Lance Mannion

Tallying up the heartbeats

...I heard on the radio
that we creatures have about a billion and a half
heartbeats to use. Voles and birds use theirs fast
as do meth heads and stockbrokers, while whales
and elephants are slower. This morning I'm thinking
of recounting mine to see exactly where I am.
I warn the hummingbirds out front, "Just slow down,"
as they chase me away from the falling hollyhocks.

---from Sunday Discordancies by Jim Harrison.

A sad day for bananafish

Updated.

Holden Caulfield sulked and skulked into my life at about the same time as these other young men were beginning their careers in the world inside my head.

Billy Pilgrim, Philip Pirrip, Dmitri Karamazov, Captain John Joseph Yossarian, and Rabbit Angstrom.

He didn’t stand a chance.

There were young women crowding him off the stage of my imagination too.

Hester Prynne, Natasha Rostova, Elizabeth Bennett, Jean Louise Finch.

Like I said.  Not a chance.

I don’t have much to say about the passing of J.D. Salinger.  As Nance says, “it's hard to mourn a writer who hasn't published in 50 years. Let's see what's in the drawers.”

But then books that are still in print and still being read and still being loved might as well have been published yesterday.  When I was the right age to take Salinger’s stories to heart, Dickens and Dostoevsky and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen and Mark Twain were as alive to me as he was.  Their books were as new and surprising as his.  Actually, probably more so.  And it’s still the case. Kurt Vonnegut’s been gone for two years and I still don’t believe it.  But if you’d told me back in high school that Salinger had died I’d have said, “You mean he was still alive?” 

That’s because I met him as homework.  His was a name on an assignment sheet and there are no names deader than the ones you first encounter as an obstacle between you and tonight’s episode of MASH.

It’s not impossible to fall for a writer whose first demand on your attention is a five paragraph essay you forgot was due tomorrow.  I found my own way to my favorites before any teachers told me they were IMPORTANT.  And having to read The Pearl for school nearly killed my curiosity about Steinbeck in the eighth grade.  I never got over my dread of the Brontes.  But Chekhov was an assignment and so were Hemingway, Emerson, Faulkner, John Updike, James Joyce, and Flannery O’Connor.

By the way, I bet you can name the stories and the essay.

Sometime next week or next month a whole bunch of high school students are going to have their mental gardens torn up and relandscaped by Holden Caulfield and the Glass family.

Naturally I don’t think it’s at all strange that some seventeen year old’s going to be carried away by a book written before her parents were born.  But I am wondering about something.

Is it possible for a seventeen year old to have a similar experience as her parents and grandparents might have had and be carried away by the work of still living and publishing writers like Salinger whose stories and novels they first read in high school?

Of course kids are still reading and falling in love with books and their characters and their authors.  (Supposedly this was more true in my day.  But I have to remind myself that I was a weirdo myself and mostly hung out with other weirdos.  Pat Curry introduced me to the political novels of Allen Drury when were in seventh grade, but if Jim Ring and Billy Eagan even read books like Run For Daylight and Throw the Long Bomb!, never mind the stuff the nuns assigned, it was probably at gunpoint.)  The names Harry, Ron, and Hermione, Percy Jackson , Max, Iggie, Fang, and the Gasman , ring bells in more heads and touch strings in more hearts than Franny and Zooey ever did.  Let’s leave Bella and Edward out of this.  But Tiffany Aching is best imaginary friends with countless adolescents.

But that’s unfair and like saying that even back in the day Seymour Glass wasn’t as well-known or beloved as Dorothy, Frodo, Tom and Huck, Anne Shirley, and Jim Hawkins.

By writers like Salinger I mean writers of what’s called serious fiction but which would be more accurately called domestic realism.  Terry Pratchett and Elmore Leonard write fiction that’s far more serious than most of the junk published in the little literary magazines.  A writer like Salinger, though, would be a writer of domestic realism who publishes stories regularly in popular magazines or wrote novels that had half a chance of making the New York Times Bestseller List.  Back in the day, high school teachers didn’t introduce their students to Salinger---or Updike or Cheever or O’Connor or Baldwin or Roth or, before them, Hemingway and Fitzgerald---by telling them what pages to read in the anthology.  They did it by taking out a copy of the New Yorker or Esquire or the Atlantic or Harpers or the Paris Review---or Collier’s, Scribner’s, even the Saturday Evening Post---and dropping it on a student’s desk and saying, “You’ve got to read this.”

These days the fiction hole in the New Yorker’s so small that all that gets published there are extended anecdotes.  The other big magazines publish fiction, if they publish it all, so rarely they might as well not bother.

Salinger’s stories made their way into the anthologies by proving themselves attractive to adolescent readers first.

This must still happen.  I just don’t know how---and I don’t see the evidence of it in Ken Mannion’s homework.  Does it?  And how does it?  How do kids find their way to the contemporary versions of Salinger?  And who are they?

_______________

James Wolcott admits to being “hit as hard by The Catcher in the Rye as any teenager.”

Update: Steve Kuusisto, who on a daily basis faces down classrooms packed with teenagers who read and love books, says they---the teenagers, that is, not the books---are still finding writers who, as Steve puts it, light up their dendrites.

______________

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Root canal

The President, Wednesday night, on bailing out the banks:

It was not easy to do. And if there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal.

Good line.  Root canal is a funny word.  Yes, I know it’s actually two words.  But that’s because James Joyce never got ahold of it.  He’d have written it as people say it, as one word.  Rootcanal.

So the President got off a good one-liner.

The trouble is it’s not the right metaphor.

Well, it’s not the metaphor people want to hear.

To the President, the bank bailout was like root canal, painful and uncomfortable but necessary because it’s good for us in the long run.

But after root canal you feel better.

Nobody feels better, Mr President!  Except the bankers, who are the the infection that should have been cleared out by the root canal.

The President’s point is that without the root canal things would have been worse.  Much worse.  Which is almost certainly true.

But that doesn’t mean things have gotten better.

And it doesn’t mean that the bailout, as it was handled, was the only or even the best way to have staved off the crisis.

Arguing that the bailout kept things from getting worse, though, is arguing an abstraction that can’t be proved without a trip to an alternate universe.  It’s a fact, but it’s a fact only because it can be “proven” by intellectual means.  It’s not a fact that can be felt in the here and now.

The fact that can be felt is that the bank bailout has not helped most ordinary citizens in a substantial way.

And, while it’s true that things would have gotten worse, an answering argument is that saving someone from falling off a cliff doesn’t mean you leave them hanging.

Things would have been worse, but they’re not appreciably better than they were.  We’re left hanging we were in the fall of 2008 and nobody was happy with that.

To me, the root canal joke, while making me laugh, made me wonder if the President sees himself as a dentist and the rest of us as patients who neglect to floss.

It made me wonder whose fault he really thinks the meltdown of the banks was.

It made me wonder if the President believes in saving the tooth for the tooth’s sake, that he thinks that it was more important to save the banking system as it was, for its own sake.

Or, it made me wonder, if he thinks there was nothing he could have done to have changed it.

So, either he thinks the bankers were doing just fine or he thinks he can’t stand up to them.

The bailout money was allocated by George W. Bush (with the consent of the Democrats in Congress) but President Obama didn’t have to spend it or spend it the way the bankers wanted it spent.  In fact, he didn’t, not entirely.  The auto industry was bailed out with TARP money.

The President can argue that the bailout was a necessary evil, and he can win the argument, but it doesn’t make anyone feel better.  It doesn’t make anyone feel that things will get better.

I’d have been more relieved, and more impressed, if instead of telling us how much he hated performing the root canal, he’d said:

“Enough already.  The bailout didn’t do the job.  It’s time to pull the damn tooth.”

___________________

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A dog’s frozen odyssey comes to a happy end

I like that Baltic was rescued by a boatload of scientists but I want to know who are these imposters claiming to be the dog’s owners and what do they hope to get out of it.

Dog Rescued After 75-Mile Trip On Ice Floe

A frightened, shivering dog was rescued after floating 75 miles on an ice floe down Poland's Vistula River and into the Baltic Sea, officials said Thursday.

Now his saviors just have to figure out who really owns him.

Four people have already claimed him, but so far rescuers say there's been no wagging tail of joy from the miracle dog they nicknamed "Baltic."

The dog's frozen odyssey came as Poland suffers through a winter cold snap, with temperatures dipping to below minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

The thick-furred male dog was found adrift Monday 15 miles out in the Baltic Sea by the crew of the Baltica, a Polish ship of ocean scientists carrying out research.

Researcher Natalia Drgas said Thursday the rescue was difficult and at one point it seemed the dog had drowned...

Read all of Baltic’s story at NPR.

Updated: My mother’s review of the State of the Union Address

Mom Mannion thought the President did a good job last night.  He was relaxed and the speech was clear and well-written.  What she liked best though was that he told those Senators and Congressmen to get on the stick.

Oh, and he smiled and made some jokes.  Mom Mannion predicted Jimmy Carter would be a one-termer when she noticed that sometime in his second year in office he stopped smiling.

Presidents should smile.  It shows that they aren’t overwhelmed by the work. 

Presidents who smiled:  FDR, Ike, JFK, Reagan, Bill Clinton.

Presidents who didn’t smile:  Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Carter.

Presidents who sort of smiled, sometimes, but like they were sorry:  Ford, George Herbert Walker Bush.

Then there was the smirker, who still defies explanation or excuse.

Updated Friday morning with a smile on my face and song in my heart:  Got a note from Bruce Bernstein, one of the best bloggers who doesn’t have a blog (friend him on Facebook and you’ll know what I mean), who wrote, “I think Truman smiled... at least on the campaign trail. And he DID win "re-election" (he served almost 8 years). “

And it’s true, I’ve seen some great photos of Truman smiling, particularly when he was out for one of his famous brisk walks or when Lauren Bacall was reclining on his piano.

Funny, he’s not smiling as broadly as I remembered or as broadly as I would have smiled in his place, but I think he’s actually singing here.

Still.  There’s not an invariable correlation between smiling and getting re-elected.  Nixon smiled too.  But Mom Mannion wasn’t talking about smiles as reflections of passing moods.  She means that smiling can be an expression of a temperament and that kind of smile is broader, warmer, more infectious, more comforting, and appears more often. FDR and the other smilers gave people the feeling that no matter how hard the times were and how difficult the job they were still glad to be President which in turn made people like my mother glad to have them as their President. 

That didn’t mean people thought a particular President was going to fix everything.  It gave them confidence things could be fixed.  Nobody believed happy days were here again just because Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House.  But his smile helped them believe that happy days were still there to enjoy, bad as things were, and more were still come.

Big boys buying new toys won’t save my newspaper

I don’t know how to save the newspaper industry but I’m pretty sure relying on rootless yuppies with too much money to spend on faddish technologies isn’t the answer.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News agrees.  On the iPad:

Even if there's consumer interest, the Apple tablet won't save journalism -- because it will be a massive distraction that will keep newsrooms from making the real changes that could keep us in business. I could go on for a couple of thousand words on this, but today I'll try to keep it short. The problem with newspapers isn't really not having the right technology. To survive, we need to change our whole worldview -- finding ways to encourage more dialogue with readers and more community involvement so that local readers feel they have a stake in this thing. And we also need to do a better job at the thing we claim to be already good at -- real journalism that makes a difference. To show what I mean, read this recent expose on the Washington Post to get a feel for how once-great news organizations have drifted so far off the track. If the Apple tablet has been around in 2003, we still would have screwed up the run-up to war in Iraq, and if it had been invented in 2007, we still would have missed the looming financial meltdown. How many stories we will miss now while the bosses upstairs are waiting for "Jesus" to suddenly deliver all the loaves and fishes of subscribers and cash.

My italics.  Read all of Bunch’s post.

From the Department of Communications: Sad news about the State of the Union Address

Lance Mannion has informed his Twitter followers that he will not be tweeting tonight’s State of the Union Address.

He received this tweet in reply:

alllancemannionsfollowers But how will we know we heard what we heard the Prez say if you aren’t telling us what he’s saying as he says it?

Mr Mannion responded:

@alllancemannionsfollowers Tough noogies.  Leverage is on.

Mr Mannion will not be tweeting Leverage either.

New Cap

Brown corduroy,
the earflaps tied on top,
the same size cap he bought
when he was young,
but at eighty-six
a head’s a smaller thing,
the hair gone fine and thin,
less meat to the scalp,
and not so much
ambition packed inside.
He squints from under the bill
as if the world
were a long ways off,
and when he tips it back
to open up his face
to conversation,
it looks so loose
you think that one of them,
the cap or he,
might blow away.

---from Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser

Crumbs

Tax credits?

Tax Credits?

TAX CREDITS??????????

The sociopaths on Wall Street get their bonuses.  Ben Bernanke gets his sinecure renewed?  And we get tax credits?

Except that most of us aren’t even going to get those.

What the McEwan says.

Look, Mr President.  People who are out of work aren’t going to cheer because you’re offering them tax credits next year.  They want a job now.  Or at least this year.

People who are working lousy jobs because that’s all they could get want better jobs now, not a lousy hundred bucks off their tax bills next year.

And people who have jobs but are terrified of losing them and all their benefits, their homes, and their pensions along with them want to know that those disasters won’t happen or are less likely to happen to them because the President is watching out for them not for Ben Bernanke’s job and reputation or  Blanche Lincoln and Harry Reid’s re-election chances or Robert Gate’s defense budget.

Even people the tax credits will help aren’t going to be helped enough or feel all that helped.

People who are taking care of sick parents aren’t going to turn to each other and say brightly, “At least when this is all over we can use our tax credits to pay a few of the bills we’re racking up here!”

People who need every dollar from their paycheck to pay this week’s bills aren’t going to shrug off the missing dollars from future paychecks because they’re relieved to know that at least now they’re putting away a few bucks towards a retirement they probably aren’t going to have.

This one isn’t even a tax credit.  It’s a tax, on employees and employers and on consumers who’ll have to pay the price increases businesses will implement to offset the new tax, and its purpose  is to put money in banks for them to invest.

People who have to figure out what to do about the kids today because the school’s declared a snow day, the babysitter canceled, and the boss has warned them that one more day off this month’s out of the question, call in sick again and that’s it, you’re out of here, aren’t going to pause in their worrying and scrambling to comfort themselves with the thought that they’ve got a tax credit coming.

And lots of people with children they’re planning to put through college are thinking, Swell, this will come in handy in five or six years, presuming it passes, presuming it’s still on the books then, and presuming we qualify, which, considering what the qualifications are, no money,basically,  let’s hope we don’t!

Then there are all the people thinking, Fine, but we could use the help right now!

I know this is trial balloon stuff.  More, bigger, and more immediate help might be offered in the State of the Union.  But even if it is, what in God’s name is the White House thinking floating this?  That we’re a nation of stupid peasants who will be grateful if the king throws us a few coins as he passes in his royal coach?

Better to withhold the whole loaf then to offer us crumbs.  It’s insulting, even if he’s planning to open the doors to the bakery on Wednesday.

Tax credits.

Sheesh.

_________

Oh yeah, and a spending freeze.

Swell.

Atrios: Because in a time of deep recession, the people want fewer benefits and higher health care costs.

And Josh Marshall’s psyched.  Why?  “I'm psyched that we're done messing around with major social reforms and finally getting down to the real business of election year gimmicks.”

Lemieux:  “The most charitable construction, reflected in a couple of Matt's scenarios, is that [the President’s] trying to expose "deficit hawks" on both sides of the aisle as frauds. The obvious problem is that the actions of Bayh and Conrad, and 6 years of united Republican rule, have already demonstrated that they're complete frauds. It doesn't matter. To the Fried Hiatts who care about this stuff being a "deficit hawk" is about inflicting pain on Democratic constituencies, not reducing the deficit. One more demonstration that many "deficit hawks" don't want to reduce agricultural subsidies won't solve anything.

Heroes Live Blog Episode 13 Lucky Number 13

Hello everyone I’m Oliver Mannion and I will be live blogging Heroes tonight. So please enjoy and comment. And you don’t have to know what’s going on to comment!

9:00 HRG is narrating again? Or at least doing the previously on Heroes.

9:01 Creepy Carnie realizes people find him creepy.

9:03 I can see the future! I’m going to stop you from destroying my race and the future! Nobody will get that reference…

9:05 A nosh? When did Sylar turn into Uncle Merlin?

9:11 Look we need a plot!

9:14 No! Your are good villian! We don’t want to the creep CARNIE TO BE THE MAIN VILLIAN!

9:17 The first sensiable thing said this episode!

9:19 HRG at this point the only one who can handle this is Chuck Norris!

9:24 Runaways from evil guarians…when did this turn into an award winning comic that I like?

9:25 This is HRG. He is like Batman and let’s not forget what he did to the Joker after he was caught in the Dark Knight.

9:30 HRG has GONE MAD!!!!! Not even I get that reference a Let’s Player on Youtube says it a lot.

9:35 Matt:I’m not Prof.X here!

9:36 There’s the Sylar we know and kind of love.

9:37 Okay Peter has GONE MAD!!!!!!!

9:38 Well the main problem with this season is we’re supposted care about the Carrnies which the show didn’t do a good job of. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.

9:45 HRG:I could be better.

9:48 Sylar better get his powers back.

9:49 I don’t like Matt anymore.

9:55 Go Peter!

9:57 Oh Tracy is back.

9:58 Blah Blah Blah.

I’m done for tonight. Hope you enjoy and please comment.

Programming note: The hero of live blogging returns

Once again, 13 year old Oliver Mannion takes over the keyboard to live blog the latest episode of Heroes.

Join him here at 9 PM EST and help him in his quest to wisecrack his way through another thrilling adventure.

Oliver asks me to remind you that you don’t need to be a fan of the show to stop in and say hello.  Also, fans of Chuck are encouraged to leave comments about tonight’s episode of that show because Oliver and his mother will have watched it too.

Fellow blogger in need

Gary Farber, of Amygdala, has serious health problems and no insurance and an angry landlord, so he’s asking for some help.  Please go on over to his place and do what you can for him.

How hero-worshipping Rob Petrie ruined my life

Was watching some old episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show late last night and realized a sad truth.

Rob Petrie ruined my life.

Actually, coveting his life ruined my life. The show was a pernicious influence on me.  Convinced me it was possible to live conflicting lives.  Bohemain by day, suburbanite by night and weekend.

Rob Petrie's a writer and a homeowner, husband, and dad.  He spends his working days in New York City collaborating with other artistic types, then comes home to his tract house in New Rochelle to mow the lawn, go to PTA meetings, and play bridge with the neighbors.

He divides himself more completely than Don Draper on Mad Men.

Rob’s happier leading his double life than Draper is, of course.  Rob has advantages Don doesn’t.

For one thing, Rob’s coworkers are actually creative and very good at their jobs.

For another, Rob comes home to a hot ex-dancer wife who is clearly crazy about him.

But serving two masters never works out well in real life.

You can’t serve both Art and Scott lawn care products.

On the other hand, it seems to have worked for Carl Reiner the show’s creator who based it on his own life.

So maybe the problem was with me. Having a mortgage isn’t the problem.  It's not having had the talent.

Or the courage.

Or the luck.

Still a great show.

Watched a terrific episode in which Alan Brady browbeats Rob into punching up a Broadway play Alan’s starring in.  Rob has to do the work in secret because Alan doesn’t want to offend the play’s author, Tennessee Williams.

Ok.  It’s not actually Tennessee Williams.  It’s a Tennessee Williams-esque playwright named Harper Worthington Yates.

Played by Strother Martin of all people, looking more dapper, plumper, less degenerate than you remember him from Cool Hand Luke.

Maybe it’s not Williams but a composite or somebody who was famous at the time but whose work and reputation have faded in the collective memory.

Funnier if you think of him as Williams though.

Of course, it’s television, in the 60s, so you have to picture a Tennessee Williams who doesn’t drink, keeps his hair combed and his tie tied, and focuses his affections on his dog, Mister Ben, rather than on rough trade.

But…Southerner, courtly, thin mustache, prolific writer, Pulitzer Prize winner.  Gay.

The episode includes two obviously gay characters.

Well, obvious to adults at least.  I doubt I caught it when I was I was a little kid watching the show in syndication on days when I was home sick from school.

The characters’ gayness is not treated as the joke.  There are only two gay jokes and neither one is primarily a gay joke.  The first is part of the set-up to a joke about people who worship their pets.

The Tennessee William character explains his devotion to Mister Ben by telling Alan that the dog is all he has left since “I lost Blossom.”

And Alan responds, slightly incredulously, suddenly thinking he has to revamp his whole impression of the playwright, “I didn’t know you were married.”

The playwright gives him a startled look as though he can’t believe Alan’s that obtuse.  “Blossom was Mister Ben’s wife.”

The other joke is a follow-up to Rob’s run in with the costume designer for the play.  Buck Brown.  That’s his name.  Which I guess is a gay joke in itself.  But it’s a throwaway.  Alan has called Rob out to Connecticut where the play is having a try-out but to keep the secret Alan introduces Rob to the director as his tailor Vito.  The director happens to be having an argument with Buck Brown over one of Brown’s designs and he asks “Vito” for his professional opinion.  Rob takes the director’s side, which brings Brown storming into Alan's dressing room to confront the nobody who’s dared to criticize a Buck Brown original!

Brown is more flamboyant that Harper Worthington Yates.

Yates might---might---have been passed off as a soft-spoken, excessively well-mannered, slightly fussy, sexually diffident straight man.

There’s no mistaking Buck Brown.

But his flamboyance isn’t a signifier of his homosexuality.  It’s the angry song of his art and his artistic pride.  This is the award-winning costume designer for seventeen Broadway shows, an artist who will bedeck a leading lady with apricot bows and then defend his design choice fiercely against the casual, middlebrow judgment of an ordinary men’s tailor named Vito.

The joke in the scene isn’t a gay man throwing a hissy fit.  Buck Brown’s tirade is far from that anyway.  The joke is on Rob, a show biz professional in his own right, for his being unable to stick up for himself because of the ridiculous position Alan’s put him in and having to stand there, stammering an apology, as a fellow pro berates him and dismisses him as a philistine.

Later, though, back in New Rochelle, after he’s mentioned that a man named Buck Brown essentially beat him up, verbally, Laura says, “Buck Brown the cowboy star?” and Rob says grumpily, “Hardly.”  Which is a sissy joke but turned on its head, because Rob isn’t expressing contempt for Brown, he’s letting out his anger at Alan for putting him on the spot like that where he was more or less in the traditional sissy’s predicament of having to submit to bullying and he’s confessing his self-loathing for having submitted.

Rob thinks he should have stood up for himself.  To Alan, not to Brown.

The Dick Van Dyke show was a very enlightened and sophisticated and even subversive show for its time and context, on a number of issues.  That’s another way it’s an argument against Mad Men.  Through the lives of Rob and Laura it shows the great social changes of the the 1960s arising out of the lives of the Northeastern creative middle class, which is of course the very class Mad Men posits the 60s were necessary to destroy.

But the 60s wiped out Rob and Laura and left us with a more stylish but simultaneously more self-indulgent and more conservative class of Dons and Bettys with careers.

That’s another post.

What was the point of this post again?

Oh yeah.  Rob Petrie ruined my life.

Him and his damn briefcase.

In that episod, as Rob is about to head off to Connecticut, he piles all the drafts of the script he’s been working on into his briefcase.

A real briefcase.  Leather covered.  Hard.  Brass-trimmed. With locks that snap.

Do any writers carry briefcases like that anymore?

Jeezus.  Do they even have any papers to put in them?

A present day Rob Petrie, summoned by her boss to Connecticut, would stuff her netbook into a backpack.

If she’d even think of actually going to Connecticut.  She and her Alan Brady could deal with the rewrites over the internet, with her emailing her drafts to his Blackberry.

Who needs a briefcase?

I still want one though.

Which is the problem.

Rob’s briefcase is symbolic.

That’s a lawyer’s or an insurance man’s briefcase.

In those days a writer would have carried a soft-leather attache.  The battered one he’d been given as a gift for his high school graduation.  If he carried anything.  He’d have been more likely to just roll up his pages and stuff them in his jacket pocket.

The briefcase was a signifier.  It was there to reassure the audience that despite his spending his day among television stars, Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights, flamboyant costume designers, and other writers, not to mention beautiful actresses bedecked in apricot bows, that Rob was still a regular guy.  Just like the folks at home.  Another nine to fiver with a wife and a kid and a mortgage and a lawn to mow and boring, uncreative neighbors who were dentists and dentists’ wives and members of the PTA for whom a night of bridge was the highlight of the week.

But I hadn’t studied deconstructionism when I was eight.  I probably didn’t know who Tennessee Williams was, let alone Jacques Lacan.  In fact, when I did become aware of Tennessee Williams I probably thought he was like Harper Taylor Yates.

I learned a lot about real life from The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Too much.

I took it all literally.

Like that briefcase.

I learned the wrong lesson from that.

It convinced me that it was possible to own a briefcase like that, and all the middle-class accoutrements, and encumberances, that it symbolized, and still hope to be a writer and spend my working days in the company of other writers and beautiful actresses with or without apricot bows.

You know what, though?  I got a birthday coming up next month?  Maybe I could ask for a briefcase.

__________________________

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Corporate personohood, a love story

Can't wait till one of my kids brings home a corporation to meet his mother and me.

"Mom, Dad, this is SallyCorp. Guess what? We're engaged!"

Soon, along will come grandchildren. Inc, Amalgamated, and International.

I just hope they'll be happy. It'll be hard being married to a corporation. You never know where "home" is.  Goals change all the time.  Every quarter you move in a new direction.

Suppose they divorce? How many lawyers will that involve?

Then there's the custody battle. Who gets which subsidy? How do you work out visiting rights for the bought and paid for politicians?

Suppose things work out. Suppose they are happy. But then along comes Bill Gates and he gets ideas?

He could buy a controlling interest in SallyCorp and liquidate her overnight!

But according to the Supreme Court, wouldn't that be murder?

Maybe I should just hope the kid settles down with a nice union.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blogs of the Day

Phronesisaical and the Sideshow.

Because these days they’re like Progressive matter and anti-matter and yet both take me to places I wanted to go, even though those places are usually in different quadrants of the liberal universe and even in different dimensions.

Interestingly, it’s Phronesisaical linking to this bitterly funny post by Michael Berube, In praise of humility, while Avedon points the way to this post by Andrew Sullivan, the Gulf.  Similar point, different approaches, opposite ends of the galaxy.

Some frustrated thoughts on “bipartisanship”

Every time the President talks about bipartisanship and working with Republicans I cringe.

Enough already, I want to scream.  It’s not working!  It’s not going to work!  It’s never going to work!

Then I remember.

The President is smarter than I am.

Look, he knows what the Republicans are doing and why.  But he knows something else I keep forgetting.

Not every Republican in the country whose cooperation and support the President wants and needs is in Washington.

He has to work with Republican governors.  And Republican mayors.  And Republican small and large business owners.

He would like the votes of some rank and file Republicans.  He would like some of them to figure out that they are no longer Republicans.

He won’t get any of this if he starts talking about “Republicans” and “conservatives” the way I often do, which is with bulging eyes and a red face and a voice shaking with rage and frustration.

Then there’s this.

There’s more going on in Congress than health care reform.

No, he probably can’t convince any Republicans to vote for his big signature initiatives, mainly because that would require them to vote against their own political interests and, for a lot of them, against their principles.  Hard to believe, I know, but many Republicans have principles.

But on a range of other issues, large and small, the President, and the Democrats, have won over Republican votes.

Sonia Sotomayor was not confirmed by a 58-40 vote.

The Lily Ledbetter Act passed the Senate with the votes of five Republicans.  But it would not have gotten passed if a dozen Republicans hadn’t joined in to vote for cloture.

Thirty Republican Senators voted against Al Franken’s amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would defund any government contractor that did to any of its employees what Haliburton did to Jamie Leigh Jones.  Thirty is an appallingly high number.  It should have been 0.  But the fact is that 10 Republican Senators voted for it.

Day in and day out, in the House and the Senate, lots of things move through committees and onto the floor, with some Democrats and Republicans joining together to vote for them, and some joining together to vote against them.  Some of these things are trivial, many of them are important although not glamorous, and many of them are routine but necessary.  It should be noted that this kind of bipartisanship practically vanished from Congress when the Republicans ran both houses, and one of the reasons Democrats objected so furiously is that it wasn’t simply a matter of the losing party being locked out.  The people Democrats represented, including Republicans residing in their states and districts, were locked out too.

Republicans in Congress deserve to be treated the way they treated Democrats.  But the people those Republicans represent don’t.

This is very hard to keep in mind, especially whenever a Republican Congressional leader opens his mouth or shows up for a Tea Party rally.

Or David Broder writes a column.

Now…

If health care reform had been a done deal back in the fall, it probably would not have been an issue in the Massachusetts Senate race.  And it should have been a done deal in the fall because it should have been a done deal by the end of summer.

But the reason it wasn’t a done deal even by Christmas isn’t that the President was too hung up on achieving the illusion of bipartisanship.  Nobody seemed to notice or care that he did not achieve that in the House or need to.

Nevermind the courting and near-coronation of Olympia Snowe.  She was only important, and only symbolically important at that, because she sits on the Senate Finance Committee which is chaired by a Democrat, of course, one Max Baucus of Montana.

The bill was stuck in committee and the reason it was stuck in committee had little to do with Olympia Snowe and almost everything to do with Max Baucus’ ego.

Baucus was convinced that he could write and pass a better bill than anyone else and that he could get it passed with bipartisan support.  In short, he was out to make the President’s signature issue his own.  He was the one who wasted the summer trying to get Republicans on his committee to support his version of health care.

Now the fact is that Harry Reid should have slapped some sense into him.  The Democrats should have been content---no, happy---to let Baucus’ bill die in committee.  But he wasn’t about to let anybody else’s bill go through (see Jay Rockefeller, Chuck Schumer) and all the bills had to go through his committee.   Max Baucus had veto power over health care all summer and into the fall.

Then the veto power fell to Joe Lieberman and health care became all about his vanity.

Then it fell to Ben Nelson and health care became all about Nelson’s pride.

You can argue that this shouldn’t have happened, although I’d appreciate it if you could also demonstrate how it could have been avoided, preferably by saying more than Reid should have been tougher or the President should have said something.

Tough how?  Said what?

The problem isn’t the President’s obsession with bipartisanship.  The problem is that the President needs bipartisan---that is, Republican votes---so that he doesn’t have to rely on the ego, and vanity, and pride of various Democrats.

He plays chess blindfolded. I play chess as if blindfolded.

Chess champ is college-bound

John S. Burke senior aspires to be a teacher

Goshen — Here's some information on Chris Herries, one of the smartest kids you'll likely ever meet.

He's a senior at John S. Burke Catholic High School with a 100.32 grade point average. He recently aced the AP history test and fell just short of acing the AP test in chemistry, both of which he studied for on his own. And he's in the running to become the school's best chess player ever.

He's so good at the game, in fact, that he can play it blindfolded, visualizing the board and his moves in his head, as his back is turned toward the game. Not even the school's two other historically best players could do that, even though they were higher ranked, says John Fedor, John S. Burke's chess coach of 35 years…

Read all of John Sullivan’s story in the Times Herald-Record.

Announcing the Altman Film Fest Schedule

A quick update.

Here’s the plan for the First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival as it stands:

Thursday night at 10 Eastern starting February 4.

February 4:  California Split.

February 11: Thieves Like Us .

Februrary 18: The Player .

February 25: Buffalo Bill and the Indians .

March  4:   Secret Honor and Streamers .

March 11:  Popeye .  This one’s just for kicks.  It’s going to be a virtual screening.  I’ll be live-blogging as I watch and, I hope, you’ll be joining in.

Of course things are subject to change.  For instance, my original plan was to get started tonight.  Family plans got in the way of that.  I was going to push it till next week but Tom Watson and his fellow bandmates in There Be Dragons are playing their first gig next Thursday.  Gotta be there.

So, February 4?  California Split?

Groovy.

And now a word about our sponsors…

You may have noticed an increase of advertising here at the Mannionville Feed and Seed Catalog Company.

YMMV, but we in the home office regard this as a very good thing and we hope that you are visiting and patronizing our various sponsors.

Thing is, as much as we appreciate the business, the ads are making us literally pennies a week.  We’re hoping to bump that up to pennies a day and have some plans about how to go about that.  And one of the ways is this.

Sell more ads.

If you or anyone you know has a business, service, or a cause to promote, here’s your opportunity.  We offer excellent rates on text links and small banner ads and you can purchase them direct.  No going through third parties (unless you want to, in which case please contact our advertising manager, who is also our bookkeeper, janitor, webmaster, editor, and blogging star).  Use this space to reach out to a highly educated, mostly professional audience of readers.

We also offer great deals on premium advertising space, including the banner across the top of the page.  That’s right, just like a football stadium, a race car, or a rock concert, Lance Mannion can be sponsored.  For a whole lot cheaper than sponsoring a bowl game or The Little Rascals Reunion Tour.

So please consider advertising with us---it’s fun, it’s easy, it’s cost effective, and it will help make me less annoyed at all those people who are attempting to make money at home by placing free ads in my comments sections, which I regard as a from of attempted theft, so cut it out!

Thank you one and all for your support.

For information, drop me a note at lance at sign lancemannion dot com.