I know someone who, at the drop of a hat, will create a blog for any purpose or cause. But he's an entertaining writer, so it's all right. (We also happen to share a birthday, so I'm naturally inclined to forbearance.) He created a blog when he got a new bike. He created a new blog when he decided that Match.com was engaging in deceptive billing practices. He created a blog when he wanted to rent out a room in his house.
Anyway, I haven't had the time to match his prolixity. But I have just created my second blog -- except it's not for me, or at least, I'm a minor character. It's for my church. Here's the notice I wrote up for next Sunday's bulletin insert:
Our parish has a new venue for evangelism and explorations of faith, this time online. Visit ascensionnyc.org/blog on our Web site to see the debut of the AscensionNYC Blog -- with inaugural bloggers Stephen Hagerty, Eve Beglarian, and Paul Kahn sharing their thoiughts and interests with the wider world over the next couple of months. Inspired by the wonderful contributions of forty different parishioners each year in our Lenten Devotionals — the online edition of the last devotional even used this same "blog space" on our Web site as a pilot test — the AscensionNYC Blog is yet another experiment for the parish in new ways of "being a church" and in exploring questions of faith with visitors to our parish.at whatever address (street or Web) they choose to meet us.
I'm extremely grateful to my three friends who have agreed to start off our experience as a blogging parish. And so we'll see. I can already foresee the potential for intraparish conflict here, but then — as you'll know if you've ever been involved for any length of time in a congregation or, for that matter, any other human endeavor — it wouldn't really be a new idea if someone didn't get their nose out of joint, right?
Simple spreadsheet analysis. And implications for the fall elections.
Almost two years ago, I made my first minor blog splash (meaming, people linked to me; sad what constitutes fame these days, isn't it?) because of some number crunching I did that demonstrated how the ten states that supported Bush the most (or the 11 states that amended their constitutions that year to ban gay marriage) had higher divorce rates and teeenage pregnancy rates than the 10 states that supported Kerry the most strongly.
I decided to take another crack at the Excel spreadsheets in advance of the mid-term elections. This time, I was wondering how states with congressional delegations leaning Republican fared in terms of per capita income to states that leaned Democratic. There's no cause and effect here. But it seemed worth noting, if only to look at how more prosperous people vote versus the way those with less financial skill vote.
The four states with 100 percent Republican congressional delegations (New Hampshire, Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho) average $34,739 per person in income. The four states with 100 percent Democratic congressional delegations (Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont, and North Dakota) average only slightly higher: $35,887 per person. Only a $1,000 a year difference, give or take.
By the way, I put Vermont's independents in the Democratic camp (since they almost never vote with the Republicans). Elsewhere in this figuring, I give New Jersey's empty House seat to the Democrats (because that's where it came from) and the empty Texas seat (DeLay's) to the Republicans.
When we look at the top 10 for each, the spread gets wider: the average for the top 10 Republican Congressional states (the earlier four 100 percenters, plus Kentucky, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arizona, and Utah) average $32,158 per person in income. The top 10 Democratic-delegation states (the four 100 percenters, plus Arkansas, West Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, Washington, and Oregon) averaged $34,306 per person.
However, the spread really becomes apparent when we look at all the states for whom the Republicans have a plurality, versus those states for whom the Democrats do.
Of the 30 states who have more Republican members of their congressional delegation than Democrats, the per capita income is $31,763. Of the 18 states with predominantly Democratic delegations, the per capita income is $36,142. And, as we would start to suspect at this point, the two states with evenly split delegations (Minnesota and Maine), have an average per capita income roughly in the middle: $34,312.50.
To look at it another way, the 10 states with the highest per capita income have 10 percent more Democrats than Republican in Congress, whereas the 10 states at the bottom of the income ladder have 30 percent more Republicans than Democrats in office in Congress.
If we split the Union in two, the 25 states with more per capita income gave Democrats a bare 1.4 percent advantage. The bottom 25 states gave Republicans a 21.2 percent advantage.
Again, there's no cause and effect here, it's just interesting to see how the more successful people -- if we measure success only by income, which is probably the worst measure possible -- are more likely to vote Democratic, whereas the less successful people -- again, speaking only economically -- will vote Republican.
Or, in other words, it's the time-worn saying all over again: If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic.
So I was listening to my neighbor, Brian Lehrer, the Smartest Man in New YorkTM -- that's my claim about him, by the way, not one he's ever made or would ever make for himself -- on his radio show the other day, and his guest was Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and the author of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.
The topic was the politics of language, and Nunberg was pointing out that all media has adopted the language of the Republican party. For example, we don't even need to talk about a "liberal elite" anymore, because no one remembers that until very recently the "elite" were not the academics and the overpaid actors so much as they were the kind of people who went to prep school in Andover and college at Yale.
In most of the world, the elite are still those who wield considerable financial or political clout. In the U.S. now, it's mostly those people who either fit somewhere in the subtitle of Mr. Nunberg's book, or are otherwise identified as part of the vast "media-academia complex." Meaning: Kathleen Hall Jamieson is Public Enemy #1, I guess.
Similarly with "values": we don't even have to bother with saying "traditional family values" -- and leave it up for interpretation whether "traditional" modifies "family" or "values" -- because that word has been so co-opted. Everyone assumes today, without thinking about it, that "values" is shorthand for the priorities of a suburban, evangelical Dad, Mom, and their 1.85 children.
Most of the callers seemed to think that all the Democrats needed were some new nicknames, slogans or catch phrases for various programs, policies or viewpoints. Which was not Nunberg's point. I think he was saying that the right wing has mastered a way of speaking that cuts through details to get at the core feelings its target audience appreciates. They don't want to know the details of whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMDs or posed any real threat; they just know that "Saddam was a bad guy" and so he had to be taken out. Liberals are always simultaneously arrogant in dealing with "people like us" or, conversely, complete milquetoasts in dealing with "them," whoever "them" is.
Most of the ugliest of the characterizations of people and issues takes place in talk radio or on Fox News, where the thinking world doesn't even hear it. But then later, when a Bill Frist or Roy Blunt might use the same language the next day, everyone who heard it from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity already feels as if they're on the inside. They already have their cues when to applaud.
I was wondering, thinking on these things, what kind of personality is attracted to this kind of belonging, this kind of team where "versus them" is even more important than the "us." Among the various personality descriptors and categorizations, I think the enneagram describes people perhaps the best.
In some ways, the enneagram is like the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, and studies have been done to map the similarities and differences between the nine enneagram types and the sixteen MBTI types. One of the most common enneagram types is the "six" -- each type is known by a number, for want of a better way to name them. The enneagram six, among other attributes, can be loyal, likable, caring, warm, compassionate, witty, practical, helpful and responsible. Just as often, however, they can be hypervigilant, controlling, unpredictable, judgmental, paranoid, defensive, rigid, self-defeating, and testy. (These descriptions came from a 1994 HarperSanFrancisco book by Renee Baron and Elizabeth Wagele called The Enneagram Made Easy.)
It may be worth noting that the first list could be said to be a rough approximation of how the people who voted for him see George W. Bush. The second could be said to be how those who didn't vote for him view him.
For sixes, the issue often comes down to authority. Most such people appreciate and support strong authority; a decided minority of sixes are defined instead by their reaction against authority. And often, the rest of the sixes are lining up behind the rebel sixes, because that kind of cocksure attitude describes what they admire, even if they themselves exhibit no similar sense of independence. (For example, John Wayne was rarely corralled by polite society in his movies, yet his perceived persona is revered by law-and-order authoritarian types to this day.)
This is the audience then -- more than others -- to which I think the shorthand and caricatures created by the echo chamber on the right are designed to appeal. They get everyone within earshot marching to the same drummer, drawing the battle lines as clearly as possible, even if they have no resemblance to the reality. (See also: "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," Hillary Clinton as a leftist radical, corporate-owned media as "liberal.") By some estimates, enneagram sixes account for forty to sixty percent of the American population. Not all of these will fall in line with such appeals, of course. But in the calculus of elections today, it doesn't actually matter. A "mandate" is held by whoever gets a bare majority of votes, because the end result -- control over a branch of government -- is the same after landslides as after squeakers.
As I thought about all this, therefore, it occurred to me that, more than anything, this is the Democrats' problem in getting elected in enough numbers to control the Congress and White House again. Namely, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think "clarity" is the same thing as "truth" -- and those who think there are more than two kinds of people in the world.
Chapter 2 of Our Quest to Put the Good Back in Tangible Goods, in which We Discover the Joys of Stationery
From my earlier discussion of Pens I Have Known, we move to Paper I Have Loved. And I have to say: much as I love pens, stationery is even better. I know, I know: this is bizarre. This is bordering on fetish material, you're thinking. You're just going to have to trust me on this one. Avert your eyes if it gets too kinky.
By far the best paper for notes and letters is by an Italian company called Pineider. Their paper is nearly impossible to find outside of Italy, I've discovered -- there was a store in New York I just happened upon that stocked several very cool "wallets" of hand-bordered correspondence cards with matching lined envelopes a few years ago, and I was hooked. Unfortunately, that store no longer carries Pineider, last I checked, and nearly nobody else in this country seems to, either. Except for a guy on eBay -- who happens to operate out of New York, by coincidence. Pineider does have some stores themselves in Italy, but now even their Web site seems to be out of business -- not that you could order from that, anyway, but it was nice too look at.
All their paper is extremely smooth -- not glossy, of course, but really, really smooth. It's almost always got a thin border in a contrasting color, and the envelopes and enveloper liner match the stationery colors. And, of all the kinds of stationery they make, the best is the correspondence card, which is of a heavier stock than the note paper stationery and measures 3 1/2" by 7 1/8". But really, any Pineider stationery will easily be the best in your desk drawer.
In my view, second to Pineider -- or, really, equal to them, but for different kinds of paper -- would probably have to be Dempsey & Carroll. They also have great correspondence cards (these vary in size, but are generally around 5 1/8" by 3 3/4") which are also hand-bordered, but their real claim to fame is their engraving.
After Pineider and Dempsey & Carroll are some smaller companies that put out some very good correspondence cards. (As you may have guessed, this is my favorite format for stationery, because it's just enough space to write a good note to someone, without it turning into -- or feeling like it ought to be -- a letter. Plus, since they're just a flat card, instead of something folded, it feels somewhat unique in the realm of notecards.)
The Grosvenor Stationery Company in London has a small line of hand-bordered correpondence cards, in a size similar to Dempsey & Carroll's, but with a finish closer to Pineider's. The Wren Press also does correspondence cards with engraved motifs, contrasting borders, etc.
Then there's the whole world of letterpress stationery, which has become completely revitalized as a printing method for cutting edge design in recent years. One of the very best in this area is a company out of California called "Little Oranges" -- they do flat cards, folded cards, greeting cards, and seem to be expanding, both in terms of designs and availability. Another leader -- not as big, it seems, but with some of the best greeting cards in letterpress -- is a Chicago company called "Snow & Graham."
You'll notice a very prominent American stationery name that I haven't yet put on the list; that would be Crane & Co. Crane's is an excellent stationer, and I have some of their engraved cards I use for some kinds of notes. While they still handle high-end stationery business, they've gone a little more middle-of-the-road with a huge number of products and business lines of late, including interactive kiosks for customer-designed paper and ink-jet ready stationery and printing templates for use on your computer. They even have a whole division that does industrial projects for things like cars and satellites that need paper-like materials.
However, exacty because Crane's is so all-over-the-map now, and seem to have at least some of their products carried in just about every paper and stationery store in the U.S., they're almost too ubiquitous to be considered very "special" anymore. But don't turn up your nose at a gift of Crane stationery -- they do know their stuff. For one thing, the company also makes the 100 percent cotton paper for our U.S. currency, thanks to their contract with the Federal Reserve that dates back to 1879. Today, they recycle old jeans, among other things, to get that rag content.
