CSotD: Long ago and far away
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Jack Ohman with a cartoon that, if you are over 50, is guaranteed to bring you right down.
Jack does these longer-format cartoons for the SacBee, which makes it worth following him on Facebook (well, or subscribing to the Bee, sure), and it seems the Old Days were on his mind, because he posted that one last night, and had just done this single-panel on Wednesday.
Specifically, Current Gov Brown has on his desk a bill to reform overtime rules for farmworkers, a bill, Ohman suggests, his younger self would have been eager to sign.
The implication being that Old Gov. Brown is, at best, playing Cat Stevens to Young Gov. Brown:
It's not time to make a change
Just sit back and take it slowly,
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to go through.
Pretty sure he knows that song from Back in the Day, when he was derided for his idealism as "Governor Moonbeam" and was dating Linda Ronstadt, a fact that is better understood if you realize that she had also dated Nebraska Governor Bob Kerrey, a bright and shining star at the time.
She liked smart guys who cared about things that mattered.
But, then, she was compared in the liner notes to her first album with Peter Pan, and maybe Jerry Brown turned out to be Wendy, and, willingly or not, grew up and forgot how to fly.
At least, in the play, Wendy allows Peter to take Jane away for spring cleaning, back to Neverland. There's a difference between remembering how to fly and remembering why flying matters.
Would it kill the California agriculture industry if, instead of after 60 hours, farmworkers began to get time-and-a-half after 40, like everyone else? According to the article:
Farmers vehemently oppose it, and third-generation almond and olive farmer Pat Ricchiuti said approval by Brown could prompt him to cut his workers’ take-home pay by as much as 33 percent. The Fresno Country farmer says he and others he knows would respond by limiting crews to eight hours by finding other workers and increasing their use of farm machinery.
Sounds like an old man's argument to me.
For one thing, I suspect there's some overlap in the farmers who threaten to hire more workers and the farmers who complain that they can't find (legal) workers.
But in any case, it seems weak to argue that California farmers can't compete if they pay a decent wage.
Not saying it isn't true; maybe they can't.
However, that's not an argument I'd follow too far, given all the competition out there from those who barely pay their workers at all. What if clothing manufacturers, or the assemblers of electronic gear offered it?
I hope Young Gov. Brown, and memories of Bobby and Cesar, will provide Old Gov. Brown with guidance, or, at least, nightmares.
While we're on the topic
Linda's old beau, Bob Kerrey, has popped back into the news, in a manner not entirely unrelated to Joe Heller's current offering.
Kerrey has little to do with the Syrian refugee crisis, except that, in the wake of his war, we admitted some 800,000 Southeast Asian refugees, and yet the republic survives.
Those who objected were seen as ingrates and bigots, not "patriots."
We had news stories about former translators, former secretaries, former allies in the field now headed for our shores.
Those stories went down better than the stories about Iraqi and Afghani allies who are denied visas and given the run-around while their enemies — our enemies — hunt them down.
They are certainly more acceptable than the outright lies of those who pretend we are overwhelmed with Syrian refugees, that there is no control.
The idea that refugees from the Middle East are pouring, unregulated, into our country isn't a matter of old versus young.
It isn't interpretation or spin or opinion.
It's just a damned lie.
And, as Heller says, the trickle we have allowed is nothing to brag about.
So, about Bob Kerrey: It turns out, now that he has been asked to head the new Fulbright University Vietnam, that his experiences in that country included what can readily be called "war crimes" and the killing of innocent civilians, and, as much reconciliation as there has been, Vietnamese are torn over how to process his grief and apologies, and their capacity for forgiveness.
I was at the hospital (yes, again) Monday for what turns out to be my final-except-for-regular-checks visit with my oncologist, and, in the waiting area, fell into conversation with a fellow who is undergoing treatment for Agent Orange-caused cancer.
We were saying that, while there are a lot of people who talk about having been in Vietnam, there are a good many more who do not. He himself never talked about it, he said, until he married his current wife of 30 years, which, by math, means he was silent for nearly 20.
Which segued into the topic of what vets talk about when they talk at all.
I was at a medals-restoration ceremony for a fellow who never brought up the term "tunnel rat" with his wife until he was safe home and out of uniform.
And my barber, who had a stunning tale to tell, rarely did, and, again, never told his wife what he was up to until it was over.
The guy at the hospital had been running boats up river, and I said he might have not resupplied a friend of mine who was not in Cambodia with the montagnards, and he nodded.
He had not resupplied a lot of people who were not there.
There are a lot of stories nobody tells, he conceded, adding that Calley's problem was less what he did than the fact that people found out.
Point being that, as we formulate our policy towards refugees, we should consider that the war they are fleeing, however horrific it seems on our TVs, is worse, and that there are stories we will never hear, and forgivenesses that will be hard, if they happen at all.
Let's not compound it by lying about the little we know in order to justify the little we do.
Now here's your moment of zen:
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