popsintx

2011-04-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Kitchen Table Math

I read the snarky, glib comments President Obama made to the man at the recent town hall meeting in Pennsylvania who asked about high fuel prices. Gas is approaching $4.00 a gallon here. Our President blithely suggested that the man trade in his old gas-guzzler (because everybody knows that anyone who would even dare to ask about the high price of fuel must be an anti-environment wastrel who surely drives a gas-guzzling urban assault vehicle) for a new hybrid from one of the US car manufacturers so as to save money and, of course, the planet as well.

This set me to wondering about how much money I would save, and whether I should dump my beat-up but noble 12-year-old Suburban (which once hauled my wife and me, and our 3 car-seat-sitting, sports-playing, art project-making, fun-loving kids around town and on trips, but which is now my work car) for one of the vehicles for which the President of the United States is currently a haughty shill.

I am what is now called "underemployed," and my wife and I own a struggling small business, which incidentally employs several working moms. Like many people in our circumstances, we aren’t able to make large capital acquisitions easily, but we're not averse to making them if there's a tangible, near-term benefit. We sat down and did a little kitchen table arithmetic. Although our kids are now in college, we still need a large, commercial-sized vehicle because we frequently have to haul large amounts of gear to shows and demonstrations in our business.

Our big old gas-guzzling 2000 Chevy Suburban, tank after tank, gets an actual 16 miles a gallon. That equals $.25 per mile @$4.00 a gallon and we put about 15,000 miles per year on the 'Burb which all adds up to annual fuel costs of $3,750. We also get the oil changed every 3,000 miles faithfully, and we buy tires, wiper blades and batteries when we need them, but we figure that’s a push because we’ll do that with the new vehicle if we buy one. (It’s interesting to note that at $2.75 a gallon, which is where gas prices were before the current hysteria-speculation-induced price run-up, that’s $3,047 making the annual differential $703). But either way you slice it, that’s real money.

The new apples-to-apples comparison for us is the GMC Yukon Hybrid which is touted to get 22 miles a gallon, or $.18 per mile for a total fuel cost of $2,700 per year. The fuel cost differential is $1,050 per year, or, said another way, $.07 per mile.

That's real money too, but when one acquires a new vehicle, there are other costs to consider.

I checked with my insurance agent and the insurance differential between our old ‘Burb and the new Yukon is $180/month or -$2,160 a year. But wait, there are still other costs. The monthly payment on the old 'Burb is $0.00. The monthly payment on President Obama's new Yukon Hybrid (after an initial down payment of $5,000 which I would be supremely lucky to get for the 'Burb at auction) is $640, or an additional annual differential of -$7,680. This, added to the additional annual insurance cost differential is -$9,840 per year. Still with me, Mr. President?

Oh, but, when it comes to saving the planet, who’s counting, right? When it comes to incurring that kind of cost, for people like us, it is we, ourselves who do the counting. The President’s dismissive generalizations, runaway demagoguery and effete snobbery sadly don't make the cash magically appear in our bank accounts. We, like our customers, associates and colleagues have to earn what we spend. We focus on every cent because that’s what it takes for us to get by month to month. We’re not whining, mind you, because we are thankful for what we have, but I will confess to a certain amount of irritation when the leader of the free world casts people like us as unthinking, uncaring, wasteful foulers of planet Earth. We are not uneducated, unsophisticated, un-environmentally aware cretins. And neither are we ignorant, nor unmindful of the speed with which our work product has become worth less and less over these last three difficult and punitive years, because on all that, we can also do simple kitchen-table math.

Profiteering

2011-03-09T19:18:00.000-08:00

Profiteering is back in vogue. There's no other way to look at gasoline prices at the pump than to call them profiteering. There is no worldwide shortage of crude (like there was when the oil fields of Qtar burned after Desert Storm). There is no lack of capacity (like there briefly was after Katrina). There IS a deep recession in the US economy--let's not split hairs about it, shall we? It's still a recession for everybody except "dismal scientists" until unemployment is below 5%. That equates to a national emergency.

Could we just get real about it, the endless dithering inside the DC beltway notwithstanding. There is a national emergency happening now. Yet, the price of the fuel we need to get to work, drop and pickup the kids at school, go to the store for groceries, go to the doctor for the required checkup, haul the goods, pick up the garbage, plow, plant and harvest the fields, run the few factories we have left, has shot up as though oil field armageddon has hit. It hasn't and it isn't likely to. Libya is still producing. The Suez canal is open. The Saudi's have said they will replace any lack of production to prevent any disruption in supply. China's consumption is down. Overall reserves are up. And yet, we are getting punked at the pump, and we do not "drill, baby, drill!" because we can't get permits for that. There was this spill in the Gulf which caused a phantom disaster. I see the commercials--The Gulf Coast is open for business! Just not for deep drilling.

Just as with the speculation in the housing market, the speculation in the oil market has quietly ballooned like an aneurism. And like an aneurism, it is likely to burst, and do horrendous damage when it does. Then, of course, we'll all cry out for triage, and then we'll get, what? Another stimulus? Meanwhile, enormous hidden systemic damage will have been done. More For Sale signs. More Closed signs. More tiny chisel marks on the face of America inflicted by chislers busy profiteering during this crisis.

9 years on

2010-09-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

I was in NYC on 9-11. For five days I roamed those wounded streets in the aftermath. I saw the ascendancy of the human spirit in those New Yorkers as they dug out the remains and carted off the bodies of the fallen. I read the most piteous signs people put up, "Has anyone, anyone, seen . . .?" I pray for all those New Yorkers directly and indirectly affected by that unconscionable, despicable, corruption bloated evil. Let New Yorkers have their peace to mourn and to heal! Respect them! Console them! But let them grieve in peace. A pox upon those measly, contemptible men and women who would seek to filch a shred of political or religious gain from those most detestable evil acts. A pox, I say, upon all their houses!

The King is dead, his replacement is in South Beach

2010-07-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

Nobody can fault LeBron James for joining up with his pals Bosh and Wade in Miami to try and win an NBA championship. That’s why they play the games. Let’s be fair, he gave seven good years to Cleveland. He paid his hometown dues. He earned, as they say in big-time sports, his payday.
What we can and should fault LeBron for, though, is the manner in which he did it. Let’s put the best face on it and say it was a poorly-conceived marketing event gone badly awry. By endeavoring to make a grand gesture on a grand stage for a grand plan, and thus launch the new era of his career with huge positive fanfare, King James, in a stunning one-hour mock-event, came off looking more like King Henry VIII—mean, small, selfish, defensive and haughty. James dumped Cleveland much as Henry dumped Katherine of Aragon, in a glaring public spectacle, with dubious rationale, utter selfishness and needless over-the-top pageantry.
Not as tone deaf (and we should all hope not as prescient) as “Bad Newz Kennels,” this, “The Decision,” was similar in that its details were delegated to and orchestrated end-to-end by James’ closest lifelong cronies, guys from his childhood who glommed onto James at an early age and never bothered to learn the subtleties of the craft of public relations, so busy have they been at harvesting the superstar’s low-hanging fruit. They learned to throw his weight around, though, and that’s what “The Decision” looked like—James, throwing his weight around for all to see on national TV. “Look at me! I’m BIG; really BIG.” He almost salvaged some measure of grace by contributing all of the proceeds from “The Decision” to the Boys and Girls Clubs, but he blew it in the end when he ad-libbed, “maybe another LeBron James will come outta one of those clubs.” We can only hope . . .
“The Decision” and all the preliminaries leading up to it, in a single stroke, morphed James's image from the noble, dutiful, devoted scion of a struggling hometown, into LeBron James, the crass commercialist who speaks of himself in the third person, whose disdain for his adoring hometown fans is only exceeded by his desire for more loot and more luster. In that regard, even if none of the other aspects of it pan out, his decision to “take my talents to South Beach,” was right on pitch.

Go, went, gone

2010-06-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

Every time I read "he had went" or "I had went" in a sports story or a news story I cringe. How hard is it to use the "to go" verb correctly? Consider the following: "Reid was a big reach who wouldn't have stood a chance of being drafted had the Thunder not went out on a limb with him." That is what one unidentified sportswriter wrote--not in a blog post, not in a tweet, but on a respected news outlet (FOXSports) presumably after having passed the piece by an editor or two.

I'll admit that a verb conjugation error (not to mention the "out on a limb with him" metaphor mashup) in a wrapup story assigning grades to all the NBA teams for their performances in the draft isn't going to cause any harm to the language, but it would have been a nice touch if Fox had gone out (or is it "went out"?) and drafted a competent copy reader who knew standard journalistic style and how to employ it.

Reynolds Harbinger of NBA Draft Trend

2010-06-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

Item from Miami Herald, "Villanova's Scottie Reynolds has become the first AP All-American since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976 not to be taken in the NBA draft."
A 34-year streak is broken. Bear in mind, this is a 4-year player (point guard) who averaged 18.2 points as a senior, has not been seriously injured, and as a point guard had a positive 1.24 assist to turnover ratio in a big-time college program (Villanova). First team AP All-American. Either this is an anomaly, or it is the harbinger of a trend.
The first senior player taken in the draft went at number 23. Two data points do not a trend make, but the phenomenon of college seniors faring poorly in the NBA draft has been inflating for some time. As the one and done draft pick numbers have dramatically increased, the later-year college players entrances into the draft have concurrently fallen.
What does this mean for college basketball players in the US? It means more and more of them will go to Europe, Taiwan, China, Korea, South America, Africa, Australia and elsewhere in the global bball arena. As the global rise of high-level basketball continues its explosive growth, the market for experienced, so-called “high Basketball IQ” players increases with that growth. Tools a successful four-year player in any college basketball program bring with him are a “high basketball IQ” and a high-level skill like scoring, rebounding, shot-blocking, playing defense, running a ballclub on the floor or some combination of all these. Any on of those characteristics makes him a commodity worth having in nascent basketball regions.
On the other hand, there will be some who, like the Boston Celtics great point guard Danny Ainge, drafted in the old third-round (now somewhat optimistically called “free agency”) will rise to elite levels in the NBA. These “diamonds in the rough,” guys like Scottie Reynolds could be, will find a home either somewhere in the NBA, Chinese Basketball Association, Developmental League, or in the other exponentially expanding international leagues. But NBA Gms and Coaches , as coldly analytical as they all are and must be, still look for diamonds in the rough. Ainge now the Celtics GM, for one, knows and understands their value all too well.

The Great LeBrotto

2010-05-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

The most interesting take I have seen on "The Great LeBrotto of 2010" is the recent post in Forbes magazine which predicts the Knicks will get the great marketing turbine because, "this January they (the Knicks) became the only franchise that can use their stock as currency. They cannot pay James (directly) with MSG stock because it would violate the league's collective bargaining agreement. But there is nothing to stop James from buying shares of MSG with his money. This would allow James to in essence work for himself and capture the upside in revenue from higher ratings on the MSG RSN, a soon-to-be renovated Madison Square Garden and much higher profits he will bring to these platforms." This is a compelling argument for James, if he wants to be an "owner," and if making money is his core issue.

It's difficut to imagine that building an entire team around him pretty much from scratch, which is what he and the Knicks would have to do, makes any sense to him at his next team since he's been doing that in Cleveland ever since they won the First LeBrotto.

My personal belief, though, and I know this is hopelessly romantic, is that he's most interested in having some fun and winning some championships. His brand equity is already far beyond internationally platinum, and, unless he does something too stupid to even contemplate, it will remain so for many years to come. Plus he already makes, has made, will make colossal lucre.

Who wins The Great LeBrotto of 2010? Who knows? My personal favorite scenario is Dallas with Dirk voluntarily taking a giant salary cut to make it happen, Phil signing a huge contract to coach them and Chris Bosh joining in for good measure. Hey, it's my blog, and I can dream, can't I?

Whoever gets LeBron's imprimatur, it will be almost as much fun watching the contortions the owners and the commentators put themselves through as it will be guessing which team will win The Great Lebrotto.

Those Entrusted To Keep ALive The Vox Populi

2009-06-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote of Political Writers:
"He that shall peruse the political pamphlets of any past reign will wonder why they were so eagerly read, or so loudly praised. Many of the performances which had power to inflame factions, and fill a kingdom with confusion, have now very little effect upon a frigid critic; and the time is coming when the compositions of later hirelings shall lie equally despised. In proportion as those who write on temporary subjects are exalted above their merit at first, they are afterwards depressed below it; nor can the brightest elegance of diction, or most artful subtilty of reasoning, hope for much esteem from those whose regard is no longer quickened by curiosity or pride."
Johnson: Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751)

When we look back at the commentary on the current local, national, international political landscape during this first six months of the current administration, we shall all exclaim--"My GOd! What kool-aid were those keepers of the public's need to know drinking?" How could they squander opportunity after opportunity to pin down the "teleprompter" president? How did they lose track of their responsibility to report the truth which they so richly congratulated themselves for doing during the previous administration? Where is the Klieg light of investigative journalism shining here? On the president's tobacco habit? On the first lady's organic garden patch?

Give us back our voice! This inexplicable dumb-show of sewn-mouth marionettes must end. Report! Account for yourselves! You are the true guardians of civilization--the press corps of the free world--report! Be journalists! Report!

The Post-Intelligence-er era

2009-03-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

This week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased regular publication and became a completely online, all-digital publication. Another daily newspaper stopped the presses.

Their press release yelped, “The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper, Seattle's oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers.” All those “weekday readers” can now go online for their news. In Seattle the daily newspaper has gone the way of that other staple of the fish business, the ice house.

The story went on, “The new operation will be more than a newspaper online, Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said. The so-called ‘community platform’ will feature breaking news, columns from prominent Seattle residents, community databases, photo galleries, 150 citizen bloggers and links to other journalistic outlets.” So, news, sports, weather and opinion—150 “citizen bloggers” worth of opinion. Oh, goodie, more “_____ sucks” journalism from “citizen bloggers.” Deep dishes from “prominent” citizens. Oooo! I’m getting chills.

Another AOL warmed up with “local content.” How visionary.

“Links to other journalistic outlets” means AP, Reuters, BBC, CNN, Fox—the same stories written by the same people working from the same second-hand facts.

Welcome to the post-intelligence-er era.

Ordinary Citizens

2009-02-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve encountered the term “ordinary citizens” in my daily reading of news reports with disturbing frequency lately. I make no apology for this bit of pedantry, but the uniquely American idea is that all of us citizens are “ordinary citizens.” That is what is meant by “equality.” So, why the insistence on this differentiation?

I grew up white and fatherless in Montgomery, Alabama in the fifties and sixties. Chaos, destruction, anger, violence, fear, suspicion and outright hatred permeated the cultural atmosphere. It was a time between worlds, as Matthew Arnold put it, “the one dead; the other, powerless to be born.”

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Meredith, Floyd McKissick, Bull Connor, John Patterson, George Wallace, Bobby Kennedy, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, strode across our lives playing out the end-games of official institutional racism—the, let it be said here, ubiquitous Jim Crow civil and social system. This was not just a southern thing, it was an American thing. Churches, schools, community centers, hospitals, YMCAs and YWCAs—every single aspect of the separate-but-(un)equal culture was shattered. Old ways came to an end. Nobody knew what the new ways would be.

In more ways than we ordinary citizens yet know, it’s like that now.

To make matters even more complicated, there was also a war on, and it brought the forced conscription of young men around Montgomery county. The young men taken were mostly the black and the un-well-connected white. Jim Crow working unimpeded at the Federal level.

We lived our day-to-day lives inside a tornado roaring through a bone-yard.

Fifty years on, the civil system in the US—the core institution of the old institutional racism, holding its power as it always has by structural process and political appointment—remains. No longer the exclusive provenance of white people, the civil system is multi-racial and multi-cultural. It retains its steely grip on the real levers of power—the ability to operate “the system,” the sure but mostly unseen hands administering the rules that direct, control and influence the daily behavior of ordinary people. Barak Obama’s triumph is as much a signal of the change in this system as anything else. Surely, and all to the good, Mr. Attorney General Holder notwithstanding, it is not about race anymore.

In the modern civil system, we have exchanged the Jim Crow positioning of African Americans at the bottom rung of society for a far less-obvious, more sophisticated but similarly insidious system devoted to the civil positioning of ordinary Americans without regard to race, creed or national origin. The modern system is based, as it really has always been, on economics and influence. The working and the non-working poor, the old, the sick, the un-or-poorly-educated, the fringe-religious, the drug addicted, the foster-system-ed, the illegally or dubiously resident, the un-credentialed, and the newly scandalized and always manipulable—the un-creditworthy—have replaced the ham-handed color-profiling civil system extant under Jim Crow.

These new “untouchables” of the civil caste system are the modern grist for the institutional grinding wheel—not so readily identifiable as by the color of our skins, but just as easily targetable by the new-breed manipulators who own unfettered access to our information, our systemic fingerprint, our social and cultural identity.

The N-words and the J-words, and the S-words, and the C-words, and the W-words of 20th century America have been replaced by a 21st century profile generated from answers to a series of questions which feed the new –ism Gnostic code. What is your credit score? Do you have insurance? What is your social security number, your driver’s license number, or your government-issued ID number? Who has custody of your children? Are both biological parents present in the home? What was your taxable income the last three years? Do you own or rent? Do you receive or are you required to pay child support? Do you have a chronic illness? Heart disease? Diabetes? Do you have a disability or some other personal situation which causes you to be unable to work? Are you obese? Do you use or have you ever used tobacco? Have you now or have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease? Are you HIV positive? Do you have a compromised immune system? Do you take prescription drugs? Brand name or generic? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have you ever been arrested? Would you take a drug test?

From the answers comes your “ordinary citizen” profile, your consequently assigned place in the civil hierarchy.

People insist on continuing to ask, is racism alive in America? Oh, yes, the same old sorry racism that across the USA exploited the labor and defenselessness of women like Rosa Parks, that stoked the angst of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, and John Carlos, that prompted The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King to re-invent non-violent civil disobedience for America.

Pause to ponder that—Civil disobedience.

Everyone knows that on many levels, racism still lurks among us. We don’t need a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Or an Eric Holder to remind us of our old and current racial sins. We are culturally, like the oft caricatured repentant drunk “taking the cure,” forever trying to do better. But our credibility is shot, our past overshadows our present, and nobody really wants to let us forget it. That’s just how it is right now. How it is.

But the racism debate is a red herring.

What’s lost in all our learned and emotional discussions of racism, of institutionalized racism, is that the civil system, populated with an overwhelming majority of white people during Jim Crow, but today a modern marvel of diversity, exerts ever more complete control over our ordinary citizen lives, our opportunities, our access to capital, education, healthcare, utilities, transportation, technology, child care, elder care, and on and on. And while the old methodology of institutional racism against black people has fallen away, the new methods, casting their much wider net of civil-control, achieve the old ends far more efficiently. Here, the “beyond-ordinary citizens” achieve their inflated status.

We need look no further than the immediate past presidential election. The winner of the election is clearly a fortuitous anomaly. Thank God that barrier is breached forever. But the practical. on-the-ground mechanics of Barak Obama’s electoral victory lead us to one inevitable conclusion. Our national and local political apparatus clearly wants us to continue to stay racially and culturally divided, to get us to continue to vote in blocs, to remain, for their purposes, predictable—“working-class white” vs African Americans vs Hispanics vs Indian-Americans vs Asian Americans. Picking at the scabs over the old wounds of racism keeps us comfortably divided and eminently predictable.

How is that system any different than the Jim Crow system?

Our best thinking and our best exhortations would lead us to say, would that our race would rise up, that it would set aside its differences as to color and gender and creed and national origin. Would that our race would confront today’s injustices not as the scion of Jim Crow’s racial system, but as the scion of Jim Crow’s civil system. Would that our race, our human race, might stand together and proclaim that the least able of America are as worthy as the most able, should have the same access to the national bounty in clean water, air, power, fuel, technology, education, healthcare, opportunity, and that every person in the US merits the respect and deference given to kings from birth right through to the natural ends of our lives. Would that as a race of enlightened humans, we might see past our own petty and narrow prejudices, and view a far greater vista for ourselves. That we would all see one another as “ordinary citizens.”

That was and is the uniquely American idea. That is the idea of “all men are created equal.” Race-baiting from whatever perspective serves one and only one purpose—to keep us diverted from that idea, from that core principle. Racial and social injustices are real. The horrors perpetrated in the name of the superiority of one race over another, one gender over another, one religion over another, one national origin over another, one tribe over another have happened and continue to happen around the globe. Just ask a Bosnian, or a Serb, or a Hutu, or a Tutsi, or a Sunni or a Shiite, or a Christian. Asking people to forget those horrors, or to just get over them, is like asking an amputee to forget the lost limb. Not happening.

Remember, then, the chaos and the horror of what has happened as the overt result of racism, and unite in the vow to never give it place anywhere in our culture again. But with that same passion and unity, remember that racism is a vicious, despicable, intolerable tactic, but it is a tactic, employed to advance a greater strategy—the superiority of one person or one group over another.

With that distinction in mind, we must coldly look to the other –isms in America, economic-ism, age-ism, sex-ism, health-ism, greed-ism, child exploitation-ism, self-aggrandizement-ism, and any other –ism (the glorification of the trivial-ism, for example) which seeks to vault one person’s fundamental civil status above another and confront them for what they have always been, the most sinister -ism of all, the tyranny of civil institutions-ism, the tyranny of the institutional state over its ordinary citizenry. Americans are all “ordinary citizens”: nothing more; nothing less.

Forget that, move beyond that, and all hope for the uniquely American idea lies slain.

NOT GOING GENTLE . . .

2009-02-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .”
From: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” 1952

Several of my 60-ish and 70-ish friends have confided to me recently they are giving up, going on unemployment until they can draw Social Security, or going for “early retirement” which means drawing a slightly diminished SS check and opting into Medicare at the earliest possible moment. It’s just too hard to find a decent job or to start a business in “these economic times.”

Eight months ago most people never used the words, “the economy” in a sentence even once in a week. They were too busy using the words that are making a comeback now, “gas prices.” Now they say, ”the economy” or “this economy” every couple of hours. We’re scared and demoralized. The president scared us even more so he could get his precious stimulus bill passed. It passed. $13 more a week (if you’re working) starting around June. Oo-rah!

Then what?

Part of the problem is the age-discrimination thing. It’s hard to get people excited about it. What with so many single moms needing in-vitro fertilization and all. The forty-somethings at the bureaus which are supposed to enforce the laws against ageism have no vested interest in vigorously doing that. They think, “what if I need that job? Why should it go to or stay with that old person?” We’re used to that thinking because we subscribed to it back in the me-decades, the seventies, eighties and nineties. What goes around . . .

What my 60ish and 70ish fellows really mean is, “I’m dropping off the grid.” We’ll draw our puny government assistance all right—we deserve it; we paid into it all these years. But we’ll do things for which we can get paid in cash, and like Daschle or Geithner, we’ll forget to report it. Hey, we’re old, our memories are going.

This is how we’ll get our revenge against the marginalization of our kind—us old folks. We’ll babysit, carpenter, yardwork, powerwash, appliance-fix, car-fix, odd-job, flyer-handout, business-consult and any number of other invisible economy jobs, and the government won’t get the benefit of our taxes any more, or of our individual and collective wisdom (which it clearly doesn’t want, representing as it does, according to that limp-viper, Harry Reid, the “failed thinking of the past.”

Fail this!

Oh no, we’ll NOT go gentle into the good night of desperation and compliant despair, walking lockstep into the faceless maw of government-run warehouses for the old; we’ll coldly, quietly, invisibly, with all the beauty, cunning and calculation of that most elegant villanelle, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Moving on . . .

2009-01-16T13:27:00.000-08:00

In praise of letting go

My son, Josh, told me Eric Clapton won’t perform his “Tears in Heaven” anymore. Fortunately, we have plenty of high quality versions of Clapton singing that timeless paean to loss and guilt, so we are none the poorer. He’s moved on. Authentic grief has a duration; there comes a time for the letting go.
Disbelief and outrage at the loss of people's life savings in the market debacle have given way to a kind of empty-socket dull ache. Kubler-Ross called it acceptance, but I do not think people have actually accepted their losses so much as they have only become inured to them. So many people have lost so much. Now, it’s hard to get even mildly exercised about another story of a fund emptied, another scumbag “financial advisor” absconding with his ill-gotten gains. I'm bone weary of brokerage commercials beating their Lipper averages at us. They must think people are over the horror too. It’s been like watching a blowout bowl game narrated by a commentator with a three metaphor vocabulary. “Market Hit Again”; “Stocks Rebound Briefly Then Fade” ; “Carnage Continues In Financial Sector.” Can we let go of the great 2008 disaster—the grieving for everyone, everywhere’s defenestrated financials? Let’s move on.
How about those bailouts? I’m not even going there. The fatigue is crushing.
Up next, the "Green” tsunami. Everywhere I look declarations of Green-ness wail their declarations that they are not boiling the planet. It’s not us, we’re GREEN! Everything from concrete trucks to plastic grocery sacks claim to be “Green.” A lithe barista wished me a “Green” day. “Have a green day!”
Oy.
Will the immense mounds of refuse the crowds at the inauguration leave behind be “Green?” I have the distinct impression that it will be a long, long time before we can move on from green . . .

Civility-Snarkility

2009-01-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

WSJ writer David Ulin wrote today about “Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation” by David Denby. Ulin quotes Denby, “I think it's reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want? . . . What kind of national conversation?" And then Ulin goes on to say, “what we need is a revolution in sensibility, a return to civil discourse, a way of opening, rather than closing down, debate."

Civility is a choice. Snarkility is a choice. The snarkist’s shtick is, “we give you pukes out there just what you deserve.” The civilist’s shtick is, “we tell you what you need to know with respect."

I’m not really bothered by either attitude. I remember them from jr. high. In both camps, if you’re in, you’re cool. If not, you’re worse than excrement. The one says it overtly; the other obliquely. It’s a convenient way to ascertain the world.

“In the context of no context,” author George W. S. Trow warned us this was coming. He wrote of the changes in how we do “History” and of the decline of adulthood:
HISTORY
History had been the record of growth, conflict, and destruction.

THE NEW HISTORY
The New History was the record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there. . . In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.

What is now counted as powerful in modern discourse is how many “views” can you “document,” not how compelling or convincing is your argument. What may be off-putting about the snarkists is they are offensive. They are, however, in the parlance of the new history, aligned with the current demographic lunge; thence, successful. Civilists are out. Dead meat.

If one is being ingenuous when engaging in discourse, one wants the other party to at least comprehend one’s point. One hopes to, if not convince outright, at least move the other person one's way. Civility for its own sake won’t accomplish that, but it may potentiate that. Snarkility doesn’t give a flying ____ whether it’s comprehended; it just wants to be seen to look good.

What kind of journalistic culture do we want? One that tells us things we would not otherwise know. Whether the tone of the telling is civil or snarky, let stories be told, let facts come out, let pictures be painted, let revealing words flow, let things that could not be measured be told anyway. Let more than what is cool to say be said. Let the free press discover its voice and let that voice yawp out something worth its hearing.

In Defense of Peggy Noonan

2009-01-10T06:37:00.000-08:00

"In the afternoon they came unto a land,
In which it seemed always afternoon."

It's afternoon in America, when soap operas reign and old movies run. When kids come home from school hungry for a snack and ready for a nap. When old folks actually do nap. When the crews go out and open or change the direction of the HOV lanes. When shifts change. When chefs put the evening's roasts in their ovens. When the lines grow longer at Starbucks, and people think about their plans for the night. Did I set my TiVo for the new shows? What am I wearing to the club? Do I need to pick up something for dinner?

We have a new president this afternoon. He'll either be an effective communicator and an effective congressional arm-twister or he won't. He'll either influence the oil sheiks or he won't. He'll stoke the fires of trade or he won't. He'll create new programs that'll get passed and even funded or they won't.

The same hustlers will make a boodle of money off his stimuli that made a boodle of money off the mortgage giveaways. Businesses will go in and out of business. The wars will wind down and up depending on how much vigor the radical islamists have and how much will we’ll have to push back. People will pay more or less taxes, but they’ll pay taxes. The “system” will grow and grow and grow.

But, President Obama cannot supernaturally fix the ills of America's generational entitlement programs. He will not make "every man (or woman) a king." He won't put a chicken in every pot and a car in every covered parking space. He will not provide free healthcare or free post-secondary education for our kids, and grandkids. He won't make public transit free. He won't do these and many more of the things a large percentage of the people who voted for him believe he will do because those things are not do-able by anyone. They are not do-able.

In her column in the Wall Street Journal this week, Peggy Noonan (among other things) is saying these things and more are actually believed by a large number of Americans--that a president can actually cause these things to come to pass. If we can blame a president for the destruction caused by a hurricane, then we can expect a president to fix social security--how hard could that be compared to stopping a hurricane? We can expect a president to provide universal, high quality healthcare. We can expect a president to keep oil prices low and make wind and solar power cost-effective, and find real life on Mars.
But Peggy said something else--there are large numbers of people in the 24/7 news cycle business, who actually believe a president can do these things, and they want to believe Barak Obama is the president who will do them. That is what she meant by “awe.” It's as if they believe the movie stars they salivate about all the time are actually the people they play in the movies. They seem to think being glib, handsome, slender and buff make you politically efficacious. They do not.

Presidents don't have the power to do the things a great and growing number of people believe they have the power to do. They can't prevent suffering. They can't prevent natural disasters, or even man-made economic disasters. They can't, with the stroke of a pen, change the economic climate, or actually put your out of work uncle back to work, or heal your Aunt Edith's lung cancer, or ease the pain of loss when your child dies in battle. They are just humans. They do not possess these powers.

If it seems as though I am selling our new president short, that is not my intention. I'm just saying what Peggy Noonan is saying--running for office isn't the same as being in office. Presidents are just humans. So, let's just get real.