When Work Swallows You Up

Where have I been? Why, with the excep­tion of that bit about Arnold men­tion­ing BC in his appear­ance at Meet the Press last Sun­day, have I been so silent? It’s noth­ing very excit­ing. I’ve been work­ing, head down, pretty much every day for about 3 weeks. Aside from going to the Van­cou­ver User Expe­ri­ence (VanUE) meet­ing on Tues­day night — and not even stay­ing for the after party, as I had to get back home and to bed in order to get up before 6 AM the next morn­ing, and I knew that if I didn’t get enough sleep, I’d have got­ten sick again—I’ve kept to bed, com­puter and client site (this past week).

I’m finally look­ing at a day off tomor­row, and all of the weather fore­casts are for a day like today, full of rain. Pam has class for most of the day, so I think I’m going to do some­thing I haven’t done in a long time; I’m going to go to an after­noon mati­nee. I don’t even know what I’m going to see, but the prospect of pop­corn in a nice warm movie the­atre tak­ing in a lit­tle bit of enter­tain­ment on a rainy day sounds awfully good to me.

I’ve checked the local the­atre list­ings, and am not sure what I’m going to see, but I can tell you it won’t be a big, depress­ing movie or a love story, and it cer­tainly won’t be any­thing that in any remote way reminds me of Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture, Pro­to­typ­ing or User Testing.

Except for bit­tor­rent, I haven’t watched all that many movies. Why do I resort to bit­tor­rent?  There is no Net­flix here in Canada, and I’ve heard many peo­ple tell me that the equiv­a­lent, Zip.ca  is not very good. There is also no stream­ing of movies over TiVo here and unlike the Amer­i­can ver­sion of the store, there are no stream­ing movies on Amazon.ca either.  Even the iTunes store doesn’t the vari­ety of movies for Cana­dian accounts as it does in the Amer­i­can store, so the AppleTV is not as use­ful either (unless you buy gift­cards on the other side of the bor­der and load up an Amer­i­can account). So CRTC or who­ever is respon­si­ble for our Cin­e­matic Rights Time Warp, don’t you real­ize that you’ve actu­ally forced me into bit­tor­rent­ing movies, because there is really no con­ve­nient, reasonably-priced alter­na­tive? Video rental stores are kind of a pain (and seem so…20^th cen­tury), and I’m not really inter­ested in buy­ing DVDs (and cer­tainly haven’t popped for a Blu-Ray player).

On the sub­ject is Video Rentals, I couldn’t resist shar­ing this lit­tle nod to Abbott and Costello by Chris Gavaler, that I saw a while ago:

Who’s on First?

By Chris Gavaler

(A CUSTOMER steps up to a video-store counter with a stack of videos.)
CASHIER: Hi. Did you find every­thing you wanted?
CUSTOMER: (Hand­ing over mem­ber­ship card.) Yes, thanks. (Pause.) When is this one due back?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Yeah, when’s it due back?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Yes. The Day After Tomor­row.
CASHIER: Right.
CUSTOMER: Right. When’s it due back?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: I mean the movie. The Day After Tomor­row. When is it due?
CASHIER: Oh! I get it. That’s funny. You thought I meant-right, OK. It’s due the day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: The Day After Tomor­row is due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: Exactly.
CUSTOMER: And Before Sun­set?
CASHIER: Any­time before 10.
CUSTOMER: Is it the same as The Day After Tomor­row?
CASHIER: We close the same time every day. Ten o’clock.
CUSTOMER: But what day is the video due?
CASHIER: The Day After Tomor­row?
CUSTOMER: Why are you ask­ing me?
CASHIER: The Day After Tomor­row is due the day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: I know, but what about Before Sun­set?
CASHIER: Any­time before clos­ing.
CUSTOMER: But what day?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Before Sun­set?
CASHIER: You can bring it then if you want to, but we’re open till 10.
CUSTOMER: The movie! Before Sun­set. When is Before Sun­set due?
CASHIER: Oh! We did it again, didn’t we? Isn’t that just like that … what’s that sketch called? Any­way. Sorry. Before Sun­set is due the day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Thank you. (Pause.) Is that the same for the oth­ers?
CASHIER: You’re not rent­ing The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: Why not?
CASHIER: I don’t know. You can if you want to.
CUSTOMER: Well, I would like to rent the oth­ers, please.
CASHIER: I’ll check the com­puter.
CUSTOMER: For what?
CASHIER: The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: What’s in front of you?
CASHIER: (Look­ing through stack.) Well, we have The Day After Tomor­row and Before Sun­set. Then Seven, After Hours, 48 Hours, Ten, and Before Sun­rise. Hey, that’s funny, “before sunrise”-we could have got­ten con­fused about that too, huh?
CUSTOMER: Yeah. Could you ring them up, please?
CASHIER: So you don’t want The Oth­ers?
CUSTOMER: I want all of them.
CASHIER: But not The Oth­ers?
CUSTOMER: I want every­thing sit­ting right there in front of you.
CASHIER: OK, I’ll ring them up. (Pause.) I’m sorry, but your account lim­its you to six rentals.
CUSTOMER: Oh, OK, I won’t rent Ten.
CASHIER: Excuse me?
CUSTOMER: Get rid of Ten.
CASHIER: You have seven here.
CUSTOMER: I still want to rent Seven.
CASHIER: You’re not allowed to.
CUSTOMER: Why can’t I rent Seven?
CASHIER: Because it’s over the limit.
CUSTOMER: Right, but I want Seven. Get rid of Ten.
CASHIER: (Pause.) That would leave neg­a­tive three.
CUSTOMER: Excuse me?
CASHIER: You know what? We’ll just let it slide this time.
CUSTOMER: Thank you. (Pause.) Is that one due back the day after tomor­row, too?
CASHIER: Yes, you have 48 hours.
CUSTOMER: But is it due with the oth­ers?
CASHIER: You don’t have The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: What did you just ring up?
CASHIER: You want me to read these to you again?
CUSTOMER: No, just tell me when they’re due.
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: But what about the oth­ers?
CASHIER: You don’t have The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: Is 48 Hours due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: Yes, by 10 o’clock.
CUSTOMER: Is Ten due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: Yes, by 10 o’clock.
CUSTOMER: What about After Hours?
CASHIER: There’s a late fee.
CUSTOMER: For what?
CASHIER: If you return after hours.
CUSTOMER: The day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: All of them.
CUSTOMER: So it’s due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: By 10.
CUSTOMER: What about Seven?
CASHIER: You can bring it then if you want to, but we’re open till 10.
CUSTOMER: The movie! The movie! When is the movie Seven due?
CASHIER: (Hold­ing up each video one at a time.) Seven is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. The Day After Tomor­row is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. Before Sun­set is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. 48 Hours is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. After Hours is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. And Ten is due at 10 the day after tomor­row
CUSTOMER: Thank you! (Notic­ing the last video after a long pause.) But what about Before Sun­rise?
CASHIER: (Pause.) We’re not open before sun­rise.
(CUSTOMER gives up and walks out.)

On the other hand, the movie the­atres here are really nice, and I’m look­ing for­ward to that.

On Sun­day, the sun is sup­posed to come out, but alas, I will have to be get­ting back to work, and hope­fully won’t be too far behind from hav­ing taken a few hours off.

Arnold Says the US Should be More Like BC

Did I ever men­tion that my favourite TV theme is John Williams’ music to ‘Meet the Press’? It’s dri­ving, but catchy music, and the part where the vio­lins leap by a minor-ninth always sounds like a Mahler sym­phonic theme to me (I’m think­ing the 6^th or 7^th Sym­phony — one of these days I’ll play excerpts and point it out). The other part I like is near the end of it, where the brass break out into a bit of coun­ter­point, which has been said to be a musi­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of polit­i­cal spar­ring, but I just hear John Williams mak­ing a lit­tle nod to J.S. Bach.

Not long after that intro­duc­tion, we had one of those jaw-dropping, did-he-just-say-that? moments this morn­ing at break­fast. We had TiVO’ed Meet the Press (yes, once a US News Wonk, always a US News Wonk). The guests this morn­ing were the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, the Gov­er­nor of Penn­syl­va­nia, Ed Ren­dell, and the Gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia, Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger. The three men were all cam­paign­ing for spend­ing on US Infra­struc­ture. I was thrilled to hear the term ‘High-Speed Rail’ men­tioned more than a dozen times. What made us nearly spill our cof­fee was this bit, said by the ‘the Gov­er­na­tor’ himself:

Well, they had me fooled, at least in terms of a love-fest here between the pri­vate sec­tor and the gov­ern­ment when it comes to tran­sit. (The recent pro­ceed­ings of a law­suit by a mer­chant whose busi­ness was all but elim­i­nated by the Canada­Line con­struc­tion on Cam­bie Street comes to mind). Still, com­pared to the bit­ter­ness and hatred between all things pub­lic and pri­vate in the US, I guess we do have rel­a­tively more coop­er­a­tion here than they do there.

I will be thrilled to see high-speed rail show up in the US, and it would be even more sur­pris­ing to see them use British Colum­bia as the model for financ­ing it.

Eight Hundred Year's Young

I’m going to do a lit­tle rem­i­nisc­ing, but for a good rea­son, as you’ll see a lit­tle fur­ther on. Any­way, one of the best things I ever got to do in my life was study at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity. I went there for my Master’s degree. Intel­lec­tu­ally, it was one of the most intense and stim­u­lat­ing expe­ri­ences I’ve ever had.  The way that grad­u­ate school at Cam­bridge worked was dif­fer­ent from any other school I’ve attended, before or since.

First of all, I had a Tutor assigned to me that I met with weekly or a cou­ple of times a week. They were to help guide me in my research, typ­i­cally focus­ing on a key area or sub­ject. My sub­ject of con­cen­tra­tion for my Mas­ters stud­ies was the music, time, and cul­tural envi­ron­ment of the com­poser Alexan­der Scri­abin, as well as the theosophists and other French and Russ­ian spir­i­tual and lit­er­ary move­ments of the late nine­teenth and early twen­ti­eth cen­turies. My tutor, Alexan­der Goehr, was also my Com­po­si­tion teacher, and he was like no other teacher I’d ever had (or had since). He chal­lenged every assump­tion I ever had about music, the­ory or his­tor­i­cal study, forc­ing me to stretch intellectually.

Depend­ing on your degree — mine a ‘Mas­ter of Phi­los­o­phy’ in Music — but the degree didn’t have any­thing to do with ‘Phi­los­o­phy’, any more than a PhD is a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy — you had some sig­nif­i­cant project to fin­ish.  In my case, it was a port­fo­lio of music that I had to write dur­ing my year there (That was fine with me; I wanted to write music any­way.) I also had a series of essays to write at the end, so I spent a cou­ple of pretty gru­el­ing days in a room doing noth­ing but hand­writ­ing in lit­tle blue essay books.

So here’s where the really unique part of a Cam­bridge comes into play — Intel­lec­tual free­dom on a level I’d never seen: Along with my tuto­r­ial ses­sions with Pro­fes­sor Goehr, I was free to go to any lec­ture given any­where in the Uni­ver­sity on any sub­ject that inter­ested me. Some­times the lec­tures were on musi­cal sub­jects, includ­ing a series of spec­tac­u­lar lec­tures on com­posers through­out his­tory by the com­poser Robin Hol­loway, but some­times it had lit­tle or noth­ing to do with music. I vividly remem­ber a set of lec­tures on the Dutch Art and Archi­tec­ture move­ment called De Stijl, a brief period from 1917 to 1931, whose fol­low­ers included the painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Does­burg (who pub­lished a jour­nal by the same name), the painter Piet Mon­drian and the archi­tect Ger­rit Rietveld (who build a fas­ci­nat­ing geo­met­ri­cally inspired chair, called, inno­cently enough,  the Red and Blue Chair:

I also got pas­sion­ately inter­ested in the Com­me­dia dell’arte, a kind of impro­vised Ital­ian sit­u­a­tion com­edy that started in the 16^th cen­tury with stock char­ac­ters and shticks, but those stock char­ac­ters kept turn­ing up later in his­tory from Mozart and Rossini’s operas (The Mar­riage of Figaro and The Bar­ber of Seville) all the way to the set­ting of Albert Giraud’s Sym­bol­ist poetry, Pier­rot Lunaire by Arnold Schoen­berg in 1912).

There were sev­eral libraries on cam­pus, includ­ing Fac­ulty Libraries for cer­tain sub­jects, Indi­vid­ual Col­lege Libraries, as well as a huge, endear­ingly ugly archi­tec­tural mon­stros­ity, the Uni­ver­sity Library. It was designed by the archi­tect Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also known for design­ing those clas­sic red Eng­lish pub­lic tele­phone boxes, and it had all of the charm of those ubiq­ui­tous sym­bols of British util­i­tar­ian design. Scott is also known for the dark, modern-yet-gothic Bank­side Power Sta­tion on the Thames that has been since con­verted into the home for the Tate Mod­ern art Museum in London.

The UL, like the US Library of Con­gress, got a copy of every book pub­lished in Eng­land, and you could fre­quently take out books (although the rarer, older ones obvi­ously had to remain in the building).

So that was it; I wanted to learn? Curi­ous about any­thing in the world? Go for it. Learn.

I had the aca­d­e­mic equiv­a­lent of an all-you-can-eat buf­fet, either in books or lec­tures, not to men­tion a train ride away from Lon­don to hear con­certs or visit muse­ums, which I did sev­eral times. I had friends who were study­ing Met­al­lurgy, Phi­los­o­phy and Crim­i­nol­ogy, a good friend who was also a com­poser (and is now liv­ing in Paris), and met many schol­ars and musi­cians (I even remem­ber hang­ing out at the conductor/harpsichordist Christo­pher Hogwood’s house; his boyfriend at the time was an incred­i­bly good cook.)  At my col­lege, Clare Hall, which was a rel­a­tively recent addi­tion to the Uni­ver­sity, the head of the Col­lege was Sir Michael Stoker, a rel­a­tive of Bram Stoker (yes, the guy who wrote Drac­ula). I also met the great-nephew of the explorer Ernest Shack­le­ton, Sir Nicholas Shack­le­ton (who died a few years ago after a dis­tin­guished career as an expert on cli­mate change and a key fig­ure in the field of palaeo­ceanog­ra­phy). I remem­ber briefly meet­ing Pro­fes­sor Stephen Hawk­ing who was fac­ulty at the nearby Gonville and Caius Col­lege.  Even my college’s grounds had some claim to fame; one of the col­lege houses, on Har­vey Road, was called Key­ne­side. It was the birth­place of John May­nard Keynes, a famous British econ­o­mist. You may not have heard of Keynes, but you’ve prob­a­bly heard of the TARP— the Trou­bled Assets Relief Pro­gram— as well as Obama’s $787 bil­lion fis­cal stim­u­lus. Both of those items have been called Key­ne­sian inter­ven­tions where gov­ern­ment inter­venes in the activ­i­ties of mar­kets that are in trouble.

I still get the alumni mag­a­zine of Cam­bridge, and also a smaller yearly mag­a­zine from my col­lege, Clare Hall. Over the years they’ve got­ten a bit glossier, and my college’s web site is also look­ing bet­ter. The rea­son that my time there has sud­denly jumped to mind is the lat­est issue of the Cam­bridge Alumni mag­a­zine, CAM, which showed up today.   Accord­ing to this issue, as well as some extra inserts, this year Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity is cel­e­brat­ing that it turns 800 years old this year. It turns out that in 1209, schol­ars tak­ing refuge from hos­tile towns­men in Oxford migrated to the ancient Roman trad­ing post of Cam­bridge and set­tled there, mak­ing that year the ear­li­est record of study in that place.

800? I have to admit feel­ing a lit­tle giddy when I read that num­ber. I don’t know of many things that are 800 year’s old. Accord­ing to my brief research, the thir­teenth cen­tury includes sev­eral of The Cru­sades as well as the lives of St. Fran­cis of Assisi, Marco Polo, Genghis Kahn, Kublai Khan, Dante and Alexan­der Nevsky. It was the cen­tury that saw the inven­tion of glass mir­rors and eye­glasses, gun powder-fueled rock­ets (in China and Egypt), and the first Obser­va­tory (in Iran).  Cam­bridge pre­dates The Hun­dred Year’s War, King John’s sign­ing of the Magna Carta, The Ital­ian Renais­sance and just about every­thing else in his­tory.  Being con­nected to some­thing that, well, ancient, is unique for me;  I can’t trace my fam­ily his­tory to much before World War I. I was born in a rel­a­tively young coun­try (the US) and now live in an even younger coun­try, in a city that is one of the youngest and most mod­ern in the world. Boston had some­what of a feel of his­tory and the patina of Colo­nial Amer­i­cana on it, but noth­ing like 800 years!

So, happy 800^th Birth­day, ol’ Alma Mater. Too bad I won’t be around to see your 1,000^th birth­day in 2209, but I’ll bet that if mankind makes it that long, you will.

Higher Ground

I got out­side today, for the first time sev­eral days, since for a long while I was too weak even to get much fur­ther than the bath­room. The air was mild, and despite a good deal of clouds, there were what they call here ‘Sunny Breaks’, which are those (some­times brief) moments when the sun­beams break through and every­thing lights up. Today, they lit up the cro­cuses. Yes, March 1 and Spring has Sprung in the Lower Main­land. Despite some snow on the moun­tains (and I heard that some friends even went cross-country ski­ing on Cypress Moun­tain today), we are soon going to be back to ‘The Other Van­cou­ver’, which is just fine by me. The good weather also was appre­ci­ated by the Real­tors who were run­ning a cou­ple open houses on our street today.

We Were Lucky to Move Where and When We Did

When Pam and I moved to Canada, we said that it was because of Bush (who I often refer to as WPIUSH). I also wrote that it was because I looked ahead to a future that looked to be unpleas­ant, because of poor deci­sions by the US gov­ern­ment in the near term hav­ing an effect on our sit­u­a­tion as future retirees. While that dim future referred mainly to the US Fed­eral bud­get deficit, it also was due to the greed and cor­rup­tion that we saw, and I def­i­nitely could feel some sort of col­lapse com­ing. Mind you, I had pre­dicted that a great eco­nomic dis­in­te­gra­tion would be com­ing (cue Sarah Con­nor look­ing at the com­ing storm at the end of the first Ter­mi­na­tor movie), but my tim­ing put it roughly around 2015, so I was off by a few years, but it looks like I got pretty close. I’m not that thrilled that the chick­ens have come home to roost a half a decade or so ear­lier than I thought.
While I feel that we were smart to leave when we did (as we could now prob­a­bly not afford to), what I didn’t count on was the fact Canada was also the right place to go, in many ways.

This past week, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek, called The Cana­dian Solu­tion. Warn­ing: I’m going to get dan­ger­ously close to smug here, but will try to hold back if I do.
Accord­ing to Zakaria, our new home is in sur­pris­ingly good shape these days:

Guess which coun­try, alone in the indus­tri­al­ized world, has not faced a sin­gle bank fail­ure, calls for bailouts or gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion in the finan­cial or mort­gage sec­tors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Eco­nomic Forum ranked Canada’s bank­ing sys­tem the health­i­est in the world. America’s ranked 40^th, Britain’s 44^th.

Canada has done more than sur­vive this finan­cial cri­sis. The coun­try is pos­i­tively thriv­ing in it. Cana­dian banks are well cap­i­tal­ized and poised to take advan­tage of oppor­tu­ni­ties that Amer­i­can and Euro­pean banks can­not seize. The Toronto Domin­ion Bank, for exam­ple, was the 15^th-largest bank in North Amer­ica one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the oth­ers have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Cana­di­ans? Com­mon sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loos­ened reg­u­la­tions on their finan­cial indus­tries, the Cana­di­ans refused to fol­low suit, see­ing the old rules as use­ful shock absorbers. Cana­dian banks are typ­i­cally lever­aged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and Euro­pean banks at a fright­en­ing 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse busi­ness cul­ture, but it is also a prod­uct of old-fashioned rules on banking.

The arti­cle goes on to laud Canada’s bet­ter hous­ing mar­ket (and it doesn’t even have to note that there was no ‘Sub-Prime’ mess here, either). The other day we learned that Obama’s “Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act” deals with Health Care, because the num­ber 1 rea­son that an Amer­i­can goes bank­rupt is because of a major med­ical prob­lem. Not needed here, and as I found dur­ing my recent ill­ness, the sto­ries that some US politi­cians and oth­ers make that we have to wait for­ever to get to a doc­tor or get sub-standard health care are utterly false, in my expe­ri­ences. Just this past week, I walked (slowly) 3 blocks to our local clinic, waited about 20 min­utes to see a doc­tor the first time, and 15 min­utes on my return visit. My blood tests were done in 3 days, and didn’t cost me a penny.
Zakaria goes on to notice the other good news for those of us in Canada:

The gov­ern­ment has restruc­tured the national pen­sion sys­tem, plac­ing it on a firm fis­cal foot­ing, unlike our own insol­vent Social Secu­rity. Its health-care sys­tem is cheaper than America’s by far (account­ing for 9.7 per­cent of GDP, ver­sus 15.2 per­cent here), and yet does bet­ter on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, ver­sus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, ver­sus 69. Amer­i­can car com­pa­nies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advan­tage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michi­gan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.

Of course that last bit about Ontario pro­duc­ing most of North America’s cars is also not such good news, as the dire straits of the auto indus­try have hit that province at least as hard if not harder than Michigan.

Even the immi­gra­tion poli­cies that Pam is learn­ing in detail these days, as she stud­ies to become an Immi­gra­tion Con­sul­tant, get some atten­tion by Zakaria:

The U.S. cur­rently has a brain-dead immi­gra­tion sys­tem. We issue a small num­ber of work visas and green cards, turn­ing away from our shores thou­sands of tal­ented stu­dents who want to stay and work here. Canada, by con­trast, has no limit on the num­ber of skilled migrants who can move to the coun­try. They can apply on their own for a Cana­dian Skilled Worker Visa, which allows them to become per­fectly legal “per­ma­nent res­i­dents” in Canada—no need for a spon­sor­ing employer, or even a job. Visas are awarded based on edu­ca­tion level, work expe­ri­ence, age and lan­guage abil­i­ties. If a prospec­tive immi­grant earns 67 points out of 100 total (hold­ing a Ph.D. is worth 25 points, for instance), he or she can become a full-time, legal res­i­dent of Canada.

Zakaria notes that com­pa­nies have begun to notice, and that Microsoft sit­u­ated their lat­est research cen­ter here in Vancouver.

At any rate, I’m not try­ing to gloat or hold our good for­tune over the old friends and fam­ily we left behind in the States, but per­haps they can now under­stand why we don’t seem to have the same level of dread and panic when we talk about our eco­nomic prospects that they do. Cana­di­ans right now seem to be more con­fi­dent, and less likely to respond emo­tion­ally to the news (partly because our news is also less sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic). Given that we have bet­ter safety nets, includ­ing health care, a sta­ble bank­ing sys­tem, and even our food inspec­tion sys­tem, which caught the bad peanut but­ter when it came to the bor­der, that’s not all that sur­pris­ing. Pam and I find our­selves con­tin­u­ally shak­ing our heads as we watch the Evening News from the major US TV Net­works, some­times in relief, and some­times in bewil­der­ment that things in the coun­try we left have got­ten so bad.