The Blog

I just heard Peter Goodman of the New York Times on a local public radio show.

He said something about our current economic crisis that’s been in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, but it’s never come to the surface, and I’ve never read it or heard it anywhere. He said (paraphrasing) that yes, in the runup to the economic collapse in 2008, people did spend beyond their means, but they did so because they did not have the means to live. Their incomes had been stagnant or falling for decades, and they had to provide homes for their families, put their kids through school and pay for increasingly unaffordable health care.

Most of them didn’t stupidly and greedily buy more stuff than they could afford. The monied class simply took all the money and left the rest of us foundering with the leftovers, while fuel prices and everything else went spiraling upward. The masses turned to credit to cover the gap. The banks then jacked up interest rates and fees, making it ever more difficult to stay out of credit problems.

I’m not excusing the abuses that many people engaged in, or the foolishness of falling for the mortgage broker’s line that you could refinance forever and your house would always be worth more. And it’s certainly true that Americans have come to expect a higher standard of living than any other population in history. But our founding documents guarantee a fair chance for all, not to mention life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and as far as I’m concerned the ability to go to the doctor when you’re sick falls under the heading of “life.”

I’ll forgive those who racked up too much debt so they could go to the doctor, or college; those who thought it was their right to take the kids to Disney World or the Grand Canyon; or those whose faith in our system led them to believe that somehow things would work out in the end.

They didn’t know that the ruling class had changed the rules, that the game had been rigged, that the house didn’t just have an edge — it had the outcome totally locked. In effect, most of us have been playing a game in which we had no chance at all.

Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe human nature was bound to pervert the values of solidarity, fairness, freedom and compassion expressed in those original writings. Maybe we just didn’t notice what was happening because it took the ruling elites a couple of hundred years to pull it off. If that’s true, then religious fundamentalists of all stripes are right after all: humans are essentially bad, and must be watched constantly and threatened with the wrath of God or else they will sin.

Personally, I don’t believe it. I think that most of us — not all, but most of us — are in this sinking boat together. A tiny few have escaped to island paradises, and are safe and untouchable. Good riddance. Those of us left holding the bag must try to keep it together by helping each other, acting like grownups, and holding on tight to our dreams.

First, I got my memory stick back.

Then, Congress passed health insurance reform legislation. So, not a bad week.

I don’t like the law they passed, even with the “fixes.” It’s not really healthcare reform. It’s insurance reform, and even at that it doesn’t go far enough for me. They started with the premise that the insurance companies’ role in healthcare was critical and sacrosanct, when they should have begun by questioning the very roots of the system. Why, they might have asked, should we perpetuate a system in which the insurance companies skim off at least 30% of the money spent on healthcare and use it for everything but healthcare?

But whatever — I’m not going to get into it. It’s been predicted, and I agree, that people are going to like this legislation and that there will be improvements to it in the years ahead. I really believe it would have been vastly better to implement a government-run single payer system. Yes, it would have been socialistic, but I’m a socialistic kind of guy. I don’t see why anyone should have 50 billion dollars while others are hungry, homeless and sick. A single payer system would have done a lot to right this wrong, but we have allowed the insurance companies to get too big and rich and powerful, and what we have seen in the past year has been dramatic proof that they will have their way no matter what the people want, no matter how intelligent and compassionate the President and no matter what makes sense. I will deal with them, since it looks as if I must.

In other news, I have survived another round of firings at work. Living inside the beast, as it were, I didn’t see the pattern until the past couple of months: Ever since HugeCorp acquired our little company they have been firing people almost continuously. The Depression that began in 2008 was an excuse to accelerate the job cuts, but in reality the job cutting began only shortly after the takeover, and continues today, despite frequent media pronouncements that the depression has struck bottom and things are getting better.

Better for whom, I wonder?

Back in 2008, everyone in my office — except me — was fired or moved to a nearby city. where they were assigned roughly triple the workload. After doing that for a year and a half, they now find that HugeCorp is closing that office, too, only this time no one is getting moved. They’re just being fired, and a new, mostly automated office is being opened. In another state. In another time zone.

The rumors about this began flying six weeks ago, and I of course assumed that I’d be getting the axe for sure this time. Training sessions that should have involved me took place, but I wasn’t invited. As the administrator of a certain network system, I was asked to create a new user — a new user with my exact job title. A fellow worker bee told me on phone that she’d been told not to “get too attached to me.”

What other conclusion could I have drawn?

I was actually starting to look forward to it. I put a CD in my work computer that would, on a simple command from me, erase everything. I started to put my personal office supplies in one place, the better to gather them up with minimum fuss when the day came. I was extra nice to my friends around the workplace, extra nasty to the assholes. What was the point of being political if the decision was already made?

Then last Monday I was called into the executive office.

There was no drama. The guy I spoke to — nominally my boss, although I have seniority on him in every conceivable category — had no idea about the rumors. I already “knew” everything he told me, except the part about my new duties. New duties because the corporate changes were going to relieve me of many of my old duties, but I still had the privilege of continuing to work there. Just when I was making plans to clean out the garage once and for all, write and record more songs, start running again, spend more time making sweet, sweet love, and updating this blog.

It was a blessing and a bummer.

I’ve been circling around my new duties this week, trying to figure out efficient ways to make it appear as if I am getting them done, but they are essentially accounting functions, which means they will be checked and audited by various detail-oriented bean-counters at several different locations within HugeCorp, so I may have to actually do some work. At this stage in my career, and considering my bad attitude about HugeCorp, this will be a challenge for me.

So I took a break and went to Trader Joe’s a half-mile down the street to get a bag of Sutter’s Formula cookies. These are soft, slightly chewy peanut butter cookies with tons of chocolate chips. Why put chocolate chips in a cookie unless you are going to put tons of them in, right? These cookies are truly of the devil. The combination of sugar, peanuts, chocolate, gluten and white flour will kill a lesser being, and you will soon pay for your pleasure, because you will arrive at the gates of hell fat and with a serious headache, which can only be cured by more Sutter’s Formula cookies, but they don’t have them in hell, bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha. However, the moments of ecstasy as you bite into each cookie will make you forget your crummy job for a while, and your “new duties” will seem unimportant, if only briefly, so, totally worth it.

I was at the counter at T.J.’s paying for my guilty pleasure (in cash, so there would be no record of the transaction), and I pulled out all my change and spread it on the counter, the better to extract the precise amount required, and I looked down at the pile, and this is what I saw: Some change, of course, and also a tiny little pocket knife, a couple of guitar picks, a nail clipper, and my new memory stick, which I bought to replace my lost one. It turned out I didn’t have the correct change, so I scraped the whole pile off into my hand and dropped it back in my pocket, and it was at this point that the lightbulb over my head blinked on.

When I had completed my unholy bargain, I picked up my cookies and strolled over to the “office” to talk to the “manager.” At T.J.’s they don’t have a reagular office where the big shots hide. They just have another counter, a little higher than the ones at the checkstands, but otherwise unassuming. And as for managers, everybody wears the same casual T-shirts there, so it’s hard to tell who is a big shot anyway. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll apply for a job there once I get fired for real.

I asked the friendly-looking guy at the big counter if they had a lost and found, and as I was describing my lost memory stick to him and explaining that I may have left it on one of the checkstand counters a week or so earlier he pulled out a small cardboard box containing several keyrings, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, a small notebook, a bunch of bank cards, and my memory stick!!

“That’s it!” I almost shouted, and I could see in his eyes a split second of indecision: How could he be sure the thing was really mine? I was fully prepared to tell him exactly what he would find on the stick if he inserted it into the nearest USB port, but, in the great tradition of Trader Joe’s, he quickly sized me up and decided I was trustworthy. Besides, he was probably prohibited by corporate policy from sticking anything into company USB ports, because of viruses and possible pornography, so he just handed it over.

Memory stick recovered, landmark legislation passed, sweet bag of pleasure in hand. A good week indeed.

On balance I guess you’d say I’m a melancholy guy.

I was just thinking I’ve written too many downer political statements on this blog and it was about time I got back to frivolous stuff, the kind of stuff you write about when you are social networking, like American Idol and Lost, recipes, music and sex.

But then I discovered that I have lost my memory stick, and it always brings me down when I lose something, but in this case it’s worse because I can’t really remember what I had saved on my memory stick. It’s physically tiny, but it holds 16 gigabytes, which is a lot of damned data, and even though it wasn’t full, I think I must have lost a lot.

I just don’t know what.

Maybe I should just forget it. It didn’t cost that much (and I’ve got a drawer full of them in my desk anyway), and if I don’t know what was on it, maybe the information wasn’t that important. Of course, there might be a list of user names and passwords on it, enabling somebody to get into my various online accounts and do bad things. (Watch out for that here on revision99.) So now I’m bummed again, and I don’t feel like happy talk.

2009 really sucked, didn’t it? Consider the depression (economic, I mean), teabaggers, the endless frustration and tedium of the “health care” “debate,” the military escalation in Afghanistan, the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, the Supreme Court decision to turn corporate money loose on our political system — oh, wait, some of that was this year, wasn’t it? That just points up the fact that 2010 looks pretty much like 2009, which bums me even more.

So I have lost my memory stick. I wish I could lose my memory. too.

But on that earlier-promised lighter note, this cartoon cracks me up. It was sent to me by my dear friend Kate. I met Kate at a party when we were both in high school, and her sense of humor and mine clicked immediately. I am certain that if we had seen this cartoon that night we would have giggled together over it for the rest of the evening, and now all these years later she has clipped it out of a magazine and sent it to me. I’d like to give the cartoonist credit for this charming non sequitur, but obviously he (or she) should have signed it more boldly.

Remember this? Ned Beatty gives a dumbfounded Peter Finch

the facts of life about “the primal forces of nature,” from Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 script, “Network.” It could be today, except the televisions are bigger and some of the corporations have changed their names.

We are so fucked.

I expected President Obama’s first State of the Union speech to be dramatic, eloquent and inspirational.

And it was all those things. He’s a fine public speaker, probably the best in the White House since Jack Kennedy. He struck most of the right chords, beginning in a somber tone, acknowledging that the nation is still reeling — and hurting — from the current economic depression. And he took us in turns through all the Americas: America the Proud, America the Compassionate, America the Injured, America the Resilient, America the Determined, America the Tough.

It was a splendid ride, but if I may cut to the chase, it was mainly Another Speech.

I don’t expect miracles, and I know he’s only been in office for a year, and he is following the administration of George W. Bush, who must surely have been the worst president ever, and who really did leave a stinking mess behind. But I have the distinct sensation that nothing good is happening in the federal government, and while I want to be tolerant of a man whom I consider smart and decent, I think I’ll hold my applause until I see some action.

I’m not even going to criticize his stupid idea of a “spending freeze,” because, based on past performance, I don’t really know if he’ll actually do it. (For the record, I hope he doesn’t. It’s wrong for job creation and it’s horribly wrong politically.)

I’m not all negative. This is what I want:

• Withdrawal of all big combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, to be replaced by diplomats, spies, police and the occasional saboteur.
• Reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or whatever it might take to make the financial sector act like grownups.
• A hundred billion dollars of infrastructure spending in the next three years (to create jobs, build for the future and fix the Grand Canyon-size potholes on the 405 Freeway).

That will do for now. If I see even one of these ideas pursued intelligently and put into effect, I’ll be a lot more excited about the State of the Union, 2011 Edition.