“I hope to pass away like my grandfather. He died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car at the time.”
– B.Y.U. humor
*
Friday, June 29, is the hottest day of the year. The newscast reports temps of 104 degrees at the airport. At 9:40 p.m., I’m sitting in the living room, reading the newspaper and formulating my complaints about the president: He doesn’t know what he’s doing. According to Marc A. Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute, the current administration makes investments in ecological, “green” technologies, but the companies they loan the money to, all too often turn belly-up. Leaving us taxpayers holding the bag.
Billions of dollars!
Solyndra, whose out-dated technology cost taxpayers a cool $535 million in loan guarantees.
The president’s people made a $33 million grant to Raser Technologies to build a power plant in Beaver Creek, Utah. The company now owes $1.5 million in back taxes and has filed for bankruptcy protection!
ECOtality received $126.2 million in taxpayer money in 2009 to install electric car chargers in five states. The company has since incurred $45 million in losses. They themselves say that they don’t believe the company will ever reach profitability!
Nevada Geothermal Power received a $98.5 million loan guarantee in 2010. With their cash reserves depleted, the company is in economic turmoil and may go under.
First Solar: $3 billion in loan guarantees for power plants in Arizona and California. They just burned through $401 million in restructuring costs and fired 30% of the workforce.
Abound Solar received a $400 million loan guarantee to build photovoltaic panel factories. The company halted production in February and laid off 180 employees.
SunPower received a $1.2 billion loan guarantee and, in January, owed more than the company is worth.
Brightsource: A $1.6 billion loan guarantee has been followed by losses totaling $177 million.
Too many of these people either contributed bigtime to the current president’s campaign or are major donors to the Democratic Party.
We’re seeing crony capitalism lead to dud investments. I’m tired of the president playing mutual fund manager. He’s no good at it! When I have shares in a mutual fund saddled with bad management, I liquidate my holdings.
Other things that get my goat:
The “McCain-Feingold” legislation, allowing campaign finance reform— cleaning up a veritable cesspool of politicians for sale to special interest groups— received only a tepid response from the current occupant in the White House.
The 54,000 soldier “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009 – 2010 put over a third of the task force—20,500 Marines— in Helmand province, where they had very little work, instead of plopping them in Kandahar, where the insurgency is mushrooming.
As Commander In Chief, the prez failed to back the State Department and Richard C. Holbrooke’s peace initiative, which could have made a deal with the Taliban and ended the Afghan conflict with “Dayton”-style accords. Instead, Mr. Passive-Aggressive, the president let bureaucratic infighting and one-upmanship overshadow a possible solution. Our boots on the ground continue to be killed while millions of dollars go into a wasted war effort.
In this election year, the Democratic incumbent sides with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is little more than an American puppet. One of Hamid’s brothers runs “The Helmand,” a restaurant on North Charles Street in Baltimore featuring Afghan cuisine. A Pashtun, touchy and corrupt, Hamid himself heads a cantankerous regime in Kabul. It’s nice for Hamid Karzai that he has U.S. backing, since his fellow Afghans in the countryside feel no affection for him.
Bailing out the banks, the Wall Street brokerage houses and the auto industry, our leader has let Main Street wither. As home values and share prices tumbled, the average American family lost 35% of their net worth in the last five years! The average wealth of a family of four is currently $66,740, according to the Census Bureau.
My mom has three additional issues:
We’ve got a “liberal” president who is a closet lackey of Big Business. The Republicans have a “Big Business candidate” who is a closet liberal.
Now that the Muslim Brotherhood won the election in Egypt, no one in the U.S. Congress is petitioning for one penny of the Egyptian aid appropriation to be released. Sharia law is not the American way. With this president, however, you never know: He may decide the Muslim Brotherhood will like us better if we send them the one billion dollars in aid money.
Our dear president favors the Canadian tar sands project. Extracting oil from the sands requires three times as much water as oil produced. Once used to clean tar sands, the contaminated water returns to the earth, poisoning the water table for generations to come. By 2030, drinkable, unpolluted water, H2O, will be the scarce commodity over which countries go to war. As such, the Canadian tar sands project seems both shortsighted and incredibly foolish.
*
What I hear first is the roar. A jet plane? A semi? Opening the front door, I see wind and rain propelling tree branches up the street. I close the door and return to my chair and the newspaper, but the air conditioning is struggling. I get up and turn it off. Then the lights go out. They come back on for one second, go out, come back on, go out. Then they come back on for one final second, before dying for good.
Ugh!
A photog in my youth, I spent endless hours in the darkroom. I don’t have any trouble retrieving a flashlight from the basement in the dark, feeling my way. I unplug the dryer, the TV sets, the cordless phones and my computer. Then I take a seat on the back porch.
The storm is called a derecho, a freight train of wind and rain tearing across several states. Words of Spanish derivation, where a tornado signifies turning air, a derecho blows “straight ahead.” We have a warm air mass hugging the ground and a cold front blowing in above it. Warm air rises, cold air sinks. As these air currents pass each other, the friction— on a molecular level!— generates electrical charges.
For forty minutes, I sit and watch the sky alight in lightning bolts every five seconds. After only a minute, I go inside and get my sunglasses. So now I’m sitting in the dark, in sunglasses, watching the sky light up! Twelve times a minute. Four hundred and eighty lightning bolts. I am definitely freaking out, waiting for the alien spaceships to land!
Since this is mom’s house, every room has a cordless phone. No electricity = no phone. I go to the basement, using the flashlight this time, and dig out a rotary phone I keep on hand for emergencies. I plug it in. The wind has died down, as the storm blows up the coast. I light two yartzeit candles, one in the dining room, one on the back porch. Candles in glasses are almost as effective as hurricane lamps.
The phone rings!
Mom has been to a show with her friends. They are now sitting in the foyer of the retirement community where the friends live.
“Stay there!” I tell her. “Don’t try to go anywhere. Wait until the storm passes.”
“The news reports say there are trees down everywhere, blocking the roads,” she tells me excitedly. “Driving here, the street lights were out at all the major intersections! The highways are a madhouse.”
She is at one tony retirement community, but fate— and the power company— don’t play favorites. There’s no electricity there either! Mom’s talking to me on her cell phone. Aha! We agree that she’ll spend the night there.
At one o’clock in the morning, I don my aquatic shoes and walk the streets. Every hundred feet, there is a tree blocking the road. They look shaggy, strange in the darkness. The only other people I meet are busy loading possessions from a pitch-black house into two cars. Thoroughly pissed off, they don’t look very friendly. I give them a wide berth. Wandering home, I am amazed to find the telephone pole at the top of the hill has snapped like a matchstick! The crossbar and the top third hang, toy-like, in the electrical wires.
What a mess.
In 2005, the Washington area got hit by two major hurricanes. Around here, during the second storm, an oak tree became uprooted mid-block and pulled down the power line. Our grid, a block long and three blocks wide, was without power for five days! On the third day, the Town Council sent politicians around to hold neighborhood meetings. A videographer tagged along, filming us with a large, professional-grade rig. “Yeah, yeah,” groused Morton Reilly, one of the most patriotic of my neighbors, “Is that so you’ll have evidence to use in court if we physically attack you?”
The reps from the Town Council weren’t amused. “Look,” they reasoned, “your wiring can be transferred to underground culverts. No more storm damage. We’ve done the math. It is going to cost each household $1,000. It’s your call.”
“That’s my vacation money!” complained Morton and three other family fathers. I just looked at them. So we never took the municipality up on their offer. The “cottage community of Oxburg” was built in 1927. Guess what? We have the same spindly telephone poles as they had then. (When we were kids, we watched every summer as the creosote tar preservative leaked out of the wood.) Except for storm damage, nothing has been replaced! Nothing.
In the last ten years, the cable companies have shown up and strung their green cables and hung their signal boxes on the existing poles!
*
Saturday morning, the sun is up, but the electricity is nowhere to be found. Mom gets home about 11 a.m., full of her adventures. “The streets are a catastrophe! I lost 30 minutes easing through intersections. The radio says to treat downed traffic lights like a four-way stop.” She has me close up the house, hopefully to keep the cool air inside. Right away, I notice that without the attic exhaust fan, the upstairs gets hot and musty, as a constant wave of dry heat radiates from the ceiling.
We return to a more primitive existence. We plan before opening the refrigerator, so the minimum of cold air will escape. (In 2005, I got two bags of ice every morning and put one in the freezer and one in the fridge, mopping up smelt water several times a day.) We don’t try to do a whole lot. I spend most of my time on the back porch, cleaning up old papers and news clippings. Mom sits inside and sweats, complaining that my junk clutters the basement.
“It’s too dark to sit down there anyway,” I point out, but she’s ornery and upset, so I let it go.
While I eat lunch on the back porch, a cardinal flies across the lawn. He’s as bright red as a stop sign, with a black mask like a bandit. He comes hopping along the porch ledge, foraging. Since mom and I don’t chase away the animals, our birds, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits have become very aggressive. They all but crawl onto my lap, not always a pleasant experience.
Pamela, next door, is abandoning her house until the power comes back on. Her hubby, the college professor, is out of town. “Can you,” she asks, “turn on the generator if it rains? We’ve got a new generator to operate the sump pump in the basement.”
We go to look. I help her fill the gas tank. She shows me how to turn on the fuel valve, how to flip the switch, the “eco filter” I need to couple in after three minutes’ running time. My eyes grow large as I devour the two outlets marked “120 volts/20 amps.”
“Sure,” I tell her, “but can I run an extension cord from our house, plug in my refrigerator and run the generator for an hour, just to cool down our fridge?”
“Will an hour be enough?” she asks.
“An hour will sure be better than nothing!”
It’s while I’m positioning myself to pull the stove away from the wall to get at the refrigerator cord that I notice the yellow light streaming from the kitchen lamp.
???
I rush to tell my mom, “The power’s back on!”
It’s 6 p.m. I go next door and tell Pamela. She’s packing to leave. Grabbing flashlights, we descend to her basement and throw the power switch from “generator” to “mains.” Nada. Nothing. “Shit!” I exclaim, embarrassed that we have power and she doesn’t. And for using an expletive.
Disappointed, Pamela heads to her sister’s place in the District. “She still has electricity.” I promise to keep an eye on her place and start the generator if it rains.
Strange brew. We have electricity. The neighbors on Algonquin don’t. How do I know? Mike McGraw’s generator is still noisily chugging on his driveway, spewing gas and producing wattage. Mike is admirably handy with electric saws, weed whackers and power mowers. He lives by the light of the orange, outdoor extension cord.
The deal is, we’re all supposed to be on the same grid! Our backyards face one another. There’s already dissension over speed humps. So the natives aren’t happy when mom and I return to civilization and electrification, leaving most of them stuck somewhere in the Stone Age: Living in their basements to keep cool. Going to bed at dusk and rising at daybreak because they lack artificial illumination. Throwing out tons of defrosted food.
It turns out the crews from Pike, who came up from Georgia to help in 2005, split the grid in two. Now there are haves and have-nots!
Some locals even lack potable water. How do you boil the water when you have no electricity?
*
The Town of Oxburg, being a separate municipality, has a contract with Mepco, the Maryland Electrical Power Company, one of the smaller entities in the electricity business. When I finally get through on my cell phone at 10 p.m. on Saturday night and tell the young lady about the snapped telephone pole, she replies, “Mepco isn’t responsible for telephone poles. The municipality owns those.”
I’m ready to strangle her.
“But the three houses closest to the pole are still without power!”
“Oh! Well! Power outages are our province. I’ll file your report.”
On Sunday afternoon, July 1st, the Maryland Electrical Power Company holds a town hall style press conference at the local elementary school. This is the same locale where I spent last year battling my neighbors twice a month over speed humps. I oppose speed humps! I lost. Being back among the toddler-size furniture of the library makes my skin crawl. Jim, the black dude representing Mepco, starts by explaining in rudimentary detail how electricity runs through substations to utility wires before entering our homes.
I hear myself groaning. I consciously force myself to clam up.
After a halting opening statement, Jim turns out to know his stuff: “Right now, we’re working on getting the substations up and running. After that, breaks in the utility wires can further delay us getting that electricity into your home!”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
He takes questions from the audience.
Groan! “Please, God,” I murmur. “No speeches! Please, God!”
The first question comes from an irate middle-aged woman with an executive demeanor: “This is the United States of America!” she declares. “Founded in 1776, we are the leader of the world. Here in the nation’s capital, I would expect an infrastructure that is capable of carrying the most basic goods and services to the people! What are you doing?! How dare you let this power outage drag on for days! Someone must pay for this incredible incompetence! What am I supposed to tell my children? That we are powerless in the nation’s capital? Are we back in the 1970’s, when America was viewed piteously by the rest of the world as a helpless giant unable to bring our enemies to heel?
“This is unacceptable!
“Mark my words! Heads will roll!”
Oh! I am thinking. Someone made a speech.
Jim does what he can to answer.
Next questioner: “Uh, as I understand it, this thing that hit us,” he says, “is called a derecho. The Washington area has been attacked. We’ve been blown out of the water. We’re shut down! We’re on an emergency footing!”
“Yes?” asks Jim.
“So when are we going to war with Mexico? Intern the illegals and let’s get on with it! How much longer are we expected to wait?!”
“For the power to come back on?” Jim suggests helpfully, trying to stay on message.
*
Over a million and a quarter people have been without electricity. By Monday, only (only!) 350,000 households remain without power. A khamseen, a warm wind, is blowing throught the region, making people act crazy.
*
Tuesday, July 3rd at 7 p.m., the last of my neighbors in Oxburg get their power turned back on. We eat late, as usual. Mom asks me if I intend to run the dishwasher.
“Thunderstorms are predicted. I’ll wait for the weather to pass.”
When I finish cleaning the table and the kitchen, I sit on the back porch, watching the lightning approach. It begins to rain. A blinding white flash lights up the night, followed by a hollow ka-pow! Ah, folks? The same neighbors whose homes were restored two hours ago…? Their houses go dark. I turn and look at our kitchen door. Yellow light streams from behind the venetian blind! This could get ugly.
Another flash of light, another explosion. Our power goes out!
“See,” I murmur. “What did I tell ya?”
This time I hook up the old-fashion rotary phone and dial the 1-800 number pronto. Cars driving down the hill light up the neighborhood. I pop open the front door and sit on the floor in the living room. On hold, listening to an endless chamber music recital, I see three white utility trucks drive by and turn onto Algonquin. I hang up, grab my aquatic shoes and walk down the hill to have a look. I find a snazzy dude talking beside his car with one of my neighbors.
“Seen any utility trucks?” I ask, introducing myself.
“They drove thataway!”
I walk to the end of the block. A man and a woman are pulling into their driveway. I ask them.
“Up on Chancellorville. There are three trucks. They’re working gangbusters,” the gentleman drawls in a southern accent so thick, I can barely understand him.
What I find is a telephone pole containing a full substation rig and a lot of guys in white hardhats, shaking their heads. “We’d just finished,” one explains. “We intended to mount a metal cover tomorrow morning. It never occurred to us that it might rain and short-circuit our handiwork!” He doesn’t apologize, but by the time I get back home, we have electricity. The rest of my neighbors are back on-line within fifteen minutes.
I run the dishwasher.
*
People in the Washington, D.C. area are going nuts. We’re not turning into zombies and werewolves, but still… Pepco has notified the District, Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties that power will first be fully restored by 10 p.m. on Friday, July 6th! A full week after the storm. It turns out, Pepco has been doling out dividends to its shareholders instead of doing the upgrades they promised the public after the debacle in 2005! Dominion Virginia Power tells Virginians that they will be back on-line by Wednesday, July 4th. The National Guard is clearing debris. Crews from neighboring states have joined in to saw up fallen trees.
We’re in the middle of a heat wave. Electric signs on the Interstate say “COOLING SHELTER NOTICE, DIAL 211.”
Look, I grew up here! Scorching summers were part of living in the Washington area. We didn’t have no A/C in the 1950’s, we had electric fans. When it was hot and muggy, everyone suffered equally. The idea that people are forced to seek malls, libraries and other locations with A/C in order to survive is quietly frightening!
Ain’t no air conditioning after the apocalypse, people! We killin’ the planet, weather gonna get extreme. It’s hot in Hell! Get used to it!
*
We spend July 4th across the street, with Billy McCluskey and his family. I take snow crab legs, corn, potato salad, cole slaw and ginger beer to their house. Then I help my mom cross the street. She walks with a cane. Ninety-one years old, she’s definitely slowing down. “What’s this?” she asks. “Everyone has an American flag out front but us!”
“I didn’t know you wanted one!”
“Yes, but look! Everyone but us!”
“Don’t you see?” I ask her. “They are competing! They’re showing off. ‘My flag is bigger than your flag! My flag flies stiffer than yours!’ I can come back to our house and hang out an American flag, if you want.”
“Do we have one?” she asks.
“We have several! Gifts from the veterans’ organizations you’ve contributed to. Of course, all our flags are manufactured in China!”
“Oh, yeah?” she grunts. “Forget it!”
Billy tells me to stop fretting over the economy: “To paraphrase Ronald Reagan,” he suggests, “it’s a recession when your neighbor is unemployed. It’s a depression when you are unemployed. And it’s an economic recovery when the current bum in the White House is unemployed!”
He explains to me that the U.S. remains a major shareholder in General Motors. “If we sold our shares today, we’d take a financial loss of $40 billion.”
“Ouch! ¡Ay, caramba! ”
“To paraphrase Ronnie Reagan…”
“Again?”
“This administration is spending like drunken sailors. Only that’s an insult to drunken sailors, who, at least, spend their own money! “
As mom and I return to our house, the sky lights up. “We’re watching the Oxburg Towne Fireworks Show,” I point out.
“A waste of taxpayer money, if you ask me!” she retorts.
We’re in a recession.
A silver cluster is followed by a yellow shower. “Welcome to Bosnia-Hercegovina!” I suggest.
*
According to the newspaper, Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, the head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria, feels the violence has reached “unprecedented” levels.
In Libya, after 50 years of Gaddafi, the country is truly a neophyte democracy: There are 2.8 million registered voters. They are electing representatives to their 200-member National Assembly. There are 3,700 candidates, 142 parties. Amidst a welter of posters, pamphlets and TV ads, most voters admit that they have no idea what the candidates stand for. Members of the former regime are ineligible to run. No risk of Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, becoming Prime Minister!
Meanwhile, in Mali, Islamist rebels are tearing apart the ancient Sufi shrines of Timbuktu. The rebels are ethnic Tuareg fighters from Libya.
Everywhere I look nowadays, I see the new “It” girl.
Katy Perry.
This is a lady I discovered while watching Saturday Night Live in 2010. She sang “Teenage Dream.” Not completely dense, I understand that Lorne Michaels specializes in booking all the pop genres, including gangly girl-women like Sweden’s Robyn, Lily Allen from the U.K. and our very own Ms. Perry. Musically, I love SNL. It introduced me to Sweden’s The Sounds. It also drives me crazy on occasion, featuring bands that are heavy on attitude and short on material. Nothing is as embarrassing as a great band— Coldplay, anyone?— who have ground out some smashing songs— performing on SNL long after their creative juices have evaporated.
Ouch!
After seeing her on TV, I buy a copy of Katy’s Teenage Dream CD. This is a 25-year-old who dresses like she’s eight-years-old. Dressy-uppy party clothes. She sings about “shots” of hard liquor, beachwear and guilty pleasures. For the 18-year-old and younger demographic. Little ‘tween daddy’s girls see her and Kei$ha as role models. (God help the next generation!) We had the Beatles and James Dean.
Gen-X had Madonna. Britney Spears. Even Paris Hilton… sorta. The lady could pout, but she couldn’t sing! It’s Katy’s turn. She gets a front cover and an article in Parade Magazine. Forget Jan Wenner’s Rolling Stone and the other music mags, this signals that Katy has now arrived. Mainstream. Bigtime. Middle America, come look upon your daughter!
On July 4th, I watch her performing live, across the East River from Manhattan, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as part of the Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC. Dressed in a sparkly, sequined American flag outfit that does no favors to her chunky figure, she belts out tunes that drive the midshipmen wild. Later that night, there she is again— her hair dyed purple— on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Either teleportation has reached unprecedented levels of development without my knowledge or the Kimmel broadcast, from the West Coast, was pre-recorded.
And she’s just as cute and amazingly empty-headed as you would expect from someone in the pop industry. Aside from her natural beauty and her chops as a performer, Katy exhibits a serious case of arrested development. Must everyone in America be young all the time? When I was a kid, I dreamt of becoming a rock star! Ho, ho, ho!
Mishegoss.
July 5, 2012 is another scorcher. That night, neighbors up the hill— who have fireworks left over— put on a display for the rest of us. Red and green explosions rip the darkness. Bam! Bang! Zoom! Pow! I feel like I’m back in a war zone.
*
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