Congressional Comedy

So let’s see… We’ve got poverty, crime, terrorism, biohazards, hunger, and a few other things nobody has a handle on, so what we should do is… yes, you’ve got it, read the US Constitution out loud!!!  How come no one thought of this before?

You may have missed this giant step sideways in American politics. The incoming Republicans who recently descended upon Capitol Hill thought it might be an interesting gimmick, because what could be more patriotic—and reassuring to the electorate—than aligning themselves with the country’s most famous document? So read they did.

Incoming Speaker John A. Boehner launched the initiative with, “We the people of the United States…” and was followed by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who, apparently overcome by the momentousness of the event, tripped as she walked to the dais. She read Article 1, Section 1, which enabled the creation of Congress. One after another, Congressmen read their passages. Time passed slowly, and soon the people’s elected servants began yawning, fidgeting, playing with their Blackberries and looking at the clock because, let's face it, reading the Constitution is not like reading James Lee Burke’s latest novel. It is indescribably boooooring.

The fun started when it was discovered that the politicians weren’t reading the full document. The section dealing with slavery (and endorsing it), was left out because it lacked political correctness. This led Representative James E. Clyburn the ranking Black member of the House, to refuse to participate in reciting what he called “revisionist history.” Other notables objected to the lapse as well, including Hilary Shelton, a senior vice president with the NAACP. Republicans reasoned that since slavery had been overturned by the 13^th Amendment, why bother with the original—and no longer applicable—constitutional passages?

In fact, what happened on the Hill is somewhat remindful of many earlier attempts to ban works deemed inappropriate by authorities. Think Ulysses, Candide, Fanny Hill, Margaret Sanger’s 1915 Family Limitation dealing with contraception, Rousseau’s Confessions, banned by the US Customs in 1929 as “injurious to public morality.”  Think, Leaves of Grass and Origin of Species, Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both of which have been dropped from many high school reading curriculum.

What the Congressmen did was choose to change a document few had ever read in its entirety and certainly none was worthy of editing. They decided what was fit and right for public consumption, an incredible act of hubris.

I should add here that a section of the Constitution was omitted when one reader accidentally skipped a page.

This, in and of itself, does not bode well.   

 

A License To...

Recently the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicle sent me an application to renew my driver’s license. I’ll be turning 65 in a couple of month and it’s been a few years since the one I have was issued.  The snapshot on my license is truly horrible. I look like a sleepy, pudgy man who just realized the plumbing in his home is faulty, so I welcomed the opportunity to at least set things right photographically.

But the more I thought about it, the more the automatic renewal gave me pause. Turns out I won’t get another photo—the DMV no longer reissues licenses in person—so for identification purposes, the license is useless; I no longer look like the unhappy man portrayed in the grainy Polaroid and even though I’m sure store clerks will make a show of looking at the photo when I write them a check, it really is an exercise in futility. But more to the point, shouldn’t everyone get re-tested once or twice in a lifetime? We’re talking about (wo)manning a large, moving piece of steel and plastic capable of inflicting death and destruction if one is inattentive for only a moment. Speaking solely for myself, I know that neither my reflexes nor my eyesight are what they were, which is why I no longer own motorcycles. 

I once wrote a politically incorrect blog on Driving While Asian (DWA). I would venture that the only drivers worse than Asian women are senior citizens who can barely see over the dashboard of their Caddies and Olds.

When my father was in the throes of Alzheimer’s, one of the most painful things I had to do was forbid him to drive and take his license away. I remember him blithely signaling right and turning left amidst a concerto of horns and nodding off while waiting for a light to turn green. My mother, who learned to drive American Army trucks as a Free French soldier in Algeria during World War II, was even worst. Though she never had an accident, she was the scourge of American roadways, causing other drivers to pass her while making insulting hand gestures out of their car windows. Her favorite trick was to stop dead in the middle of the road if she heard a siren, no matter how distant. I’m not sure where that habit came from, though she claimed it was a trick question in the written part of the driver’s license test in Maryland.

Personally, I’m glad not to have to go through the hassle of being tested again. I haven’t had a ticket in ages and I can’t remember my last fender-bender. But I am the first to recognize that driving has changed radically in the last 40 years. More multi-lane highways, higher speeds, far more powerful cars, and the need for a greater awareness of one’s environment all make for potential tragedy among older drivers.

According to elderly driving statistics, older drivers have more fatal accidents than any other age group. In addition, elderly drivers are more at risk of dying after an accident because of their frailty. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that in 2006, when the last data was computed, there were nearly 30 million elderly drivers driving on the streets of America. The statistics further showed that in that same year, 6,017 elderly people were killed in road accidents and this figure is around 14 percent of total people killed by road accidents. According to Babyboomercare.com, a website that follows elderly issues, “Elderly driving statistics clearly proves that the older population of America is a danger to themselves and other drivers. That is why there are repeated calls for elderly drivers to be retested to see whether they are okay to drive.”

The Virginia DMV charges me $35 for a new license. The fee, basically, is just another way to get a few bucks out of the local citizenry. Test us, I say. And if we’re not capable of passing the test, ground us, or provide alternative ways of getting us from A to B. We’ll be safer and live a bit longer.

That, as Mr. Malaprop once said, is my opinion, and I share it.

Buh Bye 2010

So it’s been an interesting year. Or maybe not even that. Feh. On the plus side, I finished writing a book, sold a short story to a good fiction magazine, wrote something just about every single day, met new people, some of whom were worth meeting, while others were not.  I also composed a bunch of songs and music. A few will have a future, and some will serve to remind me of things best left behind. I learned new licks and forgot old ones, touched base with old friends and lost recently-made ones whom I thought might last. I saw promising relationships whither while others prospered.

I’ve played music with people far more talented than I am and benefitted from the experience.

The writers’ group of which I am a member has been a godsend—talented people willing to listen and encourage in an occupation that is frighteningly solitary and very lonely at times.

No major illnesses but a bunch of niggling stuff that forces me to keep my $800+ a month health insurance with the local HMO. Bell’s palsy (WTF?), shingles, allergies and infections; a few weeks of flu and a back out of whack. But I am exercising—or trying to—every day, and if this is not as instantly rewarding as it would be in a perfect world, at least it does seem that the fit of my butt in the bucket seat of my car is not quite as alarming as it was prior to the sit-ups, squats and curls.

On the downside, construction of a metro push-station (WTF 2?) erupted behind my house, destroying a very nice copse of trees and driving out deer, fox, raccoons and other wildlife while making deafening thumping sounds from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., weekends included. The deforestation now allows me an unhindered view of a major thoroughfare. No doubt the paltry value of my ‘60s-era home has fallen sharply, but I am told this is the price of progress. Am I pissed of? Yes, assuredly. This is one of those moments when practicing acceptance is not only necessary but life-saving.

On the downside as well is my next door neighbor who has taken up the drums. He is not a gifted musician; I will leave it at that.

I attended some 200 12-step meetings and will celebrate 20 years of sobriety and abstinence in a couple of months. Other than breathing and eating, I can’t think of anything I have done with any degree of regularity for two decades.

I’ve gone on some wonderful hikes, and while walking next to a canal, was accompanied for half a mile by a young beaver swimming upstream. I almost stepped on a 60-pound snapping turtle and saw bald eagles roosting high in trees next to a river. I was stung a dozen times in less than 15 seconds by angry mud daubers. That hurt and took a couple of weeks to heal.

I have worked hard at disarming resentments new and old, and have only been partially successful. I think there are people who are natural sons (and daughters) of bitches. They may be here to test our forbearance and ability to remain calm during storms. Or maybe not. I do know this: such people exist and they take up space.

I have no idea what the coming year will bring, but that’s the fun of it all, isn’t it?

Best to one and all, and may 2011 bring you all the happiness you deserve.

May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields. Old Irish Blessing

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The Days After Christmas

Yesterday, in the parking lot of the upscale hardware store near where I live, workers were grinding up the unsold Christmas trees, each conifer tossed tip-first into the chute and reduced in seconds to chips and sawdust. Earlier, they’d taken the giant plastic red bows and the colored lights down and a couple of kids not wearing Santa hats any more were using leaf blowers on the pine needles and twigs. The noise was far-reaching, a combination of angry bees and more angry bees looking for something to attack. There were a couple of spectators there, people with little to do on a post-Christmas morning, a middle-aged woman walking her dog, an older couple holding gloved hands.

“Seems like a waste, doesn’t it?” The man had a round face, powder blue eyes and steel-rimmed glasses. I agreed, but then I have always thought that sawing down trees to provide a couple of weeks’ worth of decorations is sort of foolish. The middle-aged woman picked up her dog, a miniature something or other, and held it to her chest. The dog didn’t like the noise the shredder made and squirmed in the woman’s arms so she squeezed him tighter. Another tree went into the machine. “This is really disturbing,” she said. And it was, though I couldn’t really tell why. The man nodded, “The day after anything is always kind of sad.”  His wife smiled sadly in agreement, added, “We haven’t bought a tree since, when? 1985?”

If Thanksgiving is the national holiday of over-consumption, then Christmas is the one most associated with misuse of resources. One year I decided to see how many catalogs I received in the months of November and December (I think there was a Seinfeld episode where Kramer did this.)  I stacked them up daily under my kitchen counter and in the days before Christmas the pile was 32 inches high and weighed 16 pounds. The catalogs were all glossy and most came from stores where I had never shopped. A lot of them advertised items I didn’t know existed and would not buy either for myself or as a gift for another, items one might have problems re-gifting. According to news releases from the postal people, catalogs are the main reason it now costs the average non-commercial consumer almost a half-buck each to post a letter or pay a bill.

That stuff is recycled is beside the point. A tree reduced to sawdust will never be a tree again—nor, for that matter, will a catalog. Over the past couple of years I have tried to get my name taken off mailing lists, but with catalogs it’s more difficult than it is with spam. Somehow, my requests to not be mailed tons of unwanted material are seldom honored. I am sure that, from an advertising standpoint, there is a valid reason for this, but I can’t quite fathom it.

Next year, I plan to begin sending the catalogs back to their stores of origin. Maybe tie a brick to the one from Bed Bath and Beyond, just to see what happens. Gift-wrapped, of course.

Money

According to the Washington Post, the area I live in has succeeded in having the highest median annual income of anywhere in the States. One hundred thousand dollars per household, to be exact…. That’s median, which means that about half of the people make a ton more than that.

In my neighborhood, there are very few cars more than a year or two old. The high school kids drive new Jeeps—the poor ones, that is; the wealthy ones have Landrovers—and Lexus (Lexi?). The homes are a mixture of post-Korean War bungalows built in the early 60s for returning GIs, middle-income two- or three-story brick colonials, McMansions, and ridiculous manor homes redolent of new money and poor taste. Increasingly, these are built on small lots so that yard space comprises a three-foot strip of lawn in the front (some are Astroturf) and a fenced-off bricked-over square in the back just large enough for a stainless steel Crown Verity eight-grill barbecue and a fire pit.

The communities with real money—McLean, Fairfax, Great Falls, Loudon—are peopled by cabinet-level government employees, brokers, attorneys, land developers, dotcom millionaires and plastic surgeons whose mates often are real-estate agents. There are malls everywhere, as well as Porsche, Aston Martin and Bentley dealerships, and a local coffee shop sells individually-wrapped marshmallows for two bucks each. You can buy ostrich eggs and fifty-dollar-a-pound cheese at the local gourmet food store and the mechanics at the area Ferrari dealer charge $190 per hour.  Despite all this wealth, local public libraries recently had to curtail both their hours and their staff due to budget cutbacks.

On the other side of this shiny coin, we find that we have among the worst traffic in the country. Political scumbags like Newt Gingrich pollute our local restaurants. The roads are Third-World at best, and the public education system is sadly lacking. We also have snakeheads—the Asian fish that devours all other species—and, thanks to the estrogen in our waterways, largemouth bass with both male and female sex organs. The National Rifle Association and its crazies are in our backyards buying the politicians’ votes to allow firearms in national parks and the unregulated sale of semi-automatic weapons at gun shows. And 15 years ago, a few miles from my house, workers in a lab full of monkeys almost set loose the Ebola virus.  You can read all about in the 1995 bestseller, The Hot Zone.

Oh. And our hockey, baseball, basketball and football teams are all on a losing streak.

So once again, I ask you: Is this a great country or what?

Life and Opacity

There are times when I feel opaque, almost transparent.  All emotions I have had that could be expanded have been spent, for good or for ill, and whatever I believe I am capable of teaching has been taught ad nauseam. Maybe it’s a function of age, this strange repetition of feelings, events, history, passions and sensations. The core of me says everything I listen to has been said too many times before, and even in music, there are only 12 notes, and every possible arrangement has been composed, hummed and played. I finally understand the full meaning of Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Obviously, even Shakespeare was willing to rehash these older feelings, (oh how I hate to quote Shakespeare… So déclassé) in Sonnet 59, when he wrote:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child.

This sense of not-quite-déjà-vu is insidious. If everything has been done, thought, written and said, then what’s the point? Is life really a simple replay of all that’s already been accomplished?  

Christopher Booker, a British writer and founder of the magazine Private Eye, believes all literature—and here I would add all life—hinges on a few simple plot lines.

The first is Overcoming the Monster.  From Beowulf to modern horror novels, we strive to defeat something bigger and more evil than ourselves. The second story line is Rags to Riches, where we better ourselves along accepted social lines. Then we might go on to plot number three, The Quest, or the search for meaning which will almost certainly involve plot line five, The Voyage and Return. All this may bear traces of both or either Comedy and Tragedy and inevitably as spring follows winter, leads to Rebirth, or perhaps salvation. In more recent times and bowing to changes in modern literature, Booker had added two more entries, Rebellion (think 1984) and Mystery.

From my standpoint, plot lines one through seven perfectly exemplify modern lives. Some of us will live at least two of them, and many of us will exist and struggle through three or more. They repeat themselves, though wearing different costumes and playing different roles. Death, romance, work, play, family and friends, even faith, are cyclical. We pretend to see newness where there is none because doing otherwise will take the wind out of any ship’s sails.

Hmmm. I have no more deep thoughts today, nor even shallow ones, and it’s time for the brown rice holidays.

But give this some thought: out of the seven, which ones are yours?

 

Faith, Religion and the Solstice

I’ve always envied and feared people who claim to have a direct line to their god. Envied because, lets face it, it must be kind of neat to have a Higher Power you can ring up like you can Uncle Stan in Minnesota, and feared because the hubris involved in having God that close to you is nothing short of phenomenal.

I was thinking of this recently after a 12-step meeting turned into a glory hallelujah get-together and made a few participants, myself included, very uncomfortable.

You can generally spot the non-Christians at meetings pretty easily. They speak of faith, rather than religion; they don’t recite the Lord’s Prayer; they shrink back into their chairs when someone ‘testifies’ and invokes Jesus as his or her personal savior. For them, God is an acronym for Good Orderly Direction, which is a conviction of its own.

My personal belief is that my God doesn’t listen to me much.  In organized religion, one gets around that stumbling block by telling the adherents they’re simply not smart—or tuned in—enough to know God’s will. This explains all the tragedies that occur around us, the events that can only be described as mythically unfair—think Haiti, think Bangladesh, think starvation and disease. We are basically too dumb to understand the underlying reasons for calamity and heartbreak in the grand—and beneficent—scheme of things.  We are also told not to pray for our gratification but for that of others, which is a neat way of saying “don’t expect much.” And though God is always responsible for the good things in life, His/Hers/Its reasons for allowing evil are, you got it, beyond our understanding. 

My faith comes and goes. I believe that true faith is the equivalent of true trust. You leap from A, not from A to B. Faith is taking chances, and welcoming change. Most of the time I am loathe to do so, since change can have some unforeseen side-effects.

Enough of this. Tonight is the winter solstice, one of my favorite days of the year. Each 24-hour period from today on and for the six months will carry a few extra minutes of sunlight. The moon tonight is huge and sacred.  I imagine Druidic and Selenite celebrations are being held the world-over. 

Happy solstice to one and all.