Lance Mannion

The President and the responsible, grown-up Republicans

The timing is bad, that’s for sure, with Christmas and Hanukah coming up.

But Lame Duck Sessions happen when they happen.

From yesterday’s New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday announced a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers as he sought to address concerns over high annual deficits and appealed to Republicans to find a common approach to restoring the nation’s economic and fiscal health.

I gather that the general assumption on the progressive side of the bandwidth is that this is another case of the President pre-emptively surrendering to the Republicans in the hopes that another show of weakness will soften their stony hearts and open them up to realizing the dream of bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake.

I don’t know.  I have a hard time believing the President is an idiot.

I don’t think he’s surrendering to the Republicans.  My bet is he’s surrendering to Evan Bayh.

Or Ben Nelson.

Or Blanche Lincoln.

Or Bryon Dorgan.

Or Joe Lieberman.

Or maybe it’s one or more of the other conservative and corporate friendly Democrats.  Max Baucus, Mary Landrieu, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, and, apparently depending on their moods, Claire McCaskill and Jay Rockefeller.

There are Republicans the President and the Democrats need to win over in order to get any of the things that need to get done before the session ends passed---passing the DREAM act, extending the tax cuts for the middle class, repealing DADT, ratifying START---none of this makes it through the Senate unless Harry Reid can break the inevitable Republican filibusters and to do that he needs at least one Republican to vote to get himself or herself primary-ed by the Tea Partiers. 

So maybe this isn’t a surrender to the Republicans as much as it’s a cover for Snowe, Collins, or Brown.

But this assumes that all those Democrats named above are on board, and that’s not something that can be assumed.

It only takes one of them breaking ranks to gum up the works, and Bayh,  Ben Nelson, Lincoln, Dorgan, and Lieberman have done that before or threatened to.

Ben Nelson has been exceptionally difficult.

Landrieu and Bill Nelson have caused trouble too, and I suspect Baucus has raised objections that amounted to threats behind closed doors.

Remember, Baucus, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, making him one of the the most powerful members of Congress, helped make a mess of the Health Care Debate with his endless and futile Gang of Six negotiations and, if I recall correctly, had as much to do with limiting the size of the stimulus as Larry Summers.

Whenever anybody asks where all the responsible, grown-up Republicans have gone, the answer ought to be, “Into the Democratic Party.”

I used to see it noted regularly that the Democrats have not had a Progressive majority in either house since they took over in 2006.  This seems to have been forgotten over the last year and a half. 

Effectively, the President has had to deal with a conservative majority and, if you look at it realistically---or charitably, depending---he and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have been pretty successful in getting so many conservatives to break ranks so many times.

The downside to this has been the things that have looked “Republican” if not out and out Right Wing to many Progressives.

These things, of course, have not looked Republican to most Republicans.

The corporate friendly features we call Republican are in fact conservative and they’re there because the President has compromised with the conservatives in his own party in order to get them to compromise back by voting for the liberal and more or less liberal features we like or at least find acceptable or are resigned to living with as the best we can hope for, for now.

If you can read the President’s mind then you know how compromised he’s felt by these compromises.

I can’t read his mind, but the circumstantial evidence is piling up against him.

The point is that it’s not the Republicans who’ve been pushing him around.

The President took office with 56 Democratic Senators and Bernie Sanders.  Arlen Specter was still a Republican, Al Franken was far from a certain winner, and Joe Lieberman was Joe Lieberman.  He started the job without the 60 votes need for cloture and there was good reason to think that he wouldn’t have them for at least two years.  What did he plan to do?  What did Harry Reid plan to do?

Apparently, they had no plan for dealing with Republican obstructionism except to appeal to the consciences of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and George Voinovich and then trick Judd Gregg into giving up his Senate seat for the job of Secretary of Commerce and then have the Democratic governor of New Hampshire appoint his replacement.

In short, the plan, as much as it was a plan, was to always to depend on a supermajority to pass the most important pieces of legislation, and once that became the plan each single conservative Democrat became a little king or queen who had to be courted and placated and otherwise kowtowed to.

I’m not sure what should have been the plan.

The rule changes that would have helped needed the support of the conservative Democrats who would have been voting to give up all that power.

The only other suggestions I’ve ever heard were along the lines of “The President needs to get tougher” but the suggestions didn’t include any specific ideas on what getting tougher would mean.

I’m not a fan of Harry Reid as majority leader.  I think Chuck Schumer could do a better job of putting the fear of God into people.

But that’s something I think, not something I know, and I have no idea how he would go about scaring the likes of Max Baucus or Bill Nelson or Jay Rockefeller.

What was needed was a brilliant persuader and deal-maker, someone who could convince conservative colleagues, even colleagues as conservative as Orrin Hatch, that on this particular issue or that, they were more of a closet liberal than they themselves had ever suspected.

More and more, I’m convinced that losing Ted Kennedy was a bigger blow than we yet know.

I’d like to have seen what Ted would have done with the miserable specimen that is Evan Bayh.

Over at TPM, Brian Beutler says that just about everybody hates the pay freeze, except Republicans.

But I’m not so sure.

From a post by Matt Yglesias the week after the election:

Evan Bayh thinks “Democrats should support a freeze on federal hiring and pay increases. Government isn’t a privileged class and cannot be immune to the times.”

That sounds awful familiar.

This is why I think that when the history of Obama’s first term is written, the focus won’t be as much on his failure to thwart the Republicans, because, after all, they were pretty much thwarted.  Unthwarted Republicans would have defeated the Affordable Care Act entirely, the auto industry bailout, any regulation of Wall Street and the banks and the credit card industry, all the emergency spending programs.

The focus will be on the President’s dealings with conservative Democrats.

Wherever the Republicans weren’t thwarted, it was because a Democrat refused to help break a filibuster.

Come January, Bayh, along with Dorgan and Lincoln and Specter will be gone, and good riddance.  But so will Russ Feingold.  And Illinois will have a Republican Senator and we didn’t pick up Ohio or New Hampshire or Missouri which was at one time a realistic hope.

There’s no chance for supermajority.

Not that it’ll matter with the Republicans in control of the House.

So now what’s the plan?

Two years of thwarting Republican attempts to undo whatever good that’s been done?

Two years of tinkering with the budget in order to bring down the deficit to make room for whatever spending conservative Democrats and hypocritical Republicans who never met a spending program they didn’t like in their own districts will allow?

Two years of focusing on foreign policy?

Two years of hoping the economy improves enough that the President will be re-elected with long enough coattails to hold the Senate majority and win back the House?

And two frantic weeks of wheeling and dealing to keep the conservatives happy so they’ll cooperate in getting the last bits of President’s agenda passed.

That’s all I got.  What about you?

It’s the Democrats, again.  Updated in frustration: Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor are on the wrong side on repealing DADT.  Correct that.  Lincoln won’t say which side she’s on but seems to think she can get credit for being on both.  Via Greg Sargent.

On the prospect of marriage to this Glossop menace

Of course, there are probably fellows in the world---tough, hardy blokes with strong chins and glittering eyes---who could get engaged to this Glossop menace and like it; but I knew perfectly well that Biffy was not one of them.  Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.  A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table.  Brainy, moreover.  The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf, and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud.

---from The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy by P.G. Wodehouse.

“You can’t make policemen take the romantic view.”

Home from our holiday travels.  Going to relax by watching an episode of Jeeves & Wooster, "Pearls Mean Tears".  One of the sub-plots of this one is an adaptation of the story, "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy", one of my favorites not least because it includes a line that might be familiar to regular readers of this blog and proud owners of official Lance Mannion baseball caps, “You can’t make policemen take the romantic view.”

The whole episode’s on YouTube, if you care to join us.

Generations talking past each other

At B & N yesterday afternoon.  Young woman, a little past college age, there with a group of friends, crowded together around a small table, all of them women, all of them college age or, like her, maybe a little older.  Lots of movement back and forth between the table and the counter as lattes, frapacinos, coffees, and desserts are ordered and then fetched.  This particular young woman stays put, though, because she’s in a conversation with a man at a table across the way.

Not that kind of conversation.

He’s a guy in his fifties, there with his wife.  Old enough to be her father, but not acting fatherly towards her.  Friend of her father, I’m guessing, someone who’s known her from way back and feels he can speak to her frankly, with I changed your diaper authority.  Smooth bald crown, jutting chin, sweatshirt with some college’s coat of arms.  I don’t like him.

“So,” the man’s saying, “What’s the new job?”

“Recruiter,” she says.

“Recruiter?” It’s as if she said she was a wheelwright or Chinese herbalist or a circus ringmaster.  His tone practically accuses her of making up a job to pull his leg.

"I’m a recruiter,” she says again, with a note of apology, as if she’s had to explain this before, “Not with the military!  I’m working for”  She names a financial services company.  “I recruit people for their tech department.”

“What does that involve?” the man asks imperatively.  Apparently there’s a right and a wrong answer to this question, at least in his mind.  I’m thinking, What are you, interviewing her?  You’ve got a better job you’re going to offer her?

“I go out and find people to write the programs they use to figure out their trades.”

“Programmers,” he says, like a science teacher providing a particularly slow student with the technical term for the red stuff that flows through people’s veins.

She giggles nervously.  “Yes.  We call them technologists though.”

“They’re called programmers,” he says.  “People who write programs are called programmers.  Or coders.  If they write code they’re called coders.”

At this point I wanted to jump in and tell him to stop raining on her parade.  Just congratulate her and shut up.  Sounds like a good job, a rare find in this economy, with what must be a good sized and growing company if they need that many “technologists” and someone in-house to help hire and keep track of them.  And I’m guessing those couple of years that separate her from her college graduation day were filled with some stretches of unemployment.  This is good news, be happy for her, and shut up.

Of course I don’t say any of that because it’s none of my business and if I put my oar in I’d be just like this guy, another middle-aged man treating her like a child.  She’s old enough to tell him to buzz off herself and she isn’t doing it either because she’s too polite or she knows him well enough she’s used to his bullying or she just doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.

But another guy, another middle-aged man, this one without my reluctance to butt in, at the home plate of the diamond our four collective tables form, turns to her and says, “Did you major in that in school?”

“No, I majored in psychology.”

“Psychology?”

“Psychology and philosophy,” she says brightly, “It was a dual major.”

“You sure put that degree to use then.”

If there were any justice in the world last night’s evening news would have included a story about a couple of middle-aged men who were chased out into a Barnes and Noble parking lot by a gang of twentysomething women and pantsed.

I’m glad there isn’t that kind of justice because I might have been included in the young women’s rampage on general principles.

Here we are, we aging Boomers, trying to “save” Social Security for ourselves by taking away those young women’s future benefits and forcing them to work into their old ages.

Guys like this make me wonder why they aren’t doing that to us.

One reason President Bartlett loves his country

 

Happy Thanksgiving from our little, white house to yours!

Lose the motorheads, Rush, lose the nation.

Updated.

Motor Trend Magazine’s Car of the Year or as Rush Limbaugh sees it The Batmobile from the Joker’s Point of View.

The object of the Right Wing demagogues with their Dark Side of the Force Populism is to turn Americans against each other.

Every day they carve away another group of their fellow citizens and set them up as an “other” and a “them” for “us” to fear, loathe, resent, envy, and otherwise despise.

The point is to keep “us” so angry and afraid of “them” that “we” make common cause with the plutocrats who pay the demagogues’ salaries and pull their strings.  In short, instead of joining together to stand up to the plutocrats, we turn against ourselves and actually help the plutocrats.

The Tea Party wants their country back in order to make a gift of it to the Rich and save them the trouble of having to spend more to buy it all up.

This is how saving the auto industry became an act of near-treason in the minds of the very people who ought to have been cheering it on the loudest.

See, what our socialist President did was save those “others”---union workers---at the expense of “us.”

You’d think the prospect of millions of their fellow Americans losing their jobs would have brought people rallying round.

Nope.  Because those weren’t “fellow Americans.”  They weren’t part of “us.”  They were “them.”  Unions.

How dare those lazy and corrupt Unions get their bacon saved with “our” money!  How dare they expect to keep their high-paying, relatively secure jobs with good benefits while “we” proudly make do with whatever little bit the business elites who run our right to work states deign in their wisdom and charity to dole out!

I think the Union angle is only a part of Rush Limbaugh’s recent frothings at the mouth over the Chevy Volt being named Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine.

Probably he sees it as a hat-trick.  Bash the Unions, bash our socialist President, bash hippie environmentalists all in one go.

Doesn’t matter.  By now he’s bellowing like a bull trying to scratch an itch on barbed wire over something or somebody else.

But he should know, you don’t tell car nuts they don’t know from cars.

An editor from Motor Trend has taken him on over this one.

The editor doesn’t defend Motor Trend’s choice.  He trusts that his magazine’s rep and the car itself will carry the day.

He simply calls out Rush for being a ranting, unpatriotic, know-nothing gasbag who, worst of all, knows nothing about cars.

Friendly honk of the horn to Kevin Drum.

________________________

Updated with elitist chagrin:  Got a note from Gene Lyons.  Gene tells me I got it all wrong.  The evil of the Chevy Vote isn’t that it’s Union-made or that it’s part of a socialist plot or that it’s a green dream.

It’s that it’s quiet.

Gene writes, “Making noise with internal combustion engines is the redneck First Amendment. Electric cars are a sign of the Antichrist.”

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Deficit projection

The Very Serious People in Washington preaching austerity are like:

Dirty old men in backwards collars climbing to the pulpit to rail against the wantonness of the pretty young women in their congregations.

Chickenhawks screaming for war and blood and more brave sacrifices of the lives of the men and women who have actually volunteered to fight while calling voices for peace cowards and traitors.

Secret drunkards, closet gamblers, and committed adulterers railing about how it’s their lack of character that makes the poor poor.

The parents of little bullies, vandals, and cheats standing up at PTO meetings to blame other parents for not keeping their kids in line.

They are people who are trying to feel virtuous by projecting their sins onto others.

There are true believers out there, people unshakeable in their faith that the government shouldn’t do much more than pay the salaries of those whose job it is to make sure the government doesn’t do much more than pay their own salaries.

There are magical thinkers, people convinced that if the government stops spending today then, if not tomorrow, next week or next month or next year the economy will boom, industry will thrive, businesses and consumers will spend money by the basketful, and all will be well, and everything that needs to get done will get done better than it was ever done before.

There are sadists, people who just want to see others suffer and are taking advantage of hard times as an excuse to introduce their regimes of pain.  These people have the light of a holy fire in their eyes, the same light that you’d see in the eyes of the Puritan applying the lash to a bare back.

There are people who just want to see it all burn.  Alan Simspon is one of these.  There are natural builders in the world.  Men and women who can’t enter any situation without being overcome with a desire to impose their idea of order.  This can be a form of destruction in its own way.  Not all the builders are humanitarians and saints.  But the point is they want to put things together.  Well, they have their opposites.  People who want to take things apart, some for the fun of it, some out of sheer meanness and spite.  Simpson is someone who has fun being mean and spiteful.  He’s not a unique specimen.

There are the thieves and conmen and their bought and paid for henchmen in Congress, the bankers and investment brokers and corporate executives who have rigged the system as a game they can’t lose in which they play with other people’s lives and livelihoods.  They are the plutocrats and their parasites who have decided that workers are merely costs to be controlled and customers are resources to be gouged like mountainsides in West Virginia until they are stripped bare of their last dime.

There are the journalists and “analysts” who apologize for the above and serve their interests because they provide jobs for their spouses and children and plump up their 401k’s and make it possible for them to live like millionaires without having to work as hard as thieves and conmen themselves.

And there are the rank hypocrites, greedy and selfish people who know what the problem is and know what needs to be done---the government is running out of money because it can’t take in enough revenue and the easiest, most efficient, and most useful way for the government to increase revenue is to raise taxes---and they don’t want to be among the ones who have to pay for it.  Preaching austerity, for others to practice and endure, is a dodge.  It’s a method for deflecting the accusation of a vice by asserting a virtue.

But they’re all hypocrites, including the true believers and magical thinkers, first, in substituting the profession of an assumed virtue, and a virtue that other people have to put into practice, but second and most important, in that they are the ones who got us into this mess!

Joe Klein gets at this in TIME:

The release of another budget-balancing proposal, this from the Obama deficit-reduction commission's co-chairmen, has unleashed a volcanic eruption of hurrahs from the Olympian peaks of the Establishment — and reflexive harrumphs from the left and right. In the past, I've been a reliable hurrah monger. We do have a long-term structural deficit problem. The largest items in the budget — old-age entitlements, especially — are likely to grow in the future, and we have to pay for them. The solution to this problem is simple: pay for them. Bill Clinton proved the relative ease of starting along this path. He raised taxes on the wealthy and balanced the budget, with the help of a strong economy. (Clinton might have enacted some humane entitlement reform in 1998, but for an intern problem.) Even George W. Bush lets slip in his autobiography that the tax increase imposed by his father in 1990 "benefited" — that is, helped close — the budget deficit. Young Bush then helped reopen the deficit with outlandish tax cuts and two wars for which he refused to pay. These were policies endorsed by many of those yawping the loudest about the need for deficit reduction now…

<snip>

Why are we spending so much time and effort bloviating about long-term deficits and so little trying to untangle the immediate economic mess that we're in?

Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that so many of the people whinnying the loudest are prominent members of the financial community, the sector that has had the most to do with hollowing out our manufacturing base and creating the Ponzi scheme in housing that caused the 2008 bust. After all that uncreative destruction, they need to polish their high-minded credentials.

There is, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was featured on the New York Times op-ed page recently in defense of the deficit commission, describing the problem this way: "We have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford." This is the same Glenn Hubbard who served as George W. Bush's chief economic adviser when Dick Cheney was saying that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." One imagines that if Hubbard was so concerned about deficits, he might have resigned in protest from an Administration dedicated to creating them. But, no, he's here to speak truth to the powerless — to the middle-class folks whose major asset, their home, was trashed by financial speculators, thereby wrecking their retirement plans and creating the consumer implosion we're now suffering. Hubbard is telling them they now have to take yet another hit, on their old-age pensions and health insurance, for the greater good.

Klein doesn’t let conservative Democrats off the hook:

The obsession with long-term deficits is not limited to conservatives. Exuberantly wealthy center-left types who staged a leveraged buyout of the Democratic Party's economic policies in the 1980s — people like the deficit commission's Democratic co-chair, Erskine Bowles — have been reliable foghorns for long-term middle-class sacrifice. They tended to be big supporters of the irresponsible federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and most egregiously, they shepherded the deregulation of the financial sector through Congress in the late 1990s.

All of them, the true believers and the magical thinkers, the sadists and arsonists, the conmen, thieves, plutocrats, and parasites, and the plain old hypocrites have this in common.  They think the main purpose of life is to pocket every nickel and dime they can lay their hands on, they think government exists, to the degree they’ll allow it to exist, to make it easy for them to get their hands on money and more money, and so it’s fine for them if the plutocrats run the show because the plutocrats will see it that that’s what the government does.

These people are like termites who see a house as just a great big meal and they’ve eaten their way through every last beam and joist, and now with the whole thing crashing down on top of everybody, they’re blaming the house for being so tasty and the wood for not being in endless supply.

What the termites want now is for the house to rebuild itself, at its own expense, while the termites go on feasting.

Faced with the wreckage they’ve caused, threatened with the prospect that there might not be even sawdust left for them to gorge on, knowing what needs to be done---raising their taxes, as I’ve said, placing limits on their greed and restricting the scope of their bad behavior, enforcing rules, jail time---they are far from ready to fess up to their sins and their mistakes and their crimes and they have no intention of mending their ways.

So they talk.

How much easier it is, and how good it feels, to talk piously about forcing other people into church.

____________________

More to make you mad.  Bill Moyers on the making of our plutocracy, via TYWKIFWDBI.

A whale for the saving

Is it worth trying to save a beached whale?  The concern is that whatever drove the whale to shore will do it again after it’s been put back to sea or that the stranding itself delivers an injury or a shock the whale never recovers from.  That’s if the whale survives ashore long enough to be saved.  Few do.

Well…

One morning in November 2000, a large humpback whale was found stranded on a beach near Ubatuba, Brazil, clinging to life in the crashing surf. It didn't take long before a team was assembled of nearly one hundred fishermen, firefighters, biologists, and locals who began working tirelessly to return the struggling animal back to sea -- and after twelve long hours, they were successful. Still, as that whale slipped beneath the waves and out of sight, those volunteers could only hope their efforts were not in vain, knowing full well that the whale's chances of survival were slim. But now, after ten years of guessing, rescuers are finally sure the whale is alive and well -- because they've seen it.

Read all of Stephen Messenger’s story, Whale Saved 10 Years Ago Reunites With Rescuers, at Treehugger.

Falling in love with a life of adventure when the grown-ups want you to go into accounting

An all too typical teenager reaches desperately for his cell phone which he needs to send an important update to his Facebook status.

Sometimes I think the point of stories like this is to console ambitious parents and give them something to blame when their formerly bright, vivacious, cheerful, and promising darling children turn into…teenagers!

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

The devil is in the BlackBerry, in this one, when he’s not in the computer, but before this there were probably very similar articles that found him lurking on the internet and uploaded onto iPods and racking up overage charges on the cell.

Moving backwards into the 20th Century he was found playing video games, refusing to remove the headphones on his Walkman, watching too much television, listening to rock and roll on the radio, talking on the telephone, going to the movies.  Wherever there was a form of mass communication that attracted the attention of bored teenagers, the devil opened up a booth and sold tickets, taking breaks now and then to give interviews to feature writers looking for a trend they could sell to fretful and disappointed parents who couldn’t believe they’d raised versions of themselves at that age.

We’ve always had trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T that rhymes with the first letter of whatever we want to blame for the fact that we don’t like our kids very much at the moment.

The problem these articles are identifying is this:  What are our kids doing instead of doing what we want them to be doing at the moment?

The problem with the problem, though, is that what we want them to be doing is preparing to be forty-five years old.

The kids are all right and they’re no fools.  They know what we want them to do and they don’t like it much.

The real problem is that there is no alternative for them between preparing to be forty-five and sitting around bored to tears all day.

So they compromise.  That is, they offer a teenager’s version of compromise, which is to put off doing what the adults want them to do by promising to do it later.  Then they sit around bored to tears, looking for ways to distract themselves from their boredom.

We don’t do adolescence well in this country.  I don’t know if it’s done well anywhere.  People haven’t had time to figure it out.  It’s only been a hundred years or so that most teenagers weren’t already at what would be their life’s work at age twelve.

Before that teenagers really were what we call them now to flatter them, young adults, and they didn’t spend the very little free time they had trying to distract themselves from boredom, they spent it dealing with exhaustion from fifteen hour workdays.

Before I go any farther---I’m all for teenagers working.  Not in coal mines.  And not full-time.  But part-time at just about any other kind of job, paid or unpaid.  I include extra-curriculars as work, too, if the kids are really involved and not just showing up to pad their transcripts.  But this post isn’t about what teenagers ought to be doing with their spare time.  And it’s not about what adults who read New York Times trend stories are worried they’re doing.  It’s about the sadness and frustration of being fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, in a world that has no use for anybody who isn’t forty-five.

It’s about the unbridgeable divide between the world teenagers are made for and the one they have to live in.

It’s about being a witch or a wizard in world of Muggles where your magic doesn’t work.

Evolution, with the aid of advances in nutrition, medicine, and technology, has played a dirty trick on human beings.

We are at our strongest, most energetic, most resilient, most beautiful, and most desirable and desiring at ages when life presents us with only two choices, a ten-year extension of childhood or an early middle-age.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty we are designed for and ripe for romance and adventure and real life offers most of us very little of either.

Yesterday, while watching Part 1 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I got to wondering.

If I was the right age for these movies, sixteen or seventeen or so, would I have fallen in love with Emma Watson or with Hermione Grainger?

This was tricky to answer, because I don’t think I have a good sense of what I was like when I was in high school anymore. 

As it happens, though, my first girlfriend in high school was the same physical type as Watson, a slender, brown-eyed brunette with a determined chin and a sad, thoughtful expression, and she shared some personality traits with Hermione---over-achieving, dutiful, highly principled but with a tendency to moralize and expect too much of others, prone to self-doubt brought on by the fear that she wasn’t living up to expectations, and both blessed and cursed with a rebellious streak that sometimes turned inward and made herself the authority figure against which she rebelled.

So on the face of it the answer to the question, Watson or Grainger, seemed obvious, both, because I had in fact been in love with both when I was seventeen.

But the more I thought about it---this was during the boring camping scenes when Harry, Hermione, and Ron are stuck in their tent, bickering, while the actual plot continues off screen and they have to wait until J.K. Rowling is ready for them to catch up with it again, so I had a lot of time to think---the more I began to think that my focus would have been on Harry not Hermione, the way it was on the every alternative heroic me in the movies and books and TV shows I loved when I really was that age.

What I would have fallen in love with is the idea of being a young hero on an adventure with a beautiful heroine, a Ginny Weasley, waiting patiently for me at the end of the adventure.

Having the adventure while in the company of another beautiful heroine with whom I might or might not get to snog, if we both could get past our feelings about my best friend, would have just been gravy.

I know, because it’s what often happened when I came out of a movie back then, that however exhilarated and however much in love with the heroine and however much determined I was to be more like the hero in my real life when I left the theater, I would arrive home depressed by the prospect of having to face my rather ordinary parents whom, I was sure, I was always disappointing, and lying awake watching television in my room waiting for exhaustion to take hold and knock me out until morning when I would have to get up and go back to living my unadventurous and romance-less life as a fairly typical teenager.

If I was the same me now as I was then I’d have stayed awake sitting up at my computer, watching and rewatching as many clips of the movie as I could find on YouTube and going on Twitter and Facebook to discuss every last little detail with whatever other obsessives I bumped into online.

Probably would have made me feel worse about my life, but who knows.

Even more probable, though, is that I would have dealt with my boredom and ennui by doing the internet age version of what I did then, which was to turn off the TV---or at least turn the volume down---and take up a pad of paper and pen and begin writing the script for my own movie about a young hero on an adventure in the company of a beautiful heroine or the first chapter of a novel or the opening act of a play and enjoyed a vicarious adventure that way but also experienced the real adventure of doing something creative.

This would have been followed up, a couple of times, with the actual making of a movie---silent, Super 8, and God what I could have done with a video camera!---and regularly with putting on a play, an adventure that always included the company of beautiful young heroines and other handsome young heroes.

A kid like me today would have stayed up late making his own YouTube Harry Potter mashup or shutting down his browser and opening up Word or an animation program.

The act of creating a work of art is an adventure in that it puts your whole heart and soul on the line in an endeavor whose eventual happy ending is as much a forlorn hope as a likely finish.

The Times article opens with the remarkable news that there’s a teenager in America who didn’t complete his summer reading assignment.  Gasp!

Later down we find out that that teenager isn’t spending all the time he should be reading books texting.

When this kid talks about telling stories in six minutes he’s talking from experience:

The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.

He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.

In other words, this is a highly creative and ambitious young man who is already on an adventure!

The Times is quick to point out that this is beside the point.  He also plays video games and got a lowly 2.3 grade point average, and what parent wouldn’t rather have an A student than an actually creative high-achiever as their child?

As far as I’m concerned, our kids are living in what I’d have regarded as a dream come true, a time when cheap and easily accessible technology allows them amazing creative outlets.

Computers are rewiring kids’ brains, but everything does.  The life of the brain is seventy years of minute to minute rewiring.  If the computer wasn’t doing it, simply staring out the window would, and who’s to say which rewiring is for the better?  Some kids brains are being rewired to make them into artists and entrepreneurs and budding scientists!

Not every C student is a potential creative dynamo.  But there is something creative---that is, there is an adventure to be had---in becoming a self.  In setting out to make a life for yourself you make your childhood self into your adult self and there can be romance and adventure in that every step of the way.  The happy ending is always in doubt.

Living out this adventure requires a certain degree of freedom in which to experiment and make mistakes and recover and try again on your own.  You have to be at least somewhat free of adult control and even more free of the more mundane obligations of a holding down a job and keeping a house.  I’m not saying you have to be as free as Harry and his friends who don’t have jobs and don’t need to study and whose families, even when they have them, don’t intrude much.  In fact, having some responsibilities and obligations to meet are part of what makes the adventure an adventure.  But you have to be free to shake off those responsibilities and obligations or at least put them aside when the time calls for it.

To put it most tritely, you have to be free to follow your heart, as long as you accept that you might have to choose not to.

For those lucky enough to go there, college is the place where we find a close to right mixture of freedom and obligation.

For the luckier of the lucky, those who can continue a college-like life into their twenties and avoid falling into the trap of an early middle-age, the adventure can continue for another ten years.

For the luckiest of the luckiest, those whose jobs allow them to be themselves by making their own decisions and acting on their own creative impulses and reward them well for it, the adventure can continue into their old age.

Most people won’t be that lucky or lucky at all.  Most teenagers already have an idea of how unlucky they’re going to be.  And all of them, the lucky and the not so lucky, know what the main purpose of adolescence is in the eyes of most adults---high school---and they know what the purpose of high school is in the eyes of those same adults---identifying the high-achievers who are going to be successes as success is defined by those adults.

The other purpose of high school is to keep the under-achievers quiet and out of trouble until the time comes for them to take their place on the assembly line or in a cubicle in the regional office of the accounting firm.

It’s good to see that the principal of the high school featured in the story is on an adventure of his own, trying to find ways to keep more kids from giving up on the idea that they might be among the lucky and to help them find ways to begin their own creative adventures.  But it’s clearly a rich high school and this principal is unusual, in himself and in having the power to implement his ideas.  Who gave him the authority to make on his own initiative the single most effective reform to the way we run high schools, moving first period to Nine A.M.?, so that kids can start their work days when they are actually awake enough to pay attention and care?

But few other school districts will be able to afford their own media centers and, I’m afraid, few other principals, and probably not enough teachers and parents, will see what this principal’s doing as a good thing.

After all, it gets in the way of teenagers doing what we want them to be doing, preparing to be forty-five.

Meanwhile, the kids distract themselves with their computers and cell phones and the Times writes about how we got trouble, trouble, trouble…

____________________

Post script:  Not to be too much of a parent about this, but if Vishal can’t figure out how to use his filmmaking talents to get his English grades up, he’s not as smart or as creative as I take him for.  And he should read Cat's Cradle.  It’s a good book.  It’s cinematic, so it should play right to his strengths.  And it’s his responsibility to do his homework.  Part of the adventure is accepting the hardships.

How the elections taught me to understand a comic book

Ever since I was a kid something has bugged me about Superman’s origin story.

The story begins back on the doomed planet of Krypton with Superman’s father, Jor-El, going before the ruling council to tell them that the planet of Krypton is, well, doomed.

The Kryptonian Apocalypse is nigh.  Something to do with the planet’s red sun expanding, if I remember it right.  Maybe it was about to go supernova.  Doesn’t matter.  Jor-El tells the council Krypton must be evacuated before it’s too late!

And the council responds with a collective, “Yeah, right, Jor-El.  Pull the other one.”

This is Jor-El they’re dismissing, the super-genius who has, apparently all by himself, turned Krypton into the the technological wonderland it is.  He’s conceived, designed, engineered, built, and programmed every machine, device, process, and piece of software that keeps Krypton fat, rich, and happy.  He’s the smartest guy in the world!  And yet when he tells the council the world is coming to an end, they tell him to take a hike back to his laboratory.

I never understood this.

You would think that given Jor-El’s reputation and track record they’d be so quick to believe whatever he tells them that he wouldn’t have to tell them anything.  As soon as he walked through the council chamber doors they’d say, “Great Krypton, what now and what do you need to fix it?”

The problem should be that their faith in him is too strong.  Their reaction to this latest bit of bad news ought to have been, “The planet’s doomed, you say, Jor-El?  But you’ve got a plan to save us, right?  How much do you need?”  And the treasurer reaches for the check book.

Then they’d refuse to believe him when he told them he didn’t have a plan and instead of ordering the evacuation of the planet, they’d adjourn to go have a beer, confident that Jor-El would have the problem solved by last call.  How much of a challenge could it be for Jor-El to figure out how to unexpand an expanding star?

Nope.

They say, “We know you’re the smartest guy in the world, Jor-El, and you’ve been right about everything else for the last ten or fifteen years, but you’re bound to be wrong some time and we’ve decided that on the most important problem you’ve ever brought before us you’re out of your mind.  Go away.”

Like I said, this has always bothered me.  Apparently it bothered the writers for the Superman cartoon series in the 1990s because they tried to explain how the council could have been so stupid and self-destructive.

They don’t believe Jor-El because the super-computer Jor-El built and programmed, Brainiac, tells them that Jor-El is wrong. 

Nobody knows that Brianiac has been re-programmed by General Zod.  With obvious comic book level irony, the council decides not to believe Jor-El because Jor-El convinced them to trust Brianiac.  They don’t believe Jor-El because they believed…Jor-El.

Nothing left for Jor-El and his wife Lara to do but load baby Kal-El in the space ship, aim it at Earth, and launch it and the legend and the comic book industry altogether.

I don’t know if this version has worked its way into the official comic book canon.  Until this past election, I would have insisted it needed to in order to make more plausible what I’d regarded as implausible.

Now, it would have always made sense if the council was made up of Krypton’s equivalent of Republican politicians.

For a generation the Jor-Els of climate science have been warning us of global warning and climate change and Republican politicians have been responding by sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “Sunspots!  Sunspots!”

One of the first things they plan to do when they take control of the House in January is hold hearings intended to prove once and for all that bought-and-paid-for politicians in the pockets of the oil industry are smarter than any pack of scientists.

But I didn’t need the elections to tell me the Republicans are stupid and corrupt or that Democrats can be weak and venal.  If there were certain Democrats on the Kryptonian Council they’d have said, “We believe you, Jor-El, and we know we should do something about it, but evacuating the planet would be so expensive and so hard.  Couldn’t you come up with a solution that doesn’t cost so much?”

The Kryptonian council isn’t made up of politicians.

It’s made up of scientists.

Probably neo-liberal scientists advising a Kryptonian Democratic President.

For over two years, since the economy did what various unheeded economist Jor-Els had been warning it would do, crash, those Jor-Els and others, most prominently and emphatically Nobel Prize-winning Jor-El Paul Krugman, have been desperately trying to tell the White House what needs to be done to get a real recovery underway.

And the President’s economic team have responded, “Jor-El, you’re out of your mind.”

We’ve all been watching this unfold since before the President took office.  What it has looked like to me is that the economic team came into town with a plan to deal with the sagging economy that they came up with in 2007 and stuck with it through the collapse and ever since, absolutely refusing to even consider the possibility it wasn’t working even when confronted with the evidence that it wasn’t working and even after it had become clear that not only wasn’t the plan working but that voters were going to punish Congressional Democrats for it.

Which, by the way, was as early as fall of 2009!

So they had a lot of time to think things over.

And the whole time I was thinking, “Surely, any day now they’ll come to their senses.  Surely, by now, they’re seeing that Jor-El was right.  Surely, by now, they’ve got a new and bolder plan to do something!  Surely, before they get clobbered at the polls they’ll put that plan into action!  Surely, they can’t be as stupid as the Kryptonian Council!”

Then the Democrats got drubbed and I realized.

“Surely, the Kryptonian Council is as stupid as Larry Summers and his gang of Rubinoids!”

I don’t know how they could be that stupid---the Kryptonian Council or the President’s advisors---but I can make a good guess.

Vanity.

Last night we watched Superman for family movie night.  There was the scene between Jor-El and the Council playing itself out in the same way as it always had.  But this time I paid special attention to the scientist who steps forward to refute Jor-El’s argument that Krypton is doomed.

“We agree with you on the facts,” she tells him, calmly, with an infuriating smile of self-congratulatory reasonableness, “But we’ve come to different conclusions.”

Which is pretty much her way of saying, “We’ve decided we’re smarter than you are, Jor-El.”

Larry Summers has always struck me as someone who if you pushed him into a room full of Jor-Els he’d wonder how he was going to talk down to their level.

Famous story:  At a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Prize winners, President Kennedy said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

If Summers had been at the table, he’d have sneered into his wine glass, “Jefferson, that piker!”

But the vanity doesn’t have to arise from that much arrogance.

It can simply be the vanity of very smart and accomplished men and women who are used to getting things right refusing to admit that this time they have gotten things very, very wrong.

Even the President himself, who I think possesses more than an average ability to self-reflect and self-correct, isn’t immune. 

That might explain his curiously subdued, almost defeatist, tone in his press conference the day after the election.  He was having a difficult time facing up to the fact that he’d been wrong.

He was convinced that his policies were working and that voters would come to realize that.  They didn’t.  And it threw him.

But he hasn’t said anything since, that I’ve heard, that suggests he’s actually admitted to himself his policies hadn’t worked or hadn’t worked as well as they needed to.

What he has said is that he believes he failed to make the best case for his own policies.  He’s called this a PR failure not a policy failure.

For political reasons, he might feel he can’t admit the policies were flawed.  And of course when he talks about his policies he means all of them and some of them have worked pretty well.  Saving the auto industry, for instance.

But he could admit mistakes without admitting them out loud by changing the policies that haven’t worked, and he doesn’t seem inclined to do that.

Unless there’s a major jobs bill coming down the pike I haven’t heard about.

Yeah, yeah, it won’t pass, yadda yadda.

Still, as far as I can tell, what the President thinks he should have done was gone out and done a more forceful job of explaining to voters why they were wrong.

He should have gone out and told people why they were wrong to feel as bad as they did about not having jobs, not having money, not getting raises, not being able to pay for their kids’ braces or college educations, not being able to afford a new car or a vacation, not getting a good night’s sleep because they were up all night worrying about getting through to their next paycheck or about getting a next paycheck.

He should have gone out and made them understand why they couldn’t expect the government to do anything more to help them because the government had already done enough, the policies were working, they just needed to tighten their belts a notch and be patient.

He should have convinced them that he and his advisors were smarter than them and he didn’t need to listen to Jor-El.

The comic book makes sense now.

I feel so much better.

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump the Last.

Finally!  Click on the links for the first, second, and third Grumps.

If P.J. O’Rourke’s grumpy little post, I Think We Lost the Election, had struck me as just another irritable belch at having to stomach the usual idiocies of politicians I think I wouldn’t have bothered to write about it or write so much about it, at any rate.

I might have been content to point out that the government of bored, restless, and irritable amateurs who would really rather be doing something, anything, else than running the country, which O’Rourke claims to think is the ideal, would be a government run by the Sarah Palins of the world.

Or I might have gone off on how a government of bored, restless, and irritable amateurs is what the Tea Party’s trying to give us.

More likely, though, I’d have pointed out the hypocrisy behind the post.  It’s a vanity, and a pose, on the part of many Republicans that their politicians aren’t really politicians and that their side never plays politics.  Democrats are the party of the professional---read, corrupt---politicians and Democrats are the ones who insist on politicizing every issue, as if there can be an issue that affects the entire polis that isn’t political.

This pose is a cover.  It’s a way of arguing that they should be the only ones to run things.  For our own good, we should take politics out of the hands of the politicians---read, Democrats, especially liberal Democrats---and hand it over to the high-minded and self-sacrificing amateurs---read, Republican elites---who will of course put aside their own narrow self-interests when deciding how best to run things.

Probably, then, I would have gone on to write some of the same things I wrote in the first post in this series about the Republicans’ not so secret desire to bring back an aristocracy and with it a return to Feudalism.   But there’s a good chance I’d have stopped there with just the one post and not gone on to churn out four.

Maybe, if I’d really thought O’Rourke was simply grousing about the all too typical venality and ineptitude of too many people in public office, from boards of selectmen on up to the United States Senate, I’d have agreed with him.

I live in New York.  Watching the clown show that is our state legislature is not inspiring. 

I’m happy, and relieved, that Tea Party darling and habitual sender of NSFW emails Carl Paladino, won’t be our next governor, but if he’d won he’d have been far from the biggest idiot and worst excuse for a human being in Albany.

And it’s hard not to think the worst of politics and politicians when you look at Congress these days, where we have now divided the government between two sets of incompetents, one made inept by cowardice and the constant bending over backwards to serve two masters, the people and the banks, and the other made inept by stupidity, greed, rage, and a general and thorough misunderstanding of the purpose of democratic government or, among those few who do understand it, a hatred of that purpose---for them incompetence is a deliberate method of sabotage.

We don’t live in a society composed entirely of fools, incompetents, and thieves, but we seem to want a government in which they are way over-represented.

But I don’t agree with O’Rourke because I don’t think he’s simply being irritable and cynical about some politicians.

And I don’t think that because he didn’t build his post around his suspicion that all politicians are fools, incompetents, and fools.  He built it around a cynical certainty that voters are. This passage is the real heart of his post:

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.

O’Rourke’s analogy only works if you agree that the default position to take with teachers is that they deserve to be fired---that is that most of them are fools or incompetents if not thieves, although probably thieves too, because fools and incompetents who take taxpayers’ money even though they’re fools and incompetents are robbing taxpayers---that is, that there’s no difference between the fool, incompetent, or thief teaching your kids and the fools, incompetents, and thieves running the government, a thought that’s easily extended, because that’s what it implies, that anybody and everybody in a position of public trust is not to be trusted.

But  it goes farther than that.  You have agree to the premise that the entire electorate is made up over-grown and spoiled children.  Which is to say that we live in a country made up of lazy brats who want everything handed to them.

And where are you supposed to see yourself in a society made up of children and run by fools, incompetents, and thieves?

Where O’Rourke sees himself.

In the position of one of the few intelligent, hardworking, honest adults.

As part of the portion of society that doesn’t need governing and, therefore, has no use for the government.

This post, which really isn’t just another piece of lazy writing on O’Rourke’s part, perfectly expresses the Right Wing Republican attitudes towards democratic self-government.

It shouldn’t be allowed to continue.  “We,” that is the O’Rourkes of the world, won’t win an election until the running of the country is put entirely into “our” hands.

What I’ve been getting at---and what I’d have gotten to a long time ago if I was a better writer---is that O’Rourke’s  little post sums up the the great big assault on democracy the Right has bee perpetrating since, well, forever.

And the general tactic has been to try to convince “us” that “they” aren’t worth our trust.

In this, O’Rourke, as an apostle of this point of view, goes Scrooge one better.

As I wrote in an earlier post, Scrooge isn’t actively engaged in breaking the connections the bind society together.  He doesn’t set out to infect other people with his misanthropy.  He isn’t a missionary in the work of unspreading Christmas cheer.  All his mean and nasty jokes, his declarations of cynicism, suspicion, and contempt, all his bah-humbugging are in answer to other people’s attempts to connect with him.

He’s explaining himself not trying to convert them to his opinion that other people are nothing but fools, incompetents, and thieves.

To keep things within the confines of the book, where Dickens doesn’t expect such things to be kept, but for the purposes of making the point, we’ll keep them there to say this: Scrooge doesn’t try to ruin anybody else’s Christmas.

'Nephew!' returned the uncle sternly, 'keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.'

'Keep it!' repeated Scrooge's nephew. 'But you don't keep it.'

'Let me leave it alone, then…'

There’s no point in his conversation with Fred, or in his conversations with anyone else, where Scrooge does or says anything to discourage someone from celebrating Christmas.  As Fred points out, no one suffers from Scrooge’s refusal to celebrate Christmas but Scrooge.  And, by the way, any production of A Christmas Carol that has Scrooge firing Bob Cratchit on Christmas Eve is a production that doesn’t trust its audience or doesn’t trust its source material.  Scrooge doesn’t do anybody much good, but he doesn’t knowingly do them any harm, although he, like all of us, have an obligation to know it.   In his infamous exchange with the portly gentlemen collecting for charity---“Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?” ---when he’s told that many people would rather die than go to the workhouse, he follows up his horrific joke “If they would rather die, then they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” by telling the gentlemen that he doesn’t “know it.”  He means that he doesn’t believe people would rather die.

The gentlemen are aghast.

“But you might know it,” one says, and he means Scrooge ought to take the trouble to find out the truth.

But Scrooge snaps back:

'It's not my business…It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's.’

Again, this is Scrooge’s sin, going about his business as if he has nothing to do with other people.  He wants to deny his connections with other people, but he doesn’t see it as any of his business if other people want to continue their connections with each other.

Scrooge won’t go to his nephew’s Christmas party, but he won’t try to stop anyone else from going.  He won’t try to stop Fred from having a party.  He thinks Bob Cratchit is a fool for wasting the little money he makes celebrating Christmas, but he still gives Cratchit the whole day off, and notice Scrooge assumes he has the power and the right to make Cratchit work on Christmas day.

O’Rourke and the conservative elites he speaks for are asking us not to go to the party.  They’re trying to convince us we should be annoyed at those fools, incompetents, and thieves who want the whole day off and not let them have it.

It’s not enough that, Scrooge-like, we think of everybody else as fools, incompetents, and thieves.  We’re meant to go Scrooge one better and deal with them as fools, incompetents, and thieves.

O’Rourke and the anti-democratic elites want to ruin Christmas for everybody by killing people’s Christmas spirit, which Dickens has Fred define as having nothing specific to do with Christianity, and everything to do with Christ quoting the golden rule:

'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew. 'Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

O’Rourke and company pervert the golden rule.  Instead of treating others the way they would like others to treat them, they preach:  “Treat other people as if they were all fools, incompetents, and thieves.”

The Tea Party’s rallying cry, “We want to take our country  back” is based on the selfish certainty that to share the country and its benefits with people they don’t like is to have lost it.  It’s all or nothing with them.

But they’re cowards in not being able to face up to their own selfishness, so they’ve found an excuse for it.

It’s not, they would say---do say---that they’re not willing to share.  It’s that they’re not willing to be robbed.

Or taken advantage of.

They’d gladly share with “them” if only “they” deserved it, if only “they” weren’t all fools, incompetents, and thieves demanding a share in what they haven’t earned or deserved.

And here’s O’Rourke, glad to tell them they’re right and to make them laugh in self-congratulation at it.

Democracy, says O’Rourke, is a humbug, and people who buy into his humbugging are meant to shut up their hearts and treat their fellow Americans as other races of creatures bound on other journeys and the government that represents “them” as being like “them,”  something “other” to hold in suspicion and contempt.

A very useful attitude for them to have, from the point of view of the corporate elitists who want to run things as they see fit, for their own benefit, and who don’t, under any circumstances, want to share.

Enforcing a longstanding policy, we swear!

From the Department of Communications:

The Mannionville Daily Gazette announces that editor Lance Mannion has suspended himself from blogging indefinitely and without pay for making a political donation.  This is a matter of policy and not a sneaky play to make it look like the last time he suspended himself indefinitely without pay for making a political donation was a matter of policy too and not a case of his being scared that his conservative golfing buddies would rag on him at the country club.

This may be followed by future self-suspensions if enforcing the policy does not have the desired effect and Mr Mannion has to apply for membership at another country club.

Shakesville loses a voice, Wev McEwan says goodbye to a friend

Wev, over at Shakesville, on her friend and blogging comrade-in-pixels, Mary Quinn, better known as Maud:

Between all of that were serious discussions about treatment plans devised by gynecological oncologists and sorting out transportation to medical appointments and other minutiae of navigating illness. And we had very frank discussions of how much our friendship meant to one another, because the reality was that Maud was dying, and it was really only a matter of when.

But these are not things Maud would want me to talk about. She would tell me I'm being boring and burdensome.
And then she would tell me: "No, you're a grown woman. Talk about whatever you want to talk about." Because that's how Maud rolled…

Once she was in hospice, she wanted to write about the experience of living in a nursing home, and the business of dying. She didn't want to just disappear from Shakesville. And she wanted to leave a record of her experience, this most important and horrible and universal experience, in the space that meant so much to her. They would have been amazing posts. But those posts would never get written.

Last week, her emails, always fastidiously correct in every way, began to arrive with misspellings and odd spacing. Maud was slipping away.

Read all of Melissa’s post.

Their advertising dollars at work

In perusing the sidebars around here, you may have noticed that the Mannionville Daily Gazette has picked up some new advertisers recently.

I hope you’ve noticed!

I’m very lucky that these folks have thought it worthwhile to sponsor this program and I hope you’re all helping to make it worth their while by clicking on their links and banners, visiting their websites, and buying their products and using their services.  They and I are much obliged.

Whenever I do a fundraiser---and, heads up, there’s another one on the way at the beginning of December---I get email from people apologizing for not being able to afford to make a donation or being able to give more.  Believe me, I understand and here’s the thing.  If you can’t swing it, you can’t swing it, and that’s ok.  I don’t feel owed anything for pushing my way onto your computer screen and I sure don’t want you to feel obligated to reward me for my pushiness.  I’m very grateful for whatever anyone sends my way, but please don’t even give it a second thought if you can’t donate or don’t want to.

There is, however, a free and easy way to help support the blog and that is to visit my advertisers’ websites and see what they have to offer.

That’s what I try to do whenever I visit other blogs that have advertisers.

Now…

As grateful as I am for the ads I have already, there’s always room for more.

If you would like to advertise on a blog and are looking to reach an audience of well-educated professionals from around the world who find their way to LanceMannion.com from the websites of mainstream publications like Vanity Fair, the New York Times, New York Magazine, and others, as well as the A-list political blogs, we offer very reasonable rates on text links and small banner ads.  If you’re interested, drop me a note at lance (at sign) lancemannion (dot) com and we can work out the details.

But, wait!  There’s more.

If you’re a regular reader, and you have a business, a product, a book, a band, a cause, or anything you’d like to advertise, I’m happy to be able to offer you big savings on the usual rates.

Again, drop me a note if you’re interested.

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You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump the Third.

Click on the links for Grump the First and Grump the Second.

There can be something cathartic in thinking the worst of your fellow human beings.

Everybody isn’t a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, but there are enough fools, incompetents, and thieves out there that it can feel that nobody’s smart, nobody knows how to do their, job, and nobody’s honest.  And even the wise, competent, and honest are only usually so and all too often don’t think, screw up, or give into temptation.

Plus, thinking the worst of everybody else is an effective distraction from having to think the worst of yourself.  It’s a miserable feeling, walking away from a situation knowing that you’ve just made a fool of yourself or showed yourself up as an incompetent or cheated somebody somehow, so it’s a morale boost to be able to tell yourself that as bad as you are everybody else is worse, even if you can’t make yourself believe it for very long.

But for as long as it takes to indulge your private little grudge against the world or to laugh at a cynical joke, nod knowingly over essay by H.L. Menken, watch a episode of The Simpsons, read a novel by Evelyn Waugh, smirk at the news or a Leno monologue, or exclaim, “You said it, P.J.” after reading a blog post, you can take some satisfaction in “knowing” that people stink and they’re stupid and to hell with them.

It feels good because it’s a way of facing up to a nightmare.

What if everybody else was a fool, an incompetent, or a thief?

Our lives would be impossible because our society couldn’t function.

Human beings need to live together to survive and in order to live together they have to be able to rely on each other.

Of course there are situations it’s best to go into assuming that everyone else in it is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, but most of us aren’t spies, undercover cops, or politicians trying to work out a deal together, so we don’t have to face those situations regularly.

In almost all our daily comings and goings we have to trust that other people won’t be foolish, won’t be incompetent, and won’t be dishonest.  What’s more in most situations things only work if the people we’re dealing with know we’re trusting them to at least try not be foolish, incompetent, or dishonest.

The wise-to-the-ways-of-the-world blowhard who goes into stores and restaurants letting the clerks and waiters know he’s onto them and he’s not about to let himself get gypped is, besides being a bully, a fool, because one way or another he’s going to get gypped by the clerks and the waiters to spite him.

He’s going to eat a lot of meals out that have been creatively flavored back in the kitchen.

In order to survive we have to live together and live together amicably.  That doesn’t just mean not resorting to maces and axes to settle all quarrels and finalize business transactions and real estate deals.  That means treating each other with respect, consideration, sympathy, and a reasonable degree of trust.

Living together means forming a society and a society is an agreement between people to be, well, social.

And sociable.

The members of a society have agreed to live together as a group for their mutual benefit according to a set of rules that if adhered to assures their mutual benefit.

In an ideal society the rules are not onerous or arbitrarily restrictive nor do they favor any members over others; everybody shares in the benefits equally and those benefits will be relatively abundant---that is, in a wine-tasting society there will be a variety of good wines to sample at every meeting, while in a large society, like a town, a state, or nation, the benefits will include security, safety, a reasonable amount of material and spiritual comfort and the freedom for individuals to pursue their idea of happiness without, of course, threatening other people’s security or safety, robbing them of their material comfort, or denying them their freedom to make themselves happy (with the same caveats).

An ideal society is tolerant, forgiving, and somewhat elastic.  People are free to come and go as they please---new members are welcomed and accommodated with good cheer, anyone who wants out leaves with the assurance there are no hard feelings and they’ll be welcomed back if they change their minds.

In an ideal society everybody who can pitch in pitches in and those who can’t are taken care of.  Everybody recognizes that they’re all in this together.  They know they have to depend on the other members of the society and they expect to be depended upon in return.  And in order for it to work, everyone must be responsible to and responsible for each other.  It all falls apart if the members can’t depend on each other or if they feel they can’t.

They have to trust each other and of course they won’t if everybody thinks the worst of each other, if everybody thinks everybody else is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief.

I suppose you could build a society around the expectation that everybody in it is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, but that would have to be a prison, wouldn’t it?

The thing about an ideal society or a society that strives to approach the ideal is that in making room for each other to pursue their individual ideas of happiness, the members also make room for misfits of all kinds, including people who don’t really want to be members of the society---like Ebenezer Scrooge--or who want to be members only up to the point of sharing in its benefits and not its mutual responsibilities---which is not like Scrooge but the kind of people Scrooge thinks everybody else is.

But a truly sociable society can accommodate an anti-social type like Scrooge.  Scrooge’s problem is that he refuses to acknowledge his connectedness to other people not that he actively tries to disrupt the connections between others.  He admits to contributing, begrudgingly, resentfully, and as minimally as possible, to society.  He simply refuses to admit that society gives anything back to him in return.

It’s hard to imagine, though, Scrooge forming a society of any kind on his own or wanting to unless for his own exclusive material benefit.

If other people want to join his society for their material benefit, fine, but they’d better be aware that the point is for him to make money.

To the degree that Scrooge admits to belonging to any society, it’s a society limited to people with whom he can do business.  People are part of that society as long as they help him do business, that is, make money, and he owes them only the money he’s forced to spend on his way to making more money for himself.

This is a petty, mean, and joyless idea of society, but even it still works best if its members trust each other, to some degree, and don’t think and expect the absolute worst of each other.

Scrooge thinks the worst of everybody.

As far as he’s concerned, everybody else is a fool, an incompetent, or a thief, probably all three together.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting- house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

'You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?' said Scrooge.

'If quite convenient, sir.'

'It's not convenient,' said Scrooge, 'and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?'

The clerk smiled faintly.

'And yet,' said Scrooge, 'you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work.'

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

'A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!' said Scrooge…

Scrooge’s attitude towards all his fellow passengers to the grave is epitomized in his treatment of Bob Cratchit here.  Cratchitt is a fool because anyone who celebrates Christmas is a fool.  Cratchit is an incompetent, well, because who else but an incompetent would work for Scrooge at the wages Scrooge pays, but he’s also incompetent in not having his priorities straight--- “'There's another fellow,' muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: 'my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam.'”---and in being lazy enough to look forward to a day off.  And he’s a form of thief for wanting to be paid for doing no work.

But Scrooge doesn’t seem to blame Cratchit for any of this.  He knows that Cratchit is backed up by society.  Society expects Scrooge to not just overlook foolishness, incompetence, and thievery, but to reward it.

What kind of society would expect that except a society made up of fools, incompetents, and thieves?

Now, onto Ebenezer O’Rourke.

Wait.  I shouldn’t call P.J. O’Rourke a Scrooge.

That’s not fair to Scrooge.

End of Grump the Third.

The Ruffalo is all right

The Kids Are All Right came out on DVD today and I’m hoping to get to watch it this weekend.  I want to see it for its own sake but I also want to support our local movie star environmental activist.

Mark Ruffalo owns land in these parts and he’s not about to let it get all fracked up by gas drilling.

After a friend told him about cheap land in the Catskills, Ruffalo took the little money he had and bought 27 acres with a one- room cabin in the Sullivan hamlet of White Sulphur Springs.

"And that became my home," he says.

As Ruffalo's career took off with films like "Zodiac," he, his wife and kids spent time in Los Angeles. But Ruffalo wanted a life "less fractured" — in Sullivan's open spaces.

So when he found a bigger, secluded spot there, he knew it was home — without stepping in the house.

"It's all about the land," he says.

Ruffalo knows what it's like when that land is spoiled. As a kid in Kenosha, Wis., he saw fish "with bulbous tumors" when he walked around polluted Lake Michigan.

And when he heard gas drilling might come to Sullivan, he worried. He gathered information. "And none of it was good," he says.

Read all of Steve Israel’s story, Hollywood star passionate role in saving Sullivan County land, in the Times Herald-Record. (Registration recommended by not required. Just click through the window.)

More on the gas drilling boom from Huffington Post.

And here’s a longer, more detailed article from Vanity Fair.

Oh, and there’s a movie, which is not called The Water Table’s All Right, as the industry was hoping.  Gasland.

More on that from NPR.

The poet misses his father

 One writes all my days

Living in the nameless world

Of mud and fire—

 

Wish I could tell you Father

How remarkably well

It goes…Winter coming

 

& growing old

With plain bravery

Saltiness of mind

 

Music in shadow

Larger contexts

Being ahead of premises

 

Like the best poets

Be your own flight

Walked across new ice today

 

The Discords by Stephen Kuusisto

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump the Second.

Grump the First is here.

P.J. O’Rourke:

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there…

America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.

A small group of decent-hearted and intelligently self-interested people might agree to live loosely together, abiding to a mutually decided upon set of rules that don’t weigh heavily on anyone’s shoulders.  And they might make a very pleasant little society.  But over time, as some people die off or move away, and new members are born or strangers attracted to the little society’s decencies and comforts ask to join and are admitted, there will be some people who will decide that this rule or that rule or all the rules don’t apply to them.

When that happens the orderliness and the safety of the little society will be threatened and the other members will have to take steps to bring the rule-breakers back into line or drive them from the circle.

They will have to give themselves what are essentially police powers.

Now the little society has to decide how they will exercise those powers and in which of them they will invest those powers.  They can try to spread the powers out among the group, which can be inefficient or they can hand it all over to one strong man or something in between.  Whichever way they decide, they’d better have a way of supervising and controlling the exercise of those powers or they’re going to wind up with mob rule or under the tyranny of a warlord.

Basically, they need too add a little more governing power to their government.

If things are managed---governed---well, life inside that little society will grow safer, more orderly, and more secure.  Possibly happier.  The little society will thrive and more people will join it.  More babies will be born, more children will grow up to be adults, more adults will live into old age.  More outsiders will ask to be admitted.

Now instead of having a tribe or a clan you have a village.

With a village you have houses and ways to get from one house to another.  You have streets to keep clear, property to protect.  With all these people rubbing up against each other, you’ve got frictions that have to be dealt with before they burst into flame.  That means the little society must police itself a little more energetically and it must offer a means of settling disputes that don’t involve fights in the street and murders in the dark.  That means some form of court system.

Suddenly, in addition to having to supervise its police, the little society needs to supervise street sweepers and fire brigades, lawyers and judges.

If things continue to be managed---governed---well, the village will grow into a town, the town might grow into a city.  The streets will get busier.  That’s traffic that has to be regulated and controlled.  Trade will increase.  More sources of friction there, more need for regulation, policing, and adjudicating.

Other towns and cities, similarly well-governed and thriving, might like to do business with yours.  More roads.  More traffic.  More money changing hands.  More people and property to protect.  More sources of friction.

You’ve got all these workers to hire and fire, all this building and repair work to do, all these citizens to look out for, to serve and protect, if they’re good citizens, to keep in line if they’re not, all these rules that have to be enforced, all these departments that have to be administered, all this money that has to be spent and taxes or fees that have to be collected to pay for it all---do you really want all this handled by bored and restless amateurs with other immediate and to them more pressing demands on their time, energy, and attention?

This was tried once in a centuries-long failed experiment usually referred to as Europe from the about the time of the fall of the Roman Empire until about 1850---until the end of World War I in some parts.

Feudalism, in its harsher forms during the Middle Ages, and its more benign form after the rise of moneyed and meritocratic aristocracy to rival the old landed and hereditary aristocracy, worked fairly well, at least from the point of view of the aristocrats.

Feudalism is essentially a system in which bored, restless, and self-entitled amateurs run things in ways they expect will have maximum benefit for themselves, in the way of profit and safety and continuation of their place at the top of the heap, with the expectation that their self-interest, compassion, and senses of duty and responsibility will make sure things work out for the profit and safety and continued well-being of everybody else.

When you look closely at the grousing of supposedly small government and libertarian conservatives like O’Rourke, you often see that what they want is a return to feudalism.

They want an aristocracy of like-minded people---that is, people who think like them---to run things as they see fit and for the rest of us to shut up and leave them alone to run things as they see fit.

But what you usually see are anti-social grumps who just want to be left alone, period, to go about doing what they think is best for them with nobody telling them they can’t or shouldn’t do this or that or that they might think about what’s best for other people once in a while.

They especially don’t want to be asked to help pay for bringing about what’s best for anybody else.

There’s something inherently Scrooge-like in them, and I’m not calling them misers, because, if you remember, Scrooge’s failing isn’t that he’s a miser, it’s that he’s an oyster---secret, self-contained, solitary:

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?' No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, 'No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!'

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call 'nuts' to Scrooge.

“Warning all human sympathy to keep its distance…”

Scrooge’s tight-fistedness is symbolic of his refusal to recognize a connection between himself and other people or to admit that they have any demand on his time or attention, never mind his money.

Not coincidentally, Scrooge has a very low opinion of other people.  He treats them all as he treats Bob Cratchitt, as a combination of fool, incompetent, and would-be thief.

The O’Rourkian philosophy of limited government is based on two unshakeable principles.

The first is that things are just fine as they are or at least as fine as they’re ever going to be---which is true in that things as they are are working out just fine for them---and anyway trying to change things is bound to make them worse---which is also true in that trying to change things will inconvenience them, by raising their taxes, probably, but also by asking them to care.

The second is that other people are no damn good. 

Quiz the O’Rourkes of the world and they’ll tell you, usually in no uncertain terms, that they have a Scrooge-like opinion of their fellow men and women.

Everybody---everybody else, that is---is a fool, an incompetent, or a would-be thief, which turns out to be a very useful thing to believe because it provides an instant defense against arguments that they are somehow responsible for and obligated to other people.  Nobody deserves your help if everybody is by definition and natural design undeserving.

At the heart of O’Rourke’s grumpy old man post about elections not changing anything until we stop electing professional politicians to office is the Scrooge-like belief that it’s not just professional politicians who are fools, incompetents, and thieves.  Everyone who collects a government paycheck---especially teachers---and all the other kids in his kids’ school and their parents are also fools, incompetents, and a form of thief, which pretty much amounts to an argument that the public school system is dedicated to employing and serving the undeserving but also, by extension, that all public services are dedicated to employing and serving the undeserving.

And that boils down to any government actively dedicated to solving problems and making life better for its citizens is dedicated to taking O’Rourke’s tax dollars and handing them over to fools, incompetents, and thieves.

Worse, from the grumpy old man’s point of view, it’s a government dedicated to not leaving him alone to mind his own business without having to worry about society and to reminding him that he is a part of it and therefore responsible in some part for its other members:

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,' returned the gentleman, 'a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink. and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned -- they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can't go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It's not my business,” Scrooge returned.  “It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

End of Grump the Second. Click on the link for Grump the Third.

You can’t have a society of grumpy old men. Grump One.

Was there really ever a time when P.J. O’Rourke was funny?

I remember there was a time when I felt obligated to think he was.  That was a long time ago, back when he first appeared on the scene.  After all, there was supposedly no reason a conservative couldn’t be funny and there were plenty of reasons to think life in a liberal society was funny.  Life is generally ridiculous for human beings, no matter how liberally a society has ordered itself, and on top of that I knew enough liberals who were insufferable human beings and deserved ridicule, including myself.  In that way liberals have of siding against themselves in an argument, I was more than willing to accept a good satirizing from the right, although as the likes of Mark Twain, Walt Kelly, Garry Trudeau, Russell Baker, Woody Allen, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin had made clear, liberals were pretty effective and funny when it came to satirizing themselves.

But I was more than willing to give O’Rourke a chance.

I don’t remember though ever responding to anything he wrote with more than a grim smile and a rueful shake of the head.  I gave up reading his stuff without noticing I’d given it up and definitely without missing it, because what struck me about O’Rourke wasn’t that he was a conservative, it was that he was a very grumpy young man.

And a grumpy young man who couldn’t wait to be a grumpy old man.

I was a grumpy enough young man on my own.  I didn’t need the encouragement.

Now I’m a grumpy old man.  But guess what.

O’Rourke is too.

Here’s an example of a recent bout of grumpy old man O’Rourke’s grumpery, which I wouldn’t have found on my own, Andrew Sullivan had to find it for me, and thanks a lot for that Andrew.  O’Rourke:

I think we lost the election on November 2…

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there…

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked…

America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.

I can’t be sure, but I think Sullivan linked to this fatuous bit of grousing by a cranky old Republican approvingly.

I think it speaks to Sullivan’s innocent faith in the goodness and niceness that will return to the land when the nation finally limits itself to the small government conservativism of his dreams.

And, superficially, O’Rourke seems to be calling for the libertarian dream of that government which governs least.  Politicians who don’t want to take the time to run things won’t burden us all with a government that takes time to run, one with lots of rules but also, you know, one that provides lots of services.

It’s a cliche that the first disqualification for holding public office should be wanting to hold that office.   And it’s a cliche because there’s a truth in it.  Who in their right mind would want the job?  Who with any normal amount of modesty and self-knowledge would think they deserved the job or could handle it?  Standing for public office is a declaration of dangerous arrogance.   Only the foolish, the power-mad, or those who see an advantage to themselves, usually in the form of a profit, would want the job?

You’d think.

But it turns out that an amazing number of well-meaning, decent-minded, self-reflective people who, seeing problems that need to be solved and recognizing in themselves some talent for solving problems, feel drawn to the job both by the personal satisfaction of putting their talents to work and a sense of duty and responsibility to put those talents to work for the general good.

It’s a good idea to keep a close eye on politicians in order to protect ourselves from the foolish, incompetent, power-mad, and thieving. 

But it’s not necessary to think that every politician is foolish, incompetent, power-mad, and thieving in order to do it.

The notion that all professional politicians are incompetent or corrupt or both is more prevalent on the right, these days, because it’s a useful notion for conservatives who want nothing more from government than to be left alone to make themselves as rich and comfortable as they can without guilt or responsibility.

Politicians who want to solve problems tend to be liberal.  Solving problems means doing things.  Doing things usually means spending money.  Doing things also means admitting that things need to be done, that there are problems with the way things are that need to be solved.

That means admitting that a system you happen to be profiting from might have to change, putting your profit, which may be spiritual or psychological as well as material, at risk.  It may mean admitting that your profit under the old way was somehow undeserved.  It may mean admitting that the other people’s failure to profit under the old way was not their fault.

It means admitting that you have some responsibility to help bring about the change.

It means that other people have a claim on your time and attention, not to mention money.

Nothing makes a grumpy old conservative grumpier than the idea that he owes something to other people, especially any of his money, but also any of his concern.

End of Grump the First. Click on the link for Grump the Second.

“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…”

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.” ---from Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

I wonder if it was damp and drizzly on November 14, 1851.  Sheila O’Malley offers some reflections on Herman Melville and Moby-Dick, which was published 149 years ago today.  I better get cracking if I’m going to re-read it in time to write a 150th Anniversary post of my own.

You can get cracking too, here.

Self-Repair Manifesto « iFixit Blog

Our relationship with our stuff has spiraled out of control. We buy things, use them for a short while, and then rapidly replace them with the next model. It’s time to take a stand. These are our guiding principles.

via www.ifixit.com

If you can't fix it, you don't own it.

Hullaballo!

Welcome to all of you sent over here by digby and thanks for stopping by.  The post digby quoted is down below.  You can scroll a bit or just click here.