My father’s older brother, Edward, never changed his last name back to Martini like my father did. As a matter of fact, when Dad resigned his position as an engineer at General Dynamics and left the Connecticut suburbs for Little Italy in Manhattan and a job tending a bar at the Stuyvesant New Amsterdam Hotel on 5th Avenue, Uncle Ed was sincerely convinced my father had gone insane. So convinced, actually, that he tried to have Dad committed.
As a consequence, the family legend goes, they stopped speaking to each other for eleven years. Until one summer day in the Hamptons, while tending bar at a party on a Broadway producer’s yacht, my father watched in horror as a speeding cabin cruiser rammed a thirty foot sloop. The party boat being the closest vessel to the accident, he and a number of other gentlemen, including not only the host and several of his guests, but also the chef catering the party, one of the waiters and both of the yacht’s deckhands, all immediately jumped into the water, intent on rescue. There was so much enthusiasm for heroism, as it turned out, there weren’t enough victims to go around. But as fate would have it that star-crossed day, my father ended up saving none other than his own brother Edward from the foaming, perilous brine of Gardiner’s Bay. After that, Edward’s wife contacted my mother and the two of them arranged for him to pay our family a visit the next Christmas, during which he made a tearful apology to Dad; and, with that, another sullen family feud passed into history. It being the holiday season, no doubt nearly everyone reading this (in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa and the Western Hemisphere, where it actually is the holiday season, anyway) can recall something similar involving their own relatives, probably discussed over an eight thousand calorie meal, accompanied, in many cases, I’ll bet, by a bit too much eggnog or punch.
Edward, being my father’s older brother, participated in producing a large and reasonably happy family during what demographers call the Baby Boom. I consequently have a number of considerably older cousins. I’ve been receiving Christmas gifts from them since I was a child, and, of course, sending them gifts myself for the last couple of decades. Their gifts have, traditionally, comprised the usual things one buys for one’s not-too-close relatives while shopping for two dozen other gifts, surrounded by a rushing, tightly-packed throng of people likewise occupied at a typical department store. But this Christmas, my cousin Matthew, who was born in 1950, gave me something special. It’s an essay, which he composed in 1958, when he was in the third grade, entitled “Class Assignment – Tell What Life in the Future Will Be Like.” All nine pages of it, carefully written on wide-lined elementary school notebook paper in proper cursive script with a number 2 pencil, have been professionally mounted on thermostable material in a large, tasteful solid mahogany frame behind ultra-violet filtering glass. Cousin Matthew’s card goes on to say that the glass cover is but one side of an hermetically sealed compartment flooded with completely dry argon gas, and that, prior to mounting, he had a conservator treat the paper so as to neutralize its acid content.
I’m not surprised. Cousin Matt’s always been an oddball, and Uncle Ed, the consummate conformist, has never been satisfied with him. Nevertheless, Matt did quite well for himself. Starting out with nothing more than the savings from his paper route, he amassed an impressive fortune making investments in the stock, bond and, most importantly, commodities markets. His success, it appears, is largely attributable to an uncanny ability to sense what will happen next before anyone else does. I’m not in the least superstitious, but I must admit, the stories I’ve heard about cousin Matt are enough to make a person wonder if, as the Bard said, there are indeed more things in Heaven and Earth than we dream of in our natural philosophy. Matt could pick winners in any sport one cares to name with eerie accuracy, and often did, collecting winnings nearly every time. He regularly left for the horse track with a hundred bucks and came back with thousands. And whatever it is, he’s still got it – back in 2003, he wrote everybody in the family (he sent real letters, too, not e-mails – how about that?), urgently advising us to buy gold. Well, most of us did, and I can’t say those who took him up on it regret having done so. So here, without further ado, is a verbatim transcription of my cousin Matt’s third grade essay:
Class Assignment – Tell What Life in the Future Will Be Like
– by Matthew Martin, November 6, 1958.
In the future we will have a race to the Moon with the Russians, and we will beat them. They will never get there, but we will and Sputnik will look dumb. Then we will lose interest in going to the Moon because it is too expensive, and never go back. We won’t be able to afford to go to Mars, either. We will send lots of little robots, and they will send back pictures instead. But there won’t be any Martians, just rocks. There will be a Space Station, but there won’t be any hotels in it, and it will be really small and smell really bad inside.
There will be jet packs in the future, but they will be too expensive, too, and not go very far. Nobody will use them to go to work or anything. There will be sliding side walks, but only in airports.
There won’t be any flying cars, either. Everybody will still drive cars that roll on the ground and burn gasoline. A lot of people will want to burn even more gasoline, so moms will drive their kids around in big trucks. Burning all that gasoline will make the weather change and big storms will smash up things all over and the ocean will flood everywhere and the polar bears will all die because there will be no ice at the North Pole. Everybody will have too many babies and there will be so many people they will eat all the fish in the ocean and they will be all gone. Atomic power will turn out to be really dangerous and people will be very scared of it and it will be more expensive than anything.
We will find out that cigarettes are not safe and make people get sick. Farmers will stop using fertilizers and bug sprays on the food they grow because people will get scared of them. People will pay more money for food without them. Then scientists will mix animals and plants together and people will be afraid to eat their food because of that.
We will get into a big long war with the Commies. We will lose because nobody will want to be drafted to go fight it. But then Russia will decide it doesn’t like being Commie anymore and they will give up being Commies. Gangsters will run Russia instead. Red China will come to New York and be in the UN. Then the British will give them back Hong Kong. Then we will be friends with Red China and buy half of what we get from them. That will make lots of Americans lose their jobs, but the rest of the Americans will not care, because the things Red China will make will be so cheap to buy. We will not have real money anymore, just money like they have in Monopoly, and we will make so much of it that a Coke will cost a dollar.
Lots of factories in America will close because it will be cheaper to make things in other places like Red China. Big cities will turn into slums and the people there will get mad and burn them down. Then we will get very scared that there is not enough oil. That will make us do a lot of stupid things all over the world and everybody will hate the United States. They will want to come here and kill us.
America will make a cowboy movie star President, and he will tell everybody that greed is good and everybody will believe him. The Catholics will make a Nazi Pope. Priests will do bad things to boys and girls and he will make excuses for them. Europe will become all one big country and have their own money and then go broke. America will go broke too, on account of them all believing that greed is good.
Computers will get so small, you can carry one around in your pocket. They will be in every house, and playing with them will be an even bigger waste of time than watching television. Everything anybody wants to know about will be on their computers and nobody will go to the library to read books anymore. People will use the little computers to make telephone calls to anyone in the world, and they won’t need money anymore, because the computers will take care of that for them, too, with computer money inside them. Holding one of those little computers next to your head to talk on it like a telephone will make people’s brains get sick, and a lot of them will die, but they will do it anyway, because the little computers will be so much fun. They will use the little computers to spend all day telling everybody what they are doing. They will be doing things like getting tattoos, putting little metal bars in their tongues and drinking coffee that costs five dollars a cup. Then bad guys will use their own little computers to steal everybody’s computer money, and somebody will take all of America’s super top secrets and put them where anybody with one of the little computers can see them.
People will believe that the world is coming to an end and spend a lot of their time getting ready for it. They will be waiting for Jesus or space men or a comet or time travelers to come take them away from here. People will stop believing in evolution, too.
The End
It’s quite a grade-school paper, all right, and at the top of the first page, in broad, bright red ink, underlined twice and enclosed by a huge, red circle, is an enormous “F” accompanied by the inscription, “See me. I have a note for your parents.” I think it’s going to look absolutely splendid in the basement – there’s a big bare spot on the wall next to the beer fridge by the pool table that should be just perfect.
Now, let’s check out what’s in that Quarterly Mailbag!
Quite a few readers sent me scolding e-mails about the post on October 6, where I advised a fellow in the foreign service about how to avoid being sent to a hardship post. We did not, they pointed out, see Dr. Mazlan Othman shirk her duty when she was appointed UN Ambassador to Outer Space; therefore, where does this American diplomat get off trying shirk his? While I agree with them that it is, indeed, that gentleman’s sworn obligation to follow his superiors’ orders, I think we must all agree that, however hypothetical the circumstances, they were – or at least would be – extremely unusual and mitigating. Even more wrote in to protest that the collapse of the latest round of Middle East peace talks was not, as that fellow claims, because nobody else involved can stand Hillary Clinton, but because one side or the other is a bunch of stubborn, nasty, fanatic, lying, thieving, bloodthirsty scum bags. Okay, let me settle that argument by saying that everyone is right. Oh, I just love an opportunity to make positive statements. There are so few of them, after all.
Plenty of people wrote in to complain about how unfairly I treated poor John Raese, the Republican who later lost the US senate race in West Virginia to Democrat Joe Manchin in November. And furthermore, they demanded, why should the people of West Virginia be offended by a casting call for a Republican campaign commercial that characterizes them as “hicks,” anyway? After all, they are all a bunch of hicks, aren’t they? Those toothless, inbred hillbillies, I was told, don’t know how lucky they would be to have someone like John Raese representing them in the Senate. Like any conservative Republican, they assured me, John Raese would teach those barefoot, bucktoothed West Virginia yokels the value of money and how to work their butts off earning it for him. And after all those years of Robert C. Byrd, they hotly insisted, that’s exactly what those lazy West Virginia hayseeds need. Several of them also inquired, Do I know the difference between a rich West Virginian and a poor one? A poor West Virginian, they explained, has a rusted-out 1969 Chevy Camaro with no engine up on blocks in his front yard. A rich West Virginian has two.
As expected, my October 21 post concerning massive security breaches at Facebook drew fire from a legion of Facebook loyalists. All of whom, since then, have been treated to several further such lapses of trust as Facebook seeks even more inventive and profitable ways to exploit gullible suckers – ah, I mean, its members. Lately, I’ve also been receiving additional e-mails from Facebook fans gloating about Time Magazine naming Mark Elliot Zuckerberg Person of the Year. Well, duh. Hey, digital dudes and dudettes of Facebook, check it out – over the years, Time Magazine has also named Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon, Joseph Stalin (twice!), and yes, Adolf Hitler – Person of the Year. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s that group to which history will prove Mark Elliot Zuckerberg most certainly belongs.
The mail pertaining to my October 28 post fell into seven distinct categories. First, there were the predictable denunciations from Joe Miller supporters (32%). They tended to type everything in capital letters and vociferously maintain that Joe was robbed in his bid to become the junior US senator from Alaska. Many of them warned me that true Alaskan patriots like them would not mind coming down to Washington DC with their hockey sticks and giving me a free civics lesson accompanied by a complimentary knuckle sandwich. Still others told me I better watch what I say, because it won’t be long before the TEA Party takes over, and, by the way, when that happens, Joe Miller is not going to be a senator, he’s going to be President. In addition, they also reminded me that this isn’t over yet, and Joe is going to keep on fighting until justice is done and the Supreme Court makes him a US senator. In response to those sentiments, I would note that a couple of days ago, a federal judge more or less told Joe Miller and his legion of True Believers to take a long walk off a short glacier. That should be enough to convince any sane person that he has now officially lost the election. Given that constraint, therefore, I expect Joe and his followers to continue their self-righteous struggle for the next six years, when his opponent’s senate term expires; or at least until 2014, when Miller will be able to take a shot at the other Alaskan US senate seat. Second, there were the Murkowski supporters, (27%), who generally were quite nice, mostly making excuses for their fellow Alaskans’ poor spelling skills and presenting various polite arguments why ballots cast for people like “Lisa Markovsky,” “Lesha Mikulski,” and “Liza Minnelli” should be counted as votes for their candidate. Almost universally, they were very proud of Lisa for winning the first US senate write-in campaign since Strom Thurmond accomplished that unlikely feat back in 1954. However, since Mr. Thurmond filibustered twenty-four solid hours against the Civil Rights Act, then fought racial integration for decades, only to be later revealed after his death as the rapist of his family’s black maid, perhaps they should find someone else to whom they can compare their beloved candidate. Just a thought. Next, there were the folks who chided me for not only tolerating, but actually helping my brother-in-law, Hank (23%). They find him to be a thoroughly annoying, obnoxious boor, and completely undeserving of any sort of sympathy. Well, I can’t say I disagree with them. I did note that a lot of people also called Hank a Neanderthal, for which I really think they owe the Neanderthals an apology. On the other hand, Hank is, unfortunately, married to my sister, and frankly, the sooner he gets a paying job, the better. Then there were the folks (11%) who wrote in to say that hell yeah, napoleons, eclairs and, for that matter, any pastries not filled with genuine sweet egg custard are totally bogus; followed by the ones who asked if I’m crazy or something (4%), and don’t I know that sugar filling is way better than that icky egg crap? What’s more, they pointed out, you don’t have to refrigerate pastries with sugar filling, and look at how many people get food poisoning from that stuff made with eggs. And what, they demanded to know, if somebody is allergic to eggs, huh, then what are they supposed to eat, anyhow? Plus, the only way you can make vegan napoleons and eclairs is with sugar filling, so there! Penultimately, 2% of my respondents wanted to know if eating napoleons and eclairs can turn you gay, and/or am I gay, what with me eating them like some kind of French faggot, and don’t I know only queers eat stuff like that? And oh yes, finally, there was the 1% who think Hank is a splendid fellow and hope he gets that job we wants working for Senator Joe Miller.
I got plenty of e-mails confirming the assertions of Khus Dihugami Dadamizo, Special International Policy Emissary of His Excellency President Hamid Karzai for the Embassy of Afghanistan to the United States of America, which appeared in my post on November 3. If something is not done about the corruption and drug trafficking at the highest levels of the Afghan government, they all agree, NATO will lose the war, because the natives are going to conclude the Taliban are the lesser of two evils. Hardly anyone, it seems, supports the Karzai government. Besides NATO, that is – I did get a few messages from hopeful young US officers at the front telling me, yes, corruption is rampant, opium is currently the only cash crop, and the ready availability of cheap heroin is turning an entire generation of young Afghans into junkies, but by golly, our boys over there are fighting back! They’re working to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by learning to play cricket! Okay, then, I guess we can stop worrying now. What a relief.
Again, as it seems I must, every second December or January on a recurring biennial cycle, I will tell the incoming members of Congress and their staffers no, absolutely not – you will get no more advice from me concerning the subject matter of my November 11 post than that which already appears there. Now please stop asking, okay? I have more important things to do.
The messages I received in response to the November 18 post definitely demonstrate that to say there are two sides to the question of quantitative easing is to grossly underestimate the issue’s potential for controversy. Predictably, I got scads of missives from people who are obsessed with various shiny metals, mostly gold, but not entirely by any means. There’s a movement afoot “to bring down the Federal Reserve System” as some folks put it, through widespread grass roots personal purchases of “as much silver as each individual patriot can afford,” for example. Others insist that gold and silver are for fools because they are both subjects of huge speculative bubbles at the moment. Most of them recommend platinum or palladium instead, although iridium and the rare earth metals also made a very strong showing. There’s particular interest in neodymium, which is used to make those extremely powerful magnets one sees in various Internet videos, performing incredible feats or wreaking incredible damage, depending on who is playing with them. Rambling rants and raves about China, (which actually does control 98 percent of the world’s rare earth metal production – there’s a grain of truth in every conspiracy theory, after all), accompanied many of those folks’ well intentioned advice. Reading those, I’d say if Peking ever figures out a way to package and export irrational fear of the Chinese, there’s a huge market for it in places like Idaho, Alabama and Michigan. Coltan, which is contained in the high-performance capacitors used to make cell phones and so forth, was also mentioned quite a bit. Other people have gone much further around the bend than that, though. They reminded me that “you can’t eat precious metals,” and presented their plans to stock up on guns, ammo, freeze-dried rations and canned goods. Many also declared that, in keeping with time-honored American tradition, they are heading for the hills, where they will live off the land, dwelling in log cabins, chopping their own wood, eating deer and squirrels and promptly shooting any dazed and ragged former city slickers who wander within rifle range. The African-American paranoids wrote in to denounce the Federal Reserve as Whitey’s tool of oppression, and, of course, I got roughly a megabyte of screed blaming the Fed, the Great Recession and QE on You Know Who. “’Bernanke,’” one particularly fraught fellow proclaimed, “’Goldman,’ ‘Sachs,’ ‘Lazard,’ ‘Cowen,’ ‘Rothschild,’ the list is endless! What do you pinheads down there in Washington need, Collins? A [expletive] singing telegram?” Not that all the conspiracy theorists were so conventional – are you aware that extraterrestrials plotting to take over the planet founded the Federal Reserve System? Me neither, but I have e-mails from eleven different people who know better, apparently. I also got exactly one e-mail from a Keynesian who said he believes Bernanke is doing precisely the right thing. Now, how about that kook? It takes all kinds to make a world, I guess.
It seems that the question of whether or not the TSA is doing the right thing when they perform one of their now-infamous pat-downs, on the other hand, really does have two well defined sides, and the e-mails I got in reply to my November 24 post were split right down the middle. At fifty-two percent, only a slight majority of them denounced the practice as an unconstitutional abuse of government power, while the remaining forty-eight percent told me that while it’s not pleasant to have some bozo in a comic-opera uniform poking and prodding you where the sun doesn’t shine, it’s vitally necessary that they do so in order to prevent Osama bin Laden from sneaking aboard an airliner with a nuke or something like that. Those people unanimously insist that they feel considerably safer after a nice grope from the TSA, thank you very much. To which I say, good for them – but they should be careful they don’t enjoy it too much, because it’s strict federal policy that anyone who has an orgasm while the TSA is touching their junk will be promptly arrested.
Only seventeen percent of readers who wrote in about the December 1 post, which relates my encounter with a tipsy diplomat at the Round Robin Bar and our conversation concerning the WikiLeaks affair agree that he, the US government, and his employer, the State Department, are in the right. Everybody else thinks Julian Assange is the biggest hero since Spiderman. Quite a few folks, on both sides of the question, added inquiries about my opening statement in that post, which presents the attributes of a Happy Diplomat – that he lives in an English house, eats Chinese food, has a Japanese wife, receives American wages and drives a German car. His name is mentioned favorably in the media, his secrets appear exclusively in diplomatic cables, and he vacations alone every summer in the south of France. All very well and good, they said, but how about the Unhappy Diplomat? What’s up with him? Well, folks, the Unhappy Diplomat lives in a Japanese house, eats English food, has an American wife, receives Chinese wages and drives a French car. His secrets appear in media exclusives, his name is mentioned unfavorably in diplomatic cables, and he vacations every winter with his family in the north of Germany.
I would be the first to admit that the issue of who will be the next Chairman of the Republican National Committee is a very, very Inside-the-Beltway thing. And that goes for the DNC, too, of course. I dare say that, if I were to state that the jabbering, unhinged sawbones by the name of Howard Dean is no longer the DNC Chairman, how many readers of this Web log could name his current replacement without using a search engine or consulting Wikipedia? So it was no surprise that the December 8 post about the ongoing travails of Michael Steele drew the least number of e-mails this quarter. But what messages I did receive were quite well informed and, I might add, also quite passionate. They were all from Republicans and every single one of them roundly denounced Michael Steele as the worst RNC Chairman in history. They were also hopping mad at me for advising Mike on how to keep his job, too. I guess I can expect even more angry messages from them when the strategy I suggested works and they have to put up with him for another two years.
And speaking of irate Republicans, I got a very respectable number of responses to my December 16 post about Representative John Boehner being a big crybaby. How could I be so heartless, my Republican correspondents demanded, as to make fun of a man who has done nothing more than reveal that, in fact, he has a heart? To which I say, yes, he does, and apparently, he wears it on his sleeve. I firmly stick by my theory that Boehner’s bawling stems from a case of pathological rage and a writhing, slithering mass of unreasoning hatreds roiling in his vapid and shallow soul. And I bet the Republicans go ahead and elect him Speaker of the House, too, because actually, that’s the kind of person they are not-so-secretly attracted to. All of which, my Democratic correspondents echoed in various ways as their e-mails predicted a period of terrible setbacks and reversals when the new Congress begins its work next month. Methinks they doth protest too much, however. Look at it this way – not only will the Democrats still have the White House and the Senate, they will also have John Boehner in the House of Representatives, undermining everything the Republicans try to do there with numerous random, loud, embarrassing, tearful, sobbing emotional displays, each one accompanied by uncontrolled gushes of appropriately incomprehensible gibberish guaranteed to render every tenet of conservative philosophy he enunciates a grotesque parody of itself. So cheer up, Democrats – just, as the old saw has it, George B. McClellan was the Confederacy’s second most valuable general, so John Boehner may very well prove to be the Democratic Party’s second most valuable political asset. Seriously, talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Let me be the first to recommend every House Republican who votes for John Boehner to be Speaker for a gold-plated James G. Watt Award.
As might be expected, e-mails about the December 23 post are still arriving, hot and heavy. As I anticipated, of course, plenty of folks in Belarus are pretty darned steamed at me for making nice-nice to Alexander Lukashenko, and now I know all kinds of neat Belarusian insults. (I’d love to present the originals, but since most people’s computers are not configured to support Cyrillic fonts, I think Roman transliterations would be best.) So far, according to my new Belarusian friends, I’m a “blyad,” a “khui,” a “perdet,” a “mudak,” a “zjelob,” a “yobanyi karas,” a “yebanat vonuchii,” a “lobizatsa,” a “podonok,” a “uyoben pizdogalovii,” a “pidar beshenyi,” a “pizda ti jopoglazaya” and “perhot podzalupnay.” Moreover, I “yebat srat,” or something like that. Furthermore, I’m told, “Vse zayebalo! Pizdets na khui blyad!” “Zhopu porvu margala vikoliu!” “Jri govno i zdohn!” “Indanahway suka bluut!” And, my favorite, (so far): “Ya tvoyu mamu yebal pakimis tye smotrel i plakal kak malinkaya suka!” Obviously, as anyone who has read that post and this one can readily see, the Belarusians’ curses, imprecations and oaths are every bit as colorful as their proverbs.