{"id":10789,"date":"2007-12-11T11:20:38","date_gmt":"2007-12-11T16:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/11\/10789.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:44","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:44","slug":"tears-for-fears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/11\/tears-for-fears\/","title":{"rendered":"Tears for fears"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It may come as a surprise to many Gentle Readers, but Your Humble Blogger is, at heart, nothing but a big softie, weeping at the slightest provocation. Well, not the slightest. For some reason, I don&#8217;t weep at movies, generally, although it has been known to happen. I do weep (quietly) at theater performances, often without regard to the performance being good or bad. I just weep, like a big softie. There are a handful of songs that make me weep pretty nearly every time I hear them, and some of those songs aren&#8217;t even particularly heartbreaking. Oh, what the hell:\n<ul><li>Richard Thompson, &#8220;1952 Vincent Black Lightning&#8221;: a somewhat goofy song about a young hoodlum and his Red Molly, ending with <I>And he gave her one last kiss and died\/And he gave her his Vincent to ride<\/I><\/li>\n<li>Warren Zevon, &#8220;The Hockey Song&#8221;: an extremely goofy song about a hockey player who wants to be Rocket Richard but has a career as an enforcer, never scoring but becoming <I>the king of the goons with a box for a throne<\/I>. In his last game, before retirement, he finally scores a goal, just as he is cold-cocked from behind; the last thing he sees is the red light on top of the net.<\/li>\n<li>Tracy Chapman, &#8220;Fast Car&#8221;: a song without goofiness at all, about a young woman who uses a young fellows fast car to get away from a terrible situation at home, but finds her new life no better. Her determination to <I>leave tonight or live and die this way<\/I> is fatalistic, rather than optimistic.<\/li>\n<li>Dar Williams, &#8220;The Christians and the Pagans&#8221;: This is a goofy and sweet song about a young lesbian, mostly estranged from her family, who brings her girlfriend to her uncle&#8217;s house, where everybody finds solace in the awkwardness. The conservative family are portrayed with sympathy, as they find in their religion strength to see the commonality and overcome the strangeness; <I>when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning<\/I><\/ul>\n<p>So you can see that it&#8217;s not an infallible sign of great artistic achievement to make YHB cry. I make this admission because I can perhaps, then, explain to y&#8217;all what I found it difficult to explain to my Perfect Non-Reader yesterday. I was driving and listening to NPR, as I do, and they played a short excerpt of Al Gore&#8217;s Nobel Lecture.\n<p><blockquote>The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures&#8212;a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: &#8220;Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.&#8221;<\/blockquote>\n<p>And I bust out weeping. I went and looked at <a href=\"http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/peace\/laureates\/2007\/gore-lecture_en.html\">the whole speech<\/a> and bust out weeping again. I tried to read it to my Best Reader this morning, and I bust out weeping again.\n<p>Read the whole thing.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which reports of Al Gore\u2019s death prove to have been greatly exaggerated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10789"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18190,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789\/revisions\/18190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}