Skip to main content

He Was One

I try to avoid talking about politics and religion.  I hate to get hurt.

I avoid religion by sidestepping deftly:  changing the subject.
I ask, instead, how they feel about buggering little altar boys, or
by suggesting we talk about what came before God; things such as
the Big Bang creation of something from nothing, or maybe just
commenting what a shame it is gay people cannot get married. 

Politics is more difficult.  Everybody hates politics and politicians.
Everybody wants to throw the lying scoundrels out of office.
That's why they love Sarah Palin and making money and talking
dumb.  She knew that all politicians were simpletons, so she quit.
She was smart.  She gets a lot of money from the people who say
politicians are so stupid they should just quit.  Or, if they won't
quit, they should all be thrown out of office in the next election.

What a lovely idea!
Throw all the incumbents out!
Every one of them! 

That should do it.  Put a whole new crop of amateurs into office. 

The incumbents will have left a big staff behind.  The new guys
can hire them.  They know what is going on.  They can gently
lead the new guys by the nose, suggest what they should do,
until the new guys become old guys, and then we can throw them out.

Government will go on just fine.  The lobbiests will still be there,
too.  They can help the new guys by explaining how the real
world works; help them write legislation.  Give them money. 

That ought to improve government, don't you think? 
Put some babes-in-the-woods into office, and let the career
staff members and lobbiests help them make America great!


Of course incompetents ought to be turned out of office! 
But there are some extremely fine people in office, and until
somebody better wants the job, we should keep them there.

I tried out this argument with a guy one day who said we should
throw everybody out of office; maybe have a one- or two-term
limit.  "Well, yes," he admitted, "that would give the real power
to the career staff members and the lobbiests". 

He agreed with me!

He went on:  "That's why we should throw them all out of office!" 

I asked him what he knew about black holes;
whether he was in favor of them, or not.  He was.  One. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...