A week of funerals

Actually, only one current funeral, but it makes me think of others. I went Monday to Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga, for the burial of a man whose life took him far from his home here, but now dead, he has come to stay. A bit up the drive is a cluster of my family’s graves, dating from the 1920s, with my great-grandfather, grandfather, various collateral relatives, and most recently my father. In the front of the other graves is a memorial stone to Miller Smith, my father’s first cousin who died in France in World War II, and is buried in Lorraine. Today marks the 64th anniversary of Miller’s death.

I attend more funerals now, for family and for old employees of the family business, which is no more. Miller Brothers Company was swallowed up through successive mergers from 1973 until the collapse of the last corporate raider to own the various companies, in the late eighties, led to a break in the line of ownership.

Business has changed tremendously in the past 35 years, as this week of collapsing financial entities makes very obvious. I am feeling quite curmudgeonly lately. I must hone my cutting commentary and blog most ferociously. Or perhaps I will go to the corner pub for a mug of refreshing inconsequence.

Yes. I think I will. Too damn many blogs, anyway.

Karma for Hubris — CEO Justice

I had a couple of thoughts while watching the destruction and chaotic decay of the mortgage banking industry, punctuated by departing CEOs with huge separation packages. All of the folks on Main Street who screw the pooch as thoroughly on their modest level do not walk away with lots of lucre. If the CEO looters of their own companies wish to enjoy their sunset years, perhaps a few months of community service would be in order, to show that “personal responsibility” and “accountability” are not just for “little people.”

In the days of the Japanese rise to international business power, the corporate ethic was achievement or disgrace. Disgrace entailed a desk off at the side of the office, perhaps with a window but with no work, no authority, absolutely no way to feel pride in their job. They continued to receive pay and benefits. But disgrace had made them pariahs in the office, and a long, lonely decay was all that they could expect. Require CEOs of failed companies to suffer the same fate, showing up for forty hours of this sort of duty each week. They could keep their separation, but would be compelled to sit in useless idleness and shame for the time until retirement.

A more draconian fate might be for the former execs to greet bankrupt and foreclosed mortgagors who lost everything in the sub-prime bust. Each family would sit across a desk from the former CEO and tell him in excruciating detail of their total ruin. The CEO could attempt to educate them about the vigor and self-correcting features of the unfettered free market. After dodging hurled paperweights and plastic bags of the family’s meager possessions, the CEO would be required to hand over the keys to his Mercedes so the family could get around, their own car having been repossessed. The CEO’s wife would have to donate her Hermès bag so that the wife of the distressed family would have some way to transport surplus commodity cheese back to the tent under the interstate overpass which now was the family’s home.

Perhaps Jerry Springer could invite a few of the CEOs with bags of loot on to his show with audiences of newly homeless families, and small businessmen forced to close their businesses for lack of cash flow and credit. Many opportunities here to extol the strengths of capitalism, the handmaiden of freedom. To quote Kris Kristofferson, freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

The Seamless Body of Humanity

From Old John Donne, Meditation XVII:

No man is an Island,

intire of it selfe,

Every man is a peece of the Continent.

All mankinde is part of a maine.

If a Clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the lesse,

As well as if a Promontorie were,

As well as if a Manor of thy friends,

Or of thine owne were,

Any mans death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankinde.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

Donne is speaking here of the death of every man diminishing the whole of mankind. By extension, however, this reasoning applies to all conditions of man, in my reading. Where hunger, pain, persecution, sorrow, cruelty to others exist, there the continent of Man suffers diminishment. We are all less for the suffering of others. There is both a moral and a practical side to this proposition. Drawing up our personal drawbridges in the face of suffering on the part of others is both immoral and irreligious in most of Western thought and philosophy. Donne’s point about the effects of suffering on those who are comfortable applies to modern thought, I think. For a society, such as ours, for instance, to ascribe suffering to the faults and deficiencies of the suffering and rejecting responsibility on our own part is not only immoral, but has practical consequences. In many parts of the world, and in our own blighted slums, the suffering of others can affect us, and not just in our tax bills. Disease, crime, and the consequent moral corruption which spreads like a canker will affect us all.

There are no isolating moats in the modern world; we are all part of the main.

The G & T Hour Profaned

There comes a pause in the day’s occupation known, variously, as the Happy Hour, the Cocktail Hour, and for me, in warm weather, the Gin and Tonic Hour. I have a small but welcoming porch suspended three floors above the ground, overlooking an admirably tangled wood lot full of bird song and leaves fluttering in the wind. Tonight I barely settled in my seat, just raising a cooling glass to my lips when the sound of a riding mower from the next yard snarled into life.

The Neighbor does not love the wood lot. He every year wages war against his portion of it by running his riding mower in concentric circles around his trees to level all other forms of vegetation. Since his yard is heavily shaded, little but weeds grow after the mowing, with large expanses of exposed soil.

What has he gained by this rude interruption of my moments of peace at the end of the day? His property runs down the hill for some hundreds of feet and he will be grinding away until after dark. No peace. Bird song drowned out. Near-four dollar gasoline burned to enrich fanatics and cheapen the dollar.

I need to add more gin. LOTS more gin.

Grey Morning

When I woke up this morning, things were lookin’ bad
Seem like total silence was the only friend I had
Bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down… and won
And it was twelve o’clock before I realized
That I was havin’ .. no fun

Illegal Smile by John Prine

Actually, the skies appear to be partly blue this morning, but for some reason things look grey to me. Started last evening when I realized I had left my parka on the hook in the locker room of my workout venue. Drove back downtown and retrieved it. At least the folks there are honest. I did have oatmeal for breakfast this morning, and unlike John Prine I won the encounter. Still the fog of ennui hung over me. Then I realized that though I remembered laying out my morning meds (getting old is the pits) no memory of actually taking them remained. Well, they weren’t still in front of my on the computer desk, and checking the floor underneath, they hadn’t fallen there, so I must have taken them.

Sighing, I walked back towards my bedroom, muttering to myself, “Time to brush my shoes and put on my teeth.” I laughed at my tangled words, then bethought myself that with my precarious dental work, at least half the statement was not far from the truth. As for talking to myself, well such little quirks are not new for me. I have been my most faithful listener since childhood.

Ishmael had the answer for this sort of mood, sign on a whaling ship. Whaling is no longer legal, my crotchety and stiffening body would disqualify me from strenuous labor, and literature taken too literally can be disappointing. I found that out years ago when I bought camping and fly-fishing gear to go for a fishing weekend on the Hiwassee River.

I was unduly influenced in this folly by Hemingway’s The Big Two-Hearted River, which remains a favorite read of mine, in spite of the multiple disasters befalling me that weekend. I left most of my fly line, bits and pieces of camping gear and my sense of self-reliance scattered under torrential rains which began within hours of my arrival at the campsite. I spent the weekend watching sports at my favorite bar. A man must know his limitations, as The Eastwood said in one of his movies.

Meh. I think I shall go for a walk on the river here in Chattanooga, through a park winding along the Tennessee River for seven and some miles. I won’t complete anything like that distance, but physical activity is ameliorative of moods such as mine. I know my limitations, and work within them.

Heat

We would all be dead without the heat of the Sun, of course. Life exists because the great solar furnace showers solar rain upon us. In moderation, of course, filtered by the magnetic shields of Earth, and the thick atmosphere.

Like the face of  God, the Sun is not for our unprotected eyes or flesh. After several mild summers, last summer was prelude to the unrelenting heat of these past three months. This week has been relatively moderate in comparison, highs in the low 90s rather than high 90s and 100 plus. A year ago this past July, I posted a complacent reminiscence about the heat and howling cicadas of my youth, sleeping on a porch at my grandfather’s house in the country. I am mightily tired of both heat and cicadas this early September. Our high today was listed as 91° f. which was plenty hot for me. Bring on October. And hope that unseasonable heat does not pollute the colors and brisk air of that favorite month of mine.

I dismiss all arguments about Global Warming in this current furnace heat. Who knows? The trend for the past one hundred plus years is for generally higher temperatures year round, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. However the long term plays out, I am ready for cool temperatures. Please.

Driving and other Extinct Pleasures

I started this morning in a very good mood. Not always the case, although mornings do tend to be the time that I feel most hopeful and inspired. So I set out to hit the River Walk for the first time in several weeks, in spite of the temperature doing its usual thing of late, and rising like an express elevator at the Sears Tower. Since the sun was still low when I set out, around eight thirty, I expected to finish an abbreviated walk before the full furnace weight of an expected 99 degree day fell like a hammer on the path. That did eventually happen, but my mood was frayed around the edges before I ever set foot on the walk.