Eclectic Amateur

Let me see if I have this straight…

(1) Dubious financial minds come up with even more dubious [read: bullshit] derivative “securities” upon which transactions are based, and our Congressional masters sling the financial industry $700bn, no questions asked. In fact, the entire premise upon which the bailout was approved even gets changed in midstream, but no worries.

(2) Auto industry which employs hundreds of thousands (over a million if you kick in the cascade effects) and remains the largest part of the American manufacturing base asks for $25bn to get it through until new cost-saving labor agreements and reduced legacy costs kick in, and the answer is “Clear it with Countrywide Chris and Subprime Barney first.” Oh, and you boot John Dingell for the Mayor of Whoville in the process.

Yeah, we’re watching here in Michigan. Which reminds me, a word of advice for Senator Dick Shelby: I can’t recommend sticking your schnozz north of Toledo for the foreseeable future–you’ve become a household name on sports radio, of all things. And not remotely in a good way.

Other than the fact that I don’t listen to sports radio — my thoughts exactly.

John Michael Greer shares his impressions of Detroit:

I spent the flight staring out the window at half a continent’s worth of scenery while trying to fit my head around Bateson’s take on systems theory or the tangled syntax of some scrap of atrocious medieval Latin, and spent the ride from the airport to the hotel in suburban Auburn Hills taking in glimpses of Detroit: long-abandoned factory buildings in ruins, gritty slums with colorfully named churches and every third house boarded up, posh suburban neighborhoods with ostentatious yards, huge office buildings breaking the skyline, and then the huge mass of Chrysler’s headquarters complex looming up beside the freeway like a pharaoh’s tomb. I half-expected to see an inscription out of Shelley’s Ozymandias there:

My name is Iacocca, CEO of CEOs;
Look on my works, ye bankers, and despair!

“I was dreamin’ when I wrote this
Forgive me if it goes astray…”

It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a government subsidy.
— Wendell Berry, Conserving Forest Communities

From Hilary, via Dale:

lyrics

I’m not even English myself — just an in-law, really. Even so.

I suppose it doesn’t help that last night’s activity was reading aloud Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood where good King Richard the Lion’s Heart came to Sherwood Forest and set things aright …

But it’s more than that:

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk,
Of the way we look and the way we talk.
Without our stories, or our songs,
How will we know where we come from?

How will we know? The amnesia is nearly complete.

After the speeches when the cake’s been cut, the disco’s over and the bar is shut.
At Christening, Birthday, Wedding or Wake,
What can we sing until the morning breaks?

It also doesn’t help that I’m recently back from another Frey reunion. Everything I said about the vanishing of the songs with my generation? Same song, second verse.

Haul away boys, let them go,
Out in the wind and the rain and snow.
We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know,
‘Round the rocky shores of England.

We need roots!

Here is something I wrote in the immediate aftermath:

An Ordinary Week

(looking back on September 11, 2001)


Thank you, God, for an ordinary week.


While there were reports of terror and death
  all around me, you have given me the gift
  of an ordinary week.


I went to work and did my job.  There was satisfaction
  and frustration and politics and camaraderie.

I came home to my family.  Some joy, some tedium,
  some being driven crazy by each other.  You know
  how families can be.

I helped with the dishes, did some work around
  the house, folded the laundry.

The kids, in between being wonderful, challenged
  and frustrated us.  They even needed
  some disciplining.

I wondered how I was going to get all the bills
  taken care of.

My wife smiled at me.

We fought a little bit, but nothing that didn't
  pass and leave the love behind.

I went to church on Sunday and worshiped,
  distracted by the squirming and questioning
  of lively children.

It was an ordinary week.

We had a little bit out of the ordinary.  Josh
  was upset because we didn't get a newspaper.
  He likes the weather maps.

But the front page wouldn't have been ordinary,
  and he's such a sensitive child.

He won't even pray his "special prayers" at night,
  because he didn't want to speak what he'd heard
  about New York and Washington, D.C.
  even to God.

David will pray about it.  He prays every night
  for the airplanes and the buildings and the firefighters
  and that the planes will get down safely.
  I never have the heart to tell him
  that they won't.

My wife and I are in disbelief, and a little shock,
  that a building where we spent a week together
  is now a pile of rubble.

We hold each other a little tighter.

And we were relieved to find that our friend
  who lives and works around the Beltway
  had his flight on the ground a few hours
  before the terror began.

So it was not entirely ordinary.

But I am only an ordinary man
  with the ordinary responsibilities of life.

I had no terror of waiting for the awful call
  (or worse, no call at all)
  regarding loved ones in the wrong building.

I had no responsibility for coworkers in flight
  or where they might be stranded
  if the planes were still in the air at all.

I had no position of ministry
  where the grieving and questioning would come
  and ask the unanswerable.

I had no position of public office
  where more wisdom than can be humanly borne
  is demanded.

I am only an ordinary man
  experiencing an ordinary week.

Thank you, Lord, for this most precious treasure
  of an ordinary week.

Not that I always agree with everything Orson Scott Card writes, but he nailed it perfectly with Why We Should Not Rebuild on the Site of the World Trade Center :

The place where six thousand people were slaughtered all at once for no other crime than being at work in an American skyscraper is no longer just real estate.

It is holy ground.

…

Whether we like it or not, that pile of debris is their grave. And I, for one, believe it would be wrong to haul the entire thing away and dispose of it as landfill.

…

One of the reasons our enemies who did this thing despise us is because they believe we value making money more than we care about anything else. More than we care about each other. More than we care about God.

To erect a commercial building on the site of the two towers, to continue to make money there, would, I believe, prove that our enemies were right about us. [Emphasis mine]

Too bad this is advice unheeded.

For example, being able to do for yourself without depending on foreign sources? Pat Buchanan has an interesting article, The Hollowing Out of America, discussion the collapse of our manufacturing base and the Third-Worlding of our economy.