Don't Come Around Here No More

Last year the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race ran through Santa Cruz for the first time. As luck would have it, the race route ran right in front of my house. It was so cool!

Well, the route for the finish of Stage III has been announced for this year, and while the racers will still ride through Santa Cruz they will unfortunately skip Downtown — and thus my house — altogether.

Naturally this is quite disappointing. It was quite thrilling having world-famous cyclists like Lance Armstrong zip past my house, even if they went by at speeds so fast I couldn't really tell who was whom. Well, I'm glad I got to experience it even once.

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Don't Come Around Here No More	Song by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

I Never Knew

A few days ago, the folks at Zogby International released the results of a survey conducted in February 2010. In this survey, Zogby asked Americans what percentage of the Federal budget they believed specific categories represented. For example, they asked questions like what percentage of the Federal budget was comprised of defense spending, or Medicare. Then they contrasted the perception of the surveyed Americans against the actual 2008 Federal budget.

To present their findings, the Zogby folks used a simple table, which I believe made it difficult to quickly contrast the actual spend against the estimate of the average American. So I tried to create a chart that shed more light on the results. In the chart above (click to see full size), I've portrayed the 2008 Federal budget in a pie chart, then used smaller bar charts to show the range of the estimates from the surveyed population. (The Zogby survey asked respondents to characterize their estimates into ranges from less than 5% to greater than 20%, grouped in 5% segments.)

Yes, the chart's a bit busy, but I hope that at a glance (or two) you can see, for instance, that defense spending is 21% of the country's budget, and that 41% of those surveyed thought that defense spending was more than 20% of the budget. From this I extrapolate that most Americans have a general conception of how much we spend on defense.

What's interesting here is not where we're right, but where we're wrong. Or as Zogby so dryly put it, "Respondents were furthest off in their estimates for interest on the debt and non-defense discretionary spending."

For almost a year now, the media has been covering right-wing reactionary groups that call themselves teabaggers, whose rambling and sometimes treasonous epithets can be distilled into apparent demands to stop Federal spending because we can't support the debt, to stop international aid because the recipients aren't American, and to halt all non-defense discretionary spending. (If only they could make their arguments so succinctly, or cogently.)

And in an effort to help keep this country together, the Obama administration has tried to find common ground with these folks by proposing a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending.

But as the chart shows, average Americans are quite off in their estimates of just how much the US spends in these three areas. Take debt service, please. More than a quarter of Americans appear to think we spend more than 20% of our budget on interest paid on our debt. And the vast majority of Americans seem to think we spend far in excess of the 8% of our budget that we actually use to service the debt.

And the proposed freeze on non-defense discretionary spending will hold the line on 18% of our Federal budget, but will apparently have an even greater impact on the 37% of Americans who think we put even more money than that in this particular budget bucket.

As for international aid, conservative commentators have actually said recently that we don't need to donate to Haiti for their disaster relief because, in part, we already pay them out of our taxes, yet aid going outside the US accounts for less than 1% of the Federal budget. While 28% of those polled were in the ballpark on this item, 60% of the population is wildly off, which seems to feed right into the teabagger fantasies.

So it seems the small-but-loud groups that are clamoring for national and international disengagement based on fiscal inability are, in fact, quite misinformed as to just how our budget is actually spent. Imagine that. (Well, you don't have to actually imagine it, as Zogby's done the research, and I've tried to graph it.)

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I Never Knew	Song by John Coltrane and Kenny Burrell

December boys got it bad.

Why am I so sad about the death of Alex Chilton? I'd only first heard of him when he was name-checked by The Replacements in 1987. And it was only after his death that I learned that September Gurls wasn't actually an original Bangles tune but rather a cover of the song from Chilton's band Big Star.

Yet despite having only a peripheral knowledge of Alex Chilton and his oeuvre, the fact that he's dead at 59 fills me with a deep melancholy that outstrips the apparent impact he had on my life, or his presence in my music library.

He influenced bands about which I cared. He died too young. He wasn't fully appreciated.

I think, perhaps, the last sentiment strikes closest to home. I didn't fully appreciate him. Not until he died did I research Big Star or the Box Tops, only to find that both are bands to which I should have been listening for years. But it's not the fact that I'd not followed Chilton that chokes me up, rather it's the reality that there are untold numbers of bright lights that will never escape their bushels. And judging by how profound my sadness suddenly is — if I'm honest — it's also that I identify with someone who inspires others but never sees his own breakout success.

And yes, it's certainly a bit egocentric to turn someone's death into an examination of one's own life, but that is, in fact, exactly what we do at a funeral. Sure we talk about the dearly departed, but almost always in the context of how they impacted or interacted in our lives. My lack of personal satisfaction transmutes into the feeling that a somewhat obscure rock musician died before reaching his due.

Regardless, Alex Chilton penned some delightful songs. He inspired others to do the same. He and his progeny brightened the day of countless numbers of people, including me (and I hope you). He made the world a better place, and it's diminished a bit by his passing.

Perhaps this is all captured best by a song by Bob Dylan that Alex Chilton and the Box Tops covered:

I see my light come shining
From the West unto the East
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released"

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"December boys got it bad."	Lyric from the song September Gurls by Big Star
September Gurls	Covered by The Bangles
Alex Chilton	Song by The Replacements
I Shall Be Released	Song by Bob Dylan, covered by the Box Tops (and many, many others)