4603 Boola Boola

In “Alice in Wonderland,” they paint the white roses red before the arrival of the Queen. In today’s version of Alice’s world, the modern university, they paint the grass green.

Many of the nation’s colleges and universities plan to let students drift back to campus this fall.  Here’s hoping they all have plenty of ventilators. Same for the bars of New Haven, Princeton, Cambridge and other large and small towns where the current generation of rowdy and uncontrollable immortals go to get ej-a-ma-kated.

The students and pseudo students will hear pieties from their school about social distancing, hand washing, hand wringing... served with a heaping helping of political correctness, pseudo free speech and the occasional classroom appearances of professors who actually want to teach, but fear taking attendance.

This is especially true of the Movie Set colleges. The what? Places that look like places of higher learning but really are little more than places of show.  Majestic buildings. Rolling hills, green lawns (do they really paint them that color?)  

The grownups wandering about?  Most of them are there to paint the grass. They wear coveralls and carry paint cans. Then there are administrators with lofty titles but fuzzy function and who have the cunning to land and keep cushy jobs -- where attendance isn’t taken either.

But the students and pseudo students cannot be tamed regardless of what’s preached at them.  They will violate all the rules and some of them will get caught.  Most won’t.

Kids will crowd.  They will gather on the lawns of dorms or frat houses, red plastic cups in hand. They will “socialize” using every guide from Miss Manners to the Kama Sutra.  It’s what they do.

And both real and Movie Set colleges are all good at one thing besides spouting pieties.  They’re good at forming task forces and committees to study their real or movie set problems.

So, expect painstaking in the neck conferences on what was right or wrong or good or bad about distance learning.  What worked, what didn’t, what needs to be improved or discarded or left alone?

And there will be seminars and -- with socially distant seating -- on the socialization that college is supposed to provide vs. staying home and studying the history of ice cream flavors 102 in their jammies.  Important stuff, doncha know.

Meantime, life will gradually return to normal.  Football coaches will sign outrageously overblown contracts. So will the small army of deans and vice presidents and directors of this and that.

Who didn’t leave campus during the ongoing virus season?  Fundraisers and public relations staffers.  They’ve been busier than ever.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4602 Misery and Positive Thinking

Most of our eyes are focused on misery nowadays. And with good reason.  There are so many things about which to be miserable. President trump and his gazillion side effects.  The economy (lipstick on a pig,) inequality among the races, inequality of compensation, endless wars and the still almighty COVID-19.

But within this compost heap are some diamonds people succeeding at this and that.  How do they get that way?

A lot of it is blind luck. Being in the right place at the right time with the right stuff.  Some of it is horse sense.

This space has long been hostile territory to the Positive Thinking Crowd.  We believe that the coiner of the phrase, the late Norman Vincent Peale was one of the most dangerous civilian thinkers of the 20th century.  Why? Because with great humility and good intention, he codified “positive thinking” as an axiom, something that cannot be reduced into its common parts because there are none.

That’s untrue. But many believe it to this day.  “Look at the bright side.” “Every problem bears the seeds of its own solution.”  This leads to “negative thinking” as its own axiom.  It’s not axiomatic either.

There’s nothing wrong with positive thinking per se until it moves into the realm of delusion. 

But in this age of many miseries, there are things and people that are succeeding.  For example, there are general merchandise retailers expanding or at least holding their own in a shrinking industry. There are newspapers that are expanding or at least holding their own as the printed word sinks to its rightful place in the world of media.

Most if not all those successful entities share some characteristics. They carry little or no debt. They do not expand unnecessarily or extravagantly or too fast. They do not rely on fads but embrace them timidly.  And many of them are privately or closely held -- no real ties to Wall Street, to analysts, to brokers, to hedge funds, to private equity funds and other financial flimflams.

They are goal oriented without being obsessive.  And there’s the rainy day stash.  Even the mighty Apple and the equally mighty Berkshire Hathaway have a ton of actual American dollars in a Scrooge McDuck style vault.

The people who make the companies work, generally don’t have the time to read self-help books and follow the rituals, habits and thinking processes the books describe.

A word about those books.  Well, more than a word. First, they’ve been bedside reading since the gradual advent of the Bible and other writings labeled “sacred.”

Then, the most helpful help in all of the self-help books combined: Read the table of contents.  That’ll tell you whether the book is worth anything.  And the author of that idea was Napoleon Hill, one of the most prolific self help writers of all time.

Second good advice:  the key to all those books is in the title. Most of the rest of the book will be packing peanuts and how the author rose to great wealth or great romance or great reputation though largely through happenstance and circumstance and then claimed to have found this or that Grrreat Secret.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4601 A Too Long Letter to My Children

You’re all grownups now.  Way beyond the age where advice from an aged parent has to mean much.  Humor me.

Your mother and I are veterans of times like these, times that most of you had never seen.  Times when there were protests and riots and looting and fires and death.  In hindsight, they don’t seem as bad now as they did at the time or as bad as things have become now.  But they were.

Technology that blossomed in your lifetime has changed some things and not changed others. In the 1950s and 60s when civil rights and anti-war movements grew like mushrooms, there were no cell phones or social media or Zoom.  There was no “Antifa,” which I believe is more a set of ideas than an organized social movement.  And the extreme right wingers of that day were tame by today’s standards.  No American, black, white, Asian, Native American; Arab or Jew, Christian or Muslim would have tolerated today’s version of life.

No Donald trump or Mitch McConnell would have had the temerity to run for office, let alone win it and use it to club the rest of us into submission.  But then and now, the horror makers are fruit from the same tree.

And, of course, there was no pandemic which has complicated everything else we think and do today.  

When mom and I were young, your grandparents were just coming out from under what’s now known as “The Great Depression” and heading into World War II.

Your mom and I married young and stayed married for more than 40 years.  We have each gone our own ways since.  But we still have a commonality of views on many things and a history.  And we each are tied to the four of you and your offspring.  I can’t speak for her. But I’d bet my social security check and that cute little bonus trump sent to many of us that she worries about you with the same regularity and intensity that I do.

She handles worry better than I. And less publicly. But it’s there. It has to be.

A lot of life is like Alka Seltzer. You drop the tablet into a cup of water and whatever the benefits, they’re most effective before the water stops fizzing.  Ultimately, left alone, it dilutes.  So do lots of things including the crap we’re all experiencing today.

It’s all going to dilute. And/or we’re all going to get used to some of it.  And I hope whatever good comes of it, rubs off on you before it stops fizzing.

Note to readers who are not my kids:

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020.

4600 What Fred Said

Here’s the question he asks: “What is ownership?” Fred is 55 years old.  He is smart and well educated. He works in a flour mill in Rapid City, South Dakota.  Most weekends, he goes home to Porcupine SD. It’s only a hundred miles away. That’s a short hop when it comes to distances out there. He makes $16 an hour. He is, among his home reservation neighbors, a rich man.  He does not understand the idea of “Ownership.”

“We are all tenants,” he says.

I have known Fred for 30 years, but we have never met in person. We have communicated on the telephone and on the internet. We have communicated by US mail. But not recently.

Fred does not understand the idea that activists have destroyed property. I had invited him to New York and he declined. He has invited me to Porcupine and later to Rapid City. I have declined. 

There are about 800-thousand people in South Dakota. Five thousand of them have contracted the C-virus.  About four thousand of them have recovered.  That’s a pretty good number.  Better than a lot of other places. It’s certainly not because of superior medical facilities.

About 15-thousand of those South Dakotans identify as black.  None have been killed by police officers, even among the handful who’ve carried Black Lives Matter into the streets.  Nor has anyone else.

Fred says he wonders why that is.  I tell him it’s because the blue wall of cop-itude doesn’t apply there.  It’s because the cops and the victims belong to the same country clubs, all three or four of them in an area of 77-thousand square miles.

Are there lessons to be learned from these numbers? Sure. Cops who think like or look like the people they’re sworn to protect can do their jobs without kneeling on some guy’s neck.

NOTES FROM ALL OVER:

(SPRINGFIELD, IL) -- Governor Pritzker, a Democrat, says “defund the police” doesn’t accurately describe what people want and need. And he says people want to “re-think” how policing is practiced and change it for the better.  Change is imperative.  But it can’t be solved via bumper sticker law.

(STONY BROOK, NY) -- Dr. G was happy she could at last book an appointment with her hairdresser, or so she thought. But she can’t because she spends her workdays treating people with the trump virus… so they won’t let her in.

(STATE COLLEGE, PA) -- Dr. X has the same problem as Dr. G. But she has taken the matter into her own hands. Imperfectly.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Any Questions?  wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4599 What Will Life Be Like?

That yellow thing on his back is a Scott AirPak. It is all that stands between his lungs and those flames.

When we’re more or less done with trump, the pandemic, and the various social unrests of today, what will life be like?

Will we continue our distancing?  Will we stay at least six feet behind the guy ahead of us on the checkout line?  Will we all be working from home because the world headquarters of MegaComglomerate Industries now fits in the empty basement of an abandoned K-Mart in Marathon, Florida? And only six people work there?

Where are all those futurists now that we need them.  You know, the people whose accuracy rate is right up there with the astrologers in the supermarket tabloids, WestraDamus the non-prophet and the rating analysts of the stock markets?

What is the “normal” that we will return to?  Will the targets of looters replace their windows with Lexan? Will cops with troubled records be fed Quaaludes at roll call before hitting the streets?  If so, will they literally hit the streets smiling until the moment of impact?

Calls to de-fund the police will not help anything and hurt aplenty if they actually happen.  But what should happen is stopping police use of military grade weapons.  They are unnecessary. They provoke. They are not meant to be used against petty criminal suspects.

Your income taxes are due next month. Will you remember that?

If you think life was uncertain before all this, think again.

The crystal ball is cloudy right now.  The Tarot cards are out to lunch. They’re eating fortune cookies.  Someone call trump and ask him what Ivanka’s bible says.

NOTES FROM ALL OVER:

(NewRoses, PA.) -- Bars in this town are now permitted to serve cocktails to go.  They must be in sealed containers and not exceed 64 ounces.  That’s a pretty big “big gulp.”  Bartender, I’ll have a 64-ounce Bloody Mary --  hold the tomato juice and the vegetables.

(BUFFALO, NY) -- Anyone seeing the video of the knocked down old guy notice this?  As cops march past his supine body, one officer, holding his nightstick -- one hand on each end -- leans down toward the victim as if to further injure him and the officer behind him grabs him and pushes him to continue walking. Disturbing.

(Merrick, NY) -- This Long Island hamlet is 30 miles east and a world apart from New York City.  A Black Lives Matter march there brought anger from onlookers and police had to wall the marchers from the jeering residents.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions?  wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4598 A Funeral in Minneapolis

George Floyd lived, died and was set to rest on national television. CNN and MSNBC carried yesterday’s service live.  It was heartbreaking but it was a call to action. 

A fond hope: the trials of the four cops charged in the murder will not be televised.  There aren’t many of us ink and electron-stained wretches who think live court sessions are a deterrent to justice.

This idea started with the circus trial of OJ Simpson in the mid-1990s. The judge’s lack of control, the celebrity power of the defendant and his legal team and its hair-splitting shenanigans showed us why this kind of show trial should never be broadcast.

The camera, trained on that jury of men and women who may have routinely convicted Simpson, could not vote “guilty” and returned to their Los Angeles area homes without fearing for their lives.  And by the time the endless trial ended, every face of every juror was known to the people in their communities.

This anti-camera-ism was underscored later by the trials of accused baby killer Casey Anthony and accused boyfriend murderer Jodi Arias.

What would have happened at Nuremberg in some early day if Nancy Grace did live play-by-play the proceedings?  

So, they sent George Floyd to his final rest in Minneapolis, as they had earlier of Eric Garner in New York. Garner died under similar circumstances, not all that long ago. His crime?  Selling “loosies” individual cigarettes, on an uptown streetcorner.

Has anything changed following Garner’s takedown? No. You still can buy a pack of Marlboros for $13 in New York, and sell the loosies at a buck and a half each. That’s a better margin than Wal-mart makes on a pound of chopped beef or a couple of pounds of tomatoes.

More important, will anything change in Minneapolis? Maybe. Temporarily. But the underlying problems will persist.

Tribalism seems to run deep in the human hardwiring. But it can be overcome if we’d stop listening to our cerebral cortexes and just leave each other alone. Or -- the call to action? -- give the people we don’t like or whom we fear the hand up to which our laws and values have been telling us should be theirs.

NOTES FROM ALL OVER:

(MINNEAPOLIS) -- George Floyd tested positive for COVID-19. Both autopsies say that had nothing to do with his death.

(NEW YORK) -- The NYPD crashed its reputation for a kinder gentler way of handling protesters. A Police Dept. SUV plowed through a metal barricade and into a group of demonstrators.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4597 Why Are You Surprised

Piltdown Man was a fake fossil, the creation of an Englishman who claimed to have found the “missing link” between man and ape.  There is no such thing as Piltdown man. It was a hoax. Or are there real Piltdowns among us?

What you see on the streets of this country was waiting to happen. The murder of George Floyd at the knee of a Piltdown man with a badge created critical mass.  Something was going to.

Before proceeding, let’s see if we can all agree on some basics in the Floyd situation.

--There is no state in which possession of fake currency is a capital crime.

--There is no state in which having illegal drugs in one’s system is a capital crime. This is especially true when one autopsy says Floyd did and another says he didn’t.

--In general, it is not a good idea to destroy someone else’s property especially if the destruction is intentional.

--The Christian bible instructs us to not kill. The Jewish original instructs us to not commit murder.

--George Floyd was murdered.

Any problems with these assumptions, so far?

Good.  Now let’s get into some issues that are less cut and dried.

--Some white cops are racist and use the authority we’ve given them to advance their racism by singling out people with dark skin for especially bad treatment, including but not limited to Knee to the neck, chokeholds, gratuitous beatings and sexual aggression with broom handles and similar objects.

--Some white cops who are not racist turn a blind eye to the acts of their fellow officers.

--Some mayors, governors, and presidents believe force must be met by overwhelming counterforce.

--Bad apples come in every color. Unlike the cliché, they don’t by definition spoil the whole barrel.

--We know what bad apples look like and can move to discard them whether they are spherical fruit or human beings.

--Every Minneapolis cop knew that Derek Chauvin had rot spots.  No one moved to get him into a desk job or otherwise into a corner from which he could not cause physical or mental harm to anyone.

But as we said at the beginning of this post, the demonstrations and riots we’re seeing were just waiting to happen.

We have a white supremacist president who covers his ineptness and impotence in swagger, lies, and name calling. We have a pandemic that in some ways affects everyone. We have an economy that in many ways is tanking.  Some of it is rooted in the pandemic. But most of it is rooted in inequality, executive overcompensation, corporate debt at levels that demand constant growth, private equity funding and a stock market that is inflated to the point of irrelevance.

We are a first world country.  But in many ways, we as individuals are governed by what biologists informally call our “lizard brains,” what the fictional Piltdown man, had he really existed, would have used in place of reason and thought.

Can we undo this hardwiring?  Probably not.  Can we control what it thinks and feels? Again, probably not.  But we can -- we must -- control what it lets or makes us do.

NOTES FROM ALL OVER:

(MINNEAPOLIS) -- The soon to be the ex-wife of the murdering cop says in her divorce papers she wants to change her name. At the moment, it’s the same as his, Chauvin.  Hers had been, Xiong. She also says she doesn’t want spousal support from her husband.

(NEW YORK) -- Time Magazine says it had nothing to do with this cover:

It’s a fake, the publisher insists.

(NEW YORK) -- CNN boss Jeff Zucker is dodging questions about possibly running for New York Mayor. But he says the city needs leadership and he enjoys a challenge.

(MENLO PARK, CA) -- Some workers at Facebook are staging some kind of job action. It’s a protest against the website’s not taking down trump’s quote “when the looting starts the shooting starts.” They registered their ire on Twitter.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020