Scaredville

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

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

I am.

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

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

Don't mess with 'em

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

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

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

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

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

Friday nights with Jim

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

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

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

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

Ducks, beavers and tigers

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

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

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

There should be a law

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

A new and improved review process

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

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

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

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

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

Threading the needle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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