Miracle! More Public Service Jobs Magically Appear Thanks to NYTimes Author’s Lack of Diligence!

I have always had a rocky relationship with the New York Times. The fact that its mostly about New York (what the fuck?) bothers me to an unreasonable degree, but what really pisses me off is when the authors/editors demonstrate how oblivious they are to the plight of almost everyone in America.

Take today’s bogus-trend piece written by Catherine Rampell, who grew up in “the New York Part” of South Florida and then got her street smarts at Princeton. According to Ms. Rampell’s stunningly thorough review of one survey, several anecdotes, and data about rising application rates for temporary service positions, she has concluded that more college graduates are taking public service jobs than they had in the past. Of course, this claim leaves one glaring question unanswered: are there more public service jobs to be had?

I am trying on a suit because this article is about jobs! Its a metaphor!

The only answer provided by the article is the unsourced claim that the federal government payroll has increased by 3% since the recession began, whenever that was. But federal government jobs are not necessarily public service positions, and are not necessarily permanent. Does this figure reflect the massive hirings (and firings) of census workers? Does it reflect increases in particular programs? Did it come from a Fox News rant about big government? The core question raised by her very thesis goes totally uninvestigated.

The fact that Ms. Rampell has no evidence to support her argument is made clear by her use of unrelated data to try to shore up her claims. Applications for TFA and Americorps are way up! Therefore, more people are being selected for TFA and Americorps! Oh, wait… that’s like saying that more people are applying to Princeton, so now Princeton has more students. See what I did there? I mentioned her alma mater again, as a way of helping her understand the flaw in her logic.

At this point you’re wondering, why is he being so gratuitously mean? So she wasn’t very careful in researching her piece, cut her some slack! Let me share with you a few tidbits of wisdom that she imparts to the reader, which may shed light on my infuriation.

“The absence of traditional private sector jobs forced many of the country’s best and brightest into lower-paying, if psychically rewarding, work.” Wow, that sounds like it really sucks. I bet those lower-paid people who got forced into public service jobs are pretty bummed about it. But what happened to your data about how extremely competitive these positions are? Your anecdotes show that the people who are working in public service are happy about it, so who exactly got “forced”?

“It is easier to be idealistic and relatively unconcerned about wages when workers are young, childless and mortgage-free; attitudes toward the importance of financial remuneration can change when responsibilities add up.” Says who? At least attribute your editorializing to a source instead of just declaring these maxims as if they are true.

Actually, jotting down those words of wisdom without bothering to find a reputable source to lend them any weight is pretty tempting.  Let me try writing one: Opinions about the long-term viability of public service work can be valuable, when they come from people with expertise; reporters who are out of touch with everyone but the grads of super-elite colleges don’t have useful wisdom to offer.

While I’m at it, here’s a pitch for an article: Recession forces New York Times to write about the plight of a population other than privileged college graduates. You’re going to have to fake the data and rely heavily on anecdote to write that one too; I don’t think its going to come true.

Farming: Kindler, Gentler Gentrification

Oakland does not look like this.

I kind of hate that I liked Farm City.  It’s a short, very readable memoir by a woman who built a farm on an abandoned lot in West Oakland.  Having recently begun experimenting with gardening myself, and given the fact that I live about 1.4 miles away from her farm, I can’t help but feel jealous of her tenacity and know-how, and perhaps this generalized sense of admiration/envy is why I was able to set aside the more disturbing undercurrents of the book (see, e.g., racism, deliberate gentrification, self-obsession, liberal martyrdom).

The autobiographer is a character from a Jonathan Franzen novel.  Self-effacing woman raised by flawed yet idealistic parents works out her childhood issues through a sudden, absurd break with the oppressive suburban lifestyle; flirts with self-actualization. Her long-time boyfriend/husband is the kind of anachronistically masculine figure you’d expect from Franzen as well.  Mechanically gifted but a bit lazy (that’s men for you!) he has a penchant for repairing anything and everything, building chicken coops and planters and fences and reviving non-op cars.  In case it wasn’t obvious, they met in grad school.  She thinks his gawky thinness and coke-bottle glasses are sexy.

And yet, I devoured this book.  She built a fucking farm in West Oakland!  She raised chickens and ducks and turkeys and a pig!  How awesome is that!?  The central conceit of the book is that the author doesn’t realize that her readers will absolutely love her for this.  It’s narrated with a sort of aw-shucks tone that makes it sound like she regards her project as foolish and embarrassing rather than impressive and legendary.  Which, when you think about it, can’t really be the case, since she saw fit to write a memoir, the most arrogant and self-important of all literary forms.  Perhaps if this were a compilation of her farm-poetry or an instructional text the reader wouldn’t have to contend with the fact that the narrator must have at one point pitched herself to a publisher. “A book about my life would be a really good addition to the pantheon of American literature!”

Ultimately, I am left with a few persistent qualms, especially given how much I want to throw myself fully into replicating her achievement (midway through the book I went out and salvaged a discarded shipping pallet and built myself a vegetable garden…).  For example, she refers to the neighborhood in which she lives as “the ghetto.”  Except that she moved there from the Northwest by way of the Berkeley Hills.  This raises serious red flags about her deliberate efforts to improve the neighborhood by building a squatter farm on the abandoned lot next to her apartment, which she is surely renting for more than the previous tenants paid…  Nowhere in the memoir does she consider the ramifications of gentrification, or even of her own presence in the neighborhood, as anything other than an unalloyed good.  At one point she grows fearful of the neighborhood kids (apparently because they are black) and wonders if she can manage to keep living in a bad part of town.  It doesn’t occur to her that her geographic mobility is a tremendous privilege, and that by showing up and deliberately transforming her neighborhood by building a community garden and educating “the locals” about farming, she is wielding her privilege like a bludgeon.

Of course, I can’t help but feel that a community garden, however obnoxious and cliched it may sound, is preferable to an abandoned lot.  Even in “the ghetto,” and even when its run by suburban transplants with no cultural competency.  So yeah, I liked Farm City, and I like Oakland, and I’m secretly nervous about the negative impact that my having moved to my neighborhood will have; hopefully I won’t do any more damage than building a farm on an empty lot.

There are tours...

In Which I Implore You to BUY GOLD NOW!!!

I kind of hate Mint.com.  For those not in the know, Mint is a personal finance management website that logs into all your bank accounts and credit card accounts automatically and obtains current financial info for you to help you manage your budget.  However, the catch is that Mint can’t track anything you didn’t buy with plastic.

Thus, Mint incentivizes you to make all your purchase with a credit card, thereby leeching 2-5% of each transaction (depending on the fee structure of the retailer) out of the fledgling businesses that you go out of your way to support because they are helping revitalize your community and make your life better. Then pay this “convenience tax” to a predatory company that will not only sell your spending habits to marketing companies and drown you in television, radio and print marketing every day of your life, but will also ultimately steal from you with so many surpising fees and usurious interest rates that you won’t know whether to puke or sob. K, now that you’re doing that, we will help you look at where you spent your money over the past few months!

I hope that Mint is getting hefty marketing payments from Visa and Mastercard, because they sure are doing plenty of legwork for them.  Of course, the appeal of being able to micromanage your finances down to the last penny without having to carry around a grocery bag full of receipts is appealing, in a neurotic sort of way, or an erotic sort of way if you buy a lot of porn.  Yet I beseech you, dear reader,* resist the temptation to categorize your expenditures as methodically as your anachronistic collection of hummels.  Free yourself by spending only cold, hard, veiny cash.

Cash has all sorts of things going for it.  First, you don’t have to remember that you spent it, because you don’t have to pay for it at the end of the month.  Its like the ultimate real-time payment system!  Cash is fucking instantaneous, man!

Second, cash works at cash only businesses.  You know the type of businesses that don’t accept credit cards?  The ones with horrendously overpriced ATMs waiting to skim your pin number and steal from you in small increments at random intervals over the next few months?  Sure, you could cut them a check, but you* and I both know that you’re not a 76 year old woman standing in the express lane of a supermarket with a stack of coupons and a checkbook.  Don’t be a loser.  Don’t do drugs.  Don’t use checks.

Finally, the best reason to use cash is this: you can get rid of your credit cards.  Do you know what it feels like to peel back the fingers of that hairy, stinky, credit-card monkey on your back, one by one, until the fetid beast falls from your shoulder’s like a gangsta rap status symbol with a broken clasp?  It feels really fucking good.  Like, mixed metaphors good.  Like, those yoplait ads where women pretend that eating yogurt makes them feel sexy crossed with those herbal essences ads where women with incompetent lovers have orgasms because of the excessively fruity-smelling chemical compounds in their conditioner.

Give it a try.  You’ll be doing all the businesses you shop at a favor, and you won’t have to be afraid of the end of the month.  Worst case scenario, you end up having to bail yourself out by putting some stuff on your card at the end of the month.  Which is what you were going to do anyway, right?  We know eachother so well.

Say “Hi” to your mother for me.

*I should probably just admit that I know who you are and call you by your first name, but the rant wouldn’t flow as well.

Baby Boomdoggle

Your parents have bankrupted the nation, themselves, and your future.  No joke, they are going to have no money and no safety net, and unless you’re some kind of ungrateful sociopath, you will have to spend every dime you ever earn paying for their long-term care in some hellish nursing facility.  And you thought your student loans were oppressive…

Ok, maybe I’ve got absolutely no evidence to back this up, but I just finished reading Lee Eisenberg’s dystopian thriller The Number, in which the author sets out to convince you that no sum short of several million dollars will suffice to sustain a pair of convalescing baby boomers when that rascally generation retires a few decades down the line.

Yup, it turns out that the 95% of middle aged persons have not amassed the closets full of gold krugerrands necessary to save themselves from being plunged directly into abject poverty upon leaving the work force.   Does this seem like complete and utter horseshit, that at the very least should be backed by extensive research and rigorously vetted data?  Perhaps, but Mr. Eisenberg only had 256 pages (paperback, double-spaced) in which to convince you, dear reader, that your fate is sealed!  And for the former editor of Esquire, writing anything over 50 pages with no full-page advertisements or celebrity photo spreads is a really taxing endeavor.

Full Disclosure: I gave up on reading this cheesy financial self-help book when, on page 89, the author casually began to refer to the made-up people in his hypothetical scenarios as “crash dummies”, his 21st century spin on the straw men you were taught not to use in high school English class.  I skimmed the rest, which was relatively straightforward, since Eisenberg’s editor enforced a strict topic-sentence-based organization with subheadings every second page.

Setting aside the merits of Mr. Eisenberg’s New York Times Bestseller (ouch), it got me thinking about the future of our parents.  Or rather, it got me thinking about how to think about the future of our parents.  My grandmother made a series of subtly catastrophic life choices that have left her physically incapacitated by diabetes in her old age.  My parents, stirred by her example, talk about their own old age in hushed tones, with plans of exercise and extended careers.  I see nothing wrong with this: its only natural to make plans to avoid the consequences of another person’s mistakes.  But should I somehow interfere on their behalf, attempting to reinforce their promises to themselves to retire in better health, both physically and financially?  Is it our responsibility as the younger, poorer set to avert the disasters set in motion by our parents’ decisions?

I have a hard time seeing how any of us have any responsibility for the future of the baby boomers.  They tried to change the direction of the political system at our age, and then produced George W. Bush and two new vietnam wars.  They broke their own safety net by opposing taxes on an ideological level since Ronald Reagan.  If their bloated lifestyles prove unsustainable, so be it; inflation will price them out.

It’s not that I’m unconcerned about the fate of my parents.  If the doomsayers are even half-way correct about the fate of the baby boomers, we are all in for some very hard times.  But aside from saving as much money as possible and being an intolerable scold about poor lifestyle choices, what is there to do about it?  Fearfully eyeing a gloomy forecast won’t make it go away.  The best any of us can do is live sustainably, both financially and environmentally (the two tend to go hand in hand anyway) and hope for the best.  Now there’s some a common sense financial self-help idea that could never make the New York Times Bestseller list.

Ian McEwen Hates Your Mom

Just finished Ian McEwen’s latest, Solar.  NYTimes Review here, for context.  A year or two back I had a contentious discussion of McEwen’s insidious misogyny after reading Black Dogs with some friends.  I must admit that at the time I didn’t understand their point, but reading Solar was so infuriating, so polarizingly chauvinistic and I am now completely on board.

On the one hand, Solar is an enticing, intellectual romp with heady discussions of physics and academia.  Its protagonist is an aging yet promiscuous nobel laureate, who is both a Nabokovian neurotic and an increasingly irrelevant figure in his field.  It is fun to inhabit his mind, which is both filthy and extremely clever.  On the other hand, all of the female characters are flat caricatures whose redeeming qualities are limited to their sex appeal.  Literally every female character lucky enough to receive a first name commits some kind of desperate man-trapping scheme straight out of frat boy lore.  We’re talking the infamous Revenge-Affair-With-Your-Colleague, the Ambush-Pregnancy, and even the Demanding-Marriage-Mid-Fuck… the whole nine yards.

I suppose the reader might try to ignore this cartoonish portrayal of women, but the novel is literally divided into three parts devoted to each of the three main female antagonists.  Meanwhile, the protagonist’s treatment of these women is utterly abhorrent, so awful that I concluded several times that McEwen is intentionally parodying the archetypal philanderer.  But then I reach another section in which McEwen describes the demeanor and actions of a woman (any woman), in an almost preeningly misogynistic way without humor or any apparent literary purpose, and I am forced to conclude that the he is simply channeling his true feelings (and resentments) toward women.

The NYTimes and the Guardian regard this book as a comical and entertaining satire, in which the reader is “sequestered” in the mind of its philandering anti-hero.  Perhaps that was the intent, but the execution falls horribly flat, because none of the females is given even the slightest autonomy to act in a rational, human manner.  Regardless of your perspective, a woman who intentionally ceases taking birth control to trap her bi-weekly lover into giving her a child is a desperate, two-dimensional figure.  The idea that an old, overweight, and pathologically narcissistic physicist is constantly seducing young, beautiful women with his cunning wit and sexual prowess (hah!) is an insult to womankind, and upon its fourth or fifth occurrence it exceeds even the magical realism of a Marquez novel and begins to smack of McEwen’s own drooling personal fantasies.

Oh Hello! I Didn’t See You There.

Please do have a seat!  I was just admiring my many leatherbound books.  I used to write myself, you see.  Nothing fancy, just a weblog of my musings, preserved for all time in annals of cyberspace.  Hmm?  No, no, no, my good man.  That’s “annals”, with two “n”s.  I can see how you might be confused, what with the reputation of the world wide web these days.

In any case, a recent spate of pleasure-reading has inspired me to return to the craft at which I am so utterly unskilled, unnoticed, and unimpressive.  What can I say?  It’s a calling.  Yes, those of us who spend many hours a day carving beauty from the marble of the English language have no choice but to open our fingertips and let the fruit of our verdant minds pour forth onto our keyboards.

Anyone have a tissue?  That last bit of creative effluence appears to be interfering with the “b” key and the spacebar.

NYTimegeoisie

You can always count on the grey lady to go to bat for the little guy.  No, wait, that’s not what I meant to say.  What’s it called when you always side with the propertied elite?  Oh right, let me correct myself: you can always count on the grey lady to swing a bat at the little guy.

Today’s internet cover page featured a stirring piece on the plight of the downtrodden landlord.  That’s right, the weak, disempowered few who own more property than they need, and grow richer every month as a result of their already being wealthier than everyone else.  Woe is them!

Note how the NYTimes characterizes the tenants as a noisy, despicable horde, whose disruptive behavior needlessly antagonizes the innocent owners, drowning them out, and hurting their poor, sensitive, bourgeoisie ears.  I bet the tenants were smelly and diseased, too.

Unfortunately the NYTimes fails to generalize as broadly about landlords, so let me offer a primer of the various genus of owner, so that we may know of whom we speak.

The landed gentry consists of four basic varietals.  First, there is the little-old-lady-landlord, or LOLL.  This is a breed known for its innocuous properties, and also rumored to have homeopathic qualities (chicken soup commonly arrives at opportune moments).  The LOLL deserves the utmost respect and deference for her surrogate parenting of recent college grads across America.

Second, and similarly non-threatening, is the rich developer turned-landlord.  In these times of economic turmoil, your typical rich developer who rents stylishly appointed condominiums to yuppies must be excused for debasing his trade by renting instead of selling; in a down market one must wait until an appropriately profitable time to unload his decadent wares.

Third, and far more despicable, is the disembodied property management company.  These inorganic, soulless combines perform the useful role of divorcing the role of landlord from the emotions and empathy of the human experience.  You’ll never find a company knocking on your door with chicken soup, but you also don’t have to worry about the company shutting off your water because they think your pregnant girlfriend is a slut for bearing offspring out of wedlock.

Last, but not least inhuman, is the slumlord.  These profiteers pry out what little cash makes its way into the calloused, arthritic, carpal tunnely hands of the working poor.  By cramming the largest number of renters into their buildings, slumlords operate a business requiring* virtually no upkeep, and limited in its profitability only by the rent ceilings imposed by good-hearted law-makers and ballot initiatives.

*state law typically requires that lessors of real property maintain the property in conditions fit for safe human habitation.  rofl.

Finally, let us consider the testimonials selected by the accomplished and underappreciated Journalists at the Times.  Mr. Petrov, a 32 year-old who owns a 55-unit building in New York, decries the a great sacrifices that he must make for his awful, blood-sucking tenants.  It must be hard to own such an enormous building on such an extremely valuable plot of land.  I can’t imagine what trials and tribulations befell him on his way to inheriting a piece of property probably worth millions of dollars.  Of course, Mr. Petrov could always unload his terrible burden on the Free Market that he so prizes… that is, if he’s been keeping the rooms in decent condition.

Maintaining rental properties in saleable condition?  What about market incentives?!  Keeping things nice when they’re only being offered for rent… that would be Socialism!

Father and Daughter

“I have to say there was a mile or two,”

A few minutes ago I was alone in my fancy new apartment working on an opposition brief to [multinational bank]‘s demurrer to my lawsuit against them, bathing in the singular intensity that comes with staring at glowing screen after midnight while flitting fingers furiously pour out the argument that fucking hits it out of the park.

“I had the itch to fly and I flew”

Then Paul Simon’s Father and Daughter came on and I froze and realized that with all of my heart I’d rather be in be back in Tacoma sitting next to Dad while he watches Moo shine.

“the only line that is true is the line   you’re               from.”

Everything is much easier when you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

was/I/knew/I/was/I/was

Axpocalypse Now

coming soon to a neighborhood near you

Looking for a signs of the apocalypse?  Look no further than the recent spike in ax-murders.  After the New York Times was kind enough to devote front page space (below the fold) on the brutal ax-murder of a 13 year-old settler, I wondered why an israeli teenager killed by an ax while being forced by his parents to assist in the occupation of palestine gets better coverage in the venerable Times than four murdered Oakland cops (buried on page A9)?  The answer is simple, but terrifying.

This is only the most recent in a terrifying trend of ax attacks.  At first, the fact that the New York Times only cares about this one (curious…) led me to believe that it was an isolated incident, front page material only for its freakishness.  If only that were the case.

Two weeks ago, a soon-to-be divorced Pierce County couple’s legal battles came to a premature resolution when the husband hacked apart his wife and daughter.  Around the same time, Chicago residents were shocked to learn that a man who had been arrested after wielding an ax in what police described as the “March 19 melee” lacks the basic human decency to be honest about his crimes.  In January, a Native American man killed another Native American man by chopping his head with an ax, on some reservation somewhere than none of the major news outlets care about.  Even Utah has its share of ax-murderers: earlier this week a Utah man was sentenced to three years in prison for attempted murder with a battle ax.

Is there something in the water?  These cases are not geographically isolated, so probably not.  Given the fact that none of the victims were zombies or mutants, (yet) and the fact that at least one of these attacks was committed using a lame medieval battle ax (instead of a cool, futuristic ax-gun), I think its unfair to lay the blame squarely at the feet of violent video games.  Lets be realists, its time to face facts: this is incontrovertible evidence of the coming apocalypse.  And the only way to fight axes, is with axes that have swords hidden inside them.

this lord of the rings geek's jeans and t-shirt are made of invincible spider silk

At the end of the day, there’s one other lesson to learn.  The New York Times doesn’t give a shit about your ax-murdered relatives, unless they were murdered while living on someone else’s land.  I’m sure they would have covered the Native American victim, if he had wandered off the reservation before being dismembered.

And Crown Thy Good With Brotherhood…

this is our responsibility

Tent City, Sacramento, CA.  March 10, 2009

And you’re gonna bitch about “redistribution of wealth”?   Looks to me like its not distributed very well anyhow these days.