The heavy weight of politics

I heard Rachel Maddow on Fresh Air yesterday, and she was so smart and engaging that I decided I just had to record her show (record, not watch live, because as even she described after listening to Terri Gross play one of her incisive interviews with a homophobe, it made her blood pressure rise so much she wasn’t sure how her listeners could stand the tension, and 9 pm isn’t the best time for a spike in my own blood pressure).

So today I watched her opening monologue, and tension doesn’t begin to describe it. She began back in the infamous year of 2000, the year we’ve all tried to forget, when the Supreme Court, with its current conservative posse joined by Justice Kennedy, gave Bush the election. Those same 5 justices decided that corporations were people, so that elections could be influenced even more by the rich. And now … well, we all know what they’re doing now.

According to a Bloomberg poll, 75% of us think their decision will be more influenced by politics than by legal, i.e. constitutional, considerations. The real question, posed by Maddow, is: Do they care?

I think not.

I am writing this because I really hope to be able to look back and say I was wrong, not I told you so.

The non-occupation of Wall Street

You’d never know 73 people were arrested there last Saturday – yesterday, workmen were busy fixing up the power outlets under the trees (power outlets under the trees!), and Zuccotti Park was filled with the 1% except for this lonely Occupier.

My son lives in this hotbed of revolution, in one of the financial buildings converted to apartments after the financial collapse that doesn’t seem to have changed anything for those aforementioned 1%, who are represented so well by the hindquarters of their symbol (which I was surprised to find on Broadway, not Wall Street).

The happy life of a majority inspector

There’s nothing like a 12 hour day sitting behind a table in a very hot small gym at my kids’ former elementary school to make me fall in love with my life. I’m thankful that, until next May’s primary, I don’t have to get up at 5:15 in the cold dark to open up voting machines and post sample ballots and move tables and chairs. I’m thankful that I no longer have to write down voters’ names and more voters’ names and yet more voters’ names in two little books, when 20 minutes’ passing seems like an hour. I’m thankful that the sad stories we heard from some people yesterday haven’t happened to me (though there are a few happy ones I wouldn’t mind having).

I’m thankful that the woman who says the same things every year, making bad puns on people’s names or asking the married guys if they’re brothers, wasn’t there; and I’m thankful as well for our supremely competent Judge of Elections, who likes things to move as fast as I do. But all in all, I’m just so pleased not to be still there. I can take a walk on a beautiful day, or rake leaves, or go to yoga, or do nothing at all.

But it also makes me feel as if (as if?) I’m getting old. For 20 years I sat at long tables in hot conference rooms in meetings about brands of toilet paper that don’t exist anymore (or that Kimberly Clark has downsized), and then for another 10 I sat in workshops in hot hotel conference rooms saying the same things week after week, watching people realize they could change their lives but not their organizations (because organizations have no more loyalty to their people than Kimberly Clark did to our brands).

At least, as Obama has famously told Republicans, “elections have consequences.” Meetings about ScotTissue, or personal mastery workshops … not so much.

So: two days a year? I think I can handle it – and be thankful for the perspective.

Hurricane

I love weather. The NOAA forecast is my home page. I participate in live chats with a local weatherman during snowstorms.

But I have to admit I’m finding our current situation rather alarming. We are right under the scary red area on this map.

 

And I’ve never, ever seen this on the NOAA page:

My son, in lower Manhattan, is under mandatory evacuation tomorrow.

Nothing for it but to listen to one of my favorite songs – and the beginning of this video is so eerie it captures how I’m feeling.

103 degrees: Time to go to Maine

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

- Bertrand Russell

Well, let’s take a look at some of the men in the news today:

• First, the powerful economist who decided, since he had a few minutes before lunching with his daughter, to force a head-scarved maid to have sex with him;
• and then the powerful former governor/movie star who’s so sorry he didn’t tell anybody he fathered a child with a woman who worked in his (and his wife’s) house;
• the powerful Presidential candidate who divorced his cancer-dying first wife, had an affair with his lovely God-fearing present wife just after his second was diagnosed with MS, and who now owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to Tiffany’s, presumably for jewels for all those wives;
• the powerful Supreme Court justice who made it there despite the porn movies and the pubic hair on the Coke can, who tells us the Court’s critics are either illiterate or lazy;
• and that whole group of powerful God-fearing child-abusing men who, the Catholic Church has just decided, only did it because they were trying to fit in with the hippies.

No, I think Henry Kissinger had more insight into this than Bertrand.

My life is just a dream

I’ve gone to this new post page several times in the last week, dithering back and forth about writing here or on Celebrating Time, knowing that nobody but me really cares, except for my few very loyal readers who really do care, except that they don’t agree with each other in their caring.

But, really, who cares? What’s important for a writer is to write; to write without the dark nemesis hanging over one’s shoulder saying Who cares? Why write about that? And why are you writing here and not there?

And really I’ve had such a boring set of tedious problems lately, like spending hours on the phone with British Air, only to find ourselves marooned next December in Miami with the agent who forgot about getting us a ticket home suddenly unreachable; and like my iPhone turning itself completely into Japanese; and like my lovely new Fitbit telling me I wake up at least 9 times every night, which is really better not to know.

But there’s one really really good thing: unlike Jared Loughner, I gave up on lucid dreaming.

Come get refracted

Okay, I gave in; started a new blog. You won’t find a lot of saints or zodiac signs there, but come see what you think:

It’s called Refraction.

Iceland, where are you?

The weather page is my home page, and it just goes on like that for day after day after day. It looks bizarrely like sunset over the Zambesi…

Maybe I should change my masthead above to an iceberg.

How to dry off after a shower: Correction

Empirical evidence suggests that

should come before