Abandon Mythology

I’m discovering that not only does middle-age bring with it a touch of dignity and a smattering of wisdom, it also provides a disheartening number of lessons in humility as I continually find new things I can no longer do as well as I once could, if I can do them at all any more. I now fully understand the metaphor “over the hill.” It’s not just another way of saying you are getting older. There’s a definite, unpleasant  feeling of acceleration on the other side of that hill.

My most recent ”not the man I used to be” moment stems from the one hundred twenty-some bundles of shingles stacked on my roof. I should be up there nailing them down right now, but instead I’m hiding out in the bunker working on my website. A pitiful and transparent decision to put off doing something I used to be good at — and even to some degree enjoy — in favor of doing something I find mind-numbingly boring. Sigh.

But I have arrived at some level of accomplishment today. After many hours of work (and some outright thievery), I have put together the beginnings of a functional WordPress template. I have a lot more to do, but at least it’s usable now. My plan is to bring back the old look from before it blew up on me, only a little wider (kind of like it’s owner) and with a few more bells and whistles.

For now I’m happy to have my Penrose tiling banner back. My next task will be dressing up the sidebar, maybe get my buttons back. It’s tedious stuff, but it beats falling off the damn roof.

Occasionally, all the hours I spend blundering around the intertoobz sifting for nuggets pays off with something worthy of a place in my sidebar. Today I discovered Pharyngula, the science blog of biologist PZ Meyers. The tagline reads: Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal. Sounds like my kind of place. I particularly enjoyed this video.

It seems the industry responsible for redefining “bonus” to mean compensation deferred for the purpose of avoiding income taxes has so embarassed it’s toadies in Washington that Congress is making noises about creating a harsh, punitive new tax aimed specifically at those bonuses.

The media has been beating this AIG stuff to death, and of course I’m all over it on account of my recent studies on growth. It turns out that, contrary to claims promulgated by the right-wing noise-machine, it wasn’t poor, inner-city darkies that knocked the economy on it’s ass; it was people like these turds floating to the top of the AIG bowl.

They sold tons of absolute shit to the entire world, raking in huge “profits” along the way, and now, amidst the rubble, they see hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded bailout money as simply a reason to continue the looting.

Still, my guess would be it will never actually happen. This is one of those bills that disappears into a  Senate committee and just fades away.

Today my world got a little bit smaller and a lot less pleasant. A good man, a friend, and up until a few months ago my next-door neighbor, took his own life. Right now I’m drunk and angry and so very sad. I could just as easily cry or punch someone — pretty much anyone — in the face.

Bern was a soft-spoken Brit with a wicked sense of humor. I liked him from the moment I met him when he knocked on my door one night 5 or 6 years ago. He was thinking about building a house on the lot next door and needed some help finding the property lines in the dark with a flashlight. It made me laugh, and when he came back a day or so later with an empty milk jug wanting to see how fast he could fill it from my faucet in order to calculate the neighborhood’s water pressure, I knew we were going to be neighbors.

Those were the first of many enjoyable conversations. Bern was never boring, and I soon discovered that he and I were like-minded in many ways. He was the only other atheist I knew. The first time the subject came up between us, he stated flatly “Religion is for people who have no hope.” His opinion of our last preznit was worse than mine, and in our neighborhood, he and I were an island of liberalism in a sea of conservatism. Until today I had considered him one of the most stable, grounded people I know.

His family life was another story. The truth is, Bern married poorly. There’s just no other way to say it. He once told me his wife had been diagnosed as bipolar. I have other, far less clinical or kind words for what she is, but I’ll save them for saying to her face. Bern suffered for many years in a marriage to a woman so lazy she would telephone her house from her own front porch to have one of the four equally ungrateful children she bore him bring her another soda. Needless to say, Bern did all the cooking, cleaning and laundry as well as provide the income for his family. He was the only one of the whole bunch that I and most of our neighbors actually liked.

We all thought things were going to get better for Bern after he finally divorced his useless wife, bought her a house and moved her, along with most of the kids, into it. But for reasons I still don’t fully understand, he immediately replaced them with 3 or 4 post-adolescent boys along with several noisy, over-aspirated Hondas and various hangers-on. They proceeded to trash Bern’s house, a couple of his cars, and his reputation with his neighbors. We all learned just how weak-willed he was when, rather than give these losers the boot, he bought a third house with a larger lot and an outbuilding and moved the whole mess there, placing the house next door up for sale in the middle of the worst housing market in a couple of decades.

So I don’t know what finally pushed Bern past his limits. Somehow I don’t think it was the three mortgages and assortment of users milking him dry. Whatever it was, he knew as well as I do that there’s no life after this one, and still he decided he’d had enough. I have to respect that. I just wish he had called me to talk it over a little first. Bern was considerate of others to the end. He wrapped a towel around his head and climbed in the shower to avoid making too big a mess. Word around the neighborhood is he left a note. I hope he didn’t apologize. I hope it just said Fuck The World.

Uncharacteristically, and reluctantly, I volunteered to act as chaperone for my youngest daughter and the rest of her 8th grade class on a field trip to the Holocaust Museum at the Jewish Federation of St. Louis today. Given my distaste for all things religious in nature and a general disinclination toward group activities, I fully expected to hate every minute of it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find I was not miserable. In fact, I’m certain that I appreciated the experience a good deal more than the gaggle of 13-year-olds I was accompanying.

Our visit consisted of a guided tour of the museum followed by a speech from a local area survivor of the holocaust. The displays, arranged chronologically, detailed the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party and the propaganda campaign that gradually escalated from state-sponsored racism and scapegoating of Jews and other “inferior” peoples to full-blown genocide. For me, it was an interesting history refresher. For the kids, it was — literally — a yawner.

Near the end of the tour, I was reading a wall plaque description of the last British troops pulling out of what had been Palestine in 1948, leaving behind the new state of Israel, upon which five Arab countries immediately declared war and at the exact same moment our tour guide said “If it had not been for the holocaust, there would be no state of Israel. It would not have been established.”

From a weird little coincidence of timing, I suddenly had a better grasp of that moment in history. For those original holocaust survivors settling in Israel, it must have felt like a continuation of the same hatred they had so recently experienced at the hands of the Nazis. I came away with, perhaps, a little better understanding of what motivates today’s militant Judaism.

The guest speaker, a nice little man in his 80s, told the story of his childhood in Germany, seeing his country become increasingly hostile, seeing his father taken away to die in a work camp, leaving his mother behind and escaping to the US only to return a few years later as part of the US Army Airborne invasion. It took him 63 years to learn the particulars of his mother’s death in a concentration camp.

His was an impressive story, and as our tour guide pointed out to his mostly-bored audience of young people, they will be the last generation to hear these accounts from the survivors themselves. They seemed largely unimpressed with that fact. I, on the other hand, would have liked to have continued the brief conversation I began with this remarkable man after his of speech, but time and teachers would not allow it.

As I was waiting to board the school bus for the trip home, I saw him get into a nice Volvo parked in the handicapped spot closest to the building. He gave me a little wave as he drove away. I climbed onto a bus full of iPods, cell phones and oblivious teenagers.

I’ve been too busy to blog lately, and truth be told, I haven’t had much to say. I’m still spending a lot of my spare time reading everything I can find on our economic crisis, and thanks to the intertoobz, that’s a lot of material. I’ve read everyone from world-renowned economists and financial wizards to Joe Sixpack letters to the editor of my local newspaper and anonymous bloggers like myself.

The opinions I have gleaned on the current state of our economy are fairly uniform, ranging generally from dire to disastrous. There is no longer any denial or argument that the situation is indeed serious; in fact a common theme running through everything I’ve read is an expectation of conditions worsening. I get a feeling of a national, even international, holding of the breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It seems everyone knows we have yet to see the bottom. Many experts are referring to this phenomenon as a crisis of confidence, as if it is something that can be remedied through positive thinking, but I see it more as a universal acceptance of the now-obvious ramifications of unchecked greed. 

A nation of debtors, both individually and collectively, relying on a financial system based on debt, reaping “profits” from that debt by investing and re-investing in that same debt in a bizarre financial game of musical chairs is waking up to the fact that the music has stopped and the repo man took the chairs.

For a good example of the wretched excess that got us here check out this New York Times article on the insurance company, AIG. Here’s one little nugget that caught my eye:

Because of the way A.I.G. wrote its swaps, and because the company had a double-A credit rating at the time, it did not have to put up collateral to assure its customers that it would be able to pay on the insurance if necessary.

That’s right. It seems there’s a lot more profit in selling a product you never intend to deliver. I hope the Girls Scouts bring my cookies before they get wind of this novel approach. I’m jonesing for a box of Samoas.