
Everyone’s going to have to decide this sooner or later. Probably sooner.
Everyone’s going to have to decide this sooner or later. Probably sooner.
A government that can’t keep its own citizens alive isn’t worth a warm bucket of shit. A media system that makes money pretending black and white is a matter of opinion isn’t worth a warm bucket of shit. An opposition that doesn’t openly and vocally oppose rank stupidity and corruption isn’t worth a warm bucket of shit.
And a citizenry that politely lets it all happen to them isn’t worth a warm bucket of shit.
What follows is a rant. You may not need to see a rant right now. That’s cool. Don’t read this, then. Save it for another day. Ignore it altogether. Whatever. This is for me, and the last thing I want to do is add to your burdens. Your job is take care of yourself. Do what you need to do. I’ll be fine.
On the other hand, if you’re in the mood to watch a spleen get vented sit back and come along for the ride.
You know what I hate? I hate that motherfuckers who’ve spent the last — oh, I don’t know — 40 fucking years telling me I was just some soft candy-assed soft-hearted lib’rul who should get on my knees and kiss their rancid knobs of 9mm manly manliness because they were “protecting my freedoms” — are now parading around saying that their “liberties” are at stake because they can’t go get a fucking haircut. Jesucristo en una tortilla, this is worse than those asswipes who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago and forgot to bring snacks.
I hate that everyone is sitting around pretending they have to be respectful of people who are perfectly comfortable with the idea of you dying so they can get more imaginary magic beans. Yeah. That’s what money is. It’s something we made up. It only as value because we pretend it does. It doesn’t occur in nature. My cats don’t give a shit about money. Nether does your dog. And SARS-CoV-2 definitely doesn’t give flying fuck about money. Sure, a sociopath is perfectly willing to kill you over it, but Jezus Chrystus w kiełbasie playing along with them is is just fucking stupid.
We’ve never not fought a war because it was too expensive. Money is an excuse, not a state of nature. Death, on the other hand, occurs in nature. At a 100% rate. Sure it’s going to get all of us eventually, but 耶稣基督在蛋卷中1 do you have to help? What kind of sick fuck are you if shifting off someone else’s mortal coil is worth it so long as you can have more magic beans? And just what brand of moron are you if you think that’s something worth debating?
What set me off is that Brian Kemp — proof-positive that shit things can come out of Athens, GA, too — announced last night that he’s going to encourage people to start committing suicide by getting a haircut on my birthday so other people can have more magic beans. My cousin who I love like a sister and has the misfortune to be in Texas right now is having to help plan how to best open a medical library full of books that tell you what a completely fucking stupid idea it is to open a library in the middle of a fucking pandemic.
You don’t have to be civil to people who are trying to kill you so they can have more magic beans. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t have to be cooperative. It’s fine to be a pain in their asses. Not only would they do the same for you, they’re doing worse. Right now. To you.
Just don’t forget to help the people who aren’t trying to kill you. That’s most people, actually. Be a revolutionary. Be kind.
Stay home. Wash your damn hands. Stay alive. That’s your job. Everything else is bullshit, and anyone who tells you different doesn’t give a shit about you.
And you don’t have to pretend they do.
1 And yes, I love Google Translate. Why do you ask?
I honestly thought I wouldn’t say anything more about this. There have been way too many words written about it already and most of them have been pointless. I’m partly doing this as personal therapy, but I also want it as a record for when things go really wrong. My whole life has teetered somewhere between being a cautionary tale and screaming “I told you so!” at people who never learn. This is one of those times I fear it’s the latter.
I’m talking about the mess with the Astros, of course. What else can people talk about? I’ve addressed what the team did and I stand by every word I said. I suppose that once the country you live in has descended into being a third-world-style kleptocracy, you’re going to be pissed off about the circuses because you can’t do squat about the bread anymore. Man, if only people got as upset about the Emoluments Clause in the actual Constitution as this… But that’s crazy talk.
Somebody is going to get hurt. I don’t know if it’s going to be a player getting beaned by a pissed-off pitcher, somebody sliding in spikes-high into a base, or some dumb-ass righteous “fan” seeking a ballistic redress of grievances. But someone is going to get hurt. The Outrage-Industrial Complex is going full bore. We haven’t heard from the hotdog vendors at Dodger Stadium yet, but I’m sure it’s penciled in somewhere in The Athletics editorial planner. I bailed out of all social media back in November, and I’m so glad I did. People are nuts. It’s just a matter of time before someone with an AK-47 goes looking for the basement of the basement-less pizza parlor where the Astros stored all those buzzers.
Here’s “the take” you’re unlikely to see anywhere else: I don’t believe knowing the called pitch in advance helps the batter that much. Computationally the amount of information that provides versus the cascade of real-time calculations that have to be performed in order to place the bat on the ball is way too small. If you can tease out the effect of that little information on the overall task of hitting, you don’t need to be worried about baseball; You need to be worried about your travel plans to Stockholm to pick up your Nobel in Medicine.
I know, I know, I know. Every major league hitter is lining up to talk about how much it helps. I’m sure they believe it. Strongly. And we all know that the strength of an anecdotal personal belief constitutes reliable evidence of empirical phenomena. Ask any Anti-Vaxxer or Biblical Literalist. They’ll be happy to explain it to you. In excruciating detail. Attribution Theory is a thing, y’all.
I’m sure knowing what pitch is coming helps. Except for all the times that it doesn’t. Good luck finding the difference between the two. Sure, you might know slow or fast. But placement? Trajectory? Break? And have I really stolen a sign if the pitcher actually throws the pitch to the backstop? I’ll be happy to look at any evidence that it works, but I’m profoundly disinterested in the opinions of people who won’t wash their socks during a hitting streak. For Jobu’s sake, think for a minute.
And, yes, I know about the L-Shaped screens for live BP. Of course no one actually got hit once in an entire season-and-a-half of systematic sign-stealing during actual games, but they … could have? But remember: it was only wrong if it was a pitch known in advance because of an electronically-stolen sign. Analog sign stealing isn’t illegal, it’s tradition. It’s only when those darn electrons get involved that things go wrong. So be selective in your outrage when a traumatic brain injury occurs.
It’s not that what the Astros did was right. I’ve explained what I see wrong in what they did, and how the punishment they were given was richly deserved. What I can’t — and won’t — accept without saying something is the degree to which people are willing to shut off their brains in order to be sanctimonious.
Somebody’s going to get hurt. And when that happens, no one is going to understand how that happened. This is just my way of telling you that you could see this coming. Don’t try to say you couldn’t. And it will be your fault. After all, everybody who’s calling for automatic lifetime bans for everyone in the organization is clearly fine with collective sanctions regardless of personal participation.
Hey, I don’t make the rules. But I’m perfectly fine applying the ones you make for others to you.
It’s been just over a week since I killed off my social media accounts (the ones I remembered anyway) and it’s been … fine. I already knew I spent way more time on both Twitter and Reddit than I should have. I’ve had some withdrawal symptoms, but they’re fading pretty fast. No, I’m not as plugged into the zeitgeist as much as I once was, but the zeitgeist never seemed to care much whether I was there or not. So I’m not seeing the downside. There are still plenty of places for me to go if I want to despair about the state of humanity. (I call it “going outside.”)
The dumbass in the White House has said something or tweeted something or done something stupid today. His enablers have done something evil. My congressman failed a Turing test again. These are all safe bets. Here’s how they affect me:
This was the list as it existed while I was still on social media:
It’s a subtle, but important, difference.
I’m compensating in a number of ways, but that’s not exactly new. I think that’s the story of my life since roughly, oh, I don’t know, 1968. I’ve dusted off the blog, obviously. I’ve sought out some of the survivors of the Great Blogging Outbreak of the late 1990s. Some are still around. And I’m finding others. And Carla is still on social media so I see pictures of cute kids and animals. Oh yeah, and family news. That, too.
This picture is why I’m going to keep the blog:
It’s kind of hard to tell, but that’s me about a year ago getting ready for the City of Florence Tree Lighting. I’m sitting in the cab of a Florence fire truck. It. Was. Awesome. I will never forget it. I’ll also probably never do it again because the process of getting my fat ass into the cab was this weird mash-up of raising the flag in Iwo Jima and the Hunny Tree scene in Winnie the Pooh. It took three of Florence’s Finest to get me in there. No one needs to go through that again.
I often joke that the purpose of my life is to serve as a cautionary tale to others. How can I fulfill my purpose without a place to tell the stories? So I’m keeping the blog. And — because I don’t want to post my email address for all the world to see — I’ll eventually get comments turned back on (once I get a minor spam-protection issue worked out). Being off social media has taught me that I never really cared that much if anyone saw what I wrote. I just wanted someplace to put it.
By the way, this year’s lighting is December 3 back at the Florence Government Center. No fire truck. I’ll post all my public Santa gigs before Thanksgiving.
So I have no idea what the ‘ aside’ post-type looks like. So I’m finding out.
Maybe I’ll make my pithy observations here. At least it allows editing.
I believe life is hard. The Buddha said all existence is suffering and any Bengals fan can attest to that. I don’t know if everyone is basically good or basically bad, but I do know everyone is just trying to get through the day. Get up and try to make it to night. Try to be better off if you can, but try like hell to keep from slipping backwards. Rinse and repeat. You’re just trying to get through the day. Just like everyone else. It’s never easy. For anyone.
To me the greatest sin I can commit is to make someone else’s life harder. I can’t always make it easier, though I should if I can, but I should never make it harder. What other people do to me is up to them. My actions are not contingent on theirs. I have no obligation to allow someone to make my life harder, by the way, just as I can’t try to make my life better by making yours worse. Make someone else’s life better if you can, but never, ever make it worse.
I do not write the name of the short-fingered vulgarian in the White House. He values it more than anything, so it’s the thing I’ll always deny him. It’s symbolic, petty, and utterly ineffective. That’s my wheelhouse. If clear writing demands the use of a name, I use Don Palmturd (anagram!). Comic Colin Mocherie is a strong proponent of Lord Dampnut and it’s hard to beat. The juxtaposition of mocking nobility with incontinence and impotence is hard to pass up. Mine starts off with a double entendre. It’s a casual nickname sure to annoy someone who uses his full name and middle initial to refer to himself, but also a title of respect — among criminals. The surname juxtaposes shit in the tropics. Like Mar-a-Lago.
They aren’t mutually exclusive names, of course. I like the image of a shabbily-dressed Englishman doorman announcing “The Lord Dampnut, Don Palmturd” and the two-bit Il Douche strutting into the room, jaw-jutting with the smirk on his face. He thinks everyone is applauding him, but they’re really applauding the doorman behind him air-wanking and rolling his eyes.
Don Palmturd doesn’t believe what I believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can’t look into the hearts of others and all that, but come on. This guy enjoys making people’s lives harder. He gets off on it. Many of his supporters do too. You ask them how they’re buying any of this crap and they tell you “Ha, ha, ha libtard, we won and you lost.” (Even though they’re speaking aloud they’ll still manage to misspell three words, but that’s beside the point.) It’s an entire political philosophy built around “neener, neener, neener.” They didn’t win. You lost. That makes them happy. That’s all that matters. They believe their lives are better if someone else’s is worse. That’s winning. That’s making America great again.
Nope. It’s not politics, it’s potty training. I can’t fix it. I won’t accept it. I don’t have to.
I actually don’t care who they hate. I don’t care who you hate. Your hatred doesn’t give you the right to make other folks have a harder time getting through the day than they would have had otherwise. Remember, you don’t have to make anyone’s life easier, you just don’t have a right to make it harder. If I consent to let someone else make your life harder, then it’s as if I did it myself. No one gets a free pass. Making someone’s life harder is always a choice. You make that choice and you’re giving everyone permission to do the same to you.
Make no mistake. They will get to you eventually. There are people who currently reside outside the top 1% of wealth-horders who think they’re safe from all this stuff. They tsk, tsk, tsk about everyone freaking out about losing their health insurance, for example, because they get theirs through their employer. As if somehow providing health insurance is something employers will always be required to do no matter what, forever and ever, Amen.
Let’s try a thought experiment. If you have employer-provided healthcare, what would happen if your company decided they didn’t want to offer it anymore? How easily could you change jobs? Remember, you’ll likely be competing with every single other person at your company who does what you do. You that good? What if you’re wrong? And it’s only going to be an “issue” if your company is the first. All someone has to do is be the first. By the second or third it will be the new normal. If you complain you’ll be an entitled whiner-loser-millennial. There will be Wall Street Journal features on the titans of business who disrupted human decency and made the stock market soar. And after all, isn’t that all that really matters?
Of course, it can’t happen. It’s ridiculous. It’d be like an airline started charging you for carry-on luggage! No one would stand for it! Until the FAA becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Airlines and standing-room-only flights are approved, of course. Then flight attendants crews will have to be issued cattle prods, if only for appearances sake.
Yesterday the Senate of the United States of America voted to make a few people more wealthy without having the slightest idea how many people’s lives they’ll make worse. Much effort has gone into not knowing because it doesn’t matter. If you think anyone will hesitate to make your life worse if they think there’s even a chance they can gain from it, you’re delusional. You represent nothing they can’t find in a million other places. You are a commodity. Raw material from which wealth can be extracted. Then you’re slag. To be discarded.
So go ahead and say nothing when you see other people’s lives being made worse. They’ll get to you eventually. And you’ve already given the folks who could say something about it permission to say nothing. Good job!
Your time is coming. Get your hating in now. You’ll be too busy later.
Or dead.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that Mike Pence took the deal John Kasich was offered. The Grifter doesn’t want to be President. He just wants to be in charge. He wants to be the top of the food chain. As long as he’s El Jefé Anaranjado¹ who gets his cut from whatever money’s being made, he’s going to be happy. He’s going to reward those who helped him and punish those who hurt him. He’s not worried about the details. That’s what he has Pence for. Oh, and how Pence has taken the opportunity! Want to be in the Cabinet? Be white. Be rich. Be opposed to anything that wouldn’t fly in an Indiana town that has more churches than liquor stores. I have this picture in my head of Pence Interviews: The Musical where a chorus of interviewers sing (to the tune of The Spice Girls Wannabe): “Tell me that you’re white, that you’re really, really white…If you wannabe in my cabinet, you really gotta hate the gays…”
We’re going to start hearing a lot about rights soon, especially religious “rights.” I have a complicated relationship with religion. My first and foremost belief is that my religion is none of your business. The second is like unto it: I don’t want to hear about yours. I’m interested in what you do. I couldn’t care less why you think you do it. You have a justification? Yay you! Want a cookie? Regardless of what you do or don’t believe about life, the universe, and everything, the authority of your belief system ends where your skin meets the air. Your moral code has an intended population of one: you. What you do to me matters to me. What I do to you matters to you. Everything else is rationalization.
Here’s what I’ve decided is going to be my standard going forward: No one has the right to make anyone else’s life harder. It’s a good thing to try to make people’s lives easier if you can, but it’s not always possible. It’s never OK to make someone’s life harder,
Life is hard all by its own self. You can do everything you’re supposed to do and try to be good to people and still get slapped upside the head with a metaphorical frozen fish. Make the circumstances weird enough, it becomes a real one. If something can go wrong it probably will. If there’s a bad time for someone to lose hope, that’s when it will most likely happen. If there’s a really bad time to become overconfident, someone’s going to ask you to hold their beer. If there’s any evidence it doesn’t work that way, I’ve yet to see it. Given that the essence of human nature is to screw thing up, the least we can do is not make anything worse for anyone else. When we rise above our natures we might actually make things better. Hippocrates got it right, though. First, do no harm.
If the news from the past couple of years is to be believed, the biggest threat to religious liberty are selling wedding cakes to people who you don’t think ought to get married and signing the legal documents necessary for the same. Forget the fact that refusing to sell the cake doesn’t stop anyone from getting married or that the state gets to tell you what forms you need to sign if you’re an elected official. What you think is going to happen to your soul is your business, not mine, but what you’re doing is making someone else’s life harder just because you want to. That’s not OK. Your life doesn’t get any worse if you sell that cake or sign that document. It goes on just like it did before.
“OK,” you say, “so I want to rob a bank. That guard at the door is making my life harder.” Yes, but you’re planning to make other people’s lives harder. The people in the bank. The people you’re stealing from. That guard is preventing you from making other people’s lives harder.
“Oh, OK, then,” you say, “so what about abortion? You’re making the fetus’s life worse, aren’t you?” Not so fast, Skippy. The fetus doesn’t exist separately from the mother. That fetus is entirely dependent on every decision the mother makes no matter what. Sounds like to me the only one qualified to make any decisions vis a vis the fetus is the mother. Someone does have to decide. It’s just not you. Unless you’re the mother. Otherwise all you’re doing is getting mixed up in something where you’re more likely to make someone’s life worse than better.
So as we enter these dark days ahead — and make no mistake, dark days are coming — hold on to simple truths. Evil isn’t complicated. “Fuck you” is a pretty simple concept. It pays to have simple truths for yourself to hold onto. The simplest truth is this: no one has the right to make someone else’s life harder.
Anyone who tells you otherwise will be happy to make yours harder.
¹The Orange Chief
This is not normal.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
He has no proof this happened, of course. He can point to nothing because there’s nothing there. It’s not on me to “prove” millions of people didn’t vote illegally. It’s on him to prove they did. And he can’t do it. Because it didn’t happen. The only reason you write something like this is to delegitimize your opposition in the minds of your supporters. He won the election because of a loophole in the electoral system that was put in place to block the direct popular election of the President. As with most things having to do with the Yam-Colored One, this has been floating around for a little while.
The fever swamp from which the new national discourse emerges.
This, in turn, apparently has its roots in a series of tweets from some guy with a Twitter account named Gregg Phillips who claims to have a database of 180,000 registered voters “tagged with non-citizens.” Whatever the hell that means. Other than blustering statements about how the evidence is solid, he’s so far refused to let anyone see it. It doesn’t matter of course. It’s “out there.” It’s already been accepted as truth by the base. Like all stories having to do with the person who I’ve privately started calling The Last President of the United States, the details of this particular train wreck are mostly irrelevant. I’ll only throw out that the “story” begins emerging around the time it became clear Clinton was going to win the popular vote by a large margin. The fact that people keep harping on that and the margin keeps growing and Jill Stein decides to ask for a recounts before she returns to whatever cicada nest she sleeps in until Presidential election season rolls around again has really harshed the mellow of The Hairpiece that Roared. Forget the fact that the rules for being elected President of the United States don’t require you to win the overall popular vote. It’s a wrinkle that’s been in the rules from the beginning. It’s happened before. The popular vote? Sure, it’s nice to have. It’s not required. Them’s the rules. Say what you will about Shrub back in the day. He’d just shrug and say “I won.”
So why is it such a big deal to Herr Twitler? It’s part of a pattern that makes perfect sense if you don’t mind being utterly terrified.
So a couple of the classes I’ve been teaching this semester deal with games. In the process of the crash course I’ve had to subject myself to on game theory, I’ve had the great fortune of being introduced to a delightful book called The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits. It’s a deceptively simple book written (partly) in the style of a Socratic dialog using the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants as its basis. The Grasshopper isn’t an irresponsible slacker here. He’s actually a subtle thinker who develops a philosophy of life that sees Utopia in a life of all play and no work — even when that life leads to his inevitable death. It sounds depressing, but it’s really a book that attempts to refute Ludwig’s Wittgenstein’s assertion that games can’t be formally defined. Suits didn’t care for this position and wrote this book. The centerpiece of the book is his formal definition of a game:
“My conclusion is that to play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.”
Later he sums it up even more succinctly:
“…playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Compare this to anthropologist Mary Douglas’s description of an institution in her masterpiece How Institutions Think:
“Minimally an institution is only a convention. David Lewis’ definition is helpful: a convention arises when all parties have a common interest in there being a rule to insure coordination, none have a conflicting interest, and none will deviate lest the desired coordination is lost.”
Games, conventions and institutions all require willing participation, what Suits called the “lusory attitude.” Lusory is a term that’s pretty common in Game Studies. It more or less means “playful,” but sounds better when talking to colleagues from other departments at faculty gatherings and you don’t want to keep saying ‘playful’ all the time. Most everyone but the physicists will let it slide and who cares about physicists anyway? Screw those guys.
Willing participation. I’ve mentioned it before in another context, but I can’t think of this without thinking about this George Carlin routine:
“‘Cause that’s what they taught us; it’s what’s in your mind that counts; your intentions, that’s how we’ll judge you. What you want to do. Mortal sin had to be a grievous offense, sufficient reflection and full consent of the will. Ya had’ta WANNA! In fact, WANNA was a sin all by itself. “Thou Shalt Not WANNA”. If you woke up in the morning and said, “I’m going down to 42nd street and commit a mortal sin!” Save your car fare; you did it, man!”
Can anyone point out anything the Yam-Man has done that could reasonably be interpreted as wanting to hold the country together more than getting his way? The fainting-couch crowd will gleefully point out that I’m being rude to him. That I’m not showing any respect to the duly-elected Grifter-in-Chief. And you’d be right. I’m not. I won’t. I don’t have to. That’s one of those unnecessary obstacles that’s built into the game. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. I, as a citizen of the United States of America, have the right to believe that the man elected to be President of These Here United States is a simpering bag of pus with tastes that would make a bordello owner say “Jeez, that’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?” The fact is, my opposition only matters if you favor the less efficient means of putting up with it over the more efficient means of lining me up against a wall and shooting me. He’s not allowed to have me shot yet. Yet.
The most dangerous time for him is right now — before the reins of power are handed over to him. This is not a man who handles pressure well. We have to keep it up. Don’t let the bastard breathe. We don’t have to give him hell. All we have to do is tell the truth and he’ll think it’s hell. But also remember we’re all asked one question every single day: is this country worth it? What are you willing to give up and set aside in order to keep the country together?
Then ask what is he willing to give up to keep the country together?
That’s really the biggest question of all.
If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in life it’s that you’re welcome to hold any opinion you want as long as it’s well-known that it agrees with everyone else’s. I find being around people draining, which is why it’s so odd I’ve spent so much time on social media. I’m increasingly turning into the least social person I know. And I’m OK with that.
I’ve been uneasy with Facebook for a long time. I resisted getting on it in the first place. While I’ve been able to reconnect (and, in some cases, connect) with people I genuinely like, the cost has been high. I’m not going to go into any detail here, but this morning I expressed an opinion that proved to be wildly unpopular. I’ve never been good at saying what people want to hear.
Not my writing style.
Craig Ferguson has a bit he does that I think is dead on. He says that before he says anything he asks three questions:
I’m not sure which of these I did wrong this morning. Number 3, I think. Maybe #2, but I’m leaning towards #3. The point here is that I got up on a beautiful (if a little sticky) Friday morning and immediately managed to piss people off and, in turn, get pissed off myself. I don’t need this shit. No one does. I’ve got work to do.
I’ve deactivated my Facebook account. For my own sanity. If I feel like I have something I want to say I have a perfectly good place to say it right here. I don’t have to worry about accidently harshing the mellow of those with delicate mellows who might be exposed to a contrary opinion through the vaguaries of Mark Zuckerberg’s latest timeline algorithm. No one’s going to accidentally stumble on something here. You come here and you get what you pay for. Don’t like it? Don’t come here. The other side of it is that it’s not as quick to write things here as on Facebook. There are many more chances to heed Craig Ferguson’s wise counsel. I can have opinions and the world can easily ignore them. Which is how it should be. Everyone seems to be happier.
Like I said, I’ve got work to do.
It’s really all about power, isn’t it? All this stuff that’s going on in the world. It’s about power. The power to make your little part of the world the way you want it. The power to decide what little part of the world is your little part of the world. Call it control. Call it agency. It’s power. It’s the ability to affect — and effect — how things turn out for you, short-term and long-term. And it’s also about frustration. What you do when you realize you don’t have power or agency or control.
This hit me as I was commiserating with a friend on Facebook. I don’t want to say too much out of concern for privacy, but sufficed to say neither of us are having an especially good time right now. I was trying to explain my philosophy of “fuck it.” Basically it boils down to me doing this re-evaluation of the things I like to do and the things other people seem to expect of me. Those things I like I keep. Everything else gets stuck onto the “fuck it” pile. This is still a work in progress and I don’t recommend tossing everything and making it your life plan, but my thinking is that I’m not going to get to the point of suckering people for money earning an honest day’s wages until I know what the rubes will pay for what I have to offer my fellow passengers on this trip though the cosmos.
I’ve been re-reading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. It’s such a good book. It was written in the 1950’s so it’s a nightmare in terms of gender-inclusive language, but it’s clear the guy had it together and he’d have written it differently if he were doing it today. Anyway, it’s about how individuals decide to join new mass movements. His examples come from the rise of Christianity, the Protestant Schism, the Bolshevik Revolution and, because it’s written just after World War II, Hitler and the Nazis. An Andrew Sullivan piece that was otherwise a nightmare reminded me of Hoffer’s book. I’ve been thinking about nucleation points — places where conditions are right for a system to start to change from one thing to another — and it hit me that Hoffer’s book is a taxonomy of how that works. He’s not polluted or distracted by the present day because it hadn’t happened yet. All he had to go off of was a past that was less distant to him than us. And there was that whole “being a freaking genius thing.” He had that going for him.
Anyway, he talks a lot about frustration. He’s careful not to use the term clinically. Hell, he’s careful with all the words he uses, but especially that one. A good chunk of the book is a compendium of how different life circumstances can lead to frustration. He then illustrates how a new mass movement can give people the hope that their frustrations can be relieved. It’s been a long time since I read it and I’m not all the way through it yet, but one thing that’s becoming clear is that it’s not a good idea for a new mass movement to be too specific with details. People are happy to fill in the blanks.
It reminds of of something I’ve encountered a millions times when sitting down to talk to someone about me writing or making a new thing (video, educational piece, whatever). They generally have a pretty good idea about how they want to feel when the whole thing is done. What’s going to make them feel that way is pretty much a mystery to them. Experience has taught me that whatever they think is the answer is probably wrong (or so hopelessly incomplete it amounts to the same thing). It’s not their fault. If they knew what they needed or wanted they’d have already done it for themselves. They’re not stupid, after all. They spend their days happily doing stuff I can’t — or don’t want to — do. Part of my job is getting them trust me that it’s OK they weren’t born knowing how to do whatever it is that needs to be done. And trusting me to do it. My job is figuring out how to make the thing that’s going to make them feel the way they want at the end. And then get them to pay me that sweet, sweet money for it. People: good at knowing how they want to feel. People: pretty sucky at figuring out how to get there. Me: just like everyone else.
I think I “get” Trump now. And guns. And abortion. And how you can repeat all this crap about Obama that just doesn’t hold up to even cursory examination. The thing itself is not that important. It’s the ability to believe in the thing. You get to control that. You can own it, literally and metaphorically. Sure you’re more likely to shoot yourself or a loved one than you are a crook trying to rob you, but you own that gun. You can have that. You can make that happen. And before you start feeling all that damned superior yourself, you might want to be aware that you’ve got just as many blind spots. Think about that stereotypical person on Facebook that really pisses you off. What are their characteristics? Congratulations. You’ve just listed the things in your life you are frustrated about. You’ve done a chemical analysis of the soil that will list in great detail what will sprout and grow in you. You want to control, those things. You want to affect how those things turn out. And you’ll overlook things and gloss over things and do everything the person you despise does to prop up the hope that you will some day. “If people would only just…” So don’t get too full of yourself, Spanky. You’re just someone else’s garden.
A couple loose ends: None of this is new. Or original. People have been frustrated for as long as there have been people. It’s one of our defining characteristics as things that exist in three-dimensional space and fart. The new twist is we have a much wider assortment of things to be frustrated about because we have such visibility into the lives and thoughts of others. We simultaneously know way to much about other people and way too little about ourselves. That’s not a particularly good recipe for happiness. Then there’s the whole thing where somehow we’ve decided that “stuff” is what it’s all about. Whoever controls our ability to get stuff controls us. That’s kind of weird.
Waiting for the punch line? Waiting for the solution? Sorry. Not going to find any answers here. For my part I’ve been looking around a lot lately saying “What the fuck?” I’ve been seeing a lot of other people doing the same thing. I think I get it now. It’s about power, or the lack thereof. It’s people working out frustrations the only way they can.
I don’t know what to do about any of it (if, indeed, there’s anything to be “done”). But at least I know what I’m looking at.
It’s a start.
Trust me. You can’t see my face and I dress funny. I’m clearly the answer.