Book Review: Catch-22

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

This is a book about death. At its best and brilliant, the book is about death. Yes, it's funny at times. And there's the whole catch-22, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't thing. But, really, it's about death. Witness the following snippet:

Man was matter [...] Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit is gone, man is garbage [...] Ripeness was all.

The narrative of Catch-22 has an oddly swirling motion. Events circle around, repeat, expand, and disappear. You wonder if maybe you've read something before, if it has been repeated, or if you are purposefully being made to be confused. One character has deja vu, the others are at best unstable. The climactic scene contained within the book's final pages actually happens, briefly, early on in the storyline. My confusion over all of this is, of course, acerbated because it took me months to read this, only getting through a few pages at a time.

The book, though, is not that good. I give it high marks because, at its core, it is a bit existential and death and violence (in dramatic and humorous forms) permeates the text. The humor was a little lost on me. I like to think that I enjoy absurdity, pure humorous absurdity. What takes place here is pointless, empty absurdity.

The writing itself, does not stand out, unless it is discussing death. In the extended quote below, the books protagonist, Yossarian is considering the way people inside a hospital were safer than those outside:

The didn't explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn't drown or get struck by lightening, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that trick now-you-see-me-now-you-don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a woosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feel per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like a paca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

The paragraph, speeds, itself accelerating towards the vivid imagery that, again, hints at something that will reappear much later in the book.

I can knock another one of those "great books" off my list, now, but I'm happy to have read it. I sometimes found myself astounded by what I read, and at other times I wondered about the point of it all.

With whom do you "share" your home?

The Wall Street Journal article this morning on the apparent suicide of Freddie Mac's CFO begins with the following statement:

Authorities recovered the body Wednesday of Freddie Mac's acting chief financial officer after an apparent suicide in the home he shared with his wife and young daughter.

Later, the article states:

Fairfax County police, responding to a 911 call at 4:48 a.m., found Mr. Kellermann's body in the basement of the home he shared with his wife, Donna, and 6-year-old daughter, Grace, in the Hunter Mill Estates subdivision in a Washington, D.C., suburb.

What is this "shared" nonsense? I've shared places with roommates; I live in this house with my family.

I know it's a sad and possible sordid story here, but this "sharing" thing really jumped out at me. It makes it sound like he was sleeping on the couch or in the guest room or something.

Going Public

I am not a good friend. I am not good at staying in touch. In some ways the people of my past stay fixed in that past. They exist for me as only memories of that era. I rarely bring those people forward with me. This is one of the reasons the whole idea of Facebook, of going public, makes me a little nervous.

In some ways I think I'm afraid of worlds colliding. The man I am today doesn't necessarily jive with who I have been in the past. Maybe I'm embarrassed now of who I once was, or maybe I'm embarrassed of who I am now from the perspective of who I once was.

I am 'the man' now. I work a 9-to-5, I'm married, and I have kids. Heck, I even live in the suburbs. I'm not the rebel I once was, sure, but I'm not nearly as miserable as I used to be. In fact, I am quite happy.

There are risks in reconnecting, but it is not like I've been in hiding. I've been writing a blog for something like four years. A Google search will find me pretty quickly. Actually reaching out to people, as Facebook creatively requires, risks bringing up all of those things from the past, all of those traumas and dramas. There is a lot in my past that I'd rather not revisit, no matter how I feel about the people involved.

Who I am today, though, is a result of all that happened before. I may now be an MBA candidate, but I also have an MFA in Creative Writing. I may have a good job in corporate finance, but I also finished writing a novel (still unpublished and not even yet submitted) last summer. I may spend what little free time I have playing with my children, but I also spent years drinking too much and playing in bands. I may be happily married now, but I spent years either pining or having my heart broken by women.

I am venturing forward into a strange virtual world of social networking and at the same time I am venturing into my own past, opening up boxes that had been closed and tucked away. Maybe now, today, I can be a good friend--at least, virtually.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Damon-Garr/1590769401

Why I Don't Care about AIG: Outrage and Indifference

We live in hyperbolic times. Extreme reactions are the mode of the day. Everything is the "worst." Everyone has something to be angry about. Me? I couldn't care less.

This whole AIG mess is a disappointment, but it has been since Day One. In some ways it's like watching a friend with a drinking problem get himself into trouble again. Maybe you could be upset about it the first time something similar happened, but when you find out that he's used the money you lent him to buy more booze, you should not be surprised. Or outraged.

Who should I be angry with? AIG and the poor sap the government (we) put in charge? The government officials who "didn't realize" that they had bonuses to pay out? The derivative traders who took the irrational risks in the first place and got us into this whole mess? The new administration who wasn't even in place when we wrote the company the first check? Or Chris Dodd or Barney Frank?

None of them. I can't bring myself to be mad at any of them. Maybe it's because I have other things to worry about. Maybe because I think there are more fundamental problems with our economy than AIG paying out retention bonuses with our money. I now think we should never have got involved. Though there are problems in that.

The question in my mind is How big is too big to fail? Letting Lehman Bros go under spooked the market and we haven't yet recovered (I blame Hank Paulson for this--he, ex-Goldman Sachs, seemed happy to help out his friends, but when someone he didn't like was in trouble, he said "screw 'em"). So maybe letting AIG, who is responsible for insuring a lot of the debt out there, go under would be a bad idea. And I'll definitely agree that there's moral hazard in all of this. It leads to irrational risk taking. If I keep bailing my drunk friend out of jail, when does he ever learn to shape up?

Couldn't we have said that AIG was too big? Couldn't we have forced them to sell off or just dissolve the division that had put them in this position? Why just say, here you go, here's a big check, and in exchange we'll take a stake in this mess of a company?

But we haven't learned the 'too big to fail' lesson yet. When Merrill got into trouble, we pushed Bank of America into taking them, making them bigger in the process. I understood the theory for all of the bail outs at the time, but I'm ready for a little creative destruction. We have a banking and investment system that is all screwed up. They're all tangled up and twisted around, with no one paying for the risks they've taken.

And sure I could be mad at CNBC and all the cheerleaders telling us to buy and buy, all the people saying the market was going up so things must be great, the economy is strong while out in the real world things were turning sour. The media issue is separate. There should be no mistaking that CNBC or the Wall Street Journal is on the side of business. That's your mistake if you thought otherwise.

Really, I'm disappointed. One would have thought that someone would have realized earlier that using lent money to pay huge bonuses was not a good idea. One would have thought that taking a majority stake or any large stake would have given us a seat at the table. One would have thought that the government officials and legislators would have had the best interest of all of us in mind. One would have thought that there were people around who were smart enough to figure out how to get us out of this mess. One would have thought we'd have known better to believe any of this was true. I'm disappointed--with us.

Mass. Wal-Mart customer finds teeth in wallet

Mass. Wal-Mart customer finds teeth in wallet

FALMOUTH, Mass. – A customer shopping at a Wal-Mart for a wallet claims he found something that definitely didn't fit the bill: human teeth. Police say the man found 10 human teeth Saturday when he unzipped a compartment in the wallet. One tooth had a filling.
The customer turned the wallet and the teeth over to employees at the Falmouth store but left without giving his name.
Police investigating the incident told The Cape Cod Times that the teeth belong to an adult, but since there was no blood or gum tissue on the teeth, they would be unable to perform DNA tests.
A Walmart spokeswoman said the company believes it was an "isolated incident," but will investigate.

Mmmm...okay?

Cheever in the WSJ

As you can tell, I read just about nothing besides the Wall Street Journal these days. Blame it on working too hard and studying too much. Trying to stay up to day takes up what little I have left. Nevertheless, I read a good article today made me want to read. I'm really read... fiction.

David Propson, editor of The Week, uses the publication of The Library of America John Cheever complete novels and collected stories and a new biography as an occasion to revisit Cheever. My own reading of Cheever has been limited, though the big Pulitzer-prize-winning short story collection sits on my shelf and on my reading list. From my suburban perch, the article makes Cheever's study of suburbia sound like something I ought to be reading.

His subjects were the hung-over train commuter, the pill-popping analysand, the indefatigable bed-hopper. Their habitat was the pretty suburban house, the swimming pool, the cocktail party and the bomb shelter -- a habitat only recently erected atop the bucolic land that Cheever adored. They purchased groceries to the strains of Muzak Mozart and ate fast food from "Smorgorama and Giganticburger stands."
...
Cheever's suburbanites aren't stuffed-shirt fogies but shallow hedonists who refuse to grow up. Marriage, far from being a repressive institution, is a sprawling and unpredictable terrain. The extramarital affairs of his male protagonists end in catastrophe, or simply end. Conformity sometimes seems to be the threat, but quite as often it's just one of two evils. People's own unruly natures endanger their happiness, just as weeds creep up the lawn. His characters sense the precariousness of the civilization they've cobbled together and cling to it all the more.

Like I said before about Lee Siegel's idea of suburbia, Cheever's is also one that is hardly recognizable today. Gone are the swimming pools and cocktails, replaced instead by beer and kiddie pools. This is middle class suburbia, sprawl, and malls, and Starbuck-ed neuroses. Today's suburbia deserves the same sort of study. And Cheever deserves another read.

The End of the Rocky Mountain News

One Sunday morning, when I was probably 12 or 13 years old, my parents sent me out to buy the Sunday paper. From where we lived in suburban Aurora, Colorado, there were not a lot of options—not a lot of close options—for buying a paper. There were a couple of newspaper machines around, but other than that, your only option was 7-11.

I headed out with my 50 cents on my bike to one of two area 7-11s. The one I was headed to was probably a mile and half away from home. The benefit of this one was that it didn’t involve any major hills. The other was downhill all the way there, but coming home would have been difficult.
I spent a lot of time on my bike as a kid and I was pretty reckless. So, when I came to a stoplight, it didn’t matter much that it was red. As long as it was clear then I was going to go. At one red light I thought it was clear.

I was barely into the intersection when I was struck by a car. I wasn’t hit terribly hard, but there was in the street, myself and my bike half underneath the car, with two old ladies from inside the car standing over me. Why these two old ladies were speeding to church, I don’t know, but I knew that I was in the wrong and my first interest—before even checking for injuries—was fleeing the scene.

The wheels of the bike still turned and no bones protruded from my body, so I was out of there. At the 7-11, I checked myself out. My shoulder hurt, my knee was scraped, and I was pretty sure that I’d hit my head on something. I bought the paper anyway, and headed home maybe a little more carefully—the whole while imagining that I was suffering from broken bones I wasn’t aware of or bleeding in my head that would eventually kill me.

The paper I went out to get that morning: the Rocky Mountain News.

Today, the Rocky Mountain News has issued its last paper. Lord knows it is a hard time for newspapers, but the Rocky was competing in a two-paper town while sharing a Joint Operating Agreement with its competitor. This situation was untenable. The Rocky got the wrong end of the deal and it was probably doomed from the day it signed the agreement.

It was the paper I grew up with. The comics I knew were in the Rocky, not the Denver Post. When I looked for my first job, it was in the help wanted section of the Rocky. It had a comfortable tabloid format, instead of the cumbersome broadsheet format. I didn’t even know that the broadsheet was the standard format for newspapers until I got older.

So, now Denver becomes a one-newspaper town. A single editorial page, a single sports section. It’s a sad day for the loss of a 150-year-old institution, for the loss of choice and a variety of voices. It feels almost like getting hit by a car.

Fiction and the Economic Crisis

So, we're in the middle of a deepening economic crisis, with the Dow losing 45% in the last 15 months, and with around 3 million jobs lost in the last five months. Personally, my own industry is, as an article on the industry stated yesterday, "running off a cliff." While the pain isn't hitting everyone, the economists are scared. The consensus seems to be that we might at least stop the slide downward by year's end, though the job losses will continue to mount in the meantime, making the prospect of a recovery even further in the future. Some think it may well be a decade before we get to the same level of growth we were seeing before this whole crisis hit.

Crisis is always interesting from an artistic perspective. What will the American fiction of the next few years look like? What sort of country will it describe? First, there will be a lot less of it published. With the big publishing houses shuttering divisions, and book stores struggling to keep their doors open, there will be fewer new books. These changes--this crisis--are subjects for another conversation.

The books being written now could very well describe a country in turmoil, lost in a mix of hope and pessimism. Just when things looked up, like the country might be restored and the outlook brighter, greed at every level has driven us to this precipice. And if it's not us falling over that edge, it's the 43,000 workers at GM who will lose their jobs this year, the 10,000 at Boeing. Suddenly, we look at our credit card bills in horror. What was once the normal way of operating now has proved to be incredibly reckless. Our 401(k)s? Don't even look at them. And add a few more years to your planned retirement age. And the mortgage? Even if you're making your payments, knowing that your house has lost 20% of its value makes you question the reasonableness of the purchase.

Thinking about losing your home, though, is as frightening as the prospect of losing your job. Our identities are wrapped up in these things. How lost is a person who has lost either, or both?
How would such a crisis shift his/her perspective? In what way would he overcome?

It is hard to argue against the powerful notion of the American Dream because it is so much a part of our psyche. But we know it fails at times. We know that hard work and the desire for more doesn't save us from ruin. Alternatively, it seems like the country has developed a sense of entitlement. As if we deserve good things to come our way. And if they don't, by God, someone had better step in and make things right. It's at every level. The bank who expects not to suffer when the risks they've been taking have led them to near-collapse. And it's the home buyer who bought well out of his/her price range with a questionable loan who now wants the government to step in and stop the bank from foreclosing.

All of these things are bound to manifest themselves in the fiction we read in the next few years. Maybe these novels will moralize, tells where we went wrong--as if we don't know. Maybe they will offer hope, they will show us an American Spirit that is truer and more noble than the capitalist American Dream. Or maybe they will show a state of ruin in which we will stay and in which we had damn well better find our way, or perish.

Cato protests govt spending in full-page WSJ ad

I suppose it is no surprise that the Cato Institute would oppose government spending. That it would choose to protest government stimulus in a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, is a little more surprising. What is really worth noting is that they state, "Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth," and then support the statement with a long list of people who support that statement. My question for the Cato Institute: Where are all the Yale and Harvard economists on this issue?

The ad begins with a quote from the President, "There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump start the economy." Then Cato begins their ridiculous disagreement: "With all due respect,Mr.President,that is not true.

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

The undersigned include two members of the faculty of my not very prestigious undergraduate alma mater, Metropolitan State College of Denver. Not exactly A-class economists.

Let's look at their arguments. I do think that most economists would agree that the government needs to spend, if no one else will. When things seize up, as they have, the government is the only one with the purse big enough, and the responsibility to move the economy along by spending.

What led to delays in recovery from the Great Depression were attempts to balance the budget which required increased taxation. And Japan's "Lost Decade"? Government inaction was the culprit there. The belief that things would get better without intervention was the problem then, and it is the reason the US government is choosing to act as quickly as possible. Many economists will tell you that if recovery comes swift, it will be in large part because of fed action.

Now, to the belief that tax cuts cure all, we know it's not true. I'd love to shed my "tax burden" as well, but reducing taxes is not going to get us out of this hole. Tax cuts for individuals tend to be saved. How much of last year's stimulus checks actually got spent? And tax cuts for businesses are not going to encourage businesses to hire or increase output when the demand does not exist. It is estimated that every dollar of government infrastructure spending creates $1.59 in GDP growth, while tax cuts generate $1.01. And considering the lack of consumer confidence, expect most of that to be saved.

I tend to support Cato on a lot of issues because of my own libertarian leanings, but we will not find a way out of this problem by telling the government to get out of the way. My question for my Metro State economists, John Cochran and Kishore Kulkarni: What percentage of tax cuts would actually improve economic performance?

R.I.P John Updike

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irisies, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

Book Review: All Aunt Hagar's Children

All Aunt Hagar's Childen by Edward P. Jones

This short story collection may have been the only thing I’ve read by Jones, but from this alone I am tempted to rank him among my favorite writers. In a way, his writing reminds me of Alice Munro. He weaves a character’s rich history with a voice that expresses a character’s isolation even among many others. He writes in a language that is comfortable to read, from sentence structure to tone. The characters themselves are rich and varied, even though they often suffer a plight that I could never understand.

I’ve often been intimidated by African-American writing, believing the experiences being described would be entirely alien to me. I’ve come to realize there’s something in the alienation of the African-American experience with which I associate. There is something in it that is similar to Céline. There something existential in all of it.

I’d read “A Rich Man” in, I think, the Best American series, and though the story didn’t necessarily linger and leave me haunted the way some stories have, I knew then that I wanted to read more. Seeing this collection along with Jones’s novel The Known World receive accolades only reinforced that I would need to read Jones. I was not disappointed. It took me a long time to get through because of other obligations, but flipping back through the stories, I’m reminded of their qualities. They are specific and gritty, fantastical and surreal, and all the time heartfelt.

One of the things linking most of the stories is Washington, DC. The city is nearly a character in the stories. It is a place where some long to go, and a place where others have come. Jones describes the city’s streets and neighborhoods, from the time where there was nothing across the Potomac in Virginia but pastures, to the near present. After reading these stories I feel like I know the city better than some of the people I know.

These are good stories. This is a good collection. I’m tempted to rank it right up there with Rock Springs.

Schumpeter and reading fiction

I took time this weekend to actually read some fiction. Sure, I had other things I should have been doing. It’s just been itching in me. I see it in the way I think. I need to move beyond the tangible randomness of numbers, symbols, equations. School is taxing, zaps my mental energy, but it leaves full parts of my brain unexercised. The closest thing to what I was used to through the rest of my schooling was reading Schumpeter. When the professor passed around copied pages of an old text, I felt a warm familiarity. So many previous assignments came in this exact form. And even then the text called for re-reading, pondering, questioning. Things notable absent from my recent studies.

The question in Schumpeter is the notion of creative destruction, the idea that capitalism is a constantly changing form, ever evolving as even great companies need to be destroyed and rebuilt. He argues, like Marx, that capitalism has an inevitable end. He explained, in ways I had not yet seen, that socialism is seen as a replacement for capitalism, its natural successor. And while I see some parts of socialism as a natural evolution from strict capitalism, I now understand why capitalists fight so hard against socialism. It is the antithesis to the form they believe is best. Any move to socialism means a further erosion of capitalism and a step closer to its demise.

Schumpeter doesn’t see capitalism as inherently flawed in the same way as Marx. It just is not static. It changes, requiring the biggest and most formidable capitalist institutions to collapse in order to be rebuilt. Maybe that explains some of what is going on these days. At least reading this reminds me that I’m much more comfortable with theory than I am with calculating aggregate demand curves or with linear regression.

Hot Wheels, fate, and family

One of the best things about being a parent is seeing my own children playing with the same toys I played with as a child. The day I pulled out of the closet the box of Hot Wheels cars I played with as a boy, my children sat with me as we looked at every car. There were ooohs and aaahs, and woo-woo-woo for every one that resembled an ambulance, fire truck or police car.

Looking at each car I remember the sort of characters each had, which ones my brother and I would choose as a representative of ourselves. It was while playing with these cars as a child that I thought about the person I might become. Sometimes I chose the muscle car or race car, sometimes it was the Mercedes or the tractor-trailer. Doing this I thought about whom I might become, what fate might determine for me, what choices I might make that would lead to such a fate.

To now see my children playing with the same cars, the pick-up truck that I still remember taking out of its packaging, the hot rod painted with Testors model paint, the Cadillac ambulance, it really does something to my heart. I wonder what fate they’ll imagine for themselves, and what their future will deliver.

An Unexamined 'Burb: Lee Siegel and "Revolutionary Road"

I live in the suburbs. I do it for my children. I want them to live where other children live, where they can play in the front yard, on green grass, under broad leafed trees, where other children will come to play, where the schools are good, where the streets are safe.

I have, though, lived elsewhere. I have lived where drunks vomit and sleep on the curb, where fights break out in the street, where drug deals transpire below my window, where shootouts send bullets to pierce my windows.

Despite these contradictions, my detest for the suburbs continues to this day. It has its origins in my youth. I lived in the suburbs from the time I was eight until I was old enough to run from them. Primarily, I saw my own neighborhood as the embodiment of misplaced ideals. Where the uniqueness of souls was given over to the same uniformity as the tract homes. Where football games were more important to a fulfilling life than art in any form. The suburbs represented sprawl, by man's desire to pave over nature, erect strip malls, and design away the randomness of life.

Lee Siegel, in an article from this weekend's Wall Street Journal, "Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs: America's long artistic tradition of claiming spiritual death by station weekend," uses the film version of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to minimize my detest of the suburbs as intellectual snobbery and classism. Siegel explains, "With the growth of suburban towns, the liberal American intellectual now had a concrete geography to house his acute sense of outrage."

I won't defend the film. I haven't seen it. Ironically, or maybe typically, it's not playing anywhere near me. I will, though, say that Siegel's interpretation of the novel is symptomatic of someone extremely defensive of the suburbs. Perhaps, pathologically so.

He describes the novel's "fatal deficiency":

Frank and April's total lack of talent or substance makes their ultimately thwarted attempt to leave the suburbs for Paris less the stuff of tragedy than irritating farce.

Or more succinctly, "In "Revolutionary Road," the two principal characters are brought down by lawn sprinklers and station wagons."

The Wheelers are not brought down by the suburbs. Their undoing comes from the notion that they are better than their surroundings. They are not swallowed by it and stripped of their souls. Their fatal flaw is intellectual, cultural hubris. They believed they would some day escape the soulless conformity of their surroundings for fashionable Paris salons. Never did they realize that they lacked the talent or capacity necessary.

The novel is not set on Revolutionary Road as an excuse to excoriate suburban standards. It is an examination of how one's imagination can lead to ruin. Siegel cites, and idealizes, John Cheever's suburbanism. Of his story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," Siegel writes that "life's complexity and surprise follow you everywhere, even over the city line, across the river and into the suburban trees. You wonder why the creators of the film 'Revolutionary Road' are blind to such an obvious fact of human existence."

What Siegel fails to realize is that the suburbs where much of America lives are not like Westchester. It is not the place where the well-to-do have escaped the dangers confines of the city for tree-lined streets. The suburbs I know are those of the working and middle classes. It is where those of even meager means attempt to grasp a piece of the American dream. The suburbs are detestable for this displaced notion, not the result of some displaced envy.

The suburbs I know are not those of John Hughes movies, the Stepford Wives, or the "Real Housewives" franchise that Siegel cites. Hollywood does not hate the suburbs, not my suburbs. My suburbs remain, sadly unexamined. And Siegel's idea of the suburbs demonstrates his own regional snobbery.

MFA-MBA: An Ethical Dilemma

When a literary-type enrolls in an executive MBA program, an evaluative eye naturally remains open. I may be doing my best to learn, but a part of my brain remains open, judging, assessing, characterizing what is happening around me. And though the seriousness of it, the workload and the nature of what we're doing, consumes my energy, I still want to write about it.

Here, I am faced with a dilemma that is at least ethical, but goes beyond that. Writing publicly about my experience in the EMBA program is tricky. I think the blog is the perfect forum because it allows me to debate things openly. Not only do I want to write about my experience, but I also want to get into what is being covered in the courses. As well as what is going on in the real world.

My instinct for self-preservation tells me this is risky. Writing critically about the program, the faculty, or other students might get in trouble. It's not as if my name isn't all over this blog. If I fail to mention the name of the college, or the name of any other student or professor that at least might help me avoid any pesky Google searches.

So, I'll tread lightly, I suppose.

What I'm Thankful For...

New Yorker Fiction: “Ghosts” by Edwidge Dandicat

Edwidge Danticat’s story “Ghosts” in the Nov. 24 edition of the New Yorker focuses on a young man living in Haiti among slums and gangsters. Danticat’s style is more reportage than description. Told in third person, the story avoids delving too deep in the mind of the protagonist, Pascal, or giving us any real description of setting. We are given facts, some thoughts, and little else.

The story does, though, go deep. Pascal, a young man trying to find his way and avoid the lifestyle that surrounds him, falls into the fantasies that trap many of us. Dreaming of hosting his own radio show, he imagines,

It would be controversial at first, but soon people would tune in by the thousands. A kind of sick voyeurism would keep them listening, daily, weekly, monthly, however often he was on. People would rearrange their schedules around it. They wouldn’t be able to stop discussing it.

The fact-based style doesn’t illuminate or excite. The reader may be interested in finding out what happens, but he isn’t captivated. Only near the end does Danticat open the story up some, stepping away from the action, to go deeper, with Pascal again fantasizing about, this time, a new radio program:
He would open with a discussion of how many people in Bel Air had lost limbs. Then he would go from limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family—siblings, parents, children—and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor.

“Ghosts” tells of a life, a world about which I know nothing, which I can hardly understand. It does come close to helping me comprehend the problem.

WSJ Editorial Throws Cold Water on Geithner Nomination

After the Dow rallied nearly 500 points on Friday after the leak that President-elect Obama would nominate Timothy Geithner to be the new Treasury Secretary, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided take an ideological view of the choice. Instead of providing the reliable, business-centric view of the economy and Obama's choice, the Wall Street Journal seemed to think it should contradict the market, who obviously approved of the choice (as I write this Monday morning, the market is up another 170 points).

Demonstrating the skewed take on the current situation, the editorial reads, "The uncertainty over Obama's team and its direction has itself been fueling the lack of confidence, so we're glad to see the President-elect getting on with the show." Undoubtedly, a period of transition affects confidence, but when the current administration decides to sit on the sidelines during a crisis, it hardly helps anything.

I expect to disagree with the WSJ editors when it comes to politics, but it is disappointing to see the editors' political ideology to interfere with their ability to see things clearly and offer the proper reassuring opinion necessary in the current economic situation.

How does it sound? President-Elect Obama

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the next President of the United States. I am, of course, pleased that the man I backed from the beginning actually won the election (that hasn't happened in many, many years), but while watching him come out to deliver his victory speech I was proud of our country. Much has been made in the last few days about the significance of his race, but it does say something to me personally about who we are that the majority of us voted for him. During the primaries, realizing that I really like Obama, I thought to myself that he never had a chance. "He's a black guy with a funny name; what chance does he have?" Yet, here we are.

I could talk too about what this means politically, what it tells me, but there are a hundred journalists out there slicing up the data and making pronouncements about the state of the country. It is different, for me, to feel that a majority of people have come around to my point of view.

And what a weight is lifted, having the election behind us. I didn't realize how much stress the whole thing was causing. Now we get to get on to real policy issues, the meat of the matter. This, really, is what I like. I could even go on about the decision Obama has made in the last few days and the implication of them, but there are others out there, who watch this even closer than I do, who could do a better job of it. All I should say here is that I'm pleased and proud about how the whole thing has worked out.

Our Moment in History

(I originally wrote this on 8/31/08 and meant to post it immediately thereafter. It's less timely now, but still worth posting.)

This week we were witness to an historical event and we must remember this moment. When Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for President, he became the first person of African descent to be a major party nominee. I am pleased with his nomination for many reasons that having nothing to do with this historical fact, but this fact may tell us something about where we've come as a country. It was not all that long ago that blacks didn't even have the right to vote in this country. And by itself that was a long way to travel from the time before the Civil War when they had no rights at all.

Of course, it cannot be said that he nominee's race is not an issue. In the primary, as it will be in the general election, many voted, if not primarily at least in part, on race. There are still those who believe that black man should know his place or think that his race means that his politics are suspect. This thinking is abhorrent, but it does not please either when I hear of people voting for him simply because he is black. (Funny how hard it is to right that word.)

While I suspect the eagerness of some to see a man succeed despite the societal hindrances of his race, I want certain things out of my President that have not a thing to do with his or her race.

Serendipitously, I'm currently reading Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children, a brilliant collection of short stories by an African American author. Here, the race only matters because the race maters for many of his characters, despite my ability to forget their race or the author's. And as much as the press has been exercised in discussions of race and the biographies of the Obamas, I've been especially tuned to the struggles particular to their race. I was stunned to hear commentators seeming to learn for the first time about a family's move from the south to attempt a new life in the industrial north. Apparently, they've never read any African American literature. Makes me wonder how they would react to reading Invisible Man. And what stereotypes would they form after reading it?

Despite Thursday night's event taking place here in Denver, I like most people watched on TV as Obama accepted the nomination and delivered a speech on America's Promise with great pride. I was not only proud that the candidate who I supported during the primaries was actually going to be the party's nominee, I was also proud of my country. Now, I want him to win and such a win will say a great deal about where we are as a country. Winning the nomination, though, out of a field of candidates whose views are not altogether disparate tells me much about where we are today. And I'm pleased and prideful to be a witness to this moment in history.