Incorporeal Works

In his column published yesterday on the NYT website, Thomas Friedman reviews the financial disaster in plain words. Friedman’s piece was prompted by an article in the Sunday NYT about Citigroup’s “rush to risk,” followed by the Monday announcement of another federal bailout for that entity. After citing the bad decisions, the greed, the stupidity or cynical exploitation by “some of our country’s best-paid bankers [who] were overrated dopes,” Friedman ticks off the many willing hands from bankers on down who share the blame, lenders, borrowers, security brokers and others.

Friedman’s concluding summary:

That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins. I used to say our kids will pay dearly for this. But actually, it’s our problem. For the next few years we’re all going to be working harder for less money and fewer government services — if we’re lucky.

A Jeremiad for the 21st post-America Century. God save the United States.

Two days before Thanksgiving, the kickoff of the traditional shopping season for Christmas, and economic news weighs like an excessive holiday meal on the body politic. Dire forecasts of shortfalls in sales and profits for retailers follow dismal credit and employment news.

Retail sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas are so important to merchandising health that many retailers may not survive this year. Compounding the other problems, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is almost as short as the calendar permits. Less than four weeks from Thursday next, only the post-Christmas clearance sales will be left.  In fact, deep price cuts have already started in many stores, continuing a trend from the past few years.

The usual complaints about excessive advertising, and rushing the season have already been the fodder of opinion pages. The complaints about forgetting the relgious implications attendant on the birthday observance for Yeshua bar Josef, the central figure of one of the three major world religions, also get mentioned, along with Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

Time to sit down and watch A Christmas Story once again, with a chaser of It’s a Wonderful Life, then turn off the tube and go to church, synagogue or meeting house, or perhaps just sit down with your family and reflect on what is important. Life goes on, regardless of recession, depression, deflation and distractions.

Selah.

Thinking about the Presidential contest just ended, and the tangled, knotty mass of problems facing the winner come next January 20th, I wonder what the experience of having to face such problems does to the convictions of a President. Many offices in the government require balancing goals against reality, but the President has an exponentially more difficult job than anyone else in public life. As the recent campaigns show, knives have already been sharpened by those of other ideological persuasions; slings will be released and arrows fly in profusion while President Obama tries to extract order out of confusion.

Ideals and basic convictions can shift under such pressures, even for the most formidable presidents. I recently checked on quotations from Thomas Jefferson on the role of a free press, newspapers in particular, in a democratic society. Below are two, from two times of quite different circumstances for Jefferson.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

—   Thomas Jefferson, in 1787

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

—   Thomas Jefferson, in 1807

Great minds are not always consistent; the two above quotes are before and after Jefferson was elected President. The campaign of 1800, which resulted in Jefferson winning election, was as nasty and partisan as any in our time. Newspapers savaged the candidate of each party. There were few non-partisan voices in the daily press. Jefferson himself urged sympathetic editors to attack John Adams in appalling ways. Jefferson and Adams, grown further apart in the years since the Revolution, became bitterly estranged. Only in old age, retired from public life and grown more reflective in the detachment age brings did they reconcile, and their correspondence show the old friendship restored.

The exigencies of conflict and the compromises owed to reality re-shape ideas, even those as profound as Jefferson’s regarding freedom of the press. He never ceased his devotion to ideas being freely available to the public, but evidently newspapers occupied a very low place in his esteem after the election of 1800.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Change has been a mantra for this election just past; it will be interesting to see where change is more evident, in the system or in the men and women challenged to govern effectively.

I have given more thought to my dream the other morning, just before waking. I can see two major, and related, underlying themes here. First, as a man sliding down the shortening slope of early old age, I think much on those who follow me. Some of them are living now, my two grandchildren being examples. I wonder when or if they will marry and have children. What will these unknown little great-grandchildren be like?

Secondly, I think often of my parents, and further back, my grandparents. They are behind me, dead several years and decades, respectively, and never saw the two imps of joy I spend so much wonderful time with now. The appearence of both parents at the beginning of the dream starts the encounter with the great chamber of light, with soaring towers of waiting infants, emphasizing the linking of past generations with present and future.

Some of the nuts and bolts of the structure are clearer to me now. The soaring and unbounded space of light in which the towers of chambers exist, each filled with a figure both infant and adult, probably is recycled from the first Riverworld book by Philip Jose Farmer. Maybe also a nod to the movie, The Matrix, with its vast energy-producing network based on individual humans.

I have no idea about the source or function of the Indian boy, other than he functions as a kind of valedictory for the dream, admonishing me to accept the dream as a source of strength.

“Dreams are funny, aren’t they, Daddy?” An approximate line from Come Back, Little Sheba, a movie I had never seen until my Beloved Babs brought home a video. A stark, unstinting view of some of the same questions I believe under gird my dream.

Whatever.

Like Miss Emily, I never saw a moor, or like my father and his cousin Miller, war close and personal. This week I received the loan of some old papers of my father’s, letters from his cousin in France in 1944, and letters from home concerning Miller’s death. I have posted about the close relationship of the two cousins before.

Yesterday I spent hours going over fragile letters, darkened downsized copies of V-Mail messages and old newspaper clippings, all concerning the death and the mourning for Miller Smith. The V-Mails were from Miller to my father, who is addressed in the letters as “Pepe,” apparently a name used between the two cousins. No answer from my father survives. He saved Miller’s V-mails, in an envelope on which the haunting message is written, “Miller’s Last Letter. In the event I am unable to do so, please mail to…” and he gives the address of Aunt Emily, Miller’s mother. Daddy survived the war and filed  away the letters and his cover envelope, which I received on loan from my mother, his widow, yesterday. Miller’s story is a family possession, which we may share but not individually own.

The letters from Miller are full of youthful bravado and funny anecdotes, told with such detail and concentration that inescapably I think of the looming reality of danger and uncertainty that was assuaged for the time it took to write of lesser things.

The letters from Miller’s parents to my father after learning of their son’s death are painful to read. Such pain, and still strength to look forward, and expressions of such love for Fegi and recognition of the closeness to Miller that was now broken. I have read many stories of loss and sacrifice from that war, and felt something of the pain involved. But reading the words of naked grief of people I knew as the elders of my family, august and sources of calm authority - such an experience brings home so much more completely the feelings and uncertainty of that time.

I will copy the letters for myself, and return them. As I have grown older, I think more and more on those who came before me, whose lives touched and informed mine. We are all the sum of our parents and other family members, a shared history and a shared loss, as it was with Miller Smith in October of 1944.

…was the subtitle of a book my great-grandfather wrote, allegedly with his wife, on the meaning of dreams. Not the Freudian sense of meaning, but the foretelling the future sense. My favorite was the one for a woman dreaming of shortness of breath: You are soon to purchase a girdle. It should be noted that my great-grandfather was co-owner of a department store in Chattanooga, TN.

Entertainment aside, I have always been interested in how dreams make use of thoughts and actions of the day before, taking quotidian bits and pieces and fashioning them into a narrative completely new.

Continue reading ‘What’s In a Dream…’ »

Barack Hussein Obama becomes the first President of the United States of African descent today.

Let Freedom Ring.

A few hours from now we will know who will be stuck with un-sticking us from our self-inflicted predicament as a nation. Unless the Supreme Court ends up telling us. Let us hope democracy will not be hijacked that way again.

What lies ahead is daunting for anybody. Thomas Friedman had a good column in Sunday’s NYT about the difficulties, summarizing what has happened during the Bush years thusly:

Never has one generation spent so much of its children’s wealth in such a short period of time with so little to show for it as in the Bush years. Under George W. Bush, America has foisted onto future generations a huge financial burden to finance our current tax cuts, wars and now bailouts. Just paying off those debts will require significant sacrifices. But when you add the destruction of wealth that has taken place in the past two  months in the markets, and the need for more bailouts, you understand why this is not going to be a painless recovery.  — Sunday, November 2, “Vote For (  ) “

I would like to be hopeful, but the last time we had a Democratic President elected, I had hopes, and look what happened. May this time be different, for all our sakes.

This weekend has been very busy, between a large and splendid event on the river, the annual Head of the Hooch regatta, and the overnight visitation of the grandchildren from Saturday mid-afternoon until late Sunday morning. I took many photos of the hundreds of boats and thousands of people on two beautiful days. I will store many images of two beautiful grandchildren in my mind’s memory core. It is getting harder to manage a camera whilst dealing with the peripatetic grandchildren, now complicated by Lucy the Wonder Dog. So much for the highs of the weekend.

The lows concernt the endless and depressing coverage of the presidential race, with occasional sidebars on other national races. I have resolved that no more news broadcasts will trempt me to the televison. Every exposure rots my brain a bit more, and numbs my sense of decency, long since past the outraged stage. I can’t even truly look forward to the end of the campaign, for then one of the two dim lights running will face problems that would daunt miracle workers, and we will have only a politician to guide us.

Pfui. Back to the grandchildren. They are smart as whips (why are whips smart? whatever the reason, the grandchildren fill the bill.) The little girl, fast approaching six years old, can write decent sentences, with a little spelling help. She can read simple stories, with an occasional flight of fanciful invention where the devices of the story are too tame for her. The grandson, almost four and one half, can recognize a number of words and construct shaky versions of them on paper. Both  are inventive and energetic finger paint prodigies, who can also draw recognizable pictures with various  media. All the while chattering, giggling and interrupting themselves to race around the room, wrestle and pounce on the compliant Lucy.

I am tired today, Barbara is more than tired, and had to work again tonight. She managed two flying visits to see the children before bedtime yesterday, and greeted them with pancakes this morning. She went to work his afternoon, and I had already visited the regatta for the second time. What joy. Fie upon politics, economics and other dismal sciences. Grandchildren Rule.