mail call

another long holiday weekend that has been routinely dull and uneventfull (all the cool people seem to be out of town...which is to be expected, but i don't have to like it)...dull at least until i ambled out to the mailbox to peruse what the post washed in....in what i can only hope is high, swiftian satire my union local has sent me a 2009 "pocket planner" on the twenty-third of may along with a letter bemoaning these "tremulous times" and aprising us of the cost-cutting measures they have undertaken ( the local's journal will be bi-annual instead of quarterly and they will only be sending out targeted mailings dealing with referendums on school bond issues because that may be the only work left) and soliciting our "...patience and steadfast support of our union and our elected leaders ( i cannot begin to tell you how wrong i feel that is...see my myspace blog) during this time."...along with a pencil, some bumper stickers, and a lapel pin, this may be the sole return on my membership in this organization this year...but the irony and pathos doesn't stop there...old ed peper, the north american vicce-presidient of chevrolet motors has written to me to reassure me that in these "turbulent times" ( a lot of alliteration in these letters, no?) he and the folks at chevy want me to be sure that they are "...committed to fulfilling your transportation needs." ed, it seems, has been with chevy for four of its ninety-eight years and is in a position to know my needs, and he seems to think i need to know about chevy's new "awesome" compact the cruze (sp?) and the "..chevy volt, the world's first extended-range electric vehicle." a panacea for a "energy challenged world." so the new doomed continue to cling to old forms with new facades rather than re-orienting themselves to a smaller, more local world with some scaled down expectations...denial runs deep, but with any luck enough people will realize that the old economy died last fall and that things will never be the same...less poor is the new rich...we all have adjustments to make...let's not let them confuse us about the realities of the situation and the necessity of the choices