Tagged: economy

The Conservative Case for Bicycling

The tinfoil-hat fantasies of Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes are only the most extreme example of conservative opposition to bicycle-positive public policy. Disparaging remarks from the likes of John Boehner and Patrick McHenry are depressingly common (though it should be noted that Ray LaHood, the most bicycle-friendly head of the Department of Transportation ever, was a Republican representative in a previous life).

I suspect that the Republican animosity toward bicycling is more cultural than it is economic. Bicycling culture in the United States has a generally liberal feel to it, perhaps because more bicyclists live in urban rather than rural or suburban areas, or because cycling instead of driving has a countercultural feel to it in our car-dominated society. Championing automobiles over bicycles, with their faintly European and therefore suspicious aura, is a way for politicians to signal their support for the “real” America.

This is a little curious, because a case can be made that bicycling actually fits many planks of the conservative agenda. My own politics are a little to the left of Leon Trotsky, so perhaps I’m not the best person to point this out, but maybe it takes an outsider to see the opportunities that conservatives are missing. So here are a few key conservative values–both cultural and economic–that line up well with cycling.

Self-Reliance

The bicycle ought to be an icon of rugged individualism. Few people tinker with their cars anymore–modern automobiles are black boxes which require highly specialized tools to maintain–but almost anyone can keep a bicycle running themselves. Bikes are relatively simple machines that can be maintained with a few wrenches and a screwdriver. And most bicycle commuters make their daily trips in all kinds of weather with no support system but their feet and their wits. Remember that rush of freedom you felt as a kid on your first two-wheeler? It’s like that every day for cyclists.

Conservatives love cowboys, but there are precious few of them left. Might I suggest the bicycle courier as the rugged individualist’s new hero? Out there on the edge, living by wits and courage, the bike messenger is the ultimate romantic loner. (Ignore for a moment that there are a good many anarchists in this niche.) Trade in your Stetson for a bike helmet, and your saddle bags for a courier satchel, and maybe get Alan Jackson to write a few songs about the brave and lonely messenger, riding in the tracks of the Pony Express. American enough for you?

Energy Independence

The Republican Party platform has touted energy independence for four decades, but they’ve done precious little to really encourage us to give up foreign oil. As long as we remain an auto-centric society, we’ll never be free of the negative consequences of depending on despotic and unstable regimes for our energy.

My bicycle isn’t entirely free of petroleum products–rubber tires and tubes, petroleum lubricants, and some plastic parts go into keeping it running–but it is a darned sight closer to energy independence than any car. There’s no need to invest in alternative fuel technologies, no need to drill for risky and inaccessible domestic oil; the bicycle is a near-perfect technology now, and an obvious part of an energy independence plan.

End Subsidies

Conservatives hate subsidies. Subsidies distort the market, redistribute wealth, and open the door to all sorts of social engineering aspirations.

And one of the most heavily subsidized aspect of our daily lives is the automobile. Whether through bailouts and tax incentives to manufacturers and dealers, or the proportion of general funds as opposed to user fees (license and registration fees, gas taxes) that go into infrastructure, or the hidden subsidies on parking, we pay individually far less for our cars than we pay collectively. If the true cost of our reliance on the personal combustion engine were borne by individual drivers, there would likely be many more people on bicycles or public transportation.

Bicycle infrastructure, by comparison, is incredibly cheap. And because bicycles cause so much less wear and tear on roads, bike lanes are cheaper to maintain. (We Minnesotans know that Republicans hate maintaining infrastructure almost as much as they hate subsidizing it…)

There are still plenty of left-leaning reasons to ride a bike, too: environmental, social, and economic. But that doesn’t preclude conservative support for cycling. The fact that liberal and conservative policies can converge on cycling just means that, like motherhood and apple pie, bikes are a good thing that ought to belong to neither end of the political spectrum.

our obligations to each other

As Lori Sturdevant reports in her column in today’s Star-Tribune, not all of Minnesota’s representatives went down without a fight against the governor’s cuts to social services. She notes that Lyndon Carlson, Jeremy Kalin, and Paul Thissen stood up to the unallotment. And she quotes at length from Thissen, who may be a gubernatorial candidate when the chance to replace Pawlenty rolls around again in 2010:

[I]t’s a clear example of short-term thinking. It’s thinking we can solve problems by not paying for them, or just moving them off of government’s books. . . . We’ve had this notion put before us that we can keep the Minnesota we’ve always known without paying for it. That’s tied to a notion that we’re all on our own, and should be able to take care of ourselves.

“The pendulum is swinging back to the idea that we do owe obligations to each other. That is what the next election is going to be about.

It’s awfully early to be picking candidates, but based on these words, I’m looking forward to hearing more from Rep. Thissen. I think he gets it.

Governor “No” and the politics of perfidity

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has decided to go it alone on the state budget, using his line-item veto and unallotment to unilaterally chart Minnesota’s future. He has stuck to a fundamentalist “no new taxes” line, throwing the legislature’s budget out of balance by striking down revenue increases, and is going to work on his own path of cutting services and funding. This is a deeply undemocratic act (which Pawlenty appears to be making quite gleefully), and counter to a long Minnesota tradition of generosity and compassion.

The University of Minnesota, K-12 school districts, Minnesota’s cities and towns, and the health care system will all be harmed by the budget cuts. Jobs will likely be lost, and Minnesota’s infrastructure further eroded, just so Pawlenty can hold to a hard line on taxes that made little sense when times were good but makes far less sense when times are bad. Far fewer people will benefit from Pawlenty’s stance on taxes than will be hurt.

As angry as I am at the governor, though, I’m equally disappointed with the DFL legislature. This was their opportunity to step up to the challenges of a new era in governance, a chance to make the case that reviving the “Minnesota Miracle” means asking everyone to pitch in, and they failed, pushing their tax bill through at the last moment, after deadline, when they should have been building the case for months. In this environment, there’s a good chance that people would have listened.

The pendulum is swinging, and not only the governor but the legislature have managed to be struck by it. If we learn anything from the economic meltdown of the last year, it should be that a system that prospers the few against the many is not a recipe for wealth, and that a society that shares prosperity more equitably is better prepared for the inevitable failures. Both the governor and the legislature are guilty of wishful thinking, looking to 2010 to solve all of their problems. Better that they participate in, as Lloyd Alexander called it, hopeful dreaming: imagining ways in which we can rise to our challenges, slough off the shackles of the past, and create a state, if not a world, where we value more than the short-term gain.

Hopeful dreaming is an active process. The hopeful dreamer is willing to take his tumbles with the world, not insisting on the immediate gratification typical of infantile demands, but with the patience that is one sign of growing up. The hopeful dreamer says, “If not now, maybe someday . . .”

Lloyd Alexander, “Wishful Thinking — or Hopeful Dreaming?”, in Fantasists on Fantasy: A collection of Critical Reflections by Eighteen Masters of the Art

After the Fail: moving ahead from the #amazonfail

It’s been over a month since the #amazonfail brouhaha swept Twitter and the web, which is about a century in Internet time. Since then, the Twitterati have moved on to more pressing issues (“#3turnoffwords” and “Patrick Swayze” are trending to the top of the Twitterverse as I write this). The questions that the fiasco raised have largely gone unanswered.

I don’t live at Internet speeds, though, so I’ve continued to think about what Amazon’s flub means and what can be done about it. My own sphere of influence is pretty tiny, but I’ve finished up a little project that is my own practical response to the Amazon leviathan: a WordPress plugin called BookLinker that makes switching from the Amazon affiliate program, or at least augmenting Amazon with other resources, a whole lot simpler. You can read about all the geeky stuff that went into this plugin here; more important, though, are the reasons behind this project.

Why link to books?

Web sites that review books, or discuss books, or otherwise have a bookish nature, typically provide their readers to some sort of external link to the books in question. There are some good reasons for this:

  • The linked pages provide some additional context for the book: reviews, author biography, history, etc. The thing that sets a web review apart from a print review is that the context can be made richer by relying on external resources, and the review itself can be made leaner by leaving a lot of expository and extraneous information to those outside sources.
  • Readers should be able to get their hands on the book quickly if it interests them. Being able to buy the book, or request it from your library, while you’re reading the review, is a great service to readers; I can add an intriguing title to my reading queue with a few clicks of the mouse, and not have to scribble down notes on a 3×5 card.
  • The affiliate programs offered by Amazon, Powells, and IndieBound can be valuable for some high-traffic sites; these programs are a key source of income on really popular and successful book review sites. For the less popular sites, they don’t really offer much payment, though the occasional windfall is nice enough.

The web is all about linking, and so linking to book sites should be a key piece of Internet book reviews.

Why link to Amazon?

Amazon is by far the biggest player in the book link world, for some good reasons:

  • The depth of selection is astounding; most books that are in print are available on Amazon, and through the relationships that Amazon has forged with used book retailers, lots of out of print books are easy to find as well. If you want to review it or read it, Amazon probably has it.
  • For the reviewer/blogger, Amazon’s tools are the best. The link-creating widgets are nicely integrated into the site, so in just a few clicks you can generate a nicely-formatted affiliate link to a book and paste it into your page. By contrast, IndieBound has one link format that can be created from the book pages (easy enough for an HTML-savvy writer to tweak, but not as intuitive as Amazon’s options), and Powell’s requires you to enter your affiliate ID and the book’s ISBN on a separate screen, making two-tab browsing an annoying requirement.
  • Amazon is ubiquitous. For better or worse, it’s the default on-line shopping destination not only for books, but also for CDs, toys, electronics, and household goods, and a huge player in digital downloads as well. Most people who are going to buy something on-line probably have an Amazon account already, and are more likely to buy from Amazon simply because they’re familiar with it. Getting someone to buy a book from Powell’s, or go through an independent bookseller through IndieBound, is an uphill struggle.
  • Amazon has economy of scale. Its prices are low, its discounts are deep, and its shipping policies make it easy to buy an extra little something on impulse for the “free” postage.
  • The Amazon web site is very rich in content; there are lots of reviews (some better than others), links to related books, and information about authors and publishers. Most of this content is in service of selling books, of course, but that doesn’t detract from its usefulness to the reader.

That’s a lot of inertia, which makes the lack of serious change after the #amazonfail fiasco unsurprising.

Why NOT link to Amazon?

For some people, the #amazonfail event–the sudden, apparently accidental, de-listing of a whole range of gay and lesbian titles–was enough to make them stop linking to or buying from Amazon. It’s the sort of issue that a small number of people feel strongly enough about to change their behavior, like not buying lettuce during the Chavez boycott or steering clear of Coors beer (and not just because it’s a lousy beer). But it’s not sufficient to get enough people exercised to really shift the marketplace in on-line book buying.

For me, there are two other compelling, and related, reasons to avoid buying from Amazon. And though I thought that the #amazonfail event was badly handled by Amazon, and the arbitrariness of the flub was offensive, I think these are more important reasons.

First, Amazon represents a monoculture in the book marketplace. They’re not really a monopoly–there are other places to get books, and they don’t get any particular government largess (that I know of, at least) to support their business–but they are so gigantic that they set the tone for everyone else. Indeed, their ubiquity gives them incredible power over how we read. The danger with a monoculture, though, is that it makes the entire ecosystem vulnerable to the ailments of the big player: when Amazon de-lists a whole class of books, or promotes certain kinds of books more than others, or introduces proprietary technology (like the Kindle) that locks users into a particular stream of content, the quality of the entire book world suffers.

We saw a similar invasive monoculture in the book world in the 1990s, when the big chain stores–particularly Barnes & Noble and Borders–started to squeeze independent booksellers with their low prices and deceptively wide selections. (Full disclosure: I was a Barnes & Noble bookseller myself for about five years, though I remained a lowly floor walker for my tenure.) The sheer mass of the chain stores shifted the way publishers worked with retailers, and affected the kinds of books that got attention on the sales floor. But once the wonder of the big box book store wears off, most readers will discover a numbing sameness to them all.

And that’s the other, related, reason that I’m now starting to steer my readers toward IndieBound rather than Amazon. IndieBound is an umbrella site for the American Bookseller Association, made up primarily of small, independent bookstores. Unlike Amazon, IndieBound directs your dollars to a store near you, a store run by local people who know and love books and readers. Rather than “crowd-sourcing” books through Amazon’s ranks and comments, independent booksellers are hands-on matchmakers, trying to connect readers with books based on human interaction. At an independent bookstore, you’ll be offered suggestions based on insights rather than algorithms.

I’ve also included, in my WordPress plugin, links to the other way to get books: your local library. My book “shopping” lately has been confined to the library, and I’ve been very happy with how that’s worked out. My local library is an easy walk away, and the online book ordering system means that I can get books delivered there from any branch in Hennepin county or, with a little more effort, from a good number of places around the country. And if the book isn’t in Minneapolis, I can probably find it across the river in St. Paul. WorldCat links the catalogs of many libraries and makes finding the books you want almost as easy as Amazon does. And if you think independent booksellers are book people, just wait until you meet your librarian.

Jack Kemp, RIP

The only time I’ve been seriously tempted to vote for a Republican (aside from Barbara Carlson’s bizarre bid for mayor of Minneapolis, but that was during the Age of Ventura when any lunacy could be entertained) was when Jack Kemp was on the presidential ticket with Bob Dole. Kemp struck me as a smart and decent man, committed to a vision of the Republican party as part of the tradition of Abraham Lincoln. His policies at HUD seemed fresh and thoughtful, and aimed toward actually helping people.

Unfortunately, his performance in the Vice Presidential debate against Al Gore (Al Gore!) was disappointing; the eloquence of his thinking never came out in his speech. And the rest of the Dole package was distastefully unambitious; the Republican party had not quite started its flight from ideas, but it was clearly fearful of experimentation and not terribly interested in reaching past its traditional constituency.

“Bleeding heart conservatives” are now a rare bird indeed. The sort of decency that Kemp exuded–he argued strongly for his ideas, but avoided the ad hominem, at least in public debate–is hard to find on the Right, and his concern for helping people rise out of poverty has been replaced by noise about hot-button wedge issues. Kemp represented a pragmatic approach to social policy that aimed to fulfill the American promise. The Republicans would do well to take a cue from Kemp’s tone in The Inspiration of the Football Huddle:

We didn’t tolerate bigotry on the field, either. Any difference in race, creed and class immediately dissolved in the common aim of a team win. Divisiveness only weakens a team. It has no place in a huddle, on or off the field.

Something tells me they won’t.

Directed as by madness

I saw a ship of martial build
(Her standards set, her brave apparel on)
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down.

Herman Melville, The Berg (A Dream)

The Titanic has been a major topic of discussion at my house for a couple months. I’m not sure where the interest in all things shipwreck-and-iceberg related came from–these obsessions are often a mystery to me–but the boys have devoured every book on the Titanic from the Minneapolis Library’s children’s section, and a fair number from the adult section. They know all the facts and figures about the ship’s size, means of propulsion, and passenger accommodations (as I’ve noted before, kids are really smart about the things they care about), and they ask a lot of really tough questions about why it sank and how the sinking was handled.

Their interest in the Titanic is probably similar to the interest that some kids have in fairy tale monsters and horror stories: they’ve found something that they fear, and by learning as much about it as they can they master that fear, or at least build contingencies around it. We’ve had similar discussions about Pompeii, tornadoes, and plane crashes, and I always try to respect their concerns and their solutions, and work out plans with them about what to do if we should suddenly encounter, say, a volcanic eruption somewhere in South Minneapolis.

One of their favorite books has been Eyewitness: Titanic. Like all the Eyewitness books, it’s packed with pictures and facts. And at the end of the book, it covers some “lessons learned” from the inquiries following the disaster. Many of these lessons were implemented, and passenger lines were considerably safer afterward.

It’s interesting that in transportation generally, humans are good at learning from their mistakes; one of our Cub Scout leaders drives the historic trolley at Lake Harriet, and he has explained to us that “every page of the motorman’s manual is written in blood.” And it’s equally interesting, and tragic, that we don’t apply our “lessons learned” in other spheres of human endeavor. So in the service of trying to apply the motorman’s and ship captain’s ethic to the current malaise, here are a few things that people learned after the Titanic sank that might make sense for our economic future.

Enough lifeboats for everyone

The tragedy of the Titanic was that there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone on board. It carried 20 boats, with a maximum capacity of 1,178 people, but there were at least 2,223 passengers and crew. There were enough lifebelts for everyone, but since most of the victims died of hypothermia rather than drowning those were cruelly useless.

We have a similar lack of lifeboats in the American economy. As companies have shed employees like so much ballast, they’re being cast into choppy waters without benefit of health care, limited unemployment benefits, and little assistance to keep their homes. Indeed, many states are in the process of setting their lifeboats ablaze, cutting spending on social services as their revenues drop, precisely at the time when those services are most desperately needed.

The Titanic was in full compliance with British shipping regulations, though it could have carried more lifeboats. The White Star Line didn’t carry more lifeboats because they feared that the decks would be too cluttered with more boats, and the new and larger lifeboats were too expense. We’re similarly fearful of clutter and expense when we talk about improving our social safety net in the United States; but clutter and expense seem like minor inconveniences when the ship starts to sink.

Keep in radio contact

Another tragedy of the Titanic occurred in the radio operator’s room. Throughout the day of April 12, the Titanic’s wireless received numerous reports of heavy ice fields and large icebergs from other ships in the area. But the operators were too busy sending out vanity messages for the first-class passengers (radio from ships was a great novelty) to pass the warnings along. Indeed, when the last call about ice came in around 23:00, the Titanic’s operator snapped, “Shut up, shut up, I am busy” and took no more warnings.

When the tragedy occurred, and the Titanic began sending out its distress signals, the nearest ships were too far to respond. Some had even shut down their radios for the night. A massive failure of communication is at least in part to blame for the Titanic’s sinking.

The “Shut up, shut up, I am busy” response sounds a little like CNBC and the rest of the financial news industry in the years leading up to the financial meltdown. Though there were signs of trouble in the sub-prime and derivatives markets, and reasonable people were asking questions about unreasonable practices, exuberance was the tone of the day. The financial programs continued to send vanity messages from the first-class passengers long after the economy began to sink, drowning out the warnings and criticism that would have been very useful indeed to hear.

Water-tight compartments and firewalls go only so far

The Titanic was “unsinkable,” in large part because of its innovative design. It had sixteen “water-tight compartments” that could contain flooding to a section of the ship while protecting the rest of the ship, making it far more likely to survive without sinking. Unfortunately, the bulkheads proved not to be entirely water-tight, and five were breached by the collision and subsequent flooding; when the five compromised bulkheads filled with water, the Titanic snapped in half.

We’ve seen a similar failure in our economy, where financial institutions that should be protected from each other–mortgages, insurance, investment–have proved to be dangerously interwoven. AIG “insured” incredibly foolish investments in incredibly foolish mortgage instruments, compromising what we’ve always been taught to believe is a safe and boring part of the economy. And when enough of the bulkheads failed across the financial industry, the economy snapped in half, sinking industries in now way directly related to the ones that caused the crisis.

Truly “water tight” engineering would have been inconvenient on the Titanic, forcing people to go up and down between decks to travel from stem to stern. And regulatory firewalls between, say, insurance and speculation, would have been likewise inconvenient and put a brake on the “innovation” in the financial markets. Sometimes brakes are good to have.

The Greeks had a word for it …

And that word, of course, was “hubris.” If you really believe that you’re unsinkable, indestructible, you’ll be very unlikely to heed warnings and build contingency plans. Of course the Titanic didn’t need more than 20 lifeboats; of course we don’t need to weigh down our economy with the taxes necessary to build a social safety net; the ship will sail on, the economy will grow, and everything will always be good and getting better.

The opposite of hubris is humility. It’s a recognition that “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” and that we can’t always predict the nature and the hour of their collapse. Contingency planning, frugality, and caution are useful tendencies to cultivate, but it’s too late to cultivate them after the disaster strikes. We can only hope that they’ll be written down and codified in preparation for the next disaster, so even if we can’t avoid the icebergs we can at least save all the passengers and crew.

a solace of ripe plums

. . . They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

William Carlos Williams

Reading the Confessions of a Bailout CEO Wife at Portfolio.com without giving in to boiling rage is a good exercise in the sort of sympathy and decency that Carol Bly urges, or maybe in Keatsian negative capability. The anonymous author, spouse of the CEO of a financial firm that has taken TARP money, bemoans the fact that she must now make her daily decisions “according to a complex algorithm: balancing the need to look like your world hasn’t crumbled beneath you . . . with the need to appear duly repentant for your subprime sins.” She has been forced to tone down her husband’s annual birthday party, curtail her shopping, and ship gifts to people so as not “to be spotted climbing into a taxi, laden with Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags.” She recognizes that “people are angry—angry at those they view as responsible for the subprime crisis and the subsequent economic meltdown,” but she deftly shifts the blame “to any number of culprits:”

to Alan Greenspan, who encouraged the loose-money policies that undermined the pricing of risk; to Barney Frank, who cudgeled Fannie Mae into supporting loans to unfit homebuyers; to the rating agencies that were ethically compromised; to the subprime-mortgage brokers who chased fees and ignored any accountability; to the investors who didn’t do their homework and absurdly leveraged up their balance sheets. . . . And yes, I blame those who were in charge of the big banks—including my husband—for not seeing the default tsunami coming. But almost no one did. Everyone knows this, yet financial CEOs have replaced the Mob as the most despised group in the country.

My natural response is anger at her myopia. From her perch, she doesn’t see the ripple effect that the poor decisions made by her husband and his peers have had on the economy, and on the lives of millions of people who have had to make decisions far more dire, far more costly to spirit and soul and heart, than to forgo a new spring wardrobe or fly coach. Swimming in a sea of privilege, she can’t recognize the flood that the collapse of the financial institutions has brought to people who have never had the opportunity to give up the extravagances and indulgences that she and her family enjoyed during the good years. Indeed, she can’t possibly understand that many of those good years came at the expense of other people, and that the check for the “multi-star Michelin hotspots” and “opening night at the Metropolitan Opera” is being picked up by exactly the people who have been damaged.

But anger is too easy, and maybe a little too gratifying. She can’t step out of her own shoes, and that’s a terrible pity; but we can try to slip into her shoes and feel the way they pinch, even if they are a tad more comfortable than our own. Failure is, after all, a relative thing; a fall from a high place can be as devastating as a fall from a low, and sometimes more so.

The Bailout CEO Wife is expressing a “quiet desperation” that Thoreau would certainly have recognized. She admits that “we aren’t facing the prospect of losing our home or having to turn to our families to support us,” but she has worries about money and also has to contend with a public scrutiny that the rest of us who have suffered in the failed economy don’t face. A large part of her role, after all, has been to project an image of success and stability, to support her husband’s reputation as a Wall Street lion, to provide lavish gifts and grants not unlike a Kwakiutl potlatch. And now that role has changed drastically, and the old skills she honed are no longer of value; indeed, the old ways of doing things are certain doom.

She is also suffering on behalf of her husband:

Here is the reality: TARP managers are scared to death. The executives of these companies are desperately trying to hold their businesses together while complying with a slew of damaging bills flooding out of Congress. My husband has battled the shutdown of the credit markets and a deteriorating business environment for two endless years without respite. He’s exhausted, terrified of losing the company, and beaten down by the constant criticism hurled at him.

If her world has frayed a bit, his is in danger of completely unraveling. “For a person whose life has been punctuated mainly by success—from perennial class president and high-school sports star to Ivy League MBA—failure is the worst of all nightmares.” We have to assume that she loves him, though she doesn’t say so, and so suffers with his loss.

I don’t mean to be an apologist for the ancien régime. There’s a fire-breathing anarchist in my heart, after all, a Leveller who rages at the unjust distribution of wealth and the rapacious treatment of the working and middle classes both before and during the fall. The Bailout CEO Wife is still convinced that “the trappings of success were earned and not given,” when indeed those trappings have more often than not been stolen, if not from the present workers (whose real earnings have barely nudged upward in the last several decades while CEO salaries and bonuses have soared), then from the future in the form of massive bailouts to prop up the crumbling monuments to excess. If bringing the wealthy down a peg will bring the poor up, then I have trouble seeing the tragedy in her reduced circumstances.

But, alas, it’s unlikely that there will be a rise from the bottom in proportion to the fall from the top. For all the hand-wringing on the Right about President Obama’s impugned “socialism,” he’s hardly a socialist by any reasonable definition. The means of production remain solidly in the hands of the ownership class, and the sweeping reforms we so badly need in health care, credit, and education are unlikely to be enacted with the same swift necessity as TARP. Instead, the misery felt by the Bailout CEO Wife simply adds to the general pool of misery that has already been moldering for decades.

No, what I’m suggesting is that Schadenfreude, though a deeply satisfying emotion, is not productive. Instead, I would like to imagine that the Bailout CEO Wife’s struggles will have some positive effect on her soul, if not on the national mood. I can identify with her angst, though on a much-reduced level, and I’ve found that there is indeed value in my reduced circumstances. I spend more time at the library and at art museums than I ever did before; I have a better sense of what is truly valuable, and what is mere dross; I find that I can enjoy things like a good loaf of bread, or a long walk with the dog, or getting lost in a novel or story, whether I have a job or not. And when I do have a job again, when the Bailout CEO Wife’s husband’s damage to the economy has finally healed, I’ll still have the things that are valuable.

And most important, through the loss of work and through good teachers like Bill Holm and Carol Bly, I’ve expanded my ability to sympathize with other people. I feel bad for the Bailout CEO Wife, just like I feel bad for people who never received a bailout and never will; I’m angry at the injustice that shields some people from the brunt of the disaster while unleashing its furies on others, regardless of merit, but I recognize that there’s suffering all along the continuum.

And my hope for the Bailout CEO Wife is not that “some other group will come along to absorb all the frustration and anger” and let her return to her previous lifestyle, but that this experience will jar her into feeling sympathy for others and taking pleasure in simple things like bread and books and plums.

Unemployment Diary: thousands to his bidding speed

. . . But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Modern Library), Sonnet 19: On his blindness

March 30, 2009

Jack and Peter (especially Peter) have lately been fascinated with playing hearts. Peter is starting to catch on to the strategy of the game, and he mumbles under his breath, Rain-Man-like, as he figures out what cards to play. He takes it very seriously, and asks me lots of questions when I beat him (I never let them win at games, if I think it’s a game they can master).

Using card games as a metaphor for life is generally a bad idea; it leads to things like Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.” I once tried to write a short story that revolved around a strange Wisconsin trump game, “Sheep’s Head,” that involves a truncated deck, a “blind,” and the strategy of “burying Schneider,” but it didn’t work out, largely because I didn’t understand the game. About the only time I’ve seen it successfully used was in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, when the Yankee uses a poker metaphor–”a new deal”–to describe how he plans to reorganize King Arthur’s feudalist society, more than forty years before FDR resurrected the image.

Still, I can’t help but get a little philosophical about hearts. I had a double major in college–English and sociology–but I minored in hearts. More nights than I care to remember, I sat at the Country Kitchen in DePere, Wisconsin, with a giant sweet roll, a bottomless pot of coffee, a deck of cards, and three friends. I got pretty good, but I was never as good as Bob Kennedy.

Bob was a naturally gifted poet–one of those people who could turn a perfect image or a stunning few lines with no apparent effort. But I was always critical of his lack of follow-through, his refusal to edit, his reliance on a big personality when there was so much else he could bring to a poem. He didn’t seem to care, though, and when I was editing the college literary magazine I couldn’t help but take most of what he submitted, even when he submitted it under a pseudonym and never admitted to it (more about that some other time). I sweated and toiled over every syllable, and buried most of what I wrote in tattered notebooks that I never showed anyone; Bob shouted out imperfect but evocative jumbles and seemed pleased with the rough drafts.

There was more under the surface, though. I remember one day Bob asked me if I had ambition. We were reading Milton, I think, the most ambitious of English poets–he was going to out-Homer Homer, out-Virgil Virgil, and write the epic poem to end all epic poems. And he did, I think, though maybe there are no great epics after “Paradise Lost” (except maybe “Moby Dick”) in part because the epic fell out of fashion.

Of course I had ambition, I said; I was obviously going to be a great poet. I read Hopkins, Eliot, Yeats, I had huge ambitions. That I knew those ambitions were out of proportion to my talents, I never admitted, even to myself. Bob just nodded, seemed a little sad, and said that he didn’t have any ambitions. And then we went to Country Kitchen and played hearts.

Twenty years later, Bob and I are at roughly the same place. He’s married, has two kids, lives in Green Bay, and from what I can tell is happy, and funny, and as full of life as he was in college. And I’m married with two kids, living in Minneapolis, and still wondering if ambition is a useful virtue or one facet of the deadly sins.

What does this have to do with hearts? Not much. There may be some lessons in the game, though. It’s a loser’s game–avoid taking any tricks, keep your head down, play from the bottom of your suit, and you’ll do well. That’s my strategy. And if you do have ambition, the best you can do is lose big, “shoot the moon,” take all the hearts and the queen of spades, too, and share the suffering with your opponents. I rarely try to shoot the moon, preferring the slow and steady accumulation of nothingness.

Bob was a moon-shooter, and a good one. He knew how to flame out in style, and that one small victory, one slip of letting someone else take the fall on a trick, is the path to ruin.

In The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth, Bill Holm writes about Lángavitleysa, “The Long Craziness,” an Icelandic children’s card game that resembles the American game “war.” There are no winners possible in “The Long Craziness,” just a stalemate in the trenches ending in exhaustion–it’s the perfect bedtime game, sure to wear down the toughest little player. But I suspect, given his celebration of the Icelanders who failed on the prairie, that Holm was a champion hearts player, and bold moon-shooter.

Unemployment Diary: A Mob of Solid Bliss

They storm the earth and stun the air,
A mob of solid bliss.
Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
For such a foe as this!

Saturday Afternoon by Emily Dickinson

March 27, 2009

Today was a good day. There were no “leads” from recruiters, no “updates” on “opportunities” that had suddenly dried up in the harsh sun of fear and trepidation, no new job postings on the Internet. Instead, I spent the afternoon with a bunch of second graders.

In the boys’ classes, each student has a week of being the “star,” which culminates in a visit from a family member. Usually, Kelly and I take turns on the visit. In Kindergarten, I read a book about moose on Peter’s day, and Kelly presented areal photos of the school on Jack’s; in first grade, I showed scale models of mountains and talked about Mount Washington to Peter’s class, and Kelly showed storm sewer plans and pictures; and this fall, I gave a knot tying demonstration to Jack’s class. Peter’s day should have been Kelly’s turn, but given my current situation it made sense for me to do a repeat performance.

Peter’s favorite thing in the world is visiting his grandfather in Maine. We ride his little Koboda dump truck in the woods, build tree forts, go kayaking on North Pond, and search for the elusive moose. So he wanted me to give a talk about Maine to his class.

I talked about some of the similarities between Maine and Minnesota: the climate, the wildlife, the geology. They had covered some American tall tales earlier in the year, so I told some Paul Bunyan stories (Paul being a native of Bangor, Maine, who came west with the lumberjacks). I talked about some Maine writers they might know about: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Portland native, gave his name to our Minneapolis neighborhood, and wrote about Minnehaha Falls, though he never visited; E.B. White, whom they all knew through Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, summered in Maine; and Robert McCloskey wrote two of his best books about Maine–Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine–and big drawings from Make Way for Ducklings are on the walls in the downtown St. Paul Library. The kids, who sat on the rug in front of me, were engaged, often raising their hands with comments and questions, and it was a fun back and forth.

When I brought out some rocks and minerals from Maine, though, the floodgates opened. As I learned at a Cub Scout meeting about collections, kids love rocks. Everyone had a favorite kind of rock, many had rock tumblers, and all of them had really good and astute questions about geology; I was well out of my depth, and I asked them as many questions as they asked me. Kids are really smart about the things they love.

After my talk, which took about half an hour and flew by quickly, I was invited to join them on the playground for recess. Peter usually spends his recess spinning a jump rope with his teacher–he doesn’t jump himself, but he loves turning the rope. But he insisted that we play tag, and joined in for a rollicking session with more than half the

kids in the class while the rest jumped rope or played on the slides. I was surprised at how good natured the tag game was: no shoving, no yelling, no arguing about who was “it,” just a lot of running and laughing with an insistence on full participation by everyone. I was the main target of tagging, maybe because I’m old and slow, but I did my best to keep up with them.

When the whistle blew, I was out of breath, probably red in the face, and sorry to have my recess come to an end. I helped herd them inside for a drink of water and their last lessons, and scurried off to the coffee shop down the street to catch my breath and wait for the end of the school day.

I like kids a lot more than I like most adults, especially elementary school kids. There’s no pretense or bragging among second-graders; if they tell you they like something, they mean it; if they boast about an accomplishment, it’s because they’re sincerely proud of it. They also don’t hide their boredom; if you’re not interesting them, they’ll let you know, with no subtlety or attempts to protect your feelings. Kids live on the edge, with their emotions always close to the surface, and, at least at the boys’ school, they still have their curiosity and sense of wonder intact. They’re eager to learn, and if you can present the material in an engaging way that aims to their level without talking down to them, I’m convinced they can be taught anything. And with that boundless energy behind them, a gang of second-graders with a purpose is unstoppable.

After school, we went to the library to look for books about the Titanic–the boys’ current obsession–and pick up Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary which I had ordered a couple weeks ago. We ran into another of my Cub Scouts there, and the three of them lay down in the middle of the floor to pore over a pop-up book about the doomed unsinkable ship. (It’s a great book, by the way, very cleverly done and packed with facts, but it does seem a grim topic for a pop-up …) If I didn’t have to get home to fix supper, I’m sure they’d be there still.

I’ve given some thought to making a career change, and becoming a teacher. I’ve always been a “kid magnet,” even before I had my own, and I love my Cub Scout den and pack. Teaching is hard and exhausting work, and far too poorly compensated (why is it that we pay people so well at AIG and CitiBank to so badly manage our money, but pay teachers so poorly to educate and nurture our children?), but it’s work that means something. Finish a software project on time and on budget, and you’ll get a little praise, maybe a raise, but the world won’t likely be any better or worse than it was without that project; teach a kid to read, or work with fractions, or about the life cycle of the moose, and if you’ve done it right you’ve changed a life.

I used to approach software with a sense of wonder and excitement, and in my last job often had a chance to be creative and playful, but the fun has really drained from it in the last few years. Even though I was tired after my brief visit to second grade, and was kept on my toes with questions that came faster and more insistently than in any technical interview, I came away from the school energized in a way I haven’t felt for years.

Unemployment Diary: Foxes and Hedgehogs

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Archilochus, by way of The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History by Isaiah Berlin

March 23, 2009

At an out-placement services orientation I attended recently, the moderator asked us to raise our hands if we consider ourselves “detail-oriented.” Easily 80% of the attendees shot up a hand; I didn’t.

The moderator’s point was that we shouldn’t put stock phrases like “detail-oriented” on our resumes; if 80% of the resumes coming through a hiring manager tout attention to detail, then that’s a wasted piece of information that does nothing to differentiate one from the other. And that’s certainly true enough; but I found the preponderance of self-confessed detail-oriented people in the room to be the more interesting fact.

I’ve met a lot of people in IT whould would consider themselves detail-oriented: they like the nitty-gritty, bit-by-bit parts of technology, the hardware switches and minutiae of XML and the finer points of Struts configuration. This audience, though, wasn’t predominantly IT; at my table, there was a medical supplies salesman, an HR specialist, and a project manager; they all raised their hands. An interest in detail appears to cut across professions. It may be related to the specialization and compartmentalization of the modern world, or perhaps it’s a symptom of a flight from complexity.

Isiah Berlin writes about the “hedgehog” and the “fox.” The hedgehog knows one big thing; the fox knows many small things.

At first glance, it might seem that the fox is detail oriented, and the hedgehog is the big-picture thinker. But in fact, it’s just the opposite; the hedgehog is so narrowly focused on his one big thing, his unary vision of the world, that his interest is really in the details. His world is highly vertical, with the fine details tied to the cosmic plane in a neat and constrained chain of being. Indeed, I would argue, his cosmic understanding is derived entirely from the earthly details that draw his attention: the hedgehog’s god lives in a glorious burrow and dispenses tasty roots to his faithful, because those are the things that concern terrestrial hedgehogs.

The fox is less concerned about the details of things. He’s constantly moving, curious, and ruthlessly practical in his thinking. The fox doesn’t commit himself to a grand unified theory; instead, he borrows bits and pieces of theories based on their utility, and doesn’t worry too much about how, or even whether, they make any consistent sense. A theory is only as valuable as its utility: if an idea gets the fox fed, or lets him escape the hounds, then it’s a good idea and might go into the toolbox for another day.

Most of the job descriptions I see in my field call for hedgehogs. They’re looking for long and deep experience in a few technologies, and in interviews there’s a lot of attention on detailed (I might almost say trivial) knowledge. A fox’s approach to this conundrum is to tailor the resume to the job, omitting the pieces that don’t apply to the specific job at hand, and to do some last minute cramming on the details that didn’t prove useful in actually using the technology.

How a fox actually does the job, though, can be very different from the hedgehog’s approach. Foxes are messy. They pull things in from a variety of sources, try and discard several approaches, and don’t ever quite clean up after themselves. They are easily distracted by shiny things, but occasionally discover a solution that the hedgehog in all his tedious burrowing would never find. They can never claim complete mastery of a thing; instead, they know what is useful about something and leave the details to work themselves out.

I can’t claim that the fox’s approach to things is the best, even though it’s the one that resonates with me. It sacrifices mastery and perfection for speed and creativity, and often results in a solution that’s too clever by half (Rube Goldberg was probably a fox). But in conjunction with hedgehogs who can keep things grounded and work out the details, it’s an approach that can add a little pizzaz to an otherwise deadly dull project.

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