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Rants October 3, 2010

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1. How long do you have to wait to get an appointment with your dentist? It might depend on how old you are. I broke a tooth last night and my dentist is going to look at it today. I mention this only so you can see that there are advantages to being 74 years old. No matter what business you are in, if you have a customer who is 74 years old, it’s a good idea to get his money as quickly as you can.

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2. You’ve heard of cranky old men. I’m getting to be one of them. Perhaps being cranky is something that just happens to some old people and there’s no help for me. It doesn’t happen only when I’m around my wife but I notice it in particular when I’m with my wife. Ninety-five percent of the time I already know what my wife is going to say before she says it --- so there’s really no reason for her to say anything and when she does say what I know she’s going to say it makes me cranky. For example, suppose I were to mow a little piece of the lawn. She’d look at it and say it was nice but --- it was too bad that I couldn’t have done more. And then, for good measure, she’d say that it would have looked better if I’d set the mower down to 2 ½ instead of 3 ½. If I were to work all day putting a new radiator on the kid’s camper she’d be sure to say that was nice, but --- why didn’t I also put the new 82 inch belt on the clothes drier? I can’t remember ever getting a compliment from my wife that didn’t end up with, “… but…” My wife is a good woman so to be fair to her, I have to confess that the only time she annoys me is when she says something that I know she’s going to say which is most of the time. It makes me cranky. Do you know what I’m talking about here?

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3. You might have heard me say that I’m getting cranky in my old age. Almost anything and everything is now capable of making me cranky. Someone calls. If I’m sitting right on top of the phone and can answer it on the first ring, I say, “Robert Skoglund. Sorry to keep you waiting.” If the voice on the other end says, “Hi Robert. How are you?” it makes me cranky. If there is something I can do for you, please tell me what it is but don’t call me on the telephone to ask me how I am because it makes me cranky. When I bump into acquaintances on the street and they say, “Hi Robert. How are you?” I say, “Sick, tired, old, weak, and ugly.” If you don’t think that’s a nice thing to do, remember that in answer to the question I could clutch at my chest and drop, coughing, to my knees.

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4. We’re talking today about things that make me ugly. I’m getting more and more cranky in my old age and it doesn’t take anything to light my fuse. As usual, when I eat alone, I’m in the habit of clicking through the channels and the other day there was a guy and a girl way out in the desert who were trying to escape from John Travolta, who can be very bad if you pay him enough. I tuned in just in time to see them hook their truck onto a 20-foot-high rattletrap of a steel fence and pull it down. I’m going to say that again because I want you to have the picture firmly in your mind. Dusty desert. Guy and Girl in front of a rickety 20-foot-high steel fence. Girl in truck. One end of cable on truck. Other end of cable on steel fence. Girl drives off in truck. And when the fence falls with a crash that could be heard in Denver and a cloud of dust that could be seen from outer space, the guy signals her by raising his arms and shouting, “Ok.” Wasn’t that a silly thing to do? Watching it made me cranky.

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5. You know that people can change overnight. A very good friend of mine had a heart attack that changed his sweet and gentle personality. He’d holler at people and you’d never know it was the same person. One of the sweetest, nicest women you’d ever want to know started to swear at her friends when she reached a certain age. If you’d just met these people, you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them, but if you’d known them for 60 years you’d realize that some chemical imbalance or minute blood clot is at work in their heads and they’re not to blame. I mention this because some kind of chemical malfunction is making me cranky and it scares me. You knew I was going to give you an example and here it is. We have solar hot water and electricity units at the farm and we were listed on the solar tour. You know how that works. A solar tour is like a garden tour where you open up your grounds so interested parties can come in and look things over. Nobody showed up to look at our solar panels all morning but I knew I could troll them in by sitting down to eat. And I might mention that sitting down to eat is something I learned when I got married. You know without being told that old bachelors stand beside the sink when they eat because it saves time. So I’d just got my plate in my hands when, sure enough, someone drove in and the driveway bell went, “ding, ding, ding.” Plate in hand, I ate my way to the back door where I greeted the first visitor, who said, “Oh, don’t let me interrupt your dinner.” Now, the reason I enjoy visitors is because no matter what I’m doing, they don’t interrupt me. If I’m picking up apples for the cows I give them a bucket and invite them to join me. If I’m digging rocks out of the ground, I hand them a crowbar. If I’m writing a story, I invite them to sit down and tell me something that I can copy and pass off to you as a product of my own creative genius. So when that man said, “Oh, don’t let me interrupt your dinner,” it made me cranky and I hollered something like this: “Do I look like the kind of person who needs to be told to eat his dinner? I guess I’m going to continue eating my dinner and I don’t need to be told to do so.” Of course I calmed down and gave the man the tour as I ate off the plate in my hand. But my wife Marsha, who was standing there, said if I heard a recording of what I said, I’d be ashamed of myself. The unfortunate thing about this chemical imbalance I have is that it seems to work on me like truth serum.

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6. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, wanted to become Marsha Skoglund when she married me. Her reasoning was thus: her maiden name was Marsha Paradis and when I met her she was the widow Marsha VanZandbergen. Not to change the subject, but can you remember when someone knocked on your back door and asked you to vote for them in one of our never-ending elections? --- They also asked you to put a sign with their name on it on your front lawn? The neophyte --- the person who has never run for office before --- does this without any consideration for high winds and rain. --- Which creates a problem for the modern female candidate who has chosen to append her husband’s name to her own because --- she could end up with a name like Marianne Schwartzenwald-wolkenkrabbers. Or Marsha VanZandbergen-Skoglund. How long do you think a three-foot cardboard lawn sign with Marsha VanZandbergen-Skoglund on it would stay on your front lawn in a 20 mile per hour south-west wind? If the staying power of a cardboard lawn sign amounts to anything, wouldn’t a woman with a name like Sue Ek stand a better chance of getting elected?

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7. I’m addicted to a morning news blog that comes in my email. It usually contains 6 headlines, two or three of which might warrant my attention and one that might be worthy of commentary --- something I can tell you about. Yesterday, for the first time, I read the Guidelines for posting and noticed that there is to be no name-calling or personal attacks. Of course reading that made me laugh. If one doesn't understand the issues and doesn't have a substantial point to make, name-calling is all one has left. Anyone with a comprehensive knowledge of a language counts on what is called internal evidence to gain insight into any writer’s background, objectivity and literary competence. So name-calling in a letter to the editor permits us to quickly recognize a writer who wants to be heard but has absolutely nothing to say. The editor of the blog I read obviously realizes that by culling out the letters that violate the guidelines there would be very little left --- a goodly percentage of honest but confused and frustrated Maine voters would have no voice. And a handful of people who read the blog on a daily basis and see the letters for what they are would be deprived of their morning smile.

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8. A college for teachers gives one a liberal arts education. A liberal arts college has its curriculum grounded in the liberal arts disciplines which include the humanities, social sciences and sciences. As a well-seasoned product of a liberal arts institution, I can see the wisdom in at least exposing students to a smattering of several disciplines. That said, an email from a radio friend called my attention to a book named The End of Faith by Sam Harris. The first thing one reads in the synopsis is that science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. That grabbed my attention because I’ve been thinking about it for some time and if we haven’t discussed it before, we have at least tippy-toed around the edges. It is, of course, our values --- our outlook on life --- that determine the kind of government under which we want to live. And it’s long been my contention that people who have studied history are more likely to have a different opinion on the purpose of government than people who have studied only science, business administration or nothing at all. Encouraging people to have large families while discouraging them from reading history is presently an accepted manner of building a strong, long-range political base in the United States. On the other hand, you might remember hearing me say that if every young person went to college and took enough courses in history, it would pretty well eliminate one of the political parties in the United States. And I just realized that were they to study only science or business administration or nothing it would do the same thing.

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9. Let’s talk about the power of trickle-up economics. You might have recently read a letter to the editor that said, "Anyone caught and convicted of selling drugs to anyone under the age of 21 should get 30 years in prison with NO parole, NO good time, NO early out of any sort. This is the only way to reduce the blight on this nation." Letters like this could easily have been written by a person who owns the laundry or food concessions in a prison. We read that America imprisons seven times as many people as it did in 1972, several times as many per capita as other Western nations, and, since Stalin died, many more people than any other nation in the world. Did you ever wonder if a lot of drug dealers might eagerly trade the risk of jail for a job that pays a living wage? If it costs $50,000 a year to keep someone in jail, not counting what it cost to build the prison, and minimum wage were $24 or so an hour, would it be cheaper for society to legislate a minimum wage of $24 an hour and thereby go a long way towards eliminating petty crime? If people on minimum wage were earning $900 or so a week, they’d be spending money at your place of business like crazy. There’d be a tremendous trickle-up effect, unless you were the chief of police your business would be booming, and you and everyone else would prosper. The way it works now, if you own a shirt factory, you can’t expect your employees to buy your shirts if you only pay them enough to buy food. When evaluated objectively, you can see that we have a unique and somewhat primitive economic system. When one considers the big money to be made by keeping people in jail for as long as possible, it’s a wonder that necessities like whiskey and cigarettes are still legal.

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10. One reads horror stories of how Monsanto is driving small family farms into the ground. The power of Monsanto money was demonstrated when a radio station that broadcasts commercials for Monsanto purchased a booth at the Maine Organic Farmer's Common Ground Fair. Can you believe that a company that would destroy organic farms can have a commanding presence at a fair that celebrates organic farming? It's nice to know that America's right wing media still freely airs commentary for both sides of all issues --- when they can make money by doing so. ---- "Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of experience" The humble Farmer

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