Last week, standing in a tree on a ziplining platform forty feet above the St. Lucian rainforest, I let my mind drift between the chopping winds of the Atlantic Ocean and the calm waters of the Caribbean Sea.
“Would it be at all funny,” I asked Laura, “for some American stand up comedian to do a bit on carbon dioxide and deforestation?”
“On what planet,” she leered, “would that be funny?”
“I was thinking something along the lines of American attitudes. You know, ‘we’re producing all this CO2 and the trees are the ones benefiting,’ kind of a thing. Then they’d say something about cutting down more trees to discourage the trees from using so much of the CO2 we produce. Like, ‘that’ll learn ‘em‘. Could that be funny?”
She looked at me for few seconds, and as she started shaking her head the guide pushed her off the platform. She let out a short yelp of surprise and careened on the zipline down to the next tree while I felt a breeze wind its way through my sweaty helmet. The vibrating sound of the zipline faded out over the forest canopy until I could hear the birds again. Then they strapped me in and I followed, flinging myself out into the jungle.
Not a week later now, back in the city and hounded by taxes, car commercials and obnoxious ringtones, I’m faced with the raw and brutal truth of reality; that embarassing fist in the gut that explodes in your throat when you think you’re in the middle of telling a savage joke but it turns out that there is no joke. You’re living it.
–
“It’s plant food,” Rep. John Shimkus said at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. “So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?”
No way, I thought. I was just kidding. And besides, when I said ‘comedian’, I certainly wasn’t thinking of the House of Representatives as a Monday night comedy club.
…though, now that I just wrote that it occurs to me, why not?
Rep. Shimkus (R-IL) is among the many half-mad greedheads that try to argue that the United States doesn’t need a cap-and-trade system to limit CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Frankly, cap-and-trade is not my tag line — I’m alright with just ‘cap’. But as an issue, my general position on it is that we have bigger fish to fry.
In any case, I was struck dumb by the terrible babbling that continued. Is it possible that this cheap clown on television is just that ignorant and stupid? Or is it the usual evil, pushing through a failing agenda, even at the cost of common decency?
Is there any way to know? Can we continue to laugh, or was Mohammad Ali right when he said, “there are no jokes. The Truth is the funniest joke of all”?
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“My Kingdom will survive only insofar as it remains a country difficult to access, where the foreigner will have no other aim, with his task fullfilled, but to get out.”
- King Abdul Aziz bin Saud, c. 1930
Boy, if that was true back in 1930 then I’ll venture to say that in the almost 80 years since then they must’ve been working tirelessly to perfect their finely honed objective in Saudi Arabia…
Protectionism. What an ugly word. It strikes a tone of anxiety in a song of fear, conjuring images of caged rats, each lashing out individually in frightful fits, ultimately helpless when pitted against a striking viper. A pointless endeavor, especially in the world of the 21st century, where connection is everything and everything is connected. In today’s world, a state and a people left to grow only from within will develop as well as a Star Trek geek playing World of Warcraft in his mother’s basement.
We’ve gone too far with our urges for interconnectedness to slam on the brakes now. As the world becomes more mobile and global, access will be paramount to development and obstacles to connectivity should not be tolerated. It’s disturbing then, to see that so many travel hubs like hotels and airports still try to charge complicated fees for internet access.
It used to be that you could tell how much a person travels for work by their mileage accounts, or their hotel points, or if all else failed, the wrinkles and bags under their red, sloppy eyes. However, you can now tell who’s been around by looking at the list of wireless networks to which one has connected, or attempted to connect.
And if wireless connections were whores at port, I’d be a goddamn sailor.
–
And speaking of whores, let me get to the point of this little rant. Even as times are changing, outdated notions of a quick profit are being attempted in the spirit of capitalism and Adam Smith’s fucking invisible hand.
There was a time not too long ago that in order to compete for the business of business, hotels offered their corporate guests free internet connections with either a DSL line in the room or in some cases even a direct T1 line. But you’d be connected - on the grid, as it were. You know — in the parlance of our times.
But then came T-Mobile. And Swisscom. And, fucking, Joe’s corner WiFi, or whatever. Like a wildfire it spread. Today, in hotels across Europe and North America you can get a whole box of exotic teas, coffees, water bottles, towels and even a nice desk set, if you pack efficiently. Just for checking in. I’m not advocating theft of hotel property, you understand — I’m just saying it’s an easy option.
But you can’t get free internet.
Which is weird. You can get it in hostels. You can get it at bed & breakfasts. You can get it at mom & pop cafes, though not at places like Starbuck’s. And of course, god bless the few and the proud who still keep their wireless signals open and blissfully unencrypted to those wandering on the streets, unafraid to check for good souls.
Obviously there is a dollar to be made by letting a single company have exclusive ownership of your wireless real-estate. But there’s something about free WiFi that can keep people lounging in a place indefinitely and I’m not sure why these large hotels and café chains aren’t on board with the concept yet. It’s the reason why I can sit in a dingy, grimy dark pub in London that smells of greasy sausages and spilt ale and have breakfast, lunch and tea while I work. It’s also why no matter how nice the scene from a café on the Zürich waterfront, if they’re going to charge me 80 CHF for the day, I’ll be moving on, thanks.
I’m not normally optimisitic for the future, but in this economy, I can’t help but hope that there will be massive investments into infrastructure, like there were in the 30’s after the Great Depression. They built highways and bridges and I hope that in a way, so will we. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to the current internet infrastructure and we are due for a a revamp of the hard lines if we are going to advance in this endeavor. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with Al Gore’s invention and Orin Hatche’s tubes for another few decades.
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Even when growth is steady and prosperity seems to lurk around every bend for anyone willing to take out a mortgage being given them, there is much amiss in the world.
Imagine then, what things can be like in times like these?
That’s right, folks, we’re crossing the Rubicon. Things have gotten into some serious muck and there’s little that can be done to turn this car around with any kind of haste. I find myself feeling an unexpected sense of glee - an elated feeling, not of vengeance or righteousness (we’re not quite there yet) but rather an excitement of the unknown, much like the thrill of hearing sirens when you’re the one flipping the switch on the fire truck.
By now you’ve all heard of or seen the whole CNBC thing with Jon Stewart. Ho ho! Some of you might have been following the thing from its inception, and a few of you I know for a fact saw the whole thing coming. You’re the ones who don’t get your news and commentary from a fake news show (no matter how much harder it nails things than the mumbling muppets that precede it, running for hours at a time without saying anything of note. Not to mention the muppets making prank calls that comes before the Daily Show. Or was that CNN? Wait, which channel was that?)
In any case, how could you have missed it? It received as much attention, even in the mainstream media and its seventeen or so live hours of television, as if Kelly Clarkson had been caught using some kind of performance enhancing drug. And while many tuned in and were entertained, probably changing the tax bracket of most Daily Show writers, some people had actual analysis of their points, which were godd ones.
MSNBC, for its part, tried to stay unbiased - but, hey. It was never really fair to expect much from them on this one, being one of the sibling stations at the heart of the whole affair. That said, at least David Gregory did an interesting job in trying to get a panel of “experts” to say something. Nothing happened, of course, because all of his “analysts” had their own agenda to tout, their own talking points they would stick to. But he did a better job trying, I think, than did most of his colleagues. And in the end he repeated his question enough times that if you were waiting for an answer, at least you would remember the question and the fact that it went unaddressed. That’s better than the typical cud that sleazy jackass, Eric Cantor (R-VA), was fed the cameras.
Other stations did their thing and said their piece, paying lip service to the fact that it was a story they couldn’t ignore. But the NBC station’s reactions were, naturally, the most interesting because they had a stake. CNBC, for instance, didn’t react much at all for a whole week, prompting Jon’s ridiculous use of Viacom’s name for the first time since I can remember. And then they made the terrible call of letting Jim Cramer go on the Daily Show and act as pseudo-knee-jerk spokesperson for the network, which worked heavily against all of them and made Cramer out to look like a 3rd grade bully confronted by the 7th grade brother of a kid he’s been harrassing.
But I was disappointed.
Even in the runup to the show, Stewart’s interview with Cramer had become so touted, so polarized, as things are want to do in America, that it boiled down to looking and feeling like a trial of Jim Cramer’s picks and sound effects, what with the multitude of clips. It left one almost wondering what show we were watching. Maybe that’s what CNBC wanted all along and we have to give that serious thought. If they’re that organized about their image, they could be well-organized enough to have pulled off some of the dubious deception that Jon accused them of during his talk with Cramer, though I doubt that very much.
But I digress. The only thing still worth noting where this mess is concerned are two point made in the interview by Cramer and Stewart themselves, respectively.
One is what Jim Cramer said, that in today’s dynamics of journalism politics (is that a new term? Can I call it?) a reporter can’t interview someone and then report that he lied his balls off. It would be access suicide. Cramer spoke of these boundaries that journalists can’t cross, a point I agree with, however reluctantly. It’s true. If you do that as a journalist, you’ll never get another interview.
But the reason for that is that we, as readers — as an “informed public”, I guess I can say — have allowed leaders to get away with the notion of “no comment”. We’ve turned our “right to know” into a privilege they’ll give us so long as we don’t ask questions they don’t want to answer, or insist that we be told the truth.
I want to blame Nixon, but I suspect he only started the ball rolling. Reagan’s the real monster in all this and one day soon, I’ll explain how.
Don’t get me wrong though — I’m all about privacy. For individuals. But once you’re in the hot seat man, you owe me. You’re accountable. The idea that statesmen can turn down an interview from The Press when they carry a badge is as mindless as the notion that you could refuse to be arrested by a cop. Dammit, man, there are rules.
The second point is what Jon Stewart said, that we hope that these same journalists who report on the interviews they conduct at least don’t take everything their subjects report to them at face value. One of the reaons The Press is “trusted” is because they are trained professionals, studied and experienced in finding the story, fact-checking it and smelling out the lies. And if you can’t get the guy in the seat accross from you to tell the goddamned truth, that’s when the real work starts. Research. Investigation. Questioning. Not rushing to print what the man wants you to say. Otherwise, you’re just turning The Press into a PR firm.
This lack of ownership of the financial news is very familiar and if you think back to 2003 you’ll remember why. Running up to the onset of the invasion of Iraq we had similar symptoms, and we failed just as miserably today as we did then when reporters interviewed state leaders, took their word for gospel and printed it for all to see. No one seriously challenged what sounded flimsy, investigated what sounded suspect and straight up called the liars out on what were clearly false statements. That The Press committed these omissions so reliably and consistently shows, at best, incompetence, and at worst, malice.
And today’s mess is just a different tone of odd. How long, oh lord - how long?
Posted in Politics, Rants | 3 Comments…
A blur of spectacles flash before me every day, be it sirens in the distance, flash blizzards from the North East or the homeless. The sirens never seem to die, even as they approach the horizon, and the snow is torrential, heavy and undiscerning. The hopelessness of the homeless, who utter things like “have a nice day — and a better tomorrow” as they drag their feet past you, shaking an empty plastic frappuchino cup with about eighty cents in nickels and dimes is something I’ll never be ok with, no matter how many different cities I see it in. And it’s always worse on the metro, which they call subway here. I’ll have to remember that.
I sustain myself on a diet of bread and cheese, seemingly unable to break off from my European customs. Also, the coffee sucks, which complicates things. With such restlessness my darker thoughts form cohesion. My anger gives me focus. And then I open the wine. En vino veritas.
And all is forgotten.
Rambling down 6th ave on an icy night that bites and gnaws on any exposed flesh gives me more perspective than I care to have. The Avenue of the Americas, Times Square, Little Brazil, all the way down from Columbus Circle at the park. The people, their indifference to each other, bumps on the sidewalk here and there - I think somehow I’m already a part of this mob, inasmuch as I can ever be.
I’ve been walking among them like a zombie now for days. Still working on European time, I wake up at 2 am and go through the day on 3 hours of sleep for a couple weeks at a time, stopping for a few days between projects to explore the dark, to exercise, and run through my German language CDs. It’s the price I pay for leading a life with a foot on each side of the pond.
A friend of mine told me once that when you’re dealing with the Middle East, there’s no such thing as “staying on the fence”. There’s a parallel here, I just know it.
But I’m somehow outside of it all, it occurs to me. I stumble in between office environments in my line of work, jumping from meeting to meeting, from client to client. Never belonging anywhere I go, always carrying a visitor’s badge. Really what I’m doing is wandering through people’s lives, observing, noting…occasionally judging. I can’t help that — it’s an occupational hazard of life on the go, of those who live on the road. We may covet the sense of normality that most people have, but we judge the mediocrity of it. We may occasionally seek the comforts of stability but we always yearn for the excitement of spontaneity. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
But at some point we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that not everyone will have a normal life. Not everyone is capable of it. We will have to accept that the moment has come and gone many times to go down the familiar road that others do — a road that leads to routine, to tradition, to recognizable successes and failures. And we must remember that at every juncture we have chosen to veer from that path, even if it was at the last minute.
Should we ask ourselves why?
Of course. But when you start discussing reasons for things like that, you start getting into very ugly territory and people do not easily forget that kind of talk. You have to answer questions about what it would be like to feel like a part of something, even if it was something that a part of you hated, and leaves open a lot of flaws of a lot of people. Because then you’d have to put up with things like computer desktops with cats looking back at you, cups with stupid things written on them, like “Hello Monday”, and blurry pictures of people’s mediocre-looking children. You’d have to completely forget the idea of warming your feet on the radiator while drinking whisky out of a mug on a cold snowy Tuesday. You’d have to have a sense that clients and coworkers are more than just faces on a calendar week.
…and how is that worth my frequent flier points?
But maybe this problem is not entirely outside my scope of expertise. As it is I have a problem with the way I’m doing things, or the way I perceive them. I need to fix the way I’m doing things, or else find a new way to do it. In terms of what I would tell my clients, I’m spending too much time trying to re-engineer a bad process, as I often blame them of doing. Maybe it’s time to find a new process. Maybe it’s time to take some of my own drugs.
–
Sometimes you recognize wisdom in the most unlikely of places. Like, for example, Turkish digital projectors.
At a meeting in Istanbul I sat back in my chair and took a deep breath, my mind fighting to keep the lights on and the lids up. The voices in the room droned on and on about something I couldn’t have been less interested in but needed to be. I am, after all, a professional.
As the speaker wrapped up and the pace changed a bit I started coming to, my senses resharpening in the expectation that soon I’d be on a flight out of that place. But not before I noticed something on the screen.
The projected image was flickering and people were bothered by it. The speaker checked her notebook for a bad connection, and someone else checked the projector, smacking it lightly like a misbehaving child.
Very technical.
I noticed that no one had bothered to read the white text on the blue background of the shutdown screen that was flickering, which read: “The Lamp is getting old. Buy a spare lamp.”
Huh, I thought. I think I might be on to something.
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