Pure Schmaltz

Coffee, Tea or We?

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-08-31T10:22:09-04:00

I could be living a hundred years ago without changing a single spot.

When the founding fathers penned our Constitution, they began simply but profoundly with “We the people.”... Their aspiration seems clear.

While prior generations squabbled between us and them, this founding one would navigate a different path. But as soon as General Washington’s terms were completed, even the founding fathers back-slid a bit.

By 1910 we’d experienced a succession of presidents who might be described as representing either us or them.... Up against the might and treasury of a tightly-collusive gentry, most of what the Progressives proposed, such as equal pay for equal work, was summarily struck down as illegal by our (or was it their?) Supreme Court.

Then, the ‘ruling class’ used their considerable wealth to swamp the media with dire predictions, sounding every bit like brimstone-familiar New England preachers, and scaring the stained and patched pants off workers who thought maybe fifteen hour days, if they really were an expression of God’s will, might not be so bad.

After the Panics of 1893 and 1901, regular working people were literally hungry for more than social justice and President Wilson promoted a progressive agenda, strongly supported by the emerging college-educated class. The Great War stifled most of these initiatives and they, the people, put their stomachs on hold for the duration.

During the war, the media blitz started equating progressivism with Communism, and the gentry won.... They’re still clamoring for a return to ‘traditional values,’ the oldest scam in the book.

Mary Parker Follett, a writer at the time, suggested, “Whenever anyone offers you a choice between this and that, choose a third way.”

Telephoney-Part Two

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-08-14T07:27:52-04:00

Shopping for a new kidney couldn't help but seem refreshing in comparison.

The modern cell phone 'provider' offers 'plans' comprised of various combinations of damned whatever you do choices, and an array of actual telephones which, by the way, sometimes even involve telephony, though they much more prominently feature MP3 player, camera, GPS, and web-accessing technologies. Even the lowliest offerings tout ring tones more than usability, and the highest-end feature a dizzying library of 'apps,' which seem to be little more than opportunities to turn the ...ahem...... Two years before this mast seems most common because, as the folksy CEO of Sprint explained in a recent interview, the modern cell phone is a six or seven hundred dollar investment, and no one wants to pay for these machines up-front, so the cell 'provider' needs the indenture of a two year contract, with heavy penalties for early cancellation, to even hope to turn a profit.... Who could help but imagine that the day after I sign, the company will declare moot the technology I've just committed to carry for fourteen dog years.

Anyway, my wife continues to be after me to 'upgrade' my phone.... So I could have any phone I want as long as it works on Verison's network.

So I spent some time this week, attitude bucked up by a recent success, browsing through their 'offerings.'... True, the ringer's intermittent, sometimes mysteriously turning off seemingly all by itself, just before an important call comes in. I suspect that with more diligent study, I might resolve this small mystery.

I might try to try out some newer model, use it for a week to see how it treats me before agreeing to any renewed indenture, but then I might not. Amy will undoubtedly encourage me to shift technologies the next time I fail to get her urgent call, and we're both certain that this will happen again and again and again.

Telephoney-Part One

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-08-02T18:27:01-04:00

Or maybe that's Telephoney's history with me.

My current phone is a bit more than two years old, a pocketknife-sized Samsung Jazz, so old now that Google can't find any evidence that it ever existed.... If I was Samsung, I'd deny any association to the damned thing, too.

I acquired it at the same time Amy got her first Blackberry, which is a machine so damned complicated that I still can't pick up an incoming call on it for her.... Great for some but they forgot to provide access for the rest of us.

My littler phone is just marginally better, but only because I have figured out how to pick up incoming calls, usually.... The day that I was finally allowed (read: forced) by law to purchase my own phone and choose my own provider was a day that lives in infamy for me. Sure the Telephoney Industry complained about it with all the sincerity of any crocodile, but for me, this 'freedom' positioned me squarely in the crosshairs of an industrial machine bent on humiliating me.... So I took my newly found freedom and bought a phone that weighed a whole lot less and did pretty much the the same stuff as my dial phone, though much less reliably. And that phone only lasted barely ten years before I was trotting out to another 'phone store' again to be mystified by the multiple lack of choices offered me.

No, I did not want a phone with a brain, as I was still adjusting to the unvalidated assertion that I might possess a brain.

Simple Wisdom

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-06-14T17:00:11-04:00

The inquiries were worth the effort anyway.

Perhaps the purpose of these inquires was never as I envisioned—to find that definitive answer—but to reassure myself that I had not overlooked another's scholarship and jumped to some hasty conclusion.... And I admit to taking respite on the occasional flimsy lilly pad, my weight swamping the damned thing, my sleeplessness eventually driving me back into the deep chilling water to ask again and then again.

But I was praying to a false God, worshiping a moldy idol, asking for the wrong prayers to be answered.... They no more than I understood why this tar baby refused to be released, though they, unlike I, had a lot more reasons why it should have been a simple matter of a tweak here, a temporary reassignment there, and everything would resolve just as it should have resolved in the first place. And no reasons why it should not.

And I entered—probably because it was in my self-esteem's best interest to believe it so—believing that I could certainly right this slightly capsized vessel.... Cold, wet, thankful to be alive and wary of any opportunity to leave solid ground again.

But it was heady stuff, this blind navigation, this frenzied search for the presumed missing keys. I didn't know then and barely accept now that no one in the history of the world had ever managed to discover those presumed lost keys because they were not lost but had never been forged.... My enthusiasm was even infectious for a time, until it was no longer.

...to be continued ...

Windsock Nation

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-05-12T09:41:58-04:00

We’ve become a windsock nation.

This practice is not all bad, though it has significantly shifted the political climate. The original framers of the constitution envisioned a government run by elected representatives, people governing according to their own judgment.... We see long-standing policies right-face or left-face or even pivot backwards, promoted by nothing more permanent than a slight shift in the wind.

When a Harvard University researcher interviewed some of the world’s most successful designers, the results were clear.... Nobody could know, that’s why the framers put their trust in character and judgment, not popular opinion.

I consider it to be my civic duty to lie to pollsters.... When they ask a twisted question, I ask them what the question means, how others have answered, what use my response will be put to....

Who do my representatives think they are, sniffing the wind instead of their judgment?...

A government trying to satisfy all the electorate all the time is no government at all.

The Tickle Point (continued)

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-04-25T06:32:25-04:00

Rather like feathers.

This was a meeting of the club of people who never join clubs, so many felt isolated, misunderstood, out of community.... We'd been charged with creating a list of bullet points and a visual, but MY table blew off the facilitator's direction, in favor of something more memorable. Besides, no one at OUR table could draw, so I volunteered.

I went to the front and explained that our dialogue had not yielded handy bullet points.... And there we were, mere feathers blown around by the wind, facing a fulcrum with the big hairy problems of the world on one side, a pin feather trying to counter-balance with critical mass to achieve some tipping point.

We decided that instead of trying to achieve critical mass to affect a tipping, it might be wiser to find that point along the fulcrum where the feather might achieve some tickle; the Tickle Point. BIG programs to combat BIG problems almost never succeed, because they are often BIG DUMB actions which raise no intelligent response from the offending system. But a tickle can wake up the system just enough so that it becomes just a little more aware of the stupid stuff it's doing, so more mindful adaptation, even evolution is possible.

Statesmanship

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-03-24T16:57:09-04:00

I cannot describe in the limited time I have what a difference he has made--the fact we are here debating, finally, the last piece of this legislative effort to give the Americans what they have sought for more than a century, and that is the basic right to health care.

I always found it somewhat ironic in a way that we in this country provide for those accused of criminal offenses the right to a lawyer, the right to an attorney.... Henceforth, in the years to come, they can mark the calendar date of March 23, 2010, when for the first time in American history an American President signed into law a bill that will provide Americans the opportunity to live free from the fear that they or their loved ones will be

faced with a health care crisis and they will not have the capacity, without bankrupting themselves or watching a loved one lose their life or become chronically or permanently ill or sick because they could not afford it, to see a doctor.

I rise today on this very historic day to thank my friend from Montana, to thank the terrific staff of the Finance Committee, to thank the members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by my great pal and friend Ted Kennedy for so many years.... How many other children in this city or across America that night had parents sitting around, sleepless, wondering whether that child was going to get better, knowing they were getting more dehydrated and putting them at great risk of spiraling down, putting them at greater and greater risks, not knowing what to do, not having the resources to do it, not having that kind of health care, not having the money and insurance to pay for it, and wondering when they were going to show up in the emergency room to take care of that child. That goes on every single day in America, in the United States of America, in the 21th century.

This bill does not solve all of those problems, but the idea that we can lift the burden of fear from those families, those people who work hard--remember, a majority of all the bankruptcies last year occurred because of a health care crisis in that family, and a majority of those people who went bankrupt because of a health care crisis had health insurance.... It was Democrats and Republicans who tried to get this done.

What this effort represents is proof that while progress is not easy, neither

is it impossible, and that, maybe more than anything else, is important about what we saw today.

As President Obama said, we didn't come here to the Senate, to the Congress of the United States to fear the future; we came here to try to shape it.... But, Mr. President, I hope when we again find ourselves at moments of great national import--and we will and we are--we can look back not at the polls or the petty partisan fights that too often contaminate our debates and that always seem to stand in the way of progress, but rather at the fact we rose above them and we acted--and we acted, Mr. President.

We have a chance again to act this evening or tomorrow, as soon as this process comes to an end, by voting up or down on the legislation designed to make this good law even a better one.... That is not what we are sent here to do.

That is all you are going to witness, unfortunately, Mr. President, if this goes on for a protracted basis over the next couple of days--one cute little amendment after the other to see if it can embarrass colleagues to vote on something that may cause people to worry about their sense of sanity in all of this.

Eat To Excess

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-02-23T11:03:25-05:00

For a week or two in late May, the short sockeye salmon season intersects with the asparagus, morel, and the Walla Walla salad onion harvest.... Aside from eating to excess only whatever’s in season, I’m picky about what of whatever’s in season I’m going to gorge on.

I like my eat to excess rule because it’s a positive goal.... So we eat to excess.

By buffering this natural tendency with a little caveat, I’ve managed to avoid the common afflictions of the glutton so far. I could interpret this rule as carte blanche to eat Little Debbie Cakes until I burst, except Little Debbie Cakes don’t have a season....

Meat, bread, dry beans, and butter are not seasonals, and therefore excluded from my list of foods to eat to excess.... If we gather to celebrate, we might as well celebrate the harvest, and not the wonders of deep freezing technology.

Sure, I’m a pig.... And eat an awfully lot of that.

Barely Legal Seafood

david@projectcommunity.com — 2010-01-23T10:42:18-05:00

Lemon Butter Sauce is a euphemism for lousy quality in the industrial food service industry, and if you hanker to meet industrial food service with all of its euphemisms, you could not do better than to plan a visit to Legal Seafood.... Full disclosure, probably to be mandated by some future judicial ruling, will doubtless require a slight name change to Barely Legal Seafood.

I ordered the Woodfired Seafood Combo, breaking a personal rule to avoid ordering anything advertised as a combo, but it was late and it seemed the simplest alternative. The wedge salad was fine.

The sword, tuna, and Atlantic salmon came guarded by shrimp and scallops "grilled" employing a remarkable method which apparently infuses in lemon butter sauce on a wood grill.... These babies drooled all over the fish, which itself seemed to have been wood-fired in lemon butter sauce, and were not simply well-done, but well past retirement age.

Finish the presentation with steamed broccoli in poochichi sauce (an old Filipino favorite I didn't know anyone in this country even knew how to make) and a thrice-baked potato that looked as if it had survived a bar fight and was on the lam from a restraining order.

Okay, I ate it anyway.... She had the lobster, which she reported as serviceable, served on a bed of cold, sandy clams and dehydrated mussels with a small hunk of 'not bad' corn on the cob and what looked like a wood fired weenie, also probably infused with Lemon Butter Sauce.... The weenie went back with the sandy shellfish.

We will not go back.

I'd eaten at Legal Seafood in Boston before it was a chain, and liked it fine.... I am confident only that the food is now cost-effective, the operation profitable, and the small crimes committed with each course, Legal, though barely.

A Cook's Book

david@projectcommunity.com — 2009-12-10T12:13:23-05:00

I also learned that I have a naturally decent palate and an eye for unusually yummy combinations.

She worked at fast forward speed, a skill she’d had drilled into her throughout her professional career.... If you’ve ever worked in a professional kitchen, you’d recognize that it has about as much in common with your kitchen as a cruise ship has with a toy boat.... We don’t want tuna with good taste, but are satisfied with tuna that tastes good enough.

That said, I have a bookshelf filled with cookbooks, though I rarely even try to follow their instructions.... EF was different every time, yet also very much the same.

I like to think that every family must have its own personal Electric Fred.... Like I said, I’m not fast in the kitchen, and don’t aspire to be.

I believe that I should savor the cooking at least as much as the result.... I think there’s a container of wheat germ in there, too.

One shelf in the refrigerator has mason jars of homemade stock, lemon juice (I am not picky about lemon juice), and various pickles.... When I cannot do that, I’m buying blind.

My tastes are mine and you can’t have them, no matter how much you drool and beg.