New & maybe not so improved

We tend to think the newer is better. Actually newer is not always better, sometime new and improved is actually worse than what we had before.

OK, in things like televisions and computers newer is indeed almost always better, faster cheaper and more reliable. I remember fifty years ago when my parents spent almost enough to buy a new car on a 21 inch black and white television, it was a Hoffman with a sea green glass over the front of the picture tube. It was a cube three feet on a side with two dozen vacuum tubes inside -- seen one of them lately? Drug stores and super markets used to have large machines where you could test your TV's individual tubes. They ranged in size from a Christmas light to a very large and tall light bulb. Most people under thirty have never seen one.

A couple months ago I paid $450. for a 34 inch flat screen television with stereo speakers and a clarity and sharpness that is almost astounding. Real progress. No doubt in five or six years I will replace this one with a plasma flat screen set that will hang on a the wall and give pictures of unprecedented sharpness clarity and color. Now this is the sort of progress we like to think about.

The same things goes for computers. Twenty five years ago the company I worked for installed a huge IBM systems that had a gigabyte of memory. The equipment cost over one and half million dollars when you included the air conditioners, the rubber tiled raised floor computer room and the special power system. A couple years ago I bought a Mac with more than gigabyte of memory for a little over a thousand bucks. I brought it home and plugged it in.

Now this sort of “progress” is common enough in almost any kind of electronics and even in the case of house wears. Automobiles too are much better than they were a generation ago, more powerful, more reliable, longer lasting and both more comfortable and safer. OK when it comes to sex appeal, who can deny the awesome qualities of a candy apple red 1957 Chevy convertible with a black canvas top and red and white tuck and roll seats. It is is still a classic and remains what was called then a chick magnet. Same for a glossy Golden Gate Bridge Orange 1965 Dodge Charger with its huge “hemi” v-8. Now that was a machine, the all time muscle car that could pass anything on the road except a gas station. It was difficult to keep below seventy mph. When you were standing at a red light you could actually see the gas guage move ever closer to the red empty stripe.

Yet when you think back to the cars of a generation or two ago, they had some real problems and their reliability was lousy. For example until the auto industry adopted the modular connections and “harness systems” developed in aerospace, most cars, even new ones, were prone to constant and on going electrical snafu’s. In the fifties and sixties very few dash board clocks ever worked very long before they quit. Also, with the old fashioned coil, rotary distributor and loose wire harnesses, sometimes cars wouldn’t start because there was a short. It generally was easier and cheaper to rewire the damn thing than trying to find the “short.” Also, in the old days radiators didn’t have an overflow tank and you had to check your water level every time you filled the tank. Tires only lasted 5,000 miles then, not 50,000 as they do today. In almost every way cars then were crude in construction and engineering and far less reliable than what we have now. For example pickup trucks then and even large sedans didn't have power steering and it took serious upper body strength to man handle them around the countryside. I learned to drive in my Grandfather’s forrest green 1949 Ford 5 speed stick pick up truck. It was a beast to steer, it took perfect timing on the clutch to shift gears, although it’s 1949 flat head Mercury v-8 was a very powerful engine and the heavy old machine would roll along easily at 70 mph on the open road.

In some cases however, we are far worse off today than in my youth. For example “low flow” toilets are a very dubious improvement since they take a lot of flushes to clear, something that was not the case with the old timers. Progress here has not been a good thing.

Another area is our train service. When I was a boy, the old Southern Pacific, a cranky hard nosed railroad of the old school, had an express train called the Daylight. It left San Francisco every morning at eight am, pulled into San Jose at nine and arrived in Los Angeles at five that afternoon It was a bright colored streamliner with red, orange and black cars with big picture windows. The high speed express was pulled by one of the final class of American steam engines -- big locomotives with four seven foot tall drive wheels and every improvement available at that time.

Well today, Amtrak runs a daily train from Los Angeles to Oakland. It leaves LA at ten in the morning and gets to Oakland at ten at night. The San Francisco Station was torn down years ago so at San Jose the train goes north on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. It is three hours slower (on the rare days when it is on time) than its predecessor.

A few items, one of which is sort of political.

Notice that the version of Star Spangled Banner played at the olympic medal presentations is softer, more nostalgic sounding? It is after all an 18th century melody adopted to match the words of Francis Scott Key poem celebrating the failure of the British Navy’s attempt to take Baltimore during the war of 1812. The original song was called an Anachreonic Hymn -- patterned after the poems of Anachreon an ancient Greek poet. Since we are used to hearing a more bombastic brass band version of the melody, some people were surprised by softer tone. They shouldn’t be, it’s a perfectly valid version, much closer to it original sound and feeling.

Other 18th century national anthems have the same nostalgic quality. The Hungarian Anthem is sung to a smoky but haunting melody. The Polish Anthem also is nostalgic, “Where is my county, it is in my heart...” While technically an 18th century melody, the French national anthem is without a doubt the most gaudy and emotive, followed by the Russian anthem -- which still has no authorized words. (The lyrics were a prayer to Joe Stalin that was withdrawn from service shortly after his death. Stalin had it composed in WW II to give the Soviets a true national anthem -- until then they had used the Communist marching song, The International.)

Most Latin American Republics have bouncy operetta march sort of melodies. Brazil’s is the best -- an up beat melody of pure optimism. The German anthem with a melody by Franz Josef Hayden was actually written for Austria and served as the Imperial Austrian anthem until 1919. “May God exalt Franz our Kaiser . . .” In 1871 the newly united German Empire used the same melody but with the words, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles . . .” In practice this caused some confusion for fifty years, with the two largest nations in central Europe using the same melody at state occasions. In practice the Austrian original was played noticeably slower than the German version.

Three nations with very slow sad anthems are Japan, Israel and Ireland. Canada has “O Canada” which my daughter -- then ten years old -- on hearing it at a Canada Day fete in Vancouver pronounced -- “Wimpy.” But in two languages. Australia has it’s anthem, “Advance Australia.” It is pretty bland stuff for such an up front and truly wonderful nation.

The British Anthem, “God Save the Queen” was actually copied from the Danish original. The Scots have the familiar kilt swinging “Scotland the Brave” while the Welsh have the most beautiful and soaring anthem of any nation. It isn’t called the land of song for nothing. Wales exports opera singers like the Dominican Republic exports baseball players. Unlike the Irish, they still talk and sing in their beautiful native language.

Italy has a bombastic anthem called “La Victoria” but it also has Verdi’s majestic “Va pensero” where the composer took the biblical lament of the Hebrew slave in ancient Babylon and made it a prayer for the unification of Italy.

Did you know that the original anthem of the USA was Brothers in Liberty? Today it is played as the Vice Presidential march.



Thinking about it, John Kerry is the most enigmatic candidate to run for president in a long time -- he is full of contradictions and unexpected twists. He clearly doesn’t believe the old Irish adage that you can not run with both the fox and the hounds. (Translated: In a fight you have to take a side.) In the current flap he sincerely thinks has squared the odd enigma of being a big time military hero in a war where he also was a firebrand spokesmen of pacifist outrage. He is obviously enormously proud of serving with men he later denounced as war criminals. If a lot of people have trouble with this, you think he might notice. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the obvious confusing contradiction.

But this is hardly the only contradiction. Like most people, including Kerry himself, I always figured he was “lace curtain” Beantown Irish with some old yankee thrown in. After all he is a practicing Catholic and he does look sort of Irish. But it isn’t so at all. His Grandfather Kerry wasn’t Irish -- he was a Bohemian Jew named Fritz Kohn. He changed his name to Kerry when he came to America. I wonder if Senator Lieberman ever suspected Kerry was a little bit of a landsman when they were all at Yale. While this is not widely known nationally it is common knowledge in the Bay State. He has no Jewish family surviving in Europe, they were all murdered by the Nazis. Another thing Kerry's campaign oddly goes to great lengths to keep under raps is the fact his mother was French from a prominent old family that also had some Yankee conections -- that's where his middle name Forbes comes from. I guess his pollsters told them a French mother was bad news with voters except in Lousiana where a lot of folks are quite proud of their French heritage. Somehow it is inevitable that even the Senator's Jewish ancestors were upper crust. Kohn is a family name indicating they were Levites, decendents from the priestly tribe, not ordinary Jews.

As the candidate of the Democratic Party he automatically assumed the position the ancient Roman’s called, the Tribune of the People -- the voice of the working class. Let me say that again, John Kerry is the voice of the working class. Can you believe it? It is the single most absurd and laughable thing I’ve heard in years. Kerry is tied by blood to French royalty and even can trace his heritage all the way back to -- get this, I’m not kidding -- Russia’s Ivan the Terrible.

Watching Kerry in his thousand dollar French blazer and Levis mix with the common people is a sight to be seen. Senator Edwards and George Bush can mix in with the crowd -- the folks know immediately both of them can drive a pick up truck and know how to eat real barbecue and actually enjoy it. Kerry eating a Philly cheese steak sandwich is as discomforting as the first President Bush eating chicherones -- fried pork rinds. Even if they actually like it, as my daughter would say, “It’s really not you.” Kerry may want to project the prince of the blood charm of Jack Kennedy but he in fact radiates the awkward shyness and earnest but stiff desire to please of President Bush’s Dad. Both men were born in the Bay State of mainly patrician stock and boy does it show.

Now George W. Bush is every bit the New England patrician that Kerry is, indeed more so since his people have been going to Yale for a couple hundred years. Bush suffered many of the same privations the patrician class routinely inflicts on their children that Kerry did. Yet, Bush actually went to public school out yonder in Midland Texas. He played Little League and went his first two years of high school to San Houston High in Midland. He talks and walks like it. He actually knows regular Americans and who they are and where and how they live. Texas like Ireland is not a place will putting on airs will get you very far. His parents shipped him back Andover before Yale in an attempt to de -Texas him, but it didn’t take. You can take the lad out of West Texas, but you can’t ever take West Texas out of him. (One of his very West Texas traits is letting folks think he is a dunce until it’s too late and he rolls over them. West Texans play very shrewd poker.)

If fate had been different, it came to me as I saw Florida Governor John Ellis (JEB) Bush on television during and after the double hurricane hit, Kerry would be facing a Bush who is also very much from the same old patrician class. Almost as tall as John Kerry, Jeb Bush is soft and well spoken in two languages, (Kerry has made his ability to speak French and German top secret at least until the election is over) he is diffident yet obviously very bright, if not an out right intellectual. Where his old brother is all sharp angles and choppy words, JEB is as smooth as Kerry when he gets to talking. He even has a Latin wife like Kerry and is a Catholic. (President Bush, VP Cheney and Senator Edwards are all United Methodists.) Instead of the obvious clash we have today, if it was John Forbes Kerry vs. John Ellis Bush the news people would make jokes about the two Yale men debating the proper sequence of silverware at a state dinner, the correct wine to accompany various specific shell fish and when it was OK to wear a pastel shirt and when only a white one would do.

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