We've all heard the pitch during those persistent PBS calls for money. With a congregational chorus of solicitors in the background, chirpy hosts remind us of the value to our local PBS stations. And they're right. Only not always for the reasons they report....!
If you're looking for top quality news journalism, children's programming and culinary excursions, this is the place. Possibly the only place left in the great and growing cultural wasteland that is television. However, upon closer examination, PBS's greatest contribution may be the way it has learned to master the minutes and miles of our lives. The minutes of lost time, and the miles of other lands. They do it with music.
Take the musical ways they allow us to transcend time. I'm thinking of those remember-when concerts with the singers and singing groups from the 50s, 60s and 70s. In other ages, folks had to recall the songs-of-their-youth in the privacy of their nostalgia. Nothing wrong with that, but now PBS brings all this back to life. Right there in front of graying audiences who cheer to the sights and sounds of their old favorites.
Okay, their favorites look their age as they try to hit the high notes of their old Hit Parade best-sellers. But the audiences are just as old, and just as happy to be re-living their youth with the singers they once danced and fell in love to. When some of us at home watch these 2-hour trips through the labyrinths of young love, we tingle with a few long forgotten tingles. And perhaps we pick up the phone and make that pledge the hosts are chirping about.
Along with the minutes are the miles.
I'm thinking those recurring musical concerts PBS offers from far-off lands. International singing stars from European cathedrals, Tuscany mountainside, Irish music halls, Swiss and Bavarian castles. Your network and cable stations aren't taking their cameras there anytime soon. Instead, they fill out their schedules with more pop music award shows than -- well, then there is good pop music! One wonders how can 20-30 award shows a year X two hours each find enough really award-worthy singers? The answer is, they can't So they just keep trotting out many of the same over-and-over-again favorites padded with a few never-to-be-heard-again bummers.
To be sure, the law of hypocrisy demands that someone like me put up or shut up. So I pledge. Not a lot, but just enough to help PBS keep mastering the minutes and miles of my little life. And whattayaknow -- you get a PBS sticker to show for it!
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
TIME IS MORE THAN RELATIVE - IT'S EVERYTHING!
You how how it is. The event starts at 8PM, but you're calculating the best time to arrive. Never too early, but exactly how late? The computation is both science and art. Not only for your social life, but your political life as well....!
Cicero put it this way: "All life is a matter of timing." Woody Allen added "80% of success is just a matter of showing up." When you apply this thinking to new ideas, timing takes on special significance. Usually we like to be the first on our block to embrace a new idea so long as it turns out right, but gee-I-never-liked-it when it turns out wrong. History bristles with examples. Fire...the wheel...the alphabet....the Wright Brothers...the Edsel....the 40 to 1 shot at the derby...all those sub-prime mortgages.
A friend's 100 year old father-in-law once confided with a smile, "I've seen many changes in my life, and I was against every one of them." A wise after-thought. But the real payoff is in wise-forethought. Which candidate will have the right stuff? which campaign will put us on the right track? which piece of legislation or which nominee will achieve the right results? oh, and which cablecasting or blogging screamer is the right one to shut off?
Come to think of it, though, some after-thoughts can also be a matter ot good timing. For instance, when is it time to keep cherishing national memories and myths, and when is it time to crate them away? Here too history bristles with examples. Our old frontier spirit of conquering the land and everyone on it...the tall-in-the-saddle rugged individualism of Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill....unregulated free enterprise...empire building...racial profiling...corporate farming...small town Americana.
The problem with some cherished memories and myths is that, after all, they did help get us here. It's never easy to repudiate your own past, to tear pages out of the national photo album, to admit some of the old movies had it wrong. And yet, here again, time is a player. As Ecclesiastes teaches" There is an appointed time for everything...."
In the end, the case for acting with good timing comes to rest before each of us. As individuals and as citizens. It ticks there inviting us to use it in our own decision-making. In democracies, the invitation belongs o everyone. And while millions of us have made the right decisions at the right times, equal millions have really botched it! Rather than investing our time in celebrating one another, how often have we cannibalized one another? The vulgarian packs in Washington, the high-pad shouters in the media, the gun toting gangs in the streets, right down to the way we love to eat our own celebrities from a Mel Gibson to a Lindsay Lohan and now to an overwhelmed Susan Boyle.
All of which brings us back to the case for good timing. In other words -- knowing which bridges to cross, which top burn, and exactly when best to do it.
Cicero put it this way: "All life is a matter of timing." Woody Allen added "80% of success is just a matter of showing up." When you apply this thinking to new ideas, timing takes on special significance. Usually we like to be the first on our block to embrace a new idea so long as it turns out right, but gee-I-never-liked-it when it turns out wrong. History bristles with examples. Fire...the wheel...the alphabet....the Wright Brothers...the Edsel....the 40 to 1 shot at the derby...all those sub-prime mortgages.
A friend's 100 year old father-in-law once confided with a smile, "I've seen many changes in my life, and I was against every one of them." A wise after-thought. But the real payoff is in wise-forethought. Which candidate will have the right stuff? which campaign will put us on the right track? which piece of legislation or which nominee will achieve the right results? oh, and which cablecasting or blogging screamer is the right one to shut off?
Come to think of it, though, some after-thoughts can also be a matter ot good timing. For instance, when is it time to keep cherishing national memories and myths, and when is it time to crate them away? Here too history bristles with examples. Our old frontier spirit of conquering the land and everyone on it...the tall-in-the-saddle rugged individualism of Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill....unregulated free enterprise...empire building...racial profiling...corporate farming...small town Americana.
The problem with some cherished memories and myths is that, after all, they did help get us here. It's never easy to repudiate your own past, to tear pages out of the national photo album, to admit some of the old movies had it wrong. And yet, here again, time is a player. As Ecclesiastes teaches" There is an appointed time for everything...."
In the end, the case for acting with good timing comes to rest before each of us. As individuals and as citizens. It ticks there inviting us to use it in our own decision-making. In democracies, the invitation belongs o everyone. And while millions of us have made the right decisions at the right times, equal millions have really botched it! Rather than investing our time in celebrating one another, how often have we cannibalized one another? The vulgarian packs in Washington, the high-pad shouters in the media, the gun toting gangs in the streets, right down to the way we love to eat our own celebrities from a Mel Gibson to a Lindsay Lohan and now to an overwhelmed Susan Boyle.
All of which brings us back to the case for good timing. In other words -- knowing which bridges to cross, which top burn, and exactly when best to do it.
Friday, May 29, 2009
IS YOUR COMPASS WORKING? WELL I KNOW MINE IS!
A compass is an interesting thing. It will always tell you where true north is. People, on the other hand, will always tell you where their north is. And that's how we sometimes lose our way...!
In a free society we're all free to aim our arguments in whatever direction we believe (or, in the case of managers, in whatever direction they're paid to believe). Yet with all these compasses pointing to different norths, a society's collective journey can grow troublesome. If only we had some benevolent old top sergeant to straighten us recruits out, and guide us to where we need to be.
However, free societies don't want top sergeants (AKA, dictators). The platoon handbook says when troops are free, they need to freely argue things out. Such is the better way to reach camp before nightfall. And what do you know -- every we-the-people movie and on-the-road documentary says the same thing. From our very first American documentarian, Alex Tocqueville in 1835, this work-it-out-among-ourselves doctrine has been honored.
In truth, the doctrine has brought us a long long way. The camp we've reached may not be everyone's choice, but by and large our trip has been a successful one. Trouble is, success is a moving target, and so here we are in a new century with new compasses to reconcile. Some of the very same arrows on the trail are being read by us in some very disputatious ways. What's long-deferred progress to some of us, is dangerous retreat to others.
Pick any arrow out there you wish -- abortion rights, gay rights, marijuana rights; inoculation, interrogation, immigration -- they all point in different ways along our trail. One citizen's "at last!" is another's "Oh no!" One traveller's "Yes we can!" is another's "No, we shouldn't!"
History has produced a great many top sergeants. From an Alexander and a Caesar to a Machiavelli and a Napoleon. In looking back, what each of them built no longer exists. We're still here. That has to say something!
But then that brings us back to what each of our compasses are telling us is true north.....
In a free society we're all free to aim our arguments in whatever direction we believe (or, in the case of managers, in whatever direction they're paid to believe). Yet with all these compasses pointing to different norths, a society's collective journey can grow troublesome. If only we had some benevolent old top sergeant to straighten us recruits out, and guide us to where we need to be.
However, free societies don't want top sergeants (AKA, dictators). The platoon handbook says when troops are free, they need to freely argue things out. Such is the better way to reach camp before nightfall. And what do you know -- every we-the-people movie and on-the-road documentary says the same thing. From our very first American documentarian, Alex Tocqueville in 1835, this work-it-out-among-ourselves doctrine has been honored.
In truth, the doctrine has brought us a long long way. The camp we've reached may not be everyone's choice, but by and large our trip has been a successful one. Trouble is, success is a moving target, and so here we are in a new century with new compasses to reconcile. Some of the very same arrows on the trail are being read by us in some very disputatious ways. What's long-deferred progress to some of us, is dangerous retreat to others.
Pick any arrow out there you wish -- abortion rights, gay rights, marijuana rights; inoculation, interrogation, immigration -- they all point in different ways along our trail. One citizen's "at last!" is another's "Oh no!" One traveller's "Yes we can!" is another's "No, we shouldn't!"
History has produced a great many top sergeants. From an Alexander and a Caesar to a Machiavelli and a Napoleon. In looking back, what each of them built no longer exists. We're still here. That has to say something!
But then that brings us back to what each of our compasses are telling us is true north.....
Thursday, May 28, 2009
IT'S BUSTING OUT ALL OVER!
"June is busting out all over...." So goes the rousing Rogers & Hammerstein hit song from Carousel. But what's busting out this June is thunderously different than what I remember when the song was first sung in 1945...!
Back then, aside from the usual flowers and fireflies, there was victory and pride in the air. Americans were coming off the canvass from the Pearl Harbor punch of 1941 to soon land the massive knockout blow to both the Japanese and the Nazis. While the cast was still singing the song on Broadway, General Douglas MacArthur was standing on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay proclaiming the end of evil in the world. His lyrics boomed even louder than the cast's, because from now on every June would bust out all over with peace and harmony. From America to a standing-room-only world.
Sixty-four Junes have come and gone. Long enough to score how well we've lived up to the General's lyric. On balance, we've done worse than the dreamers had hoped, but better than the realists had dared to hope. As you stroll the June gardens of your neighborhood, you can study the swallow's flight and muse over the peonies' smile. They're both still here, as yet unconsumed by the terrifying mushroom cloud that ended that war. Despite the subsequent tragedies of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we have avoided World War III. In a dangerous world, avoiding can be as important as achieving.
Of course we have achieved much since then. Medical breakthroughs...electronic marvels....astronauts on the moon....the power of computers and cyberspace within the reach of virtually every hand on the planet. The ancient gods and emperors, not to mention the General, would gaze upon all this in awe. So do our poets and patriots, and let the record show some of this awe is well deserved. We are a disputatious but remarkable people who continue to climb new mountains even though we never fail to shoot ourselves in the foot on the way up.
Along with the achievements, something else is busting out this June. The school kids. Schooling is over, now dreaming begins. After all, summertime is absolutely, positively the most ebullient time for dreaming. Hanging from tree limbs, lounging on lawns, paddling in canoes, or just scratching pictographs in the dirt. True, some of these kids are prowling alleyways and peddling drugs, but the majority of them reject their darker selves and opt for their better selves. They dream of soon-to-be adulthood and careers and amazing headlines with their names in them. These baggy-pants June aficionados don't look it now, but they will be the winners and warriors of the Junes to come.
Now the June page on our calendars usually comes with pastoral scenes of life at its fattest most fruitful best. But wait. Notice the 30 empty spaces on there. Yes, for jotting in appointments. But more than that, like all empty spaces, they're meant to be filled out. Nature and Americans abhor a vacuum!
And so this June arrives like every other June -- except we haven't lived it before. The grand peace and promise we won by 1945 are the very same we need to keep winning in 2009. Neither come without work. Or without dreaming.
Back then, aside from the usual flowers and fireflies, there was victory and pride in the air. Americans were coming off the canvass from the Pearl Harbor punch of 1941 to soon land the massive knockout blow to both the Japanese and the Nazis. While the cast was still singing the song on Broadway, General Douglas MacArthur was standing on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay proclaiming the end of evil in the world. His lyrics boomed even louder than the cast's, because from now on every June would bust out all over with peace and harmony. From America to a standing-room-only world.
Sixty-four Junes have come and gone. Long enough to score how well we've lived up to the General's lyric. On balance, we've done worse than the dreamers had hoped, but better than the realists had dared to hope. As you stroll the June gardens of your neighborhood, you can study the swallow's flight and muse over the peonies' smile. They're both still here, as yet unconsumed by the terrifying mushroom cloud that ended that war. Despite the subsequent tragedies of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we have avoided World War III. In a dangerous world, avoiding can be as important as achieving.
Of course we have achieved much since then. Medical breakthroughs...electronic marvels....astronauts on the moon....the power of computers and cyberspace within the reach of virtually every hand on the planet. The ancient gods and emperors, not to mention the General, would gaze upon all this in awe. So do our poets and patriots, and let the record show some of this awe is well deserved. We are a disputatious but remarkable people who continue to climb new mountains even though we never fail to shoot ourselves in the foot on the way up.
Along with the achievements, something else is busting out this June. The school kids. Schooling is over, now dreaming begins. After all, summertime is absolutely, positively the most ebullient time for dreaming. Hanging from tree limbs, lounging on lawns, paddling in canoes, or just scratching pictographs in the dirt. True, some of these kids are prowling alleyways and peddling drugs, but the majority of them reject their darker selves and opt for their better selves. They dream of soon-to-be adulthood and careers and amazing headlines with their names in them. These baggy-pants June aficionados don't look it now, but they will be the winners and warriors of the Junes to come.
Now the June page on our calendars usually comes with pastoral scenes of life at its fattest most fruitful best. But wait. Notice the 30 empty spaces on there. Yes, for jotting in appointments. But more than that, like all empty spaces, they're meant to be filled out. Nature and Americans abhor a vacuum!
And so this June arrives like every other June -- except we haven't lived it before. The grand peace and promise we won by 1945 are the very same we need to keep winning in 2009. Neither come without work. Or without dreaming.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
WHO ME....?
You have to be careful what you laugh it, for in the long run you usually become what you were laughing at. For instance, old....!
The Census Bureau reminds us that next year the first of the Boomer Generation turn 65. The unofficial entrance into the world of gray hairs, brittle bones, squinty eyes and regretted memories. But while the government jousts with the budgetary dragon of money, the newly-arrived old must take up the lance to joust with the barbarous dragon of meaning. You know, the ancient but often deferred questions that accompanied Adam and Eve out of the Garden: why am I here? where am I going? what's it all about?
In the years just after they lost their lease, their descendants huddled around tribal campfires to hear the wise ones (AKA, old guys) speak of the great answers to the great questions. In due time, tribes found among themselves medicine men and temple priests who could address the questions more formally. In later time, societies found among themselves medical scientists who sought to wrestle with the questions in their laboratories.
Today, the graduating boomers have all three sources at their disposal as they relax between the front and back nine. Over a tall cool one there shaded beneath the fairway greens, the young elders have time to reflect on their earlier and glibber answers. Like when they were consumed with raising their children in the happy hope of felicitous retirements....or when they looked at their own aging parents and vowed never to let age do this to them....or when they locked in those portfolios sure to hoist them throughout their own declining years.
Grasses are forever greener just over the next generational fence. However, now the old boomers find themselves in a slow-motion kabuki dance with the Grim Reaper. How in the hell did this happen! How did this come to be so soon! And why without any warning!
Well, here's the funny thing. All of us -- elderly, boomer, and boomer-to-be -- have been witness to this process from the first time we could pluck a flower. Spring...! One day it's not here, then suddenly one day it is here. In all its blooming green wonder. The little signs and signals were nudging and popping for weeks, only we forgot to notice.
Likewise the sudden burst of old age is never all that sudden. It is we not it that is surprised. But now that the boomers sipping tall cool ones are no longer able to defer the conversation, one particular dragon-of-a-question challenges us to subdue it: Is the answer medical science offers us about aging, the best answer to live with? put another way, is warehousing us the best solution? or is it more like the final solution?
This is surely not to say the old ways (ie. sharing a back room in the home of your kids) are better than the new ways (ie. sharing a room in the institution your kids are paying for). As usual, the best answer probably lies somewhere between. Between familial compassion and superior care. Something for each family to locate for itself.
It's just that the aging boomers never had to joust with it so seriously. Nor was it ever topic one on the fairways before.
The Census Bureau reminds us that next year the first of the Boomer Generation turn 65. The unofficial entrance into the world of gray hairs, brittle bones, squinty eyes and regretted memories. But while the government jousts with the budgetary dragon of money, the newly-arrived old must take up the lance to joust with the barbarous dragon of meaning. You know, the ancient but often deferred questions that accompanied Adam and Eve out of the Garden: why am I here? where am I going? what's it all about?
In the years just after they lost their lease, their descendants huddled around tribal campfires to hear the wise ones (AKA, old guys) speak of the great answers to the great questions. In due time, tribes found among themselves medicine men and temple priests who could address the questions more formally. In later time, societies found among themselves medical scientists who sought to wrestle with the questions in their laboratories.
Today, the graduating boomers have all three sources at their disposal as they relax between the front and back nine. Over a tall cool one there shaded beneath the fairway greens, the young elders have time to reflect on their earlier and glibber answers. Like when they were consumed with raising their children in the happy hope of felicitous retirements....or when they looked at their own aging parents and vowed never to let age do this to them....or when they locked in those portfolios sure to hoist them throughout their own declining years.
Grasses are forever greener just over the next generational fence. However, now the old boomers find themselves in a slow-motion kabuki dance with the Grim Reaper. How in the hell did this happen! How did this come to be so soon! And why without any warning!
Well, here's the funny thing. All of us -- elderly, boomer, and boomer-to-be -- have been witness to this process from the first time we could pluck a flower. Spring...! One day it's not here, then suddenly one day it is here. In all its blooming green wonder. The little signs and signals were nudging and popping for weeks, only we forgot to notice.
Likewise the sudden burst of old age is never all that sudden. It is we not it that is surprised. But now that the boomers sipping tall cool ones are no longer able to defer the conversation, one particular dragon-of-a-question challenges us to subdue it: Is the answer medical science offers us about aging, the best answer to live with? put another way, is warehousing us the best solution? or is it more like the final solution?
This is surely not to say the old ways (ie. sharing a back room in the home of your kids) are better than the new ways (ie. sharing a room in the institution your kids are paying for). As usual, the best answer probably lies somewhere between. Between familial compassion and superior care. Something for each family to locate for itself.
It's just that the aging boomers never had to joust with it so seriously. Nor was it ever topic one on the fairways before.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
LIVING IN A NICHE & OTHER WAYS OF SURVIVING MODERNITY
The last time I saw Paris -- I like writing that, it sounds so cosmopolitan -- I spent a few cafe coffees sitting with a writer who must by now be dead. But his musings about niche marketing live on with me here back in the home of shaken but still still shimmering American capitalism....!
His thought was that while entrepreneurs aim their goods and services at specific niches of their market, consumers choose to live in specific niches of their life. There may be niche marketing, but still more relevant there is niche living. And could there be any better time to indulge in this prescription than today's daily avalanche of words and images, facts and statistics, theories and conspiracies?
You may have witnessed the same scenes -- bartenders turning off the newscast at the request of upset customers, mothers easing children away from the nightly news, jobless men fighting back despair at the latest unemployment reports. While we no longer go to our beds at night with long-rifles in the event of Indian raids, we do climb into them trailed by nightmares of the impending Armageddons faithfully but breathlessly reported by our 24/7 media.
One of the questions the media often poses is do we have more information than we can process? more knowledge than wisdom? The questions are of course sandwiched in between another breaking-news dispatch that slams into your life like another missile.
And so as Jacques pointed out lo these many newscasts ago, "You can't stop the missiles, but you can step out of their range." What he had in Gallic mind was a practice perfected by certain souls travelling this same ship of fools with us.Those who, for a variety of reasons, have reasoned that we live in herds, but can still graze in private. And so these escapees travel in their minds to other lands for brief respites.
The artists among us do so as they sabotage their way behind the line of daily fire into the bloodless fields where live music and literature and poetry. The philosophers among us do so as they tease out of the everyday hair-fright strands of thought which transcend the mud of the moment for the message of the eternal. Nostalgics too do this as they escape -- yes, they have no shame about the word! -- into remembrances of things past, people loved, and times savored.
.
My Parisian friend wouldn't shape the words this commonly, but what he was saying and what I was approving is: Different strokes for different folks! And while today's helter-skelter age brims with rhapsodic new opportunities, it bubbles with discordant new disasters. Sipping coffee in that Paris cafe and slipping into bed this night, I carry a feeling next to my heart which whispers: Yes, seize the day, but only in the pieces and parts you can actually hold.
After all, the world is a very big pot of coffee, and you are only a very small cup.
His thought was that while entrepreneurs aim their goods and services at specific niches of their market, consumers choose to live in specific niches of their life. There may be niche marketing, but still more relevant there is niche living. And could there be any better time to indulge in this prescription than today's daily avalanche of words and images, facts and statistics, theories and conspiracies?
You may have witnessed the same scenes -- bartenders turning off the newscast at the request of upset customers, mothers easing children away from the nightly news, jobless men fighting back despair at the latest unemployment reports. While we no longer go to our beds at night with long-rifles in the event of Indian raids, we do climb into them trailed by nightmares of the impending Armageddons faithfully but breathlessly reported by our 24/7 media.
One of the questions the media often poses is do we have more information than we can process? more knowledge than wisdom? The questions are of course sandwiched in between another breaking-news dispatch that slams into your life like another missile.
And so as Jacques pointed out lo these many newscasts ago, "You can't stop the missiles, but you can step out of their range." What he had in Gallic mind was a practice perfected by certain souls travelling this same ship of fools with us.Those who, for a variety of reasons, have reasoned that we live in herds, but can still graze in private. And so these escapees travel in their minds to other lands for brief respites.
The artists among us do so as they sabotage their way behind the line of daily fire into the bloodless fields where live music and literature and poetry. The philosophers among us do so as they tease out of the everyday hair-fright strands of thought which transcend the mud of the moment for the message of the eternal. Nostalgics too do this as they escape -- yes, they have no shame about the word! -- into remembrances of things past, people loved, and times savored.
.
My Parisian friend wouldn't shape the words this commonly, but what he was saying and what I was approving is: Different strokes for different folks! And while today's helter-skelter age brims with rhapsodic new opportunities, it bubbles with discordant new disasters. Sipping coffee in that Paris cafe and slipping into bed this night, I carry a feeling next to my heart which whispers: Yes, seize the day, but only in the pieces and parts you can actually hold.
After all, the world is a very big pot of coffee, and you are only a very small cup.
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