There’s an article at Poetry Foundation by Rachel Aviv on the origins of that (in)famous poem “Footprints”, beloved across the world by church bulletins and Christian easy-listening fans. The competing claims to authorship stretch back possibly as far as 60 or 70 years, but in spite of appearance on coffee mugs and greeting cards for decades, the article says:
Although nearly all of these authors claim they wrote the poem in longhand, dictated by God, the controversy didn’t surface until everyone began putting their versions online.
Aviv uses this quiet controversy as a touchstone for meditation on the burden of originality and the ease with which accidental plagiarism can occur, with a detour through Jung, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Spurgeon. The Spurgeon quote she pulls out is interesting in itself as an illustration of the meteoric fall from eloquence in the Evangelical tradition. Compare:
And did you ever walk out upon that lonely desert island upon which you were wrecked, and say, “I am alone, — alone, — alone, — nobody was ever here before me”? And did you suddenly pull up short as you noticed, in the sand, the footprints of a man? I remember right well passing through that experience; and when I looked, lo! it was not merely the footprints of a man that I saw, but I thought I knew whose feet had left those imprints; they were the marks of One who had been crucified, for there was the print of the nails. So I thought to myself, “If he has been here, it is a desert island no longer.”
The poetry in Spurgeon’s original sermon, to which an homage in the Footprints poem is evident (though denied by the various claimants of the mantle of inspiration - “I’ve never heard of the fellow [Spurgeon], so he couldn’t have possibly inspired me,” Webb says) is full eclipse of the “poetry” of the execrable little poem the entire debate centers on.
As an aside, after reading the article don’t forget to check out the comments. There’s a flameware from January through March between several of the commenters and the self-styled One True Author of the inspirational anthem Footprints, Carolyn Joyce Carty, “Child Prodigy-World Renowned Faith Poet-Author”.
And we fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we’ll fight them there; we’ll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won. - President George W. Bush, pushing the “fight them there” strategy for Iraq.
Now, of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen. - President Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushing the “fight them there” strategy for Vietnam, 31 years earlier.
Loving the treasure trove of political synchronicity that is Nixonland.
The glee with which conservative bloggers roll out Obama’s full given name, the shrill epithetical Barack Hussein Obama, is a hollow pander of the n-th degree, a rhetorical device for hacks taking a shortcut to the mediocrity of the Fifth Circle.
It’s also hysterically ahistorical, a carnival mirror where instead of biography equating to destiny in Presidential politics, genealogy becomes shorthand for personal worth, meritocracy be damned. Having a good Anglo name is now a calling-card for godliness.
If politics is bloodsport and name calling is de rigeur to play, is it too much to ask for some creativity instead of a shallow stand-in for racial phobia? “Limousine liberal” at least had a nice alliterative ring to it.
This BBC story has some great visuals (and some questionable bluescreening), but fails to address the real question: how much will my rent go up when my house, currently ten blocks from the river, becomes waterfront property?
From the article:
“We had 23% less (sea ice) last year than we’ve ever had, and what’s happening to the ice shelves is part of that picture.”
It’s worth referencing the Scott Borgerson piece from the March/April Foreign Affairs on the economic and trade implications of an Arctic that could see ice free summers as soon as 2013.
Quoting at length:
The U.S. Senate has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the leading international treaty on maritime rights, even though President George W. Bush, environmental nongovernmental organizations, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard service chiefs, and leading voices in the private sector support the convention. As a result, the United States cannot formally assert any rights to the untold resources off Alaska’s northern coast beyond its exclusive economic zone — such zones extend for only 200 nautical miles from each Arctic state’s shore — nor can it join the UN commission that adjudicates such claims. Worse, Washington has forfeited its ability to assert sovereignty in the Arctic by allowing its icebreaker fleet to atrophy. The United States today funds a navy as large as the next 17 in the world combined, yet it has just one seaworthy oceangoing icebreaker — a vessel that was built more than a decade ago and that is not optimally configured for Arctic missions. Russia, by comparison, has a fleet of 18 icebreakers. And even China operates one icebreaker, despite its lack of Arctic waters. Through its own neglect, the world’s sole superpower — a country that borders the Bering Strait and possesses over 1,000 miles of Arctic coastline — has been left out in the cold.
The thawing of vast tracts of arctic ice may ironically lead to territorial and shipping disputes between the U.S. and Russia in the coming decades with a chilling effect (har!) on our mutual relations - if we ever get around to ratifying the UNCLOS so we can legally make territorial claims on this resource rich part of our coastline.
While digging through some old photos in Lightroom last week I found this photo of the St. John’s Bridge. Taken in November, it could have been shot yesterday, except for a few more leaves on the trees today. Same grey sky, same wet grass and mossy dampness. In Oregon, we really do have two season: raining, and not raining.
