Homelessness - Part I "My Hometown"

Before I begin, no, this is not going to be about actually having no roof over one's head.  I'm fortunate to have that, and being that there are more than 5 times as many vacant homes in the United States as there are those without homes, it is a problem that we should not have in a civilized country.  But we are not civilized, we are capitalists, and that is for another day...

No, I want to write about the more esoteric meaning of "home".  About how much of one's identity comes from that understanding of having a place in the world that is yours, and that you are its.  It's a feeling that I believe I've always sought, but which has eluded me for most of my life.  Somehow, my wife and I got speaking about this tonight, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, so I'm going to write it all down.


Despite the fact that I was fortunate enough to live in the same hometown and attend the same public school system for 13 years in my youth, "home" was not a single place or sense for me after I was nine years old or so.  Right at the end of third grade, we moved across town to a new house, and although it was technically in the same elementary school zone, for some reason my mother decided that it would be better for me to go to a different elementary school for fourth grade.  My little sister continued in the old school all the way through, but apparently there was something better, the gifted program perhaps, that it was important for me to be a part of and to separate from all of my friends that I had made over the previous four years.  I remember my mother telling me that when all the elementary school students joined back together for fifth grade at the intermediate school, it would be "like I was fluent in two languages" because I would know kids from both schools.  The fact is that I ended up feeling illiterate in two languages, because I was the new kid at the one school that I only attended for one year, and I became separated from my old friends for a full year, which caused a rift that never truly healed.  I knew kids from both schools, but never really belonged to either.

At this same time, my parents divorced.  My new house was affected before it could become my new home.  In fact, the central events in the divorce seem to have gone down during a week that I was attending a sleep-away soccer camp, the only time I ever went to sleep-away camp as a kid.  I came home, and "home" was dramatically different, in ways I could sense even if I couldn't fully intellectualize them at the time.  By the time my parents took me aside to tell me that they were getting divorced a few weeks later, I was not shocked, even though life had changed very little for me over those weeks, except that my dad was away, like on a very long business trip.  I knew, even though I didn't know.

So, three major life changes all happening within a few months to a nine year-old.  I guess I can add on top of that my mother going to work for the first time in my life, both sets of grandparents moving from their homes that same year (places that had a multigenerational "home" feeling for me), and both of my parents having new relationships and getting remarried within a few years.

With my parents divorced, it meant I was away with my dad every other weekend from that time forward, further separating me from my friends, who had experiences on the weekends I was away that I could not be a part of, and which made me feel less close to them.  I always felt like I was missing something when I was away, even if what I was doing was often objectively more fun and interesting than anything I might have missed.  It led me to have a deep insecurity about being on the outside, even in my groups of close friends.  As I got older, I always made it a point to stay until the end of the party so I would make sure I didn't miss the best part, even though the end of the party was more often than not relatively boring.  I chose not to take advantage of opportunities I had to travel abroad, first with my grandfather in high school, and later in college, for fear that I might miss something at home, and those are decisions that I very much regret.  I guess, at some level, I feared that if I went away for any period of time, I'd come home and everything would be changed and I wouldn't be able to understand why, or I would become an outsider to my old friends.


Eighth grade was probably the worst.  Surely, I'm far from the only person to ever say those words.  But my home-life had a few major changes at that time that made "home" more up in the air than ever for me.  My dad and step-mother bought a house much closer to where my mother lived.  Unlike my dad's old one-bedroom apartment, this was a very large house with many bedrooms for my sister and me, and within a year, a new baby brother.  My dad and step-mother truly made every effort to make their new house a home for me and my sister, they really did.  But despite having my own room and bed and some furniture and things there, it was never really my "home".  It was my dad's family's home, and I had a place there, but I was just a very frequent visitor.  I blame no one for this, it's just how I felt.  My little brother, and little sister born two years later, grew up in that house, and it was their home all the way through high school.  I really envy that, the stability, the permanence, the "home" of it.  I loved that house, and it was the home that stayed at most of the time when I was home from college and for the year after I graduated, but by that time, it was just a more comfortable place to be, where I had more personal space, than my mother's house.

At the same time, the summer after eighth grade, my mother got married.  My step-father had been living with us for some time before that, which was a change in my "home" in itself, but what really changed was that after they were married, his daughter came to live with us full time, not just as an occasional weekend guest.  At that time, she and I could not have been more different, and we did not get along at all.  I was very upset at the new arrangement, and I let that be known.  What had been a house where I already felt it difficult to find a space of my own, became that much more so.  It's not like it was a tiny house, or that we had to share bedrooms or anything like that, but there was just something about the design of that house that made it so that every sound echoed through every room, and there was no peace to be found.  My step-sister and I are cool now, but she was not a welcome addition to my home when I was 14.

I tried to spend as much time at sports practices or friends' houses as I could, coming home in time for dinner and bed.  My friends never came over to my house.  Part of that was because my house was the most distant from everywhere else we'd ever go, but a lot of it was that there was nowhere to be there, nowhere that my sisters weren't, and frankly there was nothing to do there.  My rooms in both of my homes were always rather spare and undecorated because all I ever did there was sleep or do homework.  I didn't want to spend time there, why would anyone else?  When I was allowed to borrow the car later in high school, it only increased my ability to not be at home.

Even after I had a car to use, my weekends with my dad made my high school years somewhat distant from my hometown.  I was away many weekends, and even when I had the ability to drive the 20 minutes back to my town, it seemed that so many years of my not being around contributed to my not being included, or invited, for many get togethers.  My best friends were always there for me, but I believe that I could have had a wider social circle had I not spent my teen years out of town half of the weekends.  I never met or knew a single kid from the town where my dad lived, and even my hometown was not fully home at the time in life when identification with your town and school seem to be the most important.


Now it's 20 years later.  My mother and step-father retired to New Mexico in 2004.  My father and step-mother retired to California in 2008.  My step-sister and her family live not too far from where I grew up, but I don't have any other remaining family in the area.  There is no more "home base" where I can stay if I ever travel back.  For this reason, between my step-sister's wedding in 2007 and my cousin's wedding in 2011, I never even set foot in the state.  I still have friends there, and many more friends who still have family there, whom I'd see at holidays and such, but I don't ever see them anymore, because even my hometown is no longer "home" in any way.

And me?  I keep moving...


To be continued in Part II "Never Going Back To My Old School".

ReGergentation

I appreciate your willingness to engage on this subject.  This deserves a well-planned and thorough response, and you shall have it.  I’m going to start with generalities, and I hope my arguments will become more persuasive and pointed as I finish.

Firstly, I have already read this article.  It was probably the top laughingstock opinion piece in Left Blogistan this morning.  Although David Gergen is far from the worst hack D.C. pundit (Alex Pareene seems to respect him enough to have not included him in either his “Hack 30” or “Hack 20” lists either of the past 2 years), he is a fine example of the Washington, D.C. “Village Elite” class of journalists.  In other words, he is someone who is entrenched in the establishment, and the way one becomes entrenched in the establishment is by jettisoning one’s journalistic sense of truth or falsehood and replacing it with a motivation to be “even-handed” and share the other side of the story, even if it is complete bunkum.  After all, you don’t get invited to all those swank Georgetown cocktail parties if you start pissing off the people throwing the parties, know what I mean?

OK, so the ad hominem portion of the program is complete, except for the fact that Gergen comes out directly in his second paragraph and states that HE IS BIASED in this area because of his numerous friends at Bain and his numerous financial dealings with them!  Yes, I suppose it is better for him to disclose these connections before writing an opinion piece on the subject, but it begs the question, “Wasn’t there some OTHER Senior Political Analyst at CNN who could have written on this topic, rather than the person in the bureau who is most in bed with the subject?”  It’s damned near impossible to take anything he says seriously after this confession.

But, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and see if he actually has any sense to make.  In his next paragraph, Gergen explains the nature of his bias in more detail.

I have come to admire and like the leaders of Bain Capital because I have learned firsthand that in a private equity industry, where there are obviously some predatory companies, Bain stands out for the respect in which it is generally held and for the generous philanthropy of some of its partners. Nothing I have seen so far has shaken that view.

So, David Gergen has met and knows several people associated with Bain, and he likes them, and they are charitable, and nothing he has read so far has shaken his view that his friends are nice and charitable, as far as vultures in the private equity business go.  That's high praise indeed, Mr. Gergen, but of course, it has nothing to do, one way or another, with any actual facts or evidence regarding Mitt Romney, his tenure with Bain Capital, or his statements from the stump or in SEC or FEC filings to the contrary.  But thank you very much for adding that little taste of honey for all your readers before you get into the serious stuff.


Gergen, to his credit, proceeds to fairly properly, if rather narrowly, lay out the nature of the controversy and the meaning behind it, by explaining that yes, it is proper to scrutinize Romney's Bain tenure (since he is basing his campaign almost entirely on his past experience as a business leader, in the most general sense), and that it would be a significant revelation if it turned out that Romney had in fact been involved in some of the unpopular outsourcing, job killing, and fetus disposal business that Bain is known to have engaged in during the period when Romney was primarily running the Olympics from February 1999 through August 2002.  Unfortunately, Gergen seems to imply that this is the ONLY possible significant revelation from the filings, statements, and other evidence that have come to light regarding Romney's tenure at Bain, both before 1999 and after, and regarding statements and testimony he has given in the past 10 years about it.  But I'll cover what Gergen neglects later.


The real hackery begins with the next section, where rather than diving right into the known and accepted facts of the matter, the Villager in him can't help but first ask whether Romeny has "handled the scrutiny well".  While this is interesting from a political angle, and may shed some light on the type of President Romney might make, who gives a shit, David?  Is this all just a game to you, a horse race, entertainment to fill programming hours on your network?  Your headline says that the FACTS don't support Obama's criticisms.  Well, I haven't seen FACT #1 yet, but you're already discussing whether Romney his handling the scrutiny well or not.  It would be hard to craft a better parody of D.C. insider wankery.  


Fortunately, he answers his stupid question correctly, and also answers his next slightly off-topic question correctly when he says that Romney should release his tax returns.  Not that anyone came to David Gergen, Moral Compass, to find out what a presidential candidate should or should not do, except that Gergen is a political analyst, so he gives his answer based on what would make for the best optics for the Romney campaign.  


As an aside, I have a feeling that Mitt Romney and his campaign team have already considered this imaginative solution, David, and they've come to the conclusion that unfortunately, the better optics are to NOT reveal what is in his last 10 to 15 years of tax returns.  Mitt Romney has many shortcomings as a candidate, but being stupid and uncalculating is not one of them.  As bad as it looks to stonewall, showing his tax returns would look worse.  I'll leave the reason for that to your imagination...  


In any case, Gergen has now completed the maneuver in Centrist non-Analysis that I like to call the "Sensibility Shuffle".  He has made several statements that are quite sensible to practically anyone in the political middle, and even leaned a touch to the left by weakly calling for more transparency from Romney.  Now he can feel free to shift to the right and say things that might not stand up to scrutiny on their own, except that he has given himself political cover by speaking some sensible centrist platitudes first.  I'm not going to simply follow the magician's hand, though.  Let's see what he actually does (and does not) say when we get to the actual issue he is claiming to address in this article.

Gergen asks the question, "Has Romney basically lied about when he actually departed Bain?  Has he tried to mislead the public or investors?"  He concludes that there is not sufficient evidence to support this.  I think, after all of the evidence that I have seen over the past few days, I might have to agree that Romney and Bain probably did not try to mislead their investors.  There was a offering brochure for one of their investments in 2000 that referred to Romney as being part-time (or something like that, I can't find it right now), and I think that is a fair disclosure to give to potential investors, and I have no reason to believe that other investments were not handled similarly.  But if we're going to discuss whether Romney has, at any time since 1999, tried to mislead the PUBLIC, you have to be willfully obtuse to come to any conclusion other then "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!"  Mitt Romney misleads the public with virtually every statement that comes out of his mouth.  For the past 25 WEEKS, Steve Benen has been Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity for the Maddow Blog, and he backs up all of his claims of Romney's lies with links to the truth.  It's a marvelous resource, if you're interested in truth.

The "investigation" by Gergen of the "facts" is pitiful by any standards of journalism.  He wants to know how it all went down at Bain during the period in question, and so he goes and asks some of his above mentioned Bain friends about what happened.  This is not an entirely useless exercise, as first-hand insider accounts add much color and detail to investigations like this.  But it is the ONLY investigation he did, and he took their accounts on their word, because he knows these people, and they are good and honorable men, who give money to charities and throw great parties, and would never dream of buying a company in 40:1 debt ratio leveraged buyout, pay themselves eight figures in management fees, and then declare bankruptcy leaving dozens or hundreds of people out of work.  

Oh, and how many of his Bain friends did he speak to?  "But based on relationships over several years, I trust his or her account."  ONE!?!  Did you speak with ONE person, David?  Or was it two, and you're just trying to hide whether it was one or more?  You clever investigative reporter, you.

But what corroborating evidence does Gergen present?  Why, he presents Factcheck.org!  And the article he cites "was co-written [CO-WRITTEN!!!] by a man who was once a top investigative journalist for CNN."  Wow!  The same organization that employs such stellar fact checkers as YOU, David?!?  Regardless of one's opinion of Factcheck.org, it is simply another analysts opinion that happens to agree with Gergen's.  It is not by any stretch "corroboration".  It is "self-validation", which may be great for Stuart Smalley, but does nothing for journalism.

Most importantly though, in focusing ENTIRELY on the question of whether Mitt Romney was "no longer actively managing the company," he completely misses the LIES that Mitt Romney has told, in both written and spoken testimony, in the years since.  

No informed liberal partisan has been arguing the strawman that Gergen refutes in this article, namely that Mitt Romeny, while simultaneously working 100 hours a week to save the SLC Olympics, was taking a concerted, active, day-to-day role in managing Bain Capital in Boston.  What we HAVE been saying is that THESE are the FACTS:

1) Mitt Romney left Bain in February 1999 to take over management of the, and in the two and a half years that followed, Bain's SEC filings listed Romney as the "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president".  Whether he was actually performing all of his duties under those extremely important titles, whether he was managing the operations of the company and its investments in depth on a regular basis, he was still, according to federal filings, the party legally (and from the Obama campaign's political perspective, morally) responsible for all of those operations and investment management.  This is probably the least important LIE exposed of late, but it sure looks bad when...

2) Mitt Romney collected a salary of (at least) $100,000 per year during the period of 1999 to 2002 for those "executive duties", apart from his earnings from investments and dividend.  Either he was actually doing SOME work under his numerous titles with Bain, or he was collecting a six figure salary for doing absolutely nothing.  While absolutely hideous from a political optics perspective, there's nothing illegal about drawing a salary for doing nothing.  Unfortunately for Mitt, there is quite a bit of evidence that he was doing more than nothing...

3) In June 2002, Mitt Romney testified before the Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission in order to establish that he met the residency requirements to run for governor.  In that testimony that during his Olympic tenure, "[T]here were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth."  The testimony also disclosed that he "remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the LifeLike Corporation," all Bain investments at the time.  Regarding the Staples board meetings, "I returned for most of those meetings. Others I attended by telephone if I could not return."  

And what did Romney's personal lawyer say about these matters at those MBLC hearings?  He said that Romney "continued to serve on the board of directors of a significant Massachusetts company and to return here for most of its board meetings," and, "Now while [the Olympics management] was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had."

So, I think, even if Romney was not heavily involved in the management of Bain Capital during the period in question, his involvement was far from ZERO, and he certainly painted a much more involved picture when it served him to try to establish his residency in order to run for Governor.  This is the REALLY big problem, because...

4) On August 12, 2011, Romney filed his federal disclosure form with the FEC for his current presidential campaign, in which he ATTESTED under penalty of perjury, "Mr. Romney retired from Bain Capital on February 11, 1999 to head the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way." The 2002 testimony above directly contradicts this statement.  This is where the Obama campaign's charges of perjury stem from, and David Gergen didn't address this point AT ALL in his article in yesterday's Washington Post.

So did he lie under oath to the MBLC in 2002, or did he lie under oath to the FEC in 2011?  Both cannot be true, no matter what your definition of "is" is.

Mitt Romney is a Born Leader

I really don't understand all the hubbub about Mitt Romney's alleged high school "bullying" incident reported this week in The Washington Post.  Honestly, I can't understand why Romney and his team aren't fully embracing the story as a prime example of how Mitt Romney is a born leader, a man who has been demonstrating that leadership since his youth.  A man who has been preparing his whole life to be the Republican nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America.


I mean, it's not like Mitt was some middling prep school son of privilege, skating through life, content to be just another elitist douchebag without a care about the lives of those who were seen as inferior to him.  From all reports, he appears to have endeavored from a young age to be the biggest, meanest elitist douchebag around, and was always going that extra mile to distinguish himself from his peers.  He appears to have been VERY interested in the lives of others, especially those "others" who were different from him and his circle of friends, in deviant and weird ways.  


According to the stories of his classmates, by his early teens, he had learned the fundamental lesson that all conservative comedy is based on the pain of others, and that Romney was the undisputed king of such "pranks" on his campus.  This particular story in the Post highlights the lengths to which young Mitt was willing to go to stand head-and-shoulders above his classmates in this regard.  Sometimes, to stand above your peers, it is necessary to kneel on the chest of one of your inferiors.  Mitt wasn't just some random entitled asshole joining into an ad hoc lynch mob to shear some nancyboy of his long, bleached locks.  Mitt was the LEADER of that ad hoc lynch mob, the inciter of the violence, and the wielder of the scissors of mob justice.  No mere follower was young Master Mitt.


I bet you can't even IMAGINE Barry Obama taking such a leadership role in his high school years.  No, Barry was too busy smoking pot on the beach with high school dropouts and riding the bench on a State Championship basketball team (not exactly the captain and commander in the making there).  


Or Newt Gingrich?  You think he was the kind of kid who was on the giving end of the knuckle sandwich in high school?  Hell, no!  He may be a pretty respectable bully as an adult, but I'd bet that little Newton was much more likely to find himself pinned down in the locker room and being poked in his pasty, fat belly by some completely heterosexual jocks until he giggled like the Pillsbury Doughboy.  Newt's adult bullying style is obviously just an example of him trying too hard to make up for his inability to be a proper bully in his school days.


From Cranbrook, to Bain, to the GOP Primary, Mitt Romney has consistently shown that he knows what it takes to gain and keep the respect of those in conservative political circles.  Just because he started life's game of "King of the Mountain" at the top, doesn't mean he doesn't understand how to ultimately win the game.  You can't just sit on your father's laurels and be content at the top of the hill.  You have to make sure you put in the effort to kick those approaching the top of the hill right in the chest and back down the slope if you want to stay there.  


Some people know their place, and some people don't.  Mitt Romney has always known that he belonged in the throne, and he has also been a lifelong crusader against those who obviously do not understand that their place is somewhere further down the hill.  Who could better represent the 21st Century Republican Party than the man who has been preparing for this moment his entire life?

Mitt Romney Touched Me There

The above clip has been getting a lot of play on the comedy shows and blogs in the past week, and deservedly so.  Mitt is in super-stiff mode here, and Josh Marshall today referred to it as "the best Mitt video in history".  I have got to be the only person who found Mitt Romney's the "trees are the right height" remark genuinely endearing.

I grew up in suburban New York, which in its natural state is a lush forest.  That feeling is "home" to me.  Much of Michigan is a very similar type of forest, and while I've never been to suburban Detroit, I have been to Ann Arbor, and I imagine it's pretty much the same.

I've lived in Chicago, and Milwaukee, and Arizona, and now Omaha, and I have always said in my travels that the thing I miss most about where I grew up is the trees.  Illinois and southern Wisconsin are NOT forests.  Yes, there are trees, but those places are prairie, and the trees that grow there are of a variety that never get higher than about 30 or 40 feet tall.  No oaks and maples towering 100 feet into the sky.  No forests of trees too big to wrap your arms around.  Which reminds me, even the maples in the Midwest don't get the same kind of color that you get in the northeast.  It's always a pale imitation of autumn, as I remember it.

Arizona is obviously another world when it comes to nature and vegetation.  It's an almost alien environment for anyone not used to the desert southwest.  You have to journey to high altitudes to find any forest at all, and the trees are of completely different varieties than you'd find in the Northeast.

Omaha, strangely enough, is not like most of the Midwest.  There is an arm of what is known as the "upland forest" that reaches up the Missouri River valley to Omaha, and makes the hilly city feel much more like New York than Chicago or Milwaukee (which are both rather flat in comparison, especially Illinois).  This upland forest stretches southward down the river, across humid, forested Missouri, and up the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, to the east across Pennsylvania, New York and New England.  Omaha is just the westernmost outpost of this climactic region.  Travel 30 miles in any direction but south, and you're back in prairie or grassland.  It's one of the reasons I find Omaha comforting, despite the plainness of so many things.

So yeah, Mitt Romney is kind of a douche, and his policy positions are horrible (and apparently completely mutable), but that moment in an extremely awkward speech showed a little bit of his humanity to me.  I would not be exaggerating to say it was my favorite thing I've ever heard him say.


I saw another interesting website today that pulled some of the armor off of the Mittbot.  This page features numerous family pictures of Mitt with his wife and kids and grand-kids, and he looks like a normal (albeit wealthy) grandpa.  As John Cole remarked, "And I guess I just don’t get it. Look how happy he is in those pictures on the beach, playing with his grandkids. If I were in Mitt’s shoes, with a half a billion or however how much money he has, there is simply nothing you could do to make me go through the fresh hell of running for and then serving as President."  I have to agree.  He kind of reminded me of my own dad in those pictures, who is about the same age, and is very much enjoying his comfortable retirement.

In reading the responses to Cole's post, the explanations ranged from the caustic to the obvious to the genuinely sympathetic.  The most popular explanations involved variations on the theme of an egomaniacal elitist with the need to one-up his successful father.  A fair amateur psychological analysis, I suppose.  Many brought up the White Horse Prophecy and the pressure from the leadership of the LDS church that Mitt has felt for much of his adult life to be the one who would bring a Mormon to the White House.  This has got to play some part as well, I'd think.  I guess it's kind of mystery why anyone would want to go through what you need to go through in order to become President, and it's why it's so rare that a person deserving of the power and responsibility comes near to the goal.

My favorite comment however was one that compared Romney the politician to Hillary Clinton the politician.  "I remember wondering something similar about Hillary: By all accounts of anyone who actually knows her, a smart, wickedly funny, extremely nice woman who is fascinating to talk with in real situations, who seemed to give campaign speeches with a thought bubble over her head that read “Gee, they don’t LOOK like morons, but Mark Penn told me to talk to them like they are, so here goes …”"

It's the phoniness of Mitt Romney that will ultimately be his undoing.  I can't imagine there are many outside of the LDS community or the 1% who are enthusiastic backers of the man based on his policies.  Apart from showing a true dedication to protecting the wealth of the wealthy, he doesn't really seem to have any solid policy positions that he is not willing to revise in order to appeal to whomever his audience is at that moment.  This doesn't play to the Republican base, and it's not going to carry independents if he survives to the general election. 

The phoniness is perhaps so apparent when he speaks because he has such internal conflict with his very soul.  This is a devout man, and as odd as the Mormon beliefs may be, most Mormons are shockingly nice and honest people.  So when he must stand before a crowd and say things he doesn't really believe, there has to be some serious internal conflict, and he attempts to mask it by being the stiff Robo-Mitt that we have all come to know very well.  Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have no such issues, as they believe every crazy word that comes out of their mouths.  Conversely Newt Gingrich has no such internal conflict because he doesn't truly believe anything.

It's all particularly sad when considering that the father Mitt is trying to best was a man of deep conviction who would not sully himself by pandering to the crazy fringe of the right in order to advance politically.  He may have had regrets in his career, but selling his soul to win his party's nomination just so he could get his ass handed to him by his Democratic opponent could never have been one.  And now George Romney is forgotten to most outside of Michigan or the ranks of political junkies, and will most likely only be remembered as the father of the unprincipled, and yet strangely inept politician that is his youngest son.

Some Words That Came Late At Night

Greed and selfishness, though they may be the epitome of human nature, are not virtues, and should never be celebrated or idealized, nor even normalized. They should be treated as other natural scourges of humanity have always been treated: contained, opposed, extricated, and ultimately vaccinated against. This is how we as a species shall rise above our animal birth, and grow closer to our divine inheritance upon reaching philosophical majority. To embrace self-interest, as do the Objectivists, is to choose to wallow in retarded, syphilitic, spiritual adolescence, never accepting any reality that cannot be touched, chained, sold or killed.

Inside Of It All

About 18 months ago, my two eldest boys were really into learning about the planets and space.  They were 6 and 4 at the time.  My eldest would read all these books to his brother, and they had videos and other materials to learn about the solar system and the stars, and like many young kids spit out these ridiculously long dinosaur names, they would talk about types of stars and galaxies and the various properties of the planets.

One night we were driving home from a dinner out, and the six year-old said something about "living on Earth", and the other boy said, "No!  We live IN Earth, not ON it."

This comment really struck me as an incredibly profound observation.  Of course, it is true.  Just as a fish lives IN the sea, we "terrestrial" creatures and plants live IN the "sea" of the atmosphere, which is every bit as much a part of the Earth as the ground or the water is.  But it truly changed the way I thought about myself and about humanity as passengers here on Spaceship Earth.  Not that it was the first time I'd had a though about our interconnectedness to all that surrounds us, but to look at myself as a creature not walking upon the planet, but swimming within it, made me feel as if I were just a mitochondrion in a terrestrial macro-body, something of deep insignificance, and yet part of a larger living whole.

I am not an individual.  I am a member of a species, and not even really a "member" as most people understand the term, being one individual in a group.  I am a part of an interconnected whole that is Humanity.  And Humanity is just a part of the larger biosphere of the planet, just as all of the bacteria and microscopic bodies that float within us and around us are a part of us and thus the larger biosphere.  If you had a powerful microscope that could see all the way down the atomic level, you could eventually focus down to a level where you would not be able to discern the atoms of your skin from the atoms of the air that surrounds you.  Nor would you be able to discern the difference between the vast amounts of "space" that exist between the nuclei of atoms and the vast space that exist between the stars, based on their relative sizes.  It's all One.


To me, knowledge is a puzzle.  Each fact learned has a place it fits in the big picture of understanding.  The more you know from learning, the more you can figure out from recognition of the patterns you've already built from your knowledge to postulate other ideas, which leads you to think about where and how to find the facts that will either support or refute those theories.  "Thinking" is the process of acquiring the pieces and putting the puzzle together.  "Knowledge" is what is built.  The more you know, the less you have to think.  The more things you know, the closer are you are to knowing the One.



I've got a couple of idea projects that I've never really put the effort into that I once thought I might.  One is to rewrite the U.S. Constitution for the 21st Century, attempting to preserve as much of the original central ideas and flexibility as possible, but allowing for changes that we have learned in the lessons of 200 years.  Some 15 years or so ago, I did a similar thing with a much smaller subject, The Ten Commandments.

The First Commandment, as written in the Bible, reads, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery," or something very similar.  I wanted to make it more universal and less tailored to the ancient Hebrews, so I shortened it to, "I am the Lord your God."  Still, I felt that was cumbersome and loaded with language that has too much cultural baggage, words such as "Lord" and "God".

"I am."

Simple, basic.  God speaks and says he exists.  Right back to the first meeting at the Burning Bush.  "And Moses said unto God,  "Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, 'The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you'; and they shall say to me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say unto them? "  And God said unto Moses,  "I AM THAT I AM " and he said,  "Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel,  "I AM hath sent me unto you. "  "I am" is also the key phrase for Aries, the first sign of the Zodiac and the sign most often associated with the God of the Old Testament.

But that seemed somehow incomplete, at least in my philosophy.  I believe that the greatest philosophical gift given to the world by the ancient Hebrews, and carried on by the religions of the Western tradition, is the idea of the "One God".  The greatest problem this idea has created, the greatest misinterpretation, is "One and only One God".  The unitary deity is profound and speaks a deep truth, however the idea of "one and only one" implies an "other", be it another competing inferior god, or simply the existence of something that is not God.  NOTHING is not God.  God is One.  God is All.


George Carlin once said, "He's just like us - He's a cool guy, that's all God is, a cool guy. That's what all the religions told us:  "'He's like us, He's us.' That's what all the big ones, all the big religions said,  'Love yourself, Love your God, Love your neighbor, because you're all basically the same person.' We just don't have uniforms yet, that's all."  And that is what I wanted to build into my new First Commandment.  I am You.  We are One.  We are God.  God is One.  God is Everything.

I am You are One is All

And that's it.  It does not matter who the speaker is.  It could be God, or me, or you, or Aunt Edith, or a creature from Omicron Perseii 8.  It's all the same.

Strangely, I can't really remember where I went with the remastering of the other Ten Commandments.  I remember that I reinterpreted the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy to mean that it was important to "count the days" and keep calendars and holy days, but as for the rest, it's lost to some notebook in a box somewhere.  Perhaps it speaks to the centrality of a FIRST RULE, like The Prime Directive of Star Trek, or The Golden Rule, which I tried to incorporate into my First Commandment by implication.  Once you have the most basic rule of ethics, all others are merely derivatives thereof.

 So, I'll close with a song from They Might Be Giants.  This is from their children's album Here Come The 123's, but I find this expression of the "One=All" philosophy to be as well presented as in any text or adult music.  My wife and I are taking the boys to see a TMBG "family show" at the Iowa State Fairgrounds this Sunday.  I can't wait.








EDIT:  As Lauri said in the comments below, Neil should be in here. 

Neil Young's 1997 live album Year of the Horse opens with a heckler yelling out "They all sound the SAME!"  To which Neil famously replies, "It's all ONE SONG."

Indeed.  It is all one song.

Parting Ways

Does anyone else have music that they love, but for one reason or another it's really hard to listen to it?

I've got a bunch of it.  Mostly, it has to do with nostalgia of one kind or another.  For example, I've got several albums that I listened to A LOT in the fall of 1993, that I so intimately associate with that time in my life, that I find it very hard to listen to them without taking myself back there.  Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream is one, along with The Posies Frosting On The Beater and to a lesser extent Pearl Jam Vs. (the latter not as much, because I was a huge PJ fan for so many years that I don't associate the album with that particular time so closely).  That was a good time in my life, I was 20 and a junior in college, and had a great group of friends both at school and at home, and the world was really opening up to me and so much was possible.  Still, it's not a place I like to go in my mind, and I'm not completely sure why, although I've always felt sad about my lost past and simpler times, from the time I was a child and first felt the burdens of responsibility.


The Posies - "Burn and Shine"


There are other beloved albums that I have associations with that are more negative, the most striking being Soup by Blind Melon.  Blind Melon was my favorite band, and for those who only know them from "No Rain", let's just say that every one of their other songs is better than that.  This was a great, great band, where each musician was very talented, and they played together in a fluid way that all bands wish they could and few do.  In addition, it's really the only band that every one of their songs resonated with me in a personal way.  At that time in my life, they were where I was at.

Their second album was my most anticipated album release to that time, perhaps ever, and when it came out in August 1995, I listened to it over and over and over again until I knew every note.  I have strong associations with listening to it in a hotel room alone in Montauk, where I was fishing with my dad for a week, waking up at 5:30 every morning to go out on the boat, and just crashing out after dinner to this music.  I really loved where this band was going with this second album, and I was already eager to hear where they would take it next.  They obviously had so much more to say.

And then Shannon died.  I have never before or since been as hurt by the death of someone I didn't know personally, perhaps because I felt like I did know him. 

So, I find it very hard to listen to that album now...




A couple days ago, I heard a song on my mp3 player that struck me in that same way, but for a totally new and different reason.  The song was "Given To Fly" by Pearl Jam.  It's far from my favorite song of theirs, but it holds a special place in my heart, and now I think I understand why.

GTF was the lead single from their 1998 album Yield.  The single was released in January, about a month ahead of the album release.  I had just started using the internet that previous fall, and it was mostly because of Pearl Jam, and my search for rare recordings after hearing a low-gen tape of songs from my friend Gary that I'd never heard before, and I thought I was a hardcore fan, with bootlegs and b-sides and all that sort of stuff.  The internet was still relatively young, and mp3s were the new big thing in music, as for the first time there was available a format that could keep most of the sonic integrity of a CD and could be downloaded on a dial-up connection in less than a year, and stored on the tiny 1 or 2 GB hard drives that were the norm back then.  Plus, there were fan communities and news websites beginning to show up, and suddenly I was "plugged in" to my favorite band with breaking news and inside information as never before.  It was all very exciting, and GTF and Yield were the first new release of this era for me.

One thing that was very cool about this release, and it is something that could NEVER be done today, is that there was a "secret" b-side on the single.  Everyone on the internet knew about the first b-side, "Pilate", which it was also known would be an album track, but it wasn't until people started picking up the album in stores on release day that anyone, even those supposedly the most "in the know", found out there was a second b-side, "Leatherman", which incidentally has never had any other release besides this now rather rare single, and which holds some personal significance itself due to the subject matter.

Yield became, and continues to be, my favorite Pearl Jam album.  It was around this time that I started collecting their concert recordings, and I saw them live twice on their tour that fall.  They firmly cemented themselves as my favorite band, but (from as objective a place as I can speak about this) they also reestablished themselves as the greatest rock and roll band in the world at the time.  And I felt like I was a part of it.  The Beatles were not only the biggest band of their era, they were also the best, and at that moment in the late 90s, Pearl Jam was approaching that sort of status.  Not quite as big as they'd been five years earlier, but definitely better, and those of us who really knew the band knew that we were experiencing an extraordinary time in rock music history.

So why do I feel weird about "Given To Fly"?  It really has more to do with my relationship with Pearl Jam's music and the band in the time since 1998.  For me, 1998 was the band's peak, and all bands that last have a peak at some point where they never quite reach that level of greatness again, however you may measure greatness.  Their next album, 2000's Binaural, left me kind of cold, but at the same time the band was doing what was perhaps the coolest thing any band had ever done.  They announced they would release every show from their 2000 tour, unedited, on CD, and also announced that they didn't really care if you traded them with your friends.

Unfortunately, every subsequent album has left me feeling colder, and each business and marketing decision by the band has left me feeling further from the band that once seemed to truly care about their fans more than any other.  It's hard to believe that I have soured on Pearl Jam to the extent that I have, considering how devoted I was at one time.  It's not that my life has changed so much that I can't still be a huge fan.  I'm still just as devoted to my Neil Young fandom, and in fact much more so, it's that Pearl Jam has ceased to be the band that was so important to me, and to which I felt a closeness.  I've changed, they've changed, and we've grown apart.  So, like seeing an old friend who you once cared deeply for but who has somehow drifted away, it's a little painful to hear a song that epitomizes the time when you were at your closest.

This year, Pearl Jam is celebrating their 20th anniversary.  I'm just not feeling it.  I didn't buy the reissues of the first three albums that have been released in the past couple years, and even though I did download the new Vs. and Vitalogy special editions, I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to them yet, or even to put them on my mp3 player.  It's strange to feel this way.  I'm even questioning whether to renew my Ten Club membership, which expired today.  I've got a pretty low number, being that I've been a member continually since 1999, but since the band hasn't played a show within 4 hours of my home since 2003, I haven't even been able to take advantage of my seniority for fan club seating.

Fittingly, this performance is from Benaroya Hall in 2003, which is about the last time I felt the closeness.



Behind her eyes there's curtains,
And they've been closed to hide the flames. 
Remains.
She knows their future's burning
But she can smile just the same. 
Same.
 
And though her mood is fine today,
There's a fear they'll soon be parting ways.

Standing like a statue,
A chin of stone, a heart of clay. 
Hey.

And though he's too big a man to say,
There's a fear they'll soon be parting ways.

Drifting away. 
Drifting away. 
Drifting away. Away. Away.
Drifting away. 
Drifting away. 
Drifting away. Away. Away.


I'll always remember how it was, even if I don't really want to.  Thanks for the music.

How to Not Reduce Your Household Debt

Deficit hawks (or “deficit peacocks”  as many on the left prefer to call them, since they plainly have no actual interest in doing what needs to be done to reduce the deficit) are always asking the American people to look at the budget and spending of the Federal Government in terms of your own household budget.  “You can’t responsibly run up these kinds of deficits and borrow against the future in the way that the government does in your own home or business,” they say (I won’t get into how businesses ACTUALLY operate in this country).  So I decided to look at how the current proposals to reduce the deficits and national debt would apply to my own home finances.

I’m a middle-class father of 3 making a decent salary that allows me to support my wife and children, but we certainly aren’t putting much away in savings or investments, and we don’t have much discretionary income for wasting on fun and games.  We have some credit card debt, not a lot, but a few thousand dollars that eats up a couple hundred bucks of interest every month.  I’d LOVE to be able to pay off all of that credit card debt.

WHY do I want to pay off my credit card debt?  The simple answer is that if I were to pay off the debt, I would be saving all that money I spend on servicing the debt, and it would mean a couple hundred bucks more every month that could go to buying things for myself and my family that would make our lives better, or to saving for the future.  I mean, why the hell else would someone want to pay off their debts?

Perhaps we should ask that question to Paul Ryan and the Republican Party, because they don’t seem to have an answer to this question that makes any sense.  They appear to want to reduce the deficit/pay down the debt for the simple sake of doing it, as if that “virtue” will somehow translate into something good for people.  No matter what you believe, you can’t run a government based on the belief that God will magically reward you if you are righteous and virtuous enough.  Some right-wing leaders may actually believe this, and many more proclaim this to be true, but the “serious” people know that there are other factors involved.

The real goal is to reduce the size of the government, and to reduce taxes on the very rich.  Perhaps if I were exceedingly generous, I would say that they wish to reduce taxes on all of us, but the vast majority of those reductions will benefit the very rich, and the vaster majority of the reductions in government will hurt the poor and middle classes.  In fact, in Paul Ryan’s plan, the deficit isn’t even reduced in any meaningful way for MANY years to come, and the projections are based on assumptions that have been panned as unrealistic by virtually every legitimate economist in the country.  So let’s just call it a wash, and say that Ryan’s plan doesn’t actually reduce the deficit at all, and just shifts the cuts in spending directly to cuts in taxes for the rich.  It’s pretty close to the truth no matter who you ask.

Back to my household finances metaphor.  Here is what Ryan proposes YOU do to reduce your credit card debt! 

You are going to make significant cuts in your grocery bill, medical costs, vacations, clothes for the kids, and other such budgetary items that you already don’t spend as much as you’d like to be able to spend in order to give yourself the quality of life that your parents’ generation had.  Now, we’re going to ask you to make those cuts to essential expenditures (but we're going to call them "discretionary spending"), and use that saved money to pay down your credit card debts, but we’re also going to cut your salary at the same time.  We’re not going to wait until after the positive results of paying down the debt start to accrue to make that salary cut, we’re going to cut your salary first.

Now, if you somehow manage to actually pay down your debts in any significant way, which would be a minor miracle under this plan, any savings that you are able to make from reductions in interest payments to your creditors will NOT be shifted back into your household budget.  No, they will be offset by further reductions in your salary, because you have now shown that it is possible for you survive on less, so you must need less.  Forget about the idea of making your quality of life any better, because you deserve a better quality of life much less than the rich man who pays your salary deserves to have that small amount of money added to his already vast holdings.

Get it?  Now you understand the Republican plan to reduce your personal debt!  And by the way, if you happen to have any money left at the end of your life, they plan on instituting a 100% Estate Tax on all estates UNDER $1 million, so that “extra” will be swept up for your boss’s benefit as well!

A Fictional Tale of the Mortgage Crisis (c. 1985)

Beginning on April 12, pre-orders will be accepted for Neil Young's latest release from his Neil Young Archive Performance Series (NYAPS).  A Treasure (NYAPS #09) is a collection of 12 live recordings from his 1984 and 1985 tours with The International Harvesters, a top quality country band that Neil assembled for this period in his eclectic career.  I may be "punk" david, but the Harvesters period has long been among my favorite of Neil Young's, and by far my favorite of his genre-hopping 80s experiments.  In part, it's because this band was so talented and tight.  Also, Neil Young has a gift for writing really great country music, a talent that few in modern country music can even fathom, and one that Neil has drawn from far too infrequently throughout his career.

From the spring of 1984 through the end of the summer of 1985, Neil fully immersed himself in country music and the surrounding Nashville culture.  His fake country accent was only slightly less contrived than Hillary Clinton's, but his music was as genuine as could be, and during this time Neil collaborated with such venerable country legends as Waylon Jennings, Bela Fleck, Rufus Thibodeaux, Anthony Crawford, Ben Keith, and Willie Nelson, with whom Neil and John Mellencamp founded Farm Aid in 1985.  On that note, the Harvesters were the band that Neil performed with at the Live Aid concert in July of 1985 before a TV audience in the hundreds of millions.

My favorite thing about this period in Neil Young's career however, is the large number of songs that he wrote and performed and recorded that did NOT appear on his 1985 country album Old Ways.  I consider Old Ways to be kind of a middling album in the Neil Young canon, but he probably could have released two full albums of additional material written and recorded during this period, with much of it superior to the material that did make the album.  Fortunately for the Rusties, there are many circulating concert recordings and a few circulating studio recordings to give us an idea of what Neil held back.

In addition to the ten songs released on Old Ways, there were a whole crop of new country songs that Neil premiered on these tours that either appeared later on other albums in a slightly less country flavor or have never seen any official release.  These include:

Amber Jean (a heretofore unreleased song about his baby daughter)
Razor Love (released on Silver & Gold, 2000)
Let Your Fingers Do the Walking (heretofore unreleased)
Hillbilly Band (unreleased)
Silver & Gold (released on Silver & Gold, 2000)
Nothing Is Perfect (to date released only on the Live Aid DVD in 2004)
This Old House (released with Crosby Stills & Nash on American Dream, 1988)
Interstate (released as a solo acoustic b-side in 1996)
Grey Riders (heretofore unreleased, and long considered one of Neil's greatest unreleased songs)

Several other studio outtakes that were never performed publicly have also reached trading circles and have become well known.  Right there you have more than enough material to complete another album of new songs in 1985.  But that doesn't even include several songs that Neil had performed earlier but had not been released in the mid-80s and could easily have made their way to a country album if Neil had decided to issue a second at the time.

The Ways of Love (premiered in 1978, released later on Freedom, 1989)
It Might Have Been (an old cover tune that Neil had played with Crazy Horse in 1970, and which only gained its first release in the form of a live recording from 1970 that appeared on Neil Young Archives Vol. 1, 2009)
Too Far Gone (premiered in 1976, released later on Freedom, 1989)
Soul of a Woman (a song that Neil played in four distinctly different styles in the 80's, but which never found a release until now, it is Neil's most often performed unreleased song)
Don't Take Your Love Away From Me (another genre-hopper, which had limited release on the Solo Trans LaserDisc in 1984, but didn't find an album release until Lucky 13 in 1993)
Country Home (premiered with Crazy Horse in 1976, and ultimately released on Ragged Glory, 1990)

And to top it off, there were several of Neil's older released songs that really came into their own, often for the first time, when played by The International Harvesters:

Motor City
Hawks and Doves (2 songs from the early 80s that were a little country, but really needed to be much more so to work)
Southern Pacific (released on the 1981 Crazy Horse album Reactor, the Harvesters make this song truly sound like the train that is the songs subject.  AMAZING.)
Roll Another Number (from Tonight's The Night, 1975, I believe this song comes off better as "country & western" than the drenched in feedback-drenched rendition that appears on 1991's live album Weld)
Are You Ready For the Country? (from 1972's Harvest, country-folk becomes pure country, and is better for it)
Powderfinger
Down By the River (2 live staple Crazy Horse jams that saw some of their most powerful performances of his career with the Harvesters.  DBTR from New Orleans in 1984 is jaw-dropping)



There's so much more that could be written about Neil Young and the International Harvesters, but I've gone on long enough.  As for the title of this post, here is a song that didn't make the cut for A Treasure, but tells a story that is as timely and poignant today as it was in 1985 when it was first written and performed.



"This Old House"

Midnight, that old clock keeps ticking,
The kids are all asleep,
and I'm walking the floor.
Darlin', I can see that you're dreaming,
And I don't wanna wake you up,
When I close the door.

This old house of ours is built on dreams,
And a businessman don't know what that means.
There's a garden outside she works in every day
And tomorrow morning a man from the bank's
Gonna come and take it all away.

Lately, I've been thinking 'bout daddy,
And how he always made things work,
when the chips were down.
And I know I've got something inside me,
There's always a light there to guide me,
To what can't be found.

This old house of ours is built on dreams,
And a businessman don't know what that means.
There's a swing outside the kids play on every day,
And tomorrow morning a man from the bank's
Gonna come and take it all away.

Take it all away,
take it all away,
take it all away.
Take it all away,
take it all away,
take it all away.

Remember how we first came here together?
Standing on an empty lot, holding hands.
Later, we came back in the moonlight,
And made love right where the kitchen is,
Then we made our plans.

This old house of ours is built on dreams
And a businessman don't know what that means.
There's a garden outside she works in every day,
And tomorrow morning a man from the bank's
Gonna come and take it all away.

Take it all away,
take it all away,
take it all away.
Take it all away,
take it all away,
take it all away.