Groundhog Day and the Doobie Brothers

I spent most of the last four months without cable TV or internet, and no regular newspaper. I’d like to tell you it made life perfect, but in truth, I missed all of them and was looking forward to returning to Florida to get a media fix.

Now that I’ve had it for the last ten days I wish I was Punxsutawney Phil and could crawl back into my burrow for another six weeks. Nothing has changed. I had forgotten how bombastic and pointless our national political dialog has become. We are a nation of Nero’s, fiddling away as the country burns down around us.

There is only one reason to have a government, and that is to solve problems. Does anyone think that is what our political class is doing for us – solving problems? I honestly don’t think I know a single person – either on the left or the right - who feels that way. Everyone is frustrated.

I have more sympathy for the Tea Party-types than any other segment of the chattering classes. At least they seem sincere in their belief that the government has to be smaller. And does anyone actually believe we’d be worse off without Departments of Education, or Energy? Can you name one thing they’ve done for us? You have to at least give them credit for making Mitch McConnell’s life miserable.

As for the Republicans, well they are what they are. At least they are transparently in the pocket of big money and the closest they come to making a secret of it is to say it is because the economic benefits will trickle down to working class people. It’s a lie, but it is consistently told.

The Democrats are the worst because they so often disappoint. Like their hero Bill Clinton, they fall so far short of their potential it breaks your heart. You know the biggest political lie of the last couple of elections? It was “you should vote Democratic because Republicans don’t believe that government can do any good, and so they govern poorly. Democrats believe in good government and govern well.” Now there is some world class bullshit, as George Carlin might have said.

With their man in the Oval Office and an unbeatable majority in both houses they had two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to show us what good government looks like. The first was the stimulus bill, which could have put hundreds of thousands of people to work rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, but instead, became a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stick American taxpayers with the bill for every two-bit Congressman’s pet porker project, Harry Reid’s monorail from LA to Las Vegas, for example.

A now, with our bridges still falling down, and millions of people in need of jobs, there is zero chance of another stimulus bill because no one – Republican, Tea Bagger or Democrat – believes Congress would spend the money wisely. What is their latest approval rating – like 16%?

The Dem’s second great opportunity to show what great government could look like came with health care reform. After wasting months trying to look like they were good guys, willing to compromise with the GOP (which I doubt they really were, but it’s moot now), they ended up cramming a bill down the Republican’s throats anyway. But instead of a well considered, rational plan that any American could understand, we got yet another 1000-page plus monstrosity of a bill that most of them never read and none of them understood, pushed through at the last minute. And now they’re crying in their Chardonnay that the plan is being misrepresented by their opponents. Boo-hoo. You should have done it right. Then the voters would have understood. Instead you’ve got to send President Obama out again on one of those inane “backyard real-folks” tours selling health care reform months after the fact. Jesus – what losers.

And then there’s the Faux Financial Reform Act, the legion of Goldman advisors surrounding the President, and his misguided Afghanistan plan. If this is good government we might as well elect Sarah now and get it over with.

We don’t even talk about the really important issues in the public debate. (When was the last time you heard a serious discussion of the defense budget?) In fact it’s not a debate; it’s just one interest group shouting at another. This is good for cable TV and the internet; it provides very cheap programming and builds audiences, because we don’t really want to listen to ideas that conflict with our own version of reality. There’s no other way to explain Fox News, MSNBC or about a hundred thousand political web sites and blogs. As the Doobie Brothers told us many years ago:

“But what a fool believes…he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems…to be
Is always better than nothing”

We don’t discuss issues we wrap lies in a thin veneer of half truths; we don’t solve problems we build Potemkin solutions that are politically mollifying but substantively meaningless. What’s it going to take to change things? The financial crash didn’t do it. Two failed wars didn’t do it. Katrina didn’t do it. How bad do the schools have to become? How much more dependent on imported oil do we have to be?

Just talking about it, knowing nothing will be done is degrading in its own way. I long to do something real and tangible, no matter how small or insignificant it may appear. I’m going back into my burrow.

I'm back

Well, I’m back in Florida and more or less settled in. I’m working on a political post, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a recent road trip story, which I found rather heartening. I drove more than 7000 miles between May 15 and September 15, all without incident until my right rear tire blew out when I was about 200 miles from my Florida base last Sunday. I was on a two lane country road. There was no real shoulder, so I pulled into the grass and called for assistance. It was late afternoon, 94 degrees and humid, with threatening thunderheads on the horizon. There wasn’t a building in site – hadn’t been for miles. I leaned against the completely packed truck of my car and waited for the service truck, hoping he would arrived before the rain. If not I’d be forced to take refuge in the Dutch oven that my car was quickly becoming.

In the 45 minutes I waited, four vehicles stopped to ask me if I needed help, and a Hollywood casting director couldn’t have picked a more interesting mix of people. The first car, a late model, upscale SUV held a 60-ish couple who looked like they were on their way to a church social. They couldn’t have been nicer and promised to stop on their way back in about an hour to see how it was going.

Next, a 10 year-old F-150 pickup driven by a young Hispanic man who spoke broken English, stopped. He offered to change the tire for me. Third came a minivan so bland it could have been any age or make, occupied by a couple who were closer to 80 than 70. The wife was driving and she actually made a U-turn to see if I needed anything.

Finally, an 80’s era Firebird (or was it a Trans Am?) pulled up, driven by young white man wearing a backwards ball cap over a Florida mullet, a sleeveless tee-shirt and grimy blue jeans. If you’d seen him I suspect the label that would have come to mind would have been either “red neck” or “white trash.” I confess, with some shame, those were my first thoughts. But he made sure a truck was coming and then pointed out a path that leading through the woods to his house where he told me I was welcome to wait for the truck if it started raining.

Sometimes the world seems like a cold place, but there are a great number of good people among us.

Detroit

I just drove out to Detroit from the east coast with my daughter, who started working for General Motors this week after graduating from Harvard Business School. (I try not to brag too much but I hope you’ll permit me that one mention.) I grew up in the Midwest and have been to Detroit many times over the years, mostly to visit the car companies or the Auto Show.

I like the town – always have. I like their sports teams, I like that there is a Coney Island hot dog joint on practically every block, I like that you can go under a tunnel into Canada and see the Windsor Ballet, a staple of Detroit media T&E for decades. I love Motown. I love how it’s a Spartie town – not a Michigan town.

But I saw it with new eyes this trip. You think about things differently when you are dropping your kid off to live in a new place. It was neither worse nor better than I remembered it, but I saw things I never saw, or never really noticed before, and they are things I think every American would benefit from seeing.

I am moved to write about this but I was only there for 24 hours (although little of that time was spent sleeping.) And I don’t have any illusions that I can offer a Brooksian insight that finds the nexus of the cultural, historical, economic and political stuff of the place and make you say “Wow!”

What I did see was how easy it is for the collapse of one industry to bring down an entire community in barely half a human lifetime; a community that was, as recently as 1970, the fifth largest in the U.S. I saw what faded prosperity looks like in the residential neighborhoods just off Woodward Avenue that are filled with spectacular mansions, alternating with boarded-up hulks.

There was so much prosperity in Detroit at one time, and like in Rome or Egypt, the signs of it are still there in the old churches, mostly abandoned and succumbing to gravity, or in other old buildings that were once grand and important, but are now forced to suffer the indignity of housing bail bondsmen, dollar stores, and under-funded municipal agencies.

Everyone should see Detroit because we take our prosperity for granted, or we assume if things don’t go so well there will be a gradual, gentile decline that we won’t even notice in our day-to-day lives. But that isn’t what happened to Detroit, and you need to see it to understand.

In the end though, it wasn’t as bleak as you might imagine. Rebirth fights through the cracks in the cement of decay everywhere you look. Many old buildings have been saved and retain their grandeur. Bold new projects dot the city. The Detroit suburbs are still as nice as any in the country, and regular people can afford to live in them.

Detroit will survive – smaller, but smarter and scrappier than before. The hubris that came with being the Kings of the automotive world is long gone, replaced with the certainty that nothing will be given to them. They will have to make it happen, and I believe they will. You should see it; both for the warning and for the hope it offers.

Buggin’

There was a stiff breeze blowing as I stepped out of the cottage Sunday afternoon on my way to the beer cooler. I’d gone barely a few steps when something small and hard slammed into the side of my head. Not the side exactly. My ear actually. And not the top of my ear, or my ear lobe, or on one of the hard ridges that lie between them either. In what must have been a navigational million to one shot, this something plunged deep into my inner ear.

My amygdala took over and twisted my head up and to the left -- my eyes turned skyward as my fingers clawed into my ear. Something seemed to fall from the far edge of my peripheral vision but I couldn’t be sure what it was. I stood and wondered: What had hit me and where was it now?

I lay down on the couch and kept very still trying to recreate from memory what had just happened. I was alone. Only the laughter of little children splashing in the nearby lake disturbed the quietude. Then I heard something: a soft rustling sound at first, it amplified steadily to a scratchy clawing until it sounded like the movie soundtrack to a cheesy horror flick -- and it was inside my head.

And then it moved. I jumped off the couch and begin pounding the left side of my head in the foolish hope it would pop the tormentor out of my right ear. It stopped moving. I lay back down, outwardly calm but inside my head Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials played “Compact Man,” raw and hyped-up, manufacturing adrenalin and preparing me to jump again. I remembered the “Twilight Zone” episode in which the earwig crawls into a man’s ear and eats it way to his brain. At least my new friend was still a couple inches from gray matter and trying to exit, not enter.

What could I do? Who could help? It was a Sunday. I was alone, and in the back woods ten miles from a small town hospital. The emergency room seemed like the only option, but I knew I’d be in line behind ten guys who’d cut off limbs with chain saws or OD’d on homemade meth. I opted for self treatment.

The next six hours were characterized by periods of relative calm alternating with full out panicked frenzies every time my new friend begin to back his way out of my ear canal. I don’t know how to describe the emotions triggered by knowing something is trying to crawl out of your body, but I can tell you that it concentrated my mind wonderfully, and brought to full bloom what little “man-as-tool-maker” DNA I possess.

The cottage is filled with the remnants of 50 years worth of kitchen and household implements and I adapted a number of them into the cause of locating and extracting the varmint. Many of these tools were sharper than my elbow and would not have received approval for my uses from even the Bush era FDA. You don’t want to know more I promise you. I also flushed my ear with some peroxide solution which I believe eventually drown the visitor. Finally, the beast stopped moving.

Several more hours passed in which I employed more tools and flushes, and finally around eight that evening the bugger emerged, dead but intact, stuck to the end of a Q-Tip that he matched in size. He was perfectly preserved in a waxy glaze that accentuated his prehistoric black and iridescent green exoskeleton. His big, dead, bug eyes focused everywhere and nowhere at once.

I don’t go in for blood sports, but no fisherman ever felt more pride in his catch than I in mine; no hunter every bagged a more satisfying buck. My prize was too small to stuff but I’m keeping him in a plastic sandwich bag -- forever -- unless the dreams don’t stop soon.

Summer vacation

The Daily Blank is taking a breather for the rest of the summer. Those of you who know my work status are probably already asking yourself, “What the hell does he need a break from?”

Fair question. The problem is that I’m on the home stretch of the big move and the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy. The magnitude of the task is making it hard for me to concentrate on anything else. Actually, at this stage, I’m having a hard time finding a little piece of tabletop and a chair that isn’t piled high with boxes. Please note that I’m not bitching – just busy.

Once the move is over I’ll be spending the rest of the summer deep in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts at Pine Island Lake. Not only is there no Wi-Fi there, a usable cell signal is dependent on the relative humidity and the intensity of the Aurora Borealis. I think the best thing is to just power it down for a couple of months.

There may be a couple of special posts over the summer which I’ll announce on Facebook and via email to those on the mailing list.

It should be an interesting time next fall when we return just as we gear up for the midterm elections. At this point I’m not sure who is ahead; is it big oil or Wall Street? There is still time for big pharma to step up and take the flag – you can never count them out. Have a happy summer.

d’blank

Misc.

Can’t anybody do anything right in this country anymore? Over 200 bodies improperly buried in Arlington National Cemetery for God's sake? Ridiculous.

It’s nice to see the cat get its tail twisted now and then; or in this case – the Vampire Squid. Goldman Sach’s stock is in the tank and the government seems to actually be putting some pressure on them after losing patience with their stalling and stonewalling tactics, like sending the equivalent of several billion pages of documents in response to a recent subpoena.

The chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee, Phil Angelides, even refused to meet privately with Goldman CVS (Chief Vampire Squid) Lloyd Blankfein. Maybe their money ain’t good in Washington anymore?

On the other hand, probably it is. Goldman and other banks have already gutted financial regulation reform to a large degree. Joe Nocera, hardly a Trotskyite, lays it out in a recent Times column. This bill is going to be so weak as to be meaningless. They aren’t going to do anything meaningful about derivatives trading, and on the consumer protection front they’ve already given up on a proposed rule that would have required anyone selling exotic mortgages to compare whatever they are selling to a (formerly) standard thirty-year fixed mortgage. I guess we can all see how inflammatory and anti-bank that would have been.

I’m glad to see that wiser heads at General Motors quickly backed off the “don’t call me Chevy” memo. Maybe they are learning a few things at the New GM.

I guess we now know why Peter Carroll took a powder from USC when he did. The NCAA continues to run hard for the title of "worst regulatory organization in America." It is a very competitive race what with the work being done at the Minerals Management Service, the SEC and the FDA. I’d like to see a playoff among that group. On the other hand – maybe not.

As Buzzard said to me this morning regarding the NCAA, “I hope they are happy -- by removing 30 scholarships worth $150,000 each, mostly poor inner kids are being deprived of an education in favor of some rich Hollywood mogul who can easily afford to send his child to USC film school.” Meanwhile Carroll and Reggie Bush, the real culprits in this affair, continue making their millions in the NFL with no repercussions.

Hamburger Lit update: I’ve been sampling some of the recommendations from the comments to the May 8^th DB post. I read “An Unlikely Spy” by Daniel Silva and “Careless in Red” by Elizabeth George (who was born in Warren, Ohio). I can recommend both. Thanks to Brooke and Fenway.

Blues: I’m lovin’ the new Mannish Boys (above) album “Shake for Me.” They play bad-ass bar-band blues with a distinctly Bo Diddley-ish 1-3-2 beat. In fact they cover “Mona.” Their cover of Eric Clapton’s “Reconsider Baby” is terrific too.

Speaking of music, the Prowlers will be at the Ace of Clubs this Saturday night. That’s on Great Jones Street in da village, New York City. First set at nine. I’ll be there.

Coach Lou and I continue our bi-polar blog on “What’s Next.” We’re like the most popular content on the site. Can you believe it? Come check us out.

I’m still packing and discarding every day. It’s amazing what you can accumulate over 30+ years. It is not a fast process. Everything requires an evaluation and when you get to old photos it’s hard not to stop and day dream about the circumstances of their origins. Next up I have to decide what to do with all my old vinyl. There must be a couple hundred old albums I haven’t played in over 25 years (and am not likely to in the future), but it’s hard to toss them. Any takers? They are mostly mid-60’s to mid-70’s classic rock and R&B, but there are some stinkers in the mix too. Buzzard advises me to check the inside of all the double albums for aged and forgotten contraband before passing them on, which sounds like a good idea.

Adios muchachos.

Fatmobile

The most irritating commercials on TV are for the Scooter Store. They aren’t irritating in the manner of a “clapper” ad, or the really graphic anti-diarrhea spots. These are irritating because they encourage people on the periphery of need to use Medicare funds for these dubious devices.

The people in the ads are always really cute granny types who obviously need help getting to church or out to help at the Girl Scout bake sale. But who actually uses these machines? You urbanites may not see many of them, but I’ve spent the last few months visiting my local Wal-Mart on at least a weekly basis. Here is the “truth-in-advertising” version* of the testimonials that promote the Scooter Store:

“Hi! How do you like my new scooter from the Scooter Store? It didn’t cost me a nickel. The friendly people at the Scooter Store showed me how to scam Medicare (and you – the taxpayer) and my insurance company (and you – the premium payer) into paying for the whole thing!

After spending a lifetime eating whatever I wanted, never exercising, and watching my weight sore to 400 lbs, I found walking to the fridge a real chore. The folks at the Scooter Store felt my pain and assured me that never walking anywhere was my right as an American! So call today and let the knowledgeable, friendly staff at the Scooter Store show you how to get your friends and neighbors to pay for a new scooter so your fat ass will never have to walk anywhere again. Don’t delay. Call today.”

* My apologies in advance to anyone who actually needs one of these rolling fat-boy carts.

Topic #2: I always take my ear buds to the gym to plug into the sound system while I’m on the elliptical. One bud is marked with an L (left) and the other with an R (right). Yesterday, for at least the twentieth straight time, when I looked down I found that I had R in my left hand and L in my right. I say “at least” because it had probably happened another 10-20 times before I started counting. This seems like a near mathematical impossibility to me. One of you must have the math skills to calculate the odds. I am perplexed.

So I guess you can tell I’m reaching for topics. Forgive me but I am hugely distracted as we are in the process of sorting through 30 years of life’s accumulations, and packing them up in preparation of moving out of our house at the end of the month – our fourth major move in 3-1/2 years. This is leaving me little time for the deep thought and rigorous research that normally goes into these posts.