Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Starving Artists

You know how you can tell the economy is getting bad? Well, WCBS-AM has been pushing a bad economy for months now, and this morning they found the perfect example: A very recent college graduate, a fine arts major, who'd like to move to Brooklyn to "pursue her painting" or something, isn't at it straight out of the gate, instead "living with a family friend" upstate somewheres. Oh, it's bad out there. Cry me a river. (As to the title of this post, it was used as a headline recently, and I couldn't pick up any irony.)

Me, I notice what I always notice: At the beginning of any crisis, there's a blip of a mention of some wacky liberal cause that led to it, and then nothing. Remember the to-do a year or so back about discrimination in lending? Anyone think that led to over-generous lending? Well, it was floated. Maybe once. And then disappeared off the radar. (To be honest, I'm no economist, so I may be completely wrong there.) Oddly, in all this, I haven't heard Bush blamed, although I'm sure they'd love to and are implying it. I guess they have their hands full hating him for other reasons, or no reason at all.

I chanced across a video of the famous Buckley-Gore Vidal debate. I gotta say, Buckley's famous line looks a lot better in writing than it does live, with him hemming and hawing and talking through his nose in some pompous accent, and the two of them grinning at each other like it's a big joke. In his defense, the various videos are of poor quality, with lots of three-way crosstalk, and Vidal certainly seemed offended later (much as Buckley felt bad about it later). So, again, it may just be me. It is a beautiful line.

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