Hulk: please shut up

I turned on the TV this morning and found Hulk Hogan, wearing a pink doo rag, promoting his new book telling all about his recent depression and near suicide. Jesus Christ Almighty, is nothing sacred? What’s next, "T'he Navy Seal Diet" book? Dick Butkus coming out of the closet on Oprah? Why can’t people just shut up and keep a little tiny part of their lives to themselves? I don’t want to know.

F&LinR Update: I’ve been retired a month now. The farewell tour seems to be over. I kept my monthly train pass and Manhattan gym membership through October, but now I plan to visit the city only upon special invitation. I nearly went in yesterday for the Yankee parade, but came to my senses in time to spare myself the agony of being surrounded by 2-3 million blue-clad loud mouths who think they are special because they root for a team that can afford to spend unlimited dough to get the best players. My last “Canyon of Heroes” event was in ’81 when the Iran hostages got their parade; I’m glad I left it at that.

So I joined a new gym in Westchester and the contrast is interesting. In Manhattan the male/female ratio was about 50-50 and we all wore the same bland, baggy uniforms of blue shorts and gray tees. In Westchester it is a woman’s world. I’ve been one of only two men among 25 women in the spin classes, and there are no uniforms. These woman have a definite look. It would be a great setting for “The Housewives of Westchester County” should they make one. One should never judge a book by the cover, but where’s the fun in that? Let me try: good schools, a few years with prime jobs while living on the Upper West Side or Tribeca, then off to the suburbs once the kiddies arrived. They are nothing if not tasteful, and their typical gym outfit cost more than I used to spend on a suit. Whatever happened to natural fibers? It’s all high-tech, super-wicking microfiber and $150 shoes. I look like the pool man.

I like the suburban spin music better though. In the city the instructors were all sophistos, and the music had to represent their personal brand. We got a lot of Euro-Techno, Broadway show tunes, and indie-rock. The suburban instructors are more middle-of-the-road musically, but their selections are based on driving the class over displaying their artistic taste. Neither style is what I’d listen to for fun, but if you want something to help you sprint for a few minutes it’s hard to beat the last half of “Dueling Banjos.” Doo doo doot doot doo! We also get some country. Best lyric: “Cheater, cheater, where did you meet her, your low class, white trash whore.”

Great moments in political correctness: Have you noticed how hard the media is working to make sure we know that the Fort Hood murderer, Nidal Malik Hasan, was born and raised in the United States? When do you suppose we are going to stop pretending that it is some kind of coincidence that so many Muslims are killing Americans wherever they can find them? I really believe that the majority of us are capable of resisting the idea that this makes all Muslims bad, and the those who can’t only get more pissed off when they hear the media siding with the fairy tale that they comprise a tiny, random group of fanatics. Let’s keep searching the old ladies at the airport while the three young Yemeni men in turbans are given jobs in the airport.

I’m off to Florida Monday to scout for a new home.

Goodbye Afghanistan

Sometime soon President Obama is going to tell us what he intends to do about Afghanistan; in particular, whether he intends to commit additional U.S. troops to the cause of defeating the Taliban and flushing al qaeda from the country.

I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulty of the decision since he probably has a hundred times as much information as me, and it has taken me many months to come to my own conclusion about the right course of action. I’m not going to get into them here, but it is actually pretty easy to make a case for why we should continue fighting there, but in my mind, the case for disengaging is even stronger.

The arguments most often offered for leaving Afghanistan focus on the cost side of the cost/benefit equation, and there is no question that the cost of being there is very high. We’ve already lost over 900 men and women, and the pace of our loss is accelerating rapidly. It is unbearably sad to read their names, ages, and home towns each morning in the newspaper.
On top of this ultimate sacrifice, the country is draining the treasury of something like $67 billion per year at the current pace, which would certainly rise as additional troops are committed. Imagine how many bridges that money could repair here at home. You, no doubt, have your own wish list of projects better suited for the U.S. taxpayers’ money – or maybe we could just pay the minimum on the national MasterCard debt one of these months.

The list of negatives is long: we’re propping up a government so corrupt that the only credible alternative candidate decided to give up rather than go through another sham election even though it was the final run-off for the presidency. We all know the history of defeats suffered by global powers that have sought to conquer this vast and forbidding country. And the longer and more visibly we occupy the land of Allah, the more effectively we confirm the argument made by our enemies that we are the 21st century Knights of the Templar come to reclaim Jerusalem. Every soldier we send and every Afghan we kill only serves to recruit more Muslims to fight against us. Twas ever thus.

But ultimately it is the lack of substance on the benefit side of the equation that persuades me that it is time to exit Afghanistan. What exactly do we “win” if we win? The chief reason offered for fighting is the need to prevent al qaeda from having a safe haven there, but the core power of that organization is their ability to operate across borders, behind borders, and without borders. Most of the planning for 9/11 took place in Germany. The pilots trained in the United States. If we drive them from Afghanistan they will regroup in Pakistan, Yemen, the jungles of Indonesia, or the burned out shells of houses in Detroit.

We will be fighting these people for decades no matter what we do. We need a strategy and tactics appropriate to the challenge. Better intelligence, more and better drones, targeted humanitarian aid, and a better class of friends will serve us better than tens of thousands of soldiers bogged down in a hostel land for God knows how long.

Buy a newspaper

There was a depressing, if not surprising, report today that newspaper circulation continued to drop like a rock, with major daily papers, on average, experiencing a more than 10% decrease in the past year. The San Francisco Chronicle led the way with a 25.8% decline, but there were no real bright spots. In the few cases where there were small gains (Seattle and Denver) they came as a result of one paper folding in a formerly two-paper market, with the surviving paper picking up some of the dead paper’s subs – a net loss of readers. This is bad for consumers and bad for America.

It’s bad for consumers for two big reasons. Clearly, getting news and information online or on a cell phone is irresistibly efficient for some people. You just tell Google or Yahoo the subjects that interest you and whenever there is a mention of those topics you will receive an email with a daily abstract on your selected topics. It requires no maintenance; it’s free, fast and reliable.

But does that make you well informed? Hardly. The system is predicated on asking, in advance, for what is important. So to get the right stuff every day you need a crystal ball and if you had one of those you wouldn’t need either the Daily News or Google.

And what about the stuff you didn’t know you wanted to know? There is a surprise with every turn of the broadsheet when you read a daily paper, and that’s how you expand your own horizons; a provocative headline, an engaging photo, or a well-selected pull quote and the next thing you know you’re reading about neuroscience, viticulture or the education system in rural China. A great opening sentence got me to read Bob Herbert’s column today and it was excellent.

The second reason the demise of newspapers would be bad for consumers is that the “free” news they are getting today, in many cases, originated in a newspaper or a magazine or some other “old” media source. Therefore it was paid for by the subscribers, but once they go away, so does the “free” online version that was along for the ride. Then you’ll be left with nothing but people sitting around in their underwear blogging away for free media, and trust me, it will not be nearly as good.

More importantly, no newspapers would be very bad for America. Newspapers and magazines are the only real counterbalance we have against powerful, moneyed interests. Those BVD-wearing bloggers aren’t going to take on politicians or the drug industry. To do that takes resources that go way beyond a home computer and a blogspot account. It takes teams of reporters, editors, and researchers, and very often, lawyers, to challenge the powerful. We need newspapers and magazines.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Thomas Jefferson

Dear Congresswoman Lowey

October 22, 2009

Hon. Nita Lowey
U.S. House of Representatives
2329 Rayburn House Office BuildingWashington, DC 20515-3218

Dear Congresswoman Lowey:

I’m writing to announce my new strategy for voting in Congressional elections. It was born of my frustration with Congress’ general inability to deal with the many serious problems facing our country.

Reviewing your web site, your constituent emails, or similar communications from either New York Senator, reveals thoughtful and rational policies for addressing these problems, and given the dominant position your party now holds in Congress I was expecting dynamic and creative action to combat the financial, educational, environmental, foreign policy and social tribulations bedeviling us.

Instead we are getting financial service industry reforms that fail to address the specific problems that got us in our current mess, health care reform that looks more like a band-aid than major surgery, the corruption of the past administration replaced with an unwillingness to remove a tax cheat from the Chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, and general disappointment for those of us who had hoped for genuine reform.

The problems we face as a nation can only be solved by a bipartisan commitment to find solutions. Instead we get a never-ending war between the political parties and weak legislative action that gives the appearance of problem-solving without actually doing anything.

While you are almost certainly not the problem Congresswoman, from here on I am holding you (and Senators Schumer and Gillibrand) responsible for the actions of the entire Congress. By this I mean that unless there is real progress by next November I shall vote for your opponent regardless of your particular actions, or how closely your positions match my own.

Sincerely,
d’blank

Fear & Loathing in Retirement

Work is many things, most of them good. Work offers social interaction, a sense of purpose, intellectual stimulation, health care and a paycheck. Not many things do as much for us. But work is also a form of tyranny. It imposes restraints on our time and our range of self-expression. It imposes deadlines and de facto curfews. It imposes dress codes, modes of behavior and adherence to countless rules of its particular culture that are unwritten and unevenly applied to members of its tribe.

I’ve been retired for two weeks now and it’s all good, but it’s going to take more than a few weeks to adjust to my freedom from the tyranny of 35 years in the harness. When you throw in commuting, I just got an extra 50-60 hours a week given to me and I haven’t quite figured out how to use them yet. There’s a little voice in my head that speaks up 3-4 times a day telling me I’m not making enough progress on my list of things that need to be done, and it takes a few seconds to remind the voice that there’s plenty of time, and that I’m the one setting the timetable now.

For now I’m happy just completing my farewell tour of lunches, dinners, golf and cocktails with assorted pals and business associates who mostly seem happy to pick up the check. I don’t know why golf on Tuesday is so much better than golf on Saturday, but it is. Cocktails remain a joy on all days ending in “y.”

What’s next? Beats me. I feel like I’m still finishing a really long book. It’s about a 1200 page work of non-fiction; alternatively fascinating and tedious, with about 50 pages to go. If it was about someone’s life other than my own I might be tempted to set it aside now and find something more fun to read. But I need to finish it, which will probably take another couple of months. I’m enjoying the journey. Mrs. d’blank and I attended the Metropolitan Opera the other night and enjoyed Il Barbiere di Siviglia (above). Who knew it was a comedy? There’s a lot of New York City I never had time to explore, so boredom is not on the horizon.

I only have one rule at the moment: do an absolute minimum of things I don’t want to do, and fill my days with things that matter to me, while I’m deciding what book to read next.

Hate crimes

America is the only country on earth that could invent a concept like “hate crime” and I hate this invention of the politically correct. Congress, which of course has nothing better to do, just extended the crimes covered to those committed against gay people. Racially motivated crimes and crimes against Freemasons were already covered. I have nothing against gays, other races or Freemasons, but I hate the law because:

First, by increasing the penalties for hate crimes, it diminishes the seriousness of a plain old crime of similar nature. If someone beats you to death just to steal your wallet are you any less dead than if you were beaten to death because of your race, and does your murderer deserve less punishment?

Second, it requires the prosecutors and the jury to be mind-readers. We’re already executing people for murders that had eye-witnesses who turned out to be wrong; isn’t this putting an awful lot of pressure on an already stressed legal system?

Third, it perpetuates and encourages the whole “victim culture” in America. I’m not going to go into this any further because it tends to make anyone who feels this way sound like Glenn Beck. I don’t want to sound like Glenn Beck, but I don’t like this crap either.

Finally, it is a classic political cop-out. The kind our Congress performs so well. Instead of doing something constructive like giving gays full rights under the Constitution, as many people feel they should, they enact this essentially meaningless statute so they can beat their chests and claim to be both pro-rights and anti-crime, while accomplishing nothing.

Retirement. Well, I just completed my first week of retirement, and I plan to write about it and get back on some regular publishing schedule soon. However, if next week is anything like last week I may have to spend 45 days at Hazeden first. I’ll be back to you soon. In the meantime – talk amongst yourselves.

David Letterman is a pig

If you ran a business and used your HR director as a pimp to procure women, who would serve as both your employees and concubines, you’d most likely end up in court and probably on the front page of the local paper, held up as an example of how the rich and powerful exploit their positions.

This is exactly what Letterman has done, but it’s only the foundation of his complete pigishness.

Not only did he show no shame or remorse, he used the story of his serial exploitations of his staff as fodder for an on-air, smarmy, wise-ass comedy bit that was cleverly constructed so as to reveal his behavior late within the story of the alleged blackmail plot against him. He had his audience laughing and applauding in sympathy before they knew the real story. He made the average politician turned adulterer look good by comparison.

And let’s add stupendous hypocrite to the list of Letterman descriptors. Who told more Elliot Spitzer jokes than Dave? At least the Governor hired a professional who could have walked away from her gig with him at any time, without fear of losing her job or being blackballed from her chosen industry.

Does anyone still find Dave’s jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter funny? Maybe he was planning to offer her an internship as a peace offering.

Even Don Imus called him “a mean-spirited creep.” Letterman is just another rich prick who uses his power to exploit those he can.