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Six Less Votes

That’s how many votes the millions Romney spent in Iowa this year (30,015) won him, versus how many he garnered (30,021) in a second place finish in 2008.

Pathetic on many levels, and yet gratifying on some others – the extent to which the Republican candidates cannot move the needle. Again, the inability of the Republican party to put forward a candidate who espouses the tenants of the party AND that people will like/vote for is scandalous. The country needs (at least) two viable governing parties; the Republican party is determined not to be one of them.

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The List

of things I didn’t finish in 2011. When I think about it, I probably relish this, the idea of listing unfinished things, a little too much. However… onward!

  • 10. Fall yard work – never finished (a sub-theorem of You are NOT free!).  at least it’s this fall. By the way, a question: is it more more bourgeois to own a leafblower or to pay someone to use one on your leaves?
  • 9.  Handle of spiced Rum from Holiday cider – at least we won’t have to buy any next year, because this stuff is going nowhere.
  • 8. Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. After very much enjoying Snow and My Name is Red, I baled on MoI earlier this fall, about 2/3’s of the way through, not least because I was reading about five other things. But c’mon, the competition is always stiff and honestly, I hardly ever stop reading a book I start. There was something about this one that was a little too indulgent about the inferred exoticism of Istanbul, if you know what I mean. Which is that even the great city loses its appeal under the duress of his infatuation with small things – including the suffocating obsession with a cousin by him/his protagonist. And yet, a return and finish is just as likely as not in the coming months.
  • 7. Recording project with a friend – 11.11.11 was a nice goal, but…
  • 6. The movie about Venice I’m working on – try to leave out the work-related, could be an entire sublist here. Filmed in 2011, at least.
  • 5. Interview show – more on that later.
  • 4. Plans for an arbor-pergola over the patio. Only rudimentary drawings at this point, plus a wisteria vine about knee-high.
  • 3. Green opus – tying all of the ecological, linguistic and economic implications of one multi-versatile word into a grand unified theory that explains it all in less than 400 words. Well, there’s always next year.
  • 2. Listening to Beefheart.
  • 1. The dishes.

and you? Happiest of best laid plans in the New Year ahead.

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Rich morons: still morons

This has been ably dispatched here, here and elsewhere, but you still may have missed it. Lou-weeeze:

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. (HD) co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national agenda,” according to the group’s website. He said he isn’t worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

So… who’s the imbecile? This is not even being tone deaf – I think they’re just dumb. Why would you ever feel it necessary to go on the war path about this? You’re tough enough to create all those jobs and bank all that dough but you can’t take criticism for being rapacious windbags and now must be called petulant, too? This is a gross extrapolation of the argument that people making $400K are barely getting by – and also that more money you make, the harder you work. Neither of these things is remotely true. Krugman’s right: get rich enough to surround yourself with sycophants and no one will tell you you’re being an asshole.

Camel through the eye of a needle and all – the real moral is: We all really need close friends.

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Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011

There are many dates within those two that you could use to conflate the influence and importance of any individual who witnessed them. With many, they might well be a coincidence. Not so with Vaclav Havel.

When Mrs. G and were living in France the first time, neighbors in the next farmhouse up the chemin became great friends with us over the months – in part because of common interests but also because the painter-wife was also a transplant and non-native speaker, and therefore showed great sympathy and care for us, second-language-wise. She is a bit older and a native of what is now the Czech Republic. Though I had read some Kundera and seen Unbearable Lightness, it was not until our time with her that I began to gain some basic understanding of the Prague Spring. Near the center of events during that tumultuous year in a far away capital, was Havel.

Mr. Havel describes his playwriting in much the same terms – defending what is human against repressive social mechanisms. He openly identifies his work as theater of the absurd, unlike other writers (Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet) who disliked such generic descriptions. But the absurd for Mr. Havel is as much a political and philosophical concept as an esthetic one. He believes, along with the best 20th-century playwrights, that illusionistic theater is a sham, that realism is inadequate to the obscurity and unpredictability of modern life, that the role of the theater is not to be positive or instructive, soothing or explanatory, but rather to remind people that ”the time is getting late, that the situation is grave.”

This sounds like a civil-defense alarm, and Mr. Havel’s view of the absurd has a lot to do with a sense of social crisis, collapsing worlds, language abuse, robotic structures, entropic rule, metaphysical uncertainty – which is to say, with his experience of life in Czechoslovakia (no wonder he adds that if the theater of the absurd had not existed, he would have been forced to invent it). Still, Mr. Havel’s relationship to political theater is as ambiguous as that of Chekhov, who wrote, ”Writers must occupy themselves with politics only in order to put up a defense against politics.” The absurd for Mr. Havel is another form of artistic resistance.

Our mileage varies on some of those precepts, yet did he put his work where his heart and conscience thought best and fought hardest. Rest in Peace.

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Awe… M’art

cb

With all of its localized shenanigans, it’s important to take a step back and see what big-picture Big Box looks like:

The brand-new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the small northwest Arkansas city of Bentonville is the creation of Alice Walton, the daughter of the late Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), the largest retailer in the world.

Alice Walton, who is worth about $21 billion, has achieved her dream of building a top-tier museum that unabashedly celebrates American art in the American heartland. Crystal Bridges, in many ways, is an aesthetic success.

It’s also a moral tragedy, very much like the corporation that provided Walton with the money to build a billion-dollar art museum during a terrifying recession. The museum is a compelling symbol of the chasm between the richest Americans and everyone else. In 2007, according to the labor economist Sylvia Allegretto, the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. The Waltons are now collectively worth about $93 billion,according to Forbes.

Touche, monsieur. But what say you of the art?

But many of the paintings in Crystal Bridges hang in eloquent rebuke to the values of the company that has made the Waltons so very wealthy. Three paintings, in particular, struck me as especially pointed commentaries on the perverse values of Sam Walton’s heirs.

The first was Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” one of the greatest paintings to emerge from the Hudson River School. It celebrates the friendship of the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant, who are portrayed standing in an enchanted Catskill gorge.

“Kindred Spirits,” bought by the Walton foundation in 2005 from the New York Public Library for an estimated $35 million, is, in the words of the critic Rebecca Solnit, a tribute to “friendship freely given, including a sense of friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself.”

It’s really worth re-acquainting oneself with the Saint-Just, Cardinal de Rohan and Charlotte Corday.

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Formidable Powers of Intervention

This is some incredibly confusing news to decipher, but given the players and subject that’s not too surprising.

The European commission underlined the negative impact of David Cameron’s summit gambit by pledging that the City’s financial institutions would be subject to new regulations hatched in Brussels.

So… the City, as it were, is England’s version of Wall Street, Charlotte and/or wherever else calls itself the center of the financial industry. Cameron evidently went to bat for it, protecting London’s sprawling financial sector from ‘excessive regulation’ at the European summit last week. He either vetoed the EU treaty or it proceeded without him. Whichever, it moves on now without the UK.

Cameron’s move isolated Britain in Europe as seldom before, producing weekend headlines and comment across Europe that the UK was on the way out of the EU.

“We want a strong and constructive Britain in Europe, and we want Britain to be at the centre of Europe, and not on the sidelines,” said Rehn. “If [Cameron’s] move was intended to prevent bankers and financial corporations in the [City of London] from being regulated, that is not going to happen. We must all draw lessons from the financial crisis, and that goes for the financial sector as well.”

It’s almost like a glimpse into the future, where industries sponsors national governments to protect their interests, couched in proprietary language that conflates the country with the industry, and makes their interests one and the same. The future, or the recent past – I can’t figure which.

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Back to the Well, again

Someone, a person unknown to me, at the ______ last night asked me to name my favorite book. Typical _____-talk. After a few beats, I said it was really four – Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. This is from Justine, opened at random to page 108. By the way, I can’t find this text  anywhere on the internets, which feels like a kind of theft in reverse, were that possible.

They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red waters of Mareotis, in each other’s arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood. He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover’s share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her. She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself. What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life. He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson. And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him? This was deeply wounding. My vanity gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature she kept hidden from me.

Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein. It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions. Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but cooly, like a husband of a king. It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner life, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his  consciousness. It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife – and at times confused their names. There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others. I took this to be his little daughter, for it si children who deliver the final coup de grace in all these terrible transactions of the heart.

Mm hmm.

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That Sound You Hear, part MCMXLV

biff-21

This is, just, hilarious. If you think dumb is funny.

The cover story of this week’s National Journal takes a deeper dive into a question we’ve explored before: What happened to the Republican consensus on climate change?

Three years ago, prominent Republicans including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Tim Pawlenty, and Sarah Palin all expressed belief in human-caused climate change. Several even voiced strong support for policies to cap and reduce carbon pollution. Today, all six of these leaders have joined the rest of the Republican Party in a sudden and near-unified retreat to silence or denial.

When contacted by the National Journal, only 65 out of all 289 GOP lawmakers in Congress would agree to be interviewed on the topic. Of those interviewed, only 19 said they believed that human activities are at least partly responsible for climate change. Of the 19, only five (or fewer than 2 percent of GOP lawmakers) attributed a “significant amount” of climate change to human activity.

So, what happened?

It’s not the science that has changed — it’s only gotten stronger. As Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council, said: The level of scientific certainty that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change is comparable to the strength of our understanding that vaccines prevent measles and polio.

They don’t deserve to lead a line to the port-o-let.

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Force Multiplier

Inside the clown car that is the field of 2012 Republican Presidential candidates, one the fake knobs that doesn’t do anything but that each one of the pushes when they can get their big shoes out of their mouths and the rubber noses out of each others… ear holes, is the EPA. By turns they want to abolish it, burn it, churn it, make it cry and turn it into a boo-boo blanket for everything the Democrats know, love and want. Their opinions on environmental issues and what the EPA does are, of course, unhinged and ill-informed, as this “debate” highlighted for all to see and ignore. But guess who else thinks the EPA is the route to their own sustainability, ne’ the future part of their future?

The ARMY:

The Army’s vision is to appropriately manage our natural resources with a goal of net zero installations. Today the Army faces significant threats to our energy and water supply requirements both home and abroad. Addressing energy security and sustainability is operationally necessary, financially prudent, and essential to mission accomplishment. The goal is to manage our installations not only on a net zero energy basis, but net zero water and waste as well. We are creating a culture that recognizes the value of sustainability measured not just in terms of financial benefits, but benefits to maintaining mission capability, quality of life, relationships with local communities, and the preservation of options for the Army’s future. The Army is leveraging available authorities for private sector investment, including using power purchase agreements (PPA), enhanced-use leases (EUL), energy savings performance contracts (ESPC), and utilities energy service contracts (UESCs) as tools to achieve these objectives. The Army must invest in its installations and improve efficiencies in energy, water and waste for the benefit of our current and future missions.

“Net Zero,” is a signed program between the Army and the E.P.A  to collaborate on implementing technologies for resource conservation, renewable energy and energy self-sufficiency on Army bases, Perryromneygingrichbachmannpaulthatotheronemorans.