We’re getting a flood of mailings decrying tax increases attributed to some of the governors seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
The blanket charge against them fails to determine just who’s paying what, much less where the money’s going. Maybe it’s on all the rich? Maybe these are actually user fees? No telling.
Some of us are far more inclined to pay a tax for some service where we see a direct benefit – education, parks, highways, snowplowing, health care – than for those that profit special interests, the ones who hire high-powered lobbyists with an eye on the public purse. A subsidy of some kind. Maybe a tax break or outright credit.
Until we hear otherwise, let’s simply assume that those who are claiming to have cut taxes have also cut public services in some way. Remember that possibility if you’re standing in a long line to renew your license or are waiting for the fire department to arrive or wonder why nobody’s picking up the phone at town hall.
The blanket charge gets an emotional reaction, of course – we’d all like to escape paying our bills. But that’s not how the world works. Just ask any businessman. Or even those candidates making the accusations against their rivals.
No matter how trippy the narrative, With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses is sounding more realistic than some of the political candidates.
Some of the profiles in circulation are concluding that Donald Trump is skilled not as a negotiator, despite his claims, but in his ability to read an individual or entire audience he’s addressing – and then tune his presentation to their psyche and cater to their dreams.
That has me seeing Trump as a chameleon. Just look at how easily he changes colors to match the environment.
In many of his big deals, he may have gotten his way – but the financial consequences have often been disastrous. Plaza Hotel, anyone?
Joe McQuaid, publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, caught that in the headline to his front-page editorial yesterday: “Con man Trump.”
He then sees another twist: “Nothing he says or does will bother his most committed followers. But if they thought about it, they might realize that Trump is insulting them just as he insults everyone else.” As for the anti-politician role? “Trump is as slick and oily a pol as any we have seen. But when he doesn’t get his way, as with [last night’s] TV debate, he reveals the real Trump.
“He is a schoolyard, rich-kid bully who thinks he can push around networks, newspapers, and opponents while conning voters at the same time. We have seen that con before …”
So, we put the two impressions and what do we get? A con-meleon?
Decades ago, after hearing mention that my family had Quaker roots in North Carolina, I began the genealogical detective work that now fills my Orphan George Chronicles. Although I’d independently come to the Society of Friends and become a formal member, I was surprised to hear that my family had been Quaker and that there were Quakers in North Carolina – my, have my eyes been opened!
In the genealogical work, I chose to begin with my great-grandparents – people I’d never met in the flesh.
But when my father died, the focus shifted. I realized only one person remained who might be able to fill me in on questions of his childhood and parents, and that was his “baby sister.” That would mean getting to know her – and her parents – without all of the filters that had always been applied by my mother, who had issues of her own. (Oh, for these family dynamics!)
It became a rich and fascinating project, given all the more incentive when we met my aunt and her husband, a retired university dean, at the airport. It was a first-time encounter for them and my brood, yet he swept up my younger one in his arms and proclaimed, “It’s so good to have another Democrat in the Hodson family!” The party activist suddenly had a favorite uncle. Make it great-uncle-by-marriage if you will, he got the crown.
At that point, my aunt remarked that Grandpa’s slogan, painted on all of his trucks and on the calendars he mailed out each year, was “Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber.” She promised to send a photo of the vans all lined up on the street. “You didn’t know that? It was even on his stationery and bills.” This was something I’d never known, although he did sign one of his last notes to me as “formerly Dayton’s leading Republican plumber,” a comment that long puzzled me. Through much of the spring and summer I wound up following up on her reactions and insights to her childhood and adolescence, which to my surprise (the word of the day) paralleled my own, especially in regards to their now-Methodist church, the denomination I grew up in. At last, I could finally look directly at my grandparents through all the memories and scattered bits of data I could assemble, as well as all the material I already had, doing genealogy. It was like being given a key, at last.
Grandma and Grandpa at family reunion
My aunt suggested I correspond with a surviving first-cousin Dad’s age, who wound up also contributing memories, and the result was a remarkable project, not quite memoir but more a realization of finally knowing my grandparents, pro and con, for the first time – years after their deaths – as well as questioning many of our ingrained expectations: just what are grandparents supposed to be, do, or look like, for instance. Unexpectedly, I reconnected to more feelings/memories from their house on McOwen Street than to the house I grew up in on Oakdale Avenue. Some of the stories that turned up, like my dad’s desire to be a sports writer or a big chicken dinner Grandpa arranged to help pay medical bills for one of Mom’s best friends, are priceless. From an intellectual perspective, the project also illuminates the difficulty of knowing – it often meant triangulating something in the middle of three often contradictory sets of perceptions. More importantly, to some extent, I’ve finally been able to reconnect with more than a few fragments of my childhood.
From my end, there’s little I’d say was happy in all of that childhood. But there are things I can finally claim and appreciate, and even rework or rewire. Much of my adult life, as I’ve found in Dad’s genealogy (Mom’s is entirely different, and far more gothic than she ever would have admitted) has been a matter of reclaiming many of the values and practices Grandma and Grandpa rejected in their move to the up-and-coming industrial city. I never knew that my Hodson ancestors were Quaker or that Grandma’s were Dunker (Church of the Brethren), very close to Amish and oh-so Pennsylvania Dutch. But they rejected all that, with some values somehow surviving, however invisibly.
Some discoveries still amaze me. The fact that Grandpa accomplished all he did with nothing more than a grade-school education, for one thing.
Or that his two best friends in adulthood were both a decade older than himself, and both died within a year – one of ALS, the other in a car collision. Since he was the youngest of three sons, I wonder about the dynamics.
There’s much, much more I’ve uncovered along the way. As you can guess, it’s a long story. Today would have been his birthday.
One place where the Bush family might claim a legacy in American politics is in its reliance on casting an opponent in a negative light rather than advancing what one member called “the vision thing.” Not just a rival’s record, either, but spouses and children have been targeted as well. Just ask John McCain about the gossip spread in South Carolina back in 2000.
So here we are, 16 years later with another Bush in the running and our mailbox keeps getting attacks on his GOP opponents, most of them funded by his Right to Rise USA super PAC. Well, in one flyer, it was just three of them – Donald Trump somehow keeps going unnoticed. In the flyer, a photo shows Gov. Chris Christie from behind, to emphasize his obesity – while conversing closely with President Obama, a touch intended to inflame the hate-Obama core of the Republican base. It’s rather heavy-handed, actually.
The brochure does try to say something positive about its candidate: JEB, Tough, Tested, Ready. As we watch him in action, though, we have reason to doubt anyone in the field sees him that way.
As I view the waves of negativity, I keep thinking of individuals who are fountains of gossip – mostly dirty stuff, or at least juicy. Not what you’d want to hear about yourself. But then, when you mention this person to a mutual acquaintance, the response is something along the lines of “You should hear what they say about you.”
And that’s how I’m feeling about Jeb. Just what is he saying about US, behind our backs? Or worse yet, what would he do?
The negative approach just doesn’t build trust, does it?
As Donald Trump deflects blows to his populist demagoguery, we can feel the panic setting in on the Republican Party.
For the true believer in the “conservative” cause, it’s the recognition that the Donald’s anything but consistent in his ideological framework.
For the pragmatic problem-solver, it’s the recognition that the Donald’s business dealings have been idiosyncratic, piecemeal, erratic, flamboyant, egotistical – anything but a steady, reliable hand on the helm.
For the party leaders, it’s the recognition they can’t trust him, especially when it comes to their side of the operation. Just where does he stand, anyway? And what about all those out-and-out lies?
It’s the rogue elephant running through the circus, indeed.
Discussion of a brokered convention is percolating in the background. Keep any single candidate from winning on the first round of voting, and the delegates are free to wheel and deal. That’s the key, of course, thwarting a first-round victory.
The crux of this approach, in the minds of some strategists, is to start over – prevent any of the current candidates from clinching the nomination and then rally around a fresh face. But who?
The name of Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House, has surfaced. It’s a fascinating twist, especially if he can find a way to hold his own members of Congress in sway.
It’s a long shot, of course. And it would come at the end of what’s shaping up as a long, ugly primary campaign.
The red lawn sign – three of them, actually, in a pile of snow in front of a suburban store for lease – caught our attention:
JEB!
It’s that exclamation point, actually. Ever since one turned a pioneering Rodgers and Hammerstein musical into a 1943 Broadway hit, advertisers have looked to that imperative period to jazz up an otherwise flat word or concept. In the case of Oklahoma, the bright touch suggested the backyard of Texas or Arkansas might actually have something romantic or charming. And so it was Oklahoma! in a time of World War II, with a story and music to match. Back when the genre was often labeled American musical comedy, in fact. And think, one of the main characters was Jud – sounds like Jeb? – in a rivalry with Curly. Could that be the Donald?
Back to those lawn signs, though, where I keep seeing something else happening. The strong stroke on those exclamation points keep bending, and what I read is this:
JEB?
JEB?
JEB?
Any answer seems to get lost in the sound of traffic.
A year into swimming in Dover’s indoor pool most weekdays, I’ve settled into a routine. For each length of the pool, I engage a different stroke in a sequence of freestyle, breaststroke, sidestroke (my left side going in one direction and right on the return), and backstroke – in part to help me keep count of how many laps I’ve completed and in part because I find my freestyle – or Australian crawl, as it was called back at the Y of childhood – is my most exhausting and thus wouldn’t get me very far in a session. These days, by the way, the glorious butterfly stroke is out of the question, except for members of the high school swim team in the next lane. (Yes, I can say I swim with the swim team. I just can’t claim to swim on it.) So 18 laps – or 36 lengths of the 25-yard lanes – gets me a bit past a half-mile, my daily goal. Decent enough for my age, I suppose. Even if the younger swimmers are doing circles around me.
But another realization has set in. Some days that half-mile is longer than others. Which also means some days it’s shorter. That is, internally speaking, distance loses its universal, mechanical measurement. And it’s not necessarily a factor of how much time it takes me to swim those laps, either. This old body runs on its own clock or its own speed. With measurements that can be surprisingly rubbery.
All I can do is keeping plugging away and hoping I make it to the finish line. Wherever it is.
Following the rapidly changing weather forecast for the weekend as it evolved over the past seven days has spurred many emotions where I live. For a while, we watched our snowfall predictions rise for Saturday and then Sunday, prompting us to reconsider scheduling a gathering at our house. Let’s wait, my wife counseled, suggesting the next weekend could be even worse. And then the anticipated depths we viewed kept declining until, suddenly, there was no precipitation of any kind on tap for the weekend. What a relief, we thought.
But then we saw where that snow would be headed. It’s a strange feeling for New Englanders to see a blizzard steering south of us. Sparing most of us, in fact. We know what it’s like to be hammered and then buried. But we’re equipped to dig out, too, and accept it as part of the price of living where we do. We even know what it can do to a crowded city, where there are few places to dump the mounds as they accumulate. Driving along a street, you’d keep asking, Is that just a big pile of snow or is there a car under there?
It doesn’t take much snow to lock up a city, in fact. No matter how prepared a metropolis, six inches can really muck things up. And a foot can take days to clear free. But two? Now it’s getting serious.
We also know that even an inch of wet snow can make for some very hazardous driving. Forget what those four-wheel-drive advertisements say. We’ve seen enough of those vehicles spin off the road into the median strip or guardrail. There are acquired tricks to driving under these conditions, along with cautions. I think of it more along the lines of boating.
So when we see expectations of up to two feet of cold wet flakes blowing across Virginia and Maryland and even a corner of North Carolina(!) — and similar impacts on the District of Columbia and Baltimore — our sympathies fly southward. That’s even before Philadelphia and New York City are hit.
You probably don’t have neighbors with snowplows on their pickups, for one thing. You might not even have your own snow shovels at hand, much less snowblowers. As for those boots and gloves? We understand.
I can’t help but recall the broader term for “global warming” was “climatic instability,” which is what we’re seeing. Remember that if you hear the word “record” being applied to this storm. And no, I won’t refer to it by the cable channel’s name.
If you’re bearing the brunt of this storm, you have our sympathy. We know you’ll have your own names for the experience, few of which are publishable in polite circles. Our best advice is to stay put and take things easy as long as you can and hope you stay warm. Declare yourselves a snow day. And remember, this too shall pass.
Jnana's Red Barn 