters.

[guitar]

It's asking for the taking.
Trembling, shaking.
Oh, my heart is aching.
We're coming to the edge,
running on the water,
coming through the fog,
your sons and daughters.

Let the river run,
let all the dreamers
wake the nation.
Come, the New Jerusalem.

What Star Trek Can Teach Us

As if there were any doubt that Star Trek had something to say about the world in which we live, I happened to see another object lesson in that very subject yesterday. My sinuses in an uproar, I called in sick, and after groggily getting up around 2:30 in the afternoon, watched an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation on Spike. This was an episode I had seen during its original airing, but when I saw it then, it didn't have the same context as it does today.

In the episode, Jean Luc Picard is captured by evil Cardassians, and tortured. The first time I saw it, I was much more preoccupied by the character that Ronny Cox played, trying to weasel his way into Picard's captain's chair and dissing No. 1 along the way.

However this time, I was much more interested in the story of the evil Cardassian interrogator Gul Madred, played by David Warner and how many lights Picard could see behind him. If you haven't seen that episode (Chain of Command II, Episode #137), Warner keeps asking Picard how many lights Picard sees--the camera clearly shows four--which answer Picard gives. Warner's response is always to punish Picard for giving the wrong answer. The theme then, is that torture results in coerced information which is largely useless. But there's an even deeper level of futility, as exposed in the last scene, between Picard and Counselor Troi, in which Picard says that not only did he want to give the interrogator the information he wanted, but that Picard wanted to believe it himself. The information being sought is thus two spaces removed from anything real or useful. It was a devastating moral to a drama which is being acted out in our names even as we speak.

But I'm not going to think about it anymore. It just makes me too sad to even continue to type.

A Better Place

When I hear that so-and-so has gone to "a better place," almost always in reference to their death, I've always though that to be a platitude.  I'm not a believer in the afterlife.  I believe in the resurrection.  However, after the heart stops beating and the lungs stop breathing and the brain stops thinking, darkness ensues.  It is the "sleep of death" written of in the bible.  I do not believe we ascend into heaven immediately upon expiring and join the choir of angels.  The concept of the soul as being an eternal part of humanity just might be neoPlatonic heresy.  I'm not well read enough to know.  However, far from being a scary thought, oblivion is a comfort to me.  I certainly don't want to dream in the grave--nor do I want to have to worry about those I've left behind.

My first cousin, Cally Jo Eckhardt, daughter of my Aunt LaDonna, who was my mother's younger sister, passed away on Friday evening.  She had suffered a long illness, a complication of gastric bypass surgery.  She kept getting blood clots and finally had a stroke.  She had always been very troubled.  By the time she went in for the procedure she weighed 500 pounds.  But it wasn't vanity that motivated her to have the surgery--it was her health.  Her weight was a symptom of a profound inability to reconcile herself with the world and to experience peace of mind.

So in Cally's situation, although I cannot judge and say that she has gone to a better place, I know for a fact she's gone to a more peaceful place. 

Not so fast...

Apparently, wishful, magical thinking has had the better of me.  After reading a disturbing article in Slate, I'm going to take back my earlier endorsement of Alito.  The jury's still out.

Alito's Okay

The more I read about Sam Alito, the more I am less afraid.  This is in sharp contrast to other Supreme Court nominees such as Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.  If Roberts and Alito are the worst this administration can do to the American polity (thank you Orson Scott Card, for that word) I think we will have dodged a bullet.  This candidate is not polarizing enough to filibuster.  If it had been Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown, then things would be much different.  I'm convinced that Alito is sufficiently intellectual to rule based on legal principal and precedent and not some neanderthal allegiance to talking points distributed by conservative think tanks.

The senate should confirm him post haste and let Madame O'Connor take her last bow.