Thursday, February 26, 2009

Aging white suburban woman reflexively lapses into language patterns of the Baltimore underclass

I love The Wire, the HBO series, and I love watching great series on DVD, but I’m compulsive and once I get started, I can’t stop. Also it gets me talking like Bodie.

This is a problem near the end of winter in Chicago, permapiles of black snow dotting the parking lots and the hope of spring not quite evident. Start watching a depressing (though wonderful) collection of stories and you can get caught up. It gets embedded in your brain, in your whole way of thinking.

It’s easy for me to slip into the world, since I operated on the periphery of one a lot like it 30 years ago as one of those dreaded community organizers in St. Louis, a city very like Baltimore: old, a little southern, beaten-down. I was a community involvement coordinator for the St. Louis Public Schools working in the voluntary desegregation program, part of a consent decree that preceded court-ordered busing in 1980. The Magnet School District office was located in an old elementary school at Pendleton and Enright, something like the cast-off digs of the major case squad on the show.

I had to do an intervention on myself on Sunday after a 12-hour streak. I made myself get up, and I ran through some of the things I should be doing around the house. Talking to myself, I said, “OK, I need to take the clothes out of the washer. Then I gotta dry that shit up.”

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The ‘oh god’ echo

Count on the blogosphere to remark on interesting errors. Here’s the blog reaction to the MSBNC host or producer whose mic was open as Bobby Jindal was strolling into the shot for the Republican response to the president’s address to Congress last night. It is output from a Google blog search feed.

Later: The next day it came out it was Chris Matthews. Gotta say he voiced my own thought on the staging.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Public discourse about the economy: It’s a blusterfuck

I am sarah-palin-ignorant when it comes to the economy. So are most media talkers and politicians.

The talkers and politicians pretend to know; you can tell how hard they are trying to sound schooled and certain by the way they thrust out their chins. TV talkers have to sound confident if they want to be invited back to the show. Politicians have to sound confident if they hope to take advantage of the crisis so they can trot out longheld political ideologies and try to get them implemented. Both parties are doing this.

Few are admitting we’re through the looking glass now, and I’d like to see a little more of what the philosphers union was calling for in Hitchhikers: some admission that there are broad areas of doubt and uncertainty. I’d trust them all more.

The president and the treasury secretary are allowed one measure of over-confidence each, because it’s actually part of their job descriptions to boost consumer confidence—“only thing we have to fear is fear…” and all that rot.

Think about it. Even the real experts have to question whether it’s possible to predict the outcome of any given countermeasure when there’s no exact case study to draw from.

I picture the policymakers as engineers seated before a giant economy console. The main big fader in the center is the Federal Reserve interest rate control and it’s already been slid all the way to zero. They might as well just snap the knob off so they can concentrate on blindly fiddling with the other controls, see if one of them has some interesting effect one way or another. 

I think that’s what’s happening, and I’d actually feel a little more confident if the experts would admit it. As for the cock-sure amateurs, I’ve resolved to chalk them up as trolls, especially those still holding on to deregulation after all that’s happened.

Afterthought: Jay Rosen said something on Bill Moyers’ show two weeks ago about how the media prides itself above all on savviness. Knowing the score is the currency of pundits and politicians, too, especially if it’s predictive. Watching everybody claiming to know What Will Work when it comes to the economy reminds me of everybody knowing for sure What Would Work concerning the surge in Iraq, too. Nobody really knew that either.

After that: Robert Reich doesn’t think anybody knows what to do either.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Wall Street: back up those trucks to our loading docks, please

The Wall Street Journal columnist Steven Pearlstein tears into Wall Street, saying it refuses to be pleased until the government sends tractor trailers full of cash to their loading docks.

I think it is about time to stop watching the ticker as politicians are talking. We’re relying on it, thinking of it as that CNN audience pulsometer shown during campaign debates and it won’t do.

Full clip at MSNBC.com (If your patience will hold out past the 30-second ad. Why don’t advertisers see that the difference between a 10-second and a 30-second pre-roll is an eternity to an online video viewer?)