Jack

I and some friends for years have gone to a local diner every Wednesday morning.  Over breakfast we debate St. Louis, women, politics, and the merits of corned beef hash.

The guy who served us, faithfully, sometimes grouchily, always skillfully, was Jack.  A fiftyish, heavily tatooed biker who became, over the years, a friend and my principal reason for meals at that diner.

Jack and I developed a separate bond between us these last two years, as we discussed our battles, mine with cancer and his with heart disease.  We both became gladder with each week that we were both still there.

Now it's just me.  Jack died this week.

It's a big world and I guess Jack was just a little person in that world, but damn, not to me.  He had style, he took pride in his work, he suffered impatient dining patrons not at all.  His ability to remember what each of us wanted was simply uncanny.  For each it was the "usual" or, because one guy's usual became very popular, "the Ted."

His recall ability, in addition to being just plain cool, gave us each a sense of belonging.  But despite this, I drifted away from the usual for breakfast during the months that Jack and I faced our challenges.  To me, every Wednesday became a brand new Wednesday and I wanted to celebrate it.  He got it.

This is hard, this dying.  The world shrinks.  But the hope for a reunion grows, and if it's possible, Jack, I will sure see you on the other side.  And this time, my friend, I will pour your coffee.

Fortress America

I've always been a pro-defense, strong military, if-you-fight-a-war-you-fight-to-win kind of guy.  Which means support for most of what our military does, since it seems like the most honorable and effective governmental agency we've got.

But there's a disconnect.  Militaries do what the civilian authority decides they should do.  Our military happens to execute as well as one could expect; but that doesn't mean that what they are asked to do is the thing that makes us safest and most free.

Like garrisoning the world, for example.  If you can make a compelling case that that's how we are safest and most free, great.  But how about an alternative that brings home the garrisons:

A big tough navy that can project force and has subs that can blow up any enemy; a kick-ass Marine Corps, stationed here; missile and drone offense and defense that give us other ways to blow up any enemy and keep incomings to a minimum; and 50 tough, well-equipped state militias that would make any invader of our land very sorry indeed.  Some soldiers stationed in our embassies, but otherwise no troops overseas.

Are we less safe with this?  I'm not sure.  I don't think anyone would invade Philadelphia knowing there are lots of armed Phillies fans ready to fight back.  Not to mention Houston.  OK, it wouldn't be taking the battle to the bad guys in the Middle East.  But I just don't know that that's worked.

And wouldn't this be a lot cheaper?  I think so - tens of billions cheaper, in fact, once the transition is made.  Savings like that should make us safer and more free.

And no standing national army, but rather militias where the officers are guys from our neighborhoods?  I'm sure that's more free.  That's almost a definition of freedom.

So, hawkish I am, but for a reason.  Because the purpose of government is to make us safe.  Keeping our infantries here, under relatively local control, seems to me to keep us (including the lads and lassies in the infantries, who are also us) as safe as we can hope.

Risk and Choice

Back

From another hiatus, another great turn of the wheel.  The details probably don't matter.  We're all fine here at Strays, me, family, friends.  The latest turn does remind me, though, of a conversation I have packed and unpacked for years.

The conversation is with strangers and I have it all the time.  It goes:  What do you do?   And I answer:  I'm a lawyer.
What do you do really means, of course, what do you do for a living.

And the proper answer, in my case, should be that I practice law for a living.

But the question and the answer come out much closer to what to you do in life - almost who are you.

And the answer, literally, is that I am lawyer.  That's who I am. 

But it isn't.  I quit journalism and went to law school, which I regarded as a trade school, a place to go learn stuff and get credentialed so I could earn a good living, still do a lot of writing, be an advocate, in a world where hard work and merit play a greater role than luck.  But it didn't make me someone I wasn't before.  It was not a metamorphosis.  It was learning a trade.

And in this way I'm not a father or a husband or a musician either, even though I love and treasure fathering and husbanding and playing music.

I'm a guy trying to lead an interesting life.  Looking forward to an astounding 2011.  Happy New Year, and bring it on.

How to Raise the Dow by 5000 and Add 1,000,000 Jobs

"I think it's time to set the record straight.  There has been all this nonsense thrown around about how I'm a socialist, that I hate business, that my agenda is for government to take over the economy.

"It isn't true.  Yes, I flirted with a lot of left-wing thinking in my youth.  Who didn't?  But history's verdict over the past four decades is completely undeniable.  The free market, on a global scale, is the path to prosperity for the USA and the rest of the world.

"I am not an ideologue.  I'm a politician, and a pragmatic one.  The best politics for me and my party is to convince the US business community that the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for prosperity than the Republicans.  That isn't a strange idea.  Look at Jack Kennedy's tax cuts, and Bill Clinton's commitments to free trade and welfare reform.

"So, starting right now, here's the message to the US business community:  we are with you.  We get it.  We know perfectly well that government doesn't create jobs, and that we aren't going to prosper and compete in the world economy unless government is the wind under the wings of the free market.

"I'm announcing three steps today.  First, I am issuing an executive order that requires our agencies to implement the recommendations from leaders of the information technology industry that should save us $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years by going after waste, duplication, fraud, and abuse in federal programs.

"Second, I'm going to push for federal litigation reform.   I'm going to propose rules that say if  lawyers bring frivolous claims to court, they and their clients will have to cover the other side's legal fees.  Contingency fees will be capped, so that we aren't going to have lawyers getting multi-million dollar fee awards.

"Third, we are going to push to change our tax laws to ensure that if you take your company's profits and put them back into the business, they won't be taxed.  Period.

"And that's just a start.  From here on, so long as I'm President, I'm going to do what it takes to see that the federal government listens to business.  Here at the White House and in Congress, we are going to stop treating business people like criminals and start asking their advice."

Samizdat, sort of

I let myself down a little when these posts don't come out regularly but right now I'm writing mostly for the drawer.

This is different from something I've blogged about before, somewhat erroneously:  samizdat, the self-publication that Soviet authors were forced to engage in.  It was quiet publication, circulating manuscripts hand to hand.  Both for some level of protection, and because the authors probably couldn't get the materials published in the USSR even if they wanted to.   It isn't really writing for a drawer, where they stay.

Samizdat may be at the other end of the same scale as blogging, which is conspicuous self-publication at the click of a mouse.

Writing for the drawer, making a journal, whatever you call it, is writing for other reasons.

There is the ancient one: writers have to write like breathers have to breathe.

Also to make a record, published or not.

Also to exorcise demons.

As to the last, exorcism, it's double-edged.  If the point is therapy, then the more right down-to-the-bone personal, the better. But then the less likely you'd want anyone to see it.  If no one sees it, what has been revealed?  If nothing is revealed, does it just swirl around and go nowhere, and do nothing?  The Franz Kafka  - Emily Dickinson problems... ah, next post, or the next, or the next.

Darkness and Light

Two pieces that came out last weekend provide a cautionary tale and, to my mind, a bolt of light.

The cautionary tale is about Japan and how it has fallen in the last twenty years.  Martin Fackler at the NYT looks at not only the technical reasons for the fall - deflation being the biggest, evidently, although it's hard to tell if that's a symptom or a disease.  But more interestingly he writes about the failure of Japanese grit.

Japan’s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as “herbivores” for lacking their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country’s shrinking birthrate. “The Japanese used to be called economic animals,” said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. “But somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.”

The light, to me, is from a  piece in the weekend Journal by Jonathan Haidt that associates the Tea Party movement with karma.  It corresponds with everything I've seen about this middle class movement of people who are sick of our failure to accept consequences.  These are the folks who don't buy the idea that every kid on the team gets a medal and every team wins the league.  They are prepared to accept their own failures, but don't want to pay for everyone else's.  Losers should lose, gracefully, and winners should win, gracefully, so long as everyone plays fair.  

Putting the two together - optimist that I am - I am persuaded that we Americans can pull out of this slump because we have the stones.  We can suck it up, roll up the sleeves, and believe in the future.  But crappy handouts will not work, nor will get-out-of-jail-free cards, and unless our leadership stops offering them, it will be sayonara for the next decade.