John F. Kennedy and the Titans



On November 19, 1963, 43 years ago today, at a ceremony in the White House Flower Garden, John F. Kennedy welcomed officers of state education associations of the National Education Association. he remarked: "I realize once again in a very personal way what a tremendous flood of children are coming into our schools..."

He was always concerned about children, his own as well as the children of all Americans and the world.

John F. Kennedy and the Pigs of War

President Kennedy receives the flag of the cuba exiles (Brigade 2506) in Miami in Dec. 29, 1962 and declares: "I promise to return this flag in a free Havana." Kennedy had been misinformed about the exact details of the planned Cuban invasion.

On November 18th, 1963, John F. Kennedy predicted that the month of April, 1964, would bring "the longest and strongest peacetime economic expansion in our Nation's entire history." And he added: "The steady conquest of the surely yielding enemies of misery and hopelessness, hunger, and injustice is the central task for the Americas in our time . . . 'Nothing is true except a man or men adhere to it -- to live for it, to spend themselves on it, to die for it . . . '"

Time was slipping through his hands . . . he had four days to live.

Reporting from Nataf, Israel -- Even today, when economic storms are shaking markets around the world, posing a threat to the stability of entire countries and societies, Israel continues to conduct its business far from the turmoil, as if swimming in a private ocean of its own. True, the headlines are alerting the public here about the crisis, and the politicians are hastily recalculating their budgets. But none of this is dramatically changing the way we think about ourselves.

"By that, I mean, 'Get me a lead singer. He's got sort of an androgynous blonde hair, very pretty. We need a guitar player, sort of hatchet-faced, wears a hat, plays very fast, very dramatic. He must be very dramatic. Get me a pound of bass player, pound of drummer ... they're making little cardboard cutouts. They hire a producer, they hire writers ... And in the current stuff now, they don't even bother getting people to play. Don't bother with that guitar player, bass player, drummer - nonsense ... The people in those bands can't write, play, or sing."

David Crosby, describing the synthetic, manufactured nature of today's rock bands

"David was obnoxious, loud, demanding, thoughtless, full of himself - of the four of them [David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young], the least talented."

David Geffen

First of all, before getting back into the Laurel Canyon scene, I need to say that some of you people really need to mellow out on the visits to my website. Seriously. This isn't a crack-house, for fuck's sake, so just chill out a little bit. I mean, I've grown accustomed to the fact that you feel free to drop in unannounced at all hours of the day and night, but maybe, just maybe, you could consider doing it a bit less frequently. Is that so much to ask?

Don't get me wrong here - I'm flattered by the attention. I really am. The problem though is that you have overloaded my now-overworked website, causing it to spontaneously disappear on, of all days, the morning of September 11, 2008. And to add insult to injury, the generic, no-frills page that popped up instead, proclaiming that my site was under house arrest for the crime of exceeding its bandwidth allocation, was arguably more attractive than my actual homepage.

Luckily, this problem was quickly brought to my attention by a few alert readers and I was able to liberate my site by digging deeply into my pockets to come up with the bail money that the jailers were demanding (I think they referred to it as "adding resources" to my site, but I wasn't really fooled by that. And I didn't, by the way, really dig that deeply into my pockets. But that's not the point. No, the point is that my site is - and I'm sure that there are many of you who do not know this - primitive by design. It is my belief that the 'retro website' look will soon be all the rage, and I want to be at the forefront of that movement. Everything old will someday become new again, and the 'net has been around for long enough now, given our collectively short attention span, that a return to basics - to those first tentative baby-steps some of us took in creating one of those newfangled things called 'websites' - is all but guaranteed. My site, needless to say, will become the template that will be followed by everyone who wants to run with the in-crowd. I will, of course, be regarded as something of a visionary. Unfortunately though, I will ultimately be revealed as a fraud when, a few years down the road, legions of fans suddenly realize that, long after the fad has passed, my site is still retro. Self-righteous critics will denounce me as a poser, a charlatan - they may even invoke that most demeaning of future slurs and label me a 'Palin.' But before that happens, the brief time during which I shall have basked in the limelight will have made it all worthwhile.