Hemingway was right — Big Brother was watching

Posted on July 3, 2011 by oddmanout215

Yes, Ernest Hemingway suffered from depression that grew more acute as he realized his best writing years were behind him. Very late in life he also was plagued by paranoia — i.e., by the notion that the FBI was monitoring his every move and was out to get him. He was paranoid, but he was right.

Author A.E. Hotchner recounts the sad details in a recent NYT piece. Here’s his payoff:

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.

Many Hemingway readers will question Hotchner’s ultimate claim, and I certainly don’t pretend to know the extent to which the FBI’s hounding “contributed” to Hemingway’s suicide.

The more important question is how the U.S. became a place where those who suspect they’re being monitored by the government are more likely to be sane and realistic than paranoid.

The suspicion that Big Brother is watching you, personally, used to be a tip-off that you needed meds. Then along came 9/11 and the systematic shredding of American privacy rights by the Bush and Obama administrations, at roughly the same time Facebook and other “social networking” vehicles were becoming popular on a mass scale.

And now we’re arguably at the point where most U.S. citizens take for granted they’re being tracked by the government and various industries. Instead of reacting with outrage, these citizens have accepted and even embraced the idea that privacy rights are extinct.

Put another way, many Americans now think it’s OK that the U.S. has become in some fundamental ways like China, the former Soviet Union and the other totalitarian regimes that previous generations were rightly taught to hate.

Or, as I was about to say, have a happy Independence Day!

Posted in arts, fiction, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Friedman’s cure for Mideast crises? Lemonade

Posted on June 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

Tom Friedman could use a lemon squeezer.

Mick Jagger once sang, “I could use a lemon squeezer!” Thomas Friedman is seeking lemon squeezers, too, but of a different sort. He’s a pollyanna pundit, not a rocker, who’s fond of using the cliche, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

Years ago I dated a well-off woman who liked the same cliche. She was upbeat and seemed decent enough, but she turned out to be a libertarian, strongly opposed to things like labor unions and universal health insurance. Life had never handed her lemons, but she loved dispensing advice on how to make lemonade.

I don’t think Friedman is a libertarian but he loves telling other people to squeeze lemons, as he did last week in a column proposing an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has either raged or simmered since Israel became an independent state in 1948.

Friedman’s plan would bypass pesky obstacles to peace — little things like the enmity of Hamas toward Israel and the Israeli refusal to dismantle settlements on the West Bank. He would “make lemonade” by updating the 1947 resolution calling for separate Jewish and Arab states. The final deal would be sealed through the U.N. “with land swaps, so theoretically the five percent of the West Bank where 80 percent of the [Israeli] settlers live could be traded for parts of pre-1967 Israel.”

Nothing to it, right? Except that Friedman’s idea was greeted with scorn by both Palestinians and Israelis, because both sides see his idea as a rehash of failed proposals.

But the lemonade king is confident. All the quarreling parties have to do is do it his way.

Friedman’s ideas on the Middle East remind me of his stance on other problems. Outsourcing of American jobs? His lemonade recipe, in The World Is Flat, involved replacing millions of lost jobs with new hi-tech jobs, something almost everyone agrees is never going to happen.

He also has a glib solution to our involvement in nation-building — “It has to start with them,” which means we shouldn’t get involved in regime change. Except that this stance contradicts his gung-ho support of the disastrous war in Iraq, which only cooled down after the U.S. started handing out massive amounts of cash, not lemonade, to Sunni insurgents.

Friedman has a right to enjoy his lemonade in private, but it’s a disservice to readers that he gets to roll forth lemons in The New York Times twice a week. His simplistic brand of optimism amounts to little more than a determined wish to dumb down complex issues and ignore on-the-ground realities of the poor and dispossessed.

Not coincidentally, this description of Friedman’s approach to writing opinion columns also describes the approach of many if not most mainstream reporters these days.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, health care, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Father’s Day works better as fiction

Posted on June 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

[This one got lost in the shuffle, but I’m guessing my legion of readers won’t mind that it’s a week late.]

One of the pleasures of writing a novel is you can decide when and how things happen. For instance, you can describe a father who’s dying by inches and, if you have the requisite skills, cultivate an atmosphere that’s doom-ridden but not maudlin or predictable.

The reader doesn’t know anything except that the father will die, like all mortals. The writer can keep the old man alive until exactly the point where killing him will somehow surprise the reader, or at least move her/him in an unexpected way, even though the death was inevitable. There is time for an epiphany, or at least a restored sense of order, and even cold comfort in the fact that, as Don DeLillo wrote, “all plots tend to move toward death.”

In real life, when your father is dying, all you get is the inevitability and a first-hand look at pointless suffering, and the growing feeling that most of what goes on in the world is just as pointless. The ironies and surprises that make fiction seem meaningful aren’t good for much in real-life situations, not until afterwards, when you can look back at what happened and impose order on it.

Looking back, it’s clear my father and I hailed from different planets. I was from the same world as my late mother, a place where the natives talk and argue non-stop, with Mahalia Jackson and Bob Dylan on the jukebox. My father was from a twilit world with stark landscapes and few creature comforts. His mind was always elsewhere, and my mother used to say he’d forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his shoulders.

She also used to tell him he’d be late for his own funeral and, as it turned out, he almost was. There was a miscommunication at the nursing home where he died, and two funeral homes fought over the job of burying him. What ensued was something akin to a black comedy about body-snatching, starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.

My father has been dead a long time, long enough for all the ironies to kick in — the non-decisions that turned out to be decisive, the false assumption that one can prepare for old age, the frustration and consolation of not being able to articulate what moved him. And so on. He becomes more real to me each year, even as the evidence that he existed diminishes. It all makes perfect sense, but only as fiction.

Posted in fiction, pop music | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

By the gods, it’s Midsummer!

Posted on June 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

Skoal, as they say in the north lands. Time for wild strawberries and spiced vodka and rolling in the hay with Bibi and Liv at midnight, with the sun still shining.

Of course Midsummer isn’t quite the same if you don’t have airline tickets to Sweden and have to celebrate here. The sun sets at nine and there’s no hay to roll in unless you go out to where the Amish live, or the Mennonites, or some other tribe of Christian party-poopers.

But we make do with what we have, and it is the solstice — the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. Shoot out the lights. Build a wicker man and fill it with your least favorite people. Enjoy yourself before the real Philly summer hits and it’s too damn muggy to roll around except with the air conditioner at full blast.

I’ll keep looking for a deal on airline tickets.

Posted in Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Obama is still kissing up to Wall Street crooks

Posted on June 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s Robert Reich, talking to the wall again, trying to tell Democratic politicians what they must do to lead the way to economic recovery and prevent Republicans from creating an even worse downturn than the one that has plagued us since 2008:

Americans are scared, with reason. We’re in a vicious cycle in which lower wages and net job losses and high debt are causing consumers to cut their spending – which is causing businesses to cut back on hiring and reduce pay. There’s no way out of this morass without bold leadership from Washington to rekindle consumer demand.

If the Democrats remain silent, the vacuum will be filled by the Republican snake oil of federal spending cuts and cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. Democrats – starting with the President – must have the courage and conviction to tell the nation the recovery is stalling, and what must be done.

Reich even made a video that explains why the recession persists, so succinct even a Tea Partier could understand, if he or she was interested in understanding.

You know a smart fellow like Barack Obama understands. You know he could eloquently explain that it will take jobs creation programs, restoration of higher taxes on the rich, disincentives for outsourcing existing jobs, legal protection of workers who want to unionize and other bold measures to get the economy back on track.

By now you also probably know that Obama is still kissing up to the big corporations and, most shamelessly, to the owners of the Wall Street casinos, who are “one of his most vital sources of campaign cash” and the same people who played a major role in wrecking the economy.

It’s safe to assume Obama and most congressional Democrats — just like the Republicans — will continue to reject jobs creation, effective regulation of financial markets and higher taxes on the ultra-rich, if only because pursuing them would alienate the executives who form their true base of support.

Obama isn’t interested in Reich’s cogent diagnosis of our economic malady, or in possible cures. He’s interested in being re-elected, period, and he takes for granted we’re all in his camp because the alternative is some odious Republican dwarf who would make life even harder for most of us.

It’s time we stopped complaining about how pissed off we are at Republicans — they will always be what they are — and at “the corporatocracy,” and focused on cleaning up our own party, by refusing to nominate Democrats in name only who sell us out every day.

There is no way out of this trap without a serious challenge to Obama from within the party or from a third-party candidate. Reich knows this better than anyone. Why doesn’t he make a video that addresses this reality?

Footnote: See Glenn Greenwald on the Obama people’s ridiculous e-mail pitch for contributions from “everyday Americans.” The funniest lines: “Most campaigns fill their dinner guest lists primarily with Washington lobbyists and special interests. We didn’t get here doing that, and we’re not going to start now.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why it’s so easy to hate LeBron James

Posted on June 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

It’s not because he embraced the nickname King James and has “Chosen1” tattooed on his back. It’s because he’s too arrogant or stupid (same thing?) to resist taking verbal shots at basketball fans who rooted against him during the NBA Finals. This is how James, in sore-loser mode, put it after his team lost:

…At the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail . . . they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point.

And this is how Stephen Colbert, an eloquent LeBron hater, responded to James’s comments:

Like they say, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you disparage the pathetic lives of the little people who make it possible for you to have a career bouncing an inflatable ball.

James is a poster boy for corporate America’s core beliefs — brute force and big money are the only things worth valuing, loyalty is for suckers, wealth is to be flaunted, poor people are to be despised and mocked. It was a pleasure to watch him lose and imagine his counterparts in high finance, big business and government being undone by the same strain of arrogance.

I woke up anxious today, with personal problems, but with a real-world consolation that isn’t likely to fade — at least I’m not LeBron James.

Posted in Great Recession, Politics, sports | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Rentiers’ to the jobless: Your pain is our gain

Posted on June 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

Those trying to escape the saga of Anthony Weiner and the Weiner-ettes may not have seen Paul Krugman’s Friday column, which focuses on the relentlessly high unemployment rate and on the fact that the most powerful people in government — starting with Barack Obama, of course — are doing nothing to end this ongoing disaster.

Instead, the Republicrats want to slash spending further and thus destroy even more jobs in order to stay on the good side of the people who fund their campaigns. Krugman uses a vaguely Marxist and, Lord help us, French term to describe this group, which is opposed to deficit spending, debt relief and others actions that might help put the unemployed back to work:

Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense. Of course, that’s not the way what I call the Pain Caucus makes its case. Instead, the argument against helping the unemployed is framed in terms of economic risks: Do anything to create jobs and interest rates will soar, runaway inflation will break out, and so on…

And against these hypothetical risks one must set the reality of an economy that remains deeply depressed, at great cost both to today’s workers and to our nation’s future…

Ask for a coherent theory behind the abandonment of the unemployed and you won’t get an answer. Instead, members of the Pain Caucus seem to be making it up as they go along, inventing ever-changing rationales for their never-changing policy prescriptions.

In stating the obvious, Krugman jabs at the pigs who benefit from policies that help keep the jobless out of work and ruffles the feathers of the buzzards who disapprove of language that might wake the unemployed and working poor to the fact that they’ve been written off by the Dems as well as the GOP.

Say what you will about Krugman, he is one of only two people I can think of at the NYT — Gretchen Morgenson is the other — who speak truth to power and aren’t shy about reminding readers that the moneylenders and corporatists who own both major parties have no interest in closing the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor, or in stamping out the malignant strain of capitalism that has stunted the country’s economic growth.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Depression, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, New York Times op-ed, Obama, Politics, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Greenwald to media: You’re all Weiners

Posted on June 9, 2011 by oddmanout215

I saw a clip of Chris Matthews screeching about Anthony Weiner and, shortly afterwards, read this in Glenn Greenwald’s column:

I’d really like to know how many journalists, pundits and activist types clucking with righteous condemnation of Weiner would be comfortable having that standard applied to them. I strongly suspect the number is very small. Ever since the advent of Internet commerce, pornography — use of the Internet for sexual gratification, real or virtual — has been, and continues to be, a huge business. Millions upon millions of people at some point do what Weiner did.

This is even more to the point:

Reporters who would never dare challenge powerful political figures who torture, illegally eavesdrop, wage illegal wars or feed at the trough of sleazy legalized bribery suddenly walk upright — like proud peacocks with their feathers extended — pretending to be hard-core adversarial journalists as they collectively kick a sexually humiliated figure stripped of all importance.

I feel bad for Weiner but I’d have more respect for him if he’d ditched the tearful, interminable apology and instead told the press corps, “I’m resigning. This is not because of the sexting, which is legal and none of your business, but rather because I lied about it and got caught, and therefore will never again be able to function as an effective advocate for universal health insurance and other vital legislation that 99 percent of Democratic politicians are too cowardly to touch. So have a nice day and go fuck yourselves.”

Footnote: The Weiner fiasco is yet another cautionary tale about the limits of power and privacy, and a reminder that “social networking” technology is inherently creepy. The congressman turned to new-media gadgets for virtual reassurance of his potency, to avoid real-life complications, not realizing these gadgets have become more real to many people than their own flesh and blood.

Posted in Congress, mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Stick a fork in Weiner, he’s done

Posted on June 7, 2011 by oddmanout215

Denounced from the pulpit by the Gray Lady:

For more than a week, Representative Anthony Weiner, a New York City Democrat, baldly lied in denying that he had sent a lewd photo of himself to a woman over Twitter, claiming that his account was hacked. When he finally and tearfully confessed the truth on Monday, it turned out to be worse than expected: He admitted to a longstanding pattern of sending inappropriate photos to women.

The New York Times editorial board is what it is — a handful of smug ivory tower types who make the sort of lofty assertions (“moral” judgments) they think will appeal to the most readers.

But this doesn’t change the fact that Weiner (OMG, that name!) is a self-obsessed jerk who didn’t have the good sense to own up to his “sexting” habit before it became public knowledge.

No surprise that the mainstream media have worked much harder on this tepid tale (there was no actual sex, of course) than on Chris Christie’s hypocrisy, or on evidence that the country’s wealthiest bankers committed perjury in defending their actions during the economic meltdown.

Weiner was one of only a few Dems with the balls (sorry!) to speak out in a smart and spirited way against Republican lies, but now he just looks like a lonesome, insecure fool. Stick a fork in him, he’s done, at least through 2012.

Footnote: When will the Gray Lady use her pulpit to denounce editor Bill Keller for being disingenuous in explaining the part his newspaper played in spreading the lies that led to the disastrous Iraq war? Just asking.

Posted in Congress, Great Recession, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Promoting the 1st annual Chris Christie 100-Yard Walk

Posted on June 6, 2011 by oddmanout215

Michael Smerconish in The Philadelphia’s Inquirer, inadvertently shedding light on why the mainstream media are so reluctant to bash elitist politicians:

It was no surprise to me that Chris Christie took heat for using a state helicopter to attend his son’s baseball game, but I’m not thinking of the wrath of New Jersey taxpayers. If his house is anything like mine, he has bigger problems on the home front for the poor decision he made.

Last Tuesday, Christie flew from Trenton to Montvale to watch his son Andrew play baseball in a state playoff game. Upon arrival next to the field, Christie was shuttled about 100 yards in a dark town car with tinted windows to the stands. Then, after the fifth inning, play was halted so he could depart in order to travel to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion, to dine with some Iowans who were courting him to run for president.

Smerconish doesn’t slam the governor for believing fiscal austerity is good for the peons but not for the millionaires. He doesn’t mention that Christie’s Ralph Kramden-esque personal style is much more off-putting than that of unionized teachers, whom he has described as “bullies and thugs.”

Instead, the issue that concerns the columnist is the possible harm Christie’s helicopter usage might do to the psyche of his son, the baseball player. He urges the governor to drive — i.e., to be driven — to the kid’s next game.

Smerconish informs us that he drives an F-150 pickup and an $80,000 Jaguar “provided” by one of the sponsors of his radio show. He confesses to embarrassing his sons twice, by picking them up from school in his “spectacular” Jag and, on another day, in the F-150, which prompted one of the boys to ask, “Dad, how many pickup trucks do you see other than ours?”

Oh, the emotional trauma of kids raised in upper middle-class privilege, and of harried upper middle-class fathers like Smerconish and Christie! My heart goes out.

But Smerconish could help undermine the public perception that he and his soul brother are lazy, wasteful elitists. He could create and promote the first annual Chris Christie Save the Schools 100-Yard Walk, the proceeds of which could be used to help pay for teachers and school supplies. The event might boost both men’s public image and the oft-heard right-wing claim that charity should take the place of government programs that help the poor.

The fee to participate in the walk would be twenty dollars. Each walker would be sponsored by an N.J. millionaire who would kick in an additional $10,000 and have his name engraved in the 100-yard walkway (at Drumthwacket?).

Christie could take part, if only to inspire the grossly obese who are trying to get in shape. Smerconish might join him to prove that he, Mr. Jag, is still capable of walking 100 yards. But only after a thorough physical exam, of course.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, NJ, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments