CSotD: The facades of responsibility
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I suppose we should start with the more metaphorical garbage on our agenda.
Kal accuses the Clintons of sweeping their Foundation conflicts under the carpet, and the thing is, it's less about actual corruption than about their being astonishingly tone-deaf.
Bill's offer to step away from the board if Hillary is elected would be a start, but not if they leave Chelsea in place. It doesn't matter what her function is or how the Foundation functions. No. No. No. You get everyone in the family far away from it.
Now. Not after you find out if you won.
And yet — while acknowledging the things one does to avoid the appearance of impropriety — this looks to be yet another "scandal" in which there is no "there" there.
There have long been delusional Clinton obsessions, from Vince Foster to the current speculations about her health, lunacies whose real harm is that they remove the limits on that side of the continuum, so that, when we encounter some of Bill's more extravagant bimbo eruptions, we don't know if they belong in the "What the hell was he thinking?" category or in the "Are you people out of your minds?" category.
The Foundation "scandals," rather, seem to be bridging the "What the hell were they thinking?" and "Don't any of you know how this works?" categories.
When Whitewater first emerged, the Web (Happy 25th Anniversary!) was yet unborn, and so the accusations flew around in a place where you couldn't just go see what the reports were talking about.
You had to rely on what was reported and what was reported was mostly that there was a scandal and not a lot of the details behind it.
So we all got up in arms and cartoonists did a million cartoons with canoes hanging off waterfalls or careening down rapid streams, but nobody really explained what was actually being alleged.
When they finally did, the response from people who understood commercial development was "So?"
The thing about Whitewater was that residential real estate and commercial real estate operate in different universes.
Residential real estate is tightly controlled because most people might, at best, buy and sell a half dozen houses in their lifetime and so you have to protect them.
By contrast, the law assumes that commercial developers know what they're doing and it's one place where the vaunted free market is pretty much let loose to do its own thing.
Here's how a typical commercial real estate deal works:
It's a very good topic for discussing why male-only country clubs are a bad idea, because that's where the deals are made: Over golf, or in the bar room, and not with "guests" but with buddies, with pals, with members.
But it's laughable to single out a particular deal and point out the places where it was "unfair" or where someone "acted unprofessionally" because there are no rules in a knife fight and even the people who know that end up getting kicked in the balls and knocked into the dust.
Trust me. I specialized in reporting on real estate for several years.
And now all this email stuff is emerging, in which, as far as I can tell, the money raisers ask that donors get special favors and the responses are either silence or some pretty damn vague bits of nothing, and I'm less patient with the reporting, because, whatever the mooncalves in the newsroom know or should know about commercial development, their editors are constantly approached by the ad department with requests to do special favors for advertisers.
Though I suppose I need to update my expectations to keep up with a changing industry.
Maybe the reason reporters take the stuff in these emails seriously is because they've seen their editors repeatedly cave in. I suppose the ones under 40 have no experience to the contrary.
Sigh.
A vast quantity of plastic people
Jen Sorensen on the topic of disposable stuff that isn't so disposable.
I'm kind of horrified/fascinated by the phenomenon of people with Keurig machines sipping their coffee and talking about the Great Pacific Plastic Patch or global warming or whatever. And, whatever demographic embraces laundry pods, I know some allegedly progressive people who use Keurigs.
My own highly ethical coffee provider, while holding the line on what is truly "fair trade" and what is corporate bushwa, has given in on the Keurig issue and sells recyclable single-serving cups, as well as re-useables. I've seen reuseable cups in stores, too, but I wonder what percentage of the single-cup market they represent?
It's an old, losing battle.
I remember, back in 1971, being horrified by the idea of plastic milk jugs rather than returnable glass bottles. That was also about the time that paper grocery sacks gave way to plastic.
There's a pushback now against plastic bags, but it's bailing water with a pitchfork.
We each have our individual limits, but, as a group, we are sliding down the collective continuum. I'm not claiming to be pure, but at least I haven't sunken to Keurig cup depths.
Looking at that third panel in Sorensen's cartoon, it occurs to me that, besides the Keurig cups, we'll also leave archaeologists a lot of plastic-wrapped garbage.
Our parents put their garbage in garbage cans either unconfined or in paper sacks, such that periodically scrubbing out the garbage cans was a chore. This also meant we didn't need paper shredders because, with garbage disposals a luxury item, whatever papers you put in the trash were going in along with an awful lot of organic waste and, by the time it got to the dump, god help anyone who wanted to fish anything out to steal your identity.
Not sure how much we can turn back the clocks on this one. As she notes in the first panel, it's asking a lot for people just to have to pour detergent into a measuring cup.
I mean, dear lord, next she'll want us to hitch up the mule and plow the fields!
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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