I’m about to put the Vietnam Veterans Memorial back in my attic-brain, but before I do, I want to consider monuments and memorials a bit longer. What happened to the wall in its early years — the addition of the two sculpture pieces and the flags — is probably nothing new in the grand scheme of commissioned art, but it might have been the opening shots in the Great Representation Wars of the latter years of the century.

When the monument to Franklin D. Roosevelt was in its design stages, the wheelchair question was batted around vigorously. Wikipedia provides a sketch that seems in accord with my memory of the time:

The statue of FDR also stirred controversy over the issue of his disability. Designers decided against plans to have FDR shown in a wheelchair. Instead, the statue depicts the president in a chair with a cloak obscuring the chair, showing him as he appeared to the public during his life. Roosevelt’s reliance on a wheelchair was not publicized during his life, as there was a stigma of weakness and instability associated with any disability. However, many wanted his disability to be shown to tell the story of what they believed to be the source of his strength. Other disability advocates, while not necessarily against showing him in a wheelchair, were wary of protests about the memorial that leaned toward making Roosevelt a hero because of his disability.
The sculptor added casters to the back of the chair in deference to advocates, making it a symbolic “wheelchair”. The casters are only visible behind the statue.

I’m trying to imagine being the artist saddled with this albatross of a commission, the weekly calls from the committee. Casters? My office chair has casters. So does yours, most likely. I guess that makes it a symbolic wheelchair, but (smacks forehead). It reminds me of a story I did once upon a time, about an artist in Fort Wayne. The guy worked as a school custodian on the graveyard shift and spent his days painting. He favored large canvases and photorealistic scenes, and worked slowly on his creations; it took him months to complete one. He also liked to paint in public places, and that, coupled with his easygoing, genial, not particularly artistic nature, made him a welcome guest in most of them. At the time I wrote about him, he was working in the library, but he had also done a stretch in the lobby of a local company.

If I’m remembering this correctly, that piece, the one done in the lobby, was of a night scene — the lobby at night, in fact. It was a commission from the company’s art acquisition committee, and in the months it took to complete, provided entertainment to the workers as they passed through. Late in its execution, he added a figure to the canvas — a janitor vacuuming the carpet. Suddenly, everyone was an art critic, but particularly the art committee. They began making subtle suggestions; are you sure you want that guy there? Does he have to be a janitor? Would you consider another sort of worker? The pressure built until someone floated the idea that the commission might be at risk if he insisted on keeping a janitor in this otherwise lovely scene of their lobby. The guy shrugged and said OK, I’ll just return your deposit and clear out, then. The committee backed down. Which goes to show you a lot of things, the main one being: Art by committee isn’t really art at all.

Getting back to the Vietnam memorial, I was struck then and am still struck by the stridency with which these groups push their agenda — the three-soldiers addition to the complex was carefully crafted for ethnic diversity, but didn’t satisfy the women who served, so they got their own sculpture, and…feh.

The Vietnam memorial has to have been an influence in the makeshift-memorial trend of recent years. The number of soldiers who came to leave dogtags, boots, photos and other mementos at the wall has to be a moving force behind the people who go to fatal-accident sites to leave flowers and teddybears. Or maybe there are huge gaps in my cultural-knowledge base, but my parents had a friend who was killed in a car crash, and they did their mourning at the cemetery.

OK, a little bloggage:

Jon Stewart — or his staff, anyway — earn their money yet again. Actually, they all deserve a raise for, well, click through and see.

Via Jeff TMMO, a fine Timothy Egan rant in the NYT, wondering if it’s time to put up the barricades. Well, actually that’s my reaction, but he’s dead-on.

Good gravy, this woman is a bleeping moron. Larry King finally grows a pair, and drives Jesus Barbie away.

And now, work begins. For me, anyway. You folks, keep surfing the internet.

I wonder if, in years to come, some bright scholar will name Maya Lin as the fulcrum upon which everything we believe about dying in service to one’s country shifted. Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., pulled off something magical and strange with her beautiful black wall, which before it was even built divided the veterans of that misbegotten exercise into two camps; one called it a “black ditch of shame,” and the other said, “I dunno, it’s got something going for it. Let’s build it and see.”

The wall was built. The wall began attracting visitors. The wall became something bigger than itself. The wall became the most popular monument in Washington, and not just because the veterans of the war it memorialized were still alive. The wall became something much bigger than a war memorial. It’s a therapy session for everyone who sees it.

The black-ditch-of-shame crowd was flummoxed, and insisted on tarting it up. A bunch of flags were added, and a sculpture of some soldiers, and another sculpture of female service members, but someone had to realize they’d been defeated. Who goes to the the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to see the flags or the sculptures? They go to see the wall, and they want to see the wall because of the names.

Lots of war memorials feature names. There was one in my hometown, an archway entrance to a public park, with bronze plaques on either side, with lists of local soldiers who served, and one with those who died. My friends would sometimes pick out a grandfather or uncle in the service list, but the killed-in-action side by definition left fewer survivors to run their fingers over the letters.

But the Vietnam wall names were different. It was all the names, not just one town’s, and the brutal and elegant simplicity of their presentation — they’re etched in a timeline of when they died, starting in a trickle with the “military advisors” period of the war, swelling to a crescendo in the late ’60s and tapering down again as we packed our belongings and took off from the roof of the embassy — underlines the futility and stupidity of the war. All those boys, sons and fathers, brothers and uncles, gone. For what? The wall asks a question. You provide the answer. It’s why everyone who goes there cries.

Ever since, memorials of all types have included names, lists of names. It’s perhaps insulting to think memorial designers want a popular site, but all those pictures through the years, of crying survivors at the Vietnam wall touching names, making rubbings of names, watching their own reflections in that polished granite, the reflections crossed by names — it has to be an influence, and not just on designers. Look at the Oklahoma City memorial to the bombing there. If the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center site is ever built, it too will include names. (Lin designed that one, too.) It’s no longer enough to lump the dead in one big number, perhaps under the inscription Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Now you have to name every casualty.

President Obama spoke yesterday at Fort Hood, at a memorial service for the 13 people who died during the shootings last week. I didn’t see it live, but I started seeing the reaction online almost immediately. “Best speech ever” was the general tone, even from people who can be reliably counted on to hate everything the president says. I made a point of catching it on C-SPAN later. It was a great speech, masterfully delivered, but we’ve come to expect that of Obama, the first great orator of the 21st century. But what spiked it deep in the brain were the names. Because there were 13 and not 300, he could give names and brief biographies:

Major Libardo Eduardo Caraveo spoke little English when he came to America as a teenager. But he put himself through college, earned a PhD, and was helping combat units cope with the stress of deployment. He is survived by his wife, sons and step-daughters.

Staff Sergeant Justin DeCrow joined the Army right after high school, married his high school sweetheart, and had served as a light wheeled mechanic and Satellite Communications Operator. He was known as an optimist, a mentor, and a loving husband and father.

The names, in this case, were not just a reflection of today’s army, but of America itself: Staff Sergeant Amy Krueger… Private First Class Kham Xiong… Private First Class Aaron Nemelka… Men, women, this one an Eagle Scout, that one an immigrant, this one the daughter of a father from Colombia and a Puerto Rican mother.

I don’t know how much of his own speechwriting Obama can do anymore. I don’t really know how much he’s done since he began his run for the presidency. Good writing takes time, for both thought and revision, and time is something he of all people is chronically short on. But I will say this: His speeches sound like they came from him, from what we know of his heart and mind, and I have to think he has a heavier hand in their crafting than some previous occupants of the office.

If nothing else, at the subconscious level, that speech acknowledges what is becoming painfully obvious about this incident at Fort Hood: It was Vietnam on a different scale, a series of stupid decisions and a case of willful blindness, culminating in a massive and unforgivable loss of life. It demands an accounting and a reckoning, and we hope that will come later.

Until then, what we have are the names.

Now it can be told: I knew some people in Fort Wayne whose son-in-law was shot in one of these incidents like the one yesterday. It was also at a military base; it was what’s come to be known as the Fort Bragg sniper incident of 1995.

Now it can be told because I didn’t tell it then. It would have been a fine localization for a national story, but not everything has to be localized, especially when a man is fighting for his life for weeks and months on end. From what I recall of their account, the soldier/shooter took a bead on a row of officers overlooking an athletic field and started moving down the line. The first man was killed, the second one paralyzed. I think my friends’ son-in-law had just enough time to react, and was shot in the abdomen. He nearly died, but he didn’t, and when he recovered he was transferred to a teaching position at West Point.

I wonder if they gave him a Purple Heart. I’ve come to think of these incidents as skirmishes in America’s war on…something, even as I know they’ve happened elsewhere in the world. They still seem so uniquely American.

I haven’t had the heart to really go looking for reaction to yesterday’s news from Fort Hood. This is one of those stories where I think I’m going to stick to the best of the official accounts and stay out of Blogland. Recalling the reaction to the Virginia Tech shootings, I don’t want to accidentally run across John Derbyshire calling American soldiers a bunch of cowards for not “taking him down while he was reloading,” which I recall was one of his gems of insight following Mr. Cho’s rampage. I’ve already heard that soldiers on the base don’t walk around armed, and I’m sure that even as we speak, some keyboard warrior is calling that policy pussified, that they need to be strapped at all times. I might even agree. When it comes to guns and violence and crazy, maybe the whole country is a war zone.

At this point it seems the decent response is to maintain respectful, alert silence while we wait for the fact-finding to find some facts.

And how convenient: This attitude meshes perfectly with my need to be at a meeting in 30 minutes, and get out of here early. May I just say before I go, however, how much I enjoyed all of your comments yesterday, about how you found yourselves here at NN.C, whatever path you took. One of the coolest things about this site, no, the coolest thing, is the comment chorus, and how my part is only prelude, like in “Henry V.” Last summer I had lunch with an out-of-town friend who said he never misses a day, etc.

“And how about those comments?” I said.

“I don’t read the comments,” he replied.

WhAAA? Rob, if you’re reading, you’re missing the best part.

Now to wash my face. Defeating Eric in the crossword will have to wait. I’m running late.

You’re never too old to learn something new. I managed to report the results of every contested race in the Grosse Pointes last night in a single tweet with not even a shortened URL, and given my tendency to run on at the keyboard, I think this shows not only admirable brevity but heroic restraint. Ahem:

Millages: Passed. School board: Pangborn, Dindoffer, Jakubiec. Woods judge: Metry. Park council: Arora, Grano, Robson. Park judge: Jarboe.

There is no such thing as platform-neutral journalism. That’s actually 138 characters — two to spare. Good thing the Woods judicial race wasn’t won by the candidate with the double last name.

While we’re keeping it brief, might as well three-dot our way into this note from J.C. that arrived last night from his vacation in the American west, regarding the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. Dateline Willcox, Ariz.:

Actually, live TV happened all the time in the 1950s and 1960s. Even black and white microwave live shots date to the early 60s. But what happened in the case of Oswald was that they had a pool b/w big old RCA studio camera, a remote truck, and a hardwired, literally, big ol’ cabled connection to ‘telco’–AT&T, just like for a baseball game. Expensive, but to Dallas stations this was a big deal.

That video fascinates me because its so crisp and so clear in its black and whiteness and Dan Rather, Robert MacNeil, Bob Schieffer and so on were so young.

He’s my go-to authority on all television matters. He told me once about the day Mike Wallace came in to our college station, WOUB, for an interview, back in the day when sets were two chairs in front of a lattice screen and a ficus tree. J.C. was running one of the studio cameras. Even then, in the mid-’70s, Wallace looked impossibly wizened and old and not at all like the “60 Minutes” hero. Wallace took his seat and started directing the floor director on how to adjust the lights — bring this one down, that one up, the other one around. J.C., watching through the camera, said it was amazing: “He became ‘Mike Wallace’ right before our eyes.” Years later, he pointed out to me how every new season of “Sex and the City” took the lighting lower and lower (on a lateral plane, not in intensity), until it seemed the gals were living in a world lit only by footlights. Does wonder for female faces of a certain age.

And finally, if you didn’t follow the comments yesterday, please don’t miss Gene Weingarten’s take on the Henry Allen career K.O. It is wise and funny and dead-on, and shows why Weingarten is not a writer to underestimate, either, although I doubt he’ll punch anyone in his final act:

The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. (Obligatory mature qualification: I of course decry any breakdown in comity and collegiality and civil discourse in the workplace, and urge all young people to maintain decorum and respect others, to be tolerant of opposing viewpoints, to seek compromise, and to not punch each other out in spit-flying scrums.)

Still, hooray. Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions — a situation thought of as “creative tension” and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new “revenue streams,” ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.

There’s more, and you should read it. Bonus: A couple of excerpts from Allen’s peerless journalism, which I neglected yesterday.

UPDATE: Hank weighs in, and considers the gay-insult angle.

Getting back to the election: On my errands the other day, I passed a traffic island in a busy intersection. It sprouted two candidates’ yard signs. Specifically: Abdalla Awwad and Karen Wojcik. When you get depressed about the future, reflect on that little miracle, impossible or at least highly unlikely in Don Draper’s day — an Arab-American and a Polish-American woman, running for municipal seats in a blue-collar suburb deep in the heartland. Although — drumroll — both lost. (Trumpet wah-wah.)

I suppose yesterday’s polling will be spun as a sharp rebuke, or perhaps a warning shot, or maybe even a repudiation of Obama Nation. We’ll see. I don’t know enough about Virginia or New Jersey politics to say one way or another; the NY-23 race is far more interesting, the importation of an out-of-district carpetbagger to oppose a Republican nominee thought to be insufficiently conservative. They can run their party however they want, but so much for all that gassing about why Democrats won’t let pro-life members of their party address their conventions, etc. Make the tent smaller! That’s the ticket. Actually, this is the ticket:

NY-23 is solidly Republican but not especially conservative (it voted for Barack Obama last year), and Hoffman was a relatively uncharismatic candidate with poor command of the local issues.

Carpetbaggers are a hard sell. Although they do bring lots of media attention to their backers. Do I have lipstick on my teeth? No, Sarah, lovely as always.

I have nothing to say about that, either, because Jon Stewart said it all here. Drag your slider to the 2/3 mark, and don’t miss the Beck Test.

And now I have to call some of those folks in that opening tweet. The winner for my local judicial race is a young guy with not a lot of name recognition. But he stopped by my house three times and several times when I was out and about, I’d see him on his lonely shoe-leather quest to ring every doorbell in town. It’s true what they say, folks: It’s all local.

First, the crossword puzzle. Then phone calls.

Halloween went swimmingly. The air was nippy but not too, the leaves crunchy and abundant, and once again, I overbought. I used to buy 10 bags of candy. This year, I bought…I forget how many, but it was way more than 10. I blanched a moment when the total came up on the register, more than $50, but promptly rationalized that money spent making children happy on a candy-centered holiday is worth double karma points.

Many tourists this year. I don’t care at all, not even a little. We’ve now settled into a groove — lawn chair on the porch, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on the box, wineglass in the hand, magnanimity in the heart. I missed Spriggy this year; he was always my companion on Halloween, watching from the other side of the storm door, barking less as the years went by. I imagine this stabbing in the heart will lessen as the gulf between us widens, but never go away entirely.

I want another dog. But now I have a rabbit. No dogs yet.

(I wonder about the compatibility of cats and bunnies. The one story I heard about them was told to me by one of those guys you meet from time to time; he either sells you pot or fixes your appliances or is your friend’s cousin. Lives out in the country, has a mullet and keeps strange animals as pets — ferrets and snakes and exotic lizards, and somehow they all get along. This guy had a rabbit and a cat, and said they fought exactly once: “That rabbit grabbed that cat with his front feet, and started poundin’ on him with ’em big thumpers in back, man.” The cat left the bunny alone after that.)

The Obamas had a Halloween party, we’re told. I learned this from Google Trends, which had “michelle obama catwoman” high in the mix. She did? Get OUT, I thought, and raced for photos, but she was no sexy kitten, more like a hip suburban mom taking the opportunity to give herself a smoky eye. Well, you could hardly expect her to put on the black rubber suit (links thanks to Jolene) on the steps of the White House, but it does sound as though they made an effort to put on a pretty good Halloween party for the local kiddies. I’m sure the press releases are going out to the perpetual opposition — blah blah wasteful blah blah demonic blah blah recession, etc. I say, hey, Halloween! I’m for it.

Another week begins, and I can hardly get excited about it, except for E-Day, of course. The race known as NY-23 sailed under my radar until only recently, and that’s one to watch. Sarah Palin’s been a player in that one, probably because she believes so strongly in the people’s right to choose their representatives free of outside influence — in fact, a representative free of inside encumbrances, like residency in the district he allegedly represents.

We’ll see how that one turns out; I’m genuinely interested. It won’t be the embarrassment of Alan “What state am I in?” Keyes in Illinois — in fact, would-be Rep. Carpetbagger is polling pretty far out front — but it’ll make election night worth tuning in for.

Around here, it’s all about municipal races, and I am in a foul mood. I am in a slate-wiping mood. I am in a What Michigan Needs is Not YOU mood. Unfortunately, I can’t vote in any of those races. But the one to watch will be Proposal D in Detroit, which is a grassroots effort to make the city council actually representative of the city by changing it from an all-at large body to one elected by district. Instead of the usual crew of idiots, it will be a different crew of perhaps-less-idiotic idiots. That’s about the best the D can hope for, but who knows? Maybe a new crew of idiots will help. All I know is, the line on the campaign mailer that means the least to me right now is the one detailing how many decades of residence one has. Roots are fine, but the grand old traditions — of business, of politics — are part of what got us into this mess. New thinking, stat.

So, some bloggage? Sure.

Hank Stuever had a good weekend, with lots of good pub for “Tinsel.” The best place for an all-links roundup is his own blog, Tonsil. Bonus: His piece on Bravo, the morality-reality channel, in the WashPost this weekend.

Speaking of Sarah, wouldn’t you love to get a robocall from her, urging you to “vote for Sarah’s values?” Which ones would those be, Sarah?

And now it’s time to hop to it, quick like a bunny. Who is probably chewing something as we speak.

Another quiet morning with Ruby. (Hop. Hop. Hop. Scratch-scratch-scratch. STOP CHEWING THAT! It’s a loop.) A mild day. Rain seems to be gone for a while. It brought down a fresh load of leaves, so the work I did over the weekend, raking and piling, looks completely undone. Ah, well. As soon as the coffee kicks in I’m going to get to work for reals.

Don’t I sound stupid, writing that? “For reals?” Just like the kids say. I look at Kate’s Facebook postings, and I want to faint: “hangin wit my besties CALL TEXT ME PLEEEEZE.”

“I know you know how to spell ‘please.’ Tell me you do,” I say.

“I write the way I talk,” she replies. In other words: Bug off, geezer.

The other day I retrieved one of her short writing assignments off the printer tray. With the exception of one exclamation point, I wouldn’t change a keystroke. I guess she’s mastered the art of being one thing for the adults in your life, another for your pals. A key adolescent coping skill.

Well, she’ll never take writing advice from her mother, at least not for a couple more decades. I just sent an e-mail to our Wayne State student interns at GrossePointeToday.com, recommending yet another Detroitblog gem. You can learn a lot from breaking down a piece like this to see how it sings:

Helen Turner has a mean scowl on her face. Always. It’s the look she gives customers at the diner where she works.

“I don’t take no shit off of nobody,” she spits in an Appalachian accent.

She’s behind the counter at White Grove Restaurant, a tiny, genuinely retro diner on Second Avenue near Charlotte, in Detroit’s skid row. Her customers are the city’s underclass — addicts, prostitutes, the homeless and the insane. They spend their days aimlessly roaming their neighborhood here like zombies, slowly killing time and themselves, waiting for the next handout or the next quick score.

And nearly all of them come into the diner at some point, trying to pull a fast one.

It was a pleasure to read, start to finish. It’s hard to paint a portrait like that without lapsing into cliché and stereotype. I was left wondering how the place even keeps the lights on, if Turner and her colleague, a man with whom she’s guarded the counter “for decades,” spend virtually their entire working day yelling at their customers. I guess they’ve figured out a way to make it work. It helps when Mrs. Take-no-shit guards the register; the place has only been robbed once in recent memory, and the thief escaped with his loot only because the manager didn’t have it in him to pull his own gun on a 16-year-old boy.

So let’s get to the bloggage, then:

Vanity Fair has a piece by a former member of the Letterman staff. A woman. She gets to the heart of the flaw in the it’s-only-consenting-adults argument, right here, with the extra emphasis mine:

Without naming names or digging up decades-old dirt, let’s address the pertinent questions. Did Dave hit on me? No. Did he pay me enough extra attention that it was noted by another writer? Yes. Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.

Boss/underling relationships will be with us forever. That doesn’t mean we should stop saying it’s wrong.

Shower, work, more coffee, crossword.

Such a day to travel to Ann Arbor — the air still soft, fall colors at their absolute peak, the oblivious overprivileged students stepping in front of your car and I’m sorry but are you riding that bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street, HEADED DIRECTLY FOR ME?

She was. Swerved at the last minute. I love Ann Arbor, but sometimes I hate the reason Ann Arbor exists — students.

The online training went well. There was a segment on mobile-device info technology that turned up a few rocks for me, although again I had the thought: I hope some good new people have been entering my former industry in the years since I left it, because the people I once knew there simply aren’t up to this. I don’t think very often of my last years in the biz, but it came back to me at one point, when the speaker was discussing disseminating information across multiple platforms; I thought of the knee-jerk suspicion that accompanied every new idea in online journalism back in the day, how the immediate, gut reaction to an employee interested in trying something new was don’t, shouldn’t, can’t. And, of course, bias.

It’s frustrating to work in an environment ruled by fear. I’m sure it’s even worse now.

So I got home, got online and caught up on my Facebook buddies. Several are thinking about getting the H1N1 shot. Another is wondering whether her kids should get it. In every comment thread, there’s an anti-vaccination voice, and the position they take illustrates one of the weirder contradictions of modern life. I recommend Christopher Beam’s piece in Slate last week, about the bizarre right-left alliance against the new flu shot.

I’ve noticed one of the satisfactions the anti-vax position offers its holder, i.e., the ability to endlessly spew data into the air without having to actually consider it. People may have good reasons for not wanting the shot — and yes, “I’m afraid of needles” is a perfectly fine one — but at some level, this argument isn’t an argument at all, but more like birtherism. No matter how often someone says the vaccine is safe, you can always come back with but mercury’s a poison, is it not? “Mercury is a poison” is the “long-form birth certificate” of flu season.

Get the shot or don’t get it, but don’t bleat about mercury toxicity to one who has spent all this week clipping stories from the English-speaking press about this flu. Here’s one from the Daily Telegraph in London:

Doctors have been “unnerved” by the severity of swine flu in some patients and their rapid deterioration into a “life and death situation”, Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer has said.

I don’t like it when doctors are unnerved. I don’t like it when the ones dying are otherwise healthy young people. I’m going after the shot for Kate, but at this rate, it’s looking like the vaccine is already arriving too late to do any real good.

I’m off to my Friday morning meeting. Sorry for the thin effort this week, but we’ll try for better next, eh?

Because I have another ridiculous day ahead, an all-bloggage Wednesday, and we’ll try for something better by tomorrow, eh?

A contributor to the Times of London considers the problem of celebrity culture:

First and foremost, there is the opportunity cost of interminable second-hand gossip; preoccupation with celebrities is an appalling squandering of human consciousness.

The centuries of prattle, of air time and screen time, the miles of column inches are a sickening misuse of the gift of life, of health and adequate nutrition, of freedom from oppression, of the access we now have to the world of knowledge and the arts. They are stolen from thought about, or discussion of, things that are truly important or worthwhile; fighting poverty, disease and the iniquities and injustice of the world; the profound joy afforded by literature and the arts; questions about the meaningful purpose of life.

The celebrity culture is a black hole sucking up light. It is not only a manifestation of the cretinisation or tabloidisation of our culture but further cretinises it.

There’s a certain kind of scold who loves to tell you your dirty little pleasure is something to be ashamed of, that it’s wrong to read People when you could be reading something with a long subtitle. And then there’s the kind who makes a single moment spent contemplating Paris Hilton sound like a crime against the cosmos. Raymond Tallis is the second kind.

What were we just talking about yesterday? Oh, right: Pay cuts. Ahead of the curve, again. Meanwhile, on Wall Street:

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

Whose compensation do you feel better about? The average paycheck at Goldman Sachs, at $743,000, or the airline pilot at $34,000? Come the revolution, let’s carry our torches together.

And now I’m off to Troy, which at the moment feels about as far away as the one they rolled the horse into. Have a great day, all.

Yesterday was a holiday, I discovered when I started my police rounds. Let me see the hands of those who are a) employed in the private sector; b) had yesterday off; and c) don’t live in Columbus, Ohio.

Yes, I thought so. Columbus Day is one of those holidays we give to public-sector employees in lieu of more money. [Pause.] Just looked at that sentence, and reflected for a moment on the traditional deal we make with public-sector employment: Less money, more holidays, better benefits. For a long time, that was the way of the world. The recession may reorder things a bit. I know many, many people in the private sector who have, in the last year, had to swallow pay cuts. Not a no-raise year, not a watch-your-raise-be-eaten-by-health-care-cost-increases year, but an across-the-board decrease, accompanied by a bigger bite from health care, for a grand total of, well, a lot. Ten, 15 percent, in some cases.

Public-sector workers have been insulated from that, somewhat, at least the ones with contracts. A while back I related my jaw-drop moment while reading about the benefits bestowed upon Detroit city employees, including health care for children up to age twenty-damn-FIVE, and more days off than Ronald Reagan enjoyed in his last years in office. The new mayor, Dave Bing, has baldly stated this is unsustainable. In my own little burg, 2010 means contract-negotiation time, and while no one’s said it out loud yet, there are whispers of haircuts all around. Many other states have had public employees on unpaid furloughs already, however; I’m a follower of Amy Welborn’s Twitter feed, and down in Alabama, I gather she’s been trying to get her driver’s license renewed, enduring Soviet-style lines in the few offices that remain open, and still hasn’t been successful.

All this by way of saying that if you got Columbus Day off, and you got paid for it, I hope you did something wonderful, because that feels like a holiday past its sell-by date.

In the newspaper business, we never got the B-level holidays off — Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day, MLK Day and so on. Plus we got the lousy paychecks, too. You see why we’re so surly and wear cheap shoes.

A shabby guy on a crummy bicycle just rode past my house, checking out the recycling bins. Hard times in Michigan.

So. I want to tell you what we did this past weekend, now that I’ve finally exposed the secrets of middle-school dances. After watching “Whip It” the week before, we thought we might check out the local roller derby. And so we did: The Detroit Roller Girls met the Dairyland Dolls of Madison, Wisconsin Saturday at the Masonic Temple. It was a doubleheader, the two travel teams and then the varsity, and it was? Wonderful. Better than “Whip It,” because it wasn’t pretty actresses playing tough, but real tough girls who, you can tell, do not require a security guard to escort them to their cars after the crowd has gone home.

The bout itself was so lopsided — we left at halftime when the score was 151-8, or some such — that I suspect the Dairyland Dolls sent the junior-junior varsity. The Dolls had no D, they had no O, but they did have helmets festooned with Holstein markings. (Where was Wisconsin in its state marketing before cows became kitschy?) But it was still fun, and I think I discovered my roller-derby name, which you may address me by, but don’t tell its owner, who will hunt me down and kill me for theft. Ready? Keyser Suze.

The Detroit Derby Girls field four separate teams. Best name: Detroit Pistoffs.

And now I commence 72 hours of top-speed work, made that way in part by the Columbus Day holiday. Expect thin gruel for a while.

Grosse Pointe is a community that honors tradition. (Sometimes to a fault. That’s for another day.) Lots of people who live here as adults grew up here, went away to college, and came back like homing pigeons, because they like the continuity of the place, its small-town feel, its bedrock of lifers and rotating cast of newcomers, drawn by the beauty, the schools, the lake.

What that means is, when the Grosse Pointe War Memorial (a community center) announces the dates for its middle-school dances, many of the parents you know will remember attending them when they were 12 years old. Or, like my friend Michael, whose son grew up here with his ex-wife, will have a different memory:

“I remember how scantily clad the girls were,” he told me as I prepared to drive Kate to her first one. Michael went to Catholic school, so he has a certain Catholic-schoolboy idea of what constitutes scantily clad. That’s what I thought, anyway.

Five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot, and beheld two girls shivering by the door. On a chilly October evening, they were wearing shorts and tank tops. I immediately wondered if the other thing I heard about the dances, which everyone calls War Dances, was true — that they were cesspools of drinking, smoking and oh-my-god-I-can’t-even-imagine. I hadn’t believed that, because I thought how stupid can the people who run these things be? The procedure for just buying a ticket made in loco parentis sound like dangerous permissiveness. There was a special ID only a parent could buy, after swearing your child was a lawfully enrolled student of the school system, and you couldn’t buy a ticket without the ID. There were strict hours, pickup and dropoff policies. No one would be allowed to leave before 10 p.m.; there were no ins-and-outs. I think you’d have an easier time getting into the White House.

On the other hand, there were those girls, dressed for the Fourth of July in October.

Kate was no help. I insisted she dress appropriately, but she never told me why, month after month, I was picking up the only girl in long pants and sleeves. She said shorts and tanks were just what everyone else wore, and I chalked it up to one of the quirkier sub-traditions, one that, needless to say, I would hold the line against.

Well. This year I finally got to set foot inside the place, when I offered to chaperone. It immediately became clear why summer outfits are the uniform, and I smacked my forehead for stupidity: When you put a couple hundred sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders into a ballroom and crank up the tunes, it takes about eight minutes for the room to reach the temperature of a sauna. The ballroom looks out over the lake, but the million-dollar view is gone by the third song, as condensation covers the floor-to-ceiling windows. At the stroke of 7:30, the doors open and the kids pile up at the check-in tables, where they must display the special ID and have it checked against the computer-generated list of names. No ticket sales at the door. If you haven’t paid for a ticket by noon on dance day, you are turned away — no exceptions. Lady Gaga is already blasting from the ballroom, and they’re eager to get moving. Within 20 minutes, nearly everyone is there, the lights are down, the light outside — what you can see of it through the condensation — has faded into gray, and we’re war-dancing.

What that means is, and this will be familiar to anyone who ever attended a middle-school dance of any sort, clots of three to seven girls dance together in constellations, while boys talk in similar-size knots, or else sit in the chairs that line the walls. And that is pretty much how it goes for the next two and a half hours.

After everyone checks in, we set up the refreshments, which consist of ice water and lemonade. The one parent-volunteer holdover from last year rolled out a cart with what seemed like an excessive number of water pitchers. We refilled them all three or four times through the night, and for a solid hour, all we did was pour, pour, pour. As soon as we could set down a dozen cups, a dozen kids would pile out, red-faced, throw down the ice water like marathoners, discard the cups and head back into the heat. Lady Gaga gave way to Beyoncé, who gave way to Mylie Cyrus, who gave way to half a dozen artists I’ve never heard of. When I got tired of pouring I would circle the perimeter of the floor, careful always to avert my gaze from my own kid, to whom I’m promised I would give no indication of our relationship. Girls dancing, boys watching — check. Then I’d leave, because I was dressed in long pants and long sleeves, and brother, it was hot in there.

I asked the man who, along with his wife, organizes these affairs, how the drugs-and-alcohol rumors got started. He said the only incident he’d known of was about three years ago, when some eighth-grade girls showed up drunk, got past check-in and promptly barfed on the dance floor. Two police officers monitor the doors and occasionally do a perimeter trot-around. The bathroom is a two-stall affair with the door left open to the hallway. The no-entry-without-ID policy eliminates drop-ins, and things have gone smoothly pretty much forever.

At 10 p.m. sharp — you could set your watch — the lights come on, the music stops, and the whole crew piles out like puppies to meet the line of parents lined up for the trip home. I made one last pass through the ballroom, which, though emptying swiftly, still retained its heat.

I wished I were wearing shorts, too.

Bloggage? Some good stuff today:

An interview with Maurice Sendak (HT: Laura Lippman) about his enduring children’s classic, and the upcoming movie adaptation. Some great evidence of why editors aren’t always right:

The entire staff at the publishing house were keen on my changing the word “hot” to “warm” on the last page. Because “hot” meant “burn.”

(For some reason this reminds me of the time on the old Dick Van Dyke show, when Laura wrote a charming children’s book, and Rob, the envious professional writer, wanted to work on it. He changed “sad” to “morose.”)

A long segment from Rachel Maddow, but she just nails the Nobel and is smarter than everything else I read about Friday’s news, and that includes Tom Friedman’s stupid “the speech he should give in Oslo” paint-by-numbers kit. (If there any column-writing trope more stale than “the speech he should give”? Yes: the “open letter.” Now you know.)

Finally, for Stratford fans only: Douglas Campbell died recently. The Scottish-Canadian actor was 87 and a founding member of the greatest Shakespeare company in North America. Robert Fulford explains why he mattered, in the National Post.