Saturday, December 03, 2011

Down Time


I am home in bed with a cough and a sore throat and general crumminess today.  Oliver the doggapotamus is in bed snoring alongside me.  Rita is off running errands including getting chicken soup.   


When you find a woman to whom your being sick is a cue to get you chicken soup rather than to get herself a flu shot, you have really got something.  Or someone.  Someone imprudent, certainly.

My nephew Steve Wilhelm, a perspicacious young man, put up on Facebook a link to a Wall Street Journal article on how difficult it is to cut the deficit.  It contained the following paragraph,
"The White House, after saying all fall that Obama's jobs agenda must be paid for with tax increases on high-income earners, appears willing to simply pad the nation's $15 trillion national debt instead of finding offsetting cuts."

To which I commented, "So why did we vote for this guy?"

Earlier in the day I heard from an old and dear friend, Karen Trendler Petit.  She called me "a cynical old poop".  Unfortunately, I could not find a basis on which to disagree with her.

As it stands, the US economy is dysfunctional.  The Congress is dysfunctional.  The President sees no connection between betraying the people who elected him the first time and his prospects of being elected a second time.  The Left are narcissistic idiots with a strong taint of anti-Semitism.  The Republicans have fielded a row of right-wing idiots.  Their un-electable frontrunner, Gingrich, yesterday proposed repealing the child labor laws.

Iran is building an atomic bomb.  Yet Russia and China are more afraid of disrupting the price of oil than they are of a government in which the lunatic Ahmadinejad is the more moderate faction.  And that is even though Iran has missiles to deliver nukes to Russian and Chinese cities.  The survival of the European Union has come to depend on the good will and generosity of the Germans, a people not noted for either.  The Arab Spring is more and more being revealed as merely a device for replacing repressive military regimes with repressive Islamist ones.

Cynicism both at home and abroad is more and more the description that matches reality.

I worked on the 2008 Colorado campaign which brought us a politician created by the Chicago Daley Machine and funded by Wall Street, and I worked on the 2010 debacle which saw the people of Wisconsin discard Senator Russ Feingold like a beer can out a car window.  Clearly, participating in politics and world affairs accomplishes exactly the same result as not participating in them.  Except for the disappointment afterwards.

From which it follows that it is time to stop reading the news.  It is bad for me and it is not helping anyone else.  Further, I am in a perfect position to live as an escapist.  I am retired, Rita wants me to live with her in her big house amid oak trees in a canyon in the Berkeley Hills, and we already have all the gadgets and clothes we want.  The world's reality sucks.  Mine is actually quite good.

Reading used to mean spending time in Dostoyevsky's or Tolstoy's Russia.  Or visiting the drawing rooms of Austen's England.  It can be that again.  I am going back to reading fiction.

I have been accused of saying, "I've got mine.  Too bad about yours."  Which would be a crummy thing to say.  But "I've got mine.  I've tried and there is not much I can do about yours." does not make me a heartless prick, does it?


5 comments:

  1. Jasmin7:39 AM

    Good enough, you're better off not commenting on issues you know nothing about, especially when your opinions are nothing but racist vitriol.

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  2. This, from a person who customarily refers to Jews as "the offspring of dogs and apes" and who is indifferent to all facts.

    The most remarkable thing about Muslims like Jasmin is their complete incapacity for self-reflection. Which is why what you folks have to say contains so much unconscious humor.

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  3. Sergey Khrodovsky1:22 PM

    Your position is sickening Kessler. You know nothing of great Russian literature. You little man.

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  4. @Sergey Khrodovsky
    This from a man (Christie) who hasn't even read his own country's best and most famous novel, 'Ulysses'.

    He once wrote to me that people only read great literature to show off their literacy. That kind of remark is the mark of the true illiterate, no matter what his education.

    Ignorance is a misfortune, but willful ignorance like Christie's is a a crime. It is a waste of a mind. Which admittedly in Christie's case is not much of a loss.

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  5. Christy11:27 AM

    Just for the record, you're misattributing that comment to me (Damien said it) I haven't read Ulysses, this is true. Why don't you bend over there and take a good long smell of your own farts, San Francisco style.

    And I am not Sergey Khrodovsky.

    ReplyDelete