kolbeinn

Verðmætamat manna er mismunandi og er það vel. Menn leggja mismikið upp úr verðgildi hlutanna, sumum er nokk sama hvað þeir eiga af peningum en aðrir verða að eiga sem mest og helst meira en náunginn. Ég verð hins vegar að játa að verðmætamat blaðamanns fréttablaðsins sem skrifaði þessa frétt í Fréttablaðið er óvenjulegt. Þar segir frá því að Robbie Williams sé með böggum hildar þar sem Simon Cowell er orðinn ríkari en hann. Það má vel vera að svo sé og Robbie greyið geti á sér heilum tekið við þessi tíðindi. Fréttaskýring blaðamannsins er hins vegar nokkuð sérstök þegar hann segir: Robbie gortaði sig einu sinni af því að vera „ríkari en mig gæti dreymt um“ en í ljósi þess að Cowell er orðinn ríkari en hann eiga þau ummæli ekki lengur við.

Í fréttinni kemur fram að Robbie Williams á um 12 milljarða íslenskra króna. Þetta finnst blaðamanninum vera smámunir, í ljósi þess að Cowell er ríkari. Og draumar Robbie um ríkidæmi taka mið af eigum Cowells. Ég sé hann fyrir mér sem barn, mig langar að verða ógeðslega ríkur þegar ég er orðinn stór eiga 13 milljarða hið minnsta, en ef ég á bara 12 eða Simon Cowell verður ríkari en ég rætast draumar mínir ekki.

Þá er Kurt Vonnegut allur. Það er synd. Hann var orðinn skemmtilega kaldhæðið, nöldrandi gamalmenni sem hitti oftar en ekki naglann á höfuðið. Honum til heiðurs birti ég ræðu sem hann flutti þegar hann tók við Carl Sandburg bókmenntaverðlaununum árið 2001. Ræðan var birt í Socialist Worker.

We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup. 

I thank you for this honor, although it is a reminder that I am not nearly the passionate and effective artist Carl Sandburg was. And we are surely grateful for his fog, which came in on little cat feet. 

But tonight seems an apt occasion as well for celebrating what he and other American socialists did during the first half of the past century, with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class. 

That wage earners, without social position or higher education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workmen. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandburg of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois. Both, may I say, were continental, freshwater people like ourselves.

Hooray for our team!

I know upper-class graduates of Yale University who can’t talk or write worth a nickel.

‘’Socialism'’is no more an evil word than ‘’Christianity.'’ Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal, and shalt not starve.

Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler also had crosses painted on his tanks and airplanes. The swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person’s Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that that ‘’religion is the opium of the people.'’ Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn’t even freed our slaves yet. Whom do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then: Karl Marx or the United States of America?

Stalin was happy to take Marx’s truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.

The statement has also entitled many in this country to say that socialists are anti-religion, are anti-God, and therefore absolutely loathsome.

I never met Carl Sandburg, and wish I had. I would have been tongue-tied in the presence of such a national treasure. I did get to know one socialist of his generation, who was Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. After graduating from Harvard he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize, in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.

We met in Indianapolis after the end of World War Two, and he had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he had just testified about it in court. The judge had interrupted the proceedings to ask Powers Hapgood why, with all his social and economic and educational advantages, he had chosen to lead such a life. And Powers Hapgood replied, ‘’Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.'’

Another of our freshwater ancestors was Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana. A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for president of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, ‘’As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.'’

Some platform. A paraphrase of the beatitudes.

And again: Hooray for our team.

And our own beloved Carl Sandburg had this to say about the fire-belching evangelist Bill Sunday:

‘’You come along–tearing your shirt–yelling about Jesus. I want to know what the hell you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft, and everybody except a few bankers and higher ups among the con men of Jerusalem like to have Jesus around because he never made any fake passes, and he helped the sick and gave people hope.

‘’You come along calling us all damn fools–so fierce the froth of your own spit slobbers over your lips–always blabbering we’re all going to hell straight off, and you know all about it. I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus.

‘’You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ’em. You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus. You take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at 40 years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right.

‘’You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day. And even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that all right, all right. All they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say.

‘’Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their murderers to go after Jesus because Jesus wouldn’t play their game. I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.'’

Hooray for our team.

And I now take advantage of your hospitality by declaring myself a child of the Chicago Renaissance, powerfully humanized not only by Carl Sandburg, but by Edgar Lee Masters and Jane Addams and Louis Sullivan and Lake Michigan, and on and on.

And I propose a toast to an individual who wasn’t an artist or working stiff of any description. She wasn’t even a human being. Ladies and gentlemen of Chicago, I give you Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

And I thank you for your attention.

Stundum er óendanlega gaman í vinnunni. Gærdagurinn var einn slíkra daga. Þá hringdi Jón Guðjónsson fyrrverandi hreppstjóri í mig og sagði mér frá fjallskilum í einmánuði. Það var skemmtilegt samtal. Ég lærði ný orð eins og bröggun og ullarskil og veit nú töluvert meira um útigangsfé en áður. Jón notaði mun fleiri sérkennielg orð en eftir að ég hafði hváð nokkrum sinnum svo ég stafaði nú alveg rétt spurði hann: Þú veist hvað rúning er? Eftir það varð ég stoltsins vegna að láta eins og ég hefð margoft farið í eftirleitir, æti innmat í hvert mál og þekkti öll mörk í Gufudalssveit hinni fornu.

Hér er fréttin. Og hvað er betra en að enda svona dag með því að horfa á United vinna rómverska fasista 7-1?

Í gærkvöldi fór ég á furðulegustu bíómynd sem ég hef séð í langan tíma, myndina 300. Ég vissi svo sem nokkurn veginn fyrir að hverju ég gengi og var því ekki að svekkja mig á sögulegri ónákvæmni eða einhverju í þá veru. Það er enda bara bjánalegt. Hins vegar var ýmislegt í þeim skilaboðum sem myndin gefur sem fékk okkur félagana til íhugunar.