Lance Mannion

How much danger does a sleep-deprived mascot pose to the fans?

"Mr Met Having Trouble Sleeping In His New Home"

FLUSHING, NEW YORK—After dozing off between innings in front of more than 41,000 cheering fans Monday night, an exhausted Mr. Met informed team officials that he has not slept since the Mets moved from Shea Stadium to Citi Field.

According to Mets GM Omar Minaya, Mr. Met entered his office and used a series of pantomimes to indicate that his sleep disorder is caused by brighter stadium lights, uncomfortable temperatures, and Darryl Strawberry's snoring. Minaya, who spent two hours meeting with the 47-year-old mascot, said Mr. Met conveyed the degree of his fatigue by holding his hands several feet apart...

Despite the raucous throng of fans eager to celebrate the opening of the new ballpark as the Mets took on San Diego, the listless Mr. Met shuffled onto the field during pregame warm-ups and lethargically attempted to pump up the crowd with a few halfhearted waves and hand-claps. Not even third baseman David Wright's game-tying three-run homer in the fifth inning inspired the weary mascot, who was seen sitting atop the dugout clutching his oversized baseball head and massaging the seams at his temples in gentle circles.

Explaining that Mr. Met's usual fun-loving antics have taken a dark turn lately, Jose Reyes recalled how the mascot pushed an eight-year-old fan to the ground last week and flipped off Luis Castillo after he struck out on Opening Day. In addition, Reyes said he has seen Mr. Met take out his T-shirt gun, place it in his mouth, and repeatedly squeeze the trigger.

"When I asked if he was feeling okay, he didn't say a word. He just shook his giant head," Reyes said. "Poor guy. He used to be so upbeat. These days his smile just looks painted on."

Read the whole sad story.

The most successful snake-oil salesman in America today

Newt Gingrich is not going to be President.  He never was going to be President.  He never will be close enough to becoming President for him to be even worth my writing the first two sentences.

Nobody likes him.  Even people who like him don't like him.  He converted to Catholicism recently and a thousand saints rolled over in their sepulchers and reliquaries.  The angels in heaven, where there is more rejoicing over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine of the righteous' continued righteousness, stopped in mid-Hosanna when they heard whose reclamation they were celebrating and said, "Him?  Really?  Well...alleluia, I guess.  What the hell."  And what does it say about the Church that Barack Obama isn't welcome to speak at Notre Dame's commencement but the twice-divorced adulterer and darling of the proudly pro-death penalty, cheerfully warmongering, anti-immigrant, screw the poor party wasn't laughed out of the rectory of every parish where he offered himself as a candidate for RICA?

That the Church means what it says about forgiveness or that it's consistent in which items in the Catechism it chooses to ignore---all those that would apply to Republicans more than to Democrats?

At any rate, Newt may be going to heaven, after a long lay-over in Purgatory, but he is not going to the White House as President.

Newt isn't Speaker of the House anymore.  He's not even in Congress.  He's not a governor, a mayor, a town selectman, or dog catcher.  He has no constituency.  He speaks for no one but himself and the only authority he speaks with is the smug authority of the dealer in a back room poker game who knows the local cops have been paid off and he's got a tableful of drunken country boys to fleece.

Yet he keeps popping up on my teevee and in news reports online and on op-ed pages offline as if what he has to say matters as much as or more than what's on the minds of Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, or, God save us, even Sarah Palin, as if he represents the bright young future of the Republican Party instead of embodying its decrepit, sclerotic, senescent past, as if he's campaigning for something more than increased book sales and a bump in his speaking fees, as if he matters.

Looking for good examples of the craven corruption of the National Media is like looking for a good example of a jelly bean in an Easter basket, it hardly matters which one you pick, but I like this one---their continued presentation of Newt Gingrich as if he's a statesman and sage and not the political equivalent of a guy pssst-ing at you from an alleyway so he can sell you a bridge.

Oh, I know why they do it.  Newt can be counted on to stir up controversy and deliver a passable sound bite.  He can be passed off as a visionary because he can spout gobbledy-gook about the FUTURE in a style learned from his boyhood reading of Popular Science articles about flying cars and bubble cities.  He can mouth the conservative agenda with more seeming coherence, objectivity, and pseudo-intellectuality than the current crop of actual conservative leaders and statesmen.  And he can say nasty things about Democrats with a twinkle in his eye and a calmness in his voice that make it sound as though he's simply stating the amusingly obvious.

It's that last one, the cheerful nastiness about Democrats, that really butters his bread.

He's there so that the members of the "librul" media can hide behind him.  He helps keep their bread buttered.  When an angry corporate bigwig corners them during cocktails before a lucrative speaking gig, when the rich neighbor who sponsored their membership in the country club starts yelling at them in the locker room, when an angry Congressional aide threatens to cut off access to the boss, when the lobbyist who's promised to grease their kids' way into that great private school calls them up to scream at them about their alleged liberal bias, instead of standing up for themselves and their supposed journalistic principles they can splutter, "But didn't you see we had Newt on the other day?"

And since everybody involved, including Newt, knows that Newt doesn't mean any of it, that he's just out to make himself another million bucks, they can all pretend it doesn't matter, it's just part of the game.  You know, the game?  The one played with our money and our futures and our nation's security and well-being?

More:  Julia on Newt, the whole Newt, and nothing but the Newt.

And Newt Gingrich contra Bo Obama.

Smoke 'em, if you got 'em

Personally, I want relations normalized with Cuba so we can get more of their ballplayers.  Think of the pitching!  But it's nice to know we're doing ok without their cigars.

"Quality trumps politics at cigar store"

KINGSTON — You might expect the Obama administration's refusal to lift the trade embargo with Cuba would have brought disappointment and dismay to the men and women who covet the island's most famous export — Cuban cigars.

But proprietors and customers at Kingston's Uptown Cigar Company are a mellow lot whose deep familiarity with cigars tells them Cuban cohibas may not be everything they're cracked up to be.

To the aficionado, cigars are to other tobacco products as a Cadillac is to a Yugo. But these days, being a Cadillac was cool until the Lexus came along.

Read the rest in Times Herald-Record.

Photo by Chet Gordon, THR.

Old heart crying

I used to live here.  127 Beacon Street, Boston.  That's my window.  I don't know what's behind it now.  When I lived behind it there was a one-room apartment with a high ceiling, brown walls, and a bed that folded up into a closet, a real Murphy bed that was one of the most comfortable racks I've ever had the pleasure to count sheep in.  There wasn't much else.  A refrigerator in the corner, a small table by the window, a desk I never used---for some reason I did most of my writing and reading stretched out on the floor.  I had a bathroom that must have been decent enough.  I can't recall it to my mind's eye.  All there was for a kitchen was a hot plate and a sink in a short hallway between the bathroom and the main room, which wasn't a problem because I was working three jobs and wasn't home very often for lunch or dinner.  I didn't have a phone, which also wasn't a problem, because of those three jobs---it was easy enough to get hold of me at the bookstore or the movie theater or the projection booth at school, and if I wasn't any of those places I'd be at the blonde's, who had an apartment with a real kitchen and a phone and a friendly and obliging roommate who had her own boyfriend with an apartment upstairs.  When I was in my apartment and had to make a call I ran up to a market a few blocks away on Charles Street where I often bumped into the mayor who'd be there with his dogs, a matched set of golden retrievers.

I did a lot of walking up and down Beacon Street during the eight months I lived there.  I'd walk up, past the Public Garden, then cut across the Common to get to the bookstore and the movie theater.  I'd walk down, through the whole of Back Bay, to get to school and the blonde's.  When I walked down Beacon I passed this place, the Crossroads, which I don't think billed itself as an Irish Pub yet.  It was just a restaurant with a bar.  I never went in.  There were lots of restaurants with bars, most of them more inviting looking than the Crossroads.  I'm not sure if I ever gave the place a thought.

If I had gone in, for lunch or dinner, practically any day of the week, I'd have probably noticed a haggard, haunted-looking, prematurely old man in his mid-fifties, sitting with his chin in his hand, chain-smoking, in a front booth, alone, almost always alone.

I'd have noticed him because of his fits of explosive coughing.  He smoked like a stove, four packs a day, and had emphysema.  He didn't need it then, but by the end of his life he was dragging around an oxygen tank everywhere he went---and he was still smoking.

I'd heard of Richard Yates but I hadn't read Revolutionary Road or Eleven Kinds of Loneliness yet, and if someone had dragged me into the Crossroads and pointed him out, all alone in his booth where he ate almost all of his meals and did a great deal of his heavy and solitary drinking during the eleven years he lived in Boston, I wouldn't have been impressed.  Of course, in those days, the only contemporary writer I was really impressed with was the one I was sure I was going to be.  But I'd met, and had as teachers, other more famous and successful writers.  A few years later, after I'd read Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and decided it was one of the two perfect short story collections in the English language, the other being Dubliners by James Joyce, and I'd learned that I'd walked past his favorite watering hole God knows how many times when he was probably in there, I felt a twinge of regret at my missed opportunity.  But it was only a twinge and it passed in a hurry and never came back until today, because by then I'd also learned from people who'd known him in Boston and others who'd met him in Iowa that Yates was a miserable wreck of a human being, a depressed and depressing old drunk, self-defeating and pathetic, a bitter and scornful failed writer who hated himself for both his talent and his failure, in short a cliche of the sort he'd never permitted himself to write into one of his stories (but which, sadly, he allowed to become the main character of his last, unfinished novel), and who wants to have to face the fact that one of their literary heroes is a cliche?

I started reading Blake Bailey's biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty , this afternoon.  That's what brought back the twinge of regret.

The reason I was working the three jobs is that I was trying, unsteadily and unsuccessfully, to put away some money for grad school.  I had my heart set on Iowa, but it was a given that I would be admitted to Boston University's creative writing program if I applied.  I'd taken several classes taught by the director, Leslie Epstein, who assured me the fix was in.  Beacon Street runs into Bay State Road and from time to time I'd stop in at the brownstone where the Creative Writing Program was housed to check in with Leslie, let him know how things were going, and remind him who I was.  It turns out that I was coming closer to meeting Yates there than I was passing by the Crossroads all the time.  He was teaching at BU that spring.  I don't remember if Leslie ever mentioned that.  If he had, Richard Yates would have been just a name to me.  I'm pretty sure I never ran into Yates in the building.  He'd have presented a startling figure.

In the mid-eighties Yates's former acquaintances would sometimes see a gaunt, stupefied, ragged old man staggering around the streets of Boston; an incredulous second look would confirm that he wretch was none other than Richard Yates.  The usual impulse was to hurry away before one was recognized by this poor ghost, though of course there was no danger of that.  When not in the hospital or seated at his desk, Yates spent his days in an alcoholic fog.

He was different in the classroom.  Bailey says his students "adored" him:

"Dick was depressed and very frail but dignified," said his student Natalie Baturka.  "He elicited awe from us.  Unlike Jayne Anne [Philips] and Leslie, who were young and trying to prove themselves, Dick seemed not to give a fuck what others thought of him, but he was also fragile and insecure.  In class, though, he had an air of effortless authority."  The paradox of Yates's self-assurance and terrible vulnerability---noted by many---occurred to Melanie Rae Thon one day when he called to praise a story of hers.  "He was the finest reader I've ever known," she said.  "He'd read through a story and see everything you intended there, and give you a vision of what your story could be if you had the patience to bring it to fruition."  Unqualified praise from such a reader was a rare, exalting experience, and Thon was feeling pleased with herself when suddenly Yates's voice became small and shy:  "Do you ever read my work...?"

He was less inclined than ever to mediate wrangling in his workshop; while his students "beat the shit out of each other," as Baturka put it, Yates would listen placidly and later buy the class a pitcher of beer at a campus bar.  "Dad's gonna make it all better," he'd say, and presently a spirit of relative amity would prevail.

A Tragic Honesty came out six years ago.  Bailey's most recent book, published in March, is a biography of John Cheever, which, I wrote last month, I wasn't going to read because I didn't think I could stand to spend 784 pages in that miserable man's company.  Cheever, I meant, not Bailey.  Yates, however, was a different kind of miserable (and Bailey's devoted only 613 pages to his misery), and I think I can muster the necessary sympathy to get me through the book.  All the stories I heard about Cheever at Iowa were nasty and mean.  All the stories I heard about Yates were sad.  People put up with Cheever.  They loved Yates.  After I wrote that post about Cheever I read several essays John Updike wrote about him.  One was essentially an obituary, a fond and sympathetic good-bye from a fellow writer who admired his talent and thought of him as a friend.  Another was a review of Cheever's letters and in it Updike had to confront the fact that the man he admired and thought of as a friend despised him and belittled him and his work to other writers.  Updike managed to deal with this with grace, sympathy, and some humor.  Cheever was a mean and petty bastard.  Yates was a pitiful if sometimes noble wreck.  Bastards usually make for more dramatic reading than pitiful wrecks, but we'll see how it goes.

A Tragic Honesty drew me right in, though, because it begins with a colleague and friend searching for the manuscript of Yates'  last novel in the hours after Yates' death in November of 1992.  Yates was calling the novel Uncertain Times and it was based on his experiences as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy in the 1960s.  I'd never heard of it.  Yates' books have been in and out of print since his death---they're currently back in---so I guessed it was possible that I'd just missed it during its one or several short appearances in the bookstores.  I doubted that though, and I expected that what Bailey was leading up to was that the manuscript had been lost or, more tragically, had never existed, that Yates had been promising his publisher a book he was too sick or too worn-out or too drunk to write.  But no!  The friend, after searching through Yates' dirty and stale with the smell of beer and cigarette smoke duplex and coming up with nothing, is about to give up looking when he has an inspiration.  He goes into the kitchen, opens the pathetically unstocked refrigerator---Yates had pretty much given up solid food---and reaches into the freezer, "the poor man's fireproof safe."  And there it is!  A final masterpiece saved!

Except that it wasn't a masterpiece.

I skipped to the end Bailey's book to find out what happened to Uncertain Times.

It turns out that it was never published.  It was never finished.  It was a book that Yates was too sick, too worn-out, and, possibly, too drunk to write.  But he wrote it anyway. 

I'm not sure how good a book it would have been if he'd been able to complete it and revise it.  According to Bailey, the Yates character isn't an observer and vicarious participant in great events, like Jack Burden, in All the King's Men .  He's the book's hero or, more exactly, its anti-hero, and Robert Kennedy is missing from the story for very long stretches at a time.  A book about Bobby Kennedy in which Bobby Kennedy is a secondary character while the protagonist is a broken-spirited and mentally rickety writer more wrapped up in his own problems with women than with the political crises his boss is dealing with seems misconceived to me.  I doubt Yates himself imagined he was on the right track.  But then it doesn't sound as though he was imagining at all.  It sounds like he was remembering.  He was awfully sick.  He probably didn't have the strength to imagine.  Probably he didn't feel he had the time either.  He was writing fast, trying to get ahead of death.

_________________________

Here's a review Bailey wrote for Slate of the novel he calls Yates' masterpiece, The Easter Parade.

When I wrote my post on Bailey's Cheever biography last month, James Wolcott's review for Vanity Fair wasn't yet available online.  Now it is:  It's Still Cheever Country.

Follow-up:  An interview with Yates in Ploughshares, and DeWitt Henry on lessons writers can learn from Yates---Points of Craft.

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Back to the dirt track

The pull is just too strong.

The thrill for speed, the need of community, the drive to succeed — the motivations to stay are as plenty as the colorful cars rolled out every weekend.

The arguments to pack it in are also powerful — the tug of family needs, a tightening budget, missing out on trips and special events — but McGill says the race drivers aren't missing out on life, just living another type.

"Racing is so much like life,'' says McGill, alternating between clown and philosopher. "It's such a roller coaster, but those high peaks, those moments, just like in life, those are what you live for. The night I ran through the bleachers and fell in the mud and made a jerk of myself, that one moment lasted for a split-second, but it was special.''

Local driver John McGill and other gray-bearded veterans of the dirt track circuit climb back into their cars for another season.

"It gets really frustrating a lot of times," [says Mike Ricci], "A lot of times I want to throw the towel in but it always comes around, it always bounces back to you. You think it's not but it does. You have your bad days or three or four bad weeks. The crew is not getting along, nobody is getting along, and before you know it, you are back in the winner's circle and everybody wants to work on the car again and go racing.''

Photo by Tom Bushey, Times Herald-Record.

Extreme croquet?

I always thought of croquet as a family game.  But did you know it was once banned in Boston?   Seems it attracted a crowd prone to drunkenness and licentiousness.  Kind of the beach volley ball of its day, apparently.  These days it's become an Xtreme sport or, at any rate, a local college has an Extreme Croquet Society:

Mountains don't stop them. Neither does rain nor snow. Not even the lumpy, weed-strewn Hasbrouck Field on the edge of the campus can keep these particular extremists from their game.

"We play all over," said Justin Berbig, a SUNY senior and co-founder of the club.

Behind him on Tuesday, a dozen men and women practiced whacking croquet balls through narrow, regulation-size wickets you won't find in the backyard versions of a game once thought to be the exclusive bailiwick of the gentry...

Read the rest at the Times Herald-Record.

I remember it as if it happened only tomorrow

In Terry Pratchett's Soul Music , Death, the anthropomorphic manifestation of death who, black-robed, skeletal, riding a pale horse and wielding a scythe, is a main character and sometime hero in Pratchett's Discworld novels, is depressed.

Not because of his work.  He takes a kind of grim pride in his job.  He's depressed because he can't forget---anything.

As he tells a holy man he's gone to for advice about the meaning of it all:

I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.  EVERYTHING.  DOORKNOBS.  THE PLAY OF SUNLIGHT ON HAIR.  FOOTSTEPS.  EVERY LITTLE DETAIL.  AS IF IT HAPPENED ONLY YESTERDAY.  AS IF IT HAPPENED ONLY TOMORROW.  EVERYTHING.

Later, after he's had a few drinks---pretty much the entire stock in trade of the Mended Drum.  It takes a lot of alcohol to get Death drunk, since he has no blood to absorb it.---he explains his unique memory to the bartender:

D'YOU.  D'YOU.  THING IS.  D'YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE, EH, HAVING A MEMORY SO GOOD, RIGHT, SO GOOD YOU EVEN REMEMBER WHAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET?  THAT'S ME.  OH, YES.  RIGHT ENOUGH.  AS THOUGH.  AS THOUGH.  AS THOUGH THERE'S NO FUTURE...ONLY THE PAST THAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET.  AND.  AND.  AND.  YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS ANYWAY.  YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN AND YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS...

YOU SEE.  YOU SHEE.  YOU SEE STUFF LOOMING UP AHEAD LIKE AN ICEBERG THINGS AHEAD BUT YOU MUSTN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT BECAUSE---BECAUSE---BECAUSEITSALAW.  CAN'T BREAK THE LAW.  'SCOTABEALAW.

SEE THIS GLASS, RIGHT?   SEE IT? 'S LIKE MEMORY.  ONNACOUNTA IF YOU PUT STUFF IN, MORE STUFF FLOWS OUT, RIGHT?  'S FACT.  EVERYONEGOTTA MEMORY LIKE THIS.  'S WHAT KEEP HUMANS FROM GOING ISS---ISH---INSH--MAD.  'CEPT ME.  POOROLE ME.  I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.  AS IF IT HAPPENED ONLY TOMORROW.

In his despair, Death walks off the job, leaving the work of grim reaping to his grand-daughter Susan, and spends a good part of the book trying and failing to forget.

Remembering everything, that would be awful.  "Remembering" the future would be a horror.  But it turns out that we do.  "Remember" the future.  That is, the way our brain think about the future is very similar to the way it goes about remembering the past.  Death's memory isn't unique, after all, or at least that's what I'm taking away from this post by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance.

Sez Sean:

...the human brain, as most readers of this blog probably know, was not intelligently designed. It’s doesn’t have the high-level structure of a computer program, where all the processes are carefully planned to achieve some goal. (The lower-level structures share the mechanical features of any other physical system, but that’s of little help here.) Evolution nudges the genome in useful directions, but it can only work with the raw materials it’s given; it doesn’t have the luxury of starting from scratch. So over and over in biological organisms, we find features that were originally developed for one purpose being re-engineered for something else.

As it turns out, the way that the human brain goes about the task of “remembering the past” is actually very similar to how it goes about “imagining the future.” Deep down, these are activities with very different functions and outcomes — predicting the future is a lot less reliable, for one thing. But in both cases, the brain goes through more or less the same routine...

We tend to assume that the brain must be like a computer — when we want to access a memory, we simply pull up a “file” stored somewhere on the brain’s hard drive, and take a look at its contents. But that’s not it at all. Schacter believes that pieces of data relevant to any particular memory — times, images, sounds — are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to “remember” something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It’s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it’s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future.

Studies of people suffering from amnesia find they have almost as much trouble imagining their future as they do recalling their past.

Go read Remembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future.  I would read it again myself but I've got a good memory and remember it as if I read it only next week.

I swear I was only going out to pick up some milk for morning...

The clerk at the ice cream counter forced me to buy the chocolate milk shake.

The murderer Rigaud captures another imagination for Charles Dickens

Just now.

The fifteen year old came downstairs for a drink of milk.

"What're you watching, Dad?"

"Little Dorrit."

"It's online?"

"Yep."

"What's Little Dorrit about anyway?"

"A little hard to say.  It's got several plots going at once.  Mainly it's about a young woman named Amy Dorrit who has to work very hard to take care of her selfish and ridiculous family and a very sad man named Arthur Clennam who is convinced his family did something terribly wrong to hers in the past and he's trying to find out what it was so he can make up for it."

"Oh."  He peered down at the screen and watched with me for a minute.  "Who's that?"

"That's Arthur's mother and that's Rigaud, a blackmailer, con man, and murderer."

"I could tell he's a bad guy by his beard."

"In the book you can tell he's a bad guy by his nose and his mustache.  Whenever he smiles his nose comes down over his mustache and his mustache goes up under his nose."

The fifteen year old laughed.  I said, "You know who the actor playing him is?"

"Who is it?"

"Andy Serkis."

"Gollum?"

"Yep.  That's not what he really looks like though.  He's wearing a false nose and a wig."

"I know what he looks like.  I saw him as Capricorn in Inkheart.  He's very good at playing slimy and evil characters."

"Apparently."

"Do we have the book?"

"Little Dorrit?"

"Yes."

"You want to read it?"

"I think so."

"It's a big one," I said.  I happened to have it on the desk nearby.  I handed it to him.

"It's not that big," he said.

"Over eight hundred pages."

He shrugged, unfazed.  I forgot.  This is a kid who read all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings in a week...when he was ten.  He thumbed the pages of the book, nodded to himself, and headed upstairs with it.  "Night, Dad."

He's still awake up there.  I can hear pages turning.  I know how he reads a book.  He starts by dipping into it here and there, looking for the exciting parts or parts he's heard are important.  I'll bet he's looking for Rigaud.  Maybe he's found him already.  Maybe this is what he's reading this very moment:

She stood at the open door, staggering herself with
this enigma, on a rainy, thundery evening.  The clouds were flying
fast, and the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some
neighbouring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty
chimney-cowls and weather-cocks, and rushing round and round a
confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead
citizens out of their graves.  The low thunder, muttering in all
quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this
attempted desecration, and to mutter, 'Let them rest!  Let them
rest!'

Mistress Affery, whose fear of thunder and lightning was only to be
equalled by her dread of the haunted house with a premature and
preternatural darkness in it, stood undecided whether to go in or
not, until the question was settled for her by the door blowing
upon her in a violent gust of wind and shutting her out.  'What's
to be done now, what's to be done now!' cried Mistress Affery,
wringing her hands in this last uneasy dream of all; 'when she's
all alone by herself inside, and can no more come down to open it
than the churchyard dead themselves!'

In this dilemma, Mistress Affery, with her apron as a hood to keep
the rain off, ran crying up and down the solitary paved enclosure
several times.  Why she should then stoop down and look in at the
keyhole of the door as if an eye would open it, it would be
difficult to say; but it is none the less what most people would
have done in the same situation, and it is what she did.

From this posture she started up suddenly, with a half scream,
feeling something on her shoulder.  It was the touch of a hand; of
a man's hand.

The man was dressed like a traveller, in a foraging cap with fur
about it, and a heap of cloak.  He looked like a foreigner.  He had
a quantity of hair and moustache--jet black, except at the shaggy
ends, where it had a tinge of red--and a high hook nose.  He
laughed at Mistress Affery's start and cry; and as he laughed, his
moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.

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Mark Twain invented the focus group

Twain:

Whenever I am about to publish a book, I feel an impatient desire to know what kind of a book it is. Of course I can find this out only by waiting until the critics shall have printed their reviews. I do know, beforehand, what the verdict of the general public will be, because I have a sure and simple method of ascertaining that. Which is this -- if you care to know. I always read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows:

1. Man and woman with no sense of humor.
2. Man and woman with medium sense of humor.
3. Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.
4. An intensely practical person.
5. A sentimental person.
6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.
7. Hypercritical person -- natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.
8. Enthusiast -- person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.
9. Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.
10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.
11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.
12. Person who detests them.
13. Person of evenly balanced judicial mind.
14. Man who always goes to sleep.

These people accurately represent the general public. Their verdict is the sure forecast of the verdict of the general public. There is not a person among them whose opinion is not valuable to me; but the man whom I most depend upon -- the man whom I watch with the deepest solicitude -- the man who does most toward deciding me as to whether I shall publish the book or burn it, is the man who always goes to sleep.

To read more about that man and how his sleep habits determined Twain's course of action on a new book, go here.

Or you can buy Twain's new book---Yep.  He's still publishing.---Who Is Mark Twain?  Obviously, it was good enough to get past the man who always goes to sleep.

"Please, Mr Taxman, leave our rich corporate masters alone!"

It's Tea Bag Day!

I hope you're all taking to the streets with your boxes of Red Rose and Lipton.  Oh, I forgot.  Most of you are sane and sensible and blessed with a gift for recognizing irony.  Then I guess like James Wolcott you're on your way out to infiltrate and disrupt the protests.

The streets are going to be filled---or at least mildly congested---with a whole lot of regular folks whom rich people despise as losers protesting against raising taxes slightly on the rich people who think of them as losers.

In gratitude the rich are toasting their defenders with Korbel Brut and taking back every thing they said about their being losers.

Their new preferred word is "suckers."

If the Tea Baggers had been alive in 1773, they'd have taken to the streets to protest that the King needed to quarter more troops in their homes, the Stamp Act didn't go far enough, and tea was just too darn cheap as it was.

How would Ronald Reagan have dealt with pirates?

Updated.

This blog is officially a Sympathy For Pirates Free Zone.  Whatever socio-economic, political, and cultural forces drives them out to prowl one of the Seven Seas, they've chosen to respond to those forces by taking up careers as thugs and thieves, which is all pirates are and all they've ever been.  The great nations can deal with those forces and the problems that arise diplomatically and sympathetically in the background.  In the foreground they should deal with the pirates just the way the Navy did Sunday.

I've heard and read suggestions that we should stop calling the pirates pirates because it romanticizes them, as if none of us can hear the word without conjuring up images of Jack Sparrow, Peter Blood, and the black mask of the Dread Pirate Roberts, whoever happens to be the Dread Pirate Roberts this week.  Probably true, but it's not true that very many grown-ups will then apply those images to the thugs and thieves out there committing their acts of piracy.  Mixing up movies with reality is something Right Wing bloggers do, healthy-minded adults know that real rabbits don't talk with Brooklyn accents and real pirates don't do amusing impersonations of Keith Richards.  Not while on the job, anyway.   They're pirates, and calling them terrorists, as I've seen suggested, muddies that issue and, speaking of Right Wingers, gives them another chance to relive their glory days after 9/11 when they could shut down every argument by accusing dissenters of being soft of terror. 

Before the Navy SEALs went to work, were the Right Wingers on Fox and elsewhere really declaring that the President was too soft on piracy?  Guess so.  Of course shoot first and slap down anyone who asks questions later has always been their preferred method for dealing with any problem where killing someone else is an option, even if it's not at all a desirable one.  As long as they don't actually have to be in the line of fire they're always all for going in with guns blazing.

As if making someone else dead is the only measure of toughness.

They need to read Will Bunch's Tear Down This Myth.

Will's book is not a 261 page argument that Reagan was a bad President.  Will doesn't even think Reagan was all that bad a President, certainly not in the way Richard Nixon was a bad President or George W. Bush was a bad President.  He doesn't think Reagan was a good one, not by a long shot.  Will gets into all the things he thinks Reagan did wrong that hurt the country, especially his turning the United States from a creditor nation into a debtor nation and setting us up for the economic disaster President Obama's now trying to clean up.  But Will isn't as interested in ranking Reagan as he is showing that however he ranks Reagan wasn't a successful Conservative President.

That's because Reagan was a pragmatist before he was an ideologue, Will says, and on the most important issues he had to deal with---taxation, the end of the Cold War, terrorism---he usually did the practical thing rather than the conservative thing.  Maybe I'll get into all that in another post.  Here, though, what I want to highlight is another difference between Reagan the actual human being and the Right Wing Hero conservatives idealize and idolize.

Reagan was nowhere near as bloodthirsty.

In fact, if the bodies are ever tallied, it will probably turn out that Ronald Reagan was directly responsible for the deaths of far fewer people than any other President since Eisenhower, except Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.  Barack Obama may already have more blood on his hands.

I'm not forgetting all the people who did die because of what he did, all the people in Central America killed by the Contras and the Death Squads we trained and supported, all the people who died of AIDS because he refused to acknowledge the crisis.

I'm just saying, as Will is saying, that Reagan's response to situations in which shooting first and asking questions later was an option, it was not his preferred option.  Reagan was extremely reluctant to put American troops in harm's way.  He was pushed throughout his Administration to invade Panama to take out Manuel Noriega and he resisted it.  When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan pulled the Marines out.  When Reagan, who became President mainly because of Jimmy Carter's allegedly weak-kneed handling of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, had to deal with his own hostage crisis (Lebanon again), Reagan's response was to do what we supposedly never do---he negotiated with terrorists.  (He tried to buy the hostages' release too, which led to the Iran-Contra scandal, which Will argues was a worse assault on the Constitution than Watergate.)  And when his attempts to negotiate and pay ransom failed and the terrorists tortured and killed the CIA station chief, Reagan responded by...doing nothing.  Not because he wasn't really tough, but because he was tough enough to adhere to one of his principles.  Reagan had ruled out any retaliation against terrorists that might get civilians killed.  He called that, a shrugged-off acceptance of collateral damage, a form of terrorism itself.

Reagan could talk the bloody-minded talk, but Will says he was often talking it to pacify his critics on the Right.  Reagan himself was not a prisoner of his own rhetoric.

So how would Reagan have dealt with the pirates?

Probably exactly the way President Obama did, by taking his time, by attempting to talk the pirates into surrendering, by looking for a way not to get anybody killed, by not being bloody-minded, by being tough not to be in a rush to show off how tough he was.

Make sure you visit Will Bunch's blog, Attytood.

__________________

The Corner's Jonah Goldberg was insufficiently anti-Obama on the subject of pirates and was taken to the woodshed by Rush Limbaugh.  Jim Wolcott calls on Goldberg to stand up to the blowhard.

Update:  Dennis Perrin thinks I'm full of it.

Every time I write something less than hateful about Reagan, there are always some people who react as if I'm making the case that he should be on Mount Rushmore.  For the record:  I didn't like the guy!

"Woodworker, 8 years old, gains renown"

When my friends and I was this kid's age, we thought we were pretty handy when we nailed a few boards to a tree and called it a clubhouse.

WESTBROOKVILLE — On Tuesday afternoon Liam Naokes, 8, was in his father's woodworking shop, a small shed behind their house.

He pulled a pair of green safety goggles over his mop of red hair and concentrated.

His father, Michael, was standing nearby.

Liam picked up an electric drill, still a little big for his 8-year-old hands, and carefully placed the bit in a jig before beginning. This jig is used to guide Liam as he creates a pocket hole in the oak to attach other pieces from the inside.

Liam has been working with wood for only about a year but already has built a mission table, proudly displayed in the family living room, and cabinets in the family's bathroom.

And to think the blonde fainted when I tried to teach our guys how to use a circular saw when they were 8 and 6.  We could have had new cabinets by now!

This story from this morning's Times Herald-Record is by Steve Sacco.  Photos by Michelle Haskell.  Read the rest.

Cohen the Barbarian on the burning of books

"Is there anywhere around here where I can---" Cohen paused lovingly, savoring the words---"where I can get a steak?"

"The star people have closed all the inns.  They say it's wrong to be eating and drinking when---"

"I know, I know," said Cohen.  "I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it.  Don't they approve of anything?"

Lackjaw was lost in thought for a moment.  "Setting fire to things," he said at last.  "They're quite good at that.  Books and stuff.  They have these great big bonfires."

Cohen was shocked.

"Bonfires of books?"

"Yes.  Horrible, isn't it?"

"Right," said Cohen.  He thought it was appalling.  Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out.  Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book.  If you felt like a smoke and couldn't find a pipe, a book was your man every time.

Cohen realized people wrote things in books.  It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.

---from The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett.

All your virtue are belong to us

Don't usually pay much attention to the Right Wing bloggers, but I agree with Mark Lewis on this one.  Whittaker Chambers would make a fascinating subject for a movie and Sam Tanenhaus' biography an excellent basis for the screenplay.

But I don't know why Lewis thinks that such a movie would be a conservative Milk.

Has he read Tanenhaus' book?

I'm sure he's held it in his hands, turned all the pages, and run his eyes over every word.  But did he take any of it in?

Conservatives have a habit of missing the points of movies and songs they call "conservative."  Maybe they have the same problem with books.

Tanenhaus makes Chambers a sympathetic figure, but he doesn't present him as heroic or even particularly likable, mainly because he wasn't either.

Whittaker Chambers was a strange, creepy, and grubby little person with an outsized man-crush on the friend he would later betray, Alger Hiss.  In Tanenhaus' biography, he comes across as something of a fantasist and his motivations for joining the Communist Party and becoming a spy---actually, not much of a spy.  More of an agent provocateur---weren't intellectually deep or politically consistent, and the same went for his conversion to the Right.   He did what he did because he was acting out a script in his own head in which he was a romantic, mysterious, and misunderstood hero.

Unless the director gave Chambers the sort of whitewashing Raoul Walsh gave Custer in They Died With Their Boots On, Chambers is likely to give the audience a case of the willies.  Add to this that the movie would also have to include as a "conservative" hero, Richard Nixon, and I just don't see how the film would advance the conservative cause the way Lewis thinks Milk advances whatever brand of liberal politics it is he thinks Milk advances.

I'm guessing he thinks Chambers' story would vindicate the hysterical anti-communism of the 1950s, in which case it might be better to make it more of a Right Wingers' answer to Good Night and Good Luck and have it try to capture the spirit of a time in which effete and craven Liberals refused to take seriously the threat posed bythe international Communist conspiracy, leaving it up to brave and noble, and picked-on and reviled, conservatives to take a stand against the Red Menace.

In that movie Chambers' unattractiveness would become a defining virtue, the outward signs of his role as an outsider, the inside he's on the outside of being the Northeastern Liberal Intellectual Elite.

Chambers' place as a hero of conservative folklore has a lot to do with the same sense of class resentment and victimization that Nixonland author Rick Perlstein argues drove Richard Nixon, and in fact Chambers himself is actually a bit player in the epic tragedy of Richard Nixon.  It was Nixon who got Alger Hiss, Chambers was just what the title of his own autobiography says he was, a witness to history, not a maker of it.

Basically, a realistic movie version of Whittaker Chambers' life would be the story of a not very important, or even interesting, victim of historical events he barely comprehends let alone influences.  Harvey Milk made things happened.  He did his bit to change the world.  Chambers didn't make anything happen.  Things happened to him, except when he happened to other people, like Hiss and Nixon.

There is nothing particularly conservative about that story.  It's an accident of history that in this case the story was played out by people who identified themselves by their political affiliations.  In order to see Chambers' story as a heroic conservative folk tale, you have to ignore the existential and concentrate narrowly on the political.

On the cause of anti-communism.

A lot of conservatives believe that anti-communism is their cause.  That's partly because they held onto a world view formed around 1949 for decades after the rest of the country left it behind.

The Right never understood why most Americans weren't still looking under their beds for Communists, even as Richard Nixon opened up China and forged a detente with the Soviet Union, even as Ronald Reagan, shocked and horrified by the "liberal" anti-nuke movie The Day After, decided to do his bit to rid the world of the threat of thermonuclear obliteration by negotiating radical arms treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev.

But it's also because they have a habit of assigning all virtues to themselves and attributing to liberals any and all attitudes they deem insufficiently respectful of those virtues.

A habit that has led to another habit of theirs, mixing up their political interests with morality.

Works like this:

Communism is evil.  Conservatives hate Communism.  Therefore Conservatives hate evil and those who hate evil must be for evil's opposite.

Communism is evil.   Liberals don't hate Communism.  Therefore Liberals don't hate evil and those who don't hate evil must be for it.

This is, of course, based on historical nonsense.  Anti-communism wasn't inherently virtuous and even if it was it certainly wasn't an exclusive virtue of the Right's.

As a quick trip to the John F. Kennedy Museum and Library will tell you.

More later.

Meanwhile, Roy Edroso offers a few more suggestions for a conservative Milk.

Potato Day is Tyranny Day

Jon Stewart sez:

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"Rock me, rock me, rock me, Sexy Jesus..."

Watched Hamlet 2 the other night.

Cracked the blonde up.

Didn't have her falling off the couch laughing, the way Death at a Funeral did.  But she couldn't get enough of Steve Coogan's character, the failed actor and failing high school drama teacher who tries to save his job by staging a musical sequel to Hamlet.  It involves time travel.  And Hamlet meets Jesus Christ.  Don't ask.  Here's the big production number from the show:

Oh, good, we get to buy more junk from overseas...

...saves us from the burden of having to make quality goods here.

Everything that's been going wrong with the economy for the last thirty years is summed up in this story from the Syracuse Post-Standard:

Lyncourt, NY -- After 34½ years making dinnerware for Syracuse China, Jackie O'Neill is not sure what she's going to do with herself when the last plates roll out of the kiln today.

"I'm heartbroken," said O'Neill, 59. "I really don't have any plans. I'm in the process of denial. It feels like a death in the family."

She's not alone. Today, the company's 275 employees, many of whom have more than 20 years of service to the company, will produce the last pottery stamped with the Syracuse China name and actually made in Syracuse.

The company's outlet store and its shipping department will remain open until mid-June. But sometime today, Syracuse China's 138 years of making dinnerware in Syracuse will end.

In a cost-cutting move, the company's owner, Libbey Inc., of Toledo, Ohio, announced in December it will close the huge Syracuse China factory on Court Street in Salina, where it has been located since moving from Fayette Street in Syracuse on June 7, 1922.

The Syracuse China name will not die with the factory. Libbey says it will continue to sell dinnerware containing the Syracuse China brand name, but the products will be imported from factories in other countries.

My italics.

Can't have grown-up Americans making anything when there are children ready, willing, and able to do the jobs in sweat shops overseas.

Bailout agonistes

Updated.

All I really know about what's happening in the economy is that everything stinks.

And I don't even really know that.   Everything doesn't stink.  The candy industry's doing ok, I hear.  But if sure feels like everything stinks.

Here's what it looks like to me.

The object of the auto industry bailout is to save the American auto industry.

The object of bailing out the banks isn't to save the banking industry.  It's to use it.

Detroit is knocking at heaven's door.  Chrysler and GM may be dead no matter how much money inject into them.  Radical surgery is their only hope.  It stinks that autoworkers are going to have to suffer for this.  But there's no point in protecting benefits workers can't collect for twenty or thirty years if those workers aren't going to have jobs next year.  And it's not just the union guys whose jobs and benefits are at stake.  The industry extends far beyond the auto plants.   The delivery truck drivers who work for the suppliers, the secretaries and bookkeepers at the dealerships, the waitress at the diner where the service techs come for their coffee breaks and lunch, the agent at the little independent insurance office in town, all these people work in the "auto industry," and their jobs and benefits are on the line too.

The Obama Administration is thinking about future jobs too.  If the American auto industry goes under, who's going to build all the green cars?  Are we going to buy all our cars from the Asians the way we buy all our clothes?  Not a lot of Americans sewing shirts these days, are there?

I think the President is figuring that although we'll lose some union jobs now, we'll get them and others back later, and as for the benefit cuts, he's counting on his own health care plans and reforms to compensate for that.

It stinks that he has to take such a ruthless gamble but what's the alternative?

Bailing out the banks requires a different sort of ruthlessness.

As a plan for "fixing" the banks, the Geithner Put isn't one.  Not one anyone expects to work, at any rate, probably not even Geithner.  The banks don't need to be saved the way the auto industry needs to be saved.  Some banks should fail and are going to.  What the President wants is that the banks that aren't failing start banking again.  What they've been doing for the last six months is looking out for their own survival.

The object is to get money moving.  The Geithner Put is a covert stimulus plan.  We're working with the warlords here.  We're bribing them to do the right thing, which is to start lending in a big way.  The TARP money that appears to be going to buying up toxic assest is actually, indirectly and inefficiently, going into loans.

The object is to see to it that businesses that have been cutting hours and production and laying off workers because they can't get the loans they need get those loans.  The object is to see to it that start-ups start up.  The object is jobs.

We're not going to make back all of the money we're spending to buy up toxic assets.  But just because we're not making the money back here, doesn't mean we're not making it back over there.

Everyone who gets a job or who keeps one thanks to this gets paid back with a paycheck.  The rest of us get paid back when those people pay income taxes they wouldn't have paid because they had no income.  We get paid back when they buy things with that income.  We collect it in sales tax.  We collect it in our own paychecks which we continue to receive because the companies we work for are making money from those other people are spending.

The stimulus plan wasn't big enough.  The Geithner Plan is a way of moving money into the economy that the President didn't get---because he didn't expect to get it and didn't ask for it---from Congress. 

Looking at the bank bailout as a bank bailout means seeing the problem as a banking problem.  The problem is unemployment.  The problem is that people are in trouble, not that the banksters aren't paying for their mistakes, sins, crimes, and idiocies.  "Fixing" the banks isn't the priority at the moment.

Fixing the banks in most economists' view means taking them over.  Clearly, the President doesn't want to do that.  He doesn't want to add the job of running the banking system to his agenda right now.  He's said things and given signs that reform, re-regulation, and even some retribution are all on the drawing board.  But he's got enough on the assembly line right this minute---jobs, the budget, health care, Afghanistan.

As I understand it, most critics of Geithner's plan hate it because, besides apparently socializing risk while privatizing gains, it won't clean up the mess.  It may make it worse.  They're also concerned that this is the President's one shot.  If he doesn't get this right, he won't be able to go back to Congress and ask for money for a almost certainly necessary second stimulus.  Brad DeLong, though, thinks that the President has concluded he wouldn't get the money, now or later, no way, no how, and the Geithner plan is Plan B.

Or Plan V.  V as in Voinovich.

The problem is that the Geithner Plan appears to me to be too small – between one-eight and one-half of what it needs to be. Even though the US government is doing other things as well –fiscal stimulus, quantitative easing, and other uses of bailout funds – it is not doing everything it should.

My guess is that the reason that the US government is not doing all it should can be stated in three words: Senator George Voinovich, who is the 60th vote in the Senate – the vote needed to close off debate and enact a bill. To do anything that requires legislative action, the Obama administration needs Voinovich and the 59 other senators who are more inclined to support it. The administration’s tacticians appear to think that they are not on board – especially after the recent AIG bonus scandal – whereas the Geithner Plan relies on authority that the administration already has. Doing more would require a legislative coalition that is not there yet.

Will it work, at least to a limited degree?

Seems people's feelings about this depend on whether they believe Paul Krugman or Brad DeLong, on just how corrupt and stupid they think the banksters are, on whether they think Larry Summers is a weasel and Tim Geithner a stoat, and how much they're willing to trust that President Obama knows what he's doing and has our interests at heart.

I respect both Krugman and DeLong.  But Krugman seems to be focusing on the economics to the exclusion of the politics and on the problems not the problem---that is he saw the stimulus as one thing and the Geithner Put as another, with the stimulus being about jobs and the Geithner plan being about fixing the banks and it doesn't fix the banks.

I think the banksters have demonstrated that they aren't just corrupt and stupid, they are actively hostile to the people's interests and common welfare.  They are part of a class that sees workers as the enemy perversely insisting on being treated like human beings with rights and needs instead of accepting their place as overpriced cogs in a machine that needs constant refitting with more efficient and cheaper cogs, that sees consumers as suckers and chumps, that looks at the whole country the way a coal company looks at a mountain in West Virginia.  I don't expect them to do the right things the President wants them to do out of the goodness of their hearts and a sense of patriotism, and I agree with Jeffrey Sachs and Felix Salmon that that they're likely to take the opportunity the Geithner Plan offers to game the system.

I think Larry Summers is a weasel.  I think he's a weasel because he is a weasel.  But I don't think Tim Geithner is a weasel or a stoat.  He's a technocrat doing the job his boss wants him to do, and I think in his mind his boss is the President not Larry Summers.

I trust that the President has concluded that this is the best option he's got at the moment.  I trust that he has our interests at heart.

I'm not quite sure who he thinks we are though. I'm afraid he might have us mixed up with the banksters.

_____________________________

Christian Livermore had a fine story in our local paper Sunday about the impact of the collapse of the auto industry on people around here who work for "Detroit":

On a recent morning at Healey Chevrolet in Beacon, about 10 employees roamed the empty showroom. They would wait a long time for a customer.

Healey, like just about every auto dealership in the country, has seen its sales deteriorate as consumers, worried about their jobs, aren't about to sink thousands of dollars into a new car.

Now, Paul and Dwight Healey, partners in the business their father started, are shedding ballast in an effort to stay weatherly in the worst economic tempest in decades.

Because the reach of an auto dealership into its community is wide and deep, cutbacks at Healey Brothers Automotive Dealerships mean cutbacks for their vendors and beyond. The belt-tightening extends to the guy who washes their windows to the diner where employees used to eat dinner.

And here are The Ten Cars That Sunk Detroit.  As much of a booster of the American auto industry as I am, if I was in the market for a new car I'd reflexively head for the nearest Toyota, Honda, or even Hyundai lot and would have to force myself to consider buying American, because I remember every single car on this list.  These too.

Update:  Over at his spanking new blog, Ian Welsh finds one person in Washington who seems to be thinking and saying the right things about TARP.  Too bad Elizabeth Warren doesn't have real clout.

What a dramatic kitchen!

I don't know how it is at your house, but this is how it goes here every morning.

Breakfast as directed by Michael Bay:

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.