Public mourning: it turns out the US government can do it after all. Not for a day but for a whole week, official America mourned Ronald Reagan. I'll give it to you: we needed to grieve. Public mourning, I'm for it. Close the Congress, the banks, the malls for a day; call it quits on the gambling on Wall Street. We need to grieve, but surely not just for one man.
Imagine a state funeral for every US service person who has died. Eulogies and honor guards for all those killed carrying out US policy, or opposing it, and all those others, who've fallen victim of the same policy. How about Amazing Grace for all who grieve. For those who've lost lovers to disease while we spent money on war; whose parents died of overwork, or whose kids were cut down early. Their tears are made of the same stuff as Nancy Reagan's.
-- Laura Flanders
Someone was telling me how she felt Nancy Reagan was very courageous and brave to be able to take care of an ailing husband and handle public funerals. I was sympathetic, but noted that quite a few did the same thing (including in fact the person doing the talking, though her husband only had one not so public funeral) with a lot less resources and notice. Not to be too stingy, but I think that should be recalled.
She isn't quite such a person, but the author of Not Exactly What I Had in Mind: An Incurable Love Story, Rosemary Breslin, just died of a long mysterious blood disease. She was forty-seven, and if her book is anything to go to by, she loved life to the end. Her more famous father, Jimmy Breslin, got ill himself after she was diagnosed. She noted: "Of course, he doesn't get some wimpy thing like me. He goes for the gold. I'd always known he was going to steal the attention away from me in this whole illness thing." A word in remembrance to all like her -- gone before their time, but whose lives blessed those that knew them as long as they was on this earth.
My local paper actually had a lot of interesting news. I see that Britney Spears had to delay her concert because of an old war ... dance injury. A pair of malcontents had the ill luck of trying to steal a cell phone near where Jenna Bush was vacationing in Spain ... her Secret Service agents acted swiftly, punching one in the mouth. No one was arrested.
Encouraged by his physician daughter, the ageless Manhattan prosecutor (who outlasted the guy who played his role on Law and Order) noted he supported the use of medicinal pot. Debra Norville, Georgia native, is also a Mets fan, winning tickets to one of their Detroit games. Finally, Helen Hunt turned forty-one on Wednesday.