I'm Still Here

Good times and bum times, I've seen them all, and my dear, I'm still here....
Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer....and I'm here....

I started this blog last July with all good intentions of at least weekly postings. I've been so busy over the past few months doing work-related stuff on the weekends, and also being seriously lazy, playing Microsoft's Spider Solitaire while listening to Bright Eyes or, more recently, Martha Wainright (Wainwright?), that I haven't stuck to the original plan.

And I'm not promising that I necessarily will, but in a week or ten days I'll have my new laptop (which won't have anything natively Microsoft on it, except for Office for Mac), and can blog from any old coffee place with Wi-Fi if I want to. Or I can sit up in bed and write. And I can get back to creative writing (yes, that old promise to myself and others that I'll do something with my creative abilities besides writing dry demographic studies for certain not-to-be named here natural foods grocery chains whose names begin with "W."

I've been thinking about a blog posting that would be an alternative history of the last 25 years--a "what if" scenario that would show the difference between Jimmy Carter winning the 1980 election and Ronald Reagan winning it. I do think the world would be a much better place than it is now had Jimmy won, but it was not in the cards for him to win (partly his own fault, but he deserves a lot less blame for losing than he's traditionally been forced to accept). But I have to do more thinking on the subject, so I'm not going to write that just yet (if you want to get an inkling of what I'm thinking, pick up his new book, Our Endangered Values, in which he, a man of strong Christian faith, castigates those in power today, and shows them for the hypocrites they are, among other things).

Jimmy Carter's book has me thinking a lot about what I believe. For most of my life--since I started trying to think for myself, about 30 or so years ago--I've been a very fuzzy thinker. I parroted my mother's value systems, although without, after age 17 or so, a belief in the Judeo-Christian god. In her world, traditional Democrat values were good, and Republican values were bad. I see now that such a black & white way of thinking is no better than the way fundamentalist Christians see things the same way (except they see things in exactly the opposite way). And to be fair to my mother, she wasn't as black and white about things as I was.

Now, at 43, I have more clarity and focus than I've ever had in my life. I still see the Republican value system (especially in its most current version) as dreadfully harmful, and as leading to a world we won't recognize if they stay in power for much longer. But I also see that most Democratic politicians are full of hooey, and that most of them aren't much better than most Republicans. I am completely disillusioned about most of them, and pessimistic about Democrats changing for the better any time soon.

It was the stolen election of 2000 that started getting my vision focused and less fuzzy. Then there was September 11th, just 10 months later. Then the two wars, both of which are still ongoing and inconclusive in their results. Then there was the stolen election of 2004 (yes, I believe that Ohio was thrown to George the same way Illinois went to Jack in 1960--through chicanery and outright theft--in 1960 it was the Chicago mob, and in 2004 it was Diebold and the other criminal companies that manufacture electronic voting machines, and who hold all the keys to the software, and who made public promises to deliver Ohio to the Republicans--that's not "conspiracy therory," it's what happened).

The problem with my vision now isn't fuzziness. It's that it's too focused on the potential of bad things happening. I just finished a wonderful little novel, Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre, a Texan. The novel is yet another coming-of-age story in the tradition of Salinger and so many others, although Pierre carries Vernon's coming-of-age to a terrifying denouement on Texas' Death Row--something that few coming of age novels quite do. One of Vernon's problems is that he sees bad things coming, and feels like he can't do anything to stop them. Prior to the start of the novel, his best friend, a Mexican boy named Jesus, had brought a gun to school, killed over a dozen of his classmates, and then killed himself. Vernon is blamed as a co-conspirator, and much of the physical evidence is against him. But what's more against him is the whole paradigm (or powerdime, as he calls it) of society: everyone, including his almond-on-almond deluxe refrigerator-obsessed mother, is walking around with their brains in "park" mode. The media come to town, and take over the justice system.

In a sense, Vernon is a "co-conspirator," because in his bones he knows something is wrong with his friend. But he lacks any mechanism to pinpoint the problem and, more importantly, he lacks any kind of supportive network. He can't go to anyone--not his mother, not his teachers, certainly not the town's "leaders." And so he is blamed when things go wrong--it is the only logical thing that could happen.

It's a very cruel logic that traps Vernon, and what's so creepy about the novel is that it's the same kind of logic that is running things in our real world. When I was younger--really, up to the stolen 2000 election, I used to think that there was a "core" to our society that would always re-establish equilibrium when things got too crazy. This equilibrium took care of Richard Nixon. It ended the Vietnam War. Equilibrium gave us Bill Clinton to counteract 12 years of darkness (I'm not so sure, these days, that eight years of Bill Clinton was necessarily the healthiest thing that could have happened). This "core" wasn't made of any particular individuals--it was the collective energy of all right-thinking people. It wasn't just people who voted for Democrats, either--in the old days there were plenty of decent people who voted for Republicans--as there are now.

My fear now (although I refuse to be ruled by fear) is that the equilibrium is gone. If it were here, more people would be angry.

Where did it go? It may be that it's not gone--I am ever an optimist--it may be that it's in dormancy. But if it's dormant, then I don't know what will wake it up. After all, what happened in December of 2000 didn't. September 11th didn't. Afghanistan didn't. Iraq didn't. The second consecutive presidential election theft didn't. Katrina didn't. The still unfolding Abramoff scandal didn't (and note that the Bush White House has now given the main investigator a new job, hoping to derail the investigation). We have the most power-hungry bunch of people in American history running Washington. Perhaps the Cheney quail hunting incident--as goofy as it appears--will be the tiny hole in the dam that, as small as it is compared to the other issues and scandals, will unleash the flood (but probably not).

The Nation a few weeks ago presented the case for impeachment. Harper's, in its March issue, is doing the same thing. Have any major Democrat politicians called for impeachment? Have they? (remember Ann Richards' wonderful "where was George?" speech at the Democratic convention in 1992?--where are the Democrats?).

But I see a need to go beyond impeachment (why bother? do you really want to see Dick-still-drawing-a-paycheck-from-Halliburton Cheney living in the White House?). What is needed is for Americans to shake off the collective fog they've been living in for the past 25 years. We don't need a revolution--the Constitution is a marvelous document, and our system as it was originally constructed is still the best possible, despite a few details that need fixing--what we need is a civic revival. We need to start talking to one another.

Liberal blah-blah-blah, sure. Reading Utne too long. But in my earlier life, I would have said those things without really understanding why they're important. Now, we'd damn well better start living like we care about our future, and about the next generation (yes, my buying a new manufactured-in-China laptop I really don't need is rather hypocritical, to be sure). We're in danger of killing the American experiment. Re-establishing equilibrium is up to us--it's either that, or we're all Vernon Little, about to be destroyed for no good reason.

Blog Technology....

....is mystifying. For whatever reason, blogger.com put in a giant space on top of my posting from a few minutes ago. Scroll down, please.

Tattered Reasoning, Indeed!

I wrote the following letter to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News today. We'll see if they publish it

Link to original RMN letter to which I responded: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/letters/article/0,2777,DRMN_23966_4437182,00.html

Cynthia Mahon-Southern's reasoning (Letters, Feb. 3) as to why she does not shop at the Tattered Cover deserves a response, because it's the oldest, most persistent myth out there: that bookselling is inherently profitable. The Tattered Cover is a for-profit business with the soul of a non-profit institution. Joyce Meskis has spent 31 years running a bookstore, not making herself wealthy. Her employees (I was one, for more than five years in the 1990s) also sacrifice a great deal financially to work there--they and Joyce do it for the love of books, and the love of putting books together with people.

The economics of running a bookstore, of stocking hundreds of thousands of volumes that may or may not sell (and paying the freight to return them when they don't, and carrying them on their books for the period of time they sit there unsold), and of paying people to do all the work mean that the store can't offer deep discounts the way Amazon, Wal-Mart and Costco do. Also, it's expensive to stock travel guides to Togo, field guides to South American birds, and every last Charles Dickens novel--the profit margin on these tends to be lower than the profit on New York Times bestsellers because they don't tend to get bought every day. Unfortunately, the discounters have taken much of the more profitable business, and left independent bookstores like the Tattered Cover with the less profitable parts. Sure, you can buy anything you want on Amazon, but you can't hold it in your hands first.

To at least offer Denverites a taste of a "better deal," the store has implemented the "TC 25" program, where 25 titles per month are offered at 25% off of the cover price. Some of these are national bestsellers, and others are quirkier titles that you won't find on the front tables at Barnes & Noble or the front webpage at Amazon.

I choose to buy 98% of my books at the Tattered Cover (the other 2% from other indy bookstores when I travel) because I support it as an institution. Ms. Mahon-Southern can make the choice to do the same, or not, just as she is either a member of the Denver Art Museum or not, or gives to Colorado Public Radio, or not. Sure, the Tattered Cover is a business--but it's a lot more than just that, and if Denverites want to keep it as a part of what makes Denver a great place to live, then they should shop their more often.

As for the move: hooray! Joyce is taking a big risk by moving her business, but, civic-minded person that she is, she knows that revitalizing Colfax Avenue requires business owners like herself to make the commitment. Denverites should honor that commitment by buying their books at the Tattered Cover.