Why? Because I Say So, That's why!

Okay, if you can't rely on the Bible, the Constitution, the faith of our fathers, popular opinion, historical precedent, common sense, or common decency to tell you what's right and what's wrong, then it must mean that everybody gets to decide for himself. I therefore, solely on my own authority, hereby decree that gay people should not be allowed to get married. Of course, the gay people also get to decide for themselves so they will do what they want regardless, but they will do it without my vote. Conversely, if the gay people ever decide to prohibit the straight people from getting married, the straight people will continue to get married if they want to, with or without the consent of the state or anybody else.

I suppose the gay people and the colored people aren't really taking over the world, it just seems that way if you watch lot of television. A few months ago, there was some kind of crisis in Cleveland, Ohio. I don't remember the nature of the crisis, but that's not the point. The point is that the Mayor and the Chief of Police were holding a press conference with a whole entourage of people, who I assume, were also city officials. Maybe some of them were security guards, but that's not the point either. The point is that every single one of those people on that stage was as black as the ace of spades. I passed through Cleveland once, back in the late 60s, and I don't remember seeing a whole lot of Black people walking down the street. There must have been some of them around, but I don't remember noticing them, so they must not have been that numerous, or maybe they just weren't doing anything to draw attention to themselves. From this totally unscientific observation, I find it reasonable to assume that the Blacks have since taken over Cleveland. Maybe there's another explanation for it and, if I really cared, I would have looked it up on Wiki or something, but that's what it looked like to me.

Maybe that's what it's all about after all, perceptions. We have a few Blacks in Cheboygan and, truth be known, we've probably got at least a few gays. Nobody seems to have a problem with this, probably because these people don't do anything to draw attention to themselves. It's not like they're hiding in the closet either, they just go about their business like everybody else, and nobody notices them.

What the people of Cheboygan have noticed is that it's been an unusually cold winter so far, and it's not just our imagination either. According to an article in our local paper, the National Weather Service has officially announced that the average daily temperature in Cheboygan this winter has been 14.2F, breaking the previous record of 17.6F that was set in 1899. We didn't have a record amount of snowfall, but it was somewhat above average at 125 inches. I think the average is about a hundred, and last winter we only got 75. Last year at this time, the frogs were singing in the Beaglesonian Marsh, and this year the marsh is still frozen solid with a foot of snow on top the ice. The last few days have been mild, and the snow is starting to melt, but past experience suggests that we not put away our snow shovels yet. Like I said before, "It ain't over till the fat lady sings."

common decency my ass

When you were talking about your ancestors, I believe it was attitudes about sex, I don’t think you want to include all your ancestors because many of them had attitudes about it that were much more open, and sometimes pervy to our eyes, so I think you only want to include the ancestors who believed the same way that you do.

You hear that argument often enough, that we should do things because that is the way our forefathers did it which I think is a stupid argument, because our forefathers didn’t know as much as we do, and really they were all over the place as far as the things they did, and it’s kind of like picking a phrase out of the good book and then saying, the bible sez. Which incidentally doesn’t look like the best place to go when defining modern day sin inasmuch as they were hunky dory with polygamy and slavery, but declared that eating ham was a bad, bad thing.

But it’s true that currently we talk a lot more openly about sex than we used to, and that may or may not be a bad thing. It’s probably good that kids know that sex can lead to babies, and that they know about venereal disease, it’s a little boring when you watch a tv show or movie where they think that all they have to do is make some sexual joke and it’s funny.

But then you say you don’t care that much about sin, you are more concerned with common sense and decency. Common decency I think is just another way of saying ISRW, which is not common at all, being different for every person, and as I have pointed out several times lately, counter to the Beaglesonian credo. Common sense is just what most people think, and as clever guys like us know, most people are usually wrong.

I would much rather my neighbor didn’t have a gun. You don’t have to be a guy who doesn’t drink, or doesn’t have a bad temper, or isn’t crazy, or isn’t going to come down with Alzheimer's, or get a brain tumor, or whatever, to own a gun, so you never know, and he could be just cleaning it or something sometime or somebody could steal it. My life is better if my next door neighbor doesn’t have a gun. If Beagles moved in next door, I would be better off if he left his guns behind.

I haven’t seen anything lately where blacks are trying to take away white people’s right to vote, or gay people are trying to get straight people fired, so I don’t know how they are planning on dominating us.

A Gentleman Never Tells

When I said "ancestors", I meant from my parents on back to as far as I knew about. You're right that I don't really know how much sex those people had, but I do know that they just didn't talk about it nearly as much as people do today. Well, not in English anyway. Sometimes when I would walk into a room full of relatives (parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts), they would stop speaking English and lapse into Czech. That's probably when they were talking about sex, or something else they didn't want me to know about. Then again, maybe they didn't know the English names for all those body parts and the things people did with them. I mean, it's not the kind of thing people would talk about in my dad's store, or anybody else's store for that matter. That's what the real difference is between our generation and the previous ones, the way they spoke and thought about sex, not necessarily the way they actually did it. Like a wise old philosopher once said, "The Sexual Revolution was mostly a war of words."

I'm sure that my daughter knew that I had sex before marriage, but she didn't know how often and with whom. I mean, it's not like I kept a log book or anything like that. As far as brushes with the law, I didn't have any. As far as stupid things, well we all have some of that in our past. As far as sins, it might surprise you to know that premarital sex is not really a sin, at least not as far as the Bible is concerned. Believe me, if it was in there, I'm sure that I would have found it. Adultery is a sin, even contemplating adultery is a sin, but there is nothing in there about unmarried people getting it on. Unless they're getting it on with people of the same gender or farm animals, that's definitely a sin. There is something about marrying only a "virgin daughter of Israel", but that was mostly to keep the Hebrews from interbreeding with the heathens that they were about to conquer. Nothing says that the man has to be a virgin son of Israel, though, which may be the origin of the double standard that we finally blew away back in the 60s.

Allowing gays to get married under the civil law won't make them my moral equals. I don't care that much about sin anymore but, like I said, there is such a thing as common sense and common decency, or at least there used to be.

When you think about it, your dislike of guns isn't all that different than my dislike of gays. I have guns, and you don't dislike me, do you? If your next door neighbor had guns, would that make your life any different? Assuming of course that he just kept his guns to himself and didn't use them to shoot up the neighborhood. If a gay couple, moved in next door to me, it wouldn't really bother me. I probably wouldn't hang out with them, but I don't hang out with anybody anymore. Like I said, I have known a few gay people in my life and, while we were never bosom buddies, we got along okay. For all I know, some of my neighbors might even be gay.  I have never conducted a poll from door to door to find out, and I don't plan to. The more I think about it, it's not gay people that I dislike, it's the idea of people being gay, and then publically bragging about it like there's something wrong with you if you're not gay. Like the Blacks, well some of them anyway, they don't want equality, they want dominance. They want to take over the world and put us all in the place where they used to be before we liberated them. Ungrateful bastards!

Waving the proud flag of Beaglesonia

I don’t see our parents as ancestors, or even our grandparents, or really anybody we know. I think of them as way back in the mists of time, but a random google search says forebears, so what the hell, I will give this one to Beagles, but I’ll grumble a bit, if you meant parents, why not just say parents?

So you told your daughter about every little brush with the law, everything stupid you did under the influence, every little sexual dalliance? Well you say unless she asked, I think that leaves a lot of wiggle room. The question at hand was how moral (in the sense of sexual activities I believe) were your parents, and I was saying they surely seem more moral to you than they really were, because they haven’t told you everything they did. And your hedging about telling your hypothetical daughter only what she asked, implies you did not tell her everything, so she probably has a more moral picture of you than reality would reveal, which is exactly my point.

But it does seem a little odd, doesn’t it when some people speak of morals and values, and normally those words mean things like kindness and honesty, but when, oh, let’s call a spade a spade, the religious right, and therefore most of the republican party, really are only talking about sex out of wedlock. And by the way, wasn’t that exactly what Beagles had in mind when he cozied up to the greasers and thought of hanging with the hippies, and I’m assuming he got lucky every now and then (and I’m assuming he didn’t tell his daughters, because how many daughters ask their fathers if they ever had sex before they met their mom)? But now that he is an old man, he feels perfectly fine railing against the sins he did when he was younger.

Maybe that’s the thing, if we allow gay marriage then they won’t be having sex out of wedlock anymore, and then they won’t be sinners, they will be the moral equals of sainted Beagles, and entitled to the same rights, and we know he doesn’t want that.

No, you didn’t convince me on gun rights, but when you came up with one of your bumper slogan arguments like guns don’t kill people, I answered your argument, people with guns kill people and if people didn’t have guns they wouldn’t be able to kill people so easily, and then you said something, and then I said something, blah, blah, blah, we could do it in our sleep.

But one thing I didn’t do, because I respect the credo of Beaglesonia is say, my internal sense of right and wrong tells me that guns are bad, and therefore I don’t need to respond to any of your arguments.

It’s the difference between people talking to each other and people throwing rocks at those they disagree with because they know they are right and have no need to question that.

Is So! Is So! Is So! Is So!.......Infinity!

Our parents are so our ancestors! They aren't our only ancestors, and they aren't our ancient ancestors, but they are certainly our ancestors. If they aren't our ancestors, then what are they?

I was always totally honest with my daughter, and so was my hypothetical wife. If you remember, we even told her the truth about Santa Claus right from the start. No, I didn't tell her everything I did when I was her age, mostly because she didn't ask. If she asked about something that I regretted doing, I told her that I did it but that I regretted it, and that I wouldn't recommend that she do it that way herself and, if she hadn't gotten bored and wandered away by then, I told her why.

See, that's the trouble with sex, people use it as a lure to get you to do something and then, more often than not, they don't give it to you anyway. I always believed that sex should be a thing unto itself and not be all tangled up with that social crap, or used to sell you something. It's no wonder we were obsessed with it when we were young. Every time you turned on the TV or opened a magazine, there it was starring you in the face. Just try to actually get some of it, though, and you were denounced as some kind of pervert. I don't get around much anymore but, last I heard, it hadn't changed all that much since we were kids.

One thing though, we did get rid of that double standard, so maybe the Sexual Revolution wasn't entirely fought in vain. Remember how, if a guy did it, he was admired for it by the other guys but, if a girl did it, she was denounced as a whore? I used to think that was where all those gays came from, but now they're saying some people are just born like that. I mean, if the guys are supposed to do it, but the girls aren't supposed to do it, then who the hell are the guys supposed to do it with, each other?

Speaking of gays, you're right that my life will not materially change if gays are allowed to get married in Michigan. Nevertheless, I will never vote for it or speak of it approvingly. Why? Because I don't want to, that's why. We all have our druthers, and that's one thing that I druther not. Why should I need any more reason than that? I'm not trying to convince you or anybody else to my way of thinking, I'm just telling you what my way of thinking is on the subject. If I couldn't persuade you on the gun issue, I'm sure that I can't persuade you on this issue. I have met a few gay people in my life, and I guess they were okay, but I still don't believe they should be allowed to get married.

The Beaglesonian credlo

I have tried, from time to time, to interest people in this blog. I have dropped it casually into conversation and then never heard it mentioned again. Of course that doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading it. Perhaps they are, and have passed along knowledge of it to others, and our readership may well be in the millions. The reason we have never heard from any of them is that they are probably scared off by our eruditeness and our articularity. Yeah, that’s probably it.

I don’t think our parents are our ancestors. If you look back on our ancestors you will see that openness about sex has varied wildly. I think, like the bible, if you have any opinion you can look back through our ancestry and find a time when that opinion is validated. You know you hear people speak of perpetuating the values of our forefathers like they are doing something noble, but of course they are only speaking of a certain subset of our forefathers, and anyway we are generally smarter now then we were then, so what is there to be proud about believing that the sun goes around the earth?

And your parents? Come on, what parents are going to be honest with their kids about what they did in their day? Have you told your daughter about all the adventures you had before she came along?

There is always this belief that any culture outside the mainstream is having more sex than the mainstream is, and I’m guessing it’s mostly a bunch of hooey. I have this image of young Beagles sidling up to a group of greasers or hippies and telling them, I don’t believe in anything that you do, and I won’t share your customs or your clothing, but I’d like to hang out with you and fuck your women. And then he wonders why he got the cold shoulder.

Again I have to accuse you of Beaglesonian heresy (see motto), open and shut case, either your are for it or against it? What the hell? Why don’t we just post a list of issues, and then you and I can check each one as to whether we are for or against it, and then we can go our separate ways and do something else with that hour or so in the morning or the evening.

There was a time when there was a fire that closed down the local gay bar, and they came to the bar where I worked. I didn’t care for their mannerisms and they tended to crowd out the buddies that I liked to talk to, but they didn’t do any harm, they didn’t steal anything, they didn’t sodomize any innocent victims, they were okay.

My most shocking moment was when one of them called out my name because he remembered me from Gage Park. Gage Park? I never imagined that anybody in Gage Park was gay.

But they were around, and wherever I went afterwards they were around, and certainly they have been present in my watercolor classes. I wonder if people wonder about me, never married, has cats, does watercolors, I’d be suspicious myself. But then so what, so what if people did think I was gay, who cares?

And what do I care if they get married. Say there was a gay couple living next door to me yesterday, and then today they got married, how has my life changed, likewise Beagles and his hypothetical and their neighbors somewhere in Cheboygan, how has their life changed?

See here the thing is, that opposition to gay marriage is pretty much based on the assumption that the world will go to hell. Beagles particularly maintained that his marriage would go to hell if gays were allowed to be married, but when pressed he would never say how that would be, just said it would. And here we are with half the nation allowing it, and none of those states appear to be going to hell, and it’s just around the corner in Michigan, and I know that Beagles knows that his life will go on just exactly the same as it did before.

And I want him to admit it. I don’t want to hear that his ISRW tells him so. I want him to explain logically and in the real world, how his life is altered, or admit that it isn’t. I believe that is the responsibility of anyone who enters this forum, and of course, of our millions of readers.

What Readers?

So far I have only found one person who said that he was interested in our blog, and he never showed up. I have read some of his stuff and, while he is intelligent and knowledgeable about a number of subjects, he is kind of set in his ways. I don't know if he would fit in here or not, and we'll never know if he never shows up. So it appears that, for the foreseeable future, it's just you and me, brother.

The values of our ancestors to which I referred were mostly about sex. I don't know about your parents, but mine didn't seem to believe in it. They must have done it at least twice to produce my sister and me, but you wouldn't know it to talk to them. While I was in the army, a good friend of my parents came up gay, and my parents had to research the subject before they could even discuss it with him. After a certain amount of denial, he agreed with them that it was a sickness and promised to "get help", but I don't think he ever did. When my mother told me about it later, she said that a smile flickered across my face, which caused her to worry that I had been part of his little circle. I assured her that I had not, which was the truth. I then told her that I had always believed that there was something strange about those guys, but I didn't know what it was. If I indeed smiled, it was probably what they call an "a-hah! moment", which was also the truth.

Truth be known, the only part of the hippie culture that ever interested me was the sex part. It was exciting for me to contemplate that there were people out there somewhere who were actually doing it instead of just talking and fantasizing about it. I might have joined up with them but, by the time I got out of the army, they were all mixed up with drugs and left wing politics. I didn't suppose they would let me in on the sex part if I didn't also embrace the drugs and politics. I had briefly tried to join the hoodlum culture back in high school because it was rumored that their girls put out for real, but I didn't want to do all the other hoodlum stuff. The hoodlum girls were not interested in me, and the hoodlum boys were down right hostile about it. I don't know why the boys were so concerned, I had never shown any interest in them, just the girls. Anyway, based on that experience, I didn't waste any time trying to join the hippies. You see, back in those days, the most important thing on my agenda was getting laid. Funny, but looking back on it now, I don't seem to remember why it was all that important, but it was.

Anyway, I don't understand why it's so important to you that we discuss this gay thing dispassionately. It seems like it should be an open and shut case, either you're for it or you're against it. I have already admitted that you guys were probably going to win this one, but that I would never approve of it regardless. It's just like with the Blacks, or Coloreds, or African Americans, or whatever they are calling them these days, you can make them equal under the law, you can even make them more than equal, but you can't make me like them. Before you get on your high horse about that one, remember that I have said before that I don't dislike all Black people, just the ones on television, the ones that riot in the streets, and the ones that are elected to be President of the United States. Truth be known, that's pretty much how I feel about White people too.

ISRW my ass

Is not the motto, the slogan of The Beaglesonian Institute, “A forum for reasonable discussion among reasonable people”? To me, and doubtless millions of our readers, that means that anything is up for logical discussion. Oh I suppose there are certain things like your deist god, and my somewhat rigid atheism, that are beyond discussion. Well they are not really beyond discussion, we can and do discuss them, but at some point we run into something like faith, which I personally distrust, but there is no way we can build a theory without it, even geometry is nothing without its axioms.

But still our more general beliefs, and the laws we wish to propose to run the country when it finally turns to us and asks us for our opinion, are subject to logical discussion. Some fundamentalist religious type would have no place in this forum, because there would be nothing to discuss because everything he believed, it was something God told him, so how do you argue with that.

See and this, what do you call it, internal sense of right and wrong, sounds a lot like faith, like here it is, this is my own internal sense of right and wrong, I don’t need no stinking logic, I don’t need to know no history or nothing, I just look in my heart, I suppose, and there is the truth, and all your arguments mean nothing to me, for I posses my own truth. Well geez, why am I talking to a guy like this?

Gay marriage, I believe I have come out for it on numerous occasions, and I have had my historical references, and my logical discussion, but Beagles has his ISRW (Internal Sense of Right and Wrong), so why am I even talking to him?

As long as you play the ISRW card, I don’t see how we can have any discussion, it’s just like saying god told you so.

And what is this howler about the old fashioned values of our ancestors? When is the last time you read anything about our ancestors? What are these values that you mourn the loss of, slavery, wars of conquest, sacrificing to stone idols?

I suppose I have had my problems with authority, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a band thing, often authority is wrong. it’s always good to be a skeptic. I pay my taxes, except for a few minor skirmishes way back in my youth I have not run athwart of the law. Oh wait a minute I think you are calling me out for being too compliant to the law by letting it tell me to buy insurance, live next to black (colored? Did you say that on purpose, just to get a rise?) people, and be nice to gays?

Buying insurance seems to me like paying taxes. If you don’t pay for your own insurance then everybody else has to pay for it, so I think it’s reasonable to pay my share. The next two are not things the government tells you to do.

It was the Vietnam War I was against, not necessarily all wars. WW II seemed to me like a war to be fought, and certainly if those Michiganders raised an army and marched on the hog butcher I would take up arms.

Sometimes you have very good days Beagles, but today I have to think that you have gotten into the medical marijuana, that your state is offering as refreshments for the great universal compulsory gay wedding of all its citizens which is surely right around the corner.

This ISRW, is something we need to discuss else we face the sorry prospect of one sentence posts:

My ISRW tells me this is wrong (Beagles)

My ISRW tells me it isn’t (Uncle Ken)

Our readers will want more.

Common Sense and Common Decency

Some people rely on religion to keep them on the straight and narrow. There's nothing wrong with that if it works for them, but even people who aren't religious should have a sense of common decency. Somebody said a long time ago that common sense is no longer common, and I suppose you could say the same thing about common decency. It's probably our own fault, our generation that is. Even those of us who weren't hippies kind of trashed the old fashioned values of our ancestors. While some of those values deserved to be trashed, it appears that, in the process, we threw the baby out with the bath water. So now we live in a culture where anything goes and nothing is sacred. I never was one to blindly follow the conformities of society anyway, and now, since there is hardly anything left to follow, it seems more appropriate than ever that I make up my own rules. So my opposition to gay marriage doesn't have to be based on religion or anything like that, all I need is my own internal sense of right and wrong, and that internal sense tells me that gay marriage is wrong. If other people want to do it, I have no way of stopping them, but that doesn't mean I have to approve it, or vote for it, and it certainly doesn't mean that I have to do it myself.

You know, the concept of the state getting totally out of the marriage business is not my original idea, I read it in some Libertarian literature time ago. It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but that's probably because I never thought that gay marriage would ever become a reality. Now that it is, I'm starting to see the logic behind that old theory. Not that it's ever going to happen, but if guys like Plato, Marx, and Hegel can come up with pie-in-the-sky utopian visions, why can't the rest of us?

With this plan, people could still get married through their church or any other voluntary institution, it's just that the state wouldn't have anything to do with it. If any number of people wanted to own their property communally, they could just sign a contract to that effect, and it wouldn't matter if they were sleeping together or not. The state would enforce the contract, not because it had anything to do with marriage, but just because it was a contract. There wouldn't be any more tax breaks for being married, but that's about all that would change. I think the main reason for those tax breaks in the first place was that somebody decided it was good for the country if people got married and had a bunch of kids, but that's no longer true because there are already too many people in the country and the world. I think it was also based on the idea that the wives wouldn't have to work and could stay home and take care of the kids. Nowadays they just dump the kids in day care and go off to work and, if both partners make good money, they end up in a higher tax bracket anyway.

On a different, but not totally unrelated subject: You have told me several times that you've always had a problem with people telling you what to do, be it your parents, your teachers, your preachers,  your bosses at work, or the government. Well, not always the government. When the government wanted to send you off to war, you said "Hell no, I won't go!" Now the government tells you that you have to buy health insurance, live next door to colored people, and be nice to those gays, and you don't seem to have a problem with that. I suppose those are things that you would do anyway, whether the government told you to or not, but I said the same thing about all those other authority figures. I remember saying something like, "I would follow a competent leader anywhere, as long as it was someplace I wanted to go anyway."  Would you like to spin this one around for awhile?

Eagle takes his ball and goes home

Well Beagles you have seemed like such a reasonable person lately, not wanting to get involved in Crimea and deciding that we hippies weren’t actually a commie front organization. But I have to wonder, about your giving up marriage for everybody to keep gays from having marriage.

I don’t agree with, but I can see where the religious don’t want gay marriage, because they think gays are all sinners, well some of the more liberal of this crowd will allow gays as long as they don’t do any of that gay stuff. And it didn’t become a sacrament until the middle ages, and I believe a marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic was considered just as bad as gay marriage, until, I don’t know, maybe a couple hundred years ago. Anyway I don’t think there is anything in deism that addresses the issue of gay marriage.

So I guess marriage is all in the hands of the state, and I thought your ilk didn’t like The State telling people what they can and can’t do. But we know how that works, you hate it when the state says gays can marry, but you like it when the state says they can’t.

Well what are the benefits of marriage? Surely you thought they were beneficial enough to enter into the institution, but now you are willing to give that all up just because gays can have the same benefits. I used to have this vision where God, who looks a lot like Willie Nelson, doncha think, gets tired of all that original sin and decides what the hell, you guys may be assholes, but you’re My assholes, I’m letting everybody into heaven, let’s go. And somewhere in that ascending host there are some clowns who are saying, “Even the McGillcuddies? You’re letting them into heaven, well then I don’t want to go.”

Crazy Man crazy. I think one of the big benefits of marriage is that you share your stuff. It would be kind of bad for you and the hypothetical if you had His and Hers on every piece of furniture or whatever, and whenever one of you got pissed, you could just take your stuff and go, and leave the other living in half a house. It would make raising children a lot more difficult, and yet you are willing to toss that into the dumpster rather than let Adam and Steve walk down the aisle? Crazy man crazy. Gee I wonder why nobody takes you seriously.

I’d do more research on that Hegel, but you know I can’t even say the guy’s name without bursting into yawns. But I believe the whole philosophical vogue at the time, was what are we doing, where are we going? If evolution wasn’t accepted yet, the ideas were around, and I guess they thought the idea is where is Man going. Well I quite agree with you, nobody knows, nobody can tell, too much shit going on. Every now and then you see some ‘futurist,’ on a panel show, and what the hell, why not just have a psychic, why not just have a roulette table?

"It Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings"

Not so fast, wise guy! That gay marriage thing was all over the news today. What happened was that one federal judge ruled our gay marriage ban unconstitutional. Then, at the request of our Attorney General, another judge put the ruling on hold until the appeals process is exhausted. According to our AG, there are something like eight other states in the same position. In the interim, about 300 gay couples got married in Michigan, but our governor proclaimed their marriages null and void, at least for now. The first judge based his ruling on the "equal protection under the law" clause, which surprised me. I thought he would base it on the "full faith and credit" clause, the one that says every state has to honor the laws of every other state. It occurred to me that we could weasel out of this thing by just not issuing any more marriage licenses to anybody, gay or straight, which would seem to fulfill the requirements of "equal protection under the law". I have said before that I would rather see the "benefits" of marriage denied to everybody than have them extended to the gays. Of course, I am just a lone reactionary, with no political party to call my own, so nobody takes me seriously.

I looked up the Ukraine situation again yesterday, and I now have a better understanding of what's going on there. It seems that the Ukraine has always been kind of a suburb of Russia, way back to the days of the czars. There used to be lots of Tartars in the Ukraine until Stalin kicked them out, and now the population is divided between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians. The Ukrainians want to join the European Union, and the Russians want to join the Eurasian Union, which is dominated by Russia. Right after Crimea jumped ship, the Ukrainian government signed a treaty with the EU. They aren't exactly members yet, but the treaty is about making them full members once they get their act together. Now another province or two is talking about jumping ship like Crimea did, and Russia stands ready to render military assistance if necessary. Meanwhile, the Tartars, who have been trickling back into the country since the fall of Communism, are kind of like the wild card, nobody knows what they're going to do. So far, I am standing by my original assertion that this whole mess is none of our business and we should keep the fuck out of it.

The Red Chinese don't make very good enemies because they are so inscrutable. Outside of that little scuffle in Korea, some 60 years ago, they have never really posed a threat to us. Mao, who is probably turning over in his grave right now, used to call us "the running dogs of capitalist imperialism" which, I guess, is some kind of Chinese insult that loses something in translation but, you know, "sticks and stones may break my bones.....".  I don't think they've really given up Communism, but they've morphed it into some kind of state capitalism, which probably has Marx and Lenin spinning in their graves as well.

I looked up that Hegel guy, and I can see how Marx was influenced by his ideas. What they both seem to have overlooked is that people don't always think and act logically. Then there's the "Butterfly Effect", which we have discussed before, but wasn't even invented in their day. In the real world, history doesn't march inexorably towards a predictable conclusion. It might, if you could control all the variables, but you can't. No, history stumbles and staggers along like a drunken sailor. Sometimes it sprints ahead for awhile, then it slips and slides backwards, then it veers off on a tangent, bumps into a tree, says "Excuse me sir.", and lurches on it's way to the next crisis.

Wedding bells in Cheboygan

Well that was quick wasn’t it. One day you were enjoying bliss with the hypothetical wife and the next day you are looking for a gay dog to adopt so that you can marry him, and maybe some place you can rent a tux or at least a snappy cummerbund for the ceremony. How exactly did that happen? I understand that they ruled the anti gay marriage amendment unconstitutional, but does that mean that they automatically made gay marriage legal? Wouldn’t they have to also pass some separate law to make gay marriage legal? I ask you because you are closer to the situation, and because you are more knowledgeable about how these legal things work.

I see now where there is big patriotic pressure to send small arms to the Ukraines. This could be a big test case about how an armed citizenry can hold of an invading army.

I think this is one thing that differentiates my guys from your guys. We are always looking out at the world thinking that we can make friends with anybody, we just have to understand them and have them understand us. You guys, on the other hand are always looking for an enemy. After the doctor slaps your pink baby butt you open your eyes and see that there is something wrong with the world. It should be a better place, but it’s not, and the reason it’s not is some guys, there is an enemy out there and it is our job to defeat him at every turn.

The Germans make pretty good enemies with all their Teutonic fierceness and their love of costume and goose stepping and their language with its shower of spit. But they were vanquished by the time we came along, but the cold war was beginning, and those Russkies, they made pretty good villains too.

They were a little less threatening than the Germans because they seemed a little stupid, and they were drunk most of the time. Their language was alien enough, and their accents sounded sinister enough when spoken by the men, though rather sexy when spoken by the women, well the young women, before they became babushkas. And they had Communism which scared the bejesus out of any good American.

Those May Day parades with the constantly changing array of guys is fur hats watching and all those missiles hauled by big trucks, and that music, my God, that music. But then one day there was that breach in the wall and poof, they were gone, just like that.

But then we had the Arabs, and they had that strange religion, and their rhetoric was much nuttier, and, let’s face it, they were pretty ugly, and they didn’t seem to have any women. But even though you guys tried to put Islamofacists into Webster’s dictionary as a blanket name for them all, it never quite stuck. There seemed to be all different kinds of them, sunnis, shias, sufis, and some of them weren’t even Arabs, and they had all these different countries, and they always seemed more interested in fighting each other, and now look, they are all bound up in Syria having the sunni/shia fight that always creamed their jeans, and practically ignoring us. Us, the most powerful country, who they used to call The Great Satan, and now they scarcely know we exist.

Thank God for Putin. After all we have learned since the cold war, it’s hard to get scared by that crumb bum, drunken Russkie army, but oh that Putin, with his bare chest and those cold, cold, KGB eyes, he gives us a shiver.

And thank God, because for awhile it looked like the Chinese were going to be the enemy, but we’re so used to eating in their restaurants, and they’re not even really commies anymore, it’s just hard to fear them.

Maybe it’s a good thing that legal pot is right around the corner from being legal. it should make that old gay dog look better to you.

None of Our Business

I seem to be kind of a heretic on this Ukraine issue. I thought that, when Russia renounced Communism, they ceased being the bad guys. The current bad guys are the Islamic terrorists, and I think we've got enough to keep us busy right there. The Crimea just voted fair and square to secede from the Ukraine and join up with Russia, which sounds like democracy in action to me. Aren't we supposed to be for democracy? I guess the rest of the Ukraine isn't very happy about that, but neither were the British when the American colonies voted to secede from them. Russia may have over reacted when they sent those troops into the Crimea, but I haven't heard any allegations of fraud or coercion with the election. I think it all started when the Ukrainian president wanted to increase economic ties with Russia, while the Ukrainian parliament wanted to sign a deal with some other European countries instead. So the president skipped the country, leaving the parliament free to cozy up to whomever they wanted. The Crimeans, who are mostly ethnic Russians anyway, then decided to take their ball and go home. I don't think any of this threatens U.S. interests or world peace. It's a local yokel issue, and the local yokels seem to be handling it just fine on their own. If the United States or, God forbid, the United Nations gets involved, it will only insure that the issue will go unresolved for decades, maybe forever.

It sounds like this hippie thing is something that evolved more or less spontaneously with no central leadership. Back in the day, some of us thought that it was part of the Communist conspiracy to take over the world, but we thought that about a lot of things. Now that I think of it, the collapse of Russian Communism was to our guys like the end of the Vietnam War was to your people. It's kind of hard to be a fanatic when you don't have a fanatical enemy, or at least a perceived fanatical enemy, to deal with. It's a good thing those Islamic terrorists came along when they did or we wouldn't have anybody to blame for our problems except each other.

When I was telling you about the drug problem in Cheboygan I forgot to mention the crack cocaine, which is another one that keeps showing up in the news. Last I heard, heroin was even starting to make a comeback. There's probably more pot around than there was in the 60s, and now they're talking about legalizing it. It's already legal for medical use, but they keep arguing about the details of production and sale. The ballot proposal that legalized pot for medical use wasn't very specific about that, which is why I voted against it. I said at the time that they should just legalize it or not instead of fooling around with half way measures like that.

It has occurred to me that one of the reasons that pot hasn't been legalized until recently is that people associated it in their minds with the hippie culture. Now that the hippies are too old to cause much trouble, and all kinds of other people seem to be doing drugs, the legalization of pot doesn't seem like such a radical idea anymore.

mass movements 4

I think the army raises and lowers its requirements depending on the availability of recruits. It would be interesting to know how categories like those with a criminal record or those with poor education do when they are in the army, and how they do when they get out.

I think the national guard was first used overseas extensively by Dubya’s guys because they didn’t want to tax the regular army so much and they certainly didn’t want people to think they might be bringing back the draft. I think once we get back from Afghanistan we won’t be going anywhere for at least twenty, thirty years.

All these Crimean hawks scream for vengeance against Putin, but they all begin by saying, “No boots on the ground.” How about this, in order to punish Russia, we supply Europe with the oil they would normally get from Russia with our oil? Sure, our oil prices would surge, but it would be worth it to aid those freedom loving Ukraines, wouldn’t it? Let’s see McCain and his ilk propose that.

I don’t know when I first heard the word hippie. I think it kind of all began with the Beatles. Their hair wasn’t that long, but they didn’t comb it (remember how shocking that was at the time, guys who didn’t comb their hair?), so it appeared kind of long, kind of cool too.

My little group in Champaign, who dressed shabby, hung out at the student union all day, looked askance at the square world, took up that long hair thing, and when we came across marijuana we took that up too. We thought of ourselves as latter day beatniks, but then word came from the coasts of young people who had long hair and did drugs and they were called hippies, and that looked like us too. We never really took to the name hippie, but that was what other people were calling us, and so what the hell.

Hippiedom started on the coasts and was late coming to the midwest, but maybe I was one of the early hippies in the Champaign community. People would stop me on the quad and have their photos taken with me. I would say pithy silly things and people would go “Ooooo.” It was pretty cool. And you know people around me started growing out their hair and smoking dope, and there was the same music we all listened to, and there were those stupid alternative newspapers that I am embarrassed to admit, we sometimes took seriously. So even though nobody signed a card, we had kind of a movement going.

And at first it was all peace and love. All smoking dope and taking LSD and listening to the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and grooving. All of the outside world was misguided and square, and that included political activists with their bullhorns and noisy demonstrations. But then, like I said, they started to draft us.

And at some point I lived in Berkeley for about four months. Now there was like the headquarters of political hippiedom. I’m sure I’ve told my Berkeley stories, but maybe not, or maybe you’ve forgotten them. Just say the word and I am ready to launch into them. It was a crazy world.

The hippie drugs were marijuana and the hallucinogenics, maybe a little speed, but not like the meth of today, more like diet pills, and that was pretty much it. I remember cocaine coming around as hippiedom was fading out. The thing was when you had marijuana and you wanted to smoke it you invited all your friends, but when the coke users used, they would maybe invite two or three of their coke buddies and then they would sneak away to where nobody else could see them, or ask them for a hit. That was when the regular people were beginning to outnumber the true believers.

I think probably the draft lottery was the death knell of the hippies. A couple odd things. I remember once being around some friends of friends who were frat guys and they were smoking dope, and that didn’t seem right to me, it seemed like dope belonged to us. I remember hitch hiking once and being picked up some long haired teenagers and we were smoking the dope and talking the talk, and all of a sudden they started talking about how they hated niggers. That didn’t seem right. And once when I was in Berkeley waiting in a group for the Berkeley Barb to come out so that I could sell it, I heard someone talking with a southern accent, and I looked around and I couldn’t figure out who it was, and finally I realized it was one of my brother hippies.

Hippiedom had spread out, got diluted, was fading.

Marx Was a Hegelian?

What's that, the German word for hooligan? Just kidding, I seem to remember a German philosopher named Hegel, but I looked it up to make sure. Don't remember what he stood for though, I'll put it on my weekend research list.

I think today's all volunteer army is more selective than it was in my day, although they didn't accept gays back then. You're right that they didn't tell you what to think, just what to do. They wanted everybody to have a high school diploma, but if you didn't have one they would still enlist you and send you to GED classes once you got in. They didn't have to worry about not getting enough recruits because they could always make up the difference with draftees. After the draft was discontinued, they must have improved the pay and living conditions or they would never have gotten enough people to join. Then again, they seem to have shifted a lot of their missions to the National Guard since then, so maybe they don't need as many in the regular army.

I don't know why, but I was surprised to hear you say that the drugs came first with the hippies and the politics came later. Was the hippie culture already pretty well established when you got into it, or were you one of the founding fathers? In my world, all that stuff was just something that I read about or saw on TV. We didn't have many real hippies in Cheboygan, but we had kids that came home from college walking the walk and talking the talk. After they were home a year or two, though, they just got married and settled down like everybody else. I understand there was more of a hippie culture in Petoskey, about 40 miles away, probably because they have a community college there.

On the other hand, the drug problem around here seems to have gotten a lot worse over the years. Our county prosecutor was recently quoted in the paper as saying that 80% of his cases are drug related. When I first moved here, drugs were virtually unknown, except for some pot that the college kids brought home with them. Now it's meth and prescription drugs that you hear about the most. It's not just kids either, people of all ages seem to be involved. Of course, the people of all ages were kids once, but I'm not sure if they grew up with the stuff or got into later in life. I don't get around much anymore and, if I did, I probably wouldn't be moving in the same circles, so all I know about it is what I read in the paper or see on the news. One of my neighbors, the one who plays the loud music, is rumored to be involved with drugs, but he also drinks a lot, so I don't know how much of his behavior is actually caused by drugs. He isn't a bad guy, just a little spacey, depending what time of the day you run into him.

I think you're right about how all those mass movements get diluted by people jumping on the bandwagon later on. It's kind of a paradox, isn't it. On the one hand, the more people you have the more power you have but, on the other hand, carrying a bunch of lukewarm believers on the rolls has got to slow you down eventually. Then there's always the danger that the new guys will just take over and change the group so much that the charter members don't want anything more to do with it.

mass movements 3

My mistake on Marx. I did thumb through a bio of his lately, but I don’t think I got beyond when he was a young Hegelian. Hegelian? I thought, and then my mind wandered.

At one level the army seems like the epitome of a mass movement. Everybody lives together, wears the same clothes, there is a clear chain of command. But I think it doesn’t tell you what to think. You have to obey orders, but between orders you can think what you like. You can be a dem a rep, a wiccan, an eckankar, a birther. Well I guess it has to be that way, because they pretty much have to accept everybody that wants to join. You would think they would want to instill a super patriotism, but then everybody has their own idea of patriotism and in the end it would be a distraction.

I guess the two pillars of hippiedom were drugs and the war. The drugs were marijuana and the psychedelics, maybe a little speed, but not too much, and pills and hard drugs were frowned on. The drugs came first, but then after you had smoked your way out of school and lost your deferment, the draft came into play and hence lefty politics.

The thing was, early on, it was all very nice. If you saw some other long haired guy, he was your brother, he would share his weed with you, his food, you could crash on his floor, he would give you money. Because the outside world generally frowned on us, and because we didn’t like them either, too square and they never had any weed to share with us, we generally lived together, on college campuses, in areas of big cities. I bet there was some little head shop in a rundown area of Cheboygan where the local hippies hung out.

And some were more dedicated, and some were more easy going and there were some who went in for conspiracy theories but we all had pretty much the same politics.

There was a certain amount of trust between us. No fellow hippie would burn you on a drug deal, a guy who was anti-war like you, would not try to screw your girlfriend. Well not very often.

What I particularly remember is community tax. There would be a little can in stores and restaurants that we frequented, and after you paid for what you came for, you put a few coins in the can, and then that was collected by, well I am not sure by who, call them community elders (well not really old, none of us were old, but guys who had been around longer), and they distributed it around. I knew some guys who ran some monthly radical rag funded by community tax.

That was the other thing, The Revolution. Everybody believed in The Revolution, or at any rate gave it lip service, because to believe otherwise would get you shunned by hippiedom. It was extremely vague as to what this meant, we just knew it was coming and we would somehow be a part of it. Nobody owned guns. Only a square would think that a revolution would need to be violent.

Well that’s all pretty silly, buy it did become popular. And here is the thing, when it was unpopular there was not much future in becoming a becoming a hippie, you just did because that is what you believed, but once it became popular, well there was a future in it, you might become a hippie just to reap the benefits.

Probably a better example is the commies. At first you just became one because that is what you believed, but once the commies started taking over, guys on the sidelines who might have been thinking of becoming a baker or a banker got to thinking, hey I could become a commissar. That’s what I think happens, as the movement grows it picks up people who are not true believers.

More next post.

Marx Was Dumfounded?

I don't think that Marx was dumfounded when Russia and Red China went communist since, having died in 1883, he wasn't around to see it happen. Unless, of course, he was looking down from Heaven, which I doubt because he didn't believe in Heaven. All kidding aside, I have always wondered why the Christians put so much faith in faith. I mean, if God and Heaven exist, then they would exist whether anybody believed in them or not. If a tree falls in the forest, and you don't believe that it fell, does that mean that it never really fell? Not bloody likely! It's true, though, that Communism was supposed to follow capitalism in the natural march of history but, for some reason, it didn't.

I remember you asking some time ago about our local Tea Party chapter. I had read about them in the paper from time to time, but I didn't remember a lot of the details. It so happens that there was another article about them in today's paper, which I just now rescued from the garbage can, much to the consternation of my hypothetical wife who is kind of finicky about stuff like that. Anyway, their full name is "Cheboygan Tea Party Patriots/Cheboygan Campaign for Liberty". Sounds like they couldn't agree on what to call themselves, so they compromised by including everybody's suggestions in the title. The group's leader, Stephanie Jacobson, describes them as "a nonpartisan group of citizens that is concerned with the amount of taxation and government overreach at all levels". It says they have a website: http://chebteaparty.org . I haven't checked it out myself yet because I'm too busy writing to you, but maybe I will later when I have a chance.

I didn't think of it at the time but, looking back on it now, I guess I was looking for some kind of mass movement when I joined the army. Maybe that's one reason I was disappointed with army life. Those guys didn't seem to harbor any particular loyalty to their country, or even to the army. If they were loyal to anything, it was to each other. The officers were loyal to the other officers, the sergeants were loyal to the other sergeants, and the peons were loyal to the other peons, more or less. If one of the leaders wanted to inspire you to greater efforts, he didn't say "Do it for your country!", he said "Do it for me!"

 Maybe that's why I've had problems with every organization I've been in, I'm just not into the cult of the personality. If I admire somebody it's for what they do, or maybe what they say, but never for who they are. My favorite classical composer is Richard Wagner who, I understand, was a real prick. He was notorious for not paying his debts, and he borrowed a lot of money in his lifetime. He arrogantly believed that, because of who he was, everybody should kiss his ass and just give him whatever he wanted, no questions asked. If he were alive today, and I knew him, we probably wouldn't like each other, and I certainly would never loan him money. Nevertheless, I like his music, not for who wrote it, but for what it is. Similarly, when Bob Dylan started doing rock music, I stopped buying his records. Nothing against Dylan the man, I just don't like rock music.

Maybe that's where all those mass movements go off the rails. They start out with a bunch of people who all believe in the same things, but eventually a leader emerges who tries to slip his personal agenda in there. Some of the members follow him off on a tangent, while others try to stay true to their founding principles. Then again, sometimes they originally formed around a popular leader and, when he dies, it just isn't the same anymore.

mass movements 2

Marx’s theory was that you needed an industrialized country to have a proper communist revolution, he expected it to be in Germany and was a bit dumbfounded when it happened in Russia, even more dumbfounded when it happened again in China. In fact I think all the commie revolutions have happened in agrarian countries.

Before Hitler took over, Germany had a large commie contingent and I think it was close to fifty-fifty, and I think Hitler got support from other countries because they would rather have him then the commies. And one of the reasons they let him get away with so much crap before the war started, was they kept hoping that he would attack commie Russia.

Oh and that working up a crowd thing is no virtue. I never like a guy who can stir men’s souls.

Men get in much more trouble when their souls are stirred then when they are a little bored.

I don’t see libertarians getting into a mass movement, just not in their nature. Oh you had the tea party, but half of them were religious, and most of them were more anti-Obama than they were anything else, and I don’t think you can underestimate the guys who thought they looked pretty damn cool in those hats.

But I think mass movement is more of a lefty thing. You know how we are always talking about The People, and we seem to like mobs and marching. Not a good thing about us, but there it is.

And then I’m thinking that I had an actual experience of being in a mass movement by being a hippie. But what about joining the army, isn’t that like joining a really massive mass movement? What do you think?

I think I’ll start on my mass movement experience in my next post.

It Doesn't Take All Kinds, But We've Got All Kinds

Aye, those paper mill boys were a motley crew. They weren't bad people, just a little funny in the head. We used to speculate that it was caused by working the swing shift, and maybe that was part of it, but I think there were a couple other reasons as well. We used to joke that it was the best job on the river. The reason that was a joke was that it was pretty much the only job on the river. People worked there who wouldn't normally work in a factory because it paid  better than whatever it was they were really cut out to do. We had high school drop outs and college graduates working side by side, the only thing they had in common was that they all wanted to live in the Cheboygan area. There's nothing really special about Cheboygan, but people who grow up here tend to stay here if they can. Those who have to leave to find work usually come right back when a local opportunity opens up, or when they retire, whatever happens first. Then there was the fact that most of those guys grew up and went to school together. They married each other's sisters, or didn't, and some of them were still upset about that.

I don't think that the logging business around here was ever unionized, probably because there were a lot of small operators that kept going in and out of business. Many of the loggers were only loggers in the winter and farmers in the summer. There were a few big sawmill operations too, but they must have kept their employees relatively happy, for the times they lived in. It was different in the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula, they were all big operations and were a hotbed of union activity, the old fashioned kind of union activity, head busting and all. The copper mines played out decades ago, but those Yoopers continued to vote Democrat until just recently. I think that Obama was largely responsible for their conversion. Then there were the auto plants Down Below, they got organized a little later than the copper mines, and I think there was some head busting, but not as much. Last I heard, that region was still voting Democrat.

I read a book once about Hitler, and it told of the long standing animosity between Germany and Russia. It went back at least as far as the days of the Czar, and the advent of Communism didn't dampen it down one bit. Funny that Karl Marx was a German, but the first big country to embrace Communism was Russia. You'd think that would have brought them closer together, but it didn't. Hitler had fought in World War I, and he blamed Germany's loss of that war on the Commies and Jews back home, who he believed conspired together to sell Germany down the river. He vowed that he would make them pay for that some day, and he did his best to fulfill that vow when he came into power. Hitler wasn't the only German who felt that way about the Jews and the Commies, but he was the one who ended up leading the charge against them. One thing you can say about Hitler was that he sure knew how to work up a crowd.

I don't know what to tell you about those mass movements, I'm not really a mass movement kind of guy you know. Come to think of it, some of them never really die out, they just kind simmer down. Last I heard, there were still some Anarchists around, at least on the internet.

mass movements

Geez what a crew you had down there at the paper mill. What manner of men might they be?

There must have been loggers up at the top of Michigan back at the turn of the twentieth century, and probably miners, and I bet they were rip snorting guys back then. The north and the west was were hotbeds of union activism. Well that was then this is now.

Well I was thinking of mass movements. I was thinking about the soviet union. Well you know they had it awful bad, under the czar, awful bad, and it must have felt really good to topple him and toss him and his family into the ditch. And even though those commissars could be a little nutty, and pretty ruthless, still I would guess it made a Russkie proud. They probably felt good marching in those May Day parades waving their red banners.

Then along came WW II, and there was a lot not to like about Stalin, but they were fighting an enemy who didn’t want them to just take off their hats when their leader went by, or speak their language, or submit to some odd economic plan, they were fighting an enemy whose explicit plan was to kill all of them and take their land. And you know what, even with all his shiny weapons they beat him. It took a little while and a huge sacrifice, but they kicked his ass.

So I don’t know, I think when they were standing in those long lines for a head of cabbage, they didn’t feel so bad about it because hadn’t they and their countrymen knocked off the czar and kicked the Kraut’s asses.

But their kids, you know, their kids were like the guys in the paper mill, they just couldn’t get enthused. They didn’t want to sacrifice for Mother Russia, anymore than your constituency wanted to sacrifice five minutes of their break time to vote in Beagles and his reign of truth and justice.

I’m just thinking of mass movements and where do they go. Everybody gets all fired up, and maybe it’s for a good reason and maybe it’s for a bad one, but probably there is no way of knowing that until you know how it all comes out in the end. I just wonder, you see them at one point all marching together and they look so proud and so sure, and the next thing you know they are all wandering around wanting to know if there is any beer left.

Union Politics

My experience with our local union was nothing like what you see in movies. All the head busting was done long before I came along, and I don't think it was ever done in our plant. Most Procter & Gamble plants were not unionized, and there was little interest among their employees in organizing themselves. The only reason we had a union was that, when P&G bought the Charmin Paper Company, the union was already there.  From what the old timers told me, they wouldn't have organized either except that their plant manager was a real prick. The previous owners had gone out of business and the plant had sat idle for years before Charmin bought it. Then P&G bought Charmin a few years later, expanded the operation, and I was hired as part of that expansion.

The United Papermakers International was a democratic union that did not have the reputation for corruption or violence that some of the other labor organizations like, say, the Teamsters had. Our stewards and other officers were elected fair and square, and most of them did a pretty good job, considering that they had little, if any, training, and the rank and file seldom came to a consensus about anything. Department stewards were paid ten bucks a month and got their union dues for free, which was another ten bucks a month. If you figured that into an hourly wage for the time they spent, well suffice it to say, nobody was in it for the money.

I was a department steward for about five years, off and on. The first time I was elected to represent the Warehouse Department because the incumbent had pissed a lot of people off and he said he was tired of the job anyway. It was supposed to be a two year term, but I bid to another department right in the middle of it. Years later, in still another department, I was approached by some people and asked to run for steward because I had some experience, and they couldn't find anybody else who wanted the job anyway. After two terms, some other guys approached me and asked me to run for president of the whole local union. I explained to them that, while I was fairly popular in our department, I doubted that I had the wherewithal to win a plant wide election. According to our rules, you couldn't run for two offices at once, so I had to give up my steward's job to run for president. I told them fuckers that, if they wanted to see me become president, they'd better get their asses down to the union hall on election day. Voter turnout was usually light, so a few votes one way or the other could determine the election. They were going to lose me as steward either way, so they had to make up their minds if that's what they really wanted, and apparently they did.  As it turned out, none of them fuckers turned out to vote, and I lost by about that same number. The next day, they were all standing around and grumbling about how they wanted to get rid of our current union president, who had just been narrowly re-elected.  I asked them how they had voted yesterday, and they all expressed surprise that the election had come and gone without them noticing it. So I told them fuckers that they had their chance and blew it, and now I didn't want to hear any more grumbling about our president. I said that I would support him as best I could until the next election, and that they should do likewise. I don't remember if there was another election before the plant closed down but, if there was, I didn't run for anything.

Norma Rae had it right

Well you see, in your time of trouble, when The Man wanted you to work a 72 hour work week and was set to cram it down your throat whether you liked it or not, the union came through for you.

This guy, this union steward, he probably didn’t give a shit about Beagles. Maybe he cared about that whole union thing and the struggle and the ideals, but maybe not at all, maybe he got the job through his uncle or his brother in law, and it was just something that brought home a couple bucks. Even if the latter was true, he still knew if he fucked up he could lose the position and the couple bucks, so he did his job.

If there had been no union steward, if this had been one of those right to work joints the republicans so dearly love, when you walked out the door you would have kept walking and when they hired the new guy you know they would have told him that they fired the last guy, so if he wanted to keep his job he had better do what he was told without any lip.

I think we can all agree that these things start out well, a pissed off worker looks around at all the other guys also getting fucked over and thinks maybe if we all stand together we can stand up to the boss, and maybe we can make get a forty hour week and make them pay us overtime if we have to work longer than that. And maybe not just this mill, but the other mills in the area, and the state, and the nation. And maybe while we are at it, we can give the workingman of this country a better deal, break the railroad monopolies, break all the other monopolies, make the big city bosses count all the votes during elections, make laws for the people, not by fat cats making big bribes to our lawmakers. Blah, blah, blah, make a better world.

Well whose blood does not race with sentiments like that, who is not willing to risk starvation, to carry a picket sign in the sleet and the cold, to get his head busted by company goons? Well to be perfectly frank, not all that many people. Most people would happily take the forty hour week etc, but not if it meant getting their heads busted.

But there are enough whose blood rushes to make a movement and once you have a movement going there are those who join in, entranced by the stirring songs, the marches, the handsome red armband, and maybe you win. Well not all that stuff, hard to take the monopolies from the fat cats, and keep them from making bribes and all, but the forty hour week, and overtime, that is doable.

And because you got your head busted you get to be union steward, and the couple bucks that goes with it. But the bucks aren’t that important because you believe in what you are doing, and maybe when you stay the owner’s boot from some downtrodden guy’s back, you can’t help but give him a lecture on the history of the union and the guy nods politely enough, but you can’t help but notice that yawn.

And that new steward, he doesn’t even bother to give the guys the lecture. When you want to talk union to him, he’d rather be talking about the Cubs. When the company tries to bribe you, you tear up the check right in their faces, but you notice the new steward is suddenly driving a fancier car.

And then a new company says, you know what those union guys are nothing but troublemakers, tell you what, we will pay you union wages but without a union, so now you won’t even have to pay those awful union dues. Well who wouldn’t go for a deal like that? And then as long as you are making those fat wages, you might as well become salaried. You may have to work a little free overtime now and then, but you get to wear a suit. And then the overtime keeps getting bigger and bigger, and then all those guys around you get fired so you have to do all their work too and the free overtime is huge, and maybe you feel like you ought to storm into the boss’s office, but you know when you walk out, you will have to keep on walking.

Whaddaya think, could I have been a union organizer why back when? Wouldn’t have wanted to get my head busted though.

"Takin' Care of Business and Workin' Overtime"

Before I forget, I drove by the Secretary of State office today and saw that they had a big sign advertising their website:  http://michigan.gov/sos 
I was surprised to find out that you now need all the same documents to get your first driver's license as you need to get a state ID card. I suppose that's just the way it is in the post 9-11 world.

I saw something on the news this evening about Obama's overtime proposal. At first I thought, "There he goes again, doing something on his own without congress!" It seems, though, that what he's doing is telling the Labor Department to change their regulations a bit, which I guess he has the authority to do. It's not a new law or anything like that, all it does is clean up the definition of "supervisor", which is long overdue. It wouldn't affect me, if I was still working, because I was always hourly.

When I first started at the paper mill, I used to work a lot of overtime because I was young and had the energy. They were supposed to ask you if you wanted the overtime and, if you turned it down, ask somebody else. One day, they scheduled me for a 72 hour week without even asking, and I told the boss I wasn't going to do it. He threatened to fire me, I threatened to quit, and I stormed out of the office. Then somebody told me to go see my union steward, which I did. The next day we had a meeting with my boss and my boss's boss. The first thing my boss said was, "I don't understand the problem here, forty years ago everybody worked 72 hours a week." Well, we got it straightened out, but it wasn't the last time I had to argue with those people about their precious overtime.

It wasn't about the money, they were happy to pay the time and a half, it was about the way they just assumed you were going to do it, like there was something wrong with you if you didn't. According to our contract, you could be obligated to stay if your relief partner unexpectedly didn't come in, but you couldn't be forced to work non-vacancy overtime. If the vacancy was known about ahead of time, they were supposed to offer the overtime to you first and, if you didn't want it, they were supposed to try to find somebody else. If they couldn't find anybody else to take it, you were obligated. It was actually more complicated than that, I'm giving you the short version but, suffice it to say, there was a procedure that they were supposed to follow, and sometimes they didn't. A big part of the problem was that most of the guys would take the overtime without complaint, so the managers got used to the idea that everybody wanted it. I lobbied for years to get stronger language in the contract, but nobody was interested. What really pissed me off was when they laid a bunch of people off and then expected the rest of us to work overtime to make up the difference. I tried to tell people that, if we all refused to work the overtime, they would have to recall at least some of the laid off people, but again, nobody listened to me. Like Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

There are probably a number of reasons for the decline of the labor unions in this country, but I think at least some of the blame falls on the union members themselves. Like you said, our predecessors fought and died to organize those unions, but our generation seemed to just take them for granted. I don't know if it was the same all over, but our local union people spent more time and energy arguing with each other than they did with the management. There didn't seem to be any agreement about what it meant to be in a labor union, each person having their own version of it.

When the mill was closing down, and the company was trying to sell it to anyone they could, I tried to get people interested in getting together and buying it ourselves. It wasn't my original idea, United Airlines had recently gone through something like that, and so had a much smaller local company, Detroit Tap and Tool. For some reason, everybody thought it was just a big joke, and I soon gave up on the project. Three years later, one of our own managers got together with some outside interests and did indeed buy our little paper mill. He's had his ups and downs with it, but he's still running it today. It's nothing like it used to be, but it's still in business. The worst part is that I think he got the idea from me, and then he wouldn't even hire me back. The ungrateful bastard!

Workers arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains

Couldn’t you look at it as the dems want to raise our wages and the reps want to cut our taxes, and these benevolent forces are working together to make our lives better in every way, every day? Is that such a stretch? There, now don’t you feel better?

How do you like Obama’s initiative to make companies pay overtime? I think this could be a big winner for him. If companies had to pay overtime maybe they would be more likely to hire additional people to do the job, and that would be good no? This whole thing where companies just keep laying off people and not hiring new people so that the same people have to do more and more work, and if they don’t like it, there are plenty of unemployed people to take their jobs, is just so cruel and stupid. You are right Beagles, we both have made mistakes in our lives, but we both did the right thing in getting out of the working world when we did.

It was late in my working live that I ever heard of this salaried workers thing. You mean they have to work all these extra hours for nothing? That’s insane! At the time I was assured that they got paid so much that it was worth it, and anyway they were mostly workaholic types who loved working anyway.

Well it still seemed a little strange to me, but I was pretty sure I would never be joining their ranks so I wasn’t overly concerned.

You know the forty hour week was a big deal, it was a big struggle, people died and went to jail over it. It was mostly those old, almost comic, lefties from around the turn of the century who we have all forgotten now. Well they wanted all these other high-minded things like liberty and equality, and once we got the forty hour week, we decided we would just stick with that and the hell with liberty and equality and high-minded things. Anyway the idea got stolen from the radicals by the democrats and then it was left to be enforced by the unions, who are maybe a little corrupt and all that, but they are the only force that stands between us and the slavering titans of capitalism who would like all of us to be minimum wage slaves working eighty hour weeks. And anymore candidates rail about how they are out to destroy unions and win office on that platform. What fools we mortals be.

You know there are all these things floating around in politics and maybe this party will do that and the other do this and maybe it will make a difference in your life and maybe it won’t. But working forty or eighty hours a week makes a huge difference in your life, and yet you don’t see it discussed much.

Well you know what the business titans say, oh laissez faire capitalism, such a delicate instrument, we dare not interfere with its workings which yields the golden egg for all of us. Well the golden eggs mostly for us titans, but don’t we let you other guys have a bit of shell every now and then? Oh we dare not mess with minimum wage or overtime pay lest the goose roll over and die.

Well we finally got the forty hour week, I think around the time of WW I, and after WW II it was firmly entrenched and so were the unions and economically we never had it any better.

Then things started to slide, and who was blamed first, the unions, and we, poor suckers, thinking our futures lied with climbing the corporate ladder, and wishing to get closer to the golden teat of the titans, joined in, bad unions, cast them aside like a bad habit, and now we are working overtime and not getting paid for it.

Until Barrack Hussein Obama takes out his golden pen and signs this Presidential Memorandum.

No Saints Here

Before I forget, I forgot to tell you about the affidavits. If you don't have a picture ID, you can sign an affidavit and still get to vote. They do this right at the polling place, but I don't know how complicated it is. They have a table set up in the corner just for that purpose, but I've never seen anybody using it.

If the Michigan voter ID law was first passed in 1996, I don't remember it. Like I said, they've had it for the last two or three elections, so that 2005 date sounds more likely. Our current Republican governor and his Republican majority in both houses of the legislature were elected in 2010 and took office in January, 2011. Before that we had a Democratic governor for eight years, during which at least one house of the legislature was always dominated by the Dems. Before that we had a Republican governor for eight years, but I don't remember what the composition of the legislature was during his term. If something was passed in 1996, it would have been on his watch and, if the courts struck it down, that would explain why it was never implemented.

I don't think that the Republicans are any better job creators than the Democrats, and any jobs they do create are bound to be at the low end of the pay scale. The Republicans want to lower our wages, and the Democrats want to raise our taxes so, whoever wins, we lose. A pox on both their houses!

I don't know what it would take to bring the good jobs back to this country, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with Red China. Those crafty devils seem to have more of our money than we have, and are now loaning it back to us for interest. Those guys are way over due for another revolution. Where are the Red Guards when you need them?

Something is wrong with an economy that depends on consumer spending anyway. A sound economy is based on production, not consumption. I don't know if we're ever going back to that but, if we do, it will be too late to help the likes of you and me. As it turned out, we made it out just in time, but I feel bad for the young kids starting out nowadays. What do they have to look forward to? Get a college degree, end up working for low wages anyway, and spend the rest of your life paying off your student loans.

back to the poorhouse

This whole thing about poor people is kind of a lie by both parties. Nobody is going to eliminate poor people. We will always have them with us no? I think we have discussed this before, but back in medieval times they were just part of the social milieu. Way back further than that, before the guys with funny hats took over the religion, Christianity was all about helping the poor, I believe that was the main thing that they did. I’m not a bible scholar like Beagles, but I believe the new testament is full of the poor.

Even after the guys with the funny hats took over the religion they still at least pretended that they were concerned about the poor. If your soul was troubling you, you could always give some alms, not sure it always got into the hands of the poor people, but it was always good to have them around in case some coins trickled down. And you know you didn’t have to worry about them, because this life on earth was just a snippet, and the main thing was getting into the big show, so rather than giving them a hearty breakfast it was better to give them a glimpse of the divine, which called for fancy churches and gaudy robes for the guys with the funny hats. Anyway there was always a place for the poor so there was no reason to try to eliminate them.

Probably it was the prots who screwed that up. They had this work ethic thing and those idle poor people, it was kind of embarrassing having them around, and it would probably be a good thing to lift them up into moderate prosperity. Well how do you do that?

Very, very, roughly I think the two parties have two different solutions to the problem. The dems want to give them stuff, food stamps, welfare, free little perks here and there to make the trip up to moderate prosperity a little easier. And the reps in the words of Beagles to provide opportunities for the poor to climb out of poverty. which translates to the republicans, as does everything else, as tax cuts for the rich. Unbind those sainted job creators from taxes and regulations, and by gum they will be creating jobs to beat the band, because salting away big sacks of cash is only secondary to them, they are mainly interested in creating jobs to help the poor. If Jesus came back today He would be wearing a silk hat and be hedging funds.

Maybe a little unfair, because Beagles is not exactly a republican, though he would never vote for a dem, which I think makes him a rep for all practical purposes. But anyway, neither party is going to eliminate the poor. Actually I don’t think it can ever be done because the poor are defined as people who have less money than everybody else, and there are always going to be people with less money than everybody else. Well unless we can achieve Obama’s socialist dream where there will be a guy on every street corner who will make you show him the contents of your wallet and if you have too much he will take some away, and if you have too little, he will give you some, but probably that is not going to happen anytime soon.

One thing about poor, or not quite moderately prosperous, people, is that when you give them money they spend it, which is one reason why it seems like extending unemployment benefits would be a good idea to stimulate consumer spending. Rich people are not that good consumer spenders. They might buy a new yacht every now and then, but that’s only a bit of the money they take in. I think mostly they buy more stocks and bonds, but that’s supposed to be good for the economy too, so I don’t know. Doesn’t it sound like what they are always telling us is that to be good citizens we should spend more, oh and we should save more too? I don’t know about that one.

I tried to research the Michigan voter ID law. It seems like there was one in 1996 which was unconstitutional until 2005, and then recently there was an extension of it which your gov vetoed, but I couldn’t find out who held the levers of power when this was going on, but I am going to go out on a limb and predict that all this ID stuff was the instigation of reps, because a dem would no more make it harder to keep dem votes from the polls than he would kiss the butt of a solid gold statue of Ronald Reagan.

I like the idea of not letting pols take to the airwaves. I am no media basher, but you have to wonder how much they must love political campaigns. It is like Christmas and St Paddy’s day for them.

Harder For the Poor

I had no idea it was that hard to get one of those state ID cards, so I guess you're right about that part. Nevertheless, if you move a lot and your life is messy, it seems like you would want to have one of those things. Nowadays people are always asking you to show some kind of ID for one thing or another. It wasn't always like that, neither my hypothetical wife nor I remember having to jump through hoops to get our first driver's licenses, or to register to vote either. I suppose it started getting like this because of 9-11.

Secretary of State offices, on the other hand, are conveniently located all over Michigan. They don't have them way out in the boonies, but Cheboygan has one, and it's only a city of 5,000 population. People who live in the country might have to drive 20 miles or so to get there, but they have to do that anyway to shop for groceries and other essentials. I don't know why you couldn't find one on the internet, but a lot of people would look in their local phone book before trying that.

Okay, voting is harder for the poor people, but so is everything else. The only way to remedy that is to provide opportunities for the poor to climb out of poverty. Decades of experience have shown that just giving them handouts won't do it, they need decent jobs and, for that, they need a decent education. They are unlikely to get either one without a motivational work ethic, which they apparently aren't getting from their local subculture. I don't know how to fix that, but it seems that somebody should already be working on it. I hear a lot of crying lately about the government being broke. Well, rich people pay more taxes than poor people, so it seems like they should be doing everything they can to help us all get rich. Same thing with the general economy. Last I heard, consumer spending accounts for 70% of the economic activity in this country, and I'm sure that rich people consume more than poor people. So why don't they make us all rich? It would be better for everybody.

I'm not sure when this voter ID law was passed in Michigan, but it's been in place for at least the last two or three elections. This means you can't pin it on the Republicans. Our Republican governor has been  in office less than four years, and we had a Democrat in that office for eight years before that. The Republicans have only had a majority in our state legislature for the same amount of time as they had the governorship, before that, the Democrats dominated at least one house for as long as I can remember. I don't know how much voter fraud they had in Michigan before the ID law was passed, but I'm sure it was not nearly as much as they had in Chicago when we were kids and Mayor Daley was in charge. I also don't know if the ID law has made any improvement in that regard. It seems like it would be hard to document something like that, the only ones you'd know about would be the ones that got caught.

Like I said before, the best way to limit political campaign spending would be to ban all political advertising from television. I'm sure that's where most of the money goes, and nobody likes seeing that crap on TV anyway. I don't think this has anything to do with freedom of speech, television is not speech, it's just television. I think there's still a rule that they have to give all the politicians equal time, well if they all got zero time, they would all have equal time. They don't allow cigarette advertising  on TV, and politicians certainly generate more hot air than cigarettes do. If secondary smoke is bad for you, can secondary bull shit be any better?