Forecast For Rhetorical Flurries

Kevin Drum offers up a cri de coeur wondering why news stories regarding retail sales figures never factor for the current rate of inflation.

Question: why does this happen so routinely? Wages that are up 3% in a period when inflation is running 4% aren't actually up. Spending that's up 3% in a period when inflation is running 4% isn't actually up. This isn't rocket science. (emphasis removed at this end)

While I thought Kev was asking a question he knew the answer to, Yglesias and commentors take a stab at why and mainly miss the vein, though responder number three comes close.

Long time readers here know why, or at least my answer, that the spiritual foundation of newspapers, the reason they exist as historical agents in the first place, is to preserve the cause of retail, a campaign in the broader war of not delivering bad news at all.

Or here where Bloomberg's writers deliver the death letter as considerately as possible:

U.S. Economy: Home Prices Declined at Faster Pace (Update1)
By Joe Richter and Courtney Schlisserman

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell in October by the most in at least six years, raising the risk that more Americans will walk away from properties that are worth less than they owe.

they are thoughtful enough to explain in the next graf:

Values fell a greater-than-forecast 6.1 percent from October 2006, the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index showed today. The decrease was the biggest since the group started keeping year-over-year records in 2001.

Anyone care to offer the real headline for the story? I'd go with HOME PRICES IN RECORD DROP myself, maybe a bit vivid for a measure which has been made only over six years, but then we are left to wonder which survey would show us how the current result stacks against home sales since, I don't know. . . 1960?

And though this report is from the financial team at Bloomberg, did anyone factor in the inflation rate for that 6.1 percent October figure? I will go out on a limb here and say, nuh-unh.

Season's Bleatings

Happy solstice, everybody.

Been having a hard time mustering the thought energy to post here, my afternoons better spent now with bitters or beer, nappng after a heavy meal, reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, or just trying to get the fingering right for Norwegian Wood. I am spending the holidays in the Borough of Brookyn, a nice enough locale, especially if your idea of the season includes access to nearly unlimited supplies of Italian sweetmeats.

Not much more to report really. Though I can't help but think that our entire news-gathering system, and the process connected to it for the purpose of choosing our elected officials, is not just a vast filter put in place to insure that only the stupid rises to the top. I mean Mitt's dad and MLK?? Anyone with a living memory of George Romney (admittedly a dwindling number of the polis) could only have heard that one and spit the metaphoric coffee across the imaginary breakfast table.

I mean, what the fuck was he thinking?

Thinking though is just SO pre-9/11. Here in the decadent phase of the age of finance capitalism, the operative esthetic appears to be Say Anything. All those markets, those microphones and cameras, demand content and the job of the Campaigner, like the bond trader, is to produce, produce, produce. Trouble comes when normally pure nonsense becomes joined to innate contradiction. That dweeb Romney was doing fine spinning whatever bullshit was necessary about his dumb life and lunatic religion (and here let me say I don't find Mormonism any more or less lunatic than the Big Three), but once he vaulted his Detroit-executive dad into a posthumous parade with Dr. King (and here I will note a readiness among his coreligionists to baptize whole legions of ancestors into a faith they never knew), well, you just have to wonder if the relays have not melted to a fatal degree.

This, and Il Rude's own nonsense/contradiction connection last month, leave the field open for, gasp, old John McCain, the thinking Republican's dingbat, to move to the fore.

Yay.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

My idea of Santa:

Time Was

For an interesting illustration of something or other, compare and contrast Paul Krugman's recent foray into the blog world with that canker Klein's (no link to Time from these precincts, Matey, but this will take you there.)

Goofus uses his blog like a print column, to pass on dicey information, piss on people who might, for his prominence, hold him to a higher standard, and grind an axe while advancing the cause of no one more than Goofus himself.

Gallant uses his blog as a sounding board to further articulate his ideas, note the work of others on topics of mutual interest, provide a venue for a looser writing style than either his (very dense) academic papers, or his short-on-space newspaper column, to maintain an informed general debate with those (both colleagues and candidates) he disagrees with, and to keep in at least slight touch with what other, younger, policy bloggers are working on.

The universe is full of surprises, but I am willing to bet that Gallant has a column in two years, while Goofus just might be working on another book, and spending more time with his family.

Shorter Will Divide: Krugman gets it. And it has been fun watching him get a feel for the possible at his blog. Someone better tell the Obama camp that they can't win this one.

Your Love, Away

Copyright Infringement Theater Special Edition

Olbermann last night:



Noted not so much for what he says, for he is preaching to the choir here, but how he says it. A rhetoric which reaches high, and hits low when needed. The guy can flat-out write.

Click To Pick

I make a point of not offering reviews here, mainly because I don't read many new books, or see that many movies, and mainly think most new music now sucks. But in the spirit of the short, dark days of the ending year, and because artists I do like I tend to like a lot, here are the musicians who made a difference for me in '07.

Though debuting early in '06 (and making a few best-of lists), it took me about a year to stumble on Seattle's Sera Cahoone, and her utterly lovely and spare eponymous CD. Her voice fills up that space between Cat Power and Linda Rondstadt, and the simple alt-country arrangements of her songs carry the record's 36 minutes without a trace of boredom or gimmick. A pleasure every time I play it, and sometimes I play it everyday.

A genuine '07 release is King Wilkie's Low Country Suite. The young King Wilke band began at my alma mater, deep in the central Ohio countryside, and, true to their roots there and in their native Virginia, have for several years been playing blistering, smart and old fashioned live Bluegrass shows, just like Mr. Monroe (from whose horse they took their name) would have demanded - clear, fast, and dressed up sharp.

They are stretching out now, and Low Country Suite is a departure into wider Americana. It feels like it was written on a long distance bus, a nighttime diary of a touring band, filled with longing and visions of wide open spaces. The solo and harmony singing is outstanding, and the guys proved a while ago that they can flat-out play.

Another blast from the past I found this year came from Bruce Langhorne and the three-year-old release of his score for Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand.

A rock and foundation of Bob Dylan's early ensemble records, Langhorne was the house singer/guitar player at Gerde's Folk City, and became an indispensable session man during the whole folk scare. His Hired Hand score is a dreamlike visitation of old string instruments, short (24 minutes) and sweet, Erik Satie meets Doc Watson.

Langhorne's work led me to the oldest record here, Richard and Mimi Farina's Celebrations for a Gray Day. It is astonishing how current this 42-year-old, mainly instrumental recording sounds, devoid of the cant and silly seriousness that dressed up many of its contemporaries. Richard Farina was a writer with a pleasant voice who died in a motorcycle accident shortly after this came out. Mimi was a better guitar player than her older sister, Joan Baez. Richard and Mimi, both so gifted and astonishingly handsome, probably didn't worry too much about creating anything for anyone other than themselves. But it is Langhore's contributions, on the electric guitar especially, that are so forward looking so as to have created, maybe by accident, a timeless document.

The Winner Of Our Discontent

Winter has come in earnest to the great lakes, and its chill warms my heart. Maybe it's from being born in January and spending much more time in childhood in snowsuits churning up fields of white than in bathing togs at the shore. Call me crazy, but there's a beauty and aptness to the snow stuck in the rocking branches outside my window this morn, even knowing that the infamous Chicago wind will be an utter bitch.

I find a concomitant mix of beauty and harshness in our nation's news today, though here the sight lacks utterly any hint of spiritual uplift. While we are used to the dumb press overemphasizing relatively minor developments, they are just as capable of underplaying real big stories, and I think the NIE report released yesterday, and that squalid little man's typically inane reaction to it, is a Real Big Story.

If only Mailer were alive for this one! (And allow me to lapse into a poor imitation of one of his many rhetorical modes) For consider that the deepest apparatus of state secrecy, indeed a constellation of forces designed towards mutual suspicion and conflict (to thereby produce the best possibilities for clarity), have, for utterly opaque reasons, allowed the sudden and unambiguous appearance of a document which thoroughly undermines the aims, indeed the stated historical policy, of an administration which has been in power for seven years!! Indeed an administration that has done the most since Truman's to remodel that bureaucracy of spies so as to form a supporting institution better suited to its dark aims.

I mean. . . Just. Fucking. Wow.

This is the clearest demonstration perhaps the public will ever see of how a state bureaucracy (term here used very broadly) will act in extremis to protect itself from those on whom which it once relied. For consider how the doctoring or suppression of evidence is the usual way this country begins its imperial forays, all players, spooks and generals on board and keen. We will never know the subtle combination of intentions, mixtures of pettiness, concern and disgust, that called forth the NIE report, only assume that a good number of players had to agree in order to advance the ball this way.

My guess is that the Army is now so worn out, and expecting the situation in Iraq to shortly slip further into unambiguous chaos, that any intention of complicating their position there by attacking Iran (the consequences of which they have gamed to a faretheewell), must be stopped cold. I am left wondering if someone at the Pentagon has not already told someone in the administration, to tell the skunks in power, that a direct order to attack Iran will be disobeyed.

A Word Of Thanks

Up until recently I could count on most of the traffic here to be from students in desperate need of help on their Huckleberry Finn reports, and while I can always rely on a good number of such seekers, over the last few months they have been joined and outnumbered by regular readers, and you know who you are, who seem to have bookmarked this page.

Believe me, numbers here are not high, but I am very grateful for those of you who drop by, either from interest or habit, to hear what I have to say. I would much rather address a small group who will consider me quietly and seriously than to a crowd, for whom I'm just one more distraction.

I think one of the overlooked advantages to blogging (that strange, silly word) is how its regular practice can improve the clarity of one's own thinking and writing. As such, it is an essentially selfish act, but one which might help clarify, if only fractionally, the thinking of others.

It should be of no surprise to anyone that many good bloggers have been trained in writing and policy, and trod the worn and dusty paths of conventional media before ending up writing online for free for whoever happens by. If newspapers and magazines are grim exercises in marketed mental decay, of boredom and exhaustion, it is because they have been designed to transmit the strongest sensibilities of the culture, and are supported by a commerce which finds nothing useful in (and is in fact terrified of) daring. Some of us through accident or inclination were tossed out of the insane enterprise, maybe blown free to end up thusly before the whole ride imploded.

I very much subscribe to the ideas Marshall McLuhan put forward in Understanding Media. It is a very strange book, stylistically dense, even silly. But there is daring on every page and its vision (now nearly 50 years old!) is breathtaking. Even when McLuhan is wrong (he thought, for example, that the information TV brought into the home would abolish adolescence) he is right (what TV abolished was adulthood). In coining the phrase Global Village he also warned that, besides the advantage of community, there was a big downside to village life, being the ubiquity there of gossip and superstition. Boy is that hard to argue with now.

He also posited how any medium is essentially an extension of the human nervous system and that a NEW one tends to assume the characteristics of earlier ones (television absorbed aspects of radio, for example) causing stresses which thereby induce the social orders that relied on the older media to implode.

That's pretty hard to argue against now too.

This is all to say that I am pleased to be wrong in some details if I can thereby get a clearer look at the times. Again, it comes down to daring, and the best bloggers do it each time they set out.

Speaking of, I would be remiss not to thank A Big Fat Slob, IOZ, The Field Negro, and the Blue Wren for sending their readers my way. A big fat thanks also to Neddie Jingo, who found merit here and bid others to seek me out. Ned and I just finished up a great year running the Chumps of Choice blog, where we and a band of regulars picked apart a real big, and awfully good, novel by Thomas Pynchon, a pretty daring guy himself. Some of you drifted over from that project as well, and it's nice seeing you here.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

A prophet and a hero.