Dan was in front of me on his bike and held the camera facing backward, while riding at around 30km/h, under those conditions a very good shot, it is just too bad the sun was not higher in the sky.
Below is an essay, if you came here to read about riding or, if you've been living in a cave, skating, you might as well go on to the next blog, because the following will not interest you.
There was an article in the Huffington Post (see what I am reading on the right) today on the subject of the Republican Party. Entitled Off the shelf the article by Robert L. Borosage spent a great deal of time praising America's thirty fourth president, Dwight David Eisenhower.
Admittedly there is a lot to like about Eisenhower, and as Borosage points out, there is a lot to dislike about Eisenhower. But what I wanted to point out is not how good or bad a president Eisenhower was, rather, it was the condition of the rest of the World at the time.
Consider, Eisenhower was elected in 1952 and served for two terms or until Kennedy was inaugurated in January of 1961. During that time Europe was still in shambles from World War II, Russia was under the grip of a system which time would reveal to be a failure of massive proportions, and a leader who's paranoia was beyond insanity. Japan was a smouldering ruin, and China... well if Russia was a mess, China was even worse. At the time Eisenhower was elected, in fact long after the end of his term in office, America produced more oil than she consumed American factories exported manufactured goods all over the world, but mostly to American consumers, American farmers fed the world and the federal budget was balanced, even the long term costs of social security was not considered a major issue because there was a baby boom in full swing, Americans were producing babies faster, much faster, than they were dying.
In considering all of the above it is hard not to consider the 1950s as a golden age of the Pax Americana. I use the term Pax Americana as in Pax Romana, and just as the Peace of Rome was hardly a peace at all - students of Roman history can have quite the brain storm trying to think of a period when the Roman Empire, or Republic was at peace - America was in perpetual menace by a country who could hardly feed or clothe her own citizens, but did make an atomic bomb.
In modern times we look back on the 1950s mostly wistfully, there was high employment, a good standard of living and a man could get a factory job, without completing high school and support his family on a very satisfactory income. (A guy like me with a Masters in Engineering, well damn, I'd probably be working at NASA if I wanted to, no doubt wearing a white shirt and a thin black tie and be as comfortable then with a slide ruler as I am today with my laptop.)
Republicans are promising us a return to that age, the age of Leave it to Beaver. Except I think it is time for us to face some facts, it is time for reality to set in. The 1950s were not a normal period at all. Europe recovered from World War II, the Russians cast aside the ideas of Marx, East Asia has adopted a maxim of 'business is war'. Possibly most critically, The United States depends on other countries for the life blood of the modern military and economy, the United States needs Canadian and Mexican oil and drilling new off shore wells or tapping the Alaska Wild Life Refuge is not really going to fix the root problem, oil is running out and new elephant finds, or newly opened fields will only postpone the inevitable day of reckoning. The day when we return to life as it was in the eighteenth century.
What is going to happen when we cannot truck food across the country faster than it rots? What will happen to our cities of millions of people when all the food must come from no further than a few hundred miles away? What happens when there is no fertilizer because, lets face it fertilizer is a petrochemical, just like plastic and ironically, the very roads we drive on.
What happens to the vast military machine that exists in the United States today? Like it or not, the empire of bases has allowed the US to become the great commercial power. Think about it, Osama Bin Laden is not a real threat to Americans, yes he is a murder, but ultimately The Seven Dwarfs of big Tobacco are responsible for the deaths of more Americans every year than Osama Bin Laden will claim in his life time. So why the big effort to hunt down Bin Laden? Because he is the first real threat to America's military hemogony since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is just a theory, but surely the circumstances surrounding this whole 'war on terror' seem just a tad too war like and not enough focus on catching a criminal.
But returning to my original thought, if America is not able to contain the threat in the rise of this modern more rebellious strain of Islam, if America is ultimately held hostage, her own insatiable need for oil being used to finance one side in the 'war on terror' while her tax dollars finance the other side, shades of the 'war on drugs', how long until the breaking point?
How long is it until America goes bankrupt having loaded the world up with arms and run up the visa bill without the income to pay the mortgage, will the whole experiment in rule of self government come crashing down in an orgy of subprime debt? Has self government failed already? One hundred or one thousand years from now will historians look back at the Supreme Court appointment of George Walker Bush in 2000 and say, it was on that day, in December 2000, that rule of self government ended in the United States? Just as March 15, 44BCE on the steps of another government institution that Rome gave up on democracy and became an empire. An Empire that could not even last 500 years before being over run by barbarians. Will the Rome look eternal next to Washington?
Anyway, sometimes a person needs to write an essay, I had the idea bouncing around that Republicans really do believe that all we need do is lower taxes enough, end abortion, teen pregnancy increase the size of the US army another five hundred thousand, and the days of black and white sitcoms will return with huge chrome fenders. Do I really believe this is the end of American Empire? I am not sure, eight years ago I was dead certain that no matter if Al Gore or George Bush became president the country was too strong for one guy too really screw things up, now I am not sure if the country is strong enough to pull herself out of her current funk ever.
I will not have much to report on riding for the next few days, I will not be doing any group rides until Sunday and then no more rides until after the Duluth Marathon on Sept. 13, I need to taper. So sorry to say, you may have to put up with more politics here for the next few days, but I will say this now, baring something really substantial in Duluth I expect that by Sept. 15 almost all references to skating will be gone from this blog. Somewhere along the way to getting a passsion for riding I completely lost the passion for skating and now I am beginning to view the entire weekend of Sept. 13 and 14 as a lost weekend.
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