The Odyssey of Warren Buffett

Leave it to Warren Buffett to invite his opponent to the huddle with fourth down and goal to go. It takes a certain level of confidence to tolerate criticism. It’s also smart. Knowledge is power. Better to know what you’re up against. In his recent Dealbook column (“Buffett Picks His Bear for His Annual Meeting," NYT 3/4/13) Peter Lattman describes how Warren Buffett’s annual letter to stockholders “said that he ‘wanted to spice things up’ by finding a money manager with an unfavorable view of Berkshire Hathaway to participate in the company’s annual meeting…often described as the Woodstock for capitalists.” Would there actually be over 18,000 Berkshire Hathaway investors smoking grass and rolling nude in the Omaha mud when the meeting takes place on May 4th?  Unlikely, but as Lattman reported Buffett chose Douglas A. Kass of Seabreeze Partners Management who is also a writer for The Street and commentator on CNBC to be the bear. And Kass pulled no punches according to Lattman’s account, alluding to Buffett’s “advanced age” and “Berkshires large size” as weak points. Buffett has never been afraid to call a spade a spade and these are reasonable criticisms. He once termed derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.” It will be curious to see how he deflects these arrows. Remember Buffett always goes against the grain. He’s still buying newspapers when everyone thinks newsprint is moribund (albeit the $344 million outlay in the past 15 months represents a relatively small portion of Berkshire’s portfolio). Will Buffett be like the wily Odysseus getting at Polyphemus aka the bear's Achilles' heel?

Leader of the Pack

photo: Ralph M.  Newman

Margalit Fox’s recent Times obit describes Shadow Morton as being “almost singlehandedly responsible for the wild success of the Shangri-Las, the Queens girl group he introduced and propelled to international stardom”(“Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer , Dies at 71,” NYT, 2/15/13).  Morton was responsible for such iconic songs as “Leader of the Pack” and later produced Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” There was a haunting quality to Morton’s music. It was a mixture of doo-wop and The Sufferings of Young Werther. The dissonant riffs communicated an infatuation with a world pregnant with impossibility, one in which fantasy is prized over reality, with that which doesn’t exist trumping knowable things. Just like today you have East and West Coast rap. Back in the sixties, The Beach Boys presented the West Coast version of a similar sound in songs like “Don’t Worry Baby.”  The defiant James Dean character in Rebel Without a Cause prefigured Morton’s “Jimmy”in “Leader of the Pack." Fox’s obit pointed out that Morton possessed a “brazen, naive genius” epitomized by the fact that “he played no instrument, could not read music and wrote his songs in his head.”  According to Fox, “The nickname Shadow was bestowed on him by a Brill Building colleague to describe his habitually evanescent presence.” Morton’s bio makes him sound like a creature out of one his own songs, which is not implausible for an artist. Some writers and songwriters describe the life they’ve lived and others prophesy their own epitaphs. Morton didn’t turn out to die as young as the ill-fated James Dean, but he burned out quick, as far as music is concerned, crashing like the  “Leader of the Pack.” “Mr Morton,” Fox went on to say, “who underwent treatment for alcoholism in the mid-l980’s…remained sober to the end of his life” and “had a second career as a designer of golf clubs.”

Kim Jong Rodman

                                                                     Photo: Reuters/KCNA

The Times quoted Dennis Rodman as saying “Guess what, I love him. This guy’s really awesome,” about Kim Jong-un upon his departure from Pyongyang (“Way to Reach Kim Jong-un? Follow the Ball,” NYT, 3/1/13). Vice Magazine had sponsored the attempt at what it called “basketball diplomacy,” and as the Times remarked, it was “an allusion to the ping-pong diplomacy that helped open United States relations with China decades ago.” But what was in it for Rodman, who is pierced and tattooed and has been known to cross-dress? North Korea is a pretty repressive place, but perhaps he felt he’d met his counterpart in Kim Jong-un, who is as much a bad boy as a politico, as Rodman  is as a sports celebrity. Could Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan be next on deck? Surely they could be promoted to the North Korean leader as equally out of the box thinkers who might also see something in Kim Jong-un that the international diplomatic community has missed. Who knows Kim Jong-un might turn out to be one of the only people on earth who liked Lohan’s portrayal of Elizabeth Taylor in the recent made-for-TV movie, Liz & Dick? But getting back to Rodman, you can’t help wondering what’s in the back of his mind? Lots of celebrities have done wild things. Tom Cruise and John Travolta embraced Scientology. Perhaps Kim Jong-un will be his master, his L. Ron Hubbard. Years of media blitzing can do strange things to a person’s mind. Maybe Kim Jong-un has become a role model to the aging basketball star. Maybe Rodman is planning on modeling the next chapter of his life on the as yet short-lived career of his “awesome” new friend. Kim Jong Rodman could make headlines as the next head of the DPRKBA, Democratic People Republic of Korea Basketball Association.

Sequestered and Abandoned

Phil Gramm

Sequestering is a curious word that has replaced fiscal or cliff as le mot du jour. It’s a curious choice  considering the pickle the economy is in. Sequestering is what juries usually go through when there’s a case that calls for a high degree of neutrality. Sequester also has connotations of recuse. A jury may be sequestered, as a judge may recuse his or herself when he or she doesn’t feel he can be impartial. But what does sequestering actually mean? When you sequester a jury, it is for a limited period of time. At a certain point, if you have 12 angry men and women who refuse to come to a verdict, the jury is deadlocked. A new trial results. So are we to take it that the federal funds that will be sequestered will eventually be released? If so when? Paul M. Johnson’s A Glossary of Political Economy Terms defines sequestration this way: “The term has been adapted by Congress in more recent years to describe a new fiscal policy procedure originally provided for in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985...Under sequestration, an amount of money equal to the difference between the cap set in the Budget Resolution and the amount actually appropriated is 'sequestered' by the Treasury and not handed over to the agencies to which it was originally appropriated by Congress. In theory, every agency has the same percentage of its appropriation withheld in order to take back the excessive spending on an ‘across the board’ basis.” What’s the bottom line? Well according to AnnArbor.com here is how sequestration will affect Head Start programs in its state:  “About $20,944,350...could be cut from the Head Start program...that provides early childhood education for low-income families. The cut would mean about 701 jobs would be eliminated from the program’s staff and 3,364 fewer children would be served in Michigan, according to a report from the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee.” What will the verdict be? Will the $20,944,350 find its way back into Michigan’s Head Start program when a verdict is reached, will the jury be deadlocked or the case dismissed?

The Furies

photo of Paul Theroux by Rupal Agrawal

You’ve read and witnessed the putative subject of Paul Theroux’s recent New Yorker short story “The Furies” too many times. A dentist Ray Testa, who is 58, leaves his wife Angie, to run off with his 31year-old hygienist, Shelby. At the wedding he announces, “I now belong to an incredibly exclusive club. There are not many men who can say that they’re older than their father-n-law.” The story is blunt and almost graceless like the character it describes and it sports none of the lyrical sorties of the Cheever/Updike generation but the territory of suburban infidelity is naturally a subject that those writers addressed in the pages of The New Yorker generations before. However, the landscape seamlessly changes. Proud of his conquest, Ray insists that Shelby attend his high school reunion in the town of Medford where he’s grown up. The title of the story conjures Greek mythology, but what transpires is Scrooge’s nightmare of retribution set in a Strindbergian reality. Ray’s high school girlfriends exact a kind of poetic justice that hounds him out of the smug satisfaction of his pleasure principle. The brilliance of the writing lies in the way it insouciantly negotiates a territory that could have been a dream were it not reality--with nary a touch of narrative or verbal pyrotechnics. “The Furies" ends as predictably as it began, with Ray losing everything and learning nothing. He hears about his first wife’s death from a patient. Then Shelby goes. “She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay from her job, and got it. They spoke through lawyers, until it was final, and he was alone.” The beauty and simplicity are surgical, purgative and well nigh mythical. It takes your breath away.