My Milton Meditations

We’ve heard some big questions raised lately about the ancient book of Enoch. Now I don’t know but I been told that Enoch had written about the revolt of the angels, when they were cast out of heaven, long before this world was even around. So I was remembering back to my college days at LSU, studying English literature. We read John Milton’s poem, published in the 1600’s, when the Brits were beginning to catch a whiff of democracy. Oliver Cromwell and a host of other rowdy Englishmen made their first attempt to convene a legislative Commons. King Charles I wasn’t into it, so he sent his soldiers out to stop the democratic outburst. So the English had a civil war in 1642, which might have motivated poet John Milton to compose his classic epic poem, Paradise Lost, about Satan’s rebellion against God, a disturbance that got him thrown out of heaven and banished forever. But I digress. So, getting back to my theme for the day, Milton. . . there was another Milton that came to mind: Milton Friedman, the economist who I remember as an originator of “trickle down” economics, back in the day, when President Reagan was trying to convert the Washington bureaucracy, the “deep state” to a more Republican way of doing things. Milton Friedman was a Nobel laureate whose home base was the University of Chicago. His conservative world view and economic theories had originated in his mind, as a reaction, when he was working in Washington in the Depression 1930’s, during the FDR New Deal days. Milton’s subsequent middle-of-the-country conservatism was a reactionary fiscal and academic retaliation against the liberal and their statist economic strategies of allocating money to the lower ends of society in the working class. The Democratic worldview favored a “percolate” strategy in which funds and assets would be governmentally provided to the working folks, the lower classes of America. In contrast, Milton Friedman’s strategy was known as “monetarism”; it favored a a steady, minimal, explanation of the money supply, what some folks call “trickle down”. This 1970’s theoretical strategy was a reactionary response to the 1930’s New Deal policies, related to Keynesian economics, as had been theorized in Britain in the 1930’s. Milton Friedman called price/wage-fixing “economic overkill”. We were recently in Chicago area, Northwestern University in Evanston, where I noticed this flyer pinned to a bulletin board, with a message of resistance against the conservative establishment at University of Chicago.

So much for battles, whether in heaven, hell, England, America, or wherever. . . Lastly, in my Milton meditation, and on a lighter note. . . is Milton Berle, also known as “Uncle Miltie”. He was television’s first superstar. . . a comedian whose career had started back in. Vaudeville and early Hollywood. He had started as a stand-up comedian. This Milton’s life and career goes way back, to working with Charlie Chaplin in early Hollywood movies. Then. . . a pioneer in radio entertainment, he had a comedy broadcast sponsored by Campbell’s Soup, Philip Morris and Texaco. brands that were important to the greatest generation, my parents’ generation. When TV was experimental, Milton was right there, a pioneer who stood up for black performers on his shown, back in the day, when many Americans had not yet comprehended the “all men created equal” words of our Declaration of Independence. Elvis Presley’s earliest TV gigs were on Uncle Miltie’s show. Lastly, there’s the town of Milton, Florida, on the panhandle where our family spent our earliest vacations, back in the day, 1950’s.

So there you have it, for what it’s worth. . . my Milton reflections from this 1951 baby boomer writer with a memory that refuses to surrender to the battle of amyloid plaque against brain cells. Go figure! Glass half-Full