Social Spin

    Here's what I've been reading recently, a glimpse of what has been piling up (my magazines) and what has been needing a bit more of my attention (my yard).  But with nearly five days of steady rain, it's been a good time to catch up on eyeball time and to read a few books.  First off is Three Sheets to the Wind by Cynthia Barrett, a book of how nautical terms came to enter our everyday language.  At first, I thought that inside would be just a few dozen words (I could think of "shipshape" and the usual "port/starboard" terms); but here's one example from the book: When lost in coastal waters sailors shimmied up the ship's mast and released a crow from a cage.  The crow flew straight toward the nearest shore.  The lookout platform at the top of the mast was called the "crow's nest."  The expression "as the crow flies" implies the most direct route.  As it would turn out, the port/starboard terms were nowhere to be found, but sayings such as "get to the point," "pipe down" and "bell bottoms" were all there, the latter please-don't-come-back fashion created in order to make the jeans "...easy to roll the pant leg above the knees when swabbing the deck."  Who knew?  And while it's still a quick read, you just may discover more than the French origins of "batten down the hatches" or the Belgian origins of the duffel bag.  And that definition of fathom? -- This nautical unit of measurement is based on the span of a man's outstretched arms...To measure the depth of water, a weighted line was dropped overboard.  The line was measured in fathoms.  Each fathom equaled six feet.  The sailor's cry of "deep six" meant that the ship was in six fathoms or 36 feet of water.  Anything that fell off a ship in waters this deep was gone for good.  Now, can you fathom that? (and yes, that where that term's usage originated)

   Then came Angela Watson's book Fewer Things Better; okay it's designed for today's educators but how could you resist these opening sentences: I'm guessing you've picked up this book because you want your life to have a real impact on the world.  You care about making a difference, not only in the classroom, but in your family and community, too.  And yet that focus tends to feel impossible when you're always exhausted and overwhelmed.  How can you do what's meaningful when you're distracted by never-ending paperwork, meetings, errands, and housework.  How can you give the best of yourself when you're bogged down with mundane tasks and unfulfilling obligations?  Step one, she says, stop blaming yourself for basically trying to do the impossible; get clarity (hmm, sounds like a good lesson for life itself).  Her book is subtitled: The Courage to Focus on What Matters Most.

   Naturally, diving into one's headspace drew me to Games You Can Play in Your Head (as if all of us don't already do that with our fears and worries).  The author, J. Theophrastus Bartholomew disappeared long ago and is apparently quite content with that (go ahead and try to find out some information about him) but he wrote a lot of mind games, as in 6000+ games of which the book featured now edits that number down to the author's favorite 10 mental games.  But here's how Editors Sam Gorski and D.F. Lovett introduce you to this collection: WE DID NOT WRITE THIS BOOK, ALTHOUGH WE WISH WE DID.  It all began in the summer of 2014, when the two of us --Sam and David-- discovered six volumes of the first edition of J. Theophrastus Bartholomew's Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself at a yard sale in Bayport, Minnesota.  To clarify, we did not discover siz copies of the book: we discovered six of the fourteen volumes of the original book series, a sprawling out-of-print game series produced by a defunct publisher in the late 1980s and early 1990s...The books fascinated us!  Here, in our hands, was something so similar to many of our favorite things --roleplaying games, tales of adventure, murder mysteries, fantasy epics-- but with an entirely different approach than anything we'd seen before.  Instead of gathering your friends for a night of pizza and dragon-slaying in the basement, these books urge you to isolate yourself as you dive into your own mind.

   And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my annual singular dive into a book of fiction, this year that book being by author Genki Kawamura who wrote If Cats Disappeared From the World.  Given a true "deal with the devil," the main character can buy an extra day of life by wishing something else away and thus begins his struggle.  Think of it, if you were dying but could live for another day because of this Faustian bargain, what would you have disappear from the earth?  Peanut butter?  Mosquitos?  Cell phones?  Admittedly I'm pretty picky with fiction but somehow I was entranced...and apparently so were many others as the book has gone on to sell over 2 million copies (so far). 

   Add to all of that our rare and recent binge watching of the Irish/British series Line of Duty which just completed its 5th season (one of the most watched series in England and admittedly, one of the better crime series I've seen in recent years).  And let's not forget the offerings of Quello, the go-to site for everything concert, from documentaries to live performances (some not even available on DVD); via Quello my wife and I watched the Ron Howard compilation of the Beatles, Eight Days A Week, which was quite a jaunt back in time hearing Paul say that it was all so simple in the beginning and became so complicated in the end...a good summary of life itself, one would think.   And while in my car, I'm listening to the William Joyce "Guardian" series, book two being E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth's Core...I'm finding it every bit as imaginative and captivating as the Harry Potter books which I loved...talk the language of moonbeams, anyone?

   It's all free from the library of course.  Okay, not really free per se because we pay for this with our taxes; but anybody can use the library from which all of these offerings emerge (I've written several earlier posts on the library and my seemingly constant usage of such).  The Rosetta Stone language tools?  Free.  The Great Courses audio and video lecture series?  Free.  The complete Acorn British television catalogue (many of which are shows or series not carried by either Netflix or Amazon)?  Free.  Quello and all those hidden and newly discovered concerts?  Free.  Best selling books, new magazines, the latest audio books?  Free.  Quite likely, this might be one example of socialism at its best.

   To listen to the politics of today, one hears the word "socialism" as a negative term.  Yet in this country, people willingly collect their Social Security checks, call their social police and fire departments, and submit to the will of Congress when a majority of military and medical contracts are denied competitive bidding (our Medicare system has been forced to pay higher medical prescription costs due to a restrictive bill passed by Congress some years ago); an outsider might look at this as defeating one of the key features of capitalism, that of competition creating what's best for the consumer.  But give the people social help and suddenly that dreaded word "socialism" comes into play.  But defining socialism is far more complicated than that.  Take this brief summary from Wikipedia: Social ownership can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.  There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, with social ownership being the common element shared by its various forms.  Socialist systems are divided into non-market and market forms.  Non-market socialism involves the substitution of factor markets and money with engineering and technical criteria based on calculation performed in-kind, thereby producing an economic mechanism that functions according to different economic laws from those of capitalism.  Non-market socialism aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system.  By contrast, market socialism retains the use of monetary prices, factor markets and in some cases the profit motive, with respect to the operation of socially owned enterprises and the allocation of capital goods between them.  Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm, or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend.  The socialist calculation debate concerns the feasibility and methods of resource allocation for a socialist system.  Wait, what??  The bottom line, there are many forms of all sorts of governments, socialism included.  And political parties are happy to keep people on a carousel that continues to spin.  The Republican Party that has allegedly created the current good economy with tax breaks and deductions, the same Party that so hated deficits and was once-known as the balanced-budget party? -- it's new motto is to forget all of that and to just go into debt.  "Charge" has changed from a cavalry battle cry to a new term for the party, Charge It, to the tune of our country's deficit now pegged at over $1 trillion.  The U.S. prints Treasury bills, notes and bonds, all of which are backed by the Treasury of the U.S. and safely guarantees a set interest rate, and China has bought a lot of these as in well over 3x the current reserves of the U.S. ($3.1 trillion at last count) and could simply cash them out (in financial circles, this is called China's "nuclear option").  But in today's Presidential races (yes, the U.S. campaigns for election go on for years and are already well underway for the race for 2020), calls for universal health care, college tuition and more are being questioned by Republicans with "who's going to pay?"  Jump back two years when the same Party ignored that question by deciding to simply kick the can down the road (we'll pay later) and their cries seem to ring a bit hollow.  And now they're instituting their own "nuclear option" and bringing in the word socialism.

   This letter came to one South Carolina Senator some decades ago but perhaps exemplifies the short term memory of the voting public and how political "spin" can affect that belief of what is or isn't good for them; in a story in The Nation, the Senator told this: A veteran returning from Korea went to college on the GI Bill, bought his house with an FHA loan, saw his kids born in a VA hospital, started a business with an SBA loan, got electricity from TVA and, later, water from an EPA project.  His parents, living on Social Security, retired to a farm, got electricity from REA, and had their soil tested by the USDA.  When his father became ill, the family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare, and a life was saved with a drug developed through NIH.  His kids participated in the school lunch program, learned physics from teachers trained in an NSF program, and went to college with guaranteed student loans.  He drove to work on the Interstate and moored his boat in a channel dredged by Army engineers.  When floods hit, he took Amtrak to Washington to apply for disaster relief and spent some time in the Smithsonian museums.  Then one day, he got mad.  He wrote his senator an angry letter.  "Get the government off my back," he wrote.  "I'm tired of paying taxes for all these programs created for ungrateful people."
 
   So to end, here's perhaps the highlight of the books I've been browsing, this being 100 Speeches That Changed the World.  To read the rallying cry of Elizabeth I to her troops preparing for the Spanish Armada in 1588; to think of the speech of Chief Joseph ("I will fight no more forever") in 1877 (he was only 37 years old); to "hear" the decision by Socrates to stay and swallow the poison that the Athenian government condemned him to ("I know that I know nothing"); and this, redacted a bit so that you can have a bit of time to guess it's origin*: ...Then began the new colonization of our country, the acquisition of the best agricultural lands by United States firms, concessions of (our) natural resources and mines, concessions of public utilities for exploitation purposes, commercial concessions of all types.  These concessions, when linked with the constitutional right --constitutional by force-- of intervention in our country, turned it...into an American colony.  Colonies do not speak.  Colonies are not known until they have the opportunity to express themselves...Let us not deceive ourselves, since by doing so we only make ourselves ridiculous.  Let no one be mistaken.  There was no independent republic; there was only a colony where orders were given by the Ambassador of the United States...We are not ashamed to have to declare this.  On the contrary: we are proud to say that today no embassy rules our country; our country is ruled by its people!

*The speech was made to the United Nations in 1960 by Fidel Castro, angry that the U.S. controlled 70% of Cuba's land.  When the U.S. imposed economic sanctions, Castro (as said in the book): ...leveled pay, halved rents, improved education facilities, and passed out parcels of confiscated land to Cuba's poorest citizens.  At the same time he spent heavily on improving the island's transport infrastructure...He stated flatly "that revolutions do not ruin countries, and that imperialist governments do try to ruin countries." ...Castro's bodyguard once estimated that there were 638 attempts to assassinate the leader.  Fidel Castro died of old age in 2016.  Cuba is considered a socialist government, according to Investopedia.