Sexing up the young ones

As a gay, it’s pretty obvious that I am always on the lookout for the opportunity to have sex with young boys. Really young boys. They’re so sweet and pure, so raw and so true. I want to show them the path to man sex, gently but firmly guide them along the way, maybe act out a twisted father-son scenario or two. Don’t be fooled by my proclaimed preference for men with man-sized equipment, or my insistence that a body without hair – lots of hair, preferably – is about as appealing as a bathtub without hot water. Just ask the conservative folks, especially the conservative folks who attend or lead big churches and often lend their insights into the particulars of my sexuality to crusades that are moral, political or, most often, both.

We all know the children aren’t safe around the gays. Sadly, I’m starting to get nervous about their sexual safety when they’re in the company of non-gays as well. I’ve recently noticed heterosexual conditioning forced upon children with such blatant disregard for the innocence of youth that it made me a bit squirmy. In each instance, had a gay been involved in the conditioning – or, to step briefly into the vernacular of gay bashing, “recruiting” – the cries of child molestation would have been deafening. But since it was heterosexuals, I guess it’s just marketing.

MSN is my home page. It was the default on my computer so I’ve let it be. The stories MSN runs throughout the day at the top of the page provide a horrifying glance of what people want to know. The slide show rotation of stories a couple of weeks ago was interesting: First, the president of Egypt (he may resign, according to NBC). Then the congresswoman from Arizona (she asked for toast for breakfast and she may attend her husband’s blast-off ceremony). Then, something about American Idol. And then, this headline: Little Boy Snags Kiss from Cheerleader.

Just for the hell of it, I clicked on the “story,” which turned out to be not a story at all but a video. I didn’t watch it, but I do have a question or two. What’s up with the heterosexuals’ desire to sexualize the children? Why do they get off, clearly, on hearing or reading about children aping adults hungry for a little action? Anyhow, I did read the text that appeared below the video: This cute little guy is a future heartbreaker. See how he snags a kiss on the cheek from a cheerleader at a high school basketball game. There's something for everyone in that one: a high school cheerleader and a pre-pubescent boy. Early stage MILF inclinations, perhaps?

This sort of perversion must be popular, though, because MSN was at it again this week with another video, this one of a little girl. The headline: Watch: You want to marry this kid when she grows up? Your heart might be broken until she gets one thing first. Holy Lolita, I thought as I clicked on through and ended up at an even creepier headline: LITTLE GIRL NEEDS A JOB: This adorable 5-year-old girl sure seems to have her mind made up: She’s not getting married until she lands a job.

That’s some sick shit. Why are five-year-olds making up their minds about anything? Why are five-year-olds even able to articulate – even if they’re coached – the tired back-and-forth about career vs. family? Why are five-year-olds presented as potential marriage material? What on earth goes through the mind of someone who sees a story like that and posts it on her Facebook page because it’s “so cute”? And who is doing the coaching? The parents? Does encouraging a little girl to tart it up on video and then share it with the world via the Internet constitute child abuse? It’s a fair question, I think. And when do I get to vote to eradicate the heterosexual community’s agenda to inflict its lifestyle on me and my friends and neighbors? And my nieces, and my nephews? How long will it be before this sort of nonsense is forced down everyone’s throat – I love hearing conservatives use expressions like that so much that I cannot help using it myself – in the … schools?

When I was flying back to Oregon recently I sat behind a woman with an adorable baby. Before we took off she jostled him around a bit. He looked at me over the back of her seat and we smiled at each other for a few minutes. Then, as we took off, she nursed him and he slept in the empty seat beside her until we landed in Portland. As we were standing in the aisle waiting to get off the plane, he smiled at me again over his mother’s shoulder and I smiled back. I was flattered that he appeared to remember our smiley fest that happened before his nap – an eternity, I would think, in baby time. Then his mother held him up in the air a bit and I got a good look at the onezee he was wearing, which said, Mama’s New Man. Which made me wonder, of course, what had happened to the old man. And am I the only one who gets a bit queasy thinking about Mama not only trading in her husband – her sex partner, presumably – for an infant but for being so proud of it that she adorns her baby boy with what amounts to a banner announcement?

I immediately categorized the mother as trailer trash (I’m sorry, sort of, but really). Then I started wondering about the person who bought the outfit. Someone saw the words Mama’s New Man at a store or in a catalogue or on a Web site and thought, ahhhhh. I wonder what people said when it was held up for all to admire at the baby shower. “Oh honey,” I can imagine Trailer Granny crowing at the celebration of her daughter's ability to breed, “that’s adorable.” And what company would manufacture and sell such merchandise? Does it have to pay royalties to Freud’s people? But most disturbing, to me, what about the baby? What if at some point in his teen years – his early teen years, preferably, before the inevitability of body hair – he succumbs to the relentless gay agenda, rejects his role as Mama’s New Man and becomes, instead, Daddy’s New Man? Where do we go to find a t-shirt to commemorate that situation?

The message

I leave a lot of messages on voicemail, which used to be called answering machines. Sometimes people leave messages for me, and the automated voice within my telephone tells me how many are there, and when they were left, and how to delete them. My first job out of college was at a law school, and on my desk, beside the phone, I kept a little pad of lined pink paper that said, across the top, in bold print, MESSAGE. I worked in a downtown office when I first arrived in Portland, and my favorite part of the day was the comings and goings of the bike messengers, sexy, generally sassy young men who dropped off and picked up not messages but envelopes, or packages. Though I’ve yet to receive one, I hear there are messages that take years to arrive, via the sea, in a bottle. At the opposite end of the speed spectrum, many people exchange messages instantly. Even though it’s the Internet that makes this possible, calling it instant messenger, or IM, harkens back to an era when names and functions aligned perfectly. On the other hand, the word seems to have taken a hit in the arena of e-mail. I don’t hear the term “e-mail message” much these days. As if in contrarian reaction to the explosive increase in the number of words sent across that particular channel, the term itself has been shortened to “e-mail” or just plain “mail.”

One sphere where the word “message” is thriving is PR. I was a bit of a late bloomer, so when I wandered into that industry 10 ½ years ago I was initially intrigued by the abundance of messages. The PR people tirelessly crafted and polished all kinds of messages. There were “key messages,” “top-tier messages,” “deep-dive messages” and so on and so forth. Usually, the messages were simply listed with bullet points, but that method quickly gave way to “the messaging framework,” which relied on lots of razzle dazzle in the form of boxes, charts, graphs and arrows. The crafting and finalizing of messages was followed, after the interview or the tradeshow speech or the “above-the-fold” story in a “biz pub” by a flurry of “recaps” in which the value of the strategic counsel provided by the PR people was highlighted. Sometimes an article or speech “reflected key messages” or “captured both key and secondary messages.” Sometimes, though rarely, “the messaging bubbled up” or, my all-time favorite, “the messaging really popped!”

I thought the messages themselves were limp. Let’s say a client had decided to shut down its manufacturing plant in Youngstown, Ohio. Invariably, and I do mean invariably, the first message would be: CLIENT NAME is deeply committed to the people and the economic viability of Youngstown, Ohio. At first I didn’t believe it was possible to put shit like that out into the world without getting your face dirty, but I soon learned that if you repeat the words enough times, with the same conviction shown, or faked, by those who tell us that government employees are to blame for budget deficits, or by politicians who preach about the moral imperative of fiscal responsibility without even mentioning defense spending, it becomes true.

This tactic answers to many names, including positioning, backgrounding and “putting a stake in the ground.” I call it lying, and it’s not cheap: Even at the most junior level, PR people are dramatically more expensive than government employees. And corporations and other organizations fork over millions of dollars for PR counsel – including messaging – for one simple reason: It works.

One place where it works quite well is on the news. I understand that reporters are at the mercy of the PR people, who have the money and the access to power and influence. I get that, I almost accept that. But what astounds me is how frequently and shamelessly the word “message” is used by people who I thought were supposed to at least pretend to be objective.

Over the past few days, there have been many, many messages. Several former members of U.S. Representative David Wu’s staff confessed on the pages of the Oregonian – anonymously – that the reason they quit en masse is that they had come to believe that their boss was having a psychiatric meltdown. They were so concerned that they staged an intervention, which did not go well. “The message here is that they’re getting off a sinking ship,” quipped one political analyst over the weekend. Problems abound in the Middle East, where, according to Charlie Rose and his friends, the real challenge is to have one message that “fits” both the countries themselves and the U.S. policies concerning them. Closer to home, friction continues in Wisconsin, but according to a guest on Washington Week, the real significance of the uproar in Madison is that it is a golden opportunity to test the messaging for 2012. A guest on a radio program said that what he wants to do is “put the hood back in neighborhood.” Wow, the announcer said. That’s a powerful message. And on the downside of Sunday afternoon, after playing the glorious Wade in the Water by the Staple Singers, the host of American Routes said, “That’s a message song.”

The tone for messages are set, of course, at the top: The White House. After meeting with as many billionaires as he could in California last week, the president came up to Oregon to do the same out at Intel, where there’s an executive he’s just appointed to some feel-good group to talk about innovation and all sorts of other cool stuff. Many messages were conveyed by a woman who, though she holds a fairly senior position at the White House, calls herself “Jen.” I’ve heard and read lots about the Democrats – and specifically Obama – not being very good at messaging, and after hearing Jen talk – I would not use the term “speak” to describe it – I tend to agree. She came on the local news the night before Obama’s visit to crow, as if in the midst of a pre-game locker room huddle, about how important the visit is, how important Oregon is and how hard she’s been working to make sure the message comes through. According to Jen, we’re going to “out-educate the world and win the future.” I cannot speak to the part about winning, but in terms of “out-educating the world,” that’s the exact, precise opposite of what we’re doing in Oregon, where we approach education as if it were excess calories. Jen concluded her interview with all the grace of a rabid college football fan at the end of the fourth quarter: She said, actually said, from the White House, “Woo hoo Oregon!” Before handing it back to the anchors, the reporter who did the story grinned into the camera and said, in case we’d missed it, “Woo hoo Oregon!”

I really hate to nit-pick every move the president makes, but here’s my problem with his visit to Oregon. In his State of the Union speech last month, Obama made some great points about light rail and high-speed trains. Whether any of it ever comes to fruition or not is secondary, I think, to the message: We need to develop other, more affordable, more environmentally responsible ways of moving ourselves and our stuff around. It’s a great message, and I for one celebrate the fact that we have a president who is willing to make it pop by mentioning it in his State of the Union address. It’s also a message that resonates well in Portland, home to one of the most efficient and forward-focused light-rail systems in the country. In fact, for $2.35 you can ride a train from the airport all the way to Intel’s front door in the town of Hillsboro ($4.75 buys an all-day, all-zone pass, covering both out and back.) My guess is that detailing security for the president makes my worst day about as significant as discovering an eyelash in the bathroom sink as I’m brushing my teeth, but still, imagine how powerful the images would have been of the president riding one of the best public transportation systems in the nation – one that is tirelessly bashed, of course, by conservatives – to go meet with the newest member of his big business posse.

Instead, he took not one helicopter, not two helicopters, but three. And although I’m sorry to rain on Jen’s woo hoo parade, that was totally off message.

Wisconsin solidarity

A walk-out over contract negotiations between the union and the state education authorities was organized once during the unfortunate years I spent working as an event coordinator at Portland State University. What I recall most about the incident, which was nothing more than carrying banners and yelling chants outside the student union, was who was not there.

One person, in particular, who for me came to personify the danger of short-term, self-centered thinking, and acting. Just for fun, let’s call her Bea. Bea was in charge of student advisors. She and a group of four or five of her minions met with student groups, resolved disputes, advised on one thing or another. By PSU standards in the mid-1990s, Bea was considered cool. She was alternative. She listened to obscure music and worked with the fluorescent lights in her office shut off. (Considering that her office had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a park, it seemed odd to award cool points based on the lights.) She wore tie-dyed skirts and big, clunky jewelry. She was the first person I ever met to hold up a bi-racial child – her own – as a evidence of her smug superiority. Bea was so darn committed to social justice, in fact, that she was studying public administration.

And when it came time for the employees who were represented by the union to raise a little hell over whatever the trickery of that particular period was, Bea stayed in her office. Those of us represented by the union were “classified,” while Bea and her ilk were “academic.” So, even though Bea could barely sign her name without assistance and supervision, and even though she probably didn’t earn that much more than us, Bea believed herself a cut or two above “the union.” Unfortunately, Bea was not alone. Many of her “team” were openly disdainful of the walk-out and of the union in general.

So, even though it’s unpleasant to think about people like Bea, it was her, precisely, that I thought of when reading about the demonstrations in Wisconsin. In his mission to blame the state employees for his state’s fiscal issues, the Republican governor decided it was time to strip unions representing state employees of their collective bargaining rights. All of them, that is, except for the unions that represent the police and the fire fighters.

Forgive me, but my standard assumption is that people in Wisconsin, generally, are a bit more thoughtful than people in Oregon, a little more thorough in deciding how they feel about various issues, and a little more reserved when it comes to congratulating themselves. So even though I wasn’t shocked I was pleasantly surprised by what I read. Unlike Bea, the fire fighters in Wisconsin understood that they were being played against other unions, singled out as special not as a form of long-term preference but for the governor’s very short-term convenience. So the fire fighters joined the protesters – it’s called solidarity, Bea, and it’s more than a buzz word – and marched into the state capitol. And just to make sure their presence was noticed by the governor and his supporters, and spineless stand-asides like Bea, they brought their bagpipes.

A skillful terracing

For many years I’ve been meaning to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Originally published in 1980, the book begins with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492. The edition I’m reading, published in 2003, ends with the 2000 presidential election.

I tried to read the book a couple of years ago, and I failed. The reason, I believe, is that it is close to 700 pages of nonstop, relentless facts and figures. It’s more a transcript than a story. There are conflicts and strikes and marches and executions and fires and sleazy business deals and corrupt politicians and court justices who cannot be bothered denying the fact that their main job is to make sure the rich remain that way. But if there’s a foundation of coherent narrative beneath it, I have yet to discover it. It’s all dates and times and names and places.

It may be that reading A People’s History of the United States is meant to be a crash course, an initiation into the history class most of us were never offered, the one that focused on the absolute might of money, power and greed in the founding and management of the nation. Perhaps Howard Zinn meant for readers to springboard off his book into other areas. The bibliography could keep me happily occupied for the duration, I’m sure.

Or perhaps Howard Zinn intended for his readers to experience the text as an outline, one around which their own experiences and impressions can be arranged.

Lately, on the arranging front, the commercials Wal-Mart is running about its minority employees couldn’t fit into my one-chapter-at-a-time reading of A People’s History of the United States more seamlessly. Wal-Mart, lest we forget, has an abysmal track record when it comes to how it treats and compensates its employees. Not to mention its suppliers.

The first commercial I heard features a Latina woman with a family of four whose employment at Wal-Mart has enabled her to cancel her food stamps and buy a house – her own house! Wal-Mart hit two jackpots with that one. First, they’ve managed to get a member of a minority group off of government assistance, and that’s something we can all celebrate. And secondly, this minoritress – that’s my own word – has joined the home-owning club. While my interpretation of that is that she’s now given up what little freedom she ever had by walking straight into the most jacked-up, mythological trap of them all, I think the broader reading would be more along the lines of someone we’ve been trained to assume is a victim has, thanks to working at Wal-Mart, has made the American Dream something of her very own. And though it shouldn’t even register, given Wal-Mart’s litigation history, the fact that she’s a woman is something of jackpot all on its own. It almost brings a tear to the eye, the sheer sweetness of it.

The second commercial takes the legend of the slave making peace with his former master out for a Sunday drive. There are two voices: The black Wal-Mart employee speaks in a dialect that is pronounced enough that he’s recognizably black; at the same time, kind of like our president, he doesn’t speak in a way that you’d call aggressively black. The white guy, presumably his manager, or perhaps his mentor, sounds like a folksy old cracker, a simple man with simple solutions. He tells us that the black employee is just an all-around good guy. He’s passionate about customers and he’s passionate about service. And he is convinced – you better sit down for this one – that one of these days the black employee will be his boss.

I think there’s more news in commercials than there is on the news itself. They’re quite revealing, I think. So it was interesting to hear Wal-Mart exploit its minority employees while I was reading the chapter entitled “Robber Barons and Rebels” in my history book. The chapter details how the economic growth of the 1870s coincided with a systematic tightening of the controls over the labor force. On page 253, Howard Zinn writes that the wealthy and powerful organized and orchestrated the growing economy – and their growing fortunes – “ … with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression – a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.” Apparently, this country’s money learned its lesson quite well. And those of us who are not part of that class, as usual, appear to have learned nothing at all.

Our Egypt

Years ago I heard an interview with Jimmy Carter in which he explained his involvement with an organization that facilitated elections in countries trying to adopt a more open and equitable way of choosing leaders. The process began, he explained, with a list of 10 or so conditions that had to be met by the country seeking assistance. These conditions ranged from polling place technology to scheduling the election on a day when the majority of the voters weren’t working or otherwise obligated. The interviewer then asked Jimmy Carter one of the best questions I’ve ever heard: If your organization were asked to oversee an election in the U.S., how many of those conditions would be met?

And Jimmy Carter said, not a single one.

I find it impossible to not be slightly inspired by the sights and sounds of hundreds of thousands of people holding their own in Cairo. I find it inspiring that the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down the Internet not only failed to diminish the number of protesters but actually increased them, quite significantly in fact. I find it very inspiring when doctors and lawyers and other suited professionals walk off the job and join their fellow Egyptians on the streets and in the squares. I find it inspiring when powerful people are forced to yield to sheer volume.

In spite of the inspiration, I know almost nothing about Egypt, and I have many questions. What’s it like to live and work in Cairo? What’s it like to be a woman there? How’s the job market? What percentage of income, typically, goes to rent? Do Egyptians have nationalized healthcare? What are the gay bars like in Alexandria? What about the pyramids? Is the air noticeably cooler when you’re in the shadow of one of them? Are there reality television shows in Egypt? Are there bike lanes in downtown Cairo?

My biggest question is painfully obvious: If the alliance between Egypt and the U.S. are so strategic, so strong, did the U.S. not see this coming? With all our “intelligence” scattered around the world, did we not have an inkling that close to a million people were about to gather in a public square and make it clear as crystal that soaring speeches and redundant rhetoric are no longer applicable? Wasn’t this all on Facebook? Or was this uprising similar to our financial crisis, in that just happened on its own accord? Daily, if not hourly, I mourn the loss of wonder, the loss of a sense of magic about the world. There is too much data, too much documentation, and even though much of it is wrong, there is too much information. But man, when it comes to money and international relations, mystery abounds.

Even though the news has been pretty much all Egypt all the time for the last three weeks, I have heard precious little about the people of Cairo. That’s because the sole focus of coverage thus far has been how the demonstrations will impact us, how we should look after “our interests” and what President Obama should say and do (the title “president” has not been preceded during this event by the term “U.S.,” which I find alarming). The big guns come on one show after another and explain, with absolute confidence, what this or that means, what the president of Egypt (now resigned) is thinking, what will happen next.

On Sunday morning, in Portland, Oregon, I overheard a conversation that reminded me of how I’d reacted to the coverage of the protests in Egypt. Two guys were sitting in front of me – both in their mid-fifties, I’d guess, both white – discussing it. “What’s so amazing to me,” one began, in a musical voice, “is how peaceful it was. Imagine overthrowing the president without having to resort to violence!” Yes, I thought, imagine. While I didn’t necessarily dismiss what the man said as untrue, I still had questions: I wanted to ask the man how he knew that there had been no violence, I wanted to ask where he gets his news, but I didn’t. It was Sunday morning, after all.

Empowering local communities

Well, well, well: The matriarch of online liberalism has sold herself to AOL.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the Huffington Post. In addition to the fact that the site seems unnecessarily clunky, it strikes me as a really great example of opinion for the sake of opinion. With a few exceptions, most of the site’s “content” seems painfully clever. It reminds me of the Willamette Week, a Portland paper that’s a textbook example of what happens when the high school yearbook staff starts getting paid to crank out writing that can be classified as “edgy.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the writing, per se, in the Huffington Post (or “Huff Po” if you’re cool enough); it’s the tone of it. The word I’d use to describe it, if I were forced to pick just one, would be precious. I don’t like precious. In fact, I cannot stand precious.

That said, I do have a lot of respect for the Huffington Post. It’s an applause machine for so-called liberals, but at least it publishes “content” that does not appear to get vetted by the myth makers. And it was started, allegedly, by one person: a woman with an axe to grind. And grind it she has.

Now it belongs to AOL. And Arianna Huffington, who is about to be $333 million richer than she was this time last month, is back pedaling like nothing I’ve seen in a long while. She came on the PBS Newshour the other night along with her new pimp – excuse me, I mean boss – from AOL. I’ve listened to so many “execs” at technology companies spew forth absolute nonsense for so many years that it was instantly clear that this particular high tech “exec” is certainly in the right line of work. He talked about the stable of brands, about the new global reach of AOL. He talked about the tremendous creative talent at Huff Po, and he used the word “content” in almost every sentence. This rambling, content-void jackass is excited – excited! – about “content.” And he’s super excited about the opportunity to work with a trailblazer the likes of Arianna Huffington.

I can just imagine the PR team’s meeting the morning following the broadcast. I can imagine it because I’ve sat in more of these meetings than I care to count. A big company acquires a smaller one, not as an act of aggression, but, well, more like a romance. The acquisition, therefore, is a wedding. We joined hands because we love each other, so the script says, and it’s just such a natural fit that not becoming business partners, now that would be a story … I shudder to think how many PR people will be promoted during the next performance review season thanks to how “on message” their “execs” were.

One thing I have never experienced, on the other hand, is working on an acquisition that has a spokesperson as coachable as Arianna Huffington. Now that she’s got $333 million in her checking account, she all but scoffed at Jeffrey Brown’s suggestion that the Huff Po is known for its left-of-center editorial stance. Oh no! she said. There is so much more to the site than politics. There’s culture, there’s lifestyle, there are book reviews and entertainment. And there’s lots on Huff Po that’s local – or, as she says it, since lying is somehow more tolerable if it’s done with a European accent, “laaahhh kal.” As if she’d just inhaled a bump or two of something very expensive, as Jeffrey Brown looked as if he was trying to not react to a shadowy blur he’d just realized was in fact the tail of a rat dashing across the floor of the Newshour studio, Arianna Huffington explained that this new adventure is going to be really, really great for people who live in parts of the country where local news is a dying commodity. Why? you may wonder, given the “content aggregation” (that’s code talk for rerunning stories rather than creating anything original) and the global reach and so on and so forth. How? Simple: The new dynamic duo is going to empower local communities. That’s how.

Live from the cathedral, the big game

Here’s a good one: With the exception of the final seven or eight minutes, I watched the Super Bowl. My neighbors invited me over and so over I went. There was great food and some very interesting conversations. There was a guy at my neighbor’s house who is from Greece and who wore, quite successfully in my opinion, a pair of shorts and a sleeveless tee-shirt. As for the actual game, it more than met my expectations. Football strikes me as a perfect emblem for this country’s love of brute, thoughtless force, accompanied, or supported, by a regiment of carefully scripted gender-based stupidity. In that sense, the game and its antics delivered.

The commercials, though, were interesting, two in particular.

I was very confused by the one for Groupon. In case you missed it, here’s a summary. Timothy Hutton speaks of the tragedy of Tibet against a backdrop of beautiful images: a starkly elegant snow-capped mountain, a Tibetan elder. Then Timothy Hutton announces that in spite of the tragedy, the Tibetan’s sure do dish up some phenomenal curry, and thanks to Groupon, we can enjoy it for next to nothing. Was this a parody of whiney, suburbanly earnest white folks’ adoption of Tibet, back before we fell deeply, hopelessly in love with Africa, as their cause célèbre? If so I’d have to say Groupon made a touchdown. But if the idea the marketing team was trying to shove across the airwaves was that Groupon brings you the world, locally, then they’ve taken Internet-driven cluelessness to an entirely new level. I guess you’d call that a fumble.

My favorite commercial was about Detroit. I think Detroit was, is and will one day again be our greatest urban accomplishment. As a city, in embodies pretty much everything: Blind ambition, optimism bordering on outrageousness, and then, in adherence to the script we’ve been following since Eve picked her afternoon snack from the tree, thanks to the lure of short-term gain, collapse. Detroit is the closest we’ve ever come to Athens, and on Sunday afternoon the ruins were on spectacular display. I’m going back and forth on what I thought was the oddest part of the commercial: It was narrated by Eminem. In fact, the commercial concluded with him walking into a grand old theater in the midst of a performance by an all-black choir. Eminem sort of gestures to them and says something along the lines of “This is how we do it in Detroit.” Put another way, the black music that emerged from that city, the black music that put not Detroit on the map but put, arguably, the U.S. on the map, is being introduced by a white rapper? I did a bit of a flip flop inside of my mind on that one. If the airwaves are willing to indulge my fetish for industrial cities for a minute or two, I can almost overlook the injustice of Eminem’s top billing. But, in fairness, if the marketing team knows nothing else, its expertise when it comes to understanding its audience and all of its limitations is exemplary.

The best part of the Super Bowl, though, came via the radio on Monday morning: The greed is getting the best of the grunts, so there may not be a football season later this year.

A golden chain of cause and effect

I love Harper’s Magazine. I say that over and over and over, as I have been for more than a decade now, but it’s always worth repeating. I love Harper’s Magazine.

One of the things I love about it is that it’s like a cranky and stubborn old man. It rejects any and all of the trimmings of money-making fads dressed up as “innovation.” The magazine raised its middle finger at the marketing team when it outlawed use of the word “content” on its pages. That, to me, is an editorial orgasm. The magazine is cranky. The magazine dedicates its first two pages, always and without fail, to bashing conservatives and those who adore them, not with the clever, well-tested rhetoric that passes for liberal commentary thanks to the good folks at MSNBC, but with something far more powerful, in my opinion, something a few of my elders used to call “piss and vinegar.”

What I really love about Harper’s Magazine, though, is this: the writing. I read it from cover to cover every month. I don’t skip the articles that cover topics in which I have no interest because the writing itself, the bare-bones mechanics of it, is beautiful.

So here’s a little passage I came across one morning this week in an article entitled “Like Butterflies in the Jungle: The quest for the new El Dorado” by Damon Tabor. The subject is the gold market – legal and otherwise – in French Guiana, “ … a spleen-shaped patch of sovereign French territory on the right shoulder of South America.” I couldn’t be less interested in the actual topic, but I read on, and it wasn’t long before I was picturing Don Gouran, a 52 year-old who has been mining for gold in the Amazon for two decades. And then, this:

… there was a darkly elegant symmetry to Don Gouran’s dream: Greed and imprudence had caused America’s housing bubble, which had burst, which had roiled financial markets, which had caused fearful investors and greedy speculators to plow money into gold, which had driven up gold prices, which had fueled an Amazon gold rush, which would now – perhaps – help a poor, illiterate, middle-aged man buy his first house.

Since Harper’s Magazine – unlike MSNBC, Slate and others – is not a whore for the stock market, and since there is a narrative thread to the article that does not depend on graphics and scary soundtracks and relentlessly dumbed down chatter, the paragraph about the ‘darkly elegant symmetry’ picked up on a mention earlier in the article about the role mercury plays in today’s mining practices:

Meanwhile, Don Gouran would likely release mercury into the water and air, some of which would later travel thousands of miles and conceivably poison the same people who had set these events in motion. His gold could also end up on the world market and once there be traded by an American homeowner who, seeking redemption from past economic sins, noted that gold exchange-traded funds had been performing quite well lately – a long, golden chain of cause and effect.

While I complain too much about how what passes as ‘the news’ is not only uninformative but is more often than not crudely misleading, it makes my gratitude for Harper’s Magazine all the more profound.

No argument

I've resisted the temptation to post videos on this blog. Until today. What I really like about this guy's argument is that there's no argument at all.

The vanished frontier

For some reason, or for no reason at all, I shy away from Kurt Vonnegut. Even though I’m pretty sure that until recently I hadn’t really read anything by him, there is something about the mere mention of his name that forces me to keep looking … for something else. A few weeks ago I went to my first meeting of the book group dedicated to reading and discussing the classics, a group I found advertised on craigslist. The book for January was Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and the book for February, announced in an e-mail I read when I got back from Missouri, is Cat’s Cradle by none other than Kurt Vonnegut.

I rolled my eyes as I read the message. Then I went to Powell’s and bought it. On the bus I read the first few pages, which struck me as gimmicky. It concerns, among other things, the first atomic bomb, an island nation in the Caribbean and a religion called Bokononism that has, of course, its own vocabulary. Nonsense, I thought as the bus glided across the Burnside Bridge, but I kept reading and I’m happy to report that while I don’t necessarily love the book, I do like it.

Here, then, are a couple of passages I read on Sunday morning. The narrator meets a couple on an airplane. The wife had written a letter to the New York Times, the publication of which causes her husband to lose his job with the U.S. State Department. The wife explains that the letter she wrote expressed many negative sentiments about U.S. foreign policy, primarily that she was “ … very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.” Then her husband chimes in, quoting directly from his wife’s letter: “Americans … are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”

Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963. On the last Sunday evening of the first month of 2011, I sat in my nice hot bath and listened to 60 Minutes. The first two segments of the show were dedicated to an ‘exclusive’ and ‘extensive’ interview with the Julian Assange, the Australian guy from WikiLeaks. The master of ceremonies was Steve Croft, whose pre-election interviews with Barack Obama were conducted with sycophantic tendencies embarrassing enough they almost put him in the same league as Charlie Rose. In addition to leaking from the diplomacy realm, WikiLeaks toyed with the financial institutions briefly, which made the Bank of America quite uncomfortable. Steve Croft, who apparently doesn’t have much experience interviewing Australians, seemed to think it was his job to chastise Julian Assange for toying with the almighty and then for admitting, repeatedly, and quite clearly, that he’d enjoyed doing so. Then how, Steve Croft asked incredulously – and this is where he really showed his journalistic chops, in a God Bless America sort of way – can the face of WikiLeaks be surprised that the U.S. is trying to have him extradited? After all, Steve Croft said, “you screwed with the forces of nature.”

Forces of nature? Good God, I thought. Has 60 Minutes off-shored its editing department?

But it all reminded me of why I like to read fiction, even fiction by Kurt Vonnegut: It’s all so familiar. The exchange reminded me, of course, of that vanished frontier I’d read of earlier in the day in a book published before I was born. Out there, vanished though it may be, the horses roaring across the frontier landscape are ridden by bankers and diplomats who aren’t mere humans but have been elevated, empowered if you will, with a kind of indisputable authority once reserved for tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.