Margaret and I are on our own for the holidays — Pip is off with her brothers, first in Chciago, then in Ypsi — and we’re doing what we feel like, when we feel like it. So far, that means mostly watching old episodes of House, M.D. that we missed when it was first airing. (Necessary supplementary reading is Polite Dissent’s episode-by-episode commentary).
I have a contrarian inclination to disagree with Thomas Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell even if they were to say “The ’69 Orioles were the best baseball team ever” or “Someone should hire AKMA and Margaret,” but Friedman‘s Tuesday op-ed in the Times points in a promising direction. Any Obamian stimulus package should emphasize stimulating the future, not the past. Maybe the taxpayers should subsidize Detroit’s managers’ short-sightedness, but only to the extent that its resources can be oriented toward useful tasks for the twenty-first century.
Four vital build-outs for resuscitating the U.S. economy: Internet (fiber to the home — don’t sacrifice innovation to appease the telcos); Education (this used to be a leading quality of U.S. culture, attracting the most capable imaginations of the world to schools in the U.S. as students and teachers); Health Care (sick, frightened workers will not vault to the top of the productivity scale); and Public Transportation. Entrenched industrial interests will resist thrre of the four programs that these would entail (and cultural anti-intellectualism will resist the fourth), but Obama and his mandate could defibrillate U.S. economic culture by cultivating a well-educated, healthy, mobile, digital culture. And nay-sayers owe an account of how much the three-card monte era of money-changing Ponzinomics benefited us all.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying, “If I don’t feel like blogging this week, I won’t, till I’ve bottled up a bunch of ideas that force their way out all at once.” Now, it’s time to drift up to bed with a book.