Grown Ups Talking

I’m torn.

Education is the lifeblood of society and democracy and enlightened life and so forth, not to mention a major contributor to my, Pomerol’s, employment. The various unions we educator types belong to, are stomping around saying we can’t cut education even if the economy is swirling down the drain, but any halfway sensible person can see there isn’t enough money out there.

So do I stomp along with everyone else because it only makes sense, or do I sit by the sidelines because there’s no way in the world that anyone will get anything anytime soon?

Not that my individual efforts will make a lot of difference, or so my grouchy lazy side says.

Did you notice the students demonstrating in California this afternoon? I’m amazed at how little outrage there has been about loss of livelihoods and futures. It was good to see, and probably a small taste of what’s too come.

Sigh. Guess that means I have to get out there and be outrageous.—Pomerol

When I was a young Donald Trump launched a short-lived venture into air travel. For what seemed like a couple of weeks, Trump bought a mini-airline that traveled between New York and Boston. In those days I went to Boston frequently, and I had the opportunity to fly Don Air once.

It was festooned with logos. The stewardesses wore Don Air uniforms, carried Don Air trays with Don air coffee cups and pastries formed into the face of Don. The carpet had Don Air logos woven in, the seat backs were tricked out with Don Air doo dads, and the toilet seat had engraved Don Air logos which meant you walked around with Don Air embedded into your behind for the next half hour (a fitting statement).

Fast-forward to the mayoral election, and this syndrome seems to have taken over the entire city. Mike Bloomberg is projected to have spent $100 million dollars on his mayoral candidature, according to the New York Times. He has ads in newspapers, magazines, television channels, my poor aching mailbox, internet sites, internet videos, telephone messages, celebrity endorsements. Soon he will be shining his face onto clouds á la Batman, and foaming his message into daily cappuccinos.

This is 16 times more than his opponent, Bill Thompson. Thompson has been hopelessly outgunned by an uber-rich competitor.

Is this what we have come to? Not just purchasing your elected office (see The Regency Period), but doing it publicly?

I’m not a stick-in-the-mud about these things, if Bloomberg spent 2 times as much, or even 4 times as much, you can almost shrug it off. I even think he’s done a pretty good job. But 16 times? This is practically royal entitlement. It’s obscene.

Bill Thompson seems like a good guy, he has civilized ideas about education and taxing rich people (change, but not too much change). There’s no way IN THE WORLD that he will win this election.

But apart from my lifelong reluctance to ever vote for any republican anywhere, the main reason I am going to vote for Thompson it to get on with irritating Bloomberg.—Pomerol

I did my bit last night. I went along to a “Health Care Vigil” in Central Park. This was MoveOn.org’s answer to the manic townhallers who bellow that health care reform is the devil’s work.

Frankly it was a bit tedious. Speakers got up and read aloud reports that had been sent in about individuals who have been denied hospital care, or charged exhorbitantly. And though dreary to listen to, it’s all too true.

Being denied care is a horror. One 26-year-old had a heart condition and couldn’t quite make the insurance payments, but he made too much money and didn’t qualify for Medicaid. A lot of people are stuck in this worrying limbo.

This kind of common situation creates a whole class of uneasy worriers — middle class types who have decent jobs but still can’t afford to pay for health insurance. These people will never be free of nagging worries that when sickness strikes, your whole life will go up in flames.

Unhappily, the slipper and I are fast approaching this situation. We are — knock on wood — healthy at the moment, but keeping up with insurance premiums is becoming unaffordable.

So we may soon need to rely on the Knock On Wood health plan. Hope for the best and pretend everything is OK. Many thousands of Americans are already on the KOW plan. You could call this psychosis, denial, unhealthy psychological displacement activity, and you’d be right. The next move, in the truly American way, would be to go to a shrink. But I think KOW only covers a stiff drink and a sympathetic bartender.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. We need universal health care.—Pomerol

The sun has made a brief appearance, enough to give the slipper his customary fried lobster look. That will keep him through the inevitable weeks of gray Brittany weather that will inevitably arrive.

It’s interesting spending time abroad, you get to see America the way everyone else sees us. And at the moment we look like a bunch of cowards.

You figure after 9/11 the entire country reared up on it’s hind legs and roared about how tough we were, how we were going to kick other countries’ asses, how we were violent patriots, how everyone had to eat Freedom Fries, etc.

Eight years on we are finally presented with the chance to wind up Guantanamo Bay, freeing some prisoners, giving trials to others, imprisoning guilty ones.

But this is not an argument about how to deal with unrelenting possible terrorists, this is about the undoubtedly guilty ones.

No one wants them. Their countries of origin either don’t want them or will torture them. Friendly countries don’t want to deal with them. But more to the point, the United States of America is completely chickening out of their responsibility towards these prisoners.

All kinds of states keep whining about how they don’t want them in their back yards.

I would like to say that as a Brooklyn-based Wine, I, Pomerol, am happy to have those bastards in my back yard. We even have a currently un-used prison a couple of blocks from out apartment. I am happier knowing that these people are locked up, not blowing people up, not recruiting more acolytes, being punished as they should be, and not tortured in some distant grim prison.

Because thats kind of the deal. You want to keep the bad guys out, you gotta deal with the fallout. And yes, it’s distasteful to have men locked up in your neighborhood. Well 9/11 was a hell of a lot more distasteful than that.

Is that stupid? or naive? Or even courageous? Maybe it’s just being a grown-up American.—Pomerol

A soft gray day with some free time before my afternoon class, I snuck off for a quiet browse in a local bookstore. It struck me, as I strolled through, how much my buying habits are influenced by my point of view, and in this case, my height. Being a fairly tall Wine, I can comfortably see the 4-5th shelves without craning up or stooping down. More average-sized vintages are probably more 3rd-4thers.

You wonder how the marketers, who already have sex, age, income, race, religion, education, nationality, voting record, eating habits, career, technology use, transportation use, and, of course, reading, all wrapped into neat little graphs to determine what kind of covers, subjects, advertising, and last, and probably least important, what kind of writer, could be used in a logical way to optimally place books in order to sell them.

Don’t kid yourself. We are talking about an entire industry devoted to promoting and selling books. The big tables at the front of your average Barnes & Noble are filled with titles whose publishers have paid Large amounts of money for the privilege.

Authors go on book tours, and if you are a work-from-home person, you might hear the same author bleating the same neat refrain to several different NPR hosts in a matter of hours, and that’s before you get to television and what remains of newspaper book sections.

As I, Pomerol, increasingly approach impending middle-age, it is simply easier to rely on height. The books that are stacked highest on the front tables receive my perusal, the higher shelves of authors and magazines are easiest for my gaze. A truly vintage Wine might shrink a little in old age and discover a whole new world of fascinating reading.

Point of view comes into so many areas of life. One radio interviewee had lost his job and he joined the army to go to Afghanistan with his wife’s blessing because it was a steady income with health insurance for the family.

Another was concerned she couldn’t afford those $5,000 children’s birthday parties anymore.

It all depends on your point of view.—Pomerol