Congratulations to some unknown news writer at Global News for a wonderful turn of phrase. It went something like: “The catnip that attracts people to celebrity…” I may have got it wrong but the gist of it is obviously the bizarre fascination ordinarily sane people have for celebrity and scandal, for carnage and chaos.
You need go no further than the expressway where you have been “stop and go” for the last half hour. You finally arrive at tHe cause: a collision scene, complete with police cars and rotating red lights. Add an ambulance or two and you have the perfect formula for another dose of catnip. Of course, the jam is caused mostly by the ghouls who slow down hoping to get a closer look at the carnage. (It is, I believe, against the law to “rubberneck” by slowing down. I have never heard of anyone being charged or convicted.)
The latest lure for the thrill-seekers is the suicide of a man alleged to have beaten and dismembered his wife. The son of a wealthy man in Calgary, he was a contestant on a reality show, married a “model” and after two days of marriage appeared to have fled, leaving behind charges that he murdered the lady. We were glued to our TV news for all the details. We were treated to multiple shots of this ample-breasted woman (they were artificial) and head shots of the fleeing husband. We followed his trail to B.C. where he seems to have taken a boat from the U.S. side and entered Canada illegally. But you probably know all that.
The search was on. But he was too quick for the searchers, His body was found hanging from a coat rack in a motel room in Trail, B.C. The stampede to squeeze every last detail was on. We were shown people driving by and slowing down to gawk. There was even a shot of a woman who went close to the window of the motel room and shaded her eyes trying to get a look inside. TV stations paid the motel owner $100 just to get inside the room. The coverage included multiple “cuts” to the coat rack.
What is really going on with celebrity and ”event” fascination? The networks say “we are only giving people what they want,” and others among us say “that is so but where does the original appetite for blood and gore, for celebrity and gossip come from?”
It is always interesting to come face-to-face with someone you have watched on TV, or read about somewhere. It is all too easy to dismiss celebrities with a sneer and “They put their pants on like everyone else – one leg at a time.”
But where would we be with our impoverished, deprived, boring lives if we could not go ga-ga over Brad Pitt. Nothing in my memory has so occupied the human psyche as the mania over the death of Michael Jackson. The Pope didn’t get that much publicity!
I used to be well-known enough for people to stop me in restaurants and ask for an autograph or at least a hand-shake. That all disappeared. I’m not sure I miss it.
Just a few weeks ago sat the Festival of The Sound in Parry Sound, in the lobby during an intermission, a woman approached me with the familiar: “I know you from someplace. Who are you” I told her. I thought she was going to jump out of her skin. I was, I confess, a little gratified to be recognized after all these years of anonymity.
How many times have I heard “Wait till I tell my mother who I just met.”
But how do we really explain the fascination – often morbid? How do we explain the worship of Elvis? How do we explain the screaming people standing behind a rope watching celebrities disembark from their stretch limos? Beats me.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
THERE IS NO ORBIT
(Since I wrote this piece, something seems to be happening. Health Secretary Sebelius had to backtrack on her comment about "public option,"and the President appears to have taken another look and is backing away from his earlier "cave-in.")
There has just occurred, in America, where Health Care reform is spinning out of control, a significant reflection of how greed triumphs over patriotism, how cupidity replaces honesty, and how, in the final analysis – it is every man for himself and the devil take etc….
The Health Care “change” is like a satellite in space gone berserk. Gone is the measured pace of change with its predictable route and final fulfillment.
It looks very much like Obama is caving in. He is wilting under pressure. He is, in the most stupefying turn of character, actually trying to say that the “public option” is just a small piece of the puzzle. If you check all the statements the President has made through the last several weeks. “public option” is utterly dominant. He was emphatic that the private insurance companies were no longer going to have their way. It looked like he could win. He gave up. Between the dissidents in his own party, running scared for 2010, the rigid Right-wing of the Republican party, the hooters and hollerers who shout down civil discourse at Town Hall Meetings, and his own fear of being labeled “Socialist” – he has mortified his supporters and left the promise of change in shambles.
This about face is so archetypically American It is so ideologically driven. It is so much a reflection of the need to have “less government,” whatever that means.
When Obama spoke about his plan (which he said could exclude public option) there we people attending who – in the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, came to the meeting with visible guns, even one with an automatic rifle strapped to his back! While the President pleads hopelessly for decency, Internal Revenue has name FIVE THOUSAND AMERICANS (!) who have cheated the tax department by sending money offshore and to Swiss banks. The same people who rail that any new “Socialist” system of health care can’t be paid for are themselves avoiding taxes by brazenly sneaking money out of the country. (We should not be smug about it. Hordes of Canadian wealthy dodge taxes by sending profits offshore.)
This screed from me is perhaps a little shrill. But it no more shrill than the grotesque inconsistencies of a failing health care plan played against a background of terror and greed.
Through this preposterous maze of duplicity, I smile as I remember Brian Mulroney saying that Health Care was a “sacred trust.” The Obama about face will give courage to Canadians who think of system doesn’t work.
.
There has just occurred, in America, where Health Care reform is spinning out of control, a significant reflection of how greed triumphs over patriotism, how cupidity replaces honesty, and how, in the final analysis – it is every man for himself and the devil take etc….
The Health Care “change” is like a satellite in space gone berserk. Gone is the measured pace of change with its predictable route and final fulfillment.
It looks very much like Obama is caving in. He is wilting under pressure. He is, in the most stupefying turn of character, actually trying to say that the “public option” is just a small piece of the puzzle. If you check all the statements the President has made through the last several weeks. “public option” is utterly dominant. He was emphatic that the private insurance companies were no longer going to have their way. It looked like he could win. He gave up. Between the dissidents in his own party, running scared for 2010, the rigid Right-wing of the Republican party, the hooters and hollerers who shout down civil discourse at Town Hall Meetings, and his own fear of being labeled “Socialist” – he has mortified his supporters and left the promise of change in shambles.
This about face is so archetypically American It is so ideologically driven. It is so much a reflection of the need to have “less government,” whatever that means.
When Obama spoke about his plan (which he said could exclude public option) there we people attending who – in the spirit of the 2nd Amendment, came to the meeting with visible guns, even one with an automatic rifle strapped to his back! While the President pleads hopelessly for decency, Internal Revenue has name FIVE THOUSAND AMERICANS (!) who have cheated the tax department by sending money offshore and to Swiss banks. The same people who rail that any new “Socialist” system of health care can’t be paid for are themselves avoiding taxes by brazenly sneaking money out of the country. (We should not be smug about it. Hordes of Canadian wealthy dodge taxes by sending profits offshore.)
This screed from me is perhaps a little shrill. But it no more shrill than the grotesque inconsistencies of a failing health care plan played against a background of terror and greed.
Through this preposterous maze of duplicity, I smile as I remember Brian Mulroney saying that Health Care was a “sacred trust.” The Obama about face will give courage to Canadians who think of system doesn’t work.
.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
MONEY #3
The poor saps who bought houses they couldn’t afford and helped precipitate the sub-prime crisis have a lot in common with the titans of business who head toward bankruptcy? We tend to think that “ordinary” folks have no concept of reality, but that “business” does it better. Rubbish!
With the economy appearing to move toward positive ground, I wonder if the financial gurus, the seers and mavens are finally “getting it.”
I see no evidence that lessons have been learned. I see optimism based on statistics like rising car sales, due mostly to the “cash for clunkers” program and its European equivalent. France and Germany have both pronounced an end to the recession. Both have proudly announced a small increase in Gross National Product.
At the heart of the meltdown last year are the “toxic” securities - mortgage-backed securities that the ratings companies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor had given triple A ratings to. They were deeply flawed securities, but no one seemed to notice, as long as the housing market continued to soar. You could lend all kinds of money to people who were not properly screened, in some cases were almost criminally incapable of repaying a loan. “Criminal” may be too strong a word, except that the lending practices of many financial organizations were in fact based, not on documented proof that the borrower had the means to repay, but simple declaration of earnings – often totally false. But I am not going to chase the villains all over again. There’s been enough of that already.
The crisis was caused by a combination of greed and duplicity on the part of lenders, and naïve, gullible foolishness on the part of the borrowers. So it is those millions who were persuaded, coaxed, cajoled into borrowing money. The credit crisis was due to borrowing by idiots.
But wait. The number of failing or nearly failing companies are not run by naïve or gullible or financially childish executives. Look at a company on the edge of failure, just as you look at a poor soul with a mortgage worth more than the house that carries the mortgage. The companies borrowed all they could – believing that the economy has only one way to go – up. The rush to expand and to do takeovers was financed by borrowed money, and that money was loaned by “clever” people who believed that the company could afford the burden of debt. Until – until the economy turned sour and all the pro formas and financial and forecasts went down the drain.
These are not dumb-ass naïve underfinanced home-buyers. There are tycoons of business, industry and commerce. You need look no further than a company like CanWest Global which is crumbling under a mountain of debt. The debt might have been serviced if revenues had remained high. But hard times came. Revenues dropped. The company could not service its debt.
I shouldn’t single out one company. If you check the financial pages for failures or impending collapses, you will invariably find that the company was simply too optimistic and borrowed far too much. Even sadder, the financial organizations and private capital funds were lining up to lend the money.
All I am saying is that it is not simple folks who lack financial “smarts.” It is the educated. It is the financially intelligent, who are also feckless adventurers whose hunger for expansion has put them into bankruptcy court,
I don’t know the details of the soap company in Toronto that went bankrupt, leaving employees who were on strike stranded. I thought Unilever was an international company with very deep pockets. Do I guess correctly that this Toronto Lever Brothers plant where they make Dove soap, was bought by someone else? And might I be right in presuming that the buyer of the company went into debt to make the purchase? Would I be further wrong if I believed their business could not survive a financial meltdown? Not only the workers suffer, but the people who hold the bonds now have wallpaper.
I remember when Olympia and York, the skyrocketing multi-billion dollar company owned by the Reichmans, went bankrupt. They say the Canary Warf project did them in. I say hubris did them in. They borrowed at the lowest possible rate, which meant short term obligations, but when those instruments came due, the Reichmans had no money. Corporate greed? Long term debt might have cost more, but it would not have come due in the shirt run.
I am now in far deeper than I intended to be. All I can say, as a non-economist, is that it is not just poor saps buying homes they can’t afford. It is bright, astute, financially astute business people who have cut their own throats.
With the economy appearing to move toward positive ground, I wonder if the financial gurus, the seers and mavens are finally “getting it.”
I see no evidence that lessons have been learned. I see optimism based on statistics like rising car sales, due mostly to the “cash for clunkers” program and its European equivalent. France and Germany have both pronounced an end to the recession. Both have proudly announced a small increase in Gross National Product.
At the heart of the meltdown last year are the “toxic” securities - mortgage-backed securities that the ratings companies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor had given triple A ratings to. They were deeply flawed securities, but no one seemed to notice, as long as the housing market continued to soar. You could lend all kinds of money to people who were not properly screened, in some cases were almost criminally incapable of repaying a loan. “Criminal” may be too strong a word, except that the lending practices of many financial organizations were in fact based, not on documented proof that the borrower had the means to repay, but simple declaration of earnings – often totally false. But I am not going to chase the villains all over again. There’s been enough of that already.
The crisis was caused by a combination of greed and duplicity on the part of lenders, and naïve, gullible foolishness on the part of the borrowers. So it is those millions who were persuaded, coaxed, cajoled into borrowing money. The credit crisis was due to borrowing by idiots.
But wait. The number of failing or nearly failing companies are not run by naïve or gullible or financially childish executives. Look at a company on the edge of failure, just as you look at a poor soul with a mortgage worth more than the house that carries the mortgage. The companies borrowed all they could – believing that the economy has only one way to go – up. The rush to expand and to do takeovers was financed by borrowed money, and that money was loaned by “clever” people who believed that the company could afford the burden of debt. Until – until the economy turned sour and all the pro formas and financial and forecasts went down the drain.
These are not dumb-ass naïve underfinanced home-buyers. There are tycoons of business, industry and commerce. You need look no further than a company like CanWest Global which is crumbling under a mountain of debt. The debt might have been serviced if revenues had remained high. But hard times came. Revenues dropped. The company could not service its debt.
I shouldn’t single out one company. If you check the financial pages for failures or impending collapses, you will invariably find that the company was simply too optimistic and borrowed far too much. Even sadder, the financial organizations and private capital funds were lining up to lend the money.
All I am saying is that it is not simple folks who lack financial “smarts.” It is the educated. It is the financially intelligent, who are also feckless adventurers whose hunger for expansion has put them into bankruptcy court,
I don’t know the details of the soap company in Toronto that went bankrupt, leaving employees who were on strike stranded. I thought Unilever was an international company with very deep pockets. Do I guess correctly that this Toronto Lever Brothers plant where they make Dove soap, was bought by someone else? And might I be right in presuming that the buyer of the company went into debt to make the purchase? Would I be further wrong if I believed their business could not survive a financial meltdown? Not only the workers suffer, but the people who hold the bonds now have wallpaper.
I remember when Olympia and York, the skyrocketing multi-billion dollar company owned by the Reichmans, went bankrupt. They say the Canary Warf project did them in. I say hubris did them in. They borrowed at the lowest possible rate, which meant short term obligations, but when those instruments came due, the Reichmans had no money. Corporate greed? Long term debt might have cost more, but it would not have come due in the shirt run.
I am now in far deeper than I intended to be. All I can say, as a non-economist, is that it is not just poor saps buying homes they can’t afford. It is bright, astute, financially astute business people who have cut their own throats.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
WHERE ARE THE READERS?
I am about as sentimental as they come. The older I get, the more easily I shudder and sob – especially in movies, or at concerts where my insides coalesce into goo when I listen to “L’Apres midi D’un Faun.”
So I was sitting watching the highly entertaining, superbly acted, beautifully scripted (thanks to Nora Ephron who can squeeze tears out of a turnip) Julie and Julia.
Julie is a failed writer who works on the phones answering grief-stricken callers following the 9/11 disaster. She decides to write a blog about cooking all of the recipes in Julia Child’s “The Art of French Cooking.”
This is not a critique of the film. I leave that to others. I was, for me, and perhaps for thousands of other bloggers, an event to share. She (Julie) wonders if anyone is reading her blog. She goes to it daily, proceeding with her thoughts as she cooked the Julia Child’s recipes. Perhaps that’s what I’m missing: daily.
I find myself forgetting that I have things to say that are being left unsaid. I will never find myself a faithful reader group unless I start to arrive daily with my thoughts. From time to time I appear on Mark’s Musings, where he never lets a day go by without two items to provoke response. Julie did it too. She did not let a day go by. She built an audience.
I used to have one because I showed up every day and yelled or teased, or grated, or laughed – at the world around us. People phoned.
Now they don’t even bother to write.
So I was sitting watching the highly entertaining, superbly acted, beautifully scripted (thanks to Nora Ephron who can squeeze tears out of a turnip) Julie and Julia.
Julie is a failed writer who works on the phones answering grief-stricken callers following the 9/11 disaster. She decides to write a blog about cooking all of the recipes in Julia Child’s “The Art of French Cooking.”
This is not a critique of the film. I leave that to others. I was, for me, and perhaps for thousands of other bloggers, an event to share. She (Julie) wonders if anyone is reading her blog. She goes to it daily, proceeding with her thoughts as she cooked the Julia Child’s recipes. Perhaps that’s what I’m missing: daily.
I find myself forgetting that I have things to say that are being left unsaid. I will never find myself a faithful reader group unless I start to arrive daily with my thoughts. From time to time I appear on Mark’s Musings, where he never lets a day go by without two items to provoke response. Julie did it too. She did not let a day go by. She built an audience.
I used to have one because I showed up every day and yelled or teased, or grated, or laughed – at the world around us. People phoned.
Now they don’t even bother to write.
THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF....
Toronto’s wonderful “who goes when” traffic signal system requires a little patience. It has several different modes: one for streetcars (or as we like to call them – Light Rail Transit LRT) have their own light, through traffic has its turn, and then there is one for the left-turners. There is not however, one for pedestrians, who sometimes have to battle impatient drivers for the right to cross. But in Toronto, where the streets are “pedestrian-friendly” cars give way to walkers. Even though the walkers often stroll maddeningly across while one taps fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, they are still; privileged.
All this explanation leads to one special road-crossing, angry, probably mentally unstable man pushing a shopping cart in the special way that the homeless have. He was crossing on a green light, but because of his snail-like pace, the light changed, permitting left-turners to proceed. He trudged bravely and agonizingly slowly across. Glaring at waiting cars (one of whom, may have appeared to be impatient) he administered the “finger” and continued crawling. The arrow permitting a left turn changed to red. The angry man was however, not finished with the motorists. He turned what he could of his lean and careworn body to the stranded left-turn cars and gave them a full-front masturbatory pantomime. No one honked. No one yelled. A destitute street person made it across.
I have a few questions. Where was he going anyway? What was better on the other side of the street? But more than that, the slightly guilty feeling of sitting in a well, air-conditioned car, while a piece of social debris from our presumably caring society, inched across the road. What, if anything, can we do about the wreckage we have helped create? What can we do to restore some order in the lives of the totally dislocated, often schizophrenic non-members of our society?
We all should remember that in both Canada and the U.S. there was a major move to empty mental institutions and, in the words of the politicians – from Ronald Reagan, to Mike Harris, “put them into the community where they can be cared for.” In both countries we moved them out, but not into new community facilities. Those facilities did not and still do not exist. I remember when CUPE railed against the move and all the union-bashers were claiming that CUPE members only wanted to cling to their jobs.
Here we are many years later, and we still struggle with horded of sidewalk-sleepers, panhandlers, and the general flotsam of an uncaring society.
I have no solution. All I would hope as that we do not treat these poor souls as outcasts and even outlaws. We haven’t found the time to care.
All this explanation leads to one special road-crossing, angry, probably mentally unstable man pushing a shopping cart in the special way that the homeless have. He was crossing on a green light, but because of his snail-like pace, the light changed, permitting left-turners to proceed. He trudged bravely and agonizingly slowly across. Glaring at waiting cars (one of whom, may have appeared to be impatient) he administered the “finger” and continued crawling. The arrow permitting a left turn changed to red. The angry man was however, not finished with the motorists. He turned what he could of his lean and careworn body to the stranded left-turn cars and gave them a full-front masturbatory pantomime. No one honked. No one yelled. A destitute street person made it across.
I have a few questions. Where was he going anyway? What was better on the other side of the street? But more than that, the slightly guilty feeling of sitting in a well, air-conditioned car, while a piece of social debris from our presumably caring society, inched across the road. What, if anything, can we do about the wreckage we have helped create? What can we do to restore some order in the lives of the totally dislocated, often schizophrenic non-members of our society?
We all should remember that in both Canada and the U.S. there was a major move to empty mental institutions and, in the words of the politicians – from Ronald Reagan, to Mike Harris, “put them into the community where they can be cared for.” In both countries we moved them out, but not into new community facilities. Those facilities did not and still do not exist. I remember when CUPE railed against the move and all the union-bashers were claiming that CUPE members only wanted to cling to their jobs.
Here we are many years later, and we still struggle with horded of sidewalk-sleepers, panhandlers, and the general flotsam of an uncaring society.
I have no solution. All I would hope as that we do not treat these poor souls as outcasts and even outlaws. We haven’t found the time to care.
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