Would they live by the Golden Rule? Could they live on the minimum wage, much less raise a family? Will they even donate as much to charities serving the poor as they give to political campaigns? Especially considering how the middle-class has been impoverished?
Tag: Musings
NOW THAT WE’RE IN THE THICK OF IT
Let me confess, I hadn’t intended to blog about the political conventions, but as events unfolded, I couldn’t resist.
But I am intrigued by the unexpected counterpoint my earlier scheduled postings are providing. There’s more to life, after all, than politics, though they can make daily affairs easier or more cumbersome. So here we are, bouncing between the experiences of camping in the high Cascades or walking around town or tending the garden and the manipulated circus that’s become the new Mistake on the Lake. Maybe the real wilderness adds an essential ballast or balance or at least a breath of fresh air.
I suspect this wild ride’s going to continue quite a while. Let’s try to keep our feet on the ground as we go. And don’t forget to smell the roses or coffee. Keep our priorities straight. Maybe even with a sense of humor.
A TRIPPY DIP IN THE POOL
Sitting down at the edge of the indoor swimming pool the other day, I noticed the blue-and-white banners hanging above the lap lanes were reflected upside down on the water. Since I was the first swimmer to arrive, the surface was relatively calm, swayed only by the slow, repeated ripples my legs produced.
At first the upside-down banner images reminded me of a string of shimmering pine trees reaching more and more for the sky. Pines, of course, are also Christmas trees, so while my mind was drifting off somewhere along the holiday theme the images began squeezing, so that a blob of some kind began floating upward from each of the trees, which were shrinking in response. Almost melting. Or maybe dancing.
I’d definitely fallen into a mesmerizing time warp and hoped it wouldn’t be contagious, should anyone else show up. This was, quite simply, trippy. Very trippy.
Considering that era, I had to admit this was so much better than the lava lamps my recently retired eye doctor had in his exam room. He’s the one who’s beheld almost all of the world’s surviving Vermeer paintings in person – some of them in private collections, at that. So that, too, was stirred up. Hope he’s delighting in his freedom.
Well, it was over in a flash. Or should I say splash? Had to get my laps in and didn’t want the lifeguard coming over to ask if I was OK. How on earth could I answer that one?
“Do you see what I see?”
But that would revive those Christmas trees, and who knows where that would lead? I just might have to explain the whole hippie era to her, and we wouldn’t have that much time or spacey whatever.
JUST FOR PERSPECTIVE
Simply wondering. Does anyone remember:
- Jeb Bush
- Ben Carson
- Chris Christie
- Ted Cruz
- Carly Fiorina
- Jim Gilmore
- Lindsey Graham
- Mike Huckabee
- Bobby Jindal
- John Kasich
- George Pataki
- Rick Perry
- Marco Rubio
- Rick Santorum
- Scott Walker
More specifically, just what do you remember? Anything about their agenda? Or their record? Or has it come down to hair style and bluster?
Miss any of them?
Simply wondering. Just for perspective.
HERE COMES THE HANGOVER … OR WORSE
We knew it was coming, but it still comes as a shock. As one conservative tweeted last night, the Republican Party has lost its mind. Or another, more bluntly, “voted to die.” Some said the GOP has even endorsed Putin or at least invited him to speak. And those were the ones who were seeing more or less clearly. Compare that to, say, Chris Christie, who’s still lusting after some crumbs from the table. Is it purely pathetic or worse, tragic? Time will tell.
This is nothing like the party I grew up in, where reason and civility were honored and respected. At least on the surface, in our small part of the world, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was in command. But now?
Donald Trump has had pretty much of a free ride up to this point, but now he’ll finally have to start facing the facts, which aren’t adding up to his boasts. Just how much is he really worth? How bad has his business leadership been? Why is he afraid to release his income-tax statements — or, for that matter, how soon before the public demands to see his emails, too? As for his claims to the Art of the Deal? His co-author’s outing him as a phony.
As I’ve previously explained, the experience of living in New Hampshire, with its test-market role in the presidential campaign season, instills an alertness for the unexpected trip-up that fatally rips through a candidate’s mask. Trump evaded that possibility by largely refusing to engage in the face-to-face encounters with everyday voters here. His not-too-frequent events were largely stage-managed shows, rather than the two-way conversations of Granite State tradition. He never exposed himself to anyone to any significant degree.
His big trip-up — the one that somehow unpredictably takes hold or, as we say in the news business, “has legs” — may be emerging from his staff’s attempt to paint him as a compassionate and caring person. The notion of currying sympathy by having his (third) wife come out from her wall of privacy to say something that would soften his image might have worked. Who knows, maybe the thick accent would have been seen as charming and counter his stream of blasts at immigrants and their American-born children. Or maybe it would harden the perception of hypocrisy. That part was a risk, and it’s hard to tell how it functioned. Instead, the discovery of the lines brazenly stolen from Michelle Obama’s 2008 address in what Melania insisted was a speech she wrote herself now casts questions on all of the positive attributes she tried in invoke. After the cruelty of Trump’s attacks on Ted Cruz’ wife and family, few are likely to show mercy on Trump’s, no matter how much privacy she expects. Remember, this Republican crowd hates President Obama and the First Lady, yet Mrs. Trump turned to them as models to emulate. You can’t have it both ways. Let’s be honest, Michelle Obama is a paragon of intelligence, decency, and tasteful style, hardly what’s come out after Melania’s speech on the opening night in Cleveland as it points to organizational dysfunction in her husband’s campaign staff — his blaming Hillary Clinton’s camp for uncovering the plagiarism rather than his own failures is all too telling in its own way. You’re letting Melania go prime-time without the standard safeguards? From there it’s a short leap to falsehoods about her own accomplishments, from the failure to complete college, as she’s claimed, to the success of her modeling career before Donald came along. Oh, how long before the flood of questions of whether she’s fit to be First Lady, especially in comparison with Hillary’s success there.
It will be fascinating, maybe even painful, to watch Melania’s role in the coming months. Her absence from his side will be noted, as will her silence when she’s in public in his presence. And then if she opens her mouth?
This will not be pretty. But then neither is the nomination.
ENTWINED IN THE DETAILS OF PERSONAL FINANCE
I’m not sure any lover could have accompanied me all the way in the repeated moves from the orchards of Washington state to the seacoast of New Hampshire. The Rust Belt relocation came in part because my now ex-wife’s only aunt and uncle lived there, and we needed to be near family; as it turned out, what I really got from that stopover was an experience of Old-Order Quakerism and the swirl with another, in the aftermath, who I later followed to Baltimore.
Curiously, without her, I could have relocated anywhere in the Northeast while working as a field representative, but I wouldn’t have developed any of the Mennonite sides that continue. Events often are a mixed bag, aren’t they?
All of that got stirred up returning to the recorded files years later, well into my remarriage. You know, that part about applying to schools.
Just about the time you think the academic institutions know every intimate detail of your life and history, they want yet another detail. At least our younger one was accepted at her only early choice, which also came through with a huge scholarship.
Such a relief, after the tony prep school she’d applied to a few years earlier.
As said, all the details. I was beginning to think they knew more about me than I did. Ever feel humiliated? Or simply groveling?
HEEDING THE GHOSTS OF CLEVELAND
If anything erupts in Cleveland, we may see smoke harking back to the crowded hotel rooms of an earlier era. Or its blue-gray floating past us might be another specter altogether.
In selecting Quicken Loans Arena for what was supposed to be the coronation of Jeb Bush as its presidential nominee, the Republican Party had no doubt intended to do more than woo a crucial swing state in the November election. The spotlight would have been on the turnaround of a big city not long ago called “the mistake on the lake,” noting its 1969 fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River and the massive 1978 default on municipal loans as well as the struggles of its once-proud professional football and baseball teams. The mighty industrial hub had indeed fallen on hard times, especially as domestic steelmakers collapsed and turned much of the Midwest into a Rust Belt around the same time many whites fled the city for the suburbs, leaving a host of racial challenges in their wake.
Unlike Detroit, Cleveland can point to some progress, which will no doubt be touted. As for manufacturing, it’s bound to be another issue. The city’s once mighty corporations are largely gone. Ghosts of a sort.
There is an irony, though, when we look at the city’s history and the controversy surrounding the presumed nominee, Donald Trump. We’ve already heard rumblings about a brokered convention or of king-makers clustering over cigars in smoky hotel rooms to deal themselves out of a deadlock. Cleveland has a history there, with industrialist Mark Hanna recognized as a key Republican player. Will these ghosts raise their spooky heads?
In the years after the Civil War, Ohio produced seven American presidents. Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, William McKinley, and Warren G. Harding came from Cleveland’s half of the state, flowing into Lake Erie, while Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, and William Howard Taft came from the southern half, dominated by Cincinnati along the Ohio River. Two of those presidents were assassinated. Still, the Buckeye State was a beehive of invention and enterprise, positioned between the East Coast and booming centers like Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis to the west.
Hanna wasn’t the only big money player, either. Remember, John D. Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil Co., grew up and lived here, too, and even after antitrust suits broke up his monopoly, the city was long the headquarters of petroleum giant Sohio (Standard Oil Co. of Ohio), before it got gobbled up by BP (British Petroleum).
Cleveland’s proximity to Pittsburgh meant the big players could indeed meet over expensive cigars. It was, after all, steel baron Henry Clay Frick, a Rockefeller aide, who said of Theodore Roosevelt after the 1904 election, “We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn’t stay bought.”
There may well be other ghosts. Robert Taft, the conservative standard-bearer from Cincinnati, for one, in his bitter loss to the more moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower – there’s always that question of ideological purity – or of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare haunting the party and nation.
Of course, the very mention of loans in the convention site name itself will raise other suspicions. This thing keeps circling back to money, to say nothing of an inflated ego that brags of being loaded. Even Jeb and his record campaign treasure chest might be seen as ghosts running through this convention.
This is getting pretty ghastly, indeed. And we’re still a long way off from Halloween.
STICK IT TO ANOTHER BUMPER
Throw the Tea Party
Overboard!
BEGINNING TO FEEL SOME SYMPATHY FOR CHRISTIE?
There’s something pathetically tragic in New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s fall from good graces in the Donald Trump camp, and I hope the situation grows in public awareness.
As news stories surface regarding the reason Christie was knocked from the vice president spot on the ticket, it becomes obvious he won’t even be considered for the other top plum he desired, Attorney General.
The reason?
As the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005. Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison. Oh, there were sordid details in what included a nasty family fight for the Democratic Party supporter. All of which might have given the Trump ticket some creds in its upcoming battle with the Clintons.
Alas, Kushner is the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared – the husband of Ivanka, a husband-wife team that makes up his two closest advisors. And Jared, by all accounts, adamantly opposed Christie, no matter what he might have brought to the race.
Think about it. Christie is denied a spot because he’s fought illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. What does this say about Trump himself? His values? His practices? Even, now, his family?
For months now, Christie has been the most prominent Republican official in Trump’s camp. And now he’s cast as a pariah? For acting in the public interest? For fighting corruption? What kind of Justice Department do you think Trump would permit? One based on retribution, no doubt. One-sided, at all costs. Makes me think of Nixon’s back in the Whitewater years. Makes me also see John Kasich as a successor to another Ohio Republican of personal integrity, Bill Saxbe, who had the courage to stand up to Nixon and in the end, helped take him down.
You might see it as a warning to others to stay away from this platform. Why would any other elected Republican want to rally around this ticket? It’s an ominous sign, indeed. Please stay tuned, as they say. To something other than Fox.
WHY I’M SKIPPING MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
With the 50th anniversary of my high school class graduation coming up next month, I’ve found myself debating whether to attend.
Some of the conflict is spurred by tight personal finances these days – the event’s 900 miles from where I now live, a 15-hour drive each way in an auto that already has 270,000 miles on its odometer. Flying and then renting a car would be more practical but also more expensive. And that’s before we get to the event admission and related costs. Frankly, I’d rather spend the money on a couple of weekend escapes with my wife.
Scheduling adds its own complication. The reunion’s set for shortly after the annual session of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, where I’ll spend an intense week in Vermont attending to Quaker business. Add to that that my local Friends Meeting is planning its own retreat right the same time as the reunion. That’s a lot of time away from home just about the time the ocean here is finally warm enough for some brisk swimming. Why would I want to be in hot, humid Ohio when I could be at a refreshing seaside in nearby Maine?
When I broached the subject with a fellow choir member, he turned the focus slightly by asking if there was anyone I particularly wanted to see and talk with and then told of his own experience at his 10th anniversary class reunion where he found himself brushed off by those he wanted to speak with and was then stuck amid those with whom he had nothing in common. This had me realizing I’ve been out of touch with everyone for decades now, and when I tried to reconnect via email a decade ago – after the 40th reunion – there was no acknowledgement. My curiosity about what’s happened to many of the members has found answers online. More than anything, I’m sensing, is that any inclination to attend is being compelled by a perceived duty – I did hold some leadership roles as editor-in-chief of the newspaper and in a handful of clubs.
As I ponder the event, I’m also realizing my high school years were not particularly happy or even intellectually stimulating, apart from a few special teachers. Do I want to open those emotions, then?
Or would I want to go simply to brag, “Look how far I’ve come since!” I’m not sure that would be particularly welcome or rewarding.
Any advice? Or similar insights to share? Is this even a necessary rite of passage? Do tell!
Jnana's Red Barn 