Black Friday

Is it just me or are you just as bored and annoyed with the growing media coverage of "Black Friday?"

Really, just how interesting is it to see a bunch of half-crazed people lining up outside Walmart or Best Buy the day after Thanksgiving so they can be the first to buy a half-priced plasma TV at 5 AM?

It's just depressing to see so many potentially lovely aspects of American life (such as a gracious holiday like Thanksgiving) reduced to how much they register on some corporate entity's bottom line. It may be a corny thought, but perhaps holidays might actually serve a better purpose than giving us license to buy even more things that we don't really need. Perhaps the respite of a holiday should better provide us with the time and space to gain perspective on whether the toiling we all do throughout the year is yielding the kind of life we want.

I don't want to spoil anyone's holiday buzz, but our collective calendar should be more than just a connect-the-dots of numbers that don't really explain much about where we are at as a society. Do we all need to know that Tomkat's wedding cost a million dollars? Should I lose sleep if retailers don't earn more this Christmas than last? Will ad prices for a Superbowl minute be as high as everyone expects? Will Memorial Day weekend gross more in movie ticket sales than last year?

I was amazed to discover just how many "Black Fridays" there have been over the past century. Check out Wikipedia for a list that includes the great Johnstown Flood of 1889 and a massacre of Iranian protesters in 1978 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday). In the company of so many genuine horrors, describing self-induced, high-stress shopping as a "Black Friday" event seems like a sadly callow choice of words.

Patriotism

The most important thing you can do to show your patriotism is to pay attention to what your government is reallly doing and make sure that they don't do anything destructive.

The Return of Hope

In fear of the Republicans keeping control of the House and Senate, I launched this blog less than a week ago under the title WAKE UP. After the debacle of Bush's re-election in 2004 my faith in the American people has been shaken and despite the polls leading up to the election I still feared the "permanent Republican majority" that Karl Rove and his henchman have been hoping to install. Well, that dark plan has hopefully received a fatal blow (poor Senator Santorium - or is it Sanctimonius - and family, pictured here). So perhaps the public has really awakened. Perhaps I can now call this blog STAY AWAKE instead!

It would be easy and fun to gloat about what happened to Bush and the Republicans in the election this week. They deserved to lose. They are arrogant, incompetent and vengeful bullies whose extremist policies in the area of foreign relations, social issues, and financial responsibility have burdened and traumatized the country and diminished its stature abroad for years to come. Their stewardship of the country has been appalling, self-serving, short-sighted and mean-spirited.

For six years many Americans - including me - have felt almost physically ill from watching the President and his cronies insult our intelligence and manipulate our fears with such impunity. Today, in the wake of the Democratic victories, hope has returned. And the Demoracts had better take their responsibilities seriously: the problems are complex and intransient and politics as usual will fail.

Bloggers and journalists who follow and write about politics regularly will spill much ink about the meaning of the elections. So instead of writing a lengthy essay here, I'd like to offer these brief post-election soundbites and images:

MY THREE MVPS: John Stewart for offering one of the few truthful pictures of the Bush and Republican agenda through the dark years and motivating young voters to go to the polls; Barrack Obama for reminding everyone that the Democrats can have a charismatic star in the post-Clinton era; Howard Dean for fusing the Democrats with some "can do" energy.

THE MARY MAGDALENE FACTOR: Though we'll never know how many fundamentalists kept away from the polls because of revelations about Colorado super-church pastor Ted Haggard's unsavory tastes for drugs and male prostitutes, I'll long treasure hustler Mike Jones taking the moral high road and speaking out against the hypocrisy of this self-loathing closet case. To me, Mike Jones showed a kind of Mary Magdalene-style grace, reminding us that it is God and not human beings who should be left to judge the human heart.

AW SHUCKS: Bush's manner at his first post-election press conference suggested someone who had lost a college football game rather than someone who had received a stinging referendum on his failed policies. "Aw, shucks, we tried the Hail Mary pass with this Iraq thing but I guess it didn't work. Okay. You win! I’ll work with you now."

TOP ADVICE TO BOTH PARTIES AND THE MEDIA: Stop catering to the egos of the politicians and their ambitions and focus instead on what's good for the country. It's the message, not the messenger, that matters so lets spend less time speculating on whether Hillary wants to run for President and more time debating the issues and looking for solutions to our most pressing problems – education, environment and energy to name just three.

THE TWO PARTIES ARE NOT THE SAME: I've heard many people say that there are no real differences between the Democrats the Republicans, that the system is broken and that all politicians are crooked, beholden to special interests and not to be trusted. There's some truth in this, but I think it's short-sighted and dangerous thinking. Truth is, it was Republican Neo-con zealotry that brought about the Iraq fiasco, and I don't think a Democratic-run Congress would have allowed the budget-busting tax breaks to the super rich that were so fundamental to Bush's agenda - during war time no less!

TAKING BACK THE KEYS: When they re-elected George Bush the American people handed their car – and their credit cards – over to a spoiled adolescent without a license. Well, surprise, surprise - he nearly drove us off a cliff! We may have gotten the keys back but the car is completely banged up (close to totaled), there are many casualties on the road, and the credit card bill will be huge for many years to come. Note to collective self: don’t repeat this huge mistake again.

Go Fish!

I've been doing on on-line journal for Gramophone magazine for a while now. You can check it out at http://www.gramophone.co.uk/interviews_detail.asp?id=2580.

My Gramophone blog is mostly about classical music and it's great fun to do, but not the place where I can express my feelings about reading things like this in the NEW YORK TIMES (November 3):

Dire Warning on Fish Species
If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be "global collapse" of all species currently fished, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.

Global collapse? Ouch. That hurts.

That's why I started this blog. I actually started one at My Space but with all those ads on that site flashing in my face I was getting dizzy. So I'm starting fresh here. It's not that I'm a particularly pessimistic person (I'm actually a very cheerful guy), or that I want to revel in the fact that the world as we know it just might be coming to an end (heck, will we still call it a civilization after we've run out of drinkable water, energy and fish, just to name three fun examples). Honestly, with this blog I'm hoping to do my small part in reminding people to wake up and pay more attention to each other and the world around them.

Back to the fish. I immediately went to page A21 of the TIMES to see just how far off this "no more fish" calamity was from us. Not encouraging. Math was never my strong suit, but according to the illustrative chart, it looks like those slippery, scaly pals of ours will be checking out before 2050. Okay, I'll be 90 at that point and since I'm not having kids I won't have to be sad that MY children and grandchildren will never know the joy of a basic tuna fish sandwich. But I do have two beautiful young nieces whom I adore, and lots of friends with kids, and I certainly want them to get a shot at experiencing the whole fish thing.

The irony in all this is that in America, where we are told (and sold) obsessively to care about our health, eating more fish is one of the no-brainers on our collective to do list. So if I eat lots of salmon am I just eating healthy or helping to commit fish genocide? Or is it fishocide - or perhaps pescacide? Looks like I should have studied Latin after all!

Stay tuned to this blog for more of such observations. But I promise to lighten up and have some fun too. After all, tragedy and comedy are clearly two sides of the same human coin!