…taking myself too seriously again…

just sayin’….

I grew up in a family with a dog. Although I was known to slip Cocoa something I found unpalatable from my plate occasionally, I don’t recall her taking heat for something one of the humanoid members of the household was responsible for. Nevertheless, I can appreciate the humor of the “blame it on the dog” shtick and all of the opportunities the concept presents. I’m sure if the potential consequences for me had warranted hanging some sin on Cocoa, and assuming the transposition had been believable, of course, I’d have jumped right on it.

I’m glad I grew up with a dog. Cocoa was right there during fourteen of my crucial developmental years, ready, albeit unwittingly, to host responsibility for virtually any breakage, missing edibles, embarrassing smears on floor or wall, and foul odors which might occur within sight, smell, or earshot of my parents.

I have to wonder, though…. What do people with less dynamic life forms as companions do? I can’t fathom trying to hang some rude noise or offensive odor at the dinner table on the family guppy.

Please press two to kiss my ass….

Like Popeye, my toddlerhood hero, I finally blurted out “That’s all I can stands and I can’t stand no more…!”

From the day we moved into our current residence in 2006 right up until this noon, “Rachel” has been calling to get my attention by alluding to impending disaster around my credit card account, followed by secondary assurances that there is nothing wrong with my credit card but that time is running out for me to take advantage of some undisclosed low rate deal to refinance my balance or something like that. Rachel, of course, is a recording.

Same old shtick: press “one” to talk to a “live operator”, etc. I almost always press “three” to indicate I want no further calls. I don’t think that one works on Rachel’s end of the line. On a half dozen or so occasions, I have pressed “one” to firmly state that my phone number is registered on the “Do Not Call” list. Usually they just hang up. They won’t even listen, probably because the organization they work for, or maybe “Rachel” herself, knows that FCC rules require them to desist if they are asked to. Yet, the calls also seem to come in from different numbers, so I imagine “Rachel” has some sort rotating menu of accounts to call from just to confuse the issue. Obviously, this is not a reputable, legitimate business. If one doesn’t realize that by the time” Rachel finishes saying “Hello…” during the very first phone call…..

Today, leaving my half made sandwich on the kitchen counter, I pressed “one”, and waited.

I don’t recall the stooge’s name, but it certainly wasn’t “Rachel” and he sported a heavy accent. He greeted me and did the obligatory “…how are you?” bit, although I seriously doubt that he gave a northbound rat’s south end.

I ignored the query and slowly, firmly, and in my best boot camp belly voice stated that mine is a “Do Not Call” number, that I demand the calls stop, and that the FCC would be notified otherwise.

Rachel with Testicles ignored my controlled rant and began his spiel, so I repeated my demand again, but a tad louder. I wonder why we do that….talk louder when someone pisses us off. It’s not like they didn’t hear. They just don’t give a toot.

Rachel with Testicles interrupted me. “Wait wait wait,” he said, “lemme just speak with you for a ……”

That’s when Popeye occurred. I’d certainly had all I could stand and I wasn’t in the mood to quibble about it.

“Listen!” I bellowed, with a resonance that would make any man in a Smokey the Bear hat leaning at a 45 degree angle and barking orders from his bowels proud.

I roared again over the persistent yammering of Rachel with Testicles.
…..“Listen up…!!!”

That’s when I took off the gloves and transitioned from Manly and Assertive to Adolescent with Switchblade. I said some things that were most likely illegal, but absolutely offensive beyond my wildest dreams. I heard the dead silence on the other end of the line as snow avalanched from both sides of my roof and the cats clamored up the stairs to their secret hiding place under the bed. I hung up.

This time I wrote down the number and will be trying to negotiate my way through the bureaucratic minefield to register a complaint. In the meantime, if “Rachel”, with or without testicles, calls me again, Mister Nice Guy is “off duty”.

Despite heroic efforts by fiction writers during the last two centuries, we have nevertheless entered the Age of Idiocy with our eyes wide open, our open palms outstretched, and our alleged brains in a state of suspended animation.

We achieved a blissful condition of blind obedience to pundit polarities first, with “Liberals” automatically retching in horror at any utterance by someone assigned to the “Conservative” team, and “Conservatives” briskly goose-stepping off into rants of authoritarian national conservatism in response to acts of respiration by anyone daring to acknowledge more than a passing interest in the rather human tendency to give a toot about others.

The American version of Homo Sapiens (I can still say that without kicking off an emergency session of Congress, can’t I?) having thus completed the process of psycho-social mutation, rendering virtually all intellectual and moral decision making functions identical to the sound of one hand clapping, we enthroned a maniacal spendthrift on Capitol Hill, gave him our blessings to max out the National Credit Card and mortgage the family gem collection to the nines, while we sit back oohing and aahing like toddlers at a Disneyworld fireworks display as this glib Pied Piper and his drooling minions play Feng Shui games with the Constitution of the United States.

My genetic code predisposes me to antiauthoritarianism. Besides, I can’t pay for the dubious privilege of being bureaucratically told when to gee and how to haw.

Fortunately, there are now less than 300 days remaining until we can begin to clean up after our unfortunate affair with another National Nincompoop.

Terrible ideas share the unvarying pedigree of having started out as good ideas badly thought out.

Historically, I have tended to vote Libertarian, Independent, or Republican. I’m of bit of a political mongrel in that regard, but I don’t think I’m that unique, really. I know a few people who would vote a straight party line ticket without reservation even under the most ridiculous of circumstances, but I believe the majority of folks put some thought into it. I wasn’t pleased with the Democrat victory in November of 2008, but neither was I fan of President George Bush nor particularly enthused about John McCain being paired up with Sarah Palin.

The Libertarians have spent more time and energy conducting a non-stop beg-a-thon for the past decade than they have addressing any issues of interest, and the CATO Institute hasn’t run any candidates that I know of yet, so I was a bit at sea when it came time to cast my vote

I have tried very hard to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt since he was sworn in. I didn’t like his political portrait but, as our first President of African heritage, I felt he might be the right person in the right place at the right time to foster some significant positive changes in the American social landscape.

That was naïve of me from the outset. Democrats don’t tend to “foster” change, they kick in the door and legislate it. They are the Boy Scouts who walk the little old lady across the street for her own good whether she wants to cross or not.

Regardless, I was encouraged-or perhaps I should say successfully distracted-by his suggestion that he would do something about the entitlement culture. I was also impressed with his articulate presentation and the potential he had for serving as a role model other than the likes of Dennis Rodman for our inner city youth. That opinion has not changed. Politics aside, I still believe Obama has the potential to leave a positive mark on the American brand. But that cautious support is waning.

My most recent excuse for throwing the morning paper across the kitchen and spewing obscenities, besides the cat deciding to use the litter box at the precise moment I begin to eat my breakfast, was the piece about a possible Federal ban on texting while driving.

Like virtually all major Democrat missions, the idea addresses a behavior or circumstance that most people hate anyway, so it is difficult to criticize without sounding like a “Grinch”. Like virtually all major Democrat missions, it would prefer to err on the side of safety rather than on the side of individual freedom and responsibility. Like virtually all major Democrat missions, it proposes to attach compliance with the legislation to the distribution of Federal dollars the States have become dependent upon in order to comply with requirements previously established by the Federal government. Technically, the states retain the “freedom” to tell the Fed to go screw, but then they would have to finance their own methods of complying with mandates concerning education, transportation, corrections, and host of other Federally financed and Federally diddled aspects of daily life.

Few things drive me to distraction more than seeing someone in the next lane on the Interstate or navigating in town traffic with a cell phone pasted to the side of his head or his attention fixed on some other electronic device instead of on the rapidly changing collision vector between his vehicle and mine. One of those annoyances of superior intensity is the rapidly changing collision vector between my right and responsibility to make rational decisions of my own accord the Federal government’s unilateral annexing of that activity “for the greater good”.

Where will it stop? Terrible ideas have an unvarying pedigree of having started out as good ideas badly thought out. No Legislator in his or her right mind has ever been documented in the Congressional Record as having blurted out “Hey! I have a positively dumb-assed idea I think we should enact immediately!” Nevertheless, bit by bit, unnoticeable detail by unnoticeable detail, government has become increasingly vested in the day to day activities of you and me, ostensibly in the interest of leveling the playing field and providing equal access to the benefits of our Constitution.

How ironic that the most common cry of protest by those who oppose each new regulation is the charge that the government is sacrificing the Constitution itself to fuel the fire that runs the engine that is supposed to protect that very document.

One of my concerns is that this progressive war for safety and equity will be waged at the cost of the freedom to enjoy it in the end. My observation is that in those societies where authority and force have been used to ensure that everyone gets his fair share, the only one’s left with any freedom, and consequently the “Captain’s Share”, are those in power, while the “safety” enjoyed by the citizenry is directly proportionate to their unwavering compliance. This inevitably becomes circular, rendering any periods of stability decidedly unequal and definitely temporary.

The question of how to provide a path of longevity for a society based upon the concepts of individual freedom and liberty presents a conundrum. Surely, those who are willing to sacrifice small bits of individual freedom of choice and responsibility in exchange for a little less inequity must see that there is a point of no return beyond which a free society ceases to exist and the only way to reacquire it would be through violence. Surely it must be held as self evident that absolute equality cannot exist in a free environment, because although we may equal in one sense we are certainly not the same. Even identical twins enjoy differences that make them individuals in the larger sense. Attempting to smooth out those differences by requiring one to provide for another, or bureaucratically pigeonholing people into approved levels of dependency whose needs are to be fulfilled by pigeonholing others into approved levels of social responsibility cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called “freedom” in the ideal sense.

But the question has never been whether or not the American people want freedom. It has always been a question of how much freedom we want, what each of us is willing to exchange for it, and where the reasonable parameters of compromise begin and end. I have never believed I have the right to demand that my neighbor be required to pay for my freedom, or visa versa.

By the same token, this is not the same land first visited by the colonists of the early seventeenth century and after, and we are not the same people with the same experiences and life stories. Those who formed the United States as an entity in the late eighteenth century applied what they knew in the context of their time and put together a rather brilliant blueprint for a system of freedom and liberty that had the potential to survive indefinitely, but only if the recipe was followed and the matrix left intact. It was a matrix intended to stay a matrix rather than become a finished product. Each era must be free to use the same matrix of freedom and liberty to construct appropriate solutions for the contexts of their age. Freedom can grow by improving how we use the matrix, but it cannot survive if we manipulate the matrix itself to make it fit the needs of the moment. In other words, freedom cannot grow, if the framework upon which it is being nurtured is changed.

The challenge facing the first President of African heritage to lead the United States, therefore, is to find ways to make significant improvements in the freedom he has experienced and sees around him, without damaging the framework upon which it is built. Plucking away bits of individual freedom because those individual bits have not been balanced adequately with individual responsibility increases neither and consumes both.

Therefore, although I agree wholeheartedly that texting while driving is a dumb behavior, making a Federal law about the issue will eliminate neither the texting nor the dumb, but it will reduce the freedom to choose not to do a dumb thing and the liberty to be responsible for one’s own behavior.

The President has far more important things to do than invent new ways for the Federal government to micromanage private behavior on the grounds that it takes place in a public venue while at the same time expanding the breadth of what is considered “public”.

…….I remember looking up from the morning crossword puzzle and, with my pencil, parting the curtains covering the window across the table. Dawn. I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall above the refrigerator and noted that, as of that moment, I had completed 65 years on this galactic spitball.

Celebrating my birthday with a dish of prunes and a Purple Pill wasn’t my idea of a joyous event, but it would suffice. I sat back and contemplated the first time some young titan of testosterone had mustered the audacity to look me in the eye and file me under c:\fart\old.doc not too many years earlier.

I had smiled and reminded him that the primary difference between him and I was that his skin fit better. Other than that we were pretty much cut from the same cloth, I had noted.

I wondered though, on that morning of my 65th birthday. Surely I was not unique, my life having demonstrated quite clearly, at least to that point, that a speck of pine pollen wafting to the surface of Moosehead Lake in north-central Maine had disturbed the surface of that great body significantly more than my existence had influenced one way or the other humanity’s headlong rush toward oblivion, omnipotence, or the nearest bar. Nevertheless, my own assessment of my demeanor and behavior gave rise to the question of how a 65 year old man is supposed to conduct himself. I was new at this “Senior Citizen” shtick.

Was it OK at the venerable age of 65 to lean back and belch as long and as loud as one could?

Did other 65 year old men pilot four wheel drive trucks through the woods, driving with one hand and conducting Mozart as it booms out of the radio with the other?

Was it OK for a 65 year old man bellow “Eat me” to the strains of Handel’s Messiah when someone in a Massachusetts SUV passed him on the right in the breakdown lane and shook an insulting fist at him?

“These are important questions,” I decided.

I vowed to contemplate them carefully, and if need be, make some minor adjustments in my behavior once I reach 66….

That was almost three years ago, and I’ve got another birthday coming up in a couple of months. Things haven’t changed a whole lot, except I’m three years older. I still greet the day in my favorite rocking chair by the kitchen window, drinking coffee and doing a crossword puzzle.

I did manage to answer those three important questions I had, however, and the answer was surprisingly simple: “Who cares?”

I look at it this way. The belching thing is all about timing. One has to make some concessions. I learned at an early age that “belching” was not considered to be “polite” in our culture. Being of the male persuasion, however, I also learned that developing an impressive repertoire of body noises was not only requisite to the rites of passage, but it annoyed the hell out of my mother. It was particularly gratifying, since my primary practice studio was my second floor bedroom, when she could hear me all the way down in the cellar doing laundry.

Puberty changed all of that, and I had to learn to adjust my behavior to suit the environment. Other than a few rather interesting acts of adolescent bravado, which will go unrevealed here, I learned to “mind my manners” with the best of them, which enabled me to date females of my own species, join the campus upper crust as a Fraternity man, earn a commission in the Navy, and enjoy meaningful employment for much of my adult life.

Moving ahead nearly half a century, I find remarkable similarities between childhood and seniority. While the rules of propriety learned over a lifetime remain fully intact, I find that a little bit of well executed doddering garners some tolerance for public transgressions. I generally withhold my intentional launchings, however, for the privacy of my home, parking garages at night, still mountain lakes at dawn, and other places where the acoustics demand a cameo performance.

As for the second two questions, I might add that “yes”, it is perfectly normal for men to drive four-wheel drive trucks in the woods, and what they listen to for music is irrelevant. What would be decidedly obscene would be a squat, balding gnome wearing baggy jeans and a backward baseball cap while making signs, and chanting “Rap”.

Similarly, it is also perfectly normal to listen to Handel’s Messiah while driving on the Interstate, even if temporarily distracted by the need to utter obscenities at a Massachusetts driver passing on the right in the breakdown lane, although it would probably be more appropriate to turn off the music until I am finished.

…..or “open mouth, insert plug”…

This is a bit off-topic for me, as the media concerned doesn’t normally merit shelf space in my head. However, the nature of the incident caught my eye while plowing through the daily effluvium of MSN’s sorry offerings and I felt the urge to comment.

First of all, those who call themselves “Doctor”, hang shingles on the airwaves, and use their presumed expertise to entertain the nation’s voyeurs, exemplify the concept of “oxymoron” as well as that of the regular kind. I don’t think there is much that could be added to clarify that statement further, so I’ll proceed to Part Two of my observations regarding “Doctor Laura” Schlessinger’s recent shit-storm.

During one of her recent broadcasts, she engaged a caller in a set-to that was characteristically neither therapeutic nor informative. “Dr.” Laura used the relatively benign issue of the woman’s annoyance with a crass neighbor’s boorish remarks about her interracial marriage to launch into a crass and boorish power-trip of her own, rife with verbal exhibitionism. The fact that she seized the opportunity to diddle the notorious “N” word with the fervor of a pubescent girl’s first discovery of the “G Spot” was of minor interest, in my opinion, and hardly worthy of the subsequent attention it received. She repeatedly interrupted or talked over the surprisingly gracious caller’s attempts to respond and keep the conversation on track, but it was her party and I suppose she could behave the ass if she wanted. The “N” word itself has been appropriately pummeled into irrelevance over the past fifty years and really only garners the passion of those who need a hobby these days, while it transitions to its new home among other linguistic archaisms, both pleasant and unpleasant.

Rather than further embarrassing herself with empty apologies and other impotent backpedaling exercises, the good “Doctor” might consider a timely retirement from the tabloid airwaves and a career change that would provide peace of mind to all concerned.

Can you say “Would you like fries with that?”

…..or “he said, she said”…

I’m not big on conspiracy theories, especially when it comes to government entities. First of all, I sincerely doubt a government entity could remain cohesive enough, long enough, to carry one off. Secondly, human nature demands that someone would “leak” the story….to make a buck, to make a mess, to manipulate the politic, or just because they were in a snit over their last Performance Evaluation.

That said, I am dumbfounded at the gullibility of the public in regards to the unplugged Gulf of Mexico oil well off the coast of Louisiana. Our collective bile is leveled at the BP oil company, with some requisite small change left over to toss at the government either for not fixing it or for letting it happen in the first place.

In apparent direct contradiction to my opening statement I have to wonder why BP is taking all of the heat for this disaster and who is benefitting from that circumstance. It’s as if BP motored into the Gulf, erected a platform, drilled a hole, and started sucking crude out of the epidermis of the planet while everyone else was home watching a football game on TV and having a beer. That is unbelievably naïve.

To begin with, the well in question was drilled by Halliburton (NYSE: HAL), not BP, and it blew out while Halliburton was sealing the well with cement. Supposedly, shortcuts were taken in the matter of lining the well, and it has not been said whether that was BP’s call or Halliburton’s. The “blow-out” and subsequent explosion and fire sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, built by Transocean Ltd. (NYSE: RIG) and leased by BP, killing eleven workers.

When the well blew, one of the safety systems in place was a “blow out valve”, but it failed to shut automatically. It was manufactured by Cameron (NYSE: CAM).

Then, there are the contributions of government to the disaster, beginning with the State of Louisiana itself which reportedly more than 4,500 coastal permits to energy companies between 2005 and 2009 without denying a single application. Obviously, any state rich in natural resources stands to benefit enormously by exploiting those assets and the pressure to make those decisions more on economic and political factors than on science or environmental concerns must be great.

The federal government also has a role to play in the regulation of off-shore drilling activities. Regardless of one’s political orientation, hindsight will be sure to reveal that someone, somewhere, either dropped the ball or failed to pick it up in the first place.

The liability for the oil well disaster in the Gulf wears many hats in addition to that of BP, which of course bears the focal point of the responsibility because they were running the operation. Some of the more extreme pundits claim that each of us bears responsibility every time we fill up at the pump, but they warrant about as much attention as those who worry about whether lobsters scream in pain when they are cooked. Surely, it would be beneficial for the human species to figure out how to coexist with the rest of its environment. While brief flashes of brilliance in that regard are bound to occur from time to time around the world, on the whole it would be quite foreign to our innate character as hunter-conquerors, with parasitic tendencies, to do so either globally or as a spontaneous species-wide behavioral change.

The well will most likely be plugged at some point in time by some effort, or it will simply run dry, but in one way or another, the crisis will end. The planet will heal itself in spite of short-sighted human efforts to do so first, though its methods and adaptations may not be in sync with humanity’s blueprints for the way things should be. In the long run, humanity will have to adapt to the planet’s evolution, not the other way around. In the meantime, amid the finger pointing and posturing and transfers of wealth, it would be nice if we could learn something about ourselves from this whole thing in addition to learning better ways to exploit our environment’s largess.

…..or “swan diving into an empty pool”…

Some have rationalized the health care coup is like social Security, Medicare, etc. ……….. there are many analogies to this kind of thinking, many of them describing progressive insertion justifications by adolescent boys cajoling gullible adolescent girls that small increments of added involvement won’t do any harm and won’t constitute total surrender……

Be that as it may, although I am retired and and dependent upon Social Security and Medicaid, I am reminded that my grandfather, his father, and his father before him on back as far as one cares to figure survived well into old age, in their own homes, without such “programs” dispite the fact that they were simple working men, fishermen, and farmers.

It would be devastating to cancel Social Security and other such things abruptly because we have adapted to them. That fact neither makes them right nor justifies “just a little deeper” into of the quasgmire of dependency on Big Government.

Keep in mind, government is reactive, not pro-active. It reacts to a crisis by increasing its hold on the populace. Social Security would never have occurred in good times, and it didn’t go away when good times returned.

Such is the descent into Never Never Land…………..

…..while stringing barbed wire to the four winds…

Nearly half a century ago, Lyndon B. Johnson observed “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” That was in the day when freedom and opportunity were restricted by the color of one’s skin, which was a sad state of affairs and contrary to the creeds of our way of life.

We aren’t there yet, but mostly because we have created a culture of entitlement that reaches far beyond mere race and color and attaches virtually every accoutrement and symbol of “normalcy” to approved membership in one or more of a seemingly endless list of “special interest” populations. It isn’t about color anymore, except for those few who lack the self confidence or desire to try, and the majority of those could and would if they had to.

Nobody in his right mind would voluntarily jump ship in the middle of the ocean in favor of swimming, and few in their right minds who enjoy a legislated leg up on the playing field are likely to test their unaided mettle just because it might be a fun thing to do on a Tuesday afternoon. One of the great ironies of Johnson’s War on Poverty is that, by raising the bar on that classification so that more folks could escape the ravages of abject poverty, there ensued a lemming-like stampede to either fit under the bar or to periodically bump it up another notch. We are becoming a nation of huddled masses milling about under the umbrella of Government Tutelage and Permissions, rather than a refuge for those from elsewhere seeking the opportunity to live freely and challenge their own limits.

This is not necessarily the fault of those millions caught in that eddy, nor of the millions more who unwittingly continue to serve as cattle for those glib social servants who deliver eloquent orations about “Free Range” while liberally stringing barbed wire to the four winds, but is most certainly their responsibility to initiate and create change.

Demanding change isn’t enough. Such wailing falls on deaf ears. Liberty has never in the history of the world been given as a gift. It is a quality that can only come from within and can only be taken as one’s own by those who desire it. It is impossible for one man to offer another freedom without looking back. It goes against human nature. Heck, we pray for our kids to grow up and strike out on their own, but when they do we keep a weather eye to make sure they do it right.

The point is that the American people, tall, short, skinny, or fat, regardless of color, creed, cultural heritage, gender, gender preference, gender ambivalence, or favorite vegetable, none of us will really begin to enjoy the freedom and liberty we like to crow so loudly about until we forcefully put our obese and malignant government on a crash diet and simply say “no”. That will take courage and determination, and there will be consequences, because those enjoying a free ride, and those whose livelihood and self identity depends on the addicted remaining obediently addicted, will fight like their lives depend on it. They’re right. So am I.

Make a decision and take to your corner. The bell is about to ring.

…..oxymoron of the millenium…?

One has to give MSNBC credit. They may not ask the biggest questions but they sure are consistent at addressing the dumbest ones, or at least in addressing the biggest ones in the dumbest ways. If some guy solved the mysteries of nuclear fusion, MSNBC would want to know what he ate for breakfast on alternate Tuesdays and whether or not he drives a Prius.

Today’s winner was a story with the teaser Big quake question: Is nature out of control? Our sleaziest supermarket tabloids couldn’t shake a stick at internet keyboarding’s Keystone Kops when it comes to squeezing a sense of urgency out of the pointless with the fervor of a fourteen year old latching onto a Big One in front of the bathroom mirror

Nature “out of control”?

What the hell does that mean?

Was nature ever IN control?

Is it even supposed to be, and if so, according to whom?

What self-appointed Neo-Creator gets to define “control” and describe the up to date parameters of that condition?

Presuming someone has the inclination to answer the Big Question, who do they propose to blame? The Republicans? Exxon? Osama bin Laden? Liberals? Jews? Wal-Mart? Gay marriage? The opposition to gay marriage?

There is an endless menu of fascinating science to be explored concerning the nature of our planet and its ebbs and flows. But to approach such a subject with such an incompetently contrived headline is more than sad.

Good grief! If today’s internet “news” is any kind of an indicator of the quality of information tomorrow’s youth will depend on for decision making and values formulation, we might as well start handing out loin-cloths and pointed sticks now to get in on the ground level of the next great advancement of humankind.