Family Vacation?

I'm not sure if Fox News plans to suspend this campground chatter once Republicans are back in power, but at least they have the story for now:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=14542755

One scary aspect of this "news" is that the scenery is so beautiful, it makes American homelessness appear inviting. The father is clean-shaven, Caucasian, and clear in his understanding that what he needs is a job. A black man with a beard and bee-bopping manner of elocution would need the exact same things of course, but I can't help but think this particular homeless man was chosen with purpose. I am supposed to ignore race and hair and voice and believe that he was chosen at random for the interview from post-racial America.

My hunch is that before the interview, the TV people do not slop the foundation onto the chosen homeless sample, but I could be mistaken. The TV anchor reading the news appears to have met her base-level needs. She looks well fed in fact although I've heard TV will add 10 pounds to anyone.

So stay tuned for the bipartisan unity ticket of Liz Cheney/Sotomayor in 2016; their opponents will no doubt be Sarah Palin running stag and Hillary Clinton selecting Dennis Kucinich as a supporting mate. I look forward to Rush Limbaugh's self-imposed $10,000 fines for each time he mentions candidate weight issues on the radio. If we're lucky, he'll partner with the anonymous executives behind the sugar-cereal curtain to double the cash and the fun. If we're absurdly fortunate, Neil Bortz will promise his own diet while giving walking radio broadcasts from his childhood home in suburban Philadelphia all the way to San Francisco's Castro District whereupon things will get totally freaky in the spirit of national unity.

But back to reality, in other words back to the televised segment of Homeless America 2009, the man in the interview looked thin in an in-shape way. He is not overweight or obese as we are accustomed to seeing the homeless in our country, nor is he emaciated with a distended stomach as we are taught the homeless subsist overseas. He appears to maintain all of his limbs; there is no prosthetic device that might confuse our concerns. Stay focused on the issues, young people, and learn they must be compartmentalized and packaged in 30-second segments or 3-paragraph posts!

Leaving the rich fields of Fox television, my last impressions are of three rich colors, the bright, deep reds and blues surrounding nature's lush greens. What is more alive? The grass and the trees or our internet and TV?

Hunger

Relating to the Walter Aske piece at whenfallsthecoliseum.com, Knut Hamsun's Hunger is another one of my favorites on the themes of starvation, haves and havenots, and burning desire of any kind. I own the Robert Bly translation but believe there is a new version with an introduction by Paul Auster.

Although I have never starved on the streets of Scandinavia (or anywhere for that matter), I did live rather modestly on bread and peanut butter and occasional treats or five-franc bottles of wine in the fall of 1989. I was lucky enough to have purchased a two-month eurorail pass and would use night trains for hotel rooms when not splurging on a bunk at a youth hostel. I saw little of Scandinavia but did visit Denmark, where I met an American man living quite well on his girlfriend's couch. He would spend his days scrounging the streets of Copenhagen for Carlsberg beer bottles that he would then exchange for coins to support his Christiana spending habits. Such an audacious lifestyle eludes me to this day.

In this region of the United States, it is still difficult to see the food deprivation we can read about. What seems more apparent is the possible lack of nutrition accompanying the local obesity which is of course linked to our national wealth of poverty. Obama declines to predict how high unemployment will go, but it's getting to the point where we will experience collective shock the next time America posts a positive note on jobs growth. Down here, we can listen to Rush Limbaugh and Neil Bortz protect the wallet of the disenfranchised wealthy (did I hear Rush call the rich man "poor"?) on several different loud radio stations, but it seems evident that anyone with food in the pantry and some daily toil has a lot to be grateful for.

Happy Bastille Day.

If you plan to eat cake, be sure it is moist and iced and not the blackened stuff stuck to the top of your oven.