ONCE MORE: I PREDICT

 Most of my readers have not heard this prediction till now; so if you can guess what I am about to repeat, read on; there may be something new.

 It’s about the “killing books” by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. They have told the killing stories of Lincoln, Kennedy, Jesus, Patton, Hitler, and Reagan. When I was reading Killing Reagan, I came across the name of a famous person who died, and I thought that would be another one for O’Reilly and Dugard to write about the death of. (You, too, can end a sentence with a preposition, Churchill agreed.)  Then I waited for some announcement of the next best seller from these two. It came quite a while ago but it said only that the book was in progress. But when O’Reilly told us this, he had a telling grin on his face that would be there only if the book was about an attractive female who was killed. As soon as I saw that grin, I felt a certainty that this book’s main character is the person whose name I noticed in the Reagan book. I will reveal that in a moment.

Currently O’Reilly is in California, where Dugard lives, and while doing his “Factor” supervising from that location, he must be there working on that book. It will be out soon, I think, and it may become the biggest best seller of the killing books. I must add I have read several books about tthis female and one that convinced me she was murdered and by whom, one I will not reveal to you. You will just have to read the book. I think its title will be Killing Marilyn.

TO DO OR TO BE

 During this election season, there has been little talk about education, perhaps our country’s most challenging and most enduring problem. If education is mentioned, it seems to float around in terms of how many millions or billions and not get at the heart of the matter. Voters need to know exactly what that money is spent for. Such costs as school busses and hot lunches we take for granted, but what exactly do the teachers offer?

 When I learn that a young person wants to prepare to be a teacher, I want to shake his shoulders and scream at him to study the liberal arts first. Today we have two kinds of degrees, one that teaches you how to do something and one that teaches you how to live. Perhaps you can earn a degree in basket weaving and you may earn a satisfactory salary. (I really mean wages.) But such a degree does not teach you how to live. It takes the liberal arts for that. And what are they?  

 The liberal arts are (in alphabetical order) architecture, art, ballet, drama, language (foreign and your own), history, literature, music, philosophy and religion. It isn’t that you learn how to design a cathedral, or to preach sermons, or write the great American novel, but you learn about them, appreciate them, support them, discuss them and they enrich your life. When you are teaching third graders you might tell them the story of Narcissus from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water (as a matter of fact, just yesterday I heard the word “narcissist” as a description of one of the presidential candidates. How nice to know what the speaker meant.) Then there is Procrustees from mythology who cut off the legs of visitors whose legs were too long for his beds. Of course, I do not mean the third graders should necessarily hear the entire myth with possibly gory details, but just the heart of the story.

 When I was in the lower grades in Tennessee, the superintendent of schools, Mr. James, paid us the occasional visit when all six grades gathered to hear the story he told us. He had a great gift of telling stories and I remember hearing Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face” without any horror in it. He was there on business, I suppose, but he took time to tell us a wonderful story every time he visited us. He had a business job to do, but he knew something of the Arts too. He was showing us how to live.

 I once knew a high school drill instructor who bragged that she had not read a book since she was in school, whatever level she meant. When I quizzed her about the literature we all studied in high school at the time, she could not identify any Dickens character, or name a Shakespeare comedy. How could anyone forget Madame Defarge? Or Silas Marner? Or Elizabeth Bennet? Or Heathcilff? Or Lady Macbeth? Or Hamlet? And if you know these characters they must have taught you something to live by. This may be different with each person. But it certainly does depend on the quality of the teacher. I knew a teacher who started a phonograph record to play Julius Caesar and left the room for the duration. You don’t leave a class of tenth-graders alone with Shakespeare! You teach Shakespeare and don’t depend upon an unsupervised recording to do that for you. You stand there and stop the machine to explain what the bard meant.

 But literature is only one of the liberal arts. I have a special affinity for it, of course, but I know something about all the fields of liberal arts. It's almost safe to say that all the subjects of the arts are related to each other, but it might be difficult to convince someone of the kinship between architecture and ballet, but  if one studies the two fields deeply enough, the relationship will probably turn up.

 Before any young person enters the study program in Education (to become a teacher), I suggest he spend at least two years in the study of the Liberal Arts. It can make all the difference. You will enjoy life more and learn how to live it.

A SLOW START FOR 2016

Here it is the third day of the new year and I still cannot work my computer. But tomorrow I expect to talk with my tech and learn a bit more. Windows 7 is so much more complicated than the old machine, an XP I think it was called. And I hear Windows 10 is much worse than the 7. There is no good reason for hiding a PRINT button, but that is what this one does. You might think, with all this time away from printing something for some purpose, I must be reading War and Peace. Yes, I have turned the page once! I haven’t reached page 400 yet. New deadline: the end of June!

 Now it is the fourth day of 2016 and I’ve talked with the tech and have added one more Blog. But Pete (my computer) would not print the whole blog in one size font! That is crazy. Right in the middle of my trying to get it spaced just right, comes a big ad for Windows 10. I think I’ll look into SCREEN MAGIC and see what that company offers.

 On another plane, thousands of Americans watched “Downton Abbey” last night, beginning its sixth and last season. At MorningStar was a morning tea called “Downtown Abbey Tea” in the printed day’s bulletin. I stopped by the front desk to see if there were any leftover daily bulletins. I found two and proceeded to scratch out the second “W” in the Abbey’s name. I said to the new girl on the desk, “Can you imagine an abbey’s being downtown?” She said, “That’s for today.” I said, “I know that. This correction isn’t for us residents. It’s for you girls who work this desk and print the bulletins.” She likely thought I did not know what I was talking about. But I hope she learned I was right.  

FRANKLIN GRAHAM, A FAVORITE OF MINE

If you watch Greta Van Susteren’s program every day, you will know the name Franklin Graham. He recently showed some of the shoeboxes his company, Samaritan’s Purse, gives at Christmas–boxes filled with goodies and toys--to thousands of children who would not have any Christmas otherwise. The money for these boxes comes from people all over America and perhaps other places, and total in the millions of boxes by this time. Of course, the boxes also contain Scriptures from the Bible.

 But on a recent show of Greta’s, Graham, who happens to be a son of Dr. Billy Graham, stated in essence that what this country needs particularly this Christmas, is a national call to prayer for our country. We have never experienced a political election as the present one that is full of turmoil. He is right, of course, and deserves the Nobel Prize for Peace. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee does not usually award the prize to such a Christian as Graham. That is a sad outlook on life.