The People News, a free newspaper serving Cleveland Tennessee (TN) and Bradley County Tennessee (Tn).





Of Bradley County Tn.


MARCH  2004

                            The People News, a free newspaper serving Cleveland and Bradley County Tn.

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A Day in the Life

by JC Bowman

This boy is bound to fail.  I have heard that before, chances are you probably have heard that or something similar.  After all, I grew up in Cleveland, Tennessee.  It is always important for poor country folks to remember to not out grow their raising.  To always remember their place in this world. Those elites who want to dismiss truth by attacking the messenger remind me of it from time to time.

Well, I have always rejected those positions.

I could never be a cookie-cutter conformist that takes carpools to work, dresses identical, in a boring day-to-day job, spending my life criticizing other people.  I have watched as other people criticize people for what they don't have.  Then criticize them for what they do have. It is ludicrous.

Our inhumanity gets worse and more disgusting everyday.  But when it comes down to doing the right thing and helping people we have too many people that are committed to words not actions.  These people, who might be considered morally corrupt, think they are cheating fate. But they have not realized that they are going to have to pay in the end.

Many people need to just lighten up and put themselves into position to where they can see the simple beauty of life.  We must also realize we cannot plead ignorance regarding the condition of the world. It is true the world goes on whether we do or not. We live in a growing global environment made accessible through technology.  America is the only world power remaining.  Our nation either leads or gets relegated to following mandates established by third world countries.  Just as we must be cognizant of the political and economic situation in the world, we must never take our eyes off the spiritual.  Numerous people around the world are desperately searching for God. By the way, if you cannot find him chances are you are not looking in the right places.

We understand there are more things in heaven and earth than one person alone could envision. Nevertheless there is widespread recognition of the simple truth is there is a God.  Still too many people on earth today deny this simple, beautiful truth.  Even the lowly animals know there is a God. Amazingly during the debate about "The Passion," the new Mel Gibson film about Jesus Christ, the debate was not on whether Jesus was a real person or not, but rather who was responsible for his death.  Let me step up to the plate on this one:  I am.

J C Bowman

-J. C. Bowman, a native of Cleveland, is a well informed and outspoken conservative educator.  He is Director for the Center for Education Innovation at Florida State University. Prior to this, he served as the Director for the Florida Department of Education Choice Office and as the Chief Policy Analyst of the Education Policy Unit for Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

E-mail: flapolicy@hotmail.com


I really liked the line in the Beatles song "I Am the Walrus":  "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."  The song was inspired by the nonsensical Lewis Carroll poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

Described by Ian MacDonald as "the most idiosyncratic protest song ever written."  "I Am the Walrus" highlights some of John Lennon's brilliant verbal efforts.  Some critics believe it may also have served as the Beatles' greatest moment of musical triumph.  In one sense, "I Am the Walrus" seems completely devoid of meaning.  The angry outburst unapologetically tackles the prevailing social structures and creates the need for further contemplation.

The song, indisputably a rage against forces outside John Lennon's control, took root after he read a letter from a student at his old school.  The same institution of learning whose headmaster commented: "This boy is bound to fail."  Following the usual expressions of adulation, this young man revealed in the letter that his teacher was playing Beatles songs in class. After the students had their turns analyzing the lyrics, the teacher would weigh in with his own interpretation of what the Beatles were really talking about.

A masterful stroke of finality concludes the song with a scene from a BBC radio production of Shakespeare's King Lear, one of Shakespeare's most depressing works. The reference to death, which the protagonist has feared along with his madness throughout the song turns into the inevitable nothingness, the last piece of pandemonium. After he wrote, "I Am the Walrus," Lennon challenged the authority figures that he felt had tormented him to figure out the meaning.

Another great Beatles song "A Day in the Life" was another dramatic climax on an album where the Beatles practically changed the world and themselves.

Overflowing with vivid hues and an assortment of fascinating sound effects, the Beatles contrasted deceivingly upbeat insert with the effects of the workaday world with expressionless stories of disillusion and regret.  A Day in the Life's radiant, open-ended refrain, "I'd love to turn you on," represents the possibility of escape.  Yet the song suggests a hint of guilt and that our emotional release will always remain an unrealized dream. Sound familiar?  Like intellectual refuse, written by a perturbed woman with paranoiac anxiety aimed at an aging, political frustrated audience.  Someone you cannot turn off, and would never turn on.

Writers, actors and singers seem captivated by everything from the grotesque to the merely banal.  While Mel Gibson gets brutalized for portraying the crucifixion of Christ in a vicious manner, Lennon took the existential harshness and emotional spectrum and placed it in a psychedelic prism carefully separating forms of anxiety, sadness and fatalism.

So what can we discover in a meaningless morass of musings?  The boy did not fail.

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