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.

Just when you thought it was safe

I’m not going to say that I’m astounded by this story in the WSJ, because I’m an adherent of H.L. Mencken’s dictum that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Even, evidently, MBAs.

Fortunately, my employer has cancelled the company picnic this year, due to belt-tightening, so I don’t have to lay out a sartorial strategy. But I recall very well a former employer’s sales conference in Cyprus, where the event planners arranged all sorts of group water activities that required swimsuits (or else getting drenched in your civvies).

I went off to see the antiquities. Much preferable to viewing my Euro colleagues in the near-buff. & soaked.

As it was, they were plastered pretty much all the time. Which is probably the case at these company outings described by the Journal reporter.

At any rate, I offer it as something for you to take under consideration in your climb up the corporate ladder.

Dulce et decorum est

A letter to the Washington Post brought to the attention of the world Lt. Brian Bradshaw, who was killed in Afghanistan on 25 June. He was 25.

Bradshaw’s parents agreed to the publication of this letter, written by members of the Air National Guard transport crew who flew Bradshaw’s casket out of his deployment base to Bagram.

You can see a photo of Bradshaw at the Post’s Faces of the Fallen site. The Post does the best job of humanizing the Bush administration’s wars of any paper I know. Whenever they amass enough photos of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to fill a double full-page spread, they print them in the order of their deaths. (As the names appear on the Vietnam Memorial.)

I think they have enough to print every couple of months, sadly.

The description of Bradshaw’s final trip out of Afghanistan reminds me of a story in Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front. The essay is by a Marine colonel who accompanied the body of a 21-year-old Marine killed in Iraq home to his funeral in Wyoming.

It also makes me think of the funeral in the aptly-named town of Comfort, Tex., of Spec. James M. Kiehl, described by his aunt, Vicki Pierce.

You can see Kiehl’s Faces of the Fallen page here.

It’s fitting and proper to keep their faces in our thoughts.

Liberté!

It’s been a harrowing six weeks, but I’m back to being a single-property owner. On the advice of my amazing real estate agent, I put my Virginia house on the market the first week of June, & we closed yesterday.

I can’t tell you what a relief it is—even having it rented for most of the past year, & even having allegedly professional property managers allegedly managing it, there’s always a strain to check on what’s really happening, rattle cages because they’ve messed up, worry about repairs, etc. I’m not good at being a nag & I especially don’t like being one to people whose job it is to manage all the bits & pieces.

It’s an odd market. As late as April my agent (Craig Lilly, of Prudential) was advising me that if I didn’t have to sell, I shouldn’t. I mean, a year ago Northern Virginia was the vortex of foreclosures & short sales. Even Fairfax County, the champ of inflated property assessments, devalued my house this year by about 30%.

But for some reason, in May, when I checked again, he told me that things seemed to be picking up & I decided to go ahead & see if I could sell. Initially we talked about a price in the low-$200s, but by the end of May he came back again & said that he thought that was too low, & we went for about $30K more. So that’s what we did.

&, blow me if I didn’t get an offer about two days after the sign went up on the property. Not full, but close; & of course that bloody "seller's subsidy" that benights the Virginia real estate market.

There was the usual back-&-forth on repairs & a serious glitch at the end when the electronic appraisals didn’t match the human one, & they had to be reconciled. But papers were signed yesterday & I don’t have to worry any more about two homeowners’ associations, the paint police, the Clampetts living across the way & the rest of that Old Dominion nonsense.

I have to say that I wouldn’t be a realtor for quids—Craig managed the sitting tenants, the contracts, the repair estimates & the repairs; all I had to do was sign about a gazillion papers & ask a few questions. It was as close to painless as you can get in anything involving real estate.

I do miss Virginia, & that house was really good to me. But since I’m in Pacific North-hell, I have to focus on here now. Perhaps it’s appropriate that it ended on Bastille Day.

& major props to Craig!

Allons, enfants

Today is the 220th anniversary of the quintessential revolutionary statement, the storming of the Bastille. Really, unless you’re of the First or Second Estate, ya just gotta love the idea of the riff-raff of Paris rushing to a moldy old prison, releasing all the prisoners—all seven of them—& basically destroying the arch symbol of l’Ancien Régime.

Bugger the fact that none of the inmates was actually a, tu sais, political prisoner (unless you count “the accused conspirator, Tavernier”). Nothing but a few forgers, one aristo committed by his family (possibly for pecuniary reasons—the Bastille was good in that regard), another (a putative Englishman) & two lunatics.

Well, after all—we’re talking les Français, mes chers amis; symbolism is reality.

Anyhow, oubliez les Sans Culottes; this is an excuse to drink wine , eat snails in garlic butter & shout revolutionary slogans.

Vive la Révolution!

Bookish broad

As some of you may know, I have books. I don’t seem to be able to go anywhere without picking up one or two…or twenty.

There’ve been trips to London where I went up and down Charing Cross Road buying books—to the point that my luggage had to be hand searched at Heathrow because the X-rays wouldn’t penetrate the dense layer of literature. Once I had to buy a gym bag at a London street market to accommodate all my additions.

And then there was the trip to Paris, when I bought so many at museums and bookstores I had to take a taxi to the Gare du Nord because I knew that even with wheeled bags I wouldn’t be able to get across the correspondance of the Métro (where there are beaucoup de stairs). The guy who helped lift my bags onto the Eurostar is probably still walking funny.

Or the jaunt across the Channel to Normandy. On my return the boot of my car was filled with equal weights of books and Champagne.

When my London household was being moved back to the US, one of the packers commented that he’d never seen so many books. (Or shoes, but that’s a different matter entirely.) I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was only packing three bookcases and I had five more at home.

Luckily my Virginia house had two stair landings large enough to accommodate two bookcases each, and I was able to put six cases in the office upstairs for history and reference; three downstairs for fiction, poetry and psychology; two on the upper landing for arts and children’s lit; and two on the lower landing for travel, literature, classics, drama, etc. Oh—and one on the main floor by the kitchen for cookbooks.

The books were the prime challenge when it came to finding a permanent home here. Once I liked a place I had to start imagining where the cases would go, and one by one the prospects got crossed off the list. With some people it's the grand piano; with me it's the books. (At least 70% of them and all but five of the cases spent the last ten months in storage, so getting them out where I can read them is a major endorphin rush.)

Okay, so on this last move, distributing my collection over the three floors, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s time to cull the collection some. I mean—I did give away a couple of cartons worth when I left Virginia, things that were really tatty or duplicates. And I got the collection down to around 2700. But I thought maybe I could cut back some more.

So I went through with a machete—I mean, I was utterly ruthless, hacking left and right on three floors. (The landings here aren’t big enough for bookcases.) and I’ve pulled out a grand total of…twelve books.

I refuse to confess to being pathetic. Maybe it's a Bas Bleu thing.

Phoning it in

In the category of nice-try-but-not-going-to-happen, some business etiquette consultant has declared July “National Cell Phone Courtesy Month.”

To give you an idea of how futile this concept is, she made this unilateral declaration in 2002.

Yeah, you’ve noticed how many folks have taken up the idea in the past seven years, haven’t you?

This woman states the blindingly obvious—turn the damned thing off during meetings, movies, weddings & funerals; remember that when you’re in public your call is, too; not every call takes precedence over your real-time companions; etc. She puts numbers on them, like that’s going to imbue them with greater force than just being sensible imparts.

But the very fact that she has to state the obvious is an indicator that mobile phone users don’t give a toss about courtesy, sensibility or even the obvious.

& she doesn’t even go into the whole thing about people driving with one hand holding the triple shot mochaccino & the other the iPhone, weaving through traffic as though the Almighty Himself were clearing the way in a T-34. Those morons are the 21st Century justification for the Second Amendment. In fact, we should be issued 9mm pistols just for the purpose of removing them from the gene pool.

So, observe the made-up month-long focus however you see fit. Don't make me a lick o' difference, since I only use mine to check my email.

Summer in the Citi

I don’t know how I missed this, but it seems Citigroup, which has proved itself again & again on both a micro and a macro level to be incapable of managing its way out of a paper bag, is at it again.

Restricted in the ability to hand out obscene bonuses to employees accustomed to receiving them—restricted because they took massive amounts of TARP money to bail their bespoke-clad asses out of collapse—they’ve announced that, well, they’ll just raise base salaries to these exceedingly valuable employees…by up to 50%.

It’s the same old wheeze—have to do something to retain the best and the brightest if we want to survive, blah, blah, blah.

What I just don’t get is: if these are the best and the brightest you’ve got, and they’re the very ones who maneuvered you into collapse, isn’t it time to bring in the JVs, who might actually still be capable of grasping the concept that you’re supposed to be doing something to add actual, you know, value to something besides your own bank accounts? Like, here’s a thought, your customers and your shareholders?

What this just proves is that the obvious and immutable goal of these organizations is to perpetuate their own existence and their own greed. Everything else is a massive joke they’re playing on the rest of the world, whom they (apparently rightly) regard as nothing but suckers.

Another name on the Wall

There’s a folk tale about a not-the-brightest boy who’s always applying the lesson of the last problem to the current situation, with risible results.

Every day his mother sends him off to someone’s house to bring home something. Every day he ruins whatever it is by using the previous day’s method of transport—so he puts butter on top of his head (which was how he should have carried something else, which I can’t recall), & it melts down his face. He drags a fish behind him on a string, because the previous day that’s how he should have brought home a puppy, etc.

I often think of that folktale (and apologies for not remembering it better—I was in grade school when I read it) when examining how wars are fought. The French, in particular, always seem to be using the previous war’s strategies when they’re losing the current one.

Anyhow, the tale cropped up again in my mind when I heard the news that the architect of the Vietnam War died Sunday, in bed, at age 93.

Robert S. McNamara and other best-and-brightest of his generation just could not get over the whole appeasement scenario, or the sense that Harry S. Truman lost China to the Communists. Not that I’m a proponent of appeasement, but, really, you have to put things into context. And McNamara and the others just couldn’t seem to do that.

And so we spent more than a decade and 58,000 American lives (and God knows how many others’) following those policies.

The thing about McNamara, though, that gives me hope is that, after 30 years of stalwart silence he eventually admitted that his policies had been wrong, that he had been wrong. In the end he was a mensch.

And I’ll bet we’ll wait a lot longer than 30 years for anyone from the recently-departed administration to admit that their Iran-Iraq-war-on-terrorism policies were wrong on a massive scale.

Can't you just see that butter melting down their faces?

Prognosis negative

Well, General Motors got a pass in bankruptcy court. US District Judge Robert Gerber has approved GM’s plan to slice and dice its assets at the expense of the usual fall guy: the US taxpayer.

The deal (if I may so characterize it) is that GM’s viable (in the loose sense of the term) will be moved into an entity 61% owned by the US government, and; whatever doesn’t make the cut ends up on the bankruptcy court floor to be picked over by the usual vultures.

What this does is wipe away any unsecured claims, essentially screwing bondholders, retired employees and people who’ve sued the company for building crap cars. GM's management, present and past, are doing the happy dance on that one, no doubt.

It remains to be seen what will be defined as “viable” and what as dross. Even as we speak, the EU is losing unity over which country will get to keep its taxpayers working under whoever buys the Opel unit from GM. So far Germany seems to have the biggest pockets (and the most immediate elections to spur the efforts) to save jobs and the smaller countries like Belgium and Britain are muttering and scuffing their feet in the dust.

But I’m not holding my breath that anything particularly good will come of this.