Tom Watson

My Tiger Lily Summer

Tiger Lily, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

My grandmother called these orange day lilies "Tiger Lilies" and they graced every late June of my early childhood, heralding July and summers of sprinkler dashing, grilled hamburgers, and long bike rides. This one was photographed in my front yard earlier this week; the clump was there when we bought the place 18 years ago and it's only grown heartier and more spectacular every year. Some of the hoity-toity cultivation types call these humble Tiger Lilies - or hemerocallis fulva - "invasive weeds." I prefer "tough volunteers." I look forward to their bloom at the start of every summer, and recall the happy times in my grandmother's back garden.

The Big Steep

Today's unemployment numbers should have splashed all that talk of "green shoots" with economic Weed-B-Gone, as the official job deficit rolls toward 10 percent in our midnight garden of recession - while the unofficial numbers creep higher still.

To crib from early 70s Paul Simon: "I don't know a soul who's not been battered. I don't have a friend who feels at ease." The Labor Department's monthly number - 9.5 percent and once again picking speed on the downhill lie - doesn't include all the underemployed, the furloughed, the salary-sliced, the benefits-deprived and the just plain battered into submission in our society. Throw in the fearful and the trepidatious still clinging to old-fashioned paychecks, and that's pretty much everyone I know.

As monsoon season in New York gives way to rainy season, and the humidity grows and ripens in the corners and on the subway platforms, there's a gathering gloom about town that has nothing to do with merely the latest thunderhead rolling in from New Jersey. No, what's rolling in from the rest of America is the Great Recession, the economic event of most of our lifetimes, the one they warned us about, the one our parents and grandparents lived through a couple of generations back before the war.

Noting that Leo Hindery's "real" job losses are 18.7 percent - or more than 30 million Americans - Steve Clemons argues that "with Christina Romer out raising expectations again with giddy talk predicting a V-shaped recovery and given the 'jobs, jobs, jobs' mantra of President Obama himself -- the gap between the job figures expected and the disappointing economic realities generated may be politically consequential." Yeah, when a fifth of working age Americans are out of a job, you can bet there are consequences.

One of which is a clear depression in spending. "Americans are tightening their belts" report the pollsters, which is a bit like saying that someone run over by a semi has "passed on." Magazine subscriptions are being cancelled, fewer shirts are headed for the drycleaners, more workers are brownbagging it, coffee sales are down - hence Starbucks' massive cutbacks. The jobs cliff is pretty obvious - and so is this recession's historic nature (via Ezra Klein):

Was the stimulus enough? Is it well-targeted? Is it working and creating jobs? Hard to tell, but the job numbers are pretty indicative - and perhaps we'd be worse without it. And as Kevin Drum said today: "keep in mind that we're in good shape compared to Europe and China." This could be a long, gloomy summer.

Death to Madoff!

I know he's committed the financial crime of the young century, but I still find some of vengeance porn around the Bernie Madoff sentencing a bit off-putting. There's a bloodthirsty quality to the digital mob, as if Madoff were the American economic equivalent of Guy Fawkes, planting explosives under our vulnerable financial infrastructure. Because he revealed our weakness, he must watch his entrails roasted before his own eyes on the public commons.

Writing in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Gary Stein calls for the death penalty in cases like Madoff's: "How about making the worst of the defrauders and bilkers and scam artists and life ruiners - people like Bernie - be eligible for the death penalty? I'm very serious about that."

Over on MSNBC's Newsvine thread, it's much tougher - no lethal injection clinician to ease the Ponzi king's departure from this mortal coil.

Bernie Madoff should be WATERBOARDED to reveal where he has all this money stached!

scumbag. I say let him out, and publish his address on the internet......

He is an evil man. If there's a Hell, he's headed there. And I hope the prisoners there LOVE him and show him exactly how much.

He should have been taken out in back of the courthouse and strapped down on a hill of fire ants - as a starting point...

It's just gonna be hell sitting in prison remembering why he's there. Too bad he couldn't have been turned over to the people he defrauded

Bernie Madoff is a crook alright. But the size of his monetary theft doesn't make thievery any worse; it's like swimming - once the water's six feet deep, it may as well be 10,000. What stirs this particular pot is the social status of his victims (generally upper middle class and higher, plus some horribly victimized charities) and the poor judgement they showed in trusting the Madoff name without adding up the returns and asking questions. And the "torture Bernie  till he bleeds money" chorus mourns not just some personal fortunes lost, but an era of financial blindness just ended.

Feminists Take Out American Economy - Film at 11

How do ya hamper a hungry man? The "man-cession."

I kid you not. A sample of this brilliant economic analysis by Christina Hoff Sommers in the Weekly Standard: "Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan." After successfully arguing for more stimulus jobs for Americans sporting two X chromosomes, it seems that conservatives now believe that women have devolved into that most lowly of statuses: they're now "a conventional interest group."

The Iranian Obama? Hardly!

Twenty years ago, the newspaper I worked for was blown up by terrorists for demanding that American bookstores show enough courage to carry The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, had issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers. Khomeini's hand-picked Prime Minister - a man who publicly upheld the death sentence against the brilliant author - was none other than Mir Hussein Moussavi, darling of western bloggers and media types who have somehow confused his faction's struggle for power in the totalitarian theocracy with a grand moral movement for democracy and social change.

Call me a cynic, but I'm not buying.

But then again, I walked through the ashes of The Riverdale Press offices and felt the fear of my colleagues and their families - all because we had defended Rushdie's right under the First Amendment to sell books in the United States.

From what I can see, campaign promises aside, Moussavi is just a slightly more palatable version of the current political frontman the governing religious council supports as President. While his campaign - and the disputed results - may encourage the liberal minority of students, his administration would be as beholden to the Iranian theocracy as his predecessor's is. Sure, the unrest might lead to real societal upheaval in Iran, but it might not. And that change certainly won't be captained by Moussavi.

A highlight reel from recent reporting is worth reviewing. Here's CNN's bio:

In 1988, author Salman Rushdie released his fourth novel, 'The Satanic Verses,' which Iran said insulted Islam. The country's supreme leader called for the death of Rushdie. And Moussavi, in a radio broadcast, said the order would be carried out.

Moussavi told the Financial Times in April that he would not halt Iran's uranium enrichment program if he were president. "No one in Iran would accept suspension," he said.

More from Time.com:

Iranians seeking an alternative to Ahmadinejad's truculence have latched onto Mousavi with little concern, it seems, over the fact that in the 1980s, the gray-bearded 67-year-old was at the heart of a regime that executed dissidents, took U.S. hostages and launched a fatwa against author Salman Rushdie.

And some reporting from Foreign Policy:

His liberal detractors emphasize that the Mousavi government oversaw the mass execution of political opponents in 1988, and say he has been largely silent on human rights violations since. They also point to his support for Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the British author of The Satanic Verses. Mousavi's mindset is often characterized as a throwback to the early years of the revolution, when Islamic economics, shared sacrifice, and self-reliance were the political norm.

Yet this is the leader so many in the wired west have rallied behind. Here's more lyrical praise from Andrew Sullivan, who really ought to know better:

The next generation is desperately trying to prevent the Islamist monsters from genocidal war, economic immiseration and the hideous abuse of a great faith. I keep associating it with the Obama movement - the art, the youth, the desire for change, the innovative use of inormatio technology, the yearning to avoid a clash of religion if we can avoid it.

Please.

The Revolution Will Not Be Twittered

"Mock not," pleaded blogger Andrew Sullivan as he posted an instaclassic of hyperbole, "The Revolution Will Be Twittered" in praise of Iranian supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi who took the streets and - in some cases - used the short-form blogging services to post about the scene in Tehran.

Mock on, says I.

There is something like digital catnip on the breakfast bar for western politicogeeks in the story of Iran's disputed election and the ensuing power struggle roiling the Middle East's largest theocracy. Anything that suggests that some of the tools and tricks adopted among the wired, iPhone-wielding politically active classes in the United States may be used to - dramatic pause - start a revolution in one of the world's most dangerous countries carries the potency of a synthetic narcotic injected into the great XML vein of the Internet. Clearly, Andrew Sullivan mainlined some o' that Twitter smack:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

We need to calm down. Twitter is a fascinating startup that has spawned a passionate core community of users, many of them activists for social causes, politicians or technology sector types. Together with a host of other digital tools and platforms, Twitter can be an awesome, viral information-spreader of a tool, and it can raise support for causes and empower activism. Indeed, I'm a big believer in the growth and power of online social activism in general - and my 2008 book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World (Wiley) is in its third printing.

But I think there are limits, especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers' guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall. Sure, Twitter (and Facebook and text messaging and blog and YouTube) can be effective information outlets for revolutionaries, but it's utterly facile to suggest that information technology is driving the currents of unrest in Iran. I can understand the impulse, though; after all, we (the digerati, the plugged in, the Twitterverse) are watching it unfold online. And, you know, wherever we are, well, that's where the action is.

But I prefer the more finely-modulated - but no less fascinated - view of TechPresident blogger Nancy Scola to the current outbreak of triumphalism:

We've seen street protests in Tehran, violence there, and a veritable tsunami of information online detailing the facts, figures, and passions surrounding an election that taps into the very heart of how Iranians view the future of their republic. As we saw in Moldova, the idea of a "Twitter Revolution" isn't always borne out by the facts, at least to the extent that the uprising would have not taken place without the tool. At this historic moment in time, it's fascinating to watch -- and participate in -- how a political conflict can evolve online, how those outside the immediate sphere of its influence have a role in the chain of events, and all that interest and passion can feed back into the cycle of how events play out.

Then too, we're all too quick to align the Iranian "reformers" with a westernized liberal ideal of free elections, free speech, and tolerance. Like in the "Twitter revolution" in Moldova, it becomes cartoonishly easy to choose sides based on Tweets. Further, Iran is an old and complex society that simply doesn't fit our Democrat vs. Republican mindset. It's easy to forget, I guess, that Moussavi isn't exactly an American constitutional scholar like Barack Obama. This is a man who shut down the university system in Iran on the orders of Khomeini, and a former prime minister who managed his country's disastrous war with Iraq and has refused to answer questions about his role in the 1988 massacres of political prisoners.

Sure we instinctively want regime change and a liberalized, more open Iran. And Americans naturally side with the pro-business reformers Moussavi and Rafsanjani, who want to open up the country's markets to outside investments. Iran is also a country governed by a religious council, where several factions are fighting for control of the theocratic system that emerged from the original revolution. And while women's rights and the desire of young people to live in a more progressive society are undoubtedly driving the ongoing struggle, we can't forget that reformist challengers were Khomeini revolutionaries. Yet we insist on viewing the Iranian street through the lens of last year's presidential election - like it's a bunch of college kids taking time off to walk the precincts in the Iowa caucuses. And if the election was indeed stolen (as seems likely) can't we just organize our way to a better result?

Somehow, a key factor for folks like Andrew Sullivan seems to be "how does this square with my image of Obama, and what we accomplished last year together, and therefore my own self-image?" How else to explain this:

The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope.

So simple, isn't it? Fits in 140 characters. Yet it's too simple by far. As turmoil and violence continue in Iran, it's just too damned easy to be intoxicated by the Twitter stream. It trivializes taking to the streets against your country's ruling regime. As one Tweet put it so eloquently this afternoon:

"Seriously, everyone should check out #iranelection throughout the day. Big question is, what can we do?"

So far, just hit the refresh button.

Back on Morningside Heights

Twenty-five years after a baccalaureate address by Isaac Asimov and commencement in a sea of blue gowns on a cold day of drizzle, a small contingent of Columbia College's class of 1984 made it back to Morningside Heights for an evening of wine sampling, fundraising appeals, lectures and peering at name badges with that "you look familiar" gaze.

I'm not big on reunions, but I'm glad I went. My friend Ben Rosner, an '84 classmate who I didn't know back then (we met through our kids) talked me into it, and we reminisced about taking Professor Eugene Galanter's behavioral psych class and marveled at the new student center that replaced the old Ferris Booth Hall, where David Johansen debuted his Buster Poindexter persona early in the Reagan era.

A recurring theme in the polite conversations in the reception tent by the steps above College Walk and just below Alma Mater: an appreciation for the unchanging campus (except for that student center) - the walkways just the same, the hedges in the same places, the trees more mature but still in the same lines from Broadway to Amsterdam. An appreciation of classicism is not exactly in vogue in this era of change, but there at a center of academic liberalism,  the murmur of assent for formal architecture and unchanging core curricula rose above the discussions of careers and children and jokes about hairlines.

As if to punctuate that ceaseless (and welcome) connection to the past, there was Professor Karl Ludwig Selig holding court in the garden of Casa Italiana, his voice still redolent and full of character into his tenth decade of inquiry. A parade of lit majors renewed their acquaintance, and talked (in necessarily bold voices) about his famous classes on Don Quixote and the Spanish picaresque novels.

Then Professor Eric Foner tackled the subject of college's most distinguished living current alumnus, a certain skinny transfer student from Hawaii who graduated a year before our class, and tied the election of Barack Obama to the unfinished business of American Reconstruction (on which the history prof is a leading academic expert). Asked about the President's choice of Judge Sotomayer, Professor Foner launched into a passionate discourse on the societal value of good public housing; not the dead-end streets and towers we've settled for since the 70s, but the kind of decent, publicly-supported apartments that nurtured our next Supreme Court Justice and produced a social return on investment that would knock the feathers out of any economist's spreadsheet.

Talk flowed toward lighter subjects: Mama Joy's, the old West End, the Mill luncheonette, Tom's Restaurant, the Marlin, La Bella China, V&T's, the Cosmopolitan and its cheap breakfast specials. The old neighborhood, changed in almost direct proportion to the staid, preserved lines of Columbia's campus. Yeah man, those were the days. We were now the paunchy, balding old dudes in suits our younger selves would have not-so-gently mocked on the way across campus. And pretty much digging the role.

Recommended reading: How a young blogger saw us.

The Past Is Present at Normandy

The beaches of Normandy have become prime walking spots for American presidents in recent decades. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all strolled the hallowed strands, stopping to peer at rusting German gun emplacements or to lay wreaths in vast fields of white crosses. As battle sites for U.S. military identity go, Normandy long ago eclipsed Yorktown or Gettysburg and any other grounds of mass conflict on this continent.

Barack Obama continues the tradition today, visiting the cemetery at Colleville and meeting with elderly veterans of the invasion of June 6, 1944. For planners of presidential pageantry, Normandy is obviously a very tempting spot. In Reagan's day, D-Day was great photo op - today, it's clearly YouTube-friendly. But I think the ongoing White House connection to the beaches and the burial grounds of northern France goes beyond the chance at easy iconography.

It's really about simplicity - a return to the last clean, "good" war and its simple aim of driving Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan from conquered and brutalized lands around the world. Presidents get to extol the virtues of the men who stormed those beaches and bluffs, who walked into mortal danger bravely for a higher calling. In modern times, only the firefighters in New York City in clear day in September eight years ago have provided that kind of straightforward narrative of sacrifice - and therefore, of American ideals.

In a world of foreign relations that has seemed every more complex since VJ Day, who can blame a President (and his image-makers) for seizing a day for simple military values of right and wrong?

I don't. Even though I know that simplicity is a myth, the imagery from the last good war are still dominant in this society, seven decades after its start. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan - and all the smaller conflicts that ended the lives of men and women in uniform - do not carry the same sense of national and cultural survival that came with the Second World War. Of course, presidents are drawn to that mythological purity.

It's interesting to consider the generational tides of presidential messages in Normandy. Reagan addressed the "boys of Pointe du Hoc" as his contemporaries, the young men he grew up with. Clinton told the D-Day veterans a decade later that "we are the children of your sacrifice. We are the sons and daughters you saved from tyranny's reach." Five years ago, Bush talked about the dwindling ranks of WWII veterans - and Obama is expected to refer to the thin American line of vets today.

In 2009, the D-Day survivors are passing into history - for my shoulder generation of the early 60s, they were either older fathers or - or as in President Obama's family - younger grandfathers. History is always closer than we think. My Dad still remembers seeing elderly Civil War veterans riding in parades during his youth; several centenarian veterans of the Revolutionary War still drew both breath and pensions when the South fired on Fort Sumter. Culturally, the last veterans of WWII are still in demand for History Channel interviews and magazine stories.

President Obama's grandfather marched with Patton after the break-out from Normandy, but his remarks today would seem to come in a world markedly more complex than the one in 1944. Yet, much of that grand conflict was fought over control of natural resources, especially oil. And as Obama returns from a cultural entreaty to the Arab and Muslim worlds, it's worth remembering that the alliances of both 20th century world wars tussled for control of the same oil fields that undergird the economic concerns of the Administration in the Middle East. And it's well worth recalling that some of the very men who landed on those French beaches in 1944 went on to liberate the Nazi concentration camps in Europe - the same camps that shocked an unwilling world into confronting mass murder and anti-Semitism and the moral claim for a Jewish homeland.

I wonder if Obama will touch on this truth: there is no glory in battle. The Library of Congress has been working on an excellent oral history project on the war, with dozens of combat veterans' stories, letters, sketches, and interviews. Almost at random, I was drawn into the personal tale of Tracy Sugarman, a Navy lieutenant from Syracuse who drove amphibious landing craft on D-Day. In a letter to his wife six weeks after the Normandy landings, Sugarman got at the heart of warfare:

"I can't believe, Junie, that men will always have to fight. Men don't always have to fight. They detest it. And if they didn't when they came, they learned to damn quickly."

Recommended reading: MA Peel on D-Day. Also, Robert Stein.

Still Catholic After All These Years...

Trinity College spring, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

A couple of weeks back, I met a friend for lunch downtown and wondered at the choice - an East Village UK-style pub, replete with an iconic red phone box out front. Fair enough, but an interesting choice of venue. I was early and perusing the menu when I realized at an instant why we were there. The famous fish and chips, halfway down the menu.

Of course. It was Friday. In Lent. And we're both Catholics.

Not the daily Mass sort, yet the culture is so strong, so nearly biological, that it still persuades secularists to traipse at least at least an extra subway stop to avoid a meaty midday repast during the period of Lenten sacrifice that will conclude next Sunday. Palm Sunday is tomorrow, and Holy Week follows - concluding that particularly New York version of the liturgical calendar that adds the green of St. Patrick's Day to the purple of the passion play.

On Ash Wednesday, one of my favorite bloggers, Lance Mannion, wrote about his formal break with the Catholic Church, noting that he'd been "holding onto my faith by the threads of a frayed alb anyway." Lance's post plumbed some of the gnawing away of formal church-based hierarchical religion in this country, but I was also struck by one of the comments: "I haven't been to Church in years. But I'm STILL a Catholic." And that blend of personal cultural and religious self-identification, which riles traditional (and conservative) Roman Catholics, hasn't lost its power. Reading Lance's Lenten post (and it was a Lenten post because Lance is still a Catholic) called to mind the lyrics of punk poet Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy from 1980:

And they can't touch me now
I got every sacrament behind me
I got baptism, I got penance
I got communion, I got extreme unction
Man, I've got confirmation

I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy

And now I'm a Catholic man
I put my tongue to the rail whenever I can

Patti Smith, the force behind Carroll's angry, poetic record, was a Jehovah's Witness - at least until she hit New York, and quickly adopted Catholicism (the cultural variety) as the perfect canvas for poetry. Is there a more Catholic opening line to a song from 1970s than Smith's iconic "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine?"

That the song was a reinvention of Van Morrison's Gloria added to the hymnal quality - Patti clearly leaning on the in excelsis Deo side of the double meaning, fresh from posing as Mary Magdalene for Robert Mapplethorpe, himself an Irish Catholic divorced by sexuality yet entirely married in culture and personal reference. This was a common formula in 1970s New York. In 1973, Staten Island Catholic boy David Johansen asked with mock incredulity: "Then all the old ladies they are on their way to the church...yuh go ta church?" That same year, St. Rose of Lima Catholic grammar school graduate Bruce Springsteen cracked, "Nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin' immaculate conception" in Lost in the Flood.

I grew up on this stuff, in the years just after my service as an altar boy, and the incense never quite abandons the cultural DNA, even after the orthodoxy has fled; I've observed the same phenomenon among non-observant Jews who'll still place the pebble on the headstone every time. You can't shake childhood, and in middle age, it's surprising what remains of the old relationship with the cassock and the ritual. Skinny young heretics like Bruce Springsteen harbor second thoughts in the years of thickening middles - witness his 2005 conversation on Devils & Dust:

In the garden at Gethsemane
He prayed for the life he'd never live,
He beseeched his Heavenly Father to remove
The cup of death from his lips

Now there's a loss that can never be replaced,
A destination that can never be reached,
A light you'll never find in another's face,
A sea whose distance cannot be breached

Well Jesus kissed his mother's hands
Whispered, "Mother, still your tears,
For remember the soul of the universe
Willed a world and it appeared."

Another of my favorite bloggers, M.A. Peel, also had an Ash Wednesday post at the beginning of this Lenten season, linking this period of contemplation for Catholics to the world's crisis: "Avarice is a mortal sin - the wisdom of that classification is now sadly clear." And she posted a video and lyrics to the song Hallelujah by the brilliant singer/songwriter Rufus Wainright, culturally Irish Catholic on his mother's side and quite conscious of it:

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

As my own children make their sacraments and some days are a struggle to reconcile their upbringing with my thin personal faith and disdain for the patriarchy of the formal religion, Wainright's words ring like communion bells. The shadows and doubts and reason are all our own. I'm not alone, I think, in harboring an entirely personal relationship with a formal religion - or thinking the blaze of light is my own. No less of a  church-goer than John Updike riffed on that individuality of faith and identify when he accepted an award as a prominent Christian writer by a Catholic magazine in 1997:

“St. Augustine was not the first Christian writer nor the last to give us the human soul with its shadows, its Rembrandtesque blacks and whites, its chiaroscuro; this sense of ourselves, as creatures caught in the light, whose decisions and recognitions have a majestic significance, remains to haunt non-Christians as well, and to form, as far as I can see, the raison d’être of fiction.”

Updike's identity, his Christianity, was portrayed in doubt and human failing wonderment, in the brutal light of clear-eyed observation and realism (very Catholic in practice). On his deathbed, in what may be the most moving pages of verse to grace an American magazine in a century, Updike didn't shy away for a moment from either the doubt or the faith:

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tong reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely - magnificent, that "surely" -
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the ays of my life, my life, forever.

When I was in Oxford last week, I stayed in student lodgings at Trinity College that were nicer than any hotel room I've ever seen in London. Trinity College was founded by Sir Thomas Pope in 1555. A devout catholic with no surviving children, Thomas Pope saw the Foundation of an Oxford college as a means of ensuring that he and his family would always be remembered in the prayers and masses of its members.

The gardens at Trinity are very beautiful, but one border of the College harbors a little secret: the gates constructed along Parks Road are purely ornamental and are never opened. Tradition holds they're only swung open when a Jacobite monarch resumes the throne of England (and presumably ends the reign of the Church of England as the state religion). While I was there, the news was full of talk about PM Gordon Brown's move to overturn the part of the 1701 Act of Settlement that bans Catholics from marrying into the royal family. Maybe the gates of Parks Road will be opened sooner rather than later, I thought, my Catholic upbringing going off like a ring tone set to the Angelus.

Flying home last week, I found myself 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic, wedged into what American Airlines dashingly refers to as a "seat" and holding onto sanity only by dint of the seatback video movies. The dinner cart came along. It was Friday. The choice came: "chicken or pasta?" And there, in some pain and without a conscious inkling, the DNA of the catechism kicked into autopilot:

"Pasta," says I, only vaguely aware of my current timezone.

It's Not Dark Yet...

Radio silence from this smooth-sailing digital ghost ship has been occasioned by rougher-than-usual waters just outside the harbor. The winds gust and shift, scudding across the gray water and into the still grayer sky. The glass is dropping in every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Blog of Watson and farther westward.

Still, we stir as we must. Not to invest any time in mourning lost retirement accounts or decrying the nagging midnight omnipresence of a harsh economic challenge. But in some ways, to keep personal identity from fading out into that gray impalpable world.

We invest so much of ourselves and our time in building these social networks, our webs of blog links and wispy threads of virtual friendships - a weaving process that began during flush times, when the sheer frivolity of a goofy Twitter message or silly Facebook app was yet another dash of whipped cream on our bottomless American ice cream sundae. Still, that wide network has a binding quality that may grow more important as the economy continues to sink like the Skipper in a soundstage pool of Hollywood quicksand bellowing for Gilligan to bail him out.

Last weekend, it was my birthday (Jesse Orosco's number) and I was stunned by the outpouring of (apparently sincere) greetings that came flinging my way via Facebook - some from well-meaning friends I've never actually met. Modern friendship is broad, but it may not be particularly deep. That doesn't stop the sharing, the social graph of Mark Zuckerberg. As Jason Chervokas noted at Newcritics, "the Facebook tag-you’re-it, chain letter style list making craze is hitting fever pitch."

The big trend is lists: your 15 favorite albums, or 25 things about you other people may find interesting. Someone does a list and tags you; by the law of all that is sacred, you're supposed to post - then tag a bunch of other saps - er, friends - who will then keep the chain-letter meme of personal musical taste and "how I lost it" retrospection alive like a grid of Farrah-haired blondes in a Faberge Organics shampoo commercial from the 1970s.

And it works, mainly because of the earnest replies of so many Facebook friends. You can't but groove to an  acquaintance's obsession with the guitar stylings of the late (and oh-so-great) Ron Asheton or a business colleague's description of her Jane Austen collection. And sometimes, you just smile at a line from Twitter - or you feel a moment of shared humanity with someone you know virtually. As Fred Wilson writes on his blog, "The status update has become the ultimate social gesture."

The true test for this new wired world - one that my children are growing up with, but that I adapted to - isn't on the far horizon; it's right here in our faces. Will the still-fragile but enormous online social networks help sew together our society as the pressure of unprecedented wealth loss threatens to rip the stuffing out of our lives?

Those birthday greetings, those album lists, those 25 things, those myriad status updates offer a hint - as, I think, blog experiments of small communities like Newcritics do as well. The virtual gathering does, occasionally, make us a bit strong, if only for the sharing. The shadows are falling and I've been here all day, but it's not dark yet.