Sense and Sensibility

De Valera’s American Swing

In the summer of 1919, the man who called himself president of Ireland stole his way out of a British prison, fled to the docks of Liverpool and burrowed into the lamplighter’s cabin of the mammoth SS Lapland.

The stowaway, Eamon De Valera, hero of the failed 1916 Easter Rising and insurrectionist to the British Crown, shrank into the lower decks of the 17,540-ton passenger ship, where rats gnawed through his spare clothes.

De Valera, arguably the most powerful and divisive figures in the Irish fight for independence, might have stayed in Ireland, where his cohort Michael Collins was then waging guerilla war on English troops. But the American-born de Valera, already twice imprisoned with a death sentence hanging over his head, had his sights set on juicier prey: The estimated 5 million Irish-Americans then living in the United States. Those Irish-Americans, one million of whom had been born in Ireland, were wealthier, politically better connected and more essential to Ireland’s drive for independence than any other group in the world.

They were, says Dave Hannigan, author of “De Valera in America: The Rebel President and the Making of Irish Independence,” critical to his success.

By 1919, he said, Irish rebels had tried and failed at insurrection and were trying to “broaden out the struggle,” said Hannigan, who led a book reading and discussion of his work recently at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. “Their idea is that to take it to the British again [they] need money. They look around and say, ‘What country has money, influence and an awful lot of Irish people?’ Obviously, that’s America. Their thinking was ‘Once we get to America, surely (President Woodrow) Wilson and Washington will see the merits of our cause and row in behind us,’” he said.

Not quite. De Valera might not have received the political backing he needed, but he raised money and awareness and became a better politician in the bargain [--] a quality that would serve him well in the internecine political battles of the young Irish Republic.

Regardless of the negative coverage, Hannigan writes, 303,578 people bought Irish bond certificates, most in denominations of $5, $10 and $25.

In that financial respect [--] opening a spigot of Irish-American money for the IRA that would last for decades [--] de Valera’s trip was a success. But plenty of Americans objected to de Valera’s claim to the presidency of an Irish Republic [--] a republic that had yet to be formally recognized by the U.S. Others resented the Irish Republican’s open courting of Germany, from which it tried to obtain arms to fight the British.

“The U.S. government was not very happy about the Irish cause,” said David Valone, chairman of the history department at Quinnipiac University. “During World War I, (the U.S. government) persecuted some strong Irish nationalists in New York.” Indeed, said Valone, one of the key reasons for the failure of the Easter Uprising was that a shipment of German arms failed to arrive in Ireland in time for the revolt.

But the 18-month trip, Hannigan said, “knocked the edges off” de Valera’s naiveté and better prepared him for an Ireland in desperate need of a statesman.“His political muscles had been honed over here by going to Washington and discovering, no, you’re not going to get what you want out of them.” De Valera became prime minister in 1932, and wrote the Irish Constitution in consultation with Archbishop John McQuaid, the most influential cleric in the country. De Valera died in 1975.

chastises de Valera for not appreciating the depth of American alliance with Britain. “De Valera doesn’t realize that Wilson is in bed with Britain,” Hannigan said. “I mean, they had just fought a war together. It’s kind of naïve for de Valera to think he could get anywhere with Wilson. Wilson is no great friend of Ireland anyway, and at this point in history, he can’t fit Ireland into his agenda because he has too many other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to annoy the British.”

chastises de Valera for not appreciating the depth of American alliance with Britain. “De Valera doesn’t realize that Wilson is in bed with Britain,” Hannigan said. “I mean, they had just fought a war together. It’s kind of naïve for de Valera to think he could get anywhere with Wilson. Wilson is no great friend of Ireland anyway, and at this point in history, he can’t fit Ireland into his agenda because he has too many other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to annoy the British.”

The book tells the story of de Valera’s 18-month, cross-country visit of the U.S. to publicize Ireland’s plight, a barnstorming that eventually raised $5 million for the newly formed Irish Republican Army. De Valera packed Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Madison Square Garden.

“He got this rock star reception,” Hannigan said. In New York alone, de Valera raised $1 million from 100,000 people, a success that led the Wall Street Journal to fret that the donations had been “swindled” from “Irish domestic servants, and others of a like or lower standard of intelligence.”

Black Friday’s Grotesque Reverie

Gird yourself for the discount gauntlet.

Never mind the Recession and double-digit unemployment, Americans will not forgo rapacious foraging on Black Friday, even under pain of death.

And death came early for the markdown mavens last year. A hapless WalMart clerk, Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death last year in Valley Stream, N.Y., by craven consumers ready to devour the Deal of the Day. If we were the reverent souls we profess to be, we might observe a moment of respectful silence for Damour, whose mortifying death reveals a tad too much about our orgiastic consumer society.

According to evolutionary psychologists, it’s the belief that exorbitant items affect the way people treat us. The auction was as raucous as –well a WalMart on Black Friday. What, one might ask, is the difference between Bernie Madoff’s Jaeger-LeCoultre watches and the $300 laptops for which retail rustlers will sacrifice a body part?

But in a pallid economy overly dependent on retail, it’s “Katie bar the door.”

Retailers are reportedly mollifying their gladiatorial approach to Black Friday, which has become the suburban consumer’s retail equivalent of Paintball. No more will shoppers be whipped up into a lethal frenzy like pit bulls in a South Georgia basement. No more will they seethe at the gates, camped out like odiferous rock fans on cold cement. WalMart’s solution to the gate-swarming potential of its pre-dawn opening is not to close at all.The New York Times reports that the retail giant will be open all Thanksgiving day, a gift for which all of us should be grateful. If you have no one and nothing about whom or which to be grateful, it’s always heartwarming to spend the holiday in the automotive cleaning supply aisle.

The news that shopping might be a kinder, gentler experience came just after Bernard Madoff’s epic tag sale. The U.S. Marshall’s office organized an auction of Madoff’s personal booty, which raised $900,000 for the victims of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. Among Madoff spoils: the Monoblocco, an 18-karat Rolex valued between $75,000 and $87,000; Ruth Madoff’s Victorian diamond earrings, which sold for $70,000; five fur coats and three polo shirts monogrammed with “Bull,” the name of one of his yachts. 

In “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior,” Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico argues that we buy high-ticket items to lure high-end friends and mates, and get better treatment than the rest of the barbarians at the gate. As he told Time magazine, “animals achieve much of their survival and reproductive success through self-advertisement, self-marketing and self-promotion.”

Image – in other words —is everything. It gets you a better seat at the opera and better treatment at Le Cirque.

That’s why people who don’t know any better generally believe a $10 bottle of wine is exquisite if it comes with a $100 price tag. It’s why Madoff bought Rolex instead of Timex in spite of the fact that both watches tell time.

 It may be that our voracious bargain hunting is a product of a provident society intent on getting the most bang for its buck.

Or it may be that scooping up a brand name at discount gives us the illusion of pedigree at half the price.

But if the Christmas spirit is really with us we may realize that profligacy breeds penance more commonly than it does good cheer.

This year, we may actually have a chance to try out the outlandish proposition that Christmas is about more than booty.  Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

Mickey Mouse’s New Look

Mickey Mouse is going tough guy.

The world’s most recognizable rodent is ready for his digital makeover.

In an ignoble path paved by Tom and Jerry, Mickey is going epic and Disney denizens are praying to the animation gods that Botox-ing the mouse won’t blow up in their face.

The Walt Disney Corporation, in an effort to keep the creaky creature relevant, is re-imagining its iconic character as “cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland,” reports The New York Times.

The ever -ravenous Disney is looking to put a little spice in its mice. When it introduces its new video game, Epic Mickey, the mouse birthed in Fitzgerald’s Jazz Era will get its second act. “Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people,” Warren Spector, the creative director of the game developer behind Epic Mickey, told the newspaper. However, Spector said, “I wanted him to be able to be naughty – when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish.”

It’s tempting to read all sorts of end-of-empire significance into this: In a crasser culture, even the blandest of celluloid reliability must get his Alan Iverson on, release a rap album and start whaling on Minnie.

But the original Mickey was a lot more clever, volatile and cunning than the benign, and frankly boring character he became. Such is the trajectory of a trademark. His rap sheet must be squeaky clean. Look what happened to the poor Teletubbies for being colorful and a little, well, fey. It’s not a good time to be a kind, compassionate, if flighty children’s character. Even Big Bird has de-camped for the rain forest.

When Mickey Mouse first crawled out of Walt Disney’s pen in 1927, the U.S. was a place of pluck, ingenuity and shrewdness. It was a country that admired energy and risk-taking, where the victor was not necessarily the most principled, but the most wily. Mickey was a part of that culture, a flinty, sneaky trickster who was not above duplicity or a little mischief to get what he wanted.

What changed all that was World War II. America needed rectitude more than cheek. As Andy McSmith writes in The Independent, “in the anxious 1930s, when American was threatened by recession and political radicalism, the highly conservative, communist-hating Walt Disney toned down Mickey’s behavior and created the bland, all-American mouse kid that he has been ever since.”

To be a Mickey Mouse was a bit like being a Charlie Brown without the self-awareness.

For a long time, in politics and in children’s cartoons, being bland but kind was not only adequate but admirable. We liked Ike because he didn’t make waves and his wife didn’t make us feel like frumps. ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson has made an entire career out of reliable affability. So did Harry Reasoner and Walter Cronkite. Today, we’ve got Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer as the Betty and Veronica of Nightly News.

For a long time, Disney succeeded as well as it did because its characters – from Pinocchio to Snow White, to Cinderella, to Bambi – were kind-hearted souls who succeeded in spite of their ordinariness and lack of ambition.

Today’s Disney characters are more like Shrek, the coarse, flatulent ogre whose good soul lurks in the deep tissue folds of sarcasm and invective. In its new version of “101 Dalmations,” a dog named Whizzer pees on an image of Cruella de Ville. The new Bugs Bunny is toothier, just as the new Tom and Jerry are more ferocious than foolish.

Bland affability has no place any more in a country where “Crossfire” and “Hardball,” have replaced “Issues and Answers”and “See It Now.” Everything has to have spice to it, be it politics, cartoon characters or snack food staples. The hardest thing to find in the grocery store these days is a plain cracker, just as the rarest commentator today is a political moderate.

As it goes with Mickey, so goes the nation. The country is a more astringent place than it was in the 1940s. It is a shrewder, more cynical, wily place today where the pure of heart are ill-prepared for the rancor that awaits. In such an acrimonious environment, Mickey Mouse should arm himself to the teeth.

Sweatlodges, Suzanne Somers and Frustrating Cancer Wars

I’m not sure what “whole body cancer” is, but I have a feeling I’d like to avoid it.

Last year, when Thigh Master Pusher Suzanne Somers was told she had it, she flipped. And you would, too, if an oncologist delivered the news as if he had hit the cancer jackpot, as Somers relates in “Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer — And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place”:

“You’ve got cancer. I just looked at your CAT scan and it’s everywhere.Your lungs, your liver, tumors around your heart … I’ve never seen so much cancer.”

The result is her controversial new book, which scoffs at chemotherapy and radiation and suggests alternative methods to eradicate a disease that could reasonably be considered the scourge of the century.

I don’t know what the participants were paying for when they shelled out $9,695 for the New Age “spiritual warrior” experience, but I have a feeling it wasn’t organ failure.

Ray, a New Age mystic with the imprimatur of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” runs an empire that raked in $9.4 million last year running such retreats, The New York Times reported. Americans spend $34 billion annually on alternative therapy like this, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

The fact that 10 years and $2.5 billion in research has revealed no benefit in them has not stopped more than one-third of Americans from turning to them. Suzanne Somers may be, as Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer said, “a quack,” but plenty of Americans don’t believe the medical establishment has done much better.

Forty years ago, President Richard M. Nixon declared a “War on Cancer.” During that time, the National Cancer Institute alone has spent more than $105 billion trying to find a cure. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has spent $1 billion on breast cancer research alone. But, the New York Times reports, the death rate for cancer has only dropped 5 percent from 1950 to 2005. With breast cancer, 20 percent of those with metastatic disease, live for five years [--] the same rate as 40 years ago.

We are not winning the War on Cancer any more than we won the War on Poverty.

But it certainly doesn’t feel that way to the mourners who show up at funerals for 40-year-old mothers. It doesn’t feel that way to those undergoing treatment for cancer who endure a daily nausea that would have many of us praying for death. It doesn’t feel that way to my friend Tom, whose wife is so hobbled by the arthritic effects of anti-cancer drugs that she looks twice her age. It can feel like a degrading, dehumanizing, debilitating charade masquerading as state of the art.

This year, Newsweek reports, cancer will kill more than 1,500 people a day, “equivalent to three jumbo jets crashing and killing everyone aboard 365 days a year.”

I don’t believe the Suzanne Somers of the world, pedaling false hopes and specious remedies. I don’t believe in sweating in a tent with a bunch of strangers eager to return to the womb. I don’t believe them, but I understand them. Theirs is a frustration that can lead one to madness.

Do I really have homework at this age?

My son has homework — And that, in the modern parental translation, means I have homework.

So, when my son comes home and tells me he does not want to do his homework, I am puzzled. Why shouldn’t you want to do your homework? It’s your duty, I think. Ever the faithful catechist, I try to impress this on my son. “You think I want to go to work every day?” I ask. “Of course not. But I do it. I do it because I must.”

Unsurprisingly, this fails to make an impression. My son is near tears, and I feel like one of those sadistic Magdalene Sisters, absent only my cassock and rapier ruler.

Now, I am a working mother and don’t relish the thought of coming home at night and cracking the whip on my 8-year-old. There is nothing more I want to do than to cuddle up with my son and a bowl of Pepperidge Farm gold fish and read “Geronimo Stilton” for the 437th time. I am exhausted and not up for another fight.

My son is a bright boy and clever, in the way only children can be. He learned to read at 4, and I’d like to take credit for it, but, the truth is it just seemed to come easily to him and he enjoyed it. Intelligence, I am quickly beginning to believe, seems coiled up in some strand of DNA and needs only a flint or two to ignite.

But discipline, where does that come from?

My youngest brother, Michael, used to get up every morning at 5 a.m., mix himself a batch of Aunt Jemima pancakes and study before the sun came up. Nobody told him to do it and nobody ever needed to rouse him. He just did it. Unsurprisingly, he excelled.

I, too, had a monkish addiction to routine and regimentation, and the quality served me well. But where did it come from? Beyond a vague presumption that my siblings and I would attend college, unlike my high-school educated parents, I don’t recall any punishing rituals or demands from either of them.

What I do recall, however, is fear. Most of my academic success was rooted in a deep panic that I would fail at school, lose my scholarship and chance for economic success and end up scooping mint chocolate chip at Friendly’s for the rest of my days.

Panic can be a motivator, but my son, the progeny of two middle-class college graduates, has none of that. What he has is presumption. Presumption that he’ll go to college. Presumption that he’ll be a home owner. Presumption that he’ll be a contributing member of society.

What it means to be a middle class, college-educated parent is that your children assume that all you have gritted your teeth, sacrificed and beared down for will accrue to him as naturally as the new pair of shoes that appear, miraculously, in his closet.

Discipline is a quality I will have to instill in him. It is no fun.

What it means is that I get to come home after an exhausting day and push him. I will sit there with a pencil in my hand and irritation in my bones and try to get him to make 89 cents with eight coins. It means I will have to try to solve for x, recite the 14th Amendment and distinguish between the Federalists and the Republicans. It has meant, so far, that I have had to hold my son in my arms and comfort him, because sometimes the homework is too hard. It has also meant that we have had some big belly laughs over Mommy’s math deficiency. It has meant making dance routines out of vocabulary lists and Mommy reduced to shouting “Think!<$>” with a condescension that disgusts me.

Some nights, I hold my head in my hands and think of my son 20 years hence remembering me as a drill sergeant. “I didn’t sign up for this,” I tell my husband. “I want him to remember me as loveable.”

He will, my husband assures me. There is a great love in discipline, even if it seems so painfully elusive.

Our Revolting Cultural Balloon Ride

I never realized how incomplete my mornings were until I watched 6-year-old Falcon Heene projectile vomiting on the “Today” show.

In a moment sure to loom large in his childhood reverie, the most famous attic dweller since Anne Frank upchucked in response to co-host Meredith Vieira’s probing interrogation.

Falcon (and my brother’s name is owl) Heene is the famous “balloon boy” whose imagined runaway balloon flight transfixed a nation only just recovering from the breakup of Jon and Kate. While authorities called out the cavalry and media fanned out all over the Rockies, Falcon nested in the attic, fearing his father’s wrath or auditioning for another reality show. His father, Richard Henne, a reality show reject whose backyard enthusiasms include low-cost aircraft assembly, insisted the frantic hunt was not a hoax.

This is a man with a storm-mobile in his garage who, when not hurtling himself and family into the eye of tornadoes, is searching the ozone for E.T’s brother.

The “balloon boy” story was the lead story on all three networks. It was on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post, this newspaper and USA Today.

It was, like Octomom, one of those queer news belches we are at pains to ignore, and are complicit in perpetuating. Falcon will no more vanish into deserved obscurity than Jon and Kate or Richard Hatch or Susan Boyle or Anna Nicole Smith. Never mind that the child may have a bird brain for a father and a nut hatch for a mother, we all want to be in our living room to watch the kid go completely batty.

The New York Times listed no fewer than seven reporters on its errant balloon story. The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz insisted that the “floating silver portabello mushroom” story was impossible to ignore.

And maybe it was ‑ for the cable networks that have air time to chew up or the hapless Associated Press, obliged to cover any incident regardless of its absurdity. The issue is not that the media covered the story, but that it treated a two-hour mishap with the same rigorous inquiry it devotes to suicide bombers or health-care legislation. That lack of discrimination plays right into the hands of publicity hounds like Heene, who cannot seem to breathe outside of a camera lens. In addition to his storm-chasing exploits, Heene was in the cast “Wife Swap,” which sounds like a John Updike novel but was actually an ABC reality program.

In an out-of-the-mouths-of-babes moment, broadcast on CNN, Heene asked Falcon why the boy didn’t respond to repeated calls of his name. Falcon said, “You guys said … that, um, we did this for the show.”

All sorts of indecencies are done “for the show” these days, which is why we now have top chefs trying to impale one another on the rotisserie and “real housewives” who think a cat fight was what they did in the Roman coliseum. The more outrageous, indecorous and vulgar the outburst, the more air time, ink and Google-hits it engenders.

Where we once looked to television and the media to tell us what family life should look like, we now look to TV to gauge how much we can get away with.

Just how much the public demands this voyeurism and how much of it is foisted upon them is anyone’s guess. Certainly, networks would not continue to ladle these things out like baked ziti if viewers were running from their living rooms in disgust. For many Americans, stressed by financial and familial woes, reality shows are guilty pleasures akin to beach books or fat-free yogurt. For still other Americans, balloon boys, Jon and Kate and Susan Boyle are peculiar obsessions only a cloistered monk could avoid. I have never watched “Jon and Kate Plus 8” but feel I know this dysfunctional family intimately by virtue of the attention the show receives from other media.

Nowhere in this orgy of prurience does anyone seem to care about the emotional health of the individuals – many of them children – involved in this debacle. When Falcon Heene lost his cookies live in front of an audience of 6 million it was a tipping point moment. That was the time for TV viewers to look at themselves and consider the cultural wreckage they had wrought. When a little boy vomits under the glare of the klieg lights it’s time for those paying the electric bill to pull the plug.

contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

Is the Kindle the Blank Slate of the Future?

My mother wants me to get a Kindle.
“A guy had one on the boat,” she gushes, referencing her recent cruise. “You can get everything on them. Before long, even you will be on Kindle.”
Me, on Kindle. It is, I suppose, better than being used for kindling, although somehow I suspect the results will be similar.
Kindle is Amazon’s voguish e-book reader, as slender as a magazine and as light as a paperback. No need to lug around those door-stopping Truman biographies. With a few clicks, users can download as many as 1,500 books on to Kindle’s 3Gs of library space.

Kindle boasts a selection of 350,000 books, along with dozens of newspapers and magazines. “Our vision for kindle,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said, “is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.”

That the Kindle looks like a high-tech version of a school child’s chalk slates is only one of its ironies. The book-delivery device may end by slaying books altogether. The Association of American Publishers estimates that hardcover sales have dipped 13 percent in 2008 and have dipped 15.3 percent since July. Sales of E-books, on the other hand, though hardly robust, are increasing, 1.6 of total book sales, according to The New York Times.
Many avid readers feel an almost reflexive revulsion at the thought of reading a book on a computer screen. These are the same Luddites that like to hold a newspaper – imagine! — rather than scroll through on-line text. But beyond the knee-jerk rebuff of anything new, there are real concerns about the proliferation of e-books. Chief among them is piracy.
If you think the music industry is battered by the Napster-ized, iTuned, CD-burning venial theft that goes on hundreds of times daily, consider the poor publishing industry. Sales are stagnant; Harry Potter is gone; Dan Brown is nowhere near is profitable excoriating the masons as he is crucifying the Catholics, and the only savior on the horizon is Sarah Palin, a woman notorious for being unable to name a book she’d read.
What publishing doesn’t need is the you-share-mine-I’ll-share-yours intellectual rip-off of e-book piracy. It does not exactly warm the cockles of one’s heart to learn that one of the leading Silicon Valley digital publishing startups is called “Smashwords.”
Ah, progress.
But there are other reasons to view the emergence of e-books with circumspection. What will happen to the sensual pleasure of embracing a book with your hands? Where will the clean, pulpy scent that wafts from a book’s creases go? And what of the strange, vaguely erotic sensation of turning the yellowed pages of a used book, its pages smudged by the oily fingerprint of a stranger, its passages underlined by an earlier reader who found this excerpt meaningful – and why that one?
I have always been a book snooper, by which I mean that whenever I am in a home for the first time, I gravitate to the bookshelves. Some people scrutinize the furniture; others the art. But to me, nothing is as riveting or revealing as a book case. A bookcase so represents the soul that even our closest friends can be surprised by what they discover about us there.
A bookcase is the most intimate piece of furniture we own.

Nothing really starts a conversation — by which I mean real conversation — like a collection of book spines. Organize them by height, or by author, or by subject or color, or simply squeeze them, slapdash, wherever they’ll fit. I visited a couple with bookcases so considered and precise that they began with Andrews and ended with Zola. I interviewed a man who laid his books cheek-by-jowl under his mattress to form a box spring. Book spines glitter like jeweled chips, each representing a journey. I love the mosaic of their spines, spliced together like shards of memory.
The man who became my husband had no chest of drawers and no television, but had scores of cheap, pressed-wood folding bookcases that ringed his living room like chain mail. In the bedroom, the shelves were jury-rigged and precarious but the books were beautiful – Everyman editions you could hold in the palm of your hand and Library of America volumes he had wrapped in thick cellophane paper. When he pulled out a Austen’s “Emma,” holding it as gently as a kitten, I knew I was sunk.
When I am feeling nostalgic, I weed through my own bookcases, so much more bloated and nicked than when I first bought them. I dust off a paperback or two and turn to the inside, where I always date a book when I finish it. I remember where I was when I read the book, geographically and emotionally. I remember the feeling I had when I held the book in my hand, turning its pages, staining the jacket with tea and the pages with hand cream. The book became a part of me, and if its power is not as vital to me now as it once was, the memory of its effect lingers.
I would have so much less dust with the Kindle, and so much more room for other, less space-hogging, indulgences.
But a Kindle is merely a blank slate. And while I, too, may have started out as one, it is not the way I want to end up.

Oh, good, another gaseous opportunity

I am watching television at the pump.

I want to watch television while I am pumping gas about as much as I want to drink the gas spewing from the pump, but I have been ensnared. My captor is Gas Station TV, which discharges 4/12 to 5 minutes of visual effluent to hapless drivers who have stopped into one of the 12,000 gas stations in the country that “broadcast” its infernal prattle.

Gas Station TV is one more moth hole in the increasingly permeable membrane that separates private citizens from the insidious advertising industry. It “transforms the gas station to a highly sought-after media destination to inform and influence consumers at a desirable Point-of-Purchase, when they are mobile and can be influenced to take action at a nearby retailer in proximity,” according to its publicists. In other words, you’ve been ambushed at the gas station by an advertiser masquerading as a weather report. The only obstacle between you and that bag of Cool Ranch Doritos is 8 baby steps and $1.89.

Nobody’s going to nominate Gas Station TV for an Emmy, but you have to admire the ingenuity of the idea. With technologies like TiVo, DVR and the felicitous mute button, advertisers have had to do a lot of ducking and weaving to be heard. (Note to advertisers: We’re here! We’re here!)

But anybody who has taken to the open road in pursuit of a little silence can easily feel a little ambushed. Screens [Dash] in the doctor’s office, at the bank, at the airport, in the convenience store, at the checkout corner and [Dash] lest we forget [Dash] in your home have become the wallpaper of contemporary living. But unlike the benevolently mum wallpaper, these screens are talking, moving, bleating and otherwise niggling at your increasingly shattered brain cells.

This Orwellian nightmare is called “place-based media space.” The idea is that nobody stays still anymore. And even when they do, they have the indecorous habit ot muzzling commercials, which has the effect of flushing advertising dollars down the sewer. So advertisers have to get you where you live —- in your cell phone, at the gas pump, at Wal-Mart and in all those parenthetical places where you used to be able to try to get your head together.

You are not alone if you feel besieged by these ubiquitous screens. The average American has three televisions, two DVD players, one desktop computer and two cell phones at home. We spend, on average 4.5 hours watching TV a day [Dash] that’s more than we spend on any other leisure activity. Children 8 to 18 years spend nearly four hours a day in front of a TV screen and almost 2 additional hours on the computer and playing video games, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation

You would think that would be enough when you consider what Americans are not doing while they are blinkered to the screen. Teenagers aged 15 to 19 read for an average of 10 minutes a weekend, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. They play video games at a rate six times that.

So what do you do when you have a nation full of brain-numbed video junkies? Jack them up with more junk.

I cannot imagine who on earth wants to be transfixed by a television screen while weighing their seedless California grapes at the grocery store? I can appreciate that a little aggravation can set in while you’re standing six-deep in the express check-out line but that’s what those cheesy tabloids are for.

Similarly, I am sure that the well-intentioned executives at the bank merely want their customers to be well informed, but it can make a person queasy cashing a check while watching a CNN report on GIs blown to smithereens in Afghanistan.

I suspect these irksome additions are supposed to take customers’ minds off of the fact that their waiting, which has become some sort of crime against humanity. But to me, nothing expands the frustrating of waiting than the flatulence of wall-to-wall TV. If all Hell is breaking loose in the universe, I’m sure I’ll get a big clue-in when I get home and can turn the television on —or off— at my leisure.

Our Riveting Public Mourning

It was all about the music, we kept hearing.

And maybe it was.

Maybe it wasn’t the queerly androgynous looks. Maybe it wasn’t the chimp, the surgical masks, the glove, the baby dangling or the increasingly Caucasian features. Maybe none of it [---] the child molestations allegations, the freakish court appearances in pajamas, the surreal marital history [Dash] mattered. Listening to the mind-numbing hagiography that preceded yesterday’s orgiastic Michael Jackson memorial tribute, it was easy to believe that Jackson was just another uber-talented American entertainer, chronically misunderstood. It got so bad that even before a single performance, you were grateful for a pre-emptive weather alert that assured you that Tuesday’s severe thundershowers were not a precursor to the Apocalypse.

Yesterday’s mourn-a-thon, which began at dawn and droned on until nearly 4 p.m., was an elegy of epidemic proportions. It featured battalions of performers, preachers and politicians as well as a final, choking sob from his daughter that reminded viewers of the personal anguish of a very public wake.

And yet the whole, lurid, immoderate spectacle, from Mariah Carey’s tentative version of the early Jackson hit “I’ll Be There,” to Jermaine Jackson’s haunting “Smile,” was strangely riveting. At Tuesday’s memorial, Jackson’s real intimates [Dash] not the Jackson sycophants who have stumbled, sputtered, and equivocated through the last 10 days of non-stop coverage [Dash] but his actual friends took the stage. Some of their memories, like those of Motown founder Berry Gordy, of playing on baseball teams and swimming together, were sincerely touching. When Gordy, speaking about the 1983 release of “Billy Jean,” said, “Michael Jackson went into orbit and never came down,” you could dismiss the more sinister undertones of the remark.

The montages of Jackson videos [Dash] cinematic dance masterpieces that drew inspiration from Fred Astaire, through Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse [Dash] were the finest testimony to Jackson’s uncanny choreographic sense and enduring influence on the entertainment world. The memorial was oddly Motown-centric, even though Jackson’s biggest success came after he left that record label and went solo. Perhaps that was in deference to Jackson’s brothers, who sat in the front row wearing black suits, gold ties, sunglasses and a single sequined glove each.

Jackson, memorialized yesterday by people like Stevie Wonder, whose celebrity Jackson’s strangely mirrored and then eclipsed, was hardly the first American entertainer to warrant massive outpourings of public grief. From Rudolph Valentino, through James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Americans seem to love their celebrities sensitive, child-like and chronically misunderstood. Even the Brits we have embraced [Dash] John Lennon and Princess Diana [Dash] had the kind of impish fragility that the culture simultaneously celebrates and condemns.

A trembling Brooke Shields, fighting off tears, said that Jackson’s “laugh was the sweetest and purest of anyone’s.” It was Jackson’s improbable artlessness [Dash] in an industry that hardens the delicate [Dash] that cemented his fan base and confounded his critics. Cynics found Jackson’s breathy, edge-of-tears ballads a ridiculous camouflage that masked Jackson’s unsettling peccadilloes. Admirers saw in Jackson a vulnerability and innocence that captivated and consoled. When Jackson triumphed [Dash] through boundlessly innovative creativity [Dash] it was a victory for Peter Pans everywhere.

Somehow when Michael Jackson sang and when he danced … we felt he was right there,” said Queen Latifah. “We had him. Whether he knew he was ours or did not know, he was ours, we were his.”

The memorial was not without its clumsy moments. Michael Jackson sold more than 750 million records, but until Tuesday, basketball fans never knew that Jackson was responsible for Magic Johnson’s success as a point guard. Mourners could have done without a representative from the Congressional Black Caucus and “Britain’s Got Talent” 12-year-old wunderkind Shaheen Jafargholi. The memorial should have properly ended with Jermaine Jackson’s stirring “Smile,” but by the second hour, it seemed, like Jackson’s life, to spiral out of control.

The inevitable “We Are The World” finale had its predictable cathartic effect, with Jackson’s children, looking bewildered, taking the stage with the whole Jackson clan. The sobs of Jackson’s daughter Paris, saying that her “daddy has been the best father you can imagine” was a chilling coda to a celebrity circus that, for the Jackson children, is just beginning.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.

The Way We Work Now

My father’s best friend of 50 years grew up in a tenement in Dorchester, Mass. They fit 13 families in those cramped digs, which were decrepit almost as soon as they were inhabited. The area was saturated with gangs; John, my father’s pal, was in two of them. At 17, when John moved to Medford, a city just north of Boston, he saw a tree for the first time.

In the evenings, when John’s mother served him dinner, he got milk in a measuring cup. His mother poured the milk sparingly, up to the three-quarters of a cup line. That was all he got, and John learned to make it last.

When John got a job, at 16 as an apprentice printer at The Boston Globe, where he met my father, he wasn’t thinking about his passion. He wasn’t thinking about finding his bliss. He wasn’t thinking about self-actualization. He was thinking about that measuring cup. He was thinking about his stomach, and he was thinking about getting a roof over his head.

At the gym, working out on the treadmill, my friend tells me she feels like a factory worker. The team spirit that used to make work rewarding has vanished. Management is looking only at dollars and cents. The feeling of accomplishment has been supplanted by a suspicion of exploitation. Nobody actually cares about you anymore, she says. You’re just a cog in a set of gears whirring faster than ever. No one appreciates you.

“There’s no pleasure in work any more,” she says.

When the Dow was chugging along over 10,000, it was easy to wallow in the indulgences work offered. Large companies had gyms where they could monitor their employees’ well-being. They took them on touchy-feely outdoor ropes classes where they could advance their team spirit. They put in day-care centers and cafeterias where the chefs changed weekly.

At Google, the search-engine company, employees got free haircuts, subsidized massages, an in-house laundry, a gym, pool and game room full of ping-pong, foosball and billiard tables. At its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, it ran 11 gourmet cafeterias where all the food was free to employees.

Not to be outdone, the Container Store, which has benefited handsomely from all that stuff we’ve amassed, instituted a “family friendly” shift from 9 am. to 2 p.m. to allow for school drop-offs and pickups. At Gentech, a San Francisco-based company, employees earned a six-week paid sabbatical for every six years of service.

When labor is scarce and money flows freely, it’s heartening how indulgent management can be. In the pre-August days, we could all pamper ourselves with books about following our bliss, with Oprah leading the way. We were living our best life. We were seekers, finding our spiritual path. If we could believe it, we could become it.

This “delusional optimism” of mainstream America, Barbara Ehrenreich has written, has made thousands for its megachurch preachers and slap-happy pseudo scientists. Is there any more intoxicating snake oil than the power of positive thinking? It has worked for everyone from Dale Carnegie to the Little Engine That Could.

 “[T]he idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because ‘visualizing‘ something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen,” Ehrenreich wrote. “You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.”

That way of thinking wove itself deliciously with the credit markets push for Americans. Frost this confection with generous managers and the de-clawing of debt and you’ve got today’s financial morass.

Perhaps we were so inebriated with the illusion of our own mythology that we forgot that work really was, well, work. It was labor performed for a price. We did it not because it enhanced our self-esteem or gave us goose-bumps of empowerment, but because it filled our milk glass.

If there is any upshot of this deplorable parable it may be that we understand that work does not define us as it provides for us. It is toil for which we are remunerated. We are all mercenaries now.