Weenie or Wimp?

 A Newsweek writer has revived  the controversy about whether Mitty Romney is a weenie or a wimp. On the wimp side is the fact that Mitty spent his Vietnam War years in Europe learning to speak French. He lets his fearless wife ride the horse. And in a recent photo op Mitty was seen clinging to his wife's ample back while she drove a jet ski; as Paul Begala put it, Mitty is "like a helpless papoose."

Or is Mitty a weenie, the sort of awkward rich butthead who gets every social situation a little wrong, beats up on misfits and cuts their hair and criticizes his host's cooking? Or is he a sociopath ("I like to fire people")?

Hookers in Song

During the Civil War the American Army (sometimes referred to as the Union Army) was led in part and for a short while by General Joseph Hooker--his part being the Army of the Potomac, if I remember correctly. Hooker was known in our neighborhood, Sonoma County, and there is a place up an alley off the plaza in the town of Sonoma that is known as the Hooker House. Anyway, to get to the point, the general's countless troops were accompanied on maneuvers by a second, even larger army of prostitutes; soon the term "hookers" was coined and remains with us to this day.

To be honest I have not had much interest in hookers, other than once or twice, but I am interested in songs about them. Some developed great popularity. My favorite is BUFFALO GALS, where the singer gets to dance with a dolly with a hole in her stocking and dance by the light of the moon. More recently we've enjoyed THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN, and from 1580s GREENSLEEVES remains a favorite. It is (sadly) a folk song about a dude who gets turned down by a hooker (probably). How embarrassing is that? 

Lest We Forget

Gaye LeBaron wrote recently about a hometown Healdsburg sports icon, Ralph Rose. You might not recall who he was--Rose was the first man to throw a shot putt 50 feet.  He went to the Olympics three times and won several medals, including gold. I had never heard of him although Healdsburg is my current home.

I do remember the first man to high jump seven feet. He competed for my first home town, Compton, and his name was Charlie Dumas. He brought home Olympic gold, too. He went on to a long career as a public school teacher.

What Goes Around

When my grandmother died, my father brought home a cardboard box of old photos, and one day my brother and I went through them. To our shock we found an ancient shot of our grandfather dressed in the sheets of the KKK. Our father later explained that Grandpa had joined the KKK because they promised to serve free beer at their meetings. It turned out that they charged for their beer, and Grandpa quit in disgust after two meetings.

As you know, the Boy Scouts of America yesterday announced that they would continue to ban gays and lesbians from membership. I have to confess that about 65 years ago I was a BSA member. Now I can expect that someday my grandchild will be pawing through a cardboard box and find a photo of me in a Boy Scout uniform.

The Corrupt Are Drawn to Power

Many are familiar with Lord Acton's remark that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One of my daughters pointed out to me recently that Acton might not be totally wrong, and she is likely to be correct. But I think Acton got it backwards (for the most part). I believe that corrupt and self-centered people are drawn to power. In other words, they are corrupt to start with. Getting elected creates for them a field of play.  Our electoral process seeks out manipulative  power-lovers and elevates them.

Political leaders want power for the wrong reasons--there is no right reason to want power over the lives of others. Of course, all wrong reasons are not equally wrong.

At the moment,  David Brooks, a weakly pondering intellectual of the status quo, is taking on Chris Hayes of MSNBC on the question of the American meritocracy and whether it has become corrupt. What is most ludicrous about the debate is the assumption that we have a meritocracy. What sort of meritocracy would produce the paranoid Nixon, the bumbling Ford, the senile Reagan, the lecherous Clinton and the murderous dullard George W. Bush as its leaders?  We have 3,000 colleges and universities in this nation--so why is it that our "meritocracy" staffs itself mainly from Harvard, Yale and Princeton?

The central problem with our electoral system is that it insures the winners will be people seeking power over others. There is a cure for this, but I have never seen it discussed. The ancient Greeks used it in some cases. Fill our elective offices using a random lottery. Imagine ordinary citizens, women, Latinos and cross-dressers, some of whom do not want power, most of whom would not be adept at mass deception, making the decisions. They'd err. But they might not reward companies for sending jobs overseas. They might not start pointless wars. 

Psychopathic Leaders Around the World

Experts believe that roughly 1% of our population is psychopathic and maybe 10% of our corporate CEOs are psychopathic. Many criminals are psychopaths. The central feature of psychopaths is that they lack empathy, probably from birth, and there is probably no effective treatment for this lack. But psychopaths make useful generals, executioners and even authors (Ayn Rand). I know nothing about any of this, really, but I got eight senior citizens, none qualified, to rate Mitty Romney, using the standard Hare Checklist. On this list the subject can earn up to 40 points with 25 to 30 points indicating a pathological lack of caring about other people. The senior citizens rated Romney as a 30. (What, me worry? Nixon was paranoid, W. Bush was half-brained and Reagan was senile. Hail to the President!)

Canada

John Cascone sent me a column he found in The Globe and Mail, a major conservative newspaper in Canada. The thesis in the column can be summed up this way. Canada's health care system is not as good as many in Europe, but Canadians don't talk about that. Instead they compare their system favorably to that of the United States, which is setting the bar so low that the Canadian system doesn't get improved.

Three Fecal Sacs

When I first read Justice Scalia's balmy dissent on the Arizona anti-immigrant law, my reaction was "Hey, I bet he lost on the Obamacare case and can't handle it." Below is part of what Scalia had to say about the plight of Arizona: “Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services and even place their lives in jeopardy.”

This makes me want to ask exactly how many old white men like me in Arizona have been murdered by undocumented workers? None?

Is the Supreme Court the right place to publish hysterical blather?  Yes, it is. Three of the fearful justices are little more than animated fecal sacs (Scalia, Alioto and the silent fellow). We need to be reminded again and again of the sacs who sit in judgment here in these United States.