I Dream of Obama

I have too much going on to do much blogging, but I needed a nap after the soup kitchen today, and since the debate was on after I got home, I had to wait until after that to go to sleep.

Timing being what it was, I dreamt of Barack Obama again. And, no, not that kind of dream. I dreamed I got him in trouble with his apartment managers while I housesat for him as he went out campaigning for a few days.

It turns out that (in my head) Mr. Obama lives in a large, average, stunningly bland apartment complex. He also has a very messy downstairs bathroom with ugly navy blue embellishments, including a shag rug and a shag-carpeted toilet-cover-thing on the seat cover and back of the toilet. The bathroom wasn't dirty, just crammed with stuff in the manner of a closet, since it was close to the door. The stuff included miles of audio cable of varying gauges, since (in my head) Obama also runs his own audio in debates and while campaigning.

Anyway, while there, I brought a couple dogs to stay with me, dogs I don't actually own in real life. And I and the dogs stayed downstairs on a couch, and in between shifts at work watched a lot of political news on the big TV and drank a lot of Diet Coke. The latter is relevant, as when Mr. Obama returned a few hours earlier than expected, I was still in the midst of recycling the bottles and newspapers in the recycling alcove of his place (known in other contexts as a 'bay window') (which also contained more boxes of audio cable).

He was very calm about it, but his place looked a bit trashed, so he helped me put everything into the right bins so that his wife wouldn't return to a messy house. He went out for a few moments and when he came back, he said in the manner of a disappointed (but eminently calm) father that unfortunately it turns out that something called the 'noise abatement' squad or committee had been turned to when a water-utility worker attempted to get in and do some repairs: the dogs, it seems, had become a bit proprietary about their temporary home and been rather vocal about their displeasure with the intruder. There was an official complaint, he said, and he disheartenedly lifted the official paperwork.

Of course, the problem with my dogs' enthusiastic protection of the Obamas' apartment would be all but irrelevant were he to win the Presidency, and in all likelihood workmen would abide by landlord-tenant law at the White House, but for the moment I figured that consoling him with potentials and possibilities was an imprudent tack, so I just focused on making the newspapers very geometrically arrayed inside the recycling bins. Mrs. Obama came home, in aubergine and a single strand of pearls, while I was compulsively re-arranging the audio equipment next to the bins. As she walked through the door I had the sinking horror of a teenage babysitter who's eaten all the crab and brie and hopes desperately not to get found out until money has changed hands and some days have passed, but after a quick look around, she didn't seem unduly disturbed by the apartment's (now vastly-improved) appearance. At that point the noise from the recycling truck outside my window was too great, and I woke up.

Both Kinds of Hacks

In news today, Blogrolling was hacked, and the NY Times is cutting out the IHT's Internet presence. I had no idea it was its readership was that small compared to the Times. It will be truly sad when its print version disappears in the next year or two, likewise assuredly not for any sort of financial reason.

In other news, people of all political stripes in all corners of the world declared that John McCain said 'my friends' 22 times too many in Tuesday's debate. Convenience stores predict a continued sharp decline in sales, with many customers so horrified at the price of gas they are no longer venturing into the stores after fueling, and C-store visionaries urge a change toward the European model of offering value on staples along with convenience to blunt the blow of gas costs. And apparently even the price of plastic is up 40% (from when exactly I don't know), further hurting soda pop sales.

Although the Seattle area has been less affected by the recession than most other areas, many industries have seen significant layoffs and restaurants from low to high end are feeling the effects. On the other hand, oil is below 88 dollars a barrel and expected to continue to decline. Until producers pout and cut production. It is also Fashion Week in Athens, where many of the clothes looked like someone's acid-trip version of Jacqueline Kennedy, and Zimbabwe's inflation is at 231,000,000 %.

Camp Pendleton, the only area on the California coast with a view of the sea not blocked by luxury condos and McMansions, and the site of the federal government's last brash land grab, is on fire, with 1000 acres already in flames, and the fire 70% contained by early Thursday. The national debt clock has run out of digits sufficient to display the full amount, so the dollar sign was replaced by a number when it hit ten trillion. Three hundred undocumented poultry workers were arrested in South Carolina for stealing crap jobs from Americans. Dowsing is up as drought continues to ravage the California agriculture industry, and here in Washington, many employers in the same industry, as well as state workers charged with connecting guest workers with employers, are protesting that new federally-imposed fact-checking strictures are impossible to comply with, and that were the federal government to cut funds as punishment for failure to comply fully, that would simply make matters worse for the state, its employees and their already-too-great workloads, private employers, the job-hunting guest workers, agriculture, and residents of Washington and the United States who rely on Washington agricultural products for eating purposes.

Also a photo on Seattlest was featured on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Wild.

Chief Rain-in-the-Face, 1835-1905

You, Me, Joe Biden and a Punt

Well, I tell you what.

I read a lot of different things. That separates me not only from Sarah Palin (stop, now, you: I mean because she reads 'all of them, any of them'), but also from people who recycle well, since because I hate to walk that far I try to read them all online (the rest I drive around with in my car until I can surreptitiously dump them in the appropriate bin at my favorite gas stations while the nice man is checking the oil over on the blind side of the hood). And from Madrid to Macchu Pichu, Ankara to Akron, and Birmingham to Bristol Bay, all of a sudden on that side of the political divide (which currently seems to be about 97 percent of the global population), Joe Biden is a lateblooming heartthrob.

Wow, eh?

'Joe Six-Pack' qua hottie. Who knew?

He has a nice smile, apparently. And something about masterful, or statesmanlike or manful manhandliness of taking things in decidedly masculine order or whatnot. At any rate, there are many ladies of a certain age worldwide who would, were he stranded in a punt on a slow-flowing river, not hesitate to request a row out in order to ask were he okay or not. And then offer him sandwiches.

Here's what I know: despite his years as an 'insider' (who is he expected to be -- as a Vice-Presidential candidate of a 200+-year-old republic -- Oscar Romero? Czeslaw Milosz? Deborah Harry??), he is not a billionaire. He's not a millionaire. He is not close even to the latter. In terms of financial planning, if nothing else, and for good or ill, Joe Biden is deeply representative of the Average American, few of whom, it seems, for the past thirty years or so, have managed to sock away anything of substance for the future.

What this means, for those nice older ladies with crushes, and for you and me and Joe Biden, too, is that when everything plummets to its most horrific nadir, our stocks will not be affected! Our mutual funds will remain unscathed! Our 401Ks will remain largely as they were: nonexistent. Our children will have precisely what we had bequeated them last year, and the year before: good wishes, much love, and a solid love of learning and of the world and their brothers and sisters in it. And an inherited stiff upper lip.

I'll tell you about investment: I just returned to working in restaurants. (It seems even the working rich can't afford a private chef.) Last night, the new dishwasher in the ill-fated (only at this place; it's not actually an endemic issue, so don't give up your career plans!) weekend dish shift gave (no) notice that he was leaving to pursue greater riches with a cousin in Brooklyn. Sadly, he wasn't going to receive a check from that workplace before his cross-country trip - but he did have a car to sell.

Enter real economics, real 'Joe Six-Pack,' real individuals controlling their own financial futures. The line cook, who had been bicycling to work happily for months through spring and summer had only recently begun to revisit his transportation priorities. (Seattle has less-than-ideal bicycling weather at times, noticeably at 12AM in January.) The dishwasher had a car and a concrete plan, the cook had money and a vague longing: move 300 dollars in one direction, and one person is on a plane to destiny and another in a heated car toward bed. One guy gets five or seven dollars more an hour, and the other guy gets, minimally, two hours more free time per day. And, if that's too much idleness to deal with, the opportunity now to cut it back a bit with the chance for a second job.

For me, particularly since I'm so terribly depressed about everything lately, it was heartening, even exciting. The grey market will endure, and at least that is something. I hold up restaurants, and particularly kitchens, as paragons of many things (some undeniably glorious; others less than stellar, but not least of which is as a bastion of concrete, visceral, sometimes aching reality in a postsurreal world), but what made this even more brilliant was that, at the finish of the night, the security guard who has been living in an unplumbed van finalized the deal with one of the salesmen (by then drunk) for the papers to the Class C motorhome, on the basis of which he can now finish selling his second van to a guy who wants to use it for hunting and camping, and at the end of the day (literally, or I couldn't bear to say it; it was 11 at night, we had our aprons off and were washing the olive oil and beef fat off our forearms; I am at peace in my soul calling that 'the end of the day'), at least four people were happy with the real transactions they had completed.

Unless of course the whole 'Dollar Up Euro Down!' storyline doesn't entirely pan out for the long term and we all, along with the purchasers in these happy narratives, end up pushing barrelcarts of ABD Yaşli Dolarlar through whatever 'Main Street' is handiest for the 'Joe Six-Pack' under question looking for the one Dollar Store left that will take 4 million $ for a 4-oz. tin of non-metric kippered herring.

Joe Six-Pack 4, Cunning Chinaman 7

'The Common Man' sounds too nineteenth century. 'Everyman' sounds too medieval. 'Working Class' sounds too Marxist, and 'The Average Man' sounds boring and vaguely insulting.

Enter 'Joe Six-Pack.' (And exeunt all those of us with weak stomachs.)

I reason that it's because there are not as of yet literal corporate Presidential Campaign sponsors; otherwise 'Willy Wal-Mart' would have been employed and a special logo created. But while I am uncertain as to how ballot-happy the Ralph Cramdens, Fred Murtzes, Hank Hills, and Stanley Kowalskis of the world (the nearly-extinct demographic of typical-blue-collar Americans I believe Ms. Palin is attempting to evoke) actually are, I do know that however few remain of their species, owning a foam-fronted John Deere cap does not perforce make one a beer drinker nor, conversely, is beer drinking diagnostic of familiarity with power tools.

This makes it a stupid thing to say.

Let us breeze through Prohibition and run headlong into the First Great Depression. In 1933 a grape farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, mired in debt and no longer able to sell his grapes, shoots his wife and then himself. Two of his sons, Ernest and Julio, with less than $6,000, rise from this tragedy, start a winery and change drinking in the United States. The Gallos were successful from the start, owing as much to their complementary skills and temperaments as to their mutual willingness to devote all they had to the enterprise.

The Depression ended, but the 'misery market' remained. In 1957, Gallo introduced 'Thunderbird,' a sweet, fortified, citrusy white wine sold at a low price and, at 17.5 alcohol by volume, rather more tailored toward rapid intoxication than slow savoring. Legend has it that after sales took off, Ernest Gallo, the business and marketing wizard of the pair, would assess the brand's fame and success in its target market by being driven to bad parts of town and yelling out part of Thunderbird's slogan to people drinking from paper bags on the street. 'What's the word?' Gallo would yell, to which the legendary happy hobo would shout back, 'Thunderbird!' 'How's it sold?' 'Good and cold!' And thus arose the first chink in the elitist-wine-snob vs. earthy beer drinker binarism: it doesn't get much more earthy than strong hooch with a screw-top in a paper bag being drunk by a guy with toenails longer than my hair.

But the Gallo revolution didn't end there. Nor were its effects confined to their brand. By the 1970s all sorts of jug red wines, and sweet wines like the Gallos' fruit-flavored Boone's Farm (with real plastic fruit around the neck!) and Ripple were drunk happily all over the US by millions of (often heretofore beer-drinking) middle-class citizens wanting something 'special' with dinner but fearing tannins, texture, and strong flavor. 'White Zinfandel' emerged, as did peach-flavored wines, strawberry-flavored wines, then 'wine coolers' in bottles, and the 'wine spritzer' in bars. Anyone could drink wine -- and it could go down smooth like a soda pop, too!

Meanwhile, as wine lost its elitist status thanks to the foresight and hard work of the Gallos, two other things happened: California emerged as a world-class center of serious viniculture and winemaking, and artisan beermaking took off. Most American supermarkets now have reasonable wine selections, and a US consumer can walk away with a brilliant bottle for under fifteen dollars (or stick with a Mondavi 'White Zin' at probably half the price). Likewise there are now millions of beer bores and beer snobs whose soporific conversational tendencies and level of affectation could rival that of any beret-wearing oenophilic epicure.

So: may we please let Joe Six-Pack rest in peace, along with Scarlett O'Hara, Rosie the Riveter, Ward and June Cleaver, the Femme Fatale, the Simple but Wise Peasant, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, the Lazy Mexican, the Crafty Jew, the Cunning Chinaman, the Effete Englishman, and the Drunken Paddy? Please??? And someone hand me my Gueuze, please: I can't stand young hops, and I can't bear anything but wild-fermented beers, you know.

Cat Fleeing Debate Mid-'Shout-Out'

Politics for Grownups

This autumn night
Dawns, yet unaware
An insect sings on-
Just as am I,
Is he sunk in sadness?

Another thing that struck me in the brief Jon Stewart-Peggy Noonan interview was Mr. Stewart's visceral frustration at politicians' meretricious use of slogans, catch-words, and symbols as stand-ins for defined terms, argument, truth, or clarity. I believe two examples he gave were Conservative pack-mules 'legislating from the bench' and 'strict constructionist.' These could mean all sorts of things, but in practice are code for rather specific anathemas and goals. As Stewart pointed out, rather than risk alienating some groups of voters by railing against gay marriage, a candidate can remain in good stead with both his more Conservative core and moderate voters by espousing his distaste for the first and his fondness for the latter. A major point in Noonan's book is that the bulk of the American populace, regardless of political views, is as angry at being talked down to in this fashion as is Stewart.

And I think this is part of Sarah Palin's appeal. Unlike 'managed' and 'handled' long-time 'insiders,' she says what she thinks. She may get flustered, she may not always make sense, but until recently, when her logorrhea and lack of self-censorship became blunted by those same managers and handlers, she could be relied upon at least part of the time to say what she meant. I don't mean to say that she any more than the rest of us always acted in accord with her values, but she was largely upfront about them and the extent to which they informed her decisions. Nor do I mean that she was entirely unsophisticated politically or did not sometimes choose her public words judiciously, but her back-country candor, her physical expressiveness, and her fitted pink jackets undoubtedly do seem fresh, and more 'real' than the blandly and painstakingly contrived 'brands' of other national figures.

Perhaps tonight in the VP debate, with Palin's recent intensive training and the 90-second limit on responses, she will say as little of what she means as anyone else. She may even have a new more 'professional' haircut and style. Perhaps those ghastly faltering interviews with their exaggerated expressions and gestures and the incoherent strings of 'talking points' were a necessary intermediary step between her original shoot-from-the-hip/ take-no-prisoners/'Joe-Six-Pack' upfrontness, and she will now be ready to respond to any and all questions in a perfectly-clear and meaning-bereft coherent iteration of the same populist 'talking points' minus the nose-wiggle and the finger-licking, but with added 'y'alls' and more consistently dropped terminal G's. Should she remain on the national stage, whether the point is reached tonight or later, she will eventually be able to say as little in as many words as anyone else -- but succeed in doing so with appropriate punctuation and breath stops.

I enjoy subtlety in the right places as much as the next person. But this isn't Edo Japan, and foreign policy can hardly be confused with a lone heron on a foggy marsh. Evocation is not called for: clarity and direct speech are. I don't want synechdoche or stand-ins; I want facts, actual positions, and exposition! It doesn't matter to me in the slightest who pulled whom up by whose bootstraps -- or whether there were bootstraps involved in anyone's 'narrative' at all. I am not a medieval Japanese, and neither are you, so a symbol-ridden terse tanka is of no use to me whatever in parsing your actual stance on a specific issue. God help me, I, as much as anyone else, support 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'democratic values,' 'rights,' and wish the best for the 'American taxpayer' and the 'American Dream' - but from my espousal of these abstract concepts here you still have no idea in what way I believe they are to be defined, pursued, implemented, or served. Like a bugling stag weary in the browned bush-clover, or a departing goose calling a distant farewell, the autumn mountains echo with my mournful cry: Say something, one of you, any of you, that isn't fully, patently, abhorrently inane!

Peggy Noonan and St. Paul

Well, my love affair with Peggy Noonan continues. She is that all-too-rare combination: a lady, a Conservative, a human, demonstrably non-insane, and a thinker (although I disagree, and quite vigorously so, with several positions she has held), something nearly as hard to find as 'small town values' in small towns.

Tonight Ms. Noonan was on the Daily Show to promote her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now. The title will be disturbing in some quarters for its inclusion of the term 'patriotic,' syllables which, when mispronounced, rhyme rather effortlessly with volk and kokutai (国体). I, however, would advise those naysayers to notice the second word, grace, and reflect on what our country, its politicians, and its political contests, might look like were grace, alongside its parents maturity and reflection, to be employed more widely.

Nor did Ms. Noonan's performance belie her espousal of grace as a virtue. She was calm, soft-spoken, persuasive, and did not once wink, wrinkle her nose, lick her finger and stick it in the air, or escalate her pitch to shrill or girlish levels. She spoke, reasoned, and comported herself like an adult, something which one should hope might pass unremarked, yet cannot for its rarity. And despite Ms. Noonan's recent still-on-microphone gaffe in which she used mild profanity and dismissed the wisdom of the Palin nomination, her ladylike demeanor and reasonable speech helped stifle almost all of John Stewart's customary swearing.

Part of Sarah Palin's gut demagogic appeal, I suspect, is that she acts like a girl. She is unintimidating, even when she resorts to the crudest, most puerile sarcasm. But girlishness, or childishness, does not engender respect, nor does it facilitate rational conversation or debate. I entertain grave doubts that the Corinthians wore red peep-toe pumps or bobbed their heads coquettishly while pursuing the Vice-Presidency, but Paul nonetheless saw fit to caution them thus: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me”(1 Corinthians 13:11). Would that the majority of American politicians follow Peggy Noonan and do the same thing.

'Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it;-this is knowledge.' -Confucius

Logovores Unite!

For various reasons I hate to make this blog a blog about Sarah Palin but, God help me, she is genuinely frightening as a candidate for national office. It is equally frightening that there are people -- millions, it would seem -- who find her not only not frightening but a good choice for the office. Millions who would put their lives and their futures partially (or fully, should McCain's age or health become relevant) in her hands. And, more shocking still, millions who find her inability to answer simple questions appealing, and comforting rather than disturbing.

I am currently obsessed with her refusal or inability to name which papers and magazines she reads, which periodicals she feels have helped to shape her worldview.

Katie Couric: ''When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this, to stay informed and to understand the world?''

Sarah Palin: ''I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.''

Couric: ''Like, what ones specifically?''

Palin: ''Um, all of them, any of them that eh, have been in front of me all these years.''

Couric one last time: ''Can you name a few?''

And Palin: ''I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, it seems like ‘Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking and doing when you live up there in Alaska?’ Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.''

Or, at least a microcosm of the part of 'America' that can't recall which newspapers, journals, or magazines it reads. My problem with this is that it sounds an awful lot like she doesn't read any. I can recall five titles for myself from yesterday, some local, some national, some international. Now, perhaps it is not true that Ms. Palin never reads any media at all, but that the reticence was a moment of panic: she simply wasn't sure if the Anchorage or Matanuska Valley papers would make her sound too provincial (although lack of worldliness, sophistication, or knowledge of foreign affairs has not seemed a concern thus far, so I find the theory not terribly plausible), whereas to quote national or international papers would endanger that same perception of provincialism and make her seem like an elitist egghead - -like the rest of 'em, sittin' up there in their political insider machine in Washington and readin' their elitist newspapers (through monocles, no doubt, while they sip espresso or sherry with upturned pinkies and debate whether the Camerata Fiorentina proves that Conservatism is either ultimately conservation or innovation).

But whatever may prove to be the explanation for her inability to be specific I am inclined to doubt that it will have anything to do with her being accustomed to reading 'most of them, any of them,' nor, assuredly, 'all of them.' I am fairly certain that, well-informed and well-read though he was, even the late Conservative William F. Buckley did not, in fact, come anywhere near to reaching Palin's claimed print profligacy.

She even had an easy out: she is an executive, as she repeatedly reminds us. As such, she could well have said that her position keeps her far too busy for as much reading as she might like and necessitates a focus on regional issues, such that much of her reading is taken up with official documents and Alaskan newspapers. Maybe she really can't see Russia from her porch, but she most assuredly can see Alaska, and simply asserting a single-minded focus on the concerns of her constituency would have saved her from the embarrassing absurdity of claiming to have read 'all' of the periodicals that 'have been in front of me all these years.' I don't even think it would have been a lie -- at least nowhere near as big a one as claiming to be the world's most voracious print consumer.