Property is theft

Uh-oh.

I checked my Facebook page to find a neighbor from my old cluster in Virginia saying she “is not happy with all the dirty hippies moving in two doors down. Looks like they've been listenin to Mick Jagger music and bad-mouthin their country.”

Seems the people who bought my house—we knew up front that they were buying it for investment property, to rent it out—have already leased it, & to lowlifes.

I’m sorry about that because one property owner in the cluster made a business out of renting his house to trailer trash. There was one set of tenants there for a few years that seemed to be some sort of group home. I mean one middle-aged white guy & a collection of Gen-Texts in succession, parking their junkers in other people’s parking slots, attracting visits from the cops & generally lowering property values.

When they finally moved out the owner literally stripped the place down to the studs because of all the damage.

Then he turned around & rented it to the Clampetts—a clan of Ozarkian proportions & class who immediately let their spawn turn the landscaped front yard into a sea of mud.

So apologies to all my neighbors, but welcome to capitalism.

& I’m still glad that property’s off my hands, if not entirely off my conscience.

Sign of the Times, chapter 2

Okay, the recession has officially struck beyond the living: the LA Times reports that times are so tough people are leaving the bodies of their relatives with county morgues to be cremated on the public nickel.

In LA what this amounts to is paying $352 for collecting the ashes from the coroner after an unclaimed body is cremated. As opposed to $466 for collecting them from the morgue.

(Apparently they’re different entities. Who knew?)

To put this into perspective, claiming a body from the LA county coroner will set you back $200. Then there’s the $1000 for cremation in a private facility or a minimum of $7300 for the most basic of funerals & burials.

Personally, while I find it fascinating to visit graveyards, read the headstones & imagine the lives represented there, I’m not particularly interested in what happens to the body once the anima has departed. But I understand that I’m in the minority in this regard, & that having to decide between honoring your loved one in a way suitable to your beliefs or buying food & paying the rent is a heart-rending choice no one in this country should be forced to make.

So I’m sure these people will take comfort in the good news that the major banks whose crack-brained lending practices caused this whole mess have reported such good financial news that they’re able once again to splash out on extravagant corporate jollies & obscenely large bonuses for management.

(At least the Times had the grace not to serve up the ads for caskets on this story’s that appeared in the report about Farrah Fawcett's death.)

Jerks in the office

Joe Queenan takes on the phenomenon of the office jerk in the WSJ.

While he’s on his typically stylish form, & he’s probably right about people generally not bitching (at least not in the office) about workplace jerks during the recession, he completely underestimates the arrogance of your standard jerk. They’re not holding back, trying to stay below the HR radar; they’re going full bore with their self-promotion, grandiose schemes & backstabbing.

Stupid or not, recession or not, they are as focused as ever on making a name for themselves & leaving a trail of bodies behind wherever they go. There is no interruption in the havoc they wreak.

At least that’s the modus operandi around here.

End of an era

The world has lost one of the best newsmen of the last century. Walter Cronkite died at his New York home Friday at age 92.

First for UPI, then for CBS, Cronkite reported the biggest stories of the mid/late 20th century: the Battle of the Bulge, Nuremberg trials, Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Apollo moon landing, Watergate. He shed light on the world around us without ever inserting himself between it & us.

He was everything Dan Rather wished he could be: measured, objective, intelligent, astute. Most of all, he defined integrity in news reporting. Try to find that anywhere today.

Cronkite set a standard of honesty & trustworthiness from which the news media has been retreating ever since he retired in 1981. Peter Jennings came closest to Cronkite’s level of reportage; when he died four years ago, broadcast news fell completely into the clutches of the corporate bean counters interested only in cutting costs & blown-dried reporters more concerned with the camera angle on their on-camera stand-up than the actual, you know, story.

Try to imagine Cronkite being involved in reporting a story based on unconfirmed documents—the incident that led to Rather leaving CBS Evening News. Or staging of exploding gas tanks that rocked Dateline NBC. In both cases the “reporters” had a story they wanted to tell, & the truth wasn’t going to get in their way.

Moreover, Cronkite knew his job was to report the story, not be it, which is a rare quality in any form of journalism these days, print as well as broadcast or Internet. It’s gone way beyond the mixing of facts & opinion; it’s about thinking you’re more important than the news. That was something that never occurred to Cronkite.

Well, we’re all the poorer this week for his passing. & perhaps a bit more ignorant.