Tfgray’s Weblog

When my children were small, and wanted a friend to stay overnight, they would come to me and ask, “Will you call Jimmy’s mom and ask for an overnight, because, you know, you have the voice thing.”

They named it, but it’s a phenomena I’d noticed years before (and which really has nothing to do with the normal exchange of favors by grown-ups that got my kids the sleepovers they craved.)

Decades before I became a parent, I had a circle of friends that were a bit (well, a lot) to the Right of me. We’d sit and chat, telling stories and jokes, but I noticed that when one had something to say that he wanted to remain uncontested, he would use a certain tone of voice. It always worked, no matter who offered the opinion or what it was, although the most frequent practitioner was the son of an Air Force colonel. Years later, while driving cross-country, through a land of unfamiliar radio frequencies, I came across a station where the announcer talked in the same tone of voice. I had stumbled upon Right-wing talk radio, as I figured out after hearing one or two of the opinions the guy was spouting.

The Voice Thing.

I realized that some people are trained to respond to particular tones of voice. In some cases, it’s the gruff, confident tones of Right-wing talk radio, modeled, I suspect, on the vocal patterns of a military officer. “…well you know, Bob, those pointy-headed liberals want us to believe that we’ll be better off with clean water. Well, anybody with his head on straight knows that if you have a job you can buy all the bottled water you want, and if we have all those stupid regulations, nobody will have a job.” 

Others are attuned to the cadence of the preacher. “If you believe-uh, you will receive-uh.” Anything delivered in the proper tone of voice produces an unquestioning wave of bobble-headedness among authoritarian followers.

George Bush, neither father nor son, has the voice thing, although W can put on a pretty good imitation when he’s, say, talking about WMD at the UN. Dick Cheney has it. In spades. He’s got a picture-perfect example of the Right-wing radio voice, and when he speaks even I, who have done enough research to trust him less than half as far as I could hypothetically throw him, find myself doubting my senses. Nixon was a master of the form. Sarah Palin thinks she is. For a series of examples, click here.

John Kerry didn’t have it. Neither did Dukakis. Al Gore had the timbre, but not the phrasing. John McCain? Nowhere close. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both have it, although not the right-wing variant. I recall reading some right-wing commentary during the election in which the poster was complaining, “How can we beat Obama when he sounds like a preacher?”

Teacher, more likely, yet another form of authority figure. Professor, actually, as he demonstrated in yesterday’s session with Republican members of Congress. Pay attention, class.

 They did.

So we need to pay attention. Are we listening to facts or letting things slide in under the radar because the delivery is one we have become attuned to? Can we use this technique, say, when talking to a right-wing friend or co-worker? Would their heads explode if they heard opinions they disagreed with in a vocal mode that they were programmed to accept unquestioningly? Would the alternative viewpoint sink in?

Has anyone else ever noticed this? Comments, please.

Pharaoh had a dream, a vivid, recurring dream of seven fat and seven skinny cows. Only Joseph could interpret it.

“There will be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine,” he said, and further advised that the surplus be conserved and stored to sustain the nation through the lean times. Pharaoh took his advice and Egypt prospered.

Fast forward a few millennia, and we had our seven fat years, also known as the Clinton presidency. The budget was balanced, we lived, as a nation (although not necessarily as individuals) within our means, we saved for the future, and prosperity abounded.

Then we got a new pharaoh. Despite his affinity for the Bible, he ignored the wisdom of Joseph and gave the national treasure away. Everybody got some, but those closest to him, the “Got Mines” and the “Got Mores” got most of it. He started a war and ran it badly, squandering borrowed money to pursue his dreams. He repealed or refused to enforce laws that protected investors, saying that thieves would lose and honest investors gain, simply by the natural functioning of the marketplace, apparently in the same way that closing all police precincts will protect us from crime.

In eight short years, his rule transformed us from the world’s wealthiest creditor nation to the world’s greatest debtor. Policies begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed even further by George W. Bush, caused wages for working people to stagnate. The percentage of income going to the top 1% of the US population now stands at 20%. The last time US income distribution reached that degree of concentration was 1928, and the greatest herd of Lean Cows in our history stampeded across the landscape.

The greatest herd until now.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome. The conservative economics of the 1920’s returned with a vengeance under “Supply Side” Republican rule, beginning in the 1980s, and despite a respite under Clinton, ground inexorably toward the same result. In a rational economy, under a rational government, the cyclical nature of reality is acknowledged and, like Pharaoh, or any wise householder, the fat years’ surplus is retained and disbursed during the lean years as a way of maintaining social stability. (Economists, especially the Neo-conservative economists whose principles ruled until recently, just love the work rational.  Here I will cite the computer programmer’s rule: GIGO Garbage In, Garbage Out. The most perfect logical process is only as good as the data fed into it.)  Where a rational person would look to savings to get them through the lean times,  just as Pharaoh did under Joseph’s wise guidance, we find that they and their theories have squandered our sustenence. We’re like the woman who lost her job and discovered that her husband had gambled all their savings away, and run up massive credit card debt, as well. She has to buy groceries. Is it wise to use her credit card? No. Does she have a choice?

Getting back to Holy Writ, it’s interesting to see that the Communist Chinese are better at following it than we are. When times were good, and we bought everything they could manufacture, they saved, both as individuals and as a nation. Now that trade has fallen off, their government, using the surplus they conserved, has launched massive infrastructure spending to keep employment up. They did it right. We, with our emphasis on forgetting that the government is the collective arm of the people, not some free-floating entity, allowed our government and ourselves to become wastrels, and are now discovering the results of that policy.

There’s another biblical concept I’d like to bring up: Charity. People often think of it as an unpleasant thing you do for the moral brownie points, like eating spinach or flossing. Others point out that givers get at least as much of an emotional boost as recipients. I’d like to propose a third possibility. Just as the Ten Commandments provide a behavior code that reduces interpersonal conflict in society, Charity, the cycling of resources from the top of the heap to the bottom, keeps the economy revving. I will go further and suggest that the effect is the same, whether the mechanism is personal choice, minimum wage laws, or progressive taxation.

It’s no coincidence that financial jargon uses terms related to water: liquidity, frozen assets. When the well of consumer spending runs dry, when the rain of charity doesn’t fall from above, the crops fail, and the cows get skinny.

Just read this on the Mother Jones website and had to share it:

“…a syndicated morning zoo show on the local classic-rock station was making fun of celebrities, offering up jokes about Jenna McCarthy’s “big cans.” Then the host read a news story about illegal immigrants returning to Mexico because of the economic situation here. The whole crew was apoplectic. “Was that the Bush administration’s immigration policy,” the host shouted, “to make our country suck so bad that everyone will want to leave?’”

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/10/10409_omaha-dispatch.html

Well, yes, I am. Did George Bush or government fiscal policy have anything to do with it?

Probably not.

Eight years ago, I was supporting 3 kids. Now they’re grown and supporting themselves.

Eight years ago, my mortgage was around $70K. Now it’s about $13K. Turns out my employer shut down my workplace in 2005. I had to choose: move with my job or stay where I was and find a new one. As it turned out, my job moved to Oregon, a place I’d visited 25 years before and loved. I sold my house, the timing controlled by my workplace closing and my daughter’s graduation. As it turned out, June 2005 was the top of the real estate bubble.

The criteria for the new place were (1) no more than a $25K mortgage and (2) no more than 5 miles from work. We downsized into a smaller house on a smaller lot in a cheaper neighborhood 3.3 miles from my job and 3.5 from my husband’s. (Our previous commute was 40 miles a day each, in opposite directions. )

We always gardened, but now we are more interested in maximizing yields and putting up produce. The new place has an apple and a plum tree, and we’ve planted two dwarf pears. Our next major investment will be $200 for a small chest freezer, and in the spring, about twice that for a lean-to greenhouse for the south side of the house. Our first major investment, which we paid off this month, was upgrading the windows to state of the art. We use about half the firewood of other households in our neighborhood.

Yes, firewood. We couldn’t heat with wood in the old house, but this one has a fireplace with a fairly efficient insert, definitely a selling point from our perspective. Since my husband works in landscaping, wood follows him home (in the back of his pickup truck) on a fairly regular basis. As in the previous house, we have a timer on the thermostat. The furnace kicks on just before I get up, and kicks off an hour later, when my husband waltzes out the door to walk the dog. Whoever gets home first starts the fire.

The rest of the time, the thermostat is set at 60 degrees. During cold weather we bank the fire at night. Daytime, we open the shades on the south side in the winter; we close them in the summer. When it’s hot, we use fans rather than air conditioning. The windows keep the temp consistently 19 degrees cooler than the outside temp. In cold weather, the furnace, outside of that one hour in the morning, comes on infrequently. Our worst natural gas bill so far? $62, in February ‘06, the month that natural gas prices mysteriously doubled. (Just for comparison, the monthly bill in the summer, when only the pilot light runs, is $16. There’s a minimum fee and some taxes and whatnot that account for much of it.)

Eight years ago, in a house heated with oil–the price of which has nearly quadrupled since–we ran about $300 a year. Our oil company would sell contracts. We would estimate how many gallons we needed, pay our heating bill in July and then settle up for the difference the following spring. The company stopped offering contracts in 2004. Oil prices had gotten too volatile and they could no longer guarantee the price.

Am I doing better? Yes, I think I am, but I’ve been lucky. Without that fortuitous job-related move, I’d be looking at making mortgage payments until I was 82. My husband and I would be burning about 3 gallons of gas a day between us, instead of 3-4 a week total. My home heating bill would be at the mercy of Big Oil, speculators and Arabs.

I’m lucky. My kids are a blessing. Every day at work I hear co-workers talking about their kids’ problems with school, drugs, the law, and whether they’re on the right meds. Mine, knock wood, are doing ok. Luck has a lot to do with my being better off, as does making every effort possible to conserve energy and become self-sufficient in food and energy.

Some people wouldn’t see me as being better off. I’m in a smaller house in a more modest neighborhood, driving a used compact car. I get my hands dirty in the garden and slice and dice and pickle and stew. I sweat and watch my hair frizz as I put quarts of dills and bread and butter pickles in the hot water bath. I stack firewood while my husband swings an axe. To some people, this is a giant step backward, a fearsome reversal of the eternally upward trend of the American economy.

To me, it’s just that the lifestyle I’d aspired to, so demonized as “Hippy” in the Sixties and Seventies, happens to be working out just fine.