My Summer Job Sucked Worse Than Yours (Part 1)

From time to time, through turns of conversation, I get on the topic with an interlocutor about summers jobs. The debate ensues as to who had the worst summer job or jobs, the best summer job(s), the hardest summer jobs, et al. I feel, and of course this is a matter of my own opinion, that I've had the sh*ttiest summer job of anyone I've spoken to. The story went down as such...

Every summer break, whilst still in college, I'd come home. Happiness ensued in my family household, for another child was in residence, at least 'til the end of the summer. The joy diminished by week two, when my slumming ceased to be entertaining and started to become annoying to my parents, particularly my mother. Monday would start with her walking into my bedroom, and speaking to me (while I was in a dead sleep) about getting a summer job. Day Two started off similarly, but with a bit sharper tone to her voice. Day Three (Wednesday) began with her kicking the side of the bed and rapaciously telling me to "get a job, and don't come home until you have one". Words such as these to a slumming college student on summer break were similar to crucifix and garlic to a vampire. This might have gone on for a few more days until I could take it no more.

And so I grabbed The Pennysaver, a Long Island staple publication, filled with adverts, local news, stories of minor import...and Help Wanted ads. Scanning this paper for jobs that I could do, I came across a landscaping job opening that looked promising. And so I called the number. "Do you have any landscaping experience?" the voice asked on the other end of the phone. "Sure!" I said. "Like what?" the voice asked. "Well, I mow my parents lawn!" I lamely answered. I guess it was good enough. And so I went for my interview. Ted was his name. He was an older man, but might not have been older than I am at this moment. He LOOKED old, though, in a kind of weather-beaten but hearty way. "I'll start you off at $5 an hour; if you last, I might raise it to $6". This being 1987, that was pretty decent money. "Be here at 7:30 am tomorrow". Wow! At least my mother won't harass me tomorrow morning, I thought.

Up at 6:30 am, my mother dropped me off. The owner of the business, Ted, also had his son Ted Jr. (known as TJ) working for him, as well has his daughter, who's name escapes me. He also had some other schlub who looked approximately the same age as me, but had round glasses and full facial hair. (He didn't last.) We had a short meeting in the garage to strategize. And off we went, into the truck I went with TJ.

We arrived at a rather large cemetery. I didn't quite understand at first, but it dawned on me that this wasn't any ol' landscaping job. The title of the business said it all, "Ted's Lawn Service and Cemetery Maintenance". They weren't kidding about the cemetery, because here I was mowing in-between headstones within ten minutes. The surreal aspect of this scene was further enhanced by the fact that the cemetery grounds were littered with the carcasses of dead starlings, who were the collateral damage of a fumigation campaign against tree and leaf damaging insects. And off I went, hour after hour, kicking the carcasses of dead birds out of the blade of my lawnmower.

I made it through the day, and I'd never worked a harder day in my life than that one...up until that point in my life. (There were MANY more hard labor days in my future...) I came home at around 7 pm, at dusk. I remember it being a beautiful summer sunset, but it mattered nothing to me, for I was completely exhausted. Every muscle ached, my face was slightly sunburnt, and I recall being so wiped out that I didn't even eat dinner. (So wiped out, in fact, that I slept in the living room couch while my family ate dinner in the other room. )

This was the first day of my summer job in 1987: mowing cemetery lawns peppered with dead birds. An eleven hour day.

It would get evermore surreal as the summer ground on. And I was 19 years old.

(To Be Continued)

Quote, July 22, 2010

“If the administration wants to take credit for ‘jobs created or saved,’ it should also accept responsibility for ’jobs destroyed or prevented,’” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.

To all my friends...

On Mortality...But Hopefully Not

Several things have been going on in my life of late. I don't want to give them too much personal weight or make it appear that I am complaining in a selfish way about them, as I'm not really the one going through them directly. But I did want to make note of these things via this blog as a means of recording my feelings about them whilst still fresh.

Of late, the following things are happening, strangely to the female compatriot of a good friend, and direct female friend. Both are fighting cancer. I suppose it is a right of passage to adulthood or middle-age-hood, and I really shouldn't be too discombobulated about them, and frankly, I'm not. But they are a source of concern. Whereas one of them assured of recovery, the other is not. As for my health issues, I broke my foot approximately seven weeks ago, and it still bothers me even though I'm fully capable of walking on it and putting weight down on it. The psychological effect on me, however, was not what I thought it would be.

It is a strange feeling for me, particularly since I always thought of myself as an indestructible force of nature, to actually confront the fact that a.) I'm getting older, and b.) my body isn't recovering in the same way that it always has. I'm still feeling pretty well; I still have pretty good zip in my legs, but not what it used to me. Now it registers, that line from a Rush song "Dreamline": We're only immortal, but for a limited time. In a sense, it is true. The feeling of immortality, either consciously or unconsciously brandished, ebbs away. It might be several decades before I "shuffle off this mortal coil", as Shakespeare's Hamlet put it, but I no longer feel the need to test the limits of it all. Through my young adulthood, I have jumped out of airplanes, hand-glided over a rain forest in Brazil, rode several cables throughout the rain forests of Costa Rica, not to mention getting lured into one of the most dangerous areas of the Rio De Janeiro favela by an attractive female (came out unscathed, but with quite a story), found myself in Manhattan after-hours clubs at four or five in the morning with some of the more decadent denizens of Gotham, coached a hockey team in a predominantly black urban neighborhood for five years (without incident, for the most part), as well as a few other things that will go without mention that were considerably dangerous. Perhaps what Hemingway postulated was true: a man is never more alive than when he skirts the edges of death. I would say that was somewhat true for me, though it never really felt "death-defying" when I was doing it. But I don't feel the need to do these things further. Again, a nod towards mortality...or perhaps, I value my life now more than I have in the past.

The last few years I've delved into the philosophies of the Stoics: Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus in particular...both Romans: one an emperor, the other a freed slave. Their writings are dedicated to mitigating, through some intellectual conclusion or another, the physical and mental pains that we as humans will, with all certainty, endure. Per Epictetus, "We all must die, but must we die bawling?". Perhaps not; but hopefully not before we've gotten everything we could possibly get out of life before we're asked to leave by the biological gods that put us here.

All these existential thoughts brought on by a broken foot and subsequent curtailed mobility. I hope not to endure any like injury for some time, as being thoughtless, shallow, and devoid of introspection sounds pretty good at about this point. Plato said, "The unexamined life is not worth living". Perhaps true, but Kurt Vonnegut's rejoinder was pretty clever, too: "What if the examined life turns out to be a clunker? Then what?" Clever, clever.

This is all somewhat stream-of-consciousness drivel. Mild apologies to those that have the misfortune of reading this doggerel, but I needed to say it. May I post no existential crap for some time, even if another extremity is damaged.

D-Day, June 6, 1944

There’s a book that my father gave my mother Christmas of 1975 called “Is Paris Burning?” Written in the mid-60s, this book chronicles life before the liberation of France in August of 1944 to the liberation itself. The title refers to something Hitler would say every time he called up the Wehrmacht general in charge of the defenses of Paris, von Choltitz. Fresh from an assassination attempt on his life, which (unfortunately) did not kill him but did leave him physically incapacitated, Hitler had already succumbed to the throes of complete insanity, courtesy of an overriding paranoia and copious amounts of painkillers. “Is Paris burning yet!?!” was the standard greeting von Choltitz would get as soon as he picked up the phone. The closer Allied forces got to this great city, the more Hitler wanted it scorched. Seems that if he couldn’t have it, no one would.

Today marks the 66th anniversary of the landings at Normandy, commonly known as D-Day. I don’t think much of Mother’s Day, perhaps because my “doubting Thomas” nature precludes me from thinking that it is something other than one of those holiday’s that Hallmark created. (They’ve been getting desperate lately. C’mon….Secretaries Day!?!) But I always think about my mother today, for it was the night drop the night before and the landings on the morning of June 6, 1944 that liberated her the following August of ’44.

They’re making a big deal about D-Day this year, as they do every ten years. In my mind, it’s a big day every year. The invasion of the Normandy coastline changed the entire course of history, and for the better. It spelled the end of the Nazi German domination of all of western Europe. It liberated millions of people who had been struggling and suffocating under the tyrannical rule of the Germans for four years. And it was not without its costs. The “butcher’s bill” on D-Day alone was approximately 9,000 young kids, 3,000 killed in action. Bear in mind that the majority of these numbers were kids that were in all likelihood not over the age of 22. The average age for a junior officer was 21-22. The average age for a GI was 19-20. The ferocity of the battle has been pretty well recreated in the first twenty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan”, only the charnel house that was Omaha Beach was not a twenty minute ordeal, but rather a six hour one. So bad was Omaha Beach that Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of First Army, seriously contemplated pulling American forces from it, so grievous was the situation. It was only through the grit and determination of the sergeants, captains, lieutenants, corporals and privates that they took the bluffs overlooking the beach. The generals, who planned it all out, had nothing to do with it. The plan failed the moment the first wave hitting Omaha Beach got wiped out with a 90% casualty rate. Hitler once postulated that American forces were soft, unwilling to take orders, and suffered from streaks of individuality that would make them terrible soldiers. On the morning of June 6, 1944, with a game-plan gone to hell and a situation getting ever so desperate by the minute, the spirit of individuality that Hitler so disparaged kicked in. Devoid of actionable orders, the kids on the beach made them up as they went along, and breached the Atlantic Wall, manned by Hitler’s best troops, who wouldn’t so much as sneeze unless ordered to. So much for the children of democracy being “soft”. The airborne drops the night before were similarly wrecked. Planes blew off course. Pilots panicked by anti-aircraft fire, dropped paratroopers either too low, too high, or too far off the designated drop zone. Again, improvisation and courage saved the day.

On two blank pages in her copy of “Is Paris Burning”, my mother pasted two pictures and a photocopy of a monument that sits in the town square of her hometown of St. Cloud. Her town was on the Seine River, directly across from Paris. Allied forces used the roadway through her town to get to Paris. The two pictures are of the first liberating personnel of Allied forces. One is of two or three guys on a tank, rolling down a street. The other is of French girls mobbing the tank, the joy of liberation palpable. In the margins of the pictures, written in thin magic marker, it says “First Tanks, St. Cloud, Liberation, August of 1944”. The photocopy of the monument sits on the opposite page. The inscription on the monument, in the town square of St. Cloud, says in English:

City of Saint Cloud

Square

This Square is Dedicated to the Staff Sgt. Lawrence R. Kelly from Altoona (Pennsylvania) Who Was Deadly Wounded on August 25th 1944

As He Entered Saint Cloud Preceding The Liberating Army of General Patton

For four years, my mother lived under Nazi occupation as a teenager. People vanished without a trace, food was scarce, and homework was done in the basement by candlelight on nights when Allied bombers roared overhead. The nightmare was over in August of 1944. A few years later, she made it to the United States, met my father a few years after that, and realized her little slice of the American dream. Today I’ll do three things. I’ll think about my mother, whose indominitable spirit allowed her to carve out a life after so much sadness, to Lawrence Kelly, who did not land at D-Day but was part of the liberating forces that came ashore thereafter, and I’ll think of what Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator of “60 Minutes” (who was a reporter for Stars and Stripes during the Second World War) said:“If the world ever seems cruel or selfish, go to the American cemetery at Coleville, overlooking Omaha Beach. Go see what one man did for another on June 6, 1944”.

Some Pearls of Wisdom From Lech Walesa

Chat with Walesa [Jay Nordlinger]

I haven’t returned to my “journal-ing” — my writing of the Oslo Journal — but I wanted to stick a note here in the Corner today. I thought I’d say a little something about an interview I had with Lech Walesa this morning. I talked with him “on the sidelines” of the Oslo Freedom Forum, here in the Norwegian capital. He was in fine form: warm, expansive, funny, charismatic, earthy. In other words, he was the very picture of what he is: a trade-union leader who became an all-time hero of freedom.

I said to him I wanted to be fast with my questions, because I knew he didn’t have much time. He said, “Do I look unwell?” Did I think he was going to kick the bucket? No, no, I said. I just knew that his schedule was packed.

Among the subjects we discussed was his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. (The prize is administered here in Oslo.) What did it mean to him, Solidarity, and the defeat of Communism in Poland? A great deal, he said, in essence. I will paraphrase him:

Martial law had been imposed, and we were really getting weaker. There was no wind blowing into Poland’s sail. It’s hard to say what would have happened if I had not won the prize. The Nobel prize blew a strong wind into our sail. Without that prize, it would have been very difficult to continue struggling.

And what did Walesa think of the 1990 prize to Mikhail Gorbachev? “I think we can debate it,” he said, chuckling. Then he said (again, a paraphrase, but a very close one),

I’m certainly very fond of Gorbachev, and I respect him. But you should ask him the two questions I always ask him. First, I ask, “Did you betray Communism? Are you a traitor to Communist ideology?” And he always says, “No, of course not.” That leads to my second question. “Look,” I say, “you’re a bright guy. Did you really believe it was possible to reform the Communist system?” That really pisses him off. He gets all red-faced and angry at me. And he doesn’t answer. In fact, those two questions as a pair, he really doesn’t answer.

More:

Gorbachev tried to reform the Communist system, and failed. If he had succeeded, I’m the one who would have failed. So we were all very happy that he failed, and if they wanted to give him the Nobel prize for his failure? That was fine with us. He failed, he got the Nobel prize — everyone was happy.

On the other hand, there’s this to consider: He had the instruments of rape, and he did not use them. In other words, Gorbachev had the brute power to suppress rebellion, as his predecessors had, and refrained from using it. Every male has the instrument of rape — should we all be awarded Nobel prizes for not raping?

Walesa said to me, “I wonder how you’re going to phrase that for your article.” I said, “I’ll just repeat what you said — can’t be improved on.” Then he spoke of the peace prize to President Obama, last year:

The wise men of the committee gave the award to Obama for his potential merit, and in order to encourage him not to stray from a path of peace. Well, we could all get a Nobel prize for our potential merit — and in order to be encouraged. For example, every journalist could get the Nobel prize to be encouraged to write better . . .

Walesa was interesting, enjoyable, and unpredictable all through. I’ll have more from him — and from others, and about Oslo, etc. — later

Mark Steyn Dissects The New York Times Owners

Sucker Punch [Mark Steyn]

This is a speech given by Punch Sulzberger back in 1994. Punch, father of Pinch, was at that time Chairman of The New York Times. He was in his sixties back then - not old, the age of many a vigorous chief executive around the planet. But he wasn't one of them. He warms up the crowd with a little light humor:

A number of years ago, in a speech at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I noted that a disproportionate number of this country’s fine newspapers were family owned. My conclusion was simple. Nepotism works.

I wonder if he still feels that way. And, if so, what precise relation to him that Mexican billionaire is. Then he turns his attention to the new technology:

I believe that for a long time to come this information superhighway, far from resembling a modern interstate, will more likely approach a roadway in India: chaotic, crowded and swarming with cows. Or, as one might say, udder confusion.

I'd be interested to know whether his gag writer is still on the Times payroll. Next, in a poignant moment, he brags about how much he over-paid for an even more somnolent monodaily:

We have renewed our faith in the written word by acquiring for more than a billion dollars in stock one of the country’s great newspapers – The Boston Globe.

Hmm. And what would you get for it today, assuming you could find a purchaser?

And finally:

Reader Jones might well have a deep interest in ice hockey, grain futures and foreign policy issues affecting China. A computer can easily assemble such information from many sources. But this compilation is a far cry from a newspaper.

When you buy a newspaper, you aren’t buying news – you’re buying judgment. Already in this low tech world of instant communications there is too much news. That’s the problem. Raw news will do just fine if you’re a computer buff and want to play editor. But I, for one, would rather let a professional take the first raw cut at history and spend my leisure time fishing...

Judgment, serendipity and something left over to wrap the fish, all neatly folded, in living color, and thrown at no extra cost into the bushes. All for just a few cents a day. It’s called a newspaper. And when you add a wee bit of ink for your hands and top it with a snappy editorial to exercise your blood pressure, who needs that elusive interactive information superhighway of communications.

Just point me to the fishing hole! Thank you.

His son has pointed the entire company to the entire company to the hole.

Partner for Pieces

To my point regarding the last post. This comes courtesy of National Review's Mark Steyn:

Good news! Hezbollah can now hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem thanks to Bashir Assad, Syria's president and Obama's partner for peace, giving it long-range Scud missiles.

Assad may no longer be a practicing ophthalmologist but he can still read the writing on the wall when it comes to American credibility. This latest lively development to the Middle East "peace process" comes in the middle of Obama's summit to "save the planet" (in Katie Couric's expert analysis) and mere days after presidential emissary John Kerry, on April Fool's Day, arrived in Damascus and "raised long-running concerns" directly with Assad.

Not to worry. The Administration remains committed to sending a new ambassador to Assad's court who can "press the Syrian government in a firm and coordinated fashion", according to the White House. Firmly pressed coordinated fashion works great for Obama's next GQ shoot. Not sure it counts for much with the Teheran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis.

Quote

Bill Bruford, answer a question on who some of his influences were:


"Anyone who crossed my record player, which was a lot of people. Sometimes terrible musicians were a strong negative influence, and often non-drummers were a strong positive influence. So Miles Davis for economy and style, David Bowie because he was always moving and would never quite let his audience catch up (very smart), and the Rolling Stones who just seemed awful."

"Transcendent" Presidents Can't Change National Interests Of Others

When Barack Obama won the presidency in November of 2008, there was a wave of euphoria amongst his supporters and a sentiment that he was the man to reverse the bad relations the United States supposedly had with the rest of the world. The common theme was that the world hated us because Bush was such an obnoxious boob. With Obama in power, it was said that: Iran would shed its nuclear ambitions, Syria would leave Lebanon for good, the Russians would cease their belligerent behavior towards their former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia, Venezuelan Hugo Chavez would cease his saber rattling and relax his drive towards being a totalitarian dictator, and on and on it goes. One year plus in, nothing has changed, and if anything, the aforementioned have calcified their positions and behaviors. The Iranians are closer to a nuclear weapon than ever, Russia's Putin has become more authoritarian and wily than ever, Chavez still consolidating his power and now talking badly about Obama instead of Bush, and Syria has spat in the face of Obama's initiatives and tightened both its ties to Iran and its clutches on Lebanon. Oh....and the Europeans still don't like us, as exhibited by the Netherlands' inclination to withdraw troops (non-combat, I would assume) from Afghanistan, despite being a part of NATO.

It was always going to be. Now the meme is that Bush did so much damage to America's standing in the world that Obama can't undo the damage. Malarkey.

Nation-states will always do what is in their best interests, and they only have few courses of action to choose from. For example, one of Obama's foreign policy initiatives was to "flip" Syria and turn them into an ally, thus isolating Iran. Needless to say, Syria did just the opposite. Despite the Obama Administration's reinstatement of full diplomatic ties with Syria, the Syrians a.) increased their diplomatic and military ties with Iran, b.) wrapped their tentacles ever so tighter around Lebanon. It was always meant to be. Syria gets nothing of value from improving its diplomatic ties with the United States. From a geographic standpoint, Syria is bordered by Israel and Jordan to the south, Turkey to the north, and Iraq to the west. Israel is no friend to Syria, for good reason, but what does Syria get if it becomes a good neighbor to Israel? Increased trade? The Golan Heights? Syria is a totalitarian police state abutting a parliamentarian democracy (Israel); this in and of itself is a threat to Syria's dictatorship. In Jordan, there are diplomatic ties, but the Jordanians have played both ends against the middle for decades; again, no advantage. Iraq is currently under occupation from American and coalition forces, and hopefully will morph into a reliable democracy (a stretch, but there's hope). Turkey is also a democracy, albeit a precarious one that is currently in the clutches of an Islamist party led by Tayyip Erdogan. But remember one thing about Turkey: they're muslim, but they're not Arab. Additionally, they're still a part of NATO. There is good reason for Syria to feel threatened in their geographic position: they're surrounded by forces that are contrary to their ruling ethos. So why would they "flip" on Iran? Iran brings them boatloads of petro-dollars (Syria has no oil to speak of), essentially to buy their allegiance and to use their ports. Both Iran and Syria are military dictatorships, and more importantly, Shi'ite in character. (The Assads are Alawite, offshoots of Shia Islam.) Obama's people clearly were dreaming if they thought they flip them. Additionally, as Syria was implicated (by UN investigators, in fact) in the assassination of once (and in all probability, had he not been killed) future Prime Minister Rafik Harari, why reward them with the reinstatement of an American ambassador? Say what you want about Bush, but he understood the levers of American diplomatic power, in that bad behavior isn't rewarded by undiminished American diplomatic relations. Bush pulled out ambassador to Syria after the Harari assassination and demanded the Syrians leave Lebanon, which (at least in the form of the Syrian army, if not Hezbollah) did. With no concessions on the part of Syria, we have restored full diplomatic ties, and Syrian forces are back in Lebanon.

Same goes for Iran, but for different reasons. Iran is cornered geographically by Iraq, filled as it is with American-led coalition forces, and Afghanistan, with American-led NATO forces. They've been belligerent towards the United States and Israel since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. They are a religious/military dictatorship. They are also the locus of all international terrorism, and have been since 1979. Their memories are long and their history is deep. The Persians were, circa 500 BC, the world's most powerful empire, and though their powers waxed and waned under both the Achaemenid and Sassanid empires, they still fancy themselves as a superpower. There is no reason why they would discontinue their quest for a weaponized atomic bomb. It would mean that they are now a player in the big leagues, a position they feel is their birthright, based on their former, ancient glories. Obama's absurd "unclench your fist and we'll extend an open hand" offer was a joke from the moment it was uttered; it smacked of a naive, intellectual academic who has no experience or feel for how the world really works. And it is so.

Russia also gets nothing for changing its behaviors to suit Obama's liking. Despite a silly PR stunt by the likes of Hillary Clinton (see here), talking of "rebooting" relations with the Russians, they'll be no "reboot". Russia feels vulnerable on a number of fronts: the expansion of NATO into former Soviet bloc states like Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and even to former Soviet republics such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, makes the Russians extremely nervous. As George Friedman, CEO of independent intelligence agency STRATFOR wrote, the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet bloc now puts NATO forces "1200 miles from St. Petersburg to 120 miles...from 1000 miles to Moscow to 100 miles". Russian incursion into former Soviet republic Georgia over South Ossetia was meant to send a message: this is OUR sphere of influence. Russian routinely shuts off its natural gas pipeline to Ukraine for days, or sometimes weeks, just to make a similar point. It sells plans and materials to the Iranians because it is a.) profitable, and b.) alters the balance of power in Asia/Middle East in their direction. Again...why would they change, and for what? Because Obama was nicer to them than Bush was?

Which brings us to Western Europe, or as Donald Rumsfeld correctly referred to them, "Old Europe".

I have little doubt that the Europeans like Obama more than they liked Bush. They hemmed and hawed about Bush endlessly and repeatedly. People like George Soros likened him to Hitler. And so with Obama in the White House, all will be well, right? Wrong. Once again, despite their rhetoric, the Europeans are behaving like, well, Europeans.

The first domino to fall was the Netherlands. The government of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende fell this past week, particularly due to Dutch involvement in Afghanistan. Other European NATO forces are sure to follow suit. Western European countries in particular have large muslim minority populations that scare the heck out of their respective governments. Again, the soothing words of Obama can do nothing to stop nation-states from doing as they've always done: act in their own best interests.

It had nothing to do with Bush, and everything to do with this concept of self-interest. Always was, always will be. Obama claims he's "frustrated" with the Israeli/Palestinian impasse. Only a very arrogant, self-important man could think that he could fix that mess by the mere sound of his sonorous voice and agreeable personality. Only a man with a terminal case of hubris could think that he could re-shape the world in his own image. A visit from Nemesis is forthcoming.

Iran On The Brink....I Hope

Amir Teheri breaks it down here. Worth a read. The Green Revolution is, perhaps, upon us.

No Sense Of History

Whilst in the midst of the worst snowstorm in recent memory and confined to barracks as a result of, a couple of things have occurred to me. Today, while waiting for my train at Penn Station to arrive, I happened to have caught a snippet of a news story on CNN that was being played at one of the food/beverage shoppes that dot the station. In said news story, a delegation from the National Urban League, a predominantly black and Hispanic organization spoke outside the White House. Their concerns were that this "Great Recession" that we are currently undergoing is disproportionately affecting minority communities, and that the President needs a "stronger focus on employment counseling, job creation and direct aid to public employers." I'm always a bit suspicious, and rightly so, such entreaties; essentially, what these folks are speaking of is a greater expansion of the already over-bloated welfare state, but I digress. What I did find of interest was the continued use of this phrase:

The Jobless rate for black men last month, 17.6% and rising, is approaching the worst of the Great Depression.

Could be, but I'm not sure those numbers jive with the official government numbers. The unofficial government unemployment numbers have an overall unemployment number of about what the National Urban League, in their press release, said it was for just black men. I'm not writing this blog entry to either endorse or dispute these numbers, but rather to point out that this meme, that we are in the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression", is just a tad suspect to me. First off, statistically this is not true, and I'm not even sure that this is even remotely as bad as anything that occurred in the 1970's, or for that matter, the very deep recession of '81-'82. So....let's go to the numbers:

Maximum Rate of Inflation:
'80-'82 Recession-10.8%
Current Recession-2.7%

Maximum Unemployment:
10.8% (December, 1982)
9.7% , 10.2% maximum in November of 2009

Maximum Interest Rate (as measured by Federal Funds Rate):
20% (June, 1981)
.25% (Now)

Consider also, in the recession of the early '80's, mortgage rates approached 21%. Imagine that: paying 21% for a mortgage. (See sixth chart from the top here.) Sheesh.

Now, I'm not trying to mitigate what has just occurred with our financial system. One of my clients, who happens to be a personal injury attorney, referred to it as a "serious injury to the spinal column". (He said this before the Lehman/AIG/Citi meltdowns, but after the Bear Stearns implosion.) Of this, I cannot dispute. But I do find the constant and endless referral to this financial situation to that of the Great Depression a bit hard to swallow. I'm not even sure that this is as bad as '81-'82, and if one were to go by the numbers, it isn't as of now. That said, I think that Reagan had the better remedy than Obama currently does, but even with the obscene deficit spending going on courtesy of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama triumvirate (one, if not two of the three will be gone by next January), I'm quite hopeful that recovery is but a year or two away. Additionally, with Obama's mad government expansion schemes scuppered for now (and probably for all time), and a GOP congress (if not majority, than certainly strong minority) in the works, fiscal sanity will find its way back to our government policies. (Or, what counts for fiscal sanity in Washington.)

Conclusion? This is not the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It's not even worse than the Recession of '81-'82. Bad...but not that bad.

Quote

"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation."-Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish Statesman (1729-1797)

Posted For Posterity's Sake

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Democrats fall as fast as Nixon Republicans in 1974

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
January 27, 2010

(AP photo)

Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts' special Senate election was for Democratic leaders a moment that can be described in two words, of which I will only print the first here, which is "oh."

Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists and the stray Nobel Prize winner-turned polemicist are all urging Democrats in Congress to pass, somehow, some way, a health care bill, and many of them are calling for a second and even larger stimulus bill.

But Democrats in Congress are replying, as politicians are wont to do when challenged by party wingers, that their name is on the ballot. New York Times editorialists can opine that the Massachusetts result had nothing to do with opposition to health care, but their life's work is not in peril.

Democratic officeholders know theirs is. Some are heading for the hills. Four well-regarded veteran congressmen announced their surprise retirements in December; two longtime Democratic senators folded in January. Family concerns have suddenly become very pressing.

Others are holding out against the bloggers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that "unease would be the gentlest word" to describe House Democrats' refusal to pass the Senate health care bill. Her elegant ears must have burned in that caucus meeting.

Sens. Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln, up for re-election in Indiana and Arkansas and facing by far the most negative poll numbers in their long political careers, let it be known that there was no way they would support the reconciliation process, requiring only 51 votes, to jam through a health care bill.

But more than health care legislation is in trouble. I have not seen a party's fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.

The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford's House seat in February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican Party. Brown's victory last week looks as if something similar has happened to the Democratic Party.

Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment. Back in 1994 I wrote the first article in a nonpartisan publication suggesting that the Republicans had a serious chance to win the 40 seats necessary for a majority in the House. That article appeared in U.S. News & World Report in July 1994.

This year political handicapper Charlie Cook is writing in January, six months earlier in the cycle, that Republicans once again would capture the 40 seats they need for a majority if the House elections were held today. I concur. The generic vote question -- which party's candidates would you vote for in House elections -- is at least as favorable to Republicans as it was in the last month before the election in 1994.

Nothing is entirely static in politics, and opinions could change. Barack Obama could shift to the center, as Bill Clinton did after his party's thumping in 1994; the economy could visibly recover and start producing new jobs; a crisis like 9/11 and a good presidential response could boost the president and his party as 9/11 boosted George W. Bush and his party in 2001 and 2002.

But I sense that something more fundamental is at stake. Obama in his first year adopted the priorities of what pundit Joel Kotkin, a Democrat himself, calls the "gentry liberals." Obama called for addressing long-term issues like health care and supposed climate change. He and his economic advisers, like many analysts across the political spectrum, underestimated the rise in unemployment. Talk about "green jobs" has proved to be just talk.

Obama's conciliatory foreign policy and his attempts to mollify terrorists have produced no perceptible positive responses and run against the grain of most American voters. Questioning the Christmas bomber for just 50 minutes and then reading him his Miranda rights has left Obama open to charges that his policies fail to protect the American people.

The cacophony of conflicting advice from left-wing bloggers, pundits and elected officials is a sign of a party in disarray, its central premises undermined by events. Massachusetts may have been a wake-up call enabling the Democrats to recover. But right now they're tossing and turning.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Democrats-fall-as-fast-as-Nixon-Republicans-in-1974-82731837.html#ixzz0dvfiGk9G

Echoes Of A Life Long Gone

The only known film of Anne Frank. Haunting.

On Popularity

"Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only virtue when men have it whether they will to or no."-George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax, 1633-1695

The Loss Of Album Artwork

I caught the last gasp of the "Long Playing" (LP) album, with requisite fancy album cover, whilst coming of age in the late 70's-early 80's. It was quite an experience to buy music in those days. If you were lucky enough to be into a band that could put some bread into the artwork, the whole experience of listening to the music could be enhanced tremendously by the visuals. Yes/Crimson/Earthworks (among others) drummer Bill Bruford once opined that the album was your "mission statement"; indeed he was right. You could get a pretty good feel of the type of band you were about to listen to when you bought the album by the artwork employed by the band in question. Amongst my faves were Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery, with its metallic presentation that represented the aggressive sophistication of the aforementioned recording quite well. A smart band with some artistic license could post a visual to its cover that could be tremendously arresting. A couple of additional cases in point: King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King, Yes Fragile and Close to the Edge, Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (complete with real zipper), Jethro Tull Stand Up (which actually had pop-up characters when opening the gatefold), and of course, Sgt. Pepper's.

Great stuff, it was. Sadly, with the advent of the compact disc (CD), the artwork was shrunk to one quarter of the size of the LP's canvass. I never did get the same buzz from buying a CD as I did from opening up an LP for the first time. (Rarely did I buy cassette tape either, unless it was specifically to play on a boom box or play on a Sony Walkman.) Reading the liner notes, the lyrics, and peering at the artwork contributed tremendously to the experience. Even though too much care went into not scratching the LP, and inevitably one always did with repeated play, it was a rich experience that has been lost to the ages. Now, in the age of MP3s, one needn't even buy a CD, and so the artwork has become utterly disposable. A shame really, but then it is extraordinarily convenient to have the equivalent of twenty-four days worth of music at my disposal at the click of a keyboard. If an LP has approximately forty minutes of playing time, that equals 1.25 albums per hour in a 24 hour period, and I have 24 days worth of music (according to my iTunes indicator), I would have 720 LPs in my apartment. Sheesh.

Technological progress, for the most part, is a good thing. But there's always that is lost with the onset of said technology. I won't miss the cassette or the CD, but the loss of the album artwork made available by the LP is slightly bittersweet for me. However, I'm sure this won't be a lost piece of LP artwork, except to make fun of.

Invictus-By William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of fate
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years finds
And shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.