Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Back From Jenny

Marriage Is An Agreement Between Two People To Watch Each Other.

In addition to hiking a little over fifty miles (less than usual, but we had lots of bad weather), playing in our kayak, and hanging out with great friends, I was able to finish three books over the two weeks we spent in Jackson Hole.  Our morning ritual, fine tuned after twenty years of going up there, lends itself to that.  We get up around six.  I shower, dress in hiking or kayaking clothes, grab Kathie's tea cup and go over to the lodge to fill it with hot water.  I bring it back, grab whatever book I'm working on and head back to the lodge to sit in front of a fire and read until someone--David, Joe, Terry, or the wine couple from Napa--shows up.  Then I close my book and we chat until Kathie arrives and we go in for breakfast.  I manage to get almost an hour of reading in every morning and a little more in the afternoon when we are resting up on Bluebell's front "porch" after that day's activities.

The first book was Zero K by Don DeLillo.  It is, for a DeLillo novel, a disappointing story told by a man whose father and step mother are in the process of arranging for their bodies to be "frozen" until some time in the future when the world is more hospitable.  Of course, this is a DeLillo novel, so the story is mostly a vehicle for the author to make random comments, some quite thrilling, about the ephemeral nature of everything.  I thought it was mediocre (if you know DeLillo, you of course appreciate the monumental arrogance of that statement), so that is all I'm going to say on that topic.

I finished The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell with two days to spare.  It tells the bizarre story of two ladies who possess magical qualities and are on a collision course over the broken off tip of an Excalibur kind of sword that when made whole will be able to cut through time and space and alter history.  It was a fun read, but the ending left me cold.  Too clever.  That's all I want to say about that.

The book I would like to talk about is The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder.  It is about 22 aging men who have been getting together every year at a Ramada Inn kind of place where they meet in a kind of mini-convention and reenact the play on Monday Night Football where Lawrence Taylor breaks Joe Theisman's leg.  Anyone who has seen that play knows instantly what I'm talking about.

It is a wonderful idea for a novel that really focuses on the increasing worries of aging men and all the insecurity that brings.  It is hilarious and wise.  I will cite one example of that wisdom and let that speak for the rest.

One of the guys, Jeff, had a theory about marriage.  "All it is, he said, and he said he learned this too late, but all it is, is watching someone and having someone watching you."

I love that idea.  At first glance, it sounds like Jeff is trivializing the institution, but the more he talks about his theory the more beautiful it becomes.  Kids are watched all the time, at least we can hope so.  Parents watch their kids fill up their diapers, eventually sit on potty chairs, cut molars, make messes when they try to feed themselves, go to soccer games, get humiliated, get hurt, become elated.  They watch their kids go through school, figure out how to be friends, grow up.

But people stop watching when a kid grows up.  Sure, parents--good parents--never stop watching, but it isn't as immediate, at least not to the grown up kid being watched.  Marriage is basically an agreement that fulfills that watching void.  But it isn't the big stuff that we watch.  Everybody sees the big stuff.  It is the little stuff.  I watch Kathie come home frustrated after another meaningless meeting at Metro, or after a bad haircut.  I watch her dig weeds in the garden, make green chili, or marinara sauce, brush her teeth, redo her nails.  The thing is that none of that stuff is particularly interesting to watch, but that's okay because she's watching me do the same boring shit.  And her watching and my watching gives each of us validation, makes each of us appreciate our significance just like when we were children.

If, in addition to all this shared watching, there is love and/or great intercourse, intellectual and sexual, well, that's a bonus.  But it's the watching that matters.

"You're not in a movie, Jeff said.  He said that over and over.  Nobody sees you, he said.  He said that's why people pretend they're in movies.  People say they want privacy, but they would actually like a camera put out in their cold backyard at midnight, pointed through the kitchen window while they make a school lunch for their kids.  They want someone to just notice, Jeff said.  He said that's what marriage is for.  Otherwise, he said, honest to God, we're all just like penguins at the North Pole doing it all for no real reason."

I love the idea of this.  I love the idea that Kathie and I have spent 40 years together pointing our cameras at each other.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Giving Till It Hurts

I had to come down to the office to write this before I forgot.  There are dishes in the sink to be washed.  A newspaper to be read.  Packing for the Tetons to finish and a brunch at Lou's Foodbar to go to, but this is more pressing.

We have a new acronym (at least it is new to me) in the financial industry.  It isn't the kind of thing which is likely to bring about another great recession, but it does confirm my suspicions that there is no ethical or moral limit to greed on Wall Street.

DAF.  Has a nice ring to it, kind of like WMD, but not the thing Republicans will use to fuel our fears and lead us into another protracted war in the mideast.  Donor Assisted Funds are financial gimmicks created by giant financial institutions to profit from charitable contributions.  If you are one of the multi-millionaires profiting from a DAF, you would likely say that they are strokes of genius.  If you are someone in need of charity and waiting for the United Way to give you a little hand, you would say that they are reprehensible.

A financial institution like Fidelity creates something called Fidelity Charitable.  Fidelity Charitable offers a convenient way for the wealthy to give to those in need without actually giving to those in need.  Fidelity Charitable happily collects charitable donations and invests them until the giver directs Fidelity to send the donation(s) to a charity of the giver's choice.  The giver gets a tax deduction from the get go and the tax deduction is based on the accrued wealth of the "charitable" account.  If one gave, say, $100,000 and that, thanks to shrewd investing, grew to $2,000,000, you get to claim all two mill as your donation.  The tax advantage is huge.  The thing is that the DAF doesn't really have to abide by the directions of the givers.  If the giver says to give a hundred grand to AIDS research, the DAF looks at that as a suggestion and legally can continue to invest the money rather than give it away.

"In one case, a DAF sponsor went bankrupt and the donated funds were seized to pay its creditors.  In another case, the DAF sponsor used donated funds to pay its employees large salaries, hold a celebrity golf tournament, and reimburse the cost of litigation when a dissatisfied donor sued.  In both cases, courts ruled against the donors and upheld the rights of the fund sponsor to exert full legal control over DAF funds." (Cullman, Lewis and Madoff, Ray. "The Undermining of American Charity". The New York Review of Books, July 14, 2016.)

On the surface it sounds like a convenient service designed to act as a middle man between the wealthy and those who are in need.  In reality it is yet another scam to pad the wealth of the one per cent at the expense of the rest of us.  For instance, if I, a poor and humble retired school  teacher, gave a hundred bucks to a charity, I would receive a deduction commensurate with my tax bracket.  I don't know what my bracket is, but let us say that my income gets taxed at fifteen per cent.  That means I would get a fifteen dollar deduction for my hundred.  If a one per center gave that same hundred, he would get a forty dollar deduction commensurate with his bracket of 39.6.  And that goes up to 60 dollars if the donor gives property (read: stocks).  And, of course, once that hundred dollar donation goes to a DAF, the wealthy donor can wash his hand of the whole thing and watch his donation grow in value while across the country charitable giving that actually gets to the place where it can do some good, is declining precipitously.

I could get even more detailed, but that would require way too much scholarship for this early in the morning.  I often get puzzled about all the anger out there, but something like this goes a long way toward explaining it.  But, hey, no problem.  All we have to do is get Congress to leap into action and do something about this deplorable situation.  They're going to deal with it as soon as they address assault weapons and background checks.