This is living

I have set up my stereo set in the living room like my father did. On Saturday mornings Dad would celebrate the beginning of his weekend by cranking up big band music, sometimes before his three boys had crawled out of their beds. Believe it or not, it is a fond memory.

This Saturday morning, while I fiddled on my laptop, I put Artie Shaw on the turntable, specifically The Complete Artie Shaw, Volume IV: 1940-1941, a two-record set from Bluebird Records.

I think my dad was aghast when I confessed one day that I thought Shaw was better than Benny Goodman, whose music I heard on many a Saturday morning growing up. I am no judge of which man was better on the clarinet, but I thought Shaw was more adventurous, as when he incorporated harpsichord on Gramercy Five recordings like “Cross Your Heart,” the first track on this album.

This particular album covers studio sessions in chronological order from September 1940 to March 1941. I found myself once again marveling at the technology that enables me to time-travel and listen in on performances from more than 85 years ago.

The set includes Shaw’s version of “Moonglow,” the song that was playing when Dad proposed to the girl who would become my mother a few years later. I’m pretty sure they were listening to Benny’s take on the song.

It was a very long time before I discovered that “Moonglow” actually has lyrics, as none of the versions I’d ever heard included singers. “It must have been moon glow that led me straight to you … I still hear you saying, ‘Dear one, hold me fast,’ and I start in praying, Dear Lord, please let this last.” That’s an appropriate song for a marriage proposal.

I have no special message to share today, other than life is better with music, Artie Shaw was a remarkable talent, I’m glad I kept my records, and my parents were always a cute couple. That’s probably enough.

Happy Independence Day

A postscript to my thoughts about H.L. Mencken yesterday, in which he accurately described contemporary politics: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is still an ideal 108 years after he wrote that. The republic may be hanging on by a thread, but it’s still here.

I am not entirely enamored with the state of the republic, but the loyal opposition has spent the last 10 years presenting naysaying or a Soviet-style state (like the one we lived from 2021 to 2024) rather than legitimate alternatives, and so here we are.

But this is July 4, and so I come to celebrate. The Declaration Of Independence is a sacred document, containing as profound a statement as humans have ever declared — “that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain, unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that is to say obvious and undisputed, and yet from the beginning every word has been disputed, every phrase has been challenged.

Who is this Creator? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord of hosts, the King of glory.

That Creator has endowed us with “certain” rights, that is to say “clearly defined”; “unalienable,” that is to say, to take a phrase from another sacred document, “shall not be abridged.”

Gosh, is it really 25 years ago that I sent reporters onto the streets of Green Bay to reproduce an experiment — show people the Bill of Rights, describe it as a petition, and see if people were willing to sign it? “I don’t know if I could support this,” one law officer said in response to some of the limits on law officers. Others expressed skepticism about limits on free speech, the ownership of arms, the right to an attorney, and just about every other tenet.

I think all pretenders to the throne or other public office ought to be pressed regarding how serious they are about defending the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Judging from their performance, I dare say nearly all of them would fail.

The words are a little more complicated than “live and let live,” but that’s the essence. Don’t tread on your neighbors, lest there be consequences. And that phrase “all men” is meant literally: “All” means all, and of course the word “men” also includes all women in this context.

It is literally a revolutionary concept, and it has been constantly challenged for a quarter of a millennium, battered but never beaten. May the beacon shine ever brightly against the darkness.

A riot of peasants

A friend posted a Fox News report about an earthquake off the Russian coast that sparked tsunami warnings in Japan, Alaska, and the entire west coast of the U.S. of A. (and, I presume, Canada). I applied search engines and found no news coverage; a further inspection found that the Fox report was dated July 29, 2025. Once again, the words of the philosopher poet Tom Petty ring true: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

Afterward she asked, perhaps rhetorically, why these sort of things appear in her Facebook news feed, and I replied with H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about practical politics and hobgoblins, adding, “Social media algorithms seem to have been designed with practical politics in mind.”

I wanted to quote Mencken accurately, and so I turned to In Defense of Women, the 1918 book where that wonderfully succinct sentence appeared, and I discovered that the context remains also tremendously relevant:

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers.”

I’m not sure if I would ever describe war as “waged by the will of superior men” or “the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race,” but I probably forget that Mencken was possessed of a supreme wit and sense of irony. 

The point is that Mencken, 108 years ago, described war and politics as accurately as one of our contemporaries might. Of what are our practical “republican” or “democratic” politicians capable beyond “throwing the mob into a panic”? Who are they other than “mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers”? And how could you better describe our political conversation than “an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”?

When I peruse what passes for the news of the world today, I need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, no matter how insane it all appears, God is in control, and “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Second, Henry Louis Mencken was one of the canniest observers of the human condition ever to have lived.