His Face All Red

Here is a wonderfully macabre comic which uses the digital medium brilliantly!

Money

If we accept that the US is no longer a manufacturing economy but one based on finance and we have concern that an economy based on finance promises only the illusion of wealth which, as 9-11 and 9-2008 demonstrated, evaporates in the heat of a national calamity (another of which we are almost assured) as it isn’t the substantial assurance of a product or a producer’s value but a concept of “value” and further if we assume that a large-scale re-investment in manufacturing is necessary to halt the rapid shrinking of the middle class, grow it back to Clinton-era levels and ensure strong and sustainable consumption then where is the present day field which calls for that investment and promises those rewards?

Logic says greentech.  Europe and China boast a growing green infrastructure and promise to be huge exporters of solar and wind tech.  In contrast the US has stutter stepped along the outskirts of green development without the kind of top down commitment required to spur a national effort.  Arguments against say why risk investment in an industry that offers no assurance of return?  Green is probably just a fad and we stand on more sound footing to stay put and monitor its movement, maybe letting our competitors waste their own resources tilling fallow ground.  This kind of thinking reminds me of six years ago when American auto companies saw enough short-term gains from SUV’s that they were blinded to their long-term health and made no investment in hybrid and low MPG vehicles leaving the US three years behind the eco curve.  It strikes me that there’s little importance in whether or not green comes with a guarantee.  The point is just to buy.  By declaring “this is the future and we’re committing to it” we stoke an industry into being out of the ashes of a dead and burned out US manufacturing hulk.  Our competitors will intensify their efforts to claim their own piece of the pie.  A race will be on.  Skilled labor, research, engineering, transportation, banking and countless other industries interwoven into the fabric of a healthy American workforce are now unfettered.  Capitol flows, investments in housing and home construction, purchases of durable goods, luxury items.  And the circle is completed as homegrown greentech is plugged in to relieve our ailing infrastructure continuing to fuel the demand.

The only apparent alternatives demand a great deal of time to resume the numbers enjoyed during the boom of the late 90′s.  Or is it possible that we will simply seek to maintain 9% unemployment as the new order?  Perhaps 4% is an unreasonably low mark to reach in a global marketplace?  Employers have little incentive to grow their domestic workforce.  They’ve learned to make do and even thrive in some cases by developing greater efficiency and squeezing more labor out of fewer employees.  How long can the US endure a Japan-style recession?  Surely not a decade.  That would mean a continued disenfranchisement in the lower and working classes and a widening gap between the middle and upper class both of which in a very short time would provoke anarchy or a progressive redress.

Money

New Age Homophobia

He uses the term “playing for the other team” when he means “gay”.  To him, “filet mignon” sounds close enough to “flamer” to be employed to describe effeminate gays.  Yet one of his close friends is gay and I believe that relationship is smoothing some of his rougher edges.  He’s a new age homophobe.

That is all by way of saying that to my delight I just had a conversation with him about Project Runway.  He actually used the word “silhouette” appropriately and without a hint of sarcasm.  We dished about the final 3 contestants, the Michael C. drama (I felt his behavior to be completely manufactured as though he thought hysterics were called for on this occasion and so he would accommodate.  [And wasn't his bizarre retreat from the runway reminiscent of Vincent D'onofrio before he pulled the trigger in Full Metal Jacket?]) and Gretchen.  Oh, Gretchen.

I hope we can pull together a Project Runway finale party for next week.  The wives can come too!

Juan Williams

News analyst Juan Williams was fired today by NPR for making comments on the Bill O’Reilly show deemed inconsistent with their editorial standards and practices. His statement “undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR”.  Here’s what he said:

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.  You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

What strikes me first is that whenever someone qualifies what their about to say with, “You know I’m not a bigot” it’s generally followed by a bigoted statement.

An outcry of people defending his remarks as reflecting their views and his firing as yet another flagrant show of the left’s hyper sensitivity to people’s hurt feelings seem to me to miss the point.  It’s entirely understandable to have the thought.  I have.  But the thought was followed by self recrimination for painting an entire billion-strong faith with the same crude brush.

It seems to me that cultures are colliding and at a supersonic pace.  Until a relatively recent time in human emigration people mixed in trickles.  The lack of mobility meant one wouldn’t go somewhere unless they were passing through with the intent to stay or at least integrate themselves as much as necessary to pass through safely and comfortably.  Either way, a population’s ideas, believes and culture would impress themselves onto a non-native.  Understanding was a necessary commodity and by-product of this kind of commerce.  Commercial travel has led today to what amounts to an expectation that “foreign” is merely a less-familiar extension of home.  There is no necessity (and little interest) in extra-national exploration and integration.  The “us and them” dialectic is reinforced.  At the same time digital media provides portals to “the other” from the homogeneous confines of the house or office and to the extent that the other is deemed to have power and influence it is considered a threat.

In time the lizard-brain will atrophy.  The primal compulsion for testing, asserting will, forcing submission will fall away as respect, understanding, selflessness and love stand up in their place.  That is our evolutionary destiny.  That path is of course precluded by an end-of-days-centric brand of thinking.  A great Faith conversation is called for to resolve the zero-sum question of competing “true” Abrahamic religions.  But that conversation takes courage.  Armageddon is the easy way out.  The coward’s way.  Courage is the order of the day today.

Juan Williams may have been voicing something that many people feel and can identify with.  That doesn’t make it right.  As anyone who’s endured an off color joke can attest, real courage is not just wrestling with our own prejudices but calling out others for theirs.

I’ll miss Juan on NPR.  I looked forward to his inside the beltway insight.  The politics of politics.  I always stayed in my car until the end of his segment at the expense of appointments I was already late in getting to.  I admittedly found it strange and troubling that he was also providing analysis to Fox News as well as NPR but attributed it to a more centric leaning impulse on Fox’s part.  Perhaps Juan sought to cut the product of polarization in Fox’s great info coke-pile; to fulfill Fox’s “fair and balanced” mandate, snatching the slogan back from the teeth of bitter irony.  Perhaps there is hope for that yet.  Farewell Juan.

Between Two Ferns

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Jon Hamm from Between Two Ferns

Why blog?

No more will people shudder at the cold glare from my dead shark eyes wondering if I’m considering what combination of household cleaning products would create an acid solution potent enough to melt hair, tissue and bone.  No, with this blog you can know the clean, well-lit span of mind I enjoy and it’s intriguing (?) recesses.

Where I’ve been all this time

I found the following covered in dust in the draft folder of my old Blogsome site.  Like most of those entries, it was interesting to browse through a time in my recorded past.  It’s been a few years since all of those posts.  I relate to them but through the veil of time they read as though they were written by someone else.  Most seem honest (some too much so) while others verge on “clever”.

I’ll post this last one because it’s a companion piece to the others and completes them. With this site I intend to stear a different course.  Hope you stick around for the ride…

-Writen sometime late 2008 I think-

I can’t deny that I had hoped for BTM to help propel my career further.  It did, in the sense that it reached a lot of folks who took the time and effort of reaching out to send electronic pats on the back.  Turning people on after all is what it’s all about.  I was so pleased by the goodwill the film generated (and continues to do!)  With luck BTM will have some longevity to it.  You know, the kind of film that years from now will continue to be passed along one recommendation at a time.  The number of people who sought me out to acknowledge my work was also very gratifying.  But rather than the contact humbling me I found that it more often brought to the surface more recessed dimensions of character.

BTM and my earlier stint on Invasion were interesting experiments in personality transfusions.  In both cases I got carried away.  In bed at night my head would race with waking dreams of success and it’s trappings.  My appetites outgrew their proper sphere. My wife and family lost much of the attention they were due.  I doubt I’m capable of moderate success without my equilibrium being thrown.  Unless some ego-stripping zenlike calm accompanies my progress in this self-involving business, then dwelling in reltive obscurity will be the only truly healthy course.