It Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings

I heard most of what you told me about the recent primary developments on the evening news, but you filled in some details that I had wondered about. I was switching channels during the commercials and I caught some political commentary on the Bloomberg Channel. The commentators agreed that this has been the strangest campaign this country has seen since at least the Civil War, and wondered if it was going to be the new normal. They used the word "outrageous" to describe Trump's behavior several times, but it was tinged with grudging admiration. They said that, every time Trump says something outrageous, it's all over the news, which gives him a lot of free publicity. I said something like that some time ago. The GOP started out with over 20 candidates, most of whom were unknown to the general public, and Trump found a way to distinguish himself from the pack early on. It may be just an act, but all politicians are actors more or less. It will be interesting to see if he keeps it up now, or tries to switch gears and play a different part. If he does, he just might get away with it because the public has short memories. I am starting to see why you think of politics as entertainment.

You're on the right track with those French phrases, but you have them backwards. Savoir faire literally translates as "way of going", and it comes out idiomatically as "knows what he's doing, or where he's going." Je ne sais qua translates literally as "I don't know what", and describes a mysterious charm or attraction that somebody might exude, as in "He has a certain je ne sais qua". I think that comes closer to describing what we call cool in American vernacular. Then again, I had to ask what cool meant, so I couldn't possibly understand it. I did take two years of French in high school, but that was a long time ago. Do the Germans have a word for it? The only German I remember is, "Ein bier bitte".

The three proposals on our ballot were millage renewals. They were specific to our school district, but other districts all over the state were voting on proposals of their own. Renewals usually pass, it's when they ask for a millage increase that people get concerned about it. The other proposal that I mistakenly thought was going to be on the ballot was a statewide proposal to raise the sales tax from 6% to 7% to replace revenue lost when they eliminated the sales tax on gasoline so they could get away with raising the gas tax. Decades ago they took money from the road fund and put it into public transportation, and our roads have been deteriorating ever since. It's possible that this one is going to be on the ballot in November and whoever put the election notice together made a mistake. I find that easier to believe than that I imagined the whole thing.

Our local paper used to be considered a morning paper. The reporters worked an afternoon shift and the printers worked midnights. When the post office, only a block or two away, opened in the morning, the papers would be sitting on their doorstep and they would go out with that day's mail. Now the paper is printed in Sault Ste. Marie, some 80 miles away, so we are probably getting it a day late. The reporting of the fate of the millage proposals should be in tomorrow's paper, unless they're just going to blow it off because those Yoopers could careless about what happens in Cheboygan.

trump, trump, trump, the Donald is marching

I can see that you don't follow the news as closely as i do.  I was watching the Cubs, but sneaking between innings to CNN and Fox to watch the Indiana returns.  I was expecting the big girl to take the democratic side, and she was leading early, but then the count went against her and she lost to Bernie.  It didn't make much difference because the Hoosier dems split their delegates proportionally.  Since it was close Bernie only gets a few more delegates than her, a drop in the bucket of her big lead.

It had been expected that Trump would take the republican side, putting another nail in Lyin' Ted's coffin, and indeed he did.  Earlier in the day Trump had quoted some National Enquirer story linking Lyin' Ted's dad to Lee Oswald which had made Ted hopping mad and he had delivered a diatribe against Trump accusing him of lying and philandering and whatnot, so it was a shocker when after some meandering in his concession speech he said he was dropping out.  This would have been a little after eight with the Cubs sweeping to victory, so I switched fulltime to CNN and Fox. 


The anti Trumpers had clung to the idea of the contested convention and some faint hope of whatever, but that was all gone now.  Ted had seemed mildly conciliatory, he didn't blast Trump but he didn't congratulate him either.  It was sometime before Trump took the podium, one would think he was re-calibrating in view of developments, but who knows, anyway when he finally got there, he too was mildly conciliatory.

I was watching to see how the anti Trumpers would react but it was hard to see what they will do.  When a sudden development like this happens the pols tend to curb their tongues waiting to see what everybody else will say.  We will see, but for now it looks like my hopes for a third party will not come to pass.

I'm going to roughly translate savior faire to coolness and je ne sais qua to ability.  It seems to me that Trump has the former and the big girl the latter.  I guess Bernie has the cool.
It'll be interesting to see what Bernie will do.  Can he continue to pummel the big girl with her the only one standing against Trump? 


Just now listening to some Hoosier evangelist on the radio who couldn't understand how Trump won and he was going on about stuff and the reporter, running out time, was pressing him with the question that everybody wanted to know, who was he going to vote for, and finally he said he couldn't see voting for either Trump of the big girl.  How many evangelicals will stay home?  And the republican senators and representatives are in a bind, if they back Trump, they lose the wishy washers and if they distance himself they lose the Trumpists.

We dems are rubbing our hands in glee at the prospect of not only getting the presidency, but maybe the senate as well, and maybe even the house.  But then you never know.

I tried to look up your education bill, but I don't know if it was a state or a local issue and I couldn't find anything.  I looked up the Cheboygan newspaper and all I learned was that the quilt walk was a success.

Pardon My French

It occurred to me while I was writing last night that the American concept of "cool" was pretty close to the French phase "je ne sais qua". At first I was going to say "savoir faire", which is the same only different. Savoir faire literally translates as "way of going", and it's something like je ne sais qua except that it also implies some kind of skill or competence, while je ne sais qua means some indefinable charm with no competence implied. Donald Trump is a good example of what you get when you choose your leaders by je ne sais qua instead of savoir faire. Well, he might have some savoir faire, but you wouldn't know it to hear him speak. The only way we will find out is if we elect him and see how he works out, which is not likely to happen. Of course he wouldn't do half of what he says he will do, but the trouble is we don't know which half. Hillary probably has more savoir faire than she has je ne sais qua, but the trouble with her is that she is likely to use it against my ilk. Your man Bernie probably has both qualities, but he is even more likely to use them against my ilk. Trump is surely an asshole, but he is our asshole, or at least he pretends to be. It doesn't matter what Cruz has because he seems less and less likely to win the nomination as time goes by. I would rather see Trump run against Bernie than Hillary because the voters would have a clear choice between a right wing nut and a left wing nut, and the wishy-washers would have no place to go. If Hillary wins the nomination, she is sure to capture the wishy-washer vote and a good measure of the left wing nut vote, which will likely put her over the top.

My hypothetical wife and I went to vote today, and we were the only ones there except for the workers, who were drinking coffee, and one of them was practicing his guitar. They said only about a hundred people had voted before we did, and the polls had been open for eight hours. With only four more hours to go, it would be surprising if the total turnout was more than double that. The bad news is that the proposal we went there to vote against wasn't even on the ballot. I asked about it and the nice lady said that she had never heard of it. This might explain the apparent news blackout of the proposal, but I don't understand why it was in the official election notice that they are required by law to publish. I wish I had saved the paper in which it was printed, but I didn't, so now all I've got to go on is my memory. While a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, I find it hard to believe that I imagined the whole thing. It's one thing to forget something that happened, but it's another thing to remember something that didn't happen. Be that as it may, the good news is that there were three other school tax proposals to vote against, so we didn't make the trip for nothing.

I'm sure we have talked about this before, I am not against education, I am against the sneaky backhanded way they fund it. In my lifetime, the State of Michigan has passed about a half dozen tax "reforms" that were supposed to pay for the schools and get them off of our property tax bills. All these laws are still in effect, but the schools are still on our property tax bills, and they're still crying for more money. Another thing is that they needed more money back in the 60s and 70s because of increasing enrollment, and now they say they need more money because of declining enrollment. With declining enrollment they get less state aid, but they also have less kids to educate, so why should they need more money? Another thing is that one of the proposals we voted against today was for special education, but the state is already supposed to be funding that, since the state mandated it in the first place. (Unfunded mandates are illegal under Michigan law.) The local schools funded special ed for years while a lawsuit worked it's way through the courts. When the local schools finally won, the state was supposed to take over the payments and reimburse the local schools for the money they had already spent. Now, years later, they want to renew the special ed millage that was supposed to be only temporary in the first place. No, I am not against education, I'm against the people who run it.

back home in Indiana

Hoosier primary today.  My dad was a Hoosier, the son of a chicken farmer who came to Chicago to get work during the depression and fell for a slick city woman from Berwyn.  Once or twice a year they would pack us three kids into the backseat of the car, fussing and fighting and wanting to know if we were there yet, and drove us to Goshen Indiana.  The farm was kind of cool, the henhouses stank of chicken piss, but even that was cool in its own way.  I guess that was as close as I ever got to those hunting trips that made you a swain to Old Betsy.

I have a Hoosier friend now who i visit once a year.  He lives north of Circle City (Indy) in a farmhouse and everything around him is flat as a pancake, the way we Illinoisans like it.  At night you can see the glow of Indy on the horizon, but if you look to either side you can see the glow of tiny faraway houses, but over the years they have become not so far away and they extend further along the horizon from the glow of Indy.  It's approaching.

Not that any of that has anything to do with anything, just talking about Indiana.  Lyin' Ted is stalking up and down Main Street practicing his quick draw and Trump is in the saloon bragging with the riff raff, his arm around some bar girl. 


I guess I should be for Lyin' Ted to win.  If Trump doesn't have the 1,237 and doesn't get the nomination, I can't see him not going third party.  If he does get the nomination it's not as likely that some faction of the republican party will bolt.  A third party is good news for us dems.  But Trump on top is pretty good news too.  I guess it comes down to I can't stand Lyin' Ted, that whiny preacher speech of his is nails on my blackboard, Trump is more like some cartoon character, I don't mind him as much.

I caught a snatch of some Trump backer on the evening news and she was saying something like she likes Trump because he reminds her of some people she knows, her brother for instance.  Dollars to donuts that brother of hers can't keep a job because all his bosses turn out to be losers and he is always hitting her up to help him pay his rent, but he's a type that she is familiar with.  I always thought that was his charm.

You know education is the path forward.  Educated citizens vote more wisely.  One of the reasons that the USA does so well (we are still number one) is that we have a good education system.  Whenever we want our kids to do well we urge them to get more education.  But whenever the schools want money we never want to give it to them.  Kudos for you for re-subscribing to the paper and for paying attention to the issues of the day.  But shame on you for voting against a school bill. 

Still Paranoid After All These Years

Silly me! I thought you were planning to raise an army of aged hoodlums and hippies to overthrow the social order......again. I should have known better. Truth be known, there isn't much of a social order to overthrow anymore, it's all factions and subcultures. Then again, maybe it always was like that, but we didn't see it because we were too busy trying to get laid or something. You're right about one thing, though. It takes a certain amount of je ne sais qua (French for "I don't know what") to get people to follow you, regardless of how smart or competent you are. Who knows how many potentially great leaders like us never got off the ground because they weren't cool enough.

I guess you're right that Trump is cool because he certainly inspires a cult following. It would be funny if he actually won, then we would find out whether or not he has any skill at all to do the job. My guess is that he would make a complete fool of himself, but you never know about people like that. Meanwhile, your man Bernie seems to be giving Hillary a run for her money. Good for him!

Tomorrow I've got to vote "no" on another school tax scam. What they did was raise the tax on gasoline which, for some reason, we didn't get to vote on. Then they eliminated the sales tax on gas,  I suppose to make it seem like they didn't raise the gas tax all that much. This means more money for the roads but less money for the schools, so now they want to raise the sales tax on everything else to make up for it. There hasn't been much publicity about this, but I managed to catch one of those election notices that they are required to publish in the newspaper. (Lucky for me that I just recently re-subscribed.) They are holding the election now instead of November, I suppose hoping that few people will notice. Of course the people who are in favor of the proposal will know all about it, it's just us antis that they want to keep in the dark. Well, there will be at least two "no" votes tomorrow, mine and my hypothetical wife's, so they better not try to say that it passed unanimously like they did with the blue jean vote at Sawyer School. They are not dealing with a naïve school boy this time, I have the power of the internet at my disposal and I'm not afraid to use it.

rambling on my mind

I was specifically talking about cool, not specifically the youth culture, but these things all kind of blur together.  These conversations tend to ramble all over, and this one I have just been running off my mouth, speaking of things that I think are related and wondering if there was something there.

Most of the time in my paintings I have only a vague idea or what I am going to do and I put the paint down carelessly at first and then somewhere along the line something happens and that's the path I follow.

Speaking of the watercolor class, there is a couple in it and he is a bit of a windbag, and she was sort of complaining about it, the way old married couples do, where they aren't really complaining, just walking well-trod boards by way of getting some exercise and making a little conversation.  But it brought to mind one of my favorite theories about the perils of living alone, you don't have anybody to tell you that you are full of shit, so that instead of your crackpot theories being shut down, they take root and grow tall.  That would be one of the benefits for me in this blog, having someone to air my theories out to, but it turns out that the guy I am talking to is a crackpot like myself.

I suppose it's just as well, it's not like we are doing any harm.  I was a precinct committeman once and you ran for some county office, but that's as far as we got.  You know if we had worked hard, or had inherited a hefty sum of money we could have acted like big fucking assholes, we could this election be respectively the Godzilla of the democrats and the King Kong of the republicans, roaring at each other while the populace shuddered in their shadows.  Cool huh?

i don't think the youth culture has taken over America, but then we run against your usage of taking over, which to you means more like making a spectacle of yourself than actually grasping the reins of power.

And I certainly don't think it would be a good thing.  Witness the current crop of movies, superheroes and young adult books, and people, some movie critics who I respect, talk about them seriously.  I'm a big movie fan, and it offends me to see all this crapola.  Of course Hollywood has always spun out reams of crapola, so maybe I shouldn't complain.

But then what am I going to talk about?

Kid Stuff

I have been thinking about it all weekend, and I still don't know how I'm supposed to respond to your last post. First you say that you don't want to talk about the youth culture, and then you proceed to talk about the youth culture. My hypothetical wife is like that. When she says that she doesn't want to talk about something, what she really means is that she wants to talk about it, she just doesn't want me to talk about it. You seem to agree with me that the youth culture has taken over the country, but you seem to be saying that's a good thing. Let the record show that I think it's a bad thing. I don't know what else to say about it that hasn't already been said.