We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
New forms of learning, or should I say "credentialing", are proliferating. It's quite wonderful to see. A friend's son, who works in New York, is finishing his Executive MBA at Cornell, online. As a young married fellow with a baby, he could not afford to skip work for two years.
His boss told him he promised to make the effort worth his while, and the company paid for it.
I refer to Arthur Miller's 1949 Death of a Salesman. I saw it performed once in New Haven, read it once or twice.
It's a dreary play about unhappy people, and I would have no interest in seeing it again. For a reason I cannot understand, it's been viewed as some sort of critique of modern life and capitalist society. I suppose being a regular person seems humdrum to a wealthy, celebrated writer who married Marilyn Monroe. The Lee Siegel comment on the current Broadway production is in that vein: Death of a Salesman’s Dreams.
Lee Siegel's comment is wrong on more counts than I have time to review.
For what it's worth, in my view it's the story, not about middle class dreams, but about life's disappointments. I suppose the endurance of the play has to do with the fact that we all have disappointed dreams. Biff's sanity is his aspiration to be "ordinary."
The play is also, I suppose, a play about clinical depression and a play about kids' perceptions of their fathers. But is that worth paying big bucks to see?
I happened to have a chat with a salesman recently. He sells services for IBM. Loves his job. Somebody told me recently that, in one way or another, "everybody is in sales."
That the Obama White House has taken men and women of repute and transformed them into Axelrodian snark artists long preceded Tanden’s tweet. But it caught my attention because it seemed to be the reductio ad absurdum of modern liberalism. Until, that is, Elizabeth Warren bailed her out.
When Stalinism Was in Vogue - Lillian Hellman disdained a system that made her fabulously rich while romanticizing one that made its citizens spectacularly poor.
Right behind the economy, the issue that will sway swayable voters in November is the repeated displays of arrogance by President Obama and his administration, inept arrogance at that. Indeed, that arrogance has been so heavy- and ham-handed that it has and will continue to undermine almost every other appeal the Obama campaign may make to marginal voters. Those on the dole or looking forward to being on it may shrug, but those with a shred of self-respect will be repulsed.
Obama's arrogance has reached the point of making him a laughing-stock. Obama’s inflated self-image will continue to overreact, making him appear more unworthy of confidence. Yeah, that’s the ticket! The best worst efforts of many in the major media to cover it up will be pierced, demonstrating their own lack of credibility. Others clinging to a shred of journalism will have to report the Obama campaign’s lack of credibility. There’s my forecast. And, I’m sticking to it.
P.S.: For those wondering about how Romney will capitalize on this, his campaign and those of us in the alternative media have shown how to expose the fool behind the curtain. All Romney himself has to do regarding Obama's buffoonery is remain the gentleman that he is, and toss out an occasional barb at the overinflated balloonery from the Obama camp.
"Julia" is the "composite female" with which the Obama campaign is attempting to secure the women's vote.
Not the vote of strong, liberated women, but the vote of those women, I suppose, who want a life of dependency and want government to be some composite of parent and spouse.
"Julia" is a rather pitiful American specimen, so people are having fun with her:
As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it. (It’s not just Hollywood that perpetrates the myth; Bollywood, the Indian film industry, is even more romanticized.)
I believe that "true love" is an adolescent fantasy, a psycho-utopian fantasy. All real relationships have problems and challenges. And real life presents endless problems and challenges which effect relationships lasting longer than days or months. In Western, monogamous cultures, the trick is making it work. What else do I believe? That there is no single "right person" for anybody, that humans are not emotionally monogamous, and that many people expect far too much emotional fulfillment from their spouses than any one person can provide.
I would never disparage feelings like passion, desire, "urge to merge," and "chemical attraction". These things are intoxicating. They have prevented Homo sapiens from going extinct. However, they are temporary, and often not sturdy foundations for building a life or raising a family.
Discovering that your long-term partner isn’t really the person you thought she was can be shattering. It’s not just a loss of love and a certain way of life, it’s feeling like you’ve lost your ability to see the world accurately, protect yourself, and know whom to trust. Suddenly, your marriage seems like the Matrix.
More fundamentally, you can no longer trust your ability to know what’s meaningful and what’s predatory. In case you think you’re alone, think of all the novels and films made about this phenomenon. You’ve been stripped of a pillar of your self-confidence, and you have to build yourself back up. At least you’re just searching for your self-esteem and not a one-armed man.
Nobody is who you thought they were, and vice versa.
According to Mises, “The profit system [of the free market] makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way.” The free market is a daily plebiscite, he explained, in which “every penny gives a right to vote … who should own and run the plants, shops and farms.” Rather than giving everyone an equal share in running the economy, the free market places in charge those best able to provide for the many. In this arrangement, everyone must produce. Everyone buys and sells. “This is what the modern concept of freedom means,” noted Mises. “Every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans.
In the early 1900s, nearly 80 percent of Americans over the age of 65 had a job. Dora Costa, an economic historian at UCLA, says people stopped working only if they were no longer physically able to. They expected to work as long as they lived.
Is that really such a terrible idea?
Social Security was partly designed to prevent the frail elderly, those presumably abandoned by their families, from starving in the gutters. A secondary purpose was to nudge older folks out of the job market during the Depression. Of course, the Ponzi scheme vote-buying motive was there too.
Thus was the utopian concept of "retirement" sold to the American people. Today, for most people, Social Security is just one factor in their retirement equation, and everybody is expected to have a "retirement plan," as if work and productivity were something to escape.
I happen to be one of those fortunate people who likes to work. I like any sort of work. Retirement has zero appeal to me, although more vacation time does appeal to me. My goal is 4 weeks off per year.
Our resident blog critic says it's a dumb article. Here's the article: Against Chairs. A quote:
I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad. Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, we’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that we’ll ever be free.
It sounds absurd to claim that chairs are dangerous.
Since it's a topic I have posted about a couple of times in the past, I'd like to highlight it. A quote:
It makes one think: If the lawyers are designing the health-care system, shouldn’t they be forced to operate under regulations similar to those they’re imposing? How, for example, do lawyers get paid? Today, they negotiate fees with clients. That hardly seems fair. In health care, doctors don’t negotiate fees with patients, they get paid according to an opaque schedule determined by health plans. Lawyers should do the same. The solution is “legal insurance”. After all, who amongst us knows when we’ll need a lawyer? It is often an unpredictable expense, and yet the “market” seems to have failed to provide such insurance. Government must intervene.
I have been an American all of my life, and I still cannot figure out whether Americans want freedom or freebies. Probably both, but that does not work.
How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet
The well-known excerpt from Blake's rarely-read poem "Milton" is called "Jerusalem" when used as the popular English wedding hymn.
How the ‘love myth’ is preventing Americans from finding true love
From 