Wheeling, dealing and death

Yesterday, our elected leaders got together to talk about healthcare reform. They did it with the cameras running, in “a building across the street from the White House” – Blair House, I believe it’s called. The main point of contention, prior to the meeting, or the summit, as they called it, was the shape of the conference table.

Yesterday, closer to home, a woman in a hospital was removed from life support and died shortly thereafter. A couple of weeks ago this woman was shot by a man with a gun, who also shot and killed his wife, another one of her friends and, finally, himself. The guy was a cop of some sort, or a former cop, in the county that sits alongside the one where I live. The woman who died yesterday was the fourth and final victim of the incident (I count the guy who killed the three woman and himself as a victim).

And yesterday, also closer to home (but not as close as Clackamas County), our state representatives in Salem, our state capitol, passed some piece of legislation regarding the particulars of the amount of time convicted felons are required to wait to renew – or reapply for – their gun permit. I don’t know all the details – and I’m not going to spend my time rereading the article from the Oregonian, because it’s confusing, not to mention maddening – but the gist of it is that our legislators believe, or have been paid to believe, that felons’ gun permits is a topic worthy of their time and attention.

More heroes

I’ve really enjoyed the on-air spat about the guy who flew his plane into an office building in Austin, Texas occupied, in part, by IRS employees with whom the guy had been feuding for years. On one side there’s the guy’s daughter, who lives in Norway, telling ABC that she considers her dad a hero. On the other hand there’s the son of one of the only people killed in the building, who says that since his father went to Vietnam, he’s the hero in this story. For all I know they could both be heroes, and for all I know neither of them are, or ever were. What I do know is this: in the news people’s mission to eclipse logic and fact with a level of sappy emotionalism that even the word maudlin doesn’t do justice to, the word hero – like the words leadership and community and so many others – has become irrelevant. Children who dial 911 when their mother’s hair catches on fire while frying chicken are heroes. People who return stolen wheelchairs to the homeless are heroes. People who hand out peanut butter sandwiches to those stranded at the bus terminal by a blizzard are heroes. People who check on the old ladies on their block during power outages are heroes. The youngsters who carry caged hamsters from burning schoolhouses are heroes. Every single person, as we all know, who has ever joined the armed forces in this country are heroes. I think that according to the definition of the word, when everyone is a hero, nobody is a hero, especially those who have an on-air turf war over whose dead relation is more entitled to the word.

The designation battle didn’t last long: it was quickly blown off the air – pardon the pun – by yet another school shooting in suburban Denver, right down the road from Columbine High School. The footage of this scene on Good Morning America was laughable. Side by side, and with a soundtrack, we were treated to videos of the youngsters running for their lives this week on the right, and on the left, footage of youngsters running for their lives more than a decade ago. Robin Roberts proclaimed the similarities “chilling,” and boy George, her sidekick – or perhaps she is his … they’re still working it out, I think – commented that the hero who tackled the shooter this week had a lot in common with almost all other heroes. He wasn’t basking in his heroism, George said, but instead carefully reviewing the entire scenario and trying to determine what more he could have done.

Corrosive

Which brings me, of course, to the story Bill Moyers aired on Friday evening. I had intended to write about that yesterday but I, like millions of others, got caught up in the statement issued by Tiger Woods on Friday morning. One of the things about Friday that I find interesting pertains to those who subscribe to conspiracy theories. It’s easy to dismiss them, to ridicule them – I’ve done it myself, many times. But it is does give me a bit of pause to hear the broadcasters spew stupidity for an entire day about a guy who plays golf.

Golf.

And then, later in the evening, tune in for an hour-long exploration of the recent decision to further sell elections handed down by the supreme court (not that anyone cares, but since it would imply respect, I’m no longer going to use upper-case letters for that particular branch). To me, it’s terrifying enough that we’re not even going to continue to pretend that elections in this country are based on anything other than money. We should all be well aware of that by now.

More than half of Bill Moyers’ Friday program was a repeat from one produced in 1998, in which he interviewed two of the supreme court judges who wrote the recent ruling. In the 1998 interview, based on stories from Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Texas, the two judges were very clear in their belief that mixing high finances with judgeships is a profoundly bad idea. What happened in the 12 years that have passed since then I haven’t the slightest idea.

Whatever has transpired, it doesn’t bode well for the future of what we think of as justice, or what we were once taught to think of as justice. That’s because in 80 percent of the states, the people who look after the law, the judges, are elected. So under the new rules, if you’re a judge – or you want to be a judge – your campaign, or, more importantly, the campaign against you, will be colored by the highest bidder. What are you going to do? Speak up for those who aren’t represented adequately? Speak up against big money? Speak up your way right out of a job? And then once you’re seated on the bench, whose interests are you going to keep in mind when you hear cases? People who are speaking up and acting out against the corporations? People who put the air we breathe – literally, in Louisiana – ahead of the third-quarter financials? Disenfranchised people? Poor people?

As I watched Bill Moyers on Friday night, it occurred to me that his entire on-air existence is a great analogy for the deadly mix of big money and electing judges. His program, which doesn’t include fancy graphics or shimmering correspondents, doesn’t come on until 9 on Friday nights (in Portland anyhow). Katie Couric, on the other hand – and I’ve read many places that her salary is more than PBS’ entire non-U.S. operating budget – well, she’s prime time, of course, where she apparently prefers stories about golf players and stunts pulled by aspiring reality television stars over topics like privatizing the judicial system. Her network’s chief legal correspondent, a snide-voiced woman called Jan Crawford, has said on at least two talk shows that the reaction – if we may call it that – to the recent supreme court decision has been “over dramatized.” I guess you really do get what you pay for.

At any rate, speaking of clichés, they say misery loves company, and on Friday night I could not have agreed more. My outlook is hovering on the border that separates, barely, overwhelmed from despair. I am not alone: In the 30 years he’s been covering money and politics, Bill Moyers said, even though it gets uglier every year, 2010 is in a league of its own. I sit here and write about it, and e-mail about it, and think about it and talk about it, not sure where to stop, not sure, really, where to even start. But Bill Moyers is better at language than I am, which is probably one of the millions of reasons he has his job and I do not. He summed up the whole mess with one beautifully chosen word: corrosive.

The long-awaited statement

For the past few weeks, before the Friday evening television marathon begins, I have wondered how many more power abuse stories I can manage. I have a profound respect for the few journalists who actually report these stories, but I have recently experienced the odd sensation that I’m nearing the point of saturation in the outrage department. Really, I’ve come to think, almost regardless of where you look, someone is lying into the camera while stealing as much money as possible and then revving up the blame machine before the checks are even deposited. I think it’s that bad.

On Friday, I was reenergized by – who else? – Bill Moyers. For me, the hour that he’s on must be like the hour that my ancestors, who had just landed in a new and mostly unwelcoming country, spent in mass: familiar, comfortable, reassuring.

But before Bill Moyers – he does not come on until 9 – there was Katie Couric. I expect rampant stupidity from the morning clowns pretending to be journalists, but even I was stupefied that the first 10 minutes of the CBS Evening News – Walter Cronkite’s old show – was all about Tiger Woods. That is one third of the entire program, and more than one third if you subtract commercial time, which would bring it closer to one half. Since this story is so clearly the news of the world, I decided to pay attention, and here’s what I think:

· According to many, Tiger’s wife “is remarkable.” No, she’s not. She married a jock with millions of dollars, so she won’t have to worry about money for the next several lifetimes. When she learned that her husband was cheating on her – surprise! – she didn’t need to rely on the kindness of others or move to a shelter: she just moved into another of their many, many homes. Poor thing. Smart, perhaps, but not remarkable.

· There are golf analysts. I did not know this, although I suppose I should have. One of them explained that these situations are really tough on everyone, no matter how rich they are. Given the number of people who have lost most of their retirement over the past year and a half, along with their jobs and their homes, I thought that was one of the most crass comments I’ve head in a while.

· A woman’s golf team at a college in California is very troubled by the entire thing. They are not sure if they can salvage their faith in the game. In a display of misplaced emotion so over the top I was actually entertained by it, one young woman, through barely controlled sobs, said that she was devastated that Tiger “tore [his wife’s] heart out.” This, on our evening news.

· I actually respect Tiger’s decision to make his statement on Friday, which, according to the analysts, was done to agitate Accenture, which sponsors the golf tournament underway and used to sponsor Tiger himself. I'm not sure why the timing of Tiger's statement irked Accenture, but aparently it did. Accenture, which dubs itself “the world’s largest consulting company” – that’s a problem right there, a big one – is so proud of its outsourcing expertise that it’s listed it at the top of its Web site. I hope The breakup blades cut both ways, and I hope Tiger's timing had an impact.

I’m sorry to say that it didn’t end with CBS. The Newshour covered it as well, at the end of the broadcast and for six or seven minutes compared to CBS's full 10. Still, the fact that it was mentioned at all was troubling to me. So too was the woman who reported on it, a writer for USA Today named Christine Brennan, who was beamed in from Vancouver, where she’s covering the Olympics. She was relieved, she said smugly, that she wasn’t invited to hear the statement in person, because she would have had to decline the invitation. According to her, it’s not cool to stage an event like that and not entertain questions from the reporters in attendance. I don’t think it’s cool to stage an event like that in the first place, for a book’s worth of reasons, and I think it's even less cool to cover it as a national crisis. But I did have a good laugh listening to a sports reporter cop journalistic principle, especially one who works for USA Today, which I believe will be at the front of the textbook – if there is one – for the course on the demise of newspapers in this country.

We don't make much

You could look at it as an example of the winners writing history. Or you could hold it up as a really great example of the power of PR, especially the notion that the more money spent to create and maintain an image, the longer it lasts. Regardless of the reasons, I’m starting to really question some of the assumptions we have about people who earn a living with their hands. I grew up in a city, and I live in a city now, and it seems to me that we don’t necessarily think of farmers as dumb, but we do categorize them as sort of simple folks who wear overalls and straw hats and tend to speak more slowly than most of us. Mechanics and people who repair furnaces and carburetors are often called gear heads. People who decide to pursue a trade rather than a four-year degree seem to often be portrayed as less than, as requiring an explanation in casual conversation. The term blue collar strikes me as degrading, not because I don’t like blue (it’s my favorite color) but because my guess is that the term was coined by those who consider themselves white collar. Assigning people to a category, I think, implies that you’re different from them, and in every naming incident I’ve ever witnessed, it’s been done as a put down, a way of the people doing the naming saying, I’m different than you, and I’m better, I’m smarter, and I make more money. If done properly, putting people in their place is quite a powerful thing.

I think the long and short of it is that the assumption we’ve all been fed is that people who do things with their hands do so because they aren’t able to support themselves with their brains. That’s a pretty handy viewpoint, given the agenda of the marketing people, whose transformation of the word “union” into an automatic negative is as impressive as it is deplorable. It’s the workers who caused the decline of the car industry, we’re told, in a refrain that’s now firmly ensconced in our national lore. I remember a year or so ago, when the automakers were receiving federal aid that was a mere fraction compared to what the bankers took, listening to the outrage over unionized auto workers earning $75,000 a year. How dare the people who manufacture automobiles make that much? It’s an insult to the scads of mid-level PR people – knowledge workers, they call themselves – who are paid the same or more per year to nurture the myth that sending jobs from the U.S. to other countries is a great thing for all of us – an insult, I suppose, because the PR people are inherently smarter than the unionized auto workers. And an insult to the very smart financial people, who are so intelligent and valuable that their expertise alone is worth at least $75,000 a year … as a bonus.

So I was happy to see that Katie Couric devoted one of her “Where America Stands” pieces to manufacturing. I was even happier to see that the piece focused on Benson High School, in Portland. Even though the theme of it was generally offensive (the notion that these youngsters aren’t dumb was reiterated over and over again with noisy machinery running in the background) I was encouraged to hear people who are not yet 18 say, with conviction, that they do not want to spend the rest of their years sitting at a computer. That gave me a small glimmer of hope: young people, who’ve been inundated with technology since birth, rejecting conventional wisdom rather than heading off to the University of Oregon to major in “communications.”

What was shocking about the story was the numbers. Since 2000, the number of people who manufacture clothing in this country has declined by two thirds. Perhaps my perspective is skewed, but it seems to me that in the past decade, the amount of clothing pimped and purchased in this country has increased by at least two thirds, if not more. There are department stores, big and little stores at the malls, breathtakingly enormous discount stores, and then, as if that weren’t enough, outlet malls large enough to have their own zip code. All of them packed with cheap and mostly ugly clothing.

The other statistic that caught me is this: of the 250 million iPhones sold in this country last year, none of them were manufactured in this country. I was surprised that the number sold wasn’t higher, and equally surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) that not even parts of them were made somewhere in the U.S. But not to worry, the reporter assured me. The engineering, design and marketing of the iPhones – which is where the real money is – is being done here. The making of the devices, the cheap part, happens in countries like China. So my question is this: How long do we expect the Chinese to accept their role in our narrative, which calls for them to perform our menial tasks (as defined by us) and get paid accordingly? When the Chinese decide they’ve outgrown their current role – and they certainly will, sooner, I’d imagine, than any of our product planning geniuses are anticipating – what’s our Plan B?

Oklahoma in black and white

She was flying her flag that day because it would have been Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday. She’d been in his presidential plane once, she said, and it was an all-business type of aircraft, nothing fancy, just desks and places for people to sit and make important decisions with the greatest president this country has ever elected. At first, she was just a voice, a faceless woman sitting in a booth behind mine in a diner on the South side of Tulsa a couple of weekends ago. Sarah Palin was over in Nashville that day, the woman explained, warming up the crowd for the redemption to begin. “The mid-term elections will set the stage,” she said. A male voice grunted in agreement. “They will tell the story.” I tuned out of the conversation at my table, which revolved around my niece’s flat tire, and tuned into the one at the next table instead. Americans aren’t going to take this Godlessness lying down, I learned. The word is coming true, and it’s a wonderful thing to witness, the book coming to life on behalf of the faithful at long last. According to her, today’s young people – particularly college students – don’t stand a chance. “The Jews go at ‘em from one side and the gays from another,” she said. Obama is to blame for most of this (I kind of sensed this was coming) because he’s a traitor. The Haiti shenanigans, for instance. “That’s just a bunch of feel-goodism,” she said (I agree with that, actually). “Nobody has the Christian conviction or courage to tell those people the truth, which is that so many of them died because they’re sinners.”

The waitress appeared just then to refill the coffee and see if we needed anything, so I asked her if she had any ketchup. “It’s right there,” she said, “right behind your sugar shaker.” I turned around at that point to look out to the parking lot and, in the process, to get a good look at the oracle in the next booth. She was much older than I’d imagined based on her voice. She had red hair and wore an ivory colored cardigan over a blue blouse. If she’d been introduced on a talk show as Reba McEntire’s mother I would not have questioned it.

The next morning my sister’s husband called the house from the hospital, where he had just finished making his morning rounds, to ask me if he wanted him to swing by and pick me up to go to church. I said no, although I regretted it that night, when he told me that the main topic of the sermon had been organizing a group to go to Uganda to protest that country’s truly savage intention to execute gay people and prosecute those who fail to notify the officials of anyone they know who may be a homo. The main problem, he explained that evening, is that they’re having a hard time figuring out how to get the visas they need to get into the country. I didn’t go to church with him not because I wasn’t interested, but because I was so comfy in the big chair, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday edition of the Tulsa World, which had put a picture on the front page of the house in the city that had consumed the most water in 2009. Along with the addresses and the names of the top 10 water wasters in the area, the article accompanying the photo quoted an engineer, who said that even though there is currently no shortage in Oklahoma, assuming there never will be is short sighted.

Guys and gals

Commercials are designed to be annoying and distracting, but they’re often my favorite part of the show. They’re an interesting snapshot of what life is actually like, and when it gets close to Valentine’s Day, those snapshots are horrifying. Even though it’s 2010, are we really so stuck in gender roles from centuries ago that we cannot crawl beyond the cheapest, easiest representations of manhood and womanhood?

If the commercials are any indication, the answer is yes. In addition to being oppressively white and heterosexual, the shamelessness with which the marketing people bang the hell out of the gender stereotype drums is shocking to even someone as cynical as me. As I write this, I am going to pretend for a moment that I was just beamed in from another sphere and have formed my impression of the world based solely on the commercials I’ve heard during the past two weeks:

· Men are kind of dumb
· Women are kind of shrill
· Men speak in words containing no more than two syllables
· Women always have a hidden agenda
· Women usually try to trick the man in their life into something without him realizing it
· Which isn’t too hard (see bullet point number one)
· Women nag, especially about house projects
· Women are interested primarily in things
· Men have a serious problem remembering dates
· Even though they have the real power, men are afraid of women (isn’t that funny?)
· More than a good orgasm, women love a good sale
· Men prefer spending time with their "buddies," which makes me wonder if
· Men are gay

It's so frustrating

Less than a month ago, there was an earthquake in Haiti that killed, according to the latest body count, 200,000 people. On camera, on the evening news, we mourned, we cried, we realized, as if by magic, what our priorities really are. Even the rock stars and movie stars rose to the occasion, reminding us all of our great good fortune. The ‘music community’ came together after its most self-celebratory awards show, shed a few tears and cut a new recording for those poor, poor people in Haiti. And Angelina showed up there recently, waving and smiling at the cameras and the peasants as she continues her ongoing audition for the role of Mother Teresa’s replacement. I sit in the relative comfort of my life in Portland and gag at this sort of foolishness. That’s because this morning, we’re back to business as usual, and by that I mean bitching about the weather on the national news. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, complained one inconvenienced mommy who is frustrated with the schools, the daycare, the pick-up and drop-off ordeals. Poor thing. Another woman was interviewed at the airport in Washington, where her flights have been rescheduled four times since Sunday. She’s trying to go on vacation, she explained, and what the airlines expect her to put up with is ridiculous. I’m not sure which offends me more – the fact that she expects anyone to feel sorry for her because of her botched vacation itinerary, or the fact that she thinks the airlines control the weather. Finally, my favorite: a man who looked like he could skip many, many meals and still remain overweight is annoyed by the fact that deliveries to his local grocery have been delayed due to impassable roads. “There’s nothing here,” he said as the camera panned over a pretty bare meat case. It was wonderful to wake up this morning in my own bed and watch the news on my own couch, drinking a cup of coffee from a canister that I can buy for next to nothing, which is probably thanks to the fact that someone, along with his or her family, somewhere in Central America or South America is living way below what we’d consider the poverty line. So I poured myself another cup and watched some more of the news, sneering at the crybabies, imagining them flown off to Haiti to see how well they could fend for themselves.

Taking Anna to Oklahoma

During the weird, rudderless week between Christmas and the arrival of the new year, I packed about 80 percent of my book collection into boxes, which were hauled away for donation a couple of weeks ago in a white truck. As is the case with most things I do, I took more than a year to do it. In July I brought boxes up from the basement and then got a few more from the corner store down the street. By the time I loaded the packed and taped boxes into my friend Derick’s truck it was the middle of January.

Going through them was unnerving: here, I thought, dusting the covers, noticing how my signature has changed over the years as I looked through the ones I’d marked with my name, is my life. I kept my cookbooks, and I kept all of my dictionaries. I kept the books my mother gave me for birthdays – they’re collections of nature writing for the most part – and I kept three books I was given when I was no older than 10, one called City, one called Castle and one called Cathedral. For the most part, the rest of them went into the boxes with a speed and ease that surprised me at first, until it occurred to me that I have packed and moved them before, many times. I know how to box the books.

There are three reasons I decided to part with the book collection. First, I don’t like collections: I want less stuff around, not more. The second and third reasons go together. They may only count as one reason, but then again they may constitute four or five. Late in 2008, I rediscovered the public library, and in Portland it is a spectacular discovery, regardless of how many times you’ve made it before. It was one of the few realms I’m aware of where the computers actually improve things. A lot of the writing projects I’ve done for technology companies draw on the premise that the application or system being pimped adheres to the people using them rather than the other way around. It’s a lovely concept, I think, but I’ve never seen it come to life in such a truthful way as it does at the Multnomah County Library. In its physical rendition, the library is almost endless, but when you add the reach of the Internet it’s mind boggling. There is no need for me to ever buy another book, and that’s a great thing to know for someone as terminally cheap as me. My final reason for donating the books is that they weren’t being read because they were sitting on my shelves. That’s because I’d already read them. Books that aren’t being read, I think, are decorations, which I seriously doubt is what the people who wrote them had in mind.

So I was partially surprised, but also sort of giddy, tentatively, when I bought a little something for myself a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to Oklahoma tomorrow to visit one of my sisters, and I’d hate to have a few sequential days uninterrupted by the computer without a reading project. So I’m going to do something I’ve been meaning to do since the late 1980s: I am going to attempt to read Anna Karenina, which is considered by many to be the greatest novel ever written. I cannot say if I agree or not, but here are three things I know about Anna Karenina: I tried to read it in college, and I failed. I knew a woman who worked at a gas station that was held up while she was on duty, and she was fired when she told the owner, for some reason, that she didn’t care that much about the money, but that she was glad the robber hadn’t taken her book, Anna Karenina, in which she’d written extensive notes. The book I bought, not counting the commentary and the very graciously included list of characters and their affiliations, is 811 pages long.

My visit to Oregon

Well, I’ll be damned. Once upon a time I rode a train across the country and arrived at Union Station in Portland to visit my brother and his then girlfriend. I was in the process of moving to Seattle, where I knew people, and where I’d had a few boxes of possessions shipped the day before I left Madison. The afternoon I arrived for a three-day visit was 16 years ago today.

I didn’t really admit that I lived in Portland for the first two or three years I was here. I am not sure why, or how, but somehow I gradually became familiar with the nuances of the seasons here – Oregon was a foreign country to my sensibilities when I arrived, and in many ways it remains so. I got a “temporary” job at a law firm, where I worked for nearly two years. I became something of a militant biker. I started drinking a lot of beer, and became sort of unapologetically slutty. I lived in an apartment for eight years, then I bought a house, which I have now lived in for seven and a half, all of which is strange, considering I used to move, on average, once every eight or nine months.

There are two things about my life in Oregon that remind me that while I may be on a long visit, I do in fact live here. The first is what happens when I’m on a plane coming from wherever I happened to have been and the descent into Portland begins. The experience of looking out the window and seeing the smoky green velvet of Oregon below, usually through a web of clouds, is, to me, grace itself. So far, no matter how far I’ve ventured across the country or around the world, there is no match, emotionally or spiritually, for landing at PDX. I suppose that’s the definition of home.

The second thing is the oranges. I’ve never avidly disliked oranges, but I had never been sufficiently struck by their shrill sweetness to talk about them, or to write about them. Until I came to visit Oregon, I had never been in a place so close to the source of oranges when their time of year rolls around. For the first month or two here, 16 years ago, I stayed in a studio apartment about three minutes from the Fred Meyer on West Burnside, and there I bought oranges, and lots of them. One sure sign that the orange you’re about to eat is going to wake your tongue up properly is when the peal is in very few pieces once you’ve removed it. If an orange peel can be removed and remain in one piece – a hollow, rounded shell of sorts – heaven is not far off. Also, the thicker and more pock-marked the skin, the better. This year, as always, I vowed to eat oranges during February and the first part of March in moderation. And this year, as always, I’m off to a rocky start. I bought a five-pound bag on Saturday afternoon, and here it is Monday morning and I’m already contemplating a special run to the grocery store.