Awww, just how dumb are we, Part I

Awww, just how dumb are we, Part I?

            Poor Joe Tarica.  His Sunday Tribune column really stepped in it on Sunday.  True, he took some unwarranted swipes at people in the Central Valley, for which he was rightly chastised, but his column primarily focused on the cigarette-taxing Proposition 29, which proposition tanked because of a terrific campaign by the tobacco companies.  A lot of letter-to-the-editor writers took umbrage and wrote in.  But their letters, for the most part, illustrated just how terrific the tobacco companies’ campaign had been. 

            The Tobacco Boys ran a barrage of ads that paired the words “taxes,” and “bureaucrats/government,” with the winning tag-line, . . . we don’t need more taxes. . . Oooo, those are guaranteed winning words in this tax and government/bureaucracy-hating political climate and sure enough, the brains of millions knee-jerked and their fingers went right to the “NO!” box on the ballot.

            Brilliant.  Especially the use of the “we,” like it’s just us poor freedom-loving citizens against those evil taxers, those evil bureaucrats, forgetting that the vast majority of those “we’s” don’t smoke so would be totally unaffected by the tax.  Nope.  Just the thought of the word “tax” was enough.

            Never mind the point of the tax, or whether it might benefit smokers, or deter them.  Nope.  A tax is a tax is a tax and even the threat of a tax on some other guy is somehow translated by our already-primed brains into a tax on me.  And the letters to the editor showed just how effective Big Tobacco’s strategy had been as they parroted it back.   Said Denny Barringer, “It was an unjust tax.  It targeted the already burdened.  It made no sense.  It wasn’t about making people quit smoking – it was about bureaucracy.”

            Ah, yes, “bureaucracy.” Never mind that it was also about making people quit or never start – price points have a tendency to also be tipping points that can change behavior.  And never mind “unjust.” All taxes can be viewed as “unjust.”  Right now, polls show that the vast majority of Americans support the idea of “unjustly” raising taxes on millionaires.  That’s as “unfair” as slapping a buck on a pack of smokes. 

            No.  Logic had nothing to do with what happens in the lizard brain.  And ours have been carefully primed for years to view taxes as evil, the government as evil and bureaucrats (i.e. anybody who works for the government, even those who provide vital services to the taxpayers) as evil.  So, simply pair those two hot buttons in a primed brain, toss in the “We” to create the false sense that we’re somehow part of what’s being proposed, and there you have it: Guaranteed crash and burn.

            Ah, those Tobacco Boys know what they’re doing!

Awww, Just how dumb are we, Part II

            The Tribune’s been running a series about the plight of our schools.  They’re broke.  Classes are cut to the bone, things like art and music are tossed out the door.  Parents have to hold bake sales to even have a hope of getting their kids a decent education.

            Awwww, too bad.  Now, can we please parse this problem?  Taxes are the price we pay for things we want.  Clearly, for years and years, nobody wanted educated kids.  They couldn’t possibly have felt that was important because they refused to vote to tax themselves so they could have decent schools.  (And the schools themselves refused to deal with their own problems of waste and mismanagement and bad teachers.)  Instead, the constant mantra was (here it is again) the school “bureaucracy” is wasteful, those  rich, fat, “bureaucratic” unionized, money-grubbing teachers are earning too much money, the kids don’t need any “frills,” we don’t need to raise taxes to pay for any of this.  We need to privatize schools, make them more competitive, bust the teacher’s unions, race those wages to the bottom, turn schools  into a for-profit business.

            The result you can see.  Failing public schools, poorly educated kids, parents out selling brownies.  Pathetic.  But you get what you pay for and clearly, as a nation, we ain’t paying for public education.  It’s not important to us because you only educate the next generation if you believe you have a future.  And we no longer believe we do.

Awww, just how dumb are we, Part III?

            The AP reports that health-care spending will be one-fifth of the economy by 2021. Even if the Supremes don’t overturn Obamacare, health care costs, insurance costs, will all continue to rise, despite new efforts at reform that are now resulting in savings.  The costs are being driven by an aging population and the rise of often unnecessary expensive new medical technologies.

            And, of course, a horribly overweight population, with the young kids coming along destined to die cruelly at a far earlier age than their overweight parents.  As I said, we’ve turned ourselves into a country with no future.  Literally.  And a country sadly filling with the next generation: Under-educated , 12year-old kids weighing 200 pounds and already diagnosed with diabetes.

            But when the First Lady plants a garden and urges the country to get off its fat butt and move and eat right, right wing politicos start yelling about The Nanny State.  Propose a tax on sugar and high-fructose corn sugar, or even propose simply stopping subsidies on those lucrative and damaging products, or, better yet, shift those subsidies to fresh fruits and vegetables, and corporate, fake Astroturf organizations and the right wing will arrive in full force braying about “We” (there it is again, that “we”) as in “We don’t need any more taxes.”   

           

And now the answer to, Awwww, just how dumb are we, Part IV?       

            Meanwhile, Burger King announced they’re rolling out a new summer treat:  The bacon sundae –vanilla soft serve, fudge, caramel, bacon crumbles and a piece of bacon stuck on top.  Logs in at 510 calories, 18 grams of fat and 61 grams of sugar.

            I have no doubt it will be a big hit. 

     

Resurrection Sunday

Last year the old, old mallow bush flared into beauty – the magnificent Pink Queen of the Yard.



 

Then came the rains and laden with water the blooms and leaves collapsed in a heap.  The few remaining limbs struggled along but the roots had pried loose and it was doomed.












So I made some cuttings, rooted them and replanted the Pink Queen’s clone and lo, it started to grow.

And now, here it is again.  The Pink Queen rules!  


 On a day when the wind is perfect
 the sail just needs to open
 and the world is full of beauty.
 Today is such a day.
                            Rumi

On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin

            It was so sweet.  All those earnest, scrubbed Mid-west faces, genuinely believing that they could use a loving-hands-at-home grassroots recall movement to overcome the power of money, the power of resentment and envy that supports an effective political race to the economic bottom and the supremely effective power of false narratives.

            Naturally, the grassroots recall of Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, failed. How could it not?  Recalls are, in the best of times, difficult things to pull off.  There’s only been a few in history.  People hate recalls.  For most of them, it’s a long, long stretch between, “I hate that guy,” and “I’ll actually vote to toss the bum out.”  Instead, people will endure all sorts of awful governance and won’t lift a finger to do anything more than just grumble and wait until the next election. And in Wisconsin, the bar had been set even higher – recalls only for illegal wrong-doing. And with Walker, that was (at this point) lacking, though there is an ongoing investigation into some illegal activities alleged to have gone on in the Governor’s office.

            And nobody should ever, ever underestimate the power of envy in a bad economy.  In hard, scary times, instead of raising all boats, the reverse is true.  After all, the secret heart whispers, Why should you, via your union benefits, be doing better than I, who am without those benefits?  And if you’re a public worker and my taxes are paying your salary, well, I’m gonna make sure you really, really get cut down to my size.

            And, of course, one should never, ever underestimate the overwhelming power of the false narrative fueled by unlimited money.  The big lie too often wins in the short run, and in politics, it’s all short run.  Plus, negative ads work, no matter how many times we tell ourselves that that don’t.  They do.

            So, there’s Wisconsin, which became a sort of laboratory for what’s roiling the rest of the nation: an unbalanced economy with only a few boats rising while the rest have been scuttled or sent to China; a political ideologue (Walker) who forgot that while you can run as an ideologue you have to govern as a moderate, and instead of compromise, took an ax to the few remaining boats, gave tax breaks to his rich cronies, then openly going after union’s bargaining rights – an arrogant act of overreach that triggered the revolt.  And finally, Wisconsin became the first chance to see what unlimited (and secret) PAC money can do in a hot-button, clearly partisan, ideological,  political fight.

            Interestingly, the battle isn’t quite over.  There’s a few GOP state senators up for grabs and ultimately, the outcome of that battle may moot Walker’s win – a new Democratic majority that will block any more of Walker’s unilateral ramrodding.  

            Perfect cheese fight! With the outcome pretty predictable.  But, bless all those fresh, hopeful mid-west faces. Wisconsinites, you got the government you deserve, ot once but . . . twice! 

Speaking of Cheese Fights

            The guy even looks like Jeremy Irons, star of Showtime’s “The Borgias.”  In a new book, “His Holiness,” by Gialuigi Nuzzi, who got his inside info from a Vatican “deep throat,” the Pope is portrayed as a weak doofus surrounded by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, “the Holy See’s influential secretary of state.  In his quest to consolidate power for himself and his cronies, Bertone made many enemies at the Vatican.  The picture that emerges is of powerful groups fighting it out for control beneath an ‘almost absent’ pope, who is fully ‘under the thumb of the powerful cardinal.”  Toss in the head of the Vatican Bank, who was abruptly fired (amid rumors that he actually got the boot because he had really been trying to root out financial corruption at the bank), and now the Pope’s personal valet is caught with stolen documents . . .

            Bring on the poison-in-the-ring!

            Or, better yet.  Send a whole bunch of those fresh-faces Wisconsinites over to Italy to recall the Pope and all his minions.  Considering the still-ongoing disgrace of the child-raping priests and the still indifferent/obstructing hierarchy, maybe it’s time for a total recall.  Throw the bums out and start over.

Oh, Noooooooo . . .

            Oh, Dear God, No. . . .  John Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, has just written a new tell-all book that’s due out on June 26.  Haven’t we had enough?  Really, Rielle?  A tell-all-book?  Really?

            “Hunter told GQ magazine in 2010 that she said she did not want to capitalize on the affair to make money.

            Yet here she is. 

Time to move to France.

Your Sunday Muse

From, Love Poems from God; Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, Daniel Ladinsky, ed.  This one by St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

                   Consecrated

            All has been consecrated.
    The creatures in the forest know this,

the earth does, the seas do, the clouds know
          as does the heart full of
                      love.

    Strange a priest would rob us of this
                   knowledge

       and then empower himself
               with the ability
   
         to make holy what
                already was.

Bring in the Clowns

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for June 2,  2012

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

                                                   Quentin Crisp.

            No matter how I try, it just keeps returning to the ridiculous.  With all those ruined lives, the whole, sad story should firmly remain in the realm of tragedy.  But like one of those Shmoo boppy toys, it keeps whipping back into farce.

            He was the golden boy; a wealthy, highly successful litigator, a poor boy from one America who now lived in the other America, a presidential candidate who gave a whole gaggle of Democratic hopefuls a run for their money.  John Edwards had it all.  

           And lost it all.  It’s a tale that should cause feelings of sad empathy, perhaps a moment of smug self-righteousness. But for me it all just keeps turning from a sad-faced tsk-tsk moment back into snort-through-the-nose laughter.

            I think it’s just the sheer wretched excess of it all.  This wasn’t a story of one man’s ego and libido getting the better of him in a moment of weakness.  This was epic!--  a traveling road-show that included a cast of players larger than “Cats” that turned the action into a Max Sennett comedy, all zippy rattle-trap cars whizzing up and down and back and forth while a speeding train crashes into a water tower.

            And somewhere along its sorry way, the tale passed the point of mini-gravitas and tipped into a clown car jammed full of fools, each more embarrassing than the other. 

            I mean . . . Rielle?  the hideous high-maintenance mistress, one of those Hollywood wannabes who was originally hired to make a series of “webisodes” of Edward’s campaign.  Between making stump speeches, shaking endless hands, and kissing babies, the two of them fell into bed.  The expensive video log Ms. Hunter made turned out to be so poorly shot it was unusable (Goodbye Hollywood), but the baby the two of them made in that hotel room stuck around (Hello Pampers).

            And had to be hidden from the ferociously ambitious and now-suspicious wife.

            Who was suffering from cancer.  Did I forget to mention that part?  

            Enter Andrew Young, the loyal lickspittle willing to fall on his sword by volunteering to claim that the child was his, which prompts a few moments of delight picturing how Mr. Young explained that baby’s existence to his own wife.  Cue the pie in the face.

            And best of all, this hugger-mugger traveling hide-the-baby Klown Karnival was financed by a loopy heiress, the fabulously wealthy  “Bunny” Mellon, and a couple of Edward’s rich lawyer pals, all of whom thought nothing of dropping over a million smackaroonies just to keep this ridiculous production on the road.

            And so it shambled on, wheels creaking, calliope booming, the dying wife raging, the whining mistress demanding shopping trips to Los Angeles, the golden coins pouring out of the purses and pockets of  the Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mommy Mellon, while the baby-hiding aide stopped feeling the love and started sulking and plotting his own cover-his-ass revenge.

            And above it all, the master juggler floated, the smiling, golden-haired Edwards.   Campaigning for President, then, when that wasn’t working, maneuvering to cut a deal to become the Veep.  No?  Well how’s about giving me some kind of high-powered State Dept. office? Astonishing. Brazen. Shameless.  Deluded.  Oblivious.

            Until the wheels came off.

            And the wife died, and Edwards sought absolution from the obligatory TV confession – My bad.  My bad.  My maxima culpa bad -- followed by a trial for political corruption (all that nice Mellon money), where even more grisly, cringe-worthy details spilled out.  And the poor jurors had to struggle with confusing, conflicting election laws filled to the Swiss-cheese brim with deliberately written convenient, wink-nudge loopholes.

            All of which should elicit sympathy, perhaps some sorrow.  A long face?  I mean, how much more can one man be humiliated?

            But there it is.  That stubborn snicker.  

            In classic literature, the downfall of the tragic hero should inspire fear and pity. But this wasn’t tragedy, it was comeuppance. Somewhere along the way this sorry saga passed melodrama and fell onto the banana peel of not guilty on one charge and a mistrial on the other five.   

            That the DOJ wasted a dump-truck load of tax dollars on a political corruption case in the era of  Citizens United and all our now-legal corrupt and corrupting Super PAC spending, well, that’s the biggest laugh of all.

            Cue the Whoopee Cushion.