June 14

 We did get rain--sorta. It wasn't much and didn't do much for my plants. I was out a little earlier to check things out and watered all the plants. I also clipped a couple back. I don't see any sprouts of sunflowers or cosmos where I planted the seeds. I considered making one more trip to Home Depot but decided that I will wait until our favorite dairy brings in the fall mums. Those have done well for us before and it will bring in some fall color just as the summer bloomers are about finished.

I also made a start on sorting my collection of needlework magazines and patterns. I plan to cull a lot of them. Some years ago a meme made its way around the needleworkers' blogs: SABLE, i.e., Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy. Well it applies to magazines and patterns as well. So I am looking at all of them and deciding which I will keep because 1) it has interesting techniques I am likely to want, 2) has patterns not included in my library, or 3) patterns I am likely to actually do.

Yesterday I mentioned Aurelian's post (and linked to it) and commented on part of it. The part I didn't comment on involved his contention that we have no heroes any more and haven't had any since our last lunar landing. As a result, he wrote, we have no transcending vision of where we should go or what we should do. I can agree to an extent. After Kennedy pledged that we would land men on the moon before the end of the 1960s we did have a vision most of our population could agree with. Before that we had a vision for a world recovered from two world wars and a decade of depression. Note I said WORLD not just the U.S. Before that we had the second of those world wars to win with our allies. We didn't simply do that on our own. And the great projects of the 19th century were settling the continent (I won't mention who we ran over to do it) and the resolution of the issue of slavery which bedeviled our Founding Generation. Who the heroes of these phases of our history were not obvious during the events and depended on whose vision won the contest. As they say: history is written by the winners.

Something else rattled around in my memory and it took me a bit to track it down. At sometime during my academic incarnations I read or heard the quote: pity the people who have no heroes. No, pity the people who need heroes. It was a slightly mistranslation from Berthold Brecht's THE LIFE OF GALILEO. He wrote "unhappy" not pity. Right now many of us are searching for heroes but not really satisfied with any of the options. But we aren't asking why we feel the need of heroes. Or what even defines a hero.

We also seem to be a people who delights in tearing down "heroes." I don't know often I have heard the Founding Fathers dismissed because many of the were "enslavers." It doesn't seem to matter that they rebelled against England and established a separate political entity, that they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that they set a pattern that the country has pretty much followed since. Somehow the fact of "slave holder" washes out everything else.