All Twitter These Days

At the right.

When you are thinking in aphorisms it's a better setting.

And Fixer is getting fixed.  Will stay quiet until I figure out how to escape the corners into which I paint myself.

Rain

For some reason the media emphasis has been on the heat - well, there is a reason, the heat is unprecedented - but what has really been so relentless is the lack of rain.  Cracks appear in the ground, whole trees die.

So when the rain came we went out and danced in it.  Now the tree frogs and cicadas are in full serenade.

Chemistry

Over 100F for many days, no rain, no relief in sight.  As to plant life, and we have lots of it, you get to the point where you risk boiling instead of watering. 

What I Mean By That Is

... Strays is going to be more and more like Twitter.  In fact I may migrate to Twitter.  Until I do, aphorisms.  You know, like "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."  (Boy, that one has always seemed like voodoo.  Wear this apple around your neck and mwambajamba no more doctors!)

But where I'm really going to try to apply myself is in Fixer.  Link on the right.  It's going to start trite and derivative.  So let's watch and see if I can find a voice.

Fore

There may be another way to propel this forward.

What impels the words is a desire to share ideas, plus a desire to write, plus a desire to exhibit.  As to the last - otherwise why put it out on the Internet, where it lasts forever, is completely corruptible, and is likely to bring back nothing good.

So you could close it down, call it a day.  Or you could carry on, but try to make it more regular, more urgent, less introspective, less idiosyncrantic, less boring.

Or (and there are lots of other or's out there), you can reframe things as fiction and narrative.

And you can drop the second person when you really mean the first.

Thwack.

Downstroke

Here in America we live and work mostly in daylight, and we dine, dance, and sleep after dark.  The Mediterraneans, with their siestas, know something about another way, maybe because of the heat. Those of us who work across multiple time zones, we navigate another way too.  So you unlink from regular, linear time a little, but at the same you are more wedded to the clock than ever in order to keep your bearing.

Backswing

When the temperature reaches 108F and it's going to be over 100F for the next five days, and there's been no rain for weeks, and humidity is in the teens... well, St. Louis, meet Palm Desert.  Which is pretty good weather for geezers with a/c, but it's hell on the hydrangeas.

Gets you thinking... what if it doesn't rain until September?  It means that all the water I bought, and will buy, over the last months and this summer will be for naught and we'll be losing trees, not just plants, and we'll be facing fires, not just the usual tornadoes and hailstorms.  It's so Biblical!

One sign that it could be the end of the world:  folks are giving away their tickets to the Cardinals games over the weekend...

Back on the Trail

Yeeks it's been another month.  I hope that's over.  I just... well, it's the Meriwether Dilemma.  How can you write a journal when you are busy fightin' bears?

Well, the bears are lumbering off this morning, looking for tastier fare.  And I'm thinking that the rest of my life begins - not today, too obvious - but July 1, 2012.  So I've got this little time for a windup.  Then in about a week I will take off, stop stewing, start doing, ensuring that when my funeral comes around they will be able say more than he was a nice guy.

This is the new Blogger format.  I will give it a try, although I thought the old one was cool, dry-Manhattan cool.  Maybe this will be a little warmer.  A Perfect Manhattan, this time.  Or not, and I will try to re-engineer back.

We seem to be embarking on a new political season and the chatter seems as banal and surface-coasting as ever.  And about money, money, money, or maybe that's me, maybe I'm getting to the sad state  where I think everyone but me is venal.

Just look and listen, and see if any candidate is talking about anything because it's virtuous, righteous, and not because it's politically savvy.  And way more important:  see if the reactions to what the candidates say are based on lack of virtue, or righteousness, as opposed to smart or stupid for the campaigner.

Not to say that process doesn't matter.  There is a trend taking place in California - the place that, contrarian that I am, I admire more and more - where they are trying to throttle back the rules so that the electorate no longer has to choose between extremists on either side.  Lots of ways to get there  - I'll do a really wonky piece about it before election day.

But now, I'm getting ready for July 1.  Where are those running shoes?

Back from California

It’s a grand place, really.   Americans have loved California for generations, and it shows.  San Diego, my principal destination this time, is shiny, massive, unmoored from most traditions except the tradition of the US Navy.  The Midway is parked in front, and Saturday morning the venerable aircraft carrier was swarming with Girl Scouts.   As American as you can get.

Which is one of the ways in which this neo-secessionist movement is so sad.  Its proponents in the so-called “red” states*  think of California and New York and Massachusetts as un-American havens for welfare and disability cheats and freeloaders.  But they should go see the Midway.  There it is in California, manned by greatest-generationers who seem to love their volunteer gig. Not a bum or a panhandler in sight.  Un-American?  Please.

There are homeless people in downtown San Diego, in their sleeping bags, pushing their carts, hanging out in twos and threes with their scrawny but evidently well-loved dogs.  They aren’t in the least aggressive, and they obviously aren’t stupid -  if I were ever to find myself on the street, out of choice or necessity, I’d think San Diego was a pretty fair place to camp.   No wonder the Okies headed there.

It's a wonderful mix, homeless and Girl Scouts and folks in bars and babes in limos and families walking along the waterfront.  Walking back from the Midway, a big graduation ceremony for Phoenix University.  It isn’t blue, or purple, any more than it’s red or green or black or white.   It’s California, and if it’s any color it’s still gold, plus plenty of red, white, and blue.

* I’m sorry, I still think that the notion of “red” as a symbol for American conservatives is  an ignorant joke.

** I have no idea why this post is framed on white but I can't figure out how to undo and I'm sick of trying.  They're just words.

Lewis and Clark

There a lots of ways to divvy up personalities,  from the Myers-Briggs type indicators to my long-time favorite: are you Beatles or are you Stones.  But I'm working on a new one, William Clark v. Meriwether Lewis.

Clark was organized, methodical, commanding, and his journal entries from the 1804 expedition are daily, factual, and interesting but not compelling.  He was had a fine career, apart from the expedition, and is buried here with great distinction at Bellefontaine Cemetery.

Lewis was visionary, artistic, a companion of Jefferson, and wrote in his expedition journal only in occasional bursts, accompanied with illustrations, but with long periods of silence.  He died young, alone, on a trip back to the East on the Natchez Trace, probably by his own hand.

So in the world of public diarists - what we call, somewhat tediously, bloggers - how do we split up?

I suppose I'm Lewis, but I should be Clark.

The Wheel Turns

A little over a year ago I left my old firm.  A long, tough story, but it was my choice and I landed well.

Today comes the news, and it is not unrelated to my departure, that my old firm is closing its doors.

I'm going to stay on top of this, name no names, but try to identify some lessons learned.  There are real human tragedies that take place at a time like this, and the least we survivors can do is learn.  For some, there are no lessons left.

The first thing, and it's not as much a lesson as an indictment of all of us, is that the weakest in the firm are hit the  hardest and least capable of absorbing the blow.  We big thinkers can talk about capitalism and creative destruction, but what happens to the secretaries and receptionists - fine, dignified people - is just plain damage.

Better Answers

One of the memes emerging in the Presidential campaign is high gas prices.  The Democrats now say you can't blame the President, which is more or less true, and has always been more or less true, although it has only been true for many Democrats since January 20, 2009.

Mitt Romney, who will probably be the Republican nominee notwithstanding his furious efforts to dumb-talk his way out of it, responds to this issue by saying:  well, this President ran for office saying we needed higher gas prices.

It may (or may not) be a clever answer politically, but it really is a great example of the shallowness of American politics. Romney is smart.  He knows perfectly well that higher petroleum prices would be a good idea, to the extent that the commodity is artificially underpriced.  There is an argument that it is;  it's hard to say that the externalities of resource depletion and foreign policy cost have been captured.  And there is an argument that it is not;  OPEC has been gleefully engaging in production controls and  monopoly pricing for years.  And there is an argument that years of subsidizing gas-vehicle-favored infrastructure in America mean that we should impose a tax, in order to permit other energy sources to catch up.  Or even - heavens, from this libertarian? - to promote conservation.

These are serious answers, right or wrong, to serious questions and a debate over them might conceivably lead to better policy. But they won't ever come up, because the pols think people are too stupid to follow the argument.  Or, in the case of a tax on gas, they think the idea is political suicide.  They might be right;  the few who have gone down this road got creamed.  But if the many had the guts to enter the debate honestly, who knows, some intelligent policy might ensue.

Forgive my sniffy tone.   It's just that the good questions and the good answers have been around for years.  I worked in this field in the early 1970's and they were around then.  They were ignored by politicians who knew much better, and the trail from there to the Gulf War to to 9/11/01 is pretty direct.

We members of the Grown-Up Party can sit around waiting for thoughtful conversations about significant issues, but they probably will only be among us, and never reach a larger stage.  There is too much noise.  Only a real shouter could get above it, and in the Grown-Up Party we don't have good shouters.

What I Learned in the Last 40 Days

1.  An early Spring is a mixed blessing.

2.  Life without cocktails at home is pretty much like life with them.

3.  There's a great station on Sirius called L'Oasis Francophone.

4.  Lent actually ends at sunset on Good Friday.  I took advantage of this for purposes of testing No. 2 above.

5.  I may be better off moving this stuff to Twitter.  I seem to be thinking in aphorisms more than paragraphs.

Bad American Life

This American Life has retracted the story about Shenzhen I linked to on January 17th.  In hindsight, I can't believe I didn't see the embellishment and distortion.  There was a great movie about this problem, Shattered Glass.  You just like the story so much you suspend skepticism.

33 Days to Go

Just a note - self-referential, mildly contradictory, just how I like it - to say that like last year I'm off the posts for Lent.  Probably, as with last year, with exceptions.  The Guy who polices this either doesn't care, or cares a little, or cares a lot, and I'm either cooked or not.  As ever, I do it for the Fat Lady.

The Old Protestant Cemetery in Macau

Quite beautiful, even in winter, and sad - or maybe wistful.  18th and 19th century British and Americans, many young sailors and missionaries, left behind in a Portuguese/Roman Catholic settlement, in a Chinese world.

There is an agitated, crowded buzz in Macau.  But not here.

Leaving China

In rereading these past few posts I am mostly struck by how unqualified I am to say anything intelligent about China.  Whiskers on the back leg of an elephant seems about right.

It's just too big and I don't speak the language.

What I think I know is that we've all been right for a long time - the 21st century will have a lot more to do with China than the 20th century did.  And now that I'm back, I feel a little more qualified to talk, not about China, but what I hear about China in America.

In particular, what I seem to hear a lot is that China is a threat, or at least a challenge.  That we need to take back what we've lost.  That - if this pathetic-sounding dialogue coming out of the Presidential campaign is any indication - America is still the Greatest Place in the World and those crummy Asian countries will always be second place.

America is a great place and I am really glad to be home.  But I think this We're Number One stuff is pretty tiresome.  Yeah we are - it's a pretty hard thing to argue with that, even now - but so what?  What is the point of self-congratulation?  Me, I'm for staying in the flow, keeping busy, ignoring rank.

There is a sequence to things, and I still like the idea that America is Greece to China's Rome.  Maybe that's the book I will never write.  But to the extent that one followed the other -  or succeeded the other - or beat the other...I hope that's obsolete.  I think, can't prove, that we and China could be partners on the way to a future together, with much of the rest of the world, all of them bringing history and energy to a larger whole.

Leaving Hangzhou

The mechanics of posting are such that I can't stretch out and talk about all this with the usual Strays POV, at least not yet.

But today's nugget starts with the high-speed train.  From an old, China-style station in Hangzhou, with that standard China approach to queuing up  - a huge flock of people trying to squeeze through one portal at once, cutting each other off without mercy - out onto a platform and into a train that is science fiction.  The Beijing-Shanghai Express.  It glides, mostly at 300 km/hr.  Three stops, I'm in Changzhou.

Out the windows... not just office buildings and high-rise apartments and factories, although they are all over the landscape.  But also housing developments, with single houses and duplexes, front and back lawns.

Later, in Changzhou, at a huge shopping mall that opened a month ago.  And among the Tommy Helfingers and Starbucks and Dairy Queens and yet another KFC - a nice Thai restaurant.  Packed with young people.

What happened to America's middle class?  It's here.

Leaving Shenzhen

This was the shank of the trip.  Below, just a glimpse of what downtown Shenzhen looks like.  The photo taken from another office tower in the city - there are scores of them.  Across the river, Hong Kong's New Territories, at the center of why Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997.

Not far away, Hong Kong and Macau, the two ancient Western outposts in Asia, now part of China but very separately administered, even down to their own currencies.

I am leaving here with a lot to think about.  One piece of it is how to help young Chinese and young Americans work together in this still-young century.

Not Leaving

One of the more interesting memes I'm picking up over here is that the young people do not want to move to America. 

Back in the day, if you heard that, you'd think that they are just being patriotic, or careful, or resigned to the difficulty of getting a visa.  And there was plenty of evidence that if they really had a shot to go, they'd go in a heatbeat.

But now - I will admit this is mostly second- and third-hand, - the indifference to emigration to the USA sounds pretty genuine.  Why move to America?  Asia, they'd say, is now the land of opportunity.  America has great schools but sad infrastructure and too much unemployment, and hopes at best for three percent growth when China would panic if theirs dropped to six.  The best of America - films and Starbucks, say - is here.  The Internet (a restricted one, although my hunch is not very much in practice) is everwhere.

It could well be talk only.  I think you could look at some statistics to check it - like, how are visa applications running.  You could talk to the graduate students in the USA.   You could poll it - maybe someone has.  But there sure seems to be a shift taking place.

The young people I meet here - and it's mostly young people I see - are friendly, well turned out, and seem... poised.  As if they are not worried about their future.  That's good, right?

Soft Landing

A great old friend asked me if I thought China would have a soft landing.

I am about as far from macroeconomics as an educated person can be, but I am forming a view.  It's through a tiny keyhole - or, maybe a better metaphor, I'm determining what's an elephant by feeling a couple of whiskers on his rear left foot.  But it's my view, after three days on the ground.  For what it's worth.

I'm seeing large, well-run companies that did not exist in 2000 that sell products solely to the China and Asia market.  Old rebuilt and brand new cities - with infrastructures that match ours in the USA - that are filled with polite, friendly people who appear to be working very hard.  An economic system that is guided by a government that seems to know, when it comes to economics, what it is doing.

So I don't know that we are looking at a landing, soft or hard, any time soon.  Unless you call a growth rate that drops to seven percent a year a landing.

I know a little of the history, how China has always followed periods of prosperity with violent turns against the emperor in power.  The weight of its huge population and its limited arable land.  And I'm not naive about its lack of American-style freedom and the toxic byproducts of its development.

But the whiskers are telling me that that there is no landing to come in this generation.

Still Breathing

Well I'm in China.  Bundles to say, but hard to do it.  Blogger is blocked.  This is being posted by going in through my office portal; threading a needle through an Internet buttonhole... or something.  It's late, I'm 14 hours ahead, way late on my sleep, and back into a transformational world.

As a shortcut I'm going to lift from a couple of emails I sent earlier, thinking the blog would have to wait until my return.

China is as I remembered, same smells, same food - but more international, more English language signs and ads, a lot more commercial. Tons of malls with high-end shops.
The flight from Shanghai to Shenzhen was on China Southern, which used to be kind of scary. Now it carries the third-most passengers of any airline in the world, and it was a very respectable flight. The flight was packed, 97 percent Chinese, a decent meal even in coach. The people are well-dressed, polite, and seem comfortable with an American in their midst. They say "excuse me" and "thank you" in English, all of them. Only one other grey-hair on the flight - everyone else, black hair and pretty young. Funny what you notice. On the sidewalks in Shenzhen, lots of people walking dogs.  The dogs seem doggy, unafraid.  Downstairs at my apartment, a Corgi.
 
Shenzhen looks a lot like Hong Kong did in the '90's, only flatter and with no history.  It's huge, 14 million people, lots of very tall buildings, ill-designed roads, clutter.   Not garish, which is how I remember it from before.  A city of migrants - mostly speaking Mandarin, not Cantonese, in the middle of Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province.  About 25 years ago this was a village.

Graphic

Nope, not China.  Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, a couple of years ago.  But it looks kinda Chinese, yes?  What is that?

Shenzhen 3

So I guess the Times is on the hunt, or it's just that I'm noticing their China coverage (more, and especially here) because I'm about to go back.

What I think we need to get to is the ambiguity - the mix of massively good and massively bad.  Brand new and ancient.  International and intensely domestic.  Plural, and the Han people.

Over 90 percent of China, and one in five people on Planet Earth, is Han Chinese.  Not very ambiguous, and maybe not very important.  But it does catch the eye.

Shenzhen 2

There is more to the dark story of Shenzhen than the massive workplaces and the lives of their workers.  There is the fact, persuasively argued in a recent article in the Times, that the system responds at a level that America simply cannot match.

Margin Call Calling

All my stuff about the movie had moved over to my Facebook page, but this one - well, got to scream it out wherever I can.

JC Chandor, our wonderful son-in-law, was just nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

It's all him, and it couldn't happen to a better man.

Progress

I suppose the first thing you'd notice is the visa.  Back in my day - mid-'90's - a visa to China was a little hard to get, didn't last long, and when it came in it was a chop (a stamp, to you Yankees) and maybe a grid with some writing.

Now, my visa is slick, uncounterfeitable, high-tech.  It's for a year and multiple entries.  Came back in a week, using a travel agent less than a half-mile away.

The photo (from my Android) could be clearer, but I'm not sure I want it to be.  I suppose my entire life is in those numbers.  Oh, but wait... whatever data is there, it's known to the governments of the USA and the PRC.  Ay-ya.

Shenzhen

We used to laugh at this place, kind of a honky-tonk version of Hong Kong.  Now it's got 16 million people and its own dark signficance.  As complicated as the rest of the China story.  An example from This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=454

My first stop, after Shanghai, when I get over there.

Back to China

In 1994 I moved to China.  The first person is intentional.  My family came too, but they never really moved there - for them it was just a two-year stay, always looking back to America.  I don't recommend the mixture.

It was Hong Kong, actually, when HK wasn't legally China - under British law, in any event.  My beat was the PRC, plus the rest of East Asia.  Call it all China.  Really, it all is.

The family made it back, bless 'em.  As I've said here before, however, I died in Hong Kong in a typhoon in 1995.  Someone who looks like me did come back, and has played out this strange atonal coda for the last 15 years.

Though a set of coincidences I (or the guy who looks like me) is now going back, to Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, I hope Macau, then up to Changzhou and I hope Nanjing.  Nine days total, pretty much all business.  I'm told it will be different from the world I left behind, but I doubt it. All the promise was there in the '90's, just the buildings hadn't yet been built.  I think the smells will be overwhelmingly familiar, not strange.

And I'm sure the Star Ferry still runs.   When I dream, and live that life I never lived, I am usually on it, going back and forth, Kowloon to Honkers and back.  I keep leaving something on board that I fail to retrieve.

Kleos

An idea long gone.  A reputation so profound that it becomes the son's obligation to carry it on.  No modern counterpart.

Who's to say whether the smartest, the noblest, only lived long ago, and we are just in a long descent into mere survival.

Achilles chose death and glory.