Watching Republican Debate. As at lots of debates, they each are trying very hard to bring the best apple for the teacher (today, the Tea Party.)
Except perhaps for Ron Paul, who is almost painfully consistent here. I’m not sure that I agree with him, but it’s hard not to find him refreshing in his sincerity, willing to see his point through no matter how his audience responds.
As followers of this blog undoubtedly know, I am a fan of President Obama.
As I write that, a part of me takes a very deep breath. That’s the part of me that feels quite fearful in these divisive and partisan times to go public with any political allegiance. (Could it cost me something? Job? Friends? Readers? Respect?)
So why post it then? Why take a chance with a stance?
We live, as the Chinese would say, in “interesting times.” All times are probably interesting to those who live in them, but we live in ours and they feel particularly fraught with confusion, division, incipient risk.
While these interesting times have many aspects that are far beyond on our control, we are amazingly quick to cede control where we do have it. Many people just don’t pay attention, don’t read, don’t vote. Many feel like politics are a lost cause, that there is no difference between parties or candidates, and, shrugging dismissively, just don’t bother.
I may be naive, but I feel like there are differences and that it’s important to try to figure these differences out, and finally, to speak out about them. The speaking out is not intended to increase the divisions in the society, or even, necessarily, to persuade (although that would be nice), but really to humanize the point of view.
If I speak out, it lets others see one more example of someone that holds a certain view, one more possibility in a bigger group. Each individual that speaks out makes a viewpoint harder to dismiss. I suppose it’s a bit like being a domino in a row, except in this case, one is a human domino, with particular warts and eccentricities and style of grin and a human domino is a bit hard to flick away with a finger.
The long and short of all this is that I was impressed by Obama’s job speech, thought it set forth a viable plan in a clear and passionate manner, and is worthy of support.
After I stopped exercising
I worked out today, not while writing my blog on the elliptical machine, but while listening to the elliptical debate of the Republican presidential candidates.
Two of the meanings of “elliptic” according to the Free Dictionary (okay, not the most authoritative source but good enough) are:
“a. Of or relating to extreme economy of oral or written expression.
b. Marked by deliberate obscurity of style or expression.”
These two meanings seem at first contradictory. As someone whose tends both to run on and muddle, I would normally characterize ‘economic’ expression as clear/precise.
And yet, as I listened to the Republican debaters, the two meanings of elliptic meshed. Almost every candidate tried to pepper his or her answers with catch phrases–lines that were short and memorable–but hopefully not clear enough to alienate. (Economic ideas, that is, solutions for the economy–other than “fix it,” “grow it,” “trust in Amex,” and forget about anything green, except for cash, seemed especially obscure.)
A few odd juxtapositions: Governor Perry, when attacked for his executive order requiring young girls to get vaccinated against HPV, claimed that he will always err on the side of life. Later, Perry said, however, in a voice that grew more gun-smokey as his answer went on, that his sleep was never troubled by the high number of executions in Texas. v Romney talking about poorer non-taxpaying Americans as not supporting the troops. (Ahem, Mitt, who makes up most of the troops?) Bachmann inviting Ronald Reagan into the no-raising taxes pledge group.
Those juxtapositions could probably be labeled as trivial. But one, which was particular to me, seemed more serious. This arose not from what the Republican candidates said, but from my particular day. With all the emphasis on 9/11 here in NYC, a friend had me listen to a very sad clip about Welles Crowther (the “man with the red bandana”), a young Boston College grad, fledgling securities trader, who led two groups of people down from the 79th floor of the South Tower through the only usable staircase to the safety of ascending firefighters on the 62nd floor. On his third time up to see whom else he could help, Crowther was caught in the Tower’s collapse.
Catastrophe–disaster–emergency often seems to bring out the best in people. In contrast longer-term hardship, a state of emergency that becomes the norm, seems sometimes to wear down those generous instincts–that desire to help others, to step into the brink. (Perhaps not in extraordinary people like Welles Crowther but certainly in many others. )
In the end, it was a kind of brittleness, a worn-down hardness, that I found most troubling in some of the candidates–a hardness towards the Ponzi-profiting elderly, FEMA-depleting disaster victims, uneducated children, and even towards that old conspiracy-promoting inconveniently-warming Planet Earth.
(PS – in interests of disclosure, I missed beginning half of debate in which I understand there were a lot of very odd juxtapositions–Perry/Hilarycare/jobs under Dukakis, etc. etc.)
The above video may only be really interesting if you are a child (probably male) who really likes the 1939 classic Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. I am not such a child. Even so, seeing (live) the machines working on the stream up here in the Catskills has been pretty extraordinary in the last few days. The crews are working with speed and good humor, and seem almost as enamored of their big machines as fans of Mike Mulligan.
Disaster conditions apparently allow for a lot of tugging and pulling. I told the two guys above that their coordination was like a ballet. My husband, who had noticed the large Harley-Davidson tattoos on the workers’ forearms, thought that was not perhaps the most appropriate compliment, but the guys seemed to like it just fine.
P.S. – the little shriek in the middle of the video is me being surprised (stupidly) by the possibility of flying debris.
A greater sense of normalcy was felt by this particular evacuee in the Catskills post-Irene today. (For those who have not been following this blog, I am a “Zone A” resident who was evacuated from New York City six days ago. With remarkable foresight, I went to a part of upstate New York that turned out to be a center of flood damage.)
Normal is what you are used to. I am getting more used to the rearrangement of the streams around here. Just as the water is endlessly deepening its new channels, so the sight of those new channels is becoming less shocking to me.
Even working remotely– emailing myself documents to work on, walking out beyond the back porch for calls to my office (the small field there is one of the few places where my cell gets decent reception)–is getting less cumbersome.
A lot of this situation is frankly pretty nice. The days since the flood have been beautiful; doing office work in the open air is lovely.
Then too, there is the wonderful fact that someone made the long roundabout trip of just-opened detour road and the short hike on foot to bring us fresh milk today. (Meaning that my very strong tea with same is assured for a while longer.)
One misses the cameraderie of co-workers. The group groan and grunt The (more or less) set hours. It is easy, working remotely, to start very early, and then because of interruptions–the need of one’s dog or one’s own hind legs to take a walk–to feel pressured to go quite late. (Maybe one doesn’t, in fact, go quite late, but it is certainly easy to feel pressured.)
And yet, of course, it’s all so very lucky–to have options, milk, a dry place to sit. At the other end of the short hike and long roundabout detour, in our nearby Catskill town, many are enmired in dried mud, wondering what comes next.
While, of course, down even longer roads, life goes on as usual. More or less. Until the next crisis. Normal.
The above is a piece of road outside of Margaretville, New York, post-Irene.
I have not yet been to Margaretville since Irene, largely because of sections of road like the one above. However, I heard two very disturbing bits of news today: first, that much of Margaretville will be demolished given the hazardous conditions created by buildings damaged by Irene. Two, that some Republican congressmen such as Eric Cantor have discussed mounting an effort to withhold funds for FEMA assistance to disaster ravaged areas in the absence of further budget cuts.
The village of Margaretville had the distinction, prior to this demolition, of being a true town. The historically difficult economic conditions of Upstate New York have, perhaps, discouraged the abundance of Walmart’s. As a result, Margaretville was an actual center, with a grocery store, a couple of pharmacies, ice cream parlors, a cheese store, a sports shop, a library, a jewelers, antique store (in an old movie theater), a relatively nice restaurant, greasy spoon, bar, liquor store, thrift shop, children’s/art and clothing store, and (occasional) hair cutters. There was even the “Department Store”–a place where you could (at different times in its history) buy work pants, boots, and rare coins. Canning jars!
Everything was in walking distance, connected by sidewalks. There were a couple of parking lots, one near a stream that sported ducks! (One of them bit my daughter’s finger.) There was an old and somewhat grandiose school building built, I think, from WPA funds.
Huge ice cream cones. (Perry’s.)
Winters are long up here and there is no legalized gambling. This may be another way of saying that it was not a tremendously prosperous town, although lately, owing in part to a popular farmers’ market, local farm businesses and dairies seemed to be coming back.
Not only is Main Street being demolished, but the local trailer park (in Arkville, the adjacent town) has washed away. People who lived there have lost all they owned.
The local road crew has been working very hard, filling in crevices, removing rubble, redirecting new creeks and stream bits, arranging for milk and food to reach families still cut-off. One worker mentioned, when we spoke to him today, that he hadn’t been able to sleep even when he’d finally gotten home each night. If we wanted to donate clothes or food to those in Margaretville, he said, we could take them down to the local fire station. (This assumes we had a large vehicle that could get through the still-ravaged roads. We don’t, but still it’s a big improvement on being stranded.) I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he thought about protecting tax breaks for private jet owners.
Above is the place where a driveway used to be. This driveway belonged to an upstate house to which we fled when evacuated from Zone A of NYC before Hurricane Irene.
Which brings me to:
The Evacuee’s Plaint
From the frying pan into the fire,
the saltine into the soup,
the thick to the thin, the baby in the bathwater to the baby thrown-out
with the bath water–make that roiling water–
from puddled embankment to muddy rapids,
dim to dark,
maybe to absolutely,
the flooding to the washed-out.
It’s still raining here
where we’ve come
to be high
and dry. All feet
are cold
and damp,
but with
five toes wriggling.
Make that ten.
I am a couple of hundred miles (at least) from the epicenter of Hurricane irene, and, thanks to evacuation, unlikely to be ever closer than a hundred miles from that center.
All day the sky has felt like a petulant child in the back seat of a car. At the risk of disclosing my age, I am thinking of a 1950’s or 60’s car i.e. not air-conditioned–so the sky (in my mind) was a sticky child, forehead moist with sweat, slightly motion sick, asking endlessly when the traffic would move and if we were there yet, a child whose face darkened and contorted steadily with a kind of holding-his/her breath irritation.
It has started (at last) to rain here.
The sky is no longer dark except with night–the clouds now lie like stoles along the shoulders of the landscape; the air, though damp, breathes easily.
The rain is gentle for now, slowly getting stronger, but not lashing, not pelting, quite content, it seems, to be out of the loop.
Hope you are out of it too.
ManicDDaily 
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