By The River

John Updike died today at age 76. He was one of the great American writers, and should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That he did not is probably due to politics as much as anything. The Swedish Academy has not given a Nobel to an American writer since Toni Morrison in 1993. One suspects that disdain for American foreign policy during the George W. Bush years bumped the ever so slightly rightish Updike off the short list. And now it is too late, because the prize is not given posthumously. He joins Mark Twain on that list of American writers who could have and should have won, but didn't. Updike won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, which are nothing to sneeze at.

My one interaction with Updike came in early 1987, when my own book, Unseen Danger, a chronicle of the Centralia mine fire, had just been published. The Shamokin-Coal Township Public Library was having a fund-raising auction, and I came up with the idea of asking Pennsylvania writers to donate a signed first edition of one of their works. I wrote to Updike through Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher, hoping he would respond but not really expecting him to. Then one day I received a phone call from a quite-excited librarian. Updike had sent a signed copy of his latest novel--I honestly can't remember which one it was. As I recall, it went for a good bit of money. I kept the shipping envelope it came in, which had his handwritten return address on it.

Updike, as is well known, grew up in Reading and Shillington, Pa., and I always enjoyed his memory pieces about rural Pennsylvania that he wrote for Th New Yorker. I'll look forward to reading the story the Reading Eagle promises for Wednesday's edition.

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced a plan to help the ailing French newspaper industry that should help solve one of the main problems of the industry here and there, namely the reluctance of young people to subscribe to daily newspapers.

Sarkozy has proposed that when French children reach the age of 18, they be given a one-year free subscription to the daily newspaper of their choice. The publishers will give away the papers and the French government will pay for delivery. The theory is that if young people are presented with a newspaper every day, they will get into the habit of reading it and continue the subscription at their own expense after that first year.

I think there's something to that. My own children have gotten to like the Patriot-News now that we have it delivered to the house. I used to bring it home free when I worked there, one of the fringe benefits of the job, but since taking the buy-out I'm on my own. Admittedly, they go first for the comics, but are starting to read the stories, too.

Sarkozy's idea is a good one, and one that could be adopted here without government involvement. Newspaper publishers could give away a year's subscription to every high school graduate. They could have it delivered at home, or by mail if they are going away to college. Christmas tips would still be the responsibility of the subscriber.

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Today is notable for two things: the advent of Barack Obama, and the end of the eight-year national nightmare named George W. Bush.

It won't look like Bush is being ridden out of town on a rail, but he is, minus the tar and feathers that usually accompanied that honor in our 19th century frontier past. His approval rating is 22 percent, the worst of any President since polling began.

But we should thank Bush for one thing and one thing only: he has thoroughly discredited the rightwing conservative movement that began with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. Republicans won't have a realistic chance to reclaim the Presidency until they return to the pre-Reagan moderate conservatism of the GOP exemplified by Gerald Ford. You can't run a national party based on Bible thumpers, snake handlers, and cut-taxes-to-zero advocates.

I think back to that famous Doonesbury strip that ran a day or so after Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. It showed the White House with the sun shining, squirrels romping, and birds singing. No words, but everybody knew what it meant. It means the same thing today.

Our long national nightmare is over. Barack Obama is here.

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Most young people watching the Obama inaugural concert today on HBO probably didn't pick up on the significance of that last, aged, grey-haired performer who came out with Bruce Springsteen to sing the Woody Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."

I saw Pete Seeger walk out with his banjo and said to myself that finally, the McCarthy Era in American politics is over. Seeger, a renowned American folk singer, was a Communist Party member in his youth, and was blacklisted from television and radio for years beginning in the 1950s. Like many American Communist Party members, he later abandoned his support of the Soviet Union while still advocating socialist programs to help common folks.

And there he was at age 89, leading the huge crowd in that left wing song, even the two verses about private property and people on relief that are usually omitted to make it more palatable to people who worry about that sort of thing. I'm afraid Seeger is going to die tomorrow, finally redeemed after all these years in the eyes of the country he loves.

So no, it's not just the execrable George W. Bush who exits the scene this week. It is also the final curtain call for the red baiters who have polluted American life for the last 75 years. It all seems so silly now.

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If you missed the report on CBS 60 Minutes last night on the real reason oil prices went through the roof in the first half of 2008--Wall Street speculation--you can check it out here.

People interviewed for the piece, none of them wild-eyed crazies, showed how it was done and who some of the big players were, notably the investment banking house of Morgan Stanley. And like so much of the economic evil practiced on the United States in the last 10 years, the original player in oil speculation was Enron, the Texas corporation so closely tied to the rise George W. Bush. Enron is defunct, but its former employees are everywhere, running oil speculation for hedge funds and pension funds.

When I was still a reporter for the Patriot-News, I had been hearing a lot of this from Bob Boltz, a Lebanon heating oil dealer who then was president of the Pennsylvania Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association. The heating oil dealers, through their national association, have taken the lead in attempting to show that the huge rise in oil prices was not caused by supply and demand, or India and China, as Wall Street and its apologists in the business press are quite willing to tell you.

If even half of what 60 Minutes put on the air last night is fact--and I have no doubt 99 percent of it was--this was a major economic crime. Perhaps it was all perfectly legal because of deregulation pushed by George W. Bush or, earlier, the Republican-controlled Congress. But it's quite possible that the current near-Depression in the world economy was brought about by the run-up in oil prices. You were hurt, I was hurt, everyone was hurt by this. And there needs to be a national reckoning, with the worst perpetrators put in jail, so it can never happen again.

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I start documentary filmmaking school Tuesday at George Washington University. It's a six-month program leading to a graduate certificate, and i hope to be able to direct documentaries or work in television news production once I finish. With newspapers dying more quickly than any of us ever imagined, television and film seemed the logical area to continue to do the big (and small) investigative and feature stories I specialized in as a print journalist.

The cost of the program is $8,000, or $8.063 once you add in the student association fee and "voluntary" library contribution. I knew when I applied that I would be able to pay it out of my severance money from the Patriot-News, but wondered if there was any state program that would pay all or part of the cost of retraining me for a new profession. I figured it was worth a shot. If I got even partial hep, the severance check would go a lot further.

I drove to the state CareerLink office, which is located in a former Polyclinic Medical Center building on Wiconisco Street. Ironically, I recognized it as the building where, in its former life, my wife and I went for childbirth classes prior to the arrival of our first daughter 15 years ago. The staff was friendly, but the intake counselor told me before we even completed the walk to his office that Pennsylvania has nothing to help white collar professionals retrain for the jobs of their choice. Many come in, he said, but the only job training money available is for things like truck driving.

He thought my plan to retrain for documentary filmmaking was a great idea, and with my background at the Patriot-News, he said, I would very likely succeed in making the transition. Some of their clients don't, he said, because they have unrealistic expectations about the job they want. Some who are attracted by the good wages of unionized truck driving don't realize you have to be able to operate a standard shift and spend nights away from home. I thanked him and went on my way, wishing I hadn't put as many quarters in the parking meter as I had.

President Obama and the Congress might do well to create a program for the unemployed to get financial help in paying for job retraining. An individual decides what he or she wants to do, finds a training program, and applies for a grant to help pay the cost. A program like this would both create jobs in the training industry and get white collar professionals like me back to being fully productive members of the economy doing something we actually want to do.

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Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania probably won't end up having endured two complete terms of frustration, unlike fellow Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. But not by much. Both Rendell and Granholm were re-elected to their second terms by large margins, and saw Barack Obama win their states in the 2008 election by large margins, but have seen their programs frustrated by diehard Republican taxcutters and pro-business conservatives in control of their respective state Senates.

Two articles in today's Patriot-News in Harrisburg serve to highlight Rendell's frustration. One is about Senate Republican footdragging on confirming John Hanger as secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection. Rendell submitted his nomination to the Senate in August and there it sits.

Hanger, 51, is the founder of the Penn Future public policy group in Harrisburg. It champions the environment, and has made a special target of the coal-fired power plants in western Pennsylvania and the pollution they too often emit. One of the triumphs of DEP in the Rendell years was enacting regulations to control deadly mercury emissions from these plants. Hanger and then-DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty won approval for these regs in 2006 over the steadfast opposition of Sen. Mary Jo White, R-Venango, a champion of the coal industry and chairman of the same committee that must now consider Hanger's nomination. Hmmm.

I first got to know White as a Patriot-News reporter in the early part of the decade when she and Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, were steadfast supporters of telecom deregulation. That was before she moved up to chair the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, and I was frankly shocked that someone who was so pro-public interest on telecom issues could become a roadblock to important environmental legislation. But she did. They mine coal in her district, you see. White favored weaker mercury regulations proposed by the coal industry that would have allowed polluters to buy their way out of controlling mercury.

The other interesting article in the Patriot-News today is an op-ed piece by former Dauphin County Commissioner Lowman Henry, now chairman and CEO of the conservative Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion Research of Lower Paxton Twp. The group was created in the 1990s with funding from Richard Mellon Scaife around the same time Scaife was funding the War Against the Clintons and the rise of the modern conservative movement. But I digress.

Henry is the lead apostle for the absolute dogma of today's Republican Party that taxes can never be raised, only cut. He believes that fiscal tomfoolery by Republicans in Washington, not the George W. Bush nightmare, led to big Democratic gains last year. His article praises Senate President Pro-Tem Joseph Scarnatti, a Republican, for ruling out raising taxes to close Pennsylvania's looming budget deficit. Scarnatti is also lieutenant governor of the state, a position he assumed after the death of Democratic Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll, and Henry is beside himself with the idea of Scarnatti acting to "rival Rendell as the face of state government."

It's always important to remember that Pennsylvania is required by law to have a balanced budget, and that if you don't raise taxes to fill a budget deficit, you have to cut aid to schools, limit plowing of roads in winter, close libraries, things like that. Pennsylvania has a very lean state government for its size. There isn't a significant amount of "fat" to cut. Henry would prefer that you, the public, be hurt by the budget deficit rather than the business fat cats who fund the Lincoln Institute.

When Henry refers in his articles to the "people of Penn's Woods" who will supposedly be hurt by a "job-crushing" tax increase (a favorite GOP adjective), you know he's not referring to the majority of the state that overwhelmingly re-elected Rendell in 2006 and picked Obama over John McCain by large margins in 2008. The majority of the Pennsylvania public likes reasonable big government, and is willing to pay reasonable taxes to fund it. The Republican majority in the state Senate should keep that in mind.

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I went to see "Slumdog Millionaire" last night. It is a great film, directed by Danny Boyle of "Trainspotting" fame, about a boy from the Mumbai slums who wins 20 million Indian Rupees (a little over U.S. $415,000) in India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and in so doing captures the heart of the love of his life.

That description is the film the trailer leads you to expect, but it fails to convey the unremitting darkness of "Slumdog Millionaire." The story is played out as flashbacks as the Indian police torture the young man, Jamil, trying to make him wrongly confess that he got as far as he did in the competition through cheating. I won't tell you why he was arrested, because that would give away too much of the story. But what really got to me were the scenes of Dickensian poverty in the film.

Many of us in the U.S. tend to think of India as the place that steals our jobs through their hard work, good education, and willingness to work for less. All of that is true, but it ignores the dire poverty and caste inequality that India has failed to eliminate. What we think of as India is only the thin, top layer of a multi-layered country. Jamil comes from the lowest layer, literally living on a garbage heap, where public education is a tiny, cramped room if he shows up at all. The Fagin in this Indian version of Oliver Twist teaches orphans to sing and then blinds them because blind child singers can make more money on the street. "Slumdog Millionaire" is not for the squeamish. Even Charles Dickens himself would have been shocked by these terrible scenes.

One wonders how long India can maintain this type of a society, where the few live as kings and the masses scrape by in dire poverty. You don't sense that this sort of inequality exists in that other Asian giant, China, where communism, for all its faults, eliminated things like caste discrimination and anti-religious violence (Jamil's mother, a Muslim, is murdered by a Hindu mob in the film). It is not enough for the West to fund Mother Teresa-type missions to help the poor survive and accept their lot. The lot must change.

Like so many films, it has a happy ending with the young lovers dancing in the Mumbai train station in true Bollywood fashion. But as you watch it, remember this was the same train station attacked by Pakistani terrorists in November. Ten people were killed as they fired automatic weapons randomly at the crowds of people you see in the film.

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