Personal Musings category archive

My house in Delaware finally settled, three weeks later than originally scheduled.

Many thanks to my real estate agents, who truly earned their commission in moving things towards settlement with another agency which seems to have been settlement-paperwork-challenged.

If you are looking for agents with integrity in upper Delaware, email me. I can recommend some.

Now I can can stop looking over my shoulder.

(——————–)

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Robert Hammer in the Salt Lake Tribune:

Although hardly new, a specious argument seems recently resurgent among certain bloggers, radio talk show hosts and political groups. It holds that efforts to eliminate obstacles impeding progress toward broader social, economic and political equality in our white-dominated society are evidence of “reverse racism.” Likewise, celebrations of non-European cultural heritage are deemed “racist” for the mere fact that they highlight ethnic differences and, therefore, to some minds at least, encourage separatism.

This argument apparently rings true in many ears. After all, isn’t equality a simple matter of applying the same standards in all directions? If a skinhead shouting “white power!” is a racist, doesn’t equal application render a black person championing “black pride!” racist also? Similarly, if an exclusive all-white social institution is considered racist, why not an all-black college or Hispanic community organization?

Read the whole thing.

The newest issue of Psychology Today has an article making the point that pretending to be “colorblind” by not noticing that some persons are pink, some persons are coffee with cream, some persons are black coffee, some persons are weak tea, is pointless and stupid and, in the long run, destructive and delusional.

(Unfortunately the article is not yet available at their website; it won’t be up until the next issue is out. Buy it at your local news stand. It’s worth the price).

Charging “reverse racism” is a ploy to divert attention from the effects of racism. Those who sling those terms get to pat themselves on the back for not being racist while being racist.

Catch 22. It’s the best catch there is.

I was in the Campus Center at my college with a some friends. As I recall, we were playing bridge.

One of my friends came in and said, “They are killing us.”

The water main break in Boston is big news.

Indeed, calling it a “water main” seems an understatement; it was the primary aqueduct brining water to much of the Boston metropolitan area. The back-up water supply is not treated sufficiently to be drinkable, so residents must boil water for cooking and drinking.

They do not have to take their buckets and dip water out of Boston Harbor–which might well dissolve the average bucket–or lug it from a well to the house the way my Granddaddy did for many years.

Adrian Walker, whose own tap water was affected, suggests that the media reaction may have been overstated (emphasis added):

Now, I understand that this is a major inconvenience. Having to boil water is a pain. Mindless tasks like brushing teeth now take a little thought. Grocery stores were said to be running out of water. (Trust me, Poland Spring and its competitors will make sure the stores aren’t out for any length of time. This is their Super Bowl.) We’re in for a trying week.

But has panic become the new normal? A ferocious survival instinct was on display this weekend, even though this isn’t really a threat to survival. The psychology was familiar to anyone who watched the city shut down a few months ago for a blizzard that never came. It’s as though the capacity for distinguishing between a problem and a crisis has gone away.

He has a point. Panicking does not solve problems; it destroys thought and prevents solutions.

Demagoguing politicians and commentators prefer the language of panic–bombs! invasion! evil-doers! massive hordes! communist socialist fascism! brown people!–to create fear, leading to panic, leading to followers, leading to power.

Panic launches columns and speeches and rants that we’re not taking this, that, or the other seriously enough.

(We see this across the spectrum of American thought, but I believe, based on my own experience following news, that this tendency leans right.*)

Enough theses, thoses, and the others paralyzes action through panic overload.

I used to have a boss for whom the A Number One Priority was always the last executive to call him on the telly fone. He taught me this:

When everything is a priority, you have no priorities.

Fortunately, the folks working to patch the hole decided their job was not to panic, but to solve a problem.

The hole is patched and water may start flowing again in as little as two more days.

___________________

*Daily Kos–it is linked on the sidebar–to pick a well-know left-leaning forum, has its share of “end-of-the-world” diaries that appear via its right sidebar. Note that they are posted by members–anyone can register and post there until and unless they get banned for violating the rules of the site–not by the Front Pagers.

Nevertheless, the left has nothing to compare in numbers, vehemence, or audience to Rush Limbaugh or Cal Thomas or Charles Krauthammer and the like for sheer mouth-foaming the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh-ism.

The landmark (Hollywood sign–ed.) has been at the centre of a $12.5m (£8.1m) campaign to stop it being torn down to make room for property development in the surrounding area. Playboy owner Hefner stepped in with a $900,000 donation that means the 138-acre site around the sign will now be protected.

. . . but I suspect that no one can stop the stupid.

When I lived in Northern Virginia and traveled home to Pine View Farm, I would occasionally detour to take the Whitehaven Ferry on a nice summer day. A ferry has been operating at that spot for three centuries.

It was only a two minute boat ride; the side trip added a total of about 15 minutes to the 3 1/2 or four hour drive; and the jaunt through the Maryland countryside was quite relaxing after fighting the insane beach traffic on US 50.

Now it’s threatened.

Sure, it included War of the Worlds (the 1954 version, not the horrible Tom Cruise thing), The Wicker Man (a fantastic movie–I don’t think I could watch it a second time), Se7en (mediocre plot, but Brad Pitt was great–it was before he became a parody of himself), a bunch of Steven King throwaways, but what kind of list of scary movies gets away without Hitchcock, without Price, without Lorre, without a single Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula movie, without The Collector, not to mention The Vampire Lovers.

Damned whippersnappers think the world began when Rosemary’s Baby was born.

Don’t know what it was, but it hit Saturday afternoon with chills, with a fever up to 102.5 Fahrenheits, and with shakes and shivers.

We won’t mention the aches and pains, but I can recommend this in conjunction with acetylsalicylic acid for symptomatic relief as a satisfied user who is not a medical person in any way.

I’ve spent a good part of the last two days asleep or delirious. (Between the two, I much prefer delirious. At least delirious can leave pleasant memories.)

Today, still shaky, I had to fill out forms for settlement, which is scheduled for Friday, then run around to get them notarized, and deliver them to UPS with the prepaid shipping label the settlement folks were kind enough to provide (this way, I won’t have to drive across three states to attend–my part is done).

As with every settlement I’ve been involved in since the first one 30 years ago, the settlement folks keep coming up with last-minute complications.

It’s what they do. It makes them feel needed.

To quote a friend of mine from another life a long time ago, it was like taking an exam while suffering from a blinding headache (and from the shakes).

Normal insanity seems to be returning.

Then, again, I may still seem delirious. It’s my blog. I’m allowed.

And now it’s time to rejoin some Old Time Radio, which is already in progress.

Coal mining will continue to be dangerous as long as mine operators consider safety to be part of an expense, rather than a way of life.

. . . because whatever he did in his marriage, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was.

Sure, he kept his personal life quiet (with good reason); that means he wasn’t parading his family in public in some kind of family values hype.

He’s more honest than most of the sanctimonious gasbags who are writing and talking about him in the media.

No, I don’t watch golf on telly vision.

This is embarrassing:

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.

Republican governors George Allen and Jim Gilmore issued similar proclamations. But in 2002, Warner broke with their action, calling such proclamations, a “lightning rod” that does not help bridge divisions between whites and blacks in Virginia.

One of my ancestors was a General in the CSA. Several others wore the grey. I honor my ancestors.

I do not honor the lost cause.

They lost and it is good that they lost.

Certainly, some of the persons who fought wearing the grey were honorable men by the lights of their times.

That was then. We–well, some of us–have learned much since then.

It was not an honorable cause, whatever Robert E. Lee or Henry Alexander Wise may have thought at the time.

Honoring the lost cause honors racism, bigotry, and slavery.

Those who honor it say more about themselves than they do about the lost cause.

It is time to stop honoring the lost cause, to stop honoring racism, bigotry, and slavery, even as we may still treasure the memory of our ancestors.

News story via Balloon Juice.

Addendum, the Next Morning:

The Regent and the UDC.

Addendum-De-Dum-Dum:

The Regent misunremembered that whole slavery thingee.

Democracy is what Republicans agree with. If they don’t agree with it, it is by definition not democracy.

Just ask them.

I saw what I think was a bald eagle today, deep in suburban North Wilmington, Delaware.

I was out jawboning with one of my neighbors (soon to be an ex-neighbor when I finish packing stuff up and throwing stuff out–no more back-and-forth) in the way of making a farewell, and this bird flew–well, really, it just sort of drifted–overhead at low altitude, maybe 50 feet.

I won’t miss Delaware all that much, though it is a very nice place to live and is actually quite well run. Delaware has a fortunately low wingnut quotient and is small enough that no one can get away with anything especially sleazy for very long. Heck, I used to run into my governor at PTA meetings because his son went to the same school as my son. He came without any kind of entourage or body guard. That’s small.

My kids are scattered and all my exes live in Texas (yes, they do).

My friends meet Tuesdays for Drinking Liberally in Philly, but they are all also on line, as is much of my life. I will miss Tuesdays more than they realize.

I will miss my neighbors. They have been good neighbors for a quarter century.

But returning to Virginia is returning to family roots that reach almost 400 years. It’s home in a way that many persons in our mobile society cannot understand. Not to mention my friend who I re-met after 40 years.

You can take the Virginian out of Virginia, but you can’t take Virginia out of a Virginian.

But if my friend were elsewhere, I’d be heading there.

Back to the boid:

I wish I’d had my camera or even my camera phone on me, but I didn’t. The bird looked just like this:

I said to the neighbor, “I think that’s an eagle.” She said, “Nooooo.” I said, “Look at the white head and tail.”

And we just watched it sail down the street.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

From one of my two or three regular readers in reaction to this (by the way, the emailer is hardly a leftie):

You know, call me slow on the uptake, but this just hit me.

Liberals will call for all members of BushCo to be tried as war criminals, as they should be. But I’ve yet to see anyone call for Bush to receive a bullet between the eyes.

It’s only the conservatives & rednecks who would see Obama be killed. Or see someone spit on. Or someone else called horrible names.

But they claim to represent the majority of Americans. I bet that if the majority of Americans were polled, they would see things differently.

Aside: I don’t think I’ll take that bet. I think the majority of Americans do not consider throwing bricks through office windows and threatening children optimal ways of petitioning one’s elected representatives incongruously assembled.

I have wondered about this myself: the calls for hatred and violence from the right seem frequent; those from the left, so rare that I cannot think of one off the top of my head.

I haven’t addressed it, because, back in my younger days when I was marching in protests, I heard a lot of pretty horrible things come from the mouths of anti-war activists. I wondered whether writing about it would be a pot-kettle-black kind of thing.

These days are different, of course. Back then, to get a platform, you had to get noticed by the press. Now anyone can set up a blog or a social networking account and have a uncensored megaphone. (Getting noticed may be something else altogether.)

As I think of it, though, I don’t recall anyone who was remotely a mainstream opponent of the Viet Namese War who would have even thought of calling for the assassination of a public figure; the protesters wanted less killing, not more. Even the looniest loons, the ones who thought bombing stuff was a means of protesting bombings, tried to bomb buildings when they were empty.

I don’t think anyone shouted “baby killer” (then an anti-war slur, rather than an anti-abortion one) or “You lie” from the floor of Congress back in those days.

The reservoir of hatred on the political right in this country disturbs one.

The Republican Party’s actions not only to appeal to but also to foment the hatred disgusts one.

Reports of the wreckage of the Republican Party, such as this one from Andrew Sullivan, are no doubt premature.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to take some pleasure in the discomfiture of the Party of Privilege. Dick Polman recalls some history while predicting:

. . .10 years from now, Americans may well be amazed that the new normal was resisted so vociferously by the Republican opposition. All the current talk about “socialism” and “the death of freedom” and the onset of “Armageddon” (House GOP leader John Boehner, yesterday: “We are 24 hours from Armageddon”) is likely to seem quaint – much like actor Ronald Reagan’s 1961 warning about the health-care-for-seniors concept that would soon be known as Medicare (“one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free”); and much like the GOP attacks on the 1935 Social Security proposal to fashion a safety net for old folks (New Jersey GOP Senator A. Harry Moore: “It would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords”).

In the comments to that post, Gee1971 reacts with bafflement (I don’t usually read comments because there’s not enough time, but Polman does attract some interesting ones):

Did Something happen last night? I turned off the TV and sat with my most special loved ones enjoying our last moments together as The End approached. I was stunned when I opened my eyes this morning and St. Peter was not standing before me.

Thomas Jefferson was a good man, even as he was a man of his times, as we are a men and women of our times.

He struggled with the idea of slavery, and he lost the struggle, not being able to deal with its ultimate evil.

But he was moral enough to struggle with it–something many of his (and our) contemporaries refused to do–and to reveal those struggles in writing, even as he was unable rise above his times.

And now Thomas Jefferson no longer exists in Texas.

Blue Commonweath sums it up.

As long as it wasn’t filled with mixed nuts.

Embarrassing because it mirrors the way we were.

I was listening to an episode of The Man Called X here (just to be clear, the show was before my time–not much before my time, but still before my time).

The episode is set in the Congo (called the “Belgian Congo” when I was young, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The “native miners” are not showing up for work (turns out that the “native miners” are being duped by duplicitous white men, because, being natives who are Not White, they are incapable of thinking for themselves) and Ken Thurston, “the Man Called X,” delivers this line:

“No matter how much you offered them in trinkets and money, they wouldn’t come back?”

Trinkets and money.

It is not a very flattering mirror, is it?