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Rants June 27, 2010

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1. I tuned in late this morning but I think the fellow I saw on TV was an evangelist, and I suspect that he had been asked why his business was booming, because I did hear him say that nowadays more and more people were searching for purpose and meaning in their lives. This is easy to believe because most of the people I know who are looking for purpose and meaning in their lives had to hit rock bottom to get there. They are people who lost everything they had by gambling. They are people who drank until their spouses and their children fled. They are people who hunkered down under enemy fire and wondered if they would survive the day. They are people who lost a needed loved one at a very critical point in their young lives and were eagerly recruited when they were the most vulnerable. They are people who, through no fault of their own, inherited genes that enable them to hear words and see things that are not there. They are people who were cheated out of their life’s work when their retirement funds were legislated away or simply stolen. When you see your friends and relatives and neighbors who are searching for purpose and meaning in their lives don’t you have to think to yourself, “There, but for the grace of Mother Nature, go I?”

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2. A recent letter to the editor said that we should legalize pot. We can't legalize pot. Too many people make a lot of money selling pot. One reads that prudent dealers bury the first million in the ground to provide a measure of comfort when they are released in a few years. Too many people make even more money building and maintaining prisons filled with these people who got caught selling pot. Think of the dozens and perhaps hundreds of companies that would lobby hard against any bill that would eliminate their cash cow prisons by legalizing pot. They are the folks who cry out with indignant outrage should anyone who sold 3 ounces of pot get out early for good behavior. Some quiet evening when you want to read something interesting, Google around until you find a site that tells you how many companies take your tax dollars for providing services for state, federal, or the even the more expensive privatized prisons. Even more interesting are the economics behind the early demonization of pot. Googling "Hearst simply lumped hemp and marijuana together" would turn up a site to get you off to a good start.

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3. People who blame the govmnt for this and that should remember that govmnt does not now and never did pass any legislation without heavy lobbying by the captains of industry. Remember the millions that were recently spent by pharmaceutical and insurance companies to defeat a bill that would have given you and me health care commensurate with that found in most industrialized countries in the world? To help understand the problem of legalizing pot, put yourself in the shoes of a prison guard with an annual package of $65,000. If you don't get hit on the back of the head with a pipe, you can look forward to a comfortable retirement --- unless pot were legalized and your facility emptied out and shut down. Think of the long list of professions that would have to cut back on services if pot were legalized. Judges, lawyers, countless police agencies, social workers, psychologists, guards, anyone who provides food or other services to prisons. Which might remind you that Maine prisoners used to help raise their own food. No one makes any money when that happens, so that program is long gone. So --- how in the world could we legalize pot when so many people take so many of your tax dollars simply because pot is illegal?

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4. I am addicted to the Bangor Daily News blog that arrives every morning by email. Although the newspaper articles themselves are no more than --- well, newspaper articles, the thinking revealed in the letters they elicit is fascinating. We do not subscribe to newspapers or news magazines, so I must admit it has been a long time since I’ve read letters in The Christian Science Monitor or USA Today or The Bangor Daily News or the Portland Press Herald. But the letters appended to the BDN blog differ in content and style from any letters I have ever seen in print. Most of the writers blame the world’s ills on an ethereal entity known as thuh guvmnt. They are seemingly unaware of the tremendous economic pressures from vested interests that direct votes on even the most mundane what’s-in-it-for-me piece of legislation. Many many of them are xenophobic, nationalistic and distrustful of anyone capable of multisyllabic words. Do these people frighten you? They should, because many of them vote.

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5. Thanks to BP’s Swedish chairman Svanberg, "den lilla människan" joins ombudsman and berserk in the American English lexicon. In Swedish "den lilla människan" translates to "the small human” or the little guy. We read that Svanberg comes from Porjus, a town of 300 that makes Greenville look like downtown Hong Kong, and although he’s a brilliant and very wealthy man, his degrees are from Lidköping and Uppsala --- not the best places to absorb the infinite nuances of American English. People who speak better Swedish than I do will tell you that “den lilla människan” can refer to a person or group of people who are not in control of their own destiny and in need of help. --- And anyone without a political axe to grind knew very well that is what Svanberg was saying. You certainly remember when Khrushchev raised a fuss with his famous, “We will bury you.” Of course it had nothing to do with guns or bombs. He meant that a communist country would bury a capitalist country economically as China is doing to the United States today. Anyway, weren’t you surprised to see so many people, who ostensibly belong to the party of so-called intellectuals, jumping on a man for --- well, for doing nothing that you and I haven’t done too many times ourselves? BP has made its own comprehensive case against off-shore drilling. So let’s leave name calling and the picayune distorting of semantics with the folks who really don’t have anything of substance to say.

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6. One of my many friends said that although he enjoyed what I had written for the newspaper, he could think of a couple of things that would have made it better. If you have written for newspapers, you know exactly what he is talking about. I don’t know about you, but the only time I can write a newspaper column is at 6 or 7 in the morning. Of course it usually takes me three or four hours to write 600 words, so I don’t even get to take a shower until around 10. Because I’ve written for newspapers off and on for almost 40 years, I have learned to get my offerings out of the house and into the hands of an editor as soon as possible. And that is why my friend said that if I had talked with him he could have given me some pointers to make it better. You see, if I don’t send the article or letter off the minute I finish writing it, when I read it over the next day I find two or three sentences in there that really don’t add anything to the article and might actually detract from it, so I take them out. If I don’t send it out then out the second day, on the third day I see two or three more unnecessary sentences in there and I take them out. Well, you can see what is happening here which is why you are likely to see glaring mistakes in anything of mine in print. If I keep it around long enough to edit out all the fallacious reasoning and redundancies, there is nothing left.

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7. When I was a kid, I could have easily learned Finnish or Swedish because many of my neighbors were either Swedes or Finns. You have heard me say that when I was 6 or 7 years old, the older boys taught those of us who were little how to swear and say the most terrible things in Finnish. The other day I wrote to the Finnish Embassy, told them about this, and asked if there were any websites where I could learn some more Finnish words. Here’s the reply I got. “Glad to hear about your interest in Finnish language. “I'm afraid that with the few words you learned from your friends you could easily understand half of the conversations teenagers have in Helsinki streetcars today.” It would appear that over the past 60 years, nothing has changed.

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8. A couple of journalists from Sweden had supper with us. One of them named Agneta said that she was once asked if she could spare an hour from time to time to visit people in prison. Agneta writes books and her husband is a famous movie producer named Jan Troell, so, being interested in doing new and different things, she went to the prison and had a nice visit with a man who killed three people. But --- then she went to prison to visit a man who was in there for fraud. He took out his guitar and played folk music and she never went back.

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9. The more I think about it, the more I believe that if I had my life to live over, as soon as I got out of high school I’d live abroad for six or eight years. You’ve heard me say that a kid could work for room and board in France for 6 months while learning French and the art of repairing washing machines. At the same time he could develop contacts for his move to other countries. At the end of 6 months, he’d go to Germany or Spain and work as a go fer in a garage for six months. Then on to Italy to work for an electrician for six months. Computers in Sweden, plumbing in Portugal, woodworking in Finland, agriculture in Russia, perhaps even a bulldozer mechanic in Israel. Imagine what an education you’d have before you were 30. You’d have a conversational ability in a dozen languages and you’d be able to fix most anything. For the rest of your life you’d be able to amaze a Frenchman with your facility with his language --- as long as you were clever enough to direct the topic to washing machines. I got to thinking about this again one morning while watching half a dozen good neighbors helping a man repair his home. It wouldn’t have taken you more than a minute to realize that you would have asked three of the “pound it with the sharp edge of a two by four and it will fit” fellows to go home. And that’s what got me thinking about this. Even earning high honors in your PhD exam in chemical engineering won’t help you know how much torque you can apply to a nut before you strip the threads.

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10. Is it possible to live with a man for 15 years without knowing what he does for work? Could Arnold go off to Switzerland three of four times a month to foil bad guys --- crunch them up with his bare hands --- and still have his wife think that he was a vacuum cleaner salesman? From time to time we see documentaries on seedy and seemingly innocuous urbanites who have sold our secrets to the Evil Empire. Did their next door neighbors suspect anything? Then there are those twisted geniuses in cabins high in the hills. How long can they exist on fiddleheads and coyote livers without having the postmaster wonder what it is they are sending out in the mail? Perhaps it is possible to keep these things secret. On the other hand, when one woman in a Washington DC suburb was asked by her new neighbor what her husband did for work, she lowered her voice, glanced quickly over her shoulder and then whispered: “I can’t tell you.” Can you think of a more eloquent way to blab the news?

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11. Jeremy Tuttle used to teach doctors about all the little parts of the brain. Now he only directs research projects that might come up with cures for diseases. So when he was helping me put up my cow fence, you can understand it didn’t take me long to see that if he applied himself, in a real short while he would really be good at it. I had to tell him. I said, “Jeremy. You’re pretty good at this. I think I could train you how to put up cow fence.” He said he didn’t think I could afford him. Doesn’t that give you the impression that Dr. Tuttle is abysmally ignorant about minimum wage in Maine?”

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12. You might be amazed at how many people have written to me asking me for something without telling me where I should send what they asked me for. There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than answering your questions or sending you some scrap or tidbit that you have asked about. In that way I feel I am in some small way repaying you for your kindness and patience in listening to this program for 32 years. I do want to send you what you want. Now comes the problem --- rooting out your mailing address. Sometimes, if you are a master boat builder or own a business, I can google your email address and find your address on line. But I suspect that many of my radio friends are in Federal witness protection programs because I can’t find them on line or in phone books. Please, learn how to have your snail mail address placed on the bottom of every email as an attachment. It pays to let your friends know where you are. I recently served up a chicken pot pie that was nothing but a little gravy and blackened crust. There was nothing in it. No chicken. Nothing. I wrote to the company --- got their address off the wrapper -- and said that there was no chicken in that pie. Nothing. And only because I had my mailing address on my letter, they sent me a check for $9.99.

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