economy – Page 16 – Hopeful Romantics

Lizzie Borden Killed Her Parents Here. Eat Hearty, But Don’t Feed the Ghosts

The house where Lizzie Borden may have killed her family is now a Bed and Breakfast lodge. This sturdy wood frame house in sturdy Fall River, Massachusetts hardly looks like a celebrated murder scene, but then so few really do. That is, until you look at them with the knowing eye. Otherwise would you know the difference? Would the people lodged in creepy, haunted houses really see and feel the ghosts if they didn’t know they were inside a creepy, haunted house?

Maybe. I remember visiting one small town and finding one house particularly, in fact, unmistakeably creepy. Nobody seemed to know anything about what may have happened there, neither my family nor the neighbors. Okay. False hunches. I was just getting ready to leave.

As luck would have it the current owner of the house pulled up in the driveway. Without much prodding her confirmed my suspicions that foul play did indeed occur in that house. A minister of some religious persuasion, deeply in debt, killed his wife for the insurance money. He had pushed her down the stairs. The house over the years was occupied by other people with new and different tragedies, from riches to rags to sagas of drugs and degradation.

But Lizzie Borden was another story. She was the O.J. Simpson of her time, among the dozens of other celebrity killers. Ironically, perhaps, Lizzie was not tried for the murder of her parents in California. Nevertheless, she was still acquitted. She then became part of mythical American macabre. There is a rhyme about her. “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”

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As to who actually committed, the murders, as with most of these high profile murder cases, theories abound. It was everyone from the housekeeper to the towns people who didn’t at all like Andrew Borden. Some think Lizzie killed him because financial disputes and property divisions. That would be a motive. It has certainly been one before. Others believe Lizzie, the spinster, may have been a little too constrained and embroiled in family dissension. She may have lashed out to save her sanity and her inheritance.

Today we would find a drug ridden and repressed Lizzie seeking to right the wrongs of an inhospitable environment, an oppressive father and abusive step-mother. Who knows? But today what remains of the story, aside fromthe legend itself, is the bed and breakfast and the ghosts who inhabit it along with the 10,000 people who pass through its doors each year. Ghosts are reported to do what ghosts are best know for. They poke and prod, open and close the draws, turn the lights on and off, move things around. In short, they scare the hell out of most of us. For a population that thinks of Pearl Harbor as ancient history, it is amazing how sex and murder can long endure.

Lizzie Borden died and left $30,000 to the animal shelter. She left another $500 so that the cemetery could tend to her father’s grave in perpetuity. Guilt or true love? It’s hard to say. Maybe a little of both. The thing is, given the times, most people were perplexed and a legend was born. Today, we know the story all too well. The difference a hundred odd years can make.

At Wal-Mart You Can Shop Till You Drop

By now most of the known world has read in the New York Daily News or elsewhere about the tragedy at a Long Island Wal-Mart, where an employer died after being trampled by a couple of hundred people. Apparently, he made the mistake of trying to hold them back and paid the price with his life. Other people were also injured and there was a controversial report that a pregnant woman miscarried.

If this episode wasn’t so tragic we could find it funny. There have been numerous comedy scenes in television episodes and feature films, comic strips, even, where overzealous shoppers trample each other in search of the ultimate bargain. The old comic strip, “Dagwood,” comes to mind. The artist had regular strips depicting women fighting each other, playing tug-of-war for bargain goods.

But the fact is it is pretty tragic. It is also very telling. It is telling on different levels. On one hand we can view this as a reflection of the bad economy where the need to save money has driven people to wait outside the doors of a department store for it’s special opening at 5:AM. Some stores even had special midnight openings. For a country that goes to bed after the Jay Leno or David Letterman monologue, it says something about the need to find a bargain.

It also says quite a lot about consumerism. I have to wonder, what are people doing out there at five A.M.? How much can you really care about buying something that you would stand there like cattle waiting for the doors to open so you could fight you way under fluorescent lighting to get something for your wife and kids, girlfriend, whatever? What does this really say about us, and the fact we cannot cure that disease, that we are consumer addicts.

Seventy percent of this economy if built on consumerism. We buy stuff. We buy a lot of stuff we don’t even need. We buy stuff to impress our friends. We buy dumb stuff, and in good economic times we pay a lot of money for overpriced, status seeking stuff that has the requisite branding. We don’t save; we spend. We buy. We don’t buy things that last, most of the time, anyway, we buy instead things that are fashionable. Things that we buy are built to be obsolete. We even buy quality cars that were built to last and trade them in because we are bored with them.

We are so obsessed with buy, apparently,we don’t mind elbowing and even trampling a few people to buy more stuff. Okay, so it’s the holiday. It is a holiday in the worst economy in perhaps 100 years, and here we are buying. Hang out Santa Claus and a few pretty lights, and we kick into buying mode like so many Pavlovian Dogs.
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Of course others have a different take on the incident at Wal-Mart. Some are blaming the greedy retailers for having the temerity to open their doors in the wee hours of the morning. At least for me it is a wee hour of the morning. Some are more racist in tone and issue forth deplorable comments that the writers don’t even bother couching in more acceptable, or polite, racist content. Pretty amazing.

As for the consumerism itself, it would seem a bit obsessive to be buffeted around by crowds at pre-dawn hours, waiting for a store’s doors to open. I would think you have to be nuts, but then there were so many standing there, they couldn’t all be crazy. Just sick. Sick with what, I’m not sure. And if not sick, not real logical.

The fact when the stores are stuck with unsold merchandise, say three weeks from now, they will practically be giving it away. You can waltz in, make a better deal, and walk out without fear of getting trampled. Or if you are really smart you can wait until after the holiday when they may be paying you to take this stuff out of the store. You could buy on line and save gas and sanity, life and limb. Or you can be really, really smart and be more discriminating and not get so caught up in shopping it becomes a major distraction.

Whatever you do for the holidays, this is certainly not the way to do it. If you are that bored with your life, and your life is that stale that mobbing the front of a store, in cold weather yet, seems like a good idea, perhaps you should seriously consider ceasing to populate the earth any further. We really don’t need more people, and we certainly don’t need more shoppers.

You may see the light. Or the only lights that may penetrate the huddled masses are the twinkly lights of Holiday Season. I would say Christmas, but it really has little to do anymore with the birth of Christ, Winter Solstice or whatever else you celebrate. It is about you and how much you can shop. It is about shopping, and not really so much about the giving. You shop till you drop. Or kill someone.

No matter how you see this, there is one thing you definitely won’t see standing in the middle of a department store, either at 5 A.M. or any other time where getting frazzled and frustrated is considered part of the experience. Definitely one thing you won’t see. Me.

The Good Thief, Exit Ted Stevens

There is a great Bob Dylan line from his song, “Sweetheart Like You.” The line goes, “Steal a little, they throw you in jail. Steal a lot they make you king.”

Ted Stevens was a king in his own right. Alaskans adored him. He was a major earmarker who saw to it that his home state received more than its share of government money. According to the corruption charges for which he was convicted, he apparently made sure he had received his own morsel from appreciative constituents. In the end, at 86 years of age, he was convicted of corruption.

He lost his last election to the Senate and was forced to yield the Senate floor for the last time. He looked good,kspiffy and dignified. He was a tough old bird. His fellow Senators spoke highly of him and gave him a standing ovation. Few get standing ovations on the Senate floor. Were they just being kind to this senior legislator, or were they applauding because they were relieved, if not happy, to see him go.

We shouldn’t find the ovation surprising, although a good many pundits were outraged over it. They found it at best disingenuous. I think it is actually quite ingenuous. America tends to love its more notorious thieves and will turn them into mythic figures rather than cast them into ignominy. I don’t know why we do that, exactly. But we do.

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From Bonnie and Clyde to Al Capone, our criminals are mythic figures. We are amused by the corrupt insider traders of the eighties and deal well with presidential pardons and commutations of sentence in a good many cases. A Scooter Libby can violate one of the prime codes of the intelligence community and out an active operative, but few demanded his head on a platter. His feeble sentence was good enough, and when that was commuted, nobody really cared.

We will anger ourselves over the faceless Wall Street thieves of recent times, but for some reason we pay little heed to the mortgage scandals and the thieves who either alone or in rings, ran real estate scams well into the millions and billions. Perhaps the more complicated the scheme the less we feel capable of paying attention. We are not much for attention spans, after all.

We often laud the criminals of the earlier years, the Prohibition Era. But we do tend to be harder on our ethnic criminals, our Hip Hop Era Gangsters and leaders of our drug cartels. Killing over booze seemed more romantic than killing over drugs. We are fascinated by the Italian Mafia and can watch “The Sopranos” for days. As for the Russian mob, the Asian mobs, and the other mobs that permeate our society, we are decidedly less enthralled. They’ll just have to wait their turn before getting their own television series.

If sex is involved in the crime, then we are titillated. We are more concerned about Larry Craig, who solicited sex in a bathroom, than Ted Stevens who was convicted of screwing people out of money. We spend years on the Jon Benet Ramsey story and a few minutes on the countless murders of children that occur every other week. Jon Benet was pretty, a beauty queen, if you can even say such a thing. The other kids are just kids.

So Senator Stevens gets his final adieu, his standing ovation, and even a pension. He will be rewarded for her service and if his convictions are remembered at all, it is only because they will be chronicled in his book. And possibly a movie. As a thief, he was one of the good ones. We deem him worthy of applause.

Leave Your Child in Nebraska–No Deposit, No Return

There are many laws, many rules, in fact, that seem almost like a good idea. Without the, I suppose, the road to hell would never be paved with good intentions. Case in point is the State of Nebraska and its “Safe Haven” law which was passe for all the right reasons.

What are those reasons? The law enabled distraught, unstable and otherwise messed up mothers to dump their children at a fire station or hospital, rather than abandon them, totally. Clearly, the Nebraska Legislature had its hard in the right place when it passed this bill a couple of months ago. What this means in general is rather than drop a kid in a dumpster or leave him on the street, an irresponsible parent can legally relieve himself of the bouncing baby.

The thing is, the same Legislature didn’t foresee the challenges in not putting an age limit on the kids left behind. But since then people have been driving in from distant states to drop their kids on the doorsteps of Nebraska institutions. Sometimes these kids are a little older than bouncing babies, like seventeen years old. In fact nearly three dozen kids were dropped off. None of them were infants.

One poor kid was left calling after its mother, “I’ll be good, I’ll be good.” But the mother kept right on walking. Amazing. The allegedly lesser developed mammals don’t abandon their young. But for some of us, this is obviously plausible.
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Now I hear people are abandoning their pets due to difficult economic times. I realize also we have all seen the vintage black and white movies where the distraught but guilt and depression ridden Mom leaves her kid on the doorstep. But for adult to leave their somewhat advanced children to the fate of the State is beyond the imagination of many. In fact, it is pretty deplorable.

Maybe the so called problem kids are better off without these parents. Maybe they will be allow to straighten out and lead productive lives whereas living with destructive Moms and Dads would result only in their own destruction. With these things it is always difficult to say.

If this weren’t so sad, so pathetically deplorable it would almost be funny. It is not funny. But it is telling. It tells about some of us and what our sense of responsibility and accountability is, even with raising our very own children. In some ways, that is beyond words.

The Nebraska Legislature has seen the error of its decision. It is amending the law to stipulate only newborns. It is a wise choice. Still, there are at least dozens of people out there who are seriously considering abandoning thei childen. Some have already done so. The rest were either ignorant of the law or merely too lazy to make the drive.