Tattoo You

January 29, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     Like many people over a certain age I have been watching the proliferation of tattoos among the general public with a mixture of perplexity and grim amusement.  Here's where my age really shows.  When I was growing up the only people I knew who had tattoos were veterans of World War II or Korea, and they were all men.  Usually the tattoos were fairly small and confined to the forearm or upper arm, and focused, subject-wise, on emblems of the military, like eagles or anchors or occasionally mottoes of some kind--Semper Fi, etc.  They would sometimes be a bit more fanciful than that, but not often.  An in-law of mine had acquired a skull with a dagger being driven through it on his upper arm, which he had gotten in the Philippines in 1946.  Our neighbor across the street, who had been in the Navy, had a tattoo of Betty Boop wearing a bra top and a grass skirt.  He claimed that his Betty had originally been naked, but his post-war wife had made him add the clothing.  That was about as risque and imaginative as things got where I came from.  Women most definitely did not have tattoos, at least not any of the women I ever knew, since I did not frequent New Orleans brothels as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Oakland County, Michigan, nor did I ever travel with the circus or know any Maori warriors.  I'm sure jailhouse tattoos existed back then, and that military veterans weren't the only people who got tattoos--there were bikers and other free spirits and degenerates who no doubt had them too.  But as a rule, people didn't have tattoos unless they had had some sort of rather intense experience to go with them.  Tattoos were, if you will, souvenirs of various of life's vicissitudes--warfare, confinement, degradation, solidarity, or utter depravity.  People who had been through nothing of the sort, meaning almost everyone, didn't see the point in having indelible ink on their skin for the rest of their lives, to commemorate things like, say, graduation cum laude from college, or employment at General Motors, or for losing a loved one, or for being a parent for crying out loud.

     It need hardly be said that things are different now.  Today it seems difficult for most folks to find a reason not to get a tattoo.  I chalk this current tendency up to several things.  (You'll notice that the none of the reasons I shall enumerate for the rise in tattoos are positive ones, betraying the fact that I do not view this phenomenon in a very favorable light.)  The first is simple conformism.  People see other people getting tattoos, and they want them too, just as they want to wear certain clothing or hair styles.  This is a characteristic of human behavior that is far older than tattooing, of course.  And it has analogues in the behavior of other animal species, such as lemmings.  The difference between wearing one's hair a certain fashionable way, or having a particular pair of shoes, on the one hand, and getting a tattoo, on the other hand, is or should be obvious to all concerned.  The hair grows out, the shoes can be replaced, but the tattoo will be there until the day you die unless you undergo painful surgery to remove it.  Very few people at the age of forty would wear their hair as they did when they were twenty, nor would they wear the same clothes.  People my children's age look back on photos of themselves from the 1980s and laugh at the big, overstyled and overcurled way they wore their hair, or how they tucked their leggings into their socks and affected the "preppy" look that was best embodied in the character of Ferris Bueller's sister.  My adult children wish to continue to follow fashion, to some degree, and these things just aren't fashionable any more, at their age or any other.  They understand that decisions made in adolescence are almost invariably, well, adolescent, and inherently transitory.  Life has a way of doing that to us.  We start smoking as teenagers, to be cool, and then we get addicted to nicotine, and spend the rest of our lives, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not, trying to kick the habit.  But at least it's possible to do so.  Yet somehow, in a sort of  movement of mass hysteria, teenagers and young adults are getting tattooed, thereby committing the most indelible nonlethal act of youthful indiscretion possible.  And that includes three of my four children, sadly.  True, when they are old and tattooed, they will have plenty of company.  But whatever profound or whimsical or deep meanings the tattoos once had will have gone, and only the blue will remain on their wrinkled skin, looking like irregularly-shaped bruises.  Most of our youthful indiscretions, if they are kept to ourselves, can accompany us to the grave without being noticed by others; but tattoos begotten in the prime of our lives will stay until the last, bearing mute testimony to whatever foolishness led us to get them in the first place.  Meanwhile in a generation or two tattoos will have fallen out of fashion, and will come to represent the hopelessly outdated practices of an older, misguided generation.  The main problem, besides the obvious disfiguring and embarrassing one, is that unless the tattooed people die the day after they get the tattoos, they will almost invariably live to regret them.

     The second reason people get tattoos, slightly more nuanced than the first, is that in general, people lack specific ideas and ideals around which to focus their existences, so they think that by putting some designs on their skin they have sort of joined a club, which I suppose they have done in a way.  The Club of Nincompoops.  They are thereby one with those other folks who have tattoos.  Never mind what the tattoos are, and how varied and unfocused are their messages.  The important thing is that they have ink, like everybody else (or at least everybody else within their narrow frames of reference).  I have occasion to go to a day spa hot spring from time to time, and thus have a chance to see many partially-clothed people of all ages and sizes.  Lacking any common focus for their tattoos, they tend to choose fancy dragon-like designs or collections of Chinese characters--things they saw on others that they sort of liked--or swirly cursive renditions of their children's names and dates of birth, or the dates of death of their close relatives, friends, or who knows who.  Some folks go for large lettering of the names of their wives or girlfriends, or photo-like renditions of their nearest and dearest, without regard to whether they will be so near and so dear in a few years, or will, with the inevitability of gravity, even vaguely resemble those individuals by the time their skin has loosened and sagged.  (I knew a guy about two decades ago who loved Jimi Hendrix, so he got his face tattooed on his arm.  The problem was that it didn't look all that much like Jimi Hendrix, and more like some unnamed Native American.  So he constantly had to explain what the tattoo was.  Well, at least he saw the error of his ways more or less immediately.)  Most tattoos tend to be intensely personal in nature, doubtless reflecting the person's mood and frame of mind at the time they got the tattoos, but without regard for what their mood will be in a few years.  If the people are fat, the tattoos tend to draw attention to the vast expanses of flesh they possess, like the over-sized canvasses of the neoclassical painters of the French Napoleonic period, on which the tattoo artist has to work.  If the people are good-looking--muscular men or women possessed of smooth curvaceous and otherwise unblemished skin, the tattoos mar the fine natural landscapes of their bodies, like random stains on a beautiful piece of fabric or gashes of graffiti on architecturally attractive buildings.  Tattoos enhance natural ugliness and besmirch natural beauty.  And there is essentially no area of the body that is immune from tattoos, from head to foot.

     The third reason for tattoos flows from the second one.  Because most people are socially and morally unfocused, and tend to spend a great deal of their time watching violent cartoon-like and comic book-inspired movies and reading garbage on their smart phones, they have become inured to depictions of extreme absurdity and vulgarity.  Thus they are unable to differentiate the comic book realm from the realm of reality, and are unable to recognize the foolishness of what they see.  Besides that, they're high or stoned much of the time.  They have so much sensory input from all sides, that it's almost as if they are in anti-sensory deprivation chambers, filled not with silence and lack of sensation, but instead with too much meaningless white noise and chaos.  Thus almost devoid of anything that could possibly shock them or wake them up, they come to crave the pain of getting the tattoo itself, and care less what the ink says than what the process of getting it does to them in terms of sharply focused sensory input.  Tattoos in this context are the equivalent of beating your head against the wall, because it feels so good when you stop.  This pain consideration often divides the tattooed people from the untattooed people.  Those who do not particularly like pain, and have found enough in life to stimulate them in more focused ways, tend not to get tattoos.  These latter folks are, not coincidentally, on the whole more intelligent and better educated, too.

      Another reason for tattoos, perhaps wrapped in the tendrils of the previous ones, is narcissism.  The social media and recent technologies have instilled in practically everyone who uses them a sense of preoccupation with themselves in a way that was never before possible except among the insane or insufferable.  Facebook says to the world, "Here's what I think, where I am, what I'm eating or enjoying, and what amuses me or pisses me off," whether anyone is interested or not.  Twitter says, "This is what I'm thinking RIGHT NOW, in 280 characters or less," whether anyone is interested or not.  Instagram says, "Here's what I look like RIGHT NOW, as I'm in the act of saying or doing whatever I feel like saying or doing," whether anyone is interested or not.  (This very blog, I'll admit, is an instance of the social media, except that it's much less accessible, which is why I have about eight followers, instead of 11,000, which in turn is why the things I say won't have much of an effect on others.)  All this wasn't possible a generation ago, and so people didn't assume that anyone necessarily gave a rat's ass about their innermost thoughts and opinions, or what they look like while acting foolish at any given moment, which, in point of fact, most people don't.  This was a good thing, because it tended to keep people's egos in check, not to mention allowing people time to think about what they might say and do, and often wisely to decide not to say and do those things.  Ah, the lost art of impulse control.  Tattoos precisely reflect the narcissism and lack of impulse control created and fostered by the social media, only in a much more indelible way.  They say, in a way nothing else can do, LOOK AT ME (and see what a fool I am).

     The next reason for tattoos is akin to body dysmorphia.  That's the condition in which people completely lose sight of the objective realities of their bodies.  They become obsessed with self-perceived flaws, often leading them to diet excessively and unhealthily, or to get plastic surgeries that end up going right past mildly corrective and into freakishly disfiguring.  Yet they do not realize how ugly they look, with their fish lips and taut skin and outlandishly high cheeks.  As it occurs in tattooing, it is what causes people to get more and more tattoos, thinking that if one tattoo looks good (to them or a few other similarly tattooed people) then additional ones will look even better.  Eventually they're covered with tattoos in a way that would make a freak in the employ of P. T. Barnum positively green with envy.  It is akin to the phenomenon in a certain society of stretching the lips and putting plates in them until they stick out half a foot or so, and calling that beauty.  Almost everyone from outside that society can see how absurd that is, and regards it as ugly and disfiguring.  Except, that is, for that small group.  In a few years, millions and millions of people are going to be looking at the tattooed people of today and shaking their heads, wondering what they were (or more likely weren't) thinking.   

   The last reason for the great proliferation of tattoos, and surely the most important one, is a sort of corollary to all the rest of them, or more accurately the overarching reason for them, and that is stupidity.  The abundance of pure unadulterated idiocy among humans is staggering, and nowhere is it more evident or inexcusable than in tattoos.  People look back to the Middle Ages and say that folks were really ignorant.  And in terms of technological knowledge we certainly have come a long way since then.  But at the core of our beings we are still as ingenuous and superstitious and just plain toe-stubbingly doltish as we were when we dragged our knuckles on the ground.  There are many more of us on the planet, and we're healthier on the whole and better able to get around.  But we're just as benighted as ever.  And nowhere is our inherent stupidity more in evidence than in the phenomenon of tattooing.  Where once (and sometimes now as well) tattoos were the symbols of a comparatively narrow shared experience, like being in war, or prison, or a gang, today they are evidence of nothing much at all, except the silliness of wanting to be like others, without regard to the consequences.

     What's to be done?  Well, nobody asked me for my opinion, but I think that this thing, as I've suggested, will just have to play itself out, going the way of the powdered wig, the wing collar, and the tie-dyed t-shirt.  All things must come to an end, eventually.  In the meantime, it seems to me that with what we know about the human body, not to mention chemistry, someone could come up with a tattooing process, or an ink, that naturally fades and goes away completely after, say, five to seven years.  How goddamned difficult could that be?   We already know that some tattoo ink colors naturally fade more quickly than others.  If all tattoos had a comparatively short life, tattoo artists could stay in business, and people could, after coming to their senses, go back to having the skin they were born with.  Hell, under those circumstances, I might even get a tattoo.  Maybe one that says, "Stupid for a day." 

Weathered

Cathedral City, California

January 11, 2020

     It has been almost 40 years since the Weather Channel began on cable TV.   That means that more than a generation, and close to half the people alive today, don’t remember when the weather only occupied five minutes or less of the local evening news, and that was it.  Then, as now, the goofiest and otherwise least upwardly mobile of the news crew members would stand in front of a map of the United States or their state and gesture at high pressure centers and temperature readings, and push the weather in from the west.  Regular watchers would find out what the forecast was where they lived for the next day or perhaps the next few days, and prepare accordingly.  And then the sports guy would come on and talk about more important things.

     Today, the basic format for local weather reports remains about the same as always.  The big difference is that now we have, in addition, an entire channel devoted to nothing but the weather, in all its glorious and varied forms, not just in and around where we live but throughout the whole damned world.  This in turn has produced a generation of home weather aficionados, many of whom have gone a step or two further and become utterly obsessed with the weather, and often quite phobic about it.

     Let me say near the outset of this post that I do believe we're in the midst of climate change and global warming, much of which owes itself to human intervention due to the release into the atmosphere of lots and lots of good old carbon dioxide.  Having said that, I must also state with confidence that not every single fluctuation in the weather is due to global warming.  There are trends and cycles.  And global warming and cooling have happened in the past, without the assistance of billions of energy-hungry consumers.  But still, we are seeing some rather rapid melting at the poles, with a concomitant rise in sea levels and changes in weather streams and patterns, causing who knows what, weatherwise.  But not everything.

     As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.  Of course, when he said that, the implied joke was that nobody could do anything about it.  Today we're pretty sure that not only have we done something about the weather, but that we ought to undo it, or slow it down a bit.  But Twain is still basically right, I think, in that it's probably too late to do much to change the trends of the next century or so.  Alea iacta est, the die is cast, in the words of Julius Caesar, another fun guy to quote.  So I say we shouldn't do a whole lot of hand-wringing; rather, we should just try, within the limits of our poor powers, to slow down the profligate use of CO2-producing stuff.  We’ll figure it out, slowly, and nothing apocalyptic is likely to happen, but in the meantime it wouldn’t hurt to build higher dikes.

     Now back to the Weather Channel, which would exist even if global warming weren't a thing.  Somebody down in Atlanta, probably Ted Turner, got this idea that certainly tapped into the general populace's preoccupation with weather, identified so long ago by our favorite national pundit.  The thinking probably went, why should people wait until the evening news to find out about the weather?  And what with people's families spread out all over the country, wouldn't it be nice for them if they could know what kind of weather their children or parents are having, so they can have something else to talk about and worry about?  And therein lies the kernel of the continuous irritant that is the existence of the Weather Channel, which has by now figured out ways to fill in its airtime with shows about tornado chasing, and all that silly stuff.

      At present I reside in the desert in southern California.  Many people don't know quite where Cathedral City is, and California is a very big state.  But what they do know, thanks to the 24-hour weather reports engendered by, or inspired by the existence of, the Weather Channel, is that certain big weather-related things happen in California--earthquakes of course, and also wild fires, mud slides, excessive rain, not enough rain, flash floods, and so on.  I can tell readily which of my nearest and dearest are watching the Weather Channel (meaning that they don't have a lot else to do), and also which of them are becoming with advancing age more generally worried and fretful about a world over which they have no control (as if they ever did).  I can tell this by their inquiries via text about whether I am in the path of some fire or other meteorological event.  I appreciate it, but hell, if I was in any danger I'd let you know, unless I was buried under a mountain of lava or something.  More often than not these well-meaning worriers are off by at least a hundred miles from where I'm living, because, as I said, California is a big state, about which it is really hard to generalize, though people try to do so all the time.

     Preoccupation with the weather, I think, stands in for a lot of other fears we have, such as fear of geopolitical calamities, and of sudden unforeseen injuries, illnesses and deaths.  In other words, fears of things we can't do a thing about.   And if we're doing okay where we live, we wonder and worry about the people on the other side of the country.  Practically speaking, as we move ever more toward urbanization and away from the era of the individual farmer, most of us don't really need to worry about the weather.  Yeah, it'll be hotter or colder than we like, and snow and rain will come at inopportune times, but the majority of us have decent housing, no crops to worry about, plenty of good roads and safe vehicles to navigate them, and anyway, we lead lives that increasingly keep us indoors, rather than out in the open.  If anything, weather should be becoming less important to us rather than more so.  But that isn't the case.  If it's going to be slippery we wonder whether school should be closed and whether we should venture outside.  If it's going to be hot we worry about whether we should take extra water.  None of these considerations were not there half a century ago, and yes, people died of heat stroke and slipped on the ice and broke their necks, but generally these were treated as isolated unfortunate events, not as part of an almost conspiratorial assault on us by the weather gods.  The prevailing feeling then seems to have been that shit happens, so be careful.

     The media feeds this weather obsession relentlessly, as you might expect.  Hurricanes and earthquakes aside, the weather and the news used to be separate concepts for the most part, but no more.  Today, as often as not, the weather is the news.  There are several reasons for this in addition to the ones I've already noted here.  One is the need to fill up more and more air time.  In reality there never was, nor is there now, more than about fifteen to thirty minutes of news worth knowing about on any given day.  Huntley and Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, used to do a half hour a night, and that was more than enough.  But with cable TV we have multiple all-news channels (not to mention that all-weather channel) that run 24 hours a day.  Almost at the same time as the Weather Channel came CNN.  But there are only so many ways you can slice fifteen to thirty minutes of daily news to make it spread out over a full day.  Jesus was said to have taken five loaves of bread and two fish and broken them into enough pieces to feed thousands of people.  I think the TV people aspire to do the same with the meager quotidian information at their disposal.  But they're not miracle-workers, and their efforts end up looking silly and repetitious.  One very sure filler on any news day is a look at the uglier side of the weather.  A heat wave overtakes the east, and every person who dies during the heat wave from any cause that is even remotely connected to the heat becomes a casualty of that heat wave.  A regular heat wave becomes The Killer Heat Wave, The Heat Wave That Has Claimed 17 Lives So Far, The Heat Wave That Ate Cleveland.  Thus are our appetites for apocalyptic entertainment and true-life schadenfreude appeased simultaneously.

     I certainly don't gainsay the need to, say, warn people in Florida or Louisiana of an approaching hurricane.  That should be a matter of course.  But to devote 24 or 48 or 72 hours of continuous coverage to flying debris and palm trees bent under the wind is just too much--rather like looking at a dead body from every conceivable angle, then watching the autopsy and subsequent cremation of the remains.

     But as I stated at the beginning, we have a generation or two of people who have never known any other media-produced reality than that of nonstop concern about the weather.  Fifty years ago, and even a hundred and fifty years ago, the weather was just as good and bad as it is now, with people far less well equipped to handle it.  We see temperature and precipitation records being broken all the time, but they usually contain telling statistical points, such as "this is the hottest it's been in Chicago on this day since 1923" (before air conditioning), or "the worst blizzard in New York since 1888" (before snow plows and central heating).  In other words, much more really bad shit is behind us than we imagine to be lurking just around the corner.  In the 1930s a drought in the middle of the country, combined with poor crop management techniques, caused a disaster we call the Dust Bowl--as devastating as anything we've seen since.  And somehow, against all odds, people knew all they needed to know about it, even without the Weather Channel.  Imagine that.

It's A Miracle

January 8, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The other day I was changing in the locker room at the gym, when a hunched-over older man came to the bench where I stood and began to do the same.  As he went toward a locker to hang up his clothes he said, pretty much apropos of nothing, “Every day is a miracle.”  By that I assume he meant that he felt fortunate to be alive, and that he was glad to be able to work out at the gym.
 

     Well good for him, I thought, but why is that a miracle?  When I was growing up and going to Sunday school, we were given to believe that miracles supernatural things.  In fact, when I looked up the word "miracle" in the dictionary just now, it defined it that way, to wit:  a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.  Getting thrown into a fiery furnace and not being burned, for example, is a miracle; feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish is a miracle; a virgin getting pregnant (however dubiously welcome that experience might be in real life) is miraculous.  Maybe my idea of miracles is heavily influenced by bible stories, but still, I thought, unless this old guy I encountered dies every night and is brought back to life in the morning, or arrives at the gym by means of a magic carpet, I just don’t see how every day is a miracle, to him or anyone else.

     Of course we all know that today the word “miracle” has gone down the road of absurd hyperbole (hand in hand with adjectives like “awesome”), such that it is used almost universally to mean exceptionally good, or against the odds, or sometimes just out of the ordinary.  “It’s a miracle we made it here on time, what with traffic,” we’ll say, or “It was a miracle she survived that accident,” when what we really mean is such cases is, “We sure as hell didn’t expect that!”  This all bespeaks more a sincere but mistaken subjective evaluation of a likely outcome than any objective supernatural event.  Apparently, by the way, the definition of “miracle” is completely missing a negative component.  Miracles are always good things.  When things go unexpectedly wrong we don’t call that a miracle; we’re more likely to call it a "tragedy"--another unfortunate misuse of a perfectly good word.  In bygone days (and even today in many religions) both the good and the bad were ascribed to the Almighty and to the adherence of the faithful, or lack thereof, to the necessary prescribed forms of worship.  Thus when the sun came up in the east each morning, or when it rained after a drought, it was considered a miracle brought about by ardent prayers for divine intercession, and when a hurricane or an earthquake came it was because we somehow failed to kiss God’s ass with enough alacrity.  I suppose that giving the deity credit for everything, good and bad, is in some ways more consistent and honest than considering only the cool stuff to be miraculous.  But to think that human intervention helps miracles to happen is just plain ridiculous.    

     One of my favorite meaningless betes noires in this vein is the expression, sometimes slung about by religion hucksters on television, “Expect a miracle; make miracles happen.”  Which is silly, since miracles are by their very nature unexpected events, and most certainly not anything any mortal being can accomplish.  Another one I hear from time to time is “I am a miracle.”  To that let me simply reply, “No.  You are not.”

     The easiest thing to do when confronted with such illogical behavior is to label it stupid and leave it at that.  Most of us know there is more than enough stupidity to go around, and stopping the analysis at "stupid" saves us the trouble of having to figure out why we repeatedly do the dumb things we do.  But a more responsible approach might be to speculate about why people are so prone to calling things miracles when they are manifestly not miracles.  The most obvious answer is that we are prone to seeking linguistic shortcuts, often misusing words until, after many instances of such misuse, they succeed in changing the meaning of a word.  But another possible answer is that we persist in calling things miraculous because there are, in fact, no miracles in real life, and--poor us--we wish that there were.  That also explains why we are so preoccupied with the idea of aliens having visited earth.  Miracles only happen in the realm of myth and legend, and religions stay in business by commemorating those legendary miracles and making folks think that more miracles may be just around the corner.

     The slightly more intelligent religions, like Judaism, take a more nuanced view of the miraculous.  Modern Jews celebrate the traditional scriptural miracles of the past, like the passing over of the Angel of Death and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, as part of their cultural heritage.  But their core belief is that however chosen by God they might be, they are condemned to an existence that is always a hair’s breadth away from horror and annihilation, chiefly because God is easily pissed off by disloyalty or just by being ignored or taken for granted, and owes them exactly nothing.  They're chosen all right, but they have been chosen by a peevish, jealous, and often indifferent God.  Follow the rules, live righteously, and be just and merciful to your fellow man and you might just be okay.  Or not.  You never know.  The million-pound shit hammer might come crashing down on even the righteous.  Look at the story of Job.  The guy did nothing wrong; he just got in the middle of a celestial pissing contest between God and Satan.  Job was your average  prosperous and righteous dude, always doing what was expected of him.  God was so sure that Job wouldn't renounce him that he gave Satan permission to kill his family, his livestock, his crops, and damn near destroy his body.  He had sores covering him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.  After all this only Job and his wife remained, but sure enough, Job didn't renounce God, so he got a new family (fuck the kids who died when the roof fell in on them, I guess--collateral damage), and he prospered again.  And this is how the God of the Jews treats the good guys, the loyal guys, the troopers.  Holy shit.  One is tempted to think, after reading this story, that it doesn't much matter whether you're one of God's chosen people or not, or even if there is a God.  And many have thought just this.   

     Christians also celebrate the mythical miracles that brought their religion into existence—the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, to name a couple of the big ones.  The difference between them and Jews in this regard is that the Christians, like little children, believe not only that those miracles actually happened, but that more miracles are just around the corner.  Maybe the more pessimistic Jewish view is what an extra few thousand years of maturity brings to a religion.  I don’t know.  But with respect to the Christians, it explains why everyone is so determined to see miracles hiding behind every burning bush.  What would life be like, the thinking goes, without at least a few little miracles here and there, and perhaps a big one now and then?  It would be predictable and repetitive.  And predictable and repetitive are things an immature person, or immature religion, just can't stand.  So people all over the world wait for miracles, and when they don't get them, they fudge the definition of miraculous to include the more pedestrian events of everyday life, like active old age, close calls, and recoveries from grave illnesses.

     I do believe that it would take a miracle to convince the average person that there are no miracles.  And who am I to cause such a thing to happen?   

If There Were Any Money In It...

December 23, 2019

Duarte, California

     I am something of an amateur student and critic of American panhandling.  Throughout my life, particularly as a former briefcase-carrying barrister walking the sidewalks of Hartford and Los Angeles, I've encountered all types of beggars, and I do sometimes give them money.  I don't begrudge a person who has to ask for handouts from the passing public, but sometimes I think they're going about it the wrong way.

     It is important for purposes of this discussion to differentiate between begging, on the one hand, and conning and bullshitting, on the other.  Those who con and bullshit--for instance, the woman carrying a baby on the streets of Pasadena, looking like a gypsy out of central casting and holding a sign saying she needs food for her infant; or the guy in the gas station who tells you he needs money for fuel to get to some remote hospital in order to visit his cancer-stricken mother (there's always cancer involved)--are not worthy to be called beggars, and are beneath contempt.  They're simply criminals trying to obtain money under false pretenses, and are no better than telephone and internet scammers and TV preachers.  They're the ones who try to strike up a conversation with you, as if they were interested in you as a person.  If they don't get to the point right away, that's a dead giveaway.  These people with long involved tales of woe, designed to tug at the heartstrings of the feeble-minded and unwary, are the ones who give street beggars a bad name.  Honest panhandling is a simple proposition: if you have any spare money, may I have some?  It needn't even involve words--just a hangdog expression and an empty paper coffee cup will do the job.  It's the simplest of social interactions.  If you feel like giving you give, and if you don't, you don't. 

     As simple as it might be in principle, panhandling is hard work.  You're outside in all kinds of weather, being looked down upon with contempt and fear and condemnation, run off by police, and often abused by your competing fellow-beggars.  It can be a dog-eat-dog world, especially in urban areas where there are too many mendicants chasing after too few dollars.  No one who begs in the street is on a winning streak of any kind, and no one who does it is getting rich from doing it, as much as we might like to fantasize that they are.  There are no Artful Dodgers and Fagins behind most of the poor schmucks who ask for handouts--they are about as much on their own as a person can be in this country.  The con artists and the bullshitters might do pretty well, but not the beggars, which is not to say that they make nothing at all.  But just put it into context:  they may have to get food, clothing, booze, or drugs, and even in some parts of the city to pay rent or protection money to some self-appointed "sheriff" of the homeless, who controls the block on which they strike their tiny tent.  Those things cost money.  When you and I say we "need money," we generally mean we're looking for an ATM.  When the panhandler says he needs money, he means he needs any amount of chump change you might deign to give him.  Given these sad facts, who am I to criticize any poor hobo's modus operandi?  Well, let me assure you that I only have the beggars' best interests at heart.  I'm thinking of what would appeal most to me, an affluent passer by; that is, what would make me wish to contribute to the exchequer of a bum. 

    My first rule would be to keep it simple, but keep it simple in a positive way.  There was a guy who used to stand at the corner of Hill and Temple Streets in downtown LA, who would sort of lunge out at you from a doorway and snarl "Gimme a dollar!"  Perhaps that was taking it a bit too far in the direction of simple, and it didn't work well, because he scared a lot of people when he approached them.  But I admired his no-nonsense approach, and would occasionally give him his dollar.  Of course, he was completely crazy, and would grab the money and scamper back into the shadows like a wounded dog without even acknowledging the gift.  There was another man who panhandled in the same area who would simply lie in the middle of the sidewalk, looking pathetic, forcing people to walk out of their way to avoid stepping on him.  Come to think of it, I don't know if he ever asked for money, but occasionally I'd drop a dollar onto his filthy, shoeless, recumbent body, and he'd take it.  So I don't recommend either of those two approaches as a way of doing business, as straightforward and stripped-down as they were.

     However, it's equally possible to err on the side of repleteness.  Recently I was coming down off the freeway ramp, and at the bottom a guy sat in a folding chair holding a cardboard sign that was just chock full of unnecessary information.  It started out with something like, "71 years old.  No alcohol or drugs.  Homeless..." and it went on from there for several more sentences.  The light changed before I could come to a complete stop and finish reading it, but I wouldn't have given him anything anyway, because his pitch was just too long-winded.  "Homeless.  Need money" would have sufficed, in my opinion, or better yet, just "Need money."  I don't care where a beggar lives or what he does with his money, any more than I would expect the folks who pay me my pension to ask me what I intend to do with the money they send me each month.  My dollar, when I give it, has no strings attached.  I know that some people don't give to panhandlers as a rule because they'll "probably just spend it on alcohol or drugs."   But you, my gentle readers, probably buy booze, and maybe drugs too, with your money, and nobody would gainsay your right to do so.  If you wish not to give, that's your choice, and indeed, it's the choice of the great majority of people who encounter beggars.  The decision to give or not to give should not be questioned any more than the decision to ask for money should be.  Nevertheless, those who don't give on nominally moral grounds are probably right about where the money is most likely to go.  Of course bums buy booze and drugs.  If you took all the alcoholics and drug addicts, sane or insane, out of the homelessness picture, there wouldn't be very many homeless people left.

     So my advice to the bums out there is to keep it short and sweet.  Another fact that I needn't be told by a panhandler is that he's a veteran.  It's one of those tug-at-your-heartstrings things that repels me.  Also, because it appeals to a general kind of knee-jerk patriotism in some people, I view it askance, and tend to think, "Oh, this guy just wants money from Republicans.  Well, fuck him, then."

     Finally, do not give me any of that God Bless You crap.  Maybe in some cultures the beggar is considered closer to God, and hence more able to rain both the blessing and the curse of the Almighty on the passing citizen, but not in this country, mister.  Here, God Bless You is the most meaningless piece of inflated verbal currency we have, a close relative of Have A Nice Day, and not a whit more meaningful.  If you want my money, leave God out of it.  And if you really think you have the moral authority to call down God's blessing on another person, have a talk with the man upstairs about getting you a more reliable source of income.  It's bad enough that people are forever telling me "No Problem" and "Have a Blessed Day."  Don't add to my irritation by putting a pointless benison on your grubby piece of corrugated cardboard.

     My favorite panhandler--and I've had a few I've liked over the years--is a guy named David who sits at the northeast corner of the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration in downtown LA.  David has been there for several years, and I assume he's still there now, unless he's met with some misfortune.  He likes the warmth of a heat vent near the sidewalk.  Often he has a cardboard sign bearing a few nonsectarian words of wisdom or ironic commiseration, designed to catch the eye of the harried office workers and civil servants who frequent the area.  Sometimes he doodles a caricature of a famous person (Marilyn Monroe is his favorite).  Without asking for anything he manages to do pretty well, for one important reason.  He is completely nonthreatening--diminutive, reasonably clean, a little effeminate.  You know he's homeless and wants money, but you also know he's not going to ask you for it.  As a result, he's the only beggar I've observed to have regular female patrons ("matrons" sounds odd there; perhaps I should say "benefactors").  Women go out of their way to say hi to him and give him their leftovers from lunch, and sometimes a dollar or two.  Now, I know every homeless person on the street does not have his felicitous personality traits, gentle demeanor, and comparative lack of stench and overt insanity.  But if you're looking for an edge out there, you might consider taking a page or two from David's playbook.  He's got it pretty well down.  And he's one of the more fortunate of les miserables, in that he only tends to go off his medication occasionally.  I've seen him at such times, and he can be a bit of a handful.  But the rest of the time he's a peach.  Which isn't to say that he doesn't have extensive health problems, not to mention an inability to adjust to anything like what we'd call regular indoor living.  He's just been homeless too long, and the streets and parks and freeway embankments are his home, to which, despite the best efforts of the social workers and other authorities, he always returns.

     I'm so full of helpful advice about how to beg, that I feel as if I should hold seminars on the techniques of applied panhandling, to try to implement some of the suggestions I've set forth here.  And I'd do it too, by God, if there were any money in it.
   

Who Was Vice President?

February 7, 2019

Corona, California

     There's a game I like to play, mostly in my mind, but also among groups of people, especially those of different ages, if they'll put up with it.  It's called "Who was Vice President on the day you were born?"  Many people know who the President was when they were born, but fewer know the identity of the Vice President at that moment.  That's because, as John Nance Garner (himself the Vice President for eight years under FDR) is supposed to have said, the Vice Presidency "is not worth a bucket of warm piss."  Unless they get lucky and the President croaks or resigns from office, most Vice Presidents go into utter obscurity after their terms have ended.  A few, like Bush Sr. and Nixon, get elected to the Presidency in their own right without having first succeeded to the office through the misfortune of their predecessor, but the great majority do not.

     Knowing who was Vice President on the day you were born requires a bit of knowledge of U.S. history, as well as an understanding of when Presidential and Vice Presidential terms of office begin and end, and also maybe a thing or two about when a President may have left office prematurely.  The answer to the question for some people might be that no one was Vice President on the day they were born.  That can never be said about Presidents.  For someone born on November 22, 1963, for instance, there were two Presidents, or if you want to get really technical, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  There's always a President, automatically, even if he takes his time getting sworn in.  It's like being the monarch of England--the king is dead, long live the king, and all that.  But the answer to who was Vice President on November 22, 1963 could be Lyndon Johnson, or it could as easily be no one, since after about noon central time on that day there wasn't a Vice President, and wouldn't be another one until Hubert Humphrey took the office in 1965.  For a person who was born on January 20 of certain years, the answer might that there were two Vice Presidents on that day as well as two Presidents.  For instance, if you were born on January 20, 1993, the Vice President was Dan Quayle until noon eastern time, and after that it was Al Gore.  But just to complicate things, if you were born before inauguration day was changed to its present earlier date--to  January 20, starting in 1937--the old inauguration day was March 4.  Then, too, some guys had more than one Vice President.  Franklin Roosevelt had three, and the last of them, Harry Truman, took office on the day FDR died, April 12, 1945, and served without a Vice President all the way until he was elected to a full term that started on January 20, 1949.  Nixon had two Vice Presidents as well.

     The 25th amendment to the constitution, which was adopted in 1967, established that when the office of Vice President becomes vacant due to the death, resignation, or removal from office of the President or Vice President, the new President may himself nominate a Vice President to fill that office.  But that nomination process takes a bit of time, since both the House of Representatives and the Senate must approve the nomination.  Thus after Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President on October 10, 1963, Nixon selected Gerald Ford to be his new Vice President, but the Congress didn't approve his nomination, and he didn't start serving, until December 6, 1973.  Similarly, after Ford became President on August 9, 1974, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President, but Rockefeller wasn't given the green light until December 19, 1974.  Remember that, if you were born in 1973 or 1974.

   With all that in mind, do you know who, if anyone, was Vice President on the day you were born?  I confess that for many years I had no clue who was v.p. on the day I was born, and like some of you, I didn't really care.  When I was growing up, the grandfatherly bald head of Dwight D. Eisenhower adorned the walls of post offices and other public buildings, and as a young child I came to think of him as the only President I had ever had.  Not so.  In fact, on August 3, 1949, the day I was born, Harry Truman was barely into his second term as President (the only one to which he was so elected), and the Vice President was none other than Alben Barkley, a person who has since slid into that obscurity to which I alluded at the beginning of this post, joining such luminaries as the aforementioned John Nance Garner and Dan Quayle, as well as Henry Wallace, Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes, and the slightly more notorious Dick Cheney.  And those are only the ones who might have been around if you play the game with someone who is less than about a hundred years old.  Should you ask a centenarian who was Vice President on the day he or she was born, the correct answer would be Woodrow Wilson's running mate Thomas R. Marshall, pictured above, a man whose main claim to fame was his opinion that "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  Thomas Marshall was a fairly witty guy.  He was governor of Indiana, and is supposed to have said, upon hearing of his nomination for the Vice Presidency, "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state."  Up to that point there had been three previous Vice Presidents from Indiana, and in the ensuing years we have added two more Hoosiers to the office--Dan Quayle and our beloved current veep, Mike Pence.

     The very existence of the sitting Vice President is often only brought to our attention when he does something exceptional, like tripping on the steps of an airplane.  He is, by virtue of his constitutionally-granted powers, also the president of the Senate, but only in the most technical sense.  He might choose to preside over the Senate from time to time, if he's not busy looking for a five-cent cigar, but he can't cast a vote unless the Senate is tied.  Almost all the time the person who presides over the Senate is a senior elected member of the majority party, known as the president pro tempore.  These days it's Charles Grassley of Iowa.  But just as often the president pro tem delegates the job of presiding over the Senate to a lesser hack.  It's just a matter of banging the gavel.  In all cases the person currently presiding over the Senate is addressed, ex cathedra, as "Mr. President" or "Madam President."  This might confuse the casual watcher of CSPAN into thinking that this country has more than one President.  Unfortunately, we don't.

     One final thought about the Vice President:  because he has been popularly elected to the office, he cannot be removed from office except by death, disability, resignation, or impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first Vice President, came close to getting the boot.  He was federally indicted for bribes and kickbacks he had taken before and during the time when he was governor of Maryland, and, looking up and seeing the sword of Damocles, copped a plea and resigned from office.)  This means, significantly, that the Vice President can't be fired by the President no matter what he does, and he really doesn't have to do anything at all.  He doesn't even have to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if he is disinclined to do so.  In theory, the Vice President could refuse to have anything to do with the President at all, or tell him to go fuck himself, and there's nothing the President could do about it except maybe to refuse to let him attend any boring meetings of the cabinet, of which he's not a member anyway.  To my way of thinking this would be like throwing Br'er Rabbit into the brier patch.  This knowledge gives me an even lower opinion of our current Vice President, Mike Pence, than I am already inclined to have.  Because in spite of the fact that he's constitutionally completely independent of the President, he chooses to stand behind him almost all the time, with a half smile on his face, as if he's expecting to get brownie points for being there.  Another second-class man, without at doubt. 

I've Got A Little List

February 2, 2019

Corona, California

[To my international readers:  Sorry if some of the references herein aren't well known to you.  On the other hand, you're lucky if they're not.]

                    As some day it may happen that a victim must be found

                    I've got a little list--I've got a little list

                   Of society offenders who might well be underground

                   And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!

                           --Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado

     I've had a fantasy lately that involves fast food places.  In my imagination, I have the power to eliminate from the face of the earth one fast food franchise per month for a year--signs, advertisements, buildings, and parking lots included.  There are rules involved, of course, which I have created, since I am the Lord and Master of the fantasy.  First, there can be no replacements for the eliminated franchises, that is, other fast food companies cannot increase their numbers to take up the slack from the absence of their competitors.  The locations where they once stood, after I have caused them to disappear, must never again be used for commercial purposes of any kind.  They must be left vacant, to be returned to dirt and dust and bushes and flowers and cracked asphalt.  Second, no remaining fast food franchise can begin to serve items that might have been exclusive to or particularly made by the eliminated ones.  If I eliminate a place with fried chicken made a certain way, for example, then another place that has survived the cut cannot add such fried chicken to its menu.  In fact, all menus of the survivors must remain fixed as they are or reduced, lest they incur my wrath and subject themselves to my righteous hand.  For I am the Lord God of Food, and will not hold them guiltless that attempt to flaunt the rules of my fantasy.  Finally, the franchise in question must be more or less nationwide, if not international.  It need not be present in every state, but must be distributed across a decent portion of the country.  And the smaller, local franchises may not expand, of course. 

     Okay, so what fast food places are on my list?  Remember, I can choose one per month, and during that month I will smite it from the face of the earth.  The first one is Carl's Jr.  Now, some of you in the east may not know Carl's Jr., and therefore may not know that it is the sister franchise of Hardee's. Carl's Jr. in the west, and Hardee's in the east.  So in January all Carl's Jr. and all Hardee's  restaurants will be gone.  Poof.  (And since it is now February, that means they're gone already.  Therefore if you think you see one, it's an optical illusion.  Drive on by.)  Why this franchise? you ask,  I'll tell you why.  Because Carl's Jr. is a stupid name and it makes no sense. "Carl Jr." or "Carl Jr.'s" would be better, but even those names would be dumb.  Carl?  Really?  Sorry if your name is Carl, but don't you dare ever start a business using that name.  Also their signs, with the happy yellow stars on them, are ugly and garish.  I've only been in a Carl's Jr. a couple of times, but I've been in Hardee's many times.  Hardee's is a stupid name too, so fuck them both.  Enough said about that.  In February, Del Taco will disappear.  Like Carl's Jr., Del Taco originated in California, but through franchises spread all over the country.  Why do I want to eliminate Del Taco?  For one thing, it's also a stupid name, and their signs, with happy little sunrises, or sunsets, are ridiculous on a par with those of the late, not-so-lamented, Carl's Jr.  Sorry, but that's the way it is.  For another (and more important) thing, there are plenty of local food places practically everywhere that serve good cheap Mexican street food, which is all a taco is or ever aspired to be in the first place.  Eliminate Del Taco and you still have more than enough taco joints to go around, and surely many more than are necessary.  In March, with great relish, I will eliminate Wienerschnitzel.  I know that Wienerschnitzel isn't the largest fast food outlet by a long shot, but it's particularly offensive to me, the Lord, the Supreme Destroyer of Evil, for a couple of reasons.  The first is the fact that their restaurants are silly-looking, with their yellow A-frame buildings and big red and white "Ws."  The second and more important reason is that they specialize in hot dogs.  So what? you ask, what's wrong with a nice hot dog for a change?  Nothing really, except that in German cuisine Wiener schnitzel, as anyone ought to know, is not hot dogs at all, but a dish made from pounded veal (and sometimes pork) cutlets, breaded and sauteed and smothered with gravy.  It is, therefore, akin to chicken fried steak, and hasn't got a goddamned thing to do with hot dogs.  It originated, perhaps, in Vienna (or Wien, as it's really called), as did, perhaps, the sausage that came to be known as the wiener, or hot dog.  Long gone are the days when a hot dog tasted like a sausage anyway.  Now they're just extruded tubes of American bologna.  But somebody somewhere (Texas I think) thought it would be fun and fancy to name a hot dog joint Wienerschnitzel, with no regard for accurate etymology.  For that reason alone, Wienerschnitzel restaurants deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth, as they surely will be some time during the month of March.

     In the second quarter of the year 2019, three more venerable franchises will meet their end.  In April, Burger King will go bye-bye, along with its idiotic King and its Whopper and all the rest of its hopelessly lame and imitative stuff.  This move alone will clear an enormous amount of space from both the urban and rural landscapes, and will take nothing away from our cravings for cheap calories that can't be found elsewhere.  In May will come one that might make some folks sit up and take notice, if the previous ones didn't.  In May I will eliminate from the planet, from the homes of friend and foe alike, all KFC (formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken) restaurants.  People simply shouldn't do to chicken what KFC does to theirs.  I haven't been there for a long time, but half the time I couldn't tell whether I was eating a back or a front or something in between.  It's either too juicy (fried chicken should never be that juicy) or it's too breaded.  Extra crispy?  My question is, extra crispy WHAT?  Not chicken, that's for sure.  You have to bite pretty damn far into a piece of extra crispy KFC to get to something that was hatched and not grown from the earth.  So to hell with KFC.  As with tacos, there are more than enough local and small places that serve fried chicken, and if they don't take up the slack, then let people eat something else.  Good fried chicken should be cooked in a skillet in at least an inch of melted lard or bacon fat anyway, and there's no way a franchise is going to do that.  In June, you can all say adios to Taco Bell.  For my reasoning, please see the comments above about Del Taco, not that I, the Almighty, have to give you a reason at all.  And add to that the hideous faux-Spanish colonial mission style of its buildings.  Okay, so that leaves the world with no significant Mexican fast food franchises, I realize.  Boo hoo.  Go to a local restaurant or a food truck.  With all the Mexicans Americans there are in this great country of ours, that shouldn't be difficult.  You'll thank me when you taste the difference.

     Moving along to the second half of the year, the decisions by Your Wise and Gracious Creator and Destroyer begin to get more challenging.  As you've seen, there are aesthetic as well as culinary reasons for my decisions.  July's selection (so get it while you still can) is Jack In The Box.  What horrible commercials!  I don't give a shit what the food tastes like, this is a decision based purely on easing the assault on the eyes created every time you drive past one of their restaurants or turn on the TV.  Not to mention that they tried to kill us all a decade or two back.  In August, in honor of the month of my birth, I will eliminate Wendy's.  Now I can hear some of you start to grumble, if you weren't doing so already.  Be careful, and remember the power I have.  Why Wendy's?  Don't they have big square hamburgers?  Yes they do, and that's just plain wrong.  I will miss the Frosty, I'll admit, but it's a small price to pay to get rid of the rest of their shit, and you can get ice cream, or a milk shake, or whatever the hell a Frosty is, somewhere else.  You'll have to anyway, so get used to it.  To round out the third quarter of the year, in September I will eliminate Arby's.  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  What!?  Roast beef sandwiches?  What could possibly be wrong with those?  Seriously, have you seen the pathetically small amount of meat they put in those suckers?  And it can't be that pink in real life--they must do something to it to make it look that way.  So order a French dip sandwich somewhere else, or better yet eat only roast beef that's been freshly carved and bloody in the center.  That's roast beef. You won't get it as often, but you'll appreciate it more, especially if it has a little fat on it.  Mmmm.  

     October brings the beautiful color changes of fall as we prepare for winter.  And it also will bring the end, forever, of Sonic Drive-Ins.   But wait, you say.  Where can we get cheeseburgers as well as chili dogs all under the same roof?  And what about those absurd commercials with the two lovable dickwads in the front seat of their car?  And sometimes the two women who certainly ought to know better?  They can retire into obscurity, or may make car insurance commercials.  Chili dogs and cheeseburgers are sold by every Greek restaurant in America, so not to worry.  November is turkey month in this great land that I have given unto you, and so I'll go after poultry again.  This time it will be Chick-fil-A.  Mostly just for the billboards with the illiterate cows.  I guess if you're an illiterate cow yourself you think they're funny.  Plus they're owned by right wing religious bigots, and the Lord will strike down with a mighty vengeance anyone who engages in right wing bigotry, or right wing anything, for that matter.  And everything I've said already about every other stupid name for a franchise goes at least double for Chick-fil-A.  At last we come to December, and the purge is about to come to an end.  Thus far I have spared one important category of deep fried heavily- breaded food, namely, fish.  So I will destroy all Long John Silver restaurants.  I don't really think I need to give an explanation of any kind for this move to anyone who likes fish.  Fish is supposed to be kind of good for you, or at least healthier than many other alternatives.  Otherwise why bother to eat it?  It's not as tasty as beef or pork unless you like sushi--and don't lie to yourself that it is.  Remember, I am all knowing as well as all powerful.  Anyway, Long John Silver's fish is just the opposite of healthy.  I will grant you that it's no worse than authentic English fish and chips, but that's damning it with faint praise.

     Okay, that's the list.  It's arbitrary, I know, but well thought out.  I'm sure there are a dozen more that deserve to go, but in my fantasy I had to start somewhere.  Now let's talk about the survivors.  You'll notice that I left off McDonald's, which some of you probably figured would be number one on the list.  But in my opinion none of the places that I've eliminated make better crappy mass-produced hamburgers.  The others might be different, but they're not really better.  Mass-produced burgers are inherently kind of crummy anyway, and I wanted to keep at least one major fast food place going.  McDonald's will fill in the gaps--indeed almost every other fast food place, including the ones I  eliminated, started in imitation of McDonald's, and whatever anyone else has come up with, McDonald's has effectively imitated.  Want breakfast?  They make high fat breakfasts, available around the clock.  Want fish?  They make a really unhealthy fish sandwich.  Want candy-like coffee drinks?  They got 'em.  Want chicken?  McDonald's chicken nuggets are admittedly just so much garbage, but they're like crack to little kids, and I don't want to put the children of America into some sort of grim withdrawal.  Kids can get along fine without all of the places I've gotten rid of, but I don't know if they could survive the demise of McDonald's.  And as for french fries, there is no other franchise that does them better--crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, always hot and salty.  Please don't bullshit me or yourselves on this point.  This isn't a health-generated purge anyway.  I also wanted to wipe out the places with the ugliest and most garish restaurants.  The golden arches are so much a part of the universal landscape that they hardly qualify as ugly any more.  You might also have noticed that I didn't eliminate any pizza places.  Pizza isn't fast food, strictly speaking.  Something you have to make to order, even if you do it fast, isn't fast food.  That means Subway and Jimmy John's and all those places get a pass, at least for now.

     There are local and regional franchises that have escaped my mighty hand of justice, too.  For instance, here in the west we have In-N-Out restaurants, but since they're not national I have spared them.  Otherwise they'd be gone like a cool whiff of hot fat.  In-N-Out is offensive, to be sure, and even more so because they're not particularly fast, and often their drive-through lines trail out on the street and impede normal traffic flow, instead of being tucked beside or behind the restaurant.  Also, their food just isn't that good.  Usually the fries are cold and limp and they're cut too long.  And their huge signs are a blight. I could go on about In-N-Out, but they're irrelevant to this discussion at the present time.  

     Well, my children, thus endeth my fantasy, for the time being.  Next year I might start to work on franchise sit-down restaurants, like Chili's and TGI Friday and others.  After that maybe car insurance companies, of which there are far too many spending your hard-earned dollars on TV advertising.  For now, enjoy all those new vacant lots.

     Thanks for reading, and remember: I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, or at least of part of the world.  And as any god in any religion will readily attest, destruction is a lot of fun. 

       

 

10,000 Steps

January 30, 2019

Corona, California

     Happy New Year to you, the few, the proud, the ones who are still following.  

     All right, let’s have a quick review.  I started this thing more than nine years ago, and called it Go West, Old Man.  I went west all right, then stayed there for seven years.  Then I went east last June, back to Michigan.  Now Gretchen and I are back in the west, staying at an RV park in Riverside County, at the foot of the comparatively lush hills of the Cleveland National Forest.

     But is the old man still walking?  In a manner of speaking, yes.  Not moving forward from one place to another, exactly, but I have recently begun to walk in a somewhat dedicated way.  There’s a thing on my iPhone that records the steps taken while in possession of the phone.  Most of you are familiar with it I’m sure—it has a red heart on it and keeps track of various bits of information about one's daily activities.  The only activity I care about is steps.  Steps, people.  For now, I’m trying to log 10,000 steps a day.  Like the original walk I took from Michigan to California, this isn’t difficult, just time consuming and somewhat tedious.    It isn’t twenty miles a day, either, just a comparatively wimpy three-and-a half to four miles.  I’ve been dedicated to doing this since about last October, with mixed results, meaning that I don’t always do it.  In fact, October was the only month in which I averaged more than 10,000 steps a day.  But on the days when I don’t hit the mark, I’m conscious of the fact that I haven’t.  And in keeping with the nature of resolutions generally, I’ve already allowed myself significant exceptions.  One in particular is that on days when I do a full workout at the gym I don’t require myself to walk all 10,000 steps.  Often my total on such days exceeds 5,000, but usually doesn’t reach the full number.  However, because I’ve worked out, after all, and the point of walking all those steps is mostly to get some exercise, I forgive myself the shortfall.  Putting in a half hour on the elliptical trainer machine (not counting the other stuff I do) doesn’t give me anywhere near the total magic number of steps, but the steps I do take are qualitatively better, since I have jacked the incline and difficulty settings up to the max by the time I’m about halfway through the thirty minutes, so I’m trudging uphill in a virtual way, sweating and huffing. You might be wondering why I don’t just get on a treadmill and walk the 10,000 steps that way.  And well might you ask that.  My answer is that walking on a treadmill is about as boring a way to walk as mankind has yet invented, not to mention rather hard on the legs and feet.  I’ve done it a few times, but it just doesn’t compare to walking on real flat ground past real trees and cars and bushes and garbage.  Walking on the elliptical trainer, however, does become a bit more interesting the harder it gets, and seems to be more fulfilling.

     But even the accomplishment of 10,000 steps on real terra firma can get tedious, especially by the third or fourth (not to mention the tenth or twentieth) time one has taken a particular walk.  In Pentwater, Michigan, where we live during the spring, summer, and fall, I took to doing brisk evening walks through the dark and empty streets of the village, often at ten o’clock or later, simply in order to get the rest of the steps I needed for that day.  (Walking from room to room all day with the phone in one's pocket accounts for a few thousand steps by itself.)  I got to know the mean streets of Pentwater quite well, and knew pretty accurately how many blocks I needed to go each way to get to my number.  With the iPod playing a mystery novel in my ears, I would walk from street lamp to street lamp, from one 19th century timber baron's rehabilitated mansion to the next, often taking a quick look behind me for whatever might be lurking—things that the protagonist of the book might be wondering about, too.  Listening to books worked, for the most part, to relieve the tedium, and let me get some “reading” in at the same time.

     Here in California I’ve walked the roads surrounding the RV park where we’re staying, and have gone up into the modern subdivisions nearby, but it hasn’t been as fulfilling, for some reason, as the walks around Pentwater were.  Over the holidays we had occasion to be staying in Los Angeles for about ten days, and there I walked the neighborhoods of the Mt. Washington and Highland Park areas of the city, on what might be called the northeast side, near the Arroyo Seco and the 110 freeway, for those of you who know the area.  And what a dump that is.  I mean, really ugly and litter-strewn and run down.  These descriptors could safely be used to describe just about every part of Los Angeles, with a few minor exceptions over on the west side.

     Let me give you a little taste of my Los Angeles walking:  Walking down the narrow streets at the foot of Mt. Washington toward Museum Drive as it slides into Marmion Way, one is struck by the narrow houses plastered haphazardly onto the hillsides.  It's evocative of another world, and not the first or second worlds, either.  Superficially it has the feel of a hillside village in southern France or Italy, only without the architectural integrity and respect for history of those places.  There's no attempt to harmonize the styles of the buildings with their natural surroundings.  The garishly colored eclectically designed houses haven't so much been built as they have been slapped up onto the sheer terraced inclines, with the hope that they'll stick.  The streets in the neighborhoods are impossibly narrow and steep and could only exist in a climate that never sees freezing temperatures, and very little inclement weather of any kind.  Like all parts of the city, it's better seen at night when the chaos and ignorance of the city planning is obscured by darkness and only glittering street lights show.  It's the money view that movie makers use, usually from some vantage point high up in the Hollywood hills, on some place like Mulholland Drive, where the panorama of the city below resembles a vast and excessively busy airport landing strip.   But down below, what comes to mind is what generally strikes one when driving through almost all of Los Angeles, namely that there is no integrity in this metropolis--no attempt to create something unified.  To be sure, there are many ugly cities in the United States.  But probably no large city has been built with such deliberate disregard for, and indeed violence to, the natural beauty that existed here before humans came in large numbers.  

     Down on Figueroa Avenue, one crosses the Arroyo Seco, a concrete flood control ditch running from Pasadena in the north to somewhere down in the old center of the city.  Arroyo Seco is a charming Spanish name for what would, in English, probably be called Dry Gulch.  Along the Arroyo Seco, skirted by a freeway on one side and train tracks on the other, are the tents and makeshift huts of the homeless, an interesting lot whose presence pervades the city and indeed the whole of Los Angeles County.  They number in the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands.  Each newly-elected mayor promises to do something about the homeless problem, and each one fails spectacularly, although countless millions of dollars get appropriated and thrown at the situation in one way or another.  A fairly large percentage of the money goes into the pockets of the people who do the "visioning" and the "planning."  What filters down into the wretched depths of the problem itself is usually good money poured after bad, money spent with the best of intentions but that ignores the most important causes of the homelessness problem, in my opinion.  The easy answer to the whole idea of homelessness is to think that the building of housing is the ticket.  Just make cheap affordable places for people to live and they'll go live there and all will be well, the thinking goes.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  And not because that isn't a logically appropriate response to the idea.  However, it simply overlooks the root causes of homelessness.  Sure, a lack of affordable housing is part of the problem, but only a small one, and one whose amelioration would help only a tiny fraction of the homeless.  We're not talking about refugees here, as in some other countries, simply waiting for their chance to enter our national mainstream.  No, our homeless are home-grown, so to speak, folks who have fallen off the grid, and the majority of them are either mentally ill or drug- and alcohol-addicted, or a combination thereof.  What the homeless of Los Angeles need (and I'm sure the same goes just about everywhere in the country) is long term mental health care and alcohol and drug treatment, things we have abandoned as a society because we think they're too expensive, and because older models (scary 19th century era mental hospitals) were too abusive to those they were meant to serve.  We think that long-term confinement of such people is inhumane.  Okay, agreed.  But build them apartment buildings to live in and you simply create unsupervised nuthouses, crack houses, and flop houses.  Build outdoor toilets to relieve public defecation and all you get is filthy and dangerous confined areas where rape and mayhem occur.  Because the homeless tend to carry everything they own with them, and as a result tend to hoard and then discard, up and down Figueroa are piles of abandoned litter, clothing, and the remnants of salvaged food from dumpsters.  The city apparently has higher budgetary priorities than to spend much time or money on picking up things from the street, and so it just accumulates in niches and ditches, like the homeless people themselves.

     So that's a sample of my evening walks in Los Angeles, a city I would be happy never to have to set foot in again, not because of the homeless, but because it's a place that has been running from reality, or creating its own alternatives to reality, for the past one hundred years.  It's one thing to walk through such a place, on the way to somewhere else, or in furtherance of a goal.  It's something else altogether to swirl around in it day after day.  But hey, the weather's nice. 

     All this is in furtherance of the 10,000 step goal.  I think I got this idea from David Sedaris, who started walking around his home in the English countryside picking up litter.  And Mr. Sedaris greatly exceeds the 10,000 step mark most of the time.  How he finds time to write as much as he does, not to mention touring several hundred days a year, I don't know, but I tip my hat to him.  I have no desire to pick up litter, which in any event would be a fool's errand on the mean streets of southern California.  But emulating David Sedaris, even in a small way, is a worthy goal.  

                 

Unsex Me Here

Pentwater, Michigan
October 10, 2018

Okay, the Kavanaugh nomination happened just as I figured it would.  But I wasn't the only one, and predicting it wasn't exactly a feat of Nostradamus-like proportions.  It was more a foregone conclusion that got interrupted temporarily by the testimony of one of Kavanaugh's several sexual assault victims.

Here again, we have to examine the way we're viewing the news lately (and by "we" I mean the anti-Trump people).  So clouded has our judgment become by our bitter loathing of the president and his people that we fail, often, to see what is and is not happening.  Mostly we fail to see that Republican partisan politics will win out over reason and decency almost every time.  But since those of us who oppose Trump are mostly reasonable and decent people, we view the world through that lens.  We're on the side of fair play, for the most part, and also on the side of diversity and inclusiveness.  Well, it's about time we got a little less tolerant.  If this is a war between ideologies, as it is safe to say it is, then we shouldn't be in the business of giving anybody the benefit of the doubt.  In war you pick a side and try to annihilate the other side.  In that regard I applaud the attempts of the Democratic senators to derail Kavanaugh's nomination, even though they were pretty much doomed from the start by the unwavering mathematics of the Senate as it is now comprised.

When Kavanaugh got nominated most people (and by people I mean news reporter types) accurately predicted that he would be approved, in spite of the fact that, once on the bench, he would surely oppose liberality at every turn.  This conclusion just followed from the fact that there are a majority of Republicans in the Senate.  During his hearings he lost his composure and telegraphed to the whole country that he was precisely what liberals feared he was, namely, a card-carrying right wing Fox News conspiracy theorist of the first order, whose judgment would be unalloyed in the future by any consideration of even the possibility that a Democrat might be right about anything.  (Not that there's anything wrong with being so partisan:  such views almost perfectly mirror my own feelings about Republicans, and I would be happy to go onto the Supreme Court and be the undying voice of left-wing opposition.)  Viewed in retrospect, his tearful rant was a master stroke on Kavanaugh's part, since it established him as a once-in-a-lifetime guaranteed Republican partisan.  The failure to nominate someone with such a pristine pedigree of conservatism would be the great regret of any Republican senator for the rest of his or her life.  Even Senator Murkowski of Alaska was almost apologetic about not voting for him, and made up some bullshit so she could vote "present" rather than "no."

So, to quote a line from one of my favorite Cohen Brothers movies, "What have we learned?"  One thing, for sure, regarding women Republican senators.  They are Republicans first and foremost.  Their womanhood does not "trump," as it were, their conservatism, their hatred, their loathing of liberality and fairness.  This was another miscalculation many commentators made.  Somehow they thought that feminine solidarity would win out over partisan politics.  But no.  And really, why should they have been so rash in their expectation?  These women are, after all, Republicans.  If they'd been the least bit sensitive to the plight and rights of women, they wouldn't have run for office as Republicans in the first place.  And for Christ's sake, it's not as if there aren't dozens of other women who have put in with the forces of evil and been appointed to positions of power--Betsy DeVos, Nikki Haley, Kirstjen Nielsen, the wretched Sarah Sanders, not to mention the many harpies on Fox News.  Why should the Senate, of all places, be exempt from morally compromised women members?  These individuals have, with Lady Macbeth, called out

Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,
Unsex me here; and fill me,
From the crown to the toe, 
Topful of direst cruelty!

We suffer when we assume that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, because we waste time that could be better spent opposing the bad ones.  Perhaps at one time there were "good" Republicans, but no more.   If they're good, they won't be Republicans.  Sorry, maybe your dad was a Republican and you think of him as basically a good guy.  But your dad was foolish and misguided at best, and bigoted and filled with fear and loathing at worst.  Time to stop thinking there are salvageable Republicans, male or female, and recognize them all for what they are--the minions of the devil.  And you know who the devil is, right?    





 

Nature

Pentwater, Michigan
October 5, 2018

Most folks who read the blog already know that I've moved to Michigan.  What does this portend for the world?   Well, nothing.  Things will keep moving along, blog or no blog, California, Michigan, wherever. 

Tomorrow they'll approve the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  I'm so sure of this that I'm going to publish this today, before the vote.  If I'm right I won't gloat, and if I'm wrong, then I'll have some explaining to do.  Now, to hear the people on NPR talking (which I pick up in the background as my wife listens on her iPad), you'd think there's some serious question about whether he'll get the nod.  There's lots of excited and wishful speculation about Senator Susan Collins from Maine, and Joe Manchin from West Virginia.  One NPR guy asked the rhetorical question whether Manchin would want to be the single Democrat who sealed the Kavanaugh nomination, to which I thought, Hell Yes, if it gets him re-elected.  Then there's Jeff Flake, who gets lots of respectful consideration from liberals because he doesn't like Trump, notwithstanding the fact that he's a conservative Republican.  But he'll vote for Kavanaugh too, because Kavanaugh embodies his right wing views pretty much down the line. 

Still, the moderates and left-of-center folks hope against hope that Kavanaugh won't get picked.  Well of course I hope so too, but I don't go on the air and make a national hobby of telling everyone so, nor do I try to shape the more or less immutable facts to match my wishes.  But that is the disease of the anti-Trump media.  They've been denying the fact of his presidency since the day after he was elected, so it should be no surprise that they deny the fact that he has the votes in the Senate to get his guy approved.

This reminds me of the story of the scorpion and the frog.  A scorpion wants to cross a body of water, but can't swim.  So it asks a frog to carry it on its back.  The frog initially says, "No way--you'll sting me!"  The scorpion replies, "Why would I do that?  Then we'd both drown."  The frog sees the logic of this and agrees to carry the scorpion.  About halfway across the scorpion stings the frog.  As they're going down into the water the frog asks, "Why did you do it?"  The scorpion answers, "I couldn't help it.  It's my nature."

Remember this tomorrow as you see people voting against logic, but according to their nature.

Credo

Monrovia, California

April 9, 2018

Let's talk about religion.  It's in the news frequently, as the administration has deliberately attempted to exclude people from our country who adhere to one religion in particular--Islam.  This in turn raises questions about whether it is constitutional, under the First Amendment, to systematically bar immigrants, or refugees, from countries whose populations are so predominately Muslim that to exclude them is tantamount to barring Muslims--the so-called Muslim Ban.  Trump's first version of this was so blatantly unconstitutional--allowing as it did for the admission into this country of members of religious minorities in those same Muslim countries, i.e., Christians--that even a Supreme Court filled with Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases would have had no choice but to strike it down.  So the next version or two, which we might call Muslim Ban Light, was more facially neutral, and appears to have been given a temporary green light by the Supreme Court, to be reviewed in more detail later.  And since those old farts work at a snail's pace, the whole thing might not get sorted out for years. 

The result of all this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Muslim-targeting activity from this administration and from previous ones, going back at least to 9/11, has been to increase the sympathy of liberals toward Islam, a religion that hardly got a second look a generation ago in this country, before the Ayatollah, unless you were Jewish and/or concerned about Israel.  The press and the government, prior to the takeover of the executive branch by its current gang of thugs, were careful not to blur the lines of distinction between what they characterized as regular harmless Islam and and radical militant Kill-The-Infidel Islam.  Adherents to the latter version are now called Islamists, to distinguish them from everyday Muslims.  And the clergy and experts in the religion--the ones who get interviewed on CNN--are always quick to point out that Islam is essentially a religion of peace, and that the bad-guy suicide bombers and ISIS types don't represent the vast majority of quiet, assiduous believers in this essentially misogynistic and backward faith.

As so often happens, civil libertarians have a tendency to choose strange bedfellows in the name of protecting the Bill of Rights.  It's one reason I've never succumbed to the ceaseless junk mail requests of the ACLU to join its ranks.  Not that I'm opposed to the Bill of Rights generally.  I like the freedom of press and speech and assembly parts, in particular, as well as the amendments that protect the accused in criminal actions.  The Second Amendment I would gladly shitcan, since no one seems to know where to draw the line there, although plain common sense, if it were applied, would tell you that it has outlived its original intended usefulness.  That view recently got a respectable airing by retired Justice John Paul Stevens.  But that's a subject for another rant.  It's freedom of religion that concerns me here.  And again, it is the application of common sense that seems to be singularly lacking in the construction of this portion of the First Amendment.  Freedom of religion, I believe, was never intended to be an impediment to the orderly conduct of national affairs.  If a conscientious objector refuses to be inducted into the military in time of war, then the government has a right to sanction that person in some way.  Not severely, but rationally.  I myself was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, and, but for the intervening draft lottery that mooted the point for me, would have been classified 1-O, which would have meant that I could have been drafted and assigned to a nonmilitary place, such as a mental hospital, where I ended up working anyway.  My personal conscientious objection to that war wasn't based on any deeply held conviction that war in general is immoral or unsupportable, although I had to tell the draft board that it was.  Instead it was based on my private conviction that the U.S. had no business doing battle with the communist government of North Vietnam.  And look how it all played out.  Well, I digress.

Many people believe that radical Islamism is Islam at its worst and most perverted.  To some extent that's undeniable, but I must take issue with such a simplistic view.  A more logical way to look at it is that any religion is at its worst when its own fringes commit atrocities, and particularly when it believes that it must explain itself to outsiders.  If you have to explain it, it certainly isn't explaining itself very well.  If you must keep saying "Islam is a religion of peace," while Muslims of one kind or another are busy killing each other and those outside the faith, you have a basic problem.  Not a P.R. problem, but a problem of squaring ruthless objective reality with some sort of sanitized theological ideal that, after all, many members of that religion don't believe anyway.  Any religion is merely a reflection of the political mindset of its adherents at a given moment in time.  The mistake is in assuming that a religion embodies an ideal, an absolute, or even a constant.  Today's Islam may or may not be the Islam of a century ago, but guess what?--it pretty closely resembles the Islam of 500 to 1000 years ago, when Christian crusaders were fighting Muslims for control of the Middle East and Southern Europe.  I call that a lack of progress.

By that token, it needs to be said that the same goes for Christianity, which is about as much or as little a "religion of peace" as Islam is.  The difference is that the most militant, acquisitive, imperialistic period of Christianity is largely behind it.  Christianity, in Europe at least, is a toothless old lion, snoozing and dreaming of the many beasts it has torn apart and eaten raw in its more active years, and becoming ever more irrelevant.  But it is still only as good as the last bad thing that was done in the name of Christianity.

Europe, the homeland of Christianity, is entering its post-Christian phase (even in such recent theocracies as Ireland), with its churches little more than works of historical architecture and its clergy carrying the moral authority of someone's old Aunt Minnie.  The sectarian violence in the Balkan states and the crazy Polish revisionism regarding the Holocaust are, of course, notable exceptions.  Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still dealing with the growing jihadist mentality of the conservative Protestant Right, also misogynistic, backward, absolutist, and proselytizing, if less overtly violent than the Islamists are.  The Protestant Right has systematically fought against women's rights, gay rights, racial equality, tolerance, and scientific reality with a fervor that would warm the heart of the nastiest Taliban cleric.  And in fairness, we can't give a free pass to Catholicism, which also is a major perpetrator of discrimination against women, not allowing them into its priesthood, and insisting that a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a baby isn't her right or her choice at all, but rather the prerogative of God alone, and by extension God's spokesmen on earth.  That's spokesmen, not spokespersons.  And to add insult to injury, the Pope and his little Roman boy's club in the Vatican are recognized not just as a theological, but as a political entity, and given the status of a country, which other world leaders should visit like they would visit France or Germany, as wacky as that notion might seem in the 21st Century.    

To put it plainly, many of the views of everyday Islam, and Christianity, should not be tolerated by anyone.  Given the stated intentions of these religious groups to spread--and indeed to impose--their views everywhere, at the risk to the nonbeliever of eternal and sometimes terrestrial damnation, they both are dangerous in the extreme.  Now, I know what some of you are thinking.  When we don't tolerate all religions equally, we start sliding down a slippery slope.  Where might it end?  Which religion will be safe from intolerance if we start picking on just one, or a few, of them?  This is basically homegrown American thinking, and to the extent that it's accepted in Europe or elsewhere, it's been exported from this side of the ocean to the other, not the other way around.

But as easy as it is among liberals to condemn aspects of Christianity, it seems equally difficult to step on the toes of Islam, lest we be seen as, heaven forbid, intolerant.  My question is this: when will people with secular moral and political authority stand to condemn religions that encourage, tolerate, or at best overlook the inhumane and unequal treatment of women, nonbelievers, and other segments of humanity?  Bloggers like me can do it all day long, and we get handfuls of readers.  But if the European Union or the United Nations or some other world body did it, wouldn't it get more notice and respect?  When will the people who agree with what I'm saying stand up and say to the world, Islam isn't good, it's BAD.  It is not a religion of peace, it's a religion of violence and sexism.  It must stop slaughtering infidels and requiring women to go around with their heads covered while the men do whatever the hell they want.  Covering one's head in public is not an expression of feminine cultural solidarity, as the twisted logic of cultural relativism would have you believe.  It is a disgusting acquiescence to tyranny, and a sad reflection of the acceptance of the inherent injustice of the religion that imposed it in the first place.  Islam is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.

To borrow the words of Walter Cronkite, one of the last of our national secular spokesmen, "That's the way it is."          

The Good News

Monrovia, California

April 8, 2018

Safely through the first year plus of the Trump presidency.  I say safely because he hasn't done much physical damage--only to the truth as a general ideal.  There he has done much harm, redefining truth in an eerily Orwellian way, so consistently and often that we now accept as givens that there are such things as "fake news" and "alternative facts," rather than simply lies.  Most rational people see this with a firm sense of the irony of it all, while his true believers have gained a couple of catchphrases with which to dress up and rationalize their adherence to his ultimately pedestrian and transparent brand of jingoism and white supremacy.  The rest of us have been given permission by the mainstream media to call Trump a liar, an idiot, and a hatemonger quite openly.  Some might call that a win-win situation.

It is now perfectly acceptable to wish for and expect the impeachment of the president (whether or not that will ever happen) and to assume that whatever he says will be not only self-serving, but also the opposite of factual.  It's as if Pinocchio is in the Oval Office and his nose is getting longer every day--either an amusing state of affairs or a sad one, depending on your disposition.  In fact, Trump has effectively cut himself and Fox News off from everybody else, so that it's easier, even for well-meaning but dimwitted people (a large part of the electorate), to see the line between falsehood and propaganda, on the one hand, and news on the other.

Those of us who are hunkered down to weather out the storm that is Trump are teaching ourselves to look at the relative severity of the waves of buffoonery that regularly crash down on the decks of the ship of state, and to gauge their force in terms of how much permanent damage has really been caused.  How much?  Well, not much.  So far nothing his Attorney General, or his Education Secretary, or his hapless and now departed Secretary of State have done has effected any permanent or even major temporary change in things.  Even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court did nothing except to resurrect his predecessor, Antonin Scalia, and give him a new lease on life.  The ship of state is vast and turns only by small degrees, no matter who is at the helm.  And thank God for that.  Just imagine if Trump was a prime minister capable of instituting his harebrained ideas more or less at will, instead of a comparatively feckless president of a massive bureaucratic corporation, whose board of directors (Congress and the Supreme Court) do not answer to him but to the shareholders and our venerable corporate culture.  True, he and his allies in the Congress have altered the tax code in ways that will not be fair to all, but then the previous version wasn't fair to all either, and these things can be tweaked and changed and even undone.  It happens regularly.

To read this may come as a shock to some of you whose personal angst and disgust have been so strong that you cannot separate your feelings from what actually has, and has not, taken place.  After all, you think, hasn't the precious reputation of the country on the world stage been forever besmirched?  Aren't we a half minute closer to doomsday?  Haven't we abandoned our symbolic commitment to the laudable, if chimerical, goal of doing something about global warming?  Isn't the executive branch of the government now filled with cruel rogues and incompetent hacks?  Well, turn off Facebook and take a deep breath.  That's my advice to everyone, including myself. 

Because I'm here to give you the Good News.  And sorry, the Good News is not that Jesus died for your sins or that God is watching over us all with some kind of ineffable plan.  No, better than that, my friends.  The Good News is that all this is transitory, and not in a slow way, like the melting of the glaciers.  In less than three years it will be time for another presidential election, if we haven't all been nuked by then.  What if, at any other time in your living memory, someone had told you that in three years things will almost certainly be better.  Would you have believed it?

So relax.