You, O America, are the nation of nations.

And wherever on earth the people dwell,

or the icons of the web do sell,

and planes of air descend,

you inspire their poverty to end.

Then do they bid you adieu, like they did the British

before you.

Your golden-headed ingenuity hath inspired them all;

still, do you evade the final margin call?

In days of old, your silver-shielded inclinations gave breath to greatness.

Not hateness.

With your strong-armed enterprise enabling masses to bust the hardscrabble,

O America! how your simple speech doth strive to overcome the Babel.

Back in the day, your bronzen halfbacks scampered,

unhampered

through smoke of kamikazis  

past the ghoulish camps of Nazis

which now you accuse each other of becoming.

You're so cunning.

Not!

Oh iron-legged one, who runneth at the game

 and at the mouth,

in all directions north and south,

what will you do now upon your feet of iron and clay?

Shall I compare thee to a tragic play?

Entropy doth assail thee like a worthless m-b-s,

which thou doth seek to unload before it can digress.

Yet  it sachs thee to the ground, bearly stearns thee round and round;

with jolting, bofa torts, you fall like ponzied citicorpse.

Oh! quoth the raven evermore,

upon thy credit-defaulted shore:

Prosperity, prosperity, burning bright

in the newshours of the cabled night

what financial convoluting instrument

can forestall thy fateful detriment?

What prophetic lens or scope could foresee such slippery slope?

Upon what back of mortgaged securitee

will he who bailed the bank bail thee?

But wait! What light through yonder window breaks?

What hope, what blessing, for what

 God's sakes?

Arise! and go, and fly with me

into uncharted

opportunity.

China is fast becoming the new economic engine of the world. They are revving up now, as  we did about 120 years ago, during our time of "manifest destiny" and railroad-enabled continental expansion. The 21st century will be the era of Chinese expansion and swelling GDP.

But China's impulse to economic power has not always been so well-focused; their long plodding  path to world leadership was  punctuated by a few false starts. Two of the most notable of their newfound prosperity's costly pangs were the "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s, and the "Cultural Revolution" of the late 1960s.

These events took place on the other side of the world from where I grew up here in the USA. I had no significant knowledge or understanding of them, being caught up as I was in the bourgeois pop-culture comfort of American childhood and teen angst.

But I have learned something about what was happening in China during those perpetually revolutionary times. Earlier this year, I read a book about it: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. She was a woman born in 1952, the year after me.  This summer I visited Sichuan province, where Ms. Chang grew up and played her part in the tumultuous "Cultural Revolution" as a teenager while I was an American kid.

Her father, Wang Yu, had been the governor of Sichuan province in the early 1950s. He had served the people of China in that capacity as a dedicated, competent communist party official. Ms. Chang writes in chapter 23 of Wild Swans:

"It was then (the early '50s) that the Communists were at their most popular--just after they had replaced the Kuomintang, put an end to starvation, and established law and order..."

 But fifteen or so year later her father was denounced and humiliated as a "capitalist roader," someone  whose personal accomplishments and political identity did not fulfill the shifting requirements of chairman Mao's fickle finger of favor.

Why was he denounced after many years as a loyal agent of the party?

Among the many political mechanisms of Maoist control during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s was the regular practice of gathering peasants to denounce former leaders whom the party had determined were counterrevolutionary. In the commune at Deyang, Sichuan, where she lived and worked in 1969, Ms. Chang recounts one such public humiliation that she had witnessed.

"A 'speak bitterness' session was organized for the peasants to describe how they had suffered under the Kuomintang, and to generate gratitude to Mao, particularly among the younger generation." (Wild Swans, Anchor edition, 1992, page 417)

Local party organizers conducted a meeting in which they criticized former officials whose alleged malfeasance and incompetence  had caused a terrible famine years earlier. On this particular occasion, they singled out one cringing forty-year old man--now  working among them as a forced laborer--to be insulted. He had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap program of industrial development about ten years earlier.

But this man had been appointed by the communist party; he was not a Kuomintang leader. The zealous peasants were confused and misled. They pointed to him and proclaimed their accusation: "... that man ordered the (other working) men away to make steel, and half the harvest was lost in the fields." He had been one of the dedicated cadres who supervised gathering up woks and other metal resources to be re-smelted into industrial goods, thus supplanting essential agricultural works with misguided industrial programs.  

What a dear price was paid for those force-engineered steel products extracted from Chinese productivity during  the Great Leap Forward--famine in the countryside. The same thing had happened 35 years prior in Stalinist Russia.

Such were the meddlesome policies of party-mandated, best-laid plans of proletarian mice and men--and  their vindictive aftermaths during the unpredictable political swings of the Cultural Revolution. This unfortunate official had been guilty of towing the party line, having told his charges that they were "in the paradise of Communism now and did not have to worry about food." But now, a decade and a famine later, he was being officially blamed and maligned, just as the author's governing father had been.

Ms. Chang later sought out the humiliated production manager  and asked for his story. He said: "I had to carry out orders... Of course, I didn't want to lose my post."

Just  following orders. Where have we heard that before?

This fickle dynamic of human inconstancy is something to ponder now that the world's cultural revolutionaries of forty years ago are now its financiers.

Be careful, Mr. Hu. Don't let your country suffer the fate of Governor Yu.

 

"

Mt. Ebal stood warm, dry, and high in the morning sun. The red, gold hues of its boulderous ridges projected starkly into whisper-blue sky. On a soil-laden saddle nestled within the lower, rocky welts a man was digging.

Yesterday, the man had tilled the sandy soil and thrown in manure, which he had gathered from the sheep field. Today, he was hoeing trenches in the dirt.

Setting the hoe aside against a nearby shrub, Yahya Najah lifted his arm, moved the forearm across his sweaty brow, thanking God for another beautiful day. In order to give a moment's respite to his aching back, Yahya stood up straight, looked southward across the valley to Mt. Gerizim. He drew a deep breath, and drank water from a plastic bottle.

 He had lived here since he was a child. Today, he was extending the stewardship of this land that his father had acquired and developed for olive-growing over thirty years ago. Yahya's father, Hassan, moved to this valley in the late '60s after the old Mughrabi quarter, just below the Western Wall in Jerusalem, had been demolished. His family had been planting, cultivating, and harvesting olive trees since his father's arrival here.

He reached into a burlap bag, pulled out several short lengths of olive branch that had been cut the day before, tossed them into the trench he had just dug. Then he grabbed the hoe and covered them with dirt. He moved to the next section of trench and repeated the procedure. Several times he performed the task, until his burlap bag was empty. Having placed this collection of propagation-stock in the dry ground of Mt. Ebal, Yahya watered the new rows with a water sprayer. When the tank was empty, he picked up and strapped the tank on his back, picked up the empty bag, grabbed the hoe, and walked down a rocky path to the garden patch. He would be going into Nablus today to sell vegetables at the market.

After harvesting a truck-full of vegetables, Yahya and his brother, Kader, drove the fifteen miles into Nablus, backed the truck into the usual stall and unloaded their produce for sale.

They spent the rest of that day selling vegetables. In the evening, after most of the produce had been sold, Yahya left Kader to finish their day's enterprise while he took a stroll up the street to get some supper for them. Satisfied to have gathered the increase of their labors, Yahya enjoyed the evening sun as it bathed the busy West Bank cityscape with golden light. As he ambled along, he noticed an American news reporter speaking into a microphone. While passing the scene, and curiously surveying the camera as it turned silently upon a cameraman's shoulder, the farmer's face was projected to television sets around the world. But he wasn't thinking of that; he was looking for a good falafel.

The American spoke into his microphone.

***

Half a world away, Rachel Vinnier saw, for a couple of seconds, the face of a handsome middle eastern man on the TV in the corner of the restaurant.. She had glanced up at the TV while inspecting a case of French wine that had just been delivered to the Jesse James Gang Grille. As she watched, the cameraman in Nablus panned the busy streetscape, and ended his movement with a focus on John Demos' serious face.

"

Excerpt from Glass half-Full, a novel by Carey Rowland.

Everybody needs work.
Right now, we need art to inspire work.
Here's how it happens:
First, humans find themselves on earth. We're like, "Get busy; survive. Gather stuff to eat."
We learn a few things along the way. We plant seeds, instead of just finding them already in the ground.  We manage. This becomes agriculture, man's first industry.
That's part of it. Meanwhile, our neighbor down the road, across the street or across town or across the ocean, is doing something different: there's  animal husbandry--raising animals for their milk or meat, not to mention their dung (valuable stuff, that dung.)
There's mining, metallurgy, mercantilism, chemistry, industry and study.
Humans use their intelligence to manage earth resources--minerals,plants and animals. We devise ways to increase yields, making our efforts and our resources more productive. Old-fashion way of managing agriculture was done through accumulated generational farmer smarts and responsible stewardship of the land and its resources. In the modern way of doing things, this could mean genetic engineering.  We shall see how all that pans out. Some folks are not into it. They'd rather have God's little acre and organics. Hopefully we can maintain a society where techies and earthies can coexist and not ruin each others' trip. We get along.
We innovate. We invent tools. We fine-tune things. This is art; art is not just something that hangs on the wall at the Met.
When man has more produce and goods that he, his family and/or community, can consume, there is surplus. What to do with it? Save it for leaner times. Fine. Some stuff doesn't save so well, or could be put to better use by some other person or entity.
Trade surplus for other stuff. This is very important. It's the basis of commerce, economics and modern life.
Surplus accumulated and well-managed becomes wealth. Wealth on your day(s) or week(s) off becomes leisure. Does leisure produce anything?  Yes.
Art.
Art is the human's response to having a little free time.
A few thousand years pass by. Cut to the chase: Modern society has arranged for folks' needs to be met collectively. We have devised various systems for doing this--capitalism, communism, and everything in between.  That's oversimplifying it, but blogosphere denizens prefer simplicity.
But here's the rub. Once we've established economic systems, it turns out that everything works in cycles: day and night, sunrise/sunset, rise and fall of tides,  seasons, spring planting and fall harvest. Just like the old days. Economics is no exception to every other activity in the world. Boom or bust, like it or not. Shit happens. So we're deep in it now.
Got job? 
What our present cycle is revealing is that our era of financed leisure is over. Kaput.  Our levels of languor, our revels of being being entertained on the couch are tanking. The easy money is spent. This lifestyle maintained for too long by too many has become unsustainable.
Unsustainable:
 Time to get back to work. And if you don't have a job, can't find one, now is the time to stop waiting around for something to happen. The government may bail you out somewhat with some fake money, but the real question is: What are you going to do with your life? Get busy finding new ways to make your life productive. That's where the art to inspire work comes in.
Art is life; life is art. Get creative. Get busy. What can you do today to improve the life of yourself, your family, loved ones, community, nation?

Carey Rowland, author of Glass Chimera

Maybe it was between a rock

and some hard place

that JFK was stuck

before he was struck.

Maybe it was between

 some terrible course of action

and a place  he could not would not go.

We do not know, you know,

the contents of those daily intelligence reports,

with choices between

tragedies unseen

by us,

with news of shooting and burning

that could terminate the turning

of our regular ignitions

and our convenient conditions,

not to mention our munitions.

We just don't know.

Nevertheless

Whose woulds these are we think we know,

going to and fro between Michael,

and Angelo,

but never really knowing who's right or wrong

in any given situation,

yet always having to take sides because,

you know, we're the big kid

on the block.

Maybe it was between some rock

and a hard place

with dastards on both sides

that our Prez was found

and so they laid him down,

because he could not do both.

He had taken an oath,

gave his last full measure of devotion.

And while the car was still in motion

Jackie climbed atop the seat

where widows wail and orphans bleat.

We just do not know, you know

what those offal briefings show.

I know not  

what course the hot-seat man may trace;

I wouldn't want to be

in that oval-smelling place.

May God help us.  

What czarish beast stalks
by the schoolyard door,
and turns its big brother hand
upon the downcast eyes
of a child?
What insidious thanatos
inflicts sterility
with shameful spewing,
thus undermining daddy's counsel
and mommy's tender wishes?
Oh, It'll take a village
to deliver us from such misdirected trust--
the betraying of education
with a kiss
inappropriate.
Oh, may God help us.

So, democrats can pretend that the USA is pining away for some egalitarian health care plan that will cover everyone and still be affordable, but the predominance of the Baucus plan is evidence that something formidable brews beyond the beltway and the northeast  corridor, and that that force-to-be-contended-with is somehow accidentally or even intentionally represented by the million  plus viewers of Fox News.  Like it or not--a force to be contended with.

I know this because I went down to Louisiana and spent a week there, my sister-in-law educating me to the foxy preferences of hinterland America, or maybe it's just because I was in the south, south/Midwest what's the difference--mainly unions, I guess.

Anyway,  just when I had started to harbor a mild respect for the fox because of O'Reilly's relative objectivity (compared to Limbaugh and Beck) as they were speaking some serious truth about deficits and devaluation of the dollar or some such,  Friday morning dawns up with the announcement that our Prez had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cool.

So I'm flippin the radio from NPR to AM talk to hear what Limbaugh and Hannity are saying about it, as if I couldn't predict.  And it's like, give me a break.

They just totally dis our Prez, and for what I don't know. I mean, a Nobel is not just  spelling-bee hubris. It's much more than that. You gotta hand it to the man from Kenya/Honolulu/ Chicago--it's a great honor.

On the other hand it does seem that the Nobel committee is  using their coveted prize to put a spin on our imminent military superpower directionality.

What's with this choice that puts Prez in the same category with Mother Theresa? Is it because Mr. Obama is leaning on the Israelis to forsake their apartheid? Or because he wants to talk to Iran? 

And I don't even trust the Iranians. Something inside of me wants to classify them with Hitler and Ribbentrop, because of their reported holocaust-denial statements. Is this a case of Prez in lala land? Obama as Neville Chamberlain?

Gosh, I don't know. History is so much easier to discern when you're looking backwards.

Or maybe it's that the Nobel committee is hoping to dissuade him from further troop buildup in Afghanistan. I wouldn't want to be Barack Obama now.  I feel for him. This is one tarbaby in which his centrist strategy will alienate one side--hawks or doves--or the other, no matter how the chips fall, and  McChrystal's proclamation doesn't simplify matters any.

So anyway my sister-in-law has me tuned into Hannity one night to get a sampling of the foxy hinterland view of things, when lo and behold who shows up on the fox but Michael Moore.  Who'd a thought it?

And I'm watching this little exchange. But Hannity gets on my nerves because he keeps wanting to change the subject , to talk about Moore's accumulating wealth and influence, with its capitalist implications, as if Michael is, you know, a hypocrite, a closet capitalist.

We're all hypocrites of some kind or another, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

But Michael Moore keeps wanting to talk to Sean about Jesus, as if the Nazarene's impact on human events were a real influence on his own worldview and work and as if Jesus had some opinion about how to deal with the 46 million uninsured. Well,

I hope so; my modus operandi has for many years been WWJD.

What would you do, if your mother asked you?

 

I once walked on the top of the wall that surrounds the most fiercely disputed real estate in the world.

Clueless American tourist that I am, I had purchased a ticket from a guy in a booth at a place called the Citadel of David. So my wife, son, and I had obtained what seemed to us to be some kind of official clearance to take a hike along the ancient rampart top. Our sunlit sojourn there afforded an elevated, comprehensive  view of the old holy city area.

As it turned out, however, our purchased tickets provided only limited access. We encountered an  impediment on the south end, somewhere near the Zion gate, which required that we  descend to the ground via a narrow stone stairway. So we wandered back through the old city, generally north by northeast, past the wailing wall (a different wall), and far beyond it. At some point in, I think the northeast quadrant of that temple area, we were able to get back up on the perimeter wall and continue walking. We were no longer in, as they say, the Jewish quarter.  But getting back on the wall required us to crawl under an immobilized turnstile in a place where nobody could see us.

This did not seem like something that officially authorized tourists would do. Nevertheless, we resumed our stroll from that point. I remember thinking that, somehow, the value of our wall "tickets" seemed questionable, or perhaps, dare I admit it, worthless. Passing from one domain to another brought us under a different set of rules.

Sure enough, a couple of military guys discovered our adventure and asked some nosy questions.  We showed them our tickets, but they were not impressed.

So we had to get off the wall again.

And this is what I thought about when I saw, last night, a scene in Simone Bitton's 2004 documentary movie,  Wall.  Many scenes in the film  showed real-life westbank residents climbing over "the wall," or through breaches in it and around barbed wire that enraps it. This movie is about the wall being built by the Israeli government to separate two ethnic groups, Palestinians and Jews, on the west bank.  

So I, subjectivizing my experience of the movie as people do, remembered myself crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in old Jerusalem, and feeling a little guilty, or threatened, or something dubious like that, about it. Although I'm talking about two different walls here, the  idea is the same: a wall is intended to keep one people group on one side, and a different people group on  the other. But one of the great lessons of human history is that where some folks build high walls, other determined souls find ways to  get over, around, or through them. A couple of relatively recent examples would be  the Berlin wall, or the Dachau wall.

Anyway, my  crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in Jerusalem was one little memory that crossed my mind. There were other memories evoked as I watched this documentary. In my mind's ear I heard  echoes of Itzhak  Perlman's wailing violin that came at the end of Schindler's List.

This potent strain of musical pathos drifted into me when Simone presented in her film an interview with an Israeli citizen, Schuli Dichter. His description of the wall in Samaria found me smitten with the tragedy of it all. With video footage of the Samarian chainlink wall, Schuli's testimony includes a mention of his home kibbutz, Maanit, which had been founded in the early 1940's by some of the first Jewish settlers in that area. Here are a few of his statements that propelled Perlman's violin strains into my mind:

"Our parents in Maanit came here from the shtetls of Lodz."  and   and "This fence has eliminated... the possibility of a Jewish home in this world."

So what has changed since Nazi walls enclosed victims 69 years ago?  In some ways, the world has seen many changes. In other ways, perhaps not so much. People build walls, and other people find ways over, through, or around them. From one side of a wall to the other, hapless human beings overcome one bondage only to encounter  another.

"Closure and enclosure are the cornerstones of our lives here," said Schuli to Simone, as he drove her through Samaria to the west bank.

That's when another memory that came crawling under my radar. It had been recorded thousands of years ago by an ancient, emotive documentarian, Jeremiah.  He wrote: "Indeed, who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will mourn for you, or who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?"

 

For several generations now, we've been gathering a pile of prosperity here in the richest country in the world. And most everybody has gotten at least some piece of the action. How many decades in a row now has it been that Americans have been steadily purchasing cars and washing machines, TVs and microwaves, air freshener and deodorant and movie tickets with popcorn? We're a pretty fat n' happy bunch. What we have here in the USA is a high standard of living, probably the highest in the history of the world.

I mean, how many people do you know who don't have indoor plumbing? How many in your circle of friends don't have a car or a TV?  We are rich, I tell ya.  Even the folks whose incomes hover around the poverty level all this stuff.

In the developing nations of the world, folks don't have all this booty yet.  

In the formerly-third-world places--India,  Brazil, South Africa, and even in China, the streets and malls and markets are teeming with millions of people who have yet to acquire the wealth-multiplying trappings of  middle-class comfort. These are great, teeming markets yearning to be full. They're the next wave of aspiring consumers, like your kids in the supermarket with miniature shopping carts and little flags that read "shopper in training." So many of these minions have yet to buy that first washing machine, that first microwave, that first automobile. 

 But they will eventually, as their collective economic tides swell and their proverbial boats rise. Then the enterprisers among them will form companies and employ neighbors and friends to manufacture goods to meet the escalating demands of prosperity. But it's not likely their new acquisitions will originate in Dayton or Birmingham or Oxnard where the costs of affluent American labor render finished prices prohibitive.  

 We've got a high standard of living in this country that has propelled us, for lo these many decades, ahead of the the thundering herd. But now our opulent baggage has landed us in the dust as the pack passes by. We've priced ourselves out of the world market. But don't go blaming our politicians or our business leaders. This is just the way things work in a world where energetic workers and smart managers are free to make a better affordable mousetrap. It had to happen sooner or later; it's been a long time coming. We had an incredibly long ride on that post-wwtwo wave while it lasted; now it's time for us to paddle out and catch the next set.

Here's what needs to happen: find a way to pump some of the hot air out of our expansive, expensive American standard of living. Position us, once again, as lean and mean, efficiently productive contenders in the world marketplace. We've already, you know, burst one bubble. Can't we puncture another one? Dean Baker  opined yesterday that economists should have identified our "over-valued dollar as a main cause of imbalances in the US economy."

As it turns out though, the reserved Fed has issued a prescription for our economic obesity. They have  found a way to trim the fat real quick. And it just might work.  It's called: the devalued dollar.

If Joe Sixpack and Jane Doe found, rather suddenly, their wallets full of greenbacks that had the purchasing power of, say, 60% of last year's dollar--the effect would be just like knocking our standard of living down by 40%.  That might be enough of an overhead reduction to get us back in the game of competitive manufacturing. Then maybe we can again crank out washing machines or widgets or memory chips or hula hoops or solar collectors as inexpensively as they will in Manila or Mumbai or Mombasa. 

 Devalued Federal Reserve Notes will be a mixed blessing. On the down side, they'll  mean less buying power for us yankee producers. But hey, we've got plenty enough stuff to last us for awhile anyway. 

Folks would have an abundance of dollars again; everybody could get back in the game, pay off some debts, maybe take the kids out to eat.  

Now, if that "over-valued dollar" could be knocked down a notch or two so that it is no longer so uppity, what would it take to accomplish such a feat?  Everybody take a 40% pay cut?

No way. It'll never happen. Too complicated, and politically impossible. But there is a fix. It might hurt a little bit, but it would work pretty quickly, though not quite as fast as instant breakfast or drive-up food.

Make dollars. Print so many of them that Uncle Tim can push a big stack of chips out on the table to stay in the game. The bluff might just work if he keeps a poker face, although it's Uncle Hu's face that the world will be watching.

 

We Americans put a lot of stock in our news, you know. For most thinking people, news is a significant part of the daily routine, and a big chunk of our collective memory. For those who are not into news, other media devour mega megs in our national psyche.

 Back in the day, some studio in Hollywood made a movie, and I remember Dolly sang a song that went something like this: "Working nine to five, what a way to make a living..." I don't remember much about the flick, but I do remember the song. Funny how some things stick with you while others don't. We have those jangly little memory bits, and we have the really big ones too.

You probably remember where you were when President Kennedy was shot, or when Martin Luther King, Jr. caught the assassin's bullet. Those were dark days, times of nationally-shared tragedy.

 For my parents' generation, the big event must have been  the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor.  Four years of blood and sacrifice eventually paid off with the defeat of a lethally potent,  triaxial  fascism, and then two brighter, if not quite so memorable commendations--Victory in Europe (May 8, 1945) day and, Victory in Japan (August 15, 1945) day.

 As for my generation, we have a cloudy, mixed-emotions memory of Peace with Honor in Vietnam. Sadly, the most vivid image in my mind from the final stages of that struggle was a picture of evacuees being helicoptered from the American embassy in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

 In our present situation, I'm wondering just how the VI and the VA days will play out.

Be that as it may, I'd like to point out that we do we have, you know, a collective psyche about these cataclysmic events.

 You can probably tell me where you were when 911 hit. I was doing some remodeling work for a friend. He rolled his wheelchair out of the basement door of his house and said that a plane had hit the world trade center.  My first mental image was a kind of comic book picture of a Cessna hitting the skyscraper.  But of course that first image proved to be quite an understatement. In the ensuing hours, I found out, as most of America did, differently. As the old Buffalo Springfield song says: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear..."

Here it is eight years later and it's still not clear exactly what happened, or why. As for the why and how of what is happening now goes, that's not clear either.

 But even before that, I remember  the stock market crash of '87. I recall the mountaintop development where I was working with a carpentry crew to construct a home. At the end of a typical day, I was driving down that mountain when I heard on the radio that the Dow had dropped more than 500 points. The stark financial news that happened to fall on that sunlit afternoon is still  vivid. . . and yet, I didn't even have any investments.  Just a few days or weeks before that, the owner of the home (being built) had said: "Greenspan will be good for business."

He was right about that. Alan served up a pretty lavish punchbowl. But it seems the long party fizzled out last fall when Hank Paulson pulled a fire alarm, and all the guests went scampering for the exits. 

That memory is quite clear too, and it's something like this:  7:55 am, just before undertaking a new day in the nine-to-five routine, sitting in the car in a school parking lot, and Kai Rysdall's voice  on the radio.  In this case, the memory isn't fixed to a single day, but a series of days in the same place, at the same time, hearing the incredible story of  our financial demise as events unfolded over several weeks.

Here it is a year later and it's still not clear exactly what happened, or why. As for the why and how of what is happening now goes, that's not clear either.

One remainder is obvious though:  Times are hard; now it's like pulling teeth to try to make a living.

The exponential curves of change that  recently commandeered our course have confounded even the most prosperous  among us.  Even the Wall Street Journal people, for cryin' out loud,  are trying to figure out  how to squeeze a few profits out of people's new info-gathering habits.

Punchbowls are a lot of fun while they last. The one we're drinking from now--this internet thing--is quite a stimulant for the ole neurons. We've all become accustomed to this free online punchbowl, and we're wondering just how the freebie will inevitably evolve into something that actually costs us.  Because. . . yes Virginia, it's too good to be true.

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant online. But what can you believe? As they said back in the last depression, there's no free lunch; most likely, when it comes to reliable content, there's no free punchbowl either. We'll learn that soberizing lesson one of these days soon when we wake up and realize that unbiased, objective reporting of factual events in the world doesn't just happen. 

 There are real journalists out there somewhere who deliver verifiably accurate reports of what is going on in the world--not  just opinionated, bloggated jabber like what your're reading here.  This challenge of keeping those reporters functional and reliable is one we'll have to work out collectively, and everybody will have to pull their share of the load.  It's a little like public radio with their pledge drives, or maybe like the WSJ with its paywall between free content and premium content, or some combination thereof.  We shall see.

If you're ever in Honolulu, ask the local folks about the "Punchbowl." They may direct you to a  volcanic site where you'll understand just what dear price our freedoms require of us.  In this life, there's really no free punch, except the one that hurts.

 

Carey Rowland, author Glass half-Full

 

 

            Passing another car on the highway ain't what it used to be.

For whatever reason, this random thought flashed through Marvin's mind as he tapped the cruise control up a notch or two from 73 to 75.  With fingertip commanding a sedate roar of defossilated power, he eased on past the guy in the right lane, both of them gliding along in the same direction, and Bono on the radio. A few seconds later, he's back in the right lane, like slicing butter.

"And I still haven't found. . . what I'm looking for. . ."

            It wasn't very far from here that he had regularly undertaken a similar maneuver in the '57 Chevy.  Maybe it was even the same spot. The old county road had run along this same route. But back in the day, passing another car on the two-lane was actually a matter of life and death, although you certainly didn't think of it that way; it was just the way automobiles interacted at that time, like ships passing in the night, or in the day.

            But if you do think about it--sixty miles an hour stoked up, for passing purposes,  to seventy or more, and the oncoming car whizzing at probably the same speed--that's a hundred and twenty mph of massive steel and chrome Newtonian force--barreling  down in space and time directly at each other. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure that if the aggressor (the passer) doesn't accurately judge spatial relationships and relative velocities and overtake the passee so as to get back in his lane at the appropriate moment, there could be hell to pay--like the big one, the  that's all she wrote moment and then silence except for, like, Damocles' radio antenna flopping, and no more signals conducting through the warp of black hole space from some distant infinity of the universe.

            I'm damned lucky to be alive, thought Marvin, although there had no doubt been a million and one close calls that he was never even aware of in the intervening fifty years. And to tell the truth, the supposed danger in such an unseemly perilous passing highway encounter didn't hold a candle to what he had lucked out of on D-day at Normandy thirteen years before he even had the Chevy.  Now that... was a bona fide miracle.

            Damn Nazis, what a hell of a mess they inflicted on us. Nevertheless, passing another vehicle these days on the freeway is much safer than what it once was, or so it seems. 

             

 

 

It's important for the general well-being of our nation that we work together on the problem of keeping the most number of citizens healthy for the longest amount of time possible in the most efficient way possible. That's easily said. But what can we do about it?  Watch and see what Congress will do; it will surprise you.

"We want to build upon what's best  about our current system, but we have to change a number of things in order to make it work for the future," said Sen. Olympia Snowe to John Harwood.

"I think the right policy will garner votes," she said.

Thank you for your constructive voice, Senator. But many Americans these days, on both ends of the political spectrum, have forsaken their faith in a Congress that can actually produce the "right policy."  Bahhumbug! to you skeptics who are ready to give up on the system because you think it is corrupt beyond repair. Sure, there is lobbying that dilutes the outcomes of proposed legislation.  And yes, vested interests do make money inappropriately off the process. What else is new in the history of the human race?

 

But this health care thing is different. You see, Congress is now under a public microscope, thanks to a citizenry that is fervently engaging in public discourse. If civil people (This means you!?) will get involved with the debate, the mayhem of upstart rabble-rousers will be drowned out by the voice of reason. This is how democracy is supposed to work. Senators and
Congressman will pressed, literally, by the voice of the people, into true responsibility.

 

The favorable difference in outcome in this case--the proposed health care Act of 2009--is that everybody is watching.  We have a situation here where the center can, and will, produce a finished legislative product  that is acceptable to the extremes of both parties. Sure, single-payer went down before this drama even started.  And the public option--well, it is evolving-- but its inspired emphasis on universal coverage is metamorphosing into a form that will pass effectively through this moment in time-- this unique window of opportunity.  Health care reform is an idea whose time has come.

 

Sen. Snowe points out that "some very important pieces" have been assembled, and will serve as a basis upon which the Senate and House can work toward a real plan for public health--a plan that will prove as significant in our national history as Medicare has shown itself to be.

 

Setting up "exchanges" will become the nucleus of our new health care system. "Exchanges" are the new, improved, streamlined public option, because they will ultimately(maybe not immediately) include legislative mechanisms by which competition will thrive (due to price-shopping) and egregious policies (as deniability due to pre-existing conditions) will be weeded out. If our informed citizenry do not drop the ball, here is something our nation can work with to progress toward better public health.

 

But there's a fly in the ointment: Fiscal responsibility must be maintained, or at least attempted. We can't spend money we don't have. Or at least we must pretend to have it (as does the Fed and the Treas.) That's a bigger factor than you think. In the big picture, that's a health issue as well.

And why do we need to balance a move toward universal health care coverage with provisions for fiscal responsibility?  Sean Brodrick of Uncommon Wisdom  writes: "The Ponzi scheme of the U.S. government buying its own debt can't go on forever. Eventually, the U.S. dollar will crumble, and probably U.S.-dollar-denominated debt along with it."

  

So the very real possibility of US Government insolvency and bankruptcy must be weighed in our set (public) options. The deficit may seem invisible to most folks now, but in the long run we'll have to pay that 11-trillion-dollar piper his fees-for-service, probably at some future date, and most likely payable not in dollars but in a new world reserve currency such as SDRs or RNBs.

 

Monetarily and medically, we've got to get this ship of state charted on a viable path.

 

Why, even Paul Krugman softened a little when he saw the content of the "Baucus" plan, although I do not like to call it that because it is destined, as a work in progress, to become the President's de facto plan. Mr. Krugman writes:

 "Senator Baucus's mark is better than many of us expected. If it serves as a basis for negotiation, and the result of those negotiations is a plan that's stronger, not weaker, reformers are going to have to make some hard choices about the degree of disappointment they're willing to live with." Krugman also mentions: "Several European countries, including Switzerland and the Netherlands, have managed to achieve universal coverage with a mainly private insurance system."

 

If our nation is to be delivered from bad health, bankruptcy, incivility and certain demise,  moderation  must become the order of the day. And we do have a compass with which to guide us through this stabilizing maneuver.  A big part of our strategy toward that end is found in our Constitution, whic is, according to Sen. Orrin Hatch, "the oldest written charter of government in use in the world today." It has been proven to be a universal template of incredible utility.  Justice Sotomayor agrees: "For as long as I can remember, I have been inspired by the achievement of our Founding Fathers. They set forth principles that have endured for more than two centuries. Those principles are as meaningful and relevant in each generation as the generation before."   

 

We have a heritage of getting problems worked out. Between the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial branches of our democratic/republican government, we can lean on that framework of structured collective responsibility--the  Constitution-- to guide us through these perilous times. We can do it, but we've got to start now. It's not time for anyone to take their ball and go home.

 

This moderation thing has got to be where it's at.  Why, even Jane Fonda moves toward the center these days, as can be seen in her comment about the explosive apartheid situation in our ally nation, Israel: "it can become counterproductive to inflame rather than explain and this means to hear the narratives of both sides..."

Carey Rowland, author Glass half-Full

 

 

Two days ago, Sold at the Top posed a profound question of present economic conditions on seeking alpha.  The soldish blogger asked:

"Inflation or deflation... stag-flation, stag-deflation ... hyper-inflation... possibly even hyper-deflation... or maybe just a bout of frisky-flation?  Never has it been so hard for the consensus to agree on the coming trend in prices"

 After pondering the subsequent content of  Mr. Sold at the Top's puzzle, and after reading Klaus Vogt's article mentioned below, as well as a few other analyses along the way, including a few here on TPM, I've reached a conclusion about the matter:

 

1.)  Everything you don't really need in this life will lose value in the days ahead. This is called deflation, and it's going to happen.

2.)  Everything you do really need, like say, food, will gain price in the days ahead. This is called inflation, and it's going to happen.

Is this a contradiction? Yes, but it doesn't matter, because these economic indices are just human concepts.

What's real, and what is more and more real, is what it costs you, in labor and resources, to get a loaf of bread, a taco, or a salad, or whatever.

Are you playing the market?  Consider this:

According to Klaus Vogt of Money and Markets, there are three ways to determine the of value stocks that you may consider buying:

1.) the Fundamental Valuation method,  which calculates the dividend yield by dividing stock price into annual dividend

2.) the Macroeconomic method, which utilizes the broad statistical indicators to infer value

3.) the Technical Analysis method, which quantitatively  compares short-term and medium-term trends in the context of long-term trends.

Mr. Vogt's general projections on the stock market as a whole, based on these approaches, are:

1.) by the Valuations method: Long-term Negative, Medium-term Meaningless

2.) by the Macroeconomic method: Long-term Negative, Medium-term Bullish

3.) by the Technical Analysis method: Long-term Bearish, Medium-term Bullish

 We can surmise here another set of conflicting signals, although (let the reader understand) the "long-term" projection in all three methods is Negative (Bearish.)

Klaus  concludes his presentation with this observation:  "This is no time for buy and hold investors. But there are attractive opportunities for medium-term oriented investors willing to buy now and get out on a moment's notice."

"...get out on a moment's notice"?

We see  worlds of strategic difference here between the predominant, speculative modus operandi  of many (most?) investors and the  substantive, Fundamental Valuations approach of traditional investors.  Furthermore, we do not fail to notice in this wide gulf of equity-worldviews an indicator of our present catastrophic, bubbular problem.

The old faithful Valuations method, using profit/price ratio, has been tossed out the window.  Does a real,  innovative company startup have a snowball's chance in this heated environment?

Perhaps  meaningful financial reform will require something much more apocryphal than just throwing devalued dollars and new paper regs at the problem.

How many speculators are sitting on a keyboard perch trying to decide when is the optimum moment to "get out on a moment's notice?"

How many mortgage-holders are standing in line for a job?

As Ringo once said: "This is not your father's Oldsmobile, " although your dad may have been piloting this same vehicle in September of '87, or your great-grandfather in October of '29.

Conflicting interests,  conflicting signals, conflicting emotions, conflicting people. . . Get ready. Watch and pray.

Carey Rowland, author of  Glass half-Full

 It is written:  

  "Every survivor, at whatever place he may live, let the men of that place support him with silver and gold, with goods and cattle, together with a freewill offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem...

     Also King Cyrus brought out the articles of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and put in the house of his gods."

 

Is this a quaint ethnic legend? No, despite the reference to "God,"who has since been discredited, it's real history. Almost 2600 years ago, a Persian king released a band of political captives--42,360 of them-- to return to the land of their ancestors. The benevolent monarch, Cyrus,  enabled the return of Jewish captives to their holy city; he sent them back there with a plenteous store of precious heirlooms and sacred artifacts that had been absconded by the Babylonian  king Nebuchadnezzar seventy years earlier.

 

If this were a headline today it might read something like this:

Iranian Ayatollah releases Israeli expats to be transported back to Palestine.

Former Iraqi dictator's plunder returns with them.

 

Not  very likely, eh? Would this headline be more realistic?:

Iranian Ayatollah releases warhead on Israeli capital.

Iraqis complain of fallout.

 

God forbid. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

 

Anyway, a little later on back in the day, the returnees got organized on their home turf: "So they set up the altar on its foundation, for they were terrified because of the peoples of the lands; and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord..."

 

If this were a modern event, the report might read something like this:  So they set up numerous fortified kibbutzim and settlements, because they feared for their lives, and they built a social democracy...

 

Now it came to pass, back in Ezra's day, that after they had built a temple   . . . "the old men who had seen the first temple wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, while many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the shout of joy from the sound of the weeping of the people..."

 

And if similar events were to arise today, the report might read something like this: "...the people hardly knew whether to laugh or cry, so torn with angst were they."

 

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and the peace of Tehran.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Human beings have a love-hate relationship with bad news. On one hand, they of course do not want to hear bad news because it means trouble for them. On the other hand, there is a somewhat perverse fascination with bad news because it confirms what they feel in their bones to be an unpleasant truth: this world is a screwed-up place.

 

As the developed world enters a period of economic depression, there are of course many folks everywhere who don't want to hear this bad news.

 

Back in the developing world, bad news is no big deal.  Shit happens every day. These people grew up with poverty and dearth. Bad news is no stranger to them. It's just another hurdle along the course of overcoming the array of obstacles that are stacked against them in their pulling of themselves up by proverbial bootstraps.

 

This denial of bad news is nothing new in the history of man. In the ancient nation of Israel a guy named Jeremiah tried to tell the last three or four kings of a waning dynasty that they would have to make peace with, and comply with, the demands of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. But the kingdom leaders gave Jeremiah a hell of a hard time, put him prison, threw him in a pit, humiliated him publicly. They wanted to kill the bearer of bad news. But in the end Jeremiah's dire predictions were shown to be correct, and their little kingdom of  mediocre nepotism and abuse crumbled under the onslaught of Nebuchadnezzar's army. And Babylonian hegemony descended upon them like AIDS on a sleeparounder. Seventy years of Babylonian captivity ensued.

 

A similar scenario developed about six hundred year later in that same location, Jerusalem. The powers that be, comprised of Roman empire leaders and local religious leaders, were warned that their little moshpit of legalist politics would be severely rearranged and ultimately cut off. Wise men had tried to warn them that this would happen. But the special interest-protectors  had not wanted to hear it, and had chosen instead to humiliate the bearers of unpleasant news. Shoot-the-messenger syndrome struck again. Forty or so years later, a Roman general named Titus conquered Israel and forced the dispersal of its inhabitants.

 

 These days, a plain-dealing  leader comes along and tells spoiled citizens that they're going to have to tighten their belts and learn to conserve resources--and to share those limited resources with each other and with others of meager means--and they don't want to hear that.  It becomes bad news to them.  Again, they want to shoot the messenger.

 

 Many people, lamenting the demise of a leveraged prosperity that has seemingly brought a chicken to every pot and a car to every garage,  react vindictively to the bearers of what they consider to be bad news. Some extreme persons invent conspiracy theories by which they wrap their worst fears in constructs of legitimacy. Stuntifying loudmouths invent false accusations and toss them out indiscriminately as verbal grenades to destroy our fragile civility.

Other scheming smartasses unleash voyeuristic videos concocted to leverage half-truths, hearsay and circumstantial evidence, not to mention mean unsubstantiated gossip-- into slander with which they purport to discredit their enemies. People generally apply their various genii to smearing their opponents in the mud, similar to the vengeful barbs that their Cro-magnon ancestors had  wielded in ages past. The ever-widening vortex of entropic uncivility expands to capture the depraved imaginations of tubed-up  millions on both ends of the dissipating spectrum (I can't hear you; you're breaking up); the center cannot hold.

 

Meanwhile back in the civilized rationality of scientific inquiry, evidence is uncovered in the exquisite intricacy of one DNA molecule (times thousands of genes in multiple chromosomes in billions of cells in thousands of organisms) to support the possibility of intelligence in the universe that predates life itself and perhaps even wants to redeem this species from their hopeless wrestling with existential alienation, and folks want to shoot the messenger instead of heeding a message of audacious hope, because it upends their little kingdom of intellectual construct of secularity by enthroning natural selection as the god of our age. Eugenics and euthanasia cannot be far behind.

 

Cultured elites are forced to disown their disruptively lunatic bedfellows. Brownshirt brutishness seeks to strangle kindness. Rudeness insults politeness to death. Hate tramples love into the dust. Across the hissing-lawn quad a learned scholar murmers about newborn babies, referring to the little ones as planet-burdening "carbon emitters."  All hell breaks loose. The center cannot hold.

 

I hope not. You gotta believe we can still pull this great American experiment together before it falls apart.

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full