That Treacherous Crawl

I’ve been watching Fox News lately. Now I haven’t put aside my unashamedly liberal tendencies and I certainly haven’t become a Trump Acolyte. But, how else will you get - right from the horse’s mouth - a clear-eyed look at what is driving the country.

All right, not the entire country. And, all right again, not a clear-eyed look, but only a little ray of light, shining through whatever crack in the curtain that it’s highly-paid commentators allow to reach their self-selected audience.

But, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s famous cave - and shame on you if you never learned about it - the glimpses I have gotten in the past couple of weeks are really   illuminating.

I’m still learning. The big show continues to play on in Washington - Congress doesn’t actually have to be in Washington for the political turmoil to continue - and you can learn a lot anyway.

You want an example? Well here’s one. Some commentators were debating the other day on whether President Trump’s unpredictability was a good thing or a bad thing.

One of them (and no, I will not increase their public posture by even a single potential viewer by using their names) said that a lot of people wanted him to be unpredictable, and were happy to see he is keeping his promise.

Look at that Obama, they said. He told our enemies what he was going to do, and so they were prepared to react. Trump gives no such warning, which means he is more powerful and gets better results.

Well, it was two to one or three to one for Trump’s unpredictability. The lone dissent came from someone who said that people wanted government they could count on. 

The Trump supporters scoffed. They believe the President when he claimed he has stopped China from stealing our industrial secrets because its leaders are scared over what he might do, that he defeated ISIS by not telegraphing his moves ahead of time and has made NATO members pay their fair share. 

They didn’t say exactly what that fair share was, or how it was calculated, or what it was  paid to. But, that’s not the point. They also didn’t say how ISIS will respond to his order bringing our troops out of Syria. Maybe they will just wait until we leave until they attack.

If so, it will be obviously become the fault of the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Why? They didn’t vote to build a big, beautiful wall across the desert.

                                            So, What Could They Be Missing?

The Fox commentators neglected to say that that Trump’s being unpredictable was causing the stock market to drop like a stone, straining our military alliances to the breaking point, leaving farmers unsure what to plant next year and driving up interest rates.

See how easy it it is to tell what Fox News doesn’t want to talk about, just from the questions they ask and don’t ask. It’s a little ray of sunshine.

Even more important, watching Fox - even briefly - showed me something I never realized before - the Treacherous Crawl.

Now crawl is a term that has been used in the news business almost since cable news was invented. The crawl is that little line on the bottom of your television or computer screen that provides information which may have nothing to do with the show you are watching. Look at the words crawling across the screen.

On Christmas Eve, the Fox commentators were joking about the holidays and showing cute pictures sent in by viewers showing dogs in elf hats, children playing and heartwarming holiday scenes. The treacherous crawl was talking about the hundreds of people killed by a tsunami in Indonesia, but no one was talking about rescue missions or help or where to send donations.

There might not have been room. There are almost as few words in the crawl as in a Trump tweet. Wait. Come to think of it, he didn’t tweet about the tsunami either.

I won’t stay with Fox news much longer. But, if someone else is watching, please let me know who gets the blame for the collapse of the stock market. I want to see if I guessed right.

Cold Comfort

It’s getting to be winter here in New York. And, although the weather has been bouncing from the early-morning 20’s to the mid-50’s in some afternoons, it is swiftly moving through what has become a miserable few months.

So, I am taking cold comfort - pardon the  pun - from the hope that a bright new year is breaking, a year when change will shift some things from the bad column to the good column, and that the normally pleasant order of life will return.

Which, of course, gives a whole batch of new meanings to that phrase. You know, “cold comfort.” Actually, a lot of meanings.

It is, truly, seasonal. On some emotional level, I think, human beings take comfort in the change of seasons. For those of us who live in weather zones where leaves fall off trees, whole religions have sprung up telling us why the weather changes and days grow shorter. Turn, Turn, Turn.

In other places, the change in seasons was marked by changes in the moon, or the stars, or the times that rivers flood. Egypt and Greece celebrated those changes long before western civilizations even got into the act.

(fear not, this will eventually devolve into a political screed of sorts. But, for a while, let’s have some fun.)

This is the time of the year for another kind of cold comfort, which works equally well in the north and the south, the east and the west. Yes, it’s the time for hot stove talk about baseball, when teams make trades, and all the teams who were out of the playoffs long before the end of the season make trades - ok, most of them - to get better. Soon the players will start reporting to Spring training, and everyone will be healthy. Pitchers and catchers will make mistakes, and it will be chalked off to being rusty. Optimism will rule. 

Teams who pile up a winning record will have fans who are smiling. Teams which end up with a losing record will get a lot of cold comfort by saying that every team starts 0-0 when the season begins, or that no one remembers Spring training once the real season starts, or that this was only a chance to see what the farm team kids can do, or to evaluate draft choices.

See, cold comfort everywhere.

Old romances will die over the winter. New ones will be born. We will see new records for storms or snowfall, cities in the South where snow was a one-inch, once-a-year rarity will start debating buying snow plows. More cold comfort of a different kind. Some time in February or March, I will say to my wife “The weather has been miserable, but at least we never lost power.”

She will look at me with a sweet, sad expression around her eyes and reply “Shut up. You are going to jinx it.”

Cold comfort, again.

I am looking forward to the new year for a lot of reasons. The big one is January 3, when the 116th Congress will begin its term. Naturally, there will be fights between the Democrats and the Republicans, and there will be fights between Democrats and Democrats, and then between Republicans and Republicans. Which means we will be entertained and most of our nation’s problems will not be addressed. Cold comfort.

Then I heard on the news that our President has ordered all of our troops in Syria, about 2,000 of them, to be withdrawn, because they have defeated ISIS there and it is no longer a threat. So we will leave, and ISIS will go back. Then we can go to war again, or just bomb Syrian women and children as collateral damage. Cold comfort.

There is speculation that President Trump may have already been indicted, and that the indictment has been sealed. Cold comfort.

The Trump Foundation has been ordered to be disbanded by a judge, and a couple of million dollars - if that much is actually left - will be distributed to other charities. Now accountants are looking into what it spent and how much of its money was spent for inflated bills and services charged by other companies owned by our President. Cold comfort.

Well, you get the idea. We are heading for a couple of years of chaos. a Constitutional show-down of sorts and the likely collapse of many of our small farms, a lot of them owned by people who voted for Trump. Cold comfort.

That only touches on all the likely things that will happen next year, and gives just a small sample of how many kinds of cold comfort we will likely be getting.

Which is, in itself, cold comfort.

Time To Fire Your Editor

I got a report on farm conditions in Minnesota the other day, which no longer surprises me very much.

I have been getting reports on Minnesota weather conditions for weeks now, as well as the outlook for crop markets next summer from the state’s farm bureau. None of which I wanted, and all of which just popped up as soon as I called up Google on my old search engine.

I started it, of course. About a month ago, I was interested in a Minnesota Vikings game, and - naturally - I Googled the team, read a couple of articles in the local newspaper and on a sports magazine site, and thought that was the end of it.

No, it was just the beginning.

I search for a lot of different things on Google, often to avoid embarrassing myself, sometimes just to check the spelling of an odd name, or even something simple like, say, Mississippi.

Now those search choices rarely come back to me for more than a day or two. After all, when I type Ser... I could be looking for lots of different things, but if my last search was for Serbia, well then my computer remembers - or more likely something else someplace else remembers - and up pops what I looked for the last time. Quick, efficient, simple and often welcome. After all, it saves me 20 or 30 seconds of typing, or even more if the spelling is long and difficult.

I had to look up Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov the other day. See what I mean?

Now I started noticing the same thing happening on my phone when I search one of the news sites. It offers a helpful hint, telling me that I would probably be interested in these  other interesting stories.

It’s just as helpful in suggesting things I might want to buy. Storm windows seem to be high on the list, so is cat litter and protein drinks. And you can’t believe just how many prizes I have won, and all I have to do is just click on a link to claim them. Who says this isn’t a great country? If I actually did that, I would doubtless have more than enough money to pay for new storm windows, and think about them while I am warm and comfortable on some beach in the tropics, courtesy of one of those great prizes I have won.

                                                        So, Here's The Catch

    

So, what’s bad? Other than the annoyance of losing 20 or 30 seconds to those dumb pop-up ads, especially the ones that I have to force quit to get rid of. Hey, add that to the wasted time that I spend on people who call trying to sell me solar panels - some of them hang up on me when, after a few minutes, I ask if I have to take down the panels I already have to enjoy their offer - it comes to maybe 10 or 15 minutes a day. Maybe two hours a week. Maybe 100 hours a year - two days of my life wasted every year. It adds up.

But more to the point, those suggestions of stories I want to see have turned my computer and my phone into editors, sifting through a universe of stories and deciding what I - an audience of one - really want to see and hear. And know.

Now a real live editor has a lot of duties. In the good old days, newspaper editors had to fight every day for space - who gets how much space for straight news, for business, for sports. National news fought with local news, business page editors cherished their best story, and only reluctantly saw it drift up to the front page and off the business pages.

And they worried about balance. Not getting every opinion in every story, of course, but - over a week or a month - making sure that every valid side of every valid dispute was presented to their readers.

They worried about facts, too. There were copy desk people who checked facts in every story, librarians who provided more data than anyone could want on necessary background, and lots of files of previous stories and photographs to give the reporter a better sense of what they were writing about.

And they would worry about stories covering things I never heard of, or never would have thought to look up. The impact of over-production of oil on the delicate balance between Saudi Arabia and Israel, for example, or the possible impact of a new fundamentalism sweeping through India. Should I care? Certainly. Would I have thought to look it up? Probably not.

                                                  But, No Longer

Today my editor is some kind of computer program which looks at what I last saw and assumes I want to see more of the same. Which, sometimes, I do. But, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes, I want to know how other people see things. And, with all the junk sites that come up with every click, it gets harder and harder to find a valid opinion from the people who don’t agree with me.

Grandstanding politicians don’t help here. Repeating the same thing over and over doesn’t help much, either. On the other hand, how else do you say that maybe it’s time to bring the troops home from one place or another without repeating how long they have been there?

Well, that’s the job of a real editor. Not to tell me what the weather is going to be like in two weeks in Minnesota.

Rest In Peace, W

I watched some of the three days of memorial events for George Herbert Walker Bush, and couldn’t help being drawn back to another time in our nation’s history. The contrast with Washington today was stark, and not flattering.

So, before the memory of those events fades - as everything seems to do these days - it would be a good idea to look at what happened and what it represented, and maybe think about what we seem to have lost.

I’ll try not to belabor the obvious too much. Rather, I want to look at a few little details and some of the history of good old 41, the last member of the Greatest Generation to serve in the White House.*

That much is true. But “greatest generation,” while a term of respect which is well-earned, is something we can quibble about in the corner bar. In this corner, an elderly man who used to be a 20-year-old giving up his old life to go fight against the Germans in Africa or the Italians somewhere on the boot of Italy. In that corner, another man who, when he was 20, gave up his old life to fight some faceless enemy in a jungle in Southeast Asia in a war that never seemed to end. Between them, we can put a soldier fighting in Afghanistan with no clear plan on how to win, or even what would define victory. Which, I admit, sounds a little like Vietnam, or maybe the battle along the Texas border against all those rock-throwing children and the invisible caravan.

But I digress. And, I shouldn’t. There is much to reflect on and much to admire in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush. Decency stands high on the list, but it doesn’t stand alone.

                                                  Some Things To Remember

He was as much a war hero as John F. Kennedy. His plane was shot out of the sky while Kennedy’s boat was blown out of the water. He went to Yale, entered the oil business by founding his own company, and became a millionaire by the time he was 40. His father didn’t give it to him. He was Director of the CIA, and was picked to be vice-president by Ronald Reagan after Reagan defeated him in the Republican primary for president. Good grief, he even signed (and took credit for) the North American Free Trade Agreement, better known as NAFTA - you know, the worst deal ever that was foisted onto the country by those sneaky Democrats. It only lasted a quarter of a century before we learned how bad it was.

All those actions are honorable, and all were earned by Bush.

But he earned a lot more - things like respect from powerful politicians, world leaders, and just plain people who knew him or his family. Even from strangers, some of whom turned against him when he broke that promise - you know “read my lips, no new taxes” which only saved our nation from going bankrupt or maybe just cutting social security payments in half.

George Bush was a naval hero, and the armed forces were well represented at the funeral. It reminded me that once, every single person in that room would have known the branch of service of each man or woman in uniform and many would have been able to tell you what every dash of color - the ribbons, the braid, the insignias and rank - meant.  It was important to him, and it said so much more than just “thank you for your service.”

Extra credit if you can tell me what the crossed dueling pistols on the little brass circle that I gave my daughter from an old uniform means.

One more thing, of course. The people in the front row at his funeral - at least most of them - seemed genuinely glad to be sitting together. They exchanged small talk, they smiled at times. And, there were tears as well.

Did I just imagine that only the sitting president seemed to be uncomfortable. Was it because this wasn’t about him, or because he was wondering how many of his associates would have to be let out of jail to speak at his funeral? And, what would they say? And who would tweet about it?

Sometimes, living in the moment - no past to look on proudly, no new ideas of your own for the future (bringing back the past as a plan for the future rarely works) and no idea of what to pass on as your legacy - just doesn’t work.

So rest in peace George Herbert Walker Bush, and thank you for the example you left for our whole nation. At least, for those who will stop to see it.

* Small footnote. Jimmy Carter is the right age to be considered part of the Greatest Generation, but he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1946, a year too late to serve in World War II.