One Offs

Reggie Bush’s decision recently to give back his Heisman Trophy prompted me to think that perhaps Obama should give back his Nobel Peace Prize. After all, the Norwegians awarded the prize less than a month into his presidency not on anything he had actually accomplished, but on the hope of his intentions. Since that time, he has accomplished absolutely nothing to cause peace to break out anywhere, and done just about everything to inspire and motivate our enemies. In that light, Reggie seems of the two more honest and deserving to keep his prize.

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Facebook’s founder recently gave a NJ school district $100 million to help improve the education of the children. You know what would have been more effective? He could have given 20,000 kids $5,000 each, based on their financial need, on the stipulation that they use the money to pay for private school tuition.

The 20,000 kids and their parents who took it and used it for that purpose would at least be those motivated to get a decent education. Even better, it would reduce the public school population by that much, allowing the schools the opportunity to lay off their most ineffective teachers and administrators.

Throwing a $100 million at the public school system, no matter what the stipulations and rules for spending it are, is not much better than flushing it down a toilet.

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Historian Victor Hanson recently published an article in the National Review Online in which he described the difference between the peasant mentality of the feudal ages with that of the ancient Greeks. In the peasant mentality, the belief is that there is only so much to go around: wealth, opportunity, that kind of stuff. It says that the economy and society are like a big pie. If one person takes a bigger slice of pie that means others will get a smaller slice and some no slice at all because there is only so much pie to go around.

In contrast, Hanson says “… Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off.”

Hanson goes on to make the point that Progressives and Liberals think of the economy, society and nation through the lens of the peasant mentality. To their way of thinking, a rich man is only wealthy because many other men are poor. Therefore, they think it is only right and just that they redistribute the rich man’s large slice of pie to others who have smaller ones.

As Hanson points out, Obama leads the way. Hanson wrote, “America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama’s 'spread the wealth' slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama’s 'I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.'”

The irony is, as Hanson says, “The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses, and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and imposes additional regulations, the more those who create wealth are deciding to sit out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks, since they will likely either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit confiscated through higher taxes.”

As he says, “No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few won’t get richer.”

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So, Comedian Stephen Colbert testifies to Congress about migrant workers. He worked for a day picking beans to get a feel for their experience and it just about killed him he says. Well, you know, it’s like real work. Real work is hard. What a wuss.

I’ve picked several thousand pounds of beans in my youth, between the ages of 11 and 14. I was able to get out of the picking business when I turned 15, the age at which Oregon allowed youths back then to work for an hourly wage. When I was in high school and two years in college, I worked summers on different farms. On one farm my job was to carry 40 foot long 3 inch diameter aluminum irrigation pipe over my head through the bean fields. To move all the sets of irrigation lines took 2 or 3 hours. We did it twice a day, starting at sunup for the first set, and starting the second set about an hour before sun down. During the middle of the day, I lugged 70-100 pound sacks of beans a hundred yards to the weigh station for middle aged ladies’ who had just picked them — some of those ladies were the mothers of kids I went to school with. When I wasn’t lugging sacks of beans, I was picking up alfalfa bales from the fields, loading them onto trailers and trucks and then unloading and stacking them in barns.
Other jobs on other farms were similar in that they were all hard, muscle aching, hot, dirty work. None of that killed me. I wasn’t paid that much, but they were jobs and I was happy to have them.

Accordingly, I don’t have much respect for Colbert’s nonsense. The greater bit of nonsense is that members of Congress invited him to testify about his one-day “job”. Did they think that made him some sort of expert? Predictably, his testimony was completely in line with a comedy skit, not that you would expect anything different from this self-promoting ass. Even more bothersome is that the Democratic chairperson of the committee and other members of Congress seemed to think this was an appropriate use of their time and our tax dollars. Was this serious Congressional work, or just intended to be an entertaining break from all the hard work they do?

Whatever, it’s a bad joke on the rest of us.

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I am more and more bothered over the last several years about our spoken conversation. You hear it all the time in TV and Radio interviews, as well as in every day conversation. Take a typical interview. It doesn’t matter who is being interviewed, be it a sports star, actor, politician or man on the street. When asked a question, for example, “What do you think the weather will be tomorrow?” the response typically begins, “Yeah, I mean…”

Well, I certainly hope they mean what they say. Seriously, though, the original intent/meaning of the phrase is to explain a statement the speaker believes he may not have made clear or that the listener may not have understood. But, that is not what is going on here. Invariably, the speaker hasn’t said anything yet so there is nothing to explain further.

The phrase “I mean,” is essentially meaningless. It is just noise, perhaps used to get the speaker talking, like priming an old fashioned hand pump. More likely, however, its purpose is to allow his brain time to catch up with his mouth. One hears all sorts of such words and phrases in our speech today. “Yeah, I mean, like you know, it’s so going to be hot tomorrow.”