I spent the morning in Berkeley, poking around on Shattuck Avenue while my car got an oil change. I went out to breakfast in Walnut Square, then walked downtown to a bookstore and the library. I picked up the car around lunchtime, stopped off at the natural grocery for a few items, and then headed back out to the hinterlands. A lovely day, one that reminded me of what I appreciate about the city and the country. Berkeley is jam-packed with interesting things to see and do, and is truly on the cutting edge of good food and books. Love it! But I’m much happier not being constantly bombarded by the attendant sensory overload. Out here where the air is fresh and the pace of life slower, I can more fully savor material abundance. It’s the best of both worlds, and a very nice place to be.

It’s documented fact that ever since Ronald Reagan was president there has been a massive upwards redistribution of wealth in this country. Not only is American-style capitalism unabashedly rigged to favor profits and capital over human rights, the gap between the haves and have-nots has dramatically widened over the past three decades, squeezing the middle class in the process. The silver lining in the current mess is that politicians are being smoked out and forced to reveal the principles they truly stand for. Not content with the widened economic inequality of the past generation, Republicans now unabashedly want to pull up the drawbridge and let the beleaguered masses pay for whatever services they want or expect their government to provide. Meanwhile, the current poster child for corporate bad behavior is California’s Pacific Gas and Electric, which has run out of any plausible deniability for its criminal negligence in protecting public safety at even the most elementary level. If we’re lucky, we will see the tide begin to turn as the election season gets underway and people start tuning into cause and effect on public policy. Heaven knows, the present farce in Washington is unsustainable.

Which reminds me of the best joke I heard this week:

VA QUAKE BREAKING NEWS!!! 
The USGS has determined that the epicenter of the Virginia earthquake was in a cemetery just outside of DC. 
The cause appears to be all of our Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves.

“Another great week for Corporate America!

The economy is flatlining. Global financial markets are in turmoil. Your stock price is down about 15 percent in three weeks. Your customers have lost all confidence in the economy. Your employees, at least the American ones, are cynical and demoralized. Your government is paralyzed.

Want to know who is to blame, Mr. Big Shot Chief Executive? Just look in the mirror because the culprit is staring you in the face.”

By the cool water the breeze murmurs, rustling
Through apple branches, while from quivering leaves
Streams down deep slumber.

– Sappho (c. 600 B.C.E.)

J.R. R. Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings about a pastoral land called Ithilien, strategically located on the periphery of the Dark Lord Sauron’s realm, that was overrun by evil forces in the years preceding the War of the Ring. When the hobbits Frodo and Sam pass through there with Gollum on their dangerous journey into Mordor, they find traces of Ithilien’s once abundant natural beauty. Mother Nature being eternal, over time the land of Ithilien is restored to its former splendor, once the King has returned to his rightful place on the throne of Gondor.

“Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjoram’s and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.”

Fictional though it may be, Ithilien is a lovely image to keep in mind in considering America’s faded beauty and the scorched earth tactics that permeate the public commons, preventing our ability to avoid cyclical calamity—let alone make progress towards restoring our faded glory. Petty empires may rise and fall, but Mother Nature always bats last.

I did a dumb thing moving computer files around the other day, resulting in the system crashing around the same time the stock market began tumbling down. The computer still worked, but the stored content was stripped bare and all the programs were welcoming me as if I were just signing on for the first time. I spent a few panicky minutes trying to retrace my steps and patch Humpty Dumpty together again, but weird things started replicating and freezing up, and I fortunately had the presence of mind to recognize I was out of my depth. I turned off the machine and let both it and myself cool down over the weekend.

Yesterday I schlepped the thing into Apple’s Genius Bar, where the friendly geeks were most helpful and succeeded in recapturing most of the lost content. I was prepared for the worst, so it was a nice turn of events. The thing is a mess, but at least I can find the stuff I really don’t want to lose. Now it becomes fodder for the massive organizing project I have underway. Better late than never. Creative chaos is my medium, but there comes a time when disorder is no longer amusing. I got the memo on that awhile ago, I’m just still playing catchup. The silver lining in this experience is that it kick starts it all onto a new field. There is always more to explore.

“The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist: it is also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed. It rests on a naïve, solipsistic and exceptionalist faith that for America it will all work out in the end, because America is “the greatest nation in the world”. They take solace in tautology: America is great – this they know – because Fox News tells them so.”

Sarah Churchwell: “The willful ignorance that has dragged the U.S. to the brink”

“I keep saying I am not a Democrat because I have no idea what their economic policy is, and I am not a Republican because I know EXACTLY what their economic policy is. That is our policy choices: Inept cluelessness on one side, and hapless fantasy-based lunacy on the other.”

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/08/something-happening-here/

Reading about all the tantrum-throwing going on in the wake of the debt ceiling deal in Washington is making me feel as if I live in some sort of parallel universe. Where have all these people who are Shocked! SHOCKED! at the dysfunction in our political system been for the past several decades? I attribute some of it to the fact that we don’t have a functional news media in this country, leading to (among a whole host of other things) intelligent people who theoretically should know better being ultimately confused about the distinction between advocacy and legislating. The former involves expressing one’s personal vision for an ideal society, while the latter involves engaging with the messy realities of modern day politics. Different realms, and they need to be effectively bridged in more ways than they are at present.

I’ve managed to track down a few voices in the midst of the murk that appear to share my take on things. They can be found here, here and here.

My favorite financial blogger nails an important back story aspect of the surreal drama playing out at fever pitch in Washington. If we had a functional news media in this country, this story about credit rating agencies would be getting a lot of attention.

“I stated my long held views about them: That they were a prime enabler of the credit crisis; that they were one of the most corrupt institutions in the United States, and had sold their ratings to the highest bidder. That their senior executives were criminally liable and deserved jail time. That S&P, Moody’s and Fitch themselves deserved to be executed — the same corporate death penalty that Arthur Anderson received. I stated I was perplexed as to why they were not put down like rabid dogs.”