slow blogging

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I’ve been reading about slow blogging, which Laura McKenna calls an oxymoron. Some time back I discovered Michael Pollan and slow food. Here’s what Sharon Otterman says about it in The New York Times.

The practice is inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits. Slow food advocates, like the chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., believe that food should be local, organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul.

But I’m just slow.

And I’m not sure I’m ready to make any grandiose claims for my writing and thinking, though I suppose it takes some hubris to keep posting, mostly for myself — though I protest I do have some readers.

I’m aware of being old-fashioned and uncool. For some time I’ve written mostly about politics as the presidential election has caught my attention. But I like to write about other things, too; and I’m not above an occasional piece of fluff. Mostly, I think I search for common sense.

[November, 28: I’ve removed part of the previous paragraph because after five days I didn’t like it.]

So, slow blogging — it’s OK.

pianos from heaven

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It’s not every day something falls out of the sky, least of all a piano. We’re just on the edge of the season to be jolly, fa la la; but this is almost as good as if Albert the Alligator had risen from the dead to give us one more round of Boston Charlie.

There it sits in the middle of the woods, a light wintry dusting on the ground around it and a keystone cop struggling to make sense of it — human interest 2008. I don’t see any sequins on the policeman’s uniform, but we’re told the Harwich gendarmerie have entitled this photo, “Liberace.” Ah, creativity. . . . it droppeth as the gentle snow.

Indeed, it’s almost as though, in this season of dearth and stringency, some god with a sense of humor had decided to favor the folks in Harwich, MA, with a pick-me-up, though I suspect human agency — perhaps some high-school students with no more serious trouble to get into than attempting harmlessly to cheer up their fellow citizens. Here’s a bit of what the very clever folks at CNN have to say about the whole thing.

Discovered by a woman who was walking a trail, the Baldwin Acrosonic piano, model number 987, is intact — and, apparently, in tune.

Sgt. Adam Hutton of the Harwich Police Department said information has been broadcast to all the other police departments in the Cape Cod area in hopes of drumming up a clue, however minor it may be.

But so far, the investigation is flat.

Also of note: Near the mystery piano — serial number 733746 — was a bench, positioned as though someone was about to play.

The ever vigilant Harwich police, who note that they will not be “holding a holiday party in the storage bay” to which they have banished the offending instrument — no self respecting piano should presume to show itself in the woods around Cape Cod after all — have observed with great solemnity that “it took a handful of police to move the piano into a vehicle to transport it to storage, so it would appear that putting it into the woods took more than one person.”

O tempora o mores!

22 November

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I had almost forgotten what day it is. I was on the way to a class on 22 November 1963, and I learned of the President’s death from a colleague, Elizabeth Lomax, a close relative of the famous Alan, God rest her soul.

22 November was a Friday. I was teaching an extension course at old Crozier Technical High School in downtown Dallas the following Monday evening. As we were getting ready to begin the lesson, an impassioned voice came over the loudspeaker asking us all to join in prayer. I don’t remember the prayer, only its agonized conclusion: “Why, Lord, why did it have to happen, and why did it have to happen here?!”

In the time intervening we had witnessed, via the relatively new medium of television, report of the the death of Officer J. D. Tippett, a good deal of bluster from Dallas District Attorney, Henry Wade, and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. We had also witnessed the President’s funeral, with the Kennedy family walking behind the horse-drawn caisson that bore the President’s coffin through the streets of Washington from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

It was a time like no other–until I walked into my office building at North Texas years later and saw on television the death of the World Trade Center.

Thanks to Susan Russell for these images.

the dead hand

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We’re in a strange historical trough at the moment, as the economy gets worse and worse. Laura McKenna, at 11D, fears the CitiGroup crisis is worse than reports have told us, and says “Rumor has it that Citibank is going to go bankrupt.” So as public affairs exhibit all the signs of panic on the one hand, Paul Krugman describes “the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis” on the other, a vacuum reminiscent of the interregnum between 1932 and 1933 when “the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action.”

But the present crisis of leadership seems more than an accident of history. While the new administration struggles to be born, the old seems determined to perpetuate itself and do, from my perspective, as much damage as it possibly can while it still holds the reins of power. The Bush team’s promulgation of “midnight regulations” and its shifting of large numbers of its political appointees into high-level civil service positions, a strategy called burrowing in, in order to protect them from being fired and thereby perpetuate their influence, have been the most reported of the outgoing administration’s efforts to thwart the public will–together with speculation that Bush may issue blanket pardons to many of his most vulnerable appointees who have committed crimes during his lawless administration for which somebody might decide to prosecute them. Add to these disturbing developments the present congressional stalemate over aid to the auto industry and Henry Paulson’s foot-dragging over the next stage of the $700b rescue plan, and the trough becomes a slough.

Indeed, across the spectrum of the conservative movement, so-called, there seems to be a determination to continue to defend and perpetuate bankrupt ideology that has been falsified by events and by and large repudiated by the public. Mike Huckabee has a new book entitled Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America and is on a tour promoting it, looking every inch like a presidential candidate again. Sarah Palin has been on a victory tour, finding new venues for cognitive dissonance, and wherever she goes she speaks for the old time religion. David Brooks predicts this week that control of the Republican Party will remain with “Traditionalists,” because “Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists,” and “Traditionalists have the institutions.”

Brooks goes on to argue that conservatism has rigidified into Traditionalist ownership of conservative mythology. Here are a couple of of observations that I think are insightful in that regard.

Members of the conservative Old Guard see themselves as members of a small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite. In this narrative, anybody who deviates toward the center, who departs from established doctrine, is a coward, and a sellout.

This narrative happens to be mostly bogus at this point. Most professional conservatives are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists. Their supposed heroism consists of living inside the large conservative cocoon and telling each other things they already agree with. But this embattled-movement mythology provides a rationale for crushing dissent, purging deviationists and enforcing doctrinal purity.

And bogus or not, this mythology gives its adherents who still hold power in Washington a license to attempt to shape the future in its image even in the face of resounding defeat at the polls.

All the signs seem to point to a pragmatic Obama administration rather than an ideological one. I find this very hopeful. David Sanger predicts that Obama will govern from the center right of his own party, and that is hopeful too. Both Brooks and Sanger are predicting an Obama administration characterized by thoughtfulness and creativity rather than ideology as they survey the choices Obama is advertised to be making for his cabinet and White House staff. As Sanger puts it:

The choices are as revealing of the new president as they are of his appointees — and suggest that, from its first days, an Obama White House will brim with big personalities and far more spirited debate than occurred among the largely like-minded advisers who populated President Bush’s first term.

President Obama will need broad and diverse support if he is to govern effectively. His first moves seem calculated to garner such support and to maintain it in the future; though during its early days in office the new administration will need to do a good deal of house cleaning to disencumber itself from the Bush administration’s last ditch efforts to bind that future.