Susan Enan-- Bring on the Wonder

Monotonic

Sheryl Crow-- Sideways

Fish Cakes and the Fried Daddies

Cat Stevens-- Lady D'Arbanville

Griffin House-- Better Than Love

Chemical Brothers-- Do It Again

Kelly Clarkson-- Irvine

Jeremy Messersmith-- Love You To Pieces

Anthony and the Johnsons-- Fistful of Love

The Democrats' Epic Failure

The Paralysis of the State
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 12, 2010

Sometimes a local issue perfectly illuminates a larger national problem. Such is the case with the opposition of the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, to construction of a new tunnel between his state and New York.

Christie argues that a state that is currently facing multibillion-dollar annual deficits cannot afford a huge new spending project that is already looking to be $5 billion overbudget. His critics argue that this tunnel is exactly the sort of infrastructure project that New Jersey needs if it’s to prosper in the decades ahead.

Both sides are right. But what nobody seems to be asking is: Why are important projects now unaffordable? Decades ago, when the federal and state governments were much smaller, they had the means to undertake gigantic new projects, like the Interstate Highway System and the space program. But now, when governments are bigger, they don’t.

The answer is what Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal once called demosclerosis. Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence.

Daniel DiSalvo, a political scientist at the City College of New York, has a superb survey of the problem in the new issue of National Affairs. DiSalvo notes that nationally, state and local workers earn on average $14 more per hour in wages and benefits than their private sector counterparts. A city like Buffalo has as many public workers as it did in 1950, even though it has lost half its population.

These arrangements grew gradually. Through much of the 20th century, staunch liberals like Franklin Roosevelt opposed public sector unions. George Meany of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. argued that it is “impossible to bargain collectively with government.”

Private sector managers have to compete in the marketplace, so they have an incentive to push back against union requests. Ideally, some balance is found between the needs of workers and companies. Government managers possess a monopoly on their services and have little incentive to resist union demands. It would only make them unpopular.

In addition, public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product. DiSalvo notes that between 1989 ad 2004, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was the biggest spender in American politics, giving $40 million to federal candidates. The largest impact is on low-turnout local elections. The California prison guard union recently sent a signal by spending $200,000 to defeat a state assemblyman who had tried to reduce costs.

In states across the country, elected leaders raise state employee salaries in the fat years and then are careful to placate the unions by raising future pension benefits in the lean ones. Even if cost-conscious leaders are elected, they find their hands tied by pension commitments and employee contracts.

The end result is sclerotic government. Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.

This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure. The party believes in the positive uses of government. But if you want the country to share that belief, you have to provide a government that is nimble, tough-minded and effective. That means occasionally standing up to the excessive demands of public employee unions. Instead of standing up to those demands, the party has become captured by the unions. Liberal activism has become paralyzed by its own special interests.

The antigovernment-types perpetually cry less, less, less. The loudest liberals cry more, more, more. Someday there will be a political movement that is willing to make choices, that is willing to say “this but not that.”

Someday.

Stevie Wonder-- Free

Band of Horses-- The Funeral

John Lennon-- Woman

The Knife-- Heartbeats

Big Head Todd and The Monsters-- Broken-Hearted Savior

St Lola in the Fields-- Don't Say

Commercial break

Black Theama-- Eih Ya'ni

Julian Pereta-- Wonder Why

Elton John-- Sixty Years On

Metric-- Sick Muse

Unwinding Fairy Tales

The Storytellers
by Ellen Handler Spitz

Year after year, we print and re-print fairy tales. What is it that makes them valuable? Should we keep telling them, and if so, why? What about their detractors, the self-appointed child protectors who complain about their violence and cruelty, not to mention a different set of worriers who protest their “false” happy endings? And surely the tales do not teach morality. Remember the egregious brutality of that spoiled princess in The Frog King who, after hurling the little animal who helped her against the wall, gets rewarded. And we quail at even a mention of The Jew in the Brambles, an outrageous portrayal of barbarism and prejudice, which, in Maria Tatar’s new selection of the Grimm fairy tales, wisely appears only in a separate section marked for adults.

Nor do the tales psychologize or philosophize. What they do, instead, is what all great children’s literature does: they literalize metaphor. They lower their glittering buckets deep into the psyche’s well. Loyalty lifts spells. Jealousy becomes murder. Love trumps death. Fortune reverses. Wishes come true.

Not quite like ancient myths, which use nymphs and satyrs to explain recurring natural phenomena; nor like fables, whose timeless moral lessons are parlayed through the escapades of animal characters; nor like legends, which exude the pungent aromas of one particular locale and its history, fairy tales are stories spun into gold at the wooden wheel of a miller’s daughter: stories made to summon wonder, horror, enchantment—and not necessarily anything more. Uncanny in the purest sense of the word, which is to say, both bizarre and familiar at once, they are meant to be told, not read, and they truly possess an inexhaustible power. Children hold on tight, turn pale, close their eyes, and beg for more.

The Grimm Reader, a compilation of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, newly translated by Tatar, who has published voluminously and illuminatingly on these writings for decades, comes to us with a mischievous title. It reminds us that, in the wake of global terrorism, parents and teachers are questioning ever more nervously what sort of tales we ought to be telling children and why. In Lilith some years ago, Naomi Danis aired these anxieties, with responses from twenty writers and editors associated with children’s literature, a significant number of whom warned against “smarmy” sentimentality and against books that offer superficial “healing.”

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) were brothers who collaborated closely throughout their lives. Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, they studied law at Marburg, and through their linguistic and philological studies, became fascinated by age-old popular German oral cultural traditions, which they feared were in danger of disappearing under the threat of industrialization. They began to gather tales and songs and amassed a monumental collection but did not readily reveal their sources, which later proved, in many cases, to be not of direct folk or peasant origins but filtered through intermediaries of their own social circle.

In her introductory pages, Tatar reminds us how the Grimm brothers altered successive editions of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which were originally published in 1812 and 1815, cleansing them of erotic innuendo—notably of references to pre-marital sex, pregnancy, and incest—and hoping thereby to make them more suitable for youthful readers. Violence, however, was fine. Elsewhere Tatar has shown that Wilhelm Grimm was also ready to bowdlerize the tales by routinely changing mothers into stepmothers (as in Hansel and Gretel), so as to preserve the sanctity of motherhood and, beyond that, to seek on all feasible occasions to link feminine attractiveness with self-sacrifice and to associate feminine beauty with the virtues of diligence and domestic labor.

One of the finest qualities of this book is that, light and unencumbered by annotation, it is clearly meant to be read lovingly to children. Fairy tales were originally recited aloud, and that format gave the listeners considerable power. They were able to exercise a direct and partially controlling effect on each recounting. If attention waned, stories were modified. They could be spiced, embellished, or curtailed. But contemporary American adults rarely tell fairy tales to children anymore. We read, slavishly adhering to a text. Such reliance denotes a diminished narrative inventiveness among us, even a dereliction in regards to the sacred task of passing on our cultural heritage. With this new book in hand, however, readers may be inspired to depart from the page and improvise. The translation is fluid and open, as if welcoming interpolation. In Rapunzel, for example, finding the line “Let your hair down” too blunt and insufficiently evocative, I intone rhythmically instead: “Let down your golden hair.”

The Grimm Reader also stimulates interpretation and improvisation by eschewing illustrations. In so doing, it provokes serious reflection on the function of pictures in children’s books. The dearth in this text makes us weigh their role as enhancers or detractors. Arguments against them of course claim that they tend to fix a particular visualization and tamp down what should be left loose and free. After being exposed, say, to Gustave Doré’s haunting engravings of Little Red Riding Hood, it would be hard to imagine those scenes any other way. Here, by contrast, words are given license to perform their sorcery unaided. Pages are decorated only occasionally with delicate borders, medallions, or illuminated letters. This pleases me immensely: in a culture determined to flood itself with garish, sensational imagery to the detriment of the unaided word, this book reminds us that, as Tatar herself has written, the words of children’s stories are magic wands in and of themselves.

Rustic, often coarse, yet sparkling with silver and gold, the Grimms’ tales match, with an almost miraculous precision, children’s own ways of thinking. They transform contiguity into causality, and they maximize contrast. Their smoky looking glasses mirror, to our glossy, high-tech, twenty-first century children, hidden aspects of their own inner lives, buried treasure all too rarely tapped. I cannot understand those who deem these fairy tales unsuitable for children, and those who would purge them of their so-called inappropriate elements. If they find these old tales powerful enough to require censorship, then perhaps they themselves have not outgrown them. Fearlessly and sometimes fearfully, the Grimms embrace a welter of intractable human dilemmas—themes that, our advancing science and technology notwithstanding, have never vanished from life. Deceptively simple, their magic appeals to us not only when we are young. They perform a lasting and invaluable educational task: they teach us to marvel, to quest, to seek. We learn from their twists and turns—from a girl’s seven brothers transformed into ravens and then back again, or from a greedy fishwife who ends her days in a pigsty—that truth may abide in the strangeness of fantasy.

Joan Baez sings Dylan-- Hard Rain's-a-Gonna Fall

Leon Russel-- A Song For You

Naming Names

Lindsay Lohan, 24, is all over the news because she's a celebrity drug addict, while Justin Allen 23, Brett Linley 29, Matthew Weikert 29, Justus Bartett 27, Dave Santos 21, Chase Stanley 21, Jesse Reed 26, Matthew Johnson 21, Zachary Fisher 24, Brandon King 23, Christopher Goeke 23,......and Sheldon Tate 27, are all Marines... who gave their lives this week, with no media mention.

The Great Divider

Barack Obama’s World of Them vs. Us
October 1, 2010 10:57 A.M.
By Victor Davis Hanson

On his latest speaking tour, the president has continued to talk about a traditional midterm election — in which the country assesses the sitting administration’s agenda — as if it were some epic Manichean struggle, something akin to race relations: Jim Crow, civil rights, and now, most recently, the abolition of slavery. At best, Obama is implying that a referendum on his policies is of similar magnitude to an existential battle like the Civil War; at worst, he implies by analogy that he is the crusading abolitionist and his opponents the forces of slaveholding evil. And all of this from someone who campaigned on the notion of unity and national healing.

I’m sorry, but opposing higher deficits or cap-and-trade is not the same as denying someone civil rights, and Obama, the Ivy League graduate, is not a Susan B. Anthony or Martin Luther King Jr.

In Obama’s world, there is no such thing as legitimate skepticism of his policies, even though they seem to millions to be radical and contrary to the notions of limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom, notions that have long set us apart from our Western constitutional cousins in Europe. Instead (as can be seen in his latest Rolling Stone interview), those who oppose his policies — from the tea-party groups that resent his background to that destructive force on the national scene, Fox News — represent darker forces.

Looking back at 20 months, we see this Nixonian them-vs.-us world in which good progressives battle against those who make more than $250,000 per year; greedy doctors taking out tonsils; police who stereotype and act stupidly; Arizonan xenophobes who snatch kids out for ice cream; Islamophobes who would deny constitutional rights to Muslim moderates at Ground Zero; and racists who have traditionally stood in the way (mutatis mutandis, as they do now) of freeing the slaves.

All this psychodrama is beneath a president. It is a prescription for tearing the country in two — and about the dumbest thing you could do just weeks before an election.