All Gave Some...Some Gave All

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a short speech on the field of battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He was heartsick over the state of the union at that point, a country he described as a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

What is now known as The Gettysburg Address was to dedicate a portion of the battlefield to “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” And he said, “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” 

President Lincoln knew that no one living could truly accomplish that consecration. “…in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground,” he said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

And then Lincoln uttered one of the most profound paragraphs of his entire Presidency: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This Memorial Day we remember: All gave some…some gave all.

Plastered Paris

I managed to get through the entire week without mentioning the biggest waste of time and electrons since Don Imus’ gaffe on MSNBC. Or was it the Republican Presidential Wannabe un-Debate?
Hard to tell...

Somewhere there’s got to be a metric of minutes devoted to a worthless topic, expressed as a ratio of value to time wasted on the topic.
Maybe we’d call it the Fluff Factor, a reverse indicator (economists love this stuff!) and the higher the number, the more viable the information could be assumed to be.

Fluff Factor Grid

Scales of relativity:

• X-axis = Importance to the daily welfare of the nation, 1-10, with ten (10) being vital for the survival of the human species on this planet, the center of the scale (zero) being benign in importance, and negative ten (-10) actually resulting in the destruction of brain cells, just for thinking about it.


• Y-Axis = time consumed by people on this topic. Interestingly, the less time people spend on something, the more value it might achieve, but if no one watches/listens/reads, or clicks-on, the value will always be a negative number.

If you take Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which lasted about 20-minutes, but has been hailed as one of the most sublime speeches in American History, and apply it to this grid, you get a value of 200. Last night's 6 O'clock news, watched by 2% of television viewers (maybe) yields a value of .01 in importance on the scale.

On the other hand, Roseanne Barr’s unfortunate rendering of The National Anthem and subsequent crotch-scratch, which probably resulted in millions of minutes of wasted time watching and re-watching the footage, would rank with a factor of -1,000,000. And it was embarassing.

Somewhere between the two extremes (but not far from Barr on the scale of relativity) lies the fiasco of Paris Hilton’s DWI arrest, conviction, sentencing, gyrations by attorneys, incarceration and subsequent early release for reasons charitably described as “creatively vague,” when in reality, she’s just scamming the system.

No surprise this travesty of the Justice System is occurring in The Land of Fruits and Nuts, where one Congressional Representative is seriously pursuing a bill to stock US Foreign Embassies with copies of Hollywood films, so that the rest of the world can see we’re really not all that evil (a la Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”)

Would somebody please tell the Congresswoman that the fare coming out of Hollywood is more than likely exactly what put America in the crosshairs of some extremist groups in the first place.