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From the Week in Review (which Lauren and I are realizing is rather fluffy, if enjoyable), A Modest Proposal - Bikers, Take the High Road:

Next comes another species of biker, which I call the Really Cool Biker, because they are really cool — usually younger than the Lance Armstrong types, wearing skinny jeans and a windbreaker imprinted with, say, the name of a bar or a bowling alley, and riding a sleek, fixed-gear frame bike that I myself am too uncool to even adequately describe.

Now, as the Tour de France vs. the tourist melee is exploding, the Really Cool Bikers attempt to skirt the scrum of tourists, using the moment of chaos as an obstacle course, causing tourists to break like pheasants after a bad shot. The Really Cool Bikers speed silently around terrified bystanders, leaving a trail of bike-induced horror.

But it’s kind of fun to skirt the melee!

The Insolvency Dilemma →

Add another notch to the board: Krugman makes the case for widespread insolvency in the troubled banks. He adds to a large number of voices – including my alma mater for my WikiPhD in Economics, Planet Money – who see things that way.

In opposition, of course, are Treasury and the White House, whose continued investment demonstrates their belief that the trouble lies in liquidity. And I find the logic there irresistible: look at the markets day to day - everyone is freaking out. Toxic assets aside (or even, to some extent, inclusive!), we have to be experience unprecedented illiquidity. Right?

Folks much smarter than me disagree, but I’ve yet to be swayed by a framing of the current climate in a way that supports their view. Treasury isn’t helping this much now, but if they can eventually inject confidence back into the system, it seems like assets good and bad are bound to recover a great deal of value. That’s liquidity.

"Fairey has said that the real message behind his work is “Question everything.” I question the I.C.A. director Jill Medvedow’s claim, in the show’s catalogue, that Fairey pursues a “quest to challenge the status quo and disrupt our sense of complacency through his art.” What isn’t status quo about political rage? And have you met anyone not heavily medicated who strikes you as complacent lately? The retrospective is dated on arrival."

— Peter Schjedahl delivers a terse take-down of Shepherd Fairey’s work (the man, as if it needed to be said, behind the iconic Obama ‘HOPE’ poster). I appreciate the thesis that if it weren’t for the  faux-agitprop formlessness of Fairey’s style, that poster couldn’t have - like the candidate - meant so many things to so many people.

Madam Senator,

Though the political slate - particularly for California - is already overcrowded, I would like to register my vigorous endorsement of the dispassionate but unshrinking reasoning in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times, ‘To Investigate or Not: Four Ways to Look Back at Bush.’

As a steadfast civil libertarian, I believe that our new president cannot fully accomplish his goal of restoring this nation’s standing in the world without a full accounting of the misdeeds of the last eight years. I seek no vengeance for the pitiable men and women of the Bush administration, but the above-linked author makes a compelling case for the need to take account before memories fade and critical actors pass away. We must learn from this.

I believe you share some of my embarrassment with our recent fall from grace; I hope you will champion a thoughtful and bipartisan commission as soon as the occasion arises.

Respectfully,
Steve McFarland

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I love this drawing. Best contextualized by the article – from the Week in Review – A Primate Family Picnic It’s Not.

What do you do with your brand-new Neanderthal? Do you crank up the air-conditioning and keep him in an artificial Pleistocene, subsisting on leaves and berries? Or does he live in the lab, eating take-out from the cafeteria? Does he get to watch TV and use a computer? Do you make friends with him?

The Little Gate to God

As he closed his powerhouse lecture on Walter Rauschenbusch at Union Theological Seminary last night, Gary Dorrien quoted at length from a poem written in the spring of 1918 by the eminent theologian and founder of the Social Gospel movement, as Rauschenbusch neared a premature death from cancer.

The poem caught my ear, but every mention I’ve found on the internet seems to have selected a few stanzas with varying interpretation of the line breaks. Due to the relative rarity of the book I know it to appear in, I’m going to reproduce the entire poem, eight stanzas in all, and claim fair use, though I’m not sure that’d hold up in court - interested parties, please contact me to take it down. In the meantime I hope you find it, as I did, a profound and mystic expression of communion with God, one still laced with WR’s thirst for social justice in this world.

In the castle of my soul
Is a little postern gate,
Whereat, when I enter,
I am in the presence of God.
In a moment, in the turning of a thought,
I am where God is.
This is a fact.

This world of ours has length and breadth
A superficial and horizontal world.
When I am with God
I look deep down and high up.
And all is changed.

The world of men is made of jangling noises.
With God it is a great silence.
But that silence is a melody
Sweet as the contentment of love,
Thrilling as the touch of flame.

In this world my days are few
And full of trouble.
I strive and have not;
I seek and find not;
I ask and learn not;
Its joys are so fleeting,
Its pains are so enduring,
I am in doubt if life be worth living.

When I enter into God,
All life has a meaning.
Without asking I know;
My desires are even now fulfilled,
My fever is gone,
In the great quiet of God.
My troubles are but pebbles on the road,
My joys are like the everlasting hills.
So it is when I step through the gate of prayer
From time into eternity.

When I am in the consciousness of God,
My fellowmen are not far-off and forgotten,
But close and strangely dear.
Those whom I love
Have a mystic value.
They shine, as if a light were glowing within them.
Even those who frown on me
And love me not
Seem part of the great scheme of good.
(Or else they seem like stray bumble-bees
Buzzing at a window,
Headed the wrong way, yet seeking the light.)

So it is when my soul steps through the postern gate
Into the presence of God.
Big things become small, and small things become great.
The near becomes far, and the future is near.
The lowly and despised is shot through with glory,
And the most of human power and greatness
Seems as full of infernal iniquities
As a carcass is full of maggots.
God is the substance of all revolutions;
When I am in him, I am in the Kingdom of God
And in the Fatherland of my Soul.

Is it strange that I love God?
And when I come back through the gate,
Do you wonder that I carry memories with me,
And my eyes are hot with unshed tears for what I see.
And I feel like a stranger and a homeless man
Where the poor are wasted for gain,
Where the rivers run red,
And where God’s sunlight is darkened by lies?

"These students live in a bubble, and they know it. But then, people like me live in a bubble, too, and, on the whole, we don’t know it. From my angle, of course, our bubble looks bigger and better. Theirs: a constricted, six-thousand-year-old world ruled by an incorrigibly small-minded God, the secrets of which are to be found in a black-bound anthology of unreliably translated old tribal stories, poems, directives, and tracts. Ours: an unimaginably immense, unimaginably ancient universe ruled by no one, the wonders and beauties of which are continually being revealed to us through our senses and our minds."

— An laughable straw man of religious faith from the frequently histrionic Hendrik Hertzberg, but a rather insightful piece overall - he has been in politics for a few decades, I guess: Three Strikes (Strike Two: Pastor Rick).

The Joy of Boredom →

From NPR’s (fantastic and soon to be late lamented) Day to Day, Carolyn Johnson delivers this line so straight, you’re not sure the guest host knows what’s happening:

When you’re in a state of complete restlessness you’re driven to… contemplate a larger problem, you might think of a loved one or feel some universal human feelings like homesickness, uncertainty… and it might also drive you to create something new that you couldn’t find on your cellphone or iPod just out of the pure drudgery of the moment.

"Heading for the door, I started to grab my camera — but then stopped and winced a little. “Oh, Jesus. Really?” some voice whined. “Now you’re That Guy? Can’t you just walk out there like a grownup, retrace your steps, and be back here in 5 goddamned minutes? You really need to drag your giant, douchey camera out for a four-block walk? Who’re you now, freakin’ Diane Arbus? Jeez, get a life.” But, you know what? I told myself to shut the fuck up. And, I grabbed my camera and started downhill, into the darkness, toward one MIA Croc."

— Can’t tell you how many times in the past year(s) I have had the same thought, and all too often I give in. Merlin gives me the courage to tell that voice off - courageous sucking indeed. (from Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking)

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Time photographer Callie Shell, whose work is featured in President Obama: The Path to the White House, and has been following Obama since he announced his candidacy:

I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn’t have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I’ve encountered. Nov. 7, 2007.

(via All Things Considered)