In the Internet Age, Conquest, War, Famine, and Death have been replaced by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter as our 21st Century Four Horsemen Time Sucks of the Apocalypse. Yeah, that’s more than a little over the top, but Cal Newport, writing in Digital Minimalism quotes Bill Maher from a New Rules segment on 12 May 2017to make a strong case.

This is how Maher began:

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your Likes is the new smoking,”

(To be fair, Maher is far from original here and many others, like Marc Maron, were here first.)

Instagram, however, is different at a whole new level of evil from the other Time Sucks. You have to read (for the most part) or listen to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter but all that Instagram demands is that you stare at the pretty pictures. No literacy required! But then the self-judging begins.

Jenni Gritters, writing in The Psychological Toll of Becoming an Instagram Influencer for Medium explains:

Compared to other social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, Instagram appears to be more taxing on our brains, especially when it comes to the ways we compare ourselves to everyone else while using it. The new study also found that the more time people reported spending on Instagram, the more anxious and depressed they felt.

Study author Danielle Leigh Wagstaff, a psychology professor at Federation University Australia, says people naturally compare themselves to others because it helps us figure out where we stand. She believes that Instagram—more so than any other platform—confuses our social comparison radar. We’re constantly trying to figure out if we’re more or less attractive, smart, and accomplished than everyone else.

“With Instagram, we have immediate access to all of these idealized images, which aren’t always an accurate representation of the world,” Wagstaff says. “People tend to post only their best images on Instagram, using filters that make them look beautiful. We have a false sense of what the average is, which makes us feel worse about ourselves.”

And when you already suffer from low self esteem (or worse) buying into these curated fantasies can exacerbate suffering with horrible consequences. I’ve seen this in some of my students addicted to their smart (we need a better word here) phones.

Now imagine what life would be like if your income depended upon Instagram. Gritters continues:

Like many 24-year-olds, Alexandra Mondalek, a fashion reporter in New York, found herself obsessing over social media. Her rapidly growing fashion-focused Instagram account, @hautetakes, was gaining attention, with a little more than 1,000 followers, and it was all she could think about. She wasn’t making money from it yet, but Mondalek wondered if she could reach “influencer” status if she kept at it.

“I was putting too much weight into who was viewing my Instagram,” says Mondalek, who started posting photos of the free gifts she received from designers and PR teams, hoping to build her following. “I would worry about how a post was performing instead of making important calls. I felt a certain pressure to make a brand of myself, and there was so much anxiety in that.”

Mondalek decided to quit Instagram in late 2017. Her break lasted for nine months, and she says she felt better than ever during that period. “I didn’t feel like I had to turn out perfect content all the time,” she says. But after nine months, Mondalek decided to quit her reporting job and go freelance. She felt like she needed to rejoin the platform to keep her work connections. Now, Mondalek says she’s back to procrastinating on projects by mindlessly scrolling through photos.

“I’d be lying if I said I could look at an explore page on Instagram and not compare myself to what I see on those pages,” she says. “Someone is purchasing something you can’t purchase or making connections you haven’t yet made. It’s the rat-race lifestyle boiled down into the palm of your hand, and sometimes it feels inescapable.”

This is an addiction and the addiction is fucking users up. Social media is just one facet. Amy Fleming, writing in Constant cravings: is addiction on the rise? for The Guardian ledes:

Addiction was once viewed as an unsavoury fringe disease, tethered to substances with killer withdrawal symptoms, such as alcohol and opium. But now the scope of what humans can be addicted to seems to have snowballed, from sugar to shopping to social media. The UK’s first NHS internet-addiction clinic is opening this year; the World Health Organization has included gaming disorder in its official addictions diagnosis guidelines.

For the Free Will/Personal Responsibility Warriors out there who champion the myth that all addiction is just a matter of character flaws, that’s all bullshit, of course, especially when their fortune depends upon addiction.

“What’s happening in these addictions,” says [professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan Terry] Robinson, “is that the dopamine system is becoming hypersensitised, leading to these pathological motivational states.” He has identified three factors that could help explain why “there seems to be a wider variety of problematic things [to get addicted to]”. (He does caution, however, that “getting into social factors is very difficult in terms of proving cause and effect”.)

The first factor is that our modern environment is stuffed with craving-inducing stimuli. “People don’t appreciate the power of cues that have been associated with rewards, be it a drug or sex or food, in generating motivational states.” In fact, addicts can start liking the cues more than the end goal, such as the rigmarole of scoring drugs and so on. “The amount of cues associated with highly palatable foods are everywhere now,” he says. “Drugs, sex and gambling as well, and that has changed quite a bit over the years and could be leading to more problematic use.”

[Professor of addiction at King’s College London, Michael] Lynskey agrees, adding “some of the marketing and design of gambling machines is a step ahead of all of us academics in devising ways to attract users and boost dopamine and retain them”. The “like” button, quantifying approval and igniting a compulsion to check social media, is a similar example. Introducing a report into the effects of social media on young people in early 2018, the UK’s children’s commissioner Anne Longfield wrote that “some children are becoming almost addicted to ‘likes’ as a form of social validation”.

In her conclusion, Fleming notes that social media addictions—akin to eating addictions, we have to eat—are much harder, if not impossible for addicts to avoid:

A modern challenge is the ubiquity, and the necessity: gone are the days when recovering behavioural addicts can be told to avoid the ever-necessary internet, for example. “Younger generations will be socially cut off,” says Bowden-Jones, “and what our patients say is when they feel they’re missing out, it pushes them more toward the virtual life that they already have a problem with rather than engaging properly in their face-to-face lives.” As Moffat says, “that’s where they get their validation”.

Many of us would plot our internet habits on the lower end of this spectrum: slaves to our phones, wasting hours that we will never get back stuck down internet rabbit holes, compulsively checking for likes. “There’s a great distinction,” says Bowden-Jones “between functional use and use that is not necessary. It’s like eating too much cake, which makes you feel bad. People who are on social media too much, it’s not a positive experience, although it may have started off as such.” There goes the dopamine without the pleasure, again.

Circling back to Newport. It is possible to live a full and meaningful life without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. (I’m living proof of the first two and I’ve never been sucked in by Instagram. YouTube, now, is my particular challenge.

Bonus No. 1: However, in the spirit of compromise, we reluctantly support the stoning of Donald Trump. —Previously…

Yesterday I looked at the introductory section of Elizabeth Catte’s excellent Why ‘Trump country’ isn’t as Republican as you think where she lays the groundwork for how we got to 2019. In part two she directly links Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Florence Reece. I’ve written much about Reece and her union anthem: Which Side Are You On?

I suspect that, neither has Ocasio-Cortez. Catte writes:

When Ocasio-Cortez asks if voters are prepared to choose people over money, I hear echoes of a much older question that still resonates in Appalachia: which side are you on? In 1931, when Black Mountain Coal Company cut miners’ wages in Harlan, Kentucky, a long strike ensued. Harlan’s infamously corrupt sheriff, JH Blair, terrorised union families; law enforcement, including the National Guard, intervened on behalf of the interests of coal operators to force miners – through threats, coercion and violence – to return to work. When the sheriff and deputised coal company operatives ransacked activist Florence Reece’s home in search of her husband, who helped organise the strike, Reece penned what would become one of history’s most recognisable labour anthems, Which Side Are You On? The song galvanised workers and inspired bystanders to surrender the illusion that one could be impartial in the face of so much oppression. “Us poor folks haven’t got a chance unless we organise,” she sang. “They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there.”

There still aren’t. Catte finds a Waffle House worker writes:

In late 2016, for example, a young man named Nic Smith, another product of south-west Virginia, made headlines for his participation in a #Fightfor15 demonstration. Outside a Richmond McDonald’s, Smith, a Waffle House employee, connected the plight of fast-food workers with the past struggles of coal miners in his family. He also pushed back against the Trumpian reactionary politics that elevates white working-class racial anxiety over class solidarity. “Ain’t no damn immigrant stole a coal job,” Smith said. “I’ll tell you that right now. And really, even if they did, would you really be blaming the immigrants or the people that hired them? The only reason they would hire an immigrant over an American citizen is if it benefits their wallets.”

Instead of rigging a dying industry, Smith explains in a Washington Post op-ed, it would be far better to unionise low-wage workers and raise the minimum wage. He joined #Fightfor15, he wrote, because his family “has always understood that we can’t wait for a saviour at the ballot box to shepherd in the change we so desperately need”.

A self-described “damn white trash hillbilly from the holler”, Smith is an exotic figure to the many media outlets that covered him. Vice complimented him for not fitting “the image of the typical millennial activist” – a former factory worker, you see, who “isn’t the kind of Democratic socialist who spouts off at Brooklyn parties about the ‘means of production’”. Smith’s approach is fairly typical, however, if you are looking from Appalachia rather than New York. Here, activists such as Smith often connect to the struggles of their parents and grandparents as they engage in activism.

Political activism runs deeper than the played-out veins of coal in Appalachia. People there know History as Catte illustrates with Helen Lewis, Brandon Wolford, Aaron Bady, Charlotte Pritt and Richard Ojeda. History matters. Catte concludes:

It matters that workers are rising up, and it matters that women are leading. It matters that the fight against extractive capitalism is fiercer than ever. And for all of these actions, it matters that the reasoning is not simply, “this is what is right”, but also, “this is what we do”. That reclamation of identity is powerful. Here, the greatest possible rebuke to the forces that gave us Trump will not be people outside of the region writing sneering columns, and it likely will not start with electoral politics. It will come from ordinary people who turn to their neighbours, relatives, and friends and ask, through their actions: “Which side are you on?”

“Listen to today’s socialists,” the political scientist Corey Robin writes, “and you’ll hear less the language of poverty than of power. Mr Sanders invokes the 1%. Ms Ocasio-Cortez speaks to and for the ‘working class’ – not ‘working people’ or ‘working families’, homey phrases meant to soften and soothe. The 1% and the working class are not economic descriptors. They’re political accusations. They split society in two, declaring one side the illegitimate ruler of the other; one side the taker of the other’s freedom, power and promise.”

This is a language the left knows well in Appalachia and many other rural communities. “The socialist argument against capitalism,” Robin says, “isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree.” Indeed, the state motto of West Virginia is montani semper liberi: mountaineers are always free. It was adopted in 1863 to mark West Virginia’s secession from Virginia, a victory that meant these new citizens would not fight a rich man’s war.

There are moments when that freedom feels, to me, unearned. How can one look at our economic conditions and who we have helped elect and claim freedom? But then I imagine the power of people who face their suffering head on and still say: “I am free.” There is no need to visit the future to see the truth in that. There is freedom in fighting old battles because it means that the other side has not won.

Winning in 2020 will not be a matter of the neo-liberal myth of staying the course. That way lies the shameful defeat of 2016 and the rise of our national nightmare. No. We have to decide which side of History we’re on and recongnize that Florence was right: There are no neutrals in Harlan County.

Bonus No. 1: 30 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes Providing Insight on Race and Culture.

Bonus No. 2: Several 2020 Democrat Candidates Endorse Racial Reparations.

Bonus No. 3Remember being shocked by Tony Abbott? It seems like a picnic now

Trump Country is not a cartoon world populated by the progeny of Lov and Pearl Bensey. The real people are not to be mocked in the way a school where I worked did a few years ago by hosting a Hillbilly Day during spirit week. I know. I grew up in Trump Country and the rest of my family still lives there. We do a great disservice if we dismiss these revolutionaries.

If they are mostly Republicans, they are so because they do feel supposed, mocked and ignored by Democrats. Horrible characterizations like those found in John David Vance’s faux folksy Elegy haven’t helped matters. (For a response to Vance, see: Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.)

Elizabeth Catte, writing in Why ‘Trump country’ isn’t as Republican as you think begins—as I myself often do when explaining from where I come—with a grandfatherly tale. She writes:

When my grandfather was a child, his stepfather would bring him along as he sold moonshine to poor working men in south-west Virginia coal country. The men adored my grandfather, who was not yet even school age, for his talent for mocking Democrats. He told me this story on a few occasions to explain, I think, the inevitability of his later affiliation with the Republican party. He was a Republican in much the same way that I am a Democrat – voting with little enthusiasm every few years and sometimes not at all.

When I consider that story now, I find myself thinking less about my grandfather and more about the men who laughed at his jokes. What were their politics? Not all were the predecessors of today’s Republicans, as we might imagine them to be. In Appalachia, so-called “mountain Republicans” comprised an old vanguard of anti-secessionists, who opposed slavery and the Confederacy. They saw themselves as heirs to the enlightened legacy of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. My grandfather belonged (or at least aspired to belong) to that tradition. His audience might have consisted of Democrats, who enjoyed hearing their abuses repeated in the mouth of a child. But it is more likely that they would describe themselves as without politics, just laughing at the powerful and self-important. For a long time, it did not occur to me there were other possibilities.

To be a Lincolnian Republican was to value the Republic, the nation, over the State. We came out of our bloody civil war transformed. No longer were we a nation where these United States of America are but rather where this United States of America is. We still haven’t gotten E pluribus unum down right, but we are a work in progress.

Catte continues:

My wider view of politics in Virginia’s coal country changed when I discovered that the publisher of my grandfather’s local community paper, Crawford’s Weekly, was a communist. And not just a communist in print, but a shot-while-inciting-class-war, sabotage-the-New-Deal-from-within, run-for-local-political-office-on-a-platform-of-a-producer’s-republic com- munist. His name was Bruce Crawford, and when my partner, also from south-west Virginia, discovered his writings, we read them aloud to each other as though they were letters from an eccentric uncle.

Neo-liberal Democrats (perhaps taking a cue from Hillary Clinton’s primary win—66.7 percent to 25.8 percent—in West Virginia over Barack Obama in 2008, perhaps from shear lazy ignorance) have ceded the fictional Trump Country and can’t be bothered to seriously campaign there. That is a monumental mistake. In what I see as the central thesis of her piece, Catte writes:

Rural spaces are often thought of as places absent of things, from people of colour to modern amenities to radical politics. The truth, as usual, is more complicated. The parents and grandparents of my childhood friends were union organisers; when my grandfather moved to east Tennessee, he went from a world of communist coal miners to the backyard of one of the most important incubators of the civil rights movement, the Highlander Research and Education Center. I now organise with people whose families have fought against economic exploitation for generations. From my vantage point in West Virginia and south-west Virginia, what is old is new again: the revival of a labour movement, the fight against extractive capitalism, the struggle against corporate money in politics and the continuation of women’s grassroots leadership.

She goes on to systematically dismantle the neo-liberal tropes and demonstrate that Trump won not because his message resonated with the masses—it did not, only clever camera angles and targeted rallies created that illusion—but cause he at least pretended to care about people who drove trucks and dug coal. Socialist is not a dirty word to union members. The grandparents of rural votes fought and died for their unions. They remember, and authentic politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can resonate with them.

We remain attached, after all, to narratives that have worked very hard to simplify and neatly divide the state of the union: blue cities, red rural areas, a few swing suburbs. “In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties,” wrote the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in Strangers in Their Own Land (2016). Indeed, the biggest gift that the left has given the right since 2016 is not a few avowed socialists but the myth that Trump voters are inscrutable and monolithic. “I love Cleveland, but I’ve always considered it separate from Ohio,” resident Julie Goulis told the Guardian just before the 2017 inauguration. “Some of the soul-searching I’ve been doing after the election has been about how I can understand people outside of my bubble.”

That is a message that I have been trying to communicate—with little success—to Democrats in Cuyahoga County ever since I moved to Cleveland in 1984. I still hear liberal Clevelanders point to the hillbillies living on the west side with no sense of irony or shame. I had great hope for the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus—an organization crafted from the ashes of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign. The hope is not all gone, but, for me, seriously diminished.

Catto concludes the first section of her piece with these two paragraphs:

It would be far better for progressives to save their bubble-popping for moments such as this, when an opportunity emerges to better understand those closer on the political spectrum in those same spaces. The limbo we are trapped in compels white progressives to attempt to understand Trump voters rather than rural socialists or communists – or even rural people of colour, who face many of the same struggles as Trump voters, perhaps even more pronounced, and choose a different way forward.

Let us get free of that, once and for all. Appalachia should not be seen as a liability to the left, a place that time and progress forgot. The past itself is not a negative asset. The hierarchies and systems of power here feel old because they are, but this legacy also means there are many who are well practiced in the art of survival and resistance. Our present can be reckoned with, and a different future emerge, but the way forward for the left, in my world, is through the past.

Sound advice. I’ll look at more of Catte’s takedown of the Trump-country myth tomorrow.

Bonus No. 1: Talking Burley: by Sherry Chandler.

You’d be hard pressed to find an adult who doesn’t know the line: First, kill all the lawyers. As a bonus, the person repeating the quote will also most likely know that the line belongs to William Shakespeare. After that, they have nothing. Which is sad, because the line is spoken in Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2 by the rebel Dick The Butcher.

First, the quote is: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Second, Dick rightly believes that the law is against him and the easiest way to eliminate their opposition to his royal aspirations is to kill them all. Fast forward to modern Capitalism and the One Percent find themselves in much the same situation as Dick: the major obstacle to their limitless wealth are other people’s lawyers which they have to pay their own lawyers to combat. All wasted money. Eliminate the lawyers—or at least hobble them—and all will be well in the world of the über wealthy.

Which brings me, and Ralph Nader, to the perenial top of the Capitalism’s wish list: tort reform. Nader, writing in What are Torts? They’re Everywhere! explains:

What exposed the Tobacco industry’s carcinogenic cover-up? The lethal asbestos industry cover-up? The General Motors’ deadly ignition switch defect cover-up? The Catholic Church’s pedophile scandal? All kinds of toxic waste poisonings?

Not the state legislatures of our country. Not Congress. Not the regulatory agencies of our federal or state governments. These abuses and other wrongs were exposed by lawsuits brought by individuals or groups of afflicted plaintiffs using the venerable American law of torts.

Almost every day, the media reports on stories of injured parties using our legal system to seek justice for wrongful injuries. Unfortunately, the media almost Continue Reading »

From where I sit at my writing desk, J.K. Rowling looks like a one trick pony. All she’s got is her Hogwarts universe and I don’t know a writer who wouldn’t fuck a death eater for a chance to sit Rowling’s saddle. As my father once told me: Becoming an overnight success takes a long time and Rowling certainly earned her fame the old fashion way. She earned it.

Of course wanna-be writers (like our president?) want to know her secret. How too can they become overnight billionaires? Rowling, however has nothing but blood, sweat and tears. On her blog she writes:

I have to say that I can’t stand lists of ‘must do’s’, whether in life or in writing. Something rebels in me when I’m told what I have to do before I’m fifty, or have to buy this season, or have to write if I want to be a success.

Ten Habits All Best-Selling Writers Have In Common. These Five Tips Will Transform Your Writing! Follow J.K. Rowling’s Golden Rules For Success!

I haven’t got ten rules that guarantee success, although I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process. Male protagonists are unfashionable. Boarding schools are anathema. No kids book should be longer than 45,000 words.

So forget the ‘must do’s’ and concentrate on the ‘you probably won’t get far withouts’, which are:

1. READ—This is especially for younger writers. You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.

2. DISCIPLINE—Sometimes you have to write even when the muse isn’t cooperating.

3. RESILIENCE AND HUMILITY—Some of the greatest writers were rejected multiple times. Being able to pick yourself up and keep going is invaluable if you’re to survive your work being publicly assessed.

4. COURAGE—Wouldn’t you rather be the person who actually finished the project you’re dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about ‘always having wanted to’?

5. INDEPENDENCE—In writing as in life, your job is to do the best you can, improving your own inherent limitations where possible, learning as much as you can and accepting that perfect works of art are only slightly less rare than perfect human beings.

All perfectly solid suggestions, but if you want to be a writer—as opposed to having written—then I can offer no better sage advice than the lead epigraph at the top of every Have Coffee Will Write page. Marge Piece said everything in those six lines.

Now, quit reading this drek and go write.

Bonus No. 1: A moment of silence for the Bramble Cay melomys, another victim of climate change

Bonus No. 2: Finally! Revealed! why Donald Trump hates Muslims… Continue Reading »

When I joined the Navy my father advised me to take at least one day in port to explore the local culture, especially the food. That was great advice and after I was discharged, I continued to visit local eateries as I traveled in my capacity as a business editor. Reading last evening I was surprised, and pleased, to see one of my favorites featured: Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack.

I made three (maybe four) trips to Nashville between 1985 and 1992 and I was fortunate to discover Prince’s—in much the same way I discovered Kansas City, Kansas, barbecue—on my first visit. Eating in the Far East had introduced me spicy foods far beyond what I had experienced back home so I felt prepared to test my metal when I heard about Prince’s. I was ready. Dang, was I wrong.

Writing in The Family Business That Put Nashville Hot Chicken on the Map for The New Yorker, Paige Williams lets Ira Kaplan, of the indie band Yo La Tengo lay out the challenge. She writes:

Kaplan has recalled, “We were told it came in ‘mild,’ ‘medium,’ ‘hot,’ and ‘extra-hot,’ but if we’d never been there before we would not be allowed to have extra-hot. We asked if we could at least taste ‘extra-hot sauce.’ What rubes we were—we were informed that there is no sauce.”

A cult of insanity, akin to the über stupidity of eating Tide Pods, has risen in the Age of YouTube, and Williams takes a break to talk a bit about the science:

A food’s spiciness can be measured in Scoville Heat Units, a gauge developed, in the early twentieth century, by Wilbur Scoville, a pharmaceuticals chemist from Connecticut. A jalapeño, at its hottest, measures 8,000 S.H.U. Cayenne, the only confirmed hot-chicken ingredient, is at least four times hotter than that. There is a growing market for peppers that have been cultivated expressly for pungency. At last check, the hottest chili pepper, as recorded in August, 2017, by Guinness World Records, was the Carolina Reaper, which comes in at 1.64 million S.H.U. Prince’s fundamental recipe predates newfangled peppers.

Thank gawd.

First-timers, Williams writes, have been advised to prepare for hot chicken by putting a roll of toilet paper in the freezer at home. I bluffed my way to hot. I should have listened to sense, but I learned. I was only in Nashville for two days, but on my next stay a couple of years later, I moved up to the extra-hot. (Apparently the chain has expended the offering to a maximum now of XXXHot. I can’t even begin to imagine was a transcendent experience that would be.) Williams continues:

In November, Eater named Prince’s one of America’s 38 Essential Restaurants. [None of which, are in Ohio, JH] Six years ago, the James Beard Foundation gave the restaurant its America’s Classics award, which honors “timeless” establishments serving “quality food that reflects the character of its community.” Nashville hot chicken, the foundation said, was a “totemic” creation. The proprietors of Prince’s, and its many imitators, regularly appear on TV food-and-travel shows. Anthony Bourdain, after sampling the hot chicken of a competitor, Bolton’s, said, “I eat many strange and spicy things around the world, but never in my life have I experienced something like this.” He added, “Is it food? Or an initiation ritual for Yankees?”

Such comments can make eating Nashville hot chicken sound like one of those “challenges” in which people choke down spoonfuls of cinnamon. But for many diners the dish is an obsession. In a short documentary for the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Prince’s devotee describes hot chicken as “worse than dope” in its addictiveness. When Isaac Beard, who owned a massage-therapy clinic in Nashville, first ate Prince’s hot chicken, he thought that it was just O.K.; then, about a month later, he woke up in the middle of the night with an enormous craving. “From that moment on, I was licked,” he later told Timothy Charles Davis, the author of The Hot Chicken Cookbook, adding, “There’s something legitimate there in hot chicken that’s not there with, say, Buffalo wings.”

I agree. Wings, with the blue cheese or Ranch dressing sides with celery sticks are strictly for amateurs. This isn’t, as Kaplan noted, about sauce. This is spicy down to the bone. The food is great, but Prince’s also comes with a great story.

People eat at Prince’s because of the chicken but also because of the story behind it. Jeffries has spent the better part of her adulthood recounting the legend, for she inherited both the recipe (which is secret) and the family lore (which is unverifiable). In the nineteen-thirties, her great-uncle Thornton Prince III was a handsome pig farmer and fond of women. One Saturday night, he dragged home late, angering his girlfriend. The next day, Prince asked her to make his favorite food, fried chicken. The girlfriend complied, but with a furious twist: she saturated the bird in cayenne pepper and other spices.

No doubt, Prince was expected to suffer, and did—but he also enjoyed the experience. He began replicating the spicy fried chicken and selling it on weekends, out of his home. He eventually opened a small restaurant, the BBQ Chicken Shack, which became beloved in the black community. It became popular with white people, too, especially after the restaurant moved to a location near the Grand Ole Opry. Under Jim Crow, the Princes were not free to dine wherever and however they wanted, or to use the front door of white establishments, but they never told their own customers where to sit or what door to use. The matter handled itself: black patrons sat up front; whites entered through the back door and sat in back.

The nostalgia of reading about Prince’s was fun, but toward the end of her piece, Williams dives into a much deeper, more significant aspect of the (now) two-store business: White Privilege. She writes:

A few years ago, at a conference in New York, Devita Davison, the executive director of FoodLab Detroit, used Hattie B’s and Prince’s as examples in a lecture about restaurants and race, titled “Black Food Matters: Race and Equity in the Good Food Movement.” Recounting the story of Prince’s, she said, “Hot chicken, particularly in the African-American community, was more than just about eating chicken.” She cued up an image of an article, in the magazine Food Republic, bearing the headline “Meet the Man Who Launched the Nashville Hot-Chicken Craze.” The man in question wasn’t Thornton Prince III; it was John Lasater, the chef at Hattie B’s. Lasater, who is white, trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York. His brother-in-law, Nick Bishop, Jr., who is also white, co-founded Hattie B’s; Bishop’s grandfather was a C.E.O. of the Morrison’s Cafeteria chain.

As Davison observed, when “African-American entrepreneurs don’t grow rich” from an invention like hot chicken, it’s not necessarily because rivals make superior food; it’s because black entrepreneurs still struggle for such resources as bank loans and industry networks. The food world had been talking about “who gets credit for what cuisine.” Davison said, “I don’t think that white voices should be centered around a dish” invented and popularized “by black businesses eighty years ago.” She concluded, “We cannot afford to have a movement that is based” in “white privilege.”

Which is another good reason to never eat that nasty mess from Kentucky Fried Chicken, regardless of the faux heat.

Bonus No. 1: I’ve always admired whistle-blowers—I particularly hold Edward Snowden in high esteem (and my position cost me at least one reader)—but I’ve always wondered if I would have the guts to be one myself. Sheelah Kolhatkar, writing in The Personal Toll of Whistle-Blowing gives us an in-depth look at whistle blowers in Heath Care. The whole piece is a fascinating read from which I pulled these three passages as a teaser. First, a historical anchor:

The first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.

And then, fast forward when:

President Lyndon Johnson created the first national health-care program in 1965, after fierce political battles, when he signed the Social Security Act Amendments. The law established a fund to provide health-insurance coverage, known as Medicare, to Americans over the age of sixty-five, and to provide coverage to the poor through a sister program, Medicaid. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony, in Independence, Missouri, noting that eighteen million Americans were seniors, many with low incomes. “No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.” Johnson gave the first Medicare card to former President Truman.

And finally, to the present day:

Len Nichols, a professor of health policy at George Mason University, who served as a health-policy adviser during the Clinton Administration, told me. “Medicare Advantage is a long-standing part of the Republican strategy of privatizing Medicare.” The Advantage plans competed for patients with one another, and with traditional Medicare; they began offering perks such as health-club memberships, dental coverage, and rebates. And all this market competition would encourage better services and more preventive care, driving down costs. At least, that was the idea.

We know how well that worked.

Only because of the unanimous, 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education has the vast majority of Americans ever heard of Homer Plessy. The 1954 case made Thurgood Marshall famous and his victory was directly responsible for his appointment to the Supreme Court of The United States in 1967, but what do we really know about Plessy?

What I thought I knew was that Plessy—I didn’t know his first name until this week—was that it was a test case challenging segregation in the late-19th century that established the doctrine of Separate but Equal as the law of the land. I was kind of right, but thanks to Louis Menand, writing in The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law: How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America for The New Yorker, I am, this morning, significantly less ignorant on the matter.

Menand begins more than 150 years ago:

From the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American race relations were largely shaped by states that had seceded from the Union in 1861, and the elected leaders of those states almost all spoke the language of white supremacy. They did not use dog whistles. “White Supremacy” was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, until 1995.

How did this happen? How did white people in a part of the country that was virtually destroyed by war contrive to take political control of their states, install manifestly undemocratic regimes in them, maintain those regimes for nearly a century, and effectively block the national government from addressing racial inequality everywhere else? Part of the answer is that those people had a lot of help. Institutions constitutionally empowered to intervene twisted themselves every which way to explain why, in this matter, intervention was not part of the job description.

How did this happen, Menand asks? I know his question is rhetorical here, but I’m still bugged by his asking because, in doing so, he perpetuates the myth that the America Civil War as all about ending slavery and that’s a lie. Yes, the states that would make up the Confederacy seceded—which the our Constitution did not prohibit—but the United States of America did not fight for four bloody years to fee the slaves; the Republicans, lead by their first president, Abraham Lincoln, threw our nation into war to preserve their industrial fortunes. Ending slavery was a most fortuitous afterthought.

After the end of the military occupation of the former states in rebellion—although for a fun exercise, consider that the vast majority of U.S. Army bases in the United States are still in those states—what Neil Young would enshrine (and Lynyrd Skynyrd would challenge) as Southern (White) Man would reasserted dominance through a brier patch of laws that would collectively come to be known as Jim Crow. In 1890, Menand writes:

…a New Orleans lawyer and newspaper editor named Louis Martinet—his mother was born a slave; his father, a Belgian, bought her freedom—formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, and set about building a case.

First, Martinet approached the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which agreed to act as a silent partner. It did not do so out of altruism. From a business point of view, segregation represented a cost—the cost of providing separate facilities for black customers. It would have been cheaper for the railroads if the state had mandated integration instead.

Then Martinet recruited a plaintiff, Daniel Desdunes, a young mixed-race musician whose father was on the Committee. On February 24, 1892, Desdunes boarded a train in New Orleans with a ticket for Mobile, Alabama, and sat in a car reserved for whites. He was duly arrested and charged, his case set to be heard by the criminal-court judge in New Orleans, John Ferguson.

(Sixty-five years later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would enlist the aid of several activists to challenge, and ultimately crush, another Jim Crow law that relegated Negroes to the back of the bus in Selma, Alabama. Prominent among those courageous activists, of course, was Rosa Louise McCauley Parks.)

Martinet lost that first case, but he kept going and found Homer Plessy.

…because of the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling, Martinet needed another volunteer scofflaw. Fortunately, he had one at hand: Homer Plessy. Like Desdunes, Plessy was light-skinned—“fair-skinned enough to cause confusion,” as Luxenberg puts it, suggesting that Plessy might have been accustomed to passing, as many nominally “colored” people in New Orleans did. He was twenty-nine years old, married, and in the shoemaking business. Like Desdunes, he followed the script. On June 7, 1892, he boarded a train, one travelling only within the state of Louisiana, and sat in the car for white passengers.

That case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and again, Martinet lost. This time however, he made history in a way he did not. wish. Menand returns to Steve Luxenberg’s Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation and writes:

…the concept “separate but equal” (the phrase the Court used in Plessy was actually “equal but separate”) was hardly a novelty. It had been a customary way to throw out complaints about segregation since before the Civil War. In Plessy, the Court added a gloss that became almost as famous as the phrase itself: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” it said. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” As Charles Black, a Yale law professor, wrote of these sentences many years later, “The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.”

By enshrining Separate but Equal, Martinet did great damage, but he had to try, albeit with the wrong Supreme Court, as Menand notes:

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Warren Court would cite psychological studies showing that black children are harmed by segregation. That’s not something a nineteenth-century court would have considered appropriate (and some people did not consider it appropriate in Brown). In cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court looked to the text of the statute. If the statute did not prescribe unequal conditions, then, legally, conditions were not unequal.

The Justices in the Plessy case were aware of the repercussions that a robust interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would have, of course. Political realities, as always, put a constraint on judicial reasoning. The Supreme Court in the early twentieth century did decide cases in favor of African-American and Asian-American plaintiffs, but it mostly kept its hands off state racial regulations.

The risks were known.

When Louis Martinet formed his Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, he wrote to Frederick Douglass and asked for his support. Douglass refused. He said he could not see how the case could help things. Douglass was proved correct. The decision was the worst possible outcome, and the one Plessy’s lawyers had feared. It stamped a constitutional seal of approval on state-mandated racial segregation. The case may not have received much press attention at the time, but over the next fifty years it was cited in thirteen Supreme Court opinions.

Martinet, however, also saw a door closing.

It’s true that in 1890, when the Separate Car Act was passed, Southern race relations were still somewhat in flux. Blacks voted and were politically active. The Louisiana legislature that passed the act had sixteen African-American members. And the composition of the Supreme Court is subject to change; the lawyers for Plessy might have hoped that they would draw a winning hand.

By 1896, though, the endgame was clearly in view. Six years earlier, Mississippi had become the first state to contrive laws to disenfranchise black voters, rather than rely solely on terror and fraud. Other states followed, although extralegal methods remained in use, and, by the end of the century, the work of disenfranchisement was complete. There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero.

There is a invaluable tradition in our court system that the minority opinion in any case carries great judicial weight. In the matter of Plessy v. Ferguson, the vote was 7-to-1 with the lone dissent coming from Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan. Menand continues:

Harlan, the dissenter in Plessy, came from a family with a long history in Kentucky politics. His father was a U.S. congressman; his grandson, also John Marshall Harlan, became an Associate Justice on the Warren Court. Kentucky was a border state—it allowed slavery but did not secede—and Harlan began his career as a pro-slavery Unionist. He led a regiment against rebel forces in Kentucky, but he and his family had owned slaves, and he condemned the Thirteenth Amendment as “the overthrow of Constitutional liberty.”

Harlan was complex, but as Menand notes, he was also prophetic:

Harlan’s Plessy dissent seems unequivocal. “In the eye of the law,” he says, “there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He saw as well as Douglass did the long-term effect of the Court’s ruling, warning, “The judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.” When John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on civil rights from the Oval Office, in 1963—the speech that initiated the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—he quoted from Harlan’s dissent.

I like to think that Chief Justice Earl Warren, who engineered the unanimous decision in Brown, reflected on Harlan’s dissent and prophecy.

There is much more in Menand’s article that is tangential, but still cogent and illuminating on the topic of the Jim Crow era in these United States of America. Go. Read. Learn.

Bonus No. 1: They will call Bernie Sanders a kapo.

Bonus No. 2: The lights go on and off in the environment minister’s office, but no one’s there!

I’ll allow Howard Cosell’s crowning of Muhammad Ali as The Greatest, but I think that all other such ennoblements are hyperbole at best and shameless fawning at worst. So, when David Denby, writing in The Great Hollywood Screenwriter Who Hated Hollywood for The New Yorker, declared Ben Hecht, the greatest of American screenwriters… I winced.

But Denby lays his groundwork carefully. Hecht, he writes, began life as a 16-year-old newspaper reporter, learning his writing craft the way I wished I had done, instead of pursuing a mostly worthless degree in Journalism. Denby writes:

[Hecht] would wander about the city and spend time with “ordinary” people—an anticipation of the warm-spirited columns that Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill wrote years later about working-class New Yorkers. Barely in his twenties, he hung out in Chicago’s literary bohemia, drinking and exchanging ideas and manuscripts with Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sandburg, and many other members of what became known as the Chicago Literary Renaissance. He wrote satirical stories for H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set and Margaret Anderson’s brilliant journal of new writing, The Little Review, and, in 1921, published an ambitious novel, “Erik Dorn.” The book has some effective passages, in which a solitary man wanders through the flux of a great modern city, but the good moments get lost in endless political and erotic musing. As Adina Hoffman says, the style is all over the place—veering from modernist free association to pulpy bodice-ripping. Hecht published other experiments, including an obscene novel that appears to have been an attempt to get himself thrown in jail as a martyr to free speech. He lacked the patience and discipline for literature—though he might have become, if he had stuck to journalism, a second Mencken, dispensing pungently funny observations of everyone and everything. The best evidence of the road not taken can be found in A Child of the Century.

Then Hecht went west, to Hollywood, where the lure of real money sucked innumerable writers into a black pit.

Many good and great writers, including Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, were lured to Hollywood in the thirties and forties by easy money and by the chance to do something exciting in a still young art form, only to come away frustrated, even disgusted. But Hecht had few illusions to lose. As a screenwriter, he stuck to the newspaperman’s ethos of working fast and not caring much (or seeming not to care much) about the results. By exercising his right of contempt, he succeeded, at least in his own mind, in not becoming a victim, though he may have become something else—a cynic who undervalued the art that he helped produce.

Hecht escaped.

Hecht’s film résumé is difficult to sort out, in part because he was indifferent to getting screen credit, though not to getting paid. He worked on “Underworld,” “The Front Page” (which yielded the sensationally effective remake “His Girl Friday”), “Scarface,” “Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Nothing Sacred,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Gunga Din,” “Notorious,” various minor but potent noir movies, and many other things. Some of these were original screenplays, some were adaptations, some were collaborations (with his pals Charles MacArthur or Charles Lederer); a few times he simply provided an indelible story and moved on. Hecht also pulled together and revivified a stalled “Gone with the Wind” and worked as a last-minute fixer on “Stagecoach,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” “Foreign Correspondent,” and “Gilda.” An enormously talented man—“He invented eighty per cent of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968 [Emphasis mine, JH]—he was also frivolous, ornery, and contradictory. The best screenwriter in Hollywood was contemptuous of movies as an art form (“an outhouse on the Parnassus,” Hecht declared), and had little trust in the wisdom of studio bosses and producers (“nitwits on a par with the lower run of politicians I had known”).

Denby pulls out two of Hecht’s other screenplays for special meniton: Nothing Sacred (1937) which Denby calls Hecht’s Sinclair Novel on film and Notorious (1946). In Hecht great screenplay for Notorious, Denby writes:

…a seemingly worthless party girl (Ingrid Bergman) goes to work after the war for an American intelligence agent (Cary Grant) and penetrates a dangerous Nazi circle in Brazil. Hecht refined and subtilized the banter of the old screwball comedies into ironic japery, and Hitchcock directed with an unparalleled mastery of sexual tension. The party girl finds a useful life, even redemption, and Hecht, with this anti-Nazi movie, may have wanted to do the same for himself.

And what better goal than to find a useful life?

Bonus No. 1: FBI raid targets Shaker Hts. City Council Democrat Rob Zimmerman.

Bonus No. 2: Check out the poetry of Shane McCrae: America I am becoming white / Still for every inch my afro grows / I wait a minute longer at the Wal- / mart deli.

So, part of my father’s legacy is his love of music—he was a drummer for most of his life—and dad me and my three siblings that there was no bad genre of music, just bad musicians. My own collection spans centuries and genres and I always make a point of asking my students to give me a list of five songs/albums that they’re listening to so that I can stay current.

The most amazing musical instrument is the human voice—there’s a reason that Ludwig Von Beethoven included human voices in his greatest work—and I remember when I discovered Mongolian throat singing in the oughts. Burkhead Bilger, writing in Roomful of Teeth Is Revolutionizing Choral Music for The New Yorker, has given me a new fave to listen to. He begins:

In a throat, a note is forming. A puff of air, a pulse of the lungs, rushes up the windpipe and through the vocal cords, parting them like a pair of lips. As the cords begin to vibrate, they’re stretched taut by muscles to either side, raising the pitch. The diaphragm pumps more air, rocketing the note up the vocal tract, making its walls hum like the barrel of a woodwind. The sound ricochets back and forth as it rises, gaining resonance with each rebound, till it bursts into the hollow chamber of the mouth, the ringing cavities of the sinuses, and careens off the palate into the open air.

The human voice is the world’s most astonishing instrument, it’s often said. It’s capable of everything from a trill to a bark to an ear-splitting scream, from growling harmonics to liquid acrobatics, lofted on the breath like a lark on an updraft. Instrument is the wrong word, really. The voice is more like a chamber ensemble: winds and strings and blaring horns, strung together end to end. It’s a pump organ, a viola, an oboe, and the bell of a trumpet, each instrument passing the sound along to the next, adding volume and overtones at every step. Throw in the percussion of the lips and tongue, and the echoing amphitheatre of the skull, and you have a full orchestra playing inside you.

No wonder singers are terrified of the common cold. There is much in Biger’s piece I found fascinating and I followed many of his references to particular pieces—like Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields—and was compelled to count the number of times he repeated the noun bel canto (10), but these were the two passages I wanted to quote. First:

[Roomful of Teeth’s founder, artistic director and conductor Brad] Wells remembers the first time he heard a record by a Bulgarian women’s choir, in the late nineteen-eighties. Here was music that broke all the rules of Western choral singing. The women were technically belting, like Broadway singers—pushing their chest voices up into the range of their head voices—but they took it much further. The sound was nasal, emphatic, transfixing—closer to Arab ululation than to the smooth sonority of an American choir. “I mean, holy shit!” he says. “The oranges and reds and pinks! At first I was thinking, No, no, no. We’re always trying to remove those colors from the mix—to get this beautiful, uniform blend from top to bottom. But the end result is that the range of colors and timbres gets more and more narrow.”

The great project of twentieth-century music was to liberate instruments from their prescribed sounds, Wells says, citing the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. “Now it’s time to liberate the voice.”

That makes me think of how I first felt when I graduated from the Crayola eight pack to the intimidating 64-pack. (Now Crayola sells a 120-count pack>. How awesome is that?)

Two years ago, [Wells] was listening to NPR one morning when a story by the reporter Jasmine Garsd came on. It was about a heroin addict in North Carolina named Bone who’d overdosed numerous times and was once brought back to life after his heart stopped. Listening to Bone, Wells realized that his story was etched into the very sound of his voice: a slow, dehydrated drawl, thick with Southern heat and vocal fry, the indolence of small towns and the drag-footed pace of a heart slowed by heroin. “I thought, This is it. That’s the whole insanity of the opioid crisis right there, in one voice.”

Wells has since gone to North Carolina with Garsd and interviewed a number of addicts, dealers, and social workers for a piece he’s composing called “Visible Speech.” It’s a series of portraits pieced together from tapes of the conversations, interwoven with vocal lines sung by Roomful of Teeth. Wells hopes to have the singers capture some of Bone’s drawling, descending pitches. “We don’t think of French and English as languages where pitch has meaning,” he told me. “But it’s there.” He knew an Irish composer who lived in Paris and who noticed a pattern at his local boulangerie. Customers who said “Bonjour!” in an ascending line, with two notes a sixth apart, got served first. English has similar patterns, studies have found. We use minor thirds when telling sad stories and major thirds when telling happy ones. We match pitches with those we admire and expect the same of those who admire us. We harmonize when we agree—starting our sentences a perfect fifth or an octave from where the last sentence left off—and grow dissonant when we disagree. Our arguments are full of tritones.

Whether we know it or not, Wells said, we’re always singing.

Finally, a final line that frames an important lesson for all artists that I take to heart: As Jascha Heifetz famously said of the violin, If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

Indeed.

Bonus No. 1: You can subscribe to Roomful Of Teeth on YouTube.

Bonus No. 2: #TCMthoughts–Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Mark Rothko.

To my JD-impaired brain, two aspects of our legal system—swearing to tell the truth and deathbed statements—have always puzzled me because they are predicated on the—predominantly—Christian belief in a literal Hell; on the idea that to sin is to doom yourself to eternal suffering of the most horrendous kind. No hell, no punishment, no fear.

I have no reason to believe that a hell, or any kind of life after death, exists so, for me, swearing an oath carries no otherworldly penalty and I can claim any tall tale I wish before my last breath. For some, however, hell is a real threat and Vinson Cunningham, writing in How the Idea of Hell Has Shaped the Way We Think for The New Yorker braves the fire and ice.

What first caught my eye was Cunningham’s examination a Catholic activist and hell on Earth. He writes:

…writer Dorothy Day, in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, recounts an episode from her leftist, pre-conversion youth: she participated in a protest, in front of the White House, against the poor treatment of imprisoned suffragettes. The picketing led to the arrest of Day and several fellow-activists, and together the group resolved to go on a hunger strike until they were released and their demands had been met. After six days, exhausted and increasingly hopeless, Day slipped out of normal consciousness and into a protracted reverie of worldwide despair. Her mind shuttled away from her vacant stomach and visited every other despairing incarcerated soul. “I lost all feeling of my own identity,” she writes:

I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin. That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty…. Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on? People sold themselves for jobs, for the pay check, and if they only received a high enough price, they were honored. Why were some caught, not others? … What was good and evil? … Never would I recover from this wound, this ugly knowledge I had gained of what men were capable in their treatment of each other.

Day doesn’t explicitly associate this meditation with Hell, but her newly deepened association with the poor, and with other people on the periphery of society, has the effect of Dante’s journey through the Inferno: it sets her on the path toward the light.

One of my most life altering experiences came in 1978 during my first WestPac cruise on board the USS Bainbridge, CGN 25. I had grown up around, but not part of, a kind of poverty common to Appalachia. Running water, indoor plumbing and electricity were far from scarce, but they were not universal. What I saw in parts of Hong Kong, and The Philippines and even South Korea, however was magnitudes worse than what I experienced in rural Southeastern Ohio. Cunningham continues:

A few years ago, a minister who used to preach and prophesy at my church—which, by then, had moved from the little room south of 125th Street to a former Elks Lodge and community theatre a handful of blocks north—started posting on Facebook about how his study of the Bible had helped him conclude that nobody will be damned. He’d studied the Hebrew and the Aramaic and the Greek in which the Writ was written, and had concluded that the words most often translated as “hell” referred to a more general afterlife, or, at worst, to the daily, inward suffering that accompanies a willful persistence in wrongdoing. In John’s Gospel, Jesus promises that in his death and, later, in his exaltation, he will “draw all men unto me”—everybody, from the most perfect to the absolute worst, their rapes, massacres, and enslavements notwithstanding. The sacrifice on the Cross was redemption enough for the entire world.

The minister was looking for a response, and it arrived quickly. The angriest interlocutors debated him, paragraph for sulfurous paragraph, studded with scriptural reference, for days on end, in comment sections that unfurled beneath his status updates like long scrolls carrying the names of the dead, wherever the hell they’d gone. Some confronted him after service on Sundays. Others unfollowed him, in every sense of that word, and went on with their lives. Soon, he’d left their church and started one of his own, where he proclaimed his lenient gospel, pouring out pity and anger for those Christians whose so-called God was a petty torturer, until his little congregation petered out. Assured salvation couldn’t keep people in pews, it turned out.

In the late ’90s, when I studied at the Cleveland College of Judaism, my teachers reinforced a part of the Hebrew scriptures that had first attracted me to the religion ten years before. Judaism says nothing about an afterlife. The whole of the teachings, in both the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible, erroneously refereed to as the Old Testament by mislead Christians) and the Talmud (commentary on the Tanakh) focuses on the here and now, and does not speculate on events past death.

What matters is how we act here. What matters is how we treat each other; how we treat the least among us. Cunningham writes:

Mostly, though, I come back to Dorothy Day’s questions: Why are some people caught and not others? Why do the “least of these” keep catching hell while the richest and most powerful slide through life unaccosted and unaccountable, leaving God knows what in their wake? There’s a cruel paradox at work: the more secular our representations of Hell become, the more the poor and rejected and otherwise undesirable tend to populate it. The moral meaning’s gone wrong, it seems. However grotesque, the child-detainment centers at the U.S.-Mexico border are not Hell but the reason for a Hell to exist, so that those responsible for them can one day get their deserts. Karma within the confines of a life span sounds great but looks false: so often, the wicked seem to be doing just fine. For all the barbarism of Hell as it is traditionally taught—its ludicrous time frame, its unfair and somewhat bigoted admissions policy—at least some of the right people turn up in it. What recourse is there, real or just hoped for, without it? Our most energetic recent social movements—Occupy, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter—have retribution in mind. Bad bankers, sexual aggressors, killer cops: let’s see them finally get their due. But satisfaction arrives slowly, if at all. The bad guys are back onstage, back at their desks, back on the beat.

We certainly should be paying much more attention to the dancing demons among us and stop wasting our energies worrying about fictional bogey men meant to raise fear and distract us.

Bonus No. 1: WKYC’s Tom Meyer’s Golden Opportunity to let Budish look “passionate” that FBI took his phone, laptop.

Golfers readily accept the concept of the handicap just as sailboat racers acknowledge the wisdom of the Performance Handicap Racing Fleet rating. In non-sport settings, however, too many are loath—as evidenced by opposition to affirmative action—to give their non-sport competition a leg up. So, how do we move forward?

Nathan Heller, writing in The Philosopher Redefining Equality for The New Yorker, explores how one philosopher, Elizabeth Anderson—author of Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), approaches the challenge. For Anderson’s purposes, the problem begins with cultural ideals. Heller writes:

Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. … The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves. In The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models.

What Anderson conceived was not gray from black and white, but rather a green created from blue and yellow. Heller continues:

Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality. It was not assimilation. It required adjustments from all groups. Anderson laid out four integrative stages: formal desegregation (no legal separation), spatial integration (different people share neighborhoods), formal social integration (they work together, and are one another’s bosses), and informal social integration (they become buddies, get married, start families). Black students in integrated high schools, according to one study, had higher graduation rates than those in segregated schools, even controlling for socioeconomic background, parental education, and other factors. Students—black and white—at integrated schools went on to lead more integrated lives.

Change, Anderson thought, only begins with the formal desegregation. Progress would only come from years, decades of integration, of interaction she models the process in her classrooms at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views. Michigan, which, since 1988, has run a Program on Intergroup Relations, has avoided many of the impasses around identity and speech that have unsettled campuses elsewhere. “It’s not like there’s no racial politics,” Anderson says. “There’s lots of racial politics, but people are talking to one another.”

Anderson’s closest contact with a firestorm came last year, when Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal on whose board she sat, was pressured to retract an article exploring similarities between Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition and Rachel Dolezal’s identification as a black woman. The board ultimately stood by its publication, with a statement rich in Andersonian language. “The Board affirms Hypatia’s commitment to pluralist inquiry,” it read. The suggestion was that how you are, not who you are, supplies a legitimate basis for social action.

Derrick Darby, the only tenured black professor in Anderson’s department, offers a critique from a perspective shaped by his growing up in the Queensbridge projects of New York City

“Black and brown kids are disproportionately assigned to special education. There’s tracking that still goes on.” But his personal experience made him chary, too. “Liz has a view that you pull people up from the projects and send them on their ways into the élite,” he says. As someone who’d made that journey, he thought she underweighted the constraints—the unfreedom—involved in being “the only damn black person in so many rooms.” At one point, Anderson visited Darby’s class. “We spoke about our experiences,” he recalls, “and why it led us to focus our work as we did”: childhood for him and parenting for her. They both ended up in tears.

In the final paragraphs, Heller finally turns to Anderson’s Private Government, quoting Anderson:

“The Industrial Revolution was a cataclysmic event for egalitarians,” Anderson explains in “Private Government” (2017), a book that she assembled from the Tanner Lectures. Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:

We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.

What does Anderson mean?

What else could you call the modern workplace, where superiors can issue changing orders, control attire, surveil correspondence, demand medical testing, define schedules, and monitor communication, such as social-media posts? The decisions that a company makes, like the installation of cubicles in the bank in Harvard Square, are presented as none of its employees’ business (hence “private”). Defenders of this state of affairs often counter that people negotiate their salaries and can always leave. Anderson notes that low-level workers can rarely wrangle raises, and that real-world constraints eliminate exit power. (Workers are sometimes bound by non-compete agreements, and usually cannot get unemployment insurance if they quit.) It was as if relational equality could be suspended between nine and five—a habit that, inevitably, affects life beyond work.

I once worked for a brilliant man who intentionally kept his business below a certain size threshold so as to avoid government mandates and who, in conversation, said that he would fold his company before allowing any union to subvert his control. His was an exemplar of Anderson’s Private Government.

American progressivism is in the midst of a messy reckoning. During the nineties, upper-tail wage inequality (the gap between the middle class and the rich) exceeded lower-tail inequality (the gap between the poor and the middle class). Since then, upper-tail inequality has continued to grow while lower-tail inequality has remained basically unchanged. The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.

I had a conversation last evening with someone who has her retirement fund invested in the most conservative/safe stocks possible. In 2018, for the first time since she first invested in the plan, she lost money. And not a little money. She lost more than $10,000. Compared to Warren Buffet’s multi-billion dollar February loses, that’s chump change, but we’re all not Warren Buffet. Then there’s the matter of people waking up to what President Donald John Trump’s tax plan did to them.

Anderson believes she may have found part of the answer in, of all places, a lost essay by Jeremy Bentham.

While spending the summer researching the history of the Protestant work ethic for her Seeley Lectures, at Cambridge, this spring, Anderson had come across a rarely collected essay by Jeremy Bentham, who was born twenty-five years after Smith. Bentham is widely known for coming up with the idea for a creepy surveillance prison, the panopticon, which Michel Foucault much later turned into a metaphor for institutional control. Anderson found that, in this obscure essay, Pauper Management Improved: Particularly by Means of an Application of the Panopticon Principle of Construction, Bentham had himself proposed that panopticons be used to manage not just criminals but also the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. “He projected that this model would be really great for everyone, but especially for the owner of the panopticon,” Anderson told the audience in Ohio. “He had detailed calculations. You could get three-hundred-per-cent profits from an adult man and two-hundred-per-cent profits from an adult woman. But the greatest source of profits of all”—she paused—“would come from child labor.”

That is, I suppose, a better idea than Soylent Green.

Bonus No. 1: FBI raid today seizes Armond Budish’s entire email account.

Bonus No. 2: This is literally the biggest news story in the world.

Last year I donated nearly $500 to my local public radio station because WCPN is the only radio station I listen to—OK, I do occasionally listen to WKSU—and I firmly believe that if the shows I listen to the most had been around in the late ’70s, I very well might have been an RTV major instead of a Magazine Journalism major at Ohio University. Oh well.

Ralph Nader has been a long-term supporter of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio, but he’s begun to see changes that he’s not happy about. Nader, writing in The Realized Temptations of NPR and PBS, explains:

Recently an elderly gentleman asked me about my opinion on NPR and PBS, knowing of my vigorous support in the nineteen sixties for these alternatives to commercial radio and television stations.

Here is my response:

Congress created NPR and PBS to provide serious programming, without any advertisements, for the American people. Former media executive Fred Friendly and others worried that the commercial stations were not meeting the 1934 Communications Act requirement that they operate for the “public interest, convenience and necessity.”

In 1961, before a shocked convention of broadcasters, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow called commercial Continue Reading »

On Tuesday I began to examine Patrick Radden Keefe’s deep dive into the man who made our President look like someone who could be a president. I glossed over the second act because there was so much there and I didn’t want to have a 3,000-word blog post. There are, however, several passages that deserve to be revisited.

I’ve written before about Seth Meyer’s moment with our president, but Keefe writes about a second comedian moment where he blamed candidate Trump on Mark Burnett:

Seven weeks before the 2016 election, Burnett, in a smart tux with a shawl collar, arrived with his third wife, the actress and producer Roma Downey, at the Microsoft Theatre, in Los Angeles, for the Emmy Awards. Both “Shark Tank” and “The Voice” won awards that night. But his triumphant evening was marred when the master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, took an unexpected turn during his opening monologue. “Television brings people together, but television can also tear us apart,” Kimmel mused. “I mean, if it wasn’t for television, would Donald Trump be running for President?” In the crowd, there was laughter. “Many have asked, ‘Who is to blame for Donald Trump?’ ” Kimmel continued. “I’ll tell you who, because he’s sitting right there. That guy.” Kimmel pointed into the audience, and the live feed cut to a closeup of Burnett, whose expression resolved itself into a rigid grin. “Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don’t have to watch reality shows anymore, because we’re living in one,” Kimmel said. Burnett was still smiling, but Kimmel wasn’t. He went on, “I’m going on the record right now. He’s responsible. If Donald Trump gets elected and he builds that wall, the first person we’re throwing over it is Mark Burnett. The tribe has spoken.”

One of the many awards that Trump covets, and never recieved, is an Emmy. That Kimmel would dismiss Trump as Burnett’s Doolittle had to have been particularly galling. Getting elected despite that slam probably made Trump smile.

Television shows are never reality and the editors for The Apprentice had to swim through hours and hours of tape in order to create fake Donald that would become president. Keefe continues with his interview with Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of The Apprentice:

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Braun added:

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

When Trump was forced to go live, to get only one take, the Real Donald emerged. Even with extensive editing, however, Trump was still far from ideal. Keefe writes:

Originally, Burnett had planned to cast a different mogul in the role of host each season. But Trump took to his part more nimbly than anyone might have predicted. He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.” Katherine Walker told me that producers often struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said, adding, “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.”

This is why our president rails against the Fake Media: they refuse to edit him the way Burnett’s team had. The editing, because of the thousands and thousands of hours of tape needed to create the persona, would come back to haunt Trump following the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Trump went from being an asset to being a liability for Burnett. Keefe continues:

On August 13, 2018, Trump denied that he had ever used racial slurs, tweeting, “@MarkBurnettTV called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa.”

This was a peculiar thing to tweet: if Trump had never uttered the epithet, why would he need to be assured by Burnett that there were no tapes of him doing so? The tweet was also notable because, when the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, Burnett had taken his most definitive step toward distancing himself from Trump. In a statement, he had said, “Given all of the false media reports, I feel compelled to clarify a few points. I am not now and have never been a supporter of Donald Trump’s candidacy. I am NOT ‘Pro-Trump.’ Further, my wife and I reject the hatred, division and misogyny that has been a very unfortunate part of his campaign.”

Yet, Trump clung to his Fake Image, doing his best to fold his life on The Apprentice into what would be his race to become The President:

Burnett’s reluctance to discuss the Trump Presidency is dismaying to many people involved with “The Apprentice,” given that Trump has succeeded in politics, in part, by borrowing the tropes of the show. Jonathon Braun pointed out to me that when Trump announced his candidacy, in 2015, he did so in the atrium of Trump Tower, and made his entrance by descending the gold-colored escalator—choreography that Burnett and his team had repeatedly used on the show. After Trump’s announcement, reports suggested that people who had filled the space and cheered during his speech had been hired to do so, like TV extras, for a day rate of fifty dollars.

At least the thinning crowds at Trump’s rallies are acting for free.

Bonus No. 1: On the anniversary of Parkland–Why didn’t your guns save us from oligarchy?

Bonus No. 2: Is the government embattled? Is this a massive victory for the opposition? What does it MEAN?

Bonus No. 3: Deep Cuts—Hasan Shares His Valentine’s Day Plans

Last month, in HOW WE DON’T DEAL WITH TIME OUT OF TIME… I had occasion to post a few thoughts on Joshua Rothman’s Choose Wisely. Last evening I revisited the piece and I invested some time in Rothman’s consideration of the work of Israeli philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit. Rothman begins:

In recent decades, some philosophers have grown dissatisfied with decision theory. They point out that it becomes less useful when we’re unsure what we care about, or when we anticipate that what we care about might shift. In a 2006 article called “Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting,” the late Israeli philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit asked us to imagine being one of “the early socialist Zionist pioneers” who, at the turn of the twentieth century, dreamed of moving from Europe to Palestine and becoming “the New Jews of their ideals.” Such a change, she observed, “alters one’s life project and inner core”; one might speak of an “Old Person” who existed beforehand, browsing bookshops in Budapest, and a “New Person” who exists afterward, working a field in the desert. The point of such a move isn’t to maximize one’s values. It’s to reconfigure them, rewriting the equations by which one is currently living one’s life.

I think I would have used reprogram instates of reconfigure, here. when I read that paragraph I was more than skeptical of such reconfiguring. So was Ullmann-Margalit.

Ullmann-Margalit doubted that such transformative choices could be evaluated as sound or unsound, rational or irrational. She tells the story of a man who “hesitated to have children because he did not want to become the ‘boring type’ ” that parents tend to become. “Finally, he did decide to have a child and, with time, he did adopt the boring characteristics of his parent friends—but he was happy!” Whose values were maximized—Old Person’s or New Person’s? Because no value-maximizing formula could capture such a choice, Ullmann-Margalit suggested that, rather than describing this man as having “decided” to have children, we say that he “opted” to have them—“opting” (in her usage) being what we do when we shift our values instead of maximizing them.

I found her distinction between deciding and opting. I wanted to fathom which I was (or are all both?). Rothman—and Ullmann-Margalit—continue:

The nature of “opting situations,” she thought, explains why people “are in fact more casual and cavalier in the way they handle their big decisions than in the way they handle their ordinary decisions.” Yet it’s our unexplored options that haunt us. A decision-maker who buys a Subaru doesn’t dwell on the Toyota that might have been: the Toyota doesn’t represent a version of herself with different values. An opter, however, broods over “the person one did not marry, the country one did not emigrate to, the career one did not pursue,” seeing, in the “shadow presence” implied by the rejected option, “a yardstick” by which she might evaluate “the worth, success or meaning” of her actual life.

Clearly, then, I’m a decider. I am fond of remarking that I have no regrets because I like who I am and that that person is the sum of all my previous decisions. To regret is to think of one’s self as less in the present and that way lies a locked cell with no escape.

The whole premise of Rothman’s piece is deciding/optng to have, or not have, children. (I have been strongly in the latter camp since I was about 18 or so.) Rothman turns to L.A. Paul, a professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale. In 2013 she published What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting, for further guidance.

Paul writes: Perhaps you think that you can know what it’s like to have a child, even though you’ve never had one, because you can read or listen to the testimony of what it was like for others. You are wrong. Paul cites the philosopher David Lewis, who proposed what might be called the Vegemite Principle: if you’ve never tasted Vegemite, a mysterious and beloved Australian “food spread” made from brewer’s yeast, then neither a description of what it’s like (black, gooey, vegetal) nor experience with other spreads (peanut butter, marmalade, Nutella) will suffice to tell you whether you’d like it. Similarly, Paul argues, being around other people’s children isn’t enough to learn about what it will be like in your own case. She explains:

Babysitting for other children, having nieces and nephews or much younger siblings—all of these can be wonderful (or horrible) experiences, but they are different in kind from having a child of your very own, perhaps roughly analogous to the way an original artwork has aesthetic value partly because of its origins…. Experience with other people’s children might teach you about what it is like to hold a baby, to change diapers or hold a bottle, but not what it is like to create, carry, give birth to and raise a child of your very own. [Emphasis in original, JH]

Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like. For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should today’s values determine tomorrow’s? In her 2014 book, “Transformative Experience,” she suggests that living “authentically” requires occasionally leaving your old self behind “to create and discover a new self.” Part of being alive is awaiting the “revelation” of “who you’ll become.”

Having a child, however, is not like trying Vegemite—which I have done, the black, gooey, vegetal concoction is disgusting—you can’t spit it out, toss the jar in the bin and move one. Children are forever and while some pareents to abandon their children for many reasons, justifying those reasons to society is nearly, if not completely, impossible.

At the end, Rothman—who did decide to father a child with his wife—turns back to Agnes Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. He writes:

I read “Aspiration” last spring, before my son was born, and I talked about it often with my wife. We were especially struck by Callard’s argument that parenthood is intrinsically aspirational. Parents look forward to a loving relationship with a specific person. And yet that person doesn’t pop into existence fully formed; he emerges, in all his specificity, over many years. For this reason, it makes little sense to be an “ambitious parent”—someone who plans, in advance, what he will love about his child. It’s better to “enter parenthood for the most inchoate of reasons,” Callard concludes, since that “puts our children in a position to fill out what parenthood means for us”; in turn, parental love must “be capable of molding itself to the personality that is, itself, coming to take a determinate shape.”

To me, that is irresponsible in the extreme, akin to young mothers who want a baby because the baby will fill a void in their life and give them love. Finally, Rothman writes:

For the most part, Callard’s book is a systematic overview, situated outside the moment. Still, she writes, for aspirants “what happens in the meanwhile is also life.” Now that our son is here, we live entirely in the meanwhile. We don’t want the present, or its mystery, to end. Each day is absorbing and endlessly significant. Recently, I watched my father’s face as he watched my son’s. Later, we listened as my son learned a new kind of laugh. Each time he looks at us, he sees us more in his own way. Like pages that turn themselves, the meaningful instants follow one another too soon. It’s hard to think of them as stepping stones on the way to anywhere else.

How he, his wife and their son will feel five, ten, fifteen and twenty years from now may be wonderful, tragic or somewhere in between. This is the supreme risk.

Bonus No. 1: Flurry of Dem recusals in mushrooming Budish scandal.

I tossed my television on the treelawn in the mid-’90s because commercial television was a mindless time suck before Facebook and Twitter earned that title. Mercifully I spared myself the horrible, inhuman, cruelty of the bullshit called reality television. Reality? Yeah, right. Wanna buy a bridge? Cheap. So, I never heard of Mark Burnett.

That American broadcaster imported the abomination from Sweden was a bit of a shocker, but here’s how Patrick Radden Keefe, writing in How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success for The New Yorker, details the genre’s genesis:

“Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train.

The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series—and by editing him virtually out of the show. Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. [Emphasis mine, JH]

What the fuck? Keefe continues:

In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show “Survivor.”

The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired, on CBS, in 2000, “Survivor” was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, a hundred and twenty-five million Americans—more than a third of the population—tuned in for some portion of the season finale. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon. Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle.

While filming Survivor in Brazil, Burnett had an idea for an urban survivor, and in 2002 he found his future host sitting in the front row of an ice rink next to his girlfriend Melania Knauss. That day Burnett became Victor Frankenstein to Donald John Trump’s monster. America’s The World’s nightmare was about to begin.

Fast forward to June 2015 with the famous announcement that: The Ego has landed. Keefe continues:

[Burnett’s] chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” which falsely presented Trump as its primary author, told me that he feels some responsibility for facilitating Trump’s imposture. But, he said, “Mark Burnett’s influence was vastly greater,” adding, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.” Schwartz has publicly condemned Trump, describing him as “the monster I helped to create.” Burnett, by contrast, has refused to speak publicly about his relationship with the President or about his curious, but decisive, role in American history.

Can we blame him? Keefe goes on in his 12,000-plus word opus and Americans need to read them all, so go read. I’ll leave you, however, with Keefe’s conclusion:

When I remarked to Jonathon Braun [an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice.”] that Burnett seems eerily untroubled by the legacy of his own creation, he said that, for Burnett, the Presidency was just another game. He went on, “I think it’s a game for Trump, too. It’s a game for the audience. I think the voters like it. They’re enjoying the spectacle. It’s in the soul of who Mark is. They’re kindred spirits. There are no major causes driving them—it’s just about playing a game and winning it.”

Years ago, when Burnett did publicity for “Survivor,” interviewers tried to figure out how the contestants had fared that season. Of course, he could not reveal such secrets. So when they asked Burnett who would win the game, he told them, “Me.”

We the people, of course, lost.

Bonus No. 1: Senator Jonty Smarmyfuque and the left’s plan to tax the rich until they are dead.

Bonus No.2: The Mathematics of Monkeybread.

One of the aspects that I enjoy about The New Yorker is that I rarely come across an article that I don’t finish reading (OK, I don’t even start reading the pieces that are purely New York—the Goings On About Town, &c.) and I enjoy finding the oft-buried hook that makes me want to share. Lauren Collins’ Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head was like that.

I was two pages in, starting the second section, when Collins tapped my attention button. She wrote:

We are living in a great epistolary age, even if no one much acknowledges it. Our phones, by obviating phoning, have reëstablished the omnipresence of text. Think of the sheer profusion of messages, of all the things we once said—or didn’t say—that we now send. “You don’t have any news you’ve been waiting to tell me in person, do you?” Nathan, a software developer, asks Sukie, his much younger roommate, upon picking her up at the airport, in Mr Salary, a short story that Rooney published, in 2016, in Granta. “Do people do that?” she says. “You don’t have like a secret tattoo or anything?” he continues. “I would have attached it as a JPEG,” she replies. “Believe me.” Rooney told me, “A lot of critics have noticed that my books are basically nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing.”

The Internet isn’t Rooney’s subject, any more than the letter was Austen’s, but she has assimilated online communication into a new kind of prose. “She does it in a way that’s totally natural,” Bohan, her agent, told me. “Whereas, if it were someone in his or her forties or fifties, it’d sort of be, like, ‘I Am Writing a Novel About the Internet.’” Rooney told me that in Conversations with Friends she was interested in exploring “e-mail voice,” the way that Frances and her friends “curate their styles of communication online.” This isn’t a flashy conceptual move; it’s just that e-mails, texts, instant messages, and Facebook posts are an unquestioned part of her characters’ everyday routines. A novel without them would be like a novel without chairs.

One of the mysteries I enjoy unpacking through my students is how they perceive their particular reality. At the same time as I am attempting to teach, I am also attempting to learn, I never lose my anthropological/Margret Meadiness. Take this peek that Collins provides:

Later, Frances and Bobbi try to watch the movie Brazil, but Bobbi falls asleep. “I didn’t feel like watching the film on my own,” Frances says, “so I switched it off and just read the Internet instead.” An older novelist might have written “surfed the Internet” or “looked at the Internet,” but “read the Internet” has the ring of native digital literacy. There’s also something current about the flatness of Rooney’s tone; like “breaking the Internet,” “reading the Internet” makes a little joke of the juxtaposition of a puny active verb and the vastness of the thing upon which it is acting. Rooney’s transposition of Internet voice to the page brings a certain tension to her narration. When Frances observes that “Melissa used a big professional camera and kept lots of different lenses in a special camera pouch,” it’s impossible to tell whether she’s impressed by Melissa or mocking her. As with a tweet, you might interpret the sentence either way.

Then there was this glimpse of Rooney’s adolescence:

[Her mother] recalls Rooney as a quickly frustrated child who wouldn’t countenance anything that didn’t interest her. (Rooney says that the trait endures, and claims “excessive laziness at anything I’m not good at.”) High school, at St. Joseph’s Secondary School, an all-girls institution where Rooney had to wear a “blue sweater, gingham shirt, and lumpy gray pinafore, which I loathed,” was a particular trial. “I just found it kind of baffling, the whole institution of school,” Rooney said. “I was, like, Does no one see that this is repressive, and that there are more of us than there are of them?” She boycotted homework. “My parents were very much, like, Fight your own battles,” she recalled. She spent hours online, “more comfortable with text than with actual personal interactions.” She said, “I was someone who, in a very disorganized way, was thirsty for knowledge. I liked having access to anything I wanted to know. I still find myself using that aspect of the Internet a lot.

I can imagine any number of my students snatching at this passage and waving it about as justification for playing whatever is the next Fortnite might be. The difference, of course, is that Rooney, proofing her genius, does the work.

¹From The Irish Independent…

Bonus No. 1: Even if you beat me by Sally Rooney.

Bonus No. 2: 2020 handicap pre-Bernie, with Iowa predictions.

Bonus No. 3: Jaw-Dropping Traditional Small Japanese Home Renovation and Majestic Off-Grid Cabin In The Japanese Mountains.

Bonus No. 4: Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is Served

Forget mirrors. Mirrors can be ignored. Mirrors lie, or at least, can be believed to lie. No, we sons measure our aging by remembering how old we were when our father passed some milestone. For me, the first time was when I hit 31, the age that matched my earliest memory of him: snuggling on the couch in the dark to watch a Frankenstein movie.

Interestingly enough, one of my best memories of my father would be watching episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that he had recorded for me. I only have one memory of my father saying that he loved me, but (in the way of his generation) he had dozens of ways that he non-verbally reminded me of that fact.

I’m thinking about all this because I’ve just finished reading David Sedaris’ Father Time: I can’t predict what’s waiting for us, lurking on the other side of our late middle age, but I know it can’t be good for The New Yorker. Sedaris ledes:

The night before his ninety-fifth-birthday party, my father fell while turning around in his kitchen. My sister Lisa and her husband, Bob, dropped by hours later to hook up his new TV and discovered him on the floor, disoriented and in pain. He fell again after they righted him, so an ambulance was called. At the hospital, they met up with our sister Gretchen, and with Amy, who’d just flown in from New York to attend the party, which was now cancelled. “It was really weird,” she said when we spoke on the phone the following morning. “Dad thought Lisa was Mom, and when the doctor asked him where he was he answered, ‘Syracuse’—where he went to college. Then he got mad and said, ‘You’re sure asking a lot of questions.’ As if that’s not normal for a doctor. I think he thought this was just some guy he was talking to.”

Fortunately, he was lucid again by the following afternoon. That was the hard part for everyone—seeing him so confused.

Sedaris learned all of this second hand.

On the night that my father fell, I was in Princeton, the fourth of eighty cities I would be travelling to for work. On the morning he was moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, I was on my way to Ann Arbor. Over the next week, he had a few little strokes, the sort people don’t notice right away. One affected his peripheral vision, and another his short-term memory. He’d wanted to return home after leaving rehab, but by this point there was no way he could continue to live alone. I wrote him a letter, saying, in part, “It isn’t safe for you at the house anymore, at least not on your own, and this concerns me. I need you to live long enough to see Donald Trump impeached.”

We’d fought bitterly after the election, and I knew it would be just my luck: my father would die, and the very next day the President would go down, denying me a well-deserved opportunity to gloat.

I’m not sure where I was when my father moved into his retirement home. Springmoor, it’s called. I saw it, finally, four months after his fall, when Hugh and I flew to North Carolina.

I can relate. Of my own siblings, I am the only one to leave our hometown. I could have stayed. I could have gotten a job at one of the local newspapers or even Bird Watcher’s Digest, but I didn’t. I got out of town because of my father. Not because I wanted to get away from him, but rather because he made me a reader and being a reader I discovered the world through books that I wanted to see with my own eyes. and I did.

I saw a lot of the United States and the Far East, the Middle East and Africa during my 20s and 30s, but I settled down, in a suburb of Cleveland and I’ve stayed here pretty much all the time. So, as my father began the slide toward his end my siblings where minutes away. I was hours. They saw him gradually change. For me the changes were always jarring. Sedaris continues:

It was strange being at the beach without him, but we didn’t yet have the proper equipment: a walk-in shower, bars beside the toilet, and so on. A year earlier, he hadn’t needed those things, but that’s the difference between ninety-four and ninety-five. The day before his fall, he’d driven to the gym, not knowing that it was his last time behind the wheel of a car, his last night in his own bed. There would be a lot of that in his immediate future: the last time he could dress himself, the last time he could walk.

I worried that he had entered a period when it would be one thing after another, death by a thousand cuts: a fall, a stroke, an accident with a grandfather clock. That’s how it was with the other extremely old people I’ve known in my life: the woman across the road from us in Normandy, our next-door neighbor in London. Phyllis Diller. Late in her life, the two of us became friends. She lived in a mansion in Brentwood, and each time I’d visit her there she’d be a bit less able; her eyes wouldn’t stop watering, or she couldn’t get up from a chair without help. Phyllis was lucky in that she could remain at home, and hire round-the-clock help; lucky, too, that she was famous—a legend by any definition. All day, disciples came to pay homage to her, and every night she went out. Thus she was spared the loneliness so many old people have to suffer.

The last time I went to her house, I found her on the back patio. It was one in the afternoon and she was having a Martini. “Karla,” she called to her assistant. “Get David here something to drink. What would you like, sweetie, a vodka?”

“Just some water,” I said, settling in beside her.

“Water with vodka in it?”

“No, just the water.”

“Bring him a vodka-tonic,” Phyllis instructed, forgetting, I guess, that I don’t drink.

When my father died I was there in the nursing home with the rest of the family. He gave a last breath and that was that. I had been writing my eulogy for him in my head form months, perhaps years and I knew in that moment that the drafting was over and that I had to commit all of my thoughts to paper. I did and I only choked up once and I was done.

But I wasn’t, was I? I, like Sedaris, keep writing these memories down and sharing them with the rest of the world. In all of the above, the phrase that made me want to write this post was Sedaris’ reflections on Lasts. Up until now my life has been filled with Firsts, and there are more to come, but when my father died, I entered the world of Lasts.

At what point, I wonder, do we begin to think of our lives that way? When do we begin to think, this is the last time I’ll do this or that? When do we, when do I, begin the death by a thousand cuts. Writing about Hugh, his husband, Sedaris writes:

“I can’t believe you missed it,” he said as we were going to bed that night. He’d just pulled his shirt off, and I took a moment to admire his tan. It was nothing he’d worked for; rather, it just came, the result of all the hours he’d spent in the ocean, occasionally with the boys but mainly on his own, swimming like some sort of creature, one moment on his back and the next on his stomach, turning like a chicken on a spit. He’s done this since childhood, and as a result his shoulders are so broad I can barely get my arms around them. Still I try. He slips beneath the covers and I cleave to him like a barnacle, thinking of all the couples I know who no longer share a bed. “He snores!” the wife will tell me, or “I need my own space.” I’d hate separate rooms, though a sleep-apnea machine might be a deal breaker, or incontinence. Definitely incontinence. I can’t predict what’s waiting for us, lurking on the other side of our late middle age, but I know it can’t be good.

Am I naive to think Sedaris is wrong here? That what is waiting for us has to have some good or else, what’s the fucking point?

Bonus No. 1: #TCMthoughts–Perfidia in Casablanca & Now Voyager.

second only to oil in the rankings of the world’s most valuable trading commodity—changed how the brain functions and how people think because coffee gave us coffee houses: the first public centers of malcontents, political dissent and rebellion. A natural question would be: why would coffee houses be more politically dangerous than taverns?

In the summer of 2006 I had a short career servicing and repairing espresso machines for Phoenix Coffee. (I learned a lot but, mea culpa, all did not end well.) As part of my coffee education I read Anthony Wild’s Coffee: A Dark History, arguably the bible of coffee. Wild addressed the tavern vs. coffee house question on page 55:

On the face of it, taverns and coffee houses were both potentially places where political dissent could arise, being meeting places where open debate between strangers was inevitable. However, it is the nature of coffee to clarify and order thought, and in the nature of alcohol to blur and confuse it. A tavern might generate heated discussions, but it is likely that the contents of the debate would have been forgotten by the following day.

Adam Gopnik, writing in One More Cup Of Coffee for The New Yorker, examines a book that focuses on this aspect of coffee: Shachar Pinsker’s A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture. Pinsker’s book is pointedly European, political and distinctly post 17th century. Gopnik describes the book as:

…a close empirical study of an abstract political theory. The theory, associated with the eminent German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, is that the coffeehouses and salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped lay the foundation for the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of clan society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but among the saucers.

Democracy, yes, but also Socialism, Communism and the revolutions that would rock the 19th and early 20th centuries. Pinsker focuses on European Jewry but, at least as far as I can tell from Gopnik’s review, does not talk about coffee’s prior influences on Judaism such as the drinks influences on the mystics of Safed. He also doesn’t seem—in discussing the creation of social spaces—how coffee houses pulled Jews out of the social space of the synagogue and into secular space. Gopnik writes:

When social spaces were created outside the direct control of the state (including commercial ones, run for profit), civil society could start to flourish in unexpected ways. This was visible in the spread of café life through European cities, Pinsker observes, in the nineteenth century and afterward. It wasn’t that the conversations in the café were necessarily intellectually productive; it was that the practice of free exchange itself—the ability to interact on equal terms with someone not of your clan or club—generated social habits of self-expression that abetted the appetite for self-government. For Jews, with their constant habit of self-expression and their distant dream of self-government, the café was an especially inviting space.

These were spaces where members of the newly created Reform stream of Judaism (as well as a growing cadre of secular/political Jews) could pass and mingle with the general population. What intrigues me is how Pinsker focuses on place, on individual cafés, like the Café Griensteidl in Vienna. Gopnik writes:

In Vienna, the Café Griensteidl proved a magnet for “malcontents and raisonneurs,” with bentwood chairs and plenty of reading light and newspapers on sticks. The still extant Café Central had an interior like a miniaturized San Marco, with hallucinatory Byzantine columns and swooping enclosing spandrels and squinches. (The fin-de-siècle modernist writer Peter Altenberg listed his address as “Vienna, First District, Café Central.”) Yet in its prime it was a “place of politics,” and crowded with émigré revolutionaries. A famous story had Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, being warned that a great war might spark a revolution in Russia. “And who will lead this revolution?” he scoffed. “Perhaps Mr. Bronshtein sitting over there at the Café Central?” Mr. Bronshtein took the name Leon Trotsky, and did.

For Jews, Pinsker argues, the investment in the café as a social institution was, across Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly intense. The great cafés were “thirdspaces,” neither entirely public nor entirely private; they were escape zones where, contrary to the theme from “Cheers,” people often didn’t know your name, or what shtetl you hailed from. A patriotic Polish writer could meet other Polish patriots at a Warsaw café, read the papers, make plans, share poems, or just decide to flee to Paris. A Jewish writer in the same café had first to decide just how Polish to appear, and just how Jewish to remain. This affected how he dressed and whom he sat with, but also which language he wrote in, Yiddish or Polish, and what he chose to write about as he sat there.

I earlier called Pinsker’s perspective pointedly European, but his narrative does travel west, to New York City.

[I]n New York, as café culture was exported, the model of the central café in which all kinds come together often gave way to the neighborhood café that belonged to a subsect, usually on the political left. Emma Goldman, as a young Russian immigrant, found herself at home in New York when she arrived at a Lower East Side café that was well known as an anarchist hangout. The melting pot of New York, curiously, produced the most distinct and separate crucibles, each annealing the complexities of identity into political causes. In every case, you could see your life in a single commercial space.

How different all this is in the 21st century. Did the activist that would occupy Zuccotti park first meet in coffee houses? Why do I not think that question would apply to Trumpenistas? Do Emma González and David Hogg, too young for bars, drink espressos? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tended bar, but did she hang out in coffee shops?

And dare I ask, is Starbucks—whose former chairman and billionairethinks he can run the United States of America the way he ran the ubiquitous purveyor of bad coffee adult milkshakes—the anti-café?

Bonus No. 1: When the boots wear out, will anyone be ready to listen?

Just as I have never known a world without television and my father never knew a world without radio and his father never knew a world without the phonograph, my students have not know a time when the Internet, cellphones, email and social media were not at their fingertips 24/7/365. This is their reality. Their norm.

One of my favorite thinkers and neurologist, Oliver Sacks, writing in The Machine Stops for The New Yorker, thinks about what all that might mean. He looks at another kind of digital divide:

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. [Emphasis mine, JH] Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

I don’t have to think too hard to know which half was which. Instant information is a barrier to learning. If a student can answer a question by asking Siri or Alexa, write the answer down and call their homework done, they have accessed the information but failed in gaining knowledge. That’s just now how, as Sacks can tell us, the brain works. He continues:

Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story The Machine Stops, in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told. Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact. One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology,

I want to see you not through the Machine. . . . I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space. . . . We have lost a part of ourselves. . . . Cannot you see . . . that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?

This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.

Me too, Oliver, me too.

Elsewhere…

Of late The New Yorker has been running a single, humor page under the banner Shouts & Murmurs. I have not been particularly impressed, but Colins Stokes’ Signs That Something Might Be Going Around the Office. Here are my top three:

Your co-workers are avoiding the drinking fountain and the vending machines. Instead, they’re stockpiling water and food under their desks and defending their stores with surprising force.

and…

Someone who says he’s from what sounds like the “Center for Febreze Control” has left a lot of strange, garbled voice mails.

and…

As a team-building activity, some of the interns have banded together to construct a blockade in the room with all the printers. They’ve also collaborated on a sign warning people not to enter if they’ve “caught the sickness.”

Bonus No. 1: There is so much that is quite dreadful so here are some things that are nice.

Libertarians are all about personal responsibility and not letting the government rob them of their hard earned cash until they need to suck at that government teat. Most famously, their darling Ayn Rand drew social security benefits and now Ralph Nader outs Kentucky’s junior senator Randal Howard Paul for much the same.

Nader, in Rand Paul’s Call—Reality vs. Rigidity, writes:

Two contemporary stories about Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) illustrate the disconnect between one’s ideology and personal experiences. Imagine a fierce opponent of regulation being saved in a crash by government-mandated seat belts and air bags and the ensuing cognitive dissonance.

In the case of Rand Paul, MD (ophthalmology) the two experiences came almost at the same time. Last month Senator Paul went to the Shouldice Hernia Continue Reading »