Vic Socotra

05 November 2009

Grumpy

I am just saturated and not completely happy about it. Grumpy, maybe, though maybe others would call it creeping old-fartism. I got a call at dinner about someone who had just passed away in Maine, of the same sort of thing that is dragging my Dad down by the ankles.

It was good to talk to my old pal, but odd. Is death the only thing besides reunions that brings us together these days? Maybe they are the same thing.

I looked out the tall windows at the back-light from the waning moon. The cloaking leaves are all gone now, and the private lives of all the Big Pink residents is on display for anyone who might look. We will get used to closing the drapes again, or not.

Privacy is different than it used to be.

Pensive, I watched the Yankees win the World Series- 27 of them now. Oh well. Good for the major league brand, I guess, and if it is not the outcome I would have preferred, so be it.

There is a lot to be thankful about. Twenty-three absentee Americans convicted in the Extraordinary Rendition trials in Rome? I’m glad I am not in the business any more and don’t have to worry about being adequately lawyered-up as a condition of going to work.

The central bank of India just bought two hundred tons of gold from the International Monetary Fund. Two hundred tons. Where did they get it? Is it left over from Yamashita’s golden hoard? And what is the developing world thinking about the world’s bedrock currencies? Apparently not much.

I wouldn’t say they were grumpy, but it would appear their recovery is going better than ours.

What does this movement of precious metal mean to us, the working stiffs who have to live in this economy that has been so badly managed by those who gained our trust, and whispered all those sweet lies.

The pundits are predictably wrong again this morning, only harder in their spin than a Yankee slider. Speaker Pelosi says the results of the election demonstrate that they must push harder to enact the economic-health-energy agenda. Republican flacks are insistent that this is a new dawn for the party of Lincoln, who if he saw it these days would run in the other direction as fast as he could.

The Judge wrote and distilled my thoughts with his finely honed legal mind.
He says the election was another way of saying that anti-incumbent fever us building. He said he heard someone trying to say that on the radio but the spinmeisters kept hijacking the message. He says the electorate is grumpy and has more common sense than the politicos.

As a result, he says, we will keep changing the faces in Washington until someone gets it right.

My lovely cousin down in Blacksburg chimed in, too. She commented that: “India is the exception to what is nearly a “law” in political science, which holds that single-member district plurality systems of voting virtually mandate a two-party system.”

“Harold Hotelling’s principle of minimum differentiation (that competing but rational manufacturers will produce goods as much alike as possible – I paraphrase) was adapted by Anthony Downs in his Economic Theory of Democracy in the early 50s.”

“Essentially, if one assumes a normal distribution of voters on an ideological scale, political parties/candidates will locate as close to the center as they can to gain as much support as possible without alienating their people in the tails of the distribution.”

“Occasionally, one party is either so close to the center or drawn to the extremes of the party that there is an opportunity for a third party with a legitimate chance to locate on one side or the other of the “rogue” party or candidate.”

“Of course we know how things can change once the “populist” candidate is elected.”

Boy, do we. But what the hell. The Indians will have the gold, and against all odds, I am happy with my democracy this morning regardless of what the pundits say.

I think a rogue party of Grumpies is exactly what we are going to get in 2010. It should be interesting.

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