On Hiatus

Traveling to this city for the coming week, so I thought I'd notify all my devoted readers there'll be no blogging during that time (though I've certainly let a week pass between blog posts before, without any good reason), unless, of course, Applebee's and TGI Friday's merge or Belle and Sebastian writes another song that uses the melody of "A Centry of Elvis"/"A Century of Fakers."

We Are Not What We Wear

Is teen drinking ever not a problem? Can it ever be done in moderation or a controlled setting? To sound like your mother:

There's been a story winding its way through the Boston papers the past five weeks about a suburban teenager who tragically died while leaving a keg party in the woods one weekend night. She said she'd be fine leaving alone, apparently got lost and a few days later, her body was found in a swampy part of the woods. Unsurprisingly, local police departments became tougher on teenage parties, busting a few of them since then, including one this weekend that, disturbingly, was populated by high-schoolers drinking beer and smoking pot all while wearing the commemorative bracelets created to honor the girl who died. One of the cars in the driveway had a memorial to the girl drawn in its back window, said one of the local police sergeants!

Now, I'm not a Puritan. I occasionally drank in high school and went to a few keg parties in the woods (though thankfully my sister's Bat Mitzvah coincided with the one the cops disrupted, because, knowing my inability to be crafty, I surely would've been arrested). I also spent part of my slow day at work trying to think if anything similar happened while in high school and remembered a classmate was seriously injured in a car accident where a friend was speeding and, yes, I probably sat in a speeding car after this happened. (Though, I'm too timid of a person to drive recklessly.) Nonetheless, what these teenagers are doing is disappointing at best, genuinely disturbing and upsetting to me. Your friend/classmate dies because of unsupervised, underage drinking when 85 percent of the people in the room/forest don't know how to be moderate around alcohol and you continue drinking at parties little more than a month later?! Don't you think there would at least be a six-month period where everyone would be too scared to drink?

Most reports have mentioned the girl's mother, out of disgust, made the teenagers wearing the commemorative bracelets remove them after their arraignment. Good for her. To end on the petty (and apologies to my friends who wear such bracelets): It's funny how the profound gets reduced to these symbolic rubber bracelets that signify (accessorize?) rather than really mean. Why are these bracelets even necessary? Do you really need to wear them to prove you're a devoted supporter of X cause? Why not know internally you're one and live your life accordingly. We're not what we wear.

Thanks to Fugazi for the post's adapted title.

Welcome Back, Alma Guilleromprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto, one of the few practicing reporters today who deserves to be elevated to "journalist," returned to the New Yorker for the first time in a long time a couple of weeks ago. (According to the online archives, she hasn't published a full story there for five years.) In familiarly excellent fashion, she starts her chronicle of the Mexican drug trade at an art show and ends on a side street in Mexico City, near a subway stop, at a ceremony for the cult of death worshiped by drug dealers, and the whole piece encapsulates the crisis better than any other I've read.

What makes Guillermoprieto's reporting so absorbing and lasting is she tells stories of international importance from the perspective of the lower and middle classes, or, as a famous countryman famously coined, "Los de abajo" -- you know, those "regular people" so many reporters search for and claim to represent but never really find. When her articles address official events, background and/or sources, they're addressed in prose so fluid it's as if she were explaining it to you around a kitchen table. In an era where reporters, me included, want to run after any "official" or "celebrity" they can, tape recorder and video camera in hand, she is a refreshing antidote and a reminder that journalism is about living as we all live, being comfortable around people we should be comfortable around, and giving a voice to the voiceless. Plain and never simple. Equally important, she seems to have networks of friends in every major Latin American city, or, at least makes them very easily.

Her two collections of reportage for the New Yorker are always worth a read, first time or 11th. Even their cover photographs (obviously, not taken by her) are two of the most potent I've seen.

Update: Writing this reminds me that senior year of college, I nominated her for an honorary degree. Some guy named Franzen won out. I know a friend's dad loved the speech.

What do George W. Bush and Godspeed You! Black Emperor Have In Common?

A few days ago, I went, for work, to a Veterans Day luncheon, which is common for local papers to do. Little else is happening on Veterans Day and veterans rightly deserve to have a few days per year reserved for their veneration. The generally eloquent keynote speaker, a brigadier general in the National Guard, said something particularly interesting. While talking about the Iraq War and why he thinks the Iraqi public would ultimately broadly support it, he nearly -- and, I assume, unintentionally -- quoted the last line in the liner notes to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's 2000 record, "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!": "What does anyone want but to feel a little more free?"

This thought has stayed with me long after I stopped listening to the record, which was a few years ago. It's so poignantly elemental and so true. Really, What does anyone want but to feel a little more free? The great irony of it, I always thought, is it actually sounds like something that could've come from President Bush 43's lips when justifying the war. On one side, a socialist anarchist, all-instrumental collective from Montreal that prefers to perform in the shadows and to avoid all interviews (and, apparently, dissolved); on the other, possibly the U.S.'s most conservative president ever who prefers to avoid all complicated (intelligent?) thought. And yet, there is no way they wouldn't agree with that idea. I suppose it's funny, with a tinge of sadness, how in life, in politics, we share the most elemental ends -- who doesn't want good schools? safe streets? the ability to vote for your political leaders?-- but have this unbridgeable chasm in the means that always pushes us apart.

Playing Music In A Field Is Always Cool

After such a heady post, here's something to cool us down. The more I listen to Do Make Say Think, the more I think they are the best band making music today. This song is from their most recent record, "You, You're a History in Rust," which is beyond brilliant:

How Do You Say "Republican" in Massachusetts?

Good question, Aaron. Glad you asked it.

Of all the wonderful and sorrowful stories to come from Tuesday's election, buried in the rubble are Republicans in New England. Here in Massachusetts, the governor is a Democrat, the whole Congressional delegation the same and of 200 members in the Legislature's two houses, only 21 are Republican. While this is an exaggerated version of the rest of New England, it's quite bleak elsewhere.

On WBUR's election coverage, one of their analysts (half-jokingly) suggested the Mass. GOP should secede from the national party. Actually, that's a great idea. The national Republican Party, under the Bush administration's direction, has become so wedded to intolerant culture wars apparently beloved by much of the South and Midwest (they have to be beloved somewhere, right?) and a crude approach to populism -- "Anyone with a thought is an idiot" -- that barely anyone wants to admit to being Republican around here these days. Rightfully so.

This, obviously, hurts the local Republican Party, as they can't elect any new candidate, even a likable, articulate and persuasive one like this guy, which then discourages compelling candidates from bothering to run, and re-electing one of their party's stars against a relatively impressive first-time candidate who no one had known before she entered the race becomes a bright spot. But it's also bad for Democrats. Note that many of the Republicans who lost Tuesday -- Sens. Coleman, Smith and Sununu and Rep. Shays, for example -- are party moderates representing majority Democratic areas or states where, because of what the national Republican Party has done the past 20-but-most-especially-eight years, no one wants to vote for anyone with an "R" next to his name. That means the Republican Congressional caucus increasingly consists of conservative politicians representing places that prefer this extreme version of "thought." That means we have a Republican Party increasingly unwilling to compromise on policy proposed by President-elect Obama, as close to the center as they might be (and I think we need to acknowledge that things like cap-and-trade, fuel efficiency standards and letting the Bush tax cuts for $250,000-plus are barely left of center), and solving the general morass in which the country finds itself is increasingly difficult. That's a major problem.

So, to return to the question in the post's title: You don't. The Mass. GOP should secede and change its name. After thinking about it a few days, I propose: The Responsibility Party. It still begins with "Re" to subconsciously help people find it on the ballot, without having the stink of "publican." More importantly, it crystallizes all the Mass. GOP's talking points for what's wrong with state government here in one word. It implies fiscal and ethical accountability, both of which state Democratic politicians sorely lack and the citizens here sorely need, and which should be at the center of the party's platform. It has a whiff of opposing gay marriage, which will make hard-liners happy, because it suggests "family responsibility," even though we all know families with two dads, two moms, and one mom and one dad have an equal probability of being responsible. Really, the Responsibility Party should at least never publicly raise the marriage issue and maybe even quietly support it because one of the foundations of New England conservatism is getting out of the bedroom. Romney only brought it there because he was laying the foundations of his unprincipled presidential run. The new name also suggests post-partisanship, which, thanks to Obama, the country thankfully loves right now, and starts to solidify the incomplete argument that Republicans need to be elected to the Massachusetts Legislature because it needs both parties' voices.

Republican candidates have been right to make this argument because government works better when opposing viewpoints are present, heard and sometimes compromised for the greater good, but they've been making it without having a broadly appealing viewpoint. Some thoughts: Keep the fiscal and ethical accountability. The public will eventually come around on that. Drop the strident, accusatory tone (and press releases). Keep advocating for a business-friendly corporate tax structure, but advocate for a higher minimum wage that is tied to inflation or something appropriate so it doesn't only increase in fits every 12 years. "The federal government no longer realizes how much you have to earn to be able to live comfortably in Massachusetts," they should argue. Eliminate the Pike tolls, but put up new ones on the state border at each major highway. "If you're from out of state and don't pay any taxes, there has to be some fee for using our roads." Eliminate the Turnpike Authority, roll the T back into state government. "Enough of convoluted 'quasi-public' entities that can't borrow to pay their daily operations." Consider implementing congestion pricing in downtown Boston, tie the proceeds to public infrastructure improvements, mainly transportation. Think ambitiously on how to create more affordable housing. "Density is a great thing." Develop a plan that could eliminate public pensions within 75 years. All of these establish you as the party that cares about a responsible, pragmatic government while also caring about everyone who lives here and caring about making sure everyone can afford to live here.

Peter, if you still have your job in a couple months, you can use these ideas free of charge.

Update: As expected, the Peter mentioned above, former Congressman Torkildsen, said this week he won't seek re-appointment as the state GOP's chairman.

Further Update: It should be noted I'm not the only one to propose the same recently. David Bernstein of the Phoenix has a very funny take here.

Go Away, Kelly Timilty

To delve into the minutiae of Massachusetts politics again, which, I know, drives away all 12 of my readers, Kelly Timilty is a governor's councilor. She's also the sister of a state representative and a state senator, and the daughter of a former longtime Boston city councilor and mayoral candidate who was convicted of a federal felony (though apparently wrote a well-regarded book about it).

As governor's councilor, Ms. Timilty only has one job, and, fortunately, it's a part-time one: confirm the Massachusetts governor's judicial appointments. I often have an internal debate about this elected body: Another example of all the antiquated vestiges of the state's bloated government or actually a good idea because there should be a check on a governor's power to control the judicial bench? Fortunately, Ms. Timilty puts both of her thumbs on the scale for the former. Not only is her attendance record for her part-time job embarrassing (unfortunately Mass. Lawyers Weekly's story about this is hidden behind a pay-for-content wall; they're an industry publication, so I understand), but when facing a challenger in this past summer's primary, she forged Gov. Deval Patrick's endorsement. That's right: In her final campaign mailing, a few days before the Sept. 16 vote, there was a picture of her and Patrick, with Patrick's forged signature and a fabricated comment attributed to him, urging everyone to return to Timilty to office! It even had typos in it! (Gov. Patrick's campaign committee first said it would consider its legal options against Timilty, but then decided to drop the matter.)

And, of course, Timilty won soundly. While her competitor seemed qualified and competent, she didn't appear to campaign much beyond the forged endorsement and gave the worst speech that I've ever seen any politician give "on the trail." It was so bad someone suggested to me she was drunk while giving it, and I actually spent an afternoon pursuing this to see if it could be proved or was true. (It couldn't and I don't think it was.) But she won because she has the last name Timilty, which, even in the post-machine politics of 2008, is enough for the governor's council because all one needs to win are a few thousand votes that are easy to round up when you're part of the old Boston politician families who know a lot of people who know a lot of people, most of them in unions, which, for all their faults, still head to the polls reliably, for which they must be recognized.

Her apology for it all, issued a few days after the election and a few days after it came from the lips of one of Boston's top P.R. guys, who all the "elite" hire temporarily when they're in trouble and need someone to rhetorically massage the press: "I was with him at a couple of events, and I guess I just assumed it was OK. I can't blame anybody but myself."

This incident has irritated me for the past six weeks, so, on Election Day eve, when Massachusetts state politics are again engulfed in scandal, I suppose the point of this rant is, We get the government for which we vote. Vote for intelligence and inspiration tomorrow.

Update: Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat, has fined Timilty $8,000 for faking Patrick's endorsement, which is eight times the maximum penalty a criminal conviction could have imposed. Good for Coakley.