Just asking.

"I talk in the book about thinking about playing 'Imagine.' But that wasn’t the right one."

"I needed to play something from a great songwriter that had an emotion that wasn’t about violence, but that also contained grief. Tom Waits has the line, 'So close your eyes, son, this won’t hurt a bit.'"

Said Tori Amos, asked about performing Tom Waits’s song “Time” when she was the first musical guest to play on David Letterman's show after the 9/11 attacks. She is quoted in "Tori Amos Believes the Muses Can Help//A conversation about music, politics, and what you learn about America from being on the road" (in The New Yorker).



Here are the lyrics to "Time." Consider the process of thinking twice about playing "Imagine" and coming up with "Time." That was back on September 18, 2001. Now, as celebrities ineptly return to "Imagine" for our coronavirus pain, it's worth reflecting on Tori Amos's alternative, "Time."

Here's her new memoir, "Resistance."

"You can’t tell people in a dense urban environment all through the summer months: 'We don’t have anything for you to do. Stay in your apartment with the three kids.' That doesn’t work. There’s a sanity equation here also that we have to take into consideration."

Said Governor Cuomo, quoted in "Coronavirus Live Updates: Some States Ease Restrictions..." (NYT).

Cuomo "laid out a broad outline on Sunday for a gradual restart of the state that would allow some 'low risk' businesses upstate to reopen as soon as mid-May. He did not speculate when restrictions would be eased in New York City and surrounding suburbs. But he noted that they could not persist indefinitely."

"But the troublemakers were as bizarre as they were inescapable... There was the mysterious tent urinator, who found a way to pee on the side of another man’s tent..."

"... every night for six straight weeks (and whose identity is an as-yet uncracked case). The man who always took photos of me changing flat tires to send home to his wife, because 'she was never going to believe that a woman could do this.' The woman who had never ridden a bike before the trip. The daily hitchhiker who 'didn’t do climbs' and thumbed for rides up hills. The racer who wanted everyone else to ride farther and faster each day. The relapsed gambling addict who snuck into town every night and couldn’t be trusted with group funds. The sexual harasser who hounded me daily with lewd comments unfit to print. And in every group, there was always one person who tried to rile up a mutiny because he wanted out of the cooking rotation. It was hard to know who these people were in their daily lives, when they weren’t pushing their bodies to the limit and sleeping on the ground. I had to imagine that the mysterious tent urinator wasn’t similarly taking out his frustrations on a coworker’s office chair. Maybe all that misdirected rage could be chalked up to exhaustion, homesickness, and electrolyte imbalance?"

From "I Loved Bike Touring—Until I Got Paid to Do It/Seduced by the idea of turning my hobby into a paycheck, I led bike tours across the U.S. throughout my twenties. As I learned, some passion pursuits are best left pro bono," by Caitlin Giddings (at Outside). Excellent illustration, by the way.

"And as a young black girl growing up in Mississippi, I learned that if I didn't speak up for myself, no one else would."

"So... my mission is to say out loud if I'm asked the question, 'yes, I would be willing to serve.' But I know that there's a process that will be played out, that Joe Biden is going to put together the best team possible. And I believe that he will pick the person he needs."

Said Stacey Abrams, on "Meet the Press" yesterday, when Chuck Todd asked her, "Do you believe you'd be the best running mate Joe Biden could find?"

Notice that she's answering a different question from the one that was asked. One could infer that the answer to the question asked is no. She's not the best running mate Biden could find. She contorted her way to another question — Are you willing to serve? — which is, apparently, the question she wanted or anticipated. To that, she says yes.

But couldn't she have said yes to the question asked? Before she got to the part of her answer I've quoted above, she said, "I was raised to tell the truth. And so when I'm asked a question, I answer it as directly and honestly as I can." Who knows if that is the truth? But assuming it is, I infer that her answer to the question asked is no.

I guess she wasn't raised to answer questions straightforwardly. Only "as directly and honestly as I can." But why can't she give a yes or no to the question Chuck Todd asked? The answer seems to be that she was raised to speak up for herself. And yet she did not take the opportunity to promote herself as the best person.

That's as far as I go for now understanding the rhetoric, ethics, and mind of Stacey Abrams.

6:02, 6:12.

IMG_4664

IMG_4713

Actual sunrise time: 5:56.

"It is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet. This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be."

Said Duke University conservation scientist Stuart Pimm, quoted in "As people stay home, Earth turns wilder and cleaner. These before-and-after images show the change" (by AP science writer Seth Borenstein, published at Madison.com).

Another quote — from Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: "In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth's response is."

With photographs and maps, the article concentrates on the reduction in air pollution. There's also a bit about wild animals taking the opportunity to show themselves on city streets. But I'd like to see more about climate change.

All the article says is:
The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.
But this can be viewed as an experimental head start on the Green New Deal we've heard so much about. What had seemed impossible to begin is now a way of life we've plunged into. We've gone much further than what the climate activists were proposing, though we've done it for a different reason, by government order, under the fear of death by disease, and seemingly only for a few weeks (or months).

Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?

Shouldn't the Democrats be saying this? Where's Joe Biden?

Could Donald Trump and the Republicans offer something like this? I know the term "Green New Deal" has a Democratic Party sound to it, but why can't they present something visionary and future-looking that inspires hope instead of merely presuming that what's best is whatever we happened to have had in the past?
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