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March 1, 2009, Rants

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1. Have you noticed that all of a sudden there is a lot of opposition to the most recent bailout? Have you also noticed that it is all coming from the folks who already got theirs?

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2. You have heard me say many times that my hobby is learning how to read languages. K lastimme --- esta mala el tocadiscos. If you can think of any hobby that costs less to pursue, yet constantly invigorates whatever you are fortunate enough to have for a mind, please let me know what it is. Years of research has taught me that the ideal language learning vehicle is the Harlequin Romance. This is because you can get the same story in 5 or 6 languages, and the language is at the level of what you would find in an elementary school reading book. What you do is memorize the story by reading it constantly in Dutch or French for several years, and then it is easy to figure out in German or Italian. Do you remember my saying that if you write to 10 or 12 women who write Harlequin Romances and ask, many of them will send you one of their stories in 4 or 5 languages? Yes. They will. Sometimes they permit you to pay. Sometimes they simply give you these odd copies. Ann, who has sent me many books, has done so well writing that she is now working as a nurse in Africa. Besides reading, over the years I’ve also listened to half a dozen languages in my car or in the shop or on my bicycle. Because I have not yet moved up to the little ipod thing that fits in the pocket, I tie a nail apron around my neck and put my cd player in that. You know that those cd players look like flying saucers and are about the size of a whoopie pie so they just fit in one side of a nail apron. Anyway, if you know two or three languages or have lived in two or three countries, you know that there are cultural distinctions that are reflected in each language. This was forcefully brought to my attention again this morning while listening to a conversation in Italian. Listen and repeat. Ascolti an repeata: A man knocks on a hotel room door to keep a business appointment with a woman. Before getting down to business they have a drink and exchange a bit of information about their families and home towns. There is another knock at the door. And here is the interesting part. If you are studying one language, it translates into English as, “That must be my husband with the plans.” In another language the woman says, “Oh goodie, now my husband is here, too.” In yet another language, the woman simply says, “Oh my God --- it’s my husband.”

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3. Everyone knows that the United States has one of the widest rich-poor gaps of any high-income nation today. We also know why it is in the interest of some people, who would like to once again be able to hire an Irish maid for five dollars a week, to see that gap continue to grow. We also read that some prominent economists including Alan Greenspan have warned that the widening rich-poor gap in the U.S. population is a problem that could undermine and destabilize our economy and standard of living. They tell us flat out that "The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself.” So --- what can anyone do to save our democratic capitalism while bringing our living standards up to that of our friends and relatives in Europe? You recently saw an example of corporate socialism when Bush gave almost a trillion of your tax dollars to some bankers, who went belly up and suddenly decided that democratic capitalism wasn’t working. And when you see the biggest fat-cat bankers in the land turning socialist and begging for your tax dollars, will it be long before working people wonder why they can’t be socialists, too, and beg the government to help them out with health care? Will there come a day in America when a veteran with no legs will not need to be supported by his kindly neighbors and their fund-raising suppers?

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4. Here’s an interesting letter from a radio friend who says, “In the old soviet union the saying was "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." In public interest law the reality is they pretend to pay us but we work for sure…. Here are two cases you will appreciate. They came up in an elder abuse task force meeting the other day. After our last big storm two men solicited an elderly man to shovel snow off his roof. They worked for half an hour and demanded $400. The kicker is they didn't have their own shovels or ladder and they borrowed those items from their victim. Another case - a young woman snatches an elderly woman's purse from her shopping cart and then goes to the service desk to ask them to call a cab for her.” Thank you for that letter. It would appear that there will never be a recession in Maine as long as our young people are on the cutting edge of improvisation.

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5. One of my friends recently said that she didn’t like Obama because he was in favor of having us register our guns like we do our cars. The way she explained it, if you start registering cars, only criminals will have cars. Or something simple and easy to understand like that. But what does gun control really mean? It seems as I remember that in the movie about Good Will Hunting, something was said about thinking things through to the logical conclusion. If A, then B. And if B, then C. And if C, then D. So by doing A, you are also doing D, although D is so far removed from A that --- well, it’s like knocking over a row of dominos. You can visualize that and you know what I’m talking about. So what would be the result of gun control? It would mean a recording the numbers of every gun and the name of the person who owned that gun. In my neighborhood there are people who have guns who have waited for years for someone to break into their house so they could pull out the shooting iron and, blooey, blow the intruder away. They are the last houses in the neighborhood anyone would want to enter for any reason at 2 in the morning. If there were a list somewhere of everyone who had a gun, it would certainly be stolen by crooks who’d then know which houses you could enter at night without risking ventilation. Have you ever wondered why one political party fights so hard against gun control?

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6. Here’s a letter from a radio friend that says: “Hi Humble I had never heard of Django Reinhardt before listening to him on your program. I just love his guitar and band so thanks for exposing me to them. I did a search online and found some videos of them on YouTube. I like that Bennie Moten piece, too. Your commentary is entertaining, often informative, has a bit of bite, and tends to make one think. I agree that keeping chickens is smart; maybe some sort of chicken investment program should be included as part of the stimulus package. For years, I have wanted my own hens, but I lived where restrictions prevented livestock ownership. It never occurred to me that city living was the place to be - for chicken raising that is. I did a google search on cats eating dead people. I found one story from October 2008 about a dead woman in Romania being eaten by her 20 cats. I also found an article about soldiers in Iraq seeing cats and dogs eating dead people which caused them to have less than pleasant reactions to the family pets when they returned home. I guess that starving carnivores will eat what they have to even if it means chewing on granny or gramps. Keep up the good work.” Thank you for your letter. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com and I’d like to hear from you too. Hopefully with a more pleasant subject.

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7. Thanks to you, I stumbled on a young man out there on youtube named Josh Klein who pointed out that we could train crows to pick up highway litter and put it in a barrel. If I had time I’d do it. I can see how it would backfire, because if some of the kids who live down the road knew what was happening, they’d throw extra trash on my lawn just to see the crows working overtime. By the way, if you don’t really know me and think I’m joking about getting crows to pick up trash by the road and put it in a trash barrel, how much money would you want to bet that I can’t do it? What a great idea --- train crows to pick up roadside trash and put it in a trash barrel. Of course, although it is practical and would be very easy to do, it will never happen. It wouldn’t make somebody a lot of money.

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8. I was staggered when I saw on the Today show the great deals you could get on houses all across America. They picked 4 or 5 different locations, put up pictures of these houses, and then told us, “This is the great house you can get for only a quarter of a million dollars.” A quarter of a million dollars for a little house with no land? And that is a great deal? $250,000 is 50 times as much as I paid for a house on one acre of land around 40 years ago. I bought a house with one year’s salary. My question to you is, “Are working people earning 50 times as much as they were 40 years ago, or are they working 15 times as long for the same buying power?” $250,000 is more than 25 times as much as I paid for another house with a big barn and over 50 acres of land. At the time I was teaching and was being paid around $5,000 a year. Twenty five times $5,000 is $125,000. Are Maine school teachers being paid $125,000 to $250,000 a year? If they are, they are getting the same salaries that teachers were getting in 1970. Minimum wage in Maine is around $14,000 a year. Six percent interest on your $250,000 house mortgage is $15,000 a year. So anyone on minimum wage couldn’t even pay the interest on that “great deal” quarter of a million dollar house. “Ha, ha,” you say. “I’m not a lowly teacher and I’m not working for minimum wage.” But --- the price of houses is only one index that exemplifies the erosion of salaries in America in just half of my lifetime: If you are presently earning $250,000 a year, you have held your own since 1970. If you earn $125,000 in a year, you worked twice as many hours for that buying power as someone did 40 years ago. If you earn $50,000 a year, you now have to work around 5 times as long to buy a house as you would have 40 years ago. If you are young you might find this hard to believe, but the day President Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, it was taken for granted that any American who had any kind of job could buy a home. That’s why older working people call the era before Reagan and Bush, “The Good Old Days.”

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9. Radio friend Mark called our attention to chickens. One reads that Portland has lifted its ban on raising chickens in the city, but --- we read that some people in Camden face fines of $100 to $2500 a day if they don’t get rid of a dozen hens. I don’t have a dozen chickens, but when I was a kid, we did. And now that I think of it, if I had chickens, they, and not crows and seagulls, would eat the food scraps we throw out back. I don’t know if I’d want to raise chickens in an apartment in the city, but wouldn’t you consider anyone who keeps a dozen chickens out back a valuable, thrifty neighbor who is trying to build a stronger America? For quite a few years I have wondered how we would ever survive if they suddenly shut down all the stores. --- Or, if because Bush and his republican friends relaxed the inspection regulations on veggies, as they did on meat and peanut butter, nothing bought in a store would be fit to eat. When I was a kid, there was a bin of potatoes, bottles of pickles, berries, string beans and other vegetables in the cellar. Our chickens provided us with eggs. There must be over 100 empty quart canning jars down in my cellar now. But, although we have a nice garden in the summer, I wasn’t paying attention to my parents and grandparents, so I don’t know how to put up enough food to survive a Maine winter. --- But I’ll bet I could learn by asking any American clever enough to keep chickens in the back yard.

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10. If every American child spent 4 years at a state college or university, or lived abroad for two years in any capacity but a proselytizer, within a generation one of the political parties in the United States would wither and die. And when I say attend a university, I’m talking about going there to study history or sociology or anthropology. Although you could study math and science for 8 years and make a lot more money when you graduated with your PhD, math or science wouldn’t necessarily give you much of a political education. You might Google “the dumbing down of America” and see what turns up. I did and found one interesting essay in which the writer doesn't use the f word although that is what he is talking about. Eisenhower didn't use the f word, either. You will recall that Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex.

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11. Here’s something you might know something about if several members of your family use the same computer. A radio friend writes: “Our son comes into the office and uses the computers pretty much every day, often snacking as he does. I'm thinking of publishing a booklet entitled something like "Meals from the Keyboard", as I have to "defood" the keyboards the following morning on a regular basis!” There’s food for thought.

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12. When I went into the doctor’s office, the doctor asked me if I had noticed the man who just left. I allowed as how I had seen a man leave but I hadn’t paid too much attention. The doctor said, “That man is 107 years old, and he plays golf every day.” Wow. Isn’t it sad to see a man who is still strong and active at 107 who’s lost his mind?

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13. When my friend Winky was very young, he went to the senior class prom with a girl who was wearing a low, low-cut off the shoulder dress. And after a while curiosity got the best of him and Winky said, “What is keeping that dress on you?” She said, “Only the onions on your breath.” (Chauncey Depew)

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