The Case for a Two Class Solution

In most of human history, there were the rulers and the ruled. Very few of the rulers were elected. Most of them clubbed their way to power and eventually some had the luxury of passing on their position to their heirs. That's the historic norm. The rise of a middle class, while an aberration, was useful to the development of an industrial economy, since the possibility of social mobility kept the workers from becoming demoralized and unproductive. However, with the industrial age finished and globalization opening up vast new supplies of cheap labor in Asia and Africa, there is no longer any further need to appease the working class, or to allow a middle class.

Throughout the ages, middle classes have supplied the base for bloody political revolutions which disrupted the ruling order in places as disparate as the United States, France, Russia, China, Iran and much of South America. Working people, when kept sufficiently poor, are too busy with survival to create such problems for the ruling class, so social stability and tranquility can flourish.

People are now living well past their economic usefulness in the western industrialized world, and creating a drain on the society's resources. Furthermore, the wasteful lifestyles of the middle class in the US are ecologically unsustainable over the long haul, and if used as the model for the world's developing economies, will prove even more catastrophic. Extravagant and wasteful lifestyles must be newly confined to the few if the planet is to survive. There still is a possibility of refining and improving the lifestyle of the rich, but only if the middle class is suppressed. We can all see that poor servants are better and more obedient servants, as well as being more aesthetically pleasing when hungry than when over-fed.

Some positive steps have already been taken. Higher education has been put out of reach for most of the working class and much of the middle class. Over-educating the working class can only lead to trouble. They can be trained less expensively by their employers and unnecessary education occasionally risks leading to independent thinking, the proprietary domain of the ruling class.

The United States of America has developed an almost perfect health care system from a Social Darwinian point of view. Young and healthy workers are kept in top condition by a highly profitable health insurance industry, assuring minimal loss of production. The captains of industry and the political leadership are kept in vibrant good health well into their 80's and 90's by the world's best doctors, using cutting edge technology. When workers pass the age of economic productivity, suffer major health problems, or they are no longer employed for one reason or another, the care that kept them fit to produce, cuts out immediately and they are allowed to depart the ranks of the unproductive 47% sooner, rather than later. It's obvious that Obamacare must not be allowed to interfere with this ingenious system.

Just as sick old cats resist being put into their carriers for their final trip to the vet, all living creatures, even human beings, resist making that sacrifice for the common economic good. Nevertheless, more drastic steps must be taken if the economy is to flourish. Some of us anti-social rebels have resisted by moving to more sentimental cultures, where unproductive old people are irrationally kept in relatively good health. While this puts an unconscionable burden on the host nation's economy, we haven't yet detected a major negative impact on the lifestyles of the nation's elite. We must be missing something.

The Opiate of the People

Religion, according to Karl Marx, was the opiate of the people. Although not a Christian himself, he lived in a Europe where the Christian doctrine of a better life after death for those who accepted Christ had been used by governments of all stripes to keep the populace docile and accepting of their earthly fate for nearly two thousand years. Christ taught other things regarding the temporal life, but many of these teachings, such as those dealing with turning the other cheek and doing unto others what you hoped they'd do unto you, also tended to help rulers maintain their rule. Ironically, while Marx excoriated religion, many of his own prescriptions were not so far removed from those of Christ.

Religious institutions tend to foster conservatism, if by conservatism we mean resistance to change and the preservation of the existing order. After all, if you believe in eternal truths, handed straight down from God through one messenger or other, why would you want to see any modification of those truths, as interpreted by your tribe, sect or nation.

In modern times we have come to use the terms liberal, or sometimes lately, progressive, for people who welcome change or actively seek it out. They tend to be artists, intellectuals, feminists, immigrants and other disreputable types. In Europe there is an exception to this usage in that liberal is often a term referring to laissez-faire economics, an approach which leads, not so much to change, but to a reinforcing of the existing order.

The USA has developed a political system built around a two-party system, aligned around class, race and religion, but typically holding to the division between liberals and conservatives, with the Republicans most often representing the conservatives and the Democrats usually representing the liberals. Race was the anomaly in this equation, since it was Lincoln's fledgling Republican Party, described by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book Team of Rivals as “that curious amalgamation of former Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, nativists, foreigners, radicals and conservatives”, which favored the abolition of slavery. For a century after that, southern whites remained solidly in the Democratic column until LBJ upset the apple cart by passing civil rights legislation, which together with Richard Nixon's southern strategy, assured a solid Republican majority in the ex-slave states for years to come, as well as assuring an even more lop-sided adherence by people of color throughout the country to the Democratic Party.

Conservative groups like to proclaim that America is a Christian nation, or when they're looking for Jewish campaign contributors, that it is based on Judeo-Christian values. Liberal groups insist that the US is a secular institution, based on separation of church and state. Both are correct. Colonists and early European immigrants were overwhelmingly Christian, of various sects and movements. The Pilgrims ventured over largely to escape religious persecution, only to set up their own forms of religious intolerance toward other denominations. Jefferson and his allies noted this and insisted that religion be kept separate from government interference, and vice versa, and they prevailed.

Until very recently Protestants comprised the majority of the US population, with Roman Catholics not far behind. The influence of the traditional Protestant denominations has waned and their numbers have dropped sharply but some of the slack has been taken up by the growth of the evangelical sects whose pastors light up the passion, if not the intellect, of their flock. The fastest growing religious preference in the US is now “unaffiliated”. Whereas the RC Church has traditionally emphasized God's love and forgiveness of all us sinners through confession and penance, traditional Protestant doctrine emphasizes that God's chosen people can be identified by virtue of their good deeds. Both approaches have yielded a lot of good works and civil behavior by the faithful, and even by the not so faithful, who want to be seen in a good light by their peers.

Belief in the devil is now at an historic low and with scientists telling us ever more about our universe, faith in heaven and an afterlife is waning as well. It's become fashionable in liberal circles to speak badly of the Catholic Church, especially since the dreadful pedophile scandals emerged. Of course, most of the critics never set foot in a church. It remains to be seen if the major pedophile scandal in the football program at Penn State will unleash as virulent a protest again major intercollegiate sports programs, certainly a world every bit as venal and corrupt as the Church ever was, but one in which a fair number of both liberals and conservatives revel.

The two party system has served the country reasonably well for a long time. The Democrats have pushed for change and have championed labor unions in their struggles for a better deal for workers and have rallied round leaders such as FDR and Martin Luther King. Changes did happen. When the changes started to appear too rapid or frightening to a majority of the population, that middle slice of the voting public turned to the Norman Rockwell imagery of the country that gave us apple pie and Doris Day movies, which the Republicans like to conjure up as the real America. This back and forth worked to allow a degree of social change while avoiding radical dislocations.

Then, a few decades ago, things went badly wrong. The Democratic Party lost much of its base as immigrant groups worked their way up to suburban comfort and moved from aspiration to a defensive mode. American manufacturing disappeared to China and its former workers to unemployment or fast food outlets. Seeing how well GOP fund raising had gone in the financial world, Democratic party leaders decided to compete for support from Wall Street. This abdication left the traditional Democratic constituency, the workers and the poor, without meaningful representation, as the party decided to emphasize sexual issues and ignore economic problems. Meanwhile, control of the Republican Party moved from the prototype mid-west conservative banker/small businessman types to a new breed of sharks, trained at the Harvard School of Business to devise new ways to relieve grandmothers in California of their savings. Close colleagues included propagandists following the Josef Goebbels model. They were joined in their efforts by neo-cons (sometimes called neo-liberals) determined to bomb the world into acquiescence to American economic control. There was nothing either liberal or conservative about any of them. Neo-fascists might be a term closer to the mark, but fascists at least strove for an advanced industrial base. These people sought only reams of money for themselves and their cronies, while making the middle class an endangered species.

Throughout history, many people have opposed the Church but few have openly opposed the teachings of Christ, even when their actions ran counter to His words. Ayn Rand changed all that. There is no shortage of atheists in the world. Many seek an ethics based on the best philosophical thought rather than on fear of divine punishment. Ayn Rand was unique among atheists in not only opposing a belief in God but in turning the teachings of Christ on their head, preaching that greed is good, the masses should be left to their own miserable fate, while the elite should work for their own betterment and to hell with everybody else. She could and would be dismissed as a tedious, mediocre writer were it not for the fact that among her acolytes were people high in the Republican ranks such as Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul and Clarence Thomas. For a deeper analysis of this phenomenon, see Jeffrey Mikkelson's fine article.

Mitt Romney personified this school of thought in his remarks about the 47%. Nobody really knows what he represents because he's advocated on each side of every issue. However, the most telling clue may be in his selection of a sociopath vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, the most avid Rand disciple on the American political scene, and the most consistent liar since Guinness kept records. Ryan also calls himself a Roman Catholic and recently said, with a straight face, that President Obama is leading the country away from Judeo-Christian values. Meanwhile he's concocted a budget that would throw grandma under the bus while exploding the deficit by giving additional massive cuts to his billionaire buddies, and curtailing most vital public services. A Catholic bishop even admonished him for a budget which was anything but Christian.

Evangelicals, who had some reservations about the Mormon Romney, love his science denials, and they're supporting Israel, no matter what, because the rapture, where Christ returns and carts off the true believers to heaven, won't happen unless and until Israel is safe in the Holy Land.

Lincoln's Republican Party may have been an ill-sorted bunch, but nothing compared to the present version. The party that claims to represent conservatives has everything except conservatives: neo-cons who would discard all international agreements the country has entered into; radical deregulators who have crashed the economy twice in this century and are ready to do it again; banksters; anti-tax zealots who would happily bankrupt the nation; traitors who publicly wished to see the government fail so they could take it over; science deniers; vulture capitalists, and even Roman Catholics who preach and live the anti-Christ dogma of Ayn Rand.

Decorum

Like fresh air and clean water, you aren't aware of decorum until it's missing. My wife recalls that as a girl she was reprimanded by the parish priest for attending mass in a dress with short sleeves. She was even sent home to change. Nowadays, one encounters the gum-chewing faithful wearing low-riding shorts or skirts designed to show off their navel rings, a display which might be considered redundant, given that the bellies on display are often protuberant enough to draw one's gaze without any embellishment.

From my own childhood, I remember travelling carnivals with freak shows which featured dwarfs, hermaphrodites and “the tattooed lady”. While dwarfs and hermaphrodites don't seem to have proliferated in the interval, tattooed ladies can now be seen, free of charge, in every small town supermarket.

About twenty years ago, one of the young bachelors in the village made a habit of perusing large hard-core pornographic magazines on the steps of the village bar/general store. The old ladies, who have always made up a majority of the local population, would either pretend not to notice, or would walk away in disgust, while the children mostly giggled. At the time, these magazines were crowding out other publications on newsstands throughout Italy. The news dealers scrambled to create large, out of public view, areas to stock such publications, but a certain aura of sleaze permeated all the major outlets. With the arrival and wide diffusion of the internet, this assault on decorum received a fatal blow, as pornography became easily available in every household. Italian newsstands have been restored to the days of old, where the most widely sold magazines are those showing remarkably tanned TV and film celebrities cavorting with their new loves in the chic resorts of Sardinia. These magazines, which feature bosomy stars in low cut dresses and small bikinis, despite being reliably present in every barber shop, seem to be mostly sold to women, which I find strange, but upon reflection, may be no more strange than men reading magazines about heroic sports figures, another top category. We all keep brooding about what (we) might have been.

This summer, which has been characterized by long family visits, hellish heat and a hectic village festa, has brought the notion of decorum to mind on multiple occasions. My grandchildren, all six of them, were present for a part of the summer, and while they are all above average, even exceptional, in every imaginable category, from beauty to intelligence, musicality to cuteness, their progress toward decorum may be lagging slightly behind. I have suggested that navel rings may be out of place in church but, at the same time, toy cars are every bit as foreign to the reverence of the ceremony. I could go on to lament the presence of dogs in church as well, but I'm treading on thin ice here, as I very rarely attend mass myself. However, the church is not the only locale where some concept of decorum should reside. I regard the dining room table, not to mention the living room floor, as being as sacred in its way, as any part of the church. Toy cars, dolls and electronic devices have no place there. Perhaps when introduced to alcohol and other pleasure inducing substances, the children may give up their addictions to plastic and electronic toys, but I fear that addictive behavior itself tends to become a personality trait, rather than just being associated with any one substance.

Among my own addictions, one of the most serious is watching sports. Sky Sports allows me to indulge my habit at little cost, but I have noticed that decorum in professional sports has taken a major hit. When I moved to Italy four decades ago I was shocked to see sports venues here littered with advertising. This cancer has spread, and now the once pristine wall boards of the Madison Square Garden hockey rink are plastered with ads for McDonald's and other commercial graffiti. It gets worse! During the long TV breaks for commercials, disco music is now piped into the arenas at NHL and NFL contests, as well as Major League baseball games. I wonder that there are any live audiences left but I suppose they are mostly recipients of free tickets from corporate sponsors filling their tax write-off boxes.

This summer brought us more tennis than usual, due to the Olympics. While I prefer the blood sports, I've always thought of tennis as being a little bit classier than some of the other sports. After all, at Wimbledon, players all wear white, and the public eats dainty sandwiches in the presence of royalty. However, at the US Open the other day, I noticed that during the breaks, they were piping in the same disco babble that the more proletarian sports have adopted. So much for tennis! I'm calling for Roger Federer to stage a walkout. There's too much money at stake for that, but will Roger, always a paragon of decorum, start learning to do back flips and a little victory dance ritual a the conclusion of a successful match?

With this backdrop of worldwide cultural decadence, I suppose it was too much to expect our tiny village to demonstrate more decorum in our summer festival than major institutions in New York City can muster. Much of the festa went well. As always, the food was good. The home-grown theatrical production was well done and well received, its only defect being that the sound was slightly under- amplified. The following night, that was compensated for by mind rending amplification of the most inane disco pop ever heard since Abba retired. This was Youth Night, youth in Italy being people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-eight. (Before that, they're bambini.) When I complained to the president and other members of the governing committee that the sound levels were grotesque and dangerous, I was told that the youth liked it that way. Possibly so, and perhaps they also like to stand around excavation sites with eight or ten jackhammers in operation. All of these people making that judgment were well over sixty and I'm not sure they know any better than I do what the youth like. Based on twenty year old anecdotal evidence, I would guess that they like porn. Had they decided to put a live porno exhibition on stage in the piazza, would the town elders have shrugged and said “that's what the youth like”?

Times, people and customs change. The fellow who once offended the standards of the village is now an upstanding pillar of the community. I have no idea if his tastes have changed but his hair is now streaked with gray and his comportment is exemplary. Decorum is, after all, simply conformance to accepted standards. Perhaps tomorrow that will simply mean keeping your navel ring polished and lint-free.

Hate Thine Enemy

My early childhood memory seems like a piece of Swiss cheese, more holes than substance. One small and vague morsel remains which concerns some sort of a celebration in the basement of my elementary school. It may have been an end of the school year celebration. Whatever, for a few hours we got to play games. Between logic and arithmetic, I now deduce that the war (WWII) was still on and while I would have been too young to remember very many details, it seems to me that one of the games was to throw darts at three balloons tricked up to represent Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini. I suppose that every nation at war feels the need to demonize the enemy. It wasn't difficult to demonize Hitler but my recollection of these figures was that they were more ridiculous than scary. That's another common and useful tactic, one I sometimes dabble in myself. Making the enemy ridiculous may be even more effective than making him the personification of evil.

I don't recall a particularly large campaign of this sort in the major wars of my lifetime, but my mother did tell me of how the windows were smashed in my German great-grandfather's food shop during WWI, how sauerkraut was officially renamed liberty cabbage, and how my mother's German lessons were curtailed at the time. When WWII came along, there was much less of that sort of thing in the US, unless you were of Japanese origin. In the Korean and Vietnamese wars, I can't remember either the Korean or Vietnamese people being subjected to scorn, but of course we were fighting both with and against indistinguishable people in their civil wars.

Counter-intuitively, it seems that domestic battles lead to more elevated demonization than do foreign wars, where both sides tend to go about their business with more detachment. When I went to college in the south, the residue of resentment against people from the north seemed stronger ninety years after the Civil War than that felt toward the Germans and the Japanese who had been bitter and deadly enemies just a decade before. I've never been to Ireland and I doubt that I could tell a Protestant from a Catholic there and yet, somehow the Irish could, and the violence and bitterness lingered. For that matter, I also couldn't tell a Lebanese Muslim from a Lebanese Christian but they seem often unable restrain their hostility towards each other. Shiite-Sunni violence is another of those mysteries. When I moved to Rome in the 70's I experienced that kind of battle up close. Violent hoodlums battled on the streets and kept scrawling graffiti all over the city. Their slogans and their colors differed, but otherwise the militants of the right and the militants of the left didn't seem much different.

Back in the USA we have people of all sorts of nationalities, races and religions. There have certainly been battles but we're so mixed up by now that it keeps becoming harder to draw the lines of otherness. And yet, they do sometimes emerge. Many years ago, I was on assignment in Miami for a couple of months. I found a group of congenial people to socialize with, in and around the motel in Coconut Grove where I was staying, and I was thoroughly enjoying my Florida sojourn. One day the news came of the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the motel bar, comments started flowing freely with the booze, such as, “that bastard finally got what was coming to him”. Suddenly, in front of my eyes, Sam, the voluptuous barmaid that I had lusted after, was transformed into a monster. The place seethed with venomous creatures who only the day before had seemed like normal people. I just wanted to be out of there and never see any of those people again. Fortunately, I was repatriated to New York after only a few more sullen and angry days.

Our Civil War has been over for a long time and one might have hoped we would be getting along by now. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems. After all, I do live in Italy, so perhaps I don't get to see a more complete picture, since my view of the country is basically through family, friends, visitors and the media. Nevertheless, a few days ago I was surfing through the news channels in search of some bit of news when I came across the Gang of Five, or something like that, on Fox News. One older conservative fellow played the role of lion tamer in the midst of a circle of wild and vicious creatures who appeared not to have been fed yet. Except for their aggressive demeanor, the men were nondescript, but the women on Fox are always young and good looking, and these were no exception. The foxes almost make one think of airline stewardesses in the early days of commercial flight, all young, pretty, slim and single, back in the days before age discrimination law suits. One of the women on the show had had her fangs polished by working in the Little George Bush Administration, defending the indefensible. I don't know where the other one came from but she was shapely and exotic, and if she hadn't come from the adult entertainment sector, she certainly could have a future there if Fox goes down. All in all, the crew seem more a pack of rabid ferrets than lions or tigers. They were constantly on the attack. They routinely spoke about President Obama in terms more hostile than ever heard in the American media about the likes of Tojo or Mussolini, closer in tone to that used for the late Col. Ghaddafi or the current President of Iran. While the President of the United States received his share of gratuitous insults, the villain du jour was Chief Justice John Roberts, of all people. Yes, the same John Roberts who led the Supreme Court to rule that corporations are people and money is speech, after pledging judicial restraint at his confirmation hearings. John Roberts had not done his God-given duty by striking down Obamacare, the health care plan borrowed from Mitt Romney. He was clearly a traitor, not to be trusted, and the occasion of his defection from plutocrat orthodoxy had made the need to appoint yet more radical members to the court all the more apparent.

These people are paid (very well I suspect) to foment hatred and they are masters at it. Just as an Ian Paisley could rouse his rabble to attack Catholic neighborhoods while raising the level of hatred amongst the Catholics for his dreary flock, the Foxters manage to raise the blood lust, or at least the blood pressure, of their Tea Party faithful while producing feelings of disbelief and disgust in any outsiders who wander into the tent. I'm not especially prone to hating people, though I may succumb too easily to disdain or contempt. Neither working in difficult conditions in Saudi Arabia nor having my NYC office destroyed by the 9/11 terrorist attack ever managed to get me to hate Arabs, just as hearing way too many racist slurs directed at every imaginable minority in my childhood never left much of an impression. I even married one of the hated Catholics. Getting me to hate a beautiful woman is an especially arduous and improbable task but, when it comes to stirring up hate, these people at Fox are not to be underestimated. Watching that show was like another Martin Luther King Assassination Day all over again. Every day on Fox has something of that feel.

I don't know how long it will take the country to get over the increasingly bitter oligarchy/anti-oligarchy struggle. It took more than a century to get over the Civil War, a war which killed more Americans than any other. Slavery had to go. Oligarchy will have to go too, and with it the fascist infrastructure that sustains it. We can hope that it will take less casualties than the abolition of slavery did, but pretending that the problem isn't there, or that it will just go away by itself, is no solution.

The effectiveness of the Gang of Foxes, and the many others in their cage, is disturbing. Hatred is a bad thing but indifference isn't much better. Should King Kong miraculously return to New York and throw the whole Gang of Five through a plate glass window on the 32nd floor of the Fox HQ building, I confess that while I might be curious about all that broken glass, I doubt that I'd give a fig about the collateral damage.

Whores, Johns and Pimps

Who do the whores work for?

• They provide services to the johns.
• They work to procure money for the pimps.
• They work for themselves and , if lucky, get to keep some of the money for themselves.

Their loyalties are to whom? Clearly, they suffer from a compound conflict of interest. In my four decades in Italy, the country that gave a name to nepotism, I've marveled at Italians' inability to grasp the concept of conflict of interest. Otherwise, they never could have elected a Berlusconi, or even permitted him to run for office. There are many otherwise intelligent Italians who cannot grasp this, but it's not always simple territory. Triangulated conflicts of interest are hard to control or regulate and the nature of the conflicts is not always transparent.

We've got lots of whoring going on in Umbria. A few years ago we even had a whore-related murder right here in Acqualoreto. One john was murdered and another (presumed) john was accused, tried, convicted of the murder and then acquitted on appeal. No mention of a pimp! Was this just traditional Italian obliviousness to conflict of interest? We'll never know.

Any whore, once paid, may just run off with the john's credit cards while his pants are off. In a similar vein, a pro quarterback who professes total dedication to his team, may decide to hold out for more money and miss training camp, thus hurting his team's chances. A corporate CEO, appointed and paid to work for the benefit of the company's shareholders, may award himself salary and benefits so high as to damage the financial well-being of that company. These are all inner conflicts on the part of one party in a two party deal, a matter of personal integrity. We all face such conflicts somewhere along the line. The real conflicts of interest begin when a third party gets involved.

Whores may face inner conflicts. They may come to like their johns or their pimps too well, or be too disgusted by them for the good of the business. Johns may be conflicted about whether they're doing something wrong, being taken advantage of by the whores, or taking advantage of them. Pimps instead, are unlikely to suffer such misgivings. The entrepreneurial spirit that we assiduously strive to instill in our best and brightest youth is exemplified in its purest state in the pimping profession. The profit motive is unsullied by ethical concerns, legal considerations, pride in one's reputation, or nostalgic personal feelings about the welfare of clients, workers, or the community at large.

Good whores provide a service that makes the johns happy, and their work may even bring in a respectable income. However, they often end up badly after being maltreated by their pimps. As for the pimps, they seem to make out pretty well. None of us wants to see them prosper, just as we recoil at seeing bank CEOs prosper the way they have in recent years, but maybe that's just because we're neither pimps nor banksters.

The triangular relationship is remarkably similar to the situation with our political representatives. Let's just say that they're all whores. (Now, before politicians start a class action libel suit against me, I want to spell it out for them that I'm speaking metaphorically. I do not accuse them of selling sex.) We the constituents are the johns and our whores are well-paid to provide us services, such as writing laws, which hopefully provide extensive public services while providing us with generous tax cuts, or bringing unneeded defense contractors to our districts. But we, the johns, didn't put them on that prominent spot on the street, or slick up their public image. Their pimps created their media display windows and, while our best whores make all the right noises and try to make us feel good, at the end of the day most of our money ends up in the pockets of the pimps, whether they're called media moguls, bank chairmen, or simply oligarchs.

I wouldn't want to push this analogy too far but the only place I see it breaking down is that, unlike our traditional whores, who are often beaten, sold and abused by their pimps, our political whores seem to be very well taken care of by their pimps. When their usefulness in capitol corridors wanes, they are sent out on K Street as senior citizen whores working for lobbying firms, think tanks, Faux News or Pimp Foundations. Unlike their traditional sisters, their income keeps increasing with age and experience.

A current trend in government is to bring in third parties to provide public services paid for by the government. This is happening in everything from parking meters to schools and, most alarmingly, in the military, where mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan are now as numerous as our official troops. It's called privatization. I suggest that it could better be described as bringing in the pimps. Our troops used to do our dirty work for us. They worked cheap but we honored them with patriotic songs and medals. We still pay the bill but now half of them are working for pimps who see to it that they get paid more and decide on the terms of their service.

Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession and it's unlikely to go away. Many social critics have suggested that the whores should be allowed to ply their trade while the pimps should be suppressed. I would add that this approach makes sense to me for our political whores as well. Simple conflicts of interest may be a fact of life but triangular ones usually lead to bad results. They should be avoided or eliminated.

Roots of Spring

After an abysmal winter, the arrival of spring, with its inspiring explosion of color in the countryside, has helped alleviate the depression fostered by too much time reading the news. On top of that, a series of fortuitous coincidences has brought me closer to my roots.

Rummaging back through my old high school yearbook, I find little mention of my activities there. While more ambitious kids were listed as being on the Student Council, the varsity football team, the Spanish or German club, the yearbook staff, or an endless number of other organizations devised to allow each student the opportunity to compile an impressive resumè of extracurricular activities, I was dutifully recorded as having been a door holder, and my future plans were listed as “undecided”. We each had a quotation affixed to our name. Mine read “I wish I might show the world how to enjoy itself”. Whether this was written by a magically prescient classmate, or was simply a comment generated by my precocious tendency to abuse alcohol, I've never been sure. Since my academic performance was little better than my extracurricular curriculum, it's a wonder that I did get admitted to the college of my choice, but then, that college did have something of a reputation as a party school, and perhaps they saw in me some potential. Indeed, while never destined to be student body president, I did get to be social chairman of my fraternity. In that capacity I tried to organize theme parties and was routinely frustrated by the members failing to show up in sufficiently imaginative costumes. It's gone on that way over a lifetime, in which I've encouraged people to cut loose on Fire Island, go to jazz festivals, and visit Umbria. In recent years I've pushed our growing contingent of foreign residents to get together at the Circolo of Acqualoreto every Wednesday for a happy hour. While it's a hit or miss operation, it's proven more successful than some previous efforts, such as my ill-fated attempt to organize a bocce tournament in the village. Only people from Ireland, Australia and Bermuda participated in significant numbers. Actually, they are also active supporters of the Happy Hour. Very few Italians!

Every now and then, there is some unanticipated success. Once upon a time in my first grade class there was a little girl named Barbara Boo Boo Bagg. She was the cutest girl in the class. As she matured, BooBoo became simply Boo and she remained the cutest girl in the school. While I hadn't seen her for four decades, I have spoken with her, and her affable husband Dick, numerous times by phone, always suggesting that they visit Umbria. One year, on her birthday, I even emailed her a digital file of “BooBoo's Birthday” by Thelonious Monk, whose own daughter Barbara was also known as BooBoo. Miracle of miracles- this year Boo and Dick came to see Umbria. I suggested they come to visit us on a Wednesday so that they could come to our Happy Hour, but after a morning of sight-seeing and an afternoon of eating, drinking wine and talking, Boo was too concerned about their navigating the narrow and sinuous roads back to their lodgings on Mt. Subasio in the dark. We had a good turnout that evening and it was a shame that they missed it. At a certain age, I suppose we should all learn such prudence, and I pledge to work at it sometime soon.

At another of our Happy Hours last September, I met a man named Peter Prinssen, who was a guest of some of our Dutch neighbors up the hill in Morruzze. Having noted my Dutch name, Peter wrote to ask if I would be interested in knowing more about my family history. Apparently all this sort of information is now on the internet in Holland. I sent him what I already knew and in short order he got back to me with considerably more detailed information on the De Graaf family, as well as some information about my grandmother's family in Friesland. More may still be coming. The miracle of Google Maps brought me pictures of both places of family origin and renewed curiosity about why they left. Did somebody do something bad? I suppose most emigration is about economic opportunity. Why else would anybody move to to Houston for example, or why from a the tidy village of Goedereede on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee to Paterson, New Jersey? For that matter, my neighbors and I now live in what we regard as an earthly paradise, only because the area was abandoned after WWII by people fleeing the drudgery of work in the fields for new opportunities working in urban factories.

One of our neighbors here, Lin Widmann, has a daughter Christy who lives in Holland. Last week, between them, and with the help of the Circolo, they arranged a choral concert in the church of Acqualoreto. The group, Doulce Memorire, directed by Felix van den Hombergh, is from Haarlem and was starting a concert tour of Umbria, singing works by Dutch composers from medieval times to the present. The voices of the twelve men and twelve women of the chorus were merged, contrasted and woven together brilliantly. Much of the music, at least on first hearing, didn't seem to me memorable in its own right, but served as a vehicle for the beauty of the voices. During a brief interval, four members of the chorus played a series of wind instruments, three flutes and a bassoon, I believe. The counterpoint was delightful. Following that came the highlight of the concert, an absolutely mesmerizing rendition of Joep Franssens' modern piece, “Harmony of the Spheres”. It's a long droning work with rising and falling voices and pulsing sounds generated by the close harmonies. The acoustics of the church worked well with this music and the effect was spectacular.

After the concert, the members of the chorus walked through the village, paused for a drink at the Circolo bar and went on to a supper, provided by the Circolo, at the ex- school. I have fond memories of my Dutch forebears but if truth be told, they were a dour group. Not these! During the long meal, various groups of them would spontaneously break into song. It was a very happy evening for all of us there. The only slightly sad note of the evening was that the very enthusiastic audience was not a bit larger.

Three days later, to celebrate May Day and the fifth anniversary of the Circolo, another choral group of the same size, the Coro Nomantum from Rome, gave a concert in the piazza. The director was pleased by the acoustics of the piazza, but a piazza is neither a church nor an auditorium and a little of the force and the majesty of the sound is lost in singing the traditional music outdoors. They sung works dating from 1200 through the 1500's to Mozart before turning to modern songs such as Paul Simon's Sound of Silence, Twist and Shout and Barbaram. There was a novelty number about cats and birds in which the lead cat was a girl wearing sunglasses which turned bright green when she raised her head to the light as she meowed. Nice effect! The group has fun with the pop songs but their best work was the Mozart. This concert was well attended, especially considering the weather, which had threatened rain all day but fortunately held off. There was free food following the concert, the universal secret to boosting attendance at events which should, but don't always, attract people on their own merits.

Two days later we went to another choral concert, this time in Todi, by the Chorus of the University of Perugia. This was another return to our roots in a sense because two of our daughters sang in this group while at the University and we still knew a few of the participants. Again, the program was varied, with a progression somewhat similar to that of the Nomentum concert. It differed in that it featured a soprano soloist and the chorus consisted of twenty-two women and eleven men. Some numbers were sung by the women alone or the men alone or just by the soloist. They opened with Tourdion by P. Attaignant, a piece which showed off the counterpoint between the sections better than anything else in the concert. An English drinking song sung by the men alone didn't sound robust enough for a drinking song, and I'm not an enthusiast of the music of Donizetti or Bellini. Verdi's Coro dei Schiavi Ebrei was splendid, after which they turned to more recent music by Jobim, Gershwin, and the Beach Boys. Yes, this chorus too, did Barbara Ann, or Barbaram as it sounds to me. They were a little livelier with it than the Romans but their best moments with the modern music came with Siyahamba, an African piece which played the male and female voices off against each other very well, and a brilliant arrangement of Ennio Morriconi's music for the film “C'era una Volta il West” The soprano, Elena Vigorito, soared over the combined voices of the chorus to wonderful effect. The arrangement was by the piano player, Francesco Andreucci, a native of Todi. They sang in the Sala del Consiglio, a magnificent room, which is a joy simply to sit in. This was a free concert in this gorgeous room, well publicized in Todi, a city of possibly 15,000 people. There was a bigger crowd at the concert in the piazza of Acqualoreto, population +/- 150. Nevertheless, the small audience was very appreciative. My wife was ecstatic, and wants to bring them to Acqualoreto for a concert. I will try to make it happen.

The saying goes “you can lead a horse to water but you can't make her drink.” That's the story of my life, except that I deal with people, not horses. Getting them to drink isn't usually so hard. Getting them to eat is even easier. It's getting them to listen, where it really gets to be difficult.

Milestones

Time marches on. The odometer of life's journey keeps clicking off the days and the weeks without our taking much notice, but at the end of the year, when the big number changes, we usually pause for a moment to consider what's been gained and what's been lost since the last New Year. Kids are delighted because being a year older confers more privileges; young adults look to the new year with the optimism that it will bring a new love or a better job or some unimagined opportunity. We older folk look upon the onset of another year with more nostalgia, and as much anxiety as optimism. Will this be the last one, or how many more do we have left? Is the world (the economy, the environment, the government) going to self-destruct? And will we be around to see it? Watching vulture capitalists and lunar colonialists participate in the circular firing squad of the US presidential primary campaign does nothing to alleviate the anxiety.

This January has been particularly loaded with reminders of time's passage. During the month I watched all ten NFL play-off games, several of which were decided by “sudden death overtime”. In reality, all the games were sudden death because all the losing teams were eliminated. Extinct! Next year there will be a Baltimore Ravens team wearing the same black and purple uniforms but it will be a different team, no matter how many current players and coaches return. The team that lost on that missed field goal is gone. We all cling to the the comforting fiction that there will be another chance, maybe next year. That team, along with thirty others, lost its chance.

The day before New Years Eve we went to the funeral of a village fixture, a 94 year-old woman who spent her last years shuffling around the piazza bestowing blessings upon anyone she encountered. The blessings came with questions such as “Do you like Acqualoreto?” although her impaired hearing precluded any possibility of her comprehending the reply. After four decades here, being a foreigner, I was still regularly posed the same question. It felt like she would be doing this forever.

January brought the news that the brightest kid in my high school class had died after a three year battle with Alzheimer's. I had a series of injections of Vitamin B-12 to correct a deficiency, which doctors suspect could risk leading to a similar outcome. When not visiting medical facilities for shots, tests or physical therapy ourselves, we've been visiting friends recovering in hospitals from largely self-induced ailments.

In one case, we've witnessed the decline and death of a long-time friend who was a regular at our Wednesday foreigners' Happy Hours. A witty and creative person with a wonderfully ironic sense of humor, she was also a fine and sensitive writer, a gourmet cook, a voracious reader, a cat lover, and an organizer of Christmas caroling expeditions, book exchanges and even Halloween celebrations. Best of all, she was one of the few regular readers of, and commentators on, this blog. Unfortunately, she also had a self-destructive side worthy of a rock star or a celebrity starlet. Linda abused alcohol with the best (or worst) of them. Our community, which has many ex-smokers but virtually no ex-drinkers, tends to be tolerant, even when occasionally concerned, regarding that particular vice. It was her unrelenting addition to nicotine that drove her friends away, intensified her solitude, and nudged her health into its downward spiral. In one of her last lucid days, she reminded the woman who had spent years caring for her that her organs were to be donated, to which the woman replied, “but Linda, your eyes, heart, liver and lungs don't even work for you any more. Who's going to take them, or what else is left to donate?” The decline apparently spun faster than she anticipated. Though her intentions seemed kind and generous when expressed in numerous conversations with her friends about her plans to donate her material assets as well as her organs to worthy causes, by the time her sister, her one surviving direct relative, arrived from the other side of the world to see her in the hospital, she was unable or unwilling to inform anyone where her instructions could be found in case the doctors' valiant efforts proved futile.

We've been trying to help her non-Italian-speaking sister and brother-in-law deal with logistical and bureaucratic matters for the past couple of weeks. They need all the help they can get and there is some satisfaction in helping people in such very difficult circumstances. But the inescapable thought arises that the Kafkaesque nightmare that they face could have been avoided. We have gained from this sad fiasco, one powerful lesson.

It's later than you think!

Thanks for the lesson Linda, as well as for all the parties, cookies, blog comments and general zaniness you've brightened our lives with. For the organizational example, not so much.

UPS, Uncle Harry and the paramus of Todi

I wasn't the first in my family to go into architecture. My Uncle Harry had gone to drafting school and started working in an architect's office It didn't last long. Architectural work wasn't particularly remunerative even then but it might have afforded him the appearance of a more dignified calling, something which Uncle Harry couldn't care less about. He wanted to be outdoors. Harry was smarter than people gave him credit for. He thought that being confined to a drawing board under artificial light for forty hours a week was a bad deal with the devil, so he quit and got a job driving a truck for the United Parcel Service.

The Great Falls

That was in the days before Paramus NJ became the world's first and worst agglomeration of shopping centers. My mother, like most other suburban housewives in the area, would take a bus five miles to Paterson, with me in tow, to do her shopping. A few days later a UPS truck, often driven by Uncle Harry, would show up at the house with the clothes, furniture or whatever else my mother had purchased. I liked to go to Paterson. Not so much being dragged around the department stores but sometimes my grandfather would take me to see the firehouse he had worked in, showing me the hook and ladder with steering wheels at the front and the back and the shiny brass poles the firemen slid down from their upstairs sleeping quarters when the alarm sounded. Paterson also had the Great Falls, one of America's larger waterfalls, which just last month became a National Park, with Hinchcliff Stadium, the midget auto racing Mecca, just a stone's throw from the Falls. There were also Chinese restaurants where we could get Chow Mein to take home. There was even a street full of colorful gypsies. My parents warned us about them and when we went by car to Paterson, my father got through that one block of River Street as quickly as possible, making sure the car windows were all closed. That sense of urgency added to the gypsies' appeal but I was very much taken by the bright flaring skirts the women wore, so much more interesting than the dreary clothes of all the “normal people” around. The city had, and still has, a lot of interesting buildings, from the churches and institutional buildings reflecting the Dutch origins of many of the citizens, to the wonderful Victorian era brick industrial buildings. I can't say that as a kid I realized how rich that architecture was but I did sense that there was something there more interesting than in our manicured suburbs.

The Post Office

Everything has changed since then. Uncle Harry retired to Florida to spend his last several decades outdoors tending his grapefruit trees year round. The shopping centers of Paramus metastasized, killing off the department stores and smaller shops in Paterson, while turning housewives and their white collar husbands into part-time truck drivers. Even before the SUV (Shopping Utility Vehicle) had evolved, the monster American sedans and station wagons had the payload of about half a small UPS truck. The department stores of Paterson and Newark, as well as the shops of Hackensack, and even upscale Ridgewood, may have gone out of business, but UPS has only grown bigger. My positive feelings about UPS from Uncle Harry's time took a nosedive a few years ago when they kept leaving notes saying they'd unsuccessfully tried to deliver a package and then later that they had left my consignment of cigars with an unnamed neighbor who couldn't be found. This and their lack of pick-up points open on Saturdays led me to the firm conviction that, besides being more expensive, they are far less reliable than the US Postal Service, although Congress is doing its best to change that by eliminating the Postal Service. But back in the day, UPS provided a valuable service, which I'd like to see restored. In keeping with current economic trends, UPS and their competitors now seem to exist to service large corporations and they appear to be thriving.

A Pedestrian Entrance to Todi

Much as Uncle Harry managed to emigrate to a place in the sun, I too have emigrated to sunnier climes in Italy. Paterson, my birthplace, fell victim to suburban sprawl and urban decay. Here in Umbria we're following the same path, albeit at a slower pace. Medieval towns, such as our neighboring Todi, are seeing the shops on their narrow streets go out of business, as new commercial centers crop up on surrounding plains. Convenience is God and every person, not just every family any more, has a car. Despite soaring gasoline prices (about US$8./US gallon by today's calculation), this is not likely to be reversed any time soon. The tourist traffic, which brings in much of the region's income, will probably diminish as the beautiful town centers go dark. People will continue to go to the supermarkets in their cars. It makes sense. But why must all the other “stuff” that we buy have to be sold in big box warehouse stores that deface the landscape? Smaller shops, accessible on foot in splendid surroundings, can display whatever we need, and unlike shopping on line, we can try on the clothes, handle the objects, and discuss the products with a knowledgeable salesperson. Must we all be truck drivers? For my part I'd rather see an Uncle Harry show up at my door with the stuff I'd seen and bought in an attractive and healthy city.

"Masterpieces On The Way" in Ponterio

Todi is much smaller than Paterson but it has a longer history and deeper culture than Paterson could even imagine. I don't remember anything about Paramus, other than the horrible traffic. I expect that future impressions of Ponterio, the town where the sprawling commercial development is taking place at the bottom of the Todi hill, will be similar. Ponterio is unlikely to be a must see in any guide books that will bring people to town. Paramus isn't so much a place as a condition, and sadly, it exists all over the world. I would even suggest to one of those forums that document additions to the lexicon that “paramus” be considered a term for a zone, neither urban or rural, populated by few human residents but covered by commercial and warehouse buildings, accessed by high speed highways transformed into multilane traffic jams and to which pedestrian access is either highly dangerous or completely forbidden.

My real concern is whether Todi will face the same fate as Paterson. I've heard that Paterson has shown modest signs of a revival. I hope so. But wouldn't it be great if our towns and cities could come back without first falling quite so far.

The Hospital is Dead, Long Live the Hospital

With the opening of the new Todi Hospital in Pantalla, eight kilometers to the north, Todi has finally entered the twentieth century. Remember, the one in which each significant bit of human interaction was bracketed by a trip in a car? Members of the medical professions are delighted with the new modern facilities and potential patients in the area, heretofore apprehensive about questions of sterility in the operating rooms of the old non-air-conditioned hospital, will be reassured by the tidy new building.

I may find myself there one day, just as I have been a patient in the old hospital. Thinking back to a painful 16 kilometer race to the emergency room, I can only hope that any future trip to the more distant facility will be under less urgent conditions. At the risk of compromising my journalistic objectivity, I must admit I was fond of the old hospital. Although we knew at least two people who unexpectedly failed to survive routine treatment at the hospital, the food was good and the staff friendly. While there for nearly a week, I was cheered up by the stream of visitors casually dropping by to say hello. Over the years, when we've known that somebody from our village, or a neighboring one, was in the hospital, we've gone in to see them when we happened to be in Todi. Times change and I suppose patients will just have to get used to the TV for company.

Italian hospitals provide free basic medical care and all the tests required but for routine functions, such as getting up to go to the bathroom, or help with eating or washing, patients either have family members with them, or they pay someone to provide such assistance. There's no sign that any new system of assistance will accompany the new out-of-town hospitals. Todi is only the latest of these in Umbria. New hospitals dot the landscape outside of Perugia, Orvieto, Città di Castello and Gualdo Tadino. Even in Rome, the newest hospital is out near the ring road, more easily accessible from the airport than from the city center.

With the possible exceptions of commemorative Presidential Libraries and lavish new sports stadiums, hospitals are the most costly buildings that we build today, mostly due to their technical requirements. It's certainly easier and cheaper to build a new facility on virgin land than to try to renovate an existing and functioning city hospital. For people running the health system, the decision to close the hospitals in Todi and Marsciano and replace them with a new hospital, officially named the Ospedale Media Valle del Tevere, about ten kilometers from each city, may have been a no-brainer, but was anyone involved in the decision who weighed the social costs and other on-going expenses? Clearly, not every doctor, nurse, technician, patient, relative, assistant and visitor lives in the town center, but many do, and most of the rest are scattered around town in a fairly small radius. That translates into an extra twenty kilometer trip each day for every person, in whatever capacity, at the new hospital. In terms Americans can understand, gasoline now costs about $8.50/gallon and is trending upward. Frequent bus service has been provided between town and hospital but those buses have their costs as well. Perhaps the extra transportation costs are low relative to the medical efficiencies involved. But what of Todi, the beautiful medieval hill town that brings people and money to the region in the first place? There is essentially one street in and one street out of the center for cars, with little parking available in the narrow streets. The one traffic lane of the main descending street, Corso Cavour, is shared with nervous pedestrians. Given the risks of being run over, people have ever less reason to walk on the Corso and it shows. Once you walk down the main street about 100 meters from the Piazza del Popolo, its name changes to Via Roma and the percentage of unoccupied shops rises alarmingly. The hospital is at the bottom of the street, at this point called Via Mattioti, just before the Porta Romana in the old peripheral wall of the town. It brought a constant flow of people of people into the area and shops, ranging from tavole calde and snack bars to housewares and clothing shops, thrived there for years. Now the dead zone will metastasize.

Urban blight is not the sort of disease that the health authorities are asked to deal with. Discussions about closing and replacing the hospital went on for more than a decade during which time someone should have realized what closing the hospital would do to the town. Where were the local, provincial and regional governments? To my knowledge there is still no solid plan for the future use of the old hospital. There is however a plan to deal with the lack of parking and access to the town center. My early guess is that the treatment will kill the patient. More about that in a future article.

Orvieto had a similar situation when its new hospital was built out of town. In fairness, construction there took about twenty-five years, after politicians managed to misplace the first batch of money that had been appropriated, the building was trashed by vandals, and the project was restarted, so there was ample time to plan. Furthermore the old hospital was adjacent to the fabulous Duomo and the mix of tourists and patients was beneficial to neither group. The ex-hospital has been transformed into a local center for university students from Rome, as well as from several US universities, bringing increased vitality and commerce to the town center.

I visited the new Todi Hospital to take photographs but hadn't planned to use the facility prior to writing this piece. Then my wife suddenly needed to have an X-ray, for which our doctor prescribed an immediate appointment and we drove straight to the Emergency Room entrance to be processed in. After being advised to drive around to the main entrance and proceed to radiology, we chose to walk, probably a bad choice, since although the hospital has many fine features, internal circulation isn't one of them. After finding an exit and walking around to the front, I left my wife to the radiologists and circled back to move the car to the vast main parking lot. Parking, like lunch, is never free and although there is no user charge at the moment, the extensive parking lots certainly added to the cost of the new facility. However, in this case, inasmuch as no one will ever arrive at this hospital on foot, I would propose that even more money be spent on the parking, enough to plant a few trees or even to provide covered walks to allow sickly visitors to traverse the blazing pavements without recourse to emergency treatment. A portion of the hospital facade is recessed at the ground floor level providing a bit of respite from the weather. Why couldn't this have been extended across the entire facade? They were starting from scratch after all, not making do with an old building.

I wish the new hospital all success. My own future may depend on it. A more immediate wish is that the Todi city fathers awake from their coma and start showing the town and its inhabitants a little more respect.

Better Living Through Electronics

A few years ago a friend sent me the following. I found it moderately amusing at the time.

I Cannot SeeI Cannot PeeI Cannot ChewI Cannot ScrewOh, My God, What Can I Do?My Memory ShrinksMy Hearing StinksNo Sense of SmellI Look Like HellMy Mood is Bad -- Can't You Tell?My Body is DroopingHave Trouble PoopingThe Golden Years Have Come at LastThe Golden Years can Kiss My Ass!

Every year, it's a little less amusing. I've been deluged with offers to have my hearing tested, and several times I've taken them up on it. The tests have verified what members of my family have been saying all along: I don't hear very well. While the tests are free, the proposed solution is not, and after hearing the cost of the device, I've always skipped the free trial. But they keep on calling and writing so this year I said what the hell, let's see how it works. I was given two little metallic slivers that are slung over the back of each ear and wired to a small plug inserted into the ear. These things are custom tuned to amplify only the frequencies that have been lost with time. I must report that they work rather well. They also made me very nervous I could suddenly imagine how a woman might feel wearing clip-on diamond earrings. My life could definitely be improved by hearing better. But then, it could also be improved by a new car or a trip around the world, either of which might be had for a similar price. If I'm to make an investment in hearing of this magnitude, the device needs to be mar more sophisticated. Hearing normal conversation is a big help but what about filtering out the screams of small children. Better still, a device that just shuts down when it registers a commanding or nagging tone, ideally adding white noise to make orders inaudible. Two weeks into my free month, the devices stopped working due to an accumulation of ear wax that my attempts to replace the batteries did nothing to alleviate. This made me even more nervous and I just turned them in ahead of time, but it got me thinking of other electronic devices that could improve my life if only they were available.

• An electronic fence- I know, such devices have been around for some time, but your dog or cat must wear a collar to activate it. I'm thinking in terms of keeping unknown animals, from dogs to rats, porcupines to wild boars, off one's property. We don't necessarily want to keep people out so perhaps three or four points of contact with the ground might be the trigger. That would have the added benefit of limiting the range of crawling babies.
• A baby dissuader- To be attached either electronically or physically to cell phones, TV remotes and computer keyboards, it will emit an electric shock sufficient to inhibit the child from ever touching the protected device again. Extended exposure may keep children from ever becoming adept at the use of electronic gadgetry, but they can become an elite group, conversant with poetry and the spoken tradition. We need more poets.
• A radar buster- While I've always opposed graffiti and other malicious vandalism, with the current spate of radar speed traps documented in an earlier post, the public needs a clean and neat means to defend itself from this epidemic of governmental overreach. If we can fly unmanned bombing sorties in Afghanistan from offices in Las Vegas, I can't imagine why we can't be electronically armed to fry the brains of these insidious devices as we inconspicuously drive by.
• MP3 remote volume adjusters- Anyone who's ridden a bus or subway has been exposed to people with earphones whose “music” leaks out to envelop their surroundings. This device would allow gentler souls among us to lower the volume, while allowing the rest of us to instantly triple the volume. The owner would immediately discard or shut down the offending device or, if already effectively deaf, be throttled by enraged people nearby.
• Electronic cat flap- Standard issue cat flaps are wonderful home improvements but they are deficient in two ways. Once your domesticated cat has been seen entering or leaving through her own little door, clever feral cats will learn to use the same entrance, with disastrous results. Your own sweet cat is free to come and go, with whatever prey, dead or alive, it chooses to drag in. Rat tails under the dining room table are always an embarrassment. The new electronic cat flap must provide identity checks and rat screening, not an easy task, but our airports have managed similar functions.
• Intelligent cell phones (not to be confused with smart phones)- We see drivers wandering to the wrong side of the road, waiting to move when the way is clear, and then plunging into traffic when they should wait. Inevitably, there's the telltale hand pressed to the ear and the mouth moving. This is illegal in Italy but the law, being unenforced, has no effect. Our proposal would see to it that when a cell phone is activated the car's ignition would shut down. Many details need to be resolved to avoid unwanted side effects. We neither want to deprive passengers in a car the use of their cell phones nor do we wish to paralyze bus service. Connecting the shut off device to a sensor in the driver's seat is a possible solution. Still, the effects of engine shutdown at high speed may need further study before this device can be brought to the market.
• Eyeglass finders- Finally, it has come to our attention that eyeglasses have a way of being lost or misplaced more than other objects. Despite appearances, they are rarely stolen or moved by ghosts or evil spirits. A simple alarm device could be implanted in each pair of glass frames which could then activated by a locater button fixed in a known and permanent location in the home.

Time for all you young entrepreneurial electronics wizards out there to get busy. You keep developing ridiculous new phone apps for kids and yuppies, but there are plenty of us aging curmudgeons awaiting your help.