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.