The Lady or the Tiger

This is a cop-out of sorts.

Simply, after reading the op-ed by Robert Kaplan in the Times today regarding our options in Afganistan and the consequences of the principle choices, I realized that we are faced with a classic dilemma.

The author of the piece states it better than I possibly could.

Go figure.

That Was Fast

Miss me?

I doubt it, since summer tends to be a blur of active malaise (I just made that up).

Seems like only yesterday that I was writing about the comic antics of the Wasilla Family Palin.

In between, the true summer season was compressed into a two-week period of Dog Days that barely grew past puppy status.

Now, it's back to a preternaturally cool gloom more reminiscent of Scotland.

So what has motivated this entry?

Simply that over time, I accumulate various free associations that require noting lest they be forgotten.

Random Note One:

I have been keeping track of the tendency for people to cling to pet words or phrases uttered by small children, which then enter their personal vernacular.

"Garbage" descriptively mis-pronounced "Go-bage".

"PMS" transformed into a state of being: "PM Mess".

Even a simple case of childlike observance of a familiar noxious experience into a lifelong recollection shared by the whole family, as in "I smell a skunk" becoming "I mehwa kuk" as tiny fingers hold a button nose. That's how it's now pronounced by all who know.

Or, a five-year old chronicling the gustatory odyssey that was a vacation in Florida with a single notation pertaining to each experience, "thar was good food". To his day, that is the highest compliment any establishment can garner in our family.

There are more, but you get the idea. We all do it, or at least we should. You might make a "ginormous" contribution to the language.

Random Note Two:

The coming months should be an interesting test of the "learning from history" and "teaching old dogs new tricks" axioms. If in fact we are beginning to emerge from the chthonic depths of the Great Recession it will be interesting to see if anything has really changed. So far, we have demonstrated our ability to forget the unspeakable amounts of money dumped into bank and insurer coffers to stave off their demise. It's a collective behavior not unlike using the equity in one's house as an ATM to finance groceries. We'll see.

Random Note Three:

What's with baseball teams that fall out of the pennant race pulling star players out of the line-up with "season-ending" injuries? Can't the procedure wait for the off-season? I thought that this was entertainment. For those prices, fans want to see their heroes. Hurt is hurt, but husbanding resources is theft of services. If Broadway stars gave way to understudies with similar aplomb, the Great White way would go dark from lack of attendance.

Hopefully, the next post will come sooner.

Life Imitates Politics

So here's how it must have gone down:

Todd, Sarah and the fam were sitting around the breakfast table enjoying their Canada (that foreign country Sarah has visited on policy fact-finding tours) goose egg and wolf bacon omelets when Bristol asked, "Mom, is it true?"

Sarah: "Is what true, of course you realize that true is the new false according to the national media by that I mean lower 48 or is it 47, so don't waste your life just feeding the idea that your baby is loved any less than that."

Bristol: "That Dad's making you quit."

Sarah: "Not tomorrow, if you ask me." 

Bristol: "I am asking you."

Sarah: "Well as Lady MacBeth wrote in her play, 'Shakespeare', 'If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well. It were done quickly.', as in, TODAY!"

Bristol: "But you can't, I mean, how are we ever gonna get to see so many cool places and travel around buying stuff that you and Dad never let us have if you ditch your gig?"

Sarah: "Oh, quite the opposite my dear child, sister, child, niece, child, buddy. I'll be cross-crissing every state, from New York to Saskatchewan, bringing the message of do something not what they want if you are a patriotic and then some. You can come too if Dad says yes."

Todd: "Listen up everybody, we just need a little time off to decide if Alaska is really the state it is, or the independent, gun-loving country it should be."

Bristol: "Dad, that's treason!"

Todd: "No, it's a reason without the 't' to take some time off and let those media wolves starve for your Mom's hot copy."

Bristol: "That reminds me of another thing Mrs. Shakespeare wrote on her blog, 'That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost, Why, then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us Whiles it was ours.' A priest said that so it must be true."

Todd: "Sounds like gibberish, whatsit supposed to mean?"

Bristol: "Simple, Dad, you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone."

Sarah: "Gone, but certainly not forgotten. Is the baby crying?"

Bristol: "Which one?" 

Obligatory Post

I'm sure this happens to many who start a blog.

It begins with a head full of pressing issues that require comment and critique. (Issues in which those close to the blogger are SURELY interested.)

So you write it down.

Then time does what it inevitably does. It passes. Though events occur (nieces graduated high school, attended U.S. Open, sliced finger with bread knife requiring stitches), trips are taken (Paris) and issues continue to press (economy, Iran), the blogging lapses.

I have chosen randomly from this selection of subjects to illustrate this post. It's just eye candy.

There is a notion in the marketing world these days that centers on the idea of "stickiness". It basically refers to the ability of a suggestion, proposition or behavior to gather a committed following. Books have been written about this, laden with the expected "proprietary" acronyms and principles that govern the phenomenon.

So maybe blogging isn't very sticky. (Always.)

Obviously it is for many, but not like the stickiness of avoiding an open flame with your bare hand, (contrary to myth, it's not about "not minding").

Blogging may be, for some, more like buying that new gadget you have been eying for awhile but could not quite justify. Circumstances align one day and you take the leap. You bring it home, play with it for a few days and then...it sits there.

Perhaps the allure lay in proving to yourself that you like the idea of it, could afford it, and you could make it work. But you don't really need it after all. Not to continue living a meaningful life, anyway.

In the case of blogging, I have found that I do like the idea, though it is largely indistinguishable from a web site or wiki. I can afford it, since all you need to spend is time. Plus, I can make it work which for me is another victory that includes screwing in lightbulbs.

The truth is, I don't need it to be more than a scratch pad. It's more like a "note to self" app. I have found that the only time I create a new entry is when I have something to say to myself (my favorite interlocutor). I might as well just create another Word file. Of course, the blogness enters the picture when vanity and narcissism suggest that I tell the few people who are close to me that the blog even exists, or that I have added to it. There is no rhyme, no reason to the posts. The posts just are.

I suppose in my case blogging is not quite sticky, but it does have a certain tackiness to it, like the floor of a movie house after the Saturday matinees.

After all, I did make sure to enter at least one new post in the month of June.

Where the Cul-De-Sac Ends

I remember visiting my paternal grandparent's home in Mahopac, NY as a young child. Though that community has long since joined the ranks of the sprawling suburbs of New York City, at that time it was comparatively rural.

One day, I decided to run away from home. Being five-ish meant I was untroubled by the logistics of the move. Upon reaching the end of the gravel cul-de-sac on which my grandparent's home was located, I stopped. It was not so much that I forgot to bring a train schedule, or had neglected to inform some out-of-town associate that I would be staying awhile, or realized that I had no money (whatever that was.)

For all the bravado that propelled me to strike out on my own, I was stopped in my tracks by the impenetrable, though invisible wall of my comfort zone. The trees on both sides of the wall were green, the sky was blue, but it was different. The birds spoke to me in a less welcoming tone. I could not simply walk into my cousin's garage and settle into his go-kart. I was no longer sure who would answer any door I knocked on. Suddenly, the value of these options and certainties hit home.

Needing to save some semblance of face in my quest for independence I did manage to stay away from the house for an hour or so. Just long enough to get everyone worried, and myself banished to (the warmth, comfort, safety and familiarity of) my room. Such punishment.

Which brings us to the present. The cul-de-sac on which I now live is in a community that until 30 years ago was borderline rural, about on the same latitude as Mahopac, NY. It is of course, paved. On any given day, I can look out the window and see a five-ish boy claiming the hill (really a bump) between our houses for himself and his loyal compatriots. I'm sure that from the summit, he can see forever.

I wonder how long it will take him to work up the nerve to venture to the end of the cul-de-sac. It's still within the borders of the known world. It's where he has personally escorted his older sister, with the help of an available parent and a trusty golden retriever, to the place where the big yellow school bus picks her up. Twice a day, it resembles a town square, with parents, siblings, pets and SUVs gathered to greet the big yellow bus. Only one way to find out what lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules. (Dragons? Spaceships? McDonald's?)

These occasions bring together some very different people, bound by a common purpose. It is the Great Hand-off. Surrounded by the principle architects of their safety and well-being, the children of the cul-de-sac are sent into the "world", where they will be provided brief, pre-digested glimpses of what lies outside their comfort zones before being bundled up for the return to the cocoon. Beyond this shared agenda, the keepers of the comfort zones may be quite at odds. Politics, religion, finances and tastes in films or sports affiliations could each create cracks in the veneer of civility and homogeneity that stretches from one end of the cul-de-sac to the other. But they don't, because the common purpose trumps all that.

In today's New York Times, David Brooks wrote about the Republican party's loss of focus in terms of nation, community, cul-de-sac. He described the need for renewing a sense that his party cares less about pandering to people of wealth and more the realms of health care and public safety. The greatest fear for GOP faithful should not be the emergence of a filibuster-proof Democratic majority, but rather the explosive de-compression caused by a sudden vacuum-lack of inclusive, society-building GOP ideas. No one party should have a monopoly on the population's confidence, that only THEY can ensure that five-ish kids from comfy cul-de-sacs, stickball side streets and high-rise heavens can knock on any door or pet any pet from a perspective of safety, security and community (with a capital UNITY). How else can kids feel strong enough to test the walls of the Zone, to see what lies beyond the Pillars?

That's government. Big enough but small enough. Plain enough yet transparent. Less than all-seeing yet never blind. A balance that is almost impossible to strike, but one worth trying to attain, (parents spend decades doing this). As a nation, I believe we've established a laboratory equipped to discover that blend and recover our balance.

Oh, Average.

Saturday, April 18. The dashboard thermometers on all of those mall-shopping, car-pooling, mulch-fetching vehicles scurrying about the NY metropolitan area dallied with the numerals 8 and 0. Today, April 20, those same digital snippets will be lucky to begin with a 5. The moral of the story is, there is hardly any such thing as an average day.

Tales that begin, "It was an average day in ____, just like any other", are cheating the reader out of the critical texture that makes the tale worth telling.

There is certainly no such thing as an average person.

When parents or teachers describe a child as an "average" student, they're being lazy or hiding something.

And so on.

The law of averages is an expedient. Average anything simply provides a snapshot to those whose inquiry is limited by an absence of time, need or curiosity. No detail. No grain.

Synonyms for average? Normal. Conventional. Typical. Boring.

Average bugs me, if you didn't guess already. (Keep in mind that I am not consulting a dictionary in the writing of this post. I am writing what I think and feel.)

That's why I love the idea of the VIX, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Index. It's a measure of the volatility one can expect in the stock options world.

I don't mean to say that I really understand the underlying math or the machinations of options trading. I just like the idea that the VIX seems to be a more honest means of evaluating what things like April weather in the Northeast hold in store.

Why not an M (for meteorological) VIX on the 6 o'clock weather? Or an EduVIX for measuring student performance? Maybe they're already out there (probably in Las Vegas, the probabilistic center of the universe.)

Our seemingly natural tendency to identify the average in everything is understandable if you subscribe to the notion that people need something they can expect in all aspects of their lives. If it's April 20th in New York, four graders who tend to read at an (x.x) grade level should wear a sweater against the average high temperature of xx degrees.

Slicing it finer, they know when to leave home for their four block walk because it takes an average amount of time to traverse the distance factoring in stoplights, distractions from friends and general dawdling. Putting numbers on such things can get you federal funding for a traffic volume study.

Having determined what the average child prefers to eat, the school lunch will provide a form of that, based on what kids who bring their lunch bring on average, and within constraints set out by oversight authorities that know what the average 10 year-old body needs to function. Hence, the insane popularity of Yellow American and Bologna on White.

Of course, some averages are truly telling. Being able to produce a base hit one out of three times when facing 95 mile per hour pitches will get you into the Baseball Hall of Fame. In that case, average is a real barometer of difficulty. I get that.

I just feel the need to squint when "average" is applied to things that should not so reducible. That makes life smoother, less textured. Like retirement in Florida. Years pass by unnoticed. Fluctuations are flattened. Variations vanish.

I like a visual, emotional, intellectual VIX to keep me in the moment, on my toes. Admittedly, there are times when such a state of affairs makes it difficult to rest easy. But I would rather face up to the real-time roller coaster of real life before I rest in peace.

Why Not China?

As the saying goes, "You can grow up to become anything you want."

OK. Does that not apply to nations? If we were really sincere about spreading the word on opportunity, would that not be the case?

Or does it come with a set of pre-conditions?

IF you do business the way we do it here in the USA, and IF you adhere to the methodologies we employ to select those who govern and IF you learn...English, THEN you can grow up to be anything you want to be.

The current Gee, 20! confab is the latest attempt on the part of the ROW (Rest Of World) to confound that rubric. The Australians stand a good chance of illustrating the point. Take their blended red wines, or rather drink them.

By judiciously combining the best of shiraz, cabernet, zinfandel, merlot, even viognier, in perfect proportion, an appealing experience results. Each component has distinct characteristics that contribute to a pleasing compromise, in the best sense of the word.

And so it can be with geo-political influence. Perhaps the epoch of superpowers is passing in favor of a global community. Or maybe China is the next Tiger Woods of planetary pre-eminence. Again, work harder, study more, harness the statistical advantage of fecundity (as Thomas Friedman quoted in "The World is Flat" in China, if you're one in a million, there are 1,300 people just like you. It's now more like 1,450.)

So maybe the epoch of THIS superpower is passing. So what? Are we insecure about the next Number One abandoning everything we've done? Human nature isn't that bankrupt. The world will take what works and change what doesn't. Of course it won't be smooth, and it won't be pretty. The simple fact that our glorious revolution has still left too many people out is evidence that the sculpture isn't finished. That doesn't mean passing the torch must be accompanied by upheaval, violence, cataclysm or shame.

To be fair, the Chinese culture(s) were flourishing thousands of years before Columbus staked Ferdy & Isa's claim. For a number of reasons, they took a break. (See Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1500-2000.) Or looked elsewhere. They mixed. They matched. They are currently giving a historically flawed, but theoretically viable model a try. They have listened more than they get credit for and have retained more than our comfy zone allows. And they work hard, study hard and are learning to like themselves. So maybe they get a shot.

The one thing we as a nation should try to avoid is an indignant response to China's or anyone else's ascension. That is just not cricket, to use a popular term coined by another former torch-bearer. Chance's are, the good 'ol US of A has a few more 20 win seasons left. We need to win over the current 20 to let that happen.

(Photo by Andrew Testa for the New York Times)