Drift

October 2004

Depression is such a lazy demon.

Financially, having teeth is like owning a used car. $150 to get them checked, cleaned, X-rays. Dentist wants another $425 to fix four cavities, fortunately none urgent. So where am I supposed to get $425? [Since I wrote this, the problem has been resolved. For now.]

My image of romance is two people in bed together, reading. "Hey, listen to this."

At my age the "good old days" were when all the people I loved were still alive.

Whenever I see that love is not happening, I take a nap.

A while back I discovered on online dictionary and have been using it to look up words to see if they mean what I think they mean. Recently a friend said she had described me to someone else as "almost wholly cerebral," so I looked up cerebral: intellectual and unemotional. Well, she got the first part right.

For many of us life in the US has the quality of a bad cartoon in which not much ever happens, and when it does we wish it hadn't.

Wherever we thought we were going, we never arrived.

US politics is parental: the Democrats are mommy, the Republicans are daddy, and voting against both is unthinkable.

Getting excited about sex when you're single is like getting excited about shopping when you're broke.

Are the voters stupid? It is not considered politically correct to point out that an awful lot of voters don't have a clue what they are talking about. A recent poll from Middle Tennessee State University sheds some light on the subject. For example, when asked which candidate wants to roll back the tax cuts for people making over $200,000 a year, a quarter thought it was Bush and a quarter didn't know. And it goes down hill from there. When asked which candidate supports specific positions on various issues, the results were no better than chance. While this poll was in Tennessee, I strongly suspect a similar poll in other states would get similar results. I find it dismaying that many people will vote for Bush because they want to tax the rich (which he opposes) or vote for Kerry because they want school vouchers for religious schools (which he opposes). - The Votemaster


Aging

At 64 I have a chronic problem with low energy. I don't know if this is typical for my age. No one tells you these things. I know two people in their early 60s who are still working and seem to get a lot done, although one tells me she really looks forward to bedtime, and would retire now if finances permitted.

I've wondered if chronic small medical problems before old age expand in old age into big problems. Perhaps youth masks problems, keeps them in check, until the body weakens due to aging.

And we are unprepared, not having had to deal with these problems before. When I was getting chemotherapy for cancer several years ago, at age 57, I put up with a sore belly for quite a while before I realized it was constipation, caused by the chemotherapy drugs, and visited the drugstore for over-the-counter remedies. Doctors do not tell you these things. It is somehow beneath their dignity to discuss side effects. Nurses tend to be more helpful. They seem to see talking to patients as part of their job.

Use the Internet to research your disease.

Sometimes I think a lot of doctors would be happier if they didn't have to deal with patients. And the HMOs that make them rush.

Try to go in with a written list of questions. If you don't have a good memory, or are too sick to think well, take a tape recorder. If you're really out of it, take someone with you who is capable of asking questions and understanding details. (Some people with normal intelligence can't do that. Details quickly overload their minds, so they feel frustrated and helpless.) Older people sometimes need that kind of help.

When I mention being tired to doctors during physicals, they don't seem to be interested. Guess it's not on the checklist.

Young people these days -- how can I say it -- exist in your life, but they're not present in it. -- Renzo Bellingeri, 91, quoted in The Register-Guard

I seem to be looking at the past through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything is miniaturized and far away.

I think I do something like that to the present when it gets intolerable.

I think about medical stuff now with the intensity, and frustration, but not the pleasure, I used to devote to sex.

The medical goal seems to be to keep small problems, like allergies, from escalating into big problems, like the chronic sinus headache I've had lately. Got to vacuum, see my doctor. [Turned out to be migraines, not sinus.] It feels like a juggling act, trying to get control of all my ailments at once.

A friend, close to my age, has a tiny digital recorder on a chain around her neck. She uses it to make notes to herself about things she needs to do. An auxiliary memory.


Dreams

Dream song fragment: "But leave all the lights on 'cause we must impress the poor."

"I must be a young man, because I and another man are about to be sent off to war. At home, mother and sister there. (Not sure if they're my real ones, may be generic.) I'm trying to fix a small electrical appliance, my sister helping me, both of us singing an old song:
Know I love you, love, know I love you,
Angels in heaven, know I love you."

I don't remember what it was all about, but last night politics intruded into my dreams. I hate it. It's bad enough that I'm still dreaming about lousy jobs, two years after retirement.

"I'm a bus driver, a little nervous about it but apparently doing it okay. One day I leave on my route, driving the bus, and then at some point abruptly find myself back at home. I don't know what happened to the bus, did it go on without me and crash? Did time back up so that I never left? Or was it a dream and I woke up? I can't explain what happened but believe it's outside normal reality. Don't remember if it happens more than once.

"But apparently there is some real-world consequence because I have to talk to my supervisor, guessing that I'm about to be fired. There are other bus drivers around. Too embarrassing to explain in front of them, so I ask to talk to my supervisor alone. I've been waiting, on a bus, a long time when I wake up."

No idea what this means, if anything. Never drove a bus. A typical frustration dream, loss of control. Much like waking life.


Economics

The scholarship on social mobility is rife with controversy, but there is little disagreement about the basic picture: most lower-income Americans remain in the bottom half of the income ladder for their entire adult lives; most higher-income Americans remain in the top half for their entire adult lives; the inter-generational transmission of poverty and wealth is quite high; and upward mobility has, if anything, grown slightly more elusive. There is also no dispute that inequality has increased, health insurance and other benefits have declined, and the job market has grown more uncertain. -- Jacob S. Hacker, "After Welfare," The New Republic, October 11, 2004

In The Anarchist in the Library, 2004, Siva Vaidhyanathan writes that the neoliberal, "free-trade" policies of the dominant countries have undermined "indigenous industries, social safety nets, and traditional cultural practices" in countries such as India, China and Mexico, "while latching billions to the fickle winds of global trade."

Poor families typically find that food stamps cover only one-half to three-quarters of their grocery costs.-- David K. Shipler, The Working Poor, 2004

I get $51 a month in food stamps, which pays for less than half of my food bill.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable, off limits, beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law, seems to permeate the culture of American antipoverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. -- Shipler

Half of all new workers entering the American economy are immigrants.

"Once every three months there's a crisis in a middle-class family, and once a week in a poor family." -- Gwen Brown, University of Delaware, quoted by Shipler

The system is also plagued by welfare cheats. They are not people who receive welfare illicitly. The more damaging welfare cheats are the caseworkers and other officials who contrive to discourage or reject perfectly eligible families.

I'm going to break a major American taboo here and tell you how I live, financially. I want to show you the economic reality of those who work for low wages and then retire on very low Social Security, and also prepare you in case you ever find yourself in this position. It can be done if you are very careful and say "no" to yourself a lot about buying things. This is not a budget. This is my actual income and expenses for this month.

INCOME

Social Security
574
Food stamps
  51
Total
$625

EXPENSES

Rent (includes utilities)
300
Business
35
Household
48
Food
121
Alcohol
15
Entertainment
24
Medical
52
Miscellaneous
  30
Total
$625

Medical is higher than usual. It includes my $18 Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) premium, calcium and baby aspirin supplements, and a lot of over-the-counter meds for a chronic sinus headache I'm trying to stop. [Which turned out to be migraines. No wonder the OTC meds didn't work.]

The "business" is just getting started, no income yet. Computer-related. I'm hoping to make a little bit of money to supplement my Social Security. No idea if it will work, if there is a market.

Household includes about $10 for telephone. I get a break on that because I'm on food stamps.

So I just broke even this month. Usually I come out a little ahead if I'm careful. No big extras.


Culture

Culture is anarchistic if it is alive at all. -- Vaidhyanathan

Culture, he says, is what produces art, not the art itself.

In 2004, he writes, there were "more libraries than McDonald's restaurants in the United States."

Fred Moody's book, Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, 2003, is about the dot com go-go 1990s era. He has some interesting things to say about the contrast between so-called primitive societies and ours:

I had been reading Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return.... Eliade notes the "primitive" people -- as he calls pre-moderns -- lived in a world where time is circular; where every gesture, every action, every thought is part of an orderly ritual, a repetition of something archetypal, in perfect harmony with an infinitely harmonious universe. Life there endlessly circles around, repeating itself, from birth to death and back to birth; and every object is inhabited by a god....

The modern world, by contrast, is a march through linear time to an undeserved, undesired death, after which there is nothing. The modern inhabits a world devoid of gods and meaning, hostile to the heart, and one that forces you constantly to ask the question "Why?" without ever allowing you to expect an answer. The primitive enacts with his or her life an endlessly repeated ritual, endlessly meaningful; the modern is born without reason, lives a linear life of meaningless consumption, grows old, and dies disappointed.

Modern life seems endlessly distracting, making it hard to focus on any core mission. All those random ideas about what to do -- gee, maybe I should be working out at a gym, maybe I need to start a business, shouldn't I be reading more great literature, seeing more movies, what happened to my social life -- until we're spinning in place, never having time or energy to do the one thing that is most ourselves. "And that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless...." -- Milton, "On His Blindness"

... the angst brought on ... thirtysomething Seattleites by their growing financial prosperity and financial freedom. Restless, for the most part unhappy, either unable or unwilling to remain in relationships, they sought solace in entertainment, consumption, fleeting sexual liaisons, and self-examination -- that last endeavor generally conducted out loud, ad nauseam.

They [professionals in their 30s] viewed potential lovers as something between objects to consume and business partners, and their relationships were invariably short-lived. -- Moody

While I would like to be loved, I don't want to be consumed.


Movies

Dogville -- An "Our Town" for our time, without sentimentality. A filmed play on a soundstage with the barest of props, three hours long. It's about cruelty. Well done, with something to say, but don't watch this if you're in a bad mood.


Nader

Presidential candidate Ralph Nader spoke in Eugene on October 10. Here is some of what he had to say.

One out of three Americans make less than $10 per hour.

About half a million children died as a result of Iraq economic sanctions, pushed by the Clinton administration.

59 percent of Americans, according to a poll, believe government should provide everyone with health care.

The Democratic party has been losing for the last ten years, and to the worst of the Republicans. Instead of studying their failures they say, "Do you know how bad the Republicans are?"

Kerry is surrounded by corporate consultants, so he's putting money into TV ads instead of registering and mobilizing nonvoters, most of whom would vote Democrat, because that would be hard work.

Democrat liberals are their own worst enemy. Corporates are pulling Kerry right, and liberal Democrats are not pulling left. Only Nader is pulling left.

Kerry will not cut the military budget, which is one-half of the federal budget. The US has 300 times enough nukes to blow up the world.

In the first presidential debate Kerry "outhawked" Bush. Kerry describes the Iraq resistance as "terrorists." They're just ordinary people who don't like being occupied. The antiwar movement has "imploded," and won't come back to life until after the election, when it will be too late.

Under ten percent of the US private sector is unionized. Labor can't even unionize Wal-Mart. Kerry had to be dragged by Ted Kennedy to propose raising the minimum wage to $7 an hour by 2007. Unions are not putting any pressure on Kerry to repeal the federal Taft Hartley Labor Act, passed in 1947, which makes it very difficult to organize new unions.

The unions are saying, "Anybody but Bush, leave Kerry alone, don't make any demands on Kerry."

We need to abolish and renegotiate WTO and NAFTA. We need a tougher campaign against occupational hazards. Expand OHSA.

Workers don't bother to vote because major parties don't give them anything.

Environmental groups are also giving Kerry a free pass. The Clinton/Gore administration did nothing about the polluting auto industry, nothing about the nuclear industry.

"The corporations are our government. We have lost our government." All federal departments are run by corporate agents who "have no allegiance to our country. The corporations are laughing at us."

In the US 18,000 die every year because they can't afford health care. Kerry's health care plan is too complex. You can't have health care for all without replacing insurance companies. Anything else will blow health costs through the roof.

Medicare has a 3% administrative overhead vs. 25% for insurance companies.

The war on drugs has failed. "When are you going to concede failure?" We send 800,000 nonviolent drug criminals to jail each year. But for the two major parties it's off the table.

So is the Israel/Palestine conflict. The US government pays no attention to the peace movement in Israel and Palestine.

Corporate crime is not mentioned on Kerry's website.

Corporate welfare is totally out of control in Washington. Kerry says he wants to end it, but all he's calling for is study.

"There is no end to the cowardliness of the two parties." We have lowered our expectations too far. "Nothing surprises us any more. People say, what do you expect?" Nader expects more of them.

Parties redistrict to create safe, one-party districts. 95 percent of congressional seats are safe districts. "It's a job for life." In effect we've got a one-party system, it's just a different party in different districts.

A family of four making less than $40,000 a year is poor. We have people working in malls who can't afford to buy the products they sell.

Drug companies get results of federal research free, and then get rich off it.

Asthma has tripled in the last 25 years.

You used to be able to get something done in Washington in the 1960s and 70s, because those in power heard "the rumble of the people." They're not hearing that rumble now.

For those who don't want to vote, "we are starting a national Society of Apathetics."

"Never settle for the least worst. Always ask why not the best."

All advances in American politics have been pushed by third parties, which never won an election, but made things happen.

Nixon was more liberal on a lot of issues than Clinton. Nixon proposed a minimum income plan.