Last Year of the Decade

This is a difficult time of year.  I normally feel tremendous pressure in the last few weeks of the year to frantically see how many films, books and musical performances I can catch up on to be able to weigh in on those things.   This year, I freely admit that I was a bit reclusive this year, especially with respect to films so my usual year end summary will have a little different twist to it this year, since my authority as a music and media critic is severely limited.

Winners-

The American Worker.  Despite fears of a global slowdown, unemployment in all categories remains at a half century low.  The impact of the trade wars has not damaged the American worker, and many businesses are having difficulty attracting skilled workers.  Real wages are up and more workers are willing to change jobs.  Labor participation rates are up after an extended period of stagnation.  The strong labor market is being widely experienced.  African American and Hispanic unemployment are also at historic lows.  The state of the U.S. labor market will make Trump very tough to beat.

The American Investor-  The S&P 500 was up over 30% this year, confounding the Doom Crew.  Since Paul Krugman predicted that the markets would never recover from Trump, the market is up approximately 40%.

Tulsi Gabbard.  Gabbard is the only politician outside Trump that is willing to push against the establishment and core of her own party.  She single handedly destroyed the candidacy of Kamala Harris, forcefully took on Hillary Clinton (eliciting dark jokes about her impending suicide), and did not vote for impeachment.  There are plenty of points of disagreement with her, but you have to admire her chutzpah.

Losers-

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg.  His company introduced a line responsible for two tragic airline accidents, and then pushed deadlines for re-introducing the 737 Max, forcing the FAA to publicly chastise the company.  American Airlines flight attendants said they wouldn’t fly in the plane and the whole episode raised issues about the cozy relationship between the airlines and their regulator.

Adam Neumann and SoftBank.  Neumann walked away with a $1.7 billion “golden parachute” after We Work’s initial public offering failed, and the company announced layoffs of thousands.  SoftBank bailed out the company after it came close to missing a payroll and astonishingly announced, “The fund now recognizes that the public markets are looking for businesses with a path to profitability.”  Duh.

These two spectacular flameouts beg the question of whether you would ever fly in a 737 Max or put any of your retirement money with SoftBank.

Nike, the N.B.A. and the Vatican- All three genuflected in front of the Beijing regime.  Pope Francis gave the Chinese government a voice in the selection of bishops in China.  Oh, how we miss JPII.

Notable Deaths-

There were a number of notable deaths in 2019: Doris Day, Ginger Baker (of Cream) Toni Morrison, Harold Bloom, Caroll Spinney (Big Bird), Bart Starr, Valerie Harper and Paul Volcker among them.

But the most notable and surprising death may have been The Phillips Curve.  The Phillips Curve was a widely accepted relationship between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate.  The Phillips Curve would predict a much higher inflation rate, given and unemployment rate of 3.5%.  There are various theories of why inflation is so subdued, especially considering trade restraints that many would have would have added to inflation.  Yet inflation is hovering around 2%.   I think we can have a memorial service for the Phillips Curve.

New Words-

Two of the public intellectuals that I follow coined new words.  Deirdre McCloskey coined “innovism” as a better descriptive term than capitalism.  Daniel Pipes coined the term “civilizationist” to counter the term “nationalist.”  So I decided to follow suit and coin a few of my own:

De-networking- Much has been written about the importance of networking to advance your career.  I have taken a contrary position and have asserted that de-networking, that is dissociating yourself from individuals that are a waste of time and/or a drain on your time and resources can be even more important than networking.

Wantrepreneur- A wantrepreneur is someone that has suffered a career disruption or layoff and is going it alone as a “consultant” or in a loose confederation with others in an “eat-what-you-kill” arrangement, or someone in the gig economy.  In either case, it is someone that hops right back to a corporate job once an appropriate opportunity presents itself. 

Nerdgasm- The exquisite pleasure and heightened sense of stimulation one feels when fully engaged in certain intellectual pursuits.  A Nerdgasm can occur during a book fair, lecture series, new museum exhibitions or opening a brand new book that you’ve been lusting after for some time.

Finally, here are my Best of 2019-

Books

Fiction- Property by Lionel Shriver.  This collection of short stories and a novelette center on property ownership.  Shriver is a brilliant writer as well as a steadfast foil to the woke literary community.

Nonfiction- Lake of the Ozarks by Bill Geist.  Geist’s book is a timepiece, a trip down memory lane as he recounts summer working at a summer camp in the Lake of the Ozarks.  This book is best read in the late summer on the back porch with a glass of wine and the cicadas chirping.

Film- Never Look Away.  This is the best film I have seen in a decade.  A young artist is caught between the soul crushing regimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Its three hour length nearly scared me off but the film never dragged.  Screenplay, acting, music score were all superb.

Musical Performances- Zepparella.  With great apologies to violin virtuoso, Itzhak Perlman (see documentary Itzhak), this Led Zeppelin tribute band had me transfixed.  This high energy, young, all female band was perhaps the best tribute bad I have ever seen.  Perlman was wonderful but Zepparella was loads of fun.

All in all, 2019 wasn't a bad year.

Bloody Fall

This week my post will be short and somber.  While many of us are getting ready for the holidays, this autumn has been an awful and brutal one for three families that have experienced the unimaginable.

Take a good, hard look at these three pictures.  They are young, beautiful, and vibrant.  Their personalities sparkle in these photos.

And they are all gone.  Taken from us.   Brutally and viciously.  One in New York.  Two in Chicago. 

I don’t know any of them, or their families.  My only connection is that I know the places where each one died.  I know the 7-11 where Akiera Boston was shot.  I have parked in the garage where Ruth George was strangled.  And I have walked the staircase in Morningside Park where Tessa Majors struggled up before she died.  I have been to all those places. 

All three died this fall. 

Look at those faces.

Each one killed,  each more heinously than the next. 

Akiera was 16, and a cheerleader at Simeon high school.  Simeon has a very good public school football team.  Akiera should have had the time of her life, cheering and watching her classmates win football games.  Instead, someone drove up beside the car she was in, fired shots at her boyfriend, missing him but hitting her.  Akiera didn’t get to cheer at one game this fall.   To my knowledge, Akiera’s murderer has not been caught.

Ruth George, 19, a sophomore at UIC was sexually assaulted and strangled in the UIC parking garage by a thug out on parole with an armed robbery conviction.  Ruth was a kinesiology major, and by all accounts, a sweet and caring young woman.  She had previously ignored the suspect’s catcalls.

Perhaps the worst—if there can be such a thing--- was Tessa Majors.  Tessa Majors, a freshman at Barnard, was confronted by three assailants in Morningside Park that wanted her phone and she fought back.  One assailant slashed and stabbed her.  She struggled up the staircase and died.  Two of her assailants were 13 and 14 years old.  They are looking for a third as of this writing.  13 and 14.  Children killing children.

Each one of these news stories punched me in the gut, even though I have no personal connection to any of them.  I can’t imagine the parent receiving that phone call that their daughter is never coming home again.  My heart just aches for each of them.  Three different girls of three different races bright and cheery, just taken from us.

Taken together the murder of these beautiful young women triggers a myriad of questions.  What kind of society are we becoming?  Why can’t we protect these young women?  Who failed them?   Police protection?  The schools they attended?  The criminal justice system?  The parents of the perpetrators?   Something is terribly wrong with a society that cannot protect girls like this. 

Are we so consumed with criminal justice reform that we are willing to accept this as collateral damage?  Do we really believe in Nancy Pelosi’s admonition that in each human there is “a spark of divinity?”  I don’t think there is any divinity in the thug that shot Akiera or the beast that strangled Ruth or even the young punks that stabbed Tessa. 

Please, look at these pictures.  And look again.  And tell me what you see.  And give me your thoughts on how we failed these young women and their families.  How do we keep these soulless animals from our girls?

And just as I drafted this, another 16 year old girl was shot and killed in Little Village here in Chicago. Her picture is posted below the rest.

What have we become?  Why can’t we protect these precious girls?  4 families are going to be without them this holiday season.

I am sick at heart.

Why I Am A (Sometimes) Populist

Daniel Pipes published an opinion piece in the Washington Times recently entitled Why I Am Not a Populist (www.danielpipes.org/19157/why-I-am-not-a-populist).  In his article, Pipes takes issue with the populist movement.  He opens his essay with, “Populism has made great strides in the West.  But it is misguided, and I greatly hope it fails.”  Pipes goes on to discredit populism and instead places the lion’s share of the blame on the Left.  Indeed, his closing line in his essay is, “So, be smart and oppose the Left, not the elite.”

When the State gets too remote and unaccountable to the people, populism bubbles up.  Brexit was a populist reaction to the unaccounatability of rule makers in Brussels.  In the U.S., it was regulators accountable to no one prescribing rules about toilet tanks, mortgages, microwave wattage, vaping and such.  For a time, the hottest job in America was “Chief Compliance Officer.”  When COMPLIANCE is the goal of a corporation, you know that things need to be shaken up.  Part of populism is hacking back on the thicket of regulations and spending more time answering to customers rather than bossy, self-important government bureaucrats.  What Dr. Pipes misses is that in certain industries, the corporate elite on the right actually LOVE bureaucrats.   The bureaucrats keep the small, agile competitors pinned down and smothered with rules and regulations.

Populism seeks to address fundamental imbalance in the economic system.  Even uber-capitalist Cliff Asness observed that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street had a great deal of overlap in the things they were complaining about, even though one movement was from the right, the other from the Left.  This became more pronounced when the government backstopped Wall Street, preserved the net worths and bonuses of the bankers, but let Main Street get foreclosed out. 

One of the most striking memes was one that said:  We send our kids to fight wars in the Middle East. They (John Kerry, Joe Biden) send their kids to Ukraine.  It gains the most traction when children of the elite skirt consequences of bad behavior or gains unfair advantage and is especially operative when those that gain advantage do so solely out of political connections.  Barack Obama piously announced that “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money,” then a few years later bought an $11.7 million home on Martha’s Vineyard.  Hunter Biden, by all accounts is a ne’er do well, yet was able to raise a $1.5 billion fund from the Chinese and land a board seat on a Ukrainian energy company.  Outside the government elite cashing in,  populism also gains momentum when we learn that the rich were buying their kids’ way into elite schools, and when the captain of a failed business like We Work walks away with $1.7 billion package as thousands of employees are laid off.

No discussion of populism would  be complete without mentioning China.  The conventional wisdom among conservatives was that once China got richer, a middle class would bubble up and demand more freedom and more democratic structures in China.   As recently as two years ago, Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama was still asserting such things.  The opposite occurred.  China has become more totalitarian and more militarily assertive.  China has stolen our intellectual property, killed our youth by flooding our streets with fentanyl, hacked our government personnel files, enabled North Korea’s nuclear program, manipulated its currency, and became militarily assertive.  Meanwhile, private equity bought up companies, stripped them and shipped the jobs to China.  As I often say, “free traders don’t steal each others’ stuff.”  The populist movement allowed us to stiffen our backs vis-à-vis China.  Traditional conservatives were content to wait patiently until China changed its behavior, which grew worse.

Populism pushes back against social norms that are being violated.  While the U.S. was ready to accept marriage equality, it was not ready to accept transgender people in the military, in women’s locker rooms, competing athletically with women and girls and “drag queen story hours” for children.  It is a reaction to schools banning Christmas cards, daddy-daughter dances, and Halloween celebrations.  It rejects safe spaces, trigger warning and blaming all ills on the “patriarchy” or “colonialism” or “white privilege.”  For it is middle aged white males that have suffered an increase in mortality rates after years of decline, mostly due to alcoholism, drug abuse and suicides.  Populists lets P.C. criticism bounce off and object to objectionable things (like unfettered abortion until the moment of birth) while conservatives tiptoe around these issues.

Populism defends national sovereignty and opposes open borders.  Populists are willing to challenge conventional wisdom about immigration and ask hard questions traditional conservatives will not ask.  Globalists, like London mayor Sadiq Khan assert that terrorism is “part and parcel” of urban life.  Angela Merkel recently asserted that limits on free speech would be needed to ensure a cohesive society.  Populists, after events like the London Bridge attacks and Pensacola attacks last week whether Islam is fundamentally compatible with the West, and whether training Saudi pilots is a good idea.  Likewise, working people take umbrage with handing out free education and health care to people that came here illegally.  Why should I have to work overtime and delay my retirement so I can pay for the education of kids from Guatemala and pay for their health care?  What about me and my kids?  Populists will at least ask these questions.  Populists intuitively understand that the globalists are working diligently to erode the nation-state, and thereby make their voices irrelevant, and are willing to oppose the “abolish ICE” crowd.

In my view, the two most pivotal moment of the 2016 campaign came when Hillary wrote off Trump supporters as “deplorables” and when Trump declared at the 2016 Republican National Convention, “I am your voice.”  The Democratic party had not only forgotten them, but held them in contempt.  The Republican establishment had protected its wealthy base with the bailouts following the Great Recession.  This left a wide opening for the somewhat semi-populist Donald Trump. 

Is populism guilty of being ham-fisted and  of offering simplistic responses to complex problems as Dr. Pipes asserts?  Sure.   Does the leftist elite bear a disproportionate share of the blame for general discontent among our citizens?  Absolutely. Populists do oversimplify and misdiagnose.  Donald Trump’s views on the coal industry and manufacturing are simply not borne out by the facts.  But I believe that Dr. Pipes has underestimated some of the forces involved in the rise of populism.  I do not believe it is simply a left/right problem.  It must be seen in light of economic forces, social norms and our identity as a nation and as a people.  

I don’t think Dr. Pipes needs to worry about populism “succeeding.”  It will burn itself out in time. He is correct in that it is brash and cloddy and grows tiresome like the loud drunk at a party.  In the meantime, however, populism is serving a very useful function, especially in this time when the Left has gotten bolder and more ferocious (e.g. the Squad), populists stand up to them in ways that traditional conservatives could never bring themselves to do.  Populists should be viewed as offensive linemen in football.  They do some of the inglorious blocking and work that others don’t have the stomach for so that conservatives and libertarians aren’t overwhelmed by the Left.

Dr. Pipes, I think,  underestimates the wrath of common folks against the political elite.  In Great Britain and in the U.S., the political elite have become distant and unresponsive to the will of the electorate, and, indeed, sometimes openly contemptuous of it.  In the U.K., years of wrangling and calls for a second referendum have ground Brexit to a halt.  Here, the political elite have worked frantically for 3 years to unwind an election.  With traditional watchdogs like the press and the ACLU safely turned into propaganda arms for the Left, the vast majority of common working people begin to feel that there is no one advocating for them. Populists move in to that empty space.

Fear not, Dr. Pipes.  Populism won’t be permanent.  It simply pops up at certain times when it is needed.  And that time is now.  Then its inherent flaws will be its undoing and it will go away.

Old Age Ain't What It Used to Be

Our society is being transformed.  Sure, we have had the civil rights movement that ended Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination.  The Women’s Movement and Title IX opened the doors in the professions and sports for women.  The LGBT movement (even with its excesses) resulted in marriage equality and other accommodations for gays and transgender people. 

But last week, there were a few news items that signaled that there is a new movement afoot.  When considered together, these anecdotes say something about our society, culture and demographics.

The Gray Movement is bursting forth. 

First, NBC news reported on Shawnee Service Center in Wilmette where two men in their 80’s have been working together for 60 years…. and have no intention of retiring. (https://www.nbcchicago.com/on-air/as-seen-on/senior-mechanics-lifelong-friends-565559342.html).  This story caught my attention as I have been noticing more and more people working well past the usual retirement age.  Chicago attorney Fred Lane (who I have had the pleasure of getting to know and occasionally playing golf with) still does mediations and arbitrations and teaches a clinic in the same.  He is north of 90, still vibrant and engaging and a deadly accurate golfer, especially around the green.  Film maker Clint Eastwood shows no signs of slowing down, with his latest film to be released this month and the prolific Eastwood is 89.  Many musicians are still touring.  Mick Jagger is 75 and the Rolling Stones still put on a good show.  I saw Alice Cooper a couple of years ago, and he hasn’t lost a step.  It is not surprising that our political class is aging out as well.  Donald Trump is 73 and two of his rivals, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are 77 and 78, respectively.  I predict that within a decade, this nation will be led by an octogenarian.  We are seeing more people continue to practice their trade into their September, October, and November years.

In another news item last week, an intruder broke into the home of an 82 year old woman in Rochester, New York (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/24/us/82-year-old-bodybuilder-grandma-intruder-trnd/index.html).  The poor sot made a bad life decision.  It turned out that the woman, Willie Murphy was a trained powerlifter, and she literally turned the tables on the 28 year old intruder,  grabbing a table and beating him with it until the table broke.  She jumped up and down on him and squirted shampoo in his eyes and dragged him out of her house.  “Don’t mess with Willie,” one of her friends said.  More and more people in the later stages of life are staying physically fit and are fully capable of defending themselves.  I couldn’t help but giggle while I watched the news clips of the incident and was in awe as they showed some clips of Willie weight training.

And finally, there was the story of 83 year old Hattie Wiener of Hell’s Kitchen, NY.   “Tinder Granny” as she is known, has led a very active and colorful life, to say the least—a life that would have made Mae West blush.   She apparently had a long history of hooking up with young men on Tinder and having a series of one night stands.  But, alas, Hattie has announced that she’s finally tired of the cougar mill and is finally ready to settle down with one man (https://nypost.com/2019/11/27/83-year-old-tinder-granny-ready-for-love-after-decades-of-one-night-stands/?utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_campaign=SocialFlow).  One can only hope that she was practicing her catting around safely.  While I don’t advocate Weiner’s lifestyle, she is demonstrating that she is very much alive, and it shows that our sexual lives don’t necessarily have to turn off at age 65 either.  In Japan, the sex industry is changing, too.  The Wall Street Journal reports that older men are hiring young women, not necessarily to have sex with them, but just to lay next to them and keep them company. 

These stories all splashed across the media this week.  Western and Asian societies are aging and our demographics are changing.  It is also the case that lifespans are increasing (except in the U.S. for middle aged white men).   These anecdotes are illustrative of the reality of those changes.  Many of us are making different life choices--- to live fuller lives in every respect as we age—professionally, physically, and yes, sexually.   These people are showing us how to run through the tape.

The Gray Age is here.