Cinco de Mayo: A Victory for the Underdog

One of the many hats I wear is that of an investor. For decades, I have invested in the stock market, beginning after college when I had saved a few thousand dollars. I enjoy the number-crunching of investment analysis, finding undiscovered small companies, and putting my money where my mouth is. It is always a challenge, and I have made mistakes, but I have also returned to my mistakes to learn from them. Serious investing is investigative and practical. It is also a recursive process in which you are constantly evaluating your premises for a particular investment, as well as your evolving skills and sensibilities as an investor.

One of the things I learned about myself, during this vicious bear market, is that I need to increase my allocation for bonds in my overall portfolio. There is nothing like a heart-thumping drop in the stock market, month after month, to force you to reevaluate your strategy. I did not sell any individual stocks or mutual funds, so I did not panic and I have benefited from this bounce back from recent lows.

But in March I did feel financially vulnerable, since in four short years my older son Aaron will attend college. Now that the S&P 500 is above 900 at least for a day, I won’t go back to my 80/20 split for stocks and bonds, but instead will keep adding new money primarily into my bond portfolio. I am focusing on short-term bonds, because I believe interest rates are at historic lows, and can only go higher. Short-term bonds will be hurt the least when this happens. Remember, bond prices go down when interest rates go up, and vice versa, and this relationship is more pronounced the longer the maturity of the bond.

I am a contrarian, and this belief in my head was indeed proven by what I did with my hands and feet. I did not panic as the Obama administration got a handle on the financial mess it inherited, and as credit markets froze and threatened to turn a deep recession into a depression. I did not panic as a few mega-banks teetered near insolvency, as deficits soared because of federal bailouts, as swine-flu hysteria gripped the nation. It is important to assess how you reacted in critical situations to get a sense of who you are. You don’t know what kind of soldier you are until the bullets whistle past your ears.

We are not out of the woods yet. Corporate earnings may turn more negative than they have been so far, or we may experience flat to weak economic growth for many years, or some unforeseen event, like a run on the dollar, may undermine financial stability. The second and third waves of past flu epidemics have often been deadlier than the initial wave. So I am still wary, but I have taken steps to take advantage of overreactions and to be better prepared for the next crisis.

I am a relentless cost-cutter, and this attitude has helped me to evaluate what we spend money on and whether it is worth it. This cost-cutting also helps me to be better prepared for crises: companies and individuals who are careful with their money and carry little debt are better able to weather downturns. That’s a truism we should live by as investors and as responsible parents.

Sometimes my writer friends, who are terrible at managing their own financial affairs, ask me why I worry so much about money. Invariably this happens a few days after they’ve asked for a loan. I tell them what I’ve always told them. Investing is not about getting rich, or having more toys, or impressing others. It’s about independence. It’s about doing what you want, when you want, and not having to ask an ornery friend or a boss for more money, and not getting it.

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the underdog Mexico defeating powerful France at Puebla in 1862. The individual investor is the underdog in today’s investment world. Do your homework, know thyself, and think independently, and perhaps you will also reap an unlikely victory. Happy Cinco de Mayo.

Pandemic Flu and Xenophobia: A History Lesson

The year 1918 was an exciting and terrible time for El Paso and the border: the Mexican Revolution was nearing its bloody end and an outbreak of Spanish influenza incited one of the most shameful and neglected episodes in American history: the decades-long delousing of Mexicans, with insecticides, gasoline, kerosene, and cyanide-based pesticides to make them ‘clean.’ David Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution recounts this remarkable story.

Today when we are facing another pandemic flu, it is useful to review the irrational decisions made back in 1918, by demagogues who already hated Mexicans and who used the fear in the populace to advance an agenda that didn’t in fact help to stop the spread of Spanish influenza. Delousing physically harmed and psychologically scarred thousands of Mexicans, including my grandfather Santiago Troncoso. Let’s not repeat this kind of American history, but learn from it.

First, facts. The ‘Spanish influenza’ began in Kansas. Why it was given this misnomer is probably another legacy of how easily it is to blame the poor and those not media savvy. Also, of course, gasoline and kerosene and pesticides did not kill the Spanish flu, but it did harm and shame many people who were forced to strip naked at the border as they were sprayed with ‘the solution.’ Finally, and most remarkably, Zyklon B was used in El Paso in 1929, the same chemical agent that in more concentrated form was subsequently employed by the Nazis in their death camps to exterminate the Jews. Romo even uncovers evidence to suggest that the use of Zyklon B in El Paso directly inspired German scientists to start looking into its properties for cleansing a country of its ‘pests.’

Today the possible pandemic is swine flu, and we should redouble our efforts to act on facts, rather than on fears or prejudices that end up hurting innocents, or worse. I am waiting for a weak politician, or media loudmouth, to exploit the swine flu fears to further a xenophobic agenda. I am waiting to see whether stereotypes of Mexicans are privately reinforced and maybe even publicly acted upon, with the same bloody results. I hope I will have to wait forever, but I am still wary.

I don’t know if we as a country have a mature-enough political discourse to resist such temptations. The glib media rule the airwaves, including Twitter, and passing along short bursts of fear, instead of thoughtful analysis, is our modern forte. Moreover, the groundwork for xenophobia against Mexicans has already been reinforced by the many years of attacks demonizing undocumented workers in the United States. Perhaps the saving grace of the current situation is that we have a new administration that I believe will be more sensitive to the abuse of public hysteria to further a xenophobic agenda.

Early reports, in the Wall Street Journal, for example, indicate that this swine flu outbreak did start in Mexico. But even here the picture is more complicated than we might think. One of the first swine-flu cases was that of a five-year-old boy from Veracruz who lived near a pig farm operated by Smithfield Foods Inc., an American company based in Virginia. The company denies any involvement in the swine flu outbreak.

All this tells me is that we are interconnected, whether we like it or not. We get our food from all over the world. We get our people from all over the world. This has been our world for a long time, and I don’t attempt to imagine some false pure state where I am island and if I return to this island I will somehow be safer, or better, or truer in some metaphysical sense. Reaching back, or forward, to false utopias, especially during crises in our communities, has always prevented us from solving the problems in the first place, and too often spawned horrific ‘solutions’ that expose our greatest human frailties and moral failures. Work the problem, people. Not the fear.

Putting a Price on Time

Often in this blog I write about the smallest events, sometimes in Connecticut, where we go to decompress from the thrill and headache that is New York City. In the Big Apple, time is money. Everyone’s butt is on fire to get somewhere, to be somebody.

I have been recently thinking how the television media in particular distorts careful thinking, whether it’s on Obama or the financial crisis or the burgeoning deficits. Pithy, three- or four-second comments replace complex thought and analysis. ‘We must entertain at all costs’ seems to be the mantra. Outlandish comments are entertaining. Quick put-downs are entertaining. Outrage, genuine or fake, is entertaining. Whether any of it is true is beside the point. Capture those eyeballs, keep them riveted on you, and you will win this game.

I have also been pondering the decline of literary books, the rise of publishers as cogs of conglomerates, the domination of celebrity books in publishing, the sad decline of reading as a serious pastime for many Americans. There are small enclaves of literary publishers and serious readers, and those enclaves will continue to exist. But I think there is little doubt that literature is not central to American culture. Movies are the ticket. Television is the nightly companion for the lonely and not-so-lonely.

It is a world I have shunned with more recent effort in part because I do not like how my ‘openness’ to this world affected me. It did not improve my thinking, but instead circumscribed it to self-satisfied, meaningless reactions. It did not encourage self-analysis and self-improvement that would be long-lasting, but abandoned me at spectacles.

I have turned off the TV, except for the occasional news. I have switched radio stations to those with minimal, or no commercials. I have ended subscriptions to idiotic magazines. On the Internet, I have stopped reading the trash to waste time, and focused on acquiring the information I specifically need, or sending the necessary email.

I feel I must create this island in me, to preserve and explore a truer self, to achieve something beyond the effluvium that is popular culture. Do others feel the same way? Have others taken up this internal call to avoid the awful noise that surrounds us?

In Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I can focus outside the mainstream, in the quiet of the trees, to read, to work on planting strawberries, to ride a bicycle for dozens of miles without seeing a soul on the country roads. Thoreau had the right idea in Concord: you can find yourself if you spend some time away from the city and the crowd.

Yet I do not live in isolation. I am not a Luddite. I focus on talking to my kids and Laura. I read good books. I exchange often lengthy e-mails with many fascinating people across the world. I am writing and editing stories. But I do not dive into this world anymore as if it all equally mattered. I know most of it doesn’t matter at all, and is just like the traffic outside, a nuisance. I have stopped rubber-necking. Even in New York City, after a ferocious thunderstorm, there is a quiet near midnight that lets you work and imagine.

Easter in El Paso

I am a few hours late with my blog today, because I have been having too much fun in El Paso, Texas, my hometown. Every morning my father, mother, brothers, Laura, Aaron, and Isaac have sampled my parents’ favorite breakfast joints, so far Elmer’s near Bassett Center and the Bronco Restaurant not far from Ysleta High, my alma mater, on Alameda.

Chilaquiles, chile rellenos, huevos rancheros, frijoles con queso, menudo (I prefer to pick out the panzas and just eat the pozole), enchiladas, gorditas. On our first night, my brother Oscar bought fresh, mouthwatering asaderos from Licon’s Dairy in San Elizario. It really is good to be back home.

My sons asked me, “Why is the food in El Paso so much better than the food in New York?” I tried to explain how there are no warm-fresh asaderos in New York, and how Manhattan’s Mexican food, except for Gabriela’s on Columbus and 95th Street, isn’t even close to the real deal. I tried to tell them there’s a world of difference between the tostadas from Las Cruces, and the prepackaged ones from New Jersey at Gristedes in our building on Broadway.

The pastel de tres leches my mother brought for my son Isaac’s birthday celebration was the coup de grâce. My kids adored it. I gave up trying to explain anything anymore, and I just told them, “It’s just better here. What can I say?” Aaron and Isaac glared at me for a second, as if I have been mistreating them for forcing them to live in NYC, and begged their abuelita for seconds of the pastel.

To work off this glorious gluttony, we went to Album Park near Yarbrough for Easter, to walk around, to run, to chat more about how beautiful the weather is this time of the year. The scene at Album brought back many memories and comparisons of how our family spent each Easter in El Paso, and how these get-togethers always brought us closer to each other.

For us, Easter meant, after church, a mega-barbecue. An all-day affair of eating, playing baseball and football with other families in the park, making new friends, searching for Easter eggs, which were painstakingly prepared weeks before, and ambushing everybody and anybody by smashing our confetti-filled ammo on their heads. By nightfall we were dirty and exhausted, and we didn’t want to say goodbye to this little community we had formed for one day in the park.

I noticed that at Album Park Easter today is the same and different than it was when I was a kid. Extended families, from abuelitos to niños, still gather together under the sun and trees. But now a few families had fancy Coleman tents and even gas-powered generators. I also saw many more volleyball nets and soccer games than in my time. All the dogs are on leashes too.

But this unofficial micro-history, what may seem trivial to many, is what we should savor. This history about what families did for Easter, how they stayed together on the Mexican-American border, what this togetherness meant not only for your bonds with your father and mother, but also for the bonds you try to recreate with your family in as far flung locales as New York City, this is what stays with you forever and becomes who you were and who you always will be.

Planting Apple Trees

I find the simplest things the most rewarding. Is that a sign I am becoming wise, or just getting old? This weekend Laura, the kids and I were in the Litchfield Hills. Laura was busy in her garden; she’s inherited her green thumb from her father. On rainy Saturday, we drove to the Kent True Value Hardware store to get eight bags of cedar mulch for Laura’s two flower gardens.

I wanted to take a look at apple trees, which we had thought about planting last year but didn’t because we were too busy. We drove down the road a few minutes to Kent Greenhouse & Gardens. It was almost closing time, but we managed to find Cortland and Royal Gala apple trees, which we liked, and you need at least two so they can pollinate each other. But we left without a purchase in part to get out of the rain.

The rest of that dark, wet Saturday we spent indoors. I read Salman Rushie’s Midnight's Children, and have particularly enjoyed the Padma character, whom the narrator interacts with as he tells the story of the birth and rise of free India. I also edited a novel I have been working on, despite fighting an awful cold/flu which seemed to get worse as the night progressed. By the time I collapsed on the bed, I couldn’t inhale even the slightest whiff from my nose, and I wondered if I would be able to get up the next morning. I dreamed of chasing an apple cart through my version of New Delhi (I’ve never been there), and was the last to rise out of bed the next morning, still exhausted and my head in a fog.

One thing was clear to me on Sunday: I wanted to plant those apple trees. Laura was reluctant because she was busy with other garden chores, but I got her to put fluorescent orange parking cones in spots we thought the apple trees might go. I have my ways. So throughout the day, we watched what spots received the most sun, which were shaded by trees in and around our property, and which still seemed to be ideal, after a few hours of imaging a plethora of apples on the trees and ground.

The hour was getting late on Sunday afternoon, but I enlisted my son Aaron, who also loves apples, and got Laura to drive him to Kent Greenhouse to pick the apple trees they liked while I started digging the holes. The first hole was almost done by the time they returned, and I had to pry out a few large mica rocks embedded in the soil. The Litchfield Hills was long ago a mining area and known as the arsenal of the American Revolution, providing the iron ore for General George Washington’s cannons.

As Aaron and I worked to finish the first hole, I pushed and shoved at one last rock at the bottom, and the old wooden shovel, which I had found in the forest three years ago, snapped in two. So this time, I returned to Kent True Value Hardware, but the store was closed. I drove to Kent Greenhouse (that’s three times in one weekend!), and bought their fancy, ergonomic stainless steel shovel. By the time I returned, Aaron had nearly finished the second hole with the small spade.

We finished planting the apple trees, mixing the planting soil from Kent Greenhouse with the soil we had dug up. Aaron went back to his homework. I cleaned up the area, and raked and shoveled away the excess soil, and watered our new apple trees. I realized I was sweaty and exhausted, my pants were filthy, and my fingernails were black with grime. But I could not have had a more satisfying weekend this early spring.

"The Brothers Warner" and Writing To Educate

My family attended the Kent Film Festival this weekend, in Kent, Connecticut (population: 2,858), nestled next to the mighty Housatonic River in the Litchfield Hills. We love visiting Kent because it’s so different from New York City: forests with deer, bobcats, and bears, and a small-town sensibility and pace that bring you back to the peace of sitting under a giant oak to read a book in solitude.

We saw an excellent documentary, “The Brothers Warner,” about the four brothers who created the film studio famous for making everything from “Casablanca” to “Looney Tunes.” The film was directed and narrated by Cass Warner, the granddaughter of Harry Warner, and what struck me was her description of why the brothers originally went into moviemaking and how different the industry is today. Their goal, of course, was to entertain audiences, but the brothers also wanted to educate and enlighten them. They saw films as powerful tools for promoting the social good.

For example, Warner Brothers made the first anti-Nazi film in the late 1930’s, even when the U.S. State Department was warning them not to do it. Warner Brothers also pioneered movies depicting racism against blacks, teenage rebellion (“Rebel Without A Cause”), and even the history of medicine (“The Story of Louis Pasteur”). One of the points of the documentary was that the brothers Warner often sacrificed profit for message and that marketing did not rule their decisions about what movies to make. They repeatedly put their “toochis ofn tish,” a Yiddish phrase meaning they put their “ass on the table.” The brothers took risks, political, social, and economic risks, to communicate something new through movies.

Not only did this make me think of all the junk movies today, hooked on the steroids of special effects or hot bodies, movies memorable for about five minutes; but the documentary also made me think of my industry and how marketing and celebrity literature have overwhelmed the world of books. Most of the books produced today are meant to be disposable, a quick hit to the bottom line of a corporation, and then forgotten and shredded. Rarely do commercial publishers publish anything that they don’t think will be a huge financial success, and so they follow often outmoded, safe realities of what editors, agents, and reviewers think will sell.

For example, I appeared in a new anthology this month, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, and a reviewer from Publishers Weekly criticized the anthology for not having “fiction examining distinctively Latino themes.” What stereotypical box does this reviewer want us to fit in before he or she gives writers a chance to tell their stories? The anthology was published, not surprisingly, by a non-profit press, Arte Publico from Houston. If the anthology sells, perhaps more doors will be opened to Latino writers wanting to write stories outside of preconceived notions of who or what Latinos should be. But don’t expect commercial publishers to lead the charge to educate a changing public about what deserves to be American literature today.

I find the most interesting movies are created by independent producers, and the most interesting books are published by small, often non-profit presses. These are the creative works in which it is still important to entertain, but the point is also to enlighten, to explore a subject that has been overlooked or forgotten, to perfect a work that will sustain its brilliance for a long time, and to challenge and break stereotypes. If you want to take a voyage that truly opens your eyes, rather than lulls you to sleep or gives you a fleeting high, then go independent, go non-profit, and experience the thrill of new thinking.

Burning Down Your Own Neighborhood

The bill passed by the House last week, to tax ninety percent of bonuses for any employee making over $250,000 who works for a financial institution receiving more than $5 billion in bailout funds, will be a self-imposed financial disaster that will increase the chances of a deep economic recession becoming a depression. It may make the demagogues in Congress feel good, and the legions suffering in this economy may jump for joy that they are sticking it to the bankers, but all of us will wake up the next morning amid the burning ruins. Let me count the ways.

1) The legislation does not only penalize the tiny fraction of AIG employees in the financial products division, mostly in London, who took on enormous risk and have brought AIG to its knees; it also penalizes tens of thousands of employees from at least eight major U.S. banks who had nothing to do with this mess.

What are those employees doing? They are not spending because of their fear of what Congress will do next; they are leaving the banks we badly need to be healthy; they are taking fewer appropriate risks in their businesses, like making mortgages to individuals and loans to companies, because they don’t know what the idiots in Congress will do next.

2) Many banks will be forced to return the TARP money, to avoid being burned at the stake by Congress. Nancy Pelosi will be happy- we get the taxpayers' money back! But these same banks, the ones that can survive returning the bailout money, will restrict lending to save capital, just at the moment when we need for them to do the opposite. The banks that don’t return the bailout money will be targeted as weak banks, and expect many of them to fail and fall further into the clutches of the government. Anybody remember what a run on the banks looks like? It isn’t pretty.

3) The House legislation rewards foreign banks with a competitive advantage. Deutsche Bank isn’t a U.S. company targeted by the House legislation, but it operates a big investment banking unit in New York City. Guess where all the best bankers from Bank of America, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs are sending their resumes? Instead of keeping the best bankers to clean up the messes of a few, we are driving away the talent, and decimating our American banking system. Why doesn’t Congress focus on why AIG bailout funds made whole foreign banks that exploited loopholes in European legislation on derivatives? Oh, I forgot. That requires thinking, and actually being productive, not just livid.

4) The U.S. government owns AIG, we lent AIG most of the bailout money (yes, that’s true: it’s mostly a loan), and the vilification embodied by the House legislation destroys the value of AIG. Who in their right mind would now buy the assets of AIG? Yet selling AIG’s assets is the primary way in which taxpayers will get their money back. Killing AIG, rhetorically and financially, is only hurting ourselves again. It’s stupid.

5) The House legislation will hurt New York City the most. Many of the tens of thousands of employees of major U.S. banks targeted by the House bill work in New York. Bonuses are the way people in the financial industry have been paid for years, from high profile bankers to analysts out of college to secretaries. If anything like the House bill becomes law, expect NYC to teeter that much closer to bankruptcy. New York sponsors of the House bill, Charlie Rangel and Steve Israel, and Senate supporter Charles Schumer, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Maybe some good ol’ boys will be secretly thrilled at the prospect of watching these Yankees suffer, but remember the 1970’s: the nation stagnated, and what happened in NYC was mirrored in the rest of the country.

The ways in which the House legislation will hurt all of us do not stop at five. You can’t run any business with Congress changing the rules every week. You don’t inspire confidence in foreign investors of U.S. Treasury securities when you have a Congress legislating out of revenge, instead of focusing on new, tough, permanent legislation to regulate the financial industry so that these problems do not happen again. You do not turn the corner in the bear market in stocks by attacking everyone who makes money.

Even if our anger is justified, even if it is wild, we should focus on why we allowed trading in certain derivatives to go unregulated, why the SEC was not aggressively enforcing current laws and investigating financial fraud, and what legislation creates new, tougher rules for banks and other financial institutions while allowing them to do business that will help our economy prosper.

Or, we can burn down our own neighborhood, watch the flames in the night, not caring who is in the burning buildings, or whether they had anything to do with our justifiable anger. But remember, we will all wake up tomorrow morning, more sober and perhaps less angry, and we will have to walk through the smoky rubble to buy our groceries. If the grocery store is still standing.

Praise for Teachers Past and Present

We have just finished an exhausting process: deciding which school our fourteen-year-old would attend for high school. In New York City this is a crazy process, in part because of the incredible choices you have: specialized and selective public schools, and private schools with a variety of unique cultures. As we discussed and debated the different choices my son Aaron had, I was reminded of how important teachers have been in my life, and how the teachers at the Bank Street School for Children, Aaron and Isaac’s current K-8 school, are transforming them into the accomplished young men they are today.

In grade school, at South Loop School over thirty years ago, Mr. Preston Smith taught me I could be someone I had not yet envisioned myself. Mr. Smith was a math teacher who encouraged me to join the Number Sense club, when I was a fat kid who just wanted to be left alone. I won three gold medals in citywide competition (that’s more or less me in my short story, “The Snake”). This feat astonished me, and embarrassed me, for I really did not like the attention, and even got me into an argument with the principal, who sternly ‘encouraged’ me to donate the medals for the school’s trophy case. I said no. He said he’d call my parents. But nobody could ever convince me to give up my medals. I wasn’t just fat; I was stubborn.

Mrs. Dolores Vega taught me to be a proud Mexicano. Every Friday in her third-grade class, she would force all the kids to dance cumbias. ‘Force’ is not quite the right word; the girls would jump up and dance with Mrs. Vega, and some of the more suave boys would dance too, to show off their moves. She would not take no for an answer, and it made you feel good about yourself when you finally said yes to Mrs. Vega. I have never met a more consistently exuberant teacher who worked so hard for you to experience the true joy of who you were.

Mrs. Pearl Crouch and Mrs. Josie Gutierrez Kinard, at Ysleta High School, were my mentors in Publications. They taught me how to be a good writer of fierce editorials aimed at teachers and the school administration. How? By never accepting anything less than written arguments that were precise and provable. By showing me the meaning of integrity when they stood behind me, even when they came under pressure from the powers-that-be. By expanding my horizons: I first visited San Francisco and New York City with them to attend scholastic writing competitions. I did not know the fancy neighborhoods of El Paso, but I had seen “A Chorus Line” on Broadway and dined at Sardi’s.

At Bank Street, Aaron and Isaac have also experienced classroom after classroom with dedicated, insightful teachers. The School for Children is part of Bank Street College of Education, which is a school that trains teachers. But how do you capture the essence of a place where teaching about children, and children, and how they learn, their voices, their art, their music, are at the center of each day? Bank Street is a remarkable place. I see it reflected in Aaron and Isaac. They sit patiently to work on their homework; they discuss important subjects at the dinner table; they repeatedly ask why, and can offer plausible answers that delve deep into their own selves. Aaron and Isaac are not perfect, but I have little doubt that they will be good citizens in whatever community they decide to call their home.

Even I have learned from Bank Street. I do not think I was a good father when Aaron first attended school as a three-year-old. I was learning to be a parent on the fly; I was exhausted by my many responsibilities; I was too gruff, instead of being focused on understanding the world from my child’s point of view. My essay “The Father is in the Details” recounts my struggle to be a better parent. But I wanted to learn; I am excellent at adapting; I am a sponge. So I paid attention to how successive Bank Street teachers reached my children, how they handled questions, how they listened. Over time, I received as much of an education from Bank Street as my children did.

John Womack. Terry Karl. Maurice Natanson. Laurie Ryan. Karsten Harries. Juwanna Newman. And so many more I have not mentioned. To all those teachers who dedicate themselves to their important work every day, thank you.

TV Rants as News, and Undermining the National Dialogue

Cable news has devolved to the lowest common denominator for the sake of profit and niche ratings. Instead of reporting what happened, instead of carefully researched investigative journalism, we have on Fox News, CNN, and now CNBC loud rants from anchors spouting ridiculous positions, which attract much coveted attention and keep them in business. But what has happened, and what will happen, to the important debate about how to resolve our current economic crisis? Will policymakers have the guts to ignore these rants, which stir up the public for a few moments, and instead opt for difficult, long-term solutions? I think the more we listen to the so-called debates on TV, the more trouble we will be in.

For some channels, perhaps they were always in it to serve a small cable constituency, and get their coveted ratings to promote to advertisers. Their motto was, ‘Be Extreme, be loud, be outrageous, like Limbaugh, and get attention. Make money.’ They only used the cover of ‘news’ to attract that uncritical viewer who might have been channel-flipping.

For others, the change has been nothing short of remarkable. Lou Dobbs, in another lifetime, was a respected business journalist, before he decided to pull what I call a Bill O’ Reilly. Dobbs metamorphosed into a dictator on the TV screen, who only invited guests in order to talk over them, berate them, and pontificate on his own views, while his ‘guests’ were left stammering. For years, Dobbs has shouted at the camera, red-faced, to vilify illegal immigrants, to attack Bush, the government, CEOs, now Obama, and so on. You know the story.

And his ratings have skyrocketed. Mind you, he doesn’t have a majority of the cable news audience, just an important sliver of it, but that’s all you need to thrive in this media. Limbaugh has known that for years. Balkanization works for success on TV and radio; the middle ground is not only boring, but unprofitable. These loudmouths do not offer any practical, real-world solutions. They shout, and we tune in, amazed, disgusted, in stitches or in tears, but many of us look and listen. It’s entertaining, and we can gleefully feel good about ourselves while the talking heads put someone else down. It’s a weak and petty self that enjoys such entertainment, but well, that is who we often are.

The latest flip to the dark side of ridiculous media is CNBC. I watch CNBC often, and last week was a turning point. Rick Santelli, Larry Kudlow, and Jim Cramer unleashed a series of anti-Obama rants about the war against capitalism, subsidizing losers, and unprecedented wealth destruction. Did Obama get us into this mess? Where were these TV demagogues when Bush exploded the deficit, when the SEC fell asleep at the wheel, when CNBC promoted many of the CEOs who later bankrupted their companies and then came begging for government handouts? Is there any kind of mea culpa forthcoming from CNBC about its role in not being systematically critical of Wall Street investment banks, Countrywide Financial, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when it mattered years ago? What happened to their skills as journalists in investigating these problems before they became the crisis du jour for talk television? David Faber is the only one who still sounds thoughtful on CNBC, and he must feel lonely there.

The problem of course is that this insidious trend to gather a small, but loyal group of eyeballs to make your channel profitable is being taken for serious national debate by those who are not the sharpest tools in the shed: our politicians. If our political leaders make important decisions based on these rants, then expect our country to suffer, expect it to be irrationally divided and bitter, expect careful thinking to go the way of analog TV, expect other countries not so hooked on the boob tube to surpass us quietly and methodically. Where is Gretchen Morgenson when you need her? Turn off the TV, and pick up a newspaper, magazine or book, and think outside the box.

Bear Market Blues

Another day, another drop in the Dow. We had an interesting discussion as a family yesterday: how to cut back on expenses to save as much money as possible. Laura and I told the kids about our investments, and how along with everybody else in this country we are suffering from this vicious, relentless decline in equities. We are okay, and I have never invested in anything fancy with the small portfolio of stocks I have, mostly in healthcare. Our portfolio has done better than the S&P 500 over the past fourteen months, yet it’s little solace to be down 35 percent even if the market is down 50 percent. The kids suggested turning off more lights to save electricity and eliminating cable and just watching TV on the Internet. I suspect many families across the country are having these discussions, and I know many are making much tougher decisions than whether or not to keep cable.

I wonder how this deep recession will affect our long-term attitudes. We have never been big spenders, and I have always paid off my credit card balances at the end of the month. I don’t like the punishing interest rates or late fees from plastic. I pay our mortgage fifteen days early each month; I try to be responsible. In our living room, I still have the speakers I had in college twenty-five years ago, but we do spend heavily on books and about once a week I buy a few culinary treats from Zabar’s. This economic downturn has forced me to ask myself many questions. Have we been careful enough with our finances? Are we ready for a long-term decline in the economy, in the stock market? Should we have saved even more money, and invested it even more conservatively, so that our kids can afford college in four years?

There is a great deal of self-doubt, self-assessment occurring in my head. I know I have not been reckless with our family’s finances. In comparison to what I hear in the news, of people investing in mortgages with teaser rates, of credit-card holders paying only the minimum with exorbitant interest rates on massive balances, of spenders who did not save much for many years but instead took out home-equity lines of credit, I know I did none of these things. We spent what we needed; Laura and I have saved 10-20 percent of our income each year; and I invested it. My friends and family have assured me I have been conservative with our finances, and yet I still feel I am failing. I simply want my family to be okay; I want my children to go to whatever college they want in four years.

Besides questioning myself, I am also angry. Angry at the ridiculous 21st Century version of American democracy. I find it more akin to several mobs shouting at each other, trying to sway the middle who simply wants to live in peace and with a modest prosperity. The democratic political and economic discussion to solve our problems, I have always believed, would only be as good as the character of the participants in this discussion. But what happens when ‘character’ is defined and warped by the means of communicating your message? We are losing newspaper editors and reporters every year, but TV pundits and braggarts on the radio, both experts of pithy sound bytes, define, ambush, and drive ‘political discussion.’

What will happen when we don’t even remember that there used to be a time when careful, self-critical, and even profound political debate defined at least a significant part of what occurred in the great American conversation to solve our problems? When we don’t even have the memory of a better political discussion, I believe we will become more mob-like, and less democratic. I believe we will be prone to radical influences with simplistic solutions, which in reality solve nothing. Be careful whom you pay attention to: the more you pay attention to them, the less you will be able to decide for yourself why you began to pay attention to them in the first place.

These are sobering times. Will we get sober leaders to help us out of this mess? Will we even have the capacity to listen to them anymore? I don’t know, but I am still hopeful.