Beyond the Possibility

“Oh, that flagon! That wicked flagon!” (Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle, 1896, US-PD)

I feel a little like Rip Van Winkle today. It’s only been two weeks or so since my last blog, not twenty years, but time, as someone once said famously, waits for no one. For Rip, being asleep for two decades was a blessing of sorts. Washington Irving describes him as “one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.” He wasn’t happy at home, however. His wife berated him endlessly, with good reason, for not taking better care of his farm and his family. His escape from this was to wander off into the Catskill Mountains with his dog Wolf.

Interestingly (for me anyway), I blogged about Rip back in 2012 after a similar “blap” (blog gap). Here’s what I said then:

I hadn’t remembered the details of Rip’s story. He’s a lazy but amiable guy who went walking in the mountains with his faithful dog Wolf to avoid his wife nagging him about not having a job. He meets a guy carrying a keg up the steep trail and offers to help. (No question of the motivation there.) They get to an open area and find a bunch of guys playing nine pins (bowling!), who happen to be the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew. Long story abbreviated, Rip sneaks a drink from the keg, falls asleep, and wakes up twenty years later. He returns home to find everything changed but doesn’t have much trouble resuming his life as an idle layabout. So the moral of this tale appears to be the famous epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr , “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” (I won’t bother you with the French.)

The last line reminds me, of course, that today is mid-term election day in the United States. It says something about this event that both Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert have promised “live coverage” tonight. They expect there will be much to lampoon about what happens today and I suspect they will be correct. I glimpsed a clip of an editorial yesterday of CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asking a question that went something like this: “Can you think of a commodity that gets increasingly expensive yet delivers less and less value?” He could. His answer was American politics.

In the Irving story, Rip “reiterated his visits to the flagon so often, that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.” We have been drinking from the much-less-tasty flagon of complacency and yet still become, like Rip, foolish and well-oiled. On average, just over half of the people in our country vote in presidential election years. In the last mid-term election, that number was a shameful 37 percent. This mid-term will likely be the same yet often these elections change the political face of Washington from red to blue or vice versa. It seems that despite all the ranting about democracy from all sides, not that many of us actually practice it. Perhaps we will wake up, unlike Rip, and know who and where we are and the true circumstances of things and what needs to change. If we did, would anyone recognize us? Would we recognize ourselves? Probably not. But it would make for a great story, wouldn’t it?

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings