Thanking God For Seasons

Fall is here and that means that every weekend I am overcome with a desire to be outside doing something old fashioned. As soon as I see the first leaf turn color, at the first chill from a cool breeze, something in me screams out, “Go pick apples” or “Go plant some mums” or even, “go for a drive to the country and buy something old.” It’s the strangest thing.

So, today, on this sparkling morning, Pam and I will go out for breakfast, then head over to Strange’s. By the time we’re through, our mailbox, front steps and back deck will be festooned with seasonal finery, and we will both feel great. Maybe we’ll drink hot apple cider out on the deck tonight. Maybe we’ll have a fire in the fire pit.

Fall is the best of times. The changing colors and cool nights are like a tonic after three months of heat and humidity. This time of year I get to chose between my two favorite sports, baseball and college football. As much as I envy the likes of Key West and San Diego their gloriously predictable weather, when Fall arrives, I thank God that I live in a place with four seasons. It’s as if he knew that we humans get bored so easily, so he cleverly designed four scene changes for our lives on earth. “Don’t worry,” he whispers in our ear. “Change is just around the corner.”

Fascinated By The Germans

As a student of history, I have always been fascinated by the Germans. In the last 100 years of their existence, they have managed to fight and lose two World Wars, and within 25 years of those spectacular defeats, crawled back to the top of the heap in Europe. Even today, they seem to be the only fully viable economic power on that troubled continent. The German people have given the world the greatest music in history, the most meticulously crafted automobiles, the most brilliant scientists and the most delicious beer ever brewed in the universe. As someone who believes in American Exceptionalism, I think that the Germans can give us a run for our money in that department. If not for the insanity of National Socialism and Adolph Hitler, perhaps the Germans would rule the world even now.

So, imagine my surprise when I ran across the results of polling data about the biggest differences between Americans and Germans. When the citizens of the two nations were asked this question: What do you think is more important, the ability to pursue life’s goals without state interference, or having state guarantees that nobody is in need? 58% of Americans chose freedom, while 62% of Germans picked guarantees. When presented with this statement, success in life is determined by forces outside of our control, 72% of Germans agreed, only 36% of Americans.

It doesn’t surprise me that most of my countrymen still believe in the concept of free will, the notion that every man has it within his power to fashion his own future. But it does surprise me that a people as accomplished as the Germans don’t. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that they have given up on the liberating power of individual freedom as a far greater guarantor of abundance than the modern welfare state, they being far further down that road than we. And frankly, the fact that only 58% of us believe it is disturbing. Take that poll 50 years ago and the number would have been closer to 90%. Still, the results surprised me. Germany, a nation that has lost its freedom to government pathology from both the right and left, still chooses to place its confidence in government as provider of life and liberty. How can a people subjugated by both the Nazis and the Communists still have such faith in government?

Add this to the thousand things in life that I will never understand.

Vegan Strip Club

Cory Booker is the current mayor of Newark, New Jersey. In politics, I suppose that this would be considered the ultimate entry level position. Everything and anything that comes after Newark would be a huge upgrade. So, Mr. Booker is attempting to escape perhaps the most reviled, dysfunctional city in America by running for the United States Senate, and if I were him I would do the exact same thing.

Mr. Booker is also somewhat of a star in Democratic circles. He is handsome, smart, witty, and makes a good speech. He is also black, a bonus. This week he’s been out in Hollywood making the fundraising rounds, schmoozing the beautiful people. The usual suspects have been on his arm, the Barbara Streisands, Sean Penns of the world, making sure he’s for abortion on demand, and the legalization of marijuana.  He has not disappointed, and has returned to Newark with 4 million in his campaign war chest, raised from people constantly railing against the evil influence of money in politics.

Upon his return, we discover in a story from the UK Telegram, that Cory is apparently quite fond of a Portland, Oregon stripper named Lynsie Lee, whose Twitter bio reads, “wits and tits #stripper #model #model #weirdo. The story reveals several flirtatious tweets between the two.

First of all, what it is with British newspapers always getting the story first? But that’s a story for another day. Since Mr. Booker is single, and has had to answer questions about gay rumors recently, this revelation will probably help him. While I might question his taste in women; Ms. Lee is the personification of the word skank, he is free to tweet with anyone he pleases. What caught my eye in the Telegram story was not that a young up and comer like Booker would be involved with a tattoo covered stripper, it was something else entirely. Further along in the story we discover that Ms. Lee worked at something called a “vegan strip club.”

Try as I might at 6:00 in the morning, I just can’t get my mind around the meaning of such a thing. A vegan strip club?  My first image is of a juicy, plump ear of yellow corn freshly shucked, laid bare on the bar in front of a dozen salivating farmers. No, it can’t be that, in Nebraska maybe, but Portland Oregon? It must be something else. Then I imagine a room full of metrosexuals ogling Ms. Lee as she does her pole dance, while delicately dipping their broccoli heads into little bowls of soy sauce. Instead of a Confederate flag draped on the wall behind the bartender, there’s a portrait of Che Guevara, flanked on one side by a Rainbow Coalition flag and on the other by the baby blue banner of the United Nations.

A vegan strip club. Can a left-handed coffee shop be far behind? How about a diabetic bakery? A transgendered car wash?

I could go on like this for hours…

Scare Tactics

As the runaway freight train that is Obamacare careens down the tracks toward its October 1^st rendezvous with destiny, President Obama has finally found a political tactic that he finds reprehensible. He is accusing Republicans of trying to “scare people out of a good deal.”

Imagine that, politicians using scare tactics. Oh, the humanity! I’m not sure what political planet our President has been living on his entire life, but I have a news flash for him, scare tactics are the mother’s milk of politics and both parties would be utterly lost without them. Here’s a question for you, name one political issue over the past 50 years that has not been either passed or defeated without both political parties trying to scare the bejesus out of us? Below are just a few examples:

 

Welfare Reform 1994:  Democrats warned us of tent cities full of homeless people in every city and starving children roaming the streets, our urban centers plunged into Dickensian chaos.

Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: President Bush, Sec. of State Powell and a cast of thousands assured us that if we didn’t invade Iraq, Saddam would soon be able to attack our cities with WMD’s.

Medicare Reform attempts 2010: Paul Ryan proposed a plan to reform the most actuarially doomed social welfare program in history and for his efforts became the star of Democrat commercials featuring him literally driving Grandma’s wheelchair off a cliff.

Sequestration battle of 2013: In the weeks leading up to sequestration back in March of this year, we were assured by Democrats that a reduction in Federal spending of 1.2% would unleash calamity on a Biblical scale. Planes would fall from the sky for want of air-traffic controllers, tainted meat would be eaten by Americans for lack of food inspectors, and aircraft carriers would float powerless, in the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

 

So, now that his signature legislative achievement is under attack by the opposition party, President Obama suddenly discovers the horrors of fear and manipulation in politics. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

  

Help Me Out Here

President Obama continues to enlighten me about economics. The other day he gave a speech to the Business Roundtable in which he offered this gem:

Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.

As puzzled expressions began popping up in his audience of successful businessmen who know a thing or two about profligacy, he clarified thusly:

The average person thinks raising the debt ceiling must mean that we’re running up our debt.

Count me among the average. Let’s see, the only thing in either of these quotes that happens to be true is the statement that the debt ceiling has in fact been raised by Congress “hundreds of times.” Unfortunately for the President, each of those hundred times has resulted in an increase of our debt. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s what is known as a 100% correlation. Matter of fact, it would seem that from an historical perspective, if one wants to increase our national debt, the quickest, surest way to do so would be first to raise the debt ceiling! What could the President possibly be thinking? Since I refuse to accuse my President of an intentional, deliberate lie, I chose to believe that he is simply delusional. For example:

Let’s say that you were issued a credit card from Capital One with a $5000 credit limit. Then you promptly went out and racked up $5000 in purchases. Although you would be within your rights to do so, the credit card would now be unusable. What to do? Well, you could begin to pay down the card over time, and each time you did, it would restore a portion of your credit. But there would be another option. You could petition Capital One for an increase to your credit line. If they granted your request by doubling your credit line to $10,000, I suppose that technically that would not be increasing your debt, just your credit. One assumes that this is the President’s line of flimsy reasoning. But we all know what happens next. Since you now have access to $5000 more dollars worth of credit, you will find a way to blow through it as sure as night follows day. When the President looks back at our fiscal history, he sees the same fact, that every single time our national debt ceiling has been raised it has also been breached, every single time.

Yes, we average people who suspect that when our debt ceiling gets raised that will mean more debt, suspect as much for an excellent reason, Mr. President. But what do we know? We live in the real world where if we don’t make our car payments, someone comes and tows it away. The elites in Washington just raise the debt ceiling.

Help me out here, am I missing something?

My First Fan Letter!

About three weeks ago, I received that rarest of correspondence, a personal letter delivered by the United States Postal Service. It came in an odd sized envelope and was addressed in cursive. I was intrigued. My mail box is usually stuffed with sales circulars, bills, brightly colored credit card solicitations, and during election season, grave warnings from candidate A about how candidate B wants to take away my guns and declare sharia law. So, imagine my delight to find an old fashioned, honest to God letter?

Back inside, I showed my prize to Pam. “Look honey, I got a letter!” My daughter perked up at the news, “Well?? Aren’t you going to open it?” So, open it I did, with nervous anticipation. It was a typed letter stuffed inside a strange blank greeting card that featured a family of unknown ethnicity outside their humble hut somewhere in the third world. Turns out it was a village in India. I immediately figured that this was another announcement by one of my former Sunday School students that he or she had decided to go on a mission trip to save these poor people, and I was about to be asked for a donation. But then I opened the letter and read the first line:

Dear Mr. Dunnevant, Perhaps I should call you Doug since we have been close friends for quite some time now…

What the heck? Wait, was this…might this be? I read the next line:

I stumbled upon one of your blog posts about a year ago and have been hooked ever since.

No freaking way!! I had just received my first piece of fan mail! Is the internet great or what? But then it occurred to me that since this particular fan had evangelical sympathies, I might be in store for a diatribe about my views on gay marriage. Maybe this person had had it up to here with my snarky put downs of Baptist church services. I proceeded cautiously.

I quickly learned that my fan was a married woman with three grown children living in North Carolina, who had been introduced to my blog by the father of a girl who used to date my Son, who as fate would have it, also used to be her boss. This was six degrees of separation on steroids. She went on to say how much she had enjoyed reading my blog, how much it made her laugh and how our two world views had much in common. Throughout, she tried desperately to convince me that she was not some unhinged lunatic stalker, sometimes hilariously so. Then she got to the real reason for her letter:

I have followed your book writing and am intrigued…

She then cataloged for me her professional resume as an executive secretary, then made this astonishing offer:

So therefore, despite the awkwardness, I am offering, free of charge, to proofread your manuscript… I really thought that I would go through life anonymously reading your words, but the thought of your book going out with a missing apostrophe or comma troubles me too much to stay silent.

I then read the letter aloud to Pam and Kaitlin and they both thought she was hilarious, and were especially impressed when she ended the letter with practical tips on how to survive the wedding planning process since she was about to marry off her oldest daughter in just a few days. Kaitlin grabbed the letter from me and scanned it carefully with the critical eye of an English Literature major. “Dad, she has perfect diction and I don’t see even one punctuation error.”

To make a long story short, my new proof reader is the bomb. She has made it through chapter 21 of 30, actually likes the work and has caught a ton of bad punctuation, clunky formulations and butchered syntax, and is well on her way to a shout out on the acknowledgment page if I ever get the thing published. Plus, I’ve made a new friend.

Very cool.

Schadenfreude

The world is in a crazy, messed up place right now. There’s the Middle East with the Syrian circus and a soon to be nuclear Iran. In this country we’ve got Biblical-grade floods creating islands in Colorado, and deranged men waltzing into supposedly secure military facilities, whipping out shotguns and killing people. We have a completely dysfunctional federal government about to officially run out of money while simultaneously trying to implement a 3000 page health care law that no one, and I mean NO ONE understands. So what’s on my mind today? Baseball, baby!! There are pennant races afoot, so the end of the world will just have to wait until October.

Can the Nationals do the impossible and come from beyond oblivion and sneak into the playoffs as a wildcard? Probably not, but its baseball, so one never knows. All season long the Nationals just haven’t clicked. They’ve seemed tentative, tight, as if the burden of expectations was too much for them. Then, out of nowhere, back in early August, it was as if they all looked at each other and said, “What the hell, we’re out of it now, so let’s just go have some fun.” Since August the 9^th they are the hottest team in baseball. Just last night they swept a double header from the Atlanta Braves and are only 4 and a half games back.

Then there’s the American League wildcard race where four teams are still battling for the last spot. After 150 games, these four teams are still separated by a mere 3 games. The Cleveland Indians, Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees are slugging it out every night as if every game was the seventh game of the World Series. It’s been spectacular baseball. Watching the Red Sox utterly dominate the Yankees down the stretch, to watch the aging Yankees fall victim to a pulled muscle here and a stiff neck there has been something close to heaven for me. I believe the word is Schadenfreude, a word so rich in all the wrong human emotions that it could only come to us from the Germans. Experiencing pleasure from observing the misfortune of others is not a healthy place to live long term, I know. But for these last few weeks, watching the Yankees crumble has been like renting a fabulous house at the beach. I don’t intend to stay here forever, but what a fabulous vacation spot!!