| Friday,
April 25, 2007 I saw this in the LA
Times this morning:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/
la-oe-stein25apr25,0,5910914.column
It reminded me that I need to get my Facebook Page up and running. It
also told me things I'd rather not know. I hear about "Twitter" on Leo
Laporte's weekend radio show, but since I listen to that as sort of
background music while I try to get something done (and pay attention when
something comes on that pricks my interest), I never thought much about it.
Ye gods! Who cares what I am doing from one moment to another? And then I
realize that much of what I have written in the past few weeks has been just
that, a sort of emotional diary, and my state of shocked smugness
vanishes...
Yes, I know. A medical diary isn't quite the same as simply assuming that
the state of my digestion is of any interest to anyone but me.
Another story in this morning's times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/
opinion/la-oe-see25apr25,0,7072146.story
Carolyn See, who is generally thought of as a typical liberal
intellectual writer but whom I have found charming in person, and often
worth reading, talks about being in LA without wheels. It's an interesting
aspect of getting older in LA. Carolyn See is about my age, and has had what
is considered a fairly successful literary career. She's certainly better
known than I am in intellectual circles. (She also has a really well
designed web page; it's slick and professional and everything mine isn't,
and probably sells a lot of books for her.)
But my first impression was to count my blessings. Ms. See lives in Santa
Monica, which on her description is less like a village than Studio City.
She lives alone, in a condo that makes it so inconvenient to get rid of the
garbage that she doesn't dare bring home a roast chicken from Ralph's. She
can't drive, so the errands of life that we manage with a car in four hours
in one afternoon take several days of a couple of hours each. It's a bit of
an eye opener.
And an opportunity to count my blessings. The top of the list is Roberta.
I don't live alone. Secondly I had the good fortune to buy this house in
1968 for a ridiculously low price (didn't seem so low then!) and thanks to
Proposition 13 the taxes haven't increased to the point that I can't afford
to live here as they have in some states. Studio City has remained a
village. I don't have any problems carrying out the garbage.
I also thought about some of her problems. Too many books, too much
stuff. I have that problem too, but my problem is largely one of decisions.
I have shelves and shelves of books that realistically I will never read
again, but I have difficulty getting rid of them, even when I cannot find
room for new books I am still reading. There's a lot of computer history in
this place. A CP/M version of LISP on 8" floppy disks (they really were
floppy!) which are probably unreadable. Stuff like that.
Books are the worst, though. Some of them are valuable in that they ought
to be read: not by me, I've read them and they had their effect. But they
should be read by others. And now what? I can't afford the time and energy
to put them on eBay or even offer to give them away: I'd spend my life
packing them up and shipping them off.
Roberta tells me the contractors are here to inspect the work they did on
the back balcony drains. Owning a house has its costs in time and energy and
attention. Fortunately R0berta took care of most of that while I was
recuperating from the radiation therapy. And continues to do so, leaving me
room to recover...
And this is necessarily incomplete. More later.
================
Has McCain lost his mind?
The arrogance of the Country Club Republicans apparently knows no bounds.
Now he wants to dictate to the local party people. Of course McCain doesn't
believe in parties. McCain-Feingold was supposed to eliminate parties by
making fund raising more personal for candidates, and making it more
difficult for parties to collect money. That has profound effect, and the
whole concept needs discussion: the Framers didn't much like parties either,
and there wasn't any such thing as a political party for the first couple of
generations of this Republic. Instead there were loose federations of people
with some common interests.
That failed early. There wasn't enough cohesion among the Federalists to
give Adams a second term, nor to bring in the Federalist favorite Hamilton.
The election went to the House, where Hamilton had no chance, and it came to
a choice between Jefferson, definitely not a Federalist, and Burr, an
adventurer with a vaguely Imperial view; to the extent that we know Burr's
policies they were closer to Hamilton's than Jefferson's, but Hamilton
didn't trust Burr and threw his support to Jefferson. Jefferson was duly
elected, and Burr shot Hamilton dead in a duel.
And with all that, McCain at least does not stand for raising our taxes
through the roof; while Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barrack Hussein Obama
seem to be in a contest to see who can demand the highest tax increases and
largest budget. If the Democrats win this one White House and all, we will
all pay for it big time.
Of course we paid for it big time with the Republicans in office as soon
as Newt Gingrich self destructed. They didn't raise taxes, but they might as
well have: they spent like drunken sailors, expanded ear marks, and acted in
general like Imperial Rulers of the sheep, entitled to what they could take
and spend; ending with a bridge to nowhere. There was nothing so ridiculous
that the Country Club Republicans would not finance it. This madness
continued after we went into Iraq. The war guaranteed enormous deficits. The
trade policies guaranteed trade deficits. The wild spending guaranteed more
deficits. Those guarantees made inflation certain. Inflation is itself a tax
increase; and the enormous deficits make some tax increases almost
inevitable.
The top leadership of both parties has been overtaken by the Iron Law,
and there seems little to be done about it.
And meanwhile the Democrats seem to be drifting toward the concept of
prosecution of former office holders by criminalizing policy differences.
That's a certain formula for civil war; perhaps not immediate, but
inevitable. The absolute minimum requirement for democratic government is
that the loser be willing to lose the election: that losing an election is
not the loss of everything that matters. As soon as that assurance is gone,
playing by the rules makes no sense at all. (Pinochet learned that lesson.
Fortunately for Chile, he was old and was allowed to die in peace; the
inevitable -- liberals can always find a good reason not to keep their word
-- persecutions after he turned over power on the assurance that he would be
allowed to retire in peace were not so severe that his adherents didn't take
to their weapons.)
We live in interesting times. Be afraid.
It makes for very interesting times when McCain is the best hope we have
of preserving something like a republic rather than a socialist state.
==============
If that isn't enough to worry about, we have the climate taxes that
enrich Gore and ruin the rest of us. And mandated use of ethanol combined
with forbidding us to make the ethanol from sugar -- demonstrating that the
real purpose of the mandate is to make ADM richer, not to do anything useful
about Global Warming.
And consider this:
Climate from the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB120847988943824973.html?
mod=djemEditorialPage
Mark
Has the entire world gone mad?
============
Your observations are being
echoed
Jerry,
Perhaps when Peggy Noonan talks about the screening
process, something might change, don't you think :-)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html>
"....And,
as always: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you
know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing
kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this
harassment is the government's way of showing 'fairness,' of showing
that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its
high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate
themselves on this as we stand in line...."
Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE
I have always been an admirer of Peggy Noonan, but this essay is
brilliant. And if the Republicans of Lubbock, Texas, have had it with George
Bush and the Country Club Republicans, who is left to admire them?
Do go read Noonan's article. It's worth the time.
Equal humiliation of the laws... and we really do mean it.
===============
My
son Richard has recommended an important article worth your attention;
it also generated a number of comments from me, many of which will be
incorporated into my essay on education, which is going slowly because I
have taken your advice and am seriously working on rest and recuperation.
And my thanks to those who subscribed or renewed while urging me to do so.
The conclusions reached in the article are revealing in many ways. Begin
with the assumption that the Old Republic was antiquated, and that national
interest is no longer important; and changes in policies and political
structure can easily fix things. Policy wonks seem to have an odd disconnect
between analysis, which is often very good, and recommendations, which are
rarely dynamic and always assume that good intentions are both necessary and
sufficient to fix things.
I write this as I listen to speeches about how wonderful our freeways
will be now that they are going to kick they hybrids and two passengers cars
out of the car pool lanes, and substitute tolls. That will fix freeway
traffic!!
============
Subject: Rest or not rest
Jerry,
By all means take a rest if you want to, BUT I don't
think you should interpret the "take a rest" suggestions as an indication
that your fans want you to take a rest. After all, writing is also
therapeutic, and if you don't submit, then another group of fans will get
worried!
All in all, I think you should ignore the "rest" and
"don't rest" input and instead do exactly what you want to do!
Steve
And in fact I do, but lately I have been getting more rest, and I no
longer feel guilty about that...
===========
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