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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for April 6, 2014

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1. Perhaps you recently read that the US continues to have the most billionaires. There are 492 billionaires in this country. Wow. Can you imagine it? Although they could buy every vote in the country, they are shrewd enough to only buy as many as they need.

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2. Do you get emails that say MUST READ? And the MUST READ is in capital letters? If anything turns me off it is a MUST READ. Being a very stubborn old Maine man, I don’t want to be told that I must do anything. Whenever I find an article that I think you might enjoy reading I might call it to your attention, but I feel I would be insulting you if I should preface it with a MUST READ. This came to mind one morning when I was looking at a friend’s Facebook page and found an article written by a man who said that in 2008 he was a Ron Paul delegate to some convention. The Ron Paul delegates were poised to take control of the convention and I will now read for you what this man wrote about the woman in charge who told them what to do. And I quote: “Dress normal,” she said. “Wear suits, and don’t bring signs or flags. Don’t talk about conspiracy theories. Just fit in.” Her advice was the kind you might hear given to an insane uncle at Thanksgiving." End of quote.

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3. City people don’t think like we do out here on the farm in Maine. I just heard an excellent radio piece on urban agriculture the Catalina Island Conservancy produced for city people. It tells how to compost doggie do. The title to the doggie do piece reminds me of a bit of wisdom Zach says he heard me pass along on my radio program many years ago. --- What’s the shortest sentence in the English language? “I am.” What’s the longest sentence in the English language? “I do.” If saying do once gets you into trouble, can it also suggest what you might be stepping in if you get married twice? Anyway, here on the coast of Maine, where we enjoy rural agriculture, any organic rhubarb farmer knows that when it comes to enriching the soil, even the most robust Saint Bernard would be no replacement for his young Angus bull. And after three years of faithful service, you wouldn't want to eat your dog.

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4. In the course of the day you and I catch ourselves doing so many ridiculous things, that there is no really no need to make up stories. But from time to time a silly apocryphal tale that I think you would enjoy comes my way and this is one of them. At 2 AM, when my old neighbor Gramp Wiley got up to go to the bathroom, he looked out the window and saw a man going into the barn. He called 911 and reported a suspicious prowler, but was told that at the last town meeting folks had voted to cut back on government services. The town now had only one officer, she was checking on a car some kid had rolled over, and there was presently no officer available. A minute later Gramp called 911 again and said to disregard his first call because he had shot the man in his barn. Within minutes a state police car roared up and the burglar was soon in handcuffs. The policeman said, “I thought you said you’d shot someone.” Gramp said, “I thought you said there was nobody available."

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5. Do you remember Go dog, go? Have you ever read Go Dog Go? I had already served in the military, flunked out of music school and was living in Europe when Go Dog Go was written. But I heard about Go Dog Go because my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, used to teach little kids how to read. So when someone in our home is doing something the others appreciate, we cry: "Go dog go." And now that I think of it, I’ve heard teen age boys call each other “dog” in those movies where they steal cars in front of a hidden camera. They probably got that from reading Go Dog Go. Does this not indicate that our present educational system can boast of at least a modicum of success?

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6. An age is reflected in its literature. Edward Arlington Robinson, who 100 years ago was probably related to almost everybody where I live, wrote about whiskey. Gustaf Fröding wrote about poverty. Poets have written about bubbling brooks and whippoorwills and malleable young men who march off to die. My question to you is, how can any contemporary bard aspire for immortality when our present culture can be summarized in an essay about Viagra and plastic toys from China?

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7. Here’s a rare email that came my way a while back. The heading was, “Courier delivered Viagra.” Yes, it said, courier delivered Viagra. Can you envision in your mind a situation so critical, so pressing, that one would pay extra to have Viagra delivered by courier? Look closely and you’ll see vague specters, huddled miserably on the front steps. Their faces brighten at the distant drumming of hoof beats. A dispatch rider, leather bag over his shoulder, gallops into the dooryard. Without dismounting, he throws himself forward in the saddle, extends a clipboard, and says, “Please sign here.”

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8. You might have read that in one year the 25 top hedge fund managers made over 25 billion. Although I don’t earn enough money to pay an income tax, this is my understanding of how the high rollers did it. When the removal of Roosevelt’s government regulations permitted financial institutions to engage in fiscally unsound practices, after it made the people engaging in those unsound practices rich, their card houses collapsed. The stock of those financial institutions plummeted. When President Bush gave those institutions your tax dollars to save them from themselves, the people who got rich by causing the collapse quickly bought hundreds of millions of dollars of the depressed stock in those institutions. Because of the bailout, the value of the stock went up 400 percent or more and the top 25 people to profit made over 25 billion dollars. If you were to Google, “Jay Gould, the skunk of Wall Street” and read up on this consummate financial technician, you would learn that not much has changed in 140 years. Is this not good? There is still a chance for highly motivated individuals to get ahead in America.

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9. The email said, “Defy your age. Miracle Anti-Aging Cures Now Available.” To begin with, the word cure obviously implies that aging is a disease. And if aging is a disease, babies are born sick. These ads to sell pills to cure aging are written by young people who don’t realize that most of us who are old don’t mind being old. Got that, kids? We don’t mind being old. We don’t mind looking old. The only things that annoy us are the aches and pains we have only because we’re old.

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10. It seems that no matter what your cause, nowadays you can support it with quotes by Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Nowadays nobody would dare say anything bad about either one of them. Wow. Abraham Lincoln said that. These guys I’m listening to on the radio must be on the right side if they’re quoting Abraham Lincoln. And they have an American flag on the wall behind them. But --- if folks down my way had owned radios 200 years ago, they would have smashed them with a hammer had a radio commentator said anything good about Thomas Jefferson. The Embargo Act of 1807 shut down the shipping in Wiscasset. And can you imagine what the Emancipation Proclamation did to Maine shipping in 1862? You’ve heard me say that they had a torchlight celebration parade when Lincoln was assassinated. They touched off tar barrels. People who like to quote Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln should remember that in their day they were two of the most hated men on the coast of Maine.

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11. People from away don’t understand how we do things here in Maine. I have 150 or so rhubarb plants. I used to give away a lot of rhubarb. But my friends didn’t want to take it when I said it was free, so I started snapping a rubber band around a handful of it and putting it on a chrome plated farm stand out by the road. You get it by the bunch, because if I ever put it out by the pound, even though it might be 8 ounces over, there would come a day when someone would howl that it was one ounce short. But a bunch is a bunch. One day, a man from away was down in the rhubarb patch watching me snap it off, cut off the huge leaf, and put the stalk on the five by five inch top of an ancient blue spring scale that I carry down to the rhubarb patch. Every once in a while I’d snatch it up, snap a rubber band around it and throw the bunch aside. The man watching said, “That scale don’t work.” Of course it works. When I can’t get no more on the top of the scale and it starts to fall off, you’ve got a bunch.

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12. A woman I met down in Portland airport told me that her father traveled a lot. The night before he’d go anywhere he’d put out a pile of the clothes he figured he’d need to take with him. In another pile he put all the money he figured he’d need to take. The next morning he’d take half the clothes in the pile and twice the amount of money in the other pile, and it always came out just right.

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13. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times, that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next.

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