These decorations are an easy, relatively inexpensive way to acknowledge the holiday. They require little or no thought beyond which one to buy and where to buy it. The set-up is easy, so is the clean up and off-season storage.

Easy is good.

The unfortunate trade-off is that most inflatables are hollow caricatures of tradition and a lousy representation of the individuals upon whose lawn they are displayed.

I took three classes in college with a professor who made every class read George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

The essay warrants contemplation. The criticisms he makes of modern writing can be made of most modern pursuits. Holiday decorating for example.

He writes:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. [...] If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

When you use ready-made decorations, you don’t have to untangle lights, build scarecrows or hang bats from trees. Just “gum together” a ghost and pumpkin that’s “already set in order by someone else” and you’re good to go. The result is cute, maybe. Mostly it’s uninspired and unremarkable.

The trouble with such thoughtlessness, Orwell writes, is that it feeds on itself:

[...] an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

It is rather the same thing that is happening to all arenas of our life. The more we choose to rely on the convenience of prefabricated expressions (of thought, holidays or anything else), the less effort we put into all aspects of our lives, and the more we become generic caricatures of ourselves.

Look at what passes for political discourse these days. The majority of people are vehemently arguing about which inflatable lawn ornament is better for the country – your goofy-grinned liberal scarecrow or my fat conservative, Disney witch.

The good news is that the condition is reversible – without taking a BB gun to the neighbors yard:

One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase [...] into the dustbin, where it belongs.

I suppose that means I’ll go outside and make a scarecrow.

Now, there’s a haircut you can set your watch to. The man is thoughtful and well-spoken. He says what he means and means what he says – Orwell would be proud. Listening to him was a pleasure.

Particularly poignant were the last four minutes of the interview when he speaks of the lack of long-term thinking and information overload.

His advice to future leaders:

1. be super competent, never stop learning
2. take care of your people and the people you serve
3. have a personal code based on a value and ethical system you can be proud of

That’s good advice, sans proselytizing.

We are doomed without personal morality and our consumerist techno-culture doesn’t exactly stress responsibility and mindfulness. The best a person or organization can do is seek knowledge, pay attention to (and take care of) others, and be honest with oneself.

When asked if the new generation has a personal code Zinni replies that it’s hard because the institutions that used to provide such a foundation (family, faith, and schools were his examples) aren’t.

It is hard, but I think our morality is evolving with everything else. We’re scraping off the facade of institutions and reclaiming the values upon which they were built. We’ll find our way.

In America, we tend to laud the optimist and shun the pessimist. Not surprisingly, we are inundated with bromides about positive thinking and self-affirmation. But, turns out, all that stuff might not work. A new study published in Psychological Science argues that forcing positive thoughts can have negative consequences.

I’ve always thought self affirmations were a load of crap. Of course, I get itchy anytime someone tries to convince me that the world is roses and bunny rabbits. It’s my personality. But apparently, I’m not alone. In fact, the positive-thinking study found that:

[U]nfavorable thoughts about ourselves intrude very easily, especially among those of us with low self-esteem — so easily and so persistently that even when a positive alternative is presented, it just underlines how awful we believe we are.

The paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than try to reject and fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can also make things worse. Mindfulness and meditation techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective. Call it the power of negative thinking.

In other words, we need to learn to cope. Trying to force ourselves to be positive and happy just makes us realize how negative and unhappy we actually are. That’s not to say we should mope around and drink all day. But it is saying we shouldn’t feel bad for not being happy. Being functional is good enough.

And isn’t that wisdom for our new age?

During this weekend’s D-Day remembrance ceremony, President Obama urged us not to forget those who fought for our freedom and what they managed to achieve.

Many estimate we are losing as many as 1,200 WW II veterans every day in America alone. But there’s no reason we have to lose their stories. For those of us with parents or grandparents who fought in WWII, it’s up to us to not let that war and its sacrifices drift into distant memory and mythology.

I’ve lived my life surrounded by stories of WW II, whether it’s personal stories about my grandfathers who both served in the Air Force, a college professor’s tale of escaping the Nazi invasion of Austria and then Poland or even just the biographies of the political leaders who’ve served in office during my lifetime: George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Jimmy Carter. Even though I was born 30 years and a few months after D Day, WW II never seemed all that long ago.

But now it is long ago. Soon there will be WW II remembrances with only a handful of veterans, or none at all. Soon, the only breathing link between our world and the world of the 1930s and 1940s will be through those of us who’ve heard the stories first-hand, who knew the very real people who served both at home and abroad.

We may call them the Greatest Generation or the WW II generation, but many of us just called them Mom or Dad or Grandma or Granddad. We know they were just human, no more or less flawed than we are, no more or less brave. And that’s what makes what they achieved all the more extraordinary. All the more worth remembering.

In memory of Henry Casey Carl. 1925 – 2009.

Wish fewer people smoked? Maybe it’s time for visual warnings on packages.

Cigarette packages should show graphic images of yellow teeth, blackened gums, protruding neck tumors and bleeding brains to alert smokers to their disease risks, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

WHO says 20 nations already use some form of visual warning and evidence suggests those graphic images deter smokers from smoking.

I don’t see why we need to stop there. I’m thinking full-sugared Cokes can come with pictures of legs amputated because of diabetes. Cars can have crash victims painted on their doors. Budweiser can come with photos of diseased livers or, you know, photos of a bunch of drunk people (who, let’s face it, are only attractive to other drunk people).

Absurdity aside, I do understand the public health hazard of cigarettes. But I’m am continuously amazed and amused by the lengths governments will go to try to stop people from buying and using a legal product. If smoking is so bad, why not criminalize it? Why try overbearing market manipulations when you can just outlaw the market altogether and claim a public health victory?

The answer, of course, is taxes. As long as governments use cigarettes as a source of revenue, outlawing the stuff would be a big financial blow. So you end up with a bizarre little balancing act where government’s will do all they can to dissuade people from using the product while simultaneously profiting from the use of that product. Frankly, if we’re willing to be so ambiguous in our public health values, we might as well legalize marijuana and begin enjoying the tax windfall.

My newest story has just appeared at Stone’s Throw, an online literary magazine. Yes, this is shameless self promotion. I’m hoping some of y’all will find the time to read the issue — and maybe even read some other great literary journals as well. You’d be surprised how much literary short fiction is out there.

In fact, a recent New York Times editorial by A. O. Scott theorized that the short story might be ready for a rebound, after years and years of being considered all but dead.

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?

This is, quite likely, wishful thinking. But I’d like to believe there’s still a niche for fiction of the truly fictional variety (rather than the yarns people claim as “truth” throughout the political blogosphere).

What do you think? Anyone here read short fiction? Poetry? Novels? Would you read more if they were more attainable?

Just wondering.

In the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science, the researchers taunted subjects with the story of a waiter who was surrounded by gourmet food but not allowed a taste. Some of the subjects were encouraged to go beyond polite listening and actually imagine this poor waiter, to have real empathy with his situation. And then everybody was shown pictures of expensive stuff. Those who had put themselves in the shoes of the waiter, had suffered all that self-control as he had, wanted that stuff, no matter the price.

Yes, we are hardwired to have a limited amount of self control. The theory is that, when our ancestors were struggling to survive in the wild, those who had lower self control could not be satiated by a little bit of food and were more likely than their stoic neighbors to head out and get more — thus increasing the chances those low self control types lived longer.

Evolutionarily speaking, Gordon Gekko was right. Greed is good. Of course, in a land of plenty, greed is a little less useful. Especially if you’re talking about boxes of cookies. Or, you know, mortgage-backed securities. I guess the trick should be to lose control in smaller ways. But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

Brooks begins with the greed theory:

[T]he U.S. financial crisis is a bigger version of the crises that have afflicted emerging-market nations for decades. An oligarchy takes control of the nation. The oligarchs get carried away and build an empire on mountains of debt. The whole thing comes crashing down. [The] remedy is clear. Smash the oligarchy. Nationalize the banks. Sell them off in medium-size pieces. Revise antitrust laws so they can’t get back together. Find ways to limit executive compensation. Permanently reduce the size and power of Wall Street.

Next, the stupidity theory:

[O]verconfident bankers didn’t know what they were doing. They thought they had these sophisticated tools to reduce risk. But when big events — like the rise of China — fundamentally altered the world economy, their tools were worse than useless.
…
The stupidity narrative suggests we should preserve the essential market structures, but make them more transparent, straightforward and comprehensible. Instead of rushing off to nationalize the banks, we should nurture and recapitalize what’s left of functioning markets.

One of my guiding principles is never blame on malice what can be blamed on stupidity. Obviously, greed played a significant role in the crisis, but I’ve never thought it was a form of coordinated greed so much as it was a lot of individual greed that blinded most of those in the financial industry to the massive flaws in the system. Simply put, greed led to stupidity which led to the crisis.

I know it’s satisfying to blame everything on the greedy elites — populist anger is the in thing. But here’s the problem: you can’t eradicate greed. Lots of people will always act out of self interest, no matter the system and no matter if they’re in the public or private spheres. We can’t say “the system caused greed, let’s jettison the system and create a new one” because every system is susceptible to greed. What we can say is that the system, as it exists now, propagates stupidity, so let’s reform the system.

Both the greed theory and the stupidity theory lead to the conclusion that change is necessary. But how we change is predicated on where we see the faults. In the long run, I think we’re better off trying to increase smart decision making than we are trying to create a system impervious to greed.

So, today’s the day we celebrate the plight of alcoholism in the Irish the fun-loving spirit of the Irish with good beer and good friends.

Here’s some factoids from a guy with a bit of the Irish in him:

Over 35 million Americans have Irish blood. But the rest of you are welcome to wear green.

Barack Obama has Irish ancestry. And that’s not a bad O’Bama joke.

Twenty-four American presidents have Irish heritage, including the last nine elected presidents dating back to Kennedy.

Andrew Jackson was our most Irish president — both his parents were Irish immigrants.

The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in America was in New York City in 1762. Fourteen years later, nine of the signers of the Declaration of Independence could claim Irish heritage.

Killian’s Irish Red is not an Irish beer. It’s brewed by Coors. Don’t be fooled.

If your Guinness is cold, it’s too cold. Proper temperature is 45 degrees. Also known as Irish room temperature.

Skip the corned beef.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, y’all.

The flagging economy has accelerated the decline of the American newspaper industry. Already suffering from waning readership and declining ad sales, several major newspapers are now projected to fold or go exclusively on-line before the end of the year. Those papers include such stalwarts of the news business as the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News.

If the fall of the newspaper business is inevitable, the question is: what does that mean for society?

The Internet allows for practically infinite discovery, but it invariably fractures us into subgroups of subgroups based around personal interests rather than the historical connections provided by physical community. Newspapers, on the other hand, promote those traditional connections, giving the community a common source of information and providing a base of commentary and knowledge not tied to any specific subgroup.

In a world with only the Internet, we’d all be looking at different content (radically different, at times). What does that do to our sense of unity and our ability to find common ground with our neighbors? Will we cease to be meaningfully connected through physical community and reorganize ourselves in communities based on specific interests? Am I not already more invested in the readers and writers of this blog than I am in the people living ten miles from me? And, what’s the consequence of that?

Nothing foreseeable is going to stop the decline of newspapers. In some ways, this is like the transition from horse-and-buggy to the automobile. At first, cars seemed like just a faster, more convenient version of something that already existed. But, eventually, cars transformed our society, restructuring communities and irrevocably changing how we relate to one another. The Internet is like that. It’s not just replacing newspapers, it’s changing the ways in which we connect, communicate and build relationships.

For me, there’s some angst over the idea of losing my daily paper. I hope there will always be a place for the printed word in our culture. But economic crises have a habit of making clear what is and isn’t essential to a culture. Newspapers seem headed for obsolescence. What that will mean in the long-term remains to be seen.

There’s no way he was even half as popular amongst Northerners back in the 1860s (I still bump into Civil War kooks down South who HATE Lincoln more than my wife hates the Dukes of Hazzard).

Amongst the dozens of new Lincoln tributes is a 2,024 page biography that weighs 9.3 pounds. The longest book I ever read was Stephen King’s The Stand, a good-vs.-evil plague morality tale that made me get nervous anytime I hung around someone with a terrible cough. That book weighed in at 1,141 pages — and that is my upper limit.

Any Abraham Lincoln comic books out there?

In honor of Lincoln’s birthday, I would like to shine the spotlight on one of his most devoted admirers — a banjo-playing, wood-chopping fringe presidential candidate who believes he’s channeling Honest Abe in the woods of New Hampshire.

Sadly, Carmen Chimento’s life doesn’t even merit a one-line cameo in that new 2,024 page biography.

Carmen also boasts the distinction of making the most bizarre comment I’ve ever heard about Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

What do you think?  Would we be better off today if we had a Chimento White House?

(New Hampshire political junkie Darren Garnick can be reached at www.cultureschlock.com)

Bernie Madoff scam artist action figure

In this economy, would you pay $149.99 for a Bernie Madoff action figure?

Would your answer be influenced if you knew it was a limited edition action figure?

Herobuilders.com is no stranger to controversy, brazenly giving G.I. Joe collectors the meanest enemies possible to wage war on — Saddam, Osama, Hugo Chavez.  Without bad guys, who are the good guys gonna fight, right?

But as brash toymaker Emil Vicale tells the Boston Herald, not everyone wants real-world evil (corrupt CEOs like Lex Luthor are fine) represented in the playroom.

“Everything we do offends somebody,” he says. “If you are looking for a company not to offend somebody, it’s not us.”

(Darren Garnick, who has an Apollo Creed bobblehead on his desk, can be reached at www.cultureschlock.com)

The great writer John Updike has died at the age of 76. I say writer, because Updike was more than a novelist. He was a storyteller, an essayist, a man of letters in a way that is rare in our current age. With Updike’s passing we have one less literary great who was widely known by the public. We have precious few of those.

Without the intention to belittle such writers as Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, Patricia Cornwell or other bestselling authors, Updike was a rarity in that he became famous writing not just popular fiction but difficult, literary fiction. He presented us works meant to do more than provide an enjoyable diversion. He wanted his readers to think about our life and our world, to consider the implications of our choices and the meanings behind our relationships. He wasn’t always great, but he always tried to do more than simply write an entertaining story.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing distasteful about entertaining stories. I am egalitarian in my views of fiction — the more, the merrier. I’d rather see my kids reading comic books than reading nothing at all. But I have great affection for literature and what it adds to our culture. Like all the arts, the best literature can change minds and hearts. Updike undoubtedly changed a few.

He will be missed. I can only hope his passing does not portend the end to an age when literary writers can become, if not household names, then widely known and appreciated. Many other writers deserve the recognition Updike enjoyed.

When I’m not bloviating (blogviating?) on the web or making an increasingly meager living as a freelance marketing writing, I write fiction. That’s why this piece of news is a nice ray of light amidst the dark news stories filling the new year.

Fiction reading is on the rise for the first time since the early 1980s.

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

The caveat is: this is only a one-year trend and fiction reading is still below levels seen even 15 years ago (currently, just 50.2% of adults report reading a novel, short story, poem or play in the last year). Fine, fine. I won’t quit my day job. But allow me a moment to imagine, in this world of hi-def television, podcasts, blogs, Wii games and Facebook, there is still an important place for stories and poetry in our culture.

As far as I’m concerned, nothing beats reading a well-written story. I read almost daily and love everything from Hemmingway to David Foster Wallace to George R. R. Martin to Edward P. Jones to so many more it would be tedious for me to list them all here. Literature, whether the heady canonical variety or the best-selling vampire romance variety, engages our imaginations in ways no other media can. I fully believe fiction and poetry are essential components of a healthy culture.

And now I’ll get off my “up with literature” soapbox and let you return to another important cultural activity: reading Donklephant.