Sarcastic and Hopeful

Now that I am a big time international columnist I find myself reading other columnists with more care, and with questions like:

-What good ideas can I steal from them?
-How do they do this every day or several times a week?
-Which ones would I recommend or want to emulate? -Which ones have influenced me over the  years?
-Oh yes, you readers – who are your favorite columnists? Could we list those, link to them?

Although I read some blogs, I am still a loyal newspaper reader, albeit sometimes on line. I read daily a national paper (New York Times) and a regional (San Francisco Chronicle).

Every morning I read the New York Times on line. (Sunday I also buy the paper so I can luxuriate in it all week and do the puzzles.) The Times has some great columnists; I like Paul Krugman (Nobel economist), Nicholas Kristof (globalization), Maureen Dowd (snarky and funny on people and Catholic Church), and Timothy Egan (the American West.)

I especially like Gail Collins, good progressive smart woman. Each week she and David Brooks, smarmy neo-conservative columnist (whom I usually read, but did not include in my above list of favorites) have a fairly friendly “conversation.” Excerpts from this week:

David: Not a lot of people are following politics closely this year. Four years ago, pollsters asked Americans if they found the presidential race interesting. A clear plurality said yes. This year, a clear plurality says no. Somehow they find a race between two androids less than scintillating.

Gail: Well, duh. You have the dramatic change-guy who didn’t seem to change anything – although I personally would argue that health care alone was huge. And on the other side, the incredibly boring businessman who has offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands to avoid the taxes most of the rest of the country has to pay.

David: We may be entering an era in which politics is less central. A lot has happened recently — jobs numbers, a health care law upheld, new immigration policies, zillions of dollars in ad spending. And the polls have hardly moved. Obama had a tiny lead four months ago and he has a tiny lead now. Nobody’s mind is being changed because nobody who is persuadable is paying attention. It’s apathy city.

Gail: David, don’t feel bad. I’m happy to tell you it’s the Republicans’ fault. The normal rule of democracy is that if things are lousy, you throw out the incumbents. But right now the opposition is controlled by people who are totally insane and good at nothing but shutting things down. I would argue that the president, with a Congress composed mainly of Democrats and traditional Republicans, could take care of a lot of our problems. But if people simply want a change, all they’ve got is the Forces of Loony Doom.

…..David: (after chiding Gail for being too much of a starry-eyed liberal) Anyway, the topic at hand is apathy. Granted, I studiously ignore stories about fund-raising numbers. I have never seen compelling evidence that fund-raising levels powerfully influenced a presidential race. Whether Romney outraises Obama or vice versa is totally unimportant.

…….Gail: But I can see how this particular campaign is turning a lot of people off. And now that I think of it, I might have been too quick in giving up on the issue of the “super PACs” and their endless money. Folks in the true-blue or really-red states feel as if their votes don’t matter, and they’re sort of right – it’s as if they’ve already been counted. And people in the swing states are under such a barrage of attack ads from both sides, they’re numb with disdain for everybody involved. I have family visiting from Ohio right now, and they’re like refugees from a TV-ad tsunami. And it’s only July! There’s got to be a better way.

The S.F. Chronicle, like many papers, is shrinking before our very eyes, but we keep buying it for sports, funnies, and columnists. Jon Carroll, my favorite, sometimes reflects on news, but also has favorite topics like cyberspace, local theater, hiking at Pt. Reyes, and cats. He had a recent column about Oakland, where he lives, and the Mayor’s attempts to control gang violence. He began and ended the column in this typical fashion:

Just to be clear, I never took Jean Quan's "100 Blocks o' Crime" thing seriously. Real social problems don't work that way, with easy-to-remember numbers and easy-to-understand fixes. Besides, it did not seem particularly evidence-based.

But then, politicians are forever doing dumb stuff because they think they can get votes. I took the whole 100-blocks thing to mean that Oakland was going to increase police presence in high-crime areas. That would be good for the residents of those areas, so I was vaguely for it - just as the thing itself was a vague promise to help out.

Nobody sentient would think it was a real program; it was just the name of a marginal policy shift. The gangs were not going to go away, and the poverty that spurred on individual criminal entrepreneurs was not going to be alleviated any time soon. I understood - I think everybody understood - that any change in Oakland was going to take time and commitment.

……..

It's a sad situation, and it leaves the city floundering, looking for answers and getting just finger-pointing. Could everyone please stop petty politicking and try to work together on this thing? The voters would be ever so grateful.

In other news: Now that Larry Ellison [local billionaire owner of Oracle] has bought 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, I was wondering whether he might help his home state of California by buying it, too. I know there must be legal roadblocks to such a purchase, but with all that money involved, there must be a way.

See, this will be the real test for people who say that market forces are the way out of our current dilemma. What's more market-y than a private venture capitalist buying a huge entity and turning it around? Plus, Ellison has the cash reserves that California doesn't.

There would be many tax breaks and perks for such a purchase. California has many state parks languishing because of fiscal problems. I say we give him one of them to build a house on, in exchange for which he raises the salaries of public employees. Heck, Larry, take two. All we want is solvency.

Or, if that's too ambitious, he could buy Oakland.

The fact that I chose these two examples suggests I like columnists who write smart mildly sarcastic mockings of the rich and powerful and who root hopefully for people trying to make things better. That could describe Ed Kilgore’s column on US politics that we link to here as well.

Your mildly sarcastic, hopefully rooting columnist is taking a few weeks off for some surgery. I’ll be back with a new hip sometime in August.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter