So last night I watch this movie, “Into The Wild”, about this young guy who leaves everything behind and heads to Alaska. I sit back in my chair and I cry. I was headed in that same direction in 1972.
In those days, I left my dorm room at Moody Bible Institute one night and walked home. I just kept walking. I walked fifteen miles. I walked from the Des Plaines EL station to Addison, fifteen miles. My mother cried that night. The school called my father. He called his friends. I show up at the house at 10:30 pm. I hugged my mother and I went to bed.
So the next day, my father makes me scrambled eggs and then he drives me back to Moody. I talk to twenty people. I talk to the men’s assistant dean of students and he tells me that men have cycles like women do. I listen but my head is in Alaska. He asks me if I want a new roommate. I say, “Yes. I don’t want to room with someone named Tim.” I tell him that my first year roommate was Tim from Indianapolis. My second year roommate was Tim from Pennsylvania. The school gives me a new roommate. His name is Steve. We become good friends, in fact, great friends. One Friday night, in my dorm room, I get a call from the men’s assistant dean of students. He tells me that Steve was killed in a car accident on the way to his wedding rehearsal. He fell asleep behind the wheel of his car driving in Kansas. I stay at school to finish the semester and then I leave and I don’t come back.
Three months later my dad comes in my room and wakes me up. He says, “You gotta get up. You can’t sleep anymore. You gotta work. You gotta find a job.” So I get dressed, eat scrambled eggs and I walk to the industrial section of Addison. In the industrial park I look for signs in the front yards of factories. “Help Wanted. Machine Operator” the sign says. I apply.
Inside the factory a man tells me my job. “Take the plastic pieces that come out of here and then grind them over here.” So I take the plastic pieces and I grind them but my head is in Alaska. I walk away from the job during my coffee break. The man calls my dad and he tells him that I walked away. I go look for another job.
At another factory a man hires me. He tells me that I will operate a plastic extruder on the second shift. I say “OK” and I show up that night. Someone shows me the end of the extruder. There are strands of hot plastic coming out of the extruder’s die. The strands are pulled under water to cool and then a blower dries them off. Then, the strands are chopped into pellets. The man tells me to keep my hands out of the pelletizer. I remember this. My job is to keep the extruder hopper full of regrind, keep the plastic strands in their path and empty the pellets into a box. I do this until the third shift guy appears. He is a tall, lanky black man in a jumpsuit. He is carrying a Yankee Doodle Dandy Hamburger in his hand.
I process plastic for the next six years. I also get married to someone I meet at church. We have two sons. I tell my bride-to-be that I want to live in Alaska. I tell her that I have collected maps and books about how to live in the wild. She tells her mother. Her mother tells her that I am crazy. Her mother wants her grandchildren to be close. We divorce after five years and two sons. Alaska is on hold until the majority age of minor children.
So I work and I work and I work. I become a designer of plastic machines. I become director of engineering. I become a partner in a manufacturing company and I get married again. I tell my bride-to-be that I want to go to Alaska. She tells her mother. Her mother says that I am crazy. Her mother wants her grandchildren to be close. So, I work and I work and I work. I work night and day as a partner. I make a six figure income. I get a Suburban. I get a company credit card. I have twenty-five people working under me. I work so much that when my wife takes the Suburban on camping trips with the kids she says that she doesn’t know if she wants to come back. I went to work and I came home to an empty house. When she was home and I was home, my wife and I would fight. The way I figured it, she wanted more of what my well-paying job offered her but she wouldn’t stand me at the same time. I worked and worked and I worked until one day I told my partners that I wanted to quit.
So, I left the company I helped to start fourteen years before. I left the partnership and the perks behind. I came home and looked in the paper in the help wanted section. I looked and I looked and I looked but there was nothing. I refinanced our home to pay the bills. After three months my wife tells me, “I want a separation.” I cry.
So, we go to marriage counselors. First we go to a male counselor and then we go to a female counselor and then we go to a male counselor. My wife is convinced that I have something on my mind, that I don’t love her. I don’t mention Alaska. After some counseling, we agree to live to together again. My wife says, “I’ll see how you do.”
So I find a job and I go to work. This time I build electrical control panels. I work and I work and I work but the money is not the same as the partnership money. One day the manager takes me in his office and tells me, “Things are slow. We are downsizing. We are closing this branch. We don’t have any openings in our home office in Janesville, Wisconsin.” I say, “Oh.” I call my wife and we meet at a restaurant because I want to tell her in person what happened. I drink two gin and tonics while I am waiting for her to show up. I look out the window and see her pull up in our rusty family van. She comes in and sees me drinking and she wonders what’s up and I tell her. She asks me what I am going to do and I tell her, “I will look for work.”
So I look in the Help Wanted Ads in the newspaper. No jobs. I file for unemployment. Three months later my wife says she wants a separation. I say, “No.” She says, “Get out or I will force you out.” I leave. I go to a hotel. I get a room and call my kids.
So that night I watch this movie, “Into The Wild”, about this young guy who leaves behind everything and heads to Alaska. I sit back in my hotel chair and I cry. I was headed in that same direction in 1972.
America deserves better than this media mollycoddled divisive passive-aggressive politician. The hangover from election night 2008 still has America off her feet.
****
This morning I bumped into our office’s cleaning lady. I’ll call her Dushanka.
Dushanka asked if I had watched the election coverage last night. I answered sadly that I did.
I never knew Dushanka’s political inclination before this morning. We previously had only talked before about our families and about work. We often talk when we arrive to work at 6:30 in the morning. We sometimes see each other during the long work day and then we also chat.
Dushanka came to America from Romania. She came to America because America was hope and change long before Obama came on the scene. Dushanka works long hard hours just as I do. We both pay our taxes and we obey the rules. But after watching the election results and the crowd at McCormick Place and on the street she told me, “America is now broken.” She could not fathom why those young people were standing there paying homage to Dear Leader, economic reality held in abeyance. Nor could I.
Dushanka told me something that I am no longer shocked about in Obama America: another cleaning women working with D cheats the “system” – you and me.
This woman, a foreigner, is using some else’s social security number. This woman has a child from a boyfriend. This woman registered the child at a Chicago Public school and received $200.00 (for what Dushanka didn’t know). This woman who works with Dushanka also receives food stamps. This same woman wrote on her job application that she had graduated from high school though she never graduated. All of these things and more this woman related to Dushanka in a rather smug way: “Look, I am getting away with this. You can too.” In other words she is “cleaning up” at our expense. That is Barack Obama’s America. And that is status quo for Chicago. It is quickly becoming so for the nation. This is Social Justice Obama style but is this going forward in a morally right direction?
Dushanka told me that she does not cheat the system: “That would be cheating God.”
Where is the Social Justice for people like Dushanka, for people like me? Where is the social justice when people steal from other Americans? And where is the social justice when people forcibly take your property and give it to someone else though taxation? Where is social justice in class warfare? In dividing the country racially? There can be no social justice when men are not given their due, when materialism trumps the justice due human dignity and worth.
Did you notice that our American ambassador and his aides were slaughtered in Benghazi? The Obama White House is covering up their decided lack of involvement. American citizens were killed but Obama played golf, campaigned and had another cigarette. Could it be that there is now in place “a U.S. government policy of “engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East,”? This is the biggest scandal in American History. The Obama regime wants to stonewall the whole business so that time will pass and people will forget. But we won’t forget.
Did you notice Fast and Furious – AG Eric Holder sends lethal weapons to narco-terrorists in a scheme to teach America a lesson about owning guns? The scheme backfired and a US border agent, an American citizen, is killed with the same guns along with hundreds of Mexicans. This is Social Justice Obama style.
Religious liberties are now being deleted for the new religion of political correctness. Moral relativism is replacing absolute truth.
Asstounding! People voted for more uncertainty, more unpredictability, more taxes, more regulation, more tight money, more policies that undermine business confidence and block economic recovery. They voted for more incompetence from Barack Obama!
Today’s children want socialism. And it is the very people who want socialism who bring nothing to the table. That is why they want redistribution of other people’s money – they have nothing to offer themselves.
People now want the government to be their insurance company and their vending machine for everything from birth control to abortions to health care. People now want government to cover all their bets and to give them other people’s money to play. The majority of people voted for the indentured slavery of big government and the Boot placed on their neck!
****
Obama’s Hope and Change cocktail has put our country on its back. The only cure for the “Goddamn America” hangover from the 2008 and 2014 election nights is “God Bless America.” The cure didn’t happen the last four years and it is not going to happen these next four years. The narcotic effects of atheism, nihilism, materialism and antinomianism (lawlessness) – an elixir of evil gulped down on those election nights will now spread rapidly through your system. Liberty won’t know what hit it.
Just ask D.
*****
Read The Forgotten Man – those who supply jobs and resources – requirements for human flourishing – are not the academics.
The journey of a lifetime was being nixed at the first intersection. Boyd pulled up to the red light in the middle of our town. He braked and the Caddy stopped dead. There was nothing lit up on the driver panel – no “BATT” light, no “CHECK ENGINE” light, nothing. The Marantz stereo we placed on the back seat hump coasted to a stop. As it did the Lizard King’s voice churned down Riders On the Storm with a demonic basso profundo until the needle stopped sucking sound. Could a journey of a thousand miles end with a single stoplight?
Before the trip my mom had said “Go.” Boyd’s mom handing Boyd the Amoco gas card said “Go,” They both said, “Be careful.” So we went. So we thought.
Boyd and I sat in the Caddy facing a green light with dashed hope silence. There was no crank of the engine, no radio, no stereo rush, just a mortifying silence a half mile into our road trip. We looked at each other and then over at the Saint Jude medallion dangling from the rear view mirror. The “Pray for us” entreaty quickly came out of limbo. A horn blast broke our abject reverie and we jumped out of the car.
Boyd popped the hood and looked into the vast Caddy cavern. The engine gave no indication of changing its mind. The emergency light wasn’t working so I stood behind the car and waved folks around. Boyd ran over to the library and made a call home: “Mom we are stuck at the intersection of Kennedy Drive and Lake Street. The car just stopped dead.”
The Caddy was Boyd’s dad’s idea. He thought we would be safer driving the massive armored vehicle instead of Boyd’s sporty cruiser, a Chevy Caprice. But the journey of a thousand miles would restart with the Caprice.
Boyd’s mom drove the Caprice over to where we were stranded. We unloaded our gear from the Caddy into the Caprice. Boyd reconnected the AC cord of the Marantz to the dc to ac converter plugged into the cigarette lighter. We were good to go musically. Hope started charging the moment the Caprice cranked over. We thanked Boyd’s mom and drove off leaving her to wait for the tow truck.
After a couple of hours driving we had left Illinois behind. Boyd drove the whole first day and night of the trip. No-Doz, Dr. Pepper and a BTO album kept Boyd’s hand thumping the dashboard for hours on end. We puffed on Dutch Master Panetelas as he drove us through Wisconsin and through Minnesota and then into South Dakota, clicking off mile after mile, ash after ash. While he drove I lay back in my seat, eyes half-open, as the day turned to night before us. When it became dark I wondered if Boyd could stay awake the whole night staring at the two-lane monotony always just headlights away. As DJ Denny I was soon charged with changing the records and keeping him alert. Bumps in the road and lane changes kept me busy returning the wandering needle to its groove.
South Dakota: grasslands, vast open landscape, not a building in sight. In the early morning hours back-lit by the sunrise, the tall wheat grass looked like golden blond hair as it was brushed by the wind. After fourteen hours we let the turn table go silent. When we did I heard other music playing outside the open car window – ancient music streaming in the wind. The cessation of all that I knew from a life in Chicago and the revelation of sights and sounds I never knew somehow caused ancient memories to stir up in me, a mystical vision of a boy running free – no shirt, no shoes, just earth and boy and wind. Snap! A Wall Drug billboard appeared and then another and another. Burma Shave Lives on: GET A SODA…GET A ROOT BEER…TURN THE CORNER…JUST AS NEAR…TO HIGHWAY 16 AND 14
FREE ICE WATER…WALL DRUG.
What great wonder of the world awaited us? Boyd drove us past the endless signs to that middle of nowhere – the town of Wall, South Dakota, home of Wall Drug. The promise of free ice water noted on the drug store’s ubiquitous billboards along I- 90 had wetted our interest.
Wall Drug was just what my post card thought’s had pictured: Indian lore and artifacts packaged for tourists along with food, souvenirs, polished stones, rubber tomahawks, prescription drugs and the free bottle of ice cold water. When we got back to the Caprice a Wall Drug bumper sticker was affixed to the rear bumper – a billboard to go:
“WHERE THE HECK IS WALL DRUG?”
We set off with our free ice water and our newly labeled rear end and headed for the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, the Badlands and the Corn Palace. I queued up Paul and Linda McCarthy’s Ram album. Out came “Too Many People,” “Three Legs,” “Ram On.” The Beatles were breaking up in our back seat.
“Looking for a home in the heart of the country….Heart of the country, where the holy people grow, Heart of the country, smell the grass in the meadow.”
We exited I-90 at Rapid City and drove south to Custer State Park. After scratching our heads we left. We followed Iron Mountain road out of the eastern gate of Custer State Park. The road’s corkscrewing “pigtail” bridges and three narrow honk-your-horn-through-the-rock tunnels wound us through the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore. As we drove out of one tunnel the chalk-white “Shrine of Democracy” appeared before us in the receding aperture. We had come out of the rabbit-hole of the sixties and face to face with our forefathers. We sat up straight in our seats.
As we stood on Mt.Rushmore’s viewing terrace I was hoping to see Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint but not James Mason. I was in a North by Northwest latitude of mind. With some intrigue in mind I did put some tokens into a telescope. I was hoping to catch someone hanging from the nose of a president but all I saw was a few eroded pores. Stone faces don’t do anything for me.
That night we decided to camp at Mount Rushmore National Park. Red – eyed and saddle-sore, we had been driving since 2:00 in the afternoon the day before. It was now 7:30 pm Saturday. Fortunate for us the gods behind the stone faces smiled down upon us: we were able to get the last open spot on the campground. After pitching our two-man tent on a floor of pine needles we crawled into our sleeping bags. We let sleep overcome us – screaming kids, barking dogs and banging pots not withstanding.
The next morning’s commotion gave us a start. Folks were packing kids and camping gear into their cars and leaving the park. We didn’t start a fire or make coffee. We pissed, packed the tent and drove back to Rapid City where there was a Waffle house and breakfast.
After some scrambled eggs and toast and plenty of coffee we pulled onto I-90 heading northwest. I put the needle down on BTO’s groove “Taking Care of Business.” Boyd again thumped the dashboard as we drove past Sturgis into Wyoming. We drove past Sundance and then Gillette. We turned south and headed to Casper passing the Hole-In-The Wall hideout. We had heard that Butch and Sundance were out of the country so we didn’t stop and say “Hi.”
After an early supper in Casper we made the Grand Teton National Forest by twilight. On a bluff that overlooked Jackson Lake’s Spalding Bay we set up our tent. The once-in-a-lifetime view: the cerulean blue lady of Jackson Lake had put on a string of diamonds that sparkled as the sun set.
The air that night was crisp and clean, full of promise. We slept like two bears in hibernation. I finally woke the next day when I stretched out my legs and my feet touched the cool damp edge of the tent. I poked myself out of the tent and found the same morning dew had been soaking the bottoms of my shoes. “Hey, Boyd wake up. Look at this.”
With one last snort Boyd roused and fumbled out the tent, one leg in his pant’s the other caught in the tent. “What?”
“Look!” I pointed.
Boyd’s jaw dropped.
All around our tent there were huge paw prints in the damp earth. A bear had been stalking our campsite during the night. “Whew!” – our collective thought blurt out from our ashen faces. We were relieved that we had not been mistaken for food and that the cache of food we had brought with was safely packed in the car’s trunk ~ a two-week supply of beef jerky, spam and bottles of Dr. Pepper. As far as I was concerned, though, the bear could have the jerky. GIGO, as they say.
Now Boyd liked to keep moving. He was not ADD. He was ASAP. His mom told me one day that “you never know with Boyd. Boyd goes wherever the wind takes him at the moment.” Boyd was my Dean Moriarty. So every day, On the Road, wind at our backs, we drove like the world was holding out on us.
For the both of us movement meant music. Boyd brought his LP and eight track collection and I brought my LPs: Boyd’s road tunes: Bachman Turner Overdrive (BTO), the Beatle’s White Album, McCarthy’s Ram, The Bee Gees, Barry Manilow (yes, Barry Manilow), Jefferson Airplane. Mine: Chicago Transit Authority, Blood Sweat and Tears, Bill Chase: Chase, The Doors, Sargent Pepper Lonely Heart’s Club Band, the Woodstock soundtrack, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Green River, Moody Blues Every Good Boy Deserves Favour . Mile markers, grooves, tracks and flashbacks – we let the RPMs take us.
Driving up to Yellowstone was a panoramic delight. We “aw”-ed at the sight of Old Faithful, we laughed at the “blup blup” of the Mud Volcano erupting and pinched our noses at the rotten egg smell of the Sulphur Caldron – the bounty of good earth filled our senses.
From Yellowstone we headed south to Wind River Indian Reservation. We set up our tent in the early evening in a nearby campsite and started a fire. Boyd stirred up some Sanka.
We sat by the crackling pine needle fire until the reflective light of the moon flooded directly down onto us through the towering jack pines. Branches scratched each other in the night breeze. After a while we decided to hike over to a treeless area we could make out at the edge of our forest canopy. As we did we came upon a creek bed lay that lay at an opening in the side of a deep ravine.
It appeared that a mighty river had once flowed through the rock, its torrent gouging a deep channel through the sandstone and later breaking out the gulch before us. But now instead of a large swift river forcing it way upon the landscape, a shallow unhurried stream silently passed over a bed of smooth stones and sand. The desultory shimmer of wet stone offered teasing glimpses of the moon’s face from earth. Boyd and I sat down near the stream on a fallen grey tree trunk. Our short shadows floating on the stream.
I saw her then, a silhouette of a young woman with waist length hair. She was kneeling at a bend in the stream. She looked to be a cutout of the Indian princess on the Land-O-Lakes butter package. (My fantasies always include food.) Kneeling about twenty feet from where we sat she turned toward us. I met her gaze. The next thing I knew my legs were carrying me over to where she knelt. Funny things, legs, but I guess when you are seventeen and having just graduated from high school the torrent of impulse is unleashed within you moving your legs before all else.
“The moon,” was all I got out and I sat down next to her feet. The moon’s ethereal light dappled our faces with faint glow. We sat silently for a while, my fearlessness now speechlessness. And while I waited for my impulse to catch its breath I hoped that she would say something.
“I’m Anna.”
“I’m Denny. Hi.” I looked over at her hoping to see more of her face but it was in shadow.
“Hi.”
After a couple of awkward minutes she said, “My folks are taking us to California for vacation. I’m from Rapid City, South Dakota.”
“I’m from Chicago.”
“I can tell.”
“How’s that?”
“Guys from Chicago talk like Chicago. You know, like their chewing on meat and potatoes when their talking to you, like regular guys. That’s what my mom says about her dad. He’s from Chicago.”
“I didn’t know I was regular until today. I do like my mom’s pot roast.”
“Regular is good. It means you are who you are and not something else. I could sense it before I walked out here alone.” She turned quickly toward the trees. “I am not alone. My parents are right over there in the camper, so I am not alone. See?”
I looked where she looked and nodded. “OH. OK then. I am regular.” I said looking at her. “Regular is good. So be it.”
From behind me came the sound of a small rumble and then a loud splashing of hoofs followed by neighs and whinnies. A herd of wild horses ~ Mustangs ~ appeared out of the east ravine passage. They stopped right in front of Boyd to slurp up the clear water.
It was midnight and a dreamscape: wild horses standing in a quick sliver stream, my hand now in hers, the moon’s pale illumination casting a black and white surrealism onto the ravine walls and Boyd, a shadow, sitting alone on a log. I shook off my dream.
I said good night to Anna telling her that I hoped we’d meet again in another dream and walked over to where Boyd sat. He had been whittling a pine branch into what looked like a spear. I sat down and together we watched the horses until they chased each other down the stream and out of our view. We returned to our tent for the night. The Dream followed me there.
*****
One fine morning, girl, I’ll wake up
Wipe the sleep from my eyes
Go outside and feel the sunshine
Then I know I’ll realize
That as long as you love me, girl, we’ll fly
And on that mornin’ when I wake up
I’ll see your face inside a cloud
See your smile inside a window
Hear your voice inside a crowd
Calling, “Come with me baby and we’ll fly”
Later, Boyd said he didn’t mind about me and the girl. But he did begin to mind when I met another girl on our trip to England and then another on a trip to Miami and then another on our trip around the Great Lakes. I was happy when began to talk about a girl he liked at church. I hoped she liked him.
*****
Wyoming was a state of mind that I didn’t want to leave. I vowed to return and make my home among the broncos. Denver was next on our road trip. Our former pastor lived in a suburb of Denver and Boyd decided that we should surprise him by showing up at his church office. The pastor gulped when he saw us.
Pastor Renz greeted us and then invited us to his home for lunch. We ate PB & J sandwiches and drank lemonade. His told us that his wife was out-of-town so we sat with him and his three sons on their patio. During lunch we chatted about our trip and about our home town and then we said goodbye. This side trip was important for Boyd. Years before I had brought Boyd to our church. This pastor had led Boyd to the Lord. Boyd wanted to see him one more time and thank him. As his mother said Boyd was impulsive in every way. The high RPMs of his soul kept us moving quickly in some direction – a direction we’d figure out on the way.
After lunch Boyd’s compass pointed northeast and to Estes Park, Colorado. We made our way to this mountain town where the bindle bums of the sixties had come to find a Rocky Mountain High – hippies and tie-dye shrines were everywhere among the polished stone and incense shops. Guitars were being strummed by glazed eyed folk singers warning of the world’s destruction at the hands of the Man. We quickly left town after stocking up on a supply of beef jerky and Mountain Dew. We soon found a campsite along Silver Creek.
Our rented patch of earth for that night was no more than six feet by five feet. It sat right on the edge of a small bubbling creek. All the other campsites were taken for the night. With no space to build a fire and an itch to do something we left the tent and drove around until we found a sign for a drive-in movie theatre nestled within the steep mountain valley. An hour before the movie began we bought our tickets. To pass the time we sat on the hood of the Caprice eating popcorn watching the sunset gild the mountain ridges.
By 9:30 the mountains had shuttered off light on all sides except for the corona of moonlight directly above us. The previews began to roll and then came the main feature: Le Mans with Steve McQueen. There were Porsches and Ferraris burning up the track. There were more wild horses, more RPMs. All good until the screen went blank after the credits. Everyone had driven off except us. The Caprice wouldn’t start. Then the drive-in manager shut off the food stand lights. Our race car wasn’t going anywhere. Boyd wiggled the battery cable but the battery had been DOA.
After talking to the drive–in manager Boyd made a phone call, this time to AAA. An hour later a tow truck chained our fate to its cantilever pulley and hauled us over to a darkened Amoco gas station. The sign on the door told us the station opened at seven am. We got back into the car and slept restlessly wondering if seven o’clock MST was ever going to show up like it did in CST. I also began to realize that Beef jerky and popcorn don’t come together for your enjoyment.
At seven-o-five a mechanic pulled his pickup into the driveway of the gas station. He got out of the truck, dropped his mouth open at the sight of us and then spat some brown liquid twenty feet behind him. He then walked over to front of the gas station and unlocked the garage door. He then set about brewing some coffee. When the muck he was brewing had finally stopped belching he offered it – an oily looking residue with islands of powdered cream floating on top – in a grimy Styrofoam cup. The lack of air at that altitude must have deprived my brain of needed oxygen. I drank the coffee.
While the mechanic installed a new battery we called home. We wanted to let our parents know that we hadn’t fled the country to avoid the draft. We were “OK” we told them, “just more battery problems.” We set out again confident that we were firing on all electrolyte cells.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The drive through Rocky Mountain National Park lifted our spirits skyward but the dizzying drop offs and the struggling out-of-breath car are the things I remember. And the feeling of being at the top of the world with eagles, soaring.
After descending the mountains our trip began to take on a deliberate speed. We had tired of sleeping on the hard ground and the endless ribbon of highway unreeling in our sleep. We drove across Colorado to a town on its western edge, the town of Dinosaur. This small town and its streets were so named because of their proximity to Dinosaur National Monument – the home of prehistoric fossil beds. The rocky ridges along the highway leading to Dinosaur gave the appearance of exposed dinosaur backbones.
After a brief glimpse in the direction of epochs and eras Boyd pushed the “Fast Forward” button on the floor of the Caprice. From Dinosaur we drove into Utah so we could say that we had been to Utah. We found a campsite east of Vernal. In the morning we headed southeast to Grand Junction Colorado and then up and around Denver and straight for Kansas. We camped that night outside Salina Kansas, under a large oak tree. The next day I wondered if I would see Jim Ryan, the first high-school cross-country runner to break a four-minute mile, run past us as we drove through his home state.
Topeka came and went. We drove into and across Missouri. We spent the night at a St. Louis West Route 66 KOA campsite. After breakfast in St. Louis we sped a northeast diagonal across Illinois prairie up to our homes outside of Chicago. Even wild horses need their batteries recharged.
“You didn’t build that.” We’ve all heard those dismissive words in the news recently.
Luckily, for all I involved, when I heard those words I didn’t jump up run out and burn an effigy of BHO or stampede my local DMV. I guess that’s because I didn’t inherit the Islamist strain of thin-skinned believer DNA that makes one go berserk at the mere thought of someone trivializing what they hold to be true. I did yell at the TV, though: “You’re full of yourself BHO.”
I am an ardent believer in the constrained view (see below), the view that incentives, individual hard work and prudent trade-offs builds houses on stone foundations. The unconstrained view of good intentions, big government and “divined” solutions builds houses on sand. And we all know what happens to each house when torrential rain comes. And, we all know what Liz Warren’s government built road to hell is paved with.
There is a reason why BHO diminishes the individual effort. BHO, of the central planning view, wants joy-stick control of the “invisible hand.” And I am not talking about “Thing” from the Addams Family comic or the other-worldly operator of the Ouija board.
The “invisible hand” of the market is a metaphor used by the father of modern economics and capitalism Adam Smith. Simply put, the metaphor describes the self-regulating behavior of the market place. Individuals seek to maximize their own gain in a free market society where goods and services are traded in a free exchange between both parties. For Smith the” invisible hand” guides individuals into mutually beneficial exchanges. Moral and socially beneficial behavior is evoked through the process. Fairness is part and parcel of market practices. Obeying the rules (i.e., standard weights and measures) is the order of the day in the market place. Contract laws were developed to help enforce agreements. If an agreement was broken a resolution in a court of law would be required. This is just and fair to everyone involved, because everyone is involved in protecting their own interests. Free market capitalism offers “The possibility of cooperation without coercion” as Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics once said. Regarding one-on-one resolution Jesus did say, “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison.
Adam Smith theorized that the self-interest of individuals acting independently will lead to a socially optimal outcome. From Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter 2:
“As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other eases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. [emphasis added].”
Free market exchange encourages a man to, let’s say, go fishing. The man may eat the fish he caught or he may trade for something that will benefit himself. The fisherman is not coerced into doing either. He is free to do as he pleases with his fish. And another is free to trade with the fisherman – say, bread for fresh fish and both parties therefore benefit from the trade-off. The second party is also free to simply say “No, I don’t want your fish. I want to make tacos al pastor today.”
Again Adam Smith,
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
On the other very visible hand, the well-intentioned-solutions hand, the government confiscatory and coercive hand taxpayer money is simply thrown at problems. Data abounds showing that well-intentioned-solutions (i.e., food stamp programs, Obamacare, minimum wages laws, etc.) never ever ever fix problems they were intended to solve. The “solution” is never a mutually beneficial exchange. Rather the solution is a one-way, one-time meal ticket that will always end up requiring more taxation, more regulation and less of your liberty. The only fishing taking place is in the mail box for the food stamps. BTW: The hand that provides the food stamps is an iron fist – “Do as I say or you will end up hungry,” “Buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty.”
Now, Adam Smith, and later Noam Chomsky invoking Adam Smith, warned of an unrestrained free market society where the “vile maxim of the masters can be pursued without undue interference.” In other words they thought government regulation (Smith much less, Chomsky much more) would hold the free market in check. One example: the fisher folk would not be allowed to restrict the wee folk from fishing, thereby preventing a monopoly on the fish market.
From what I can tell, both BHO and Chomsky see big corporations and Capitalism in general as behemoth American Devils who suck the air out of the world leaving societal corpses in their path. In each their own measure they see the free market, left on its own, turning into unconstrained selfishness. Yet, they see themselves as altruistic. And as a result of such myopic views of the free market and of themselves they are eager to throttle the life out of the free market with very visible “hands”, the hands of government regulation, taxation and confiscation – the hands of coercion. They truly believe that an unrestrained socialist statist (central planning) government under the guise of a (small “d”) democracy would be superior to an unrestrained free market within a big “D” democracy. But government, if you haven’t already noticed, is a monopoly. It is an all-powerful, ready-to-inflict pain monopoly. Who is holding the tyranny of government back? Not good intentions. Not nebulous open-ended “social justice” solutions. Not the voters. Take a look at congress – there are a lot of visible hands in the pie, grabbing at taxpayer money. They’ve want their clutches on your property because controlling redistribution is a means of staying in power.
The so-called “unrestrained super-national corporations” are in reality restricted to what the markets will accept. Countries all around this world invite corporations into their realms because they see the benefits. These corporations are not coercive like government is. And don’t think for a moment that your vote will restrain government. Those in power like to stay in power and to wield that power. They pass laws to keep themselves in power as State CEOs. Good intentions and redistribution solutions are simply “goodies” thrown out during the campaign parade. The public is left with the big mess after the parade.
My answer: Laissez-faire – a “hands-off” economic environment made possible by a majority vote for smaller government (big D, small g), less regulation and fewer hands in the pie. Vote for the person and party that will let you keep your money and control your life. You know what I am saying– restore LIBERTY. The end result will help generate the dynamic green energy needed for human flourishing. Human flourishing will then enable people to not have to think so hard about scrapping together an existence or worry about whether the hands of government will snatch away your property. Human flourishing will also allow more time for the sublime.
So, put your hand in the hand, the “invisible hand,” and let conscience be your guide, not the government.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” (A free will-free market exchange moved by the Invisible Hand of love.)
“Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” Proverbs 10:4 (A statement of fact from the wisest man who ever lived – Solomon.)
Sally Paradise: “I built it with my own two hands.” Invisible hand: “And I helped.”
Definitions:
Laissez-faire (i/ˌlɛseɪˈfɛər–/, French: [lɛsefɛʁ] (listen)) is an economic environment in which transactions between private parties are free from tariffs, government subsidies, and enforced monopolies, with only enough government regulations sufficient to protect property rights against theft and aggression. The phrase laissez-faire is French and literally means “let [them] do”, but it broadly implies “let it be,” “let them do as they will,” or “leave it alone.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire
Constrained view: The constrained vision sees man as he really is: self-motivated. This realistic vision sees man as selfish and greedy but also willing to respect tradition and rules and certainly able to make prudent trade-offs based on knowledge gained from centuries of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, knowledge and wisdom not confined to an omnipotent Decider. One with a constrained vision doesn’t have all the answers. He or she must operate with humility, tolerance and cooperation in order to support the freedom and liberty within which they seek to live.
Unconstrained view: The unconstrained vision relies heavily on surrogate decision makers, men or women of “superior” intelligence and virtue, to make our decisions for us. The implication of this vision is that the common man does not know what is good for himself and for those around him. But those with super-rational intelligence and sincerity do. And because of our lack of “fair and just” decision making, we the people need an over-arching Decider – someone to rein in society. (Recall Obama’s statement: “You didn’t build that.” He’s trying to rein in economic activity and attribute a man’s own blood, sweat and tears to government largesse!)
See my post What’s Left? To Be Decided for more information on the Constrained and Unconstrained Views, terms derived from Thomas Sowell’s book Conflict of Visions.
… a short story about a man’s final hours, as related to me.
It Bears Repeating
The first time I heard the news was right here in the parlor of Moore’s funeral home. I’ll tell you what happened because I need to hear it again myself. I find it hard to believe. Please allow me this last chance to tell my story. I don’t have much time. I’ll be brief. The last cocktail is kicking in.
Being dead, I must note before I move on, has its once-in-a-life time privileges: I can stretch out my legs and nap all I want. I don’t have to bother with bill collectors and more importantly I don’t have to listen to my ex-wives blather on about how horrible a husband I was. They did stop talking bad about me though. That was on Thursday the day I died. Before that day these women were probably right about me but there were times when I tried my darndest to love the heck right out of them, damn near killing myself in the…
“I don’t want you. I want your money.”
Yeah, that was what I heard at the end of two of my trilogy of marriages. That kiss of betrayal twice laid on me would be enough to break any man’s spirit, let alone his pocket-book. Heart and money gave out last Thursday and I wound up here looking at the insides of my stapled eyelids.
Now, I’m not looking for sympathy, just an ear, so lean in close, because my mouth is wired shut, too. There are things that need to be said, my side of the story, before the cover comes down and this chapter ends. And if there is another chapter, the gods, who must all be female because I’ve been a man of constant sorrow, may very well have taken note of my male deficiencies over the course of sixty-five years. They will not rule in my favor. And God help you if you snore or if your nose whistles while you are still alive and breathing. In fact, the gods may certainly deign to send me back as a woman – a large squat cat woman wheezing with asthma and having no idea the cat box litter needs to be changed – Pearl Purgatory.
Is there life after women? If there is I am pretty darn sure that there will be retribution for my lack of mind reading: “Because if I have to tell you, it doesn’t count.” And that will mean that I will be reincarnated en femme. As such I will be made to learn what women need, what women want and, more importantly, I will learn how to demand tele-empathy: holding every man accountable for every woman’s unspoken thoughts.
As I formerly live and breathe, if you don’t know what a woman wants before she opens her mouth you are already in the death’s hollows. And because I could not read the minds of the three females in my life I spent twenty-six years in the dog house barking at shadows and howling at the moon. My only reprieve being a weekly escape to the local tavern, a tavern serving dead-beat husbands like me. Thank God there was a “Joe” the bartender at TKO Tavern. I could read his mind.
And Joe could read mine. Tuesday nights the Miller Lite would stand waiting before my stool: tall, cold and gushing with anticipation. In that room filled with nodding imbibers, tattooed torsos and limbs and shouting TVs I would tell my story of woe to unknown people of every color and stripe. It was easy there. Everyone at TKO was in my corner for those couple of hours a week. Going home afterward I felt as if I just had therapy. Sleep would come and I would start again the next day. But the truth was always there standing over me in the morning.
Where was I? My feet are cold. They feel like lead. Did I own a suit and tie? Oh, yes. I wore a suit for the studio picture of me with my four kids last year. I see it now in the picture frame sitting on the top of the casket. But I’m starting to ramble, a foible also despised by the women in my life. What can I say? My mind became mush on women. But let’s go on before the fat lady sings my song.
Wife number one. After six months of marriage wife number one didn’t hang around for further conjugal visits. The umbilical cord between mother and daughter snapped her away from me like a bungee cord recoiling
I met Andrea at a Bible college. We dated while at school and then after graduation we camped out at her family’s home outside of Crown Point, Indiana. Every weekend I would drive from Illinois to her parent’s home in Indiana. I was hoping that her father would say just take the girl and get out the hell out of there. Her father, a straight arrow of a man, was predisposed to disposing with unnecessary words. His remaining words were pounded into arrow heads meant for a bullseye.
You see, Andrea’s father was native-American – an Apache. He liked him his TV, his Pabst, his pipe and his solitude. He made no demands on Andrea’s family other than “be quiet,” “shut up,” “get me some dinner,” bring me a cold one” and “don’t ever touch my pipe tobacco.” In this denizen of dysfunction Andrea stayed close to her cowering mom while avoiding her father. It would take me several harrowing attempts to ask him for Andrea’s hand in marriage. When her father said “Yeah, take her” I had hoped to leave the dystopia behind. I married Andrea in her family’s GARB church – that’s a General Association of Regular Baptists church for all of you outside of the Bible Whiplash Belt (No, I never had a crew cut).
The “hallelujah and amen” of nuptial bliss lasted about six months. Andrea’s father took a job transfer to Arizona – Arizona or Bust. I figured that with the transfer Andrea’s father could get back to his native-American roots. Being an oil refinery pipe fitter in Gary, Indiana was not the proper place for this son of the earth. He saw the transfer notice posted on the lunch room bulletin board and applied the same day. He never consulted his wife. I figured, too, that the desert would be a good place to drink, shoot a gun and fall down drunk. I gathered all of this from his stolid stare which told me everything and nothing.
In the moment when Andrea’s her mother told Andrea about the transfer Andrea decided that she and I had to move from Chicago to Arizona to be near her mother: “Or else.” It was The Ultimatum Express for me or the highway for her.
Now, I hadn’t mentioned this: before Andrea and I married I had a solid job in the Chicago area. Andrea and I had settled in an apartment an hour away from her mother. Things seemed quiet and sane apart from her family – us in Illinois, her parents in Indiana. But that was the problem: way too much sanity for Andrea.
So, without further discussion and a half-year after making our eternal vows to each other, vows which I found out would not indemnify the oath taker from the pain and loss of separation and subsequent divorce, our marriage was torn in two. I came home from work one day and found that Andrea had taken all her things and had left for Arizona. There was a note: “I’ve gone to Arizona. See ya.” She certainly had her father’s eagle-eye determination and his paucity of words. Suddenly I was left with my job, an apartment lease and dozens of unpaid bills. I was uncoupled and alone but mother and child were reunited, a co-dependency I probably should have seen coming.
After six months of being married in absentia and being surrounded by the four walls of loneliness I decided to go out to Arizona and plead my case for our as yet “unwrapped” marriage. I flew out to Phoenix.
The sun has finally moved behind the curtain. Good. Oh, there are lilies. I wonder who sent those. Maybe it was my daughter Anna. I wish she was here. My nose must be stuffed up. There’s not a smell in the house. Who are those people looking at me? Are you still listening?
The day I arrived in Phoenix the temperature was 121 degrees F. I couldn’t sit down in the rental car until the air conditioning had cooled the seats and steering wheel. Standing next to the idling car I thought my feet might stick to the black top taffy.
After checking into a room at the nearby airport Holiday Inn I immediately phoned Andrea and told her where I was. She sounded out of sorts when she told me that she would leave work at 4:30 and then drive up from Globe, Arizona where her parent’s lived. When I called her the week before and told her that I was flying out to see her she balked, “Come but don’t expect anything.” I came expecting everything. I bet it all on “See ya.”
The drive to phoenix took about an hour and forty minutes. I waited in the restaurant lounge of the Holiday Inn. I asked the bartender what he would suggest for someone waiting to be disappointed once again and who never had a drop of hard liquor. He put a Manhattan in front of me – a cherry about to drown in a sea of bourbon. Between the ebb and flow of Manhattans I would ride the elevator up to my room to see if I had any phone messages. Upon opening the door if I saw no red light pulsing in the dark room I would return downstairs to my drink. The waiting bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters consoled me. The bitters and I were now comrades in arms.
At nine o’clock I finally saw the pulsing red light. Andrea had left a message: she’d be there in five minutes. I splashed some cold water on my face and headed downstairs.
Once back at my seat Andrea appeared at the door of the dining room. The soft knit turquoise dress she wore gathered all of my attention. The hands on her hips said, “Let’s go.” But after five Manhattans I was in no shape to go anywhere but up to my room. Andrea insisted that we get in her car and go back to Globe. But the liquor, now speaking on my behalf, failed to get my tongue to form syllables. “I rave de…,” was my only response so she relented and we went up to my room.
There Andrea and I sat on the edge of the twin beds and talked for five minutes. I can’t recall the things we talked about. At one point I got up, leaned over and kissed her. Shapely turquoise and stultifying bourbon would continue to have the same effect on me up until last Thursday. Now if I have one saving grace to present to the gods it would be my kissing ways. Playing trumpet for forty years puckered my lips into the perfect embouchure for kissing. A few nicely placed notes would make any woman’s ears wiggle. Actual levitation would occur. You’ll have to trust me on this.
I did try to sleep off the bourbon but luck wouldn’t have any of it. After a couple of hours we set out on Superstition Freeway and then U.S. 60 heading east toward Globe, Arizona.
I remember the full moon transforming the rough cut desert landscape into a B & W western. I half expected to see Tex Ritter or Roy Rodgers galloping along with our car. In the distance I could see saguaro looking like they were in a holdup, both arms up. Gila monsters and tumbleweed lurched into and retreated from the light of the headlight “projectors.”
We finally reached the town of Globe, a community of workers from the sliver mines. Up north in the Tonto Basin there was an oil refinery where Andrea’s father worked as a pipe fitter. His nature had taken its course.
I found a room at the eight room Globe Motel. After checking in Andrea and I grabbed breakfast at the Mother Lode diner. It was there at the diner that Andrea’s older brother showed up, a pack of Luckies rolled up in his tee-shirt sleeve. He had a pock-marked face and his jaw was set. He sat down across from me, flicked the ash of his cigarette into the ash tray and ordered a coffee. I didn’t know what to expect. His demeanor was always silent tough-guy gruff. He finally spoke: “So, you’re here to take my sister home?” “I respect that.” I breathed a sigh of relief but then he said, “I don’t think my mother wants that to happen.” My stomach tightened. After drinking his coffee down in two gulps he stood up and walked out. That was it. I was disposed of.
I looked at Andrea. She looked back at me over her glasses as if to say “don’t you see?” She went off to work and I returned to my motel room to ponder what just happened. I spent the rest of the day watching TV in my room hidden from the sun’s death rays. The tepid water in the motel’s outside pool offered no relief. I had lost my cool, too.
After passing a couple of monotonous days in the Globe Motel Andrea offered me a room in their parent’s guest house – a tiny adobe bungalow at the bottom of a steep gully shaded by mesquite and jojoba trees. That was better. Andrea would be closer but she could be a tease.
When Andrea finished work at 4:30 she would come down to the bungalow and spend hours kissing me like I was her best beau. She’d coo and I’d plead. Later she’d go back up to her parent’s house to sleep.
My return flight was on Sunday. Nothing had changed in the status of our marriage. Andrea said nothing about returning with me. I was perplexed to point of “Enough already.”
On Thursday I found a Globe Yellow Pages and looked for the name and address of her company. I bought a Rand McNally map at the Texaco. The place where she worked was on the outskirts of town. I drove my rental car to her office and walked right in. Andrea was nonplussed. She grabbed my arm, turned me around and took me out to the parking lot. She told me to stay away from her work. After some futile begging where I asked her to come home with me, I drove back to the bungalow feeling despair. I felt it where I never felt it before – in my feet. Later that night, though, she told me that on Saturday we would do something together. Hope and pace revived among the kissing.
Saturday morning we drove north to Tonto National Forest and Apache Lake. The reflection of the midday sun off of the bleached rock was blinding. We got out of the car and stood together on the bluff that over looked the cobalt blue lake.
“Denny, I have something to tell you. I have a boy friend.”
“What? What’s his name?” (What did it matter?)
“His name is Scott. I’m not coming home with you. I have divorce papers coming. I don’t want alimony. I just want to be here. I have to be here.”
There it was, that unspoken word that pulled the bottom out of everything: “over.”
On Sunday my dad was waiting for me at an Ohare Airport’s arrival gate: “At least you tried.”
“Yeah, I have that going for me.”
****
Who’s that? Do I know you? Someone please open my collar. It’s stuffy in here. Someone please open a window. I need some air. I promise the next bit will be shorter. I’ll have to rest soon.
Wife, part two. Melanie is a good woman. She didn’t get the best of me, though. I had become jaded after my first marriage to Andrea – philandering took the place of fidelity. I figured that I couldn’t count on just one woman to be there for me. At any moment she could go off the reservation and perhaps return to her mother’s womb. I didn’t trust any woman even though Melanie deserved it. Regrettably, I decided there was safety in numbers.
Melanie gave me two roly-poly boys. I never thought life could hold such inimitable joy as when these two were born. Fatherhood set the responsible part of me in stone forever. But the marriage part remained free-floating. And though I had two beautiful sons I kept up my selfish ways until one night. I came home and found all my belongings sitting out at the curb. I knocked on the front door but no one answered. I sobbed and knocked and no one answered. I had been locked out of the marriage. Later the sheriff would knock on my door with divorce papers: “I don’t want you. I want your money.” I had blown it with Mel and all of my change-of-heart soul-searching wouldn’t bring her back.
Wife, part three. Yes, I tried again. Once again I succumbed to the elixir of physical attraction. But this time I thought I had also found someone who didn’t just love me for my kisses. I met Bethany at the Pacific Club dance bar where on Friday nights a friend and I tried to hook up with the dancing queens. She and I met on a Friday night when I came alone.
After returning to my seat that night I heard a voice behind me say, “That’s my chair.” I turned around and looked into the face of a model. I said “Sorry. I went to dance and came back to my seat. But you can have it.” She sat down. We ended up going out to eat that night and talking for hours.
Bethany liked photography as much as I did. We both liked fine wine and gourmet food. And kids. She had a son from a previous relationship and I had two sons from Mel. After whirlwind dating for six months we decided to elope. I was pushing for this, perhaps unknowingly, thinking about the final net cost should there be a divorce – still jaded after all these years.
We set up shop in a suburban town west of Chicago. Two years later Bethany would give birth to a beautiful baby girl and then a boy two years later. Four kids now on the payroll.
The first Lamaze class with Mel awoke fatherhood within me. I was right at home with kids. But marriage relationships, no, no, no, they would not come home to roost. As it turned out Bethany was a very needy person. Instead of mother issues Bethany had father issues. The effects of family dysfunction had come full circle. There was also the bane of Bethany’s PMS. Every month I wanted to go into the husband protection program the moment Bethany’s voice took on the other-worldly tone of a candidate for exorcism and her eyes became blue steel beebees and her dissatisfaction with me amounted to me just being alive.
Beyond this, in her own special three Margarita way Bethany would let me know that I was never “man enough.” She went on to tell our marriage counselor that she didn’t “feel loved,” by me, that “Danny is clueless. He doesn’t know what a woman wants or needs.” In lay person’s terms, I wasn’t woman enough to be a man. And from what I could gather as a mere mortal Bethany had also been looking for the Old Spice-John Wayne-gladiator-movie-watching father-figure who lathered on the macho during her childhood. What she got was a Ward Cleaver-turned-Casanova-turned-“give-me-a-break” type.
Fourteen years later my marriage to Bethany ended with a prolonged, painful separation and a matter-of-fact divorce. With that cut off point came the demand for support: “I don’t want you. I want your money.”
That’s my “trilogy of women” story – the troika that did me in. In the end, emptiness is what’s left of me. It can be found everywhere in my life: empty vows, empty pockets and empty rooms to kick around in. I had emptied my emotions, too. This final loss was not paid for with tears. This loss was paid for with my health. I would soon break down, the hemlock of sorrow and depression working its diabolical alchemy. The only thing not empty in my life is this casket. And that brings me to my final state – death by marriage.
Who is that strawberry blond with the turquoise pendant? Is that Andrea? Who is that young guy with her?How did she know that I passed on?I wish someone would stop playing that damn organ. I want to hear what their…
Andrea: “Scotty, say goodbye to your dad. We have to go.”
The free form litany below was compiled based on the verbs and the sequence of action found in Genesis Chapters One and Two.
I agree with the theory of theistic evolution: the creation act once initiated by God set evolution into motion (without the need for fine tuning) over millions of years and right up to our present day.
Here’s something you’ll get a big bang out of: if you wonder whether there is a personal God, wonder no more. God had (in our time frame) envisioned every boson in every hair of every head. You are a unique accumulation of God Particles held together by the Quantum Force of Love. Smashing.
Any exhaustive research into my childhood would reveal several close encounters with aliens.
You would learn that these encounters occurred primarily on Sunday afternoons but also sometimes on Saturday nights. You would read that the aliens would slowly pull up in front of my parent’s home and then park right smack in the center of our view, a view framed by our front room picture window. (I wanted to say “frontroom” because it’s the Chicago way.)
For our family Sunday mornings meant going to church – the hell-fire-and-brimstone-preaching-shouted-from-revved up lungs-quivering jowls-and-leaps and-bounds-of-a-Baptist-minister-kind of church. Such a fire-breathing monster would let us know in no uncertain terms that redemption came only by turning from our sins and by walking down the aisle or raising our hand. I did wonder why he didn’t sell exercise videos out in the foyer – “Pilate Your Way Out of Purgatory: Fit and Fundamental Workouts.”
Now my mom and dad are God-fearing people who have always been very hospitable. Often, after a Sunday morning service or an evening service, my folks would invite friends, speakers, missionaries or relatives over for a meal. As I said, this happened a lot.
There were also a few Sundays when my parents decided to have an afternoon home alone with the kids. On those days we would come home from church to the salivating smell of pot roast. The roast would cook while we sat in church pondering our short comings and our eternities. The record will show that I had aromatic visions of pot roast as I turned from sin, walked down the aisle and raised my hand.
Back at home my mother would take the pot roast out of the oven and cover it with aluminum foil. Apparently the fat needed to rejoin the roast in a final cattle roundup. Mom and dad would then prepare the sides – all kid friendly: corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls. And, upon occasion my mother would make butterscotch pudding for dessert. As a devotee of such fine cuisine I sat in the basement far out-of-the-way of the chefs. Down there I watched Warner Oland play Charlie Chan on our B & W TV: “So sorry.”
Besides being wafted to Kid Heaven by the smells I knew that my parents were not just making a scrumptious Sunday meal. They were not going to take any chances with me going far from the straight and narrow. They knew that the way to tether a kid’s soul and keep him close to home was with pot roast and butterscotch pudding.
Well, on one of those blissful Sundays when my tummy was ballooned to its fullest pot roast-iest extent I lay on the floor rolling and reading the funny papers. Nancy and Sluggo. Dick Tracy and Flattop. Brenda Starr and…my brother.
Daryl ever the antagonist always wanted to read the same few square inches of the comics that I was reading. I swear. He would daily invent ways to aggravate me. That day his pointed elbow to my side almost burst me. In retaliation I poked him back and then he poked back harder. This went on for ten minutes until my father said, “You two cut it out or no butterscotch pudding for you.” That settled things for the next five minutes. The thought of Butterscotch pudding had a calming effect on me. An added dollop of whipped cream would also keep me in check – for at least a half-hour.
It was within the cautious serenity of those five minutes that I saw my father suddenly leap up out of his swivel rocker. The Chicago Tribune fell to the floor splayed open. My dad turned to my mother who was sitting on the couch half asleep. With a look of petrified horror he said, “The Gephardts are here!” That was the day I would have my first sighting of aliens in our own front yard.
Absolutely beside himself, my dad thought for a moment: perhaps we could make it look like we weren’t at home. But then he saw the visitors looking at him through the picture window. The alien father on the front lawn was yelling “Hi Bob.” My dad then looked down at his two young children, children who just came home from re-dedicating their lives to Jesus and to pot roast looking up at him. Instantly changing his mind my dad scrambled in two directions at once. In the same step he first bolted toward the kitchen but then turned and flew to the back of the house. Things were put away, hidden from view. Rooms were “straightened.” Food stowed deep in the refrigerator. Our Schnauzer Bobbie took the cue and hid under my bed whimpering. My brother and I hid all of our toys. The quiet afternoon had morphed into the afternoon of the living Gephardts.
Now the Gephardts were good people my folks said, “They’re just a little different.” Yeah, as different as earth and mars I would soon find out.
After greeting the family of five, my dad said he had to get “some things” at the grocery store. An hour later my mother looked concerned, abandoned concerned, angry concerned. As the time crept, my mother sat patiently listening to Mrs. G. wonder out loud if her little “Ronnie was really over the chicken pox.” (I kid, (scratch, scratch) you not.)
My brother and I stood across from the three alien kids, two boys and a girl, and wondered what to do. Mom suggested that we go to a nearby field and play baseball until the FBI had located our father. So off we went.
I can not recall whether it was my brother or whether it was me who was hit in the head with a baseball bat by a Gephardt boy. It must have been me who received the carom because great a swath of my memory has been forever displaced. The oldest kid swung right though an imaginary fast ball which was in fact my head. Let the record show that silly remained intact though. (I have had three concussions in my life: one from a right-handed batter on sugar, one from a concrete wall that halted my fifty yard dash at 55 yards and one as an adult when a humongous lead pipe-carrying truck used my car as a brake – my head bounced around like a pin ball in a Dukes of Hazzard pinball game. Three concussions may explain my David Lynch-like persona, my dream-state reality and my stuttering posts.)
At some point my dad came back from the store with a pie, a cherry pie and a can of whipped cream. He offered to heat it, slice it and even remake it -anything so as to not have to talk to Mr. G who I now know was dead ringer for Randy Quaid. Mr. G sat in our front room – greasy tee shirt, flys buzzing and all. The three G kids all could have walked off a page of the Addam’s Family comic strip. It’s all a blur. On purpose.
Mr. G was a junk collector by trade. He collected “fine” items no longer of use to their owners. He resold his JIT inventory on Maxwell Street. Did we have anything that we didn’t want any more? I imagined that my father wanted to say “Yes, you here.” But my dad, a generous and good man, kept to his busy ways and went looking for a ‘fine item” that would spur Mr. G into immediate sales activity. My dad “sacrificially” retreated to the basement where after a half hour of searching everywhere including a Walter Cronkite newscast he found a lamp on its last light bulb and handed it to Mr. G. who was pleased with his salable good but continued to eye my mom’s china cabinet. My mother seeing Mr. G’s honed gaze locked onto the china cabinet stood up between Mr. G and the cabinet as she continued to talk to Mrs. G. The “over-my-dead-body” look must have told Mr. G all he needed to know. He backed down.
After some warmed cherry pie and coffee and a shake down of each the kids to see if they had taken anything from our rooms we said goodbye to the G’s and to the afternoon. It was now evening. Exhausted we all fell back into the couch to watch a “really big shew.” We had seen the Outer Limits.
Over time the Gs would show up again and again unannounced. Somehow we were ever on their radar though my parents only slightly knew them as neighbors at a previous address in Chicago. But finally these afternoon aliens did stop showing up.
I suspect they stopped coming when our house looked eerily uninhabited: with all the curtains pulled my dad started taking long Sunday afternoon naps on the couch in the dark, cool basement of our house. My mom who loved our dad took us three (by now) perturbing kids for a long drive in the country – all of us far from afternoon aliens.
(Any truth in this account, real or perceived, is totally up to you.)
The obvious answer: political gain. But there may also be a not-so obvious reason.
A President who thinks that eighteen holes of golf is work enough has now decreed that laboring to obtain an otherwise free benefit is no longer required. Yet, free lunches, there ain’t no such thing. You the taxpayer are paying for someone to sit on their ass and collect welfare.
By presidential fiat just months before the November presidential election Obama has told us in effect that he doesn’t want the beneficiaries of welfare to have to strain themselves on the way to the 7-Eleven. Lifting that bottle of Jack or that can of malt liquor is work enough. Am I being cruel? No. You’ve been to the 7-Eleven and seen the line waiting to buy lottery tickets. Is this a generalization? Perhaps, but you can fill in your own eyewitness accounts. Obama by fiat diminishes individual effort and seeks to replace it with the collective effort (to win reelection.
What may not be so obvious a motive for this fiat by Obama, who is rabidly anti-colonialism (see Obama 2012, the movie), is his desire to denigrate the Protestant work ethic in America. Beyond political gain he may have decreed this because of his or his father’s own ill-will towards American missionaries. One can only speculate based on the familial and national dysfunction found in Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father.
Obama may very well have thought that American missionaries who were sent over many years from U. S. churches to foreign countries like Africa brought with them free-market enterprise, capitalism and the Protestant work ethic along with the Gospel. Because of Obama’s learned hatred of colonialism there would be little wonder when later Obama would sit within ear shot of the black liberation theology rants of “Rev.” Jeremiah (“God Damn America”) Wright. For Obama those “colonizing-looking” missionaries may have appeared to be bringing with them the shackles of Americanism. To Obama and Wright those falsely perceived “projected” purveyors of slavery via work ethic are anathema. And from Obama’s speeches one can readily tell that Obama detests anything American and especially the individual effort which produces human flourishing. Work is just to be a caged sideshow event outside Obama’s big circus tent of government. Obama’s Big Government Show does not need you to work. It just needs your ticket to the show (your vote).
This is the screwed up thinking born out of Obama’s father’s dreams. And, it is now America’s nightmare.
I learned about work from my father. He showed by his example how to support himself and his family. There were times when my dad worked at two jobs. He did what he had to do. He provided for his family and for his future. He also paid taxes and donated ten percent of his earnings to our local church. I’ve followed in my father’s footsteps (see my previous post). Obama on the other hand has no idea about what I talking about here.
Obama’s father spent his time drinking and womanizing. Obama’s “founding fathers” Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and mentor Frank Marshall Davis, a radical poet and former Communist, taught Obama how to radicalize what he felt inside.
Obama has learned nothing from his father except how to hate that mechanism that promotes cultural and material exchange and success via the marketplace. He hates the hard work that supports it. He lives in the valley of the shadow of colonialism.
Beyond this, Obama, in Howard Zinn-Noam Chomsky-like fashion defines America as the pompous ass that needs to bow the knee to the ever-gracious world – the same world that spits out Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, Iran’s Ahmadinejad and countless terrorists and tyrants and those who support them. And like Zinn and Chomsky Obama thinks America has a big head. But what Obama and these other “big heads” don’t realize is that they are projecting their own dysfunctional personalities onto America.
Obama sees nothing exceptional about America. He sees America as the throw-away packaging that holds his own political gain.
Obama: why work so hard trying to reach for the stars when you can easily reach for your food stamps in the voting booth?
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What does the 2012 Obama Presidential election campaign look like? A collective of special interest groups (big labor unions, homosexuals, women on birth control who can’t afford to pay the five dollars every month to buy it even though they attend prestigious colleges, etc.), limp-wristed faux Indian progressives like Elizabeth Warren, extremely wack radicals like Van Jones, giant ‘plasticized’ Hollywood egos craving attention, Wall Street deep-pocket Super-Pac cronies, Green Energy Money Launderers, Occupy Whine Street-ers and all the disenfranchised “not-ready-to shovel” for their lunch people.
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Jesse Lee Peterson speaks w/ Dr. Dinesh D’Souza, NY Times Bestselling author of “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and President of The King’s College. D’Souza’s new film, “2016: Obama’s America” – Love Him, Hate Him, You Don’t Know Him!
For fifteen years I was one of three partners in a manufacturing business, a business that I helped start from scratch, a business that when I left had sales revenues close to twenty million dollars.
Before starting the company I met with two friends. Each of them wanted to leave the company we were all working for. The three of us knew that the company we were at would soon fold. The owner had mismanaged the company into the ground, causing many to be fired. Soon the owner would take the assets out of this failed company and go start another business. We saw what was coming and so we decided it was time for us to set our sights higher and take care of our futures.
In the failed company the three of us soon-to-be partners were the three people who knew how to make the equipment being sold. And, though only one of us had a BS degree there were plenty years of experience between the other two partners. Each of us had met with customers and we knew manufacturing. We didn’t know all there was to know about running a business but we did want to find out for ourselves.
My own experience developed from many years of electrical engineering and design in the manufacturing sector. Over time I managed groups of designers and electricians. There were also many times when I was a welder, a fabricator, an electrician. I taught myself how to use AutoCAD and Microstation CAD design software. I taught myself how to program PLCs and computers. I went to night school to learn accounting, economics and business. I took math course, physics and welding. In order to commission equipment I traveled thousands of miles to customer sites across America, Mexico, Canada, and as far as Korea, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. I learned by applying myself to the task, by learning what I needed and simply by doing.
After several after-hours discussions at a local bar the three of us decided which day we would leave the troubled company to start our own business. Being integral to the functioning of the business our concurrent departures would mean that the company would rapidly fold. The company did close within a year. We went off on our own with no nets beneath us and just our own will to make things happen.
We began our business in a basement. We invested $3000.00 in start-up capital. We each claimed a share of equity in the new firm, incorporated as a Delaware corporation.
Now I have to tell you, starting a business with nothing but sheer determination is not easy. The risk of no immediate sales and therefore no paychecks for weeks and months is ever before you. With this in mind we began to solicit business by sending out business letters telling a broad spectrum of customers about our new venture. We even begged for business, often drastically discounting the sale just to get our foot in the door and to keep it there.
While we advertised I also set up the computers and the accounting system using what I learned at night school. I set up the accounts: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Assets, Revenue, W-4s, etc.
Over time (almost a year after starting) we received our first purchase order. I had developed a small position indicating device that could be readily used in the plastics industry to control plastic sheet gauge – a necessary requirement for thermoforming companies. We sold one and then two. I was then sent to California to install the later-to-be patented device. I had to make sure that our product did what we promised it would. Once it was proven we invoiced our first receivable.
We slowly gained sales momentum from customers who knew our reputations and knew of our capabilities. We sometimes over sold ourselves just to get in the door. There were many quiet anxious days along the way waiting for something bigger to break. When things did start happening we rented a small industrial building and set up what little we had. As orders came in and invoices went out we were then able to buy computers, software, drafting tables, welders, paint equipment, hand tools and a truck with our company name.
We soon hired staff: a fabricator. As business continued to grow over a time , a seeming eternity for us with our shoe string budget, we added more and more people. When I left the company there was over fifty employees on the payroll. This company, currently housed in a 325,000 sq. ft. building with large overhead cranes, is now doubling it size, building an expansion on the same site.
The reason I left the business and cashed out was simply the fact that the work of starting a new business is a 24/7 job. This intensive venture took a toll on me and my family. There were many nights away from my family. There were many intensive phone calls with clients. As the Vice president of Engineering I spent many hours trouble shooting customer problems in person or over the phone from home. I spent a lot of time interviewing people and then hiring and firing as needed. I supervised design work and managed over a dozen people, all engineers. I was on call constantly.
In the early days of our company I multitasked. There were only three of us and one of us had to go on the road to do the cold calling. I stayed with my other partner and we did what was needed. As an order came in I would create the electrical schematics on a drafting board, I would then order the parts. I would receive the parts, sort out the paper work, input accounts payable, print out checks on a line printer and then send out the checks to vendors. I would assemble the large-scale equipment by hand: I welded half-inch plates of carbon steel to create structural frames; I assembled control panels and wired the instrumentation. I also spray painted the finished products. Before that I would power up and test the equipment. I was front office, plant, truck driver, assembler, engineer and tired but excited. I was working for myself and creating growing equity. My piece of the pie was growing.
Until you’ve done something like start a business from scratch you would have no idea how intense, exhausting, scary and pleasurable it is to make your way in this world with just the work of your own hands. But the excitement doesn’t stop there.
As the company grows you hire people. But it is a scary proposition. You know you need more help but you don’t know where or when the next order is coming from. You bite your nails and finally say “OK, we need someone. Place the ad.”
When you hire someone and train them you’ve given them hope. At the same time your own stomach is wrenching with the fear that someday you may have to lay that person off if business drops off. It is all risk, calculated risk and that is what entrepreneurs do best: find a venture and put themselves and their money at risk in order to create something successful and to gain a return on their investment – an investment of dollars and tons of sweat equity. Obama knows nothing about what I talking about.
Obama risks nothing. He finds safety in numbers, in government. He is the child of safety nets. His absent father gave him no guidance whatsoever about business. It is apparent from Obama’s biographies that Obama learned to hate anything which might smack of colonialism. And Obama has wrongly conflated capitalism with colonialism. Obama’s only claim to success is his community organizing. We can see now that his organizing is nothing more than organizing taxpayer money to the benefit of his political gain.
No government built our business. Government with its ever-present paper work and regulations was ever the impedance to growing our business and hiring more people. Government now, in effect, hinders human flourishing. And I don’t have to tell you that Barrack Obama wants more government and less independent success. You’ll have to ask him why he hates business and demonizes success.
Sweat equity built our successful business not government. And it was not Obama, not Elizabeth Warren, not roads and bridges, not the IRS, not organized labor and not the three thousand dollars of start-up capital back in 1988. We built it with our own hands while paying corporate taxes up to 30%! Obama can kiss my sweaty ass!
Listen Obama (I know I am speaking to deaf ears) – “There is no sweat equity in golfing.”
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
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“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
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“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
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“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
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To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
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“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
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Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
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If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
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“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
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“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
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Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
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“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
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“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
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God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
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From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
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“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
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One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
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“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
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God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
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“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
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“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
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“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
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“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
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Cindy Wity 
The Hangover Continues
November 7, 2012 Leave a comment
Obama won. America lost.
America deserves better than this media mollycoddled divisive passive-aggressive politician. The hangover from election night 2008 still has America off her feet.
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This morning I bumped into our office’s cleaning lady. I’ll call her Dushanka.
Dushanka asked if I had watched the election coverage last night. I answered sadly that I did.
I never knew Dushanka’s political inclination before this morning. We previously had only talked before about our families and about work. We often talk when we arrive to work at 6:30 in the morning. We sometimes see each other during the long work day and then we also chat.
Dushanka came to America from Romania. She came to America because America was hope and change long before Obama came on the scene. Dushanka works long hard hours just as I do. We both pay our taxes and we obey the rules. But after watching the election results and the crowd at McCormick Place and on the street she told me, “America is now broken.” She could not fathom why those young people were standing there paying homage to Dear Leader, economic reality held in abeyance. Nor could I.
Dushanka told me something that I am no longer shocked about in Obama America: another cleaning women working with D cheats the “system” – you and me.
This woman, a foreigner, is using some else’s social security number. This woman has a child from a boyfriend. This woman registered the child at a Chicago Public school and received $200.00 (for what Dushanka didn’t know). This woman who works with Dushanka also receives food stamps. This same woman wrote on her job application that she had graduated from high school though she never graduated. All of these things and more this woman related to Dushanka in a rather smug way: “Look, I am getting away with this. You can too.” In other words she is “cleaning up” at our expense. That is Barack Obama’s America. And that is status quo for Chicago. It is quickly becoming so for the nation. This is Social Justice Obama style but is this going forward in a morally right direction?
Dushanka told me that she does not cheat the system: “That would be cheating God.”
Where is the Social Justice for people like Dushanka, for people like me? Where is the social justice when people steal from other Americans? And where is the social justice when people forcibly take your property and give it to someone else though taxation? Where is social justice in class warfare? In dividing the country racially? There can be no social justice when men are not given their due, when materialism trumps the justice due human dignity and worth.
Did you notice that our American ambassador and his aides were slaughtered in Benghazi? The Obama White House is covering up their decided lack of involvement. American citizens were killed but Obama played golf, campaigned and had another cigarette. Could it be that there is now in place “a U.S. government policy of “engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East,”? This is the biggest scandal in American History. The Obama regime wants to stonewall the whole business so that time will pass and people will forget. But we won’t forget.
Did you notice Fast and Furious – AG Eric Holder sends lethal weapons to narco-terrorists in a scheme to teach America a lesson about owning guns? The scheme backfired and a US border agent, an American citizen, is killed with the same guns along with hundreds of Mexicans. This is Social Justice Obama style.
Religious liberties are now being deleted for the new religion of political correctness. Moral relativism is replacing absolute truth.
Millions of people are out of work. Yesterday people voted for more of the same!
This is what fear of the state looks like<< click here
Asstounding! People voted for more uncertainty, more unpredictability, more taxes, more regulation, more tight money, more policies that undermine business confidence and block economic recovery. They voted for more incompetence from Barack Obama!
Today’s children want socialism. And it is the very people who want socialism who bring nothing to the table. That is why they want redistribution of other people’s money – they have nothing to offer themselves.
People now want the government to be their insurance company and their vending machine for everything from birth control to abortions to health care. People now want government to cover all their bets and to give them other people’s money to play. The majority of people voted for the indentured slavery of big government and the Boot placed on their neck!
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Obama’s Hope and Change cocktail has put our country on its back. The only cure for the “Goddamn America” hangover from the 2008 and 2014 election nights is “God Bless America.” The cure didn’t happen the last four years and it is not going to happen these next four years. The narcotic effects of atheism, nihilism, materialism and antinomianism (lawlessness) – an elixir of evil gulped down on those election nights will now spread rapidly through your system. Liberty won’t know what hit it.
Just ask D.
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Read The Forgotten Man – those who supply jobs and resources – requirements for human flourishing – are not the academics.
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Media Bias and the other Great Overlooked Stories of this Election Season
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Filed under commentary, Political Commentary, Politics, Writing Tagged with 2012 Presidential campaign, Big Government, Economics, Liberty, Obama re-election, politics, socialism