Enemies of the People

"You can't mine coal without machine guns." Richard B. Mellon, March 19, 1858 – December 3, 1933, Testimony before Congress, quoted in Time Magazine, June 14, 1937

John L. Lewis

Mellon as a huge stockholder in the Pittsburgh Coal Company was a great enemy of  John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers. He was also a great donor to the Presbyterian Church.

Don Blankenship,  member, board of directors, US Chamber of Commerce, CEO of Massey Energy, operator of the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, where twenty-five died this week,

Mr. Blankenship is also a huge contributor to the "Tea Party/Tea Bagger" movement. 

Blankenship Quotes:

"Turn down your thermostats? Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I have spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that’s the first stage. You go from having your own car to carpooling to riding the bus to mass transit. You eventually get to where you’re walking. You go from your own apartment and bathroom to sharing kitchens with four families. That’s what socialism and the elimination of capitalism and free enterprise is all about.”

 "We don't pay much attention to the violation count." 

"Some fear we are entering a new Ice Age. We must demand that more coal be burned to save the Earth from Global Cooling."

But, he added, "I don't like to see trade associations refer to global warming as "an issue" because it supports the idea something needs to be done about it." He said he has pressed Mr. Donohue [corporate flunky, former Postal Service Executive and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] to take an even tougher stand against proposals in Congress to require companies to pay for their emissions. He said high emissions "mean you've got a better, more productive economy."-Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2, 2009

Quote of the Day

"He paid the market-price for politicians. Up in Western City I happen to know a lady who was a school-commissioner when he was buying school-lands from the state--lands that were known to contain coal. He was paying three dollars an acre, and everybody knew they were worth three thousand."

"Well," said Cotton, "if you don't buy the politicians, you wake up some fine morning and find that somebody else has bought them. If you have property, you have to protect it."

 Upton Sinclair, King Coal 

Monk's Advice (1960)

- Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.

- Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.

- Stop playing all that bullshit, those weird notes, play the melody!

- Make the drummer sound good.

- Discrimination is important.

- You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?

- All reet!

- Always knows …(Monk)

- It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.

- Let’s lift the band stand!!

- I want to avoid the hecklers.

- Don’t play the piano part, I am playing that. Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompaning (sic) you!

- The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.

- Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by. Some music just imagined.

- What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.

- A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

- Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig & when it comes, he’s out of shape & can’t make it.

- When you are swinging, swing some more!

- (What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!

- Always leave them wanting more.

- Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.

- Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!

- You've got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).

- Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

- They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it. -

Thelonius Monk (as transcribed by Steve Lacy)

From the 1932 film Vampyr directed by Carl-Theodor Dreyer

"A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers."
-Seneca (the Younger) De Brevitate Vitae, i. 18.

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
-W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

"Hunger is the best sauce in the world."
-Cervantes, Don Quixote

"Hunger can explain many acts. It can be said that all vile acts are done to satisfy hunger."
-Maxim Gorky

"Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving."
-O. Henry

"Hunger knows no friend but its feeder."
- Aristophanes

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
-Matthew 25:35-40

"Where people go hungry, to say that man does not live by bread alone is too easily misunderstood as an argument in favor or starvation."
- Theodore Roszak

“If you offer your compassion to the hungry and satisfy the famished creature, then shall your light shine in darkness.”
- Isaiah 58:10

“And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and for the stranger.”
- Leviticus 19:9-10

“God says to Israel, 'My Children, whenever you give sustenance to the poor, I impute it to you as though you gave sustenance to Me.'”
- Numbers 28:2

"It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest."
-Dorothy Canfield Fisher

"I saw a few die of hunger, of eating, a hundred thousand."
-Benjamin Franklin

"Hunger is insolent, and will be fed."
-Homer

"Anticipate charity by preventing poverty."
-Maimonides

“In eating, a third of the stomach should be filled with food, a third with drink, and the rest left empty.”
-The Talmud

"Gloved Dance" John Bonanno, watercolor, 1990, $150

"Glove-O.E. glof "covering for the hand," also "palm of the hand," from P.Gmc. *galofo (cf. O.N. glofi), probably from *ga- collective prefix + *lofi "hand" (cf. O.N. lofi, M.E. love, Goth. lofa "flat of the hand"). Ger. Handschuh, the usual word for "glove," lit. "hand-shoe" (O.H.G. hantscuoh; also Dan., Swed. hantsche) is represented by O.E. Handscio, but this is only attested as a proper name. To fit like a glove is first recorded 1771."-Online Etymology Dictionary

"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

“See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!”-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly."-James Joyce, Ulysses

The following glove references, in this order, appear in Ulysses:

"I want puce gloves and green boots."
puce gloves
kid gloves
gloved hand
rich gloved hand
"Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulders and hips."
canary gloves
"one plump kid glove"
"his other plump glovepalm"
small gloved fist
small gloved fist
"Father Conmee drew off his gloves"
violet gloves
"It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were scheduled to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns."
kid gloves
"Cigary gloves long John had on his desk the other day."
"Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved hand, blunders stifflegged out of the track."
"elbowlength ivory gloves"
glovers
"doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet"
"fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc"
warmgloved
"lovely ladies saling gloves"
canary gloves
"Clipclaps glovesilent hands"
"a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves"
"the present of Byron's poems and the three pairs of gloves"
"touch him with my veil and gloves on going out I kiss then would send them all spinning"
"I did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind"
"he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off"
"he pestered me to say yes till I took off my glove slowly watching him"
"when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out"
"when I put the chair against the door just as I was washing myself there below with the glove"

“It's a pretty sure thing that the player's bat is what speaks loudest when it's contract time, but there are moments when the glove has the last word.”-Brooks Robinson

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."-Johnnie Cochran

Some Quotes of the Bloomsbury Group

"At its simplest, the Bloomsbury Group was the circle round Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. When the Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen died in 1904, his daughters, Virginia and Vanessa, being determined to put their constrained middle-class girlhoods behind them, set up house at 46 Gordon Square in the then-shabby district of Bloomsbury with their two brothers, Thoby and Adrian. Thoby brought home his Cambridge friends Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Saxon Sydney-Turner, inviting them for social evenings with his sisters, the scene being set of earnest youths sitting around the room sipping cocoa and whisky and discussing intently such matters as the ‘meaning of truth’. Most of these young men had been elected to the Apostles, a secret society of intellectually notable undergraduates from Trinity and King’s Colleges. Through the link with the Apostles the Group widened to include E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy and John Maynard Keynes who had left Cambridge earlier. The Group also included Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey’s cousin.

Apart from Saxon Sydney-Turner, who remained an obscure Treasury official, all of the Bloomsbury Group made a very significant contribution to British intellectual and artistic life in the first part of the twentieth century. The two giants, famed internationally, are Virginia Woolf, who broke new ground with her ‘stream of consciousness’ writing; and the economist, Maynard Keynes, whose revolutionary economic theories and significant efforts to build new economic orders after the traumas of two world wars remain an abiding legacy."- Tony Bradshaw, Introduction, "A Bloomsbury Canvas"

Do I have to say this? I do not necessarily endorse or condemn any of these quotes or the activities of these people. But, familiarity with the works and ideas of these undeniably brilliant men and women is essential to understanding the early twentieth century; their influence persists.

"A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind."- Clive Bell (art critic, husband in a very open marriage of Vanessa Stephen Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf)

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."-Virginia (Stephen) Woolf (writer, a suicide)

"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it." -Virginia Woolf

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." -Virginia Woolf


"Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land or the workmen's tools but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive." J.B.S. Haldane (biochemist, geneticist)

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."- John Maynard Keynes (economist)

"Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."- John Maynard Keynes

"I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal."- John Maynard Keynes

"But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."- John Maynard Keynes

“The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds”-Desmond MacCarthy (journalist, editor)

''Relations we may be: have them, we may not''- Duncan Grant, artist, to his older cousin Lytton Strachey in the midst of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to rebuff multiple attempts at seduction, later, Grant became a lover of John Maynard Keynes

"Discretion is not the better part of biography." - Lytton Strachey, historian, (and friend of Thoby Stephen, "the Goth", brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; Thoby died at 26 of typhoid) Strachey loved Ralph Partridge who married Dora Carrington; Dora loved Lytton Strachey and performed a suicide after Strachey died

"Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well-deceived."- Lytton Strachey