Treasure

When I was young I read a fable about a farmer who was dying.  He told his sons, “I have a treasure buried on my land,” but didn’t tell them where it was. After his death, they dug up every inch of the land to find the treasure, but found nothing.  But their digging left the land in such good shape that it produced big crops, and they made a fortune after all.  That father understood motivation!

I’ve always been interested in gold rushes.  I was reading Pierre Berton’s book about the Klondike gold rush, and there was one fact I noticed.  Thousands of prospectors went there, and the total amount of money they invested in their adventure—travel expenses and food supplies and equipment—was even greater than the value of all the gold the place produced! (That gives you an idea of the odds they faced.) People made fortunes without going there, just by selling them supplies.  There’s a country song that goes “All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverley Hills, in somebody else’s name.”

I read that pirates burying treasure is a cliche, like walking the plank.  Captain Kidd’s the only pirate known to have buried his treasure.  With most pirates, if they made a big score they’d spend it as soon as they could because they didn’t know how long they’d live to enjoy it.

When I was young, we had a treasure for the eyes.  Every fall we’d get the Christmas catalogues from Eaton’s and Simpson Sears.  It was fun to look through them and feast our eyes on the wares, especially the toys and candy. (The clothes didn’t interest me much.) Indeed, I mention this because just the other night I was dreaming about the catalogues’ candy pages!

Yet it didn’t occur to us to want the stuff bought for us.  My parents didn’t raise materialist kids!  In fact, when they asked me what I wanted for Christmas I could rarely think of anything in particular…

Anyone remember the Buried Treasure treat?  It was a cone-shaped combination of ice milk and sherbet that would have a little figure inside that would appear once you finished it, a bit like a Kinder toy or a Crackerjack prize.

Remembrance of music

I have a huge Chinese dictionary with thousands of characters in it.  Lately I’ve been writing the characters down one at a time, fitting the meaning of each mostly into a single line.  And when a character is also used in Japanese writing, I’ve included its pronunciation in that language. (My computer has fonts for writing Chinese and Japanese characters.) I’m almost finished, and all that’s left is some of the characters under the water radical.

As I work on this summary, I’ve been listening to classical music on YouTube.  Stuff like symphonies and concerti and sonatas.  A lot of it I was already familiar with:  there are a couple of melodies I remember hearing when I was young, and I’m hoping to hear them again somewhere.   One of my favourite piano concerti is Edvard Grieg’s A Minor piece.  I read somewhere that when Grieg was a boy he spent a lot of his time in dreams, which sounds like me.  Just now I’m listening to Chopin’s polonaises:  he composed over two hours worth!  

Before that I heard all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Hearing them today, these sonatas are a revelation.  I think my favourite is the one called “Appassionata.” There’s one melody that I’m pretty sure I heard in a TV commercial back in the 1960s, for bathroom tissue or something. I used to play piano when I was young.  I could play just about all of Mozart’s sonatas, and some of Haydn’s.  But Beethoven’s sonatas were out of my league!

On the other hand, my sister Moira was playing piano in university, and I got to hear her playing just about all of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Listening to them now, I remember hearing them back then.  I was really lucky to be exposed to all this incredible music at that age.

Faith

 Dostoyevsky said, “You can’t be a socialist and believe in God.  You either believe in the Kingdom in this world, or the one in the next.” I’m a half-assed agnostic, but I do believe in the socialist movement.  I believe that a society’s success should be measured not in its overall prosperity, but in the prosperity of its least prosperous members.  And I also believe that the power of big business is something that must be confronted rather than appeased.

One of my heroes is Bernie Sanders.  His vision of social democracy may be milder than mine, but it’s an important step forward.  I think that the Democratic Party were foolish to choose Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over him, and I still hope that 2024 will be different. (And if you can believe that they won the nomination “fair and square,” you can believe anything.) Some people keep saying “Bernie’s not a Democrat.” Well, he’s more of a Democrat than Trump, isn’t he?  Who’s being a self-defeating purist now.

Another thing that bugs me is Democrats blaming Clinton’s 2016 defeat on Sanders not being more supportive.  Firstly, that’s blatantly unfair.  Bernie could have double-crossed the Democrats and defected to the Green ticket, and might even have won!  But he played it safe, campaigned for Hillary and actually delivered an even more solid share of his supporters than she’d delivered for Obama back in 2008.  

Secondly, two can play the blame game.  The polls during the primary showed Clinton with the same dicey narrow lead over Trump she’d have in November, and Sanders with a much wider lead:  he was clearly the safer bet.  But some Democrats kept insisting that Hillary was more “electable” because she was a centrist…

Another hero of mine is Jeremy Corbyn.  His detractors keep saying “He lost twice,” as if that were the last word about him. (The same with Bernie.) Yet in 2017 he managed to take away the Conservative majority.  And the accusation that he enabled anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is nonsense.

Opponents of Brexit have some nerve blaming their failure on Corbyn.  He campaigned against it, despite his past criticisms of the EU, then took a pragmatic approach and tried to effect as less drastic break.  He would have actually succeeded, but the Liberal Democrats abstained on the key vote!  Then Keir Starmer persuaded the party to demand a second referendum, which backfired badly in the 2019 election.  A second referendum wouldn’t have been wrong, but the proposal was disastrously ill-timed and turned a crucial bloc of voters against Labour in crucial seats.  Voters who rejected Labour over the second referendum made the wrong decision for the wrong reason, but it was a predictable backlash.

Soon after becoming Labour leader, Starmer launched an anti-left purge starting with Corbyn, as needless as it is dictatorial.  His thinking is clearly along the lines of “Screw the left, they have to vote for us anyway.  Or if they don’t, there aren’t enough of them to matter.  Or if there are, they can serve as a scapegoat!” What could possibly go wrong?  It’s time for the British left to form a genuinely socialist party.

Socialists often have to defy the Official Difference and risk the accusation, “If you aren’t with us then you’re with the Bad Guys!” Sometimes you have to risk making a bad situation even worse if there’s to be any real chance of making it better.