On Student Evaluations

By the time I started teaching as a full time professor, Duke had a longstanding program of student-based evaluations of teaching. The evaluations were very simple things, consisting of about eight questions for students to answer. Students would rate a professor on a scale of one to five on each of those questions (quality of lectures, level of student participation, how well organized was the class, etc.) and there was ample room for students to write something substantive after each rating.

I liked those evaluations. Students often took the time to answer thoughtfully. Yes, they tended to give high evaluations to those that graded and taught the easiest. But the written parts of the evaluations were helpful. Students had good suggestions. Some also had a good sense of humor. The evaluations were fun to read.

For the first year or two that I was teaching, the university let volunteers from student government look at those evaluations and write a short synopsis of the comments and ratings for each course. Those synopses were compiled in a fat booklet every year or so for all to see. The volunteers, I thought, took their job seriously. They filtered out the crackpot evaluations fairly well and their comments were usually spot on.

Professors hated the booklets. Bad professors were truly savaged in these things. But my feeling was, hey you're lousy at what you're doing. I know you're lousy. The students know you're lousy. You have no personality. You can't teach your way out of a box. Why shouldn't the world know you're a crappy teacher?

The faculty fought to remove student access to the evaluations. They succeeded. Then we got a new provost who was a complete idiot and screwed up just about everything he touched. One of the things he wanted to change was the student evaluation forms. He wanted more quantitative information from them so he changed the form into a 40 line bubble sheet questionnaire. The form consisted of one redundant question after another.

When students received the new form, they spent all their time filling out bubbles. They had a little space at the bottom to write one comment. Most wrote nothing. For one class, I received a "comment" from only one student; it was a sketch of male genitals. The drawing was actually quite accurate. He - I think it was a he from the drawing style - gave me high marks on the bubble sheet. I had no idea what possessed him to draw what he did. At any rate, evaluations were now completely useless to me as an instructor. Instead of worthwhile comments, I had an array of 40 meaningless numbers.

I'll continue this next post.

No We Aren't Europe But We Too Have an Unsustainable Model for Government

I watched the second half of the US-Algerian soccer match in a little French-owned coffee shop near my home in Palo Alto. The place was full on a workday morning, mostly consisting of soccer fans. Not everyone knew the rules of soccer, but they were all interested in the game. One fan brought along an American flag. I'd never seen this kind of attention paid by Americans to soccer before. In 1994, World Cup games were held literally across the street from this coffee shop and hardly anyone cared. I was buying tickets to the games off desperate scalpers for five bucks a pop.

But now, it's different in Palo Alto. The soccer games are even on the public address system in the local Trader Joes. No it isn't like in Europe, but an interest in, if not mania over, the World Cup has taken hold. Then again, this is Palo Alto, liberal as liberal can be. Palo Alto, like most liberal communities in America has a longstanding European envy. Parking lots have more than a smattering of Mercedes, BMWs, Volvos, Audis, and Volkswagens. Palo Altans wanted European-style single payer national health care. They want the cradle to grave government assistance and pensions of Europe. I don't think they'd even mind paying European-size taxes.

The crowd in the coffee shop roared (except for the two people in Algerian soccer shirts) when Landon Donovan scored the winning goal that catapulted the US into the next round of the World Cup. I did too! But Palo Alto is not mainstream America. That's why I live here. I've lived in mainstream America for much of my life. I can't say that I liked it.

I know that on the West Side of Milwaukee, the hood (and it is a hood) of my youth, hardly anyone was watching that soccer game. Baseball? Sure. Basketball? Yeah, that too. Football? Now we're talking. Soccer? ZZZZZZ. The people in my hometown don't look to Europe for much of anything, although most probably still know a few catch phrases in German and Polish, dontcha know. They don't want European cars or shoes. They'd rather not have government assistance or "so-called social security" if they can help it (although they're not stupid; if the government is handing out dollars they'll take their share). They dislike and distrust government and they sure as hell don't want to be paying European-size taxes.

They have no interest in emulating the countries that their grandparents and great grandparents left. Why do you think they came here all those years ago? I do note that Wisconsin does not allow for capital punishment. That appears to be one area where the European model seems to work.

We aren't Europe. Basically, the way it works is that the US spends its taxes on bombs and soldiers. Europe, which looks to the US for military protection, spends its taxes on social welfare.

Oh sure, we spend money on social welfare, too. But almost all of our efforts are half-hearted things except for Medicare. We seem to believe in the "moral hazard" of poverty. We incarcerate people at rates that would make Europe shiver. Social security is nothing anyone could possibly depend on for their old age, although the checks do help more than a bit. Our new national health care program is a half-assed attempt, and is certainly nothing to get excited over.

The not-so-funny thing is that neither the European model - using the government to provide comfort for all - or the American model - using the government to be the sole feared military power in the world - are sustainable. They cost way, way too much money. Our military grows and grows and is currently costing us about a trillion dollars annually. It's essentially tracking the combined cost of Medicare and Social Security. Europe's social welfare model is creaking, causing exploding debt even in the presence of high taxes.

You can look at both the European and American models of government as 60 year experiments that followed WWII. And after 60 years, it's clear that neither model will be with us for very much longer. We'll have to reign in our military spending (and likely our social welfare spending as well) or we'll go bankrupt. Europe will have to reign in their pensions and health care benefits or they too will crash.

The next time I go to my little French coffee shop and see all those Palo Altans watching America in the World Cup, I'll be cheering right along. It will be USA versus Ghana, a country with a newly working democracy and without military might or extensive social welfare. As for my fellow coffee shop clients' European envy, part of me would like to tell them you're envying something that is, just like our way of doing government, crazy and broken. And why do you think the people who own this coffee shop moved from France to Palo Alto anyway? We're better than Europe. Stop the envy thing. We're the best frigging country in the whole damn world.

I could say all those things. But I won't. It's the World Cup, not time to be talking politics. I'm not interested in being a party pooper. Still, I might be thinking these things, now and then during the game, shame on me. Of course all distractions will end every time I hear the magic word, gooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllll!

Literary Fiction Is Dying and For Me That's Probably a Good Thing, Part 2

In my 20s, I stopped writing because I kept feeling the weight of all those greats that I thought I had to at least equal. I'm sure others have felt the same unrealistic burden and not just in literature. For instance, I remember seeing a DVD of Leonard Bernstein conducting West Side Story; he mentioned that no, West Side Story wasn't anything as good as Mozart. There was a certain sourness on his face as he said it and I felt I knew exactly why Bernstein had produced so little original music. The poor guy had Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler as his standards. How was he going to compete against that level of genius?

But something has happened over the last 30 years in both music and literature. The high European tradition is dying. The public cares little about Shakespeare or Beethoven. They care far, far less about contemporary writers or composers. They don't even know they exist.

It's probably been over twenty years since a piece of literary fiction has had significant public impact. The public is watching TV and movies. They are keenly concerned about popular culture. They are playing video games and reading genre fiction. They never read those "great books" in college, if they went to college, and they aren't going to start now. The closest they get to literary fiction or poetry are memoirs, and they seem to only want those that titillate with sordid tales - real or faked - of addiction and family dysfunction. The best of these are well written soap operas.

I have some sympathy for those that lament this change. I'd love to see a public with an ability to look and ponder something, anything, in great detail for more than 30 seconds. For years, I tried to get very bright students to slow down and think deeply about what was in a single equation or sentence; it was, frankly, impossible. The cultural and societal shift toward multi-tasking and the public's aversion to anything that isn't instantly accessible is here to stay.

Plus, the literary world has turned inward. Writing schools have created a culture where writers are less concerned about satisfying the public than they are motivated to impress their fellow students and their teachers. The quality of the writing has turned precious, antiseptic and steeped in political correctness. I can barely read most of it.

Men who write literary fiction have also been - and this is part of the influence of political correctness - defanged. Their narratives avoid sexual conquest and desire altogether (unless they are gay; there seems to be a gay exemption). I went to a reading this year at a bookstore and thought, my god this guy is writing as if he's on Prozac. Maybe he was. The novel was completely absent of testosterone and libido. At the end, a reader stood up and praised the author for writing an "androgynous novel, which is of course, what all good fiction needs to be." Ugh.

A couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker came out with its 20 under 40 issue. I read the New Yorker every week and have done so for 30 years except for a short disastrous stint when Tina Brown was editor. I've been going through the stories in the young fiction issue one by one. There are writers on this list that I do greatly admire. But the New Yorker's taste in fiction isn't my taste. It tends to be twee in style and strictly for liberals.

In their introduction to these anointed 20, the editors of the New Yorker state, "What was notable in all the writing, above and beyond a mastery of language and of storytelling, was a palpable sense of ambition. These writers are not all iconoclasts; some are purposefully working within existing traditions. But they are all aiming for greatness...." I read that passage and and cast a gimlet eye toward the page. Now that is just oongibloosen nonsense. You can't attain greatness in an art form that's on life support.

But the impossibility of greatness is a good thing for me. I think it's why I'm writing again. I no longer feel the burden of all those that came before me. I know I'll never equal Tolstoy. But no one reads him anymore anyway. I'm just writing to tell a good yarn, nothing more, nothing less. I'm writing to create satisfying entertainment for people with attention span somewhat longer than a flea. I want to make people laugh above all.

We'll see if I succeed. I think so. There are still barriers, though. A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a reading at the 92nd Street Y in NYC. I was going to open for a prize winning speaking novelist who, like me, speaks Yiddish. I guess the idea behind the pairing was, here's an old guy, and here's a sort of young guy who both are unlikely writers. I was flattered. But I recoiled. Oh god. Did I really want to fly across the country for 20 minutes of attention before a lot of snobby East Coast people? I said no.

A few years before that, Tom Wolfe wrote a 3000 word diatribe (mostly about me) in an obscure newspaper in response to a review I wrote about his dud of a novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. Part of me was, once again, flattered. I thought only people like Updike and Mailer got that kind of treatment from Wolfe, not small fry like me. But I also thought the guy did write a dud of a novel and I wasn't the only one to give it a bad review (my review, it turned out, was printed in his sister's local newspaper). Why doesn't Wolfe, instead of being an infant, just take the fact that he came up short like an adult? Do I really want to write if I have to deal with obnoxious jerks like this? Life is too short.

So I still am not entirely unburdened by the pretentiousness that comes with literary fiction. But I am writing. I like what I've done so far. If all goes well, I'll have a decent draft of a comic novel by November. Then we'll see what happens.

Literary Fiction Is Dying and For Me That's Probably a Good Thing

I wasn't much of a reader when I was a kid. I loved numbers not words. In order to tweak my interest in reading, my second grade teacher let me raid the fifth and sixth grade libraries for sports biographies. I devoured those. But when I was done with the Bart Starr/Jim Brown/Henry Aaron/Babe Ruth/Johnny Unitas/et al. stories, I put aside recreational reading for pretty much the rest of my childhood.

My brother was the library goer. He was the big thinker and started to read philosophy in middle school. My father was a fabulous story teller. I always figured that I was more like my grandfather than anyone else in my family, laconic and stoic, with a high tolerance for pain and a head for business. But then, something changed when I was 15. Maybe it was drugs. Who knows? I started to read. A lot.

I picked up Russian novels, one after another, and read them with the same voraciousness that I had once read sports biographies. At 17, I was living with my aunt and uncle in Israel and my aunt was dismayed with my incessant reading. "Go to the beach! Go find a girl! Get out of the house and live!" My aunt's reading habits consisted solely of Israeli bodice rippers. She once picked up my copy of a Gorky novel and then slammed it down in disgust. "What kind of boy reads Gorky? You must not have a single friend in America." She actually did love me. She was only looking out for my best interests.

In college, I thought I'd major in comparative literature, but the fact was that I couldn't stand the people in the humanities. The professors and students seemed like such frail things and they wore their neuroses like merit badges. I'm prone to depression. I don't need any encouragement. I ran from the humanities as fast as I could.

Still, I'd pick up poetry and novels in the library in between studying for my science classes. There was a wonderful open area on the library's second floor with nice chairs overlooking the lake that had an excellent collection of 20th century poetry. I devoured those books as well. I'd wander around the stacks and pick up random novels and literary reviews. One night before a final calculus exam, I found the shelf that had all the back issues of the Paris Review. I'd never heard of the magazine. I read 20 issues worth of interviews from the 1950s and 1960s that night and decided to forego studying altogether. Because of the Paris Review, I ended up with a B in math that semester.

I had this idea - where this idea came from I don't know - that I'd write my first novel by the time I was 22. I wrote a few stories that weren't good, but I didn't know that, and English major types told me that they were wonderful. Then I started off on my novel. I typed page after page. It was dreadful stuff. Even I knew it was dreadful and incoherent. Every day, I'd feel the heavy weight of all those greats I admired - from Tolstoy to Pynchon - and I remember feeling physically sick as I typed. Eventually, I actually ended up in the emergency room of the college hospital with horrible pain in my left testicle. The doctor found nothing. Now I knew why those humanities majors were so frail. They must have been trying, like me, to outdo Tolstoy. You can truly work yourself into a terrible state trying to do the impossible.

I'll finish this up next post.

Oil and The Housing Collapse Probably Were Related

This is the kind of thing - a non-economist looking at some big problem in a very simple way - that undoubtedly makes economists roll their eyes (just like I roll my eyes listening to everyday people talk about how to plug the BP well in the Gulf).  But here is a nice little graph of oil prices in the US (data from the DOE) as a function of time.

From the winter of 2003-2004, when gas prices were at about $1.50, to the summer of 2008, the rise in oil caused your average working class family (assuming two cars getting about 22 miles per gallon and about 20,000 miles per year of use) to spend an additional 400 dollars a month on gas.  That mileage figure is high relative to national averages, but an educated guess is that it's typical for a family with a working wife and husband. During the oil shock of the 2000s, the conventional wisdom from economics circles was that energy prices were largely divorced from consumer spending. I think that's true for families of economists, who are typically upper middle class. Maybe that's why the conventional wisdom is what it is.

But for a working class family earning 50 to 60K a year, an additional expenditure of 400 dollars a month is a huge thing. Those working class families drove the housing boom. They were the first time buyers who were getting mortgages they couldn't really afford.

Imagine a family with a post-tax (income and sales tax)  income of 35K a year buying a 200K home with some funny sub-prime mortgage.  Their monthly housing costs will be about $1200 including utilities and property taxes (and assuming they've bought a new house with little upkeep needs) or about 2/5 of their post-tax income. That leaves them with about 20K for everything else in their lives. That's a tight, tight situation with little or no room for any emergencies. Now add $4600 to their car costs every year for gas. They go belly up with that kind of new burden.

Housing prices probably would have collapsed eventually anyway. Prices could not possibly continue to rise at the ridiculous rate they did. But maybe not. Maybe housing prices would have eventually plateaued had energy prices stayed stable.

We'll never know to what degree the oil shock contributed to the housing collapse. We could run economic models to make estimates, but those models - like models in my field - tend to be worthless predictors of anything meaningful. That all said, I find it quite plausible that the economic burden of the oil shock played a significant role in the housing collapse. It was a collapse driven by the lower middle class, those who bought their homes with sub-prime mortgages. That economic class was severely impacted by rising gas prices. They just might have been able to make their mortgage payments - even when their teaser rates expired - if they hadn't been forced to throw their dollars into their gas tanks. Of course, any economist reading this right now is rolling his or her eyes. Roll away.

I note that economists have as of late, been talking off the cuff and writing papers about things they know nothing about; they've given these silly explorations the name "behavioral economics". So let's call my meager effort "behave yourself economics". Just think of the long low tail of the housing market, not the average numbers. You just might agree with me.

Little Miracles

Here's a little photo I took the other day. I was on top of Mt. Tam.  That butterfly in the upper left is real, not Photoshopped. There were a bunch of butterflies on top of the peak, and as luck would have it (well a little more than luck, I waited and waited) one of them showed up in my viewfinder as I clicked my shutter. Or maybe it was God shining down on me if I believed in a higher being, but I don't.

I had lunch after I took the photo - a very sweet place for dining outdoors - and then walked down the rocky peak (it really is a very simple and easy climb, but is rocky for about a 400 foot stretch). Somehow my foot got wedged between some cracks on my way down. I pulled and then lost my balance as my foot got free, flying forward. There was a four foot high boulder a few feet ahead of me and my mind was doing a quick physics calculation that told me in about a half a second my face was going to be smashed against the boulder. I was thinking blood, a broken nose, a cracked tooth or two as my glasses flew off my face. A lot can go through your mind in half a second.

But none of that happened. Somehow all my momentum was stopped in mid-flight. I landed four inches short of the boulder in a one foot square of course sand. I ended up with a small cut on my hand, a scrape on my right biceps, a tiny cut and bruise in one eye socket, and a bruised back. That was it. My camera had a couple of light scratches on the LCD viewfinder and when I retrieved my glasses, I found one scratch on the left lens. I can live with both.

I was lucky, very lucky. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine actually died taking a similar fall in a national park. My mother, if she had been with me, would have definitely called my lack of serious injury a miracle. And the fact is that I swear I felt a force stopping my momentum in mid-flight, keeping me from hitting that boulder.

But really I think what happened is that - just like when I tried to hit some fastballs in a batting cage a couple of years ago and mostly whiffed - the physics calculation my mind made over that split second was off. Like in the batting cage a couple of years ago, my mind assumed my body was still young. It isn't. My lift off the ground wasn't what it might have been thirty years ago had I tried to yank my leg free and lost balance. I fell right where I should have given my lack of...oomph in middle age. There are some advantages to getting older. Then again, in my youth I probably wouldn't have lost my balance.

I had two very lucky things happen to me in the space of ten minutes. Alternatively, two small miracles happened, take your pick. Either way I have both a nice photo and a body still in one piece. Of course my back is killing me. It'll probably hurt for another six weeks. But I'll gladly take that pain over what might have happened.

Confessions of a Music Snob

I get a fair amount of popular music sent to me by friends, both real people I know and electronic friends (whatever that means). These people aren't musicians. They just love music and that's a wonderful thing. But the fact is that almost all of the music I get sent my way is frighteningly bad. Yes, the songs tend to be mega-sellers. They are still frighteningly bad.

I'm a music snob there is no doubt. I don't understand the ears of the listening public. For instance, the other day I was listening to something by Eric Clapton from the 1990s. By then, Clapton was old enough to know that the notes you don't play on a guitar are as important as the notes you do. He picked some good songs for the CD as well with some interesting chord progressions. But the production of the music was pure junk. It was click-tracked out the ying yang. The drums sounded artificial and mechanical. Clapton's voice, never much to being with, was inexplicably put way out in front in the mix and he sounded like a vocal metronome with his phrasing. I could barely listen. It wasn't really music.

Most of the time, it's much worse than this. The production is terrible. The song is horrible both melodically and lyrically (if there are lyrics). Everything is so simple and unintelligent musically that I know exactly what's going to happen 30 seconds ahead of time. The rhymes are just plain lame, expressing sentiments of someone with the emotional and intellectual depth of a ten year old. The singer, if there is one, can't really sing and you can hear Auto-tune bring back the notes to a precise, yet artificial sounding pitch. Or maybe worse yet, the producer has decided to Auto-tune a singer who actually is very good and by shaving every little slightly off pitch warble sucks the life right out of the song.

There is so, so much wonderful music out there, both old and new, that rarely gets listened to. I'm talking strictly about pop music here because I know hardly anyone listens to classical. The musicians are inventive. They play live without gimmicks. The singer is expressive. The songs are unique. The lyrics make you pause, they are so good. I smile uncontrollably when I hear something wonderful like that. But I also know that if I'm smiling, the music isn't going to sell a lick. I think it's precisely because the music is interesting enough to keep me listening that it bores or scares the hell out of the public.

I will never understand what makes a hit song. But then again Ray Charles said the same thing and his ears, I know, were much, much better and more critical than mine. Despite that, Ray Charles did alright for himself. I just wonder what he'd say about Lady GaGa.

Is it Anti-Semitism? Sometimes Yes. Sometimes No.

The recent Israeli raid of the Turkish flotilla brought out the usual condemnation of Israel from European governments and the American left. Yes, the raid was a big and tragic blunder - if commandos were going to raid these ships, they needed to be prepared for an attack - but whatever Israel does is subject to condemnation by Europe and the American left. It's a knee jerk reaction.

For the American left, the narrative that Israel is an evil empire and that Zionism is a racist cabal is just symptomatic of their naiveté, and how they love to romanticize any conflict into a battle between the oppressed and the capitalistic oppressor. Stalin, Castro, the Sandinistas, the left somehow manages to create this oppressed versus oppressor narrative again and again, omitting and twisting facts along the way. They are just as stupid as those on the right with their harping about individual freedom (which apparently means simply no taxes and lots of guns) and American exceptionalism.

For the American left, the fact that Hamas - the leadership democratically chosen by the Palestinians in a fit of madness - is a terrorist organization (backed by Iran) whose major publicly avowed aim is the destruction of Israel doesn't matter. Israel's failure to make peace with these lunatics is viewed as a sign of Zionism's failure. You read this narrative again and again - Israel as a rogue evil state - in leftist publications like The Nation. That magazine is forever saying in defense of its anti-Zionist views that no they aren't anti-Semitic. I agree. They aren't anti-Semitic. They're just total brain dead dopes.

And what about Europe? The anti-Israel sentiment is definitely all about anti-Semitism. I invite you to spend some time in Europe as a Jew. You'll find it's a slightly precarious existence. On the surface, it's alright. But there are always reminders that you really are an outsider. England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, these nations still view Jews as the dark and evil other. Anti-Semitism is simply built into European culture. The US let go of the idea that Jews were Christ-killers in the 1960s. But in Europe, anti-Semitism is like the little black dress. It never goes out of style.

I never understood this Christ killer narrative by the way. "The Jews" didn't kill Christ. The Romans did. Jesus was Jewish and yes, Jesus got caught up in what was likely an internecine squabble with Jewish priests (if you believe any of the New Testament and I don't believe it any more than I believe in the Old Testament; these are made up stories and parables, not fact filled histories). The priests didn't like Jesus, so the story goes, and gave him up to the Romans. You could say that the Jews let the Romans do their dirty work for them. The New Testament is big on that interpretation. To me, though, this looks like some nutty conspiracy narrative a la The Mafia killing JFK. The Jews didn't kill Christ. You're blaming the wrong people. Hate the Romans not us (the "Romans" no doubt created the evil and dreadful Olive Garden restaurant chain, too, those bastards).

If Jews should be hated for anything they really did, it's for the creation of monotheism. It's true. We did it. I admit full guilt. If you love idols and Greek and Norse gods go right ahead and hate me. I fully deserve it. I'm a Zeus killer there is no doubt.

How did I get on that riff and all that shtick above? I have no idea. I got distracted. Anyhow, back to the subject at hand.

Israel is hated by many. No, it isn't a perfect nation. No nation is. While there is much to criticize about Israel - as there is much to criticize about any nation - its creation and existence are not a black mark on the world. In fact there is much to celebrate about Israel's accomplishments. Israel has provided a home for millions - including many of my own relatives - that have literally nowhere else to go. The fact is that if the Palestinians had wanted peace and their own nation, they could have had it a decade ago. But they refused to sign a peace accord because they still wanted Haifa and all the rest of Israel back. They still want it all back.

When the Palestinians give up their demand for the "right of return" - which is simply a code phrase for the elimination of the Israeli state - I believe that rapid progress toward peace will be made. We are probably a couple decades away from that happening. Until then, the American left will cling to its loopy narrative that Zionism is inherently evil. As for Europe, anti-Semitism is (much more than the Euro apparently) the tie that binds. Peace or not, Europe will cling to its anti-Semitism and its hatred of all things Jewish, including Israel, for the foreseeable future.

Learning How To Play a King

When someone takes a position of leadership, they - and I don't understand the magic of this - are no longer just a person. They are imbued with something extra. It's like they instantly have an aura. They even walk with a little more confidence.

Personally, I don't respond to this change well when I observe it in people I know. I get irritated. I find it tacky and distasteful. But I notice that organizations seem to view this transformation positively. They need a leader to follow and need to believe that leader has special qualities.

So it goes with our nation's presidents. Before they are elected they are just Joe Blow politicians. But if they are successful at winning the presidency, everything changes. They are deferred to. They are instantly respected. At least that used to be the case.

Since the advent of the media age and its associated cynicism and crudeness, a president has had to earn his aura of greatness. It's no longer given to him from the beginning. And even if he does earn it, there's always a group of people trying to take it away. This change has been destructive to the nation. People want and desire a president who can play the role of king or at least a sheriff from the Old West. In the absence of such leadership, this country edges toward chaos.

In the media age, which began during the Vietnam War, there have been presidents that have manage to carry themselves like royalty for at least a few years. Johnson did so until the horror of Vietnam was shown day after day on the evening news. Nixon, surprisingly, did so for several years, until he forgot we live in a democracy and that there is a difference between play acting the role of a king and being one. Carter was never even an assistant prince. Neither were Bush Sr. or Jr. Reagan managed to play the role of king until Alzheimer's started to slow him down. Clinton also had a few years where he held court, but then he had his zipper problem.

All of which brings me to our current president. Unlike Clinton and Nixon, Obama seemed like a natural to play the role of king. He gives great public speeches and exudes confidence. But somehow, after over a year on the job, the aura still isn't there. Barack Obama isn't "President of the United States". He's just another president, more Bush-like than Reaganesque.

Watching Obama deal with the current oil spill in the Gulf, for example, has shown him at his best and worst. He's intelligent, surprisingly honest, and treats the public like they are adults. He's great with detail, but lousy at making an emotional connection with his audience. Somehow he can't rise above it all and lead. It's hard to explain, but watching Obama is like watching an actor in a good regional theater. The actor is competent. He can recite his lines well. He is clearly professional. But there is no sparkle. No pizzazz. And you know exactly why that actor isn't playing Broadway.

Some may wish to ascribe the inability of Obama to play a strong leadership role to the incessant criticism from the right. Yes, the right wing media cannot find a single thing to like about Obama. Obama is not really an American. Obama is a narcissist (as if Reagan, Bush, and Bush II weren't narcissists; it comes with the job). Obama is too educated (apparently only C students can lead). It's comical really, this week by week attempt to find yet another ridiculous reason to hate Obama. It's not simply hatred. It's lunacy at work. But this is all a reprise of what happened with Clinton, who somehow managed to overcome the right's hatred to lead effectively for a few years.

Obama may yet learn how to play a king. But the odds are getting long that it will happen. What we are seeing now is likely what we're going to get for as long as Obama is president. He can more or less do the job. But he cannot inspire. Without that inspiration, this country is rudderless.

Chutzpah

Sometimes you hear logic turned on its head with such conviction that you wonder if you're simply having a bad dream. So it is with the latest meme from the conservative movement: environmentalists helped cause the BP disaster. The "logic" goes like this. BP wouldn't have to drill under the dangerous conditions of the Gulf if environmentalists wouldn't bar the oil industry from ANWAR and the Pacific Coast.

All the cries of "drill baby drill" during the Republican Convention are ignored in this blame game. All the corners cut by BP during the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon well are ignored. All the regulations that were sidestepped by the government in the drilling of the well are ignored, too (and as we all know, regulation is always bad, isn't it?). The fact that we don't drill off the Pacific extensively because we suffered an ugly spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 is ignored. The fact that ANWAR would at peak production likely reduce our dependence on foreign oil by a whopping three to four percent is ignored.

Who could possibly buy this piece of baloney? This is akin to the chutzpah of a cheating spouse blaming their mate for their cheating.

We need oil. Our economy depends on it. We will drill for oil wherever we can drill economically. I am confident that after this fiasco there will be a renewal of environmental regulations so that corners aren't cut and disasters won't likely happen again. But we will have future spills. That's inevitable no matter where we drill and where we ship. We won't eliminate spills by drilling in ANWAR or the Pacific Coast.

We will reduce the number of our oil disasters if we do one simple thing: use less oil. But of course, conservation isn't anything right wingers want to talk about. What do they want to talk about besides preposterous reasons for the BP oil disaster? Well here's one thing that I know they won't say anymore. Come the next Republican National Convention, there will be no shouting of three formerly popular little words: drill baby drill.

I Love Roy Halladay

I note that Roy Halladay pitched a perfect game the other day.  He's a fabulous pitcher, one of the most fun to watch in all of baseball today.  I remembered that I wrote this in August 2007.  In honor of his perfect day, I decided to repost.


A Meaningless Game?

A few days ago I went to what was probably my last ballgame for the season. It was a meaningless game. My beloved Oakland As are, for the first time in a while, well out of contention with forty games yet to play. For years now, they’ve managed with a low payroll and smoke and mirrors to be one of the better teams in major league baseball.

But this year is different. There have been too many injuries and too many bets on head case players with talent that haven’t paid off. The As have hovered around .500 all year. And recently they’ve started to unload their higher salary players – two head cases and one guy who has been awful ever since major league baseball started to test for steroids - to save some money for next year. In the lineup at the game, there were only three players starting who were playing on opening day. The other seven, including the pitcher, started the season either playing for other teams or more commonly, in the minor leagues.

On the other side were the Toronto Blue Jays, another mediocre team that is well out of contention. But the starting pitcher for Toronto was Roy Halladay, one of the best pitchers in the major leagues. If Roy Halladay pitched in New York or LA, he’d be a nationally known star. But he plays on a team that is virtually anonymous. He’s 30 years old – prime for a pitcher – and has pitched for Toronto for about nine years having been drafted by them when he was 18.

Hardly anyone was in the stadium. And it was hot, about 90 degrees. When I was young, I’d have never gone to a game like this. What would be the point? But nowadays, I seem to be finding an ability to see the joy in the little things. I was happy to be able to watch a good pitcher do his work even if that pitcher was pitching for the other side and the game was meaningless.

Roy Halladay did not start out well. He looked miserable out there and I was wondering if he was just going through the motions. He gave up four cheap runs in the first three innings. But then in the fourth inning something changed. Suddenly he had command of his fastball. His curve ball was devastating. He was locked in.

When a great veteran pitcher gets locked in like that, it’s all over. The As hitters, mostly rookies, were looking helpless. I looked up from my scorecard during that inning and said to the guy sitting next to me, “The As are going to get nothing until he’s done.” And they didn’t. He was unhittable for the rest of the game. Even though he had thrown a lot of pitches because he had started out so miserably, he kept coming out inning after inning. I couldn’t believe it. The game was meaningless, but he still had that desire to win. I smiled in admiration watching him. He threw 120 pitches over nine full innings, keeping his team in the game.

The As eventually won in extra innings. One of the many As rookies in the lineup slapped a single to win the game. By then Roy Halladay was long gone. But he had been fun to watch. Performances like that are why I love to go to baseball games, even when the teams are out of contention and it’s so hot that even my kneecaps are sweating.