Nowhere to Go Nothing to Do

That mantra was given to me as a gift by my friend Anna when my mother was dying of cancer, and I had no control over anything, except for being there with her in the present tense and letting her know that I loved her. Intentionality. Moving and acting with purpose. What I admire so much about President Obama and Michelle is their intentionality.

Yesterday was a perfect spring day, sunny with a light breeze, temperatures reaching nearly seventy. So I spent the morning in the garden, no gloves this time, but hands directly into the soil, readying one bed for herb planting. I pruned rose bushes, too. Then I sat and read the pile of magazines that had accumulated over the last month: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, and I even leafed through my daughter's Vogue.

What surprised me about the Vogue were the ads for less than glamorous places right up in the front of the magazine: H & M, Walmart, and Target. One cover story for the May 2009 issue is "The Real Lives of Models" and another is "You're Fired! Surviving and Thriving After the Pink Slip."

David Sedaris was wicked and one can tell that he still longs for his cigarettes in his new essay in The New Yorker. I quit smoking on March 23, 1996, and must admit that after September 11, despite the debris that was falling all around us for days afterwards, I did long for a cigarette. Instead my husband and I drank a bottle of 1989 Le Tours with a Mario's home delivery pizza. I don't write about smoking anymore this many years later.

The Harper's Index is always illuminating. We might think that suddenly Americans are saving a lot of money, hording it for the worst that is yet to come, but according to Harper's, since March 2008, Americans have used far less credit through credit cards: -$349,300,000,000. That's a big number. And it is estimated of all new US savings last year that 3/4 of it was really payment of credit card debt. That might be why the credit card default rate hasn't ballooned yet: 9.33% default rate as of April 15, 2009. Another marker to look for in despair.

Next I read a scary story about fundamentalist Christian soldiers serving in the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although as a whole, the military is less religious than the population at large, 20% of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel checked off that they have no religious preference, those who are religious and in the military are militant about it. In addition to the 22% who identify themselves as evangelical or Pentecostal, there is another 7% who although attached to a traditional religion, also see themselves as evangelical. And of the 19% of military personnel who are Catholic, there is "a small but vocal subset who tend politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals." It's the Officers' Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 active members at 80% of US military bases that is worrisome. These officers like to make the war in Iraq and Afghanistan a religious one. One officer had "Jesus killed Mohammed" painted onto a military vehicle in Arabic, as it drove into battle. A friend of ours son left the Air Force Academy after three years, his dream dissolved, because of the fundamentalist culture that had taken over the place. These are the Crusades to some acting in the name of all of us.

Sipping some wine, I turned to The Atlantic, also the May 2009 issue. OK, I admit to reading the trashy book review by Caitlin Flanagan about Alec Baldwin's memoir, A Promise to Ourselves, in which he tells his side of the divorce and custody battle over Ireland. I adore "Jack," the character Alec plays on 30 Rock. It was sunny, it was hot. I wanted a moment to just forget that the world was on the brink once again.

That led me to Jeffrey Goldberg's hysterically funny, but oh-so-true, description of his naivety surrounding the collapse of his 401 k in "Why I Fired My Broker: An Everyman's Guide to Financial Survival."

Jeff's broker hasn't called him in seven months. What is wrong with this picture? Mine called me on Friday and told me there was nothing for me to buy. She doesn't trust anything available in the current market. Goldberg interviews some of the smartest financial people, including George Soros' son, and concludes? Well, I'll let you discover for yourself. Just know this, everytime my husband came out to join me on the patio of our house, which is desperately in need of repairs we can't afford, I read aloud another brilliantly ironic paragraph from Goldberg's piece.

Talking Points

Although we might not find Moody's as trustworthy as before, (since Moody's is the credit rating service that, oops, miscalculated the risk on those derivatives based on subprime mortgages that are going sour), try this set of "facts" and keep them handy for conversations with Republicans. They are from the April 2009 Harper's Index:

• Estimated amount by which the U.S. GDP increases for each additional dollar of tax cuts: $1.03
• Amount for each additional dollar of infrastructure spending and food stamps, respectively: $1.59, $1.73

So if anyone doubts the advantages of government spending over tax cuts, refer to these items.

Also found in the latest issue of Harper's is an essay by Thomas Geoghegan called Infinite Debt. (He ran for Rahm Emanuel's seat in Congress and lost.) In it he looks at the real reason for the collapse of the financial system: the loss of collective bargaining, the shift from manufacturing to financial services because of the gigantic profits reaped, and the infinite consumer debt. Notice that there are no such thing as usury laws anymore. Credit cards can charge insane amounts on trailing balances. They don't want people to pay, because then they don't make these horrendous profits. Instead of placing a 35% cap on credit card interest rates, he suggests it should be at 9%. Isn't that enough profit?

War As Corruption

No matter who ends up writing the history of the American invasion of Iraq, no matter whether it's five, ten, or one hundred years from now, it will necessarily include the lust for oil, the grab for Iraqi oil reserves, no matter how much "democracy" icing Bush and his cohorts wanted to put on the story back in 2003 or ever.

Here's a new fact to get angry over: According to Harper's Index for November 2008, the US government has paid Blackwater, the private security firm, $110,000,000 from federal small business contract funds!!!

According to its own website, Blackwater has operations domestically in: Moyock, North Carolina; Mt. Carroll, Illinois; San Diego, California; and Tampa, Florida. Internationally, Blackwater has offices in East Africa; Amman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan; and UAE. Blackwater claims to operate in nine countries.

Blackwater hardly qualifies as a small business, although it remains privately held and therefore not subject to many transparency requirements. But as we have seen time after time, this Bush administration doesn't understand the rule of law.

I'm currently reading Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." If the Bush administration hadn't been in a delusional state about global warming and not quite so greedy to fill its own pockets with the proceeds of the sale of the last of the planet's oil reserves, we might not be in this global financial crisis. Instead the US could have shown real leadership, opening the doors to new sustainable technologies, recycling everything the consumer uses, finding alternative fuels, which translates into good jobs at home and abroad, trade with other nations, and a quieter planet. By sending all of our money to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, we have succeeded in funding the very source of anti-modernist, misogynistic fundamentalism. We didn't need the Patriot Act to try to stop the flow of money to support terrorism, that's all we had to do was trade in our SUVs for hybrids.