If You Read Only One Thing . . .
about religion this year, make it this. Whatever your religion is, or isn’t.
That got me going, “Where on earth is this coming from?” Here’s the answer. Much more here.
I wish I had come across this 30 years ago, but it didn’t exist then.
Also, as I read on, it’s probably too politically liberal for me (86 percent Democrat). If only it were as freethinking politically as it is religiously.
Palin Nailin’ It
She—or at least her speechwriter—just went up in my estimation. (There she goes again, reminding me of Obama circa 2004. Words, words, words.)
She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).
These ideas hit the nail right on the head—diagnostically. But is there a cure? Can anyone we send to Washington buck these trends? Is there any way to mobilize the power of the little guy? When big fund-raising has to pay big media to get a well-groomed version of the rough-hewn message across on a mass scale?
Benignant Belgium?
Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom.
Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent.
Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny?
Because Belgium doesn’t have a government.
Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy.
It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.
– John Lanchester: The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway
Eviscerating Indictment
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism…
…Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.
… the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner…
…This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document…
…Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy.
Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class – without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking…
…It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors’ looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At “Washington spending” – which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade’s corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.
The author resigned this year, after serving 28 years as a professional GOP staff member, the last 16 on either the House and Senate Budget Committee. Lofgren goes on, providing a scathing review of what he believes current principal tenets of the modern Republican Party.
– Mike Lofgren in Goodbye to All That
Job Market
The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, we would have to gain some 18 MILLION jobs.
– John Mauldin in Business Insider
Bonus Army
For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion for banks that have filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel: The Great Bank Robbery
How to Remember 9/11 [UPDATED]
I was determined not to—once was enough—and then I was walking past the IFC Film Center this afternoon and . . .
Impulse-bought a ticket to see “Rebirth.” What did it was probably my oblique personal connection to the late FDNY Capt. Terry Hatton, whose friend is one of those interviewed. His wife was Mayor Giuliani’s personal assistant Beth Petrone; her brother was the publicist we’d hired because I had an article about J’s slow recovery from trauma coming out in Oprah’s magazine. Curiously, it was called “Journey to Healing,” and it appeared 9/10/2001.
Small, silver lining: Hatton and Petrone had been trying to conceive; afterwards, she discovered she had, and daughter Terri was born the following year.
The movie is very, very good and very moving in the parallels it finds between the rebuilding of bodies, lives, and buildings — in all cases a halting, back-and-forth process, more complex than you might expect. The people whose lives were followed through the years from 2001 to 2009 were amazingly brave about revealing their emotions. This was sort of the premiere and the filmmakers were there to answer questions, as well as two of the principals. After the film I felt absolutely compelled to stay and talk to Terry Hatton’s friend, Tim Brown, which was absurd because my connection to the family was so tenuous, but they were “my” 9/11 family nonetheless. Terri Hatton is “doing great” and still has on her wall cut-out heads of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake — and Tim Brown! The film will be at IFC film center down the block from me for some weeks, and in other theaters around the country, and will air on Showtime on 9/11. Try to see it on the big screen, because the panoramic time-lapse photography of the site is breathtaking, and the intimacy of the close-ups is enlarged.
There’s also a marvelous middle-aged Chinese-American woman in the film, Ling, who was very badly burned and went through 40 surgeries trying to regain freedom of movement constricted by terrible keloid scarring. In spite of everything, she is FUNNY. She was there and I got to tell her she was my hero because she was funny. And I got to point out to her that when she got up her “reserved” sign was stuck to the seat of her pants, which was very much in her spirit.
This is the way to remember 9/11 — not static but dynamic.
UPDATE: The most spiritual person in this movie is a construction supervisor. He does not utter a Christian piety, nor is there even a hint of new-age Candide, “all’s for the best in this best of all possible universes.” Rather, expressed in completely new words which he gropes for and finds onscreen, it’s his direct response to the site, which he instinctively senses is sacred, and from the moment his firefighter brother dies there, Brian is possessed and driven by the imperative to rebuild it, right through and out the other side of the PTSD that blindsides him a couple of years after the event. It’s the first time you’ll ever think of a construction worker as an agent of resurrection.
Read more:
The Hurricane and the Death of “Here”
Trying to find out what might have happened to a friend’s house near the water in Westport, CT (I first Googled “Irene Westport” and frustratingly got a list of residents named Irene), I came upon this in a news item about a man stranded on foot just before the hurricane:
It was in Westport that he saw more police officers drive by without asking what he was doing than anywhere else. “I’m just really surprised that no one offered to help me,” he said Sunday. “I know people are really distrusting these days. But you think people are coming together, looking out for each other. No one even asked: Where are you going in the rain?”
This struck me because it matched up with my experience in very different Greenwich Village. I’d had a fantasy that the hurricane would bring the people in my little building together. The scattering of old-timers who’d welcomed me back so warmly and the more transient young people who exchange friendly “Hi!”s at the mailbox would check up on each other, make sure we all had what we needed, make a plan to join forces and even party if the power went out.
None of it happened. Mind you, I didn’t try to make it happen, either. I mostly sat back and waited and observed. Would the young people show any concern for the old loners? Would any of the old-timers welcome the excuse to reconnect? I did check up on my neighbor just below me, a likewise one-year-widowed Irish musician (don’t cry for him, he reportedly already has a girlfriend, an eventuality his dying wife blessed, and is doing well). He was alone but said he had everything he needed and shooed me out pretty quickly, maybe absorbed in something on TV. Throughout the hurricane there was not a knock on the door or a voice in the hallway. (Of course, some had gone away.)
By contrast, enormous caring and concern was expressed by my (and no doubt by everyone’s) social “cloud,” via Facebook, e-mail, and phone.
So here we sit, in adjacent cubicles, wired in to our far-flung, nebulous networks, with physical presence and proximity meaning next to nothing. Only if the power had actually gone out would we have been forced into each other’s company. What’s this all about?? I find it creepy.
UPDATE: In another CT news item, an old man trying to get to a shelter couldn’t, as they say, get arrested:
The retired Bridgeport carpenter woke up in his Isinglass Road home to a power outage that included his phone, so he tried a different way of calling for help.
“I couldn’t call out,” Belus said, “so I got a couple of big pots and pans that I was banging on to signal for help, but I live deep in the woods.” […]
Belus said that he finally drove his car up to the head of his driveway and got out. His initial gestures for help failed as motorists sped by without stopping.
Finally someone pulled over and called local emergency personnel. Belus was driven to the shelter in his Buick by a Shelton firefighter, emerging from the vehicle with his cane and a box of medications.
Meanwhile, I am very concerned to hear from Karen, since Vermont reportedly was hard hit by wind. Karen, I’m sure you have a lot on your hands, and possibly no power, but give us a report when you can. Did all the cows, calves, and horses weather the storm? Did your neighbors look out for each other?
Hurricane Without Television
. . . is a strange experience. Television, annoying a companion as it is, is what mediates collective experience to us, especially in crises, keeps us “in the know” (or provides a comforting, deceptive illusion thereof), and makes us feel a part of something larger—a community and an event. For us who live alone, for all its drawbacks it is perhaps particularly important—a voice in the house—as a divorced friend has been exhorting me in vain.
The computer, normally welcome because it doesn’t harangue you with overhyped drama, incessant repetition, and noisy sales pitches, is eerily silent now. I usually prefer to get my information by reading—certainly not by watching video snippets, which you have to activate voluntarily and which are the worst of television, rendered-down, semiliterate, breathless, frustrating in what they fail to tell you. But reading is a cold experience when you are facing a mass-scale event paradoxically alone. I’ll turn on live streaming AM news radio and will no doubt quickly get annoyed by the repetition, the trivia, the jocular commercials (there it goes: “You may be a candidate for dental implants!”), the attempt to drum up drama where as yet there is none (“What’s it like where you are?” “Rain is still pouring down . . .”). The winds are supposed to intensify overnight and the worst to come between 5 A.M. and 5 P.M. tomorrow. Irene is a slow-moving beast.
Of course, if and when there is the nearly inevitable power outage, TV and the Internet will both be gone and only a battery-operated radio (which I failed to buy in time, but which some neighbor probably has) will provide vital information. The result will probably be renewed bonding with neighbors, a taste of the unwired world we would revert to if there were a massive grid crash or sabotage. It will be a novel experience for the young, who will keep reflexively checking their blank iPhones, and a nostalgic one for older generations.
Ambiance 