I’m inclined to sit home in my little studio apartment, writing columns and eating popcorn. The world is just too scary and noisy and the Red Sox are just too disappointing.
On rare occasions, I’ll “go to work,” where editors will sit around screaming at me about how my stuff is too long or too short or too stupid. That’s not so bad. It encourages me to stay home and sulk. All alone.
The problem, of course, is, according to quite a few smart people, the “world is flat”—meaning that when some Thai fisherman snares a few shrimp off his back yard, I will be eating it for supper within 36 hours. Human and financial capital and shrimp are flying across the globe, faster than I can type – while I just sit in my apartment, watching the world go by.
Even at the local and regional level, urban and regional planners are insisting that New England should be one big happy family, rather than Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Vermont, wherever that is. If we got ourselves some “stimulus” money and built a high-speed train line to every New England state, and shared tourist and businesses and mediocre relief pitchers, we would be more “competitive” with other nation-states that don’t have separate zoning boards for every 15 miles from the Canadian border to Providence.
The suspicion is that the New England group hug is a conspiracy against New Hampshire, which has no taxes and where you can drive 80 miles per hour, without your seat belt, with an inexpensive, open liquor container, on your way to a cock fight, where you will meet 50 New Hampshire state legislators – because one out of every three citizens of New Hampshire is elected to the legislature, because New Hampshire doesn’t take that government stuff very seriously.
Fee-fdoms
See the challenge? Live Free or Die. Most New England politicians don’t want us to live free or die, unless we leave a large estate to be taxed, in which case dying is encouraged. If we were one large, cooperative taxing district, New Hampshire would just be gobbled up and become Maine, with socialized heath insurance imported from Sweden; or Connecticut, which gets its cultural and regulatory cues from New York City; or Boston, where the School Committee has designed a districting system so complex that the principals get lost on the way to their schools.
New Hampshire just became the 50th state in the union to require mandated kindergarten, which, until a few days ago in some local districts, was considered a despotic effort to arrest young souls and force them to learn theoretical physics, rather than play tag and stuff.
No income tax? No kindergarten? No mandatory helmets for motorcyclists? See, this is what I mean about the “flat earth” stuff. It is sort of interesting to see how the rest of the world lives, whether or not we import it.
Consider Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, where a guy was just arrested for illegal possession of too much wild brook trout, and for selling the trout, because the trout is good to eat.
In Maine, possessing and peddling illegal and illicit trout could put this guy in jail for six months, which is longer than some guys get in Boston for manslaughter.
Maine is different, in a rugged, outdoorsy sort of way. I’m not talking about working up a bit of a sweat kayaking on the Charles River. No, these Maine guys chop down trees with their teeth. The Maine Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife folks, unleashed an army about the size of the Afghani invasion forces, to get the trout guy and bring him to justice.
That being said, there are apparently some New Hampshire-style, Libertarian guys in Maine. Commenting on the trout criminal, one reader of the Bangor Daily News expressed doubts: “I’m thinking the electric chair. Why not? Let the methadone junkies, stabbers, and thieves walk away with a slap on the wrist.” He was being ironic, in a northern New England kind of way.
I need to get out more. The world is flat. And the trout are running. Oops.
