For this one, I don't actually have to write anything new

These are a few related things. The first one is an email Dad sent to me, and cc'd to Karl, two work friends, his sister, and Nana & Papaw. And apparently Sean Hannity too, at some point.

[Subject: Good luck!]

Open letter to my son in college who voted for B. Obama,

President Elect Barack Obama will be taking office soon. With his left-wing agenda and his Liberal history it is likely that he will allow the Bush tax-cuts to expire, reinstate capital gains taxes on the house I'm trying to sell and increase the taxes on businesses and the majority of the middle class in order to fund his universal federalized medical coverage and the other ‘entitlement’ programs that he has promised.

This being the case, it will probably push the economy into a tailspin. This will result in any profit from the stock that I had dedicated to your tuition being re-distributed to more worthy (including those 40% who don’t pay taxes because their income is below the taxable level) individuals. Since I will not have the money, I encourage you to submit your request for free, government-subsidized, tuition promptly. President Obama has promised tuition coverage.

I will be using my 401-k and military pension to support myself and your mother in our retirement.

Best wishes,

Dad

(Mom wrote me this.)

OH FER …. Please do NOT worry about this. Things are fine. I’ll give your dad a lashing with a wet noodle.

MOM

Then I wrote this back to Dad.

Dad... the economy is already IN a tailspin. You cannot push the blame for that onto Obama. He has 75 days before he even takes office. The blame goes to the king of deregulation, Alan Greenspan, who as I recall was a Bush appointee. Obama will obviously be working to resolve the crisis, but being as how a coalition of the smartest economists in the world has had zero success in raising the Dow back up to the 14000 it was at last year or even to the 11000 it was in the first half of September, I doubt Obama will be able to make everything instantly better, and I even more doubt that McCain could have. The economy will suck for quite a while. But look at this without a conservative bias: it started tanking in mid-September, and has not come back even close to its former level, and not one bit of that crash can be attributed to Obama.

In conclusion, blame George Bush and Alan Greenspan for the failure or tanking of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lloyds TSB, and Iceland, and for the imminent tanking of Chrysler, Ford, and GM. Don't blame Obama for anything. When he gets into office, he'll be inheriting a country in economic shards, and it will keep failing, just like it would have if McCain had gotten elected.

And, finally, I wrote this in my journal last night.

...To be honest, I wouldn't put it past Dad to cut me off for something, but I think it'd have to be more severe than a vote. I'm still the unproblematic son - no drinking, no pot, good grades, nice friends - and his only issue with me is that I didn't absorb the Fox News hogwash that he spends half his waking hours watching. I think he also groups me as a liberal, even though he ought to know that politically I'm anarchist, and only voted for Obama because he mentality wasn't "Drill, baby, drill!" but rather something more common-sense and foresighted, and also less apt to keep destroying the planet. Not that Obama necessarily really cares deeply about the environment. I'm sure he cares, but he's also going to be of the mindset theat we need to find a "balance" between the economy and the environment. In these "balances", the environment never gets the respect we desperately need to give it, because policy-makers (ncluding Obama) see it as something that exists mainly for people who like to go on vacations in it and people who think nonhumans have rights too, beyond the right to be "developed". (What a quaint concept!) I went to Bob's tonight, and inside the graffiti-covered bathroom, there was a piece on the door that read, "This planet is not a resource to be seized and exploited." (Or something close to that.) Underneath, someone had written, "Why not?" The next person had said something about a person with a French name who (naively, they implied) believed animals and the rest of the biosphere had rights too. The next person called into question this person's philosophy, the existence of animal rights, and even perhaps the existence of rights in general. And then the debate got illegible. I believe the rest of the world has rights, but I cut right to the quick and wrote under the original "Why not?", "Because, no matter how hard we pretend otherwise, we are a part of this ecosystem just like every other species is, and if it fails, we fail too." This is the sort of concept I don't expect lawmakers and politicians to understand or, if they do understand it, to act on.

[Compelling Title Goes Here]

I finished break, unfortunately, and drove on back to Iowa. The next day, I discovered I was going to have one heck of a week. I was more or less continually working the whole week, and getting to bed around 0300 or 0400. Im short, it was pretty awful. The only upside was that it made the weekend so much better by contrast. Stuff I did included: a sociology report where I went into the Walmart in town, a lot of reading for Spanish and a lot more than that for English, and reading a whole book for anthropology. I also worked with Press some. We're working hard on getting all our books in publishable shape. And on Friday night I worked at Bob's Underground Café.
-The weekend was much better. On Saturday, I went on a trackwalk with a friend I found a while ago named James Y. We were both looking for edible plants by the railroad north of college when we first met. So, that tells you a little bit about both of us. James told me he'd found a way to CERA via the railroad, and after I checked out Google Maps, I saw that it was possible to get there. We ended up arranging the trip on the spur of the moment that day, when we ran into each other at lunch, and we headed south at 2:45. It was pretty fun. We talked about politics and stuff, which was interesting becasue we're both shades of anarchist. We also talked about plants and growing stuff. James is fascinated with the idea of growing tropical plants at his home in Buffalo; he's already ordered some small banana trees. He says plants always seem to grow really well under his care. We passed lots of rail construction equipment, which was pretty cool, and we also saw a big corn processing installation that looked like a bunch of tin cans of varying hugeness and suspended from various heights by a bunch of pipes and stuff. There was a loading dock for train cars, but the spur that led to it looked pretty disused. Which is a shame. As we went further, vague industrial buildings with giant, pointlessly manicured lawns gave way to distant motels on the state highway leading to town, and then to farms. We crossed under the interstate (a road crew had stashed some No Passing Zone signs underneath the bridge), and then passed by some emptied cornfields to a gravel road. James said this was the road he'd gone down to get to CERA a while ago on a tour of some sort. So we walked down that road for a ways, but then came to a point where we couldn't see anything even vaguely CERA-like. To be honest, I'd been expecting that since miles back, when we kept going south at the rail intersection, instead of following the perpendicular track to the west. I drew him a map showing where I thought we were, and where CERA was (several miles away), and he conceded that maybe we weren't there after all. I would've spoken up earlier, but I wasn't actually too worried about the destination. It was just a fun walk. Later, when we looked up a map, it turned out we wouldn't have gotten there anyhow - it was at least half again as far as we'd gone, and we just barely got back in time for dinner. Maybe we'll try going to CERA some other day, but probably not until the spring, because there won't be much daylight soon, and it'll be cold too. James says he finds something to like in all the seasons, except winter. It's because he likes growing plants so much. He says his dream locale would be somewhere subtropical ("Zone 10," he specified), where you can still tell what season it is, but the growing season is year-round. All in all, it was a pretty fun trip.
-On Sunday morning, I went kayaking in the pool. Now, I don't want to say a lot, because I smell a jinx lingering somewhere, but I will say that it was with a girl, and no one else showed up, so we two kayaked alone the whole time. Anything more than that is going to have to get said later. I'll just leave you all with that.
-Since I guess it's as good a topic as any to close with, I fed Tenzing today, and he's getting nice and fat. While he was swallowing his mouse, he looked awesome and you could maybe say savage; right after he got it all down, he went right back to looking cute again. Especially when he yawned to straighten his jaws back out. (Snakes do that.) He's a pretty cool snake.