About a month ago, for my 82nd birthday, my son David gave me a strange gift: a web site (actually, not this free Blogger site, but a site he purchased in the UK, from which I subsequently moved). What am I going to do with it, I thought; I don't even speak html. (That's an embarrassing admission for one who was for almost thirty years a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. But give me a break--I retired from UCB before the Web was more than an academic toy.)
Maybe my son was gingerly trying to ease me into the era of social networking. Fair enough. Perhaps, I thought, I'll write a diary. But not the type of my youth, books with lock and key that said, "These are my thoughts! Hands off!" Nowadays, one lets it all hang out. And what better opportunity than today, Leap Day, to make the leap--well, not actually into a Facebook-type letting it all hang out, but at least into the blogosphere. So I pinch my nose and jump.
A blog should have a name, and I've taken The Berkeley Write as a double entendre, the other half being the anomaly of being a Jeffersonian liberal in Berkeley, where I've lived for over fifty years. I've been a left-wing Democrat all of my adult life. That makes me comfortably centrist in Berkeley, even a bit to the right. (Indeed, Berkeley as a whole has moved a bit to the right in the last decade or so; there may even be some Republicans amongst us now.)
But I am a radical (read "socialist") in much of the rest of the country. In the sixties, when the true Berkeley left consisted of Maoists, nihilists and anarchists, I was regarded with great suspicion elsewhere just because I was a Berkeleyan. Now, perhaps because my age makes me seem unthreatening, I am considered merely an anachronism; and perhaps I am.
This detour into my politics brings me to my theme of the day: a suggestion for a campaign song for Mitt Romney, who--following his primary victories in Arizona and Michigan yesterday--looks to be the next Republican nominee for president.
Jean Paul Schweitzer, the janitor at my tennis club, is a French intellectual with whom I discuss many things, but mostly politics. He has more difficulty than I in understanding the average American politico, who, I think, verges on being illiterate and innumerate, and certainly is a scientific know-nothing. (I sometimes, in an excess of defensive patriotism, point to Jean Paul Le Pen for comparison.)
Yesterday we were discussing how none of the current would-be Republican candidates has difficulty in looking straight at the camera and uttering the most incredible howlers. That reminded me of a quatrain from a song written by David, a professional musician now in London, who performs under the stage name Emit Bloch:
They say the truth is beautiful, but they obviously haven't heard me lie.
They say the truth is beautiful, but they obviously haven't heard me lie.
Oh, I can tell a beauty
Simultaneously looking you in the eye.
The complete song, "Disabled by Good Looks," which I think describes Romney perfectly, is given in this track David performed several years ago at a London nightclub: