HYPOCRITE IN CHIEF

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SOTU

Barack Obama should be forced by law to wear at all times a small drone-replica lapel pin instead of an American-flag lapel pin. Wearing the drone pin he would find himself unable to say with a straight face half the things he says about the “rights” of Americans, by which he actually means the rights of Americans which he personally, in his infinite and infallible wisdom, chooses to respect.

TEN THOUSAND CATTLE STRAYING

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This song, often collected in anthologies of cowboy ballads and identified as traditional, was in fact written by Owen Wister for the 1904 stage adaptation of his novel The Virginian. Wister, a classically trained musician, had seriously considered becoming a composer before turning to literature as his profession.

As a sidelight to this, in 1893, on a ranch in West Texas, Wister had heard a cowboy singing “Get Along Little Dogies”, which really was a traditional cowboy song. Wister wrote down the words and annotated the tune, and later supplied these to Alan Lomax, who believed this to be the first documented record of the song.

WISTER ON HEMINGWAY

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SunAlsoRisesCover

After reading The Sun Also Rises and the short story “Fifty Grand”, Owen Wister, then sixty-seven, said:

Were I thirty, that’s the way I should wish to write.

After the suicide of Hemingway’s father, as Hemingway struggled to complete A Farewell To Arms, Wister heard that the younger writer was having financial troubles and sent him a check for five hundred dollars, so he could finish his book without having to worry about money.

Hemingway never forgot this. In 1956, he recalled that Wister was one of the few fellow writers he actually liked.