The running of the bulls

WELL, I didn't go shopping on Black Friday.  I know.  President Bush's quick-fix nostrum for the dark days after 9/11 was to go shopping.   Americans shopped themselves silly before  that solemn hour, and many never stopped until the economic meltdown.  Still, the sight of busting  down doors with the Big Dipper still in view and charging the discount  shelves with the grace of the running of the bulls - that was asking too much of me.  You are looking at the counterculture in me.  I don't consider myself to be an impact player and I can't help you with an economic fix.  Besides,  I still haven't figured out how an iPod works.  

The reports from around the nation suggested the crowds were big, if not entirely profitably satisfying for our retail merchants.  Still worse,  the predawn rush in a Nassau Co. New York Wal-Mart was so violent that a worker inside the store was trampled to death.  Such savagery is not the wholesome side of the  fa-la-la  season.  

As a small-town product, I don't recall a single pre-Christmas season sale (nor, for that matter,  a post-season sale.  The owner of one of two men's stores in town simply packed up the surplus holiday inventory of shirts, ties, etc., and stashed it in boxes to reappear the following year.  And that was during the Great Depression!    Still we are asked to believe that America travels on its retail excesses and patriotism requires us to cripple our credit cards with debt.  

Don't take my word for it.  In one of the most perceptive books that I've read this year, the Boston University historian Andrew J.  Bacevich (a conservative who can be as grumpy as I am)

is critical of America's dependency on spending to colonize  the world.  His thesis in his The Limits of Power  is simply that Americans are conditioned to spend their earnings with unchallenged conscience because, as the first President Bush asserted: "The American way of life is not negotiable."  Even before  that imperious thought, Bacevich leads us to previous free-spenders, citing  Ronald Reagan as the "modern prophet of profligacy.  The politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption."

So now we are asked to buy Christmas cards with Biblical verses made in China (honest!) as the dollar discount stores knock a dime or two from the stuff they have been selling all year for a cool buck.   It's for the cause.  If you think so, too, then you ought to do the patriotic  thing, as they say, and "shop 'til you drop."   I won't, and it's not negotiable.  

Boning the turkeys

NEWS FROM the front: Ken Blackwell, the guy who ran so poorly against Ted  Strickland for governor in 2006, is reported to be interested in chairing the Republican National Committee.  Wow!  A friendly word to moderate Republicans, Democrats and Palin's Pro-American Party:  Get out of his way and let him have it!  With him around, your workload in electing your own candidates in 2010 will be reduced by at least half.....Speaking of turkeys, Glenn Beck, the newly arrived right-wing ding-a-ling at Fox  (from CNN) says states that object to government bailouts have an absolute right to secede  from the Union.   With some Alaskans of a similar mind,  they should all be reminded that the U.S. is a country (not a continent) where secession has been tried without success.  Nice try, Glenn, if not original!...And speaking of bailouts,  Miriam-Webster's online report has declared "bailout" to be the "word of the year." However, over the course of the current economic remedies,  " flailout"  might have been more appropriate some days.  

Newspapers: The shrinking 'word force'

THE CURRENT issue of Columbia Journalism Review casts more gloom on the newspaper business with the kind of grim figures that won't go away.  Since January 2007, CJR reports, some 2,700 journalists have left their jobs with buyouts.   The figure is doubtless on the low side inasmuch as new rounds of buyouts are being announced these days as often as corporate bailouts.  

The buyout packages vary from newspaper to newspaper regarding the weeks of paid severance and medical benefits.  The Buffalo News, for example, offers no post-employment medical benefits while the New York Times grants eight  months of coverage with 11 years service. 

The picture is much the same for the Beacon Journal and Plain Dealer, which  have already gone through their first stages of buyouts, leaving newsroom employes wondering when layoff notices might appear in their mailboxes to make up for staff reduction quotas not met with buyouts.  The BJ is down to 14 reporters, I'm told, a rip from the days when 40 to 50 reporters arrived daily on the third floor.  The paper, respected for decades for its  pinpoint coverage of classical music, has an awesome  vacuum in the wake of Elaine Guregian's departure for a post with the Cleveland Orchestra.  A source at the paper tells me it's not likely to be filled, leaving a city with a progressive century-old tradition in the performance arts  to grope for  public visibility.  The local enablers  who are trying to uphold that  tradition are dejectedly at a loss to know where to turn.  

Meanwhile, up the road at the Plain Dealer, the staff tension grows as it awaits another axe to fall, perhaps as early as next week.   The paper had presented the newsroom regulars an either/or situation several weeks ago as it set its stage to eliminate 50 jobs.  Twenty five or so staffers accepted buyouts, leaving it up to the front office  to  sever about that many more with layoffs. I'm told it could include some of the ablest bylines, all of whom are members of the American Newspaper Guild ( of which I was a longtime member). In other industries,  laid-off workers might be called back when the business improved.  That's not likely to happen with the victims of newsroom shrinkage.   The owners are quite adept at downsizing, even when their papers are profitable.  So what would encourage them to start  rebuilding their staffs some day if and when the clouds part?  

It's sad, not only for journalists with no future as well as readers who are finding less and less to read in newsprint. Of course, there's the computerized on-line stuff that will lure the modern readers and maybe even the non-readers.  But if there is no one writing a concert review or about the latest exhibit at the museum in the first place, it won't be on your computer either. I would assume that potential on-line writers would like to be paid, too - in cash and health insurance. Yeah,  it's sad. 

Historic rescue plan?

THE TAG on the half-page pictorial ad in this morning's Plain Dealer  is:

             BROWNS HISTORY COMES ALIVE.

It's a start.   

A day with music

I SPENT  much of Saturday  isolating myself from post-election politics and the annual hysteria surrounding yet another Ohio State-Michigan football game.  First stop for our musical odyssey with Nancy was the Regal Theater in Montrose for a wide-screen live telecast from the Met of Berlioz's "Damnation de Faust ".  The work was originally written for a concert performance, morphed into an opera  and has now been staged with overwhelming special effects in mind.  Even those modernists who may hold that opera is intolerably dumb would have sat transfixed for nearly three hours for the montage of artificial images that accompanied the three principal  singers on the  mood-stricken Faust's descent into to hell.  It doubtless is a harbinger of what we may expect in opera as time goes on in the hands of those who take great joy in renovating  the works that have done pretty well for themselves for more than  a century without silhouetted  figures projected on screens, motion-activated birds in flight and human torsos swirling in  turbulent sea water.  

By now, you may have guessed that I didn't leave the theatre in a pleasant mood - as I have on the previous occasions of Met telecasts. The past offerings placed me in the audience at Lincoln  Center  and backstage during the intermissions for  the interviews with the leading singers amid the commotion of stage crews arranging new sets.  In Faust, the sci-fi elements were staged on a laddered five-tier grid in which surrealistic action was projected with computers, infrared cameras and shadowy motion-activated figures as the  singers  pressed forward (thankfully, with great voices) in what is largely a static text.  (All three - Marcello Giordani, Susan Graham and John Relyea - confessed during the intermission interviews that as they faced the audience in their roles they had no idea what was going on behind them.)  Nor did I.

The advance notices (warnings?) of  the production in the New York Times said it offered an "unprecedented  level of technological stagecraft to the house."  Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager responsible for bringing a series of the Met productions  to theaters everywhere,  said the latest  entry was a "kind of hallucination."

I'm sure I will be out of step with those scientific progressives who will change grand opera into something else.  Science over art?  Artful science?  I'm ready for it with my DVDs of the traditional versions.  

Non-traditionalists can stop reading here.  A happier experience was in store at the Akron Symphony Saturday night. Mozart arrived on a cold flurried night with a nimble performance of the composer's "Concerto for Two Pianos"  by two young collaborators, Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky.  Weiss, a Lyndhurst, Oh., native, has been enjoying a lot of positive attention from critics for his inspired playing. Likewise,   Polonsky, who came to America in  1990 from Moscow, has a long list of  accomplishments. Together they made a strong impression  in the cheerful and melodic Mozart piece.  OK, Mozart!  I happen to be one of his big fans.  If that is treason against the modernists, make the most of it.  

 

Marathon masochism

IS THERE anywhere to hide from the 24-hour speculation on whether Barack will name Hillary as secretary of state, or vice versa?  The tele-talkers have interviewed virtually everyone with shoes on the ground in Washington to discuss the pros and cons of such an arrangement.  Among the few who are still missing are Brad Pitt , LeBron James and Sarah Palin, the latter being fully  consumed by a sunrise seance with Ronald Reagan.  I did not stay tuned and have no opinion.    

Back home in Indiana

TO FOLLOW UP on my earlier post about how the Republican Party persists in backing into the future, more evidence from the Bloomberg News  page:  Indiana's  Rep. Mike Pence, the former talk-show host and aspirant to Rush Limbaugh's "great chain of being," has been placed in the critical No. 3 position of House Conference Committee chairman.  Pence, one of the most conservative Republicans in  Congress, will play an influential role in shaping GOP's policy agenda in the new congress and has already indicated his desire to purify his colleagues with the ideology of Ronald Reagan.  Again, may I remind Mr. Pence that McCain and Palin sang the same song with historical elegance and where are they now?  Back in Plato's cave?  

Calculated procrastination?

OHIO AUDITOR Mary Taylor, the lone Republican to survive the Democratic sweep of state offices in 2006, has the look of higher public office in her eyes these days.  Governor?  U.S. Senate? in 2010?   Other than mentioning that she's asked about her political future wherever she goes, she didn't quite respond in her appearance at the Akron Press Club luncheon Thursday.  And when smiling politicians don't discount "rumors,"  as she described them,  you can bet that they are more than rumors and that she will receive countless invitations to speak at high-powered Republican get-togethers in 2009.  Who else, after all,  is available to the state organization in the wake of the GOP slumber parties in Ohio in 2006 and 2008.  She will only say  that she can't predict  where she'll be "One, two, three years from now." Her county enabler and party chairman, Alex Arshinkoff, who attended the luncheon, resorted to the words of his former boss,  the late Ray Bliss,  when asked to define her coy words:  "Ray called it calculated procrastination."  Thank you.

Taylor was co-chairman, along with former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine,  of McCain's losing campaign  in Ohio.  But with that grim experience behind her, I remain puzzled by her remedy for the party's return to parity with the Democrats.   The party, she says, must return to its basic values of "tax relief and job opportunities."  Return?  It seems to me such  party insistence on its core values was cascading from the Republican  megaphones in 2006 and again in 2008 and no more effective than gossip.   Maybe it's  time to look for more imaginative ways to lure voters as the 21st Century races forward.  Except for the never- discouraged  GOP hard-liners, it couldn't hurt. .  

Leave the driving to others

PUT THIS  in the category of, "You can lead some  corporate CEOs to Washington to beg for bailouts of their companies, but you can't make them give up their costly personal entitlements fit for royalty."  That's the ugly moral of an ABC News report that all three princely CEOs of the Detroit automakers flew to Washington in their  companies' luxurious corporate jets.  

Why is that a big deal?  As the ABC report notes, GM's Rick Wagoner, who is seeking $10 to $12 billion to prop up his company, burned up $20,000 of  GM money as the cost of a round trip with his tin cup.  On the other hand, he could have flown forth and back to Detroit, first class, for $837.   Better yet, coach fair on Northwest Airlines, which you and I suffer,  would have been $288. 

Ford's Alan Mulally, paid $28 million,  and his wife have corporate jet perks.  They live in Seattle and Mulally flies home each week end aboard his Ford jet, to spend, I presume, more time with his family.  It's amazing how indifferent they are to spending other people's money, particularly when it is earmarked for their personal comfort and convenience.    

A chameleon returns

I HOPE THE Democrats in Congress knew what they were doing when they agreed to reward Joe Lieberman for his chameleon-like behavior in  this year's presidential campaign.  Whatever deal he made with the Democrats to hold on to his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee  will last only until he finds it convenient to break it.    Lieberman, in turns, has been a peacenik who became a hawk , a Democrat who became an Independent who supported Republican John McCain , and a senatorial candidate in Connecticut who enlisted Barack Obama's support only to betray  Obama as  McCain's slippery-tongued ally with an eye on a big job in a Republican administration that was only a failed dream. 

When it served his purpose Lieberman praised radical Muslim Louis Farrakhan , saying,  "I have respect for him...I admire what Minister Farrakhan is doing."  On the other hand, he found the Rev. Wright to be a political handicap for Obama, one of many ways he went after the eventual  president-elect.   Lieberman's dance mode has been watched over the years by many who find it repugnantly shameful.  Hear what Colin McEnroe, a home-state columnist for the Hartford Courant and radio personality had to say about his senator:  

"The way you always knew that Joe Lieberman was the kind of guy who 'rises above'  politics was that he always told you so.  The way you knew he wasn't was to watch him the rest of the time."

With his characteristic rise to the occasion, Lieberman said  the Senate's action was "fair and forward behavior".  Right, Joe.   On the other hand he had said that any attempt to strip him of his Homeland Security chair would have been "unacceptable".  To whom?  To him.  See what I mean?