The Real Charlie

My Minimalist Inaugural Post

I was trying to come up with my seemingly obligatory inauguration post and was struggling to describe my mixed feelings of resignation, trepidation and vague hope (in that order) attached to Obama's inauguration tomorrow. The NY Times did my work for me, though, by going to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and talking to the good conservative people there. A quotes like this says a lot about this country, and about how most conservatives and Republicans act on the patriotism and the profound love for this country that lies at the very heart of the conservative movement:

"Oklahomans understand and respect the elections process,” said Chris Benge, a Republican from Tulsa who serves as speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives. “Once the president has been determined, the vast majority of people are willing to get behind him."

A far cry from the "stolen election" and "let's flee to Canada" whining of 2000 and 2004, eh? And most conservatives of my acquaintance with a more or less fully lamped chandelier feel more or less the same way.

So I'll be watching tomorrow, with less joy and enthusiasm than most here in Boston, but with the same deep love for our country and awe for our system and constitution that I share with our next president, and his predecessor, and so many others.

Thank God

My cheapskate town does not give out those little "I voted" stickers, so after casting ballot #101 at Precinct B this morning (and watching a lady get chewed out by the police for hocking people about Obama in the polling line) I put on flag lapel pin that I wear on 9/11 and a few other times per year. At lunch downtown today I was paying for my sandwich and the cashier asked me if I was wearing the pin for the election. Yes, I told her, because my cheapskate town does not give out "I voted" stickers. "Thank God you voted" she told me. "No," I replied, "thank God we can vote." "You got it, man" shouted the manager behind her "you got that right!"

I told my father, who reminded me that he has now been voting for seventy years, this story, and we got choked up together about it. My father had friends who went into the service in the 1940s and never came home. His father, my namesake, was born in Belarus and became an American citizen. I am told that he used to tear up when the flag was carried past him at a parade. Like my father, he never missed a chance to cast a ballot.

As I sit hear at a little before ten on Election Night it looks like Barack Obama will be our next president. I dislike Senator Obama's stands on most issues, distrust his philosophy and judgement, see grave danger in his choice of friends and advisors (with the notable exception of Colin Powell), and generally am proud to have voted against him. But I wish him the very best, and all of God's blessings, in his sacred role as the leader of the extraordinary country that he, like I, is fortunate enough to call his home.

I Have A Family To Feed

I actually used that cliche last week in the final chapter of a strange, scotch scented, oddly retrograde, transitional moment in my life, one that came quickly in the end, but has been months in the making.

The end result of which is: I am leaving my current job for another one with almost exactly the same title (delete "of," replace with ",") but very different responsibilities. At an employer I last worked for in the Clinton era, when I was single and foolish and brown haired. Ground Rule #2 remains in effect for both my new and soon to be former employers, so forgive my discretion. But yes, I did throw fatherhood out there as a justification for not accepting a job offer on the spot, rather wanting to know the salary first (they gave me 90% of what I actually wanted, so Roxanne doesn't need to get a night job yet). So an end of one era, a beginning of another. There'll be some good posts out of this new world, I wager, especially as I plan to give up the car commute for the commuter rail. And, as always, I blessed to have Abby along for the journey. Thanks for the support, my love.

In unrelated news, Roxanne came and voted with me in the primary election today. Oh, trying to explain American electoral politics to a nearly four year old. She was nervous about coming, but did a good job. I always get a little anxious voting, too, thinking of my grandfather, who left his home in Minsk and worked so hard so I could, as Roxanne understands it, pick the grown ups in charge of the other grown ups. And I think of my friend Evan, on his way to Iraq soon, of my father, alone in his watchtower in the ruins of Yokohama in 1946, and of the hundreds of graves of African-American Civil War dead ("US Colored Troops," as their stones said) that I saw on Memorial Day a few years ago in Arlington National Cemetery.

I voted for John McCain, with pride and confidence, as I did in 2000. I won't suggest how you should vote, but if Republican primaries are open to you, please give Senator McCain a look.

Firing the Grey Lady

My apologies for the blog lull since July 25th. I had a major (and successful) work event the next day that left me pretty wiped out, and ready for the three day weekend with my friends Adam and Jen and their crowd out on the Cape. I returned to a busy week at work, Abby's 32nd birthday and a need for some serious daddy duty this weekend. But I'm back now.

My big decision of the past week was canceling my subscription to the New York Times. I have been reading the Times since I was a little kid (my father was a newspaper wholesaler, as was his father, and I have photos of an adorable baby Real Charlie literally crawling around on the Times) and have had my own subscription since the first day of freshman year of college. I could never imagine life without a daily paper, and for as long as I can remember, that paper has been the Times.

But I've moved on the past few years. The Jayson Blair scandal was very disillusioning, and the continued string of forgeries and distortions (many of them, irritatingly, seem to be designed to make the President, people of the Right and/or religious people look bad) has broken my confidence in the paper's quality. The culture coverage has become obsessed with celebrity and television. The arch "New Yorky" tone has gotten stronger, and bothers me more as a Bostonian. And the anti-Israel bias definitely bothers me more than in the past.

I've gotten The Boston Globe at work for years, and it is a decent paper. It is written at least four grade levels below the Times, but it covers the Sox well (except for the CHB, of course), reviews museums and restaurants I might actually visit someday, and features the obituaries of people I know, giving me the opportunity to cluck my tongue at the Angel of Death each morning over my muesli. Abby is eager to see more local news, get some ideas of things to do with the kids and, also, feels that the Globe covered her show at the Wellesley Free Library well last year. So we are Globe subscribers now, and I'll miss the Times (the article on wealthy but not super wealthy people in Silicon Valley today was super) but not so much (the Noah Feldman magazine section hatchet job on Maimonides School is shaping up to be another disaster).

On the subject of Abby, those in you in, near or able to travel to Portsmouth, New Hampshire should check out Abby's work at Three Graces Gallery starting this Friday. The exhibit is a group show called "Things With Wings" and Abby has some great new stuff for you to see. She is the featured artist on the exhibit announcement - check it out. I am always so proud of my creative and brilliant wife, who makes such beautiful things and cares for our two little people and keeps me on the straight and narrow, too. If you can catch this show, please do so.

Very Poorly Constructed

My sympathies go out to my good friend Carla Geek of All Trades as she begins to gut renovate her kitchen. Her most recent post includes the unpleasant combination of phrases "structural beam" and "very poorly constructed." Ouch. Good luck to Carla, David and Demetrius in surviving kitchen rehab. May they find comfort in anything other than the "surging" New York Yankees...

Speaking of very poorly constructed structural elements, kudos to the Massachusetts State Legislature for rejecting the anti-gay marriage amendment. Not just because of its contents (which I opposed, with little passion, on vaguely libertarian grounds), but because I detest referendums. I can not think of many worse ways (short of a theocracy, or a dictatorship of the proletariat) to govern than leave anything other than the most trivial and tangential policy matters (electing a Corn Festival Queen, or selecting a State Stone Fruit) to popular vote. Popularly electing representatives to make these decisions is okay (sorta), but this whole referendum business is a cop out, a way of giving loud voices unneeded amplification, the political equivalent of cobbling a few boards together and calling them a structural beam (phew). Also, I don't trust the People. As Hamilton said, "Sir, your People is a great beast!" My wife will now look for a certain elitist John Jay quotation here, which I withhold for use in some future anti-democratic (or anti-Democrat) screed.

Wow, I start out consoling a friend and move on to kicking the Yankees, forcing a metaphor and exposing the dark "innermost depths" of my Federalist soul. Beats exposing speed traps, I guess. 

The Return of Politics

As a young man, I was very into politics. I participated in a debate in 1984, in seventh grade, as a brand new student - a history teacher and me against two seniors and an English teacher. We won, and so did our candidate: President Ronald Reagan, of blessed memory. Thus began a very consuming love for political debate and conservative politics that ended when I was in college. It ended because I was burned out, because my right of center politics pissed off too many people in a small college, because my roommate had already staked out the role of "lonely conservative guy" for himself, and because my "side" suddenly, in 1994 and a bit before then, started to ascend to power. And, to some extent, I have moved to the center, especially on some social issues and taxes, while the center of gravity has moved to the right. Although I have remained informed and engaged, and have never, ever missed an election, I have drifted away from the scene. The fight was over for me.

After yesterday's election, the results of which pleased me not (except for Joe Lieberman winning, I happen to love Joe), I was thinking about something today while stuck in traffic. Our new governor is from the Democrat party (I was trained by my mentor to never say "Democratic" or to call someone a "Democrat" - only "Democrat party") and I was stuck in traffic. Once he is sworn in, it is his fault. Everything bad that happens in Massachusetts is now the Democrat party's fault. My problem was that I didn't like being in power. I love being in opposition!

So this blog won't turn into a political blog - lord knows there are enough of those. But politics may pop up from time to time, as I have some targets to snipe at now. And hey Deval, can you please do something about the Route 9 - Route 16 interchange in Wellesley? If you're going to keep that extra 0.3% emergency tax hike in effect, can you at least finish my bridge?

This will be fun. Stay tuned.

An Unfamiliar Malady, and August Forboding

MMWR is in the summer doldrums. This week we hear about melioidosis, an infection that I have never heard of, blood lead elevation in adults (hint: avoid battery manufacturing and lead mining as career choices) and West Nile Virus (it killed a squirrel in Kansas). Nothing too fascinating.

So a number of years ago my friend Adam (his group blog lives here) and I observed the August Level Event phenomena, that is the tendency of big news to happen in the allegedly slowest month of the year. Coups, wars, hurricaines, deaths of celebrities, etc. Other people have noticed this and written about it as well, but we take particular note of it, and around mid month try to predict the sort of event that we will see. The Lebanon situation isn't quite enough, and started in July. The Jon Benet thing is so 96. I am guessing either political celebrity death or some mess with Iran. Either way, a pall is cast over the whole month until things get cleared up.

By the way, one year August came and went and nothing especially dramatic happened. Unfortunately, it was 2001. We all came to rue that quiet August, didn't we?

Any thoughts out there among the blog reading public?

My Brother Man, Or A World of Charles

I was waiting for the infernally slow elevators at work today (free hot dogs and hamburgers in the basement cafeteria, woo-hoo!). Usually they take one of the elevators out of service for the kitchen to use and deliver food in the building, and you are not supposed to try and "hitch a ride" with the kitchen people. They are pretty strict about this, a strictness reinforced by the fact that they guys who deliver the food are mostly Haitian men with limited English who pretend not to hear requests to join them.

But today this guy goes to his elevator and says, "I take you downstairs." I get on with him and thank him, and he points at my badge and says "I do it because you are Charles. I am also Charles." He shows me his badge, he is Charles W. I ask him if he knows Charlie Q., who does the painting and wallpapering in the building. "Yes, and Charles L.," referring to a very elderly gent who works as a volunteer running errands around the place. So there are four of us Charleses in the joint, Haitian, Jewish and Boston Irish, white collar and blue collar, very old and pretty young, and if you catch Charles W. he gives you an express ride to free grilled tasties!

While people all over the world blow each other up and shoot at each other, and two places that I love (Lebanon and Israel) burn, it is good to know that a few men without much in common can join together and break a tiny rule and simply acknowledge that each other exist just because they are all named Charles.