Technical Difficulties

Some generous person gave me a Nook Simple Touch Reader for Christmas. I have long recognized the utility of electronic readers, starting with Amazon’s Kindle. Like many New Yorkers, I have books and papers in too many places. Mostly, my books gather dust.

E-readers are numerous on the New York subways. More than once I have glanced over the shoulder of the person sitting next to me to catch a good glimpse of his or her device. Many persons of what I would take to be average, or better, intelligence seem proficient in the operation of such devices; turning them on/off, flipping pages, slipping them neatly into bag or purse; looking comfortable with them. People who read silently on the subway are quiet and pose no danger to society.

Though I don’t read as many books as I once did—but many selections from books and reviews of books online–I greeted my new gift Nook favorably. I liked that it was “simple.” So I charged the battery with a USB connection. No problem.

No problem with the lengthy Terms of Service: a quick I Accept. Selecting my time zone: done. Connecting to a wi-fi network. Which one? I have no other wi-fi devices. Only a few choices not recognizable by name. Who, what? Only two had fair signal strength. One of those could not connect, and the other was password locked. How would I find the password?

So I went online and waded through lists of Nook topics, read the FAQ, couldn’t find the answers I wanted, and checked out recommended nook.com/wifi, where I typed in my question in the capacious box. I’m good at describing problems in simple English, and clicked Submit. Well, turns out I could get expert advise for $19 on Answers.com, and $29 on Yahoo Answers. No thank you.

I found and called customer service on the Barnes & Noble website, when through that menu and an automated voice referred me to tech support, but the call was dropped or intentionally, or programatically ended—twice.

And that is where the matter stands at this point. I turned the Nook off. It sleeps with the digital visage of Joseph Conrad on the black & white screen. Good man, Conrad.

Whatever happened to live customer service? In the old days, I could dial three digits and get live support from my cell phone provider. Today? Fugetabout it. More touch choices from calm humanoid voices. I went online and unhappily discovered a forest of FAQs, menus, lists, live chat that failed to connect me to a human voice or anything.

Increasingly, I enter this Byzantine maze erected by our Byzantine civilization; a firewall put in place by imperious content providers to keep away the rabble of frustrated customers pounding at the gate. Aren’t there sufficient unemployed in India, or the U.S.A., for that matter, to answer these questions? Or, are human beings just too expensive to employ to answer person-to-person questions anymore? If so, what does that portend for our society?

I don’t know who writes these elaborate websites; maybe the same people who write intricate instruction books for software and the like. I’ve browsed through them in bookstores—remember them? Java or HTML for Dummies? Patient mouse steps, rational mouse clicks. After several minutes of this, and no immediate solution, my solution, the irrational mind takes over and I want to cry Help! At which point, I want to talk to a live representative.

Will millions of us end up dithering in circles, reaching skyward, waiting for information drops from the content providers and their clever code writers? Apocalyptic scenarios rush to mind.

So many times I have started out to write something, send text via email—and technical glitch BB’s have come flying my way. I’ve spent hours with that friendly voice from Bombay restructuring my email, for instance. Sound familiar?

Back in the early days of network television in the early 1950s, much of it live, when something went wrong behind the scenes, the channel put up a fixed image on the screen while it scrambled to fix the problem.

The image was a kind of target, with closely spaced lines and the head of an Indian Chief in the center. It was the kind of image photographers use to measure the resolution of their lenses. You heard a voice that said: “Due to technical difficulties, we are unable to continue our broadcast at this time. Please standby.” And there was a tone.

You could change channels. There were three networks: NBC, CBS, or ABC. You could wait, or you could turn the tv off and do something else. Things were much simpler then, believe me, not necessarily better, but simpler.

Your devices, what few there were, were not interactive; they didn’t come charging at you to do something. They didn’t press you to download a new update or install a new program. They didn’t overwhelm you. When you went to the soda shop, you had three flavors: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. You didn’t stand at the counter and choose from dozens of flavors, hundreds of channels, thousands of applications.

You had a life.

Maybe I’m just not trying hard enough. If I were younger, I might stay up all night toiling to figure the durn thing out, texting my friends madly for their collective nook knowledge. That’s it; I don’t know enough tech savvy people. I don’t yet text and I don’t tweet. Maybe that’s it. I know that I can reach out and touch a book and page through it without any instruction—old romantic, gentleman writer and reader, that I am–or read the same online. Hey, I know computers. It’s just those pesky little e-readers that—for the moment, hopefully—detain me from taking reading to the next level.

I think I have time to adjust. I’ve been using the computer and the Web for more than a decade now. I think I can slow down, at my age, when I sometimes forget and lose things, and keep up with ruthless change, at a jog trot, stay relevant, find my place on the slower track, keep one step ahead of those who would pack me off to the knackers and the body parts exchange, or one of those awful camps around the corner where I might provide energy in exchange for food pellets and water, running breathlessly on the gerbil wheel.

By Hudson Owen. All rights reserved.

 

Notes on North Korea

Of course events in historical time proceeded at a slower pace because life itself was tied, more or less, to the orderly transition of the seasons, for example, even into relatively recent times–think of Vivaldi’s the Four Seasons, I believe, the musical work is titled. We see much of this in Medieval and Ancient art.

Thus, we can imagine the transition of dynasties in ancient Egypt, grounded in the elaborate rituals of death and the afterlife and the tides of the Nile without much interference from outside, temporal events. But after the revolutions of 1848, in Europe, it would be difficult to imagine an Egyptian-style dynastic succession anywhere, at all. As per your example, the last Romanov, as well as the last emperor in China, was swept away by the swirl of events in the fast-paced 20th Century.

I am saying that North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom, cannot remain a dynastic society for much longer, an entire nation living in a museum. While the Chinese want stability in the Korean Peninsula, they also represent themselves to North Korea as a model of surviving and flourishing in the contemporary world, of bending without breaking, in Confucian thought; and they punish North Korea for not listening to them by temporarily turning off their oil pipeline into North Korea, for example. A lesson impossible to ignore.

In short, no one will offer carrots and sticks to the heir apparent or the military in North Korea to stand rigidly still for the next half century. The Un-Kim must do something different from his father and grandfather to make a name for himself in history, for good or ill.

Comment posted by Hudson Owen to “Even in a Best-Case Scenario, North Korea Remains a Big Problem,” by Megan McArdle, The Atlantic,Dec. 20, 2011

 

Poor Hands – The Gift Not Given

I was riding the subway home to Brooklyn and noticed a girl, maybe six or seven, sitting beside me, and what I assumed to be her mother, in her late thirties.

My first impression was that both were poor. They just looked poor, to me, not so much by dress—though they were plainly dressed—but by their straggly hair and, somehow, by their hands. I had never thought of poor hands before, but this girl and her mother had poor hands. The daughter read word-by-word with her fingers.

Poor white hands with blue veins and nails cut to the quick. They resembled the kind of distraught people Dorthea Lange photographed in the 1930s. Proud, hungry people with a difficult present and uncertain future.

On the girl’s lap was an open ring binder missing the rings. The girl was scribbling with a golf pencil on various simple drill forms—such as supply the missing word—at an elementary level, as rapidly as her mother presented them to her. The mother pointed with her poor finger at the daughter’s scribbled answer—I couldn’t read a word of any of it—and quickly erased the wrong response with an overworked nub of an eraser, as if each sheet of paper was precious and had to be preserved.

The mother presented each of a dozen forms in hand to her daughter, quickly instructed her as to the type of response needed, reached and erased wrong responses, and so on with the next form, shuffling these papers in hand, giving the impression that she was trying to teach her daughter in as many different academic subjects as quickly possible while riding on the train.

Part of the lessons involved what looked like a worn library book about chameleons, with color illustrations of the reptiles. The mother turned the pages, pointed out different examples of the species.

Occasionally the girls objected, saying this was stupid. The mother paused, recalculated her line of attack, and continued with the lesson in a hushed voice. I have watched many mother-daughter drills on public transportation in my time in New York. This was the most urgent and frantic procedure I have seen, as if by the end of their ride, the girl would learn enough to pass an important test, or series of tests, that would advance her a grade and so out of poverty.

These frantic lessons by the mother attracted the attention of nearby subway riders, who cast a wary eye the mother’s way. The mother never shouted at the child or hit or criticized her. She clearly loved her daughter and wanted to help her in her studies in the worst sort of way.

I felt uncomfortable, sad. I wanted to do something, say something, help in some way. My stop came and I exited the train.

Later, on the bus from the train, I realized what I should have done, or imagined I should have done. I should have furtively taken out my wallet—which I never do in the subway—taken out a $20 bill, stood and addressed the mother saying, “I hope I’m not intruding, but I couldn’t help noticing that your daughter might need a new pencil or notebook and, this being the holiday season, I thought I’d help out. Please accept my donation. After all, it’s the holiday season.”

What would the mother have done? Would she have accepted, snapped back at me that it was none of my business? Neither one looked at me or paid me any attention during our brief encounter. I can only hope that others will do what I was unable to accomplish during this holiday season.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

Rejection Letter

I once worked as a temp typist in a midtown Manhattan publishing house. My assignment was typing rejection letters for a youngish trade editor. By typing, I mean on a typewriter. These were mostly run-of-the-mill “Sorry, this isn’t quite right for our list, best wishes in placing it elsewhere” kind of letters–nothing so colorful as the examples shown here.

Anyway, one such letter seemed unnecessarily harsh to me; and having been on the receiving end of these dismissive missives, I walked into the editor’s office. I saw manuscripts in neat stacks all around the office, on the radiator and carpet–maybe a thousand, possibly more. Clearly, the editor was under stress dealing with that load. She looked up, and I pointed out the especially punishing phrases and returned to my seat.

Shortly, she came out with a new, less painful version, and I rolled a fresh sheet of letterhead into the IBM Selectric and punched it out. I counted that moment as a minor victory in a week of sorrow and defeat.

Comment posted by Hudson Owen on the article Famous Authors’ Harshest Rejection Letters, by Romy Oltuski, on The Atlantic, November 18, 2011.

 

Terra Nova: It’s All Ova

It’s 2149, and Earth is a mess. It’s overcrowded, heavily polluted, and families are limited to two children each. Fortunately, scientists have discovered a crack in space time that allows humans to escape into the Age of Dinosaurs 85 million years ago. The Shannon family joins fellow escapees in walking through a stargate portal and landing kerplunk into the tropical rainforest. Jim, his wife Elisabeth and their three children are led by armed guards into the Terra Nova camp proper. The extra child landed Jim briefly in prison, from which he escaped.

It turns out the Shannons cross in the tenth pilgrimage, and already there is trouble in paradise, or if you, will Fresh Start City, where humanity can start over and finally get it right. Finally! It seems that a bunch of Sixers (from the sixth pilgrimage) have become rebel outsiders posing a challenge to the authority of Commander Taylor, head honcho of the colony.

We recognize the fence from Jurassic Park—a lot of good they did in that movie. Inside, the camp teems with armed guards. The Shannons move into their spacious, breezy house. Medical doctor Elizabeth gets started with her twinkling Star Trek tricorder, while tough guy Jim Shannon quickly proves his worth by foiling an assassination plot against Commander Taylor, and so joins Taylor’s security squad. Much is made of fresh fruit in Terra Nova. Dinosaurs make an early appearance in the form of herbivores with very long necks that reach over the fence to munch on a branch offered by the Shannon’s youngest, Zoe, lifting her gently a meter or so off her feet. It isn’t long before teenage son Jose is led off beyond the protective fence by pretty girl Skye where they go a-wandering and plunge into a waterfall pool.

What is this 20th Century Fox Television show all about? And why are they still calling it 20th Century Fox Television?

The story’s vision is shaped thus far principally by executive producers Stephen Spielberg and Brannan Braga of Star Trek fame. The 23rd Century tricorder looks out of place in this 21st Century setting with blood and gore, especially from dinosaurs attacking people. Star Trek, you will recall, was a curiously bloodless environment. As per Jurassic Park rules, the dinosaurs are superior to humans and are immune to man’s advanced weapons. The best sustained automatic weapons fire can do is momentarily scare the predators off. Are they shooting rubber bullets or what? Mr. Spielberg is apparently so committed to dinosaurs over man, that he cannot stand to see one of his digital creations get splattered by human weaponry.

This raises questions as to how far the audience must go to suspend belief sufficiently to get through this 13-part series. The Fox series website has a page still in progress called “audience strategy” which “develops and implements transformative strategies to catalyze a cultural shift in the industry, embracing a multi-pronged approach of working from the inside-out to drive behavioral change and outside-in to advocate for diverse perspectives, and to engage all audiences in our multi-cultural world.”

Do people get paid for writing sentences like that?

So far, we see how race is a factor in this story. The leader of the Sixer opposition is a fierce black woman squaring off against Commander Taylor. Jim Shannon and his son are white, while the three women in the family are all caramel color—a curious division of race. The cast is quite diverse, though to what effect is yet uncertain. So the show has lots of diversity but as yet no cultural clashes, no culture at all.

But diversity, multiculturalism et al, is not a new message. It goes back, at least, to the original Star Trek and the 1960s. The overcrowded and polluted earth of mid-century is the world we can see taking shape today—and diversity and sensitivity training will not save us from that world. Nor will the children alive today who will live into 2149 have any Terra Nova to escape to. Looked at as a heavyweight vision of the future, I think Terra Nova is already ova. The vision of a fresh start is already too corrupted by the tenth pilgrimage to think it will ever produce a transformed human society. This is not Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Terra Nova works much better as a lightweight sci fi thriller with good production values such as you would expect from Steven Spielberg. But please, the dinosaurs must take a hit now and then. Our ancestors took down the wooly mammoth and saber tooth tiger with sticks and stones and guile. The Indians hunted the buffalo for its many gifts to them. If I don’t see some reference to that history fairly soon, I will change channels.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

About These Protests…

The Occupy Wall Street protests entered their 17th day Tuesday. Today is zombie day. Quoting from the New York Post: “ ‘The Zombie is a metaphor and symbol of corporate greed,’ said Manhattan artist Mercury Cloud, 36, as he painted people’s faces…”

Really? I thought zombies were symbols of the living dead. Remember the movie Night of the Living Dead? That’s your archetypical zombie. Again, from the Post: “The Times quoted one Occupy Wall Street veteran telling a newcomer: ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re protesting. Just protest.’” Got it.

Do they really want to shut down Wall Street? New York City would turn into a ghost town without taxes on Wall Street. Greed is good for the coffers of Gotham. Without that stream of green flowing from downtown to the Mayor’s Office and Albany, the Big Apple would become a little sample cup of juice, before it blew away into a dusty gulch.

Taxes on Wall Street provide for thousands of city jobs, good union jobs. Now the ballsy Transport Workers Union is has gone to federal court to block the city from commandeering city buses to haul away protesters as the NYPD did on Saturday when the demonstrators tried to shut down traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. So now they’re protesting the Brooklyn Bridge? They’re trying to shut down the entire city. Huh?

Are they against local business? Because local businesses are complaining about loss of revenues due to these days of street demonstrations. Who is donating pizzas and other such healthy foods to keep these happy feet on the march? What’s their angle? Today the Occupy Wall Street bunch joined a rally on the Upper East Side in support of locked-out art handlers at Sotheby’s. Now there’s a target for you, Sotheby’s. Have protest, will travel.

The longer this thing goes on, the more attention it attracts. A rolling stone gathers celebrities like Susan Sarandon, so I hear. Does the chant “Down With The Rich!” include Hollywood stars? Or would this wandering troop jump at the chance to be extras in a big time film at $100 a day? They’re always shooting somewhere around town.

Demonstrators are falling to sniper’s bullets in Damascus, and we have street theater in Manhattan. OK, that’s a good thing—once in awhile—street theater. Even if it’s zombies who don’t know the difference from a street and an avenue. But hey, watch the police overtime. My taxes pay for that.

It’s nice this time of year. You know, autumn in New York. Maybe a few stalwarts will hang around to run in the New York Marathon in November. And then maybe, just maybe, they’ll go somewhere else when the chill sets in.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

New York Visions

When I arrived in New York in the late 1970s, the Twin Towers were up and running, part of the skyline. I had a temp job working in a bank or financial firm, on the 95th floor of the North Tower. Some employees from the old location refused to make the move because of the height. After the attack, I thought about those people. I don’t remember any of their names and only vaguely their faces. None would have survived the airplane strike and fires. They would have been trapped and died in the flames, or jumped.

I didn’t like the towers. They were too brash and shiny new. The other five buildings of the WTC site were more to downtown scale. And there was the plaza with the sphere sculpture and water fountain. During water emergencies, the fountain was dry.

The historical core of the downtown was low rise: the Dutch buildings on side streets, Fraunces Tavern, Delmonico’s, the circular fort in Battery Park, the long, low Battery Park Building and Coast Guard Station, the quaint shops and eateries in the Southport Seaport. Downtown was there the city began (the water once came up to Water Street); Our first president gave his inaugural speech in Federal Hall, one of the most photographed sites in New York.

Downtown was about history not progress. Any upstart could build the world’s tallest building. New York had the neo-Gothic Woolworth building, the Empire State Building, and then the Twin Towers.

Basically, what the Twin Towers lacked was class, charm. The lobby of WTC 1 had cathedral proportions. As a observer of New York interiors, I would rate it second to the Winter Garden at the World financial Center, definitely worth a look, in its day.

When the towers went down, the skyline opened up. For the first time in decades, New Yorkers had the opportunity to re-think their skyline. There were two main strands of thought, at the time. Mayor Rudy Giuliani wanted the entire site given over to a memorial, a view I shared. The more popular view was to rebuild the Twin Towers, to repair the hole in the sky and deny the terrorists any victory they thought they might have achieved. Developer Donald Trump would become the champion of this concept and publicly submitted a scale model design of his own. The huge problem with this idea was that it would have suggested, visually, that the attack never took place and hence the 2,793 persons who perished there had been brought back to life.

Soon after the attack, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was formed to oversee the rebuilding process of replacing the 10 million square feet of lost office space. There were expressions of concern that no one would want to work in these new buildings, out of fear or a sense of creepiness. The businesses there at the time were either destroyed or would be someplace by the time all the structures of the new World Trade center were completed.

In December 2002, plans were submitted by competing architects to redesign the 16-acre site, totally demolished in the attack. As I recall, six models were displayed in public and reviewed. Each building of every design was totally white. As near as I could tell, these designs resembled the World Financial Center, a cluster of uninspired designs across the street; nonetheless, a fitting harmony, I thought at the time.

Poorly presented, as they were, these designs were rejected and a new round of more ambitious designs was offered. The more extreme were like daring modern or postmodern sculptures than office buildings that people in suits would work in every day. One featured two twisty towers, as though seen in a fun house mirror. I wondered how the elevators might work. The elevators in the Twin Towers worked flawlessly, although some persons refused to ride alone in them. This design prompted me to write a protest letter to the LMDC. I like to think I helped nix that monstrosity. Among this second group was Polish architect Daniel Libeskind’s master plan which included a 1776 feet high Freedom Tower, which won the competition. Maya Lin, of Vietnam Memorial fame, was one of the judges.

Libeskind’s illuminated models were angular and aggressive, it would be fair to say. They suggested giant ice crystals from Planet Krypton, where Superman was born, jutting into the sky. Larry Silverstein, who had leased the WTC site from the Port Authority only months before the attack, hired an architect of his own, David Childs, to lend a shaping hand to these giant ice crystals, which nearly drove owlish Libeskind nuts. However, for Silverstein to have the insurance money to rebuild, his lawyers had first to convince a jury that the two planes represented separate attacks on the Twin Towers, a neat trick which they managed to pull off.

What would old Peter Stuyvesant think of all this, one wonders?

It was probably too much to have hoped that the powers that be would stop to consider that they liked the new skyline pretty much the way it was. Older cities like Paris, London and Rome preserve their iconic skyline. The British could build a structure taller than Big Ben and Parliament but realize the value of what they have, of history. The Empire State Building, with its graceful setbacks, is our icon. So why not leave it at that and enter New York City into the category of mature civilizations not continually trying to outdo itself? One might have wished.

Great buildings remind us of the wealth, energy and vision of the people who constructed them. The Empire State Building was begun in 1929, at the start of the Depression, and completed in 1931, at a cost of $41 million. It spoke of America’s drive and determination during a tough time. The energy that built it helped carry the country through World War II. From its inception in 1943 to ribbon cutting ceremony April 4, 1973, the WTC project evoked criticism. Lewis Mumford wrote of it as an “example of the purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism that are now eviscerating the living tissue of every great city.” Yet the Twin Towers inspired the lyrical high wire walk of French aerialist Phillip Petite on August 7, 1974, perhaps the greatest public stunt in recent memory.

The night lights in the North Tower seemed like a friendly beacon to me, walking toward the subway after work in winter.

No one who witnesses the 10th anniversary ceremony on TV can doubt the value of the National September 11 Memorial to those who lost loved ones there. They touched the names, made rubbings, placed flowers in the grooves, grieved openly and publicly.

The value of the Memorial and Museum will far outstrip that of WTC 1 (the official name according to the Port Authority) in the life of the city. Architecture has other uses than to impress with its “technological exhibitionism.” In recent years, the paradigm of New York has shifted somewhat from power and speed, the incessant flow of traffic through it streets and avenues, to a more “green” and bike-friendly city, with open public plazas replacing traffic lanes and bike paths along the waterfront and in the heart of the city.

Perhaps, in this way, New York will come to resemble the stereotype, at least, of the laid back European capital, more suited to taking a stroll than rushing to catch a cab. Early indications are that the horizontal changes are popular but the growing numbers of bike riders create competition for parking spaces and conflicts with pedestrians. Bike riders are often accused of not obeying traffic laws.

New York faces stiff challenges as it enters the second decade of the 21st Century. Something like a million illegal immigrants have poured into the city, mainly Brooklyn and Queens, in the past half dozen years. With its rich plate of social services, and limited funds for transportation and maintenance, it remains to be seen if New York can hold on to its middle class or if it will leave for less taxing environments. It remains to be seen if the structures rising at Ground Zero will be the day spaces of happy productive citizens, or defensive towers whose inhabitants seldom touch the ground.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

9/11 Ten Years On

Visually, of course, Ground Zero and Lower Manhattan have changed tremendously since Sept. 11, 2001. Not only was the entire 16-acre site in ruins but adjoining buildings were damaged by flying steel beams and debris from the collapsing towers. One piece of steel sailed across the street and plunged through the roof of the Winder Garden in the World Financial Center, killing two trees.

In the days following the attack, Lower Manhattan was locked down, with police barricades on the side streets and police officers checking company IDs. Many stores south of Canal Street were closed, some, like Burlington Coat Factory, never to reopen. Lower Broadway was like a ghost town; store front windows were covered in white ash and dust. Satellite dishes were everywhere on the streets. Verizon provided free phone carts on the sidewalks as many buildings had little if any phone service. It was a mess.
Large trucks carried debris endlessly from the wrecked site along West Broadway, which required resurfacing twice, if memory serves, during this period. They worked quickly. In six months, film crews were once again filming in Lower Manhattan. And you know New York is back when they make movies here.

As the Mayor noted on the ten year anniversary of the attack, the district has grown since the attack. Twice as many people live here than a decade ago, and Lower Manhattan is much more of a 7/24 neighborhood than before. WTC 1, aka Freedom Tower is 80 stories tall and growing day-by-day. The National September 11 Memorial opened to rave reviews on the tenth anniversary, and the accompanying museum will open next year. Finally we have got to this point after years of wrangling between the stakeholders in New York and New Jersey.

We have not been attacked in ten years, thanks in part to excellent police work and some luck. You can follow the progress at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation web site.

“Reflecting Absence,” Michael Arad’s winning design for the memorial was the best, in my view, for its simplicity and symbolism, being the footprints of the twin missing towers, a little more than 200 feet on a side, and with running water and names of the victims inscribed in bronze. Memorial Plaza is populated with 300 oak trees on eight acres of the World Trade Center site, an adequate amount of space though not what many of us wanted: the entire site dedicated to the memorial and museum. I’ll have more to say about that in another piece.

So, much has changed. Still, we live under a state of siege ten year after the attack. Nothing reminds new Yorkers more of that then the alert of possible attack on the anniversary itself. Once again, police took to the streets in full battle gear, with helmets and automatic weapons at the ready. Like they say, if you see something, say something.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

Investing in the Future

“It’s time to invest in the future.” “America needs to invest in the future.”

I’m guessing you have heard one of these phrases, or some variation thereof, recently. I heard Clinton-era notables Robert Rubin and Robert Reich utter these phrases on talk shows in the past two weeks. The President is fond of using this phrase in concert with several other similar phrases. The litany goes something like this: We need to invest in the future, in education, infrastructure, and science. As the 2012 election campaign heats up, you can expect to hear this phrase uttered many times, and not only by the Democrats.

What does it mean to “invest in the future?” Well, what is an investment? An investment is money put into a project in the hope of making back that money plus interest. There are ways individuals can invest in the future. You or I can purchase municipal bonds, for example. Municipal bonds can be issued by local entities to pay for capital projects. They can be issued by school districts, or to pay for airports and seaports. Municipal bonds are often tax free by the federal government, and can be traded by the investor.

Another way the individual can invest in America is by purchasing U.S. Savings Bonds. Savings bonds used to be a good investment. You walked into the bank, purchased the bond and the bank employee typed the name of the bondholder directly onto the bond. Today, the teller hands you a form to fill out first. The time to maturity is much longer than it used to be. The interest rate for Series EE bonds dropped to 0.7% in 2009, but is back up over one percent today. A $100 bond purchased for $50 in year 2000 is worth $74.40 today, at 1.5% interest. If you’re not getting much from your savings account, chances are you won’t make much on your bonds either, in hard times. You can buy savings bonds directly online.

And, of course, you can purchase Treasure bills with six months maturity dates, if you like. In the 1990’s T-bills paid a good seven percent and above.

You can invest in education by giving to your alma mater or to some other college. You can donate to your local library. But here, you would be straying from the business model that you would make a direct profit from your money invested.

Many of President Obama’s so-called investments are not really investments, at all. Investing in homeless shelters, for example, is really charity. You can invest in charities too. Is the federal government the best means of giving to charity? There is an old expression: “Charity begins at home.”

Similarly, much of the Recovery Act’s so-called stimulus billions are really investments in energy projects, quite a variety of them. Some of these huge sums may pay off in the future, others may not. Other of those billions went to prop up state governments running large deficits. So, tax dollars from residents in New York, say, went to support the inefficiencies in California state government. Is that fair? New York has its own fiscal woes.

Of course, a civilized society repairs and builds infrastructure: roads, bridges, and the like. Governments spend large sums on the state education system. A good education is important for everyone; for entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, who go on to invent new businesses that employ thousands of employees, and in the case of Microsoft, change the way the world uses computers. Bill Gates and others of the super rich are in the President’s sights to pay more taxes to help relieve the enormous government deficit and debt, to pay “their fair share”—whatever that amount may be, even though economists like Martin Feldstein have shown that increasing marginal tax rates on the super rich will bring in only a small fraction of the sums needed to pare down the deficits, much less cut the debt itself, maybe less than one percent.

The problem I have with “investing in the future,” as the President uses it, besides the fact that as a nation we are practically broke, is that it is open-ended and without accountability. What if these investments fail? New York City spends as much or more per pupil than any other city in the country on public education. Yet this year it is closing several dozen schools for poor performance. Why? Because there are social issues at work in the classroom that have little or nothing to do with money per se. Maybe residents should be able to invest directly in individual schools. If the students do well, you get your money back with interest. If the students run wild and flunk out and you lose your investment, then you will have a strong incentive to change the system.

Many Americans have come to think that the government is not only powerful, and can therefore stomp lesser monsters, but it is wise as well. These people think that government scientists are more likely to find a cure for aids that a private sector scientist who “works for profit.”

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, we students were summoned to the nurse’s office to receive shots, a new vaccine known as the Salk Vaccine, to prevent new cases of polio. Polio was a great scourge of society. Many of its victims were compelled to live out their lives in an awful contraption called an iron lung. Jonas Salk was a scientist whose research was funded by the March of Dimes, a non-profit organization founded by FDR, himself a polio survivor. On practically every counter top in America there stood a cardboard display with slots into which you could insert a dime. I might have contributed a few myself. Those millions of dimes helped to put an end to the scourge of polio and the awful iron lung that many polio victims lived in just to take another breath in this world.

Dr. Salk was the great medical hero of my youth. You can’t dial up someone like that; and you cannot guarantee that so many millions of tax dollars will create such a genius either. One can hope that we will continue to live in a society where a dime from you and me and the next person will make such an achievement possible.

You can invest in the future.

By Hudson Owen. All Rights Reserved.

 

So, What’s Your Real Name, Anyway?

In the same way that the novel provides the novelist with a method for telling a story that contains valuable universal truths without revealing certain facts, so a pen name both empowers and gives the novelist cover. The writer’s unspoken contract with the reader is: “I will tell you a good story, if you will allow me and my characters some anonymity. Otherwise, I will not tell you the story.”

People who push the artist to deal with the “real you” have a contempt for the imagination and are jealous of the artist, and want the Plain Jane version, the least interesting and least expansive version of the self to manipulate and think ill of. The artist, of course, deals with the real world in his or her own way, often unsuccessfully.

Facebook has millions (!) of artists on it, so I would think Facebook will need to show discretion in how they handle names. As for disciplining comments on forums, that’s up to the webmaster/owner with full deletion powers. Government investigators can find you through your email address, IP, etc. Blogging has spawned millions more artists and would-be artists who use pen names or variations on their given names, as one finds on any thread in “The Atlantic.” I agree with those who say that the Web invites and generally tolerates degrees of anonymity.

There is another consideration, that Facebook and Google are part of a trend to shrink the online and real world self down into a smaller more compact, more readily identifiable “space,” with almost no room to maneuver or breathe free. An economy measure in a crowded world, one might imagine. You are you, baby. And that’s all she wrote. Is this where we are heading, with, as always, the pigs on Animal Farm in charge?

Comment posted by Hudson Owen in response to Why Facebook and Google’s Concept of ‘Real Names’ Is Revolutionary by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, Aug 5 2011.