Republicans Yet Again

It has been more than 2 months since the lesser lights of the Republican Contenders blinked out leaving only four still flashing. It looked good for a while, as if these skilled Vaudevillians would duke it out in a timely manner and leave the field clear for Mitt to get down to the serious work of molding lies and distortions about the current administration and generating impossible promises of a prosperous future with his glorious self at the helm. Instead what we have had is a seemingly endless parade of these indefatigable blowhards trumpeting lies into the 6:00 news and slinging little gobbets of feces at one another. What was once a bit of light-hearted fun has crossed over to the realms of pure tedium.
The latest opinions of those still paying attention suggest that Mitt is still considered "Most Likely to Succeed," which status he has been able to maintain through generous application of more money than an ordinary citizen can imagine. Rick is still baying at his heels, his campaign buoyed up by the noisy support of followers who are either deeply suspicious of anybody with that much money, or appalled by the thought of somebody in charge wearing magical underwear. Newt is still hanging on like a terrier on a rat, thanks in no small part to an open-handed Las Vegas billionaire. And finally there's poor Ron with only $1.6 million on hand, but ever hopeful.
Of course they must be getting pretty tired of the whole thing too. After all they have been addressing the same crowds with the same talking points, repeating the same tired threats and promises for months now, night after night. There is nothing new to be gleaned from these carefully choreographed events, so if we are to learn more about these contestants we need to look elsewhere. And what better way to get a good long peek behind the curtain than to study their blunders?
Take Mitt, for example, who in the midst of the worst depression in almost a century tries to connect with the unemployed by telling them that he too is unemployed and therefore sympathetic to their concerns. At least on this occasion he had the uncharacteristic insight not to mention his $200 million in assets that ease his heartbreak. He slipped a little when he went to reassure a room full of auto workers that he stood foursquare behind the industry, offering as evidence that his wife drives two Cadillacs. Maybe he thought that if he stunned them with this bizarre little factoid they would forget that he rabidly opposed the bailout money provided by President Obama, without which his audience might also have been in the unemployment lines. Then at a NASCAR rally while speaking off-the-cuff to a crowd of fans, he declared that he was a great fan of the sport, that in fact he had many friends who owned NASCAR teams.
What we learn from all this is that Mitt Romney is so completely out of touch with the world of the wage earner that he could not possibly understand, much less fix, any problems that the 99% might have.
Then there's Rick who thinks the President is a snob for wanting everybody to have the chance to go to college. And he gets hiccups at the thought of homosexuals wanting to marry, or blacks wanting decent schools, or women wanting any control over their own lives. He is frantic at the mere suggestion of contraception and abortion and believes that the "threat" of gay marriage is on a par with the destruction of the Twin Towers.
He stated, in public, his views of President Kennedy's speech in support of the separation of church and state: "Earlier in my political career,"
he said, "I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up," said Senator Rick Santorum. A man with such a delicate constitution should perhaps be spared the rigors of presidential politics.
Newt's gaffes have a more general interest flavor, and often sound more like the inventions of Jon Stewart than actual public statements of somebody hoping to occupy the White house. Like his promise to set up a permanent lunar colony. Or his explanation of his upcoming divorce from his first wife: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President. And besides, she has cancer." With regards to the Occupy Wall Street throngs he suggested they should get a bath and a job, in that order. When asked to explain how he ran up half a million dollars in credit card charges at Tiffany's, he just huffily insisted that he was really very frugal. There are a thousand of them.
Not that he is free of religious mania, having growled to some jostling multitude that he saw a time where the kindly Christian ideals that made the country great will be replaced by the apostasy of radical islam.
And finally, straggling in last and breathless, there's Ron, who, to his credit, beat out Newt in Michigan. His fatal flaw is that he makes sense. He is the only politician in the country who wants the military withdrawn from everywhere, not a popular idea among the bloodthirsty majority. He seems to be lamentably innocent of serious blunders, or maybe his chances are so slim that it is considered unsportsmanlike to record them, like snatching the chair out from under a blind person.
Whatever the case, now that we have had a close look at these creatures in unguarded moments, face to face, as it were, the options are clear.
As of last Friday, March23, 2012, 57% of Republicans were rooting for the guy who would sell his first-born to the gypsies if they offered a good price. 25% favored the one who wants to eliminate the teaching of science and bring back witch-burning. 13% were hoping that the classic Boss Tweed look-alike gets the nod, while only 4.5% thought that the irritating little man with the ideas that might actually work should get a shot at the prize.
The good news is that Obama's chances look better every day.

Rebirth

Six years ago I sold a house and bought another one.
On a cold, dark Tuesday in February a huge truck backed up to the door of the first one and emptied it. I mopped and vacuumed its echoing carcase, loaded a toothbrush and a clean shirt into my car and went to the lawyers to hand over the keys. It would not be until Thursday that I could move into the next place and all my clothing, books, furniture, pots and boots, towels and radios, bowls and brooms, sewing machines and pictures and computers and shovels, all the clap-trap and paraphernalia in which I am embedded would remain in that truck until then.
So there I was on that gloomy Tuesday afternoon, free of trammel and care. "Noplace to go and all day to get there."
I booked into a motel and went down to Church Street for a completely idle stroll and a bite of supper. It felt like a new life. As if I were suddenly somebody else. I was suddenly freed not only of all that stuff but of any other concerns, worries and problems that had been growling in the back of my mind. The slate was clean and inviting.
For two lovely days I was a happy person, poking through the library, reading newspapers, which I seldom do, but this was a different life, so it was OK.
Then Thursday overtook me. I handed over a heap o' money and the huge truck returned and filled my fine new house and ratty old life full of all those familiar chattels and worries.
So when I try to think what, above all else, I would like to achieve this year or in the next 5 years or before crossing to that promised land the only thing that springs to mind is a return to those 2 glorious untrammeled days. I would like to get that truck back and then as soon as it lumbers off to Colchester to wait for a fictitious delivery in 2 days I would like to hop in my car with a toothbrush and a clean shirt and vanish.
You'd think it would be easier to get rid of stuff that it is acquiring
it. But you'd be wrong.

In Search of an Exercise Program

I hate exercise. Not that I mind a bit of snow shoveling or digging of potatoes or cutting the grass. The thing is that after I have engaged in one of these training exercises I may be hot, sweaty, and out of breath just as if I had spent the time on the StairMaster, but in addition I have actually achieved something, something I can stand back and admire, congratulating myself on what a fine wide path I have sculpted through the two-foot drifts or what an impressive heap of potatoes I have grown to sustain me and the vermin in the basement through the short cold days to come.

However, exertion for its own sake holds no allure. So when I had finished planting my bright red peonies back at the end of August, and after I had gathered in the last of the butternut squashes, and after I figured the grass was as short as it needed to be until next spring, I flopped down into my La-Z-Boy with a large bowl of popcorn and haven't moved since except to heave to my feet occasionally to explore the possibilities of the fridge or waddle off to the store to replenish my dwindling supply of sausages or cupcakes.

The thing is, there has been no snow. In times gone by I was saved from atrophy by the need to relocate a ton or so of snow at least once a week, or failing that the opportunity to shuffle down to the creek on snowshoes once or twice a season. But alas, this year there has been nothing but sleet, drizzle, mud and frozen, lumpy terrain. To be honest these conditions are not sufficiently appealing to lure me out from in front of the stove except for a quick foray in search of a snack.

The result of this unfortunate diet and exercise program was made tragically manifest shortly after New Year's when I went shopping for clothes. Garments offered on the small/medium/large spectrum have always been rather whimsically sized. I believe I still have a shirt I once bought not because I liked it more than average but because the one that fit me had an S stitched into the collar band. That did not happen on this particular trip to the shops. Unfortunately the numerical spectrum of sizes is way more rigorous, and what I took away that day were items in sizes I thought I would only see lined up at the Italian sausage booth at Field Days.

I was so depressed by this that I went straight home and flopped into La-Z-Boy with a large bowl of popcorn and wallowed in the warm embrace of self-pity and specious rationalization. When this became tedious I stared out the window at the bleak, dead spectacle of a snowless winter – bleached-out grass, tangled brown weeds, frozen mud, skeletal black trees against the murky sky. I needed a plan.

I could stop eating everything I enjoy eating and replace it all with saltines and weak tea. This was so far into Fantasyland that it lacked the power even to depress me.

I could respond to one of those fliers inviting me to join a “health club” for the low,low price of way too much, and drive 10-20 miles to an underventilated facility smelling chronically of sweat, dust, and sneakers for the pleasure of stepping up and down on a box, lifting shiny metal objects, doing energetic things on a contraption that looks like a huge mousetrap. Tempting though this option might be, I put the idea aside in favor of wistfully hoping for snow.

The bicycle option, so attractive and effective when I lived near an actual bike path as opposed to the long, narrow gravel pit known to the state cartographers as Shacksboro Road, is another distant dream. In fact it has drawn yet further from the realms of possibility since I ripped the sidewall open on one of my new and costly winter tires on one of the razor-sharp stones that are a constant feature of the two miles of roadway before you get to the pavement.

Then one day I strolled out the back of the house to the greenhouse to tidy it up a bit in case this endless horrible winter ever ends. There were some tools underfoot that were of no immediate use, so I picked them up and headed off for the barn. From the barn I could see something down in the field I couldn't make out, so I went to see what it was. It was just a tangle of hay left from the last cutting, but there were some deer tracks nearby which headed off for a brambly clump further down the field. I went to see where they went after that. They continued into a thicket of prickly bushes that were tearing my coat to shreds so I backed off a bit and listened. There was a pretty loud running water sound from the creek so I thought “Ooooh, otters!” and went down to see. There were no otters, but there were definite reminders of Hurricane Irene in the form of washouts and downed trees even after all these months, so I picked my way among the flood-flattened grass and half frozen puddles alongside the creek to where there is a huge old willow that I was happy to see appeared untroubled by the extra water. The spring water that wound among its roots looked the same as it always had and then I was past the bend in the creek and could see down the next stretch to where there was a beaver dam.

This vision should have excited me more than it did, but by now the wind was picking up, my feet were wet, and my hair was full of burrs and twigs. Therefore, I resisted the impulse to thrash down through another prickly thicket to have a look and instead retraced my soggy steps back up the hill to my nice warm kitchen, puffing and sweaty. Once safely ensconced back in my La-Z-Boy I realized with surprise, over a collation of hot milk and Oreos, that what I had just had was a whole lot of healthy, wholesome exercise of a sort that I am hard-wired to avoid like a high colonic. While I was pretty sure I was the same size as before, and my fondness for grilled cheese sandwiches raged unabated, still I had moved more than the length of myself and it had done no lasting harm, it gave me pleasure, it smelled nice, and it involved no driving. These are the characteristics of a perfect exercise plan.

For my next training exercise I went back down to the creek from the other direction and had a look at the beaver dam. But that is another story.