My local newspaper, the Topeka Capital-Journal, carries the comic strip Dilbert, which occasionally features a character known as Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services. Mordac earns his title by being so obsessed with the security of his company’s systems that he makes it essentially impossible for anyone to access them. In Kansas, we have a real-life counterpart to Mordac – Kobach, the Preventer of Voter Registration. In his excessive zeal to prevent non-citizens from being able to register to vote in Kansas, our esteemed Secretary of State has advocated policies that have prevented more than twenty thousand individuals from being able to register to vote. In a debate with his opponent in the recent election, Mr. Kobach justified this by pointing out that it had been determined that at least twelve of these individuals had been determined not to be citizens. Not twelve thousand, or twelve hundred, or even twelve dozen – twelve individuals, as compared to the twenty thousand people, deemed guilty by Mr Kobach until proven innocent, who were unable to register to vote. Mr. Kobach claims his intention is to protect the integrity of elections in Kansas, but as I see the situation, he is doing exactly the opposite. Twelve votes will seldom be enough to swing even a local election, but twenty thousand people denied the right to vote because they are unable to jump through the hoops that have been set up to make it difficult for them to do so could make a real difference in even some statewide elections. Mr. Kobach and his supporters insist that the twelve individuals they have been able to identify represent only the tip of the iceberg, and that there must be many more illegal immigrants just waiting to decide the outcome of elections in Kansas if given the opportunity to do so. I believe that the most appropriate reply to this contention is a word coined by Theodore Roosevelt – BULLfeathers. The hordes of non-citizens desperately awaiting an opportunity to hijack our elections exist only in the paranoid fantasies of the reactionary bigots who seek to use alleged voter fraud as an excuse to deny the right to vote to as many young, poor and minority voters as they can manage to disenfranchise. I have seen Mr. Kobach quoted in print as insisting that he is not a bigot. This may well be true; I do not claim to know the inner workings of his mind. However, if this really is true, then his actions suggest that he is instead an opportunistic demagogue, pandering to the bigotry of others in order to advance his own political future. In either case, it is about as appropriate to have Mr. Kobach safeguarding the voting rights of Kansans as it is to have a fox guarding a chicken coop.
Month: May 2015
How did they die?
When I was younger (long, long ago), newspaper obituaries most often stated that the person who was the subject of the obitiuay had died, although in some cases they stated instead that the deceased had passed away. This second usage actually offended some people, who felt that it was an attempt to deny the reality of physical death, but that is not the point I am trying to address here. Instead, I have noted that in recent years, perhaps as newspapers have begun to treat obituaries more as a profit center than as a news item, obituaries have become somewhat more florid, referring to the deceased as having gone to be with Jesus, departed this vale of tears, crossed the rainbow bridge, etc. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, since those paying for the obituary should be allowed to phrase it in a way that is meaningful to them, but it has occurred to me that another way to approach this matter would be to phrase the information in a way that relates to the decedent’s occupation, since in many cases this is one of the things that most defined the person’s life. With this in mind, I offer the following list, which attempts to identify how in at least some cases a person’s obituary might be worded to reflect that person’s occupation in life:
| Occupation | Manner of Death |
| Building custodian | Kicked the bucket |
| Agribusiness owner | Bought the farm |
| World poker tour participant | Cashed in his/her chips OR Folded his/her hand |
| Motel operator | Checked out |
| Bounty hunter | Went to his reward |
| Rodeo cowboy | Bit the dust |
| Working cowboy | Rode into the sunset OR Went to his last roundup |
| Casino card dealer OR Vaudeville song & dance man OR Shakespearean actor |
Shuffled off this mortal coil |
| Test pilot OR Astronaut | Slipped the surly bonds of earth |
| Sea captain | Sailed into the sunset |
| Professional mover | Relocated |
| Musician | Began decomposing |
| Football quarterback | Passed |
| Football field goal specialist | Kicked off |
| Movie director | Faded to black |
| Professional boxer | Went down for the count |
| Realtor | Moved to a quieter neighborhood |
| Astronomer | Became one with the universe |
| Attorney | Rested his/her case |
| Librarian | Closed the book |
| Travel agent OR Lifelong resident of Alaska | Went south |
| Professional singer | Joined the choir invisible |
| “Survivor” participant | Was voted off the island |
| Navy frogman | Croaked |
| HVAC Technician | Assumed room temperature |
| Geometry teacher | Became horizontal |
| Watch repair person | Ran out of time |
| Orchestra conductor | Laid down his/her baton |
| Professional truck driver | Reached the end of the road |
| Respiratory therapist | Expired |
The items below were added after the original posting of this entry:
| Building Demolition Contractor | Imploded |
| Surgeon | Suspended operations |
| Agricultural Custom Cutter | Met the Reaper |
| Plumber | Went down the drain |
| Postal Carrier | Completed his/her appointed rounds |
| Anesthetist | Began sleeping the big sleep |
| Railroad engineer | Left the tracks |
| Professional genealogist | Joined his/her ancestors |
| Nuclear reactor technician | Went offline |
| Paranormal Investigator | Gave up the ghost |
| Ornithologist | Sang his/her swan song |
I would be happy to receive suggestions for additions or revisions to this list.
This could have happened
One branch of my family, on my father’s side, did a fair amount of genealogical research in order to try to determine whether any of our ancestors in that lineage had fought in the Revolutionary war. They confirmed that at least one ancestor, a man named William Sexson, had in fact served under George Washington in the war. William had been born in Virginia, and was therefore doubly proud of his connection with General Washington, so he took every opportunity to tell his children stories about him, including the story about the cherry tree, which even then, and even though it was fictitious, was well known.
Some time after the end of the war, William moved his family, including his son Frederick Free Sexson (my direct ancestor, who appears in the family history as Free Sexson) from Grayson County, Virginia to Whitley County, Kentucky. Although the area was at that time sparsely settled, there were other families around, and young Free got to know, and become friends with, other boys of about his age.
As sometimes happens even now, boys of a certain age got together on Halloween and performed pranks that seemed like a better idea at the time than they did the following morning. This was the case on the morning of one November first, when William, obviously very angry, approached young Free and said to him, in a stern voice “Son, I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to give me an honest answer: did you and your friends push our outhouse off the cliff last night?”
Young Free realized that he could be in serious trouble, but he remembered the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, which his father had told him many times, so he answered “Father, I cannot tell a lie. Yes, my friends and I did push the outhouse off the cliff last night as a foolish Halloween prank.” Whereupon William gave his son the worst beating of his young life.
Afterwards, young Free, with tears in his eyes, said to his father “Pa, why did you do that? I told the truth. George Washington’s father didn’t beat him after he told the truth about cutting down the cherry tree.”
William answered “Son, that is true. George Washington’s father did not beat George Washington when he told the truth about chopping down the cherry tree. But George Washington’s father was not IN the cherry tree when George Washington chopped it down.”
A malady no one wants to talk about
During the latter part of the 2012 Presidential campaign, President Obama several times noted that his Republican opponent seemed to be affected by a previously-unknown medical condition, characterized primarily by loss of memory concerning political positions that Mr. Romney had only recently endorsed. This condition, identified by President Obama as “Romnesia”, has affected other political candidates over the history of this country, although Mr. Romney did seem to have a particularly virulent strain of the disease.
However, President Obama, most likely in order not to offend those voters who do not feel that such conditions should be publicly discussed or even alluded to, did not mention a much more severe medical condition, which did not affect Mr. Romney, but did seem to be affecting a number of conservative political candidates and pundits. This malady is characterized on one hand by a complete denial of facts which one does not wish to acknowledge and, on the other by an absolute conviction that what one devoutly wishes to be true must therefore be true. This condition appears to have been responsible for a large number of Republican pollsters and officeholders convincing themselves that their own polling results absolutely must be correct, and that any evidence to the contrary from polls conducted by others must be the result of either seriously flawed methodology or outright dishonesty by those conducting those polls. This led, for example, to a number of political pundits on FAUX News making complete fools of themselves in the days leading up to the election, and even as the election results were being reported, even arguing with their own staff members that it could not possibly be true that President Obama was winning the election.
Donald Trump’s deranged, ranting tweets on election night suggested that he, too, was affected by this same unfortunate medical condition. The President chose not to discuss this situation in public, perhaps for the reason I suggested earlier, or perhaps for other reasons. I am also reluctant to mention this matter publicly. However, more recent events, in which some Republican members of Congress remarked that it would no big deal if the government of the United States were to default on its debt, when almost everyone else, including wealthy Republican campaign donors, realized that such a situation would be disastrous for the economy of the entire world, not just for the United States, leads me to conclude that someone must bring this matter out into the open, in the hope that this malady will not infect more individuals than it already has.
I confess that I have not had any medical training, and that I am used to referring to this condition in layperson’s terms, but I believe that the proper medical term for the condition to which I am referring is Rectocranial Inversion, or RI for short. Although it can certainly affect Democrats and Independents as well as Republicans and other conservatives, recent outbreaks of RI that I am aware of seem to have been concentrated mostly at the exteme right end of the political spectrum. One can only hope that a cure for this malady can be found before its victims manage to do irreparable damage.
Note: Since I am not the junior senator from Kentucky, I feel that I should acknowledge my sources when possible. In that regard I need to mention that I first became aware of the formal medical name of the condition I have mentioned here in an episode of the early 1990’s TV series Nurses.
“Our Customers are Idiots!”
Like many people, I find that I really enjoy some TV commercials, and I really dislike some others. I have noted, however, that some people seem to be really annoyed by commercials that I find inoffensive or even entertaining, while I some commercials that really aggravate me don’t seem to bother other people. A few weeks ago, I did a brief Google search for the phrase that I used as the title of this posting, and found a lot of discussions that suggested to me that I am not the only person who is generally annoyed by commercials that suggest that the company advertising its products or services thinks of its customers as fools. One set of such commercials that was often mentioned in this regard was the series plugging the Sonic drive-in chain. Strictly from my own personal point of view, no individual one of these commercials is so outrageously annoying that it would prevent me from ever patronizing Sonic (although I don’t much care for Sonic anyway), but the sheer number of different, mildly to moderately annoying commercials in this seemingly endless series definitely gets on my nerves.
However, rather to my surprise, in the (admittedly not exhaustive) searches I performed I did not find a single reference to the small set of commercials that, to me at least, represented far and away the most irritating example of the “our customers are idiots” genre: the (thankfully) brief series of Staples’ “Wow! That’s a LOW Price!” commercials that appeared a few years ago. This series of commercials was so aggressively annoying(not to say insulting) to me that I found myself regretting that Topeka, where I live, did not have a Staples store, because I had a strong desire to walk into a Staples, find the Customer Service counter, and convey the message (in a restrained way; I didn’t want to be as obnoxious as these commercials were) that I would not spend a penny in a Staples for as long as this ad campaign was running.
Given the fairly short duration of this ad campaign, I don’t think I was the only person who was annoyed, and perhaps someone in a city that did have a Staples store did actually take the step that I had only fantasized about, and convey this annoyance to the company in person. I would like to think that Staples even found a different ad agency – one that didn’t think that insulting the company’s customers was the way to attract more business – and even, perhaps, that the person responsible for this campaign may have realized that he or she was in the wrong line of work, and went on to seek employment better suited to his or her talents. (I won’t suggest an appropriate line of work, because to do so would be an insult to anyone who is currently earning a living doing whatever I might suggest.)
Anyway, this is more than enough about this particular annoying series of commercials, but I hope to write at least one more post addressing some of the other more annoying TV commercials I have encountered in recent years. That may take a while, however, so in the mean time, I hope that readers of this post might respond by citing commercials that they find particularly annoying (or even by defending those two Sonic dolts, if they wish to do so). And if anyone reading this piece did find those Staples commercials as irritating as I did, and actually did convey this sentiment to the employees in a Staples store, please identify yourself and accept my sincere gratitude, since you may have helped get those commercials off TV, and therefore helped lower my blood pressure.
About the title of this blog
In order to try to head off any possible confusion, I feel that I should explain that I am not affiliated in any way with the rock band Kansas. To my knowledge, I have never met any member of the band, or anyone directly associated with any member of the band.
I bring this up because Kansas included the song “People of the South Wind” on its album “Monolith”, in 1979. As people who were educated in schools in this state may know, and most other people probably do not know, the word “Kansas” comes from the language of the Kaw tribe, and is normally translated as “people of the south wind”. Thus my source for the phrase “… of the south wind”, is not the band’s song, but the same source that the band used for the title of the song. As to the use of the word “rant”, I’m sure that will be appropriate for at least some parts of at least some of the postings I plan to add here. Those who disagree with the sentiments I express may consider the word “rant” appropriate for the entire blog, but I would like to believe this is a matter of opinion.
On the subject of words that come from the language of the Kaw tribe, another of those words is “Topeka”, which is of course the name of the city that is now the capital of the State of Kansas. It used to be written routinely that the word “Topeka” meant “a good place to dig potatoes”, but in recent years I believe that some doubts have been expressed in at least some quarters about the accuracy of this translation. One school of thought (not often voiced) is that a more accurate translation might be “these honkeys will believe anything you tell them if you keep a straight face while you’re doing it”. Another possibility, also seldom voiced, is that the word “Topeka” was created by a shaman of the Kaw tribe who had a prophetic dream that a city in this location would one day become the state’s capital, and that the word should actually be translated as “behind schedule and over budget”.
To return to the alleged topic of this posting, I don’t believe I can be considered to have stolen the title of this blog from the band Kansas. I prefer to think that we have both drawn upon a shared cultural heritage.
Comments policy
I will try to avoid moderating comments to this blog, but I reserve the right to do so if it becomes necessary. More specifically, you can certainly post a comment disagreeing with something I have posted. You can call me an idiot, if you feel that’s appropriate, but I don’t feel that profanity is appropriate. I will take down comments that appear to be libelous, or contain racial, religious or ethnic slurs, or threats of violence, whether directed at me, at others posting comments, or other individuals. I plan to allow anonymous postings initially, because I understand that some individuals feel uncomfortable, or fear retaliation, if posting under their own names. However, I reserve the right to change this policy if the situation merits it. I would not allow someone to come into my home and verbally abuse or threaten my guests, and likewise I don’t feel I should tolerate such behavior here, either. My hope, however, is that commenters will exercise sufficient civility that I will not need to intervene.
Help me with my Bucket List
More specifically, I’m requesting suggestions concerning one particular item on my list. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am a Kansan by birth, and have lived in this state all my life, but there are a number of counties in Kansas that I have never been to at all, or have only passed through on my way elsewhere. One thing I hope to do while I’m still above ground is to visit all 105 counties in the state of Kansas, to spend at least some money in each county (whether for lodging, a meal, gasoline, or even just a cup of coffee or a soft drink), to take a photograph of the county’s courthouse, and to visit and photograph at least one other site of some significance in the county. That significance might be scenic, historical, personal, or something else, but this is the portion of the bucket list item that I would be happy to receive suggestions about.
Before continuing, I feel the need to digress briefly. I now live in Topeka, and a few years ago, the local newspaper, the Topeka Capital-Journal, published a story about a local couple who had done something similar to what I have described above. As I recall, however, that couple had approached the matter differently, primarily limiting their endeavor to visiting each county’s courthouse and photographing it; they had completed the task in a fairly short time because they had not made it a point to visit other sites in each county. For some reason, I feel the need to mention that I had actually had the idea for my project before the article I am referring to here was published; I have an admittedly absurd need to identify my idea as being my own, rather than being copied from that of the couple in question. This almost certainly matters to no one but me, so having mentioned it, I will return to my request for assistance. For some counties, I have a fairly clear idea about what site in the county, if I must limit myself to one, should be the one site I choose to visit, but for others, I would be happy to receive suggestions, particularly from people who live or have lived in or near that county: what is the one place in your county you would suggest that a visitor should not miss.
Kansas has 105 counties, so I won’t list all them here, but I will list a few, and the sites I would consider, at least for now, to be the must-visit locations:
|
County |
Site |
|
Barton |
|
|
Chase |
|
|
Cherokee |
|
|
Ellis |
|
|
Graham |
|
|
Mitchell |
|
|
Reno |
|
|
Russell |
|
|
Saline |
|
|
Shawnee |
|
|
Smith |
|
|
Wallace |
Additionally, in order not to be overly restrictive, I would also be happy to receive suggestions about “must see” places in other states, particularly from people who live or have lived in those states, again with the same basic idea: if you knew that someone would be visiting your state, and you were going to suggest one place that the visitor really should make it a point to visit, what one place would you suggest? In this regard, I will only add that there’s a place in Michigan that I really hope to be able to get to, because people have been suggesting for decades that I should visit it, or even take up residence there.