Things get reversed for the slightest reasons. I’m drinking coffee right now—it was made hours ago and I put too much sugar and cream in it. It doesn’t taste as good as the last cup—but I know if I were starving or dying of thirst, this simple mugful would seem nectar from the gods. Whenever I’m not enjoying my food, I try to imagine I’m in a death camp—I take small bites and chew for longer than I usually do—sometimes enjoyment is missed simply because we pass by too quickly.

It’s always ‘backwards-day’, in my view. I have found that ceasing to need to find something makes it suddenly appear—and you can’t fake it, it only works if you’ve really stopped caring. Another example is from our younger days, when Claire and I would frequently dine at the finest restaurants (and this was back before they outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants). Claire and I joked one night that my having just lit my cigarette was the cause of the waiter’s appearance with our next course. But we used it ever afterward—when we would tire of waiting for our food, I would light a cigarette and, voila!—our food would appear. It was really quite effective and rarely failed us.

And I am prone to noticing these things because I’m a great ‘achiever’—I want to get things done, I want to close that sale, I want to make friends and influence people. But I never do a proper job of it—no one who goes straight at their objectives ever has an easy time of it. The truly successful people in the world are those who want to avoid specificity, and straight lines.

A banker, for instance, will never look you straight in the eye, having just heard your uninterrupted business-proposal pitch, and say, “Loan approved, my good man.” Life doesn’t work like that. It took me a long time to appreciate the importance of being comfortable—comfortable people are in no hurry—they cannot be frustrated by long pauses, additional questions, or verbal BS without end. They are the ones who still have half their drink left when everyone else in the meeting room is trying to pretend they’re not chewing on the ice cubes.

Of all the things a person does, being patient, not being in a hurry, and most certainly not being eager, is one of the most important—successful people never buy during scarcity or sell during a glut—they wait. Successful people like to complicate things—they don’t waste a transaction when they can also use that transaction as leverage for some other, future transaction. Successful people are rarely gracious, although they will go to great lengths to appear so—being truly gracious is simply too much overhead and extra time for successful people to spare.

Successful people try to appear under many disguises (the better to eat you with, my dear): the knowing old man, the sensitive person, the philanthropist, the concerned friend. All these masks have been so effective over time that even corporations will try to wear the same masks—‘at Gadzooks, Inc. we really care…’, ‘Mutual of Plymouth helps protect you from the unexpected.’, or try, ‘We at BigOilDotCom are ensuring a cleaner world for your children and your children’s children.’ And to finalize the confusion, there actually are such things as ‘knowing old folks’, ‘sensitive people’, philanthropists, and concerned friends!

Advertisers use these transparent manipulations because they work. And they have worked, on a more face-to-face level, for centuries. People want to believe—they want to trust—and that’s very nice. But it’s really great from the standpoint of manipulative, non-linear, successful people who want to get something from someone less ‘worldly’.

That word bothers me—‘worldly’—as if learning about the commonness of human deception automatically equals the taking up of this practice without question. We who feel too soft to join in are despised out loud by the players and shakers. They assume we despise them, silently, in return—but we are more likely to feel sorry for their jaundiced view of life and the way in which such an attitude prevents anyone from ever finding happiness, or even contentment.

And there is another example—to pursue happiness itself is a foregone failure—one only finds happiness in forgetting oneself. This is often cited as a reason for charitable activities—but one needs only to forget oneself—it is not strictly necessary to serve others. Hence the popularity of movies, books, TV, hobbies, and gardening. Of course, there is nothing wrong with charity—but it should not be held up as a highway to happiness, only as a righteous activity—and an opportunity, for some, to forget themselves in service to it.

But this is just one aspect of ‘backwards-ism’ in daily life—we are happiest when we forget ourselves. Also, we are at our most capable when we don’t watch ourselves too closely. I used to be very good at eight-ball—I would make incredible shots simply by taking them without lining them up or aiming at all—it’s that ‘Zen’ thing—as soon as someone exclaimed at how great a shot I’d made, I would become too self-aware, and I always missed the next shot because of it.

That may even explain the ‘beginner’s luck’ phenomenon—on our first try at something new, we haven’t yet learned what to worry about doing wrong—we have no precedents to trip ourselves up with.

When we can’t quite remember something, we have to wait until we’ve stopped trying to remember before the memory will return. When we try to be friendly to others, we get tongue-tied—but if two people, total strangers, say waiting on line together, see a kid being really cute, and their eyes meet, they experience something together and they suddenly feel a connection that no amount of small talk would engender.

My motto has always been ‘Moderation in all things—including moderation’. It speaks directly to the issue of ‘backwards-ness’. If I like to eat something, I eat too much and I never enjoy eating it again. If I enjoy reaching out to others, I do it too often, and people begin to avoid me. If I want to be able to concentrate, suddenly the whole world is knocking on my door, ringing my phone, and emailing me multiple times. If I feel like company, the whole world has gone out of town for the week.

We delude ourselves with the concept of ‘qualities’. Example: “Women are weak”. It’s true. But it’s only true in one way—upper body strength and aggressiveness. In all other ways, Women tend to be superior—they’re better insulated against cold, they have greater stamina, their pain-tolerance is much greater, and they are less vulnerable to stress. I remember much was made of this subject at the time of the ‘Space Race’—the question arose, “Can women handle the rigors of space-flight?” and one pundit’s op-ed pointed out that, from a purely biological point of view, women were in fact better suited to space travel than men.

Women, though incredible, are not perfect. They have that whole menstruation meshegas to deal with every lunar month. Men are always quick to jump on that fact whenever the subject of female superiority is broached. We’re drones, trying to find self-justification in a women’s world—we can’t help it. But it is only ‘backwards-ness’—women are stronger but weaker, women are steadier but less steady. I think that’s what the whole Yin-Yang thing is about—everything contains its opposite because it wouldn’t be ‘everything’ if you left out opposites.

Questions.

via Questions.

Wednesday, January 02, 2013                1:56 PM

Okay, the world is becoming something else—something it had no conception of, even as little as thirty years ago. Yes, we had PC’s—we even had LANs (Local Area Networks)—but we didn’t have the Internet, wireless tech, or hot-spots. We didn’t imagine that geographic location would become moot. We still thought of machines, and even robots, as dumb compared to us. But the one-ton, nuclear-powered robot on Mars right now puts that attitude out of date.

Now we face the same upheaval of the norm that pervaded the early industrial revolution. They called autos ‘horseless carriages’, they called movies ‘moving pictures’, and they saw morphine and cocaine as ‘tonics’. The idea of young people driving to a secluded spot to pitch woo was a scandalous notion—people used to require a destination for love-making—automobile seats offered a magic carpet of ‘anywhere’ privacy. Crossing the oceans went from a months-long voyage to a matter of days. The concept of laying telegraph cable from one continent to another was as new-fangled as a trip to the Moon.

These changes thrilled the young, intimidated the aged, made some peoples’ fortunes and made others’ fortunes disappear. Factories, which began as urban phenomena, created hundreds of jobs overnight—the children of farmers flocked to the cities to make money, and to enjoy the excitement of cities. Populations shifted. And, for the first time, the exponential changes of technology were visible to one and all—new things, new ideas, new jobs—all were coming faster than was comfortable for the aging scions of the nineteenth century.

And we see similar effects today—the young are thrilled with each new gadget and innovation, and the old are awash in a sea of confusion. Many businesses that were doing fine have vanished overnight, sometimes without their absence even being noticed. New businesses such as Facebook have no visible merchandise, location, or structure. These modern companies are at their most vulnerable when they seek to change from ‘free-to-the-public’ to a profit-based, corporate configuration. This shift usually involves a change in privacy policy, and the hapless users, for whom the assumption of privacy was one of the reasons they began using the companies’ services to begin with, are left with the choice of dropping the app or the site, or allowing themselves to be sold for profit, in a digital sense, without a cut for themselves.

I have gone to the trouble of reading some EULA’s lately—and I was glad I did. Sites that offer a free forum or service these days usually tuck in a quiet little set of terms that basically cedes all ownership and usage to the supposedly ‘free’ website. Dover Publishing’s new ‘Pictura’ website, for example, offers free access to their database of Public Domain graphics—but their EULA specifies that everyone’s artworks, using such graphics, are under the copyright of the Dover’s website—not the artist/end-user’s.

So, is that free? If I create great works of art (I should be so lucky) and use Dover’s free service to add something from the Public Domain of old images—well, that’s not really free if I’ve ceded ownership of the final product to the ‘free’ service, is it? It’s more like becoming an unpaid employee.

Also, sites for online storage of images and videos can get at you if they decide that all the images on their servers are theirs to do with as they please. I don’t have any embarrassment over pictures of me and my family and friends. To be sure, if I wasn’t comfortable with an image, I’d never post it on the Internet, regardless of the site I use. I assume all uploads, posts, comments, etc. –are all accessible to any halfway-decent hacker who cares to seek them out.

Thus, I never upload any personal info, my own or another’s, in the first place. But that doesn’t mean I’d be OK with some third party using my home videos or family snapshots in a commercial, or a billboard, or any other public use of images.

I’m starting to rethink the whole ‘uploading’ business. I’ve posted a book of illustrated poetry on WordPress; I’ve posted one-thousand music videos on YouTube, and I’ve posted countless articles and essays on StreetArticles, plus my personal blogs at XperDunn and OneAspiration.blogspot . Originally, I imagined hundreds of people being curious enough to read, listen to, or look at my posts. But, to my knowledge, very few of the billion people online have washed up on my digital shores over the last four years.

Why? Because a billion people are all posting their own stuff, checking out their friends’ stuff and their families’ stuff, and being led to certain websites by search-engine prioritization and television promos. YouTube asks me every day if I want to ‘Monetize’ my channel—if I wanted to be a commercial artist, I wouldn’t be posting my stuff as ‘Public’, would I?

Poetry has become a loosely-organized ‘social app’ of its own—with contests, and themes, and discussions—so my static little post (even with the lovely pictures) of a book of poetry is just an anachronism. As far as music goes, I usually listen to other music than my own—hey, YouTube has pretty much any piece of music ever recorded. So my piano ditties get short shrift, even when someone is kind enough to listen to it once. And essays like the one you’re reading this moment? Well, people go online to read memes, quotes, and ad copy—they don’t want a five page essay by some modern-day Ambrose Bierce with a chip on both shoulders.

The enormous audience has another drawback—I can’t police it. If someone plagiarizes from me, I may never know it. There is just too much stuff on the internet—only a big corporation, like YouTube, can have a filter to catch duplicates and ‘covers’—and even they have trouble keeping pace with the endless flood of uploaded videos.

The Internet is now the sole focus of many entrepreneurs—anyone, like myself, who still clings to the early idealism of freeware, shareware, and the like—will eventually be taken advantage of by those who are busy converting the Internet into a marketplace.

So, read those EULAs, folks—you’d be surprised at the nerve of some of the terms. And remember, promotion is still necessary for anyone trying to build an audience—no amount of ‘tags’, ‘categories’, or ‘shares’ will bring flocks of like-minded people to your sites. And beware of these self-promotion tutorials—most of them are just a roundabout way of getting ambitious people to compile spam-lists of their friends’ email addresses for the web-site’s parent company.

For the foreseeable future I intend to curtail my various uploadings. It is a double-edged sword—I’m disappointed that people don’t see my works, but I still must be creating something intended for public exhibition. I think I’ll spend some time just amusing myself, without the pressure of wondering if something of mine is ‘good enough’ to broadcast to the whole world—that’s a lot of unnecessary pressure. Plus, if anyone should decide that my digital-footprint’s (‘xperdunn’s) search-results are the least bit interesting, there is four-year’s worth of my best efforts already online.

I should have hit on this idea a while ago—but it was camouflaged by the fact that all my social interactions have been online these past years. I can still hang out on Facebook or YouTube without feeling obliged to contribute to the upload-stream. So, this year, retreat and re-group, get organized, get caught up on all those things I never get to… yes, this will be much less stressful than putting myself ‘out there’ and then worrying if anyone will see it or not. Excellent—OK, so that’s the plan.

Now, back to the topic. What has changed so drastically? Well, top of the list—job security. And that is bound up with business security. When I was younger, the top businesses in the world weren’t going anywhere—and if you got hired to work there, you weren’t going anywhere either. Now we see businesses like book publishing, encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers all dropping like flies. And we’ve already lost businesses such as typewriter and adding machine manufacture, book stores, broadcast radio, and many others. All these segments of industry were assumed to be permanent—and the people that were employed in these industries had no incentive to move from one job to another.

Secondly, our sense of time has contracted—lunch hours are often half-hours; gathering research is expected to take mere moments, rather than the endless man-hours of looking up data in reference books, copying out notes by hand, re-typing it all; buying retail merchandise no longer takes several minutes at a check-out counter—it should take only seconds for the bar-coded items to be laser-scanned into the register and for the customer to swipe his or her credit card through the reader. We aren’t even satisfied to get our news read to us any more—now we have additional news crawling across the bottom of the screen, just in case you want more news than one voice can speak.

Minutes and seconds are bought and sold by phone-service providers billions of times every day—video games require a level of hand-eye coordination and focus that only a youngster’s nervous system can endure—even our slow-motion sequences in ‘action’ movies are only there to show the incredible speed at which things are happening—faster than we can follow by simply watching in real-time at normal speed.

A third big change is the modern adjustment to finding oneself communicating with a machine when calling a business. This includes fringe events like self-check-out at the supermarket, ATM withdrawals, and touch-screen maps in the lobbies of theme parks and malls that direct us to the store we’re looking for. As this computer interaction is used extensively in children’s museums and such, we can expect even more examples as our kids become the adults of tomorrow.

And then there is the ultimate interaction with a machine—Google, and its competitors. Ask Google anything, and it will give the answer—word definitions, wikipedia articles, movie credits, travel routes—from the most trivial to the most obscure, any question is only seconds from an answer. We’ve effectively removed ‘I don’t know’ as a response to any question, and replaced it with either ‘I don’t care enough to Google it.’ Or ‘Nobody knows, not even Google.’

You’d think there would be more interest in this Google phenomenon—and the same effect from Facebook. We once lived in a world where questions went unanswered, where old friends faded from memory and were never seen again. Now we live in a world where all questions can be answered, where we can contact anyone we ever met, from pre-school playmates to grad school alums. And GPS—GPS has made it impossible to get lost—and made it possible to get directions to anywhere—even a given latitude-longitude coordinate.

At the start of my life, I (and everyone else) could expect to wonder about a lot of stuff, possibly for one’s entire lifetime, without ever knowing the answer. And if one had a question important enough that it needed an answer, the best thing to do was go to the public library and ask a librarian’s help in researching the question. And even then, the odds were even that an answer could be found.

And I haven’t even mentioned modern social changes—this stuff I’m listing is just some of the practical aspects of modern change. Here’s a real new-ish one: cell-phones can now hear you speak English and repeat it in another language—then when the foreigner speaks, it can do the same thing in reverse. It’s new enough that it has a few drawbacks—it isn’t perfect yet. But that will come.

One of the reasons the digital age has become such a tidal wave of new opportunities is the infrastructure. When PCs were new, there was little programming other than the operating systems. And there weren’t archives of books and artworks and government statistics and television videos—the great worldwide data entry continues even now—but a lot of the heavy lifting

(        

GuttenbergProject.org,  [everything ever written, except for current]

Wikipedia,           [an encyclopedia that allows any article from any user]

Google Earth,      [a virtual globe that lets you pick a spot & zoom in to street level-magnification—I can look at Pago Pago—or my own house]

the Library Of Congress, [which includes audio recordings and videos]

and the tremendous database represented by YouTube           [this is a video library of nearly 1/3 of the world’s population]   

)

has been done. The millions of things we can now do online generate their own info, their own updates, and their own interconnections with other databases.

There are Ancestry sites that will soon rival the Mormon Church’s research, if they haven’t already. There are Cooking sites that contain instructions for any dish known to humanity. Please note that all such sites started as empty databases—which have since been filled with input from enthusiastic web-surfers over the last 20 years or so.

So let’s try an extrapolation. Assume another 40 years pass. Assume that the search engines, apps, filters, and interconnections between related databases are 40 years more sophisticated than they are right now. Here’s the hard part—what will change? How will the future manifest itself?

We already have the first evolutions in education. One is the posting of videos that recorded a series of professorial lectures in Ivy League schools—to watch these videos (plus doing the reading and course-work, that is) is to get the same course or courses as a Master’s Degree student in a certain field. This means that educational material is available for free now—anyone can access it, thereby receiving an Ivy League post-graduate education that includes everything but the sheepskin and the dorm experience.

A second, more recent change is the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These, too, are free (that’s the ‘Open’ part) but have the potential of crowd-sourcing the education of the future.

Crowd-sourcing, itself, will expand beyond Flash-mobs and Multi-player internet gaming. It’s potential is as huge as is its malleability—which makes crowd-sourcing a two-edged blade—able to do great good and/or great evil.

But what of the life experiences of the college campus? Surely being a part of something, and prepping for exams, and being responsible for your own laundry—surely all these things are as much a part of education as the courses? And, in many ways, more so—leaving the nest may be the largest part of higher education.

So the college campus would still play a part in a thorough education. However, the recorded lectures would be the same, or at least of the same quality. The educational input would not come from a staff of professors, it would come from the internet website that hosts college-lecture videos. And this would make the Bachelor’s Degree earned at Yale indistinguishable from that of your local Community College.

The administrators of tomorrow’s colleges will be souped-up RAs—guiding newly-adult students through the new environment, refereeing the social life on campus, answering technical questions and helping those unfamiliar with the school’s i-pads (or whatever they’ll be using).

Alright, enough already. But, as you can see, the next few decades have an infinite potential for the new, and an ever-accelerating tempo of change, whether economic, social, technological, or systemic, will make for one wild ride! The example above is just one possible change in one specific aspect of our culture.

-Opus1

Once upon a time, in the year 2009, I decided to mail Xmas Cards. Then I thought about it some more and I decided to send Music CDs instead. My initial impulse was to provide the same piano accompaniment for groups of one or more that I am accustomed to provide for my family in our living room some evening just before each Xmas.

Then I thought about it some more and I decided that Xmas Carol music CDs are a dime a dozen, and I could instead send out music CDs of my personal improvisations, the best sounding ones of the year.

I scrupled at doing this because responses to my music have often included the phrase ‘that’s not music’. On the other hand, some folks have embraced its calming, even soporific qualities and have kindly added it to their listening library as a genre unto itself, a sort of silliness that can’t be found among either the studious virtuosi or the o-so-serious performers of pop music.

-Opus2

Its main strength is in not fully being there. I myself have trouble listening to my music without being distracted—by virtually anything else, internal dialogues included. It is, simply, non-silence of a nonintrusive nature. Some people want that as a part of their choice-menu of listen-ables—and some people are repulsed by my obstinacy in claiming it is different music, instead of sub-standard music unworthy of anyone’s time spent listening. And they have logic on their side, I regret to admit.

But it is a matter of taste—lots of different genres include aspects of questionable musicality, or even entertainment-value—and if I am not the King Of The Hill, I can still be in the pile.

-Opus3

So I don’t much worry about my shortcomings—they are unavoidable, after all, and I have to fashion a life from both my good and bad attributes, like it or not. The only regret I have is this compulsion to explain my analysis of my own motivations—I’m sure most of you couldn’t care less why ‘Chris Dunn is reluctant to publicly present himself as an eccentric musician’.

So, moving on, having decided to send, as pseudo-Xmas cards, music CDs of my best-sounding improvs, I began to choose the tracks. This is the hardest part. As I mentioned, it’s hard to really listen to this stuff—yet there are some that are better than others, and only careful listening will reveal the grains amongst the chaff. I’ve been recording myself for a decade or more, prior to 2009, and I had kept the better ones straight in my head because those preferable were quite few and far between. That year I felt confident that I had enough ‘listenable’ music for three CDs. That year I mailed out Opus One, Opus Two, and Opus Three—I had eleven people on my Xmas Card List.

-Opus4

The next year, I managed to match that, producing and mailing Opus Four, Opus Five, and Opus Six—I had twenty people on my Xmas Card List. And last year I was indisposed and only came up with Opus Lucky Seven—which I mailed to thirty-two people on my List.

-Opus5

This year I’m hoping to manage another three CDs—I feel that my music has progressed slightly, and has become more listenable than last year’s CDs. While I am nervous about creating a huge project with less than a month to go, I would like for people who haven’t heard my recordings to send me their mailing addresses. (My days of ‘direct marketing’ are long ago over, so don’t worry, I’m not going to sell my Xmas Card List to advertisers—plus, it’s not big enough to matter, anyway).

-Opus6

Send your name and address to xperdunn@optonline.net and I will add you to the list.

If you can, send me a stamped, self-addressed CD-Bubble-Pak-Mailer at:

Chris Dunn

PO Box 343

Croton Falls, 10519

(It’s a lot easier if I only have to burn the CDs and stick’em into your mailer envelope.)

Anyone who has gotten my past CDs will get the new one(s) also—no need to email or anything.

-Lucky Opus7

My plans for this year aren’t complete, but I’m leaning towards Opus Eight being a series of improvisations recorded during the recent Hurricane Sandy storm and power outage. I was able to video piano-improvisations from the “the Calm Before” the storm, to “Hurricane Winds”, then “Black-Out”, “Dying Camcorder Battery” (which ends abruptly on the third day of power outage) and “Power Restored”, at last. There are seven pieces in all, the better part of a CD’s storage—and I am conveniently left with two more CDs, at most.

Opus Nine should include “Noblest of Daughters” (A recording I made as a birthday gift for Jessy) which may be the best thing I recorded in this last year. There is also a “Cathedral” series that I was proud of, including “Cathedral Arch”, “Cathedral Dome”, “Cathedral Pews”, “Cathedral Glass”, etc.

Older Mailing (2008)

So CD Opus Nine will be the yearly ‘best-of’s CD. I may need Opus Ten for overflow—but I might also want that last CD to present improvs that show some of my more experimental efforts. Either way, if I don’t get to Ten this year, it will only be due to lack of time. I’ve been very busy at my piano bench this year.

I ordered supplies from Staples on Wednesday, and the Staples truck dropped off the wrong stuff and I asked the driver “Isn’t there supposed to be a case of paper?”, but he came back later and said, “You’re right.” And dropped off my real order and took away the wrong stuff.

This is what a CD Xmas Card project requires:

1.          A list of people’s addresses
2.           A bunch of recordings
3.          A CD burner
4.          A 100-pak of blank CD-Rs
5.          A ream of ‘Presentation’ paper (fancy finish, BOTH sides)
6.          A pack of Sharpies (to write on the CD with)
7.          Seven 12-packs of ‘Bubble-Pak’ CD Mailers
8.          A box of Self-Adhesive Labels (ink-jet printer compatible)
9.          An “Album Cover” graphic for the front side of the jewelcase insert
10.         A Playlist (with track#s, Titles, durations, and dates recorded) graphic for the back side of the jewelcase insert
11.         Replacement Printer Cartridges
12.         Lots of free time

So, if you want to join the few, the proud, the ones I mail CDs to—get to steppin, ‘cause I’m already started working on it and Christmas is a-coming….

Wednesday, November 07, 2012             5:21 PM

Claire’s dad, John Erling Anderson, PhD, CSF, a great person of great kindness, intelligence, and wit, has finally passed on—Parkinson’s disease is as terrible a thing as there is. Our sadness for his passing is leavened with relief that his illness can no longer reach him. He is survived by his wife, Karin, his son, Mark, his daughters Lynn, Kristin and Claire, his eight grandchildren, and his two great-grandchildren.

He was an experimentalist and inventor, responsible for hundreds of Union Carbide’s patents in the field of industrial combustion. One of his greater inventions involved replacing or retrofitting air-fed furnaces with a pure oxygen feed, allowing greater temperatures, and quality and precision of burn. At least that’s what I think he told me.

As in-laws go, I have loved John and Karin—they were the nicest parents I’d ever met when I first visited their old family house on S. Pine St, Katonah and have remained my favorite ‘old people’ friends (seems funny to say that at 56).  I intend to get ‘Nana’ (Karin) on social media so we can keep in contact—it’s surprising how little we connect, seeing as how their Heritage Hills condo is barely more than a mile away.

There was a brief, private service before the cremation. Spencer joined us and Lynn’s and Kristin’s tribes—Mark came down from Cleveland and Nicholas came from the city. For a few days, we hardly noticed our power was still out…

At last! Our electricity wasn’t just some strange dream of paradise—it really exists. Claire is pleased with developments—she has been watching the thermostat. It was at 37 and now our valiant furnace has raised the ambient to 41! It’s funny how the little things matter.

Things I am suddenly thankful for: candles, matches, batteries, flashlights, down sleeping bags, fast food, coffee to go, sunlight (excellent for reading), a wife, who thought to fill the bathtub the night of the storm, a daughter who brought me mcgriddle and lecafe—while still healing from her emergency appendectomy, a son who is everything we could ever hope he would be, a post-surgical dog who kept us smiling (especially with that big, white plastic neck-cone thing and her geometrical-shaved patches of naked dog-skin).

I’m kinda sore about freezing my butt off for a week and change—especially because I missed the Election Returns TV coverage last night. But the important thing is—my hero, Barry Two-Times, is still on the job for another 4—thank you, Ummurickuh, I knew you wouldn’t let a fellow down. Sucks we didn’t get the house—6 billion bucks and 18 months later: same old same old. Maybe there’s something wrong with that—but I ain’t no expert.

Wow! I just looked at my Outlook emails : 238 Unread, 381 Junk Mail—I knew it was gonna be something crazy like that. Still, I’ll be surprised if more than 3 or 4 are from actual people I know, trying to communicate with me—not just me and everyone else on the sender’s emailing list.

Xmas at the Anderson’s – 2004

I was able to get a coupla recordings out of my camcorder, mid-black-out, before the recharge light shut me down, but it’s gonna take time—I posted “Here Comes Sandy” before the hurricane hit, but I had another one, “The Calm Before” that is still waiting for processing—plus the two I’m planning on calling “Powers Out” and “Powers Still Out” (original, right?) and I guess I’ll be playing a “Powers Restored” tomorrow morning, when the piano keys have had a chance to thaw. But that’s all theoretical—first we have to wait and see about tonight’s snowstorm. (What the NYSE&G lineman give, the Precipitation may snatch right back again!) Maybe I should succumb, and get a generator like all my neighbors have….

There ain’t Nothing worse than Art

Cause Art’ll break your Heart

Even if you’ve Never Fallen

Deeply down in Love

An unpaid Actor plays a Part

Interrupted by a Fart

Just before Sweet words have Fallen

Sneezer gives’em a Shove

A Starving painter forms a Tart

Of Colors rich, Of Dawn’s first Start

But all the Beauty painter’s Drawn

Is repossessed Ungently of

The Keepers of the Shops and Carts

Who, without Coin, will ne’er Part

With Tools or stuff of Inspiration

Naye Food or comfort’s Cove.

My post, “President At A Loss Arguing With Idiot”, has been slapped with a warning: ‘reported as “abusive” by one of Facebook’s “partners” (whatever that means)’ ..per my friend, Chris K. I think that means my aggression was palpable—I can get that way (and the funny thing is I feel quite dispassionate and logical as I write those kind of essays).

I read this one back to myself, partially to verify that this was a Republican tactic, vilifying their opposition’s more-rational public supporters. But I did, in fact, find it very abusive. I was insulting, facetious and just plain mean—So, does that mean the GOP have won? Have they taken a peaceful person like myself and pestered me into crazy-talk? Was it that easy?

It was the same with WWII. Before then, the idea of bombing a city was unthinkable to civilized folk. Before that war ended, America and the Allies had virtually carpet-bombed Germany, Japan, and a few other places—all in defense of liberty and equality. And ever since WWII, dropping a bomb on a city has been considered par for the course when at war—as can be seen today in Syria.

We also learned to use propaganda on ourselves, just to fight off anyone else’s—and now we expect our government to lie to us, and the government should expect lying right back. There’s also the coup de grace, atomic bombs—we use them twice and spend the next half-century (and counting) worrying about using them and having them used on us.

The GOP, as portrayed in the news, has been something of a sensation of late. Their entanglement in gayness, as an espoused evil and as a scandalous truth about many of their elected officials who most viciously attack the gay community, was hard to keep from laughing over. Human nature, so conspicuously on display, is hard not to laugh at.

But, my first thought was of sympathy. I can only imagine the difficulties of a gay person who fights politically to marginalize gay people. You couldn’t pay me to live in that skull.

But in other forums, the Republicans have become masters of the deconstructive. They realize that fear is their friend and there sure are plenty of fears to pass around. They brought up Obama’s having crossed paths with some radical, many years ago, and used it to try labeling him as ‘dangerous’—which is odd since those most endangered by Obama nowadays are the terrorists.

They began by criticizing his long-term church minister of being anti-American—and when that didn’t get any traction; they started whispering that Obama was a Muslim. They spent months after the election trying to convince people that the President wasn’t born in Hawaii. And even though this may sound ridiculous, there are a lot of conservatives who still swear that Barack Obama is a foreigner, a Muslim, and a threat to ‘real’ Americans. While that makes me feel impatient towards such people, it makes me even more upset with a party that could undermine the President so, in time of war.

They realize that losing faith in one’s religion is nearly inescapable for the educated, thoughtful people of our day—and so they champion it. Their detractors are, thusly, either ‘godless’—or they are just as pious as the GOP’s platform, i.e. insincerely.  But this is an entirely manufactured schism. Plenty of people choose to belong to a church, to pray to a God, to live by its tenets, and seek fellowship with other church members, including social support programs for the locally disenfranchised. Only a tiny fraction of those people, however, insist on the myths of the Bible being set above scientific inquiry. Only a tiny slice of Americans are actively expecting an End Of Days in the near future. Just a few knuckleheads try to separate the various other ‘Single God’ religions from each other—to make Christians war against Muslims war against Jews, etc. and so forth. Extremism is a synonym for unbalanced. I can’t see much difference between an extremist zealot and an unbalanced mind. They’re both capable of killing themselves and others, they both reject the importance of civil obedience over ‘spiritual mission’ and they both do a terrible job of raising well-educated, emotionally well-balanced children.

With certain mid-eastern nations giving a perfect demonstration of how to ruin everything with dogmatic theocracies, there couldn’t be a worse time for us in the USA to break our long and hallowed tradition of separating church from state. There is a reason why Americans made that ideal a part of our heritage—and it should not be called into question by those who feel picked-on when asked if they read a newspaper now and then.

Our freedom of speech is now being questioned by some because of naysayers whose language is slaughter and burning of US diplomats, consuls, their staffs and buildings. Well, two wrongs and all that—What Would Allah Do? -is perhaps the best approach to this. Besides, America does not modify its rules whenever they annoy other nations—we know how strong our freedoms make us and we know how wrong it is for one person to have complete control over another’s thoughts and words.

But back to me. Have I been turned into a monster merely by witnessing the bile of Todd Akin claiming a difference between victims of ‘legitimate rape’ and, well, ‘illegitimate’ seems redundant when used with the word ‘rape’? The succession of crazies that were the GOP primary racers sensitized me to the fact that stunningly drastic changes in our country’s character were being threatened by the Republican party, many of them having no qualms about the continuing chasm that spreads between the rich and the poor. And it has been pointed out that many of their staunchest supporters, lower-income families, would clearly be hurt, financially and legally, by the GOP agenda.

Then there’s the audiences at these ‘rallies’ of extreme right-wingers such as Sarah Palin—they have the sound of a hungry mob. And the GOP speechifiers do this great little dance wherein they get these folks all lathered up without actually raising their own voices—but they also don’t ‘correct’ the crowd when they go too far—and that is a problem when it might be taped for the cable news channels.

Maybe the mid-westerners think all the folks who live on the coasts on either side are a bunch of spoiled intellectuals who think they know better because they went to college. To a certain degree, they’re right—the average person graduates from college knowing a lot more than they went in with—and college graduates of the mid-west have been known to return home and make great contributions to their state and their community. Besides which, smart is smart and dumb is dumb—only bullies try to minimize the value of education and only snooty brats think their diplomas make them better than someone else.

In short, every time the GOP is presented with a challenge, they go by the low road—to the point where some of their worst tactics (like strangling the legislature for four years) can seem downright unpatriotic, to put it mildly. They never answer a single issue with “we are in agreement with the opposition on this, except for a few details”. They never say, “We recognize the importance of settling this matter, and we’ll be bi-partisan on this bill’s passage because of that urgency”. And if one of them did, the rest would ostracize the traitor—I’m thinking here of the courageous Olympia Snowe—she suffered loud criticism of her attempts to create a middle-ground for the two parties.

These are only a few samples of what we’ve seen paraded across our TV screens for four long years—and every year they are emboldened to blame Obama for our economic troubles. They couldn’t do it on election day 2003, because it was still quite clearly Bush(W)’s spilt milk—but they only waited a few months before they began speaking of the economy as if Obama had made the mess to begin with. And according to several indices, Obama has had surprising success at pulling us up from the nose-dive the GOP left him. And so another claim is made to paper over this hole in their wall, “Obama isn’t fixing the mess quickly enough—Obama doesn’t know enough about business to fix this thing”. Well, employment is up, job losses are down, business is improving (although slowed by the EU crisis and the slowdown of China’s economy) and it is hard to justify kicking out a President who has so masterfully turned our economic frowns upside-down.

So, then the debate. I guess I blew my top on that one. When Mitt accused the President of ‘wasting time’ on health care reform when he should have been fixing the economy(!) –well, I tell ya, if I coulda crawled through that screen and got at’im—I’d be locked up in a sanitarium for the criminally insane by now. The GOP showed us foot-dragging as high art throughout their struggle to block health-care—if they’d really cared about getting Obama focused on fixing the economy, why’d they waste so much of his time, and the time of the hundreds of Democratic legislators?

I just can’t imagine that they’re fooling anyone with this whole ‘create a crisis, draw out a crisis, and blame the crisis on Obama’ strategy. It is very much of a piece with Mitt’s betrayal of every promise he made to the Neo-Cons during his primary race. It also answers the question of why Mitt hasn’t given details on his ‘plans’—he reveals his plans, as needed, during the debates to rebut any accusations against his older positions. I think it’s kinda funny that his supporters are all saying ‘He won the debate—and that’s that’. That’s because they don’t like the sound of ‘Yes, he made a great huff-and-a-puffing—too bad he made up his answers as he went along.’

As far as that goes, I think the President would have performed better if someone had told him he was playing liar’s poker—he thought he was there for a debate.

Now, there I’ve gone again. I simply lose all sense of propriety—I think it comes from a fear that more than 50% of my fellow citizens might disagree with me. I fear that the majority of Americans will say, “Hey, lying’s okay—all politicians do it” or they’ll say “Hey, women don’t really have the right to control their own reproductive choices.” Or they’ll say, “Yeah, we grow faster and go faster with fossil fuels—let’s drop all this ‘hybrid’ nonsense until the gas runs out—then we’ll worry about it.” Or they’ll say, “Climate change? It’s a hoax, the ice caps melt all the time—what are you, a big sissy?”

And I guess my fear that you all might find the GOP acceptable, when they have (to my eyes) conclusively proven their unfitness for office, makes me too excitable—I’ll try to calm down and write something less ‘abusive’ next time.

Romney has an unfair advantage in these debates—all he has to do is collect the facts and figure out how to twist them in favor of himself.

Obama has to work twice as hard—he has to put away his knowledge and facts, and waste valuable time to gain command of the ‘ideas‘ Romney’s cotton-candy world has so few of, memorize all the lies the Republican’s candidate has been telling for over a year, and then memorize the truths that refute those lies. Then he has to defend himself against this mountain of horse-dung without seeming dismissive. I understand how the President must feel—I’ve never felt anything but ‘dismissive’ towards our little Mittley-Droid—well, I take that back. When I heard about his high school bullying of a gay kid, I felt pure disgust. But then I went right back to ‘dismissive’.

Obama didn’t want to look him in the eye. Damn right—Romney, the ‘Grand Old Idiot’, doesn’t have a case for winning other than his demonstration that he’ll bend in the direction of the strongest wind—without pause or scruple, lying and flip-flopping. And, if he did win, he would continue to lie to us all for the worst potential four years of Republican mismanagement that will have ever been inflicted on the USA (And I say that knowing just how badly we were misled by his predecessor, Bush W). If I had to look that goon in the face while he made stupid jokes about our 20th anniversary, I’d have lost my mind. So I, for one, can attest to Obama having way more self-control than me. How about the rest of you? Could you really stay on that stage for 90 minutes without spitting in Romney’s eye and calling him a big, fat liar?

To pay attention to the words that come out of Romney’s rictus is to give him the same accord as an honest person. It’s like showing respect for that clown in Stephen King’s “It”. It is hideous, its presence may fill us with fear, but we do not ‘respect’ it any more than we respect Cancer. We just wish we were somewhere else.

I would feel much safer if everyone wasn’t so impressed by his ‘energized’ lies and reverses during the first debate. The Republicans, in courting the Fundamentalists and Big Business, have become an ugly bunch of folks. They are expert in lying because they haven’t stopped for twelve years and practice makes perfect, I guess. They have also been unforgivably brick-wall-like in putting all our legislative needs, including budgets, on hold so they can blame the President for this legislative deep-freeze. They want to replace the President and put those disastrous agendas back in place which caused the collapse that Obama has been digging us out from under, these last four years.

What gets me is the incivility. And that is not solely because I could be described as a ‘pansy’ when it comes to civility—it is, rather, for the same reason I favor it so—it is the only sane response in a modern nation’s leader that will win through when facing the savagery still found in much of the world, including quite a few places right here at home. Civility is the responsibility to lead a nation without letting oneself get swept up in childish petulance, passive-aggressive obstructionism, or resentment over personal slights.

Our current President has that civility. He didn’t let it stop him from taking down Osama, or from taking out those pirates off the coast of Somalia, and he didn’t let his civility get swept away by the contrarian nature of the Republican campaign. Obama is strong—as strong as any President—but not in his impulses, only in his dedication.

A man can’t control a nation if he can’t even rule himself—and we see that lack of resolve in the pasted-on grin of the President’s debating opponent. Mitt Romney would do better to return to honesty and plain-speaking (if, indeed, he has ever stopped there) rather than outshout his President in a respectable, public debate.

It burns me up that the GOP is trying to worm their way into power, rather than challenging Obama and the Democrats with forthrightness and sensibility. Even if GOP platforms made sense (and they don’t) I would be loath to support their candidate on the sheer effrontery of their campaign. It isn’t just their showing a disrespect for responsible Government, or a disrespect for our sitting President—it is a disrespect for the intelligence of the citizens they hope to win over.

Lying has worked well for the GOP in the recent past—one can see where they might start to accept it as ‘good tactics’—but the lies are so tired, so roundly disavowed by third parties, so blatant and ludicrous, that we would have to be brain-damaged to offer them any credibility at all. God forbid the GOP ever told the truth—at this point, whatever they said, I would believe ‘the opposite of that’ to be true for years before I could afford to grant them any credence at all.

Eftsoones the Nymphes, which now had Flowers their fill, 55

Ran all in haste to see that silver brood,

As they came floating on the Christal Flood;

Whom when they sawe, they stood amazèd still,

Their wondring eyes to fill;

Them seem’d they never saw a sight so fayre, 60

Of Fowles, so lovely, that they sure did deeme

Them heavenly borne, or to be that same payre

Which through the Skie draw Venus silver Teeme;

For sure they did not seeme

To be begot of any earthly Seede, 65

But rather Angels, or of Angels breede;

Yet were they bred of Somers-heat, they say,

In sweetest Season, when each Flower and weede

The earth did fresh aray;

So fresh they seem’d as day, 70

Even as their Brydale day, which was not long:

Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song.

*[Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. "The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900".]

Monday, September 24, 2012          1:53 PM

Dear Daniel Mayes:

I’ve just been reading your excellent article  “Are We Heading Towards A Big-Brother World?” regarding the use (or over-use?) of Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) camera systems in modern cities.

By and large I must agree that this is a ‘balancing act’ issue, with security and surveillance on the one side and an invasion of personal privacy on the other. But there is a larger issue being overlooked here. The once-a-decade National Census (an attempt to get an accurate-as-possible head-count of all US citizens) is written into our Constitution. It, along with voting (another data-sampling activity) are both minimal attempts at determining some information of the people’s presence and wishes with regard to ‘self-governing’.

Self-governing is an ideal that cannot be realized—even working towards an exact head-count is an attempt to determine how many people are in which location, so that their congressman can represent them in numbers proportional to the number of people in the state, for example. But no tabulation can count all the people in the United States at one instant of time—even if we had the manpower and resources to physically count every person in the country, people would be born, people would die, in the time it takes to tally the numbers, they will have already changed. So the ideal of self-governing, of a government that responds to every want and need of every single citizen is, like all ideals, something that can only be imagined.

In the voting process, we encounter ‘hanging chads’, voter suppression, voter turnout (especially ‘voter turn-out’–there are only 20% or 30%, at best, of eligible voters participating in any election). So this, too, is an ideal that we should not hold our breath, waiting for its realization in reality. Fortunately, we have mathematics.

Sociology is the study of humans as groups–the smaller the sample, the less accurate the results–and even in large-sample studies, the results cannot be expected to predict the behavior of a single individual. But as a group, humans are incredibly predictable–and whenever huge samples of data-sets are available, they can predict with uncanny certainty the percentage of the group that will go this way, the percent that will go that way, and how many are left undecided and standing pat.

When polls first came into everyday use, in the 1950s, most of the applications were commercial–sales and marketing jumped right on the new miracle science, and have stayed riveted to consumer-testing, market research and back-end analysis ever since. Both politicians and news outlets soon saw the inherent entertainment value of releasing survey results on current trends in the opinions, politics, and tastes of the masses.

But there were other, more sensible, uses to be had. Traffic surveys in high-traffic urban arteries allowed for more efficient design and maintenance of freeways and intersections. Foot-traffic surveys of mall-shoppers changed the designing of malls and parking lots. Supermarkets use their inventory turn-over to determine future shelf-stock purchases. Lawyers use medical-symptom-mapping to prove high-risk ‘cancer cells’ located near places of pollution. The list goes on.

Many are the benefits to business and commerce—but even so, the individual also benefits from some sociological data-sampling. In a world of terrorism, radiation, and bio-safety concerns, a data-set of every pedestrian within a particular ten-block-radius might hold vital clues to emerging threats or illegal activities. But it can also aid in the search for a lost child or pet (if the pet doesn’t already have a sub-dermal LoJack device), or rescue operations during a natural disaster.

Many people seem to think that only ‘bad-guys’ require surveillance—when the truth is that, as we become a faster-moving society using synthetic signposts to organize the flow of us, the provisioning of us, the educating of our children and the protecting of our weakest, we need to keep tabs on what’s happening. Is blanket coverage of CCTV cameras the right method for collecting this data? Perhaps not. But, is there a built-in need for record-keeping in our high-tech, high-speed global village? I’m afraid so.

I find something strange in the waves of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. Where were these outraged Muslims when the Soviet Union banned religion throughout Eastern Europe? And what is all this talk of ‘respect’ without respect for life? If we were to ask the Syrians or the Libyans or the Egyptians for ‘respect’ we’d be accused of high-handedness; ‘the Great Satan demands respect, does it?’ We give billions in financial aid to some Mid-East nations, well, most Mid-East nations. Isn’t that respect for our fellow Peoples? Does the money not count, all of a sudden, because we built an Internet that allows the Middle Easterners to forget that we are an ocean apart?

This so-called movie (that is actually a ‘trailer’ (a preview) for an imaginary movie) was made by one person, maybe two. The armies of Islam have no beef with those individuals–if they did, they should have gone after those people in particular. Instead, they thought, what a great excuse for murdering the American closest at hand, the one with the best reputation–just so the whole world would know how ‘angry’ these folks are. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was in Libya to help the newly democratic nation transition to a more settled, less chaotic installation of an elected government. I assume he was also there to oversee the transaction of billions in aid. He wasn’t naïve–he knew he was risking his life to be there and to help.

He was not some puppeteer trying to coerce Libya into becoming a pawn of the United States–the world knows this. In all the fighting our armed forces have ever done, we have never taken permanent possession of any real estate–that is our tradition and it hasn’t changed in over two-hundred years. He was there to help, period. Likewise the three other innocent Americans executed by the mob that stormed our embassy.

Respect? We have a tradition in America, a common cause that many Americans have died to protect–it’s called free speech. The protesters say “We never insult Jehovah or Christ, why must you insult our prophet?” Well, first of all–Go ahead. I can call Christ a Pig. I can call Jehovah a Geezer in the Sky–we don’t CARE. Sticks and stones will break our bones but words will never hurt us. Or our gods, or our government. No. What these protestors are against is Free Speech.

They were nice and quiet all through the Cold War, many of them siding with the Soviets in exchange for arms or funds–working hand-in-hand with an enforced-atheism government. Syria still does it today–well, I shouldn’t say Syria, Syrians are being blown up in the streets by their own government–but that Government is still dealing with Communists, just like the good ol’days–as is Iran.

What do they have in common? Repression. They believe in repression of public dialogue–they prefer to keep political discourse as a blood sport. They want their governments to retain the ability to cow their citizens, instead of serve them. Why? Because Islam (again, perhaps not Islam, but it’s figureheads, the ones with the ability to rustle up some gang violence among the population) has a tradition of repression–they repress their women, they indoctrinate their young, and they punish people for speaking their minds. This is not a healthy format for a major religion. We will come back later to the issue of their longed-for dream of committing genocide in Israel.

There are Muslims in the United States–their lives are no different from us non-Muslims–they understand that Free Speech takes precedent over religious dogma, they don’t attack passers-by on the street every time someone takes a swipe at their religious traditions. There are Jews in America–hell, last I heard, there are more Jews in the New York metro area than there are in Israel. But the Muslims here understand that religious freedom takes precedence over some feud the Imams have been stoking the fires of for a millenia.

In America, we know that freedom is more important than dignity. We know that dignity is an illusion, that the Emperor is buck-naked, and that ‘fervent prayer’ is the limit of how far one citizen’s religion can impose its rules on another. When I was a kid, Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays–but there was no pressure from Catholics to close the butcher shops on Friday by law.

And there is another bit of childishness to this Mid East violence–have they no faith? Can one sick guy’s post on an obscure web-site really touch their prophet? Is their faith truly encumbered by this arbitrary input from one stupid foreigner, half-way round the world? Don’t they see that their magnification of this one guy’s bad attempt at satire makes him a world-renowned figure? If they had an ounce of sense, they would have let this guy and his ‘trailer’ fade away like a billion other tasteless web-posts.

The way I see it, all these embassy protests have been orchestrated by Imams jealous of the power they wield in the Middle East that they enjoy nowhere else. They see repression as a necessary tool for their survival as leaders of their society. They see religious freedom as a death knell to their world order. They think that anyone with the nerve to face up to them, and tell their own truth, ought to be put to death.

Well, the terrorists have become very sophisticated. One can hear and read in the media of a new ‘discussion’ over freedom of expression. There is nothing to discuss. If we adopt any new legislation amending the freedom of the press or freedom of speech–I swear I’ll make a hundred videos ridiculing Islam. I’ll devote my frickin life to it.

Ancient Egypt Arts.

via Ancient Egypt Arts.

Trumpeter Hornbill..

via Trumpeter Hornbill..

The thing everyone overlooks is that Karl Marx was right. The desperation of the revolutions that are thought of as Communism were half-baked, seat-of-the-pants efforts to rectify the evils of Capitalism. There is no better example in human history of good intentions leading to a hell here on earth than the Socialist and Communist regimes that transformed into police states before the dust of overthrown palaces had settled. But that doesn’t make Marx wrong—it simply means that the struggle to recover humane principles from a Capitalist world is a complex and difficult thing.

The apoplexy that erupts whenever ‘Socialism’ is mentioned is part of this misperception. Let’s imagine we did something humane, that we paid for it with tax revenue because it is our responsibility to see to it that our country is a decent, human place to live—and we forgot to label it ‘Socialism’. Would that be so bad? We accept the rightness of keeping kids from going hungry—if our government can bring a more consistent and standardized effort to bear on the problem than local charities and churches, we are all for it. Then, as soon as someone calls it ‘Socialism’, we decide it’s better to let people suffer than to risk our great nation becoming a ‘socialist nightmare’.

I, for one, don’t give a damn about Socialist or non-Socialist—all I know is that we let our country become littered with former human beings who are now something less, something broke (in both senses of the word) and who deserve to be taken care of. This business of criticizing the unemployed for not being employed is total rot. For one thing, these people all had jobs up until the financial crash at the end of Bush’s second term. And our economy may recovery completely—with the one detail—that unemployment will remain.

This makes sense—nobody uses people in factories any more—automation is providing better precision, better quality control, and higher production capacity than sloppy humans who get tired, or sick, or have to sleep at night. Who needs’em? But with great automation comes great responsibility. If we are creating a world of robotic activity then we must deal with the other side of that coin—we have to stop judging people by how tired they get. If an average worker stays home all day because the old job has been automated, that worker has no money to participate in our consumer society.

So, owners who remove any need for human workers are, whether they realize it or not, saying No to consumerism. And without a consumer society, who’s going to buy any of the stuff that gets made at the factory? We can’t pretend that economic action has no equal, but opposite, reaction. We will only survive the robotic revolution by subsidizing unemployment. I’m sure someone can show me all the facts and figures proving that it’s impossible to subsidize the 1/10th of the human race that we simply don’t need labor from anymore. But we should anyway—billionaires don’t just keep a disproportionate amount of the fruits of prosperity, they also get off on being top dog.

But they shouldn’t think of it as something being done for others—that 1/10th of humanity will someday be ½ of humanity, 2/3rd of humanity, all of humanity! Someday in the not so distant future, even board chairmen will get the boot from our robotic AI overlords. Then won’t they be glad they started a systematic separation between employment and consumption!

We are very subjective about employment—we don’t see it objectively. We tend to discount the jobless as people who are too lazy to find work—unless we’ve been subjected to that massive degradation of ego that losing a job inflicts upon us. I have been on disability for years—but I’d do just about anything to have a job—and the sense of self-worth it bestows. And we tend to assume if the economy is healthy, then jobs are plentiful. This is a baseless assumption. It was true back in FDR’s day—a worker could be made useful digging a trench or paving a highway or building a bridge, a dam, a skyscraper. But masses of laborers are no longer the norm at construction sites. We have huge cranes, trucks bigger than houses, earthmoving vehicles and tunnel-digging machines. We still need workers to keep a hand in, but nothing like the mobs of laborers that built everything in those older times.

And what’s so ‘lazy’ about pounding the pavement every day being rejected from job after job, while the employed sit at PC keyboards, talk on phones, and decide about lunch. There are plenty of lazy people with jobs—they don’t add a whit to their employer’s business success, they do just enough to keep themselves from being fired, and in many cases are actually drags on the company’s bottom line. The owner would do better paying someone else to stay home than to support this viper at the breast of their business. What do we do when there are simply no more jobs and plenty of unemployed? Do we continue to blame them for a situation they are victims of? I think (and it’s surprising how often this is true) that charity is good business. If people are being reduced to desperate criminals or ghastly non-persons because our economy has no place for them, it is better to make a place for them.

In the sixties, Americans became aware that, after centuries of throwing trash over our shoulders, there were simply too many of us doing it now and we have to either stop littering or live in an ugly place, piled high with refuse. I believe that now is the time to stop throwing ‘useless’ people over our shoulder—they are capable, we just have no use for them right now. If we don’t take responsibility for all the people in the country we’ll see a decline of empire, and a well-deserved one, at that. If all those people become disaffected, or criminalized, then the super-wealthy will ultimately be surrounded by hungry wolves—and that’s not a very nice neighborhood.

Capitalism is sacred only because the more powerful a person is, the more that person’s security depends on the status quo. Ask a hungry person how they feel about Capitalism—I’m betting they couldn’t care less, unless Capitalism is code for ‘a hot meal’. Bill & Melinda Gates endowed the largest charity ever with half the personal fortune of the richest man in the world—but the poor abide. We have to make charity a part of business. We have to start moving away from the assumption that money must be earned. Lots of people have tons of money they didn’t earn—I hardly think it would be a crime to legitimize government support of the poor.

However, the implementation of such a change has at least as many pitfalls and risks as old-fashioned communism—we would need new perspectives and new approaches to even begin such a process. So, that won’t happen. Still, I think it is a sensible direction, compared to the alternatives.

Two-thousand years ago Christ addressed the problem of the poor. There are no doubt hundreds of institutions in operation today with the sole aim of feeding and caring for the poor. The number of poor has reached such heights that an entire country can be at risk of starvation for years without end.

How has this simple problem continued to grow and thrive in a world with so many people (and lots of them wealthy) trying so earnestly to end famine and homelessness and sickness and misery? Christ proposed that when someone asks for your coat; give him your cloak also. After decades of people giving away free turkeys on Thanksgiving and blankets to the shivering homeless on Xmas Eve, we see no reduction in poverty—but rather expansion, as if our very civilization were a culture for its growth.

So many people are digging wells in drought-ravaged communities. So many people are trying to spread literacy to the third world. So many doctors and nurses, clergy-persons and philanthropists strive to alleviate the preventable diseases and hunger pangs of the needy. What makes the situation an unshakeable constant in our global community?

There is no obvious answer—third world famine is a starker illustration of the problem than the developed worlds’ own citizens—but we can see poverty and homelessness in Appalachia, a not-so-long drive away from the center of commerce, the Big Apple itself. Even on the streets of that city, and most others, we can find deprivation and suffering.

By this we can see that the poor are not from some well-spring deep in the poorest, least-developed nations—the poor come to be everywhere. The sophisticated man-about-town, leaving his Fifth Avenue townhouse, will only walk a few blocks before he must step over someone who is sleeping on the sidewalk.

So the poor are always with us. Despite centuries of well-meaning charitable activism, the poor abide. Why?

They are the price we pay for having the luxury of becoming millionaires. The design of Capitalism is to compete in the marketplace, to outsell, to outdo, to win at all costs and thus become a ‘master of the universe’. That 99% of us are not millionaires (and have no foreseeable prospect of becoming millionaires) yet remain loyal to the idea of dollar-Darwinism is a marvel of misdirection. We are raised to be proud of our nation’s openness to a sharp operator’s victory against the established businesses—the iconic entrepreneur who plows through the marketplace unopposed due to our amazement at an unprecedented operation’s swift encroachment on established culture. A new marketplace to sell a new something that we poor sods didn’t even know we had to have!

But marketing is a side-issue, a symptom rather than a cause. For Capitalism to retain its power to elevate the odd Titan of Industry, it must have an environment of competitive struggle. Ideally, Capitalism would control the elevation of the few through a series of economic levels that never fell below subsistence. In that happy dream-world, the poor would simply be the least rich, the least pampered—the last place finishers in a sporting event, rather than the wasted, diseased, and tortured casualties of all-out, bleeding warfare. But that is an ideal that only the Canadians have manifested in our real world.

For economics to be stable enough to allow such immense disproportions as there are between billionaires and homeless starvlings, it has to be a blood sport. If any legislation were ever enacted that overruled the rules of finance in favor of humane re-distribution of some of that wealth to the ‘inactive players’ of the sport of Capitalism, the rich would simply block the legislation, or shoot the legislator, or (most likely of all) besmirch the bona fides of the proponents of humane reform of Capitalism. We have been victims of lazy thinking—the triumph of the Free World over the Soviet Union is not proof of the unleavened goodness of Capitalism—it only proves that you catch more flies with the honey of personal liberty than with the coercion of a police state.

Das Kapital is just as merciless and bloodthirsty as it was when Karl published his precious treatise. That soviets and red Chinese were perhaps guilty of trying to implement idealism with all-too-human humans does not change the fact that Capitalism is still the foot on the throat of human civilization it has always been, since it replaced monarchies (the only stupider form of society there is for comparison).

The solution, poor, naïve Karl supposed, was to give power back to the people—in the Iron Curtain countries this was ‘collectives’ and non-currency oriented culture; in the United States we thought labor unions had succeeded in stemming the predation of the owners upon the workers that made them rich. In neither case did any real change result. The soviets lost the majority of their internal economy to the black marketers (who had no objection to cash payment for goods). But here in the States, we had the illusion of equity among workers and owners/management—and union workers’ salaries, benefits and working conditions began a steady climb. But there’s more than one way for the Fat Cats to skin the Hoi Polloi.

And the most successful one was Lobbying. When WWII ended, the nation strode towards what we hoped would be a new age, with Fascism vanquished and the Communists content to regroup from the War’s devastation—and with civil liberties growing to include Social Security, Medicare, the right to form unions and to strike, the right to travel the country from coast–to-coast—and the shiny, new means to travel it.

Our country’s laws reflected a sense of fairness and protection from abusers of personal rights. But now the money began to roll in—and not all the hundreds of federal legislators in both houses were sterling saints of their offices. Eisenhower’s valediction to the people, as he left his presidency, was a warning against the ‘military-industrial complex’—a cadre of business moguls who saw huge riches in keeping our country on a war footing, just to create the demand for the arms manufacturers, and every army base, and all the boats, jets, and bombers we would need to ‘make the world safe for democracy’.

So, cutting military funding is the most unpopular idea for a politician to mention aloud. Second to that is speaking in favor of regulation of Capitalism. Those two ideas together will get a politician zero votes—in any state or county in the nation. I am suggesting that our rabid, knee-jerk response to either of those concepts is an attitude that has been carefully cultivated by our Capitalist media-moguls. Hitler, famously, invented Kindergarten as a way to reach his citizens with propaganda at their earliest possible age. And in our schools we have traditionally indoctrinated our American children with the ideals of the United States of America. But now we live in a time where policy-makers and tycoons have discovered that Skinner’s behavior-modification techniques continue to work on people of all ages, not just the innocent tykes of Kindergarten.

Competition is so much a part of who we are that the idea of turning our backs on it seems outright psychotic. But my thought is that competition exists all by itself—and we will always have to struggle to have the lives we work towards. If we placed some regulatory boundaries—not on a cap for fortune-makers, but a minimum for Capitalist-last-placers—then the players could all knock each other around all they liked. But the ones who have lost, the ones who are unable to function in that rough-and-tumble, could be assured that their society would not make them starve to death because they failed at the American Dream. Is the American Dream any less a dream if we admit that it doesn’t always come true?

Why should we? I hear ya. Who says we have to build decent housing and give free food and clothes and furniture and plumbing to a bunch of lazy, no-good goldbrickers? Who says we need to educate their children and give everyone free medical care? Well, the answer is—you do. Think about this—when you go out for a walk, is it nice and clean and peaceful and decent? If you had a choice between giving that up to live in a commercial ‘war zone’, or paying extra to keep everybody’s suffering to a dull roar, which would you pick?

If we want this country to be a nice neighborhood, we have to spend some money on maintenance. The rules of Capitalism insist that winners win at the expense of the losers—so, do we want our society to operate like a casino and try to take everyone’s last dollar before they leave? Or can we adjust Capitalism, as we did, after much violence and struggle, when we realized that it is only fair to let workers unite to protect their interests against the owners?

We should take that concept a bit further and resolve that Capitalism is only suitable for a decent society when it draws a line beyond which we will not sink, a line that guarantees no one will die from being poor—that losing in the marketplace doesn’t condemn a person, or an entire family, to slow, miserable death. We like to look back in horror on the old practice of keeping a Debtor’s Prison—but are we any better for letting our poor starve in broad daylight?