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This was written as a comment on http://www.thepartisandialogues.com

This thread has actually gotten quite interesting.  I’m even thinking Kong99 is perhaps not the total villain I thought he was.

I don’t want to write anything too long, but basically my feeling is this: nobody should go hungry, nobody should be homeless, nobody who is sick should be denied medical care, and everybody should be able to get as much education as their brains can handle, because that’s just a good investment for society as a whole.  Above that, let the capitalists go crazy.

As far as disincentivizing people, I think that right wingers have an overly simplified view of  human motivations.  If money were the only reason people worked, all rich people would stop working, and that’s not the case.  Bill Gates does not need any more money, but he continues to work.  Artists, writers, musicians and often architects, engineers and inventors work because they have something inside them that needs to come out, a vision which needs to be expressed.  Many people work because they are competitive, or seek recognition.  Doctors, teachers, firemen and the best of the policemen work because they truly want to help people, farmers work because they love the land and because of their family traditions.  Many people go to work because they are bored and want to get out of the house.

I’m not against the profit motive.  I’m just saying that the economy will not collapse if everybody has a decent base standard of living.

There is an election coming up here, and so every party has lots of signs up. There are billboards along the roads, ads in the metro, flyers pasted on every available flat surface.  It’s

not like the U.S., thank goodness.  Nobody has signs up in their yards or windows, nobody displays their political preferences via bumper stickers, you never see anyone wearing a t-shirt or a hat supporting one party or another.  In the U.S. they say that you should not discuss religion or politics.  However, everybody does.

Here, they really don’t much.  The times I’ve tried to get my students to discuss politics, it has not worked very well.

In any event, I’m not too clear on the differences between the Czech political parties.  The two big ones are the ODS and the CSSD.  I guess it’s basically a difference between wholeheartedlyn embracing capitalism and the west and taking a go slow approach, because there’s plenty about socialism that people liked, too.  If I were a citizen, I’d probably vote Green, because it’s a parliamentary system and you might as well vote for the ones you like best, and they are the old hippies, like me.

I saw an ad on the Metro this morning, though, which surprised me.  It was for the Royalist party.  Now, I’ve seen these guys before.  They like to dress up in traditional costumes and have events with oompah bands and it all seems like a harmless joke.  This ad, however, was written in full seriousness.

My Czech is not perfect, but I understood “a return to traditional, conservative values” and their slogan “God, King and Country.”

Suddenly, I realized:  they are the Czech version of teabaggers.  Just because everybody else thinks that they’re a joke, doesn’t mean that they don’t take themselves dead seriously.

Last night, I went to a friend’s 75^th birthday party.  I must say, Jim is doing pretty good for 75   He still gets around, goes to all the poetry readings, writes a blog, has a quick mind and a great sense of humor.  He’s got a wife who’s less than half his age and he was the oldest person at his party by almost two decades.

It was a pretty cool party.  It was held at his wife’s art gallery.  Honestly, I’m not crazy about her choices in art, but it’s a cool space.  Right at the corner of Riegerovy Sady, on the 4^th floor of a building with no lift, it’s a bit inaccessible, but the view is phenomenal.  While it was still light, it was a nice view of the park and after night fell, the castle and other buildings across the river came into focus.

The theme of the party was 1935, which meant that most of the men were wearing suits and a fair percentage of the women were wearing men’s suits as well.  It was the nature of the crowd.   Of course, there was some flexibility.   A couple of women wearing boas, which you don’t get a lot of chances to wear, one flapper…O.K., off by one decade, but close enough…and of course a lot of people who didn’t get the memo and came dressed normally.  As my overly educated and heavily politicized friend Karl said “I’m dressed as a member of the bonus army.”

The food was great, but ribs and being well dressed do not go together.  I limited myself to 3 or 4, whereas if I hadn’t been worried about looking like a pig, I might have had 9 or 10.  Come to think of it, maybe there was some logic in their planning after all..  I have been known to overconsume at parties.

I talked to a lot of people I sort of know, some I should know and was happy to get to know better and quite a few who I know but hadn’t seen for a long time.

So, it was not only an entertaining but a productive evening.

The other day I was out for a walk, and I saw something that made me a little sad, even though it was inevitable.  A new building was going up on a lot that has been vacant since I moved to Prague, back in 1998.  As I say, it was inevitable.  The lot is in a prime location, at the corner of Dlouha and that little cul-de-sac that ends behind Kotva.  The only surprising thing is that it wasn’t developed years ago.

There’s an Italian restaurant across the street, where I took my wife on our very first date, but that’s not the image that I have in mind when I think of that vacant lot.  About a year or so before I met my wife, there was a little incident, nothing of any importance at all, that took place there, as I sat and watched from the restaurant across the street.  And now it will be erased from the landscape of the city.  So I wrote this sonnet:

This morning I walked past a vacant lot

In the city center there are changes

It was bound to happen, it’s not so strange

But soon, there’ll be a building on that spot

There’s a restaurant right across the street

Where myself and a young lady that I knew

Used to drink a glass of wine or two

And one fine day, we had a window seat

We saw two lovers (people who we knew)

Oblivious to all the world outside

We watched them, you could even say we spied

Curious to see what they would do

It was early spring or late in fall

The snow was gently falling as they danced

It was a tender scene of sweet romance

At least, that is the way that I recall

Changes come, we leave the past behind

But still it is imprinted on our minds

Before having a debate about whether God exists, we need to define God.  If you say that God is love, then of course, God exists, because love exists.  That doesn’t explain who created the universe.  If you say that God is the force for good within all of us, or the spirit which moves the wind and the water and causes the trees to reach up and absorb energy from the sun, then the word should be lower case and plural.  You are talking about gods and not God.

If you say that God is everything in the universe, then why do you need to say God at all.  Universe is a perfectly good word for that.  If you say that God is the force which created the universe, that’s all well and good, but it still doesn’t tell me what God is.  If the universe was created in a big bang, which doesn’t even seem to be questioned any more and I’m not scientist enough to raise objections, then where did that matter come from?  If it’s from a previous universe, then we have a situation where universes are coming into existence, lasting for a few billion years, and then going kerflooey all over again.

Now, billions of years is an awful long time, but the end of existence as we know it has me a little bit worried.

If the matter did somehow spontaneously generate, because maybe it is possible for something to come out of nothing, maybe the awesome weight of infinite miles of nothingness is enough to force some gasses into existence, it is still a pretty awesome thought.

In either case, I would want to know, and I don’t see any particular need to attach the word God to it.

If we are talking about a Christian sort of God, the big man on the golden throne, who consciously created man in his own image, who is keeping a list and seeing who is naughty or nice, who can appear like George Burns to John Denver or the various guest characters on Joan of Arcadia, then I think you are a bit delusional.

Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people.  In fact, the world we live in is just about as random as a world could possibly be.  I don’t really even believe in Karma, but I do try to be as decent a person as possible most of the time.  You never know.