My Head Is Exploding

 My head is exploding from trying to understand all that is really going on in our country and in the world today.

I keep trying, but it’s hard to deal with all the waves of hatred and selfishness and glowing optimism and self-assurance that keep crashing together in....oh, say Saudi Arabia or Israel or some ISIS leader’s conference in a cave in Afghanistan or in our own country.

The big problem is how many people don’t see  - pardon the image, but it works in several ways - the elephant in the room. It’s the one big contradiction that our body politic seems to be ignoring.

What? That makes no sense, you might be saying. I would be saying pretty much the same thing. “What do you mean?”

So, I will give myself a few examples. Then you can see why my head is exploding.

Let’s look at Britain, where a majority of the voters thought it would be a good idea to pull out of the European Union, talking about how unfair their businesses were being treated and how illegal subsidies in France and Germany and Spain were hurting their own workers.

Pulling out would be easy, some leaders said. Then we can re-negotiate our own terms. What could go wrong?

Or was that Donald Trump talking about pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Or Scotland and Wales talking about declaring their independence from Great Britain. What could go wrong, the Brexit backers said. What they all said. My head hurts.

Then our president promised - at a little talk in Davos - that we would never again let terrorists have a safe haven in Afghanistan. Let’s see what that means. 

I think it means that the longest war in our nation’s history (we have had troops there since 2001, when our goal was to dismantle al-Qaeda) will just go on and on. Unless, hey, they could just build a great, beautiful wall all around the country to keep out the terrorists. And deport the home-grown terrorists.  And cut off the money that those terrorists are getting from some people in countries that are our allies like Saudi Arabia. (remember where most of the 9-11 terrorists came from?) My head is exploding.

Or, we could look at the very valuable and still-growing Me Too movement in our country, calling out men who have behaved very badly and deserve to be jailed for life like Larry Nassar, a former doctor for the US  women’s gymnastic team, who was just sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for molesting seven girls and women.  More than 150 women charged him with molesting them over the years, and all 125 who reported his crimes to the Michigan State Police were allowed to make court statements before his sentencing. He ultimately pled guilty to seven counts of criminal assault, three involving girls under 13 and three more who were13 to 15 years old.

Well, good news. The chief executive of the US Olympics Committee has just announced an  independent investigation to find out how that abuse could have gone on so long - to find out “who knew what and when” when it came to Nassar, who is now safely in jail for the rest of his life. Now he didn’t say who would be doing the investigation or how long it would take, or whether it might be expanded to look into other abuses of our young Olympic athletes. But, he assured us, the results will be made public. My head is exploding.

And while we’re on the Me Too subject, I am having some trouble with a women who attacks a man because he was not able to understand her non-verbal signals, or who takes joy in driving Al Franken out of the Senate because of some piggy things he did in 2006, but sees no reason to keep up an attack on our President for all the piggy things he did and still does.

See why my head is exploding yet?

Well, I have a clue to what’s going on inside my troubled head, and in our troubled world. But, it is a dark and ominous clue. Kinda goes with my old saying  “being smart doesn’t make  you happy.”

I think “the other” is getting closer.

What? 

Well, while we often feel concern and sympathy for disasters far away, we often turn a blind eye to it after a few days. We are finding it harder and harder to care what happens to other people, and we are viewing more victims as “the other.”

Storms and earthquakes outside our country can be written out of our memory as soon as the cellphone videos stop being shown on television. Heck, we have shootings in our nation every day, and we don’t even collect data on gun violence - Congress made it illegal. And, we forget them quickly because they are in other states. We already have had 11 mass shootings in the US this year. Remember where?

Now we do pay attention to natural disasters that impact on thousands of our own citizens, or at least we did it until one hit Puerto Rico. After six months, half the island still doesn’t have electric power. Remember?

Well, that started a slippery slope. We can ignore the problems of forest fires in California and their mudslide aftermath - someday Congress will pass a bill to pay for disaster repair work - but then we remember there is still flood damage to repair in Louisiana and Texas.

Well, the next step on that slope was to ignore the economic impact of tax reform - specifically the impact of not making state and local taxes deductible - on those blue states on the east and west coasts. Heck, if they want to waste money on things we don’t need like bridges or mass transit, then let them pay for it.

Guess where the next national disaster will hit. I’m already starting to forget it, because it wasn’t in my state or my town or on my block, and it hasn’t even happened yet.

Maybe your head should be exploding, too.

The Chain That Pulls Our Migrants

 Lots of people have been talking about chain migration lately, but not too many people - even the most ardent sign-waving Republicans or the wisest-looking TV commentators - have been saying just what it is.

The President wants to stop it. Lots of Democrats in Congress generally oppose the idea of stopping it, but don’t really talk about it much. It is much too complicated, lots of them say. The commentators on television say it would just bore their audience but would love to do a show on it some day, if they could only figure out a way of getting ratings.

So, unless John Oliver jumps in and explains it all to us, I feel that it is up to me to explain Chain Migration and look at some possibilities of what ending it might have done in the past and what it might do now.

But, first, let’s make it entertaining. I’ll give you a little quiz.

Chain Migration is:

A - The wholesale import of chains into our country, from the small ones used to hang plants to the really big ones that hold the anchors on ships.It is killing our own American chain industry.

B - The quasi-legal importing of gold and silver chains from nations that would otherwise be banned from dealing with the United States and getting our hard currency, simply by shipping their reserves of gold and silver - doubtless collected by terrorists and North Korean agents - through Swiss chain makers, then selling them at a discount for Valentine’s Day through some jeweler at your local mall.

C - Allowing legally settled immigrants who live in the United States to sponsor someone from their village in the old country to come here and immigrate, allowing them to someday sponsor another immigrant, until much of their old village population is now living in the United States.

The answer, of course, is C.

Now, let’s suppose we end the practice. It is, as the President said, really bad.

Well, let’s go to Fiddler on the Roof. Ah, Anatevka, that wonderful, fictional village which stood for hundreds of little Jewish villages that dotted the Pale of Settlement - the only place in Imperial Russia where Jews were allowed to live a century or so ago. Who said so? The Czar.

Now, that Pale was a pretty big place. It covered parts of the Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldavia and Poland. Some Jews lived in cities like Warsaw and Odessa, but most were just in rural villages where they were farmers and shopkeepers. They could scrape out a living and dream of someday having a better life and observe their religion, at least until a Pogrom broke out.

For those not familiar, a pogrom is a kind of a riot, where the local citizens rise up and beat up or kill their Jewish neighbors, burn their businesses and vandalize their homes,  and then go on to live happy lives free of the debts they may owe those Jews, move into their now-vacant homes or simply do business free of competition.

All with the blessing of the Czar, who knew that his people needed an enemy to be angry at, lest they become angry at him.

Exaggeration? Well, there were about 200 pogroms in the Russian empire between 1881 and 1884, many in Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa. The very first pogrom was earlier, in Odessa in 1821, where 14 Jews were killed by people who thought they were somehow responsible for the execution of Greek Orthodox patriarch Gregory V.

Now the Jews who tried to get out of the Pale and get to the United States or England or Holland or Argentina or anywhere else generally needed a sponsor, and that sponsor usually was a family member who had previously moved to one of those countries.

And, if and when they managed to emigrate, and settle in Brooklyn or Cleveland or Atlanta, they might - if things worked out right - sponsor a brother or a cousin or a lucky neighbor who might emigrate to those cities, too.

Presto, chain migration.

The same thing, without the pogroms, happened when famine ravished Ireland, when hard times swept through Italy and when Germans (and yes, Jews and Germans do not mean the same thing) tried to escape the chaos of their nation after World War I. It was the same path that people from other nations walked as well, the path that makes Minnesota the unofficial Norwegian capital of the United States and makes Riverhead, N.Y, hold a Polish Fair every year.

Now, if we end chain migration - that evil, evil practice - we might hope that the problems of the hopeless people in the world today might be solved when all of the tens of thousands of villages and cities across the United States rise up as one and each agree to find and sponsor some poor family in a nation where they - and we - do  not have a common language, where they and we have no political or economic connection, and where we and they have never shared a single room or a single meal, or ever seen each other.

Now, if their village is small or if their schools are poor or if they have no hope of ever improving their life, they might somehow make it to the United States. But the chances of those poor families and those poor children making it would be a whole lot better if they had neighbors in their new home who spoke their language, shared the same religion or who might even be related to them.

On the other hand, I am not in Congress and I am certainly not the President. I am sure they have a much better idea to deal with the problems of the poor of the world. You know, the folks in the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

I know they talk about it a lot on certain national holidays. Maybe, sometime, they will take the time to explain how to do it. Or, maybe, John Oliver will notice.

Guess who's coming to live here!

We’ve been talking a lot lately about immigration, but - as usual - our discussion has kind of missed the point.

Well, it hasn’t really missed the point as much as avoided it. Lots of words have been tossed around, but none of them has actually hit the target.

What do I mean? Well, our President and our Congress haven’t actually said who they want to admit into the United States to become citizens. The closest they have gotten was mumbling something about doctors and about bringing in people we need.

So, using my skills as a retired reporter (investigations and farm crops a specialty), I have found the top-secret list of the kinds of people we want to help make our nation even greater.

Let’s go.

1 - Magicians. We need to bring more people into our country because the birth rate here isn’t keeping up with the death rate. Our population is growing only because more people come here each year. And, a shrinking nation is a bad thing - few people want to take their turn in the army or collecting the garbage on freezing winter mornings or being our gardeners. So, since President Trump wants to cut immigration roughly in half, we need some magicians to turn that trickle of people into a mighty stream.

2 - Doctors. Now, I know we have a lot of doctors, and bringing in too many of them will result in lower medical costs. Ha, Ha, Ha. Actually, we need a couple of different kinds of specialists, mainly plastic surgeons, who can make Americans look really great again. After all, appearance is everything.

3 - Young, attractive models. Two reasons. The first is outlined in category 2. The second is that Donald Trump will not be in the White House forever and he will, sooner or later, be looking for another wife.

4 - Scientists. Not the boring kind with test tubes and computers, but the smart guys who can sit behind a desk, look at a camera, and say “This really hasn’t been proven yet. And, we have to know before we act.” We need them because the limited supply of those experts was pretty much used up by the tobacco companies, the fast food industry and the advisors to municipal water companies.

5 - Birch whip makers. There are lots of saunas in our country, but few of them have authentic Swedish birch whips to swat your back and get the blood really flowing while someone pours some water on the hot rocks. Increase the immigration quota for Sweden.

6 - Reindeer Herders. Now that the War on Christmas has been won, we will need a lot more reindeer for the parades on every main street in the nation and for the Christmas displays that will be going up in front of town halls and churches and - if they know what is good for them - in front of Temples and Mosques as well. Increase the quota for the Danes.

7 - Auto assembly line workers. There are some car makers - I can’t reveal just who - is going to spend more than a billion dollars building a manufacturing plant in one of our states, and they will need specially-trained experts to oversee the automated assembly line. Increase the quota for Germany.

8 - Hard-nosed prison guards. Crime is raging in Democrat-controlled cities, where they are wasting tax money on things like soft prisons where convicts get packages from home and actually get out early for good behavior. Law and order is a national goal, and our new private prisons will not only cut costs but will be good for the economy. There are already plans in the talking stage to turn medical care over to some of the surplus plastic surgeons we are allowing to come into the country.

Increase the immigration quota for Russia.

Little Words Mean A Lot

Words just don’t mean what they used to. But, our media - the newspapers, the radio stations, broadcast and cable television and even social media - just haven’t kept up with the changes.

You can’t really blame them. There just isn’t the traditional news structure - the old who, what, where, when, how - to deal with such a rapid change, kind of like watching a stomach ache in Alien becoming a deadly other-worldly threat bursting out of someone’s gut.

Pretend your dictionary is a GPS, and just as soon as you try to use a word you have long been comfortable with, it says “recalculating, recalculating.”

So, as a public service, let me give you some words and phrases which have been so changed in the past year that their original meaning is all but gone.

I’m a bit of a romantic, so let me start with a phrase that just drips of history and longing for a time gone by. A time of a stately culture, with breezes under the trees and a song whispering from the fields. A culture in a world long, long ago and far, far away.

“States Rights.”

For decades, it was a fine, honorable phrase echoing in the halls of Congress. It meant 

the citizens of particular states down south had the right to discriminate against minorities, forcing them to use separate drinking fountains and public bathrooms, sit only in certain sections of movies and courtrooms, and go to separate schools, all of which supporters of States Rights claimed were separate but equal. 

The fact that minority children got poorer grades from their underfunded schools simply proved to some people that the states were right not to waste money on them. I think some of those elected officials said “believe me, believe me” when they talked about it.

 Then schools were integrated, the water fountains too (except for the ones removed in a fit of pique) and “States Rights” was used only to block the freedom of some “other” people to practice their religion or build things like temples and mosques in areas previously reserved for churches. Or marry someone of the same sex.

You never heard any of those states arguing they have the right to have people drive on the wrong side of the road, or to require people to eat three gallons of ice cream a day, or to let children marry at 16. Oh, wait, they did have that right. But, I digress.

Now, States Rights means just one thing - it means any state has the right to oppose the actions of the federal government, just as long as the President is a Democrat. 

That sweeping power doesn’t seem to apply to Republicans. Now while people have the absolute right to grow marijuana and create a new billion dollar industry in any state that allows it, that right stops when the Republican Attorney General opposes the idea. 

Your state also has the right to pass laws regulating the insurance industry, but you can’t stop out-of-state insurance companies from selling cheap policies in your state which won’t provide needed services. It violates the rights of the state where the policy was issued.

 Then there’s the old phrase “Laboratory of Democracy.”  We used to think the states could compete with each other to decide what worked best for their residents with things like education or the social safety net. But now, if some state feels people should be allowed to carry a concealed firearm when they buy a $10 state permit, our federal government wants to allow them to carry that weapon concealed in any state. It is, after all, the issuing state’s right.

But enough with the long-winded explanations. Let’s just list a few other words or phrases which have evolved during 2017. Bigly.

* “Very, very. Really, really. Love it, love it.”  Repeating a word used to be done for emphasis. You make “it’s really big” larger by saying “it’s really, really big.” Now, it’s a double negative, which gives the phrase the opposite meaning. “My hands are really, really big” means that your hands are really very small.

* “...ist”. A double negative in a single word. It is remarkably flexible because it can be attached as a suffix to almost everything. I have a big brain becomes I have the biggest brain, which means, of course, the opposite. Works with “I am the smartest, I am the richest and I am the most powerful.” 

* “Believe me, believe me.” A plea, one that is actually believed by fewer people every time the phrase is used. 

* “I will do it, 100 percent.” This odd phrase has evolved over time, from the gold standard of purity - Ivory soap was 99 and 44/100th percent pure, although they never said pure what. Then it became “I support that, 100 percent,” which was about as far as you could go. That is, until “I am behind you one thousand percent.” Now, it has gone back to its original 100 percent form, but there is a new time element attached. “I will support him 100 percent” actually means the countdown to the floor dropping out from under him has already started.

* “I don’t remember that” and “I don’t recall.”  It used to mean that you truly do not remember something, and you will not remember it until you go on the witness stand and the lawyer questioning you hands you a document labeled People’s 16 and says “does this refresh your memory.”

* “Does this refresh your memory.”  A legal question that means it is all over, and how truthful your next answer will be is going to determine how long you will be in jail.