Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

Hot new trend sweeping the nation:

Today I am more fearful than I have ever been up to this point in our economic crisis. You may recall that I stated in an earlier post (I have no time to look for it now) that if China were to begin selling off US dollars, then we would be royally fucked, unimaginably more so than we seem to be at the moment. Well, last week a high-ranking Chinese minister voiced his concerns about China’s massive investment in the dollar, and now China is apparently calling for the dollar to be brushed aside as the dominant reserve currency in the world. This is totally fucked, guys.

The best thing the US has had going for it since WWII has been its dominance of world finance. We could pile up debt to the heavens so long as the rest of the world was using our currency for its national reserves and for financing major international transactions. It meant some country has always been willing to buy our debt, most notably China. For years, I have suspected that China’s willingness to buy endless dollars was part of a long-term strategy to divest the US of this extraordinary economic advantage. B-school students would always tell me, “No, no, silly fellow. Why would China risk devaluing its enormous investment in dollars?” Because: the value of being the one who makes the rules in the sphere of international finance is more valuable than almost any amount of currency. Especially one that could become worthless overnight.

China will make a power play economically and politically to overtake US dominance within our lifetime, more likely sooner than later. These are the first tremors of an earthquake that will result in a New New World Order, one that will likely be much less amenable to our Western tastes than the last few have been. How stupid we have been to squander our advantage! We could have persisted for another hundred years in a position of privilege and wealth, but now we’ve squandered everything to fatten the bank accounts of a handful of reprobates and petty thieves, all the while steadily eroding everything that was once good and great about this country.

Sometimes I get so mad when I think about these things that I literally want to put my fist though a wall. People think there will be a “recovery.” Well, to whatever extent there is one, it will be nothing like that after WWII, when the rest of the word was decimated, allowing us to reshape it in our own image.

For God’s sake, Tim Geithner even acknowledging that China’s basket plan for international reserves was worth thinking about caused the dollar to tumble. Can you imagine what would happen if it actually came to pass? Say goodbye to your savings. Watch the value of your paycheck shrink to the size where a pot of broth with a soup bone will suddenly come to seem like a luxury. Watch crime and poverty escalate so that the slums of Chicago and Cleveland come to resemble Brazilian shanty towns a la “City of God.” All this and more will be ours due to our short-sighted greed and stupidity.

For awhile, I was getting on the Obama bandwagon. But this guy has got to get things moving. Now. For real. I’m very afraid that it’s already too late. For everyone’s sake, I hope that it’s not.

“I thought she was lying, or that the tabloids were making it up,” one girl said.

“She probably made him mad for him to react like that,” the other ninth grader said. “You know, like, bring it on?”

Turns out he was angry at her for reading a text to him from another woman.

Right. My first thought when I read this was, “Man, I probably could have hit Julie that one time I was really mad at her for reading my IMs over my shoulder and catching me cheating, and she wouldn’t have done anything about it. She probably even would have stayed with me.” My second [concerned adult] thought was, “My God, what’s wrong with the kids these days?”

My first instinct as an educated white male was of course to blame hip hop culture. After all, Tricia Rose, teacher of African-American culture at Brown “said that the singers and their young fans are a generation steeped in commercial hip-hop, which has influenced the smack-down tone of so many recent comments.” But then I considered that the headline of this story quotes a Dolly Parton song, and that made me think about how lots of country songs talk about abusive, alcoholic men and the women who love them. No one would say that country music makes Southern women take abuse, so I must assume we can extrapolate that lesson to hip hop. I.e., the music doesn’t make the person. Also, who could say that Southern drunks are more abusive than any other strain of man, even the dangerous Urban Stereotype? Not this writer.

A professor from Harvard, who must know better than that nobody from Brown, had this to say:

They’ve been taught, she said, “What really matters is that we don’t destroy boys.” Teenage girls think that if they speak out against an abuser, the boy’s future will be shattered, she said. “We have to appreciate that this is not simple for them.”

I’m not so sure about that, though, because I’ve seen girls destroy boys many-a-time, but instead of using their fists they use secret psychic powers passed down from generation to generation, much like the Da Vinci Code. In fact, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness [induced by their relations with women], starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. And those were the ones who were the best off.

I think if we really want to understand why girls stand by abusive men, we must turn to Dayton, Ohio art rockers Devo, whose theory of “Devolution” has proven more prophetic than its bizarro New Wave roots would originally have led us to believe. Devo teach us that the spread of mass culture, particularly through the medium of television, but also deriving from a general public desire for cultural regression to a “simpler time,” augmented by the average person’s perennial disdain for those mentally superior to him or her, has led to a new era of Devolution whereby we are slowly moving backwards, culturally and intellectually speaking. Devo’s ideas have been echoed by such respected public voices as that of Lewis Lapham, former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine, who has said that “a new Dark Ages may be right around the corner.”

Where am I going with this, you ask? If due to lack of proper education and discipline children are no longer being civilized to function as decent members of society, it is no wonder that they are regressing to the level of peasants from the Middle Ages. And it’s a good thing, too! Thinking about it relaxes me more than imagining myself on a tropical beach with a cool, fruity drink on a little table at my side and a large umbrella (Rhianna shout out!) shading me from the sun. Ah, the Middle Ages, those were the days: when every woman expected her man to be an abusive sot, coming home stinking of cheap booze, slapping her around a bit, then having his way with her so that she could spit out another brat that would likely die of typhoid anyhow. Men worked in the fields by day while women tended to the children and kept the hut in order, when they weren’t gossiping or getting into catfights with the other townswomen, that is. How I wish for a simpler time!

The thing is, this dream is now truly within our grasp. With our infant mortality rates the highest of any industrialized country, I think we could make this bucolic vision of a better life a reality. It seems that our young men and women are willing to transport us back in time. And with no real jobs except soul-crushing menial labor for most of our high school graduates, the next generation will truly know what it was like to live under a feudal regime. If I could go back in time, I’d join the seminary and shoot for Archbishop…

(1) recently, American has lost its “commercial,” can-do spirit; (2) America has always had said spirit, as evinced by the popularity Dale Carnegie, some hypocritical preacher, and Donald Trump; (3) Obama and other ne’er-do-wells do not support the commercial spirit, which irks Brooks; (4) the commercial spirit will inevitably return triumphant, as it is a part of our “cultural DNA.”

As is my usual difficulty with responding to Brooks, I don’t know where to start with the stupidity of his arguments. I mean, just to get started, he cites some of the greatest hacks in American history in his own support, from the authors cited above to Horatio Alger and Jim Cramer. Is this supposed to be convincing? Perhaps it convinces that Americans will always be extraordinarily gullible and greedy, but you’re making a normative argument that the commercial spirit is good for us, aren’t you Brooks?

In that case, what your analysis ignores is the corrosive effects that this commercial drive has had on other American values over the years. I believe it was good old Ben Franklin who told us that “a penny saved is a penny earned,” and yet we have become the most debt-laden country in the history of the world, mostly because of this zealous appetite for more and more that you praise without hesitation.

Another old school American value is so-called “equality of opportunity,” that is, the idea that a relatively level playing field provided by public education and other social programs gives most anyone the chance to succeed. Yet, social movements and government policies over the last forty years have done everything possible to ensure that there is very little equality of opportunity. White flight and flight of capital from our inner-cities have created ghettos where illiteracy often reaches above fifty percent, where high school graduation rates fall almost to zero, where murder rates exceed anything imaginable in the wonderfully safe suburban environment to which rich and middle-class whites  fled. In many former industrial communities such as Flint and Pontiac, Michigan, our commercial spirit has left communities decimated with no real hope of urban revival. And the general greed of our upper class has ensured that since 1970, real wages of the middle class have steadily declined while the fortunes of the rich have grown decade by decade.

Not to mention the cultural vacuousness for which we have our commercial spirit to thank. Would a heinous mockery of human life like Paris Hilton (or Perez Hilton, for that matter) ever been taken seriously for a second back in those wondrous days of Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan?

The taste for money, among the “sophisticated” rich as well as the teen with dreams of “bling” in his heart, stem from the same vulgarity which is corrosive to the better aspects of the human spirit. When major religions preach the evils of coveting wealth, it isn’t because having money is inherently bad; it is because, as Brooks notes, such covetousness is an addiction. An like any addiction, love of money gradually pushed all other human values out of one’s heart and one’s vision. It’s why we can so easily step over men dying in the street, why we can abide debacles like Katrina, why we can rape our environment in the name of progress without blinking an eye.

The fact that America is addicted to the drive to get rich quick is no argument in the addiction’s favor. It’s sort of like saying that being a heroin addict makes one a better panhandler, so we shouldn’t try to break said person’s addiction. Clearly this reasoning is asinine. You welcome a return of the same tired ethos that has brought our country to the brink of ruin at least twice. You may be right that as soon as things level out, people will embrace greed as our great national value again. But to champion such a return right now, to look forward to it with gleeful dollar signs in your eyes, is a position I’ll never understand.

President Obama vowed to try to stop the faltering insurance giant American International Group from paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives, as the administration scrambled to avert a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street that could complicate Mr. Obama’s economic recovery agenda.

I have previously noted the Times’s tendency to cite “populists” or “populism” as the motivation behind calls for putting limits on Wall Street executives’ pay. It annoys me to no end when journalists and commentators portray calls for lower bonuses for our failure executives as if it’s all about President Obama pandering to some crazed “populist” masses in order to get to the real work of fixing the economy. I’m not going to go through all the arguments I already made regarding reining in executive pay on Wall Street (see above link), suffice it to say that Americans have a right to call for some equity in this matter if we feel like it, since AIG is on life support on our dime. If these guys had done their job in the first place, we wouldn’t be the ones signing their checks. And as long as we are, we have the inherent right to call for a reasonable level of compensation for these terrible, subsidized employees. For once, I can understand all the complaints about government workers.

On another tack, many readers will probably recall the famous 1996 welfare reform law that placed onerous restrictions on who could receive welfare. Republicans were overjoyed by this legislation, bragging in a United States Senate Republican Policy Committee memo from August 1999 that their successes included:

(1) In January 1995, when the Republican Congress arrived, there were almost 14 million welfare recipients. By March 1999, that number had shrunk to 7.3 million; and

(2) All 50 states and the District of Columbia have met all the work participation rates for welfare recipients set by the 1996 welfare reform law.

So it’s great to kick poor people who don’t have anything to fall back on off the welfare rolls, but when we’re handing out welfare to the rich, questioning million dollar bonuses is populist madness. I see…

AIG would not exist and the executives in question would not have jobs if they weren’t on welfare provided by us. That’s much better than anything we ever offered poor welfare recipients. They had to go find jobs at McDonald’s or be kicked off the rolls. But when it comes to Wall Street execs, we not only pay them lavish salaries despite their repeated failure to do their jobs properly, but we also actually provide them with the same jobs that they would have otherwise lost due to their own incompetence. Uncle Sam never payed off a Mickey D’s manager when Julio got fired for spilling fry grease and burning down the entire restaurant. He’s living on the streets now. But if you do something thousands of times more destructive than that, we’ll pay for you to keep your job and even allow you to debate on whether or not you’ll get a bonus. Sweet.

But if you ask me, not allowing these execs to get bonuses is really a question of personal dignity. If we simply give out millions of dollars to these failures, it’s like saying, “Don’t worry. We know you can’t provide for yourself. Uncle Sam will give you some spending money and tuck you in at night. Everything will be fine.” But how will they ever learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in this Marxist vision of utopia?

Frankly, I’m surprised that these titans of capitalism don’t refuse all wages provided by the government, as such a move is supporting socialism, which every trader I’ve ever me it vehemently opposed to. It’s like when it benefits them to get welfare, they’re for it, but when welfare benefits the poor, they’re against it. Gosh, I wouldn’t like to say these guys have no integrity, that they’re only motivation is greed, that they’re utterly untrustworthy, that they’re not even good at what they’re supposedly experts at, but that’s the only conclusion I can draw given the facts.

If anything, Obama should throw those executives out in the street like the dogs they are and give their houses to homeless former poor-person welfare recipients. That would be populism. Cutting out the bonuses, that’s nothing but old school Republican philosophy getting turned on its head.

Anyhow, the circumstance prompting me to write this post is that I received my new The New Yorker yesterday, and as usual, I browsed through it throughout the day, reading a few shorter pieces and picking out which longer ones I would try to read before the end of the week. Near the back of the issue, I was pleased to see a piece by David Denby, The New Yorker’s “serious” film critic, extolling the virtues of the so-called “mumblecore” film movement. Mumblecore basically means movies made very cheaply with non-professional actors, generally focusing on the lives of twenty-something hipsters as they drift through aimless lives in places like Brooklyn and Boston. Denby correctly notes that mumblecore has been criticized as merely “smug portraits of a new generation of privileged white slackers.” And while I’m by no means an expert on mumblecore, I agree wholeheartedly that “[w]hen the material is emotionally raw, and the nonprofessional actors show some strength, mumblecore delivers insights that Hollywood can’t come close to.”

That said, there were a couple of glaring problems with Denby’s article, one perpetuating a common misconception about mumblecore, the other a clear misrepresentation or misstatement of fact. Denby’s first mistake is the less egregious of the two. After noting the frequently negative criticism of mumblecore, he goes on to state, “But a critic, I think, should grant a filmmaker his subject”, implying that the movies are merely portraits of “privileged white slackers.” Such is hardly the case.

While it is true that mumblecore films do tend to be set in the world of privileged hipersterdom, at their best, these films are scathingly critical of the hipster lifestyle. For instance, one of the films Denby cites favorably, Mutual Appreciation, is a relentless critique of the milieu in which it is set. Even the title is obviously mocking the film’s characters’ empty and banal professional and artistic lives. The story here centers around would-be indie rocker Alan, who comes to New York after his previous, semi-successful band the Bumblebees breaks up, in order to try to make it as a solo artist. Although he starts off the film as likable and shy, his cumulative actions throughout the film reveal his true character. Alan hits on his best friend’s girlfriend repeatedly, asks his dad for money while lying about his efforts to get a real job, plays an incredibly lame show at Northsix (which everyone assures him was great), sleeps with a college radio groupie then unceremoniously dumps her after learning he might get a record deal, immediately states his willingness to sell out when said deal is discussed with sleazy A&R guy Walter, dresses like a girl when a group of hipster chicks pressures him into it, gets drunk on other people’s booze without ever seeming to bring his own, etc., etc. And, yet, as I mentioned, if you met Alan on any given day and didn’t know any of his exploits, you’d think he was a pretty cool guy. Which is the film’s central point. Alan could be any of hundreds of people you meet everyday who seem like “alright dudes” but who are in reality selfish, shallow assholes.

So if Denby is claiming mumblecore to be mere portraits, he is missing completely their capability to critique the subjects of those portraits. But, oh well, he’s trying.

My second criticism goes to the heart of The New Yorker as an institution. Anyone who has worked in magazines knows how much the The New Yorker prides itself on its impeccable fact-checking. In fact, they recently ran a long article on how hard their fact-checkers work. The article implied that any mistakes these fact-checkers make would have been very difficult to catch. If that is the case, then, somebody slipped up big time in their checking of the Denby piece.

Denby paints the relationship between Alan and his friend’s girlfriend, Ellie, as if the main plot point in their relationship was a mere flirtation that did not proceed beyond an exchange of words, a fact he uses as an example of how mumblecore movies often revolve around the emotional minutiae of their characters’ drab lives.

When I read that part of the article, something seemed wrong to me, so I watched Mutual Appreciation again last night. (I’ve had it on my DVR for months.) What actually occurs in the film is that after their second round of flirtation, during which Ellie’s boyfriend is away at an ex’s wedding, Alan and Ellie end up lying face-to-face in bed. Ellie starts to leave, but after some urging, Alan convinces Ellie to stay for “ten minutes.” This ten minutes turns into “all night.” The next scene shows Ellie leaving Alan’s apartment in the morning. Although it is unclear exactly what happened between them during the night, and although Ellie later claims that they only had a “moment,” clearly the evening was more than just that. Alan also denies (but only after hearing that Ellie said nothing happened) that there was anything more than a “moment.” The point of these scenes is not to display the three making a big deal out of an ephemeral exchange, as Denby would have it, but to show the duplicity of Alan and Ellie, while painting boyfriend Louis as a hapless fool. And so, aptly, the film ends with a ridiculous group hug and the three friends falling into bed together.

Denby’s exact words on the scene are: “For Bujalski, however, the passing desire, the impulse not acted on, is a major dramatic event, and a good part of the rest of the movie is devoted to discussing this ineffable conversation.” Denby is saying the two never went past the mere flirtation, which is obviously wrong given the above analysis.

This error is surprising. Denby’s fact-checker should have watched all the films cited in this article, so I don’t see how this mistake was made, unless Denby hadn’t seen the film for a long time and the fact-checker did a really bad job. Since I generally liked the article, I don’t want to be overly critical on this point, but, really, New Yorker, maybe you should save some of your self-praise next time you print an article about your own inner-workings.

In his piece today, Friedman follows the same rhetorical and argumentative scheme that he nearly always does:

(1) Friedman almost always starts by announcing some sort of catch phrase that encapsulates his larger point and draws the reader into thinking, “Hey this is entertainment, not learning. I’ll keep reading.” In this case, he puts forth one of his lamer phrases, “This is not a test,” echoing those Emergency Broadcast System announcements that we all remember interrupting Scooby Doo on summer mornings when we were kids. Those were actually tests, and they do remind me of Friedman’s column, except they were less annoying.

(2) He then goes on to make his first argument, which is generally non-controversial point that no one is likely to disagree with. In this case, he forcefully forwards the assertion that we “need to let failed companies, or homeowners, go bankrupt…” Who can disagree with that? By now we’re all thinking, “Gee, this Friedman guy knows his stuff. He’s right there in the center of things. A man we can trust.”

(3) Friedman makes his second point, which is always the fugazi in this game of three card monte, sandwiched in between two nearly incontrovertible arguments. In this case, I will quote at length:

Second, we need to get a market going that would bring fair value and clarity to the “toxic mortgages” crippling the balance sheets of our major banks. This will likely require some degree of government subsidy to private equity groups and hedge funds to get them to make the first bids for these toxic assets by guaranteeing they will not lose. This could make great policy sense, but be a nightmare to sell politically. It will strike many as another unfair giveaway to Wall Street.

Unfortunately, the president may have to look the American people in the eye and explain that “fairness is not on the menu anymore.” All that’s on the menu now is whether or not we avoid a system meltdown — and this will require rewarding some new investors.

Ah, yes, Mr. Friedman. Fairness is off the table, or everything is fucked, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like Mr. Friedman wouldn’t like to be more fair about things if it were at all possible, but when the only solution to a problem is an unfair one, then me must suck it up like men and follow that route, right?

Wrong, I’m not at all convinced that this is the only way to “clear” these “toxic assets.” As I’ve stated many times, there has to be some way to throw this wind-fall to the people who are hurting rather than the monumentally incompetent banks and hedge funds that got us into this mess. I’m not going to beat a dead horse, but I’ll make another suggestion. Why not subsidize the sale of these toxic mortgages in auctions open to the public? Thus, people who would otherwise be unable to purchase a home might be able to take them off the market at a discounted price. If no one would buy the pieces of real estate, then what value are they to the banks at all? Of course, I’m not an expert and this plan could be highly flawed, but until Mr. Friedman and his ilk show me why the waves of cash can’t go to average Americans rather than Wall Street, I’m going to assume that something fishy is going on. Something real fishy. Like the scene on a tuna boat or at a fish fry.

(4) Here, Friedman says things that pretty much everybody already knows, thus further reinforcing our perception that he’s just reasonable Uncle Tom, and we can all trust implicitly everything he says. Here, he tells us that Obama is either going to have to double the stimulus or nationalize banks for us to get out of this mess.

(5) Friedman signs off with another seemingly benign but, on closer inspection, ridiculous assertion. Today, he states:

Which is why I wake up every morning hoping to read this story: “President Obama announced today that he had invited the country’s 20 leading bankers, 20 leading industrialists, 20 top market economists and the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to join him and his team at Camp David.

Yes, the 20 TOP BANKERS, the 20 LEADING INDUSTRIALISTS, the 20 TOP MARKET ECONOMISTS, and… the democratic and republican leaders in the house and senate. Right, Friedman, let’s put more faith in our bankers, industrialists, and economists than in our law makers in order to solve this mess.

Your faith in the members of the business and financial community to come up with the solutions to their own problems is gravely misplaced, sir. For God’s sake, do I even have to explain why? When another economic ideology and world-view has failed, such as Soviet Communism, you wouldn’t have argued that the former Kremlin aparatchiks should decide how to liberalize Russian markets, would you? So why would you go to adherents of unfettered, corpratist, neo-liberal capitalism to figure out how to nationalize banks and fundamentally restructure our financial system in ways certainly not auguring in their favor?

Who is paying your rent, Friedman, the CEO of Goldman Sachs? ‘Cause either you’re a real devious bastard, or you drank the punch years ago, all of it. I’m not sure which it is. It’s probably a little of both. But, ultimately, Mr. Friedman, you are probably the most dangerous of all the Times op-ed columnists, because you seem so damn reasonable. You would have made a good lawyer, no doubt. As for being a journalist, you are not good. You are terrible, from a professional as well as a moral view-point. In sum, I must call that the Times do the right thing and immediately sever all professional ties with you, Mr. Friedman. Any other move on their part would be just another sign of their upper-class liberal pandering and cowardice. So do it, now, Times editors, before another piece of Friedman’s insidious copy fogs the good sense of your faithful readers and the American people at large.

The New Frugality: No Passing Fad

I was glad to see it reported in the Times over the last few days that our bacchanalian days of unchecked hedonism and conspicuous consumption are over with. Yes, it’s true: consumption for consumption’s sake is dead. Were “Sex and the City” still around, I’m sure there would be an episode where Carrie feels bad about her shoe-purchasing addiction and tries to auction off her Manolos on EBay, only to find she’s unable to part with that one pair she was wearing the first time she met Mr. Big. Then she’d write something in her fake column like, “It might not be fashionable to have fifty thousand dollars worth of strappy heels these days, but in my heart of hearts, this new era of frugality will always leave some Big shoes to fill.”

You see, I’m all for frugality. And it’s cool that socialites like Sacha Taylor of Atlanta are pulling out ten-year-old dresses for their charity events. And that corporate lawyers are suddenly “clipping coupons.” Or that Ethel Knox gives away her car to a needy friend because “I just feel so decadent with all the stuff I’ve got.”

Why it took the country’s economy to tank for people to realize that a constant need to buy bigger and better goods and services is decadent, I’m not sure. It’s kind of like when the jocks in school suddenly all started listening to Pearl Jam three years after you first heard Ten. Or when your girlfriend’s mom shows up at the dive bar you’ve been going to forever because their karaoke night was featured in the alternative weekly, turning the Pabst-and-a-whiskey joint into the hottest spot in town.

My only worry is that like the trends mentioned above, this frugality is merely a fad that will hardly outlast any other, be it stretch Hummer limos or Tickle Me Elmos.

It’s interesting that the article on consumption featured quotes almost exclusively from women, as if they are the only consumers that really matter. Now, I’d hate to say that the sort of people quoted are capricious, but… Actually, I don’t hate it at all. Socialites and such are incredibly capricious. Wearing a ten-year-old dress is just as much a fashion fad as wearing a brand new one to every even was a year ago. As soon as they’re tired of making their patriotic show and assuming they haven’t been utterly ruined by that point, the ancient American practice of showing one’s superiority through displays of wealth will once again return. Perhaps not to the degree we’ve witnessed over the past decade, but it will certainly be back.

You might be saying to yourself right now, “Why is this guy being so negative? Can’t he just accept that these ladies are doing something good?” Well, I’d like to believe that the changes described are going to be lasting, but the fact of the matter is that they probably won’t be. Just as conspicuous consumption was the fashion last year, so conspicuous generosity and frugality is so this year. And just as wearing twenty-thousand-dollar fur coats was all the rage in Chicago last season, so giving away ten-thousand-dollar used cars is this season. And as soon as these fine ladies get tired of giving instead of getting, which is as inevitable as a junky turning back to the needle, things will be essentially the same as they were before, albeit perhaps not as over-the-top as the decadence we’ve witnessed in the past decade.

And I don’t really care that much about the whims of society ladies when it comes down to it. What I do care about is that we not be deterred from the most important mission facing us today: not necessarily to get the Dow Jones booming again, but to get Sam Jones out of debt and with a roof over his head. Not to save the shareholders of Citigroup, but to save the infrastructure of our cities from crumbling beyond repair. Not to ensure the economic health of our insurance giants, but to ensure that every American citizen has adequate health care.

For all those who deny that their is any class war in this country, you are wrong. It’s just that this war has been fought mostly by one side, while the other was blind and had one hand tied behind its back. It is not always the case that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” When one side of the lake is walled off by an enormous dam harboring ninety percent of the water, then a rising tide doesn’t do the other side much good at all. If we don’t escape this depression (and it’s questionable if we ever will) without largely eliminating poverty and homelessness in this country, then our efforts can be considered a failure. Because the yachts will be fine; they’ve risen far enough. It’s time to even out the waters to some vaguely reasonable degree.

Dudes, I couldn’t believe it when I turned on a computer for the first time in fifteen months and the first fucking headline was announcing the amazing return of fucking Phish. Phish, dude!

God, if only I’d heard about this somehow, I’d have been down in Hampton in a heartbeat. I’ve been to 246 Phish shows over the years, and each and every one has been special in its own way. Like that time in Bolder when Trey played a ninety-three-minute solo in the middle of “Jumbalaya.” No one even remembered what song they had originally been playing after an hour and a half, but then in perfect Phish tradition the bros went right back into the crunchy riff where they’d left off, just like Trey had only played his normal seven-minute jam.

Here’s a photo from that show. (Those spinning lights looked like a fucking flying saucer was about to land right on stage, which didn’t seem too far-fetched since I’d just eaten four tabs of the most powerful blotter acid I’ve ever had. Fucking awesome!):

Or then there was this time in Charlottesville when Jeff and Mike just went off on this super-dope back and forth for a good half hour. It was like they were sending energy between each other and then out into the audience. I was tripping balls on a combination of shrooms and mescaline so- ha, ha- let’s just say it was a truly “magical” experience. Later that night in the pup tent I dry-humped Lisa for six hours. It was the first time we met. Crazy to think that that shy, innocent eighteen-year-old girl with the big blue eyes and the hand-painted acoustic guitar that I met that day is now my wife of half a decade. It’s truly amazing what can happen over fifteen years. We even got married at a Phish show, if you can believe that. I’m not sure if the marriage license is legal, now that I think about it, since the ceremony was performed by a Shaman from Vermont named Oolookoo, but it’s cool because we have true love for each other in our hearts. And when you’ve got true love, you don’t need any government paper to let you know you’ll be together forever. Right on!

So, like, the reason that Lisa and I didn’t hear about the Phish reunion is ’cause for the last, oh, year and three months we’ve been living totally off the grid in a trailer way out in the middle of the Ozarks. Life without electricity or plumbing has been challenging, for sure, but it has also been incredibly liberating and amazing. Like, we’ve been able to live this entire time off of canned beans and tortillas, as well as what I’m able to scavenge in the forest. Once I found these fucking amazing blackberries. Dudes, I’m telling you, nothing you’ve ever eaten in your entire life compares to the taste of a blackberry after you’ve eaten just beans and tortillas for four months. Fuck, man, I totally took my shirt off and loaded it up with those black beauties and couldn’t wait to show Lisa my find. Unfortunately, just as I was on the edge of the forest, I tripped on a root and fell on the load, mostly smashing all the berries and ruining one of my two shirts. Well, it wasn’t ruined exactly, it was just really fucking purple after that. Which was kind of cool, actually.

So, if any of you are wondering, Lisa’s doing great. She did a ton of knitting while we were living in the trailer and she’s giving it all to the Salvation Army as soon as we get back to civilization.

Actually, speaking of Lisa, I’ve got kind of a big announcement to make, bros. The reason we left the trailer is ’cause… well, let’s just say I’m gonna be a real-life dad in about four months! Can you believe it? This certainly wasn’t something we planned, but it’s a blessing for sure. They always say life is what happens when you’re making other plans, right? Anyway, I can feel already that this new life-force is only going to bring Lisa and me closer together. Hell, I hear Phish is playing more shows this summer- maybe, the newest addition to the Mackey clan will be born at a Phish show. How awesome would that be?

So, um, I can only afford about five more minutes at this internet cafe, and I wanna write my mom an email, since she hasn’t heard from me in over a year. But, anyway, I hope to see you all jamming out at a Phish show sometime this summer! Peace and much love to all! Keep on Phishin’!

Journalists are never supposed to start a piece with a scene in a taxi because it signals either laziness about gathering facts or a tendency to embroider facts.

Nonetheless, I’m going to. David Brooks and I were sharing a cab to the British Embassy the other day to meet with Gordon Brown.

Naturally, my first thought was, “My God, what did Maureen Dowd and David Brooks say to each other during this cab ride?” (My second was, “David Brooks gets to meet the British Prime Minister? Is he dying and this is his final wish or what?”)

Unfortunately, the bulk of the article has nothing to do with said cab ride, which only comes into play about a dozen paragraphs later when Ms. Dowd relays the key exchange of the day:

In the taxi, when I asked David Brooks about [Michelle Obama's] amazing arms, he indicated it was time for her to cover up. “She’s made her point,” he said. “Now she should put away Thunder and Lightning.”

If you haven’t guessed by now, yes, this article is mostly about Michelle Obama’s penchant for sleeveless attire and how that fashion choice reflects her relative boldness in comparison to other First Ladies, in particular Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton.

Now, as any of my regular readers will attest (I’m talking to you, Edgar “Smitty” Randall from Ward 7- and by the way, you’re not paranoid, Larry Summers does want to eat your brains) I’m not one to get overly critical when it comes to matters of rhetoric and style in op-eds, but this piece just raises too many questions for me to simply ignore it and let Ms. Dowd go on her merry way.

In the first place, why were you visiting Minister Brown? Were you meeting with him as some sort of emissaries from the Times? Or from the media in general? Because your article says nothing of this meeting besides the fact that you were in a taxi going to it with David Brooks. You would think that for a professional journalist such as yourself that this would have been an excellent opportunity to get a “scoop,” as they call it in the trade, from the Minister. Admittedly, the exposure of Mrs. Obama’s bulging biceps is an intriguing topic worthy of a writer of your stature, but at the same time, I kind of would have liked to have known Minister Brown’s views on the global economic downturn, President Obama’s apparent downgrading of our relationship with the UK, what exactly “bangers and mash” is, etc.

Now, I wouldn’t say that you’re being superficial, Ms. Dowd, but, then again, you wrote the following sentence for publication in a national newspaper:

Let’s face it: The only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps.

Seriously? The only symbol of American strength are Mrs. Obama’s upper arms? Did someone knock over the Statue of Liberty? Did Lincoln get up and walk away from the Memorial? Did people finally stop wearing those Lance Armstrong bracelets?

I know your thing is to make absurdly flippant statements to try to make a larger point about the state of American society and politics, but this is really a bit much, don’t you think? I didn’t even know about this ridiculous arm-exposure fixation apparently rampant in Congress and the press until you wrote about it.

And now that I think about it, it’s actually making me kind of angry. What the hell are these people doing that they have nothing better to do than call Mrs. Obama a “babe” because of a sleeveless dress. Is that the level of seriousness that our Congressmen and women bring to the floor in this time of dire crisis? Is that how much they care about their responsibility to the American people? You disgust me.

And you, Ms. Dowd, I realize that levity is your strong suit, and it’s true that we could all use a laugh in these dark days. But, seriously, can’t you raise the level of dialogue in this country instead of degrading it to the that of People magazine? I’m sure you’re an intelligent person. I’m sure you have a firm grasp of the issues of the day. Why can’t you focus in on the right things and still be humorous about them?

As for Brooks: Thunder and Lightning? Come on. Why the fuck do you care what the hell Michelle Obama is wearing? It’s not like she came out in a leather miniskirt and a tube top, like one of the tramps from “Rock of Love.” Is this the 1850s? Are we living in the world of Arthur Miller’s timeless classic The Crucible? Are you a complete idiot? (Hint: the answer to only one of the preceding three questions is “yes.”)

Please, I know you folks have to entertain the masses or whatever, but can’t you at least treat us like dogs and slip some medicine into our balls of meat? Can’t you take your job a little more seriously? I mean, Ms. Dowd, you must make about ten grand per article, considering you only write one every three weeks or so. Isn’t that enough to at least try to write them well? Really, grow a sense of responsibility and do your damn job. At least you still have one.