After an overlong summer hiatus I am now back ruminating at my computer and you should expect posts from me every few days or so.
To get started, here’s a few bursts of stored up opinion:
Congressional resolution on “General Betray us”:
Please! Doesn’t Congress have better things to do, like getting us out of Iraq, slowing global warming, or providing health care? Maybe designating an official national sandwich?
I think in attacking General Petraeus, Move On fell prey to the all to easy temptation of attacking the messinger. (or maybe it was just the irrestible temptation of a great pun) Petraeus is a military commander, doing what military commanders are sworn to do, which is carry out their governments directives for organized slaughter, in the defense of freedom, or honor, or ego, or greed. Now, granted he’d be doing humanity a greater service if he quit his post and took up, say, teaching preschool. In that he is a military commander placed in the position of conducting the Bush Admnistration’s unjustifiable and unwinnable war, it’s no more fair to accuse him of “betrayal” than it would be to accuse a corporate CEO of betrayal when he tries to put an unprofitable year in the best light in the company’s annual report.
But all of this is completely irrelevant. The relevant point is that Move On has the constitutional right to express any opinion they please. It is not Congress’ business to pass judgement.
#2 From the ridiculous to the more ridiculous: the right to dry controversy
I don’t know if this has spread beyond Oregon, but in a a woman who lives in a gated community in Bend, ORegon (300 sunny days a year) decided to do her bit to slow global warming by hanging her laundry out to dry. Trouble is, this violated the covenants of her gated community and people ACTUALLY complained (like Congress, I guess they have also have nothing better to do than meddle in areas they don’t belong).
I grew up with clotheslines. My grandmothers used to hang clothes out on lines strung between their apartment windows in Chicago, gossiping with the other women as they hung out and gathered in the wash. My mother didn’t get a dryer until I was in high school. I remember helping her hang out the laundry and helping her fold the crisp, sweet smelling sheets. She wasn’t alone. Most households in our perfectly respectable tract house development hung out their wash.
Sometime in the seventies, I guess, dryers became de rigeur, and I admit, I’ve used them for all my adult life. In Portland, nine months out of the year, “outdoor drying” is an oxymoron. The one time I didn’t use a dryer was the summer our family spent in Italy. There, again, hardly anyone owns them, and in many a beautiful village, clothes flap happily in the breeze.
Probably the times going to come when we’re all going to have to pull out those clotheslines again, given the rising economic and environmental cost of running them (dryers consume 6% of the average home’s energy output). In the meantime, I’d say cheer this woman on rather than hassle her. Maybe hang up a clothesline yourself and gossip over the underwear. I can’t understand why residents of gated communities are so fond of coming up with these silly covenants anyway, like telling homeowners what color they must paint their deck or what kind of flowers they can plant. Don’t they have anything better to do than mind what’s in their neighbor’s backyard? Some participants in this argument think the correct recourse would be to change the covenant rules, and they have a point, but some rules are so petty and absurd that ignoring them is the best tactic.
