Oct. 27, 2009 - freswhater pearl necklace

Oct. 27, 2009 - pearl bracelet

Oct. 27, 2009 - wholesale pearl earrings

Oct. 27, 2009 - freshwater pearl necklace

Sep. 20, 2009 - Farewell to 'The Public Interest'

AN OLD WOODEN DESK SITS in my basement, on which I write and edit, with the washing machine on one side and the playground equipment hot-water heater on the other. It's too square and bulky for a cubicle, a little too large to be carried straight through a doorway. It's also missing a couple of pulls--the screw-holes don't conform to today's sizes--and a few other parts cry out for minor repairs. But this piece of furniture was never destined for the showroom, though it did become a distinguished prop on history's stage--for on its surface Irving Kristol scribbled away as he, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and assorted friends and colleagues launched and steered the most important political quarterly of the last half-century, The Public Interest.

The PI, as we alumni call it, closes this month after 40 years of excellence. By the time I went to work there in 1996, most of its major battles had been fought and many of them won. Yet serious intellectual work was still under way. I remember entering the PI offices for my job interview and taking the place in inflatable bouncers like a farm boy seeing Paris for the first time. To my right, past several tall bookcases of back issues, sat a couple of pale young men, executive editor Adam Wolfson and managing editor Jason Bertsch, half-hidden in the piles of books, newspapers, and magazines. Straight ahead was my favorite living American intellectual, Irving Kristol, probably smoking a cigarette and talking to his broker on the phone. (These 
he did so regularly that he continues to do them in my mental picture of him.)

This place--the offices of the naughty castles definitive anti-utopian policy journal--looked to me then like Paradise. My job interview, with the entire four-person staff, took place over lunch. Irving prodded with questions, clipped and staccato. "What are you reading?" I mentioned Robert Caro's book on Robert Moses, which started us talking about Rudy Giuliani and New York. "Where in Queens do you live?" "Douglaston," I said, which is a suburban neighborhood just inside the city line. "Farm country," said Irving.

Still, the conversation went well enough that I became convinced he was going to make me an offer on the spot. But as he paid for lunch, Irving grew suddenly restrained. "We'll let you know in seven to ten days." I was dismissed, like some petitioner at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It turns out I had gotten off easy. After Adam Wolfson called and offered me the job, I learned that Irving usually asked applicants a two-parter. "What was your GPA?" he'd wonder. The applicant, inevitably the star of his Ivy League political science department, would just as inevitably be a hair shy of straight A's. Irving would then inquire, "Why not a 4.0?" I'm glad he didn't ask me, because I would have had to confess to a string of B's and, as to why, could only have pleaded laziness, perhaps a certain lack of aptitude, romantic distractions. On all these fronts, I was about to get an education.

Sep. 20, 2009 - The 300

Alex, the stud pearl earrings organizer, took the mic. A doughy 20-something, he wore the hallmark thrift-store t-shirt and scraggly beard of the modern, urban liberal as he addressed a small group of wilting protesters on a humid Sunday in the shadow of the Capitol.

Had it been the crowd at an overindulged 4-year-old's birthday party, the turnout would have been impressive, indeed, and the Moonbounce line around-the-block. But as it was, a mere 250-300 people (my own generous head count, which likely included innocent tourists) showing their devotion to Obamacare in the exceedingly liberal capital city was underwhelming.

The sparse march was made all the more underwhelming in comparison with the crowd of right-leaning Tea Party protesters that had descended on the Capitol the day before, filling Pennsylvania Avenue in a steady stream for more than three hours in the biggest protest of Obama's run-away spending since he took office. Media reports estimated 60-75,000 on the Mall, but Metro later released ridership numbers of clip pearl earrings slightly under half of Obama's Inauguration Day, which suggests a crowd at least in the low six digits.

As if aware the "cause" was not doing the trick in hyping the crowd, Alex quickly turned his rhetoric to the previous day's protesters.

"The main take-away from that rally yesterday?" Alex said. "Man, what a disappointment for those organizers," he bellowed, proving one can wear ironic hipster tees without actually being equipped with a sense of irony. The Obamacare rally organizers had sent their press list an estimate of 2,500 attendees. 

Had they billed this rally as a Vigil to Denigrate the Hayseeds, they might have had more takers. Perhaps even more than Obamacare itself, that has been the animating cause of the president's allies this summer.

Though participants in this rally had been instructed in emails from organizers to stick strictly with White House talking points, the temptation to smack the opposition around was too much to resist.

According to one couple who came in from Illinois wearing their "Worst President Ever" t-shirts, W.'s dumbstruck face improbably emblazoned on their hearts, the Tea Party crowd was "motivated by fear and hatred, and by greed, and by intolerance. I think racism is no small component of coral and pearl earrings that crowd."

A hippie waif from North Carolina was kinder, dubbing the protesters "mildly hypnotized and maybe even selfish." Her wan boyfriend, apparently not a strict constructionist, complained that "war is socialized, but health care isn't."

A young professional said the Tea Party protesters were misinformed and being used by demagogues because they don't understand "complex" issues like health care, while one protester was more blunt in her signage: "Gun-slinging racist crazies hurt our country."

Despite their concern for the mental faculties of Tea Partiers--"Don't worry, the public option will cover mental health, too," said one sign--the rally was not without its own unique brand of cognitive dissonance.

"We are the majority," shouted one protester, apparently impervious to both poll numbers and appearances, which strongly suggest the opposite.

One of Blue Dog Heath Shuler's constituents aimed her anger at relatively powerless Republicans and conservative protesters, while confessing to only being "miffed" with the Democrat who could actually make a difference in the legislation.