Since that semester in high school that introduced me to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, I’ve been a huge fan of anti-Utopian literature - books that imagine the ills of our present spiraling out of control, creating such dark, dismal (and devastatingly plausible) futures that the reader can’t help but be jolted into thinking: why didn’t we see the signs? Why didn’t we stop it when we still could have?

In this week’s New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman points, rightly, to the miserable state of education in North America as a major contributor to the unemployment crisis and the likelihood it will persist in spite of an economic recovery. (If you think this sounds vaguely oxymoronic then clearly you still have’t grasped that the “economy” and the “real economy” are two very different concepts).

Tom Friedman, who worships at the altar of globalization, has concluded that in an increasingly globalized world, it’s not enough to be a lawyer - or even a great lawyer - but it’s a lawyer’s talent for hustling and trolling for business that will count. It’s not the dude who can build the sturdiest home, but the one who can do that and sell you on a fabulous open-concept kitchen that will be the envy of the neighbors who’ll get the job.

In this future Friedman envisions, creativity and arithmetic come together - like water for chocolate - in perfect synergy in service of that most sacred of goals: making money.

And what of those who are lacking in either the creativity or arithmetic departments (or - shudder - both)?

Friedman leaves that to the reader’s imagination, as if those unfortunate souls may be gobbled up by some highly evolved monster with little tolerance for imperfectly solved equations and no interior decorating sense.

I’m sure Tom knows this but a reminder wouldn’t hurt: the “economy” exists to feed people. People have never existed to feed the economy (until very, very recently in our evolution). The economy doesn’t have feelings. It is not its own entity, independent of human beings. We made the economy, and we can unmake it if we damn well choose to.

And unmake it we may very well do, if the economy stops feeding us and starts feeding on us.

Margaret Atwood’s wonderfully imaginative 2003 dystopian novel Orynx and Crake imagines a world split along “word people” and “numbers people” lines (not unlike our own) where numbers people have access to far more wealth and privilege seeing as their skills are so much more in demand (people with neither skill are relegated to wastelands).

It seems that every time the economy runs into a snag it is people who are asked to adapt, not the economy.

Not very long ago, having any education at all was something special, reserved for elites. But when nearly everyone could read and write, things like having a high school diploma, then a college degree and beyond, became a must if you aspired to own an ipod, a car, a house, or participate in the modern economy at all.

Now it seems even that isn’t enough. We are all entrepreneurs, hustlers, fighting for scraps. Some of us are born entrepreneurs. But what becomes of those of us who are not? Will the question that Friedman does not dare answer in his column - what happens to those of us who cannot adapt - be realized through Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic vision, or will we ever live to see a different sort of economy, one truer to its roots, one that actually exists to feed people?

Picture it.

You’re a nine-year old recent immigrant, one-time exemplary student, forced by a certain language law that shall remain nameless to undergo a year-long French immersion program ironically called (I can only imagine, by a civil servant with a twisted sense of humour) “Welcome Class” where you find out that anything you accomplished in your home country wasn’t worth much if you couldn’t speak French. You would expect that the government, in its wisdom, would enlist culturally-sensitive teachers to ease the transition of impressionable, terrified, and in some cases, somewhat traumatized youngsters into Canadian and Quebecois society.

You’d be wrong. Or at least you would have been in a certain classroom in 1987 Saint-Laurent, Quebec.

 “What is this?”

The teacher, who shall also remain nameless, pointed to the picture I’d been asked to draw of myself earlier that day with the word “Palestine” scripted in a child’s hand underneath. It was past 3:30 pm, the class had emptied, and a ragtag group of fellow-immigrant friends with whom I communicated mainly through sign language were waiting for me outside. Also, the teacher had spoken in French which at that point in my life, sounded like what you might get if you played a Pink Floyd tape backwards.

Eventually, through a combination of terrible English (hers), exasperated explaining (mine), and yes, sign language, I managed to decipher that Miss Cultural Sensitivity 1987 could not understand how a person born in Beirut, Lebanon, could possibly call herself Palestinian. My nine-year-old self threw around words I once thought of as mundane as “bread” or “water” but were actually inflammatory, misunderstood, and controversial in this frosty new country of mine. Words like “refugee” and “birthplace” versus “racial ancestry” or even “travel visa” versus “passport”.

Clearly in no mood to argue, my teacher tore off the part of the picture that said “Palestine” and wrote “Lebanon” instead. She hung it back up on the wall, along a row of similarly crafted self-portraits, drawings with words like “Syria”, “Iran”, or “El Salvador” written in brightly coloured crayons underneath the smiling stick figures.

The curiously altered piece of art was the subject of some discussion among my classmates the next morning, but I quickly cleared it up. Though I was born in Lebanon I had never, in my entire life, held a Lebanese passport. My grandparents were Palestinian, as are my parents, which in turn makes me Palestinian. Simple. The kids got it. The adult had not. Call it an early lesson in absurdity.

Some years later I’d come to understand that in the Western world, unlike the one I’d come from, there was not one set of laws for some people, and another for others. It didn’t matter that your grandfather was born in a small coastal village south of Jaffa where he tended the local coffee shop until the Nakba of 1948. Neither the olive hue of your skin, nor the distinctive shape of your eyes ever drew any special attention beyond mildly annoying comparisons to Disney’s Princess Jasmine.

What mattered in this new country was a newfangled notion regarded as quaint where I’d come from. If you were born in Canada, you were Canadian. If you weren’t, you could become one through a clear and unbiased process, after which you were every bit as Canadian as the descendants of Samuel de Champlain. It was a cultural quirk that had pitted the preconceived notions of a stubborn nine-year-old against those of a narrow-minded teacher.

But that was 1987.

In 2009, the picture has become very different.

In 2009 Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was taken back to his native Afghanistan by his father when he was a minor and was subsequently labelled an “enemy combatant” in a questionable conflict, with questionable goals and questionable motives and currently sits in a cell located in a tropical naval base of questionable repute and origin. He’s been sitting there since 2002, waiting for the federal government to throw a charge at him that actually sticks.

Also, in 2009, Suaad Mohamud, a Canadian citizen was finally allowed back into Canada after being unlawfully detained for three months in Kenya because a customs official didn’t think she looked like her passport picture too much. Maybe she’d lost weight; maybe she’d gotten a haircut, or switched her glasses for coloured contacts. Who knows. You’d think the process standing between you and three months in an African prison would come down to something slightly more substantial than whether you happen to be bloated that day. Anyway, she’s back, after DNA testing established that she was indeed the biological mother of a Canadian kid whose two-week stint with babysitters had turned into three months. The Canadian IDs, credit cards, transit tickets and old dry cleaning stubs hadn’t done the trick.

Finally, this summer, a bittersweet ending to a six year ordeal. The court-ordered return of Sudanese-Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrasik to Montreal after countless efforts by the federal government to bar his re-entry, each more surreal and cruel than the next (decreeing, for example, that he will be re-issued a Canadian passport if he can purchase his ticket back to Canada, knowing full well that all his assets have been frozen, and invoking a law stating than anyone caught assisting Abdelrasik in obtaining return fare to Canada can be prosecuted. George Orwell couldn’t have made this up).

Today, September 11^th, marks the eighth anniversary of the event that triggered the reconsidering of such quaint notions as citizenship rights, Canadian support for citizens incarcerated abroad, or even clemency requests for Canadians sitting on death row – a practice in direct violation of Canadian laws and principles.

South of the border, a Black man ran for president on a platform of change, and won. Here in Canada, our government has morphed into a gleeful champion not of its citizens, but of the laws and decrees set by the now-defunct and discredited Bush administration, ex-rulers of a foreign nation.

Some might say the world the nine-year-old immigrant girl had left behind, the one her coddled teacher knew nothing about, had triumphed over Canadian principles and values. That Canada is slowly turning into the kind of place where things like where having a Middle-Eastern, African, or Southeast Asian last name and tan skin matters more than what kind of passport you hold, or whether or not you’ve actually committed a crime.

Some might also say a Canadian passport is no longer worth much at all.

Here’s an apt quote, on this day of rememberance, to keep in mind. In his decision ordering the Federal Canadian government to repatriate Abdelrazik, Federal Court Judge Russell Zinn writes that this unlucky Canadian is:

 ”as much a victim of international terrorism as the innocent persons whose lives have been taken by recent barbaric acts of terrorists.”

Indeed.

Cross-posted on the CJPME (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle-East) Blog where I’ll now be contributing every once in a while. CJPME is entirely volonteer-run and has been an tireless advocate for the rights of Middle-Eastern and Southeast Asian Canadians, and has become the Canadian governments source for the reactions and positions of the Canadian Middle-Eastern community. CJPME has produced dozens of fact sheets providing a brief but meticulously researched background on hot political topics on anything from settlement building activity in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, to the case of victims of anti-terrositm discrimination like Omar Khadr’s. Please check out their website.

I started watching this story on Jon Stewart at 8 pm, and at that time, this was just a really hilarious comic piece about a high-ranking politician going totally AWOL. By the time Rachel Maddow rolled around, Mark Sanford was discovered at the Altanta airport, returning from a very poorly-planned, impromptu trip to see a woman in Argentina he is apparantly having an affair with. So by the time you read this - who knows? Maybe we’ll find out he has a whole other family down there, with four daughters and a poodle named Fifi (not terribly unlike a subplot in a Sidney Sheldon book I read many moons ago)

I’m going to jump on this bandwagon right now, before everyone with a Twitter account and their grandmother has weighed in - I feel bad for the guy.

I shouldn’t - he’s cheated on his wife, he left his kids on Father’s day to be with his girlfriend in Argentina, AND, most important of all - this is a Republican so dedicated to party politics that he would rather turn down federal stimulus money than assist his fellow South Carolinians in the the midst of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

From the sounds of that, Mark Sanford should be the poster boy for arrogant jerk.

Except it’s pretty clear from his pitiable press conference that he’s not. Or at least not just an arrogant jerk. Look at the guy!

This is a dude who seems like he went to sleep reasonably happy one day, woke up in a completely different one, and has no clue how he got there.

What’s notable about the media reaction to all this isn’t so much how a guy with such a bright future ahead of him had an affair and “blew it all up” to quote one pundit, but that he was caught being…well… so emotional and flaky about it. How dare he appear human on television, admit to crying, when a sterile statement from his chief of staff would have sufficed? How are you supposed to mindlessly bleat stupid party lines after you’ve shown your human side?

And you know what else? He doesn’t actually sound that repentant! He’s sorry he hurt people, like his wife and sons and staffers, but the guy isn’t sorry he hopped a flight to BA to be with his darling after his wife kicked him out of the house.

Obviously, this is a guy who did not “have it all” to quote another pundit. And we’re not talking about a sleazy affair with an intern or who hired a hooker, or going to public bathrooms in search of a thrill. This was obviously an unstudied move - with no premeditation or planning - and the press conference delivery was heartfelt, if not polished. The “crime” is notable only for its humanity, its all-too-familiar ring of man’s inner struggle against society’s expectations gone wrong.

It reminds me of a recent case of a very popular Latino priest based in Miami - Padre Alberto (who also happens to be quite the looker) - who was caught… wait for it… cavorting with a woman on the beach. A woman, who it had been revealed, was his girlfriend of many years. Was teh Catholic church relieved that he’d been caught with a consenting adult rather than molesting a minor - the church’s usual MO? Of course not! The man had to choose between the little lady and the Catholic church and Padre Alberto is now an Episcopalian.

I wonder how much longer before we acknowledge how much hyprocricy hurts us all by enabling us into believing other people’s lies and therefore making us feel doubly guilty for our desires, controversial and upsetting though they may be? Isn’t honesty also an important Christian/Muslim value - and wouldn’t it include honesty to our own selves?

And so does Nadine. Thank you for voting on the Kindle question guys! Results shall be discussed this week. On to more pressing issues.

I was going to write a nice, happy, optimistic piece celebrating baby steps in the right direction, along the lines of what Thomas Freidman wrote in the NYTimes today.

Honest, I was.

Because I still remember being seven, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV (the kind with a manual spin dial for changing channels) on the threadbare Persian carpet in our living room in Beirut, watching Amine Gemayel, the handsome then-Lebanese-President/militiaman/murderer and not appreciating the look of disgust that crossed my aunts’ faces as they passed the television screen (they may have spat, memories are fuzzy). Did they not appreciate his hotness? The patriotic backdrop of a red-and-white Lebanese flag flapping behind him, set to our snazzy national anthem?

Why the hate, my little 7-year-old heart cried out. Can’t we just try and be optimistic for once?

Apparently not, because:

A) Arabs are inherently melancholy and nostalgic (and not the “good” nostalgic, either). This is why most Arab literature that gets translated into English only gets read by the same people who swear by the New York Times Literary Review, meaning you’ll never catch a dude on the subway with his/her nose buried in a fun/sexy/thrilling/romantic/funny novel by an Arab writer. This is something I really hope will change.

B) Arabs have a good century’s worth of broken promises under their collective belts, beginning with a promise of self-sufficiency and auto-governance by Brits and Frenchies at the end of WWI which turned into - quite literally - the fuck-up of the century. The tattered trail of broken promises is limping right into 2009 with yet another American president trying to make nice with Arabs. That kind of baggage can turn a ray of sunshine grouchy.

I say “Arabs” and not “Muslims” because most Muslims are not Arabs. Arabs account for only about 8% of the world’s one-and-a-half-billion Muslim souls. Indonesia is actually the country with the highest concentration of Muslims in the world and is - believe or not - a functioning, non-radical-Islamist democracy! Can you believe that? No? I don’t blame you. Though on a related note, how much must it suck to be one of the one-and-a-half billion NON-ARAB Muslims, and constantly see your religion depicted by a few hundred million dudes in white robes and checkered headscarves? Or being an Arab-Christian, like Zahra, in mu novel Cutting Loose (and many, many of my dear friends?)

Back to Obama… so what’s there to complain about now, you ask. And rightly so - we’re finally rid of Bush, surely there must be a silver lining somewhere.

Well, simply put, as nicely as Barak Obama speaks about this political theater that is the Middle-East peace process, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still political theater.

Bigger honchos than Barak have made promises to cut through the bullshit and said that they really mean it this time, and yet the only thing that’s changed since 1993 (date of the Oslo Peace Accords - it was a BIG deal at the time), is that I’m now sporting a few gray hairs on my head.

And with the gray hairs I suppose I should have sprouted some wisdom. But no, I read Thomas Friedman’s NYTimes piece this morning and allowed myself to feel as hopeful and optimistic as an American.

Then I read this Op Ed piece (also in the NTTimes) by an Egyptian journalist, and the picture he paints, in true Arab fashion, is pessimistic, grounded, and gray.

Reality is not usually a fun place to be. I don’t blame Americans for their aversion to it. It plain sucks, to tell you the truth.

And while you’re reading Hossam’s Op-ed piece, I’d like you to do a little compare-and-contrast exercise in your head, between Cuba and Egypt…

…both countries run by dictators-for-life with little to no respect for human rights? Check!
…critical-of-the-regime bloggers are getting fined and/or imprisoned left and right? Check!
…ruling elite hogs most of nation’s resources? Check, with one caveat: Fidel spreads the wealth around a little bit better, ensuring education, housing, and health care for all. Over in the land of the Nile, illiteracy is rampant, millions are homeless or live in shanty towns, electricity is not widespread, and health care? What’s health care?

…both countries getting ONE BILLION DOLLARS IN AID FROM THE US? Ch..uh… no, not quite. Egypt gets military aid (which of course, it can’t use against the only country likely to attack it, Israel), and Cuba gets a big fat embargo.

So why did Obama choose to visit Egypt (and they uber-dictatorial Saudi Arabia, which perfectly embodies Borat’s views on where women figure in society)?

Good question, but Thomas Friedman sure isn’t asking it.

Score one for delusion, and ziltch for a happy, sunny blog post about Obama’s Mideast visits.

Tomorrow: notes on the book club meeting! Thank you for voting! More Cristiano pics! GCC blog tour! No depressing political posts! Yay!

Ex-Lebanese President Ameen Gemayel

Question: what do the Queen of Jordan and Susan Boyle have in common?

I’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, a little more about my unhealthy obsession with Queen Rania. There is a lot about this queen that inspired the character of Ranya Hayek in Cutting Loose. There are more than a few reasons for this. She’s evolved into one of the world’s premier clotheshorses, American Vogue - and the American public in general - can’t get enough of her. She’s funny and articulate, she’s of Palestinian heritage, and she (unsuccessfully) took a stand on an issue few Middle Easterners like to acknowledge - honor killings (because Arabs in general don’t like to add fuel to the fire by drawing attention to yet another reason why white people ought to dislike us. So we choose to pretend we are blameless in all this badness instead). She’s also one of the very few (if not only) recognizable positive female role models the Arab world has to offer.

Given that the country I spent a lot of time in as a kid had more royal princesses per capita than you could shake a stick at (Saudi Arabia), you’d think a hot queen would be no casue for me to get my panties in a bunch. But no one ever saw the princesses in Saudi. Not unless (like fictional Ranya), you happened to have gone to a snooty private school in Riyadh and sat next to one. Or maybe you were a woman with serious connections and a hefty bank account (or had a husband with a hefty bank account, rather). 

So why does it seem like more Americans and Europeans like Rania than Arabs do?

Is it our long and rich history of misogyny to blame? Or something a little bit more complicated?

As usual, the answer is: it’s complicated.

Part of the reason Arabs (and Arab women in particular) aren’t too impressed with Ranya is for precisely the same reason she is loved everywhere else. Look at her - she’s so polished and perfect, and she speaks English beautifully… she’s like Princess Grace, but Arab, and a Queen! Of a real country! She is what every Fifth Avenue Bergdof Blonde aspires to be, but in brunette, and with a proper title to boot (not some bullshit Baroness of Oscar’s TrashcanLand or other such crap). She also started out in life as a “commoner” with a boring-ass job as a computer geek, albeit a commener with connections (which makes all the difference, daahling)

She’s like a glammed-up version of Pocahontas, in a poufy French ballgown and glittering tiara. Queen Rania is picture proof that Arabs could clean up nice if only they stopped being so damn angry, left the keffiyeh at home, and just tried to be civilized for once.

Of course, Ranya doesn’t just prance around with $50,000 python handbags dangling from her arm. She does stuff! Like reach out to the West by batting her eyelashes at smitten reporters and hosting her own Youtube channel (take THAT Hillary). She’s a woman who proves you can be allowed to jetset in public and say cute things Americans want to hear, like “Arabs just want peace!” while being meek and docile and a good mother and housewife and a patriot all at the same time.

And while I enjoy seeing a Palestinian woman stand tall among the world elite in stunning Dior slingbacks and Gucci trench coats, I also happen to know that Jordan is a dictatorship with a shockingly high unemployment rate. I know that Jordan has one of the highest cancer rates in the world because Israel pays to have its nuclear waste dumped in Jordanian landfills so Israeli citizens can enjoy clean air and water while Jordanians can enjoy malignant tumors.

I know that Ranya, like a prizewinning mare, is strutted out before a mesmerized Western public to distract them from women’s true status back home, in Jodan.

Yes, yes, I know we couldn’t get an anti-honor killing bill through Parliment last month, but look - Ranya made Vanity Fair’s World’s Hottest Political Wives this year!

It makes me wonder. If Ranya gave up all her beautiful, expensive clothes and opened up a few women’s shelters instead, if she lobbied her husband to give her a more meaningful political role than the Arab world’s answer to Angelina Jolie, and travelled around the Middle East spreading a message of modernization and acceptance of women’s rights, but looked like Susan Boyle in a veil - would anyone in the Western world have even heard of the honorable Queen Ranya of Jordan?

Click here to see more of Her Royal Ranianess.

What have months of brainstorming sessions among some of the braininest American minds from the world of economic academia and bazillions of dollars thrown at “zombie” banks brought us? (and we are all in this one together, no matter where we live)

The NYT writes today that after a brief respite, home prices have continued their downward spiraling trajectory and foreclosures have risen again with no end in sight. One dude bid $30,000 on a golf-course adjacent property just outside Boca Raton, and won. That’s not a typo - not $130,000 - but thirty thousand dollars.  

So, since we’re clearly not getting anywhere, I propose the following stimulus plan to save this sinking economy. I know I’m just some yahoo (yahette, actually) with an internet connection and a pink laptop, but it seems to me that the nerdy set need all the help they can get.

Here’s what I propose:

Step 1: 

“Claw back” any money used by banks to pay bonuses and other such bullshit, or from banks that have cooked their books to show a profit (Goldman Sachs, I’m talking to you) and use it to pay for… wait for it… regular people’s mortgages! THAT’S RIGHT - entire mortgages. Instead of handing cash to banks who refuse to lend it out to people and small businesses, cut out the middleman and PAY THE PEOPLE DIRECTLY.

Imagine that - owning your house outright… what would millions of people DO with all that security???

Step 2:

Bring back decent (mandatory) pensions! I like the Cayman Islands pension system - every company that operates here MUST contribute 5% of the value of an employee’s salary towards a pension plan that may not be cashed out before retirement, and the employee matches another 5% for a total of 10% going towards retirement savings for the entire length of a person’s career.

But this ain’t no AIG handout - there are conditions involved.

They are:

1) Raise income taxes significantly for a really, really long time. Seriously. Don’t even ask for how long, because you’ll probably be dead by the time this proposal breaks even (what… thought your house would be free?)

2) Tax undesirable behavior (smoking, fuel consumption, fast food, etc) and give tax breaks on things like “greening” your house, investing in a fuel-efficient car, organic food, etc)

Step 2:

Spend tax proceeds windfall on:

a) Public transportation infrastructure (will create jobs in the short term AND give people cheap transport options in the long run)

b) UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE. If you want top-of-the-line treatment, great. Pay for it. But if you just want reliable, good (if annoyingly slow and inefficient) health care because otherwise you might die or be in debt for three generations, then universal healthcare is for you.

c) Paying teachers a competitive salary so good they don’t do it because they have a fascination with living like impoverished monks, or because they married money. This one will also pay dividends when the kids who benefit grow up to be better citizens, and will encourage really competent people to consider teaching as a viable career choice.

As for your kids, well, they’ll be left with universal healthcare, a great (or better, anyway) education, less college debt, efficient public transport, cleaner air and water, and better prospects for renewable energy.

That, and really high taxes. Which they’ll eventually vote to eliminate, and then be free to ride this economic roller coaster all over again.

And that’s it. That’s my plan.

What do you think - if you could have a free (or nearly free) home, if you weren’t afraid of getting sick and had the option of taking a heated/air-conditioned light train to work, would you mind terribly if your tax rate went up by 10 or 15 or 20%?

I know what you’re going to say.

I’ve been absent from my own website (let alone my friends’) only to lurch into the light with a post about Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney (I love a recent blog where it was pointed out that George Bush, a man of weak character, is Darth Vader. Cheney is the irredeemable Emperor, the origin of evil). But when I saw this this morning, I just couldn’t help myself.

Why are we STILL listening to this pompous douchebag’s endless ranting about how when HE was in charge - oops, I mean when George was in charge - everything was JUST FINE, thank you, and how Obama SUCKS, yes, he SUCKS, and beware people, because even though when Cheney had been the VP for a full year, more Americans were killed in war on American soil since Pearl Harbor, and we have yet to see anything happen under Mr. Obama, but BEWARE because Commie, tree-hugging, pro-diplomacy Obama is a threat to national security.

Not only must Dick Cheney shut the f**k up, but CNN, Fox et al. must stop enabling him by pretending he’s relevant.

No wonder Ashton Kutcher beat you out CNN - you are slowly going the way of granny underpants.

168 million in bonuses, out of US$700,000,000,000.00 of funds that are otherwise going down the black hole of mismanagement (and let’s not even talk about the billions upon billions “misplaced” in Iraq, and the billions more soon to be ”misplaced” in Afghanistan).

AIG bonuses - THIS is what has finally ignited Americans’ populist wrath! 

Those of us Commies who have been watching for 8+ years (I only cared about boys and and how many of them might be interested in kissing me during the Clinton years, so sue me) have been watching and waiting, waiting and watching for that moment we knew had to come. And now, here it is!

I have to say, it’s a little anti-climatic, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. I will not be critical of the American people’s choice of vehicle for their outrage - it’s as good as any, really. Even one dollar in bonuses for helping to bring the world economy to its knees is one dollar too many, so to the American people, I say: YAY YOU!

However, being a Commie, I worry (we tend to have a pessimistic streak, but as luck would have it, pessimists are having a moment right now). I worry, amongst other things, that maybe the forest may be lost for the trees, and a huge opportunity to rekindle interest and nurse back to life a creature facing extinction might be lost, that creature being dialogue.

Now, as evidenced by debates involving Sarah Palin, not just any dialogue will do - you have to put the word “meaningful” in front of it.

And in the tradition of mindless blogging, I will go on a seemingly unrelated tangent now: Hookers.

More specifically, Eliot Spitzer and hookers.

Even more specifically: Eliot Spitzer, hookers, Eliot’s wife Silda, and Vogue.

Blame Vogue for getting Eliot Spitzer back on my mind, or rather blame Vogue’s whitewashed, kiddie-gloved, fairy dust-sprinkled and utterly hypocritical March 2009 feature on his wife, and how Eliot’s penchant for blondes-by-the-hour nearly derailed this Southern Belle’s philanthropic campaigns (and no, we are assured, this princess ain’t a pushover. And she has a weakness for Petit Bateau tees and chocolate cupcakes. No, she doesn’t. I made that up, but only because I don’t have the actual article before my eyes at this very moment so I can transcribe the nauseating drivel verbatim, but hopefully you get the picture)

I read this article, and I worry. Then I read a piece like this by Mr. Spitzer, about how AIG’s bonus payouts are just the tip of the iceberg, and how instead of focusing on symbolic gestures (in this case, ”clawing back” the ill-gotten spoils from the recipients, which has effectively happened already), that perhaps we should realize that this bonus thing is a distraction from the real crimes that festered in the absence of regulations and created this environment in the first place. Doing that will surely be more complicated, not quite so black-and-white, and, more importantly, require us to think. A lot.

The article sure made me think - about Eliot Spitzer, Silda (yes, they are still married), Vogue, and hookers.

I wondered what kind of warped world would be so hypocritical so as to force a competent, vocal, thinking (at least this is the impression I got from reading this article) dude to resign due to something completely unrelated to his ability to carry out his duties as governor of the state of New York.

You might argue that by employing prostitutes, he was breaking the law. But when even the “good” guys are breaking the law, maybe it’s time we rethink the law. And while we’re at it, score politicians on how well they protect us from companies like AIG, and not on where they prefer to put their dicks.

While we’re on the subject of laws, there ought to be one against using a scandal-celebrity to sell your magazine, and then not having the balls to ask her tough questions on why she doesn’t seem too bothered by her husband’s preference for ladies of the night. After all, if the man’s wife doesn’t mind, why should we?

A very interesting article in today’s NY Times exposes how kids are currently being taught only the nuts and bolts or reading, as opposed to reading as a means to make sense of the world. The article hit home for many reasons - I recently touched base with a old high school friend I hadn’t seen in years and she’d since become a French teacher. We reminisced over cappuccinos and croissants about the horribleness of some of the books we were made to read in junior high and how we grew up to love language in spite of our curriculum, not because of it. (I still have nightmares about Le Lion, a book I still wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, even as an adult)

The article cites the example of giving school kids a piece about “hiking in the Appalachians” and asking them to find the central idea. It then goes on to explain that if the kids don’t give a hoot about the Appalachians, don’t know much about hiking in that area, and moreover, are extremely unlikely to ever experience that activity, then they will naturally be less likely to be able to find the central idea, or answer any other questions about the piece.

The article inadvertently makes a commentary about how we expect kids to think (which is to say we don’t expect them to). Asking you to comment on something you have no prior knowledge of will not stretch your critical thinking muscles. It will not build “connectors” in your brain, or teach you to make associations and connect the dots between seemingly disparate subjects. If you studied WWII in history class and a blurb about WWII came up in English class and you were asked to process the information from a different angle, it would “stick” more, and you’ll be more likely to see how it fits into the big picture.

And isn’t that really the root of so many of our problems these days?… So many of us finding it so hard to see the big picture - connecting the dots between our declining health, our lifestyles, an economy gone berserk, the health of the planet, vested interests, the role of religion and politics in maintaining the status quo, etc, etc….?

I still don’t see the ”big picture” of Le Lion, though. Damn you, Le Lion!!! (shaking fist, angrily)

Readers of this blog know that I haven’t spared common, everyday greed for its role in the inevitable deterioration of our standard of living coming our way. . 

Still, I thought this column by Frank Rich of the New York Times adminishing average Americans for their role in the crisis, was, well, pretty rich (sorry- couldn’t help it).

Now that it seems to be fashionable to talk sacrifice and go green and scorn the mighty Starbucks, columnists are tripping over themselves looking for scapegoats and it seems, just as Time magazine infamously crowned YOU, the American Consumer, with your indomitable willingness to spend and thus make the economies of the world go round, they are now ready to bestow on YOU, now that the other shoe has dropped, a hefty chunk of blame for this mess.

That’s right - YOU. You, with your Viking ranges, your Hummers, your Victoria Secret secrets, your $40 Yankee Candles and your addiction to $5 polysyllabic coffee concoctions.

The fact that a Merrill Lynch ex-exec, John Thain, decided to expense $1.22 million of company money (right before his company qualified for bailout funds out of, ahem, your tax money) is directly correlated to YOUR greed. (Poor guy… hes was a victim of your culture of consumption. Shame on you for getting mad at him and not at yourselves).

You were hoping to make $50,000 in profits on your house when you hadn’t seen a raise in decades, when your health care costs have gone through the roof, when inflation had quintupled the cost of buying a starter home in the kind of neighborhood where you don’t have to worry about drive-by shootings and crack whores coming on to your teenage son - that’s the very same brand of ostentation that inspired John Thain to think he simply had to have a $87,000 rug for his office, or got Steven Schwarman to blow a million smacks on his 60th birthday bash (on Rod Stewart for crying out loud. Why not the New Kids while you’re at, Stevie?).

Potatoes, pot-aahtoes.

It’s not, say, because the media - who play a pivotal role in maintaining a healthy democracy as the moderators of bullshit - failed the American people by catering 1) to poltical spin, and 2) to the lowest common denominator of intelligence.

It’s easy to use “Americans” as punching bags (God knows I have), but who are “Americans”? The guys on Cops, Jerry Springer’s audience, or are they regular people with regular faults and regular strengths, people who tend to be lazy (because let’s face it - we’re wired that way) and who are not prone to heroics unless absolutely necessary. On the other hand, they are also fairly reasonable people, who, in times of relative plenty, can be made to think and plan long-term if the people watching out for them cared to make that case.

Instead of fostering critical thinking, the term “conspiracy theory” was brought into the common vernacular as a way to demean anyone - and I mean anyone - with a question, be it a legitimate question, or one that could be easily refuted. In classrooms kids are brought up to think that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but as soon as they enter the adult world they’re expected to figure out which questions are “safe” and which aren’t. Like for example debating the pros and cons of controlled protectionism (so jobs at home can be protected), or the economics of growth altogether (as in, we should not be banking on relocating to Mars in case our “growth” outpaces the planet’s resources). These are all baaaaaad questions, so shame on you for even thinking them.

Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say to Mr. Rich that the people’s “greed” was planned, enabled and magnified by design, not by accident. After 9/11 we were told it was our patriotic duty to shop. Bush wasn’t lying when he said so - in an economy where 70% of the GDP is accounted for by consumer spending, of course we need to shop to keep it going.

When free market theory was invoked to justify manufacturing jobs being shipped off to China, India and others, the American people roared. I remember - I was a teenager in the 1990s and I remember the campaigns to “buy American”. I especially remember that one of my favorite shops - BCBG - was proud of its “Made in America” label (and used it to justify its crazy prices). I also remember than in 2004, scarcely 10 years after the “Made in America” campaign, I ordered a Marc Jacobs dress through ebay and was convinced I’d gotten a fake when it arrived in the mail - the label said “Made in China”. How could that be? It absolutely could be, it turns out. Most American  - and many European - designers have moved production to China. Nobody cares where it’s made anymore, and that, boys and girls, is how North America lost its status as the manufacturer of “quality” goods, after ceding the manufacturing of cheap crap to the Far East.

And now we’re set to lose our white collar jobs as well. Just last week, a bank which operates mostly in the Cayman Islands - not part of the US but culturally and economically intertwined with it - has shipped off a sizeable chunk of its operations to India, where accountants are just as nimble with numbers and cost half as much as accountants with American, Canadian, or British qualifications.

So what are people supposed to do? Go back to school? And do what, exactly? The NYT also reported, in its business section, that enrollment in trucking and welding school is up, as people seek “recession-resistant” careers.

What next? A resurgence in horse-and-buggy renting? A demand for scribes as we inch towards illiteracy? Why do our economies seem to be going backwards, and why are we so unprepared? Can that be blamed on the common greed of the American consumer too?

I’ll leave you with this thought, one I’ve blogged about before and have never managed to get over: the median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is around$25,000.

That means there are around 150,000,000 souls living in America today whose household income is $25,000 or less.

Or less!

When the median purchase price of a home in the US tops $200,000 and the median income is $25,000, and 50,000,000 Americans don’t have health insurance, can we really place the blame for the reckless defrauding of American prosperity at the doorstep of the “average” American consumer?

Frank Rich - what the hell are you talking about???