Friday, December 29, 2006
the state of lying in state
As longish-time, rare though they may be, readers of jmbm know, I am often struck by juxtapositions. I enjoy noting and/or making connections between events and people and things. Yeah, okay, sometimes I stretch a bit to make the connection, but it amuses me. Anyway, at the moment there are two recently deceased well-known Americans lying in state: James Brown, the putative father of soul, and Gerald Ford, the pardoner of Nixon. I've been wracking my brain off and on all day, trying to make a connection between the fact that our news is filled with both their leave-takings at the exact same moment as we also take leave of this year called two thousand and six. I cannot make anything of it, hard though I am trying. Nothing I can think of is similar: not their personalities (quiet and mellow / wild and exhuberant), not their influence (reputedly a healer after Watergate / a musical innovator), not their energy (again: mellow / wild), not their wives (upper middle class and very proper albeit innovative in some ways / several wives and rarely calm or even remotely "proper"), not their images (staid and stately and calm / dynamic and punchy and rousing). I could go on but it's making me crazy because I want to find something to tie them together, or at least tie our experience of their leave-taking together. Maybe I'll dream something about this, tonight....
Labels: farewells, juxtapositions
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