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So it was a lovely Friday morning, temperatures around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, pretty white-to-pink-to-red shaded flybush, autumn asters, never-give-up ladies-thumbs and dayflowers and chicory blooming along the way. Not hot enough to be ideal for selling cold drinks, but not nearly cold enough to generate interest in hand-knitted winter gear. I took into market about $150 worth of $1 and $5 items, plus the Monet Blanket, priced at $100. I sold $33 worth of the $1 items. Nobody even looked at the $5 caps.
A woman I know fairly well, who is tall, blonde, and Southern Preppy enough that anything she does in a public place tends to be noticed as A Scene, played a big scene of saying "Here's $1 for a bottled drink even though I don't want a bottled drink." What was there to do, as she strode away looking about forty years old (while being seventy), but pick out a book and thrust it upon her, saying, "You ought to enjoy this one. The writer's 'a nut' and so are you."
This is to be understood as a compliment--nuts are my preferred protein food, and I richly enjoy Mary Daly's wacky wordplay and whimsical approach to the kind of serious activism that was beginning to depress feminists in the 1980s. Pure Lust goes well beyond the scholarly requirements for a Ph.D. thesis in philosophy, but it also includes a "conversation" with cats and at least a half-dozen puns per page. I would not expect most people who shop in the Friday Market to enjoy it. This woman, I think, might enjoy it. It contains lots of big abstract words, but they're printed in big clear type, so for her they shouldn't be a problem.
I do not, however, talk to members of the older generation that way...only to the handful of people in what P.J. O'Rourke
calls the senior class of baby-boomers who were born around 1946, became parents before 1966, and like to hang out and banter with members of the freshman class of baby-boomers. I don't have a formal rule about this. Some senior-class baby-boomers, e.g. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have achieved enough gravitas that I feel conscious that they are a good bit older than I am, and some, e.g. my Significant Other, have been more concerned about keeping up with people my age physically, such that I treat them as coevals.But seriously...the problem wasn't even so much that people were turning up their noses at my wares, although some of them were. I already know that (a) a lot of Friday Market shoppers no longer read, and the ones who do read are guided less by the author, title, reviews, Amazon ratings, or seller's comments than by the size of the print; and (b) some people don't like bottled drinks--even the fruit juice drinks I brought in just for old John Doe turned out, when I sampled one of them, to be quite acid so I could see why Mr. Doe didn't buy a second bottle; and (c) a lot of Friday Market shoppers get their handout money at the beginning of the month, and come to the market, by the third week of the month, purely for exercise. The problem, I suspect, was that the weather was too pleasant. We've had enough mornings this month that were chilly enough that, when told to expect sunshine and afternoon highs in the mid-eighties, a lot of people who didn't have to go to work this morning went directly to the lake. I've seen heavier traffic in the Friday Market when it was actually raining.
So to pass the time I sat on the cooler bin and tried to compose a song parody. What came to mind was the Freedomworks rally scheduled for Saturday morning, Washington, D.C., near Union Station...
Please click here to notify Freedomworks if you can join the rally. "Marching on Washington" involves some security risks. The Capitol Police will be present and want to know how many people to expect. One thing D.C.'s finest have been tipped off to watch for, as evidence of "enemy infiltration," is disrespect for local people. U.S. and Gadsden flags are fine if carried in an appropriate way. Stash all flags somewhere when you hop onto a Metro train and go sightseeing. If this gorgeous weather holds, the sights may never look better, and there'll be tons of fun stuff to do over the weekend...
The problem with getting unworkable Obamacare repealed is that too many Republicans want to continue working with insurance gambling schemes. I don't think any insurance gambling scheme can possibly work as a medical care plan for a nation, but as long as they leave me out of it, I'm willing to stay out of their bickering about which gambling scheme they want to lose money on. Eventually, as people wake up to the reality that our dear old Uncle Sam has thrown money around too freely and is going to have to become more frugal, I think people will come to agree with me that what this country needs is a plan for paying the actual cost of medical care--not funding a million-dollar, private-for-profit gamble.
So I don't know how many Freedomworks types will want to sing it, but here's the song. The tune that occurred to me is not precisely "Waltzing Matilda" (yes, I was in the U.S. when I learned that song in primary school) but close enough that, when I've hummed or played it to people I hoped would remember what it is, they've said, "Hmm...'Waltzing Matilda'?" Since Freedomworks is U.S.-specific I suppose we're entitled to have an all-American song that fits either "Waltzing Matilda" or a variant thereof.
[Chorus]
Pay the real cost and not one penny over;
Insurance schemes aren't what poor people need.
Pay for the medicine, not for the meddling.
Yes, fund the health care, but don't fund the greed.
[Verses, optional]
Once every now and then gamblers are lucky,
Pay for insurance and use it next day;
When people base a whole business on a gambling game
We know they'll take most of that money away.
Profits can be made from running a gambling game,
If all know the risk and are willing to play,
But the poor fools who bet money on the gambling game
Are only throwing their money away.
I'm sure some other Tea Party can think of better verses, and as long as their verses aren't touting one kind of insurance scheme or other I give them my blessing to improve this song.
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