One of my great pleasures in life is my sauna. It was already installed in our house when we purchased it back in the eighties, and I soon became addicted. My spousal unit, on the other hand, would rather be horse-whipped and dragged by her ankles through a stony field than enter my cedar-lined sanctum. She views willfully sitting nude on a wooden bench at ambient temperatures exceeding 150 degrees and sweating like a galley slave as a form of madness, indicating seriously defective reasoning ability or rampant masochism, or both.

I, however, enjoy it enormously; the benefits of moist heat to the aging carcass are many, to wit:

1. It gets those rascally endorphins moving without the distasteful requirement of actually performing physical exercise.
2. It is quiet, almost preternaturally so; as noted above, no one else in my house will go near, and there is no radio, TV or telephone made that can withstand the temperatures at which I take my ease.
3. Near-scalding steam (I splash a little water on the hot rocks) is a wonder at temporarily loosening old creaky joints and clearing sinuses that clog up even in a fresh mountain breeze.
4. The whole steamy experience also magically sluices away those sundry transudates , exudates and waxy build-ups that seem to accumulate in assorted nooks and crannies after one reaches 70 or so. You youngsters out there (i.e., those having yet to receive your first SS check) will have no idea what I’m talking about – not to worry – you’ll know soon enough.
5. It provides an unassailable excuse to sit and do absolutely nothing for a half hour or so.

By the way, I’m told that the Finns (who claim to have invented the sauna) are fond of sitting in the scorching heat until they begin to simmer then running naked into the wintry outdoors and beating each other senseless with branches from alder trees. Now I’m as open to new experiences as the next geezer, but this seems to me to be too much of a good thing. The thought of people, Nordic or otherwise, frolicking buck-naked in the snow, whipping each other with tree branches exceeds even my admittedly fairly high threshold for weirdness. Anyway, I don’t think there’s an alder tree within several hundred miles of here.

My doctor frowns each time I extol the virtues of saunas, and invariably counters my panegyrics to them with cautionary accounts of the dangerous stresses of excessive heat on old and often fragile anatomies. He even once regaled me with the story (doubtless apocryphal) of a fellow who nodded off in the sauna and awoke to find himself more or less parboiled; he used terms like “second degree burns” and “multiple skin grafts”, but I regard such scare tactics coldly and remain loyal to my wooden sweat-box. Besides, this is the same guy who harangues me unceasingly about cutting my caloric intake while he himself tips the scales at a solid 270. He also lectures me about the dangers of tobacco, then excuses himself to step outside for a quick smoke. Maybe I should invite him over for a sauna or two.

I think I do my best thinking in the sauna. I can’t really document that conviction because within minutes of cooling down after a session, my wizened cerebrum goes back into its customary slow waltz mode and I can’t for the life of me remember any of the details of what I was thinking about – only that it was really, really clever. I’ve tried taking a paper and pencil in with me to record some of my high temperature brilliance, but writing on a steam-soggy Big Chief tablet is a trial at best. It always comes out looking like the Dead Sea Scrolls only without the sand.

Redd Foxx once observed that the scariest thing in the world is an 80 year old white woman in a bathtub. I bet Redd never saw a 70 year old nude sweaty white guy in a sauna.

Bo Pelini is not a happy man, by which I do not mean that he is just distraught after getting his khaki-clad keester handed to him last Saturday night by a gaggle of squareheads from CheeseCurd U. … though that debacle is doubtless the source of significant heartburn for him. No, Bo’s malaise is considerably more profound than just post-loss doldrums. Put simply, the man lacks humor – joie de vivre – in the same way that deep space lacks matter, or that ramen noodles lack nutritional value, or that Bill Clinton lacks a moral compass. Bo seems possessed of a rooted conviction that the only good, indeed the only salvation, in God’s universe is mystically linked with hulking young men in tight pants and the inflatable prolate spheroid which occupies the majority of their waking attentions. Football – Pelini-style football – is, to him, not just the most important thing – it is the only thing.

Now I admire the ability to focus on tasks at hand as much as the next man, but rankly obsessive behavior makes me queasy, especially when such singleness of purpose induces profound sociopathies. In Bo-World, everything outside of PeliniBall is just commentary … and unwelcome commentary at that. If you want to ask Bo about anything, especially Husker football, you better have your armor on (including a cast iron cup) or be prepared to bob and weave … or both.

Bo’s snarling, sulking performances during the contract-dictated post-game press conferences have become, for me, nearly as interesting as the on-field contest(s) which they succeed. Well … not interesting exactly … more like arresting … or disturbing … or ominous … or something – imagine watching a twelve car pile-up on I-80; you know it’s yucky, but you just cannot avert your eyes. His body language alone should convince those in charge to call for back-up. He twitches, figets, rubs his eyes, ears, nose, pinches the skin on his neck (what’s up with that?), all the while swinging his head back and forth like a polar bear in a zoo, coldly eyeing his tormentors, daring them to ask even the most innocuous question about today’s game … or anything else. Growly monosyllabic responses, venom almost literally dripping from his sneering lips … Bo knows how to put the “grunt” in “disgruntled.”

I keep waiting for him to come raging over the microphone table and throttle some unfortunate part-time sports stringer from the McCool Junction Herald Tribune before anyone can intervene. Why reporters even show up for these exercises in stone-walling is beyond me – you can get more information about NU’s team from the back of a box of Wheaties than from a Bo Pelini news conference – and you don’t have to tolerate the personal abuse.

I don’t know if Bo Pelini is a good football coach or not – I am not qualified to judge. To quote Howard Cosell, I never played the game – though this might be the appropriate juncture to note that over UNL’s last 59 years and five coaches, Bo’s WL percentage betters only that of the execrable Bill Callahan. I don’t even know if Bo Pelini is a good man, but I am persuaded that he is a deeply unhappy man. I also think that he fiercely believes that his perceived agonies are directly and wholly attributable to the world-at-large and it’s inexplicable  refusal to perform in a manner acceptable to him. That particular set of attitudes and behaviors is not apt to endear him to any class of onlookers anytime soon, be they fans, media, athletes, or anyone else except possibly a tiny cadre of testosterone-charged low self-esteem coachy types who like to affect grey sweatshirts, high-dollar sneakers and headphones.

So here’s some unsolicited advice, Bo – idle down, have a donut, maybe switch to decaf. Smile once in a while for no good reason. You have a bunch of pretty good kids playing for you. Act like it. Stop assuming that everyone who says anything to you is either an evil subversive element of the Dark Side, or a mental incompetent recently bolted from the local Drooling Academy. Remember, most of us were interested in Cornhusker football while you were still learning to be a playground bully in grade school – and we like to talk about it, and even occasionally hear about it from the coaches. Oh, and lose that stoooopid baseball cap – it just makes you look cheesy. I’m thinking maybe a spiffy snap-brim à la  Tom Landry, or the ever-popular Bob Stoops crownless eyeshade number. Don’t go bare-headed though – the exposed burr cut is not your best look.

Proceed Large Scarlet.

Coming to you this morning from a soggy, drizzly downtown Nashville, Tennessee … or “TENN-asee”, as they say down here. Spent a delightful weekend at brother-in-law Bill’s lovely place on the Lake of the Ozarks, then yesterday motored leisurely down to Music City. Twas a wonderful late summer day, little traffic (surprisingly), and Mother’s new Hyundai purred along like a kitten at just under 35 MPG. Yee-haw … my pickup uses a couple gallons just to go to the store to get Metamucil. Mebbe them Korean folks know a bit about cars ….

Anyway, arrived Nashville around 6:00 PM, checked into our favorite downtown hotel, scrubbed off the road dust and headed for Jack’s Barbecue – THE premier spot for burnt pig and cow on this part of the planet. After tucking in enough pulled pork to feed a small village, we headed for Tootsie’s where a George Strait wannabee was just knocking them out. Then up to Legends to hear maybe the best young Telecaster jockey I have heard in a couple decades, then finished the night at Robert’s Western World where they do the finest in western swing. For those who don’t do the Nashville thing, you should know that everyone in this city is the best guitar/fiddle/steel/etc player you have ever heard – even the cooks, cabbies, and mechanics. And it shows – my stars and little hoptoads – what music.

Today we do the Country Music Hall of Fame – a must-see, then this afternoon it’s out to The Hermitage – Andrew Jackson’s ancestral home and one of the best-preserved examples of ante-bellum plantations in the state. Tonight we do the Opry (Rascal Flatts), and continue our quest for the ultimate barbecue.

Time to head out … more anon.

For most of my life, especially in my younger days, I was a closet poetry lover. In that part of the country in which I came up, poetry, as well as anyone who liked it, was viewed as “weird” … or worse. Poets in general were  known to possess little or nothing in the way of manly attributes. If you could rhyme two or three lines, or knew that iambic pentameter wasn’t the active ingredient in a herbicide, it was assumed that you also wore frilly undergarments, spoke with a lisp and ate things like quiche and arugula.

I remember the day a group of us were pheasant hunting and someone, rooting around in the glove compartment of my car for shotgun shells, found a well-thumbed copy of Keats. I endured several weeks of hooting and giggling after that; they just never did buy my story that the book belonged to my sister (they were right). A couple of those guys wouldn’t ride with me for several months after that – I think they were afraid that an affection for verse might be contagious – like whooping cough or herpes.

As an undergraduate at UNL I studied science – though I also managed to sneak in a couple of poetry courses, telling everyone it was to fill a humanities curriculum requirement (true) and that poetry was the only lit class left by the time I registered (false). Engineering and Agriculture were really where the testosterone was back then but my math skills bordered on nonexistent so Engine School was out, and I was by then really sick of cows so that took care of an Ag major. Instead I opted  for several years worth of smelly chemistry, biology and zoology courses, eventually winding up with a degree in microbiology. But I kept my Dylan Thomas, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Wallace Stevens under my mattress.

There were some heavy duty literary names around Andrews Hall back in those days – Shapiro, Welch, Kooser, Kloefkorn, etc., with occasional injections of Eiseley, Morris, and others. I never took classes under or with any of them because they were all mostly involved with the heady reaches of graduate school, advanced prosody and the like, and I was a lowly underclassman (and a science major to boot), but I was aware of some of their work. I even peeked inside a copy or two of “Prairie Schooner” (eek!) and “The Sewanee Review” (gasp!) when no one in my dorm was looking.

Sometime later in life, as I staggered toward my dotage and my skin got thicker, I discovered that I no longer cared so much if folks saw me reading T. S. Eliot or A. E. Housman. When people chortled, I simply moved to another table in the library. If someone held a gun on me, I would even admit to penning a few lines of poesy meself, though always with an apologetic tone. Now, hip-deep in geezerhood and with most everything in decline including my dignity, I openly read and write verse, and tell my detractors to go fish. And by the way, I still like quiche, though I would rather eat a musk thistle than arugula.

Let me leave you with a quick snapshot of ordinariness that is anything but ordinary – from William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just To Say     
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

If you’re in the neighborhood on the 3rd Tuesday for the next several months, stop by for some poetry, or just to say hey.

It’s hard to get any respect …

Whilst poking around some of the lesser-known blogs recently, I came across one with the provocative title of The Southern Avenger, which, it turns out, is the nom de guerre of one Jack Hunter. Mr. Hunter is a blogger/writer/talk radio dood (WTMA in Charleston, SC) whose work appears regularly in the Charleston City Paper, and sundry right-leaning internet watering holes such as The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and LewRockwell.com. He also “assisted” Rand Paul in writing Paul’s recent book The Tea Party Goes To Washington. Most of his offerings tend toward raffish pseudo-libertarian polemic which he hangs out there like a booger on a screen-door. Anyway, an essay he authored back in June titled Identity vs Philosophy caught my eye.

In the piece Hunter posits a fairly simplistic dichotomy of voter motivational dynamics; he holds that there are two types of voters. There are those who choose or reject their candidates based on pure personality-driven factors – he/she is cute or plain, All-American or untrustworthy, good parent or lousy role model, etc. – these are Identity voters. On the other side are the Philosophy voters – they vote for candidates based only on stated/demonstrated positions with regard to issues the voter sees as important, like smaller government vs more government involvement, strong defense vs mind our own business, etc … you get the idea.

Said all that to say this: disregarding for the moment the shallow smattery of Hunter’s thesis, note the following excerpt in which he uses Sarah Palin in an attempt to illustrate his point about his Identity voters:

“Palin is adored by conservatives for … personality-driven reasons. Ask the average conservative what they like about Palin and you will hear very little if anything about policy or philosophy. You will hear is that she’s a good mother. You will hear that she’s all-American. Maybe they’ll mention that she’s a good hunter.”

Like Othello’s Iago, he tries to disguise his duplicity a bit by mewling … “This is not to insult the former Alaska governor, only to note that Palin has replaced the former president as a focus of Left hatred.” Yeah … right.

Hunter, unsurprisingly a pusillanimous water-carrier for Ron Paul, artfully implies that Palin has no policy ideas nor a political philosophy worth articulating. By his lights, the only things she is good for is mothering, and maybe a little patriotic cheerleading. And the “good hunter” crack is beneath contempt. I don’t know how things are in South Carolina, but out here in the flatlands, when Sarah is discussed (and she is discussed a lot) we speak mostly of her record rather than her personal attributes (of which, incidentally, she has plenty – including a natural leadership quality that blots out the other contenders). We talk about accomplishments such as:

1) Elected governor of the largest state in the union, in the process challenging and beating one of the most entrenched good old boy networks in US political history, and went on to be the first Republican female candidate for Vice President.

2) Reduced earmark requests for the state of Alaska by 80% during her administration, requesting only earmarks that would benefit the country as a whole.

3) While governor, vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unnecessary spending, often at significant political risk.

4) Reduced spending in her budget for FY1010 by more than one billion dollars from the previous governor’s budget, a 9.5% real reduction in spending, simultaneously keeping her campaign promise to forward fund education in Alaska .For a concise summation of how her fiscal record compares with the other governors in the race see here  (spoiler alert – Sarah beats the others like a rented donkey).

5) Expedited the TransCanada/Exxon natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the Lower 48 – the largest private sector infrastructure project in North American history and helped put America on a sustainable path to energy independence. More progress was made on this effort under Palin’s leadership than in the previous three decades.

6) Has several years more executive experience (city councilwoman,mayor, Chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, governor) than the current White House occupant.

There are many, many others – take a trip on your googler – they’re not hard to find.

And yes, we also talk about her monster prowess as a fund-raiser and  her favorable head-to-head poll results against Obama, as well as her dedication to faith-based family values, and her demonstrated commitment to less intrusive government. Sue us.

It is, of course, a truism that strong conservative women of faith and ability are much feared and maligned among the political chattering class these days. The RNC trumpets the Republican Party as welcoming all comers, yet toward Palin it has been about as welcoming as a stucco toilet seat. Even NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, normally a dependable and rational voice for both conservatives and women, cannot resist taking a back-handed swat at Sarah with her recent article titled I Can See China From Iowa – an obvious and reprehensible reference to Palin’s comment that she could see Russia from her house (which, for the record, she indeed can).

As an indefatigable supporter of Governor Palin, I only hope that the political pharisees continue to take her lightly. They will find in their arrogance the seeds of defeat. In the words of the prophet Micah, all that is asked of us is to seek justice, act with mercy and walk with God – a perfect description of Sarah’s journey. The respect that she so richly warrants will come and soon … as surely as light follows darkness.

Run, Sarah, Run!

One of the more cynical tropes abroad in some of the fringier … uhhh … let’s call them “political movements” until I can think of a more appropriate term … goes something like this: those who claim to be “pro-life” are intellectually dishonest unless, along with abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide, etc., they also condemn participation in war in all its forms. These folks loudly aver that sending young men and women against their will to die in foreign lands (and presumably at home too) is surely antithetical to a reverence for life – at least that seems to be the basis for their assertion, as nearly as I can make out.

To begin with, equating going off to war with, say, abortion, is not just ideological ignis fatuus, it is also committing a grave logical fallacy – that of arbitrarily assigning moral equivalence where none objectively exists (or, indeed, is even possible). This lack of synonymy is manifested in at least two ways:

1) Since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973, the United States military is 100% voluntary, i.e., no one is coerced into serving, and those who do enlist do so with full knowledge that they may be placing their lives in mortal danger. While one might argue that military service can be less than pleasant, at least for some, I am aware of no instance in which an enlistee was promised that he or she would never be placed in danger. Soldiers know and accept (indeed, volunteer for) the inherent dangers of service. This fact alone belies the notion of “sending” unwilling soldiers to their death; our warriors serve (and yes, some die) out of a sense of duty and honor, and ideological cant such as that noted above desecrates the sacrifice of those who have indeed given the last full measure for their country.

2) Participation in war clearly implies contesting with those who intend to do us in, either directly or indirectly. In a macro sense, we can argue endlessly over the propriety of a given conflict (anti-war types are excessively fond of emotion-laden terms like “war of imperialism” and “empire building“), but in the end, armed conflict always comes down to ‘inflict harm or be harmed’ – a highly individual choice and one made solely within a context of self-defense. Right or wrong, armed combat in war distills down to preventing another from doing mortal injury to me and mine. I know of no mainstream religious or philosophic school of thought that admonishes anyone to not protect themselves from potentially fatal threats. Put simply, the soldier in combat and his commander(s) are acting within a highly moral context, while the abortionist, the executioner, the suicide enabler are under no threat from those they kill so their actions can in no sense be categorized as moral – or even acceptable. Abortions are killings perpetrated for profit (for the abortionist) and convenience (for the parents), “legal” executions are carried out as an expression of a limbic societal lust for vengeance, and the suicide enabler presumably views him/herself as some sort of procurator for the Almighty (that view is wrong, of course  – God does his own winnowing).

So to say that serving in the military and all that such service implies, as well as directing those who do serve, is akin to the taking of the life of the innocent (as in the case of the unborn fetus and the suicider) and the nonthreatening (as in the case of the condemned but chained murderer) is wrong-headed and willfully misleading. It gets us no closer to first principles and in fact separates us from our humanity and, for the faithful, from our God.

He who would tread the path of the iconoclast, attempting to trap his foe with this kind of  pseudo-logic would do well to remember Emerson’s admonition: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Uhhh … I didn’t watch. There were new episodes of “Burn Notice” and “Suits” on the USA cable network last night. I’m gonna give that up to watch a group grumble featuring two Mormons, an over-achieving female, a black dude who should be doing stand-up, a misanthrope, a “Crazy Uncle”, a Chippendale wannabe, and a guy so uncharismatic that he was able to get elected governor of Minnesota??  I don’t thiiiiink so.

Call me when Sarah gets in.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman). There exists perhaps no more succinct and searingly apposite refutation of the false hope inherent in the modern conception of ‘compromise’ than Shaw’s 1903 pronouncement.

The word derives from the Latin compromissus, past participle of compromittere, “to make a mutual promise”, which itself comes from com – “together” – + promittere – “send forth, foretell, promise”. Promittere, in turn, stems from pro – “before” – + mittere “to put, send”. So the original ground sense of the word can be stated as “a declaration made about the future, about some act to be done or not done.” This classical meaning devolved in the 1800′s to “coming together”, and, thanks in no small part to the festering, creeping progressivism endemic to the 20th century, has been further debauched into the current (i.e., modern) apprehension of compromise as “capitulation as a strategy to avoid unpleasant confrontation”.

Imagine a world in which Jesus had “compromised” with Satan in the desert. Picture the modern face of Europe (and, for that matter, the Americas) had the English “compromised” with Bonaparte instead of kicking his diminutive keester at Waterloo. “Compromise” as immutable policy becomes appeasement – as Neville Chamberlain discovered to his considerable chagrin in the 30′s and 40′s. And who among us doubts that the Berlin wall (a very real manifestation of the Iron Curtain) would still stand, grim and foreboding, had Reagan chosen to “compromise” with the Soviet Communists.

As Scott Peck points out in his “People of the Lie“, one does not – must not – compromise with the demonstrably evil. It is one thing to lie down with dogs and get up with only fleas … it is something else altogether to lie down with wolves and get ripped to shreds. To go back to Shaw’s aphorism for a moment, refusal to bow to forces that we know to be destructive and ill-founded, in other words to abandon our principles, only seems unreasonable to those who would impose their maleficence upon us. To stand against those who seek to diminish liberty through glorification of class warfare and exercise of the Marxist precept of “from each according to his ability – to each according to his need” is the highest form of patriotism. No one should have to apologize for resisting consumate malfeasance, of which, make no mistake, modern liberalism is the exact epitome. To paraphrase Annie Savoy, Liberalism is made for people who aren’t cursed with the ability to think and act rationally and independently.

And so it is with something less than enthusiasm that I greet the formation of yet another committee of career politicians (the so-called Super Committee) whose charge it is to find ways to significantly temper the gubmint’s gobbling propensity to spend our money. In my opinion, none of them, dem or pubbie, are in any sense willing or even able to manifest a healthy Shawesque unreasonableness. No … they will purse their lips and wag their heads and, in the course of dozens of hundred dollar lunches, uncover unplumbed depths of “compromise”, and eventually write an arcane report, and the spending will continue to soar, and the wheels on the bus will go round and round ….

My current favorite fantasy goes something like this: the Super Committee is in the middle of its 14th (or 29th, or 56th) session and suddenly some young gun (maybe with a cape and a mask) who bears a disturbing resemblance to Paul Ryan swings down on to the table from the chandelier, kicks over everyone’s silver-plated water carafe and says something like, “OK, you lollygaggin’ sonsab*****s, compromise time is over – here’s the way it’s gonna be ….

Ah, sweet unreasonableness … where is it when we need it?

Sigh.

I’ve spent most of the last couple evenings slouched in my recliner watching the end of civilization as we know it. I have been witness to a panorama of earnest performances (varying in quality from wretched to giggle-inducing) from a variety of alleged commentarists – O’Reilly, Olbermann, Hume, Blitzer, Baier, Matthews, Scarborough, Van Susteren, Krauthammer and three or four of the network newsies (those network folks come and go with such rapidity I don’t bother to learn their names anymore). To a man (or, woman – sorry, Greta), they were all feverishly detailing the latest juicy exigencies of the rolling, roiling crisis – Geithner is seen as “pensive” (ya think?), Congressional leaders are said to be “wondering” if they should come back to Washington (stay home guys – you’ve done enough), Obama is running around the halls of the White House looking for a pick-up game of hoops, and Nancy Pelosi’s permanent wide-eyed look of astonishment is finally appropriate.

See, what happened was, some bond rating agency decided that America’s credit wasn’t as good as it should be so they changed their grade from “AAA” (which is like really, really, really nifty) to “AA+”, which apparently is only really nifty. On the scale of stuff to be concerned about, this is about as momentous as Professor Veeblefetzer changing my biochemistry grade from “D minus” to “Not Quite An F” but the TV bedlamites all had a cow anyway and galloped for their microphones – and they haven’t shut up since.

By the way, I don’t know what Sean Hannity had to say – I NEVER watch Hannity – Hannity makes me lose my supper … and not in a good way.

In case you haven’t heard (like if you’ve been hermetically sealed in a titanium-reinforced, ceramic-lined, hypocrisy-proof isolation booth) the American way of life is crashing all about us. That dull thumping you hear is the economic langoliers (note gratuitous Stephen King reference) munching away at our reality. That annoying clicking sound is not your cardiac valves playing Bolero because of all those chicken-fried steaks and triple scoop hot fudge sundaes, but rather the initial pieces of a falling sky hitting the linoleum around you. Yup, it’s all over but the shouting, folks; the rag is off the bush, the train has left the station, the ship has sailed, <insert your favorite metaphor for certain and impending doom here ________>.

So I got to wondering how many times in the last couple of hundred years economic apocalypse has been visited upon us and was only mildly surprised to find that official fiscal armageddon rains down on our heads just slightly less often than night-time heartburn and Congressional sex scandals.

By the numbers, here’s a back-of-a-cereal-box summary of our economic fortunes since the founding …

The Panic of 1819, Panic and Depression 1832, Panic and Depression 1836, The Panic of 1837, Six Year Depression 1837-1843, The Panic of 1857, Panic and Depression 1869-1871, The Panic and Depression of 1873, The Panic and Depression of 1893, The Panic of 1901, Panic of 1910, Panic and Depression of 1929, Great Recession of 2006

For purposes of elucidation, “Panic” is defined as a state of fear and economic uncertainty that borders on frenzy, virtually always followed by a “Depression”, which is defined as a massive collapse of the economy. A “Depression” is usually accompanied by a crash of the stock market as investors lose confidence and refuse to buy stocks or make loans. A very high level of unemployment is always a part of the scenario. If the down turn in the economy is short lived and relatively mild, it is called a “Recession.” Note that I have not included any “Recessions” in the listing above save the Great Recession of 2006 (which not a few authorities describe as a full-bore, flat-out Depression, but hey…) – there have been at least two dozen “Recessions” over the course of the last 250 years, interspersed gaily amongst and amidst the sundry Panics and Depressions.

All of which just goes to show that old Qoheleth was right (again) when he declared in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that there really is “nothing new under the sun.”

None of this is to imply that I welcome hard times (which danged sure are a-comin’) – I get just as cranky as the next geezer about putting most of my monthly pittance either in my gas tank or in my tummy. But the thing is – the sun will come up tomorrow, and, at some point, things will get a little better. At which point, of course, because they are who (and what) they are, the politicians will screw the whole thing up again like Hogan’s goat. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, politicians gotta connive and dissemble … if you don’t like it, find some other form of government that works half as well.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to make some popcorn and watch the end of the world … again.

Well … not really; more like a refusal to communicate. Whilst Obama and Reid and Boehner and McConnell and their toadies continue to cling precariously to the running boards of A Streetcar Named Denial, there are at least a few dozen folks in Washington who have, praise the Lord, elected to put principles before politics. Tucked way in the back of the House of Representatives is a small but stalwart platoon of Congress-critters who are displaying admirable foresight and fortitude in their stand against the barrage of legislative travesties (designed ostensibly to deal with the phantasmagorical “debt crisis”) loosed by a whole cadre of appeasers on both sides of the aisle. Yes, Mel … I speak of that much-maligned – hell, savaged is a more apt descriptor – band of brothers known loosely as the Tea Party (a sobriquet which, when uttered by traditional politics-as-usual pols, is usually accompanied by a spitting sound).

Most who know me also know that I have been no great friend of the whole Tea Party movement since its inception back in April of 2009. I predicted early on that what began as a laudable grass-roots resistance against the depredations of out-of-control government would be rapidly and cynically co-opted by forces with motives much less laudable than those adduced by the original TP enterprise, and I was largely correct. Soon we saw the emergence of the Tea Party Patriots, the Tea Party Express, Freedom Works,  and several other “official” TP organizations, most of whom allowed their own parochial (and often suspect) interests to supervene the goals of the April 15th organizers.

In spite of the real Tea Party being shoved into the background by more cynical offshoots, several freshman lawmakers were elected in 2010 who embraced, if not all, at least some of the ideals of the TP founders – and I am pleased to report that they have been making traditional politicians uncomfortable ever since. I do not, of course, countenance their every action (no party, group, club, brotherhood, coffee klatsch or dance class enjoys the august distinction of my blanket approval), but I grudgingly give them props for standing up for what they believe in, and (and this is critical) in doing what they said they would do when they were campaigning. Some of them have folded under the withering fire of Boehner et al, but many have not – and I am impressed. Can it be that we have actually elected some people who are willing to do what they said they would do?! Alert the media.

They are, mirabile dictu, being excoriated unmercifully, from the right, the left, and the middle, leaving me to puzzle over what character traits, what abilities, what skills most of the electorate find attractive in those for whom they cast their votes? Have integrity and strength of character now become such devalued attributes in our politi-sphere that we castigate, even ridicule those who possess them? These people (most of them) are only doing what they said they would do – doing what their supporters cheered wildly for during the campaign. Now those same gadflies who helped to put the TP’ers into office diminish themselves by scourging them for their actions.

Admittedly, I am feeling somewhat charitable to those whose interests have, at least temporarily, aligned with my own. I believe strongly that any “deal” that ends with the national debt limit being raised at all, and/or does not contain immediate significant (think 3 – 4 trillion) spending cuts is a non-starter. We might dodge the lance now, but soon, too soon, all the injuns east (and west) of the Pecos will be back, and the slaughter will make the Little Big Horn look like a Sunday school outing.

I asked my financial adviser this morning what, in light of the impending meltdown, I should be buying. Mutual funds? Bonds? Gold? He thought a minute then said, “Canned food, bottled water, and ammunition”. Good advice.

**** UPDATE ****

Conservative, Liberal, Venusian, whatever you are … please, please read Andrew McCarthy’s excellent article in NRO today – it describes,  in excruciating chapter and verse, the depth and breadth of our current economic peril, and precisely why there is only one solution to the problem.