I read David Brooks column in the New York Times this morning. The Times still gives me plenty of material to analyze and consider, even if it is only a vestige of its old 'get them the objective news and get it to them right now' self. David Brooks wrote a very fetching article about dignity and manners, and how we have, as a culture lost both of those things. He used the incidents of Governor Sanford's blatheringly stupid comments about his own infidelity, Micheal Jackson's conduct of a child-like life, and finally Sarah Palin's applied confusion about life itself, as his examples of a culture gone to the dogs. There is no dignity left, he asserts. There are no manners, public or private, which are consistently followed or applied. It is all out here right in front of us. Brooks rails against self-promotion, even to the extent of running for the office of President of the United States (that insults the dignity of the candidate). But then he turns, in typical, and very modern Republican form, to use Ronald Reagan as an example of a relatively current public figure who had dignity. A bigger self-promoter there never was, except maybe P.T. Barnum, but that is ignored by Brooks.
The entire neo-con rant by Brooks is about being wealthy. You can ignore everything if you are wealthy. You do not need help, or money, or even much in the way of relationship, if you have enough money. That is the man's basic forlorn tenant. He harkens back to a day, George Washington's, to be exact, when a man like our first President could exercise all of the well-mannered characteristics of not promoting himself or herself, speaking when spoken to, standing when spoken to, and, of course, not requesting or even accepting help from anyone. That George Washington was extremely wealthy is not mentioned at all.
You read an article like the one I am discussing and the material almost sounds rational. You almost pine for those old days when such great-seeming principals of conduct supposedly ruled all of social life. Until you begin to think about it. Washington's family had droves of slaves and tons of servants. I wonder how they conducted themselves with respect to the 'rules of dignity.' There were throngs of struggling new Americans trying to barely get by or survive on subsistence farming or in slave-like manufacturing jobs. We still had bond-servant versions of slavery all over the countryside. What a load of dignity they possessed, and displayed.
Today, we are all trying to make it. We are trying to feed our families, just like before. There is absolutely no dignity whatever in not paying your bills or being foreclosed on. None. Not one shred. Try it, if you think there is. I encourage anyone in dire financial straights to self-promote the hell out of him or herself. I absolutely encourage them to ask for assistance from their friends and family before putting their children in shelters or onto the mean streets of our downtown cities. Dignity be damned.
David Brooks is wealthy. Can you tell?
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By God, but Maureen Dowd has taken them on! The Sunday Times is getting with the program, firing William Kristol and putting it's back into a deep thrust into the central heart of this still developing financial bleak hole. I refer to the 'bleak' hole, as opposed to black, simply because I foresee that we will eventually come through. Nothing, except (and allegedly) Hawking radiation, comes out of a black hole. The other day, Maureen began her tentative foray into the real causes of this nightmare. The causes that are being avoided by mainstream media, even when they are tossed right in their faces. The executives show up in private jets wtih limos and security details. They buy new jets with bailout money. They refurnish their offices because they just simply could not work in an office without a million dollars of (again bailout money) new decorations. But Maureen is hard charging in. Today's article was all about how we might consider going back and getting the money from these thieves. This is new talk coming on the scene. Only a few blogs, like mine, have approached the real truth, and then discussed the only viable solution to the problems. We must take these entities apart and examine them. We must fire all of the executives (Ralph Kramdon and Ed Norton would do better, from the old 'Honeymooners' sitcom), and bring in the money crunchers. Then we go right out there and demand that all of those people who took the money give it back. When they refuse, which they will, quite naturally, we get serious with them. And the institutions where they have the money. I don't give one hoot and holler whether executives in New York, or elsewhere, are dependent upon 'bonuses' to provide their lifestyle. Tell it to the auto workers. Tell it to the laid off people who are getting pink slips back and forth across this country. The only bonus they got was merely pronounced that way, but spelled differently: "Bone Us." I coined that expression just this minute. Maureen Dowd is on fire, and the Times is limping along behind her, but they are at least there. They are finally getting it. They will be totally gone if this country conitnues to head toward a future of financial chaos. Their survival is at stake. Our survival is at stake. So what do we do?
Since Obama did not see fit to cancel the rendition special orders of Ichabod Dunce, his predecessor, then lets use this presidential order. If Barack wants to continue to grab people left and right on the streets of the cities of the world, then I say okay. Let's 'rend' financial executives. Let's commandeer their G-5 private jets and take them on some real 'business' trips to Algiers and Syria. On into Libya and Lebanon. We have been using these countries for their ability to have no moral or legal code whatever when it comes to getting information out of people, or simply torturing them for the fun of it. These thieving executives have been killing people. And their actions and theft are going to kill a lot more. So let's rend them. They'll talk. Hell, almost all of them look and act like Dick Cheney, and everyone knows what a coward that man is. They may spill their guts right there during the lengthy plane rides.
Meanwhile, however, we get set up to punish that Illinois Governor all the more. What did he do? We don't really know. He pissed off that federal prosecutor. We certainly know that. Fitzgerald. Look for him to be governor one day soon. Yes, that is exactly the way it happens. But I don't know about Blago, that governor. He does not seem to have a lot of quit in him and maybe he takes punishment well. Or at least, in ways we do not forsee.
Years ago I sold life insurance. I was working for the Western White House in San Clemente, California, as a Beach Patrol Officer. It sounded like a neat job, but in reality it was boring as hell. So I started selling life insurance on the side. I had all these partners who had to work long shifts with me, and they were making okay money and had families. So I presented my products during those long night and early morning hour shifts. I only quit my horrid presentations when they bought a life insurance package for their family from me. They all bought. I made a lot of money. So much money that I left the presidential service (it also helped that Nixon was getting the axe about that time!) to sell life insurance full time. I sold several policies a week for a year (which is a lot) until I had a dry spell. It was the end of the week one Saturday when my boss, Chuck, called me to his house for a sit-down. I hadn't sold anything. He reviewed my week and figured out that everything I had written in my sales logs was a lie. I'd spent the week playing pinball in coffee shops and simply screwing around. In his rage he told me that I was going to go out that very morning and knock on doors. I was to make cold calls to people in their homes, as my punishment. Knocking on doors and making cold calls is the lowest form of outside sales. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to ever do that. Chuck knew that, of course, and he also knew that I was frightened to death about every having to do such a thing. But, if I did not do it, and provide signed pieces of papers from the residents of the homes I called upon to prove it by four o'clock in the afternoon of that Saturday, I was fired. To quote him, and I still remember through all this time: "You get out there and start your tour through purgatory. Punishment is all that is going to save you from Hell." Chuck was Catholic, as you might have guessed.
I stepped outside of his lovely three bedroom home on the golf course. I looked around, in my misery, briefcase (filled with phony prospecting reports) in hand. I sat down on his front steps and thought about life, and the universe, and my obscure place in it. I heard a nearby sound. I turned my head to look at Chuck's next door neighbor's house. A woman was on the stoop picking up the newspaper, wearing a robe, her hair a mess. She instantly slipped back inside once she had secured the paper. An idea swept over me. I went over and knocked on her door. The rest of the morning I spent going up and down the street where Chuck lived. I discovered immediately that the 'golf course' people all belonged to the club. The golf club. They were automatic members because of the placement of their homes. They only knew Chuck and his wife from the club and incidental contacts at school and church. They had no idea about either Chuck's or Curck's wife's sexual proclivities, affairs, drinking, drugs, or monetary problems. I knew all that. A life insurance office is hotbed of rumor and investigation. It is filled with agents who do not want to go to the field, so they hang about and collect information. By the time I finished the morning I easily had twenty signatures on the forms which Chuck had provided me. I even sold a fifty thousand dollar policy to an off duty Laguna Beach cop. I dropped the forms and the life application off at chucks and went home to celebrate my successful day. Chuck was never the same. He and his wife eventually divorced and sold the house. It took Chuck quite awhile to figure out just how effective his punishment was. My conscious was clear. After all, I believed that sales was a function of quality selection and management (it was Chuck's job to find good agents and them take responsibility for them), and that if I was not selling enough, then it was ultimately Churck's fault anyway. He had selected me.
Illinois selected Governor Blago. And there will certainly be a very painful and prolonged period of punishment. But the punishment they envision down there may, indeed, take on an entirely different form from that which they currently conceive.
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Today's New York Times story, "Obama Battles Block By Block to Get Voters to the Polls," speaks to what the groundswell of tens...hundreds...now thousands of Obama volunteers here in 'swinging' Missouri already know. Come November 5th, neighbors will have made game-changing history. Not to be cocksure about the outcome; rather, to coop a quote from my new friend, Jackson County Field Organizer Brandy Gordon, "[We] know for a fact that [our] families have been extended here in Jackson county and [we're] LOVIN' IT!!!!
We volunteers are growing. In numbers, resolve, zeal, understanding and compassion.
My teammates? A sixty-year-old African-American, retired TWA union leader who explained the message of a passing pick-up truck, confederate flag sticker in the rear window. Two black, 15-year-old Central High School Sophomores, one of whom asks me for dating advice. Eighty+ affluent, fed-up Republican white women from conservative Kansas so compelled to help Obama win they phone bank Mondays to ID Missouri voters, and canvass Saturdays in Independence. A recently layed-off single mom turned ninja campaign office worker, and her pre-schooler, her play space stocked with organic snacks and buttressed by powder blue baby blanket.
Even having lived a decade in NYC, I've not been part of such a diverse, open-hearted, deeply committed group, united -- perhaps for the first time in history -- in common purpose.
Obama has already won.
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