Untethered: Problem Solving Unshackled by Rhyme or Reason

By Roy Wepner

Untethered: Problem Solving Unshackled by Rhyme or Reason explores problems that are large, small, trivial, and imaginary. And it provides solutions to these problems that are free from the restraints of logic and practicality. Roy Wepners solutions are way beyond outside the box. They will make you forget that the boxand even your problemsever existed. Among the knotty problems from the world of politics solved by Wepner are how to deal with the corrupting influence of money on politics; how and when to start presidential campaigns; how to make the presidential candidates running mate more useful; and a surprise nominee for admission as the next member of the European Union. Wepner solves workplace problems, including a surefire way to avoid getting fired. He promotes the general welfare with a variety of best practices for producing and watching television; long overdue changes to our mind numbingly tedious calendars; and even a way to assure that we take our meds every day. Wepner even conjures up several ways to improve baseball. The one problem he cant help you with is passing up this opportunity for a few chuckles and maybe even a guffaw or two.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504983563

Roy Wepner

Roy Wepner is an intellectual property litigator in New Jersey. A baby boomer, he is the author of The Postwarriors: Boomers Aging Badly. He divides his spare time between watching excessive amounts of television, doing just enough exercise to neutralize his ill-conceived dietary habits, and annoying his grandchildren.

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© 2016 Roy Wepner. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/04/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8355-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8356-3 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: THE BODY POLITIC

Chapter 1 Buy High, Sell Higher

Chapter 2 The Winds Of War

Chapter 3 The Vice Of The Vice Presidency

Chapter 4 The United Blue States Of North America

Chapter 5 Uncommon Wealth

Chapter 6 Save The European Union. Here’s How.

PART II: TV OR NOT TV

Chapter 7 Don’t Call Me

Chapter 8 Down For The Count

Chapter 9 Keeping Your Grades Up

Chapter 10 Better Late Than On Time?

Chapter 11 DIY

PART III: THE DAYS, WEEKS, AND MONTHS OF OUR LIVES

Chapter 12 ’Tisn’t The Season

Chapter 13 Forward March

Chapter 14 Monday: Sometimes It Just Turns Out That Way

PART IV: WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Chapter 15 Words And Phrases I Hate

Chapter 16 Words And Phrases I Love

PART V: LABOR PAINS

Chapter 17 Wish I Could Do That

Chapter 18 You’re Fired! (Or Not)

PART VI: PRIVATE EYES AND EARS

Chapter 19 I Spy, You Spy

Chapter 20 Hide And Don’t Seek

PART VII: LOOKING FORWARD TO THE PAST

Chapter 21 (Still) Don’t Know Much About History

Chapter 22 You’ve Got Mail

PART VIII: FEED ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION

Chapter 23 No Crunch, Or No Lunch

Chapter 24 Sleep On This

Chapter 25 Fill ’Er Up

PART IX: GOOD AND WELFARE

Chapter 26 Our National Past-Its-Time

Chapter 27 Tear Down This House

Chapter 28 Souvenirs, Souvenirs

Chapter 29 Periodic Pains

Chapter 30 The Suspense Is Killing Me

Dedication

To my grandchildren ____

Eliza Morgan

Teddy Eli

Sydney Violet

Sloane Georgia

They have recharged batteries I didn’t know I still had, and brought incalculable amounts of joy into my life.

To their parents ____

Meredith and Judd

Leslie and Marc

They bring joy to my life way beyond the grandchildren they created.

And to my wife, Shelley, who ____ from the beginning and in the end ____ is the ultimate source of all of my joy.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to those who read and (ostensibly) enjoyed THE POSTWARRIORS: BOOMERS AGING BADLY. Your numbers may not have been impressive, but your enthusiasm certainly was. Without it, I would never have attempted an encore. You know who you are.

Any many thanks to my long-time assistant, Denise Ghilino. In addition to transforming my chicken scratchings to legibility, she kept the project organized and ready to complete over too many years. Her efforts provided me with the comforting knowledge that at least one person has read all 30 chapters. Thanks, Denise, for your patience. We’re done!

Introduction

Let’s get this out of the way right here and now. If you don’t enjoy the essays collected in this book, you are probably not going to care all that much about how this book came into existence, which will be the focus of this introduction. But if you really want to start at ____ or even before ____ the beginning, who am I to say no?

In around 2003, I got an urge to do some writing. I had dabbled in writing short articles and essays as far back as high school. I had become convinced that I would never write anything as substantial as a book unless it consisted of a collection of short, bite-size pieces. But to get started, I needed something resembling a topic and some vehicle for writing, collecting, and publishing whatever might result from the exercise.

Choosing a topic turned out to be relatively easy. I was then and remain today a member of the Baby Boom generation, which ____ by the beginning of this century ____ was finally in the process of shedding much of its overblown relevance. For decades, people had been making fun of the Baby Boom generation, and I figured that, as an insider, I could do that too.

The way I found a vehicle, on the other hand, is a poster child for the notion that, sometimes, you just need to be lucky. After writing a bunch of essays about the Baby Boom generation, I had the amazing good fortune to have a local weekly newspaper, The Princeton Packet, agree to publish them on an irregular but continuing basis, as a column known as THE POSTWARRIORS.

In generating what eventually turned out to be over 50 such columns, I had to deal with several restraints, above and beyond the need to convince the editor to look kindly on my musings, which might prompt him to fill some space with one of my columns when no advertiser stepped up to claim that space. First, the essays all had to be about 700 words in length. Sometimes this meant cutting a bit of fat ____ or even a great deal of fat ____ from an early draft. Other times, brevity became my enemy, and a column might need a bit of enrichment before it was suitable.

The second constraint was that I had to stay on topic. By calling the column THE POSTWARRIORS, I had committed to finding some nexus ____ however tenuous ____ between each topic I chose to write about and the so-called postwar generation.

The third constraint, which ____ in hindsight ____ proved to be an invaluable benefit, was the fact that every time the editor of The Packet published one of my columns, if I wanted to keep the enterprise going, I had to write some new ones. As a cure for writer’s block, this was surprisingly effective.

In any event, I finally sweated out enough essays about the Baby Boom generation to generate a small book having 56 chapters, with each one having a word count that was absurdly close to 700. The result was THE POSTWARRIORS: BOOMERS AGING BADLY.

But a funny thing happened on the way to publishing THE POSTWARRIORS. When I should have been focusing on topics that were relevant to the Baby Boom generation, I would occasionally have a stray off-topic thought that could be teased into an essay that would be at least fun to write, if not fun to read. Try as I may, I could not find ____ or manufacture ____ a hook between some of these stray thoughts and the Baby Boom generation. So I put these extracurricular essays aside, thinking I would deal with them when I was ready to write my second book.

In hindsight, I should have known that this second book was never going to be easy. Untethered by topic, word count, or the continuing need to keep a newspaper editor happy, I quickly discovered that without some sort of leash on me, I would flail away in too many directions, or I might procrastinate, or both, resulting in a pitifully small bunch of essays that were collectively about pretty much nothing.

After a while, I found what could at least be viewed as a theme, if not a topic: problems and solutions. Much of what we do in life is try to solve problems large and small. And much of the energy we expend ____ including efforts to solve existing problems ____ results in the creation of new problems, requiring even more exotic solutions.

As you will see, some of the problems that have interested me were real. Some of my solutions, on the other hand, tended to be untethered to reality, rhyme, or reason. As I hope you will see if I have not already scared you off, some of my so-called solutions are not just outside the box. They are unmoored from the very concept of a box.

Whether the effort was worthwhile is, of course, for you to decide. I can, however, reach a judgment as to whether or not my creative juices were productively stimulated by being untethered from word counts, narrow topics, and the needs of a newspaper editor. Remember those first essays I wrote around those stray thoughts that hit me before I finished THE POSTWARRIORS?

That was ____ ahem ____ more than nine years ago.

Part I: The Body Politic

Chapter 1

BUY HIGH, SELL HIGHER

So it came to pass, in or about the second decade of the 21st century, that the importance of money in politics reached a tipping point ____ and then proceeded to leave that tipping point in the dust.

The cost of every election now exceeds the cost of the prior election by a wide margin. Every day, money seems to pour into every election, from the presidency, down through the Congress, state legislatures, county governments, and even the local boards of small towns. This occurs not only in general elections, but also in primaries. And in states where judges are elected, small fortunes have been spent on some judicial elections, and massive fortunes have been spent on others. Accusations that big coal companies had bought key members of the West Virginia judiciary, or at least appeared to have done so, actually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

That the situation is out of control has long been beyond obvious. But the situation is not simply out of control; it appears to be simply uncontrollable. Our Supreme Court seems to believe that there is nothing untoward about millions ____ if not billions ____ of dollars being spent, not only by well-known plutocrats, but also through political action committees and other devices that can hide the identity of the people who are ____ let’s be honest here ____ trying to buy elections. The Supreme Court ____ dominated by justices who owe their positions to presidents and senators who are themselves beholden to megadonors ____ seems to believe there is nothing wrong with this picture.

So, if this problem is so insoluble, what am I proposing that we do about it? How do we stop all the handwringing about money corrupting politics?

Here it is: let’s just drop all the pretenses. Let’s allow the world’s zillionaires (why only Americans?) to unashamedly, unabashedly, and openly purchase politicians.

How would this work? Suppose there was a member of the House that sits on a certain committee that is considering legislation that could financially impact some plutocrat. I am here proposing that we allow the plutocrat to simply purchase that House member outright. What would be the price to be paid? Let the famously efficient market sort that out.

We would need to make sure that the property rights of the owner of this congressman are respected. After all, no politician with integrity would sell himself twice ____ right? There would have to be a system whereby deeds of ownership are recorded. You know how, when you purchase a house, there is a deed that gets recorded with the county clerk? Same idea.

Of course, purchasing a single member of the House will only buy the owner ____ and we do mean buy ____ so much influence. To get a bill out of a House committee, it might be necessary for the entire caucus of the majority party to vote to send that bill to the floor of the House. So if the bill in question was important enough to our dear plutocrat,