April 21 (poorest county)

Philadelphia is the poorest county in Pennsylvania and the only major metro area aside from Baltimore (if we count Baltimore as such) to appear in this slide show of poorest counties in each state. Congratulations! In fact, our leadership in poverty does help maintain the reasonable pricing of rents and restaurants, at least compared to other cities.

Maybe along the lines of "the city that loves you back," we could have something like, "the poverty that sleeps on your park bench," or "poverty with a smile," or "Philadelphia: bringing poverty to the twenty-first century."

I'm hoping I have a few more liveable years before I slide back into our leading indicator. I'm hoping for a few more years of teeth, too, because there's nothing quite like poverty with a blue solution in a glass for the dentures while one's food is being mangled and made mushy by one's gums.

And then, reminded of my own slim margins, I chance upon this poor lost soul debating the merits of a BMW purchase and kitchen remodeling and felt all was right with the world.

All was right for all of us who aren't even close to Rex Pickett as far as fame and experience and luck and talent and connections and Hollywood credentials go. Okay. "Right" may be a strong word, but we were persisting. We were still alive. We were. Weren't we? Rex was wronged, though, and that seems to be one point of this article that indicates he's come to see big publishing as no more of an ally to literary fiction than Jeff Bezos. I hear your "duh," but still enjoyed reading his screed. And for Sideways, I certainly enjoyed both the film and the book.

Meanwhile, President Obama does what so many big media entities do as well. That's cater to the next generation of consumers, voters, etc. with a nifty election-year student-loan pitch (while to the best of my knowledge remaining mute on the question of what these colleges that students should go into debt for are paying the teachers that the students will meet on the inside). Hey, maybe Trident could have gotten Rex that nice book deal if he'd agreed to name it Sideways Youngbloods, and instead of beautiful scenes with middle-aged gripers and philanderers swishing and spitting merlot and cabernet he added a bunch of nine year olds dropping their weekly allowances on fruit-punch pouches at the local conveniencery?

And even as I'm writing this stuff, I'm thinking to myself that I should be writing.

Fight for Your Long Subsistence in a Lower Middle Quintile!

And have a good weekend.

no college student left behind?

Harper's Magazine offers this take on the (in)solvency of Brandeis University: http://harpers.org/media/pages/2009/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2009-11-0082722.pdf
I'm sorry you won't be able to read the article (read "diagram") without a subscription to the magazine.

My best hunch is that there are many other schools with similar economic problems, and yet the audacity of expansion straight through a serious downturn is its own way impressive. I imagine college administrators near and far have a tremendous fear of what would happen to the enrollment numbers if their campuses were unable to offer the "cutting edge" or "newest facilities" or "high-tech dorms" or "state-of-the-art gym equipment."

In another article, I read that many Japanese private universities are in danger of going out of business. At an on-campus workshop, I mentioned that even Harvard University had cut jobs (around 500 if I'm not mistaken) this past year, and the glib facilitator of the event replied, "Do you think up at Harvard they ever note that even [add any school South of the Mason-Dixon line] cut jobs?" It sounded funny at the time, but the larger point to me is that recession and downturn are true global phenomena and that if understood in a more honest way, they could encourage more national and global cooperation.

National politicians of course have to be wary of how they embrace any "global" unity or togetherness whether the topic is global warming or higher education, and true to the conditions that get people elected, President Obama has stated he wants the United States to have the largest percentage of college graduates of any developed-world country. I believe this is a nice goal, even an essential one if we hope to maintain our status as a world leader in information, technology, or even information technology.

But perhaps a better goal would be to offer the best ratio of teachers to students at the institutions who will be doing the educating? By teachers, we could focus on access and class size; in other words, we could offer our young-adult citizens the greatest number of professors who actually teach our undergrads. In an age when lofty rhetoric and representation so often trump reality, we will most likely continue the trend of increasing the number of students while we decrease the number of undergraduate teachers, and I suspect as a nation, we will pretend we are doing the opposite. And this will most likely be both a national and global trend. As long as President Obama doesn't call his stated goal "No College Student Left Behind," I think the votership will give him the benefit of the doubt. I suppose we could try to get the k-12 teacher-student ratios down first.

out of work in america?

Time Magazine's Joshua Cooper Ramo is lying through his teeth if we can call the use of an adverb--in this case, "unthinkably"--a lie. Cooper Ramo writes, "Jobless figures released Sept. 4 showed a 9.7% unemployment rate, pushing the U.S.--unthinkably--ahead of Europe, with 9.5%." I'd bet my house (the bank's house that is) that Cooper Ramo knows darn well that high unemployment is very thinkable in the United States and that Europe has had some recent years of robust economic growth.

This could be seen as nitpicky, but it could also be seen as editing by corporate-media elites. Time wants to save whatever audience it has left, so Cooper Ramo's original sentence gets two dashes and an adverb, or it is just too depressing or too honest to sell magazines and advertising.

Could Cooper Ramo believe that unemployment above Europe's is so unthinkable? Is his pay check based only on how well he sculpts sentences and not at all about his knowledge of his subject? In the same issue, Time is kind enough to inform us that we have 131 millions workers in our economy, and that is the same number we had in 1999. In other words, just as my earlier post suggests, we have lived through a jobless decade.

In reality, both Cooper Ramo and Time provide good information in the recent "Out of Work in America" issue, and I appreciate their work. I'm sure they are well aware of the limits to what their subscribers can take when it comes to a focus on negative news that is hitting quite close to home. Click here to learn that 80 percent of us consider the economy to be poor and over half of us are worried about our own ability to make ends meet.

When it comes to a poor economy, Africans Americans are a group that would never find any of this information "unthinkable" or perhaps even less than expected.

Barbara Ehrenreich has an effective summary of the African American Depression of the 2000s, and I doubt the findings would shock any black person or anyone with eyes open living in close proximity to the half of black America that has never seen the good times roll, rock, or animate themselves in any way.

On Tuesday, I return to literature class, armed with James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and it is convenient to teach this as a pre-Civil Rights "that's how things were but they're so much better now" story about redlining and segregation and discrimination and everything else that used to be but then magically disappeared with a long, looping LBJ in cursive script. I hope I can offer my students more than that.

At the same time, my teaching strategies are superficial compared to today's larger problems of how President Obama can help us retain or obtain healthcare and jobs. It is Obama's time, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that any compromise bill that passes will be one that can help us all.

And please, if you are in a position to hire anyone at all, please do so.

The Audacity of Excuses?

Please Mr. President, could you create a single job before your content is more or less the same as George and Bill? As in W. Bush and Cosby, but you are welcome to insist Clinton's "Welfare to Work" was in a similar vein; Costanza wouldn't dare pull the "responsibility card" out unless he thought it could get him laid or fed or both. But back to the Obama link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/us/politics/17obama.html?_r=1&hp

We have more population, more high school and college graduates, and millions of more folks who would like more work, not less. You don't have to be John Travolta talking economy with the old dude behind the doughnut counter (the film version of Joe Klein's Primary Colors) to know a change in tone and lofty rhetoric and two dollars will get you on the bus in most cities but rarely pays the utility bills, rent, post-secondary education, medications, groceries, or any other ingredients required for your subsistence.

Okay, so Barbie in Whaleskin Boots can't find the Kurdish region of Turkey on a map of said region. She probably knows how to talk about "responsibility" and uplift her version of "the people." Both of these "leaders" have significant basketball experience although it is Palin who won the state championship, which to my mind makes her the superior WNBA applicant, an old Jrue Holiday if you will, but still doesn't prove she is WNBA-ready. (Check out Jrue's youtube.com links from the McDonald's HS All-American game! If only we all got to play against other 18 year olds for the rest of our lives.)

Is it that bad? Where's the good news???

It's Friday, folks!

So forget the politics, the unemployment rate, the homeless, all the NBA teams losing money, the higher cost of textbooks. Remember this week's lower cost of gas and GO!

I take the bold liberty to send you Cassendre Xavier's blessings and light, Don Riggs's spiritual healing, and my own middle "peace"; if you happen to receive pay on this Friday, the truth is I'm not responsible for it.