Camille Paglia on Lena Dunham

Posted on 10 March 2016 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 3 minutes

Camille Paglia broke on the national public scene with the publication of her magnum opus Sexual Personae back in 1990. It was originally her weighty and quite serious doctoral thesis, at Yale University, some 20 years previously. Since its commercial release, I have had the guarded ambiguity-laden relationship with her we all like to place under the heading of “love/hate.” Ever wary of Paglia’s inevitably brash, seemingly liberal pronunciamentos, always to my ear, as well, vaguely self-congratulatory, what I brace for, always, are crypto-fascist eruptions.

These days she seems to have found at least one rhetorical nesting place in which to opine regularly, that is, with the National Enquirer of the proto-progressive left, “Salon.” Indeed, she falls well into line, as she puts it, with her “perspective as a fervent supporter of the ruggedly honest and principled Bernie Sanders.” Unhappily (in the French sense), she says so even as she steps without a skosh of trepidation and embarassment away from her prior position towards Donald Trump. He was a “carnival barker.” Now, she thrusts toward a much more accommodating stance, in a paroxysm of self-revision (perhaps in fear—and I say this knowing that la bohème de l’académie springs with predatory zeal when so accused—of not having gotten on board soon enough to embrace the inexorability of The Donald’s earth-scorching march on Philadelphia this summer). It seems now, conversely to mere weeks ago, he (or should we be considering any reference or adversion with an upper case pronoun, usually reserved for kings, God, and Jesus or Mohammed, and call Him “He?”… I would prefer Trump, or His Trumpness, or Trumper, or El Trumperino) is to be viewed differently. According to a reassuring la Paglia, as she informs her public that “[his] fearless candor and brash energy feel like a great gust of fresh air, sweeping the tedious clichés and constant guilt-tripping of political correctness out to sea….Trump is his own man, with a steely ‘damn the torpedoes’ attitude.” And she does so with an equal insouciance to the appearance of a public reversal, like any seasoned pol intent on righting the meaning of truth.

However, I am not here to challenge her on what was, indeed, a refreshing and validating expression of opinion by she who must be heard in the very same column in today’s Salon (I Was Wrong About Donald Trump). Though, briefly I have to admit it is inviting to point out the myriad aspects of Trump’s public persona that are signifiers of a wholly insupportable inhumane tendency—qualities the foremost diva of the academy elects to overlook in her 180-degree reassessment.

Lena Dunham, by David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19316880

Rather I am here to take what is to me a godsend of an opportunity to quote her on another curious phenomenon in this day of grotesque judgments by the establishment as to what constitutes newsworthiness. Never mind as to what constitutes worth of any sort that is substantiated by reality, and validated by any kind of rigororous epistemological scrutiny. I speak of one of my personal bêtes noires, Ms. Lena Dunham.

Quite simply, let me quote Camille without comment. I could not have said it better. Having observed that Ms. Paglia has seemed to have overlooked Ms. Dunham while doing a “superb job of analyzing contemporary figures,” one of the professor’s admirers ask her point blank for her “thoughts on this young woman who fancies herself The Voice of her generation:”

On the one hand, I believe that each generation has the unchallengeable right to create its own aesthetic and to carve its own idols. On the other hand, as Gwendolen Fairfax darkly remarks to Cecily Cardew in the great tea-table confrontation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.”

Lena Dunham belongs to the exhibitionistic Andrea Dworkin school of banner-waving neurotic masochism. The body is the enemy, a tainted lump whose limitations and afflictions the public must be forced to contemplate in grisly detail. We must also witness, like hapless medieval bystanders at a procession of flagellants, just how unappetizingly pallid Caucasian flesh can be made to be without cracking the camera lens. The torpid banality of Dunham’s utterances (reverently accorded scriptural status by the New York Times) is yet another matter. I am woman–hear me kvetch!

Progress is Our Most Important Product

Posted on 6 March 2016 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

I’ll go out on the proverbial limb, the one I hate being on the end of, and state what some of you may tell me is the obvious.

In 35 short years, we’ve gone from “The Great Communicator” to, well, hmmm, “The Great Reality Show Host?” This pathetic slog we all endure (apparently; our existences are beset and so many of us have persevered through genuine trauma, nay tragedy, and death awaits us all, it’s true, but still, there are iDevices and a new Tesla model coming out…, but except for the whatever percentage it is, what is it anyway? 99% 98% as little as 95% Here on Amazon marked down for you today only to 78% I mean how many people are really truly and honestly suffering daily, fighting for subsistence, strung out, addled, stricken with stubborn and unresponsive diseases, living in poverty… well not here on Facebook, nay nay, we just come here to have shpilkes about all the actual people who do, of which any number is too many, and rail and get snarky with one another, and sling vulgarities or bloat ourselves in a superior way because those inferior specimens running for President are just, I mean, de trop when it comes to vulgarity; I even heard a joke, pretty lame, about how if he’s elected Bernie Sanders will be the first President to sign significant legislation into law or more likely yet another Executive Order that will go nowhere with a mustard stain on his shirt… where was I ? oh, at the pathetic slog we all endure), this “life” as we call it, is no longer what has always been understood by serfs and philosophers alike is no longer that, but a big reality show in which we’re all extras, with feature parts that are archived for as many people as you’ve indulgently allowed yourself to have as friends on your social medium of choice with photos, videos, and bad audio, some of which has probably been illegally pirated.

And reality tv was not really a genre until the 70s (discounting Allen Funt’s initial efforts with Candid Camera, which dates to 1948, when the number of tv sets could still be numbered in the thousands). PBS aired the groundbreaking An American Family, which let it all hang out, including the outing of their adolescent son, in 1973. Regularly scheduled prime time programming that falls solidly under the rubric began in 1979 and 1980 with the airing of “Real People” and “That’s Incredible” which, as the Writer’s Guild of America puts it, “took the camera fully out of the studio to capture people in their real-life settings.”

I’ll remind you at this point that Ronald Reagan had already been Governor of California, with his first term beginning in 1967, serving two terms. And more than a “great communicator” he had been and was, in actuality, a great huckster, being advertising spokesman for a number of brands, but most notably the major brands of Chesterfield cigarettes (back in the 50s, when smoking was still safe) and then, more famously, because he did it on television, for GE—kind of forming a complete circle, from the products that could give you lung cancer to the company that made the x-ray machines that could detect it in your body.

The Republicans invoke Reagan’s name with reverence, as if he did not do the things he did (raise taxes, legalized immigrants, and suborned illegal gun traffic, with some drug trade thrown in, with known terrorists), but did set a model for the modern major Republican candidate. And they repudiate Trump, because he is an enormous vulgarian—indisputably, and without mussing a hair on his lacquered head—as if that were not the cause of the reverence in which he is held by the “rank and file” (the term applied, in a headline, by the NYTimes, probably with a big grin on the face of the editor who cooked up that particular combination of words) despite the imprecations of titular head of the party until they settle on a nominee, Mitt Romney.

All this by way of solving the challenge of what do we do with a problem like The Donald. And all this, I would suggest—here I am, fully out on the end of that limb—in actuality a mere evolutionary cycle, kind of an attenuated one if you ask me, given that most politicians are ready to flip on their steadfast positions in as little as a 24-hour period since last asked to state that position for the record.

History is fun, so let’s backtrack a little further, a small bit of evidence to further anchor my indubitably trivial and unaccountable point.

I’ve seen no mention of it, as, I mean, it is four years ago after all, and who can remember what happened four days ago any longer—I mean long term memory is so yesterday, you know what I mean—but recall for a moment Mitt Romney’s “presidential” excursion to our closest ally (measured in terms of countries predominantly white, Christian, Anglophone, and of which we used to be a colony), and he proceeded to tick off the British hoi polloi, amuse the gentry and the establishment over just how “American” he revealed himself to be, and was suitably otherwise snubbed by the UK media. No one mentions that, and yet we have progressed. The British (I mean the people… apparently, who really knows?) have decided that it would be best if the UK immigration control simply didn’t even allow Donald Trump to cross the border (and that was long before the current cascade of vulgar trumpery).

It’s not a new era at all my friends, it’s what we like to call in the United States progress. Let’s just not call it Progressive shall we, otherwise both Bernie and Hillary might start getting some really bad ideas to try out.

Trump: What A Nomination Means

Posted on 1 March 2016 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 7 minutes

To me it means simply that if the American people who bother to vote in primary elections and caucuses choose him before other candidates, he should be the nominee. In the end, it has nothing to do with my preferences.

In most instances, if the President was selected on the criterion of personal preference, there would be, as there has been in totalitarian countries historically, only one nominee, and voting would be pro forma, when it isn’t—as well—mandatory (it was Donald Trump, incidentally, who pointed out recently that he is not sure he is for the health care “mandate” as it would mean that having insurance would be mandatory—he can be faulted for many things, but a very small kudo to him for his sensitivity to the language as the general populace should understand it). I get the impression, especially when paying heed to the most vociferous of Hillary Clinton opponents, who are not necessarily feeling the Bern, which seems to aggravate the effects of the Hill venom, or the most ardent of Tea Party endorsers, that this is precisely what they would prefer. And that preference for one candidate, one vote, clearly is heedless of the meaning of that foundation of the system of government called democracy.

Personally I would naturally be most comfortable, which means in my case that I would be most free of anxiety and worry, if the person I thought most appropriate for the office of President of the United States were simply appointed to office. However, I find myself questioning the intent of anyone who becomes a drummer for a candidate, and closes himself or herself off from even the simple request that “enough is enough” already, and to let the cards play as the players see fit to bid or bet on them.

There is no lack of passionate intensity among the acolytes and partisans of any one candidate. All have at least some.

In the social media, arguments fly like bees sensing pollen in the next field over swollen with herbage, but disoriented by the nerve toxins in the herbicides that abound invisibly in the air. No matter the candidate, commentators with the deliberate mien of their sagacity or merely outrageous in their certitude find platforms and are quoted ad nauseam in the feeds of the broadcast media, the ones that measure their subscribers in the hundreds of millions. Where individuals measure their self-worth on the volume of their followers or their connected relations with others, all of whom are “friends.” Permission to believe is found, refreshed daily, in virtual venues with names like Alternews and USUncut. The channels of information are chock full of truth, unsluiced because of the freedom of speech, all speech, any speech.

The bottom line for me, more than ever, and all thanks to the general air of mass hysteria that has taken over the land of netizens and tv watchers, is that this is a democracy. Every citizen is entitled to his or her vote. Everyone is entitled to his or her preferences.

In an odd sort of way, and I can imagine whatever I may about what is really going on the heads of people I don’t know in the least, but in the end I still have no idea, they accept with perfect equanimity my views. My views, which when we get down to cases (or at least I do in those occasional bouts of honesty I impose upon myself), are fairly predictable for my socio-economic set and background and my history as a resident of the rabidly liberal northeast corridor localized in eastern Massachusetts and particularly in that citadel of progressive mania, Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT, and one of the biggest bubbles on the continent.

I am well-off, and socially minded. I am highly educated and likely in a tiny minority at the upper reaches of some scale of measurable intellectual capacity. I believe in reason more than I believe in faith. I believe in that which is called Natural Law, more than I believe in the possibility of being saved personally. I believe humans should live ethically, and that ethics are, in a sense, not so much a solipsism as self-evident and derivative of natural law.

I believe we are not so much an accident on the planet as the result of perfectly deducible sets of determinable, but hardly determinative combinations and recombinations of organic molecules and genetic signalling. And I believe we are as likely to evolve into some other life forms in the fullness of time, as likely as it would have been to anticipate that we would make an appearance on the planet’s surface in the fullness of time were we to go back far enough prior to our emergence on the stage of the grand selective lottery.

And I believe that Donald Trump has the same potential inevitability as any other candidate who, by accident or design, for a lark or for some nefarious purpose unknown even to himself or herself, who, for all we know, had no motive for running that he or she is at all aware of consciously. Indeed, in the case of Donald Trump, I believe it’s possible he, in bare acuality, has not an idea or even an atom of a kernel of a concept as to what makes him do anything. And all that being said, is to say not very much more than we can say about any of his supporters. And as for other candidates and their supporters, I’m not sure that because we can delineate a cogent argument that seems to posit in a thesis and at once to constitute a proof as to its coherency as logic, that such arguments, in a democracy, are worth any more than a feeling deep in one’s heart that the other guy or gal is the right one, not when the curtains close behind the voter in the ballot booth.

I believe there are far fewer chips than one would infer from the aggregate energy of all the handwringing arguments and all the casuistry, all the passionate invective, all the frustrated anguish and all the anger. The country is young, but still old enough to have gone through this closing in on half a hundred times over our history that began in a period set three centuries ago, when life was profoundly different in terms of the nature of the quotidian and the sophistication and leverage provided by the prevailing technologies of the time. We will still elect a president and what chips there are, however many there are, will fall where they may, as they always have fallen.

Fact is, the country was founded, in terms of principles of the structure of government with a sharply divided, largely dualistic and dueling set of theories. We are still divided, though along different lines. We shed blood periodically as parties on either side of whatever divide defines our present epoch—and as it has repeatedly in all previously discernible epochs. And perhaps, there will be blood. Yet again.

But, despite the dire sense of both sides that there is some Manichean division that with victory for one side of the other will mean that white will prevail over black, or black over white, or red over blue, or vice versa, or, using whatever semiotic figures you like, that there will be a prevailing order—even though there is none now, and has not been for some time, if ever, perhaps even when we separated ourselves from England and struck out into the world, no longer a colony, for sure, but a sovereign nation, which we remain—and that the other side will lose, our side or theirs no matter. As if the outcome will mean the extinction of roughly half the populace of a profoundly large country with not a small number of citizens, with no clear majority holding an unequivocally clear position standing on undisputed ground.

We live in a time of political paralysis, of stymied hopes, of dashed plans, and unbalanced forces pitted increasingly against one another. We’ve lived in such a time before. Before we always suffered the torment of the irresolution that follows when the great engine of compromise, which assures that progress will occur, however slowly and incrementally—or we would not be where we are now, which is no longer, and mainly for good and not for ill, were that engine not in a state of ready revival as it has always proven to be. We are poised on a tipping point, as it has become stylish to call it, though I mean it in a much more mundane and less precipitous, hence less dramatic, sense. Once we tip into that necessary realm of painstaking—in few other contexts does the word assume literal meaning so forcefully—compromise. It will happen as it has always happened. It even happened under the “impossible” circumstances of most of the tenure of President Obama. It will happen, or not, of course, under a President Trump, or a President Clinton. And it will likely be no less difficult than it would be under a Rubio or a Sanders.

Here are the bare facts, at least insofar as they pertain to me. This I know for sure. If you feel you are in a different position, and there’s reason to think that attaining such a position is possible through a duplicable process, you have a responsibility to share the algorithm, as they say. But for now, I manage to live, more and more readily each day, knowing that there is not a thing I can do, not a word I can say, and not a dollar I can spend that will alter the selection of delegates to represent this or that candidate come convention time in any state in which I am not a resident. I could not alter the outcome in South Carolina for either party in South Carolina, no matter how much I might have wanted to, which was not at all. Any more than I can do so in the thirteen states (and one territory) of Super Tuesday casting their ballots even as I sit here typing.

It must be enough to accept that however you vote, whatever your reasons for doing so, it will have an impact on the outcome, however infinitesmal that impact, though it will not measurably change the outcome that results from all the votes of all the voters, on whom you can have no impact whatsoever. I get no solace knowing that whatever the range of emotions that rise within me—usually uncontrollably, as I’d just as soon pay no attention whatsoever to this race or to any of the candidates, and even less so to their supporters (who are the agents of encouragement to behave in such provocative or egregious or predictable ways)—they will not determine who is President on January 20, 2017. The great test is not accepting the panoply of feelings that are inevitable, and good or bad, from hearing the results on election day this November. The great test is merely accepting the result. It is part of the experience of being a citizen. And if that isn’t a conscious choice, given the state of affairs as they have been, not for the past ten months, or even ten years, but likely for your entire life, you have no reason to complain at all. It certainly won’t matter to President Trump, if that’s who we get.

The Presidential Campaign Thus Far, Late Summer 2015

Posted on 24 August 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

also posted on Facebook

At this point in the increasingly extruded presidential campaigns (they used to be a year, more or less, and now are two, making lame ducks even lamer), I think less about who I am “for”—I’m never earnestly in favor of anyone, and never have been; I gave money generously to Obama in 2008 to help ensure his run against Clinton for the nomination, and then against McCain/Palin… but no candidate ever aligns perfectly with my views, which is the way the phenomenon should occur, I think, that is, it’s the candidates who should be taking quizzes to see what percentage of my views they agree with. I think about those whose policies I can best embrace.

I don’t think about viablity, not as an index of my likely potential vote, not this early. I don’t think about all the non-salient factors that seem to motivate so many other people, on the full political spectrum, from left to right, all supporters act almost exactly the same way. I can’t say they are genuinely intellectually engaged; almost nobody is sufficiently articulate and certainly not on Facebook, let’s say, to assess when someone is making an intelligent informed decision. On the social media everyone appears to be emotionally driven, and as much by antipathy for the other, as by enthusiasm for my man or woman. It’s clear though that a lot of people are about as animated as my classmates used to get when selecting the prom king and queen (I never attended a prom; never wanted to, and couldn’t have cared less… I was defective in this regard even then). Some people, regarding their candidate of choice even froth a bit at the lips, figuratively speaking. I’ve seen it in right-wingers; I’ve seen it in Bernie supporters; I’ve seen it in the disenchanted who say hold your nose and vote for (Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush usually) because either of them is better than the alternative.

Now, as for Bernie Sanders, in particular, but to a certain extent it’s true of Donald Trump, who, as an aside, are a strange Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but that’s how I see them, yin and yang and therefore reinforcing each other’s gestalt, we’re beginning to see the Messiah syndrome emerge. Increasingly, as the media institutionalize the question of Joe Biden’s candidacy (his jumping in would be entirely opportunistic, even if he is genuinely contemplating it, and his prospects more an index of Clinton’s failing inevitability—Biden is simply not an inevitability kind of candidate; he is what he is, the dependable, steady running mate; even Andy Borowitz still doesn’t take him seriously) and the progressives now getting really hot about Bernie Sanders are acting exactly like suitors with a new flame, having been spurned by their real soul mate, Liz Warren (who has shown herself to have feet with a little bit of clay in them, but not so much it can’t be overlooked except by Republican trolls).

Now suddenly, every candidate has the potentiality for being a snake in the grass, a spoiler, duplicitous, ambitious, greedy, and underhanded. Judases. As if Sanders is not a politician, but something purer than the common clay that contaminates all of us ordinary people. As if Sanders is not also, despite the allure of many of his policies, and his quiet assertions of mature, rational adulthood, contrasted with the insane adolescent spritz of the crypto standup comedians that constitute the rest of the candidate field, capable of solecisms and misfires. As if our Bernie is not a member of that most exclusive of clubs, the Senate, who must go along at times, to get along. The Senate does not do absolutely nothing, and when it does what little it does, it manages to do so these days because somebody has to cross the aisle and work in league with the enemy.

Finally, of course, to take the focus off Bernie Sanders, who is the cynosure of all of that other white minority, the urban liberal, plus all the other people who usually quietly go about their lives because there is so rarely anyone who seems genuinely capable of honestly expressing their sense of being passively oppressed for decades, let’s consider Liz Warren, the former darling of the left. She’s got more flash and glamour, and showed some of what seemed sincere humility, not to mention a sense of humor, when she would appear on The Daily Show (it’s too bad that aside from an appearance in 2011, to speak up for universal health care, Bernie Sanders can no longer be “interviewed” by Jon Stewart, especially as a possibly viable candidate, a proposition that Stewart seemed to dismiss earlier this year—he was as taken by surprise as anyone), but essentially, she’s a Bernie type progressive, without the self-imposed label of “socialist.” But now, she’s plotting with Smilin’ Jack Biden… some even suggesting, with all the intrigue of a genuinely tortuous Machiavellian strategy, that the sudden talk of a Biden/Warren ticket is actually a Trojan horse, brilliantly calibrated to ensure a Clinton nomination!

Would that politicos were that smart and capable of diabolical skullduggery. Of such artistic treachery. Senator Iago.

No, as usual, at this stage, and building a drum beat that increases in tempo and volume (undoubtedly to the proportions of the soundtrack of Birdman as election day approaches) the fascinating thing about the campaigns is not the candidates, it’s all of you, the people, carrying on about your candidates. The caravan is nothing without spectators and hangers on, without camp followers, without purses full of the currency of our hopes and fears, waiting to be fleeced by the vendors in their stalls in the marketplace. But when the caravan moves on, as in that famous saying, still the only thing to be heard as the wagons diminish in size on the horizon, will be the dogs. Barking.

Curt Schilling

Posted on 8 March 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 6 minutes

What disturbs me about the current Curt Schilling brouhaha that’s, as the au courant term puts it, “trending” is not that he took the bull by the horns and decided to leap… No great risk for him as he’s clearly of the John Wayne “Searchers” school of vigilantism. It’s not that he loves his daughter, is proud of her, laudatory, and, as is now obvious, protective just short of a fault. I hope it’s short. In fact, one way of looking at what I find disturbing is a kind of falling short in the protective department.

He is, by his own characterization (and it reads like a pre-emptive rationale, to those who might question the rigor with which he pursued his daughter’s tormentors), a public figure. To many people, especially Red Sox fans, and to the electorate of a more conservative persuasion politically who take any notice, he’s a hero. He is clearly outspoken, and possibly even brazen in his stated willingness to confront all comers mano a mano.

He has been using personal computers, he says, since 1981 (quite possible; the IBM PC was introduced that year. Of course, he was 15 in 1981, and possibly it was with some hobbyist version of the PC that he became acquainted with the technology. No matter. I know it was possible even to have begun to have some acquaintance with connectivity, as there were communication networks for the public, accessible using personal computers, that predate the Internet going back at least as far as 1981. Whatever the case, he portrays himself as a man well versed in the ways of the social media.

He makes a great case for being a man, now mature and responsible for his actions, taken prudently and thoughtfully, and before that, a fairly typical teenager, reckless and daring, and more than willing to do regrettable stupid things. He says he understands the impulses of men in groups, having been one for most of his professional career in sports, certainly in the Major Leagues of baseball and in other leagues as prelude to that. He knows the braggadocio, the manly preening, the boasts and the longings and the lusts.

After congratulating his 17 year old daughter, whom he names in the post, on Twitter, for having been accepted at Salve Regina College, both as a freshman and as a member of their varsity softball team, he was, he claims, non-plussed by the less than kindly well-wishes of what grew to be a mob of scurrilous cyber-bullies, and would-be sexual predators, stating explicit sexual assaults intended for Mr. Schilling’s teenage daughter.

I have no quarrel with his vehement and aggressive stand against such behavior. I have what may or may not be a quarrel with his tactics (though not his motives—which are understandable; even not being a father, one can understand his sense of protectiveness) in outing and setting up her would-be assailants and threat-mongers for retribution through perfectly legal channels. By bringing their behavior to the attention of their managers, bosses, coaches, et al., Mr. Schilling instigated the dismissal, firing, and expulsion of many of these transgressors from their appointments to college and professional athletic teams, from their jobs, and so forth. In the end, I guess—again my feelings are not sorted out, and hence are kind of equivocal, if not ambivalent altogether—justice has been meted out, and, in addition to the immediate punishment inherent in their loss of status, or even of a livelihood, they face the possibly life-long prospect of having been branded as offenders as one of the most reviled sort in this country.

But for all that, here’s what’s bothering me. Mr. Schilling, by all accounts, but especially his own, a responsible adult, taking very seriously his role as provider and protector of his family and, in particular, any female offspring, was not sufficiently mindful from the start, or not, in my book, as he might have considered being. I don’t mean with his original proud innocuous “tweet” congratulating his daughter. But before that, when he took it upon himself to have a public presence, presumably for his fans, as well as actual personal friends and family, on the most visible of social media. On Twitter, in particular, which has become a vetted conduit for fast-breaking news, among whatever other more frivolous uses to which it is put, he has 122,000 followers. We can’t expect that he knows all these people personally. We can’t imagine, when it comes down to cases, that he would consider it a comfortable proposition that they be privy to all matters concerning his personal life, not to mention those of his family, and greatest of all those of his children.

Many other public figures go to great lengths to preserve their privacy and shield their loved ones, despite the exertions and no-expense-spared tactics employed by the world at large, not only the media, but all self-styled media, including commentators, hangers-on, and those, in the case of celebrities, who consider themselves somehow colleagues, if not peers, because they are engaged in the same business (other athletes in the case of Mr. Schilling, from junior high on up through college; in the case of the performing arts, all those who are studying those arts, or performing them, even at the amateur and community level). People do want to feel that kinship with those who have proven themselves, especially if they have received accolades and the world’s recognition. In practice, people still have to earn trust though, one-by-one and on a personal level.

Some public figures go to unusual lengths, expatriating themselves, or living behind ultra-secured gates, and enrolling their children in private institutions that have been dedicated to do everything possible to protect their privacy. Perhaps the parents are fair game—that’s the way of the world for public figures of global recognition and stature—but I have yet to hear an argument, except from people who are clearly tainted with perverse interpretations of appropriate ethical and moral standards by which to live, that the family and children of public figures are equally fair game.

Many public figures also go to great lengths not to make other members of their families, especially those under legal age, also a member of the professional act, so to speak. I’m not talking about the “stars” of reality media, who are largely famous for being famous, and being famous and making as many blood relatives, or those tied by marriage, famous in the bargain.

Curt Schilling, I don’t believe, is part of this latter category. He is, nevertheless, a genuine sports hero and icon to many.

If anything, I would argue, he has a greater responsibility to be mindful of what he shares about himself and his life—but in particular his personal life—with the world outside of what amounts to a small circle of friends and family, as is true for anyone. Anyone. He is entitled to be as proud as he can stand to feel about the accomplishments of his children. He is entitled to feel all the positive feelings any normal person has regarding loved ones, and those held dear, by blood or friendship.

I am not sure he is entitled to expose them, if he can help it, to the attention of the thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, to the wanton, lurid and often perverse, sick and criminal curiosities and fantasies of some small portion of a public as large as theirs is likely to be, and as large as Curt Schilling’s demonstrably is.

I don’t think he owes one word of apology to anyone who, through his or her actions directed at Mr. Schilling’s daughter, jeopardized their participation in a normative way with the rest of society. They have made themselves pariahs, and they must find their own strategies for extricating themselves from that status, if that’s even possible.

What I do think Mr. Schilling is obligated to do, is to think, or to think again (assuming he gave thought to these matters in the past; he is clearly outspoken, and just as clearly an intelligent thinking man who arrives at his point of view only after due consideration), about the repercussions of offering up what should be private communications intended for the bosom of his group of nearest and dearest, and keeping those offers of his, of praise, or whatever else, out of the eyesight and earshot of the rest of his world of admirers. They are simply bright flames to countless moths who never stop coming.

Portland Doesn’t Cut it as One of America’s Ten Most Liberal Cities

Posted on 2 December 2014 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

The 10 Most Conservative and Liberal Cities in America

**“Ceci n’est pas Portland”** http://media.salon.com/2014/02/san_francisco_clouds.jpg | Not so interestingly, this is a photo of San Francisco, of course, and not Portland, but then, the person who posted the original link is from Portland, and he was lamenting a lack of approbation he felt his home city deserved. I believe this is what’s called an abundance of negative capability. Also, I like that there’s a Margrittean quality about illustrating a blog post about Portland with a stock photo of San Francisco, a city, like Portland, I mainly admire from afar. Good for food and short visits, and seeing friends I love. But not much else.

Note to a Portlandian upset over Salon’s analysis:

It’s been clear to me since I began to learn in earnest about the greater than superficial (i.e., stereotypical—in short, Fred Armisen is NOT your friend) and more salient facts about the culture, ecosystem, and anthropological excrescences of Portland, because some of my dearest friends purely serendipitously (and hence appropriately to the PDX gestalt) moved there, that it is, in fact, a huge movie set, planned, designed and executed by Hollywood moguls, starting, likely, in the 1920s, as a kind of Truman Show on an urban scale and an ongoing experiment.

This magazine’s analysis (and I wouldn’t get my knickers in a twist because Salon doesn’t think you are liberal enough—their shtick these days is to froth at the mouth, and amusingly, they seem close to considering Henry Wallace a closet conservative; must be a new form of jaded NYC chic). Besides, a whole city full of hipsters, slackers, and very very very early retirees and proto-survivalists (or is that pseudo-?) could not possibly sustain a consistent political point of view so as to constitute a caucus, never mind a quorum.

You’ll just have to wait for the list of the ten most apolitical cities. Don’t worry, the delusion that you actually have a political stance, never mind a liberal one, will pass. If not, take two of your drug of choice, and forget about it. Otherwise, your only solution is to move to Vermont—a whole state that, for over 250 years, has been what Portland thinks it is.

Ten Squared and counting.

Posted on 20 August 2014 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

“1 Standard Deviation” is not only my new (and newest) blog. It is also to be the new home of all previous blog entries on what was my usual writing post, a blog called Per Diem. Though, to the relief of everyone, not least of all myself, it did not live up to its name in a literal way. The blog entries there, as my regular readers, my loyal friends and subscribers long since learned, made up in the volume of words what they lacked in regularity of appearance. In a good week, sometimes essays appeared three days in a row. But that was a rare occurrence. I tried, at least, to concentrate the quality of rarity in the quality of the writing itself.

For three days now (it’s a tedious technical process) I have been importing the Per Diem blog entries to this blog as their new repository. There are now 100 essays, jibes, quips, and observations lifted without alteration to these virtual pages.

If you look on the home page of “1 Standard Deviation,” down there in the left hand column you will see, arranged by month and year, the growing library of vintage Dinin.

If you are or were a subscriber to Per Diem, you might consider subscribing here. The place to do so is just a little further down on the left. Per Diem, as a blog, will be removed from its present location after I have given the web crawlers and spiders to find these essays once again and index them, so people searching on their favorite engines for doing so will find them in their new home. Though hardly pressing, this is as much a cost saving measure as it is an esthetic (the old site was getting a little old, along with my face) and a marketing decision (the cleaner, more accessible design I hope points to some cleaner more accessible content to come, in many forms).

If you have a favorite piece or two of mine that you always mean to look up and read again (or perhaps, more likely, you’ve simply forgotten, as I have, the surprising pleasures—yes, I do surprise myself, as any writer should be able to do—of certain passages or even whole pieces; now’s your chance to re-discover a lost favorite or two).

Enjoy.

I hope in the next day or so to have transferred all the contents of Per Diem to this site, going back to 2002…

Notes from the Hinterlands

Posted on 13 August 2014 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 13 minutes

Despite many promises, often repeated, and most frequently by the more liberal politicians, that all Americans deserve and will have high-speed Internet connectivity, we are not there yet. Many Americans, especially in rural areas, do not. Like so much else that gets promised and then forgotten, until the heat of the next campaign demands new or renewed pledges, if it bothers anyone making the promises, there is no sign of it.

I write from a booth in a “family style” diner and restaurant in a town called both poetically and ironically somehow, “Woodsville” (remembering that the town in David Lynch’s perverse and perverted masterpiece Blue Velvet was Lumberton… which Woodsville decidedly is not, nor could it have served as a model, but the ethos Lynch sought to satirize, if not demonize, with some ham-handedness, is in the air, as it has been since long before any of us were born). I am able to connect from my seat in this two-person booth because they are kind enough along with the generously sized pancakes and the vaguely decadent apple-bacon omelets, to offer a Wi-Fi hotspot of middling capacity in terms of throughput and bandwidth. Wisely they put more emphasis on the quality of the food than on the strength of what I admit are geekish parameters of performance few patrons expect, never mind demand.

Most of the patrons of Shiloh’s in Woodsville, from outward appearances, are either “Middle Americans,” in the sometimes seemingly indelicate, surely insensitive taxonomy of sociologists and economists, or they are working farmers (and I operate under the romantic sentiment that all lifelong farmers are workers, even if officially retired—not in the middle, by any means, but at the foundation of our existence; surely the intensity of their exertions add up in some account to a lifetime of what anyone would consider real work). They are drawn, or so I infer from a periodic survey of the license tags of the vehicles in the parking lot, and this largely in the summer, from the surrounding towns in the county and neighboring Vermont. Otherwise they are drawn from kindred origins elsewhere in the country, farming communities as far afield as Texas (surprising the number of Texans, and distinguishable if I may say so, mainly because of those license tags, that is, everyone has a country drawl of one kind or another, and I don’t listen too closely). and as relatively nearby as New York State—these seem to have more of a recognizable linguistic marker than others, but I was born in New York City and have a particular sensitivity to the accent.

I am guessing that the home towns and villages of the patrons are also farming communities, in fact, if not in spirit. From their dress, mainly peaked caps with embroidered logos of companies serving that profession, t-shirts emblazoned similarly and almost without exception marked in some way with printed matter, text or images or both. Nondescript trousers, dark, of gabardine or denim. The women are in equally casual garb, sometimes in a dress, sometimes in shorts and a t-shirt, usually the difference being a function of age. Further, Woodsville and the other hamlets and villages of Haverhill, the county seat, are decidedly not tourist destinations. Not so much that you’ve seen one dairy farm, you’ve seen them all. Rather there is not much to see in a community that is dedicated, essentially, to hard work when the earth is clear, and then to hunker down, except for feeding the animals from a store of food laid down in part as a result of that hard work, when the fields and roads and hills are covered in snow.

Around here, the farms that make up the larger part of the area of any of the surrounding towns and villages are, indeed, dairy farms, producing milk for local consumption, as well as its by-products, cheese and yogurt and ice cream. Or they are contributors to much larger cooperatives. Cabot, by far the largest of these that produces branded products, based in Vermont, has its trucks ply the roads hereabouts as well as much farther afield. Other mass aggregators, unencumbered by the demands of keeping a brand top of mind among the public, gather milk in anonymous tankers. Then they no doubt dispose of it in markets to major conglomerates. Hood, and all the major supermarket chains come to mind.

The farms, being largely populated by a variety of breeds of bovine creatures also offer up their fair share of grass-fed beef. However, and again I’m guessing, I suspect most of the product of this lesser cottage industry, except for the consumption by the sparse number of nearby restaurants, whose patrons would arrive driven in part by a discriminatory desire for locally raised grass-fed meat (for in addition to beef, there is lamb, and from some farms, pork and veal) is not aged, or even freshly slaughtered. These restaurants would prefer a steady if narrow stream of fresh product, it’s true, and they get it (proudly publishing on the menu the provenance of that choice cut of sirloin or filet—none of your fancy hipster cuts, like tri-tip or hanger steak, and only one place, nearly an hour away in cosmopolitan White River Junction, VT offered flat iron). However, for the most part you can still fill your trunk with as much meat as it will hold, but frozen, hard as the rocks so strenuously dug out of the resistant soil in the surrounding hills. And that’s year round, when the grills are cold and the restaurants, the less stalwart ones in any event, not fully committed to the needs of patrons in these austere climes, are closed for the winter. It seems there is no dearth of local beef (and veal, and lamb and goat). In 2013 local slaughterhouses, of which there were three at the time—these are slaughterhouses meeting USDA approval, meaning spending millions of dollars and creating accommodations (an office and a separate restroom) for a full-time “resident” Inspector—were turning away customers. Apparently there were, and remain, inefficiencies in the logistics of coordinating the needs of a surfeit of small time operators. The slaughterhouse in North Haverhill, brand new, and state of the art, whose owner, a fellow named Pete Roy, said, “it was necessary to go big [as in 10,000 square feet big, as opposed to two thousand in the previous plant] or go home.” They can process 40 or 50 beef a day in that space, but still do not possess the equipment and manpower to handle that capacity. Demand is too sporadic and unpredictable to make the investment.

All of this industrial grade capability, incidentally, is well-hidden. I haven’t asked, but I also continue to have no idea where this sizable operation might be located, and I have been in North Haverhill, where it is based, for over three years now. I can, on the other hand, point out many of the farms easily enough. They are quite visible, as are the crops that grow alongside the cows.

Aside from the pasture and meadow land accessible in the line of small towns on either side of the Connecticut River, which straddles the state line, most of the farmland, some of it rolling seemingly without end to the edge of the distant woods that girdle the rich earth, is visible from any negotiable country road, and often grows right to the shoulder of that byway. For the most part it is given over to corn. Of what type I cannot, with my city-boy ignorance, say by a glance or even a studied look. However, I can’t help but notice it grows wondrously high. Given the sparsity of the market for fresh produce however (for example, in the 2012 count of souls dwelling in Woodsville, a scant thousand residents, almost exectly divided by gender, were counted out of upwards of 440 households), the relatively short growing season, and an abundance of eating corn at a handful of farmer markets and farm stands, plus an even larger inventory in the chain supermarkets that service the local populace, also featuring “fresh” produce, but, not surprisingly, from wholly other venues far afield, I am guessing until I can suss out the data from a reliable source that the corn I see is of another variety. Likely that which was made infamous by food writer and social critic Michal Pollan. At least, I surmise, it some grade of feed corn, not fit for direct human consumption.

The Feds are of service here, with their relentless data collection, which we ordinary citizens never see. No NSA required. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, through its Farm Service Agency, openly solicits and collects surveys on a monthly basis from farmers who wish to certify their yield (no doubt in service to Byzantine tax-related subsidies and credits, based on even more arcane laws buried deep in the code). A moment’s Google search, with the right terms, through the good offices of the ‘good enough’ wi-fi accessible to me in my booth at Shiloh’s, iPad propped up next to my plate of an egg-white omelet chock full of onions, peppers, spinach and good cheddar cheese, local whole wheat bread and home fries crisped on the grill, and I’m home… with a spreadsheet to download that covers every county in every state of this great nation. It takes a couple of minutes to download.

Sure enough, all of Grafton County is planted over to three kinds of corn. There’s sweet corn, the kind we like to eat right off the cob, buttered or not, and in other forms no doubt. Sweet corn, irrespective of Mr. Pollan’s opinions of the uses of #2 Feed Corn (about which more in a few moments), is a favorite of a great many Americans. We consume, according to recent figures (2012), just shy of 34 pounds of corn products (which includes not only the kernels, but cornmeal, flour, etc.). But let us suppose, because it’s easier, we are talking about corn on the cob, the edible portions. The yield of a bushel of corn, at a little over 15% moisture, is about 56 pounds. This means a bushel of sweet corn will satisfy the average annual needs of almost two Americans.

I’ve saved all of you readers the math and the research time. Here’s a further breakdown of what all of Grafton County, in which Woodsville is situated, and of which Haverhill, the township into which Woodsville is incorporated and is county seat, has dedicated to corn farming. Sweet corn (what we put directly into our mouths) is just short of 1% of all those rolling hills and fields of the tall crop, or about 4400 bushels, or enough to feed 7-1/4 thousand people their corn for a year. That many people, assuming they consumed all of Grafton County’s corn, constitute a tad over eight percent of the county’s total population of 89 thousand souls. Doesn’t leave much for tourists, unless they’re the ones scarfing up all that delicious corn.

But as Mr. Pollan will tell you, that’s nothing. Not compared to the 453 thousand bushels of yellow corn, on 90% of the farmed acreage in Grafton County, corn that is dedicated to silage production. Silage, which this now informed city boy has learned, is for forage, that is, it’s stored for the winter, mainly to feed milk cows (which makes eminent sense, given the cow population), and consists of most of the plant that’s growing above the ground. That’s stalks, leaves, green corn (it’s generally not allowed to mature into grain) and all, cut up and chopped into a form that’s easily stored. Pollan talks a lot about Corn #2, which is largely used by way of harvesting the grain, some fed directly to live stock, and preponderantly processed into high fructose corn syrup, the great contaminant of our food chain, and responsible, ostensibly for everything wrong in our diets and metabolisms, from diabetes to obesity.

Feed corn is grown in Grafton County. It accounts for the other ten percent (if you’ve been silently doing the math) of the crop in 2013, and it mainly is devoted to providing seed for next year’s (that would be this year’s) silage planting, and for the usual uses of feed corn, that is corn byproducts, like corn meal, and alcohol.

So the farmers of Woodsville, I’d say, can rest easy as they’re not contributing much to the degradation and debauchery (as one anthropologist I read calls it) of the American standards of nutrition. They’re barely serving the needs, if the numbers here are anywhere near accurate, of the average demand for good fresh sweet corn, one of the pleasures and treasures of summer dining, especially here in the hinterlands so close to the source. It’s a wonder then that Woodsville, population of barely upwards of a thousand people (evenly divided almost exactly between men and women) make such a poor living. The average household makes slightly over $31 thousand, which is almost exactly half the average household income for Grafton County. Moreover, as a kind of reality check on the actuality of these figures, the average valuation of residential real estate in Woodsville is, again, almost exactly half of what it is in the rest of the country, that is, just barely north of $100,000. Hardly a castle.

Woodsville, and much of surrounding Haverhill, is far and away predominantly white. It is poorer (even than the rest of Grafton County). Generally, the county is older, better educated, and less employed. All of these demographic data seem to point to some internal contradictions, but nothing discernible, not to me. And least of all, in terms of the potential demand for a convenience (I’d call it a utility, like water or electricity, but that’s me) and that’s access to the Internet, which is the subject that inducted me into this meditation.

Being poorer than the rest of New Hampshire, which, according to coverage maps, especially in the southern part of the state, is pretty well served by service providers, I’d expect less demand. There’s also much less call, as I infer from the kinds of stores supplying staple items and other groceries, for natural products. Consumer package goods are generally the same to be found all over the country: over-processed, loaded with high fructose corn syrup, GMOs, salt, and preservatives with long convoluted chemical names. Only one market chain has a store nearby (in Vermont) that has an organic produce section. The same store offers bulk bagels, wholly local oddly enough. This is the kind of anomalous product discovery, like the home-made breads in the local general stores, made from whole grain ingredients and fewer additives of no nutritional value whatsoever, right next to the candy bars and the chips and the Tasty-Kakes, I stumble on from time to time. It’s as if the region, for so long mainly populated by people who worked hard, kept their heads down, fought for lower taxes (or none at all) and willing to live in the kind of community that is perpetually sleepy and a little behind (that’s poetic and romantic euphemism) the zeitgeist that drives the 24/7 news cycles those of us who are denizens (or addicts) of the Internet culture that fills our days, has no need, in fact, for high-speed Internet.

It’s not clear what they’d do with it, even if it’s offered, which it is from time to time, though I guess with no takers, by the local phone company, who bought all the lines and the equipment from Verizon, happy to let them go as this was one of the few money-losing regions of the country of their far-flung profit machine. Life here is idyllic in many dimensions and likely for the locals in this dimension as well. There simply is no call to check into Facebook, Buzzfeed, or send hundreds of images a day via snapchat and Instagram.

Teenagers and even younger folks I see in restaurants are well enough outfitted with smart phones. In fact they are the only people I see in public exercising the right of the plugged-in generation to dispense with etiquette, never mind the basic social graces. Their elders do not sit hunched over tablets and smartphones. They sit looking each other in the eye, and having real honest-to-god conversations. They chat with neighbors at other tables, including “new” neighbors, which is to say, the strangers in the next booth, who may as easily be from Berryville, Texas (population 999) as Wells River, Vermont, the town just across the bridge from Woodsville.

Just across the road from Shiloh’s is a relatively new Walmart, whose parking lot fills fairly early in the morning and stays full until closing. Residents of more than a few years attest that even before the Walmart arrived, the small stores on the classic main streets of the area, and Woodsville’s is as classic as it gets, with banks, merchandise specialists, a railroad stop, beauty parlor, even a bookstore at one time now represented by the empty store fronts they once inhabited, had emptied out or were emptying. The virtue of Walmart, if nothing else (and someone else’s critical apparatus may be tuned to a different set of parameters), is that it is open early and stays open late, so if you need the odd ingredient, or have the odd fixation, you can satisfy it even at ten o’clock at night, when most good farmers have probably already been asleep for a bit.

There’s no shortage of personal computer and mobile electronics, including the latest Kindles and iPads and phones, with many accessories and even the equipment required to pull bits out of the ether, including wi-fi routers. Though who buys and uses this merchandise is unclear, and how they “jack in” (to use William Gibson vaguely distasteful coinage) is even less clear. It’s true the major carriers of cellular voice and data signals have finally (as of a year and a half ago) managed to bring their fastest technologies, 4G and even LTE in spots, to the area. This means that in a region where there is still not critical mass to entice a cable company to pull coax or fiber, and most television is transmitted digitally solely by satellite dishes, which festoon every house, trailer and double-wide, not matter how posh or dilapidated (and there is a broad range of wealth and lifestyle even here in the boondocks), most other digital communication is by phone. I guess the locals surf the Web on those tiny screens.

We live in what is a secondary house for us (we also have another, as I have documented and told of in story and fable, in a medieval village in rural France, about 45 minutes from the foothills of the Alps; there we have DSL service and connect to France Telecom and the world) in North Haverhill. I have spoken repeatedly to the local phone company, a struggling enterprise called Fairpoint, which continues to buy up old Verizon assets here in northern New England and New York. They have DSL service as close as Pike, another unincorporated part of Haverhill, and which consists of mainly a sign on a utility pole that informs you that you are in Pike. We pass the sign on the last leg of the trip here from our urban cocoon, seven hours to the south, and then, two or three minutes later pull into our driveway. But we are still too far from the switch in Pike for them to offer even the barest of essential high speed service.

They are always apologetic, are Fairpoint, but simply cannot say even with cloudy uncertainty when they might muster the justification for installing another piece of equipment another critical mile closer to our house. It’s easy to surmise, there is not much call from our neighbors.

All of this kind of inconvenience, one of the deprivations of the truly spoiled, but still speaking to the more fundamental issue addressed only briefly and by allusion alone in my opening sentences, points to yet another inequality in the United States. The disparity between the access to those aspects of modern life that serve more than a basic set of needs. In an age long since established as a digital age, the digits, it would appear, stop somewhere just beyond the city line. And our rural brethren, both the dying breed of farming stalwarts, who provide so reliably the most fundamental of needs, and the merchants who sell them seed and feed and tractors and wheelbarrows, not to mention the restaurateurs who make them breakfast, are clearly, by default, de facto, and by some not very deep cost benefit analysis not in any way equal to the lowliest urban dweller. The government has long since acknowledged this disparity, but like all other disparities, use it as lyrics to the mouth music politicians like to play.

What I can’t figure out, though I do not by any means question it, is why Shiloh’s, an oasis of family cooking, is also a lone outpost for Internet warriors like myself, so seldom do I show up at their door, and so few in number, clearly, in these parts are my brethren. They don’t even require a password.

Social Media and the Erosion of Values

Posted on 8 May 2013 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 14 minutes

Flattened Preferences and Decaying Judgment

Like it or not, many of us are spending non-trivial amounts of time on-line using social media, most likely Facebook, but whatever. I’ve decided the time’s long past due for having a way to choose with greater subtlety exactly what we get to look at once we log in, and for as long as we can tolerate being there. I think most of us are aware there are ways to control what we see and what we don’t, at least in crude ways. However, after that, sometimes using even these tools is a bit like learning how to use a new operating system without a manual or an instruction video.

Within the social media in general there have always been coarse means for filtering the continuous stream of data that reaches our information devices. Facebook, being the paradigm because of its size and ubiquity, provides a rough template for methods of distributing or disrupting any part of the flow. Other services may do it differently. We can “unfollow” this person or that (to use the no longer curious, but merely stubbornly ignorant usages of the semi-literate—if it makes you feel better, consider “unfollow” a term of art; in all events, to resist is futile). As a middle way, we can elect to receive messages in some hierarchy of alleged personal preference—like so much else, not only not very precise, but essentially not defined anywhere either—as to the significance of any sender’s declarations appearing on our feed: you can choose to receive “all” of them, “most” or “only important” ones. Who decides? Who knows? We can be sure there’s an algorithm for it. And that Zuck put his stamp of approval on it.

That sort of takes care of incoming. As far as outgoing content, in a drastic, but not extreme, step we can “block” undesirable correspondents (usually originally linked for political or social expediency), simply to prevent the temptation, theirs, to imagine they are chums, or, to avoid the embarrassment, ours, of saying something, anything, these not-quite-soul mates in an unwary and unknowing limbo might consider improper, imprudent or, simply, “fightin’ words.” And of course, there is the radical tactic, the social equivalent online of exercising extreme prejudice, the act of “unfriending.” This, however, is not sufficient to keep the barbarians on their side of the gate.

In one of the protocols of what must be a whole lexicon of obscure rules and terms of engagement, even if you “unfriend” an individual, they are automatically relegated to the status of “follower”—we may assume unbeknownst to either or both parties not paying attention—and they will still receive your wholly “public” utterances. Presumably, Zuckerberg has decided, with his genius for embracing a kind of nincompoop psychology, that having a lot of followers is akin, sort of like a first cousin once removed, to having a lot of friends. However, before I go too far in the gleeful enterprise of making fun of the current supreme idiot savant of technology, I’ll add simply that, despite his protestations that he’s not interested in the money, the Zuck always has his eye on the prize of as many eyeballs as he can sell to prospective advertisers.

Look. It’s clearly deliberately made hard to understand how to use Facebook, and it’s equally hard actually to break with anyone with whom you have even the most tenuous connection to begin with, because the more people who follow you (and you them, of course), the more opportunities there are to sell the myth of affinity. If it were easy to drop people, you’d do it. By the same strategy, this is why, if, for example, you made the mistake of giving Facebook your real baby boomer birthdate, let’s say, you’ll be seeing ads, offering dating opportunities with eligible “mature” women—even though you’re married, which they won’t actually know if you don’t tell them, perhaps out of a vestigial tender regard for your own privacy—and the ad is illustrated with a photo of a comely large-breasted woman whose maturity consists in being able to remember the most poignant moments of passing through puberty as if they occurred yesterday, because, in fact, they did. But, in that immemorial cliché, I digress. In fact, this is related to the dilemma of truly managing your cyber-social life, and so back to that. In the meantime, in your off-hours and I mean off the internet and with nothing better to do, convince yourself you’re not being manipulated.

Now, aside from somehow wanting the power instantaneously to render all of the arcana of Facebook, and of its myriad competitors, transparent, I have in mind something even more desirable. I find myself wishing that there were more precise ways of monitoring and, optionally, diverting the stream of messages so that even my most precious relations can be preserved while I am spared being exposed to every single atom of a personal datum they deem significant enough to mention it—every snapshot, every progressive development, sometimes hourly, of their baby (human or hamster; it really makes little difference, not to me, outside the immediate vicinity… cute is cute and love is love).

Currently, I have a very short friends list on each of the rivals, Facebook and Google+. I believe this microcosm is sufficient to form certain inferences. For one thing, even among a group of only 40 or 50 people, there is great individuality. Simply, we’re each of us different, and, of course, hooray for that. However, one result of our asynchronous traits is a divergence of interests. More critical than that is the way our differing values, however subtly we measure the distinctions, affect the course of daily life: what we think about, concentrate on, share with others. Naturally, we expect our values and preferences may differ. We forget that, until we’re reminded when a best and dearest friend talks our ears off about, say, their latest addition to a collection of antique quilted tea cozies. Yes, yes, I know. So what? If you collect antique quilted tea cozies, I apologize. In private and in person, I smile and listen myself. Online, of course, to paraphrase that famous “New Yorker” cartoon, no one knows you’re yawning uncontrollably. And no doubt there is in each of us the ability to evince the same degree of mute tolerance in others.

What’s trivial to you may be vital to me. What’s compelling to me may be inconsequential to you. What makes me laugh may leave you dumbfounded or nonplussed. We accept all this, usually without comment, especially as we tacitly accept the social contract revisions inherent in adopting the now incredibly expansive entitlement of “friendship.” Friends, after all, accept. They don’t judge. Judgments are frowned on. And we surely don’t comment, if we’re experiencing even the slightest pangs of disquiet. Even nay-saying might be seen as encouragement. Irony is completely out of the question.

All this makes for an interesting mix of exchanged content in a feed, as it develops organically on a web of usually spontaneous utterances. We tell ourselves we are merely sharing news, often personal. We’re letting a large set of people know what we’re up to, essentially that we’re all right, and all with greater ease than by meeting the burden of informing each and every person within the group directly and intimately with some other form of contact. We also use these forums as a means to convey the formalities that constitute vestigial social protocols, like invitations, pleas, and exhortations. As well we can make, with one click, a universal call for the requisite or tacitly expected acknowledgments, specifically, say, an rsvp or at least that diffuse and inarticulate form of encouragement or approbation, a “like.”

Indiscriminately, these generally ordinary, if not banal, and certainly almost all purely quotidian, messages and posts get broadcast, largely wholesale. As it’s simply not worth the effort—and what is these days, aside from signing that consent form agreeing to, oh, I don’t know, chemotherapy?—to spend the time deep in the weeds of deciding which group or list should get what message, we send every message to everyone. The bigger our friends list, the more recipients of the same messages. Concomitantly, with our precious time being a critical factor, and with a reciprocal and mutual number of messages being shot our way by that same mass of “friends,” we do take the trouble to exclude all but the slimmest stream of posts from people we are really interested in hearing from. What describes “really interested?” Likely an honest assessment of one’s gut; and an algorithm is not possible, not in the current state of the art—if you’ve ever had limited space for wedding guests, and you had to decide who you wanted there, you know what I’m talking about. So we have to screen, at least once, and in each direction: incoming and outgoing.

As I’ve pointed out, there are only the crudest tools for including this group or that in a communiqué. That sort of discrimination is only slightly more refined on Google+, with its adaptable taxonomy of self-defined circles. Facebook takes, as usual, a more authoritarian and controlling approach, defining the categories you may use: “best friends,” family, acquaintance, with all the apparatus of discrimination and class distinction inherent in the language–the objective, as everywhere else in almost all social media, seems to be some enforced (or possibly coercive) conformation to some kind of norm. Of course, in my cynical way, I have to note it’s also a gauge of your probable level of compulsion. Most people believe, for example, that blood is thicker than water. If you designate someone as family, it’s likely Facebook can get away with murder telling all your relatives about your sincere, warm and personal recommendations. Like for sources of antique quilted tea cozies.

Beyond that, there is always the danger of committing what has evolved in the second decade of the 21st century into the present-day blunder of making a message “public” that was really intended for that special group of three friends you formed, and which you have to remember to address each time you create a post. It’s all for the sake of getting warm and friendly with three by sending out only a single cozy, so to speak. You could send an email and copy all three at once—and thereby ensure you will get a private response, instead of the compound blunder of having yourself and your friends airing your cozies in public. But email is so 20th century, and it also requires you to get off Facebook. And that might take a whole minute.

What this all means, to me, is that we are bombarded on Facebook, say, (and even outside the confines of this blue zone, if we happen to allow notices to reach us on our phones and in email boxes, each and every time there is activity among our friends). We are cluster bombed with messages and hails sometimes terse, sometimes barely coherent, sometimes wholly pictorial, sometimes by way of linkage or transfer from yet other sources, making the locus of virtual affinity sometimes so wide as to encompass the globe. Notions like nearness, like neighborhood, like geography and boundaries lose all meaning. Next to an image of a squalling infant is a photo of flowers budding improbably in the Antarctic, and immediately next to these, yet another photo of an impossibly cute puppy, next to an endorsement for a brand of rare bicycle parts hand-crafted of military-grade titanium… It’s not only a triumph of mid-cult, as if suddenly a billion people were subscribers to the old Life magazine, or Reader’s Digest, wherein matters of life and death take on, or are reduced to, the same magnitude of importance as which stars of the original Star Trek are appearing at this year’s ComicCon. It also removes from our personal control the right to decide not to pay attention. It degrades the expectation that it’s all right to accept that some person, even among your nearest and dearest sometimes, at least to you, is a crashing bore. Or worse. But allow me to take you back a step or two from this bit of corrosive editorializing.

The inherent faux sociology at work behind these hypotheses aside, let me add, as a personal rationale, that I love my friends. Truly. That’s why the visible and publicly declared number of them is so small. To call each and every one friend is to say, at least, that I willingly give them tacitly and freely the time it takes to hear them out. I may be naive in assuming, as I do, that there’s also a tacit agreement that they will not waste that time unduly, with the constant mortar fire, say, of innumerable links they have uncovered online. I end up being dubious that there is equal significance to each link, each datum, each tidbit of information, each tweak, bon mot, and epigram (classic or contrived). But I pay heed, because they are friends, all of them, after all, and like a parent with a small child, I owe them that attention, and maybe even some interest, even if at times it’s feigned. Friendship, even consanguinity, is never an excuse not to be polite and mannerly. But then, I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy.

Those who are sufficiently mindful that they are well aware that they are only one of many making the same regular broadcasts, including the status of their personal state of mind, and the rise and fall of their welfare along with that of their immediate families, must always be aware what the consequence of their flow is, added to the flow from other sources (some of which we share—and sharing of friends is encouraged; the next most used word on Facebook is the qualifier, “mutual” with the strong implication that you should also be friends with your friends’ friends), flow added to flow, until there is a veritable Mississippi River at full flood running down the middle of your news feed.

Every item calls out for your attention, even for the fraction of a moment it takes to decide to ignore the details. Time spent is a drum beat, a blunt blow to your consciousness. The very action of coalescence of all that data, post by post, from myriad sources, also necessarily levels the significance of any one datum. I propose to you, reader (friend or not), that whatever your resistance to the idea, everything becomes the same when it comes to importance. For starters, there’s just too much to take in. I have only 33 friends on Facebook and it’s too much. Perhaps it’s just me, and I wouldn’t deny it, but there’s enough of the everyman in each of us that leads me to feel it’s not. Water constantly flowing, or even continuously dripping, is eroding, if not actually corrosive. Witness the Grand Canyon: we should all live so long.

First consider that in addition to the license granted by Zuckerberg and his confréres to you to pop off, spout, or declare whatever happens to be on your mind at the moment, there is also the tacit invitation by you to each and every one of those individuals you have dubbed some species of “friend” to say whatever they please in response. Hence, there’s the potentiality that attached to your post will appear a spontaneous growing appendage of commentary. Often these addenda are from those who may feel either the pressure of declaring their feelings of affection and attachment, whether deep down through fear of alienation if they don’t say something, or perhaps merely because spending any significant amount of time within the blue zone, say more than five minutes a day, induces an uncontrollable reflexive response, the expression of which is not merely enabled, but facilitated by a whole new orthography of faux-expressive verbal gestures and symbols… LOL OMG ;-D, ad nauseam. Before asking the not-so-rhetorical question, “do we really universally care–even focused upon the corral of our ‘friends’–about each and every one of these matters?,” I’ll ask another question. Can we live with accepting some limits to our sense of closeness and intimacy with loved ones–family, or certain members thereof for sure, but the extended family of people we love for no other reason than some attachment has formed that we don’t question or analyze it?

There is a simple solution of course, even within the specialized context for conduct created by a social network, the blue zone of Facebook, the Googleverse, the Twitter-sphere, the Instagramathon, the Tumblrversity. Like life itself, each of us may exercise the easiest coping mechanism of all, especially in response to what are, after all, the most innocuous of effusions of the sort everyone on earth expresses during the course of a random day. That is, we can ignore any one, or all, of them. For sure. But, I wonder if I am alone–even with my collection of carefully selected cohorts, trivial in number, that, between Facebook and Google+, still falls way short of a hundred souls–if anyone else does not feel, even briefly and sporadically, overwhelmed by the aggregate effect of receiving messages, often, if not usually, accompanied by visual stimuli in the form of original and borrowed images, from every point of the compass.

It’s a rain, an unending relentless precipitation, of the mundane, particular and peculiar in each instance to the special and unique life attached to the name of the sender, but, taken together, coalescing into a thickening layer of the stuff of which each human on earth creates a buffer, insulation against the inescapable realities of existence. We bother with these things, no matter how small and insignificant, because they keep us from thinking about the existential dilemma. And, while trying sincerely to convince you I’m not being cute, I’ll say no more about what that dilemma is than to suggest to you that if you believe, in your quietest, deepest, darkest moments suffered in solitude that you yourself don’t have one, you might consider making a call to your physician to confirm that you still, in fact, exist.

We all, we each of us, are certainly entitled, as far as I’m concerned, to seek, to find or create, and, finding or creating, embrace anything and everything that fulfills our sense that some part of us finds pleasure and meaning in being alive. Moreover, we each are entitled to seek and tenderly clutch whoever and whatever there is in life that comforts us when that other, the inescapable depredations and deprivations that impoverish our experience of being alive, seems more than we have the capacity to bear.

I worry, and have done for some time since, even long before the universal emergence of Facebook in 2007, from its laboratory of usage among a highly circumscribed privileged set of users. What I worry about is that a false sense of homogeneity permeates a significant part of the developed world, like the artificial banding of commonality and amity fostered within the enclaves of Ivy League institutions where the blue zone was first formed and incubated–a way for those of like mind and interests, at least nominally so, could bond, commune, and manage their social engagements.

Each of us posts alone. Why not? For the few seconds it takes to compose and send a message, we lose all peripheral vision. May I not presume that if it’s a singular and concentrated thought for me on the sending end, it’s the same for you receiving it. It takes work after all to realize, and retain that insight for a bit, that for you—even as for me, when you come right down to it, even with my measly list of friends—it’s a pile of singularities arriving in a stream that never ends.

I began this extended contemplation with the simplest intent: to suggest, in what I originally and foolishly imagined would be a simple, brief “status update” (well, brief for me; a paragraph is as good as an emoticon) suggesting that we need better ways to filter posts from others, to avoid very fine categories: photos of cats, let’s say, or announcements of events taking place more than 10 miles from where we live. As so often happens, the thought grew wings, and took me to a much loftier place. That original idea remains buried somewhere in this essay, which, with a certain irony, reflects precisely the phenomenon I’ve decried. One thing just leads to another, and another, and another into a great mass that may seem to you like just another reason for a grouch like me to grouse. But I think there is something worse going on.

Take it all away. Shut down the internet. Turn off the servers at Facebook. Stop every feed. And we each of us, alone and collectively, will be left once more to ourselves. What I fear is that what may be required for us to regain a sense of being in a world where there’s a chance of remaining upright even as innumerable forces, chronicled in the news and demonstrated daily on every street in every city in the world, seem to conspire to efface any sense we have of any value, beyond the material. I am sure that one of the most insidious of the effects of so-called social media is that by the very mechanisms that make it attractive and easy to use, not merely as needed, but compulsively and reflexively is the numbing of our senses. The result is a slow, almost imperceptible, paralysis, a loss of sensation in a world that remains, even as polluted and altered as it has become after so many thousands of years of so-called civilization, one that cries out to be experienced with immediacy and mindfulness. The chief allure of Facebook is the simulation of immediacy. But is it not mediated, as every transmission and exchange passes through a network of such complexity and opacity, that any instant is a lifetime and every seeming touch is robotic, or like making love in oven mitts—not a real world, nor immediate, but a simulacrum?

Is it really a place to live? Game of Farmville anyone?