Broke but Woke

The governor of New Mexico is about to call a special session of the New Mexico state legislature.  The entire state should be afraid...very afraid.  Whenever this group of people gets together, there is no telling what might happen.  The Law of Gravity might be repealed or the state might join the Delian League and declare war on Persia.

Supposedly, the foremost legislative priority is to pass legislation legalizing recreational marijuana.  Unfortunately, this measure failed during the regular session because there was no consensus on how to tax it.  Well, to be honest, there was also a spirited debate on whether a citizen should be allowed to grow six plants or eight.  

Why is it that our legislature immediately presumes that any human activity that is permissible must also be taxed.

I’m probably wrong, but I’ve never thought the role of government was to regulate and control every aspect of its citizens’ lives.  I must be wrong, since evidently the sole responsibility of citizens is to provide an ever-increasing amount of tax money to our elected nannies.

Money, of course, is the primary motivation for the state’s justifying the legalization of marijuana.  Proponents of marijuana legalization have inundated the voters with ads and mailings claiming that if New Mexico will just legalize pot, it will magically bring in tens of thousands of jobs, will flood the treasury with new tax money, and probably will make it rain more often.

There is also the expectation that legalized pot would eliminate the criminal sale of marijuana.  Somehow, I’m skeptical to think illegal weed from Mexico—a country so close that I can see outside my office window—is going to be forced out of the market by a product regulated, licensed, inspected and taxed by the anti-business trolls from Santa Fe.

Supposedly, if the state will just legalize recreational pot, New Mexico will suddenly have 11,000 new jobs.  I live in a relatively small town, but if my math is correct, that means that my little town will suddenly have 550 people selling pot.  I’m curious: Is that about 100 little neighborhood pot shops (roughly one on every other street corner), or is that going to be one big, giant super Wal-Mart-like store?  Like a monster Cost-Co where I can just walk around and sample the chewables offered to me on a tray by some little old lady trying to supplement her Social Security check?

All of this sounds like that time about a dozen years ago when the state was going to legalize Indian gaming (Which is more aptly described as, “building tacky little casino wannabe bingo and slot machine parlors on every reservation”).  According to the out-of-state gambling corporations fronting for the various tribes, legalization would permanently solve the state’s entire budgetary problems with enough money left over to build an unused Spaceport and an empty tourist train.  

The horse racing industry took out ads that claimed that racetracks employed one out of every ten people in the state, all of whom would immediately become unemployed if people were able to play slot machines.  Actually, I don’t know anybody who works in the horse racing industry.  I don’t even know someone who knows someone who works with racehorses.  I still don’t know where those one in ten people are hiding.

The state legalized Indian gaming.  Aaaaannnd:  The horses still run around the race track and the promised the tax money did not appear.  I think the state may actually spend more money policing the gaming than we receive, though we went ahead and built the stupid Spaceport and the train, anyway.  If the state had built the stupid tourist train so that it connected the casinos to the race tracks….  Nah, I better not joke about that, the state legislature is still in session.

Then, there was the time that, if the state would only authorize a state lottery, it would provide so much revenue that the state could give every college student in the state a scholarship to cover tuition.   Now we have a state lottery, and the state allocates a measly 30% of the proceeds towards education.  Maybe the rest goes to cover the million dollars a month the stupid train loses.  (Which is a real bargain compared to the tab for the empty Spaceport.)

I hope you have noticed a couple of trends here.  First, the state keeps looking for an easy fix, since we know that actually expanding the state’s economy, creating jobs, and collecting taxes would violate the unofficial state motto:  We’ll try anything but hard work.  

Second, the state prefers to pass so-called ‘sin taxes’ that are primarily paid by people in the lowest economic strata of the state.  We have liquor taxes, lottery tickets, cigarette taxes, and casino taxes, and now we want to pass a marijuana tax?  All of these are incredibly regressive taxes for a state that prides itself on being so progressive.  

All of these taxes are aimed at products used primarily by the poor, the uneducated, and (at least traditionally) minorities.  We may be a state crammed full of schizophrenic hypocrites, but we be woke.  

In reality, the state lives and dies on the price of oil and gas, which provides one-third of the state government’s annual income.  We hate oil and gas, we despise fossil fuels, but we love the money.  The state pretends to be oh so progressive, but would secretly sell blood by the pint from the last surviving unicorn.  

Note:  Dear state legislature, I’m kidding.  There are no unicorns.  The last one was eaten by a wild jackalope.

Senate Ethics, Almost Equal to Whorehouse Morals

I see news every day about how partisan and contentious the politics in our nation’s capital are.  According to multiple stories, the bickering in the Senate between the two parties has reached epic proportions, said to be ”unique in our nation’s history”.

Horse hockey.

Today, politics is utterly tame in comparison to the politics of the 19th century.  Our august representatives may argue on the Senate floor, but there hasn’t been a fistfight in more than a century.  What happens in Senate offices is a topic best left alone, of course.

From the very beginning, the Senate drafted a set of rules designed to promote good behavior and polite discourse.  Of the first twenty Senate rules passed, ten dealt with the behavior of the members.  Most of these rules were influenced by Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s now-classic Manual of Parliamentary Practice.  One particularly telling passage reads as if it had been taken from a schoolroom wall: 

"No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting, speaking or whispering to another; nor to stand up or interrupt him; nor to pass between the Speaker and the speaking member; nor to go across the [Senate chamber], or to walk up and down it, or to take books or papers from the [clerk's] table, or write there."

Reading this, I’m immediately reminded of a diversionary tactic Winston Churchill once used in Parliament.  Wanting to divert attention away from the speech of an opposition member, Churchill lit a long cigar and merrily puffed away.  As the speech droned on, the ash of Churchill’s cigar grew longer and longer and impossibly longer.  Soon, most of Parliament was watching the cigar and waiting for the ash to drop...Waiting in vain, since Churchill had inserted a long thin wire up the middle of the cigar to hold the ash on.  Jefferson would have been pissed.

Well, a lot of things have happened in the Senate chambers that Jefferson wouldn’t like.  Ted Cruz once did Darth Vader imitations, Jim Inhofe threw a snowball, and Strom Thurmond staged a 24-hour filibuster against Civil Rights during which he was forced by hydraulic pressure to urinate into a bucket while he spoke.  All of this pales in comparison to that small incident in 1854, when Congressman Preston Brooks barged into the Senate chambers and beat Senator Charles Sumner senseless with a stout walking cane.  Incensed at Sumner’s anti-slavery stance, Brooks beat the senator so severely that the cane broke.  Despite the fact that the senator had collapsed, Brooks lifted the stricken man up by his coat lapel and continued to beat the man about the head with the brass tipped end of the broken cane.  Other senators rushed to help Sumner but were held back at gunpoint by Congressman Lawrence Keitt.  

Sumner was unconscious and never completely recovered either emotionally nor physically, not returning to his sear in the Senate for three years.  Brooks also needed medical attention as he had beat Sumner so savagely that as he swung the cane backwards to deliver another blow, he had inflicted several blows against his own forehead.  (He was passionate, but not overly intelligent.)

Both Keitt and Brooks were forced to resign, and in the next election, both were sent back to the House of Representatives.  It may give the reader some satisfaction to learn that almost immediately after returning to the House, Brooks caught the croup, and as he painfully died, he was so desperate for air that he tried to rip open his throat with his bare hands. 

There have been, other, occasionally violent, memorable moments on the Senate floor.  During the debate over the Missouri Compromise, Senator Henry Foote pulled a pistol on Senator Foote, who screamed "Let him fire! Let the assassin fire!", as Foote was wrestled to the floor.  Fifty years later, the senior senator from South Carolina had a fistfight with the junior senator from the same state, despite the fact that the two men were both in the same party.  The fight was so violent that most of the senators who tried to stop the fight suffered blows requiring first aid.  And at the start of the first World War, Senator La Follette lost his temper and had to be physically restrained from hurling a brass spittoon at Arkansas’ Joseph Robinson.

If you are like me, at this point you are probably wondering when the spittoons left the Senate.  The answer, of course, is that they haven’t—there are still two on the Senate floor, though no one has actually used one in the last forty years.  And though smoking in the Senate has been banned since 1914, there is still no rule against chewing tobacco.  The two snuff boxes installed by Millard are still present but are no longer filled:  the last Senator to avail himself of snuff was Senator Overman in 1930. (Overman once staged a filibuster to prevent the passage of an anti-lynching bill, saying that passage would give ignorant black people in the South permission to "commit the foulest of outrages.”  Overman died in 1930, I hope it was the snuff that killed him.)

Sadly, there have been a few times when a good cane or a well-aimed spittoon would have been useful, but no senator had the nerve to provide it.  A monstrous (and unfortunately all too recent) example would be when the deranged racist, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who was inspired by the example of Adolf Hitler to rise in 1938 to make an impassioned plea for Congress to set aside $250 million dollars for his pet project:  the deportation of twelve million African Americans to Liberia.  

It will surprise no one to learn that Bilbo—a dedicated, lifelong member of the KKK—was so inept an administrator that while governor of Mississippi (and despite starting the first state sales tax in America), he left the state millions of dollars in debt with slightly less than $1300 in the state treasury at the end of his tenure.  Recently, his statue was removed from the statehouse rotunda to a room used the Legislative Black Caucus, whose members use the statue as a coat rack.  This is probably the best example of Mississippi humor since Mark Twain steamed past the state on a riverboat.

Lest you think the Senate has always been sort of a reform school for overaged children, I would point out that the two political parties have occasionally been capable of remarkable cooperation.  Between 1953 and 1954, during the 83rd Congress, the Senate was so incredibly balanced between the two parties, that the death of a single Senator could tip the majority to the opposite party.  Normally, the death of a senator is such a relatively rare thing that a single death is an outlier and a statistical anomaly.

But, in 1953, the average age in the United States Senate was slightly higher than that of Great Britain’s House of Lords, where membership is a privilege for life.  Over the next 24 months, there were nine deaths and one resignation (the latter probably for fear of being a member of a legislative body that had a mortality rate similar to that of the units that assaulted Normandy Beach on D-Day).

Majority control of the Senate changed so many times, switching back and forth between the two parties, with each switch prompting a new election for majority leader and the requisite change of offices and stationery, that finally, the Republicans, despite being technically the majority party, just told the Democrats to keep the office and pretend they were in the majority.  This made perfect sense, since before they could actually vote on any important piece of legislation, somebody else was likely to die.

As for bipartisan cooperation today, if the 1953 model is the only way we can achieve it, I’m for it.

And So Was His Grandfather

Every so often, Americans become fascinated with royal lineage, family heritage and race.  The current craze is due to the recently televised interview of a couple of royal multimillionaires discussing oppression with a multibillionaire while comfortably seated in the garden of the billionaire’s estate.  

The story was titillating only because the royal family were supposedly horrified at the prospect of a black member of the royal family.  Why the royal family should be upset by this, when they so clearly are not bothered by the fact that somewhere in Prince Charles’ ancestry there is a horse, is never explained. 

Maybe I missed it, but the press never got around to reporting that according to some historians, the royal family already has a black member of the family, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of mad King George III, was descended from Black Portuguese royalty.  Even the records of the queen’s private physician recorded that Her Majesty was a mulatto.  

Of course, all such nitpicking at our DNA is complete nonsense.  If you look at the history of royal families, it doesn’t take long to realize that monarchs were far more concerned with keeping property concentrated within a single family than about who actually descended from whom. 

The foolishness of ‘royal heritage’ was superbly caricatured by the great Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, in an etching he produced in 1797, which is number 39 in his “Los Caprichos”.  Titled, “Hasta Su Abuelo” (which means “So Was His Grandfather”), it shows a well-dressed royal jackass looking at what is presumably a collection of pictures of his ancestors, all of whom were also jackasses (albeit, not well-dressed, but resembling livestock).

 Goya used the recurring image of an ass to represent the aristocracy in Spain, and one possible interpretation of this etching is that it shows the general preoccupation of the aristocracy with establishing noble lineages.  Considering the power of the royalty when Goya produced this image, it represents an amazing act of courage for any artist—much less the official court painter to the king—to lampoon the aristocracy.

When Goya produced this etching, it was at the tail end of the Enlightenment, which marked a shift in the way most people thought. The Enlightenment was generally characterized by a growth of logical reasoning and a return to ‘naturalism’—but this arrived a little late in Spain.  There was a general awakening to the belief that the old, established ways of doing things—founded in superstition and questionable religious dogma that favored one group over others—needed to be reexamined under “the light” of logic and reason.  

This was, of course, a direct challenge to the status quo and to tradition, particularly for the Spanish Crown.  Remember the “divine right of kings”? Remember that the French Revolution was ongoing right next door was so popular that people were losing their minds.  Or at least their heads. The Spanish Crown’s fear was not that unreasonable, under the circumstance.

The causes of the Enlightenment were as numerous as they were varied.  Tens of thousands had traveled the world, and ironically, it was frequently the Spanish who brought back with them new ideas and observations.  Travel exposed people to other cultures—frequently those in which people placed less importance on ancestry.  They also brought the new fruit and vegetables of the New World back to Europe, dramatically altering diets and the ways agriculture had been done for millennia.  Merchants, miners, and tradesmen suddenly had wealth enough to challenge—if not exceed—that of some aristocrats.

The Spanish monarch, King Charles IV, was terrified of these new ideas—especially a philosophy that said the common men were equal to aristocrats—so he ordered his soldiers to inspect all mail coming south from France, seeking to keep the ideas of Rousseau, Locke, and Voltaire north of the border.  This attempt at censorship did not work, of course.

A plausible alternative explanation is that the ass depicted examining his heritage represents Manuel Godoy, the Spanish Prime Minister who had (by remarkable coincidence) just recently had his family lineage published, claiming to trace his noble ancestry back hundreds of years to the time of the Visigoths. 

 Godoy, the son of a noble but penniless family, had come to Madrid in 1784, at the age of 17 to join the palace guards.  Handsome and with a talent for singing and playing the Spanish guitar, he soon came to the attention of the Queen, Maria Luisa de Palma.  Godoy’s phenomenally rapid rise to power undoubtedly was the result of talents that, while understood by later historians, were nevertheless not fully documented.  

By the end of 1788, Godoy was the Captain of the palace guards and six months later, he had been promoted to the rank of colonel in the Spanish Army.  In rapid succession, he was promoted to general, he was knighted, he was made a Gentleman of the King’s Chamber and he was promoted to Field Marshall.  By the end of 1792, he was the nation’s Prime Minister at the tender age of twenty-five.  Godoy was a very talented young man!

As Prime Minister, Godoy involved Spain in several disastrous wars, eventually inciting the invasion by Napoleon that resulted in the abdication of King Charles and the destruction of the Spanish Empire.  Surprisingly, Charles IV remained a faithful friend of Godoy until the monarch’s death.

All of Godoy’s ministerial misadventures were done with the blessing of King Charles IV, who had neither any aptitude nor any interest in governing his realm.  This was a direct result of the long practice of limiting royal marriages to first cousins and nieces, in order to keep property inside the family.  After a surprisingly few generations of marriages where your own children were also your first cousins, you get a monarch who can sit in a corner and lick his own eyebrows.

Goya, who painted several portraits of Godoy and executed several commissions from him, was as openly contemptuous of the foolish aristocrat as possible—which was a remarkable act given that Goya depended on the favor of the court for the continued sales of his works.  Less remarkable was that within weeks of publication of Los Caprichos, Goya pulled all remaining copies from sale and ‘gifted’ them to the king.

Goya worked at the royal court, so he was well acquainted with the king and queen and the rest of the royal family.  Despite his background and the strict rules of society, Goya could recognize that the royal family were simply privileged jackasses.

So, three hundred years after the Enlightenment and more than two centuries since Goya so magnificently pointed out that all royalty are jackasses, why do we still give these fools so much of our attention, if not respect?  

Twas Best Done Slowly

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a French corporation’s attempts to resurrect sail powered cargo ships.  Almost immediately, I received emails about a different French company that already has such a ship crossing the Atlantic, carrying French wine to America and chocolate back to Europe.

While the Grain de Sail is really cool, I doubt that she is going to revolutionize the cargo ship industry.  On her maiden voyage, the aluminum-hulled sailing vessel was able to transport 15,000 bottles of cognac to New York.  For the sake of comparison, if just the French champagne annually consumed by Americans were shipped this way.... They’re gonna need another 5000 sailboats.

That’s assuming that each sailboat can make the scheduled 4 voyages a year.  It also assumes that the crew of four on each boat won’t sample the wares on a 30-day crossing.  Nah, no sailor would do such a thing.  

The company claims that the gentle voyage, the natural rocking of the ship, and the far better conditions of their cargo hold as opposed to a being locked inside a hot closed cargo container, will deliver a better bottle of wine.  I admit to being a contrarian by nature, but in this case, I bet they are right.  And by some back of an envelope figuring and total guess work, this method of shipping probably adds a minimum of $10 in shipping cost to each bottle.  

I will probably never know, since $10 is getting pretty close to the top of my wine price range.  My personal wine philosophy says it doesn’t take an oenophile to find a good $25 bottle of wine, but a true connoisseur can find a decent bottle for $15 that doesn’t come with a label reading “Australian Fighting Wine”.

Still, I like the idea of those sailboats and I really hope the sailing ships are a great success.  Maybe, it is time for travel to slow the hell down.  If the only point of travel is to get to the destination quickly, why bother?

There is a great passage in the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant where he describes his journey to West Point.  Having just been appointed to the academy, Grant left Ripley, Ohio for Pittsburgh by steamer.  At that time, riverboats had no defined schedule and would stop as frequently, and for as long as necessary, to pick up passengers and freight.  Today, the trip will take about five hours by car, but for Grant, the trip up the river took three leisurely days.  

From Pittsburgh, Grant took the Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg Mainline Canal to Harrisburg, deciding against traveling by stage, since he described travel by canal as the most comfortable method of travel possible.  I heartily agree.  While traveling through the Oxford region of England, I once got off a canal boat, turning the duty of steering the 60’ boat over to my twelve-year old son, The-Other-One.  (It wasn’t like he could get lost on a canal:  it wasn’t even wide enough to turn the old boat around, and if he really messed up, he had his fourteen-year-old brother, What’s-His-Name, to help him.)

Once on the tow path, I slowly stretched my legs, stopping frequently to admire the magnificent gardens.  When I got tired of walking, I took a short nap on a waterside bench.  Presently, the canal boat caught up and I boarded again.  The only things lazier than a canal boat are stalagmites and congressmen.

Where was I? Oh, yeah.  When Grant arrived in Harrisburg, he boarded a railroad train bound for Philadelphia.  This was the first train Grant had ever seen.  As he wrote:

In travelling by the road from Harrisburg, I thought the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.  We travelled at least eighteen miles an hour, when at full speed, and made the whole distance averaging probably as much as twelve miles an hour.  This seemed like annihilating space.

How wonderful!  Twelve to eighteen miles an hour is fast enough to get somewhere, but slow enough to see the countryside, and occasionally read a book while the scenery races past a window.  In travel, speed is the antithesis of enjoyment.

I made a list of my favorite writings by Mark Twain and quickly found an obvious pattern.  Twain’s stories of traveling by riverboat in Life on the Mississippi, his account of traveling across the American West by stagecoach in Roughing It, and his remarkable and unforgettable accounts of Huck and Jim’s raft floating down a languid river in Huckleberry Finn…. All are about slow, dignified travel.

I cannot imagine anyone writing as memorable a story involving someone traveling across an ocean in a 747.  If Marco Polo had gone to China by plane, his book would have been a forgotten pamphlet.  Travel used to be a way of broadening the mind; today it is just a way of lightening the wallet.  Traveling by air has all the dignity of being sentenced to a weekend in the county jail.

Perhaps we have made travel too easy.  I remember when my wife and I took our sons from London to Paris.  The Chunnel had just opened, and we took the train.  For a while, the signs in the little towns that flew by the windows were in English, then we went into a tunnel for a few minutes and when we came out, the signs were in French.  My sons were only dimly aware that we had journeyed to a new country.  We never even saw the water.

Think of the history of what crossing the English Channel used to mean.  Monarchies rose and fell on crossing that strip of water.  Countless thousands of men died in the attempt.  All the power and military might of Hitler and Napoleon couldn’t cross that channel and their failure changed the future history of the world.  And my sons had just done it in the time it took to drink a coke (and I wasn’t even sure if they knew we had done it).

Half a century ago, I used to drive my aging pickup down to the beach at Corpus Christi.  The old highway took you through every little town and village along the way.  The town of Beeville was about an hour away from the beach, and I’d stop at the town square and admire the Navy Skyraider up on a pedestal in the town square.  You couldn’t get too close, since the aging old naval jet was also home to a thriving bee hive.  Then, I’d stop in at a charming bookstore next to the diner that served a damn fine chicken fried steak.  

The last time I drove that route, the new highway was done, bypassing all the old picturesque little towns.  As we zipped down the multilane highway, I couldn’t even find the exit for Beeville.

I think we are all aware that the faster you drive a car, the narrower your cone of vision of the road ahead becomes.  Today, travel has become so fast, that I fear we can just barely see beyond the tips of our noses.  We can travel so far and so fast that we have just enough time to turn around and hurry back home.  

I don’t have any immediate plans to return to France, even if the pandemic would allow it.  But, if I do go again, I want to go on the Grain de Sail.  I’ll help them take care of the cargo.