Back at Sandhill

Morialekafa is back from vacation. As I feared, things have deteriorated further in my absence. But first let me tell you what I have learned. The Napa Valley is 30 miles long and varies in width between 1 and 5 miles. Virtually the entire area is devoted to raising grapes and making wine. It is the most blatant tourist trap probably in the entire world.They actually boast that the AVERAGE price of a bottle of Napa Valley wine is $53.00. Think of that! In Europe, that is at least in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, and most other countries people drink wine with their meals just as a matter of course. Can you imagine ordinary people in Europe paying the equivalent of $53.00 for a bottle of wine? Of course not, wine is simply part of their meal. There are fine local wines that are inexpensive, delicious, and merely part of everyday life. They are not something reserved for the very wealthy who apparently are mostly interested in proving how much money they can spend for one of the ordinary pleasures of life. Wine tasting is the big thing. It costs usually $5.00 just to taste a wine. For this price you get a tiny bit of wine in the bottom of a glass. You are supposed to swirl this around, smell it, taste it, and then proclaim that it has a blackberry, cherry, fruity, nutty, dry, wet, or some other particular character that makes it what it is. As near as I can tell, all it tells you is that it is wine (obviously I am not an aficionado). I can tell if it tastes like wine. I can’t tell you all of this other stuff. And I’ll bet that for the most part the tourists who are engaged in this rather absurd behavior can’t tell the difference either. I grant there may be a few individuals in the business who might be able to actually tell the differences between some of these wines. But I’ll bet money that most of the tourists who participate in these tastings can’t tell one from another. Blindfolded, I’ll bet many of them can’t even tell the difference between reds and whites. It’s not just the wine that is absurdly expensive, the restaurants are the same. While it is true that there are fine restaurants, it is also true that they are terribly overpriced. Usually what you get is a few dollars worth of food and many dollars worth of service, and what is worse, art. Meals are apparently viewed as works of art, so they are gussied up and made pretty. We have decided that we are not really interested in food as art. We want our food to look like food! But enough of this.

The second Presidential debate was about as absurd as the first one. Bush continued to lie, Kerry continued to look Presidential, and most everyone seemed to think that Kerry won again. Bush obviously became angry, shouted and waved his arms around, and said absolutely nothing worth remembering. I kind of thought Bush looked a bit better than he did in the first debate but I find that most others didn’t think so. The most interesting thing to emerge from this is the possibility that Bush was “wired” to receive information and answers from someone else. At first I thought this was probably just another conspirancy theory but now I believe perhaps not. There are photos of Bush in both the first and second debates that seem to indicate the presence of something on his back under his suit coat. There is also the fact that the Bush people insisted there should be no photographs from behind (a condition that was obviously ignored by the photographers). More to the point, there is a claim from a previous interpreter who believes Bush had to be wired when he engaged in a dialogue with Indonesian leaders. This interpreter believes that Bush could not possibly have known certain details of Indonesian politics and must have been being fed information by others. As Bush probably doesn’t even know where Indonesia is, or anything whatsoever about it, and can’t be bothered to read newspapers or anything else, this has for me a genuine ring of truth about it. There is also the fact that those who have examined his behavior, oral and otherwise, believe some of it can only be explained by his relying on information being given him over a wire. Indeed, my wife who is herself a linguist, insisted to me before any of this became an issue that he was obviously wired.

Finally, for today, let me call your attention to a fine article by Charley Reese on Antiwar.com. This article says simply that if there is to be no Palestinian State, there will never be peace in the Middle East. And it is clear now that Sharon/Bush have made it clear there will never be such a state (as long as they are in office). I believe this absolutely, as I have been saying for a long time. Of course there is little chance that there will ever be a viable Palestinian State if Kerry is elected either as he claims to support Israel wholeheartedly. I do not agree with Kerry on this, nor do I agree with his military position on Iraq, but I do believe he is an environmentalist, will support a woman’s right to choose, will at least try to do something about universal health care, and will, in general, be better about the middle class that Bush and his corporate base would like. There are some real differences between the two, in spite of what the egomaniacal Nader would have you believe. There is, at the moment, no alternative to getting rid of Bush/Cheney and their lying, warmongering, criminal and totally unethical gang of murderous war criminals.

WAR CRIMINALS BELONG IN JAIL - NOT THE WHITE HOUSE!