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.