Pictures

We recently hosted a family barbecue. As I usually do, I took out my digital camera and started shooting at whatever moved or looked like an interesting grouping. The kids run around so much, most of my pictures are puzzlingly vapid. Especially in digital photography, there is a delay between when you depress the shutter and when the image is impressed on the electronic sensors so that I get many shots that come out like the drawing of cows eating grass, where the grass is already eaten and the cows have left.

Roll back the scene about 80 years or so. I have a large shoebox filled with photographs taken by my father from the late twenties through the seventies. The pictures taken after 1965 don't interest me too much because I have my own pictures of the same events and because I have living memories of those depicted in the photos, and, although interesting in their own right (see how young we were) they don't convey the same sense of continuity I get from the pictures of people I never knew.

There are pictures of my dead cousins dancing at some celebration or other, pictures of my aunts' weddings, random pictures of dinners and hikes and groupings of people who were related to me before I was born but didn't manage to be contemporary with me, and also pictures of young people whom I did manage to meet when they were older. I think about all of them, these personalities flitting in and out of my consciousness, as I go through the piles of photos. I think, here are people, like me, with likes and dislikes loves and hates hopes and disappointments triumphs and failures. They are mostly, if not all, gone now and we have taken their place. I long for the opportunity to interact with them.

Back to the twenty-first century. I sent my children a random shot of four of my adult children at the above mentioned barbecue; one is asleep in a chair, the other three are busily engaged in eating a corn or a hot dog concentrating on the matter in hand and oblivious to each other, sort of like Hopper's "Soir Bleu." I asked them what they think one of our descendants would think when coming across this picture in 50 years.

Here are some of their answers;

"why would anyone have saved THIS picture?"
"why would anyone have taken this picture?"
"what's Dr. Brown soda?"

I guess they don't think like me.

Happy Birthday

I had birthday this week. ( I know, A birthday, its a German thing, let it go). Lovey really gets into birthdays and thinks it is funny to tell everyone she sees that it is my birthday. So we were in an old age home visiting some relatives and she announced to everyone that it was my birthday (I only think about a third of the people heard it, though.) One man standing there perks up and says " hey, its my wife's birthday too!" so I go over to the wife and say " Happy Birthday" and she responds " Yes, my birthday is August 28th".

I felt that at this point it was just best to smile all around.

Travels in America

Any place that has a population density of less than 6 people per square mile is considered by the US Census to be uninhabited. I don't know if this is an average figure over a large region or if this applies to every square mile in the country. By the latter standard, I have been traveling in a largely uninhabited area. Every mile or two one does spot a farmhouse and some outbuildings upon a knoll or somewhere behind a stand of tall corn.

I have been driving hundreds of miles in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota for the past few days and the word "uninhabited" keeps popping into my consciousness. Not that the land is desolate. On the contrary, it is miles and miles of verdant, rich, productive cropland giving proof to human intervention on a grand scale. Some of the towns along my route are little more than trailer parks (figuratively, the houses are all real and permanent) while others have lovely tree lined and canopied streets in a region not distinguished by trees of any sort.

Minnesota is known by its self-dubbed nickname as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes." There are a lot of lakes here but eastern South Dakota, as I have often noticed while flying across it, is riddled with one lake after the other, large and small. At ground level these lakes appear to be large holes filled with water with no accessible shoreline other than thick healthy bullrushes leading to the water's edge. I am told they are filled with fish and I even saw some water birds frolicking in their dark blue waters. Some are quite deep. But on the whole these lakes are, for the most part, featureless. Many are just round without coves and most are surrounded by flat land making the distinction between water and land a matter of only color change. The usual pattern of gently sloping wooded hills forming a bowl containing the water does not hold here.

Today, I drove more than 400 miles fronted on both sides as far as the eye can see by waves of light and dark green soybean leaves rippling in the wind, seas of brownish-yellow tasseled corn carpeting the land, golden swaths of harvested wheat and green lawns of newly mown hay fields. Depending upon the level of the fields relative to the roadway the views change, sometimes showing an incredible symmetry of rows and sometimes only showing an unbreakable surface of one color or another. All this accompanied by the redolence of livestock and other farm odors which is even more pronounced when traversing the region in an open convertible.

Of all the millions, possibly billions, of ears of corn I passed today, the one I bought for dinner this evening was the worst I have ever tasted.

Go figure.

Doctor, here's where it really hurts!

Issues in the health care debate boil down to the following:

If the puchase of health care insurance becomes mandatory, and there is no public option, the industry will acquire a stranglehold on the health care system, It will furthermore be greatly enriched by 47 million people forced to buy their products at rates that can be arbitrarily set. There is no possible way that such a scenario will not be more monopolistic than the wildest imaginings of the muckrakers of the early 20th century. Our lawmakers will be handing the health insurance industry a munificent windfall without receiving much in return.

If there is a public option it may serve as competition to the industry but with the possibility of a large increase in costs to the government and the public. Also at the cost of bureaucratically administered health care rationing. The fact that the Senate even considered a "death panel" is proof of how much personal liberty health care reform will eliminate. And this will only be the first step on the slippery slope to dictatorship.

If congress tries to limit the cost of health care for the masses by increasing the co-payment and deductible burden on a mandatory minimum health policy holder then the poor will have to shoulder close to half their medical costs plus the insurance premium. This is bad enough for those who are sick, but it is vastly more unfair for those who don't get sick who will be forced to buy a piece of junk that they don't need..If the purpose of this reform is to help the poor then how does this help them? Heads I win, tales you lose.


The most evil part of this plan is the mandatory clause. Administration spokespeople are lauding the health insurance industry for their agreement to insure those with preexisting conditions. Obviously if insurance purchase is mandatory then even the sick will have to buy it and if private insurance providers don't agree to insure the already sick it would leave the government no choice but to have a public option.

Never in this country's glorious history has one been forced to purchase anything. I have nightmares of shouting guards and barking dogs herding innocent people into boxcars.

The best solution to this fake crisis is to do nothing. The system isn't perfect, but it works. Tweak it a bit if you must but use gradualism. Write your congressman and senators and tell them that they should vote against any and all the bills for massive health care reform.

The levelers in Washington have taken control and I fear for our inalienable rights.

BIAS!

I am trying to recall a special catastrophic historical event which, in hindsight, was the primary cause for the assumption of absolute power by a dictator. The assassination of Kirov? The bombing of Cambodia? No matter. There aren't too many cases of homegrown dictators in 20th century history and before that, monarchy and absolute power were the norm. I have previously blogged about crises becoming the excuse for power grabs but what follows is a description of a manufactured crisis and we do have to be careful that once the "crisis" becomes fixed in the public's mind, it will be hard to counteract.

The news media needs to exaggerate and hype everything out of proportion in order to sell its product. I once called the Wall Street Journal when they used to sponsor a few minute recap of the financial news on WQXR regarding a program headlined by, "Oil prices soar!" when the price of petroleum went up a few cents. I pointed out the apparent contradiction between the headline and the story and was told that after all, they needed to attract attention.

So when they characterize the recent spate of spiteful town hall meeting rhetoric as organized mob activity and nazi-like behavior it should be taken with a grain of salt, but I think this time it's a product of their collective socialist bias.

Let us examine the facts. Yes, booing and jeering isn't very civil or mannered behavior but mob activity is more sinister, employing clubs, brass knuckles, knives and a considerable amount of pushing and shoving. The people, like the media, just crave a bit of attention.

What is really annoying the politicians and their news media supporters is that the people are angry with, and distrustful of, their elected representatives and that they see the threat the Obama administration poses to individual freedoms and rights. The public feel entitled to voice their disapproval to their elected representatives. For years, politicians have been using the so called "Town Hall Meeting" construct to conduct a one-way, staged, indoctrination of the citizens who misguidedly attended these affairs under the impression that they would be able to influence or at least have a meaningful exchange of ideas with their elected representatives.

Well, no longer. Congressmen and Senators are consequently shocked that they can't get away with it this time.

I have listened to some of the public's remarks at these town hall meetings and they seem to me to be calm and reasoned arguments, albeit oppositional and delivered emotionally and feelingly. Politicians don't like to hear from their constituents unless they represent a substantial number of voters or control a lot of campaign money.

I just read a letter in USA today which presents the following argument against the claim that health care reform protesters are the storm troopers of organized right wing opposition. There are two pictures, one showing the conservative opposition holding long winded hand written signs and the other showing supporters displaying professionally designed and printed posters. The letter writer asks: Which is more likely to be the "organized" group and which the true grass roots protest.

Hussein (III), the honeymoon is over.

Its Hard to Soar Like an Eagle......

I had the misfortune of actually mentioning to the pest who was on the highway with me that I posted about him. He has taken the term pest to a completely new level. Let me tell you about this person. He works in my office, and thinks he is the boss. This means that he really doesn't listen to anyone, and wants everyone to listen to him, including the scintillating story of how he burnt his feet. ( I have been trying to avoid the details of this riveting story, but I think that he will corner me and tell me anyhow.)

Anyhow he has become completely hung up about this, and the idea that anyone would blog in the first place. He keeps coming in to my office to give he his cumulative knowledge about the world in general (all 22 years of his experiences) and his opinion on blogging specifically. I think it is probably jealousy since English and writing is occasionally a second language to him.

Now you can imagine what it is like to deal with someone like this on an every day basis. Root canal looks more and more appealing each day (" I have to go out for a few hours and have my head drilled, to take away the hammering in my brain from you"). Unfortunately, most people have similar issues in the work place. Sometimes it can be an annoying co-worker, in worst case scenarios it can be a supervisor or even the head person in the office. There really is not much that can be done about it except grin and bear it.

And blog about them.

The Throne, or the power behind it?

We were coming back from visiting day in the mountains and a pest who works in my office was driving behind me. He noticed that I was a passenger and Lovey was driving. He (of course) felt compelled to question the hierarchy at my house, since, in his silly little single mind, the MAN has to drive, or he isn't a man.

Without getting into his psyche too much, or telling him that it is usually more a burden then a joy to have to drive all the time, I still felt compelled to inform this misguided youth that the fact that I was not driving had nothing to do with my lack of standing in the house, ( actually, a case could be made that I insisted that I do not drive, so I am clearly in control, but to say such a thing in a blog that may or may not be read by a significant other is dangerous, so I will just posit it as a hypothetical) and more to do with my not sleeping the night before. ( I could also add the fair division of labor in the household, but that could cause more problems than the previous statement, so I will leave it as another hypothetical).

Actually, on a quick tangent, I know of certain households where the distaff side does all or most of the driving, sometimes because the male does not drive, and sometimes because it is not worth taking a stand with a female who insists. But I indeed digress.

Staying on the division of labor theme, as well as who is ultimately in charge of the house, leads to an interesting episode at Chez Greunkern that might just indicate how the residents see things. At the table over the weekend, there was a discussion as to who would do the dishes. Lovey decided that I should do them, and expressed her opinion accordingly. Not wishing to gainsay her, I looked to one of the children (house servants?) and told him that he should do the dishes.

Not missing a beat, he immediately started to say "But she told...." Then he caught himself. ( Smart boy)

Having not been born yesterday, I knew the end of the statement. I also was not going to let it go. So a quick discussion ensued that I am not part of the sibling pack, where that line will get you out of a job, and I indeed do have the right to delegate any job I choose, including those assigned to me by Lovey. However, it did show me exactly where the children think the true power in the house lies.

I have to go now and hide all my pants.