FunctionalAmbivalent

Recommended Viewing: House of Cards

CNBC has a show on the subprime mortgage crisis that takes a methodical look at all the players. House of Cards is a solid and consistently appalling look at one slice of the big, bad pie: the self-indulgent home-buyers and the abusive mortgage writers who enabled them. After watching it last night, I was more pissed than ever about using tax money to bail out the financial system, but utterly unmoved in my belief that that's exactly what we have to do.

Still, there were moments when I felt like throwing something at the TV. They were not, perhaps surprisingly, when Wall Street millionaires admitted that yes, they knew the whole thing wasn't sustainable and that they shouldn't be writing the loans they were writing or issuing the securities they were issuing. The thing is, they explained, it was just so damned profitable they couldn't resist. Call me old fashioned, but I'm one of those people who thinks profitability isn't justification for corruption.

No, my most infuriating moments were when the helpless homeowners told their hapless stories. One segment of the show had a parade of formerly-cheerful dimwits who didn't understand basic things like: money isn't free. One after the other, these dreamers of the American Dream paraded across the screen surprised to discover that they'd hocked their lives for shiny object purchased at a shopping mall and only now learning what most people with IQs over 40 know instinctively: salesmen lie.

There on my screen -- the 20-inch, low-def screen we have because we've spent the last four years paying down debt rather than buying things like HDTVs -- is a helpless, totally-screwed, soon-to-be-former homeowner explaining that he'd done what anyone else would have done. He expected, as everyone else did, that housing prices would go up forever, so it made perfect sense for him to take all the equity out of his home to build a backyard swimming pool. It would pay for itself! Except that, no, it didn't, and now housing prices are in the tank and there are his kids, happily splashing away as dad explains to the news crew that they're going to lose the house any minute and have to move to an apartment, if they can get anyone to give them a lease with their crappy credit rating.

Pardon me, sir, but you're a fucking idiot. What's happening to you is exactly what should happen to people like you -- and the fact that I have to pay for your swimming pool in order to keep my wife's TIAA/CREF account from going up in smoke pisses me off to no end. So do me a favor: shut up and feel a decent sense of shame. Don't come on my TV and plead for sympathy while your kids splash and paddle in your private pool.

One of the basic divisions in our discussion about bailouts is whether we prop up failing banks or failing homeowners. It's an understandable first instinct to answer neither, but in the end we're going to have to get someone out of trouble in order to save ourselves. Me? I come down on the side of propping up the banks. People who are as stupid as the homeowners on House of Cards need to learn a hard lesson, and those of us who, by (in my case) grace and pure dumb, luck avoid the devastation need to learn from the suffering of others. Those lessons will stand us in good stead for a couple of generations, until another crop of giddy optimists comes forth to announce that economic laws and cycles have been repealed and the boom times will last forever.

Unfortunately, the best way to protect those of us without backyard swimming pools seems to be to protect the financial system as a whole, which means propping up banks and -- inevitably -- the people who run the banks. Collateral damage, in war, is innocent stuff that gets blown up when when bombs hit their targets. What's the opposite of that? There needs to be a word for people and institutions who don't deserve preservation but are preserved anyway when society comes to the rescue of people who weren't stupid and self-indulgent. "Collateral salvation," maybe. Saving the banks will, inevitably, save lots of people and institutions that don't deserve it.

That said, I have absolutely nothing against zeroing out the shareholders of those banks who went blithely along, enabling a culture of short-sighted self-dealing that made possible the payment of out-sized bonuses to people who knew they were building an unsustainable, as the title says, House of Cards. As mad as I am at the Orange County homeowners who borrowed and borrowed again to buy themselves toys I, personally, can't afford, I'm madder still at the Wall Streeters who got rich bundling loans they knew were no good and selling them around the world as perfectly safe investments. I'm convinced there's a special place in hell for the ratings agencies who went right along with the swindle, and government, which declined to step in and put an end to things.

House of Cards does a good job of walking viewers down what the MBAs call "the value chain," as unfettered capitalism fills a (self-indulgent) need and dishes off (thoroughly disguised) risk, leaving all of us holding the bag. It's infuriating and enlightening at the same time. It's on tonight at 8, and a couple of more times after that. Watch.

You've Got To See It

Standing at the base of the Washington Monument tonight, looking up The Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, I changed my mind about the three-year old World War II Memorial.

I was never against the memorial. Of course we need to do something and do something big to memorialize those who fought and won the most important war in the history of mankind. (Go ahead and argue, but Adolph Hitler with nuclear weapons trumps everything. And the first person who compares Iran to Nazi Germany wins my Complete Lack of Perspective Award.) I just never liked either the placement of the memorial or the design.

Boy, was I wrong.

From the Washington Monument, the memorial fits in perfectly with the reflecting pool and view up to the Lincoln Memorial. It looks like it has been there forever, adding to the view rather than overwhelming it.

And up close, walking around the perimeter or down around the central fountain, the design that I had thought grandiose and even a little vulgar seemed almost completely right. I could have walked around it for hours, just soaking it all in. Oh, I've got my quibbles. The almost irresistible tendency in designing public memorials is to include too much, and this one certainly does that.  Once you get past the basic architecture of the thing, there are lots of little sub-ideas included that really don't add much: a wall of stars, some bas relief storytelling, and added bonus water features. The most beautiful of Washington's monuments are demonstrations of the power of stark simplicity; the New Wave of monument design is so all-inclusive I'm afraid it will date that which should be timeless.

I'm also not nuts about the metal wreaths that adorn the state and territory columns. They seem almost fascist to me, a presumably accidental recollection of Mussolini's constant use of laurels to laud himself. But I don't have another idea about what I'd put up on the columns and I suspect they need something, so I won't complain a lot.

All of that said, the sum effect of the World War II Memorial is stunning, particularly at night. Former Senator Bob Dole, FedEx chairman Fred Smith and everyone else who raised the money to build it and oversaw the design and construction process, deserve an enormous amount of credit. They've built something that, I believe, will look as right a hundred years from now as it does today.

Ken Burns Me Up

I sat through all two-and-then-some hours of part one of Ken Burns' The War last night, and I remain in awe of Ken Burns the way I'm always in awe of Ken Burns. Which is to say that I sat there wondering, "How does he raise all the money to produce these things?" Because, to be devastatingly honest, that -- more than the creative output itself -- seems to be what's outstanding about Burns' oeuvre.

This is not to discount the amazing achievement that was The Civil War, but I haven't seen much that came out of Burns' shop since then that seemed like it was worth all the hoo-ha. Burns' work is good, but to treat everything that he does as if it were a cultural event seems overboard to me. And to get various corporations and foundations to pony up the untold millions it takes to keep Burns in business seems a much more stunning achievement than the documentaries themselves.

So now he's made his World War II documentary. I know the subject of World War II reasonably well, both from the point of view of history and from the point of view of materials available for video production. I co-wrote and produced several multi-part documentaries on the subject. (Don't ask. They're tangled in litigation and literally locked away.) I researched extensively in the National Archives and know pretty well the privately-held footage that's available out there. I've done long interviews with dozens of World War II vets.

World War II is, from a production standpoint, a softball lobbed up for the smashing. It's huge history that's close enough to touch. With the possible exception of NASA, it is the best documented, large-scale human undertaking ever. The subject matter has all the elements of great drama, including the fact that it was, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, "a war against pure evil." It would probably be more difficult to do a World War II documentary that wasn't interesting than it is to put together one that is.

That said, based on the first episode, Burns comes close to making World War II boring. The pacing is slow even by Burns' bucolic standards. The narration is ponderous and self-important. The imagery is familiar and unsurprising. (Where's all that new, never-before-seen footage? Or maybe it's there, it just looks like the old, seen-all-the-time footage.) The script is top-heavy with foreshadowing. The number of people interviewed (or, at least, whose interviews actually made the cut) seems small. And the whole, tugging-at-the-heartstrings portion of the programming seems unnecessarily forced.

Oh, yeah: One other thing. Can we do one series without a lot of mournful violin in the background?

I realize that Ken Burns is everyone's favorite documentarist, and I know that smarter-people than me are saying everything nice about The War. I also know that I'll watch the second installment in large measure because it is Ken Burns, and I'm still hoping he'll catch the Civil War lightning in the bottle again.

But my hopes, after Baseball and Jazz, really aren't all that high.

Dead Certain

I finished reading Robert Draper's Dead Certain. It's an interesting book, though it doesn't live up to the excerpts everyone heard a couple of weeks ago. There's not a lot of new information in it. It's a vivid picture of President Bush to put up on the shelf next to lots of other vivid pictures. Both sides of the President are there: The determined idealist and the pig-headed ideologue.

What struck me more than anything is the total disconnect between the President's vision and his ability to make things happen. He is truly someone driven by a desire to do big things, make an impact, change history. But he doesn't have that intermediate step in the process where he says, "OK, how do we do this?" He just assumes things can be done because of his own force of will, and delegates everything without regard for how his ideas are going to work in the real world. That, certainly, is one quality of a visionary leader. At the extreme, it's also a recipe for disaster.

Ultimately, it's that predilection that has been the downfall of his Presidency. It's why we have a Medicaid drug program we can't pay for and a war in Iraq we can't win and Osama bin Laden still running around free.

The book is a little bit of a structural mess. Big pieces of the administration's history that have been well covered in other books are simply left out, so Dead Certain feels a little like grout between the cracks of previous books: Cobra II and State of Denial. I suppose that's part product differentiation and part a means of developing the book's theme. Ultimately, the book suffers for having no ending. The Bush Administration isn't over, so the story just kind of peters out with a short discussion of what Bush is going to do in retirement. It needs a real ending -- an end to the war, an end to his time in office, a real change in the President's worldview. It has none of those.

It's a well written book, though. It clips along.

I Saw the Best of America Last Night

The music department of my son's high school held its Winter Concert.  By any critical measure, the music was awful.  The orchestra was dissonant when it should have been harmonious.  Voices were weak when they should have been strong.  The band took five minutes to tune and never really got close.

So why was I almost moved to tears?

Because in the gym of a thoroughly integrated public high school, kids sucked it up and put on a show.  They were teenagers, bundles of insecurity trying to find identity for themselves, experimenting to see how they fit into the world.  Between songs they squirmed and blushed and looked down at the ground, but when the music started they focused and grew in confidence, individual parts of a whole much bigger than themselves: Of an orchestra, a chorus, a music department and even a culture.  During the performance, they belonged.

As my regular reader knows, I'm a snob.  It would be easy to make fun of the performance and the audience.  But on a cold night in a high school gym, people who probably don't venture out into the musical world much past Toby Kieth and their old Eagles LPs sat patiently through truncated versions of some of the world's great music. 

The kids, who have been working toward this performance since the begining of the school year, learned not only the music.  Most of them will abandon their instruments upon graduation.  What they'll take with them is the knowledge that they can can risk embarrassment in front of a crowd of strangers and survive.

The musical program was, in keeping with modern life, diverse.  Carol of the Bells appeared three times: Once as a vocal, once as a band piece, and once in a delightful arrangement with African drums.  The Girl's Chorus, featuring two girls in Muslim headscarves, sang an Israeli folk song.  A smaller girl's group sang the sweetest version of Danny Boy I've ever heard.  The orchestra donned flashing red noses for Rudolph

In keeping with current government policy of discriminating against Christians, the program was heavy with Christian music: Agnus Dei, Joy to the World, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Silent Night and the Hallelujah Chorus were high points.  No one complained, though several parents marvelled afterward that storm troopers hadn't burst in.  Apparently, they forgot that last year the program featured a lot of Christmas music, too.  The band played Feliz Navidad. 

There are people who rave against multiculturalism, but in my kid's school multiculturalism isn't a theory, it's a fact.  The names in the program read like a U.N. phone book.  Well, maybe the book for the phones in the hillbilly wing of the U.N.  Caleb, Ali, Phoenix, Kamisha, Abukar, Emilio, Kyaw, Roniesha and even a Mary took the stage together.  It wasn't threatening; it was joyful.  These were American kids in an American high school singing, and in the audience were parents beaming with pride.  And, it's true, occaisionally smiling at the miscues. 

I don't get the complaining.  I don't get why some people think we ought to fix American culture at what it was fifty years ago and never let it move.  I don't get why inviting a bit of other cultures into ours is something worthy of debate, because those bits of other cultures are becoming ours whether we like it or not. No culture has ever frozen in time, and ours can't either.  I don't get why that causes anger and fear. 

And neither, in the post-concert crowd, did anyone else.  That was a gift from our kids.

You Have To Give Them Points For Originality

Wineblogging haiku:

Gently cooked green beans
Mints hidden in the pillows
Thick plummy whispers

You'll be surprised how fast the novelty wears off.

Shackburger Veterans for Truth

Turns out, The Fat Guy is a Shackburger vet. That's probably how he became a fat guy. Here's the Fat Guy's take on where to find great hamburgers. (It's a continuation of this largely unread posting.)

As an extra special Friday bonus that I have, for some reason, written in the voice of NewMexiKen, here's some information that serves no purpose whatsoever:

No one is really sure where the cheeseburger originated. There are two competing claims.

First there's Louis Ballast. (Think about the origins of that surname. His was the family that got thrown overboard in times of distress. It's amazing a member of his family didn't invent the life preserver.) Ballast, who operated the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In in Denver, trademarked the word "cheeseburger" in 1935. Or maybe he didn't. According to this apparently authoritative history of the hamburger, Ballast was not successful in his attempt to trademark "cheeseburger," which may have already been in use. But everyone else in the world seems to think he did get a trademark, though there's some disagreement about whether it was 1935 or 1936.

Whatever, the other claimant, Kaelin's Restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, appears nowhere in the hamburger history but insists it's the real birthplace of the cheeseburger. The restaurant has menu and advertising evidence that they started serving cheeseburgers in 1934. I've been to Kaelin's and its burgers are very good, though they're not the only cheesy aspect of the restaurant. The clientelle is made up largely of octagenarians who look like they might still be waiting for the check for a dinner they ordered 70 years ago.

Take a Break from Swift Boats to Think About Mouth-Watering Dead Animals

Since I, like Pandagon, am tired of Swift Boats, and will leave that dead horse to be beaten by the likes of Joe Scarborough. Instead, I shift my gaze to Farm Accident Digest, where a serious, issues-oriented discussion is taking form. Today's topic: Hamburgers.

FAD has a list of favorite hamburgers, a topic of great interest given that 2004 is the anniversary of the hamburger in its modern incarnation. (Incarnation meaning, literally, "made into meat," so I'm linguistically aligned here.) He includes on his list In-and-Out Burger, a southern California favorite but not, in reality, even the best fast-food burger in L.A. County. That honor goes, instead, to Fatburger, a local chain that gets extra points for just coming out and admitting it. Calling a hamburger "Fatburger" is like naming a brand of cigarettes "Cancer Cluster." While it is, indeed, lots of fun to take the In-and-Out Burger bumper stickers and clip off the "B" and the "r" to create an "In-and-Out urge" bumper sticker, it lacks the self-destructive decadence of going into one of the seemingly millions of Fatburger storefronts in L.A. and demanding a Double Fat with Cheese. Can't you just hear your arteries hardening?

All of which reminds me that I have my own nominee for favorite hamburger:

The Hackneyburger, born of humble beginings in the Chicago area:

At that time their garage was extended to accommodate a four-stool bar and a little office and liquor-inventory room, as well as a very small kitchen in the back with a four-burner plate. There the Hackneyburger was born, cooked in ten-inch black iron frying pans and served on Aunt Bebe's own dark rye, which she had learned to make as a child while cooking for her family after her mother died.

There are now a half-dozen Hackney's in and around Chicago. Their decor is right out of the 1950s, reminiscent of places where steak-and-potato businessmen shared three martini lunches with their willowy secretaries. The Lake Zurich location features actual taxidermy, to make you feel all the more manly.

Despite the justifiable fame of the Hackneyburger, Hackney's real eat-this-and-die freak-show grease-fest champion is onion rings. The manufacturing technique works like this: Lightly batter a whole mess of sliced onions and then cram them down into a deep fryer basket. Literally, stuff them down into the baske until it can't hold any more. Then deep fry the rings until they're mahogony brown, just this side of burned. Invert the basket and dump the rectangular mass of onion rings onto a plate. Use a forklift to serve.

OK, I'm kidding about the forklift, but we're tlaking about five pounds of rings here. A full order is the size and shape of a shoebox and will feed a family of four for a week. If you stockpile the leftovers you can use them to build that new patio you've always dreamed of.

Honorable Mention: The Shackburger, at (you've probably already guessed this) The Shack, in Playa Del Rey, California. Hard by LAX, the Shack looks like what you'd get if you called down to props and said, "I need to shoot a scene in a surfer bar in twenty minutes." The picture of The Shack in this website shows yuppies standing at the bar in ties. My wife and I frequented The Shack for ten years back in our L.A. days and I never once saw anyone there in a tie.

Here's a review of The Shack that calls it "Hamburger Heaven." It also has a good picture of The Shack's exterior.

The Shackburger is a mutant hybrid, and thus not technically eligible for consideration in a "Best Hamburger" competition. It was a hamburger, yes, but atop the burger was a sliced, grilled hot dog. The effect was too tall to eat without making a huge mess, which was the whole point. Guys in ties don't like food that gets all over everything. Me? I never minded at all.