{"id":25,"date":"2008-03-03T10:57:17","date_gmt":"2008-03-03T15:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/2008\/03\/03\/on-admiration-of-celebrities\/"},"modified":"2008-03-17T00:13:41","modified_gmt":"2008-03-17T05:13:41","slug":"on-admiration-of-celebrities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/2008\/03\/03\/on-admiration-of-celebrities\/","title":{"rendered":"On Admiration of Great Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” -Abraham Lincoln<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>I’m not a slave to objectivity. I’m never quite sure what is means. And it means different things to different people. -Peter Jennings. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>I’m an odd bird: I read the speeches of Reagan<\/a>, Kennedy<\/a>, MLK<\/a>, and Churchill <\/a>for fun. I pour over the Wealth of Nations,<\/a> marvel at the language of Shakespeare and dissect the language of the Harvard Business Review. It could be the Literature Major in me, but i am in love with language and how it moves people. I am also fascinated by the speaker and their time and place in history. Language is the music of the soul. <\/p>\n

If you have not guessed, i’m a Lincoln man. There are not that many people I admire, infact, I’ve only just now come to admit that I do like lincoln; which is interesting because i know preciously little about him. Unlike many people, i do not consume everything i need to know about someone to admire them. The extended life of an individual is filled with their accomplishments and failures. How they are formed<\/span>, forged into the sword they eventually become, can be fascinating, but it does not occupy my attention. I don’t have a fascination with celebrities either.<\/p>\n

As a whole I fail at almost all games of “which celebrity do you admire, who do you think is beautiful, etc” because I don’t think of them like that. Yes celebrities are beautiful, yes they are strong, or well spoken, or dress well, but i don’t know them. I have to know something about them to make a judgement about them, and truely I care less about their martial problems and religious beliefs. Anyone under a microscope will eventually be a horrible person.<\/p>\n

Still, every so often, something makes me take a bit of notice and that is what I admire about a person. One such person is Peter Jennings<\/a>, former ABC news Anchor. Mr. Jennings is dead now, cancer, but i admired him for one simple reason: The last grade he finished was the 9th grade. Officially i think he did eventually get his GED and maybe some college, but inspirationally speaking, that meant to me that if I tried hard enough, if I was hungry enough or looked forward enough (and was confident of my own abilities) I can and would make something of my self.<\/p>\n

One person who’s views i do dislike is Milton Friedman.<\/a> to clarify, i think his view has been taken to the valley extreme. I don’t believe in shareholder value, at least not reported quarterly. [That requires a whole another post] Quarterly reports has allow the corporation to become a soulless beast, and mindlessly to boot. It lives for it’s shareholders, who are not a scattered lot of the working class, but investment houses and fund groups, who themselves are working for a corporation in a self generation frothy blood frenzy of generating money … for what? to make themselves more money!<\/p>\n

I digress.<\/p>\n

Back to Lincoln. <\/a><\/p>\n

His vision, eloquence and forward looking speeches fascinate me. Hard to believe but i am a student of language, in that the words people use tell me alot about them. I have an ear for throw away phrase and common musings. Reading his speeches or his writings, reveals a character of a man and conviction, who, considering the shear number of times he failed to even become a senator, would become the President of the United States, and is considered one of the greatest presidents America has known.<\/p>\n

Personally, the two quotes above define me well enough, by the two men who i believe i would have liked to have known personally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” -Abraham Lincoln I’m not a slave to objectivity. I’m never quite sure what is means. And it means different things to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[74,75,76,78,3,73],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-truthiness","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-celebrities","tag-hero","tag-milton-friedman","tag-news","tag-peter-jennings"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}