A Public Apology To My Readers

24 hours. If you are a regular reader of this space, you know that I have led the charge in educating you all about the catastrophe that is about to befall us. I have done this because I don’t want any of you to be caught unawares, insufficiently prepared for the coming apocalypse. In this effort I have been aided immeasurably by the White House press office, Mr. Carney, as well as several cabinet members who have detailed the tremendous damage about to be done to our beloved country by the sequester. This morning however, I must confess that a great confusion has washed over me as I read the latest overnight reports coming out of Washington.

My administration sources have almost daily been warning of starving children, teachers receiving pink slips, 700,000 layoffs, dead in the water aircraft carriers, senior citizens thrown out on the streets, long lines at the airports, airplanes spinning out of control for want of air traffic controllers, meat rotting for want of inspectors, crucial life changing scientific discoveries scrambled beyond recognition, and worst of all…delayed tax-refund checks. All of this I have faithfully communicated to you so you would be without excuse come the first of March. But now oddly, less than 24 hours before Armageddon, a confusing inconsistency has emerged, a note of ambivalence, a hedging of bets, a dialing back of rhetoric. Naturally, I am perplexed by the stunning, abrupt change in tone.

Now, we are being told that perhaps, there may not be quite as many (if any) starving children, apparently the total number of teachers receiving those pink slips turns out to be 7 in a county somewhere in West Virginia. Now, we are also being told that maybe the 700,000 number of layoffs might not be immediate after all. Those long lines at the airport may not materialize either, and it appears that money has been scraped together to insure that those air traffic controllers stay on the job, same thing with the aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea. I learn all of this new information from “policy experts” who now are saying that the public may not even notice any impact for weeks or even months. Somebody named Loren Adler of the Bipartisan Policy Center is quoted in The Hill newspaper saying, “The key takeaway is that on March 1^st no doors will be shut, no lights will go out. It will take awhile for these cuts to take effect.”

Well. I certainly feel sheepish. In my morning roundup of news sources about the sequester, gone are adjectives like “massive, draconian, severe, devastating”. Now, less than 24 hours before zero hour, I’m reading descriptive adjectives like “nuanced, complicated, and a new formulation…expectation reassessment”. I simply don’t know what to say. It would appear that I have been duped. Here I’ve been warning all of you about the coming end of days, only to discover at the very last minute that nothing is going to happen on March the first…nothing.

Needless to say, this has been a humbling experience indeed. The notion that responsible people throughout our government would try to manipulate me with false warnings of financial collapse to score cheep political points has been a bitter pill to swallow.

Well, on the bright side, there’s plenty of milk in the fridge, bread in the pantry, and I want have to buy batteries for years.

Batten Down The Hatches!

48 hours and counting. Every day the news gets worse as we slowly discover just how draconian the Great Sequester cuts will be. Now, we know that the ability of meteorologists to predict the weather will be severely constrained, criminals will be turned loose on the public, flights will be delayed, and trains will derail. It’s so much worse than we thought as recently as yesterday. Oh, and we also learned this morning that the 85 billion dollars worth of cuts will actually only be 44 billion in 2013, or 1.2% of all federal spending.

 Webster’s dictionary defines the word “draconian” as follows:

Exceedingly harsh; very severe; unusually cruel

 The second most used adjective by our news media to describe the cuts brought on by sequestration is “massive”, which is defined thusly:

Impressively large or ponderous

 These words are the ones chosen by the media to inform us as to the level of spending cuts about to be unleashed on the Republic…exceedingly harsh, unusually cruel, large and ponderous. A 1.2% reduction in 2103 federal spending, which even when it happens will result in total federal spending in 2013 higher than what we spent in 2012 and a whopping 30% higher than what we spent in 2007, the last year that Obama was not in the White House.

 48 hours from now, I for one will remember exactly where I was when these “massive, draconian” cuts became a reality. When my grandkids ask me where I was when the lights went out all over America, I want to remember.

For Want Of A Nail, The Shoe Was Lost

We have 72 hours left. In three short days, life as we have known it in this country will be forever altered, our pursuit of happiness imperiled for years to come. The very foundation of our republic is about to be shaken. The eyes of the world are upon us, financial centers from London to Seoul, from Istanbul to Montreal are watching, waiting for a miracle.

Children in all 50 states prepare to eat their last meal. Senior citizens are saying their goodbyes in nursing homes from Seattle to Saratoga. 700,000 Americans wait anxiously for their pink slips. Aircraft carriers prepare to drop anchor, mid-mission in the perilous waters of the Mediterranean. For want of fuel, our fighter pilots await their orders to stand down. Scientists in research labs all over the fruited plain, on the cusp of discovery, anguish over seeing their work destroyed. The end of our grand experiment in Democracy is upon us. We are ruined not by invading armies of totalitarian barbarians, not by the ravages of nature and nature’s God. No, we meet our end because of a word that will forever live in infamy…SEQUESTRATION.

Who is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? Does it really matter? These hideous, devastating, egregious, slashing, wanton, extreme, massive, brutal spending cuts are sadly a bipartisan effort. The very thought of forcing a government that in more sane circumstances spends 10 billion dollars a day, (3 billion of which is borrowed from the Chinese), to suddenly get by on a mere 9.76 billion a day is, of course, a national outrage. The carnage done to our way of life by this draconian 2.3% spending meat cleaver is so much sadder because it could have been so easily avoided if only our leaders were worthy of the moment. If only someone in government could have just stood up and said, “An 84 billion dollar spending cut is going to visit all of this destruction upon us? Hell, why don’t we just eliminate the Department of Transportation? Their entire budget is 84 billion, and what in God’s name do they do?”

Alas, for want of a nail, the shoe was lost. To all my fellow citizens out there, Godspeed, and I’ll see you on the other side, March the first.

The Oscar Show

The 85^th Academy Awards show is in the books and I for one would like to thank the Academy for spending 2 hours handing out Oscars for things like production design, makeup, hairstyling, and sound mixing, so the awards for stuff like best actor, best actress and best picture would come on after midnight. Only the inflated egos and hedonism of an industry like Hollywood could take 4 and a half hours to celebrate…itself.

I watched the first 2 hours or so with Pam and Jon, and before hand, just to make it fun, we all printed off our own ballots and voted for everything ourselves. Let me tell you, trying to decide who did the best job of sound editing for 5 movies you haven’t seen isn’t as easy as it looks! Anyway, at least now, we had a little competition going to make the evening more interesting.

I was feeling smugly confident after forging ahead with my brilliant pick of Christoph Waltz as best supporting actor and “Brave” as best animated feature film. But then things fell apart as my voting strategy in the short film categories failed miserably. Since not only had I not seen any of the nominated films,( where does one go to see short films?), I voted for the entry that sounded the most ethnic, the one that perhaps had been made about the most persecuted minority, counting on Hollywood’s propensity to throw bones to minorities by giving them “little” Oscars. Well, “Fresh Guacamole” and “Asad” let me down big time. It was all downhill from there. I did manage to correctly predict the winners for best actor and best actress but that was about the extent of my prognostication skills.

What I did find interesting was that in the entire 2 and a half hours that I watched, I heard not one single political joke, not one snarky putdown of the occupant of the White House. During the administration of every Republican president in my lifetime, it has been an article of faith that the Oscar ceremony was the ideal time for “speaking truth to power”, so actors great and small would routinely take shots at the President over the various injustices that he was trying to inflict on the country, from failing to adequately fund AIDS research to cutting funding for PBS, but this year, nary a peep of complaint from the glitterati. Not only that, I learn this morning, that the First Lady actually made a satellite appearance to present the Oscar for best picture, the shining jewel of the night. Wow! I guess all those fundraising events in Beverly Hills paid off for the President in more ways than one. The most hilarious thought of the night turned out to be trying to imagine any Republican first lady being awarded with such a plum assignment. Yes, here’s Barbara Bush live from Kennebunkport to present the Oscar for best picture, or let’s give it up for Laura Bush as she makes her way to the podium to award Quentin Tarrentino with the Oscar for best director. Hilarious.

Bringing Dad Home

Dad comes home this morning. After one week in the regular hospital and two weeks in rehab, he is finally coming home. His doctors and therapists all declare him to be a “model patient”, and rave about the progress he has made. We have all seen an increase in his energy and enthusiasm in response to the rigorous physical therapy he has undergone. The trick will be whether he can move around well enough and safely enough on his own at home with dependable balance. No rehab on earth can alter the fact that he’s 88. But, Dad is optimistic, so we will be too.

 The great home decorating lollapalooza of 2013 is over! Pam has wrought a miracle transformation of 5 rooms of our house. When Kaitlin got home last night and took the “tour” she was blown away. I sent cool panoramic pictures to Patrick and he was blown away. Even Molly seemed thrilled with the results and all the new things to sniff. As I looked at the final product it occurred to me that Pam is one of those people about which others often say, “You know, she could do that for a living”. In Pam’s case, “that” would be anything that she becomes interested in and sets her mind to do. Whether it’s baking cake pops, interior design, scrapbooking, children’s church, planning an elegant party, or just being a gracious hostess, she does nothing haphazardly, nothing is left to chance, everything has to be perfect, and usually is. Maybe she does need a “chic nook”.

 For the past month or so I’ve been working on a novel, (don’t worry, I won’t quit my day job). I wrote one twenty years ago that’s still in the bottom drawer of my night stand, so this is a purely therapeutic, and self indulgent exercise. But I must say, it’s also a blast. I’ve managed to fashion an entirely separate world of my own design, populating it with characters that I care about in some strange paternalistic way. The story involves the general themes of gambling, luck, clairvoyance, the power of dreams, a tragic romance, suicide and redemption. As a genre I suppose it would be classified as a psychological thriller. It’s been great fun, and I have no idea yet what will happen next, and won’t until it appears on the screen when I write. Kinda cool.

Tom Wolfe Is The Man

                                                                                  

One of my literary heroes of the past thirty years or so has been Tom Wolfe, he of the brilliantly tailored white suits and Richmond heritage. My first taste of Wolfe was his 1979 book, The Right Stuff about the Apollo astronauts. Then I read his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities in the late 80’s and was mesmerized by his craft as a writer. Then I had to wait 11 years for him to research and write the fabulous, A Man in Full. For some reason unknown to me, I didn’t read I Am Charlotte Simmons when it was published in 2004, so I bought the i-book version  a couple of days ago for $9.99 and have been blazing through it ever since. I was so inspired to read Simmons because of the recent release of his fourth novel, Back to Blood.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is not an easy breezy read. It’s depiction of the often debased life of the modern American undergraduate experience, while true enough, comes awfully close to being merely raunchy. Its lurid portrayal of sexual debauchery seems excessively and unnecessarily descriptive for my taste. But the way Wolfe captures the cloistered arrogance of academia is worth putting up with the occasionally over the top raunchiness.

Can’t wait for Back to Blood, a book Wolfe publishes seven months after his 81^st birthday. My man, Tom.

My Barnyard Manure Detector Is Going Off

Fresh off his golf vacation in Florida, the President yesterday breathlessly intoned that the looming sequester was poised to visit untold devastation on our nation. A government with a 3.6 trillion dollar budget is about to be eviscerated by an 85 billion dollar cut.

A mere ten years ago, this same government managed to get by on only 2.2 trillion dollars of spending. That’s a 68% increase in the budget in ten years. And yet this government will be brought to its knees by a 2.3% decrease in spending?

Here’s a question for you. Has your income increased 68% in the last ten years? I did the numbers for the Dunnevant family and found that our family income has increased roughly 28% since 2003. Not bad, but compared to my government, I’m an underachieving hack. Second question, how many of you would be thrust into economic Armageddon if you were forced to reduce your yearly spending by 2.3%?

So, if the President and his party are to be believed, in 9 short days, our very way of life will be plunged into a desperate struggle for survival. Children will starve; old folks will be cast out into the mean streets, millions will lose their jobs, infrastructure will collapse before our very eyes, our air and water will instantly be polluted beyond recognition, our meat won’t get inspected, but worst of all, no one will be able to answer our tax questions at the IRS, all of this calamity because 85 billion dollars will have been trimmed from our 3.6 trillion dollar government. 85 billion, or put another way, the amount of money that our government spends every eight days.

We are being asked to believe that a sequester that cuts the equivalent of a little over one week’s spending will plunge us all back into the Middle Ages. Hmmm.

Call me skeptical.