+

Rants March 13, 2011

+

1. When I heard my wife say to a neighbor something about, “Arms and legs all worn out” it took me a few moments to realize she was talking about the couch.

+

2. Here’s a letter from a good friend who has been listening for 20 or 30 years. She went out to a restaurant and this is her report. She says, “Well, we ventured out to try gnaf gnaf gnaf and found it not worth the effort. Go for yourself though and make your own decisions. From the miserable chairs to the waitress with the many piercings and tattoos to the tough pot roast....I found it a big disappointment not the gourmet fine dining experience I hoped for. But we all have different definitions of gourmet and it was good to get out.” Then she later sent me a PS that said, “I was really being nice about the restaurant. I could have told them that the place was a greasy dump and I was surprised that we both were not sick afterward. When I leave food and do not bring a doggie bag home or an extra meal so I do not have to cook the next day you know the place is not a repeat.” Well. Thank you for this letter. And of course my first reaction was, you, my good friend, must be pretty provincial if you don’t want your tattooed, thronged waitress with nose, lip, belly button rings to prance out on platform heels with your roast beef. And after an experience like that doesn’t the fact that the chairs were miserable and the roast beef tough become a trivial sidelight? Yes, my friend, you are truly provincial if that bothers you. Because I believe it was Robert in Brunswick who told me that he was unable to enjoy his sautéed escargot in a ritzy Parisian restaurant because the woman at the next table had a dog on her lap who was sharing her plate of chocolate truffles. You understand that in a high class Parisian restaurant you would never ask for a doggie bag. Instead, you bring your dog who sits in your lap and eats off your plate. Robert says when he moved so he wouldn’t have to look at her he could see into the kitchen where a dog was helping the cook prepare meat loaf. (say what are you doing this afternoon in French and then I want to have supper with you in Italian. In Swedish – I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. ) J ar sa hugrig sa jag kunna ata en hest.

+

3. I’ve almost finished reading Idiot America, which was recommended to me by a person who has listened to The humble Farmer for many years. Thank you for contributing to my education. Oh, the entire title of that book is: Idiot America, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. A thesis in Idiot America is that whatever the group believes to be true is the truth, be it religion or nostrum science. And I must have thought about that for a week before I remembered where I’d read the same thing in an old book a long time ago. I remember in particular one of the characters in that old book comes across pathetically comical just because of his obvious ignorance and arrogance. He has a son who fibs and lies and takes up with a couple of con men and, thanks to his ability to lie, the kid is able to quickly adapt and succeed in a world of con artists and scams. As I recall, the book contains a burlesque of religion and how a gullible audience can be easily swindled because of its faith. These con men always did very well because to succeed all they needed was a community of gullible fools. One town was no different from any other. And the more I thought about it the easier it was to understand why Huckleberry Finn has been banned by so many libraries in America.

+

4. The next time you hear someone complain about big government clamping down on us little guys --- trying to make it hard for little people with two or ten or 50 employees to make a living --- you might want to ask them if their problem is with big government --- or big business that decides how big or how small or how effective our government will be. Right now we have a government and media that has been bought by big business and is therefore not responsive to the needs of the people. Because big business controls most of what we hear on the radio and see on TV, too many people vote the way big business tells them to vote time after time. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the goal of big business is to keep the wages of working people as low as possible. But until we have an educated populace, too many working people are going to vote against themselves in every election. Does this help explain why corporate America is doing everything in its power to keep people from getting an education? The bottom line is class warfare. No more. No Less. It’s the 400 people who own around 50 percent of the country’s wealth against the rest of us. Do you see it any other way?

+

5. We heard about Chernobyl and now we are hearing about the destruction of a nuke plant in Japan. You know, that tsunami certainly took out all of the solar collectors that were in the way, too, so why haven’t we heard a word about that? Are you a fan of nuke plants? No matter what you are told by the folks who build and own them for that short-range profit, you know that they are prohibitively expensive and, if anything can go wrong with them, it will. When you figure how much each nuclear power plant is going to cost both taxpayers and the planet earth over the next 100,000 years, you are not going to be able to find a more expensive or disastrous way to generate electricity. One hundred years from now, if anyone is still here, the survivors will probably consider the technological "advances" of the 20th century the most disastrous in the history of the planet. Plastics --- radiation --- the proliferation of infernal combustion engines. We are no more than children playing with dangerous toys that we do not fully understand. How long will it be before we all realize that solar collectors on our rooftops or in our backyards is one of life’s necessities? Until we find a way to make the sun shine at night or on rainy, windy days, whenever feasible our little solar collectors could be augmented with a small but adequate wind generator. Can you understand why so many people are so vehemently opposed to getting their hot water and electricity for free? Because there are certainly many positive aspects to science, there might soon come a day when each home could be painted --- roof and sides --- with a material that will, even on cloudy days, generate five times as much electricity as our primitive present day solar panels. Imagine spraying this stuff on the back of your sweater --- to generate enough energy to power your cell phone --- or all over your car, creating enough power to run it. Hopefully the grandchildren will see a day when panels made in China and nuclear disasters belong to the dark ages.

+

6. What’s your opinion on militia men? --- the antsy folk who keep a couple of guns and plenty of ammunition in their little houses out in the woods just in case --- in one last dying gasp of greed --- corporate America finally succeeds in bringing the entire country down around our ears in a money-grabbing scramble clouded in complete anarchy. All this talk of militia men has piqued my curiosity to the point where I’d like to know more about how they think. Perhaps you, too, would like to ask them some questions. In 2011 are we are talking about a combat situation where a few berserks perish at the pass clattering away at each other with swords? Are we talking about the smog-free countryside where our ancestors popped away at each other with muzzle loaders? Or do you see yourself sitting on cans of ammo in your self-contrived fortress, listening to Lady Gaga on a solar-powered radio while you wonder if they’ll come at you with flame throwers, dogs or a block buster at 3 AM? Please tell me --- even if you are safely ensconced behind your machine guns and bazookas and 4 cozy inches of steel plate, how long do you expect your powdered milk and cans of spam will sustain you? And exactly who is it that you think you are going to be pepper-spraying at your front door? Hungry little orphans? Your brother? The guys at work? The folks in the next town who control the votes in your school district? Is there any chance that your communist buddies in China, who not only supplied you with the materials for your house but almost everything in it, would harm their cash cow? You certainly can’t expect that the folks worth over 100 million who bought the US media and Congress are going to come looking for you --- they already have several houses and stashes all over the world. Poor people looking for food? Ok, agreed: But because Corporate America is doing everything in its power to create many more poor people in places like Maine and Wisconsin, isn’t there a chance that you might very soon find yourself outside looking in with the rest of us? And suppose you do manage to shoot us all down. What availeth it you to be the last man standing? Years ago America’s greatest newspaper columnist wrote a classic story that went something like this: after shooting all his neighbors, the last man standing walked all the way across the United States seeing nothing but broken windows, blowing dust and dead birds. But when he got to the other side he met a man who, alas, didn’t want anything to do with him. At last, in desperation, he asked the fellow if there wasn’t something they could at least talk about --- wasn’t there something that this man would like to know. And the fellow said, “Yeah. My radio went out when the bomb hit. Who won the Super Bowl?”

+

7. You might have heard that a Maine company recently got a contract to produce Gatling guns for the military. Right below the article I read was a letter that said, "This is simply further payment for Collins and Snowe continuing to support Obama's progressive agenda." That’s when I laughed out loud. Can you believe that nowadays in America producing Gatling guns is considered part of a progressive agenda?

+

8. There is nothing some people like to do more than send unsigned letters to newspaper blogs. Because they don’t have to sign their letters, they can be as saucy or as naughty as they want. Nobody knows who they are and the only thing the reader is absolutely sure of is their educational backgrounds. The other day one very weighty topic got 246 people worked up enough to send in their opinion on the matter. And I tried to imagine what kind of an article could elicit 400 or 500 irate letters from Maine’s most vocal illuminati. And listen. I could do it by submitting a bill to the legislature that would ban target practice while chugging beer on a snowmobile moving over thin ice.

+

9. A man who reportedly went into a truck stop the other night with a bandanna covering part of his face and a pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants was arrested on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon. Upon reading further we learn that the man had made his way to the truck stop after a friend he reportedly was riding with was arrested about an hour earlier by Maine State Police. The man allegedly told officers he was not aware that he was breaking any laws. If you’re a teacher this might bring to mind a certain fifth grade kid who never could find a handkerchief to wipe his nose. Don’t tell me that school teachers don’t earn their money.

+

10. Are you a fan of dog sledding? When was the last time you heard of a dog sled killing the driver by flipping over or hitting a tree or ramming another dog sled at 70 miles per hour in a zero visibility blizzard? Could any Real Maine Man get excited about a sport with such a low mortality rate?

+