Underachievement blues

Did we have too much riding on Bode Miller? Can any one man really live up to our unquenchable thirst for disappointment? Do we need to diversify our downer expectations? It seems so -- and, according to Philip Maddocks, George Bush intends to do something about it.

Saying the nation had become far too dependent on American skier Bode Miller to fuel its need for disappointment, President Bush outlined an ambitious program designed to wean the country off its dependence on a single athlete for its frustration.

Fortunately, this is an administration with vast resources of underachievement at its command.

Lost in the stacks

Books come and go so quickly in these postmodern, post-literate times, what with all the other media competing for our attention. The book you see on the new fiction shelf in Borders is likely to be here today, gone tomorrow. All too many books are simply forgotten once they lose that brief window of exposure. And it's not just bookstores and publishers, with their constant turnover. Libraries constantly have to get rid of the old to make room for the new. Some of them are books that should be better known than they are.

Take Kate Jennings and Christina Stead. As our economy continues to careen along under the laissez faire ministrations of the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight, you can't help wondering what will happen when the wheels finally fall off. Two extraordinary Australian novelists, Christina Stead (The House of All Nations) and Kate Jennings (Moral Hazard), writing 60 years apart, provide some fascinating answers. Both writers provide a woman's view of what then was almost exclusively a man's world, and which hasn't changed all that much since.

We can identify with the protagonist, and her outsider status makes her all the more effective a mole for the rest of us in as she burrows into “a firm whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas. A firm where women were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag.”

...

“To date, no follow-up. Nothing. Nada. As if afflicted with Alzheimer’s, the Fed [Federal Reserve] remains adamant that banks can police themselves,” Cath muses after the collapse of a hedge fund modeled on Long Term Capital Management. The spectacular demise of LTCM in 1998 was an eye-opener for industry insiders, but after a bailout arranged by the Fed it was quickly forgotten. “Deregulation rackets along like a runaway train, banking lobbyists clinging to its side, climbing into the cab, waving from the windows, hollering in their exhilaration. Hoo-ha.”

By the way, the near disaster that closes Moral Hazard took place under President Clinton, when largely unregulated hedge funds were starting to get frisky, as they again are now, but when we still had a functioning government. Now -- judging from Iraq, Katrina, Portgate and God knows what else -- not so much. Read 'em and weep.

Everything I know about surviving winter I learned from the cats.

They just sort of slow down and snuggle up together. Not a bad idea.