Shots in the Dark

One of the things I’ve always liked about U2 is the band’s rebel status. From its wonderful, startling first record, “Boy,” to the “Achtung Baby” experimentation of the ’90s, U2 has always kept one foot squarely in the outsider’s camp. And I think that’s kept their music fresh and inspiring.

But over the past few years, U2 has become as socially acceptable and conservative as, say, Sheryl Crow. That’s partly because they’ve mellowed somewhat, and their audience has aged. I’m told by those who’ve seen U2 shows on their current tour that Bono has taken up the unfortunate habit of pulling children up onto the stage. I may be old-fashioned, but the thought of bringing your child to a rock show appalls me. Rock should not be little kid-friendly.

A bigger factor may be Bono’s politicking. Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredibly important, more important than his music, although you can’t really separate them—the latter helps broadcast the former. But because of Bono’s aid work, U2 has become a way for slick politicos to claim street cred without risking the possibility of embarrassment.

For example: Larry Summers has listed Bono as his “favorite performer,” and the New York Post reports that Hillary Clinton has U2 on her iPod. Time magazine named Bono one of its persons of the year. I’m told that former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle—now a lobbyist—was near the stage at a recent U2 show in Washington.

Now, come on. Does anyone believe that Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton ever listen to U2? Someone should ask them to name three U2 albums…or three U2 songs. Or three members of U2.

So here’s what I think U2 ought to do the next time they head into the studio: Make a record that is so passionate, so political, and so rebellious that no upstanding politician could safely support it. U2 needs to reclaim that sense of danger it used to have….

…and the strike is over, though the trains still aren’t running.

“We got nothing. Absolutely nothing,” said George Perlstein, a member of the Transit Workers’ Union executive board.

Which makes one wonder why exactly the union went out on strike in the first place…whether union head Roger Touissant overestimated the union’s staying power or level of public support…and just how much longer Touissant will remain head of that union after the dust settles. No one’s going to be very happy about a strike that devastated New York businesses for three days before Christmas…and that won the union “absolutely nothing.”

And while Mayor Bloomberg made a big mistake describing union leaders as “thuggish,” Touissant was equally offensive in comparing the transit strikers to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks was not breaking the law so that she would get to retire at age 50, rather than 55….

As Harvard president, Larry Summers has adjusted several of his more liberal positions so as to curry favor, or simply not alienate, the Republican congressional majority—by refusing to challenge enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, for example, or promoting patriotism at Harvard by pushing for the return of ROTC to campus. Not that it matters—the GOP is sticking it to higher education anyway.

In voting to cut the federal budget by some $40 billion, the Republicans in Washington have slashed public support for higher education. Here’s how the Times describes the cuts:

Nearly one-third of all the savings in the final budget bill comes from student aid, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

Under the bill, college students would pay higher interest rates on loans. Many banks will receive lower subsidies. And the Education Department will work with the Internal Revenue Service to ferret out students and parents who underreport incomes on financial aid applications.

…”This is the biggest cut in the history of the federal student loan program,” said David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for public and private colleges and universities.

It’s yet another irony of the Summers administration….ironies which stem from philosophical incoherence or position-shifting for political advantage.

Summers has a visceral dislike of the left, and that’s another reason why he’s taken some of these positions; he doesn’t want to espouse the same political views as, say, Cornel West or Richard Thomas. Of course, the left does believe in federal support of education. So there is that, then.

I’ll admit, the thought of Johnny Damon in pinstripes is going to take some getting used to…but for the Yankees, it’s an excellent move. One, it puts the Red Sox in a jam—there just aren’t many good centerfielders left to sign, and it’s psychologically devastating to the team. (Imagine if Jorge Posada signed with the BoSox.) And two, it helps the Yankees considerably. Let’s face it: Bubba Crosby just wasn’t the man to play center every day. In Damon, you have a guy who hits over .300 and wreaks havoc on the basepaths. Plus, he allows Derek Jeter to hit second, where he’s probably a bigger offensive threat.

It’s weird, though—you now have on the Yankees the guy who crushed them in that ghastly Game Seven of the 2004 ALCS.

Well, if you can’t beat him, sign him.

Which gives the Yankees a lineup something like this: Damon, Jeter, A-Rod, Sheffield, Matsui, Giambi, Posada, Robinson Cano, Andy Phillips.

Wow. That’s going to be tough to beat.

What is this? A subway just rolled past outside my window, heading north to 125th Street.

Has the union seen the logic of my arguments and caved?

Broadway outside my window is strangely empty today, at least as empty as it ever gets. Perhaps people are staying home, or gave up their cars to take the train in from the suburbs. Whichever. The novelty of this strike has worn off fast, even for me, and I’m lucky enough not to have to commute to an office. But yesterday I did have errands to do down around Lincoln Center, and so I wound up walking there and back—about 110 blocks all told. Today, Christmas shopping for the nieces and nephews, and there isn’t much of that up here around Columbia University.

Meanwhile, the union is fighting with itself, as it should be. It’s also facing fines of a million dollars a day, and additional fines for specific union leaders, for every day the strike continues—and it doesn’t have a lot of money in the bank.

It did, however, manage to plant a wildly sympathetic story in the Times. It’s just bizarre. Reporter Steven Greenhouse writes:

Just hours before the strike deadline, the authority’s chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority’s soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. The union balked, and then shut down the nation’s largest transit system for the first time in a quarter-century.

Greenhouse emphasizes that the increase in health care contributions would save the MTA only $20 million over three years, roughly the cost of two days of police overtime. “This war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years,” he writes in a line that reads as if penned by transit worker union chief Roger Touissant.

After the jump, however, Greenhouse quotes one pension expert who says that the measure would save the MTA $160 million over ten years, and after that about $80 million a year. Which makes it sound more worth fighting for.

I suspect that with every passing day, the union’s position will grow weaker. Tomorrow is Thursday, probably the last day many people will come to work before Christmas. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a downtime for most workers (although a very busy one for retailers). People will find a way to cope. According to Gawker, they’re coping by a) walking to work, b) staying home and gambling on the Internet, and c) having sex.

Meanwhile, for the union, those fines will start piling up…and the workers will start calculating whatever raises they gain against whatever pay they lose.

Meanwhile, over at Foxnews.com, the march to turn Larry Summers into a right-wing martyr to political correctness continues. Summers is used as the prime example in an anti-PC diatribe.

Here’s what Foxnews.com contributor Wendy McElroy has to say:

Last January, when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers raised the mere possibility of biological differences as an explanation for the ‘gender imbalance’ in science, a vicious PC backlash forced him to apologize publicly no less than three times. After what some called his “Soviet-show-trial-style apologies,” Summers made an act of contrition by pledging “to spend $50 million over the next decade to improve the climate for women on campus.”

Sigh. Where to begin? President Summers didn’t raise the “mere possibility” of gender imbalances. He strongly suggested their reality, and dared his audience to “prove me wrong.” Then there’s the question of whether genuine outrage and “vicious PC backlash” are the same. (Answer: sometimes, perhaps, but not in this case.) And who exactly does Fox cite (in a hyperlink) as the source of that “Soviet-show-trial-style apologies” line? Well, it comes from the National Journal’s Stuart Taylor, who’s pretty right-wing himself. So that’s kind of like Dick Cheney quoting Jesse Helms as an objective authority.

Irony watch: Clinton-administration economic hero Larry Summers has become a right-wing hero.

Beyond irony, this is a very tricky position for Summers—it means he’s lost the left, but at the same time, he’s really not a good fit for conservatives, and if he spoke out against something they believe in, he’d lose that base of support fast.

Hmmm. Perhaps that explains his silence on intelligent design.

That’s the question PBS reporter John Merrow asks in the Christian Science Monitor. Name the presidents of any three American colleges or universities, Merrow challenges readers.

Go ahead…

Concludes Merrow: How could the public know the names of higher education leaders, who are largely silent on the great issues of the day? Today’s presidents only get noticed if they say something outrageous (Harvard’s Lawrence Summers’s comments about women and science), live too lavishly (former American University President Benjamin Ladner), or make millions (Lynn University’s Donald Ross).

It is yet another irony of President Summers’ tenure that a man who was hired to put the role of university president back on the cultural map is now being used as an example of a president known for all the wrong reasons.

But then, President Summers has missed some obvious opportunities to speak out on issues of the day which would make sense for someone in his role: intelligent design, for example. But, as Merrow points out, only three university presidents have publicly spoken out against considering intelligent design as science: Cornell president Hunter Rawlings, University of Idaho President Timothy P. White, and University of Kansas Chancellor Bob Hemenway.

This is pathetic. Why hasn’t Summers, who has made science the singular emphasis of his presidency, spoken out on this issue? Is it because he doesn’t want to spark any more controversy? Or because somehow the issue is too obvious, and in his contrarian way, he thinks it’s beneath him to talk about something so glaring?

Summers’ spokesman, John Longbrake, pointed out not too long ago that Summers had addressed a Harvard club audience on the subject of intelligent design. But that’s preaching to the converted, as it were.

It’s too late now—the tide seems to be turning against intelligent design. But it is unfortunate that, back when Summers’ words might have meant something, the Harvard president stayed mysteriously silent.

The Crimson runs a fascinating piece on the coalition of department chairs at Harvard which has quietly developed into a powerful anti-Summers faculty bloc.

I enjoy irony, so I often point out the ironies of Summers’ presidency, and here’s another one: A president who has set out to diminish the power of the faculty may well wind up increasing that power, because he has united so many professors in opposition to him.

And from what I hear, Summers has returned to his imperial manner these days, and is acting as if the brouhaha of last spring never happened….

In Cambridge, the drama is far from over.

As I write this and look out my window—multi-tasking!—cars on Broadway are stacked like shoes in Imelda Marcos’ closet. People are getting frustrated; I’ve heard the distant sound of one screaming woman, and the bleating of horns drifts upward toward the sky.

Existential digression: Why do people in bumper-to-bumper traffic honk their horns?

All of this is because the Transit Workers Union has gone on strike, and buses and subways aren’t running.

The primary issue is retirement benefits. At the moment, transit workers can retire at 55 and receive full pension benefits, which are substantial—half their annual pay, among other things. I’m not sure how many other Americans have that assurance after only 25 years on the job.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority wanted to raise the retirement age from 55 to 62 for new hires. That seems reasonable to me. But earlier this year, the union, which gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to New York’s wildly corrupt state legislators, pushed a bill that would actually lower the retirement age from 55 to 50. (It was actually passed; Governor George Pataki vetoed it.)

The MTA has dropped its demand for a higher retirement age for new workers and is instead asking that future employees contribute six percent of their wages toward pensions, up from two percent now. The union refuses to consider the idea.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I sympathize with the workers, who often have tough jobs. Would you want to drive a train underground for eight hours a day for 25 years? Or maneuver a bus through midtown Manhattan? That can’t be good for the blood pressure.

Of course, there are some union workers who have pretty cushy jobs—subway attendants, for example, who do shockingly little work and frequently manifest a ton of attitude if you dare to interrupt them while they’re reading a newspaper or chatting on their cell phones. Three-quarters of the time they’re being paid to sit in a booth and drink coffee.

But going back to the workers’ side, the MTA does seem to adjust its budget numbers arbitrarily—they have a deficit, they need to raise fares; they have a surplus, they want to build a new headquarters. I don’t trust ’em.

On the other hand, New York’s transit workers are pretty well paid, and they have great benefits. (They don’t have to contribute a thing for health insurance, for example.) The average subway or bus driver is paid $63,000 a year, which is a living wage, though far from excessive in this area.

On balance, I think I’m supporting management on this one. The union wants its workers to be able to retire at age 50? Come on.

Two other points: As difficult as this strike is going to be, I think it would have been much worse if it had come when first expected, about four or five days ago. This city is already shutting down for Christmas; many people just won’t come in to work. And the week between Christmas and New Year’s is dead anyway. As is the week after New Year’s, for that matter. So I think a mid-December strike would have been worse.

Second, it’s days like this when I’m especially pleased that the office I commute to is about ten feet away from my bedroom….