Bede's Beat - April 15 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865

In 1942, Aaron Copland's mind was on the past and the present, because he was commissioned by André Kostelanetz write a piece about an "eminent American" for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra,

Copland -- like Kurt Weill, who was contemporaneously setting several of Walt Whitman Civil War poems to musical accompaniment -- turned to the figure of Lincoln as a means of explaining to his countrymen precisely what they were fighting for in battle against the Axis.

The result was The Lincoln Portrait a work written for full orchestra with narrator. Over the years, many famous actors and Americans have performed the Lincoln Portrait, including Henry Fonda (with Copland himself conducting), Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Marian Anderson, Katherine Hepburn, Esther Rolle, Vincent Price, Walter Cronkite, Carl Sandburg (in a performance that won a Grammy), Gore Vidal, Margaret Thatcher, Neil Armstrong, Julius "Dr. J" Erving and Adlai Stevenson.

Carl Sandburg with André Kostelanetz conducting the New York Philharmonic [winner of the 1959 Grammy for "Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy)"

Community Standard or Do Not Be a Dick

We have a good crowd of intelligent, funny, friendly commenters here who can and do really talk to each other. I treasure my commenters.

TROLLS BEWARE!

I am now banning IP addresses as well as screen names. You cannot come here and irritate, harass, lie about the facts, and trash and sneer at people. Go elsewhere for your kind of fun.

People can have a good clean fight here. Fighting can be educational and fun. Just do not be a dick. And use facts. And the most important rule of all is I am the Queen. Do not piss me off.

Internet Trolls Are Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Sadists
Trolls will lie, exaggerate, and offend to get a response.
https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Happy Earth Day!

These Poems seem appropriate. Peace.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I Think I Could Turn And Live With Animals...
By Walt Whitman
from Song of Myself

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Just poking my head out briefly. I cry now while watching the news. Now we can see the Children dying.

FOR TUCKER CARLSON

Clucker’s like
Rose from Tokyo.
Bold faced because
So not broke-e-o.
Grab his bowtie
And give choke-e-o.
Don’t kill him oh no;
Stop the NewSpeak flow.
And let’s send Clucker
Off to the pokey-oh.

Tucker Carlson and the Fox Network practice stochastic terrorism. 

Stochastic Terrorism 1. The use of mass communication to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. 2. Remote-control murder by lone wolf.