Author: Dan Brekke

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Just One Thing About That

And now a word about The Campaign: John McCain has decided that our economy is so strong that he needs to leave the campaign trail to make it stronger. It would be unseemly to put Country Second and indulge in something so vulgar as politics by debating his opponent. Stop for a moment and admire McCain for trying to execute a clever political gambit by trying to haul himself above the muck of politics for a moment. Then consider the election-year crises that the country has come through while candidates carried on their campaigns:

2004: The whole Iraq endeavor coming undone.

1992: Economic recession.

1980: The Iran hostage crisis.

1968: Intensified fighting in Vietnam, assassination of leading national figures.

1964: Nation in turmoil over civil rights campaign in the South.

1952: Korean War.

1944: World War II.

1940: World War II.

1936: The Depression.

1932: The Depression.

1916: World War I.

1864: Civil War.

1860: Slavery/disunion crisis.

1856: National coming apart at seams over slavery.

1812: War with Britain.

Gee, we managed to have an uninterrupted campaign during 1864? When the nation was sufferiing through an appallingly bloody series of battles? You mean Lincoln didn’t try to put a hold on politics while trying to fulfill his duties as commander-in-chief? Neither world wars nor economic calamity put campaigns off the rails? Stunning.

The history shows what an empty gesture McCain’s move is. Obama got it right when he said that this is exactly the moment when the candidates need to be in front of the people.

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The $25,000 Solution

As I’ve made annoyingly clear to most of my friends and acquaintances–the people who stand still long enough to hear me say a full sentence before looking for a safe exit–I have a simple, elegant answer to many of the intractable ills that plague America: poverty, a failing educational system, crime, the illicit drug trade, stagnant inner-city economies, the obesity epidemic.

Here it is: Let’s give $25,000 in cash, no strings attached, to each and every American who lives below the federally set poverty line (and no, I don’t care what your papers say: if you’re here, you’re an American). It’s a yearly payment until you don’t qualify anymore (and no, the payment does not count as income and wouldn’t disqualify you; only earnings independent of the poverty stipend count to get you out of poverty and off the program. We’re talking about cold, hard cash here: no bureaucrats wanted, no social engineers need apply for a grant.

I can hear the peals of outrage: You mean, just give all those poor people all that money? Just GIVE it to them? That’s crazy! They’ll spend it all on crack!

I answer unruffled: It may be nuts. And some of that nicely redesigned cash may be spent unwisely. But what we’re administering is the only weapon that’s proof against all the problems mentioned above. When confronted with difficulty, doubt or obstacles of any sort, the affluent in America utter slogans about values and steadfastness. As their words die on the wind, they wheel in their trusty artillery: the credit accounts and cash reserves. Meantime, we bleed little dribbles of cash into the lives of the poor, and all it does is keep them poor. Their poverty and all that accompanies it, from lousy health care to crappy schools, is tolerated with a wink of concern and a nod to reform, and little, very little, changes. It’s not that we don’t mean to do better. We do. Millions of people far better than me have dedicated their lives to improving life for others. I just think it’s time the rest of us, through our gigantic government ATM machine, got into the act.

Don’t think about the downside for the moment–where in the world will we get all that money?–think about the upside: First of all, an economic stimulus that would have groceries and big-box stores and banks and other services the rest of us take for granted fighting to get into neighborhoods they’ve shunned for generations; that stimulus would also have a far-reaching impact in creating new government revenue. Second, removing the principal motive and driver for most inner-city crime. Third, giving the have-nots some real clout about where they send their kids to school. Fourth, providing resources for community self-improvement projects.

Now about the cash. Spending that kind of dough should give us pause. Some recent statistics show that 37 million Americans live below the federal “poverty line.” Let’s round up to 40 million, since things haven’t gotten any easier in the year and a half since those numbers came out. Now if we gave each of our less fortunate fellow citizens 25 grand apiece–everyone in the family gets a payment, even the kids and the ex-cons who never graduated eighth grade–that comes to $1 trillion.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Over the last five or six years, we’ve been reminded of that repeatedly, especially when it comes to the government and money. Iraq: $550 billion and counting (that amounts to a $25,000 payment to every Iraqi–even the ones who don’t love us). The negative economic impact over the next generation is forecast to be as much as $3 trillion. Bush tax cuts: the total number is so high it will make your nose bleed, but the yearly cost if they’re made permanent is expected to be $400 billion. Then there’s the Year of the Bailout. It’s getting hard to keep track, but off the top of my head: $30 billion for Bear Stearns; Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac: $200 billion; Great Bailout of Ought-Eight: at least $700 billion. I feel like I’m forgetting a couple hundred billion somewhere.

Now, the architects of our tax cuts, wars, and financial mega-rescues say roughly the same thing in defending their handiwork: it’s all necessary for our prosperity, well-being, and national survival. I’ll make the same claim for my $25,000 Solution: It’s a prescription for the economic and social ailments that beset not only the 40 million people who live in poverty, but for the entire society that has failed in its efforts to address those ailments.

And really, after the Bush years, what could it hurt to try?

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Gallery Bikes

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Bikes 1 and 2, with admirers. Spotted in a downtown gallery as I walked up Broadway to BART. I didn’t go inside to appreciate the true artsyness of these machines. I see lots of fixed-gear cycles on the streets that look like gallery pieces.

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Go Cubs Go

Walking the dog this morning, we encountered a younger couple pushing a kid in a stroller. The guy had a Cubs T-shirt on. “They’re gonna clinch today, right?” I said. “Oh–you never know. They could still lose it.” Technically, it was true, but I thought it was an overly cautious, self-consciously Cubsy thing to say. As it happened, the Cubs did win this afternoon. They won the National League Central Division title. We’ll see what the next step is. While we let the suspense simmer, we can consider some of the team’s musical history

Growing up in the Chicago area–the far south suburbs, in my case–baseball was a summer fixture on WGN. The station had a heavy schedule of both Cubs and White Sox game. Back then, WGN didn’t have an ownership connection with either team (that would come in 1981, when WGN’s owner, the Tribune Company, bought the Cubs from the Wrigley chewing gum dynasty). The fact you could count on seeing 150 or 160 games a year, including all those weekday afternoon games from lightless Wrigley Field, had something to do with creating a pretty avid fan population that followed both teams. At least I know I and most of my friends did. Eventually, the Sox went to WFLD, on Channel 32. Their games were fun to watch because Harry Caray, who had alienated his bosses in St. Louis and Oakland, took up residence on the Sox airwaves. Many commercial breaks featured Harry and Falstaff beer, and Harry delighted the fans at Comiskey Park by doing his play by play from the barren bleachers in center field, his booth perched about 500 feet from home plate. On hot days, the Sox set up an open-air shower out there for fans to cool off.

When the Sox left WGN (Channel 9 in Chicago), the station responded by adding Cubs games to its broadcast schedule–more than 150 a season. Maybe that was part of developing more of a Cubs-centric fan base. More important was that the long-comatose franchise woke up and started a run of about seven seasons or so in which the team went from a horrifying 10th place finish in 1966 to challenging for firstt in ’67; the following seasons ranged from very good but heart rending (1969) to decent and unembarrassing (1973, when the Cubs and several division foes wallowed around the .500 mark until the final week of the season). Needless to say, the notion that the Cubs could make what was never back then called “the post-season” was a theory we never saw proved.

I did mention music up there. WGN’s telecasts in the late ’60s featured Mitch Miller-like choral numbers that a music salesman in a plaid blazer might have pushed as “peppy.” One had a line that went “Hey, hey, holy mackerel, no doubt about it/The Cubs are on their way.” “Hey, hey” was WGN announcer Jack Brickhouse’s signature home-run call; it’s now enshrined on the Wrigley Field foul poles. In due course, that sappy number was supplanted by a mindlessly cheerful ditty that started out, “It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame, for a ballgame today.”

Eventually, I moved away from Chicago, well beyond the reach of WGN’s signal and then, when it became a national “superstation,” into austere Berkeley households with no cable TV. In 1984, the Cubs did what they had never done in my lifetime and played well enough long enough to get into the playoffs. No need to go into how that turned out. By that time, though, Steve Goodman had written the best Cubs song ever: “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” That’s wrong, actually. It’s the best baseball fan song, ever–unique for its combination of humor, poetry, and rueful but affectionate disdain for the home team.

Goodman died a few days before the Cubs clinched their playoff spot in ’84. But by then, he had already composed and recorded the song that the team now uses as an anthem after a home win: “Go Cubs Go.” A year ago, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wrote a great piece about how the song came to be written. The best part is that some of the team’s execs disliked Goodman because of “The Dying Cub Fan.” I don’t know where any of those guys are now. But today, when the Cubs won, Goodman’s voice was ringing out over Wrigley Field, and it sounded like every fan in the place was singing “Go Cubs Go.”

(Lyrics after the jump.)

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Continue reading “Go Cubs Go”

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‘Well Done, Good and Faithful Servants’

Seeing this headline–“Administration is Seeking $700 Billion for Wall Street Bailout“–and this one–“At Least 40 Are Killed in Blast at Pakistan Hotel“–I reflected briefly on how we got here. My quest took me to Bush II’s first State of the Union address, in 2001. The new president talked about a nation at peace, a government that enjoyed a sizable budget surplus, and how he would go about fixing all that. His stirring conclusion:

“We all came here for a reason. We all have things we want to accomplish and promises to keep. Juntos podemos — together we can.

“We can make Americans proud of their government. Together we can share in the credit of making our country more prosperous and generous and just, and earn from our conscience and from our fellow citizens the highest possible praise: Well done, good and faithful servants.”

Well done, indeed, Mr. President.

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Miscellany

A couple small things, perhaps random and unconnected:

My favorite online find this week (and maybe ever): The Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” blog. It publishes several topical photo essays each week. I happened across it while looking for space pictures of Hurricane Ike. What I found instead was a gallery of hurricane pictures shot from the International Space Station and various shuttle missions. From far above, the storms are ethereal in their beauty. All the other collections I’ve seen on The Big Picture are absorbing, too. Check out the current show, on the worldwide observance of Ramadan.

Words still matter: Attempting to justify my long-term New Yorker subscription by actually reading the thing, I picked up the September 15 issue yesterday. It fell open to a story called “A Cloud of Smoke,” about disputed findings of post-mortem examinations of a former New York police officer who may have died from the after-effects of working on the World Trade Center pile after September 11, 2001. It’s a good piece of journalism, but I was captivated by the opening of this paragraph:

“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has the unrenovated pallor of a forgotten city agency. Dimmed by a concrete overbite, the street entrance manages to look at once ominous and shabby—a homely approach to an agency that houses one of the largest and busiest forensic labs in the country. Even by the standards of other big cities, New York has a prolific capacity to produce dead bodies, and, as Chief Medical Examiner, Charles Hirsch is responsible for the processing of some twenty-five thousand fatalities a year—nearly half the city’s annual total. Roughly fifty-five hundred of those cases require autopsy, including all deaths that are violent, sudden, mysterious, or in some way related to public or consumer safety. …”

“Unrenovated pallor.” “Dimmed by a concrete overbite.” “At once ominous and shabby.” I felt like I was standing in the building when I read that.

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City Art

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On north side of 16th, near Folsom. I’m new at the genre, but the two names belong to San Francisco graffiti artists.

Not that this is a natural segue–I find the sidewalk stencils and other street art I see around the Mission and Potrero Hill pretty arresting–but if you read a little into some local blogs (here’s an example, and here’s another) shit on neighborhood streets is a recurring topic. By shit, I mean shit–what the polite but not highbrow might call Number Two. I raise the subject mostly because in the last few weeks, I’ve occasionally found myself strolling through what appears to be a well established and frequently used open-air toilet on Harrison Street between 17th and Mariposa. And today, right by the Honda motorcycle garage on 17th near Folsom, a large pile of human excrement. Notable in the latter case was the presence of a wad of toilet paper. It’s comforting to know that even those with no other facilities, or who are perhaps moved to make a social statement of some kind, are still wiping themselves.

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So Long, Ike; Next Up: Hurricane Nutjob

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We continue with more exclusive coverage of the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. The image above is the storm as it looked last Wednesday from the International Space Station, which was at an altitude of 220 miles. (For comparison’s sake, the GOES satellites that provide most of the views we see of Earth weather are parked in geosynchronous orbits with an altitude of 22,300 miles. The Terra and Aqua earth observatory satellites that regularly provide stunning images of wildfires and other events work at an altitude of about 430 miles.) NASA has posted a gallery of ISS shots of Ike. And if you like these ethereal views of killer storms, see a wonderful collection published last week on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture blog.

Enough fawning over pictures. Now to the serious business at hand: If you think those photographs merely depict awesome natural forces at work, you’re sadly mistaken. No. Just like Katrina before it, those who see world weather as a giant conspiracy have declared that Hurricane Ike was a storm on behalf of (someone’s) scheme for global domination.

First, there’s this: An alert from Kevin Martin, a self-described meteorologist in Southern California, that “chemtrails” (a type of evil aircraft condensation trail) were detected last week in areas of the United States along Ike’s forecast path. Whoa. If you’re not sold on the forecaster’s credentials after reading that, check out his public plea for letters of recommendation so that he could be admitted Mississippi State’s online course for would-be TV weathercasters. (There’s more to Kevin’s story, too: one of his inspirations, it turns out, is that he was once struck by lightning.)

Then there’s this: Scott Stevens, formerly of Pocatello, Idaho, TV weatherman fame, announced before Ike’s landfall that “this entire storm is manufactured.” Scott, like Kevin, also saw dark doings overhead in the Midwest before the remnants of Ike got there. Faceless Global Dominators were manipulating weather to fill all the region’s rivers and streams before the moisture-laden ex-hurricane arrived. The motive behind the storm and associated “tweaking,” apparently, is economic chaos. As if we need any more help.

My one and only question to the World Weather Conspiracy folks would be: In olden times, before the advent of high technology–or maybe I should say human high technology, because the Faceless Dominators could be extraterrestrials or Greek or Norse gods unhappy in their retirement–who was responsible for all the floods, droughts, hail storms, heat waves, cold snaps and other weather catastrophes that beset us?

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Urban-Wildland Interface

In California, when you hear the term “urban-wildland interface,” it’s generally used to describe suburbs that have sprawled so far into the hinterlands that whole subdivisions are in the middle of areas that are prone to burning. In fact, a little Google research suggests that the term occurs together with “fire” about seven out of eight times it’s used. But I don’t want to talk about fire. I want to talk about deer running wild in the flatlands neighborhood where we live.

In the Bay Area, as in most of the rest of California and as in most of the country, deer have become very numerous in the past 20 or 30 years. This has led to colorful side effects such as the appearance of mountain lions and coyotes on the fringe or urban areas (I’ve never seen a mountain lion; but a couple years ago I spotted a coyote loping across the road ahead of me when I was on a bike ride about 10 miles from home; and hiking in the hills I’ve come across part of a deer, in carcass form, that had been taken apart by something with good strong jaws).

Deer, on the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of. There are so many in the hills, both inside and outside town, that when you’re riding a bike back down to the flats near dusk you keep an eye out for any that might be crossing the road. I’d say the first time I saw them near our house, well below the hills, about a decade ago. A panicked looking young male went clattering by one night when I was out for a walk. The sightings have become more frequent. Our neighbor Piero set up a motion-sensitive camera in his mother’s backyard to try to find out what was destroying her flower garden. The culprits, captured in pictures just about every night, are a small but healthy deer family that apparently has taken up permanent residence in a neighbor’s untended lot. Some people here think that deer travel down from the hills after dark, moving along the creeks that run toward the bay and through our unfenced parks. In a sense, they’re moving the urban-wildland interface right into the heart of the city.

Tonight’s example: I was just out taking the dog for his final neighborhood patrol of the day. A couple blocks away, alongside a big elementary school, a deer came bounding onto the sidewalk about 50 yards ahead of us, then went springing down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. The dog followed at a trot. The deer stood at the next corner; as we approached, it trotted north down the intersecting street, followed by another deer in that vaulting gait they use to jump hedges and fences and, now, to navigate the byways of North Berkeley.

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