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“Rants March 24, 2013

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1. You might be surprised to hear that I not infrequently amaze my friends when I merge my physical and academic prowess. The other day I went into Wikipedia and printed off 9 pages on Nietzsche. I mentioned on my Facebook page that I read about Nietzsche while taking my walk today. My friend Lance couldn’t believe it. He wrote, “You can read while you walk?”

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2. You know that I’ve been struggling to learn languages for over 50 years. And suddenly, at the side of my web page, there are advertisements informing me that there is a new easy way to learn Spanish and a new easy way to learn Italian. It might surprise you to hear this, but the pertinent literature in the ad is not below a picture of August Friedrich Pott poring over crumbling manuscripts, William Jones or even Ernst Pulgram. Instead of these august scholars, above each ad there is a picture of an unnamed young woman who is experiencing a great deal of difficulty keeping ample portions of her torso crammed down inside her dress. And you might well ask, as I do every morning when they make their predicted return to my sidebar, how could any of this appeal to a young man hoping to increase his proficiency in tongues?

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3. I was on my way out the door when Marsha looked up from her ipad or ipod toy thing and said, "They are opening Acadia National Park a month later this year." That's too bad. So many people like to walk up there so they can be the first to slip on the ice and fall off.

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4. One night we watched a program called Undercover Boss. The man who owns a company goes into his store disguised as a worker and talks with people and finds out what his employees are doing. He wants to learn what he has to do to make his business better. In the end, the owner reveals himself to his employees and rewards them. To the employee who works a 65 hour week and then works a second job on top of that to get by, he gives $20,000 or so --- enough so he won’t have to work a second job for at least a year. To his employee who is deeply in debt for his parent’s hospital bills, he gives $20,000 --- enough for a four day hospital stay. To the employee who is in debt for his year or so of college he gives enough to pay off that debt. To the two employees with children he gives $10,000 to be put in a fund to be used years from now when the kids are old enough to go to college. When the three or four employees realize what is being done for them, they are reduced to tears of gratitude. But what happens when someone who has lived abroad in a wealthy country like Holland or Sweden watches this program? It is common knowledge that there are countries on this planet where people do not have to work 65 hours a week and then take a second job to get by. In those countries you would be hard pressed to find a college graduate who will spend most of his adult life paying off his college loans. In those countries people might be surprised to hear that in our great land of opportunity people have lost their homes because their jobs had been bought and shipped overseas to make rich men richer. And that these same hard-working homeless people would never live long enough to pay off their hospital bills. And should these people on the other side of the pond watch Undercover Boss and fully grasp what the members of one political party are doing to working people in America, they would look at their own healthcare and educational and employment systems and be reduced to tears of gratitude that they don’t have to live here.

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5. The newspaper headline said, “Double amputee accused in Alaska Walmart shooting” Would you be surprised if someone told you that Walmart is going to arm its employees? You can well imagine that the program would have the full support of those who would have a gun in every classroom to protect the students. Could you bring yourself to believe that starting on July 4, no one at Walmart would be permitted to sell anything made from Chinese plastic without first being able to assemble a glock 9 in a dark room while crouching beneath simulated machine gun fire? If nothing else, a program like that should increase sales: After all, wouldn't you feel safer if every employee in Walmart carried a gun? The more guns that we have in more hands, the safer everyone will be. Did you hear talk about taking away that Alaska shooter's disability pension? Some seem to think that anyone with no legs who can take care of himself in such a forceful manner really doesn't need help from the government.

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6. Here’s another shooting in the headlines. This one says, "A Marine shot and killed a male and female Marine before turning a gun on himself late Thursday at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va., officials said Friday." This would not have happened if we armed Marines.

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7. When I walked into the home to get my second breakfast, Marsha reached for the clicker to turn off the TV. She said, “I wasn’t really watching it. It's about a blind man and she’s an architect.” The blind man was built like Superman and she was a very nice looking architect and I couldn’t help but think what a waste it was to have such an exceptionally good looking girl in a movie with a man who couldn’t see her. Wouldn’t you think that in a world that was fair and honest the heroine for that particular movie could have been The Graduate’s mother-in-law, who must be ninety by now and could use the work? That architect girl was really nice. Couldn’t she have been used in a movie where the hero had a slouch to his shoulders and a nervous tick in his left eye --- in other words, a needy, deserving man with the ability to appreciate her looks? I know you’ll tell me if I’m wrong. I’m thf at g mail dot com.

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8. We have two big political parties in the U. S. today. One calls the other the "Tax and Spend" party, probably because they are always willing to tax and spend tax money on repairing bridges and roads and building schools. The other is called the "Borrow and Bomb" party, probably because they are always willing to borrow and run up the national debt to start and fight wars. At the end of the day, when all of the name-calling and excuses have been scraped away, the bare bones of the matter seems to be: Who Gets The Money? The very rich, or the working people?

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9. Have you noticed that there is nothing more useless than a well reasoned argument soaked in facts when you're dealing with someone who doesn't believe in facts but simply pounds his fist on the Word or repeats what he heard one of the boys say down at the loading dock? Was it some old German philosopher who said that if either facts or religion amounted to anything, there would only be one political party and only one religion in the world?

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10. You might have noticed that there is a lot of name calling on newspaper blogs that contain letters to the editor. Edit out the name calling and the spelling errors, and have you really got much of anything of substance left? We recognize the function of an on-line letters to the editor page. Folks who for years read the printed page and were limited to a silent, inward boil at its political slant, can now type some garble, spit, turn on their heel, and walk off. It’s sad, and I have to ask you what has happened to the language Maine people now use to express themselves? If you are a student of Maine newspaper blogs have you not concluded that ours is an era where a watered-down milksop of a language has replaced what we heard as children? Have you noticed that the insults on the blog page lack spark? Do you agree that calling someone a “fool” day after day lacks imagination? Does not “So don’t you, nya, nya, nya” evince a limp impotency? Our Maine language was not always so. There is nothing like a frosty morning in a Mars Hill potato field to enrich the vocabulary of a child with big ears who is eager to learn. Emery Dordy would drive up on Mr. Gallupe’s shiny new 1947 Farmall hauling the digging machine. I think it did two rows. Old Dave, who smoked a pipe, was the digger man. Old Dave would kick at the two inches of solid soil that stood between him and 300 barrels of Green Mountains and what Old Dave said was an education not to be found in the halls of higher learning. “You white-livered son of a horse” was how he started and his creativity increased geometrically with every pipefill until the frost weakened. And to this day I still don’t know if it was Old Dave’s language or the sun that had done the job. Anyway, if you’re like me, you probably bemoan the fact that the linguistic creativity and facility of an old-time digger man on a frosty morning seems to be a thing of the past and that we’re going to have to live with the insipid likes of “Nya, nya, nya. So don’t you.” But people have had their say, and that is good. If they weren't able to complain about the problems in their community on a newspaper’s blog page, some of them might actually get out of their chairs and do something about it.

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