On the getting, and the getting rid of, tattoos.

Posted on September 3, 2011

September 3, 2011 | Author: Jeffrey Lant | Posted in Dr. Jeffrey Lant’s Article Archive

Amy Winehouse, thanks!

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant
I want you to know, right from the start: I am tattoo- phobic, have been my whole life. I’m not, and I mean ever, going to give some total stranger with a needle the chance to “improve” upon what God gave me, and so amply. No way.
I wish further to impart this intelligence: I have never been in or (so far as I know) near any tattoo “parlor” or have suffered from even a fleeting moment of belief that I would be better off with such decoration. Tattoos and I don’t get along.
Still I am forced to admit that millions of my fellow earth travelers do not agree with me… up to and including having the most grotesque and meretricious designs and colors injected into the skin of any and every body part.
We’ve all seen such people; indeed, nearly every friend I’ve got has at least one colorful outrage. This perhaps isn’t too surprising. You see, I’m a vintage Baby Boomer and here, as elsewhere, it was Boomers (starting in about 2000) who challenged the status quo and removed tattooing oneself from the odd and outre to the mainstream. It’s something we Boomers do.
Eric.
I have an acquaintance named Eric who pops up in my life every few years. Every time he shows up (as he did the other evening) he wants to show me, indeed insists on showing me, his latest tattoos. I  demur, but not even a court order with cease and desist all over it could get him to stop, refrain, and cover up. That just ain’t gonna happen.
Anyway, Eric arrives, announces his colorful new acquisitions, and strips right then and there… and he does this whether I’m alone or whether Her Majesty the Queen is present. Like I told you, nothing interferes with his presentation, as carefully organized — and eye-catching — as that by any Parisian couturier.
Eric’s body is a journey through the infrequent ups and often roller-coaster downs of a tumultuous, hard-drinking, self-abusing life. Indeed, his body reads like the plot outlines for a dozen soap operas.
The name of every girl he’s “loved” is there, including “Rosetta” his first and so far only wife. It’s telling that her name has the smallest print, the blackest color (black being the easiest color to erase, orange and yellow being the most difficult), and the worst location; (I talk like I know, but I’m only guessing that the back of the left leg is not a position of honor. I’m sure some aficionado will correct me if I’m wrong. Perhaps she left him disgruntled that he hadn’t given her a better position on the body she was deserting.)
By now, of course, Eric has shown off his tattoos so often to so many he has an established tour of his body. You can get either the short, medium, or full-fledged, see everything, learn everything version. Forced to choose, I always opt for the shortest option; he hasn’t, I think, noticed this is my usual selection. I’m thus in for a rough quarter hour, I can tell you… but I grin and bear it; it could, after all, have been longer and worse.
First, as stated, Eric has all the outmoded “love” tattoos.
Most people tattooing their bodies believe that a tattoo of their beloved’s name is a) proof of that love and b) a sure sign that love will last, the tattoo a symbol of true and enduring affection. Thus, a visit to the tattoo establishment is a “must” date for lovers of any age; indeed, not beautifying your body so could be construed as a sign the relationship will be fleeting and must certainly give grounds for serious doubts and reservations. What’s a poor boy — or girl — to do, and so the course of least resistance occurs, fortified by alcohol and hope, a very dangerous combination.
Tattoo in haste, regret at leisure.
Frequent practitioners add one tattoo after another, despite the fact that most are afflicted by the tattoos of long departed lovers who have made the lovey-dovey image a thing of profound (and embittered) irony. Those who tattoo are optimists by nature. They believe
1) tattoos make one more attractive, even irresistible.
2) the feelings they possess today, they will possess tomorrow.
3)  in all powerful, love ever lasting and the contentment that comes from telling the world, gloriously if garishly about it in this way.
4)  more of the above is necessarily better.
Oh, yes, they are optimists, indeed, every single one of them.
They also believe they can improve upon the most glorious of God’s glorious creations, the human body. Thus, they tattoo themselves with human words of great meaning and designs of no meaning whatsoever. They try different colors and different locations. They select classical images and motifs and images and motifs which are new, provocative, and so they think, seductive, erotic. In short, the number of tattoos is limited only by the number of people succumbing to them. And that number is now at least 45,000,000 in the United States alone. Mercy!
But what happens when love dies, you and your best friend quarrel and your favorite cat Fluffy is superceded by another, more winning, more desirable? In short what happens when you wish to banish and erase the now embarrassing (and erroneous) effusion? Aye, there’s the rub.
Millions once happily in, now want immediately (and completely) out.
A Harris Interactive Poll puts the tattoo remorse rate at 16 percent in 2008. In 2009, members of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery performed an estimated 61,535 tattoo removal procedures. In short, a whole new industry associated with tattoos is growing, the tattoo removal business. It’s booming.
Now hear this: stubborn tattoos can take up to 15 or even more sessions to remove. And it can cost thousands of dollars, a sad fate for something that usually costs under $100 and is meant to showcase your good and loving heart.
But consider this: as arduous as today’s removal process is, it used to be worse. Prior to selective tattoo-ink targeting lasers, the options for removal included surgical excision or dermabrasion and ablative lasers. Both physically removed the entire skin where the tattoo was placed and replaced the tattoos with scars and obvious discolorations.
But surely this will never be the fate of Eric and his colorful painted body, or at least I used to think so. However, on his recent visit, he confided a distaste for one of his tattoos; it wasn’t for Rosetta, but for a dog named Chipper, who had bit him and run away. Unrequited love is the main reason for total erasure with all its pains and costs. Eric is looking at several expedients, including good honest work to raise the funds. I’m glad to hear it, but I won’t believe it until I don’t see it anymore.
* * * * *
About The Author
‘YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.’  How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html
For
more information contact me via skype at homeprofitcoach
Or visit my site after watching the link above every person who is currently working in the United states needs a legit home business and Uncle Sam will pay for it each month while you work your J.O.B.!
Sign up here now!
==>
It will take you 10 seconds!
We will then show you how to get your FREE Traffic!
Super BONUS: Find out how we GIVE OVER 1,000,000 Ad Credit To EVERYONE…
Yours In Success,Free information http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=dk4EpfHO

Joey Vento, dead at 71, owner of famed cheese steak stand. He told you to order in English, or else!

Posted on September 1, 2011

September 1, 2011 | Author: Jeffrey Lant | Posted in Dr. Jeffrey Lant’s Article Archive

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. Let’s get something sorted out right from the get-go. Whether you call them Philadelphia cheesesteak, Philly cheesesteak, cheese steak or steak and cheese, you are a member of a cult. You are a person who not only eats these concoctions, you have decided (often violent) opinions on which establishment makes the best and which ones are just grease pits. And, yes, you know the official cheesesteak song… of course there is one!
This not-quite-top-forty production appears in the collection known as “Songs Inside the Park.” I figure its unknown creators spent about the time it takes to order and cook a cheesesteak to craft this not-quite the-toast-of-the-nation-(but) peppy little number. Still, how many sandwiches have their own beau-ti-ful anthem? Exactly! So, show some respect…
You’ll find the official Philly Cheesesteak song in every search engine. Go find it and give a listen now. Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you: less than Mozart it may be… but it’s got that insidious quality that differentiates a mere song from an invasive little bugger that you can’t get out of your head once you hear it. It goes without saying it was Joey Vento’s favorite song; always a part of his luggage… sung at anniversaries, engagement parties, at weddings… even on one notable occasion at the funeral of a (shall we say) overweight (actually tubby) gentleman whose passion for cheesesteak may have contributed to the sad event.
Joey Vento didn’t care. He was a Zealot, and for such folk everywhere, absolutely anywhere, is the best place — just as now is always the right time — to drive home the message: that you’re nothing without your cheesesteak, and that’s a fact. Cordon bleu eat your heart out…
History of cheesesteak.
No less an organization than the prestigious Historical Society of Pennsylvania, whose journal pages are more usually devoted to Philadelphia’s pivotal role in the American Revolution, no less an organization, I say, has reported that the cheesesteak was developed in the early 20th century “by combining frizzled beef, onions, and cheese in a small loaf of bread.”
Philadelphiains Pat and Harry Olivieri are often credited with inventing the sandwich by serving chopped steak on hoagie rolls in the early 1900s. They began by selling this variation of steak sandwiches at their hot dog stand near south Philadelphia’s Italian Market. They became so popular that Pat opened his own restaurant which still operates today as Pat’s King of Steaks; it’s right across the street from Joey Vento’s place, “Geno’s Steaks.”
Ironically, the cheesesteak was originally prepared without cheese; zealots tell you this because they feel better telling you the truth, no matter how painful that might be. Yikes! A cheesesteak without cheese. Jeeeeze……
But Pat Olivieri says provolone cheese was first added by Joe “Cocky Joe” Lorenza, a manager at the Ridge Avenue location. As you may imagine from his sobriquet, Cocky Joe wasn’t inclined to keep his invention to himself… For one thing, he asked for — and got — a nice raise for coming up with this crucial improvement. The whole cheesesteak industry and every satisfied cheesesteak muncher that ever existed thank him, too, not least because provolone is a universal favorite and a cheesesteak without cheese is just too awful to contemplate.
Joey V ento arrives on the scene.
Joey Vento was to the meat industry born. He learned it from father who had opened Jim’s Steaks in the early 1940s. Joey wanted his own place, too… and so in 1966 witih $6 in his pocket, two boxes of steaks and some hot dogs he opened “Geno’s Steaks”, right across the street from Pat’s King of Steaks. It was a provocative gesture to the already well established Olivieris… but it ensured him a steady stream of new customers who wanted to taste what the new establishment and its in-your-face owner had to offer. They liked what he dished up… and Geno’s Steaks is here to this day, a place where Rocky Balboa and his need for mouth-watering protein always feel at home.
The ability to create this feeling was very much Joey Vento’s skill and talent.
First off, he made a point not just of knowing his customers’ names. He knew little things about nearly all of them and, of course, about every regular. He knew their wives and children, the vicissitudes of their often turbulent lives; he knew where they liked to sit and what special cheesesteak they particularly craved. Joey was a whirring, never stopping action figure at “Geno’s Steaks.” Longtime friend Domenic Chiavaroli summed up the padrone thus, “I’ve been coming here since 1967. Joe was a good guy. He always tried to help everybody.”
Given that this was pretty much the universal feeling about Joey Vento, it is ironic that he got Andy Warhol’s few minutes of fame by posting a couple of signs with strong, even offensive messages on them, messages which affronted and angered some of the new non-Italian residents of South Philadelphia. Joey had located his restaurant business there in the first place not just to cock a snoot at his arch rival at Pat’s King of Steaks but to be right smack dab in the middle of steak and cheese loving Italians and the meat industry they dominated.
These congenial folks, all known to Joey, were being replaced by immigrants from Asia and Latin America, folks who understood neither America’s values nor America’s language. And this really ticked off Joey for whom America was the greatest country on God’s green earth… love her or leave her. This meant America’s language, too — English. Joey got irritated that so many of these new folks just wouldn’t learn the language of the nation that generously took them in.
He posted two small signs reading “This is America: When ordering ‘please speak English’” It only took about 5 minutes but Joey Vento and his message became the flash point for angry Americans who flocked to his restaurant and ate his cheesesteaks as a vote of approbation… and the new non-English speakers who immediately filed a discrimination complaint against this most congenial and welcoming of men.
Philadelphia’s Commission on Human Relations began looking into whether Vento was in fact guilty of discrimination and found probable cause. The case went to a public hearing where the Commission’s lawyer argued that the signs were not about political speech but intimidation. In March 2008 a three member panel voted 2-1 that Vento and his signs did not violate the ordinance.
So Joey Vento won a great victory… in what may well be a losing war. The plain fact is cheesesteaks, with all their carbs and flavorful fats, may well be on the way out, killed by a nation slowly awakening to their nutritional damage and punishing effects to the body. If so, Joey checked out just in time, the victim of colorectal cancer and a massive heart attack which you’ll never convince me had nothing to do with eating a lifetime’s worth of cheesesteaks. The sign Vento should have put up was simply “caveat emptor,” though it is written in Latin.
* * * * *
About The Author
Howard Martell
Sign up here now!
==> http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=dk4EpfHO
It will take you 10 seconds!
We will then show you how to get your FREE Traffic!
Super BONUS: Find out how we GIVE OVER 1,000,000 Ad Credit To EVERYONE…
Yours In Success,
Howard Martell
Webmaster
TAXSAVINGS How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html
For more information contact me via skype at homeprofitcoach

338 Article in the series ‘And the days dwindle down…’ Thoughts for dear friend and colleague Wallace Johnson upon the occasion of his 86th birthday April 18, 2011.

Posted on September 2, 2011

338 Article in the series ‘And the days dwindle down…’ Thoughts for dear friend and colleague Wallace Johnson upon the occasion of his 86th birthday April 18, 2011.

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Howard Martell

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Today is a special day, a festive day, a day of  celebration and hijinx… today Wallace Johnson, friend, turns 86 years young; legions of his friends and well wishers will gather via the Internet to toast, to laugh with and to note the day and the man.
Wallace, for all that he was a test pilot with the Apollo Project, (and so truly flew high)  is a man of sentiment, art, culture. So I looked for a suitable song to mark this event, and had no trouble selecting “The September Song” by Kurt Weil (music) and Maxwell Anderson (lyrics). It first appeared in the Broadway musical “Knickerbocher Holiday” (1938).
It is a grand tune with haunting music and a message that grows more apt and poignant day by day.
A host of top artists have recorded this song, and no wonder; Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante (in 1955 in a particularly touching manner). I select Lotte Lenya. She did, after all, know Weill best; she married him twice. Her rendition is mesmerizing. Go to any search engine and find it; let the music and its lyrics envelop you as you read an article straight from the heart on this his special day.
“.And the days dwindle down To a precious few September, November And these few precious days I’ll spend with you. These precious days I’ll spend with you.”
Thoughts from a whippersnapper of only 64.
Readers, if you’re lucky in life you have a friend and colleague like Wallace. He is dedicated, conscientious to a fault, and he knows the fine art of handling a CEO, which (being the CEO in question) I appreciate more than he knows Today, greatly daring, with grave temerity, this self-same CEO offers a few limpid reflections and observations in the hope that they are welcome…and, more to the point, correct.
1) You’ve lived.
In 1955 best-selling author Patrick Dennis wrote a pip of an novel entitled “Auntie Mame”. It offered this pithy admonition well loved by my mother, “Live! Live! Live! Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
Wallace, you are a lucky man; you have lived… you have loved… and most importantly you have been loved, and still are. You have known and lived by the truth of Sigmund Freud’s famous observation that the best life is composed of love and work.  It is not given to all to know, much less to benefit from, this.
“Happiness is composed of love and work.” (Glück ist Liebe und Arbeit zusammen.”)
You have, of course, made errors; not one of us is immune from that. But I suspect, as well as one human can know another, that yours were the faults of generosity. You, I know, are quite capable of giving too much to those who may not have been worth the gift, being neither capable of understanding nor reciprocating. If this is a “fault”, it is a good one to have. It is, after all, always better to have given, even if from time to time, to the unworthy. Let a man be evaluated by such errors…and he shall be found, assuredly, a good man, a kind man, a man of heart. That man is you.
2) You  served America proudly, regarding her as needing the support of all who love her, a bastion, not a milch cow for exploitation.
Wallace, you have been since your earliest days, a man who knew the secret of life was always to look up, to the place beyond the rainbows, for it is only by the exertions of untrammeled people that progress can come. You looked up and saw the cosmos as a subject of study, as a great adventure, as a never-ending source of wonder; a place to embrace and excite, never to shrink from. As a test pilot for the Apollo Project during the heady days of its inception and development, you saw first-hand what this great nation can do… no technical impediment too difficult… no vision too unlikely… no destination too remote.
You are one of the very elect who can say, and proudly, “I was there… and it mattered.” And so it did. The salary was meager; the hours long; the effect profound and inspiring. And you were there, dedicated.
3) You have been a great teacher.
Ask a new member of our Worldprofit community to name a single member, a single monitor, and the odds are overwhelming they will name you. I know why. First because you saw in us the best of you and in joining did no lip service but made the most serious of commitments. You resolved not merely to take, but to enhance, improve, and through every season and year, to give.
You learned our innovative business… you excelled.  You understood, as so many have not, that the Internet is not a destination; it is a process, a process of  connecting the members of our species, wherever they are located, so that they may communicate the very best of which we are capable.
You embraced this mission as you embraced all your missions: with seriousness of intent, with full commitment, and with an unexampled talent for training other good people worldwide who understood the vital importance of our monitor program and wanted to add their talents to the corps epitomized by you. As such you have, first, touched the lives of these monitors, directly, personally, diplomatically, thoroughly. In turn these monitors, with their important tasks, have touched the lives of untold thousands, who may perhaps never know they have benefited from you and your gift of giving.  But they most assuredly have.
4) You have helped your CEO, a “lad” still on the sunny side of Social Security, just.
Wallace, many people today, and on many days to come, will extol  your virtues, and rightly so. But I am the only man in the universe who can extol you for this: that you have helped your CEO, not least by your empathy, diplomacy, and the art of knowing just when to offer home truths, the better to attend to them… and to listen. I appreciate your deftness… and your unflagging assistance.
Many people, 2 decades and more senior in age, would have found ways to roil the waters. You chose  with consummate loyalty, to smooth the road… without the slightest hint of servility or arriere pensee. You have been amidst so many loyal, the most loyal of all.
You have given me the benefit of wisdom, without condescension. You have listened… you have spoken candidly… you have reminded when necessary and “forgotten” when prudent. I am appreciative, in your debt, impressed and grateful.
“And these few precious days, I’ll spend with you.”
If we are known and greatly defined by the company we keep, then surely we are here at Worldprofit, all of us the beneficiaries of this: that from a multitude of other companies and opportunities, Wallace Johnson selected us.
Now my 86th birthday gift to you, Wallace, is this:
May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face…
(ancient Irish prayer).
Wherever you go, whenever you go there, you take a particle from us with you, just as we carry a bit of you on our own unique journey through time and space.
Readers: for more information on Wallace Johnson and the Apollo Project, visit any search engine.

About the Author:
‘YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.’  How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Dr. Lant is also the author of 18 best-selling business books. Republished with author’s permission by Howard Martell <a href=”http://HomeProfitCoach.com“>http://HomeProfitCoach.com</a>. Check out Mass Traffic Leak ->  http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=zv3unWbc

Do you want to keep throwing your hard money away or want success with any business !

‘YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.’  How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html
For more information contact me via skype at homeprofitcoach
Or visit my site after watching the link above every person who is currently working in the United states needs a legit home business and Uncle Sam will pay for it each month while you work your J.O.B.!
Sign up here now!
==>
It will take you 10 seconds!
We will then show you how to get your FREE Traffic!
Super BONUS: Find out how we GIVE OVER 1,000,000 Ad Credit To EVERYONE…
Yours In Success,Free information http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=dk4EpfHO

Top Way To Make WorldProfit Money Online…Revealed By Howard Martell

Posted on September 2, 2011

By Howard Martell President of Homeprofitcoach.com
Looking for a home business which provides you a one stop shop towards any of your home business needs.
Go to:    http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=dk4EpfHO  Howard Martell
When choosing the right home based business with the right training and mentor, you have to do your homework. Find a business and mentor you resonate with. One that has a product and mentor you can believe in. Call or email me hmartell29@yahoo.com Call me 757-962-2482 Making money Online can be very easy, but it can also be a long, strenuous process. Follow my ways and you can hit the jackpot. How to Make Money Online? How to Work from Home? Looking to work from home? No Job? Want to know the latest Work from Home program on the Internet? Simple, easy Job for everyone from anywhere in the world. This is a better way to make money on the Internet. Get paid through Google Checkout and Paypal. Its probably the BEST WAY to Make Money Online. The best work from home biz in 2011. Make money online Fast cash The absolute best work from home program. Sustainable income. Long term prospects. Operate from anywhere in the world. All you need is a fast Internet connection, and a modern computer. Change my Job. Change your job. Change my career. Career change. Internet business opportunity. Great new Internet biz. Franchise Opportunity. Internet franchise. Not an Online franchise. Cash Online. Paid for uploading video. Web 2.0 marketing. Video Marketing. Get paid today. Get paid in my sleep. Start earning money from home today! Earn money while you sleep. Work from Home. Make money online. Money making program. Jobs abroad, work overseas …

Do you want to add 400.00 USD by having a home business if so visit my video links down below!

Posted on September 2, 2011

http://blog.homeprofitcoach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Video-19.wmv
Sign up here now!
==> http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=dk4EpfHO
It will take you 10 seconds!
We will then show you how to get your FREE Traffic!
Super BONUS: Find out how we GIVE OVER 1,000,000 Ad Credit To EVERYONE…
Yours In Success,
Howard Martell
Webmaster
TAXSAVINGS How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html
For more information contact me via skype at homeprofitcoach

Maya Angelou lashes out on paraphrase at the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial… and she’s right.

Posted on September 2, 2011

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. To understand the point of this article, the point of Maya Angelou’s complaint about paraphrasing the great words of one of history’s most influential speakers on his very monument, you must love both language and precision. And above all you must love the truth.
At age 83, Angelou is an honest woman. She is a truth-telling woman. And is a woman who understands and can wield with effect the right words in the right order. Most people will call her a writer, and a writer she is. But I prefer to call her a poet, for she is that, too.
A poet is a person who strives to deliver maximum impact with minimum words… who labors with the demons of truth, the difficulties of language and who works obsessively (for every poet is obsessive) with delivering just the right meaning… and this is difficult.
To such a person, gifted with the scourge of outrage, the loutish behavior of the officials in charge of the new national memorial to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is deeply painful… and thoroughly outrageous. Not least because in true loutish fashion, they did not have a clue that their seemingly innocent action would produce justifiable rage.
But before we dig into that, I want you to hear Maya Angelou, poet, read from her acclaimed works, for few poets have won so much recognition as she… listening to the woman as she reads her words will make it clear why. Go to any search engine. Listen to the cadence, feel the way she caresses the language, loving each word tenderly before she delivers it to an expectant world. She is in love with language and the mighty power of language… and she is at war with the unenlightened who by killing language, obliterate meaning and leave us the poorer.
The background.
On February 4, 1968, Martin Luther King gave a haunting sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. In it he discussed the eulogy he might and should be given in the event of his death. Death and prophesy were in the air that day; tensions were high on both sides of the Civil Rights question, those who embraced it and its leader and those whose every word bespoke an adamantine opposition. The people, and not just those in the congregation, were unsettled, anxious, and needed the balm of comfort…
… and so the mahatma of the movement, moved to the pulpit none could grace as he, and he spoke, as he always spoke, from a heart, this time burdened with thoughts of eternity and of frail humanity. He wished to admonish, enlighten, and above all prepare them for a reckoning with a destiny he felt was his — and theirs.
This is what he said…
“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”
And the people knew their revered leader was talking about his legacy and about what they must do to ensure his right and proper recognition and that his message of justice and of peace endure when he was not present.
Two months later, this prophet of equality and righteousness, was gunned down … and so entered History.
His words and his monument.
In due course the nation chose to honor the man and, above all else, to honor his message, in a great civic temple in the nation’s capital. On the soaring walls of this edifice designed for the ages, key passages from his world-changing thoughts would be etched, thereby indicating to even the most casual of visitors what was important and what they must strive to recall and even cherish. The words of his sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church were selected… then mangled, insulted, diminished by the very folk charged with revering and protecting the great man’s legacy. These by eviscerating his words became the killers of his message. Little men, they took it upon themselves to rethink, rewrite, and paraphrase what was already perfect and needed no help from them to ring out resolutely for the ages.
Paraphrase.
The culprits of this drama, the monument’s organizers, decided to paraphrase the original, searing words from a man sensing the culmination of his life and work… and so rendered in stone the crucial words from his last Atlanta sermon thus:
“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”
Thus they outraged the man, his message, his meaning. For what they chose to engrave in the stone was profoundly different from King’s remarks and purpose. These people, thinking of the good they were doing, instead were transgressing on matters high and mighty, matters they should have left alone.
Why did they do it?
They could not fit the famous passage in the space provided by the architect… they did not wish to leave it out… and so they decided upon the expedient of paraphrase. In so doing they rewrote the passage, gave it quotation marks so readers would wrongly assume the words were accurate, and so they slaughtered what they were charged with preserving. To read the dictionary definition of paraphrase is to see how greatly they erred:
“a restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form.”
But these words, from this man, spoken at such a time and place needed tender care… never to be altered or tampered with.
Imagine if you will what would have happened if the organizers of the Lincoln Memorial, hard by Dr. King’s, had paraphrased the Gettysburg Address, so…
“87 years ago, our ancestors created a great nation of liberty where all men are created equal..
Now we’re in a civil war to test whether this great nation with its great ideas can continue to exist…”
Simply paraphrasing great Lincoln’s great words makes it instantly apparent what an outrage paraphrasing can be… and demonstrates why the diminished words and their diminished meaning must instantly be removed. If space can be found for them, so much the better, but, if not, the right thing must be to take them down at once.
The organizers will of course complain about the extra work, the inconvenience, and especially the cost. They will also tell you that they ran their ludicrous and insulting plan to paraphrase before the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which was overseeing the design. They, Philistines all, had no problem with the proposal, thereby indicating their unfitness for their work.
Here the honesty and rage of the poet enter. For Maya Angelou knows that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word was God.” (John 1-1). This is known by every poet, and is surely Angelou’s abiding creed. It is also Our Saviour’s whose words “Noli me tangere” (John 20-17), so disregarded by the monument’s organizers, are so very apt and must constitute the last word on the matter.
* * * * *
About The Author
‘YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.’  How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Dr. Lant is also the author of 18 best-selling business books. Republished with author’s permission by Howard Martell <a href=”http://HomeProfitCoach.com“>http://HomeProfitCoach.com</a>. Check out Mass Traffic Leak ->  http://www.HomeProfitCoach.com/?rd=zv3unWbc
‘YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.’  How do I get it?”
http://homebusinesstaxsavings.com/Slash_Video.html