The Language of Politics

Two language-related things are on my mind this morning, enough so to write about them here.

• I'm disenchanted at just how entrenched the "liberal/conservative" distinction has become in the United States, as if it's a distinction that comes from nature, such as "man/woman" or "day/night." It isn't. It's just a nearly useless distinction that inhibits creative thinking, impedes our ability to communicate, and oversimplifies everything. It reduces options at a time when we need flexibility, and divides us when we need cooperation. Thanks to win-at-all-cost blowhards on the right who have propagated this distinction for the past two decades, thus coarsening the nation's political dialogue for a generation, maybe more.


• I'm tired of hearing about "job creation" as the aim of government policy, as if the direct purpose of government is to create jobs. It isn't. Business creates jobs. Government oversees business to protect the people. Thinking that government itself can create jobs is like thinking that straw can be spun into gold. It can't. And thinking this shows a lack of understanding of how economic wealth is created. It is created by adding value. Government does not do this.

Talk of government "creating jobs" sounds especially silly coming from politicians who seek to reduce the role of government in the lives of citizens. Okay, I know such people actually mean they want government to get out of the way so businesses can grow and prosper. These days, however, businesses often seek growth not by hiring people, but by being more efficient, which means using fewer people, or outsourcing work to places where labor is cheaper. But I digress.

Back to the idea that government can create jobs. This reminds me of when my brother travelled to Norway in the 1980s as part of U.S. Army cold weather survival exercises with the Norwegian military. He and his squadron flew commercially, and had to change planes at London's Heathrow Airport. While there, he was amazed to see women standing at the bottom of escalators whose job was to stand in place and urge people to use caution when mounting the moving staircase.

Absurd, right? Even after a decade of Thatcherism (including, by then, privatization of British Airways), what my brother thought of as "the post World War II British welfare state" was still alive and kicking. However you feel about it, that's the result when government creates jobs.

So let's stop talking about government as if it can create jobs. We're giving it way more credit that it deserves. Businesses create jobs. And people create businesses. And government, ideally, has as much to do with the process as the referee in a hockey game.


• P.S. In reading new coverage about politics, I've noticed a verb that's suddenly being used everywhere. It's "to pivot," as in a candidate pivoting during a campaign. It's used like this, seen on www.politico.com last week: "The pivot to attacking Paul marks the first time Gingrich has launched an unprovoked broadside against another Republican candidate."

The implication, I guess, is that a candidate keeps his or her positions and efforts and overall operation intact, but now swings them in some new direction without the use of much additional energy or groundwork, rather like one of those machine guns mounted on the back of a pick-up truck often seen in ungoverned regions. Well, that's not the most encouraging illustration, but that's what comes to mind when I hear the word.

I suppose it's a useful expression, but I'm suspicious of any sudden increase in the use of any word or phrase in a new context. If it was that useful, it would have been out there more often all long, right? So to me, a sudden new buzzword smells of flavor-of-the-month intellectual laziness, a kind of mental shorthand that does not enhance our ability to communicate with precision. It's just one more brick in the wall of thoughtless thinking, another step on the road to the city where we don't have the ability to think for ourselves.

I hope civilization never pivots that way.

The virtues of being incomplete

I believe the best kind of art is that which engages one's imagination. This explains, I think, my interest in such archaic forms as silent film and network radio: each lacked an element, which had to be provided by its audience. And that, in turn, made the experience more personal and individual and real.

I've just breezed through 'A Man Without a Country,' the slim volume of musings issued by Kurt Vonnegut in 2005, and in it (among many recycled ideas from his earlier work) are thoughts on what Vonnegut calls "the imagination circuit." These below pertain to visual art such as paintings or drawings:

"If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it."

So I guess paintings or sculpture might fall into the same category — they require viewers to collaborate, though they're not usually trying to tell a story in the same way more narrative forms (film or radio) do.

A similar collaborative process happens with reading: we take these little marks (which I'm using right now) and run them through our minds to create pictures that appear to us, however fleetingly, in ways that only we could have imagined. They're private little epiphanies, though fueled by the shared experience of watching or listening or looking.

Regarding those "imagination circuits," Vonnegut writes that...

"...it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these imagination circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses."

Vonnegut leaves it at that, without making a judgment, though he doesn't seem to be too enthused by the situation. For me, I can't speak against today's movies and television shows, as I enjoy them as much as the next person. Rather, I wish to raise my hand and point out that older, incomplete forms did have their own unique power to communicate, and still do. That power is rooted in their very incompleteness, which requires people to use their imagination.

And I think those who have a certain kind of imagination can still get a lot from older forms. Once your imagination is engaged, it's possible to enter a meditation-like trance stage that is the launching pad for emotions that are bigger and intense and personal than if you are a mere spectator, which is what you are when everything's given to you on a silver platter, or screen.

Even when movies began being made with color and sound as a matter of course, the great directors understood the importance of not showing. Alfred Hitchcock was a master at the "less is more" school — he often did not show scenes of violence, instead leaving it up to the viewer's imagination, knowing full well that we would envision something many times more frightening that any image he could have put on the screen. Why? Because, left on our own, we can't help but fill in the blanks, so to speak, with images that resonate with us personally.

In an age of alienation, I think these kinds of collaborative art are good for the soul. They involve us and make us feel a part of something, and can tap into emotions that are more abstract and bigger. By giving up some elements, we can gain so much. Call it the new primitivism. There, I just did.

I suppose by this thinking, a "Mad Lib" qualifies as great art, as you choose words to fill in the text of a story. Could be. That's a ___________adjective idea if I ever heard one.

The human potential for unexpected randomness

This weekend I saw 'Hugo,' the big screen adaptation of the 'Hugo Cabret' book by Brian Selznick. It was the first time I'd never seen a film in 3D, which until now I had dismissed as just another Hollywood substitution for character or story. But it really added a lot to the visual experience of the film, and didn't give me a headache, either. So other than the $13 ticket price and slightly dark image, yay 3D!

As for the film: 'Hugo' had me from the opening shot, which starts high above Paris of the 1930s and then swoops down into the sprawling glass and steel shed of an idealized (and now long gone) Gare Montparnasse, once one of the city's great train stations. Of course anything with a big city European train shed and steam engines, plus lots of mechanical clock machinery and scenes of baked goods and then old film would have been more than enough for me. It could have been a documentary about the effect of the Great Depression on French post-Symbolist poetry; I would have been happy to just watch scenes of the station and eye the croissants for two hours.

Yes, the film did have a story—one involving the French film pioneer Georges Méliès, no less, and yay again for that. But the reason for this post is to examine a specific point made in the story, when the question of "Why We're Here" once again rears its unanswerable head. In this case, with clocks all about, it's only natural that the question is answered in terms of machinery. So here's what I wrote to an acquaintance who saw the film with me:

"At one point, Hugo says that clocks or machines have only just the parts they need—no more, no less. From this, he extrapolates a reason for each person's existence: everyone must have a purpose, or he or she wouldn't be here. And though it's not said explicitly in the film, it's an argument for our universe reflecting a master design of some higher power or another.

"It's a nice thought, but I find it doesn't sit well with me. To me, such a notion seems kind of limiting or dismissive of humanity—to think that we need to justify our existence and that we MUST have a reason for being here. To me, the essence of being human is our ability to transcend the absolutely necessary (very much unlike a watch part) and do things that are completely unnecessary, such as make art or do cartwheels.

I'm not saying the "we're all like parts in a wonderful clock" answer is wrong. But it's not the right one for me, as it seems at odds with the one thing about humans that sets us apart from so much else: our capacity for whimsy and creativity and imagination. We don't always do what's necessary. Heck, we sometimes do things that make no sense at all, often again and again.

Consider: insanity is commonly illustrated as a person doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, humans have been asking "Why are we here?" for ages, and not getting an answer, and yet we continue to do it. Given that we know in advance that we can't know an answer for sure (which is a scary thing to most people, hence the popularity of religious systems and beliefs), then it's a remarkably human thing for us to keep asking. It's like we're in a casino in front of the biggest slot machine of them all, and the chances of hitting the huge jackpot are infinitesimally small and might well be zero for all we know, and yet we keep pulling the handle again and again. Insane? Maybe. Human? Yes!

I like the idea of the human potential for unexpected randomness, and sense there may be something holy in it. I've long felt this way, even without thinking about it, and even while growing up marinated in the teachings of the Catholic church. When I attended Fordham University in New York City, I would annoy my new city friends while crossing streets in Manhattan by suddenly diving down to the pavement, somersaulting, and then standing back up again and continuing on as if nothing had happened. Asked why I did that, I'd reply along the lines that I was just making sure I still had free will, that's all. Oh, there's the hick from New Hampshire, at it again!

Yes, everyone wants to be needed. It's an important part of life. But equally important to our humanity, I think, is to preserve and exercise and celebrate our ability to do things that are totally unnecessary.

I think it would make a great basis for a church: that people all get together once a week and do something completely unexpected to celebrate their humanness. Plus, you could get a tax write-off.

And speaking of that: if the current U.S. tax code isn't a celebration of the human capacity for the unnecessary, then I don't know what is.

Keeping score

Heard something on a BBC radio report the other day. A Hong Kong guy was interviewed about discrimination and prejudice in his life. He's an ethnic Indian, and the point of the interview was discuss what roadblocks he's run into in his business career.

One thing the guy said stuck with me. In describing his own lack of prejudice, he said he has nothing against anyone based on religion, race, or sexual orientation. He summed up his philosophy as:

"If knowing you is something that can help me make money, then you are my friend. But if knowing you is somehow going to cost me money, then you are not my friend."

What a way to evaluate people. Contrast that with what I recall Vonnegut saying in praise of someone: "He didn't keep score with money." That's a far better way to go through life, I think.

Berle, Hackett, and pocket change

I defy anyone to analyze this dream I just had and come up with some coherent meaning. I dreamed of a TV talk show with Milton Berle and Buddy Hackett at a round wooden table. There's no audience, and the set is one of those daytime TV kitchens.

Berle mentions at one point that he's "almost 90" but he's vibrant and alert and full of beans. Hackett functions as his stooge. And the show consists of Berle taking out a bag of pocket change and spilling it onto the table, then picking out one coin, and then reminiscing about that date: show biz, personal life, history, whatever.

The show had the feel of some kind of PBS thing, like the old Steve Allen "Meeting of the Minds" show. It's not a bad idea, and it appeared in my dream as a finished and polished production.

Where did that come from?

And now, I've just gone to find an image for this post, and to do so I entered "Milton Berle Buddy Hackett" just to see what would come up, and look what did: an image of Berle, Hackett, and Steve Allen.

I should have mentioned Ernie Kovacs and Lucille Ball, because it would have been fun to see them in the picture as well.

Sometimes life is a little weird.

Hey, there's de-icer in my ice cream!

Every once in awhile I make a connection between two disparate areas of interest. The other day it was ice cream and airports. My wife has been bringing home tubs of a certain brand of ice cream (yay!) that I enjoy. But then I actually read the ingredients, and I was surprised to see "propylene glycol" listed. I'm no chemist, but my obsession with airports (see Airline Terminal Mania) allowed me to recognize this as a key ingredient in aircraft deicing fluid. And that can't be good. (The brand is Edy's, by the way.)

So I checked around and yes, propylene glycol is considered safe to ingest, and is often added to processed foods to help them retain moisture. Fine, but that's not enough to reassure me. I can't help but think of the "high fructose corn syrup" factor in this. That chemical, which replaced sugar as a sweetener in most processed foods in the U.S. around 1980, is considered safe, too, but I'm convinced it has long-term effects that we just aren't aware of. I've tried to eliminate it from my diet, but that's not always easy in the land of overprocessed foods. Still, it's been a long time since I've thoughtlessly swigged soda sweetened with HFCS.

One interesting thing about high fructose corn syrup is that it was developed by the Japanese, which made me want to write an international conspiracy thriller where high fructose corn syrup was exposed as a plot by the Japanese to get even with the U.S. for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stay tuned on that one.

Back to ice cream: So yesterday, the grocery fairy caused a tub of another brand of ice cream to materialize in the freezer—this one marketed on its packaging as "all natural." That can mean anything, but I looked, and sure enough, there was no propylene glycol listed in the ingredients. And you know what? It kinda tasted better and felt more "right" going down.

How much of that is just psychological I'm not prepared to say. But it's me and all my hang-ups and emotions and non-scientific judgments that are in charge of what I actually eat, and that's good enough for me to steer clear of deicer in my ice cream from now on.

Except maybe in winter.

Two books, two worlds

Moving books around the house has prompted me to re-read a couple of favorites.

One is 'North of Monadnock,' a 1961 collection of essays about life in back-country New Hampshire by Newt Tolman, a man my father knew. The other is 'Shock Value,' a collection of essays by schlock auteur John Waters, published in 1981, just after his most fertile period of movie-making, I think.

I love both books. But the worlds they come from could not be more different.

One is old-time Yankee writings from a guy whose family had lived in Nelson, N.H. since before the Revolution, and still does. The other is the proto-punk musings of a filmmaker from Baltimore whose aim at the time was to shock the sensibilities of the American middle class.

But these two books (and their authors) have more in common than you might first realize.

First, they are both written by individuals with a worldview that is complicated and interesting and all of a piece. The worlds are worlds apart, yes, but both writers are able to make a compelling (and entertaining!) case for them.

And their views flow naturally from their life experiences, which take place in settings that are completely different from each other -- one rural New Hampshire, the other urban Baltimore. I find each man's response to life completely justifiable, given their backgrounds.

But the most important connection they both share is subversion. The energy in Tolman's writing, it seems, comes primarily from a desire to dispel a hundred clichéd notions about quaint Yankee life. The old-time country store was not a friendly down-home kind of place, but a filthy rat hole often run by the most disreputable character in town. (Being a shopkeeper was no life for a grown man, it was felt.) The subversion in the Waters book is far more obvious: when Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversion includes 'The Human Puke Eater,' it's hard to miss.

I think I'm drawn to both books, to the point of wanting to spend time reading them again when so many other books beckon, because both men succeed in explaining their worlds so thoroughly and completely and entertainingly. They are both superb tour guides to places they know very well, and both trips are so good they're worth taking again. Hence the re-reading.

For me personally, the Tolman book represents my childhood, and not just in a general way. We spent our summers in that area (where my dad grew up) when I was a kid. I personally knew a few of the people Tolman writes about, and got just enough of a whiff of the whole scene for everything he relates to really resonate.

The Waters book, I think, represents my rebellion -- not in any specific way (I didn't go to Baltimore and join in the underground film scene), but the general rebellion that all adolescents work through in their own ways. In my case, I rebelled by going to college in New York City and eating at the White Castle.

But both books are windows into worlds worth knowing. I'm glad the great slot machine of life somehow led me to them long ago, and glad for the chance to revisit them. It's a rare case of me being grateful for being a packrat, and I'll take it.

Wait, there's more

Here's another little snippet from the same Jonathan Franzen piece (see below) in the New York Times:

"BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love."

Passion is by definition uncool. Wow. I think humanity is divided into two groups, depending on whichever side of that statement you fall. You either have passion and are uncool, or the opposite. That explains a lot of what goes on around me, and how I relate (and how I don't relate) to people around me.

Alas, I believe the people who'd rather be cool far outnumber the people who "betray real passion."

Chairs are used for sitting

Here's a shard from an op-ed piece by Jonathan Franzen, published in the New York Times on May 28, 2011. The topic is "liking" in the Facebook sense, and how that applies to stuff we could buy:

"This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)"

So there's a clue -- that serious art and literature should not be preoccupied with you liking it.

Not sure how much I agree with that. Me, I think there's art in creating art that is popular and serious, or at least in creating art that tries to meet the audience at least half-way. To ignore this aspect of art is like being a furniture designer who creates this really cool chair that can't be used for sitting.

A daughter's view of "the freedom to think"

I just read an obituary for Tom West, the computer engineer, who was found dead earlier this month at his home in Westport, Mass. He was 71 and died of either a stroke or heart attack.

Some of the things in the New York Times obit resonate with me. To wit:

His daughter Jessamyn West said he was driven “to understand everything.”

“He knew a million things — it didn’t matter: worms, plumbing, literature. He could give you a discourse. It seemed like he could never rest until he had a sense of control over the things around him.”

And...

“My dad loved routine. He rolled his sleeves up exactly the same way every morning. He went to work at exactly the same time every day. It was what gave him the freedom to think.”

I think that's a key motivator for me in how I structure anything I do. I crave the freedom to think, and anything that takes away from that is a negative. So that's why, I think, I go crazy when software gets updated and you have to learn a whole new interface, etc. It's not that I don't want to learn new things. Rather, I'd rather stick with a routine so that my mind can get the running room to take off.

Whatever it takes

I have few people in my life with whom I can really communicate about the creative process. I guess that's true for most people, so I'm not feeling sorry for myself, just facing up to the reality of it, that's all. Anyway, from time to time I come across things that set it out for me in language plain enough to stick. One such example was from a 2010 essay by Garrison Keillor, who talked with six students at the University of Minnesota and then wrote about academic happiness. He came away impressed, and also inspired (pretty open-minded of him!), and expressed it this way:

"I left Dinkytown and drove home to Saint Paul, resolved to quit fruiting around and try to focus and work harder and make my time count for something. I'm hopeful about that."

Thanks. Weirdly enough, last night (Thursday, May 5) I found that I came quite close to getting a chance to meet and talk with Mr. Keillor, one of the creative people I most admire. He was appearing in his one-man show at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, N.H. on Wednesday, May 4, and for some reason I felt it wasn't worth going (lots going on in my own life), though I'm right now rereading and rereading his 1991 novel "WLT: A Radio Romance," which I love for many reasons.

Then, at a different event just last night, I ran into a friend whose husband recently served as chairman of the board of trustees of New Hampshire Public Radio. And of course she had been at the Keillor thing, and she surprised me by saying that after the performance, audience members were invited to speak with the author, and she and her husband found that virtually no one sought him out backstage. Keillor was curious about this: "Did I go on too long?" she recalls him asking.

Well, so much for a chance to say hi, tell him I think his writing will endure, and even invite him out to the Red Arrow or, even better, the Red Barn for chat. (What is it with the color red? Well, it would have gone with his shoes.) I find celebrity worship utterly repugnant, so I know it would have felt a little weird, but still it was kind of unfortunate that the chance was missed.

Very weird mood lately, getting nothing done, spinning my wheels. Hoping that a quick trip out to Chicago to see relatives and then a very slow trip back (via Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited) will get me back in the zone. Lots of silent film screenings coming up, too, and not sure how that will all work out.

Simply stated

Two things are causing Americans to suffer an inexorably declining standard of living in my generation:

1. No one thinks about the long term anymore. We only think short term.

2. No one thinks about the common good anymore. It's only "How can this benefit me?

Look at any sign that the overall quality of life in this country is declining, and it can be traced back to those two dynamics. Guaranteed.

I'm not speaking of individual citizens. I'm thinking of the leaders that guide the institutions that affect us all: government, business, labor, and so on.

It's what's killing us.

Random post-Nepal thoughts

Lots of good ideas from browsing the latest "Daedalus Books" catalog.

- The lesson from "Timbuktu, The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold," is that a city that prospered 600 years ago by trading in everything from salt to gold, and which then led to impressive schools and libraries, and which then gave the city a wonderous repuation, resulted ultimately in "invasions and plunders that precipitated its decline," according to the book's summary. And there's a lesson for us all. Fly too high, and the bastards will inevitably come after you. It happened in Timbuktu, which today is a sad outpost, even as its reputation for exotic magnificence lingers on in our collective consciousness. I think that's another lesson: with the right name, a reputation can last a lot longer than reality. Take note, marketers.

- Paradox alert: A book titled "The Well-Made Book" is all about an American printer, Daniel Berkeley Updike, who set the standards for book design in the 20th century. So who designed this? What kind of experience was that? Also, kinda sad to see "Outwitting History," a book about a guy who saved a gigantic number of Yiddish books from being lost, now in the remainder bin for $5.98. (Published price $24.95.) We just don't read books anymore, do we? Archaic form.

- With that in mind, I would like to follow through on the notion of creating an extended work of fiction in Twitter, and see how that goes. Add it to the list!

- I am becoming fond of instant coffee. This can't be good.

Nixon in China at the Met

This past Saturday (Feb. 12, 2011), I saw a simulcast of the opera "Nixon in China" live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. (I was at the Portsmouth Music Hall.) I've wanted to experience this opera in its entirety ever since hearing about it shortly after graduating from college, and this was my first chance.

I find the music of John Adams to be exciting to listen to. I feel that it does capture the American experience in ways that are unique to my time. And the idea of an opera about Richard M. Nixon and Chairman Mao, figures that are from my time on the planet and whom I remember (instead of, say, the Duke of Mantua from 'Rigoletto'), is tremendous, in that it treats contemporary events as material to celebrate the bigger emotions in the way that only opera can.

I would love to hear the music again and again, and probably will. But my first impression of the whole three-and-a-half hour experience was a sense that it can be done differently and more effectively. Somewhere out there, there's a blend of the strengths of opera with the immediacy of, say, a Broadway musical. And as good as "Nixon," is, I thought it didn't do that, exactly.

And that blend is what I would aim for in creating a piece of theater that both speaks to today's audiences but also is rooted in the classic traditions of opera and musical theater. That's what I hope to do with the Pam Smart story, and a few others, once I get to a point when I can.

Right now, silent film music takes up all the creative energy. But making a piece of opera come to life is something to look forward to, someday.

A somber milestone

Today is the 25th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It's a big deal here in New Hampshire, the part of the world I call home, because the ship was carrying the nation's first "teacher in space," Christa McAuliffe, who was from Concord, N.H. She and the six other astronauts were all lost in the explosion.

It was one of those events where you remember where you were and what you were doing when it happened. In my case, I was 22 years old, in my senior year at Fordham University in New York City, and working as an intern at CBS in mid-town Manhattan, in the book publishing division. Our offices were at 383 Madison Ave., an older building just north of Grand Central station that's since been demolished. A television sat in our office, and someone that morning had turned it on so we could check out live coverage of the launch.

People drifted in and out as the countdown progressed. As lift-off approached, we all gathered to watch it. And it happened, and we all followed it for about a minute or so. Then, just at the point where people's attention started to fade and the topic was about what people were doing for lunch, it changed.

I remember watching the image and seeing the steady exhaust trail peter out in a way that didn't seem right, and wondering if something had gone wrong, even before anything was said by mission control or the anchor following it. And then the guy on the mission control feed said something like "obviously a major malfunction" and it began to sink in: the Challenger had blown up!

And yes, we were all in a state of disbelief. But what I remember specifically that day was finally going out at about 12:30 p.m. to get some air, and already copies of a special "Challenger" edition of the New York Post were being hawked on the street. It was long before the Internet, of course, and 24-hour news was in its infancy. And "extras" were nothing new for the newspaper business, especially in a competitive environment such as New York.

For some reason, it made quite an impression on me: that something could happen in Florida, and within an hour a newspaper in a city 1,000 miles away could be on the streets telling people all about it. I think it's one of the reasons, at least subconsciously, that I gravitated toward working in newspapers. It seemed so vital, so important.

Who knows what changes in communications the next 25 years will bring? But for me, the Challenger explosion provided an accidental but memorable lesson in the importance of information in a time of crisis, perhaps made all the more vivid because it was so rooted in a style of communication that even then was becoming obsolete. Anyway, with graduation looming only a few months away, I regard the Challenger explosion and what I saw that day as a significant step toward working in the news business.

A distracted nation

I live in the United States of America. And if you want to know something about the state of our nation's union, relative to its own history and the rest of the world, here's a good summary.

This morning, while working out on an elliptical trainer, I was watching excerpts from President Obama's 'State of the Union' address, which was made last night. Seeking to inspire us, the president said that "this is our generation's Sputnik moment."

And right next to this was another television (part of a bank of 12 hanging from the gym ceiling) tuned to VH1, and showing a blonde woman singing and partying and doing a spectacular bungee jump from what appeared to be that Stratosphere tower in Las Vegas.

And on the other side of President Obama was a television tuned to an endless information about car repair.

Despite the rhetoric about our Sputnik moment, the truth is we are a distracted nation with no patience for long-term anything. My whole life has seen the rise of the "immediate gratification" generation, and it hasn't crested yet.

I'm not sure if the president addressed this in his speech because I was too busy watching the blonde woman bungee jumping.

A certain majesty

Today I did something that doesn't happen often, but when it does, I find myself getting sentimental, even emotional. It was this: I drove one car to a dealership, and then drove away in another.

How sentimental? In the past, I've saved bits and pieces from my cars and carried them with me in the current vehicle. My first car, a 1984 Subaru GL wagon, yielded a weirdly-shaped running light. I saved a knob from the radio of my 1988 Subaru Justy, the most ludicrous car I've ever driven.

But the practice now seems silly at this point in my life. So this time, just prior to the final ride, I contented myself with snapping a photo of the car, sitting in the driveway on a bleak mid-winter afternoon, looking into the garage where it spent so many nights.

Don't ask me how I can feel emotional about inanimate objects. For one reason, cars are sufficiently complex to mimic life in some ways. But more significantly, a car has been a faithful partner on so many journeys, a companion no less meaningful than a fisherman's boat or an astronaut's spacecraft or the Lone Ranger's horse. A certain closeness develops that, in my case anyway, has more warmth and substance than the relationships I have with some people in my life. (One exception: when my "companion" showed its warmth by overheating in Boston one wintry afternoon three years ago, leading to a very expensive and prolonged headgasket job. And also when the timing belt went, necessitating an expensive repair job. And then...)

And it seems weird to me that this car, a 2002 Subaru Impreza with 189,000 miles on it, cannot just continue to function my car. It runs fine. It has everything it needs to function on the road: not just a working engine and power train, but lights and safety features and so many components necessary for it to hurtle down a paved road 10 times faster than I could ever move on my own, guided only by little movements of my hands and feet. It can still do it. It did it just today, when I shut it off for the final time, the odometer reading 189,357. And it could do it tomorrow for me if I just called the guy at the dealership and said, sorry, I can't make it there until Thursday.

But even so, I recognize it can't continue. The car would need a great deal of costly work to pass state inspection, which would have to happen this month. And the rational part of me still functions well enough to recognize that the money needed to keep the Impreza hurtling down the road any further into 2011 would be better spent on something not as close to 200,000 miles.

And there are signs of decay. A persistent engine oil leak has been making the car smell like a railroad locomotive. The air circulation fan under the dashboard has stopped working (not a good thing in the middle of winter) and only comes to life when you move the air circulation lever back and forth a few times.

And I know this will come out wrong, but the whole process of coming to terms with the reality that the Impreza would not be able to carry on much longer reminded me a little of what it's like to handle the loss of a pet. Yes, it's a lousy comparison, but to me, there's a certain majesty involved in the finality of making a decision that moves you irrevocably into another era.

I try to joke about the change. The new car, a tan 2008 Subaru Forester (the paperwork calls the color "topaz") with just 17,000 miles on it, is the first non-white car I've ever owned, so I say that buying it on Martin Luther King Day was my way of celebrating diversity.

Yes, the new car is fine, and promises many adventures. (Plus, for the first time ever, I bought a car with automatic transmission, so my wife can drive it!) But the old car is gone, even though every piece of it that got me from my driveway to the dealership today remains intact. It still runs yet, but it is no longer mine, and it seems weird that in parting with such a big piece of equipment that I've spent so much time with—a thing that's gotten me to appointments and road races and carried the dogs and done so much—it seems weird the process of changing vehicles in the end is similar what happens when water goes down a drain. Once it passes from our vision and flows down the pipe, where it goes next is invisible, and by design no longer a concern of the present. It's "taken care of." And the recognition of the finality of that—a process that seems unique to the human species—is something I can easily make a big deal out of, which is what I think I'm doing here.

But that's enough for now. It feels good, however, just to put it into words, which is yet another thing that I think makes us human.

And that's truly an odd way to memorialize a car.

More on economics

Money interests everyone, but the reasons evolve as we go through life.

When I was a kid, I collected coins. That led to reading about the history of the U.S. Mint, which began producing coins in the 1790s: exotic denominations such as half cents and gold eagles, but also familiar coins such as dimes and quarters.

Strangely, one of the happiest times I recall as a child is spending a winter night with my uncle and a cousin in our family's dilapidated hunting shack out in the snowbound woods near Harrisville, N.H. There, nestled in my father's old sleeping bag, and with infinite darkness all around and above us, I read and reread my little dog-eared paperbound "Black Book" of U.S. coins in the light of a kerosene lamp and in the heat of a wood stove. Never was anything more real or vivid to me, including the history of the coinage.

But reading about the U.S. mint, and watching the pattern of trial and error and low mintages and design experiments that led all the way to the change in my pocket, wasn't enough. In late 1974, on the verge of turning 11 years old, I got the idea of starting my own coinage: designing it and then producing it, and recording the quantities. It was a project that made sense to me numerically, if for no other reason, because the year "1974" had the same numerals as "1794," one of the first years of the U.S. Mint. (I was that kind of kid. I still am.)

I designed them with magic markers, and made them out of construction paper, a different color for each denomination. I proudly dated each specimen "1974," and knew that these would be extremely rare in the future because the year only had a few weeks to go, greatly limiting the quantities that could produced. (Plus there was the distraction of Christmas.) I knew I would soon be marking coins "1975," and those would come to be much more common as production continued throughout the year.

But production depends on demand, and early in 1975, school started up again after Christmas break, rendering demand non-existent. And so the few construction paper coins dated "1975" came to be much more scarce than their "1974" predecessors—just the kind of unexpected turn of events that influenced the way the U.S. Mint seemed to operate at first.

Unlike the U.S. Mint, my own efforts did not continue. But it remains a great example, I think, of how an interest in money is a natural human thing at any age, even in childhood, when it really shouldn't matter. But the problem, as we become adults, is that our natural interest is blunted and then diminished because, as adults, we begin to find the topic either scary or just plain incomprehensible. And it's also bad form: few people want to be seen as obsessed by money, at least in the manner of Ebenezer Scrooge. So the topic of money becomes subject to fear and apprehension, with the economy now global in scale and subject to instantaneous transfers of wealth at the touch of a button, and so on.

It's impossible to grasp, it seems, even as it affects us all in many ways.

So I've come to admire anyone willing to try to put it all together and make sense of it in a way that an average person can understand. And I recently came across a provocative example of this among the online comments to a story in one of our area's daily newspaper, the Union Leader. The story was about a guy panhandling at a busy intersection, and readers started offering economic theories about why an able-bodied guy should be out begging. And a guy identified as "Biker Bill" came up with something that's perhaps oversimplified and a little xenophobic, but more to the point than anything I encountered in three years of business school.

Here it is:

"Let me tell you what is going on, but you already know in your heart of hearts. It's a vicious circle so never mind what I choose as a starting point:

"Greedy American CEOs and Boards, under pressure from greedy Wall Street tycoons, outsource work to China, Mexico, and India. American consumers buy the foreign crap. American companies (who grew and became profitable and international on the backs of Americans) lay off those Americans. Jobs become scarce. Liberal Democrats increase tax burdens on American companies to pay for the social welfare programs for people out of work.

"Companies leave America in droves. Americans with jobs soon take jobs beneath their skill and experience levels. More and more are "under-employed" and can't afford college for their kids. Wealthy foreigners send their kids to American colleges. Americans can no longer compete, and there are not enough low and entry level jobs.

"America becomes a third world nation, but everyone's attention -- including nit wit Selectmen and the few who are employed -- is on persecuting one Chris O'Toole who is trying to feed his family somehow.

"Government needs to cease all foreign aid, cease all corporate bail outs, cancel all scholarships and double tuition for foreigners in American colleges, ban H1B visas that allow foreigners to work here, and heavily tax outsourcing. Now.
- Biker Bill, Derry NH

Not so sure I agree with the fear of "foreigners" being educated in America and some of his other claims, but a lot of it seems to make sense, which is refreshing. So many economists you hear about in news seem to get lost in their own jargon, and because there are no real absolutes in economics, clarity is really hard to come by. So it's nice to find something that even a kid in a sleeping bag might be able to follow.

Global village, but divided planet

One of our local papers here in New Hampshire carried an opinion column last Sunday by Harold Meyerson with the alarming headline of "America's downward slide." In it, Meyerson outlines how the U.S. economy, and our standard of living in this nation, isn't undergoing the familiar up-and-down-but-generally-up pattern, but is actually at the start what promises to be a prolonged decline.

It's a fact-filled column, but I found the most significant one was this: for the first time ever, in the past decade, the income of the average American household was actually less than the prior decade. The numbers: In 1980, it was $42,429. In 1990, it was $46,049. In 2000, it was $50,557. With me so far? But by 2009, it was $49,777, and even at the prior decade's peak (in pre-recession 2007), it was only $50,233. As good as it got for us in the past 10 years, it was better in 2000.

So what to do? Economics is an impossible topic, a discipline where too many variables compete for significance in the hothouse environment of human nature and the marketplace. In getting an MBA, what I learned about economics was that my opinion is just as good as anyone else's, and also that sometimes too much information can get in the way of clarity and utility.

So again, what to do? I think, clearly and plainly, that we're stagnating as a nation because we don't make things like we used to. If you don't create value by making things, you don't have a healthy economy. It all stems from that. We can't survive by selling each other insurance or shopping if in the end no one in the national economy produces anything of value.

For those who think the triumph of the "service economy" is a good and inevitable thing, I have my own statistic for you. In the United States right now, only 11 percent of our Gross Domestic Product is produced by manufacturing. But in Germany, where business leaders have an eye toward long-term strategy and are not obsessed with quarterly profits, 25 percent of their economy is manufacturing. That's more than twice the level of ours. And that's a deliberate choice by German industry as a whole to coordinate economic activity so it's balanced in a way that gives a large segment of the population to benefit from economic activity.

And that's important because manufacturing jobs generally pay higher wages that service jobs (a change from generations ago!), and so more manufacturing jobs = more dough to spend = more economic activity, which fuels all the "add-on" service economy action, both at the business level and the consumer level. But if there's no value-added manufacturing activity in the first place, then the real benefit of any activity accrues elsewhere, and all the follow-on activity stagnates as well. And that's what's happening in the United States.

To see the degree to which this is happening, let's go back to Meyerson's column for another trip the statistics well. How about this? Back in 1977, U.S.-based companies earned 17 percent of their profits from foreign-based operations. In 2006, that percentage had swollen to 48.6 percent. That's an absolutely stunning shift, and I think it's at the root of this stagnation, because so much of the basic work, from manufacturing to now value-added activity such as legal work, is done within another economy, not ours.

People speak of the global village and how we're all interconnected, and perhaps we are in many ways. But despite many breakthrough trade policies, we are still a divided planet when it comes to economic activity. Economies really are divided by national boundaries, and there are winners and losers, and the standard of living of each nation's citizens is closely tied to the ability of its business and government leaders to craft and execute an effective strategy.

Want proof that we're not getting that at present? Just take another look at Mr. Meyerson's statistics. Or your own paycheck.

Or better still, how Meyerson summarized it: "Our economic woes, then, are not simply cyclical or structural. They are also—chiefly—institutional, the consequence of U.S.corporate behavior that has plunged us into a downward cycle of underinvestment, underemployment, and under-consumption. Our solutions must by similarly institutional, requiring, for starters, the seating of public and worker representatives on corporate boards. Short of that, there will be no real prospects for reversing America's downward mobility.

I'm not sure worker representation on boards is a good or even realistic idea, but it's enough to start a conversation that might help. Amazingly, this was published in the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, a paper noted for its support of all things to the right. I wonder if they even read this to the end.

You mean you never heard of that?

Some people would find it amazing to be nearly 47 years of age and still be discovering many things that others would regard as basic for an educated or civilized person. Not sure what it says about my education or civilization, but I continue to discover new stuff all the time. It's one of the things that keeps me going, I think.

The best example recently was this past fall, when doing the music for an old German silent film, "The Golem." In it, the reason for Germans to hate Jews is made mind-bendingly clear when someone points out how it was Jews who crucified Jesus, the "son of God," and that's why all Jews should be regarded as sub-human and worthy of extinction and so on.

A light bulb went off in my head, or over my head, if this was really a cartoon, which I sometimes suspect it is. So that's why the Nazis had it out for them! So that's why Wagner and so many others were fizzing with anti-Semitism all those years. I get it now!

Obvious to you, perhaps, but it was actually news to me. On my own, I just had never made the specific connection before, and no one had ever pointed it out to me. I guess I just assumed it was completely irrational hatred and bigotry, which itself more than sufficed as an explanation for me.

And so it was a pretty major gap in my understanding of people and the world that remained essentially unbridged until I encountered this obscure film. And the point of this is to point out that there are probably a lot of unfilled gaps that we all have and remain undetected, precisely because we DON'T know about them.

This condition seems dangerous in some ways, and might even be at the root of a lot of big misunderstandings—everything from the BP oil spill in the Gulf to the long-running conflicts in the Mideast. We all have little knowledge gaps (or actually BIG knowledge gaps) that prevent us from understanding each other and formulating widely accepted goals, etc.

So wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of medical or psychological procedure where you could have your mind and the accumulated knowledge and experience it contains be checked for gaps? Kind of like how you bring your car in and they hook its computer up to a machine that can tell what's wrong with it.

Anyway, the point of all this is to point out that I had another big gap experience come my way, this time in the form of G.K. Chesterton, the British author, critic, and so-called "Prince of Paradox." And it's a BIG gap, too, because he was 6-foot-4 and weighed something like 290 pounds. I encountered a reference to this guy in reading a review in the N.Y. Times of a small new book about Marshall "The Medium is the Message" MacLuhan" by Douglas Coupland, so I looked him up.

There's a lot to look up, and I'm amazed I never really heard of this guy before. I'm looking forward to exploring what he had to say. For now, though, let's just ponder something this "Prince of Paradox" wrote about, not surprisingly, the notion of Paradox.

To wit: "Paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief."

I like that, because as I go along I keep coming back to the idea that paradox, or at least the recognition of paradox, is one proof I can offer of the potential for human divinity of some sort: that we're not just a random species here on earth no different from dogs or dandelions. We can actually recognize when something transcends reality and triggers infinity, such as the sight of a gasoline tanker truck stuck on the side of the road because it has run out of fuel.

So G.K. Chesterton, wow. Makes you wonder how much else you don't know. Maybe that could be part of the gap check-up: to alert you somehow to how much you don't know. But that might be just too scary to contemplate.