Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Adelor is dead and I don't feel so hot myself
I was talking about columns that I haven't written yesterday when I slid into "The Death of Klinghofffer" ditch and couldn't get out, exploring the controversy of the John Adams opera at such length there wasn't room for anything else.
But the column or, rather, non-column I had in mind was the one about my older son going off to college. Nearly 20 years of writing about him in the newspaper, and he just vanishes, in a puff, exit stage left, to California. Nobody has said, "Where's the obligatory ave atque vale?"
I wondered about that myself, though I had a pat answer.
I've seen a million of those, and liked the idea of being the one columnist who didn't see his kid off poignantly for college, with tears and insight. I know people whose kids are never going to college, and performing the death scene from Tristan over mine traveling a three-hour plane trip away seemed unseemly.
Count your blessings, give thanks, don't complain. Not everything belongs in the newspaper.
Besides, the goodbye fell flat, and reflected poorly on me, and I was loath to tell it. Rather than fly to Los Angeles to say goodbye to him properly, like a smart man would have done, I had the dumb idea of letting my wife take him, my big idea being that I would then follow, the reinforcements, a month later, when perhaps he was homesick, perhaps when a visit from the old da would be even more valuable. Clever dad!
So I said goodbye at O'Hare, or tried to. He sort of pulled back from my hug, as if my clothes were dirty. But that's how teenage boys are, or mine anyway. I drove off, swallowing hard but that's all. Then a bright smile—well, check that off, one boy raised, dust the hands and then off to No. 2, kneeling on deck, twisting his hands around a bat handle.
I only regretted my decision to stay home after my wife relayed back all the pomp and circumstance of the big Pomona welcome -- a parade, in essence, parties and ceremonies. Missed them all, irretrievable. Who knew? When I went off to school, ulp, 35 years ago, the frats had a bunch of beer blasts and your parents weren't invited. Meanwhile, rather than any mano-a-mano bonding time, son No. 2 met my suggestion we go out to dinner with "How about you bring carry-out home? I'm sort of busy."
A month later, when it came time for me to buy my plane ticket to LA, my older son said, "What are we going to do all that time?" and I quickly established that I would be intruding upon his firmly established freshman routine. Clever, dad. I batted away disappointment. This, this is good, I told myself. Saves money. Some kids dive into college with a splash of problems. My kid, when I asked, "Do you need anything?" replied, "Send my viola tuner."
To be honest, I didn't think about him much. He was where he needed to be, having a great time. The spheres were in their proper places in the heavens. A central planet of my life for the previous 18 years was suddenly a lot farther away, that's all. An occasionally-felt loss, as if the moon were reduced to the size of a pinprick.
Cut to last Sunday. A pleasant morning rowing on the Lincoln Park Lagoon -- a column to come on that, no reader requests necessary. I finished about lunchtime, and thought I'd stroll in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Hadn't been in years. We used to live nearby, and we'd always bring the boys there in their big double stroller. "The bus," I called it. They loved the zoo. What child doesn't? They had elephants back then and everything.
Gaze at the tiger. A couple lions, lolling, up close and personal. The Helen Brach Primate House ("Who DID kill old Helen?") But it wasn't the same, alone—what is? Soon I was heading back to the car.
But I paused in front of something new. A bronze statue of Adelor, the much-beloved lion that we used to visit. You'd be in another part of the zoo, and hear the low resonating rumble of Adelor's roar. A true king, he was. The boys loved him. Now in bronze, which is a poor substitute for lion. Kids were running around, climbing the statue, shrieking in delight.
A woman was with them, and caught my eye.
"Four more hours of this," she said, wearily.
"Mine are off in college," I replied, twisting the truth for the sake of brevity. No. 2 doesn't leave until next August, but close enough.
"So..." the woman said, catching my drift, "enjoy them while you can?"
"Exactly," I said, walking to the car, starting it up, pulling back carefully, then driving south toward the exit gate.
Only then it hit me, after a two month delay, like the thunder that follows loping along after lightning. The old lion was dead, and all those days of strolling the boys around the zoo, gone, the years of squiring them here and there, gone, the fun and the laughter, all gone, irretrievably gone. Gone gone gone, reduced to a thumbnail of grey goo in the corner of my brain and, maybe, theirs, as they hurtle into their new lives, not a glance over their shoulders, while I am left an old man haunting the margins of life, trading quips with beleaguered mothers, smiling at other people's children.
And here we'll draw the veil. It hit me hard for a few seconds — delayed reaction, I suppose— and then I shook it off, composed myself and drove home for lunch.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Why I'm not writing about "The Death of Klinghoffer"
Glass flower, Harvard Museum of Natural History |
Mostly readers limit themselves to commenting on something I wrote or, frequently, on something they imagine I wrote.
Though occasionally readers will notice something I haven't written and call for it.
The Metropolitan Opera opened its production of the John Adams opera "The Death of Klinghoffer" Monday night, drawing several hundred protesters because of its depiction of the Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985 and caused the death in the title. They are portrayed as people with a grievance.
"My father's house was razed in 1948..." goes one line in a haunting chorus.
You're Jewish, the readers—and more than one have mentioned this—insinuate, why aren't you addressing this? It's your table, clean it up. And by their tone, I get the sense they think they've have me boxed into a corner, either being forced by faith to support something dubious, like the shouting down of an opera, or go against my fellow Jews and be some kind of turncoat. A quandary!
When of course it's nothing of the sort. Knee jerk support of whatever folly your kinfolk happen to endorse is perhaps the second greatest cause of suffering in the world, after disease. I had no trouble mocking the Spertus Museum for staging, then abruptly yanking, a show that illustrated the plight of Palestinians, I doubt I'd have trouble pointing out that those trying to stifle an opera are also wrong.
How do I know that? Particularly not having seen the opera in question? Easy. Because they're always wrong. I can't think of work of creativity ever created since the dawn of time that should be suppressed, including The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary, an 850-page collection that I not only have on my shelf, but I bought, just in case it comes in handy. "No woman was ever ruined by a book," future New York mayor Jimmy Walker said in 1923, words that hold true for either sex and any act of creativity from doodles to encyclopedias. The harm is always notional, imagined, self-assigned.
That said, I'm tempted to respond to those readers demanding I jump into this pond: "Screw yourself. I'm not a short-order cook." No requests, thank you. Rowdy readers shouting out "Free Bird!" will be politely ignored.
But what the heck. I have to write something. Why am I reluctant to write about this?
First, it's unimportant, a tiff, a spat over an opera being performed in New York that most readers have never heard of and don't care to hear and wouldn't attend were it free to go. The Met made the right decision and is still putting it on, except for one slip, its decision not to broadcast it on pay-per-view, under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, roundly denounced as the cowardice it is. No need for me to chime in.
Second, writing about "Klinghoffer" would obligate me to actually listen to the opera. Not doing so is lame. With that in mind, I grumbling trotted off to the Northbrook Public Library Monday night to retrieve their boxed set, anticipating the three hours of atonal moaning that is John Adams music. The computer says it hasn't been checked out—of course, who in their right mind would?—but it wasn't on the shelf either. Perhaps some avenger trying to reduce the net total sum of anti-Semitism in the world pinched it. Whatever the reason, I haven't the stomach or the time to buy it, since I already own John Adams "Nixon in China," and, owning it, that means my older son is free to subject me to it, repeatedly, during long car rides. Some people consider "Nixon in China" brilliant. I am not one of those people. It drones.
Third, there's nothing to say. It's obvious. All who believe that works of art should reflect their politics are invariably wrong. I don't care if it's D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" or Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the notion that artworks, even vile, propaganda artworks, should be banned is cowardly and mistaken. The harm is imaginary. I've talked to enough bigots in my life to know they ain't taking their cues from opera. We believe in free speech because it works; the truth will out.
So what if Adams and librettist Alice Goodman (both Jewish, at least at one point) give the terrorist personalities? So what that they air a rationale before they kill an old man on a wheelchair on the Achille Lauro? That's what happens in life. Right or wrong, they spout justifications. And that's what happens in the art that reflects life. Iago explains himself, and the audience gets to not like him on his own terms. Satan is also a pretty attractive guy in "Faust"—if the King of Darkness gets to be portrayed in a good light, why not the PLO?
What are the protestors upset about? That the justifications for terrorism are given? Or that a growing part of the world—wrongly, in my view—seems to accept those justifications? Shouting them down isn't going to help.
So yeah, the Jews look bad, not that I believe in collective guilt: if some idiots want to picket and protest and fire off huffy letters, well, it doesn't reflect poorly on me. We're not fungible. I didn't kill Christ either. So yes, cack-handed of organized Judaism, such as it is. The model for doing this right is the Mormon Church. The subject of the sharpest, most obscene put-down ever to cross the footlights, "The Book of Mormon," the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had the savvy to not only fail to oppose it, but to run ads in the Playbill saying, "You've seen the play; now read the book." Clever.
A shame professional Judaism couldn't be as sharp, but that's how it's been for us lately. An unwillingness to view Palestinians as human beings is part of what's stoking the PR nightmare that Israel is going through in the first place. Though really, world opinion has never been Judaism's friend, so maybe Israel's right to ignore it. Me, I'd say solve the damn problem and go on to whatever problem's next. But they're a democracy, remember, like us, and can be just as paralyzed and in thrall to their Right Wing as we are. How can anybody marvel that Israel neglects this thing when American manages the same? We don't need to look to the Middle East to find injustice; it isn't as if America doesn't have 12 million people living here in rightless limbo, decade in, decade out. That's probably why Israel is such a favorite whipping boy among the young; sure beats fretting over your own nation's woes, which is too bad, because a few big campus rallies on immigrations might actually help.
Just to show how maddening, what a seductive time sink this topic is, the above was meant to be a brief introduction to what I actually wanted to write about: my older boy going off to college, another topic that I haven't written about and nobody asked about, and I thought the Klinghoffer trope would make for an opening paragraph or two. But it is one of those slopes you once you start sliding down you sort of just keep going. I blathered on so long that it's time to ring down the curtain. It would be strange to stick college boy here. So we'll get to that actual thing I wanted to write about tomorrow. Or at least try to. One gets distracted by nonsense.
Monday, October 20, 2014
If I point out the big-breasted bimbos in your game, will you threaten to kill me?
Melted crayon, Durham, North Carolina. |
We can assume that the men threatening to rape and murder Anita Sarkeesian were not doing so because they wanted to disseminate her observations about sexism in the video gaming world to as wide an audience as possible.
But that is what is happening.
Like many, I had never heard of her until she showed up on the front page of The New York Times last Wednesday, after she canceled a speech at Utah State University, not just because of threats of a mass shooting but because Utah concealed carry law forbids audiences from being screened (if you thought, “Why, that’s insane,” then there’s two of us).
The Canadian-born Sarkeesian has a blog, “Feminist Frequency,” offering dissections of the pervasive misogyny of video games.
When I was a lad and played video games, they were primitive arcade consoles that for 25 cents allowed you to blast asteroids or repel relentlessly advancing alien invaders.
The past few decades, however, as gaming developed into a $70 billion industry (larger than the world movie industry and all U.S. pro sports combined), the typical adventure involves a well-armed hero wandering a complex fantasy landscape, one that, as Sarkeesian repeatedly points out, is inevitably chocked with scantily clad women.
After watching a half hour of her "Women as Background Decoration" lecture, it's difficult to see what the fuss over Sarkeesian is about. As someone steeped in the 1970s, all-men-are-rapists extremism of Andrea Dworkin et al., Sarkeesian is tame, practically Holly Golightly as she sedately narrates between clips of the wooden, puppetlike hookers and dancers in popular video games, images no doubt erotic to 14-year-old boys and workers stranded on North Sea oil platforms, but stiff caricatures to us adults.
Given that men in these games are there mostly to be bloodily mowed down with a chain gun, focusing on the women and their roles as sex objects who "almost never get to be anything other than set-dressing or props in someone else's narrative" seems to miss the point. I couldn't tell whether Sarkeesian is calling for the women in these games to be given some clothes, or for the creation of new games where female heroes visit death upon cringing, semi-nude men.
Although, discussing her argument seems secondary, given the echo chamber of malice it touched off, blending into an ongoing online brawl over computer games and journalism called "gamergate," a bolus of ill will that Gawker aptly describes as "a tone-deaf rabble of angry obsessives."
Since society is less sexist than it once was — glance at any magazine from the 1970s to confirm that — we can safely assume that it is still more sexist now than it will eventually be, and activists like Sarkeesian help nudge us toward that happy day, drawing attention to overlooked aspects of our culture in need of overdue adjustment.
Those who would intimidate and harass and silence her, however, also tend to silence those who take legitimate exception to certain arguments she makes, and would poke holes in her thesis, but are reluctant to even seem to be on the side of her vile enemies. (Sarkeesian notes that, having gunned down women, the player is "free to go about [his] business as if nothing had happened." Which had me asking: "As opposed to what? Standing trial at the Hague?")
How she differs from Tipper Gore railing against rock music or Congress investigating comic books in the 1950s is a matter of style - it's all censorship disguised as moral righteousness. She leaps to lay real-world problems at the feet of video games - "these systems facilitate violence against women by turning it into a form of play, something amusing or entertaining" offering no evidence, ignoring the fact that women get the worst treatment in the most underdeveloped regions, places generally free of Xbox. Those who claim violence in video games fosters real violence are like those who claim the fluoride in our water is poisonous - were it true, we'd all be dead.
Sarkeesian is urging a kind of game world purdah - she isn't quite saying the ladies are too delicate and feminine to be blown apart like the guys, but she comes close.
She calls online carnage "especially sad because interactive media has the potential to be the perfect medium to explore sex and sexuality." She's right, but give it time. Just as the crude technology 30 years ago only let players blast penny-sized pulsing aliens, so the simplistic, sexist bloodsport of today will be seen as a coarse interval. Someday, games will involve a player struggling over a long weekend to seduce Scarlett Johansson - or, with a button click, George Clooney - putting up with all the setbacks and frustrations such an endeavor might involve. Maybe at the point I'll have to start playing.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Don't leave home without them
The New Yorker's Patricia Marx, and alpaca, at the drugstore. |
I subscribe to just three magazines: Consumer Reports, The Economist, and The New Yorker.
Consumer Reports, not as a practical tool—it isn't as if I need them to help me choose a blender—as for the magazine's skeptical tone. So much in the media is blathering, mendacious corporate hype, it's refreshing to see scientific sorts asking: is this any good? Does it work? Should you buy it? I enjoy reading the smartly-written publication, but I also want to give Consumer's Union the money, to support what they do.
Reading The Economist is, as I've said before, like having an extra brain. Not only do they bring news of corners of the world that we'd never seem to hear from, hear cries that otherwise would be smothered by our big comfy American blanket, but the magazine applies a keen outsider's eye to this country as well. Even their coverage of Chicago is fresh and interesting.
And The New Yorker. Nothing needs be said. Either you get it or you don't. I've subscribed to the magazine for 30 years, and my father has subscribed to for 60 (and my son Ross, insisted on getting both it and The Economist at college. That's my boy!)
Last week's issue, dated Oct. 20, sat on my nightstand for a few days—I've finally got around to reading Keith Richards' Life and find it hard to put down (like Consumer Reports, it's a question of tone. It isn't what Richards reveals so much as how he reveals it, his voice. I find him as interesting writing about the Boy Scouts as he is writing about the Rolling Stones, maybe more). But I cracked The New Yorker Saturday morning, and was rewarded with Patricia Marx's delightfully-conceived and bravely-executed takedown of emotional assistance animals.
Basically, the American with Disabilities act allows for service animals—seeing eye dogs, monkeys that can do tasks for paralyzed people, that kind of thing. And glomming onto this are self-indulgent pet owners who want to bring their animals places, and pretend they have emotional issues, and get ersatz credentials and animal vests from for-profit groups. Thousands and thousands of people do this, and people let them, because we're trained to defer to anybody claiming any kind of disability whatsoever, however marginal or illegitimate it might be.
Marx skewers this woeful situation by getting a variety of rebarbative animals certified then traipsing around Manhattan with them: a 30-inch long snake, a four and a half foot tall Alpaca, a turkey. She flies with a 26-pound pig, Daphne, to Boston, and takes her to tea at the Four Seasons.
The responses of the flustered clerks, maitre d's and flight attendants are priceless. The story is like Borat, the intersection of generally-polite, generally-accommodating America with Dadaesque insanity. One clerk at Chanel flees the snake but another suggests what snakeskin handbag would best match it, and for only $9,000.
While I have never spotlighted someone else's story on my blog before, I'm spotlighting this one, because it does so many neat things, stomping on a social wrong most people would be too timid to tread gingerly upon (I thought of Patricia Marx as more of a member of the supporting cast at the New Yorker, the woman who did those delightfully droll shopping reports. Obviously I underestimated her; this article, in my mind, boosts her to star status).
Given the way victimhood and disability have seized the whip hand in American culture, I sincerely think Marx's piece represents an important shift in tone: the cresting of a wave, the reassertion of a modicum of balance and common sense, where your needs to bring a service hippo into the china shop are now balanced by the needs of the people in the shop not to share it with your pachyderm.
I'm sure she is hearing howls from those who have had their asses kissed for so long they consider it a birthright, people who feel they are adults in every sense but the chance that their actions might bear scrutiny. So I felt, besides the inherent good of sharing her story, I would add my applause, for what it's worth. It took courage, as good things often do.
Don't take my word. Read her story, "Pets Allowed," by clicking here. It enhances the effect if you share it with someone. I must have read a quarter of the piece out loud to my wife, laughing hard, tears in my eyes. Bravo.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?
I was reflecting gloomily on this contest yesterday, thinking, "I've never stumped them. Never! Why?" Maybe I'm too soft-hearted; I just can't pull the trigger on something truly obscure. It seems unfair to you. But when I do—that stone surrounded by velvet ropes. Who was going to place that tucked into a corner of the B'hai Temple? I guess you guys were. In fact, the more obscure I think a place is, like this Pegasus wind vane, the quicker people seem to peg it. Though this really should stump you. You can't see it from the street, you have to go there, and it really isn't a public spot, though the public can, under certain circumstances, visit. I stayed there a while, and have gone back to see friends, from time to time. And there we'll draw the veil. Where is this place? The winner gets ... oh heck, let's get rid of the last of the posters, to make way for the new poster, its design, as we speak, winging its way down to Nashville to be set in type by the good folk at Hatch Show Print. Please be sure to post your guesses below.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Ebola is here and we're gonna die! (eventually, that is, and not from Ebola)
Is it too early for the Ebola post-mortem?
I don’t think so.
While there are still a few weeks of frenzy left in the mania, you gathered here in this quiet corner of the media have my permission to exhale a collective sigh of relief and move directly to the soul-searching segment of the show, reflection that comes when we all grasp that the nation has been in a quiver over what is, in essence, nothing.
Well, okay, not nothing, but close enough to nothing on the crowded sliding scale of Bad Stuff We Need to Be Concerned About.
So let’s jump the gun together and pretend it’s already, oh, mid-November, when the media will shift into the holiday season, the War Against Christmas and such, and shake off Ebola like a dog shaking off water after a bath. Let’s look at what lessons we’re learned from all this. (And no, “people are morons” doesn’t count; that’s a one-size-fits-all truism applicable in every circumstance).
Lesson #1: Sex sells.
Media attention is not doled out due to relative importance on some objective index. It is not fair. I hear continually from readers wondering why some bit of nonsense gets huge play. A few Americans dying of Ebola (Africa, as always, barely registers) shouldn’t outweigh the millions dying of heart disease. But Ebola does, because it’s weird and graphically arresting. Wondering why Ebola gets so much press and diabetes doesn’t is like wondering why all those photographers trail Miley Cyrus and not your cousin Maude, given that Maude does such good work with the church choir.
Like Miley, Ebola is sexy. Not the black vomit- and diarrhea-inducing viral infection itself, of course, but as a subject. How many movies feature those oooh-scary biohazard suits and graphics of the outbreak rapidly spreading red across computer maps of the United States before the alarmed eyes of the young and attractive epidemiologists who have only 48 hours to find a cure, build a breeder reactor out of junk lying around the office and, of course, jump into the sack?
Let me boil the above into a simple code you can refer to later: "They never did find that missing Malaysian airliner, did they?"
Lesson 2: It's your fault.
When CNN shifted to wall-to-wall breathless speculation and endless plumping of some nondevelopment perhaps related to the missing Malaysian flight, what happened? Did a disgusted public turn away from such craven manipulation? No, it was cravenly manipulated. CNN's numbers spiked, no matter what dim bulb non-news they ladled out. So blame the public, aka you. You didn't say, "This is idiocy" and turn to another channel. You lapped it up, bought the false sense of urgency and tuned in. "Please sir," you said, extending your empty bowl toward the bubbling pot of idiocy porridge, "we''d like some more." Ebola is the same. Works every time.
In CNN's defense: The job of the media — those of us who still have jobs in the media — is to display the bright, shiny thing the public wants to see. Period. I wrote a scare-mongering Ebola column, too, last week, because it seemed the thing to do, though I also emphasized that, horrible as it is, you're not going to get Ebola, so sit back and enjoy the show. It isn't my fault nobody listened.
Lesson 3: Better safe than sorry.
Neither authorities nor media want to be the dopes who miss the next disaster's warning signs. In our post-Benghazi world (Congress is already holding Ebola hearings) there is a huge cost for failing to act, but little for overreacting. Thus, doctors order rounds of expensive, unnecessary tests; travel has become a crazy security Kabuki; and everybody treats Ebola like it's the next Black Death because the editors of The New York Times are terrified they'll someday be able to say, "If only we ran another 50 Ebola stories, we might have saved the world."
Lesson 4: We're all cowards.
People really, really care about their own precious selves, so much that actual threats — heart disease, fatal car accidents, cancer, suicide, taking your last breath in a grim, ammonia-reeking nursing home — are just too real and scary to actually think about.
So we take all that anxious energy that should be spent whittling down the enormous cantilevered bellies hanging over our belts that really will kill us someday, and instead obsess over notional risks like Ebola.
It's a perfect pre-election distraction. A new scandal for jackal-pack Republicans — Phyllis Schlafly already said that Obama intentionally let the outbreak occur so we'd be more like Africa. For Dems, a chance to focus on our broken health care system and the biblical woes of Africa, which Americans otherwise blithely ignore. And for everybody, a real-life thriller we can keep tabs on as a distraction from our plodding, pedestrian lives. We'll miss it when it's gone.
I don’t think so.
While there are still a few weeks of frenzy left in the mania, you gathered here in this quiet corner of the media have my permission to exhale a collective sigh of relief and move directly to the soul-searching segment of the show, reflection that comes when we all grasp that the nation has been in a quiver over what is, in essence, nothing.
Well, okay, not nothing, but close enough to nothing on the crowded sliding scale of Bad Stuff We Need to Be Concerned About.
So let’s jump the gun together and pretend it’s already, oh, mid-November, when the media will shift into the holiday season, the War Against Christmas and such, and shake off Ebola like a dog shaking off water after a bath. Let’s look at what lessons we’re learned from all this. (And no, “people are morons” doesn’t count; that’s a one-size-fits-all truism applicable in every circumstance).
Lesson #1: Sex sells.
Media attention is not doled out due to relative importance on some objective index. It is not fair. I hear continually from readers wondering why some bit of nonsense gets huge play. A few Americans dying of Ebola (Africa, as always, barely registers) shouldn’t outweigh the millions dying of heart disease. But Ebola does, because it’s weird and graphically arresting. Wondering why Ebola gets so much press and diabetes doesn’t is like wondering why all those photographers trail Miley Cyrus and not your cousin Maude, given that Maude does such good work with the church choir.
Like Miley, Ebola is sexy. Not the black vomit- and diarrhea-inducing viral infection itself, of course, but as a subject. How many movies feature those oooh-scary biohazard suits and graphics of the outbreak rapidly spreading red across computer maps of the United States before the alarmed eyes of the young and attractive epidemiologists who have only 48 hours to find a cure, build a breeder reactor out of junk lying around the office and, of course, jump into the sack?
Let me boil the above into a simple code you can refer to later: "They never did find that missing Malaysian airliner, did they?"
Lesson 2: It's your fault.
When CNN shifted to wall-to-wall breathless speculation and endless plumping of some nondevelopment perhaps related to the missing Malaysian flight, what happened? Did a disgusted public turn away from such craven manipulation? No, it was cravenly manipulated. CNN's numbers spiked, no matter what dim bulb non-news they ladled out. So blame the public, aka you. You didn't say, "This is idiocy" and turn to another channel. You lapped it up, bought the false sense of urgency and tuned in. "Please sir," you said, extending your empty bowl toward the bubbling pot of idiocy porridge, "we''d like some more." Ebola is the same. Works every time.
In CNN's defense: The job of the media — those of us who still have jobs in the media — is to display the bright, shiny thing the public wants to see. Period. I wrote a scare-mongering Ebola column, too, last week, because it seemed the thing to do, though I also emphasized that, horrible as it is, you're not going to get Ebola, so sit back and enjoy the show. It isn't my fault nobody listened.
Lesson 3: Better safe than sorry.
Neither authorities nor media want to be the dopes who miss the next disaster's warning signs. In our post-Benghazi world (Congress is already holding Ebola hearings) there is a huge cost for failing to act, but little for overreacting. Thus, doctors order rounds of expensive, unnecessary tests; travel has become a crazy security Kabuki; and everybody treats Ebola like it's the next Black Death because the editors of The New York Times are terrified they'll someday be able to say, "If only we ran another 50 Ebola stories, we might have saved the world."
Lesson 4: We're all cowards.
People really, really care about their own precious selves, so much that actual threats — heart disease, fatal car accidents, cancer, suicide, taking your last breath in a grim, ammonia-reeking nursing home — are just too real and scary to actually think about.
So we take all that anxious energy that should be spent whittling down the enormous cantilevered bellies hanging over our belts that really will kill us someday, and instead obsess over notional risks like Ebola.
It's a perfect pre-election distraction. A new scandal for jackal-pack Republicans — Phyllis Schlafly already said that Obama intentionally let the outbreak occur so we'd be more like Africa. For Dems, a chance to focus on our broken health care system and the biblical woes of Africa, which Americans otherwise blithely ignore. And for everybody, a real-life thriller we can keep tabs on as a distraction from our plodding, pedestrian lives. We'll miss it when it's gone.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Rahm kicks the can down the road
Rahm |
Until Wednesday.
Up to now, his central sin seemed to be closing 50 schools without the requisite hand-holding and
Nipper |
That's tradition, but Rahm is not exactly a traditional guy.
The bedrock fact is, schools needed to be closed. Chicago's population has dropped 10 percent in recent years. If you paid close attention to CNN's "Chicagoland" series, the halls of Fenger High School, the backdrop where principal Liz Dozier was always wobbling through, shouting, were often deserted. Four hundred kids in a school built for 1600. She had to send her teachers out into the street to round up students so they didn't lose federal funding. How many empty shells is the Chicago Public Schools supposed to keep open?
The bottom line is, we're broke. I found myself explaining, it's not the Rahm doesn't like mental health clinics. The city has no money. Like most broke people, Chicagoans have a hard time accepting that. Easier to whip out the Mastercard and sleepwalk through one more day of plenty.
And while I sympathize with the cops and firefighters castigating the mayor for aiming his razor at their pensions—I lost mine; it bites. Now I'll never get that fishing boat—the truth is his predecessor gave away the ranch, and the money is not there. Is it fair? No. But then neither was Hurricane Katrina, and the mess had to be cleaned up anyway. Bad stuff tends not to be fair, that's what makes it bad stuff and not a delightful bit of irony. "Oh look, Donald Trump, killed by a block of malachite that tumbled off his latest tower..."
Rahm Emanuel is so unpopular, I told myself, because he's making the hard choices, trying to knit together some kind of workable parachute as the city hurtles toward the canyon floor of complete fiscal insolvency. He's leading, or trying to, and maybe people, instead of bitching and scanning the skies for some new savior who'll tell them what they want to hear, wistful though it may be (we'll tax the commodities exchange!) should bite the bullet and get behind him.
Then Wednesday came. And Rahm Emanuel stood in front of the City Council and kicked the same by now dented and battered can down the road that Rich Daley kicked for years.
Glance at my colleague Fran Spielman's lucid story on Rahm's speech outlining the 2015 budget.
In case you are reluctant to veer away from my golden prose, I'll give you the key point, in paragraph three:
He talked about “continuing to confront the challenges facing our city,” but failed to even mention the biggest one: police and fire pensions with assets to cover just 30 percent and 24 percent of their respective liabilities.That will be remedied, no thanks to Rahm, but as demanded by state law, with a $550 million mandatory payment by the city to the pension funds next year that will either further gut city services, or demand income tax increases, two subjects our mayor danced over in his 40 minute talk.
I guess his sudden unpopularity unnerved him. The speech was no doubt written before Karen Lewis's brain cancer was revealed (I'm probably going to hell for saying this, but my first, unfiltered thought when I heard the bad news about Lewis, Rahm's only potential challenger of any merit, was, "Wow, how did Rahm manage that?")
So count me in the camp of — well, I don't hate the guy. I pity him too much for that. He's a politician. He's one of those guys who thinks if he wins enough he won't ever die. And I also have to deal with him occasionally, so I like to squint my eyes and see him in the best possible light. Though now that I think of it, it's the end of October, and I haven't spoken to the man since ... last December, so I guess I don't really need to deal with him all that much. Maybe none of us do. Rahm Emanuel is the master of the possible, and perhaps he looked at the polls, the print-outs, and the entrails of ducks, and saw that the time isn't right to save the city from utter financial ruin. He'll wait until he safely trounces Bob Fioretti and THEN pull the rip-cord, five seconds before impact. Let's hope the chute opens in time. I do try to give him slack. Remember who taught him how to charm voters: Richard M. Daley.
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