Thoughts and prayers

Surely there's a Democrat somewhere who's not on Medicare

I was listening to the Michelangelo Signorile show on Sirius XM as I was coming home Friday afternoon, and once again people were speculating about Elizabeth Warren as a possible vice presidential candidate. Same thing on "Real Time" with Bill Maher that evening. Without even getting into all the strategic reasons why it would be a really bad idea to have two women running together (at least at this point in U.S. history), all I can say is Jesus Christ, isn't there at least viable Democratic candidate who's not eligible for Medicare?

Common sense tells me (but apparently no one else) that if people who vote for Democrats really believe that Hillary Clinton is going to win in November then they should be thinking a few years down the line: who's going to be around to run in 2020 or 2024? Because, let's face it, no one is getting any younger. Hillary is going to be doing good to make it through two terms -- she's about to hit 69, not exactly spring chicken category. Elizabeth Warren is slightly younger, but not by much. Bernie Sanders, who the Berners would really like to see in the V.P. slot, will be 75 in September.

Okay, I can kind of see tapping Bernie for the V.P. slot. It would be a nice Retired in Place slot for him. The past year has to have been exhausting for him; he deserves a comfortable retirement. He could spend a few years kicking back, going to the occasional state funeral, nodding off in the Senate waiting for the infrequent occasions when the V.P.'s vote is needed to break a tie, and providing colorful curmudgeonly quotes for the media. Because that's the other thing: the Vice Presidential slot has to be the most useless position in government. Unless the President dies in office, the V.P. gets to spend year after year doing basically nothing. No power, no real influence, just kind of hanging out in the background trying to suppress their Frank Underwood tendencies. A former vice president, John Nance Garner, described the job as "not worth a boot full of warm piss." That strikes me as pretty accurate. So why pull an effective progressive Senator like Warren out of the Senate -- a place where she's become increasingly influential -- and stick her in a job where she'd become an instant nonentity? She's got more good years left in her than Bernie -- the dude is going to be 75 in September. Seventy-five! -- and could accomplish a lot more if she's left where she is instead of wasting time being Hillary's understudy.

So why not tap one of the younger Democrats who's currently at loose ends when it comes to politics? Like Deval Patrick? or Martin O'Malley? Actually, Deval Patrick would be perfect. He's really not that young (hitting 60 this summer), but he doesn't look like a geezer. And he's black. I think it's pretty much a given that the Democrats have kissed the angry white guy vote goodbye so why not go all out?

Indentured servitude

 I answered the phone at the museum the other day and got asked if we could use someone who has a community service requirement to fulfill. For quite a few years now one of the requirements for "welfare" has been that you earn your Food Stamps or your TANF vouchers by performing community service. This scheme is usually referred to as "workfare." At first blush, this does not appear to be such a horrible requirement.

Except it is. It's basically a punishment detail for having the nerve to be poor. The person I talked with said the work requirement was 35 hours per week between her and her partner. Okay. If a person worked for minimum wage for 35 hours per week, he or she would earn $253.75 before taxes. Figure roughly 4 weeks in a month and you're talking $1015. In Michigan, as of 2014 the average monthly SNAP benefit was $127 per person and $246 per household. If someone has to do community service for over 140 hours per month, that's a pretty steep price to pay for their food stamps. If someone is "earning" their welfare benefit, then they're working for quite literally pennies.

It gets worse. The workfare requirement was originally designed to help people transition into actual jobs. You know, help instill a work ethic. The plan was to push people who were unemployed into finding paying work. Except (and you know there's always an except) when it comes to this community service requirement it doesn't matter if you're one of the unfortunates who qualifies as "working poor." You can be part of a household where one spouse works full-time but the household is large enough and the wage is low enough that you qualify for SNAP. Guess what? The other spouse has to do community service. Workfare will quite literally force a family to put their kids into daycare or incur babysitting costs they otherwise would not need, all in the name of instilling a work ethic in a stay-at-home parent.

Workfare isn't particularly effective at moving people into actual jobs in any case. The organizations where a person is assigned to do their community service generally aren't interested in transitioning anyone into a paying position -- why should they when they've got the labor for free? -- and the work assigned rarely provides any meaningful training or experience. It also isn't effective in reducing the cost of anti-poverty programs. The World Bank, which has an obvious vested interest in supporting workfare, has done a number of studies that show that it's more cost-effective to simply give the poor cash benefits with no strings attached than it is to impose a workfare requirement. But if governments did that the punishment and humiliation aspects would vanish, and that would defeat the real purpose of the programs, which is to make welfare programs so unpleasant that no one applies for them.

In any case, I might actually buy into the notion of asking benefit recipients to do community service if it was calculated so the hours required matched up with a real world wage, but this bullshit of forcing people to work for pennies? It's dehumanizing, it's devaluing their labor. It's telling the poor they're worthless, or close to it. If their work had any meaning, the program would calculate the hours differently, make it a closer match between a legal wage and the amount they're going to receive. But when it's the equivalent of $1/hour or less? Then it's pretty obvious the work doesn't mean anything; it's the punishment part that's important.

Still, I did not say no to the offer of exploited labor. This is a small rural community; opportunities for community service are limited in number, and I have to give the people credit for having the guts to cold call the museum to ask if they could "volunteer" there. I will feel odd about it, but if it's something they have to do, I'm not going to make things even harder for them. (Side note: one of my pet peeves is the perversion of the word "volunteer." You're not a volunteer if you've been told the activity is required. A more accurate term would be "indentured servant.")

Oddly enough, I had been thinking about talking to the clerk of court to see about getting the other category of community service workers, the ones who end up paying for their DUIs or disorderly conduct by having to pick up trash or wash police cars. The one upside to this is we may get more competent help. With people sentenced to community service by the courts I figure we'd get guys who could do maintenance stuff (sweep, mop, wash windows) but probably not anything more complicated than that. Through workfare, we may end up with a "volunteer" who's computer literate.

Online marketing

I keep seeing ads for a "Baby Sale" at Macy's. I know the chain is in financial trouble -- people have lost interest in wandering through department stores so sales are down nationwide -- but didn't think things had gotten so desperate they'd decided to get into human trafficking. And why, I wonder, do the Facebook algorithms think I'm in the market for an infant? Or perhaps a toddler?

I must say the prices seem quite reasonable. Considering how many people there are who are desperate to have children, you'd think the going price would be a little higher. Then again, maybe it's like one of those infomercial deals where the product is totally free but you pay a gazillion dollars for the shipping.

Sometimes procrastination pays

I've been feeling rather guilty lately because (as usual) I've been really slow about getting the garden in. I got the broccoli and cauliflower plants transplanted along with half a dozen or so tomato plants and that was it before the rains hit. I should have known -- this happens every year. We'll have a stretch of nice weather, we get the garden tilled and ready to plant, I procrastinate, and then the skies open. Day after day goes by with conditions being too wet and muddy for me to feel like crawling around in the dirt planting beans.

Well, yesterday the rains finally tapered off. I started thinking about setting the rest of the tomato plants and getting this year's experimental sweet potatoes into the ground. Then I noticed the little red triangle for the weather app on the computer -- there was a frost advisory. So I decided to procrastinate for one more day.

So what's the current outdoor temp here at the Retirement Bunker? 31 and dropping. Will there be actual frost this morning? I don't know yet, but I am really happy now I didn't plant any beans a week ago. If I had, they probably would have sprouted by now -- and they'd all be dead.

As for the sweet potatoes, I have no idea how they're going to do this far north. They are definitely a warm weather crop, and it appears summer is off to a relatively cool start. Whether or not they'll survive, let alone produce anything, is anyone's guess.

And, speaking of gardening, I'm starting to get psyched about doing a native plants flower bed at the museum. Other projects at the museum are finally getting to the point where I can coast and do fun stuff like gardening. I've got the flower bed more or less mentally laid out. Now all I need to do is get the S.O. to help me put some treated timbers in place for borders and I can start moving stuff like lupines, goldenrod, and daisies into it. I need to find some wild blue berries to dig up and transplant, too. The trickiest part might be figuring out for sure what's a native plant (e.g.,Joe Pye weed) and what's an invasive wild flower (e.g., Queen Ann's Lace, aka wild carrot, which is not native to the Americas). I want the flower bed to be strictly stuff that's native to Michigan -- no invasives no matter how common they now are. It would be nice if it's also all perennials so once it's in, it's in.

Some people have rich fantasy lives

I was listening to the Michelangelo Signorile show on Sirius XM as I was coming home this afternoon. As might be expected, one of the topics du jour was politics and the California primary. Also as might expected, he was getting a few phone calls from folks who are seriously detached from reality.

There are a number of Bernie Sanders supporters who are quite vocal about their dislike of Hillary Clinton. They swear up and down there's no way they'll ever vote for her; they'll either sit out the election or vote for a third party candidate. I don't have much sympathy for the hard-core fanatics. I don't like Hillary much myself, but when it comes to voting for her or voting for someone who's sounding more and more like his kids would be trying to shuffle him off to a "memory care" unit if he wasn't (as he likes to remind us) really, really rich, I'll vote for the candidate who isn't showing signs of slipping into dementia. (And once again I'm bemused by the way you can say and do totally batshit crazy stuff and no one calls you on it if you're rich or already in a position of power, but that same behavior would result in shunning or getting tossed in a holding cell waiting for a pysch evaluation if you were poor.)

Anyway, those same "never Hillary" types do seem to be living in a fantasy world. One guy who called in was totally convinced that if Bernie Sanders would just throw his lot in with Green Party possible nominee Jill Stein the people would rise up and defeat both Hillary and the Donald. On what planet are these people living? Right now Jill Stein is polling about 5%. If she does indeed end up as the official Green Party nominee (they haven't had their convention yet so the nominee could turn out to be someone even less well-known), she might manage to pull off 1% of the vote in the general election. Studies of past elections indicate that about 80% of the people who support a third party candidate when responding to polls in the months leading up to the elections experience a reality check when the time comes to actually mark a ballot.

Was this a bucket list item?

Can I now say my life is complete (or close to it)? We had lunch at U.P. Chuck's bar in Kenton yesterday. We drive by the place all the time but it's usually not at a time of day when we're thinking about lunch. And even if it is the right time of day to be thinking about food, let's be honest. An establishment that features a drawing of someone upchucking on its tee-shirts doesn't strike me as being a place I'm real keen to patronize. But curiosity and hunger finally won out, so we pulled into the parking area alongside the building.

Note to anyone else who might contemplate stopping there: if you're driving a car, be careful when you park. The drop from the pavement on Federal Forest Highway 16 to the parking spaces is an abrupt one. You might not notice it in a truck, but in my little Ford Focus it felt and sounded like we'd just driven over a curb.

U.P. Chuck's is a typical small town bar. You kind of feel like you're stepping into a smoke-filled room even though smoking hasn't been allowed indoors in bars and restaurants in quite a few years in Michigan. I'm not sure what the building's original function 100+ years ago, but it's been a bar/restaurant/hotel as long as I can remember. The only thing that's changed on the exterior in the past 50 years is the name. There have been some updates to the interior: a new bar and tables in the past decade or so, but that's about it. The interior space was smaller than I expected -- the building is a decent size, but the actual main bar room doesn't take up much of the first floor. There is more space off to one side, but it looked like it didn't get much use, at least not in the summer. The lights were off and I got a vague impression of chairs stacked on tables. No doubt things get a lot busier during hunting and snowmobiling seasons. Most of the reviews on Yelp are from people who found it while hunting or sledding, although the place does get some summer tourists.

The menus we got handed were really short: just basic bar food like hamburgers, a couple of other types of sandwiches, a variety of deep fried snacks (the usual mozzarella sticks, mushrooms, zucchini, pickles, and whatever else Sysco sells breaded in humongous plastic bags), and pizza. This was a really good sign in place that had exactly one person working. I tend to get really suspicious when a small eatery has an elaborate menu -- that's a sure sign everything is coming off the Sysco truck pre-cooked and just gets microwaved in the kitchen.

Anyway, the S.O. ordered a Reuben and I got a cheeseburger -- a basic cheeseburger or hamburger is the test item I tend to order if we're eating someplace I've never been before. I figure if a place can make a decent hamburger, it's probably worth a return visit. So where did U.P. Chuck's fall on the decent burger scale? Kind in the middle. The burger was a decent size and it was cooked right -- sufficiently well-done that a person doesn't have to feel paranoid about E. coli or other food-borne illnesses but not so well-done that it's bone dry and bearing strong resemblance to a hockey puck. Normally it would fall into the really good category, but there was something ever so slightly off about the taste, like maybe the grill hadn't been kept as clean as it should be or the meat was hitting the end of its useful shelf life. Or maybe the cook decided to sprinkle on some seasoning I'm not used to tasting on burgers. Who knows? If I was a mustard user or had raw onions on the burger, that slightly off taste was subtle enough that I probably wouldn't have noticed it. Was it enough to keep me from eating there again? Nope, whatever the taste was it's been more than 24 hours and I haven't started upchucking. Still, the next time we stop there it'll be to try the pizza.

Downside to U.P. Chuck's: a couple moronic anti-Obama posters on one of the bulletin boards. I have a hunch this would be a good place to not talk politics because odds are Trump fans drink there.  

Like a lot of local establishments, there are framed photos (or photocopies of photos) of historic scenes hanging on the walls. Kenton used to be a good-sized town, thanks to a sawmill operating there. It was never a huge city, but it covered several blocks with businesses and houses. The main street had two-story commercial buildings for at least a block on both sides of the road; the town itself was big enough that it even had a wrong side of the tracks neighborhood, Finn Town. Finns were at the bottom of the social ladder back in the 1890s -- recent immigrants who spoke a stranger than usual language and practiced odd customs (e.g., sauna) -- so tended to end up clumped in the crappier housing. The photo above shows the main street in about 1910. I have no idea which one of those buildings is the current U.P. Chuck's (it might be the 5th one back on the left), but I do know that none of the other two-story structures have survived. And, considering how naked the hill in the background looks (that's a pretty thin line of trees) I think I know why Kenton faded into obscurity -- it's hard to keep a mill going once all the trees are gone.

Additional tourist information: there is a rustic (basic) US Forest Service Campground about 3 miles from Kenton, the Sparrow Rapids Campground. It has six sites and is free.There's also a nice wayside/picnic area on the north side of M-28 close to where the highway intersects with FFH-16.

Pulitzer Project: The Goldfinch

This one was an accident. Loyal readers (all two of you) know that I can be more than a tad obsessive about some things, including doing the Pulitzer fiction winners in chronological order. I started with the first winner (which, if memory serves, stank) and over the past 7 years or so have been slowly  working my way up the list. I'd actually gotten to 1969 when the ability to indulge in Interlibrary Loan vanished for a few months -- the L'Anse Public Library only has ILL during the school year. I figured the next Pulitzer winner I'd read wouldn't be available ntil sometime in September.

Then I pulled The Goldfinch off the shelf as part of my normal every-other-week trip to the library, recalled a friend had enthused about it a year or two ago, checked it out, eventually started reading it, and then found out it was a recent winner. My reaction was. . . oh, maybe a tad peeved at myself? I'd screwed up the nice neat order I was doing things in. I'm not supposed to skip around; it breaks my self-imposed rules. I consoled myself with the fact it was an accident -- there was nothing on the cover that would have warned me, and I hadn't looked at the list in awhile so how was I supposed to know?

So what exactly is The Goldfinch? For starters, it's really fat. This is not a book you pick up to skim on the bus on the way to work or to zip through on a weekend. It quite possibly is what might be termed a beach book, something you tote with you when you're looking forward to having a bunch of unstructured time to just kick back and read and not worry about how long it's taking you to get through it. It is a book with heft. In case of a home invasion, it could serve as a defensive weapon. It would also make a nifty doorstop.

It is also quite readable. Donna Tartt can write. She manages to wax almost lyrical when describing the trash floating in the canals in Amsterdam and the sand blowing through the decaying unfinished suburban housing developments in Las Vegas. If someone had told me someone could make descriptions of teenage druggies puking into trash cans readable, I wouldn't have believed it but Tartt pulls it off. How believable the scenarios are is another question -- I know adults can be pretty oblivious to the deviant behavior adolescents indulge in, but I find it hard to believe any two high school kids could show up at school day after day so stoned on alcohol and pills that it's a minor miracle they can walk. It's a rather implausible scenario. Then again, at that point the kid is going to school in Las Vegas so who knows? Maybe compared to his cohort, his behavior would have seemed pretty mainstream.

The Goldfinch is a coming of age story, sort of. The narrator is 13 when the book opens, mid-20s when it ends. It's his perspective on what's happened in his life since the day his mother died. It's been compared to Catcher in the Rye, but it's been so many years since I read that book that I have no idea if it's a valid comparison. I do seem to recall that Holden Caulfield didn't spend his time curled up in a fetal position from post traumatic stress while self-medicating like crazy and wallowing in paranoid fantasies, so I'm doubtful that the books actually have much in common. My memory of Holden is that he was pretty defiant; in contrast Theo (aka "Potter") spends a lot of time huddling under the bedclothes (metaphorically speaking) and having paranoid fantasies about being hauled off to prison in chains. He's pretty much a prisoner of his own fears.

The narrator in The Goldfinch, Theo Decker, is one of the oddest mixes of character traits I've seen in a long time. He's academically gifted, definitely book-smart, but remarkably naive when it comes to people. It doesn't help that with his own age group he has the social skills of a rock. Adults like him; his peers tolerate or bully him. When the book opens he apparently has only one friend, a sociopathic rich kid with a bad case of kleptomania, who drops Theo like the proverbial hot potato after Theo's mother dies. Theo also suffers from full-blown, total PTSD after surviving a bombing (vaguely ascribed to domestic terrorism) along with all the usual adolescent angst. The kid has one of the most wretched lives imaginable, loses his mother in the bombing, gets stuck living with his amoral alcoholic, drug-abusing con man of a father, and ends up living in a Las Vegas suburb that bears a strong resemblance to a ghost town. And it goes downhill from there. One horrible thing after another happens to Theo until he finds himself burning up with fever and freaking out from drug withdrawal in an Amsterdam hotel room. Then the author waves her magic wand, and, bingo, suddenly the thing that's terrified him for 13 years is no longer an issue. Even better, he's suddenly wallowing in huge amounts of money. To say this particular plot twist felt like cheating is an understatement. 

Maybe it wouldn't have felt so much like cheating if some of the horrible stuff that happened to Theo hadn't been his own fault. True, he was sadly orphaned in his teens and he did wind up drug-addicted, but that didn't automatically entail him to decide as an adult to sell fake antiques to gullible wealthy clients. The last chapter or so of the book really had me going, "That's it? All that weirdness and suddenly Theo gets a happily ever after? WTF?!" It felt contrived, formulaic, trite, you name it. It just didn't ring true. Then again, the same thing could be said of the whole book. . . so maybe it wasn't cheating after all; it was just the author doing an, "Oh, crap, I'm 650 pages into this sucker and no logical end in sight. Time to wrap it all up so my editor will stop harassing me about missed deadlines."

Bottom line: The Goldfinch is readable but odd. Tartt is sufficiently skilled as a wordsmith that the book flows smoothly; it's just a shame that when you hit the end you find yourself thinking she could have done it better with a lot less prose and some good illustrations. It feels like a graphic novel or the plot line for a not-very-good movie. You know, if it had actually been a movie and I'd paid to see it in a theater, I'd have walked out thinking, "Crap. Should have waited for it to be on Netflix." Except I'm not sure there's a Netflix equivalent for books -- does Reader's Digest still do condensed books?

Which I guess answers the question would I recommend this book to other readers? Not really. Once you start, the writing is sufficiently skilled that you get sucked into it, but in the end you just feel like you've wasted way too many hours of your life on a not very good book.

Next up with the Pulitzers: supposedly it'll be House Made of Dawn by Scott Momaby but having messed with the natural order of things with The Goldfinch, who knows?

More stuff I never thought I'd need to learn

How to do payroll.

A few months ago the historical society submitted a proposal to the Michigan Council for the Humanities for a local history project, although it's actually more of an ethnographic, anthropological type project. We said we wanted to collect oral histories that focused on the emergence of Indian gaming and the impact of Indian gaming (i.e., casinos) on the local area. We thought Big, which is what I always  do when writing grant applications. Ask for the maximum and hope you get a small piece of it.

I didn't think we actually had a prayer of being given the money. To be honest, I was sure our proposal did not meet SMART* criteria. I had no clue how we'd operationalize the thesis, assuming we even had a thesis, which I'm not sure we do. To me it all seemed remarkably vague. But, what the heck, doing proposals, even ones you don't think will get funded, is good practice.

A few days ago we received an email. Holy wah. The proposal was approved, and not just approved but approved for the full amount they were willing to give: $25,000. This is definitely a case of "be careful what you wish for." We're being handed a sizable chunk of change, all of which I'm going to end up having to track. I'm the Society's treasurer; ergo, I'm the Fiscal Officer for this grant. And unlike other grants we've received that mostly went for paying for stuff, this grant is going to spent on services: the person who does the interviews, the videographer standing (or sitting) close by with the camera, the person who transcribes tapes into pdfs, and so on. You know, people who just might end up on payrolls. People who will (and it pains me to type this) need to have taxes withheld from their wages. Social Security, Medicare, federal income, state income. . . it's not a happy thought.

I spent several hours today wandering around the Internal Revenue and State of Michigan websites feeling my eyes glaze over as I read page after page of bureaucratese and studying various forms trying to figure out what does or does not apply to the Historical Society. Part of me (a big part of me) is hoping that everyone who gets paid for their work on this project will opt to consider themselves independent contractors and let us weasel by with just giving them 1099s. I do know this is one grant where we're going to have to account for every penny spent -- the word "audit" pops up a lot in the information that accompanied the "Congratulations!" email. I tend to be remarkably anal about tracking the museum's money now so the actual documenting the money being spent shouldn't be difficult. I'm just not too thrilled with learning how to do the paperwork.

As for why we're focusing on the topic of Indian gaming, it's because Indian casinos were sort of born here in Baraga County. The case that always gets cited is California v. Cabazon, but an earlier case in which the United States government sued a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community for illegally operating a casino laid the groundwork for Indian gaming nation-wide. In US v Dakota, the courts decided that an individual tribal member could not own or operate a casino, but a tribe as whole had rights individuals did not. Ergo, a tribal-owned casino might be legal. End result 30 years later? A multi-million dollar business and some really interesting history that needs to get documented before everyone who was there at the beginning is dead.

*Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely

Thought for the day