On today’s This Week (ABC News) George Will called my hero, Robert Kuttner, a reactionary liberal.  I’m not sure I know what that means.  Between Krugman last week and Kuttner this week, poor Will has taken some heat, so I assume that his comment represented his frustration getting the best of him.  While I have a great deal of respect for his baseball knowledge, Will generally bats in the Ted Williams’ range – good enough for baseball, but not good enough for political and economic analysis.

“Reactionary” in the most general sense describes a person that favors reaction.  In recent times, it has become a synonym for ultra-conservative, which explains my initial confusion.  George is very cleverly mixing the general sense with a perceived popular distaste for the specific sense, generating a negative connotation.  That said, the question remains whether a liberal can be reactionary and whether Kuttner is such a liberal.

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POV (“Point of View”) is talked about a lot in discussions on how to write fiction.  (For the uninitiated, I have defined it in another post.)  Here I want to speak to a multidimensional POV for just one character.

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The CEOs of the big three American automobile companies got blasted in congressional hearings, especially today.  Never mind the fly down in corporate jets or how much the CEOs are making.  The question is: do you want to own more of GM?

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While we all are trying to catch our breath and recover from the last election, it is useful to sift through the debris a little.  As I sit here enjoying my Sunday fix of caffeine via some strong Peet’s coffee (Colombian, the best coffee in the world), here are four small points that come to mind from the depths of my nostaglia:

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Michael Crichton has died.

The author of popular sci-fi novels like The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park probably achieved more fame from the movies that were made from them.  He also revitalized the late night TV soap opera with ER.

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Chris Hedges in a report on truthdig points out that “we live in two Americas.  One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world.  It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.  The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system.  This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.  It cannot differentiate between lies and truth.”  (An illustrious colleague at my day job brought this report to my attention – thank you, Rick.)

Chris definitely makes some valid points in this report.  Yet I believe that he doesn’t go far enough.  In the following I extrapolate his arguments.

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Bill O’Reilly has now called Massachusetts a fascist state (Nov. 6 O’Reilly Factor).  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!  This man is so far out in right field (notice I did say right) that I must respond, even though my audience is certainly smaller than the dwindling far right that feed off his rants and ravings.

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While I’m generally pleased with the results of the election, I’m wary of the US public permitting euphoria to rule the day.  The main reason for voting for change is to roll up our sleeves and fix things that need fixing.  In other words, Mr. Obama has to apply a full court press to the nation’s problems.  This is fraught with dangers because a basic trait of human nature is to resist change!  Yet euphoria must be replaced by realism.

There are two major domestic problems our President-elect must face: controlling capitalistic greed and fixing a broken healthcare system.  These are related. 

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At times I will include in the writing category of my blog a post corresponding to a review of a book I’m adding to my bookshelf.  While not every book in the bookshelf has a review, when they do, there is something special about the book-or, I just felt like reviewing it!

Elsewhere I have remarked that Koontz is a much better horror story writer than King.  His one consistent theme is that there is evil in the world and good people can stand up to it.  We only have to read recent headline stories to know the former is true: the killing of Hudson’s mother, brother, and nephew; the brutal murder of the anchor woman in Little Rock; the killing of a NJ woman by her husband; the beheading of tourists by the Taliban in Afghanistan; the threat by a pair of skinheads to kill a presidential candidate.  We have become insensitive to the evil because there is so much of it.  Some of the people in Hudson’s neighborhood heard the shots but did not react-they hear shots often in that neighborhood.  The tourist bus incident in Afghanistan went out of the news as fast as it went in-we expect horror stories from that part of the world now.

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