economy – Page 8 – Hopeful Romantics

Nature’s Way of Sorting Out the Environment

I was reading a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about how the cold spell in Florida is killing many of the nonnative animal life. Burmese Pythons and African Rock Pythons are buying the farm on a major scale. Iguanas are falling dead from trees. Nonnative fish are dying by the thousands. The Mayan cichlid, walking catfish, and spotfin spiny eel, are among the fish floating lifeless to the water’s surface.

I would take this to mean that this is nature’s way of telling these invasive animals to get the hell out of where they don’t belong. Not that they had a choice in the matter, as many were brought over on ships, or in the case of the snakes, they were former pets that were let go in the Everglades when the novelty wore off or when the hurricane deposited their former domiciles on FEMA’s statistical list of trash. Nevertheless, these animals who thrive in the warmer climes of he tropics will only thrive so long when the temperature takes a dramatic turn.

Yes, I would take this as part of nature’s way of rearranging the order of things. I have to wonder what else does nature have in store for us. We are inundated with dire predictions about global warming, which is not global warming, really, but dramatic climate change. What’s this mean? It means that not everything will warm up, but in places that are already warm, it will probably get warmer still. In the colder spots on the climate, it may get colder still.

Yet the Arctic is melting and Florida has a cold spell. Who knows what is really going on? What I do know is that things change. I have stood in places up on the high desert of Four Corners, Monument National Valley and further North. It is hard rock, bone dry. Yet in places you can still see actual dinosaur footprints in what is now rock or really hard ground. Dinosaur footprints. I kid you not. This is the legacy of an earlier time when this vast region was under water, either covered by seawater or vast marshes that prevailed for millions of years.

Things change. As a civilization that wants to believe that all things are safe and permanent, we have yet to get the memo that the planet is ever changing and in doing so is making things more or less secure at his own universal discretion. Or in reaction to the conditions we inflict upon our planet.

Suffice it to say that while some of the global changes my be cyclical, it still doesn’t mean it is a good idea to pollute the hell out of it. You can’t treat the Earth like a rental car and expect it to run smoothly. Common sense would have it that dumping poisons into our water, filling our air with toxic crap, and leaving piles of waste on our lands and in our oceans will hardly result in something positive. Common sense would say if you put poison in water then you will poison yourself when you drink the water, and poison the fish that live in that water. Who you will eat.

In short, global warming may not be a result of our human transgressions, but our human transgressions aren’t helping things either. No matter how long we care to live in denial. You do not have to tie natural cycles and human pollution together to validate the fact the planet is going through changes. Planetary cycles can still take effect, regardless of human pollution. But for sure as hell, human pollution is not going to improve the situation, any. Poison the oceans, the fresh water and the landscape, and it is still poisoned, whether there is climate change or not. Common sense should bear that out.

But, unfortunately, common sense is not so common. It took certain people hundreds if not thousands of years to realize that crapping upstream and drinking the same water downstream will result in disease. People in some spots took thousands of years to correlate sex with the making of babies. In some places on the globe, it seems it is still the case. Recognizing the existence of germs took awhile.

And then there is the money factor. There are those who are making money and those who are making more money by ignoring the obvious. It is cost effective n the short run to ignore the obvious. If you take the precautions and impose the industrial standards to eliminate or reduce pollution it will cost you bucks in the short run. This cuts into your bottom line. The bottom line in America and most countries is the major modern religion and messing with the bottom line for the sake of such minor considerations as the welfare of humanity borders on sacrilege.

Then there are the people who are allegedly in power. The legislators. What was once a somewhat responsible body of lawmakers who tried to oversee the well being of their constituents, looks more like a group of small time hustlers, working the corridors of government for their next corporate handout. With some exception, most are being paid by their keepers to assure us that all is well and that they are maintaining “our way of life.” They are paid to nod their heads and look the other way, examining their purses and the prospects of future elections, which more often than not conflicts with public interest.

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We leave a lot of things out of any argument. We do this out of convenience. While there are obscure noises about overcrowding, increased strain on an already fragile infrastructure and ecosystem, we don’t talk much about overpopulation. We fear for social and political repercussions when entertain the fact that the world has too many people. We are are overcrowded. Some of the population is undernourished. And most of the population is undereducated and hardly prepared for the next decades of the twenty-first century.

We cover this by talking about the unique quality of every human being and making Hallmark cards of our sentiment, without addressing the true dangers that overpopulation will create. We talk about global warning and claim hundred of millions will die. What we don’t do is say that if we keep flooding this planet with the crushing hordes, it will cause natural reaction. And natural reactions are often grim and consequential.

We cry over an earthquake in Haiti but ignore the fact that overcrowding, ignorance and the rest may well result in a pandemic, the likes of which we have never experienced. Yes, it is a pity for Haiti, but if watching a quarter million die on one small island is nearly unbearable, what will it be like when hundreds of millions, billions, start dying from previously unknown diseases? Diseases for what there will not be a cure.

So we argue out of convenience. Convenience in this case means we pick and choose the safer salient points while leaving out the dozens of considerations that may really cause us harm. We find consolation in sentiment when pressing issues loom before us. We deal in modern day superstitions and embrace the religious either in its traditional form or as some metaphysical salad bar to support whatever half baked theory we are using to confront very real global events.

I would consider that more people have died from ignorance than anything else. Ignorance has led to war, has caused us to crap upstream and drink downstream. We overpopulate out of ignorance of the consequences and how it reduces the general well being of this planet. We declare theory and conjecture as truth and fact, although we have not yet been able to gather all the relevant information. We are ignorant and proud of it.

Will all this happen? It’s probable but not certain. History is often a cruel prognosticator of what life has in store. Historically, civilizations have come and gone. Civilizations here have vanished. There is room to speculate that even on other planets what was once living is now long since dead.

But then there is the other side of the coin. Despite the cold spell in Florida, not every nonnative animal has died. the smaller pythons are surviving, as they are able to adapt by slipping into smaller rock crevices and other spots that may keep them warm enough to ride out of the cold. Only half the green iguanas have succumbed. Maybe it’s dumb iguana luck, or it is Darwin’s Laws of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest, as it is sometimes known. Or as the more religious will inveigh, it is the hand of divine providence.

I don’t know. In the case of how and why some live and others don’t everyone has a valid opinion. As long as it remains an opinion and isn’t carved in stone as absolute fact.

What we do know is that things chance. Nothing remains the same, whether we want it to, or not. And life goes on.

Content of Author Gordon Basichis Interview with Nanci Arvizu

Last week, I announced Gordon Basichis to be Interviewed on Nanci Arvizu’s Page Readers. This was the interview about my new book, “The Guys Who Spied for China,” a roman a clef about uncovering Chinese Spy Networks in California and the United States.

The book has been receiving good reviews, with critics calling in quirky and darkly humorous. I dare say it is by no means your typical spy story. It is character based and has a unique perspective. Anyway, enough of that. For those interested here is the interview between Nanci and I.

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Hang High the White Collar Criminals

People are pissed off. This in itself is no real news as the public disgust with the news media, politicians and Wall Street has been on the increase every year. But now they are really pissed off. People are so angry that not even their Prozac and Zoloft, and the other mood enhancers, can fend off the seething desire to retaliate against the charlatans they believe have done them wrong.

People want justice. They have lost their savings, and they have lost their jobs. They have seen their pensions cut in half. Their houses, if not foreclosed upon are underwater. What equity they had is gone. They have been lied to, bamboozled, and moved around by the sound byte media and the sound bitten politicians. The had put their faith in their civil and social leaders, their financial advisers, and they have been led astray. The economy has become a fiasco and the state of the nation is regarded as but one more news event to be commented on by the spurious and insipid who through media magic have been qualified as experts. A reinvigorated Wall Streets continues its efforts to make a buck off the public’s ignorance and apathy.

But people are pissed off. Certainly, some of the responsibility for this national debacle must fall upon their shoulders. For it is the public that overbought and extended itself. It is the semi-literate public who disregarded the large print, yet alone the fine print, on its mortgage contracts, never bothering to ask why am I paying so little for a house that is worth so much? Instead, they bought into the snake oil sales pitch that they should overlook the balloon payment due in a few years, as they will always be able to get another mortgage. And the real estate con artists most used phrase, ” housing prices will always go up,” resonated with millions, much like we take comfort in our being watched over by angels, or global warming will be corrected by forces other than ourselves.

We are a nation that doesn’t read too well. Forget about the languages of other nations. Approximately half of us our functionally illiterate with our own language, and that’s when we bother to read. Much of our more significant correspondence has been truncated down to pithy little phrases that hinder the scope of any detailed thought or definition. We utter sound bytes that are fed to us and believe wholeheartedly that this is original thought. Anything more than a few sentences to a paragraph forces us to give up what little element of concentration we still possess. And critical thinking, true critical thinking, is far too demanding to warrant our attention.

So, in short, our ignorance and laziness can turn us into victims. We are easily bamboozled. We take lies as truth on face value, as long as those lies come from our own segment of social and political belief. We give more credence to our celebrities and are suspicious of our scientists. A crackpot with a theory gets more attention than the knowledgeable with the facts. Especially if the fact is bad news.

We believe for some reason that we have the inherent right to be safe and free of any slights or contrary opinions or perspectives that would make us uncomfortable. We think of our children of geniuses in the making and believe they will prevail and prosper by virtue of their American heritage and their legacy of a two car garage. We believe we can buy anything and pay for it later. We take out home equity loans on our houses with inflated values and then use that money for trinkets and beads and other crap we don’t really need. We buy boats and overpriced designer clothing. We buy gourmet foods for our pets and dress our four-year-old’s in $300.00 blue jeans.

Instead of being a producer nation, we are a consumer nation. Two-thirds of our economy is based in consumerism. It is a hell of a lifestyle, and to support it we borrow money from foreign countries, borrow against our house, our credit cards, and, lately, we melt down our own crappy old jewelry and sell it off for its weight in gold. We do this for one of two reasons. We are either in love with ourselves; we are special people who absolutely deserve to garner all the material offerings that the world can provide. Or we hate ourselves, have the kind of esteem issues that compel us to buy these baubles and trinkets so that we can feel better about ourselves. Feel that we measure up to the people next door.

In short, we have set ourselves up as suckers. We are ripe for the plucking. We are semi-literate, prescription drug indulged individuals who worship celebrity while eschewing any kind of critical or cognitive thinking in favor of our own distorted view of the world. We are the perfect mark for any group of slippery sliders wishing to sell us a bill of goods. And that they did. Our government gave Wall Street a license to steal. And that is what they did.

First came the panic. We were on the verge of a depression. Enter the federal government as those surviving companies, paragons of what is loosely labeled free enterprise and free market conditions, took bailout money by the trillions to shore up their companies. Those those that took the bailout money, or stimulus money, were supposed to use it wisely. Stimulate the economy. Pass it from Wall Street to Main Street. It didn’t happen. Instead the money was used for consolidation, for shoring up financial institutes and for buying companies that should have been left to die. A trillion bucks later, and unemployment remains high, businesses are closing, and there are millions of foreclosures.

There is constant talk that America is in the economic downturn from which it may never recover.. We have stopped our buying, most of us anyway. Suddenly, we realize we really don’t need those extra trinkets and beads and that Fluffy the Cat doesn’t need gourmet food that children in a developing nation would kill for. Little Child can make do in a $50 pair of Levi’s, in fact it is chic again, and the two luxury vehicles in the driveway, the $20 thousand dollar vacation, the caviar and custom made $500 shirts, the ski mobiles and snow mobiles and the RV that drags them to places where we can overrun the landscape may not have the cachet they once did.

Then came the anger. We are trying to save our money. We are watching every buck. We are eating in and ordering movies with a couple of pizzas for our rich and robust entertainment on a Saturday night. We have no credit left, so cash is king. We try to make the best of a bad situation, knowing that we were left stranded by political and financial chicanery and that the vaunted promise of change is like other campaign promises, fading in the light of a harsh reality. We are tightening our belts and punching new holes in the leather, because we can’t afford to buy another belt.

And we are very pissed off. In response to our anger we have voiced our concern by claiming we are lapsing into Socialism though few really know much about that economic system and what it really means. We make noises about a free market, but corporate welfare leaves the rest of us struggling. We become tea baggers and in tepid attempt to express ourselves conduct insipid reenactments of the more stalwart at the Boston Tea Party by flinging our Lipton’s into the rivers and lakes. We are angry and it is vented in misguided ways with little direction that will promise little results.

We are frustrated and we have few channels for its expression. In the past couple of decades we have been indoctrinated with the belief that anger and frustration are by their nature bad things and shouldn’t be expressed in polite society. As colonialists in our nascent stages and in quest of our independence we dragged our scalawags into the streets where they were summarily tarred and feathered. Now we just whine at them. We are admonished that we shouldn’t act out, that we shouldn’t raise our voices, that we shouldn’t complain. So when we do act out and raise our voices, we do so with meaningless displays. We wear our guns to a healthcare meeting and consider this a show of resistance.

We immerse ourselves in nonsense. We conduct meaningless debates that are exploited by the media and the interest groups who manipulate our deeper emotions. We are turned against each other over petty discord, and we allow our prejudices to condemn us to the kind of narrow thinking that obfuscates the real demons among us. It is in the best interests of the special interests that we continue this nonsensical rancor, allowing time for the real criminals to continue to rob us blind.

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We are a nation that believes in justice. We are a nation that believes in accountability. At least we used to. We believe someone should be responsible for transgressions against society. We went to war and fought the Nazis, then conducted the Nuremberg Trials to show that leaders must be accountable for their actions. At Nuremberg, we listened to one Nazi after the next claim they were only following orders. And then we hanged the bastards. We hanged them high.

But no more. Our leaders are anything but accountable. They screw up and get promoted. They run their companies into the ground and they get bonuses for their efforts. They break the law and rob and steal, and receive bail out money from the government, which is best described as public money misused and misdirected. We bail them out and absorb the disaster, and they pat themselves on the back. The New York Times just announced that Wall Street is preparing to give itself even more bonuses, after taking government money for bailing out of a debacle they created and then leaving us in the lurch. Who could be more deserving of a hefty reward than a collective bunch of failures?

There has been predatory mortgage lending, falsification of documents, and the fraudulent act of according toxic financial packages mythical value. There was insider trading and the illegal shuffling of money. There were crimes committed. And yet the government in its implacable wisdom has deemed it fit not to investigate or prosecute any financial wrongdoings. While it has been broadly acknowledged that a fair portion of the financial dealings were indeed criminal acts the government while wrangling over partisan politics can not be bothered bring these white collar criminals to justice. Sure, they brought Bernard Madoff to justice, ad a few others, but their few billions in stolen funds are mere drops in the bigger bucket, compared to the trillions stolen by others.

We are not accountable. We do not suffer consequence for our actions. We allow criminals who screw up royally and drive this country into the ground to walk off with the the spoils of their ill gotten gains. We endure one of our few remaining industries were the media discusses the crimes ad nauseum, and books are written. But no one stands accountable and no one goes to jail. Remarkable.

I realize that out of the thousands of people in the financial sector, Wall Street, if you prefer, only a portion committed criminal acts. The rest merely climbed in on a rare opportunity, universal deregulation, perpetrated for the past twenty years by idiots in government who failed to see the catastrophe the end game would bring. But then, among the high paid toadies there are the criminals, the ones who robbed this country blind. These are people with no conscience that raided pension funds and pillaged the economy worse than any group of gangsters. While we arrest a couple of grocery store robbing fools and put them in jail with vapid pronouncements that we are fighting crime, we allow the true criminals, the ones that took our retirement money and the futures of the children to live in luxury.

This is what we are pissed off about. Underneath the spurious nonsense about Socialism and the loss of our old America, we are seething that everything we believed in has been delivered as one big lie. We are enraged that all those Western Movies, Cop Movies, where the good guys defy the odds to bring the bad guys to justice is just a lot of crap. Because we have not just been robbed of our money. We have been robbed of our culture and our sense of justice and fair play for all.

Had either this administration, the past one possessed half the insight it claims it has, then they would prosecute these white collar criminals. They would bring them to justice. We would take back the money they stole and give them long and harsh prison sentences. We would make examples of them by making it more costly to commit the crime than to endure the moderate penalty that, if ever, are now being handed out. We would hang them high.

Making white collar criminals accountable would promote the true healing of this country. Here is where at least partisan populist cultures can converge in rare mutual agreement. This would ease the anger and the pain. This would give us justice. And justice is what we deserve.

Advent of the Electric Car Means Luxury Cars for the Poor

The Age of Steam is upon us. Or, in this case, as we are several generations removed from the Age of Steam, we are adapting to the age of alternative energy. Alternative Energy is in itself a funny name, as energy is energy, so an alternate energy source is just a difference source than the fossil fuels we have been using for several centuries to foul up the planet.

Or, more to the point, some of these energy forms we have been using for quite some time. Coal has been with us for centuries. We have stories written about the people who have extracted it from the earth. Stories about the people who delivered it to houses. We have stories about the people who work with it, suffer illness from it, and die from its dreaded black lung disease. We hear tales of horror about going into the bowels of the earth and the mine shaft collapses, both newsworthy and legendary. We hear about perhaps even the greater horrors of strip mining and what it does to the community and general environment. We hear about clean coal, and the rebuttals there will never be any such thing as clean coal.

Coal drives machinery and begets our electricity. So does oil energy, nuclear and solar. No matter what source we utilize, it gets down to one or two things, driving our machinery and providing electricity. Our industrial machinery relies on these sources of energy. Some machinery requires the conversion from the energy sources into electricity, and others do not. The automobile is one of them. The automobile depends on the combustible engine, which is set off by tiny explosions initiated by gasoline or some other fossil fuel. That is the way it has been for nearly a century. First steam and then the internal combustible engine, functioning on diesel or gasoline.

Until now. With the world well aware that oil won’t be around forever, we have been searching for new sources to fuel our vehicles. There are rumors and then there is the reality. In the rumors, we have hydrogen powered cars and solar powered cars. Maybe. But not at the moment. What we do have are hybrid, part gasoline, part electric cars, and, finally, all electric cars.

Despite the pitfalls of short ranges and the need to find an electrical outlet, the electric car is upon us. Much as the Age of Steam was once upon us, the electric car is greeted with mixtures of wonder and skepticism. These two sentiments rest at the heart of our true diversity. We are naturally skeptical, and we are naturally in wonder. We live in awe of new achievements, technological breakthroughs, but we also revel in their subsequent failures. We either choose sides and split up the responsibility for uttering either sentiment, or we fall back into our time honored position of wait and see. Right now probably more people are waiting and seeing than pushing the pros and cons of electric powered transportation.

Nevertheless, it is here. The recent Los Angeles Car Show featured a variety of electric cars. Other, gas powered vehicles garnered not even half the excitement as the new offerings of electric cars. Damn near every car manufacturer stepped up to the plate, showcasing either its production model or prototype. It is here, and despite our concerns, we secretly can’t wait to embrace it.

Of course life will be different. With the economy in the dumper and the cost of gasoline bound to increase in the forthcoming years, a little fuel economy never hurt anyone. Electric powered vehicles offer just that. Also, electric cars can be fast, as in very, very fast. There is on reconstituted, electric powered old Datsun Sedan that is breaking quarter mile speed records at the local drag strips. They are fast, and they are cheap to fuel. They may lack the range, making longer trips a little difficult at the moment, but over time that concern with be a thing of the past.

Of course, electric cars don’t make the sexy sounds of the old V-8’s. No throaty, ass gripping roar as the engine accelerates. The quiet electric motor may lack something in the sex factor. As a matter of fact the sex factor may lack something as well. So far we have no reports of couples doing it in an electric car. No humming engines on Lover’s Lane. Singles don’t get hot over the new lack of throbbing engine. Hey, but throw in a few accessories, perhaps some truly futuristic accouterments, and having sex in an electric car will someday be downright sexy.

Okay, so with the price of fuel going sky high and the electric car the poster child of the car shows, what’s to become of the plain old internal combustion luxury roadsters we know and love? I live in Los Angeles where the love and reverence for the luxury car takes on religious dimensions. A perfunctory observation of the boulevards and parking lots would tell even the densest of individuals that you are nothing here if you can’t plod through bumper to bumper traffic in a 200 mile per hour Ferrari or Maserati. Or if you are too cheap to lay out the necessary $300,000 or more, the very least you can do is a Turbo Porsche or Aston Martin.
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If you are a paltry piker living from paycheck to paycheck than you should simply make do with a Lexus, BMW or Mercedes Benz. If not the top of the line, then at least an entry level or middle of the line model. Lest you disgrace yourself with anything that would appear unseemly and out of touch in an image minded status seeking society that has as its epicenter the City of the Angels.

And while Los Angeles is the epicenter for status seeking car culture, the rest of the nation, despite its protests of humility and self-denial, is not all that far behind. Not really. Look at the recent real estate boom, or the more recent real estate illusion, where millions of people took out equity loans on their overpriced homes to buy among other trinkets and beads a luxury automobile. Because if you can’t live in luxury for that ten minute trip to the market, what is life, after all?

But now, after all the years of scratching and stretching for that luxury automobile, we find ourselves in a proverbial quandary. There is the slow dawning that the sleek Italian or German, maybe even Japanese piece of machinery in the driveway will soon be diminished in status and value. The electric car is here, and it is the next big thing. Even if it is a modest Chevy Volt it may have more cachet than that lumbering Lexus some stranger must have left in your driveway. I mean, with everyone going electric, what is a person to do? When you can buy a sleek and sophisticated all electric 200 MPH Tesla to drive in bumper to bumper traffic what are you doing with that gas guzzling Neanderthal of another technological era?

Well, if you are a righteous, environmentally concerned individual, you would be giving away that smoking, belching dinosaur. You wouldn’t be caught dead in it, not when you could be ensconced in the vanguard of the 21st century. Let’s e objective. It’s time to go electric. So what to do with that suddenly out of fashion internal combustion vehicle?

Why you give it to the poor. That’s right. Sign over that pink slip to some non-profit organization and hand the keys to a member of the underclass. Let them experience luxury driving for a few brief moments before the polar caps melt and global warming floods the streets, making the Hummer the only drivable vehicle. Let the poor souls who are out of work or barely working, surviving grimly in this economic downturn, take a brief spin in an historical landmark of automotive engineering. It’s only fair.

It’s a win-win situation. The poor have a brief shot at luxury living, and you can feel good about brightening up their lives. You also get rid of this inconvenient truth of a luxury albatross that is so diminished in value it is hardly worth the paint that covers its metal. As for its value in status and image, you are driving the equivalent of a Nehru Jacket.

So let the poor have all those luxury cars. A few smiles, before the last hurrah. All those streamlined super designed German and Italian vehicles will brighten up those seedy neighborhoods. Add a shabby chic sensibility to the dilapidation and graffiti overload.

Some may caution with the price of gasoline ever on the increase it would burden the poor. They would have these beautiful cars but not the money to pay for the fuel that would power them. Not to worry. The poor are poor, remember. They are not going anywhere, anyway.

When Sex Goes to the Dogs

Let me begin by saying I enjoy having pets. Pets are great companions, and they give you unqualified love in return for very little. To be the object of adoration, you just need to pet them, feed, them, change their cages or little boxes every now and then, and take them for a walk. Pets are healthy for our spirit and made even add years to our life. And when their life ends, it leaves us wanting and missing them.

I have had at one time or another, either because of children or on my own, a pretty rich assortment of pets. I have had a couple birds, a frog, an Iguana, enough turtles and fish to populate a small lake, the brief stint with a cat left by a runaway neighbor, and at least a half dozen dogs. All things considered, I prefer the dogs.

I have loved my dogs, some more than others. I grew up with a dog loving parent who kept Dog World Magazine in the bathroom for comfort reading. I went to dog shows and probably knew more types of breeds at nine years old than most adults.

I have experienced the terrible moment when you have to put them down. I have taken them with me on long trips and spent time walking them and doing all the things dogs love to do. The thing is, no matter how much I have enjoyed my dogs, or other pets, I realize they are not people. Dogs are much simpler, but still require much attention. People are far more complex and tougher to deal with. Some animal lovers deal well with animals, but have it rough when dealing with relationships, no matter how casual.

Lately, I have noticed more people are pet centric and less people centric. They adore their pets, bestow on them the affections and attention folks don’t seem to be getting elsewhere. Pets are not only pets but objects of transferal. They lavish the kind of love and attention on them they have normally reserved for close friends, family and the people with whom they engage in romantic relationships.

What used to be reserved for people love and romance, those with whom we have sex, share histories and develop relationships, we give to the dogs. Perhaps it is the economy and daunting times that people need so much reassurance without complications. Perhaps it is life and all its disappointments and knowing that tail wagging fur ball loves and accepts you know matter what. Perhaps we are experiencing levels of arrested development and any relationship more complex than that with the pet or a twenty minute reality show is far too daunting for our childlike sensibilities.

I would like to think this perception applies largely to aging Gen Y people or Boomers. Here it is somewhat understandable. Whether for good or bad a lot of Boomers, especially, for reasons unknown to me, are winding it down and resting on what they mistakenly consider their laurels. They have been hurt in love, carry enough baggage to settle in Paraguay, and are too set in their ways to adjust to another human brain pan. Besides, as they are climbing in the years, romance is scarce, sex for a good many is near nonexistent, and there isn’t a whole lot going on, anyway.

For those who were married with children, the kids are out of the house and are soliciting not desiring your advice and counsel. The children are no longer dependent and will rarely show up for the holidays yet alone paddle every night up to their food dish, do a little begging or lick your hand. Or give you the dog breath kisses so many seem to adore and even boast about on Facebook. Notice in Facebook all the people who instead of themselves post photos of their dogs. Subliminal desires?

So to put it bluntly, the kids are ungrateful little assholes that can barely remember to buy you a birthday card. The dog is nothing but an everlasting expression of gratitude. Your kids will barely let you touch them. The dog will curl up in your lap and in your bed. When was the last time your teenage or older kid with lie in bed with you as a gesture of affection. You would have to be sick and dying, or close to it, before most of you would see that day again. As for those who don’t have and never had children, will then the dog is a definite convenience. No nasty sex with strangers, in vitro sessions, or adoption overtures. Just a trip the the pound or a few hundred bucks if you are determined to acquire pedigree.

I see a great many women I know, and some men. I watch them thrust their affections on their four legged lovers. They hug them, kiss them, buy them gourmet food and cute little dog clothes that have the kind of price tags animal rescue groups would covet as a generous donation. They talk baby talk, and if there is a prospect of a relationship, the dog comes first. Maybe it is smart, and maybe it is just another rationale for a missed opportunity.

But that is not the only place the pet fetish has fully taken hold. Blame it on the lousy economy, maybe, but more and more younger people are not only acquiring dogs but taking them wherever they go. Living in a high rise building I can see the increase in dog ownership. I can also smell it in the elevators or see the little urine trails the overanxious canines leave on the floor as they scramble to make it to the great outdoors of Los Angeles.
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Ad when the dogs take sick or are o the verge of dying? It is a sad moment. As I have said, I have been there. But the dog is old, or it is sick, and while we can reconcile it more often with people we have a tougher time letting the animals pass on to pet heaven. Rather than let old Fluffy go when it is terminally ill or has reached the age where it is barely functional, these people are spending a small fortune for the kind of medical treatment half the people in this country do not receive. In short, they do more for Fluffy than they would for Aunt Mary, yet alone the ailing kid down the block.

Okay, I am grousing. And what, you may ask, is the point of all this grousing? I will tell you. I believe this sudden embrace of the obsessive canine code is more of a testimony to our abject failure to engage in relationships with people than anything else. I think it tells us more about our dashed expectations, fed and fostered by relentless commercials and magazine write ups about all the glitz, glamor, and drama that is ephemeral at best, and nonexistent for the most part. We embrace an illusion and then grow disappointed when it shreds in our hearts.

We think love with a human will be some kind of fairy tale, and life will be a constant adventure. And then when it doesn’t turn out that way, we shun the possibility and turn to our dogs. After all, they will give us unqualified love and a surfeit of affection. They are grateful that we take care of them, and I am sure grateful to the good and caring souls who volunteer at the animal shelters but not the hospitals and hostels.

But the dog can give us affection, but it cannot give us the intimacy that only humans can provide. Sure humans will give us more grief and disappoint us more than any beast, but they also leave us with complex and richer memories. Humans are the material from which civilization moves forward. In our relationships with humans we come to understands ourselves in ways we can never do with animals. We realize the complexities of love and the nuances and predilections of our sexuality. We are gifted by their involvement in the arts and sciences.

We will miss the dog, and we will love the dog. But the people who have impacted our lives are subjects of ongoing reflection. Through our relationships we comprehend our personal breakthroughs and failures, the measures of our personalities. We become wiser through these human relationships and we pass this wisdom on to forthcoming generations.

So why the breakdown, besides some of the things I noted? Why are we finding it so tough to relate to people and preferring to romance our dogs instead of men and women. I believe it is our reliance on technology that has caused so many to turn away from people and turn to their dogs. Maybe they have sex and maybe not, but deeper relationships are difficult to develop and sustain if your main form of communication is texting. If the relationship is broken down to categorical components, behavioral mosaics that either fit or don’t fit into your own lifestyle, it is difficult to advance the romance. If you want undying and one dimensional love and affection, well people can be tough and more demanding that that.

So with our dogs, we don’t text or email. We don’t even phone them. We spend time with them. We talk to them. We listen to them. Part of that listening if to take note of every nuance, every expression, the slightest movement. We know from their body language what they want. We understand their nuances and can make the distinction between our dog and another dog, even one of the same species. We are intimate and affectionate for reasons other than sex. Well, in best case scenarios.

With people. It’s different. We simply don’t have the time to nurture the relationship. It’s a few characters on a liquid crystal display and a quick roll in the hay.