The 2016 election offered followers of both parties a variety of candidates to sort through. But in any election year, the party that is not in power will present a field of candidates to primary voters, all vying to make it through the long culling process to reach the nomination.
As a resident of New Hampshire, I have felt responsible to make what seem like good choices for the overall direction of national policy. This involves at least two components: the policies presented by each candidate, and the overall electability of the candidate.
Electability is the harder one to judge. As a result, I have lowered its importance, because it will emerge as the primary process crosses the country. In the earliest contests, it's much more important to pick a candidate whose policies you like, to let the party leadership know what you want to see in their final platform, no matter who is the standard-bearer.
People who fancy themselves as more politically sophisticated will try to make more nuanced choices. On the Republican side in the earliest voting states, I'll bet none of those people would have chosen the candidate who ultimately took the White House under their banner. The 2016 election turned on promises and bravado.
Promises and bravado are not good indicators of competence in office, but elections are guided mostly by emotion. Early voters should vet the policies that are presented. Understand as you do so that they will evolve for various reasons throughout the election, and through the distortion of political pressures once a candidate becomes an office holder and tries to force things through the sausage machine of actual legislation.
New Hampshire is a place to vote Utopian. Ask for it! Demand it! Realize that you probably won't get it! But make the statement because you have the chance, and the attention of the nation is -- briefly -- upon you.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Monday, December 09, 2019
Farewell, douchebag
I spent two of the most unpleasant years of my childhood attending an all-boys' prep school in Severna Park Maryland. As a short, chubby, nearsighted lad, I quickly learned a whole lexicon of insults. It was the end of the 1960s, so a lot of sexist, homophobic stuff was just normal. Cocksucker? Fag? Homo? Pussy?Hell yeah. Douchebag? Absolutely.
When you know better, you do better. Cocksucker fell by the wayside when I reflected upon the fact that I had friends who were. There is nothing inherently wrong or contemptible in consensual participation in oral pleasures. Interestingly, I can still say "fuck you," and a host of other fuck-related profanities. It's such a satisfying word to say, in all of its combinations. It's also an act of pleasure, and sometimes of love. But when something's fucked, nothing sums it up more succinctly. When someone needs to fuck off, they need to fuck off.
Douchebag had been hanging in there. I was so young when it was first leveled at me that the first meaning I assigned to the word was "contemptible loser idiot." I'm not sure when I actually learned about the device and its uses. I was pretty slow in that regard. It has so many connotations of douchebagitude that it almost has its own existence independent of the device that gave it its name. In fact, as far back as the 1970s, when I became a visitor to vulvas and vaginas, and conversed with women about their intimate lives, I was hearing that the douche was unnecessary, and becoming obsolete. I have no standing in that court, so I take my opinions from those who know. I champion whatever cause requires my alliance. But the apparent end of the douche era did not diminish the popularity and pervasiveness of the insulting potential of the bag.
Some technical purists would say that the bag doesn't really do anything, and the nozzle is the real dirty business. And that starts to penetrate the controversy in which I inadvertently found myself today.
I like to post photo comments. When commenting on the antics of a male engaged in acts of dicklitude, I use this picture of a stinkhorn mushroom a lot.
But it was getting a little old, so I rustled up another picture that could apply perhaps to a slightly wider range of offense, and give a little change-up from the fungal dick-pic.
It never failed to get a laugh...until today. A woman whose views I respect stated that the term equates her intimate anatomy with a dirty place that renders the tools of its maintenance -- whether still in common use or not -- symbolic of filth and degradation.
Well shit. If you want to get technical about it, it's absolutely true. A douchebag is no more contemptible in and of itself than a cocksucker. The contemptibility of a cocksucker would come not in the act itself but in the motives for the act. So then you need to append a bunch of supporting scenario to the insult that robs it of all of its immediate whip-crack power as a combat word. And there's no such thing as contemptible douching. I mean I suppose you could -- again -- construct a scenario in which the application of a douche could be degrading, but there you are, digging around for cumbersome qualifiers again.
Sack of shit is still usable. Schmuck is a degrading reference to the penis, but so far no one has been able to refute the fact that a lot of stupidity does seem to emanate from the masculine. So, dick, dork, wang, they're still in play. Or you could be a men's rights dickhead and hold out for the right to insult vaginas. But let's face it: men have gotten away with generations of insulting vaginas as part of a generalized contempt for women. Godammit, we know better, and now we have to do better.
Farewell, sweet douchebag. Unless we can all decide on a treaty that permits insulting use of those syllables unmoored from their vaginal derivations, we must bid farewell to a fine old war horse in the cavalry of harsh words. I shall do my best now to remember and amend my ways. I don't want to be a dou-- fuck! Shithead. I don't want to be a shithead.
When you know better, you do better. Cocksucker fell by the wayside when I reflected upon the fact that I had friends who were. There is nothing inherently wrong or contemptible in consensual participation in oral pleasures. Interestingly, I can still say "fuck you," and a host of other fuck-related profanities. It's such a satisfying word to say, in all of its combinations. It's also an act of pleasure, and sometimes of love. But when something's fucked, nothing sums it up more succinctly. When someone needs to fuck off, they need to fuck off.
Douchebag had been hanging in there. I was so young when it was first leveled at me that the first meaning I assigned to the word was "contemptible loser idiot." I'm not sure when I actually learned about the device and its uses. I was pretty slow in that regard. It has so many connotations of douchebagitude that it almost has its own existence independent of the device that gave it its name. In fact, as far back as the 1970s, when I became a visitor to vulvas and vaginas, and conversed with women about their intimate lives, I was hearing that the douche was unnecessary, and becoming obsolete. I have no standing in that court, so I take my opinions from those who know. I champion whatever cause requires my alliance. But the apparent end of the douche era did not diminish the popularity and pervasiveness of the insulting potential of the bag.
Some technical purists would say that the bag doesn't really do anything, and the nozzle is the real dirty business. And that starts to penetrate the controversy in which I inadvertently found myself today.
I like to post photo comments. When commenting on the antics of a male engaged in acts of dicklitude, I use this picture of a stinkhorn mushroom a lot.
Well shit. If you want to get technical about it, it's absolutely true. A douchebag is no more contemptible in and of itself than a cocksucker. The contemptibility of a cocksucker would come not in the act itself but in the motives for the act. So then you need to append a bunch of supporting scenario to the insult that robs it of all of its immediate whip-crack power as a combat word. And there's no such thing as contemptible douching. I mean I suppose you could -- again -- construct a scenario in which the application of a douche could be degrading, but there you are, digging around for cumbersome qualifiers again.
Sack of shit is still usable. Schmuck is a degrading reference to the penis, but so far no one has been able to refute the fact that a lot of stupidity does seem to emanate from the masculine. So, dick, dork, wang, they're still in play. Or you could be a men's rights dickhead and hold out for the right to insult vaginas. But let's face it: men have gotten away with generations of insulting vaginas as part of a generalized contempt for women. Godammit, we know better, and now we have to do better.
Farewell, sweet douchebag. Unless we can all decide on a treaty that permits insulting use of those syllables unmoored from their vaginal derivations, we must bid farewell to a fine old war horse in the cavalry of harsh words. I shall do my best now to remember and amend my ways. I don't want to be a dou-- fuck! Shithead. I don't want to be a shithead.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Running with the lemmings in the name of love
I'm no fan of holiday travel. With more than 100 million more people in the United States than there were when I started driving, any motor trip to or through even a moderately populated area is stressful. For major holidays, the percentage of the population on the move packs even more vehicles into the plumbing system. Each one is guided by the pilot's emotions as well as intellect.
The holidays themselves are all about emotion. For Thanksgiving, many people travel long distances to give a quick nod to gratitude before kicking off the Christmas shopping season in earnest. Major retailers have been pimping Christmas since October, but certain rituals still seem to have power. One is that Thanksgiving marks the real gateway to "the holiday season." There is no "Thanksgiving season." Anyone stuck preparing the meal will have been doing some planning, but the rest of us just get ourselves to the table and try to waddle away afterwards. It's a spike in everything: one hectic approach by any travel mode necessary, one feast, one hasty retreat to the routines of work or school for the few weeks until "the Christmas season" -- or (insert holiday here) -- intensifies steadily through modern echoes of solstice observances handed down through countless generations.
When I was a kid, my siblings and I knew that nothing was more important than Dad's job. He never missed a Thanksgiving or a Christmas, but he wasn't home for my birth, and I think he missed my older brother's, too. He would go years without taking a vacation with us. He might or might not attend our activities, depending on the needs of God and country. The idea that Dad's job was the family's essential lifeline was common in the 1960s. It's interesting that today we see a lot of promotion of the idea that time with family is the highest value, while at the same time people are working longer hours for less money, and major employers are pushing further and further into what had been traditional holidays for everyone.
I remember when stores were closed on Thanksgiving. Forget the cranberry sauce? Tough shit. There's probably a recipe in the Joy of Cooking. Get busy.
Someone has always had to work on the holidays. Aside from the obvious, like the military forces guarding our freedom from -- in those days -- the commies, and police and firefighters, there were also the people providing the fun or the solemnity. Your local pastor is on duty, racking up billable hours. Places that might provide a festive, holiday-themed dining experience need kitchen staff and servers, and employees to keep the place clean. And let's not forget the hospital, for all of the potential mood wreckers that can come along on their own schedule with no regard for human desires for rest and sociability.
Working in the winter recreation business, I came to regard the holidays as a nuisance. They motivate the general public to think of leisure, and give them a block of time in which to pursue it, but they just added more items to my already crowded schedule. I took advantage of my family's tradition that your job is your top priority. It allowed me to beg off from the traffic jams and sleep deprivation of holiday travel with the legitimate excuse that my job didn't allow enough time to get there and back and be at my best.
The job grew less demanding with changes in the business that employs me. But I lose pay when I'm away, and the business suffers for the shortage in staff. If I had no family, I would not consider driving anywhere, let alone hours on the highway with thousands of other lemmings. However, the parents are definitely advanced in years, and they are traditional people. They don't ask for much, and this simple thing makes them happy. I'm never able to make it at Christmas, so here we are.
My family did not habitually pack up and go to see my grandparents at every holiday. If we happened to live near enough we would do the occasional Thanksgiving, Easter, or Christmas. Sometimes the grandparents might make the trip to us, but my mother's older brother lived right in their area and had four kids of his own, so we weren't the only option. We were such a moving target that we might be a three hour drive away for a couple of years, and then a 21-hour drive away for a couple. We might be to their north, in a land of ice and snow, or down at the bottom of the Florida peninsula. Or the tippy end of Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. So traveling or not traveling was on a case-by-case basis.
Life is always moment to moment, day to day. It becomes more obvious when a person is ill or old or both, but we are being hunted from the day that we are born. We live in the hope that what we consider good will continue, cultivating gratitude for what we have gotten away with. When possible, we bolster the comforting illusions of those we love.
The holidays themselves are all about emotion. For Thanksgiving, many people travel long distances to give a quick nod to gratitude before kicking off the Christmas shopping season in earnest. Major retailers have been pimping Christmas since October, but certain rituals still seem to have power. One is that Thanksgiving marks the real gateway to "the holiday season." There is no "Thanksgiving season." Anyone stuck preparing the meal will have been doing some planning, but the rest of us just get ourselves to the table and try to waddle away afterwards. It's a spike in everything: one hectic approach by any travel mode necessary, one feast, one hasty retreat to the routines of work or school for the few weeks until "the Christmas season" -- or (insert holiday here) -- intensifies steadily through modern echoes of solstice observances handed down through countless generations.
When I was a kid, my siblings and I knew that nothing was more important than Dad's job. He never missed a Thanksgiving or a Christmas, but he wasn't home for my birth, and I think he missed my older brother's, too. He would go years without taking a vacation with us. He might or might not attend our activities, depending on the needs of God and country. The idea that Dad's job was the family's essential lifeline was common in the 1960s. It's interesting that today we see a lot of promotion of the idea that time with family is the highest value, while at the same time people are working longer hours for less money, and major employers are pushing further and further into what had been traditional holidays for everyone.
I remember when stores were closed on Thanksgiving. Forget the cranberry sauce? Tough shit. There's probably a recipe in the Joy of Cooking. Get busy.
Someone has always had to work on the holidays. Aside from the obvious, like the military forces guarding our freedom from -- in those days -- the commies, and police and firefighters, there were also the people providing the fun or the solemnity. Your local pastor is on duty, racking up billable hours. Places that might provide a festive, holiday-themed dining experience need kitchen staff and servers, and employees to keep the place clean. And let's not forget the hospital, for all of the potential mood wreckers that can come along on their own schedule with no regard for human desires for rest and sociability.
Working in the winter recreation business, I came to regard the holidays as a nuisance. They motivate the general public to think of leisure, and give them a block of time in which to pursue it, but they just added more items to my already crowded schedule. I took advantage of my family's tradition that your job is your top priority. It allowed me to beg off from the traffic jams and sleep deprivation of holiday travel with the legitimate excuse that my job didn't allow enough time to get there and back and be at my best.
The job grew less demanding with changes in the business that employs me. But I lose pay when I'm away, and the business suffers for the shortage in staff. If I had no family, I would not consider driving anywhere, let alone hours on the highway with thousands of other lemmings. However, the parents are definitely advanced in years, and they are traditional people. They don't ask for much, and this simple thing makes them happy. I'm never able to make it at Christmas, so here we are.
My family did not habitually pack up and go to see my grandparents at every holiday. If we happened to live near enough we would do the occasional Thanksgiving, Easter, or Christmas. Sometimes the grandparents might make the trip to us, but my mother's older brother lived right in their area and had four kids of his own, so we weren't the only option. We were such a moving target that we might be a three hour drive away for a couple of years, and then a 21-hour drive away for a couple. We might be to their north, in a land of ice and snow, or down at the bottom of the Florida peninsula. Or the tippy end of Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. So traveling or not traveling was on a case-by-case basis.
Life is always moment to moment, day to day. It becomes more obvious when a person is ill or old or both, but we are being hunted from the day that we are born. We live in the hope that what we consider good will continue, cultivating gratitude for what we have gotten away with. When possible, we bolster the comforting illusions of those we love.
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
-ophobia
Idly cruising Twitter this morning, I kept seeing a thread about how legal experts on the right and the left are continuing and intensifying the polarization that has afflicted us increasingly since the election of 1980. The thread addresses the alignment of the legal profession into partisan wings, and the presentations of argument and information by each side.
Justice may be supposed to be impartial, but the law is consciously and purposely partial. Laws are written to define what is legal and what is not. Judicial interpretations declare a winner. Discussions of legal interpretation will have their basis in the philosophical position of the interpreter. Lawyers go into litigation knowing who they want to see as the winner. Even a negotiated settlement starts from the premise that there are sides -- two or more -- to the question.
Polarization in American politics has waxed and waned many times since the country's founding. The height of tension usually yields to a partial solution good enough to bring things down from a boil while not really fixing anything in the long term. One time, the boiling escalated to the actual Civil War, but even that only brought the partial solution that ended open warfare between white people, but left African Americans subject to racism and oppression.
Side note: No crisis ever addressed the treatment of Native Americans in a dramatic and significant way. The treatment of the indigenous people grew from fundamental principles of capitalist expansion even more so than did slavery. Slavery might seem like the capitalist dream of labor, but it is economically debatable. Displacement of the natives and seizure of their assets is only morally objectionable, and morals have no weight in capitalism. If there's more money to be made being cruel and heavy handed, guess what's going to happen.
Today, humans face many issues that have been presented in a binary fashion: it must be this way or that way. You're either with us -- in complete agreement -- or against us. This attitude closes the door to both compromise and synergy. Compromise is often worse than polarization, as elements of each side's plan are instituted in ways that guarantee that neither one will work. But synergy draws from actual good ideas that may have come from disparate sources, blended into a policy that actually helps. It's extremely rare, but possible. The resulting policy might be almost entirely as one side wants it, but with some rough edges or sharp points sanded off, or some curlicues and doodads simplified as a result of beneficial critical input.
The situation is rendered more difficult by the fact that the side we refer to as the left has had a better vision of the future than the right since at least the early middle of the 20th Century. But the broad divisions of left and right encompass fringe elements that represent unacceptable authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the lazy or desperate shortcut to enforcement of ideas that should be popular enough on their own to need no whip hand to keep them dominant. But the whip hand is attractive to some people. They may use social philosophy as a basis for their policy prescriptions, but they also just like whipping. "It's for your own good!"
The lawyer suggesting that inquiring minds delve deeper than the talking points and the exchange of clever snark between right and left stated that we would do better to listen to more voices on each side and find common ground. That sounds bravely intellectual, strong, and positive. And it can be. But it requires strength and courage to listen deeply and carefully to the intellectual proposals of someone speaking from a point of view opposite to your own. Common ground is very scary.
An argument against homophobia has long said, "What are you afraid of? That you might be attracted?" It calls upon the 'phobe to face up to their own inner self, to entertain the possibility that their own subconscious might entertain the possibility. Arguments for open consideration of sociopolitical solutions that incorporate elements from the conservative, racist side risk legitimizing it. Because both sides depend on basic principles that have to be accepted as absolute in order for the subsequent logic to hold up, following a logical path on the right inevitably leads back to their version of bedrock. Trickle down happens in porous limestone. "White supremacy is real, y'all, just look at how we have dominated every major trend in history for a couple of centuries." "You're just jealous of the wealthy and want to rob them of the fruits of their hard work and superior intelligence."
The most blatant straw-person arguments can be brushed aside. It gets harder when the opposition comes up with something that sounds okay, like figuring out that profit-driven health insurance is bad for small business and the self employed. I saw a thing on Breitbart once that I actually agreed with. It was very unnerving, because it was nested among tons of other stuff that I didn't agree with at all. So the brave intellectual sifting through for things on which to agree has to wonder how many poison pills will be thrown in with the little kibble of real nutrition that one might glean from sources more noted for their bigotry, and their hostility to inclusion and diversity.
By welcoming the input of opposition thinkers, each side complicates the chess game in which a benign move may conceal deeper strategy. Indeed, how could it not? We can't even really agree on the ultimate objective of society. Is it to provide necessary services cost effectively to the people within its boundaries, with a broader view of improving quality of life world wide? Or is it to facilitate the most ruthless and financially successful competitors in a winner-take-all world of endless conflict? Is it survival of the fittest? If so, fittest by what definition? Are the stakes life and death? Should the losers in capitalism be destroyed as quickly as possible to make way for the victors to prosper?
Should we throw open the town square and let every idea seek its popular following? The condition of the environment demonstrates how harmful pure democracy can be. Many people would say that they are in favor of a clean environment, but sales of fuel-guzzling vehicles remain robust, off-highway recreational vehicles (dirt bikes, ATVs and snow machines) are extremely popular toys, and motor boats far outnumber sailboats at most launching sites -- motor boats towed behind fuel-guzzling large vehicles capable of pulling them at highway speeds. People buy large houses of poor quality, built quickly, often on virgin land or former farm land. Most development chews up new land rather than redeveloping old sites, while developers continue to press for lenient environmental regulations so that they do not have to mitigate the effect of covering more and more ground with impervious surfaces. You might consciously vote every couple of years for lip service policies that restrain the destruction, but in day to day life the wallet votes add up strongly on the other side.
In a purely capitalist world, everything and everyone is for sale. If you're not for sale -- or at least for rent -- you deserve nothing from the marketplace of life. You might want to choose your clientele based on your personal principles, but this usually limits your income. Sometimes it limits it pretty severely.
In a collectivist world everyone has to kick in, too. Totalitarian collectivism might provide comfortable basic sustenance for everyone, but any human organization tends to develop some degree of hierarchy. "Some are more equal than others." Any synergy of free enterprise and collective sharing of responsibilities needs to take that into account.
A perfect example of how opposition input can destroy a collectively-based social policy is the so-called Affordable Care Act. As soon as the insurance industry had their operatives in Congress kill the public option, the ACA became just a herding mechanism for profit-driven insurance and health care providers. A lot of people believe that they benefitted by being able to get insurance when they could not get it before, but it's still a complicated bureaucratic mess designed around corporate income, not patient outcome.
Yes, we should listen to all intelligently composed input. But the answer still may be no, and perhaps even hell no.
Justice may be supposed to be impartial, but the law is consciously and purposely partial. Laws are written to define what is legal and what is not. Judicial interpretations declare a winner. Discussions of legal interpretation will have their basis in the philosophical position of the interpreter. Lawyers go into litigation knowing who they want to see as the winner. Even a negotiated settlement starts from the premise that there are sides -- two or more -- to the question.
Polarization in American politics has waxed and waned many times since the country's founding. The height of tension usually yields to a partial solution good enough to bring things down from a boil while not really fixing anything in the long term. One time, the boiling escalated to the actual Civil War, but even that only brought the partial solution that ended open warfare between white people, but left African Americans subject to racism and oppression.
Side note: No crisis ever addressed the treatment of Native Americans in a dramatic and significant way. The treatment of the indigenous people grew from fundamental principles of capitalist expansion even more so than did slavery. Slavery might seem like the capitalist dream of labor, but it is economically debatable. Displacement of the natives and seizure of their assets is only morally objectionable, and morals have no weight in capitalism. If there's more money to be made being cruel and heavy handed, guess what's going to happen.
Today, humans face many issues that have been presented in a binary fashion: it must be this way or that way. You're either with us -- in complete agreement -- or against us. This attitude closes the door to both compromise and synergy. Compromise is often worse than polarization, as elements of each side's plan are instituted in ways that guarantee that neither one will work. But synergy draws from actual good ideas that may have come from disparate sources, blended into a policy that actually helps. It's extremely rare, but possible. The resulting policy might be almost entirely as one side wants it, but with some rough edges or sharp points sanded off, or some curlicues and doodads simplified as a result of beneficial critical input.
The situation is rendered more difficult by the fact that the side we refer to as the left has had a better vision of the future than the right since at least the early middle of the 20th Century. But the broad divisions of left and right encompass fringe elements that represent unacceptable authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the lazy or desperate shortcut to enforcement of ideas that should be popular enough on their own to need no whip hand to keep them dominant. But the whip hand is attractive to some people. They may use social philosophy as a basis for their policy prescriptions, but they also just like whipping. "It's for your own good!"
The lawyer suggesting that inquiring minds delve deeper than the talking points and the exchange of clever snark between right and left stated that we would do better to listen to more voices on each side and find common ground. That sounds bravely intellectual, strong, and positive. And it can be. But it requires strength and courage to listen deeply and carefully to the intellectual proposals of someone speaking from a point of view opposite to your own. Common ground is very scary.
An argument against homophobia has long said, "What are you afraid of? That you might be attracted?" It calls upon the 'phobe to face up to their own inner self, to entertain the possibility that their own subconscious might entertain the possibility. Arguments for open consideration of sociopolitical solutions that incorporate elements from the conservative, racist side risk legitimizing it. Because both sides depend on basic principles that have to be accepted as absolute in order for the subsequent logic to hold up, following a logical path on the right inevitably leads back to their version of bedrock. Trickle down happens in porous limestone. "White supremacy is real, y'all, just look at how we have dominated every major trend in history for a couple of centuries." "You're just jealous of the wealthy and want to rob them of the fruits of their hard work and superior intelligence."
The most blatant straw-person arguments can be brushed aside. It gets harder when the opposition comes up with something that sounds okay, like figuring out that profit-driven health insurance is bad for small business and the self employed. I saw a thing on Breitbart once that I actually agreed with. It was very unnerving, because it was nested among tons of other stuff that I didn't agree with at all. So the brave intellectual sifting through for things on which to agree has to wonder how many poison pills will be thrown in with the little kibble of real nutrition that one might glean from sources more noted for their bigotry, and their hostility to inclusion and diversity.
By welcoming the input of opposition thinkers, each side complicates the chess game in which a benign move may conceal deeper strategy. Indeed, how could it not? We can't even really agree on the ultimate objective of society. Is it to provide necessary services cost effectively to the people within its boundaries, with a broader view of improving quality of life world wide? Or is it to facilitate the most ruthless and financially successful competitors in a winner-take-all world of endless conflict? Is it survival of the fittest? If so, fittest by what definition? Are the stakes life and death? Should the losers in capitalism be destroyed as quickly as possible to make way for the victors to prosper?
Should we throw open the town square and let every idea seek its popular following? The condition of the environment demonstrates how harmful pure democracy can be. Many people would say that they are in favor of a clean environment, but sales of fuel-guzzling vehicles remain robust, off-highway recreational vehicles (dirt bikes, ATVs and snow machines) are extremely popular toys, and motor boats far outnumber sailboats at most launching sites -- motor boats towed behind fuel-guzzling large vehicles capable of pulling them at highway speeds. People buy large houses of poor quality, built quickly, often on virgin land or former farm land. Most development chews up new land rather than redeveloping old sites, while developers continue to press for lenient environmental regulations so that they do not have to mitigate the effect of covering more and more ground with impervious surfaces. You might consciously vote every couple of years for lip service policies that restrain the destruction, but in day to day life the wallet votes add up strongly on the other side.
In a purely capitalist world, everything and everyone is for sale. If you're not for sale -- or at least for rent -- you deserve nothing from the marketplace of life. You might want to choose your clientele based on your personal principles, but this usually limits your income. Sometimes it limits it pretty severely.
In a collectivist world everyone has to kick in, too. Totalitarian collectivism might provide comfortable basic sustenance for everyone, but any human organization tends to develop some degree of hierarchy. "Some are more equal than others." Any synergy of free enterprise and collective sharing of responsibilities needs to take that into account.
A perfect example of how opposition input can destroy a collectively-based social policy is the so-called Affordable Care Act. As soon as the insurance industry had their operatives in Congress kill the public option, the ACA became just a herding mechanism for profit-driven insurance and health care providers. A lot of people believe that they benefitted by being able to get insurance when they could not get it before, but it's still a complicated bureaucratic mess designed around corporate income, not patient outcome.
Yes, we should listen to all intelligently composed input. But the answer still may be no, and perhaps even hell no.
Sunday, October 06, 2019
Our enemies would fund our civil war
A country torn by civil war can't be a power player on the international stage. Think about the countries in the last 50 years that have broken apart in that way. Their struggles might influence global policy and occupy the time of superpowers, but they themselves are not superpowers.
The term superpower was coined to describe the massive influence of the mightiest nuclear-armed nations in the second half of the 20th Century. America was the first, with its atomic bomb. As nuclear weapons technology spread, the Soviet Union became the opposing force. Alliances formed among the lesser nations to gain power by association with one superpower or the other.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the last remaining superpower. For a brief few years, we could believe that we stood unopposed. Of course the nuclear arsenal still sat in readiness in the remnants of the USSR. They were no longer under a central command, but enough of them were still in Russia's hands to make a nice armageddon. Good thing no one was in the mood at the time.
Russia reconstituted its power gradually. It was never going to lie there and give up its global ambitions. The ambitions live in the minds of human leaders, but the culture of imperialism -- no matter how re-labeled -- has centuries of heritage there.
China emerged as a power player more gradually. Its role in an actual armed conflict would probably be doggedly defensive rather than as an initial aggressor, but it can't be dismissed. Its leaders would enjoy global power as would any ambitious person. And unambitious people don't seek positions of leadership. Policy is made by dominant people.
If America gives way to its temptation to fight it out internally -- literally, with gunfire and explosions and factional killing -- China and Russia would fund and arm both sides and just sit back. America has conducted itself internationally with more pride than humility since it took its place as a real global power in the 1890s by beating up on Spain. The rest of the world might feel some sorrow at our dissolution, but also a bit of schadenfreude at the toppling of our self-constructed pedestal.
Would American business leaders really let the civil war happen? Civil wars in other countries are profitable. Let the smaller nations go up in flames and down in rubble. Good businessmen will talk about how it's in our national interest to be involved a little bit, but hold back from the wasteful extravagance of either global war or a real armed conflict on American streets. We can send a few thousand troops, and arm the combatants in these endless lesser conflicts as a way to affirm that the human species will never be peaceful and unified, while still keeping the golf courses, yacht clubs, and estates safely distant from the battle zones. But what if they can't maintain control? Lots of people are getting disgusted with the rule of the corporate elite. Who knows for sure how the official military forces might divide? Once an uprising is declared an insurrection, not just a criminal act, US armed forces can be used on home soil. Troops would have to decide where their loyalty lies.
Civil war would be a supremely bad idea. Since when has that ever stopped a determined bunch of people from marching off on a grand campaign? And on a higher level, maybe the destruction of the United States is just the next phase in evolution. It wouldn't be a failure of the principles on which the republic claimed to be founded. Those are universally available to any interested humans. If nations really are obsolete, the obliteration of this one would be merely another chapter in humanity's quarrelsome history. The principles of individual liberty and shared responsibility could still underlie any future regime more generally applied to human well-being across the planet.
I'm not saying that they would. But they could.
We are free to prevent our dissolution by growing up a little and facing the reality of the damage our species has done to the planet and each other. We can choose to start to get along with each other and look more carefully at the interdependence of all life, not just human life or of one sub-category of human life. I'm not saying that we will. But we should. We can confound our enemies by refusing to destroy ourselves at the same time that we decline to engage in direct hostilities with them. Such a course would depend on an unprecedented level of wisdom. The only other option is to continue our uneasy paranoia for as long as we manage to keep from destroying ourselves outright. Aggressive leaders can always find recruits. Even if a majority of people don't want to be hostile to each other, a minority of motivated aggressors can always force the issue to bloodshed. That then has to be resolved before any progress can resume.
The term superpower was coined to describe the massive influence of the mightiest nuclear-armed nations in the second half of the 20th Century. America was the first, with its atomic bomb. As nuclear weapons technology spread, the Soviet Union became the opposing force. Alliances formed among the lesser nations to gain power by association with one superpower or the other.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the last remaining superpower. For a brief few years, we could believe that we stood unopposed. Of course the nuclear arsenal still sat in readiness in the remnants of the USSR. They were no longer under a central command, but enough of them were still in Russia's hands to make a nice armageddon. Good thing no one was in the mood at the time.
Russia reconstituted its power gradually. It was never going to lie there and give up its global ambitions. The ambitions live in the minds of human leaders, but the culture of imperialism -- no matter how re-labeled -- has centuries of heritage there.
China emerged as a power player more gradually. Its role in an actual armed conflict would probably be doggedly defensive rather than as an initial aggressor, but it can't be dismissed. Its leaders would enjoy global power as would any ambitious person. And unambitious people don't seek positions of leadership. Policy is made by dominant people.
If America gives way to its temptation to fight it out internally -- literally, with gunfire and explosions and factional killing -- China and Russia would fund and arm both sides and just sit back. America has conducted itself internationally with more pride than humility since it took its place as a real global power in the 1890s by beating up on Spain. The rest of the world might feel some sorrow at our dissolution, but also a bit of schadenfreude at the toppling of our self-constructed pedestal.
Would American business leaders really let the civil war happen? Civil wars in other countries are profitable. Let the smaller nations go up in flames and down in rubble. Good businessmen will talk about how it's in our national interest to be involved a little bit, but hold back from the wasteful extravagance of either global war or a real armed conflict on American streets. We can send a few thousand troops, and arm the combatants in these endless lesser conflicts as a way to affirm that the human species will never be peaceful and unified, while still keeping the golf courses, yacht clubs, and estates safely distant from the battle zones. But what if they can't maintain control? Lots of people are getting disgusted with the rule of the corporate elite. Who knows for sure how the official military forces might divide? Once an uprising is declared an insurrection, not just a criminal act, US armed forces can be used on home soil. Troops would have to decide where their loyalty lies.
Civil war would be a supremely bad idea. Since when has that ever stopped a determined bunch of people from marching off on a grand campaign? And on a higher level, maybe the destruction of the United States is just the next phase in evolution. It wouldn't be a failure of the principles on which the republic claimed to be founded. Those are universally available to any interested humans. If nations really are obsolete, the obliteration of this one would be merely another chapter in humanity's quarrelsome history. The principles of individual liberty and shared responsibility could still underlie any future regime more generally applied to human well-being across the planet.
I'm not saying that they would. But they could.
We are free to prevent our dissolution by growing up a little and facing the reality of the damage our species has done to the planet and each other. We can choose to start to get along with each other and look more carefully at the interdependence of all life, not just human life or of one sub-category of human life. I'm not saying that we will. But we should. We can confound our enemies by refusing to destroy ourselves at the same time that we decline to engage in direct hostilities with them. Such a course would depend on an unprecedented level of wisdom. The only other option is to continue our uneasy paranoia for as long as we manage to keep from destroying ourselves outright. Aggressive leaders can always find recruits. Even if a majority of people don't want to be hostile to each other, a minority of motivated aggressors can always force the issue to bloodshed. That then has to be resolved before any progress can resume.
Tuesday, October 01, 2019
The human hand on the landscape
Thirty years ago, the mountain slope behind my house was covered with mature forest. Mixed hardwood and pine covered the whole little mountain range from end to end. The climb to the nearest summit was an easy bushwhack with little understory. No one seemed to go out there except during deer hunting season. Even then, it was only a few hunters. For almost ten years, I could traverse the entire range to the highest point at the far end without seeing many signs of human activity.
Like most of the eastern United States, this area was pretty well deforested by the late 19th Century. But old rock walls and cairns, and the occasional cellar hole, don't seem intrusive. They did foreshadow the possibility that humans could develop an interest in the land again at any time.
Other parts of the mountain range got logged. Some of the cuts were large and drastic. One cut even came up the far side of the ridge behind my house. That one wasn't a total shave. When it was over, regrowth began. Any cuts provided a bit of open skiing for a couple of years until saplings grew in densely.
The first incursion into the happy playground of my home mountain arrived in 1997, when a neighboring property was sold. The new owner had it logged. The logger was one of those people who could be stupid or could be a criminal or could be a stupid criminal. His first move was to ignore the boundaries of the lot he was supposed to cut, because the terrain was easier and the trees were more valuable lower down. He mowed a large swath across my immediate neighbor's land -- not the one who had hired him -- and was starting in on my oak trees when I caught him. It still took several days to get him to stop and relocate to the parcel he was supposed to be logging. Then he did a rather ugly job, driving his skidder right up to my property line to leave his mark. But then he was gone, and the open area made an interesting place to practice telemark turns on an easy slope. The landowner never went out on the land. This continued through subsequent owners as well. I poked around out there and never saw anyone I hadn't brought with me.
At the start of the 21st Century, the timber industry began to work on my end of the mountain. A couple of large tracts abut each other, and each property owner at some point decided to harvest some trees. They were large cuts, but not large clearings. I'm always disturbed by motors and machinery in wild land, but when the cutting ended it was not followed by more motorized activity. I resumed my bushwhack visits, remaining unseen as much as possible, and leaving no trace.
The owners of a cabin in a hollow decided to replace it with a chalet on a knoll, but it is amazingly well concealed. During its construction I literally almost walked into the wall of it, covered in gray Tyvek, as I traversed the slope in a zigzag course of exploration. They had seldom been around. I'd grown accustomed to having the freedom of the hill. After they built their bigger house, I retreated. I only end up over there by accident, usually when descending in snow. The structure is still quite invisible. I thank them for that. There was still plenty of mountain left to play on.
Large cuts began to occur more frequently on what had been reassuringly covered with trees. Sometimes I would see that someone with a motorized vehicle had made one scouting foray and found it uninteresting. I know that in a human-controlled world everything has to earn its keep monetarily. Every tree is on borrowed time. Every undisturbed landscape has to pass an audit to show that it has more economic value in its natural state.
Most recently, the big parcel more or less directly uphill from me was drastically cut. The owner had died and his widow had sold the land to a logger and developer. The cut went on for months, including the operation of a large chipper at the landing on the road frontage, operating for six or eight hours a day. This is how it is when you have a home in timber country. Heavy machinery churned the mountainside. I finally went out to look at it at the first snowfall, when the action had shifted further away from my end of the lot. It was startling. Further exploration through the winter confirmed that the cleared area was huge compared to anything that had preceded it. I knew it would be a beacon to people who can't do anything without a motorized vehicle. The blaze of the snowfield would attract "sledders." The wide open spaces would attract wheeled vehicles. And so it was. Late-season surveys showed knobby tire tracks up the deeply gashed skidder swaths. Most recently, I had heard a motor vehicle cruising up there in the quiet of evening, its low mutter coming through with the annoying persistence of a dog licking its private parts next to your bed at 3 a.m. I fear that this is the total end of the peaceful escapes I once enjoyed up there. The neighbors with the chalet have been patrolling their land on a tracked vehicle, and now the other piece has become a playground for polluters as well.
The motorists will say all the usual things: "It's just me! I'm not hurting anything. I'm just having fun."
Brock Turner was just having fun. Lynch mobs were just having fun. The Mongol Horde was just having fun.
Don't try to create a false equivalency between my footsteps and ski tracks, and someone else's carbon footprint, noise pollution, and tire gouges on a landscape already slashed and gashed by the heavy hand of industrial timber removal. There are cuts and there are cuts. There's good management and there's fast work that maximizes profit at the cost of things like drainage and topsoil. I've seen the aftermath of every cut out there since 1989, and the latest is by far the worst. The fact that it attracted motor vehicles like flies to a corpse is an added strike against it.
Yesterday I went to have a look because the persistent motor noises indicated regular use, not just a random foray. I found a bear baiting station with ATV tracks indicating that I have probably heard the baiter coming and going. The bait is a disgusting mass of old doughnuts, mashed into the bottom of a large plastic barrel. Because bait season ended two days ago in this wildlife management unit, it was no longer supposed to be there. Because the land is owned by a profit-driven company that cares nothing for it ecologically, I don't know if the baiter even sought the written permission required by the state. There is nothing to connect the bait station to an identifiable individual.
How did people ever kill bears before the invention of doughnut shops?
All this activity pretty well kills the place for me. I don't want to run into any motorheads when I'm out there. The sound of even a quiet motor carries way too well, grating on my nerves in my own back yard, let alone in closer proximity. I don't want them to see me, and I don't want to see them.
Hunters might claim that they depend on the meat and the sale of hides. The meat argument doesn't hold up to cost analysis when you figure out what they had to invest in guns, ammunition, dogs, dog food, ATVs, registration, fuel, and other expenses related to the modern hunt. Fashion yourself a spear out of a sapling, with a stone point on it, and then we'll talk about real cost savings compared to just buying some meat at the store. Then there's the "wildlife management" angle. It's been people versus nature from the beginning of time, or at least from the time at which humans evolved enough to separate themselves from nature. We control the balance by taking what we want and killing what we have to. We have believed that we could figure out how to maintain that balance by means that please us. These have to be adjusted as research indicates that the system isn't working to our long-term advantage. We're too slowly acknowledging that the overall natural mechanism that supports all life depends on leaving quite a bit of it alone. This would reduce the number of house lots that land pimps can profit from, and create by default a lot of undisturbed habitat in which the creatures that don't answer to us can do their thing. It's not just some animal rights story. It's an understanding of the complex relationships of all the parts. Any animals accidentally left alone are just collateral damage to the profit-driven enterprises that have to slow their pace of destruction.
Whoever builds a house up there will need to understand that the forest used to support all kinds of life. You can clear the vegetation and replace it with what pleases you, and eradicate the inconvenient animals, but that will have its price.
Like most of the eastern United States, this area was pretty well deforested by the late 19th Century. But old rock walls and cairns, and the occasional cellar hole, don't seem intrusive. They did foreshadow the possibility that humans could develop an interest in the land again at any time.
Other parts of the mountain range got logged. Some of the cuts were large and drastic. One cut even came up the far side of the ridge behind my house. That one wasn't a total shave. When it was over, regrowth began. Any cuts provided a bit of open skiing for a couple of years until saplings grew in densely.
The first incursion into the happy playground of my home mountain arrived in 1997, when a neighboring property was sold. The new owner had it logged. The logger was one of those people who could be stupid or could be a criminal or could be a stupid criminal. His first move was to ignore the boundaries of the lot he was supposed to cut, because the terrain was easier and the trees were more valuable lower down. He mowed a large swath across my immediate neighbor's land -- not the one who had hired him -- and was starting in on my oak trees when I caught him. It still took several days to get him to stop and relocate to the parcel he was supposed to be logging. Then he did a rather ugly job, driving his skidder right up to my property line to leave his mark. But then he was gone, and the open area made an interesting place to practice telemark turns on an easy slope. The landowner never went out on the land. This continued through subsequent owners as well. I poked around out there and never saw anyone I hadn't brought with me.
At the start of the 21st Century, the timber industry began to work on my end of the mountain. A couple of large tracts abut each other, and each property owner at some point decided to harvest some trees. They were large cuts, but not large clearings. I'm always disturbed by motors and machinery in wild land, but when the cutting ended it was not followed by more motorized activity. I resumed my bushwhack visits, remaining unseen as much as possible, and leaving no trace.
The owners of a cabin in a hollow decided to replace it with a chalet on a knoll, but it is amazingly well concealed. During its construction I literally almost walked into the wall of it, covered in gray Tyvek, as I traversed the slope in a zigzag course of exploration. They had seldom been around. I'd grown accustomed to having the freedom of the hill. After they built their bigger house, I retreated. I only end up over there by accident, usually when descending in snow. The structure is still quite invisible. I thank them for that. There was still plenty of mountain left to play on.
Large cuts began to occur more frequently on what had been reassuringly covered with trees. Sometimes I would see that someone with a motorized vehicle had made one scouting foray and found it uninteresting. I know that in a human-controlled world everything has to earn its keep monetarily. Every tree is on borrowed time. Every undisturbed landscape has to pass an audit to show that it has more economic value in its natural state.
Most recently, the big parcel more or less directly uphill from me was drastically cut. The owner had died and his widow had sold the land to a logger and developer. The cut went on for months, including the operation of a large chipper at the landing on the road frontage, operating for six or eight hours a day. This is how it is when you have a home in timber country. Heavy machinery churned the mountainside. I finally went out to look at it at the first snowfall, when the action had shifted further away from my end of the lot. It was startling. Further exploration through the winter confirmed that the cleared area was huge compared to anything that had preceded it. I knew it would be a beacon to people who can't do anything without a motorized vehicle. The blaze of the snowfield would attract "sledders." The wide open spaces would attract wheeled vehicles. And so it was. Late-season surveys showed knobby tire tracks up the deeply gashed skidder swaths. Most recently, I had heard a motor vehicle cruising up there in the quiet of evening, its low mutter coming through with the annoying persistence of a dog licking its private parts next to your bed at 3 a.m. I fear that this is the total end of the peaceful escapes I once enjoyed up there. The neighbors with the chalet have been patrolling their land on a tracked vehicle, and now the other piece has become a playground for polluters as well.
The motorists will say all the usual things: "It's just me! I'm not hurting anything. I'm just having fun."
Brock Turner was just having fun. Lynch mobs were just having fun. The Mongol Horde was just having fun.
Don't try to create a false equivalency between my footsteps and ski tracks, and someone else's carbon footprint, noise pollution, and tire gouges on a landscape already slashed and gashed by the heavy hand of industrial timber removal. There are cuts and there are cuts. There's good management and there's fast work that maximizes profit at the cost of things like drainage and topsoil. I've seen the aftermath of every cut out there since 1989, and the latest is by far the worst. The fact that it attracted motor vehicles like flies to a corpse is an added strike against it.
Yesterday I went to have a look because the persistent motor noises indicated regular use, not just a random foray. I found a bear baiting station with ATV tracks indicating that I have probably heard the baiter coming and going. The bait is a disgusting mass of old doughnuts, mashed into the bottom of a large plastic barrel. Because bait season ended two days ago in this wildlife management unit, it was no longer supposed to be there. Because the land is owned by a profit-driven company that cares nothing for it ecologically, I don't know if the baiter even sought the written permission required by the state. There is nothing to connect the bait station to an identifiable individual.
How did people ever kill bears before the invention of doughnut shops?
All this activity pretty well kills the place for me. I don't want to run into any motorheads when I'm out there. The sound of even a quiet motor carries way too well, grating on my nerves in my own back yard, let alone in closer proximity. I don't want them to see me, and I don't want to see them.
Hunters might claim that they depend on the meat and the sale of hides. The meat argument doesn't hold up to cost analysis when you figure out what they had to invest in guns, ammunition, dogs, dog food, ATVs, registration, fuel, and other expenses related to the modern hunt. Fashion yourself a spear out of a sapling, with a stone point on it, and then we'll talk about real cost savings compared to just buying some meat at the store. Then there's the "wildlife management" angle. It's been people versus nature from the beginning of time, or at least from the time at which humans evolved enough to separate themselves from nature. We control the balance by taking what we want and killing what we have to. We have believed that we could figure out how to maintain that balance by means that please us. These have to be adjusted as research indicates that the system isn't working to our long-term advantage. We're too slowly acknowledging that the overall natural mechanism that supports all life depends on leaving quite a bit of it alone. This would reduce the number of house lots that land pimps can profit from, and create by default a lot of undisturbed habitat in which the creatures that don't answer to us can do their thing. It's not just some animal rights story. It's an understanding of the complex relationships of all the parts. Any animals accidentally left alone are just collateral damage to the profit-driven enterprises that have to slow their pace of destruction.
Whoever builds a house up there will need to understand that the forest used to support all kinds of life. You can clear the vegetation and replace it with what pleases you, and eradicate the inconvenient animals, but that will have its price.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Rage against the dying of the light
My father is dying. He's not going in any immediate way, but he is 92, and his poor life choices are catching up with him. He is that bizarre anomaly, a healthy fat man. He's not as healthy as he would have been if he had prevented himself from getting fat, but he's not your stereotypical mess of clogged arteries. He could go for at least several more years. And they're already not fun years. He knows too well what is happening to him, and how he made it worse.
His parents both lived well up into their nineties. But when his mother died in the mid 1980s, she had been a vegetable from an acquired -- not genetic -- debilitating illness since the late 1940s. His father was somewhere between 96 and 98 when he died, blind and infirm, in veterans' home in Indiana. My father knew he had the potential to live a long time, if his job or some other intervening catastrophe didn't take him out first.
A diligent survivor, he had dipped briefly into poverty and uncertainty after the disintegration of his family around 1943. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1944 after flunking out of MIT. He qualified for the Coast Guard Academy, and emerged as an officer in 1951. He served with distinction until his retirement in 1979. He survived storms at sea, and the Arctic night, and his propensity to drive long distances without stopping. He has even survived a classic American diet of meat and starch. He quit smoking in time to avoid cancer and heart disease. In an alternate universe, he kept smoking and survived anyway. We'll never know. But he has lost a lot in the last few years, making his present existence pretty miserable.
He's a fighter, literally. Although sailing was his passion, he also boxed in college. He learned how to make his characteristics work for him against fighters who were larger and faster. Manly anger was a power source. He's far from a one-dimensional character, but that inner fire was his emergency battery. A man of reason, he would tap into a furnace of accumulated rage when he needed to make a special physical effort.
The inner fire and his oddly durable genetics allowed him to get away with very haphazard exercise all the way to his eighties. You might think that's pretty good, but when it's no longer good enough the endgame isn't pretty. His fat is a hard, firm fat. He cannot bend to tie his shoes. He can't even pull on his socks. Crippled with pain from a degenerated hip, he got himself a new one just a couple of years ago, and has recovered pretty well, but he still resorts to a walker for a lot of maneuvers in his home, which can be disastrously awkward when he has a digestive emergency occasioned by the years of poor diet.
To stave off the macular degeneration that blinded his father, he gets a hypodermic needle in his eyeballs every couple of weeks. Sometimes he goes a month. An avid reader, he now finds it extremely cumbersome, because the degeneration was not caught quickly enough to preserve perfect acuity.
His tendency to default to a chair, to reject walking and jogging because he didn't want to look funny out there, is calling in its debt.
Contrast this to my mother's father. Longevity also runs on my mother's side. An optometrist in private practice until he was in his early eighties, Earl made a point to take a walk every day. As a younger man he had been a vigorous tennis player. He was always lean, aided perhaps by some food allergies that kept him from pigging out, but also by a work ethic that included conscious physicality. His mind grew more vague as he went through his last decade. I carried on a correspondence with him as long as I could, but my last letter to him was answered by my uncle, explaining that Earl couldn't continue the exchange. My grandfather's last act was to get up from his seat in the living room and walk to the bedroom, where he dropped dead from a stroke at age 98. I know from our late communications that he did not like the dimming of his mind. As he went into that tunnel, he knew he was going into it. It wasn't classic dementia as such, but he had taken pride in his intellect and was sad to see his sharpness fade. He was heard to long for death quite a while before he reached it. But at least he could tie his shoes.
My father is no fan of either elderly decrepitude or death. He adopted a more physical lifestyle just a few years ago, but it still wasn't a full-bore campaign of daily walks. The phrase "too little, too late" springs to mind. He still defaulted to his chair in front of the television, where he trolled through the full array of news programs, and processed what he saw through a mind trained by decades of administration and policy analysis in Washington. His body fits most naturally into the shape of an armchair, and yet he loathes the stiffness and slow shuffle of his gait when he rises from it. This is what happens when you know better, but you don't do better. He rages against the dying of the light, but his body cannot function solely on that emotional fire. He did not build the machine to carry out his will. He dwelt too much in the mind, aided by a body that produced surprising results for too long, lulling him into a sense that it would always be thus.
The young cadet went aloft in square riggers, and climbed the forestay of one of them hand over hand, just to show that he could. The officer advancing up the chain of command retreated to the dignity becoming his rank, and the less physical duties required of him. He complained of his expanding waistline for years. After he retired from the Coast Guard he had complete control over his time, but spent none of it trying to recapture any of his youthful physicality. As he advanced through middle age, he excused his portly physique by saying that the men in his family all aged that way. He viewed it as inevitable. Genetics are not like a box of chocolates. If you know the traits of your lineage, you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get. But you don't have to merely ride that train to the last stop, taking whatever your DNA dishes out. Start raging early, and don't stop.
His parents both lived well up into their nineties. But when his mother died in the mid 1980s, she had been a vegetable from an acquired -- not genetic -- debilitating illness since the late 1940s. His father was somewhere between 96 and 98 when he died, blind and infirm, in veterans' home in Indiana. My father knew he had the potential to live a long time, if his job or some other intervening catastrophe didn't take him out first.
A diligent survivor, he had dipped briefly into poverty and uncertainty after the disintegration of his family around 1943. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1944 after flunking out of MIT. He qualified for the Coast Guard Academy, and emerged as an officer in 1951. He served with distinction until his retirement in 1979. He survived storms at sea, and the Arctic night, and his propensity to drive long distances without stopping. He has even survived a classic American diet of meat and starch. He quit smoking in time to avoid cancer and heart disease. In an alternate universe, he kept smoking and survived anyway. We'll never know. But he has lost a lot in the last few years, making his present existence pretty miserable.
He's a fighter, literally. Although sailing was his passion, he also boxed in college. He learned how to make his characteristics work for him against fighters who were larger and faster. Manly anger was a power source. He's far from a one-dimensional character, but that inner fire was his emergency battery. A man of reason, he would tap into a furnace of accumulated rage when he needed to make a special physical effort.
The inner fire and his oddly durable genetics allowed him to get away with very haphazard exercise all the way to his eighties. You might think that's pretty good, but when it's no longer good enough the endgame isn't pretty. His fat is a hard, firm fat. He cannot bend to tie his shoes. He can't even pull on his socks. Crippled with pain from a degenerated hip, he got himself a new one just a couple of years ago, and has recovered pretty well, but he still resorts to a walker for a lot of maneuvers in his home, which can be disastrously awkward when he has a digestive emergency occasioned by the years of poor diet.
To stave off the macular degeneration that blinded his father, he gets a hypodermic needle in his eyeballs every couple of weeks. Sometimes he goes a month. An avid reader, he now finds it extremely cumbersome, because the degeneration was not caught quickly enough to preserve perfect acuity.
His tendency to default to a chair, to reject walking and jogging because he didn't want to look funny out there, is calling in its debt.
Contrast this to my mother's father. Longevity also runs on my mother's side. An optometrist in private practice until he was in his early eighties, Earl made a point to take a walk every day. As a younger man he had been a vigorous tennis player. He was always lean, aided perhaps by some food allergies that kept him from pigging out, but also by a work ethic that included conscious physicality. His mind grew more vague as he went through his last decade. I carried on a correspondence with him as long as I could, but my last letter to him was answered by my uncle, explaining that Earl couldn't continue the exchange. My grandfather's last act was to get up from his seat in the living room and walk to the bedroom, where he dropped dead from a stroke at age 98. I know from our late communications that he did not like the dimming of his mind. As he went into that tunnel, he knew he was going into it. It wasn't classic dementia as such, but he had taken pride in his intellect and was sad to see his sharpness fade. He was heard to long for death quite a while before he reached it. But at least he could tie his shoes.
My father is no fan of either elderly decrepitude or death. He adopted a more physical lifestyle just a few years ago, but it still wasn't a full-bore campaign of daily walks. The phrase "too little, too late" springs to mind. He still defaulted to his chair in front of the television, where he trolled through the full array of news programs, and processed what he saw through a mind trained by decades of administration and policy analysis in Washington. His body fits most naturally into the shape of an armchair, and yet he loathes the stiffness and slow shuffle of his gait when he rises from it. This is what happens when you know better, but you don't do better. He rages against the dying of the light, but his body cannot function solely on that emotional fire. He did not build the machine to carry out his will. He dwelt too much in the mind, aided by a body that produced surprising results for too long, lulling him into a sense that it would always be thus.
The young cadet went aloft in square riggers, and climbed the forestay of one of them hand over hand, just to show that he could. The officer advancing up the chain of command retreated to the dignity becoming his rank, and the less physical duties required of him. He complained of his expanding waistline for years. After he retired from the Coast Guard he had complete control over his time, but spent none of it trying to recapture any of his youthful physicality. As he advanced through middle age, he excused his portly physique by saying that the men in his family all aged that way. He viewed it as inevitable. Genetics are not like a box of chocolates. If you know the traits of your lineage, you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get. But you don't have to merely ride that train to the last stop, taking whatever your DNA dishes out. Start raging early, and don't stop.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)