Category: Best

Posted on

Canada vs U.S.

It appears that most of the opposition to proposals for national health care reform in the U.S. stem from the belief that government can not do anything right.

Let’s let corporations decide, instead, when I should see a doctor, and how much I should pay.

As a Canadian, let me extend my sympathy. You poor Americans. You are so proud of your flag and your nation and your constitution– but so embarrassed by the idiots you elect to office every two years that you can’t trust them to run an insurance program. You call yourself the greatest country in the world but the citizens of this country appear to be the dumbest voters on the planet.

You see, we Canadians are very lucky. We actually elect reasonably good governments and then give them the power to execute their policies and then we enjoy the benefits— like universal health care coverage. Oh, of course it’s not perfect. You can always find a few Canadians out there who envy you Americans your vastly over-priced system that treats you quickly and then bankrupts you.

But how good is the Canadian system? Not a single politician in Canada will run on a platform of dismantling it. How simple is that? If there were any number of Canadians who were dissatisfied and wanted to move to the U.S. model, surely we’d have a member of parliament or two who would dare to campaign on privatizing health care. But even our conservative parties pledge to leave health care alone, or even to improve it.

That’s not the only thing our government does that strikes most Canadians as reasonably good. Your Social Security is a mess because Republicans won’t cooperate with reforming it and Democrats are terrified of being accused of raising taxes. Our Canadian government simply adjusted the rates of contributions a few years ago. Most Canadians probably barely noticed. But the result is that the Canadian Pension Plan is actuarially sound and all Canadians can count on receiving full benefits when they retire.

Oh and our banks. Did you know that our banks were the only banks in the developed world that did not need a single penny of bail-out funds? Not one cent. Once again, we happened to choose a government (the Liberals) who decided that the credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, and derivatives, were too risky. Our banks pleaded to be allowed to make the big money, like their U.S. competitors. The Liberals, under Jean Chretien, said “no”. Our government also wouldn’t let the banks merge so they could take on the big U.S. banks. Crazy, eh?

Do you Americans ever get sick of your two year election cycles? It seemed to take Obama forever to finally get to the inauguration. Well, we might have an election this fall. If it is called soon, the campaigns will start almost immediately and end six weeks later. Yes, six weeks! Isn’t that a gas! Done. Over. And much cheaper too.

No doubt our government could do better. We haven’t done very well in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We didn’t get sucked into Iraq, but we are stuck in Afghanistan. Our top executives, like yours, get paid too much. The taxpayers bought the Skydome for the Blue Jays but the perception is that no major league sports team will get a tax-payer funded stadium ever again. (That’s why the Expos are gone, probably, and why the NHL doesn’t want to see any U.S. teams moving to Canada. Probably.)

But it’s a nice country. You should come visit sometimes. Our Conservative party would be roughly comparable to your Democrats. Obama probably would have gotten about 75% of the votes up here. Our liberals would probably find Obama a tad too “moderate” for our tastes.

You guys did invent the Internet– good for you!  Yes, your government invented it. And yes, Al Gore took the initiative, in Congress, to fund the proposal.

I personally thank God regularly that we don’t have anything like the Republican Party up here.

Bring your can-do spirit, your generosity, and your exuberance. But don’t bring your guns.

Posted on

Take a Trip to New York

Hi Marg,

We had a great trip to New York. “Hair” was fantastic, and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was also fabulous. We hung around Times Square for a while– it looks like a very interesting place– lots of glitter and lots of people around– but not much to actually do except grab a coffee at Starbucks and hang out. However, if you don’t have tickets in advance, you can buy heavily discounted tickets for Broadway shows there by lining up in front of a TKTS booth and seeing what is available. These tickets are typically 40% off, available for shows that night, most of which are in easy walking distance of the stand. You can’t miss the booth– it’s right in Times Square. We didn’t use it because we already had our tickets, and you wouldn’t have been able to get tickets for “Hair” there anyway.

We loved MOMA. It’s on 53rd St. near 7th Avenue– it’s closed on Tuesdays! Especially the 5th and 4th floors, which had a lot of Picasso and other modern artists. Beautiful building, and we really enjoyed lunch in the café on the 2nd floor. You can take pictures (no flash) and most paintings are unprotected (no glass barriers). Right now they are also showing this “installation” that consists of the possessions of a Chinese woman who “kept everything”. It’s actually quite intriguing.

If you want a great view, there is Empire State Building of course, but you will probably have a better experience at the Rockefeller Centre on 50th St. also around 7th Avenue (near MOMA!).

Everything, by the way, is expensive. I find you just have to kind of ignore prices and do what you want to do– you came all this way and went though all the trouble of getting there, so why not?

The Museum of Natural History is pretty good– a bit like our ROM but bigger. It’s on the West side of Central Park (I assume you’ll have a touristy map). Oh– there is a “Titanic” display on 44th Street, near Times Square. I thought it would be kind of cheesy, but it is actually very interesting. It features a lot of exhibits of items retrieved from the wreck, beautifully presented, with lots of basic information. There is even a recreation of a couple of state rooms and the grand stairway. Expensive again ($25) but we thought it was worthwhile. Took about two hours to go through.

We weren’t high on Ellis Island– they haven’t done very much with the building– just placards, text, and pictures, really, though it was interesting to see the island. You won’t get into the Statue of Liberty– it’s all reservations now, and they are convinced that Al Qaeda is determined to attack it (!) so you’ll have to wait in line so they can scan your lunch bag. You do wonder if they shouldn’t be investing the huge cost of it into protecting something that really matters. It would probably be cheaper to buy a spare Statue of Liberty and keep it in a warehouse in Brooklyn in case it’s needed.

Bill

To use the toll roads on the way to New York City, you take a slip of paper from a man in a booth and then, when you exit the toll road, hand it to another man in a booth who calculates your fee and collects the money.

This is pretty whacky, especially if you have used the 407 in Canada, which has an automated system. You don’t even pay when you exit– you get a bill in the mail.

But then, we paid 5 or 6 dollars for each stretch of the toll road in the U.S. Ontario’s 407 seems to charge a lot more. Your bill is not going to be less than $15 for even a short stretch, from the middle of Toronto to Brampton.

Audio Books: We listened to the entire audio recording of “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt on the way down and back– about 14 hours, altogether, with time out to hear “Hair”, which we saw in New York at the John Hirschbeck Theatre.

“Angela’s Ashes” is a remarkable memoir, of Frank McCourt’s upbringing in dire poverty in Limerick, Ireland, in the 1930’s and 40’s.

The saddest song I’ve ever heard is “Kilkelly Ireland” by Peter Jones, based on letters found in his grandparent’s attic. It might well be the perfect soundtrack for “Angela’s Ashes”. “Kilkelly Ireland” is simply a series of letters, one to a verse, each verse a decade, to a son who has moved away to America, updating him on family events, expressing how wonderful it would be to see him again.

Posted on

Why Obama Won’t Propose Single-Payer Health Care

It Took a Nixon to Open the Door to China

Why on earth has Obama and the Democratic leadership ruled out the “single-payer” model, the one Canadians love so much?

I’m sure he wants Americans to believe that he is not a fanatic, a radical, who intends to impose a socialist regime on the country. I’m sure he knows that this perception is ridiculous. I’m sure he knows that the insurance industry and some doctors’ organizations and conservative talk radio and Fox News and the Republicans will spend millions and millions of dollars to try to convince Americans that Canadians hate their health care system (in spite of some studies that show up 97% of Canadians would not trade our system for theirs) and that Canadians are dying in unparalleled numbers because we can’t get doctors or treatment (in spite of our longer life expectancy) and that our breast implants are not as firm or ample as good old all-American breast implants.

So why has Obama rolled over on this one? He’s afraid of a brutal, divisive fight. He wants to be bipartisan. He wants to unify America.

I always thought that if a liberal Democrat took George Bush’s approach to the Iraq war and applied it to health care, the U.S. would have a single-payer, universal health care plan in a matter of months. Nobody wanted the Iraq war. Nobody thought it was a good idea. Nobody believed Saddam had anything to do with 9/11. Did that stop Dick Cheney? Not on your life. He just steam-rolled the idea through Congress and the Executive branch and refused to compromise or bend until he got his way. Above all, he threatened to paint every wavering Democrat as an unpatriotic wimp if they didn’t join in.

Now, if an idiot could do that with a bad idea– why can’t a genius like Obama do it with a good one?

To answer my own question: because Cheney’s opponents were intelligent, reasonable people who were not given to hysterics and mudslinging. They wanted to compromise. They wanted to seem even-handed and fair to President Bush.

Obama’s opponents are well-funded shrieking harpies who will lie and distort and stop at nothing to take political advantage of any issue.

Perhaps it is going to take a Nixon (or a John McCain?) to change America’s health care system for the better. (The story is that if a Democrat had tried to establish diplomatic relations with “Red” China the way Nixon did in 1972, the Republicans would have revolted en-masse and created a constitutional crisis of insane proportions. But Nixon, who was trusted by the conservatives, was able to achieve remarkable results because everybody thought that if old arch-cold-warrior Nixon thought it was okay, it must be okay.)

Why doesn’t labour approach the problem of influencing government the way conservatives do? What they would need to do is create a foundation (or several of them, each of which appears to be independent of the others) called the “Ruthless Capitalist Institute” or something, and find some stooge entrepreneurs to staff it and fund some stooge college professors (maybe at Oral Roberts University) to do “research” and then make presentations to Congress on how investors would make even more money if they employed only unionized labour.

Posted on

The Cost of Death

From the Washington Post, June 11, 2009

In the final two years of a patient’s life, for example, they found that Medicare spent an average of $46,412 per beneficiary nationwide, with the typical patient spending 19.6 days in the hospital, including 5.1 in the intensive-care unit. Green Bay patients cost $33,334 with 14.1 days in the hospital and just 2.1 days in the ICU, while in Miami and Los Angeles, the average cost of care exceeded $71,000, and total hospitalization was about 28 days with 12 in the ICU.

Some differences can be explained by big-city prices, acknowledged Elliott Fisher, principal investigator for the Dartmouth Atlas Project, “but the differences that are really important are due to the differences in utilization rates.”

Much of the evidence suggests that the more doctors, more drugs, more tests and more therapies given to patients, the worse they fare — and the unhappier they become, said Donald Berwick, president of the independent research group Institute of Quality Improvement.

The kicker here is that there is evidence that the more treatment a patient receives late in life, the less happy he or she is.

I believe it. Anyone who has spent time in a hospital or nursing home can’t help but believe it.

Billions of dollars of health care spending in the United States is guided by a very simple and pernicious logic: don’t you love your mother? (Or father, or grandparent, or…). And if you love your mother, don’t you want to do everything possible to extend her life? Everything? Even if the odds of the treatment actually extending her life or improving her quality of life are not very good?

I’m sure some elderly people simply want to live for as long as they possibly can even if it bankrupts their families, but I don’t believe most of them want that. I think most people in their 70’s and 80’s accept that life comes to an end eventually and probably hope, more fervently than for anything else, to die in peace, close to friends and family, and without unbearable pain. They don’t want to spend their last weeks or months strapped to a bed with tubes going in and out of every orifice, nauseous, drugged out. And they don’t want pallid substitutes for pain killers because the pharmaceutical industry has succeeded in establishing a monopoly over drugs.

The average American works hard all of his life, buys a house, builds up his assets, sends his children to college, saves something for retirement, spoils the grand kids, and then, just when he thinks he’s survived the economic snake-pit of American capitalism, the health care system sinks its fangs into him and sucks him dry. If you want to leave something for your grandchildren, you need to drive your car off a bridge before you become incapacitated.

Perhaps one of the most depressing facts of American life is that the medical-industrial complex has managed to convince many Americans– and almost all talk radio hosts– that the cruelest, least fair, and least efficient health-care system in the Western World is actually the best. They stand there bankrupted and ruined, dropped by their insurance companies, buried under piles of arcane incomprehensible forms, denied critical treatments because their insurance companies simply refuse to pay out… and they look at us Canadians and go, “Oh my god! You have to wait three weeks for an MRI?”

Posted on

The Third Man: How do you know a thing like that Afterwards?

It’s 1948. Postwar Vienna is suffering shortages of everything, including medicine. It is administered by a cooperative security force comprised of British, French, American, and Russian soldiers. In a unique arrangement, a representative of each country takes part in each routine patrol, even if they can’t speak each others’ language.

The city is in ruins. The people, demoralized, desperate.

Holly Martins is an American writer of pulp westerns. He gets a message from an old school chum, Harry Lime, to come visit him in Vienna. Sounds like an adventure– old times! But he arrives just ten minutes after Lime’s body has been carted away to be buried, after a car accident. Instead of a happy reunion, he attends a somber funeral, along with a very small number of Lime’s friends. And a young woman, Anna, who walks away quickly when the service is over.

Martins is clearly already infatuated with her and later catches up with her at the theatre where she performs in sad, dispirited, period comedies. Perhaps the most depressing moment of the film– the actresses, in sumptuous costumes, smiling and cavorting on stage, in some pathetic effort to recapture something magical from a hopelessly distant past– and the audience half-heartedly laughing.

After the play, she offers him a cup of tea, but it is clear that she is in no mood for sentimental reminiscences.

MARTINS
You were in love with him, weren’t you?
ANNA
I don’t know. How can you know a
thing like that afterwards? I don’t
know anything any more.

Well, damn right it’s written by Graham Greene. Martin’s line is freighted with a misguided nostalgia for Lime (we come to understand, even if Martins doesn’t, that Lime used him) and Anna’s line is freighted with bitter disillusionment.

Holly is one of the earliest incarnations of George W. Bush, blundering into complex situations which he can’t remotely understand but determined, nonetheless, to do something about them, and, in the process, causing mayhem and suffering to all those around him. He’s the ugly American, the bumbling fool who thinks his native wit will triumph over sophistication and cunning.

This is not a coincidence.  It is a known theme of Graham Greene’s: how the naïve but well-meaning Americans sew disaster around the world.

Anna wants nothing to do with him. She just wants time to go by. She’s filled with fatalism, resignation, and emotional fatigue.

You begin to understand how war saps away hope and passion. And you begin to understand the complex, disturbing attraction of Lime. And it is a wonderful tribute to Greene that he resists the temptation to imbue Anna with some kind of special nobility: it is clear she doesn’t care about the victims of Lime’s black market activities– she only wants him back. Because he was the only thing in her bleak life that made her laugh.

You don’t even get to anesthetize yourself with this illusory “true love”– she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how you would even know something like that “afterwards”

[spoiler] Then there is the astonishing last scene. The camera stands distant, at the end of a long laneway leading away from the cemetery. Martins, the fool, prevails upon Major Calloway to let him off. Calloway, reluctantly, stops the jeep and lets him out. He stands there waiting for Anna to catch up to him. The camera watches impassively as Anna slowly approaches Martins… then walks right past him as if he doesn’t even exist.

Martins doesn’t move.

We fully understand that he is being forced into a tremendously painful realization, and all he can do is stand there and watch her walk away.

Graham Greene, who was no stranger to Hollywood movies, thought the original ending of “The Third Man” was too bleak for most audiences and wanted to change it….

Well, no– it wasn’t the “original” ending: [spoiler] in the novella he wrote as a first draft, he actually had Anna walk off, after Lime’s funeral, with Martins. [end of spoiler] It was director Carol Reed and–shockingly– the producer, David O. Selznick– yes, the American Hollywood producer– who insisted there should be no compromise, because it was “right”, artistically, because it was inevitable, because the romantic ending would have been completely contrary to the spirit of the story.

It is very hard to imagine otherwise. It was an uncharacteristically cheesy idea of Greene’s, and a brilliant realization by Reed and Selznick. And I am convinced it is one of the main reasons “The Third Man” is regarded so highly more than fifty years after it was made. The romantic ending might have provided a moment of transient gratification– but it would have trivialized the rest of the film.

Considering all the indignities Hollywood has rendered upon good stories over the years, that is amazing.

I can’t stand it when a movie like “The Reader” comes along acting as if it was something like “The Third Man”. Watch the two one after the other: what’s different? The world. But mainly the writing. The difference is that there is not a single moment in “The Reader” that is even a shadow of the “how do you know a thing like that afterwards” or the cuckoo clock, or “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. ”

If someone were to do a remake of “The Third Man”– a terrible idea, of course– you could do worse than…

Holly Martins: Steve Carell
Harry Lime: Phillip Seymour Hoffman — without a doubt.
Anna: Taryn Manning, or maybe Amy Adams, if she ever decides to take on a challenging role, instead of those lightweight confections she’s been indulging in lately.

Or how about Kelly MacDonald? I don’t know. Yes– absolutely Kelly MacDonald, with Franke Potente as a close second.

Posted on

John Maxwell’s Useless and Ephemeral Leadership “Wisdom”

There is only one real irrefutable law of leadership: Anyone who doesn’t already have what it takes to be a good leader will not know what it is they need in order to become a good leader.

And the obvious corollary: anyone who already is a good leader does not need leadership training and would be better off spending this time productively… doing something. Like have a sex change operation if you are a woman, because Maxwell doesn’t ever refer to a good leader as “she” or “her”.

Here it is — in the simplest possible terms: all “leadership training” sounds great in the workshop and works perfectly as long as you don’t let reality intrude. That’s all there is to it. The minute you leave the seminar and immerse yourself into the real world again you will find that your problems are no simpler and the answers are no clearer. And if you had weaknesses as a leader before the seminar, you will have the same weaknesses afterwards. I guarantee that.

However, a considerable number of people make a considerable amount of money trying to persuade middle managers and executives otherwise.

Almost without exception, none of these “leaders” have any real-world accomplishments: they are all preachers, essentially, or what they used to call “snake-oil salesmen”: glib speakers who charm and amuse you and persuade you that you can purchase that glib goodness itself and take it back to your place of employment and do magical things that you could never have done otherwise.

Not only are they unashamed of their lack of real world accomplishments — they sometimes seem to revel in it.

Have any of these geniuses ever actually accomplished anything in the real world? You would think a few would– just for PR value. Just to convince us that someone, somewhere actually used these principles in a real workplace with real problems and actually succeeded because of them. Just to show us that some people care about whether or not people who preach a lot of leadership actually know what they’re doing, in the real world.

Come on– do it! Just to prove– and here’s the most important thing– that the examples given in these workshops and presentations are not simplistic and unrealistic. In other words, nothing like the real problems real leaders will face in a real world.

Not one.

Well…. if you include celebrities like football coaches and Oliver North… But that sort of proves the point, doesn’t it? How wonderful it would be if you could run your company like a football team? Your team accomplishes exactly what your individual players are capable of accomplishing, and you get to credit yourself with some abstraction called “leadership” that miraculously appropriates your players’ talents.

How wonderful if you are a successful athlete– born with a gift– and people will pay to hear you talk about how you invented the gift, nurtured it, developed it, with your hard work and determination. What you have with these people is an attempt to cash in on their celebrity.

Maxwell gives Churchill as an example of a great leader. Why? Because he stood up for democracy and human rights? No. Because he defied the most efficient and powerful military machine in Europe? No. Because he was determined to win. Well, so was Hitler, and so was Custer, and Marc Antony, and Lee.

John Maxwell is at his most offensive when he tells you that the only way to cultivate effective leadership in your church is… surprise! By buying more and more John Maxwell books and video tapes. No– wait– even better! By subscribing to his various leadership clubs so that you receive something in the mail every month– along with expensive ongoing subscriptions.

It is a tribute to Maxwell’s charm, I guess, that he can get away with these blatantly self-serving stratagems in front of an audience that has paid to hear him speak! Wow. That is leadership!

It is even more wildly amazing that while telling this audience that leaders can’t be herded like cats because they think for themselves and ask critical questions and think outside the box…. he insists they all need to buy his tapes and books and videos, and they all nod obediently and scribble down the names of the stuff they need to buy from John Maxwell to realize their potential.

The real purpose of all this stuff? To make you feel entitled to your position. To give you the illusion of authority and influence. To convince you that you are really more necessary and more valuable than the people who actually produce products and ideas but don’t know how to suck up to those in authority.

The results from all this “training”? Mission Statements that consist of a platitudinous enunciation of the obvious, and Strategic Plans (a redundancy: a “plan plan”).

And I imagine that most of them probably do. They reach their potential. Just as you will and I will.

John Maxwell does not take questions. Real world issues must not intrude, because they introduce complexity that reveals the utter uselessness of most of his “wisdom”. John Maxwell does not take questions, but he probably could– because this audience does indeed look like sheep.

Posted on

Genuine Heroes: Brooksley Born

Even after reading a lot of articles on the current economic crisis, it is difficult to get a grasp on just what, specifically, brought about the chain of events that have led to our current upheaval. The question is, who is responsible, and why.

Well, we know of someone who was not responsible. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of her. Her name is Brooksley Born. During the Clinton administration, she was in charge of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She objected to these new derivatives and credit swaps and other nefarious instruments of economic bamboozlement.  But she was overruled and marginalized by Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, who were entranced and delighted with the possibilities raised by deregulation of the securities markets. (Rubin was later a director and counselor to Citibank, until January this year, when he went to work for Obama).

They saw lots of Enrons (then considered miraculously profitable) splashing money around making all their friends rich. Well, to be generous, they probably would like you to believe they thought any red-blooded American investor could get rich by investing in a company like Enron.  All you needed was lots and lots of disposable money.  Sure, anyone.

Today, everybody knows about Kenneth Lay and AIG and Eliot Spitzer and Britney Spears and even Susan Boyle, and nobody knows the name Brooksley Born. So here is my modest little tribute to a great woman:

Brooksley, you were right.

And she was not the only one who was right but didn’t receive nearly enough credit for it.

You were wise when everyone around embraced foolishness. Someone should name a large federal building for you. And remove the name “Greenspan”.

The world of high finance and banking seems to have been mainly a giant Ponzi scheme and those who were in on the backroom deals profited immensely and, so far, with near impunity.

No one will ever know exactly how complicit Rubin and Greenspan and the others were, but we do know that neither of them left their federal appointments to go work for Habitat for Humanity.

Do Americans finally get what’s going on? While they were all excited about this incredibly expensive military adventure in Iraq that would cost nearly a trillion dollars– to prevent America’s interests from being harmed by nefarious Islamic foes– American’s interests were harmed by the same fat cats that sponsored Bush in the first place, the ones who got all the tax cuts, the ones who urged you to keep America safe by voting for a strong military.

They are counting on your ignorance, your indifference, your confusion. They are counting on you believing that our economic systems is fundamentally sound and fundamentally serves your interests in spit of what appears to be looting on an unimaginable scale, of your pensions, your insurance, your mortgages.

What Actually Happened and Why it Should Not Have

Do you get what actually happened? This is what I understand went down: banks and other financial institutions conspired to set up these huge funds– derivatives– which consisted of bundled mortgages and loans amounting to trillions of dollars. They resold these packages to investors and then, to eliminate any risk, set up entities to back the loans called “credit swaps”. The credit swaps guaranteed repayment of the loans if the borrowers defaulted, essentially giving investors all the benefits of risk — high payments– with none of the actual risks. These credit swaps were fraudulently presented as some kind of magical black box which could never fail to produce bunnies, when, in fact, they were never responsibly vetted by any authority. It was the duty of the government to vet these instruments– it failed.

These funds spread like wildfire throughout the financial industry until nobody even knew who was really holding what. When the mortgage bubble burst and housing prices began falling catastrophically in the U.S., buyers started defaulting on their loans in massive numbers, bleeding the magical system dry, and sucking up all of the liquidity in the entire financial system.

That’s my understanding as far as it goes.

The most frightening thing about the bail-out is the number of people, like Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, who were involved in the original sin who are now involved in the massive attempted “redemption” of the world economy.

Can the same people who steered us into the ice berg rescue the passengers from the life boats?

Much as I would like to lay this at Bush’s feet, it is clear that the era of deregulation began under Clinton and that Bush merely carried on in the same general spirit.

Posted on

The Inauguration and the Fake String Quartet

I just read that the lovely little quartet that performed “Air and Simple Gifts” at Barack Obama’s inauguration faked it. You watched the lovely musicians, elegant, focused, rising to the occasion– you thought. But the music you heard came from a recording that had been made a few days earlier. They finger-synched. They had ear-pieces so they could hear the recording, and then they put on a performance, but the performance was not musical: it was acting.

I am always amazed at the rationales given for cheating. The Chinese said that the little singer was not pretty enough to dance and the Olympics were too important to allow ugliness into the stadium. The people in charge of the inauguration said it was too cold to play, and too important an event to take a chance something going wrong, and allow any musical ugliness’s into the mall.

Even Pavarotti, at a performance in Italy a few years ago, cheated because he had a cold and didn’t want to disappoint his fans. Never mind the people who were disappointed to find out that even Pavarotti is a fake.

I hope most people immediately see through these lies. When we watch a brilliant musician perform, we are impressed precisely because it is difficult to do, and because of the dynamic connection between performer and audience responding to each other in the moment. So someone who successfully performs, live, deserves our respect. Others only want you to believe that they performed live. They want the same applause and respect. They bow and bow and bow– what’s the matter with you? What do you mean “cheating”? I just didn’t want to disappoint my fans.  I say, fuck you.

If it wasn’t fakery of the highest order, why were they trying to make it look like they were performing live? Why not just stand there and bow?

And why on earth, if they were so concerned about the cold, didn’t they just perform live in the White House — in the Oval Office– and then broadcast it to the huge screens on the mall? At a moment of crisis and change, demanding the highest level of inspiration for the American people, Obama’s people cheated. They pretended they could do something they didn’t believe they could really do.

They put on a show loaded with symbolism meaning nothing.

Well, I refuse to give in to this bullshit that someone it is reasonable and good and fair to cheat in public performances.  It is absolutely possible to perform live or to simply do something else if you don’t want to be honest.

[2022-05-09: they did for music what Obama did for progressive politics — faked it.]

The faked musical performance music wasn’t the only thing about the inauguration I didn’t like. The rows of guards dressed in grey overcoats lining the streets called to mind nothing so much as a police state. Rick Warren was boring. Obama’s speech was disappointing– merely “very good” instead of great. The poet played it entirely, decisively, antiseptically safe.

Diane Feinstein was good. She looked like she was having fun up there. I have never liked patriotic hymns of any sort, so Aretha Franklin’s song didn’t move me. The only other part of the inauguration I really liked was the benediction by Rev. Joseph Lawry, who at least put on a little funk and passion and sounded cheerfully unceremonious.

More Fakes: 2011-04

Did you like the tap-dancing in “Riverdance”? The sound was faked. The producers triumphantly chortled: nobody cares.

Turns out that Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) is also a fake, according to “60 Minutes”. The stories he tells in his books and repeats in person, about getting lost on K2, and being kidnapped by the Taliban. False.

Bitter Dobsonites

If you check the James Dobson website, you’ll find that there are at least a few patriotic bible-believing Americans who are so bitter and self-serving that they are unwilling to acknowledge, even on inauguration day, the historic importance of America’s first black president.

Dobson’s proxies, instead, attacked Obama for employing several Clinton-era appointees.

Why on earth choose John Williams, most famous for the theme of “Star Wars”, to compose a piece for this historic inauguration? In his favor, he is American, living, and successful. But were the best parts of the composition the pieces he lifted from Aaron Copland? I would have preferred Tom Waits myself, but that’s just me.

Posted on

Suburbia

I just read an article by Judith Warner in the New York Times that noted how often movies depict the lifestyle of 1950’s suburbia as a hellhole of emotional privation and spiritual desiccation. There are a long list of movies that fit the bill, from “The Hours” and “Far From Heaven” to “Edward Scissorhands” and “Revolutionary Road”, of course. How about “Hairspray”? Andy Warhol’s “Bad”?

She didn’t think it was quite fair. I’m not sure if she actually admired those mythical moms who spent their days cooking and cleaning and plucking their eyebrows and showing up at school “perfectly coiffed” to pick up their children– maybe she should– but she seems to think it’s unfair that we castigate a lifestyle that provided stability, security, and happiness to most people. The movies never tire of ridiculing suburbanites, whether they’re manicuring their hedges or swathing the house with Christmas lights.

The audiences for these films live in suburbs, where they manicure their hedges and put up Christmas lights. And go to movies that ridicule them.

Having acknowledged a measure of hypocrisy in the near-universal (among liberal intellectuals) condemnation of 50’s conformity and materialism, I’m not sure this (Warner’s diatribe) isn’t just another case of the a writer acting as if she had just discovered something that the writers she criticizes had always known and took for granted: that there was indeed a trade-off, and that the material comforts of suburbia are… just what they are: material comforts. Warner acts as if an entire generation has forgotten about how nice it is to have a warm, clean home and meals. Artists, don’t you know, sacrifice these things for the purity of their “art”. But of course, we are only ever shown the successful artist, for whom, we conclude, the sacrifice was worth it. How would it look if, instead, the movies showed us the dismal, depressing lives of the vast majority of wood-be artists, living in poverty and deprivation, for nothing more than the, assumed, personal satisfaction of creating great art?

And she’s right about the note of hypocrisy among the swaths of young, urban professionals who choose to live in the suburbs for the material comforts while entertaining quiet delusions about soulfulness and authenticity being smothered by the spirit of conformity.

Why You Want a War

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Goring

Why You Don’t Want a War

“The drive-through, which accounts for 60 percent of the chain’s business in the United States, was reconfigured to become more efficient.” NYTimes (January 10, 2008)

I didn’t know McDonald’s does 60% of their business through idling carbon emitters. We have a problem. McDonald’s chief executive (Jim Skinner, who looks like a McDonald’s customer) eats at McDonald’s every day.

Posted on

$250 a Seat: Neil Young at the Air Canada Centre, December 2008

What’s with Neil Young charging $250 for the best seats at his concert at the ACC in December? And for this, you get to see his wife sing back-up.

Now it is quite possible that his wife, Pegi, can actually sing. It is also quite possible that she has no particularly remarkable skill in this area, but she is married to the boss. It is possible that it doesn’t really matter to anyone except me.

I recall watching the Neil Young video “Heart of Gold”, shot by Jonathan Demme in 2006. Young had his wife Pegi singing backup alongside Emmy Lou Harris, one of the finest backup singers ever, and a terrific solo artist. Was it just me, or did Emmy Lou seem a bit put out? I think that if I had been Emmy Lou Harris, I would have politely reminded Neil that I had paid more than a few dues in my career and, oh, is that my phone? Oh darn, I guess I can’t make the tour after all.

But then again, Young– who I think is an absolutely terrific song-writer, by the way– has been known to tour and record (in his barn!) with probably the worst back-up band of any front-line rock star of the era: Crazy Horse. I’m sorry– they were just awful.  They really were.  Listen to their recordings: they sound like a below-average bar band.

Sometimes I listen to Bob Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” and wonder what Neil Young would have sounded like with crack accompaniment. Well, all right– we have “Deja Vu” and “Harvest” and “Comes a Time”. There you go: fabulous.