"Goin' To The Candidates' Debate"

     I listened to much of the Democrat Presidential Primary candidates debate last night, despite audio problems (digital glitches and occasional interruptions by the U. S. Naval Observatory "talking clock," used as audio confidence filler on NPR's Breaking News channel) that had me remembering the view through sunglasses in They Live.

     Many of the candidates were promising to tax the wealthy, raise worker's wages and bring businesses back to the United States -- and never you mind that avoiding taxes and seeking to pay less for labor is at least part of what drove businesses offshore in the first place.

     In fact, fewer people than ever are having to live in poverty, especially at the lowest end of the scale, while the ultra-rich are spending their big bucks about as fast as they come in on job-creating things like space travel.  If having less kids stave to death in the mud requires I have to accept Jeff Bezos running his own space program instead of being taxed into Middle Suburbia, oh well; I think I can tolerate that.
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     Meanwhile, last night I dreamed my employer had provided paid apartments for the staff, about 1930s standard (which is what I usually lived in, when I was younger), with a washroom off the shared hall (managed to avoid that, thank you).  Somehow that, the debate and some craziness on Facebook gave rise to a story idea, in which most of Western Civilization, especially Freemasons and Moon landing, was the result of an intelligent alien crystal's efforts to get itself back to the Moon from the Earth, which it had somehow ended up on after a meteor impact.

     It's an interesting idea -- and it was even more interesting in 1957, when Isaac Asimov wrote a slightly different version, titled "Does A Bee Care?"  It's better left as he told it.