........in which I lament the disappearance of brick and mortar.

So I heard on the radio today that Kohl's was closing down.  Well, that's what the DJ said.  It turns out they're only closing 18 stores.  That's a relief.  Not because I love Kohl's so much.  I suppose it's a fine store.  I bought some stuff there once or twice.  Truth be told, they don't -- in my experience -- have the most imaginative or inviting layout; their floor plan strikes me as a tribute to the Miller's Outpost I used to buy Levi's at in college. 

But I digress.  I wasn't really wanting to write about Kohl's.  I was wanting to write about the tremendous ambivalence I feel about the disappearance of brick and mortar retail stores in America.  See, when I heard that Kohl's was closing, my first thought was, "Great, we've lost another one."  That is to say, another store chain bit the dust, a casualty of the shift to shopping on the internet.  To be honest, I've still never really gotten over the loss of Borders.  I used to love shopping at Borders.  I know, Borders and Barnes & Noble are six of one, half a dozen of the other, but Borders happened to be the chain that had a store in Downtown Boston during the years I inhabited that glorious city, and it was a Borders that helped me retain my sanity when I would visit it first thing upon arriving at my in-laws' in Sterling, VA from the cultural waste that is Greenville, PA.  (Apologies to my Mercer County peeps, but that pathetic excuse for a bookstore in the Shenango Valley Mall just wasn't cutting it for me.)  Big box book stores meant -- no, mean -- they mean something to me.  I've loved them ever since the Barnes & Noble went in in Santa Clarita, CA while I was an undergrad.  While I appreciated the plot line of You've Got Mail as much as the next guy, I have to admit that I was a little on the side of Fox Books.  Not that I wanted the Shop Around the Corner to have to go away, but Joe Fox (Tom Hanks' character) was right about his fictional Borders.  It was a nice place to be.  You could get a coffee, browse, and go home with a book immediately after making the decision about what you wanted to read.  I suppose there's a bit of karma in that here, hardly 20 years after the big box book store was the soulless giant tromping out the indie bookstore, it's the big box book store which looks to be the first line of casualties in the era of the internet.  Not coincidentally, Amazon.com started, if I remember correctly, as books and music.

But now you can buy anything there.  You can buy it cheaper, and while you won't get it faster, you can get it without ever having to leave the comfort own home.  You don't have to put any pants on to go shopping, and since it seems like you don't have to actually sign anything for the UPS guy anymore, you probably don't even have to put pants on to take delivery (though your neighbors, in most cases, would appreciate it if you did). 

One sees the advantages.  But rarely has the easiest thing ever been the best thing, and internet shopping, too, comes with some costs.  There are, no doubt, the same economic woes that people whine about with regards to Walmart all the time.  You know, putting small businesses out of business (though it seems that Amazon.com tends to hunt much bigger game), the loss of jobs that comes with said businesses going out of business (they do estimate around 1500 people will be put out of work by the Kohl's closings), etc.  But I'm less worried about those than I am the loss of the quintessentially middle class American experience of going shopping.  Notice I said going shopping.  And I meant it literally.  Going somewhere to go shopping, and by somewhere, I don't mean to the desk to open up the laptop.  I mean going to a store.  Getting out of the house, venturing into the rest of the world, making contact with some other human beings.  Maybe taking someone with you.  Stopping into some other stores along the way, just for the hell of it.  Browsing.  Stopping on the way home at a restaurant for appetizers and a couple drinks.  It sounds fun to me, but maybe that's just my '90s talking. 

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not on a curmudgeonly rant about the evils of technological advancement here.  I don't want Amazon.com to go away.  Or Ebay.  Or really any online shopping.  I, too, appreciate its convenience, and I'll readily admit that it has become as much of a necessity as any of the things we need but could easily do without.  But I worry that someday there'll be no Fox Books anywhere for me to go to.  I worry that every shopping mall that I would have happily whiled away a midweek evening in in the '90s will turn into the half-empty ghost town that half of them already are.  And the thing is, when businesses that sell things we actually buy go under because we're buying those things online instead, businesses that sell things nobody wants at all curiously take their place.  The Barnes & Noble in Reston, VA gave way to a place called The Container Store.  I don't get The Container Store.  It's a huge store that sells oversized and overpriced Tupperware.  Who buys this?  Yes, I'm bitter about their having taken over a bookstore, but I doubt very seriously I'd shop there anyway.  I mean, how exciting is it to buy a clear plastic container?  Does one go "just browsing" in a container store, perusing plastic storage?  As if deciding on the one you will get, not now, because you've got the one you came to get today, but the next time you're in the store.  You see the point?  Plastic containers is what we should be buying online, not books, or pants, or shirts.

I'm not sure what the solution is.  I don't want to plead with my readers to spend more than they need to get what they want.  But maybe it's time to also consider the value of the experience.  One of my well-heeled friends in college used to buy his undershirts at Nordstrom.  I asked him about the wisdom of this, given that, even if it was higher quality, it was an undershirt.  Nobody would see it.  He said it was worth the experience of shopping at Nordstrom.  I thought he was a little nuts then.  I'm not so sure now.           

Super Tuesday Edition......in which I recount a conversation over some beers.

Yesterday afternoon I was relaxing with my neighbors Mickey and Seth.  Mickey's an older gent, a retired machinest with lank dingy hair and at least one white T-shirt.  Seth's a Lutheran minister.  We were drinking beer and discussing politics on Mickey's patio.

"I can't believe he might actually win," Seth said over the top of his mug of homebrew -- it's always BYOB on Mickey's patio.  "He's making a mockery of this whole thing, you know, and he's still probably going to get nominated.  And he might win the whole thing."

"Who?" Mickey asked around a Camel Light.  "Trump?"

"Yes, Trump," Seth answered. 

Mickey looked nonplussed.  I drank some beer and watched. 

"Doesn't that bother you?" Seth pressed. 

Mickey shrugged.  He crushed out his cigarette and wrenched another tallboy of Miller Lite from the six-holed plastic dolphin killer.

Seth looked annoyed.  "Well," he said, "at least it's not my party.  I guess I should be glad that Trump is wrecking the Republicans.  It makes it easier on us in November."  I could tell he didn't mean it.  Seth votes Democrat because he's a good liberal whose heart bleeds in all the right places, but he likes the give and take of the two-party system.  He likes Republicans.  He was drinking with two at the moment.

In any case, it didn't phase Mickey.  He slowly opened his tallboy and lit another Camel.  He exhaled a cloud of smoke.  "Problem with Trump ain't Trump," he said.

"Say again?" Seth asked.

"The problem with Trump ain't Trump."

Seth looked at me for clarification.  I shrugged.  Heaven only knows where Mickey might be going when he first starts in. 

"How do you figure that?" Seth asked.  "The guy's a blowhard.  He's rude, unqualified, astoundingly ignorant of policy issues for a guy running for president.  He's a rac-"  Here he stopped and fixed me with a look; he reads my blog.  "He's a bigot, at least," he continued.  "This morning he refused to denounce David Duke.  Did you guys see that?  He's turned your debates into sensationalized wrestling matches.  He's turned the entire Muslim world -- practically the entire world outside America -- against him with the stuff he's said.  How can you say he's not a problem?"

Seth looked at both of us for an answer.  I wasn't going  to undertake it, since it was Mickey's assertion, but while Mickey was thinking I did point out that Putin seemed to think Trump was alright.  Mickey grinned.  He was ready to talk.

"Yeah," he said, "Trump's a show.  The man's been a show for thirty something years.  We all know that, and we knew that going in.  But I said 6 months ago that he's great for American politics, and I stand by it.  He cuts through the B.S. and calls a spade a spade.  Sometimes he's wrong, but he's never dishonest, except when he's lying.  And he lies honest too, not like Hillary.  She lies dishonest, because she expects you to believe her.  Trump doesn't care.  In a way, he's even honest about his own ignorance if you listen careful enough.  That's why the media can't get enough of him.  He's good T.V. and he undermines, as you say, the whole political game.  But that's good.  We've needed somebody to take a wrecking ball to Washington culture for a long time.  He's not a problem."

Mickey took a drag and a swig while Seth and I tried to get our heads around what he said.  After a minute, Seth asked, "So what then is the problem?  I assume you think there's a problem?"

"Sure, there's a problem," Mickey said.  "The problem is that we're no longer capable of self-government.  Dennis Miller said it months ago on O'Reilly:  We're a nation of ignorant, narcissistic celebrity whores, drunk on the delusion of entitlement and high on pop-culture.  We're hardly the sort of people capable of seriously going to the polls and choosing a leader of the free world.  How many people that are voting this fall, you reckon, have read a book this year?  Hell, this five years?  Since high school?  You think any of them have any clue what's in the Constitution?  I'm not talking about having read it; I'm talking about having any vague idea beyond the first two amendments what is actually in the document.  Miller was right.  Only thing is, when he first said that, he thought it meant we were stuck with Hillary.  He didn't realize there was a bigger full of crap icon coming down the pipe. Trump is the perfect man for our time.  Just like always, we will get what we choose.  Neat thing about America, ain't it?  Our government is a reflection of our people.  So, no, Trump's not the problem.  The electorate is the problem.  They're mistaking the prophet who points out the problems for the messiah that's going to solve them.  You'd think they hadn't just made that mistake eight short years ago."      

I watched Seth.  He was processing.  He seemed to make his peace with what Mickey said and took a drink.  Suddenly he looked a little self-satisfied.  "Well, that makes sense, I suppose," he said.  "I guess you could say you guys had it coming.  I read an article in The Atlantic the other day that argued it was the Conservative populism that created Trump.  All the anger and alarmism of talk radio and Fox News, you know, producing a populist electorate that is irrationally fed up with the establishment and willing to follow anyone so long as he's pledged to tearing it apart."

"Mm-hmm," Mickey said.  "I read it, but don't get too smug and comfortable in your ivory lawn chair over their, preacher.  You guys got your own internecine problems brewing.  Don't be too sure that Bernie Sanders isn't your Sarah Palin."

Seth was taken aback.  "What?" he laughed.  "Do you seriously mean to equate Sanders' millenials with....with..."

"The angry mob?" Mickey finished for him.  "Teabaggers?" 

That was unfair.  Seth, being a man of God, had never used that particular pejorative. 

Mickey went on.  "You're damned right I do.  Only thing is, like Trump, the Tea Party is honest.  Bernie's college kids don't even know how ignorant they are.  Come on, Seth.  I know you lefties like to stick to your own news networks, but surely you've seen some of the clips of undergrads supporting Sanders who can't even define Socialism.  These kids are sheep.  They're not critical thinkers.  And speaking of critical thinkers, did you see the polling results on the African-American vote in South Carolina?  Clinton won 87% of that bloc.  You know who wins 87% of the vote?  Iranian presidents.  Militaristic totalitarian dictators.  I don't know what's going on with the African-American Democrats in South Carolina, and I'm not going to guess -- God knows you guys think I'm racist enough as it is -- but I'll tell you who doesn't vote 87% on one candidate:  an informed and free thinking populace of any kind whose results aren't monkeyed with at the polling station.  So don't lecture me about the conservative 'monster' like you ain't got one of your own.  The Democratic primary doesn't have anything more right about it than the Republican one does.  You guys just don't get as much news because you don't have as loud a 'carnival barker' on your side." 

Seth didn't have a response to that.  Neither did I, really.  All in all, it seemed about right to me.  Most of it, anyway.  Seth looked at us each in turn, then he asked Mickey, "But you're not voting for Trump?"

Mickey's Camel was in his mouth while he was wrenching free another tallboy, so he had to speak around it.  "Hell no.  Not in the primary.  Probably vote for Rubio.  Not that he has much of a chance."

Seth turned to me.  "You?"

"Rubio," I nodded.

Seth took a drink.  "Well, I suppose I'm in the same boat as you gents.  I'm feeling the Bern.  But unlike the millenials you refer to, Mickey, I can define socialism, and I think that Bernie's version of it is right for America.  I only regret I'll probably have to vote for a watered down version of it in the general.  What about you guys?  Will you vote for Trump in the general?"

We both nodded.  Seth looked perplexed and shot Mickey an indignant question.  "What about all you just said about Trump and what's wrong with the electorate?"

Mickey grinned -- or maybe it was a grimace.  "Well," he said, "despite the grim prospect presented by a Clinton-Trump election, you still got to go with the lesser of evils.  I trust Trump more than I do Hillary with the Supreme Court appointments, and I do think he'll fix the V.A. -- Hillary hates vets.  And besides," Mickey said, "when he lies, he lies honest."
 

........in which I talk about King Arthur's Court and welders.

A few months back, Marco Rubio made a comment about the country needing more welders than philosophers.  This made most every philosopher I know pretty upset, and social media seemed to explode (insofar as philosophers possess the demographic capital to make anything explode) with mass protest about how important philosophy is to society, how educational programs in philosophy are indeed conducive to an economically productive future, and how philosophers are disproportionately rich and good-looking with rapier wits.  O.K., I made that last part up, but it wasn't too much an exaggeration of the hullaballoo. 

 

Lost in all of this angst was the welders.  Perhaps because they were on the complimented side of Rubio's comment.  I think it more likely they lacked the luxury of time and means to fritter away their day hunting down links to statistics that validated their wages and existence and which they could post on Facebook with a "Ha-Ha, Marco Rubio."  Whatever the case, I want in today's post to give the welders -- and their ilk; what I think Rubio was intending to connote with the term was anybody who works in a manual labor profession and produces or services material goods as their vocation -- a little of the attention they didn't get in the Rubio flap.

 

Two things at the outset:  1) I'm not concerned at all here with the economics of profession, the usefulness of degrees, or any of the implied politics of Marco Rubio.  Those things concern me as a person, but not here.  2) I do not mean at all to denigrate philosophy.  The examined life is terribly important.  Anyone who knows me will tell you that I spend, if anything, too much time in examination of both my life and life in general.  Philosophy is probably more important to the human race than welding, as such.  We got along for a few thousand years without welding; rudimentary philosophy has been around since Adam first wondered what he was doing here.  So please, philosophers, withhold your ire.  I'm not against you.  In fact, what I would like to do in what remains is to philosophically consider the welder.

 

In a passage in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the title character Hank Morgan (The Boss) takes a moment off from his drilling King Arthur in how to act like a commoner to consider the difference between the life of the King and the life of the commoner.  The King, of course, is an intellectual (loosely speaking) and the commoner a member of the working class.  I'd like to quote the passage in its entirety.

 

"There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about 'the working classes,' and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one but haven't tried the other.  But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pick-axe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down -- and I will be satisfied too.

Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him -- why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same.  The law of work does seem utterly unfair -- but there it is, and nothing can change it:  the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also."

There's a lot in that little passage:  the gulf of separation of the intellectual ruling class from the working class, the injustice that the most rewarding professions pay the most money too, and the line of B.S. that hard intellectual work more or less equates to hard physical work.  (Think about that last one for just a minute:  It doesn't take you too terribly long to realize that nobody has ever been or will ever be sentenced to 20 years in Siberia working out Sudoku puzzles.)  I'd like to briefly consider each of these three things in turn, and at the end of it all, hopefully we'll appreciate the welders -- and machinists, excavators, janitors, garbage men, dishwashers, road crew, landscapers, etc. -- a little bit more than we're used to.  You'll notice I left farmers out of that list.  I did that on purpose.  I'll come back to it.

First, Twain noted that the intelligentsia in his day pretty much didn't get the working classes.  He knows this because they say that hard intellectual work is as hard -- or harder - than hard manual labor.  And, as Hank points out, it's not.  Not in any way.  Like Hank, I've done both.  I've worked hard at both, insofar as working hard means putting in a great deal of earnest energy in order to accomplish a task.  But there's a difference, that can easily be illustrated by two different experiences with summer jobs.  During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I laid railroad track to earn money for school.  I spend 8+ hours a day manually hauling around heavy, creosote soaked ties and driving railroad spikes.  It was hot, miserable, and dirty.  What made it bearable was that I knew it was temporary.  Like Hank, I don't think there's money in the world that would have made it doable as a vocation....for me; obviously, it was a vocation for a number of the guys I worked with.  Fast forward not quite 15 summers, and I spend my "vacation" between academic years at Thiel College writing a detective novel.  I put just as much effort and probably nearly as much time into the novel as I put into laying track, but..... well, let me illustrate this with a story:  I wrote most of the novel on our front porch, because, like Twain, I like to smoke cigars when I write, and my wife won't let me smoke in the house.  Employing the "if you give a mouse a cookie" logic, when I smoke, I like to have a beverage.  So most afternoons found me at the bistro table on our porch with a laptop, a beer, and a cigar......working.  One day, a man from the window company came by to give us an estimate on replacing our front windows.  The short of it is that it was too high, and we were in the midst of declining when he indicated my beer, cigar, and laptop on the bistro table and said,  "Well, if your husband was spending his days working......" 

He was being funny, of course, but he was also dispensing some true homespun wisdom, which is that to those who actually work, intellectual work isn't work at all.*  Sure, those of us in the philosophic fields of academia might whine all the time about how much we aren't paid, but that's exactly to the point; we do what we do anyway, because we like it.  I didn't see a penny from the novel, which still languishes in unpublished obscurity, but I can't wait for this summer to start so I can do it again, even if for the same pay.  Conversely, I wouldn't drive spikes again all summer for half again as much pay.

Of course, academics are sort of the exception to the rule.  As Hank Morgan noted in his day -- and it's worse now -- usually one is paid more the less his job requires him to actually work.  Don't get me wrong, he may put in the time.  Lawyers, for instance, famously never see their families, but they never break a sweat either, unless the building's air conditioning goes out, and I'd bet any one of them their savings account that they wouldn't trade positions and work an assembly line if the respective salaries were switched.  And there's something of an injustice in that.  For much manual labor, the pay is the only reward, so it seems to me it should be larger proportionately.  It'll never happen, the market being what it is, but I'd kind of like to see a bus driver paid more than a hedge fund manager.

We do have a sector of the ruling class in our country who purportedly are dedicated to helping rectify some of that injustice.  Predominantly, that's the Democrats.  Of course, there are other planks in their platform, but, traditionally, in my lifetime at least, the Democrats have been a party dedicated to adjusting things so that the economic situation of the working class is more equitable with that of the white collared "worker."  And don't get me wrong, I think that many of them actually mean well.  Some of them, of course, are simply Machiavellian villains pandering to folks they consider their intellectual inferiors in the interest of swindling their votes so that they can remain in power.  But many are also probably well meaning.  But even the well meaning ones have a problem, which is that many of them have never really worked, themselves.  I offer exhibit "A" above and to the right.  I get that he's not dressed for the job, but that man is clearly not used to swinging a pickaxe.  He looks more likely to fall down than make any real progress on getting a sizeable hole.  This, by the way, is one of the guys that I think genuinely feels like helping a worker, but I don't think he gets their lives at all.  It is, of course, not just Democrats who have become experientially separated from the working classes.  A lot of us have.  Many upscale urbanites in our country probably go cradle to grave anymore without ever having a good healthy backache brought on by spending all day working.

And there's something problematic about that.  A lot of somethings, probably.  Doubtless, we can't fix them all today, but one thing we can do is learn to appreciate the welder in our midst.  In Twain's novel, the bogey was the aristocracy, a bloated, lazy class that, though they added nothing to society in actuality, received all the respect.  I wouldn't at all equate present day philosophers with the medieval aristocracy -- nor any of the intellectual professions as such.  I would equate celebrities.**  And professional athletes.  These folks have earned neither their bloated*** salaries nor the respect that we lavish on them as a culture.  Rivet drivers have, conversely, earned much more than we pay them, and certainly more respect than we give them.

A follow up on farmers.  I excluded them from the manual professions as such because, as Twain describes the working classes, they are people who work only for their pay, i.e. non-intellectual, not rewarding in their own right.  That doesn't describe the farmer.  Farming is an intellectual trade, and an autonomous one.  Farmers don't punch a clock.  They're their own bosses (when the bank doesn't own them), and their trade requires intellect.  In some senses, they are every bit as artistic as the fiddler or the painter, working the canvas of flora and fauna and producing something beautiful (and often times tasty).  Which isn't to say that they don't work hard.  One might say that, from a perspective, farming is the perfect vocation.  A farmer understands more of the fusion of hard work and wit and even homespun philosophy than pretty much anybody.  When you throw in the fact that they keep you fed, you can't help but come to the conclusion that they're more important and deserving of respect than even welders, to say nothing of the Kardashians.


*A similar anecdote also illustrates this.  Once at a Foo Fighters concert I attended, Dave Grohl came out for the encore with a guitar and a can of Miller High Life.  The folks in the front started chanting, "Chug it!"  Grohl fixed them with a stare and said, "Chug it?  I'm working right now."  'Nuf said. 

**It really is a social evil that the Kardashians are a thing. 

***Bloated like a tick gets bloated when it's been on a horse for three days, all puffy and grey and nasty. 

........ in which I comment on the perils of free college.

First off, my apologies to readers.  I've been out for a few weeks, and I've no doubt you've been at a loss for what to do with those 15-20 minutes you otherwise would have wasted reading the Tuesday Blog.  I can only plead the demands of a paper deadline.  I'll try not to let it happen again.

Second off, despite the title and its obvious reference to a key plank in Bernie Sanders' political platform.  This is not really a political post.  Nor is it an indictment of Bernie, per se.  I actually like Bernie.  I think his rabid socialism probably comes from a good place, and given the utter chaos of the Republican primaries right now, I may well vote for Bernie in the Virginia primary, since the one thing I can be politically sure of at this moment in time is that I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president.  I'm getting to feel that way about the Donald and Ted Cruz too.  Oddly enough, some political quiz I linked to through Facebook tells me I should like Ted and the Donald, and maybe I do agree with them on political positions, but the Donald seems to me just a little too ignorant and a little too volatile, and Ted feels awfully oily.  I mean seriously, I would not purchase an automobile from that man at any price.  Do I want him for my president?  Thanks, Ted, I'll walk.  But enough politics.  Let's talk about college.

My worry about free college has little to do with the economics of paying for it as a society -- well, that's not entirely true; I worry much about that, but I'll let the economists hash out that issue -- what I'm worried about is the destruction of what is left of the academic integrity of the American public college and university system.  See, we already tremendously undervalue a college education here in the good old U.S. of A., and I can't help but think that reducing the material economic value (i.e. the price tag) of that education to $0 will lead us as a culture to undervalue it even further.  Let me be clear:  I am speaking of the undervaluing of college education (the actual intellectual content and practices learned in college) as distinct from a college degree or the college "experience."  Those latter two are actually overvalued in weird sort of zero-sum relation to the actual education.  I speak from the experience of a person who has been teaching English classes to college students for getting close to 20 years, and my experience tells me this:  free college will damage higher education by exacerbating what is already a problem in our culture's attitudes towards college as a whole.  That attitude is largely already a prevailing assumption that college is a time free of responsibility and authority figures; a time for finding oneself, not in Socrates or Charles Dickens, but in Natty Light and Trojan condoms; and a time at the end of which -- all of the "living" notwithstanding -- one is entitled to a degree that will lead to unreasonably gainful employment.  I don't see how free college won't make all of this worse.*

The truth of the matter is that our current generation of college students was raised by parents whose impressions of what college should be like were disproportionately influenced by the movie Animal House.  That fact that these parents' understanding of the college experience is centered in ideas of Bacchanalian revelry is testified to by the fantasy portrayed in the 2003 hit, Old School about going back to college to escape the responsibilities of adulthood (yes, hard as it is to believe, Beanie's baby, the very one who so often needed "earmuffs" is coming up on college age about now).  And this is the parents of our current university generation.  To say nothing of the students.  Parents, moreover, often try to recreate the good experiences they had in life for their kids. This seems particularly true for college.  Numerous conversations held between Phil, Claire and Haley Dunphy (TV's Modern Family) during the episodes surrounding Haley's short-lived college career illustrate this fact:  modern parents expect some level of debauchery and rampant irresponsibility to be at the center of their kids' college experience.  Learning anything, not so much.  A degree, most definitely, but it need not necessarily tie to their cherubs having taken anything away from those four years in their proverbial noggins.  

At this point, I realize I'm probably sounding like an old Puritan curmudgeon.  That is unintentional.  I don't mean here to rail against college immorality.  Lord knows that I enjoyed a good Dionysian rant during my graduate school years, as far as (and sometimes a little beyond) what my moral compass would allow.  I don't begrudge any measure of fun to college students now, but what I do mean to say is that there's a certain zero sum measure of time and energy in college, and we have already overbalanced that ledger on the side of partying down.  One of the few things that probably restrains the revelry is a lack of cash.  It stands to reason that not having to pay any tuition leaves more money in students' pockets to spend on beer, movies, shopping, etc.  One thing about the activities of going to class and doing your homework:  they're free.  Yes, I'm implying that being broke is an effective goad for spending one's time wisely in university.  Incidentally, this video gives an idea of how those in college now view the experience.  You'll notice that there is very little that is considered inherent to college that has to do with learning anything.

There's another thing about free college that is troubling, and that is the dilution of the academic gene pool that would undoubtedly accompany it.  I realize this is a classist argument, but it's true, for all that.  College isn't for everybody.  It's higher education; academic conversations in specialized fields are carried on at an advanced level, a level to which not everyone is intellectually equipped to contribute and in which, quite frankly, not everyone is interested.  I do realize that the issue here is economic, so the assumption might be that the gatekeeping function exercised by tuition is going to keep out the poor and not the ignorant or the stupid not intellectually prepared, but I don't think it's that simple.  We have scholarship programs for those who are intellectually but not economically equipped -- scholarships that should perhaps be expanded so that those truly qualified and interested aren't left out.  Opening the floodgates is quite simply going to dilute the pool and make it harder to get something truly academic out of college.  Think about it.  We have gifted programs at the K-12 level precisely because those at an advanced level of intellectual achievement cannot learn optimally in a classroom geared towards remediation.**  Do we really want that in college?x  Are we going to have university gifted programs?  

Lastly, I think that making college free would exacerbate the sense of degree entitlement that is already being felt by a number of American college students.  Now this might seem counterintuitive, since the entitlement a lot of students currently feel is articulated something like this:  "Hey, I paid good money for this degree" [implied: the professors better pass me and with the grade I want, because I paid for it, right?].  One might think that removing the price tag would remove the argument, but I don't think that would actually happen.  The rationale that Bernie argues for when pimping free college is that a college education is an American right.  We agree to educate all citizens K-12 because we at some point agreed that it was necessary preparation, and our people have a right to it.  He now argues that since a college education is necessary for a good job, it is our responsibility to provide it, and receiving it is a student's right.  Sorry, I said that wrong.  A college degree is necessary, and therefore a right and our responsibility.  If you don't think the latter (degree) is the way students (and their parents) are going to hear that promise, then I've numerous bridges and a high quality Mexican wall to sell you.  And that's why I think removing the price tag will make the sense of entitlement to a degree worse than it already is.  Because the degree will become, quite literally, a government entitlement.  This could do very bad things to the average college classroom.

Again, I don't mean to disparage Bernie Sanders, exactly, in writing this.  I do think the old guy genuinely wants to help people, and I think his free college offer is in that vein.  But I think there's a massive chance of unintended consequences here.  Consider:  the analogy he's making is that public college will be like public school, K-12.  Isn't it widely agreed upon that the majority of the nations' public schools are a disaster?  Wouldn't that logically follow in college?  I do buy the argument that the old public school logic says that we should be responsible for educating a populace with whatever they need pursuant to getting a decent job, but rather than putting everyone through college, how's about we stop requiring a college degree for things that don't need it and, for Pete's sake, stop stigmatizing people that don't have a degree.  It doesn't mean they're stupid or incapable.  It means that they didn't find Socrates and Dickens and Freud all that compelling of a thing to spend their time and money on for 4+ years.  That strikes me as a better idea.

Well, there's more I could say on this, and probably more that I should've said in the interest of avoiding overstatement and making nuanced qualifications, but it's after 9pm on the East Coast.  Many of my readers will be enjoying this, not with coffee, but with a shot of nightcap.  Speaking of which, it's high time for me to knock off and put my own higher education to good use by watching a little TV.

*In full disclosure, most everything that I'm saying about college here is radically not true of the college at which I am currently teaching, but finding an experience where the education was paramount, for me, required taking a job at a microscopically small Christian liberal arts college that primarily admits the best and brightest of America's home-schooled kids.  The atmosphere is something of a cross between America in the '50s and Oxford circa 1450.  It's not typical.

**We actually already have a lot of remediation in college.  Particularly at public colleges, especially community colleges, an alarming number of freshman have to start their college writing courses at the Basic Writing level, which, at many schools, does not actually even merit college credit.  They have to pass out of that and into the introductory freshman writing class.

.......in which I comment on the fallout of Winter Storm Jonas.

 

"We used to be made of sterner stuff."

I remember my old neighbor Mike saying that wistfully around the butt of a half-smoked cancer stick one evening as we stood on the front porch of my half of the duplex I lived in in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston.  Mike was lamenting the recent passage of a city-wide ban on smoking in bars in Boston.  Of course, as the aforementioned cigarette will have hinted, Mike was in large part concerned with the imposition that the ban put on his ability to enjoy a cigarette with his Guinness while perched atop a stool at the James Gate pub just down the street.  But what Mike was concerned with more than that, and what his comment really alluded to, was more of an attitudinal thing, a degeneration of American backbone, a propensity to roll over and let the wiser parents of the government have their way. 

See, the majority of Boston bar patrons -- and employees, by the way -- preferred smoking in bars.  The majority of patrons were smokers, of course, and die hard smokers at that, as could be observed on many a winter night in Faneuil Hall when smokers poured outside into the freezing cold to feed their habits while the bands were on break.  Many of the employees were smokers as well, but their opposition wasn't so much about freedom to smoke as it was about the dent that having more than half of their clientele standing outside the bar half of the time was putting in their tips.  But despite this majority opposition, the citizens of Boston, the heirs of a group of people who dressed up like a bunch of natives and dumped a payload of tea into the harbor because the king's tax was a few cents too high, were just going to roll over and take it.  The Irish gals would stand outside and suffer all winter long, freezing in their spaghetti straps while they sucked on their coffin nails, all because, as Mike put it, Mayor Menino was an eating man, not a drinking man, and didn't want to be bothered by second hand smoke while he enjoyed his lunch.

I imagine two questions are in the minds of many of my readers about now.  One, why would I -- a non-smoker, unless you count the occasional cigar -- seem to be objecting to the passage of a law that is clearly to the health benefits of everyone and to the definite benefit of bar patrons not given to an ill-advised vice?  And two, what does any of this have to do with the picture of the high-piled snow in my court at the top of this column?

The answer to both questions is encapsulated in the sentiment behind Mike's quote that I opened with.  "We used to be made of sterner stuff."  That is to say, we used to have an indomitable individual will that was part of our identity as Americans.  We did for ourselves.  We'd be damned if anyone was going to tell us what to do, whether it was good for us or not.  We were free and self-determining.  And self-doing.  While we always appreciated neighbors and were willing to help each other out, if necessary, we were quite capable of -- and sometimes intent on -- being a society unto ourselves.  Both sides of this sentiment of will -- the will to do for ourselves and be free -- are expressed by Charlie Daniels in the chorus of "Long Haired Country Boy":  "I ain't askin' nobody for nothin' if I can't get it on my own.  If you don't like the way I'm livin', you just leave this long haired country boy alone."

Which brings me to Winter Storm Jonas.  The flip side of letting the GOV tell us what to do is depending on the GOV to do for us.  As you can see from the pictures above, Jonas dumped quite a lot of snow on the East Coast as it rolled through, setting records in Maryland and Pennsylvania.  It had to come pretty close to a record in Northern Virginia too.  Predictably, it crippled the region.  How could it not?  Roads are still being cleared, and as I was writing the previous sentence, I received the text that let me know that Fairfax County Public Schools will be closed tomorrow for the fourth day (and counting).  Most of that is to be expected.  Northern Virginia is not Buffalo.  The area doesn't usually get anywhere near this kind of snowfall and doesn't have the infrastructure to clear it quickly.  I'm not necessarily launching a complaint here about government response to the storm -- although the school closings here are historically absurd.  What I'm more taken aback by is the attitude of the denizens of the East Coast to the storm.  To wit, look at the picture below, taken by a Reston, VA shopper at our local Trader Joes.

This isn't a store under new construction that hasn't received its goods yet.  It's a store whose dairy supply has been completely emptied in preparation for a winter storm.  Yes, it was a big storm, but when I look at this scene, I think we're preparing for nuclear winter, not actual winter.  I mean, yeah, it'll be a couple of days before you can go to the store, but don't we regularly do that all the time anyway?  This scene is rather indicative of what the prevailing attitude towards the storm seems to have been.  Hunker down and wait it out.  Not wait until it stops blizzarding, by the way, but wait until Uncle Sam has plowed the roads back to where they are typically in mid-June and gives us the all clear to proceed with life as usual.  The all-clear was apparently a necessity in New York, whether individuals wanted it to be or not.  Supposedly Bill de Blasio threatened to arrest anyone who was out on the roads in a non-official capacity.  I get that some of that is for cleanup, but the press conference made it sound like part of it was saving people from their own-- what?  stupidity? or is it gumption?  self-reliance?  lack of fear?  Lucky for de Blasio, most of the NYC populace was probably too happy to stay inside and wait on the civil apparatus.  What would we do if we lived in Barrow, Alaska?

Again, we used to be made of sterner stuff.  We used not to be so cowed by something like the weather.  There used to be some honor in being able to overcome obstacles and some shame in being defeated by them.  Our dads were heroes in our eyes, capable of anything, and sons wanted to grow up to be just like them.  That sort of local heroism was a specific American thing, by the way.  The indomitable will of the hero has been part of the Western mythos since Achilles and Odysseus, but across the Atlantic, you had to be an aristocrat -- of a certain bloodline -- to be heroic.  Here in America, it was available to everyone.

I'm not necessarily saying it's exactly heroic to dig your car out of the snow (though it might make your back hurt), or that it's heroic to drive to the store on less-than-perfect roads, or that it's heroic to do a number of other things like it (change your own tire, build a fire, cook without a recipe, etc. etc.), but the capability to do any of these things -- the capability to do for oneself -- is certainly more heroic than the alternative.* 

We used to be made of sterner stuff.  We didn't surrender to something so silly as a winter storm.  The indomitable will used to be a virtue.  I'm put in mind of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses."  Ostensibly, it's a poem about the Greek hero Odysseus (Roman name Ulysses) in his retirement, but in essence, it's a paean to the indomitable human will.  I feel like internalizing some of it will do us some good.

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

So driving on an icy road isn't exactly striving with gods.  Still, I feel like we'd be better off if there were more embracing of the heroic ethos that says we'll do for ourselves and less of the prudent foresight that says I'll stockpile 14 gallons of milk and 8 dozen eggs and wait for civil servants to plow me out.

*Hopefully, it goes without saying that I'm exempting the usual suspects from the shame that might attach to inability here:  children, the elderly, and even the fairer sex (apologies to my feminist friends for mentioning the last; I by no means mean to imply that a gal shouldn't be able to shovel herself out, too).

........in which I comment on the lottery as an odd way of taxing the poor.

Chase Stephens had a piece in Dailywire the other day that came through on my Facebook feed.  It was the story of one Cinnamon Nicole, who had spent her entire life savings on Powerball tickets for the recent $1.5 billion jackpot and then established a GoFundMe site in order to recoup her losses when she didn't win.  Perhaps the most amazing part of this story is the fact that she was actually able to get people to give her $800 before GoFundMe shut her down. 

I'm not sure how I feel about people giving her $800.  On one hand, there's the logic that says a Darwin Awards candidate like Cinnamon (or is Nicole her given name?) really should be out her life savings.  What she did is a pretty stupid thing to do, and it doesn't bode well that in her GoFundMe plea, she gives evidence of not having even learned from her mistake:  she  pleads with would-be donors, "With your small donation of at least $1.00, a like and one share, I’m certain that we will be able to pick ourselves up from the trenches of this lost [sic] and spend another fortune trying to hit it big again!"  Yes, she is apparently ready to do this again, so on one hand, I'm with Kenyatta Gibson, the GoFundMe user who wrote in response to her plea, “Guuuuuuuuuuurl…….I ‘SWEATERGAAAAAWD’ if I see one person give you one rusty copper penny I will spend ten times what you spent on lottery tickets on PLANE tickets to fly to their humble abode so spoiled in riches that they can afford to make it rain on Sweet Brown like ratchet humans such as you who choose to spend their cash on Remy, Flaming Hot Cheetos, VOSS Water and Powerball , and commence to kicking every single one of their asses!!!” (courtesy Dailywire). 

On the other hand, it says something nice about the mercy we're still willing to have on each other that someone would subsidize Cinnamon Nicole's (I'll use both names just to be safe) chronic lack of wisdom.

Moreover, though Cinammon Nicole is perhaps the most publicly egregious example of Powerball puerility that took place over last weekend, she's certainly not the only one.  I will admit to getting a little caught up in the mania myself.  I'd purchased a couple of tickets when the jackpot was at $900 million, and since I had the correct Powerball in one of them, I parlayed my $4 winnings into two more tickets for the $1.5 billion drawing.  The scene at my local Safeway was taken with Powerball mania.  There was an unusually long line at the lottery ticket machine, and everyone was abuzz with lottery fever.  It was, in a way, festive, but it was also, in a way, a little sad. 

I should set some context.  I live in a decent enough area of the D.C. suburbs, but Reston, VA, is intentionally economically mixed, so the Safeway in question services, in addition to my middle-class development, some lower income developments and a sizable project building.  The demographics of lottery ticket buyers, by all appearances, came from the lower income neighborhoods.**  While many of the ticket buyers I observed may not have been going quite to the extent of Cinnamon Nicole, there was all manner of what appeared to be foolish spending and illogical thinking.  One lady, for instance, while waiting for the customer service person to process her handful of lottery slips -- what had to equate to $50 or more worth of tickets -- remarked that she didn't usually play the lottery, but when the jackpot got this big, she had to go in on it.  I suppose this makes some sense on the face of it, and the critical reader here will no doubt recognize that I was doing the same thing, albeit to the tune of $4, but when you examine the statement, it makes no sense.  Why is $1.5 billion so much more compelling than a very small jackpot, like, say $40 million.  Presumably, the $20 million she would keep from the smaller jackpot would change her lifestyle no less drastically, yet she, and many others in her shoes, are apparently not willing to part with money they can't afford to lose for such pocket change.  "No thank you.  You can keep your tens of millions of dollars.  But when it gets to a larger jackpot, which I am equally, if not more, unlikely to win, then I'm willing to part with half of next month's electric bill for a chance at the really big bucks."  Something like this sentiment was echoed in a lot of Facebook comments I saw last week.  It's a strange idea.  If you're really putting your eggs in the lottery basket, why does it have to approach $1 billion to get you to play?  You should be playing every week.

Of course, not everyone could afford to play every week at the rate that they were buying tickets ahead of the $1.5 billion jackpot.  Most of the people in my Safeway weren't taking the conservative road I was, hedging their cash on a mere $4 bet.  Most people that I could see were going whole hog.  The man immediately in front of me shelled out no fewer than 3 photos of Andrew Jackson on lottery tickets.  Apparently, the amount of money people are willing to fork over is proportional to the amount of the jackpot, which I guess makes sense, but, again, the smallest of Powerball jackpots would do the trick, and I would think that the increasing size of the jackpot shouldn't lure you into spending more money that you don't have on a chance to win.  The $60 the man in front of me fed the machine looked like it would have purchased at least half a dozen pairs of shoes, assuming what he was wearing that evening was representative of his regular footwear. 

I am loathe to tell anyone how to spend their money -- the clear critique of how my fellow Safeway shoppers were spending their money notwithstanding -- but what I saw in the last week or so in the run-up to the giant Powerball jackpot made me think that this lottery is making a whole bunch of people spend money they don't have on a very foolish hope.  As I was driving away from the Safeway the night the jackpot was actually won, I got to thinking about the lottery as a form of taxation.  And by the lottery as taxation, I don't mean the parts of the proceeds that go to education, environmental upkeep, etc.  I mean the income taxes on winnings paid by the jackpot winners.  According to Money Magazine, large jackpot winners will pay about 39.6% in federal income taxes.  That's about $600 million.  Another $40-80 million will go to state taxes.  That's a lot of tax revenue the GOV is raising in revenue, and again, that's completely aside from any revenue that they take directly from the proceeds (which, if I read the ABC news article I referenced above correctly, amounts to about another $350 million, roughly speaking).  And keep in mind that that tax revenue is not coming from the much maligned top 1%.  Far from it, by my observation.  I mean, those that are financially set are not blowing significant money on Powerball tickets.  I bet Mark Zuckerberg bought zero.  My guess is that the overwhelming majority of tickets are purchased by people of lower-middle class status or below, people who are hard-up and holding on to a pipe dream that the winning numbers will make it all better. 

So what struck me, after thinking about this for a while, is that the lottery is like some sort of bizarro-world Bernie Sanders taxation scheme.  Imagine if the effect of the lottery with regard to government revenue and who it was being taken from were announced as an actual tax program.  Imagine the government saying, "We're going to amend some of our revenue difficulties by assessing another $1.85 billion in taxes.  We're going to take this money randomly from the poorest Americans, but, here's the good news.  We're going to kick about half of that $1.85 billion to between 1 and 3 of the taxpayers, selected at random, who pay into this special assessment.  The more you pay in taxes, the better shot you have of winning the money, but your chances of winning anything of significance at all are less than 1 in a million."  Because that's essentially what's happening, unless I'm misunderstanding something terribly.  My guess is there would be something of a hue and cry if it were announced this way, and yet people can't part with their hard earned money fast enough when it's voluntary. 

As I said, I don't mean any of this to tell anyone how to spend their money.  Nor do I mean to get all moral about the lottery or gambling or any of that.  I just find it odd that we get so drawn into something like the Powerball, so drawn in that we voluntarily tax ourselves at an alarming rate, and collectively do so in one of the most regressive tax structures the world has ever seen.  I feel like we should be more clear-eyed about this as a society.

Then again, as Annie Savoy once said, "This world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness."***



**Before accusations of racism fly, let it be known that I was making this observation based entirely on what the buyers were wearing, particularly on their feet.  I may, of course, have been incorrect in my estimation of the socio-economic classes of the various ticket buyers, but we all know that I wasn't.

***Annie Savoy is the female love interest in Bull Durham, played wonderfully by Susan Sarandon.
 

........in which I reflect on a certain character in The Force Awakens (spoiler alert....I'm serious; do not read this yet if you haven't seen the film and care about what happens in it).

Like many Generation X boys, I learned most of what I need to know from Star Wars.  Well, that's overstatement of course, but you get the point.  It seems most of us grew up either wanting to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.  I fell into the Solo camp.  My ideal of masculine virtue was probably formed as much by Han Solo as anything.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that good-hearted scoundrel is also in my family DNA going back as far as I can trace, but that's rather beside the point of what I want to say today, which is a fond farewell to one of my great childhood mentors.

I was oddly not completely emotionally flattened by Han's apparent death* near the end of The Force Awakens.  It seemed somehow fitting in the context of where the story is going.  The writers have clearly announced with this film that this trilogy is about the next generation of Star Wars heroes.  Rey, Finn, BB-8, and Kylo Ren will clearly star in this adventure, with the holdovers from episodes IV-VI providing supporting roles.  And oddly, I'm OK with that, too.  Lawrence Kasdan has done a great job with developing characters that fill the shoes of Luke, Han, Leia, and Vader, in my humble opinion, and I'm happy for my sons to have their own heroes to root for over the next several years as opposed to borrowing mine.  My almost-seven-year-old already has a crush on Rey that will probably parallel mine on Leia.  I also really like what they've done with Kylo Ren as the son of Han and Leia.  It's an unexpected twist that nonetheless fits -- one of those feats of story that you don't see coming, but, once it's happened, makes you say, "Yep, that's about right."  In that context, Han's sacrifice on the bridge in Starkiller Base fits in the story.  Yes, I said sacrifice.  This wasn't an Obi-Wan Kenobi giving up his life so other's can get away, of course, but as Han walked out onto the bridge after Kylo Ren, I was muttering his own famous line in my head -- "I've got a bad feeling about this" -- and I think he knew what was coming too.  He sacrificed his life in an ultimate gesture of faith in the good left in his son and in -- forgive the sentimentality -- an ultimate gesture of love for his son, no matter how wrong he has gone.  I actually found it a profoundly redeeming moment for the character.  One of my own rules in story is that if you're going to kill an important character, you better damned well not waste his life in the process.  I don't think they did that with Han Solo in the slightest.  I think it represents a sacrificial maturity on the character's part, and I actually find myself liking it very much, though, like Luke and Leia, I will miss Han very much.

The only real complaint I have is that they shortchanged Han and Leia's reconciliation.  It should have been longer, more complete, and more romantic.  In short, they definitely should have shared a heartfelt, maybe even a passionate, kiss.  Of course, I was forced to rethink this a little after the somewhat awkward kiss between Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes in the season premier of Downton Abbey, but I still think Harrison Ford and Carrie Fischer could have pulled it off.

In any case, I find myself saddened but at ease with Han Solo's passing, as, I suppose, one would with any old (and let's face it, he was old) friend and mentor.  So, by way of farewell, I'd like to list a few of the things I learned from Han Solo, and in doing so, I assume I speak for a generation of boys who modeled themselves after the crass yet lovable smuggler pilot of the Millennium Falcon.

• (Since we're on the subject of the Falcon) -- Character is the thing most important to be sought after in one's mode of transportation, with speed coming in a close second.  Sensibility is for losers.**    

• Girls like scoundrels, provided that they have a heart of gold.  My wife will never admit to this, but I only ever made real traction with her when I started sardonically calling her "princess" (with the accent on the second syllable).  I suppose one shouldn't make too much of this, but one should not also underestimate the importance of being a little bit interesting.

• A few good friends are worth a world of acquaintances.  Han held much of the galaxy at arm's length, but Luke, Leia, and, of course, Chewbacca were people he would have died for.

• The arbitrary laws of men may be taken or left, but it is important at the end of the day to do the right thing.  (cf. Han's opportune appearance during the Death Star run at the end of Episode IV)

• “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”  Overstatement, of course, but there's something to this cowboy pragmatism, and really, it is a good thing to know how to shoot.  Which is to say nothing about the virtue of self-reliance that is latent in this quote.
  

• And finally, it is a noble and good thing to, at the end of the day, be willing to lay down your life for the love of another person, as Han did for the hope of his son's redemption in The Force Awakens.  I think that is why I was so satisfied with Han's death.  I mean, we all have to go, but it's very poetic and right to go in a way that embodies the virtue in one's character that redeems all of the loveable and interesting flaws.

So, assuming you are actually gone, happy trails old friend.  I and numerous others will miss you, but rest assured that you will take your place in the hall of heroes in Western culture.  You'll be there beside Achilles, Aeneas, Frodo Baggins, and when he gets there, your old pal Luke Skywalker.  You've taught us well, and we're appreciative.


*I say apparent death because one never knows for sure.  As I'll say later, the circumstances of Han's death on that bridge over a chasm were eerily similar to Gandalf's apparent demise on the bridge in Moria, and he came back inexplicably.  I don't expect that to happen here.  I do think we'll see Han again, but most likely in that blue-shaded Force apparition in which Ben Kenobi and Yoda appeared in Return of the Jedi.

**My vehicles in life (with the exception of the Volvo I currently drive, inherited from my wife):  a '65 Rambler, an '80 Pontiac Phoenix (this was a mistake), a '74 Chevy Caprice, an '85 Porsche 944, a '64 Rambler, and an '80 El Camino.  I get some of this from my dad, too, by the way, who is very Soloish in his relationship to vehicles.  When I was very young, he bought a 1977 Ford pickup that he is still driving on occasion, despite numerous (unintentional) attempts by his children and grandchildren to decommission the vehicle -- it might, in fact, be currently still in dire need of repair following my nephew's recent ill-advised attempt to cross the highway with it, but I have no doubt dad will fix it and drive it again.  I remember him saying one time that he wanted to be buried in it because "it's gotten me out of every other mess I've been in with it, maybe it'll get me out of that one too."