“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.” —Hermann Hesse
Despite our respite from the summer heat in Chicago last week, my energy level is is way below any sort of normal. Here in Tucson we’ve surpassed all previous recorded heat records with fifteen 110+ degree days. I have acquaintances who just LOVE the summer heat and CAN’T WAIT for it. Bah…
June was cooler than normal and dry enough that we could open the house and use the evaporative cooler 24/7. I’m thankful we also have air conditioning but the house has remained sealed up since early July and we’re pushing our unit to its limit. It’s an 18 year old Rheem that kicks ass, and I’ve only had to change out capacitors one time a couple years ago when two of them bit the big one. Ace Hardware, right around the corner, had both with a total expenditure of 47 bones. Yes, they take bones at Ace.
Just a few mentions of Wackiness in the News today as this week has been slammed with multiple activities.
1.
Well, damn…
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Good ol’ Mike Pence. He saved our democracy from the orangeman, right? As he’s seeking higher office, on Wednesday he released an economic proposal to tackle high inflation that includes cutting government programs, the Environmental Protection Agency and President Joe Biden’s incentives aimed at curbing impacts of climate change.
Yes, let’s keep focusing on ignoring climate change. July has been the hottest month on Earth since scientists have kept records, and the Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts. Prof Peter Ditlevsen, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark said “I think we should be very worried. This would be a very, very large change. The Amoc has not been shut off for 12,000 years.” Yes, Mike, great idea ignoring reality.
And the part about ‘tackling’ high inflation: In half of the U.S. states, job creation is strong and unemployment is at or near 50-year lows, while lowering inflation rates has helped U.S. consumer confidence to rise to its highest level in two years (an important marker because consumer spending makes up about 70% of U.S. economic activity). And with Biden’s policies in place, there’s been a surge in manufacturing construction across the country thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which invests in roads, bridges, and other “hard” infrastructure projects; the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in addressing climate change; and the CHIPS and Science Act, which invests in science and semiconductor chip manufacturing. During the 2010s, manufacturing construction generally held at about $50–80 billion a year. Now it is at $189 billion, with private investment following the government investment. And yes, Mike, let’s fix this…Republicans got nothin’ except a bone to pick with Hunter Biden, probably justified. Joe can’t help that his son is missing a few cogs.
Good ol’ Mike is also calling for elimination of the Education Department and pushed for reforms to entitlement programs including Social Security. Yep, Social Security is such an unpopular program, let’s just 86 it. He babbled on saying “Government cannot spend its way to prosperity, and yet Joe Biden is set on dismantling our once great economy and hurting families who can no longer afford food or find a good paying job. My top economic priority will be to renew American prosperity by cutting wasteful government spending, restoring the value of the dollar, building resilient supply chains, and restoring American energy independence.”
I only loved Bizarro World in Superman comics…
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And on a more global scale, at a four-day economic summit in India of the G20, the commitment to phase down fossil fuels or to increase the development of renewable energy came to a screeching halt due to the opposition of several major fossil fuel-producing nations (Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, South Africa and Indonesia). Jennifer Granholm, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, expressed disappointment following the failed deals. “To truly revolutionize our energy sectors, we must deploy renewable energy technology at scale—doing so will help solve the hardest energy access and cost challenges,” she said in her speech to delegates. “As a mark of our ambition and a signal to the world, we should all be able to support a collective tripling of renewable energy deployment.”
4.
I’ve been reading Canadian author Robertson Davies off and on for many years. I just finished reading his final work, The Cunning Man, from 1994, published shortly before his death in 1995 at 82 years of age. His novels were written in three sets of complete trilogies; The Salterton Trilogy from the 1950s, The Deptford Trilogy from the 1970s, and The Cornish Trilogy from the 1980s. His fourth trilogy was to be The Toronto Trilogy from the 1990s but only two were completed before his death.
The Cunning Man is a portrait of an elderly man recounting his life and friendships from his college years forward. His writing can be a bit ponderous and tedious at times but I always seem to pull some gems from reading his work. Here are a few:
Colbourne College was an admirable school, but of course that does not mean that it was a comfortable, agreeable place; the most strenuous efforts of the most committed educationalists in the years since my boyhood have been quite unable to make a school into anything but a school, which is to say a jail with educational opportunities. Schools, since their beginning, have been devised to keep children out of their parents’ way, and in our time they have the added economic duty of keeping able-bodied young folk off the labour market. But they are so organized that only the most inveterate blockheads can enter at the bottom and come out at the top without having learned a few things.
At Colbourne we learned not only the set curriculum, but also the intricate politics of community life, how to behave toward our elders and presumed betters, and a certain sophistication, shallow but useful. We learned how to bend, but not break. We learned to take the rough with the smooth. We learned not to whine or lay claim to privileges which we were not able to carry successfully. We found, and adapted to, what was probably going to be our place in the world. And in the midst of all this we learned a high degree of cunning in concealing what our true nature might be. You could be an artist, or an aesthete, a philosopher, a fascist, or a con-man at Colbourne, and only a few people would guess your secret.
The belly-achers who hated school are usually bores, but the larger group who saw nothing much in school except as a background to growing up, are to be greatly pitied, for they began early lives crippled by incomprehension, which might, long afterward, bring them into my consulting room, complaining of vague, but to me revealing, ailments.
I was rather inclined to despise the Funny Papers, as they were then called; but Brocky was an avid reader, never missing a day with Mutt and Jeff, or Maggie and Jiggs, Barney Google and Andy Gump. He delighted in the Falstaffian braggings of Major Hoople, and occasionally spoke in what he imaged was the Major’s voice.
“If you’re too fine for the funnies, you’re too fine for life,” he would say. “They show you what the people are thinking who never read a book, never hear a sermon, and forget to vote. Does that make them worthless? Not on your life. The funnies give you the dreams and the opinions of l’homme moyen sensuel, and if you want to be a politician, for instance, that’s the place to start. Understand the funnies, and you’ve made a good beginning on understanding mankind.”
One day he took me to the headquarters of his father’s newspaper, and there, after a brief colloquy with a sub-editor, he showed me the page-sized pink cardboard forms, embossed with what would be the funnies, when the sheets had been through the stereotyping machine, which would cast them in printer’s metal.
“Here they are, you see. A full week’s issue of hilarity and hard-bitten street philosophy on every one of these sheets. That are not called stereotypes for nothing; they embody what a majority of people believe, or accept as self-evident. They make every reader feel superior to what he can recognize as the stupidity or folly of somebody else. Whenever Mutt crowns Jeff with a spittoon, a million simple minds have a thrill of triumph. When Maggie hits Jiggs with the rolling-pin and a balloon reading ‘Ka-Pow!’ Springs out of his head, a million painfully endured marriages are given a momentary discharge of tension. And it’s all funny, you see. That’s what you have to bear in mind. What might be tragedy if Sophocles got hold of it, is funny in the four or five daily frames of the funnies. While the funnies live, Aristophanes is never quite dead.”
When irony first makes itself known in a young man’s life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle. Of course I had been aware of irony in its superficial form, because Brocky made great use of it; but he was not a master, a subtle and gentle employer of mockery in almost every aspect of life, as was Dwyer; it was something Brocky had learned, not flesh of his flesh. Later, when I thought I had become wiser, I tried to find out what irony really is, and discovered that some ancient writer on poetry had spoken of “Ironia, which we call the drye mock,” and I cannot think of a better term for it: the drye mock. Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of a cool and illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious. He scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit’s desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.
Already a legend was growing up around me. It was suggested that I used unconventional methods and there is nothing a professional group mistrusts so nervously as it does anything that appears unconventional, and that has not been thoroughly written up in the journals. It may be quackery. Worse still, it may be effective. And if it is both quackery and effective it is utterly hateful.
Admirable fellow as Spengler was (foreseeing the disastrous consequences of National Socialism in Germany, and standing up bravely for the Jews) I could not tag along after his Prussian insistence on austerity. As it appeared to me, a practicing physician, life would provide all the discomfort anybody needed, without making a principle of it. I would, so far as possible, enjoy old age.
That’s all I can muster this week…stay hydrated!
And now…
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I recently heard (from Bandy Lee) that for many decades there has been measurably more violence in this country during Republican administrations than in Democratic ones.