Half Changed World

The single most frightening statistic out of this recession is this one:  41 percent of unemployed workers have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. This is vastly higher than in previous recessions.

26 weeks is the maximum length of time that workers can receive regular unemployment insurance, but as often happens during a recession, there has been a series of extensions, paid for at the federal level.  These run out on Sunday.   If nothing happens, 1.2 million workers will lose their benefits starting next week.  Even if there’s a one or two day gap, it will cost state agencies a ton of money to reprogram their systems, and cause delays in workers getting their benefits.  Extending them should be as closer to a no-brainer as exists in politics, but it is proving surprisingly hard.  So, I’m begging everyone I know, call your Senator, and tell them:

1) Pass the short-term extension immediately so benefits don’t run out.  It is unacceptable to hold 1.2 million workers hostage so that a few dead millionaires can pay less taxes.

2)  Extend benefits until the end of the year.  Congress has too much else to get done this year to keep passing short-term extensions and then having to take it up again. And workers need to know that they’re not about to be cut off.

3)  Not everyone qualifies for unemployment insurance, and some people just want a job.  The TANF Emergency Fund, created under the Recovery Act, gives states money for subsidized jobs for low-income parents, and also helps pay for rising cash assistance caseloads.  It doesn’t expire until September, but states are doing their budgets now, and they’ll start shutting down their programs if they don’t know that the money will be available next year.  Plus, because it’s part of TANF — aka “welfare” — it has almost no chance of passing on it’s own.  So please tell your Senators to ask that it be extended along with UI.

Thanks.

I’ve been reading a bunch of interesting takes on the question of whether Joe Stack (the guy who flew the plane into the IRS building in Texas) is a “terrorist” and whether the word has any meaning at all.

I think there’s a lot of truth in Glenn Greenwald’s argument that as actually used by the American media, the word has become racialized, and essentially means “a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.”   But I think the more interesting question is whether it is possible to set that definition aside and draw a line someplace that makes sense.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any question that the 9/11 perpetrators, Timothy McVeigh, the IRA bombers of the 1980s,  and the Beslan murderers all qualify as terrorists.

On the “just nuts” side of the fence, I’d clearly put Amy Bishop and the Columbine murderers.  In both cases, the attacks were aimed at people known to the killers, and were not politically motivated.

The government was pretty quick in the case of both Nidal Hassan (the Ft Hood murderer) and Joe Stack to reassure the public that these were “not terrorist acts,” by which I think they mean “were not linked to a larger network of terrorists.”  By contrast, Najibullah Zazi, who just pled guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction in the New York City subways, is considered a terrorist, because he was recruited and trained by al-Qaida.  I’m not sure I buy that distinction — which would put McVeigh on the “not terrorist” side — but at least it makes some sense and isn’t purely racial.

I think I’m inclined to say if you’re killing people — especially civilians — you don’t know, and are politically motivated, I’m ok calling you a terrorist, even if you’re acting entirely alone.  That would make Stack and the Unabomber terrorists.  I don’t know enough about Hassan’s motivation or Bruce Ivins’ (the alleged anthrax killer) to say with any confidence which side they’re on.

That said, I sort of agree with Jill in thinking that some actions — flying an airplane into a building, bombing a public building or public transportation — are maybe inherently terrorist, regardless of your motivation or whether you’re part of a network.  But my examples (Beslan on one side, Columbine on the other) suggest that other things , eg. shooting up a bunch of kids at school — are not.

What do you think?  Does the distinction matter?

We’re almost 2 weeks out from the last of the snow, and it’s amazing how much is still left, even though it hit 50 degrees yesterday.

Our yard is still entirely white, with no patches of grass visible yet.  The truck that got stuck across the street before the storm is still there.  My office is on 15th street, and even though it is a snow emergency street (e.g. you’re not allowed to park on it during a storm), the entire parking lane on the other side of the street is still full of snow and ice.   Parking lots are still full of icebergs where the plows left them.  I had to climb a 2 foot pile of ice to feed the parking meter near the Building Museum on Saturday.

And don’t get me started on the potholes…

I promised Jody that I would post a review of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, but I keep putting it off.

It has some truly astonishing, wonderful passages, elegant and haunting.  I think my favorite is the description of Tassie, the main character, eating dinner by herself at a fancy restaurant the night before it will close.  But overall, I didn’t like it.  Moore is too in love with her own wordplay (and when you listen to it as an audiobook, as I did, you can’t skim past these sections the way you’d do on paper), and she puts things into her characters’ mouths that I just don’t believe that they would say.  (Tassie is supposed to have never taken a taxi at the start of the book, let alone have flown on a plane, and yet she is credited with all sorts of metaphors connecting things to phenomena she’d never have seen.)

And the plot twists start out implausible, and eventually get so bizarre  — not only does Tassie dress up as an owl to chase away mice from her father’s salad green fields, she keeps the owl costume on  while she plays music and rides her scooter around town — that I started to wonder if I was supposed to conclude that she was mentally ill and an unreliable narrator, that none of the book should be believed.  At least that would explain why her Jewish mother would make hamentaschen for Hanukah.

In getting ready to write this entry, I pulled up the rave reviews of the book from both the New York Times and the Washington Post that had led me to buy it in the first place.  Both reviewers clearly saw the same flaws that I see:  Kakatuni talks about the plot twists as “clumsy” and “fumbles,” while Charles calls the wordplay “too clever by half” and the descriptions “polished to distracting brilliance.”  But both of them ultimately loved the book,  and feel that it offers profound insights into the human condition.  I didn’t.

My office follows the feds, so we’re officially open tomorrow, although with a two hour delay.  I’m going to work from home, though, as I think the commute will be a nightmare, and I still have work I can do.

Total inches of snow: somewhere around 34.

Inches of packed snow remaining on the road post-plowing: about 3

Height of piled snow surrounding our driveway: 5 feet, plus or minus.

Days snowed in: 8 (as of tomorrow)

Soups made: 4 (chicken chili, red lentil and chickpea, black bean, and curried cauliflower)

Breads made: 3 (challah, multigrain, and Portuguese sweet bread)

Batches of cookies made: 3 (two chocolate chip and one peanut butter)

Pounds gained: haven’t dared to set foot on the scale

Games played: Dominion, Ticket to Ride, Sorry, Monopoly, Go Fish, Don’t Get Caught, Munchkin Fu, Qwirkle

Hours of TV watched: too many

The NY Times has a terrific graphic about snowfall in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, showing what each city has received this year, last year, and the average level.   It dramatically shows that Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia have all gotten way more snow than average, coming after a less-snowy-than-usual year last year (in fact, in DC, the past 3 years have all hardly had any snow), while NY is having an average year after another average year, and Boston is having an underperforming snow year after a snowy year.   But the most surprising part of the graphic is how little difference there is in the average snowfall levels for DC vs. New York.  I grew up in NYC and have lived in the DC area for the past decade and a half, and I would have told you that NY gets much more snow on average.  I’m not sure how much my impression is biased by the low snow levels of the past few years, and how much it’s that DC snow usually melts on its own in a day or two, while NY snow sticks around in ugly gray piles for weeks.

I finally made it to the top of the library waiting list for Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford, and this snowed-in week gave me the chance to sit down and read it.  I have to say that I was underwhelmed by it.  I thought that the passages where he describes his work on motorcycles were lovely — Laura was right  when she said “I dare you not to get carried away by his intoxication with his work.”  But the rest of the book read like it was written by the philosophy PhD  that Crawford is — and that’s not a compliment.  I got lost in the jargon, and found myself skimming long passages.

As best as I can tell, Crawford makes four different arguments.  Three of them I basically agree with, although I don’t think they are particularly original.

• Skilled trades jobs can be as lucrative (or more so) than white collar jobs, and are less vulnerable to being outsourced to other countries.
• Skilled trades jobs can be as intellectually demanding as white collar jobs, and should not be considered as only an option for people who can’t cut it on the academic track.  (Crawford cites Mike Rose’s The Mind at Work on this, which has been sitting on my to read pile for at least a year)
• There is a value to doing work where you can see the results of what you do, where the people who benefit from your work know you, and are known to you, where you learn from people who have done the same work, not just from books.  This reminded me of Wendell Berry’s statement (which I’ve talked about here before) that “The right scale in work gives power to affection.”  (I’m not agreeing that this is the only work with value, but there is a power to it.  It’s why I used to volunteer to make meals at Food and Friends before going off to work at HHS — I needed to something where the results were tangible.)

And finally, Crawford argues that there is an autonomy and independence that comes from work where it is objectively clear whether you know what you’re doing or not — the light turns out when you flip the switch, or it doesn’t, the motorcycle starts or it doesn’t.  He contrasts this with an office culture that rewards conformity, where judgments are made about workers’ beings, because their product can’t be objectively measured.  I’m just not sure I buy this argument.  I think he’s comparing the most easily caricatured aspects of office work with idealized versions of his job — because even most motorcycle mechanics don’t own their own shops, and can’t spend 20 hours in search of the truth when the client isn’t going to be billed for more than five.  And at the same time, he seems to blame the flaws of offices on the drive for profits, although not-for-profits can be just as dysfunctional work environments in their own ways.

It’s almost impossible to write a review of this book and not think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.    I haven’t read Zen in 20 years, and don’t remember that much about it, but I remember my outrage near the end when you learn that after riding thousands of miles with his son, he’s only just noticed that while he has a view of the open road, his son only has a view of his back.  Crawford has some similar blind spots, particularly around gender.  Early on he writes “It so happens that most of the characters who appear in this book are men, but I am sure that women, no less than men, will recognize the appeal of tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.”  Well, yes, but there’s also an issue that the forms of tangible, straightforwardly useful work that are traditionally done by women are paid far less than the forms of tangible, straightforwardly useful work that are traditionally done by men.

I also suspect that there are very few women in the trades who would agree with Crawford’s claim that the objective quality of your work is all that matters in achieving acceptance.  (He makes a nod towards acknowledging this reality in a footnote where he tells a story about a time where he was hazed by his coworkers and notes that “the new guy, the nonwhite guy, and the woman are especially likely to incur extra hardships.”  But he doesn’t seem to notice that there’s something categorically different about being the “new guy” — which you will be on one job, but not the next, and being nonwhite or female, which are permanent characteristics.

So, in spite of finding parts of Crawford’s story very appealing, I found the book a disappointment.  Go read Life Work, by Donald Hall, instead.

Over at 11d, Laura wrote today about What To Do When Your Kid Doesn’t Talk. She begins:  “Five years ago, we noticed that Ian was not meeting his speech milestones, and we started down the disability path. Here’s what I’ve learned in the past five years:

• If your child isn’t talking by two, is super picky about food, doesn’t like long sleeve shirts, can’t sit still in nursery school, doesn’t like bright lights or loud sounds, doesn’t respond when a stranger says hi, doesn’t like being touched except by you, walks in circles, spends a lot time doing one thing, doesn’t like getting his hair cut, doesn’t like taking a shower, suddenly starts crying a lot at age two, hums, or can’t run, then go get him/her checked out. If he/she is doing just one of those things, then get him/her checked out.”

D met at least 4 of these criteria as a toddler, and we did get it checked out.  We went through the local Child Find (early intervention) program, which was less of a pain in the neck than it was for Laura, but definitely a hassle.  And they agreed that he was indeed speech delayed, and qualified for services.  (At 2 years 8 months, he had less than 100 words, most of which were monosyllables that only T and I could understand.)  So once a week we took him to meet with the speech therapist at the elementary school down the block, and she played some games with him, and taught him to blow bubbles, and when they retested him at the end of the year, he no longer qualified for services.  We still don’t know if the therapy did any good, or if he just was on his own timetable, but he never looked back.

The sensory issues took longer to resolve.  I’ve installed a WordPress plug-in that identifies related posts from the archives, and when I wrote about snow days last week, it came up with a post from 4 years ago, called simply snow.  In it, I wrote:

“Playing with the boys was especially sweet because I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get to do it, at least with D.  He has mild sensory issues, and this is the first time that he’s been willing to play in the snow.  In the past, he’s totally refused to walk in the snow, even in boots.  He liked the idea of snowball fights — but only the throwing part, not the getting hit part.  He’s outgrown a lot of his issues — he used to be unwilling to walk on grass — and so I was hopeful that he’d eventually be willing to play in the snow, but I wasn’t sure it would happen.  But today, he had a great time, and was even willing to lay down and make snow angels.”

Four years later, those fears seem like a distant memory.  He’s been out in the snow this week, climbing in and out of the fort, and eagerly participating in snowball fights.  He still hates wearing shirts with collars, and prefers sleeping in his robe to pyjamas, but we can live with that.  He’s still a ridiculously picky eater, but doesn’t seem to be wasting away from malnutrition, so we’ve mostly stopped arguing with him about it.

So, what’s the take-away from this?  I don’t know.   Laura says to go to a pediatric neurologist, but others have commented that the specialists missed their kids’ issues.   My kid mostly outgrew his issues; Laura’s kid, who seems to have presented with pretty similar traits, hasn’t (although he’s made a lot of progress).  I think this is where I’m supposed to say “trust your gut” but I know that when I was dealing with all of this, I had no idea what my gut was saying.  The best I can say is that if you as a parent don’t know what’s right, the “experts” who see your kid for a couple of hours are highly unlikely to know any more.

(Side note: At some point while my blog was down, I read Schuyler’s Monster, which is Rob Rummel-Hudson’s account of his family’s struggles to find out why his daughter couldn’t speak, and then to get her the education and technology (she uses a computer that speaks her words) needed to communicate.  It’s a lovely book, scary and sad and loving and hopeful and honest.  He also gives some advice similar to Laura’s, especially about networking, the need to fight for services (particularly when they are expensive), and moving to more affluent school districts.)

The current prediction in the DC area is now for 16-26 inches of snow.  Given that this is a place that freaks out over snow  in general — the schools here in Fairfax shut down for about 4 inches on Wednesday — you can imagine the level of hysteria.  And it’s not all that misplaced — after the December storm, it was a good 3 days before there was any hope of getting a car safely in or out of our hilly street.

The federal government went ahead and declared an “unscheduled leave” policy, which means that employees can stay home if they want, but it uses up a day of their annual leave.  My office follows the feds, but we also have a pretty flexible policy about telecommuting, so I’ll be able to work from home.  Fairfax went ahead and announced this afternoon that they’re closing the schools tomorrow.  (We’ve already burned through all the slack in the school schedule, so this is going to eat into spring break or extend the year.) Based on my facebook feed, I’d say most of the stay-at-home and work-at-home parents are pissed that they’re losing their last chance to get anything done without the kids underfoot.  The work-in-an-office parents seem to be more sympathetic, probably because the early dismissal scenario is such a nightmare if getting home midday would take you an hour or more.  Of course, if you’re a work-in-a-store or other such inflexible job, you’re probably screwed in any case.

I’m tossing the comments here open for reports of the snow, the response, how you entertain the kids and try to get work done from home,  soup recipes, whatever else is on y0ur mind.

In college, I read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, and loved it.  I remember only the vaguest outlines of the plot — two scholars writing about Victorian writers develop a relationship with each other and discover new truths about their subjects —  but I can vividly recall what it felt like to read the book, the feeling of falling into it, so that it was just as real as the world around me, only far more clever.  After that, I started a few of her other books, and never finished any of them.  Just couldn’t get into them at all.

The reviews of Byatt’s latest, The Children’s Book, all consistently said that it’s her most readable book since Possession, and a few people I generally trust about books recommended it, so I picked it up over the holidays.  It does share many characteristics with Possession — the elegant language, the meticulously researched historical setting, which left me wondering which characters were real and which fictional, the stories within stories within stories.  But it doesn’t really have a plot to drive it forward.

The children of the title (or rather, the children of one meaning of the title) grow older, go to school or not, study, or go into business, or make pots,  travel, fall in love, have children, fight in a war, die (from war or suicide).  But nothing any of them does really seems to affect any of the others. I’m reminded of the book on writing (can’t remember which one — google attributes the line to John LeCarre but I’m not convinced) that says “The cat sat on a mat” is just a sentence, but the “the cat sat on the dog’s mat” is the start of a story.  By that definition of a story, I don’t think  The Children’s Book qualifies.  But it’s so charming and elegant, and makes you feel so clever for reading it, that I’m not sure I minded.

I spent most of today immersed in the details of the federal budget.  (And as far as I can tell, no one has posted it in ereader format yet.  On the other hand, NASA is starting to post its histories as ebooks.)  I’ll post about substance later in the week, but for now I want to comment about the differences between the Health and Human Services (HHS) and Labor presentations.

HHS basically took an old media approach.  There was a press conference.  Anyone who wasn’t credentialed press could watch in a different room, over a closed-circuit TV, or via webcast, or could listen in on a phone line, but could not ask questions.  HHS has posted the transcript of Sebelius’ prepared remarks, but not of the Q and A session, and if there’s archived video of the conference, I couldn’t find it.

Labor did a live webchat, which is archived on the site. Anyone — press or otherwise — could submit a question, via the chat window, email, phone, or twitter.  And it’s clear, from the questions, that some were submitted by press, some by advocates, some by people running programs, and some by the general public.  I don’t know who Solis had in the room with her, but it seemed to me that the answers were much more substantive than in the HHS Q and A session.

I’d love to know who makes the decisions about how to run these events.