My "Paying-For" Problem

 Nancy Pelosi, the remarkably well-preserved former Speaker of the House, has contributed mightily to the ongoing debate about the 6 trillion dollar debt explosion we have endured over the last 4 and a half years. Appearing on Fox News, she told Chris Wallace that it was a “false argument to say we have a spending problem, when in fact we have a budget deficit problem.” To make it even more clear Rep. Steny Hoyer added this valuable insight, “we don’t have a spending problem, we have a paying for problem.”

Crickets.

Far be it from me, a mere business owner who over a thirty year career has managed to overdraw his checking account only once, to question two savvy veteran politicians, but I would say that if you have spent 6 Trillion dollars more than you have collected over 4 and a half years, you have a problem that sure looks and sounds like it has something to do with spending. But if Nancy and Steny and President Obama are convinced that our financial problems have nothing to do with spending too much money, well then, it must be true. I do wonder though how this explanation would hold up down at my bank:

 Wells Fargo Banker:  Mr. Dunnevant, thank you for coming in this morning. We have a problem with your business checking account. It seems that over the weekend you wrote three checks, one to the Melting Pot for $158, another to the Apple Store for $3205, and a third to Martins for $219. However, you only had $2100 in your account, so we have a problem.

Me:  A problem? What? I don’t understand.

Wells Fargo Banker:  Well, generally speaking, one needs to have sufficient funds in an account to cover checks written. In your case, you spent $1482 more than your balance, so there’s a spending problem.

Me:  No, no. You don’t seem to understand. I don’t have a spending problem. It’s more like a deficit problem.

Wells Fargo Banker:……………yes…but that’s pretty much the same thing.

Me:  More specifically, I don’t really have a spending problem as much as I have a paying for problem.

Wells Fargo Banker:  Wait…what?

Me:  Here’s the thing. Yes, my accounts seem to be out of money, but just because I’m broke doesn’t mean I can just stop making investments in my business. That computer I bought over the weekend is going to pay huge dividends down the road in improved efficiency at the office.

Wells Fargo Banker:  I’m sure it will, but Mr. Dunnevant, you are $1482 overdrawn and I will have to charge you $150 for the bounced checks.

Me:  Fine, just put it on my tab. One of my kids will be getting married at some point and then it won’t be long before I’ll have a grandchild. He’ll be good for it, I’m sure.

We are being governed by morons.

Underboobs?

This morning in my news feed are these headlines:

President Obama’s State of the Union Speech

Mysterious end to man-hunt

Alicia Keys underboob incident at the Grammy’s

 Now, I ask you, which one of these sparked the most curiosity? In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I watched neither the State of the Union show, or the Grammy’s. I did watch the live reports from California of the burning cabin where Christopher Dorner was supposedly holed up. As of this moment the remains found inside have not been identified as those of the cop-killer.

 But as interesting as these stories may have been, I was most intrigued by this underboob business. First of all, what a cool word…underboob. It’s even fun to say, let alone the “titillating” prospect of what it may mean. So, I did my research and discovered that an “underboob” is exactly what its name would suggest, ie…the revealed lower section of the female breast. Well, apparently CBS came very close to pulling the plug on Ms. Keys’ revealing underboob garment since it clearly violated its pre-show dress code. This is where it gets confusing. CBS, or any other network to my knowledge has never had any problem with plunging necklines that reveal practically every part of the female breast EXCEPT the underboob, so why all the fuss about this rarely revealed section of the female anatomy? Maybe we’ve run out of things to be scandalized about. Ever more scantily clad women have been paraded in front of us for so long now that we’re bored with the female form, and must create some new forbidden thing? It’s ok for Beyonce to give a concert in her underwear, but as a society we must draw the line at the over the top display of underboobs? (or should it be UNDER the top?) And I haven’t even mentioned the growing sideboob controversy.

I’m with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. I might not be able to define pornography, but I know an underboob when I see it!

Late Night Conversation With My Dad

Last night at the hospital with Dad, he was especially talkative. He began telling me stories from his life, ones I had never heard before. There was a crazy one from his days in the navy during World War II. On the day that Japan surrendered, bottles of booze materialized out of thin air. Since Dad had famously never taken a drink in his life, a couple of guys decided to force him to by cornering him and pouring it down his throat. When Dad realized what was up, he grabbed the bottle out of the guy’s hand and cracked him over the head with it leaving only the jagged- edged neck in his hand. The other guy backed off as his buddy lay out cold in a puddle of bourbon. Dad even remembered that his would be attacker was from Waycross, Georgia. This from a man who can’t remember what he had for lunch, but can recall the home town of a man he hasn’t seen in 68 years.

 Then he told me in great detail the story of Charlie Newton. When Dad became the pastor of Nicholsville Baptist church in Nicholsville, Alabama in 1965, he was warned by the members not to bother visiting Charlie. He was something of a celebrity in that small farming town because he was so violently hostile to the church in general and preachers in particular. Of course, Dad determined to visit him first before anyone else. Dad went through all the details of the long and tortuous relationship that he gradually built with Charlie, all the nastiness that he endured from this wretched and profane man. When Dad got to the part where Charlie knelt on the kitchen floor of our trailer early one Sunday morning to become a Christian, my father broke down in tears. “When the people saw Charlie Newton walk into church, in his right mind, and a bible in his hand, they just couldn’t believe it.” Dad said through his tears. “ I never can get through talking about Charlie without crying son, even after 48 years.”

 Later, I asked him to look back on his amazing 88 years and try to pick his favorite year. “I’ve had lots of favorites,” he said with a smile. Then he talked about the year he was saved, the years he was going to University of Richmond full time, while working midnight to 7 every night, and the years in Seminary where he spent 5 nights a week loading freight as a teamster, while pastoring a church in Alabama, and taking a full load of classes at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary as a 41 year old man with four kids. “Dad,” I said, “Those were the hardest years of your life, how on earth can they be your favorites?” He looked at me with an easy smile on his face. “It’s not a hard year when you’re in the center of God’s will.”

 After talking for the better part of an hour, he was tired and fell silent for awhile. Then out of nowhere he says, “You know, your Mother didn’t marry a preacher. She had a preacher thrust upon her. She had to learn to be a preacher’s wife, but she ended up being the best preacher’s wife in the whole world.” Once again he began to cry.

 

I’ve written this down because I don’t ever want to forget these conversations. My dad is laying down a marker for me and my children and their children to aim for. Not sure any of us will hit it, but even if we miss and just end up in the neighborhood, we will have lived well.

Skipping Church

I will be skipping church today. Every now and then it’s nice to experience a two day weekend, so I can better relate to my un-churched friends. My church is in the middle of it’s annual Israel-a-thon featuring something called the “Watchman On The Wall”, which sounds perfectly dreadful. The church website features not only this Watchman thing but also an April pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and coming soon, a “first Friday Shabbat”. Perhaps we should just declare ourselves a temple and be done with it.

But, luckily for me, there’s no law that says that you have to be fully on board with everything your church does to remain a member. Grove certainly has enough good qualities to compensate for this particular annoyance, so I’ll skip the “Israel can do no wrong” love fest again this year and enjoy a Sunday at home.

Inquiring readers might like to know what I will be doing instead. I will be serving as Pam’s low skilled, poorly paid manual labor in her latest campaign to makeover our house. This arrangement works quite well actually, since I have no appreciable interior design gifts, and therefore no strongly held opinions on the subject. Pam, on the other hand, while sometimes wracked with indecision and plagued by the lethargy that it produces, once sufficiently inspired, becomes a whirlwind of activity, grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down at Hobby Lobby and Khol’s, and making online purchases until 2 in the morning. After last night’s internet shopping breakthrough, Pam has enough Khol’s cash to become a majority shareholder.

So, today I will hang curtain rods, mirrors, and wall clocks. I will reach the spots that she can’t as a month of painting begins. Before she’s finished, the downstairs bathroom, the kids’ bathroom, the breakfast nook and Patrick’s old bedroom will have new coats of paint and be redecorated from wall switch cover to curtains and everything in between. The transformation will be complete with only hours to spare before a bunch of kids from a traveling choir from Belmont come to stay beginning the first weekend in March.

My wife is awesome.

Celebrity Gun Control

Sometimes in life, irony is subtle. It is found only after deep thought or revelation. Then other times it screams at us like the angry lead singer of a high school metal band.

One such occasion occurred this week when Sylvester Stallone issued a ringing endorsement of gun control. Even the headline writer at the Huffington Post could see the irony…”Bullet To The Head star doesn’t see value in assault weapons”

I suppose it isn’t quite fair to single out Rambo. He had plenty of help from several other celebrities this week. At a press conference in support of Obama’s gun control initiative, that famous authority on firearms, Tony Bennett, came up with this gem…

”It's the kind of turn that happened to the great country of Germany, when Nazis came over and created tragic things, and they had to be told off. And if we continue this kind of violence and accept it in our country, the rest of the world's going to really take care of us, in a very bad way.”

Tony probably shouldn’t have mentioned Nazi Germany in a discussion of gun control, since no country in modern times had tighter gun control laws than the Nazi’s. And I’m sure it will come as a surprise to the soldiers of the 101^st airborne that the Nazi’s were defeated when we “told them off”. How does Mr. Bennett think that the citizens of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, fought back against their German invaders? With what did their underground resistance movements defend themselves? The headline read, “Tony Bennett says that without gun control U.S. may end up like Nazi Germany”. Apparently, his heart wasn’t the only thing Tony left in San Francisco.

Not to be outdone, comedian Chris Rock followed Bennett to the microphone with this savvy advice…

 "The President and the first lady are kind of like the Mom and the Dad of the country. And when your Dad tells you something, you listen, and when you don’t it ends up biting you in the ass.”

　

Thanks Chris. It’s good to know that we’re all children.

Seriously, for those of you who support the President’s gun control efforts, please tell your celebrity supporters to shut up. They’re not helping.

Drones And Our Philosopher King

It’s taken me several days to process the startling news of the leaked memo from the White House concerning our philosopher-king’s new and improved license to kill. It seems that the phrase “imminent danger” now means something closer to, “seems suspicious”.

With the rise of the drone as a neat, clean, killing tool, governments can now exert their will with a single machine rather than having to go to the expense and aggravation of marshaling troops and public opinion to support their foreign policy objectives. Under former President Bush, drones were used to go after Al-Qaeda types hiding in straw-roofed huts in Pakistan. This President has managed to make Bush look like a weak kneed pacifist, wracking up kill after kill of swarthy terrorist types along with any innocent friends and neighbors who were unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Instead of Code Pink protesters swarming Pennsylvania Avenue with signs screaming, ”Obama=Murderer”, this killing frenzy has been greeted with silence by the left. But with the release of this memo, even the most sycophantic members of the loyal press are snapping out of their hero worship long enough to think about how awful this new power would be in the hands of a future (shudder) Republican President!

The new policy gives the President the authority to order drone strikes against even American citizens abroad who the President believes might be a threat to national security, but with the new meaning of words made famous by this administration, the lack of specific prohibitions against killing Americans on American soil gives pause. That slacker Bush toiled under the timid definition of “imminent threat” which restricted the kill order to Americans involved in activities that actually  constituted an imminent grave danger. For example, surveillance cameras pick up Joe packing the back of his van with a thousand sticks of dynamite, while on the front seat there’s a street map of Washington DC with the Pentagon circled by a red sharpee, along with a worn copy of the Koran. That’s an “imminent” threat. Under this new definition of “imminent”, all it might take is intelligence reports that Joe was seen in the middle east aisle of the local library checking out biographies of Bin Laden then going to an Arab film festival, smoking a Hookah pipe and drinking really strong coffee.

I’m fully aware that there are some weirdoes in America. Among my fellow citizens there lives every strata of social and political deviants known to exist on the planet. But, the idea that we would allow any one man or woman to possess the power of judge, jury, and executioner of one of our fellow citizens is an outrage and an insult to our founding documents. In the 236 year history of this nation, there isn’t one single President who I would trust with this power, and few who would even dare want such authority. With such flimsy evidentiary standards as those advanced in this memo, every American citizen should be appalled at so stunning a power grab, at such an evisceration of due process.

So far, the only thing we Americans can manage to be appalled by is the possible loss of the Hostess Twinkie.

My Dad and Thomas Jefferson

The other night, I read the final two chapters of Jon Meacham’s “Art of Power”, his masterful biography of Thomas Jefferson. The great old man was dying. In painstaking detail, Meacham described the physical struggles and bouts of melancholy that plagued him in his last days. But to the end, Jefferson’s mind still had moments of clarity, and in those moments his thoughts were of the great events of the revolution, and his obsession with the well being of his family.

After the last page was read, I sat in silence for awhile, as I often do in such moments, trying to take it all in, trying to process so monumental a life, so magnificently lived. Jefferson was a great man with admittedly great flaws, but remains one of the few men from history with whom I would love to have dinner.

As I sat there staring off into the distance thinking of Monticello, my cell phone began to vibrate on the reading table beside me. It was an e-mail from my sister. My Dad had fallen now for the third time in one day. Something was wrong. Suddenly, his legs had become weak and his gate unreliable. We would take him to the doctor and discover a badly swollen leg and foot. He would be admitted to the hospital for treatment of the infection.

So for the next several days we will all visit him there. We will monitor his progress, and sit with him when we can. He will make it as easy as possible on us by being cheerful. He will be grateful for every visit. He will make conversation even though he would rather sleep. He will eat whatever awful food is put in front of him. He will inform me of the latest news of the world as I marvel at how he manages to be so peaceful, while his body continues to betray him.

While Thomas Jefferson was the great man of history, my Dad has always been, and still remains the great man of my life.