Author: stevekuusisto

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/14-0

Stephen Kuusisto
Director
The Renee Crown University
Honors Program
University Professor
Syracuse University

"Before I decided to write this book My Twenty-Five Years With Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives that were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near-geniuses, of would-be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses. Fernande, who was then living with Picasso and had been with him a long time that is to say they were all twenty-four years old at that time but they had been together a long time, Fernande was the first wife of a genius I sat with and she was – not the least amusing. We talked hats. Fernande had two subjects hats and perfumes. This first day we talked hats. She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success. Later on once in Montmartre she and I were walking together. She had on a large yellow hat and I had on a much smaller blue one. As we were walking along a workman stopped and called out, there go the sun and the moon shining together. Ah, said Fernande to me with a radiant smile, you see our hats are a success." from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

From The New York Times:

OPINION: Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news.

http://nyti.ms/J8DpWp

For the dead are not far

Nor are they neighbors

In fashions

Of ease. Instead

They speak

Like working men

Or the women

Who saved Finland,

Voices resolved

Still to love, half

Of unreason

For when alive

They were fluent with sadness

but never fooled.

Dear Governor Romney:

When I read the article at the Atlantic Monthly today detailing your "high school hijinks" (link below) I was thrown back into my own adolescence which, I assure you, was a time of terrible struggle and pain. I was like your teacher who had the thick glasses–a teacher who you side-swiped, presumably for a cheap laugh. I was the kid with glasses thicker than Coke bottles–they were as thick as padlocks. I walked bent over. I struggled to read the printed word. I belonged to no known social group. I was harassed by able bodied kids in the hallways. By my junior year I was hospitalized with anorexia and exhaustion. I was, in short, the kind of person you would have gleefully victimized. I don't think the word "hijinks" quite captures what you did, Sir, for cruelty is steeper than easy shenanigans. Cruelty to people who have disabilities or who are gay requires a penchant for stigmatization, an intellectual property that balloons inside unreflective and judgmental human beings.

Do I believe that people can grow? Certainly. But there must be evidence, and given your wholesale support for the Ryan budget plan, a plan that calls for cruel and unnecessary cuts to the social programs that help people with disabilities actually live, I'd say that there's no evidence to date that you've grown one iota. 

I have never thought of blindness as an antagonist, merely the people who make the way harder. Of this I am certain: you know plenty of those folks.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/time-when-mitt-romney-was-bully/52151/

Stephen Kuusisto 

Yep. Gay people and folks with thick glasses were fair game for the Mittster:

The Time When Mitt Romney Was a Bully

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/time-when-mitt-romney-was-bully/52151/

(Sent from Flipboard)

Stephen Kuusisto 

Director

The Renee Crown University Honors Program 

University Professor

Syracuse University