Nathaniel

Shockey

Read Nathaniel's bio and previous columns here

September 29, 2008

Where’s My Violin Teacher? He Can Teach McCain How to Close His Case

I dropped my violin down the stairs when I was about nine years old. It turned out that I had neglected to close the case properly, and as I began descending the stairs, the case opened like a wallet photo album and out tumbled my first violin. At nine years old, there are two kinds of money – allowance and grown-up money. I had no idea how much the damage would cost my parents. All I knew was that they would pay it because, first, they liked watching me suffer as I practiced, and second, because anything costing more than $1.50 was a hell of a lot more than I could afford.

Wouldn’t you know it, before the week was out that same violin was in mint condition, staring at me with that sardonic look in its F holes. My violin was magically repaired, and I was promptly back in front of my accomplished Chinese teacher who was so intense he would roll up his sleeves to blow his nose.

“So what did you learn from this experience, Nathaniel?” he demanded.

I immediately scrolled through a mental list of optional responses. Be general, aim for wisdom, swing with remorse.

“I need to treat my instrument with much greater respect and care.” Quite instinctively, he wasn’t listening to my response because any teacher worth his salt (or 45 bucks a lesson) only asks questions he intends to answer himself.

“You must learn to close your case.”

I only bring up this story because Friday night’s presidential debate reminded me of it. This is how I remember it.

Jim Lehrer: What will you do to fix the financial crisis?

Barack Obama: I’ll tell you what we can’t give up, and that’s our commitment to the middle class.

John McCain: We have to be responsible, and we have to cut costs.

Lehrer: Okay, but are there any plans you might have to put on the back burner because of these dire circumstances?

Obama: We have to make sure everyone has health care.

McCain: We have to treat our resources with much greater respect and care.

And as I sat there, I was just begging for someone to say, “You know Jim, we absolutely must learn to close a violin case.”

It is remarkable that two people can take turns talking for several minutes at a time, purportedly about the same topic, without bringing an audience any closer to a greater understanding of the issues or where they actually stand. In fact, I wonder if most people are more confused after the debate than they were before it.

Obama kept saying that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed because of Bush’s refusal to increase taxes on the rich, which is a lot like saying your transmission failed because you neglected to replace your floor mats. And as much as I like hearing McCain talk about stressing personal responsibility, it doesn’t give us much to chew on in terms of who actually knows what’s going on and how to stop it.

Both men clearly agreed that the government hasn’t spent our money wisely, but beyond that, the math gets a little fuzzy. They disagreed on a business tax, and although I’m not sure exactly how, McCain’s answer made a little more sense, and I appreciated that he actually got specific about something.

Obama clearly favors increasing the already enormously imbalanced taxes on the rich, and allegedly, he plans to decrease taxes for 95 percent of us. Evidently, he’s already given up on 5 percent of America’s voters.

I thought the most interesting part of the economic debate came when McCain said he would consider freezing all spending except for defense, veterans and entitlement programs. You’ve got to hand it to Obama for his quick reaction, saying that this would be like “using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.”

Style points for Obama, and substance points for McCain, who incurs a slight deduction for taking a home run cut and cushioning it with words like “consider.” Was this like his momentary threat to skip the debate, feigning character but lacking substance? Regardless of whether these decisions would be the best, they were both refreshingly surprising and possibly good ones.

Obviously, my ideas line up more with McCain’s than Obama’s. But what drives me nuts is watching someone with a shockingly tiny record ostensibly keeping up with someone who owns an entire record collection. I can’t imagine laying the most powerful position on Earth before a man like Obama. But the longer it takes McCain to explain why his ideas are better, the more I understand why people who can’t afford to make political understanding a part-time job would vote for the guy who sounds a lot more impressive when he opens his mouth.

I wish my old violin teacher were around to ask McCain what he learned at his first presidential debate.

That way he could neglect McCain’s response and tell him that all he really needs to learn is to properly close a case.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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