It’s hard to feel bad …

For years, any suggestion that Social Security should be privatized was met with visions of a failing economy — so they came up with the 401k, a scheme whereby we put our retirement money into the stock market, but under the control of people we don’t know, who make money whether we do or don’t
And sure enough, when the economy tanked, the only folks who didn’t lose big time on their 401k were folks who didn’t have one. And when Citibank and AIG drove the world economy into virtual bankruptcy, and we the people, who had been paying our credit card bills and mortgages to the best of our ability, reached into our other pocket to bail them out, somehow none of those billions of dollars made it to the retirement funds of the rank and file employee.
When you’re at, or almost at, the lower end of the financial food chain,it’s difficult to have sympathy for guys how show up in personal jets to cry about how much money they lost.

Beware the winking barracuda

The story of Sarah Palin and her bath towel reminded me of the first time I met, sort of, a woman who seemed remarkably comfortable with her appearance.

“That was nice,” I told the guy who was sitting in my passenger seat.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I was sitting at a stoplight several decades closer to my youth when she pulled up beside me in one of those small pickup trucks that was popular before Ford started selling four-door F-150s to the yuppies. I guess the motion of the vehicle suddenly appearing made me glance over, and there was one of the most attractive young women I’d seen.

It wasn’t lust. I’d read the articles in Playboy, and I knew the difference.

She looked over at me, caught my look, and smiled. I smiled back. The light turned green and I never saw her again.

It was more like a ‘thank you for noticing.’ At least that’s the way I chose to read it.

I never saw her again, so I never learned what lay behind the smile, but years later, I had a friend with a similar smile, with whom I occasionally went swimming in the river on hot summer afternoons. We talked about politics and our kids and such stuff.

Sarah Palin, I think, would not be such a friend. After watching her campaign performance and reading of her rise to becoming vice-presidential nominee, I think she had a different message when she came from her shower, wrapped only in a bath towel, to tell her briefers, both men, she would be “just a minute.”

I think she was making a statement. She was telling her male briefers she was not afraid or them, or subservient. Be not mislead, she seemed from my distant perspective to be saying, by my beauty queen experience and posture, or my blue-collar manner of speaking. I am as tough as you, and will, when this is over, use you up and toss you aside as easily as you will me.

This woman, nicknamed Barracuda by her high school mates, is comfortable in her own body. I like that, almost as much as I don’t like her divisive, power-hungry, “real American” brand of politics.

She and Todd are not done yet with their political career. Those who become distracted by her wink and her towel will find themselves bleeding, broken and discarded in the bushes outside the arena.

Generation Gap

An item in a Newsweek story: “At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. ‘I’ll be just a minute,’ she said.”

On MSNBC Wednesday, Andrea Mitchell referred to the story and seemed to chastise Palin for not putting more clothes on when she popped out to tell her male briefers she’d be “just a minute.”

It seems from here that says more about Mitchell than about Palin, and about and old generation more than young. Mitchell is 62, born and raised in a time when the thought of a woman clad less than neck to toenails was scandalous. Sarah Palin is 44, well aware of her appearance, equally comfortable in jeans or $10,000 gown.

In Mitchell’s time, a shapely young woman in a bath towel would have been advertising sexual favors for her spot on the ticket. In Palin’s, men who think “getting comfortable” means “let’s f—” are in for some serious disappointment.

The story, and its subsequent treatment, begs the question whether, had those same male briefers come in the room and John McCain appeared in his boxers, what would have been the response from the press on hearing the story.

Moving back’rds

Big splash this weekend about comedian Al Franken looking real good as the next junior senator from Minnesota.

There’ve been an awful lot of folks have gone from the entertainment stage to elected politics — Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, and Arnold Schwarzenegger come quickly from recent memory.

Sarah Palin, though, has an excellent chance of reversing the trend.

Executive privilege

“John and I are asking the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group (Acorn) and to do it immediately.” Sarah Palin in a stump address.

This from the vice-presidential candidate who, as governor, exhibited her executive experience by refusing to respond to subpoenas issued by her own state legislature.

High-tech memory lane

The 13-year-old granddaughter had a couple of questions for her Senior Citizen relative last night, and they made me come up with answers that seemed to amaze her. I herewith share them for the benefit of other 13-year-old grandchildren who have never seen a transistor radio or a Number Three wash tub.

1. Describe a new technology that came out when you were young and any thoughts you had about it at the time.

I was about 12 when my uncle gave me a Sony transistor radio. It was cream-colored about the size of a pack of my dad’s cigarettes, with a gold screen over the speaker. It used a nine-volt battery for power.

We don’t hear much about transistors these days, but until they came along, radios and televisions had glass tubes about the size of light bulbs. A radio had to be about the size of a boom box just to play a couple of stations.

Then someone figured out how to use silicone and some other stuff to make “solid state” tubes — so-called because they were, well, solid. They did the same thing tubes did, but they were bout the size of pencil erasers and needed only small batteries for power.

So there I was with my pocket-size Sony under my pillow at night, listening to Cousin Brucie talk about the Submarine Races on 77-WABC in New York. And the really cool part (at that age I didn’t understand that transistors, themselves, were cool) was that I was about 500 miles away from New York, in the Maine woods.

2. What new technology made the biggest change in you life? How did it change your life?

That’s easy. Computers. Specifically a Kaypro 4 that was my first one.

I wrote and produced a radio show then, writing in long-hand and typing, and then crossing out and making corrections and retyping. A recorded show was about three and-a-half pages of double-spaced print, so all that rewrite was a pain.

But I had been using computers in the Navy, so when I got wind of the Kaypro being affordable for personal use, I had to have one. That was 1984.

It was about the size of a suitcase, with a keyboard that unclipped from its bottom to expose a seven-inch screen that displayed text-only, in green letters about like newsprint. It had 64 Kilobytes of memory, and two five and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that held about 400kb each. One floppy held the operating system; on the other, you stored your work.

If I wanted to change something, I simply moved up the screen and changed it. If I wanted to move a paragraph, or several paragraphs, I cut them from where they were and put them where I wanted them.

Shortly after I got out of the Navy, Tandy Radio Shack came out with a TRS-102 that became my first laptop, with which I filed stories from pay phones to the paper for which I wrote.

I still remember how to use a pencil, but I avoid it whenever possible.

3. Looking back when you where younger, did you like the lack of technology or wish you had more?

I didn’t know about technology. Running water meant hustling from the hand pump to the kitchen. We took a bath once a week in a Number Three washtub, with water heated on the wood stove. I was 12, the year I received the transistor radio, before we had indoor plumbing and a shower.

Nobody knew what a computer was, except a few people in the space program, or at big name technical colleges such as MIT. Today, there is more computer power in many cell phones than sent Apollo 13 to the moon in 1970. I bought my first calculator from JC Penney in 1971, on sale for $120 — and all it would do was add, subtract, multiply and divide.

4. Do you think that if you had the technology that we have now while you were growing up that it would have changed your life significantly?

Maybe a little. I think life was slower then, and without video games and television, we had to use our imaginations to invent stuff only we could see. I had a rock that took me into space, and I spent a lot of time wandering the woods around home, learning — though I didn’t realize it then — about wildlife and the natural world.

But I read a lot, which took me to places I never hoped to see in real life. I enjoyed research papers in high school because they were an excuse to pore through encyclopedias in search of amazing stuff.

Now, when I want to know who was chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1985 (I needed to know that for a story I was writing the other night) I Google it, and in a few seconds I have it. Had I used Google in a high school paper, I’d have received a red mark from the teacher for using a word that didn’t exist.

There was a little more, but I’m out of space.

I’m waiting to see Morgan’s report.

© 2008

These things I believe

I believe that every family has a right to a family doctor, and that as long as the employer will not provide it, in large part because the consumer does not want to pay for it, the taxpayer must expect to pick up the cost.

I believe that we need to know our enemies — how they live, what they believe — before we move in with guns, treasure and young people’s lives trying to force a way of life they will never accept.

I believe books about other cultures are written from the perspective of their authors, and the only way to really know another people is to live among them, to share their bread and drink.

I believe the American middle class is a special interest, and must have as much representation in the halls of government as the upper-level captains of industry and finance.

I believe there are wasteful earmarks such as bridges to nowhere, and valuable earmarks such as investments in a broad education for our children and entrepreneurial research into ways to provide sustainable and non-destructible energy.

I believe we need to put on our nation an international face that says we are accepting of people of varied race and ancestry; that our president must be welcomed by our allies and respected by our foes, not because we have the biggest guns, but because we have shown by example we are willing to share the planet with people who may not agree with some of the specifics of our lifestyle.

I believe that when hundreds of thousands of citizens of other nations gather to applaud our leaders, they will gather to convince their leaders to join with us in times of great stress, and when those citizens walk away from our leaders, their leaders will walk away from us

Those are the main measures by which I will chose the person to get my vote for president.

Where has all the money gone?

We’re spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and we’re about to put the economic bailout tab to more than $800 billion about $15B to Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, $85B to AIG, and now a proposed $700B to the banking industry). We owe our soul to China, which has picked up a large portion of our national debt. Our banks are charging higher interest, denying credit, and going under.

How many things could we do to make life better for our citizens that are not going to be possible because of the greed of a few and the need to now merely save the many from extinction.

And what’s really amazing is how willing now for federal help are the very industrial leaders who until about a year ago decried socialization or federal regulation of anything! Let the market take care of it, they said.

The market place is a great place to determine what sells and what doesn’t. But there have to be some rules, like in some sports, where the game ends if one team gets behind by some preset limit, the other is declared the winner and the game stops —before the final score becomes too embarrassing to the loser.

Changing face of the information control

Here’s an interesting thought: Apple has come out with a device that plays music, videos, and radio and TV shows, and makes telephone calls. It also will run a plethora of software. We know that because Apple says it’s true. The company says an upgrade to the operating system will allow all those hinted-at applications to run.

But Apple gets to decide what software will run, and when it will run, by mandating that all software must be obtained from the iTunes store and installed from the iTunes application. Presumedly, Apple could, if it later decided, turn off any software that once worked simply because, oh, say it allowed users to buy music, videos, or podcasts from Not-Apple.

One might point to hackers who already have figured out ways to run software on an iPhone, but how long will it be until Apple decides to shut down iPhones that do not operate approved software through the approved iTunes interface. It’s in the agreement with AT&T that Apple maintains control — AT&T merely sells the units and provides over-the-air service

With that much control, Steve Jobs can decide what information will be allowed to appear on the iPhone. Maybe it will come from only Google, or only Yahoo, or only some as yet unknown AppleSearch that will decide not do display certain search results. (Don’t laugh; companies already pay to be at the top of the list; eliminating “objectionable” content altogether would be easy.)

To use the device at all, the buyer already has to activate a two-year contract, at an exhorbitant price that includes charges for “features” many users may not ever use, often do not want, and at any rate may not have available where they hang out. One may not purchase an iPhone and opt out of the Wi-Fi or email, for instance, by not subscribing to the mandatory $30-a-month data package.

And yet people seem focused on complaining about the price as they stand in line to acquire the latest state-of-the art gadget, while the once dying Apple computer brand moves toward total control of what it hopes will be the new Microsoft-model of control by becoming the de facto standard.

But Microsoft has controlled only the tools by which we manipulate information. Apple is well on its way to controlling access to the information.

And that is, or should be, more worrisome than the size of the monthly bill.

She is woman; they hear her roar

Hillary Clinton’s run for the American White House began in 1776, when Abigail Adams wrote to her husband: “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

In their statement of independence, John Adams and his compatriots declared “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

But some “men” were more equal than others. Blacks were only three-fifths of a man, a precept accepted in print, if not in unanimous principle. Women were not allowed to vote until 1920.

Nearly two and-a-half centuries after the national declaration of equality.

More than a century and-a-half after a bloody war to abolish the enslavement of Americans of African descent.

In 2008, women finally have an opportunity to finish the job Mrs. Adams began as her husband made his way to Philadelphia to help create a new nation upon the globe.

“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

They are fomenting a rebellion, those women who have been kept “in their place” these many years. They understand being told, by societal acquiescence if not by statute, their job is to care for children so their husbands can go off to slay a beast for dinner.

Hillary Clinton has grown up through the ‘70s when women burned their bras and began taking hammers to glass ceilings.

When women decided they did not need men for any reason other than to make — not raise — babies.

When she cried in New Hampshire, thousands of New England women understood.

I had a friend in college whose husband was a dairy farmer. When she graduated and wanted to put her degree to use, he objected.

He had allowed her to go to college; now she should return to help on the farm.

Hillary Clinton knows about those women. Thirty-five years of campaigning have taught her how to touch them.

She won last week in Pennsylvania by touching the same women. Women wished they could do things, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, raising children.

There is an acceptance in this nation, in spite of a vast reservoir of empirical evidence, that men of color could, if they wished, be as successful as any white man.

But women, including women of color, know in their bones that is not true for them. They have stood in the bars with their hard-working men and drank shots and beers. They did not necessarily approve, but they did it. They have cried because they have been denied opportunities given by right to their men.

They are proud of their husbands and sons, but now it is their turn, and Hillary is their standard bearer. For a large number of them, large enough number to keep her in the contest, and maybe enough to help her win it, nothing else matters.

If Hillary Clinton beats Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, it will be because she knows how to touch those women, and he does not.

He never will. He is a man.