Tom's Musings

People say I’m pretty smart. Okay, I can’t name names of such people at the moment but I have been in school a long time … like my whole life. That must count for something.

Yet, like virtually all other males, I am clueless when it comes to those of the female persuasion. Let’s get past their obsessions with relationships and feelings and other emotional nonesense when they might focus more profitably on sports and sex or, more promising, sex and sports. What is with this processing of the minutiae of one’s life. At the end of each day, my poor Mary would ask me how things went. I had the same response every day … ‘fine.’ It mattered not whether I made an earth shattering discovery (which I never did) or whether we lost all our research funding (which never happened either but there were some close calls). Each day was ‘fine.’

Of course, I would get an earful of what went on in her day (she was deputy director of the Wisconsin Court System). I recall when she went back to Law School. I would pick her up in back of the school and she would talk non stop all the way home about the cases being discussed in class. Like I could care. Perhaps that was the origins of the glomus tumor that grew in my ear and which took over 5 hours for the surgeon to remove.

Bottom line, what do women see in men? Why do they freaking bother? We don’t listen. If by chance we do, we want to fix things and not just listen to them express their frustrations. And if we try to listen, we often can’t figure out what’s going on. Face it, we are not the brightest bulbs on the marquee, the sharpest knives in the drawer, the fastest arrows in the quiver. Okay, you get the picture.

Then there are household chores. I was always getting fired by Mary (my long-suffering spouse). I know what all the females out there are saying. You think I tanked my responsibilities on purpose in order to get fired. You would think so, but no. It was all incompetence, plain and simple. I thank the good lord that he created universities where those without any skills whatsoever might go and toil away on meaningless things without bothering real people doing meaningful tasks like cleaning toilets.

There is sex of course. Even though it strikes me that female orgasms are more powerful than their male parnters, some seven decades of observation suggests women are just not that interested, and never have been. Mostly, for them, it is a transactional activity useful to achieve other ends … security, money and things money can buy, social status, and (god knows why) male companionship (see paragraph 1).

We males always suspected such even though our sparring partners from the other gender can, as we know, fake important things with considerable aplomb. This leads to a conundrum for us. If you watch female behavior closely, you realize they look upon us as dangerous predators (no eye contact, always checking us out on google, carrying pepper spray, and so forth). I didn’t have to get used to the social distancing during the Covid pandemic since women ALWAYS practiced social distancing around me … staying six feet away. So, when I was in the game, so to speak, life was difficult. I would worry that some friendly female was really thinking “oh no, this Corbett character is going to make a pass. Better I be bitten by a rabid dog.” Sigh!

But now, finally, I am the perfect male. I’m so freaking old that everthing has fallen into place. I’m pretty deaf so that I just nod while the females in my life are chattering away while blessedly not hearing a damn thing. I still can’t do anything practical but I have plenty of money and can hire people too do real work. And most importantly, I have virtually no testosterone left. Women can be around me without seeing me drool uncontrollably or fear I will make some clumsy pass.

This is nirvana for me and those on the other side of the gender divide. I have no freaking idea why Providence made two sexes so different as to be compleely incompatible, but He did permit us a few years at the end of life where we might get along and enjoy one another’s company.

You can send all hate mail to corbettirp@aol.com

I hate to admit this but I’m a bit of a snob, someone who borders on intellectual elitism of all things. This bothers me greatly since I grew up in a Catholic, ethnic, working class household where money was always an issue. There was, in truth, enough for the basics during my tender years but my parents had a tendency to fritter away too much on rather hedonistic pursuits. There was little left, none really, for culture or investments in education or other aspirational advancements. As a result, I’ve always felt a connection with ethnic, working class folk who struggle to make their lives a little better (more on this in future posts).

More accurately, I’ve always wanted to sympathise with the down to earth working types. I thought, since I shared their roots and was raised in this culture of struggle and upward aspirations, that I would have an affinity with the common people. It turns out … I don’t. They baffle the total crap out of me.

What mostly shocks my sensibilities, and I’m grossly generalizing here (mea culpa), is that so many of them cannot connect the simplest dots. Growing up, the working class stiffs around me seemed, though less educated, quite sharp about things. At a minimum, they seemed able to discern what was in their self-interest and what was not, who was in their corner and who was taking them to the cleaners. Few willingly voted for thhose who made their lives more dificult.

Somewhere along the line, working stiffs have lost their way, too many (though far from all) now enthisiastically support those who systemically rob them blind. Take a look at the chart below. It tells a simple story. Starting with the Presidency of ‘guess who,’ you can trace the red line which represents the famous (or infamous) top 1 percent of the income distribution. Their share of the income pie has steadily and inexorably trended up. On the other hand, the share enjoyed by the bottom half of the population has trended down … a simple way of demonstrating growing U.S. inequality of both resources and opportunity. By the way, the divergence has gotten worse in recent years, propelled by Trump’s massive 2017 tax gift to the uber wealthy. We haven’t seen anything like this since the end of the gilded age and then the late 1920s, just before the great crash.

Perhaps this is something beyound our control, perhaps God is willing this as a way of rewarding the blessed in His eyes. Well, not exactly. Look at the bottom panel. Our western European peers have seen a modest trend toward increased inequality but nothing like what we’ve seen here. A human hand, not Providential belssings, lies behind this ominous trend. Want to enjoy the American Dream these days? Head back across the pond.

You would think that the working classes, people struggling to make ends meet, would be outraged. You might even think they would be seeking redress from their growing difficulties through the ballot box. You would be wrong. Many of those who have lost out in recent decades enthisaiastically support the very people and the very political actors that have robbed them blind.

The reasons for their inexplicable actions will have to wait for further posts, the story is complicated. But I am reminded that W.E.B. Dubois, the first African American to get a doctorate from Harvard, over a century ago discussed the ease with which poorer whites accepted a ‘psychological wage’ in contrast to real compensatory relief. They would eagerly be pacified (and distracted) by those who promised an illusory superiority over those with different skin color or other superficial differences. Hate and division proved such an easy distraction. He described the classic ‘bait and switch’ tactic that has so many voting against their self-interest, and with surprising passion.

This makes me sad. It really does. I loved the people I grew up with. Now, many are an alien species to me.

PS: If you want a witty tour through my childhood, look for ‘A Clueless Rebel’ on Amazon.

Al Franken, one of my favorite public figures, commented on the most recent U.N. report suggesting that the globe put its collective affairs in order since we are all going to die soon. Like our friend the dinosaur, who went extinct suddenly after an unfortunate collision with an asteroid, we are on the precipice of a similar fate due to anthropogenic (human caused) global warming.

His perceptive take on the issue is that many Americans, especially baby boomers, feel like they are lucky enough to be on the ‘last chopper out of Saigon.’ They will die just in time, before the apocalypse becomes reality. Such a clever man.

For those of you too young to recall party line phones that were tied by a cord to the wall, the ‘last chopper out of Saigon’ references the embarrasing and hasty retreat of the American military and their South Vietnamies allies as the NVA and the Vietcong swarmed into the South’s capital in 1975 and toward their inevitable triumph. Those on the chopper escaped ‘just in time.’

To mercilessly beat this analogy into the ground, baby boomers and those even older (like the ancient fart writing this post), can smile in the face of doom. We likely will die before the inevitable collapse of civilization into toasty cinders. We will have boarded the last chopper to whatever comes next. So, do we have a dog in this fight? Since I was raised as a Catholic, I am wrought with guilt and therefore feel some reponsibility in this matter. Catholic guilt is a terrible thing … avoid it like the plague.

It is not like we have not been warned. I mean, the dinosaurs were caught by surprise. Over a century ago, there were reports in our major neswpapers that fossil fuel use was releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Now, we have irrefutable scientific evidence of our complicity in our species’ doom. Carbon dioxide emissions grew very gradually over time until the early 1940s (when I was born though I don’t think their is a causal thing going on here). After that, they increased exponentially and now imminently threaten the homeostatic status of our atmosphere that has kept temps relatively stable for eons. Soon, very soon, the game will be over, the last chopper will have left.

Our collective teponse to doomesday? We worry about March Madness, Prince Harry’s relationship to the Royal Family, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and whether Aaron Rodgers will play for the Packers next year. Really? Give me a f#@king break!

I am freaking glad I’m on the last chopper out of Saigon. I don’t want to be around when the ice caps melt and astonished politicians point fingers and say ‘but no one told us.’ We have known for a long time and chose not to respond. Shame on us!

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PS: An old Peace Corps buddy of mine has written a scholarly book on the topic. Climate Policy Foundations, William C. Whitesell, Cambridge Press, 2011). He writes useful books, unlike me.

I can now insert a foto. Not bad for someone who has trouble changing the time on any of his clocks or watches. I marvel at the ability of young people to master all things technological and yet remain so dumb in other ways.

Of course, I did many questionable things in my sketchy youth. This is me overlooking the Thames River some 55 years ago. Can that be correct … 55 freaking years? At least, I think this is me. After all, this guy has a full head of dark hair and is skinny as shit. I’m on my way to spend two years in India, as a Peace Corps volunteer. Ah yes, two years living in a remote desert region of Rajasthan, defecating in a hole, and trying to be an ‘expert’ in an area about which I knew virtually nothing. Actually good training for my later career as a policy wonk and academic type … refining the ability to fake things.

India was a tough site, especially back then. We were really isolated, no cell phones of wi-fi. You were on your own, battling disease and heat and loneliness. But, in the end, despite our griping, this turned out to be a special and unique experience. While India merely survived our presence, we, on the other hand, learned who we were. I know I absorbed so much about the impact that culture has on an individual, lessons I brought forward and which greatly influenced my policy and academic work.

There are three things I really miss from those years and experiences:

1. Having a full head of hair.
2. Being that skinny.
3. Having all that time to reflect on things.

I can’t share all I want about those years here. But listen, go and find Our Grand Experience, my memoir on India 44. It is a witty recollection of my fruitless efforts to be an agricultural expert along with the equally funny stories of my fellow volunteers. Humorous, sad, and insightful. End of my self-promoting pitch (for now) :-).

Welcome to WordPress! This is your first post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey.

I am a refugee from Facebook who is seeking asylum in a blog. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been thrown in their gulag for using sophisticated humor or sarcasm or irony. I was thrown off their site (presumably for good) after posting a meme fearuring Jesse Owens getting hid gold medal at the 1936 Olympics. You are right, that makes no sense. I had almost 30,000 friends and followers at the time.

I started over as Jim Corbett and quickly rose to have some 7, 000 friends and followers. Still, they kept throwing me off, the final time for commenting on a post from an octogenerian about his lonely life. I jokingly commented that he would be visited by someone from the escort service. I guess they thought I was selling sex. Sure, a 78 year old geezer was selling sex to an 80 something geezer. Give me a break. Their community standards program is beyond incompetence.

I’ve gotten many emails from former FB freinds pleading for me to find a way to connect again. Several suggested a blog since Facebook is hopeless, Twitter is owned by a neo-Nazi, and the other sites seemed aimed at kids. So, here I am!

At present, I have no idea where I will go with this concept, other than experiment for a while. On Facebook, I posted a number of humorous and political memes along with occasional musings on our politics and current events. I may do more of the latter here but, as an experiment, anything is possible.

Join me in this experiment. Let me know what you are thinking. I can be reached at:

corbettirp@aol.com