Leaks, LePage, and Leftovers

“There is NOTHING to eat in here,” I often grumble, even after dutifully sealing a plate of leftovers in a Tupperware container the night before, only for it to sneak behind a bag of celery, lost forever.

When I open the refrigerator, I always expect whatever I’m looking for to position itself front and center. The idea of moving stuff aside to see what might be hiding under or behind that milk carton simply does not penetrate the tiny cluster of nerve cells I call a brain.

As most students of human behavior know, if I really wanted to find something to eat in the refrigerator, I probably could. Deep down inside, I would rather order pizza, or visualize a plate of nachos and meat loaf so it might magically materialize in front of me.

Our political system, in many ways, is like my refrigerator: there’s a lot of stuff in there we’d like to see, but not badly enough to actually look. So we ignore it until it starts to smell.

We can thank WikiLeaks.org, the group responsible for publishing 90,000 classified military documents about the War in Afghanistan, for reminding us that we really should do something about the string bean casserole from last Thanksgiving that still lurks way in back, behind the milk carton.

The documents reveal atrocities galore, but nothing new or surprising. Still, they have value because we live in a society in which it is easy to forget about the realities of war (unless you have a son or a brother or a cousin serving in the military).

Afghanistan has been a problem since the Russians invaded in the ‘80s. Remember that? No? Oh, right – you were ordering pizza. Well, if you think the U.S. just stood on the sidelines and crossed our fingers, hoping the Mujahideen guerrillas would defeat the Soviets without help, I have some yummy green bean casserole I’d like to sell you.

We say we want transparency in government, but when it comes down to it, we’d actually rather not know what’s really going on.

Take the race for governor. Republican Paul LePage recently accused a Democratic party official of inciting talk that LePage would not make a good governor because he is French Catholic.

You have to feel for LePage, because he seems to understand politics about as well as I understand microbiology. Racist comments by bloggers were not a story until he called out the Dem’s. His reaction makes it look like he can’t take the heat.

The best strategy would have been to ignore the fringe racists. If a reporter asks you about it, say, “It’s unfortunate that some people have to resort to ignorant tactics, but that’s politics.”

Instead, LePage attacked the Democrats, and when the media reported his attack, LePage responded by saying he would not longer talk to reporters.

Oy. Welcome to big boy politics, Paul.

We can conclude that if LePage somehow wins, he will pilot the government machinery like a Glaucoma victim at the helm of the Hindenburg. He will get nothing done.

Baldacci, a master politician, got things done. They may have been terrible things, but at least they got done.

Why? If someone insulted Baldacci’s Italian heritage, it’s hard to imagine him saying, “I know just the scumball who’s behind it. His name is So-And-So, and we’ll make sure he sleeps with the fishes tonight.”

LePage’s mistake was impulsively trying to uncover something (fringe nutjob mudslinging) the general public would rather ignore.

He opened that six-week-old leftover tuna salad, and how he has to live with the stink.

And so do we.

A Thoreau Analysis

Most regular readers of this column -- at least the ones whose anti-psychotic medications are managed properly -- have probably noticed that I try offer a big-picture perspective, like a Renaissance painter, while remaining topical, like an anti-fungal cream.

I might get around to that today, but first I have to tell you about my vacation.

I just got back from camping in Vermont and New Hampshire, where I spent most of my time trying to find an ATM so I could buy a key card that would operate the campground’s laundry machines, thus enabling me to dry my sleeping bag just in time for the next thunderstorm to roll through.

But I enjoyed living simply for a few days. With fewer electronic distractions and life management tasks, I could focus on my family and my insect bites.

President Obama recently vacationed at Acadia National Park, but it’s too bad he did not get the genuine tourist experience there: fighting traffic in Ellsworth, taking the Park Loop Road by mistake and having no way to turn around, nearly running over absent-minded pedestrians in Bar Harbor.

No, he has lackeys and secret service agents to do all that for him, so all he has to do is look at the lighthouses, trying to seem Presidential for photographers while gazing upon Maine’s most cherished phallic symbol.

Come on. Without some degree of stress in getting there, how can you feel like you really earned that view from Cadillac Mountain?

Just like Obama, my getaway was far too short, and I returned home to find all sorts of major problems waiting for me.

First, I had to deal with the pool.

The lethal mystery mix of chemicals we mix in had worn off, so we undertook emergency procedures. We were pool paramedics. We checked vital signs, we shocked, we billed insurance.

I feel awkward even telling you that we have a swimming pool. It feels immodest. When I grew up, they were reserved for the wealthy. I must have been 9 or 10 years old when my grandparents got an above-ground pool; I thought they must be loaded.

(They probably were, just not in the way I imagined.)

Nowadays, you’ll see these “pop-up” pools next to run-down trailers with rust stains on the siding, and no one thinks this is particularly odd.

We paid $75 for our eight-foot “pop-up,” a financial decision I vigorously opposed at first. Perhaps part of me felt subconsciously unprepared to claim pool-worthy status. The other part of me knew that we lived five minutes from a lakefront, making a pool seem unnecessary.

Besides: In Maine, it only gets truly hot about five days out of the year; five days of relief (which could otherwise be obtained from the lake or the shower) did not feel worth an entire summer of pool maintenance.

I’m not the type of person who wants to sit around worrying about the pH level in a vat of water.

On the other hand, I also don’t like worrying about my daughter. Now that we have a pool, she is already a better swimmer, at age 5, than I am.

So I caved, of course, and we got the pool, and now we have to go spend even more money on camping trips so we can feel what it’s like to have a simple life for a little while.

Our lives are full of conveniences that somehow do not make things feel any easier, and products that add a measure of security but don’t enable us to worry any less.

Well, at least my bed is almost always dry.