The Harp of Aengus by William Butler Yeats.

Some background on Midhir and Etain.

11:18:59 PM    

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Homer. "Do thou restrain the haughty spirit in thy breast, for better far is gentle courtesy." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

A noble sentiment, often quoted, and apparently unattributed.  The page from which the quote comes says simply "Homer."  Google indicates that a number of other people have picked up the quote, but no one seems to have a citation, or even a context.

10:59:05 PM    

Thought: Criticism of a "chicken hawk" -- a vociferous proponent of military action who went out of  his way to avoid military service in time of war -- is not based on the premise that no one who has not served can voice an opinion on whether the country should go to war.  People, like myself, who have not served should, however, be very conscious of the heavy consequences of  a decision to go to war.  Chicken hawks all too often gloss over these consequences, which they themselves strenuously avoided when they were confronted with them.  If we must ask others to suffer for us, perhaps even die, then we should at least do so with humility, after careful deliberation, concious of the magnitude of what we are asking.  These qualities are nowhere more evident than in the great speeches of Abraham Lincoln -- not a combatant, but not a chicken hawk.

10:49:20 PM    

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OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan 

"The revelations also underscore that JFK was very much a man of his time. He was of the Sinatra generation; they got through the Depression, fought the war, and came home too hip for the room. People think the boomers discovered sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but it was their parents, really--second-generation Americans home from Anzio and the South Pacific, beginning to leave the safety and social embarrassment of their immigrant parents' religion, informed by what they'd been taught as children about World War I and what happened at Versailles, influenced by Scott and Ernest and the lost generation."

Peggy Noonan's fundamental intellectual dishonesty is apparent in this excerpt from her article on John F. Kennedy.  Unlike Sinatra or her hero Ronald Reagan, who only saw action on the movie lots, John F. Kennedy actually did fight in the war.  Noonan -- with her sly reference to Sinatra -- attempts to cheapen what Kennedy and others like him learned from the war and contributed to the country by suggesting that they simply came home to party. 

While Noonan grudgingly concedes that Kennedy showed a certain "old school" stoicism in refusing to discuss his pain or pander for sympathy, she also attempts to suggest that Kennedy's illnesses -- and the crude treatments available for them -- disqualified him for the Presidency.  It is ironic that this crude bigotry toward disabilities comes from a spokeswoman for the party that keeps Dick Cheney on life support in the Vice Presidency and that sponsored the Americans with Disabilities Act.

10:21:07 PM    

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Peace Corps Online | November 25, 2002 - Buffalo News: President Kennedy's suffering forged his character "It is not a compliment to our secularized society that we are obsessed with a man's, or woman's, weaknesses to the exclusion of their gifts and their accomplishments. Kennedy helped begin, but could not finish, the civil rights revolution. He might have stopped the Vietnam War. He slashed income taxes, incubated Medicare and the Peace Corps, prosecuted the Mafia, defied the Soviet Union at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and endowed America's victory in the space race. And he took a lot of pills. Suffering can deepen a man, and stimulate his better nature, make him empathetic. Kennedy's ceaseless pain, and his brushes with death in the Pacific and on the operating table, did not dull his wit, or make him shrink from life or from people. It made him more courageous and cerebral."

10:03:35 PM    

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