Isn't Pork Stimulating Too?

Republicans are grousing about pork in the stimulus package. Normally, I would grouse too, but this time, I wonder if we should. Isn't pork stimulating?

The WSJ listed its gripes in this article which, being a month old now, might not be addressing the current version of the stimulus bill. But this is one of the few articles in a mainstream newspaper that lists pork in the package, so I'll use its examples.

We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

Maybe this is pork. But won't all these projects create jobs? Some opponents will say that they don't create ongoing jobs, just temporary ones. But my layperson's understanding is that we need to get people working and spending again, and this will provide further stimulus to the economy which, ideally, will bring back to health business, which is where more sustained employment can be found. Sure, it's a trickle effect, but what Republican doesn't like a trickle effect?

And the WSJ implies that these projects are the means for liberals to have their way with taxpayers' money. Rahm Emmanuel is quoted saying, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

Good point, WSJ. We don't want ideologues taking advantage of public fear or anxiety to further their own schemes. Let's keep a sharp eye out for that. At least these are investments in our own country; not donations that end up feathering the nests of tribal leaders and corrupt politicians and military officers.

And while we don't know exactly how these projects will be implemented, at first glance I see them more as good investments than pork anyway. If Amtrak can be made to provide better service, surely that will improve energy efficiency and facilitate commerce in the areas it serves; money for childcare helps create or sustain jobs, and facilitates parents going to work; global warming and carbon capture research would create or sustain good jobs in the science and technology sectors and would also help us deal with an ongoing crisis.

The WSJ makes its snide remark about the NEA too. But as Svetx says, arts are a crucial part of a healthy economy. Consider what she and I did last night. We went to a concert by the North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra (NCJRO or N.C.J-Ro!) in a nearby town. They are amazing, by the way. Before the concert, we had dinner at a restaurant, and while at dinner our waiter informed us about a an awesome Paperhand Puppet Theater show coming to town. Svetx had seen the show in another town and she said it was awesome, so we will be going to that too. Then, after seeing NC J-Ro, we had dessert at another place that tries so hard to have fancy desserts they don't have basic milkshakes or chocolate syrup.

The point is, we participated in the economy because of the NC J-Ro. Consider that art is one of the few reasons people come to a city center after business hours and on weekends. Sure, bars and clubs are another reason; but the bars and clubs, and the city overall, benefit from having folks interested in art come downtown to spend money.

The NC J-Ro receives support from the NC Arts Council which is in partnership with the NEA.

I come from a pretty much neoconservative family that supports preemptive war and is deeply concerned about government waste. And yet, my stepmom enrolls in art classes from time to time in Richmond, VA which is a 1.5 hour drive away from her and my Dad's home. They drive to Richmond to see shows that she participates in, and to see other concert and theater events. I bet a lot of performers and artists they appreciate receive some support, at least indirectly, from the NEA. Republicans might want to consider what would be left if there were no government support for the arts.

I could list the rest of the examples of pork cited by the WSJ, but I have similar responses to them too.

Nonetheless, Republicans will complain. This is all just a New Deal redux, they say. Government spending didn't end the Great Depression; World War II did! (Apparently they don't think the government paid for WWII. After all, for all of the Bush administration, the government didn't pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan either.)

On the other hand, liberals say it's time to revisit the theories of Keynes, who is reputed to have said that in times of recession, the government should pay people to dig holes and fill them back up again (I can't find the original source of that quote though). The natural response to this is to suggest that the government pay people to do jobs that would be more beneficial, and this brings us back to the stimulus package and its elements that conservatives consider to be pork.

Fine. So conservatives don't want pork but do favor war spending, and liberals want Keynes. Here's my compromise: have the government pay people to build war machinery and then destroy it. We could stage demolition derbies with tanks. Because, that's basically what happens to tanks and jeeps and everything. They go to desert environments and get blown up all at once, or sand-blasted over time. But we don't want to start a new war, because our current wars indicate that we won't find in modern wars that definitive ending that makes WWII such a subject of nostalgia.

Tanks for the conservatives, Keynes for the liberals. That's our answer.

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An Outsider Goes In

Former housemate Brooks is going places.

You could have called us losers. While pouring beans out of a can into a pot once, he asked me, “What’s your favorite bean?”

“Black. But when I get tired of that, I change it up with some pintos.”

After his first year of living with me and attending business school, he spent the summer doing internships in San Francisco and D.C. When he was due to return for his second year of school, he asked if, instead of moving back into his old room, he could rent the crumbling shed behind our house for a measly $10.00 a month. He would take showers and use the bathroom indoors, but sleep out there.

I knew he would do it too. Over the summer he had emailed me descriptions of sitting on the floors of subway stations of San Francisco, his back against the tile wall, reading about African population and disease statistics. Once a bum had come and sat next to him and talked gibberish, then tilted over and fallen asleep on his leg. Brooks just kept reading.

At the end of that internship, he delivered a presentation about how that foundation’s disease prevention efforts were not as effective as they could be, and he recommended some new approaches.

“No,” I said, “You may not live in the crumbling shack. If you live on the premises, you man-up and carry your weight -- $250.00 per month share for rent plus utilities like the rest of us pay.” I mean, it’s not like I was asking him to live according to middle class values or anything. We are not air conditioned; a family of birds nests in our chimney every summer. Anyway, I knew that, if he were to move into the shed, I’d be out there on the cold nights insisting that he come indoors.

Instead, for that fall, he found a long-term housesitting gig in town. For his final semester the following spring, he doubled up on schoolwork by beginning a public health program in Baltimore and dividing his time between here and there. Then he enrolled in a PhD program for agricultural engineering in Baltimore, and used his grad school stipend not to live on, but to start a non-profit company that experiments with growing meat as tissue culture. The plan is to one day replace factory farms with incubators that grow only muscle, not entire animals.

Now he speaks at international conferences dealing with food production. His ex-girlfriend from here told me that his research compelled him to compile a list of the greatest risks our country faces. I don’t know what they are, but guess what -- it’s not Iran’s 3.49% concentrated uranium. He submitted this list to some pentagon official, and was invited in for some conference there.

When he lived with me, I had lost a job and was sleeping late most days, and applying to graduate schools in creative writing. We all know what happened with that. I eventually found my way back into the field I had worked in previously. But now that field is slackening off, what with the economy and all. I’m sleeping late a lot of days. And taking naps. I wake up not knowing whether it’s time for breakfast or dinner; the room is dark either way.

Usually I don’t know what to do upon waking, so I check email. And one evening, while doing this, still groggy, the phone vibrated. It was an investigator calling to ask about Brooks.

When did I know him, and in what capacity?

Housemates, I said. How much would this guy want to know?

I did not say that I had met Brooks when he called one August Friday morning when I was in the final days of that job I lost. He wanted to see the house that day and have us make the decision right then on whether he could move in. I said that usually we take a few days after the interview to check references. He offered to give me the references so I could check them during that day, from work, before we met. Then, if I liked him and had found the references favorable, I could then make the decision right there.

I was feeling a little pushed into this, but I said I’d check the references. They were two or three guys spread all around the country, and all had those non-violent vegetarian tenor voices like you hear on This American Life. They said that Brooks was great -- that he would “invent something for us, like a better way to dry clothes on the line,” that he would refinish the floors.

Brooks showed up and liked the downstairs room, somewhat separate from the rest of the rooms upstairs. He said all he would have would be a sleeping bag and a bicycle. His dad was with him and sat out on the front walkway while Brooks and I talked. I liked him and said he could move in. His dad wrote the first check. Two weeks later Brooks came back with his stuff.

A bicycle, sleeping bag, backpacks and books. The smell of musty camping gear emanated from his room and filled the stairwell to the upstairs hall. He had nothing to sleep on besides his sleeping bag. I insisted that he add the guest mattress to his accouterments. It had been our guest accommodations for years. We would get it out from the attic and slide down the stairs on it, crashing into the hall closet door on the first floor. We slid it down for the last time for Brooks, and on it he slept and studied that whole year, reading by the stark light of the single bare lightbulb in the ceiling six feet above his head, his back against the plaster wall.

He rode that old beat-up three-speed bike to class and back. He said he didn’t even want a 10-speed, because he could fix the 3-speed himself. And he never wanted to drive a car because he never wanted to kill anyone on the highway.

He was a student at one of the most prestigious business schools in the country.

The investigator said that it was customary for students at this school to do a lot of their work online and cut classes. He asked if Brooks did this. I admitted that he had. (I didn’t say that he had even skipped one class so much that that professor put his picture from the class roster on the overhead projector and asked the class who he was. Near the end of the semester, Brooks needed to attend that class to take a test. His classmates warned him that the professor had recognized his absence. So Brooks went in disguise. He wore Groucho Marx glasses and moustache, and a baseball cap.)

What was he doing when cutting class?

Mostly he studied for other things, I said. (He sat in on extra ethics classes that he was not officially enrolled in, because he felt he needed an antidote to business school. He stated that he wanted to date a “vegan ethicist,” and another housemate found him one. Her favorite word was “aricea,” Greek for knowing what is the right thing to do and not doing it.)

One night at the semester’s end I found Brooks at the dining room table with books and printouts spread all out. I asked what he was studying for, and he told me he was boning up on certain writings on Utilitarianism, which had been a focus of his undergraduate studies. I said that didn’t sound like a business school class. He said it wasn’t -- he was having a date with that girlfriend the next day, and she had said she wanted to ask him some questions about this branch of philosophy.

So he was studying for his date. During the semester’s end exam period. I figured there was no way I could describe all this to the investigator. But I did say that Brooks was the most ascetic person I know -- the person who most lives according to his values. He’s not just talking the talk.

Did he have any hobbies?

Not really. (Unless you want to talk about “The Big Lebowski,” which we watched over and over again in 10 minute intervals while eating oatmeal in the morning, Raman noodles in the afternoon, beans and rice in the evening. When we would reach the end, we would start it over. This went on for months. Our conversations came to consist mostly of quotes from that movie. “It’s a nice drive to Winston-Salem . . . well, parts at least.”)

Would I trust him with national secrets?

I would trust him as much as anyone I know with such secrets. He takes things very seriously.

Has he ever been a part of subversive or terrorist organizations?

No. (But he would take vegetables out of the compost bin behind the food coop and bring them home and cook them. I went with him one night. We stepped over a chain barring the alley, took the lid off the compost garbage cans, and right there was some only slightly un-fresh broccoli. We took it home and steamed it up with some lemon juice.)

Funny, I was thinking. Once upon a time, the word “terrorist” would have been instead “communist.” I should have said, “No sir. But there were these communists . . . ”

I wrote to Brooks and asked him what he was going to be doing. He said it would be working to forestall the attack by killer robots. Had I seen the Sarah Connor Chronicles? Scary, Dude.

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This Whole Media Thing is Getting Out of Hand

It's gotten so any loser can record himself and post it on the 'net. I recently purchased these cool mics for my work, and a housemate went and used them to record himself on some creaky out-of-tune piano where his girlfriend is house sitting. Took him like an hour of egregiously missing notes to finally get this overly cautious rendition out, and it's still ragged and misses notes. Well. There's probably a better playing of the piano solo in one of the takes, but who wants to dig through an hour of media to find it.

Oh, and this is Elton John's "Rock Me When He's Gone," in case anyone cares about hearing it played well.

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New Ice Cream Flavors

Ben & Jerry's flavors honoring George W. Bush are listed here. My suggestion is "Dubya Dip Credit Crunch."

Flavors honoring Sarah Palin are here. My suggestion is "Trackolate Pipermint Wanillow Bristol Trigonometric Swirl."

Meanwhile, there are rumors of more unplanned parenthood in the family of this family values politician. I honestly hope it's not true. The pro-life family values camp will deny its significance, and anyway, the world does not need two more fatherless children.

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Sarah Palin is So Dumb . . .

. . . She ran for governor because she heard it was "in Juneau" and she had always wanted to be a French actress.

Honk!

In other news, it looks like she lied to the RNC, telling them that she could not attend their winter retreat because she had important work in Alaska that same weekend. Then, on the Friday of that weekend, she was seen at a GOP fundraiser in DC (the same town as the retreat, and not the same as any town in Alaska) and the following night she was at the Alfalfa Club dinner, also in DC. I can attest to that. Here's a lousy cell phone picture I took of her entering the ballroom at the Capital Hilton. She's the blur in front of the window. But even in the blur, her Pentecostal hair is distinct as a Miss America crown.

Oh, and apparently, Alaska receives $1.87 for every dollar it pays out in federal taxes. It is the second largest welfare state after New Mexico.

Hmm. New Mexico keeps coming up as one of the best states to put our nation's algae farms for growing oil for Diesel and jet fuel. Hey New Mexico -- wanna bring in some cash?

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