Normally, it’s only fringe publications like Mother Jones or The Nation that find it important to discuss the gap betweeen rich and poor in America. But The Economist, in a typically fact-laden fashion, tackled the question in a September 2003 article entitled “Would You Like Your Class War Shaken or Stirred, Sir?”:

Follow almost any Democratic presidential candidate around, and it won't be long before you hear this statistic. In 1980, the average CEO was paid around 40 times as much as the average worker; now the multiple is above 400. George Bush's tax cuts “for the rich”, say the likes of John Kerry, who formally announced his candidacy this week, must be scrapped to help those of lesser means. Meanwhile, pundits, notably Paul Krugman at the New York Times, have argued that a new “plutocracy” is rising.

By whatever measure you use, the richest Americans have done very well over the past few decades. According to the Census Bureau, the share of national income going to those in the top fifth of earners rose from 44% in 1973 to 50% in 2000. The share going to the top 1% rose to 15% in 1998, higher than it has ever been since the second world war, according to a recent study of tax returns by two economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

Take wealth rather than income, and America's disparity is even more startling. The wealthiest 1% of all households controls 38% of national wealth, while the bottom 80% of households holds only 17%, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Around 85% of stockmarket wealth is held by a lucky 20%.

If the rich have been doing much better than other Americans in relative terms, the poor have failed to improve their lot as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The wage incomes of the bottom 20% of households have barely grown in real terms since the mid-1970s. As for wealth, the bottom fifth has debts that exceed its assets, making its wealth a negative number. The bottom fifth's percentage of national wealth worsened from -0.3% in 1983 to -0.6% in 1998.

Admittedly, none of the above has much to do with Bush in particular, but it does lead to questions about a larger issue. With the Democratic party having to lean more and more to the center in order to gather a coalition necessary to compete with the Republicans and their faith-based economics, our range of options shrinks when choosing who to represent us in the government. When your only two choices are middle-right and “right-wing nutjob” right, you begin to suspect that some viable policy options are perhaps being left in a dark unswept corner somewhere with most of the country’s poorer and/or more darkly-complected folks. I certainly shouldn’t be criticizing Kerry when, despite my ambivalence or worse about him, he’s our best hope for returning this country to any level of decency and reasonability. Nonetheless, the Economist article ends by making a point that the muckrakers on the left have been shouting about in their free speech zones for years now.

. . . The tax policies of the Bush administration will probably only exacerbate the already wide gap between rich and poor. The inheritance tax has been all but scrapped. Marginal rates on top incomes have come down. Most important may be this year's reduction in capital gains and dividends taxes which, by some estimates, will provide a windfall to just the top 20% of households.

It is these “giveaways” that the Democrats are now concentrating on. But raising marginal tax rates, the Democrats' traditional solution to inequality, usually hits many people who regard themselves as middle-class, and does nothing to reduce the vast fortune of true plutocratic families, such as, well, Mr Kerry's.

Indeed, is the Harvard-educated Mr Kerry, who is married to a Heinz heiress worth $600m, any more an homme du peuple than George II, as some Democrats like to call Mr Bush? Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner, may stress his occupation as a humble doctor, but he grew up in the Hamptons and Mr Bush's grandmother was a bridesmaid to his granny. As long as the presidency remains the shuttlecock of different scions of the north-eastern aristocracy, Americans may have a hard time thinking of any party as the champions of the poor.

In a much larger article about the aspects of Bush’s presidency that history will regard as most controversial, The Economist presents an analysis of the ways in which he has increased the power of the presidency. Again Reagan looks like a ray of hope in the darkness in contrast to Bush (and remember, for instance, how the former undid decades of work by the labor movement in a morning when he fired all the air traffic controllers?)

A subset of [the Bush administration’s] reaction against scrutiny is the use of what might be called government by small print: slipping additions into law at the last minute or tinkering with the wording of rules that implement laws. As a recent series in the Washington Post argued, such changes often appear minor but can have a big impact. By changing the word “waste” to “fill” in a rule governing coal-mining, for instance, the administration allowed an increase in strip-mining in West Virginia. By adding two sentences about scientific evidence to an unrelated budget bill, it gave itself increased authority to rule in regulatory disputes.

Perhaps the most disturbing way in which the administration has increased its power has been through its public-relations machine. Thomas Jefferson said long ago that a well-informed electorate is the most important constraint on government. By issuing partial and sometimes misleading information, the Bush administration has hampered such scrutiny.

Consider for instance the arguments for tax cuts. Here, Mr Bush made claims about the cost of the cuts and their distributional impact that he should have known were misleading. In 2000, he claimed the first round of cuts would cost $1.6 trillion over ten years, a quarter of the budget surplus at that point. On his own figures, the share was a third, not a quarter, and he arrived at the figure only through outrageous accounting gimmicks that he is now campaigning to forbid.

He also asserted that the cuts would provide “the greatest help for those most in need”, providing a Treasury study to back up his claim. In the past, Treasury studies have been impartial. But this one arrived at its conclusion by leaving out the parts of the tax cut that most benefited the wealthiest (such as the repeal of the estate tax). By any normal measure, the tax cuts have been regressive—hardly “the greatest help for those most in need”.

Taking facts out of context, politicising government studies and presenting anomalous examples as typical are hardly unique to the Bush administration. But they still do damage. The system of checks and balances—indeed, democracy itself—requires voters to be able to understand the impact of actions taken on their behalf, so they can apportion credit or blame fairly. If it is impossible to tell how much of the administration's arguments for war were vindicated or disproved, or who the tax cuts really helped, then proper public accounting is impossible.

Beyond that, members of the administration have occasionally acted in ways that have discouraged public debate directly. In May 2002, the White House's communications director, Dan Bartlett, argued in the Washington Post that Democratic criticisms of administration actions before September 11th were “exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do.” Mr Ashcroft had earlier conflated civil-liberties activists with terrorist sympathisers, telling Congress: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists.” All this came near to arguing that, after September 11th, debate itself could be treasonous.

Mr Bush has frequently said that voters will give their verdict in November, and that he looks forward to it. But quadrennial elections are not the only means of restraining government. The genius of the American system is that administrations must work within a system of checks and balances. These checks have themselves been checked.

Congress is the main competing source of power. It has become more like an adjunct to the administration. Information encourages public scrutiny. The flow has been reduced. The administration's actions are filtered through civil-service rules and procedures. The rules have been chopped and changed. A free press is essential to the working of democracy. Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, rejected that view, arguing “I don't believe you [the press] have a check-and-balance function.” On occasion, the administration has even crossed the line separating the interests of the state from the party by using taxpayers' money to finance advertising for the Medicare bill.

Almost all governments bend the truth. This one has seldom resorted to outright falsehood; instead, the administration has manipulated public information and breached basic standards of political conduct in Congress, the civil service and public debate. Whatever the merits of increasing presidential authority, Mr Bush has achieved his aim less by winning support for more power than by weakening the authority of other institutions.

I have probably mentioned that The Economist is one of the best magazines in print, and I have probably also mentioned that such a statement coming from my mouth surprises me most of all. After all, what business does a self-avowed anti-globalization liberal have advocating a magazine that champions the World Bank and the IMF as forces by which the world will be improved? Nonetheless, there is something refreshingly insightful about a magazine that describes political power and action by and large in the terms in which decisions are actually made, as opposed to the rhetoric in which they are usually couched after the fact when decisions which have already been made are finally presented to the public. There is also something startlingly refreshing about The Economist’s particular mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, and for good reason.

The main advantage of conservatism, back in the good old days when Reagan was president (note that only the current state of affairs could one recast the Reagan era as a golden age), was small government, the kind that left many policy decisions to the states or, even better, to the munipalities, with the goal in mind that the laws would most accurately reflect the composition of the community at a microcosmic level. Fair and good, I suppose, from a theoretical point of view. Furthermore, he believed, the government being incompetent at best in most endeavors, it should simply not get involved whenever possible. I think most of us can agree with the sentiment behind that. But now, as the Christian Right continues to become more and more influential in politics, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, conservatism has become an unthinking march toward ignorance and regression.

Luckily for me, the folks at The Economist will not see me stopping here to watch their woods fill up with snow, so I can feel relatively free to reprint without permission some of their pertinent insights about the current administration. It is important to keep in mind that the magazine is the self-proclaimed champion of the free market, a typically conservative standpoint. Thus their criticism of George Bush reveals much about the nature of Bush’s conservatism.

This month, we have a study about poverty in America, which deserves to be quoted at length. First, though, take a look at the chart, and notice the year in which poverty began rising so abruptly. Coincidence? Now read on to see what the statisticians at the magazine have to say about how poverty is measured.

Contrary to popular belief, President George Bush’s campaign against terrorism is not the first time the United States has waged war on an abstract noun. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Then, as now, the administration had some trouble defining the enemy. The poverty line it eventually adopted, a line first drawn by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration, remains in place today, adjusted for inflation, but otherwise scarcely altered. Two parents, bringing up two kids, are judged to be poor if they live on less than $18,660 a year (for an unencumbered individual under the age of 65, the threshold is $9,573). On Thursday August 26th, the Census Bureau revealed that 35.9m Americans, or 12.5% of the population, fell below this poverty line in 2003, 1.3m more than the year before.

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

The bubble years were also a period of ferment in the country’s welfare laws. State handouts came with new strings and time limits attached. Single mothers were encouraged, often required, to work. In a 2000 study, Rebecca Blank, who once served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that welfare reform—both the state experiments of the early 1990s and the federal overhaul of 1996—reduced the poverty rate among female high-school dropouts by about 5 percentage points.

But the latest census figures show a partial reversal of these gains. Poverty among the households of single mothers has increased from 25.4% in 2000 to 28% in 2003. Child poverty has also increased. In retrospect it is clear that Mr Clinton signed his 1996 welfare reform at an auspicious time: the economy was creating jobs faster than people were being ousted from the welfare rolls; the states implementing the reforms were flush with cash. But as Congress now debates how to revamp and extend the law (the 1996 act was due to expire in 2002), all of these stars have fallen out of alignment.

Firms are reluctant to hire, and even when they do, they are loth to offer health insurance. Employer-sponsored health plans covered 1.3m fewer Americans last year than the year before. State governments are strapped for cash; as a result, they are cutting back on child-care assistance. Many welfare recipients are now close to using up all the months of help they are entitled to. Unfortunately, those who remained dependent on welfare when times were good are the least likely to get a job now that times are not so good.

Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th century British prime minister, likened the rich and the poor to “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were . . . inhabitants of different planets”. As a guide to the less fortunate of these two planets, the Census Bureau’s poverty figures are flawed and anachronistic. But they do show that welfare reform is not by itself enough. Unless the labour market tightens further this year, there will be many more Americans discovering the other planet for themselves in 2004.

We should keep all this in mind while counting the number of references the Republicans make to “compassion” at the convention this week.

People are actually selling these things on eBay, and I can barely give them away. And they apparently multiply like rabbits. I now have sixteen (16) Gmail invitations to give away. The first sixteen groveling sycophants to email me get ’em. I mean it. Even if you have never met me, even if you have no idea who I am, even if you don't even know why you're reading this page, write me and take one off my hands. Please.

Some days I have a hard time coming to terms with my new cubicle drone identity, and I don’t even work in a cubicle. (Hey, if I didn’t invent the phrase, at least I can beat it to death.) Four other interns and I share an enormous corner conference room with a 20-foot stretch of fifth-floor view, and my desk is twice the size of the desk of the VP I work under. I certainly can’t complain about the setting.

Nonetheless, returning from lunch today I caught my reflection in the shiny metallic elevator doors and I realized that, in complete seriousness this morning, I put on a striped polo shirt and tucked it into my beige pants. Furthermore, I had forgotten to take off my ID badge when I left the building and had been wearing it around on the street. Jesus Christ, I used to laugh almost out loud at that guy. Granted, we all know that the men’s business casual palette is limited, so not all the blame lies with me. It’s almost impossible to compose a biz-cazh wardrobe without some shade of brown in it. If it’s not tan, something’s going to end up being khaki, or at least beige.

Whatever. I can get used to the uniform. I may possibly even be able to learn to find satisfying ways to spend the two or three hours each day when there is no work for me to do. But I can’t get used to one thing that seems to come with working at a huge company: the waiting in line, the filling a chair until the promotion comes along, impressing the right people, shaking the right hands and knowing the right names, remembering who owes you one, or who you owe, always looking back over your shoulder, or peering over the shoulder of the person ahead of you in line to see what’s coming up next and who’s already jockeying for it, the callous recognition that mediocre is good enough except when someone’s watching. Shouldn’t we demand excellence of ourselves at all times? If not, what’s the point? This is a horribly unhip and unfun notion, sure, but it’s a nagging feeling I just can’t shake. This particular place definitely seems better than most, in that the majority of people seem genuinely to care about what they do and take pride in what they’re working toward, but I suspect pockets of that political undercurrent still exist.

Certainly not everyone who tucks in his shirt and works in an office is so lazy and self-serving. I’m exaggerating for effect, and I’m infant-new in a world that I have emphatically and consciously avoided for my entire life for exactly this reason, so my biases may be clouding my vision. But I hear that mentality every so often in small comments that fall unthinkingly from people’s mouths as it imperceptibly and incrementally creeps into their lives. When young, brilliant, energetic people, weeks out of college, who could do anything they want talk about “putting in a few years in such-and-such department,” or “doing some time under so-and-so, who’s really tight with the CFO,” as if it’s prison, what I hear is that they have chosen instead to hop onto a conveyor belt that ends much sooner than they realize in middle-aged disillusionment and regret. It is not always so, but often enough that it should frighten everyone who does not actively choose anew every single goddamned day to live consciously and deliberately with the whole scope of her actions and their consequences in mind. I’m not talking about the corporate world in general; I’m talking specifically about the attitude with which we approach our work, whatever it is, whatever aspect of our lives we choose to call “work,” for it can be much broader than it sounds at first. Of course there’s the personal ineptness caveat: by no means have I yet figured out how to live properly, but if you had state the goal, in a perfect world, wouldn’t that be it?

I assigned my Czech university students an essay each semester. First semester we worked on formal writing: the five paragraph essay, dreaded beast of freshman rhetoric students the world over, or so I thought. The Czechs had never heard of it, and knew not wherefore to fear. They objected most indignantly to the constraint that they not use the first person pronoun in any formal writing. These essays, however, were painful to read, and ‘painful’ might even be a euphemism for what they really were to read, which was excruciatingly, mind-numbingly, castratingly dull. While reading the first hundred or so, I developed an unfortunate nervous tic: pulling out the hairs at the edge of my forehead one by one. Over the course of the three weeks it took me to read all the essays during my evenings and weekends, I developed a noticeable bald spot at the top of the my forehead which took a few weeks to grow out. I learned such respect for all of my past teachers after that experience.

Can I share a sample? I hate to make fun, and Jesus, if any of my students had heard my Czech they would have seized with laughter. Nonetheless, the history of mankind thus far apparently begins, in someone’s mind, like this:

From the very beginning of the human age people traveled.There used to live so-called pickers who began it. After them came hunters.

Then first farmers went on, behind them people from the Iron and Bronze Age came. Nobody knows how many people in bondage of thousands kings and gueens there were on the world and all of them traveled. We must not forget a big move to the new world behind the ocean. Kings and queens have gone and people still travel. There are so many places waiting to be discovered. It is peoples naturalness moving around lookig for something no one can surely say what exactly it si .

But let us start from the beginning.Small,poor maybe happy pickers. Whole day consisted from picking food. Everything could be eaten. Every little animal, no berry was safe from them, if nothing else was around even the little tiny rootlet was good enough for empty stomac. The time they realised that everything was eaten was the right time to move on.First travelers were born.

Tribes of hunters had not more difficult way of living. Their only thing to care about was how to hunt as big animal as possible. It surely took a lot of time to keep whole tribe well fed. Not only plenty of time but also plenty of animals. As soon as the animals saw something is hunting them they moved.No mammuths, no supper. So the people moved too. Some moved, some started to cultivate land and plant first corn and plants. When the ground stoped to give good food they went to find another good place to make new fields.

So second semester I decided to lighten things up a bit, hoping that if I assigned essay topics that were enjoyable to write about, they might be more enjoyable to read, and they were. One of the topics from which the students could choose was “What do you hope to be doing in ten years, and what could you be doing now in order to make it happen?” (Note the use of the present continuous in the second part of the question. We use the present continuous in English to indicate a current, ongoing action, in this case, doing.) It proved to be one of the most popular essay topics, though students often told me as they handed it in that they regretted choosing it because it had seemed so easy at the outset, but required not only some difficult introspection, but a thorough understanding of English conditional structures as well, which are very difficult and counterintuitive if you didn’t actually grow up speaking English natively.

What surprised me were the number of responses that involved something along the lines of “I have never considered this question before, but . . .” and after reading several in a row I began to suspect that introspection just isn’t a Czech cultural value. But that, of course, is a ridiculous assumption. And then I thought about all my American friends and wondered how many of them had thought at any length about where they want to be in life in ten years. And by “where they want to be” I don‘t mean at what job, at what point in their career, but who they are progressing toward being, and how far along they expect to be. Are they all just on a conveyor belt too?

What’s more likely is that I am in fact overly concerned with the future, I who, at an unspecified age between 27 and 35, have not yet really decided what I want to do when I grow up. Whenever I choose one thing, I feel overly constrained and can only obsess about all the things that I will then not be able to do. I feel like my sister, who admitted to me one day sitting on our brother’s front porch that, sadly, she has had to face up to the fact that she will never work in metal. I, too, will probably never work in metal. Nor will I ever be an organic farmer, a truck driver, an engineer, a publishing tycoon, a magazine editor, a rock star, a recording engineer, a political activist, a diplomat, an artisan of any kind (including cabinet maker, ceramist, or graphic designer), a research linguist, a mathematician, or a cognitive scientist, all of which I have considered and even worked toward to some degree or another. Instead, thus far this life, I have had 29 jobs and 23 addresses, if you count various dorms and a brief stint when I lived in my van (but hardly ever actually slept in it), all in the name of exploration and keeping my options open. After a while, your options become so open that they in fact disappear.

Nonetheless, if I may return to the tone of emphatic proclamation I copped in paragraphs 3–4, I would say this with an additional note of conclusionary table pounding: If I had to distill the manifold lessons taught me by the deaths of my parents into one sentence, whether or not it sound like trite Robin Williams seize-the-day crap, the truth seems incontrovertible that this life is simply too short to underestimate the moments that in sum make it up. There will not be nearly enough time to spend with the people you love and the things that matter, and time wasted waiting for things to happen is just heaved onto the one-way conveyor belt into the irretrievable past. Said another way, in the words of impeccable rockers No Means No, “I got tired of waiting because I found out there only a fine line between biding one’s time and wasting one’s time. Know what I mean?”

When I was living in the Czech Republic and ended up spending all the free time I would usually spend with friends, since I had few, delving into the news and comparing multiple sources of the same stories, I briefly kept a separate blog called, straightforwardly enough, “You Should Be Reading The News More Closely,” which contained links to interesting stories that you had to dig to find, as well as contradictions in coverage that pointed to an interesting story lurking just below the surface. You can find in the bar to the right some links to regular sources of good information, or at least good questions that deserve better answers than I’ve heard so far, but since no one ever clicks them, I thought I’d spend a blog entry explaining what some of them are and calling your attention to them, in light of the impending decision we must all make about the current course of events and whether or not we want to take steps toward regime change at home. For those of you who are too lazy to “click here to continue reading,” I’ll put everything on the front page here. (I understand that your mouse finger can get pretty tired by the end of an internet session; I recommend the following: Finger Weights, The Stretch-Assager [a fine product with an unfortunate name], or The Gripmaster.)

So . . . Where should I start? If you watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and wished that Mr. Moore had substantiated some of his insinuations just a bit more, you might pay a visit to the Center for Cooperative Research, which rigorously documents all of its insinuations, though admittedly at times it sounds just a bit rabid. You have to do a little critical thinking of your own while you read. Nonetheless, it is one of the most interesting open-source news database projects I’ve seen, and I guarantee, if you spend a few hours with this site, you will inevitably come to the conclusion that there are far more questions than answers regarding the current administration’s methods and motives.

Ancient History is an interesting article (from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank) that is very informative about the history of US intervention in the Middle East. If you’re curious about the Middle Eastern entanglements of the Bush family in particular (also alluded to in Fahrenheit 9/11), you’ll find more information than you probably want to know in this article from Kevin Phillips. Interestingly, the editorial first appeared in the LA Times but has since, as far as I can tell, disappeared from their website. Phillips, incidentally, is a former Republican strategist who worked under Nixon’s Attorney General. He gradually turned into a “muckraking populist,” to quote The Nation, and is responsible for two recent influential books: Wealth and Democracy (2003) and American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004).

Everyone should be aware of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and their agenda, which our current president has been following in lock-step since September 11, 2001. Many of his advisors, both current and those who have been forced to resign, have prominent positions in this definitive neocon organization. This article by Bette Stockbauer, from antiwar.com is also a bit rabid at times, but very informative. If you have the patience to read more in depth, you might as well visit the PNAC website and read their other position papers. They’re pretty open about their imperial vision. There is also a detailed and oft-updated website following their every move: pnac.info.

That’s all for today. There’s plenty more where that came from.

Today was a beautiful day, as warm as a cat’s dream on a window sill, not too humid with a bright blue sky. It’s a nice change from the miserable wring-the-moisture-right-out-of-the-air kind of swampy nastiness we’ve been having since I arrived. It promises to be this way all week long.

It was a wonderful day to end up completely unexpectedly at the National Zoo. (I guess that gives away my “undisclosed location on the east coast.” Oops.) A friend picked me up at my house and we went exploring the town. At the zoo, we came across a diagram of the panda gestation process, and the first step in the process just looked so charming I thought I’d share:

This is a pretty interesting article by Jim Hightower about the increasingly common practice of “free speech zones” that we’re starting to see wherever folks gather to do what used to be called protesting. The powers that be in both parties learned some valuable lessons in the 1960s, and have been learning other valuable lessons since then about using the media to manipulate public opinion. It’s a science now.

I once interviewed an aging economist for the English Department newspaper at the university where I was teaching English. I was asked to interview him by the editor, who just didn’t have the time to do it herself. He had recently had an article published in Vital Speeches of the Day, and was at the university to present the paper in a Q and A session. When I walked into the room to interview him at the scheduled time, he greeted me coolly and made some pleasant conversation, just long enough not to appear rude, and then he invited me to begin the task of asking the questions so that he could get down to the business of answering them which, after all, is the sole purpose of an interview.

We talked for a while, and I tried to ask the most thoughtful questions I could about his paper, which was entitled, “Quality of Life? The Emergent Critique of America’s Work-centered Culture.” I knew from reading his paper that I agreed with almost everything in it, but having thought a lot about the subject myself, I had some ideas about the causes of the situation that differed from his presentation in the paper. It was clear, however, that he had very definite opinions about everything he was telling me. As the interview progressed, he would occasionally glance up over his reading glasses at me, trying to gauge my understanding of his responses, and he began to grow testy when I continued to ask if perhaps there might be another way of getting to the root of the problem. After twenty minutes or so of questions and answers, though, we began to realize that we saw eye-to-eye on many issues, and after I acknowledged that I also thought Adbusters was a very insightful magazine (which seemed to serve to him as some sort of litmus test of my political stance), he began speaking to me much more frankly. Soon this very conservative and mild-looking economics professor was espousing radical theories of a neo-feudal world order with multinational corporations at the head of the power structure, and he could cite references and research to back up every outlandish claim he made. It was a very interesting interview. (The Adbusters website, should you choose to click the link, looks rabid and amateurish compared to the magazine, which is actually beautifully and thoughtfully designed.)

At one point, while musing about the amount of political sway enjoyed by the tobacco lobby, he uttered a sentence that caught me completely off-guard. “Bob Dylan, you realize, was one of the most powerful forces for political change in the twentieth century.” Suddenly it came to me: an image of this balding man in his tweed coat, looking at me over his reading glasses, with long hair and bare feet, wearing bell bottoms and perhaps some garment with a leather fringe. I didn’t ask, but in that comment I heard a syllable of unadulterated nostalgia for the time long ago when he was an idealist and acted out his beliefs with no regard for adult responsibilities. We forget sometimes that the kids in the video footage of the sit-ins and the ones in the photos at Kent State and Berkeley are now passing middle age and heading for retirement. And it was precisely because I always forget that fact that his comment about Bob Dylan came out of left field. Don’t get me wrong: I like Bob Dylan a lot. In fact, I was listening to the first side of Blood on the Tracks yesterday morning on the bus to work, which is probably what got me thinking about Dylan in the first place. (The album side is, of course, a theoretical concept on an iPod, but it still persists as a fundamental unit of musical dissemination). As I type this very sentence, in fact, I’m listening for the fourth time in a row to the several layers of Daniel Lanois’ other-worldly pedal-steel guitar on “Not Dark Yet” from Time Out of Mind. I like the drawn-out drawl of Dylan’s voice, and his clever rhymes and obfuscated lyrics. His backup bands, also, are usually exquisite. Nonetheless, I never really think of him as a political force, at least not of such magnitude that he would rank among the most powerful of any century.

So do I underestimate Dylan, or perhaps the effects of the sixties in general? I do know that we all tend to become a bit myopic about our own lives, and we tend to overestimate the importance of the movements with which we associate and identify ourselves. When I was playing in a band and running a tiny recording studio in Chicago in the mid-90s, I was convinced that we in particular and the whole indie scene in general were going to shake the musical foundations of the world. Classic rock guys who grew up in the seventies talk about Steve Miller or the Eagles as if they’re prophets (“Fly like an Eagle, man! To the frickin’ sea! If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is, man. Hey, pass me another Bud Light, will ya?”) But it’s not just the music scene of the day—it’s everything to do with pop culture: social movements, philosophical trends, fashion, advertising, you name it—all these things that change over time, whose changes themselves come to describe the character of a particular generation. I’ve heard my own contemporaries talking about Friends and South Park in such terms, and that honestly frightens me. In a similar way, this aging economist had become convinced over the years that Dylan, that clever songsmith of subversive ideologies, had led a revolution. In some ways he had, it’s true, and obviously to a far greater degree than any of the soy-and-ramen-eating slackers in my band, but to unthinkingly call him a political force seems almost an insult to the many people who have offered up their lives and/or livelihoods in the name of social change since, say, the beginning of the industrial revolution, folks who did far more than draw stoners to stadiums by the thousands.

Sometimes I get to thinking about a particular time and place, mine perhaps, or the particular time and place that constitutes the life of any one of us. All these ephemeral things that identify us, those that will seem so ridiculous to subsequent generations, and will be completely forgotten sooner or later, have such weight, don’t they? Whether it’s Chandler or Homer, Dylan or Brandon. I remember my father asking incredulously if I’d really never heard of Tommy Dorsey. I could barely identify Clarke Gable in a line-up. What will they say about Eminem? Or Matt Damon?

Let me just mention what two of my favorite things are these days: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens . . . no wait . . . that’s Julie Andrews. I get confused easily. The version I have in my head when I think of that song, however, is (I think) from an Anne Murray 8-track that my mom listened to all the time when I was a kid. What I meant to say is that Godspeed You Black Emperor!, a nine-piece Canadian anthemic experimental rock band currently playing at top volume in my headphones, have recently been elevated to this week’s favorite band. Epitonic has this to say about them:

Listening to Montreal nine-piece Godspeed You Black Emperor! is a bit like opening up the face of a clock and trying to make sense of its works. They’re fascinating in their shiny metallic complexity, beautiful in their technical sophistication, yet ultimately unknowable for a mere layman, representing a prototype for a strange world with a different physics more than a functional machine. In other words, true understanding takes work and effort, but true understanding with respect to Godspeed, unlike a clock, is always a matter of subjective interpretation.

What Godspeed You Black Emperor! actually presents its listeners are dense, epic instrumental compositions, which tend to start small and stark and build inexorably towards intense climaxes, swaying and bending as they go under the weight of so much accumulated instrumentation. Strings, in varying shapes, sizes, and degrees of distress, are their pieces’ most dominant element. These include guitars which rarely sound like guitars—some bathed in layers of feedback and fuzz, some prepared and painful sounding, almost all broodingly dolorous—as well as achingly pretty cello, viola, and violin parts which often sound almost as if they’d been plucked from some forgotten backwoods folk tune. Complementing all this stringed noise are brassy waterfalls of French horn, repetitive organ and synth parts, heavily processed machine noise, found sounds, and a lot more. As the pieces build from delicate sound poetry to frenzied eruptions, martial percussion rhythms—often featuring glockenspiel, chimes, and nontraditional percussive instruments in addition to the drum kit—emerge, underpinning the rest of the instrumental mix. It all adds up to varying degrees of incredibly nuanced, repetitious hum, the sound of an alien life force, its heartbeat and breathing, expressed through music.

You can find two songs from their 2000 release, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, at epitonic.com.

The second one of my favorite things is my new 20GB iPod, which I bought in order not to go crazy on the three-day drive out here. It worked well for that, since I also bought Griffin Technologies’ iTrip, which broadcasts on the FM frequency of your choice and allows you to pick up your iPod on the U-Haul truck radio. I thought it a pretty clever solution. My new iPod, Alyosha, now accompanies me while I wait in the mornings, for up to 20 minutes sometimes, for the bus to arrive. And as I walk down the street, my feet in lockstep rhythm to whichever soaring and/or richly textured music I’ve chosen to escort me into wakefulness that day, my otherwise nondescript getting-to-work routine syncs up to the beat, like in that Jetta ad from the mid-’90s. (You remember it, don’t you? This one.) The world is a beautiful place when you’ve got your iPod in your pocket, especially when you have the little remote control clipped onto your pocket so you can adeptly change songs or turn down the volume when somebody’s looking you in the eye and his lips are moving and you realize that he’s probably trying to ask you a question.

It sometimes makes me feel better, when I’m sitting on the bus in my dorky business casual get-up with my shirt tucked in, that I’m secretly listening to loud fast punk rock music that has its middle finger raised haughtily at the Man I’m working for. The funny thing is how many other people I see on the bus in the morning, their shirts tucked in, their tan chinos ironed smooth, with those tell-tale white ear buds, spinning the little virtual song chooser dial with reckless abandon.

It’s good to know I am not alone.

I would like to apologize for my negligence in posting for the past week. I’ve been in transition, beginning with the drive for three interminable days across humid and twang’n’drawl-soaked regions I’d never otherwise frequent. If you want an idea of what it was like, play the movie and then multiply what you see by about 16,000:

After I finally arrived here, I spent far too long unpacking and sorting, sleeping in spurts, and I had to devote a whole afternoon to buying a couple of pieces of respectable looking clothing. Before the big shopping day, my footwear collection consisted solely of one pair of sandals, and I owned only two pairs of jeans, one without holes.

I’ve been spending my allocated computer time migrating the blog to a new server. Neither of my readers will have to look at ads anymore, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate. More importantly, I’ve got plenty of storage space to spare, and new services like PHP/MySQL support and streaming Quicktime, so you can look forward to an ever-expanding array of goodies from yours truly, depending on how long it takes me to make friends here. If past experience is any guide, you can expect a lot of goodies. Please bookmark the new location, your home away from home, your shelter from the storm: http://www.strangeproportion.com.

I once wrote a panegyric to coffee. It was for a college language class, and I was required to write a persuasive speech. I decided to persuade the class that everyone should drink more coffee. Who could argue with that? Piece of cake. The relevant excerpts went like this:

Coffee. Mystical black beverage. Hot, thick, and bitter—steaming, filling the room with its unique scent. Coffee. A swarthy pirate returning home victorious from a battle at sea. Or a quick-tongued serpent in a damned big hurry to get wherever it is that serpents go. Jazzy, yet serene, slithering along to its own internal groove and rhythm and rhyme.

But leaving aside for a moment the poetry of the drink, let’s come to the matter at hand: Everyone should drink more coffee. Now, as self-evident as that statement sounds to me, I realize that I have spent more time thinking about this particular subject than most. And I hope in the few minutes I have to share with you some of the wisdom that this, as I said, mystical black beverage has imparted to me.

When I sat down at my desk to begin writing this speech, my pot of Sunday coffee was brewing itself, gurgling like a neighborhood gossip with too much to say. You should realize that Sunday coffee is different from weekday morning coffee is different from evening coffee spent with friends is different from post-dinner lethargy-combating coffee. This is due to the various ways that the ritual of coffee can unfold itself. Granted, at times, one just grabs a cup of coffee as a pick-me-up on the way to somewhere to be. Sometimes those not prone to reflection fall into the habit of assuming that this is the sole role of coffee in our lives, but that is cubicle-drone mentality. To cubicle drones, coffee equals functionality times efficiency. Now, this is true, and not to be underestimated by any means, but it doesn’t stop there. For coffee doesn’t just counteract the negative; it fosters the positive.

At the time, I was quite proud of the speech. There was some other horribly clever stuff in there from which I've chosen to spare you. I have dragged it out of the archives tonight because I remember explicitly making fun of what I referred to as “cubicle drones.” Today I began my first day as one of them. It may be nothing but Stockholm Syndrome, but I have to say that it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it was a bit boring, and I literally did nothing all day long, which is only slightly less surprising to me than the fact that the other, more experienced cubicle drones did little more than I did.

Can I mention my sadness at realizing that there are 308 Google references to that phrase? ’Cause here I was thinking I was all clever, only to be slapped in the face yet once again by my own overwhelming lack of originality.

To get back to the point: My position is an internship at a very large company, and the nature of the internship consists almost completely of training in things that I yet know nothing about, so I didn’t expect to be solving problems and cranking out theorems on my first day. Nonetheless, neither did I expect to spend two hours of my morning on the phone with tech support getting my log-in and password. Nor spending an hour of my afternoon on the phone with the network administrator resolving an issue with my home directory, nor two hours waiting for our instructor to finish something else he was doing in another office and come back to teach us something. In the end, I finally received my first UNIX factoid at 4:30 p.m., and that UNIX lesson continued for almost 20 minutes uninterrupted until someone stopped by the office and announced that he was the ride for another one of the interns and that he was leaving now, and did the other intern want to come with? All that momentum lost, a sigh and a hanging of the head, and we decided to call it quits for the day and try again tomorrow.