Decency on the number 15

I recently realized where my aversion to fake sentimentality originated. In 1989, I worked for a very large, very powerful organization that specializes in cancer (you’ve all heard of it). The two women I worked for, neither of whom were known for independent thinking, decided that the theme of one of the quarterly board meetings would be this: Be a Hero. There were postcards, and flyers, and there was even a theme song those of us staffing this meeting were asked to lead. The song, of course, was to follow the speech delivered by a guy who had been to the Olympics but hadn’t clenched the gold medal because he was so distracted by his sister back home in Wisconsin, who was dying of cancer. As I recall, he’d been so affected by the experience he’d written a book about it, and even though the country had not yet fallen under the spell of Oprah, I believe he’d been on a national talk show. “I’ll bet people will cry,” said the older, fatter and more authoritative of my two bosses. Her normally deadened eyes twinkled hopefully.

I have to applaud that woman for being way ahead of her time. Cast clearly into the role of hero, the past-his-prime jock stood up and spewed forth every cliché imaginable about the death of his sister and his quest for the gold. The dough-faced housewives from the suburbs of Milwaukee reached, as if by divine command, for their tissues. Even the hero paused a few times, dramatically, and with great difficulty, as if he too were on the verge of tears. Then we all broke into song and celebrated the democratization of heroism. Because that day, in the crusade against cancer, we were all heroes.

Well, here we are 20 years later. We’ve had lots of wars, shootouts, explosions, terrorist attacks, climate conferences, earthquakes, emergency landings and burning buildings. There has been no shortage of opportunities to save the day. Not long after singing about heroes, I got fired from my job (I totally deserved it, but the ratio by which I deserved it to how wrong it was for the fat cancer prevention expert who fired me to be hired in the first place is about one to 40). I actually respect the fact that she saw the train to maudlin long before it became a part of daily life, and managed to hoist her heft on board and ride it for all it was worth. At the same time, I resent her and her ilk for word hijacking. Heroes my ass.

So to end this year, I am making a point of replacing the word hero with another word, one that, for me, is much more meaningful: decent.

And the most decent thing I witnessed this year was on a Friday evening in early November. I was on my way to church, believe it or not, to meet an old friend whose husband is part of a touring Christian musical ensemble. Shortly after the bus crossed the river to the east side of Portland, an older woman who was sitting near the front stood to exit, holding one bag while using her free arm to reach for a second, which sat on the seat. Though heavily scarved, she appeared frail. A guy who I’d guess was in his early thirties stood up at the same time. He wore a black leather jacket and a dark knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He was sexy, I thought, in a risky sort of way. He would not have appeared out of place in a lineup of suspects. He offered to help the woman. She refused. He insisted. She asked where he lived. He said it didn’t matter. She said that even though she’d lived in Portland her entire life, she’d never heard of It Doesn’t Matter Street. He lifted the bag off the seat and she told him, loudly enough for all to hear, that she’d been getting her own groceries home since long before he was born. He said he didn’t doubt it and together they took very short steps toward the front exit. The old woman stepped off first, and as she was doing so the bus driver tore a transfer from the metal stand beside the steering wheel and offered it to the guy, who said thanks, but no: there was plenty of time to catch the next bus, he said, because his ticket was good until 8:30 and it was, at the time he and the old lady left the bus, only a few minutes before 7:00.

Elements of a good day

Every now and again, and against my better judgment, I attempt to fill a day with various plans with various people doing various things. Such days are arranged around several different and usually incompatible events and personalities. It may be that I am inflexible, or it may be that I am disorganized, but regardless of the cause, when one plan falls apart on a multi-tiered day it’s pretty much all over. On Christmas day each and every one of my haphazardly planned little things collapsed, causing a major structural failure that resulted in me spending the day and night on my own.

I’m almost disappointed that the hours of December 25th were not characterized by lots of dark drama – dead parents! regrets! sibling problems! concessions of failure in the arena of love! It’s more fun, somehow, writing about such topics. Instead, I baked brownies, made several phone calls, listened to lots of Christmas music, watched a couple of movies and ate a roasted chicken. As if high, which I was not, I watched the light throughout the day, checking on it from every angle possible as if it were a work in progress, a personal project. It was at once subdued and brilliant.

Oddly enough, and much to my surprise, it was one of the best Christmases I’ve had in a good long while, which, of course, makes me wonder if I’m missing something. I am not sure why Christmas has become such a bummer. I know people, perfectly reasonable people, I think, who spend the two months before the holiday dreading it and the two months following it giving thanks for its passing.

There are lots of reasons to hate Christmas. I think all of us – myself included – have invested a bit too heavily in Norman Rockwell images. Oh, the beauty of gathering around the family table, all smiles and clean faces and beautiful manners, Pa skillfully, joyfully carving a turkey, or a roast beef, Ma beaming proudly at her man across their sea of children and elderly relatives, all so happy and grateful for the good fortune life has sent their way. You can almost hear the laughter, just gazing into those paintings. Those images belong in the recycling barrels that are picked up with the garbage on Fridays in my neighborhood. When those paintings were being done, where were the gay uncles? Where were the children who had never met their father? Where was the cousin who was obviously, visibly, battling a terrible addiction of one sort or another? Well, they were off somewhere else, at home alone, perhaps, or at some other less picturesque gathering, feeling badly about themselves, wondering how and where and why they’d gone wrong. I think openly scoffing at anything Norman Rockwell-esque – existing or aspired to – has been an important step for me in the process of wiping the Christmas slate clean and starting over. That might explain why I enjoyed Friday so much this year. Any day, especially Christmas day, I’ll take my own company, along with the openness to something spontaneous, over dinner with the conformists. It’s no wonder people hate the holidays: spending time with loved ones who strive to secure a spot in the painting is indeed painful.

Children, of course, are more of an issue than usual at Christmas time. People who have children feel that they are expecting too much of the rest of their family or expecting too little. People who don’t have children seem to feel that they’ve failed by not issuing forth an offspring or two, or that they’re on the short end of the receiving stick at the expense of those who have bred, who often times, as many of us know, simply warrant more not only in their own minds, but in the minds of many others. Last week, one of the local call-in radio shows spent hours dissecting the meaning of Christmas. One of the guests explained that he and his wife had waited many years to have children, and that it wasn’t until they did that they became a legitimate piece of the family’s Christmas puzzle. Another guest, an elderly woman, said that she learned years ago to not expect to be included in her family’s Christmas festivities because she and her husband never had children (the fact that there was no outrage expressed over this was more disturbing to me than the statement itself). My own parents, in the later, childless years of their marriage, willingly delayed their own Christmas until the 26th, which was when one of my sisters would swoop into town with her husband and their two hopelessly spoiled daughters. Regardless of who was telling the story last week, what everyone kept coming back to is that Christmas is for children. I could not disagree more. Saying Christmas is for children isn’t just lazy. I think it’s selfish when it’s regurgitated by parents of little ones, who come receiving gifts, certain of their place at the head of every table they grace with their presence. Personally, I think Christmas should be for the old ladies, without whom none of us would even be here.

Finally, one of the things that made this Christmas nice was that there were very few gifts. I have tons to say about that, as you may imagine, but I’ll limit myself to one observation: the mood of our nation is measured by how much we spend in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Last year at this time it was hard to celebrate anything because sales were down; this year, the stores made more money selling more poorly constructed shit to more people than they’d expected, so we have permission to be happy. That’s pathetic. Of all the people I know – myself included – I cannot think of one who really wants more stuff. Most everyone I know, again, myself included, is discarding, and aggressively so. Why buy more? I went to a mall a few weeks ago, and I was so shocked by the absolute absence of joy that I am more convinced than ever that making a donation to a good cause in lieu of gifts is the way to go. And speaking of gifts, I was thinking about them on Friday. For all the significance gift giving carries, I do not recall a single Christmas present from my childhood. We got them, certainly, and my parents and grandparents put a great deal of care into them, but they’re not what I remember. What I remember is the house smelling like our Christmas tree and being mesmerized by the lights, the glow of which somehow altered the dimensions of the room in which it stood. Lucky me.

Merry Christmas

There was nothing special about the cards, nothing particularly holiday-ish. In fact, the cards themselves were quite plain. They were relatively small and, with the exception of the texture of the paper, free of design. I came across them one morning in early June when I was downtown killing time before going to meet a couple of friends for lunch. In what was once a drugstore from the age when they were grand, there is now a discount department store, a place with all the charm of an outlet mall, right there in the heart of downtown Portland. I’d never ventured into the odds and ends section until that morning. And there I found my Christmas cards, tucked in among the desk calendars with daily Jesus quotes (already half obsolete, considering it was then June) and Post-it notes adorned with unicorn images. The cards were packaged in topless boxes, tied with a lacy bow and shrink wrapped in plastic. According to the label on the back, they were made of recycled athletic socks from India. For less than $10, I bought three boxes: one white, one pink and one blue.

I’d forgotten about the pen until I found it a few weeks ago. Last December, I took the train to Los Angeles, which took nearly two days due to delays. In Eugene, just south of Portland, a very drunk old lady stumbled on with lots of packages and crashed down into the seat beside me. “If I would have walked I’d already be there!” she said to me just before conking out. It was 2:30 in the morning and, as the local Fox affiliate likes to say, we were just getting started. A day later she got off the train near Oakland, where she was going to catch a shuttle bus across the bay to spend Christmas with her son and her grandchildren (her son’s wife was in jail for embezzlement, so she wouldn’t be joining the festivities, which was fine with my seat mate). I carried her packages down the train’s ridiculously tight stairwell and we wished each other a happy holiday on the platform. Somewhere between Oakland and San Luis Obispo I found the pen, lying on the floor in front of my seat. I picked it up and put it in my bag. It is a very nice pen, sort of a hybrid between a felt tip and a ball point. It has a nice glide to it, but it’s sharp enough that you can easily dot the i’s and cross the t’s. The pen, I discovered a few weeks ago, goes quite well with the texture of the socks turned into cards.

I also discovered that I enjoy writing holiday cards, something I haven’t done in years. Christmas cards were serious business when I was growing up. My mother wrote everyone a note, not a long note, but one that said a thing or two. We hung up all the cards that came to the house, and when they came down they were tied up with twine and put into a box. They’re interesting to read, I think, even though many of them are signed with names I don’t recognize. Old neighbors, college friends, former colleagues. I can’t articulate this as exactly as I’d like to, but those cards were written in a language that is at once more flip and more sincere than what we’ve become accustomed to. They used words differently, I think.

My job at the holidays was to put the stamps on the envelopes before they were mailed. My mother was a stamp Nazi – she collected them, and she had no problem expressing the fact that she was appalled at the crappy selection usually available at P.O. 63119 – and I am here to confess something: I am just as bad. God, the postage stamps in this country are a national disgrace. Flags? Eagles? The Simpsons? Are people really going to want to collect and save that crap to commemorate our history? This year, for the holidays, we have snowmen, a menorah and something to do with Kwanza. Everywhere I go in Portland there is fantastic artwork on display, in coffee shops, at the airport, in galleries and on bathroom walls, and yet our stamps seem to become more and more visually abysmal every year. I think we should spend some stimulus money to stimulate the stamp situation. I think Obama should appoint a stamp czar – he likes czars, because they don’t have to go through congressional hearings. I’ve heard you can buy stamps online, but that, for me, takes a key part of the Christmas card ritual away. (I did check the stamps online, and it’s equally pathetic, I think).

Anyhow, here’s what I settled on. I went to what is now the main post office in downtown Portland but l left after a woman showed me what was available. I went to another post office, which is not, for some reason, listed if you do an Internet search but that I’ve ridden past on a bus many times. The selection at that post office wasn’t anything to get excited about, but I did find something I could live with: larger black-and-white portraits of various U.S. Supreme Court justices. Not exactly Christmasy, but at least they look nice, and I think everyone’s Christmas cards could use a little judgment, just to get warmed up for dinner with the family.

Let's make a deal

For the past couple weeks I’ve been so preoccupied with the Christmas tree, the shopping, the lights and the gift wrapping that I almost forgot to pay any attention to the marathon poker match dressed up as healthcare reform being played in Washington. Long ago, I gave up regarding politicians as anything other than pathological liars, but even I am disheartened by the circus that took place over the weekend as I sat at home, enjoying the candles and Dolly Parton’s Christmas CD. To Harry Reid’s credit, he told reporters that the unsavory deals made to pass the Senate bill were not unprecedented. “This is how legislation happens,” he mewed on Monday morning in response to the word bombs hurled by Republicans, who were outraged at the special deals even though the very people shouting have been on the receiving end of such deals themselves, many times. The Democrats, after all, are in no danger of being accused of doing anything original, including sleaze.

And when it comes to mastering sleaze, I can think of no better teacher than Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, a “moderate Democrat” from a state that consistently lands near the top of the list when it comes to things like poverty, adult illiteracy and chronic disease. No matter, though: she has been one of the most vocal opponents of the public option part of healthcare reform, claiming that she’s concerned that people will confuse the concept of a public option with free healthcare. That’s a great way to show your stripes, so to speak, and prove that you’re no bleeding heart when it comes to people on welfare or immigrants. But it wasn't until it came time to vote over the weekend that the senator stopped fueling the flames against reforming healthcare in the spirit of fiscal responsibility. Instead, Mary Landrieu gladly accepted $100 million in free, public Medicaid funding for her constituents in exchange for her ‘yes’ vote. For the sake of contrast, the two senators who represent my state have supported – sort of – the public option from the beginning. And as a result, Oregon didn’t receive any of the newsworthy bribes over the weekend, so when the healthcare reform effort disintegrates in earnest as election season rolls around, the two senators from my state will likely be smeared for supporting socialist legislation and perhaps be replaced by a more business-minded Republican or "moderate Democrat."

Mary Landrieu, on the other hand, should have no problem being reelected, and there, I think, is the lesson. She managed to soothe the rattled nerves of the insurance industry by seeing to it that it doesn't have to endure any real competition while at the same time throwing a considerable amount of free cash – a public option if ever I’ve seen one – at the poor folks she's exploited shamelessly for her own purposes, standing, throughout the entire process, for nothing at all except herself.

Sometime today

… Winter officially begins. According to the Portland news, the season begins at 9:47 this morning, but according to a Seattle television station’s Web site, which draws on information from the U.S. Navy, Winter begins this evening at 11:02. I’m not sure if it should be called Winter 2009, or Winter 2010, or Winter 2009-2010, which sounds kind of clunky. At any rate, Winter, for me, calls for endless layers of clothing, thick socks and slippers, oatmeal for breakfast, cinnamon tea in the afternoons, soups and stews galore and lots of white lights and white candles, powered up earlier and earlier in the afternoon as we creep toward the most night-like day of the year, which I believe is today. I used to dread the descent into darkness but over the past several years I’ve come to really enjoy it.

In praise of the off button

I wanted to write about holiday cards today, but I saw two things on the morning news that caught my attention.

The first is that a financial company is offering a credit card to customers considered high risk that carries a 79 percent – I am not kidding – interest rate. They want to extend credit, God bless their generous souls, to those who would otherwise not have it. And thanks to the compromises our elected officials are willing and ready to make as long as there’s enough money at stake, this company is operating within the law, which states that new regulations don’t have to be adhered to until February. This is exactly the sort of shit that makes my undies steam every time I see and hear Barney Frank spewing his carefully crafted indignation. He chairs the oversight committee, the committee that supposedly keeps an eye on the money, and when things get outrageous enough he and his cronies hold hearings and yell at the bankers. Their hearings are entertaining, to be sure, but if this is an example of oversight, I’d hate to see what lax looks like.

But enough about interest rates: thanks to the recession, the children are stressed out this holiday season because they’re not getting as many gifts as they have in years past, and the gifts themselves, well, they’re not quite as lavish as we’d all hoped. So one of these life coach types came on the local morning news to offer some advice to concerned parents. Don’t focus on the negative, she advised. Focus on what you have, rather than what you don’t have because of what you cannot afford. Focus on the fact that you’re together, and while you’re at it start a few new traditions of your own, memories of which your children will cherish for many years to come. The coaches usually make me nervous. I’ve met very few of them who do not appear to relish playing the role of guru, but this woman seemed okay. Especially toward the end of her interview, when she pointed out that if children aren’t inundated with images of expensive toys and electronic gadgets, they’re not as aware of what they’re missing, materially speaking. And one sure way to work toward that state of blissful ignorance, she pointed out, on the morning news no less, is to watch as little television as possible.

Money control

For a year now I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about economics. I’ve read lots of magazine articles and a few books and I’ve watched way too much television. Unlike Obama, if the last year were an economics class and I had to give myself a grade, I wouldn’t feel comfortable blaming W. and would therefore have to settle for a high D or a low C. Unlike Time magazine, which coroneted Ben Bernanke its person of the year this week, I still do not have a grasp on what the Federal Reserve actually does, or where it gets the power required to do it. I do not comprehend the particulars of our debt to China, how it happened or what it portends. Some say we’re owned by China, most others say nothing. And even though the company that owns my house has changed four times in seven years, I have no idea how or why mortgages are traded, or sold, or swapped or stolen.

Of all the things I’ve wondered about over the past year, the one aspect of the economy that puzzles me most is the business of credit scores and the bureaus that assign them. As I understand it, a credit score is determined by a credit bureau based on a number of factors gleaned from a person’s transactional DNA. Not surprisingly, things like loan payments are taken into consideration, as are a person’s track record when it comes to paying other bills on time, or not, a person’s income and the amount of debt carried. All those factors lead to a credit score, which is used to determine how much money a person can borrow, and under what terms, when the person decides, for example, to buy a house. Applicants to one of the largest employers in Oregon, by the way, must agree to having a credit report run on them as part of the hiring process, which strikes me as particularly heinous.

I understand, in terms that are loud and clear, that before a bank issues a loan, the bank wants to know if it’s a wise bet or not based on the applicant’s history of managing the money. That’s about where my understanding ends.

First of all, who exactly is in charge of these credit bureaus? Are they appointed or have they just wedged themselves into the control booth? By whom are they authorized to grade everyone? In a way that I think is sinister, the credit bureaus are mentioned frequently on the news, but I’ve yet to see a face, or a shot of an office building. Even the most shadowy of figures have been on the television this year, but the credit bureaus remain abstract. Not that they usually do any good, but is there any kind of oversight committee that monitors their activities? My economics education, obviously, is a work in progress.

My main question for the credit bureaus, though, is this: How is it possibly legal that cancelling a credit card lowers the holder’s credit score? To me, that makes about as much sense as returning a loaf of bread to the grocery because it’s turned out that it was moldy when you bought it, only to find that you’ll now pay considerably more for bread at every supermarket in town. I experienced this trick firsthand when I bought my house in 2002. My credit score was pretty good – I’ve never bounced a check, or gotten into the habit of paying bills late or defaulted on a loan – but lower than I’d expected. That’s because in 1997 I cancelled one of my credit cards because I saw no reason to pay an annual fee on the first when I’d been offered a second that didn’t charge one. I was uninformed enough at that time to think that the fewer credit cards you have, the better. The fact that the exact opposite is true baffled me then, and it baffles me now.

When people show restraint with their credit cards, and they’re punished for that by the almighty credit score posse, who profits by being given the green light to, among other things, charge dramatically higher interest rates and deny perfectly reasonable loan applications from people whose taxes bailed out the very company to which they’re now applying for a loan to remain solvent? Not me, and probably not you either. Call me paranoid, but I find it hard to believe that the scorers and the card companies are not somehow connected. Just the other night, it came on the news that some of the major card companies are raising their rates, which, thanks to the U.S. Congress, they have until February to do. A woman was interviewed who had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a lower rate with the company she’d had an account with for many years. Her solution, logically, I think, was to cancel the card. The reporter closed with a dire, grim-faced warning about how that would not be good for her credit score, to which Katie Couric said, somewhat nervously, “Yes, well, Merry Christmas.” For the bankers stampeding the trough of public assistance, I imagine it will be merry indeed.

Location, please

For the most part, being able to search for information on pretty much any person, place or thing on the Internet is quite handy. Not that long ago, when I first acquainted myself with the Internet, I thought of it as an endless library that gets exponentially larger with each and every click. For various reasons, I love reading neighborhood news on sites that originate in places like Bakersfield, California or Macon, Georgia, places I’ll probably never visit, at least not in person. I enjoy reading about sublets all over the world, and looking at collections of old photographs under the stewardship of libraries in places as far flung as Prague and Uruguay. It is fun, I must admit, to sit at my desk with a cup of coffee and read the morning news from Australia.

When I do it in moderation, I do enjoy clicking my way around the world on the Internet. It’s when I’m actually looking for something that I run into trouble.

Food is a sore spot for me. At some point, many cafes and restaurants in Portland stopped including their street address in their newspaper ads, fliers and billboards. My knowledge about advertising may be outdated, but as I recall ad space is charged based on the dimension of the ad, not the word count. And the address-free ads I’ve seen aren’t lacking for open space. Maybe it’s just a medal of cool to skip the physical location – ‘bricks and mortar,’ as they say. Or maybe the marketing people with search engine expertise do it on purpose, to ‘drive traffic’ to their client’s Web site so that they can brag about the increase in visitors during their quarterly review. Or maybe the number of visitors to a site determines how much they can charge companies that advertise on their site. Or, this being Portland, maybe they’re just kind of sloppy. I don’t really know, and I don’t care: if a place I’d like to go to to spend my money doesn’t list its location, my money ends up in another company’s till. I am an unapologetic cash fascist.

The search engines themselves are often pretty spotty. One day I met a friend for lunch and discovered that the address for the restaurant listed at the top of the results page was off, way off, not by a couple of digits but by 10 blocks. At the restaurant I told the guy who poured us coffee about it. He said he’d e-mailed the search engine company at least 20 times and had yet to receive a response – or a corrected listing. The maps spit up by the search engines, I’ve learned, are hopeless. And when I finally decided to buy a new refrigerator, the most annoying part of the process was not getting the old one hauled away but horsing around with the Internet in my unsuccessful attempt to buy from a local business. I entered ‘refrigerator sales Portland OR’ and with that the search was off and running, pretty much everywhere except for Portland OR. Listing after listing directed me to businesses with six-digit addresses in towns like Canby, Molalla and Forest Grove. Portland’s a fairly large town, but apparently there’s not much going on in terms of appliances. Still, I called one of the listings just for fun, and found that it wasn’t an appliance store at all but an appliance brokerage of sorts, a place that collects information on ‘your preferences,’ which, of course, includes your e-mail address, and then refers you to a dealer accordingly. I went to Home Depot – to the store, the one with a parking lot out front and sparrows flying about the rafters – where I selected, paid for and scheduled the delivery of my new refrigerator, which included the removal of the old one, in under an hour.

But as fraught with sloppy trickery as the Internet can be, I must admit that I’m sometimes pleasantly surprised at how responsive it is. Last week, for example, I was going to meet a friend at a restaurant I’d been to before but the exact location of which I couldn’t recall. So I looked it up, and discovered that its address is not listed on the main page, or the contact link but on the restaurant’s blog. So, in the spirit of technology as a conversation, I wrote a comment: “Kindly list your STREET address on the front page of your Web site. I will read the menu when I get there.” And lo and behold, within 24 hours, they did just that. For those of you in Portland, I’ll spare you the name of the restaurant, but its address is 555 N.W. 12th Avenue.

Tough talk for fat cats

Well, I did make an honest and sincere effort to watch Oprah Winfrey’s special on Sunday night in its entirety, but I couldn’t take it so I turned the television off about 25 minutes into the program. I really don’t want to go into too much detail about my feelings toward Oprah, because this blog would be three days long, and she’s simply not worth it. Of the two things I’m proudest of in my life, not watching any of her programs in their entirety is one of them. She’s the dean, if you will, of the self-obsession movement and in my opinion she’s insufferable.

Anyhow, she waddled into the oval office at 10 PM Pacific and the next 25 minutes was some of the oddest television I’ve seen in a while. I have no idea what the back story is, and I don’t really care, although I have a few friends who I am sure will fill me in, but there is something painfully awkward about the Obamas and Oprah. I don’t know if she thinks she should be president herself, or if B. Obama knows that she thinks she should be president and therefore feels threatened by her, or if M. Obama thinks O. is out for her husband, or if she’s aware that O. is the first lady of the people, M. Obama’s title be damned, or maybe O. was expecting her campaign contributions to be rewarded with an appointment of some sort (can you just imagine?). Or maybe it has something to do with the dog. Am I the only one who cringes a little bit every time the dog is mentioned? Seriously, it was amusing, sort of, for the first couple of days, but on Sunday evening, as is often the case, the dog is used as a filler, a segue. In 25 minutes of uncomfortable stiffness, the attempt at spontaneous doggy banter between Oprah and Michelle Obama stole the show. Both women sort of shifted into a black dialect, as if it were funny somehow, as if that was the signal that they were being real. I was embarrassed for both of them.

The weirdest part of Sunday night was the president himself. I’ve been slacking a bit on the news lately, so I had no idea that he was meeting with some of the money people on Monday. On 60 Minutes, he told Steve Kroft that he didn’t run for office to look after the Wall Street fat cats. He was equally outspoken with Oprah. The president’s refrain, of course, is beyond familiar: The tax payers have bailed out the banks and now they’re giving themselves huge bonuses while the rest of the country lingers in a recession and that’s just not okay. We must do something.

Good luck on that. The first commercial on the Oprah special, believe it or not, was for Bank of America, which was touting its plan to “invest” more than a trillion dollars over the next 10 years in communities that will benefit from financial assistance. The second commercial was for a pharmaceutical company.

I do not understand how Obama or any of them can talk tough about the banking class and expect anyone to take them seriously, given what’s happened in the past year. And apparently I’m not alone in that sentiment. By daybreak on Monday morning, the testicles on Pennsylvania Avenue had shrank back down to human size, at least for David Axelrod, who went on Good Morning America to talk about Obama’s upcoming meetings with the bankers, using different verbs than the ones used on Sunday night, softer, easier verbs such as “suggest” and “recommend.” In a country where money apparently has more power than the army, I’m actually afraid of what would happen if someone did really tell the bankers what they may and may not do with public assistance funding, so I was relieved at what a difference eight or nine hours can make.

Dissection of a perfect 30 minutes

I didn’t realize the true beauty of the brief time until it had passed, and I’ve concluded over the last couple of days that the key ingredient to what I know as happiness is being completely unaware of the fact that the meter is indeed running. The time I most clearly recall this happening was the afternoon I floated down a river in southern Oregon. It was years ago, during the summer, and I recall leaning back and looking up at the enormous blue sky, faintly veined with streaks of flimsy clouds. I remember being shocked my feet were by how cold the deep jade colored water was. I remember riding back to Portland that evening and realizing that during the many hours I’d spent on the river, I had not once contemplated what I should have done the day before, or what I should have been doing during those hours I spent in the water, or even what I needed to do that evening, the next day or the next week. I’d been lobotomized, gloriously so, and without even knowing it, of my inner clock, my schedule.

It’s been unusually cold in Portland this week. I had plans to meet a former colleague on Tuesday evening for a happy hour at a bitchy restaurant on the outskirts of downtown in an insufferably precious neighborhood called the Pearl District. The temperature never made it out of the 20s on Tuesday, and it was forecasted to dip down into the high teens with nightfall, which happens at around 4:30 this time of year. I spent most of Tuesday dreading going to meet this woman, who I’d offered to help with her resume. I checked the bus schedule. I looked the restaurant up on the Internet to get the address. I looked in my wallet and realized I was running low on cash. I kept hitting ‘send/receive’ on my e-mail, hoping for a message from her apologizing for the inconvenience she was doubtlessly causing by rescheduling. The message didn’t arrive, so I wrapped myself up and left the house at a few minutes after four, even though I wanted nothing more than to spend the evening with my soup and candles and the evening news. I did not want to go.

Hot chocolate is one of those things that almost never occurs to me. I like it sweet, but only slightly so. There is a perfect pitch that hot chocolate sometimes achieves, and while I cannot describe it, I know it when I taste it – or don’t. On Tuesday evening I arrived at the restaurant early, as I often do, and when I realized I had a half an hour to spare I went outside and noticed a coffee shop a block down the street. I grabbed one of the free newspapers and ordered a large cup of hot chocolate and a fudge brownie and for the next 27 or 28 minutes I cannot tell you, really, what I thought about because, quite simply, I didn’t think about anything. I sat at a round table in front of a big window. The two women behind the counter talked about which stores have the best deals on Christmas ornaments. What appeared to be hundreds of chandeliers blazed brightly in a storefront across the street. The whipped cream on top was cold, but not menacingly so. The bottom layer of it melded with the hot liquid beneath it. The chocolate sprinkles on top reminded me, briefly, of mouse turds. The traffic hummed by, a blur of tail lights from where I sat. The brownie was slightly warmed and spongy, but it was also crunchy, sort of, a little. A few people left and a few people arrived, and each time the door opened and closed I felt enveloped in a sheathe of cold, each molecule of which evaporated quickly, replaced by tiny fragments of warmth that expanded rapidly like tiny cells multiplying beneath a microscope. I wasn’t uncomfortably full, but I was no longer hungry either (I skipped lunch on Tuesday for some reason). I realized that if I’d finished a large mug of hot chocolate and eaten a brownie, it was probably time to go, so I did, and it wasn’t until I was outside on the sidewalk headed for the restaurant that I noticed the newspaper, sitting on the table right where I’d put it, unread.

Pizza prophets

The memorializing of the four police officers fatally shot in Lakewood, Washington is simply too tempting for me to pass up. Early one morning, the four officers were in a coffee shop preparing for their shift when a man walked in and killed them. The killer was hit by a bullet, but he escaped and kept most of the police in the Seattle on edge for more than 24 hours. The killer was ultimately cornered by an officer, who shot him to death. It turns out the killer, who is not white, had been paroled from prison in Arkansas. The governor of Washington wasted no time announcing that parolees from Arkansas are no longer welcome in her state. The former governor of Arkansas wasted no time telling the governor of Washington that she ought to familiarize herself with the facts before assigning blame via national television.

And with that, it began.

It’s very difficult to write about the police. I think some of them live right down to the worst stereotypes, but I feel the same way about lots of attorneys, and reverends, and politicians. I often feel the same way about myself. It’s fun to criticize the police, but when something goes wrong they cannot arrive quickly enough. I don’t know many cops, because I’m not that crazy about authority, and I really do not like being around guns, but I would guess that many of them are wonderful people who do genuinely want to protect the citizens of the communities where they work. I also think that some of them are thugs. I’ve met a couple of CEOs who are thugs as well.

But in this story, as is often the case, the subject of it ceased being the subject as it was eclipsed at a breathtaking speed by people rushing to forge an emotional link between the people in the story – in this case, the killed officers’ families – and themselves. It’s a deadly strain of narcissism, I think, one that repeats over and over again, every time a child turns up missing, every time a soldier comes home in a box, every time the third grade classroom’s pet hamsters are carried from the burning school house by the firefighters. There are lots of hugs, and lots of tears, and lots of people proclaiming to now understand, thank the dear lord, what’s really important. In Washington, 20,000 people showed up – many of them law enforcement types from all corners of the U.S. and Canada – to watch the vehicles carrying the bodies pass by on the procession route. People were so moved they couldn’t speak. Since they couldn’t speak, many of them cried, and many of them left – as they always do – a lot of plastic crap in front of the coffee shop where the cops were killed as a “makeshift memorial.”

Over and over again, I kept hearing the phrase “our finest.” We’ve lost four of our finest. Four of our finest selflessly gave their lives in the line of duty. This horrific crime cost us four of our finest, which makes it even more difficult. Since when are police officers automatically considered our finest? That’s just code talk, I think, kind of like we do when we’re speaking of people in the military.

As the frothy sentimentality cycloned inside of itself, I waited patiently for the marketing people to get involved, and I did not have to wait long. On Tuesday a very popular pizza business decided all its Washington stores would donate profits to the families of the fallen, which, I presume, will also receive financial support in the form of pensions and insurance settlements. The status updates on Facebook were, of course, posted at fever pitch. Isn’t this company great? My boss ordered pizza for all of us, it was touching. I got a little misty in the lunchroom, watching the procession.

Please, stop it.

The pizza company is out to make money, which is why it’s a corporation and not a non-profit food pantry. Someone at the pizza company picked up on the fake emotions buzzing around in the aftermath of the shootings and decided it would be foolish to not get in on the act. Since they’re so smart and so strategic, they even leveraged social media outlets to get the message out because, ah shucks, they care about the community. I fully expect to see something about it on the news, perhaps a clip of some executive tearing up about how this hits close to him, and it’s the least they can do, and all the rest of it. In the world of PR, that’s called resonating with your target demographic, or demonstrating good corporate citizenship. I call it selling. I believe in selling and I understand its importance. What appalls me is the fact that working the violin strings in a way that’s not even clever can infect people so quickly, so thoroughly. Because long after flag folding and gun salutes – ironic, ain’t it? – long after the plight of the families the four killed officers left behind is superseded by some story that’s even more worthy of Hallmark, lots of people in Washington will recall fondly the fact that the pizza company was right there with them during their hour of need, which, in spite of their best effort, wasn’t really theirs at all.

Scaredville

I cannot figure out if my fears are a symptom of aging or a result of watching too much television. I worry about trees falling on top of the house and traffic signals crashing down in the middle of an intersection as I walk through. I worry about falling as I climb out of the shower and I worry about falling out of my bed, which is two feet – at most – off the ground. What if I get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and, being only half awake, get disoriented and trip over something on my way back to bed and break my neck or my ankle? What then? What if I come down with the swine flu and die a prolonged and agonizing death because my brain gets so fried on the virus that I’m unable to make a phone call? What if I have sleep apnea? What if I suffer an aneurism – one of my grandfathers died from one – and my head explodes while I’m putting away the dishes? Last week I got really dizzy every time I turned over in bed. I was just about to call the doctor when I woke up with a start and realized I’d been having a dream about being dizzy. But why did I wake up so suddenly? Was there a noise? Was someone prowling around outside my window? Or did I wake up because I couldn’t breathe? It’s endless around here.

I come up with plenty to worry about on my own, and the television does not help. The food may be contaminated, tap water may be hazardous to our health, the Internet is a gigantic disaster waiting to happen. It’s gotten unusually cold in Portland this week, and the news people are all over it, issuing dire warnings about when you should rush to the emergency room in case you or your children are frostbitten, what you need to do to make sure your wood stove or fireplace doesn’t burn the house down and kill your family in the process and, while we’re on the subject of calamities, we should all be very, very nervous about the pipes bursting.

I am.

A lot of the fear I see and hear is focused on children. The toy hamsters are toxic. The side of the crib is going to kill the baby, as will the baby hammock. And the car seats, man, the car seats. I’d love to know who does the lobbying for the car seat manufacturers, because they have done an excellent job. According to one of my more authoritative relations, it’s illegal to not use a car seat if your child is under a certain weight or age. Every car commercial I see talks about new and improved safety features, and yet it’s now a law to buy something that wasn’t even heard of that long ago. I have three brothers and two sisters, and when we were growing up, not only did we not use car seats, we didn’t even use seatbelts, nor did our parents, who usually sat up front when we went out. Sometimes we even hung out the window, and if our father was in a really good mood he’d let us ride in the trunk, our legs dangling out over the rear bumper like we were country music stars. Believe it or not, sometimes my parents drank beer in the car, while they were driving, with children.

And yet here we all are, in our 30s, 40s and 50s, still managing for the most part. We’ve survived, but some of us have adapted to modern times more readily than others. Not long ago, relatively speaking, one of my nephews was learning how to ride a bike. He put on his helmet and his mother snapped it for him. Being the son of two unusually hype-prone parents, he looked up at me and said, with a very genuine smile on his face, “Safety first.” My dead mother turned over in her urn, and as far away as Oregon, the windows trembled. Safety first. Isn’t that sad? Like most everything, my nephew’s statement gave me something to worry about. When people get physically injured, they often recover, but what’s the prognosis for toddlers who, thanks to their parents’ aversion to critical thinking, repeat mindless slogans that wring childhood dry of any sense of adventure or spontaneity? More so than broken plumbing and broken bones, that’s something that really scares me.

Don't mess with 'em

I don’t like violence. I don’t like getting hit, or punched or kicked. I do not like pain – mine or others – that underlies bruises, or torn flesh, broken bones or blood where it’s not supposed to be. My disdain for violence has political underpinnings, or it’s evolved along those lines. It seems to me there are hundreds of better ways than brute force to resolve differences, regardless of whether those differences occur between the thuggiest of street gangs or the world’s most powerful nations. But what I really don’t like about violence is far more personal. I do not like getting beat up. It’s not fun. In nearly every way imaginable, it does not feel good.

I got beat up as a child on the playground, in the locker room and, once, in a field that meandered between two of the major roads in the town where I grew up. I haven’t been to see a therapist about those incidents, so I have no idea if I’m psychologically damaged or can lay claim to post-traumatic stress disorder (I don’t believe I can, nor do I want to) but I do know that my guard goes up when I find myself amidst relatively young men charged up about something bigger than themselves and in no way related to their well being.

In Saint Louis, the years when the Cardinals made it to the playoffs fights erupted throughout the city. And when the Cardinals made it to the World Series, buses – city buses, big ones – were turned over on their sides and set on fire. In Madison, Wisconsin, where I lived for a few years, packs of frat boys would prowl up and down State Street after football games, beating people up. One of the scariest moments of my life was on a train in London. A football match was underway, so the guy who announced the trains decided to use the P.A. system to recite his team’s chants, over and over and over again, each time more menacing than before. For what seemed an eternity – although it couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes – the entire station had the vibe of a stadium about to disintegrate into the chaos of violence. Somehow, the faces all became faceless, the thoughtful elements of them replaced by something automatic and, I thought, deadly.

On Friday morning I was listening to one of the local radio programs. The station was sponsoring a drive to raise money for military families. That’s nice, I thought, not at all sarcastically. If money is being raised to help people in need, I think that’s great. Unfortunately, my mind was changed very quickly, so quickly that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t start letting at least 24 hours pass between the time I see or hear something and the time I form an opinion. The mayor of Vancouver was on, saying that he thought a lot of people talk a good game when it comes to the military, and now that it’s time to make a donation, they need to put their money where their mouths are. Good for him, I thought. I do think there’s a lot of fake support for military people – the flag lapels worn by members of the U.S. Congress, for example. I’d like to see who would actually give money or other forms of support once the ceremonies are over and the news cameras are on to the next spectacle. But then the mayor started talking about the reservists who were answering the phones for the drive, and he said, without any prompting that I heard, “They’re back there, and oh boy, you better not mess with ‘em.”

How in the hell did we go from raising money for families that are having a rough time to “messing with ‘em” in about three seconds? I was truly disgusted by the mayor’s comment, but it left me with more questions than answers. Are young men in groups, especially in uniform, whether athletic or military or business, inherently violent? Or do we expect them to be, and secretly want them to be, as an extension of our own lust for a good fight? Did the mayor inject violence into his bantering because he gets off on it? Or did he just figure that, well, when in Rome. I have no idea, of course, but his comment left me even less inclined to make a donation than I’d already been, which was an accomplishment of sorts.

Friday nights with Jim

Well, the social media, cross-channel marketing flunkies have gotten their idle hands and minds on what I think is the best, if not only, regular news program on television, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. The program comes on at 7 in Portland, and on Friday evening I tuned in, as I often do. I’m no journalism expert, so I’m not sure if my admiration for Jim Lehrer is based on the fact that he and his group are really good, or if it’s more about the fact that the others are truly awful. Either way, the program has somehow managed to resist the cheap tricks we’ve all come to expect. The boy in the balloon over Colorado was barely mentioned, for example, and even when it was the focus was on how quickly the media had fallen for a complete and utter publicity stunt. And on the day Michael Jackson died, Jim Lehrer dedicated less than a minute to the story, and that minute came exactly where it belonged – at the end of the newscast. On The New Hour with Jim Lehrer, there were no tears over Michael Jackson, there were no flowers.

I suppose the highest compliment I can pay Jim Lehrer is this: I would not want to be interviewed by him. He doesn’t fluff around with people or giggle or ask after the wife and the children (at least not on camera). He has a way of gazing at the people he’s interviewing that would easily render me useless. I think it’s the way a father looks at one of his sons after listening to a particularly trumped up account of how the car was dented in the middle of the night. In fact, Jim Lehrer’s face is kind of scary: there is something about the structure of his mouth that makes me think he’s smiling when in fact he is not, when in fact the process of him shifting into a smile is so awkwardly noticeable that for a split second it seems something has gone terribly wrong. I like the way Jim Lehrer speaks. When he sets up the top story, he says “Judy Woodruff has our lead story report,” even though ‘lead story’ or ‘report’ would suffice. He says the word ‘killed’ like he means it, and when someone important is coming on – and someone important is always coming on – he introduces the segment by saying what the subject will be, and then adding, always, “among other things.”

On Friday, I watched Jim Lehrer introduce the changes being made to his program and wondered, as I often do, what he might have to say about it at the breakfast table. The jist of the changes, as best I can tell, go something like this: the name of the program is being changed from The News Hour with Jim Lehrer to The PBS News Hour. At the same time, the Web site is being enhanced and brought into closer alignment with the broadcast. There will be graphics, and there will be videos. Along with, of course, Facebook, and Twitter and blogs.

Pardon my language, but after hearing that bunch of non information, all I could wonder was, who gives a shit? As usual, I thought, the marketing people have managed to turn their lame attempt at relevance into a news story – literally, in this case. I shudder to think at the amount of time and money that was wasted on this schlock in order to advance a few egos that have likely already been hopelessly inflated. It’s yet another example of the sheer power that’s been amassed by the C students. But Jim Lehrer – and this is one of the many reasons I love the man even though we’ve never met – managed to reserve the last word for himself. I cannot recreate how this transpired exactly, but he somehow ended the show with this. Does The News Hour have a list of rules? Why yes, Jim Lehrer said, as a matter of fact we do, and even though the Web site and name are changing, the rules remain. And then he read them, not from a teleprompter but from paper. The rules themselves, with one exception, were pretty standard: respect your sources, don’t resort to anonymous sources unless absolutely, undeniably necessary, do not allow a story to become about someone’s personal life unless it is demonstrably critical to the story itself. “And finally, we are not in the entertainment business,” he said, placing his emphasis on the word ‘not’ in the manner usually reserved for the word ‘killed.’

Ducks, beavers and tigers

I have a good time making fun of sports fanatics, but the truth of the matter is that I’m jealous of them. My best guess is that the devotees use the games, the scores, the stats and the scandals for camaraderie and as a ladder to climb out of their own lives and snuggle into a narrative that couldn’t be more foreign to their own. For years I relied on a 12 pack to accomplish the same thing, more or less, but since I threw that broken crutch into a landfill, I’m kind of lost.

I envy the all-consuming zeal that’s in the blood, evidently, of the sports fans. The problem is that I cannot stop laughing at them. Speaking of jokes, bad ones, the fact that Tiger Woods’ marital issues constitutes international news would be entertaining were it not so lame. Seriously, a golfer supposedly cheats on his wife, rams the car – an SUV, of course – into a fire hydrant, posts some remarks on his Web site then doesn’t show up at his own golf tournament and all hell breaks loose. As best I can tell, the main problem people are having is that they feel let down by Tiger because he is not the wholesome family guy they believed him to be. Worse yet, his shenanigans are a huge disappointment to the youngsters, who look up to him as a role model. Other than the fact that the advertising dictators have ordered us to do so, why would anyone ever “look up to” any athlete, professional or otherwise? Are we so desperate that we look up to a guy who makes hundreds of millions of dollars because the product pimps like the fact that he knows how to slam a ball across a landscape poisoned by chemicals in order to look pretty? Yes, indeed, we are.

Closer to home, we’ve been very busy in Oregon recently getting ready for last night’s big game: the Civil War. Oregon State, the Beavs, took on the University of Oregon, the Ducks. I don’t understand football protocols, but for some reason the winner of the game goes to the Rose Bowl. For those of you who are not in Oregon, it’s been very, very serious. So much so, in fact, that the presidents of the two cash-strapped universities set their differences aside and got together to make a video reminding everyone that even though some of us are Ducks, and some of us are Beavers, we’re all Oregonians. “With so much pressure riding on this game, emotions are running high,” a reporter said yesterday, live from the stadium where tailgaters were already arriving. Then the reporter put a plastic duck toy in her mouth and made it quack before quickly apologizing for not giving the Beavers equal time, although nobody on the news could decide what sort of noise a Beaver noisemaker would make. Not to be outdone, the traffic reporter, dressed in green – “My dad was a duck!” she said – reported that already the roads to Eugene were experiencing delays. Around noon yesterday, I went grocery shopping with a friend of mine, a Beav, and saw several cars festooned for the big game. It was kind of festive, in an odd way. All laughs aside, though, there is a sobering aspect to this year’s Civil War. Early this week, the Ducks announced the will be wearing helmets with special stickers on them in a show of support for the troops, some of whom will watch the game from Iraq. We want to honor the men and women serving our country, one of the players explained, so sweetly, so sincerely that even I couldn’t muster a good laugh.

There should be a law

Every great once in a while I am thrilled and almost inspired by something I run across in the news, and since it happens so rarely, it would be irresponsible to not share. On Tuesday morning I read an article about a man in Sacramento who is collecting signatures for a petition that would give Californians the opportunity to outlaw divorce in the state. One of the best parts of the story is that the guy collecting signatures is married to a woman with whom he has two children. He selected an opposite marriage! And he’s employed! He’s not some jaded, middle-aged fag like me. I say that in jest, but only sort of. You’d expect someone like me to gather signatures for such a cause, but the inclusion of a straight – presumably – married guy in the mix changes the story in a way I think has potential. I’m no political strategist, but I think we should be doing more of this type of thing. If the citizenry wants to protect marriage, hell, let’s go full-tilt boogie and criminalize divorce, a lethal cultural cancer that claims the lives of nearly half of all legal male-female unions in the country. As civic-minded homos, paying lip service to the importance of marriage only goes so far, and I think the time has come for us to do something truly supportive by lending our support to the crusade against divorce. I am excited already, just thinking about what we could accomplish in Oregon, where we are in love with the initiative process. The only strange thing about the story was that most of the gay news blogs I read didn’t even mention it, but that’s okay, because it was in the “Today’s Picks” section on MSN, which is visited by many, many more readers.

A new and improved review process

Recently I read an article that reminded me of one thing from my corporate life I loathed almost as much as putting my life in peril by driving to a soulless office park on an interstate highway: the annual performance review. What a phenomenal waste of time and energy and money, what a crime against humanity. Having not been forced to participate for the past three years, I can laugh at it, sort of, but seriously, all across the land millions upon millions of dollars are spent on this foolishness every year. It’s no wonder our economy has tanked.

As is often the case in office situations, the trouble trail leads straight to HR. The first year I worked at the PR agency, I was baffled by the fanfare generated by the performance reviews. First, the time spent on it was referred to as “the review season,” or, more ominously, “the review cycle.” The second thing was that everyone was required to attend a training session to learn how to fill out the self evaluation. I’ve seen nonsensical forms before, but I’d never known there to be a training to help fill them out. The reason training was offered was that the process was “new and improved.” Each and every of the seven years I worked at the agency, the self-evaluation process was “new and improved.” And performance reviews did indeed constitute a season, and a cycle. In PR, by the way, people say “cycle” when they’re too cool to say “time.” “Do you have cycles to take on this project?” in PR means “Do you have time?” in the rest of the world.

Even though the process was new and improved each year, it was always the same. It went like this: You agonize over your self evaluation, writing about your accomplishments and your shortcomings, cramming your careful rambling into formulaic parameters that in no way reflect your actual job. Then you beg your colleagues – the ones you think you’re on good terms with – to provide input on your review. You hand the self evaluation and the list of colleagues over to your manager, who manages to turn that into the main subject for at least three one-hour meetings. Then your manager goes to a series of meetings with his or her peers – they call this “talent review” – where each section of your review is discussed by people who sometimes are familiar with your work and just as often are not. In the meanwhile, you spend a considerable amount of time providing feedback to colleagues who have asked you to return the favor. I’m sorry, but mutual masturbation is the only way I can think to describe that process. Finally, as Spring is about to arrive, you sit down with your manager and spend a couple of hours going over every single section of the review, most of which has usually been completely rewritten. You’re told, almost as an aside, whether or not you’re “ready for promotion” and what your “salary adjustment” will be. Because this isn’t about money, of course: it’s about an opportunity to grow, and learn, and challenge yourself, and how your manager can help you succeed, because that’s what she’s there for, after all. It’s about more than the money, so much more. Then the process begins for setting goals for the following year, which is as drawn out as the review itself. Finally the whole thing is uploaded into some HR portal, you’re sent an automated confirmation mail and all is well until the leaves begin to fall and the days shorten, when it all begins, new and improved, of course.

I went through this foolishness seven times, and if you’re thinking that I’m bitter about not getting promoted, you’re thinking wrong: I was promoted four times. I was given raises that were almost embarrassing. But it scares me, looking back on it, the power that HR people and leadership coaches and process experts and all the other corporals in the war against independent thinking have amassed. Here’s the truth of the matter: Where I worked, whether or not people were getting promoted was decided before the invitations were sent out for the self-evaluation trainings. Those decisions were made on what I think are reasonable considerations, such as whether the person had a good relationship with the client, whether they got along with the boss, whether the team was already too top heavy to absorb yet another promotion. But it took four months and lots of expensive HR people and countless hours of group and individual agonizing to get from start to finish. The reason for that is simple: HR people write, interpret and enforce – or not – the rules and regulations, and, being the people who specialize in hiring and firing people, they wrote being untouchable into their own job descriptions. They’re to be applauded, really.

This is the third review season from which I’ve been blessedly spared, so when I read the article I actually laughed a bit. It’s clownishness at its best, but I do gasp from time to time and how quickly we comply when it comes to mandatory stupidity, me included. For perspective, I defer to my parents, whose work lives occurred a few decades earlier than my own. They didn’t do performance reviews, or if they did they didn’t take them seriously enough to ever mention them at home. That’s because in addition to being smarter than most people who make decisions these days – I never claimed to be free of bias, and I’m not about to – my parents had more important things to do. Like their jobs, and paying their bills, on time and in full, and, rather than leaving the task up to the television, raising their children.

Threading the needle

I try to avoid making predictions, but here’s one I cannot resist: get ready, ladies and gentlemen, because we are going to thread the needle. Even in a world where most people have all the originality of a parrot, especially in the way they speak, it still amazes me the way that phrases take hold. I used to think the disorder that compels people to mimic authority figures was unique to the PR world. I was wrong.

The most offensive example of this, in my opinion, is the liberal sprinkling of every utterance with the word “right.” In early 2001, a woman I worked with who is blind – I point that out because what she lacked in the visual realm she more than made up for when it came to listening and hearing – started counting how many times one of our managers used the word “right” every time she opened her mouth. Then she started calculating and predicting where in the sentence “right” would be used, and the tone, and the significance of the pause either before or after the word. For a while I thought the use of “right” was something only the high tech marketing people were into. Again, I was wrong. Obama’s people use it all the time. A couple of my brothers do as well. We’ve all moved on to other jobs, the blind woman, the manager and me, but a few months ago I had breakfast with the former manager, who is now a teacher, right, and loving it.

Although it seems to have subsided somewhat, “Wall Street vs. Main Street” was making me nervous there for a while. Seriously, when something is recited thousands upon thousands of times, it loses its punch. Toward the end of last year, when a billion dollars in aid still seemed substantial, Gwen Ifil made her opinion on the sudden and excessive use of the two most famous street names in the U.S. clear. “We sure have heard that expression a lot lately,” she said, and then segued into the next segment of her show.

So for now, it seems we are threading the needle. As is often the case, I have no idea what this means, and I’d bet that many people who use it don’t either. My guess is that they’ve heard it used by people with power and since imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, why not? For me, threading a needle means being precise, merging two objects – a needle and a thread – with very little wiggle room given that the eye of the needle isn’t much larger than the thread through which it must go. And for me, it’s an important step in a mending project. I cannot replace buttons or repair a tear without a threaded needle.

At any rate, regardless of the meaning, which almost never really matters, there are lots of sewing projects going on at the moment, including (all from one morning):

· Obama’s war council is threading the needle on Afghanistan as it makes a decision that will impact us for many years.
· Consumer advocate Clark Howard helped a woman who called into his show thread the needle as they reviewed the interest policy for her credit card.
· The healthcare debate on the floor of the U.S. Senate is a very tricky affair because of the public option, supported by some, loathed by others, and, for still others, loathed and supported at the same time. This means that during the debate, Senate leaders must be very careful as they thread the needle.
· There are a number of scandals running simultaneously in Portland, one of which involves a vote of no confidence against the police chief, taken by the police union, the leaders of which have been quietly threading the needle against her for a while now over other matters.
· The retail outlook for the upcoming holiday season is abysmal. This is a classic example, an analyst said on one of the morning programs, of why it’s a wise idea to thread the sales needle before – not after – the economy goes sour.

As I said, lots of needles are being threaded, and I expect that many more will be. Although it’s still early, the best use I’ve heard thus far came from a woman who lives in the neighborhood where I grew up. “I’m so old,” she bellowed recently, “that I can barely thread the goddamn needle without a magnifying glass.” Of course, the amount of alcohol she consumes probably doesn’t help matters, but I didn’t say so, because by that point in the conversation such a comment would’ve gotten lost like a needle in the haystack, where threading is pretty much impossible.