Skip to main content

Mitt's Mitt

Mitt Romney--Does that not foster an image of a device to catch a baseball?--says that Barack Obama is fostering a culture of dependency.  (Pay no attention to the charge:  it is pure B.S. and political rhetoric.)  

I have been watching a friend who works for one of the richest men in Minnesota.  Being extremely rich is what fosters a culture of dependency.  People with a s**t-load of money are good at fostering dependency.  When they say s**t, people squat.  When they say, "Do it over!", people do it over if they want to be paid.  When they say, "Carry it up the driveway! I don't want trucks up here!", people say, "Yes, sir!", and carry it up the driveway.


If you have $1.7 billion dollars, you don't care whether the sub-contractor is happy, or treated fairly, or paid on time.  You don't care.  You don't have to care.  Someone tells you that there will soon be another contract to replace the flooring, and do you want to be considered for the job?  (You probably won't be:  Fred has a brother-in-law.)


Several states asked President Obama to waive the work rules for receiving welfare aid because, they said, they could get people off welfare quicker if the rules were changed.  Obama agreed, for the states that made the case.  Mitt Romney said that proves Obama is fostering a culture of dependency.  Obviously, quite the opposite, the States had argued.  No matter!  There is an election.


I remember my first mitt.  It was a Stan Musial outfielder's glove.  It might have been the worst baseball glove ever made, but I loved it, even though it had a pocket almost precisely the size of a baseball, which made the smallest mis-calculation a major-league error, and my error-free career had not yet begun, at the time.  (I like to blame that mitt for my less-than-stellar sports career, but there may be other factors.  Talent, for instance.)


I have sometimes wondered whether Mitt still has a Stan Musial mitt.  Some of his best friends own baseball clubs, you know.  Not bats.  Clubs.  Teams.  



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.  Even when all they wanted to do w

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