Bears of the USA

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Bears are back in New England!

 

 

A bear was sighted in North Kingstown, Rhode Island only a few days ago. And there have been bears sighted on Cape Cod too. (Which is interesting, because they’d either have to clamber over one of the two bridges to the Cape, or ride on top of a vehicle to get there. Or swim. Or ride a floating log across the Cape Cod Canal. Or commandeer someone’s Humvee. Nothing’s impossible.)

 

 

Well, it’s like the Middle Ages around here.  The bear here in Rhode Island knocked over a chicken coop and made off with one of the chickens!

 

 

Our stuffed polar bear, Carbuncle, has his own thoughts on the subject. (Carbuncle, you might recall, won the Financial Times crossword puzzle contest about a year ago. This is a picture of him wandering the neighborhood last winter):

 

 

 

 

First of all: Carbuncle is glad that the bears are back. He’s less lonely now.

 

 

Second: Carbuncle wonders what kind of bears are back. Polar bears? Probably not. Ah well. Less competition for those tasty seals:

 

 

 

 

Also: will this mean less pick-a-nick baskets for Carbuncle to steal from friends and neighbors?

 

 

I direct you to the following cartoon for more information:

 

 

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The Jerry Sandusky trial

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The Jerry Sandusky case has finally gone to trial. The testimony – descriptions of what Sandusky did to those poor kids – has been brutal. The defense, naturally, is trying to depict the victims as a cabal of greedy envious ungrateful liars, but I don’t think they’re having much success.

 

 

I was given pause on Wednesday morning, however, when I happened to overhear the following scrap of narration on “Good Morning America” (I paraphrase): “Present in court were both Jerry Sandusky and Mike McQueary, the two men who – more than anyone else – brought about the downfall of Joe Paterno.”

 

 

No. Sorry. Joe Paterno brought about the downfall of Joe Paterno.

 

 

Joe Paterno covered up a series of vicious violent crimes against children, because of his own vanity, and his overblown regard for his own reputation, and – maybe also a little – because of his (misplaced) loyalty to his friend Jerry Sandusky.

 

 

Paterno also tried (briefly) to portray himself as a victim. Remember those ugly Penn State campus riots protesting his firing? That’s another little nastiness that Joe Paterno brought about, and then did little to stop. I imagine him sitting home snickering about it.

 

 

Sometimes we have to separate people’s accomplishments from their failings. Everyone says Paterno was a great college football coach, and (because I know nothing, or next to nothing, about football) I can accept that. But Gandhi or Saint Francis he was not.

 

 

The more I think about this case, the emptier and more desolate I feel about it. Sandusky actually founded a children’s charity, which proved to be a rich source of little boys for him to prey upon. At least one victim was told that his accusations had to be groundless, since it was well know that “Sandusky had a heart of gold.”

 

 

I know that the trial isn’t over yet, and that I’m prejudging Sandusky.

 

 

Here’s the thing: I don’t think I’m wrong about this.

 

 

Here’s a sad fact about humanity, kids: when you assume the worst about people, you’re not often wrong.

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The cigarette lady

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I was waiting for the University shuttle the other day when a tough-looking broad approached me.  “HEY!” she said, a little too loudly.  “YOU GOTTA CIGARETTE?”  She moved her hand in front of her face in a smokey-smokey gesture.

 

 

“No,” I murmured demurely.

 

 

“I’LL PAY YOU!” she blared.

 

 

I shook my head.

 

 

She shrugged and turned away.  There was a guy parked across the street with his window rolled down; she bulldozered over to him and gave him the same line (I could hear the same dialogue, and his muttered reply).  She tilted back her head and bellowed: “DOESN’T ANYBODY SMOKE CIGARETTES ANYMORE?”

 

 

She stomped back across the street.  As she reached the sidewalk, I saw her look down.  She paused, and reached down into the gutter –

 

 

Please, god, I prayed to whatever god I pray to.  Let her be picking up a quarter.

 

 

Nope.  It was a cigarette butt.  She held it up and triumphantly displayed it to someone back inside the building she’d come from.  Hobo’s delight!

 

 

Hey, listen.  I used to smoke.  I remember waking up and realizing that I’d forgotten to buy cigarettes, and gone through the ashtrays to find some nice juicy butts.  Late nights, no cigarettes, same thing. 

 

 

Addiction is a terrible thing, kids.  It makes us do grimy horrible things.

 

 

I’m not hooked on cigarettes anymore.

 

 

I am probably blind to my real addictions.

 

 

I wonder what my real addictions are?

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Happy families and unhappy families

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Tolstoy wrote, famously, that all happy families are alike, and that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

 

 

I have two comments on this:

 

 

a)     I think we say “dysfunctional” nowadays, though I’d hate to read a translation of “Anna Karenina” with the word “dysfunctional” in it;

b)     I do not believe there is any such thing as a happy family.

 

 

I know I sound terribly cynical, but hear me out.

 

 

First of all: yes, I know, mass-murder families, sex-crime families.  Yes, those are really awful, and “dysfunctional” is not a strong enough word to describe them.  But here I have to invoke Woody Allen’s Law, also known as the Horrible/Miserable Divide.  In Woody’s own words, in “Annie Hall”: “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”

 

 

Yes, indeed, we are all lucky to be miserable.

 

 

My family was – what can I tell you? – normal.  We fought.  We did not necessarily like each other very much.  There was strife, and sometimes bad feeling that went on for years.  To use one example, my older sister Darlene and I had no real love for each other after about 1970.  We argued, fought, were terribly snide to one another.  My mother was very close to both of us, and used the traditional method of dealing with these situations: when she was with me, she agreed with me, and when she was with Darlene, she agreed with her. 

 

 

And who can blame her?

 

 

I used to think we were a nightmare family.  Now, with the calm (tranquilized?) perspective of late middle age, I look back and compare us to other families of my acquaintance, and realize that we were pretty much normal.

 

 

But here’s the other thing: I have learned to mistrust people who claim that their family life is/was perfectly happy. 

 

 

I learned this primarily through a school friend who insisted that her family was something between a Currier & Ives etching and “Leave It To Beaver.”  Then I met said family.  Father: abusive.  Mother: passive alcoholic.  Brother: growing up to be a mean-minded tyrant like his father. 

 

 

Lovely!

 

 

I was talking about this with a student acquaintance, and she was astonished. Her family, she said, was very close.  They actually like each other.

 

 

Well, I suppose miracles happen.

 

 

But I have my doubts.

 

 

Learn to love the misery, kids.  Remember: you should be thankful that you're miserable.  

 

 

Because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

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Economics: fitting together the pieces

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We got back the other day from a Cape Cod vacation, and I was reading over the last few issues of the Financial Times to make sure I didn’t miss anything important.

 

 

And I had the odd impression that I was actually catching on to something.

 

 

Articles about Yemen, Germany, Bahrein.  An article about the Durban summit on the environment (heard much about that in the American news, kids?).  A commentary by Lawrence Summers.

 

 

It all began to feel like – well, do you remember that scene in “A Beautiful Mind” when the crazy genius mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe in a very tight t-shirt) began to understand how everything fit everything together?

 

 

(Of course, John Nash was insane.)

 

 

But this little epiphany of mine doesn’t feel insane.  This feels like the edge of enlightenment. It feels if, if I only knew a tiny bit more about the world economy, the role of Brazil, the intentions of India and China, I could actually figure out what was going to happen next.

 

 

It was exciting.

 

 

This is probably what economics is all about.  I suspect this is what economists feel like all the time; they seem so dry and bookish, but they’re constantly in a state of orgasmic epiphany.  A few months ago, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was first accused of sexual abuse, the obnoxious Ben Stein did a piece on CBS Sunday Morning defending him (which he basically repeated in print, in the American Spectator), stating (among other things) that such a man wouldn’t do such a thing. 

 

 

The implication was that respected economists don’t do sex.

 

 

I rather suspect that they do.

 

 

Another epiphany!

 

 

So give me the Nobel Prize already. 

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Greg Mortenson

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I have never read any of Greg Mortenson's books. I know his backstory, generally: lay person in Central Asia, gets to know people – and hey! they're normal people, just like you and me! - and he comes home and spreads the word, and magically everyone starts helping everyone else, and now there are schools, and everyone is singing and dancing and drinking Coca-Cola.

 

 

I am generally mistrustful of stories like this. There are really very few selfless people in the world. I learned in the Peace Corps that the business of international aid is just that – a business – and there are surprising numbers of people who are in it for selfish reasons: self-aggrandizement, opportunism, laziness, and even personal gain, if you can believe it. There's also the Great White Savior thing: the American who goes to a foreign country and makes everything better.

 

Now it turns out that Greg Mortenson was maybe too good to be true.

 

All of the facts are not in yet. It does appear beyond question, however, that a large percentage of his foundation's money – money that was ostensibly being raised to build schools in Central Asia – was used for his own travel expenses, and publicity for his own books Investigators have found that some at least of the schools he “built” are not actually schools.

 

Mortenson is holding fast. He is blinkingly cheerful about the whole thing, and is assuring everyone that everything will be fine, and that he will be proven to be a Great Guy.

 

The thing that saddens me, though (even beyond the abuse of trust Mortenson and his foundation demonstrated – using money contributed by schoolchildren to pay his own expenses!), is how people react after they realize they've been taken in.

 

In a recent bulletin from my alma mater Gonzaga, for example, there's a ravingly idolatrous write-up of an appearance that Mortenson made there in March – what a wonderful guy, how charismatic, blah blah blah. With an afterword from Gonzaga's president: “We have seen the allegations made by '60 Minutes' and other sources. We still believe that Mr. Mortenson is an inspirational figure.” Or words to that effect.

 

And Nick Kristof of the New York Times wrote something almost exactly like it. He notes with foolish fondness Mortenson's chronic lateness, his carelessness, but makes it all sound like Mortenson was a big ungainly dog, full of love. And, after all, isn't it worth it if Mortenson did some good? Not all the money was wasted. Some of it was sent to Central Asia. Some schools were built. A few people were inspired.

 

No, my dears, no. He fooled you. This is nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing for the skeptics like me to gloat over. Con men are good at their game. Do you remember, right after 9/11, how every corner store had a FOR THE VICTIMS jar on the counter? People poured money in by the handful. Did you ever wonder what happened to that money? I sometimes wonder how much of it actually made its way to the victims, or to any reputable aid agency.

 

Kids, keep believing in your causes.

 

Just don't send your money by way of Greg Mortenson, or (for that matter) anyone you don't know really well.

 

Okay?

 

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