My American Unhappiness

My own particular American unhappiness the other night was that I was a broadband addict deprived of my fix. The storms that moved through Tuesday night knocked out our DSL line, at least that's what I thought. But when I called AT&T Support, they thought it might be my router and scheduled a tech to come out this afternoon. But just before the tech was supposed to come today, the broadband light on my router turned from flashing red to steady green. (I called back and canceled the appointment. Turns out it was the line.)

Nearly a day and a half without home wifi. What to do? I used my iPhone to access the net, but soon tired of that. I was looking for something more immersive than a tiny screen. Tried to do some writing, but the charm of that tiny touchscreen keyboard with the autocorrect with a mind of its own soon faded (it's a lot more pleasant when you can think of it as an added option, not a necessity).

Thrown back on my own resources, I decided to try mitigating my American unhappiness with a book of the same title -- My American Unhappiness, by Dean Bakopoulos, which I had received for Father's Day. The story unfolds slowly, and I was starting to get bored. Not the sort of instant gratification I get bopping around the web. But the voice of the hapless, clueless and utterly unreliable narrator, Zeke Pappas, grew on me. I really enjoyed the book and was sorry when it ended.

Bakopoulos provides a wry, gently satirical view of modern American life and love, with a humorously untrustworthy though endearing narrator who flounders around and gets into all sorts of trouble (including with an obscure -- and hopefully fictitious -- branch of Homeland Security). Great satire about pseudo-academic research and the think tanks and foundations that support it -- thus, the "Inventory of American Unhappiness." Also a fun read for Madison residents. (An incredibly maladroit attempt at seduction takes place in the dark, right here in Wingra Park.) Zeke Pappas is a character I'll remember fondly.

And I'm glad my home internet was down. If it had been available, I might have been too impatient to stick around for the real enjoyment the book provides -- especially after reading J. Robert Lennon's review in the Sunday NYT Book Review recently, one of those Times reviews of a second novel (the author's first was Please Don't Come Back from the Moon) that damns it with faint praise:

But the author seems a bit lost, adrift in unfamiliar waters, and the book feels less like a second novel than it does another try at a first.

It's as if Lennon and I read different novels. Maybe it's just that somebody who pens that sort of exercise in critical one-upsmanship and general snippiness just can't appreciate the wise, sunny good humor of a book like this.

Tell Scott Walker you won't tolerate this attack on the rights of credit union members

There's a lot of history in this photo, and a lot of it sucks, especially the most recent. I photographed this Mirro Employees Credit Union billboard in Manitowoc, WI in 1980. Mirro Aluminum Company, the famous aluminum cooking utensil company, was once one of the largest employers in Manitowoc. Much of it had already been moved out of the city when I took the photo, and now it's all long gone now.

The sign points to an earlier era in credit union history, when they were chartered as cooperatives to provide financial services to working people at a time when banks mostly did not serve people of limited means. The umbrella was a familiar symbol of the credit union movement. Most credit unions no longer market themselves this way. Instead, they position themselves as member-owned banks, providing a full range of modern banking services to their members.

But the umbrella still has a symbolic resonance. As member-owned financial cooperatives, credit unions are about the only pro-consumer financial institutions left. The banksters have stolen practically everything else, and now they want to destroy credit unions by enabling them to become banks, pretty much without notice, in the dark of night and without sharing the resulting bank equity with their members. Brett Thompson, President & CEO of the Wisconsin Credit Union League explains what they're up to:

The Wisconsin Credit Union League is asking Gov. Scott Walker to veto provisions in the state budget bill that would allow direct conversions of member-owned credit unions to shareholder-owned banks.

The direct-conversion provisions subvert the interests of a credit union’s full membership to that of a few who intend to own and profit from a stockholder-owned – and not member-owned – business structure.

The many major deficiencies in the conversion language are stunning. The provisions adopted by the Legislature allow for the direct charter conversion of a credit union to stock-bank with few meaningful notice requirements, no protections of members’ voting rights and no requirement that any equity in the converted institution be returned to members.

Check out the rest of the story here -- and then call Governor Walker's office to stop this assault on the rights of the nearly 40% of Wisconsin residents who rely on credit unions for financial services.