Friday Homestead Dispatch

Disparate Dangling Daffodils

1.
I thought I’d kick off today’s post with a little personal horn-blowing, as it were. My band, The Carnivaleros, had a twenty-year run in Tucson before I called it a day a year ago. But Susan Holden approached me about a possible ‘reunion’ date this fall, I reached out to the gang, and all were enthused to get back on stage. Along with me on accordion and vocals, we’ll have Karl Hoffmann on bass and vocals, Joe Fanning on electric and acoustic guitars, baritone, and mandolin, Björgvin Benediktsson on acoustic guitar and vocals, and Les Merrihew on drums.

And the icing on the cake will be the addition of a horn section with Carla Brownlee on saxes (bari, tenor, alto), Anita Hershey on trumpet, and Tony Rosano on trombone. Damn, this gonna be fun!

Save the date! Saturday, November 26 (Thanksgiving weekend), Congress Hotel Plaza. Details forthcoming but pop it on your calendar now!!

And here’s a taste of what you’ll hear that night…Justified Fitting End from the CD Tallsome Tales with horn arrangements by Greg Mackender.

In the meantime, the Morpholinos will be back at Monterey Court, Thursday, August 25 for our ‘Last Thursday Residency’ gig. 6:30-9pm!

2.
I got my copy of Leslie Caldera’s Homage to John Evans last May and just now getting around to sharing with you. Evans was known for his collage work as well as his involvement in the international Mail Art underground movement. And I know Leslie through a mutual Tucson friend, Michael Hyatt, who is also a multi-talented artist.

It’s a 40 page, hard cover book of Caldera’s collages made from a bag of material he received from John’s widow, Margret. You can order your copy by email at info@redfoxpress.com. Thanks, Leslie….great work!

3.
I’ve wondered over the years why GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is the main arbiter of how we are doing as a country. If you only listen to and read mainstream news sources, that seems to be the case. You’ve heard them, sentences uttered like Gross Domestic Product fell 0.9% at an annualized pace for the period, according to the advance estimate. That follows a 1.6% decline in the first quarter and was worse than the Dow Jones estimate for a gain of 0.3%. And, of course, you’re thinking Now I completely understand how we’re doing as a country.

Senator Robert Kennedy famously said, “GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” GDP consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports, and it’s been the dominant metric in economics for the last century.

Joseph Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, says in a detailed and interesting article in Scientific American, “Governments can fail if this number falls—and so, not surprisingly, governments strive to make it climb. But striving to grow GDP is not the same as ensuring the well-being of a society.”

Starting over a decade ago, Stiglitz, working alongside the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—a think tank that serves 38 advanced countries—concluded the GDP should be dethroned. He says, The OECD has adopted the approach in its Better Life Initiative, which recommends 11 indicators—and provides citizens with a way to weigh these for their own country, relative to others, to generate an index that measures their performance on the things they care about. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), traditionally strong advocates of GDP thinking, are now also paying attention to environment, inequality and sustainability of the economy.

In that same article he goes on to say, A good indicator of the true health of an economy is the health of its citizens. A decline in life expectancy, even for a part of the population, should be worrying, whatever is happening to GDP. And it is important to know if, even as GDP is going up, so, too, is pollution—whether it is emissions of greenhouse gases or particulates in the air. That means growth is not environmentally sustainable.

To tie this in with my recent reading of The Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, as quoted a bit earlier this month, he addresses the GDP quite extensively:

Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on.
Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include:
the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number;
the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI);
the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions;
the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated);
the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability;
the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and few other countries;
and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

All of these indexes are attempts to portray civilization in our time using the terms of the hegemonic discourse, which is to say economics, often in the attempt to make a judo-like transformation of the discipline of economics itself, altering it o make it more human, more adjusted to the biosphere, and so on. Not a bad impulse!

But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.

4.
Hey Roger, check out my nude wife! Man, is she nude or what? Uhhhhh…

…and the bailiff…!

5.
The Orange man’s followers will never be able to revel in the opulence of said potentate but mysteriously and insistently latch on to the man as if a god. They will never live in a home that’s been named, unless it’s something like Bubba-u-Topia.

Did you know that the autocrat learned about Mar-a-Lago after unsuccessfully trying to purchase and combine two apartments in Palm Beach for his family? He offered the Post family $15 million for it, but they rejected it. Trump then purchased the land between Mar-a-Lago and the ocean from Jack C. Massey, the former owner of KFC, for $2 million, stating he intended to build a home that would block Mar-a-Lago's beach view. The threat caused interest in the property to decline, and Trump ended up getting the property for $7 million in 1985. Different sources have put the combined total cost of the purchase at around $10 million. $20 million had been the minimum acceptable bid and the interior furnishings were appraised at $8 million.

What a guy...

6.
One more item…are any of you Tucsonans wondering ‘Wow, that darn bipartisan infrastructure plan that the Democratic President pushed through and made law is crazy good, but too bad I don’t benefit from it way out here in the wild west!’

Well, you ornery critter, the Tucson Sentinel reported that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg HIMSELF paid a visit to Tucson yesterday to announce a $25 million project to replace the 22nd Street bridge over Aviation Parkway and the Union Pacific Railroad. Buttigieg touted the project as one of the first major investments to come out of the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed last November. The work will include replacing the bridge with a stronger, wider span, and constructing a second bridge dedicated to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Great news! I drive over this 1960s bridge quite often. Buttigieg said the current bridge “forces trucks, transit buses, school buses, emergency vehicles to detour through Kino Parkway and the Barraza-Aviation Parkway. That means kids losing time everyday on their way to school, people losing sleep, parents heading to work on Sun Tran buses — spending up to 30 minutes more than if the bridge were in good working order.” Our own Mayor Regina Romero said "This investment will help us improve the quality of life for Tucson residents who have lived with safety risks, heavy treks through their neighborhoods, few options for non-motorized travel and separation from them to the University of Arizona and Downtown Tucson. This project takes a 1960s-era mindset of how to move vehicles and brings it to the 21st century."

Living up to our expectations, RNC spokesman Ben Petersen said in an email before the event, "Biden and Buttigieg’s attempt to bail out Mark Kelly will fail. Biden bureaucrat Pete Buttigieg’s campaign stops are a slap in the face to hardworking Arizonans after Democrat Mark Kelly just voted" to pass the inflation-targeting bill that had no Republican support.

Hmmm, isn’t the replacement of a giant, crumbling, load-bearing bridge a good thing? JUST. VOTE. BLUE.

And now…