HELLO KATHY FROM ENGLAND

Today, at the Spike coffee house, I met and talked with a women who is currently living in America (Hi, Kathy) with her husband who was transferred from England by his company when they moved to America. What? An influx of jobs from overseas to here?

We talked of many things. At one point we were talking about the greatness of America, and she noted, without malice, that America is the only major industrialized country in the world without nation health care. Yes, the only one!

Another moment came when she noted how much American stuff comes from China. As an interesting example, she told of bringing her father from England here to visit, and they passed an army recruiting station downtown. He, being a WWII Englishman, wanted to stop in to check out the American soldiers doing the recruiting. They came away with a gift key fob that read, An Army Of One. When he opened it up or turned it over, he noted that it was stamped, Made In China.

We talked about Thatcher’s closing of the coal mines and the hardships that caused. I mentioned "Brassed Off "and "Billy Eliot", both of which movies dealt with the troubles Margaret Thatcher brought to working men and women when she shut down nationalized industries. We talked about many things. She said the gas in England is about $6.00 American bucks a gallon and couldn’t understand what our bitch was. We discussed the large size of most American homes, and she mentioned that even in England there are some pockets of rundown houses, but she noted that she’s seen some shacks in America that no Englishman, no matter how poor, would be forced to live in. Local councils in England supply good housing and maintain it while the poor pay as much rent as they can for that housing. Since the councils maintain the property, no neighborhoods get run down just because the poor live in them. It seems to me that we’d have less fear of living among the poor if we also knew that our neighborhoods wouldn’t decline if the poor moved in beside us.

Yep, we talked about many things—language, money, Australia, accents, automobiles, transportation. . . .


NOW IT’S FANNIE MAE

Do you recall years back when the model for government was to be business. Run government like a business, the conservatives said. Well, would we really want to be overcharged for our government like Halliburton overcharges us for what they do for us? What about the dishonesty of Enron and WorldCom? Then we hear that it “appears” at Fanny Mae “that accounting for expenses was put off to a future reporting period in order to meet [earnings] targets that brought bonuses for executives.”

Look, how many ways do I gotta say it: it’s corporations which have corrupted American government. If we just turn the whole shebang over to them, what can we expect but more rape, pillage and economic plunder? That’s the corporate way—to get ahead at all cost. They were never designed to put the needs of their employees ahead of the bottom line. They were never designed to run a democracy.


NOW I’M READING “A MIND SO RARE”

Merlin Donald who refers to the Bible a lot will try to counter the evolutionary “Hard-liners”, those who are most deterministic when it comes to freedom of the will in my current reading. Admitting the truth of some of the findings of science, he writes, “No matter how wise or learned we become, in terms of the knowledge we have stored away, the video editor of our conscious experience will not let us stop, even for a moment, to reflect.”

Donald gets at what we could realize about the moments of our daily lives if we’d only stop to think about them. Think how the thoughts and observations fly into us, through a small window of consciousness only to disappear as the next things seizes our consciousness. When you try to stop and think about it, a bit of fear arises at the speed of life whizzing through us, but, even then, we don’t have time to linger on the insight before the next thing seizes the conscious window.

Walking back to my car after I began reading the new book, an apt phrase about how I used to feel when feelings overcame me, arose in me. “When feelings would tip me over. . . ,” I thought.

When I was younger the very process of looking about myself and letting the visual images bore into me filled me with intense feelings, some almost unbearably intense. I’d rise and soar on wings of feeling. Those day are over. I wonder if the sensory machine is wearing down or have I compromised myself in some way so as not to be in perpetual pain? I'm fairly content these days.

Now, of course, the way I keep something in my conscious is by repeating some phrase over and over or some image until I can sit down and put it on paper. Then other thoughts rush around it and a whole series of thoughts gets put down on paper, and only on paper, does conscious achieve length and duration. The process of writing things down seems to be the cultural invention that allows consciousness to seem to be more than fleeting. The length of an essay or a book allows us to imagine that consciousness is a continuous, seamless process rather than a series of fragmented sensory impressions.
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"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance." —Oscar Wilde