"A horse is a horse, of course, of course"

Truth be known, I know less about horses than I do about art, I was just trying to use your own example. Let's try again.

It seems to me that the goal of an artist, whatever medium he uses, is to make you feel something. Maybe that's why textbooks aren't as interesting to most people as novels. The textbook just gives you information, while the novel engages you so that you feel like you're part of the story. There's information to be found in most novels too, but some of it isn't true, and you have to figure out what part is true and what part is just artistic license. With the textbook, it's all allegedly true, but maybe the pure truth isn't as much fun because there's no emotion associated with it. A text book about horses might tell you what you need to know about horses, but it wouldn't give you the feeling that you get actually riding a horse which, in my case, would be frustration. A painting or a song about horses might give you some of that feeling without leaving you with a sore ass afterwards. This is probably why most people would rather see a science fiction movie about space travel than to actually travel in space themselves.

Some song lyrics are narrative, they tell a story, while others paint a picture or just create a mood. Like the visual arts, they may be realistic, impressionistic, surrealistic, or abstract. Instrumental music can't actually tell a story, but it may be based on a story and, if you are familiar with the story, you might "see" it in the music. Then again, you might see a story in the music that the author never intended to put in there, which is okay too. A really good song is one that appeals to a broad audience, and each listener feels that the song was written specifically for him. Dylan was like that in his early years, and maybe he's still like that, but you couldn't prove it by me.

Technically, rock, blues, jazz, and swing are types of folk music, but most people don't think of them that way, rather, they would classify them as "pop". Truth be know, though, the folk music of today is the pop music of yesteryear, and today's pop is tomorrow's folk music. Classical is a little different, probably because it's more elaborate than pop music. Steven Foster wrote for the pop market in his day, but now his music is considered to be folk. Strauss and Mozart also wrote for the pop market, but their stuff is now considered to be classical.

It sounds like you have followed various trends in pop music in your lifetime and, of course, trends come and go. Traditional folk music certainly did not "disappear", it just fell off the top 40 charts for awhile. Give it a century or two and it will likely come into fashion again, and the younger generation of the day will think that they invented it. I have not followed the pop trends that much. In fact, the neo folk revival had been going on for years before I became aware of it, not because I wasn't a folk fan, but because I wasn't a pop fan. When I was driving school busses, a kindergartener once asked me what kind of music I liked, and I told him "classical". He then asked me, "What's classical?", and I told him that it was really old music that had stood the test of time because it was so good. He said, "Oh, you mean like the Grateful Dead?" I told him that I had heard of the Grateful Dead, but was not familiar with their music, so maybe he was right.

the story or the tune

How do you tell which one best captures the classic spirit of horseness? I guess you are talking about your own personal sense of horseness, because what other classic sense of horseness would you know? And how could the artist know what your own classic spirit of horseness is? I guess he has to go for his own personal sense of horseness and hope that everyone’s sense of horseness is close to his own. But how likely is it that everybody has the same sense of horseness? Not very I think. I think he aims at something close to the classic spirit of something, but I don’t know what that is. That’s as much sense as I can make.

And it’s an odd thing about lyrics. Sometimes you take them away from the song and they sound perfectly good:

And the sailors on the water
They all want the captain's daughter
They want her beauty and her youthTo grace their bow out on the sea

-Nanci Griffith

There he goes gone again
Same old story's gotta come to an end
Lovin' him was a one way street
But I'm gettin' off where the crossroads meet
It's a quarter moon in a ten cent town
Time for me to lay my heartaches down
Saturday night gonna make myself a name
Take a month of sundays to try and explain

It's gonna be easy to fill
The heart of a thirsty woman
Harder to kill the ghost of a no good man
And I'll be ridin' high in a fandangled sky
It's gonna be easy; It's gonna be easy from now on

Raw as whip but clean as a bone
Soft to touch when you take me home
When the mornin' comes and it's time for me to leave Don't worry 'bout me, I got a wild card up my sleeve

-Susanna Clark, Easy from now on

Then there is this

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

-Jim Morrison

In fact all the Doors songs and a lot of the surrealistic Dylan songs are like that, the words sound perfectly good in the song, but take them out and they sound like almost random collections of words.

I’m way out on a limb here, but I think there are two distinct elements to art, the aesthetic and the story. The aesthetic would be like just the notes and beat of the song and just the colors and the shapes of the painting. They are just like what I like to call mathematical things, they are just patterns, pleasing patterns, things that we like just because, the way we like chocolate just because of the way it tastes.

Then there is the story. In a song it would be the words, and in the painting it would be the subject matter of the painting, a cat, a landscape, the rape of the Sabine women, whatever.

I think there is something more to be said about that, but nothing comes into my mind at the moment. It just seems like a useful distinction.

My history of music is a little different from yours. First there was the music of Your Hit Parade, which I guess I liked well enough because I didn’t know much else. Then there was Elvis, who at first I didn’t like because my sisters liked him, but eventually I came around, and then music became insipid with all those teen idols and all, but then along came the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and music was really good, and then along came psychedelic music and since I was doing drugs at that time music was terrific. But then when I got to my late twenties, I kind of lost interest in music. I would hear it on jukeboxes and in car radios, but I wasn’t paying much attention, I wasn’t buying any albums.

When I moved to Texas I sold my record player and my records, and music was just not a big deal, and it continued not to be a big deal until around 1990 when I got into CDs. I bought all the music I had liked in my youth (I think I have said before that I’ve observed that while musicians keep up with music all their lives, most other people like music from their teens to maybe their thirties and after that they cling to that music and don’t pick up much on anything new), and I ventured out into a couple different genres. I got into some pop folk music like Townes Van Zandt and Nanci Griffith, and I got into the blues.

The blues had been mixed into my earlier rock and roll, and I had dismissed it as stodgy and boring, but eventually it began to seem more substantial to me than than flighty rock and roll. And then following the blues back I got into roots or delta blues. It’s usually just one guy and his guitar, and some people consider it folk music, I wonder if you do.

It seems to me that there was some folk music mixed into the Your Hit Parade, and it was ok, but it sounded a little plain and boring to me. When I got to college there was a committed folk music contingent, and I went along with it a little. I remember that they were very purist. There was a big controversy about whether you could write your own folk music or if you could just sing songs that had already been written. But then along came the Beatles and then psychedelia and Dylan went electric, and the folkies just seemed to disappear.

Art and Life

First of all, before I forget, thanks for the link to the article about Talman. I didn't have an account there, mine was at the Republic Savings and Loan, a block or two north on Kedzie, but I remember Talman as being a landmark in the neighborhood.

Also, before I forget, we are going to my daughter's place in Petoskey for dinner tomorrow and will be getting home late, so I won't be going on line. Be back on Friday.

So it sounds like art is in the eye of the beholder. I understand that there are different schools of art, like realism, surrealism, and impressionism. I suppose that I would be a fan of realism. If you showed me several pictures of a horse, my favorite would be the one that I think looks most like a real horse. Now if they all looked like real horses, then I would pick the one that I thought captured the classic spirit of horseness. What I mean is, the one that inspires you say, "Now that's a horse!" Does that make any sense?

It's the same with music, only it's an  auditory rather than a visual experience. The words to a song could stand alone without a tune, but then it would be a poem rather than a song. Whenever I had to write a poem in school, I would just think of song with which I was familiar and write different words for it. The teachers always bought it. Many of the songs I have composed were just my own words tacked on to a familiar folk melody. That's acceptable in the folk genre as long as you tell your audience where the tune came from and don't try to claim it as your own. Many traditional folk songs were spun off of earlier songs like that. The original song is called the "root song", although sometimes nobody knows which version was the earliest one.

The tune of a song should match the mood of the words and, yes, the instrumentalist should try to play with the same attitude that the lead singer is expressing. Of course, some tunes don't have words, in which case it's the tune's job to evoke whatever image or feeling that the author is trying to express. With traditional fiddle tunes, it's not unusual to find several different tunes with the same title. I'm not sure how this happens, but I suppose that, as the song is handed from one player to another, they each put their own spin on it until the tune evolves into something quite different than it originally was. There is an olds fiddlers' joke about that: "All fiddle tunes are devolved from three  generic fiddle tunes, and all three of them are called 'Sally Ann'".

I never cared that much about Dylan's politics, and it's possible that Dylan didn't either. What made Dylan's defection to the rock camp so disappointing was that the neo folk revival of the 60s was seen by many as a cultural alternative to the rock and roll lifestyle of the 50s. The rock culture was viewed as artificial, shallow, and urban, while the folk culture was believed to harken back to the days when life was more rural, natural, and honest. Maybe the good old days were never really all that good, but we liked to believe that they were, or at least that they should have been. The youth of America seemed to be divided into two camps, the "greasers" and the "long hairs". It wasn't just about music, or hair styles, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Then Vietnam reared it's ugly head and all bets were off, but that's a whole nother story.

art and lyrics

I reckon if you know what you like, you know what you need to know about art. When I am speaking about art now I am including all kinds, music, writing, movies, whatever. And I don’t want to make that distinction between whose an artist and who is a performer, or entertainer, or illustrator. That’s pretty much a matter of opinion, and no hard standards there.

There is a thing though, some people have their fingers to the wind. They look about them and see what is selling, and they just try to copy that, and some people who aren’t paying so much attention to that but just going with what makes sense to them. I prefer the latter but there is probably a blend between the two, everybody is a bit one and a bit of the other, and whose to know what goes on in the minds of men?

And then there’s that horse thing. Somebody who is not familiar at all with art, when shown several paintings, if they are a fan of horses they will choose all the paintings that have horses in them. But then if you show them only paintings that have horses in them and ask them to choose which of those they like best, maybe they will choose the red horses, or the close-ups of horses. And then when you show them only red horses, or only close ups of horses, then they have to choose between which of them they like best and when explaining why they prefer them they will have to take into account color and line, and they will be on their way to being immersed in art. Similarly in music. The first time you hear bluegrass it all sounds alike, but the more you listen to different kinds the more you see what is going on.

And so your taste becomes a little more educated, you have preferences and dislikes that you didn’t have before. Is this a good thing? Weren’t you just as happy when you could just look at any picture of a horse or play that Earl and Scruggs record over and over? Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the more you know about something the deeper your enjoyment of it is.

Odd thing about music. Sometimes there is music and sometimes there is music and words. The words have to have a certain cadence, but after that they can mean anything. You could take the same melody (what is the word for the song minus the words, you know I have a hard time understanding the words applied to music) and you could put commie words to it and you could just as easily make it a tea party jingle.

If you are singing it, I guess you have to pay attention to the meaning of the words, you have to sound angry when the words are angry and sweet when they are sweet, but what of the guitarist, does he change anything depending on how the singer is singing? Just curious about that.

I guess I am wondering because the early Bob Dylan, who you liked, was pretty lefty, and the later Bob Dylan, who you didn’t like, was more politically neutral. Was it just a matter then of the words didn’t matter? I wonder if you have listened to the latest Bob Dylan. He is not rock and roll anymore, he is much closer to folk, to my ear anyway.

"I Don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

You have me at a disadvantage because I don't know much about art. When people say "art", I think of a painting but, of course, there's other kinds, like music. Some people who produce music are called "artists", but others are called things like "entertainers", "musicians", or "performers". So how do you tell he difference? Is it a subjective thing, or is there some kind of generally recognized standard by which their work is judged? You used Elvis as an example, but I never was a great Elvis fan, so I don't know the difference between the early Elvis and the fat Elvis. I do know the difference between the early Bob Dylan and the electrified, degenerate, rock and roll Bob Dylan, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that one of them was an artist and one of them wasn't, I just know that I liked Dylan's early work a lot better than his later stuff and felt betrayed when he switched over.

As far as giving great works of art to the poor people, hoping to inspire them, well maybe, but maybe not. Awhile back they started a program to give cell phones with prepaid minutes to the poor and, as far as I know, they're still doing it. A lady I used to correspond with on the internet, who lived in some kind of low-income housing complex because she was disabled and couldn't work anymore, said that many of her neighbors immediately sold their free cell phones to buy drugs. Of course all poor people aren't drug addicts, but that's just what the lady said about some people that she knew.

I think that just giving people those paintings wouldn't help, you'd also have to give them a class in art appreciation or something like that. Then again, if you gave them the class, maybe you wouldn't even have to give them the paintings. If I catch your drift, the whole point is to show them that there are other things in life than what they are accustomed to, and that they shouldn't resign themselves to accepting their present condition.

This reminds me of that bunch of teenagers that came to help us clean up after the Bliss Fest one year. They seemed like decent kids, but I never got to meet any of them personally. I was told that they were "high risk youth" from the inner city who were brought up north to show them that there are other ways to live than what they were used to. I don't know if it was a government program or if it was sponsored by some church or charitable organization. Anyway, they helped us pick up litter after the festival. They weren't paid, but I think that they got a meal or something out of it. I only saw them from a distance, but they appeared to be happy in their work, and I didn't see anybody standing over them with a whip and a gun. I was told that their work at the festival was only one stop on their itinerary, and that they were doing other fun stuff while they were in the neighborhood.

Human beings are about the most adaptable creatures on Earth, they can get used to just about anything if they have to. Sometimes, though, they adapt too well for their own good. I have heard of people who are released from prison and immediately commit another crime just to get back in there. Apparently, they adapt so well to prison life that they have a hard time un-adapting to it after they get out.

So anyway, your idea might have some merit, even though I suspect that there was a certain amount of sarcastic humor imbedded within it. It's like that old Chinese proverb: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day. Teach a man how to fish and he will be a regular customer at your bait and tackle store for the rest of his life." I think it loses something in the translation, most of that Oriental stuff does, but that doesn't mean it's totally worthless.

Art, what is it good for?

You know all those poor people with government certified valuable masterpieces, maybe they couldn’t all cash in on them and be rich, but they would have a nice painting to hang in their wretched paint peeling front rooms. Maybe they would have nothing but beans to eat out of the can, but they would have a magnificent work of art to inspire their spirits. Isn’t that even more important than a full belly? Would it not elevate them, raise them to a higher plane to where they could see the destructive habits that had led them into a life of poverty, and set their feet on the clean path to good behavior, which naturally leads to riches?

What do you say about that? I suppose it would have to be the right kind of artwork. I imagine Elvis on black velvet which lead to people wanting to eat those peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and listen to those trashy Las Vegas songs he sang in those last sad fat days of his. He was making plenty of money then. Surely more money than if he had stayed true to his early music, and pleased all those purist fans who like to listen to old wax and wax ecstatic, but can be kind of cheap when it comes to buying the product.

Probably what they should have hanging in their dingy dens is something like those Hudson River School paintings. Those magnificent landscapes of hilly New England that were painted in the early 1800s when our country was yet young, still fired up with revolutionary ideals, uncynical, proud to be Americans, hearts swelling to a patriotic song. Sadly I expect that they had by then abandoned their unfashionable tricorner hats, packed them up in old steamer trunks where they would be retrieved and proudly worn by their descendants 200 years later when the scourge of socialism and gay rights and gun control would run roughshod over the country by, well, by folks like me.

But anyway as yet, back then, no strip malls dotted the rocky hills of New England and the paintings are full of drama and graceful trees and soaring mountains in the background and topped by God’s own cloud bedecked heavens. Very nice paintings really, but after you have seen four or five in a row, you are inclined to think enough with the trees already.

Well what good is art? What if our best artists were guys like Peter Max, our best writers guys like Stephen King, our greatest musicians, Elvis in his fat phase? Myself I guess I wouldn’t like it because how would I entertain myself, but not many like me I think. Otherwise the rich would still be just as rich, the poor just as poor, I imagine we would still have those miracle phones and all those things of that ilk. Remember when you just had a phone, and then you had to specify that it was a landline phone, and now when you specify that it is a landline phone you have to make some little joke about being old and backward, and still the whippersnapper asking the question rolls his beady little ironic eyes.

But do we really need good art, literature, music? Think of all the effort that people put into making that stuff, all that study, all those discussions, all that creative agony, all those balled up papers crashing into the wastebasket. Wouldn’t we all be better off watching Stallone or Sandra Bullock movies, shoving fists of popcorn into our greedy mouths?

You know all these action movies, all these romcoms, they are all the same. From the first time the couple meet and instantly hate each other, or the villain pisses off the hero, you know everything that is going to happen. They are built like houses, they follow the blueprints, put the boards here, the plaster there and they’re done and there is a perfectly good house or romcom or thriller.

But never a movie clever lads like ourselves like. We want something more, something extra, something, well you can’t say what it is beforehand, that is what keeps me in my tower in the morning swiping the brushes and trying to go somewhere but never sure exactly where, just like I imagine Beagles is doing with that keyboard. Kind of what I want to talk about after this meandering, where does art come from where it is going?

On other matters, I am pretty sure the house has nothing like a filibuster. Well they have that thing where they don’t bring up an issue unless the majority of the ruling party is for it, but that is a relatively recent thing and is an instrument of the party in power and not the party out of power.

As for Iran, everybody trades with their enemies. I don’t think we buy any Iranian oil, but even when we buy Canadian oil, that is so much oil that China can’t buy from Canada so they have to go to Iran, so we might as well be buying off Iran. It’s not like the world is composed of only friends or enemies of the US. Even our best friends don’t have our best interests at heart, and we have common interests even with our worst enemies.

Money

I read somewhere that the reason they keep changing the paper money is to foil the counterfeiters. A few decades ago, counterfeiting had almost died out in this country because it was costing almost as much to print the money as it was worth. The advent of sophisticated photocopying changed all that, and now they are trying to design bills that are harder to photocopy. I'm not sure about the coins, but it might have something to do with collectors. That's why they make so many different styles of postage stamps, to appeal to the collectors. Every stamp that goes into a collection represents one letter that the post office gets paid for but will never have to deliver. I once read on Wiki that the U.S. still makes silver and gold coins now and then, but they never get into circulation because the collectors immediately buy them up for more than their face value.

The value of a painting or other object is actually latent value, it doesn't become actual value until you sell it or trade it for something. It's like when you own stocks that either go up or down. People say that you have gained or lost money, but it's really only a paper gain or loss until you actually sell the stock. If you gave all the poor people a painting, they wouldn't be able to sell those paintings for their declared value because there would be so many of them out there that it would drive down their market price. Antiques are the same way, it's not so much how old a piece is, it's mostly about how many of them were originally made and how many of them are believed to still be in existence. This is why, when the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply, it devalues the money already in existence and prices go up all over. The value of the goods and services purchased doesn't actually go up, it's that the value of the money goes down.

At least that's how it usually works but, for some reason, it's not working that way currently. The Fed has been creating 85 billion dollars a month for about three years now and inflation has remained quite low. I don't know why, but I speculate that all that money is not really going into circulation. I used to think that it was leaving the country as fast as they created it but, upon further reflection, I decided that would cause the U.S. dollar to lose value against foreign currency. I haven't heard of that happening yet, although exchange rates go up and down every day and I haven't been paying attention to them. Still, if the dollar went into free fall, it seems like it would be all over the news. My latest theory is that the banks are just sitting on that new money, maybe because interest rates are so low. Low interest rates are supposed to stimulate the economy, but not if nobody is borrowing or lending money.

One way or the other, money has to represent true wealth, meaning material goods and services. It used to represent gold, but gold has become too valuable to be used as money anymore. Now money is supposed to represent the economic potential of the country. If there is more money in circulation than the country is worth, the value of the money decreases accordingly. I don't know how they determine what the country is worth, but it must have something to do with all the numbers that are constantly being crunched by the experts.

I am no expert, but I have long believed that the only way to increase prosperity is to increase productivity. Come to think of it, though, there's more to it than that. It wouldn't do a lot of good to make a bunch of stuff that nobody wants and just store it in warehouses. First you have to make it and then you have to sell it. But how can you sell it if nobody has the money to buy it? Even if they do have the money, but don't want to buy the stuff, you can't force them to, unless you're selling health insurance. Even that might not work, it's a little too soon to tell.


I think that filibuster thing comes from an old parliamentary tradition that says, once somebody has the floor, they can talk as long as they want and you can't make them shut up and sit down. I think the house has it too, but they must have a different rule about how many votes it takes to over ride it. I guess I have no objection to the senate changing their rules because the constitution says that congress can establish their own procedural rules for conducting business.

I haven't thought about that Iran thing much. So far it has been all talk, and talk is cheap. The way I understand the latest treaty is that Iran promises to not make a nuclear bomb for six months and the U.S. promises to lift some of their "sanctions". I think sanctions have something to do with foreign trade, and I don't know why they are trading with those people in the first place. As I have said before,  they should stop feeding them and stop buying their oil, but they never do what I say anyway.

money money, money money

Well money, that funny thing. Have you noticed how lately they have been changing money around so it never looks the same for more than a few years? You get your change back and it doesn’t look like it did the last time you looked. The coins are all goofy, but then they are not worth much, probably cost more to make than they are actually worth. Why don’t we just go with slugs and get it over with? Remember slugs? Were they cool or what? The paper is worse. The Prez’s heads are all blown up like they are balloons, and they are off to one side and not in the middle anymore. Is this really money?

The guy who gave you the change doesn’t appear to be giggling out the side of his mouth like he is getting away with something. You can hardly ask, “Is this really money?” without risking being contained in that big butterfly net. Well probably as long as you look confident and not like you are giggling out of the corner of your mouth wherever you end up spending the money, they will also assume it is real money. And really, what does it matter if it actually is real money as long as it goes from hand to hand and nobody complains and you work for it and you get food and beer for it?

Just like gold I suppose, only worth something because it is kind of rare. Of course other things are even rarer, but they are not worth anything. Oh it’s shiny, and this is good, but surely in this age of, we could go to the moon if we wanted to spend the money but we don’t so we don’t go, we could make something shinier. And then what if we discovered a huge gold meteor sitting in the swamps of Beaglesonia? Worldwide panic I imagine. But then maybe we do an assay on it and it turns out that even though it looks like gold and acts like gold, it isn’t really gold?

What about those masterpieces that are worth millions of dollars and then some expert gets suspicious and picks and probes at it, and discovers that it isn’t painted by that famous artist, and now suddenly it is worth like thirty seven dollars? And where did those millions of dollars go? How has them now? Nobody. Just poof. And then it turns out that the expert is really a crook, and then poof, the money just appears again.

Maybe that’s the way out of poverty. Give all the poor people some painting, and then by an act of congress declare them all to be Rembrandts, and poof every poor person has like a million dollars.

In the news we have the nuclear option and the Iran treaty. I like them both. Never made much sense that the house only needs fifty percent while the senate needs sixty percent. Well it made a bit more sense to me when the reps had the majority, but now that my people have the majority I have grown in wisdom. Just a brief stroll down memory lane, but I am having a hard time trying to recall when a filibuster, or more accurately the threat of a filibuster has ever done this country any good.

And the treaty seems like a win win. They get a little break on their sanctions and we get a little ease on the threat of their developing nuclear weapons. Seems to me that is the way treaties should work, just a little deal at a time. Seems to me the way that those Israel/Arab treaties should work that way. Instead of Israel asking for a right to exist and the Arabs asking for a right to return right off the bat, they should just start talking about some relaxing some trade thing and see how things go from there.

Some of these detractors are saying something like Obama made a treaty too slanted on the Iran side just to get a treaty, just to get a little victory, just to get a rise in the polls. But I don’t think he will get a rise in the polls. Joe Sixpack doesn’t like it when we make treaties with our enemies, it is much simpler to just hate them and not think much beyond that.  

The Same Only Different

While reading your excellent summary of the history of working conditions In the United States, it occurred to me that the new normal is a lot like the old normal, only different. In two or three generations, working conditions seem to have come full circle. The working people were downtrodden, they rose up, and now they are downtrodden again. What's different is that being downtrodden today is not nearly as bad as being downtrodden a hundred years ago, but it's all relative. Everything was worse a hundred years ago than it is today, so you can't compare to that. It's more relevant to compare to what it was 50 years ago, which was the middle of the cycle, if it is, indeed, a cycle. There is no guarantee that what happened before will happen again, although it seems likely because most things do go in cycles. The thing about a cycle, though, is that it's not necessarily a circle, it could be a spiral or a wave type of thing. I hope that I'm making sense to you, because I am starting to confuse myself.

If you think of labor as a commodity, it's affected by supply and demand like most other commodities. During World War II and the Vietnam War, lots of young men were off fighting the wars, which constricted the supply of labor and made it more costly. Another factor was that, after World War II, most of the industrial capacity of Europe and Asia was in ruins, which created a big demand for American production. Europe eventually rebuilt, and Asia rebuilt and kept on going to exceed all previous levels. Looking back on it now, everybody should have known that what we had after the war was not sustainable, but hindsight is 20-20.

Like you said before, people are just highly evolved animals. Like the coyotes, we all have to make our living as best we can. You can't blame the coyotes for eating your sheep, but that doesn't mean you have to like it or be resigned to it. Now you might think that, if you regularly put out food for the coyotes, they would leave your sheep alone, but that's not how it works. All that food will just attract more coyotes and encourage them to breed in your neighborhood. Before long it will cost you so much to keep the coyotes fed that it would be cheaper to just let them have the sheep. Then you wouldn't have to feed the sheep anymore, or the coyotes either. Going out of the sheep business means that you have to find another way to make a living for yourself, and your new business will surely have problems of it's own. Is there any way out of this mess?

I tell you, what we need is a way to make money that is not dependent on other people. I've been racking my brain since the paper mill closed trying to come up with something, but I am no closer to it now than I was 23 years ago. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. When you think of it, there would be no money without people because money was invented to facilitate trade and, without people, there would be nobody to trade with. Maybe we should be trying to find a way to live without money at all. Just because others have tried it and it has never worked very well doesn't mean that it can't be done. Maybe they didn't do it right, or they overlooked some key component in the process.

I have never been what you would call a materialist. I don't have nearly as much stuff as a lot of other people, and I don't really want any more stuff than I already have, but I don't want to give up any of my stuff either. We shouldn't have to give up our comfortable lifestyle anyway, the whole purpose of living without money should be to remain just the way we are, or even get better. I'm not selfish about it either. If I discovered a way to live comfortably without money, there would be no point in selling the idea to anybody, so I would freely share it with anybody who was interested. Now that's the way to eliminate poverty! If you define poverty as the lack of money, then we would all be poor, but it wouldn't matter because we'd have all the stuff we needed.

Well, all this thinking has made me tired, so I'd better sleep on it for awhile and get back to you. Have a nice weekend.

in a handbasket. You heard it here first

There’s a book just out by Dolores Goodman Kearnes, who had that book about Lincoln maybe ten years ago, and I first got hooked on her way before that when she did a book on LBJ, even being invited to his ranch while he was out of power and just sitting around waiting to die.

It’s about Theodore Roosevelt and one of the big events was the election of 1912 when he was running on the Bull Moose ticket while Taft was the Republican and Wilson was the Democrat and Eugene Debs (who I’m still reading that book about) was running as the socialist from inside prison walls. The thing is you then had three progressives (precursors to the today’s liberals) and one socialist.

Debs by the way carried no states but did get six percent of the vote which is pretty high for a socialist. One of the reasons he didn’t carry more is because the other guys stole his platform which was the eight hour day and other worker’s right things, which, when enacted, made our working experiences soft relative to those who came before us.

The radicalism of the turn of the century is mostly forgotten these days, we 60s types were pretty unaware of it. Had we been we would have realized what pipsqueaks we were compared to them.

Well the workingman had some power then. Probably because he had no power to begin with and the captains of industry pushed him to desperation, and he had nothing to do but fight back. The workingman looked great standing up to the bosses, not so great when he looked down on minorities and wouldn’t let them be part of the battle. And not so great maybe when he got what he wanted and then turned his back on the struggle and said I got mine, fuck everybody else.

The lefties that had fought the fight with him were forgotten, and it was partly their fault because they were constantly fighting between the socialists and the communists and the unionists. Well they were fighting for abstract things and what the workingman wanted was material things and once he got enough of them he dropped out.

And now the union guys are fading and getting picked off. Probably they should have continued their fight until they had unionized everybody. But there is that other problem in that the guys running the union are not the workingman anymore and when some moneybags guy drops by they are easily tempted.

And another thing that made things easier back in our day was employment was pretty low. You didn’t have to worry about losing a job because there was always another one just down the street. And for those of us who went to college it was pretty cheap so we weren’t carrying around those horrific student debts that you hear about.

Used to be, maybe a little before our day, that you could go to work for some big company and spend your life there and they probably wouldn’t treat you too badly and you could come out with a reliable pension.

Do you ever read the business section of the newspaper? Myself I scan through it, but I am so bored I seldom pick anything up. But there is a very pro-business slant to the articles in between the conglomeration of conglomerates. One of the things they laud is how the New Man will not be tied down to some boring company all his life, he will flit back and forth, going from company to company doing this and that as his abilities allow, and the companies will be begging for his services and he will be in the driver’s seat.

And I think that’s all bullshit. What is really going on is the companies are hiring him only until they can find somebody cheaper to take his job and then shedding him like dandruff to find another job at some other company who will hire him to work cheaper than the guy they fire to hire him.

The employee is never in the driver’s seat, and even less so in times of high unemployment like now, and it will only get worse.

Because we are all going to hell in a handbasket. And if you didn’t hear it from someone before now, then you heard it from here first.

And it must be true because an old guy is saying it.

It Could Be Worse

Old people have always ranted about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and now that I'm old myself, I think I know why. What's really going to hell in a hand basket is us but, due to some obscure principle of physics, it appears from our perspective that we are just fine and it's everybody else that's screwed up. We lived through the Vietnam era, just like our parents lived through the Great Depression and World War II. To them, those were the good old days. "Sure, times were tough back then but, by God, it made a man out of you (If it didn't kill you). The trouble with kids nowadays is that they have it too easy. They would have never survived like we did, with all their long hair and ridiculous clothes. I don't know what the world's coming to!"

If you think it's tough working for a living today, look up "The Battle of Blair Mountain". I found out about it from a lady who grew up in that region, and people in those parts are still bitter about it. Labor relations were like that during the whole late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Another interesting story is the tale of Coxey's Army, which developed out of the Panic of 1893, the worst of a long series of "panics", which is what they called economic downturns in those days. Then, of course there was the Great Depression, which made all the other panics look trivial by comparison. Have you read "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck? Some people say that it was greatly exaggerated, but I've never heard anybody claim that nothing like that ever happened.

You said once before that this is a good time to be retired, and I agree, but I also think that our working years were not so bad compared to what our predecessors went through. The kids starting out today will probably have a tougher time of it than we did, but not nearly as tough as it was before we came along. When you think about it, we were the Lucky Generation, we reaped the benefits of the sacrifices that our ancestors made, and we got out just in time. Of course that doesn't mean we can't rant and rave about how the world is going hell in a hand basket. Isn't that what old people are supposed to do?

*******************************************************************************

Coyotes do not live in highly socialized packs like wolves do, but they are not solitary like bears either. In the summer, mommy and daddy coyote are raising their pups and teaching them how to hunt. Sometimes we hear them howling at night, the parents start it out and then the kids all join in with their yippy puppy voices. These guys can't pull down a healthy adult deer, but they take a toll on the young fawns. They used to mostly live on snowshoe hares and, since the hare population crashed, we don't hear from the coyotes nearly as often. There seem to be more small predators around, like foxes and raccoons, which indicates that the coyotes are not as plentiful as they used to be.

In the winter,  unrelated coyotes sometimes form temporary hunting packs and do indeed pull down adult deer, especially when the snow gets deep. Deer have a hard time getting around in deep snow and, being herbivores, they will collapse from exhaustion in a matter of hours if they are chased hard enough that they don't have time to stop and eat something. Feral, and even domestic dogs can be hard on the deer too for the same reason.

Coyotes are also scavengers. Anything they find dead, at any time of year, is fair game to them. They are not above raiding garbage cans either, and are also fond of kitty cats and small dogs. At our previous residence we had a sheep farm next door to us, and the coyotes would pick one off a couple times a year. When that happened, the farmer would call in his friends who hunt coyotes with hounds. The hounds would pick up the track at the carcass and run the offending coyote for hours. They seldom caught it, but they must have put the fear of God into it because my neighbor wouldn't lose any more sheep for months after that.

to hell in a handbasket and red in tooth and claw

Well maybe we should have worked at becoming filthy rich, then when we gave all our money away to the poor they would have risen up to being only moderately poor and we would have remained moderately rich.

The slogan is that they don’t need a handout, just a hand. Hard to say what the difference is, since they both amount to money. All this talk about jobs neglects the fact that what they really want is a paycheck. If they could get the paycheck without the job, that would be fine, but also if they must they would be willing to work if that’s what they had to do.

The problem with that bum on the street below who provokes my liberal guilt, is that there is nothing he can do. His clothes are rags, he has no place to sleep, how the hell can he ever get a job? There are programs where if you can get into them they will provide you with a room and some clothes and you can apply for a job, and get one, and then you are on the road to better things. I guess if we had enough programs like that it would be ok. The poor would always have that avenue open to them and I wouldn’t feel so guilty anymore.

But there is a problem in getting a job. When I went broke in Texas, I pounded the pavement but I just couldn’t find no job. I had a college degree, I knew software just as computers were beginning to appear on every desk in the office world, but nobody would give me work. I applied for jobs at burger joints, and they wouldn’t hire me because I had a college degree. I could have not mentioned that, but then I had no burger experience. This whole thing they trot out from time to time that the ads are full of jobs and anyone could get one is just not true.

Seems to me that the two forces that are taking away American jobs are globalization and mechanization. It was never really logical that Americans could do the same job as somebody from India and get paid like ten times more for that. It had to even out sometime. The other thing is our factories no longer need a hundred guys off the street, they need one smart educated guy to keep all the machines running. I don’t know of a way to combat either of these trends.

We do have all these service jobs, nobody from India is going to be able to fry your burger. We could pay them more, then they would have more money to buy things, even if they were Chinese things the stores would get money for selling them, money would move around a little more, we would all be a little better off.

But I don’t know how long that would last, it’s kind of like that phrase ‘taking in your own laundry’ which I never quite understood, and this morning when I google it all I get is stuff on how to make your own soap. But anyway I think what we need to do is make stuff the rest of the world wants. One of our best engines for this was that we had this well-educated workforce, but anymore we can’t cut education fast enough whenever budget time comes around. And that charter school shell game, don’t get me started.

So we are heading to hell in a handbasket, which is something old folks always think, but that was other old folks, in our case I think we are right.

There’s movies, we still make the most profitable movies in the world, as a matter of fact anymore Hollywood always takes the world market into account when making movies. Why you never see Chinese villains anymore, or even Arabs. Mostly it’s Nazis anymore because outside of some drunken teenagers they are all dead.

Well it’s interesting, what if you injured that deer so that it fell victim to coyotes. Wait, coyotes don’t hunt in packs, pretty sure they don’t. What animal takes down a fully grown deer in Beaglesonia?

Well maybe the coyote notices that the deer is wounded and can’t run so fast and so it harries it to death. You see that all the time on the nature shows, the wounded wildebeest, who would be just fine if everybody would just leave him alone, but those damn hyenas, they are just so persistent, and eventually they bring him down. I remember once seeing one where the rhino heard had this cute baby rhino, and then along come the hyenas, and the rhinos they can charge at them but the hyenas always scatter out of the way with that hideous laughter, and the poor rhinos, they have no hands, they can’t pick up their little baby, and eventually he is hyena lunch.

Oh I weep a million tears, but that is nature, red in tooth and claw. We piss and moan about man’s inhumanity to man, but nobody is as ruthless as mother nature. We lose points because we should know better and because we have this technology that enables us to do crappy things on a bigger scale.

But there are no crappy things in nature. Those hyenas purr with their full stomachs and feel not a whit for the sorrow of rhino mom. Had they only nipped him and left him vulnerable to some terrible disease somewhere down the line, they would feel a little bad about missing lunch that afternoon, but the suffering of baby rhino would mean nothing to them.

At one point surely we were just like them, just after something for dinner, and I’m sure we didn’t lose any sleep over that speared deer that slunk into the woods. Probably we were like that for a long time, until we discovered agriculture and the guys who didn’t have to slave in the fields had time to sit around and think. And I think we always had a basic morality, just from our long dependent childhoods, but I don’t think it included anybody but the tribe, certainly no other animals. But those pesky philosophers, sitting in the shade with their ifs and thens extended it out to all people, and then, what the hell, to other animals as well.

I guess that’s why you felt bad about wounding the deer.

Poor People - Poor Deer

I've been thinking about those poor people some more. It occurred to me that, if you and I sold all our stuff and gave all our money to the poor, like Jesus said to do, they would quickly spend it, they would still be poor, and now you and I would be poor too. In our good intentioned effort to alleviate poverty, we would have actually added two more people to the poverty rolls. I suppose it's not the same thing when the government takes money from us and gives it to the poor. They don't take all of our money, they leave us some to live on, and they don't just take our money, they take money from a whole bunch of other people and put it together, then they redistribute the money so that each poor person gets some. The thing is, by the time they spread all that money around, each poor person doesn't get enough to lift them out of poverty, just enough to help them get by for awhile, but they are still poor. This might work better if there were many more rich people than poor people but, as long as the poor people remain in the majority, it's the old law of diminishing returns.

I don't think there has ever been a time in history when the rich people have out numbered the poor people, which leads us to the concept of the middle class. I don't believe in class distinctions myself, but I don't know what else to call them. Middle income maybe? If we have a strong middle group like that, then they, combined with the rich people might out number the poor people. I have heard politicians of both stripes bemoaning the diminishment of the middle class and, of course, each party blames the other party for it. During each election cycle, candidates from both sides promise us "jobs, jobs, jobs", but where are the jobs? We keep losing good paying "middle class" jobs and, eventually, they are replaced with lower paying "McJobs". These McJobs might be fine for a young kid starting out, but they certainly are no substitute for the good paying jobs that were lost. This trend has continued since the 1970s, and it doesn't seem to matter who is in the White House or which party controls the congress. Unless this tend is reversed, I don't see how we can substantially reduce poverty in this country.

I suppose that hunting is more like golf than any of the other ball sports. While there is a competitive aspect to golf, I believe that, for most golfers, it's more about improving your own score for your own personal satisfaction. Making a bad shot like I did is kind of like a golfer hitting the ball way off into the bushes instead of right down the fairway. As soon as he sees his ball hooking off into the rough, he knows what he did wrong but he can't call his ball back and take the shot over again. Added to that is the idea that this deer is a living creature that doesn't deserve to be abused like that. I know it's hard for a non-hunter to understand how we don't mind killing a deer, but we certainly don't want to torture it. A farmer who slaughters his own livestock would understand it better. He has to kill that cow to be able to eat it, and he raised it for just that purpose, but he doesn't want to cause it any unnecessary pain and suffering, and he certainly doesn't want it running away and dying off in the woods where nobody but the coyotes will get any benefit from it.

Hunting like I do is classified as a sport, not a job, but there's more to it than that. It's something like farming or gardening when you do it as a hobby instead of a career. You put in some effort but, truth be known, Mother Nature does most of the work. Come harvest time, you reap the fruits of your labors, assuming that Mother doesn't throw you a curve. If she does, well, that's all part of the game and you're supposed to take it like a man.

The piano playing fell by the wayside as soon as the spring thaw gave way to regular spring and I could work on my outdoor projects. I knew that would happen, but the keyboard isn't going anywhere, it will still be there whenever I have the time and the inclination to play it some more. It's the same with my guitar, I haven't touched it in years, but it's not hurting anything sitting in my closet. When I've gone on to the Happy Hunting Grounds, somebody else will be playing both of my instruments, or at least storing them in case one of their kids want to take up music. I've got a bunch of guns like that too. Like this old Polish lady used to say, "It's good if you never use it!"

Rambling on about the poor

The storm hit some towns downstate but didn’t have much an effect here, well trees were blown down and all, and I guess the biggest effect was that they made everybody in the stands at the Bears game huddle in the concourse and delayed the game for an hour or two, but in the end the Bears won.

You know we have never discussed sports, I remember you saying in some of our earlier letters that you thought sports was stupid so I never brought it up. Myself I am a Cub fan and a Bears fan when they are winning and likewise the Bulls, and on those rare occasions when Illinois is in some kind of playoffs or bowl I will root for them. But that, as sports fans go, is pretty mild. It’s just a game and someone will win and someone will lose, and the world will pretty much go on as it has before. Unless the Cubs go to the world series, but that will never happen in my lifetime, or probably anybody else’s either.

The towers do sway and shake and shudder too from time to time, but not enough to knock anything off a shelf. I used to notice it a lot more often when I first moved in, but I can’t remember anymore the last time I noticed it. But storms are magnificent at this height with great sheets of rain plummeting down the side of the building across the street and then boiling out across the river.

Because you and your cranky reactionary allies will never let us have the socialist paradise we dream of there will always be some people richer than others and so there will always be the poor.

But I agree with you there is no true measure of who is poor and who is not. Is it a dollar amount, is it a percentage, do we need to vary it for places that are cheaper and more expensive to live? And of course we need to vary those things from time to time as conditions change. And then everytime we alter our standards we find that poverty has gone up or down by so many percentage points, but nothing on the ground has changed.

The democrats, being the party of big government solving problems, is more likely to take up the issue of poverty. They kind of set up a thing where they are the generous good guys lending a helping hand and the republicans are the selfish bad guys unwilling to help their fellow man. And the republicans are inclined to bring up that culture of dependency thing and claim that they are actually helping the poor people gain self sufficiency by giving them nothing, and by the way, voter, that is money out of your pocket going to the poor.

Both sides are being hypocritical I think. It’s kind of like being against winter. It will always be there so what can you do? Well you could buy a coat. Maybe there is such a thing as liberal guilt. I am quite comfortable here in my warm tower this windy morning, but when I see some bum walking down below in a raggedy coat, I don’t feel so good anymore. Maybe the guy is just some wino who doesn’t want to work and spends all his money on muscatel, or maybe he has some kind of mental problem, or maybe he is just down on his luck. But you know, even if he is just a wino, he is still cold out there in the wind, and, I admit it, I feel his pain.

And I guess I accuse the reps of feeling nothing but a warm satisfaction on seeing this guy thinking, ha, serves him right for being a lazy bum. Surely there are some who do, but most probably don’t. Well, I don’t know. I will leave it there for now.

What was the trauma of winging the deer? If I look at it one way, the deer gets to keep its life, and Beagles, since he is only allowed to bag so many (two?) a year, gets to go out hunting, which he loves to do, again. Seems like a win-win. On the other hand (There is always another hand. What if humans had evolved with one arm and thus one hand? What would we have to talk about all day?), some poor deer suffered a wound for no reason, and another deer will have to die to fill Beagle’s larder, and Beagles will have to sit in that cold little shed another day in order to fill the larder. One thing I am never clear on, is hunting fun, like shooting golf, or is it more like a job, like going to work in the paper mill?

How is the music going?

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Okay, you win this one. I can't seem to poke any holes in your argument. Maybe you're getting better at it, or maybe I'm still off my game because of my traumatic weekend. All today I've been trying to think of an alternate proposal to abolish poverty, but I haven't come up with anything yet. Maybe that's because poverty, like the weather, is affected by a multitude of variables, so there is no "magic bullet" with which to fight it.

Speaking of the weather, how did you city folks weather the storm? I've heard that tall buildings actually sway perceptibly in the wind. Is that true? Were you guys rockin and rollin on  Sunday? According to our local newspaper there was some damage around our county, trees down, roads washed out, and some flooded yards and fields. Almost 2000 homes lost their electric power, but not ours.

When you think about it, poverty is all relative, isn't it. I'm sure the poor people in the U.S. today are  better off than the poor people who lived through the Great Depression and, compared to the poor people in Africa, they're actually pretty well off. My father in law used to say that, if he and his neighbors hadn't read about the Great Depression in the newspapers, they wouldn't have known anything about it. Their lives were pretty much the same before, during, and after the Depression.

I haven't heard this old cliché for awhile but, whenever somebody screwed up at work, people used to say, "You keep that up and you're going to end up selling apples on street corners." I don't think they would let you sell apples on street corners nowadays and, even if they did, nobody would buy them from you because they could get them cheaper at the local supermarket. See, that's what we need, some way that people could make money without working for the man. Okay, you could sell drugs, but that's kind of a high risk business. I read somewhere that more drug dealers are killed by other drug dealers than are caught by the police. Talk about your cut throat competition!

I never was all that excited about Medicare because the part you pay is more than the whole bill used to be before Medicare was passed. Of course some of that is due to inflation, but it was about the time that Medicare was passed when medical costs started rising faster than inflation. Okay, that doesn't prove cause and effect, but it kind of makes you wonder. I've been on it for three years now, and I haven't been to a doctor in all that time. I haven't needed to, and I'm certainly not going just because I'm on Medicare.

One thing good about Medicare is that it keeps us off Obamacare. What a joke! I'm glad now that the Republicans weren't able to repeal it because then the Dems could have said that it would have worked if the Reps had let it. Now everybody can see what a piece of crap it is and, hopefully, will remember it at election time. Don't count on it, though, people have short attention spans nowadays, and some different crisis or scandal will likely have distracted them by then.

Cause and Effect

I had to go to wiki to look up the war on poverty. My impression was that the money Johnson wanted to spend on the war on poverty ended up being sucked up by the war. Well a lot of different opinions. Some say it helped, some say it made it worse, hard to tell though because there are so many other factors going on at the same time. One thing I didn’t know before, that’s where we got Medicare, which I guess is something we both appreciate, but I don’t recall that we set our oldsters out on ice floes before that came about.

But I guess I will repeat myself, I don’t think it is logical to blame current rates of rising poverty, on something that happened fifty years ago and has been largely mutated since then. Are you saying we would now have decreasing rates of poverty if the war on poverty had never happened.

Cause and effect were formalized by the Greeks way back. It is maybe the most important fixture of logic. But you can’t just take any event and declare it the cause, and then pick something else and call it the effect. The way this is usually done, and people do it all the time, is they pick something they don’t like in the past and pick something else that’s bad in the present and declare a cause and effect, when all that really says is something happened before and then something happened later. It’s just not logical.

And the way it is usually used is that somebody doesn’t want to spend money on something. Welfare doesn’t work, let’s stop spending money on it, education doesn’t work, let’s stop spending money on it. How about the damn army hasn’t done us any good since maybe Korea, so let’s stop spending money on that.

That was Einstein that said that about doing the same thing and not getting results. Seems like I hear that quote twice a day anymore. It’s like that knowing you are getting hanged tomorrow clears up your mind, used to be you couldn’t go more than a day without hearing that.

Einstein was a very smart guy (actually I think you don’t like him because he invented what you call ‘modern physics’), but he made two big mistakes. One of them was the cosmological constant, and the other is he briefly got into politics, thinking people would listen to a smart guy like him. They didn’t.

Anyway the thing is we will always have poverty, and we will always have stupid kids, and we will always have enemies, but that doesn’t mean we should eliminate welfare or public education or the army. Some poor people use the help, some kids learn something, and who knows, we may win a war someday.

Bummer!

I don't know about the rest of my "reactionary allies", but I don't have any legislative bills on my agenda that I want to "push through". As far as I'm concerned, there are too many laws in this country already. If I was a member of congress, the only bills that I would sponsor would be bills to repeal laws, not make new ones.

I don't know if the War on Poverty did any good or not. All I know is that I keep reading newspaper columns, most of them written by liberals, complaining that poverty is worse in this country now than it ever was. If, after 50 years of giving our money away, the problem is worse instead of better, what are the chances that giving even more of our money away will help? Somebody famous once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time. That doesn't mean that I have a better idea to offer, it just means that I don't think the current idea has worked, and that doing more of it isn't likely to work any better.

"The culture of dependency", you've got that right, but I don't know what to do about it either. When I was a kid I couldn't wait to grow up and become as independent as I could. Of course, nobody is completely independent, but it seems like a lot of people today aren't even trying. For the record, I'm against all this "trickle down" stuff too.

I'm sorry, but my heart isn't in this discussion tonight. I'm still recovering from a bad experience that I had deer hunting yesterday. I shot a deer that ran off into the swamp and I was not able to find it after almost three hours of intensive effort. The forensic evidence at the scene suggests that the wound was superficial and that the deer will probably recover, which makes me feel a little better about it, but not much. I took a questionable shot, and I knew better, but I did it anyway. This would be excusable if I was a rookie kid on his first hunting trip, but I'm not. What can I say? I fucked up pure and simple. What's done is done and can't be undone, and there's no use dwelling on it. Hopefully, both the deer and I will recover from this, but not tonight.

Another thing that's got me bummed is the weather. We didn't get it nearly as bad here as many other places, I hear that six people died in Illinois alone. We had a tornado touch down about 80 miles south of us, but damage from that was minimal. I haven't heard of any significant damage in our neighborhood, and our power didn't go out. Bad weather in November is nothing unusual around here anyway, but it still blows.

They will always be with us

You don’t think you and your reactionary allies can push any bills through? Well kind of true in the current situation, all you can do is block things in the house. Reminds me of the old joke where the body parts argued who was to rule the body, and the brain the muscles and the heart all thought it should be them, but strangely enough so did the sphincter, which made all the other parts laugh at him, so he said ok, I’ll show you and he refused to function. Eventually the rest of the body couldn’t stand the constipation and had to give in, which all proves that in order to be the boss, you don’t have to be smart, or strong, or compassionate, you just have to be an asshole.

Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty didn’t work, well how about the several wars we’ve had on drugs, and I believe we even had a war on inflation at some point.

Surely you are not claiming that the war on poverty caused the current situation where the richer are richer and the poor are poorer. That was like fifty years ago, and the laws have changed over the ten or so presidents elected since, and I don’t think you can blame a long term trend on some bills passed fifty years ago.

One thing I like about the war on poverty is that it sounds like it cares about poor people. You don’t see that anymore. Anytime they want to help out people in the country it is always the middle class. Nobody wants to say anything about helping the poor anymore, because nobody would vote for them because nobody wants to help the Goddamn poor. Years ago you would pass by the projects and think oh those poor poverty stricken wretches, anymore what you think is oh those lousy drug dealing crack heads.

We have the homeless now and they have largely usurped the place of the poor. If we find out a poor person has a place to live, we think, ah, they don’t have it so bad.

Seems to me that it is logical that some people benefitted from Johnson’s programs, raised their families out of poverty, but I can’t give you any numbers on this.

Well it’s like I said before some of the poor are unfortunate, and some are lazy, and some have something wrong with them. I guess we want to give to the unfortunate because that will help them through the hard times and then they can succeed, and I think we have to give it to those with something wrong with them because they can’t do much and we can’t let them starve. I guess it’s the lazy ones where the problem is.

You know these are the guys that piss people off. People feel good about giving an unfortunate guy a helping hand, and nobody wants to see some handicapped guy freeze in the snow, but nobody wants to give to some lazy guy who is going to laugh at you on the way to the liquor store or the crack corner. This really pisses people off and sometimes they would just as soon not offer a helping hand, or house that handicapped guy as long as they didn’t have to pay off that lazy guy either. People don’t mind sharing their money sometimes or even losing it, but nobody, nobody, wants to think that they are a sucker.

That culture of dependency, I think that is a problem, but I don’t know what you do. They try to force them to get jobs or go to school, but those are hard things to force people to do. And then they have children. Are you going to punish the children too? Couldn’t you just give them the money and let it trickle down to the kids? If we can give money to rich people and have it trickle down to us, why can’t we give it poor people?

Banks, Gridlock, and Poor People

To be considered a bank, you have to be chartered as such by the Federal Reserve. S&Ls and credit unions are chartered too, but their charters are different. There used to be two kinds of banks, commercial banks and investment banks but, some time ago, the laws were changed so that one bank can be both things. After the last financial crisis, when some of the biggest banks had to be bailed out, there was some talk about re-separating the commercial banks from the investment banks, but I don't think that anything ever came of it. For people like you and me, there is no significant difference between an S&L or credit union and a bank. They all take in deposits, loan out money, and provide checking accounts. If we were big shot wheeler dealers, we would be more likely to use banks than the other things. I'm not sure why, but it probably has something to do with the size of the loans they provide and their intended purpose. If we were borrowing millions of dollars to buy out another company, we would need to go to a bank while, if we just want to buy a house or a car, our local credit union would do just fine.

Although our current government is far from perfect, most of us right wing nuts believe that you guys want to make it worse, not better. Therefore, gridlock is better than sliding further down the slippery slope to totalitarian socialism. I suppose it might be possible to slide back up the slope too, but that's not likely to happen any time soon. It's like somebody said in Alice in Wonderland, "These days you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place."

Once before you challenged me to identify what time in political history I would like to go back to, and I couldn't do it. The best I could come up with was to say that it's not so much where you are as it is in what direction you are heading. Like back in the days when the ink was still wet on the constitution, they had slavery, but lots of people were working to abolish it, so there was reason to believe that the future would be better than the present. Nowadays, all we've got to look forward to is "another day older and deeper in debt".

Take poverty, for example. Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty way back in the 60s. Since then, lots of money has been spent on numerous programs, but what has been gained? According to your own liberal people's statements, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider now than it has ever been, an increasingly smaller number of people have an increasingly larger share of the wealth, and the "middle class" is fading away. It looks like they are losing the War on Poverty, so what do they propose to do? Why, just spend more money on more programs! I think that, if it were possible to spend your way out of poverty, we would all be rich as kings by now.

So what do we do about all those poor people? You said something about feeding the poor, but all that does is perpetuate the cycle. Some of my conservative colleagues want to just cut them off cold turkey, but that won't work either. If you regularly put out food for birds or other wildlife, they become dependent on it and, if you suddenly cut them off in the middle of winter, a lot of them won't make it till spring. If you care about these creatures, but don't want them dependent on you, wait until summer when their natural food is abundant, and then wean them off gradually.

Since the War on Poverty was declared, I have watched the employment situation in this country slide steadily down hill. What they need to do first is restore the good paying jobs that we had in the 60s, then they can talk about getting people off of government assistance. Don't tell me that it can't be done, if they can put a man on the Moon they can do anything!

Poor, poor, poor people

As I recall my Czech grandparents told me that their parents came to America because the Kaiser wanted to make them speak German, something no self-respecting Czech would want to do, even before the unpleasantness that was to come. When I was there in 2000, Mercedes, or maybe it was Volkswagen, were launching a campaign to sell their cars in Czechoslovakia, I’m sorry, the Czech Republic, those damned ungrateful hillbilly Slovaks, and as part of their campaign they had an ad which showed all these arrows coming from Germany into the Czech Republic which they meant to represent car sales, but the Czechs saw it differently and took great offense.

I’m really not up on the difference between banks and savings and loans. I’m aware that Talmans was a savings and loan, but we always called it a bank. Sadly Talmans is now defunct. Maybe twenty years ago in one of those bank crises they had to swallow some banks that had made bad loans, and they could never make up for that, and eventually somebody bought them out, and then somebody bought the buyers out, and now they are just some minor branch of some megabank, and that beautiful structure on the corner with all the coins embedded in the windows is abandoned and broken and covered with graffiti, while some little office in the south end of the bank by that once vast parking lot, does whatever business remains. There was a photo of it on a fb page called Forgotten Chicago. I can’t find it right now, but I will look later.

I think all that talk, and it seems to crop up every election time like it is some brand new idea, of a third party, is a bunch of bunk. Anybody with enough prestige to be a credible candidate is not going to throw it all away by running at the head of a third party ticket. I pretty much agree with you about the tea party. I think they have lost their invincibility and some republicans dare to speak against them now, but not too loud and not too long. We may see a small split in them between the more pragmatic and the more idealistic, but really no big deal. Liberals like me have long been looking at the Republican party and looking for a rupture, but I really think nothing like that is going to happen, and the dems are scared shitless of the reps and they will all hang together lest they all hang separately.

I am always a bit puzzled at fans of gridlock. To truly believe in gridlock I think you would have to believe that any change would be bad, and if any change would be bad, then we must currently have the best possible government at this very moment, yet most gridlockers don’t seem to feel that way either.

What I have been reading lately agrees with what that Irish lady was saying. Before the protestant revolution in England, it was sort of feudal with lords owning manors and the peasants living there were more or less his property, but it also meant that he was responsible for their welfare, and he would build up points towards heaven by being nice to them. I think that was mostly lip service and I don’t think anybody was very nice to them in practice, but at least they got that lip service, and some food. After the revolution they were seen as lazy bums, and not really God’s elite, otherwise why would they be poor, so they were shoved into workhouses.

Later on with the industrial revolution they were needed to stoke the factory fires, so they were fed a bit, and actually were able to gather some power and form unions and get better wages and claw their way into the middle class. Lately though the middle class is fading and they are falling back into poverty and anymore nobody needs them to stoke the factory fires or do chores around the manse, nobody needs them for anything, so nobody even wants to feed them anymore.

Wasn’t Ayn Rand’s answer to who will feed the poor, to say that you can if you want to, implying that the questioner was a soft collectivist and a bleeding heart. But what happens when the questioner sees the light, indeed when everybody does? Who feeds the poor then?

Czechs, Libs, Thumpers, and Poor People

It seems that you already knew about the stingy Czechs. I don't know why, but your previous message gave me the impression that you didn't. I guess I could read it again, but let's move this thing along.

From what my parents told me about my grandparents, they were poor in the Old Country, which was the reason they came to America in the first place. Here they found more opportunity to get ahead in the world, and they tried hard to take advantage of it. One of the things that is still true in Europe is that not as many people own their own homes as in America. Home ownership was a big deal to the Czech immigrants, it represented the American Dream to them more than anything else. In those days, banks only loaned money to people who didn't need it, so the Czechs and other immigrants patronized the savings and loans, which were originally called "building and loans". Do they still have savings and loans in Chicago? I remember there was some kind of crisis centered around them awhile back and, since then, I haven't heard anything about them. In Northern Michigan we have credit unions instead of savings and loans, and they fulfill the same purpose. When I first moved here, our local credit union only made short term loans, but they have since expanded into home mortgages, and now do pretty much everything that banks do.

Another thing that the Czech immigrants pioneered was group life insurance. The Czechoslovak Society of America was a fraternal organization that provided life insurance to their members at a time when the big insurance companies wouldn't do it for immigrants. Last I heard, they were still in business, headquartered in Berwyn.

I agree that, logically, libertarians should be somewhere in the middle between the Dems and the Reps but, for some reason it doesn't work out that way. There was some talk awhile back of the moderates of both major parties forming a third party of their own but, as far as I know, nothing ever came of it. Another possible scenario is the moderate Republicans drifting over to the Democrats. I think that either one of those scenarios is more likely to happen than your idea of the libertarians and the Democrats getting together but, of course, anything is possible. The Tea Party might just peter out after awhile, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. I think it's more likely that all the criticism they are getting will just toughen their resolve. With neither the left, the right, nor the middle commanding a solid majority, we're likely to have political gridlock in this country for a long time to come, which is fine by me.

I know this Irish lady on Ipernity who is deep into genealogy and has traced her ancestry back to the three digit years. She says that, in 19th century Britain, it was generally believed that, if people were poor, it was their own fault. It was believed that their condition was due to some kind of character flaw in their family's gene pool. They used to put people like that into work houses that were little more than prisons. Much before that they would have been peasants or agricultural laborers who lived on the ragged edge of starvation most of the time. Poor people were also transported to Australia for petty crimes. After seven years or so of slave labor, they were offered the choice a return ticket to England or 40 acres of land in Australia. Most of them took the land.

Although Thomas Paine and the other Founding Fathers took much of their inspiration from John Locke, they were not his contemporaries, living about a century later. Locke must have been a historical hero to them, like they are to us. Well, some of us anyway.

libs and thumpers

I believe I told you that I learned about Czech frugality straight from Mama, and of course, from the time I was able to toddle I was off to Talmans to put my nickels into the bank and watch the clerk carefully write the new balance into the book, and every three months I think, there was interest! Interest, free money, I learned that early on, you can get money just from having money. And there was the dark side, if for some reason you had to borrow money from somebody you would have to PAY interest. You could have money taken out of your pocket just for owing money.

Not that any Czech would find himself in that position. I learned early on that Bohemians do not pay interest, they collect interest. I don’t know if it was that way in the old country, probably not. My readings in Czech history reveals that the kings kept inviting in the Jews and the Germans into the country because they knew they would work hard and make money and could be taxed, while their native countrymen, not so much.

But there is something in the Czech psyche, something flinty, something skeptical, maybe from being under those Hapsburg fops for so long, where if there is some guy, who is maybe a little too dressed up, talking, maybe a bit too fast, to a Czech about some kind of deal, which doesn’t quite make sense, it’s not too long before the Czech’s eyes go to slits and his hand goes to his wallet, and the too-well-dressed, too-fast-talking guy is looking at a slammed door.

I imagine we brought that attitude with us on the boat, and it was in this country, where we learned about interest, that we attained that reputation. I remember once showing a free-spending non-Czech friend a big fat tax return I had just gotten and he was all like, “Oh, what are you going to buy?” And I was all like “Ed, I am a Bohemian, this money is going straight into the bank.” Sometimes, I’ll observe to a friend that I have noticed that they are cheap, and they will be a little offended, and I will have to explain that I meant that as a compliment.

When I say libertarian, who I am referring to depends on the context. On the one hand I suppose there are the card-carrying libertarians, like members of the libertarian party. I am almost never referring to these, as I consider them irrelevant for all practical purposes. I guess I mean the people who claim to have libertarian principles, and they may know about the philosophy of libertarianism, or maybe just don’t like to pay taxes, but think libertarian sounds better than cheap or selfish, and more specifically I mean people in some kind of political office.

Technically libertarianism has goodies for both the right (limited government) and the left (legal dope, fewer wars), and this gives the pure libertarian those airs about how he is a man of principle, and above all those dirty partisan political parties. But the libertarian who wants to get into politics, who wants to actually make a difference, soon jettisons that left wing stuff about dope and war and clings to the lower taxes thing, and has no other home than the Republican party, although he still puts on airs, like he is better than all the other reps.

I think one of the ways he thinks he is better than the reps is that he hates the dems even more than they do. And on the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, finds an unlikely ally in the bible thumpers who really hate the dems too. I say unlikely ally in that Christianity, with its emphasis on altruism and love would seem the antithesis of the libertarian, but the republican Christian doesn’t go in for that stuff much, is mostly interested in punishing people who they consider sinners, which generally means curbing individual liberty, something the libertarian is also against, but it’s mostly the individual liberty of disreputable people so the libertarian is not so upset with that.

So the two groups get along just fine, and I believe they each make up roughly half the tea party. I suppose you are right that they have more in common because of their hate for the dems because the dems are the other party, but ideologically I think they are both closer to the dems than to each other.

Nevertheless in my plan for marching together to a brighter destiny, I am throwing the bible thumpers under the bus. They are men of faith and there is no reasoning with them. The libertarians are ostensibly men of reason, so they can be reasoned with, and since the dems have logic on their side there is a chance they could win them over.

Here is something interesting. I am reading a couple books on the history of the English revolution where they beheaded the king. I think you might be interested in this because I believe it was the hey day of Locke, maybe Paine, but what interests me is the difference in the way they looked at the poor. Before the revolution, in the time of Catholicism the poor were considered vaguely saintly and you could build up your holiness by giving to them. But in the time of that early harsh Protestantism, it was believed that it was the role of society to move up everyone’s holiness together, and since the poor were not doing anything it was best not to give them any alms. Well something like that. I could explain it better but the morning is growing late already.

Money, Czechs, Farmers, Libertarians, and Bible Thumpers

When I was quite young, I remember hearing some talk about a famous prize fighter who made a lot of money, but died penniless. I asked my parents how that could happen and they explained to me that people who make a lot of money in sports or entertainment frequently think that their fame and fortune will go on forever. They become accustomed to living high off the hog and have a hard time adjusting when the bubble bursts, as it always does sooner or later. Although I never expected to be rich and famous, I made up my mind right then that, if I ever came into money by accident, I would stash it away for my old age instead of blowing it all on a fancy lifestyle that I wasn't interested in pursuing anyway.

I never saved any money when I was working but, when they closed the mill down, they gave us a generous severance package, which I invested in a stock market index fund. An index fund is about the most conservative approach you can take to the stock market, and it generally earns more than you can get from things like bank accounts and certificates of deposit. I studied up on it some but, before that, the only thing I knew about the stock market was that it causes people to jump out of windows. People often talk about "playing" the sock market but, actually, there are two types of people who buy stocks, investors and speculators. The investors are in it for the long haul, and the speculators are kind of like gamblers except that there is more to it than random chance. I knew that our severance money would not last us the rest of our lives unless I could make it grow, so I took a  little risk and it worked out fine. When my mother died, she left me some more money which I invested the same way. I have not actually gotten into Mom's money yet, but it makes a nice security cushion for the times when the market takes a dive.

I'm surprised that you never heard about the Czech's penchant for frugality, which was legendary in our day. Like most legends, it was exaggerated, but there certainly was some truth in it. One joke that comes to mind: "How do they take a census of all the Czechs in Chicago? - They just roll a quarter down the middle of Cermak Road." Another one has to do with the classic Czech success story: Buy a two flat, rent both flats out, and live in the basement. - "Why were there no Czech suicides during the great stock market crash of 1929? -  You can't commit suicide by jumping out a basement window."

Speaking of stereotypes, I hope that you know all that stuff about your farmer friend for a fact and are not just profiling him. If I did that to a Black person you would be all over my case, and rightly so. Just because the man raises hogs for living doesn't mean that he's an ignorant red neck hillbilly, you know. Indeed, if he's a successful professional farmer, he could probably buy you and me both out with the proceeds from the sale of just one of his tractors.

It just occurred to me that,when you say "libertarian, with a small "l", you are referring to people who believe in libertarian principles, but are not necessarily card carrying Libertarians with  a capital "L". Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul, who once ran for president on the Libertarian ticket, but later decided that he actually wanted to get elected to something, so he became a Republican. Of course, he's still a libertarian at heart, as are probably a significant number of the Tea Party Republicans. I think that the Bible thumpers in the mix mostly came from the old Southern Democrats and the American Independent Party.

The more I think about it, I can see why you might believe that libertarians and Bible thumpers are unlikely allies, but I think that they have more in common with each other than either of them have with modern Democrats. If we were talking about classical liberals like Thomas Jefferson it might be a different story, but today's Democrats probably have Jefferson turning over in his grave. To be fair, modern Republicans probably have Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt turning over in their graves as well. The Tea Party types tend to believe that government is part of the problem, not part of the solution and, of course, the Democrats believe the opposite. Why would either the libertarians or the Bible thumpers want to form an alliance with the Democrats? If I didn't know any better I would say that you are playing the old "divide and conquer" game. Have you been reading Machiavelli again?