The New Normal

Two conditions characterize what some are calling “the new economic normal” by which they mean the intractable, seemingly permanent state of an economy limping along following the fiery crash that was the great recession of the last five years. The first of the two conditions: the redistribution of wealth from the pockets of the great majority (now poorer and less employed) and into those of the rich (now the super-rich,). The second: the unlikelihood for millions of American workers of a post-recession return to the America of old, where people found new employment or returned to their old jobs after a brief time out of work. The second condition and its apparent immutability is in some measure a product of the first. Political power is now fully purchasable by billionaires. Our politicians are now nearly indistinguishable from those of the third world drug-trade countries where civil servants, being human, are unable to resist the offer of pesos or dollars in unimaginable quantities taken from billionaires wishing to buy favor. With the political class in the pocket of the moneyed class the chances of political reform to reverse the slide of wealth from poor to rich no longer appears possible, thus the concept of "new normal".

I would argue that this is a good thing. (No, I am neither rich nor powerful. I am a teacher. Enough said.)

How can I think that a reduced quality of life for the majority of us is a positive development? I can think this because less money, fewer things does not constitute a reduction when it comes to quality of life in contemporary American culture. We are addicted to money as the druggy to his fix or the gambler to his game. The defining feature of addiction is that the addict obsessively prioritizes the acquisition of the addictive substance over the components of a healthy life. Even when the buzz is gone. Even when he realizes he’s neglecting his family, his friends, his health, his ethics, his sense of himself. Our relationship to the pursuit of material wealth is that of the addict to the drug, nothing more, nothing less.

The balance, the gratitude, the joy and the playfulness of a healthy life stand in stark contrast to the money-drug addict’s ever more consuming pursuit of monetary reward. “The ever more consuming pursuit of monetary reward.” Where the 19th century would have seen in those words a description of the exceptional extreme, of society’s Scrooges, today’s average American is perfectly captured therein. In contrast, there are cultures in the world where a modest living suffices to assure vitality and satisfaction. Relationships, time and space, rituals, physical activity, creative projects and the enjoyment of nature occupy the place that work and the paycheck occupy in our culture. In a new normal America, the conditions are being created for a reintroduction of these healthful components into the American lifestyle. The great recession has reset American society economically. We are now setting out on a much healthier path.

The first and foremost of these new realities: housing is no longer affordable for a hugely increased percentage of Americans. At least that is the way a society addicted to wealth views the current dearth of affordable housing. I see it differently. There is more than enough affordable housing for all. You have to be blinded by your addiction to the one-house-with-livingroom-diningroom-extra-bedroom-backyard-and-garage-per-generation-per-family idea of adequate housing in order to see the current supply of American housing as in short supply or as too costly for the American income. Now it is true that the available houses and apartments are expensive and out of reach for huge portions of our citizenry. However, I see housing costs as starting to reweave the parts of our shredded families back together. Underemployed children moving back in with their families after college, elders lacking adequate health insurance being cared for by their adult children – these are universally seen as sacrifices by our addicted culture. But what is really occurring is that the conditions for de-isolation of the lonely American are being stitched. Two or three generations living together brings their house to within financial reach for many, many more families and forces us to find the connections whose loss we bemoaned. It's a win-win.

Let me briefly address the issue of the two extremes: the poor and the super-wealthy. In a society organized around the procurement of the money-drug, the poor tend to exist in truly desperate conditions. Not because of a lack of riches. That has its benefits. Indeed, there are poor peoples around the country and the world (fewer and fewer, however, as the world Americanizes) whose satisfaction with their lives is measured at levels that most Americans can only dream of. The problem facing the poor is that among them live the most desperate of all money-drug addicts, those who do not possess the wherewithal to obtain the money-drug by non-violent means. It is crime, the threat of crime and the fear of the criminal, conditions that are fanned by illegal drugs that turn desperate people into monsters, promise instant status and ultimately doom them to prison and their families to deeper despair. There are easy answers to this dire situation: good schools, drug-rehab, good policing and jobs. Much cheaper than the war on drugs, the war on Iraq, the war on Afganistan or the exploding prison system.

The biggest losers in the new normal are the super-rich. Their misery is camouflaged by their caldelabres, obfuscated by their objets d’art.

Classroom Learning

Schools make learning hard. No matter the subject, it would be easier to learn it in its natural environment: basketball in the gym, government in the legislature, cooking in kitchen and agriculture in the fields. We like to think of the classroom as being the best place to learn. Actually, the average classroom is the last place I’d go to learn anything. Unless I was there to learn how to be a student in a classroom. Or a mediocre classroom teacher. 

THE THREE REASONS WHY

1. Learning is a product of practice not of book-based knowledge. You want an electrician who is practiced in his craft. Same with your lawyer and your restaurant chef and your mechanic. Imagine a tennis player who learned to play sitting in a classroom. A politician with only knowledge of, not practice in, the political system will be called Stalin or McCarthy or McNamara. Theory has its place. In fact, the masters in any field of endeavor from tennis to physics to plumbing to food service more often than not possess a deep understanding of the principles that underlie their application in specific cases. But theory learned separate from practice trains one to be a theoretician, a professor, not a competent, much less a masterful, practioner. As long as the primary challenge posed by our teachers to their students is the absorption of the textbook's contents, learning will not be occurring in our classrooms.

2. Teachers are woefully undertrained in the complex, subtle and demanding art form that is teaching. It takes as long to train a great teacher as it does to train a great M.D. or legislator or farmer or chef. The actual training requirements of teachers in the United States bespeaks a definition of teaching as requiring no more than a cursory exposure to the principles and challenges of the profession and a brief part-time apprenticeship. Furthermore, once the typical teacher is installed in a school, the scandalous reality that predominates is that while teachers are at work in immediate proximity to colleagues who are practicing the teaching profession day in and day out, teachers do not observe each others’ classes, do not request that others critique their classes, do not, in other words, see the need to continue their professional development. It is the exception that a teacher takes the initiative to forward his/her development beyond the silly requirement of attendance at the occasional conference. Additionally, teacher training, to the extent that it exists, focusses to a goofy degree on the policy dimension, and on management issues whereas the focus needs to be on dynamic, project centered, playful yet demanding classroom pedagogy. The school must be a place where the student loves to return each day.

3. The best and the brightest (i.e. those you want to attract to teaching your children and training your workforce) will have no interest in a poorly paid career working in under-financed schools functioning under a most uncreative system of regulations authored by bureaucrats and administrators with little understanding of the artistic freedom required by the exceptional teacher.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?
There is a very simple set of reforms and systemic changes that can be initiated to solve these three problems, and I shall describe below those that I would recommend were I asked. 

Unfortunately (1) teachers, especially teachers who see, and are willing to say, how increasingly empty this educational glass is, are rarely asked. And when asked, we aren't listened to. (Surveys today being designed by the established to illicit responses not outside of the range of proposals undisruptive to the establishment.) And when listened to, we are marginalized as a statistical minority, the majority, by definition, being those whose self-interest is served by the maintenance of the status quo.  (2) Truth telling -- in the "Hey, the king's naked!" sense -- is never the norm despite everyone agreeing tacitly with the truth teller. People's opinions are so easily swayed by simple membership and identification with a group. And, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the punishment awaiting anyone who is foolish enough to tell the truth is worse than that meted out to a murderer. (3) We have arrived at the period culturally where our mediocre educational system is fully ramped up and mass producing in vast numbers  Generic-Unconscious-Materialist-Worker-Opinionated-Consumers or GUMWOCS where once local citizen craftsmen individuals stood.  (4) The culture of schools at all levels now includes a farcical amount of self-celebration. It could not be clearer to the outside observer that the less confident the educational institution becomes in its excellence, the more of its energy is expended in celebration (of its excellence). Methinks you celebrateth way too much.

A program of reform will focus on three areas:
1. Educator training and support
2. Revocationalization of schooling (including apprenticeships)
3. Reinstitution of educationally oriented standards for broadcasting 

American Dreamers

I. We Americans take it as a given that we are engaged in the process of pursuing happiness. We define the daylight hours as the time available for that pursuit. For most of us, this means we're after stuff in the form of better goods and access to more services. It's what we call the American Dream.

Now, this pursuit thing works pretty well so long as you are a person who neither owns your own... nor has enough... to retire with enough..., meaning you'll likely have no choice but to .... until you can... no longer. Your accrual of stuff, though less and less rewarding as the pile of stuff grows, nevertheless yields a sense of security, of a buffer against calamity. You'll notice that this is a very different feeling from "happiness", but one finds a way to ignore the gap.

Now, people who have attained the dream -- those with the house in the magazine and the travel and the kids in the right schools and the friends in high places -- they're the ones in the fun house, but like all fun houses, it's mostly mirrors and not so fun.

For happiness is not derived from any of these things, and the possessors of these things -- faced with the demoralizing realization that more -- more expensive, more convenient and more exclusive -- doesn't increase happiness, and that friends in high places aren't really your friends, and flummoxed by their own kids who, fucked up from having too many options, choose rather to cut, smoke and have indiscriminate sex in order to escape into something real -- are among the most unhappy people you'll meet. Much more unhappy, just for instance, than those who live on a dollar a day in villages of mud-floored huts to whom it would not occur to think of happiness as something that one pursues.

The point is not that poverty makes one happy. Nor does it make any sense to idealize the poor. 

My focus here is on decoupling happiness and pursuit on the one hand, and, on the other, ascendance to the “top” of American society (a trip that actually takes one down and down in moral, philosophical and psychological terms) and an increase in joy, delight, satisfaction or well-being. The ivy league is replete with neurotics, with the anxious offspring of the arriviste, with the depressed superachievers. The BFD corporations are dog-eat-dog people shredders. The bottom line, the short term profit, the competition, the elimination of one’s rival, of deadwood, of those unwilling to put winning over everything, all prioritized above human connection and the simple pleasures of being or gratitude. 

II. There is a form of political and commercial discourse, based on the following principles. First, make the target audience feel like you’re on their side and they on yours. The use of “we” effectively implies this team spirit. Now, make a bold statement of a principle that “we” hold dear. A principle with which no one but a scoundrel could possibly disagree. Choose a principle which you yourself do not follow, a principle were you not to declare it yours might leave you open to attack. To ensure that your fake statement of principle persuades, elaborate by dividing the generality into its component parts thereby making your declaration appear to constitute a specific, substantial commitment. Make no actual commitments that might lead others to expect action. This is not a statement of intention, it’s an ad with which you lead the target audience to imagine you and they themselves positively. Here’s a good example:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

III. The ubiquity of American self-deception is such that the prospect of deconstructing our national character with an eye to straightening out the culture is inconceivably daunting. Where would you start?

With "the home of the free and the brave"? Free? Please. Is a woman who can't walk the streets of her prosperous town at night free? If the white male were similarly limited in his movement, freedom of walking would become a plank in the Republican party platform! Are children forced to live among armed camps of drug dealers free? American Freedom: the economic wherewithal to live behind the walls of a gated community. And the brave? If you've been to the graves of the American dead in Normandy, France and read the tombstones of the brave, you will have noticed that there is a preponderance of seventeen year olds from the most economically depressed areas of the American South. These were not the brave. These were the desperate, the uneducated, the manipulated. The throwaways. Some things never change.

Or should we start at the end instead? Let's look at our current efforts to solve the global warming crisis. Self-deception. Talk. "Not if it negatively impacts my (extravagant, wasteful, addicted and unhappy) lifestyle." We don't have lives, here in the U.S. We have lifestyles. Same thing, only bathing in the self-deception of an unhappy people pursuing happiness through materialist self-distraction. Harder and harder to talk to your children -- have you noticed yet -- because children see your truth, the truth you're madly paddling to escape.

Slave owners declaring that all men are created equal, manifest destiny as a rationale for genocide, elected officials spending nearly all their time raising money from wealthy interests who thereby purchase access and influence, corporations spewing public relations and advertising which is nothing more and nothing less than an officially sanctioned form of lying, war against those who possess natural resources, a judicial system that puts poor, barely defended blacks to death despite overwhelming evidence that mistakes are made all the time.

Why do attorneys accept a justice system devoid of justice? Why do businesses agree to lie to their customers for profit? Why do politicians allow lobbyists to monopolize their time? Why are the media used for sales rather than enlightenment?

The answer is that the United States is a society founded, developed and maintaining on self-deception. Hard to see for those who have grown up in it. Easy from abroad.

Seen from abroad, the U.S. is the nuclear superpower attempting to prevent others from having nuclear weapons. We're the profligate producers of carbon emissions telling the world to produce less carbon. We're the lovers of freedom who support dictators. We're the enemies of AIDS who deny support to condom distribution in third world countries resulting in hundreds of thousands of women contracting AIDS from their sexual partners.

Sports? Our heroes are uneducated millionaire drug abusers while the average person can't afford to take his family to a game.

Art? Removed from the schools, but we cherish our children (and believe in the power of art).

Cinema? We are proud of our Hollywood which is synonymous with mindless entertainment.

T.V, movies, food... American products are known as the lowest common denominator crap in the marketplace.

Education? How long will the U.S. be the leader in innovation when the average citizen can no longer afford to go to college?

Immigration? We treat our desperate Mexican immigrant workers so arrogantly while we enjoy the fruits of their labor...

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A Problem with Public Opinion Surveys

The notion that a multiple-choice opinion survey will render valid results is highly questionable.

Let’s imagine that we were to survey people on their opinion of the asteroid XR69P in the Migicue galaxy:

How do you feel about asteroid XR69P?

a. I like it.

b. It’s wonderful.

c. It’s too big.

d. It’s too small.

e. It’s too gaseous.

f. It’s too solid.

g. It sucks.

h. other.

Obviously, nearly everyone would choose reponse h. In the case of an obscure asteroid, as with other other utterly unfamiliar material, survey respondents are aware of their ignorance, their indifference and their absolute lack of basis upon which to form an opinion.

On the other hand, there are surveys on topics with which the respondents have some familiarity: 

How do you feel about David Letterman?

a. I like him.

b. He’s wonderful.

c. He’s too irreverent.

d. He’s too commercial.

e. He’s too old.

f. He’s too liberal.

g. He sucks.

h. other.

In this case, 98% of Americans know who David Letterman is. As a result, over 90% of those surveyed will express an opinion including the 65% of them who haven’t watched his show in twenty years and have not had a thought, much less a conversation about David Letterman. These respondents are mostly ignorant, mostly indifferent but forming a response because they are being asked for a response. 

Indifference to a question is not measured by the response that question illicits when posed. To put it another way:

Which is more reflective of public opinion on David Letterman?

a. the fact that  a great majority of the respondents live their lives without ever having a thought, much less an opinion, about David Letterman

or

b. the fact that a great majority of the respondents expressed an opinion about him when asked

Let's say that 80% of the respondents gave positive answers. And let's say that 50% of those never give David Letterman a thought and are only answering because they are being asked. (They are indifferent but, when asked, have more positive than negative feelings about Letterman.)

The pollster would be likely to conclude that the public feels very positively about Letterman. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this conclusion is false. For it counts indifference as a positive reaction.


Now, it makes little difference whether polls of opinion accurately assess attitudes toward a TV personality, but it makes a big difference when the opinions expressed concern public policy and political candidates. For when large swaths of uninformed, uneducated, a-political citizens vote (elections being a form of opinion survey), as has occurred in the most recent case with The Tea Party, the course of a country swings in their direction. It is as if we checked "It's too gaseous." and science, taking our opinions into account, therefore decided to turn its attention to studying (non-existent) asteroid gas.

American Self-Deception

The ubiquity of American self-deception is such that the prospect of deconstructing our national character with an eye to straightening out the culture is inconceivably daunting. Where would you start?

With "the home of the free and the brave"? Free? Please. Is a woman who can't walk the streets of her prosperous town at night free? If the white male were similarly limited in his movement, freedom of walking would become a plank in the Republican party platform! Are children forced to live among armed camps of drug dealers free? American Freedom: the economic wherewithal to live behind the walls of a gated community. And the brave? If you've been to the graves of the American dead in Normandy, France and read the tombstones of the brave, you will have noticed that there is a preponderance of seventeen year olds from the most economically depressed areas of the American South. These were not the brave. These were the desperate, the uneducated, the manipulated. The throwaways. Some things never change.

Or should we start at the end instead? Let's look at our current efforts to solve the global warming crisis. Self-deception. Talk. "Not if it negatively impacts my (extravagant, wasteful, addicted and unhappy) lifestyle." We don't have lives, here in the U.S. We have lifestyles. Same thing, only bathing in the self-deception of an unhappy people pursuing happiness through materialist self-distraction. Harder and harder to talk to your children -- have you noticed yet -- because children see your truth, the truth you're madly paddling to escape.

Slave owners declaring that all men are created equal, manifest destiny as a rationale for genocide, elected officials spending nearly all their time raising money from wealthy interests who thereby purchase access and influence, corporations spewing public relations and advertising which is nothing more and nothing less than an officially sanctioned form of lying, war against those who possess natural resources, a judicial system that puts poor, barely defended blacks to death despite overwhelming evidence that mistakes are made all the time.

Why do attorneys accept a justice system devoid of justice? Why do businesses agree to lie to their customers for profit? Why do politicians allow lobbyists to monopolize their time? Why are the media used for sales rather than enlightenment?

The answer is that the United States is a society founded, developed and maintaining on self-deception. Hard to see for those who have grown up in it. Easy from abroad.

Seen from abroad, the U.S. is the nuclear superpower attempting to prevent others from having nuclear weapons. We're the profligate producers of carbon emissions telling the world to produce less carbon. We're the lovers of freedom who support dictators. We're the enemies of AIDS who deny support to condom distribution in third world countries resulting in hundreds of thousands of women contracting AIDS from their sexual partners.

Sports? Our heroes are uneducated millionaire drug abusers while the average person can't afford to take his family to a game.

Art? Removed from the schools, but we cherish our children (and believe in the power of art).

Cinema? We are proud of our Hollywood which is synonymous with mindless entertainment.

T.V, movies, food... American products are known as the lowest common denominator crap in the marketplace.

Education? How long will the U.S. be the leader in innovation when the average citizen can no longer afford to go to college?

Immigration? We treat our desperate Mexican immigrant workers so arrogantly while we enjoy the fruits of their labor...

About Ilona

     I’m a big President J.F. Kennedy fan, have been since my Freshman year in college. I remember the actual day it all began, the class. We were in World History, Randy, Bruce and me, large lecture hall, maybe four, five hundred students, way up in the last row, center section. Randy was sitting between me and Bruce. This was before Randy and Ilona Birch broke up. He was obsessed with Ilona. Actually, so was I, but then, everybody was obsessed with Ilona, I found out later. As far as I could tell, the lecture that day was sort of about a war. The lecturer was a tightly wrinkled old lady, Professor somebody.

   So we’re in the lecture and Bruce, Randy and me are really trying to stay listening, but it’s so hard. Not just the boredom, Randy keeps whispering stuff about Ilona and since I’m obsessed with Ilona, I’m mostly listening to him. So’s Bruce.

   “So we’re making out for a while. Ilona’s an unbelievable kisser.” Randy’s telling 

us in hushed tones for obvious reasons.

   And Bruce and me on either side of him: “Uh-huh.” We’re keeping our voices down too.

   So I’m trying to listen to the lecture and scratch some notes while waiting for more details about Ilona and Randy.

   Then Randy goes “And then my foot started killing me.”

   “From last week’s game?” Bruce asks.

   “Probably.” says Randy.

   “Uh-huh.” I say.

   We refocus and scratch some more lecture notes. It was 
clear to me now that the lecture definitely involved some 
kind of an international shoot-em-up.

   “But I don’t know.” Randy continues.

   “About the foot?” I inquire.

   “About Ilona. I think she’s great, you know.”

   Bruce and I: “Uh-huh.”

   We’re all three whispering, which was a major challenge but absolutely necessary under the circumstances.

   “She’s great, but…”

   He hesitates.

   “She’s a great kisser?” I was trying to keep Randy on topic.

   At the same time I was beginning to suspect America was possibly involved in the conflict that was probably what the lecture could have been about.

   Then Bruce says “A neutered country”…?” and he elbows Randy. “A neutered country?” 

   I that what she said? What’s that mean?”

   And Randy: “What?”

   And Bruce: “A neutered country.”

   And Randy: “What about it?”

   “What’s that mean?”

   “How should I know?”

   “Well, that’s what she said.”

   "Who said? Ilona?”

   “Her.” He’s pointing at the old lady blabbing down front.

   And Randy: “Oh her.”

   And Bruce: “A neutered country… How’s that possible?”

   Bruce: “It isn’t.”

   Randy: “It isn’t?”

   Bruce: “Too many pets.”

   Randy: “She said it was.”

   Bruce: “Who?”

   Randy: “Her.”

   Bruce: “Ilona? So what do you care?”

   Randy. “No, HER.” He’s pointing down at the wrinkle bag 
again.

   Bruce: “Oh, HER. Hold on. I’ll be right back.”

   So he turns to me.

   “Hey, a neutered country, what’s that?”

   And I’m like “A neutered country? What?”

   And he goes “How can a country be neutered?”

   And I’m like “Who says they can?”

   And he’s like “He says she said it.”

   And I’m like “Who said it?”

   And he’s like “Him.”

   Then I’m like “So what do you care?”

   And he goes “No, no. He says SHE said it.”

   And I go “Ilona? So what?”

   And he goes “No, HER.” He’s pointing down at the blabbing sack.

   And I’m like “Oh HER.”

   And he’s like “I’ve heard of electrons being neutered, but—"

   And then I remembered “Wasn’t Switzerland neutered 
during the war?”

   And he’s all glad. “Oh that’s right! Yeah...”

   So he turns back to Bruce.

   “Switzerland, during the war.”

   And Bruce has lost track of the subject.

   Randy explains. “It was neutered.”

   I remind him. “By the Germans.”

   He passes this information on to Bruce. “By the Germans.”

   Bruce is grateful.

   “Switzerland. Oh, O.K. During the war. Great, thanks. 
During what war?”

   Randy says “Hold on. I’ll be right back.”

   And he turns back toward me.

   “During what war?”

   “Uh…” I had to think about it. “The Big One.”

   Randy: “Civil?”

   Me: “You bet.”

   He turns back to Bruce.

   “Civil.”

   Well, Bruce is blown away.

   “Civil? Switzerland was neutered during the Civil War?”

   Randy: “Well, things didn’t come to a halt all over the globe 
just cause a few American Patriots were having our little red, white and blue ass-wipe with the slaves! I’m sure all the country…” He was searching for just the right word.“… vets 
were still neutering in areas that wanted to change their 
national image…”

   Bruce, ever skeptical: “You sure?”

   Randy, back to me: “You sure?”

   Me: “That’s what she said.”

   Randy: “Ilona? How would she know?”

   And I’m like “No, HER.” I’m pointing at Our Lady of 
Burlap.

   Randy: “Oh, HER.”

   He turns back to Bruce.

   “He said that’s what she said.”

   And Bruce: “Who?”

   And Randy: “Him.”

   He’s pointing at me. But I’m not paying attention cause I’m trying to take lecture notes. Somebody had to.

   “He’s sure?” asks Bruce.

   Randy answers: “He says that’s what she said.”

   And Bruce is like “Ilona?”

   And Randy’s all “No, HER.” He’s pointing at Professor 
Scrunchy down front.

   And Bruce: “Oh HER. O.K. Thanks.”

   And Randy’s like “No problem.”

   Meanwhile I’m giving this some deep thought.

   “Boy, those Germans weren’t satisfied with Jews and Palestinians, they had to go after poor defenseless dogs and cats too, huh?”

   Ok, so now we’re all back listening to Professor Dustbunny and scratching some more notes.

   But Randy’s still like “So, Ilona’s sexier 'n shit, but…”

   And I’m like “You’re still young. There’s other fish to fry in the lake.”

   But Bruce is all “If I were you, I’d shag her pronto and often!”

   And Randy’s still “I don’t know.”

   So I go “Isn’t Ilona a German name?”

   This obviously shakes Randy up.

   “It is?” He looks worried. “I thought it was French.” Randy’s not the sharpest tool in your wallet.

   So now we’re still taking notes and listening to Professor Peach Cobbler and taking more notes. But I can feel that Randy’s lost in thought. Or at least as close as he comes. And then we’re interrupted again by Bruce.

   “Wow… Hmm… Hey, I didn’t know that. Did you?” he asks Randy, of all people.

   And Randy’s like “Huh?”

   And Bruce’s like “I didn’t know President Kennedy was a 
heroic war vet!”

   Randy isn’t seeing the implications.

   And Bruce is like “He must’ve been one of the vets that went 
in and reversed the Swiss neuterings. Think of how many Americans who know what to do with an Animal scalpel must have been needed.”

   Now Randy’s catching on. “Ohhhhh. On D-Day?”

   Bruce fills in the detail. “To pay back the Swiss for their sacrifice.” And then he’s like: “What’s the D stand for again?”

   So Randy elbows me. Who else.

   “Hey, what’s the D in D-Day?”

   And I’m not sure.

   Bruce: “Dry?”

   Randy: “Why would they have a Dry-Day?”

   Bruce: “Maybe it didn’t rain?”

   Randy: “They would’ve just called it Dry-Day then.”

   Bruce: “Well, there’s lots of dry days, but there was only one 
D-Day. With so many  hospitals destroyed during the Big One, they must’ve had to wait for a super dry day--"
   "To perform the reversals on all those neuterings.”

   So Randy’s like “I don’t think that’s dirty enough.”

   To which Bruce replies “Dirty? What’s dirty got to do with 
it?”

   Randy explains. “You know. Like A-hole or Son-of-a –B, or 
D-Day…”

   “Maybe it was Dildo-Day.”

   And Randy’s like “You mean because of all the neuterings?”

   Now Bruce has a theory.

   “How ‘bout Do-It-Day?”

   Suddenly out of the blue, Randy exclaims “Wait, I 
remember!”

   And Bruce and I are like “What?”

   And Randy reports his finding.

   “Doubleday. I think the pet population doubled on that date because of the reversals.”

   Well, Randy and I write that one down!

   But Randy’s still tortured. “I don’t know about Ilona.”

   And Bruce says “Kennedy was a physical therapist too, if I remember correctly.”

   And I’m like “How come?”

   And Bruce says “He wrote a book called PT 106. We were supposed to read it last year.”

   And Randy “Probably the number of Swiss he physically therapized per day.”

   And all this is starting to sink in with me. So I’m like “Geez, Kennedy was a vet, a hero and a physical therapist!”

   And Randy’s like “The guy was a regular one-stop 
convenience!”

   And me: “No wonder he got elected President.”

   And Randy: “Surprising he didn’t get elected President of Switzerland.”

   And Bruce: “It was really good of the Swiss to sign up their animals in order to free the slaves.”

   And Randy’s like: “I wouldn’t have!”

   And I’m like “Me neither!”

   And Randy’s like “ I don’t care if it was triple or quadruple 
day!”

   And Bruce: “Gives you new respect for the Swiss Miss 
don’t it?”

   So we kinda settle back into listening to Madam Furball 
for a bit.

   Then Randy says “There’s other fish in the river.”

   And I’m like: “Ilona Guttenberg.”

   And Randy’s like “No, her last name is Birch.”

And me: “Oh, I was just mumbling to myself.”

   And then Bruce’s ear picks up a detail that really sets him off.

   “Bay of Pigs Operation in Cuba?”

   And Randy: “You mean…”

   And I’m like “The damn Germans neutered the Pigs in Cuba too…”

   And Randy’s like “God, Kennedy really had his hands full...”

   Well, that’s about all I can remember. But starting on that day, I became a History buff. And Kennedy especially. Ironic, isn’t it, that the thing between me and History began in a class that I got a D-plus in. But what I learned that day was that History isn’t a huge ten-thousand-page mass of factual events. It’s like girls or beer, you can have opinions about it.  Like with the Kennedy assassination. I’m convinced that that was his Presidential Stunt Double in the car with Jackie. President Kennedy was doing Amelia Earhart in the South Pacific. If you were President, wouldn’t you? Think about it.