Category Archives: Current Affairs

What the hell is going on in Washington? (Other than a gang of thugs breaking into Arnold Kling's house.) It's hard to know, exactly. Dig into the primary sources and you find congressional testimonies near impenetrable.

There's a phrase for this, actually: oracular obscurity. Permit literary critic Harold Bloom to describe:

"Oracular obscurity combines the spoken traditions of Homer and Shakespeare with the writing style of postwar French pomposité grandiloquente and just a dash of Latin American magic realism to produce an entirely new phenomenon that has reinvented congressional testimony as a literary genre."

Hat tip to Alan Greenspan for inspiring this phrase.

Part me gets emotional and serious around events like a historic presidential inauguration. But I also find it all totally hilarious. The media coverage surrounding the event was ridiculously American in the best possible way. Here are some quotes and nuggets from the brave men and women on the journalistic front lines:

• "At the end of the day, I think a lot of people here, as excited as they were to see him inaugurated and take the oath of office, were so cold that they just wanted the inaugural address to end." – Jeremy Schaap, ESPN's coverage. (He went on to say there were "millions" of people in the mall.)
• On MSNBC, weatherman Al Roker implied that Chris Matthews sensed the infamous thrill up his leg because the new president looks good without his shirt on.
• On TV One panelist Al Sharpton lost significant street cred, in the moments before the ceremony, in mistaking Aretha Franklin for Barack Obama's mother-in-law.
• Tomorrow's inauguration special on Oprah features the dynamite trio of Forest Whitaker, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Jon Bon Jovi. They complement each other so well!
• Rick Warren's bizarre tonal emphasis on the names of Obama's children. Here's an excerpted clip of his pronunciation. It's like he was referring to some exotic Mexican spice. By the way I thought Warren sucked. As one commenter put it, we were all waiting for Warren to pull out a loaf of bread and feed the spectators.
• Ross Douthat has the best serious brief analysis of Obama's inaugural address.

And then of course there was the laugh-out-loud screw-up of the oath. Dhalia Litwhick has the transcription:

The oath is supposed to go as follows:

I (name) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Most presidents traditionally add the words So help me God at the end, as did Obama.

Here's how it went down today:

ROBERTS: (working without a text, and also without an overcoat): Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator?

OBAMA: I am.

ROBERTS: I Barack Hussein Obama …

OBAMA: (interrupting) I Barack …

ROBERTS: Do solemnly swear …

OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear …

ROBERTS: That I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully…

OBAMA: That I will execute … (pauses, smiles, waits for Roberts to put "faithfully" in correct spot)

ROBERTS: … The off … faithfully the pres … the office of president of the United States…

OBAMA: The office of president of the United States, faithfully … (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em)

ROBERTS: And will to the best of my ability …

OBAMA: And will to [the] best of my ability …

ROBERTS: Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

OBAMA: Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

ROBERTS: So help you God?

OBAMA: So help me God.

ROBERTS: Congratulations, Mr. President.

"I believe the difference between the literature of California's past and the literature to come will be the difference of expectation. There are children growing up in California today who take it as a given that the 101 North, the 405 South, and the 10 East are unavailable after two in the afternoon."

– Richard Rodriguez's essay "Disappointment"

Joel Kotkin's cover story titled Sundown for California in The American magazine says: "The Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity."

He marshals depressing data on slowing job growth (CA has third highest unemployment rate in the country), the collapse of the housing market (taken a drive around suburban Sacramento or Riverside recently?), and poverty rates in high-end cities like San Francisco which now lack a real middle-class. Out-migration statistics show residents are very aware of these problems: they're leaving. Read the whole thing.

Why is this decline "largely unnecessary"? In part because of years of breathtaking incompetency of State legislators in Sacramento especially on financial matters. Just in the last few days we've seen them argue over how to close this year's $11.2 billion deficit. This time the shitshow features a weak Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting Democrats so handcuffed by unions that they cannot accept rational modifications to the payroll system. As the Sacramento Bee editorialized, "California has seen epic failures of leadership before, but never over such an extended period and at such a perilous time."

This morning tech exec Jeff Nolan called for "massive civil disobedience" from Californians:

[T]he state is now saying that they will be paying their bills with IOUs come February. Taxpayers of this state should respond in kind with a massive civil disobedience campaign, let’s pay our taxes with IOUs to express our displeasure with the political leadership in Sacramento.

My question: Why aren't more Californians talking about the dire straits of our state? Why don't more citizens focus on local government?

Day-to-day, local politics and policies affect Americans as much as federal ones. Potholes, parks, schools: these are the issues of your city, county, and state government. Yet, most people follow politics only at the national level. This past election, lots of Californians flooded battleground states for Obama while ignoring pivotal issues closer to home. I know more than a few Obama volunteers who, stunned to return home to find gays stripped of rights, are wondering whether their efforts at progressive change should have been focused on their own community.

Obama and Washington D.C. will dominate the headlines the next few months. Let's not forget about working for change at the local level, especially in California. California needn't devolve into mediocrity. We still attract the best and brightest from all over the world, Silicon Valley and Hollywood are still engines of creativity, the weather still rocks, the culture / lifestyle still attracts misfits and rebels and people looking to find themselves. In other words, the ingredients that have made California the "Coast of Dreams" are still there. It's up to Californians themselves to tune in to local issues and fight to make sure this unique slice of paradise survives the next generation.

For those of you who enjoyed Michael Lewis’s piece on “job vs. calling,” and my follow up post Why So Many Struggle to Find a Job or Calling, I must alert you to another recent Lewis piece, this time on the Wall Street melt down.

It’s titled The End of Wall Street’s Boom in Portfolio magazine and it’s absolutely essential reading for understanding the financial crisis. There’s so much to read about on this topic — one must be picky. I recommend reading Lewis’s long, helpful chronicle of how we got here and why.

Interestingly, he opens by wondering why Wall Street entrusts 24 year-olds with no experience to dispense investment advice to grown-ups. Though he doesn’t explore this particular angle too deeply, it is worth wondering how much responsibility a young, money-hungry, recent college grad should assume for understanding the work he is doing and how it fits in the total picture. Certainly, the willingness of young bankers to re-package and sell essentially fraudulent mortgage-based financial products up the food chain contributed to the overall systematic breakdown.

The other great piece of journalistic reporting on the financial crisis happened on This American Life radio program. Turn up the volume, kick back on a couch, and listen. Prepare to be deeply disturbed and dismayed, but also grateful for at least a few people’s ability to explain what is going on in plain English.

It’s from Will Wilkinson, who read the New Yorker profile of Naomi Klein and says this:

Ouch! Loyal readers know I’m no fan of Klein, either.

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Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Tyler Cowen has a fascinating post speculating on why women study abroad more than men 2:1. The “expert” reasons are varying risk tolerances, gender ratios in fields more inclined to send students abroad, and females’ concern about safety inducing them to particpiate in formal study abroad programs over independent travel. Then there’s the more interesting explanation:

The biological clock strikes again.