Mundane Musings

Listening to cowboy music (Lonesome Dove Suite by Basil Pouledoris) with earphones. Boob tube is off. Rosie is visiting on the phone or working on her genealogy or both. Rudy is in the chair opposite me, muzzle on paws.

We got a break from the fiercest of the heat today with a high merely in the mid-nineties and less humidity. I leaped (well, slouched) to the opportunity to mow grass. After cutting about a fifth of the yard, I bent the mower's blade, or rather a tree root bent it. Tragic error! David counsels that I'll have to go to Sears and get a new blade. Manana, muchachos y muchachas. Till then, !fiesta y siesta!

Rosie lay down and slept like the dead this afternoon for a full hour and a half and afterwards remonstrated about being so lazy. She has been in a dead run in the service of her family all week in this infernal heat and I reminded her of that.

Rosie is back in her chair and Rudy has moved to the back of this recliner behind me. It's comforting for both of us for him to be back there.

TCM had some Edgar Allan Poe movies on today, which reminded me of Poe's "tales of ratiocination," as he called them, i.e. detective stories in which the mystery solver uses logic to untangle the mystery. Poe invented a Parisian sleuth named August Dupin, on whom Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is said to have been modeled. The two Dupin stories are "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." The one I like best is "The Gold Bug," in which the protagonist finds buried treasure by solving a cryptogram, in which the letters of a message are substituted for by other letters, e.g. c stands for y, g for a, etc. Various newspapers have such puzzles and I think they're on the internet, of course. The Merriam-Webster dictionary site has word games, although M-W is not as generous in making a variety of games available as they used to be.

Alison Stewart has subbed for Keith the last two nights and has done a wonderful job as usual. She is fun and I think it would be nice if she and Keith would partner all the time with him doing the political news up front and her doing the "Oddball" etc. She did the banter with Michael Musto last night and was great. I think those things are somewhat scripted with the straight host setting Michael up to do his comic remarks. The buffoons of choice last night were Britney and "K-Fed."

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are not seen on Fridays. I think it is a wise choice not to overexpose. Jon has been going after Mitt Romney a lot lately. The guy is pompous, and he is inserting his foot in his mouth more and more with increasing public exposure. I love the latest remark about how his five sons were serving their country best by (instead of serving in Iraq) campaigning for him. John liked it too and went after it with his usual brilliant satire. I wish satire would save our country. I suppose sometimes it does, but its wheels grind exceedingly slow and, I fear, exceedingly coarse.

Well, enough of that. Last night we also watched La Ley de Herodes (Herod's Law), a Mexican film. It was gallows-humor and a morality tale about political corruption in Mexico, set in 1949, and it prompted me to reflect that los Estados Unidos has turned into a banana republic, with a vote, and rhetoric about "freedom" and opposition to "evil," but with everybody on the take and brutal repression of dissent, and every peasant humping along trying to keep from going under and pretending that it's the best it can be.

I've pretty much stopped using this as a forum for criticizing the government, or rather the people who have hijacked our government, an institution that I believe can be good and useful to its citizens, from the decent people who once ran it. In 1949, the president was Harry Truman, who was a good and honorable public servant and, it so happened, a man of the people. He was followed in office by a good and honorable public servant, Ike Eisenhower, an excellent military commander and not so bad as a president. Both of these men, a Democrat and a Republican, believed in the potential of government as a force for good and saw themselves as servants of the people, all of the people.

After Watergate and the resignation of Nixon, the journalists were crowing about how our government had survived a constitutional crisis, some saying they knew all along that it would. Will we survive this one? I think we've been weakened and corrupted to perhaps that "tipping point" that they speak of, one of their buzz phrases. I guess we'll see. I think we've tipped for sure and we're sliding and not many perceive our slide into the abyss.

Maybe it will become more evident when we're over the edge and in free fall.