I haven’t been commenting much on political things lately, partly because of the apathy I wrote about in an earlier blog but also because I haven’t been able to get a handle on our president. He is so remote and self-contained that he makes me realize that I have probably succumbed to the sports media form of public debate. I rather wanted to see him exert some muscle and act out in some way my own anger over the way the previous administration ran the country into the ground.
Of course he hasn’t done that—and he’s not going to. His methodical control has left me somewhat perplexed. I am forced to recognize that the shout and yell form of political discourse had infected even me. So I’ve been quiet. I had to regroup. Could all this needed and careful reform actually be boring? Could all the needed change he is bringing actually be tasting like medicine without the spoonful of sugar?
I’m very much of the school of we’ve brought this upon ourselves when things go wrong, as they certainly did with the presidency of George W. Bush. History may, of course, prove him right, but I don’t think so. Not many of us really wanted to see the super rich become the obscenely rich or for corporate America to remove the pretense of even liking the public let alone wanting to do right by us. But outside of voting in the Democrats we haven’t really had our pound of flesh. It’s coming in small doses—keeping lobbyists off government advisory panels and restricting former high military brass from serving as lobbyists and advisors—so we keep saying, hey, change is coming. But it’s coming without drama and without real satisfaction for the vengeful (yep—me) among us.
All this convinces me that it’s really difficult to come down to earth after an adrenaline rush. During WWII with its shortages and bombing and enlistments, people lived high—they could be killed at any moment, there was a ferocious thrill to the latest news, there was a sense of everyone being in something together. Then came peace. It could never compete.
My former boss, the president of the University of Hawaii, was a dynamic dynamo, bursting with ideas and thoroughly exhausting to anyone who worked with him. Everyone said they wanted calm and more emphasis on planning. The next president brought those qualities and lo and behold people started complaining about the lack of excitement. Yet the calm, quiet president laid the groundwork for the next burst of advancement.
I have the feeling that when Obama is through with his work, this nation will have been transformed. Very quietly and without fanfare he is rebuilding. We need this. I just hope that the country can get beyond its fascination with celebrity politicians and understand that the qualities making a politician charismatic are not the same qualities needed to run a complex bureaucratic government.
But what the hell, craven me, I’m looking forward to the fireworks when Ms. Palin tries for the presidency. It will be such fun to oppose her.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Snow Birds
I have a new appreciation for people who turn into snow birds when the weather turns cold. Until now, I thought all they had to do was shut up their house (if they had one) and drive south and enjoy the weather. I hadn’t realized all the logistical challenges that go with it.
For example, there’s the mail. The post office will hold it for only a month so if they’re going home periodically (as we are) travel has to be timed what the PO is willing to do. Otherwise, the mail has to be forwarded, with uncertainty built into the system or else some relative or friend must be delegated to retrieve and forward it.
Then there’s the banking. To take money out of home accounts entails using ATMs, which in turn incur charges from both banks. It can cost around $5 for a single transaction when both banks whet their whistle. I’ve got around this by opening an account with a local bank and writing checks (we do remember those, right?) on my home account. Still, it took thought and some scheming.
Then there’s the medical stuff. Prescriptions have to be transferred to the new location and then transferred back. Doctors and dentists have to be located or else one has to fly home for treatment. Everything otherwise has to be scheduled during the times one is home. It’s surprising how difficult it sometimes is to get an appointment with a regular practice. Unless prior arrangements have been made, standing in pain in a receptionist’s office doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.
Then there’s the internet. Many people pay for satellite service—these are the pros as it turns out. The RV parks provide some basic service, but it quickly gets clogged up by people who insisting on connecting to the towers, remaining on all day, and downloading movies. The alternative is connecting to the cable service (along with the TV) and buying a router, which is its own set of dark challenges to the uninitiated. The providers provide the service far faster than they provide the support. The free advice from Best Buy is just that—free, and unless you have the standard system they can only guess what you need.
Finally, there are the mysteries of the highways and road system, including the drivers. Arizona drivers seem to like blocking lanes and providing a laconic wave around the car rather than moving. It seems to be a state-wide thing as we encountered these blockages in various towns on the way down to Phoenix. Denver drivers would be leaning on the horn and throwing various digits. Down there, drivers just edge their way around the stopped vehicle. We also have learned to expect the unexpected. In Globe, Arizona, a police helicopter landed in the middle of the road with much waving of arms and parking of police cars to create a landing spot; nevertheless, it was quite diverting.
I think the biggest learning curve for us first-timers, though, has been the differences between the states. Arizona is not New Mexico and neither is Colorado. New Mexico drivers are very dexterous at changing lanes very rapidly and in very tight spaces. One can only drive straight there and let the cars weave their dance, hoping that one of them won’t hit you. Let a snowfall happen and they wind up in the median on their roofs. Colorado drivers are used to mountain driving and icy conditions. They gear down a lot and buy snow tires so they don’t hit the median (a pleasure left primarily to the California drivers trying to make a winter drive to the East Coast). You can always tell a novice driver in Colorado: they’re the ones using their brakes down the hills and ending up with smoke billowing from their wheels. I suppose somewhere someone is saying “Those Colorado drivers, those novices don’t know how to drive.”
Despite everything, it’s been an interesting experience and we’ve even participated in some of the RV resort’s activities—pretty good for a pair of non-joiners. Next year, though, we hope not to be novice snowbirds anymore.
For example, there’s the mail. The post office will hold it for only a month so if they’re going home periodically (as we are) travel has to be timed what the PO is willing to do. Otherwise, the mail has to be forwarded, with uncertainty built into the system or else some relative or friend must be delegated to retrieve and forward it.
Then there’s the banking. To take money out of home accounts entails using ATMs, which in turn incur charges from both banks. It can cost around $5 for a single transaction when both banks whet their whistle. I’ve got around this by opening an account with a local bank and writing checks (we do remember those, right?) on my home account. Still, it took thought and some scheming.
Then there’s the medical stuff. Prescriptions have to be transferred to the new location and then transferred back. Doctors and dentists have to be located or else one has to fly home for treatment. Everything otherwise has to be scheduled during the times one is home. It’s surprising how difficult it sometimes is to get an appointment with a regular practice. Unless prior arrangements have been made, standing in pain in a receptionist’s office doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.
Then there’s the internet. Many people pay for satellite service—these are the pros as it turns out. The RV parks provide some basic service, but it quickly gets clogged up by people who insisting on connecting to the towers, remaining on all day, and downloading movies. The alternative is connecting to the cable service (along with the TV) and buying a router, which is its own set of dark challenges to the uninitiated. The providers provide the service far faster than they provide the support. The free advice from Best Buy is just that—free, and unless you have the standard system they can only guess what you need.
Finally, there are the mysteries of the highways and road system, including the drivers. Arizona drivers seem to like blocking lanes and providing a laconic wave around the car rather than moving. It seems to be a state-wide thing as we encountered these blockages in various towns on the way down to Phoenix. Denver drivers would be leaning on the horn and throwing various digits. Down there, drivers just edge their way around the stopped vehicle. We also have learned to expect the unexpected. In Globe, Arizona, a police helicopter landed in the middle of the road with much waving of arms and parking of police cars to create a landing spot; nevertheless, it was quite diverting.
I think the biggest learning curve for us first-timers, though, has been the differences between the states. Arizona is not New Mexico and neither is Colorado. New Mexico drivers are very dexterous at changing lanes very rapidly and in very tight spaces. One can only drive straight there and let the cars weave their dance, hoping that one of them won’t hit you. Let a snowfall happen and they wind up in the median on their roofs. Colorado drivers are used to mountain driving and icy conditions. They gear down a lot and buy snow tires so they don’t hit the median (a pleasure left primarily to the California drivers trying to make a winter drive to the East Coast). You can always tell a novice driver in Colorado: they’re the ones using their brakes down the hills and ending up with smoke billowing from their wheels. I suppose somewhere someone is saying “Those Colorado drivers, those novices don’t know how to drive.”
Despite everything, it’s been an interesting experience and we’ve even participated in some of the RV resort’s activities—pretty good for a pair of non-joiners. Next year, though, we hope not to be novice snowbirds anymore.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Back to the OK Corral?
For those anyones who haven’t been reading any blogs on this site—the answer is simple. I’ve been hit by the big A. No, not swine flu or any of its derivatives or wannabe viruses. It’s apathy with a capital A. I am beaten down, wrung out, and becoming increasingly indifferent to whatever is happening in the world.
It’s both sad and surprising that this is so. Until recently, I had a few dregs of passion left. I actually found pleasure in the self-immolating behavior of the extreme conservative wing of the Republican party. I cared whether they destroyed the world with their moral judgment on other people. I was repulsed as I watched them doing the same things they purport to condemn and, when caught, pleading the fact of their “human weakness” and begging for the understanding they deny to everyone else (think Limbaugh and his “unfortunate” addiction to painkillers—not a moral lapse of course since they were originally prescribed for him, dontcha know).
I think I lost my appetite for exposing them when I realized that it didn’t matter. Let one idol fall, another rises to take its place as long as the new voice is as shrill and venomous as the one it replaces. This country has gone mad. We are now so addicted to the frantic voice of sportscasters that we cannot recognize quiet, good public work. Everything must be magnified, brutalized, and broadcast for us to even hear it and there are all too many willing to give it to us.
Recently, Ken in Canada sent me an article from a UK newspaper in which the author bemoaned the lack of civility and respect among teenagers. I smiled grimly. Teenagers are merely the tip of the iceberg. On this side of the pond, we have a soldier killing his comrades, supposedly in the name of religion, just as the nation recognizes Veterans Day, we have a hospital worker infected with Hepatitis C stealing drugs and leaving her own used syringes to infect scores of patients, we have fraud on such massive scale that it is almost sufficient to bring down the government.
My apathy, I suspect, has something to do with how powerless I feel. Yeats was right. This is no country for old men—or women for that matter. It has become a place where self-interest rules among the powerful and greed among the lesser. It has a become a place where it is quite acceptable for leaders to become millionaires and to spend billions on war, but it is some sort of moral outrage for some poor slob to get a job if he or she was slapped with a felony for possessing a minute illegal substance or for some sick people (god forbid) to have medical coverage provided by the same government that gave out billions in corporate welfare. Hear the moral outrage in the insurers’ bleat (keep in mind they are reporting profits of around 18%) that sick people buy insurance only when they are sick. The insurers only want to insure the healthy while they are healthy—actually become sick and see how long you keep your insurance and then good luck getting any more. And yet the lobbies fight to keep things as they are.
For those who wish to tell me that I am a traitor to capitalism, I would say I think it’s time we took a long, hard look at exactly what it was like to live in a time of “rugged individualism,” little government, and unregulated commerce.
We just came back from Tombstone, Arizona—yep, the OK corral and all. Walk through the cemetery at Boot Hill and you come away with a sense of the reality of the American West. Deaths from falling down mine shafts (no OSHA), from smallpox, tuberculosis, and childbirth (no Dept of Health), from stabbing, shooting, and clubbing (only defense is your own gun), from suicide (particularly the prostitutes who were shunned if they contracted syphilis—never mind the men they got it from). Yes, sir, these were the days of good old family values. I saw only two or three graves of people who made it into their sixties or beyond. Grave after grave contained the remains of victims of crime or babies who never made it to their first birthday.
I once wrote a speech of my president about the shooting at the OK Corral. I tried to make an amusing point about how this shootout could not have occurred given today’s media. There would have been television cameras at every viewpoint. There would have been interviewers asking the principals about their strategy and their equipment. There would have been interviews with legal pundits asking about possible legal outcomes. Even the undertaker would have been pictured polishing his hearse. In other words, it couldn’t have happened without turning into a farce.
Perhaps that is why I feel such gloom these days. We have one third of this nation—one third!—who want to turn back the clock in the face of a world that has changed politically, technologically, and culturally. No wonder our politics so often appear farcical.
As I watched the re-enactment of the shootout I realized that America has not really moved on from the past. Things are just as ambiguous and subject to interpretation and violence as they were then, except that today were are infected by a sort of self-righteous hypocrisy reflected in the drivel that fills our newspapers (no wonder they’re dying). At least the Clantons never preened as paragons of family values. Ike Clanton was roaring drunk as was Doc Holliday at some point during the events leading up to the shootout.
Rather than all this palaver over trying to prevent people from getting a handout, we could surely benefit at this time for Congress to quit feathering its own nest (they’re nearly all millionaires anyway), get beyond partisan politics, start listening to the people they are supposedly representing (not the lobbyists) and let the president do the job he was elected to do.
It’s both sad and surprising that this is so. Until recently, I had a few dregs of passion left. I actually found pleasure in the self-immolating behavior of the extreme conservative wing of the Republican party. I cared whether they destroyed the world with their moral judgment on other people. I was repulsed as I watched them doing the same things they purport to condemn and, when caught, pleading the fact of their “human weakness” and begging for the understanding they deny to everyone else (think Limbaugh and his “unfortunate” addiction to painkillers—not a moral lapse of course since they were originally prescribed for him, dontcha know).
I think I lost my appetite for exposing them when I realized that it didn’t matter. Let one idol fall, another rises to take its place as long as the new voice is as shrill and venomous as the one it replaces. This country has gone mad. We are now so addicted to the frantic voice of sportscasters that we cannot recognize quiet, good public work. Everything must be magnified, brutalized, and broadcast for us to even hear it and there are all too many willing to give it to us.
Recently, Ken in Canada sent me an article from a UK newspaper in which the author bemoaned the lack of civility and respect among teenagers. I smiled grimly. Teenagers are merely the tip of the iceberg. On this side of the pond, we have a soldier killing his comrades, supposedly in the name of religion, just as the nation recognizes Veterans Day, we have a hospital worker infected with Hepatitis C stealing drugs and leaving her own used syringes to infect scores of patients, we have fraud on such massive scale that it is almost sufficient to bring down the government.
My apathy, I suspect, has something to do with how powerless I feel. Yeats was right. This is no country for old men—or women for that matter. It has become a place where self-interest rules among the powerful and greed among the lesser. It has a become a place where it is quite acceptable for leaders to become millionaires and to spend billions on war, but it is some sort of moral outrage for some poor slob to get a job if he or she was slapped with a felony for possessing a minute illegal substance or for some sick people (god forbid) to have medical coverage provided by the same government that gave out billions in corporate welfare. Hear the moral outrage in the insurers’ bleat (keep in mind they are reporting profits of around 18%) that sick people buy insurance only when they are sick. The insurers only want to insure the healthy while they are healthy—actually become sick and see how long you keep your insurance and then good luck getting any more. And yet the lobbies fight to keep things as they are.
For those who wish to tell me that I am a traitor to capitalism, I would say I think it’s time we took a long, hard look at exactly what it was like to live in a time of “rugged individualism,” little government, and unregulated commerce.
We just came back from Tombstone, Arizona—yep, the OK corral and all. Walk through the cemetery at Boot Hill and you come away with a sense of the reality of the American West. Deaths from falling down mine shafts (no OSHA), from smallpox, tuberculosis, and childbirth (no Dept of Health), from stabbing, shooting, and clubbing (only defense is your own gun), from suicide (particularly the prostitutes who were shunned if they contracted syphilis—never mind the men they got it from). Yes, sir, these were the days of good old family values. I saw only two or three graves of people who made it into their sixties or beyond. Grave after grave contained the remains of victims of crime or babies who never made it to their first birthday.
I once wrote a speech of my president about the shooting at the OK Corral. I tried to make an amusing point about how this shootout could not have occurred given today’s media. There would have been television cameras at every viewpoint. There would have been interviewers asking the principals about their strategy and their equipment. There would have been interviews with legal pundits asking about possible legal outcomes. Even the undertaker would have been pictured polishing his hearse. In other words, it couldn’t have happened without turning into a farce.
Perhaps that is why I feel such gloom these days. We have one third of this nation—one third!—who want to turn back the clock in the face of a world that has changed politically, technologically, and culturally. No wonder our politics so often appear farcical.
As I watched the re-enactment of the shootout I realized that America has not really moved on from the past. Things are just as ambiguous and subject to interpretation and violence as they were then, except that today were are infected by a sort of self-righteous hypocrisy reflected in the drivel that fills our newspapers (no wonder they’re dying). At least the Clantons never preened as paragons of family values. Ike Clanton was roaring drunk as was Doc Holliday at some point during the events leading up to the shootout.
Rather than all this palaver over trying to prevent people from getting a handout, we could surely benefit at this time for Congress to quit feathering its own nest (they’re nearly all millionaires anyway), get beyond partisan politics, start listening to the people they are supposedly representing (not the lobbyists) and let the president do the job he was elected to do.
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