Politics

It’s Sunday night and there’s school tomorrow and homework is probably unfinished and not confessed to and likely a quiz unstudied for so Fred isn’t in a good mood.

He’s sixteen and I have to pay bills tomorrow and I’m not feeling so zipadeedoodah myself.

What’s for dinner? Meatloaf. Can I have chicken and bacon risotto? No. Why not? Too much trouble.

The meatloaf is ready. I don’t like meatloaf. It’s not true, but meatloaf is one of those foods you’re allowed to dislike depending on how you feel.

I weaken and think of my friend Jerry whose mother Ida ran a lunch joint on La Cienega in the fifties. Ida cooked at night for her family of six.  She went around the table and made them pretty much whatever they wanted for dinner as in two steaks, one chicken, and three noodles with kasha.

Jerry remembers the first time his bride uttered the words “Dinner is ready.” He replied, ”Aren’t you going to ask me what I want?”  He learned fast.

The economy is in tatters and, for millions of people, the future is uncertain. But for some employees at the Hormel Foods Corporation plant here, times have never been better. They are working at a furious pace and piling up all the overtime they want.

The workers make Spam, perhaps the emblematic hard-times food in the American pantry.

Through war and recession, Americans have turned to the glistening canned product from Hormel as a way to save money while still putting something that resembles meat on the table. Now, in a sign of the times, it is happening again, and Hormel is cranking out as much Spam as its workers can produce.

In a factory that abuts Interstate 90, two shifts of workers have been making Spam seven days a week since July, and they have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely.

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Dear Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid,

You’ve been writing to me for months (years), now I’m writing to you....
Why are we bailing out the auto industry?

We have enough cars sitting in new car lots and used car lots across the country that nobody can buy.  Why do we really need to waste all that steel, rubber, leather, emit greenhouse gases for a product nobody needs.  What we need to do is figure out how to convert those cars to energy-efficient cars.  We can change a heart, how come we don’t know how to change an engine?

Yes, I know, that 600,000 jobs hang in the balance but wait, I have a solution.  Why don’t we convert all those plants to alternative energy sector plants, windmills, solar panels, solar batteries, bio-diesel, lithium batteries...put the UAW workers first in line for those jobs and turn that sector into a Union Shop.  It’s a win-win all around.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

-William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”

We won the big one. I had dared, privately, to hope that Obama would win, and I always said publicly that I was sure he would win, but I felt something hard and tight melt inside of me when it was a fact that he really, actually did win. After Obama was declared a winner, my 11-year-old son reminded me that “now we can both say we shook a President’s hand.” I’m proud to say we did.

We lost the little one, though; Bob Alexander’s Congressional campaign for which I have lost sleep, accepted “snack sized” pay, and written, read, analyzed and studied when I was so tired I was sure I couldn’t do one more thing. We were not even close.