I wandered through the room as Lester Holt was laying out the pirate-rescue details on NBC, and of course I stopped. (I cannot walk past Lester Holt without stopping, I am so fascinated by his utterly immobile upper lip. My old neighbor, the ex-dental hygienist, theorized he’d had extremely good cleft-lip surgery at some point in his life. But never mind that.)

What fascinated me this time was the animation of the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips. They needed an animation — a re-creation, based on information provided by the Navy — because of course reporters weren’t there. I don’t know how close the U.S. news media was able to get to the scene, but the correspondent on the scene was in Kenya, so that’s a pretty good bet. Anyway, the animation was very odd. You know those caricatures you see lately, where the caricature is all done in Photoshop? (Example.) No need to learn to draw when you can emphasize features with digital tools. It was like that — the “ocean” was plainly a water tank, the “ships” were toy models and the Somali pirates were symbolized by three black silhouettes; when they were “shot,” the silhouettes popped into the air and then flew out of frame.

Oh, hell — let’s just go spelunking for the damn clip. Here it is. Sorry about the Applebee’s ad.

I’m not opposed to re-creations or animated graphics. This one was just weird. And sorry, but I’m a word person. Describe it simply and clearly, and I can see it in my head. Lots of people probably think a lifeboat resembles a giant rowboat, however, like the ones in “Titanic.” So I can see the problem.

By the way, is there anything to these reports, about why the pirates feel justified in robbing American and European ships? I know, I know — failed state, warlords, etc. But if Italian mafias were shipping toxic wastes to my coastline to dump, I’d be pissed, too.

How was your Easter? Mine was lovely. We went to the Detroit Institute of Arts, not to see the Norman Rockwell exhibit or anything, but just to poke around. I hadn’t been since the big reno/reorg a couple years ago, so that was interesting — it really is a better museum now, with rooms grouped around ideas rather than strictly by periods. (Two ways of looking at an arch, Gothic and Renaissance, for instance.) Alas, we couldn’t linger with the Diego Rivera murals; there was some sort of presentation going on there, a dramatic storytelling thing that required a loud, screechy voice that echoed around the space and was not exactly conducive to art appreciation. Another time.

I also stayed away from my computer for much of the weekend, although I did finish my taxes and discovered, mirabile dictu, I’m getting a refund. Nothing like having a little money worry go away to make a person feel mellow and happy. Which is why I don’t understand Caroline Kennedy these days — glutton for punishment, or does she really think these things should be hers? The Vatican? Why not Ireland, or Luxembourg, or some nice, inconsequential minor principality with good food and a decent party circuit? Who in their right mind would want to grovel before Ratzi? As Michael Wolff puts it:

Caroline Kennedy has come to represent something that makes people crazy. Whatever she wants, people don’t want her to have. This is partly because she can’t but seem to act like she’s entitled to it. And it is partly because she does not seem to want to bother erecting the pretense that she is qualified for it (after all, she, of all people, knows that most politicians are not brain surgeons). And it is partly because her desperation is so apparent. She needs a job. Any job. Please. Which is not a good way to present yourself.

Well, yeah. Is being rich that boring? Having made one’s choice (to be quiet and wealthy and good), is it so hard to realize it doesn’t come with all the benefits one would like? This girl needs a good therapist.

And that’s it for me, today. Off to speak to a journalism class out in Dearborn and then to contribute to my IRA. And then to e-file.

Easter eggs and Easter bunnies.

It looks as though the Associated Press is firing the first shots in what we might look back on as the Great Content Wars of the Aughts. They’re after the aggregators and search engines, mainly, not individual bloggers, although the story isn’t that clear. They want permissions and revenue-sharing, and I for one will be watching this one closely. I think this fight is long overdue, and if we’re going to have it, then let’s bloody well have it.

The initial response is about what you’d expect — most are taking the wait-and-see approach, with a few trumpeting the sort of swaggering arrogance the web does so well:

The last time they TRIED, it was a public relations nightmare for them and we in The Blogospheres had thought they had arrived at their senses — guess not. Again — JUST BRING IT ON.

“A public relations nightmare” — that’s a good one. Because if there’s one thing the AP must have, it’s good PR. They wouldn’t want a bunch of ignorant bloggers pissed at them or anything. Because, you know, the people who are stealing their content (always providing a link back in tribute) must be kept happy.

We need to have this fight, if only to establish what eyeballs are worth (my guess: nothing), what links are worth (a fraction of nothing), and finally, what content is worth. It may well be a losing battle, but it’s time to go beyond the usual response (information wants to be free nyah nyah) and actually have a reasoned discussion about free lunches.

The aggregator’s defense is that they reproduce no more than a “fair use” portion and always provide a link back (which is sort of like being paid in invisible money). The problem is, frequently that’s all the eyeballs are interested in. A friend of mine told me a few years ago, “I went from reading the paper to reading the paper online to reading a few blogs that tell me what the interesting stories are, and even then, I just read the summaries.” Broadcast news has known this for a generation at least. Why provide depth, perspective and context when you can get the gist in two or three paragraphs? Particularly when you’re gathering your audience via their political biases, all you need is the fair-use segment. You use it to touch off a getta-loada-this blog post, in and out in a couple hundred words, and on to the next one. Most people don’t want anything more, so why bother?

The AP, however, doesn’t exist to provide blogfodder. It exists to serve its dwindling list of clients, and this is where I start rolling my eyes at the stunning ignorance of most of the online commentariat. The AP is a co-op; it has its own staff reporters, but most of its content is provided by member papers, which then take the AP’s versions of other members’ stories in return. Everybody who’s done time on a news desk knows the drill — after deadline, the slot editor sends three or four of the day’s best stories to the AP, where editors trim and rewrite, then send them back out to member clients. If someone stands up at a Fort Wayne City Council meeting and shoots its august members a moon, they’ll be reading about it in Evansville a day later, not because the AP had someone there, but because they took the local papers’ stories and passed them along to the state wire.

Of course, nowadays, if such a thing happened, they’d be reading about it in Evansville via the web, via links to the Fort Wayne papers. At least, for a knee-slapper story like that. For less amusing material, maybe not. My point is, however: The AP is producing something of value, and we need to figure out what its value is. So if a big ugly lawsuit is the way to find out, time for the big ugly lawsuit.

There’s also a reckoning coming in advertising value. It’s often noted that many newspapers are being read by more people than ever before, and yet still can’t support themselves through advertising. Huh. I wonder why. Let’s take a few sports-section ad stalwarts — tires and tits. (If you’re in the market for new radials or wondering which porn star is stripping at which club, Sports is your go-to section.) Imagine being the ad salesman trying to convince the tire-store owner of the great deal he’s getting, because of all the new eyeballs. Pistons fans in Tokyo can read the Detroit News online, and keep up with the best local coverage of their favorite team! But the tires are being sold in Detroit, not Tokyo. Or San Diego, or Cincinnati. The internet has been a great boon for readers. But the strip club is unlikely to draw patrons from the Sun Belt. Some eyeballs are more valuable than others.

So, a bit of bloggage, never exceeding fair use:

As creepy as this story is, the video is worse.

The game last night was the expected blowout, and Mitch Albom sprained his syntaxes capturing it in his purplest prose. No link — go find that shit y’self.

Another incredible Sweet Juniper post, capturing blight on a Detroit “ghost street.” This, my friends, is multimedia reporting. Don’t expect the papers to figure it out.

Off to the gym to battle gravity.

Detroit loves nothing better than hosting a huge sporting event. The city is really at its rowdy, friendly best when thousands of out-of-towners drop in for a Super Bowl, or an All-Star Game, or a Final Four.

Of course, it would be nice if the weather cooperated, too.

Eh, I guess it could be worse. The forecasts called for anywhere from one to 10 inches — talk about hedging your bets — and it seems we fell well into the short end of that zone. It won’t last, but it’ll leave a lot of North Carolinians convinced they made the right call in moving south. I suppose I’m backing the home team, although truth be told I have no interest. No one in the house does. Guess what my husband said Saturday night: “Until I saw it spelled out, I thought Michigan State was playing a team from Alaska.” UConn, Yukon — what’s the difference, really?

OK, so: On to today.

Let’s start with a stipulation: Everyone is blind to their own side’s faults. And so the argument that starts “If (my guy, whom you hate) and done the same thing as (your guy), you’d be screaming bloody murder” just isn’t worth having.

Or if it is worth having, at some point someone is going to say, “Well, he started it.”

So there’s the stipulation. Ideas have consequences, the right lectured the left for, oh, years and years and years. The inventor of the birth-control pill envisioned it being used by married women in their 40s who wanted no more children, and whoops, he touched off the sexual revolution. And so on. To this day, you can still find conservatives trying to link whatever they disapprove of to a “culture” that encourages it, everything from sexy Bratz dolls to gay marriage to whatever has a bug up their butt at any given moment.

Only here’s something they’re strangely silent on: Our current trend of mass murders and shootings. Guy bursts into a Unitarian church, says he wants to kill liberals. Silence. Guy kills three cops, friends say he fears “the coming Obama gun ban.” Crickets, also caviling. Who, us? Encourage an atmosphere of fear and suspicion? I don’t know who you’re talking about. Certainly not us.

I knew the cold-dead-fingers contingent had passed a milestone when, after one of these slaughters, the talking points became “well, if only one of the potential victims had been packing, s/he could have expertly returned fire and taken the maniac out.” (This isn’t something you heard after the guy shot up the nursing home last week, I noted.) Not so much soul-searching, however.

Of course, if there was, it would be easy to miss. I recommend Eric Boehlert’s excellent column for Media Matters, “Rampage Nation,” about the steadily declining interest in the steadily increasing number of massacres nationwide:

Killing sprees, especially the ones that have erupted since the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, just don’t hold journalists’ attention like they used to.

Even more telling was the way the press avoided addressing the issue of gun control in connection with the Alabama rampage. There was a virtual media ban on the topic last week. And that’s become the media’s trademark pattern when covering the mass murders that stain the country — they’re treated as though they’re isolated incidents and as though there is no larger public policy issue that ties them together. The press has pretty much embraced the old NRA mantra: Guns don’t kill people. People do.

That I would disagree with. Rather, I think gun control doesn’t come up because gun control is absolutely a lost cause in this country. As I have been cynically telling people for years, America has made its bloody bed, and now it has to lie in it. What’s more, any talk of gun control, no matter how reasonable or incremental, only serves to make things worse, as we saw in Pittsburgh this weekend. There’s nothing like a tentative policy statement made by some C-list legislator somewhere for firing up the troops, and before you know it some lunatic is taking out cops because the president is coming for his guns.

How good is this sort of talk for the gun business? Very, very good.

Meanwhile, Dave Cullen has produced what sounds like an excellent book on Columbine, 10 years later. Seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?

OK, so the week begins with snow, but somewhere in here we have baseball and, by week’s end, spring again. So fingers crossed.

Thanks to all of you who made Day 1 of the Amazon store such a success. I earned $15.43! This is better than Google has done me in a single day, ever, and while I know it can’t last, I’m pleased to know how many of you are willing to do me this small favor.

I’m equally pleased to see my report from Amazon tells me what you bought. No names attached, alas, although some of you announced your purchases in comments. So I know Del is probably the one behind “The McCleers and the Birneys;: Irish immigrant families-into Michigan and the California gold fields, 1820-1893,” but I have no idea who might have picked up “Strip To It: Core Moves and Fantasies Sexy Striptease (exotic dancing)” on DVD. Although I have my ideas ::koff::BrianStouder::koff::. And truly, I am delighted, because it would seem to indicate we’re drawing a younger demographic. Money in the bank!

One of these days J.C. and I will put together a proper button for the sidebar, but for now click either the current On the Nightstand book or the link below. Oh, and Laura Lippman, if you’re reading this, we also sold a copy of “Life Sentences.” Onward to the bestseller list.

So. I haven’t said much about the General Motors situation, mainly because the more I read, the less I know about this company — or know that I know, anyway. I don’t want to be one of those pundits whose advice to the company boils down to “duh, make cars people want to drive,” as though running the largest industrial corporation in the world, with a few hundred thousand employees, plants all over the globe, a product line that takes years to develop and produce, that’s expensive and prone to the vagaries of commodity and labor prices, trends and a fickle public — all this is no more difficult than running a cupcake bakery somewhere.

Fortunately, in Detroit, there are lots of people who know more about this than I do. I e-mailed one and asked him his take on the Wagoner business. I don’t think he’d mind if I pasted his thoughts:

I think Wagoner got a raw deal. But I also think GM could use a little outside agitation. It’s a huge company. And huge companies are hard to turn around. Maybe a new face at the top will help. Certainly the government has the right to call some shots.

But two of the biggest problems of GM were created a long time ago – shitty cars and bloated union contracts. The third – healthcare costs – is out of their hands. Wagoner went a long way to turning quality around. (It’s ironic that he’s out a week after Buick officially ended Lexus’ 14-year run at the top of JD Powers “Most Dependable” list.) And he took a huge step in bringing union costs in line with the last contract. He certainly blew it when they decided not to build a Prius-like hybrid when Toyota did. But he’s admitted that mistake and GM is catching up. (And he gets no credit for the fact that GM was developing that technology as fast as Toyota and Honda. They just made the strategic mistake of not thinking the market was ready for it … a mistake that must be viewed in the context of the fact that GM struggles to make money with small cars under the weight of their staggering health care costs.)

True to Wagoner form, he didn’t stamp his feet and make a fuss. He is the rarest of birds – a CEO with very little ego. GM is in trouble, much of it by their own hand. But that trouble started a long time ago. Rick Wagoner was the guy turning it around … until a banking and credit crisis clipped him from behind.

…One more thought. I made this prediction late last year, and this latest news makes me think it’s more likely that this scenario will unfold: The government overseers will, with support from Nancy Pelosi et al, righteously force GM to shift its focus to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. Not much will be done about health care costs, of course. So these cars won’t make money. Toyota and Honda, meanwhile, continue to invest billions in their truck fleet, fighting for a spot in this sector. With Detroit money sucked away from truck development – Chevy’s new Silverado gets better gas mileage with its V8 than Toyota can get with its V6 – Toyota and Honda will rush in and seize this highly profitable high ground. And that, my friends, will be all she wrote.

I might add: While gas prices remain low, lots of Priuses are sitting on lots, too. And Toyota sales are down as much as the domestic companies’. When people are losing jobs and can’t get credit, a car that flies would be a tough sell, let alone a Volt. Although Toyota saw something in hybrids that GM didn’t, and was willing to carry the Prius for a good long time until it wormed its way into the zeitgeist. And now when people think of Toyota, they think Prius, not Sequoia, Highlander or Tundra. And GM will forever be the makers of the Suburban. (Which I still see a lot of on the streets, btw.)

A bit of bloggage before we depart? OK:

Detroitblog unearths another great story, about a old-time west-side schvitz patronized mainly by Russian geezers, but on weekends? It’s an orgy venue. More pix (nothing spicy) at the first link, easier-on-the-eyes black-on-white text here.

Oh, it’s so cute when newspapers have April Fool’s Day stories, isn’t it? I’m amazed they’re toying with subscription cancellations at a time like this, frankly.

I am stupid and law-abiding, because my first question, reading this, was, “Why not sell at a loss?” I know nothing.

But I have a lot of work to do. So off I go.

There was a terrible accident not far from here Monday, up in Macomb County. A gutter-level alcoholic with a BAC at nearly three times the legal limit drove her van into a car full of teenagers waiting to make a left turn. All the kids — four of them, ages 15 to 19 — died, and the drunk received only minor injuries. They charged her with four counts of second-degree murder, a wise choice under the circumstances.

Every day, the story seems to get worse. We’ve known for a while now that the driver, a woman named Frances Dingle, had been drinking “at a party” earlier in the evening, and had been warned not to drive, but did so anyway. Today we learn that the “party” consisted of a confrontation with a man whose fiancee was drinking with Dingle, and he took her keys, and she tore the mailbox off his house, and, and, and.

The picture was of a stratum of society where alcohol use more closely resembles what goes on in a drug house. When I was pregnant I did a little reading about fetal alcohol syndrome, after reading a truly mind-blowing — and utterly irresponsible — passage in Newsweek magazine that said, “even a ‘hooray, we’re pregnant’ glass of champagne” can have a negative effect on a fetus. I’d read “The Broken Cord” a few years earlier, Michael Dorris’ heartbreaking memoir of trying to get help for his FAS-afflicted son, born on an Indian reservation. I was puzzled, then and now, why it took so long to diagnose the boy. Alcohol has been a part of human culture for so long, surely someone had noticed the link between women who drank heavily during pregnancy and the mentally retarded babies they gave birth to. Which led to me the “gin babies” of Victorian England, and gin in general during that era, which was a substance we’d recognize more readily as crack cocaine.

I’ve been around drinkers and drunks all my life, but few like the ones described in recent stories about the accident, or the father in “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” whose model was to come home with a bottle of Kessler’s and a six-pack, and sit at the kitchen table taking it like medicine, growing meaner by the minute. No tipsy cheer or social lubrication for these folks, just pound pound pound, and then oblivion.

The first thing they teach you about alcoholism is that booze is booze, and that even if you drink high-dollar stuff, or just beer, or just wine, or always among others and never alone, or never before 5, or whatever, you’re exactly the same as the guy who drinks hair spray. Maybe you’re better-dressed, or better-employed, but at the end, your poison is his poison. It just tastes a little better.

I keep imagining Frances Dingle’s life, the bouts of homelessness, the shattered relationships, the push-me-pull-you of cycling through rehab to drunk tank and back, the final decision to get into her huge van and push it to freeway speeds down a crowded thoroughfare. She hit the median strip at around 60, the cops estimate, which launched it airborne and into the little Chevy Cobalt full of kids. They didn’t have a chance. Doesn’t sound like anyone did.

[Pause. Claps hands together.] OK! Happy time now!

Via the Boston Globe’s excellent Big Picture blog, Scenes from a Recession.

A while ago Ruth Marcus was rooting for Caroline Kennedy to be a U.S. senator…just because. Because it would be sooo cool. Today? Leave AIG alone!

Gawker says the former leader of the free world got dissed with his book advance. What about the people who have to read it, eh? What about them?

My new standard of excellence is Five Lester Freamons. Thanks, NYMag!

Oop, almost time for Flex Appeal at the gym. Later, all.

Some years ago, when my parents were downsizing from a three-bedroom house to an assisted-living apartment the size of a box stall, it was my job to dispose of my father’s vast wardrobe. He kept a nominal suit, handful of ties and a couple of dress shirts, and I had to get rid of everything else, which included all sorts of interesting treasures like Bally loafers and Irish wool trousers the thickness of a wetsuit. This was at the very dawn of eBay, so please spare me the “you could have made a FORTUNE” comments. Believe me, I know.

There were a lot of ties. Many, many ties, most of them first-quality. (My dad had friends in the rag trade, and he was a loyal customer.) I offered some to the men in my office, who were already into the casual-Fridayization of the newspaper business, so I didn’t get rid of many there. (In my time in newsrooms, I watched the default men’s turnout go from jacket and tie to shirt and tie to collared shirt with no tie to polo shirt to plain T-shirt to Mustard Plug T-shirt — worn with Teva sandals, the better to show off your grimy toenails.)

But there was one that I held onto. It was green with very small blue shamrocks, perfect for St. Patrick’s Day in a corner office. Silk, classy, nothing about Erin-go-braless or kiss-me-I’m-Irish. I gave it to the most Irish American I know, Dr. Frank Byrne. His mother was Italian, but all her genes were recessive — he has the mop of prematurely gray hair and the ruddy complexion, a sister on the New York City police force and a degree from Notre Dame. They don’t come any more Irish than Frank. He accepted the tie with far more gratitude than the small gesture was worth, and every year at the time it’s like 5,4,3,2,1 and my e-mail beeps, and whaddaya know, here it is. Subject line: Got your Dad’s tie out & ready to go for St Patrick’s Day! Text: Thanks again.

No problem. My dad’s been dead since 2003, but his ghost still walks every year on March 17. And he was no more Irish than Tony Soprano.

Bloggage:

People tell me that after you live here for a while, you get used to stories like this, but I haven’t, yet: A Detroit city councilman — one of the good ones, one of the sane ones — has defaulted on his mortgage. Detroit is a city where everyone lives pretty close to one sort of edge or another, but it was this detail that dropped my jaw:

Kenyatta and his wife walked away from a monthly tax, insurance and mortgage payment of $2,600, one year before the interest would jump to 11.625 percent from 6.625 percent and the payment would hit $3,600. Kenyatta said that even though his monthly payment has remained the same for years, he felt it made no sense to remain in a house whose value had plummeted to $100,000.

The $100K figure is less than half the 2004 purchase price, but that wasn’t the jaw-dropper for me: The guy makes $81K as a councilman, a post he could, presumably, hold for life. But the bank wouldn’t let him renegotiate his ARM. Frankly, I don’t blame him. Now that bank owns a house that will likely stand empty for months or years, losing value with every passing day, because they wouldn’t give the guy a break on a 11.6 percent mortgage. Screw. Them.

This is a popular attitude today, of course: Contempt for our financial institutions. Elsewhere in the DetNews, a business columnist reminds us of a lesson about the sanctity of contracts:

Contracts? Sacred? Unbreakable? Tell that to autoworkers whose union cut a deal with Detroit’s automakers only to see the Bush administration, Team Obama and ranting members of Congress from both parties demand those contracts be torn up in exchange for a $17.4 billion federal lifeline.

Tell that to bondholders of General Motors Corp. under relentless pressure to swap two-thirds of their debt for shares in the automaker and risk bankruptcy. Tell that to CEOs at GM and Chrysler LLC now working for $1 a year and flying commercial. Or to employees whose bonuses are gone. Or to suppliers whose “contracts” aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Contracts matter in Bailout Nation or they don’t. And either the lenders of last resort — you and me, Congress and the Obama White House — can demand shared sacrifice from those who managed their firms into the ground or they can’t.

But, but…the UAW has good health insurance! How much can the American taxpayers be expected to endure?!

Eh, what do I know? It’s garbage day, everything’s at the curb, and I just saw the third scrapper cruise the block, looking for a little metal to scrounge. Because we live so high on the hog here in southeast Michigan.

Elsewhere? When Richard Cohen went wrong, he went wrong in a big way. Today: Sympathy for Jim Cramer. Because how could a man who tells everyone he knows everything be expected to know anything?

Once upon a time, the new NYT conservative columnist was a young man at Harvard. And, apparently, a real jerk. Michael Kinsley piles on, with stem cells.

A little disjointed today, I know. Sorry. I’m off to the gym, to take up the burden I dropped last week.

From the Fort comes word my alma mater just instituted a six percent pay cut, as well as a sharp reduction in 401K matches. I don’t know any more than that — this information was gleaned through instant message — but if true, they got off easy. Alan quipped, “So, they give back three years of raises,” a comment on the miserly wages paid there, but we’ve been gone five years, and I’d place a fair-size bet that meets-standards raises haven’t even seen two percent over the last few years. Coupled with the usual sharp increases in health-care cost sharing, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that a person who hasn’t been promoted in the last few years has been going backward for some time now. This is just an acceleration. Well, as we always told the job applicants: The cost of living is so low! And many of the groceries will triple your coupons!

What’s more interesting to me is the 401K match. We know we’re responsible for our own retirement, that we must save throughout our careers to avoid eating Cat Food Surprise in our golden years. Fortunately, tax policy favored the 401K, and our employers sweetened the deal by tossing in a modest match. I’ve heard tell of media companies that matched 100 percent of your 401K contribution, but I never worked for one. The best I ever got was 50 percent if you saved six percent, and nothing after that — three percent, basically.

At a small paper in the Knight Ridder chain, people moved through pretty quickly, and it was interesting to hear how the policies varied from paper to paper. I was amazed to hear that at some places, the 401K match was made in company stock, no exceptions. Given that you can’t spend your 401K before retirement without paying a stiff penalty, and given that the company’s stock is now worthless, I wonder how the people who were stuck with that deal are faring, particularly considering the rest of the package is worth a lot less, too.

Considering how much crap you take doing the work of journalism — I’ve been called everything from a bleeding cunt to a fucking jackal — you’d hope the compensation package would at least ease some of the pain, the way it does in, oh, the legal profession. You would be wrong. Any half-bright bartender or waitress can out-earn a college-educated reporter in many media markets.

So, anyway, my sympathies to my former colleagues. Here’s hoping the cuts are at least across-the-board, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t. You have to pay for the talent at the top, after all.

So. The Detroit newspapers got another data dump from the Kwame Kilpatrick text-message archives, and it’s the same old story, underlined: Heedless, immature, power-drunk young politician sees world as his oyster, acts accordingly. He is enabled by everyone he comes in contact with, including his mother, who helpfully reminds him YOU ARE CHOSEN, all-caps, and I don’t think she was using “chosen” as a synonym for “elected.” His wife was no shrinking violet, either:

Part of that alleged sense of entitlement was revealed when first lady Carlita Kilpatrick complained she wasn’t getting a city-leased Lincoln Navigator fast enough. “Any word on my Navigator?” she asked in a June 12, 2002, text message. The city’s leasing of a Lincoln Navigator for Kilpatrick’s wife became a major controversy. By Sept. 18, 2002, the mayor’s wife still hadn’t gotten the Navigator, and asked “Can I get my truck before the 2004s (models) are out?”

Well, I guess they all learned their lesson. Screw up, cost the city millions, do a little jail time (which serves as a weight-loss program) and then graduate to a fine, six-figure job with a staunch local supporter (in a Sun Belt city, so you can get that fresh-start thing working). I have a new ambition in life: To screw up like Kwame. Maybe I’d enjoy a warmer climate.

Rhinoviruses continue to lay me low. It’s concentrated between my chin and clavicle, so I spend my days rasping, croaking and, of course, complaining. However, I still have work to do, so any bloggage today will have to come from you.

It seems to me there are two narratives to the mortgage crisis. The first one is about the deadbeat who bought a $750,000 house in the suburbs, either with a liar loan or just because they are Stupid About Money. The stories of these elegant Mediterranean mini-manses with their green pools, perhaps littered with trash from the eviction, arouse every contemptuous emotion we have.

This one is popular among many Republican pundits. I don’t need to tell you why — it underlines their bedrock beliefs of personal responsibility and the blamelessness of the holy market, which knows all and is perfect. It puts blame for the disaster not on a corrupt system (except for that part that passed the Community Reinvestment Act), but on millions of individual shoulders, but, it goes without saying, never their own.

There’s a second mortgage narrative unwinding, however. It’s starting to get its share of attention, a bit of it this weekend, in a NYT magazine cover story and in a longer piece from the Associated Press. The magazine story is about Cleveland, the AP’s about Detroit, but the datelines are interchangeable — both stories apply to both cities. If all you read is the first narrative, you might not know that the crisis hit the inner city particularly hard, maybe harder than it hit the suburbs, and with more devastating fallout. You might not know that the stupid decisions made by individuals were aided and abetted by aggressive salesmanship on the part of the mortgage industry, whose representatives cold-called and went door-to-door with pitches that promised poor people $8,000 cash in hand by the day’s end if they’d sign here and here, initial here, and sign again here.

Many of these transactions were outright fraud. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a version of this story:

Waver Brickhouse, gray-haired and soft-spoken, has come undone twice during the nation’s housing crisis. In 2005, she fell behind on her mortgage payments and turned to a so-called rescue firm, which, court papers allege, tricked her into signing away the deed to her Brooklyn home. She says the company, Home Savers Consulting, secretly sold her home, with the help of a mortgage from IndyMac Federal Bank, and ran up huge new debts.

You wouldn’t think it would be possible to steal a house, would you? And yet it happens all the time.

Fraudulent or not, what’s happened as a result of all this vigorous capitalism has been devastating to poor neighborhoods. Detroit’s problems haven’t been getting much ink because Detroit was on the ropes before it all began, but I’m telling you what I’ve seen with my own eyes: While many of these neighborhoods were poor before subprime came to town, they were still neighborhoods. They were hanging in there. Houses were shabby but occupied. Today virtually every neighborhood in the city is dotted with what, if they were trees, would be called “standing dead” but in the real-estate world is called “O.V.V.” — open, vacant and vandalized.

Last year, a friend of mine wrote about the proliferation of $1 houses in Detroit. His editors weren’t convinced it was much of a story, but it was picked up by blogs all over the world, and for weeks, months afterward, his phone rang regularly with calls from potential “investors.” One gentleman called from Australia. “I don’t see how I can possibly lose,” he said. A house for a single dollar? It’s like finding gold on the ground. Ron said he tells these folks that a $1 house will require thousands in repairs, usually comes with thousands in unpaid back taxes, and frequently has judgments from the city to either improve or face court-ordered razing. Here’s one of Cleveland’s housing investors, from the Times magazine story:

So much here defies reasonableness. It’s what (city councilman Tony) Brancatelli keeps telling me. A few months ago, he met with Luis Jimenez, a train conductor from Long Beach, Calif. Jimenez had purchased a house in Brancatelli’s ward on eBay and had come to Cleveland to resolve some issues with the property. The two-story house has a long rap sheet of bad deals. Since 2001, it has been foreclosed twice and sold four times, for prices ranging from $87,000 to $1,500. Jimenez bought it for $4,000. When Jimenez arrived in Cleveland, he learned that the house had been vacant for two years; scavengers had torn apart the walls to get the copper piping, ripped the sinks from the walls and removed the boiler from the basement. He also learned that the city had condemned the house and would now charge him to demolish it. Brancatelli asked Jimenez, What were you thinking, buying a house unseen, from 2,000 miles away? “It was cheap,” Jimenez shrugged. He didn’t want to walk away from the house, but he didn’t have the money to renovate. The property remains an eyesore.

And so we come to the next chapter in the decline: The arrival of the flippers, the would-be landlords, the investors. The AP story is hopeful, but points out how many of these people aren’t even Americans. Like Ron’s Australian caller, they don’t see how they can lose:

“Do the math, you can buy and rehab a home for $20,000, then rent for $900 a month,” he said. “Three to four months of the year, rent is going to pay the taxes.”

The person doing the math is from England, who thought “it would be quite good fun to have a look,” and ended up buying six houses, with plans for “many more.” Well, I wish him luck. The story points out he’s not buying the $1 OVV’s, but decent places in still-stable neighborhoods. However, it’s hard to keep an eye on a real-estate empire from across the pond, and I think he may be overestimating the rental market in a metro area about to lose not just its biggest employer, but its bedrock industry. I heard an estimate over the weekend that if GM and Chrysler go under, we can expect a 25 percent unemployment rate in Michigan. Which officially clears the betting table, I’d say. I don’t see how he can possibly lose.

Come the apocalypse, I’m moving to the Upper Peninsula, where I will bitch about winter eight months out of the year, instead of my customary five.

Anyway, there’s your official Depressing Modern Life update. How about some grim humor?

Alcohol: Cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. Especially when combined with firearms.

And now, felled as I was by the grippe this weekend, I’m going to bed for a brief spell. Carry on in my (koff, croak) absence.

A couple years ago, perusing Google Analytics in a fit of procrastination self-improvement, I noticed I had a single reader in Iceland. I wondered, in the following day’s entry, if it was a real person or a robo-server checking in from Reykjavik. I’ve always had a fascination with Iceland, and once seriously considered taking a two-week solo vacation there, touring the volcanic plains on Icelandic ponies. It never happened, but I still think that if I’m ever fit enough to travel 25 miles per day by horseback at a brisk tolt, and at peace with three meals a day of mutton, I’m gonna do it, just you wait.

The following day I received a note from a man with the initials H.K., announcing himself as my regular reader in Iceland. Signs and wonders of the internet age.

Anyway, I mentioned Iceland again yesterday, linking to Michael Lewis’ marvelous dissection of the financial meltdown there, in Vanity Fair, which you should read, because it is one interesting piece of journalism. This choice passage sums it up nicely:

(A) hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

It was almost that simple. And crazy.

Anyway, what did I find in my e-mail yesterday but another note from H.K., still reading us after all these years. He asks that I not use his full name, because there are only 300,000 Icelanders and everyone knows everybody else. His account of how the financial crisis played out there is so interesting I think it deserves wider distribution. And so:

As a long time reader and (maybe) still your only Icelandic reader I feel the need to send you a e-mail every time you mention Iceland on your blog. Searching for the last (and first) letter I wrote to you and seeing that it was from the spring of 2007 made me almost miss those golden days at the height of the madness back home in Iceland. I say almost because although everybody was spending money and trying to make themselves believe that they were happy, things were truly fucked up.

But as I said, I’m one of the lucky ones. I love living here in Copenhagen and I haven’t been so happy in years. Without this recession I would never have dared to move out my comfort zone back home and now I live in a big global city and have a great job (which I hopefully will not get laid off from).

File that one under So You Think You’ve Got It Tough.

Here’s a passage from the Lewis article that stayed with me:

Here is yet another way in which Iceland echoed the American model: all sorts of people, none of them Icelandic, tried to tell them they had a problem. In early 2006, for instance, an analyst named Lars Christensen and three of his colleagues at Denmark’s biggest bank, Danske Bank, wrote a report that said Iceland’s financial system was growing at a mad pace, and was on a collision course with disaster. “We actually wrote the report because we were worried our clients were getting too interested in Iceland,” he tells me. “Iceland was the most extreme of everything.” Christensen then flew to Iceland and gave a speech to reinforce his point, only to be greeted with anger. “The Icelandic banks took it personally,” he says. “We were being threatened with lawsuits. I was told, ‘You’re Danish, and you are angry with Iceland because Iceland is doing so well.’ Basically it all had to do with what happened in 1944,” when Iceland declared its independence from Denmark. “The reaction wasn’t ‘These guys might be right.’ It was ‘No! It’s a conspiracy. They have bad motives.’” The Danish were just jealous!

The Danske Bank report alerted hedge funds in London to an opportunity: shorting Iceland.

I guess you can’t really fault the Danes; they tried to deliver the message. But when the message was ignored, they did what investors do: Positioned themselves to profit. You knew durn well I was a snake before you brought me in.

A wee bit of bloggage:

I don’t know if you non-subscribers can read this WSJ story, but here’s hoping. And here’s the nut graf:

Marketers, politicians and consumers like to imagine a world of solar panels, wind turbines and cars fueled by wood chips. But none of that gadgetry packs the here-and-now punch of a decades-old option: plugging leaky homes with a caulk gun.

It’s like finding out your mother was right when she said to eat your vegetables.

People sometimes express amazement at the shenanigans of the Detroit City Council. No way do members show up in tiaras, call one another “Shrek” and play not the race card, but the whole race deck, you might think. Well, you’d be wrong:

On a dizzying day that ended with the threat of a court fight to block the regionalization plan, Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins launched into a tirade Thursday. She lambasted the media and suburban officials, said council members have been called “crazy, stupid monkeys in a zoo” and said the deal follows a history of European settlers who pillaged, raped and slaughtered indigenous people.

The 17-minute speech was capped by cheers and ended with Collins leading the council and 40 spectators in the song “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

And there’s video!

Finally, Lance Mannion delivers a writing lesson. Beautifully.

So here it is Friday, and we’re having some unseasonable warmth — in the low 50s already, headed another 10 degrees higher. All this talk of the northern latitudes has me thinking of midnight suns and the necessity of enjoying gifts like this while they last. So adieu for the weekend, and let’s hope for a little bit of springtime, for H.K. in Copenhagen and all the rest of us.