My friend the talented and prolific cartoonist Jamie Smith wrote in his blog recently about how he likes to work in public spaces like cafes because the background noise of people helps him concentrate.
As often happens with Jamie's observations, it made me realize something: cartooning is inherently social. As also so often happens, I feel like an idiot for not realizing it sooner and incorporating the principle years ago.
It makes perfect sense. Who is the cartoonist? The doodler draws in the back of class and hands the sketches around for the reward of laughter. Even the most awkward social outcast who draws will try to find someone with whom to share it. Fine art might or might not be snooty, but cartooning is always looking for a friend.
Writers have been known to haunt cafes and bars, too, but their art takes more time to absorb. A cartoonist has the unique ability to dash off a sketch that can be appreciated in seconds, but viewed over and over.
A stand-up comedian can snap off a hilarious observation, but repetition might make it tiresome to the performer or the audience. For the cartoonist, the panel or page can be as fresh as when it was new. If the material doesn't depend on a topic that goes stale, every new viewer can enjoy it at full potency. The cartoonist can draw in a room alone or with a handful of people, but the product can be reproduced and distributed almost infinitely.
When I moved to the woods in 1987 I did not fully appreciate how the isolation of rural life would affect my ability to work. I have the same need for social contact that any cartoonist has. When I lived in a small city I liked to go out into it to watch people. I didn't need to meet them, just to have them around. Then I got pulled off into outdoor writing, which is a strange name for the genre, if you think about it. I did do a lot of the writing outdoors, but the term refers to writing about activities conducted outdoors. The craft required that I do these outdoor things. I wanted to know if they were really a good option for the working class compared to the more expensive and destructive pursuits marketed to them. The answer turns out to be yes and no. By the time I came back around to my original goals I was already here with a snug home and an income that looks better and better as other sectors of the economy topple.
A recent public radio segment I heard featured some people interviewing for jobs at a call center. The salary was $20,000 a year. The company they were applying to work for has very strict policies. One applicant came in with very businesslike attire and years of experience to try for this job that pays what would barely be a living wage in many parts of this country. Seriously, try to have a halfway decent place to live, a somewhat reliable used car and regular dental checkups for $20,000 a year in the Baltimore-Washington area. Forget trying to live in a truly nice place and have a solid vehicle and maybe a family for that kind of money. So my steady trickle, which has actually managed to exceed call center money after all these years, doesn't seem like such a stupid choice.
Jamie mentioned that some other cartoonists have said they run the radio or have the TV news on in the background. I get drawn into the broadcast, which can be good for generating ideas, but hard when I'm trying to follow through on one of them.
Ideas flow when I'm supposed to be doing something else. The social context of work or school provides the base level of activity that stimulates the brain and offers the promise of someone to laugh as soon as you finish and show them your work. In Jackson I could often do good finished renderings. In Wolfe City I can't. I drag home bedraggled scraps of scratch paper with scribbled doodles and notes and hope I will have the energy to overcome my media paralysis and actually finish some of them on my so-called "days off."
Web publishing offers the possibility of a worldwide audience. The tricky part is hooking up cash flow to this exposure. You also have to avoid getting sucked into the vast array of truly fantastic passive entertainment and educational material on that same worldwide buffet. Your odds of being seen are really no better than if you scrawled on the wall of an alley in a second rate city on the skids. The difference is that the city can now be anywhere in the world, with the correspondingly greater number of lost pedestrians who might stumble into your seedy neighborhood and appreciate your doodle. Unless they leave a comment, the social aspect is conspicuously lacking. And processing and responding to those comments requires another chunk of your time.
Home alone today with cats climbing on me or my table, I have to try to get some work done.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
I Ponder Economics
In this world of illusion you have to choose your level of illusion carefully. If you have none at all you can easily become suicidally depressed, whether you act on it or not. Depression is by nature a slow-motion suicide because you sit and wait for death when you do nothing else with your time. So it pays to avoid the realization that all human existence is pointless unless it propels you into a hardworking pursuit of distracting hedonism. In that case you become a driver of the economy. You have to pay for those physical gratifications somehow, and that means trading goods and services.
If you want to try for happiness you have to come up with a solid set of stories you tell yourself about the things you do to fill your day and calm your mind for sleep at night. I was going to say lies, but if you know they're lies they will cease to work and you're back to suicidal depression or a knowing pursuit of distraction in a vast cosmos of pointlessness. The veil will inevitably slip from time to time, leaving you staring into the fathomless blackness.
If you decide your life has a point or points, pursuit of them will provide the structure to support the comforting facade you place over the big black hole. You can equally validly decide that you simply like certain things in life and will enjoy them as much as possible until the end, making no bets about their higher purpose or what experience might lie beyond the point where our perception appears to cease.
While you're here you have to figure out how to generate income.
I know a lot of people in the realm collectively known as The Arts. They are actors, writers, directors, painters, cartoonists, musicians and even tradespeople who have an artistic approach to their work. The tradespeople have an advantage over the purely artistic types because they offer a practical service like auto repair, carpentry or plumbing in their own eccentric way.
The unifying trait in the artistic personality is independent thought. Their creativity might be completely derivative, but every artist feels independent and does not perform well under someone else's authority. My auto mechanic started his own shop because he did not like how he was being told to fix people's cars to low standards in shops where he was merely an employee. For the luxury of setting his own standards he undertook the endless work of being his own boss. He's staying afloat, but he can't tolerate helpers with low standards any more than he could work for an employer with them. He works as hard as he can to meet his own standards for as many customers as he can serve at that level. It means a lot of six-day -- if not seven-day -- weeks.
Many of my friends in the pure arts: music, drama, visual media both serious and humorous, teach others their craft. The money they get for lessons and classes helps fund their more speculative creative ventures. However, they create more creators as they go. If even a fraction of the students go on to put up their creations for the public to view, judge and perhaps purchase, they fill the display with more and more for the consuming public to pay for, or not. That money has to come from somewhere. Even the money for lessons has to come from somewhere.
Right now, the Internet has evolved to a point at which creative people, good or not so good, can put up their work and possibly gain some income from it. I gather from my musician friends that the model is not serving them well because their intellectual property can escape through too many leaks without producing a return flow of cash. While a performer can gain worldwide exposure, apparently it's very easy to lose all benefit of the fame because the cash flow fails. In fact, according to one musician's article, musicians now find themselves paying more and more services to publicize them while receiving no money in return. If no one has to pay for recordings anymore, the only sources of income are live gigs and authorized merchandise. That seems like a throwback to the age when musicians played not only without being recorded, but without amplification except by their own numbers and the acoustics of the performance space.
Returning to the concept of what is worthwhile in human existence, how much should we care about people who have chosen to devote extraordinary amounts of time to perfecting skills that do not produce food, build shelter or move people and goods from place to place? The answer begins with the fact that we are not ants. We as a species seem to believe there is more to our existence than mere existence. We evolved these arts as a way to enrich our lives. The fact that some of us prove more adept than others at them complicates matters because then the arts of a few become desirable by a larger audience that finds itself incapable of doing as well, or who simply like the product even if they are fellow creators.
Many adult advisors did their best to convince me to get a good job and do art as a hobby. As far as they were concerned I was throwing away my life by chasing a dream of creative success. Was it because they'd seen my art and knew it wasn't good enough to succeed or did they give the same advice to any student? I'll never know.
How often do you find yourself looking at something and asking "but what good is it?" It seems like a reasonable question when looking at a piece of art that seems badly done or in poor taste, or listening to music that's disturbing or sloppily performed. In the realm of pure art, so much is subjective that a lot of it can seem like crap and a certain amount undeniably is. But apply the same question to everything you see, not just art, and be ruthlessly critical. Keep at it long enough --perhaps not long at all -- and you question the value of nearly everything. And that's a good thing. You want to keep checking your assumptions not just once but as many times as it takes to get around all sides of them and make them prove their worth. Even if you continue apparently unchanged, at least you ran the checklist.
If you want to try for happiness you have to come up with a solid set of stories you tell yourself about the things you do to fill your day and calm your mind for sleep at night. I was going to say lies, but if you know they're lies they will cease to work and you're back to suicidal depression or a knowing pursuit of distraction in a vast cosmos of pointlessness. The veil will inevitably slip from time to time, leaving you staring into the fathomless blackness.
If you decide your life has a point or points, pursuit of them will provide the structure to support the comforting facade you place over the big black hole. You can equally validly decide that you simply like certain things in life and will enjoy them as much as possible until the end, making no bets about their higher purpose or what experience might lie beyond the point where our perception appears to cease.
While you're here you have to figure out how to generate income.
I know a lot of people in the realm collectively known as The Arts. They are actors, writers, directors, painters, cartoonists, musicians and even tradespeople who have an artistic approach to their work. The tradespeople have an advantage over the purely artistic types because they offer a practical service like auto repair, carpentry or plumbing in their own eccentric way.
The unifying trait in the artistic personality is independent thought. Their creativity might be completely derivative, but every artist feels independent and does not perform well under someone else's authority. My auto mechanic started his own shop because he did not like how he was being told to fix people's cars to low standards in shops where he was merely an employee. For the luxury of setting his own standards he undertook the endless work of being his own boss. He's staying afloat, but he can't tolerate helpers with low standards any more than he could work for an employer with them. He works as hard as he can to meet his own standards for as many customers as he can serve at that level. It means a lot of six-day -- if not seven-day -- weeks.
Many of my friends in the pure arts: music, drama, visual media both serious and humorous, teach others their craft. The money they get for lessons and classes helps fund their more speculative creative ventures. However, they create more creators as they go. If even a fraction of the students go on to put up their creations for the public to view, judge and perhaps purchase, they fill the display with more and more for the consuming public to pay for, or not. That money has to come from somewhere. Even the money for lessons has to come from somewhere.
Right now, the Internet has evolved to a point at which creative people, good or not so good, can put up their work and possibly gain some income from it. I gather from my musician friends that the model is not serving them well because their intellectual property can escape through too many leaks without producing a return flow of cash. While a performer can gain worldwide exposure, apparently it's very easy to lose all benefit of the fame because the cash flow fails. In fact, according to one musician's article, musicians now find themselves paying more and more services to publicize them while receiving no money in return. If no one has to pay for recordings anymore, the only sources of income are live gigs and authorized merchandise. That seems like a throwback to the age when musicians played not only without being recorded, but without amplification except by their own numbers and the acoustics of the performance space.
Returning to the concept of what is worthwhile in human existence, how much should we care about people who have chosen to devote extraordinary amounts of time to perfecting skills that do not produce food, build shelter or move people and goods from place to place? The answer begins with the fact that we are not ants. We as a species seem to believe there is more to our existence than mere existence. We evolved these arts as a way to enrich our lives. The fact that some of us prove more adept than others at them complicates matters because then the arts of a few become desirable by a larger audience that finds itself incapable of doing as well, or who simply like the product even if they are fellow creators.
Many adult advisors did their best to convince me to get a good job and do art as a hobby. As far as they were concerned I was throwing away my life by chasing a dream of creative success. Was it because they'd seen my art and knew it wasn't good enough to succeed or did they give the same advice to any student? I'll never know.
How often do you find yourself looking at something and asking "but what good is it?" It seems like a reasonable question when looking at a piece of art that seems badly done or in poor taste, or listening to music that's disturbing or sloppily performed. In the realm of pure art, so much is subjective that a lot of it can seem like crap and a certain amount undeniably is. But apply the same question to everything you see, not just art, and be ruthlessly critical. Keep at it long enough --perhaps not long at all -- and you question the value of nearly everything. And that's a good thing. You want to keep checking your assumptions not just once but as many times as it takes to get around all sides of them and make them prove their worth. Even if you continue apparently unchanged, at least you ran the checklist.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
This just in: Osama bin Laden is still dead
At the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives the man most associated in the public's mind with the 9/11 plot has finally been gunned down by an amazing team of fighters from the United States.
In terms of cost effectiveness, chaos is always a better deal than order. That would not be true if all was chaos. Nothing would be a good deal. But if your hobby is anarchy or subversion you definitely get more bang for your buck as the evil genius planting bombs in unexpected places or sending suicidal minions out to blow themselves spectacularly to smithereens as a political or philosophical statement. While the chumps try to keep a functional society going, you can hide out in your lair, plotting. Release the occasional propaganda video to stir the pot.
Osama may be dead, but who really won? We have no idea how much he might have been enjoying life. What did we really take from him? It could have been everything. It could have been not much. Rumors had circulated about his poor health. He could already have been on the way out. And he can't have been surprised that the forces of retribution continued to hunt him. The magnitude of the hunt will give the dead man an aura of greatness among those inclined to admire killers who accept their own death as the price of their lifestyle choice. Is that supposed to make it all right?
Now that first impressions are wearing off we can get down to the serious long-term business of arguing over it. It has to be used as political football for as long as it will rise nicely to a sharp kick. It will go flat eventually, but hardly soon enough.
Meanwhile, the actual snuff operation has the makings of a great movie. Who's got the hot hand writing that shit these days? This one practically writes itself. When was the last time a mission like this worked so well and could actually be publicized?
In terms of cost effectiveness, chaos is always a better deal than order. That would not be true if all was chaos. Nothing would be a good deal. But if your hobby is anarchy or subversion you definitely get more bang for your buck as the evil genius planting bombs in unexpected places or sending suicidal minions out to blow themselves spectacularly to smithereens as a political or philosophical statement. While the chumps try to keep a functional society going, you can hide out in your lair, plotting. Release the occasional propaganda video to stir the pot.
Osama may be dead, but who really won? We have no idea how much he might have been enjoying life. What did we really take from him? It could have been everything. It could have been not much. Rumors had circulated about his poor health. He could already have been on the way out. And he can't have been surprised that the forces of retribution continued to hunt him. The magnitude of the hunt will give the dead man an aura of greatness among those inclined to admire killers who accept their own death as the price of their lifestyle choice. Is that supposed to make it all right?
Now that first impressions are wearing off we can get down to the serious long-term business of arguing over it. It has to be used as political football for as long as it will rise nicely to a sharp kick. It will go flat eventually, but hardly soon enough.
Meanwhile, the actual snuff operation has the makings of a great movie. Who's got the hot hand writing that shit these days? This one practically writes itself. When was the last time a mission like this worked so well and could actually be publicized?
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
When the world changes right nearby.
The world is always changing. it's just that most times it's far and muffled. But sometimes you're yanked out of bed, swung around by one leg and flung into a new universe.
The phone went off with a harsh jangle at about five past midnight last night. Usually the initial surge of alarm subsides when the caller turns out to be someone in a different time zone who forgot the difference or a caller excited by something great that happened to them.
Once in a while it's as bad as the first surge of fear and then some.
The cellist answered the phone. It's on her side of the bed.
"What? No! How? When? Are you all right?" She sounded instantly breathless and shocked. I could hear a tearful woman's voice on the other end of the line. I began repeating the questions the cellist was asking, to know what had happened, to whom, and how badly.
Her brother had been found dead in his house while his wife and two toddlers were away visiting her parents. He was 47.
Over the years I have had friends of friends die young. Just a couple of weeks ago I finally got a solid Google hit on one of my old fencing teammates I'd been trying to track down for years. It was his obituary.
While I'm no great fan of death, it doesn't freak me out when it happens to someone young. By the time I finished high school I'd lost one schoolmate to cancer when she was in fifth grade. Another graduated from high school with one leg. By the end of the following year she had lost the other leg and her life. I know death has no respect for your age, your plans, how beloved you are or your social position. Some people live a long time. Others don't. Sometimes the death makes a certain amount of sense: the deceased may have a medical condition, dangerous habits or hazardous activities. Our cars kill 40,000 of us a year in the United States alone. But when someone just drops, and he's the only parent in his group of siblings it changes everyone's outlook. The man is dead, that's shocking enough. His survivors still need to live. We all have to figure out how to help them with the plain practical matter of going on.
When we went to bed we thought the bad news was that we had less time than we had thought to find a kidney transplant facility for her and see if we need to set up one of those transplant chains to get live donors lined up with matched recipients. If I match her it's just $150,000 worth of plug-and-play. The odds are against it.
Organ transplantation isn't like any other purchase. You only get one shot. The organ has to be right. The surgical team has to be right. It's a lot to absorb. We have about six years. Will a medical miracle change our situation? One can hope, of course, but again, the odds are against it.
The future looks complicated and expensive. In the meantime we still have to get to work every day and pay our bills. The future is unknowable. Lay the groundwork for what you hope to reach. Remember that most of your plans and absolutely none of your hopes guarantee anything.
The phone went off with a harsh jangle at about five past midnight last night. Usually the initial surge of alarm subsides when the caller turns out to be someone in a different time zone who forgot the difference or a caller excited by something great that happened to them.
Once in a while it's as bad as the first surge of fear and then some.
The cellist answered the phone. It's on her side of the bed.
"What? No! How? When? Are you all right?" She sounded instantly breathless and shocked. I could hear a tearful woman's voice on the other end of the line. I began repeating the questions the cellist was asking, to know what had happened, to whom, and how badly.
Her brother had been found dead in his house while his wife and two toddlers were away visiting her parents. He was 47.
Over the years I have had friends of friends die young. Just a couple of weeks ago I finally got a solid Google hit on one of my old fencing teammates I'd been trying to track down for years. It was his obituary.
While I'm no great fan of death, it doesn't freak me out when it happens to someone young. By the time I finished high school I'd lost one schoolmate to cancer when she was in fifth grade. Another graduated from high school with one leg. By the end of the following year she had lost the other leg and her life. I know death has no respect for your age, your plans, how beloved you are or your social position. Some people live a long time. Others don't. Sometimes the death makes a certain amount of sense: the deceased may have a medical condition, dangerous habits or hazardous activities. Our cars kill 40,000 of us a year in the United States alone. But when someone just drops, and he's the only parent in his group of siblings it changes everyone's outlook. The man is dead, that's shocking enough. His survivors still need to live. We all have to figure out how to help them with the plain practical matter of going on.
When we went to bed we thought the bad news was that we had less time than we had thought to find a kidney transplant facility for her and see if we need to set up one of those transplant chains to get live donors lined up with matched recipients. If I match her it's just $150,000 worth of plug-and-play. The odds are against it.
Organ transplantation isn't like any other purchase. You only get one shot. The organ has to be right. The surgical team has to be right. It's a lot to absorb. We have about six years. Will a medical miracle change our situation? One can hope, of course, but again, the odds are against it.
The future looks complicated and expensive. In the meantime we still have to get to work every day and pay our bills. The future is unknowable. Lay the groundwork for what you hope to reach. Remember that most of your plans and absolutely none of your hopes guarantee anything.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Attention Motorists
The only time it is appropriate to leave your vehicle idling is when you are using it to kill yourself inside your garage.
We also request that you rethink that decision and choose a more environmentally sensitive suicide method like drowning in the ocean or smearing yourself with raw steak and going for a naked hike in grizzly country.
We also request that you rethink that decision and choose a more environmentally sensitive suicide method like drowning in the ocean or smearing yourself with raw steak and going for a naked hike in grizzly country.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
It's gonna get deep in New Hampshire
Yeah, we have a big snowstorm headed our way. The total between today's light shot and tomorrow's big dump could be as much as 22 inches. It's gonna get deep around here.
It makes a nice metaphor for the beginning of primary campaigning for the Presidential election in 2012.
My risk of a stroke went up with my blood pressure this morning when I turned on the television looking for an updated weather forecast and instead caught a few minutes of Mitt Romney in an interview on Good Morning America. That's not good for an aging man with no health insurance.
Mitt's health care plan in the 2008 campaign was to make everyone in the country buy health insurance, as he had made everyone in Massachusetts buy it when he was governor. Now he says that President Obama's health care bill, requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, is unconstitutional. He says it's a power reserved to the states. If your state is a slum, tough luck.
According to what I've read, Thomas Jefferson would never have envisioned a state like California or Texas, as big and rich as a small country. His original concept called for small states of more uniform size and a largely agrarian character. As I recall, we weren't supposed to keep a standing military force, either. Instead we would call together the state militias in the event our federation was threatened. The coastal states can furnish naval forces. The ships can be built of the native wood.
Following Mitt's logic on health care, instead of trying to get a plan through one federal bureaucracy, we the taxpayers and working stiffs have to try to get something through 50 state bureaucracies with widely varying tax revenues. If the federal government offers some sort of aid, that bureaucracy will have to grind its gears to dispense these funds to help the poorer states make up their shortages.
Mitt says he's pro-business. He's certainly favorable to the insurance business. While politicians wrangle in Congress and state legislatures all over this mythically great land, the insurance business will go on as usual, making book on people's health and writing rules to suit themselves.
Living in New Hampshire gives us a front-row seat to the political circus early in the process. It can be fun to watch all the candidates until you start to listen to them and care what they say. Then you wish they were doing it somewhere else. It's only funny when they step on a cow flop. And with the state of agriculture in this country, that doesn't happen nearly often enough.
It makes a nice metaphor for the beginning of primary campaigning for the Presidential election in 2012.
My risk of a stroke went up with my blood pressure this morning when I turned on the television looking for an updated weather forecast and instead caught a few minutes of Mitt Romney in an interview on Good Morning America. That's not good for an aging man with no health insurance.
Mitt's health care plan in the 2008 campaign was to make everyone in the country buy health insurance, as he had made everyone in Massachusetts buy it when he was governor. Now he says that President Obama's health care bill, requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, is unconstitutional. He says it's a power reserved to the states. If your state is a slum, tough luck.
According to what I've read, Thomas Jefferson would never have envisioned a state like California or Texas, as big and rich as a small country. His original concept called for small states of more uniform size and a largely agrarian character. As I recall, we weren't supposed to keep a standing military force, either. Instead we would call together the state militias in the event our federation was threatened. The coastal states can furnish naval forces. The ships can be built of the native wood.
Following Mitt's logic on health care, instead of trying to get a plan through one federal bureaucracy, we the taxpayers and working stiffs have to try to get something through 50 state bureaucracies with widely varying tax revenues. If the federal government offers some sort of aid, that bureaucracy will have to grind its gears to dispense these funds to help the poorer states make up their shortages.
Mitt says he's pro-business. He's certainly favorable to the insurance business. While politicians wrangle in Congress and state legislatures all over this mythically great land, the insurance business will go on as usual, making book on people's health and writing rules to suit themselves.
Living in New Hampshire gives us a front-row seat to the political circus early in the process. It can be fun to watch all the candidates until you start to listen to them and care what they say. Then you wish they were doing it somewhere else. It's only funny when they step on a cow flop. And with the state of agriculture in this country, that doesn't happen nearly often enough.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Magic Words
Live = Free. Live - Free = Die.
Listening to a dope-growing pig farmer at a public hearing about wetland buffers last night, I realized that the phrase "Live free or die" effectively nullifies all environmental protection.
If you subscribe to The Code, any restriction on your freedom, by anyone, for any reason, calls for your armed resistance. If you fail to remove the restriction, by logic you must die. Even self restraint counts as unacceptable tyranny. It might set a precedent for a standard of behavior less than free. At the first urge to show self restraint, the true believer should commit suicide. Anything less will dilute the purity of everyone else's freedom.
Obviously, any concern for your neighbors, descendants, other species, aesthetics, or any factor other than the fulfillment of your immediate and ongoing desires makes you less than free. The true believer that we must Live Free or Die has an obligation to destroy the environment that supports all life, since death is the alternative to living free. We must live free to the hilt, to the bitter end, or it won't have been worth living at all.
The supporters of living free or dying have made it an unofficial governing document. It's four blunt one-syllable words. It's easy to remember and it sounds so tough!
In the rest of his discourse, the pig farmer basically said that he was too stupid to understand the proposed ordinance, so it was wrong. It is clear that the speech centers of the brain are nearly the last thing to be destroyed by decades of drug use.
This same pig farmer walked into my yard when I moved here in 1989 and told me he was the local dope grower, so if I wanted any smoke I should look him up.
"The cops know all about me and they don't do nothin'," he said. "So it's perfectly fine."
About four years later, some friends moved in about a quarter-mile away, just across the river. The pig farmer appeared as if by magic, walking right into their house. He repeated the same welcome-wagon message.
I hadn't seen him in years. I thought he might be dead. Only from the neck up, it would appear.
He left, daring anyone to come change his lifestyle in his swampy lair down a mud road.
In the same meeting we spent an hour and a half on one definition because a dyslexic was wrangling over homonyms. Of all the crap I had brought regarding the science of wetland buffers, the one thing I needed was my big, fat dictionary.
You want to know why nothing gets done by the government? By the time everyone is finished arguing the problem has either gotten too big to be fixed, in which case it becomes "an engine of the economy," or gone away on its own. Gone away doesn't necessarily mean it got better. Maybe whoever you were trying to save had already died. Maybe the problem mutated into a different problem.
Sullen people sulked over their bad real estate investments as if the rest of us owed them something for their stupidity. We let them speak. Their supporters growled their tough slogan. They sneered at government, the big and bad. No individual here is any more responsible than average for the collective bad choices made in America from the mid 1970s onward, but we're all paying the price. We have to be absurdly careful going forward because we were so greedily careless when we should have been starting to adjust our behavior while the problems were smaller.
People made bad decisions in other parts of the world, but America, self-styled leader of the "free" world, owed that world a better example. Instead we chose vanity and an escalating standard of self indulgence.
I subscribe to no religion. I am afraid of most of them. I don't moralize as someone who believes we should dress in somber clothes and deprive ourselves of fun. I just believe in doing a personal environmental and social impact statement on that fun. Hedonism is absolutely fine as long as it's sustainable.
Environmental standards are meant to put helpful limits around development. People who just want to plunge ahead without restraint won't view those standards as helpful, but those are exactly the people from whom the standards will protect the rest of us.
If you subscribe to The Code, any restriction on your freedom, by anyone, for any reason, calls for your armed resistance. If you fail to remove the restriction, by logic you must die. Even self restraint counts as unacceptable tyranny. It might set a precedent for a standard of behavior less than free. At the first urge to show self restraint, the true believer should commit suicide. Anything less will dilute the purity of everyone else's freedom.
Obviously, any concern for your neighbors, descendants, other species, aesthetics, or any factor other than the fulfillment of your immediate and ongoing desires makes you less than free. The true believer that we must Live Free or Die has an obligation to destroy the environment that supports all life, since death is the alternative to living free. We must live free to the hilt, to the bitter end, or it won't have been worth living at all.
The supporters of living free or dying have made it an unofficial governing document. It's four blunt one-syllable words. It's easy to remember and it sounds so tough!
In the rest of his discourse, the pig farmer basically said that he was too stupid to understand the proposed ordinance, so it was wrong. It is clear that the speech centers of the brain are nearly the last thing to be destroyed by decades of drug use.
This same pig farmer walked into my yard when I moved here in 1989 and told me he was the local dope grower, so if I wanted any smoke I should look him up.
"The cops know all about me and they don't do nothin'," he said. "So it's perfectly fine."
About four years later, some friends moved in about a quarter-mile away, just across the river. The pig farmer appeared as if by magic, walking right into their house. He repeated the same welcome-wagon message.
I hadn't seen him in years. I thought he might be dead. Only from the neck up, it would appear.
He left, daring anyone to come change his lifestyle in his swampy lair down a mud road.
In the same meeting we spent an hour and a half on one definition because a dyslexic was wrangling over homonyms. Of all the crap I had brought regarding the science of wetland buffers, the one thing I needed was my big, fat dictionary.
You want to know why nothing gets done by the government? By the time everyone is finished arguing the problem has either gotten too big to be fixed, in which case it becomes "an engine of the economy," or gone away on its own. Gone away doesn't necessarily mean it got better. Maybe whoever you were trying to save had already died. Maybe the problem mutated into a different problem.
Sullen people sulked over their bad real estate investments as if the rest of us owed them something for their stupidity. We let them speak. Their supporters growled their tough slogan. They sneered at government, the big and bad. No individual here is any more responsible than average for the collective bad choices made in America from the mid 1970s onward, but we're all paying the price. We have to be absurdly careful going forward because we were so greedily careless when we should have been starting to adjust our behavior while the problems were smaller.
People made bad decisions in other parts of the world, but America, self-styled leader of the "free" world, owed that world a better example. Instead we chose vanity and an escalating standard of self indulgence.
I subscribe to no religion. I am afraid of most of them. I don't moralize as someone who believes we should dress in somber clothes and deprive ourselves of fun. I just believe in doing a personal environmental and social impact statement on that fun. Hedonism is absolutely fine as long as it's sustainable.
Environmental standards are meant to put helpful limits around development. People who just want to plunge ahead without restraint won't view those standards as helpful, but those are exactly the people from whom the standards will protect the rest of us.
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