MindSpinner

The coffeepot sits forlorn,
absent aroma, in the kitchen.
When you walk again with me,
daffodils will bloom.
I depend on the promise
of their green fingers rising.

Paul Krugman faults Ben Bernanke’s first Congressional testimony on only one point: that income inequality is driven by inequalities in education in a society that demands a “rising skill premium.” Krugman counters, “It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite.” He cites the evidence:

In fact, college graduates on the whole are doing not so well, though better than those without college degrees:

The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

Productivity gains, it seems, belong to the few, not the many:

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?,” gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we’re talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn’t give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it’s probably well over $6 million a year.

Krugman points to evidence of a rising oligarchy in this country, rather than to a broader group of highly educated workers, to account for growing income disparities. I think of how powerful forces in this country manage to rally voters around certain push-button issues only to engineer the system such that your tax cut and mine translate to a weaker safety net for the most vulnerable Americans (and indeed ultimately to all of us who cannot finance our own safety nets), and to compromised opportunies for the most. What is protected, as far as I can tell, is the ability of corporations to make money that ends up in the hands of the few, not the many. The result is devastatingly short-sighted policy-making that squanders what this country represents and darkens its future. Elaborate smokescreens of issues and non-issues, soundbytes and hollow rhetoric, keep American voters too distracted to perceive the penultimate agenda, which is not only wealth but unchecked power wielded by the unwise. And education, though touted, is handily defined as the endless pursuit of test scores so that we might be too busy to remember that, in a democracy, education must be about asking hard questions, pursuing truth, and vigilantly holding government accountable for being of the people, by the people, and for the people - all the people.

I do not kill garden spiders. I admire their webs and am careful not to tear an especially beautiful work of spider’s art. Nonetheless, I have a certain fear of large spiders.

Last night I dreamed a spider - a big black and yellow one like the one that landed somehow on my shoulder when I was a little girl outside in the yard, occasioning my terrified screams.

The dream spider did not sit in the middle of its web in the sunny green of the garden on a summer’s day. Instead, I saw it from indoors, at night. The spider moved on the window screen outside, which trembled and shook with the tugs of its legs. At first the spider was impressive but of an ordinary size. Then it scuttled quickly across the screen, alarming me. When fear woke me, I thought the body to be some two inches in length and the span of its legs nearly a foot across, though I did not perceive its growing. I did not scream - I am a light sleeper and would have known if I had - but I woke panting.

I do not pretend to know anything of the interpretation of dreams, but today I found myself webbing and then cataloging certain worries and fears, taking measure of spiders, so to speak, the length of their legs, their capacity for startling movement. I make myself note that the spider in my dream, my archetypal scary spider, is actually a harmless one, even beneficial.

I love sitting cross-legged on my bed, writing - not with pen and paper, but tapping away on my Powerbook G4 laptop, the petite 12″ model that ensures I have to don my glasses to see what I’m doing. But that was yesterday.

Adjustments will have to be made. Laptops must occasionally be connected to power cords, and persons other than myself have occasionally tripped over power cords - three times, to be exact - yanking my laptop to the floor. The first two times, this happened at school, when a student went the wrong way round my desk. Now my desk at school is situated such that going the wrong way round is difficult to do. Twice, the laptop kept right on working, except that I had to resort to using a mouse. It kept on working, too, when a student turned and bumped a Coke on my desk, tipping the contents of the can into my keyboard. It survived even a second, similar fluid spill a year later. But it didn’t survive last night’s encounter with the laminate floor at home, and the nearest it comes to booting is the occasional appearance of the Apple logo. Fortunately, I had backed up a few gigs of my most important files a few weeks ago. Much is lost, but I’m not going to think about that all at once. Losses are best accounted for in manageable bits. Today I’ll mourn the loss of email. Next week I’ll think about music.

So now I’m downstairs using my children’s computer, the eMac I bought them two years ago. This relegates my writing and surfing the Internet to early mornings, when teenagers are asleep. My mother has already proffered the inevitable suggestion - a $500 PC from WalMart. But we Mac-loving folk adore our elegantly designed technology and operating system. I use a PC every day of school - a fairly new one - and I can only say, with Gollum, that, comparatively speaking, “We hates it.” I’d rather just get up early in the morning and slip down here to the eMac.

She spoke in the usual singsong. Airline attendants’ school probably has a course in “the voice.” So “the voice” was exactly what everybody expected, maybe faintly dreaded. The same voice on every flight, whether deep or high - the same singsong. The same words. The same demonstrations.

She was pleasant looking, if nearly plasticized by her make-up, her bleached blond hair swirling loosely about her thirty-something face. Her uniform was neat; only beneath the obligatory airline wings pin was another pin, her own, a playful cat. The first words out of her mouth jangled the woman one aisle up from me on the left, in Row 9. “While our pilot figures out how to get us where we are going, I’m going to go over a few things with you.” Maybe the woman in 9B wouldn’t have been edgy had the bus driver that transported us from the gate to the plane been able to find the right plane in straightforward fashion, but he hadn’t, and we had wandered about looking for a flight already an hour late, until he finally had to get off the bus and ask, so we were all a little glad to hear that the plane we boarded would indeed be going to the City on the River, where we all had to arrive that night in order to get to work Tuesday morning. For surely the world would have fallen apart had we not gotten to work Tuesday morning. Apparently some of us did not appreciate the suggestion, even in jest, that the pilot did not know the way. It was not reaassuring. And if we want anything regarding going up into the air and coming down again, that seems to be reassurance. Upon consideration, I found some delight in the notion of ending up somewhere besides work in the morning, in Luck-of-the-Draw City. Luck-of-the-Draw City would be the best fantasy the scenario could offer, given that there was no way to imagine that we’d all be boarding a plane that wouldn’t be leaving at all.

The attendant asked us where we thought we could exit the plane in case of emergency. Right-o, the marked exit doors on Row 8. The woman in seat 9B looked back at me. We had not been told, in proper terms, where the exit door was and how to use it. I was chuckling at the departure from script. I was grateful for the relief of something even faintly unexpected. “I don’t think this is a laughing matter,” 9B grumbled, looking piercingly at me for affirmation. I stuck with my amusement, and she gave me up for an idiot and looked for an ally elsewhere. The young man sitting beside her looked deep into his book, probably right into the seams of the pages and resolutely exuded the message, “I am not with this woman in 9B. No relation at all. ”

The attendant held up a seatbelt and demonstrated clicking the ends together and tightening the belt. She did not tell us how to do this. “If you don’t know how to use this by now … you shouldn’t be allowed out in public.” Laughter rippled through the audience, except for 9B.

Then began the spiel about the pressurized cabin and the oxygen masks dropping down from overhead. “If the cabin loses pressure, put on your oxygen mask,” the attendant intoned, deftly demonstrating. “If you choose not to put it on,” she added in soothing singsong, “you will have no oxygen.”

In the unlikely event of a water landing, we were to remove our seats: “Take them with you as you exit the plane, compliments of USAir.” This sounded so generous, like a hotel giving you your towels and a bathrobe as souvenirs when you check out.

“I’m thinking of filing a complaint,” 9B intimated to the woman who sat just across the aisle from her. Protocol had been breached. The script had been subverted.

I was just glad to receive my pretzels and Coke from a woman in the usual uniform who managed, despite the repetitive nature of her job, not to be a bot. I found that - reassuring.