What Are Ya Doing, Writing A Book?

    I've been asked that a few times as I posted to this blog.  The answer is, yes. Yes, I am.  I'll tell you why.

    As events progressed in 2015, 2016 and inevitably, 2017 I became more and more involved in the politics but not in the day to day events. As I saw simple, basic values and shared conclusions be ignored and trampled I realized those were the things that needed discussed and reinforced, so I set out to do just that. I don't think you have to be oh so serious about things we've all known since we sat at our parent's knee but sometimes we do have to be reminded.

    I'm all but 70 years old.  I've seen a great deal first hand and participated in some of it. In addition, I've habitually and systematically read somewhere around 500 pages a week for well over 45 years. That's a privilege of opportunity not a lot of people have had. I'm not sure what that means other than if I say something is a fact; chances are I can tell you why I think that in detail. It also means I can generally tell you more than the average person would ever want to know and I'm not shy about doing so. Obviously.

    If you'd like to read the book I made out of this just scroll down to January of 2017 and start reading. It's not too bad but doesn't make a lot of sense read that way.  These efforts are much better and more informative if read in some sort of logical (maybe) order.  That's what the book is.  I wrote this stuff as it occurred to me with the intention of organizing it later.  I did. (maybe).

    A little Jim goes a long way. With that in mind, this makes a perfect bathroom or coffee table book.  You can put this book down and I encourage you to.  I also encourage you to wash your hands, maybe light a candle as a courtesy. Thanks to the publisher guy it's also an attractive thing to have laying around. The cover makes me look smarter than I really am and it will do the same for you for a mere 12 bucks.  Can't beat that. 

https://bit.ly/JimRetzerBook

Hard Truth

    I try not to comment on day to day affairs in favor of observing underlying values. I try for a light touch and maybe a smile or chuckle.  I try not to change people's minds.  I want people to feel as though, now they know why they have always thought that way. Isn't that nice?
    A few days ago I wrote about how I might feel if I were 30 years younger and confronted with the pandemic. Yeah, screw that. We better get focused.  The truth is, people have known how to effectively deal with this health threat for a century. None of the public health measures urged or imposed in response to this emergency are new, "novel" or less than reasonable.  Been there, done that.  Wash your damned hands,  wear a mask and stay the hell away from me ya stupid snot bubbles.

    Don't tell me about your "freedoms".  Going back to colonial times no one has ever had the right to endanger the public health.  Also, going back to colonial times, you and four or five of your knuckleheaded buddies don't have the power to determine what threatens or serves the public health.  That's the governors. Always has been. Watching these people discuss their rights and freedoms is like watching Chimps sniff a Rubik's Cube. Try not to be one of the chimps. 
    I haven't lost any friends or close associates to the Coronavirus. Wanna know why?  I don't have stupid friends. I have a lifelong habit of keeping ignoramuses at arm's-length.  Six feet hasn't been much of a stretch.
    I'm one of those liberals.  I believe, in almost a spiritual way, in the dignity of my fellow man.  Ya know why? Because that's the best way to have a world where I can survive and prosper and my children and grandchildren can survive and prosper.  It's entirely selfish and the smart bet.  Ya never looked at the Golden Rule that way did ya?  Blaise Pascal and Nietzche hold hands with Jeremy Bentham. I probably just wandered out of your depth. Sorry. Look it up.
   There are two ways to deal with an epidemic or a pandemic.  Stop it in it's tracks by giving it no opportunity to multiply and spread or let it rampage until it carries away all the vulnerable.
    Thinning the herd is a seemingly hard-hearted and kinda mean way to go about things but that's what we've been doing right along.  After the initial shock and false steps of the first wave, the intelligent, viable members of our society have settled into the common-sense measures necessary to preserve our society.  We isolate, wash our hands wear masks and pray when it's appropriate.  Others have not and God bless them.  The truth is, we are now witnessing the weaker members of the herd being swept away. They have dictated their own demise and they are welcome to it.  We should thank them and encourage them.  The hard truth is, there is no reason to believe the family members or close associates of these people (The people they are most likely to infect and kill) are of any more value than they are themselves.  Speaking of useless; there is the fact this would be over by now, like it is in other countries if these people had behaved with common sense. Screw 'em.
    That seems pretty mean but have these people made any other choice?

Hand Baskets and Hard Times

    People will find jokes in just about any circumstance.  It's human nature and people are playful by nature. We've all seen cartoons and skits making fun of ourselves in quarantine.  We've seen the lampoons of our leaders being clueless.  Caricatures of even the most respected still bring a smile and even a chuckle. I remember, years ago, visiting with my uncle and discussing the news of that week, the Challenger disaster.  I said,  everyone would remember where they were when they heard about that and one way to tell how seriously people took it was, there were no jokes about it.  Then, being my uncle, deflating his oh so serious nephew, he proceeded to tell me five or six jokes he'd heard in the last few days. So much for that idea. He also had a theory that the majority of dirty jokes, at least,  came from guys in prison. Mabee so.
    My favorite joke about this current mess is; "I was told there would be a handbasket."  It's just so absurd it makes me laugh. My mother used to say, "The world's been going to Hell in a handbasket since Day One."  She was a shrewd euchre player and a big believer in never getting too excited or too discouraged.
    Excited and discouraged. That certainly describes a lot of what we're seeing but I think fear explains more of what we're seeing than anything else.  I'm old.  There really isn't much you can do to me that would interfere with my plans or aspirations.  A few years ago my doctor was cautioning me about some risk or other.  "Doc, at my age, to hear you tell it, getting out of bed in the morning is like stepping in front of a moving bus."  I think that's when he just gave up. It did make me think about being a younger man with a lot more in front of me, a lot more in my basket.
    I've been taken aback by the outright belligerence we're seeing, torturously dressed in some grotesque form of patriotism or other outright bullshit. Why?
    How would I feel if I were 30 years younger, which most people are.  If I had a family, future expectations that I was responsible for. I'd be worried to death. A cough, a sniffle, a random fever or a summer sneeze would become a major threat.  A threat I would take personally. Throw in the loss of employment, financial ruin, the prospect of homelessness. Frightened people are suspicious, resentful, unreasonable.  If you frighten people for months on end it's understandable some, at least, will become irrational.
    What do we do about that?  I don't think we should belittle our friends and neighbors dealing with those, seemingly unrelenting, very real fears. We can only support them and keep reminding them of the proper response.  Get your shots, limit your contacts, wash your hands, wear a mask and pray when it's appropriate. It's the least we can do and you can usually count on frightened people to do the least.

The Boob's Tube

    Someone mentioned the Challenger Disaster and the events and decisions that led up to it.  Yep, it's still depressing and it still makes me mad.
    The Challenger missed its launch date by a few days because of what sure seemed like a comedy of errors.  One day a wrench that would be laying on a bench in most people's garage couldn't be found in all of Cape Kennedy.  The next day a power drill had to be retrieved from a guy's car in the parking lot because NASA didn't have one.  These things were kind of mirthfully reported on the evening news with a 'meh ', kinda shrug,. Whattaya gonna do?
    The third day was cold for Florida, too cold for the design limitations of the launch rockets and it looked like another scrub. They fatally decided to go.
    The engineers and techies who had traditionally administered NASA had been replaced by the Reagan people with political appointees better suited to projecting image. In an other word; fools.
    It has been reported that the Reagan Oval Office had 3 televisions running all the time to monitor news and projected image.  They thought it made them better informed and more responsive. In fact, it made them more poorly informed and reactionary rather than responsive.  When the blue glow they bathed themselves in began to sting with the comedy of errors at NASA they decided to act decisively.
    Launching a space shuttle is tantamount to hurling a small office building into space. You can see it from over a hundred miles away even in the daytime.  It's spectacular and unbelievably complicated. The engineers at NASA, to a man, rejected the idea of launching in the cold conditions that were outside design limitations.  They were overruled by the Reagan political appointees, seven innocent people were killed and the program was set-back for 3 years.  The design of the booster rockets was declared to be the culprit and they were redesigned.  Thank God that cosmetic redesign didn't turn out to be sabotage in and of itself.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Quietly, the political people were replaced with techies. That was a broken idea that was fixed.
    If the boobs in the Oval Office hadn't been watching television rather than doing their jobs that would not have happened.
    Well, that was long ago and far away.  Certainly, long ago but not as far away as we'd like.  Stupid people tend to repeat mistakes.  We still have the wrong boobs watching the wrong tube.
    Here are two really funny examples of the unintended consequence of essentially mindless television. The phenomenon of bungee jumping comes from a long-forgotten PBS documentary about a rite of passage practiced by some obscure tribe that Boomers were stuck watching on some rainy Sunday or Saturday afternoon. That's just strange. This second one is hilarious.  Most people think  diamonds can be created by subjecting a lump of coal to tremendous pressure.  That's just bullshit.  That's not how diamonds are formed at all but people believe that because we saw Superman do it by squeezing a lump of coal in his Super Hand. The persistence of that idiotic idea illustrates the problem.
    Donald Trump recently tried to hold a political rally in Tulsa.  It was a serious mistake and a serious humiliation founded in completely ridiculous assumptions.  Why?  How was a decision that bad reached?  Trying to spin the facts provided the answer.
    The Trump people said that something like 8 million people had watched the rally on television and online.  They want people to believe that was some sort of victory.  Trump saw a drop in the polls as a result of the failed rally.  He obviously knew it was bad news.  It led him to say that TV ratings were the real polls.  He touted the fact 5.1 million people had tuned into some sort of "town hall" he'd held with Sean Hannity on Fox News. It was pointed out 1.8 million had watched Chris Cuomo and 3.1 million had watched Rachel Maddow instead, at the same time. He saw that as a victory.  Why?
    There are 330 million Americans.  It's reasonable to expect over 130 million of us will vote in November. 10 million people watching a TV no matter the content, is a meaningless drop in a very large bucket.  The ratings of the various "news networks" are meaningless because they are so paltry.  There is nothing of value to be divined from watching the creators of this nonsense or following those who have bothered to view it.  They seem to move further and further from objective reality on a daily basis. None of these programs has ever contributed to a coherent decision nor should they be expected to. Our leaders should know that.  At the very least, it looks like we should stop paying the cable bill for the White House.  Again; a case of the wrong boobs watching the wrong tube.
    One undeniable fact of life is this:  Unless it's currently on fire or being shot into space, television is worthless as a source of information.  Our leaders should know that and you should too.

Covid-19

    I've been doing a lot of reading about COVID-19 and other pandemics and epidemics.  Most of it I think of as "pre-COVID 19 reading" because the things  being written during this emergency are too concerned with this emergency to be objective or particularly informative.  There's nothing new in that.
     The idea of a pandemic is fascinating. How it moves thru the world-wide population.  The idea that as we develop immunity in defense,  the infection mutates to evade our immunity.  How it mutates to survive. In a way, it's natural selection at work in our bloodstream.
    It seems to take a cycle of about ten years of an infection moving thru the world population for it to mutate beyond our defensive "mutation" of  immunity to become a widerspread threat again. That's really interesting, thought of that way. As a side thought, it makes me wonder if the Mayans simply got the flu and it so burdened their economy that their society collapsed. Hopefully, we'll avoid that. Who knows?
    This part is a result of my untutored reading so, again, who knows but I think this is right. It's reasonable to compare our experiences with influenza viruses and this novel virus  because  they act the same. The noted influenzas, H1N1 and so forth are results of that survival of the fittest battle between viruses and our immune systems and novel viruses are just that, novel, new. They act and track the same.  That makes it reasonable and useful to compare them. It particularly makes it useful to look back at what we did before. What worked and what didn't and what we can expect.  That's a little grim.
    What worked and what didn't. A hundred years ago, they kept meticulous records. Just because there wasn't much they could really do doesn't mean they didn't write down what they did do. We know from their records what they tried and what gave better results. The things that have been recommended and in some cases imposed are as a result of consulting those records.  That just makes sense. It's too soon to tell how well we're doing.  Are we making sense?
    Because of the political climate in some states, certain measures were only halfheartedly embraced and then abandoned, probably too soon.  We're seeing those states begin to pay, in illness and death, for those mistakes.  Following on the heels of those premature reopenings we've seen, literally, hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, abandoning social distancing but usually wearing masks.  We'll see directly how that works out.  If there's no spike in the spread of infection it means we just wasted everybody's time and trillions of dollars.  No reasonable person is stupid enough to root for one outcome or the other.  I would, eventually, like to see other studies investigating what other spreads of infection we might have slowed or stopped along with COVID-19.  Have there been fewer head colds or cases of seasonal flu.  STDs have probably gone down (the bars are closed), things like that.
    Isn't that interesting?  Well, the truth is, most of us aren't going to die and we have to divine lessons both social and economic from these things.  One of the worst lessons is this. We're all in praise of our essential workers.  As this emergency passes, we're going to learn there is a hard-eyed difference between essential and expendable and that difference will be defined in dollars and cents. The minimum wage is going to go up in those businesses that survive and it will probably go up more than it would have otherwise.  The recession will continue.  There just isn't enough government money to make up for shuttering about a third of the economy for a quarter or longer. When times are good or normal we're fantastically productive.  Taxes are going to go up on our famous 1%.  This money has to be paid back and we'll have to go to the people with money to pay it back. Not only that, it has starkly highlighted the mountains of excess wealth and people rightly think that concentration of wealth is unreasonable, unnecessary and unfair. Just as the medical field has looked to the past for answers and solutions, the economic community is going to do the same thing.
    I don't think this is sinking in just yet.  Looking to the past is going to be harder.  The most vulnerable group is older people.  That's getting to be a significant loss of institutional memory.  One example most people can easily understand is, there's not going to be any new John Prine music but across our communities, there's going to be a lot less senior creativity, lost ideas and lost answers. Buh bye Boomer.
    I think this is just sinking in. The quarantine taught us we are together and we can act with common purpose.  We can identify a thing needing done and just do it together.  We can, within reason, bend our government in the desired direction by just sharing agreement of what that direction should be.  We're getting a feeling of 'we the people'. No capitalization. Just, we, the people.
    There's a lot of us and our goals and aspirations are as complex as you might imagine in such a large group of competing and common interests but also common values. People are getting the idea that we can be the change we want,  It will be fascinating to see how that all works out and we have a front-row seat.
    It was said when the cannons went silent in France at the 1918 Armistice, the silence was the last time the Voice of God was heard on the earth.  That's a striking idea. The voice of the Almighty expressed in silence.
    That idea, related by Kurt Vonnegut, connects to this piece of free verse.
 
and then the whole world
walked inside and shut their doors
and said we will stop it all, everything.
to protect our weaker ones
our sicker ones, our older ones.
and nothing, nothing in the history of humankind
ever felt more like love than this
-CD

    Can't we be wonderful when we listen just right?
    That connects to the silence of usually bustling city streets in mid-day.  Have we created enough silence that we can hear the voices of the Angels of Our Better Nature in ourselves?  Mabee so.

https://bit.ly/JimRetzerBook

Normal

    A lot of people are talking, kinda nostalgically, about "normal".  I don't know that combination of wage slavery, kleptocracy and inequality is something we really want to return to but there it is.  Be that as it may, that's not the subject here.
    The calls for a return to "normalcy" and the repeated use of that word in respectable publications is one of my pet peeves.  My peevishness isn't rooted in some imagined dedication to the tenets of the King's English. (Technically that should be the Queen's English but what the hell?)  My peeve is rooted in our history and who should know it in detail. "Normalcy" simply is not an English word.  The word is, normality.
    Frederick Lewis Allen was a leading American literary figure and respected historian of the first half of the twentieth century.  As long-time editor of Harper's Magazine, he was a kind of be-all, end-all in journalism circles.  Rightfully so. As a historian, he wrote the very influential and informative, "Only Yesterday".  It's very well written and I guess how interesting it is, is up to you.  I liked it just as a diversion.
    Isn't that nice of me to recommend something written over 85-90 years ago?  Like most things of that era, it is in black and white but I think you'll like it.  Now, here's the hook.  There is a difference between recommended reading and required reading.  If you're a journalist or historian or a public official concerned with making American policy, this is required reading.  If you haven't read Allen you really shouldn't be commenting because your education is incomplete, inadequate.
    "Only Yesterday" is a social and political history of the 1920s.  The first presidential campaign of that decade was,  Harding v Cox.  Harding campaigned on the slogan, "A Return to Normalcy".  That drove the eastern, intellectual establishment wild.  It set off a debate about the fact "normalcy" just isn't a word and Harding's other nostrums and platitudes were so much bullshit of equal, dubious value. The Republicans went to great lengths to prove it was, indeed, a word and cited with straight faces, ridiculous sources going back to, in one laughable case, 1857.  Lewis recounts that all with a straight face.
    Harding won the election with just over 60% of the popular vote.  It did turn out the most polite description of Harding could be, "a real piece of work".  Two confirmed affairs. One, confirmed, illegitimate daughter.  About half his cabinet went to federal prison and the other half probably should have. The one guy, Forbes, yes one of those Forbes, fled to Europe before being apprehended.  It was credibly whispered Harding was assassinated in a sort of palace coup, with the connivance of his wife because he had discussed coming clean about the various scandals with his Vice-President, Coolidge. You can imagine his wife's motives. That's pretty funny and the list of names is a roll-call of FDR's  "malefactors of great wealth".  It's also not my point.
    If you're a journalist or someone involved in public policy in the United States and you don't know the proper word and the anecdote proving the mistake, it means you haven't read Allen's book and screams your education is inadequate and your conclusions half-formed and dismissable.  It really bothers me to see that in the best of circles and on the front pages of national publications. Hopefully, now it will bother you too.

Road Trip!

    As I get older I wonder about us as younger men.  I overheard Kurt, one time, describe me as, "about a half an outlaw motherfucker".   I think he was probably the strongest man I ever met and I considered his comment to be high praise, indeed.  In a way, I still do but 35 years later, I wonder.
    I do know, had I not been that man then  I would not be this man now.  You can make of that what you will but it is true.
    I was driving from my parent's home to where I lived in Phoenix, Arizona.  I was part of the great, unmentioned migration from the Northeast Rustbelt to the Sunbelt in search of employment in the mid-1970s and '80s.  In point of fact, it was a movement of economic refugees that's never been, in my opinion, adequately explored and it won't be here.  I'd been home on vacation from the oppressive summer, desert heat.  My lifelong friend, Joe ( Kurt's older brother) decided to go back with me, mainly because he had nothing better to do.
    To ourselves and those who knew us we were different guys but to the casual, world at large we were pretty much the same guy.  Early thirties, working-class, denim-clad, lean, long-haired, full beards.  Forty years later, kinda scruffy, sorta rough lookin guys. We couldn't have been too bad, we always had good looking girlfriends.  I'm not telling those stories either. Some of them are pretty funny but not today.
    We were serious about the drive.  It would seem scandalous now but we only had a half bag of reefer which we barely touched and only drank 3/4 of a case of beer between us on the 44-hour trip.  The reefer was awful which set off an argument between me and Joe that would go on, half-seriously for a decade. I wanted to kick the guy's ass who had ripped us off.  Joe was like. Oh forget it, he's been a life-long friend.  It was 20 years before I would even speak to the guy again, over 10 dollars.  Joe was right but I don't think I missed anything.
    Serious. To that end, I showed up at Joe's parent's house to pick him up for the trip at about 5:15 in the morning. He was ready and loaded his suitcase and got in.
    Then he said, " Oh wait, I forgot something."  and went back in the house.  After a minute he came back out with a brown paper bag and tossed it in the back seat and off we went. I didn't ask.  It was too early in the morning to care.
     Here's something you don't see anymore but 40 years ago was a commonplace.  On long car trips, the little kids used to just bounce around the back seat and entertain themselves and often entertain the occupants of the cars behind them on the highway with little, improvised Punch and Judy shows.
     Sometime that afternoon or maybe the next afternoon we were following such a family on the interstate. Joe gave that little chuckle he had and reached over the seat for the forgotten paper bag. He withdrew a Grover, from Sesame Street,  hand-puppet he'd brought just for the occasion. 

    I wish I smiled like that more often now.

    Ya see, Joe was wrong.  He did have something better to do and he was doing it.
 

Wear No Collar, Baby!

    The title is just a dumb joke. Collars are important.
    We talk about blue-collar and white-collar jobs.  That's not right. When I started to work in residential construction I noticed there were these big stacks of pretty heavy plywood that had to be moved from one place to another.  The guys with collars on their shirts were telling the guys in T-shirts where to hump that shit.  About two weeks and a couple hundred sheets of plywood into my eventual 35-year career, I went to Goodwill and bought a bunch of second-hand golf shirts for about 2 bucks apiece. You know, little alligators and such.  People quit telling me what to do.  Except for the fact I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground that was pretty cool. I did have the brains to ask what to do and before long I progressed and I learned what to do with a minimum of lugging heavy stuff.  It's not a new idea.  It was called                   'dress for success'  but I don't think people realized it could be applied at that level.
    So, it's not blue-collar and white-collar.  It's golf shirts and T-shirts.  The Suits are in a world of their own.  I've been thanked several times by guys I gave that advice about golf shirts.
    Here's another piece of advice you'll thank me for.  About once a year or every two years you'll have to attend some function that requires an actual suit.  Go to Goodwill, blow 40 bucks and buy a decent one.  I call it the wedding, funeral, goin to court suit but there are Holiday get-togethers and such for any job and it's a good idea to clean up.  Who knows?  You might actually meet someone who expects you to attend church.  You should probably get stoned first but you should definitely dress up for church.
    About the title.  That's an out of context quote from " Twelve Dreams of  Doctor Sardonicus" by Spirit. You should listen to that every few days just to keep your mind right.