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Mrs. du Toit Weblog

From the U.S. Constitution...

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Fleeting

Yes, it is 9/11. 

I’ve been thinking the last few days about what to write.  I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say, especially given that it will be my last 9/11 post… I couldn’t think of anything that seemed worthy of mentioning… until now.

I love history, as I think I’ve made clear, and a specific aspect of history has become my passion.  Military history isn’t my passion, but I know a wee bit about these things (because they get the big space, with the bold headings, in history books).  There’s an aspect of formal remembering on 9/11 that bothers me, but it is difficult to explain.

One of the things I love to do when traveling is to stop for a moment and just think about and feel my surroundings.  It could be an old path, leading between old buildings, with the wear of time on the stones.  It could be the way a step that’s split on a stairway that leads into a shop.  I don’t know if something happened here, but it feels like it, is the thought that occurs to me when it happens.

It’s nothing psychic or supernatural, but there is something about the light or the patina… and it just says to me to stop and smell the roses.

That’s when I daydream a bit and allow myself that silly bit of speculation about all who traveled here and stood on this spot before me.

Who were they? What was their daily life like?  What did they smell like?  What did they eat?  Were they hot or cold and was their clothing brand or humble?  Did lovers share a kiss in that dark corner?  Was a robbery stopped in that doorway?  Were battles fought on that field? 

It’s a thousand and one questions, depending on where I am, and my mood about the place.

There are no plaques.  There are some, of course, but the daily life of the ordinary man is not marked. 

There aren’t plaques that say:

John Armstrong, bastard son of Cecil Armstrong, asked Lilly Abigail Holstead, laundry maid, to marry him on this spot, on May 27, 1234.  They did nothing remarkable in their lives, except to live decently.

There are no markings that say that in that small tenement room above that Gerald Smith died of a heart attack, after having worked for 45 years in the tailor shop, eeking out an existence, remaining faithful to his wife and children for all those years.

There is nothing that says that Winston Clark decided not to pursue the advances of a young harlot and chose to remain faithful to his wife on that spot, or how Abigail Thunderson was comforted with a hand squeeze by her husband, Terence Jackson, when their daughter Mildred died of typhus when she was three, on October 3, 1575, after being reminded of it when a woman with a baby Mildred’s age passed by in her buggy.

All of those events were life altering for ordinary people, but they were tiny.  They were choices and ordinary actions that had the potential for paradigm shifts in the lives of the people who lived them.  We do not know who they are.  We do not know their names.  All we know is that people with similar lives, did similar things, since time began, and man became conscious and developed a conscience.

I can touch the stone of the 623 year old building, or the 204 year old railing, and I can feel them.  They talk to me and for that moment, anonymous as they are and as lost to time their deeds, I remember them.

I take mental snapshots of these places, preferring the temporary sphere of my memories to the faulty and fleeting digital photograph.  There is something not quite deferential enough about a literal photograph and it is vulgar in comparison.  I have to sear the image into my mind and hold it there.  I can’t cheat and take a photograph, easily lost, and easily forgotten.  I have to make a place for it in my head, and keep it sacred there. 

People like plaques and memorials.  They dot the earth.  They tell us about grand events, done by evil or brave men.

At some point, however, the plaques begin to wear, as the carved letters wear away on tombstones found in small churchyards.  You can’t read the words anymore or they have no meaning to us any longer, because we do not have any knowledge of them as living people.  When the plaques fall away or the memorials disappear, it is as if what happened there never happened, because we come to rely on those markers, rather than our imaginations and study… and our hearts.

We’re cheated by the placement of plaques.  There’s something offensive about it, to me.  It is as if nothing else happened there that was remarkable enough to mention, or note for passers-by.  Who decides what is remarkable enough to take the time to make the cast for the little plaque?  Was little Mildred’s life so unimportant that we don’t want a plaque for her too, to give a bit of relief to Abigail and Terence, as we do for the larger number that died in other events?  Was their loss, though common, not as tragic as the grandness and drama of something we thought better to create a plaque for it?

And when the plaque begins to wear away, the screws that hold it fast to the archway begin to crumble, do we stop remembering that people who lived and loved died here?  People gave everything and chose better, are no longer worth remembering, simply because we’d prefer to use the space for something else now?  Let’s just decide that now and not fool ourselves into thinking that people for all time will remember us by name and deed.  We will become as anonymous, and as insignificant, as all that have come before us.

Plaques and formal remembrances are a bad habit.  They allow us to forget about the other events, and other plaques that time has absorbed into nothingness.

We, simply, shouldn’t have plaques because they allow us to focus only on what it says and not what it means.  It allows there to be, temporarily, a feeling that nothing else of significance happened there, and that nothing noble or grand enough occurred in the lives of other people who stood on the spot, made statements, or decisions that demonstrated they were brave, or noble, or persevered through trials and tragedy, with simple acts of loving kindness, or for nothing more than their gut that said, you must go on.

I remember.  I remember every spot… especially the ones without plaques, without dates or names… because what happens to us has happened to everyone before us… and they are just as deserving of our moment of smelling the roses as those we remember by name and date, with bronze plaques and glorious memorials.

Remember… all of them… every day, not just on days we set aside as official.  We may never become significant enough to be remembered on a special plaque or on a special day… but we lived, loved, suffered, turned our backs on evil, experienced Grace, had pains and sorrows, and had joy.

We know they existed.  They had to, or we’d never be the people we are that remember the grand events with love, respect, and deference.  Remember the forgotten, humble, and anonymous because there are no plaques or days set aside for them.  Remember them, for they are us.

It is the anonymous and unmarked who are just as, or more, miraculous in their decision to choose right when no one was looking, and no one remembers or cares who they were. 

I do. 

Mean It

When both boys are home in the afternoon, they have tea together.  They’ve done it so many times they don’t think about what they’re doing anymore.  One of them puts the kettle on while another gets the teapot ready.  While they’re waiting for the water to boil, they fold and set out the napkins, cups, and spoons, and place the milk pitcher and sugar bowl on the table.  Then they sit down, eat their cookies, and drink their tea from cups poured from teapots they each picked out as their own, from travels around the world.

Civilized young men.

* * *

A couple of weeks ago Kim and I were at a restaurant for breakfast.  It was the weekend, so the restaurant was full of moms and dads with their kids.  At one table, Mom got up to fetch something from the car.  Their littlest child followed after her, with Dad shouting a feeble, “no, Sara, stay with Daddy.” But he didn’t stop her and there were no consequences for ignoring what Dad said.

Then don’t say it.

That’s the part of parenting that far too many parents don’t quite get.  Your words and directions have to have meat.  You have to follow through.  If you’re not up to the task or don’t care about a particular activity, then don’t say the child cannot do it, or should be doing something else.  Just be quiet at that moment.

Now it would be great if we were able to be consistent parents all the time, always following through to correct inappropriate behavior.  Since situations sometimes make that impossible, what’s more important to remember is that it is more destructive to the parent-child relationship not to follow through than it is not to mention it.

It’s times like that when I want to give parents an attitude adjustment.  “Why did you say she had to stay with you if you weren’t going to get up and make it happen?” Some parents really think that kids will mind them, simply because they say so.  Children mind their parents (and their manners) only when the child knows the parent’s words are the beginning and the end of the conversation.  It takes months (and years) of diligent follow through and only giving directives when you intend to put your weight behind them.  If you do that, then what you say will matter, because there is a history behind it.  If they say it, they mean it.

But he was a weekend dad and that was clear by the way he conducted himself with his children.  He was in a state of chaos, just wanting to eat his breakfast quietly, and as undisturbed as possible.  He forgot that he didn’t have that option anymore, because he had children now. 

When I had my first child, one of my best friends gave me advice: Do not to keep waiting for your life to get back to normal. This was the new normal and there is no going back.  You know how you’d just grab your car keys and run to 7/11 for milk?  Well, that’s not going to happen anymore.  Now you have to bundle up kids to go with you.

And she was right.  The first few months of having a baby isn’t difficult because of the baby, although that presents challenges, but those are the challenges you expect and plan for.  It is because the things you used to do, and the way you used to them, have changed.  Your life isn’t completely your own anymore.

The dad trying to forget that he had kids hadn’t been given that advice, and if he had, it hadn’t sunk in.  His life had changed, but he didn’t get the memo.  He thought he could stop being dad when he wasn’t in the mood. 

That’s why being a parent is a requirement, because it forces you to think about someone besides your self… every single minute, for the rest of your life.  It is no longer about you.

Later that same day we went to a large store.  As we were walking in there was a dad holding the hand of one of his kids.  The child’s hand he was holding was holding on to another sibling, and she was holding on to another child’s hand, etc.  There were five children in a line, like baby possums. The dad was a calm as could be.  He walked confidently, navigating his brood out the door and through the parking lot.  It was a series of actions that he had been doing for years and his kid’s demeanor matched his confidence by also behaving calmly in a crowd.  All had jobs and responsibilities to do, but they’d rehearsed them so many times it was no longer necessary for anyone to say anything.  When he stuck out his hand, the closest child would take it, and they would, like falling dominoes, take the next child’s hand, making sure that all were accounted for.

It was beauty in motion.  That dad has gotten the memo and his diligent years of patient follow through had paid off.  There was no chaos in being out with children, no fear of one of them making a scene, getting lost, or getting hurt.  He’d paid his dues as a father and now he was reaping the reward. 

It was also clear that mom was as equally clued in.  All the kids were groomed.  The girl’s hair was all combed and in pony tails or pins, and the boys had recent hair cuts.  Their clothing was clean and matching.  Everything about the family said love and care. Most of all, pride had been instilled in everyone.  Everything about those kids and their behavior said, “We’re happy.  We’re safe.  We’re loved.”

Mom didn’t have to look over her shoulder to make sure dad was being dad.  She could walk away and all would be handled.  Even if dad got ahead of the kids, the kids knew how to take care of each other, because they had been taken care of.  They knew what it meant because their parents had been constant role models.

Those were parents.  The other couple at the restaurant were something else, sires perhaps, because no parenting was going on.  Their kids were doomed.  They would never be able to figure out why other people were able to do things so easily, how others didn’t get flustered in a crowd, or how others were always able to maintain their composure, regardless of the situation.  They’d never be able to put their finger on it precisely, but it was because their parents were terrible parents.

Earlier at the restaurant a mother came in with her son and daughter.  The son was about 10 years old, at that terrible stage of a boy’s development when his feet seem like they’re 100 sizes too big, his arms and legs don’t cooperate with his brain’s instructions, and he is unable to walk a straight line or do anything without making a mess or bumping into something.  He was also a mess, having not brushed his hair, not washed his face before going out, and his clothes were a disheveled, sloppy mess.  When he plopped down on the seat of the booth one of the glasses of water tipped over and spilled everywhere, and his mother snapped at him, stood up in a fit of rage, and dragged him back to the car.

How do you think he ended up being such a doofus, Mom? Chaos defined him and she had no clue why that was or why he seemed so lost.  I wanted to strangle her and run out to her crying boy in the car and take him home with me.

The poor boy was so flustered and so out of step.  All he needed was attention, so he could model what it was like to be attentive to his surroundings.  But he was on guard.  He was on guard in a panic state, because there was no telling when mom would lose it, shout at him in public, of if she’d give any notice this time.  He was living in a constant state of confusion and inconsistency that was projected on the world around him, and in his demeanor.  He had no clue how to behave because the rules were not clearly defined, practiced, or known to him.  When he screwed up he needed to be told to be more careful next time, and then taught how to remain calm in the face of calamity, and immediately begin cleaning up his own messes (without panic or duress), with help from everyone else in the family.  It was no big deal.  You just fix it.  Instead, he got sent to the car, dragged out in a scene by harridan mother, while sister sat there doing nothing and staring into space, and then mom came back to clean it up.  Mom could fuss, sigh, and grimace, and get attention for the woes she had to deal with, because of her ill mannered boy.

Bitch.

And then she’ll wonder why he became a juvenile delinquent, despite all her hard work. Oh, woe is me.

The plopping on the seat was a dead giveaway.  No one had ever told the boy how to sit down, because no one else in the family did it either.

* * *

Some time ago our kids asked us about the schedule of events that was going to be taking place in our home.  We were having a dinner party and they asked for details.  “How do we serve the...” was their question, wanting to know how a particular appetizer would be served.  They continued their line of questioning until the entire meal and schedule had been explained to them.  They asked what we were having, the order things would be served, what they would be served on, if people would be eating buffet or at set places, when things had to cleared, when new plates or glasses needed to be set out, and then all they would have to do is act the play.  There would be no surprises because they knew what would be happening.

Kim and I talked about it later with the kids when the evening was over.  “It’s easy” one said to us.  “When you know all the rules you don’t have to think about it and can just enjoy having company.” They told us they wished we had formal parties more often.

Similarly, several years ago we took the kids to my favorite place for cream tea, the St. James’s room at Fortnum and Masons in London.  It’s a formal room, with a formal tea, with the extreme of manners required for a traditional service of afternoon tea. 

The kids loved it.  They wanted to go back the next day.  I told them that I wasn’t sure they’d like it because it was so formal and a bit twee.  “Noooooooooo” they said.  They went on to explain that they loved the fact that everything had such specific rules and they knew them.  It meant you couldn’t screw up, if you just did what you were supposed to do.  There was no chance of looking like a fool, or feeling out of place, because we’d been practicing all of it at home, for years.  All you had to do was follow the rules and that was easy to do. “You taught us how to do that” they said.  “It was just like what we do at home.”

Many other people would feel totally out of place in a situation like that, but for the kids is was like a graduation ceremony and a right of passage.  For the boys, it was a chance to be gentlemen, an activity they don’t get to practice very often outside of home, but ask to do when they can.  ("Can I buy a tuxedo?") They went on to explain that if they could be comfortable in that place, then they could go anywhere and do anything, and be comfortable.  Since they’d had a chance to do it at one of the fanciest and most formal types of places, they could master the universe by just following the rule book.  It wasn’t rocket science.  It was simply etiquette, like a dance with steps they’ve mastered so it feels like floating.  “Can we do it again?” they asked.

That’s what it is all about… knowing the rules so you never lose face or are presented with a situation you can’t handle.  It isn’t about having rules to make you uncomfortable.  It is just the opposite… it is about having rules so you always are comfortable and know exactly what to do.  It takes the guess work out of it.

Manners and etiquette aren’t confining.  If they’ve been explained and practiced so they become instinctive, they’re liberating.

More

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Soft Skills vs Hard Heads

For folks who are all about hard skills, this post is not going to be their liking.

Kim had a post relating to the Brit TV show Top Gear.  The comments are a classic example of the same issues we have in trying to communicate (badly) when people are coming at things from entirely different perspectives (and preferences).

I’m sure this is a problem that has caused communication to be slanted forever, but it has become more significant in recent decades because of the nannyism that has entered the workplace.

It is fairly common for someone in the workplace to complain that they aren’t valued by their company.  If I could, I would respond this way:

Did you get fired?  No?  Did you get your paycheck?  Yes?  Did you get a satisfactory or better performance evaluation?  Yes?  Then what are you complaining about?

“Being valued” is nonsense.  What the person is really saying is that they aren’t fawned on enough or other people are not praising them every time they manage to use a stapler.

That’s not what work is about.  Work is doing your job, getting paid for it, and doing the next assignment without complaint.  Any value or pride you might feel comes FROM YOU, not from what other people say to you or about you. 

This is the same crap that comes up with gay marriage, where some in the gay community believe that marriage is the path to get others to “accept them.” Sorry.  It is not going to happen.  The government handing out marriage certificates, like some sort of Carnival bead throwing for showing your boobs, is not going to allow gay people to be accepted.  If they are going to be accepted, by anyone, it will be because they have demonstrated that they are worthy of it.  Certificates, plaques, or prizes aren’t it.  The root of the problem is that the gay person isn’t accepting himself.  If they were accepting of themselves, then they wouldn’t be looking for some external validation that they’re an OK person, just the way they are.

It’s the same with people in the workplace.  If you have pride in your work, if you know you’ve done a good job and earned your day’s pay, it doesn’t matter what other people think of you, or if they praise you often enough.  You’re content in your own head that you’re a good employee and that’s enough.

What the above illustrates is that there are various types of praise, acceptance, rewards, etc., and if the only reward that is valuable to you is someone else’s words, then you’re going to go through most of your life terribly disappointed.

It’s time to grow up.  Confidence comes from inside, not from the outside.

Where Kim’s post had a new wrinkle on the above is that there is this constant desire for the folks who build things to be recognized as the most important component of the chain, and the quality of which, the only thing of value.

Wrong.

To take that to an extreme to illustrate the point:  The guy who made the paper on which Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, was not responsible for Hugo’s masterpiece.  When Hugo took the manuscript to his publisher, he didn’t say, “Great paper!  Let’s publish it!”

The praise (the beginning and the end of it) for the paper maker was Hugo buying it.  Similarly, the praise for the car designer is the purchase of the car by a consumer.  The praise for the computer designer is the purchase decision to buy the computer.  Mario Andretti is going to get the prettiest girl, not the guy who built or changed the tires.

Now if the paper maker’s guild wanted to give Hugo’s paper supplier an award, to recognize him for his superior paper making that year, that’s up to them… to that group of people who care about the skills in a different way.  For superior pulp mashing and blending… the award goes to...[drum roll]

Folks like Victor Hugo had soft skills not hard skills and soft skills are always going to be praised and recognized more highly, except by people who are similarly hard-skilled.  That’s just the way it is.

Now this has the hard skill folks kerfloozled. They’ve worked pretty hard to acquire those skills and master them.  And they should be proud of themselves for that.  They can also be handsomely rewarded when others recognize the quality of their works and buy it. 

I know a lot about stoves.  I couldn’t build one if my life depended on it, nor do I have any desire to learn to build one, learn how they are made, or know how to repair it.  I’m appreciative when I see one that has all the right lines, the proper cooking elements, with everything in the right proportion and position, etc.  The stove designer obviously worked with a master chef to design one that allowed the chef to use the stove so he could make masterful cuisine that others could enjoy.  The master chef is using the stove to turn out art.  Being able to use a stove has nothing to do with being able to build or repair one.

Thirty years ago I bought a great sewing machine.  It doesn’t fight with me.  It doesn’t grab the fabric, such as irascible terry cloth, so I can make anything with it.  I recognize that a lot went into the design and manufacture to create the solid feel I experience when the needle bounces up and down.  I recognize the quality of the tight tolerances that allow the machine to have a needle threader that works.  There’s a hum to the motor that lets me know that the machine is solid, and that adds to my confidence and experience when I use the machine.  I can feel it when I use the machine, but I have no desire (really, NO DESIRE) to know how it was made or what they had to do to make it do that.  In fact, hearing about it bores me silly and it is like a constant drone of Cliff Claven factoids that makes me want to run screaming from the room.  IT IS BORING… to me. 

It is important to always recognize the context of a conversation before jumping into it.  It is OK to have unexpressed thoughts and have knowledge and factoids about something, without sharing them with everyone.  It folks are talking about how something feels to them, then telling them that the thing was made from flixalated monostables, mounted on a bobulated terminololicitator is going to get blank stares.  That’s not what they were talking about.  It is rude to try to change the subject of a conversation.  It demonstrates that you aren’t listening to what others are saying, nor care about what they’re saying.

If folks are talking about flixalated monostables, I’m not going to join in the conversation, because that bores me.  I’ll sit politely, and smile, until the subject turns to something I know or care about it.

The post of Kim’s had to do with cars, as the show Top Gear is targeted to people who love cars as drivers and aficionados of them as art.  “Loving cars” can have a few different perspectives.  You can love machines and appreciate a car for its parts and assembly.  You can love to drive, and appreciate a car for how it handles, and the sound it makes that makes you feel good when you drive it.  It has to do with how responsive it is, how the gears shift, how the seats feel, combined to make the experience positive or negative for the driver.  Then there are folks who want to know about how much it costs, how reliable it is, or how much of the original price the car will maintain when they go to sell it.  Some people care only how the car looks and don’t care about anything else. 

Now there might be folks that care about all of those aspects.  But they’re entirely different perspectives and skills, even if they happen to be contained in the same person.  It is infrequent to find someone with all those skills and all those perspectives.

When looking at the Mona Lisa, an art aficionado isn’t looking at the frame it is in, nor are they looking at the quality of the raw canvas, or the paint itself.  They’re admiring the work based on Leonardo da Vinci’s skill as a painter, not his skill as a paint or canvas buyer.  The work is appreciated for the soft skills of Leonardo, for the intangibles--that mastery of giving life to intangible objects.  If someone jumps into the conversation about the subject and says, “you know, when Leonardo had it framed, the frame maker used nickel plated nails with a flixolater so that...”

Oh, Lord have Mercy!  Were we talking about anything like that?  No?  Then SHUT UP!

And those folks wonder why no one ever praises them for all the facts they have spilling out of their mouth all the time, or others don’t find them fascinating.  CONTEXT, people.  At least try to give the apperance that you have a clue as to what is being discussed!

Someone else might have been just as adept at holding a brush and applying paint to a canvas.  There is also a hard skill component to what Leonardo did.  But he added something more… something incredibly rare.  Those were the soft skills of being able to see the subject and transfer her essence to the flat plain of a canvas.  He gave the canvas life.

When the folks at Top Gear are evaluating cars it is the intangibles that they’re using to judge a car’s worth.  It has nothing to do with how reliable the car is, or what type of steel or plastic was used to make it, or if the brakes were made using nickel plater kerflobulators dipped in pig fat.  They don’t need or want to know anything about that to know if they like it, if it feels right, if it responds in a way that is appealing, or if it looks sexy.  Does the car have life?

There are car TV shows that focus on the machinery itself.  There are countless magazines that review cars based on how they were built, how reliable they are, how much of their value they retain at resale, and on and on.  Top Gear is none of those things… because those of us who love to drive, who love to stare at the Mona Lisa and be seduced by what Leonardo created, don’t care about those things. 

If other people are turned on by that, that’s their thing, but it isn’t everyone’s thing.  In Kim’s comments, in an effort to try to explain this, I posted:

It’s not surprising, as folks approach these types of things from ENTIRELY different perspectives, but some of you are missing the point entirely.

Just as Kim writes about guns from the perspective of the art of shooting, he writes of cars, women, and just about everything else from that same (artistic) perspective.

It has nothing to do with how they’re made.  It has to do with how touching it and using it make you feel.  Does the steering wheel and gear shift fit your hand, the way the curve of a woman’s breast or back arouses you in the way she responds when you touch her curves. 

There are certainly more perfect women than the ones he posts.  He isn’t looking at them as sex objects, as machinery.  He’s looking at them as things of beauty and their personalities are more important than the sum of their parts.  Some folks like the perfect and can enjoy things like anime or cartoons, or sci fi, that can be perfect, because they aren’t real.  Kim wants real, with all its ugliness, and because they have flaws that give them personality.

It is in the imperfections caused by wear, in the acquired patina, that things become beautiful… and an old bottle of ink, with its seal broken, with drops of ink staining the label… if you want to see Kim melt, show him one of those.  It is the same appreciation for a woman’s stretch marks, knowing that she acquired them from the strain of carrying a baby, put there by a man who adored her.  It isn’t what it is.  It is what it represents.

I think he loves my scars more than my “attractive” features.  “Scars of battle” he calls them.

Kim will be the first to admit that there are many people who write about guns from a technical perspective, and there are many who comment here who are interested in guns from that purely technical perspective.  It just isn’t Kim. 

Kim doesn’t write about guns from a technical perspective because that has no interest to him.  It isn’t because he can’t learn about that side of things.  It is because it has no appeal to him.  There are others who do that and like that, so he leaves that aspect to them.

It’s why he prefers wood grips over plastic ones.  Why he prefers old metal guns, with wear of use, over the new shiny plastic guns, such as Glocks.  It has NOTHING to do with their manufacture (good or bad), because it has everything to do with how they perform in the hand of a shooting artist… man cooperating with tools, not controlling them.  When he picks up a gun he treats it like a lover.  He feels it and teases it.  Then he shoots the first round to see if he can make her perform.  It’s all about how he handles it which determines if it is responsive to his touch.

The ONLY thing Kim has in common with the technical gunnies is that the common focus is guns, but that interest and perspective… man-o-man they couldn’t be MORE different.

Top Gear approaches cars in exactly the same way Kim approaches guns.  There are plenty of people who write about cars from a purely mechanical, technical perspective, and that appeals to people who are interested in the same. 

Hearing people talk technically about guns or cars is like hearing a doctor or pornographer talk about sex.  It has no romance.  It has no mystery.  It completely looses its sexual appeal, and becomes a vulgar description of inserting hard penis A into vagina B, as if we’re putting together a sterile bookcase bought at Ikea.  Bleuch.

There’s a reason why the difference between erotic and pornography is that pornography is lacking any artistic merit.  It is difficult to quantify, but the vulgarity and starkness of a technical reference manual is not it.

Kim is a romance man… a Renaissance Man. 

The folks who are in the target market for Top Gear are watching because they don’t want to know how the car was made or what they paid for the component parts, but we can recognize cheap and tacky when we feel it, without having someone drone on with the details to explain the technical reasons why that is.  Hearing about all of the technical aspects is a complete a turn off, just as hearing about body parts is not romantic.  We’re interested in the way the car looks, how the wind feels in your hair in a convertible, how the rumble is on-key and if it jives with the roar in your belly as would a spontaneous, perfect kiss with someone you adore… it’s about the artistry of driving and what makes a car sexy, and appealing.

That’s how the Top Gear folks are judging cars.  Hearing that a Jaguar has electrical problems is like looking at a beautiful woman and someone telling you she has venereal warts.  How rude!  What’s that have to do with how she looks and it makes you feel when you look at her?  The man admiring her isn’t going to possess her, he’s just appreciating that beauty walks the earth, the lines and the curves of her, and the roar of her engine, and is satisfied with imagining how her skin feels next to his, and how he can use his artistry as a driver to arouse her to ecstasy.

But I might as well have been speaking Greek to non Greek speakers.

Trying to have a conversation with people of who approach things from different perspectives like that is like trying to converse with three people who each speak a different language that you don’t speak.  I realize that people want to get Brownie points and praise for what they know… but it isn’t going to work in an audience who isn’t similarly jazzed by the same things.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Gardening

For anyone who has been to our house, they know that we’ve been involved in a multi-year project to redo our backyard.  It was a mess for such a long time that it was unusable space.  It was technically usable, but it looked so awful that all Kim and I saw when we went in the back was work, so we avoided it, and seldom went in the back, except to work on it.

We turned a corner in July.  One day we were taking a rest from working in the back and had a mess staring us in the face.  Because so many other sections were done, it was even more of a disappointment to see that section so topsy-turvy, so despite the fact that we were exhausted (and it was HOT) we pushed through.  The pile got sorted into trash, shed, garage and house and we finished… then we sat again and marveled.  We’ve been repeating that few minutes of sitting and marveling ever since.

There is only one tiny area that is part of the original redo that we haven’t done yet, but that is waiting for cooler weather as saws, nails, and angle clamps are required.  It is no longer the horror that it once was, but a reminder of all that we have accomplished.

Kim and I spend at least a few minutes each day sitting in the back now, just marveling at what seeds can do (everything you see in the picture below was planted from seed or bulb).  We’ve become constant weeders, feeling as if the crabgrass that tries to poke through the feathery dichondra is a territorial invasion.  It is in so many ways the way we’re feeling about life, in general.  You plant seeds with the hope that some will pop their heads through the soil, that some will flower or bear fruit, but without anything but hope that it will amount to anything at all.  Then, one day, as if it happened overnight, it is lovely… and all the tending and hard work suddenly causes your heart to spill over, and you’re taken aback that all the hardest of the work is over… and it’s time for joy part.  Our children have done that… all that weeding, tending, and watering with hope that some of it would take, without any clear sign that it would, and then you discover that it took.  It happened.  They blossomed!  They, too, have become as lovely as our garden.

Kim had never been a gardener before and he still leaves most of the design and selection to me (while maintaining veto power).  He’s had outside chores, since boyhood, but never really loved a garden before, although he talks fondly of frolicking in the fruit orchards of his boyhood home, living on fresh-picked, white-flesh peaches in the summers.  Perhaps he’s come to enjoy it because he loves me, and knows how important the garden is to me as an activity of hope and frivolity, and a place of tranquility.  Perhaps it is because of the contrast of the way it used to look and how it looks now.  Regardless, he’s come to enjoy sitting with me out there, in a way he never has before, and that pleases me, and my pleasure pleases him, and on and on.

It has become, in every way, our very intimate English garden and an oasis from the world.

It was raining today, so we couldn’t spend time sitting outside and engaging in a kind of shorthand whisper conversation, while taking a few minutes of the day to have a cup of coffee together, and scout for enemy weed invasions.  It is the kind of conversation style and degree of intimacy that only other married people understand.  But it was our favorite kind of day...damp, overcast, with that flirtation of Fall in the air, so we didn’t mind.

We’re coming up on a dozen years together.  A dozen years… and they said it wouldn’t last.

Fall is, without question, my favorite time of year.  It is when all the worst things in the world have happened to me and the people I love, contrasted with the very best.  I love contrasts.  They’re also my favorite. 

Sort of like the backyard.

Simon and John

I recently had a discussion in email that resulted in the age old question relating to the source of laws and morality.  This is a subject I’ve tackled a few times, but there are always nuances to the conversation.

I made the statement that laws should not be based on morality, as enforcement of the laws often become more immoral than the actions we’re trying to prevent (and because many morals laws are unenforceable, and all laws MUST be enforceable, or they alter our respect and perception of laws).  Countering that statement was the idea that all criminal law is based on morality, such as not stealing, not murdering, etc.

It’s important to note that the prohibitions against those things articulated in the 10 Commandments predated the 10 Commandments.  The 10 Commandments represents a distillation of man’s collective wisdom.  What is also important to note, and the crux of the matter, is that we’re not talking about individual morality; instead, we’re talking about collective morality.

Society doesn’t (and can’t) give two hoots in Hell about the individual as a specific person.

Now before everyone jumps on the “she’s a socialist!” bandwagon, let’s be clear here.  When we speak of “the individual” we’re not talking about a specific person.  That’s where things get all bunged up.  We’re talking about the representative individual, in the generic sense.  We often represent the concept with clichés such as “John Q Citizen,” to differentiate between the generic person, and Simon Johnson who lives at 124 Elm Street, Some City, USA, 00001.

When the Founders used the word “individual,” they weren’t talking about Simon.  They were talking about John.

This is where the collectivists jump off the rails, but it is also where the strict individualists jump, too.

The right and proper amount of individual liberty is the consensus of (historical) opinion (via observable truths, based on facts) on what liberties the generic individual must have in order to function at his best, without causing harm (undo burden) to the rest of society.

We know, for example, that individuals do not excel (or work) when they cannot reap the benefits themselves (a return on their labor).  This is why collectivists schemes that promise “each according to his need” fail so miserably.  If the individual (John #324,342,321,342) does not see a benefit from working harder than some other individual (John #122,453,534,234), why should he bother if the benefits are the same to all?

It has been argued that John should want to put out his best effort regardless, and that is what defines collective morality, even if some other John doesn’t.  But reality rears its ugly head, despite fancy Utopian talk and bad theory.  John is only willing and able to maintain his best, and support himself (thereby eliminating the burden of his own support on others) when he experiences reaping the direct consequences of his individual actions (both positive and negative).  That means there has to be a bit of wiggle room.  We have duties and obligations with respect to society, but in order for society to reap those rewards, it has to give John some latitude.  We put up with some of the bad to get all of the good.

At this point in this sort of discussion, someone from the peanut gallery will throw the “but what about the disabled?” gauntlet into the discussion.  That’s because they’re talking about Simon, when we’re talking about John, and they don’t get that distinction.  Simon is an outlier and isn’t covered by the broader umbrella of “everyone else.” We have to deal with disabled Simon separately, with asterisks in the law.

So, too, with discussions about laws and morality.

Harm is often narrowly defined as theft or physical hurt to define what should be criminal, but harm can have much broader meaning when discussing society.  It becomes a hornet’s nest of complications when trying to find the right and proper balance between the freedom the individual needs to have and maintain a stake (and therefore a vested interest as a motivator to behave well and be successful), versus what a bunch of Simons behaving badly can do to the rest of us.  We make laws for John, to protect the rest of us from Simon.

If Simon (a different Simon, not the disabled one) decides to cheat on his wife, which results in a pregnancy with someone who is not his wife, that results in divorce, that splits a family, that requires them to divide their financial assets, each lowering their standard of living, using the civil courts, usage of the family social services safety net, the health insurance usage because of emotional stress, and the loss of face and standing suffered by the children caught in this mess (increase in juvenile delinquency, psychological impacts, etc.), it really doesn’t make a difference on society, as a whole...if there is only one Simon.

If Simon becomes a collective behavior and there are a million people doing what he just did, then it begins to have an impact on society at large, and those not engaging in adultery are left to foot the bill for the Simons that do.  We all suffer as a result even though all of us didn’t engage in adultery.  That is when the collective individual Simons become Johns, and then the rest of us Johns get to have a say in the matter. 

That is why there is nothing wrong with having a law that says that adultery is a crime, one punishable by the criminal system, as opposed to a civil action between Simon and whoever Simon is married.  It isn’t because one Simon is a problem or we’re going to install cameras in the bedroom to check up on Simon.  It is because the consequences, the cost, to society are so high.  It is because a bunch of Simons behaving that way begins to erode John’s freedom and opportunity in society.  We all suffer for their actions, not one person’s actions.  We aren’t punishing Simon.  We’re punishing the Johns who behave as Simon has. 

So we have prohibitions, in the form of laws, which penalize actions that have short and long term negative impacts on the rest of us.  Simon still has Free Will, but (as I’m wont to remind) Free Will is a trick question.  Free Will allows man to choose between good and evil, but one choice is still good and one is evil.  They aren’t all “good” simply because they’re on the menu. If Simon cares about his immortal soul, then that is between him and his Maker, but what we care about (the collective “we") is the choices he makes that effect the rest of us.

It becomes a point of contention when we discuss issues of morality that may also have limiting effect on someone’s passage through the Pearly Gates, as that is an issue between the individual and their God(s).  That’s none of our business and passing judgment on whether someone will get through those gates is none of our secular business (and is often considered a “sin” in religious code because it is a demonstrative of behaving as a God).  Where we get to pass judgment is on actions that effect us while on the earthly plain, the secular impacts of behavior, and those things that we refer to as actions, behaviors and laws that we render unto Caesar.  We punish them, not because they impact the person’s passage into Heaven (on which it is none of our business as a society, nor our business to play God), but because the action is in the realm of Caesar, and impacts all of us.

The reason that society’s religions have so many overlaps (between those things that are prohibited by religious edict, and those things that are prohibited by society), is because the ultimate fruition of the common practice of Simon’s bad behavior is harmful to the society at large.  If you remove religion from the equation, in an attempt to maintain our religious freedom and autonomy, the bad things on that list are still bad, not because of what they do to Simon’s chances at entering Heaven, but because of what they do to all of us Johns while living on the earth.

If we look then at the concept of criminal laws as morality based, we can only concern ourselves with acts that have a negative consequence on all of us, not on Simon’s judgment by his God(s).  That is the beginning and the end of the basis of morality as criminal law.

The 10 Commandments gives us a starting point and a fairly good ending point of where we may intrude in Caesar’s realm.  Getting too far beyond that, in the criminal code, begins to effect John and erode what makes life livable for us.  There was a reason the list was short, as societies had tried a longer list and it didn’t turn out well (they aren’t around anymore to champion their longer list).  It was the short list that brought us to this point in history.  There still exists a long list of behaviors that we must avoid to consider ourselves moral (in the spiritual or religious realm), but that entire list cannot be made into law, without restraining ourselves so completely that we cannot function as a society.

We only care about Simon marginally--when his case becomes our collective own, and then it is very much our business.  Simon can go to Hell, but the rest of us would like to have the freedom to earn our daily bread, to raise our children to be prosperous and successful, and avoid anything that makes that not a certainty while on earth.  We don’t and can’t legislate how Simon gets into Heaven.  That’s H/his business. 

On Being a Grown Up

I find that it is incredibly difficult to be a grown up, all the time.  After a decade or more of taking care of yourself it becomes a habit, and it is easy to forget what it was like to live under the thumb of someone else.  It doesn’t mean there aren’t times when you want to escape to the covers and not be a grown up for a while.  It can’t last long, as adult demands pull you back.

I try to remember what it was like as a way of understanding and relating to my children.  They’re halflings:  half adults (with the legal status as adults) and half children, as they are totally incapable of supporting themselves at a level remotely close to the standard of living they maintain while living at home.  Walking the precarious line of treating them with the respect their age demands and their actual capabilities is difficult to do consistently.  Sometimes they do brilliant things--far beyond their chronological age.  Other times they engage in juvenile pursuits and are silly or temporarily stupid.  Such is growing up in the 21st century.

Several months ago I was talking about the election with Daughter.  I asked her if she had selected a candidate to support.  She told me that she had and who it was.  I asked her why she had chosen that candidate and she responded, “because that’s who you are supporting.”

All my bells and whistles started blaring immediately and I told her that I didn’t want her to vote for someone because I said so, but because she had done her homework and decided it was the best person. 

She went on to explain that she didn’t have all the reasons, because she didn’t and couldn’t have all the information yet.  But she knew I did.  “I’m still in college, remember?” she said to me.  She knew that I had considered all the possibilities and had made my decision based on the wisdom that comes from study and more time on the planet.  “Until I know all that you know, I have to trust your decision.”

Frankly, I was blown away.  I still had niggling doubts about what she was telling me, but I couldn’t fault her logic and approach.  Given that many other people determine how to vote based on how handsome the candidate is, how flowery and powerfully they deliver speeches, or some other asinine reason, making your determination based on the wisdom of someone you trust didn’t seem so bad. 

We ended the conversation with the usual parental memes and concerns that I wouldn’t always be here for her, so she was going to have to continue to improve herself so that she could make the decision on her own, at some future point.

All of my concerns about young people voting were enlarged because of that conversation.  I know that most young adults tend to be radical in their beliefs, because they can be.  They still function very much as impervious beings:  feeling as if they are immortal, feeling that they can conquer the world, and engaged in the world as lesser beings, without the skills, responsibilities, or burdens that fully actualized adults feel.  They’re low risk and what they do has little consequence on the grand scheme of things so they tend to extrapolate that to the world around them.  You don’t want to beat that out of them and steal the optimism that often manifests in radical thinking, but at the same time you don’t want that innocence and ignorance to effect the outcome of elections.

Young adults may get a paycheck, but when they file their taxes at the end of the year, they get most (if not all) of their money returned to them.  The tax burden isn’t felt in the same way.  To young adults, tax withholding is like a forced savings account, with a kind of symbolic breaking of the piggy bank when the money is returned to them each year. Adults should be so lucky.  The outcome of political decisions, laws, and tax policies don’t impact young adults in the same way it does adults who have mortgages, car payments, grocery receipts, auto insurance payments, and college tuition to pay.

And just rattling off that list of adult obligations makes me want to run for the bedroom to jump into bed and pull the covers over my head, shouting:  “I don’t want to be grown up anymore.  I’m not coming out.”

Young adults can always join the military, folks will say, to suggest methods in which they can be made more responsible or grown up.  But that’s just nonsense (for those reasons).  They don’t have to decide what to wear or how to pay for clothes, where to sleep, what time to get up, or buy and prepare food.  The military takes care of that for them.  What the military does do is enhance them physically and give them a chance to live someplace not near mom, but I’ve never been that kind of mom that kids need to get away from in order to grow up.  On the contrary, I am closer to a sweet talking drill sergeant than a coddling mother.  If I was my own mother, I’d scare me.  That seems to be a bit of the way the kids feel about me.

I haven’t done my kids laundry since they were in the double digits, nor have I cleaned their rooms, or done of any of that sort of basic care that coddling mothers provide.  I buy the groceries and cook the food, but they have to carry it in from the car, put it away, and clean up after I cook.  That’s the extent of the coddling.  They were given an allowance (to cover all their expenses, sans room and board) and had to learn to budget and make purchase decisions for everything else.  I just maintained veto power, but seldom had to use it.

All three kids are in college.  Working and going to school proved to be too much for Daughter and she was becoming careworn in her expression and demeanor so we told her to quit working.  One son is currently not working either, and I suspect that the other one shouldn’t be working either.  They have a lot on their collective plates and college has to be a priority.  In that I indulge them, but they come to the party half-way.  If they’re not working it means that their social life spending has to be near zero, and money for food and gasoline can’t be used frivolously.  Finding the balance between toughening them up (for some sort of twisted stake in doing it for no reason), and allowing them to grow up is difficult.

Their college tuition and books are not that expensive, since we insisted that they spend their “figuring it out” period in the local community college.  It is the fact that all three are needing the money at the same time that becomes a juggling act.  Once they’ve figured out what they want to do, then it will be time to consider higher priced institutions to get their BA degrees (and beyond, if they choose). 

And that’s what really scares me.  Not in the ghost popping out kind of scared, but in the “how in the heck are we going to have the money to have THREE kids in expensive colleges all at the same time” kind of way.  The costs are staggering, roughly the cost of our entire annual income, each year for three or four consecutive years.  All options are on the table, including selling the house when that time comes, getting night jobs, or one of the kids working to support the one currently away at school, until they’re done, and then we all focus on supporting the next one.  It requires patience and tenacity.  We’re still figuring it all out, but what has been made clear is that it is a family duty and obligation, and if the parents are going to surrender all their worldly goods for the pursuit, we will expect to be paid back, in kind. 

We’ve also been fairly headstrong that getting a BA degree from just anywhere is a complete waste of time and money.  The degree will follow them around for the rest of their lives (and although they could technically get another one at some later point, it is not something that is recommended or common), as well as the social network that comes from university contacts.  We want their BA degrees to be obtained at a stretch institution, such as the American University in Paris or Rome, not Plebeian-Nowheresville U.  Raising the future leaders, diplomats, thinkers, or champions of the world requires raising the capital to fund their educations.

It pervades my thinking, now that it is something that will be happening sooner, rather than later.

After reminding myself that robbing banks or buying lottery tickets are not college tuition savings plans, it makes me want to run for the covers, it does… but I can’t stay there for too long.  I am a grown up, after all.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Fixing Hurricanes

The comic Louis Black crafted an entire act based on overhearing stupid people say stupid things.  In one of the routines he describes the feeling of hearing something said on the street and how it does things to your head.  He uses the analogy of wanting to stab an ice pick in both your ears to get the thought out of your head, because try as you might, it’s damn near impossible to stop trying to figure out what in the heck they could have meant by it, or how they came to be so wrong.  He used the gag of a woman saying, “if it weren’t for my horse, I’d have gone to college.”

Whaa?

* * *

Kim’s son and heir was at a shooting competition outside Houston last weekend.  When he was checking out of the motel, folks were checking in who were from New Orleans, having (this time) evacuated the area.  He overheard one of the women speaking and she said, “The government really needs to do something about these hurricanes.”

I’ve spent hours with that thought in the back of my mind, trying to figure out how many things could have gone wrong for someone to be that stupid.  It’s easier to assume that he misheard what she said, or there was a preface to, or a word in, the conversation that was missed.  Perhaps she meant to say, “the government really needs to do something about these hurricane evacuations,” or something that would indicate that she really didn’t believe that the government was capable of altering the weather.

It is possible that she thought, because of all the nonsense about man-made global warming, that falling in lockstep behind the idiots who truly believe that man can alter the weather to reduce the number of hurricanes.

But even that’s being charitable.  I realize it is generally best to apply Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is generally the right one) and to assume that she really believed that if the government set their mind to it (with our tax dollars and our top scientists) we could reduce the number of hurricanes.

More frightening than the idea that someone is that stupid is that this woman might vote.

Why I decided to write this down in a post doesn’t have as much to do with that example, as it does with other stupid things that people believe.  I was checking in with the Rasmussen Polls this morning and came across this:

Forty-two percent (42%) of voters say that economic issues are most important this year and Obama holds a 34-point advantage among these voters.

Twenty-four percent (24%) of voters say the national security issues are most important. Among these voters its McCain by 39.

Whaa?

It is perfectly logical that many people view the economy as an hot button because the Democrats have (in concert with the immoral media) managed to convince people, despite all evidence to the contrary, that our economy is doing badly.  Where it begins to jump the shark is that if people believe the economy is in trouble, the Democrats would do a better job of handling it.

It is further complicated by the fact that segments of our economy are greatly effected by consumer confidence, which is a statistic that does not need to have any validity in fact to make a difference.  People can just decide that things are going to be tight for a while, based on what they see on the news (or hear from their neighbors), so they stop spending, which has the ripple effect of causing a downturn in consumer sales.  Much of the economy is based on feelings in this way and they become self-fulfilling prophecies.  That’s why we’re treated to silly things like tax rebates to make us feel better about the economy, so we’ll get over our stupid, collective selves.

Those types of feelings-based effects on the economy can be triggered by something asinine.  In the case of gasoline prices rising, people start looking for some sort of conspiracy within the American oil companies, to explain why gas prices have risen, despite the fact that gasoline prices always rise in the summer months (because demand goes up in the summer) and the fact that there’s a war on over oil (which uses more oil and is about oil).

And that’s when I want to get the ice pick.

Gas prices have risen, at least significantly, because there is a war on, yet the number of people who put the economy first does not match the number of people who put national security first! 

If the percentages were closer, say within a 5 point spread, then I would assume it was the fault of the polling questions or a few people misunderstand things.  Since the gap is so huge (nearly double), it must really be that folks haven’t made the connection that the reason we’re engaged in a war is because of oil.

Ever since we began talking of war, Fifth Columnists have done a dandy job of spreading the meme, “It’s about oilllll.” Well, of course it is, and no it isn’t.

If we examine the skirmishes in the Middle East in the last 100 years, the majority of them have been about oil, but not in the way the Fifth Columnist’s claim.  That’s why their crap has coattails, because there is an element of truth to what they say, but their conclusions, and premise, are totally wrong.  It isn’t because we’re trying to steal their oil.  It is because they’re trying to blackmail the world by hoarding it.

Even suggesting that the war is about oil is enough to make many on the right jump to attention to scream back, “NO IT ISN’T!” to try to negate what the Fifth Columnists mean when they say it.

Yes, it is about oil.  Anything that happens in the Middle East is about oil.  It’s the oil, stupid.

When Iraq and Iran went to war against each other (when we supported Saddam Hussein to defeat Iran), it was about oil.  When Iraq invaded Kuwait and we entered the arena to push them back (Gulf War I), it was about oil. 

It was about the countries in the region wanting to steal the oil fields of the other country or control the waterways so other countries in the region can be blackmailed on oil prices.  Iran and Iraq were fighting for control of the Gulf.  Whoever has control of the Gulf has control over the tanker ships that pick up oil.  By not allowing tankers to pass through the Gulf, regardless of in which country the ship’s belly was filled, it couldn’t leave the area.

Our national interests, our strategic interests, required that no anti-Western country have control of that body of water, for precisely the reason that cutting off the world’s supply of oil would mean World War, not simply a war in the Middle East.

The reason that the Middle East has arms, soldiers, and any ability to engage in a war of any magnitude, and not sword fights on horseback, is because of oil.  It is the profit from the oil that has brought prosperity to the region to buy planes, guns, and other war matériel (and even consider building nuclear weapons).  Before oil was discovered in the area, and before Western companies showed the people how to drill for it, the raw materials available from the region amounted to pistachio nuts and dates.  Those are not natural resources sufficient to an economy make. 

In the interim, we’ve figured out how to grow pistachio nuts at home, and we do a better job of it (that’s why they’re cheaper than the used to be) and they’re of such better quality that we don’t have to die them red to hide the flaws.  Similarly, we grow our own dates.

* * *

In the 17th century Western Europe (specifically Britain) was buying its tea, spices, and silk from China.  (Read about the Spice Wars for a more in-depth analysis).  China decided to play reindeer games with those products, as the single nation producer, strangling the West’s economy by hoarding those products.  Now it’s all fine and dandy to say that it makes no sense for a producer of goods not to sell them, as their own prosperity is dependent on the revenue, except that it happens, and has happened all over the world, since people began trading.  In addition to hoarding, China also controlled the spice trade routes, similar to what Iran was trying to do in the Gulf (that was defeated in the war between Iraq and Iran, and what Saddam Hussein was trying to do when he invaded Kuwait).

England can’t grow tea.  They don’t (and didn’t) have the weather for it.  They needed to grow their own tea, however, because China was hoarding it (as well as silk and spices, and the spice trade routes).  So Britain looked around the world to see where they could grow tea, and that’s when they made goo-goo eyes on India.  India had the climate and the labor to produce tea.  Tea was a immensely labor intensive crop, as only the tips of the plant make decent tea.  Because of that it had to be hand picked.  Britain taught the Indians how to grow tea, silk, and spices (in addition to the spices already indigenous to the region).  The Honourable East India Tea Company included a fleet of cargo and war ships to defend their cargo ships.  There is no distinction between commercial and military interests.

Sound familiar?

Now it might not seem like a big deal.  We don’t really need tea, silk or spices, right?  Well, no, except that industries that are the end users, and manufacturers using those products, would go out of business without them.  The scale of these industries was enormous. 

We don’t need cars either, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what would happen to our economy if we could no longer get the raw materials for their production, or benefit from their use.  Folks whine loudly when coffee prices go up fifty cents a can, and that is a crop that is entirely imported.  Coffee is another crop that we don’t need either, but wars have been fought to maintain the free market in that industry as well.

Japan is a country the size of a half a postage stamp, yet Japan, despite being able to buy much cheaper rice from the world markets and use their land for more profitable purposes, continues to grow some of its own rice, as a strategic requirement.  Japan knows, all too well, that losing the ability to grow some rice, and have rice in strategic reserves, would mean that the entire nation could be starved into submission if other countries decided to stop selling them rice.  It is a strategic decision for Japan to continue to produce rice, and it is sold to the people as an issue of national pride, and Japanese identity (how else could you convince people to pay $15 for a pound of rice that could be bought on the world market for $.50 a pound?).

Japan is a nation that is dependent on trade to survive.  The Japanese have never been too happy about that, and have come to understand that the size of their population is limited to the amount of food stuffs it can grow to feed itself.  This is why Japan invaded China in World War II.  The only way that Japan’s population could rise would be to have land, somewhere else, to grow more food.  It was because of Japan’s imperialistic invasion of China that the West (specifically America) embargoed Japan that caused Japan to decide to bomb Pearl Harbor (instead of leaving China, which was why we had an embargo), and we know how that turned out.  That is exactly the same reason the other small island country (Britain) engaged in imperialism to use the land in other countries to grow their food, and dominated India for over 300 years.

These same reasons were why the French dominated parts of Northern Europe, why the Dutch and Belgians were in Africa, and why imperialism came to exist at all.  It is why Columbus sailed to America. 

It was all about oillllll foooooooood.

Folks talk about the fact that we now live in a global economy as if that’s some new thing.  It’s quite sweet, actually, until you realize the complete and utter disregard for 10,000 years of history required to make such a stupid statement.  The economies of the world have been global forever.  There’s nothing new about that, and the fact that any nation is able to grow or produce even 50% of what it uses is the anomaly.  We trade.  That’s what man does, and it is when that trade is interrupted, or when some country tries to hoard, or use another country’s land for their own to grow those resources, that we go to war.

American as apple pie requires nutmeg and cinnamon, and those aren’t grown here.  If you want sugar from cane (instead of sugar beets or corn syrup, which were later sources of sugar developed because we couldn’t grow enough cane) be prepared to buy imported cane sugar.  The reason Hawaii became a state, and the reason we had any interest in the land in the first place, was because Hawaii has the climate (and land) to grow cane for sugar and coffee.

The reason that America is a nation of (primarily) coffee drinkers, instead of tea, was because (like China before it) Britain came to control the world’s tea markets (at least the newer teas grown in India, developed and dried to suit Western tastes, unlike the green teas of China).  Britain was able to put a tax on tea in the Americas because we couldn’t buy tea, except through Britain.  The tea trade begot two historical American paradigms:  “a cuppa Joe” as something American, and “no taxation without representation.” We don’t grow tea OR coffee.

We went to war for our independence because of a revolutionary spark created by tea.

It wasn’t because of tea, but the idea of it.  If Britain was going to play reindeer games with us, and put a tax on a product on which they had a monopoly (without at least consulting us), we were going to put an end to it.  The Boston Tea Party was a reaction to one nation attempting use their monopoly against another group of people.  Rinse.  Repeat.  Ad infinitum.

Which brings me back to oillllllll. 

* * *

America has oil.  We have a strategic reserve of oil, for the same reason Japan has a strategic reserve of rice, and we have strategic reserves of food.  We buy oil on the world market because it’s cheaper (because the rest of the world doesn’t have OSHA or trade unions), but we continue to drill our own oil, too, for our immediate use and for our reserves.

America is made more humble because we need to buy some of our oil in the world market. It is a point of vulnerability for us, strategically.  Our economy, as with the rest of the world, is dependent on oil to keep the machinery of industrialization greased and churning out goods.

But even that’s a stretch.  That’s mostly propaganda, supported by the ever present Fifth Columnists who occupy the Democrat seats in Congress.

America has sufficient resources to produce all the oil we need, from our own lands, for over 250 years.  We have coal reserves when that runs out.  The oil shale in the plains states has more oil than the entire known oil sources in the Middle East, but government has decided that we can’t tap those resources, because it would create environmental concerns. 

Bullshit.

It is because the rest of the world doesn’t have those same resources and if we were 100% self-reliant in our energy production, it would put the rest of the world at the mercy of Russia and the Middle East to get their oil, and they’d have to pony up soldiers and the money to fund wars to keep the oil flowing from those regions.  All the nonsense about global warming is an attempt to curb America’s manufacturing might, to reduce our use of oil, so it would be cheaper in other places in the world.  All the strangleholds on oil production are not about the environment.  It is about maintaining the fiction that America needs oil from someplace else, so we continue to fight the world’s wars, so they don’t have to.  They can maintain their moral superiority by not getting their hands dirty from a war over oil.  Of course we know this, and we play along.  It’s called diplomacy.

The money and blood that Americans have been spending and spilling is because the rest of the world would rather us do it for them.  It would be preferable if they did it themselves, but we’ve been there, done that, and have the WWI and WWII memorials to show for it.  Wiping Europe’s poopy butt Fixing Europe’s messes for them, because they’re too daft and lazy to do it themselves (or they immediately erupt into war because they’re amoral idiots), is actually cheaper and less dangerous (in lives and money), in the long run.

Only about 15% of our oil comes from the Middle East, yet we’ve been doing a lion’s share of preventing the region from falling into the hands of military despots, or China’s hands, and keeping Russia at bay, so they can’t hold the rest of Europe hostage for oil.  This is also why Russia has been so involved in Venezuela (and Mexico), playing the usual game of inciting worker discontent, and government controlling of the oil fields in those countries… because that is where America buys more if its foreign oil.

Destabilizing the oil markets has been one of the favorite playgrounds of economic wars for the last 100 years.

It just happens to be oil today.  Tomorrow it could be coffee, or cotton, or steel (that we no longer produce in sufficient quantities either).  We’re dependent on some other place, for some other thing, always… and so is the rest of the world.

Hungry people, people thrown out of work because their industries can’t get materials, resulting in depressions that cause mass starvation, is the kindling for war on a global scale.  This was the kindling for all the wars of the last 100 years, and every war before that time.  Most of the time we’re able to do battle in board rooms and mercantile auctions, until some global player decides to play dirty.  Then soldiers, battleships, and bullets get involved.  The way to prevent major wars is to the keep the economy open (even if by force or the threat of force), to prevent any one player from having dominance with a single product, or to keep the major producers selling and doing business fairly.  It is not in every man’s nature to do business fairly.  Force is often required and history has proven that to be the fact, even if we choose to keep our head in the Middle East’s useless supplies of sand.

We’d prefer to believe that we fight for noble ideas, not tea, spices, or oil.  The facts, however, do not support that, although a nation of tyrannized people (as was the case in Iraq) are also dangerous, for all the same and more reasons.  A people without work or food do terrible things and it is the prevention of that which keeps America playing cop all over the world.

Americans can be short sighted about world events.  The Middle East has been running Hitler’s playbook for the last 30 years (and in some cases, longer).  I use Hitler as the example because it occurred in the more recent past, with events that are familiar to most people.  When Hitler was gearing up the manufacturing for war he was also readying his nation to fight.  The Hitler Youth was a program that would give him willing soldiers but it would take more than a decade for it to bear fruit.  It was a long term strategy.  The Middle East did exactly the same thing.  They remade the madrases to churn out a supply of future warriors--warriors who do not value any life, even their own.  It, too, was a long term strategy.  The Sheiks who have been oppressing their people for decades couldn’t develop a program exactly like the Hitler Youth (based on extreme Nationalism), but they could use religion, and hold out some future reward for their sacrifice, and the ideal of an Islamic Caliphate (similar to Hitler’s propaganda of Aryan pure bloods running the world).

It is in our national interest, it is in our strategic interest, to keep the oil flowing from the Middle East, whether we buy it, China buys it, or Europe buys it.  We may only get 15% of our oil from the Middle East, but the rest of the world is dependent on the Middle East for most of their oil, if for no other reason than to have a balance for Russia’s holdings, and if Europe doesn’t have oil, they’ll do anything to get it, including engaging in world wars with death tolls in the billions.  It was because Germany was destitute (and starving and shamed) after WWI that Hitler had willing dupes who would do and believe anything to regain their National pride.

It is in our national and strategic interest to reform the Middle East because people with pride and a stake don’t make war on their neighbors.  It is not in our interest to help in Darphor or any of the current hot spots in Africa, because they don’t provide any goods to the world, and they don’t have enough money to make war on anyone but themselves.  At some future point Africa may be a threat, but they’re not a threat (or have any thing to offer the world) right now.

If folks think that the war in the Middle East is an ugly one, try considering the scale of war if oil wasn’t coming out of the Middle East, and don’t think (for a moment) that the oil Sheiks wouldn’t do it because it would stop their flow of revenue.  They have billions of dollars, more than enough to see them through 50 years of strangling the world by withholding oil.  They’d starve us out by hoarding oil (overturning the markets, stopping production all over the world) the way that wars are always fought (by strangling supply lines), and then we’d have to grovel to their terms to end it.  We might be OK, but think of what that would do to China and to Europe, and what that would do to the economy here and there. 

It would make WWII look like bridal gown sales day at Filene’s. 

Bill Clinton kept the price of oil down, artificially, by tapping into our strategic reserves, making us vulnerable (and the world markets vulnerable) if the Middle East should decide to slow production (as they did do this summer).  This summer was just a sampler plate of what is possible when oil flows are even slightly reduced.  One of the first things Bush did when he got into office was to clamp down on the use of the strategic reserves, demanding that we restore the minimum levels (which would allow us to make gasoline for tanks until we could win a war to open the markets again), which is why oil prices rose during Bush’s first years in office.  That was a delayed reaction to the normal inflation of oil, that Bill Clinton created for us.  Bill Clinton also ignored the small fires of discontent in the Middle East, allowing them to become raging fires, resulting in the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 with the not-so-symbolic attempt to destroy the trade center of the United States. 

The terrorists bombed our trade centers with “Trade Center” in the name of the building, and people STILL refuse to get that it’s all about a trade war.  Islamic radicalism is the propaganda to get people to volunteer to fight over the price of tea in China oil in the Middle East.  It has nothing to do with religion although the terrorists recruit using that propaganda, and many folks outside of the Middle East have been duped by the propaganda as well. IDIOTS!

And folks, stupid, idiotic, fools, think the Democrats will do a better job of handling the economy, despite every bit of history showing that they screw things up completely, and put our lives at risk.

The Rasmussen poll shows that people care more about the economy than national security… because they don’t understand that national security and the economy are one.  Economy = Trade.

Perhaps while the Democrats are fixing the economy, they can do something about those hurricanes. It makes about as much sense. 

Some people really are that stupid, and many of them vote.

Hand me the ice pick, please, I need to try to get this illogical, idiotic nonsense out of my head. 

Friday, September 05, 2008

I Could Throw up

In my post about Why I Didn’t Life Reagan, I made the point that what bothered me the most was the fact that people liked him for his ability to move them in his speeches.  The aspect of him as “The Great Communicator” is what gave me grave concern… and a huge case of the creepies.  That wasn’t his fault entirely, of course, but he was partially responsible for delivering Capra-esque speeches. 

The new motto of the Republican Party:  We give better patriotic speeches.

I listened to every word of the testimony Oliver North gave, with immunity, before Congress.  I had a Sony Walkman with a radio and I listened to the thing from beginning to end, even at work.  I felt it was my duty to listen and I will admit some sort of morbid fascination with it, too.

There was a time when he presented a kind of patriotic soliloquy and I found myself tearing up, as you do at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.  Then I snapped out of it.  This bastard lied to Congress, the slimy shit, and he’s only giving testimony now because he negotiated an immunity deal, and he dares stand before Congress now, presenting himself as some sort of hero. HEROES DO NOT LIE TO CONGRESS! The immoral scum bag should have been shot.  He dares to stand before the American people and present himself as patriotic, when he LIED TO CONGRESS, the PEOPLE’s Congress.  When you lie to Congress you lie to every single citizen of this country.

I was furious.

It was as close as I came to understanding how the German people must have felt when they were enthralled with the magnanimous speeches of Adolf Hitler.  How repentant they must have felt afterwards, having been taken in my fierce and fiery speeches, realizing that they’d been taken in by performance, appealing to their fears and placating their shames, rather than their duties as human beings.  For a moment, I gave Oliver North my heartstrings, and I felt dirty afterwards.

I fear the mob.  I fear a people who are taken in by well delivered speeches.  Deeds matter.  Words and flowery delivery are the bastion of actors, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with actors, nor would I negate the skill of the orator as something inherently wrong or evil, it is because of emotionalism that people need to be educated.

It is not difficult to fire up a crowd.  I can do it quite easily, actually, having spent my formative years on the stage.  It is because it is so easy and people are so mailable that I fear the mob and am suspicious of the orator, on his words alone.

Yeah, Palin gave a great speech.  What does that have to do anything?  Her ability to fill a hall and make people feel good is now the measure of the character and worthiness of the individual to become President of the United States? 

We could just elect the speech writer and the actor, regardless of any other abilities or skills they have may have, and cut out the middle man. 

Last Words
by: H. L. Mencken (1926)

I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world - that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters - which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion - so beautifully Christian - that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfillment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other, more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws - but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state - but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

Bread and circuses.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

VP Choice

I am not thrilled with the selection of Sarah Palin as the VP choice.  I’m not a social conservative, in the slightest, and it is my strong belief the social conservative wing of the Republican Party should be purged by the base, and their ideas should not be given a platform, nor should we pander to them.  Let them start their own party and the GOP should stand on Constitutional principles, leaving aside anything that is not in their purview (and there is no articulated power at the Federal level in the social sphere).

I do not yet know how entrenched she is in her social conservatism--if her social conservative beliefs are personal or if she intends to make them into political issues.  Since Alaska is a social conservative state (and if socially conservative legislation is passed, it may only be done at the state level), it is difficult to know if she respects the difference at the national level.

Justice Antonin Scalia has social conservative views, but he’s never had his personal opinions trump the Constitution, so personal opinions alone are not the issue. 

It won’t change my voting decision, of course, because the flip side of social conservatism is social radicalism, and it isn’t in the Constitution for conservatives or liberals.  Both sides can be guilty of taking power that was never granted to them.

It just pisses me off.  I’ve spent years trying to explain the difference between political conservatives (the smallest government we can have and still accomplish what is required of government, fiscal conservatism, and strong defense) and social conservatives… and along comes someone nominated by the Republicans who fits the stereotype of the social conservative to a T.  Only time will reveal how she intends to balance her personal opinions with those tasks and duties enumerated in the Constitution.  The fact that she is also “pro union” is about as extreme an example of her views being an anathema to what political conservatism and Capitalism is all about, and I just get sick to my stomach.

More than a generation will be requisite [for an unprepared people], under the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent security of person and property, before they will be capable of estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence to the principles on which it rests for preservation.
--Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1815

Freedom has no safety net and that fundamental principle is frequently forgotten.  If The People want to surrender the risks associated with being free agents, then they must surely realize that it is their independence and sovereignty that they have sacrificed to do so.

Unions are contrary to a republic.  Unions are extortionists (both the individual union member and the unions themselves).  It assumes that the individual is too stupid and irresponsible to negotiate favorable employment terms on his own, and must rely on the threats and dangers of the mob.  In other words, it assumes he is something other than a free agent and only through strong arm tactics (threats) is he able to get what he believes he’s entitled.  People are not entitled to a job.  They have the right to pursue one and to reject a job that doesn’t meet their requirements, but they have no right to use extortion tactics, ever.  The reason we have no major manufacturing in this country is because of unions.  The reason we have jobs moving offshore (in the thousands) is because of unions.  The reason we have such a huge illegal immigration problem is because of unions.  The reason we have stifling regulations that prevent businesses from modernizing and becoming more efficient is because of unions.  The reason that market competition has been stifled is because of unions.  It may not, in all cases, be 100% of the problem, but it is a high percentage of the problem in every single example. 

Political conservative principles are, to quote Kim:

Axiom #1: All capital (i.e. money) belongs to the individuals who earn it, and not to the State.

• This seems to me so self-evident that I hardly know how to explain it. Suffice it to say that in countries where capital has been considered the property of the State, those countries have generally collapsed,