January

Much to my own surprise, I have decided that January may very well be my favorite month of the year. Over the past few weeks, when I’m sitting in my living room, or out running errands on the bus, or taking a walk, or meeting someone for coffee, or meeting a good book for coffee, I’ve been struck by how different the quality of the light is. I think I may have noticed this, on a less conscious level, in years past, but this year it’s remarkable.

Here is my attempt at an explanation, along with a confession: I do not understand the planets, particularly the rotation part. On or around December 20 we experience both the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Ever since I moved to Oregon in 1994, I have come to think of this day as bottoming out. I don’t mean that in a negative way, necessarily; what I mean is that if you see the daily light dosage on a graph, with the hours of light at the top and the hours of darkness at the bottom, June would be the high point with December at the bottom. In Oregon, the loss and gain of light are so dramatic they’re impossible to miss. In Portland, you can read the newspaper without electricity after 9 o’clock in the evening in late June, and by the week of Christmas it feels reasonable to light the candles just before 4 in the afternoon.


To me, the change in the quality of light between the 22nd of December and the first week or two of January is way more significant than the number of days that have actually passed would suggest. This year it occurred to me that it must be due to our movement away from the sun being replaced by our movement toward it. By my calculations, November 30 and January 9 are the same distance – the same number of days – from December 20 and therefore have the same amount of darkness and light, yet thanks to the lighting in Portland, I often have to remind myself that I’m in the same city, the same neighborhood, that I have not, after all, been transported to a new sphere. I’ve decided that in Portland, even though the hours and minutes are the same, the gaining rather than losing puts a different tint to it, and I’ve decided that I really, really like it.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been captivated by the lighting to the east, right outside my living room window. In the brief moments before afternoon surrenders to evening, it’s light enough out for the rooftops and the edges of the evergreens and the other trees, bare branches at this point, to be silhouetted before a backdrop of faint gray. At the same time, the street lights and the lights on the porches up the side street come on and cast a yellowish glow over the neighborhood, which more often than not includes a shimmering reflection of the wet, black pavement, which the moisture transforms into something close to silver. During these few moments on January afternoons, the aluminum siding on a rectangular building and the boards in a deteriorating fence look regal somehow, almost elegant, even the power lines and a low-slung, hopelessly beige apartment building across the street, all of it washed in a golden-orange glaze – golrange, I call it – that makes me feel, for a second or two, that I am in New Orleans.

He should focus on jobs

Math is not my strong suit and it never has been. From the moment I was told that if you multiply two negatives you end up with a positive I was hopelessly lost, and have been ever since. So here’s a question about numbers, a confession, if you will, of statistical ignorance. Obama really screwed everything up by focusing on healthcare reform rather than focusing on getting the economy back up on its feet by waving his magic wand and creating millions of jobs to replace the ones we’ve lost – given away, in my opinion, for the sake of a cheap and easy increase in “shareholder value.” Here’s where I get lost with the math. If healthcare comprises a portion of our overall economy that is growing by the day, wouldn’t reforming the system that’s the foundation of this mega industry be, in fact, a way of creating and stabilizing a considerable number of jobs?

Talking

Once upon a time, in Hawaii, an unmarried, unwealthy white woman gave birth to a baby boy fathered by a black man from Africa. And tonight, less than half a century later, the man that child grew up to be will ride a very short distance along Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver the state of the union address to Congress and perhaps to the world as well. There are times when I am stunned by this country’s flair for narrative, and today is one of them.

Unfortunately, the narrative extends to the industry that talks for a living, for which it must be bonus season because they will simply not shut the hell up for more than four consecutive seconds. Obama is in trouble. Obama’s way down in the polls. November is going to be rough for Obama. Obama is too cerebral. Obama does not show enough emotion, or passion. Ohio is not looking good for Obama in 2012. In 2008 in Cleveland Obama polled higher than he did a year later, in 2009. But among white females in two districts just outside of Cleveland, but not too far outside, only 42 percent think Obama had delivered on his promises as of August 2009, and that’s down from 73 percent of the black males between the ages of 24 and 36 who believed that, in February 2009, Obama was the president they’d hoped for. Nebraska is a different story for Obama. Obama still does well among independents living in mid-sized communities in California. But that just might be offset by a shakeup among the senatorial contingent from North Dakota, and this could have some long- to medium-term impact on Obama, but Obama will likely not be affected in the immediate future. Obama is calling in the big guns – the guy who managed his presidential campaign – because he’s scared. Obama is getting ready to clean some serious house, the big white one, where he lives and works. Obama is too radical. Obama is just a conservative, disguised as a liberal. When the people of Massachusetts elected a senator last week, that was really a vote against Obama. Obama lost. Obama will not win a second term. Obama may not even run for a second term. It’s all over for Obama. How will history remember Barack Obama?

Late in 1999, I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek, after a guy from Texas named George W. Bush was given the magazine’s cover three times prior to winning the Republican nomination. If I still had a subscription, I’d cancel it again today, based on this gem of a headline: The Problem with Barack Obama. The president is leading with his head instead of his heart. It’s followed, even more insidiously, I think, by this: Is Obama paving the way for a Palin presidency? Well, given the magazine’s habit of covering politics as if it were analyzing a season of Survivor, I suppose it’s a fair question. The editor of the magazine, who has one of the most smug television personas I’ve yet to see, sat on the Charlie Rose show Monday night and said that we really, really need to know more about what Obama feels. We need to see Obama be more emotional. On Tuesday morning, John McCain offered up the Republican response to a pre-address interview Obama did with Diane Sawyer, doing away with the tradition, apparently, of waiting until after the state of the union address to have a member of the opposing party respond to it.

God, please send help our way now, and as much of it as possible.

I have plenty of criticisms of Obama, but rather than force them to fit within the very tight quarters of a single speech, tonight I am going to try to ignore the fact that the address itself – once considered a dignified occasion – will be perverted and degraded by input from the pollsters, the lobbyists and the legion of people who earn lots of money hashing and rehashing and spinning and twisting everything Obama does, from sending more troops to Afghanistan to cutting a fart in C sharp rather D flat. Since I have yet to receive an offer from the White House to help out with communications, which I would gladly accept, tonight I am going to try to just listen.

Welcome ... welcome

Today, in about an hour, I am going to try something I’ve never tried. I am going to try to address an issue before it becomes an emergency. This is something I’ve never really done before. With increasing frequency, but with no apparent pattern, when I sign into my computer in the morning I get stuck in the welcome mode: a blue screen, the word “Welcome” and, beside it, a circle that turns. And turns, and turns. This morning I spent more than an hour turning the computer off and then restarting, and being welcomed all over again, and I’m embarrassed to say that my life kind of passed before my eyes in slow motion as I contemplated the prospect of losing everything. Finally, I was granted access. I don’t know if it’s an issue with the hard drive, or the operating system, or a virus, or what it is. What I do know is that sitting here as my chest tightens and my stomach threatens to rebel is not something I can do on a regular basis. So I have the number for the computer repair service I’ve used a couple of times – for emergencies, of course – and I am going to call them at 9:30.

When Mommy goes backwards

A friend of mine, in a way that’s harmless for the most part, is very susceptible to pop psychology, things like psychic projections, numerology, astrology, channeling positive energy here and there in order to receive what you put out. I make fun of him, of course, mainly because the source of his interests seems always to be the Oprah show, which he records daily and quotes as a news source.

On Friday though, he shared something with me that I have to admit captured my attention for most of the weekend. “I have been thinking,” he said, almost conspiratorially, “and I’m pretty sure I only use about two-eighths of my brain.” There have been many television shows on the subject, he told me. There is no shortage of information on the Internet, and Louise Hay – a spiritual guru with an astonishing number of devotees – has written on it extensively. And Oprah, to be sure. My friend happens to have HIV, and he wondered, over teriyaki chicken, if there was a connection. “What if there’s a part of my brain that I don’t use that has the ability to say no to an infection?” he wondered. Does the mind make women who believe breast cancer is in their genes have a higher rate of the disease? Do people who consciously believe they are protected against HIV have a lower rate of infection, in spite of the prevailing wisdom that they’re actually at a greater risk?

The entire topic, I think, is ripe for harvest by the enlightenment industry, but it did make me wonder. We pay an excruciating level of attention to our bodies. We’re obsessed with what we eat, or don’t, our weight, our flexibility. We go on diets and take pills by the millions. Since most of us sit on our ass most of the time, we go to the gym, where we strive to keep our bodies in good working order. When’s the last time you heard someone say they’ve finally found the perfect brain instructor? Or how proud of themselves they are for having gotten in the habit of spending 15 minutes every morning doing memory stretches?

The main thing I wondered about, on Saturday morning, is language, and how much of it is clunking around in the parts of our brains we do not access. The best professor I ever had once said that people who believe that children learn language by memorization are way off the mark. “They learn English because they’re geniuses, and they’re geniuses because nobody has told them not to be,” she said. My professor believed all toddlers who can string the most basic sentence together should be awarded a Ph.D. She was from Nashville.

One day a few years ago, I was sitting at the table with my brother, his wife and my nephew. I don’t recall the exact date, but it was before his younger brother arrived, so my nephew could not have been more than two and a half years old. We were talking about words that contained verse: diverse, converse, universe, versatile. It was on a Sunday morning, and I believe our conversation got going as a result of the weekly word game on NPR, which I love. After listening to the discussion for a few minutes, my nephew, still confined to a high chair but able to drink his orange juice from a grown-up glass, said, “When mommy goes backwards in the driveway.” I guess I had not been properly warmed up after trying to keep up with the radio puzzle because it took me a few seconds before I realized that he was referring to the word reverse. He heard other words with 'verse' in them, which must have triggered his recollection of the term reverse, then used his brain to use a completely different word - backwards - in a phrase about his mother's driving. I’m not saying I think my nephew should be awarded a doctorate degree, but recalling the discussion over the weekend did make me think of my professor and her rejection of the memorization theory.

Thi$ i$ not a good deci$ion

I was stalking around on Facebook yesterday afternoon when I came across a post from a guy I know who is in Paris on business. According to him, a union protest attended by thousands had snarled traffic and disrupted his dinner plans. As an executive for one of the world’s most known retail companies, this guy’s sphere of influence is horrific, so lots of people are in line waiting for their chance to kiss his ass in the most public way possible. And yesterday they did just that. The comments attached to his status update were great examples of how people want to side with those who have power and money, even if they’re fortunes are far more aligned with those who do not. What could French workers possibly have to complain about? What do they want? More vacation time? Here’s how I see it: People who depend on earning an hourly wage are willing to throw grenades at people in another country because they’re in a union, because they get more vacation days and because they have the nerve to cause a traffic jam in Paris and delay their main man’s dinner engagement. This is done in order to suck up to someone who would, I’m quite certain, vote on the side of management and shareholders rather than on their behalf were he forced to make a choice. Pardon my language, but what a mind fuck.

Personally, I wish the Paris protesters had been in Washington, D.C. yesterday to clog traffic in our highest court’s neighborhood. I think it would have benefited all of us in ways we can barely imagine had some folks who think about more than their next promotion been available to distract the justices as they paved what I think is a major on-ramp to the road that will lead to the demise of our election system, or what's left of it. In their wisdom, they ruled that corporations can spend as much as they’d like on campaigns. In their benevolence, they tossed us a bone, I suppose, by granting unions and nonprofits the same green light. That assumes, of course, that unions and nonprofits will be able to sustain themselves through what I anticipate will be an onslaught the likes of which we’ve never seen, so forceful and relentless they may even interrupt dinner plans.

Picture tricks

In my family, there is no more effective way of dissing someone than the photo block. In one photograph, one of my aunts, according to my mother, who took the picture, leaned over half a second before the shoot button was pressed and blocked all of my grandfather (her father) except his right arm. He was shorter than my aunt, so in the picture she appears to have three arms – two bare and one in a suit jacket. In another, which is one of my favorites, my grandmother is sitting beside one of my sisters, who is blowing out eight candles on her birthday cake. The only problem is that the camera was held in such a way that only the right third of my grandmother’s face made it onto the print. In spite of the score settling, the picture is actually kind of artistic: a fraction of a mature woman’s face, part of her eye, the edge of her cheek, only a little bit of her mouth, which makes it impossible for a smile to offset other elements of her face.

So it’s through this lens, pardon the pun, that I reacted to a photograph I happened across in the business section of the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. There, in full color, was our president and three of his economic lieutenants strutting into a stuffy looking room to announce that they’re going to play hardball with the bankers over the bonuses they awarded themselves a mere year after being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks these bad-ass horse and pony shows are a joke: I think a year ago such a story would have landed on the front page rather than being stuck back on the business page. But what was truly odd about the picture is what was missing. In spite of the tag line that read, in part, “Barack Obama and his team of economic advisors …” Christina Romer got cut. The only reason I noticed her absence is that the event was on the television news the night before, and Christina Romer, pardon me for saying this, is hard to miss. I didn’t read the story but as for the visual accompaniment, I suppose her image would have interfered with the tough guy angle. She’s possibly the only one of Obama’s economic advisors who is not beholden to Wall Street, which makes the photo editing even more interesting, I think.

That was on a Friday afternoon, when I was at a coffee shop where the New York Times just happened to be strewn across a table. That evening, it was briefly, briefly mentioned that the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death had put the goods on full display (with the good parts blurred out) for Cosmopolitan back in the early 1980s. He did this not just because he’s hot – which I think he is – but as a way of paying for law school. Good for him, I think, but it was funny to watch the male newscasters squirm a bit over it, and when the race in Massachusetts came up on Washington Week, his nakedness was not even mentioned. I applaud people who are happy enough with their equipment to share it in checkout lines at grocery stores across the land, but man, if it were revealed that a woman who was running for any public office in this country had once worked as a topless dancer to pay for graduate school, she’d be a household name by now.

Using my No. 2

On Sunday morning, I poured myself a big cup of coffee, got comfortable on the couch and voted yes on both measures 66 and 67. Never before have I been so indecisive on which way to vote, and never before – I think not coincidentally – have I invested quite as much time and energy into finding out exactly what I’m voting for, or against. After clawing beyond the messaging and sloganing from both sides, I have only two conclusions. The first is that our legislative system in Oregon is badly broken and in need of repair; the fact that the guide printed by the secretary of state with the express purpose of informing voters can be used legally to intentionally confuse them is an insult to anything we’ve ever imagined democracy could be. My second conclusion is that I think about 95 percent of our elected officials – from the city council to the governor – have got to go. They seem to thrive on underhanded power plays and deception. I think they’re unprincipled, most of them, and I look forward to doing my part to vote them out of office.

One of the reasons I voted in favor of the measures is that funding issues don’t affect the people running the show, who are experts at looking after their own interests, but the people who rely on public services. The children, for example, who walk by my house on their way to and from school each day will at some point be running the state of Oregon, if not the world, and I’d like for them to be educationally equipped to do something more meaningful than what’s offered by a career in the fast food industry or at Wal Mart. The fact that they’re spending their formative years in a state crawling with short-sighted “leaders” is not their fault, and yet, when it comes to accountability – don’t you love that word? – they’re the ones on the hook. The strategists will continue to mine the system for their own gain, while the children will continue to graduate from schools in Oregon without knowing much about science or math or English composition. On a purely selfish note, when I’m in the rest home, I’d like very much for them to know the difference between a plus sign and a minus sign and the implications of each.

For me, the least compelling of my reasons for voting yes is the issue of business taxes. I think the in-favor campaign has used some cheap tactics about the corporate tax, implying, with lots of intentional holes and blanks, that you can do business in the state for $10 a year, which is like saying it only costs $10 to go to the doctor’s, when in fact what costs $10 is to park in the garage, making it technically true that that’s what the visit costs, but only technically. At best, tripping people over technicalities is an unethical campaign strategy, something I previously would have only expected from the anti-tax crowd. But personally, I was more offended by many Oregon businesses and their associations, which threatened the state with additional job cuts and higher costs for their goods and services. After hearing their message a few times, it occurred to me that they’ve already done just that. Have you noticed that the price of a yellow jacket with a certain logo and the name of one of the rivers in town on it hasn’t exactly come down over the past few years? Have you noticed that a manufacturer in North Portland last year moved a lot of jobs to a state with “a better labor climate”? Over the past decade have you heard that whispery whooosshh – usually late at night – as companies throughout the state send jobs to other countries for no other reason, they say, than to better serve their customers? Like the test scores of students who graduate from public schools here, even with increased fees the tax burden for businesses in Oregon will remain among the lowest in the country. Hell, even with a new tax or two, some businesses may still have a few million sponsorship dollars left over to throw after professional athletes who don’t even live here. The ads complaining about the state budget increasing every year were tiresome also. There are other things that have increased every year in Oregon as well: the number of people living here, the cost of almost all goods and services, including private groceries and private health insurance, and the amount of money earned by CEOs. I’ve heard enough threats from whiney corporate people to last me the rest of the year.

On that note, I don’t think affluent individuals or couples are to blame for the economic shambles that is Oregon. At the same time, the people I know who make more than $125,000 or are part of a male-female couple earning more than $250,000 can spare a few bucks to keep the state in business. I have to admit that a big part of what I think about that is that the people I know who earn those kinds of salaries aren’t any smarter or hard working than those I know who manage within a more realistic income bracket. They’re just better liars.

Finally, the main reason I voted in favor of the measures is that funding public services is in my DNA. My parents, who were from a very different era (obviously) believed that this country needed a strong progressive base in order to save itself from existing only in service of the interests of the very wealthy, who generally hold the power. Going after things like public education and other services designed to alleviate poverty, according to my father, was generally the first line of attack taken by the rich and those who represent them. My parents both believed that there were quantifiable differences between liberals and conservatives, and, to that end, that the Democratic party – it was a group of liberals at one time, I’ve heard – could be counted on to speak up for those who most needed speaking up for. While those notions are as dead as my mother and father, filling out my ballot on Sunday morning felt, in a small, brief way, like honoring what they taught their children.

Powder Blue

Movies are a challenge for me. I usually feel like I’m missing the point, that I don’t quite get – or don’t get at all – what makes one good and another not. I think my main problem with movies is that they’re overwhelming. There are the visuals, of course, but also characters and a story. Most movies, to me, seem like an on-screen competition among those elements. Unlike books, which I read at my own pace while picturing images as they occur to me, I feel like I often miss huge parts of movies.

Which is why I love Netflix. As much as I bitch and moan about the Internet’s creeping deeper and deeper into our lives (and conversely, becoming more and more irremovable), this, my friends, is some technology I can get behind. I signed up for Netflix last fall, and to be honest I did it because I thought I should. I would horse around with it for a couple of months, I thought, and then my Netflix membership would quietly go the way of YouTube, which I OD’d on a couple of summers ago, and Facebook, which I came to regard as a troubling attempt to confirm the fact that we are indeed alive.

I think the main reason I signed up for Netflix is that I felt like a bit of a dweeb for having never tried it, so the fact that I’m love with it surprises nobody more than it does me. It’s cheap, easy and convenient: the movies, without due dates or late fees, come and go in the mail. The main reason I like it is that I can watch movies as many times as necessary. I recently took two days and three viewings with Angela’s Ashes, two run-throughs on a Saturday evening and a rainy Sunday morning for a quiet little gem called In the Bedroom. With Netflix, I can watch a movie with the volume off and pay attention only to the camera angles. Nobody needs to know that I was unable to grasp an entire movie having watched it only once, unless, of course, I chose to share.

Which brings me to Powder Blue, which I watched – once – this weekend. I don’t understand movies deeply enough to articulate this in a fancy way, but for some reason the script, the acting, the story and the visuals all worked together on this one. The way I know that is that I didn’t hit pause or rewind a single time. I paid no attention to the clock. I let the phone ring its way into voicemail a couple of times. The plot goes like this: a group of people in Los Angeles seek solace in the week leading up to Christmas. I did a search on the movie on Monday morning, and was surprised to learn that Powder Blue was made in 2009 (it seeemed older, for some reason) but only had limited release in the U.S., which seems weird to me given some of the big names in it. I’m not in the film biz, so I have no idea why. Another strange thing: how did Netflix know, based on my ordering history, to recommend this movie?Anyhow, I do not work for Netflix in any capacity, and I recommend Powder Blue.

You can trust us

Well, I guess things are returning to normal after last week’s earthquake in Haiti. Today, Robin Roberts was back to making inane comments about football on Good Morning America, and the main story on MSN is no longer the disaster. Images of the dead and dying have been replaced as of this morning by news of the Golden Globes. The stars were out last night, expressing their gratitude and their solidarity with the people of Haiti. Touching.

Over the weekend, I was a bit surprised that some humor – unintentional probably – crept into the news. I was almost ashamed of myself for having a good laugh at the brief remarks made in the Rose Garden by Obama and the two men he’s asked to lead the country’s efforts to help the people of Haiti, Bill Clinton and W. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a year since W. was our president because on Sunday morning I was caught completely off guard by his presence. I forgot what he’s like. He swaggered to the podium, very much like a cowboy, and made some comments that were either completely off the wall or truly clever. “Now, I know a lot of you want to send food, and, and other provisions,” he said. Listening to W. speak is like watching a toddler take his first, tentative steps: you know he is going to fall at some point. I cannot tell if he drawls, or twangs, or, as a result of talking out of the side of his mouth, both. Anyhow, he went on. “But what we need, what we really need here is your cash.” Then he smirked at everyone – I had forgotten how good he is at doing that – and said, “You can trust us with your cash.” Was that a slam on Obama not being able to manage the bankers? Was it a slam on Clinton’s reputation as a notorious compulsive liar? Was it self-deprecation? Or was it just W stammering his way through yet another occasion that should have been dignified and solemn? I have no idea, but I thought it was hilarious.

On Sunday, the president went to Massachusetts to rally the troops in support of the woman running for the senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy. My laughter over that is more along the lines of gallows humor, but man, if I don’t laugh I’m afraid of the options. The entire healthcare reform issue, we are told, is, in a way, riding on this one election for this one seat in the U. S. Senate, a fact that strikes me as a cartoon in the making considering there are more than 300 million people living in this country. According to the news, one of the factors making the race too close to call is the statement the Democratic candidate made about someone being a Yankees fan. The fact that we cannot manage to put together a healthcare system that works for everyone is, on some level, comical; the fact that an election that could determine if our half-assed attempt at doing so could feasibly be impacted by a comment about a sports team is hysterical, in my opinion. I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t a comment about football.

But it was the president himself, I thought, who provided the most fodder. He parachuted in to “fire up” the crowd, speaking about speaking up not just for the privileged few, but for all of us, the people. The Democrat, he rumbled, has the crowd’s back. “But her opponent,” he said, “has Wall Street’s back.” I apologize in advance if this sounds like a racist remark, especially since it’s on the day we pretend to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, but Obama’s words, to me, were like the pot calling the kettle black.

What's important

To put it mildly, the images being beamed out of Haiti are disturbing. Although I’ve never been, Haiti has always kind of intrigued me. When I was growing up, a philosophy professor who lived in the neighborhood, along with his most Catholic wife and their eight children, declared Haiti their cause. They went there many times, and many times they returned to our neighborhood with orphans, who were adopted, I believe, via a Catholic charity in Saint Louis. This was in the days before charity was openly mined for the sake of publicity, so our knowledge of the place and what our neighbors were doing there was spotty. All we knew about Haiti is that the politics were dark and the people poor beyond comprehension. Since the children were black, Haiti was placed in my young, uninformed mind somewhere in Africa. I was shocked when I realized how close Haiti is to the state of Florida, a fact that remains shocking to me today.

But geography is only one aspect of what shocks me about this week’s earthquake there. Late last year I helped a friend with a press release about a business in Haiti, which included some amazing statistics about the country’s economics, but even with some basic knowledge, the proximity of the poverty is something I can still only describe as shocking. I am shocked at the number of U.S. media people who broadcasting from there even though reports say that water, power and food are scarce. Did they bring their own provisions? I am shocked at how truly heartwarming – I am not being sarcastic – I found reports of the U.S. military sending people there to help. I am shocked that this country is sending $100 million today. Generous, to be sure, but a drop in the bucket from which the banker bonuses are being poured. Perhaps I am shocked most of all by the people I know, marginally, who are littering the Internet with word of their awakening about now knowing what’s really important. “What was important yesterday is not important today,” someone declared via Twitter. My question: what was important yesterday? And a woman I know, who lives as if PR is the work of God, is announcing today that she just cannot focus on the action items on her desk because, compared to Haiti, they're just not important. Not to worry, though. This woman has an assistant, whom she degrades regularly, so I’m sure her action items will be tended to just fine.

Managing the money

On Friday nights, at 9 o’clock Pacific, I offer up silent thanks to the goddesses of reason that for at least one more week, none of the PR people have managed to shut down Bill Moyers’ studio and put him behind bars. Clearly, when it comes to his show I am a confirmed member of the cult, but I am not naïve about it. Even if the worst-case scenario were to be revealed – and for me that would be that Bill Moyers is actually an instrument of the financial officials – I think I would still love his show.

That’s because the show is relevant. And the more interesting and relevant the subject matter, the more amped up Bill Moyers is during the opening. On Friday evening, he was on fire about one of his favorite topics (and mine): money. After an impressive onslaught of trough metaphors, he announced that his two guests, both of whom report for Mother Jones, would be walking us through just a few examples of how the bankers have considerably more power than the people we elect to (allegedly) represent us. This, I thought, snuggling up beneath my afghan and sipping a cup of steamy tea, is going to be a very good hour.

There is, unfortunately, nothing new about the reporters’ premise: the outrageous tricks played by the banking people are in no way against the law. In fact, they’re perfectly legal, thanks, in large part, to the fact that the laws governing the conduct of the bankers are written, believe it or not, by the bankers. The guests produced a staggering list of contributions made by the money people when a group of elected officials – almost all of them Democrats and many of them members of the committee that ‘oversees’ the financial industry – came to New York for a visit. This money has no impact on how we legislate, the elected liars proclaim, over and over again. It would funny if it weren’t so insulting. Equally troubling is the fact that a lot of people who lobby for financial institutions are former congressional staffers.

And, faithful to the beauty of symmetry, some former lobbyists now work for the government. First, an admission: I do not like Timothy Geithner. His entire existence, from childhood on, has depended on bankers and their children receiving as many unfair advantages as possible. Putting him in charge of reforming the financial industry makes as much sense as putting me in charge of cigarette patrol. And besides, he looks like one of my brothers, which takes my dislike for him to a new level. But here’s yet another bullet point in my list of reasons I think he was, and remains, one of Obama’s worst appointments: his chief of staff, Mark Patterson, is a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist. Of the $700 billion bailout Timothy Geithner administered, $10 billion of it went to Goldman Sachs. During his lobbyist gig, one of Patterson’s projects was to derail legislation meant to regulate executive pay, legislation that was sponsored by a then-junior senator from Illinois. On the other hand, to be fair (sort of): the main criticism of Geithner thus far is that he doesn’t have much of a staff to speak of because his picks keep backing out of the vetting process or declining outright. So maybe his chief of a practically non-existent staff doesn’t is a ceremonial figurehead, a payback for a favor extended long ago. Maybe he’s just some guy who likes to wear feathered headdresses to the office. Who knows?

What shocked and aggravated me the most about this tid bit is not that it’s just one more example of the blatant smokescreening that goes on with the money being saved to send the children to college, or to retire, or to finance dignified end-of-life care or to simply fall back on if things go lean. What aggravates me about it is that I cannot blame the ‘mainstream media’ – I hate that term – for not covering it, because it was, in fact, covered. Among others, I discovered that USA Today ran a few paragraphs about it in the Fall. I’m apparently as prone to distractions as those I criticize routinely and with great joy. I’ve never denied hypocritical tendencies, and I guess I cannot start now.

For me, the show didn’t really end at 10 on Friday night, because on Saturday morning it occurred to me that I really should subscribe to Mother Jones. I had some errands to run that day, and I made a mental note to help myself to one of those tear-out subscription cards if I found myself at a magazine rack, which, of course, I did not. But that was okay, because when I got home, tucked in to the wad of junk mail was an envelope from Mother Jones offering me a special: one year, six issues, for $10. So I subscribed, but rather than “Send your $10 check payable to Mother Jones today!” I sent cash instead.

I really like country music

For me, one of the best parts of not working in a suburb is riding public transportation. Tri Met, the agency that manages the buses, trains and streetcars in Portland has no shortage of aggravating little idiosyncrasies, but I find getting from here to there with someone else doing the driving preferable in almost every way to the death march on I-5 or I-84.

Thanks to decades of handiwork from the marketing people, using public transportation, like living in public housing, infers ghetto, poverty, shiftlessness. Every time there’s an incident at one of the train stations, or on board a bus, the news cameras are on the scene almost as promptly as the paramedics. But unless they involve someone driving a vehicle into a building, which happens with freakish regularity in Portland, the headlines generated by deadly, atrocious car crashes quickly fade.

Personally, I’ll take my chances, because in addition to getting somewhere without having to drive, the public vessels around here are a joy to ride. From my front door, I can be on a train in 15 minutes, one that will take me to the main terminal of the airport in one direction and downtown Portland and the far western suburbs in the other. In five minutes or less, I can catch one of three major bus lines, each of which will take me downtown in about 20 minutes. And during those 20 minutes, I don’t have to worry about other people’s driving irregularities or car issues. During those 20 minutes I’m not clogging the roadways or clogging the atmosphere with exhaust and I’m not giving even a fraction of a thought to where I might park when I get there, or how much it will cost. Plus I get to see the city through big windows from angles I’d never notice if I were driving.

All of which is great, I think, but what really keeps me riding are the conversations I overhear. Provided the bus or train car isn’t dominated by cell phone blather – which does happen from time to time, in spite of the very nicely done signs reminding people that not everyone on the bus or train car is interested in what they have to say – there’s some good stuff to be had on Tri Met.

Like this. Last week I was on my way downtown on Friday morning. Sitting in front of me, in what I think of as the parlor – it’s at the front of the bus, where the seats face the aisle – there were two young women and one young man on their way to the mall. I could not ascertain the dynamics. Perhaps they were sisters and a brother, perhaps the two women were sisters and the guy was the boyfriend of one of them, perhaps, I thought briefly, they were about to be – or had just been – an ongoing group situation. Maybe they were in the same drug rehab program; maybe they were on their way to buy crack. I do not know.

What I do know is that the guy doesn’t like Carrie Underwood. “She’s not awesome,” he said. “That turn the wheel over to Jesus bullshit? Come on, Carrie. Not awesome at all.” The young women both agreed, enthusiastically. “And don’t get me wrong,” said the young man. “I really like country music.” One of the young women nodded at him and smiled. “Me too,” she exclaimed. “I love Pink Floyd.”

The Negro dialect

On Sunday morning, I heard the news that Harry Reid, my favorite political piñata, had finally said something with which I agree. A book about the 2008 presidential campaign came out on Friday in which Reid said he thought the fact that Barack Obama does not speak in a Negro dialect “unless he wants to” and that he is relatively light skinned were critical factors in his ability to become the country’s first black president. According to the news, Reid spent most of the weekend apologizing not only to the president himself, but to black political leaders across the land, many of whom are calling for his resignation.

My question is: apologize for what? Aside from the use of the term Negro – which strikes me as a bit of a relic – I think his take on the racial proclivities of the citizenry is the most honest thing he’s said since I began paying attention to him a little more than a year ago.

The reason I believe this is simple. Take a look at the comments section of almost any even vaguely political site on the Internet, look at the history books, look at the members of the Portland City Council or the Multnomah County Commission or the roster of the U.S. Congress, look at prison data, or employment statistics or death penalty tallies. Look almost anywhere you’d like, and if you manage to avoid the conclusion that if there’s one thing that makes us more uncomfortable than black people, it’s black people with power, please let me know. And when it comes to power, it’s clear as crystal to me that this country has daddy issues. We sleep better when daddy is in charge, and when we’re not sleeping we just feel better in general, knowing that daddy is watching out for us. Daddy is white, daddy is (presumably) heterosexual and daddy at one time or another – if only during weekend drills – donned a uniform in defense of our grand nation. Daddy sits before a gently roaring fire wearing expensive slippers and sipping brandy as he chuckles his way through the marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal. Barack Obama is not daddy - even though he was called “a long-legged mac daddy” by Al Sharpton during the campaign - and he never will be. Light-skinned though he may be, he’s still far too dark and his family background murky beyond our capacity. Having a black father allows us to believe ourselves revolutionary by electing him our leader; but I am convinced that the fact he had a white mother and a speaking style that's more Harvard law professor than inner-city community organizer helped propel him into the comfort zone for many, many voters. I believe two black parents and an undeniable Afro would have prevented Obama from winning elections that would have taken him any further from cozy Hyde Park than Springfield, Illinois. As a president, Obama is stuck straddling two positions, neither of which are part of the daddy portfolio: he’s either the most legitimate outsider, or the least legitimate insider. Bill Clinton had the same problem.

A big part of hoopla on the news yesterday was speculation that Harry Reid’s statement is going to diminish his chances for getting reelected this year. I have never been to Nevada, but I hear it leans conservative, and I wonder if this revelation might turn out to be just the boost his campaign needs. Just a thought.

The most interesting part of Harry’s statement, I think, is the bit about the Negro dialect. I think the way people speak is intriguing, and when Obama switches into what we’d call a Negro dialect when “ … he wants to” – wa’ssuuuup New Jersey!! – it doesn’t sway my voting intentions one way or another, but it does strike me as cheap. No cheaper, though, than Hillary Clinton trotting out her painfully faux Southern accent when speaking in places like Chattanooga, Tennessee or Charleston, West Virginia. And certainly no cheaper than people who are whiter than me – let’s say, just for example, members of the city council – who, although they may not speak a word of Spanish, can trill at a professional level when ordering burritos from their favorite food cart in downtown Portland.

It's within the law

For a while, I was amused by Oregon’s steadfast rejection of a sales tax. It was kind of quirky, kind of folksy. But after living here for 16 years, I think it’s kind of stupid. Our refusal to even consider a sales tax as the state’s service infrastructure crumbles before our very eyes is a bit like a hopelessly obese man proudly raising his middle finger to curious onlookers as he wheels himself up to the counter at McDonald’s to order lunch.

This year’s half-assed attempt to keep the state up and running comes in the form of measures 66 and 67. These two measures were approved by our legislature last year to make up for budget shortages. Then a group of individuals and organizations opposed to the tax implications gathered enough signatures to put both measures on a ballot and let the voters decide.

I was going to write about the dirty tricks on display from both sides, but I changed my mind. The camp in opposition is just doing its usual anti-labor, anti-teachers routine. But for today, I must say it’s the campaign in favor of the new taxes that is truly distinguishing itself when it comes to misleading language and system abuse. These are the people who supposedly stand up for educating our children, protecting our elderly and serving our disenfranchised. I’m not sure where I’ve been all my life, but I am shocked and truly disappointed. If our future is in the hands of these tacticians, I am scared.

I still don’t know how I’m going to vote, so in an attempt to make up my mind I decided to ask some basic questions. First, would the additional taxes that would be levied if these measures passed be assessed retroactively? The clear answer – and all answers in these matters should be utterly clear – is yes. That’s because the measures were approved by the legislature in January 2009, then put on hold when a petition was filed to vote for or against overruling them with the ballot. So if the measures pass, taxes are due from January 2009 forward, making them, in a word, retroactive. Not surprisingly, the word ‘retroactive’ is avoided stridently by the group support the measures. Second, trying to tie this issue to the fact that corporations pay a $10 annual tax in this state is troubling to me, so I asked after some particulars. According to those in favor of these measures, corporations in Oregon enjoy paying a corporate tax that hasn’t been increased in generations. Here’s my question: I own an LLC. I am one person who earns a comfortable income but is by no means wealthy. You could technically say that the only ‘corporate fee’ I pay is the $50 check I write every year to the secretary of state’s office for the privilege of having my LLC on file in the state of Oregon. Technically, that would not be a lie, but it would not be the whole truth either. The whole truth would have to include the other taxes and fees I pay to the state, to Multnomah County, to Tri Met and to the City of Portland. Although it makes for a great battle cry, I refuse to believe that corporations large and small, local and national and global, contribute only $10 per year to Oregon’s tax till.

For a week or so I believed I’d reached the bottom of the sneaky heap with the commercial trying to link our new taxes to Wall Street bonuses and excessive credit card fees. I know that in Oregon we love to insert ourselves into every national story. We may have a place in some of the stories, but this is not one of them. Raising taxes in Oregon is not in any way going to address the broken components of the country’s financial industry. It’s a false notion, period, an attempt to sway voters with emotional triggers (“let’s get the bad guys … together!”) that crumble quickly beneath the most cursory scrutiny. I called the campaign that sponsored the commercial and asked the woman there several questions, none of which she could answer without blatantly slippery qualifiers. “We are trying to reach a certain demographic,” she said finally, after I told her that there were easy holes in each of her statements. I was tempted to ask her if she’d ever considered going into PR.

But the commercial appears almost benign when compared to what I found in The Register Guard, in Eugene. If you read no other words in this post, please read these:

The group Our Oregon, which is leading the campaign to pass tax Measures 66 and 67, turned in to the Oregon Elections Division the first and last of the 34 submissions on which the “Argument in Opposition” circle was checked off. As a result, when Oregon’s 2.1 million voters thumb through the official voters’ pamphlet, which is to be mailed out at the end of the month, they’ll find pitches to vote [for] the increase in personal and business taxes in a section where they thought they were supposed to be getting the reasons to vote against them. Don Hamilton, the Election Division spokesman, said state law makes it clear: Submissions of pro and con arguments will go where the submitters intend them to go. And after double-checking with Our Oregon after receiving Our Oregon’s “Opposition” arguments, the Elections Division concluded that they should go in that section of the pamphlet.“That’s where they wanted them and that’s where they were placed,” he said. “It’s within the law.”

If that sort of move is within the law, I am starting to wonder if there’s any point to voting at all.

Memories of Crawford

This is not an exaggeration: between the years 2000 and 2008, I don’t believe I watched more than 24 hours of news – total – because I could not stand the fact that W. was running the show. I was sick of hearing from and about Bush during those dark, lonely years, and I am even more sick of hearing about him now. For the first few months of the Obama show, it was fun, really fun, to constantly remind the world that we were in clean-up mode thanks to the mess W. and the ranchers made. But it got old quickly, as all simple games do, and the constant referencing of what the current administration inherited from the one that preceded it began to make me wonder if it was amateur hour in Washington. Like many people I know, I voted for Obama because I believed, naively, I think, in his ability to steer the country in a somewhat new direction. And a new direction, in my opinion, does not include constant references to the Bush administration a year into Obama’ s first term (if he’s a one termer, which I believe he will be, that’s one quarter of his presidency).

Then a guy from Nigeria put some explosives in his underwear, got on a plane and took a seat right above one of the jet’s engines. The intelligence community, we are told, did not connect the dots. Of course they didn’t. Who does? At the City of Portland, the department that enforces sidewalk code violations does not connect the dots with the contractors licensed to repair them. Nor does it connect the dots with the department that files the reports on the violations, or the repairs. The company that backs up my hard drive, supposedly, does not connect the dots with my computer. The health insurance company does not connect the dots with the doctors practicing less than two miles from its office, the same doctors who are part of the insurance company’s provider network. My opinion is that nobody’s really saying anything worth listening to, so, in spite of our marvelously sophisticated communications technologies, nobody’s listening. Lots of disconnected dots out there, bobbing along in the sea of blather, I think. So I was surprised by the shock and outrage expressed over the fact that someone on some sort of official list could actually board a plane even though his father had told someone at an embassy that he was worried about his son’s politics. At the root of the failure to connect the dots, of course, was the legacy of the Bush administration. Enough, I thought.

And then came the commentary about the fact that Obama was on vacation the day of the incident, which just happened to be Christmas. In fact, after he was told about the incident, he played another round of golf – or two – before making a statement. That’s when I had to set my aversion to referencing Bush aside and, well, reference Bush: during the eight years he lived in the nation’s most opulent public housing project, he spent nearly 11 months (that’s more than one month per year) at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, vacationing. Although I’ve tried to forget his reign, I’m struggling to delete that factoid from my memory bank.

Finally, cartoons on week nights

If I’m in the right frame of mind, watching the local news around here is, as they used to say, a laugh riot. Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed a couple of opportunities to sit in my living room with the tiny white lights glimmering behind the matchstick blinds, a steamy bowl of perfectly spiced rice and beans on my lap, and howl at the television. It’s that good.

For those of you who do not live in Portland, here’s some news you can use: last week we got some snow. As if that weren’t enough, the fact that it wasn’t forecasted only heightened the story’s dramatic tension. And to make matters worse, it fell just before rush hour. Interstate 5 came to a complete standstill, as did a highway that goes out the western suburbs, a highway that’s a disaster on the best of days, according to the traffic reports. Bridges were closed, streets remained uncleared. It took some people four hours to get out of downtown. Others sat on the freeways until their cars ran out of gas, at which point they just got out and walked, worsening already impassable conditions. Many of the buses did not have chains on their tires, although across the river in Washington, there are some buses with equipment that can attach chains in seconds, and that was showed and discussed, many times. (It’s cool, but expensive). The city was unprepared, and people were frustrated – and they said so, on the news. There are few things quite as entertaining as listening to people in Portland take the weather as a personal affront. But the mayor, bless him, stayed on top of it with Twitter updates. Last week there were a couple of national security stories I thought were kind of interesting, so imagine my surprise when the national news did not come on at 6:30 because it had been preempted by “continuous coverage” of our surprise snowfall.

The preempting of the news isn’t what amused me. I think it’s disturbing, actually, so I switched to a channel I don’t normally watch, and that’s where I learned that the Oregon Department of Transportation – ODOT – was recommending that people not use their cruise control during the storm and its aftermath. Thankfully I was not gasy at that point, because I laughed pretty hard.

The official snowfall in Portland last week, as measured at the airport: one inch. It was all but gone by late morning the next day. The hilarity, on the other hand, continued.

On Monday night, I learned that a guy – fairly young, attractive, stable looking – has been snipping locks of women’s hair without their knowledge, or permission, on the city buses. I don’t think non-consensual haircuts on the bus are funny – seriously, I don’t – but my God, the amount of time dedicated to this story … Only one of the victims was interviewed, and she was in disguise, but a number of randomly selected women waiting for buses were on, and they had plenty to say. They thought it was “creepy” and “gross” and they think, furthermore – and this is where, for me, it got funny – that there should be a law against it. In a city in love with rules and regulations that could be most politely described as unclear, can you imagine the wording in legislation prohibiting transit trimming? Would the law apply in fareless square? And if so would it fall under the new ruling that in fareless square – which means downtown, more or less – the train and the streetcar remain fareless but the buses, as of Sunday, January 3, do not? Would age restrictions apply? What if the offender were a licensed cosmetologist? What if it was a holiday? In order to be ticketed, would the cops have to initially apprehend a suspected hair snipper for something else? These questions are sort of humorous, and sort of not: when it comes to entrusting the city of Portland with the simplest of undertakings, the one thing you can be certain of is that it someone, at some point, will screw it up royally with a list of exceptions and conditions that render the new rule or regulation pretty much pointless. And, thankfully, comical.

On a much less funny note, I did read a few stories about the hair cutter online, where I learned that he’s also associated with a number of other, more serious incidents, break-ins and robberies and such. If they mentioned that aspect of the story during the “news,” I guess I was so entertained by the rest of it that I failed to grasp it. Sorry about that.

A new decade

It wasn’t until about a month ago that I became aware of the fact that last week we entered not only a new year but a new decade as well. When the 1980s ended and the 1990s began, I recall being very conscious of the transition, but I suppose having two zeros in the midst of the year derailed me. I wasn’t derailed for long: the stories on the Internet and the television were endless. At first I didn’t take them seriously. PR people “seed” year-end stories to journalists, who, in my opinion, write and report them as a way to look back on the period of time being commemorated in order to showcase how significant the stories they worked on – as opposed to those worked on by other journalists – really were. They’re essentially resumes dressed up as reportage. In the world of PR, the year-end stories are an easy, cheap home run, and I receive them accordingly.

But then the analysis began. The commentary was exhaustive, and most of it seems to tell us that not only was 2009 a bad year, but the entire decade it brought to an end was pretty grim as well. These two conclusions are based, of course, on “polls of the American people.” Which makes me wonder, naturally, I think, not only who was asked to assign an impossibly simplified value to 3,652 days and nights, but the questions that were used to prompt them as well. I wonder what sort of people participate in these polls, and how lifeless they must be in order to cram a full 40 seasons into a checked box on a form. I wonder what role the marketing people played in these polls, or the bankers, or the land developers or the control freaks who chant that if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. I wonder what sorts of atrocities are on the horizon, ones designed to remedy the dissatisfaction we’re all apparently feeling over the 10 years we’ve just endured. I wonder if the people – and there were a lot of them, evidently – who think of the last 10 years as “the post-9-11 decade” have ever bothered themselves to read about people in other parts of the world. I wonder how it is possible that in such an advanced era, the news people and their extended family of commentators still refer to “America” this and “America” that when any map – online or otherwise – will clearly show that what they mean to say is the United States. I wonder how much this sort of polling costs.

I wonder if I am the only one who, over the past decade, went to some funerals and went to some weddings and went to some baby showers and birthday parties for children so young they still think the wrapping paper is the best part of the present, who lost some old friends and made some new ones, who watched his 401k lose money but also saved some cash on oranges, who had some really shitty days, and some really good ones.

Was the past decade good? Or was it bad? And should we call this new year “two thousand ten” or should we call it “twenty ten”? Katie Couric is all over the “look forward” angle with her schlocky series about where we – America, that is – stand. Are we prepared for the new decade? she asks. Is America ready for its teen years? I apologize for being a killjoy, but given the fact that our national attention span seems to extend no more than five minutes into the past or the future, I feel obligated to say that asking if a country well beyond its 230th anniversary is ready for its teen years takes stupid to a brand new level. There were other decades when things both good and bad happened. There were other centuries that generated a headline or two. I know that’s difficult for the Twitter crowd to grasp, but it’s true.

So if I’m asked by a pollster to say whether I think the past decade was good or bad, I’ll refuse. But if I’m asked the all-consuming question about what we’re calling our new decade, I will answer by telling the pollster that I call it now.

Driving in Oregon

One blustery morning a year ago, shortly after I’d decided to stop poisoning myself with alcohol, I was standing on a corner two blocks from my house, waiting to cross the street. Coming toward me, on the side of the road on which I stood, was a truck that kept swerving, gently, in and out of the bike lane, then over a bit into the lane of oncoming traffic, then back, then back into the bike lane. I have finally stopped drinking, I told myself, and this morning, in a way that would impress even O’Henry, I shall die an alcohol-related death. I stepped back from the curb slowly, one careful step at a time. When you confront a bear, I’ve read the best defense is to remain calm. I know that a truck on East Burnside in Portland is not a bear in the woods, but my body reacted as if it were about to be demolished.

The truck, a white Toyota, glided past me as if in slow motion. In the truck’s bed was a large object covered by a blue tarp that was tied with bright yellow twine. The driver, a man wearing a gray jacket and a dark baseball cap, sort of pudgy, with glasses, had one hand on the wheel and the other hand – and most of his attention – on the slim, black device in his hand. I watched him weave his way on down the road toward 82nd, a very major thoroughfare, offered thanks to the powers that be, crossed the street and came home.

I smoke cigarettes, but a couple of years ago I voted in favor of an ordinance barring smoking in almost every public place imaginable. Even though I smoke, I understand the stupidity of it, and I understand the risk it puts on those who don’t smoke but share air with those who are. I feel the same way about cell phones. If people feel the need to talk all day long on a cell phone, that’s their business, of course, but I think those of us who are tired of the mindless braying that is now at the heart of every public experience – not to mention the dangers caused by distracted drivers – have some rights as well. Peace, for starters, and the freedom to think, and have a conversation with someone – someone live, and in person – without having to accommodate interferences from the walky-talkies. And what about safety? According to the manufacturers of automobiles and car seats, safety is a top priority for us in this country, and yet people text and talk while driving, and they walk around downtown Portland with their heads down, furiously punching out messages on their wondrously wireless devices (I recommend running into them on purpose, which is actually a lot of fun). I want cell phone conversations banned in all public places, the way cigarette smoking is. I’ll shut up when I see dark blue signs on buildings that say, in pale gray letters, “No cell phone usage within 10 feet.”

Until then, a new law that took effect January 1 in Oregon will have to suffice. As of Friday, you cannot talk on a handheld cell phone while operating a motorized vehicle on this state's public roadways. Texting while driving is prohibited. That’s because a bill sponsored by Representative Carolyn Tomei, a Democrat I’d vote for if I lived in her district, forbids it. Forbids it, that is, unless your cell phone conversation behind the wheel happens to be related to your job. In all fairness, I guess it’s no worse than the law in Washington, where you can only be fined for a cell phone violation if you were pulled over for something else, like a dead tail light. Then, if the officer happens to notice that you’re also texting while driving, you’re fair game. Imagine, if you will, for just a moment what kind of hell would break loose if car seat laws were written with language that’s nothing more than a procedural wink. Anyhow, I wrote Representative Tomei last week, thanked her once again for her hard work and expressed my disappointment that this law is but a start. To her credit, one of her staff members wrote me back within an hour and told me that the law’s exception applies to people whose jobs require them to drive specialized vehicles, such as tow trucks or taxi cabs. Which is curious, given the wording of the exemption:

· G) To a person operating a motor vehicle in the scope of the person’s employment if operation of the motor vehicle is necessary for the person’s job

I fail to see how this exception does not apply to architects conducting work-related conference calls with the building permit department while driving, real estate agents chasing a tight closing deadline while driving, an attorney making sure that a brief has been filed properly and on time while driving, a hair stylist special ordering a specific shade of heather while driving, a public relations writer interviewing an impressively busy executive while driving, a bookkeeper calling his boss, while driving, to alert her that he’s running late but please, please do not worry about the year ends. It’s all in your definition of ‘necessary,’ of course, but in a society where calling people on your cell phone to let them know where the bus you’re riding is, or calling people from the line at Old Navy to let someone know how many people are in front of you, and how long you think it’s going to take to make your purchase, and how long you think it’s going to take – but you’ll call back if the traffic’s bad – to get home once you leave the mall, in a society where that type of drivel has become critical to our ability to function, I wish Oregon traffic courts the best of luck when it comes to enforcement.

In the meanwhile, I do applaud Representative Tomei and the legislature for taking an honest stab at the issue. I’ll continue to bitch and moan about it and be as obnoxious to texters as possible, because really, when you get right down to it, it’s entertaining. On one hand, we’re so high on the notion of safety we can barely open the front door or answer the telephone or let the youngsters out of our line of sight. On the other hand, when a law is passed to prohibit – sort of – a couple of habits proven to be much, much more dangerous than drunk driving, it makes the national news. For now, I’m just enjoying the rush on hands-free cell phones, evidenced by a barrage of obnoxious commercials brought to us by a company so honestly named it deserves an award: Car Toys. It took me a number of paragraphs to say what the existence of a company with that name can say in two simple, one-syllable words. If there’s a more efficient use of language out there, I’ve yet to see it.