Burned-Over District Observer: August 2014

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Della Mae Perform "Pine Tree," "Hounds" & "Carter Country"

Labels: America the Beautiful, Folk Music

MLB, MiLB, LLWS

Yesterday, with my dad and my son I drove the thee hours to Williamsport, Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series. O, the purity!

We started the season driving an even longer distance to see the Toronto Blue Jays forgettably host the New York Yankees. In between, we saw many a good Rochester Red Wings game. We finished the season watching Seoul defeat Tokyo and are looking forward today to watching the former play Chicago in fifteen minutes.

The LLWS is like going to the school dance with the girl next door. MiLB is like spending some quality time with the missus after a hard day for the both of you. MLB is like whacking off alone to hardcore porn on the Internet.

Labels: America the Beautiful, Corea, Family, Nippon, Porn, Rachacha, Sport

True Patriotism

"It is in the interest of every American to understand why war is so dangerous to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," reminds Mike Marion — Anti-war Is Pro-American.

Labels: America the Beautiful, Peace

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Walt Wilkins & The Mystiqueros Perform "Night Train Rolling By"

Walt Wilkins and The Mystiqueros play tomorrow night at the Abilene Bar and Lounge.

Guitalele in hand, last night yours truly hopped a freight train, just for practice, near the trestle pictured above.

Labels: America the Beautiful, Folk Music, Pittsford, Rachacha, Trains

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Cloud Cult Performs "Breakfast With My Shadow," "Ghost Inside Our House," "You're The Only Thing In Your Way," & "Pretty Voice"

Labels: America the Beautiful, Classical Music, Folk Music, Popular Music

Iosue Andreas Sartorius was repatriated to the Burned-Over District in 2011 after a fifteen-year foreign entanglement in the Far East where he blogged as The Western Confucian, bringing back with him one wife and a couple of his own kids (not to mention a somewhat orientalized mindset) to live in a XIX^th Century home in the Village of Pittsford.

Raised in High-Church Lutheranism, after a fifteen-year search of the world's religions, in good Burned-Over District fashion, he found himself joining the world's weirdest religion, Catholicism. Politically a paleolibertarian, his sympathies lie with what fellow Western New Yorker Bill Kauffman called "the peace and love left wing of the paleoconservative movement."

When not at the ballpark rooting on the Rochester Red Wings, he is most at home on his front porch sipping a Genesee Cream Ale and strumming Punk Rock-informed old-timey on his Gretsch G9460 Dixie 6-String Banjo or his Yamaha Mini 6-String Nylon Guitalele, in his kitchen experimenting with vegetarian fare while listening to WRUR, or upstairs spinning vinyl on his Crosley Stereo Turntable Sound System Cr66-pa Rochester.

"Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the Book?" — Red Jacket.

"The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity" — Martin Van Buren.

"Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other" — Millard Fillmore.

"America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future" — Frederick Douglass.

"I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one, and that even by indirection a strong power may with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory" — Grover Cleveland.

"Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter" — Louise Brooks.

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" — Rod Serling.

"When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries" — Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen.

"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it" — Christopher Lasch.

"I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care" — Camille Paglia.

"I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist... I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn." — Bill Kauffman.

"If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged" — Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Mary Immaculate,
Patroness of the United States

"[T]he Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men," wrote Henry Adams, America's greatest man of letters, in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

This self-described "conservative Christian anarchist," a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, "with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him," continued: "In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners."

St. John Fisher, Patron of the Diocese of Rochester

"St. John Fisher was born in Beverly, Yorkshire, in 1459, and educated at Cambridge, from which he received his Master of Arts degree in 1491. He occupied the vicarage of Northallerton, 1491-1494; then he became proctor of Cambridge University. In 1497, he was appointed confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, and became closely associated in her endowments to Cambridge; he created scholarships, introduced Greek and Hebrew into the curriculum, and brought in the world-famous Erasmus as professor of Divinity and Greek. In 1504, he became Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of Cambridge, in which capacity he also tutored Prince Henry who was to become Henry VIII. St. John was dedicated to the welfare of his diocese and his university. From 1527, this humble servant of God actively opposed the King's divorce proceedings against Catherine, his wife in the sight of God, and steadfastly resisted the encroachment of Henry on the Church. Unlike the other Bishops of the realm, St. John refused to take the oath of succession which acknowledged the issue of Henry and Anne as the legitimate heir to the throne, and he was imprisoned in the tower in April 1534. The next year he was made a Cardinal by Paul III and Henry retaliated by having him beheaded within a month. A half hour before his execution, this dedicated scholar and churchman opened his New Testament for the last time and his eyes fell on the following words from St. John's Gospel: 'Eternal life is this: to know You, the only true God, and Him Whom You have sent, Jesus Christ. I have given You glory on earth by finishing the work You gave me to do. Do You now, Father, give me glory at Your side'. Closing the book, he observed: 'There is enough learning in that to last me the rest of my life.' His feast day is June 22."

"In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism. These concerns came together under the umbrella of the badly misunderstood America First Committee, the largest popular antiwar organization in U.S. history. The AFC was formed in 1940 to keep the United States out of a second European war that many Americans feared would be a repeat of the first. Numbering eight hundred thousand members who ranged from populist to patrician, from Main Street Republican to prairie socialist, America First embodied and acted upon George Washington's Farewell Address counsel to pursue a foreign policy of neutrality." ─ Bill Kauffman in Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism

"Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated 'military-industrial complex.' If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms." ─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics

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