The Vig

I had the pleasure of attending yesterday’s Tom Friedman lecture at Portland State.  A co-worker and I both showed up without tickets and after a half hour or so of waiting, were allowed in.  The room was definitely divided between the haves aned the have-nots.  The haves were all seated on the floor in their own chairs.  The commoners were sent to the Stott Center bleachers.  Actually, we ended up with better seats than Ted Kulongoski, who was reported to have been down front, but actually took a seat in the rear of the place and left a good fifteen minutes before the lecture was over.  Friedman made it a point to mention he’d met with both Kulongoski and Portland State President Wim Wiewel prior to  the event, but failed to mention even one green initiative either man presented.  Not exactly a stellar endorsement.

If you’ve followed Friedman for any length of time you would have found the presentation pretty boiler plate.  He’s gone to cool places and seen some cool things.  And that’s great.  Yet even he seemed underwhelmed by what’s going on out there.  He kept coming back to this idea that “going green” seems to be more of a hobby for people right now than an actual industry.  A perfect example locally is that lame solar plant down at the junction of I-5 and I-205 between Wilsonville and Tualatin.  Hey great!  We can light up a freeway exit with the sun!  But we can do so much better.  And Friedman challenged the audience to do better.

“Get off Facebook and into someone’s face,” he admonished us.  The change we seek isn’t here on-line, it’s in the Senate cloak room.  And he’s right.  The innovation is out there.  There are guys everywhere doing some spectacular things.  What we’ve lacked is the leadership to channel our efforts.

He talked about hobbiests in garages sparking energy innovation.  The way he described it reminded me a lot of films I saw as a kid of people trying to figure out flight.  You’ve seen them too.  We watch these films now and laugh.  What fools!  But the thing is, until the Wright Brothers, no one knew how to fly.  And they were trying everything.  What Friedman suggested was we incubate tens of thousands of these inventors and creators in the hope that just one or two seriously take off. Because like the Wright Brothers, it will all be worth it when we find the one discovery that works.  It will all be worth it.

The New York Times has finally relented and decided to end its Times Select service.  They made their decision to wall themselves off from the blogosphere at the exact wrong moment and it’s seriously cost them in terms of relevance.  I’d almost forgotten Mo Dowd even existed.

The wall will begin coming down later tonight.  I’ll begin copy-and-pasting Friedman soon after.