I know people aren't really interested in politics here, but thought this cartoon from
GoComics by Stuart Carlson last week seemed to sum up much of the stupidity I heard on talk radio last week about the troubles in Wisconsin.
I can't believe I am hearing people arguing that public employee unions are the cause of our economic problems. This kind of general "I hate the teachers" stuff is really scary. Every year, Phi Delta Kappa does a survey on American attitudes towards public education. Every year the results of the survey are pretty similar. "Public education stinks. Oh, my kids' public school? It's great. We really love our kids' teachers. But public education stinks and we hate public school teachers." I understand what Gov Walker is doing. It is pretty clearly documented that this is a political move to disrupt union (read Democrat) political fundraising to make things easier for Republicans to win office. It makes a lot of sense that way. I just don't get the fact that just like in the cartoon above, middle class folks are screaming and yelling at each other over this issue. It's hard being middle class in this country, much harder than it was 30 years ago. We used to think of middle class as being able to own your own home, take a vacation now and then, have two reliable cars, and, with a little help, see your kids go to college. I don't see many households making 36,000 to 57,000 (which according to the census bureau lands you statistically in the middle for US incomes) being able to do those things now. Rent, transportation, and health premiums and expenses eat up a significantly larger share than they used to.
The joke goes: A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party and a Big Corp CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a 100 cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 99 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, “Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.
Now you might say, that joke is really anti-business, and anti-free market. But I don't think so. I think its just anti - fat cat, so to speak. From 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300% (adjusted for inflation), while production workers gained only 4.3%. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage actually declined by 9.3%, when inflation is taken into account. In 1960, CEO's made 50 times what production workers in their businesses did. In 2000, they made 520 times as much.
I think we're getting upset at the wrong people and, for that reason, I don't see the economic situation for 80% of the people in the country changing appreciably any time soon. I'm just saying.
Another one of those weird coincidences happened again this week. The picture at left, I learned this week, is of an art museum in London called the Tate Gallery. It was founded in 1897 and houses the UK's national collection of British art. In the Tate Gallery (or Tate Britain as it is called today) hangs a rather curious painting called the Fairy Fellers Master - Stroke. It is shown below. It was commissioned by the Head Steward of Bethlem Hospital in 1855. The hospital I was already familiar with. It is the origin of the term bedlam. The Bethlem Hospital was in the forefront of cruel and unusual treatment of mental patients and the name has come to have a very bad connotation. The painter was Richard Dadd, who was incarcerated in the hospital for what would now be called schizophrenia. In 1842 while on a boat trip down the Nile River, he had a personality change and claimed that he had been taken over by the Egyptian god Osiris. He was committed to Bethlem Hospital in 1843 after killing his father (who he thought had been possessed by the devil) and remained in mental hospitals until he died in 1886. I ran across the first reference to the painting while reading a pair of fantasy novels by Mike Shevdon called Sixty - One Nails and The Road to Bedlam. They are very reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which is one of my favorite books. A man dies in a subway of a heart attack, but is brought back to life by a woman who introduces him to the Fey're world. That world exists alongside our own, but normal people tend to block out things they see that they don't understand. 
