Stillman 3 Months

Economy: When the Rich Start to Suffer . . . .

Interesting AP story today about a kind of "trickle-up" effect: when the economy gets sour enough, the pain eventually sets in for the wealthiest segment of the population. And because of the massively inequitable distribution of wealth in our society -- with the top 1o percent of households representing 25 percent of consumer spending and the top fifth of households earning half of all income -- when the rich start to curtail their lavish ways, it has serious repercussions throughout the economy. With the decrease in consumer demand that this segment represents, companies start dropping the ax on us little people. And guess who's better able to weather a tough economy, the paycheck-to-paycheck family of modest means who lose their source of income, or the high-net-worth individuals with thick investment portfolios who now have to choose between the impulse buy of a $1700 purse and a last-minute $1700 weekend in the Hamptons?

For the whole article, click here.

Culture: Aren't We a Bright Lot, Though?

Yesterday TLS was watching "The Family Feud," and from the next room, this is what I heard:

HOST: Name something a man making a deal with the devil might ask for.

FAMILY MEMBER #1: Money!

HOST: Let's see if "Money" is up there. Yes! It's the number-one answer! On to you, Harold. Name something a man making a deal with the devil might ask for.

FAMILY MEMBER #2: Greed!

REST OF THE FAMILY: Good answer! Good answer!

Family: Road Trip to the Home Place

It was certainly impromptu; my blessed beautiful car had been parked behind Brother Beorn's house for more than six months, and I was beginning to fear that it would simply crumble into the earth if I didn't get it out of there and start driving it again. So, with a sudden lull in work, we decided to seize the moment and just head northward to retrieve it, laying aside plans for a more structured visit next month. 

What a beautiful time of year to visit the North Country! Fresh air, everything just as lush and verdant as the mind can imagine, the lovely farm smells, a massive pink sun sinking over wet pasture where cows graze, the rivers all swollen and happy. 

Sister Lue and I (with help from Niece Lauren) saddled up my parents' two rideable horses and took a beautiful evening jaunt up the road where we used to ride when we were teenagers. Much has changed there, but it felt like a time warp to be riding along with my big sister -- especially when we passed the power line where the redwing blackbird used to scold and chase us. One of its descendants is still there, guarding the same spot. We rode into a meadow and let the horses run, and I can't describe how good it felt to be charging down the field with a horse beneath me. I need more of that in my life.

And peppermint still grows abundantly along the brook where we used to play as kids. I harvested three large bunches of it which are now drying in my kitchen, for tea.

Our visit happened to correspond with the annual Summerfest of the town of Hopkinton, the subject of my father's recently published history book. He, Mom, Aunt Di and Chrissy were set up at the museum/historical society to sign copies of the book for sale.

Stillman got to meet lots of new relatives (The Blogger apologizes to those many who were not photographed. He was simply not on the ball.). But we did get shots of Aunt Nichelle . . . .

. . . and Dear Sweet Cousin Molly Bryn.

He got to reconnect with Grandma Irene:
And see his cousin Lauren again.

Meeting Cousin Truman was interesting for him. When Truman's mom, Nichelle, held Stillman for the first time, Truman took it as the dirtiest sort of betrayal, and set about howling and screeching with indignation and hurt. This is a picture of him not howling and screeching with indignation and hurt, though.

Eventually an uneasy peace developed between the two cousins. (For the record, Truman seemed completely okay with the idea of his father, Jonathan, holding Stillman).  By the end of the visit, Truman was even giving him hair (you touch your hair and then reach out and touch the head of the recipient, see).

Three generations of male Burnetts . . . .

As for head-kicking, I've lost all ambition for it. Attentive reader Kenrya points out that the world record is a mere 77 blows, but if anyone is going to shatter that record, it won't be me. It will be my sister Chrissy, against whom it seems futile to even contemplate competing. How do you beat someone who doesn't even have to bend over to kick herself in the head? Check this out:

Family: The Congers Drop In

Cousin Maria and two of her brood, Elisabeth and Young John, dropped by for a night over the weekend, in transit from other parts of PA to the northern stomping grounds. We had a very pleasant visit, sitting up on the deck until after midnight visiting, joking, and performing acrobatic feats. Most notably, we worked on kicking ourselves in the head, which is roughly as difficult as it sounds. It requires a certain degree of balance and flexibility, and the nice thing about it is that it's impossible to even try without causing those around you to erupt in laughter, and that tends to make you laugh, too, which makes the whole endeavor just that much more challenging.

We've all vowed to work on it until one of us breaks the world record, which is only, like, 145 times or something. A little conditioning and that sucker is mine to hold, I swear it.

In the morning we took some photos with Stillman, but he was pretty sleepy, so he looks more like a clump of clay than an actual human child.

Family: Your Basic Baby Update

Young Stillman continues to thrive, and astounds us with the way he changes daily. We're guessing he must weigh 16 pounds or so, and as you can see from the photos, he's developing quite a unibrow and his hair is lightening considerably.

He's remarkably alert these days, making eye contact from way across the room, and paying close attention to his three favorite objects: the television (I know, I know! We don't let him watch it, but if you carry him into a room where it's on, his eyes zoom in on it, especially commercials for local car dealerships); a plastic star that lights up and plays classical music; and as is the case with all babies, of course, an iron image of the Hindu elephant-god Ganesh.

Yes, my son worships graven images. I think it's funny; TLS thinks it's creepy. A few years ago, I brought home from India this dull-black iron depiction of Ganesh. When we moved into this place, I half-jokingly hung it on our bedroom wall where a screw was sticking out. A week or so ago, we realized that every time we carried Stillman past it, he looked at it and smiled. Now, it's not just a matter of smiling. He coos at it, laughs at it, stares meaningfully at it. It stops him from crying. Really, he's fussing and you carry him over to the wall and hold him up to it and he starts to laugh. The thing just hangs there, dull black, but it somehow entertains him or otherwise holds great significance to him.

It's getting really fun to play with him. He laughs, is starting to giggle, and plays The Howling Game with me. In the Howling Game, what you do is, is you howl at each other. He makes the greatest shouting/howling/laughing noises, which I do my best to imitate. Sometimes it can go on for 15 minutes, just us looking at each other and trying out new sounds. He's pretty attentive when we read to him, too. Sometimes he'll spend a good quarter hour looking through books with us, staring at the pictures, occasionally yelling at them. Kind of like me with the TV.

And he remains a serious music fan. He likes a beat, and he likes it loud. Lacking breasts as I do, it's the only truly reliable method I have for calming him. Crank up some music and dance. You can't try to dance without music; that's just stupid. Same with music without dancing. But put the two together, and it soothes the savage beast.

Politics: Freedom and Rights (July 4th Musings)

So I'm a bit late for Independence Day reflections, but hey -- only by five days. Rather than waiting until next year, I wanted to share a few notions that have been chasing each other around in my head recently, making my brainbox clatter, before they dissipate forever.

On my recent trip to Jamaica, I was struck, as I often am when traveling in the "developing world," at how free the people there are. Now I realize it is heretical and blasphemous to put forth the idea that people in another country enjoy greater freedoms than we do in the U.S., but it's pretty hard to argue that they don't: just witness people zipping around on motorcycles with no helmets, racing around in cars with no seatbelts, carrying their babies on their laps instead of strapping them into carseats -- and that's just the automotive stuff. How about walking down the street with a marijuana joint in one hand and a Red Stripe in the other? (Yes, marijuana is illegal, but nobody's going to bother you about it out in the bush) How about not having to work for the government for the first three months of every year?

Now, do I want to do all of those things, or do I think that they're good ideas? No, all except for shrugging off some of the tax burden. But it would be nice to make those decisions myself, and it's pretty undeniable that the people in Jamaica (and a lot of other places) live much more freely than we do, at least if your definition of freedom has to do with being left alone to make your own choices about how you conduct your everyday life. So jingoists who spout the line that the USA is the freest country on the planet either are ignorant of how the world actually functions or they're confusing freedom with rights.

We do have good rights in the US, no doubt about it. But the way I've come to see it, there is a practical tension between rights and freedom. You have to surrender some of your freedom to secure your rights. I'm being a bit abstract here, so let me lay down something concrete by way of illustration.

Several years ago, my brother-in-law moved to Haiti, in large part because of the freedoms he could find there. As you may know, Haiti has almost no functioning government. People are left alone to sort things out. There's not even such a thing as a building permit. You want to build, you put up your structure and get on with life. There's no reliable electrical system, so you wire up something using a generator -- no light bill, no regulation. And if someone steals a dozen eggs, he will be chased down by his neighbors and beaten, perhaps to death, his body left on a garbage heap. Nice, right? Your neighbors will definitely think twice about pilfering eggs from off your porch.

But here's where it gets tricky. What if someone thinks they saw you steal a dozen eggs, but you were actually at home with your children at the time of the theft? It's pretty hard to argue your case against a mob determined to do you harm. In the US, we have the wonderful right of due process, a trial by peers, a chance to defend oneself in open court.

But you can't have the rule of law without sacrificing some of your freedoms. You've got to organize into civil society, abide by more and more rules, pass some laws, get some order going, allow the government into your life and into your wallet. Is it a worthwhile tradeoff? When the gang of neighbors has you cornered up against the garbage heap, you certainly might think so.

But these things are not absolute. The balance between freedom and rights changes constantly with passage of new laws, court precedents, the political mood. At some points in our history, that balance has looked quite different than it does today or will tomorrow. Somewhere in abstraction lies the perfect balance. Compared with a lot of other countries in the world, the US is doing all right in finding that balance. Compared to others, not so great. We have the rule of law, sort of: but the blacker your skin, or the further down the economic ladder you happen to be, the less enforceable some of those rights seem to be. And when it comes to the basic balance between how freely we get to live and how secure our rights are, I think we're losing ground.

This was driven home to me a few days ago when I was out riding my bike. One of my favorite trails is a dirt road sandwiched between the river and the railroad tracks. It goes along like that for miles. I stopped for a drink of water and an older gentleman pedaled up to me and we started talking. Somehow we got onto the subject of the railroad tracks, and he said something about how you didn't ever want to venture onto them because they'd fine you for trespassing if you got caught. I began to bemoan the loss of the old freedom of strolling along the tracks to one's heart's content. "I hate that people aren't allowed to make their own choices about things like that," I said. "The government always seems to be deciding for you what things are safe enough for you to do."

He looked at me kind of funny and said, "The railroad and the government don't care at all about your safety. The railroad just doesn't want to have to defend itself in a lawsuit because your foot got stuck in the track."

True enough, I realized. We in the US have this wonderful right to sue for the redress of grievances and damages. I've spoken to enough people who were woefully maimed by malpracticing doctors to believe very strongly in that right. And yet the ample exercise by enough people of the right to sue has resulted in the curtailing of a personal freedom: the freedom to spend a lazy afternoon seeing where the tracks go.

And it's not just railroad tracks. In my lifetime, I've seen an astonishing number of personal freedoms just disappear from this country, sacrificed to public health and national security with virtually no thought to the reality of the threat. No kids under 12 in the front seat. Why not? Well, because there's a very, very slim chance that you might get into an accident. And if you do get into an accident, there's a slim chance that it might be just such an accident as to cause the airbag to deploy. And if the airbag deploys, there's a slim chance that it might injure your child. Yet we follow these rules, and follow them, and follow them.

There are some pretty obvious reasons why that's a bad thing, but let me suggest one not-so-obvious repercussion of all this: the psychological fallout. Put up enough gates and barriers and warning stickers and ordinances and no-trespassing signs, and pretty soon you have a population that believes their world is absolutely fraught with peril (especially when you throw in some television, including the 6:00 news). Walk along the railroad tracks? Everybody knows that's dangerous; look at all the signs and laws against it!

Americans used to be an intrepid people. We used to go out into the world and do bold things, confident in our self-sufficiency. We're not like that anymore. We're an increasingly timid, law-abiding, stay-at-home people. Who makes it out to Jamaica's Cockpit Country these days? Germans. Dutch. Australians. The Americans are down on the coast, at the Sandals resort, safe within their fortress.

One final note to my rant. I've talked about the natural tension between rights and freedoms, and I've said that in the balance between them, we've been losing ground. The worst eventuality is an erosion of both rights and freedoms simultaneously. And I would contend that we have experienced just that over the past eight years. If you're a conservative and a Clinton-basher, I'm certainly not going to argue that the Clinton years didn't see a diminishment of personal freedoms -- but what do you make of an administration that codifies torture, conducts illegal domestic spying, suspends habeus corpus, and on and on?

This election is about some very basic things. I posted a couple of days ago about some of my reservations concerning Obama. But voters would do well to ask themselves which of the two candidates is more likely to continue the Bush Administration's policies of simultaneously curtailing our rights and our freedoms. The US will not be a very nice place to live when we are overburdened by taxes, penned in by laws that touch every corner of our lives, and denied the human rights which once made the sacrifice of a few freedoms seem worthwhile.