I recently had the pleasure of enjoying Dr. Johnson’s accessible yet thorough summation of the upper-left coast’s passionate political dalliance with Marx and his recounting of some very earnest sparks struck in hopes of lighting up a revolution.  Unfortunately, it’s a little soggy up in that corner of the country.

But it’s the numbers that really got me.  Back a turn of a century or two ago in the rough-n-ready Pacific Northwest, Eugene Debs was able to pull one vote for every ten that went to the ever-heroic, big-game-huntin’, horseback-riddin’, Teddy Roosevelt.

That One-in-Ten/Republican-to-Socialist ratio translates to state vote tallies in the low thousands, not the hundreds-of-thousands like you’d have to win today.  In other words, back then you could start spinning national policy with a vote count that would barely qualify you as a mega-church pastor.  I guess a little charisma once went a long way.

Furthermore, the  Socialist Party was able to achieve this while preaching a red-scary philosophy that would have made Dennis Kucinich look like flip-floppin’, middle-of-the-roadin’, convictionless tool of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

Of all of this, I can conclude only one thing:  These were different times.

Today, candidates run focus-group led campaigns to swing the swing vote a percentage point or two in their favor.  Today, we have two parties that differ more in theory than practice.  (Bush cut taxes for most of us while funding a little make-work program called The War On Terror, Obama pledges to cut taxes for most of us while stimulating us to make some work.)

I suppose it’s nice to have the stability.  But how long can it last?   I would guess that the gap between the poor and the rich, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, is a greater thing now than it was in a Washington State mining town in 1900.  I would also guess that these terms probably don’t translate very well to the average South Dakotan on the job in one of the Call Centers that seem to be holding on just fine despite the recession.

I might even have to admit that compared to the kid in Cambodia that helped Old Navy sow my fancy new t-shirt, that I’m the King Of The Hill with my boot on the necks of the rest of the world.

It’s all somewhere in the numbers.

Outside of soft spot for Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg, I’m no fan of last century’s revolutionaries, but I have to admit it would have been kicks to hear some of the banter bouncing around the room.  Now we’ve got bigger numbers.  We might need some bigger ideas.

Yes, yes, yes… give me 200 pages of always superfluous & sometimes superlicious style and this blind pig will find the acorn.  Or maybe a nugget.  So it is that Michael Chabon writes a bit about feeling outta place whether in his cradle of Berkeley or on a business trip to a euphemistically christened Middleburg, USA.   “You have to be weird somewhere,” he writes, “might as well be here.”

The take-home tidbit here (Would you like a doggy-bag, sir?) is that it is our shared culture that provides us with the cues and the shibboleths — political, socio-economic, religious, etc. — that either allow us to belong or push us outside.  In other words, if we didn’t know each other so well, we wouldn’t know how much we were different.

Well sir, that makes sense.   And in the hopes of making this world a better place, I leave you with the words of the visionary Perry Farrell:

Wish I knew everyone’s nickname,
all their slang and all their sayings.
Every way to show affection,
How to dress to fit the occasion…

Blacks call each other brother and sis’
Count me in ’cause I been missed.
I’ve seen color changed by a kiss.
Ask my brother
And my sister.

Wish we all waved…
All waved…
All waved…

And now I’m feeling free to be me.

In recent issues of Wired and The Economist, the same quote was trotted out by both ‘zines to sum up a new debate on what to do with our financial institutions.  The quote was dispensed by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis in 1913 regarding his take on the economy a hundred years ago:  “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.  Electric lights the most efficient policemen.”  In other words, if you expose the back-room mechanisms by which big deals are struck, the temptation to lie, cheat, and steal will be gone.

It became a maxim under FDR and has continued to inform our thinking right through the post-Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley present.  However, as the headlines of the last year can tell you, our banks and businesses aren’t doing any better at avoiding disaster.

So what’s the solution?  Radical Transparency!  We need to see all of the numbers all of the time!  Wired takes this a little leap further with an eye-lens focused through the filter of the Open-Source movement:  Make the numbers such that anyone can understand and we will all become citizen-soldiers policing the commercial world through our wise and wily investment acumen.  Surely, only the cream of the crop will rise to the top if we vote with our well-researched dollars.

The Economist wishes it were that simple, but alas, reality is pin-pricking the Hindenburg of Good Intentions.

First of all, financial data is opaque and ambiguous because it’s dense and confusing.  This is why people with PhD’s who have studied the crap their entire lives come up with very different ideas about what to do with it.  The lack of clarity in Company XYZ’s quarterly report isn’t usually a result of malicious intent, but rather the outcome of some poor sap being forced to spend a caffeine-drenched weekend in the office cranking out something that looks respectable when the data he’s dealing with is incomplete and borderline incomprehensible after being thrown together by some other department that just lost their planned getaway to the Hamptons to the need to crunch numbers that may or may not have been entered correctly by Jimmy in cubical 83.  Good luck!

Secondly, We The People are really not to be trusted to make good financial decisions.  Studies have shown that we don’t know what we’re doing.  Better, clearer information does not lead to smarter decisions.  We The People make our calls based on what’s worked in the past, how much risk we’re willing to tolerate, and our general emotional dispositions.  And we don’t like math.

Thirdly, it’s not just the Enrons of the world that are causing the trouble.  The current crisis is one of faulty (or perhaps misapplied) mathematics.  The guy that wrote the formula on how to quantify the risk inherent in a big bag of bundled mortgages thought he was doing us a favor.  And for ten years it seemed that he was.  Then things kinda went downhill.  (This is worthy of futher reading.)

However, despite the talking-headed raving and expert-opinioned ranting on the daily news, we are a long ways away from the mess of 1929 and transparency has much to do with that.  How to take this further is a tricky task, but maybe we’re beginning to see the light.

Sure, it was the devilishly charming, always youthful, and darn-right talented Justin Timberlake that made the cover, but on page 206 GQ sent it’s crack team of cultural reporters to investigate one of the last lost little shops still trying to get by selling the packaging of a product that’s now almost free.  Music, baby!

Nothing new here.  I’ve read many great profiles of many great stores in Paste, Spin, etc., all aiming for the same thing:  To breathe a little life into a much-loved corner of the music industry before the ghosts are given up for good.  But this one one rang a bell.

[However, before that bell tolls, I wonder: Has death been knocking on these doors since the start?  The walls are adorned with posters of dead stars, the smell of incense smolders in the back room.  Yeah, it's pretty much a mausoleum for that one thing which would never die:  Rock 'n Roll, man!  And I love 'em for it.]

But back to that ringing bell:  This “Kiss The Sky” place sounded familiar, and I as read on I learned that the story was taking place in Geneva, IL, just up the Fox from where I used to live.  Ah, I thought, “That’s it! But wasn’t the store in Batavia?”  Yes, the story goes on to say, it was, but they moved a town to the north a few years ago.

What I can’t remember is the exact location of the old Kiss The Sky.  It might have been the record store in the strip-mall by The Jewel where I procured the debut CD by my old landscaping buddy Mark Schiltz.  The other option is that it was the record store in downtown Batavia next to the barbershop where the gregarious owner threw open mic nights on the summer sidewalk.  It was here that I, being assured that I was possessed of extraordinary talent, would pick at such great works as “Feelin’ Groovy” and revolutionary anthems like “Old Man.”  I was rediscovering the rock canon, enjoying my summers driving along Lake Shore Drive, and generally letting my Freak Flag Fly.  The only thing I really miss was that ponytail.  It really tied the look together.

A decade or so later, it’s good to see that Kiss The Sky still stands, and that life goes on.  It was also nice of GQ to mention Magnolia Thunderpussy in the sidebar about great record stores around the country.  I might have to visit one of these places again someday, now that my son’s almost old enough to appreciate it.  He’s been sneaking my iPod when I’m not looking.  His favorite band so far is The Secret Sound Of The NSA.  Hey, the kid’s got taste!