Holiday help

In this season of celebration, when even families of humble means somehow find reasons for comfort and joy, we shouldn’t forget those who are truly suffering deprivation and hardship.

An eloquent plea to ease such suffering came last week from Dan Akerson, CEO of General Motors, and it’s truly heart-wrenching.

In a speech to the Economic Club in Washington, Akerson said government limits on executive compensation at bailed-out companies are hurting GM’s ability to keep top talent. “We have to be able,” Akerson said, “to attract and retain great people.”

Let’s presume he means a different set of “great people” from the ones who steered the American auto industry into bankruptcy, then flew to Washington in private corporate jets to schmooze Congress for twelve-digit welfare.

Mind you, Akerson, who says GM has learned “a lesson in humility,” isn’t pleading his own case. He’ll unselfishly make do on the meager $9 million a year the heavy hand of big government grudgingly allows him.

No, he’s arguing on behalf of the other GM executives he had the unhappy duty of telling not to expect increases or bonuses next year. Think about it: There are people in Detroit who might not be able to buy that chalet in Aspen, or build another wing on the house at Grosse Pointe. The yacht on Lake Erie might have to go another year without a new Jacuzzi.

If you can live with that, Ebenezer Scrooge has nothing on you.

We’ve heard this “best and the brightest” argument before. In fact, a historian named David Halberstam wrote a book by that name. It’s about the Ivy League brain trust that led the Kennedy and Johnson administrations deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War.

By the way … how’d that work out?

I’m not comparing General Motors to Vietnam, but they do have this in common: Both are on the American taxpayer’s tab. In fact, we still own a third of GM.

So it’s up to us. Yes, I know budgets are already strained this time of year. I know some of us are having a tough time just getting by. I know unemployment is close to double digits. And I know we’ve already given GM close to $50 billion. But that’s clearly not enough.

So let’s open our hearts and wallets just a little wider for those who really need it. If you’d like to help, call 1-800-55-GIMME.

Or just write a big check to General Motors. By now, we should all be used to that.

None of the below

A semi-regular e-mail correspondent -- an articulate heckler, really -- sent me something about the Beckstock festival in Washington. The gist of it was that he fully expected the likes of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews to mock the spectacle of thousands of people in prayer.

I didn’t respond. I seldom do. He’s a Last Word obsessive, so it’s easier just to let his first word and his last be the same. Life is just too damn short for some forms of aggravation.

But the idea of Glenn Beck (speaking of hecklers) leading a spiritual renewal of America is like a sick joke that’s perversely funny and mostly just disgusting. If that weren’t greeted by hoots of derision, and not just by the likes of Olbermann and Matthews, I’d be greatly disappointed.

Mocking prayer per se would indeed be immoral. Mocking a made-for-TV prayer choreographed for a bomb-lobbing commentator’s political propaganda and profit is a moral imperative.

A critic – I think Oscar Wilde, but might be wrong – supposedly said of Dickens’ tearjerker The Old Curiosity Shop that “anybody who didn’t laugh when Little Nell died has a heart of stone.” The principle seems relevant and applicable here.

So does Barry Goldwater’s famous comment on the so-called Moral Majority, when he declared that good Christians should “line up and kick Jerry Falwell’s ass.”

Point being: Mocking God and mocking charlatans who claim to speak for Him aren’t, never have been, and never will be the same thing.

And speaking of charlatans…

While Beck and his flock were gathered on the mall once filled for Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, the Right Reverend Al Sharpton was in another part of town holding a counter … whatever.

Sharpton, as he no doubt would like everybody to forget, rose to national prominence in 1987 as enabler-in-chief of the Tawana Brawley hoax. That breathtakingly reckless episode brought New York to the brink of racial meltdown over the alleged gang rape of a 15-year-old black girl by white men -- including, supposedly, a New York police officer. The whole thing was later exposed as a hoax, for which Sharpton and others were ordered to pay defamation damages, but for which he has refused for more than two decades to apologize.

Maybe in Al’s world, being a venerable civil rights leader means never having to say you’re sorry. In my world, he’s hardly any less absurd an heir to the MLK legacy than Glenn Beck.

It occurs to me that maybe that’s the real message of these dueling gasbags: Do they really represent what America has to choose between? If so, then we really do have reason to pray.

Economic agoraphobia

So what’s the latest thing that airline you’re flying next week had to cut from the budget? Spare fuel? A co-captain? Air masks? Replacement parts for the landing gear? Were a few mechanics or maintenance folks no longer affordable? Did somebody decide an aging fleet of jets that should have been retired years ago will just have to be duct-taped and baling-wired together for a few hundred more flights?

Not picking on the airlines here – statistically, you’re still safer in the air than just about anywhere else – but the Metro rail crash in D.C. got me thinking about something that must have occurred to lots of people, even if not many talk a lot about it out loud.

Namely: Just how much has this crappy economy put people who use mass transportation at risk?

It’s a creepy question precisely at a time when we desperately need more people to get out of their cars and into more efficient forms of transportation for the sake of the economy, the environment and our whole quality of life.

But that’s not going to happen if you start wondering whether one of the corners somebody decided to cut was the one with your life in it.

Some early speculation about the Metro tragedy, whose body count stood at nine as of Wednesday, centered on the use of aging train cars whose emergency systems might have failed. There’s still a lot of investigating to be done, and the usual suspect – human error – could still turn out to be the culprit.

But it would be naïve to think that the pressure of a tanking economy hasn’t put us at risk.

To use an example fairly close to home: Delta’s financial troubles have been almost daily biz page fodder for years now. That hasn’t stopped me from flying Delta several times over that period, and won’t for the foreseeable future. But I consciously try to avoid – at least while I’m in the air -- thinking about things like how old the plane might be, or how deeply the cost-cutting process has cut into things that contribute to passenger and crew safety.

Those things cost money. So do things like brakes, and bridges, and railroad trestles, and safety inspections, and crossing signals, and even traffic lights. And almost nobody has enough money right now.

So I’d be mighty comforted if somebody could convince me that money and safety have nothing to do with one another, and that when I leave my house – to cross a street, a state or an ocean – I’m just as safe as I would be if times were flush. It’ll be a tough sell.

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