Dystopian Paradox

It’s been almost 15 years since I got a new pair of glasses. Monofilament nylon that runs in a grove on the bottom of lightweight plastic lenses secures them in the wire frame. Two times I’ve had to have the monofilament replaced.

The day before the election, the left lens fell out because the monofilament broke. I’m legally blind without my glasses. I figured there would be no one in Roswell who could provide a fix.

Wrong. Second phone call is to a locally owned eyeglasses place who knew what I was talking about and said they could fix them while I wait.

Ten minutes later I’m there. It’s in a strip mall. I walked in and they have frames on display and I could her a lens being ground by a machine. This place was its own lab.

A lady in her thirties said she would be with me in a minute. Off to the right was a baby in a carseat who was obviously the child of lady and her mate, who was behind the counter working on something.

I was embarrassed to show her my glasses they were in such sorry shape. I built a fiberglass airplane in those glasses and there is a glob of epoxy on one of the lenses. The wire frame had broken in one place and were so wobbly even with the monofilament in good shape, I had superglued the lenses in the wire frames to keep the thing together. Over the years, the nose piece disappeared and the plastic ear pieces wore through to the bare wire.

The lady didn’t look down her nose at me nor did she make any condescending comment. Rather she asked if I wanted to her to try to find another frame that the lenses might fit into. I said no, that I just needed to get these patched up so I can get back to Fort Worth.

After showing them to her husband, she came back out and asked if she should look for a new nose piece and ear pieces. I said yes.

Ten minutes later her husband brings the glasses to me, and like his wife, without any sort of patronizing behavior. He said it would be $7.00. I gave him a $10 and told him to keep it. He said, “Are you sure.” I said absolutely.

That sort of experience would have been great anywhere, but to have it happen while eight hours away from home and without a backup pair of glasses made it special. People like that will be the salvation of our country and the world.

Some feel that the Bush administration is again using fear tactics a la Iraq war to force the Paulson bailout plan on U.S. taxpayers. Paulson wants the fed to get paid back when the bad assets are sold. Some economists are calling for implementation of the Swedish plan.

In the early ’90s, Sweden’s financial system had a meltdown and its government acquired an equity interest in the banks as a part of the bailout. If Congress doesn’t adopt the Swedish plan, and if our financial system survives, those who are guilty of bringing about this mess including private investors will be rewarded for it, all at the taxpayers’ risk and expense.

Those individuals complicit in setting up this house of cards should be banned from the financial industry, except in low level positions. They could become motor bank clerks. Since Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs two years ago when he transferred into the Bush administration, his part in the fiasco should be carefully scrutinized to determine if he has the cash-register honesty of a typical bank clerk. If not, then he can work as a clerk in a 7-Eleven.

Cheney-like rules should be put in place as it pertains to executives of the major players in prosecuting those responsible for this fraud. They should all be rounded-up and sent to Guantanamo Bay where they will be initiated into their new-found brother and sisterhood with a good waterboarding. Congress should make the Patriot Act applicable to the investigation.

Before any financial benefit accrues to the private sector, taxpayers should first recoup 100 percent plus interest and expenses for all fed funds going into all bailouts from Bear Stearns forward, and additionally be rewarded with a substantial amount of the appreciation in the equity of the companies as compensation for bearing all the risk in the bailouts.

Lot’s of news and all of it’s related.

GM officially unveiled the Chevy Volt today, set to go on sale in 2010 for $40,000, about twice the price of other models of the same size. But this is a plug-in electric, designed to go 40 miles between charges. That would get most people to work and back without using any gas.

The big question is whether GM will be around in 2010. Because of the financial sector implosion, GM’s financial woes haven’t make headline news lately. GM has been burning cash like crazy and it’s going to be looking for liquidity sources before long.

Which brings up AIG. It’s got to get a lot of cash quickly or it may be heading into bankruptcy as early as tomorrow. GM may be hoping that the fed will participate in bailing AIG out as a sign that the fed will be available when GM’s number comes up.

As to the nominees take on the Wall Street sinkhole, Obama says the problem is faulty regulation of Wall Street while McCain blames it on greed. I guess the number of houses McCain and Cindy own doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not one or both of them are greedy. Maybe the only affect their wealth has on them is their seeming insensitivity to the plight of Americans who are out of work, or who do have work but can’t afford necessary healthcare.

Back to the Volt. GM isn’t expecting to make a profit on the vehicle initially. Moreover, Toyota and Honda are working on plugin electrics so the market is going to be competitive. The question is whether GM has a strategy with respect to the Volt any more rational than what has been it has always been, which is show the stockholders a profit this quarter and to heck with the future.

The strategy is different with the Volt in that it seem to include forgoing profits immediately in favor of becoming more competitive in the future. Some say it’s a big gamble for GM. It can’t be much of a gamble since GM is likely headed for the recycle bin irrespective of whether the Volt or its offspring ever shows a profit. Sources of liquidity are drying up worldwide. How much longer will China hold up the fed? Or does it have a choice?

Over the last week, I’ve been feeling an absence of energy in the Obama campaign, hearing all this stuff about the Republican VP candidate, McCain attacks that seem to go unanswered, and Obama slipping in the polls. I expressed my concerns to a close friend yesterday.

And then I watched Barrack on Letterman last night. He was as cool as ever, quick witted and outgoing. If he’s worried, he’s not showing it. I was feeling better.

This morning I scan Gail Collins’ column noting that a lot of Obama supporters are freaking out and that they are overreacting. Later, I get an email transmitting an msmbc pundit’s list of all the things that Obama has done wrong: not taking public money; declining McCain’s offer to hold town hall debates; ignoring the Clinton’s; Obama’s 22 state strategy; no sweeping yet concrete policy idea; professor speak; failing to attack McCain early.

On balance, I’m going with hope and two assumptions. The first assumption is that the Obama people anticipated a Rovian smear campaign.

The second is that Obama is a strategic thinker. Three facts support the second assumption.

The first is that Obama implemented the strategy of community organizing that successfully improved a community in South Chicago. Get the community involved and work from a baseline of hope rather than acceptance of hopelesness.

The second has to do with the blitz strategy of winning the first four primaries. Clinton had the same strategy and they split the first four primaries.

But Clinton had no backup plan and her campaign fell victim to infighting and Hillary’s failure to act quickly and decisively. Obama, on the other hand, had a plan B and it worked.

Third but the most important strategy is non-violence, which is intrinsic in Barack’s campaign rhetoric and persona. I came to know only recently that non-violence is a political strategy when I heard a lady interviewed on NPR who was a part of the civil rights movement in the sixties along-side Martin Luther King.

It’s real simple. When you fight people, they resist and dig-in.

But when you turn the other cheek, it takes the political power out of violence in a relatively free society. People die, but not nearly as many as in an armed revolution.

So McCain keeps up the attack. And he gets a good bounce out of Palin. But McCain’s attacking a strategy that will absorb the negative energy of hate and fear and take the power out of it.

And so I go with the hope that the non-violent strategy of Obama’s campaign will prevail.

One of McCain’s criticisms of Obama is that Obama is not qualified to be commander in chief. The problem with this argument is that the logic is faulty. It’s based on several underlying assumptions that are not necessarily true. One is that McCain’s military experience makes him more qualified to be commander in chief. Another is that the president as such holds a military position. If that’s true, he or she should be decked out in military attire at least some of the time.

I accidentally bought a book by Andrew Bacevich copyrighted in 2005 entitled The New American Militarism. Bacevich is a Vietnam war veteran and a professor of international relations at Boston College. I had intended to purchase his new offering Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, but I got Militarism by mistake at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago. So I’ve been reading it. My comments here include views Bacevich expresses in Militarism.

At the end of the cold war, the U.S. remained the sole super power militarily. Post cold war, the U.S. has displayed that power both as show and in two wars to demonstrate what we can do in a conventional war. Our military power became the single facet of our foreign policy under the Bush administration. Diplomacy was out. You’re either for us or against us and we don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. It would seem we got to where Hitler wanted to be.

The problem with this attitude is that it didn’t and still doesn’t reflect reality. We were not the world hegemon in 2003 when we invaded Iraq nor are we now. But the problem is that militarism has become a part of our mindset. It’s a an accepted, and embraced, component of our mainstream culture. The citizenry for the most part, and irrespective of whether so called liberal or so called conservative, has bought into the idea that we have been imbued with the divine right and duty to make history.

Moreover, the president has been catapulted from the position of commander in chief as a citizen to commander in chief as the top military officer. Bacevich states that the “framers of our Constitution designated the president as commander-in-chief as a means of asserting unambiguous civilian control.” He notes presidents George Washington, Grant and Eisenhower went out of their way to avoid their prior military identity while in office.

So what does Bush do, one who was in the reserves and maybe awol from that light duty? He dons a Navy flight suit and hits the deck of an aircraft deck as commander in chief of the military in a grand photo op in which he states “Mission accomplished,” referring to the Iraq war.

In a recent Bill Moyer’s interview, Bacevich said that a new president will change nothing regarding how we deceive ourselves into believing that we are destined to be the world’s police (one of our many misconceptions). Bacevich’s statement is supported both by Obama’s and McCain’s campaign rhetoric. Obama said in his acceptance speech that he would rebuild our military. McCain’s campaign continues to tout his Vietnam experience as a credential for qualification as commander-in-chief. Both candidates know that campaigning on a promise to reduce our military is political suicide.

What’s suicide is spending money you don’t have, both personally, at the business level, and at the governmental level. And that’s what we’ve been doing at all three levels for the last eight years. GM for example owes tons of money because its management thinks that it must show its shareholders profits each quarter; they did that with SUVs and trucks and now where are they. We did it personally with homes and cars we can’t afford and credit card debt. The fed creates money to keep this insane economic model in place as long as possible so that they keep their jobs and get reelected. We have a huge military with 100 or more bases around the world allegedly to keep oil coming in to keep the cars going we can’t afford financially or environmentally.

There are similarities of the to the run up to St. Helens explosion in 1980, to warning signs of an impending financial disaster now.

With Mt. St. Helens and other explosive volcanic eruptions (Krakatoa for example), the warning signs were tremblers. Maybe not so big on the Richter scale, but a warning that something’s going on underneath a volcano.

With our economy, and our standing in the world as alleged hegemon, we have warning signs: extremely volatile markets that indicate nobody knows where things are going to be in the relative short term; a challenge to our military might by insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan along with Russia’s new assertiveness militarily.

David killed a giant with a rock. Achilles was done in by an arrow to his eponymous heal. Patrol boats sank heavy cruisers in WW II. A few missiles with conventional warheads can take out our aircraft carriers. A well placed bomb in a weak spot killed the Deathstar in Star Wars. The bigger and more complex our military hardware and organization designed to fight conventional wars, the more vulnerable they become to unconventional, cheaper, less ostentatious warfare.

A lot of bullies find out they’re not so tough just because they’re bigger. Kick ‘em in the crotch and suddenly they’re shorter than their intended victim. It’s fantasy to think that a huge military is going to keep us out of trouble. In reality, it’s a big part of our problem. Our main challenge doesn’t lie outside our borders. Our challenge is to come to grips with reality, to recognize that the problem is systemic- a disease within several aspects of our mainstream culture, and to take steps to treat not the symptoms but the disease itself.

Neither Obama nor McCain can bust our bubble during the campaign, the bubble that we are world hegemon, the bubble that was Dorothy’s vision while out of touch in lala land and in which the Good Witch of the North arrived. An apparition. As between Obama and McCain, the question is which one is more in touch reality and once in office will do something positive to get the U.S. headed in a sustainable direction.

For me the answer unequivocally is Barack. He’s demonstrated his executive skills in community organizing, and in his presidential campaign fueled on the audacity of hope.

Moreover, there’s no way I can buy into McCain’s Rovian guided, fear based campaign rhetoric. He plays on our citizens fears and prejudices. I can get a good feeling talking trash about somebody, especially a public figure that isn’t going to sue me. But I know it’s cheap to do so.

And I have hope that the U.S. citizenry will see above the baseness of McCain’s smear campaign, and elect Barack Obama, someone with proven organizational and executive talent.

Saturday morning, August 8

The wedding was my excuse for making this trip, but what I was really looking forward to is being with my sister Grace and her kids and their spouses. And then the wedding began at 10 a.m. and I realized that the wedding itself was why I came.

Erin in her simple white dress, pink shawl, with a bouquet of daises she holds at her waiste and a daisy in her hair, decending the walk to the beach with her bridesmaid, the sister-in-law to be in a simple brown dress, the wedding party on the beach standing in loose dry sand, waiting in a circle open to the east from where comes the sun, the force of life, the circle open to receive the bride, wherein waited her groom Matt and his father the best man, and the judge who would wed them, all in bare feet.

And Erin and her bridesmaid entered the circle from the east, and joined her groom Matt before the judge, the circle closing around them. And all there were barefoot, except me, and I removed my sandals and we were all barefooted and grounded in the sand of our Earth.

I was experiencing a wedding of a thousand years ago in the British Isles or Polynesia, outdoors as guests of nature, and all of us children of the Earth and grandchildren of all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Beautiful words the judge spoke, words chosen some by the bride and groom and some by the judge. And tears in the eyes of all. By the sea from which came life. All reaffirming life and our gratitude for the gift of it, and the opposites coming together as a symbol of hope for the renewal of life, a remembrance of those who have left us but are still with us, and those who will come from the joining of opposites.

The bride and groom kissed, and then it was over.

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There was a steady south breeze on the beach, fifty-five degrees on this cloudy wedding day morning, mist in the air, yet all of us barefoot. Someone found a spot in the sand maybe five feet in diameter that was warm, and some of us warmed our feet in it, wondering what caused the warmth.

A niece in-law told us about a small spot in California that stays at 800 degrees and no one knows for sure what causes it. I asked if there was a voice that kept saying, “I am what I am.” My ex-brother-in-law said, “Yes, Moses before the burning bush, and it announcing ‘I am that I am,” and my niece-in-law says “Yea, God and Popeye saying “I yam what I yam.”

+ + +

Everything about the wedding drew us together. The families of the bride and groom coming together including the extended families. While the wedding was going on, at brunch after the wedding, and that evening at dinner at the home of the groom’s parents.

It’s 8:30 am Friday morning, August 8, and I’m in a Spring Breeze Budget Motel room in Newport Beach, Oregon, typing-out my experiences to date on this adventure in progress. It officially began last Sunday afternoon when my sister Grace mentioned in an email exchange that she was crazybizy getting ready to leave for her daughter Erin’s wedding next Saturday in Newport Beach, Oregon.

What! I thought the wedding was in the fall. I didn’t receive an invitation because I change mailing addresses more often than Grace and I write each other. So I got on Priceline and scored a roundtrip airfare to Portland. Newport Beach by car is about three hours south of Portland. I got the airfair for a reasonable price. And a reservation for this budget motel room I’m sitting in for an exorbitant price, considering the lack of amenities.

From the looks of the exterior when I drove up yesterday, I expected to see Fred Flintstone at the check-in desk and Wilma cleaning rooms. Or vice versa. Figured they might have retired here.

I got my key and went in the room. Sure enough, it had a bed. And a toilet. That’s all I really need since I like to camp out anyway. Whoever owns this place should start a motel franchise and call it “Bed and Head.”

This morning, I went looking for a good breakfast along the historic bayfront. I passed a coffee house that was open and advertised breakfast. A bunch of cars were parked in front of it which is usually a good sign. I parked, got out of the car and could hear bull seals or walruses trumpeting (I don’t know the correct term for their mating call) in the distance. How quaint.

There were outside tables and a guy was sitting at one. I walked into the small coffee house and no additional patrons in there. Uh oh. Just two artsy types in the kitchen doing something. The menu on the wall looked ok, but here it was 7 a.m., and they had fairly-light heavy metal music going at several decibels too loud for me. I like that kind of music, but not for breakfast. The coffee house failed the quaint test.

So I left and continued my quest for breakfast and found a place kinda like a Dennie’s but locally owned. Eggs tasted like fish and the coffee tasted like the eggs. But I didn’t complain and did leave a tip. It’s not the waitresses fault, except for working there.

+ + +

Just got back from the only Starbucks in town and they don’t have WiFi, but the nice lady said the local library does. So I went to it and could logon in the parking. Great!

But I did buy a cup of Starbuck’s regular over-priced high octane coffee to determine if the coffee at breakfast was that bad. It was. At least jet lag didn’t screwup my tastebuds. I hope I can find some good crabcakes here.

Now for the good stuff. This is the first time I’ve been to the Oregon coast. To get here yesterday, I drove down Interstate 5 and took a right on State 20 which runs through Corvallis, and on to Newport Beach 50 miles west of Corvallis.

Corvallis lies in a valley just east of a low range of mountains which is a rain forrest (the peaks are maybe 2500 feet). This valley is an Eden.

Corvallis is the home of Oregon State University. I went to undergrad school at the University of Texas in Austin. It was a great town back then. It’s still a great town if you like wall to wall traffic and bumper to bumper people. Corvallis is still a great college town. I’m glad Vince Young didn’t visit OSU before he signed at UT.

OSU’s moniker is the Beavers. I checked www.osubeavers.com, and that’s the moniker for all their team sports, both male and female. I guess the feminist movement hasn’t made it to Corvallis yet. Or maybe a sense of humor and of irony prevail at OSU, essential characteristics for learning about life and getting the most out of it.

+ + +

I’m finishing up this post at the library. I’ve just decided I could live in Newport Beach. Not only can I bring my laptop into the library and use the WiFi for free, but there’s electrical outlets at the desks. Don’t have to worry about the battery fizzling, plus the thing works better plugged into the wall.

And Louis L’Amour didn’t write all the books in here.

Randy Pausch died yesterday, July 25, 2008. If you are not familiar with Randy, go to YouTube to view and listen to his last lecture. His heroic battle with pancreatic brought his story and works to all of us. His students at Carnegie Mellon were fortunate to be tested by this man. Randy challegened them to never give up even when they hit the brick wall. Randy met the profound challenge of his life when handed his death sentence less than a year ago. He confronted this brick wall by practicing what he preached and giving of himself to others even as he was dying. The Chicgo Tribune includes a respectful and informative obituary.