On the Climate, Both Figurative and Literal

All that heated argument about anthropogenic global warming notwithstanding, Thursday was colder than a well digger’s posterior or even a witch’s breast here in our portion of the prairie. The sky was a depressingly Ingmar Bergman-esque gray all the short day long, the winds that came sweeping down the plains from the North Pole were whipping around a desultory amount of snow the in otherwise dry atmosphere, and we had chores to do.

Our beloved Pa helped us deal with the dreary task of getting our newfangled cellular telephone to reveal those noisome voice mails it now features, and to replace it with the old Ma Bell land-line number that had been in the phone books for as long as we or any of our friends who might call can remember, which our Pa insisted on in case there was some family emergency that only we can deal with, and after making it all happen with the help of the earnest but rather dim-witted woman at the phone company’s east-side strip-mall shop he treated us to a couple of very nice slacks at a nearby clothing store that was already touting its Valentine’s Day specials. After that we helped we helped our beloved Ma and Pa take down all their fabulous Christmas decorations in their enviable retirement apartment and return them for another 11 months or so to their place in a nearby rental storage space, and although some of those boxes were heavy enough to cause a strain in our back it also somehow lifted our heart.

All that bother also kept us largely away from the rest of the news all day, and we happily listened to old rockabilly and garage band music and the crazed conversation of the regulars at a dive we sometimes frequent on the way home, which also did us much good. When we at long last got home to our adequately-heated old house and turned on the space heaters in our poorly ventilated airplane room of an office we logged on to the internet and found it as desultory as ever, but we decided to dismiss it all with the same hopeful attitude that our Pa and Ma lately seem to have. They’re both convinced that the age of Trump can’t be any worse than the age of Obama, which is all too convincingly plausible, and that the weather is bound to get better for at least a little while, which is inarguable.

The weather for today here on our portion of the plains is forecast to be just as awful as yesterday, and we’ll have more chores to do, but we nonetheless have our own high hopes. We’re slated to get up relatively early to take an old and dear friend of ours home from the hospital, where he’s undergoing some nether-region-invading procedures that he assures us are quite routine yet still require sedation that prevents him from driving himself home. He once woke up even earlier on an even colder morning to give us a ride home from the airport after we’d been visiting the folks when they were living back east during Christmastime, and we expect that the chance to partially repay the favor will boost our spirits past what the thermometer shows. That gray-ponytailed old hippie is also convinced that the age of Trump can’t be any worse than the age of Obama, and although he’s a couple of decades younger than our Ma and Pa we’ll consider his wisdom, and look forward to a brief nap today despite all its other chores.

By next Tuesday the temperatures are forecast to be near 60 degrees Fahrenheit around here, and although that’s nowhere near were we like it to be we’ll still be glad of it. There’s every reason to believe that our Pa and Ma will be starting their early Valentine’s Day celebrations during their 60th year of marriage, and that our gray-ponytailed friend will be relieved that those intrusive tests have proved happily negative, and that the age of Trump will prove at least no worse than the age of Obama, and that no matter what all our friends will still be able to reach us in case of emergency at that same old land-line number.

— Bud Norman

Yakking on the Obamaphone

We’ve just mailed yet another check to a phone company for a month’s worth of service, and we’re feeling rather foolish about it. It’s not just that the phone rarely rings around here, and when it does it’s usually some annoying stranger trying to sell us something we have no use for, but because we’ve recently learned that we could have been conducting our occasional telecommunications on an Obamaphone at somebody else’s expense.

This amazing money-saving tip came to us through the miracle of YouTube, where an intrepid independent journalist has posted a short video of a protestor in Cleveland urging her fellow Americans to “keep Obama in president, you know” because “he give us a phone.” The woman, a very nasty piece of work to our thinking, screeches this information with a frightening ferocity, then further explains that “everybody in Cleveland [inaudible] minority got Obamaphone” and that “you sign up if you on food stamps, you on Social Security, you got no income, you disability.” She also adds, with a pithiness rarely heard in contemporary American politics, that “Romney? He sucks, bad.”

The video has “gone viral,” as the internet lingo would have it, with more than two-and-a-half million views, while millions more have heard the audio on various talk radio shows and at conservative web sites. Reaction has mostly been outraged, but we expect that most of the callers and commenters have been the people picking up the tab rather than the ones getting free phone service. Because the former group outnumbers the latter, at least for now, the Obamaphone could pose a political problem for its eponymous president.

Someone at the Obama campaign certainly seems to think so. If you had gone to the government’s obamaphone.net web site the day before the video was posted you would have been greeted with a picture of a smiling Barack Obama making the thumb-and-pinky-out hand-to-the-ear “call me” gesture to such adoring fans as the one featured in the YouTube video, but the day after the posting it was abruptly changed to plain text and now features an oddly incongruous photograph of some Japanese lanterns or a Chinese chess set. They’re still stuck with the self-imposed “Obamaphone” moniker, though, and the tricky business of explaining to the taxpayers of America why they’re footing the bill for this horrible woman’s cell phone service.

The administration’s many defenders in the media have bravely attempted to argue that the Obamaphone program has its roots in legislation dating back to the Reagan era, which is true, but it didn’t start paying for cell phones until the Clinton era and has seen its budget increased from $772 million to $1.6 billion during the Obama era. Those hearty defenders also contend that the program isn’t paid for by taxes, only a surcharge that actual bill-paying phone customers are required by law to pitch in with their monthly bills, but they’re unlikely to convince anyone but the most adamant Obama supporter that money taken by force of government isn’t really a tax.

The woman starring in the viral video is black, so there’s always the old reliable argument that any objection to paying for her cell phone use is stone cold racism. This is the predictable line being peddled at the AtlanticWire site, which contends that the video itself is not racist but that writing about it is. The writer does make a fair point by noting that much less attention has been paid to a video posted by the same journalist featuring an equally appalling white Obama supporter, who makes some wildly inaccurate claims about Mitt Romney’s tax proposals, then admits he hadn’t heard about the murder of America’s ambassador to Libya and shrugs off the news by saying “He probably had it coming,” but if the AtlanticWire truly believes that publicizing this video will help the Obama campaign we are glad to help them out with the project.

Romney’s campaign will likely avoid any mention of the video, lest it provoke the inevitable cries of racism, but having others draw attention to it could help him stave off the voting power of the now-infamous 47 percent. Here’s hoping that the public scrutiny also forces a reform of the Obamaphone program, which is a waste of the public’s money, an inducement to sloth, and has the unhappy effect of making a taxpayer feel like a sucker.

— Bud Norman