No this isn’t about martinis and disappointment when they’re stirred rather than shaken. Today we are celebrating MLK (Martin Luther King) Day here in the United States. This morning I was indulging in my morning ritual of reading through various news sites before I got into the days work. There were a number of terrific articles about the slain civil rights leader, and reprints of a number of his speeches. And every article was followed with a deluge of the most grotesque, hateful and openly raciest comments I’ve ever seen. Perhaps it is just the anonymity of the net that allows this to happen, but the fact there are people out there who are willing to publicly make these statements about this man in particular and African-Americans in general has me once more in despair.
Is it ever going to get better? Are we ever going to face, acknowledge and deal with America’s original sin?
Bypassing your main point entirely, I offer the following from the series West Wing:
President Bartlet: Can I tell you what’s messed up about James Bond?… “Shaken, not stirred”, will get you cold water with a dash of gin and dry vermouth. The reason you stir it with a special spoon* is so not to chip the ice. James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it.
(* Actually a glass rod)
I don’t drink martinis. Well, I’ll drink an appletini, and I’ve had one made with peach nectar that was very good, but a straight up gin or vodka martini. No thanks. I drink girlie girl drinks. 🙂 Now my husband, Carl Keim is a martini affcianado and snob, and he also insists that James Bond was full of it, and that a martini must always be stirred. 🙂
In college a friend and I concocted the Veper martini, the recipe for which was created by Ian Fleming for his first James Bond novel Casino Royale. Although I warranted that it was a good martini, it was not something I particularly ever wanted to drink again; I guess I prefer the “girlie” drinks too.
Just reading thru some of your blogs and read your sentence: “Are we ever going to face, acknowledge and deal with America’s original sin?” I always thought America’s original sin was the native American Indian holocaust our “Christian” nation is still waging? I am assuming you think America’s original sin was slavery – unless I have misread this? I am quite often mistaken, I am too simple a person to really understand a lot of the political twists and plots, etc., which is why I usually don’t express my opinions about complicated subjects. Sorry if I am mistaken, but I just had to ask for clarification.
I was referring to slavery, but I think the systematic destruction of native Americans was also a horror. My grandfather was half-Cherokee so I’m very aware of the destruction of the first American settlers. The difference is that slavery was enshrined in our Constitution — a slave counted as three-fifths of a person, laws were passed to codify that these individuals were not humans but property, and we fought a bitter and costly war in terms of the numbers of lives lost to end slavery. That war was then followed by decades of Jim Crow laws and lynchings, and I think it has poisoned our society in subtle ways that remain to this day.