Brooding

[rain_gryphon]

Some of the more obscure Rankin/Bass specials.

*****

Plausible speculation on why the CIA erased the tapes of Zubayda's questioning.

*****





A dead person (a woman, I think) in Auschwitz. She died staring at the train rail. Between where she's lying there, and her home town, there's an unbroken length of rail. She could touch that rail, and know that somewhere along its unseen length it ran near her home, near all she had left behind, perhaps running right by her own house, where she used to be safe and comfortable. Maybe she used to watch trains go by, and wonder what other places that rail touched. I wonder if that's what she was thinking about.

It fascinates me that I can hold things in my hand that came from places where I could never survive, and that carry the marks of those places. I have a yellowed, heat-distorted glass jar that I found as a child in the remains of a burned house. It didn't break in the fire - it just slumped, and turned a strange cloudy amber. It's quite beautiful in its own way. Over the years, I've filled it with lost keys that I've found.

I'm not at all sure where I'm going with this. If I were a better writer, I'd write about the connection between places and things and events. As it is, I just kind of blither along in free-association.

Comments

[maxgoof.livejournal.com]

1) Someone should blow Rankin-Bass to kingdom come. They have never produced anything that I really liked. And that includes Rudolph.

2) I can think of a better reason for the erasure: Congress cannot be trusted with the information. They would rather jeopardize national security than lose power.

3) More of your morbid fascination?

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Someone should blow Rankin-Bass to kingdom come. They have never produced anything that I really liked. And that includes Rudolph.

That's hardly a proper expression of the Care Bear spirit...

More of your morbid fascination?

You know what I'm like.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

> 2) I can think of a better reason for the erasure: Congress cannot be trusted with the information. They would rather jeopardize national security than lose power.

Because, historically, secret police with unchecked powers to arrest, torture, and imprison people with no independent supervision and no public process to root out and correct error have been much better guarantors of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than have been democratically-elected public representatives. This is why for example in the 19th century oppressed masses everywhere fled to Tsarist Russia or Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, while trying to do everything in their power to escape the United States or United Kingdom.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Other countries have aimed their secret police against their own citizens. We send ours against foreign enemies. I think that's a profound difference.

[rapidtrabbit.livejournal.com]

Amazingly enough, the Videocraft animated series of "The Wizard of Oz" has been running for the past couple of years on Time Warner Cable's Kids On-Demand channel.

And speaking of Rudolph...and the Care Bears, the red-nosed reindeer in all of those R/B Christmas specials was voiced by Billie Mae-Richards. A couple of decades later, she would become the voice of (me yours truly?) Tenderheart Bear in "The Care Bears Movie", "Care Bears Movie II" and the mid-80's DIC Care Bears animated series. When the Nelvana-animated Care Bears series came out on ABC, Richards swapped voice roles with Jimmy Henshaw and did the voice of Brightheart Raccoon.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

She's apparently yet to meet her doom, according to wikipedia.