“But there were worrisome signs. For one thing, unlike your typical joyful and carefree 4-year-old, Kiran didn’t have a lot of fun. ‘He wasn’t running around, bouncing about, battling to get to the top of the slide like other kids,’ Raghu notes. Kiran’s mother, Elizabeth (her middle name), an engineer, recalls constant refrains of ‘Nothing is fun; I’m bored.’ When Raghu and Elizabeth reminded a downbeat Kiran of their coming trip to Disney World, Kiran responded: ‘Mickey lies. Dreams don’t come true.’”
-The New York Times asks if preschoolers can be diagnosed with depression. Later on in the article a different little boy hides under a table and whimpers, “I’m so sad. I’m so sad.” This will probably either make you cry or remind you of your own childhood, or, in the case of certain website editors, both.

by Carl Hegelman

The 1970s began in late 1973 and ended in early 1982. A decade-long hangover. The childish joie de vivre of flower power had faded by 1973, five or six years after the Summer of Love, three years after the breakup of The Beatles. The bloom was off the rose and a kind of cynical sense of entitlement had set in. To be cool in 1973 you needed to live in a squat (preferably in The Smoke, as we called London in those days), go on the dole and wear an Afghan coat. Brightly colored underwear was still OK, but the important thing was to be weary and jaded on the outside. A beard, if you could manage it, helped achieve this effect.

We were coming off a boom and about to pay for it.

In 1973, when inflation was already headline news, the Arab oil producers, responding to US military support for Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, imposed an oil embargo, and the price of oil quadrupled in three months, from $3 a barrel to a staggering $12. (Current price: around $73.)

Sundry other commodity-producing countries thought that seemed like a good idea, the newspapers were full of predictions of a Third World of commodity-cartels “holding us all to ransom” (by which they meant getting the best price they could). One day the papers would report rumors of an impending shortage of lavatory paper and suddenly, with everybody rushing to stock up, there would be no lavatory paper on the shelves in Woolworth’s, not even the thin scratchy kind (eg Broncoâ„¢) so familiar to English bottoms of the post-war era.

It didn’t help that a year or two before, Nixon had taken the dollar off the gold standard and most of the major economic powers were printing money like Sunday insert-coupons. To cap it all, food supplies were short after a worldwide drought. Sugar, Nescafe, everything was going up. In Britain, inflation peaked in 1975 at somewhere around 25%. That doesn’t feel good. It’s like you’re getting a pay cut every week. Particularly not good for the Old Age Pensioners on a fixed income.

Some things you don’t really notice when you’re still at university, wrapped up in socializing, dissipation and drunkenness. You feel a vague sense of grievance when the price of beer goes up (Double Diamond 16p a pint! what a drag!), but you’re only dimly aware of the London stock market going down 70% — more than it had in the 1930s — house prices crashing (after going up 50% in a year by mid-1973) and the government having to step in to bail out banks, British Leyland (maker of the Mini, which in those days was for people who couldn’t afford a bigger car) and Rolls Royce.

These were blurry headlines you might half-see on the board at the tobacconist/newsagent’s door as you flashed by on your bike. Just The Usual Mess, you might think, if you were in a thinking condition.

At least in the UK we didn’t have to worry about getting airlifted to Vietnam and flown back in a body bag. Like the stock market, Vietnam was a remote story. What we had, apart from miserable grey winters, was those unions. Every week a different strike; even civil servants, for one (timid) day in 1973; sometimes it seemed nobody was working at all. This had been going on for at least a decade, but the winter of 1973–4 was kind of a low point because when the coal-miners came out, with oil also being in short supply, Britain went on a three-day week to conserve fuel, and electricity was rationed. We sat in pubs drinking beer by candlelight and it was too dark to play darts or bar billiards. All you could do was sing rugby songs. It was jolly, in a way, but also promoting a certain sense of grimness and impending doom. Whistling in the dark, as it were. Doom, anyway, awaited the Conservative Prime Minister, Ted “Teeth” Heath, who was ignominiously booted out while seeking a mandate against the coal miners in a snap election in that bitter February.

This went on for what seemed like a long time. Under the new Labour government, the unions were able to get wage increases of 25%, 30%, to protect themselves against the rising prices. Wages chasing prices, prices going up with labor costs, it was a merry-go-round indeed, and hard to stop once it started. People began to get very pissed off with strikes and unions. Taxes had to go up to fix the deficit. The top bracket (£20,000 and above) was up to 83%, and a new class of “tax exile” emerged-people who spent six months and a day each year at their houses in France to avoid British taxes. (One’s heart did not exactly bleed for them, but, dammit, an Englishman’s home is his Château? A bit thick.)

Margaret Thatcher was still a minor figure in the Conservative party, known to most as Thatcher The Milk Snatcher who, as Teeth’s Minister for Education & Science, had made her mark by stopping free milk for schoolchildren. But her time was coming. In 1975 she replaced Teeth as leader of the Blue Ribbon lot, and in 1979 the Conservatives came back to power.

The rest is history-ending, in 2007, with the same damn crash-and-burn. A 30-year swing of the pendulum, with the same result.

All this was really the culmination of a Socialist-egalitarian experiment that began when the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill’s Conservatives by a landslide in the 1945 election. My generation grew up as almost the last beneficiaries of this experiment. Even the children of relatively prosperous families could go to university-whether Oxbridge or the local Polytechnic-pretty much for nothing. Health care was free. If you were low-income, you could get a Rent Allowance check. As students, the first thing you did when term ended and vacation started, assuming you didn’t want to take a job, was to apply for Supplementary Benefits-AKA, the dole. The newspapers were full of stories of people, generally men with families, to whom taking a job meant an actual decline in income: they would get paid more on unemployment than if they worked. Who knows whether the stories were true or not, but that’s what they said.

Why bring this up now? Well, the creation of an egalitarian society is a worthy goal. It seems particularly pertinent now, at a time when the gap between The Rich and the Not Rich is as wide as it’s been since the Robber Baron days-the so-called “gilded age”-before Teddy Roosevelt was President. Politicians are arguing over the best way to tackle our current economic difficulties, and in November economic policy will probably be a key issue. It’s an opportunity for a creative restructuring which can both help us out of this mess and create a more equitable, less polarized society. In order to do it, we need to know what works and what doesn’t. The Reaganomics/Thatcherite/Free Market model didn’t work-is that pretty clear now?

But the English socialist model didn’t work, either. So what to do?

Here’s a couple of interesting proposals:

1. Swords into Ploughshares. Robert Reich, the small but clear-thinking and humanity-packed economist, Labor Secretary during Clinton I, suggests substituting useful job programs (infrastructure, green energy, etc etc) for useless ones (building hardware we don’t need, like the C-17 cargo jet). The “defense” budget, at $950bn (if you include Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons management, and intelligence), is the biggest single component of the US budget. We spend more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined. Put some of that money into stimulus programs that actually result in things we need. It’s revenue-neutral, and there’s no military power without economic power, right, Boehner? Robert Reich is on fire right now, read his blog.

2. Scrap the current ragbag welfare system and implement a Negative Income Tax. An idea proposed by that notorious radical, Milton Friedman, in his 1962 book Capitalism And Freedom. Robert H. Frank, another very free-thinking economist and author of the radiantly thought-provoking Luxury Fever, outlined the idea in a sort of obituary-cum-op-ed in the New York Times when Friedman The Red died in 1996. Essentially, it provides a guaranteed minimum income to everybody, but without removing the incentive to rise above the poverty line by going out and getting a job. It has been tried successfully in Israel. They’re even thinking of trying it in Britain. There are potential problems, but they shouldn’t be insoluble. One of the big advantages is its relative efficiency: we eliminate the bureaucracy overseeing all the different left-hand-doesn’t-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing welfare programs; the administrative savings, together with the direct cost of all the existing programs, go some way toward paying for it.

Really, it’s been one long battle between Left and Right for as long as most of us can remember. Can’t we just call it a draw and focus on fixing the mess?

Carl Hegelman (a pen name) is a corporate bond analyst and a connoisseur of leisure.

Science has finally solved the age-old question of why children bully.

Kids can be cruel, for many reasons and most often on a fleeting basis. But bullies are tenacious in their brutal acts, and scientists have not had much luck figuring out why. A new study sought answers in a way no other study has, by asking bullies why they do it.

Bullies with the most hostility reported picking on kids because those kids were not good at sports. The most frequent bullying involved picking on students they perceived to be gay or lesbian, a result that agrees with another recent study on bullying.

You will also be shocked to learn that bullies “tended to hold a negative view of themselves, suggesting they pick on others to feel better about themselves, and they may especially single out those who have trouble fitting in for other reasons.” Anyway, now you know!

As is the often the case in life, the old ways are the best ways: “[S]quatting on your toilet seat is not for everybody. Even when I was holding onto a towel rack, the situation felt precarious. A bedpan or a plastic container would have been easier, but I didn’t have the former and the latter seemed gross. So I forged ahead, pushing through the week-or, as it turned out, not pushing: Bowel movements just seem to happen in a squat. My 10-minute routine dropped to a minute, two at the most, and within a few days my knees stopped complaining. “

“I am assuming it is a misguided joke. But it is disgusting. In particular because a resident of Berlin was murdered by a cannibal not too long ago.”
-Local politician Michael Braun is offended by a restaurant in Berlin which, likely in a bid for publicity, “has disgusted residents of the German capital by hinting that human flesh will be on the menu and asking for people to donate body parts.”

In a very satisfying end to a story the Post would definitely have made up if it had not been true, the mysterious “Cat Lady,” who has been robbing posh boutiques around the city this summer, has apparently been caught. “It wasn’t a purr-fect crime after all,” reports the Post, which is really the only publication you should be reading about this story. “The suspect was identified as Shanna Spalding, 28, of Queens, who sings with a death-metal band called Divine Infamy under her stage name, Purgatory.”

In late June, the sexy-schtick stick-up artist was caught on video slinking around Arche shoe-store in the East Village, where she put on a cat mask and robbed the place at gun-point. The next day, she disguised herself in a burqa (thanks for helping out the city’s race relations!) and hit a Body Shop in Queens.

Cops nabbed her yesterday, after she tried her act in Soho. Best of all, she remained in character for her perp walk-look at her naughty kitty pout.

If you’d like to hear some of her music, it’s at the beginning of this video.

“If I had to say what one thing really moved me to create this site it would be the 2004 reelection campaign of George W. Bush, the most homophobic national campaign in history. That campaign was run by one of the nation’s worst closeted individuals, Ken Mehlman.” This, by Mike Rogers, who outed former RNC Chair and now-out Ken Mehlman years ago, also poses a great question. Was 2004 that? Probably!

But also let’s not forget the plans that began in 1992 to funnel public health money solely into religious institutions, so HIV prevention money could be spent almost entirely in systems that advocate “marital fidelity, abstinence, and a drug-free lifestyle,” as that year’s Republican platform put it. (This scheme had as a nice backdrop and semi-foil Pat Buchanan’s still-unbelievable convention speech.) This resonated for years around the world, undermining HIV prevention in Africa. (Ahem: “A full two-thirds of the money for the prevention of the sexual spread of HIV goes to abstinence.” And: “HIV prevention funding turned into a patronage system for the religious right.”)

Anyhow! How about that Ken Mehlman? Is it completely biased of me that I can’t take his personal struggle that seriously? Given that he was the fund-raising architect of a system that advocated and literally built anti-gay initiatives? I guess, to extend the empathy that he never once exhibited, it’s sad that he has spent 40+ years blinded by ambition, in love with power, literally unable to think properly about causes and effects. And that he’ll spend the rest of his life trying (one assumes) to compensate for his self-betrayal.

But really, I find it next to impossible to keep any empathy going, given that his self-betrayal has a bodycount.

In case you missed the paper this morning, here are three individual excerpts from today’s New York Post:

• “Tuesday’s stabbing must be taken for what it was: the act of a disturbed individual who is now in custody.”

• “Indeed, it would be outrageous for the same people who reflexively insist that confirmed and coordinated Islamic terrorist attacks are “isolated incidents” that don’t reflect on Muslims generally to suddenly insist that this one lone, despicable act somehow reflects the views and attitudes of, say, the 70 percent of Americans who oppose the Ground Zero mosque.

• “A drunk barged into a Queens mosque last night and shouted anti-Muslim slurs as he urinated on prayer rugs, cops and witnesses said.”

Many of you have complained that you were notified about National Duck Out For A Drink Day too late to properly celebrate the occasion. I am sympathetic to your plea, and also deeply moved by the fact that it is, at least here in New York, an absolutely gorgeous day. So, by the power vested in me by the Internet, I hereby declare today, August 26th, to be National Duck Out For A Drink Day (Observed). Tell your friends and co-workers! But mark your calendars for next year, though; I have better things to do than spend my days encouraging you to leave work to knock back a quick shot. Oh, wait, I don’t. Anyway, Happy Holidays!

Look out, lady who dumped a cat in a garbage bin, the race to be the most reviled person on Knifecrime Island just got a little more competitive. Step forward Wendy Lewis, urinator and sex-act performer.

A VILE drunk who was dubbed the “most disgusting woman in Britain” for urinating and performing a sex act on a war memorial cheated jail today — to the fury of ex-servicemen gathered outside the court.

Wendy Lewis, 32, was given a 15-week sentence suspended for a year after a court heard how she had desecrated the memory of fallen heroes.

The Sun calls her a yob, and the Mail asks if she is half of “Britain’s vilest couple” after her boyfriend “managed to further offend the former soldiers by performing a Nazi salute and yelling pro-IRA abuse at them.” Still, the full tragedy of this case is expressed most succinctly by the Mirror headline: “War tribute pee woman Wendy Lewis escapes jail.” (The Mirror also clarifies that the sex act was performed on a man, not on the war memorial itself, in case you were unsure.) “When you urinated on the memorial you desecrated on their memory. You brought shame on yourself and you brought shame on the town,” Lewis was told by the presiding judge. True enough. But is it enough shame to top the cat-binning lady? Only time will tell.