| 17 August 2005 Wherever You Go The people who are working this week, at least the ones who are writing about it, seem a little querulous. Maureen Dowd is back from book-leave in the pages of the Times, and she is right back in her waspish prime, stinging the President and his father for their predilection for taking vacations in August. I'm glad she is back from vacation to bitch about someone else's. But I certainly take her point. I feel the last sands of the summer running out. The commutes have been a breeze. The town is empty. I can be at my desk in fifteen minutes. There is time to puzzle over the story of the moment, be a bit contemplative. Read other people's bile. The moment of departure for the Israelis in Gaza is something to consider. A woman set herself on fire in protest, and I don't know if she is going to live or not. If I was in Sydney this morning, I would be frothing. The Indonesians have decided to reduce the sentences of the conspirators who killed two hundred people, mostly Australians, on the island of Bali two years ago. The spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, the organization that was responsible for the nightclub bombings, is a man named Abu Bakar Ba'asyir. He had his sentence reduced by 150 days in commemoration of Indonesia 's independence from the Colonialist Dutch. He had been convicted to serve two-and-a-half years, which had been controversial at the time. Australian opinion at the time was that the 66-year-old should be locked up the rest of his natural life for inciting the murders. Indonesian opinion generally reflected the idea that he was just exercising protected religious speech. He will walk out a free man by next June, or perhaps sooner if he continues his good behavior. The other seventeen men convicted were also awarded reductions in their sentences. The longest stretch any of the actual murderers are doing had been sixteen years. By my calculations is the equivalent of a month for each of the dead. If you throw in the bombings at the J.W. Marriott hotel and the Australian Embassy it is much less. Obviously, the foreigners aren't worth much. Cheap, really. If these were the good old days, this might be considered a causa belli, a reason for a punitive expedition. But of course Australia has twenty million people, and Indonesia has ten times that many. It would not be a cost effective operation, though perhaps something about the struggle in East Timor still resonates. But I could say that about life generally seems cheap at the end of this summer. There seems to be little comment on the charter jet filled with French tourists that went down returning from Panama with all lost. There is more about 17 Spanish soldiers who died in Afghanistan when their helicopter ceased to fly, or the numbing daily news of the latest car bomb in Baghdad . But it would be easy to fixate on that. After all, look at how many of us will get through this day, this week, this season. Carpe diem. Seize the day. It is about the moment, after all. I was talking to Shirley, our administrative assistant yesterday about the cost of gas. She had driven her mother thirty miles to get a rib sandwich at a favorite restaurant in the country over the weekend. She said the cost of gas was going to make extravagances like that increasingly rare. I pondered for a moment. I have suspended my disbelief on the cost of fuel. Privately, I have always thought that a little shock at the pump would have been a good thing, since the rest of the civilized world has been paying more than we do for a long time. The economists who claim to understand all this say the sharp rise in oil and gas prices have had no effect on the economy. But I read the dark opinion of one fellow who claims that the cost of energy is a deep and slow game-changer, and impact may lag six months behind the current indicators. Inexorable. I honestly don't think about it the when I fill up at the pump. I have been more worried about the housing bubble, which trails the war in Iraq and the war on terror and my libido in reverse order. They say that many areas have passed the high-water mark and prices are coming down. I comfort myself that owning property close-in to the capital will insulate me from the shock, and bolster the recent gain in real estate prices. Maybe even make me more money, since who is going to be able to afford driving out to the County every day? Of course, if oil prices cause the economy to stagnate, then no one will have any money to spend. They say the bankers who lend money for mortgages say they are running out of shills who will take it. Maybe the party is over, and I am just one of the last die-hards at the bar who don't realize it. Rental prices versus the amount it costs to purchase have swerved way out of balance. The mortgage on the efficiency unit I own, the one that produced the paper profit I leveraged to purchase the bigger place, is running about $400 a month more than I could reasonably expect to lease it for. I tried to explain that to my older boy the other day, how it worked, and I realized I couldn't. Living in this moment makes me wonder if another has passed. But of course it has. And now we have to live in another, crafted of the one before but subtly different. Day to day, the Bard said. “Creep in this petty pace.” I must keep walking forward through the end of summer. I have a friend whose motto exactly fits my mood. After a few Harp Lagers he would look up owlishly. “Wherever you go,” he would announce gravely, speaking revealed truth, “ There you are .” I remember precisely where that saying came from, but for the life of me I can't figure out how we got there. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra ww.vicsocotra.com |