Burnin’

The nation could certainly use more Senators with Bernie Sanders’ perspective and his willingness to act for the common good.

Writing in The Nation, Sanders proposes to levy a 10 percent surtax on the income of individuals above $500,000 a year, and $1 million a year for couples in order to provide liquid capital for the nation’s beleaguered lending institutions. Sounds good to me.

Here’s what he has to say about the Bush/Paulson plan.

This proposal as presented is an unacceptable attempt to force middle-income families (and our children) to pick up the cost of fixing the horrendous economic mess that is the product of the Bush administration’s deregulatory fever and Wall Street’s insatiable greed. If the potential danger to our economy was not so dire, this blatant effort to essentially transfer $700 billion up the income ladder to those at the top would be laughable.

That’s not all that’s laughable coming from these bandits. Sadly, it’s just this week’s version of laughable.

Portland poet and essayist, Floyd Skloot, is the unique position of having two books introduced at once. His fourth memoir, The Wink of the Zenith, is out from University of Nebraska Press. And his new book of poems, The Snow’s Music, is out from Louisiana State University Press.

Last night, while reading at Powell’s, Skloot said The Wink of the Zenith is getting good reviews but he fears his new book of poems could be overlooked in the process.

Not by this site.

Here’s a selection from The Snow’s Music, a poem Skloot shared last night during his reading:

The Ensemble

The actor playing Claudius has worn
the same shirt to rehearsal every night,
a faded royal blue polo with torn
sleeves and grayed message: Ophelia Was Right.
The student of divinity who plays
Laertes has stopped seeking his inner
hothead. He’s come to believe the boy stays
calm and affects rage while his voice, thinner
the louder it becomes, gives him away.
That new beard, flecked with white, will have to go.
Meanwhile, the Gertrude whispering her way
through another chest cold still does not know
her speech from Act Three, saying No more sweets,
Hamlet! instead of No more, sweet Hamlet!
Her husband playing her son is two beats
too fast on every line. No surprise. Yet
his quick mouth suggests doubt, a racing mind,
something she has not considered before.
At the bar tonight the Director is kind
in his final notes, knowing little more
to do now, certain it will come together
tomorrow. He orders one more round,
toasts cast, stage crew, opening night weather,
Shakespeare, Denmark. He savors the sound
their laughter makes as it rises and falls.
He’s loved them all since the first casting call.

After Skloot read, I asked him if he’d written a play. He said not yet, but it would be an interesting challenge. He mentioned that he used to act and that the theatre has a big impact on his writing.

Portland is a city full of friendly, interesting people, so it’s natural that web sites would spring up from this fertile land to support that fact. One is Portland On Fire, a site that profiles a different Portlander each day. The site is currently inactive, but there may be work happening behind the scenes to bring us more profiles.

Raven Zachary created Portland on Fire. I saw Raven present a slideshow on the iPhone at Inverge 2008, earlier this month. He seems like a super smart guy.

Another site I took note of is Strange Love Live, a podcast series featuring local tech persons of interest produced by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. I’m looking forward to the show’s next feature on local photographer, Mark Coleman. Mark and I met at Beer and Blog two Fridays ago.

Also at Beer and Blog, I bumped into Dawn Foster. Dawn is profiled on Portland on Fire, as well. Since meeting her, I noticed that another Portlander (one I have not yet met), Marshall Kirkpatrick, named her an up-and-coming social media consultant on ReadWriteWeb. Dawn gave me an invite to Shizzow, a Dopplr-like site that helps friends connect in real space and time.

I also met Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo at Beer and Blog. They’re working on organizing the first annual CyborgCamp, among other things.

This post is not conclusive, it’s just a run through of some of my preliminary findings in the tech and social media communities here. I’ve also had coffee with a couple of ad guys, and gotten to know someone working at Wieden + Kennedy. The someone at Wieden mentioned her frustration that the tech and ad communities are not better connected. It was an interesting observation, and by no means a situation exclusive to Portland.

Keen cultural observer and wordsmith David Foster Wallace–who passed away at 46 this month–gave the commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio, on May 21, 2005.

He advised that it’s important to break out of one’s “default settings,” which is his phrase for the state of mind that limits one’s ability to operate at a higher level of consciousness on a day-to-day basis.

…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

That’s damn good advice. There’s way to much going on to “pay attention to.” We need to focus on what matters most to us and go deep there. We need to pick our waves carefully, and ride the ones we’re good on. The ocean, like the day-to-day world, is much to big to comprehend, but there is one thing we know—we have to go into both with utmost awareness and respect.

His point about choosing how we construct meaning from experience is also hugely important. The clichéd version is “we create our own reality.” Which is true, of course. We have the power to choose how we relate to events and to people. Often times, we don’t choose is what Wallace is getting at in his speech, we just fall back on our “default settings.” Wallace thought it important to do better than that, to work towards a better self, which means consciously shaping ourselves with thought.

Or as Ken Kesey said, “Always stay in your own movie.”

…the cult of the individual has caused the commonwealth to wither. - Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote a splendid op-ed on the culture of Wall Street and how the nation needs to move beyond this epoch of unchecked greed into something better, something wholesome and sustainable.

The leverage party’s over for the masters of the universe. Shed a tear. When you trade pieces of paper for other pieces of paper instead of trading them for real things, one day someone wakes up and realizes the paper’s worth nothing. And Lehman Brothers, after 158 years, has gone poof in the night.

We’re witnessing the passing of more than a venerable firm. We’re seeing the death of a culture.

Cohen taught a journalism class at Princeton recently, where he saw first hand how attractive the high paying jobs in the financial sector are to the young minds coming out of Ivy League schools.

According to the Harvard Crimson, 39 percent of work-force-bound Harvard seniors this year are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies (or were in June). That’s down from 47 percent — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007.

These numbers mirror a skewed culture. The best and the brightest should think again. Barack Obama put the issue this way at Wesleyan University in May: beware of the “poverty of ambition” in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.”

Cohen recommends that we read Nick Taylor’s stirring American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A.: When F.D.R. Put the Nation to Work. It shows how the Works Progress Administration, a linchpin of Roosevelt’s New Deal, put millions of unemployed to work on dams, airports and the like.

Maybe all the ex-paper pushers could be put to work, building things of value to the community. It seems far fetched at the time of this writing, but it might be less so in the not too distant future.

As strange as this may sound, I’ve been wondering what’s up with Palin’s hairdo. According to SNL’s wig maker, it’s a “French twist with a ’60s bouffant kind of thing, and bangs,” yet it lacks an identifying name. I suppose it’s safe to call it “The Sarah” at this point.

“Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man’s life in God’s own backwoods.” —Jeffrey St. Clair

I picked up a copy of Joe Bageant’s book, Deer Hunting With Jesus, in the Atlanta airport recently. The author attempts to explain how the middle class vanished from American life by looking closely at residents of Winchester, Virginia–his home town.

In the chapter titled, “American Serfs,” Bageant argues that our public education system is a shambles for a reason.

Conservative leaders understand quite well that education has a liberating effect on a society. Presently they are devising methods to smuggle resources to those American madrassas, the Christian fundamentalist schools, a sure way to make the masses even more stupid if there ever was one.

Is it any wonder that Gallup Polls tells us that 48 percent of Americans believe that God spit on his beefy paws and made the universe in seven days? Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution. It is no accident that number corresponds roughly to the percentage of Americans with college degrees.

As you can see from the passage above, Bageant isn’t pulling punches. Nor does he have reason to. Once upon a time in this country, we believed anyone could reach for the stars. Maybe it didn’t work out for all, but it worked for many. Today, the deck seems brutally stacked against those without financial resources. This didn’t just happen, and it’s not a conspiracy.

Class is now the ultimate bifurcating factor in America. Obama is proof of that. That he’s black seems to hardly matter. That he’s Ivy League-educated is what people either reject or embrace.

p.s. See this great illustration inspired by the book on Flickr.

Campaign Manager, Rick Davis, defends the McCain camp’s zealous protection of Governor Palin: “She’s not scared to answer questions. But you know what, we run our campaign, not the news media. And we’ll do things on our time table. And honestly, this last week was not an exemplary moment for the news media. So why would we want to throw Sarah Palin into a cycle of piranhas called ‘the news media’ that have nothing better to ask questions about than her personal life and her children?

[via Talking Points Memo]

The Oregonian is reporting on efforts being made to establish a Major League Soccer franchise in Portland.

At a news conference today, City Commissioner Randy Leonard and Henry Merritt Paulson III, owner of the Portland Timbers and the Portland Beavers, stated their intentions to help turn the Rose City into a big-league sports town.

Paulson is applying for one of two MLS expansion teams that will begin play in 2011. If he succeeds, he wants city help making $40 million in improvements to PGE Park downtown and building a new home for the Triple A Beavers. A new minor-league park could cost $35 million.

This type of appeal to the city and its taxpayers happens all over the country, year in and year out. I’m not a big soccer fan, but this type of growth is good for Portland, so I’d likely agree to a tax hike. Yet, I’ll also offer that Portland has unique corporate sponsorship opportunities in this category, with Nike, Adidas, Columbia Sportswear and Jantzen all based here. Ideally, a mix of public and private support will get the job done.

The Oregonian has an interesting piece on the solar business and how important tax credits are to the burgeoning industry.

According to the story, Portland’s Tanner Creek Energy faces a module shortage and record-high prices as they rush to erect solar systems before the 30 percent federal tax credit for solar-system owners expires at year’s end. Solar advocates say such subsidies are crucial until new technology and mass manufacturing reduce costs.

Faced with the loss of these tax credits, many in the solar industry fear a crippling slowdown right as momentum is rising.

On the other hand, Tim McCabe, director of the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department, is unfazed by predictions of a panel surplus and slowdown.

“The interest level in Oregon, with our business-energy tax credits, is extremely high with solar manufacturers right now,” McCabe says.