Talk Thursday: I Remember When ...

Now there's a topic to make you feel old. Fortunately I was feeling old already as I was contemplating my birthday, which I always start doing when Joan starts contemplating her birthday. We're a month and a day and ten years apart, she and I, and she's due. Due for what? Well, no major medical procedures, let's hope. But definitely due for a birthday dinner at Red Hot & Blue, the local barbecue pit, which I love because it has food other than barbecue. Yes, I'm the only Texan who doesn't like barbecue. So sue me.

Anyway, I remember a scad of things that people born after, say, 1980 don't remember. This is kind of fun sometimes, because to all intents and purposes I grew up in a different world than they did. For example, I remember when the Russians were the bad guys. I posed this to a 19-year-old co-worker, and she said, "The Russians were the bad guys? Are you kidding me? They're pathetic! They sink their own submarines!" And so I tried to explain about the domino theory and Korea and Vietnam and the Berlin Wall, and detente and glasnost and why Nixon went to China. And she blinked at me, this winsome creature so young and full of life, and said, sympathetically, "I'll bet you thought Cate Blanchett was really scary in Indiana Jones 4, too, huh?"

Like I said, different world. I remember when we sang "Up, Awake! Ye Defenders of Zion" right after the "Star-Spangled Banner" before starting the school day. (I went to school in Utah, in the early 1970s, and apparently several Supreme Court decisions before Madalyn Murray O'Hair--or at least before word of her hit the local school board.) I remember when gas was 78 cents a gallon during the Iran oil embargo, but it didn't matter because you couldn't find a gas station that had any. Not that I expected to live long enough to learn how to drive because the Russians (remember them?) were going to push the button and start the nuclear war that would destroy life on Earth. I remember "On the Beach" and "The Day After" and wondering why anyone would want to survive a nuclear war in the first place. (Yes, I was a fatalistic little kid. It was kind of hard not to be.)

I remember when Jimmy Carter was President and for a few shining years there, everything looked hopeful. We were going to have electric cars and we'd stop relying on oil from the Middle East. We'd all pass the Presidential Physical Fitness Test and devote our lives to community service and everything would be just grand. Then Reagan got elected and AIDS swept the planet (coincidence? Probably) and the Space Shuttle, that great symbol of American know-how, blew up because it got too cold out. And inevitably the jokes started: "What does NASA stand for?" "Need Another Seven Astronauts." Oh yes, the witty repartee never stopped.

On the other hand, I remember when there were no play dates and nobody had ever heard of day care. Kids ran around the neighborhood on bikes after school and hung around in each other's yards, and nobody panicked and called the local police department's gang control unit. I remember when there were no cell phones and no Internet, and you had to ask your parents' permission to use the phone because telephone calls were expensive. If you wanted to know something about something, you had to go look it up at the library because there was no such thing as "googling." I remember when you'd be walking to school, and somebody's mother would be driving by and she'd stop to pick you up and give you a ride the rest of the way, and it never occurred to you for one second that this might be an abduction about to happen. There was no "stranger danger" because there weren't any strangers. Everybody knew everybody, except that sinister old dude who lived across the street, and everybody still knew he was the sinister old dude across the street, so you still knew him even if you didn't know him. And after he died it turned out he was a millionaire several times over who'd left all his money to the library or the hospital or something. People were just weird like that.

I remember when the school day ended at three and the parents came home by five. I remember when we spent weekends at Snowbird because ski lift passes only cost $15 each (scary to think of now, isn't it?) I remember when you could get on an airplane and not only avoid being groped by the TSA (because there was no TSA), but you didn't even have to walk through a metal detector. There was no such thing as "skyjacking", the Twin Towers were still standing and Osama Bin Laden was just another reactionary fighting some pointless war in Afghanistan against the Russians, who used to be the bad guys. Oh, and we were financing him then, too. Your enemy's enemy is your friend.

And on that note, it looks like I've come full circle. So I'll just say this. I remember when I didn't have a blog, and I just blathered this stuff to myself in the shower. Heaven forfend we ever return to those days. Cheers, all.

Bring Out Your Dead!! Bring Out Your Dead!!

Playing in the background: An episode of "Good Eats" on the Food Network
Smelling delicious in the background: Joan's Schadenfreude Pie (recipe)
Meters swum today: 1400

For some reason, my posts about child abuse don't seem to be all that popular. I can't imagine why that is. Since my blog might get axed by The Network if I'm not bringing in the ratings, let's talk about something more palatable to the general public: The Black Death. A couple of days ago, The History Channel ran a fascinating special on the only thing to kill more Europeans than Adolf Hitler. Here's the link. I stayed up way too late watching this thing. It was utterly fascinating and terrifying.

This is an electron-microscope picture of Yersinia pestis, the little bacterium that caused this big near-extinction-level event in the 1340s. If you read your history books, you know that the little bugger hitched a ride on rats by way of fleas, which infected humans by biting them. It causes three diseases, bubonic plague (30-70% mortality rate), pneumonic plague (same disease but you catch it from an infected person instead of from a flea bite; 95% mortality rate) and septicemic plague, the Black Death (100% mortality rate). The septicemic version may be the end stage of the first two, or it may be its own disease. Whatever, it kills you very fast, sometimes within a day. You probably know that half of Europe (and Asia and the Middle East) died of this thing. I knew that, too, but the implications hadn't really dawned on me.

I started thinking about that while I was watching the program. Here in Dallas we have about 1.3 million people, give or take. If even 10% of those folks dropped dead (and this would be within a matter of days, or maybe weeks on the outside), that would be 130,000 people. How in hell do you bury (or cremate or--whatever) 130,000 people? Where do you find enough gravediggers, enough fuel for the funeral pyres? That number was staggering enough, but half of Dallas? Dead within weeks? Good God, that's over half a million humans. That's just about unfathomable.

Let's try something smaller. There are about 50 people working at my law firm. 25 of them would die. Joan works at the big library downtown which has about 400 employees. 200 of them would die. You can fit roughly 3,000 passengers onto the typical cruise ship. 1500 of them would die. My typical OA meeting has around 20 people. 10 of them would die. Start crunching these numbers and you get an idea of how utterly devastating this disease must have been for the people who were alive then. Everybody lost loved ones, friends, children, parents. What's worse, they had no idea what was causing it, and if you didn't get better by yourself, there was nothing anybody could do for you. Weirder still, nobody knows if the disease finally went away because there weren't enough humans left to spread it effectively, or if it just mutated into a less virulent form. Waves of bubonic plague went through Europe roughly once a generation until the 1700s, when rat control and better sanitation put the brakes on transmission. None of them were as deadly as that first wave, and again, nobody knows why.

This got me to thinking about the stock market. (Bear with me, it'll make sense in a minute.) Like pretty much every other person who had any money in a 401k, I've lost roughly a third of its former value. At least on paper. In real life, the stock market always comes back, real property always appreciate in value, and investments always gain over time. The question is, how much time? A year? Twenty? Fifty? If you bought stock in Ford Motor Co. in the 1920s and held onto it since then, you'd be a multigajillionaire today. Unless, of course, Ford Motor Co. tanked in the meantime and its stock became worthless. This can and does happen, which is why those financial gurus are always saying to Diversify Your Investments.

What's interesting about this particular market crash, though, is that everything is losing value. Not just stocks but also commodities (plunging gas prices may be great for consumers, but they suck for petroleum futures investors), bonds and other bland, boring, supposedly-safe investments. Across the board, everybody's losing money. At least on paper. Like Europe during the plague years (aha! There's the connection!) everybody knows somebody who's lost their life savings, their job, their house or all of the above. And just like in the plague years, people are losing faith in their institutions - the banks and financial houses instead of the Church, but it's the same sort of deal. If J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch can't give us good advice during a crisis of this magnitude, then what the hell good are they? Why bother listening to 'em anymore?

Though many priests acted heroically during outbreaks, a fair number also behaved badly, refusing to help the sick or give last rites for fear of catching the disease. Likewise, many financiers are behaving badly now, committing fraud, grabbing bonuses and bailing out with what they can. The end result after the plague years was the Renaissance as people began to think in radical new ways, and, eventually, the Reformation, when the whole Church got upended in the name of different views on divinity. I dunno what the end result will be when the economic plague finally goes underground, but it would be cool if it could be a different kind of Renaissance, based on commodities that actually hold value and not mortgages that never should have been made in the first place.

Horrible as it was for the human race, the survivors of the plague picked up and moved on. In fact, in a lot of ways the plague had a happy ending. With so many folks dead, a lot of land changed hands. In Italy for the first time, there was enough food to go around, and people were able to plant luxury crops like tomatoes and olive trees, leading to what we think of as Italian food. Labor shortages led to the inventions of things like the Gutenberg press. Survivors and their ancestors also had a kind of limited immunity to a number of diseases, such as smallpox and AIDS.

I'fact that last deserves its own paragraph. Even though AIDS scared hell out of everybody in the early 80s, it's really not that easy to catch, at least, if you're of European stock. You can get it, theoretically, by sleeping with an infected person once, but in real life most people catch it through multiple encounters or by injecting it directly into a vein, ie, through a shared needle. Condoms prevent transmission most of the time. (Hysterical pronouncements of God's wrath on the homosexual community aside, as far as I know, no woman has ever given AIDS to another woman. Every lesbian who has it got it from a man, or from blood. Does this mean lesbians are God's chosen people? Hmm.) However, if you live in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India, none of the above is true. AIDS has burned through communities like a bush fire and the death rate is ridiculous. It's highly communicable and some scientists even theorize it's gone airborne. Why? No one knows, but one theory is that sub-Saharan Africans never got the plague. That Sahara Desert being in the way thing. They didn't get the immunity that us northern European plague survivors have.

So, financially speaking, what does this mean? Well, I'm hoping it means we'll be a little more immune to bullshit financing schemes. That we'll ask a lot more questions about the regulation of the banking industry. That we'll invest in sustainable crops, energy that doesn't kill us, hybrid cars (or better yet, mass transit) and other things that people need to live decent lives. That instead of kneeling and praying when the flagellants come through town, flogging themselves into hysterics, we'll actually stop them and say, "Guys, you're making yourselves weaker and you're going to be easy prey for an infection. Cut it out, now." Or, more directly, "Guys, don't bail out of your 401k. You won't do any better on your own and ten years from now you'll feel like an idiot."

Beats hell out of burying 600,000 bodies, or, harder still, figuring out how to take care of millions of adults living to the age of 106 with no income and no Social Security.

Dear President-To-Be Obama:

Playing in the background: Jean-Michel Jarre, one of the Chronologies from "Hong Kong"
Meters swum today: 1700

Not that you ever listen to me, guy, but I gotta chime in on this "who should be my vice-president" thing. I mean, I'm sure you've thought about it, but now that only about five people hiding under a rock near Odessa still think Hillary Clinton could be the nominee, the whole choice thing is gonna be the next fierce debate. And I'm sure everybody, from your wife, your close friends and shrewd political advisers to ill-intentioned saboteurs from the national media and anonymous Buddhist bloggers in Dallas, has an opinion. All the same, here are my thoughts:

Not Hillary.

Don't get me wrong. I like the woman. I think she'd do a good job. I voted for her in the primary, even (sorry about that). But after the last few months, I'm positive she's the wrong choice. Why? Well, like I said in the several emails I sent to both of you roughly a year ago (do you ever read your email? You need a Blackberry, dude) voters don't take you seriously if you spend months slamming each other only to suddenly unite in a "dream ticket" as soon as one of you gets booted from serious contention. And yes, you were more of a gentleman about it than she was, but with all that fur flying through the air, none of us think you're capable of suddenly settling down on the couch and sleeping with your heads on each other's backs. (Pardon the cat metaphor.) Either we need to assume you were both lying all this time, or we need to assume that you're lying from this point forward. Gotta be honest with you, neither assumption is an attractive thing in a soon-to-be-saddled-with-every-problem-known-to-humankind world leader no matter who his sidekick turns out to be.

So having said that, here's my suggestion: Janet Napolitano. Yeah, I know she's a Republican and the governor of Arizona. She'd still be fabulous at it. She's tough, smart, a savvy politician and good at what she does. She's also totally cool. I used to know her when. And she's a lot better lookin' than John Edwards. And ol' Outgoing George didn't listen to me when I told him he should put her on the Supreme Court, so she's even available. Kind of.

Thems are my thoughts. Go forth and campaign. Oh, and incidentally, if you do end up picking Hillary, put her in charge of the national health plan. What? She's already done that? Great. She has experience.

Hey, if you want to know how oil from the Saudi wells (and other places) becomes gasoline that powers your car, you really need to go here and read this (thanks, David!) Once you get a look at how frick'n complex it is, you might have a little bit more insight into why gas prices are so high. There's gotta be thousands of people involved with the production of that stuff in your tank. Buy David's book, too, as long as you're there.

Battle of the Eco-Snobs

Playing in the background: The soft gurgle of the kitty fountain
Meters swum yesterday: 1800 (whoo-hoo!)

They're at it again. As gas prices continue to creep upward, my North Texas denizens are writing letters to the paper, slamming each other for various driving habits. While I think it's true that the one sure way to bring gas prices down is to frick'n use less of the stuff, people seem to have endless ideas about the best way to do that and they all think they're right. Which means everybody else is wrong. Which means they're behaving just like church people, which, seeing as it's Sunday, is totally appropriate.

Quick disclaimer: I do drive to work, by myself, most days. Roughly two days a week, Joan and I drive together, which saves us about 32 miles, or maybe a gallon and a half vs. driving alone. I live about eight miles from my office. There is public transit and I do use it sometimes, but it's not terribly convenient from here and takes twice as long. Throw in going to the pool and I'm more or less forced to drive by myself. Joan is not terribly keen on getting up at 5 am and hanging out at a Starbucks for two hours, waiting for me to drive her the rest of the way to work.

We have a Saturn Vue, which gets like 20 mpg, and a Toyota Corolla, which gets 28. Most weeks we're going through about half a tank in the Vue and maybe a quarter tank in the Corolla, the "other car." Which doesn't seem like much. I'm always after new and exciting ways to use less, though. If not for two really nasty hills I could ride my bike to the pool, and Joan could pick me (and the bike) up in the Vue afterward. So yesterday I browsed around on the Internet for an electric bike, which has a small motor that can push you up hills. I found a couple of options, but they all cost around $1000. So much for that idea. It might be an option in the future, though.

Back to the paper. Some guy writes in about how gas-guzzling SUVs are feeding the terrorists. Then some lady writes in saying, "Hey, I have an SUV because I car pool all the kids in my neighborhood, and you're driving your Mini-Cooper 45 miles to work one way, and how is that saving any gas, you moron?" Then some other guy writes in and says that they're both idiots and the best way to save gas is to live downtown in a walk-up. Meanwhile, my cousin Kyle, who works for BP and should therefore be the Deciding Word, sends around an email saying by far the biggest problem we've got energy-wise is how we've built all these cities sprawled out for miles and miles, and that's not going to be fixed any time soon. He advocates all of the above; moving closer to work, driving a fuel-efficient car, ride sharing and so on.

I think Kyle has the right idea. I think everyone else, including me, is missing the basic point. One could argue the whole history of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern oil resources and the geopolitics of global warming, business interests, declining production and investment capital for several years, but let's just consider this for a second; we got into this mess by not thinking. Not thinking about the environment when we built the cities. Not thinking about the length of the commute to work when we bought a house. Not thinking about the budgetary consequences, or the effect on the ozone layer, of buying a Hummer. Not thinking about how our actions, both individual and as a society, effect other people, other countries, other climates and other beings. Maybe the guy with the mini-Cooper is smarter than the lady with the Hummer, but at least they're both thinking.

So there's the task, the mission for the millenium. THINK. Be mindful of how you affect other people and things. Be aware that your purchasing decisions do have consequences. Consider that you might not have all the answers and it wouldn't kill you to listen to other people every now and again. Do what you can to save gas, but don't beat up on other people just because they save gas in different ways. If you're not driving your Hummer 45 miles one way to work by yourself, you're doing something right. And if you are--well, why are you? Think about that. In any case, quit writing letters to the paper bashing other people for their choices. All that ink and paper being used up to make somebody else feel bad. Honestly. Cut it out.

So when are they gonna put me in charge?