February 2009 Archives

The other night I saw the pop singer Brooke Waggoner performed three songs. It's been so long since I paid attention to contemporary pop music that I had no idea who she was. Her songs were wonderful, and I was surprised to learn when I met her that she comes from a tiny town in south Louisiana, and is a recent LSU graduate. I was so intrigued by the music that I told her I was going to download her most recent album, "Heal for the Honey," when I got home.

Lo, I got a copy of her disc on the way out, put it into my CD player on the way to work the next morning, and was blown away. This is flat-out gorgeous piano pop music, orchestral and alive with shimmering textures and eccentric melodic curlicues and irresistible hooks that reveal a musical maturity you rarely encounter in pop music, at least not in the work of an artist so young. Please go to her website and check out Brooke's work. When I heard someone say at the meeting the other night that Britain's authoritative music magazine NME called her a "pop genius," I thought that might be laying it on a little thick, but after two runs through "Heal for the Honey," I think yep, that's right.

I got an e-mail this morning from an old friend with whom I'd grown up in Starhill, the little community just south of St. Francisville. Her husband is a businessman, and they've lived away from there for many years. They came back not long ago and built a house, but as her husband has risen in the company, they've had to move. They now live in Houston, and yesterday sold their house in Starhill. My friend was feeling sentimental about it this morning, and dropped me an e-mail to say how much it did her heart good to know that our parents, all retired now, are rediscovering the pleasure of each other's company. L.'s husband had been the night before down at her mom and dad's camp by Thompson's Creek, with her folks and mine, and the other moms and dads we'd all grown up with, eating and drinking and talking late into the night. We really come from a special place, don't we? my friend said.

I responded:

It's so easy to romanticize where we come from, as you know. You and I have gone so far from there (you the farther, having lived in Singapore!), but there is an impulse -- a good one, I think -- that always drives us back. I'm not sure what it is. There's nothing to do at home, really, and certainly nothing I could do to support myself and my family. There are a hundred reasons you and I could come up with in about five minutes why we wouldn't want to live there. And yet .... there it is.

I wonder if the overriding reason we think about it so much is not for what it is, but because it's ours. It's the smells that get to me most. I can't pass a sweet olive tree -- which you rarely find in north Texas -- without stopping in my tracks, flooded with memories of Starhill. There's another smell too: the aroma of y'all's camp, which started out, of course, as my Great Aunt R.'s antique shop (side note: I always that Aunt R. was kind of a snob, and that's true, but Daddy told me not too long ago that she was a wild woman back in the Forties, and that made me laugh hard; it's so easy to forget that all these old people were once young like us, and human). R.s shop had such a particular smell -- I guess it was the wood her husband used to build it, and the varnish. I really don't know. But I know that no place smelled like that, and that it was a deeply comforting smell to me for a reason I can't imagine. And that it was one of the earliest smells I recall, inasmuch as I got dragged over there by Mama as a very small boy. So when I caught the aroma at that party y'all had at the shop two or three winters ago, when we were visiting, it almost made me cry. Strange, and wonderful.

Y'all ready for a depression? Because it surely looks like one is coming. From today's Times:

A sense of disconnect between the projections by the White House and the grim realities of everyday American life was enhanced on Friday, as the Commerce Department gave a harsher assessment for the last three months of 2008. In place of an initial estimate that the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 3.8 percent -- already abysmal -- the government said that the pace of decline was actually 6.2 percent, making it the worst quarter since 1982.

The fortunes of the American economy have grown so alarming and the pace of the decline so swift that economists are now straining to describe where events are headed, dusting off a word that has not been invoked since the 1940s: depression.

Economists are not making comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent. Current conditions are not even as poor as during the twin recessions of the 1980s, when unemployment exceeded 10 percent, though many experts assert this downturn is on track to be significantly worse.

Rather, economists are using the word depression -- a subjective term with no academic definition -- to describe a condition of broad and extreme economic distress that remains stubbornly in place for much longer than a typical downturn.

This is more than a matter of semantics. As the government determines its spending plans, readying another infusion of cash for troubled banks while contemplating an additional bailout for the auto industry, the magnitude of those needs will hinge on the extent of the damage.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com, now places the odds of "a mild depression" at 25 percent, up from 15 percent three months ago. In that view, the unemployment rate would reach 10.5 percent by the end of 2011 -- up from 7.6 percent at the end of January -- average home prices would fall 20 percent on top of the 27 percent they have plunged already, and losses in the financial system would more than triple, to $3.7 trillion.

Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics, sees a 20 percent chance of "a depressionlike possibility," up from 15 percent a week ago.

"In the housing market, the financial system and the stock market, we're already there," Mr. Sinai said. "It is a depression."

I hope Joe Nocera of the NYT wins the Pulitzer prize for commentary this year. His financial columns are consistently fresh, and help me understand this catastrophe falling in on us. Today he writes about AIG, which is expected to announce on Monday the largest quarterly loss in history -- allegedly $60 billion! Nocera writes that on top of the $150 billion in taxpayer funds the government has already sunk into AIG, we'll probably have to throw $100 billion more before the company stabilizes. Nocera:

A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.'s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world's financial system by the throat.

If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks "will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect." A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners -- which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.

More:

I don't doubt this bit of conventional wisdom; after the calamity that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers, which was far less enmeshed in the global financial system than A.I.G., who would dare allow the world's biggest insurer to fail? Who would want to take that risk? But that doesn't mean we should feel resigned about what is happening at A.I.G. In fact, we should be furious. More than even Citi or Merrill, A.I.G. is ground zero for the practices that led the financial system to ruin.

"They were the worst of them all," said Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a derivatives expert. Mr. Vickrey of Gradient Analytics said, "It was extreme hubris, fueled by greed." Other firms used many of the same shady techniques as A.I.G., but none did them on such a broad scale and with such utter recklessness. And yet -- and this is the part that should make your blood boil -- the company is being kept alive precisely because it behaved so badly.

Really, read all of Nocera's column today. It's breathtaking, literally, to contemplate how these criminals are holding us all hostage -- and how our government let them get away with it during the fat years. I can't imagine what kind of reckoning needs to take place to settle accounts with these people in finance and in government who have done this. But it will come.

And yet, there's a story about AIG that won't make the newspapers, and really, it's about more than AIG...

Thomas Gibbon, a white guy, gets hired to teach in an all-black inner-city high school, and learns a lot. Excerpt:

The school system in this city is a big fat lie. The stats are juked every year to show some tiny bump in reading scores when everyone knows the ugly truth - a few "good schools," predominantly white schools, are factored into the overall city school average, thus bumping up the scores on whole. The school I teach in and this system as a whole is a mockery that doesn't get mocked enough by the press, politicians or academics. Perhaps they are afraid of being called racist.

When you teach 100 kids in a day and only one of them is white, it's hard to not believe this is a black/white thing. When you get reading tests back from these same 18 year-old seniors telling you they read at grammar school levels, it's hard to not believe it's a black/white thing.

I've had to accept my many shortcomings here and have come to grips with the fact that race is an issue that can't be ignored. I am "culturally sensitive" to the troubles and travails of my students, but we have an understanding now that I expect the best from them whether its behavior or academics. These are basics that go beyond racial debates. Schools must be a place where American citizens are developed into productive and respectful members of society.

Race affects how we're asked to teach students and what we are supposed to teach them, but it shouldn't ever affect what we expect of them. We must expect greatness because this is the burden we've put on ourselves in this country in our determination to educate every child, rich or poor, black or white. With this expectation comes the responsibility of taking on the burdens of the poor, which often have much more to do with basic necessity than of higher learning. So we can argue for vouchers and charter schools, but at the end of the day, the poor will be with us and we just can't forget about them.

We need to call the achievement gap what it really is. White kids are succeeding at a much higher rate than minorities in this country. Minority areas are the ones suffering the greatest when it comes to unemployment and dependency on government assistance. The correlation between the failed systems is so apparent, yet we continue to talk around the real issue - race and expectations of all students. Teacher education programs are geared towards teaching methods for "diverse learners." I argue all the time in my program that we need to worry more about teaching kids, period. If we're always worrying about what method it takes to teach diverse learners, we'll never teach anything.

Fair enough, as far as that goes. But what is the local school board, or anybody else not the mother or father of these low-achieving students, supposed to do about it? I don't ask rhetorically; I really want to know. In my day job on the editorial board, we are always talking about this or that policy fix to help bring up the dismal minority test scores in the local public schools. I don't have any confidence that anything other than a cultural change -- specifically in the culture of the families of those kids -- will make anything more than a marginal difference in their educational achievement. But that's nothing the government can force, right?

Slate poses the question, in light of changing social mores. Excerpt:

In October 2007, Howard K. Stern, co-star of The Anna Nicole Show, filed a lawsuit claiming that he was defamed when the author of a tell-all book said he was gay. A Manhattan judge will soon decide if the suit should go to trial. Stern (not the host of the Howard Stern Show) has asked for $60 million in damages.

This may seem like a throwback, but gay libel suits abound. In December, Joseph Farah, founder of the conservative news site WorldNetDaily, threatened a libel suit against Wikipedia, which had listed him as "an Evangelical Christian American journalist and noted homosexual." And in 2003, a Los Angeles judge awarded Tom Cruise $10 million in a gay libel suit against a porn star who claimed he and Cruise had been lovers.

When he sued, Tom Cruise said that he had nothing against gay people. But these cases inevitably send the message that it's shameful to be gay. Increasingly, that's an anachronism: Millions of Americans lead openly gay lives and hardly think being gay is a stain on their reputations. Why should courts rule otherwise? And shouldn't gay rights groups, which have largely ignored these lawsuits, instead put pressure on plaintiffs like Cruise, Farah, and Stern to drop them?