He's Back!

I was startled by Obama's budget.

Not by its size - who could have imagined anything less given our present circumstance? - nor by it's breathtaking deficit.

I was astonished to see a budget (well, I really haven't seen it, only read about it) that not only did what a politician had said he intended, but showed even the costs of things that previous budgets have left out and then supplemented with "emergency spending" requests.

Tax the richest. Use some of that money to provide health care.

It flies in the face of the consensus I never joined. Which was that anything that led to wealth production was good.

Even though I never joined it, I had just enough invested to at least silently cheer as the market climbed to dizzying heights.

And to ignore what it was doing to most of the those who were not accumulating vast wealth.

Can Obama pull it off?

We'll see.

I'm sure pulling for him.

Helps to have a whole lot less to protect.

In a sense it doesn't make much difference, when trying to come up with some coherent explanation for what is happening in the world's economy, whether one has what might be called an open mind, or believes in rules and boundaries that one can look to.

Not much difference only because we are were we are. There seem to be almost as many opinions as there are people, about how we got here.

And certainly that many ideas about what may save us.

But it could make all the difference in how one faces the reality.

Many of my email friends are ascribing blame. A YouTube is making the rounds that is meant to show us that President Bush and Alan Greenspan and a few other Republican notables, were warning about the coming collapse, back in 2005.

While Barney Frank - who has become the new figure Republicans love to hate (leaving Nancy Pelosi in the dust for the moment) - is shown to be reassuring that the Fannie banks were sound.

Turns out the video is from 2003, not 2005, when pretty much everyone - though they may have realized it wouldn't go on forever - was happy to be riding the crest of the bull market.

Nonetheless, it strikes me that this situation (which I tend to think is an inevitable part of the long term economic cycle, and as severe as it is because clever people were able to manipulate economic instruments in ways that postponed the inevitable correction) is simply a part of what we human beings must endure.

I hate it. I think it is grossly unfair that it always has the most severe impact on those who can least bear it. I have long believed it is the responsibility of government - every government - to define the level generally considered bare minimum, and do whatever it must (and can) to ensure no one has to live below that number.

But the cruel reality is that we can no more ensure ever continuing prosperity than we can ensure sunny weather.

When I was interviewing for a job that would move me from Massachusetts to southern California, I asked the people interviewing if they worried about the coming massive earthquake that seismologists say is long overdue.

Their answer? "Let's put the number of people who have died in earthquakes over the past hundred years in California, against the number that have died in hurricanes in Massachusetts, and we'll see which is the more dangerous place to live."

Though there is a certain compelling quality to the argument, we all know an earthquake of six or seven on the Richter scale, could separate California from the North American mainland.

Nonetheless, the point is that we rationalize what we can't control, so we can do what we always intended to do.

Which, in the case of the economy, was to keep the party going until the music stopped.

Did we all know it would one day? Likely so, if we really stood back and considered it. But who did that? Not Alan Greenspan. And, while I now wish he had, I can't blame him for not doing what I doubt I would have.

Now, about the open/closed mind deal.

The closed mind people will continue to believe there are ways, if only people will adopt them, to avoid these cataclysmic moments.

Open minded people know there is no way human beings - limited as we are - can keep them at bay. Not that we like them any better. Or don't use every weapon in our arsenal to combat them.

But know we must stand ready to face them.

I just wish the job losses would abate, and credit would begin to flow, and houses would begin to sell and build, and the goddamned Dow would get its sweet ass back above at least ten thousand.

And that my aching back would return to its strength of several decades ago.

Matthias February 24, 2009

Listen for Peace
Choose to be well
Find contentment
Listen!
Or your tongue will make you deaf.
- Cherokee saying

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.
- Chögyam Trungpa

******



Conversation overheard in the cubicle next to mine at the life-giving Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego:



We need to stop complaining and adjust, because this is the way it’s going to be for a long time.



Maybe we can learn something from the folks across the border, just 20 miles down the road. They’ve been in a financial crisis for the past 30 years.



Yeah, but it’s totally different with them. I mean, they’ve got tequila. You know what I mean? Like agave plants in their back yards.



And another – three buff guys in multi-colored biking gear – leaning into the curve as they sped by, so all I got was:



fifth grade education…inflation



disappointed not to have picked up just enough more to have re-rigged

my investment strategy



A friend who’s a plumber needed a crown.

His dentist needed an upgrade to her complex office irrigator.

Reverting to the financial world they remember from before they were 10
they traded No banks need apply



Seems most critics hated the Oscars.

Though I rarely watch, had seen only 3

of the movies I loved the stars’ self-congratulation

Slumdog, the one they all loved pissed me off until they

danced over the credits
and I clean forgot all that crap we export about miraculous
deliverance
from squalid desolation through
sudden celebrity



Oh yeah, the Oscars

well, the seemingly stunned stars helped and Sean Penn’s

bad boy commie loving homo hugging sons of a ??? Gun(?)

alongside his embrace of another obviously bad boy Mickey Rourke

of whom I had never heard and who looked like an unmade bed

cheered me up

Kate Winslet (I also saw and loved The Reader) standing at

the podium:

Whistle, Dad, so I can see where you are



but it was the ads making merry with our national malaise



JC Penny- where I used to get my jeans as a little boy - pitching to

the Nordstrom crowd

Hundai dissing Mercedes/Toyota we’ll suspend your payments if you lose your job

How about the big suit Geico guy doing a backwards

trust fall

into the arms of their signature tiny lizard mascot?

Two former Masters of the Universe enjoying a fancy meal at a

power bistro

only to learn that $14 burger was a $4 burger from

Carl’s Jr.

And the elegant dude turning away from the glittering girl and

designer drink on behalf of a diet coke?

When did you last see a Tide commercial during the Oscars?



Wall-E the other movie I saw my very first animation

action figures courting love amongst the ruins our ruins their getaway



I’m just old enough to remember movies during WWII/Korea

the pleasure those inane glitterati singing & dancing

amongst our ruins
like an
agave in every back yard




For an exhilirating fast trip through the fires of the past 50 years:



http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html

We now seem in free fall, at least in the financial markets.

Some say it is driven by hitting the wall of reality after decades of illusion.

Some say it is our emotional response to a downturn most - despite ample evidence to the contrary - apparently thought would never happen.

The most incredible thing I have heard said in the midst of all this was Alan Greenspan's testimony in which he said the collapse of the world economy had exposed the flaw in his system.

I expected to hear him recite some arcane mathematical formula that had been shown to break down under the pressures of trading derivatives.

But no.

"My theory rested on the assumption that people behave rationally on behalf of their own self-interest."

He was referring specifically to reckless decisions made by leaders of major financial institutions that endangered the very institution they were charged with overseeing. (Of course many of those decisions were on behalf of short term goals that benefitted the CEO)

Rational means behavior that describes how we think a person ought to behave.

Alan Greenspan was a reverential figure for longer than most presidents. Considered to have some mystical connection to the forces that move markets and economies.

Rational?

Sweet Jesus.

A friend went off the rails recently in a conversation about Eric Holder's speech in which he accused Americans of being cowards for being afraid to speak openly to each other about race.

My friend was enraged on many fronts.

Why should the new Attorney General choose his first major speech to be about race?

Why isn't he pleased to be the first black Attorney General?

Doesn't he know that white America has recovered from its racism, and since the end of the active phase of the civil rights movement, accepted racial equality?

Has he noticed that a black man is now president?

Why are black people so angry anyway? I'm not.

Whew!

As a white man who grew up in the segregated south in the 1940s, it seems ludicrous to think that racism has been eradicated from the hearts of white Americans. Or, for that matter, of black Americans. Or Africans. Or Arabs.

One of the puzzles of our species is this response to skin color. Most of us have long understood that it has nothing to do with intelligence or really anything else that has ever been demonstrated. But we (I) still have an instant, instinctive response to skin color.

Not only do I still flaunt common sense by spending time in direct southern California sun - both because I like its warmth, and because I like having some color in my skin - but when I encounter a person with dark skin, it is the first thing I must parse before moving on to anything else about the person.

If I meet a black person at, say, a fund raiser for the museum, and he is dressed nattily in a pinstripe suit and expensive tie, I will feel impressed at how well he has done. If he were white, my prejudices might reverse, and I could see him as wearing his expensive clothes as either armor to fend me off, or to announce his impressive stature.

My unequivocal support for Obama came when I heard his Philadelphia speech about race. He was forced into it by the flap around remarks by his pastor, but forced or not, it was as brilliant, honest and accurate speech about the subject as I have ever heard from a politician.

I will die with racial prejudices remaining in my cells.

But as Lawton Chiles once said, when he was running for governor of Florida on a strong civil rights platform, and was challenged by a white voter who asked if Chiles, a white southerner, was claiming not to be racist:

"Oh, no, I am shot full of prejudices. But I try not to let them run my life."

If the subject of race can ever make its way into honest public conversation in this country, we would have a chance to at least come as far as Governor Chiles.

Some years ago a friend told me about a downtown men's eating club in Boston to which he had recently been invited.

I have never wanted to belong to a men's club, but this one might have tempted me.

The Marshall Street Eating Club was a single room in an old building in the narrow streets of Boston's financial district. In the room there was a long harvest table surrounded by perhaps twenty chairs, the number of members.

The ate in common, whatever fare was being offered that day, and carried on a single erudite conversation on a subject decided by a process either secret or perhaps I have forgotten.

My friend said the conversation might be on nuclear disarmament one day, the Red Sox bull pen the next, and the relative merits of salvation offered by Islam versus Judaism the following day. Esoteric matters.

The only rule was that if any member - by virtue of special education or experience - had any first hand knowledge of or experience in the subject, he was required to recuse himself and remain silent that day.

An exercise in pooled ignorance or - if you please - in participatory democracy.

The Marshall Street Club has come back to me during whatever we decide to call this period we have been in for more than a year, and which has become acute since September. Economic meltdown? Recession? Depression? Global dislocation?

For the past many years, as the appearance of wealth and global economic cooperation has created the likes of Bernie Maddox, I have enjoyed learning the vocabulary of that world so I can banter with friends. I suffered no illusions that I actually understood most of what I was talking about, but so long as it all continued to expand (well, not all, plenty of people who enjoyed modest prosperity from 1950 - 1970 were being left in the wake of "unfettered free markets."), who cared?

It was all a game and anyone could play.

After the Fall, the dynamics of the Marshall Street Club have come back to the fore.

Turns out the Masters of the Universe were betting our fortunes as much on their hopes and illusions as on their actual knowledge. It's not as if we couldn't have all known this. After all, if a meteorologist - with radar and GPS - can still only guess which way that storm will turn, what would have made us think Alan Greenspan could predict when the bull market would turn into a bear?

Now that we are all suffering the consequences - both of our hubris and our stubborn refusal to acknowledge the law of gravity that eventually pulls back to earth everything that has risen above its surface - I find myself again hovering between ceding authority to my financial advisor, and trusting my own amateur sense.

My advisor has led me into unprecedented investing success for more than twenty years. He studies charts, history, balance sheets, speaks endlessly with CEOs of companies, reads nearly as compulsively as I do (albeit in different genres), and suffers my frequent calls and emails with unflagging good humor.

He and I are poles apart on political and social policy. Fair to say that he is as long and committed a Republican as I am a Democrat. And during our time together, he has celebrated Reagan and a pair of Bushes while I have done the same for Clinton and now Obama. We have, of course, deplored whom the other has celebrated.

I told him the other day that I will continue to differ with him about those matters, our debates one of the highlights of my day. And I will even be so cheeky as to predict that my Democratic presidents will preside over legitimate and lasting prosperity for greater numbers than his Republican presidents. He believes Reagan's tax cuts accounted for the prosperity that came several years later, and I that Clinton's fiscal caution and tax increases led to near elimination of our vexing national deficits.

Since we are still arguing about whether FDR saved us from worse than what we experienced in the Great Depression, or caused the Great Depression, it looks like our argument may not get settled soon.

I also told him that I will not argue with him about what effect the particular policies may have on investor sentiment and the direction of the financial markets. In that, I do give way to his experience and expertise. I hate doing that because it feels chicken-hearted not to follow my political convictions with my investment decisions.

But I'd bet not a single member of the Marshall Street Eating Club would follow up a lively discussion of the merits and demerits of having an appendectomy, by asking whichever of them spoke most eloquently and persuasively, to remove his appendix.

I just had tea with a young - 20s - English couple at whose wedding I officiated a few weeks ago.

They left their jobs in England and moved to this country to be near her family. Her mother is American, her father British.

I asked them how they were faring in their new country. She has taken a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant. He has to wait for clearance from immigration before he can work. Both are studying for their real estate licenses.

"Great," they answered, almost simultaneously.

Brave.

I said I hoped the process of gaining real estate licenses takes long enough so people are buying and selling real estate by the time they become brokers.

"Oh, there's plenty of action," they told me. "In fact so many brokers bailed when they saw the downturn coming, the real estate companies are looking for brokers."

Brave.

Yesterday I streamed live a symposium from the University of Pennsylvania in which Penn's several brilliant economists held forth on how they see this global financial stink.

What struck me was the same thing that struck me in talking with these brave young would-be brokers.

This isn't the end of the world. Likely not even the end of the world as we have known it. Yes, there are a scary number of people who have lost their jobs. And an equally scary number who have lost their houses.

It's a bad time.

But it's not the end of the world. And there are lots of people who are putting their heads down and going forward. Taking on what work they can find, living by their wits and incredible hard work. And courage.

My right-wing friends (I have more of them than of any other sort - for my sins I suppose) have taken to accusing Obama of passing these massive spending bills (bail-out? stimulus?) by spreading fear among the voters. I think that is about as ludicrous as calling John McCain and peacenik because he once opposed torturing prisoners in American hands.

But what is true - and I got this so clearly in my head as I watched and listened to those economists - is that this is by no measure another Great Depression, and, painful as it is for so many, we have the means to begin to extricate ourselves, and we have begun.

I have resigned myself to the likelihood that I will never feel as rich - nor look as rich on paper- as I did just a few years ago. But the illusion I enjoyed for a brief period then - that I was safe, immune to the vagaries, not only of the economy, but of aging, disease and chance - was likely more damaging to my living a full, adventuresome life than the - to me - vast amount of paper wealth that has slipped off the pages of my 401K.

Janani Luwum February 17, 2009

The eccentric mathematician Paul Erdos (1913 – 1996) once met a colleague at a conference. Erdos asked the man, "Where are you from?" and the man replied, "Vancouver."
"Vancouver? Then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelsohn," Erdos said.
After an uncomfortable pause, the startled friend replied, " I AM Elliot Mendelsohn." (Courtesy of Norman Levin)

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. -Michael Pollan, author, journalism professor (b. 1955)

*********

I wonder if you have been aware of the numbers of articles recently in journals of all sorts, which seek to soften the sting of death? So many, that the end piece in Sunday’s NY Times Book Review (Death: Bad? by Jim Holt), wants to reassure us that those claims are whistling past the graveyard, and fear of annihilation is healthy.

You can imagine how much this conversation cheers me up.

Maybe it’s being in the middle of the fourth quarter that causes me to notice. Or that provokes exchanges like the one in the locker room after tennis this weekend. Lacey and I had been defeated and, had it not been for her heroics, my poor play would have made our defeat even more ignominious. In default mode, humiliated, head down, I was startled by a man who emerged from between rows of lockers as I passed by.

Not preaching any more?

Really, no.

I used to be pretty regular when you were preaching. Sat in the back. Kept a low profile.

Sorry, I don’t remember your name. (I left there 12 years ago, but I might not have known his name then. He gave it to me. Sounded familiar.)

I still go a couple of times a month. Miss your screwy preaching. But church can still take my mind off the shit I think about all day.

What sort of shit is that?

Business. Business. All I ever think about is business. Most of it really doesn’t matter.

What business are you in?

I’m a doctor.

What kind?

Neurosurgeon.

I bet it matters to at least a few of your patients.

I suppose you’re right.

He finished dressing. As I stepped into the shower, he laughed, wished me a good day and left.

I remember in my prime jousting with another neurosurgeon about his Maserati and my Saturn. He had no doubts about the importance of his work. I wondered about mine. He ended up self-destructing with alcohol and drugs. I don’t think the guy in the locker room is in danger of that. I’d let him open my head.

Saturday I took our crippled drying rack to the beach to throw into the fire pit where I knew the surfers would be warming themselves on a chilly morning. They told me a guy had died surfing Friday afternoon. They didn’t know him, but they knew of him. Had a heart attack. By the time anyone got to him he was gone. Long gone.

How they knew he was a regular was that he had a Skip Frye board. Skip and his wife Donna are San Diego beach legends. She is the longest serving member of the City Council, was nearly elected mayor on a populist platform that frightened the city elders so badly they threw their support behind the retired police chief they had once scorned.

Skip only shapes boards for people he knows and respects. The silence that followed this pronouncement – as we all looked out to the horizon - was as solemn and evocative as taps played at the grave of a fallen warrior.

On our morning walks, Cosmos and I have gotten to know a dog new to us this year, a toy white poodle missing a leg. She and Cosmos would run off together if they weren’t tethered.

What’s her name? I asked her walker.

Nelson, for Lord Nelson, who lost a leg in battle.

The Roman Catholic Church has let it be known it is still in the business of granting indulgences, once much sought after as a means to shortening one’s span in purgatory, gaining earlier access to heaven’s golden streets. It may be that their marketing people are ahead of the curve in detecting people’s search for different sorts of investments in these troubled times.

My printer died a couple of weeks ago. Without warning. Printed a sheet, went to do another, and began getting those error messages. I fiddled with it, did all the tricks I’ve learned, turning it on and off, plugging and unplugging, to no effect. Last night Lacey heard me casting aspersions on the machine’s ancestry.

Want me to give it a go? she asked, - nicely - without any barb in it.

Why not?

She did all the things I’d done. No luck. Just about to give up, when she said, Hang on. Stick in a piece of paper.

Bingo! Worked perfectly. Turns out she is still supple enough to lean all the way down and see that the bottom button was set for printing from a different portal. With the push of a button Lacey cut through the Gordian knot that had me tied up for weeks.

As a friend emailed me last week: resurrection is miscast as an issue for after we die.

The longed- for bipartisan governing looks to have been a chimera.

Likely President Obama knew this when he promised to give it a good try. Having come up through the rough and tumble of Chicago ward politics, it's hard to imagine he would not understand that politics is almost always gutter sniping, at least in public debate.

But the latest Republican attempts to brand this interesting new president as a "fear monger" borders on hilarious.

One month after relief from eight years of a president appealing to our fear of a terrorist attack every time someone so much as questioned one of his initiatives, to see that president's Party accuse Obama of playing on fears to pass his economic stimulus package is just silly.

I am in sympathy with those who hate hearing the present economic disaster compared with the Great Depression. Not because the comparison is unjustified, but because I still hope it may prove to be less awful than the near decade long nightmare the world lived through then.

It's not as if Obama began referring to this scary time before anyone else. Even John McCain habitually referred to the economic meltdown during his run, running against the policies his own Party had been practicing.

It's one thing to disagree with what Obama proposes to do to try to lift us out of this morass. But to descend to calling him a fear monger looks to me to be evidence that the Republicans are admitting they are just as mystified and frightened by this as the rest of us.

A few days ago the media enjoyed a flap when the Vice President - as this Vice President is wont to do - injudiciously repeated a conversation in which the president candidly admitted that if they got everything right, they still have a 30% chance of the plan not working. Which strikes me as the honest assessment of a man smart enough to know his own limits.

I know the financial markets hate uncertainty even more than bad news. But in the world of grownups, uncertainty is the default reality an awful lot of the time. Which is the very reason investing is such a dicey business.

It looks as if Obama believes - as I do - that FDR's decision to take drastic action quickly, even knowing it was to some extent a roll of the dice, was a better choice than waiting for the "free" market to correct things. Like FDR, Obama has said that if something he does turns out not to work, he will abandon it and try something else.

But to try to paint him as Chicken Little after eight years of 9/11 Bush, is to stretch a pun, bush league.

Because I have never fancied myself a savvy investor, nor facile with economic theory, I am used to deferring in both my own investing and in judgments about the economy, to those whose expertise and experience gives them way more claim to credibility than I have.

And I still do. Or did until very recently.

Now I begin to see that the situation we are in around the world is much like a mysterious, catastrophic illness a person might suffer.

She begins to feel odd, not quite right, but able to function normally. But gradually at first, then suddenly precipitously, chaos ensues. Her head feels like it's going to split open, her heart rate accelerates to 140 beats per minute, she experiences paralysis of her legs, she can't keep food in her stomach, she spikes a fever of 104º, and she feels as if she has to fight every moment just to remain conscious.

Her friend rushes her to the emergency room where the triage nurse begins taking her symptoms, and the emergency room doctor starts an IV and various other interventions just to try to stabilize her. At the moment - while he may guess - he has no idea what is causing this systemic collapse of her recent seemingly healthy body.

I have been present in an emergency room for such a moment. A parishioner I was visiting was being wheeled on a gurney down to X-ray for a CT scan when she suddenly went into cardiac arrest. As I had been walking alongside, as the doctor jumped onto the gurney, straddling her body, and began doing CPR. The orderly stepped up the pace and I did the same as we raced for a slot in the X-ray department where they shoved the gurney into a space and yanked the curtain around her. Because I had been slightly ahead of the gurney, I was pressed against the wall.

"For God's sake pray!" the doctor shouted at me.

"What's happened to her?" I asked anxiously.

"How the hell do I know?" he shouted back, as someone stripped a vein in her ankle and inserted a line, while another put the paddles on her chest and administered a shock to try to restart her heart.

You get the analogy.

Before they had any idea what was fundamentally wrong, they did the only things they knew to do that had worked in other catastrophic situations. It astonishes me to tell you that I can't remember who the person was, nor whether they managed to get her going again at that moment, nor whether, if they did, she went back to anything one could call normal life.

Most of those with whom I have spoken take issue with everything that has been done so far to try to stem the collapse of the global economy. Those on the right are angry that the government seems to be taking too active a role without a clear plan, filling the bail-out bill with political pork. Those on the left feel the bail-out bill is too small to do any good, does not rein in the fat bonuses of the very people who have led us into this, and fails to address the epidemic of mortgage forclosures that continue cripple ordinary people and to drain value from housing.

When I hear someone say that every time John Thain speaks, they call their broker and tell him to sell more, it makes my blood pressure rise. Both from fear (for my own shriven portfolio) and from anger at the arrogance of those who believe they know the solution.

It's true that a lot of smart investors were saying for at least a couple of years that the housing spike and the long bull market were unsustainable over the long haul. But how few of them cashed out for fear of missing another 20% run-up before the deluge. And how many - like me - unable to believe this was systemic and not simply another correction that would bring us down 15% and then begin the climb back above where it had left off - sold even when it fell pat that 15% mark.

Crying wolf is a well-known phenomenon, in investing as well as in wars on terror. Though it implies that the person giving the warning is doing so for his own gain, in reality, he usually is speaking from honest fear.

And, as the story goes, he is usually wrong.

He may turn out to be right this time. Not only because this is such a dramatic drop, but because it looks more and more as if, like the woman on that gurney, the world economy has suffered a mysterious and systemic breakdown of the system that has been in place since Bretton Woods.

What is striking about accounts of the meeting of world leaders at the annual get together in Davos (in addition to the absence of so many of the usual leaders who were too shamed and chagrined by their failures to show their faces) this year, was how few of the speeches were the usual chest-beating that has characterized those meetings for the past many years. In past downturns there have been plenty of people talking about the opportunities to take advantage of the moment.

This year they lined up to top the prediction of the pervious genius as to how bad things may yet become.

Because all but the most arrogant and self-delusional are beginning to suspect this is one of those moments in which a sea change - which no one could predict and from which no one can forecast - has hold of events.

There is, I suspect, no bail out possible from this. Because the platform on which every economic and political system rests - public confidence - has been shattered.

Some person or persons yet unknown, and some economic instruments just now being devised, will, sometime in the future, be touted as the prophetic voices that lent to the emergence of the new day. I doubt I will live to see that.

I am enjoying a visit from two daughters whom I see all too seldom.

So I have blessedly missed most of the hype around the so-called Bailout Bill and Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan for salvaging our economic system.

But I have seen just enough to know that those who oppose it (and many who are for it) are doing so with the hope that we may somehow return to business as usual.

Forget about it.

36 years ago, I stayed with my sister on Boston’s North Shore while I was interviewing for a job in Dedham, south of Boston. A friend of my sister asked me where the job was.

Dedham. Long silence. Those people on the South Shore live a pretty fast life. Big money, lots of extra-marital sex. I tried to look concerned.

When I arrived for my interview someone asked where my sister lived. Hamilton. Long silence. Big money in Hamilton. North Shore. Fast bunch. John Updike lives up there. I hoped my expression – and explanation, my sister edits the local newspaper, not one of the fast crowd – communicated sufficient gravitas. The job, after all, was for rector of their church.

People base their decisions not on the actual situation that confronts them, but on their perception or interpretation of the situation. Their decisions make an impact on the situation and changes in the situation are liable to change their perceptions. - George Soros

I hope John Updike was alert enough to have read the NY Times Sunday magazine a couple of weeks before he died. The cover piece on women’s sexuality contained diagrams and text that, had it been found in my boarding school room a half century ago, would have caused me to be kicked out.

I also so hope he knew this: Glenway Wescott, who became a friend (and even occasional sex partner) to the bisexual [Alfred] Kinsey, spent long periods at his research center in Indiana, sorting through the largest pornography collection in the world outside of the Vatican. - From The Loves of the Falcon by Edmund White, in the February 12 NY Review of Books.

This one’s on me, Buddy, Peter said this morning as he handed me my double espresso mocha. Friday after you left I couldn’t figure out what those two little glasses were. Realized I’d left out your espresso. Couldn’t sleep all weekend.

That $3.35 gesture evoked my first euphoric sense of feeling flush in over a year.

Remember the response attributed to Everett Dirkson during a hearing in which a huge public works program was being debated: A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.

Try doing the following experiment suggested by the mathematician John Allen Paulos, in his book Innumeracy: Without doing the calculation, guess how long a million seconds is. Now try to guess the same for a billion seconds. Ready? (A million seconds is less than twelve days; a billion is almost thirty-two years.) - From Heroes And Zeroes by John Lanchester in Feb. 2, 2009 New Yorker

You may not be able to find the dove’s nest in the attached photo I took while standing in our kitchen doorway. It’s there in the middle. She’s been roosting - seemingly without leaving – for a couple of days, while her mate has been bringing her what she needs. She did this last year and abandoned the nest before laying. Somehow we’ve staked a lot on her producing young this time. During the storm this morning, we marveled at how she seemed to hunker down and stay her appointed course.

I know some find it demeaning that we seem to be obeying impulses etched into our nervous systems from before you could have identified us as a distinct species. Although I’ve never attached much significance to our wish to find evidence of progress in the universe – since, as Soros suggests, it’s all about how one chooses to consider it – I do welcome our curiosity expanding into areas that once would have offended our sensibilities.

Like: what are we to make of these hormone storms on behalf of which we will strenuously disrupt an otherwise sensible day? Or: given my delight at a gratis $3.35 double mocha, what accounts for my elevated heart rate reading accounts of the billion dollar rescue debates in congress sorting strategy with slight-of-hand more opaque to me than a game of Monopoly?

Somehow it seems ennobling to me, taking our turn alongside that dove, bobbing and weaving as events and forces challenge our tiny, intricately machined systems, calling from us responses beyond what we had thought we could manage.

Our adult children are scattered across the globe – another phenomenon that leaves me feeling old and parochial. Two of them arrive tonight for a visit. I am struggling to keep from apologizing for our rare Southern California winter storm.

As if they still require my intervention for their safe-keeping. And I could shelter them from the storm.

Somewhere on the ubiquitous web I read today the obvious but often overlooked reality that climate change and care of the environment is not about saving the planet.

No matter what we do or don't do, the planet will survive us.

No, what we are talking about is saving ourselves. Even if we smarten up and begin to put conservation ahead of momentary greed, our tenure here will be limited, only a chapter in the geologic history of the planet.

And for that matter, the planet won't be here warming and coloring up this pinpoint in space forever either. The sun will burn out or perhaps burn up the earth. The earth will be hit by another spatial body large enough to break it into pieces. (Could be that the moon was once a part of the moon, dislodged by a collision).

A piece on the Scripps Oceanographic web site today tells of seismologists attempting to predict the next "Big One" in southern California. They claim 99% certainty of a shift along the San Andreas fault in the next thirty years that will cause a shake of at least 7.3 on the Richter scale. That would equal the 1906 San Francisco quake.

And if they are successful in making all the sophisticated detection equipment they have put in place work, and can organize a sensitive and widely based enough alarm system to alert people, guess how much warning we may get?

One minute.

Perhaps time enough to shut off some gas mains and stop trains.

This isn't new news. And we carry on on top of these faults as if it isn't going to happen.

And why not? Because, short of evacuating the many millions of us who live here, there's little we can do. People my age hope we'll be dead by the time it shakes the place apart.

It's OK. Has to be because it's how it is.

Just to remember, we're here for a season. Great season.

But it's not about us.

Surely I am not the only one who is struggling to find ways to describe what Obama ignited in this country during his campaign.

And some days I worry that even he doesn't understand what it was. Or may have decided he better not stray too far from the categories we have all accepted as normative, or he will freak out the whole country.

Someone sent me a video clip from an interview he did with several reporters in which he explained the importance of passing the stimulus package.

He began by saying that in five years - or nine years should he have a second term - when people are judging the success of his presidency, it will all rest on whether he was able to resolve the economic disaster he inherited.

There can be no doubt that the economy must be his first priority. But to say that the historic judgment on his presidency will be based solely on his performance on the economy, makes me very sad.

If there is one major focus for what the past generation has meant for our nation - and for our nation's influence on the rest of the world - it is reducing the entire human enterprise to commerce and wealth production.

I am far from a socialist. I admire business and profit, entrepreneurs, innovation, all of which depends on people believing hard and clever work will pay off in financial reward.

But this is hardly the whole story.

I went to seminary and was ordained a priest, at least in part, hoping to lend to another dimension of the experience of being human together. I admit I was afraid my personality was ill-suited to business, and that I didn't want to compete with my father who was a successful business executive.

But I also felt strongly that when we become focused exclusively on how much money we can make, we become lopsided.

It is a hackneyed cliche that money doesn't buy happiness (no, neither does poverty), but how many people came into my office to talk with me about how empty and without purpose their lives felt even though they were great successes by any material measure.

I don't believe the government should become involved in setting compensation for business leaders (unless government becomes a major stockholder as it has been doing recently), but neither do I think that setting a ceiling of $500,000 a year need work a hardship on anyone.

And what is to keep a bright, ambitious business leader from deciding to work for less money in order to contribute to bailing the country and the world from this catastrophe? Does that sound so 19th century that it could never fly now.

I hope Obama said what he said, not because he really believes how well he manages the economy will be the sole measure of his success, but because that's where his focus and energy must be right now.

Because the incredible groundswell of excitement, from disparate parts of this nation, that he aroused over the past two years, was not about how we can all become fantastically rich.

It was about the possibility of finding our common humanity so compelling that we will forego a lot of what has been seducing us for so long, in order to join in that community for which we are all so hungry.

Anskar February 3, 2009

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE (1932-2009)

I doubt Bill Schenck, who died this weekend at 85, near his family home in upstate New York, could recreate the life he lived were he to be born now. With John Updike he likely believed about his death that The shock of it will register, Nowhere but where it will occur.

And, even more than John Updike, Bill Schenck would be astonished – and likely embarrassed, - at the shock waves his death sends across the globe.

In 1956, having flunked out of Kent, my family’s ancestral school, St. George’s School in Newport, RI– another Episcopal boy’s boarding school even more desperate for paying customers (my father worked for Procter & Gamble in the Philippines and they paid for tuition back in the states) – agreed to give me a tryout in their summer school. And if I showed any promise, perhaps a space in the fall.

I was 15, pretty certain I was headed for whatever ignominy awaited a terminal slacker. Schenck was head of the summer school.

He took a liking to me. Today we would be suspicious of a bachelor schoolmaster living in an apartment in a boys’ dorm, his apartment always full of laughing, roughhousing students. It never occurred to me at the time to be the least uneasy, and these 53 years later I thank God it didn’t.

Bill was an historian, Harvard trained, Stevenson admirer, Democrat of the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. stripe. It was the summer of the political conventions. I was from a crusty, Yankee, business, Republican family who believed Eisenhower was about the right blend of bland, folksy, hands-off, middle-class President. And that Adlai Stevenson, a show-offy, (divorced) intellectual, likely a danger to the commonweal.

During the Democratic convention, the boys on Bill’s dorm were allowed to stay up past lights-out to hear Stevenson deliver his acceptance speech. Schenck and his faculty colleagues thought it brilliant. I still remember their interest in the junior senator from Massachusetts, who dared challenge the old war horse, Estes Kefauver, for the vice presidential nomination. They liked Kennedy, thought he was too young, worried about the influence of his rich, corrupt father who had been against our entry into WWII.

It was my introduction to thoughtful politics, as against the culture-bound, reactionary brand of my upbringing, and I found it fun, fascinating. A few years ago I teased Bill about having prepared me for a life in political exile from family and friends.

With my 16th birthday looming, and Bill knowing I would never have a chance to drive in the Philippines, he took me to a deserted sandy parking lot and laughed when I stripped the clutch on his Ford coupe, did inadvertent four wheel slides, and jerked along trying to get the timing of clutch and accelerator. He was an awful driver himself, but a patient teacher. I guess schools and insurance companies had yet to form an alliance.

But his most outrageous intervention in my life – which I still mark as the moment on which all the rest pivots - came toward the end of the summer term. I had done passably well in my studies. Schenck had become my champion, and persuaded Mr. Wheeler, admissions director, to accept me for the fall, assuming I passed my summer courses and stayed out of mischief.

The last weekend we were allowed out, a boy from New Jersey and I went to Providence and spent the night with my aunt and uncle. On Sunday, before we boarded the bus back to Newport, we bribed a sailor to buy us a fifth of bourbon, most of which we drank on the hour ride.

You checked in from a weekend by taking your assigned seat for evening chapel. Mr. Schenck sat at the back overseeing his minions, so he saw the two of us stagger in, drop into our seats, and spend the half hour chapel service noisily laughing, disrupting.

Immediately after the service, he came to me and cuffed my ears, saying loudly, “Colmore, your grades have been slipping and tonight, you’re going to study in my apartment instead of study hall, so I can watch and see that you’re concentrating.”

With a tight grip on my neck, pretty much holding me up so I wouldn’t drop to the ground, he marched me to his rooms where I likely passed out with my head on the desk until he woke me to go back to my room.

It wasn’t until sometime later I learned that Mr. Wheeler was monitoring evening study hall that night, where, without Schenck’s intervention, I would have been, drunk and unruly, and shit out of luck.

I’ve told the story many times as an example of what I mean by Grace. I think Bill found the story embarrassing. He and I became colleagues a few years after I graduated, when I taught two summers at the school

Today I suppose he would be fired, if not prosecuted, for some of the risks he took on behalf of boys bent on self-destruction, determined to defy the expectations and demands of their onerous birthrights.

I have marked January 30, the day he died, a red letter saints day on my calendar.

Some of my conservative Republican friends are having fun prodding me about the several nominees for Obama's cabinet who have been discovered to be delinquent - or, alas, worse, deficient - in paying their taxes.

I guess I have earned this from years of giving them a hard time about the avaricious ways of the Republican rich.

What it says to me is that sometime ago those at the top of the Democratic Party no longer understood themselves to be the Party of the working and middle class, and began greedily feeding at the same trough as the plutocrats have always fed at.

But this strikes me as more egregious because the Republican Party has long represented itself as the Party of big money. In fact one of the mysteries to me of the so-called Reagan Democrats - blue collar workers who supported Reagan's tax cuts for the super rich - has been what may have been in those people's minds.

I hate to admit it, but I suspect it is what is in every one of our minds: the hope - however secret that one day some fortune might drop into our lap. That's why we buy lottery tickets. The Reagan message to those people was: Do you want those spoil-sports to take away any chance you might have to become one of us? Because if they get the chance, they will tax us all into the poor house.

Reminds me of when Adam Clayton Powell was photographed on his motor yacht in Bimini, surrounded by scantily clad young women, many of them white. A reporter asked him how he could justify the way he lived, when those he represented in congress were mostly poor and black.

"Don't you know," he asked the reporter, a huge smile on his face, "that every time I go out on that boat, every man in Harlem goes with me. They don't just put up with my doing that, they demand it."

It may be a little cynical, but it's very real.

I confess I was felt bitterly let down by learning that Tom Daschle had spent the years since his defeat and leaving the Senate, had become hugely rich feeding off the fat of the Washington, D.C. power beast. I have always admired his seeming low-key integrity.

And I so hope it needn't shake my sense that Barack Obama may actually be some sort of new breed. Bred in the wilds and corruption of killer Chicago politics, he is no goody two-shoes, which is a good thing. But is he, as I perceive him, thanks to his unusual racial makeup and eclectic upbringing, made of something different from the one-dimensional avaricious people this country seems to have raised up for a generation?

For our sake and for the sake of this beleaguered world, I devoutly hope so.