The Price Of Peace

 My wife insists that all responsible journalists should stop using the tag "said" when printing quotes from the Orange Worst. Instead, use a universal replace with the word, "lied." 

Like all that talk about peace. The Boared/Bored of Peace requires all permanent members contribute one billion dollars in cash in the first year of their enrollment. Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan,Bahrain, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Uzbekistan have all poinied up that big wad of cash to be part of what is supposed to be promoting global stability, restore governance, and secure peace in conflict-affected areas. Like Gaza, a place the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist once hoped to turn into "The Riviera of the Middle East." Fellow real estate developer and son-in-law Jared Kushner sits at the top of the organizational chart for this Bored, so the chances are good that there will be a championship golf course installed, aided by the countless numbers of shell craters created by the three years of nearly incessant bombing of the area. 

You may notice that there are a number of countries missing from that list, partly because they can't afford the membership fee because they are currently under attack from other invading nations. Like Ukraine. And Greenland. And Veneauela. And Iran. Those last two are "our bad," since the peace that those countries might be enjoying was disrupted by (checks notes) The Trumpstein Regime. 

The suggestion that the former game show host and owner of four bankrupt casinos will be up to the task of promoting any sort of stability seems like a stretch if not a bald faced lie. The nominal purpose of the most recent attacks directed by the Chairman of the Board of Peace was to re-obliterate the nuclear capabilities of Iran, but also managed to target key member's of that nation's leadership. Not for capture and return to the United States for trial like we did for Nicolas Maduro, but the not-so-subtle attempt of regime change via high explosives. Meanwhile, Board of Peace member Pakistan called for the U.S. attacks to stop and ”an immediate halt to escalation through urgent resumption of diplomacy to achieve a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the crisis.” Russia also took time out of their invasion of sovereign nation Ukraine to complain about the United States' invasion of a sovereign nation. 

There was no immediate response from the guy who pulled the trigger and/or the Chariman of the Bored. 

That's what a billion dollars will get you these days. 

Tent To The Ively

 At three in the morning on what was essentially the last day of negotiations before the Oakland Education Association went on strike, a tentative agreement was reached. The rank and file, myself included, breathed a sigh of relief. Yet another in a series of battles for the right to provide education to the public school students of Oakland was won. 

"Won." 

With all the asterisks that come with a beast we call "tentative." Signing on to be a part of this machine, showing up every day and providing services to the community that stretch far beyond my job description provides me the security that can be best described as "tentative." The Oakland Unified School District is not sending a car for me each and every morning to drive me to the work I do, and my salary is determined primarily as an operation of things for which I have no active impact on with the possible exception of simply showing up. Every single day. 

I will be receiving an eleven percent raise, over the course of two years. I won't probably see the whole thing since I have plans to retire before those two years are up. But it's a nice bit of news as I head off into the sunset. 

It tends to displace a bit of the trauma experienced by the announcement just a couple days before the "tentative" agreement that the district will be laying off four hundred twenty-one people in order to close the one hundred million dollar budget deficit they find themselves with. Noting that none of the positions eliminated were School Board officials. One hundred forty-four additional positions will have their hours cut. 

To save money.

To give me a raise.

This comes somewhere in the midst of an additional flurry to get as many folks in the district to retire early. I don't claim to be an expert at labor relations, but something about all of this leaves me feeling like I'm running to stand still. 

And maybe the best part of this whole transaction is that I will most likely avoid walking a picket line one more time before I actually do stand still. 

Tentatively. 

We're Watching

 Several people were involved in the invention of the microphone. Initially it was developed by Alexander Graham Bell to make his telephone more useful. That was back in 1876. A year or so later, Emile Berliner sold his patent to a more refined version of the device to Bell. Another year passed and David Edward Hughes continued to improve on these initial designs, and coined the term "microphone." Thomas Edison, who didn't allow science to move too far without putting his stamp on a carbon button transmitter that became the standard for telephony. That was back in 1886. One hundred forty-years ago. 

Video cameras began their existence as movie cameras beginning shortly after those microphone inventions. A funny science joke might be made here about how this was a case of sound traveling faster than light, but I won't bother you with that now. Instead I will let you know that those first moving picture cameras were created to capture events as they happened in "real time." The Lumiere brothers produced the first black and white document of this kind in 1895, and clocked in at forty-six seconds. It showed workers leaving the brothers' factory. It was about the length of your standard TikTok video. 

In 1895, a seventeen second film of a man playing a violin was released with sound. The first music video, brought to you by William K.L. Dickson. Practical video tape recorders were still some decades off, with the creation of the Quadruplex, created by Ampex back in 1956. 

Seventy years ago. Sound and vision.

These days, we don't need tape or film anymore. We carry around more computing power in our pockets than was used to land astronauts on the moon. Things are being recorded all the time by everyone. And left on the vast storehouse of Al Gore's Internet. 

I just thought Donald Trump should know this, since he seems to believe that nobody can remember all his lies. That's what all those lights and cameras and microphones are for, you microcephalic jerk.  

How 'Bout Them Eggs?

 Watching an interview with author A. Mechelle Dickerson on The Daily Show a few nights ago, something that was discussed stuck with me: the idea of having us all down here in the middle looking to the left and right with an eye on who is getting what and why aren't we getting the same as them. We don't tend to look up. Up there are the ones who are content to keep us fighting for scraps. They would much rather have us a scattered rabble arguing amongst ourselves about the price of eggs while up there (insert gesture here) they have plenty of eggs. Ironically enough, they who are "up there" are often given eggs in the hopes that they will recommend the eggs to those "down there" so that more eggs can be sold.

It's not about the eggs, as it turns out. 

My wife was intrigued by the number of stars being offered travel shows, with destinations that we who are in the middle will likely never see. I pointed out the frustration I sometimes feel about these excursions, since these celebrities are being paid to take these lavish expeditions while we are left at home hoping that we can afford the subscription fee it costs to watch their exploits. 

Sometimes they are served eggs on these shows. In very special ways at which we can only marvel. 

It's still not about the eggs. 

It's about working a job for decades and hoping that negotiations with the school district allow us a raise that keeps us on pace with the cost of living. In California. 

Right. Good luck with that. 

And yet, here we are once again having testy debates with a school district that struggles to pay its bills while the Second Trumpreich "struggles" to find ways to spend five hundred billion additional dollars on war. 

Five hundred billion dollars would buy a lot of eggs. 

And they all seem to have a way of finding their way up instead of spread out like you might expect eggs to do. 

Once again ladies and gentlemen: It's not about the eggs. 

Great Expectations

 Betty White was very close to one hundred years old when she died. Just another couple weeks longer, and she would have made it to a century. The comedy legend passed away on New Year's Eve 2021. Her birthday was January 17. There was quite a bit of hoopla leading up to what became essentially a non-event. Please understand that I mean this as no slight to Ms. White. I remember watching her on Password with her husband, host Allen Ludden. They were quite the pair. Allen went to that big TV studio in the sky in 1981, and in all those years after Betty never remarried. 

But she didn't last until one hundred. Bob Hope did. So did George Burns. And, as comedian Bobcat Goldthwait once observed, they kept getting funnier every minute. Mister Bobcat meant that sarcastically, but the argument might be made that Betty White experienced a renaissance in her career as she grew older, rather than simply riding on the wave that is, "Really? Almost one hundred?" Her last film role was the voice of the owner of the eponymous animated dog, Trouble, in 2019. 

I could go on and on here, but I am actually creeping toward a potentially larger point. There were those who believed that these United States might not last until its one hundredth birthday. Happily, the skeptics were wrong, admitting the great state of Colorado to that union in 1876, marking it as The Centennial State. A hundred years after that, even as the wounds of Watergate and the war in Vietnam were still healing, America celebrated its two hundredth anniversary with parades and celebrations and collectible quarters which are now worth (checks notes) twenty-five cents. 

And now we find ourselves on the brink of our semiquincentennial, a word that had to be cobbled together to pump up the importance of the pending event. Two hundred fifty years is quite a run: two and a half Betty Whites. Here's the thing: Wouldn't it be awful if we didn't manage to hang on that long? A catastrophic event of some stripe that brought about the end of our great republic? The loss in swag sales alone would be devastating, while the great nations of Europe might cough and say something along the lines of, "What a pity. And so young." 

World War. Economic Collapse. Civil War. These were the kind of scenarios that used to be the stuff of dystopian science fiction novels. Now they're all on the board as we teeter toward our two hundred fiftieth birthday. 

Or maybe we'll just die peacefully in our sleep after a prolonged Trump. 

Reckoning

 I want to reiterate my stance here and now before I begin my tirade: No one deserves to be shot. I am firm in this belief much in the same way that I am a supporter of this thing called Restorative Justice. All of the loopholes like the "Stand Your Ground" laws found in some states, including the one in which I live, No one should have to die. 

Now I hear a voice from my past, the one that shouted in my ear insisting that if someone raped and murdered my mother I would surely be locked and loaded for that individual. A pause, a deep breath, and then the question that I did not ask at that time in response, "Why would you even think of this as some kind of litmus?" Like the sickest possible version of "Never Have I Ever," a co-worker of mine whose politics skewed several degrees to the right of my own seemed to take a certain degree of pleasure mining my resolve. Eventually I replied that I would hope and expect that as difficult as that situation would be that I would rise above my simian urges for revenge and instead seek out a resolution that didn't involve taking one more life. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that my mother would back me up on that. 

So the stage is set. Now I will say that I can understand why the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has had as many attempts made on his life as he has. This past weekend a young man carrying a gas can and a shotgun attempted entry into the "Southern White House" and was shot and killed by Secret Service Agents. This brings the alleged attempts on the convicted felon's life to three in the course of less than two years. While my disapproval jives pretty consistently with the poll numbers found  in and around this great land of ours. I will say that the white guy with a gun model hasn't done much to conflate the images put out by the twice impeached "president's" handlers of Antifa assassins coming to assassinate the last best hope of making 'merica great again. 

As a a matter fact, the current occupant of the ruins of the White House has been the target of more assassination attempts than any other previous chief executive of the United States, especially when you include the envelopes of ricin sent along in that first term. It does seem as though there are quite a few people who would like the former game show host dead. 

Again, I cannot stress this enough, no one deserves to die. That is not up to us as mere mortals. The reckoning awaits, not from those with access to guns and ammo, but to a ballot. 

But more on that later...

In Charge

 I've been in charge a few times. 

I was pep band president when I was in high school. Much of my orchestrated tomfoolery became legend, at least for a compact group of individuals. Eventually all that anarchic energy proved to be my undoing. As it turns out, being the authority in an anti-authoritarian group is a pretty tight rope to walk. 

I climbed the ladder at Arby's all the way to closing manager. They gave me the keys to the register and a nice brown polyester vest. I enjoyed it as much as I suppose anyone could enjoy a job in fast food, and my managerial style was modeled on which I saw around me. Roast beef sandwiches with a side of silliness and never ask anyone to do a job, even cleaning the shake machine, if you haven't done it yourself. I came back from a week's vacation just as the old guard was being phased out, and a quick perusal of the back room showed me two things: I was not on the schedule for the next two weeks and all the amusing/gross cartoons I had drawn and tacked up around the bulletin boards had been removed. Aloha, Arby's. 

Eventually I found my way to a video store, a setting which suited my needs for a job during college: Flexible hours and plenty of time to watch movies. Friday and Saturday evening rushes were tolerable when balanced out with the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. That was when I instituted "theme days," during which each employee was encouraged to pick a film from a particular category. Like "rubber suit monsters" or "sweatiest movie ever." We traded free movie rentals for pizza from the place up the sidewalk in the mall. A change in ownership made all that fun go away. 

I used all that experience to my advantage when a spot on the warehouse management team opened up. Turns out that I was the responsible one: newly sober and a newlywed, I was going to build a family out of the tiny margin that book wholesalers made. Until the employee-owned company expired under its own counterculture weight. 

Now, some thirty years into my teaching career, I still get asked, "Why didn't you ever become a principal?" Well, as you can see, I had my share of time wandering around with a clipboard, checking other people's work. Watching the intensity of the interactions between management and customers in this realm gave me pause. I don't shy away from student or parent connections, but I also know that somebody else has the office, and the metaphorical brown vest and keys to the register. I understand that offering someone a two-for-one coupon at an elementary school won't bring the same result that it used to get in fast food. I have carefully massaged my job description to be as helpful and supportive as I can possibly be just before taking on an actual title. 

And every so often, I get some leftover pizza.