About the only advantage in being raised during the Herbert Hoover Depression of 1929 was that the radio carried intelligent music. The lyrics had a story line and there were harmony and melody to the music. There were dozens of bands that toured the country at a time when almost every major hotel offered a ballroom. Those bands would appear in the ballroom as well as at smaller locales that were dedicated to dancing and good music. Off hand, I can remember Shep Fields, the Dorsey Brothers named Jimmy and Tommy, and Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Then there was Eddy Howard, who almost whispered the lyrics to the vocals he sang. There was also “Music in the Morgan Manner”, directed by Russ Morgan, who achieved a “waa – waa” effect by placing tin derbies over the ends of the trumpets and trombones. Then there was the orchestra of Artie Shaw with his clarinet and the magical memories of Glenn Miller.
There were dozens or more of dance bands who played pleasing music as distinguished from the screamers of today who seem to be captivated by their drummers. Finally there were the musical offerings of Ben Bernie, a man who had a pre-eminent broadcasting record from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Old timers may recall that Ben Bernie was a genial sort of man who, when he was pleased by his orchestra’s performance, would exclaim, “Yowsa! Yowsa! Yowsa!” While Ben Bernie was at the top of the heap, he engaged in a running battle of words with Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist. But Bernie also had another expression. When he was mixing his songs among waltzes and foxtrots and swing music, he would say, “Here is a little bit of thisa and a little bit of thata.”
As you can see, I have lifted Ben Bernie’s expression for the title of this essay, which at heart is nothing more than the ponderings of an aged essayist. The ponderings and the “thisa and thata” line have very little to do with each other. They are individual thoughts that more or less stand on their own.
One of those individual thoughts has to do with politicians who refer to our current economic distress as only a “recession.” Given our loss of jobs, the number of home foreclosures, the state of the stock market, and the low level of confidence among American consumers, it would seem to me that this is no “recession.” It is a full-fledged depression and is entitled to be named the George W. Bush Depression of 2008. The hope here is that Barack Obama may make a dent in the Bush depression by the end of his first term. But, boys and girls, when a man has lost his job and is in danger of losing his home as well, this is not a mere recession. It is a full-fledged depression.
When I speak or write about the previous Depression, I am also forced to recall that, shortly before that Depression began, I learned a song at school as I entered the first grade. The lyrics of the song were:
Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
We’re all in our places
With sunshiny faces
Good morning Miss Brantley,
Good morning to you.
Miss Brantley was the first-grade teacher who on the first day of school rescued me after I had wandered into the girls’ room to care for my physical needs. She was a proper woman whom I might imagine dancing a waltz now and then but never dancing to a jitterbug tune. In a previous essay, I used the lyrics to the Miss Brantley song, but in these troubled times, those lyrics continue to inspire me. Hence, they are included in the “Thisa and Thata” section of Ezra’s essays.
Now a further bit of non-related pondering or thisa and thata. Politicians always refer to their own state and to other states as “the great state of blank.” May I suggest that not all states are really great states? Take Missouri, the home state of Howard Davis and your old essayist. It is distinguished only by the thought that it borders on eight other states in the Midwest. It also contains the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. Those are merely the accidents of geography; it has nothing to do with whether it should be considered a great state.
Its capital is Jefferson City, which I can tell you should be avoided at all costs. Missouri has its share of yokels who believe that the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 does not apply to them. At the same time, it is the home of great intellectualism as represented by Washington University in St. Louis. A state that contains such contrasting styles of thought does not automatically become a “great state.” Yet there are nitwits who would refer to all of our states as “great,” including such ruptured ducks as Alaska, Alabama and Mississippi.
Now on to a new pondering. In the old Bell System, which upon reflection seemed to work wonderfully well, there was universal telephone service, a great laboratory called The Bell Labs, as well as a manufacturing arm known as Western Electric. But the Telecommunications Act of 1984 cast the Bell System asunder, and we have been paying a price for it ever since.
One of the competitors of Western Electric was the German manufacturer Siemens. There was always some wonder about how Siemens could win contracts in places such as Nigeria and the Far East when Western Electric had presented what was considered to be a superior bid. In the last week, we find that for all those years there were line items in the balance sheets of Siemens reserved for bribery. The bribes ran into millions of dollars. Siemens has now been brought to account and, as a result, they have paid to the Securities and Exchange Commission of this country as well as to their own authorities a total of more than $2.5 billion.
It is now much too late to tell anybody at Western Electric why they lost those bids because Western now belongs to Alcatel, a French company. In the final analysis, we have taken a very successful corporation called the AT&T Company and scattered it to the winds through the legislative process. That process was motivated by greed in that other entrepreneurs wanted to share in the system that went all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell. I suppose this says that if our competitors do not do us in, we will take care of that function ourselves. As a matter of interest, a person could buy a share of stock in the Alcatel-Lucent organization today for $1.51 per share. Some success story!
A final thought of pondering here. It is now January and the weather in New Jersey has turned decidedly colder. The GIs of World War II might well have said that the weather was “colder than a whore’s heart.” Alternatively, there were those who might say that the weather was “colder than a witch’s tit.” Finally there were other GIs who might say on a freezing day that the weather was “cold enough to freeze the testicles off of a brass monkey.” I of course am a seminarian who harbored no such horrid thoughts. As a matter of fact, I did not even understand what my fellow GI’s were referring to. Which goes to prove that those of us from the seminary are clearly pure as the driven snow, whatever that means.
Well, these are my ponderings for the moment and those random thoughts must be blamed on the ghost of Ben Bernie. He was a wonderful musician who led a delightful orchestra. If he could look down or up from his celestial parking place and read this essay, I simply hope that he would say, “Yowsa! Yowsa! Yowsa!”
E. E. CARR
January 9, 2009
Essay 361
~~~
Kevin’s commentary:
1) There is nothing great about Texas.
2) Obama ballooned the debt even further, but whatever.
3) According to my father, HIS father often used to say that something was “as useless as tits on a boar hog” which leads me to conclude that
3a) language used to be more colorful than it is now
3b) tit-based expressions were particularly popular.