This was a weird show, coming as it did on a Friday night on heels of a monstrous pair of blizzards that shut down most of the city for a week. And it was in a shiny new concert hall in suburban Maryland, which oddly enough is the home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. I say oddly because Bethesda is a suburb of Washington, not Baltimore, which is forty miles away. So we had a huge hall, with three ranks of balconies, and a fairly bedraggled crowd. Vega and Cohn are both veteran performers, and each did a competent set, but only the penultimate encore, when Vega and her guitarist came out to join Cohn and his guitarist in a Cohn-arranged version of The Only Living Boy in New York, was completely moving.

And the show made me sad, because Mark Cohn has an enchanting voice, but his muse is clearly an intermittent one. He even said, introducing his new album of other people's music, that otherwise he would only be in the studio once a decade. Maybe that's why he seemed a little bitter, in general. It must be difficult to have a few big hits, to have a certain level of success, but to have spent many years knowing you're probably not going to get all the way back to that level, and that you don't quite deserve to on your merits. I hope he does turn some corner, find something that works for him.

But I'm still addicted to the news blurbs on the front page. Google news doesn't substitute. NY Times front page doesn't substitute. Nothing can fulfill this craving except six to eight short headlines and a touch of celebrity gossip or news of the weird.

And it's changed over time, usually not for the better, but I'm still stuck there. The best was when there were always, I think, six headlines, and the last one was some kind of light-hearted human interest item. They've stopped doing that, but plugged in a few more columns of junk. The top left part with the rotating pictures is terrible, but it has brain-dead-magazine-cover-type lists that I'm utterly helpless to not click on. Six ways to reduce your mortgage. Ten cars to avoid. Five foods with more anti-oxidants. I probably even learn one useful fact for every ten or twenty lists I read.

But make no mistake, the (mostly outsourced and syndicated) writing and the editing and the journalism is all terrible. Here's an especially cringeworthy excerpt, from this morning's article, Best and Worst 2010 Cars:

... Plus, with only 25.7 to 51.3 cubic feet of cargo space, [the Honda Accord Crosstour] doesn’t provide much utility. [...]

[The Dodge Caliber] looks bold and provides a respectable 18.5 to 48 cubic feet of cargo room, but is marked by subpar interior materials ....

Update: The editorial team outdoes itself by including this AP "news" item seemingly headlined and written by a publicist:

Brilliant designer Alexander McQueen found dead

LONDON – Brilliant and controversial British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead in his London home Thursday, his company said ... McQueen's sudden death robbed the fashion scene of one of its most innovative and successful young designers. His clothes were sexy and distinctive, dramatic and different, perfect for red-carpet presentations and late night rock gatherings.

...His pieces were coveted and treasured by stylish women across the globe....

During the period last summer that I only had one working arm, various people came to help take care of things. So I thought it would be useful to label some of the kitchen cabinets and drawers for them.

Of course, I wanted to warn them about the monster threat.

Little did I know that we would soon, indeed, suffer from a monster infestation.

It only got worse from there.

A few weeks later, we had houseguests on their way back from some sort of national high school Latin competition. They found the label maker ....

Apparently Aqua is Latin for faucet.

Meanwhile, the monster was still lurking. And sometimes, there were victims.

The Latin peoples were no strangers to monsters either.

Update: And of course we could get a periodic table table for the conference room.

Answer

One of the basic concepts that I retained from grad school was Douglass North's framework for understanding societies, and in particular the notion of "limited access order". My preferred formulation of this idea is, "the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to maintain their wealth and power." History interpreted through this prism becomes a series of lurches back and forth between extreme concentration of "access", or wealth and power, and slightly less extreme concentrations. This is not a Marxist view, but class-based analysis is certainly complementary. Populism is, at its heart, the anger of the people on the wrong side of the access boundary. And one major strain of the antagonism towards our government here in the US circa 2010 is that, first, the goverment is part of the establishment that just bailed itself out, at great public expense, from a massive disaster that was entirely of its own making; and second, that the government was the only part of that establishment that was in any way accountable to the public, that might have broken the stranglehold on access, and yet it still aided and abetted the swindle.

On a related note, these quotes from the Economist really grabbed my eye when they were published. (This is, I think, a separate case from the recent acquittal of Chirac's Prime Minister, Villepin, on unrelated charges.) The details are less important than the reaction from France's ruling class:

The French have greeted the decision to put Jacques Chirac on trial for misappropriation of public funds with mixed feelings ... Many politicians are calling for leniency for an old man who has served his country. ... "Why seek to wound him now?" wailed Jean-Pierre Raffarin ... "Today, he's a man who deserves to be left alone," declared Ségolène Royal.—The Economist, "Liberty, equality, no impunity". 7 Nov 2009, p 51.

Glen Greenwald and other bloggers have been calling this the Village Mentality, which is a specific manifestation of "limited access order". In the Village Mentality, the people wielding power and influence are a nice little club, and nothing they do as part of wielding that power could possibly be criminal; the only reason to consider any of it criminal would be as part of a partisan power play between factions within the village. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the notion of rule of law.