A solution for Citizen's United

This is very simple: as a country, we should ban political advertisements on TV. Nothing from candidates, PACs, chambers of commerce, or any political entity.

Then we'll see if our country is still for sale.

Accumulating culture

Elijah leaves a thin layer of oil in the bottom of his cast iron pan. It pools in a thin circle around the smaller pan which stacks atop it. I never would have thought of this as normal. "Clean" and "greased-up" seemed mutually exclusive. But that pan will never rust, not while he owns it. It will accumulate the flavors, just hints of them, of a hundred meals, (most of them bacon-related) and impart them on the next hundred, so deliciously.

Elijah cooks excellently--he knows how food works, so he improvises with techniques and foods I wouldn't have considered. I watch, and try to absorb.

Culture, for years, meant behaviors and knowledge passed on through families, in regions, and shared. You learn how your mom's pandekage should taste, and tried to emulate it when you cooked your own. California gold miners taught each other the tricks to making sourdough, to coping with the problems of their environment. Wealthy Americans, in our closed face sandwiches, treated bread as vehicle for meat, while in Europe, with the long memory of poverty, meat was flavor for delicious bread.

Culture is far more than just accumulated behaviors--it's attitudes and worldviews, a shared agreement on how we'll interact and what we'll value, but the modes of transmission always remained the same. You absorb experience, and hope that in the time you spend with your family, you learn enough to pass on to your own children.

So guilt and satisfaction split the emotional paycheck when I realize I'm learning my own, completely new culture from the people I stay with, day in and day out. Pleasure is by far the stronger partner. In every new house I see lives at their most minute and revealing. I steal a trick from here: Justin and Jackson cut the corner off their counter sponges to signal their use, a necessary form of inter-roommate communication when the recession packs busy tenants together, and no designated dish-doer can track sponge age. (It's spreading through San Francisco.) I steal a concept from there: the Danes value, above all else, hygglet, which roughly means the cozy joy of shedding artifice in the company of dear people. The quality over quantity approach changes the approach to architecture and design, the primary uses of wealth, even the general humility of a nation.

I know I'm diluting the lessons and traditions of my parents--if I had stayed in Alaska, I'd learn to read the subtle details of the land the way my dad does, and understand more of the joyful attitudes of my friends. But instead, I get to pick and choose, so intimately, from the lives of so many people. And as my parents learn, and the internet stores trade tricks which once hid years into apprenticeships, I'm slowly building my own culture. As I share it with my friends, we'll make our own little corner of America, not only with the values we've inherited, but with the values we've considered, and chosen.

It sounds hygglet.

Now, I'm going to go bake Christmas cookies with a girl from Minnesota.

Barack Obama and Holden Caulfield Share the Same Unease

            So, apparently the White House is having Big Debates over whether they should actually try to explain their economic policy. 

            President Obama, in trying to be the anti-Bush, has always been hesitant about salesmanship. Take Libya. The name for our Libya incursion, "Operation Odyssey Dawn," emerged from a naming protocol for military operations, similar to the system for naming hurricanes. Recent politicians overrode the military names in favor of grandiose public relations stunts. The last war opened with a name that forced the media to repeat “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” until the word “freedom” sautered itself to the invasion in our brains. The last time we enforced a no-fly zone the politicians called it “Operation Provide Comfort.”

            After eight years of public relations as policy, it’s refreshing to see a president refuse to interfere with his generals. But it shows that Obama lacks respect for the power of language, unlike his Rovian predecessor.

            Barack Obama's presidency suffers from an unease about salesmanship. He disdains branding.

            Substance over style is a great philosophy. It’s nerdism at its core, and I'm proud my president embraces it. However, as any graphic designer will explain, style is substance. What’s the cliché? Form is content.

            This is how brains work—we sort the world in shorthand. Someone says “liberal media” and our brains call up an archetype and look for it. The more expertise you develop in a topic, the more refined and numerous the archetypes your brain can apply. Skilled Washington hands saw Obama’s move as a subtle middle finger to beltway PR jocks. The rest of us didn’t notice, because he only spoke to the experts.

            In Adam Levin’s The Instructions, my favorite novel of 2010, the young narrator, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, studies with a black mentor. The mentor says, basically, “A guiding black character carries certain associations, so don’t write me as that guy from the Green Mile. Pay attention to what you signify.”

            The Instructions is the latest in an American tradition of coming-of-age novels. From the Red Badge of Courage to Huck Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, something about American idealism makes us excel at the genre, the way Scandinavia seems to inspire mystery novels and earnest moralizing.

            Obama, the new kid in Washington, D.C., ought to re-read the books. Like Holden Caulfield, Obama has just enough experience to notice the perversions of his new society, but he still hasn’t figured out how he wants to communicate with it.

            Your English teacher probably characterized the central conflict of coming of age novels (bildungsroman for those who’d rather type one word than four) as youthful innocence encountering a sleazy society. The real conflict is a struggle to reconcile integrity and utility. However inconsistently, these young characters nurture a code of morals. As kids, they have to—they’re told that once we leave high school the petty bullshit stops, so figure out the type of adult you’re going to be. So they march forth, armed with a personal code, and the world couldn’t give a shit.

            As Americans, we were told you can do anything you put your mind to. As new adults, we realize our futures depend on other people. An individual’s force of will is insignificant, which means despite one’s code of personal morals, the morals of strangers determine his success.

            Getting shit done, then, depends on presenting oneself to millions of equally potent creatures of will. To survive, one must augment ones behavior. The battle is to maintain a sense of self while trimming the sails of one’s personality.            

            Gurion takes the hardest route—he rallies those potent wills to his service. Holden is weaker. He choreographs his behavior in order to impress girls, but the swamp of perverts and screwballs will never part for him.

            For Holden, Gurion and Obama, the question is one of presentation. Society is irrational and overpowering, so getting the job done requires compromise. We spend a lifetime negotiating the border between reasonable compromise and selling out.

            In terms of salesmanship, Obama negotiates this border like a rebel pacifist, David Bry wearing sweatpants to a first date, a PR Gandhi. Obama the pitchman refuses to even approach the sell-out line.

            In terms of policy, Obama has erred resolutely on the side of the paycheck. He sold out the public option to guarantee heath care reform. His stimulus was full of tax cuts. Guantanamo is open. Goldman Sachs gets the same free pass they got under Bush. By refusing to enter the PR fray he has lost legitimate policy momentum.

            For years, Republicans blatantly used the term “small government” to excuse custom-made markets for campaign donors. The economic collapse shoved that corruption in everyone’s face. Fox News frantically rewrote history, but one good Obama speech could have described the new archetype, and made certain legislative positions political poison. If the White House even clumsily applied their political leverage to an ideology caught red-handed, Republican politicians would have hastily distanced themselves from their oil, pharmaceutical and Wall Street friends. Senators would have stumbled over each other in a race to regulate Wall Street. Instead Rahm Emmanuel had to trade favors with Republicans just for the opportunity to hold an up-or-down vote.

            Obama refused to stoop to bumper sticker branding, so he inherited the conversation the media gave him. His style hurt his content.

            As an insider, Obama recognized blatant D.C. hypocrisy. (He clearly understood being pro-corporate as a right-wing thing, so by helping Wall Street, he considered himself bipartisan.)

             Meanwhile, most of us couldn’t spot a blatant Washington lie if Paul Ryan were hooked to a polygraph. We’re not mavens. Obama thought “death panel” was so stupid it would self destruct. But in cable news politics, even imaginary weaknesses get attacked like steak in a hyena park. Because Obama didn’t attack “death panel” for the dirty lie that it was, he signified to the cable news universe that it was true. The same goes for not prosecuting Bush and Cheney for torture. And for not prosecuting Gonzalez and Rove for firing US Attorneys who failed to investigate Bush’s enemies fast enough. Obama thought he was staying above the partisan fray. Instead he was declaring their innocence.

            Context signifies. Form is content.

            Obama is a sellout without being a salesman, the opposite of what I’d want him to be. He’s still new to the society of politicians, the insane high school that is cable news in Washington D.C.  To resist the D.C.’s temptations, he isolates himself from the posturing like a sullen teenager. He wears his PR tactlessness like a punk rock hairdo. He refuses engage society on its terms, then he can’t seem to figure out why nobody likes him.

             I once tutored a high school student who kept writing about drugs for a class project we would publish for parents. “Keeping it real,” I told her, “means knowing your audience.”

            Salesmanship is a fight for your audience’s limited attention. As Chip Kidd puts it in his coming of age novel, The Cheese Monkeys, communication is a war. Everything tells a story, and if you don’t tell your story, someone louder or catchier will.

Abstinence

There are many reasons not to raise a child in the South. The heat alone sounds masochistic. Arcane social hierarchies involve debutantes and would confuse any child, especially one with parents unable to guide him. Then of course, there's this:

Now, admittedly, what this is really saying is that the South is a terrible place to be poor, or judging by the STD breakdowns by race, a terrible place to be black.

So: abstinence only education anyone? If get a disease, remember your health insurance card.

I saw this when I was six and it made me a man

Winters of My Youth

I sing for the winters of my youth, which in my mind begin airborne: watching the clouds and sky reel with the last scrape of sled ringing like silence in my ears, floating. Sky, silence. Sky, silence. Until whump! snow compacts to form fit and shouts approach and that cloud drifts, changes, and I don’t move even just to prove I’m alive, paying with tingles, aches, icy trickles down my neck.

            These are the memories: hot chocolate with Mom and rosy cheeks in the little house in Spenard; Dad bursting home with snow on his beard, camping with Ian and Eric wrapped in tarps and watching stars – liners out of our of boots so they don’t freeze and can serve as sock puppets on Orion’s stage, a Snickers thawing on my belly.

            These were winters of April blizzards and porch-high powder, the Sunday-morning scrape of Dad’s shovel on the roof, cold air inside with the newest color Calvin and Hobbes, a quilt and a fight with my sister; days of trenches on the shed roof and blueprints for fort-linking tunnels, of no enemies and grand defenses, winters of snowburm mountains and Dee Dee Jonroe swishing ‘round the corner at Goose Lake, dogs yapping tongues flapping and spray smacking your face as you jumped and cheered.

            Our friend Gina made cranberry brandy and Mom and Dad took brisk skis with flasks and rosy cheeks, dragging us along through snow-draped birch, and I yelled bonzai on the downhill and tumbled into a knot of extended limbs.

            I wasn’t hurt because the snow in those days made you invincible, even, somehow, to cold. That we learned winter camping with ten boy scouts and three dads, wrapping tarps in an octagon to reflect the heat and stripping layers until we bared our tiny eleven-year-old chests and ate marshmallows, toasted by fire, bravado and parents who couldn’t admit they’d never camped at six below, either.

            This is about the cabin, the clatter of firewood thrown on the pile, heat sucking out the door, Dad brushing snow onto splinters and flakes of birch bark, sap smell and spruce smoke and the door groaning closed. Early morning at the cabin had dignity. Dad’s arms had thrown the logs up, his hands drawn the plans, and he could work without the stay-at-home coffee and want ads of a laid-off welder, had more to do than teach chess to a child to pass the time.

            But in the city, hockey was the purest – cold air burning down your lungs and down to a steaming T-shirt, one-on-one in the backyard with Dad, dinner cooking, rink lit by Christmas lights in Febuary and a shadow from the moon on the spruce trees.

            In the blue light of a Saturday afternoon our friends played, hypnotized by the rhythm of passes and dekes, ignoring the crystal-draped trees and hoar-frost on the chain-link fence that shuddered and shattered and rained broken ice if you shot it. It was shinny hockey, shinpads taped under jeans and chin yarn waving in the breeze that comes with pure and scraping speed – fakes and passes, rotating triangles and bursting til your lungs tore ‘cause even if it was just shinny there was no relent.           

            I recall the purity of those winter months and the year the snow kept falling, in April, May, and I was 8 and could make hobbit holes.

            Now, for whatever pundit-mangled reason, it is raining on Christmas. Yellow grass penetrates the snow. The cross-country races sliced over a film of muddy shavings collected from zambonis. I realize my children will never believe that every winter, it never thawed.

            So maybe Grandfather was as dashing in tails as Grandma claims, and maybe Dad really did free solo a chausy cliff in Mexico in the early days of rock climbing. If what I remember so clearly is so true and vanished, I don’t doubt Mom tried to canoe Cook Inlet, and Stuart Beard is that little dot on someone’s shoulders, bobbing along in an aerial photo of post-earthquake damage in ’64. Maybe there were sawdust bars and rowdy individualists, crazy sons of gold and oil telling themselves they wanted fortune and not freedom, that they were running to and not away. Maybe there were gods and demons, spirits and ravens, salmon thick as traffic and copper mountains green as grass.
            This is for winters that I know were real, and the miracles that happen, true in every generation, while we build magic for the next.

Google, you creep me out

On marraige

This is all I really want.

This really seemed obvious to me.

That's right. Politics. Because whether or not you want to deal with politics, politics wants to deal with you.

Dear Senator Begich,

Jim DeMint has announced that he plans to filibuster all Senate business until January, so that the government will shut down until Republicans are back in power.

            This fact should be an enormous gift. Republicans have said, again and again, that they want America to fail during this administration. Republicans have made a record number of filibusters. They have stalled an unprecedented number of appointments.

            Americans hate the partisan poison that has infected this country. Republicans have deliberately created it. The media feeds off it. Pundits are afraid to blame anyone for it (except for Fox News, who create it and then blame Democrats.) Using their own statements, you can prove that Republicans are responsible for stalling the machinery that keeps this country working. In our darkest hour, Republicans put partisanship first, and discarded their countrymen.

            I know you think you know this already, but respectfully, I think that rather than fighting against partisanship, you are playing along with it, or trying to ignore it. That strategy won’t win.

            Republican partisanship is a danger to all Americans. Make no mistake, Republicans do not care if our economy is robust, as much as they care that the powerful stay powerful. They would prefer stagnation to losing their status. A tea partier worries that he might count a Mexican as an equal in the job market. A corporate donor worries that he may have to improve performance to compete with small businesses, rather than just buying competitors. Our economy suffers as corporations manipulate laws to smother their competition.

            You're an Alaskan. We're tougher up here. I urge you to rally your party to grow a spine. If you don't hold Republicans accountable for the poison they inject into the campaign system, if you don't make partisan obstruction a political liability, then it you reward it. If Democrats tolerate this poison, they encourage it, perhaps paralyzing America in the process.

            In 1976, hockey in the NHL was a dirty game, led by the Broad Street Bullies, from Philly. Once the Flyers had some rings on their fingers, teams stocked up on goons, to emulate the Stanley Cup winners. But one team resisted. The Montreal Canadians were fast and talented, and size was not their first priority. They still had enforcers, though. In game two of the 1976 Stanley Cup Semis, Philadelphia’s Gary Doernhorfer raced over the Montreal blue line with the puck, bearing down on the goal. He thought he had enough space to score. Montreal’s Larry Robinson hammered him into the boards so hard the wood broke. That one hit changed hockey forever. Montreal won the Stanley Cup for the next few years, and teams emulated their fast style of play, paving the way for Wayne Gretzky and the early 1980s Islanders. Had Philadelphia won the ‘76 Stanley Cup, the age of skilled, fast hockey might not have emerged, and goons would have ruled. Wayne Gretzky, a skinny 17 year old kid, would have looked dubious, and he might have lacked a team to compliment his playing style. Instead, two decades of the most exciting hockey in history followed, all because when it counted, Robinson hit hard.

            This is that kind of moment. Hit Republicans for their dishonesty, obstruction, and partisanship. If Democrats win using facts and stressing integrity, like Obama did in ’08, facts become the dominate political style for the next decade. Republicans have a vast vulnerability—the truth. Their own dirtiness is their greatest weakness. Hit them hard. Democrats can win this election, win back popular appeal, and use your majority to put America back to work. If you fail to hit while Republicans are still vulnerable, Republicans will stall this country into a mess that no one can fix. In desperate times, we need swift action, not partisan deadlock. Make obstruction a liability.

            I'm asking you to pass this advice to Senators, Congressmen, and the DNC.

            I urge you to lead Democrats to vote bravely--for middle class tax cuts but not wealthy tax cuts, for disclosure laws about campaign finance, to limit the monopoly power of banks and other big business. And I urge you, and all Democrats, to seek victory by shifting American opinion to the left, rather than inching your actions to the right. Every possible fact, from economics to partisanship to corporate recklessness to government corruption, is a fact in your arsenal. Use the facts to promote a culture of results over ideology. Use the truth like a warrior for the American people. You may never get another chance.

   

Thank you for serving our country.

Sincerely,

Wrestling

More links....



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19corner.html?_r=1

To the New York Times

Dear Editor,

I was appalled to see Deborah Solomon say in her "questions" column with Lisa Murkowski that Murkowski threatened to split the Republican vote. This is utterly false. Before she declared as a write-in candidate, polls ran the race at about 50/50, Miler and McAdams. After she declared her candidacy, polls showed Murkowsi and McAdams at 20/20, with Miller holding steady. Murkowski is not splitting the Republican vote, she is splitting the educated vote. I know many, many lifelong Republicans in Alaska who could never bear to vote for a fool ideologue like Joe Miller.

Likewise, Sarah Palin only won the governorship because a moderate conservative third party candidate ran, splitting the educated vote in exactly the same way. Keep in mind that until Palin announced her VP candidacy, the Obama campaign considered Alaska a battleground state. Alaska is diverse in its people and viewpoints, and has a political math far different from that of the rest of the country. I'm tired of reporters coming up and writing stock profiles of Georgia and just changing the word "swamp" to "moose," and going on about how we all love God and guns, without knowing a damn thing about the place. We are a different kind of conservative, if we are conservative at all.

Sincerely,

Christopher Benz

The Journalistic Hampster Wheel

http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_hamster_wheel.php?page=all

More good reading: why journalism is becoming a modern-day hampster wheel. Note how the writer explicitly dismisses most modern arguments about why modern journalism is a failure, right at the outset. This way, he makes it really clear that you're about to hear something new.

On hot dog carts and banana republics

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/39815/inside-dc-food-truck-wars/full/

This perfectly exemplifies the problem with our government, and the problem with our economy. In short, some people had a new business idea. The powerful, big businesses lobbied hard to change the laws to prevent the new business model from being viable. It's not a free market--it's a custom-made market for the best lobbyists.

a link

http://nymag.com/print/?/nymetro/news/features/9503/

Just trying to keep this going. Gossip journalism is dumb. Here's an article about it.

Not all taxes come from the government

BP’s oil spill magnifies a problem familiar to any high school economics student. BP is taxing all Americans. Even when the oil spill isn’t catastrophic, a miniscule degree of contamination or environmental impact is inherent BP’s daily effort. It’s simply the nature of the oil business, just like air pollution is the nature of coal power, or pesticide runoff is inseparable from industrial agriculture. These small taxes on Americans add up. The tourism industry in Mississippi loses money when pesticide runoff from the Midwest clears life from the Gulf Dead Zone. Federal agriculture subsidies and pesticide laws shaped the market so that Archer Daniels Midland’s profits in Illinois tax Cajun Resorts Gulf Shore Charter’s business in Mobile. Shrimp fisherman have lost jobs to create jobs at BP—in fact, the Minerals Management Agency has given those men’s jobs to BP. That’s simple economics, the tragedy of the commons.

Americans choose which businesses we allow to tax us, and how much to let them. By removing regulations, we automatically surrender our resources to whomever wastes most permanently. Like it or not, the government shapes which industries and business practices succeed, either by action or inaction.

This is the role of government in a market: maintaining competition. Did those fishermen have a way to compete with BP for the Gulf? Did you? The government could have helped, but politicians were busy taking campaign contributions to keep it “small.” There is only one way an ordinary citizen can compete with BP for clean air and relatively-less-cancer-causing fish. The American government is the American people’s lobby. It is no wonder corporate donors and corporate media have worked hard to discredit and corrupt it.

Every American deserves a competitive shot at our resources. Programs like carbon trading are one of the simplest, one of the most effective models of ensuring citizens can compete. Yes, the coal industry’s PR pitchmen are right: cap and trade is a tax. But pollution is a tax on us. Americans give our air and water to BP, and some of us are surrendering jobs to them. We should not give all that away for free.

Traditionally, Americans have reduced pollution or financial mismanagement with regulations. Regulations are standards of business we expect in exchange for access to our common goods. Taxpayers spend money to enforce those standards, by funding regulatory agencies. However, the current system taxes us twice: once to pay BP with our water, once to fund regulators to watch them. With cap and trade, corporations pay us back some, and incentives mean they earn money if they improve beyond the bare minimum. Polluters tax all of us. Cap and trade is a straightforward solution.

Why Democrats Will Lose the House This Fall

Dear Mr. President,

I make less than $20,000 a year. I donated the largest possible amount to your campaign. That's more than ten percent of my income. I ate the same meal of beans and rice three days a week, phone banked, wrote to the editor, and knocked on a lot of doors to make you president. I think you are the smartest man to occupy the White House in years. But you are dangerously close to losing my vote, my energy, and my respect.

I hear rumors that your administration intends to alter America's Miranda protections. That might be the last straw for me. It's not just that it gives unwarranted credibility to Dick Cheney's lies about the Christmas bomber, while abandoning American principles. It's that I can not bear more retreat in the face of right wing bluster. I voted for you because I thought you were a fighter. And you have shown some political courage, especially in your attempts to be truly post-partisan. I respect that. But you have consistently played along with right-wing games, especially on national security. You're better than that. It saddens me to see such a strong, intelligent man pretend that the emperor is wearing clothes--or that civil liberties are a threat to America.

When Republicans get ruthless for victory, they pander to the right. Why should Democrats, ruthless for victory, pander to the right as well? Clinton says he regrets introducing competition-killing aspects of Reaganomics. Please don’t repeat the mistake. Bring Americans to your position, rather than positioning yourself where you think we stand.

You are following an administration that kidnapped people from their homes and tortured them in secret prisons. It shouldn't be hard to argue that such behavior was un-American. Frankly, it was criminal. Bush’s economic performance begs for public repudiation as well. Markets don’t regulate themselves—from mining collapses to privatized ratings agencies to oil spills, it’s clear that “Voluntary Protection” didn’t work. This Miranda nonsense is just lending your stature to Bush administration policies that the results long ago discredited.

The facts are glaring everyone in the face—we need someone to say what we did wrong and why we won’t make those mistakes again. I believe you are the one to do it. So far, you’ve only sacrificed promise after promise, from Guantanamo to offshore drilling to ending no-bid contracts. Your ideas were right. Be a great communicator, hold your ground, and explain why. Don’t pretend American rights make us unsafe. They make us American. If you decide to fight on behalf of what makes us free, I will follow you, all the way. I’m sure millions of other Americans will, too.

Sincerely, and with a great deal of respect, I am yours,

Superbowl Commercial Breakdown

An essay written hours after the 2010 Superbowl.

I watch the Superbowl for the game. However, if I’m well prepared and I’ve got my snacks and beer out in front of me before kickoff, I watch commercials, too.

This year, the commercials reminded me of prom royalty who all accidentally wore the same dress. Dockers wants men to “wear the pants.” Dodge believes you are a spineless yes-man who only feels strong while driving. FloTv personal televisions are a cure for men whose girlfriends have removed their spines. Did some memo circulate Madison on Avenue this year? “During a recession, males feel shame. Tell them your product will restore manhood.”

It isn’t just the Superbowl. There’s a new company called “Man Cave” that sells grilling products to men using the business model from Mary-K makeup and tupperware—have little parties, convince men they aren’t manly, and tell them your products will make the difference. Man Cave has a set of fake rules like “a man never turns down a free beer.” Now, I’m a big fan of free beer. I work at a bar. I’ve played a lot of rugby. I love free beer. But I drank beer long before I was a man. Being a man has nothing to do with what brand spatula you use or what beer you drink. Being a man means doing what’s right, even when it’s difficult.

I think we’ve witnessed a gradual wimpening of American culture, in which being a man is somehow associated with acting like a child. Selfish frat boy culture infected America’s most powerful businesses and politicians. Meanwhile, every immature schulb on tv dates some hot, inexplicably tolerant mother-figure. Advertisers even call expensive machines like four-wheelers “big boy toys.” Pop culture’s new vision of normal is the fifty-year old little boy.

There’s another ad campaign, for Diesel designer jeans. The ad reads, “smart has the brains, stupid has the balls.” May I suggest that no one wearing $145 jeans has the right to lecture me about balls? True courage requires intelligence. A lot of football is about just that, intelligence under pressure. Courage means knowing the risks and acting anyway. Berate brains all you want, but guts means knowing what you’re getting into.

Now, I don’t always make bright decisions. I enjoy snowmachines and four-wheelers as much as the next guy. In fact, I can operate a front-end loader and gut a fish, and I have performed first aid in the back-country and have acquitted myself well in bear and moose encounters. But what I did in the past doesn’t make me a man. Being a man means steeling your principles, glaring down reality, and dealing with it.

Advertisers aren’t alone. Political pundits love childishness. Whole campaigns translate to “do you feel weak, vulnerable, pushed around? A vote for me is like buying your balls back!” They sell moral compromise as “common sense” that experienced guys will get. They bully those who point out that the world is complex. If you don’t understand it, they say it doesn’t mean you’re ignorant—just listen to their simple version, and assume anything more complicated is a lie.

Being a man is not about what you buy or who you vote for. It is about the person you have forged yourself into. For years, our country was run by a group of grown children, playing moral-historical dress-up in times that weren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard. (A phrase I must credit to Josh Marshall.) They were cowards who surrendered American freedoms the minute something frightened them.They pulled American citizens from their homes on nothing more than suspicion, held them without trial and tortured them in secret prisons. They did medical experiments on prisoners and locked them in camps away from their families. Then, they tried to make us ignore it by saying that Arab-Americans aren’t “real” Americans like you and me. They sunk to acts no western culture has since World War two, because they were cowering with fear and they needed to feel safe. I’ll say it right now: torture is pussy shit. It’s un-American and cowardly, and it will remain so no matter how many fat guys on tv pretend it’s up for debate.

No pitchman in the world can make you a man. That’s the whole point.

On Having an Opponent

I often think of writing in terms of rugby. This is undoubtedly a roundabout approach. But (according to cognitive scientists) the mind understands the intangible in terms of the physical (anger is heat, love is a journey) so since I have devoted years of energy to shaping my rugby skills, I suppose rugby was a natural vehicle for understanding hard-honed craft. I imagine the ideal way to understand writing is in terms of sex, but sadly, art as seduction just doesn’t translate for me. In any case, I was reading an interview with David Foster Wallace today, and I had an epiphany.

It was an old Believer interview, and in it, Wallace discussed distraction and work. He said that when a piece inspires him, he can write any which way, but when he is forcing himself to write, he has to set hours and build a routine. (DFW: “What often happens is that when work goes well all my routines and disciplines go out the window simply because I don’t need them, and then when it starts not going well I flounder around trying to reconstruct disciplines I can enforce and habits I can stick to.”)

You ever try to lift weights with no routine? You wander around the weight room sampling dumbbells and copying the exercises you overheard a personal trainer teaching to a lady named Fran who works out in a red tracksuit. When I lift properly, I have a schedule from my rugby coach of exercises, reps, and sometimes even specific rest times. This way, at 6:30 in the morning, with no motivation, I can plop myself down on the bench, see how much I lifted last week, and try to beat it. The momentum of a routine only helps you if you build it in a direction. You know what you plan to do and what you’re capable of, so the routine pulls you through uninspired moments.

Some of the excellent writers I know love structure. They tinker and toy with it, and brighten up like kittens when they find a new structure to experiment with. Even in my own writing, I’ve noticed that I write better within a structure. Structure frees up brainpower. It’s one of the reasons post-concussive syndrome wears on an artist—the first thing you lose in concussions is “working memory,” which is the ability to hold onto multiple ideas at once. An average person can remember seven things in their working memory, and it’s nice to use one of them on overall structure, one on what you’ve written so far, one grasping the truth you’re trying to communicate, and to use the final bits of working memory playing legos with sentences. Imagine tinkering with structure as you go, too. Something slips.

Writing within a structure, like lifting with an exercise schedule, means you don’t need to be inspired for every minute of effort. You wake up in the morning, plop down at your desk, and know where to start. You can fight through, using willpower when you lack inspiration’s gleam.

But your best rugby doesn’t emerge when you’re willing yourself to endure pain. Your best performances emerge when you’re having so much fun, the pain is incidental. Your lungs burn, sweat stings your eyes, your collarbone aches ominous and you need to sprint to the ruck, coldly read the field and call a play. Tricking yourself into ignoring your body just focuses your mind on the pain. You play best not in a frenzy, nor in prove-yourself blinders, but when you’re so busy toying with the other team, you forget yourself entirely.

Which is why I think inspiration, in this getting-yourself to write sense, comes down to the object of your focus. Allow me another sports example. Mike Tyson used to begin fights by staring down his opponent to find an eye twitch, a swallow, a hint of mental weakness. I play my smartest rugby when I am determining, with almost sadistic glee, how I intend to damage my opponent. In principle, this tiny attitude adjustment seems no different from spending the game dwelling on what my team should do. “I’m going to nail this tackle” barely differs in meaning from “this schmuck’s gonna hit the grass.” But the difference is vast.

Inspiration, I suspect, is partly a product of joy, of forgetting yourself while you test what you can do—you toy with the story, or the ideas, or the audience you’ll manipulate into ecstasy. On the other hand, when you’re thinking about you—and how to avoid distraction, how to trick yourself into sitting at a desk—you’re occupying bits of working memory that could be probing your story for weakness, imagining plans of attack. The effectiveness of a writing routine (or a stressful deadline) is that it walls off the girlfriend and internet and whatever might release you from the contest and return you to your own weak flesh.

Praying for the economy.

            People are praying for the economy. The New York Times reported an trend of recession-related religious services since Lehman Brothers failed. This explains how poorly Congressmen understand (and explain) the economy. If my car breaks down, I don’t pray for it to work again. Even if I’m not sure what’s wrong, I don’t pray. I find someone who can fix it. I may throw in an extra prayer for good measure, but I’m looking first to the mechanic.

            One of the first ideas of anthropology is that religion forms around the experiences in which people are powerless. Polynesians prayed before venturing out into the open ocean, but not before boating in a safe lagoon. Agrarian societies pray for rain and harvest, but not that they will manage to pick the corn.

            Too few people see the economy as a problem for an expert, and even fewer see the solution themselves. The economy is a system, like an engine, not a mysterious force. Yet I’d say 95% or more of people, even informed people, turn to religious reactions, performing rituals to appease economic gods. Republicans cut taxes and deregulate, regardless of circumstances. (In an unspoken platform plank, Republicans also stimulate spending by starting wars and buying arms.) Democrats, in theory, respond to broken economies with infrastructure investments and social safety net programs like welfare.

            Both approaches, when a religious reaction rather than reasoned reaction, are like getting a jump start every time you have car trouble, even if it’s a leaky radiator or a frozen oil pan.

            Maybe we just need a better diagram of the economy than supply-side and demand-side. Something that doesn’t use calculus, because that might spook the Senators. Just a really good diagram.

            I think its safe to say that our current system occurred when we devoted ourselves to ritual deregulation and bloodletting through tax cuts far past the point it could have helped. The underlying problem is the willingness to treat economics like a shamanistic crapshoot.[1] The problem is people don’t even see the economy as a man-made system.

            Our power is to vote and to educate. Those we elect need to learn to face a crisis. Instead of falling back to their party holy book, they should at least first call a mechanic.

           

---

[1] (We sacrifice a regulation, blow on our lucky tax cut, and roll.)

OK Go letter and video

http://okgo.forumsunlimited.com/index.php?showtopic=4169

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.