Category Archives: Other Stuff

Are American politics absurd enough?

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No one’s complained yet, but it’s been weighing on my conscience that I make fun of British politics more often and more joyfully than I make fun of American politics. I have several excuses, all of them true but none of them good enough:

  1. I grew up in the U.S. and spent most of my life there, so its absurdities are less visible to me. Mostly. If you want to see what’s right in front of you, it helps to be an outsider.
  2. Britain wraps its political absurdities in such glorious traditional craziness that it invites satire, from the little loops in the parliamentary cloak room where you can hang your sword, assuming you weren’t in such a hurry that you rushed out without it this morning, to the prayer cards MPs leave on a seat because it’s the only way to reserve one and there aren’t enough to go around. It’s like saying dibs, but infinitely more grown up and bizarre.
  3. U.S. politics (like most—or maybe that’s all—countries’ politics) can be despicable, but most of the time they fail the absurdity test. If I could recommend a change to my fellow Amurr’cans, as Lyndon Johnson used to say, it would be that we cultivate a bit more absurdity in our political lives. It’d be good for us. Both sides of the political spectrum could unite in an effort to eliminate it. And in the midst of fulminating or being depressed about the problems we face, we could share a good laugh at ourselves.

But T. sent me an email a while ago that allows me to even the balance a little. According to Reuters News, the Pentagon has been—and here I’m going to abandon the balanced language of Reuters for a minute—throwing money in the air without bothering to count it.

Speaking of absurdity: From the pose, this could be Washington crossing the Delaware and threatening to tip over the rowboat, but it's a picture of someone in a House of Lords robe. I'm not sure what period it's from. The hairstyles and the poses have changed but the robes are pretty much the same. From Wikimedia.

Speaking of absurdity: From the pose, this could be Washington crossing the Delaware and threatening to tip over the rowboat, but it’s a picture of someone in a House of Lords robe. I’m not sure what period it’s from. The hairstyles and the poses have changed but the robes? Not much. From Wikimedia.

How much money are we talking about? Oh, $8.5 trillion or so. Not enough to worry about. And that goes back to 1996, so, you know, per year and all it’s not that much. Just a few hundred billion or something. You can’t trust me with numbers, especially when we’re dealing in amounts I can’t even imagine, never mind count. Let’s just say a number with a whole bunch of zeros following it. Per year. I do understand years.

Apparently, the problem is that the Pentagon uses “a tangle” of accounting programs that can’t talk to each other. “ ‘It’s like if every electrical socket in the Pentagon had a different shape and voltage,’ says a former defense official who until recently led efforts to modernize defense accounting.” (The quotes here are from a series of three Reuters articles. I won’t include separate links. Follow the link above and you’ll find them all.)

Record keeping, as Reuters puts it, is “rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.”

That leaves the military storing physical object that are out of date and buying new ones it doesn’t need because it has no idea what it needs. It has “a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.”

When it comes to veterans and serving personnel, in some cases they aren’t being paid what they’re owed. In others, they’re overpaid and then the overpayment is clawed back all at once. Or an amount they haven’t been overpaid is clawed back because some computer system somewhere thinks it was overpaid, so poof, the income a vet had every reason to rely on stops coming. In a case Reuters followed (a mistaken claw-back), no explanation was offered until Reuters got involved, at which point—surely this wasn’t connected—the mistake was corrected.

In fairness, the Pentagon has tried to fix the problems but ended up making them worse.

“In 2000, the Navy began work on four separate projects to handle finances, supplies, maintenance of equipment and contracting. Instead, the systems took on overlapping duties that each performed in different ways, using different formats for the same data. Five years later, the GAO said, ‘These efforts were failures. . . . $1 billion was largely wasted.’ ”

But, y’know, $1 billion? What the hell.

The Pentagon is the only federal agency that’s never been audited. So how much of that $8.5 trillion has been paid out legitimately, how much wasted, and how much stolen? We don’t know. And more to the point, they don’t know either.

But it’s only money, as my father used to say whenever an inappropriate situation came his way. You can’t buy happiness with it.

You can, however, buy a lot of other stuff. And no doubt someone has. We just don’t know who or what.

So there we go. Absurdity in American politics. But you’ll have to admit, it needs a few swords and a wig to make it funny.

British wildflowers and British roadsides

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I don’t want to romanticize the British countryside—enough people will do that without my help—but British wildflowers are enough to tempt me. They grow along the roads, in the hedges, in the stone walls, in the fields if they can, in the garden if you’ll let them, anyplace a teaspoonful of soil gives them a place to sink their roots. When I first moved here from Minnesota, never mind their beauty, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of them.

Trying to keep track of things you have no name for, it turns out, is next to impossible, and I’ve gradually learned to name the most common ones. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so I won’t repeat the tale here except to say that I settle for the broadest categories. I can’t tell the one speedwell from the next and forget about all those yellow things that look like dandelions but aren’t (hawkweed, hawkbit, cat’s-ear…).

Thrift growing by the coast. The church in the background is St. Materiana.

Thrift growing by the coast. The church in the background is St. Materiana.

In late June, the “Plantwatch” column in the Guardian wrote about the roadside verges— if you’re not British, those are the stretches of land that run beside the roads—as wildflower refuges. It was one of those things I’d known but hadn’t known, since the thought didn’t come in any form I could use. I hadn’t put words to it. I’d seen the flowers growing there, I’d been struck by their richness, but thinking of the verges as refuges changed the way I see them.

So every day I walk the dog past wildflower refuges.

It turns out that almost half the native plants in Britain—700 species—grow on the verges. It’s perfect habitat: unplowed, unfertilized, unweed-killered, and for long stretches of time, unmowed. Basically, the plants are left along to do what they know how to do.

Before modern medicine, the verges and hedges, as well as being beautiful, were as drugstores. Hedge woundwort is a mild antiseptic. St. John’s wort—now sold as an herbal antidepressant—was used for treating wounds, and modern research shows that it is, in fact, an antibacterial. Valerian was used as a mild sedative, and you can still buy it in health food stores. Scurvywort is full of vitamin C and was used to treat (predictably) scurvy. It’s become more widespread since they started salting roads after a snow, which creates perfect conditions for it. Dyer’s greenweed was used to treat gout. I don’t know how well it worked. Some of the herbal medicines worked reasonably well. Others—let’s just say they gave patients something to think about while they were sick. Maybe it took their minds off their problems for a while.

I have no idea who measures these things, but if you put the verges all together they’d cover the Isle of Wight. How big is the Isle of Wight? Interesting you should ask, since I just happened to google it: 380 square kilometers. What’s that in miles? You don’t want someone like me pretending to answer a question like that.

But forget the numbers. The roadside verges are a treasure chest—one that’s easy to overlook because they’re just, you know, sitting there beside the roads, with no signs, no warnings, and no admission fees.

A government decides to promote British values

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The British government worries that Britain may not be British enough. It worries so much that the Department for Education has instructed schools to promote British values.

Part of this is meant to counter the lure ISIS has on a (let’s be realistic, limited but highly publicized) number of young people, but I seem to remember that they started talking about British values back when Scotland was voting on whether to leave the U.K. So I’m guessing that some more general unease lies behind the decision.

Let me be clear: I take ISIS seriously. Hell, I take Scotland seriously. What I don’t take seriously are people who think “promoting British values” is a response to either of those very distinct entities. Especially since the British values campaign forces everyone to confront the awkward question of what those values are. I mean, they’re not , say, the flag or apple pie. They’re hard to define.

Irrelevant photo: an old shed at Trebarwith Strand.

Irrelevant photo: an old shed at Trebarwith Strand. The pink flowers are red campion. I don’t make this stuff up. Really I don’t.

As prime minister, David Cameron defined them as freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility, and respect for British institutions. Nick Clegg, when he was deputy prime minister, added gender equality and equality before the law. Then his party tanked in the elections and no one’s consulted him since. Michael Gove, when he was secretary of education, defined them as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. Awkwardly enough, in 2007 he said trying to define Britishness was “rather un-British.”

Oops.

Since Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which should really be OSECSS) will have the joy of assessing the schools’ efforts, it’s published the official set of British values. They’re democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.

Can we tolerate people with different, non-British values? Sorry, the question’s too complicated. Ofsted lives in a true/false culture.

Do other countries hold to these same values and if they do are the values still specifically British? Sorry, that’s not on the test and we can’t discuss it now.

Can we tolerate politicians offering three sets of non-identical British values plus one opinion trashing the whole idea of codifying them? Of course we can, because by now everyone’s swung their weight behind the official version and has forgotten that they didn’t always agree. Except possibly Nick Clegg and, see above, no one consults him anymore.

In joyful response to this attempt at unifying the nation’s beliefs, a whole lot of people cut loose on Twitter under the hashtag #BritishValues. According to The Independent, some of the early tweets summarizing the aforesaid values included:

  • Being wary of foreigners while having a Belgian beer with an Indian curry in your Spanish villa wearing Indonesian clothes.
  • Queuing; dressing inappropriately when the sun comes out; warm beer; winning World Wars; immigration & Pot Noodles.
  • Wearing socks with sandals
  • complaining about immigration

The Independent article online was open for comments, and they included a few more suggestions:

  • Seeing a rogue traffic cone and immediately working out the nearest sculpture in need of a hat.
  • Denouncing immigrants, while we have a royal family made up of immigrants.
  • Loving fish and chips even though the potato migrated here from abroad.

The comment thread quickly degenerated into arguments, name calling, and “This comment has been deleted,” so I stopped reading. Instead, I went to Twitter to check out the more recent comments. Not all of them are funny. Some are bitter-edged comments about homelessness and not rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean.  Others are about trash in the hedges and dog-poo bags left by the side of the road. But, hey, we try to keep laughing here, even when the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.  The lighter tweets included:

  • The bloke in front of me just put his entire body weight on my foot & I said sorry.
  • Forming an orderly queue.
  • Pie and chips done properly!
  • Get an exclusive 15% off any order from @TwiningsTea

None of these answers the question (and I do understand that it wasn’t posed as a question) of what British values are, but it does point us in the right direction: Whatever they are, they include an ad for tea and a sense of humor. So brew yourself a nice cup and tell me something silly about British values, would you?

Or American values. Or any other nation’s values. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Publishing on Medium.com

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Apologies for the extra post (what do you all do with your week when you’re not hearing from me?), but I just published a piece through The Coffeelicious, a magazine on Medium.com, and since both of them are new for me, I’m going to shamelessly promote it. And introduce Medium to anyone who hasn’t explored it yet.

“I Pledge Allegiance to the–Queen?” is about taking U.K. citizenship, which turned out to be a surprisingly emotional issue for me. If you like the essay, it would be great if you’d hit the Recommend button at the end. If you don’t like it, you won’t reach the end, so don’t worry about it. (Seriously, I wouldn’t ask you to recommend anything you don’t like. It’s almost like–am I really going to say this?–faking an orgasm. Yes, apparently I am going to say that. I’m not sure what I think about it, never mind how I feel.)

mixed flag

Shockingly relevant graphic. Not mine. I found it on Wikimedia.

And with that out of the way, the rest of this is for those of you who either write more than blog fodder–and I know that’s a good number of you–or read more than blogs. Because not everything belongs in a blog, and I’ve been looking for outlets beyond mine. I’m hoping this will move me in that direction.

Medium describes itself as a place “where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.” In theory, at least, it helps you find your audience. We’ll see. Technically, Medium makes it fairly easy to publish, although I obsessed about the mechanics for weeks before submitting anything, and only did it after investing something like $10 (it seems to be $12; never trust me with numbers) in a probably unnecessary but still helpful manual.

From what I’ve read, the good thing about Medium is that stories have a chance to build slowly–it’s not all about the first few hours, or days, or even weeks. Stories recommended by a lot of people become more visible. And we all like to believe that those are the best ones. They may be. It would be nice to think so. It also explains why I was asking people to hit that Recommend button. (I should mention that you have to sign up to recommend anything. It’s not a big deal, says the person who closes down her computer and hides under a chair when asked to sign up for anything. You can do it with Facebook or Twitter–and if you plan to publish on Medium, you should eventually add both connections.)

Medium also sets it up so that as a reader you can follow writers you like and get a notification when they publish something new (which, of course, lets writers, with luck, build a following) or follow magazines that filter and gather the work that’s most relevant to you. I’ve found some good writing there. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a browse.

A Cornish beach town bans the mankini

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For today’s story, we’re traveling to the Cornish resort of Newquay to find out why the mankini’s been banned, along with other “inappropriate clothing.”

Yes, boys and girls, women and men, dogs and cats and everything in between, in Newquay enough people—and I have to guess they were of the male persuasion—wore mankinis  that they became worth banning.

A Guardian article reports that the ban was part of an attempt to cut down on anti-social behavior. It doesn’t comment on whether the mankini is, in itself, anti-social, but I think a good case could be made.

Semi-relevant photo. Primroses, taken in May (they're past their best now). I thought the primrose path might actually have a connection here.

Semi-relevant photo. Primroses, taken in May (they’re past their best now). I thought the primrose path might actually have a connection. If you want a picture of the mankini, you’ll have to follow the link above, because, no, I just can’t do it. They’re too ugly.

And here I have to interrupt myself: Since English place names need a pronunciation guide if you’re going to have any hope of knowing how to hear them in your head, never mind say them out loud, I’d better tell you that the town’s pronounced NEW-key. I should follow up by saying that once upon a time, in a more innocent (and possibly more boring) past, it was the place Sunday schools went to hold their picnics. They drank lemonade and ate Victoria sponge cake. What else they did I’ll leave to your imagination, because the world of Sunday schools is so deeply foreign to me that I’m not even sure how to poke fun at it.

Inevitably, though, Sunday schools lost their hold on the culture. Time passed. More time passed. At some point Newquay became the place for stag and hen parties to get drunk and throw up in the street. What fun. Isn’t modern life glorious? We’ve done such wonderful things with our liberation. According to mayor Dave Sleeman, in the 2000s “you couldn’t walk the streets on a Saturday without seeing someone wearing a mankini or what have you.”

Eventually the teenagers joined in. Being new to the art of drinking, they got so drunk they fell off the cliffs. Which is not only serious but fatal, and it happened twice and suddenly people started saying out loud what surely some of them were already whispering: “I think we have a problem here.”

Not long after that, residents and business owners marched to “take back their town,” as they put it. Cops started meeting trains in the summer and shaking the kids down, looking for the booze they were still too young to buy so they had to bring it from home. I don’t know if that would have stood up to a legal challenge, but no one seems to have made one.

Then the town banned the mankini, the what have you, as the mayor so cogently put it, and other inappropriate clothing. It’s hard to define inappropriate clothing, and even harder to define what have you, but never mind, because reports of anti-social behavior dropped and crime is down. Mankini sightings are rare or nonexistent. What have yous stay both in the suitcase and behind closed doors, where god intended them to be kept. Or not kept. The bible isn’t specific on the handling of the what have you, so we have to guess.

How well a ban on inappropriate clothing would hold up on appeal I don’t know. It’s a vague term. Your inappropriate may be my fashionable, or my comfortable, or my hysterically funny, or even my perfectly normal, although I have never and will never be seen in a mankini.  That’s a solemn promise, and folks around here will be relieved to hear it.

The definition of appropriate varies wildly with time and place. There was a time when the jeans I’m wearing would have been inappropriate enough to get me in serious trouble. I’m guessing an appeal would stand a fair chance. But launching one depends on someone being sober enough not to throw up in (or wear the mankini to) the lawyer’s office. So I’m not holding my breath.

I’m not going to defend the mankini. I may be dyslexic about fashion, but I do know ugly and ridiculous when I see them. In fact, that may be part of my problem with fashion, but let’s skip over that. I’m also not going to defend throwing up in the street, or the hen and stag party. The hen and stag groups I’ve seen wandering the towns and trains look dismal, and I’m always glad not to get invited to any because after a while I’d run out of contagious diseases that could keep me away at the last minute.

I also sympathize with the residents of Newquay who want something like a normal life. Living in the middle of someone else’s party isn’t a whole lot of fun—especially when it reaches the stage where people fall off cliffs. It’s the approach that makes me hesitate.

But something baffles me about the article. This is coastal Cornwall. People I know sit around saying, “I want to go someplace hot.” You can hear the italics in the way they say it. They want to lie in the sun and sweat. They want to be incapacitated by heat. Because it doesn’t get hot here very often. The summer here may give you a hot day or two, but basically they range from comfortably warmish to comfortably cool. If it gets up to 80, the newscasters talk about heat waves. Mostly we have the kind of weather where sleeves feel good. When I asked an acquaintance if she wasn’t freezing in a spaghetti-strap sumer dress, she said, “We just have to wear them anyway, otherwise we’d never get to.” Go to the beach and you’ll find windbreaks, cover-ups, sweatshirts. I’m writing this on June 1, and I’m wearing three light layers, and they feel good.

How, I ask you, are men running around in mankinis?