Why Americans Hate Recessions

I’ve lived through a number of recessions now. This current one is a little worse because it seems to have effects that may stretch out into the future, and that influences our feelings of Hope for the Future. And that is very bad for Americans. \Americans are very into the Future and all the promise that it implies.

Things may be bad now, but there’s always the future. The future can bring unforeseen ‘opportunities’ that can change our lives radically and beneficially. Hence, the ‘future’ is something that is inherently Americans’ friend. Regardless of what has come before, the future beckons.

Mostly, I think, Americans hate the limitations that recessions bring. Spending must be curtailed, and that always makes Americans antsy. Shopping is a hobby for many in America, and many a middle class family spends their Sunday at the mall picking up a few things to make their week sunny and bright. Recessions slow this activity down. Life looks duller and grayer during recessions—and you’ve pretty much seen the clothes your co-worker or school chum has worn before. How depressing.

Americans also hate recessions because it cuts down on travel, and we are a big country with lots to see, and relatives who have landed at various points around the nation that need to be visited to renew old tribal ties. Recessions make this travel more burdensome, either by making it too expensive, or by slowing it down by car instead of by plane. I’m a travel junkie so, believe me, I take the inconveniences created by the recession very personally and I hold George W. Bush and the Republican Party wholly responsible for my staying home more this summer and spending waaay more hours on the internet looking for good travel deals.

The Recession also changed a lot of educational plans for Americans. Many college-bound kids had to ratchet back to community colleges in order to afford tuition. Many adults who lost jobs had to retrain for other ones, or they had to put off classes they might have taken for personal improvement in order to do more job-oriented training. Americans love to learn new things, from Thai cooking to belly-dancing.

All in all, this recession put the U.S. on hold, and America really hates to feel itself spinning its wheels in place. This is a country with places to go to and things to do. Its entire psyche is wrapped up in forward movement, from its history of wagontraining across mountains, to its invention of an entire auto industry, to its flights to the Moon, to its communication around the planet with the internet. This country is all about movement—and it will not rest easy until the money starts flowing again, and with it, the movement of goods and ideas and energy.
Till then, let’s hope Americans get their act together. So we can all move forward to reap the benefits this nation so generously provides. All of us—together.

Dinner With Dieters - Redux

Okay, I can’t seem to leave this subject alone. Again, I spent a weekend with some friends, and it was very clear that the female side of this couple was constantly making food choices of a dietary nature. There was a concentration and calculation evident that was unnerving to me. Every morsel had to be mentally weighed and evaluated for substantive nutritional value and caloric consequence.

It was both fascinating and horrifying to me, as hostess to this person. I had the feeling that whatever I had chosen to serve these people was wrong—even though I clearly chose foods that were high in nutrition and had made healthy ‘choices’ possible, I felt I hadn’t done enough. Worse, I felt that even serving food at all had sabotaged this person’s efforts.

Woe is me.

It reinforced my sense that we are fast losing our ability to enjoy food. The food that we all centered our family and societal rituals around was now the enemy—not to be trusted, and never to be given into. It really made me feel uncomfortable to be around. I longed for a nice smiling, chubby dinner guest who complimented my efforts effusively.

I wonder how many other people are out there making preparations for dinner guests and weekend guest and are absolutely agonizing over what to serve and how much of it should be available. Too little looks skimpy and cheap—too much looks reckless and even hostile. It becomes a hostess’s nightmare, and there is no winning situation here. If you serve great food, a certain number of your guests will be inclined to turn their nose up at it, even BECAUSE it is so good and tempting. And no one wants to serve bad food, or food that doesn’t please both visually and gastronomically.

So I will entertain my guests as usual, and I’ll watch them turn away. I’ll watch the fevered calculation and the fear and self-loathing they experience when placing something delicious on their plate. I’ll watch their doubt and their regret.
These people sure have taken the pleasure out of entertaining. Much of life is no fun anymore.

Shania Twain's "You're Still the One."

It’s fairly often that a song makes me drift into a whole train of philosophical thought, and maybe that’s the true genius of good song-writing. It can lead into a complete thought pattern, so you can even draw a conclusion about life in general.

I was on a bit of a road-trip recently and Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still the One’ was playing on the radio. For those who don’t know, it’s a song about a couple who is still together after a number of years, even though people didn’t think it would never last. And the love is still very strong. A classic circumstance. Who in their own lives has ever heard of a couple getting married, or have even attended the wedding itself, thinking ‘Good God, this will NEVER last’?

(‘but let’s keep dancing—let’s bring out the booze—and have—a ball—if that’s all—there is.’)

Pardon me, I digress into an old Peggy Lee song. A very good one, by the way.

But it strikes me that this tendency to pre-assess the success of any relationship is a waste of time and bald expression of ego, because we can never fully know the people involved, nor what makes the relationship tick, nor the circumstances that will conspire in the future to keep them together or break them apart. Essentially, it’s an exercise in futility—a blowing of hot air—a frittering of thought-energy. We can never possibly know the future, we are only playing likely odds, and even then odds that we know so little about. What I’m saying is, there’s not enough data. So why are we compelled to do it?

We do it because we like to feel we can control things. So much of human existence turns on random events. And this, the most intimate of relationships—one that touches us so near our hearts every single day of our lives--by rights should be both knowable and controllable. Throughout the history of mankind, humans have struggled to control these relationships, even to the point of making the basis of them economic. Now, economics and finances, we know something about. It has a beginning point and an end point, and we’re pretty clear on what finances and economics do in-between. And though this has worked to some extent throughout history, there have always been outliers—relationships that don’t follow the imposed rules. History is replete with examples. Songs are written about it, artistic works memorialize it. We struggle to make sense of relationships, but they have mysterious unwritten rules of their own.

To get back to my point:

I am one of those couples of which Shania Twain sings. People in fact did say it wouldn’t last—it lasted anyway. The people who said it now feel silly. And we feel strangely vindicated, though we do still occasionally feel like sending out raspberries to some people.It just shows the drawbacks of prejudging people. We’re so often on the losing side.

Things I Like About Men

Okay, I decided to do this article because, believe it or not, some people have accused me of not appreciating men. I know, I know—whodda thunk it? They don’t know me at all, do they? Actually I have a man in my life, I have been surrounded by men in my work environment most of my life, I even have a couple tiny little men-in-the-making as grandkids. I know something about men. After all my years of observing men, these are the things that astound me most about them:

That thing that makes men work at something until they almost drop to the ground. What is that? That is amazing. Men very seldom say, “Gee, you know, I think I’m going to let this go for awhile and go do something brainless, then I’ll come back to it fresh.” No, they just keep at it and keep at it. Sometimes, there’s a lot of swearing involved. But they keep going until they master (conquer) it. I like that. It’s a little unhinged, but I like it.

That thing where men all jump in to pull together to help do some heavy lifting guy-thing together. I love that. I’ve seen it happen over and over. Men will drop what they are doing to come to pitch in on something that has to be lifted onto a truck, rolled over to another position, or crawled inside of to get something out. What is that about? And they’ll do it to help any other man regardless of who he is, whether they like the guy or not, or who else is involved in the task. I love that quality. Keep that one. It’s beautiful to watch.

The thing where men are compelled to jump into dangerous situations and rescue people. This is the quality that gives us firemen, and police, and EMT technicians. But I’ve seen this one in lots of places—even on roads where someone has overturned their vehicle and the police and ambulance haven’t arrived yet. Ordinary guys will just jump in to see if they can help someone. This quality just makes me weep. This one should be kept in the gene pool no matter what else we decide to keep. This is the one that keeps people alive, keeps little kids safe, and makes women want to live with men no matter how much trouble they are. Keep this one. Definitely.

That thing where men think every problem has a solution. This sometimes drives women mad, but it really is a terrific quality. When you tell your husband or boyfriend or father about a problem you have and they automatically come up with some focused, practical solution that will turn the problem around. Often it has little to do with the problem, and doesn’t have a chance in hell of working. But I like that mental state of thinking that just about anything is manageable. I like that optimism. It’s somehow comforting—even if not at all true.
That’s it. I’m sure I’ll think of more things later, but these are the ones I can stand behind right now. If anybody has more to add, just jump in. I’m open to suggestion.

Lady With A Gun

I was at the post office the other day, a couple of people behind an older woman who evidently wanted to pick up her mail. The man at the counter politely told her how she had to do it now and gave her a card that would help her get it done by phone. She took the card and turned to leave, but before she got far , she stopped in front of me and complained to the effect that she traveled a lot and it used to be easy to pick up her mail, but now it was very difficult but and different now—and maybe it was because of the illegals. She waited for my input on the matter.

Now, I don’t quite understand how she connected the illegals to this process, but it was clear she felt that ‘her country’ was no longer the same, and that everything was worse now, because of something—she wasn’t exactly sure what—but illegals seemed to definitely be a part of it somewhere.

I was left standing there, trying to be agreeable and indulgent—rather as everyone does when faced with older peoples’ misconceptions and fears about modern life. I tried to say something vague and sympathetic. At which point, she informed me forthrightly that she was considering getting a gun.

Now, I’m not sure how the gun helps with the mail delivery and the illegals in America either, but it seemed that she thought this would help her significantly in her daily living in these unsettling times. And I thought: How many other older or otherwise slightly dispossessed people of this society are considering buying a gun as the solution to their confusion, fear, and general alienation?

I don’t know why she felt that way. I suspect it has something to do with right wing talk radio whipping fears about everything that Republicans no longer have control over, and didn’t do a good job controlling when they DID have control. Maybe someone out there can add a bit of clarity to the situation. It seemed more likely that this little old woman would fire on the UPS man trying to deliver a package than anything else—especially if he were the wrong color or otherwise threatened her in some irrational manner that day. But she had her right to own a gun, and by God, she was going to use it.

She looked at me squarely in the eye as she told me this about buying the gun, as if I could automatically be counted on to back her up and encourage her to do so. I did not, however. In fact, I told her I thought it probably wasn’t a good idea. “Why not?” she demanded. So I told her: “Because more guns floating around only make it more dangerous for good people.” She did not take this well. And I added with a shiver, “I don’t like guns—I don’t want any in my house.” The gentleman behind me in line, a young man in his thirties piped up at that very moment. “I don’t like them either. They scare me. My dad used to teach me to handle them, but I don’t want any around.”

The little old woman seemed nonplussed by this lack of support. It was my turn to step up to the counter, and I missed her departure. But I don’t think she got the satisfaction she hoped for. Maybe, however, the young man and I were able to dissuade her from reaching for gun ownership as an automatic solution to every problem, the standard balm for every emotional wound.

I don’t know, it was just a very scary encounter. It just did not bode well for our society that she should feel this way. Old or not.

The Republican Legacy of Dismissal

Republicans are still at it—still pushing their same old ideology of ‘them that has, gets.’ Now, it's regarding healthcare, and it’s going on continually among people—with talk radio starting the ball rolling to give people the language with to start dismissing people—as individuals and in groups—so that they can rightfully be eliminated from the political public discourse.

I recently heard it in regard to fat people. You may hear it pretty often yourself, more so, now that we are discussing healthcare and what should be done. From ‘fat people should be taxed’ to ‘fat people are causing all the healthcare dollars being spent.’ As if when we eliminate fat people from the healthcare equation everything magically falls into place.

This is ruse of the worst kind. It plays on peoples’ already entrenched visual dislike of those with extra body fat, who are easily recognized and can be readily pointed out as ‘not like us.’ It calls to mind what was once done—is still being done—with blacks. And that similarity to a past social error alone rubs me the wrong way, to the point where I refuse to participate in the group dynamic of ‘let’s get fatty.’ Which also plays out as ‘we’re better than fatty,’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us.’ Which technique was used to everyone’s detriment during the Bush years, when anyone who disagreed with a stated policy was met with taunts of being unpatriotic and un-American.

See what a handy dynamic it is? Useful in almost ANY circumstance.

Okay, before I get too psychological here—which I am prone to do—let’s just say I expect better of the human species. Historically, we always get into some strange and ugly territory when we lean into the ‘us versus them’ mentality. It never serves us well, and almost always sets us backward on the evolutionary track. Better we should get used to the idea that we are all in this together. That even those who hold us back during the trek on this planet are valuable assets and may even teach us something.

But you won’t find this in Republican ideological circles. It will always be ‘us against them’ there. That political party thrives on division. It also thrives on delusion. That much, we have already realized.

The Elusive Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina

Okay, I couldn’t resist commentary on this one. It’s just too rich in detail to pass by.

The illustrious and respected conservative Mark Sanford of South Carolina gave us all a treat this week with his flight from responsibility and pressure into the arms of an Argentinian mistress, without passing the mantle of government to his most capable lieutenant governor and without even telling his staff where he could be reached. This is the stuff of which operattas are made, and surely we will see a number of them on this very case before the decade is out. The story has all the elements—love, sex, power, betrayal, secrecy, possible misuse of funds, and media excitement and confusion fuging in the background.

I particularly liked the use of the Appalachian Trail as the cover for where he was. It was a stroke of genius so blinding as to be too cute by half. Hiking the Appalachian Trail has an air of macho derring-do about it—an air of solitary wisdom—an air of environmental concern—an air of youthful energy—and an air of relevant hipness--all qualities that the public would most like to have in a presidential candidate. It was such a perfect excuse for a prospective presidential candidate for 2012, in fact, that no one believed it. We all sat around waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it surely did, in the form of a separated woman with two sons in Argentina who was evidently good at sending sympathetic emails. Good God. If ever an affair reflected the contorted magic of our technological times it was this one.

Okay, who had ‘Argentinian mistress’ in the ‘Reason for Sanford’s Mysterious Absence’ Pool?

But as the media slobbers over those tantalizing emails, we must not forget that it isn’t the affair itself that is most significant to the character, or lack thereof, of this man at the head of South Carolina. It’s that he so got wrapped up in his own needs and desires, the people and government of South Carolina came a very distant second to him. Adulterers will come and go in this world—so to speak—but not doing the job you are paid to do always deserves a punishment fitting the crime.
So as we wave a fond farewell to Governor Sanford’s political career, let us remember to re-focus ourselves on what is truly important to us as citizens. Not the idle proselytizing of pompous blowhards who believe their own PR a little too much—nor the high moral tone that always turn out to be a bit of a joke--but the actual care and work put into the ‘public service’ of the positions they are elected to do. “We will know them by their fruits’ is one of those biblical phrases Republicans can appreciate. Let’s hope they will live by the phrase in the choice of their leadership.