Vic Socotra

03 August 2008

The Rose

I’m getting a late start this morning. Not my fault, of course. I blame it on the New York Times. First, there was the news about the commercial rocket failure that destroyed three light-weight satellites. Growing pains in the launch program, I assume, and a predictable risk. Still, there was more.

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Along with the space vehicles was a payload composed of the ashes of famous people who had been promised that, for a fee, their remains would orbit above our blue marble for eternity.

Actor James Doohan, the famed “Scotty” of the original Star Trek television show was among them. I understand his Wikipedia page has already been updated to reflect the failure to achieve orbital insertion.

My mind reeled, though I knew I could not20change the laws of physics and change the outcome, any more than we can change the march of technological progress, even if it is a little flawed. That realization came with the stunning news that I could search the criminal records of all fifty states for names of interest for free.

This is fantastic news. There used to be commercial services that could accomplish the same thing, for a hefty fee, and now you can get erroneous and damaging information for nothing.

That is about what it is worth, and I won’t give you the link to the service, since you will immediately want to go look me up and see if that unfortunate inc ident in Tulsa a few years ago made it into cyberspace. I was relieved to find that it had not when I searched for my own name.

Of course, there is someone else who does have a criminal record who goes by my name, so you can see that this bold new capability comes with a bit of baggage. The information includes traffic violations, which makes this association with criminals and thugs a complicated bit of business.
It was sort of fun searching the names of my adversaries to see what I might find. That idiot who lives on the Seventh Floor was among the first, and it was worth it.

Of course, just because a person of that name caused all that mischief doesn’t mean that it is actually him, of course. There are a lot of people with criminal tendencies who share the same name. It would not be fair to tag him with the crimes of others, though that, of course, is the practical consequence of the new site.

The Bard had it right, as he did with so many things:

    JULIET:
          “ 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
          Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
          What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
          Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
          Bel onging to a man. O, be some other name!
          What's in a name? that which we call a rose
          By any other name would smell as sweet;
          So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
          Retain that dear perfection which he owes
          Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
          And for that name which is no part of thee
          Take all myself.”

Experts in literature tell us that there is a hidden context to the lines- an embedded joke lost to us today. They say that Shakespeare was also making light of the rival Rose Theatre that competed with his Globe. The public restrooms of 1594 at the Rose were said to be of poor quality, and thus the passage has a duel text about the pungent odor.

I don’t know about that, but it certainly could be true. What is in a name, after all?

President Truman gets the onus, or the credit, for using the Bomb, though the course had been set long before. As creatures with limited context, we find it useful to assign blame to things, and personalize the consequences of decades of bizarre public policy decisions.

Therefore, while a bit arbitrary, I believe Dan Rather caused the downturn in the economy that accompanied the end of the Clinton Administration, and ushered in the policies of Alan Greenspan in his fourth and fifth terms as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

In fact, there is no evidence that the economy was in recession when the second President Bush took the oath of office in January, 2001.

Sure, the growth that had sustained the irrational exuberance o f the Clinton decade had slowed, but that is the way of things. The growth for which he gets the credit actually started under Poppy Bush, though he is remembered as an economic loser.

Of course, the big Reagan Defense Build-up, the one that defeated global communism, actually was already in progress under peacenik Jimmy Carter. I didn’t say personalization was fair; it just happens to be about the way we remember things.

There would have been a recession even if President Gore had presided upon it. But still, the confluence of the end of centralized power in broadcast journalism that gave us nearly a decade of unprecedented low-inte rest rates, the junk housing market, and the bitter end of the rope for a lot of people.

So, I am forced to conclude that if Dan, in his commanding role as the CBS Evening News Anchorman everything would have been fine.

These days the influence of any one commentator has been diluted by the number of them. Hardball with Chris Matthews, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly, take your choice. There are so many that it is easy to ignore just about all of them. Including Dan. He is still a television host and interpreter of the world, though he did not accompany Candidate Obama on his triumphal world tour with all the20other anchors.

I wouldn’t wonder if you didn’t know that. He is currently working at a place called HDNet, a high-definition cable network bankrolled by Internet mogul Mark Cuban, noted owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National basketball Association. They say he might purchase the Chicago Cubs for a cool $1.3 billion, so who said there was a recession, anyway? If Dan had a comment, I did not hear it.

Channel 775, or whatever it is in your market, is not where Dan Rather thought he was going to wind up, any more than I would have thought I would wind up happy as a clam at Big Pink. I was thinking about that20at poolside with Jiggs and Sarah One late yesterday as the storm clouds began to roll over the pool, and we realized we were going to have to do something else.

None of us are quite where we thought we would be. Although, I must say that with the new search engine, we can all be someplace much more accessible than we thought.

I’m sure that when you look me up you will not think that it was me responsible for the theft of articles from a vehicle. What I actually did was in another state, at a different time. And it is not in the database.

At least not yet.

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