WHEN WE WERE HAPPY HIPPIES

By Tom Kando

This past summer, my mother turned 100. She lives in Holland, where she is a famous photographer (see her work at www.atakando.com)

A huge celebration was held at the Kranenburgh Museum in Bergen. That museum devoted several floors to her work. The reception was attended by over 650 people, including mayors, ambassadors, celebrities, the media and our far-flung family from all over the world.

In addition, one of my mother’s photo books - Dream in the Forest (Google it) was re-published for the occasion. This book, and another one titled Calypso and Nausicaa, were created half a century ago. My twin sisters and I are the “stars” who posed for those pictures.

Back then, we lived like hippies. My single mother took the three of us on wild hitch-hiking trips across Europe in order to take those magnificent photos, in which we act out mythical tales such Homer’s Odyssey. I was 15 and my sisters were 13.

Today, many people know our family story. The Kando saga has been described in many articles and television interviews. We were refugees from war-torn Hungary, living first in Paris and then in Amsterdam. We were very poor. We hitch-hiked and led a gypsy-like life.

At my mother’s 100th birthday celebration, I delivered a speech. My main point was this: Let no one think that the Kando saga is a sob story. Yes, we were outsiders, we were bohemians, we experienced rejection and humiliation. But all in all, when my mother took us on those wild trips across the Alps, to Mediterranean beaches and to Greek temples, boy did we have FUN!

Here is part of my speech:

Each year, I give a birthday speech for my mother. Typically, I praise her for her heroic life. I mention World War Two, the Holocaust, our poverty, the struggle for survival. I remind people that Ata raised her children largely by herself, and that she overcame adversity. I remind everyone of her wonderful exotic Hungarianness and her great photos.

All these things are true and important. But today I don’t want to bore you with a rehash of the same sob story. I want to try something different.

In conjunction with Ata’s 100th birthday celebration and this great exhibition of her work, her book Dream in the Forest has just been re-published. Within her rich and diverse work, the focus this year is on that early, fairy-tale like, child-oriented work which she created in the mid-1950s.

Today, we have experts and aficionados interpreting Ata’s work. We read reviews of Dream in the Forest and Calypso and Nausicaa. We read that the photos are about the elusive boundary between childhood and an emerging adulthood, including adolescence, sexuality, etc.

  However, (to paraphrase Rose Dawson in the movie Titanic), “the reality of the experience was somewhat different.” Let me tell you how things felt to us, the children.

Let me tell you how I remember MY experience, during that chapter of Ata’s life, when these photos and these books came to fruition.

In my recollection, we were a team. A team consisting of a single mom and three children growing up in foreign lands, in great poverty.
Ata was determined that just because we were poor, her children would not be denied what many other children enjoyed. She insisted on her children’s right to go to the sea, to the beaches, to the mountains, to the exotic places usually reserved for the rich - or at least for those richer than us, which was practically everyone. By hook or by crook, she would show her children some of the world’s beautiful places. If we couldn’t afford the train, then we would just hitch-hike.

After we arrived in Paris as a bunch of Hungarian refugees aged 8 to 10, we hitch-hiked to the Atlantic beaches of the Vendée, to the Cote d’Azur in Cannes, to the Lac d’Annecy in the Alps, and elsewhere. We did this year after year.
Then, when we were in our early teens, mother undertook these photographic projects. We hitch-hiked to Austria, Switzerland, the South of Italy and other distant sites. This was the “Kando way of life.”
We camped out, we slept on beaches and on public benches in city parks and at railroad stations. We were kicked out of cafés and stopped by the police. We slept in underground bunker hotels and in beet fields. Sometimes we woke up next to piles of discarded tomatoes. Sometimes a farmer took us to his home and let us sleep in his barn.
We hitched rides with truck drivers who put us up in the open back of their trucks, where we were pelted by rain and hail, or drenched in our sweat under the blazing sun. Sometimes the truck drivers became fresh with my 13-year old sisters and with my mother. I was the 15-year old man of the family, supposed to protect the women. When Ata and my sisters resisted, we were kicked out of the truck and left stranded in the middle of nowhere.

This is not a sob story. To the contrary. We had a fantastic childhood. We had sooooo much fun. We met kids in France, in Austria, in Italy. Oh those Italian girls! Can you imagine how much I loved meeting those girls on the beaches, dancing with them at cabana clubs? Can you imagine the fun, the adventures and the freedom we enjoyed, compared to other kids?

Here was a 40-year old mother and her three children. A family trying to survive and to have some fun at the same time. For Ata, much of this may have been work. For us it was largely play. We enacted fairy tale stories, the sleeping beauty, a flute-playing shepherd, Ulysses, Calypso, Nausicaa. Sometimes we fought a little, we cried a little, we got angry at mean people. Sometimes we were too cold, or too hot, or tired, or hungry. But we were also happy, we saw beautiful things, we met beautiful people, we did exciting things. We saw mountains, glaciers, we saw how the ancient Greeks and Romans had lived, we swam in the surf, we sang and danced on Mediterranean beaches, and in Alpine chalets.
When we moved to Amsterdam, the Dutch welcomed us and helped us. And in the end, it all turned out for the best. But we were never Dutch. We were NOMADS!

These trips resulted in several beautiful books. They were the crowning achievement.. But at the time, what mattered most to us, was the experience behind these photos. And this was a wonderful and exciting experience. Ata was the director. She asked us to pose and to enact mythical characters. And in order to do this, we visited some of the world’s most beautiful spots. We hiked up and down mountain tops, we saw the Jungfrau glaciers, the Vesuvius, Pompeii, Paestum, the Amalfi coast, and more. Did we - the children - know what we were doing and where we were going? Was there a plan, as far as we could tell? Absolutely not. We were just having the time of our life. leave comment here

CLICHES

By Tom Kando


Today, I want to be creative and to try to entertain readers with some product of my mind. I am an organized fellow. I divide all my issues into separate files. This is proper, and it is functional. In other words, it is good (a moral concept) and it works (a pragmatic concept). See, here I go again: I sub-divide an idea into two parts. Organization.
So is this what I am - organization man? Is this why others respond so little to me?
Nobody likes an organization man. Where are beauty, humor, love, excitement, adventure? Organization is dull. You want beauty, humor, love, excitement, adventure? Okay: number one, beauty: Mozart. Number two: humor: Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Number three, love: I love Leah. Here I go again, I make a list. I am the organization man. Let me try again:

Beauty: Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungala campum
Well, not the greatest, but the only thing that came readily to mind - some Latin verse I learned in high school. I believe it’s iambic pentameter, and it says, “with four-footed sound, the nailed hoof thunders across the field.”

Maybe I can be better at humor... Let’s see...What’s funny?

! The Hungarian word anus means “mother,” I believe. Vulgar, not funny.

! The French invented the word ordinateur for computer, because if they had kept calling it a computer, in phonetic French this becomes con-pute-heur, meaning “cunt,” “whore” and “hour.” Vulgar and (a little bit) funny.

But I cannot entertain readers with products of my mind without a theme. There cannot be a stream of consciousness without a topic. How about the topic of cliches, and starting out with one specific cliche?
Yes, this is a good topic. It can include humor, wisdom, intelligence, it can benefit readers, it can be interesting.

Examples of Cliches:
! #1.: “Most cliches are true.” This is a cliche, but is it true?
! #2.: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,”
! ...or the opposite: #3: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Both true: Say, you've broken up with a person you love. The longer the separation, the more you miss her (cliche #2). But you must try to steel yourself and force yourself to care less, as time goes. Try to forget her (cliche #3).

! #4.: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” True. But we just saw that a
cliche (e.g. #2, above) and its opposite (#3) can both be true. Now what about a cliche and its “mirror image” - can they also both be true? Cliche #4 means that we should not have good intentions. Should we therefore have bad intentions?

! Cliche #5: The road to heaven is paved with bad intentions.

Such logic would make Aristotle cringe, but let’s think about it for a moment, as if the nature of our intentions (good or bad) were both a sufficient and a necessary condition to end up either in hell or in heaven. Let us assume that cliche #4 also renders its mirror image - cliche #5 - true.

It follows that if I plan to steal, cheat, lie and hurt others, I will end up in heaven. Hmm...

Maybe this is where I could have done a lot better in my life - as could many others: What if early in your life - say when you are ten years old - you plan to become a criminal, you plan not to go to college, not to have a good job, not to raise and support a family and children, but instead you plan to just use and sell drugs, be lazy, exploit others, etc. Of course, you also plan to do these things smartly, getting away with them and avoiding punishment. These are your intentions, your plans.

So let’s say that now, it’s ten years later. You are twenty. Okay, you have achieved some of your goals, you have done some bad things, but many of your plans have not materialized, because that’s the nature of most plans - they mostly don’t materialize. So you have taken and sold some drugs, you have hurt people (your parents, your friends, etc.) you have stolen here and there, etc. But you haven’t really succeeded.
So you scale down your ambitions. Maybe you will get your high school degree after all. You might even get a job (just for a while, because it’s against your principles).

What about ten years later? Now you are thirty. Well, you have slipped even more: After fucking everything in sight for many years, you met Susie, and you tried to abuse her like you abused all your previous girlfriends, you wanted to dump her after you used her sexually and took her money, but somehow you couldn’t quite do it. You kept backsliding and going back to her. In fact, you even moved in with her. Now, even the M-word (marriage) has begun to surface, God forbid.

And then, you turn forty: Now, you are married to Susie and you have three children. You went back to college, got your MS in Computer Science, and you have been working for a software company for four years. You own a fine home and your children are about to go to college, with you paying for their higher education.

By the time you turn fifty, you have joined the volunteer organization Habitat and donated three months of every summer to go down to South America to build homes for the homeless.
Also, Susie’s brother, who was on kidney dialysis, needed a new kidney or else he would die, and you gave him one of yours.

By the time you are sixty, the value of your total estate is about five million dollars, including your house, your summer home in Hawaii and everything else you own.
Susie, alas, has had an affair with your boss, and she wants to divorce you and marry him. You totally understand, and you hold no grudge against either of them. You facilitate the situation as follows: You liquidate your entire estate. You make provisions that Susie and your children automatically receive the first two million. The remaining three million dollars, you give to the International Children’s Fund, stipulating that it all be spent to rescue some of the millions of children orphaned by AIDS in Africa. Then, you move to a region in rural India still plagued by leprosy, and you dedicate the rest of your life to the leper colony which you found there.

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DESTROYING THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, AND OUR CHANCE TO BE CIVILIZED

By Tom Kando

The country is hell bent on doing the wrong thing, and everyone is joining the party.

Opposition to mandatory national health care used to be primarily a Republican stance, strongest on the far right. Now, the orgy of recriminations against President Obama and the Affordable Care Act has spread to every level of society. Unaware that they are doing great harm to the long-term welfare of the American people, the mainstream media, the Internet, the Social media, nighttime talk show hosts and comedians have all joined the dance on the Titanic/lynch mob - select your metaphor.

I am fully aware that I am whistling in the wind, and that there is no way to be heard when a society is going through mass psychosis, but I will nevertheless play my customary Quixotic role and repeat some of the obvious reasons why President Obama is right and why the massive assault on Obamacare is criminal and suicidal.

The liars at Fox News, the likes of Krauthammer and Limbaugh, have won. Their indoctrination campaign has succeeded. The so-called “mainstream” has happily joined the assault. The near totality of the media and the culture at large now limit themselves  EXCLUSIVELY to bad news regarding Obamacare - the flawed website, the very low enrollment rates, Obama’s false promises, on and on. This is impartiality? It is utter and total group think. There is no more “mainstream” in America. There is only criticism, bias and anti-Obamacare ridicule nearly everywhere.

If anyone out there can briefly step out of the mass psychosis, consider (once again) the following:

1. Many other countries have long recognized health care as a basic constitutional RIGHT, not an entitlement.

2. Every civilized country in the world has a mandatory national health care system, except the United States, which seems hell bent on remaining the last bastion of feudalism. Is "exceptional backwardness" what the chauvinistic "American exceptionalists" have in mind?

3. Many of those countries enjoy longer life expectancy and better health, while spending far less on health care. As one of my readers wrote, “anyone who wants to know how (pre-ACA) American health care compares with the rest of the world needs to read "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care" by T. R. Reid. NOBODY else wants to have a health care system like ours!”

4. My 100-year old mother thrives in the Netherlands. She used to live in California. When she got older and her chances of becoming sick increased, we repatriated her to her country of citizenship. A wise move, both medically and financially.

5. Many countries enjoy the equivalent of Medicare for 100% of the population. Such a government-run, single-payer system is what this country should have had long ago.

6. We require car insurance, but not health insurance, even though the latter is much more important. After all, not everyone gets into car crashes, but sooner or later everyone becomes sick.

7. The young and healthy want to forego health insurance. They figure, they’ll sign up AFTER they get sick. That’s like saying, I’ll sign up for car insurance after my accident, and I’ll ask to collect from the insurance company then. Nuts!

8. Critics of the ACA think that they are very clever when they say, “Ha! Obama wants to sell men pregnancy insurance and women prostate cancer insurance!” This is moronic: Policies are usually standardized, not tailor-made. You get health coverage for yourself and for your dependents. You don’t cherry pick what illness each member of your family is covered for or not.

9. Reasonable Americans have tried to introduce mandatory universal health insurance for 70 years, since President Truman. Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon supported it.

10. Did the roll-out of Obamacare go badly? I don’t know where this website snafu ranks among other similar huge innovations, but let me ask this: Have you never heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy? If a program is maligned, vilified and ridiculed from the get-go, isn’t it obvious that millions will have qualms about it and hedge their bets?

11. The Republican opposition is utterly hypocritical: They are offering NO alternative, no fixes for what ails Obamacare. Their sole purpose is to destroy ANY version of universal health care, period. They want to euthanize the baby because it suffers from some infant ailments.

12. The true motives here are quite obvious: 80% of America already had some form of health insurance. Bringing the remaining 60 million people on board was too much to ask for in an increasingly selfish society. That was Obama’s mistake. He didn’t see clearly enough that the prevailing attitude in this country is: “I got mine, and if you haven’t, that’s not my problem.”

Maybe my family’s excellent experience with socialized medicine overseas cannot be replicated. It’s too late. We have become too greedy. Physicians are increasingly turning away Medicare patients. Drug manufacturers and hospitals are making insane amounts of money. Insurance companies are for-profit businesses.

It is  evil for people to profit from other people’s illnesses, but that is the essence of the American health care system. That is what Obamacare was trying to change, and what the majority of Americans apparently want to preserve. This is not the America I used to know. leave comment here

CONSPIRATORS OR LONE ASSASSINS?

By Tom Kando

On November 13, Jeff Cottrill published “Ten Reasons to Stop Believing JFK Conspiracy Nonsense” in the Digital Journal (http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/362080) I’m sure he is right.

Also, Bill O’Reilly’s book “Killing Kennedy” was recently made into a movie, with Rob Lowe starring as the late President. I hate to admit that both the book and the movie, while not terribly exciting, probably got it right. For once, O’Reilly was fair and balanced.

Nevertheless, let me quibble about some of this stuff, and tack on some general observations:

First, as an aside, when Jeff humorously describes such diehard beliefs as Apollo 11 fakery, 9/11 trutherism, Elvis being alive and Sasquatch Nazis from Mars, he forgets one of the great current beauts: Donald Trump & Co - the wacko birthers!

Secondly, his article contains a bit of a red herring: Jeff spends too much time arguing that Oswald was not innocent. To many of us, that was not the question. We recognize the obvious fact that Oswald killed Kennedy, but the question is whether he was helped in any way by anybody or not.

And a corollary question is: If he was helped, was it by people on the “right” or on “left”? In other words, did Oswald by and large hate right-wingers (such as General Walker) and still sympathize with Castro and with Soviet Communism, or: was he aided by anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia-like figures, Southern Yankee-haters, etc?

Clearly, liberal conspiracy buffs like Oliver Stone prefer to believe that Oswald was backed up by right-wingers, whereas conservatives such as Bill O”Reilly reject this. In the book and the film “Killing Kennedy,” there isn’t a single allusion to any possible link between Oswald and the right. Instead, it is made clear that Oswald was a “commie,” or at least a confused commie sympathizer.

Now don’t get huffy, Jeff. In the end, I agree with you. I just want to add to your analysis. If we ask, NOT whether Oswald was innocent or guilty (indeed a stupid question), but whether he acted entirely alone or not, then the answer can, at first anyway, go either way. I refer to your reason number #3 - Jack Ruby.

Let me play a little game of statistical probabilities: let’s start with the premise that we know NOTHING about ANY aspect of the assassination, except that (1) Oswald shot Kennedy and (2) Ruby shot Oswald. With that premise, there is a 50% probability that Oswald acted alone, and a 50% chance that Ruby was also a lone nut. The probability that both men were lone nuts is therefore 1 in 4. Reasoned this way, there is a 3 in 4 chance that there was some sort of cooperation. It is because of such odds that a majority of the world - in the US and overseas - still believes that Oswald did NOT act alone. Many people view the assassination of the assassin himself within a couple of days as too much of a coincidence. That’s how the Romans did it . First you hire someone to kill Domitian, or Caligula, and then you kill the killer.

The question of lone assassins vs. conspiracies is an extremely interesting historical one: Consider the following haphazard list of a dozen examples:
Henry the Fourth’s assassination by Ravaillac, 1610,
John Wilkes Booth, 1865,
President Garfield’s assassination in 1881,
French President Sadi Carnot’ assassination, 1894,
Austrian Empress Elisabeth’s assassination 1898,
President McKinley’s assassination in1901,
Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination by Gavrilo Prinzip, 1914,
Martin Luther King’s assassination by James Earl Ray, 1968,
Bobby Kennedy’s assassination by Sirhan Sirhan, 1968,
Gerald Ford’s attempted assassination by Squeaky Fromme 1975,
John Lennon’s assassination by David Chapman, 1980,
Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination by John Hinkley,

Every single one of these was by a lone assassin, presumably. On the other hand, ancient Romans preferred conspiracies. The most famous conspiracy in that era was Caesar’s assassination by Brutus, Cassius and others. Caligula, Nero, Domitian and dozens of other emperors were also killed by conspirators - usually members of the praetorian guard.

I’m not sure what this difference between the ancient world and the modern world indicates in terms of cultural and political differences. Just wondering.

And another thing: Kennedy was our 35th president and the 4th one to be assassinated. That’s 1 in 9, excluding failed attempts on the lives of presidents! What a dangerous job! Way more dangerous than being a cop, or a soldier in combat, or just about any other job.

Anyway, all in all I agree with Cottrill: Oswald was probably a lone assassin. And while I hate it, I am also forced to agree with Bill O’Reilly: (this one time): Confused as Oswald was, he was a Lefty. leave comment here

OUR QUEER LINGO

 

By Wilfried, an English teacher in Belgium,
August 30, 2010

Following up on Madeleine’s “Random Thoughts on Language.” Teaching English is not necessarily boring, but once in a while "tricky" ! Take a chance and read this poem aloud:

Our Queer Lingo, by Richard Tobin:

When the English tongue we speak
Why is BREAK not rhymed with FREAK
Will you not tell me why it's true
We say SEW but likewise FEW ?
And the maker of a verse,
Cannot rhyme his HORSE with WORSE ?
BEARD is not the same as HEARD,
CORD is different from WORD,
COW is cow, but low is LOW,
SHOE is never rhymed with FOE.

Think of HOSE and DOSE and LOSE.
And think of GOOSE and yet of CHOOSE
Think of COMB and TOMB and BOMB?
DOLL and ROLL and HOME and SOME.

And since PAY is rhymed with SAY
Why not PAID with SAID I pray?
Think of BLOOD and FOOD and GOOD
MOULD is not pronounced as COULD.
Why DONE but GONE and LONE?
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sounds and letters don't agree!

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