Under the Powdered Wig

Under the Powdered Wig

Without phone, light bulb, nor power of steam,
Our Founders forged the American dream.
Esteemed and praised, they guide us even now
With their thoughts to the laws they did endow.

We discuss what were the Founders' intents
As we parse our historic documents.
We oft forget they all did not agree,
But would trade one's wishes for all's liberty.

Do our minds today differ much from theirs?
Are ours a new set of worries and cares?
Or did they leave lessons on how to cope

With whatever new ages bring within our scope?

We need not stop thinking at pauses long past
Where they then decided on what then was asked.
They taught us to keep growing our country
With rules to talk and choose now as our key.

Pooka Privacy

Pooka Privacy
I was talking with Harvey yesterday and he made a very good point. People are seldom what they seem, he said, but we seldom seem to need to know who they are. Not that we never might not be safer to identify the deeply hidden lunatic or sociopath lurking amongst us. But the occasions which would make much difference to us personally are so rare that the investment of nervous energy to it will generally be wasted if repeatedly applied to everyone we meet.

Perhaps that is why I pay so little attention to people beyond the demands of courtesy. Courtesy is an important shield for both the wielder and the recipients seeing themselves in its shining surface. Harvey says so too and he is one of the most courteous beings I know. Oh, sure, he likes his little jokes, but he only pranks to help people, not to hurt or humiliate them. A bit of humor does not contradict the unfathomable sincerity of courtesy. It merely serves to bring attention back to the surface of what is seen and said and to remind us only internally of the mysteries and absurdities of what lies unseen and unsaid beneath.

But can we live our lives knowing people by what they publicly show and tell or do we need to know their inner beings? Who has permission to peek behind our (Jungian) character masks to glimpse at the selves even we often do not know? Do we grant this permission or is it the natural right of others to feed their curiosity and suspicion in precaution for their safety and security? Certainly our curiosities and anxiety-driven motivations are natural enough, but is trust not an evolutionary compromise to allow our species to cooperate rather than to skittishly remain frozen, unable to turn our back to our fellow Man?

Privacy has never been a big concern for Harvey, but he respects discretion. If folks have a story to tell, well, he’s all ears, so to speak. But if they prefer friendless silence, he will readily seek the more welcoming company of others. Nobody ever met and parted friends with a more convivial stranger than Harvey. He quietly accepts what others offer with the importance they place upon it. Infrequently, he may reciprocate, but not compete, with his own tales, whether truthful, fancy, or some proper blend thereof. But it is his willingness to listen to any and all who so often found themselves misheard, marginalized, or ignored which quickly endears him to them.

Harvey says it is the simple courtesy of acknowledging that anyone may have a story awaiting an airing, whether to share our human experiences of joy, grief, or inexplicable fortune, good, bad or not yet known. The storyteller has a license to withhold or to embellish his tale beyond simple truth, to don whatever masks his players require to animate their actions, and to set the stage as a frame for our attention. We, in the world surrounding the individual, are best served by our patience to listen from our seats in the theater, not by any desires to storm the stage and shut down the presentation. Wait for the Q&A, he says. A teller in a good mood from a receptive audience may be even more revealing (and entertaining).

Does an invisible Pooka in the room put people off? It only seems to bother some people when they know he is there and many others do not sense any malevolence either knowing of his presence or not. After all, they say, he is not listening to anything we are not saying to others already and who is he going to be able to tell?

But the troubled ones see it differently. The Pooka is uninvited, they say. Our public stories are only semi-public occasions to be relayed to our privately selected audience. Not that we have anything to hide, of course, they say, but we learned in grade school that etiquette requires that nobody in the chain is allowed to read a passed note except the recipient (unless the teacher spots its passage). It simply is not playing by the rules, they say. Nobody likes a tattle-tale. Mind your own business.

Well, Harvey knows who he is and what he does, so it does not upset him when some folks feel him step on their toes. He may be big, but he treads as light as air. His mission is to lend an ear to the neglected. People do not need to fear him. The Bogeymen will cause enough mischief to the deserving without his help.

Fore Father's Day

Fore Father's Day
Nearly all have had one,
Some had two, maybe more.
We grew up as their son
To inherit their chore.

On this day we may think
Of those who tutored us.
Generations to link
Through us to the next thus.

What of the old man came
To grow in the grandchild?
What role ours in the game
So long by the ages styled?

When the Hand is Ready But the Mind is Not

When The Hand Is Ready But The Mind Is Not
When the hand is ready but the mind is not,
Not a word can you write nor a thought can you jot.
And the hand hangs there, paused, ready to jump,
But without the mind's command, the whole body sits like a lump.

But the words don't come and the hand is dumb and still,
Sitting, balanced. On the very summit, but unable to roll down the hill.
Oh, please, send some words, a thought, to relieve this poor hand,
Who is posed hopelessly where the mind's conviction made him stand.

Saddling the Gerrymander

Saddling the Gerrymander

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We have gone through three consecutive Congressional election cycles (2008, 2010, 2012) with the measures of the public's approval rating for Congress sinking below 20% on Election Day. The opinion is shared by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; Congress simply is incompetent to do the job for which they were chosen. It seems like a sure sign that it is time to replace these non-performers. And yet, in those three elections, only 8% of the incumbent U.S. House Representatives took the hint to retire (many to seek other offices). And when the other 92% ran for re-election, 90% of the time they won. These results are only slightly different than the three preceding election cycles (2002, 2004, and 2006) when the approval ratings were 47% (2002) to 26% (2006); then 7% retired and 96% were re-elected.

Why, we might ask, if nearly everyone believes the members of Congress cannot do their jobs, do we continue their employment? It is not that there are no other persons in the job-seeker pool eager to fill those positions. While the Gallup poll shows that 65% of adults cannot name their Representative, the approval ratings for those individual members in their home districts averages around 50% or above historically (and is currently about 46%). In the voters' minds, it is not the person they chose who cannot do the job, it is the other 434 Representatives who are interfering with their Representative's ability to “get it done”.

Thus, we enter the voting booth with a dilemma. Despite the urge to purge the country of all the incompetents, we tend to want to keep the one gem from our own district. We have no say in the ousting of the non-cooperative, counter-productive, and simply wrong-headed Representatives who hinder the progress of the person we chose before and whom we wish to choose again.

Well, then let's give ourselves the ability to tell those voters in the foreign districts what we think of their Representatives. I propose that in each U.S. House election we allow a randomly selected extra district to cast their “itinerant votes” to be counted alongside of the local vote. Since every Congressional district is approximately the same size, there will be no inherent imbalance between the local and itinerant votes, but at last our Congressmen will need to consider not just their parochial appeal but also the effects of their behavior on the larger national stage.

In order to not forewarn Congressional candidates (thereby allowing them to tailor their campaigns to the biases of a fully known electorate), the selection of the second voting block should be delayed until after the local primaries are completed. But within one or two days after the last party primary, the Federal Election Commission will oversee the coupling of every District with another in a random process. There will be no votes nor cognitive decision-making, simply the luck of the draw. But there may be some controlling rules to ensure diversity. For example, adjacent districts cannot be coupled nor may any two districts be paired (i.e. each are the itinerant district for the other). With this prompt national process in place, the information can rapidly be exchanged between the agencies administering the local elections and the final ballots prepared for the national Election Day.

By adoption of this vote-sharing process, we will double our individual influence in the democratic mechanism while indulging our national proclivity to tell others what they ought to think.  While there may be Constitutional and State regulation wrinkles yet to be worked out, moving forward with this idea offers greater accountability for Congressional results in governing our entire nation, not just the local pork barrel projects that endear our Representatives to their current constituents.