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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 26, 2002
A Plague of C-students
Mac: You missed one in your litany of Bush's Japanese screw-ups: "For a century and a half, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times," he said in an address to Tokyo lawmakers. A century and a half? Shurely shome mishtake, unless that whole Pearl Harbor thing was just an early screen test for Jerry Bruckheimer. Sure enough, his aides cleaned up the mess again, and on the White House website the speech is incorrectly transcribed as saying "for half a century ..." So add history to the list of things Bush doesn't know squat about. Not very comforting, is it?
Understand, I'm not attacking Bush because he has a good-ol'-boy accent. So did our last President. Neither of them were exactly characters from Faulkner. Both had some of the best educations the world has to offer. The difference is Bush was a C student, and what's much worse, appears to take pride in the fact that he was a C student (remember his speech at Yale last year?). What concerns me is that he appears to have no impetus to learn, to notice and correct his mistakes. It suggests that behind the scenes, in the Oval Office chats we won't know about until after this administration is over, Bush sits and nods his way through important policy deliberations, trying his best to look intelligent and interested in time-honored C-student fashion. It suggests that Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld are really running the show. Is this not something to be ringing the alarm bells about?
As for Enron, I think Lewis has the genesis of a fair point: Congress and the country are searching for scapegoats; Lay and Skilling are the most convenient targets. Obviously this (like Bush) is disingenuously simple-minded; there simply had to be more people involved in this conspiracy. But Lewis' alternative seems to be: let's scapegoat all Enron employees instead (except for "lowly clerks, some blue-collar types out in the field, the mentally incompetent"). The answer lies somewhere between these two extremes, and it's going to take a lot of hard-nosed investigation to determine exactly where. But I'm inclined to think most of these non-senior managers are innocent through incompetence. They probably breezed through their days like most working stiffs, their minds elsewhere, and didn't notice the subtle clues that heavy stuff was going down because they spent their meetings trying their best to look ... intelligent and interested. I suggest we start a fund to look into the cause of and cures for C-student-itus.
--Chris
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