* * Politic'n

I’m sitting now, warming by the fire, after a cold, dark evening spent at my local polling place, doing my part to help the Democratic Party and our candidates. I was asked, so I agreed, to spend the last hour the polls were open handing out sample ballots.

If you voted, you were likely handed one of these sheets by a partisan volunteer. They were color coded; the Democratic was blue and the Republican was pink. Each one had the respective candidates for that party highlighted above the others.

I relieved a woman who had spent the last hour there, and joined three other folks doing similar work. One was a Harry Hillbilly guy, decked out in a camo jacket festooned with all manner of right-wing buttons and stickers. His hat was embroidered with “NRA”. He was dressed for the chill and had obviously spent much of his time outdoors. The other Republican was a more urban looking man, dressed in a stylish woolen overcoat and a polar fleece flyer hat.

Interestingly, my fellow Democrat wasn’t from around here at all. He was a resident of suburban Maryland and he worked as a Congressional staffer on the Committee on Science and Technology. Looking to be no more than thirty, he wore a light-weight suit jacket and no hat and was clearly unprepared for the chill of our mountain air. He was originally from Georgia and had gotten a law degree; I don’t remember where. He was handsome and clearly intelligent. He had driven 4-1/2 hours to be in Virginia because Maryland was not a battleground state and somehow he was assigned to our area.

Voting by that time was light. There were no lines inside and each voter simply walked in, did their civic duty, and walked out. We dutifully handed our sheets to them, and most people accepted both. But I questioned the efficacy of our efforts. How could anybody at literally the last hour of a grueling campaign season still be undecided? And if they were, how could we assume for even a charitable moment that they’d be swayed by the suggestions printed on a piece of paper handed to them at the door by strangers?

Anyway, we fulfilled our commitments to our respective parties, doing our best to be cheerful and conciliatory in the cold evening air.

As you might imagine, we didn’t have much to talk about except politics.

All of us felt that the amount of money spent on the election was inexcusably grand, money that surely could have been better spent in many ways. The total cost, I learned, for the races concluding that hour, was around $5.8 billion, with $2.5 billion of that going to the presidential race and the rest to the congressional races. We agreed that the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to dramatic and unprecedented increases, and was not something either party really supported.

We also talked about the Electoral College system. I had done some reading on it a few days ago to refresh my memory. Rather than electing a president by popular vote, each state would elect “electors”, whose numbers are based upon the sum of each state’s Congressional representatives, that is their senators (two each) plus their congresspersons (proportional by population). So every state would have three electors, minimum, regardless of how small their population. The theory behind this system is that while Congress is popularly elected by the people, the President is elected by partisan representatives of a federation of independent states. It was possible, therefore, that a president might be elected by the electors while not receiving a majority of the votes cast, something that has in fact happened on three occasions, most recently in 2000 with Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote to George W. Bush. Interestingly, all of us agreed that the current system was a relic and had no logical justification in our modern nation of how a democratic system should work. In the election calculus, the result was that “battleground” states like Virginia received a wholly disproportionate share of campaign spending and effort by both candidates. For example all four candidates for President and Vice Presidents from the two parties came to Virginia over and over again but seldom to New York, Texas, or California, because of their clearly predicted outcomes. None of us felt that this was a defensible system and it should be abolished.

The four of us, sharply partisan people, shivering in the cold, were a diverse group, if not demographically at least culturally. We were all furious at the inability of Congress to get the work done that seemed so necessary to tackle our nation’s vexing problems. Yet as I departed, I couldn’t help but think, perhaps overly optimistically, that if the four of us held office and were called upon to reach agreement to move this country forward, we’d find a way to do so.

A new day would soon dawn, giving me hope.

* * Am I smarter than my phone?

I’m not a Luddite. Seriously. Technology is fine. But I’m not an early adapter, and I don’t tend to buy the latest, greatest stuff. Waiting in line and fighting with crowds all night to get the newest gizmo strikes me as borderline absurd.

Yes, I have a cellular telephone.

I tend to invest time and brain cells with things that I think will enhance my life. I got a cell phone a few years ago, I’m guessing perhaps 15 years after they emerged from the Dick Tracy car phones to being simple, compact things that were in everyday use. I got one when I was spending time in a vehicle, doing sales and deliveries. It came in handy. I still have it. It is a little, flip-top thing. Somehow I’ve avoided ruining it by dropping it on concrete or into a pot of boiling stew.

Yesterday, quite spontaneously, it broke.

I was walking the dogs on the Huckleberry Trail and somebody called me. I tried to answer, but it was quickly clear that he didn’t hear me and I couldn’t hear him. It was maddening: everything worked, at least everything else. It rang, so the speaker was evidently working. The screen came on, so I could see that what was supposed to be happening really was. It seemed fine. It just didn’t let me do what I need a phone for: talk with somebody.

He texted me and said, “I’m trying to call.” This little phone doesn’t have a true keyboard, only the 10-key pad, so texting is a real pain. I wrote back a brief message, “Phone broken.” He got the message and wrote, “I’ll call later.”

No big deal, really. People have been walking the Huckleberry Trail with their dogs for thousands of years and until the last ten or so, they didn’t have cell phones. There was nobody I really needed to talk to and as far as I knew, nobody needed to talk to me. As emergencies went, this was low on the importance totem pole. Still, I wanted to get it fixed.

So today, I went to one of the cell telephone stores. (Note, they’re everywhere!) I spoke with a nice young man who was kind enough to answer my simpleton questions with nary a contemptuous word (at least audible). He submitted my venerable phone to the man behind the curtain who I’m guessing was suspiciously Wizard-like. This person recited incantations and produced some purple colored smoke, or something equally magical, then returned my phone to the nice salesman. He tried calling it from his own phone.

“It’s still broken,” he concluded sagaciously.

Yes, it would appear so, I thought to myself.

At that point, he went into full tilt salesmanship mode, dazzling me with a stunning array of fantastical machines, packing more horsepower into the palm of one’s hand than fantasy or reason would dictate. “This is a ‘smart’ phone,” he began, “one of our latest and most advanced.” At this point, my eyes began to glaze. “It has your dual digital thermocouples, with the black-raspberry operating system, allowing eternal e-messaging and unlimited apps. It has a 6-megapixel hypobaric X-ray camera. It translates to and from Cyrillic and can navigate you anywhere in the solar system, with a new app for Alpha Centuari. It has 4Gs, 7Hs, and 8Fs and is compatible with the Desertron Superconducting Super Collider.”

“Can it predict when it will snow at least a foot in Blacksburg again?” I asked, plaintively.

“No sir,” he shrugged.

“Then show me one that just makes phone calls.”

Evidently calculating the ruination of his sales commission in his head, he walked me to the wall display. “Here’s one, sir,” he said in forced cheerfulness. “This one makes phone calls and takes pictures.”

“I already have a camera,” I offered, proudly.

“I’m sorry sir. All our phones have a camera.”

I left the store empty-handed and a bit frustrated and did what any guy my age would do; I found a land-based phone and called an expert. My daughter is 21 and has for 1/3 of her life had a cell phone surgically attached to her right cheek. Just kidding – it only seems that way sometimes. I swear she can text as fast as I can speak. “Dad,” she said, in her patient, understanding voice she takes on when dealing with me and issues of modernity, “I think I have an old phone that you can have. I’ll be home later in the week and I’ll dig it out for you.”

I’m picturing her phone as being encased in some sort of Indiana Jones style buried casket from which we’ll brush off the dust and gently coax it back to life, imbuing it with fresh electrons.

So for the next two days I’ll revert back to a Civil War era and be phoneless. In the meantime, if you want to reach me, the mailman still comes every day.

* * Watching you

There’s a song lyric that goes like this, “Every breath you take, And every move you make… I’ll be watching you.” As of this morning, I have a new idea of what that means today and perhaps the future.

My wife and I are subscribers to a couple of internet-based hosting services. www.warmshowers.com is a network of travelers, mostly touring bicyclists. www.couchsurfing.com is a broader-based organization, helping members meet and share adventures with people around the world. I’m also a member of Rotary International’s Hosting and Travel Fellowship. So we’re often seeing strangers occupying our guest bedroom. We really enjoy most of these folks. And so far, we’ve never had any problems whatsoever. They’ve been respectful of us and have never abused our hospitality in any way.

Last night, Jim from Texas spent the night.

Most of the bicyclists are strictly recreational, most on long-term rides. Many of the others are touring for various reasons. Jim was on a business trip. And what an unusual business he’s in!

Jim works for a company that sends him around the country to take clandestine videos inside retail stores. As I understand it, retail chains hire his company to send him and people like him to be industrial spies, mostly on their own staff.

Many of us are aware that there are more cameras around than ever before. Historically only the domain of professionals, cameras made their way into hobby hands when I was growing up. As consumer electronics became increasingly inexpensive and widespread and with the revolution in digital photography, cameras became ubiquitous. Camcorders were a big deal when introduced in the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s. But the advent of miniaturization and the proliferation of surveillance spawned by the age of terrorism put cameras seemingly everywhere.

I suspect for you young people, it’s hard to imagine how new and revolutionary this is. I was already an adult when a volcanic mountain in Washington State began to rumble. When St. Helens, American’s most appealing mountain, eventually blew itself to smithereens in May, 1980, there was not a single movie taken of it. The best-known photographic sequence was shot with a conventional, film-based camera and the images have been merged by computer to give the simulation of motion. If St. Helens got active again, there would be a thousand cameras watching.

The first big customer for clandestine video cameras was the U.S. Defense apparatus, with the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency getting into the act. The technologies spread outwards to local security agencies and police forces to assist with crime prevention. Nowadays, video cameras are almost literally everywhere. You’re being watched when you bank. You’re being watched when you walk a city sidewalk. You’re being watched while you drive. You’re being watched while you eat dinner at a restaurant. And you’re being watched while you work.

Jim was candid and unapologetic as he showed his equipment. He was wearing what appeared to be an everyday shirt, button-down, with a dark black/brown/white pattern. He pointed at what looked like a minor imperfection in the material beside one of the front buttons. It was the lens of his camera. Around his chest he wore a strap that had on the side under an armpit a koozie-like holster where the controlling computer was carried. A wire connected the lens apparatus to the computer. That’s all it takes to film someone against their knowledge or consent.

He said, “Recently, I was in a store to film a particular salesman. I was acting like an everyday customer. It took, like, ten minutes for the guy to even acknowledge me, and then was indifferent to my apparent needs. Finally the guy looks at me and says, ‘You gonna buy anything, or what?’” When the video was seen by the store owner, the salesman lost his job. “I know for sure my work has resulted in the dismissal of at least three people.” Creepy.

It’s difficult for me to envision a cogent opinion about this practice. Certainly an employer should be able to monitor the effectiveness of his or her employees. But it seems clear that any notion of privacy that we once had as citizens of an ostensibly free country has been sacrificed.

Jane and I have normally been so trustful of our visitors that we’ve allowed them to come and go whether we were home or not. With Jim, I asked him to leave before I left for the office. He seemed sincere enough. But as he walked towards his rental car and drove away, I wondered to myself whether we’d welcome him back.

* * Understanding the rash

When you inhabit a body for several decades as I’ve done mine, you start to think you understand it. At least I do. Then, sometimes, you get fooled. At least I do.

Last week on Friday, I developed a mysterious rash. It popped out in several places, on my neck, on both arms near the inner elbows, and across my midsection to under my groin. My eyelids had swelled, too. The rash was red and ugly, and it burned and itched like crazy. It was so bad I had trouble sleeping all weekend.

I was thinking it was hives, and that I’d had an allergic reaction to something I’d eaten. I considered poison oak or ivy, but I hadn’t been in the woods. Besides, how would the oil have gotten under my clothing? I had no answers.

On Monday, my doctor, Rob Solomon, was kind enough to wedge me in for a quick evaluation. He wasn’t sure either, but he gave me a prescription for Prednisone, a steroid. “Take three pills of 20-mg each for the first two or three days and then start tapering off.” He had his staff make an appointment for me with a dermatologist the next day for further evaluation.

I was freaked out by this. I’m not really allergic to anything I know of, at least in the traditional sense. What could I possibly have eaten that would have caused such a reaction? One friend suggested sea food. Another suggested I might have developed an allergy to mold.

The dermatologist was sure it was poison ivy. He gave me another medication, a steroid-based cream, to be used topically.

Within a day or so, I was buzzing higher than a kite. I was stammering my speech and re- re- re-writing almost everything I wro- wro- wrote, my fingers dancing nervously around my keyboard whenever I tried to type. Oh, and I gained five pounds in two days! No wonder body-builders take steroids. Yipeee!

On Wednesday morning, half the puzzle was solved. Gabriel, a handyman who had done some work on the trees around our house, came by to pick up some tools he’d left behind. I mentioned the rash. “Oh, the trees we cut had poison ivy vines all over them.” Turns out, I’d helped unload some of the logs the prior Thursday when I returned from the office to find his pickup truck in my driveway. File this mistake under the category of, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Anyway, at that point, at least I knew where the contact had come from, but the mystery of how the oil spread to my midsection lingers on. Is there oil on some of my clothing, still somewhere around the house? (Geez, Gabriel, could you have told me about the vines before I offered to help?)

At noon, I was a guest speaker at a women’s club event in Blacksburg. Of course, I was still jumpier than a room full of grasshoppers. My heart was pounding in my chest. When I rose to speak, I did okay I think, other than repeating myself a few times myself a few times. But when I read from my books, I couldn’t stay focused. Lots of people seem intimidated by public speaking, but I typically rather take pleasure in it, enjoying being the center of attention. But my self-consciousness was getting the better of me. I think I may have drooled on my shirt. The woman who invited me said some nice things about my presentation and several people bought my books. So I suppose I mustn’t have made too much a fool of myself. But as I drove back to my office, I couldn’t shake the lingering feeling that I’d inadvertently insulted a few people and would never be invited back.

It’s a full week now since the poisoning and I’m still reeling from the effects of both the rash and the medications. My typing is twice as fast as ever before with twice the errors, and my automatic spell checker is working overtime. I try to convince myself while scratching my arms that someday, I’ll think I’ve learned how this body I inhabit works. But before I get too confident, somehow I can’t help but think I’ll get slammed again.

* * Politicin’ at the polls

I’m sitting now, warming by the fire, after a cold, dark evening spent at my local polling place, doing my part to help the Democratic Party and our candidates. I was asked, so I agreed, to spend the last hour the polls were open handing out sample ballots.

If you voted, you were likely handed one of these sheets by a partisan volunteer. They were color coded; the Democratic was blue and the Republican was pink. Each one had the respective candidates for that party highlighted above the others.

I relieved a woman who had spent the last hour there, and joined three other folks doing similar work. One was a Harry Hillbilly guy, decked out in a camo jacket festooned with all manner of right-wing buttons and stickers. His hat was embroidered with “NRA”. He was dressed for the chill and had obviously spent much of his time outdoors. The other Republican was a more urban looking man, dressed in a stylish woolen overcoat and a polar fleece flyer hat.

Interestingly, my fellow Democrat wasn’t from around here at all. He was a resident of suburban Maryland and he worked as a Congressional staffer on the Committee on Science and Technology. Looking to be no more than thirty, he wore a light-weight suit jacket and no hat and was clearly unprepared for the chill of our mountain air. He was originally from Georgia and had gotten a law degree; I don’t remember where. He was handsome and clearly intelligent. He had driven 4-1/2 hours to be in Virginia because Maryland was not a battleground state and somehow he was assigned to our area.

Voting by that time was light. There were no lines inside and each voter simply walked in, did their civic duty, and walked out. We dutifully handed our sheets to them, and most people accepted both. But I questioned the efficacy of our efforts. How could anybody at literally the last hour of a grueling campaign season still be undecided? And if they were, how could we assume for even a charitable moment that they’d be swayed by the suggestions printed on a piece of paper handed to them at the door by strangers?

Anyway, we fulfilled our commitments to our respective parties, doing our best to be cheerful and conciliatory in the cold evening air.

As you might imagine, we didn’t have much to talk about except politics.

All of us felt that the amount of money spent on the election was inexcusably grand, money that surely could have been better spent in many ways. The total cost, I learned, for the races concluding that hour, was around $5.8 billion, with $2.5 billion of that going to the presidential race and the rest to the congressional races. We agreed that the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to dramatic and unprecedented increases, and was not something either party really supported.

We also talked about the Electoral College system. I had done some reading on it a few days ago to refresh my memory. Rather than electing a president by popular vote, each state would elect “electors”, whose numbers are based upon the sum of each state’s Congressional representatives, that is their senators (two each) plus their congresspersons (proportional by population). So every state would have three electors, minimum, regardless of how small their population. The theory behind this system is that while Congress is popularly elected by the people, the President is elected by partisan representatives of a federation of independent states. It was possible, therefore, that a president might be elected by the electors while not receiving a majority of the votes cast, something that has in fact happened on three occasions, most recently in 2000 with Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote to George W. Bush. Interestingly, all of us agreed that the current system was a relic and had no logical justification in our modern nation of how a democratic system should work. In the election calculus, the result was that “battleground” states like Virginia received a wholly disproportionate share of campaign spending and effort by both candidates. For example all four candidates for President and Vice Presidents from the two parties came to Virginia over and over again but seldom to New York, Texas, or California, because of their clearly predicted outcomes. None of us felt that this was a defensible system and it should be abolished.

The four of us, sharply partisan people, shivering in the cold, were a diverse group, if not demographically at least culturally. We were all furious at the inability of Congress to get the work done that seemed so necessary to tackle our nation’s vexing problems. Yet as I departed, I couldn’t help but think, perhaps overly optimistically, that if the four of us held office and were called upon to reach agreement to move this country forward, we’d find a way to do so.

A new day would soon dawn, giving me hope.