Author Archives: Ken

Frances Fragos Townsend

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This is, like, my fourth blog posting and I must admit I don’t know a lot about the game of getting noticed. No one has noticed me so far. My blog doesn’t show up in Google searches, and really, why should it. There is nothing remarkable to be read here. And not very much of the unremarkable to capture the attention of Google’s roaming spiders and bots.

The blogosphere overflows with compelling writing, diverse subject matter and inventive communication techniques. There are over 100 million blogs, according to Technorati, and surveys show your average blogger is pretty educated. Oh, yeah, I don’t show up in Technorati searches either, though my virus protection program indicated someone thought enough of my presence to slip me a Trojan horse while I was exploring the site.

There are not only a lot of blogs, there are a lot of prolific bloggers. “The sad truth is the more content you produce the more page views you get,” according to blogging evangelist Duncan Riley. He also once said that no one will visit pages that have ads on them. Riley was wrong about that, but right about the sadder truth.

I don’t really care about any of this. I’m not trying to build an audience, make a statement or earn a buck.

My master plan is to blog infrequently for an audience of one.

And I established forever in the ’80s my total lack of the entrepreneurial gene when I wrote one of the first computer programs for running a fantasy baseball league and limited its free use to a small group of friends. Even when I took it to the web a few years later it was limited, free and unknown, by design.

That’s probably a good thing, because as Riley points out:

“If you want to get rich quick, don’t even bother. There is no such thing as get rich quick. I know everyone goes out there and sells ‘make money from blogging.’ It’s rubbish.”

No money. No fame. Probably not much intellectual satisfaction. I get that by belittling Glenn Beck from my living room couch. So what’s in it for me? Well, now I have some writing clips to show when trying to convince potential employers to end my extended sabbatical from the workplace. I’m talking to you, Firedoglake.

And I have an activity to help me battle my growing addiction to Malcolm in the Middle reruns.

But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

In this age of lists, I want to be on one. And this list doesn’t appear to offer advice that I can, or am willing to, make use of.

So, I’m gonna try this.

Frances Fragos Townsend.

There. I’ve done it. I’ve mentioned the name of a former homeland security adviser to former president George W. Bush. When I searched Google blogs for a monthly mention of her name only 17 links appeared. I want to be Number 18.

I don’t need to be Number 1. It’s not just about me, you know. I’ll be waiting for the chant to go up. “We’re Number 18. We’re Number 18.”

Instant recognition in the marketplace of ideas.

Update: Two weeks later, this blog entry turned up as the ninth entry listed out of 240 on a Google search for mentions of Frances Fragos Townsend during the past month. She seems to have become more popular. I would like to think I helped.

I don’t know anything

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I spent a not insignificant part of my formative years in Michigan cowering in a school basement, or under a desk, curled up in a fetal position and waiting patiently for disaster to be visited all about me. But not upon me.

We were being trained how best to survive a nuclear disaster. Or a tornado. Duck and cover. It was drilled into us on a regular basis. Signs on walls and ads on television made sure I knew what to do when the end of the world was near. We all knew what to do.

When I moved to California, I brought my knowledge of how the world worked with me to earthquake country. My wife and I taught it to our daughter, and put it to good use when the 1994 Northridge earthquake jolted us from our beds and sent us scurrying to the doorjamb in the kitchen. We cowered beneath it as the walls shook and the floor rocked, secure in the knowledge that we were taking all the proper precautions under difficult circumstances.

But just the other day, I received an e-mail from a friend who forwarded me an article from “rescue expert” Doug Copp, who had crawled through 875 collapsed buildings, worked at a high level for the UN and was a member of the world’s most experienced rescue team. He categorically refuted everything I ever knew about surviving the Big One.

He called his method The Triangle of Life.

Falling buildings crush big things and everything under them. Don’t get under things. Lie next to them. Don’t go to the center of a building. Cuddle up to a wall. Don’t curl up under a doorjamb. It will skewer you to death. The only safe place was in the space next to objects, beneath the triangle of wreckage. About all the two approaches agreed on was that when disaster struck, it was OK to assume the fetal position and regress back to the womb.

Copp shot a video of a staged disaster that validated all his natural experience.

Once again, the conventional wisdom had proven to be the wishful thinking of people who felt the desperate need for safe, concrete solutions in a world of deadly uncertainty. Like the efficacy of vaccines, the insights of Keynesian economics and the lasting value of a good smoke, yet another unshakable truth was replaced in short order by its diametric opposite.

If only they knew this in Haiti, how many lives might have been saved, I wondered.

But I didn’t wonder for long. Another friend e-mailed that their father, an aerospace engineer, was skeptical of this most unconventional wisdom. He detailed a number of specific objections to Mr. Copp’s article and linked to a U.S. Geological Survey website that linked to, uh, this.

And just like that, I had yet another new contradictory set of facts.

In a world of diminishing returns and growing uncertainty, it’s good to know that the unceasing flow of information, streamed at us our entire waking lives, will continue to provide an unending supply of simple truths.

They’re cheap. Help yourself.

Talk the talk

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After watching President Obama go head-to-head with Republicans at their annual retreat in Baltimore, and dominating every aspect of the conversation, I am once again intrigued by the possibility of real dialogue about issues on a national stage.

Anyone who has seen the British prime minister debate his rivals on the floor of Parliament knows that there is much to be gained from a legitimate exchange of information and ideas. Unfortunately, in this country, the closest we come to that are staged debates, so formal in their structure, that any meaningful exchange is smothered at the outset.

And the substitute dialogue, hammered out hourly by surrogate talking heads on the cable news networks, only serves to emphasize our paucity of legitimate public forums.

So it’s no surprise to find that only a third of Americans know what the health care public option is, 39% believe in evolution, nearly half think the President can suspend the Constitution and a majority still think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when we invaded the second time. Let’s hope that the 50% of Americans who believe we are protected by Guardian Angels are right. Someone has to take care of us.

I would like to see President Obama issue a challenge to the loyal opposition to debate him, one on one, every week for an hour on C-SPAN. Two people sitting across a table having a spirited discussion of whatever issues come to mind. Participants would venture into the seamy world of wedge issues and demagoguery at their own peril. It would be a fine replacement for the weekly presidential radio address and maybe make it up to the TV network for jobbing them on Obama’s pledge to televise the final stages of health care negotiations.

Update: How delightful. Not only did Obama arrange to have televised the final stages of health care negotiations, he sat down one-on-one with the loyal opposition and debated a range of issues.

Something new

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I’ve had an interesting past year. How about you?

I didn’t used to notice years being particularly interesting, though I often felt interesting things were  happening in my life and the world around me.

Empires would rise and fall. But there always seemed  to be some continuity in the sweep of my personal history. No one year being all that more significant than another. No one event defining an era.

Though I have grown up in interesting political times, I have never quite felt the pendulum of history swinging between left and right in this country. Watching a culture of Kennedy/FDR worship morph into the veneration of Ronald Reagan always seemed less an ideological gyration than an incremental victory for money and marketing.

People still seemed to have a sense of shared responsibility, a sense of community  and the knowledge that we’re all in this together.  Even if Tea Baggers, in a bizarre spasm of corporate doublespeak,  wanted government to keep its hands off their Medicare, they recognized the underlying virtue of the government program.

There was still hope that facts, with their distinctive progressive bias, might still somehow inform our world.

But I had little doubt where politics, awash in money in a modern world, was headed. The die was cast in 1975 when the Supreme Court, building on a historically obscure, though monumental, screw-up, equated spending money with free speech.  It was just a question of time before the intended consequence of that decision would be realized.

And now it has.

On Jan. 20, the Supreme Court may have made its most significant decision since  establishing itself as a co-equal branch of government alongside its executive and legislative brethren 200 years ago in Marbury vs. Madison.  This time, the justices brought in a new, senior partner, corporations, and proclaimed them free to spend as much shareholder money as they want to influence and elect politicians.

It’s only 22 days old and the new year has already piqued my interest.

Addendum: A dissent from the left.

Fly me

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“Delta,” they used to say, “is ready when you are.”

They’re right. I wasn’t ready for what lay ahead. And neither were they.

After a week of Thanksgiving partying in Detroit with my large extended family, I spent Sunday evening — and Monday morning — camped out on the floor of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, hoping that I wouldn’t get bumped at 7:30 a.m. from yet another standby flight back to Los Angeles.

Sunday had started out in promising fashion, of a sort. It took 15 attempts to get the Delta Airlines computer to engage the task of producing boarding passes for my venture, but an hour of banging away finally bore fruit. After having my Southwest flight to Detroit earlier in the week cancelled at the last minute and my luggage lost upon arrival, i was encouraged to find online that the first leg of my flight out of town — the 5:20 p.m. to Atlanta — was only running a half hour late despite the onset of snow flurries an hour earlier and inclement weather in Georgia.

That would barely cut into my two-hour layover before proceeding home.

When I reached Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a dutiful two hours ahead of time, I noticed that my departure had been pushed back to 7 p.m. Uh, oh. That would make my Atlanta connection problematic, but the Delta ticket agent checked his computer and assured me the plane was actually in the air early, would arrive at 5:40 and depart no later than 6:15. Problem solved. But just in case, he gave me a backup standby ticket for the 10:30 p.m. flight from Atlanta to L.A.

My plane did not get out of Detroit until 7:10 p.m. It landed at 8:50 p.m., but sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting for an open gate. I O.J.’d through the airport to my connecting flight, which itself had been delayed a half hour, but stood with my nose pressed to the window and watched as the plane, its doors closed, sat waiting for permission to taxi to the runway.

I dashed down the concourse to my 10:30 p.m. standby flight in time to watch as it was delayed first til 10:45, then 11:15. Not that it mattered. I was 32 on the list, and near as I could tell, only three people had not claimed their seats.

It was the last flight to L.A.

Upon announcement that the flight was filled and the unfortunate bumpees would be processed elsewhere, our hoard careened down the concourse toward what one would-be flyer called the “I got screwed by Delta” line that held upon our belated arrival at least 300 people from other errant flights.

Aggrieved customers, armed with cellphones, called loved ones to relate their plight while Delta agents obligingly handed out yet more standby tickets for Monday and offered to book flights for Tuesday and Wednesday. We were encouraged to blame God for the weather conditions and the FAA for any ancillary evil, but they insisted Delta had no complicity in our fate. We also received a card that offered us lodging at the local Wellesley Inn with the prominent directive: “Bill to customer.”

Although my Monday 7:30 a.m. flight was already “totally booked,” the agent assured me I would be on it and personally guaranteed that he would get me on a plane if I were still there when he showed up for work Monday night. He seemed like a man of his word and I didn’t know enough then to invoke Rule 240.

I decided to spend the night in the airport terminal and save the $127 hotel expense. I wasn’t alone. Mostly individual flyers were scattered about, some stuffed into stiff, unaccommodating chairs; others strewn across the floor. Laptops had replaced cellphones for contact with the outside world. Children in pajamas wandered about the concourse.

Finally, I hunkered down for the night in a cozy corner with my book, The Predator State (How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too), pulled my Delta courtesy blanket tight and tried to block out the incessant chatter from the airport intercom system and the overhead television.

The next morning, I was ready to go home. But was Delta?

I vied with 52 standbys for the Monday 7:30 a.m. flight. I was pulling for the older gentleman with the cane, but when I heard he was 43 on the list, I knew he was doomed. I was number 12 and didn’t come close. Although Delta had assured me that all of the seven flights to LA were booked solid, they offered $600 vouchers to the first four people who agreed to take a flight later that afternoon. I’m not quite sure how that works.

Atlanta has a huge airport, with half a dozen concourses spread out across a mile. Fortunately, they have a train that shuttles people from one end to the other, because I bounced from one end to the other, getting shut out of the 8:30 flight before lining up for the 9:50 plane.

Again, I was low (15) on the standby list, which had somehow grown to 63 from 52 earlier in the morning. But amazingly, they called my name and told me to grab the “last” open seat. I dashed aboard, plunked myself down and sat amazed as the plane departed.

The seat beside me was empty.