Money may not be able to solve all your problems, but money can provide security, and it can provide you comfort. It is also a source of pleasure; and by pleasure, I just don’t mean sybaritic, sensual pleasure, but intellectual or emotional satisfaction. I would rather own a fine telescope than spend a weekend in Las Vegas. It’s not that I have anything against Vegas, I just don’t value its charms as much as I do a night under the stars.

Where money becomes pathological and destructive is when it becomes an end in itself: when it becomes a means of keeping score, of flaunting your social status, of establishing your power over others.

Lavish consumerism has always been with us. The rich who cannot spend their money wisely never seem to have any trouble spending it conspicuously. What makes our age unique is how much effort (and money) has gone into making conspicuous spending a social virtue. Our entire economy is based on it, and now that it is becoming environmentally and financially unsustainable we have nothing to
substitute in its place. I think I first realized this when I was just a youth, and I have lived my own life with that idea in mind. I do believe it was the single most important and valuable realization I have ever had.

I’m perfectly aware that having money doesn’t necessarily mean you stole it from someone else. But very often those who use it as a means of self-actualization do exactly that. When money becomes an end in itself, or the act of demonstrating to others that you have more of it than they do becomes a psychological necessity; then the need to get it by any means required, whether criminal or predatory, is inevitable.

I do not begrudge the wealthy man, in fact, compared to the average human being on this planet, I AM a wealthy man. I have everything I need and much of what I want, and I have a nice reserve for emergencies. It can be truly said “I live like Pharaoh”. We are all entitled to earn what we can, spend what we must, save what we are able, and squander what we want, although not all of us are able to do so.

The rich man can spend his money. He’s even entitled to spend his money to get or stay rich. However, he has no right to spend my money so he can become richer.

Anyway…small rant has expired…yes..they still exist ER…but it is endangered.

The one reason I started my blahg was I wanted my granddaughter to know her grandmother. I was hoping for memories to surface when she read it. We’ll see.

One day I eavesdropped while some of the older girls (pre-teens) were teaching the younger ones some nursery rhymes. These were accompanied by elaborate sequential hand gesures, like “patty-cake”, but much more complex and elaborate. They had dozens of verses, and the graceful twirling and slapping of their hands was keyed to the stories in the rhymes. Little girl’s voices, in rapt concentration, a singsong being transmitted from generation to generation of children. Many of the phrases seemed to be very ancient, and probably dated back to medieval England.

Everyone knows “ring aound the rosy” goes back to the time of the Black Death in the late Middle Ages, but it appears there is an entire repertoire of folk history buried in children’s rhymes and games. I asked the girls what some of these words meant, but they did not know. They had just been taught by older girls, and by their sisters. In an unbroken chain back to the beginning of time, now passed on to a new generation of kids. Those pretty little girls are probably all grandmothers now, I wonder if those delightful little chants still survive.

I wonder if this still goes on. Have electronic toys and games destroyed this priceless oral history? I remember from my own youth how we had a sequence of toys, and each toy had its own season. One day everyone would be flying kites, the next we’d be throwing tops, and a month later playing stoop-ball. The girls had jacks, we had marbles. Do kids do this any more?

I don’t think anyone even knows how to wind and throw a top these days. Its probably too dangerous for our litigious age.

I am a huge Barbara Ehrenreich fan. I’ve read several of her books. Not only is she a compassionate and perceptive researcher and analyst, she is also a clear and elegant prose stylist and a trained scholar who documents her assertions and conclusions very effectively. I’m sure Tom would love her.

BTW, the Wiki entry on Pleasantville had this entry…

Director Gary Ross stated, “This movie is about the fact that personal repression gives rise to larger political oppression…That when we’re afraid of certain things in ourselves or we’re afraid of change, we project those fears on to other things, and a lot of very ugly social situations can develop”.

Robert Beuka says in his book SuburbiaNation, “Pleasantville is a morality tale concerning the values of contemporary suburban America by holding that social landscape up against both the Utopian and the dystopian visions of suburbia that emerged in the 1950s”.

Robert McDaniel of Film and History described the town as the perfect place, “It never rains, the highs and lows rest at 72 degrees, the fire department exists only to rescue treed cats, and the basketball team never misses the hoop.” However, McDaniel says, “Pleasantville is a false hope. David’s journey tells him only that there is no ‘right’ life, no model for how things are ‘supposed to be.’”

But you better not let Tom know you’re reading BE. She’s been on the Conservative shitlist for years now.

I can tell just by the introduction…I perceive I will be eating humble pie for awhile.
Gonna be interesting…she sits on the left. But I will listen.

Also, in town, I had extended family and friends and neighbors of my parents who were always available for a chat or a treat. It seemed everybody knew me, (and ratted me out to my mom if I got into mischief). The Cuban ghetto had a lot more in common with Mayberry RFD than the sparse, scattered suburbs west of town.

Out in the country it was all weird Anglo people with impenetrable accents and mystifying customs. Unlike the city, I had no friends my own age except at school, and school was 7 miles away by bus (I had always walked to school before, and my classmates were my neighbors). I now only had one school chum living near me (two miles walk away!).

When I was a kid we had kid toys, we had tops, stickball, yo-yos, kites, marbles, bikes to get around with. In the country, the hormones kicked in and only girls mattered any more, and if you didn’t have a car you just had no access to girls, or any hope of ever having access.

There were some advanatages, I could rent a rowboat at Giant’s Camp and go fishing in the Alafia River. I could catch frogs and snakes in the canals that drained my neighborhood, and I could hunt fossils at the phosphate pits. But these were mostly solitary pursuits. In school, only football and cars seemed to matter, and I had no access to the latter and rapidly came to hate the former.

Suburbia sucked, big time. And I never had the heart to tell my mother. I knew perfectly well she had sacrificed so much to allow me to grow up in that environment, I couldn’t just tell her I had been happier at the Ponce de Leon Projects in Ybor City.

As a result of your post, and looking up a few things, my goal today is to go to a secondhand bookstore and purchase SuburbiaNation, by Robert Beuka.