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Louis Armstrong’s Birthday, Muggles and Star of David

8/3/2014

Muggles ~ Armstrong and Hines (1928)

Louis Armstrong ~ 4 August 1901 to 6 July 1971

Adapted excerpt from The Book of the Is (2013)
Section 12 (of 16), Chapter 4 Epimorphosis

You might not miss jazzercise if it disappeared, but I hear it’s good exercise. Many would miss Jazz though, as it was a pretty good invention. In today’s world, Louis Armstrong might be labeled a marijuana addict and perhaps even put into coerced treatment. What an odd political thought: no Jazz because all the jazzers were sent to treatment and cured. Armstrong was a cannabis consumer, that’s for sure, and he wouldn’t understand today’s cannabis fuss.

It’s been said that Armstrong told stories with his cornet. At the 2001 tribute, From Lincoln Center – Louis Armstrong: Master Interpreter, Ed Bradley (of 60 Minutes fame) said these kind words about Armstrong’s Chicago music-making days:

"On a series of records made in Chicago during the 1920s, Louis Armstrong almost single-handedly set out the foundations of Jazz. Some of the most fertile and overwhelming music in all of recorded Jazz gushes from those old discs by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Bands."

Later on in the tribute, when they are talking about the great Joe “King” Oliver and the New Orleans roots of Jazz, Bradley tells us about how Oliver and Armstrong wowed’em in Chicago:

"Oliver taught Armstrong about breaks – short unaccompanied solos played at the end of a musical phrase. When Armstrong played with Oliver, the sound of their two powerful horns playing breaks – in unison – amazed the crowd that packed Chicago’s Lincoln Gardens. The secret? Oliver would tip Armstrong off by surreptitiously fingering what he was going to play."

When it comes to Armstrong, his music, and his cannabis use, the show brings them together but only in a general way. Here’s what Bradley said:

"Alcohol and drugs figure into the story of many a Jazz musician but Armstrong was very health-conscious. He didn’t drink heavily, but acknowledged an affection for marijuana, which he found soothing and medicinal. Armstrong and Earl Hines named one of their collaborations after one of marijuana’s more closely-held nicknames, 'Muggles.'”

Armstrong wore a Star of David from his childhood; he wore it in remembrance of something he learned while growing up in New Orleans: how to live peacefully and well.

Happy Birthday Ambassador Armstrong!
Muggles ~ First Recorded in Chicago, 7 December 1928. Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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World War I: Empires Crumble and Others Build

6/27/2014

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Sarajevo 28 June 1914

War Cry Heal Union: The series (3rd of 10)

The United States is the Other today: Hannah Arendt cast in lead.

The painting of the assassination on June 28th 1914 portrays the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie being shot by 19 year-old Gavrilo Princip on a Sarajevo street corner.

The painting encapsulates an era of endemic militancy that fueled 1914 Europe and the catastrophe called World War I: fired shots, stunned chauffer, blank-wall, sabered rider, plumed officer, soldiers sashed, lurched and rifled, and a grounded headless hat.

Those times and today’s circumstances are nicely summed in the Wall Street Journal article, Scars of World War I Linger in Europe on Eve of Centennial. The author notes war’s carnage is never simple (or just) and 15 million dead also means 15 million destroyed homes, families and relationships. Lyrically apropos war is not: it thrives and embellishes disharmonies in order to live off the discord. War needs Others, that is clear. One take home lesson for today is that Peace needs Others just as much (maybe more).

Hannah Arendt, who found citizenship in America, is today’s representative example of the Other. Born in 1906 in one of the Empires about to fall (the German one), Arendt “moved” to the United States running from the Nazis and their ideas of Otherness: Arendt became a US citizen.

Representative Arendt? ~ Yes, it has a nice sound to it.

Citizens like Hannah Arendt in Congress representing a district of thirty thousand as our constitution commands? That too sounds nice. Geez ~ she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958), and would have added much to any mid-century policy debate.

Maybe that’s one of our political bad habits we can grow away from, this always thinking it can’t matter who’s representing us.

We will learn the constitutional lessons of representing We the People, or, like the generations before us, some will survive the carnage and do what the Others always do – start building again.

Peace Others.

Bryan W. Brickner
Ew Publishing

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Represent the Women of We the People

1/28/2014

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*This post continues a theme from January 2013: the under-representation of women in the US House. It’s an updated excerpt from the introduction of my 2006 book, Article the first of the Bill of Rights: Constitutional representation – the forgotten story of We the People. The main update: in 2006 the US House was 16% women – today it’s 18%.

The founders approach to government was scientific. They had many ideas about how to build a new government, but they also had a lot of doubt. This led to debates on how to proceed, as revolutions are never clear.

The founders attempted to build a system that would protect such rights as the (now) famous, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” They also knew, when talking of citizens and representation, that there was no monopoly on how to define those three rights. Freedom is a deep well; it has also been aptly referred to as an abyss. Our revolutionaries certainly knew the abyss. Thirteen colonies do not revolt against their King and fight an eight-year civil war and not come to know the abyss. Those subjects-turned radical revolutionaries who took up arms against their law and the King of England, they had firsthand knowledge of how deep the well of human freedom ran – they lived it and then left us a blueprint: the US Constitution.

The first time I considered constitutional representation a political issue, rather than a historical one, was in graduate school at Purdue University. Before that, when I taught high school US history classes, I recall discussing the representation ratio but dismissing it; frankly, it seemed old.

Then, as a political science graduate student, I was assistanting a professor who was lecturing on the US Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and James Madison. At one point, the third clause in Article I, Section 2 entered the lecture. After class we discussed the size of a constitutional House, one based on the constitutional ratio of “one for every thirty Thousand.” The House would be huge, we agreed, but mostly we thought it impractical.

That was nearly twenty years ago. Since then I began to think of the representation ratio in constitutional, and not congressional, terms. If we were to build a new Congress based on the constitutional ratio of one for every thirty Thousand, we would have a House of Representatives of 10,000 members. This would bring dozens of groups (factions) into the constitutional process and fundamentally change Congress. For example, women won the right to suffrage with the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), but have never received their right to representation according to their numbers. Women are more than 50 percent of We the People, and yet they are represented in the current House, our 113th, with 79 Representatives, or 18 percent of the representation; that is a 32 percent under-representation of women as a group. Such under-representations of We the People create profound political, and constitutional, consequences.

Bryan W. Brickner

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The Peace Terms of We the People

10/27/2013

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An introductory essay for ~
The Book of the Is: A book on bridges
(2013)

The Book of the Is is a theory of the Is (everything and nothing).

As a theory of the Is it bridges to solutions (mostly political ones).

The Is and Is Not, as political theories, were noted in the work of Parmenides, a pre-Socratic thinker. Parmenides thought the Is Not to be an inscrutable path; he also understood humans would still choose that path: the same is true today.

Regardless of your political identification, libertarian, progressive, conservative, liberal, communist and/or tea partier, the ratified US Constitution is “an Is” and it contains the peace terms for US citizenry. Those terms, the peace terms of We the People, are as follows:

·      USC Article I, Section 2, Clause 3: “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.”

·      USC Article V: the Amendment process is available for US citizenry to alter these ratified peace terms (the “thirty Thousand” in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 for example).

·      USC 7th Amendment: regarding common law, preserves the right to trial by jury in the districts of thirty Thousand mandated in Article I, “where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars [$20].”

·      Article the first of the congressional Bill of Rights (1789): this proposed and active amendment (the first and last of the original twelve), would change the ratio ratified in Article I from thirty Thousand to “fifty Thousand.”

We the People have already won the war between “us” and the peace terms have been ratified. Evidently, it is up to us to build the peace, as that is and will be our heritage: representing We the People in Congress according to our numbers.

Constitutions quell challenges, making them an integral part of our Is. This is not a question of morality in the sense of right and wrong: the US Constitution is not a moral concern – it’s a legal one. What’s to be done with this Is – these terms of peace – that’s up to US.

The Book of the Is (2013)

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Louis Armstrong’s Birthday, Muggles and Star of David

World War I: Empires Crumble and Others Build

Represent the Women of We the People

The Peace Terms of We the People

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