Doves Mating in Trees

doves mating in trees
pattern of wood grain
in every single feather.

- Photo & words by Rich Seeley

News Under the Republicans and the Democrats

Last year's news
two categories
Hate for Bush
Love for Bush

This year's news
two categories
Hate for Obama
Love for Obama

And news people
fret because
the public
is not interested

Grass Eating Boys: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

It seems hard for Americans to understand that not everybody in the world wants their lifestyle.

Cut throat competition in the marketplace.

Office politics and vicious gossip in the workplace.

The 24/7 rat race.

Long commutes and longer hours.

The pursuit of money, which turns out to not be the same thing as the pursuit of happiness.

The trivial pursuit of the trendiest fashion, the hottest car and the coolest gadget.

Even some Americans opt out as the Beats and the Hippies did in the 1950s and 1960s when the beast of capitalism slipped the leash.

Now in Japan come Grass Eating Boys as profiled in a Slate article Peggy pointed out to me the other day.

It seems a significant number -- up to 75% in one survey -- of Japanese men in their 20s and 30s are opting out of their country's knockoff of American capitalism.

Raised by parents, who bought into it by working 24/7 for Toyota and Honda and Sony, these boys were left home alone.

They stayed in their rooms and played video games. They found a new world on the World Wide Web. They did not develop any interest in sex.

This latter seems to be what Japanese culture watchers worry about the most.

The consumers gone wild boom in the 1980s, followed by the recession and lost decade of the 1990s, produced a generation of young men who show little interest in the traditional values of capitalist society.

They have lost interest in going to college, getting a good job, marrying the woman of their dreams, buying a house, and raising 1.6 children.

They watched their hard working, dressed for success fathers strap on "the heart attack machine" that Bob Dylan warned them about.

The Grass Eating Boys are saying thanks but no thanks to that lifestyle.

These sons of the bourgeoisie also reject the more ancient Japanese macho culture of the Samurai.

Growing up solitary, only sons in empty houses where parents were otherwise engaged, the Grass Eating Boys are leading a silent and virtually invisible rebellion.

This revolution will not be televised. There is nothing to see.

The Grass Eating Boys do not gather in groups to protest the way things are.

They are simply walking away, quietly walking their own way.

They are home gardeners and vegetarians, thus the Grass Eating Boys nickname.

They like to go for hikes and photograph Zen temples.

They are a living critique of the American illusion that the American Dream can be exported, or that it is even a dream worth following.

What Would Thoreau Twitter?

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which detract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easily arrived at ... We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." -- Henry David Thoreau, Economy, WALDEN: Or Life in the Woods, first published Aug. 9, 1854

There's an old saying that if 40 million people believe in a dumb idea, it's still a dumb idea.

While I am generally fond of new technology, Twitter is a dumb idea no matter how many users it attracts.

After being bombarded by Twitter hype, I went out and looked at the Website for it.

It turns out to be a very simple idea, dumb but simple, which is probably why it is attractive to so many people.

The Twitter user is asked to answer a single question: What are you doing?

While the user answers in a manner similar to email or instant messaging, there is a 140-character maximum, so it avoids the run-on brain dumps that are the bane of email and IM.

There is a video cartoon on the Twitter home page that explains how it works. A skeptical cartoon character first discovers that a friend, who is also a cartoon character, loves baseball. This leads to some kind of epiphany for the skeptical cartoon character.

All this convinced me that Twitter is an ideal means of communication if you happen to be a cartoon character.

However.

For human beings it would seem to be one more trivial pursuit to distract ourselves.

Other examples in the Twitter cartoon suggest that you could let your friends know that you are mowing the lawn or out having coffee.

What are you doing?

Drinking an iced mocha.

What are you doing?

Mowing the lawn.

Certainly drinking an iced mocha or mowing the lawn are noble pursuits but do they deserve to be memorialized on Twitter?

Human nature being what it is, there are probably more intriguing Twitters as day turns into night.

What are you doing?

I'm drunk in this bar and somebody is putting the moves on me.

What are you doing?

I'm letting the grass grow to see if the neighbors complain.

That would not be so noble but might be more interesting.

You might even get true crime stories on Twitter.

Imagine if Lizzie Borden had had Twitter.

What are you doing?

I've taken an axe and given my mother 40 whacks.

And Lizzie's father might also have used Twitter.

What are you doing?

Lizzie's gone postal. I'm dialing 911.

Oh dear.

I also wonder if after the Twitter hype cycle peaks, people won't get tired of answering the incessant question that would border on boorish behavior if a human being was constantly asking it.

What are you doing?

None of your damn business!

As HAL learned in 2001 A Space Odyssey there is a limit to what flawed human beings will put up with from a computer.

So there may be a Twitter backlash.

The self-absorption of the 1980s ME generation led to the slang retort: "Get over yourself."

Some similar fate may yet befall the narcissists of 2009 when they discover that their friends no longer care what the hell they are doing because they are too wrapped up in what they are doing.

At that point, it may be best to follow a more old fashioned methodology.



Get a puppy, who will be infinitely fascinated with whatever you are doing.

But remember we live in an imperfect world, so although you believe your own special self is absolutely fabulous and unbelievably interesting, eventually even your puppy will get bored and fall asleep on you.

Zen & The Art of Doing Dishes

Lesson from the Guru

It may not be the most important lesson
my guru taught me that I can pass on

But after every meal at the monastery
he did something that's very ordinary.

The guru didn't always grant our wishes.
Instead he went in and washed the dishes.

After the meditation and doing the chants
if you don't do the dishes you draw ants.

Students worry about reaching Nirvana or not.
The guru showed us that little things mean a lot.

Enlightenment may be the student's ultimate goal
but be sure you don't leave behind a dirty bowl.

You can wear robes, be a snake charmer
but an unwashed cup is still bad karma.

- Rich Seeley

Forget the Whales! Save the Rich!

ACTIVATE SATIRE DETECTION SOFTWARE BEFORE READING


"The very rich are different from us," F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said to Ernest Hemingway.

"Yeah," Hemingway replied. "They have more money."




Susan Molinari, the former Republican Congress member and now a lobbyist in Washington, was on the cable news the other day weeping and gnashing her teeth over President Obama's plans to tax rich people.

In the worst recession since World War II with almost 10 percent of working people unemployed, the Republicans are launching a lobbying campaign to save the rich?

Suddenly the rich are an endangered species?

Forget the whales.

Save the rich!

They are the true downtrodden in this recession because they might finally be forced to -- gasp! -- pay taxes.

If they can't hide their income using corporations based on obscure Caribbean islands they will surely perish.

If Congress won't uphold the Bush tax cuts for them then the rich are doomed!

Who is going to buy all those new made-in-China Hummers if the rich are taxed out of existence?

Why if President Obama has his way the rich might end up being treated like everybody else. Then where will we be?

Of course, there's the rich and then there's the RICH.

During last summer's Presidential campaign, Republican nominee John McCain was asked how much money you needed to have to be considered rich. His answer was $600 million. That about what McCain's wife, the beer distributorship heiress, is worth. McCain, who made his money the old fashioned way by marrying into it, was apparently trying to distance himself from then candidate Obama, who has only made a few million in book royalties and therefore is still a working stiff by McCain's standards.

But what about the Billionaires who consider $600 million chump change?

Rumors are floating around the Web of a bizarre meeting of the SUPER RICH, who are apparently trying to figure out where they stand in this economic mess:

The mysterious, media-blackout meeting was called by Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway; Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft; and David Rockefeller Jr., chairman of Rockefeller Financial Services.

In addition to Gates, Buffett and Rockefeller, the attendees included Oprah Winfrey, George Soros, Ted Turner, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among others.

Before you can say "conspiracy theory," you might wonder if Gates, worth $57 billion, and Buffet, worth $37 billion, aren't looking to cut a deal with the Democrats who seem intent on sacrificing the rich to the budget gods.

Sure let them tax those losers with a mere $600 million as long as they spare the billionaires.

This is class warfare on an unprecedented level.

The mere rich versus the SUPER RICH.

It could lead to a new version of Whack-a-Mole called "Who Wants to Beat a Millionaire."

Members of the middle class (those with less than $600 million according to the McCain standard) are advised to stay indoors during this phase of the upper class warfare.

Meanwhile reality bites: If only one class of rich people can survive, guess who it is going to be?

Forget the whales.

Forget the rich.

Save the billionaires!

F. Scott Fitzgerald & the Last of the Booze

The Typist's Tale is a feature story on The Los Angeles Times website today about Frances Kroll Ring, the last person to work with F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last months of his life as he struggled to write one last novel, The Last Tycoon.

Ring, who is now 92, had a distinguished career of her own as the long-time editor of Westways magazine.

But in 1939 as a 22-year-old, who had just arrived in Los Angeles from New York, she got a temp job as typist for the famous novelist.

Fitzgerald, while only in his early 40s, was already seriously ill with the disease that would kill him.

When Ring met him, he was recovering from a booze cruise to Cuba with his wife Zelda, who after the trip had to be institutionalized in what in those days was called an asylum.

Ring recalls that Fitzgerald conducted the job interview from bed in his Encino, California home. He was too weak and perhaps too drunk to get up.

At one point during that interview, he asked her to open a bureau drawer where she expected to find folded shirts. Instead, she found neatly stacked bottles of gin.

She surmised that this was a test. Fitzgerald wanted her to know what she was getting into and the nature of the demons he was struggling against.

Fitzgerald never finished the novel Ring typed for him. He died of a heart attack in December 1940. He was 44.

Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald's last completed novel, published in 1933,is an autobiographical account of the author's descent into the bottle.

Dick Diver, the Fitzgerald character, is a famous psychiatrist who is part owner of a clinic that treats wealthy mental patients including those who a century ago were diagnosed as dipsomaniacs.

Set in Europe in the 1920s, the story begins with Dick as the hero of French beach parties attended by the rich and famous. The wine flows like wine usually does at such events and it all seems like so much summer fun in the sun.

But as the story progresses so does Dick's drinking and its characteristic self-destructiveness.

In Italy, Dick gets drunk and causes a scene. Taken to a police station, he is about to be released more or less with a warning. But walking out the door, he insists on decking a police officer, which leads to his being severely beaten and jailed.

This is said to be based on an incident from Fitzgerald's own misadventures.

Throughout the book there are keen insights into the pitfalls of the drinking life although the author was powerless to apply them to his real life.

Fitzgerald appears to have known exactly what he was doing wrong but was unable to learn from the lessons he was teaching.

This is the irony of Dr. Dick Diver.

Late in the novel, the psychiatrist's drinking has reached the point where his patients and their families are complaining to Franz, the doctor who is his partner in the clinic practice.

The confrontation between Dick and Franz is a blending of the drunk's denial that anything is wrong and a kindly and almost timid psychiatrist's attempt to get at the truth without stating the obvious.

Despite incidents including the drunken brawl at the police station, Dick tells Franz: "You must know I'm the last man to abuse liquor."

Franz replies: "Dick, I know well that you are a temperate, well-balanced man, even though we do not entirely agree on the subject of alcohol. But a time has come--Dick, I must say frankly that I have been aware several times that you have had a drink when it was not the moment to have one."

This classic understatement begins a conversation that ends with Franz buying out Dick's share of the clinic, and sending him packing.

It is followed by the unraveling of Dick's marriage, and his once famously promising medical career.

Unlike popular fiction and biographies of today, Tender Is the Night does not end with an uplifting recovery.

For all his obvious flaws, Fitzgerald was too honest to work up a happy ending for himself.