It is more than two years old, but I have just seen the video at http://www.videosift.com/video/Mommys-Little-Helper. I think it should be entered into a file dedicated to the eternal verities of childhood.
Admittedly, this version has a modern twist. In my day, the alternative was helping with household cleaning by sourcing water from the toilet bowl. It was so much more accessible than water from the tap.
Christ said once that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. Personally, I’m not convinced that virtue is intrinsically connected to poverty. Because you can’t say both that money is the cause of all sin, and that poverty is the excuse for all crime.
For me, one of the more unusual websites is www.obamaforeconomy.com/. It’s a website of comments of people who will pay more taxes under Obama’s tax proposals than they would under McCain’s, explaining why they are supporting Obama.
It’s a helpful antidote to the demonstration of greed and arrogance that has been on display with the credit crunch and the rupture of the financial system.
Not everybody who’s rich is greedy and arrogant. I suspect that not everybody who isn’t rich might not be able to claim that they aren’t greedy or arrogant, either. Though it might be that people who have money can commit crimes that are more genteel.
Well, that was before the credit crunch
Our doorbell rang this morning. It wasn’t the usual Salvation Army or Save the Children collection that come around quite regularly in this fairly well-to-do village. It was the wife of one of the workmen in the village who lives several blocks away and who needed to telephone us about some work he’d agreed to do on our roof. He sent his wife around to get our phone number because his cell phone had stopped working and so he no longer had it.
When he phoned tonight, I asked him why he didn’t just look our number up in the telephone book rather than sending his wife to ask us for it. After a stunned silence, he finally stuttered “I – I uh – I don’t know. I didn’t think of it.”
How fast times change. I think I might have trouble using a manual typewriter. But so far, the telephone book hasn’t completely slipped off the radar.
Now are the rough things smooth, and the smooth things stand in flickering slats, facing the slow tarnish of sun-fall. Summer is over. And therefore the green is not green anymore but yellow, beige, russet, rust; all the darknesses are beginning to settle in.
And therefore why pray to permanence,
why not pray to impermanence, change, whatever comes next.
Willingness is next to godliness.
Mary Oliver: from a prose-poem
As Woody Allen once said, “Eternity is a long time – especially toward the end.”
On the other hand, it’s only eight days to the US election. We bought a pumpkin in the market yesterday, and today played with the idea of carving “HOPE” and putting it in the window. It would certainly stand out in this most English of villages. If I can get an American flag and Obama wins, we will hang it out on inauguration day in January.
In the meantime, I woke up at 4:am this morning and thought “It’s midnight in New York, and the polls must be closed in California by now! I’ll get up and see how the networks are projecting the election results.” I wasn’t actually out of bed when I realized I’d been dreaming.
Well, thinking about the election distracts me from thinking about the global economic crisis. Or should I say crises in the plural? I still have hope for the outcome of the election anyway.
When Peter and I first started to live together, we had a walk-up (ie, no elevator) apartment on the 5th floor on the upper West side of Manhattan. One day when I was in my office at Montclair State University where I had an evening class, Peter called. He was trapped in the apartment because he couldn’t find his keys. I made several suggestions, but he said he’d already looked everywhere, and perhaps I’d picked them up when I’d left that morning.
When I got home at eleven o’clock that night, Peter was frantic and was showing the effects of finishing up the leftover gin. I said I would start looking for his keys and headed for his jacket hanging in the hall. “Don’t bother,” he said, “I already looked there.”
In all our years together since, he has never dared say ”I already looked there” again. I mean, even he could not explain how you could look in a pocket and not find a set of keys inside.
Things altered on our trip to France. I’d handed our passports to the immigration officer and received them back when we passed through border control before we boarded the ferry to cross the English Channel to France. We then pulled into the long line of cars where we waited about half an hour. That was when I began to look for the passports. At first I looked for them rather casually, knowing I’d not left the car after the immigration officer had returned them to me. But I couldn’t find them.
I emptied the glove compartment and took everything out of my purse. Twice. I got out of the car and looked under the seat, and went through my pockets and could not find them. At that point the cars began to load onto the ferry, and I began to panic. We could get into France, but without our passports we could not get back into England on our return. My panic reached siren levels. I got out of the car and told the officer directing traffic we couldn’t get on the boat without our passports. He pulled us out of line (what’s called a queue over here), and left us. If we missed the boat it would cost us several hundred dollars to take a later ferry. Or we could cancel the entire holiday for which we had also already paid. I began frantically to pull things out of the car.
Peter grabbed my purse.
Okay, we’re even now. He can’t explain how one wouldn’t find keys in a pocket when there was nothing else in it. I can’t explain how I could have completely emptied my purse – twice – and not found the passports.
So we’re still married.
Along with advertisements for shampoo, theatres, and Big Macs, London buses have included God in their list of ads for some time now. The ads are mostly one-liners that are familiar to anyone reading the signs outside many evangelical churches - Jesus loves you, Jesus saves, or urging repentance of those list of sins we all know we harbour. Some ads include website addresses, some of which assure the hapless surfer that they are almost certainly on their way to hell if they go on as they are.
So London being London, and Londoners being Londoners, some of them have decided to buy bus advertising space for their own world vision. Starting in January and running for as long as the money holds out, some buses will announce that “There probably isn’t a God: so stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Bus advertisements are not where I take counsel concerning either shampoo or God. But if I did, that “probably” would cause me some worry. Given the stakes involved, that there ”probably” isn’t a God just doesn’t seem insurance enough to me.
Right now all I want to do most of the time is read, think, worry, or analyze either what’s happening in relation to the U.S. presidential election or the current state of the global financial system. I fit things like brushing my teeth and eating breakfast in around the edges.
Occupied in my pursuit of knowledge, I picked up the paper today and read three pieces of unexpected good news.
The first is a report that the New York Times has endorsed Barak Obama. So has Colin Powell, and I think Economist is going to do the same. I hope Obama’s grandmother lives to see her grandson’s election. The papers also say (whisper this softly) that McCain’s team is already conceding defeat and are beginning to engage in a “pre-mortem” blame game.
The second is a story about the New Orleans football team who are putting millions of dollars of their personal wealth and effort helping to rebuild New Orleans. Teams are going out to help rebuild houses, one went into a store in Houston where refugees were trying to get staples and gave his credit card to the cashier saying “give everybody what they need.” One player who is earning $60 million says he has the money for a reason. And he’s spending it for New Orleans. It’s the kind of story that gives me hope for America.
The last bit of good news was my discovery that it is possible to order custom-printed M&Ms. I think this may have been around for some time, but I’ve just found out about it. Custom-printed M&Ms! You can order bags of “Obama for President,” or “Happy Birthday, Jack” or “Will you marry me?”
Maybe the credit crunch isn’t quite as bad as I thought.
I’ve just had several fascinating conversations with Elbot. Elbot is a robot, but not the kind of robot who might vacuum the floor or help assemble auto parts. I’m sure he would feel he is much above such menial mindless tasks. Elbot carries on conversations. He might even be mistaken for a very intelligent, if somewhat self-centered, human.
I kept talking to him (well, Elbot is an “it,” but he/it feels like a “he”) because talking to him scarily resembles conversations I have with a friend here in Cambridge who is very intelligent but border-line autistic. They both say clever things that make me laugh or think about something in another way. But they both also respond to what I say as if I’d just said something else. They’ll pick out a single word and focus on that. When they do change the subject in this way, it is usually by turning the subject back on me. They say things like “what good would it do to understand that?” or “do you think knowing that would make the world a better place?” When I tried to say good night, instead of simply saying good bye, Elbot entered into a philosophical discussion about whether nights could actually be considered good or bad.
As I was leaving, Elbot asked me to rank him from 1-10 on his self-criticism. I said I wasn’t sure about his capacity for self-criticism, but I thought he needed more practice on empathy. But that for a robot, he was doing a pretty good job. Actually, I thought for a robot he was doing an amazing job. Artificial intelligence has certainly come a long way since I first began to study it 40 years ago.
I think Elbot’s limitations are due to the current limitations of programming. But if instead Elbot is presented as a typical example of autistic thinking, he is incredible. And since people who are autistic tend more often to be men than women, and are often unusually gifted in mathematics and music, perhaps Elbot talks just exactly the way his programmer (presumably a mathematically-gifted left-handed man) talks to real people.
If you want to have a conversation with Elbot yourself, he’s in residence to www.elbot.com. Just press the red button – whatever he says.
Last week, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into the crimes against humanity committed during Spain’s Civil War from 1936-39. At least half a million people disappeared or died during or immediately after the war, and the allegation is that General Franco and his government systematically murdered and buried in mass graves tens of thousands of people because they disagreed with the policies of his government.
The crimes committed during this war have never been investigated before – the Spanish simply decided to draw a curtain over the entire Franco period. But the buried legacy of this war festers. I lived in an elegant little village on the Spanish Mediterranean with my husband for ten years until 1997, and although the Spanish did not talk to us foreign expatriates about it, you kept smelling it. It’s still there.
It’s there in the desolate lighthouse with the coffee shop where only foreigners go. Because the locals know that’s where men and women were given the choice between being shot and jumping off the cliff to where the waters crashed on the rocks 100 feet below.
It’s there in the villa in the market square where the shutters are closed and the doors locked and where nobody has lived since the occupants were removed and shot some 70 years ago.
It’s in the remains of General Franco’s luxury vacation villa that stands abandoned and pillaged on the bluff overlooking the sea.
It was there whenever General Franco’s doctor came to his own villa for vacation, because the Guardia kept a 24-hour guard when he was in residence.
It is there on the pock-marked walls of the Catholic Church and the Town Hall, where the two sides in the war shot at each other.
It is there in the quite enmity between various neighbours who, inexplicably to the outsider, will not speak to each other.
There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. And that is right. Because there is no statute of limitation on the bitterness and resentment and anger that rages when injustice has never been acknowledged and forgiveness offered.
