WGEO

Spring has sprung
a leak in my brain
voids “duties” and makes “should”
a debate between
trimming shrubs and meetings

dirty fingers, holes in gloves
stubborn roots
and aching back
rows of plants in pots

I can still swing an axe
if not remember appointments
I found some wine

and warm sun to calm
the aches of conscience

Hope you did OK without me.

Dear God,

I sure wish you would make me a whole lot smarter, or at least a bit more certain that my self-righteous opinions were absolutely correct. I’d like to be more like my friends who send me emails every day. They sure know what they are talking about, even if the greater half of their facts are really just opinions.

The problem is that a lot of my friends are starting to sound just as willing to impose their beliefs on the rest of America as the radical Muslims they despise and fear so much. They do seem to be a bit more fearful than I am that somebody is already forcing them to follow Sharia law or have sex with another gay man. Whoops, I mean a gay man. Not another one.

Personally, I would not want to watch the kind of porno flicks my friends watched when we were in the army together forty-some years ago. What little I saw when I took my mind off of getting drunk back then looked pretty gross, so I am sure I would not want to watch any modern, politically-correct porno flicks. I sure hope nobody really forces my friends or their children to watch them.

Now the most recent thing they seem to be concerned about is being forced to give up their religion and pay for someone else’s insurance plan to cover contraceptive prescriptions. I presume that means women. Me, I kind of get disgusted thinking about how most of those guys are asking for the insurance company to cover the cost of Viagra. Most of them are just plain too old, fat, and ugly to get any anyway. (Any you know what, not the medicine.) The Viagra seems like a waste to me.

Speaking of fat, I am really disgusted that these butt-heads have fallen to the sin of gluttony all their lives, not to speak of consumption of vile spirits that pollutes their minds and corrodes their livers and stomachs. We will not speak of delusions of sexual potency or attractiveness.

Given my own beliefs in following your word, God, I do not feel it right that people like me must help pay for their quadruple bypasses, liver transplants, and heart transplants for those who smoke. They have failed to follow your advice and corrupted the temple of their bodies. Let them die. Screw them. Oh! Wait a minute. No, that might be what they want. Don’t screw them. Just make them pay for their own damned heart operation. Serve them right for screwing around if you know what I mean.

You see, it is getting a lot more complicated to be an old, white, male Pee-rublican. It used to be all about money and responsibility. Today, it is all about who is screwing around and doing bad things I disapprove of.   Please do not look too closely at my own habits, just give me a shot of holy certainty.

Thanks. Your humble servant,

Me.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, which is why fiction writers have an endless source of material to choose from. And if one human being can make bizarre decisions, imagine what the human race en masse can accomplish.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stock market.

While many people have simply given up on gambling in the stock market, those of us who think of ourselves as the old coyotes of the financial world look for opportunities to pick off dazed rodents stunned by financial explosions (or maybe implosions is a more appropriate word.)

Take the financial news of the day. Sprint, the cellular phone company whose stock value on paper approaches 15 Billion dollars at nearly $4.5 per share, has been steadily losing money for years.  According to my stock-watching software, this year it’s estimated losses are $1.19 per share, over one quarter the value of each share.  Losses narrowed slightly on reports that the company had added contract customers to it’s rolls for the first time in three years, so the stock rose 3.2% in one day.  Clearly, investors believe it is a good idea to lose less money each year rather than lose more money. Investors put 480 Million dollars to work losing less money.

On the other hand, Cisco Systems, another technology company, with stock “value” somewhere between 110 to 115 Billion dollars at $20 per share dropped over 12% of its value in one morning on news that it had only beat analysts’ expectations of quarterly profit by 2 cents.  The company is estimated to earn $1.36 per share for the year. Conservative money managers at the company have so much cash on hand, they are buying back company stock. However, “Investors” threw away 13 Billion dollars selling off stock on the disappointing news.

No doubt some of them invested in Sprint, so they could lose less money rather than make more money.

Now, if you understand the rationale of those kinds of decisions, you could be getting fat on lemmings.

I recently found myself studying grocery ads like I was reading an incisive book. “Beef rump roast at $1.99 per pound,” I remarked to my wife, “not bad if you are willing to chew on a cow’s butt.” For some unknown reason, perhaps consumer psychology related to the Gulf oil spill, fish is no longer within our normal budgetary allowance.

“I’ll write that down,” she replied. “Which store?”

So it goes. This is a small town. You cannot visit a grocery store without seeing people you know, so we stopped to speak with an old friend who was reading the small print on the tags posted on the shelves. “Being retired means you shop more and buy less,” he said.

I guess that is true. Given the age demographics in our town, you would think the grocery stores would pay a bit more attention to scaling down the prices on the basic, unprocessed food items, while charging the profligate more for their potato chips and beer. Unfortunately, we live in a cold climate, and growing peppers is an act of faith. When green peppers went from 50 cents apiece to 2 bucks, and red peppers approached 4 bucks, we declined the offer. The problem with age is that you don’t always develop dementia. We can still remember sweet corn at 10 cents an ear.

We just returned from visiting my wife’s father in Boulder, Colorado. There, among the privileged generation of Lady Gaga, we found strawberries at a buck a pound, red peppers so cheap we bought a dozen, and fresh Washington cherries cheaper than in Oregon. We binged so completely that the gastric distress could have powered my truck on the way home, if only we had a flex-fuel hose to the cab.

However, after a week in the frantic flow of traffic in Boulder, cheaper gas prices notwithstanding, we were quite happy to return to our little town at the end of the earth. Quality of life means a lot. You pay for what you get.

Clair Button makes irregular contributions of (ill-?) reputed humor to this column from time to time.

Mark Hulburt must be important. He has his own financial digest and is a “senior columnist” for Marketwatch, a financial news source I see on the internet a lot.  That means something, doesn’t it?

Here are some samplings of Hulbert’s insight.
June 9, 2010 – “The stock market is now at more or less where it stood at the bottom of the January-February correction. …Contrarian analysts consider this discrepancy to be a bullish omen…”

June 8 – “Monday’s stock market action was particularly discouraging, with the Dow closing below its May 6 intra-day low of 9,870 — the day of the infamous Flash Crash. With that level now broken, investors face the prospect of the stock market decline picking up steam. …within shouting distance of becoming an official bear market…”

On June 4 – “Corporate insiders are betting that recent market weakness is only a correction within a longer-term uptrend.  That’s good news for the stock market, since historically they’ve been right more often than wrong.”

You get the idea, right?  OK, I’m not Ben Bernanke, but Hulbert is obviously all over the map and doesn’t have a clue.  Of course the DOW is going to peak above 14000 in the next two months! Hulbert has no guts. That is his problem. Why the heck would Marketwatch pay that sucker money when they could hire me?

Likewise, there is another great financial blog called “Dripping Oil” which now predicts the imminent demise of British Petroleum (BP) in bankruptcy court.  This, of course, presumes that somebody assassinates the entire team of BP lawyers and catches BP exec Tony Hayward in “flagrante delicto” with the head of the Minerals Management Service at a Bermuda bordello. This is a company reported to make 30 BILLION bucks every year. The chorus of U.S. congresspersons clamoring for a suspension of the BP quarterly stock dividend shows they are getting worried about the security of their regular infusions of oil company cash into campaign chests.  Obviously, the media campaign against BP is starting to take hold in a world of Chicken Little investors and (dare we say?) “self-serving” congressmen.

The premise of the Dripping Oil prediction is so preposterous, that commentors on the blog are offering thousands for the secret to getting such meaningless drivel posted on Google (Goog) financial news.  I propose to show them how, thereby earning huge sums of cash, which I will then gamble and lose in the impending stock market crash just like all these other idiots.    And, I make those predictions on one day, not even wasting three days to write pointless columns of drivel for you to waste your time reading.

Clair Button has regularly shouted out financial advice to the British Exchequer (from a considerable distance,) but clearly, no one is listening.  I suggest you consult with someone more knowledgeable before investing millions.

I spent a few days in May with some old Army buddies. I learned more about them and myself. We weren’t thinking about Memorial Day, but the conversation turned to our history, and the memories fit in to a Memorial Day theme for me.

What do veterans think about at those times? Friends lost. Things we did right. Things we did wrong. A misstep that caused a tragedy. Intravenous kits that failed to work. Bravery, loyalty, and sorrow. Brave foes. Hapless, innocent people caught up between warring forces. Fate. We wonder what happened to someone, perhaps someone you would not expect us to worry about. We discover we are not alone in those thoughts.  This is a piece I started writing last year, about a man we knew, who became important in our lives and memories.

 ”The World”

“The World” is what we called our homeland, the United States. What we meant was “The Real World” as opposed to the “unreal” world of our nightmare existence. Our lives seemed unreal at all times, whether we were fighting for our survival, taking risks we had never imagined we could, or playing like uncontrollable children to release tensions we did not comprehend.

And of course, we complained about being there in Vietnam. It was a year, an interminable year. We longed to get out, to go home.  We could welcome a “million-dollar wound” that, even if partly disabling, meant our internment in that strange, unreal world would end. Like grazing beasts, we lived in a wandering herd, doing what was necessary to survive, and gratefully moved beyond the scene when one of our number was pulled down in combat.

When we did go home, most withdrew and left the past behind. But not really.  A moment when you failed to save a friend is never forgotten. Some were rejected by the people they came home to.  Some managed to slip back into their old lives. Most adjusted to daily life and moved on.

We have the luxury of time and peace to look back. It did not really matter to my friends why our government went to war. Oh, sure, some volunteered out of patriotism. Some believed they were fighting would-be dictators who wanted to oppress a weak nation.  Most simply felt it was their duty to serve rather than run away to Canada. But the truth is that we were young, with only half-formed beliefs and even less understanding.

There was a man, more of a pawn and prisoner of fate than I, who put my year into a perspective I will always remember.  His name was Ni. A peasant farmer, he had been forced to work with the Viet Cong until we captured him.  He was  “re-educated” by his government, and released into our custody again as a “Kit Carson” scout.

“You Americans,” he said, “always complain. But you have only a year.” He told me that in his country, he had to fight from the age of seventeen, and could not quit until he was thirty-five. If he was lucky. If he survived. If he was not again captured by the enemy and forced to join their ranks. Forever. His war was forever. His chance of survival was best with us, and he was glad to be with us, to share our gruesome chore and our risk. Because it was the best he had experienced.

He had a family and twelve living children we never saw. That is all I know of him. That and his simple statement that both complained and accepted the reality of what he must do to survive.

We left him behind when we came home. I think of him and hope that he too found a “real” world to come home to; that he could live out the rest of his time in peace with his family.

Clair Button

This is the monster we have created.

Ten people who entered the country illegally were busted in North Carolina for running a tax preparation business that claimed 22 million dollars in phony tax refunds for their clients between 2006 and November 2009. One tax credit improperly claimed on a majority of the false returns was for child care expenses, prosecutors said. The credit can result in a refund even if no taxes were paid. About 13 million in refunds were paid before the IRS discovered the fraud. A number of the guilty parties would “assist” their clients in cashing the refund checks, presumably pocketing a healthy cut of the refund.

Ask yourself why international criminal gangs would come here to target our tax system as a means to make a living.  The number one reason you should already know is that the tax code is so complex that even the IRS can’t figure out who owes what.

The second thing you should think about is whether it is really worth it to you to go through so much work and agony to get each tax break or credit the law allows.

While my retirement income is pretty straight-forward, I spent sixty bucks on a tax program to help me organize my records and calculate profit and loss on a pitiful publishing business and a significantly more successful bit of stock market gambling. In both cases, the software left me in the lurch to read multiple volumes of tax rules and instructions from the IRS. I had to file three different forms on a 75 dollar capital gains reduction that saved me close to 20 bucks. But I spent six hours scratching my head while reading the instructions in four different IRS publications. In other words, H&R Block either didn’t know what I should do, or their paid software engineers could not write software that could calculate it.  I would gladly have paid the 20 bucks just to avoid reading all that legalese garbage, but I didn’t want the IRS to throw me in jail for not filing three pages of forms which each had a single line item saying the form they required the oil company to submit did not apply to me or mean a damn thing.

If we re-write the tax code to cut out the wrangling over what we can deduct or whether the government ought to give us money for taking care of our own kids, I could have saved the 60 bucks on software, a net savings of 40 bucks without the reduced taxes. Imagine what I could have saved if I had hired a tax consultant to figure out I didn’t owe twenty bucks.

The IRS could have saved us 13 million bucks in fraudulent refunds, and we would have a few less illegals who come here to steal from us because our tax system is insane. Now, why in the world am I paying you to take care of your kids?

“Leaves Blown Apart” was read by Baker County Library Director Perry Stokes for the WGEO Second Friday Literary Night event in January 2010.  Though accepted for the Libraries of Eastern Oregon anthology, “A Sense of Place,” it was inadvertently omitted from the first printing of the anthology.  Some of the audience asked if I would make it available elsewhere, so here it is.

Leaves Blown Apart

by C. F. Button

Empty quiet filled hours between delayed flights in Chicago O’Hare airport. Leaves with faces swept by, rattling, skittering voices caught in droning conveyor winds that failed to stir me. Some were brightly colored, some drab. Some briefly lodged against walls or benches and others raced past to meaningless destinations. They were nothing to me until one bit of color dropped from an eddy of swirling forms and paused tentatively, as though seeking refuge in my quiet, still pocket of space.

I glanced up. “U. S. Marines” was emblazoned in a yellow band across a young man’s tee shirt. Judging by his short-cropped hair and muscular chest and shoulders, I concluded the shirt was probably authentic and belonged to him. There was something in the shy way he glanced at me that faintly tugged on my invisible shroud of isolation. I nodded and silently resumed eating my portable dinner. Without speaking, he settled next to me on the two-seater bench at the side of the hall, folded his arms across his chest, and self-consciously tried to find a balance between somnolent patience and expectant attentiveness to the other travelers busily hustling between flights.

It was the patience that got me thinking, the patience that had to be learned. Memories tumbled like leaves in wind, memories of young men always moving, being transported, and learning to sleep, to rest, to relax, and to tolerate uncertainty. Trucks, planes, helicopters, long marches in single file, it didn’t matter which, you always had to learn to wait, to gather each precious moment of rest and luxuriate in it, never to hoard what could not be saved. Patience does not come quickly or naturally to young men. I, too, had been attentive to each passing figure and feature in my landscapes once. Each bit of motion might lead to adventure, or danger, or nothing at all – it took a while to learn that patience. The young or inexperienced dislike waiting. The old and experienced learn to live with it.

At the beginning of my trip this time, I had met two friends, brothers-in-arms, from a never-ending yesterday 37 years long. Winds of time and fate had blown my friends and me away, each on a separate path, and made us strangers for so many years.  Yet we will always be twenty years old, those brothers and I, no matter what our bodies and faces look like now, no matter if some of the details of yesterday have started to slip from our memories. We learned patience together. We shared a fierce bond of loyalty that endured all those years apart.

Glancing sideways, I thought I could see the light of idealism in the marine’s face, and perhaps anticipation of challenge and glory. Clean-scrubbed innocence, the kind you only see in the young. My friends and I knew the brief exultation of living through the danger this young man could only imagine in his future, wondering how, when the moment came, he would face the challenge. It was such a silly conceit, that self-doubt and concern for living up to a romanticized notion of heroism. I had known it, too.

A single year can teach patience beyond measure, a willingness to wait forever for another adventure like the one this young man anticipated so eagerly now. I thought of my friends’ shared grief, the kind that made the exultation of your own survival so brief. Would this young man feel it someday? Would he and his friends grow old with forty years of never-ending nightmares filled by horror?

I could sense him taking my measure as well. Curiosity showed, and perhaps a desire to speak – yet he hesitated. Could he see the brittle old armor that still separates and protects me from the innocent pain of green, young soldiers like him? I wondered, should I say anything to him?  Is there anything I could say that he wouldn’t take as criticism or as the emotional wandering of an old fool?

An announcement of my impending flight, changed to another gate farther down the hall, broke through my whirlwind of thoughts, brought me to earth and present tense.

I looked at him directly. “Are you active in the Marines now?”

“Yes, Sir. I was just at officer training camp. Headed home to Kansas now.”

The “Sir” provoked me like the buzz of a mosquito. I had once been a sergeant. Sergeants don’t easily accept being addressed as “Sir,” but he meant it politely, as respect due an old man. I repressed an urge to laugh at the irony.

“Is that like ROTC in college?” I asked hopefully.

“No, Sir, no college. The Marines don’t have that program.”

No, I thought, the Marines would want them young and unpolluted. Another thought came unbidden. Oh, hell! A first lieutenant! He’s going to be a first lieutenant. My platoon had lost two of them in less than a year. He’s going to want to lead the charge into battle or take risks for his men, thinking that is his duty, to risk himself before his men. I thought of booby-traps and body parts flying through the air, images which still wake another of my old friends in his 37^th year of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Suddenly the sense of loss was heavy on my chest and I already feared for this eager young man’s life. Was there  anything I could say that he would understand, anything that would make a difference?

I stood to go. I held out my hand and he shook it.

“Good luck, then. Take care of yourself and your men. It’s an important job.”

“Yes, Sir, I’ll try my best.”

I hauled my bag down the corridor. There are some things which can never be explained or understood unless you have seen the sunlight glance off the wing of a butterfly, or a mote of dust in the air turned to gold, or a drop of ruby-red blood suspended against an ice-blue sky – a moment before fate grasps all life in its rending jaws and leaves consciousness forever marked. No, he couldn’t have understood if I said more. Not then. Give him time. Give him time.

I give special thanks to Perry Stokes for reading in my place, because I had found this piece too difficult to read aloud once it was written, and to my friends from Recon Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 196th Brigade, who have helped me face those buried memories and become more whole.
Clair Button