On his blog,, the indefatigable Tom Clark salutes Terence Winch today.
A toast
to both these gentlemen
on the occasion of this post.
To the question above, the answer is
a) sin, b), gin, c) the din in your local gin, d) a win-win situation.
"Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine." -- DL
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Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of "The Awl," has posted the first poem of 2012 to contain an epigraph from Immanuel Kant on a theme usually associated with Edmund Burke. For more, click here. If you are willing to take a brief survey that wll help us serve you better, please answer any of the following questions prior to hanging up:
(1) Is "beauty is truth" a meaningless statetment?
(2) Is a "turkey dinner" a good example of the sublime or should Cole Porter go jump in the lake?
(3) Will the Braves go in front of the Mets on a Jason Hayward home run?
(4) Is baseball sublime? Is basketball beautiful? Where does that leave football?
(5) Is it better to have love and lost than never to have loved at all?
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I just got the July / August issue of The Atlantic and note that the lead article, judging by size of type and prominence of cover placement, is "Why Women Still Can't Have it All" by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Can't wait to read it. Although as a man I can't recall the subject of "having it all" ever coming up in conversation with peers, I am willing to go out on a limb just this once and predict that in twelve months time, an op-ed column in a major metropolitan newspaper, or a cover story in a national magazine, will appear arguing the same or the opposite position using the first-person point of view and a sincere not to say heartfelt tone, and will elicit letters to the editor, or subsequent columns in other papers, saying (1) I thought I could have it all, but then my teenage daughter and eight-year-old son started acting out in school, and when I told my boss that I wanted to spend more time with my kids, she said wanting to spend more time with your kids is this town's euphemism for you got fired, baby, and by golly I realized then and there that you can't have it all, even though I am the chief operating officer of a Fortune 500 company, and I told my friend I was going to write this article and she said you of all people must not do so, or (2) This is news? No one can have it all, or (3) Feminism lied when it promised you could have it all, or (4) Feminism never promised you a rose garden, or (5) What about men? Is it still a man's world?, or (6) It is the hard cold sober truth that no one can achieve the ideal balance between family and career, because there always will be trade-offs, with sidebars on the American lifestyle, the fate of the "feminine mystique," the problem of teenage obesity, a historical recap of the Equal Rights Amendment, and a comparison between the differing expectations of American and European women? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen before les jeux sont fait. -- DL
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Back in January 2008, when the media was fixated in Iowa, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidency and be re-elected. Stacey can confirm this prediction. Scarcely infallible, I picked Kerry to win in 2004. Nevertheless -- I think it's fun to go on the record with a prediction, and here is mine of the season:
I believe that in my lifetime the Unted States will go to war with China. And by war I mean military conflict -- to be fought primarily on the sea. It will require the shifting of our navy to the Pacific, which is under way, and our disengagement from the fruitless and basically irrational forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, which are winding down, as the Obama Administration replaces boots on the ground with drone strikes in Pakistan and computer hacking in Iran.
Since this is an interactive blog, I invite you to choose the Sarajevo or pretext for the naval battles to come in the ironically named Pacific Ocean:
(1) China's ancient cultural conflict with Japan rears its head. The Chinese interfere with a Japanese ship, and the loss of face in Japan is such that they ask the US to intervene.
(2) Chinese efforts to control North Vietnam spills over into South Korea
(3) China presses spurious claims to mineral-rich islands off Japan and the Phillipines
(4) On the corporate level, China eats America's lunch because Chinese regulations put US firms at a decisive disadvantage
(5) A recession in China exposes the fundamental contradiction between the capitalism the Chinese practice and the government's repressive policies. Google makes its inroads. Riots break out among people whose consciousness has been raised. Among the rioters are parents dying to have more children than the government permits, laborers who feel exploited, and an intellectual class that learns there is a discrepancy between the government's official line and the truth -- as in: what were the real reasons the earthquake of May 2008 was so devastating?
Your pick, dear reader? -- DL
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When you read a newspaper after two weeks of shunning any,you may get excited at first (Bristol Myers develops anti-cancer medication without debilitating side-effects of chemo; professional hackers in Idaho are sabotaging Iran's nuclear program) before reality returns with a vengeance: twenty per-cent unemployment in Spain and Greece; Putin visits Merkel in Berlin to explain why Russia conintinues to support the murderous Syrian tyrant. (At the UN, only three countries voted against the resolution to condemn: Russia, China, and Cuba.) There is a chill in the air as the Dow Jones loses 250 points and the market is down for the year. Everone is afraid that a panic is just around the corner. This is the time for stoicism and a poker face. But then the news turns absurd, though in a macabre way, and the impulse to convert the ephemeral into an aesthetic product takes hold in the spirit of Paul Fussell, who died last week at age 88. According to Fussell, the decisively ironic tone of the modern temperament "originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War," World War I, the war to end all war. To the memory of Mr Fussell I dedicate this multiple choice of the week:
1) "Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, [the idea of college for all is] now doing more harm than good." Vocational training is better than "dumbed down college." Who said it?
a) An economist in the Wasington Post
b) "Square-jawed" Mitt Romney, who clinched his party's nomination
c) An old guy griping that things ain't what they used to be
d) Paul Fussell
e) Bernadette Peters upon being toild that she will receive a Tony Award on June 10 for her work in animal adoption.
2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh
3) Which of the following didn't happen last week:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) A New Yorker writer blogged that he was quitting Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg is a despot and you enter his pseudo-democratic realm at grave risk to your privacy
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, twittered his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that
1) The campaign finance laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is accompanying you is another
4) Screwing is one thing, but doing her while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody is afraid of looking ignorant
Extra credit if you can identify the fellow in the piocture and explaiun his relevance to this post.
-- DL
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I asked a friend who works on the Street to comment on the news of the colossal mishaps at JP Morgan Chase under golden boy Jamie Dimon's watch.
<<<
One of the more bizarre signs of Jamie Dimon's fall from grace is the way he is now often referred to in the media as "James Dimon." (You feel like saying, "Private eye?") The real money loser, though, unless the initial $2 billion, which has already widened to $5 billion, turns out to be only the beginning of a chasm, is his loss of the ability to argue down regulation in Washington. That regulation, whatever its virtues, and there's no doubt in my mind that the regulation is needed, just as there's no doubt it won't prevent future stealing, mismanagement, recessions, and depressions, is going to cost JPM and the other banks a fortune. And do you remember the way they howled when Spitzer forced them to cough up $1.4 billion for the privilege of not admitting guilt to collusion between research and investment banking? In the real world it's called a plea bargain; on Wall Street it's known as the "settlement" (sometimes inital capped) or, occasionally and longwindedly, the "settlement agreement." Of course enforcing the separation between IB and research cost, and costs, the companies a lot more than the one-time fine. Volcker will be expensive, too.
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In other financial goings on. . . in the last twenty-four hours I have heard from pros that the best place to put your money at the present time is
a) A thirty-year mortgage at the lowest rate you can get from a reputable bank. "Cash is going to be a lot more expensive when prices and costs start to rise, and inflation comes back big."
b) Cash in US dollars as the last stable currency in a worldwide flight to safety. "The chances of a global recession beginning in the fourth-quarter approach 100%, not so much because of the mess in the Eurzone but because China and India are slowing."
c) Dividend paying blue chip stocks with healthy balance sheets and free cash flow -- Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Microsoft, Intel, Coke, Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Caterpillar, Disney, IBM, Procter and Gamble, GE, American Express. "The size of the dividend is less important than the company's record of growing the dividend."
d) Gold (always the default position for 5 to 10% of the investment public).
e) Kenneth Koch's poem in which the crazed poet gives away "the money you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. / The man who asked for it was shabby / and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold."
The only thing they all agree on is to avoid bonds, especially long-term bonds, and Treasury notes. -- DL
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I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say
by Anthony Madrid
A creative communications, branding, and resources consultancy founded by Victoria C. Rowan
