Today in Collapse-obsessed foamer blogs

Everyone has heard the dictum "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." It means that when crime strikes you personally, you supposedly forget all your liberal pieties about race, gun ownership, non-violence and so on, and instead go out and buy a gun and start voting for Nixon.

How about this one: a real conservative is someone who goes through a natural disaster and, instead of forming compassion for others and realizing we all have to depend on each other in an emergency, comes away with a resolution to hoard, arm himself, and fortify his compound.

During a major disaster, food will quickly disappear. Living for over 3 decades on the Gulf Coast, I can tell you with absolute certainty that whenever disaster strikes (usually an approaching hurricane, for those folks), food and provisions at the store sell completely out in a matter of a few hours. People panic, and within hours, you cannot find food, bottled water, ice, generators, batteries, candles, etc. ... Furthermore, almost all disasters include a complete loss of electricity. The water supply is compromised. Bottled water becomes more valuable than bank accounts. Dehydration becomes a very real and present danger. I remember witnessing a man offer an ice vendor $100 for an extra bag of ice during Hurricane Ivan. My wife and I went 2 weeks (14 days) without electricity in the aftermath of that hurricane. Believe me, I got a taste of just how precious bottled water, ice, batteries, generators, fuel, etc., can become.

-- Far-right preacher-politician Chuck Baldwin

Okay, sure, preparedness. Good idea for everyone. But it's telling that the writer doesn't mention how he helped that man who wanted ice so badly, or his neighbors who were also suffering without electricity or water.

It's also telling that he doesn't mention how the National Guard was there within 48 hours to secure the area and then coordinate either evacuation or helping the survivors, including with water. Because for far-right conservatives, the government can never be seen in a positive role, it can only stand in your way (at least) or oppress and imprison you (more likely according to this worldview).

No, in Baldwin's world, there's only you and the free market against the elements and the devil. He probably wishes he was the ice vendor who anticipated there would be desperate people waving Franklins after a hurricane. (As for the man who offered $100 for ice, I have the feeling he needed it to keep his insulin cool, not his gin and tonic.)

Then in my favorite collapsitarian blog, the always-excitable Mac Slavo quotes someone predicting violence, death, dead cops, disaster in NYC.

According to the insider, the Obama White House and partisan organizations that support the President are now actively promoting chaos in New York and other cities as a form of punishment and intimidation against those on Wall Street (and elsewhere) who have spoken out against the administration. The chaos, he says, will lead to elevated levels of anger and the real possibility of nationwide violence and riots...

ZuccottiPark should have been cleared last week. ... Now if there is a move by law enforcement against the protesters, the dangers will be greatly increased than just a week ago. The violence will be much-much worse. Police will be harmed. Citizens will be harmed. Businesses harmed. ... I don't wish to be overly dramatic here -- but violence. Injury. Perhaps death. Most certainly destruction of property. It's getting dangerous. I can sense it. It's palpable. And you feel it too, don’t you? Something terrible is coming just around the turn. So for now, I'm getting out.

Oh well, it's a good thing he doesn't want to be overly dramatic. I guess if he were overly dramatic he would break out the exclamation marks. Then I'd really be terrified.

All supposedly because Obama somehow "promoted" this by not breaking the heads of protesters. I don't know if Occupy Wall Street is making the 1% afraid, but it's certainly successful in exciting the foamers.

More on copywriting

Last Wednesday I mocked an advertisement that promised big money in the copywriting game. But I didn't really know what it was talking about.

That same day the New York Observer ran this piece about the career of someone who made money in the way they may have been thinking of:

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing. ...

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game -- practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night -- soon proved unsustainable.

Then fun was had all around. This all just makes me realize I don't really understand SEO (search engine optimization, one of the dark, or at best grey, arts of the internet) and should read up on it. Dang, though, it's getting harder and harder to keep up.

Books I read: "Red Lights" by Georges Simenon; "Let the Great World Spin" by Column McCann

I spent the weekend reading one of Georges Simenon's American novels, Red Lights (Feux Rouges, 1953). The book is about a couple who quarrel on a road trip and are separated, each of them encountering, at different times, an escaped convict. As usual for Simenon's romans durs (or "hard" novels, a phrase he used to distinguish them from lighter genre fare, particularly his endless series of Maigret detective novels), the story is a tense psychological thriller, bearing down on the spirit of an ordinary man until he breaks.

Filled with mid-century period detail -- the casual practice (if not exactly acceptance) of drunken driving, the difficulty of interstate travel before the interstate highway system, the insanely manual nature of a long-distance telephone call, and the utterly strange mixture of casualness and strictness of the hospitals of the time -- the book is also a curiously off look at American culture. The Belgian author composed the book while living in the U.S. for several years between 1945 and 1955*, and he gets many things right, but there are also many other details which receive a weird emphasis or which are simply wrong. (Adding to the strangeness was the fact that the copy I procured was a British edition and contained an occasional British spelling, such as tyre.) But even though these missteps occasionally were jarring, I didn't really mind them because the pacing and plotting were so effective. A Simenon book is a universe unto itself, rendered in complete detail (and not a detail more than necessary); once inside, the reader surrenders all disbelief.

Just before this, I read another novel of American life by a foreigner, "Let the Great World Spin" by Column McCann, an Irish writer. While the book uses as its centerpiece the World Trade Center tightrope walk by Philippe Petit, none of the characters in the book, except for the judge in whose court he appears after the escapade, ever meets the acrobat. Instead they are people who watched it, or more often merely heard about it. Their lives, ranging from Bronx street hookers to a Park Avenue matron, are decidedly earthbound; the transcendence of Petit's feat is a major contrast.

Looked at from this perspective in 2011, these two books -- one set in the early 1950s, the other in the mid 1970s -- are both set in the long-ago past, and drew my attention to the amount of change that has occurred in the years since. Aside from McCann's excellent writing, which in its way is just as intense and insightful about the human spirit as the dark work of Simenon, I was very much struck by how much New York changed from 1974 -- during the depths of its gritty decay, pre-Saturday Night Live, pre-Times Square cleanup, pre-Yankees resurgence, pre-almost everything we associate with New York these days -- to today. Of course, the subtext is that it is also pre-Nine Eleven, but in drawing attention to the World Trade Center itself, not to mention hinting at the amount of planning and subterfuge that went into staging the tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, it foreshadows their identity as a backdrop for world historical events.

Finally, what struck me was the complete lack of reluctance of non-American authors to take on the American landscape. It makes me feel better about my portrait of Bangalore in my unpublished novel Mango Rain.

* This 1953 Paris Match article sets a profile of Simenon in the house where he lived when writing "Red Lights."

Torn between two lovers

For a while, she made use of an office at The New Yorker. Through the window, she could see the flashing sign of the Time-Life Building; she told her new friend Shirley Hazzard, "When it says 'Time,' I write. When it says 'Life,' I want to go out."

-- from a profile of novelist Muriel Stark
in the April 5, 2010 New Yorker

The case of the productive blond

Courtesy MediaBistro, here is some of the worst, most entertaining writing I've seen. It's in a blog post by a former TV producer, who writes about his tortured relationships with Fox News fuhrer Roger Ailes, a blond assistant, his agent, his wife, and other characters. Despite the quality of the writing, it has all the ingredients for a Bonfire-of-the-Vanities style novel and/or memoir.

Some choice phrases:

My wife Gina was emailing strange men in foreign countries on the computer, a habit she seemed unwilling to break. I was fantasizing about the 23 year old blond, who that day walked into the elevator facing me, threw her shoulders back, projecting toward me her extraordinary breasts, stared at me, and backed up against the opposite wall, putting a sexual no-man's-land between us.
...
She was blond and productive. Regardless, on the last day of production, the blond knocked on my door and asked if we could talk.
...
I had lived at 1060 Park Avenue for 30 years. My adult life had played out on that stage. I loved it. I walked out along Park and wept. Everything was intolerable. But that which could not be changed had to be accepted. And I had to have the courage to change that which I could change. I moved to my mother's.

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