Tfgray’s Weblog

I’ll let you see this before I comment. Sessions is “Worst,” the third story in this segment.

There are some interesting things to think about here. Sessions has been around long enough to remember when the Taliban were those heroic Freedom Fighters led by that man among men, our good friend and anti-Communist ally Osama bin Laden.  Sessions has been around a while. I suppose we can forgive him forgetting that that world turned upside down on September 11, not that he and his friends have ever let us forget it. I’m not sure we can forgive him for making that comment the day after the head of the Arkansas State Medical Board was blown up in his driveway, Baghdad-style.

More troubling are the rumblings from the Right that their cause is so righteous that violence is justified. It’s not just Sessions. Not just David Duke. There’s Charles Colson, preaching this sermon in 1996. (“Only the Church collectively can decide at what point a government becomes sufficiently corrupt that a believer must resist it. But, with fear and trembling, I have begun to believe that, however Christians in America gather to reach their consensus, we are fast approaching this point. “) Although Colson, et al would beg to differ, this sounds like a call to theocratic revolution to me, you know, like the Taliban. Apparently is also sounded that way to billionaire heir Eric Prince, who founded Blackwater a month after Colson’s essay was published, now in possession of massive amounts of armament and combat choppers, thanks to its Iraq profits. 

It’s my husband’s dittohead co-workers talking about how “We’re going to have to fight the Government.”

One of them made that comment in my presence. I asked him, “What part of the government? The part that paves your street? The part that sends a lady over to watch your disabled girlfriend for free so you can go to work?”  He grinned and admitted that I had a point.

“You mean the Republican Party, don’t you?” I asked. “The part of the government that trashed the economy and got us into a land war in Asia.”

He thought about it.

He grinned. “Yeah,” he said.

If their recent statements and actions are any guide, the Republican Party cares only for its own power, and at present there are few willing to grant any to them. Their primary constituency has always been George Bush’s Base, not the Christian Right, but the “Got Mine’s and the Got More’s,” along with anyone they can bribe, cajole, or sucker into buying their agenda.

What is going on inside the Republican squirrel cage these days? The country club Republicans have fallen silent. Perhaps they have begun to realize that the economic policies they favored, while enriching them in the short run, have come perilously close to killing the golden goose called the American Economy. Perhaps they are too busy trying to save their own businesses and salvage their own portfolios. Perhaps, having got out in time,  they are looking for nice condos in Dubai, or, if not, sulking and sticking pins in their Bernie Madoff voodoo dolls.

This explains the apparent ascendancy of Limbaugh, the thoroughly corrupt mouthpiece; Palin, who will eventually face the same charges that brought down Ted Stevens, involving the free house she got from those contractor buddies who went on to build the massive Wasilla Sports Center on no-bid contracts at vast government expense, not to mention all the days she got paid extra to stay home from work; and Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurtzelbach, not a plumber, really, but he plays one on TV.

Right now there is a wide open playing field for the other side of the Republican Party, the shock troops, the true believers, the religious anti-abortion, anti-gay activists, the gun huggers.  The authoritarian followers who are conditioned to favor belief in authority over independent thought. Those who talk tough about self-defense and national defense, but who cling in panic to Big Brother’s trouser leg, selling off their Constitutional rights in exchange for alleged security while regarding the government whose newly-expanded powers they support as “too big” and “too powerful.”

They are the other side of the Obama story. The one that says, “You don’t have to be born rich or connected, heck you don’t even have to be particularly smart, get your facts straight, or work hard. All you need to do is have the right belief system, and you will be raised up to prominence. They look at Sarah and Joe and say, “That could be me!” 

And they support politicians that systematically knock the pegs out from under the very programs that could help them advance.

Stimulus package? A lot of fatty-assed bureaucrats taking our hard earned money. Never mind the construction jobs. We’ll do better if the money’s in our own pockets.

When’s the last time your neighborhood took up a collection to get the potholes fixed? Add a room to the local school? Hire a new policeman or teacher?

What part of government are you planning on fighting?

Oh, um, not the part that runs the Lottery.

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.