Obama's Oil

That's the message being broadcast everywhere. It's the President's fault. Well, okay, he didn't actually cause the spill, but he hasn't done enough and quickly enough to fix it. Yeah, that's it.

"Why has the Bush Administration been so slow to intervene into what was from the first day obviously a major environmental crisis?"
--The Los Angeles Times
March 30, 1989
(six days after the Exxon Valdez disaster)

Back then, there was public debate about whether to allow oil and gas exploration in ANWR -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Bush administration -- barely two months into its first term -- was for it, but the Exxon Valdez disaster killed the idea. The Obama administration recently proposed allowing it 50 miles off the East Coast. The BP disaster has now killed that idea, too.

The fact is: we Americans demand fossil fuels and oil companies meet that demand. Government is supposed to protect us from shoddy practices but it cannot. Whistle-blowers go unheard until there's a disaster (think Countrywide, undertrained pilots, ignored intelligence).

That's SOP unless and until we change it.

THE GREEN ROOM

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. –The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It wasn’t a 30-yard fence, but a patio we had enclosed to create an additional room. Never mind that we never used the darned thing. For one thing, it’s ugly, with siding all ‘round, and emerald green indoor/outdoor carpeting laid by the previous owner. For another, we’re just not “outside” people: we don’t go camping, hiking, picnicking or any such thing. At most, once a year we drive to a remote spot to watch the 4th-of-July fireworks over downtown. We’re pasty-white indoor folk.

So there it was, an outdoor-indoor room that needed painting. I knew how to paint a wall, but it had been awhile. “Preparation,” a housepainter once told me, “is the thing. Get all your gear on-site, ready.” So I prepared exactly nothing. How hard can it be? I thought. Just paint the damned thing.

The wall that we created to enclose the room was made of fence wood, board-on-board. At the time, we thought it was a good choice. It was not. It soaked up the paint like a sponge. An hour into the task, I had completed one wall when the phone rang. A friend and I talked for half an hour. By then, the paint roller had stiffened a bit. *sigh*

And what’s that on the floor?? A big drop of paint that went unnoticed ‘til now. And another over there! Jeez.

Thus it went for the next three hours until I’d had enough. Clean-up took another 45 minutes because paint rollers hold a lot of paint.

Tonight I sit here, achy and hungry. My arms and shoulders are threatening legal action against my brain, and my jeans are sporting new designs that suspiciously resemble painted finger wipes.

Tomorrow, the remaining two walls.

Don’t say a word; two walls in one afternoon ain’t bad. But if you spot Huckleberry Finn, tell him I'd like a word with him.

BROKEN DOWN

I've been a Triple-A member for years, and until recently it has served me well. Mind you, I don't call upon them for anything but a tow or a boost. Twice a year at most, and the driver always gets a tip. Lately, though, the service has deteriorated. The drivers are universally courteous and professional. It's the folks in between the driver and me who have become the problem.

The process is simple enough. The call to the Roadside Assistance number gets you a customer service rep who takes your information, schedules the truck and gives you the driver's Estimated Time of Arrival. Once he's on the way, you get an automated call confirming (or slightly adjusting) that ETA. The driver arrives, does his job and -- in my case, at least -- always gets a tip. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Tonight, my car died right at the fast-food pick-up window. Three young men at the store hustled right out and pushed me to a safe area nearby. (Who says today's kids are going to hell in a hand basket?)

I called Triple-A's Houston headquarters and was promised a tow truck driver within 45 minutes. Houston always promises 45 minutes. Thirty minutes later comes the automated call, estimating the driver's ETA 20 minutes later than first promised. After a half-hour, I call. "Uh, I'll contact Dispatch, find out what the problem is and get back to you." Twenty minutes go by with no call-back, so I call again. "He's on his way and will be there in 30 minutes." Thirty-five minutes later I call again. "He's 8-10 minutes out," which proved true. The driver was courteous and professional, and he apologized: he's the only guy covering Plano, Allen, Frisco, Richardson and West Garland, and he's got 4 more calls after me. I've heard nearly-identical excuses the past two years. Tonight, this driver did his job well and got the tip. Houston is lucky that my car wasn't down a ditch in BFE tonight and that the weather was tolerable and that there happened to be a Starbucks within walking distance while I waited three hours for Triple-A's tow truck driver.

Footnote: The disabled car was our "nice car," which has about 100,000 miles on it. The car that my wife drove to the scene was our "everyday car," which has more than 150,000 miles on it and has been far less trouble.

THE BOOK

At around the time of Barack Obama's inauguration as President, Doris Kearns Goodwin was a guest on NBC's "Meet the Press." Since the new President had studied Abraham Lincoln, she was asked to compare the two. By my count, the presidential historian has written five books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "No Ordinary Time," about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's gallantry during World War II. She not only knows her stuff (duh!), but she also is wonderfully articulate.

On this occasion, Kearns Goodwin was asked about her 2006 treatise on Abraham Lincoln, "Team of Rivals." She described how Lincoln managed to pull together a first-term cabinet that included bitter political rivals, virtually all of whom grew to respect and love the rail-splitter. The suggestion of the interview was that perhaps Barack Obama would capitalize on the lessons he learned from Lincoln and meet with equal success.

Based on that interview, I went out and bought the book. For me, it was a heavy read:

Text: 749 pages, including the Introduction, photos, maps and illustrations
Epilogue: 4 pages
Acknowledgements: 2-1/2 pages
Notes: 121 pages of tiny print
Illustration credits: 1 page
Index: 33 pages

I plowed into the book head-on, soon realizing that this would take a while. So as I have done in the past, I removed the jacket and whenever leaving the house I took it with me and tossed it onto the back seat of the car. One never knows when opportunity arises: waiting at the car wash, the doctor's office, the barber shop and -- my favorite -- those weekends when my wife and I both read our books together. Except, she's a faster reader. Once we went to the library together. She checked out three books and I pulled two. She easily read her three that weekend and I barely finished my two. More about that weekend in another post.

One reason that my wife reads faster than I do is how I read. It must be hard-wired in my DNA, for I note sentence structure, voice, grammar, etc. If all is well at first, the read flows well. If not, I watch for things. Doris Kearns Goodwin reads very, very well.

Reading a good book is a treat. It's visiting with someone who has a tale to tell, yet whose only presence in the room is the story unfolding before your eyes. Years ago I signed up for one of those book clubs that send you a new book every few weeks and automatically hit your credit card. I was working 12-hour days then, which begs the question, "If you have no time to read, why buy books?" My answer was, "Well, I should be reading more and one of these days I'll get to it." After a couple of years, I cancelled my account and the books sat on the shelves of my library, staring at me.

My boys were young then and playing soccer. I'd go to practice with them, but found that I actually enjoyed solitude more than sitting in the bleachers and listening to other parents yell the darndest things at their kids, the coaches, the referees and occasionally each other. My boys weren't that good at soccer and didn't play much anyway, so one afternoon I grabbed one of those dusty books and took it with me to practice. They consented to me sitting in the car, reading.

I'd never heard of this particular author and had forgotten most of what I learned in school about the dawn of civiization. In brief, it was a wonderful book. It was about 325 pages covering the the dawn of man through the Early Renaissance. To me, the most striking attribute was the writing: crisp, thoughtful, wonderfully descriptive and -- well, informative. I so admired the writing that I have read it three times. Since then, I have nearly always been working on a book of some kind. Some, like "Team of Rivals," take time. Others go more quickly.

As I said, reading a good book is a treat for me. Occasionally, I'd leave the house without the book and be immediately disappointed. But there's always the weekend. Or an evening. Or a doctor's office. And nearby, the book.

HOPE

I've always liked John McCain, but I voted for the other guy and I'm standing by him. Aside from being legendary drunks and sourpusses, once we Welsh make up our minds, that's it. Besides, W and the Republicans really, really messed things up.

Our new President (which, by the way, is ALWAYS capitalized) is young and inexperienced, that's true. And it's all a very serious business and he's already made some mistakes and he's probably going to make more mistakes and the economy sucks and the deficit is now bigger than the Sun and his poll numbers are tanking and people are yelling at each other about health insurance and .. and .. OMG!

Calm yourself. We have far more pressing matters:

Ellen is the new judge on "Idol"!
Diane is replacing Charlie!
Microsoft is now actually advertising Windows 7!
Hallowe'en is just around the corner!
Leno's new show starts next week!
My BFF just posted on FaceBook that he's had a long day!

See? None of that other stuff really matters to us average Americans. We have our broadband, BlackBerrys, Starbucks and trucks. We're fine.

We have hope.

TO A DEGREE

Finance-311 wasn't really such a bad course; it's just that I was 23 and cruelly distracted. You've heard the saying, "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." So it was with me.

I was pursuing a degree in business administration and English. I needed gas and food money, so I took a part-time job. It turned out to be an exciting job and I was getting good at it, or so they told me. I got hired full-time. So there I was, going to school and working. I kept telling myself that even though the job was fun, school must take priority.

Then one day I decided to skip Finance-311. I hadn't studied for that day's class and, feeling guilty, sought solace in the student union building. I spotted a classmate at a table with a foursome playing pinochle.

"Glad to see you," he said. "You ready for class?"
"Nah," I said. "I'm gonna skip."
"Good," he said. "You can take my place here." He introduced me to his pinochle partner and the other 2 players and left.

I sat down across from a wild-eyed platinum blonde with dilated pupils. Great, I thought. I'm about to play a card game I've never played before, and my partner is high on marijuana. She looked me up and down and said, "Follow my lead and don't **** up." We won. And we won all day.

Apparently I was clueless even then, because my classmate from Finance-311 told me the next day that the blonde likes me. I took her out for a Coke.

"First," I said, "why are your pupils dilated? Are you high?"
"It's a hereditary condition," she said. "I don't use drugs."
"Listen," I told her. "I'm trying to finish my degree and working at a new job and you're a nice girl and all that but I don't have time for a relationship."
"I understand," she said. "No problem."

We were married six weeks later and I dropped out of college. That was many years ago and we're still married.

The career has had its ups and downs, and right now it's down. The recession recently ate my job. There are a lot of us searching for work these days and boomers in particular are having a hard time.

Among the skills I have honed over the years is writing, rewriting and editing -- vital to my industry but increasingly ignored everywhere. I've applied for various positions that rely on such skills, confident that I could perform well, but there have been no takers. A friend the other day explained: You don't have a degree. Resumes are scanned for certain keywords, and those without degrees get tossed immediately. Pressed about it, HR people say it's policy: no degree, no follow-up, no job.

That's misguided. Well, okay: dumb.

Happy Trails

This week I joined the millions of other Americans who have lost their jobs thanks to the folly and greed that led to the recession. Far brighter people and better writers have addressed that elsewhere, so I will not do so here. Bitching gets tiresome after a while, regardless of its merits.

Here I will speak of the man who terminated me -- a sort-of Everyman in the Corner Office.

He is a good man and it pained him to pull the trigger on employees he had known for years and liked. Most of his day was spent in such closed-door, one-on-one meetings, all unhappy and woeful. He is paid well for the position he holds, but on this day it didn't feel worth the anguish he inflicted on talented, skilled and valued employees.

He said all the right things befitting his position: he professed his care and vowed to do anything he could. He listened attentively to every plea, curse word and rage, as if he were a preacher consoling a confessor.

Virtually no one else knew in advance of the coming tragedy. His second- and third-in-commands had not been briefed, the decision was so quick. It was evident to those he terminated that the order had come from On High: "Cut, cut deep and cut now." It's brutal out there, said the sacker to the sackees. And on this day, Brutality slung its scythe with deadly aim.

Card keys and other such company property were collected then and there and forms were signed and witnessed by the only other being in the death-house meetings: the HR person, charged with detailing how the condemned would be executed and how long it would take to exhaust the last, pathetic breath of life in the now-former employees.

The slain carried themselves from the gallows to their lockers and desks to perform the sad ritual of removing all possible evidence of their existence. Some of them appeared to colleagues to be visibly wounded; others were just unusually quiet. All left the premises quietly as their co-workers watched, speechless, at dead men walking.

The executioner went home at the end of the day with a knot in his stomach and a foul taste in his mouth. The business that he once loved so passionately had become -- much more so in recent years -- a spiteful and foul thing, virtually unrecognizable now.

What lies before him in the days ahead is a company of edgy and frightened employees. Today was a repeat of previous restructurings. His employees, already spread thin, must take on even more. Hell, he's laden with additional responsibilities and no additional compensation.

But he must carry on, leading and encouraging, remolding and pushing. He is the face of the company. To all his shaken flock who so earnestly seek reassurance and hope, he must appear steadfast and confident in the future. He must make omelets. And chicken salad. And lipsticked pigs.

At least he has a job. I don't.

Happy trails.