Holiday happy hour

I was ambivalent about going to meet a group of former colleagues for happy hour two days before Christmas. We met at “the agency” and spent a mind-boggling number of hours trying to outdo and unhinge one another in order to curry favor with whomever happened to be in charge at the moment and, theoretically, get ahead. It’s what you do at a PR agency; it’s what’s expected, and it’s what’s rewarded. At the same time, I am thoroughly embarrassed at some of the things that came out of my mouth, and off my keyboard. I know better now, and I knew better then. Over the years, the alliances and allegiances among this group shifted and swerved, collapsed and then re-emerged in ways I would have never dreamed of. One by one we all quit, eventually.

They’re not bad people. There are two guys who are almost exactly the same age as me, and each of them is married to a woman he met in high school, each raising one son and one daughter. One’s wife is a hardcore Catholic – “I love Christian chick lit!” she told me optimistically, after I told her that reading was pretty much all I’d been up to – and the other’s wife is a vegetarian who cannot stop bringing stray animals home. Both of these guys have extensive music collections. Then there’s a guy who is 10 years older, a world traveler who has managed bookstores and studied in Europe and is currently restoring yet another turn-of-the-century house. The woman who was our manager, until three of us got together and orchestrated her downfall, is great on paper, with her degrees, her stints at various newspapers, her travels to politically unstable countries. But in person she’s shockingly mundane, the type of person who likes to project herself as a progressive but who, with very little pressure, yields to convention each and every time. Though nearly fifty, it’s the breathy giggling and hair twirling you tend to remember.

We were joined by a former client, a guy who was a ‘senior comms manager’ at a huge corporation, which he left in the early 2000s to go into politics. He failed spectacularly, and so now he’s a ‘comms consultant.’ And, as fate would have it, one of the people at the table was a PR account woman, who is nice enough, I suppose, but who was very clearly enjoying the little bit of power she held that night. “It just kills me that I can’t keep all these guys busy with projects all the time,” she gushed. The former client, who is fantastically fat, would have leaned over at one point to say to her, in a conspiratorial tone, “Do you have a card?” but since he cannot lean, he sort of sagged instead. Which would have been fine, except for the fact that the guy who organized the get together, the one who’s married to the Catholic, relies on the PR account woman for lots of business, and so …

For the next hour we were regaled with one insider story after another about what it was like to be behind the scenes at this particular corporation, mapping out the strategy, dealing with the PR teams, ‘onboarding’ the journalists so that they could report accurately on the company’s new vision and so on and so forth. I drank one glass of lemonade after another and ate a chicken pot pie the size of a cupcake. I excused myself at one point to go to the men’s room and went outside for a ciggie.

And when I came back everything had shifted.

If you were to boil the first hour of the conversation down, it would go like this: when we spend millions on PR, look at what we can do, look at our influence, look at how good we are at getting others to convey our messaging. And yet, when I came back to the table, we were feeling quite betrayed by Barack Obama. “He just sold out,” said the former manager. “He sure did!” said another. “It’s complicated,” said the former client, in a tone that suggested he believes the authority he had over those of us at the table when he was a client is still in effect. “It sure is,” I said, “when you’re beholden to the banks, which are run by rich folks.” The former manager said she thought Obama had misled the country during his campaign. I said I think we love to be misled, that as far as I can see we wouldn’t have it any other way. “That’s horrible,” she said, and I laughed a bit, in a real, honest way, a way that I could never laugh when I was drunk.

I laughed because it was funny: sitting in a trendy, pricey restaurant with a group of people who make a fantastic living misleading people into believing that certain products and services will make their lives better, bitching about someone not turning out to be quite the engine of change he presented during his campaign speeches. If it were a plot synopsis for a screenplay, I thought, I’d be exiled from Hollywood, permanently. But I wasn’t in Hollywood: I was in Portland, with the eternally earnest and sincere, and so I said to my former manager, the woman who had written my performance reviews, who monitored my comings and goings, who came very close a few times to firing me, “You need to put the bong down, just for a minute.” God, that was fun, showing zero respect for someone who doesn’t deserve any and never really did, and it seemed a fitting way to celebrate the end of the year.

Stuffing the stockings

Even though it’s almost Christmas and I really should be focused on other things, I keep returning to last week’s vote to extend W.’s tax breaks for the ultra rich and – wink, wink – extend unemployment for those who are anything but. I believe that the rich in this country are going to continue to get richer, and that the poor will become only more so, and I’m no good with numbers so I’ve chosen to ignore the mathematical aspect of the whole thing. It’s the basic structure of it that bothers me, and really, to take it a step or two closer to pure honesty, it’s the fact that the deception of the whole thing even registered in my mind as distasteful, not because it isn’t distasteful – it’s plenty distasteful, and then some – but because it is so familiar it’s almost tedious.

At the same time, you have to admit this is damn-near perfect. It’s actually kind of Christmasy.

Let’s say I’m a ‘liberal’ U.S. representative. I can come back to Northeast Portland for the holiday recess. Since my constituents are short-sighted and suffer from memory issues, I enjoy the free pass I get for barely raising the issue during the nearly two years that Democrats controlled Congress not to mention a pretty powerful office a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol, a majority that Democrats managed to lose (oops!) in spite of their best efforts to behave like Republicans. So, I’d be off the hook for that. But when the organic, free-range, locally grown tomatoes were thrown at my office or at my Prius as I drove past on my way to an event with the word “sustainable” on the banner because my constituents were pissed off about my support of extending tax cuts for the fine people of, say, Lake Oswego, I could exclaim, without lying, oh no, no, what I voted for was to stand up for those without a voice, for those who have been systematically disenfranchised by the system.

Speaking of Lake Oswego, say I was a “conservative” U.S. representative, elected to preserve and defend the American spirit of entrepreneurship, the very foundation of this country’s greatness. I didn’t vote to further the Democrats’ socialist agenda: I voted because in the midst of a recession the last thing a responsible public servant would do would be to vote to increase taxes. I voted against continuing to take money away from Americans and give it to a government that has no sense of fiscal responsibility, a government that has no clue how to create jobs and put America back on the road to greatness. The extension of hand outs for the terminally shiftless, lazy and unemployed is a problem, to be sure, but it’s a temporary one, because, less than two years from today …

It’s all Obama’s fault. That’s the real beauty of it. The most amazing accomplishment of this knock-knock joke masquerading as legislative action, in my opinion, is that even though our senators and representatives have done exactly nothing in terms of standing up – or not – for their convictions, the opportunity for them to trash Obama is but a soundbyte away. He betrayed the liberals (again) and once again he’s tried to block any notion of progress, as they see it, put forth by the conservatives. And in so doing he’s given the people who make a lot of money to make “edgy” predictions and provide third-grade level analysis and insight on millions of television and computer screens across the land a lot of job security for the next 23 months.

And speaking of elementary blabber presented as analysis, here’s a little something: Does any of this matter? The figures rattle around in my mind, as disconnected and disjointed as a family gathering around the holiday supper table. A billion here, a few billion there, sometimes a trillion of this and that, and I’m speaking here not of the tax cuts but of deficit spending and cash borrowed from God knows where, which makes me wonder, is this kind of like buying property on the Monopoly board with fake money?

Praising Dick

There are many, many pages in War and Peace devoted to debating, disputing and deconstructing who deserves credit for Russia’s eventual victory over France in the early 1800s. Tolstoy’s opinion, which is made clear time and time again, is that when it comes to accolades, the historians couldn’t be more wrong. According to the count, it’s the men of whom we hear very little – a commander by the name of Dokhturov in particular – upon whom the honors should be bestowed. You wouldn’t know it from the sheer heft of his books, but Tolstoy had a flair for being succinct, and here, from page 1021, is one of the best examples: “This silence about Dokhturov is the most obvious proof of his merit.”

It’s that line that keeps coming to mind during the orgy of anything-but-silent eulogizing of Richard Holbrooke, a most influential diplomat who died Monday evening. I’m not an expert on the man, nor do I have any interest in becoming one, but it seems to me that his involvement in many of the major foreign policy sagas, beginning with Vietnam and ending, with his death, with our current (and very dubious, I think) undertakings in Afghanistan, would make a good starting point for a lot of questions.

I have not resumed drinking. I just had a momentary lapse of reason.

Richard Holbrooke was just amazing. In much the same way the supreme court justices are lauded for their “constitutional mastery” after asking a few basic questions about what a law might or might not mean, Richard Holbrooke, according to the post-mortem, had a phenomenal grasp on the finer points of U.S. foreign policy. Pardon my snarkyness, but it seems to me that anything less than that would be cause for serious alarm given the central role he played in formulating much of it. He was really strategic: His office at the U.S. State Department was like no other in that it was staffed by a real mix of people with different backgrounds including, well, including professors. He was genuinely interested in what other people had to say. He read a lot, and he wrote a lot as well. He was networked like no other, and he was generous with his time, his experience and his influence, which he used, as legend has it, to place many people in many jobs. One of the many overweight, suited white guys recalled working on something or another in Central America, and Richard Holbrooke came down for a visit, not because he was involved in the work per se but because he was simply so gosh-darn curious.

Unlike Richard Holbrooke, I’m not going to be remembered for my intellect, or the powerful connections I had with powerful people, but I am quite curious. I am curious about what and who carries the most weight in foreign policy decisions. I am curious about how much money is involved, where it’s from and where it’s going. I am very curious about the cost of the wars we’re currently involved in, not just in terms of dollars, but in terms of lives – lives of U.S. military personnel and also lives lived, or formerly lived, by people in the places where we’re “executing” on Richard Holbrooke’s brilliant foreign policy strategies. I’m really curious about Osama bin Laden. Is he the reason we went to war, or to wars? Where does he live? Where is he working these days? Just for fun, really, I’m very curious to know what the ratio of how much money we’ve spent searching for Osama bin Laden is compared to, say, the average amount of public funds we spend on a young person’s education from the time she enters kindergarten through high school graduation. I’m just curious.

But what makes me most curious about Richard Holbrooke’s death has nothing to do with him at all. Tuesday evening Oprah’s understudy (Charlie Rose) was on, almost unbearable in his smarminess, as usual, when I heard something that stopped me cold. Charlie Rose was bragging about how connected he was to Richard Holbrooke, exchanging utterly irrelevant remembrances with one of the fat white guys, when he let loose with this: Charlie Rose had known Richard Holbrooke for many years, having met him when that particular guest was working as an editor with a foreign policy publication and Charlie Rose was working for … Bill Moyers. I’m still in mourning over Bill Moyers’ retirement. He’s about the only one I’ve seen on television in the last decade who is worth watching, and he employed Charlie Rose? Denial has its place in every life, including mine, so I switched the channel and watched a bit of Antiques Road Show and pretended I had misheard. Because that’s some shit about which I am not even remotely curious. I’d really rather not know the details.

Hot water

One of my more notable skills is the ability to put off, for years, having repairs made at my house. Last week, when I finally had a new water heater installed, I realized why. Every since my very early childhood, I have been terrified of going to the doctor with one malady or another and completely baffling the doctor. We’ve never seen this before, I hear the doctor saying as he shakes his head with grave concern, but whatever it is, it’s not good. And that’s when the real horror begins in my nightmare: ruling things out. We’ll try this, and we’ll try that, and we’ll see where we go.

I have the same dread when it comes to house issues. Repairs that should be minor, it seems to me, are ripe with the potential to become anything but.

The water heater should have been replaced two years ago, if not before, but I had concerns. Over the summer my friend Derek replaced the hardware that sits behind the handle that turns the water on and off and, when it’s working, regulates the temperature. It did wonders in terms of hot showers, but the baths, though occasionally hot, were for the most part lukewarm. But there was never a shortage of hot water at the sinks in both the kitchen and the bathroom. So I envisioned the tile at the head of the tub needing to be torn out. I envisioned walls in the basement needing to be taken down. I envisioned all the pipes needing to be removed and replaced. I envisioned being held responsible for tearing up the street to repair the water mane and being told, nonchalantly, that since I live on a corner there are two streets rather than one, and therefore …

If the bath is tepid, one way to warm it up is to boil a big pot of water on the stove and then, when the tub is almost full, dump it in.

The guy who showed up Tuesday afternoon to install the new water heater looked like the grandpa from The Waltons. “Your stairs here sure are weird,” he said before he’d even reached the front porch. Halfway down the stairs to the basement, he said, “Oh man, this sure is going to be interesting,” and then laughed a little. I told him that today wasn’t the day for small talk or comments about the house. My tone of voice was an assault to my own ears, even as I was speaking: I sounded so much like my mother. Although I’d been told by Stan, who works the phones, that I wouldn’t have to “lift a finger,” I did, in fact, help carry the old water heater up to the kitchen and I helped lower the new one down. On Tuesday night I had a glorious bath, and on Wednesday morning I noticed there was no hot water in the kitchen. That afternoon when I came back from meeting a friend, there was still no hot water. So I called Stan, who told me it was no biggie, that gas bubbles often get trapped immediately following the installation, and proceeded to give me instructions on how to relight the pilot light, and after trying to transcribe a page and a half of his utterly nonsensical rambling I stopped writing and demanded that someone come to my house to show me how to do it. So he put me on hold, and I listened to George Morlan Plumbing commercials for about 12 minutes. An hour later I called back and spoke with Noreen, who told me she wasn’t sure if she could “squeeze me in” that afternoon or not because they have other customers, and I told her that I’d be happy to help her reach a new level of sureness, having spent $733.00 the day before, and at 6:30 a very pleasant, straightforward man arrived and discovered that the reason the pilot light went out is that something had been connected improperly. He fixed that and then showed me how to light the pilot light, which was quite simple. “That sure doesn’t match what Stan told me on the phone,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything,” the man said. “Nice guy, but clueless.”

I wrote the pilot light instructions on a piece of paper and clipped it to my invoice and put it in my file folder marked “House Receipts.” Which was a good thing, because Saturday night the bath wasn’t exactly chilled but it wasn’t hot either. Sunday afternoon I went downstairs, removed the metal safety rim, lay down on my stomach, and had a look. Sure enough, no pilot light. So I relit it. There was something very satisfactory about the sound of a miniature explosion after I’d held down the buttons and counted the seconds, per instructions.

Oddly enough, though, that’s not my complaint. Something was connected incorrectly so, after a bit of bitchiness from me, they came back and fixed it. And then the pilot light went out so I relit it. I am hoping the fact that there have been two issues in less than seven days is a coincidence. But what really pisses me off, for some reason, is the fact that the guy who did the incorrect installation left a couple of metal parts from the old water heater (I presume, and I hope) just sitting on the floor, and when I went in to my laundry room, which sits right behind the water heater, he’d just left the power cord for the washer draped over the dryer. Seriously, pick up after yourself.

Anyhow, I’m now in the process of finding an electrician. There are a couple of things I’d like to have fixed, or replaced, or reinstalled, and rather than picturing having the house torn down in order to determine why an outlet in my kitchen doesn’t work, I’m trying to visualize a nice strand of lights on the front porch, which I’m hoping, naively perhaps, to have up and lit by the longest night of the year, which is next week.

The purists

Did you about fall off your chair, or your barstool, or right out of your bed when you heard that our president went ahead and proposed extending W.’s tax cuts for the ultra rich? I’m currently on a Huffington Post hiatus, and I’m so tired of Tina Brown’s linking as many stories as she can to either Hillary Clinton’s eventual presidency or Prince William’s engagement or, if at all possible, both, that The Daily Beast is no longer recognized in my search bar, having been subsumed, when I type the letter “T” by … The Rotary Telephone. So I have no idea what they have to say.

But in Portland, people are pissed. He’s betrayed us! He’s sold out! He’s caving to the Republicans! It’s fun to rant and rage and talk about organizing and building some coalitions and maybe putting together another “third party” and raising some awareness here and there and maybe it’s time to really learn to hear each other and honor one another’s stories and have a shitload of meetings to ensure not only that everyone has a voice but that everyone is a stakeholder, and so on.

But this is a rerun, and it’s as pointless this time as it was when it was first aired.

That’s because the fact – the fact, the truth of the matter, the official record to which each and all have round-the-clock and round-the-calendar access – is that the largest single contributor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was Goldman Sachs. I’m sorry to be a bitch about this (more on that later) but if even a fraction of your brain believes that that donation and so many others were an act of benevolence meant to preserve the integrity of Democracy and free elections, you are hopeless.

Here’s my bone of contention: Obama is proof, I think, of the inherent value of having a president who understands the language. I am not joking or being even remotely sarcastic when I say that I celebrate his presidency every single time I hear his voice. But language, of course, can be aimed in any direction, and this week, I feel that Obama aimed his language at those “on the left” who supported him in 2008. This was done, I believe, to appeal to the people who are closer to the middle, people who were, from what I’ve read, actually conflicted about whether to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain and his tundra-tested running mate, a conundrum that I will not dismiss or criticize, but one that baffles me outright. (If you’re reading this and you were undecided in 2008, I mean no disrespect: It’s just that we have yet to meet, so I have yet to hear your side of the story.)

Having been on the receiving end of more than his fair share of smear campaigns, Obama certainly understands that one of the surest ways to win hearts and minds, not to mention votes and campaign contributions, is to identify an opposing group and then trash it. And trash he did: Many of us, myself included, oppose this extension of tax cuts. When all is said and done, this bit of holiday cheer will cost the government more than the 2008 stimulus the Republicans have leveraged, in one of the most amazing examples of political cartoonism I’ve ever seen, to portray Obama as a socialist. And those of us in opposition are, in the words of our president, “sanctimonious” and “purist.”

I’ll take sanctimonious – it’s true! – but purist? I’m no purist, I’m not even close. If I were I would have never voted for Barack Obama. If I were a purist it would have been impossible for me to listen to his high and mighty and thoroughly unconvincing – almost embarrassing, really – attempt to mimic black preachers in certain settings, his “unwavering support” for the homos to live as equals to him and his wife, his tough talk aimed at “the bankers” as they helped themselves to record-breaking bonus payments last year and hundreds of other examples of his “messaging” as anything other than audience-driven fundraising tactics. That knowledge, and that knowledge alone, if I were a purist, would have prevented my hand from blackening (pardon me) the circle beside his name on the ballot.

Holiday lights in Northeast Portland

Over the weekend I bought a strand of red and white lights. The bulbs on this particular strand are glass, they are not LED and they are shaped (forgive me for this) very much like a butt plug. These are the kind of lights with which we adorned our Christmas tree when I was a youngster, and I love them. I hoard lights for some reason, so when I bought this particular strand, I needed a reason, a justification. These lights would be hung out on the front porch for the duration of the holiday season, I thought. That, of course, didn’t work out, but that’s okay.

Because over the past few weeks, the Portland police have been putting on light shows in this neighborhood that put to shame even the most intricate of holiday displays.

One Monday afternoon a few weeks ago I was on the phone with a friend, when an onslaught of blaring, glowing cop cars descended on the corner that’s not more than 50 feet from the window in front of my desk. Holy shit, I thought. I told my friend I better go and went to the opposite side of the house to have a better look. I stopped counting police cars at 12, and there were many more. Then, not one ambulance but two, and a fire truck, and then two of those vans with satellite equipment on top and television logos on every other surface. There were news cameras set up on the side street, so I put my jacket on and went outside.

I have never heard the word “motherfucker” sequenced quite so skillfully, with so much variety in tone, placement and volume. I asked the painfully pretty television reporter what was going on, and he said that they’d heard on their scanner that there had been gunshots. Indeed. Grandma, it turns out, blasted Grandpa in the stomach; Grandpa, whose very shapely torso was drenched in blood, finally, after 45 minutes of nonstop mother-fuckering, was brought out to the street on a stretcher. Before he was loaded into the ambulance, true to his neighborly and friendly nature, he waved at the cameras. And with that he was gone. From what I’ve heard, via Grandma’s very loud cell phone calls, which she conducts outside for some reason, he’s doing quite well – in detox.

The other night I could have sworn I’d been woken up by the sound of sirens, but happily so because the noise was followed by that swirled, kind of disco-esque display of red and blue swooshy lights that danced up and down and on and off the walls, the floor and the ceiling. I asked a couple of neighbors if they’d seen or heard anything. No, they had not. A dream, I thought.

But, just as some time passed, here, on my corner, some lights flashed: it was a transition. On Monday night there was an even better display. Reds and blues and perfectly round spots of white danced behind the oatmeal-colored curtains in my living room. I stood in front of my couch holding a plate with two pieces of toast slathered in butter and honey, getting ready to sit down. I peered out the door and saw that the police cars were in the intersection, up the street, down the street and, based on the blare of sirens, many other places as well.

Outside, I learned a couple of things. First, the noise and lights from a few nights before had not been a dream. There had been a high-speed chase at 3 in the morning, which was witnessed by one of my neighbors, who was, he explained, still up working on his computer. And second, all the commotion on Monday night was in response to a robbery. I stood outside and watched the cops talk a guy out of a white car and command him to take three steps back, then three steps forward, then put his hands on his head, then kneel down on the pavement, and on and on. Then a dog barked and, guided by so many high-powered flashlights that it reminded me of a vigil, began to sniff at the trunk of the car.

The first story was that someone had robbed someone at gunpoint on the sidewalk. Then, someone had robbed Walgreens. Then, of course, both: There had been two robberies, both at gunpoint, and the suspicion that the neighborhood is going straight to hell is turning out to be truer than any of us had imagined. But on Tuesday morning there were news reports that what had actually happened even more seasonal than the festive lights courtesy of law enforcement: Someone had pointed a gun to the cashier’s head over at the Christmas tree lot at Safeway, and then made off with an undisclosed amount of cash. The guy whose car was searched a block from my house turned out to be, in fact, the wrong guy, so the police are still looking.

An accomplishment

At 9:30 on Sunday morning, I sat at my table with my coffee and read two words that caught me a bit off guard: THE END. To the southeast there were low, severe streaks of cloud through which the sun burst, off and on, off and on. It was brutally cold (by Portland standards) and windy. Finishing War and Peace left me a bit discombobulated. It was a little sad, in the way that the end of conversations you’re really enjoying are, but at the same time I felt quite a sense of accomplishment that may or may not have been misplaced. War and Peace is not as “hard” as its reputation, it’s just really detailed, and really long. So part of the sense of accomplishment I felt has to do more with me than the book: back when my vocation was getting liquored up every day and night, I couldn’t have even dreamed of finishing such a book. I probably couldn’t have even started it. That’s my own individual circumstance, which, as you’ll see if you ever read War and Peace, is, in an oversimplified, boiled-down sort of way, the book’s main point. Historical events – and that includes, among other things, wars, elections and marriages and divorces – are not the result of a grand, careful master plan but of random chances and circumstances set into motion by random individuals, some of whom are accurately portrayed by history, most of whom are not.

Does that theme require 1,200 pages? I have no idea, but I thought War and Peace, as a book, and the reading of it, as an experience, were well with the time and effort, and here are a few reasons.

First, it’s written by someone who knows his way around the language and knows how to populate the landscape of his theme with people. Even though it’s long and broad, there are only about 10 main characters. I was surprised at how often I would read a chapter, close my book, and then, while washing the dishes, or paying the electric bill, or filling a plastic bag with red lentils in the bulk section at the grocery story, find myself wondering what was going to happen to Natasha, and Sonya, and Andrei and Pierre.

Second, the experience of reading War and Peace is good exercise. I worry about my brain and how certain parts of it have atrophied – or are at risk of doing so – as a result of spending so much time in front of a computer. War and Peace is 1,200 printed, dense pages. There is one illustration – a map of one of the battle scenes. There are no links, no pictures, no videos, no sound tracks, no pop ups. I read the book with my eyes, which absorbed the information and presented it to my brain, which, I’m happy to say, is still capable of translating words into images of my own making. Reading a book like War and Peace is the exact opposite of an Internet experience in that it requires focus and patience.

Third, the familiarity of it is truly shocking. War and Peace was written in the 1860s, and yet, on each and every page, there we are. In pursuit of power and wealth, people lie and cheat and steal and scheme and misrepresent when it serves their purposes. They fuck it up (pardon my language) and then, sometimes, they get it right. I’ve had this sensation with nearly every classic I’ve read (I have not read many), and I used to find the familiarity factor disturbing. Have we not learned a single thing? I’d wonder. Now, thanks to War and Peace, I have a slightly different take on it. Do you ever watch or read the news and find yourself disturbed by the rapid speed at which our standards seem to be declining? Well, they’re not: our standards have been plenty low for at least 150 years. So, while it’s regrettable that we haven’t learned from history, thanks to War and Peace, I can say that when it comes to scraping the bottom of the integrity trough, we’re no worse than our ancestors.

Fourth, finally and closely related, War and Peace seems to me an amazing portrait of what it means to be human. No other book I’ve read has evoked in me such a powerful feeling, as if it were a memory of my very own, a sensation that rose up and off each and every page, a message that’s simple but not, that’s transmitted through the century and a half since its publication, that, in the end, is as follows:

This is how we are.

Part two: disengagement

Shortly after I read the press release announcing Small Business Saturday, I noticed that many of my Facebook “friends” had decided to “Like” it. When a person clicks “Like” on a Facebook page, it’s announced to all of his or her “Friends,” and so I, trying to be a true “Friend,” started posting comments that were attached to the “Like” announcements. Unlike my blog posts, I try to keep the Facebook verbiage short and sweet, so my comments were along the lines of “Please keep in mind that this is sponsored by American Express and that businesses have to sign on with that company to participate.” Then I was accused, though nicely, of not “supporting” small businesses.

Nothing could be further from the truth. What I object to is people being deceived by the millions by wording that’s at best misleading and at worst false. If we made a conscious decision to stop receiving messaging and instead spent a few minutes actually thinking, naïve though it may sound, I believe we could be well on our way to bringing the corporate class to its knees, which is exactly where it belongs.

Here, then, are a few simple ideas that are too wordy for a Facebook comment, but not for a blog.

One: There is no reason to wait for American Express or any other company to advise you to support local merchants. There’s an amazing store down the street from me, for example, called Mr. Plywood. You pay slightly more there, but you get higher quality, you get better service, and the people who own the store are quite generous with the neighborhood. Plus, it’s close. One potential drawback is inventory, but if enough people asked for specific products, I have a strong suspicion that they’d stock it. With Mr. Plywood right down the street, why on earth are there pilgrimages to Home Depot and Lowe’s? In a word, marketing, which, as we know, works.

Two: When you shop at a small business, go out of your way to say that you’re not there as a result of direction, guidance or inspiration by or from American Express. Comments expressed by real people with real mouths who use real words are important. I’d bet that members of the marketing team that came up with the small business shenanigans is counting – literally, as in dollars – on people being rendered speechless, cocooned in the warm and fuzzy afterglow of Small Business Saturday. Somewhere, the holiday bonus for some rising, super-smart, super-strategic marketing superstar is riding on this campaign. Wouldn’t it be fun to help jeopardize it simply by speaking up and stating the obvious?

Three: Pay cash. I know plastic is more convenient, but it’s like a one-way superhighway for money to travel elsewhere, never to return. You get charged, the company you’re buying from gets charged, and the companies who offer us all this convenience get billions in bailouts when their greed, combined with our gullibility, gets the best of them. Go to your bank or your ATM and take out a certain amount of cash on a regular basis. That way you’re only paying one fee. Better yet, move your bank account to a credit union. It’s your money, and it’s your life. Why should you give a rat’s ass about creating “shareholder value”? If you’re short on cash, you could be really old-fashioned and write a check. It’s good to see your handwriting from time to time, and I think it’s time to reintroduce the youngsters to the concept of balancing the checkbook.

Four: I think we should all be really careful with the “Like” button on Facebook. As I understand it, when you “Like” something, you’re opening yourself and all of your “friends” to the individual or corporation – one and the same, according to current court wisdom – that sponsor the page. I apologize for “Like”[ing] Don’t Let Bristol Palin Win Dancing with the Stars and Gay Boys with Beards and a few others, but when it comes to pages with commerce at their core, I think caution is in order. More than 1 million people decided to “Like” Small Business Saturday, and given the deception at work, who could blame them? It sounded like a good idea, as marketing campaigns almost always do. But when it comes to Facebook pages dedicated to Best Buy, The Gap, Microsoft, Toyota and many others, the less cross-channel, cross-platform, light-touch engagement hocus pocus bullshit I’m participating in by refraining from one simple click, the better.

Part one: engagement

Although I didn’t have to invest much energy in looking, I have at long last found a perfect example of the truly sinister nature of what we call marketing. Before I delve into my story, a definition: marketing, as far as I’m concerned, encompasses all of the enterprises dedicated to telling you what you need, and why, and, most importantly, how your existence is lacking without it. Terminally, perpetually afflicted with self-fascination and greed, the practitioners of these endeavors spend lots of time and money trying to differentiate themselves from one another, but when it comes to misrepresenting the value of everything from microchips to new housing developments, communications, public affairs, advertising, political strategy, public relations – it’s all rooted in the same soil.

A few weeks ago I ran across something called Small Business Saturday. This was the day, I read, to support your local merchants, who live and work in the same community that you and your “loved ones” do. That’s suspect right there, I thought. It’s tired, unoriginal language, phrases that have been repeated in a million ways in a million formats. Much like the mostly mindless craze for any and everything the marketing team declares “green” or “sustainable,” this regimenting of sentiment around the folksy notion of shopping at small, locally owned businesses is, in my mind, little more than a stage designed specifically for the contortionists.

Small Business Saturday was orchestrated, managed and messaged by American Express. I’ve written and read many, many press releases, more than a few of which were issued with the sole purpose of distracting people from something else, but until the announcement of Small Business Saturday, I’d never read a release that included footnotes. So I read them, and there, amidst the tiny font, I learned that to reap the benefits of the campaign (which were quite slim, I think) a small business was required to sign on to accept American Express.

That, of course, is not cheap. In fact, it’s notably more expensive than accepting payment with plastic cards with other logos. The unadorned math of it is as follows: As people spend their dollars at stores that open onto sidewalks rather than malls, as they permit themselves the moment of grace that follows purchasing goods or services from a business that’s likely to donate to the little league team or the scholarship fund, what’s actually happening is that a greater portion of the purchase price is going not back into the communities where that money is spent but straight to the coffers of a global corporation.

That, my friends, is the essence of marketing: one thing is actually another.

Public safety

On Friday afternoon, a 19 year-old was arrested for attempting to use his cell phone to detonate a bomb in a van parked very close to Pioneer Courthouse Square – commonly called Portland’s living room – a lovely public space downtown where I’ve passed many hours over the years drinking coffee, eating burritos, shopping at farmers markets, attending festivals, waiting for people to show up and, most memorably, just watching the comings and goings all around. The young man, known to his friends as MoMo, believed he had found a group of co-conspirators, but they turned out to be FBI operatives. His mission was to blow the van up in the midst of the tree-lighting ceremony, which was attended by thousands. After the first call from his cell phone failed to do the trick, he tried again. Then he was arrested on an attempt to use a weapon of mass destruction.

It’s a strange story, I think, and I’m not going to comment on the nuts and bolts of it, because when it comes to dealing with the feds, I’m illiterate, and I intend to stay that way. But there was, of course, plenty of aftermath.

The first thing that happened was that fire was set to a mosque in Corvalis, a town not too far from Portland that is home to Oregon State University (The Beavs), where MoMo took courses. I’m not sure if the KKK has an official presence in Oregon or not, but its spirit sure does.

Running a very close second in the ignorance department, if not an outright tie, is the washed-out hag who earns a living at an AM station that pays her to fly her banner of white, heterosexual supremacy in the service of degrading and dehumanizing as many people who do not look, sound and think exactly like her as possible for four hours each weekday. Here’s what she had to say yesterday about the city’s response to the incident. Isn’t it outrageous that the people from the city who are going to meet with the leaders of Portland’s Somali community are a gay guy (the mayor), a chick (Amanda Fritz) and a wimp (the new police chief, Mike Reese, who had the audacity to say he sees his job as one of peacekeeper rather than gunslinger, which of course set off lots of conservatives, many of whom seem to enjoy it just a little bit when people, especially black people, get shot by the cops). Don’t the people at the city understand the Muslim community’s “pecking order?” the hostess wondered. At first, I thought, wow, that chick is earning her keep today, insulting gay people, women, men who do not grunt and groan and paw themselves in public, Arabs and Muslims all in one sentence. It’s impressive. Then I thought, wait, if a panel assembled by the City of Portland consisted of only outwardly heterosexual, married men, wouldn’t that imply a concession to the Muslim “lifestyle”? And aren’t we supposed to hate them? But my confusion was short lived. A few minutes later the self-appointed oracle of white suburban victimhood screeched that when you’re dealing with Arabs, “you don’t send a gay guy, you send a man.” If I didn’t have other things to do – like earn a living – I’d organize an excruciatingly clever, humiliating and effective protest of businesses that advertise on her show until her sorry ass was taken off the air.

But best of all, I found something inspiring, believe it or not, on Facebook. I am “friends” with a persona whose sole mission seems to be to rid the world of the damaging burdens of organized religion. And the persona never fails to deliver. On Monday the status update concerned the use of cell phones at tree-lighting ceremonies. Following the methods of the TSA, the status update read, should cell phone usage be allowed at future ceremonies? Why I didn’t think of that myself I cannot say for sure, but I’m glad someone did. The logic, I think, is beautiful: one incident and everything gets revised. We didn’t start measuring shampoo and lotion and personal lube until someone – one someone – tried to use those ingredients to make a bomb while seated in the coach section. We didn’t start taking our shoes off until one person tried to bring a plane down by blowing his up. So I am hoping that the unfortunate incident in downtown Portland last Friday will be the beginning of the end of cell phone use not just at tree lightings but at any and all public gatherings. There are enemies everywhere, and danger all around, and we need to act accordingly.

A good transition

Though I do not indulge as much as I used to, there is nothing I enjoy quite as much as rearranging furniture. It’s fun to move shit around, I think, and, if done correctly, it’s like having a new room when the job is done. Light moves differently among spaces that are reconfigured. The same table that looks like a ship stranded in the wrong harbor in one corner of a room appears to have been built quite specifically for another. On Saturday afternoon, I moved one of my two identical bookshelves. They’re tall and narrow, but for the past few years I’ve had them side by side against a wall right beside the desk in what I call “the office.” On Saturday I moved one of the units – I cannot think of another word – into the living room. My shelving units take up very little floor space, but they soar toward the ceiling and, like the Hong Kong of the furniture world, have an amazing amount of actual shelf surface.

Moving the shelves required moving all the books and other things that had come to rest on them. Even though I donated most of my books months ago, there are many left, and I was grateful for that on Saturday afternoon. Books were stacked on the coffee table and on the couch, haphazard towers of print waiting for order to be imposed. Although I don’t follow my own guideline absolutely, I do tend to segregate the shelves based on whether the author is living or not. But that can be tricky: Does John Updike really belong on the same shelf with Walt Whitman? I don’t know.

I have no doubt, however, about Flannery O’Connor. I fell in love with her work via her short stories, which I read for the first time when I was in college. Her stories are about desperate people in desperate situations. Most of the desperation revolves around religion. For Flannery O’Connor, who spent most of her unfortunately brief life in rural Georgia, religion was the only theme worth the ink. Before you let that turn you off completely, consider this: Unlike today’s cheap renditions of what we’ve come to think of as “spiritual,” Flannery O’Connor appears to have actually read that big old book, and she appears to have understood it enough to inflict upon her characters an eternal moral dilemma that revolves primarily around reconciling one set of beliefs with another. Her work, like many of my relations, is funny in a way that I’ve yet to see anyone match, funny in that weird way that’s anything but.

Over the summer I read two of Flannery O’Connor’s novels: Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away. Before I read these books, my main impression of her wasn’t necessarily what she’d written but something she’d said. You haven’t experienced grotesque until you’ve read her short stories, and once an interviewer asked her why her characters and their lives were so outrageous. Well, she said, I think that when you’re talking to the hard of hearing, you need to shout.

If you ask me, that’s damn-near perfect.

But in Wise Blood – tucked in among the car whose color is referred to as “high rat” and the self-inflicted blindness of the main character, Hazel Motes – I found something that seems to have superseded, in my mind, her comment about the hard of hearing. In writing, in all types of writing, I think, the most difficult thing is moving forward. To do this effectively, you need to know how to write a good transition, one that seems as natural as a bookshelf being pushed across a floor from one room to another. There are millions of ways to accomplish this, of course. You could write about the changing seasons. You could write about aging by describing a person’s face. You could convey the years by focusing on how a man regards his wife.

But here’s another way to do it, taken from Wise Blood, which sits alongside Walt Whitman and Mark Twain:

Some time passed.

Let's have a play date

Man, I have got to hand it to Barack Obama. If there is such a thing as the Political Maneuvers Hall of Fame, and if he had anything to do with it, the unveiling of the recommendations from the panel convened to determine how to get the national debt under control after the elections should be inducted. Many of our conservative countrymen and women have been quite indignant over the national debt. And since Obama has been president for almost 23 months now, it is his fault. Many of our fellow conservatives arranged their campaigns neatly around this simple message: You balance your household budget, and so too should ‘the government.’ It’s a great “message,” and many of them won. And our president, or his advisors, or someone decided that it would probably be best to not clutter the already cluttered pre-election messagefest with numbers and projections and that sort of thing.

So, a week after the elections, with a thud that caught even the most in-the-know pundits completely off guard, came the recommendations: the national debt is a big problem, and getting it into order is going to be a big and painful undertaking.

Before I go any further, I have a confession of sorts. I loathe Rand Paul, the newly elected senator from Kentucky. I loathe his over-simplified, smug brand of saviorism. I loathe his whining, his condescension. I loathe his tone of voice, which says, to my ears anyhow, you should know the answer to this question, but since you don’t, let me explain it to you, even though I shouldn’t have to. I would love to say that I’m open to Rand Paul’s ideas, that I’m open to listening and watching, but that would be a lie. Though I criticize conservatives for taking the same approach to dethroning Obama, what I’m looking forward to is watching Rand Paul walk into a trap from which even his most sermon-esque foolishness won’t liberate him.

And on Sunday morning, on Face the Nation, I got a little taste of exactly what I’m hoping for: Rand Paul, being asked what he thinks, now that he’s elected, about the recommendations to balance the budget. The recommendations, which are not pretty, call for, among other things, a dramatic reduction if not elimination of mortgage-based tax breaks, raising the retirement age, cutting social security for wealthier seniors, reducing the size of the federal government by reducing the number of employees and, best of all, raising taxes.

We should not cut defense spending, the soon-to-be senator opined. Strong national defense is the most important thing. And we shouldn’t look at reducing the salaries of soldiers and other military personnel, because the sacrifices they’ve made are amazing. And we should not raise taxes at all, because, you see, America is inspired by the private sector, by entrepreneurs, and raising taxes isn’t good for that. We should definitely reduce the number of government employees.

The best part of the discussion had nothing to do with the issue (it rarely does). Rand Paul was asked if he’d heard from the president, who is apparently “reaching out” to the newly elected. No, he has not. What will he say to him when they speak? Well – and here he laughed that gross little ah-shucks part laugh part grunt of his – when he talks to the president, he’d really prefer the conversation not be all about politics. Because there’s more important things. What he’d really like is for his kids to play with the president’s kids. Isn’t that adorable? He’d like for the little white kids to play with the little dark kids.

And that’s when it occurred to me that this is going to be far more entertaining than I’d ever imagined.

Precious junk

I was going to write a bit about Rand Paul, but then a bigger dick came along.

The guy who ranted at the security guards at an airport the other day about his “junk,” recorded it all on his cell phone and then posted it on YouTube where it “went viral” is even more tiresome than Rand Paul. In case you don’t know the story already, and in case you do not make a conscious decision to stop reading right now, here it is. A man went to the airport. While going through the security line, one of the inspectors informed him that there would be a bit of inner-thigh patting down (that’s my wording) to which the man said, “If you touch my junk I’ll have you arrested.” More words were exchanged, and at one point the inspector told the guy that the pat down was procedural and not a sexual assault. “It would be if you weren’t the government,” was the reply.

So here we have a guy who is not only quite taken with his own penis but who also thinks it’s his mission in life, provided the camera is running, to take on “the government.” Much like the balloon boy and the JetBlue flight attendant, the story, and the dweeb at the heart of it, became something of a sensation. So much so, in fact, that our beloved Katie Couric carried the story at the top of her show. The PBS NewsHour also did a segment on it. I was shocked that the show included our most current renegade’s call to arms. At the same time, the NewsHour focused more on the Congressional hearing convened to address the issue of cargo, and some wonderful phrasings ensued, including “high-risk packages” and “blowback” over tighter security restrictions.

It all did make me wonder, though. Are we really that anxious to talk about penises? I mean, I think they make for good discussion myself, but my God. I wonder what kind of reception the story would have received had it been a woman who decided to take on “the government,” and then I couldn’t help but wonder if this might be a little bit of a window into why people are damn near feverish with curiosity (to the point of voting about it) when it comes to what the homos do in bed, or on the floor. I wondered whether or not there will be follow up on the fine that this clown may be smacked with compliments of the TSA. One of the few things I actually learned from this story is that it’s illegal to start going through airport security without finishing the procedure because that opens up the whole security system to terrorists coming to airport to test their latest tactics. The fine is $10,000, and I hope this guy gets double that, or triple. Part of his rant was that if procedures that fail to recognize the sanctity of his penis are not banned, he’s going to stop flying. Please, do. The fewer male types who blow the significance of their dicks so far out of proportion to their actual relevance we have on airplanes, in security lines and on the roads and highways leading to and from airports, the better. I wondered, briefly, how many seconds it would take for this guy to start blaming “the government” if someone will ill intentions were to make it through security. My guess: about two. And I wondered, of course, why it’s even considered a news story, but I’ll spare you that part of it today.

But the best part of the story, for me, is that this guy is a software engineer. That’s a perfect detail, I think. Software engineers are cool, they’re hip. They “get” technology, they’re “super smart.” They’re here to show us the way, to save us from ourselves, and they know it, and they’re paid for it. Having worked with software engineers for a decade now, the ego behind this story doesn’t surprise me at all. This particular software engineer is so focused on his “junk” that he filmed his trip through security and then shared it with the entire world, assuming, of course, that the entire world is as interested in his “junk” as it is in his software. Based on the obscene amount of coverage, I have to admit that he’s right.

Cat stories

On Friday night, just for fun, I watched the six o’clock news. It was cold, my dinner was still warming and I had nothing better to do. On the news there were not one but two stories about cats. The first was about a cat that had been rescued from a house fire. In Portland, even though the schools seem always on the verge of bankruptcy, even though we cut bus schedules while raising fares, even though the Humane Society is often overwhelmed by cats pulled out of hoarder homes, our fire and rescue folks are equipped with masks for cats caught in burning buildings. I had no idea. The second story was about a cat named Agatha Christie. She’s lived in a small-town library (not in Portland) for most or all of her 12 years, but she’s getting old, and her health isn’t what it used to be, so she’s leaving the library and going to live with a family. The library – and here’s the news hook – threw a retirement party for Agatha Christie.

On Saturday morning I was telling a friend of mine about the kitty cats on the news. “That is nothing,” my friend said. “I talked to Ruth last week.”

Ruth is probably the strangest individual I’ve ever met. She’s my friend’s friend, not mine, although I’ve done lots of drinking with her when she’s been in Oregon. Ruth is known for her hair, her makeup and her nails, all of which are truly exquisite.

Until the tale I heard about how Ruth chose to get rid of 17 feral cats, the thing that best defined the tedious, exhausting madness of her existence was her house. It’s a two-story house – I’ve seen the pictures – sort of cottage-esque, perched in front of a large, mature, very cared for yard. The only problem is that there are no stairs connecting the ground floor to the second story. Instead, there’s an opening in the ceiling. There were no stairs when Ruth bought the house a decade ago, and, as of Saturday morning, there are still no stairs. There have been ladders, and pulleys, and platforms and one thing and another. Her son, the one who is no stranger to restraining orders and other court-issued formalities, has moved in and out many times under the pretense of building a staircase. Ruth has pulled muscles and sprained one thing and another, dealing with this problem. Once she decided that to recover from one of her injuries what she needed to do was go to bed. For a year. Which meant she couldn’t work, which meant she lost her job, which caused all kinds of drama with her daughter – not that there was any shortage of it before – who took it upon herself to deliver, weekly, Ruth’s library books by the dozen and Ruth’s groceries, which wreaked havoc on Ruth’s plans to lose weight because Ruth’s daughter favors frozen pizza and boxed macaroni and cheese, and for Ruth to ask her daughter for specific items from the grocery store would have made her appear ungrateful.

The thing about Ruth, to me, is that just hearing about her is aggravating. Ruth’s quite altruistic with her troubles: she not only shares them with everyone, she inserts everyone into them, gives everyone a role to play. It’s the grown-up version of my grandmother letting me “help” put icing on the birthday cake when I was five years old, sort of. I have a tendency toward this type of behavior myself, believing that life, when lived properly, is participatory, and that’s probably why I find Ruth stories so infuriating. I see a bit of myself in Ruth’s antics, and it horrifies me.

Fortunately I don’t have cats. Nor does Ruth, because she ran an ad on the innernets and found someone to trap them in cages in the back yard and blow their little heads off with a shotgun, which, as it turns out, was not registered with the authorities because it was owned by a guy who’s “got restrictions” (whatever the hell that means), so now there’s trouble not only with the law but with the cats’ rights people as well.

Which brings me, of course, to the cats. Ruth’s son found the original kitty in a parking lot and decided to bring it – or her, as it turns out – back to the house. Ruth’s son used to be a personal trainer, but he hurt his back trying (and you know you saw this coming, just admit it) to build a staircase for his mother, so he’s had to give up that line of work. This is Ruth’s fault so, although he’s well into his forties, she let him move in with her. And then he moved out, and then back in, and so on. He’s been on painkillers, which make him groggy, so he didn’t get around to taking his new pet in for surgery. He did, however, get around to meeting a woman at a bar, where the two of them eventually almost made finals in the shuffleboard tournament. The girlfriend loves, loves, loves cats, so imagine the joyful sense of wonder they experienced, together, when the first batch was born.

Unfortunately, their joy was short lived: Not long ago Ruth’s son tried to run his girlfriend over with his car and in this case Ruth sided not with her flesh and blood but with his girlfriend. She turned her son in. He’s now in jail and Ruth has a new roommate. Since there is no way to get upstairs, Ruth’s bed is set up in the dining room, and the girlfriend sleeps on the couch in the living room. “It’s cozy,” my friend told me. And Ruth’s daughter is sending hostile e-mails every hour on the hour, in which she accuses Ruth of setting the entire thing up as revenge for the unfinished – unstarted for that matter – staircase. While I don’t doubt her ability to do so, I have no idea how Ruth would have gone about orchestrating such a chain of events, and believe it or not I did not ask after the particulars.

What I did ask was why on earth you’d run an ad to deal with the cat problem rather than calling the Humane Society. “Oh, oh,” my friend said. “Because, her son’s girlfriend really likes the cats, and Ruth was afraid that if the Humane Society showed up it would be totally obvious what was going on and that it would upset her.” Of course, I thought when I heard that, because the rest of it is so subtle.

It's so unfair

Before the vote was finalized, before John Kitzhaber made a speech, before Chris Dudley conceded the race for governor not in front of his supporters but in front of a restaurant in Lake Oswego, where he was meeting his wife for margaritas, before any of this the whining and whimpering began.

This time around we’re not crying about miscounted ballots or other election irregularities but about how unfair it is that Multnomah County, which is where a large portion of Portland sits, has more than its fair share of influence in statewide elections. This sort of stupidness is to be expected on the comment pages of various internet sites, and it’s standard procedure among the right-wing talk shows hosts, whose main job is to demonize public figures they don’t like not by analyzing their legislative records but by giving everyone in agreement implicit permission to be a victim of the politician whose ass happens to be on the rotisserie that day.

Last week it was John Kitzhaber. He doesn’t respect rural Oregonians. He has no regard for people who live beyond the small stretch of state that connects Portland to Salem, which for reasons I do not understand is our capitol.

Since I do not rely on ratings to determine how much my station can charge for advertising, which would in turn determine how much I earn, and since I do not plan to ever run for office, here’s my take on it: If you live in rural Oregon, please shut up. Registered voters in Multnomah County each get one vote. Since there are more registered voters here, there are more votes. In the same way that California sends more people to the U.S. House of Representatives than Oregon because more people live there, it’s simple. It is not a plot against you. It is not a union conspiracy. I have lived and voted in Multnomah County for 16 years, and I have yet to have a “state worker” hold a gun to my head and force me to fill out my ballot accordingly. Though I wish you wouldn’t, if you live in rural Oregon and are feeling cheated, there are plenty of homes for sale in Portland. If you live in rural Oregon, what I really wish you’d do is stop and think a bit before yielding to the directives of the talk shows to regard everyone in Multnomah County as an enemy and yourself, therefore, as a victim. If it weren’t for Multnomah County, the rest of Oregon would have to absorb a lot more people, which would make the rest of Oregon, quite simply, less rural. Your way of life would be “threatened” by new people who would compromise the luxury to which you’ve become accustomed, the one that comes only with the confidence attained when your sphere consists mostly of people who look just like you, good people, people you’ve known all your life. And the government assistance that’s doled out in non-urban settings wouldn’t go quite as far because – here’s another bit of basic, basic math – it would have to be divided among more people.

As I said, I expect this sort of divisiveness to be fueled by professional scapegoaters, but I was truly surprised last week when it seeped onto Think Out Loud, a local talk show on OPB. The guy who called in to whine about the unfairness of Multnomah County was actually from Clackamas County, which may be partially rural but is also partially a part of what’s commonly called Portland. So I’m not sure if his call would be a symptom of the “urban-rural divide” in Oregon, or maybe something new, like the “mostly urban-partly suburban divide.” When it comes to identifying yourself as a victim, I suppose the possibilities are endless.

Book report

For the past few weeks, the Tolstoy book club has been a bit irregular. One of my nieces in Saint Louis turned 13 on Halloween, so my sister was busy with that, and last weekend my sister in Oklahoma was in New Orleans with her husband, who had to attend a doctor’s conference there. My sister in Oklahoma, who does not go to bed until 3:30 in the morning, did say that they’d be home by 10:30 Sunday evening and suggested we all get on the phone at midnight, which would be “early” in Oregon, but my sister in Saint Louis, who has a job, said no.

So from time to time I’ve been kind of ahead of schedule with War & Peace. I’d gotten to the part where Napoleon’s army is starting to disintegrate, where Rostov has just met Princess Marya, the sister of Andrei Bolkonsky, Andrei being one of the most interesting characters I’ve encountered on paper in a long while. He’s easy to hate until you begin to like him. His wife (“the little Princess,” whose main characteristic is her weird mouth and her mustache) dies during childbirth, then, rather quickly, he falls in love with Natasha Rostov, who loves him in equal measure until Anatole Kuragin comes along and attempts to elope with her. And Pierre Bezukhov decides to go into battle in spite of his harsh criticism of it – by this point he has become a freemason to cope with his marital misery – but he goes into it as a tourist, as if the war were an amusement park. He is shocked by how graphic death by sword can be. Pierre is interesting as well. He may be married to Anatole’s sister, but what really stirs his heart is Natasha and, even more so for my money, his friendship with … Andrei. It’s all quite delicious.

Much to my surprise, I hope War & Peace never ends, but surely it will, so to slow that process down and to be as current as possible when the book club does meet, I’ve strayed from my vows to book monogamy and had a few affairs along the way, two of which I recommend.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter would be an amazing accomplishment even without knowing that its author, Carson McCullers, had not yet turned 25 when it was published – that’s right, not written, published. If you aspire to write quality fiction, and you’ve passed 40, or 30 for that matter, reading it is a bit of a slap in the face, but an enjoyable one. It’s all good but the scene that stands out in my mind is when one of the white characters goes to the black doctor’s house, where trouble is brewing, and is treated, in a private, black-owned and black-occupied home according to the same rules that apply in public: blacks defer to whites, removing themselves from the table and standing against the wall when the white man, a total stranger to them all, is seated and served coffee not in chipped, stained cups but in the best china in the house. Many generations, sketched in three, maybe four deft, capable sentences. The scene is written with such a lack of urgency or outrage or condemnation for that matter that the particulars of it did not occur to me until two or three pages later, at which point I went back and reread it.

I think I’m becoming a bit of a slut for Ian McEwan. Like Saturday, Amsterdam is about fairly ordinary people. A composer and a newspaper editor have been friends for years, and both have had affairs with the woman whose funeral opens the novel. Most of the story takes place in London but it ends in a hotel in Amsterdam, in a way that I think would seem contrived in the hands of most. The language, though, the language. I’m sitting here trying to think of a clever way to describe the way Ian McEwan uses language, or the seduction of it, and I can’t, so I won’t.

Joy Williams is a writer whose work I have admired for many years. When I was in college she published a story called The Blue Men, about a grandmother and her grandson living a fractured life in Florida, where the boy’s father and the grandmother’s son was awaiting execution on death row. One night they’re driving; the grandma loses control of the car, it flips over, then rights itself and they continue on their way. A sheriff witnesses this and follows them for a couple of miles in complete disbelief. When he finally pulls them over he asks the grandmother why she didn’t stop. “We thought it was a dream,” the grandmother says, “so we kept going.” And that one line of dialogue, which has resonated for me for more than two decades, is my main objection to The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams’ novel about three teenage girls in Arizona. In the map within my mind, the prime minister of the country called Short Stories is Joy Williams, and reading a novel by her – and this is strictly my opinion – is as unlikely as reading a short story by Leo Tolstoy.

The Pelosi problem

So now there’s the issue of Nancy Pelosi. Before I write another word, I have to confess that she makes my skin crawl. What really bothers me, though, is that I have no idea why. Without giving it much thought, I’d say my main problem with her is that whenever she opens her mouth I begin trying to determine what percentage of what she says is completely false compared to what’s not, and then how much, from the “what’s not” category, is partially true compared to what’s almost entirely factually correct.

More succinctly, Nancy Pelosi makes my skin crawl because she’s just as bad as any other politician. It’s embarrassing and humiliating for me to admit this, but evidently I am every bit as susceptible to Republican-generated bullshit as anyone else. Nancy Pelosi is every PR person's dream come true: the messaging document has transcended bullet points and words and is now political scripture, and it goes something like this: Nancy Pelosi is an unapologetically liberal politician. She’s a rich bitch. Since she represents San Francisco, she’s an elitist, she’s out of touch with real America and the people who live there, and she should be disposed of immediately.

I woke up, sort of, one night not long before the elections when I happened to tune into her being interviewed by Charlie Rose. Speaking of crawling skin, Charlie Rose, along with Oprah, is one of the worst interviewers I’m aware of. He does more talking than the guests – that alone should get you fired, I think, but that’s just me – and most of his talking is beneath banal. And Nancy Pelosi was having none of it. If there is a man who has man-handled Charlie Rose more effectively than Nancy Pelosi, it’s a spectacle I’ve yet to witness. The next day I looked up her legislative record, which I realize is sort of an elitist thing to do during election season, and my reaction is hard to describe. Blown away, perhaps. Stunned. Guilty. Maybe all three. It seems to me she is one of the last remaining politicians who didn’t succumb to Pappy Bush’s degradation of liberalism by referring to it as “the L word” during the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. Pappy was a man’s man, a national father figure and a direct link to the most revered president of our time, and his smears were interpreted by the majority of Democrats, including the Clintons, as guidance from the invisible hand of God to shift from the left to the center, which they’ve been doing dutifully now for 20 years.

For the next several days I listened to many, many people on the radio and television and internets reiterate over and over again how forward they were looking to voting against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. All of the bellowing was done with zero regard for the fact that there was not a national election last week. Also absent was any acknowledgement of how far from or close to San Francisco the orator or his or her audience lived. No matter: according to Mama Grizzly and many others we fired Nancy Pelosi and put Barack Obama on a performance plan last week (we did neither, in my opinion, but this is hardly the time for technicalities). As I listened I was overtaken with the same sense of quiet dread that usually accompanies the dreams I have where I’m in houses I’ve known for decades, only the rooms are completely and irrationally rearranged, and no one but me seems bothered or even surprised.

Are we really that retarded? I wondered through it all. Am I really that gullible? Yes, and yes. And I suppose I should show some gratitude to Charlie Rose.

Those are scary thoughts and questions for me, but, as always, there’s more: as Nancy Pelosi was being demonized with a measure of misogyny so vehement it made the Salem witch trials seem like a mismanaged but harmless badminton tournament, where were the Democrats? They were hiding, as usual, caving. It’s a very bad thing to be associated with Nancy Pelosi, so the script said, and so they bailed. Until, of course, it was too late. Once the Republicans had reclaimed control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, nervy woman that she is, decided she wanted to retain some sort of leadership position even though her party had been dethroned. And since the commercials had run their course, her fellow Democrats decided, with ringing clarity, at long last, to stand by their leader. For this reason and thousands more, it’s not at all surprising to me that the Democrats lost the majority in the house, but that they ever managed to attain it in the first place.

A prediction

Now that the countdown to 2012 is officially underway, I have a prediction: I believe the Republican candidate for president in 2012 will be Marco Rubio, who was elected to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by the people of Florida.

I heard him on the radio on Wednesday evening, and he’s perfect.

He’s young – he’ll turn 40 in May – and reasonably attractive (by suburban heterosexual standards anyhow). For college he won a football scholarship, so he’s no pussy. He’s married to a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, which is awesome, and together they have four children, meaning he can legitimately get misty eyed when regurgitating the sermon about how wrong it is to pass Obama's debt down to our children, our grandchildren and beyond because, having shown zero regard for reproductive responsibility, he will, theoretically anyhow, be represented in greater numbers in future generations of citizens who will, also theoretically, pay taxes

After going to law school, he served in the Florida legislature (for two years as its speaker) so he understands people. He used to go around the state holding what he called “idearaisers,” and based on those events he wrote a book called 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. He’s conservative and he’s a Republican, so he’s really good at simplifying things and, in the process, really connecting with people just like you and me.

When he speaks, he does so in that flat yet sing-songy Republican cadence. In a way that’s probably similar to what a deer experiences when the rifle is silently aimed at his head or his heart on what started out as an ordinary Saturday morning, I recognize this vocal shift instantly. Describing it is more challenging, but here’s my attempt: It’s condescending, but in a circuitous way. It's a way of speaking that reaches out to the ear and then, drawing on the full aresenal of horsepower behind tone and inflection, invites the ear to join the voice in speaking to anyone who happens to fall into the category of “other” with one side or another of the lower lip slightly upturned.

Thanks to NBC’s insertion of itself into a state election, he already has national name recognition, and in 23 months and three weeks Marco Rubio will have served in the U.S. Senate for close to two years, and you know as well as I do how his supporters will respond to any suggestion that he doesn’t have enough experience.

But, speaking of comparisons to Obama, here’s the best part: Marco Rubio is not white. He’s Cuban American. That makes him a Latino!

Marco Rubio will certainly face some obstacles, but I believe he’ll overcome them all, and beautifully. As a Tea Party candidate, he is beholden, of course, to Mama Grizzly, but by the time 2012 rolls around, she will have realized that it’s time for her to do what real women do, which is to shut up, offer cream and sugar with the coffee and let the menfolk do what they were put on this earth to do. Otherwise, she’d be veering into feminist territory, and that’s an expressway to Lezzy Land. The second big challenge for Marco Rubio is his religion. He’s a Roman Catholic by birth and breeding, but he and his family now do their magical thinking at an Evangelical church, so, in terms of fundraising and the inherent rightness of bringing more babies into the world, I think that could easily be turned into an advantage for him. Plus, it’s clear as crystal that he is not a Muslim, so we can all rest a bit easier, a bit more peacefully.

Here, though, is the best part of Marco Rubio: his parents are from Cuba. This concerned me initially, with the Tea Party’s hard line on immigration and all, but I’m probably over thinking it. I look to the Marco Rubio people to trot the issue out full throttle with a brass band and lots of fireworks. Marco Rubio truly understands the love of country, the power of patriotism, because he was raised by two people who endured an amazing conflict. They loved Cuba, but with equal fervor they hated Communism, and they hated Communists. Naturally, when Castro took over their hearts were so broken that they came to Miami and, like many of their fellow travelers, became Republicans. I was on the edge of my seat, fearing that those painful labels might ruin an otherwise beautiful scenario: immigrants, illegal immigrants or, the worst, illegals. But my worries were for naught, because Marco Rubio is not the son of immigrants, he is the son of exiles. And that one word alone makes his story one from which we can all draw inspiration.

I want a better show

I have to hand it to the people who call the shots on the television, the radio and the Internets, for conducting themselves in a way that is indeed fair and balanced. If you thought the fact that they started crowing about the midterms before Obama even walked onto the stage in Chicago to give his acceptance speech in 2008 was unfair to Democrats, think again. Because here, word for word, is a bit of story seeding from Wednesday morning’s headlines:

Hold the celebration. Most voters expected Republicans to win control of the House of Representatives on Election Day, but nearly as many expect to be disappointed with how they perform by the time the 2012 elections roll around.

And a few hours later, this headline, on MSN:

With elections down, all eyes on 2012.

Down? Was it a hunting adventure? And in terms of eyes, who exactly constitutes ‘all’? Speaking only for myself, my eyes, and my ears, were on Multnomah County, Oregon where they were counting ballots to see if the keys to the governor’s mansion were going to be handed over to a guy who, as best I can tell, never so much as ran for student government. (The answer, for now, appears to be no.)

You might expect me to be critical of this, but there’s one piece of information that’s changed my mind. The cost for the game show that ended for the most part on Tuesday evening was $3 billion, which I believe makes elections, officially, an industry. And with the media publishing polls about the next election before the current election is finalized, coupled with the high court’s wisdom about the spending rights of corporations, it’s only going to get better with time.

And another thing that might surprise you is that I am looking forward to seeing how far this goes, and given the fact that we worship the almighty dollar – and why not? – I predict it will go all the way. I picture a more user friendly future for our elections, where people cast their votes via text or cell phones or e-mail, or all three perhaps, plus Facebook and Twitter and some red state/blue state iPad app and whatever new moronic thing comes along between now and 2012, and at the rate we are innovating there will surely be many. I can see shapely women in sparkly gowns gliding to and fro in the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol, walking people in and out depending, of course, on the results, and allowing them to comment briefly from time to time about how it was either the best time of their life or how much they’re looking forward to serving the people of our great country, especially the men and women in uniform and the men and women – but mostly men – who once wore a uniform but now reside, tax free, in graveyards. It gives me chills, just thinking about it. And I picture, or hear, a soundtrack of some sort, maybe an orchestra, or a pre-recorded theme song since the acoustics at the Capitol are terrible.

But what I really want in my elections is some personality, and the perfect way to achieve that, I think, is to have some judges. Not the black-robed sorts, but some real rabble rousers, some real personalities, who could give hand signals or put ping-pong paddles with numbers up to cast their vote. The former governors of Illinois, for example, could do a season with their parole officers in tow, just slightly beyond the camera’s reach, but very slightly. Or maybe a panel of jilted political wives. The possibilities for putting some lipstick on the old pig are truly endless, and with only 24 months to go before the next season finale I think we better get moving.

Do you believe in magic?

John Boehner, the future speaker of the house, didn’t waste a nanosecond last night in reminding everyone that his party’s wave of victories does not constitute “a revolution,” but I think he’s being admirably modest. I am quite confident that by this time next year we will be living in a very different place, one where there is little if any unemployment, where spending is under control, where there is not much of a deficit, where quality healthcare is available to any and all and where, most importantly, questionable deal making and compromising one thing for the sake of another are as obsolete as a handwritten thank you. John Boehner’s modesty aside, The American Dream was revived yesterday after its two-year stint on life support, and even though Rick Fox, the hot black guy, got voted off Dancing with the Stars last night while Bristol Palin was spared, I for one am really looking forward to the good times.

Talking

The short-term question for today seems to be this. Is your life any different than it was two years ago, when Obama was elected and Democrats became the majority in Congress? In one way mine is radically different. In early November 2008, I still clung to my belief, stridently, some would say, that you cannot blame the media – the media simply serves its audience. The media is not to blame for the message. I was wrong, and for the past 24 months I’ve been eating crow. The media – all of it, the radio, the television, the incessant Internet commentary and chatter and rambling – began priming the pump for the midterm elections not on the day that Obama was sworn in but on the day he was elected. It’s a show, and since they’re hosting it they want to make sure as many people as possible attend. Therefore, Obama takes a dump on a Thursday afternoon, out of synch for various reasons with his regular rhythm, and it is tied directly, somehow, in a way that defies your wildest dreams, to the midterms. A road is paved on a hot summer afternoon; by the next morning the analysts are reporting on it “in the context of” the midterms. While surveying the destruction in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama, who is the president of the United States, refuses to behave like he’s a guest on Oprah and that, ladies and gentlemen, will have an impact on the midterms.

In PR this behavior is called “seeding the story.” It’s toxic enough when it concerns the launching of a new computer program that shouldn’t be newsworthy in the first place; when the “seeding” intentionally distorts and perverts politics for the sake of ratings, I think we’ve taken the concept of sinister to an entirely new level.

So today I’d like to seed a story of my own, one whose primary character is a little boy called Ian. I cringe when people attempt to explain the world with toddler quotes – so simple yet so true, and so gosh darn cute! – but today that’s exactly what I’m going to do. On the morning of the inauguration, Ian and his father, who happens to be my brother, came to my house to watch the festivities. It was a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, cold and wintry, January. Inside we had coffee and bagels and brownies. “The steam coming up out of the mugs, it’s so pretty,” my brother said. Though wasteful, I’d boiled water to heat up our mugs before pouring the coffee. That had been one of our father’s signature moves: warming cups and teapots and such with boiling water. Since our father had died shortly after casting his vote for Obama from a hospital bed via absentee ballot, I’d wanted, in some way, to recall him. It was touching, for a very brief moment, that my brother bothered to notice. Ian, who was about to turn two, trashed his face with cream cheese but managed to get most of the bagel in his mouth. Using both hands, he drank fruit juice from a steamed coffee mug of his own.

There was all sorts of commotion on the television. My brother thought the wheels on the helicopter waiting to carry W. off the national stage looked like they belonged on a toy. I thought Mrs. Obama’s dress was wonderful. We sat on the couch, the three of us, watching. Ian looked up first at his father, and then at me, with a curious but resigned expression on his face, then pointed at the television and said, “Talking.” We laughed, we agreed, we all pointed at the television, and Ian said once again, with more conviction, “Talking.” And for the past 24, hype-fueled months of stories that are at best distorted and at worst completely made up, it’s been mostly just that: talking.

Basic math from Florida

I’ve been doing a pretty good job of curtailing television time around here. There are two reasons for this. First, the campaign ads and, far worse, the accompanying, nonstop nonsense about ‘the midterms’ from some of the more odious celebrity anchors is sickening. Secondly, and more importantly, I have really been enjoying reading first thing in the morning. I make the coffee, make the bed, turn on the lamp on my table, and sit down. It’s been dark here lately until well past 7:00, and starting the day with well-crafted sentences printed on paper rather than the television or radio is a little bit of heaven for me.

But this morning I relapsed and turned on Today, which never fails to provide endless examples of the transformation of what was once the news into cheap entertainment. My current favorite is Matt Lauer, who hosts Today, and David Gregory, who moderates, supposedly, Meet the Press. Matt Lauer went to California to moderate a debate between the two candidates for governor of that state, and David Gregory went to Florida to do the same with the three candidates vying to represent that state in the U.S. Senate. As much as they would like for it to be, this is not a presidential election. These elections are about people voting on candidates and issues specific to their cities, counties, municipalities and states. So why, I’ve wondered, are these figureheads from national media outlets even involved in these races?

Because, I learned this morning, they’re doing what they do best: manufacturing stories. This morning, Today opened with the “controversy” from Florida. Three people are running for one seat: a Democrat, who is black, a Republican darling of the Tea Party, who is Cuban, and the governor, who is running as an independent, who is white and widely rumored to be a homo. According to many polls, the Democrat is so far behind it’s hopeless, and therein lies our paint-by-numbers controversy for the day: Bill Clinton, who hasn’t been president for nearly a decade, is campaigning for his fellow Democrat, and there are rumors that he advised that candidate to drop out of the race, which would bolster the independent candidate and defeat the Republican. Is that true? Did he really say that? Meredith Vierra had the Democrat on and really showed us her stuff. But, but, she said, there are rumors, and where do you suppose they came from? I’m not dropping out of the race, the candidate managed to say at least four times. The people of Florida will decide with their ballots.

If you have three candidates and one withdraws, there are two options. Either the people who supported the withdrawn candidate do not vote, or they vote for one of the two remaining candidates. Regardless of what Bill Clinton said or did not say, that’s a simple mathematical fact. If Bill Clinton reminded the candidate that his withdrawal from the race would increase the chances of one of the two remaining candidates, so what?

Here’s what. Not five minutes later, Ann Curry sat down with two of the network’s Cub Scouts, David Gregory, just back from his celebrity appearance in Florida, and Chuck Todd, NBC’s blandly snide White House correspondent. Ann Curry wanted to know how things are looking for the Democrats. How badly are they going to lose next week? Then – and this is perhaps one of the reasons that someone who greets people on national television by saying “Hey” earns millions – she brought the chat back to the interview with the Florida candidate. Only by that point the story had morphed a bit and the reference about advice given – or not – in Florida was no longer to Bill Clinton but to The White House. My oh my, I thought, how things evolve in less than five minutes, because had you tuned in at that moment, or had you not been paying attention, I would not blame you for believing that The White House was interfering in state races. And that, of course, makes it a story not about elementary mathematics as broken down – or not – by an elder statesman who clearly knows a thing or two about winning elections but one of national relevance.

Dangerous people, dangerous movies

I love picking out movies on Netflix and then watching them at home, but there’s still nothing quite like seeing a movie at a theater with a big screen and a sound system to match. So this weekend I walked to my neighborhood theater, paid $4.00 for a ticket, and bought a bag of popcorn from a young woman who, as it turns out, lives two houses down the street from me. I love a late-afternoon movie, especially if it’s a dreary day, so Saturday was perfect. I decided to see Eat, Pray, Love, which I did not expect to like. I wanted, badly, to be wrong. Before the lights even went down my problem with the movie wasn’t the movie itself but the author of the book, who, post eating, praying and loving, believes her plight of not being able to marry someone because he is not a citizen of the U.S. is worth a lot of ink (the publishers and the book-buying public agree, unfortunately). Personally, given the hostility toward many couples in this country when it comes to marriage, I find that sort of tone deafness offensive. Still, I didn’t want to dismiss the movie before it even started. I am trying not to typecast. I wanted a good surprise, and I got one. The movie started badly, and then – here’s the surprise – it got worse. Way worse. If I had to write a succinct overview of the movie for the newspaper, here goes: A celebration of middle class self-indulgence. Great scenery.

Which made for an interesting contrast with the other two movies I watched over the weekend: The Most Dangerous Man in America and Sometimes in April. My blurb copy for each of them would read as follows: Freedom of speech: Yes? No? Maybe?

I didn’t fully experience the 1970s, but I still get nostalgic for the era. From what I’ve read and heard and seen, it seems to me that the 1970s is the last time people, en masse, actually rejected convention. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon employee and the Wiki leaker of his day, earned the most dangerous designation by sharing massive volumes of classified documents with The New York Times. He was driven to this act because, as someone who had contributed to the “intelligence” used to justify the war in what Nixon called, on tape, “that little shit-ass country,” his conscience would no longer permit him not to. The most compelling part of the film, I thought, occurred after the leak. Nixon imposed an injunction, so other papers across the country, one by one, in solidarity, took up publishing the documents where the New York Times left off. In fairly quick order, the supreme court also answered to its conscience and dismissed Nixon’s injunction, but not before what for me was the movie’s most memorable scene. As Tricky Dick was doing his best to nationalize the print and broadcast media, Daniel Ellsberg gave a copy of the documents to a congressman from Alaska, who read from them at the U.S. Capitol during a filibuster, which, technically, transferred the official ownership of the papers from the Pentagon to the U.S. Congress. I love dangerous people.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, Rwanda. The 1994 genocide in that country in which nearly 1 million people (more by some estimates) were killed intrigues me. April 1994 for me is not confined to grainy black and white photographs in history books. I remember it, and I remember it well. Sometimes in April follows two brothers throughout the killing spree and its aftermath. One is married to a Tutsi woman; the other is an announcer on the Rwandan radio station that beat the death drums via the airwaves throughout the genocide, branding Tutsis as, among other things, “cockroaches.” The story is a complex one, and the questions it left with me are even more so. What exactly does freedom of speech mean? Is it okay for people like Michael Savage to take to dehumanize Muslims and liberals and anyone else he doesn’t like by calling them “vermin”? Does the right to free speech cover Portland’s own right-wing, talking hyena, who claims, repeatedly, that well over half of all Latinos in the city are “illegals”? Should her station be required to have documentation on file to back up that claim? I don’t know.

Throughout Sometimes in April, newsreels from a particular day of the genocide were shown along with the number of people killed by that date at the bottom of the screen, a morbid ticker, if you will. One day that month – and I remember this very clearly – as people were hacked to bits with machetes, the lead story on the national news in the U.S. was the mournful youngsters gathered in Seattle to comfort one another through a devastating blow: Kurt Cobain had killed himself, silencing forever “the voice of a generation.” What on earth were they going to do without him? In spite of the message that Courtney Love had recorded for the weeping wounded, they were lost, as was Julia Roberts on Saturday afternoon as she gazed down at her wedding photos and tearfully realized she couldn’t picture herself in her own marriage. It was a crisis, to be sure, as was the number accompanying the images of the mourners. I believe 30,000 people had been murdered in Rwanda at that point in the film, but it may have been up to 60,000 by then. Sorry – I’m not so good with numbers.