Closure, After All These Years

I posted not long ago about the dangerous historical similarities Islamic-fascism, namely the similarities between groups like Al Qaeda and the Nazi form of Fascism that once presided over Europe with a horrific reign of terror holds. Well today, gratefully, there is one more historic connection between the two: the two faces of evil who gained their power by preying on the weak and murdering the innocent that we associate with both, Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, both found their demise by a bullet through the brain, on the same day, May 1^st, just 66 years apart.

I do not think I can say it as well as this, or the thousands of other commentators with a better command of language and writing than I can even pretend to have. Nor can I put it, as poignantly nor as truly heartfelt as those who lost family and closer friends than I did that day. But I am a New Yorker, and I was in the city that day and I can remember the feelings, and that leads me to look at the incredible success of tonight’s news that Osama has been killed with a personal and nationalistic, and even global perspective.

I also hope that from an international sense, this opens up the Middle East to the sort of modernism, pragmatism and level of sustainable democracy that it so desperately deserves. As I wrote about in that earlier post, the issues that have led to such violence in those countries is an economic and cultural clash that has served one side so well, and seemingly hurt the other so badly. It has been a clash of cultures and mindsets, and no one person, either literally or as a symbol, has served as a larger wedge in ensuring that those two cultures, Islam and the rest of the West, would hopefully continue to clash forever. Egypt earlier this year proved that no schism could last forever, especially not in a modern society, and this moment, when the face of that schism has been destroyed, is yet another positive step for everyone, no matter where they were from.

Ultimately, this is a symbolic victory. It represents both the ultimate closure to a horrific event, yet also an opening for an entire section of the world that that needs this sort of news. The closure part is obvious: we have gone on ten years fighting since 9/11, and we have arrested or killed innocent men and supremely guilty men. Along the way, it would seem that as a country, we have encountered political loss and the loss of reputation, and certainly more significant, the loss of life for those who served our country. Others have been brought to justice, even those perhaps more directly linked to 9/11, yet none offer the sort of ultimate closure that this death does for us. It feels like everything that has gone on over the past 10 years has led to this point, a much needed victory for America, and finally a resounding response to the largest open wound in our countries history.

“The Freddy Krueger Honorary ‘Back From the Dead!’ Tour”

I have been intently following Barrack Obama’s recent cross-country “Raise Taxes-apalooza” tour, or as I refer to it, the “The Freddy Krueger Honorary ‘Back From the Dead!’ Tour,” for a while now. Before I go further, however, this post is not an opinion on raising taxes or the overall performance of Mr. Obama himself. I will save that for my next posting coming in a couple of days. Instead, I offer you my take on the laughably partisan political stance of a man who was supposed to be able to transcend politics altogether. It has neither inspired nor angered me, but instead, quite the contrary, it has tickled me.  It has filled me with the sort of jaded amusement specially reserved for those times when I get to witness a public official so blatantly, and inefficiently, enter the muddied scrum of politicking. In an age where government seemingly cannot do anything right, least of all provide protection and service to its own citizens, the least is can do is provide a few giggles.

This amusement is a product of having front row seats to witness first hand President Obama’s ongoing and increasingly awkward dance with selling his tax policy. It is a tango that has gone on from the start of his first presidential campaign until today. Tax reform has proved an uneasy partner for him, causing him to shift goals and approach more times than a teenage boy attempting to finagle his way into second base. As an unabashed lover of the old VH1 show, “Behind The Music,” however, I was able to form a more apt and complex analogy. Obama’s political journey, it turns out, has taken on the form of a narrative that most closely resembles the journey nearly every music group takes along the bumpy road to stardom.

In these cases, a band usually releases a great and original first album. This, in turn, gains them a rabid and cult-like following of fans. This was Obama during the 2008 election, where he railed against the Bush tax cuts for the rich, endearing him to the grass-roots liberals who never quite trusted Hillary Clinton, whom they suspected, with good reason, to be more “business friendly.” They perhaps got this idea from her own husband’s failed experiment with a different sort of personal taxation: letting the rich sleep in a bedroom near him and collecting the proceeds. Of course, this came out after Clinton, having removed nearly as much financial regulation as Reagan himself, pardoned Marc Rich, the financier who paid his dues to society by, well, paying Clinton.

This first album, or the 08 election, spoke to a liberal sect who had, in recent years, acted like concert goers floating listlessly from each new fad or band of the moment, hoping to capture a the new hot thing they could call their own, with the ideology of Nader and the looks of Edwards.  They had eagerly gotten into bed with Howard “The Hulk” Dean. This was followed, begrudgingly, by a flirtation with John Kerry, the man who attempted to break Al Gore’s record of most consecutive days on a campaign trail while seemingly under the heavy influence of horse tranquilizers. Finally, they had discovered the hot new band that made music just for them, and he was unlike any other candidate we had previously seen in our history.

Inevitably of course, that same band is burdened with unreasonably high expectations to follow-up their sizzling debut. The groups delayed second album inevitably becomes influenced by eager and greedy record company executives, which for the sake of comedy I envision as Rand Paul sporting a Clive Davis-esque jumpsuit, sunglasses and all. Once this album, mangled by conflicting influences and vision, is released, it is always panned as merely junk for the mainstream. By now, their original core fans have deemed them as “sell outs.” This is the equivalent of the point not so long ago, when Obama extended, and in some cases, lowered, those same Bush Tax Cuts he once so vehemently disagreed with. This, of course, was the result of his desperately attempting a compromise with Republicans after his politically disastrous and belabored passing of the albatross that was Health-Care Reform. To those who loved him first, this was the ultimate betrayal.

One interesting note and similarity: during this tumultuous period, the hardcore fans always seem to blame a certain band member, almost always the drummer with the long hair and hefty drug problem, for their supposed bad influence in navigating the bands future. It is always the drummer who showed up late each day for recording sessions with a new girlfriend, and its always he or she who introduces the front man to either cocaine or heroin. Knowing this, it might make sense for someone to frisk Rahm Emanuel for drumsticks the next time they run into him in Chicago.

Finally, comes the all-important third album. For successful bands, with a new drummer in place, this is usually when they get it all together, and make an album that brings them back to their roots. In admitting they had strayed, they are making a desperate plea to their former groupies that they are, once again, cool.

This is the point that Obama finds himself today. He is trying to be ‘cool’ again. He has visited college campuses and the headquarters of Facebook to make his point about raising taxes, ironically both places supported by the interest of those who serve as the cultural gatekeepers of ‘cool’, yet also by those who don’t even pay taxes in the first place. He needs his hardcore fans again, if not for the countries sake, at least for reelection sake. Hence my pet nickname of the “Back from the Dead” tour. Perhaps, then, it is not a coincidence that Obama has centered his liberal spiritual awakening around Easter Sunday season.

The Hope Of Opening Day

“Repetition within immutable lines and rules – baseball is counterpoint: stability vying with volatility, tradition with the quest for a new edge, ancient rhythms and ever-new blood- an oft-told tale, repeated in every game a season, season after season.”
- Bart Giamatti

Opening Day in baseball is here, and it goes without saying, for any true baseball fan it remains the true start to summer, and a moment filled with the most overwhelming, and mostly irrational, feelings of hope that one feels regarding just about anything else in life. No matter how bad your team was last season, and still figures to be once again, humans, inherently and consistently choose to ignore the obvious, blinding us from the cold, harsh realities of the situation, and show up excitedly to watch the first pitch. Baseball in this way symbolizes what is at both of best and often times worst feature: our innate desire to romanticize and create a personalized narrative of our lives, even if it means we have to lie to ourselves to do so.

It is for this reason that, each year, at around this time, I make a point to re-read two of my favorite pieces of writing, the late commissioner of the sport, Bart Giamatti’s pieces “The Green Fields Of My Mind” and “The Story of Baseball- You Can Go Home Again.” These titles seem a bit contrived at first, like a bad John Fogerty track or Mitch Albom novel. Yet as an all too passionate sports fan, especially New York Met fan (tragically), my Dad introduced these articles, published excerpts from Giamatti’s books, and since then I have always returned to them. They are like old friends, perfect companions, to both inspire and temper the sort of hope all fans of baseball inevitably feel at the start of a long season.

Baseball is a rebirth. It is the start of summer, and it is youthful in every sense. Each season takes the form of the life, and the start, not ironically in the spring, is similar to the changes in nature: born in the spring, when hope is at its highest, and carries us through the long hot days of summer, maturing and experiencing inevitable high and low points, and then, unless you have defeated the overwhelming odds, dies, just as autumn beings and the cold picks up, when we need it most. This happens, (mostly, lockouts not included) like clockwork. Life is not always certain, but the season will always start again, and follow the same uncertain path and even more uncertain conclusion. That is why baseball is seemingly the only sport that we take true solace in, during times of national or international crisis. The fact that it carries on, regardless of disaster, gives us a link to a certain normalcy that otherwise might seem ridiculous given a certain moment.

Baseball is a religious experience for the fans. What exactly is the great difference between a baseball stadium and some sort of cathedral or temple? Both exist to house a group of people who believe in something greater than themselves, a shrine people take pilgrimages to in order to feel some sort of communal relationship with total strangers around them. Fans are essentially just people who strive to be a part of a larger, ‘imagined community’ so that they can feel like they belong, and experience depression and elation together, in the same building, often only moments apart. How often can we experience the deepest and most painful of emotions and know that nearly every other person around you is feeling the same thing? The rituals we have in watching games, hoping that our idiosyncratic series of jinxes or movements might somehow make a difference, is strikingly similar to religious thought.

In order to accept ant kind of religious system, there needs to be a sort of hope or belief system that allows people to make a leap of faith to choose to believe something outside of themselves with an ending that is uncertain. Pascal described this as a 50/50 wager, no more or less, that all our hopes and beliefs and ritual will account for something in the end. Embracing a team is just like that. We invest hours and hours of emotion, watching games that often seem endless, debating the most arcane statistics with friends and relatives, with the statistically small, yet enduring hope that we will eventually be rewarded. This is in fact the driving force for fans of any sport. It is not 50-50, but it is at least something. It is the possible promotion after years of hard work, the possibility of a lifelong marriage at the start of dating. That is why we get so upset when players use P.E.D’s for contract years or choose not to run out a fly ball. We expect the same draining level of passion from our teams’ players that we put into rooting for the game ourselves, even though we have no real hope of impacting the outcome of a game and they have all the chance to.

Furthermore, baseball is a game constructed to help us play out and realize our most idealistic, and unrealistic, vision of how our lives work out in reality. The game idealizes our supposed cyclical journey through life to reach comfort by enforcing strict rules demanding that all action and progress must be contained within a semblance fair ground, guarded by foul lines that technically stretch into infinity. Going further with that concept of the infinite, baseball is also not coincidently the only American sport I know of that can technically last forever. No outside forces can set a time limit or induce a certain result: the outcome is solely and completely dictated by the merit of the efforts of each player.

In reality, naïve hopes and wishes like these are proven each day to be impossible. Often times, it is those people who take the shortcuts, operating in the grey area outside the realm of fairness and law that succeed at an unthinkable level. In life, whether we are religious or not, we need to hold ourselves to some made up ethical or moral code to keep us within the fair points of those foul lines, or else we would all simply spin out of control, with the temptation to do otherwise simply too great. We still like to think, or at least hope, that as there is in baseball, in life there exists some sort of umpire to call out those who break the loose code of legal and ethical morals we have constructed.

Baseball is also more intricately intertwined with an even deeper understanding of the purpose and meaning of life. In baseball, reaching home is the entire objective of the game, its why we play and its why we watch. It’s tantalizingly close objective, yet also an incredibly difficult feat to accomplish. The path to get there is set out by the rules of the game, and in a way, following the base paths can be viewed as an allegory for following an uncertain path in life. In life, we are met with an onslaught of setbacks and difficulties, distractions that only serve to accentuate those very difficulties. Baseball too, is a system designed to severely restrain your freedom. On your path around the bases a player is filled with temptations, stealing a base for instance, or rules that impede natural, and excessive, progress such as having to tagging up or being slowed by a ground rule double. One must pass all these obstacles, all while making sure not to skip any of the bases along the way, in order to finally return home.

If baseball can be described in one simple way, Giamatti says, it is “The story of going home after having left home; the story of how difficult it is to find the origins one so deeply needs to find. It is the literary mode called Romance.” He further defines his concept of ‘home’ as such:

“Home is a concept, not a place; it is a state of mind where self-definition stars; it is origins – the mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original, perhaps like others, especially those loved ones, but discrete, distinct not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it ever were to occur, would happen.”

Perhaps in a way that makes the sport an all too idealized version of life. As Thomas Wolfe once famously said, one can never truly ever go home again. And Giamatti concedes as much, stating that in life, not baseball, “to go home may be impossible but it is often a driving necessity, or at least a compelling dream.” Yet baseball, as Giamatti also recognizes, is the only sport I know that introduces a loaded term like home into the field of play, and that must say something about the psyche of the American people, who all feel a paternal sort of ownership over the game despite how international it has become in recent years.

Most importantly, however, baseball is family. It is the one great thread that connects generations. Attending a baseball game is about the associations more than anything else. It is a game and experience of sense memories and the personal associations we have with it. Americans associate with the game as a national pastime because of its undeniable roots to our history. For a country so young, it is the game that has existed for nearly 200 years. And most of all, we associate it with those who introduced us or taught us the game: our parents. Growing up and playing catch at such young ages is perhaps the most primitive and egalitarian form of conversation we will ever hope to have with our parents. The memories we have of the game are often not based in actualities or fact, but in how our personal histories intertwine with those memories.

Family bonds are formed over stories and memories, and baseball specifically is a game that seems to be designed with a sort of storytelling in mind. Each game and each inning lingers on, and in between the blanks it is expected that the fans, the mothers and daughters or fathers and sons, fill in the blanks. This kind of banter, often mindless but also deeply personal or historical, is only possible in a game like baseball. In one of my favorite films, Field of Dreams, James Earle Jones describes the reasons for going out to the ballpark as a way to escape the lack of peace in the real word, and a longing for the past. Fathers take their sons to games so that their children can have the opportunity to sit where they sat when they were children and cheered where they sat when they cheered their own heroes of the past. Once again, it is cyclical, just like life. I was always allowed to skip school for opening day, just as my parents had when they were younger, and that shared guilty experience of breaking the rules for something as juvenile as a meaningless game in April bonds us together. I sincerely hope that one day, I can let my own kid skip a day of school to share the same experience with me.

This is all, for lack of a better word or keener intellect, really silly stuff. Personally, I have always detested the tendency for intellectuals to insert an excessive amount of psychoanalytical babble to anything, especially something as benign and fun as going to a game of baseball. Yet, here I am, writing four pages comparing baseball not only to a religion, but also analogous to the meaning of life and family in its entirety. Still, there must be a rational explanation for the utter irrationality of fans relationship with sports, and American’s with baseball specifically.

I am a lifelong and long suffering Mets fan, and the past three years for me have been historically hard to handle. On the field, we as fans have witness the greatest collapse in the history of the sport, causing us to miss the playoffs, and then years followed by smaller collapses or odd injuries and even odder plays that has led me to be convinced there is some sort of karmic curse on the franchise. Furthering this notion, just this off-season came the news that the team and its owners were broke, robbed blindly (or, allegedly, not so blindly) by Bernie Madoff, the man who operated his entire life outside the sanctity and comforts of the foul lines. Despite all of this evidence to the contrary, I still became giddy with the start of Pitchers and Catchers earlier this year. I found myself intently following the feel good stories of the spring, hoping, quite unreasonably, that Player X might finally stay healthy through 162 games this year, or Player Y might finally realize his potential, and give at least 20 quality starts.

Is any of this likely? Probably not. It is possible, though. And just as in life, I chose to hang onto that thinnest thread of possible good because it’s the only thing I could. For this reason, and many others, I found myself rushing home a few weeks ago, skipping my last class of the day, in order to catch the opening pitch of the new season. The Mets of course, were nearly no-hit and lost in a typically feeble fashion. But I was happy: I had once again skipped school for a righteous cause, and I was once again irrationally optimistic when I had no right to be on my 22nd Opening Day.

A Lifeline for Serious Film Fans

The implications of the Academy Awards the other night were much more interesting than the actually awards themselves. The hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, proved to be, as expected, awkward and not up to the task. Furthermore, as has been the case for far too long now, the show was far too long, spending countless hours focusing on awards no one in the general public quite understands, and even worse, hours of Hollywood doing what it does best: patting itself on the back. Instead, the results of the major categories, as well as some interesting points about the films themselves should have led the audience, and America in general patting its collective self on the back. Most all of the films nominated and all of those awarded were smaller, adult focused films with independent backing, and focusing on topics that generally don’t make any money. The last point is what makes this year so very interesting, however. These films did make money, unexpectedly large sums of it in fact, and the implications of their box office success may change the course of the American film business and consequently film product for at least the near future.

Looking at the numbers, and the statements from studio heads, the future of film generally points in one direction: those that focus on children, usually CGI, and those that focus on young teenage boys or girls, namely mindless comic book films and their sequels for the former and, interestingly enough, horror films produced in the 10 to 20 million range for the latter.  In fact, Disney head Rich Ross took over the studio just a few years ago with the goal of only making family films with the potential for sequels and franchising.  Over the last few years, the top 10 grossing films for each have almost entirely been G rated or PG-13. Among those, really the only true adult films, outside of comic book based or twilight (whatever the heck that is) were inception and Avatar; with The Hangover representing the only true R rated film. Much has been made of this. With the inception of Netflix and other methods for streaming videos, the movies that Studio heads trust most are those that are driven intensely by a clear demographic that could also be considered “spectacles” or tentpole “event” pictures.

The independent film industry, on the other hand, which had gained so much prominence in the 1990s with the rise of companies like Miramax, were the sole parties responsible for making movies of taste. Yet, these companies died from multiple wounds. The first was self-inflicted, a victim of taking on too much capital during the hedge fund boom, and as a result they were tempted to spend wildly making expensive movies. They had left the comfort zone of adult driven serious films capped at a budget of $40 million or so, and as a result made poor decisions. The other death knell was the destruction of the DVD business at the hands of Netflix or I-tunes and other Internet companies. The DVD business was a key source of a revenue, and without it, once the hedge fund money dried up with the crash of 2008, companies that cared about taste rather than the bottom line in films nearly ceased to exist. Even those that did survive and were able to produce recent films like The Hurt Locker, faced a bitter pill to swallow: critics loved their works, and Oscar awarded them, yet they barely made back in profit what they had spent on their budget.

This years Oscar’s film, however, were different. Films like True Grit and the Town earned over $90 Million dollars, and films like Black Swan, the Social Network and the eventual Oscar winner The King’s Speech all earned over that sum themselves. Those are numbers that executives expect from their larger comedies, starring bankable stars, not serious films starring actors who have never appeared on a commercial in their lives. What happened? Well The New York Times recently proposed that perhaps the fact that America is aging as a whole is contributing to a larger number of adult theatergoers. The expansive number of baby boomers has in turn created an audience without kids to cater to and, now that they are retired, not much to do otherwise. Another argument is simply that the product was better this year, and that studios, though at a scale dwarfed by what they do with their larger summer films, managed to get behind them and market them more effectively than they had in the past. Personally, I have my theories but don’t have a set concrete opinion just yet. I think what happens, not quite this summer, but during next winters season and the summer after that, when the effects of the success of these sort of films can truly be felt, will let us know if perhaps the quality films, with real cultural resonance have been offered a last minute lifeline.

The Chiseled Face of Relief

Who needs sympathy when you can have Fergie?

More and more, it seems that in order for a relief effort to work, the need for an important, significant cause is overshadowed by the need for a celebrity to make it hip. The lagging tsunami relief effort coordinated to help those in Japan, well below what other recent, and similarly tragic events such as hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti, raises the question of what drives us to give money to relief efforts? At the risk of sounding detached and cynical, although that’s one of my favorite risks, it’s clear that what drives us to philanthropy is not our inherent altruistic nature but instead our increasingly, and somewhat bizarre, obsession with celebrity.

The question is, though, is there anything necessarily wrong with that? and the simple answer is, no. Whatever works to inspire people to give to others and to help is a good thing. But its sad that there exists a flip side to that: without an effective “marketing” campaign, situations can be neglected and overlooked.

There is a great moment in the recent film Bruno, where the title character, played by Sascha Baron Cohen, goes to see two blond “specialist” in the field of choosing charities to support. While I am not entirely sure that such a field should, or even actually does, exist, the two women depicted in the film help advise celebrities which worldwide trauma, whether it be Darfur or Haiti, they should get their formidable name and chiseled features behind. This is not matchmaking made out of aligning two needs together, but instead it is matchmaking nurtures one narcissistic side of the equation, with the hope that the other side, the one desperately in more need, is helped as a result.

Associating “hipness” with charity is not a new thing. The original combatant in the war against pollution and littering is not Teddy Roosevelt, whose progressive reforms on factories and other excessive elements during the tail end of the great industrial period, but instead perhaps the tears of the crying Indian, the pop-culture hero from the 1970s ads. This sort of charitable commercialization, thus, is not just beginning. But it does seem as though we are in the eye of some sort of storm.

What happened with Katrina in New Orleans is almost as unthinkable today as it was nearly six years ago. The images we saw seemed impossible to be from one of our cities. New Orleans was decimated beyond comprehension, an American city that in its destruction seemed to not be from America at all, but instead from the Third World. Yet the images of desperate citizens looting while the national guard attempted to keep order on boats with shotguns, and Sean Penn, seemed essentially like a bad post-apocalyptic movie, one that wouldn’t be so strange for Sean Penn to star in himself, as the “fictionalized hero with personal problems.” This is the role he attempted to play in real life there, and the camera man he hired to document his role and release them to the papers was there to make sure everyone knew about it. And you know what, all jokes aside, this P.R. stunt may have helped actually keep the discourse regarding the horrific event relevent past the point where people tried to move past it as a means to rationalize it.

The other event that helped keep Katrina on the front pages was the infamous video of Kanye West, next to Mike Myers who looked as though he was watching a car accident happen right before his very eyes, claiming that “George Bush does not care about black people.” This was in interesting argument to make, and anywhere outside the politically correct confines of network television, one that surely merited a discussion. The race issue with Katrina was undeniable, and while it might not be as simplistic as West’s assertion, had he made a statement like that on cable, perhaps on Bill Maher’s show, he might have been lauded as an intellectual instead of dismissed as ignorant.

Yet, the moment created a TMZ style you-tube viral video, and this was exactly what America, especially its youth, needed to keep discussing an issue and perhaps, as a result, give more thought about giving aid themselves. If one thing has become clear during the digital revolution, it’s that a piece of controversial media, a video or a tweet, that goes viral and involves a celebrity is undoubtedly the most effective marketing campaign possible, whether it involves a tragic disaster or a new summer blockbuster movie.

The issue in New Orleans remains anything but resolved. A startlingly large portion of those displaced are unable to return to their homes. Many streets still look as though the storm hit just yesterday. Rebuilding the levee’s is taking on a glacial pace. In fact, if that same storm were to hit again today, there is a good chance that a similar flooding would occur. The only person who continues to fight and build houses for those in need is, you guessed it, another celebrity: Brad Pitt. His efforts, it seems, are not so narcissistic, and perhaps that’s his problem. If he were to generate more publicity, perhaps even a controversial PR mishap, people might get a better idea that disasters need more sustained effort than a week.

While there was no controversy needed to help market Wyclef Jean’s noble efforts in Haiti, his presence has pushed the needle, forcing Americans to recognize a disaster that was incredibly close to home and desperately required our attention. Jean is a master at self-promotion, and always has been, and he used these skills to create a fund that received money via texts and other digital promotional efforts. Just as George Clooney became the beautiful, speckled gray face of Darfur, Wyclef became the face of Haiti, and for Americans to process these issues, we need a face to go along with them. We simply process and digest harder to fathom issues if they go down smoothly with a nice pop-culture image alongside.

Recent word from Japan is that they are not accepting foreign aid. Perhaps this is a product of the infamous Japanese attachment to a form of long-lost civility, or they are just developed enough to truly not need help. In the first four days of those other crisis mentioned above, Haiti raised 150 million and Katrina raised 108 million, while Japan has raised a mere 23 million. I can only imagine the possible difference if Lady Gaga would just get behind the issue…

Reform, Not Eradicate

 

Scott Walker hates your kids.

 

This supposed truth is as catchy as it is infuriating, and it is just what the teacher’s union in Wisconsin, and all other public unions across America want you to believe.  There’s just one problem: it’s not true.

 

The truth is, in fact, much more startling. The majority of states in our union face staggering budget deficits and financial issues that would make the executives at Lehman Brothers and AIG chuckle and reminisce. No, the real truth is that a large portion of these state’s budgets are spent on protecting the interests of public government unions. The scariest truth of all is that unless we seriously reform the way we deal with these unions, we will bankrupt ourselves much in the same way those banks did, with the taxpayers, as always, footing the bill.

 

These unions very existence seems to transcend the rules of rational investing and spending, private or public. They believe that they can continue to swallow taxpayer investment, receiving benefits while neglecting their own monetary contributions, and because of their bullying and powerful clout, they can do so beyond the realm of reasonable evaluation. This has been the status quo since the Kennedy administration, and despite the fact this model is causing our states to hemorrhage money at unprecedented levels, union leaders refuse to even acknowledge the need for change. I propose that, just as investors in a private company are allowed voting rights and a conference once a year to judge the direction of the company and hold its workers accountable, so too should taxpayers with the unions they subsidize.

 

Judging by their actions, unions want to be able to collectively bargain with regards to helping protect and enhance their benefits, yet they do not want to take part in any discussion about the accountability that comes with accepting special standards. It is hard to justify an entire segment of the population refusing to contribute even the smallest margin of their salaries to their own health-care or pension funds, while workers in other private industries, even those working for the federal government rather than the state, are afforded not even close to the same standards.  To use one of many examples, in New Jersey, where the budget deficit is nearly 10 billion, unions have spent millions of dollars campaigning against the notion that they might have to give even 1.5% of their salary towards their healthcare.

 

Looking at the teachers union specifically, in states like Wisconsin, taxpayers pay around 101,091 each year per teacher, a sum that is seemingly justifiable when you take into account the significant role education has in sustaining a successful and productive society and ensuring its future. In teacher’s hands, we place the most important responsibility: our kids. Yet, teachers are not held accountable for the failure of our public school system, and the humbling place our children rank worldwide in testing, because they are able to hide behind union rules that make it nearly impossible to fire teachers who have tenure, regardless of if they fail the most simple test of all: are they good teachers? Just as corrupt cops can hide behind the thin blue line of silence, failing teachers can fail their students for years, even decades, without any reproach. That is unacceptable.

 

These are all simple, and practical points, yet their simplicity and rationality underscores what is the greatest failure of the recent protests in Wisconsin that I touched upon at the start. Instead of settling on weakened unions conceding and accepting financial regulation, a significant feat, Walker saw the opportunity to kick them while they were down, and in doing so, incited a public outcry that took the debate and rhetoric away from his original point. Ultimately, by making the issue more ideological, demanding an end to collective bargaining and therefore a systematic destruction of the very idea of unions, and less practical, reforming unions to fit the financial terms of the present, Brown went too far and created a circus in the process.

 

The juvenile nature of the debate opened the door for the unions to revert to their time tested characterization of victimhood to garner support. The strategy, using the tired, yet comforting archetypes of yesterday, works. Let’s call them the “Frank Capra terms.” Big business and corrupt politicians undoubtedly dressed like “the man,” with their ubiquitous cigars somewhere nearby, attempting to break the will of the good guys, the teachers, firemen and cops.  By allowing them to weave this familiar narrative, Walker allowed the central issues to be obscured and ignored.

 

What has happened is Wisconsin may prove to be an all-important step forward or, regretfully, one backward. If anything, other states, led by Democrats and Republicans alike, can learn from the mistakes made there.  One particular Governor, Chris Christie from New Jersey, has astutely enhanced his popularity by taking a different tact from Walker, embracing the need for collective bargaining because, simply put, he knows his argument, when put in pragmatic and appealing terms, is the right one. At the very least, at least there is reasonable public discourse regarding an issue that has been ignored for too long. Regardless of how we get there, the end result must be clear: the creation of a system that works for the reality of today, not the wishful thinking of yesterday

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Market for Insanity

 

A few years from now, this whole Charlie Sheen ‘thing’ (I would say outburst but that just seems inadequate) is going to be taught in schools and universities across America. It won’t be within the context of the studying psychology and the definitions of psychotic behavior. Nor will scientist use his example or researchers, trying to understand the effects of cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin and whatever else he has loudly boasted to use. No, instead, we will look at the past two-weeks, his manic behavior and the even more manic widespread public reaction and use it as a case study for what business, and more specifically, media and marketing. Through all his crazy ramblings and psychotic ranting, Charlie Sheen has provided a textbook example of marketing yourself, the William Randolph Hearst of a generation raised on twitter and TMZ.

 

America’s obsession with celebrity is neither unique nor exactly new. Anyone who has been to England recently can clearly see that they have us beat in the world of tabloid and the lengths they are willing to go. And anyone who contends that this is just a product of a generation removed from radio or books and immersed in Television and now the internet does have a valid point, but also an ignorant one. America has always been obsessed with scandal and celebrity, dating back to colonial times. Perhaps the greatest celebrity of the 19^th century was Jesse James, a man who had comics and books and songs written about him, and whose myth was as well known to Americans then as any other.

 

Just as people then were fascinated by this myth, the bad guy, going against the rules and breaking laws, people today are obsessed with Charlie Sheen, who uses hookers and cocaine as his publicity hook rather than horses and robbing banks. While Jessie James did not produce his own PR, Sheen has over the last week produced a media blitz unlike anything we really have seen before. What’s even more interesting too look at is that he has moved beyond the media establishment. He has gone on the today show, gone on Piers Morgan and gone on 20/20. In doing so he has reached quadrants, man and woman, in the 40 to 50 year old sector. Then he moved on to the world of twitter, fast replacing even Internet videos and articles as the way young people devour information, and conquered that world. He was the fasted person ever to reach a million followers, and will soon bypass every conventional superstar in fields like sports, politics and music to have the largest set of followers ever. While they all have fields, domains of specialty that demand we know them, Sheen has created a new one: insanity.