INAUGURATION NOTES (based on a rough draft written in a packed Spitfire bar on the morning of Jan. 20): I never saw so many people in a bar prior to 9 a.m. since the soccer World Cup. It’s now 10:37 a.m. and the place is still quite full. The scene was just as packed and festive at the other viewing parties around town and around the country. Lots of hugging and kissing and clapping and cheering. A lot of people, including myself, seem not to want this moment to end. Yet it must.

Or must it?

What if the celebratory spirit carries over into people’s everyday lives?

 I’ve never known such a world. The many corporate attempts to create all-positive spaces (Disneyland, malls, casinos, porn) invariably reveal a face of tragedy glaring from behind the comedy mask.

But Obama’s positive thinking is different from manic corporate positive thinking—and from the neocons’ bullyish swagger.

It’s a positivity that recognizes the negative, while vowing to overcome it. Not to hide troubles, but to solve them. To create a new reality the hard way, the only way that works.

Thus Obama’s call to begin the real work, invoked during the eat-your-vegetables passages of his inauguration speech.

How far will he, and we, rescue the economy, health care, education, and the planet?

One thing we do know: That incessantly repeated Pepsi commercial with the song “My Generation” totally blows.
Yet the fact that one of the world’s most aggressive marketers wants to hop on the hope bandwagon reveals something. I don’t know what, but something.
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SPEAKING OF HOPE, P.J. O’Rourke recently visited Disneyland’s Tomorrowland-of-yesterday for The Atlantic Monthly and asked whatever happened to the imagination.

That’s close to something I’ve been asking: Whatever happened to the future?

The two are intertwined, as O’Rourke’s essay implies. Without a working imagination, a society can’t foresee a compelling vision of tomorrow, let alone implement it.

You could see this utopia-deficiency among those liberals and radicals who spent the 27 years prior to this past year conveniently moping that everything was going to hell and nothing could be done so why bother.

You could see it among conservatives and business hustlers who spent the same years propagating a zeitgeist of I-got-mine-screw-you.

I’m writing a graphic-novel script. Its setting is a future America that’s neither utopia nor dystopia, in which machines have progressed and the environment’s “saved,” but humans are just as fallible and their social structures just as imperfect as ever (albeit “different” in intriguing ways).

When I’ve told people about it, I’ve had to repeatedly explain to them that my story’s “back story” includes no apocalyptic event between our “now” and the characters’ “now.” No eco-catastrophes, no corporate coups, no mass genetic mutations.

It’s as if we’d lost the ability to imagine an Earth on which things just happen, at their various paces, with various results, with which people learn to live.
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BRAKING THE NEWS: Hearst doesn’t want to run the  anymore, at least not as a printed daily. What can be done now?

First, the Web side. Seattlepi.com has already made great steps in adding value to its site, beyond merely repeating the print paper’s content. But the site’s design retains an ugly 1999-era notion of a print newspaper’s Web stepchild. This can change.

The site should also emphasize a full-time reporting team’s advantages over one-person blogs. These include editing, juxtaposition, organization, research, and that elusive thing called “branding.”

And here’s how I’d revamp the printed P-I:
-The P-I and Times have narrowed their page size in recent years, and will narrow it again this month. Take that width, then crop four or five inches from the height, and you’ve got the “Berliner” format. It has more impact and versatility than a tabloid, but is still compact and easy to hold.
-Let the Web site contain the total product. Turn the printed paper into something intensely focused on local/regional politics, policies, and people.
-Be bright and bold. Make a newspaper something people want to read again.
-Slash expensive home delivery, except perhaps on Thursday and/or Friday.
-Revise, or dump, the Joint Operating Agreement. The Times could continue to print and deliver the P-I, but as a contractor. Bring ad sales back in-house (you can’t possibly do a worse job than the Times is doing).
-Turn Saturday into a “Weekend Edition,” with essays and features that would otherwise go into a Sunday paper.
-Be a real alternative to the Times. Not in the formula of an “alt weekly,” but as a dynamic, well-written, well-edited product with its own mission and its own audience. The P-I can be the paper for those who prefer city life, and for those in the suburbs who look to the city for cultural and civic leadership.

With these and other innovations, the P-I’s losses can be pared to a level that local angel investors could support. With anything resembling an economic recovery, such a paper might even pay its way.
   
(Much more of this at miscmedia.com.