How the generals eat

Every now and again I brave up and get together with people who still work in PR. By that I mean people who still work in PR for a company, in an office. I do enjoy keeping in touch, and I love going downtown for social outings, and I love gossip. But most of all, to be completely honest, what I really love about these get togethers is that they remind me of how dreadful the whole affair is. Not that I need any reminding, but these meetups are like seeing a photograph of myself taken during a really bad stretch. Each time, I cringe a bit.

Friday was gorgeous in Portland. It was sunny, mostly clear, the leaves starting to turn but just barely, cool enough to wear a sweatshirt, warm enough that the jackets and gloves are still on the top shelf in the hall closet. One of my former co-prisoners and I sat in a booth by a window at a restaurant across the street from the library. I like this guy. He’s funny at times, I think he’s read a lot and I think he pays attention. But oh man, when the talk turns to work, as it always does, look out.

We talked about who has been promoted, who has been fired, who is “kicking ass and taking names,” who is now managing whom, and the new tricks devised by the HR people, and who might now be dating whom, maybe, but maybe not. On and on it went.

Then this: the generals always eat last. Holy shit, I thought as I took a large and sloppy bite from my cheeseburger, now we’re at war. This is the manta of one of the super smart strategy guys, apparently: the generals always eat last. That’s how these people talk, I reminded myself. Once the equally offensive sports metaphors have been exhausted, their vernacular transitions, as if by primitive instinct, to the battlefield. We really do get off on destroying others, which concerns me.

For several reasons I received the messages with much more clarity than I ever have before. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve had more time to think over the past couple of years. Perhaps it’s that I haven’t attended any leadership workshops in quite a while. Maybe it was just the natural beauty of the day, which only made my impulse to powerwash away the stain of falsehood all the more urgent. “It’s totally applicable to team leadership,” my lunch date explained earnestly. I nodded and put more food in my mouth. “You have to take care of your team first. That’s what being a leader is all about.”

Given what constitutes “leadership” these days I couldn’t disagree more. In my experience, most of the people in today’s workplace aren't “leaders” because of what they contribute or when they eat, or don't, but primarily because they say they are. I cannot imagine having the nerve to declare myself – in writing, no less – a general but that doesn't stop lots of people. Although I think I’ve known it for years, last week it occurred to me in very clear terms that it’s the language that pulls the weight.

If you want to be a leader – whatever that means – just start talking like one. Interrupt people to sing the praises of others. Highlight things other people have done in e-mails sent as broadly as possible. Tell your current authority figure that what really keeps you up at night is worrying about how you can help everyone on the team be successful. Give it a whirl and see what happens. Once you’re comfortable with it – and it won’t take nearly as long as you may think – dump the amateurish sports metaphors and make your grand entrance onto the battlefield. Talk your way above and beyond others, and chances are good that someday you actually will be. Refer to yourself as a general long and often enough and it’ll catch on. Hell, someone may salute you someday when you walk into a conference room.

At any rate, perhaps the generals – the real ones, and those who have appointed themselves to the post – really do eat last. Good for them, because even if they do eat last, I’m sure that the grade of their steak and the quality of the china off which they devour the meat makes the wait more than worthwhile.

One year without

I would not make a very good bulimic. More than close-up shots of heart surgery on television, more than the sight of a needle piercing skin, I hate throwing up. The reversal of gravity that comes from within my body, the sheer violence of it. One warm afternoon in September I was weary with nausea. I tried to recall what I’d eaten but nothing out of the ordinary came to mind. I’d consumed several cans of beer, but there was nothing unusual about that. That night I slept, sort of, but by morning I was on my knees in the bathroom, secretly hoping for a quick death. That’s a bit dramatic, of course, but I do seriously hate the entire ritual of barfing. I took small, tentative sips of water, which my body promptly rejected. At about four in the afternoon, feeling sort of better, I walked down to the corner grocery and bought a cold can of Sprite. I nursed that can until 9 o’clock that evening. I have never enjoyed the taste of soda as much as I did that day. Then I took a shower and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, a slew of empty beer cans greeted me when I walked into the kitchen. The smell of them – I’d meant to rinse them and put them out on the curb, but illness intervened – made me gag. I skipped the rinsing and put them into a plastic bag as quickly as I could and put them out. I drank water all morning. At around two in the afternoon I opened the refrigerator and came face to face with two 12-packs of PBR (I never ran out of beer, ever). I considered putting them out on the curb, box and all. I considered just dumping them in the garbage. For some reason, what I did was stand at my sink, holding my nose with my left hand and, with my right hand, opened and poured 24 cans down the drain. I was a very experienced beer drinker, and it was no problem to do all this with one hand. I ran the hot water and poured Murphy’s Oil Soap into the sink to get rid of the stench. I ate crackers for dinner that night and watched the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, which was held in Oxford, Mississippi.

That was a year ago today. It’s funny to think about things in terms of time units. For many years my life revolved around drinking beer. But something happened that day that changed me: the act of throwing up, for me, was like my instinct to drink being expelled. So for the last 52 weeks I’ve had the privilege of enjoying things in a way I’d somehow forgotten. Food tastes good, I finish books, I meet people for coffee and it’s not a prelude to going to get smashed at a bar in the middle of the afternoon. For the most part I sleep very soundly at night. I've gotten to know people in a different way, which has been both good and bad (though mostly good). Parties are the most interesting thing. I thought it might be awkward to go to gatherings where people are drinking but it’s not. It’s fun actually, and I can remember conversations in the morning. Lucky me, because I’ve seen people who struggle with evicting alcohol from their lives and it’s horrifying to witness.

I wish I had something more grandiose and profound to say, but here’s the truth: for me, my favorite thing about not drinking is the smell of toast. If I could find incense that smelled like toast, I’d buy a case or maybe even two.

Territory

I really do not like my neighbor. I refer to her as Chinese Grandma – she is Chinese, and she is a grandmother, and we’ve never introduced ourselves so I do not know her name. Not only do I not like her, I actively dislike her. She’s pushy, and she’s sneaky.

She arrived on my block a few years ago when a weedy vacant lot was replaced by a truly ugly house, thrown together quickly and cheaply with vinyl windows and colorless vinyl siding. She lives with a married couple – one of them is her child, I presume – and a rotating assortment of – again, I presume – relatives. I’d say she’s close to six feet tall and very skinny. She usually wears gray pants and a blue shirt, short-sleeved or long, depending on the weather, and a Gilligan hat. I saw her once without the hat. Her hair, shoulder length and a shade of gray that reminds me of yarn, parts on the side in a way that seems almost regal. I do wonder about her life, but just making eye contact is difficult. Her English comes and goes, depending, and I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, so we’ve never had a conversation. I’d guess she’s about 75.

The territory marking began not long after the family arrived. Chinese Grandma, you see, is the Donald Trump of the recycling biz. Long before sunrise and long after sunset my neighborhood creaks and groans with the sound of her enterprise: shopping carts overflowing with cans and bottles pushed up and down the street, the middle of the street, across lawns if it’s a corner lot, through intersections, across parking lots. She stops from time to time and reconfigures everything, sorting into different bags and boxes according to some system, I suppose. I have no idea how far Chinese Grandma’s daily orbit takes her, but I do know that she has been officially banned from a number of grocery stores for taking recyclables from other people’s carts. In Oregon, there is a legal limit on how many cans and bottles you can bring in per day, so Chinese Grandma makes the rounds, stopping at Safeway, QFC and Fred Meyer. There are probably many more stores on her itinerary, but those are the ones I’m aware of. More than once I’ve seen her just ignore a car coming right at her. For a while there was another woman who trolled the recycling bins in the neighborhood. She wore capes and one of those traditional Asian hats that looks like an upside-down basket. She and Chinese Grandma faced off one day in the street and played a shopping cart version of chicken. The other woman hasn’t been seen on my street for years. Some say she died.

Chinese Grandma has done a couple of things that irritate me. First, she told her obnoxious little granddaughters, who used to spend the summer in Portland, where they attended English classes, that the devil was my roommate. Then she sent them to my house one afternoon. They took a couple of things off my front porch, including a plaster imprint of the foot of the little boy, Riley, who was born when his off-the-charts insane parents lived next door. I wasn’t that crazy about it, actually, but still. When I rapped my knuckles against their tinny metal screen door, Chinese Grandma’s granddaughters told me that I could not have my belongings back until I put my bin of bottles out on the curb for them.

It’s also annoying that she leaves her carts tucked in here and there. One is usually docked for the night in the shrubbery in front of the apartment building across the street. Another is often hidden, sort of, beneath a tree in front of my house. You never see a cart in Chinese Grandma’s yard, which is all rock except for a patch of hot pink zinnias. For a while, every time I saw one of her auxiliary carts I considered taking it back to Safeway, but the chance to be mean was the only real motive I had, so I left them.

I think there’s something intrinsically personal about garbage, and that’s what really annoys me about Chinese Grandma: I’m under surveillance. After living three doors down from her for a few years, it seems normal to assume that she’ll review everything I throw away.

One day this summer another shopping cart came clanking down the middle of the street. The woman, who walked a few paces ahead of the cart, wore jeans, hiking boots and a leather vest. Her dark brown hair was pulled back from her face and fell halfway down her back in a single, ropey ponytail. She nodded from time to time, made broad, sweeping gestures towards different houses in a low, inaudible voice. The man who pushed the cart had hair as long as hers but his was the color of early rust and unkempt. They picked up a couple of the bright yellow bins that say “Portland Recycles!” and, finding them empty, threw them down to the curbside, where they landed with a hollow thud. Without thinking about why, I went out on my front porch and busied myself picking scabby remnants of blossoms from one of the canes of the rose bush that’s wrapping itself around one of the columns.

The people who go to the neighborhood association meetings assume that anyone they don’t know – and many they do – is a criminal. Sometimes they are right, often they are wrong. I would much rather say that I was outside to make eye contact with the man and the woman pushing the shopping cart so that they’d know that I knew what they were up to, which would, of course, cause them to think twice before breaking into my house or my car or taking anything off the porch or out of the yard. But the truth of the matter is that I went out there because I felt like we were being invaded by colonizers who were scoping out their newfound territory and rejoicing in their discovery. Without even thinking about it, I felt obligated to let them know, with one glance, that anything that can be recycled for cash in this neighborhood has been spoken for until further notice.

Mary and Joseph take down a tree

You’ve got to love the people who get high watching Oprah and perusing spiritual enlightenment picture books and then go on a preaching stampede, telling anyone who will listen that looking at things from a positive angle is the solution to all the world’s problems, which are caused by those who bitch and complain too much. A few months ago I collided with one such individual over the issue of tree removal. In 2002 I planted a stick in the ground, essentially, that grew into a Eucalyptus tree that was at least 50 feet tall and was, briefly, the horticultural wonder of my neighborhood. I loved the silvery green sheen of the leaves, the white bark and, most of all, how out of place it looked. Sadly, the tree got zapped last winter, when the temperature hovered around 18 degrees for many days. By April it was clear that the tree needed to be removed. The tree wasn’t much in terms of bulk, but it was tall and power lines were involved. “My God,” my friend the positive thinker exclaimed. “That’s going to cost you. That’ll cost a fortune, I bet.”

My guilt here – and it is considerable – is that I internalized this oft-repeated bantering to the point where I was queasy just thinking about calling around to find out how much it would cost to have the tree removed. I do not use the word guilt in order to appear reasonable and civilized. I use it seriously. My guilt is that I ignored one central fact that’s kind of a game changer: my happy-go-lucky, positive-thinking friend has never, ever had a tree removed. So I now must admit that I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to not letting the facts interfere.

Having the tree taken down did require me to make a few arrangements. The tree company came over and gave me an estimate, but I forgot to get it in writing, so I had to call them back and ask if they could drop it by. Joseph, the beautiful, haunted looking young man I dealt with, said he could bring the paperwork over at about 3:30, and his truck pulled up at exactly that time. I had a bit of a run around with a woman at the power company, who kept changing how much advance notice was required to arrange a service shut off. I finally told her to please let me know what date worked best for her and offered to reschedule accordingly. She said, in a sort of huffy tone (although I’ve heard way worse) that the date I’d scheduled the tree removal, September 2nd, would be fine. A few minutes later another woman from the power company called me back and told me that someone from Pacific Power would be at my house that morning at 9 if not a few minutes before. Her name was Mary.

The tree was gone by 11 that morning. I was surprised at how sad I was to see it go, but equally surprised at how pleasant the house smelled the rest of the day. And speaking of surprises, I cannot believe how much I've enjoyed being totally passive-aggressive with my glass-half-full! friend. In a very forced-to-sound-casual way, he did ask how the whole thing had turned out. I told him it went fine. He stopped short, of course, of asking me what it had cost, and I kept it to myself, because my commitment to not gloating over proving someone wrong is sincere. One of the few things I didn’t like about my mother was her terminal zeal for starting statements with, “As I tried to tell you …” As much as I wanted to pound my chest about how very little the tree removal process had cost, I still think talking about money in a competitive way is tasteless. Plus, I’d be lying if I denied that it’s kind of fun to listen to someone scramble around a conversation like a lab rat, desperately searching for any morsels that will help him avoid admitting that he was wrong.

So many murders, so little time

One of the things I’m most curious about is how some news is not newsworthy but other news is. Who decides what makes it to the air? What are their decisions based on? If a network decides to pursue one story, how many others do they decide not to pursue? What is the agenda during the meetings where it’s decided what to cover? Are there HR people in the room? Is there a white board involved?

All of which made me wonder about last week’s frenzy over the graduate student murdered at Yale. Even before her body was discovered on the day she was to be married, Good Morning America was all over it, reporting on the fact that she’d gone missing, her last known whereabouts the lab building where her remains were ultimately found. I don’t want to come across as being flip about it, but seriously, a graduate student at Yale is missing so let’s get it on the national news? I don’t have any statistics on hand, but don’t people go missing every day of the week in this country?

The student’s body was found on Sunday, and by Monday Good Morning America was warmed up, fully rehearsed and ready to go. And go they did. At first I thought it was just another example of the horrors we can all look forward to as the Diane Sawyer era dawns, but I was wrong. This story was carried by Katie Couric, on the evening news, which I still like to think isn’t quite as dumbed down as the morning crap. And a continent away, in my city, the story was covered by local radio and television stations.

That’s where the story got even stranger.

On the local morning news program, the arrest of the suspect was mentioned, along with an invitation to stay tuned for Good Morning America for more information on the fact that police had released him. Had you missed that little bit of information – that the suspect was, in fact, released – and tuned in instead only for the beginning of Good Morning America, I would forgive you for assuming that the suspect was indeed guilty. That’s because Good Morning America, true to form, played the video footage, in slow motion, of the suspect being escorted to the police car, pushed down into the back seat and driven away over and over and over – seven times, at which point I stopped counting – before acknowledging, once, and very quickly, that he’d been released. Wasting no time, the next item was an interview with a retired law enforcement guy who walked through what likely happened after the student had been murdered, a narrative threaded together by information about when and where he used his card key to access certain rooms in the building. By the following morning, the DNA tests had indeed linked the suspect and the murder. And with that the show continued. A motorcade was filmed driving down a road with flashing lights, turning a corner and taking the suspect into custody at a motel where he’d spent the night in a room with his father. Given the fact that the cops were staked out in front of the motel the entire time the suspect was there, why the parade? Why the show business? Why the waste of tax dollars and national air time for the “capture” of a guy who’s at a motel not far from his apartment and under full surveillance? Why is this a national news story? Why, in Portland, Oregon, is it a local story, updated every hour on the hour? I asked my neighbor, who works in the news biz, on Sunday afternoon. Her boyfriend answered on her behalf: first, the victim is young and cute, and second, America loves it when the Ivy League people turn out to be as sleazy as the rest of us. My neighbor did not disagree.

Whatever the reason, I’d imagine the suspect’s attorney is pretty happy about the news coverage. It’s probably the only bright spot on the horizon for him and his client. His client was declared guilty on national television before the results of the DNA tests were available. All due respects to the family and friends of the murdered student, but what would be truly thrilling would be to see people like Diane Sawyer and Chris Cuomo put on the stand and forced to explain, without a teleprompter, their rush to judgment.

I was going to leave it at that, but then I found this tucked in among the other news items on CNN.com on Tuesday:

A Florida man in custody in Haiti faces first-degree murder charges in the deaths of his wife and five children, authorities said Tuesday.

Yep, five children and a wife. The story did not warrant its own box on MSN – as the Yale story did – nor did Katie Couric or the local radio station bother with it. As for Diane Sawyer, on Wednesday morning she was busy with other things, including an in-depth – by her standards, anyhow – chat with the high school girlfriend of the presumed killer of the graduate student at Yale. She went on Good Morning America with her mom and confessed to a very concerned looking Diane that her high school sweetie was very charming but that he was a control freak and had an anger management problem.

Fall 2009

At 2:18 this afternoon (Pacific time), fall 2009 begins, and for that I am grateful. This summer I spent a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of my aversion to summer. I know that heat and sunshine are essential for growth. The Missouri-grown tomatoes that are part of my own personal mythology, for example, would not have been possible without heat, nor would the stunning array of fruits and vegetables that now crowd roadside stands and farmers markets all over Oregon. Even I can appreciate the precision of the math here: if it’s not hot and clear for a number of consecutive months, plants don’t grow, and if plants don’t grow, we don’t eat.

I have other heat-driven memories, many of them good: seemingly endless weeks at the swimming pool, barbecues, haphazard family outings to the riverfront – the Mississippi, that is – to behold the spectacle of fireworks casting brilliant reflections on the Gateway Arch, the German festival in South Saint Louis, especially the one when the woman threw up all over the sidewalk in a way that was both traumatic and thrilling, and, of course, discovering the wonders of sex back when we all thought the things we did with each other would have never occurred to our parents.

But the older I get, the more I realize that I really do not like summer. In fact, I dislike it. Heat, and the prediction that heat is on the way, riddles me with anxiety. This summer I spent a week in Saint Louis in June, something I’ll do my best not to do again. One evening it was still 80 degrees – and equally humid – at midnight. I thought the weather people described it perfectly with a one-word banner beneath the forecast: Oppressive. The weather in Portland was equally offensive, I thought. “We’re smashing records left and right!” one of the local weather monkeys screeched. My main objection to heat, I think, is the way it’s talked about. It’s no longer sufficient to hear on the evening news that it’s going to be 95 tomorrow. Instead, we are told what the temperature will be at 7 in the morning, and at noon, and at 6 in the evening, and how this compares with this time last week, and how “that’s nothing!” compared to how hot it’s going to be two days from now, and how we’re going to “smash” a record for this day, this particular day, let’s say July 27, and it hasn’t been this hot ever on July 27 since 1968, so we are smashing a goddamn record and let’s break out the champagne and noisemakers and, finally, by the way, it’s only going to get down to 72 by midnight so it’s not going to be very comfortable sleeping weather.

As a person who finds solace in a sky illustrated with big, billowy clouds, I find these two statistics troubling: in Portland, we’ve had more days where the temperature has surpassed 90 degrees than ever before; at the same time, we’ve had almost no rain. The shrill tone the weather broadcasters use to convey this news is as annoying as mosquitoes. They talk about “smashing” records as if their year-end bonus depends on it. Of course, I could always turn the television off.

So here we are. Even though it’s going to go above 90 today in Portland, and even though there are warm winds blowing out of the east, and even though the fire alert is at the highest possible level – thank God it hasn’t rained! – today is the first day of fall according to the calendar. The sky is perfectly soulless this morning, a flat, textureless blue, but the end is in sight, and I’m looking forward to welcoming the other half of the growth equation: rain.

Janet is offended

The locally produced radio talk show is an endangered species, so I make a point of listening regularly to Think Out Loud, a one-hour program that airs on OPB, Portland’s NPR affiliate. On Friday, the topic was Oregon. Oregon’s been on the receiving end of an attention blitz, fondly noted in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Vogue Italia. So the Think Out Loud people decided to ask recent transplants if Oregon lives up to their expectations, or not, and why.

I wasn’t invited to be on the program, which is understandable since I’ve been here since 1994, when the biggest news coming out of Oregon was Tonya Harding.

One of the first people on Friday’s program was a guy who moved here a few years back. The thing that attracted him to Portland, he explained, was a ceremony commemorating 9-11 that he attended. He was touched by it, he said, so moved he moved. At first I thought, oh boy, another 9 -11 banner waver. But this guy was actually working as a cop in New York City on the day of – not the anniversary of the day of – the terrorist attack. If you’d lived through something like 9 -11 as a New York City cop, I can appreciate the importance of forging a connection in a new city, of feeling welcome and respected for your service.

Things for Janet, on the other hand, haven’t been so great since she moved to Portland. She’s deeply offended, in fact, because we have the audacity, the utter insensitivity, to continue referring to a collection of buildings connected by enclosed walkways – two or three of them, I’m not sure exactly – in downtown Portland as the World Trade Center. “That really offends me,” Janet said, her voice a distinct blend of whine and snide, an effect I recognize immediately but have never been able to mimic. Janet thinks that the World Trade Center in Portland – which has been there since 1994 and probably for many years prior to that – should be renamed out of respect for her personal 9 -11 grief.

I don’t know how to respond, or where to begin responding, or which words to use to express how ridiculous I think Janet is, how shameless and self-indulgent I find her to be, how her willingness to turn events that irrevocably altered thousands of lives in a matter of minutes into a cheap and easy parody is an affront to what little faith I have left in the basic goodness of people.

While I may be at a loss for words, the Think Out Loud host was not. She offered, rather graciously, to introduce Janet to the former cop so they could talk amongst themselves. Which is just one more reason that I’m not the host of the program, because I don’t think I could have managed the situation without saying a few things that would have compromised the station’s broadcasting license.

Pork, is and former

Sometimes the power wielded by one word is a thing of beauty. Consider the impact of the word “if,” for example. “If” may very well be my all-time favorite word. Just imagine the volume of CYA-ing that’s been accomplished by if. Think of the millions and millions of dollars lost and won in lawsuits and contract negotiations and divorce settlements by if. I invite anyone who doesn’t believe in the power of language to try to calculate the dollar value of that one-vowel-one-consonant duo. But sometimes it’s not so pretty. The power of one word, which is often demonstrated by its omission, is particularly troubling to me. It’s a relatively simple word, six letters in all, two syllables, easy to spell. The word is former.

One of the toxins I pollute my life with is the Sunday morning news programs. My upbringing wasn’t particularly religious, but one of the few rules my father enforced was that we couldn’t turn on a television or a radio on Sunday mornings. I’m 43 now, and I’ve nullified that rule, and I reserve the right to slob around my house on Sunday mornings. I turn the television on – and there’s something thrilling about it, still, some bizarre sense that I’m getting away with something – and waste a couple of perfectly good hours listening to the yammering about what happened last week, what’s going to happen next week, and how that’s going to impact Obama’s approval rating, and how Obama’s approval rating compares to that of any number of other presidents after their first four weeks, four months, six months.

Whether this is an issue during other time slots I cannot say for sure, but it seems that the Sunday morning shows are particularly lax about using the word “former.” Newt Gingrich, who appears so regularly on Sunday mornings that I wouldn’t be surprised if he started preaching, is often addressed as “Mr. Speaker.” Newt Gingrich – whose birth name is Newton Leroy McPherson – was the 58th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from Jan. 4, 1995 through Jan. 3, 1999. He’s not the speaker of the house at all – Nancy Pelosi is – and has not been the speaker of the house, in fact, for more than a decade. On Sundays though, his tenure as speaker is timeless. It’s the same thing with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, whose presidencies are eternal on the seventh day. I thought, very briefly, that maybe it was a southern thing, until I came across this, on a blog hosted by a local radio station in Portland, Oregon:

Sunday September 20, 2009 - We invited Governor John Kitzhaber into our studios to talk about his 2010 run, healthcare reform, and Oregon’s “Green economy.”

John Kitzhaber was the governor of Oregon from 1995 to 2003. He recently announced that he’s going to run for governor next year, in 2010. He is not the governor of Oregon. He has not been the governor of Oregon for six years. Though he’s easy to forget, the present governor of Oregon is Ted Kulongoski.

The absence of the word “former” somehow clogs the passage that connects my ear with the sound-to-thought conversion center in my brain. If someone with no interest in politics or the news were to happen across one of the Sunday morning shows, he or she would rightfully understand that Newton Leroy (I love that name, for some reason) is in fact the speaker of the house. Given his title, his authoritative tone of voice would make perfect sense. So too would John Kitzhaber’s in-charge swagger. Unless the viewer or listener takes the time to insert the word “former,” he is the governor. It seems like just one more layer of confusion to me –one that could be easily remedied.

Another easily remedied problem, I think, is the utter stupidity employed by the corporates when they talk. They are so limited – and, at the same time, so arrogant – that they assume that since they haven’t bothered to understand language, nobody else has either. But I’m encouraged, tentatively, by the fact that openly and rigorously ridiculing them is becoming almost common. Just this week, in fact, one of the morning news shows I listen to had a field day with one of those Business Speak – BS – top 10 lists. All the usual crap was included – leveraging, circling back, aligning etc. – but the top one on the list, I was very happy to hear, was this completely asinine anti-expression that has, for some reason, become quite popular: It is what it is.

I could write miles of text on those five words, and the people who use them in sequence, but I’d rather offer my own remedy, an alternate phrase. One of the grand old ladies from my childhood spoke in a way that was not always ladylike. This offended some people, who had, and have, very delicate sensibilities. So out of respect, I won’t mention her name, but she did exchange words with someone one day, and it made an impression. Someone came to the house and said, “Well hello there, whaddaya’ know?” So she said, quite simply, “A pig’s ass is pork, that’s what I know.” Because she’d already lived for many years and had navigated many situations, and because she could drink whiskey, smoke a cigarette and knit sweaters all at the same time, and because she knew how to do all sorts of math in her head, without a calculator, she only had to use the word “is” once when answering the question about what she knew.

The stolen wheelchair

Nothing brings out the best in people quite like a story about someone who is so down on his luck it doesn’t seem possible that things can get any worse, but then they do. This week, one of the local stations pounced all over just such a story: someone stole a man’s wheelchair. The man, who lives in an apartment on a very fixed income, is a U.S. veteran. He can barely afford to eat and pay the rent. Buying a new wheelchair is out of the question. For this man, the statistics aren’t abstract. He lives below the numbers.

Before the newscast was over, the razzle-dazzle anchor announced that the station had been flooded with calls from people who wanted to help. She shuffled her papers and thanked the viewers for being so nice. And with that, it was time for Katie Couric, but the wheelchair story was far from over. The following evening the anchor spoke of the outpouring of support like a proud parent. Money, food, a brand new wheelchair donated by a hospital and, best of all, a contractor with the wood, tools and know-how to build a ramp into the man’s apartment. The contactor was interviewed briefly. He explained that building a ramp is easy, that it wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

And then, time for community talk.

The contractor passionately explained that yes, he works and lives here in this community, and the man whose wheelchair was stolen is also a member of the community, and this isn’t about money or anything else, it’s about taking care of people in the community, because we’re a community and that’s what we do.

Please, stop. I think the notion of community is beautiful. I’d love to live somewhere where everyone is valued for who they are, where those in need are looked after, where those with abundance share with those cut short. But I have so many questions about these feel-good stories, and those who respond to them. In a city that’s ape shit about wheelchair accessibility, how is it possible that this man’s apartment doesn’t have a ramp? Where has this community-minded contractor and the good Samaritans at the hospital been for the last year, as the unemployment rate in our state has remained well above 10 percent, as the foreclosure orgy continues full-tilt boogie, as the food bank’s pantries become more barren by the day, as more people’s unemployment insurance expires and well, they’re kind of just screwed at that point, and more and more people are forced to either pay the rent or pay their health insurance premium – but not both? I’m not proud of myself for bashing generosity, but given our rat-on-a-treadmill enslavement to terms like community and giving back, I’d be foolish not to wonder.

The most offensive thing about this week’s feel-fuzzy blitz is the veteran angle. As far as I can tell, nothing gets this country aroused quite like the military. Our lust for war and all its trappings is insatiable. We’re so turned on by war images, in fact, that we even use them for commercials – shamelessly. Shilo Inns – yes, a hotel chain – runs a commercial regularly that’s so sparse it’s almost elegant. A man, a woman and a boy – presumably a family – slowly approach a grave marked by a white cross. They get down on bended knee and the man and boy – daddy and son, I assume – salute the cross that commemorates – again, I assume – the fallen older son who died defending his country. The man, boy and woman embrace, the Shilo Inn logo appears along with some schmaltzy message and that’s the end.

And the end it is, indeed. We love our veterans, the ceremonies, the uniforms, the flags, the teary departures and reunions at the airport, the baby that was born while daddy was away, often bestowed with a name along the lines of Justice, serving the country and preserving freedom and liberty so that his baby can grow up proud and free. We love the whole narrative, apparently, until it’s time to pay the bills. I am sorry, sincerely, to rain on the parade (although it has been an unusually dry summer) but I find it difficult to stomach these types of stories, the moral of which appears to be that nothing brings out the fair-minded generosity in people throughout the community quite as effectively as the arrival of the camera crew.

Faceless

Yesterday morning, I read that the number of people on Facebook is on the threshold of exceeding the number of people who live in the U.S. To borrow the words of Ann, a very gracious older woman who ran the mailroom for an organization I worked for 20 years ago, that’s not good.

Like millions of others – 300 million, to be precise – I too got caught up in the Facebook craze. I signed up, added friends, posted a Warhol-ized photograph of myself. My profile included my real name, the city where I live, the college I went to and my birthday. It’s really stupid, if you think about it, to share that sort of information via the Internet.

I have to admit, it was fun. I have a lot of long-distance friends, and it was nice to click on photo albums and see pictures of their newborns, their remodeled homes, new hairdos and fireworks with the Hong Kong skyline in the background. It was also fun to happen across familiar names and then troll their friends’ list, discovering, quite by accident, many dubious “friendships” along the way. And finding that my high school graduating class had its own Facebook page was like hitting the jackpot. I savored the visual evidence that almost every boy I lusted after in the early 1980s is now a fat slob who looks at least 10 years older than I know he is.

And then, for some reason, it got really, really stupid. Let’s start with the status updates. I know of several people who update their status every single day without fail with a few words about how exhausted they are because they had such an insanely busy day and why oh why aren’t there more hours? I know people who post the results of those ridiculous quizzes at least once a week and usually more. Which of the Brady Bunch are you? What interior decorating style best suits your personal style? If you were a Bob Dylan song, which one would you be? Which Star Trek character would you be most likely to marry? At the end of each week eight of my “friends” take the time to write that they’re very glad it’s Friday. And I know more than a few people who write shit like this: Susie is so thankful to everyone who sent good wishes her way during this very difficult time. Those sorts of updates are followed, usually, by a flurry of drooling comments by those in the know, while everyone else wonders … One woman I used to work with posted a comment about how much it irritates her when people who never post comments see her – in person, with their eyes – and mention something about her that they wouldn’t know if they hadn’t read it on Facebook. And how dare people, this woman wrote, get on Facebook but never make comments? There was of course a torrent of comments beneath her status update. Hell yeah! they said. The losers! They’re stalkers! That’s creepy! They should be banned from FB!! Perhaps they were just L-ing OL, or :) ing together, but the angry tone of the whole thing was a bit alarming.

In June I had lunch with a friend of mine, a real lunch with a real person at a real restaurant, where we sat outside and enjoyed the shade provided by a real tree. “I cancelled my Facebook page last night,” my friend said. “I’m sick of the shit.” If he hasn’t been in touch with someone for a decade or more, my friend explained, there’s a good reason for it and he was tired of being “friended” by people he hadn’t talked to since Bill Clinton’s first term. I had sent this friend an e-mail over the winter, by the way, asking him if he wanted to get together sometime soon. “I’m kind of busy,” he’d replied, “just sitting here Facebooking my life away!” And here he was, a few months later, sitting outdoors, liberated. His recovery was inspiring.

I’m embarrassed to admit that deactivating my Facebook account required prompting from someone else, but it did. I love spending time with people, I love talking with people and listening to people and learning more about people. I love meeting up for coffee and talking on the phone. I like to sprawl out on the couch and read books and I like riding the bus and going to the grocery store. Going downtown for a gossipy two-hour lunch is my heroin. I live on e-mail, and I’m on the Internet most of the day, and I love writing my blog. I think technology is useful for many things, but Facebook somehow had the power to stain the entire day with an odd, low-grade sort of despair, kind of like having the flu. It became the anti-connection. Here we all sit, I thought, dying to be interesting. I don’t toss this word around casually, but Facebook, for me, was depressing. I deactivated my account on a balmy Monday morning in June, and although my information is still in the system – beware: Facebook owns everything you post, always and forever, period – it’s no longer possible for me to send or receive friend requests, or to post status updates, or to comment on those posted by others. While it’s a day-by-day existence when you’re living on the other side of Facebook, I am surviving without it.

$erena William$

I may have to revise my opinion about the absurdity of holding professional athletes up as role models. The microphone hijacker’s chat with Jay Leno after completing his freelance publicity assignment over the weekend was child’s play compared to tennis thug Serena Williams’ appearance on Good Morning America.

Over the weekend Serena Williams made more money than most people – teachers, for example, paramedics and the engineers trying to come up with new ways to make sure we all have water – will make over the course of the next few years. Serena Williams also told a line judge to stick a tennis ball up her ass, or offered to stick the tennis ball up the ass of the line judge for her (I can’t vouch for the word-for-word accuracy of this because I had to listen between the bleeps). For this role-model worthy display of sportswomanship, Serena was fined $10,000. For some reason, a beast like Serena Williams is paid millions while teachers are laid off and the funding for arts programs is slashed mercilessly due to “these economic times.” Hell, she could have preserved the tennis ball and just shoved the $10,000 in cash straight up the judge’s ass without making a dent in her checking account.

So I was, understandably I think, simultaneously amused and horrified to see that they’d propped her up and out of combat posture long enough for her to sit down and chat with Good Morning America’s millennial moron, Chris Cuomo. She’s truly sorry for her outburst, she explained, adding that there is “lots of stuff” that goes on at tournaments that fans aren’t aware of. And – how I didn’t see this one coming is beyond me – she has a book out, which includes several pearls of wisdom that keep her strong during life’s more challenging moments. Like when her sister was murdered. At that point Chris Cuomo practically coached her to shed a tear or two; Serena didn’t get quite that far, although her voice did get mighty reverential. Yet another reason to stay on the good side of your dead relations: You never know when you’re going to need them to help you keep the role model machine running smoothly and profitably.

Word muscle

One of my goals is to write really short, succinct sentences that convey far more than the word count would suggest. Tight, is the word I use. So imagine my envy upon reading the following sentence, all 27 words of it, which was fourth from the top when I saw it (although Kate’s appearance on “The View” may have bumped it down later in the day) on the “latest news” section of CNN.com:

(CNN) -- The reaction to Kanye West's hijacking of the microphone from Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards came quickly and unequivocally.

• “The reaction … came quickly and unequivocally.” I thought language like that was reserved for events like bombings and assassinations or the testing of nuclear missiles. You know, things that actually matter to people.


• “Kanye West” – who the hell is Kanye West? And why does his name matter enough to be in the first sentence of a top news story?


• “… hijacking of the microphone …” I was under the impression that when a hijacking takes place, and it’s a top news story, that the hijacking is of something significant, something of value. Something like a ton of money, the release of political prisoners, someone’s life. I’m just saying.


• “Taylor Swift.” Again, and my most sincere apologies to her family, but who is Taylor Swift? And why should I care?


• “ … the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards …” Really? MTV is still on the air? I had no idea. And it’s still taken seriously enough to have an annual awards show? That reminds me of my 20th high school reunion, when the woman who’d been the prom queen showed up in the dress she wore in 1984 and showed the photo album from her big night to anyone willing to look.
  

So to the writer of this most muscular of sentences, congratulations. It should be included in Journalism 101 – if that course is still taught – for beautifully conveying, with so few words, so much of what is so terribly wrong. And best of all, it doesn’t even reference the one-word talentless wonder at the center of the whole fracas, who closed the evening with her selfless “graciousness,” who would probably fork over a lot of money – I’m just saying – for publicity that good.

Clear

One of the best aspects of my television addiction is the commercials. I know they’re annoying to a lot of people, a rude interruption to be endured and tolerated. But they offer an interesting window into what’s on the minds, and the shopping lists, of people who are ready to spend some money. There is a lot that goes into a 15-second commercial that’s aired during prime time. Focus groups, messaging development, revisions, testing on test audiences, on and on, and lots and lots of cash. This shit’s serious.

One of the commercials that’s caught my eye recently is for a company called Clear. I’ve seen Clear’s logo around town and watched the commercials, but I wasn’t really sure what the company does, so I looked it up: “CLEAR is a high speed mobile Internet service provider for your home or business. CLEAR is the best alternative to DSL or Cable. Get CLEAR Today.” That’s actually not a bad description, compared to some of the crap I’ve seen. Compared, in the spirit of full disclosure, to some of the crap I’ve written.

The commercial though, which was obviously scripted to adhere tightly to a few key messages, is disturbing to me. The theme of it seems to be that none of us really want to be where we are. We’d rather be somewhere else. A woman is walking her dog in the park, so she tells someone, via her computer screen, in a very drone-y voice, “I’m walking the dog.” Then she’s riding in a car – in the passenger seat, thankfully – and “keeping an eye” on her child’s classroom. Then, finally, we see her fingernails being done at the salon while she watches, via her computer, a television show.

If it weren’t for technology I wouldn’t have the job I have, and if I didn’t have the job I have I wouldn’t have the life I have. I work out of my home office with clients around the world. I don’t commute, or spend days and weeks doing team-building activities, or spend months incapacitated due to “the review cycle.” And if it weren’t for technology, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this blog, which I do truly enjoy.

That said, this commercial, this brief snippet, says for me better than I could ever say for myself what annoys and terrifies me about this age. Why, I cannot help but wonder, why on earth would you take your computer to a dog park? So that you can log on and announce to someone – and everyone else unfortunate enough to be within ear shot, including the dogs – that you’re walking the dog? Shut up. Who cares? Well, that’s the scary part. The millions of dollars that go into marketing technology is all the proof I need to say with certainty that lots of people care. It’s important to have the ability to babble useless information, unfortunately. It’s like people on the bus who bellow the bus’ location into their cell phones every five minutes. Now the person on the other end of the cell phone knows that the Number Twenty is approaching the Burnside Bridge. To someone, to lots of people, for reasons I do not understand, that information is critical.

Even more unfortunate, I think, is that it’s important to lots people to be able to watch a television program while having a manicure. I’ve never had a manicure myself, but from what I hear the beauty salon is a gold mine. I avoid making promises because I think they’re a bad idea generally, but here’s one: if I ever go in for a manicure, the only communication tool I’ll take with me is my sense of hearing and, perhaps, a notebook – the old-fashioned kind, made of paper.

"You lie!"

If there’s one thing that irks me more than conservatives willfully ignoring the facts to advance the agenda, it’s when liberals do the same thing. Which brings me to Obama’s healthcare pep rally last week, interrupted by a representative from South Carolina who yelled “You lie!” when Obama said the plan doesn’t include people who are here illegally. It was undignified, certainly. It was rude. It was the sort of thing that would be best left at the bowling alley, perhaps, but I think the truth is on the side of the representative, not the President.

There are two problems with Obama’s claim. First, while there is wording in a number of draft plans that specifically prohibit providing services to undocumented residents, it’s widely acknowledged that proving who is documented and who isn’t is nearly impossible. That’s kind of odd, and kind of scary, I think, given that my entire life history can be stored and recalled and shared and projected from a chip smaller and thinner than my thumbnail. The second pothole in Obama’s absoluteness is that nobody – including people who aren’t legal citizens – will be denied care at an emergency room because of their status. If that doesn’t constitute providing healthcare to illegal residents, I don’t know what does.

The whole issue of lying about it – or, at the least, seriously spinning it – isn’t my main gripe. What bugs the hell out of me is that the liberals are as susceptible to hysteria about “the illegals” as the conservatives who started the fire in the first place are. In corporate America, big companies often cut costs by “redeploying” support staff while continuing to add vice presidents. It’s a smokescreen, a cheap and easy move designed to make it appear that something responsible is being done. Entertaining the notion that “the illegals” are to blame for this country’s financial predicament is the real lie, I think. It’s another scare tactic, another fire in the dark movie theater.

I cannot speak to the issue of being able to easily and quickly identify people’s citizenship status, but when it comes to emergency room care, here’s what I wish Obama would say. Yes, in the United States, under my plan we will treat the sick and wounded in our emergency rooms before the forms are filled out because we are a civilized society. When someone’s life is on the line, our focus is compassion, not cash. I fail to understand why politicians can’t just come out and say that, although my guess is that it has something to do with the messaging people. You can always count on the PR experts to complicate the living hell out of the simplest human inclinations, murk an issue up so that it requires more and more fine tuning and massaging, more explanation – if you can call it that – all of which ensures they still have a job.

But alas, the weirdest part of it, to me, was the reaction. I heard and read several comments on Thursday and Friday, all of which expressed shock and sadness at the decline in decorum. Which made me wonder: Have these people been to the grocery store in the past decade, or gotten behind the wheel and gone for a drive? It’s only a matter of time before we revert to carrying clubs. Good manners in this country, like rotary telephones and good penmanship, are relics.

Comfort food

Well, here we are at September 11, yet again. Thousands of people died that day, thousands of lives were forever altered. I sympathize with anyone who lost loved ones that day.

I do not, however, sympathize with the many more thousands who have shamelessly kicked and punched their greedy way onto the victim bandwagon, the ticket to which seems to be getting a faint quiver in your voice, and a reverent look in your eye when you say, “9-11.” Nikki Giovanni, considered a major poet by many, stood before an auditorium at Virginia Tech after the shooting spree there and said, “This is our 9-11.”

Oh boy. In a way I applaud her. Without apology or pause she gave voice to the delusion (maybe she is a poet after all): we’re part of this too. We’re all in this together. We’re all victims.

I beg to differ. We’re not all victims. Many of us, in fact, have no connection whatsoever to the events at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania where the United Airlines flight crashed, except that we happen to live in the same country, which covers a lot of ground. We don’t let those facts get in the way where I live. My favorite example of 9-11 me-too! stupidity came on the second or third anniversary of the attacks. The city I live in is approximately 3,000 miles from New York. On the anniversary I recall, the head chef at one of the bitchiest and most expensive grocery stores in town was interviewed on the radio. People soothe their grief, he explained, with food. As 9-11 approaches, there tends to be a run on comfort food, such as mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese. People have called me unpatriotic for ridiculing those who hog the grief stage, clinging to 9-11 as their script. What’s truly unpatriotic, in my opinion, is exploiting a global tragedy to sell outrageously priced food to offer people ‘comfort.’ At any rate, since it’s supposed to be hot today I’ll skip making mashed potatoes, which I do love, and instead take comfort in wishing my friend Luci a happy birthday and my friends Cindy and Chris a happy anniversary.

Mish-mash Wednesday

Yesterday was just odd, not in a particularly good or bad way. I woke up, certain that I was coming down with something (and I was right). Of course, after watching 45 minutes of Good Morning America, I was convinced that it was swine flu. I felt congested, tired, and a nice phlegmy cough was coming along nicely. I met a woman for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant three blocks from my house. This woman and I have known each other for more than a decade, yet yesterday was only the second time we’ve ever sat down together intentionally. We know a lot of people in common, and we don’t live terribly far from one another. Our stints at a dysfunctional gay newspaper and an equally dysfunctional – but wildly more successful – PR agency overlapped. I left that place two years ago, and I’m thrilled thus far with the results, so I asked her why she left, why she stepped down. “I couldn’t lie to people I like,” she said. I asked the waitress about the lemonade, which is fantastic, and she confessed that it’s made of powder. At home later in the afternoon, Bill Clinton’s voice boomed through the radio, saying that “Walter Cronkite was averse to conformity.” Then Barack Obama said that what he admired about Walter Cronkite was that he was more interested in the story than the story line. All of which made me wonder what Walter Cronkite would have made of Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last night. It wasn’t Obama’s speech that bugged me. I like the way he speaks, and it still fills me with joy to hear a president of the country where I live get up and talk without butchering the language. It’s the show that’s getting tedious. It’s the merciless and endless slanting and spinning. It’s the fact that I read and watch the news all the time and have no idea what is being proposed, or not, or why, or by whom. That, I think, may have something to do with the fact that for every one member of Congress, there are six full-time lobbyists whose sole focus is healthcare. I love Barack Obama, but I’d be crazy not to believe that he’s as bought and paid for as the rest of them. When there are billions of dollars at stake, regardless of your position, or what you believe your position to be, clarity is a fantasy at best. I watched Glee, which I think is pretty funny, swallowed a clove of frozen garlic – the most effective home remedy I know of – took a Tylenol PM and went to bed. I feel much better today.

Exhibit A in our demise: Jon & Kate

Several years ago, a few months after the U.S. invaded Iraq under W.’s orders, my friend John said, “You could watch television all night long and have no idea our country’s at war.” Not too long after that, my friend Julie started commenting about how chilling it seemed to her that updates from the world of reality television were tucked in among headlines announcing news that was actually newsworthy. Once I started paying attention, I couldn’t help but notice that sites like CNN and MSN were indeed doing just that: under their “news” banners were tales about people being voted out of clubs and off of islands, people getting laughed off stage, people breaking up and hooking up and making out and making off and then breaking down – crashing, really – on more of these insidious shows than I could keep organized in my mind. What if it’s intentional? my friend wondered out loud. What if this is a way to confuse and disorient people?

I didn’t contemplate those questions seriously until my television-watching bender began a year ago. Holy shit. The latest trick from this house of horrors is Chris Cuomo’s interview with Jon, of Jon & Kate Plus Eight. Chris Cuomo, who comes across as so boorishly dumb that I’m surprised Daddy hasn’t revoked his usage of the family name, sat down with Jon to get “his side of the story.” It ran between the swine flu update and the weather, and I remained on my couch with my coffee and watched. Jon’s been mistreated by his wife, and misunderstood by the media, and, as the father of twins and a set of six, his twenties went by so quickly it’s almost as if the decade was stolen from him. Kate, meanwhile, has lost some weight and has written a book that she’s been whoring on the ‘news’ shows, which seem unable to get enough of it. As someone who writes and reads and has aspirations to write a book and who knows lots of people who are extraordinarily talented writers with intelligent manuscripts languishing in the reject pile, it’s years beyond insulting and demoralizing to know that a publisher jumped at the chance to bring us her story.

Cuomo’s interview on Good Morning America, sadly, wasn’t an independent piece but a teaser for an hour-long chat with Jon on an evening news program – 20/20, I believe, the newsworthiness of which is debatable from what I’ve heard. I resist paranoia. I reject conspiracy theories quickly, and with no mercy. But when it comes to this sort of crap my resolve falters. Why do Jon & Kate have a television program in the first place? And why do the networks legitimize the show by including it in their news coverage? And why do advertisers pay for it? And, given that there are only so many minutes in each day, if a certain amount of them are dedicated to the Jon & Kate enterprise, what stories are we not hearing?

Function

I’ve been on a purging kick lately. Last week I found a case of wine, minus two or three bottles, I bought when I moved into my house seven years ago. I have an odd relationship with wine. I don’t like the taste or the smell of it, but I love the labels. I love standing in the wine aisle and selecting a bottle – or, more accurately, a label design – to bring along if I’m going to someone’s house for dinner. So, I thought seven years ago, why not have a case on hand, ready to go? That, of course, took all the fun out of it, so the box remained beneath the stairway right where I’d left it. On trash day I had some spare room in my can so I carried four bottles out on Friday morning and put them in. Then, watching the garbage man toss the bottles into his roaring truck one by one, employing the same gestures as horseshoes players, I felt guilty for not recycling. So I dug through my utensil drawer and found a corkscrew.

As best I can tell, the corkscrew is made of wood and metal. It doesn’t require electricity. It doesn’t have computer chips embedded in it, it didn’t require a manual and it’s so unobtrusive it’s survived a dozen or more moves, hidden enough to avoid the donation box but evident enough that I knew, somehow, of its existence.

Friday morning was on the cool side, the sun’s glow stretching across the floors in my house with a sharpness that seems to come only in September, when the weight of summer’s heat has been cleared out of the atmosphere. I stood at my counter, opening bottle after bottle, content in a way I haven’t been in a long while. What intrigued me the most was the fact that as my turns drove the screw down into the cork, the cork rose up and through the neck of the bottle. How, I wondered as my kitchen filled with the aroma of past-prime wine, does that work? I was simultaneously pushing down and pulling up. I would have been happy to stand there opening bottles all day, no technology, no so-called innovation, happily free of anything that could be mistakenly referred to as progress.

And now, Diane Sawyer

As I recall, the men and women on the network news programs used to be journalists. As a child, I somehow understood that the men and women on our black and white screen did a lot more than read. Perhaps my father explained this to me, perhaps my mother did. Perhaps I just understood that in the same way a child understands that rage, deceit and lust often lurk in the tiny cracks between the spoken words that chart the course of ordinary living. Or in the same way that I understood cooler mornings meant school would soon begin. I do not know.

But every time I watch network news – which I do on a daily basis, for various reasons – I am shocked and saddened by the decline. One of the main problems is that I’ve worked in PR for many years. I know the tricks, and I see them deployed constantly by people like Matt Lauer, Katie Couric and, the worst offender by far, NBC’s Brian Williams.

Which is why I am saddened by the news that Diane Sawyer will park her ass in the anchor chair at ABC in a few months. Yesterday, on Good Morning America, hostess Robin Roberts placed her hand over Sawyer’s after the two of them engaged in one of those painful I’m-really-going-to-miss-you banters, and said, “You’re my Thelma.” Jesus Christ. Diane Sawyer, daughter of a wealthy Kentucky family, former beauty queen, Hollywood bride, former Louisville ‘weather girl’ – her description, not mine – organizer of Richard Nixon’s memoirs, multi-million dollar crooner of the latest from the annals of reality television and celebrity scandal – is now going to be the face and voice of the nightly news on a major network. In fairness, Diane Sawyer was on Sixty Minutes for a while but, in equal fairness, millions of people voted for George W. Bush … twice. My point being that anything can happen. Has that woman ever uncovered a significant story? Whitney Houston notwithstanding, has she ever conducted a single interview of consequence? Do we really trust her to take a stand in defense of reporting on what really impacts the lives of ordinary people? Do we really believe there is a bottom line beneath which she will not sink, regardless of the revenue and ratings on the table? Although I hope to be proven wrong, I expect her to do exactly what journalists should not: make millions cooing sweet sentimentality while the real news remains as silent as sand. I think it’s fair to question these clowns. Given the sheer massiveness of our media in terms of people, technology and money, how on earth is it possible that 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda not that many years ago as we salivated over Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan? How did Bernie Madoff make off with billions of stolen dollars even though several complaints against him were filed with the SEC? How, with very little warning, did the entire economy crumble, much of it traceable to office towers not far from the networks’ headquarters? When did our world shift to a tilt such that reality television, celebrity marriages and divorces and talent shows trump news that actually affects people? It is impossible to understand.

I try not to dwell on it, but when my nephews are my age, their news compass will guide them not back to people like Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Max Robinson, but to the squad of glittery goons that now includes Diane Sawyer. As I said, I try not to dwell on it, but I cannot help but wonder who would get Walter Cronkite’s vote for the job, if he were still alive and if any of the network executives would even consider the opinion of someone so clearly more informed, intelligent and instinctive than them. I don’t have a vote in it any more than Walter Cronkite, but if I did, it would be cast in two words: Gwen Ifill.

Language crimes

One of the things I loathe about working as a writer is the rampant use of sloppy language. At times I’ve been reduced to tears by it. I’ve gotten better though, rehearsed my way of reacting until it’s almost natural to think, well, this is what I do for a living, this is how I buy time for myself to write grant proposals for an agency that helps elderly people, this is how I buy groceries, and if people want to assault one of the most wondrous languages in human history, they can answer for that deficit themselves. One of the clients I’m working with now, a marketing person (of course) at a huge corporation we’ve all heard of, is fond of saying, in a very shrill, urgent tone of voice, things like “Guys, guys … what I want us to do here, right, is to pivot on the audience, right, to leverage the communications rhythm.” Rather than object, or throw up, or scream, I sit here at my desk and look out the window. Overhead, a blackbird perches elegantly on the power line, its neck and head moving this way and that, its beak gleaming in the morning sunlight like a river-polished stone. The Chinese grandma who lives three doors down clanks past, pushing her shopping cart that’s overflowing with brown paper bags full of recyclables. A golden-furred cat jumps up onto my fence, where he sits still as a statue, waiting. Perhaps, I think with longing, it will rain today. It’s been a dry summer.

What the woman means is simple. Since there are already employee and customer newsletters a plenty, we should get our hands on their publishing schedules and submit articles accordingly. There is no pivoting whatsoever, and zero rhythm. But she spews forth nonsense like this because she is a senior marketing person. She earns a six-figure salary because of her “depth experience” and her strategic approach to B2B and her expertise at executing on cross-channel initiatives. “And now,” she says, her voice brimming with the kind of barely concealed excitement usually reserved for the moments just before a magic trick is performed, “I am about to start whiteboarding!”

She talks like that – and what I am sharing is but a snippet – because nobody has ever taken the time or nurtured the balls enough to tell her to shut the hell up until she has something to say. I too am guilty as charged on that front. But, her foolishness is paying my bills for half a year. I do protest, though, in my own small way. Unlike all the other PR groupies who sit in on these tedious, mind-numbing calls, I never laugh at her jokes.

The death of Ted Kennedy

Nothing has made me as ambivalent as the hoopla over the death of Ted Kennedy. Diane Sawyer purred the inevitable news on a special edition of Good Morning America. Chris Cuomo was, as always, borderline retarded, reporting – if you can call it that – from the family’s compound, his staged reverence about how darn tight knit those Kennedys are cringe worthy even by his standards. Thank God Robin Roberts was ‘on assignment’ that week. Unfortunately, George Stephanopoulos and his unique ability to combine breathy and snide, was not.

My back-and-forth goes something like this. Ted Kennedy was born a millionaire and he died a millionaire without ever having held what I’d consider a real job. Ted Kennedy took an unpopular stand against the defense of marriage nonsense and refused to get behind legislating discrimination. Ted Kennedy killed a woman and not only got away with it but did so while remaining in the U.S. Senate. Ted Kennedy was one of the few politicians who voted against Bush’s war. Ted Kennedy was a drunk. Ted Kennedy never forgot a birthday, or an anniversary or the names of your children. Ted Kennedy was waited on his entire life and never had to worry about the basics: food, shelter, clothing. “At least he didn’t spend decades in the senate passing really damaging laws,” a friend’s husband said. I agree. And yet, it seems that looking out for those born into circumstances not quite as cushy as his – which means pretty much everyone in the country – was really the least he could do.

When it comes to the rest of the family I have no ambivalence whatsoever. In all fairness it’s not really their fault. It’s the television people, as usual. Although it pains me to do so, I concede that NPR was no better. The commentary was without relent. Look at what they’ve all done, look at the causes they’ve embraced, look at what fine young humanitarians they’ve turned out to be, and they love to sail, and they love to hang out at the compound with family, and they love to go to exclusive schools and get married to the well connected and have children. “This family is all about giving,” one of the anchor monkeys said, his voice marbled with awe. All of which brings us to wonder who among them – in Diane Sawyer’s words – are the emerging leaders? According to the history books I read as a youngster, our forbearers left England hungry for freedom of – and from – religion. That turned out to be a joke, and so too, apparently, did the quest to get out from beneath a monarchy. Although I was briefly hopeful when Caroline Kennedy got laughed out of the running to replace Hillary Clinton.

On Saturday morning, morbidly curious, I turned on the funeral but by the time the friend I was going to breakfast with showed up I’d switched channels and was watching a sewing show hosted by a woman with a deformed face. I’d had enough, listening to one expensively dressed, impeccably educated spoiled brat after another speak about what a noble thing it is to look out for poor folk. Again, given the fact that they’ve been burdened with no real responsibilities, it’s kind of the least they can do. I went to breakfast, silently thankful to have missed Obama’s eulogy, during which I feared he would seize the opportunity to gleefully lick the billion-dollar ass of the family whose patriarch ‘passed the torch’ to him at the convention last summer. Torches make me uneasy. Announcing the passing of a torch assumes you’re holding one, which assumes you’ve either taken one by force or that it’s been handed to you because it’s rightfully yours. The Kennedys seem like the sort of people who would be very fond of torches, passing and receiving.

In spite of my ping-pong feelings about the senator, I sympathize with Ted Kennedy’s children. It’s no fun when your pops dies, regardless of who that man was, regardless of who nested on his family tree, regardless of the monetary value of that tree’s trunk, its leaves and its branches. I think Ted Kennedy championed the same causes I would champion if I were a senator. At the same time, to live above and beyond the law and to waltz into scenarios most people will never know, I think he traded heavily on his family name, a name whose mystique and resonance baffles me at times and infuriates me at others.