Before the President's Speech...

President Obama will give a major foreign policy address to the nation tonight in which he hopes to convince the American people that A. he has a strategy to confront ISIS and B. it is a good one that we should support. To put his alleged gifts of public speaking to the test, I will state my opinion of the ISIS threat now, before his speech, then tomorrow I will revisit the issue to see if the President was able to change my mind.

Of course, you may well point out what a ridiculous exercise this is since I am essentially a nobody, and who the heck cares what I think? You would be right about the nobody part but wrong that it doesn’t matter. It very much matters that the President is able to move the needle of public opinion on such an important issue as foreign policy. In as much as I am a member of the public and consider myself persuadable, I am very much his target market in this speech.

Here’s my view. ISIS is a brutal collection of roughly 20,000 black-robed 7^th century Islamists who, having noticed that their particular slice of the world doesn’t have a pot to piss in, have concluded that what is needed in the ARAB world is a revival of the Dark Ages. To this end, they all quit their day jobs as used camel salesmen and took up arms. This new “army” consists of small arms, machetes, lots of Toyota pickup trucks, rusty box-cutters and video cameras with which they film beheadings of various westerners to greatly exaggerate their power. The areas of the Middle East which they “control” consist primarily of vast stretches of…sand. ISIS has no air force, no mechanized armor and no camouflaged uniforms, (Seriously…who wears black in the dessert??). A 20,000 man army sitting around in the middle of a dessert with no air cover and no serviceable artillery seem like the very definition of “sitting ducks” for a modern air force. And speaking of air forces, there happen to be three very well equipped ones in the area belonging to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel.

I agree with the premise that ISIS is a despicable organization, and their execution of American journalists in cold blooded fashion means that these murderers should be dealt with accordingly. But, I am at a loss to understand why this particular group of savages are suddenly some sort of existential threat to the Western World. Sure, there is always the threat that some nutjob will hijack a plane and fly it into a building, but this has been true ever since there were planes and nutjobs. ISIS didn’t invent brutality.

It would seem to me that the nations with the most to lose from ISIS are in the neighborhood. Something tells me that The House of Saud isn’t interested in being part of a Caliphate. I’m not sure the Kuwaits or the fine folks in Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates are anxious to give up their high rise luxury condos any time soon. In my opinion, it’s high time that these modern Arab states stepped up to the plate and policed their own back yards.

Besides, this nation-building business started by George Bush hasn’t been going very well. We get rid of the tyrant Sadam Hussein and we end up with a leaderless, ungovernable Iraq. We get rid of Muammar Gaddafi and we end up with a failed State and Benghazi. We draw a red line in Syria to try and get rid of Assad and now…

Enough already. The only reason ISIS is still in existence is because the neighboring ARAB states haven’t summoned the will to destroy it. Why have we armed them with the finest fighter aircraft in the world, the finest tanks and artillery, if not for a time such as this?

I will watch and listen to the President tonight, eagerly awaiting new information that might justify a change in my opinion. 

The Price of Things

“Price of milk reaches all-time high,” screamed the headline on my computer screen. At that moment it occurred to me that I couldn’t guess the price of a gallon of milk within 50 cents if my life depended upon it. It’s not that I haven’t bought a gallon of milk at the grocery store before, it’s just that I never pay any attention to the price. What am I going to do, shop around for the best deal on milk? No, when we need milk, we buy milk. The price is basically irrelevant. You can’t pour water on your cereal.

Be that as it may, it still bothers me that I am so unaware of the price of something so basic to my way of life. I know how much a gallon of gas costs. I’m completely up to speed on the costs of coffee and beer, other must-have life liquids. How did I get so out of touch with how much stuff costs?

So, I decided to give myself a little test. I wrote out a list of staples that we buy at the grocery store every week and made my best guess at their price as follows:

1.     Gallon of milk             My guess…$2.50……….actual price…$3.65

2.     Dozen eggs                  My guess…$1.75……….actual price…$1.82

3.     Box of cereal               My guess…$2.23……….actual price…$3.98

4.     Loaf of bread               My guess…$2.00……….actual price…$2.03

5.     Pound of bacon            My guess…$4.00……….actual price…$5.58

6.     Jar of peanut butter      My guess…$2.10……….actual price…$2.40

My Guess total...$14.58

Actual Price...$19.46

Pathetic. Stuff costs roughly 33% more than I think. I take away two lessons from this exercise. One, I am a terrible consumer, and two, when in God’s name did bacon become a delicacy? $5.58 a pound? Are you kidding me? What…did hogs go on strike or something? I don’t remember reading about a pig shortage down in Smithfield. Has the government slapped some kind of obesity surtax on the stuff? Is this some sort of politically correct punishment for our insensitivity to Muslims? What in the name of Porky Pig is going on?

I guess its simple supply and demand. In a country that serves up triple baconators for lunch you have to pay to play. Maybe if we didn’t love the stuff so much it would be cheaper. Still, I can’t help but be a little resentful of the big shots at Smithfield Foods for hogging all of the profits. The Chairman of Gwaltney gave a press conference the other day to try and explain the high prices. I’ve never seen a more HAMfisted performance. Total HOGwash, a complete boar.

I’ll stop now.

 

One more…who was Porky Pig’s favorite President?   AbraHAM Lincoln.

What is Happening to Me???

Regular readers of this blog know of my opinions about television. You know that in my house it’s Pam who does most of the watching. She sits downstairs on the sofa, busy on her laptop, while simultaneously watching everything from cooking shows to CSI. In her defense, most of the time the television provides nothing more than background noise while she is busy doing something else. But my uses for the thing are more targeted and less frequent…sports and old movies.

However, since the kids left we have developed a nice routine whereby the two of us sit down together during and after dinner and watch a show from Netflix. Almost exclusively these shows have one thing in common, they are all British.

Our latest discovery is a delightful mystery series called Foyle’s War. But before that there was Sherlock, Mr. Selfridge and The Paradise. So, what’s going on here?

For most of my life I have been decidedly snobbish about “foreign” things. My kids will attest to this with universal eye-rolling. “Dad, you’re so provincial! It’s OK to like Honda Dad…the war’s been over for 70 years!!” Generally, my taste for foreign things was limited to the dead…Beethoven, Churchill, etc. But I guess I’m having a mid-life crisis or something because not only have I developed a love of Indian cuisine, now I’ve become enamored with British television. What’s happening to me??

Take Foyle’s War for instance. Here we have a rather straight forward mystery series that takes place at the outbreak of WWII in the sleepy coastal town of Hastings. Foyle is a police detective who is too old to fight so must stay at home and investigate murders during war time. He has a son in the RAF. He is a widower. He has a spunky 20 year old girl for a driver and a recent amputee as an assistant. They go about the business of bringing murderers to justice amidst the backdrop of total war. Many of the crimes are related to the war effort and therefore present ethical conundrums to our team such as, should our top ace pilot be sent to prison for a circumstance-drenched murder depriving the country of perhaps it’s best aerial fighter?

Aside from the thought provoking story lines, there’s Foyle himself. Calm, unflappable, polite and measured, with kind eyes and a soft heart, he always seems in control of himself no matter how horrific a scene he encounters. He happens to be a dead ringer for my long dead Uncle, John Dixon. Watching him think things through, slowly, with methodical calm is fascinating.

The one thing that all of these British shows seem to have in common is something that is sadly missing in many American offerings…intelligence. The storytelling pulls you along, makes you think without the need for the profane or salacious. There is a certain sweetness to some of the characters that makes you care about what happens to them. Even though each episode of these shows is generally 15 minutes too long, afterwards, you don’t feel as if you’ve just wasted 90 minutes, in fact you come away thinking you just might be a bit smarter for the experience.

Try saying THAT after an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. For sure American television does have its share of triumphs (Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Parenthood come to mind), but lately, it has been the Brits who have drawn me back to television.

How many days until Downton Abbey??

How Do I Know That My Wife Loves Me?

Pam and I are going up to Charlottesville today for the UVA vs. UR football game. We have friends, Rob and Dodie Whitt, who have season tickets. It will be hot and muggy with a strong chance of thunderstorms by game time (3:00) and Pam hates football about as much as ISIS hates infidels.

That’s not entirely true since she doesn’t actually want all football fans beheaded, but she can only maintain interest in any sporting event for about five minutes, bless her heart. Now that I think about it, that isn’t entirely true either. She loves figure skating. That’s a sport, right? Yes, we have spent many a winter evening together marveling at the grace and beauty of all those triple toe loops and Sal chows. Oh, and she does watch the Little League World Series because the boys are “so adorable.”

But that’s about it on the sports front. About the only thing she hates more than football is being hot. I speak here of the temperature, not her drop dead beauty. Being from Maine has instilled in my wife a thermostat that is permanently set on 70. Add sauna room humidity to the heat and she feels as if she is in Hell.

So, today she gets to look forward to her two least favorite things in the entire world! On a positive note, Dodie is one of her favorite people and always a blast to be around. There’s the tailgating part which gives her some food to prepare and organize. Who knows, by the time the kickoff comes around she might find that she has gotten swept up in the buzz, thrill and excitement of big time college football. No, wait…this is UVA we’re talking about, where the fans enter the stadium midway through the first period, leave at halftime and don’t return until the fourth quarter, it at all. These are fans who instead of tearing down the goalpost in a fury of exultation, sing songs after each score.

My University of Richmond Spiders, of Division 1-AA fame will do our best to compete, and if the past is any teacher, will give the Cavaliers a battle. I’ll be wearing my Spiders gear, while Pam will be in denim shorts and a sleeveless orange top, not because she is a Cavalier fan but because all of her red things are “just too hot!”

I will thoroughly enjoy myself. Rob and I will talk sports all afternoon. Rumor has it that he has a Cuban cigar waiting for me.

After this day I will owe my wife BIG TIME.

Bob and Maureen. A Love Story.

I have refrained from comment on the Bob and Maureen McDonnell trial largely for two reasons. First, I wanted to wait until a verdict was reached, and second, it was just too depressing. Here we had for the first time in history the very real possibility that a Virginia governor would be convicted of a felony and sent to jail. For a state who boasts of having had the likes of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Tyler in its governor’s mansion, this was a severe blow to our reputation for good governance. But now that a rather emphatic guilty verdict has been reached, a few observations are in order.

Let me here confess that I have not followed the trial very closely. I basically relied upon summaries of testimony in the online version of the paper every two or three days. So I’m sure someone will feel the need to enlighten me about some aspect of the whole ordeal of which I am unaware that may help me to understand the proceedings in a new light. Having said that, as a husband and father I find it inconceivable that the governor chose a legal strategy that involved kicking his wife of 38 years to the curb and baring every sad detail of their twisted relationship for all the world to hear, including his five children.

Mr. McDonnell could have pled guilty to one felony corruption charge, which would have spared his family and us the spectacle of this trial. He would have been sentenced to a perfunctory prison term of two or three years in a minimum security prison and probably have served six months. Upon leaving jail he would have still had some measure of dignity left.

But something happens to men and women whom we exalt to positions of power in our system of government. They begin a slow withdrawal from the very people they are elected to serve. Before long they are surrounded by a coterie of yes men and career government people. They begin to live an estranged life where their day to day existence starts to reflect their “specialness.”  Suddenly, men and women of better than average ethics and values have their judgment clouded by privilege. In the case of the McDonnells, they became convinced that having a “family friend” who provides them with lavish gifts to the tune of $150,000 is perfectly acceptable. The appearance of evil becomes invisible to them. Amazingly, behavior which would be pounced upon if discovered in a political rival becomes routine, to the point where Bob McDonnell, once the scourge of big-government malfeasance, can convince himself that accepting large financial favors from a hustling businessman was perfectly fine for a sitting governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Such is the debilitating seductiveness of power.

Poor judgment aside, Bob McDonnell’s legal strategy makes his financial misconduct seem like child’s play. Apparently, he thought it appropriate to sacrifice his family’s privacy and reputation upon the altar of his own vindication. Anything to avoid a day in prison, we are told. The idea was to convince the jury that the governor’s marriage was so irretrievably broken and dysfunctional that conspiracy was impossible. By revealing Maureen’s volatility and nastiness, perhaps jurors would feel sympathy for the heart broken governor. The jury was having none of it.

I watched his children marching into the courthouse, a beautiful legacy for any father, and I can’t even imagine what this has done to them. Their lives have been laid bare, and their wounds will never heal. Their father will serve his time. He will no doubt be a model inmate. After a few years he will get out. He will write a book, finally getting that big payday he has always coveted. Some high powered law firm on K Street will eventually hire him. He will survive this. His children will not.

When my wife and I brought two children into this world, we inherited a lifelong obligation to protect them from harm in so far as it was in our power to do so. Obviously there are many things we can’t protect them from. Skinned knees and broken hearts are unavoidable consequences of life, over which parents are powerless. But we can protect them from the big stuff, from having their family’s dirty laundry paraded in front of the world. That much we can do, even if it means doing time, even if it means our own humiliation.

For a man who made a political career on family values, who advertised his beautiful family like so many trophies in his commercials, and for a man who, if he is to be believed, still views Maureen as the “love of his life,” didn’t hesitate to throw her under the bus to save his own skin.

Like I said, depressing.

STEP ONE: Borrow the fingers of a five year old!!

I actually did some work on Labor Day. My job was to replace the burner elements of my gas grill. My grill is probably 6 or 7 years old, and I’m one of those guys who is grilling something all year long. I’ve worn the thing out.
 

So, there I was wearing yellow dish washing gloves, no shirt and plaid shorts, with sweat pouring off the end of my nose, peering under the hood of my Commercial Series 2000. There was a half of an inch of black sludge lining the walls. In the catch pan underneath was a two inch glob of meat drippings that had to be scraped off with a hard metal spatula. The actual cooking grate had its own greasy lining, mostly on the underside, the residue of a thousand chicken breasts, jumbo shrimp, New York strips, hamburgers, hotdogs, pork chops and the occasional pork tenderloin. I had bought some sort of environmentally agreeable citrus-based natural cleaner to spray on all of this mess and was skeptical of its value. There’s a reason that old fashioned oven cleaners were “environmentally disagreeable.” Because they could strip the chrome off of a trailer hitch in two seconds! You either wore gloves when you used that stuff or you lost fingers.

I was pleasantly surprised. I sprayed the stuff all over everything and waited two minutes like the directions suggested. The smell was an unholy mixture of rotten oranges and ammonia. But after two minutes and a little elbow grease, the black sludge started melting away like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.

After all of this cleaning it was time to install the “universal elements” which were advertised as “easy to install.” Like most advertising, this claim proved to be bogus. Actually they would have been easy to install if my hands were the size of a five year old child’s. There was a crucially important step in the process that required you to line up the tiny holes on the two telescoping tubes. These tiny holes must be aligned because if not there would be no holes through which the gas flames could travel, turning your gas grill into a giant metal eunuch. To accomplish this vitally important step in the installation, I was provided with a single screw so ridiculously small, so agonizingly tiny that to merely pick it up required the fine motor skills of a concert pianist. I’m not kidding. Here are some pictures as proof:

Needless to say, this procedure took half of the morning. Luckily, I have some of those tiny screwdrivers, the ones you use to repair eye-glasses. I felt like I was diffusing a bomb. There I was, hands shaking, reading glasses trying not to slip off the end of my sweating nose, struggling mightily to thread a quarter of an inch screw into a sixteenth of an inch hole without completely losing my religion. The first one took twenty minutes. Each of the next two took only slightly less time.

Finally it was all done and working like a charm. Time to take it for a test drive.

I grilled up some brats, tomatoes and fried bread and it was a magnificent triumph.

Totally worth it! 

Autumn Possibilities

Partly cloudy, 94/72. That’s our forecast here in Short Pump for the next few days. Not that we can really complain since this has been the best summer ever. Still, mid-nineties and humid is unpleasant whenever it shows up, especially over a holiday weekend.

This Labor Day has been a bit of a bust in the Dunnevant house, which is my fault. It snuck up on me and I made no plans. As a result, Pam and I have been knocking around the house resting and eating and whatnot. Whenever we thought about going somewhere, we would walk outside, get blanketed by the warm embrace of humidity and think better of it. You know it’s bad when it only takes ten seconds for your sunglasses to fog up and you’re only in the garage!

We are ready for Autumn in the worst way. When the leaves start to change and the temperature drops 25 degrees, I intend to make up for my lack of a Labor Day plan, by taking some weekend trips. There’s apple picking and the Shenandoah Valley. There’s Patrick in Nashville, Kaitlin and Jon in Columbia. There’s even the beach, an underrated October destination. There’s also the Smokey Mountains, a sort of mid-point between us and our scattered adult children. A cabin rental over a long weekend might be very nice. Then there’s also that most elusive of trips…the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York. It’s quite a drive because it’s essentially in the middle of nowhere, but I’m told that the best time to go is in October. The leaves are stunning.

So, I have my work cut out for me. So many destinations, so little money.

Better fix that.