Author: Stagger Lee

So my class ring – the one from grad school, the one I claim, the one that let me down in the first round dammit – is kind of dinged up. I can live with the scratches and dulling, but a good bit of the black enamel on the signet has worn away. And it’s apparently under a lifetime warranty, so I will be able to get it refreshed to good as new with no more than the cost of shipping (and insurance obvs). Only problem is…this leaves me with no way to open beer bottles. (I don’t have the strength in the off hand to use my wedding band. Nor am I willing to switch to twist-offs.) Since there’s exactly zero chance of putting on my undergrad ring (I’m amazed I haven’t thrown it into Mount Doom), that means that I have reverted to….my high school ring.

When I went to pull it out of the humidor last week – where it sits along with my old badge from my first job, my dad’s hunting club patch, the original key to my old Saturn, and some of the other stuff that I’d have to grab first if fleeing a house fire – I was oddly reminded of a Monster.com commercial that ended, “What did you want to be?”

A good question. When I received the ring, I had a notion of what my career path would be like. It deviated within two years, obviously – and for the last decade, it hasn’t been within screaming distance of what I originally expected. But that goes back to the notion that you can’t define yourself by your job – so I looked at what the rest of my life looks like since then. Let’s see: I drive a car that has a sunroof, a good stereo, and well under a hundred thousand miles. And my Walkman has been replaced with something even smaller that holds more songs than I owned on every tape and CD put together at the end of the 80s – and plays movies, makes phone calls, and gets on the Internet almost anywhere. (The what? Trust me, kid, you’ll love it.) I actually have a computer at home. More than one. Macs, at that. If I want to keep the fridge full of Dr Pepper, I can. I own all three Indiana Jones movies and all six (SIX!? Well, yeah…you’ll find out. Just deal) Star Wars movies. There’s ice and water in the fridge door and a disposal in the sink, and the hot water lasts longer than fifteen minutes, and there’s not a parent of mine for 2000 miles in any direction.

And I have friends and comrades and contacts all over America, and I’ve been there. Irish bar in DC, bagel place in Manhattan, fajitas in Nashville, drinks on the parade route in New Orleans, steakhouse overlooking Highway 1 by the Pacific Ocean, a go-to winery in the Napa Valley. I’ve been to the World Series, Mardi Gras, and the Stanley Cup playoffs. I’ve seen major league baseball in 8 different stadiums and owned season tickets for a top-10 college football team. I’ve had three jobs with three different household names. I’ve been a godfather, a University Graduate Fellow, and I’ve been in three weddings – including my own. Yes, I have a girlfriend, who is pretty much everything I would have asked for back then, and who happens to be married to me. And our honeymoon was on another continent.

Half a life ago, the Devil himself could have shown all this to the younger me, and said “for the low low price of one soul, all this can be yours.” And I would have said “Okay.” Without hesitation.

In every way that actually matters, I am who I wanted to be. And it’s a good thing I pulled this ring out, because I need to remember that.

I don’t care what you think of prostitution – these guys should not be on trial, they should be on exhibit.:

So last week I was knocking down sangria at a ridiculous pace in the company of another blogger, with whom I was discussing the problems of modern online life. I think the chain of events started with the matter of Eliot Spitzer and his young lady, followed by the fact that she apparently got herself all over the Internet and already has footage of her cookie on Girls Gone Wild, followed by amazement that kids these days go to eighth base on the first date whereas in our day, you had to invest a year and a half just to get a long lead off second, culminating in amazement that the current generation of teens has no problem with every aspect of their lives being online, which can’t be good for future job prospects…

And she made an excellent point: these kids have grown up with reality TV and tabloid TV, from OJ and Tonya Harding to Monica Lewinsky to Survivor to American Idol to Paris Hilton. Based on that, it is not unreasonable for them to think that anybody can be famous, and it really doesn’t matter what for. Consequently, having your entire life out there on the My Space or the Face Book (SEE HOW I LOOK CURMUDGEONLY) is just one more avenue to accumulating friends and followers and fame. Of a sort.

Which dovetails nicely with another thought I have long had: that technologically, genuine privacy is almost impossible to achieve. You’d have to deal entirely in cash, stay completely off the Internet, go to great lengths to make sure nobody uses your SSN as a unique identifier for your driver’s license or student ID or anything like that. But if you’re a normal person in 2008, you’re leaving a trail of breadcrumbs all through cyberspace, from the DMV to your credit report to your Friendster to that weird website account you opened two years ago, used once and forgot about. And that’s before you add in the influence of government snooping and the fact that most of your communications will pass through a small handful of pipes – AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, the like.

Basically, as Neal Stephenson demonstrated in The Diamond Age, the only fix for the privacy dilemma is not technical, but cultural. Messing about in other peoples’ business has to be not only a crime in law, but a crime in polite society. A snoop and a busybody have to be held in the same regard as somebody who farts loudly in public, or worse. But if people insist on hanging it all out there, it doesn’t work. It’s difficult to respect the privacy of an exhibitionist.

Scott McNeely of Sun famously said “Privacy is dead. Get over it.” Tough to argue that the youth of today haven’t done just that. Which may be a good thing – they may well be equipped to deal with the reality of the future than us. Does that make me some kind of cranky old man?

INT, Easter Sunday Mass…

PRIEST: Any other birthdays?

WOMAN OF ADVANCING AGE: (waves hand)

PRIEST: How old?

WOAA: Twenty-nine!

PRIEST: Happy birthday. Confessional’s open right after Mass.

Remember the name. 27 years old, Venezuelan, hair like an exploded Brillo pad. Handed the controls of the San Francisco Symphony tonight, he conducted Stravinsky’s Firebird like a kid handed a chemistry set, a bottle of Jack Daniels, two old issues of Playboy and a box of Mexican M-80s. Spectacular.

…as if you couldn’t guess, my brackets are officially made of grade-AA, imported 800 thread-count SUCK.

SRSLY.

China Might Bar Tiananmen Broadcasts

I honestly don’t know how a government that insists on maintaining an embargo against a mostly harmless speck of an island off Florida can reconcile that with the fact of massive trade – indeed, massive economic indenturement, to be blunt – to the hugest Communist dictatorship in the world. Yes, Communist. Yes, dictatorship. Just because everydamnthing in this country is made in China, because businesses get moist in their special places at the thought of 1.2 billion future customers, we’re willing to overlook the fact that IT’S A GODDAMNED TOTALITARIAN STATE.

I realize that nobody in this country has a memory longer than last week’s American Idol elimination, but yes, this is a country that was “liberalizing” back in 1989 – right before they machine-gunned the kids asking for democracy. That guy didn’t have a line of tanks waiting to run over him because he missed his quota at the Nike plant. It’s something that none of the last three Presidents seem to be able to wrap their brains around, and I sure don’t expect any of the current crop to grasp it (if we piss off China, who’s going to make all the cheap Wal-Mart shit to try to make our economy lurch forward again?), but this is a fact, and it is indisputable: the leadership in China is, for lack of a better word, evil. I’ma say that again. EVIL. If the Soviet Union was evil, if Saddam Hussein was evil, then a government that eschews democracy, uses its economic power to dampen foreign opposition, sells dangerous weapons to known international bad guys AND suppresses its citizens by force of arms?

If you don’t think that’s the definition of evil, well, you’re welcome to suggest another word, but I will also suggest that you’d be full of shit.

And now, oh look, they’re basically doing what they always do to Tibet…and cutting off the press to make sure nothing mars the pretty pictures from the Olympics. Where the world will turn a blind eye again. Just like always. Massacring citizens, shipping toxins, ravaging huge areas of the country (think Three Gorges) – we’re willing to look past all that, because we need our cheap goods, and maybe one day they might buy them too.

If that’s not a pathetic indictment of us as a country, I don’t know what is. But if we had the balls God gave a gnat, we’d bag the Olympics right now and tell the butchers of Tienanmen Square that they can have their five-ring circle jerk without us, because despite everything, we still really do care about promoting democracy. I’m not waiting, though.

You want to chant “Overrated”? Fine. Chant away.

4 teams from the SEC East made the tournament. 3 of them going out in the first round. And having never led, never tied, and generally shit the bed all the way through the game, Vanderbilt – with 10 minutes to go and having cut it to 7 – basically laid down and died. Uncontested dunks in the halfcourt, fumble turnovers by unguarded players – the Commodores basically quit on the game.

Well, fuck them Commodores. No, that’s not a typo. FUCK THEM. I can accept losing. I will NOT accept quitting. And to trail by 12 at the half and ultimately lose by 21 is a fucking disgrace to the uniform. They quit. They gave up. And when Siena gets waterboarded in the next round, it will be obvious to the world just how incredibly overrated we were.

Okay, so having laid down the parameters in part 1, let’s look at where things are right now.

(Continued after the jump, or just clicky clicky)

Continue reading “Hmmmmm, part 2”

It’s a favored concept among economists, especially conservative ones, this notion of moral hazard. Basically, the argument is that if you are insulated from the consequences of your foolish decisions, you have no incentive to avoid them. Think of it in terms of Britney-Lindsey-Paris: if you catch an STD or seven, you can get all the drugs you need. If you drive your Jag into a pole while tanked on Grey Goose, you can go to tennis prison for a week. If you’re whacked out on grass and pills and God knows what else, there’s always a VIP suite at Betty Ford waiting for you. No matter what, you never have to land on your ass.

P.J. O’Rourke, back when he had his fastball, had the perfect term for this: “the Whiffle Life.” It came to him after he spent a night with the DC police at the height of the crack epidemic when they raided and busted a teenaged drug dealer at his roach-infested house, came home the next day, and found out one of his friends had a kid on drugs and was trying to get the kid on the “treatment track” rather than the “punishment track.” (An aside: everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, should read “A Parliament of Whores,” PJ’s landmark book about the American system of government – from the 3 branches to implementation issues to the ultimate responsibility in a democracy. I would have used it as the textbook for PSCI 101 if I’d stayed in my old profession.)

So anyway, a bunch of stock traders get wacky on the junk and start pouring money into crazy financial instruments built on unsound lending practices and borderline-deranged notions of investment, and as a result, they wind up holding the bag when the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Their investors are baying for blood, the value of the company is in freefall, and guess how big a splat it makes? None. Because at the last second, Uncle Sam is there to throw a $30 billion mattress under them.

Now everyone will go on and on about how it had to be done, you can’t let a major financial institution collapse, the economy is in a precarious state, blah blah blah. I’m not having it. Lassiez-faire capitalism, market economy at its purest, relies at heart on the immortal words of the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

Buy the ticket, take the ride.



If you loaded your investors’ money into securitized subprime mortgages and suddenly found yourself staring at a billion-dollar shortfall, whose fault is that? Nobody is obligated to save your ass. Now that you’ve climbed up there, it’s a hell of a lot higher than you thought, ain’t it? But not if Uncle Sugar is waiting with the parachute, because even if we have to cut interest rates five times and kindle the kind of inflationary pressure that hasn’t been seen since Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter were asking “what’s your 20, good buddy?”, we’re not going to let you hit the ground, because you’re a vital part of the American economy and must be preserved. It’s not like you were a bad person or anything – you’re too white and too rich for that.

That’s what we’ve come to in our society. There is a threshold line, which I shall call…the Whiffle Line. Above that line you get to live the Whiffle Life. You are completely free from the consequences of your actions. Somebody is always there to bail you out, and you can go on your way just as you always have without ever having to change a thing.

But God help your ass if you’re not above the line.