Where Words Fail, Pictures Illuminate

Calculated Risk, in my humble opinion, is the best of the blogs documenting events in the economy. Accurate, insightful, no axe to grind, no hysteria, and to the point.

Today's notice about the GM bankruptcy is typical of the spare and factual style found at CR.

But, from a more colorful corner, the UK Libertarian Party, comes the perfect image to portray the 'New GM', aka 'Guv'mint Motors'.

Now, all we lack is a name for this creature.

Your suggestions welcomed below.

It Doesn't Take Billions to Transform Lives--Kenyan Boys Choir

Another green shoot: The Kenyan Boys Choir

Now, if this can be done in backwaters like Kenya, or South Africa (I had the joy of hearing the Drakenburg Boy's Choir perform!), or in the Fens of Ely, England...

What might happen here?

The answers to our cultural and economic quandries do not reside with the politicians and bankers.

They reside with us.

Another Pair of Obits: Steve McNair and Karl Malden

Sometimes, I think Providence schedules earthly departures in pairs, just to make a point. Remember how the funerals of Mother Teresa and Princess Di occurred back-to-back? I'm to the point that I almost expect these dual departures.

This first one makes no sense.

Dead at 36, with a lifetime of achievement behind him, at least as many years ahead of him, financially secure, and a local hero in two states, just for good measure.

Found dead in a murder/suicide, where he was the party murdered, and the girlfriend appears to be the suicide--usually the roles are reversed between the parties.

The grisly, sordid, Jerry-Springer-stuff will all be published, humiliating his wife and children (yes, he left behind the wife and kids by getting shot by the 20-year-old girlfriend).

And to quote Jerry Springer, as he says at the end of each televised melee:

'So, what have we learned here?'

Not really certain yet...

But, perhaps a comparative obit from the same week might provide food for thought--another kid from hard-scrabble America, who played football, and ended well.

Karl Malden, requiescat in pace.

A Life That Mattered

Traveling in England last week, away from TV and computer, I wandered into the local newsstand to be greeted by the trumpeting headlines of Michael Jackson's demise.

Everywhere I turned, it was all Michael, all the time. And, as I suspected, it turns out that in the wake of a chaotic life, a multi-million/three children trail of chaos and debt has been left behind for others to clean up.

This man, father of three, who owned half the Beatles song catalogue, didn't get around to making a freaking will!

I flashed back to 1977, waking to the news of Elvis's summons to Eternity. Watching that melodrama unfold, especially from my native Nashville, none of the Jackson saga is surprising. Same stupidity, different year.

Why does this culture idolize people, however gifted, who create raging chaos at every turn? Does artistic achievement give anyone license to be the proverbial bull in the china shop? Haydn, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, Bing Crosby, Eddy Arnold, Bob Hope, Dolly Parton, Stravinksy, Yo Yo Ma, Van Cliburn--the list goes on and on. They have created an enormous body of enduring work, and have also lived ordered lives. Far from perfect, to be certain, but on the whole, sanity prevailed.

Why do Elvis and Michael get a pass? Why won't anyone state the obvious?

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be celebrities!

Artists, yes. Celebrities, no.


Here, on the other hand, is a life that mattered.

This kid died within a few days of The King of Pop. Look at what he accomplished in the short time allotted to him.

You be the judge.

Real Green Shoots

Thanks go to Tim Sharp, Executive Director of American Choral Directors Association, for sharing this with his world:



CBS, for all its failings, does not spend major money and time on stories they don't believe have much audience. There are too many people pitching too many stories to them on a daily basis, and limited airtime.

Here and there, we see green shoots in the culture. If we water, fertilize, and keep pulling the weeds, who knows what might happen?

What if, instead of installing that MongoSantaMaria! flatscreen home theatre system with the Wii game installed, MomAndDad decide to enroll the kids in the local university's community choral program? How about a year of music lessons instead of three days in The Land of The Mouse? Or a year of language or math tutoring? Or a year of the local community theatre?

What if MomAndDad decide to sign themselves up for the local university choral program?

What if?

What would the culture look like if this became normative?

Then, and only then--what would the economy begin to look like?

Real green shoots.

John Ruskin's Appeal To Our Better Angels

We occasionally run across pithy quotes from John Ruskin(1819-1900), the Victorian essayist. The final paragraph below may be familiar to a number of readers. Like so many Victorians (such as Dickens and MacDonald) the language sounds flowery and archaic to our post-Hemingway, media-saturated world. It's worth the effort to dig through and learn the rhythm of Ruskin's verbal craft.

The words preceding that famous quote deserve consideration: What would our culture look like if these words guided our behavior?


'The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practicing present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendents may live under their shade, of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was within our power to bequeath.

Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.'


From The Seven Lamps of Architecture: The Lamp of Memory

Monday Morning Morality Moment

Always good to begin the week with a strong cup of coffee laced with a dose of sober reality.

It's the account of one Harry Markopolos, the financial analyst from Boston who uncovered the Madoff Ponzi scheme a decade before Bernie turned himself in to the FBI.

Culture creates economy...

If You Live Long Enough, And Remain Patient....

... you get to see the thugs that took over Iran confronted in the streets by a young populace that is fed up with rule by the mullahs.

For those of us who agonized through 1979's hostage crisis, this is really, really sweet.

The BBC points us to Tehran 24, updating news from the streets.

Maybe, with a million mobile devices uploading images to the rest of the world, the goons that run Iran won't be able to crush this uprising as the Chinese government did in Tiennamen Square in 1989. Those brave reformers only had fax machines, a few phones, and film to smuggle out. The true story there may never be known.

Here's wishing the young people of Tehran well.

Listening to the Baptists Sing

Last night I visited a buddy engineering a live recording session at First Baptist Nashville, the venerable grand dame of the once-mighty Southern Baptist Convention.

I arrived to find he was recording a live concert, featuring some 150 men assembled in a choir, all of them church music directors from across the South, all of them with music degrees of some variety, and thrilled to be there with one another for the occasion. They are the remnant of a fabulous tradition of church music, forged in both revival meeting tents of the 1800's and conservatories and seminaries of the 1900's. An audience showed up as well, to sing along on the hymns.

What started out as a visit to check out mic placement and pre-amplifiers became a poignant revisit of the world I grew up in. The sound of that choir and that congregation singing those stolid tent-meeting hymns like 'Come Christians, Join to Sing', and 'The Solid Rock' is indescribable. It was a warm evening, and the folks in the balcony were occupied fanning themselves, singing, and daubing tears from their eyes.

Somewhere along the way, most of the Baptists decided that it wasn't that important to sing hymns anymore, and they settled for listening to inane 'praise choruses' sung to them with the words projected to them on a screen. They decided to abandon the glowing theology and inspiring poetry of the hymnal, and settle for bad prose and angry theology from the pulpit.

Now they wonder why things seem to be falling apart.

It was a wonderful evening, an occasion to be grateful for what I was given growing up.

I wish the remnant well, and hope we all find a way to recover and transmit last night's spirit to the next generations.

We are running out of time, as most everyone in the room was over fifty years of age.

To Quote Austin Powers...'Yeah, Baby, Yeah'!

Dan Hannan wisely chose to refrain from Shakespeare tonight. Gordon Brown doesn't deserve to have good words like that wasted on his sorry self.

Hannan instead called upon Dr. Suess.

How very appropriate. Even Gordon Brown and his followers can understand the good Doctor.