Nikki Haley Forgot About Slavery & Joe Rogan Forgot About Facts
Nikki Haley Forgot About Slavery & Joe Rogan Forgot About Facts
OK Governor Wants to Cancel Diversity, Taraji P. Henson Despairs Over Hollywood Pay Gap for Women and Minorities, Tommy Smothers Homage, "American Fiction" Must-See Movie, Sarah Vaughan Sings
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Paul Simon warns us about the dangers of isolation and the challenges of aging.
Nikki Haley Struggles to Say What Caused the Civil War: Her inability to be truthful while vote-grubbing isn’t what we need in a leader.
Joe Rogan Berates Biden for Saying Something So Absurd, It Should Disqualify Him for Presidency: Except Biden didn’t say it. And Rogan’s outrage suddenly got cringy.
Oklahoma Governor Wants to Eradicate Diversity Programs: He claims he wants to protect the children, but his reasoning is so irrational - who will protect the children from him?
Taraji P. Henson speaks out about Hollywood pay gap: She works hard for the money. And Hollywood wants her to work even harder.
Kareem’s Video Break: Tommy Smothers died last week and here is a video of him joking and singing with his brother Dick.
Kareem’s Movie Recommendation: American Fiction is one of the funniest, most touching, and most insightful movies of the year.
Kareem’s Fiction Recommendation: S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed has just become one of my favorite mystery novels of all time.
Sarah Vaughan Sings: The Divine One lets us know why she deserves that nickname.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Still crazy after all these years.
Paul Simon, “Still Crazy After All These Years”
I know this line doesn’t seem like my usual pithy quotes from the likes of Yeats, Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, or Peanuts. But I find this line haunts just as much as the more classical bromides.
Here’s why the lyric gets me thinking: The song starts with the narrator meeting an old girlfriend and they have a few beers and laugh about old times. He says he’s “still crazy after all these years,” which is what people say when they desperately want to portray themselves as being atypical, unpredictable, spontaneous. No average Joe or Joanne here. Still youthful, still cool, still edgy. Sadly, they never are (or they wouldn’t need to say it).
In the second stanza, “still crazy after all these years” describes his life as a loner who doesn’t socialize. In the third stanza, he’s “longing his life away.” In the fourth, he sits by a window watching cars, imagining doing some “damage” (to others or himself, we don’t know). Now, “still crazy after all these years” reveals his craziness is that he has wasted his life in isolation (similar to the narrator from Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” which I discussed a few weeks ago). The line means something different each time he mentions it as it moves from the whimsical craziness of youthful shenanigans to the middle-aged craziness of cutting himself off socially, to the old age craziness of not changing his life even though it leads to despair.
Yet, for me, Simon’s line is cautionary but ultimately hopeful. On one level, “still crazy after all these years” reminds me that I’m never at the place of maturity and wisdom I want to be. I’m in my mid-seventies now and I still have petty thoughts, make stupid mistakes, contradict myself, don’t know things I wish I knew (and promised myself I’d learn), and I consistently don’t accomplish things on my to-do list. There is always that wrinkle of chaos in the fabric of my life that I can never iron smooth.
On another level, I realize I will probably never reach that comfortable pleather La-Z-Boy throne of satisfaction with myself. That’s good news, because then what would I do? The line “still crazy after all these years” makes me take stock to ensure that I am always trying to improve myself instead of staring out the window stewing at the damage I might do someday.
There’s another Paul Simon quote from “I Know What I Know” that I often think about to keep things in perspective when I get frustrated with the world and my inability to accomplish what I want or be the placid zen master I strive for.
We come and we go
That's a thing that I keep
In the back of my head
“We come and we go” says it all. I may strut and fret my hour upon the stage, but then it’s curtains. Do what you can and not what you can’t. Try to live so that when you leave a room—or even the world—people were happy that you dropped by. That’s a thing I keep in the back of my head.