The following is an essay I wrote, or began, some time in 2002 as nearly as I can tell. This blog didn’t exist then, and apparently I intended it for some other purpose. Some of the biographical information is out of date, for example, I am no longer on the board of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce and have not been for years.

Like Groucho, I would not like to join a club that would have me as a member. This pertains especially to those clubs most eager to have me, because I meet the criteria. Unfortunately, their sense of affinity is not mine.
Jews would have me, but I wouldn’t have them. At least not simply because they are Jews. Some of my worst friends are Jews.

The AARP would have me. And their cutoff seems to get younger and younger. So although for six years I qualify for cheaper airfare to certain places;
Although I qualify to have my very own lobbyist in Washington;
Although my hair is white and my skin is creased;
And although, like it or not, I am treated deferentially in all the many eateries in Harvard Square that otherwise cater to the overwhelmingly predominant population of young adults;
I really can’t stand even the idea of the AARP, which seems to predicate its importance on the mere fact that they feel chauvinistic about that which they otherwise can do not a thing. Those doomed to die, unite! Join the great society of humans and other mammals, arthropods, insectivora, indeed, all vertebrates and invertebrates! Discounts on movies, and other benefits.

I think the greatest right, right there under life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is the right to be let alone, and to enjoy only that society we choose. Well, can’t help it in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but that’s a small price to pay, as a citizen, for the privilege of legally driving a motor vehicle. I am talking about something more basic. I am indeed talking about rights.

Of course, they all have the right to solicit not only my interest, but my involvement, my dues, my charity, and my attention: the Jews (though, in fact, they don’t; it’s little known that Jews are very uneasy with the idea of proselytizing and doing missionary work with the objective of creating new adherents), the rapidly aging here (and everywhere else: I don’t know, but I can imagine that AARP has designs on the creation of an international constituency — today McDonald’s, tomorrow AARP for world citizens with cardiac artery disease).
I realize I’m already well into this, and have already invited the response that I’m looking for trouble. I ain’t looking for trouble, or picking on, either the Jews or the AARP. It’s just that, through no effort of mine whatsoever, I qualify for both.

AARP has a marketing campaign, which delivers the usual communications channels — direct mail, telemarketing, and SPAM. As if that weren’t embarrassing for them enough, my friends ask quizzically what my problem is, anyway.
Which brings me to the other. The Jews do not have a marketing campaign, contrary to the opinions of some, and despite, no doubt, their ownership of all major institutions and organizations that service and control the money supply, not to mention the media. They do not need one. They have my friends, or at least some of my friends.

Like my brethren in the chamber of commerce, whose measure of the worthiness of any civic, political, or financial initiative within our venue is “Is it good for business?” — this is, indeed, often the only measure or criterion to determine support — the question of my co-religionists is, “Is it good for the Jews?” There is, to be sure, a certain historic weight to this question — a question fraught with intimations, if not direct threats upon, one’s mortality. Indeed, it is prudent to expect that there is still a certain amount of caution one must exercise as a Jew in the world, which can turn selectively, unexpectedly, and viciously upon one merely for being a son of the covenant. Beyond the innate caution that I would urge upon any citizen to exercise, however, I believe that there has been a considerable diminution of a threat purely on a basis of institutionalized and universal hatred. Anti-semitism is, for the time being, a pocket evil.

Whether it’s Babbitts on business, or a Person of the Book, chauvinism goes a long way to providing a touchstone for behavior. Indeed, there are no more codified ways of conducting oneself than in the broader realms of global business, or global religions.

Well, I will admit it right now. The first things I seek when I have stepped off the plane in another continent, or even farther afield on my native continent than my feet could take me for a day (with ample stops for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and other moments of refreshment), are not either the local board of trade or where one may go to expect a minyan will gather four times a day.

What I seek is more broadly existential. Call it what you will. Shelter from the storm. A feeling of peace, if not of sanctuary. I seek, as I say, to be let alone. And this means only one thing. If you actually are interested in me, let’s leave it at that pronoun.

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Part One

I’m coming clean with this, and right up front. I am an anxious person. I wake up most days filled, not with dread, but simple fear, behind a layer or two, a mask, of calm. It’s a kind of fraught expectancy. On the worst days, I pop a pill.

It’s probably always been this way. Not quite always. I recall, on the frontiers of early memory, being a more or less fearless child. Not reckless, but simply fearless, especially when faced with the day-to-day adventurous challenges that a little boy will face on the proverbial sidewalks of New York. I was not undersized, though decidedly underweight and, so, tall and slight at once. The housing project in which I spent the first phase of my formation was riddled with man-made, downsized, canyons and valleys. Mainly crafted of brick, the building blocks of this complex, there were precipitous drops, say from one level, usually street level, or slightly elevated, of passage between buildings to a garden level, perhaps below grade, where certain apartments let out on tiny plots of land the tenants pretended were theirs. To me, they were landing zones for my jumps, or drops. I never suffered a break, or a bad fall, never knocked out, and never discovered. Most importantly, never discovered by my otherwise ever-vigilant mother—from whom I hid nothing unless I could otherwise help it. She did suss out, in one famous incident, the time I and my gang of seven- and eight-year-olds ran riot on the gravel strewn flat tar roofs that joined all the buildings in a single city block to one another without any of the impediments one found to pass from one section of apartments to another at street level. There was a low retaining wall, high to us, who could barely peer over it on tiptoe. No vertiginous views. These were low-rise apartments, planned well before the days of realizing Corbusier’s vision of celestial cities that scraped the sooty sky. Nevertheless, any fall would have been fatal. I was not so slight that I would float down, flutteringly, like a feather. There was no thought of falling, and never an idea of seeing how it would be to scale that wall.

The roof was freedom to run, at full speed, as fast as spindly developing legs could carry us, for maybe 10 or 15 seconds. Such runs were exhilarating, not least of all, because at the time of my ultimate confession to Mommy, we, the gang, had only just discovered access to the open air atop our homes, and the spaciousness the vaguely hostile planes of the rough-grained surfaces up there offered us. I must have arrived back after one of these maiden flights to the safety of our first floor digs still somewhat flush from the exertion of running back and forth, purposeless, willy-nilly, until we split up: probably closing in on some meal time we knew intuitively approached.

My mother, long since a past mistress at asking the direct pertinent question and, as it turned out, already having received early warnings on the parental telegraph inherent in a community, tight-knit, and sharing the common fate of all inhabitants of what in rural New England would constitute a small town and yet, in the Bronx, covered a mere four city blocks, dense with full occupancy, a settlement, though no shtetl, of five thousand souls. “Where were you?” she asked, almost nonchalant. “Up on the roof.” “And were you doing that running up there Howie? With your friends? And who led you up there?” “Yeah, running.”

“Well then, Howie, come here,” she said, suddenly in deadly earnest, and not really interested in responses to those supernumerary questions. Likely she asked for effect, and to create an air of inquisition to deepen the sense of seriousness in me. “I want you to promise me something. Wait a minute,” as she headed into my big sister’s bedroom. She came back with a ponderously thick blue-covered volume, and put it down on the table next to the chair in the living room in which she sat to watch her morning soap operas on television. I knew enough to know this must be the Bible of which I had heard conversation, and somehow I knew of swearing on the Bible, and the solemnity of the oath one took in so doing.

“Put your hand here,” she said, lightly touching the cover, the back cover. I observed she had not asked me first to wash my hands, invariably grimy at that hour of the day. This was serious. I put my hand lightly on the book and she put her hand lightly on my own and pressed it down, as if to ensure contact. “I want you to promise me you will never never go up on the roof and run again. Never go up on the roof for anything. No playing up there. You promise?”

“I promise.” And I never did venture beyond the fourth floor in any of the walk-up buildings of Hillside Homes. Not ever again. Not even after a couple of years, just before we moved away, during my tenth year, when I was in the forbidden precincts of my sister’s bedroom, on some errand to retrieve something she was too lazy to get herself, and I noticed that book casually on her desk. It was a grown-up desk, as she was practically a grown-up, valedictorian of her class at the public school, K through 8, that I still attended, about to graduate and attend the Bronx High School of Science, necessitating a ride on two buses and rising at 5:30 in the morning to get there. I had already attended PS78 more than long enough to read easily the words in 36-point type on the cover of that thick blue volume: Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, Abridged Second Edition.

I was probably already a bit of the Freudian I had always been, and somehow in all of this I believe were implanted the seeds of what bore the fruit of the other tree, little spoken of in the Garden of Eden, emerging fully mature, and sprouting, as the Original Father and Mother, covering their shame, were driven away, the Tree of Anxiety, a genetic mutation perhaps of those other two growths that have gotten all the attention in the Judeo-Christian era, the ones so readily confused as to which to eat of, and which not. Anxiety, close cousin, if you like, of knowledge, and synonymous with life, which we are denied beyond a pitifully, cruelly brief share. Though of anxiety, we may share in this without bound, as there seems as well to be no limit to the products of good and evil in the world.

by

I’ve felt free in the past four years or so to speak out on political matters in a kind of back-row, mumbling way. It’s been longer than that actually, and my opining has been public enough and, I suppose, audible enough, because it has always appeared in public places, like this blog, or my other blog (I know, you didn’t know: it’s here: the 02138 blog). As for the “mumbling,” that’s my idea of endearing self-effacement. I know I am articulate enough. From a limited number of what even I can’t help but call admirers, or I’d be insulting them, which I am truly horrified to think of doing, I have received praise for this effusion or that, often a whole paragraph, and, I’ll admit, often enough for a whole piece. Nevertheless, to be honest, I have not expected, nor will I speak of my fantasies, a groundswell of support for my views, never mind an uprising based on the brilliance or inspiration of my rhetoric.

On the basis of this evidence alone, I would not call myself likely material for a political career, neither as strategist, nor, certainly, as candidate. Being outspoken requires a certain finesse of timing—too tedious even to ponder the requirements, measured in self-control, patience, and seizing opportunities, either manufactured or serendipitous. Being right, or sensible, or rational, or articulate, never mind eloquent, count for nothing in the end, as these qualities, though they have a fairly universal appeal, only generate praise, and do not inspire action or commitment. Of course people subscribe to the right, that is, the appealing thing, and are willing to attest to being stirred by stirring talk. However, even the most succinct, never mind gnomic and memorable, rhetoric—essentially incisive, concise, and inarguable except by idiots, zealots, and the insane—is not enough to sustain a political platform or agenda. It may launch a career, but it takes dedication to live with the decision to live a life of political engagement, whether as a politician, the purest form of dedication, or as an activist or full-time advocate and spokesman. For one thing, though it’s not the only thing, you need to build a base of support. It’s a principle that extends to other areas of engagement in the human arena.

We all need an activity, something that keeps us moving. A lucky (I guess they’re lucky) few need few, if any, adherents to stick to what they have come to realize, whether in their conscious minds, or their hearts, or their souls, or perhaps in their ears (“the voices, the voices…” if you know what I mean), is to be their life’s work and endeavor. Sometimes no matter what. The rest of us need a base, in one form or another. Most efficiently, it can be a very small group, and manageable, usually be made up of those we know, or come to know, and trust and respect… and this is enough. For a far greater number, the risk must be accepted of seeking support on a wider basis from the greater mass of men, to borrow a phrase, most of whom we don’t, and really, to be coldly rational about this, cannot, and never will, know. Certainly not on an individual basis.

Speaking of the greater mass of humanity, I was also on Facebook for a while, my modest way of saying that it was five years (longer if you count an earlier, exclusive, boasting-rights sort of subscription that resulted from my taking advantage of having a harvard.edu address, the key at first to exclusive entry–what did it matter to me that, though not a subterfuge, it was as the result of the flimsiest of alumnus status affiliations?; Facebook didn’t seem to care, and this should have been a sign of something, if only to someone more prescient than myself). It didn’t matter much how long a period I stayed, as I wasn’t particularly active for much of that period, both before and after the barn doors were thrown wide open, to admit even the most mongrel and unbred of subscribers. Just another affiliation for an Internet-besotted computer freak.

It was a period when I passed from being idly and distantly curious to an active participant—one friend labeled me a “denizen.” The joining was nothing, because, if a site didn’t appear sinister, or as a container for who knows what kind of technological mischief, say turning my computer into a destructive robot, part of a larger infernal machine intended to keep Walmart’s website from offering this week’s special on Ore-Ida frozen potato products, with me as the unknowing dupe of a captain of this miscreant and piratical cyber-ship, I would join. I still have vestigial memberships in all sorts of arcane sites, usually geeky, but not always (one of them involves incredibly expensive, gourmet foods from the source in southern Europe, the scions of ancient Italian farm families, now specializing, say, in two kinds of tomatoes (canned, alas) or three kinds of olive oil waiting expectantly, somewhere in Umbria or Tuscany, over open cardboard shipping containers for my order to come through on their computer screen from their broker and impresario in the Bronx). Talk about global marketing. The Bronx was the lure for me (I’m obviously speaking of a real website; I couldn’t make this up) as my birthplace will always be a lure for me. It’s a kind of Proustean Pavlovian mash-up of response that dictates if it’s from the Bronx, I’ll sign up. I am the original dupe of the obvious strategy for a website: build it, and I will come. I’m easy.

In a different context, I make the same sort of response to essentially nerdy cohorts who have decided to gather, though it sometimes seems more like a coalescence, on the Internet in solidarity, affinity, and always some bumbling attempt at conveying a wish for good fellowship and emotional connection; often scrutiny of gadgets is offered, either of the hardware sort, but more often of the virtual variety, that is, software promised to do all the things we took up with computers for in the first place. They too managed to get hold of my email address. I actually have about ten addresses, or more, for various and what should be obvious reasons, but I’ve used the same one for over 18 years, so I’m not hard to find, even as I yap from the back benches.

My sense of what computers could do, especially for me, was at the same time (though these are surely apposite qualities, if seemingly at first glance antipodal) intuitive and inchoate. Intuitive, because producing excitement and a gleam in the eye that could not be explained or checked by conscious, that is, rational, effort. Inchoate, because I am still rendered mute by things where the words or even the thoughts won’t form. The best strategy for when I can’t express myself clearly is still, and has been since childhood, just to shut up, and to keep my eyes and ears open, if anything, in an even heightened sense of vigilance–by the prospect of trying to explain untold longings. These often involve how these machines, and their mechanical form subsumes their separable, but unquestionably integral, inner workings—the coded instructions that put intelligible operators on the screen of the computer so that you can “talk” to it, and ask it to do things, and so you can see the result of the commands—will allow me to do the wonderful things that I know I have in me to do.

The words that will emerge, not in serried ranks assembled, like soldiers, like a checklist for what not to forget for a month in the French countryside, are more malleable, flexible, produce even headier feelings of creative power, or at least potentiality (and what is potential, but the storage of energy for later release?). I use computers to manipulate images, mainly photographic, it’s true, but their chief usefulness lies in text. Not texting, mind, but words, assembled into the usual clots of organization and thought that we are still taught in school.

The potentiality of words directed against the simple goal of impinging on the consciousness of another human being still gets me up in the morning, that is, the prospect of producing them does. Some mornings are better than others. Worse, whole days pass, weeks, for a while it was months, when no words appeared at all. None, in any event, that anyone is likely to see.

The vagaries of mental and emotional preparedness aside, and in my life I’ve had as many or as serious, or measured by any dimension the same, constraints by life on my engagement. I measure this vitality, this involvement, by my sense of well being, sure enough. Sometimes I think the proper index is mood, and whether I feel like it’s nice to get up and wonderful to feel alive. After a very long streak, a very lucky one in hindsight, of feeling that way, and then, for even longer it seems, not feeling that way at all. At its worst, it’s Gerard Manley Hopkins’s home turf. “I wake to feel the fell of dark not day.” Other days, it was the blahs. Most days it was the shock of coming around to realize I was still alive when some people whose presence I had come to depend on no longer were there to be depended on, whether they wanted to be or not. I knew only they didn’t want to leave, and that knowledge has its impact also on how the morning portends the rest of the day.

Those people were my first line of support, my base. I wrote for them, as much as for myself, even though I didn’t have them in mind, in a quite literal sense, as I tapped away at the keyboard in the sometimes seemingly illimitable way I have. I know it seems that way to people who happen to be around to watch it happen. It seems that way to me, when I give myself leave to pay any attention while I’m trying to tap the words out and need no such distraction; that heightened meta-sense of oneself doing what one is doing and thinking about doing it while doing and keeping track of one’s own reaction to doing even while not saying a thing about what all that meta-thought is about. It’s my style to meander, to seem to lose track, or follow whatever path opens before me, randomly, as if, trying to avoid what I’ve learned a writer I admire, Geoff Dyer, tries to avoid, and that is being consumed by his own boredom. It was reassuring to learn that somebody else felt that way. He has no more sense that I exist than a cicada on a tree in Cotignac, which is about eight kilometers from where I’m sitting right now, has, assuming that a cicada has the consciousness, or can be occupied with anything more than the rhythmic and grating flexion of the membrane on his (yes, it’s the male that makes all the noise) abdomen. But he’s my base now too. Geoff Dyer, not the cicada. (But given the numbers, wouldn’t that be nice?)

What brings all this up is that I got an email this morning. I say this here and now for a number of reasons. It is the reason for starting to write this essay. I do know of the editorial phenomenon called “burying the lead (or, to use the increasingly de rigeur and hip term, as used by the pros, the ‘lede’–I think that orthography, as an exemplum of the kind of thing I find repellent, I being a language purist, is likely the result of not wanting to confuse references to the lead: sentence, paragraph, editorial raison d’être, whatever, with that element symbolized on the Table of Elements as Pb, as in get the lead out, or graphite in cylindrical form, as in put the lead back in your pencil).” And, with reference to this latter interdiction of not burying it, however you spell it, I don’t care. I do care about using such prohibitions and rules against themselves, or trying to. To me, a rule of style or grammar or syntax is instant shibboleth, and a ripe target for attack; now or later, no matter; I’ll get to it. To me, more often than not, I like to make it a strategy. You see, I hate that question, “Well, what’s it about?” As I used to reply to such questions about my writing, when I used to be a wise guy, “It’s about 2150 words [the rough count through the middle of this sentence].”

My base consists of the people who stick with it, who stick with me while I venture on, not into my head, but out of it, really. If you think about it, I’m not inviting you into my thoughts, but I am inviting you to use my thoughts to enter into your own. It’s an insidious thing, and also, I’ll admit, it’s a really underhanded way of conducting myself, time after time, essay after essay. Seeming boustrophedon (not seeming really; this is boustrophedon), looping back and forth, row after verbal row, back and forth, to those who begin to stray from their own attention to the text, apparently aimless and wandering, but, when it gets to the end, the entire field has been plowed, and is now ready for the seeds sown to begin to germinate. There’s also a built-in test of fertility. If you make it to the end, I for one (and that should be a good enough start for you, dear reader) believe you have shown yourself to be of the right stuff, not merely fertile ground for the propagation of thought you can honestly call your own, but part of the base. And you can count on me to keep coming back to you, as long as you let me. That way, we all get to eat. In a manner of speaking. If we do this right, it can be a feast.

However, I spoke of some email. It was simple really, maybe, even probably, not something to make too much of. On this blog, if you don’t already know it, there’s a place to subscribe. What you subscribe to is notification of the admittedly completely unpredictable appearance of yet another of these loopy and meandering essays, and you’ll subscribe in the hopes of having another experience like the one you had, maybe a number of times, maybe that you’re having for the first time right now. And me, knowing that you subscribed, whether I know you or not, will get that feeling I like, akin to what I feel on one of those good mornings, that I’ve added to my base. Perhaps you’ve guessed that that email was to tell me, and it was just a computer telling me something it was programmed to tell me without human intervention. This particular computer was programmed, because I asked it to be, to tell me when another subscriber had signed up. It may have been on this blog, or on the other one I told you about at the very beginning of this essay. It may have been the subscription form on the home page of the website I consider my official website, bertha.com. Wherever.

On this particular day, so particular as to be today, early this morning, and it’s still now only mid-afternoon, the email told me I had two new subscribers. I don’t know either of these people, and one of them, from the orthography of the name in English, and the email address attached, I have reason to assume is a Chinese person, in China. This gladdens me. Just as an aside, because this truly is a digression, if somehow relevant, especially to the notion that I want a base, have a base, if I’m being honest, and I like having a base, I seem to have quite a following in China. And it’s mainly because somehow or other, and I truly don’t know how, I gained a following by reason of my design or advertising work, or both, because all of the links that used to show up even more prominently than they do now, were on web pages on servers with IP addresses in mainland China and Taiwan. Talk about a base. Characteristically, I did nothing about it, from the time I first noticed. It all had to do somehow with my website, but especially my homepage, even as my homepage had less and less to do with my business of servicing, among others, design and marketing clients, and more and more to do with me and my personal work, which I’ll refrain from calling art: it was mainly photographs, more and more random, usually of French subjects, and less and less frequently posted as my personal life became mired in the miasma of that which makes all mornings hazy and forgettable, and each day a numb ordeal to be gotten through.

Fact is, my website, though occasionally refreshed, especially in a brief frenzied burst of activity when I published a book of my travel essays about life in France, and went to the additional trouble and really, to me, loathsome tasks of creating a way for people to order those books and pay for them. More base. With any greater expenditure of effort, I might even have managed somehow to create some greater mass of followers, even to that personal philosopher’s stone of mine, called critical mass, where whatever words I might put out there would simply, magically, get transformed into another form of gold. Not for the money, because I never suffered the delusion that I could possibly make a living at this, but for the signification. Praise is one thing. A base, and having one is a very big thing. But getting people to part with some of that filthy lucre we, most of us, are forced to carry about with us and transact with others to exchange? Ah, that’s something. Because it means, presumably something to them, and they’re exchanging their meaning, what they value, for some of mine. I haven’t sold a lot of books, but I didn’t make, couldn’t make, much of an effort to do so until now. I haven’t gotten any of those books back though. And people keep subscribing. The base is growing. And if you must know, the book is far more readily available, and far more efficiently delivered promptly, purely by way of going to Amazon. It won’t cost you any less, but the delivery may be free, or cheaper than the method I use. I just tell you this in passing. It’s a base-building measure. Long overdue.

If you go to that website link, you’ll see the same old, by now tired, words and pictures that really haven’t changed materially or, more importantly, in terms of what is called, in that really disgusting notion (disgusting because it refers ultimately to me, and I’m a human being, a person) that the world knows as branding, in at least six years. Now, this kind of talk, about branding, used to be my stock in trade. I understand branding, and I understand, in those completely crass commercial terms what building a base is all about. I certainly understand it, as all politicians must, in terms of politics and getting things done (or in the case of Republicans, managing to extend the world’s longest legislative streak of really getting absolutely nothing done whatsoever). It’s current. It will be for a long time, as far as I can tell, and it means I must pay more mindful attention to it, as I have not done. At least not for the sake of myself.

Soon, because I’ve already begun working on it, when you visit the homepage, if you visit the homepage, you’ll see something Monty Python immortalized, “something completely different.” Just making it different will likely stir some people up, and will attract others out of the woodwork. It’s a phenomenon I know to be true and I now leave to others to explain better than possibly I ever might have been able to, and I used to be considered pretty good at doing that. In the end though, what I’m hoping is that as a real sign of response, of growth, what else can I call it, but a sign of life, those subscribers will begin to roll in. A lot faster, I hope than they have done, but then, and I’m now repeating myself, but, as you can see, I’m close to the end, but then, I have done nothing for a long time.

After the website, the blog sites. Complete makeovers. There will be more photographs. There will be more frequent essays. There will be another book, especially if I get some sense that the base has grown, and the base wants something to be put upon it.

Be my base. You won’t regret it.

by

Under the rubric of “even brains won’t save you from stupidity” comes this classic opening from today’s New York Times story about fleeing the stock market for investment, spurred on by what another article, featured in “The Week” magazine, referred to as the “Facebook debacle:”

The excitement surrounding Facebook’s initial public offering was enough for Alex Tsesis, a law professor, to give the stock market one more try. But after the company’s stock encountered technical problems then sputtered for three days, he sold his few hundred shares for a $2,200 loss and vowed to end his equity gambles for good.

I’ve suggested to anyone within earshot (mercifully a very small number of people) that the catastrophe that was the Facebook IPO was a disaster one could see coming from miles away. Perhaps even as far as the distance between the most antipodal of Facebook subscribers in their locations on the globe. To digress a bit, if you don’t understand what Facebook does, suffice it to say that they (Facebook, that is) could tell you at any time, if somehow the information could be made marketable, what the distance is, in your choice of metrics (whether measuring meters or yards, or MIT “smoots” if you like), between any one subscriber and another.

I’d say you needn’t spend too much time on Facebook to understand something about its value (disclosure: I spent about five years on Facebook, being one of the first subscribers after they opened the site to anyone with an email address, including those that didn’t end in .edu—I recently, that is, as little as a couple of weeks ago, requested that my account be deleted and not merely deactivated–which is the social media equivalent of being one of the living dead, ready for resurrection, with no miracles attached, at a moment’s notice—let it be enough to observe that I simply had had enough, in my own neurotic way, of having my sense of privacy, and personal integrity, mind, potentially and actually violated), in sum to understand that Facebook serves no better or worse purpose than very economically in terms of time and effort expended, staying in touch with as many people as you like. You do so under the delusion, it’s a mass delusion, and I feel safe saying that because the subscriber count is approaching a billion on the planet and you must subscribe accepting the methodology and terminology—signifiers and signified included—forced upon you, as there is no other to use, that each of your correspondents is either one of all of the undifferentiated great number of millions of the Facebook “public” at large, or is, more specifically, your “friend” (Facebook may have managed to give a word with a long and illustrious etymology the status of being devoid entirely of any useful meaning whatsoever—so much for John Kennedy being one’s “friend;” on Facebook, he can be, as I’m sure he has a page, if not a membership, and also Facebook is high on the list of notorious reasons to exile oneself permanently, if not deport oneself for the duration, of Internet-based enterprises that essentially exploit the dead: just ask me about the time they informed me that my late wife, at the time, two years gone, had been seeking her friends using some new convenient friend-seeking utility they had just initiated, and why didn’t I try it?). What is its value then? Well, General Motors’ actions with regard to its relationship to Facebook as a channel to reach whatever number of people among its potential customers it deems represents a good investment of part of its advertising budget are as good a way of finding a means of measuring it as any.

General Motors had been an advertising client of Facebook to the annual tune of ten million dollars (a drop in the bucket given a total budget of nearly two billion, as reported by The Wall Street Journal). They will continue to spend 30 million on preparing marketing content for its “brand page” on Facebook. But consider one salient fact. Facebook will now see not a plugged nickel of what GM spends for advertising itself on the page it gets for free (just as you do, or would, and just as I did—but sometimes free is just another word for paying through the nose, the one you cut off to spite your face: go ahead, take a close look at almost any “profile photo” on Facebook, another face without a nose… it just looks like there’s one there, one of those optical delusions). It gets its revenue, Facebook does, from advertising revenue, which it attracts because of its vaunted powers of helping advertisers target their messages with extreme precision to the captive audience, or any slice or segment of it the advertiser likes as defined by some list of targeting criteria.

Given the cost efficiencies of waiting as long as possible after early investors have sunk their money into the enterprise as it develops the resources called for in the business model—create a very effective, i.e., cheap, engine for generating data that can be viewed or shaped to be seen from any and every conceivable angle, so that a highly defined demographic portrait can be limned and then discerned from among the enormous pool of possible recipients of advertising messages—Facebook potentially could make a significant amount of money. There should be a great deal of profit in selling the packaged data that can be collected about an aggregation of humans as large in number as a billion (or anything close). Even on the Internet, where selling prices for advertising are what one Website following these things calls something like “criminally low” (in other words, they—that would be something like Google or Facebook—are not charging enough for selling access to consumer eyeballs (ears, all body parts that can be stimulated using a computer), there’s a lot of money to be made, as Google has amply demonstrated. They have also demonstrated, while staunchly clinging to their corporate motto, “Do no evil,” as still being true and applicable to their now global presence and reach, that they can make enormous amounts of money by selling any services related to advertising even at pennies a “click” (that would be you, pressing the button on your mouse, or jabbing your finger at your smartphone screen or tablet, or applying pressure to the trackpad of your laptop).

Facebook know this (rather, the Zuck, or Mark Zuckerberg, the 28 year-old wunderkind and prime candidate for youngest richest and yet most obnoxious-from-a-distance person on the planet earth, knows this). And their rates are geared to make even as untested, if gigantic, a pipe for messages attractive to advertising high rollers. Yet, as General Motors relates to the financial press, they simply don’t know if it’s wise, in terms of, at this point, unmeasurable results, to spend that ten million bucks, which is three percent of the 300 million spent by them in digital media, which is, in turn, 15% of the total amount they spend on advertising—so one of the world’s largest companies, greedy, but smart and rich, if chastened after their near-death experience, doesn’t know the same thing that John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia merchant-king of the early 20th century famously didn’t know: what Wanamaker said was, “I know half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but the problem is I don’t know which half”—and, as a result, they’re not willing to spend even that paltry amount whereas Wanamaker had no choice about a great deal more proportionately). General Motors do know that they spend money effectively on their Facebook page, because they know exactly how many people visit the page, or any part of it, over any given time interval. This is all thanks to Facebook technology, and other technologies far older and tested than Facebook’s, and long since in use by the likes of companies the size of GM, and smaller.

So, here’s Facebook, a sensational phenomenon in terms of its apparent social impact, and the effect on the daily lives and quotidian activities of a significant fraction of nearly a billion souls (it’s only a few hundred million who on any given day use Facebook with any regularity, but the potential of reaching a block of people the size of the population of the United States must be tempting to anyone who has a business that faces the task of reaching a well-dispersed audience of potentially interested consumers) that’s making, relatively, hardly any money, given the potentiality.

In point of fact, because even as we remain exposed to the vagaries of regulatory legislation that allows unscrupulous people still to get away with legal profiteering, there are still enough rules in place that require companies making an Initial Public Offering to disclose certain facts about their performance. And the result of examining Facebook’s performance expressed quantitatively gives a very simple number, a very important ratio in the speculative business of making money by investing money in equities (playing or “gambling,” if you like, on the stock market—I personally don’t believe it’s that bad, unless you’re greedy, basically, and your greed and possible suffering from an addiction force you to assume calculable risks that you shouldn’t, if you’re prudent, intelligent, and mindful of what you’re doing, and what you’re risking). It’s called, as you likely have guessed if you’re at all conversant with what are otherwise the vagaries of the investment racket, the price-to-earnings ratio, or P/E. It’s the simplest and first point of judicious assessment of a particular investment.

The P/E of Facebook, which sets its own initial stock price (the “price” in P/E) with the advice of its IPO managers (in this case, Morgan Stanley, already having a certain currency as an exemplum of infamous, and highly dubious, financial practice, sufferings as one of the worst victims of the prime mortgage debacle, speaking of debacles, and despite their role, in the good old days, in underwriting the future of Apple, Google, Cisco, and Compaq—a fact in itself that would set any investor to wondering about the “wisdom” of Facebook management in their choice of advisors), is and was, on the day of the IPO and the days leading up to it, 100. For some perspective, Apple Inc., which hovers close to the position of being the world’s most highly valued company, in terms of stock value, very close to General Motors and Exxon/Mobil, which are in all other respects gigantic compared to Apple (and certainly to Facebook), has a P/E of 14. So Facebook was valuing itself at a level seven times greater than Apple, which has been in business for 35 years. GM’s P/E is about 6.6, Exxon/Mobil’s is about 10. Those companies are, of course, as old as the automobile industry, more or less, and have lasted, through thick and thin, for as long as 142 years in the case of Exxon/Mobil (which started as Standard Oil) and 104 years in the case of General Motors. Respectively they are almost 18 times and 13 times older than Facebook.

The prudent investor, the wise one, buys a 100 P/E stock in small quantities when the stock market is hot, that is, bullish and rising at a noticeably positive rate in overall value. At present, this is not true of any of the standard indices (the Dow, the NASDAQ, or the Standard & Poor 500 stock index of so-called blue chips.; we are closer to a bear, or retracting, market than a bullish one, and it’s unwise, to state it conservatively—it’s nuts, frankly—to buy any more than a token amount of stock in such a company). But even smart people, like law professors, don’t manage to think when it comes to getting caught up in the undertow of speculation surrounding a stock that is sexy because of the currency and newsworthiness of the company putting itself on the market. This company is a social phenomenon, to say the least, and what can be said equally well is that it is not in any way a financial phenomenon, except on paper, and mainly for the people who have been involved with its development as an entity from the start, with Mark Zuckerberg leading the pack.

The lesson here, where I’ve expended so many words, and not a red cent otherwise let me add, is not about Facebook at all, or even about Mark Zuckerberg, but about the behavior of Professor Tsesis, whose name, I can’t help but notice, sounds remarkably like a Yiddish neologism that might mean, “even smart people do stupid things when it comes to money.” It’s the behavior of such otherwise (I assume) rational and prudent people, who are reasonably well-off—I think you’d have to be to write off, in the space of less than two weeks, an amount like $2,200, as the cost of an object lesson) that underlies a great deal of the ongoing lack of resilience in our economy. For the life of me, I can’t account for why perfectly intelligent people not only do stupid things with their money, but why they persist in compounding that error by dissociating themselves from one of the bedrock components of what drives the still unequalled financial engine of the American economy when it is working properly and in the interests of nearly everyone concerned, except the utterly and absolutely poverty-stricken, who must otherwise (I think) be protected by the marginal or discretionary moneys that any very healthy economy throws off. People who are relatively well-off are entitled, no doubt, to feel they should accord themselves some protection (since no one else, including the government, seems eager to do it). But I would also say that that kind of protection begins with the mindful exercise of the advantage smart people have as their endowment to begin with.

The problem, not to state it too simply, or at least trying not to do so (reductivism is a disease of our time and it is legion), is that smart people are unwilling to do smart things. Sometimes circumstances require not only the exercise of intelligence, but the resolve to see through what our brains can’t help but allow us to conclude what the intelligent thing is to do, short of exercising such a high degree of conservative behavior as to induce stagnation. What we’re suffering are the artifacts and collateral effects of stagnation: recession, slow growth, sluggish financial conditions, and the suffering these conditions induce in an ever-widening circle of victims. Of course, many of them have the distraction (and the utterly useless sounding board for their gripes and moans and complaints) of Facebook—or as I have come increasingly to want to call it, the Book of Face, or, if you prefer, Fecebook. Unfortunately, Facebook, whatever it may have been fantasized to be by its founders and early benefactors, and its would-be next round of beneficiaries through investment, is at worst a symptom of the malaise of “stupid intelligence” and, at worst, and it’s this latter that I fear is the more accurate case, a facilitator of the slow devolution of those acts that can benefit society through the participatory intervention of a majority of its most intelligent members. All it requires is a great deal more, at no greater monetary expense, of that which is in a dwindling supply: thoughtfulness, or, more appropriately, mindfulness on the part of all. But especially those we used to be able to call, truly, the brightest and the best.

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I made a big move recently. Actually it was a series of moves, some large, some small, all adding up in the end to one mammoth relocation. I lived in the Boston area, more or less, for 48 years, and at one location, a condo, in Cambridge for over 26 years (the longest continuous single home of my life). As of the middle of February, officially, as it was the day that ownership changed hands on my new home, I am now a resident of Pennsylvania, just outside of the city of Philadelphia. I have not been entirely covert about this change of venue, and what I already and more and more rapidly think of as home. Rather, I have alluded to it.

It’s become my habit of late, and I can time it fairly accurately, to be far less forthcoming about the specific detailed circumstances of my life than had been my wont. One of my two blogs in particular, but both of them in general, used to be peppered with personal details in the essays I posted regularly. I fully expected that it was mainly people who knew me personally who paid the most attention to these outpourings, and so I had little to hide. I was completely discrete about certain things. For one, the short list of things that most people do not care to air in public. Domestic strife, financial status, sexual proclivities and activities. I’m not prudish or paranoid, but there was never a reason to seek “material” for my serious writing within the particulars of my private life. For six long years and then for the years thereafter, I also was fairly mum about the health of my late wife, and the progress of her ailments and their treatment. For one, despite the profound impact on my life, and experienced in that circumscribed context by no one but me, it seemed these matters were the substance of her life, and her business. Discretion is not the better part of valor. It’s the better part of dignity, usually someone else’s first, and always your own after that.

The change in accounting for those parts of my life that I made the stuff of my poor attempts at literary output came more or less with the initiation, a choice I made, into participation in Facebook. I became a subscriber (there is no other word for it; I’m not really a member of anything… there certainly is no affinity involved, though, I suspect, a lot of shared addictive tendencies; and it is a service, ostensibly free, but truly a commercial agreement: they give any subscriber access to this wonderful assortment of ways of a simulacrum of connection with other humans, known and truly unknown to oneself, and the subscriber gives up, within certain ultimately circumscribed limits, any claim to privacy about those parts of one’s life, however few in number if you are vigilant and well-versed in the “rules,” that Facebook and its corporate owners feel are necessary to pursue the business and financial objectives of the company). And after I became a subscriber, I became increasingly aware, to the point of a hypertrophied attentiveness every time I “logged in,” of the extent to which I was exposing parts of myself that I had never given much heed to protect in the past.

Previously I enjoyed, or perhaps suffered the delusion of having, control over what I said to the world at large in such a public place as an electronic communications network that is truly global and ubiquitous. With a subscription to a service like Facebook (at bottom, any of these so-called social networks are essentially the same, especially if they are described as free—take a moment and think about it: if it’s truly free in every respect, why must you sign, that is, click on a box that says “I agree,” a statement of terms and conditions that governs the relationship you enter into with the entity granting you these services, gratis?) comes the need to be conscious (and I have long been a practitioner of behavior as I make my way in the world, that it has become fashionable to engage in and to call it, specifically, “mindful”) every moment, and with every word and image transmitted and, not to mention, received, that there is a gateway into that which the “owner” might otherwise feel, in a pre-Facebook, pre-MySpace, pre-Web, pre-Internet world, is best kept to oneself, within the confines of one’s own figurative property boundaries.

What I have found, in the five years since becoming a Facebook subscriber, is I have become increasingly uneasy about this sharing of what are to me intimate parts of my life. They do concern me, after all, and often only me, but quite frequently other people also, and I don’t have blanket permission from anyone to reveal that which any other individual might not want shared with anyone else. There is no law, not even a natural law as far as that goes, in terms of how I believe these things to be in life as we know it, that compels me to reveal anything (except I suppose under pain of torture or the insidious ways of being treated with truth-baring drug treatments) to another living soul. Too often on Facebook it is ignorance (specifically not only of the terms & conditions I mentioned, but of the rules and protocols—intentionally labyrinthine and complex, and virtually impenetrable in terms of clear sense, and highly capricious—that govern what appears where on Facebook and beyond that concerns you, or anyone you mention, personally, whether you willed its appearance or someone else did) or inadvertency that is the occasion for having items of fact appear for virtually anyone to see. True or not is of no consequence whatsoever, because on the Web, everything is true and it is the kind of truth that never dies, even if it is, in substance and meaning, wholly and utterly false. Worse, because it is in the way of these things on the Internet, that there is always the potential that any single datum, any fact, any image will be seen, eventually, by everyone.

What I knew to be true already, having maintained two blogs for years, well before “joining” Facebook, was that it was best to invent what every writer worth his or her salt learns (sometimes knows instinctively, and hence has the easiest learning curve of all). That is, it’s best to cultivate not only a voice, in the rhetorical, stylistic, and narrative senses of the word, but at least one persona, not oneself, however tantalizingly close it appears to be oneself (even appears to be to oneself) when one has one’s words appear in public. Hence the practice persisted into my use of the Facebook, and the trouble began almost immediately.

As we all know, whether we care to admit it, there are friends and there are “friends.” And, pace Professor Robin Dunbar, there is a significant difference. Those whom I count among true friends, who I knew before Facebook and I will continue to know for the rest of my life, inclusive of certain of those relationships formed since whatever exact date it was I subscribed to Facebook (I am sure they could tell me that date; I refuse to look it up… some things are just not important even to someone as neurotically punctilious about so-called facts as I) also, of course, know me. And I don’t mean merely in terms of my end of some reciprocal relationship of emotional engagement. I mean, they know when I am kidding (usually), or certainly that I do “kid.” They know me to be, by turns, ironic, sarcastic, sardonic, deflationary (in the sense of busting other people’s balloons), challenging (especially to the denial mechanisms of others), and they learned—or knew instinctively—when and how to take me seriously. No one is perfect, least of all me, and so, even with my nearest and dearest friends, it’s necessary still, sometimes after decades, to stop and apologize (always that first, if I can) and explain that “it’s only me.” There’s a price to be paid for attempts at maintaining a certain kind of dead pan. Sometimes, it’s just dead, at least to anyone else besides myself.

However on Facebook, inevitably, hardly anyone can really know me or anyone else, except celebrities, that is, people who professionally must present themselves to the world with only a public persona—sometimes a quite outrageous one, or outrageous were it an “ordinary” person who comported themselves so in public. As President Nixon would have said about my earliest efforts on Facebook and well into some “middle period” out of the past five years, “mistakes were made.” I still make them occasionally. I just don’t care to be that vigilant. I just don’t care to assume anything—given all the effort I have made to keep my profile and privacy settings to the bare minimum to exclude virtually anyone but the “Dunbar number” of friends I maintain on Facebook from seeing what I have to say—that is, assume anything, save that there is a better than statistical chance that people who do know me will realize that whatever I say is not to be taken personally.

There have been two results. One is what I have already alluded to in this essay. I have become more circumspect, more private, in a way that has spilled over into my personal life, dealing with people generally, so that in one-on-one encounters with old friends there has been increasingly larger and larger ground to cover in terms of filling them in on what has occurred in my life since my last encounter. Two is that I have had to forge a zig-zag path through the intricacies of Facebook postings and status updates. I mainly say things that are, taxonomically speaking, of the nature of publicly declared opinion, that is, mainly political, and usually preaching to the choir, as I make virtually none of these expostulations public beyond the circle of my “friends” who tend to be, mainly, like-minded. And of course, I have become, uncharacteristically, wary of saying what I know is deeply contrary or provocative to the like-minded.

I always write or post something with the hope, but no expectation whatsoever, of a response. The whole reason for being on a gated social network like Facebook, for me anyway, is to communicate, interactively (to use a word I hate—exchanges are always interactive, it seems to me; it means that there is some other category or several of them of social exchange and engagement that is not truly interactive, but something else, probably something like having two properly programmed computers “communicating” with each other, using words in some known language, as well as icons, images, and other signs and symbols [click on the upturned thumb icon if you “like” this idea]). It rarely happens, that is, the live communication between humans, one of whom is me.

I’ve come to speak less on the phone to people I was used to communicating with regularly in real time, each of us hearing the sound of the other’s voice. I have virtually ceased having what had been an incredibly rich, active, and dense correspondence with a variety of correspondents, mainly on email, but also, mirabile dictu, using pen and ink on real paper, made from rag or wood pulp.

I was reminded of all this, this former life, for life it was, a soubriquet I cannot assign to Facebook relations. They are something, but they are not life for me. They may be for every one of the other 147 individuals of which my Facebook Friends list now consists. But they are not for me. I was reminded of all this mainly because I am unpacking the literally tons of belongings that had to be hauled from New England to very near the city line of Philadelphia. Among the artifacts and objects thereby revealed—sometimes, it truly seems like a dig and I have unearthed some treasure, an archaeological find from the ancient history of the civilization I know as myself—was an ancient laptop, a Power Book G3, last used a decade ago, and first put into active service in 1998.

I looked at the email client I used then and perused some of the individual messages. As it was me writing, those I sent were of unusual length, in words, even for the circle of people with whom I corresponded back then. I was a member of at least two listservs, those hoary precursors to the phenomenon that has evolved into the present form of Facebook, except then the list usually consisted of about 100 people on the forums I attended. Most of them never wrote a word, preferring to “lurk,” that is, to read and be entertained by the more effusive of us. I formed friendships, real ones, thereby, some of which I retain and cherish to this day, and, as had always been my propensity throughout my life, thereby enlarged the circle of people I could count on to be engaging in a meaningful and substantive way, even if our relations never evolved beyond intellectual kinship. As for close friends, even those who, back in those days, lived nearby (the closest of them moved away long before it ever would have occurred to me to re-locate myself, and perhaps that is another causal factor in the chain of reasons or the nexus of conditions that have left me where you find me here, trying to account for what you have found), we wrote regularly, sometimes daily, exchanging links and quips and jokes and personal anecdotes, plans for meetings, assignations, mutual attendance of cultural or social events. Even as we wended our daily way through our obligations, writing and staying in touch even from our work desks.

I miss all that, not because Facebook has become the über-forum for such activity and for such a life, but despite Facebook. Facebook only reminds me, more and more poignantly, nay, painfully, of what I miss. I know friendship. Friendship is a friend of mine. And Facebook, you are not friendship.

Facebook is no substitute for me for what I describe for a broad matrix of reasons, none of them noteworthy enough to single out and not all of them important enough to analyze. I leave that to the sociologists and behavioral economists who at least can make a living, even if they eventually never make sense, of it. Chief among the reasons however is, in my mindfulness, I can never forget that whatever I say or post (if it’s an image or a link or a video file) it’s not to just this person, or that short list of friends or forum-mates, but it’s also and always to all of Facebook. I mean the corporate entity, which is always there, lurking, in the true sense of the word, listening without hearing, and archiving every syllable and every pixel, no longer mine alone, but the property of some giant entity. Call it a swarm or hive or call it the Borg, it’s not me.

Therefore, I am leaving. It’s a nominal and provisional leave-taking. Among the mistakes I have made in my life, from the tiny to the shattering, perhaps this is another one, and I will regret it, and so, for now, though the temptation is strong to cancel my account utterly and allegedly have all the bits and facts obliterated (Facebook has long since admitted that somehow—they can work any kind of programming wonder, but some things just can’t be explained, darn it!—certain images and other code objects have persisted in their system), I will deactivate the account. This means you will no longer find me on Facebook should you be looking or should somehow take notice, if only as a passing thought.

My real friends, whatever the number, know how to find me, both by phone and by email, and they can find me where I live, if they don’t already have the address and need only care to ask.

As for me, I will make what attempt I can, mustering the energy I can to do so, an expense of effort that came so effortlessly and unconsciously in the past I so recently just re-discovered in short form, to get back in touch with people using what I guess are now considered antique means. That is, I will be writing blog entries again. I will be re-designing one, if not both, of my Websites, and posting more regularly to that or those. And I will try, at least to be more regularly in contact, by phone and email and, dare I say it?, the U.S. Post with people whose contact I miss more than I have cared to say, perhaps because I had been reduced to saying such things, or anything, on Facebook. And I didn’t care to say anything so personal or intimate in such a place. So goodbye Facebook, for now and perhaps for good.

by

I’ve spent my entire life bemused (when not enraged) by the extravagances of language, including hyperbole, unfounded generalizations, and a host of other pernicious and misleading rhetorical devices by my more agitated brethren and sisters of the Left. There seems to be another epidemic of the same disease at work, now, as the Occupy movement actively seeks to find a center (in more ways than one) and a way to be politically effective in a directed way, and the attempts of the “chattering masses” on the Left, apparently to agitate and provoke the agitate-able and provoke-able of we less publicly vocal yeomen and women. Now a 24-yr. old, recent journalism graduate of Morehead State, named Carl Gibson has announced that “America Has Become a Fascist Police State” [http://bit.ly/uQNdpR]. The slightly older and decidedly more well-known Naomi Wolf (as she ramps up her contorted public position) regarding the allegedly general police reaction to Occupy, unqualifiedly asserts “US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality…”. Fox News and its predecessors and fellow travelers have long since opened the current door to saying what you please, whether it’s true or not, and now the (finally) angered left that likes to babble to hear itself (and entertain those all too poised to believe what they hear) is marching through the same portal.

I don’t blame Mr. Gibson. He’s way too young to remember anything except possibly stories, told to him on, or at, someone’s knee, about the skewering of President Clinton, the “electronic lynching” of Justice Thomas, and the much more recent “evidence of WMD” that justified a trillion dollar war in Iraq that hasn’t ended yet. Ms. Wolf, a presumptive student of history (she is billed as a political consultant) should know better, even though she was born just a year before President Kennedy was assassinated, and was only six when Reverend King was killed. Had they longer memories, or were more prudent in making their assertions after checking what historical facts there are about police brutality and overreaction—and there is a sufficient body of knowledge that is essentially academic in nature that they might trust at least the fundamental accuracy of those accounts—they might not be so quick as to suggest, or state baldly that there’s anything new to the realization that “there’s a riot going on” (no less an august observer of cultural phenomena and current events than Sly of the Family Stone made this percipient declaration, to music no less—the song “Family Affair” from the album by that riotous name hit number one on the Billboard 200 charts for popular songs, and number three on their R&B charts, for two weeks back in 1971-72, almost exactly 40 years ago: Mr. Gibson was somewhere in the general gene pool at that time, and Ms. Wolf was just about to celebrate her tenth birthday).

Had they better memories, Gibson and Wolf would recall such things as the fire hoses and attack dogs turned routinely by the local constabulary, largely in the South, on non-violent demonstrators for civil rights for African-Americans, demonstrators, it might be added, of all colors by the mid-60s. They might recall the fire bomb dropped by helicopter by the Philadelphia police on the headquarters of the fundamentally African-American movement called “Move” back in 1985 (Wolf, precocious no doubt, and almost the age of Gibson now, and Gibson, still waiting to be born). They might recall through reading and being taught, as I was, as these events occurred even before my appearance on Planet Earth, of the use of Federal troops and state militias, as well as local police and constabulary, to forcefully quell and subdue demonstrators (sometimes, but not always, a polite term for “rioters”) agitating for causes ranging from better working conditions, to the outright need for work, to peace rather than war, or simply anti-war, throughout the history of the 20th century, towards which some people, in their fog and ignorance, sometimes look wistfully, if not in the full bloom of nostalgia. People forget the number of times, commissions (after the fact) and boards of inquiry, reviewing the actions of police in carrying out whatever orders they were given to restore the peace, insofar as it seemed to someone or other to have been threatened or actually disturbed, had in fact rioted themselves, and thus the concept (today we’d call it a “meme” of some sort, something like an animated GIF of memes being flipped through, like a cartoon) of a “police riot,” a combination of words that should otherwise be seen even by a moron as an oxymoron. I mean, I grew up at least to understand that police keep the peace (at least in the abstract; at least that’s the fundamental strategy; remember the phrase “law and order” and I’m not talking the long-running, prize-winning TV series?).

I have the fortune or misfortune to remember the accounts, because I was not there, though I was well into voting age, old enough to drink, and, for sure, to be drafted, of the iconic “police riot” of my day, in late August of 1968, in Chicago, during the maniac suppression and subduing of demonstrations, largely peaceable and civil, that happened to be proceeding, and upstaging, a singular quadrennial event called the National Convention of the Democratic Party, at that time still known, without irony, as the “people’s party.” Some party. Gibson at that time, understandably, still cosmologically absent, and Ms. Wolf, well she was only six, and was probably, at best, still reeling from the assassination, even as much as she could have understood the idea of this, of two leaders of our country’s most outspoken proponents of civil rights and antagonists of oppression or suppression of U.S. citizens. It was hard for me to take in, at 22. Though even then, at that age, without the advantage Mr. Gibson has of an additional two years of prescience, insight, and wisdom, I would not have declared, on harder evidence, that there was an argument to conclude that universally and absolutely the U.S. was a Fascist state. Strong words.

The Fascist states I recall, and they were these without question from any quarter among the ranks of historians, or any other discipline that pretends to seek objectivity, and they had been defeated decisively by the time I was born, were Germany under National Socialism and Italy under, well, the National Fascist Party (when in Rome, use Latin). It can be argued, and go ahead, I have no objection, that the totalitarian regime of Stalin in the guise of some form of communism was, in fact, largely fascist. I don’t have the political philosophical chops to disagree. No matter. These are our more current templates and models. Other lesser models abound, and they persisted until well into the latter part of the 20th century, or persist (but leave us not compare the U.S. to anywhere else; it might give us, heaven forbid, some perspective). North Korea bears some study. There’s Spain under Franco, and that leader, now long, and famously, “still-dead,” happened to meet his demise in 1975, around the time Ms.Wolf was well into puberty (I’m guessing) and Mr. Gibson, still waiting in the wings.

If we wanted models of true, unquestionable, police brutality—”unparalleled” or not is irrelevant; I don’t care to delve even further back in history: Tamburlaine, Genghis Khan, the Borgias, the Caesars… if you don’t know about Bull Connor or an individual named Frank Rizzo, who warrants another reference to Philadelphia and its police, rivals in their day to the notorious and corrupt, and brutal, LAPD of the 1990s, but we (i.e., Gibson & Wolf, et al.) don’t seem to remember even back that recently, then I don’t expect you to remember back so far as the tyrants, the true paradigms of tyranny, from so far back in the history of civilization—we’d have to take a somewhat wider in scope and more mindful look at recent, and then not so recent U.S. history. And as I said, god forbid that we do that. We might have to speak more reasonably, even amongst ourselves, loathe as we are to confront people who expressly disagree with us directly and to their faces. And it’s clear to me we simply don’t want to be reasonable, and our excuse is, “Well ‘they’re’ not reasonable!” Whoever “they” are for you: go ahead, pick your enemy: the 1%, or to fine-tune it (like Krugman suggests), the 0.1%, the right-wing, the Tea Party, the Republicans, or, god help us, now, the police. All police, everywhere, as long as they’re American.

References to the history of our country recently seem to have moved away from the positioning that, in the larger global scheme of things, we are still a young nation. Though the less than astute former Secretary of Defense Mr. Donald Rumsfeld found occasion to use the term “old Europe” in a wholly derisive way. That was in 2003, a year by which Ms. Wolf had long since acquired some credentials as a respectable and valid spokesperson for the Left, and Mr. Gibson must, at least, have been thinking about where he would be studying at an institution of higher learning to begin to acquire his own—he’s precocious it would seem: making pronouncements as off-the-wall as any established member of the old guard, and expecting an audience of some magnitude, having attained the imprimatur of yet another self-styled organization for truth-telling, the Reader Supported News, founded by the founder of the slightly better known “Truthout,” which is no better or worse at rabble-rousing and un-truth-telling, or, to be fair, shall I call it unsubstantiated truth-telling? But, as a young nation, we’re entitled to find our way still, especially with as fungible and elastic a political template to shape our wanderings as the U.S. Constitution is—and my apologies to strict constructionists, but that happens to be my point of view; in a half-assed way, I am a student of history, and that includes reading the Constitution, which I have; have you? We’re entitled to make the mistakes we’ve made in 220 years. The mistakes we continue to make, and will, if we are at all lucky and are not subsumed by the fires of progress: it’s an idea at least as old as the writers of the Old Testament; I’ll only quote “Mene mene tekel upharsin,” and move on (to coin a phrase). Included in those mistakes, of course, are the errors of judgment that are now an everyday occurrence, by those voted into power, those appointed to power, and those of the rest of us, left to comment. I don’t want to shut Gibson or Wolf up. I just want them to use the brains God gave them before they open their mouths or their laptops. And I’d like you, dear reader, to do the same: I have faith you do it once in awhile regularly. Maybe it’s time to make being mindful a 24/7 occupation, to use the common parlance.

Read these contributions, or any, at your peril. They will at best fuel your indignation and sense of righteousness (and then you’ll go off quietly somewhere and think about it; you can even do that while eating a sandwich of Thanksgiving leftovers). At worst they will fuel the ire and illogic of others possibly less prudent and introspective than you (surely you count yourself prudent and introspective, and, if you are older than Mr. Gibson, at least as old as Ms. Wolf, if not a bit younger, but still well into double-digit college reunions, consider yourself wise as well), and the small fires that are burning (some of them merely for warmth and light, as darkness falls, and heat, for the cooking of what sustains us) will become conflagrations. If I were to predict anything, and I am no prophet, nor a betting man, but if I were, that seems more likely. I mean the conflagrations, and they will not be a new thing, nor unparalleled. We have laid waste, we Americans, and our liberal Allies, truth-seekers and defenders of democracy, whole cities. And we have seen our citizens, and our police, lay waste to whole neighborhoods in our pure and unsullied country. Leave us not mention the natives of this continent.

But the first wasting, the one that enrages the lonely likes of me, because no one particularly wants to listen to some crank who spouts off at such obvious “truths” and says, “take a look at what you’re swallowing, before letting it go down whole,” is the wasting of the language. It’s the only vehicle we have for truth, even the truth we tell ourselves in the pure silence of our wakeful consciences, and we should not pollute or corrupt it. Whether our name is Limbaugh or Bachmann or Coulter—and anathema—or Gibson and Wolf, and not to be questioned, because the words they use satisfy our sense of what the truth must be. Otherwise it’s too complicated and troublesome, isn’t it? To grant some iota of truth to “the other side,” to admit not to knowing everything? To see grey, where it’s so much easier to differentiate black from white, and stop.

by

Pretty women…
Fascinating…
Sipping coffee,

Dancing… pretty women.

Pretty women

Are a wonder.

Pretty women!

Sitting in the window or

Standing on the stair

Something in them cheers the air.

Pretty women

Silhouetted…

Stay within you,

Glancing… stay forever,

Breathing lightly…

Pretty women,

Pretty women!

Blowing out their candles or

Combing out their hair,

Even when they leave

They still are there.

They’re there.
—Stephen Sondheim, from “Sweeney Todd”

It’s always been my fortune in the latter part of my life to find myself caught up with women who others cannot help but love. They drew affection naturally, draw it, rather, as the luck continues. There is something in each of them, or was, that brought out a sense of affinity, a sweetness, a joy, a natural allure. I cannot speak of physical appeal, not objectively, because to me—and not only to me, but that’s not the point—they were and are beautiful. But I don’t think attraction of a carnal sort is a necessary component of this common response, this spontaneous response. For one, it has always been both women and men who were drawn to these women who were, and are, oh so important to me in my life.

I had some premonition of this as a younger man, but my own interests were more strictly passionate, more singularly objective. And the goal was always bound up in a natural tendency in myself to devotion, specifically to uxoriousness. I sought a mate, always. And my tender efforts, mixed up, confused no doubt and entangled, with more hormonal derivations of my attractions, always ended up in bad judgment, for reason had little part in it. As much as I am by nature analytical, observing, perceiving, processing, ruminating and digesting through the great maw of my intellect (likely itself a very small thing), reason always came last in making my choices, if it came at all. I do not mean to suggest that I am some brilliant philosopher or that I was precocious in any kind of wisdom, though, in retrospect I always showed glimpses at least of a kind of prescience. In the case of women, however, in my youth there was no sign of the reliability of my intuitions. These instinctual habits of mind, upon which I have come so much to depend for my judgment for several decades at least, and reliably so, had they not developed fully, if they had developed at all.

I made mistakes in my choices, as did my partners. And we came to grief. The rupture of any bond, especially those meant, from the first moment one is conscious of being bound in intention, to be long-lasting, dare I say life-long, is overwhelming in its initial shock. Recovery is sometimes hard won in time, if not in emotional stress and in the diminishment of one’s capacity for engagement with life in general. The rupture of the bond of marriage raises the outcome of such breaks, and their collateral effects, to a higher power. I have been married three times so far. Twice, youthful couples that we were, these marriages ended in divorce. The immediate cause each time was a discovered infidelity, neither of them (or any, to be mathematically accurate) mine, but I came to discover this was irrelevant. There are those who would also say that, indeed, the infidelity or its discovery was not an immediate cause at all, given that in each case, my wife decided to take the long walk out the door to our home together. Alone. And I must add: if only momentarily so.

But this is not a narrative about what life they found for themselves with others, after our separation and divorce. Indeed, it’s not even a narrative necessarily about me, and my misadventures. The point is, at least twice in my life I entered into an agreement, a formal joining based on trust, bound by a mutual avowal of that trust, and it was sundered. I take nothing away from these women, as they were themselves lovable in the way I describe in my opening. Were they not, at the very least, there would not have been the one additional set of arms willing to enfold them in loving, trusting embrace that was in each case waiting to do so.

No. I’d say, much as I cannot deny there was a sundering of that trust, a betrayal, the blame, which is the better thing to ruminate upon, lay with both of us. Anyone reading this may infer what they like, but I learned the hard way what to set my thinking upon. And it was necessary to do so, if I had any hope for what remained of my life after the second divorce, never to experience such a sundering again. After the passing of what has been as many years, and more, as an adult since that second split, I can say, I’ve managed not to. There has been another marriage, and another end to it, but that resulted from a far more irrevocable, and undeniably the proximate, cause. In that sovereign state called marriage, I am sorry to differ with the Reverend Dr. John Donne, but death does have dominion, without question as a matter of terminating the earthly condition of it, no matter how loving and strong the bond.

And it has been more in reflection on my years together with my third wife, than through any active contemplation as we lived them, that I came to understand the depth of her innate, her absolute, lovability. I mean that quality as I mean to have you contemplate that quality in others, at least in women, when and if you should come upon it. Since her death, I have had the fortune of meeting other women, some of them more quickly and consciously identifiable to me as possessing that quality. Not with any allure or attraction beyond admiration and a wish for friendship, as differentiated from other kinds of desire, but with the difference that I could, for a change, substantiate any spontaneous draw I might feel, or not, with a conscious awareness of each of them as a person, wholly separate, with an inviolable integrity, which included this quality I am calling lovability. I mean of course a personality and a character intertwined possessed of what could be a long string of associated qualities that constitute them. Qualities like those already alluded to, of sweetness and joy, but also gentleness, and modesty, of guilelessness at bottom. However, such a listing might end up being endless, without enhancing or clarifying the point if I have been at all successful in making it.

I began by speaking of my good fortune, and, I do so despite death and the disaster it wreaked upon my life, that is, the destruction of the very everydayness of my life being the worst part. I say this, because grief does subside. There is nothing equivocal about death, sudden or expected. In its wake, you learn the meaning of absolute, of being definitive, of an end to all that. And you learn to submit to that grief, and you learn to let it overcome you, and then to let it leave by leaching away, bit by bit. As much as there is such a thing as a slow death, there is such a thing, too, as a slow resurrection, an exquisite incremental return to life.

One lesson in this should be enough for any lifetime, but as the healing occurred for me, I had the continuing fortune to meet another, it seemed, of these lovable women I speak of, I hope it is clear, with adoration. I was only beginning to get to know her, however intensely we permitted ourselves to be with one another. In terms of temporal commitments to be together, in terms of openness of consciousness, in terms of being confessional. I speak for myself of course, because, in a way I had not expected, one result of my experience of my first, impossibly (or so it seemed) glorious re-flowering of a life that had begun to emerge from a long winter of losses and killing frosts, was that I felt free. That freedom was a new experience, for all my experiences, generally, and specifically in my eternal commerce with women over a life growing ever longer. It was a freeing sensation, rather, existential, more than a notional abstraction of the sort we speak of when we speak of politics or public discourse. What was freed within me was my self, my sense of who I was, and of what I could permit myself to be or to say. Without, in fact, granting a conscious reflexive act of permission, however unspoken.

There was a lesson in this too, which I could not learn in full until later in this very late period of the history of my own life. And it was death that once again was the agency of delaying my full mindfulness of what I was experiencing even as I lived it. For death made another visitation upon someone I had come to love, whether for her lovability, which seemed amply proved by the reverence and affection displayed by all who knew her—my newest set of friends—or because I simply had met another woman in the course of my sojourn on the earth with whom, and for whom, I felt such things. I will never learn whether there was a chance for the sort of permanence I have sought since I was reasonably old enough to think about such a conjunction. You’d think I could tell, given my knowing at least that it is in my nature, de rerum natura, truly, or at least insofar as the “thing” whose nature was to be known was myself. But I could not. We learn about the permanence of things, I now believe, by living them, all the way through. And, as I’ve already noted, the only definitive end, the probative finish to a matter of permanence and whether something has truly endured to that end, is death. And so death provided some definition, but not of the sort I, or anyone sane and loving, would wish.

My second lesson (among many, I am sure, but these will require more reflection, and hence, more opportunities to speak and write of them separately, with the focus each deserves), occasioned by a death, by my bearing witness to it, and the suffering of another soul within its grip, was this. I learned, with greater force, what I thought I had already learned long since in my struggle to understand how to live with another human being, my counterpart, my equal, but given my preferences and disposition, differentiated nonetheless by secondary and apposite manifestations of gender. I learned, once again, there are boundaries, and they define not only where one ends and another begins, but where, and under what circumstances, and within what terms I may exercise that freedom to be myself I thought I had finally discovered. I am sure whatever other lock there is in my being, that binds me by turns, or keeps me out of places I have a right to go, but have never before ventured—whether from fear or ignorance I still cannot say—has its key in this quality of being lovable. It’s a theory that posits in such a quality being inherent in the other, in women, because, much as I have a love for friends who are men, it is a different kind of love and satisfies a different instinct. I cannot even say that such men as I know who are true friends, and reciprocate my friendship and love unquestioned (and I am, I am sure, if only by dint of some of my behavior, disposed not to make it easy—not at first efforts) possess the lovability of which I write here.

I am sure of that quality, so sure that I can write of it, as I never have before. There are no instant revelations here. No epiphanies at all, least of all good news, as if these insights had occurred just yesterday. In fact, even as I write this, I must note that I began this essay more than two months ago, and have learned that much more in the interim. This is undoubtedly why I could finish it. What has happened is another stroke of luck, not a mere single stroke, but a painting full of them, I have a sense of possibly a gallery of luck. I have met another who is, in fact, the purest embodiment of that lovability I have ever met. I am sure that one reason for my life is that I might live it, willy nilly as I might and did live it, so I could in fact be ready at this time—more or less—to meet such a one, so pure a one and appreciate her and have the chance, once again, to live it right, to be free, but only so free, to let her be free, in all her gentleness, and sweetness, and modesty, and, yes, vulnerability, and to know how to honor these qualities and cherish them, and avert any risk of sundering what I would prefer never again to have sundered. And also, yes, of course, to love her, as a sign, if of nothing else, that I recognize that capacity in her.

by

The U.S. stock markets have been in a state of wobbly uncertainty for so long, it seems masochistic even to think, never mind worry about it. Today, they look like they collectively are looking for the momentum to sink another 3%. The problem is, what strategies the remaining investors seem to have are all simply predicated on wanting a sure thing. They’re pessimistic today because the “super committee” of Congress has forecast dismal failure at coming up with a “plan” for cuts and whatever else. An idiot could have predicted that when President O did what he had to in the summer and caved on the brilliant tactic of automatic cuts demanded by what is now comically called the Teanderthals in order to keep the U.S. and the world from a worse fate. The consequences of default were obvious to the same idiots cited above.

What investors don’t want to do is look at things the way the management of the companies in whose shares they speculate do—look a bit further down the road, that is, look at a picture a bit larger than the one on the tiny LCD of the next eight hours. With no “plan” the automatic cuts will occur. Nothing drastic (Medicare and SSI for now are spared), but the effects of cuts in government funding will occur in enough areas of the daily lives of ordinary Americans—OK, I can go along with calling them the 99%—that, if they’re hurting and some of them are pissed now, things should get really ugly in the months ahead.

One can only hope they will get ugly enough that there will be revulsion and rejection even from the bone-head constituents of the demented right-wing Congressmen and Senators who have survived so far by feeding those folks back home a steady diet of idiotic conceits and outright lies in an unremitting stream, and all with a singular goal. To keep Obama from gaining a second term. The underlying reasons why are too ugly to contemplate; the stated reasons are the basis for a new definition of the usual louche and despicable motives of the epithet “politician.” If the solution, short and medium term to our economic woes, is the elimination of tax cuts that were instituted by the Moron in Chief, George W. Bush, so be it. Our immediate problems stem from his having rammed two unfunded wars down our throats, with the aid of those assassins of rationality called the Republican Party: cuts insufficient in amounts to send the whole nation immediately and irretrievably down the river, but sufficient nonetheless to prevent those desperate to keep the creaky raft of state from heading to the white waters ahead, because just beyond those rapids are the precipitous cascades of utter ruin. All this was done while also persuading the American public that tax cuts for all, but which mainly benefited the rich—OK, I’ll go along with calling them the 1%—was a wise thing to do, while we continued to spend like the indulgences of our rich Chinese uncles, always ready to lend us another trillion or so, would last forever.

We’ll have to wait and see, of course, how the public reacts this time around, as things they’re used to (at government expense) begin to dry up: roads will deteriorate further, and won’t get fixed. People will get restive and there will be more protests, and more crime, and police departments will be forced to cut back on hours and personnel. Teacher contracts will not be renewed, and no new teachers will be hired. Slowly, inexorably, all of the “investment” categories of our national budget: mainly education, research, housing assistance, transportation… which are our hedge against a worse future for ourselves and ensuing generations, will wither and disappear. Even the densest minds, possessed by the most fear-paralyzed xenophobes of our populace will see it, and feel it. But what they might do, and who they will blame remains to be seen.

We do have a history of the public rising up, miraculously, with a re-birth of reason and clear thinking, however brief the resurrection. It’s usually sufficiently long in duration that the electorate manages to do “the right thing” (in scare quotes because the right thing gets harder and harder to define), and we are set back on the road to recovery. This time, of course, the road will have a lot of detours because of literal and figurative washed-out bridges, crumbling pavement, pot-holes, and the occasional fearsome sinkhole, and recovery will take longer. And once we arrive at that place called Recovery we may be dismayed to discover that the rosy glow we remember was actually pink filters on the klieg lights of political rhetoric and easy money, “spend now, and pay it later…maybe.” This time, if they do rise up, it will be, in some ways a far easier task than the painful one of voting in reforms the consequences of which fully half of the public has spent enormous energy slamming, without expending one joule of mental energy thinking about what they are saying, for over a decade now. They learned the lines from their directors and coaches, the politicians who facilitated the means of their own ends, through faulty loans and easy personal debt accumulation at extortionate rates of interest, and those same mentors are still acting as prompters, though to steadily decreasing effect. The approval rating of Congress now rivals the alleged level of unemployment…the former continuing to go down even as the other apparently rises in real world terms. And the politicians act baffled by this clear inverse function.

I do have a hope, today, anyway, though I try to look further than that, so ingrained still is the way of thinking I wish I could impose on those stock investors, so ready to sell at the first cries from Chicken Little (and yet, sickeningly, bizarrely, in some vertiginous habit derived from the cheap thrills of a carnival roller-coaster—what comes to mind most are the old-fashioned rides, the steepest of all, which always contrived to weave the word “death” into its name—just as willing to buy at the least projection, on any given day, of a hopeful sign from the world’s leaders that they have miraculously recovered their sanity sufficient to overcome their vanity). I have the hope that derives from understanding there is strategic value in having the super committee fail at its appointed task. If they fail, and the automatic cuts are triggered, that trend of politicians managing to accomplish nothing even while burning billions of Kilocalaries of hostile energies keeping one another in check will spill over into next month. For next month, the infamous Bush tax cuts will expire on their own, and like it or not (I mean the 1%) the rich will once again have to start forking over money to the government, badly needed to pay for all the things we elected to buy ourselves without virtue of having any of the necessary ready in our pockets to keep those purchases from putting us further into debt.

Of course, the headlines are already appearing, two days before the inevitable admission of Congressional failure (with no chance of an 11th hour compromise—especially that new kind of 21st century compromise that is uniquely American, but apparently compelling to our European cousins, because they have copied us stroke for stroke, and measure for measure: the compromise that truly satisfies no one, and accomplishes nothing but a worsening of the conditions that define the stalemate to begin with). The headlines are suggesting that Congress will pull some more legislative tricks out of their bottomless bag, and forestall, if not eliminate these cuts altogether. And if they do, it will be another Jack & Jill Expedition back to square one, another pull of the roller coaster car to the very peak of the lift hill of the ride, just another in the fun park called 21st Century America, called the stock market.

I have to wonder once again if I can withstand the involuntary trip, seeing the operator so far below me on the ground, he looks like he’s unreachable, never mind controllable, without this time packing a nausea bag.

by

Freedom, of course, is restricted to no sovereignty or boundary. I might say, if I were in a particularly lofty mood, that freedom itself has dominion. In itself and of itself. We can look for it, somewhat paradoxically, in any location.

No doubt, one of the greatest instances I personally witnessed of a sense of freedom occurred in France. It was on the deuxiême étage, the third floor under the eaves, of my house in a village in Provence. It was my late wife Linda who marveled at, and reveled in, actually, that freedom. It was late at night for us, and we were up, and up there in that aerie, because that meant it was only the late afternoon or evening in the United States.

Linda worked for IBM, that giant of information technology. We were quick to learn after they acquired, for the then staggering amount of 3.5 billion dollars, the more cuddly modest software giant called Lotus, for whom she was a global program manager. She oversaw the efforts the company made to find ways to turn a profit on having third parties teach programmers and information specialists of all sorts how to exploit the deep functionality of a product called “Notes.” Notes did what we all take for granted these days, even the lowliest and most technologically challenged of us, at least if we have spent any time at all on that latter-day phenomenon called Facebook. It, as does Facebook, defined and facilitated the means of collaboration and sharing of information in a self-defined community. Whatever the cause of connection—including the somehow too broadly inclusive, if somehow sweet (cloying, anyone?), “like” of Facebook land—affinities, shared objectives, ideologies, loves, hates, pleasures, or agonies, sharing leads to productive ends, in the most expansive interpretation—Notes was the means of managing the substance of the connection. And,as a result, Notes was better than anything else at the time at enabling the enterprise to achieve goals that required continual improvement in productivity from all workers, based on the collaborative model. At that time, as it does now still, IBM had over 300 thousand employees all over the globe, including its most remote or sequestered corners and niches.

If it had wanted to do nothing else, IBM could have done worse than to acquire Notes and its developer for its own uses internally. However, knowing a bargain when it saw one, IBM was also buying the significant market for the product that Lotus had established, with plans of expanding that market to a size the begetter of Notes could only dream about. To do so required that companies licensing the product learn how to customize it to their particular needs and applications. Like so many proprietary technologies at the time, Notes required knowledge and mastery of what I’ll call its own language. Only specialists in “speaking” Notes had the capability, ultimately, of creating the form of the product that, put in the hands of every worker within an organization, improved their efforts. To ensure that Notes specialists, usually people trained as software engineers, or at least conversant with the skills of programming any sort of computer code beyond a rudimentary level, had the requisite capability to make a Notes license a justified corporate expense, for it was not a cheap product, and it did not come in a shrink-wrapped box from Staples, the office supplier, Lotus would “certify” that a person who studied the particular and singular methods and terminologies of the product had mastered it.

And so, in short, Linda was manager of the department that certified users to various levels of mastery. IBM learned it was more profitable to allow third party companies, specializing in teaching a variety of computer skills, from the most elementary to the most advanced, to do the teaching, and to do the testing, using certification materials that only IBM developed and owned. This meant that Linda had to ride herd not only over the highly driven technocrats who shaped, sold, and managed the certification program in the field, and dealt with the day-to-day relations with the third party training companies, but she had to manage relations with those third parties, who were a bridge to the corporations that licensed Notes directly from IBM. What may sound stressful enough was always kicked into higher quanta of anxiety, because it was a world-wide program, split into markets more or less defined by the classic list of the populated continents of the earth, and Linda’s “little” sub-division had to show a profit doing what it did. The profit was usually set at goals that were percentages in double-digits of tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees, plus the net costs of testing materials, scoring and certifying the subjects. She was a people manager: overseeing a diverse group that included software product managers and sales people, to experts in test metrics, PhD holders who wrote the actual instruments that measured one’s expertise in Notes mastery. She was also a business manager: with bottom-line responsibility for producing money that had to be generated in every-increasing amounts, and all in a competitive setting. Notes defined and established a viable market. This is America. No one is going to allow a monopoly where there’s money to be made by simply putting up a fight. And so there was competition (not to mention keeping an eye on the sales and marketing efforts of the third-party training companies, a restive bunch that paid for the privilege of being certified by IBM to certify others in the use and mastery of IBM products—this meant keeping yet a fourth constituency happy). Finally, and most naturally, if this weren’t enough, all of this herding and managing (which included much hand-holding, cajolery, flattery, compromise, and an iron will masked in a soft and, if I may say, endearing if not motherly demeanor), but it had to be done in a myriad of languages. Not literally. Linda was quite adept in English, for sure, and knew a smattering of Spanish, and understood more than she could speak in French. But that was it. Rather, I mean that Linda was responsible for the toeing the line of all streams of revenue, that is, all sub-groups based in all other places on the planet, and nominally, outside the U.S., under the aegis of the heads of IBM-Europe, IBM-Pacific Rim, IBM-Asia, etc. So there was a fifth constituency, if you include her necessary and ongoing ties to the upper management of these subsidiary organizations. Talk about the need for productive collaboration.

Because of its size and history, IBM is a company marked by a remarkable seeming contradiction in management philosophy. It is, structurally, highly traditional, adhering to essentially conservative forms for the organization: hierarchical, intensive perpetual assessment via regular and frequent measurement, reporting and meetings—in groups, sub-groups, and sub-sub-groups. To effect efficacious management company-wide, every means of communications was adapted and exploited (including not a small list of innovations created by IBM itself—a longtime first-place holder in number of corporate global patents issued annually and, as they were a company specializing in making things to make companies operate more efficiently and profitably, disposed to eating their own dog food, which, odious as it sounds, is not a bad thing: if it doesn’t work for you, why even try to sell it to someone else?).

This propensity to stay not only connected, but in touch, includes, as modalities, telephones of course, teleconferencing technologies, visualization for mass audiences (IBM had flat screen plasma monitors in the very early 80s), etc., and naturally, the full exploitation of every species of computing, from the mainframe, which ran the largest enterprises in the world, to mini-computers, which ran just about every other kind of business, to personal computers, which the world seems continually to forget IBM made viable for business. That was after small companies, like Apple, for one, made them merely enviable toys for geeks and technical thrill seekers. It’s a testament to the pervasiveness, and incredible rapidity, with which IBM could create (or invade) a market and make it its own, that the famous “1984” commercial for the Macintosh positioned what everyone knew to be IBM as an unassailable, irresistible totalitarian dominator. It was shown on television, the one time the commercial was paid for by Apple, in January 1984. The IBM PC had been introduced barely 29 months before.

The other dimension of that contradiction in IBM I averted to, that strange, and, if you ask me, marvelous duality, was its willingness always to be flexible, wherever you looked in the corporate structure. You don’t otherwise get to be as big as IBM has been for years and years. They were so big the government targeted them, as they had, successfully, targeted, and broken apart, AT&T, at one time the only technology company that IBM rivaled for size and domination of the business environment. The difference is, even the government could not break IBM. It’s taken IBM to do that. It has slowly and steadily divested itself of multi-billion dollar divisions of itself, while it remains one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. It is certainly the world’s largest transformer, because its divestitures were driven by the realization and placid acceptance that better opportunities lay in newer ways of doing business in newer technologies. In more mundane ways, IBM has demonstrated its flexibility, demonstrably to its employees, if however quietly (if not in utter silence) with regard to the world at large.

They were one of the first companies (and one must always include the qualification, while at the same time, always, one of the biggest) to adopt the principle of flex-time, putting in your hours as you saw fit. As well, at IBM, we learned, workers above a certain pay grade were accorded the confidence and the privilege to take what time the company owed them for themselves, even while they paid them for that time, also when the worker saw fit. I am talking about what less forward-thinking, less mindful companies refer to as vacations, holidays, ‘personal’ time, “leaves,” etc., except within the scope of what state and federal laws might have demanded of them. In the case of IBM, the company always far exceeded the statutory times allotted for such time away. There simply are not, in practical terms, such things as holidays, or vacations in IBM land. Meet or exceed your objectives, and make yourself available as needed, through those means and media and channels provided and sanctioned, and you could do your job in the middle of the night, if you preferred, or from the back porch of your camp on a lake in Maine.

Something else illustrative of what I am calling this liberal degree of flexibility lies in what IBM has done over the course of the past 15 or 20 years. It has more or less steadily employed over three hundred thousand people for decades. Indeed, it is now estimated to employ well over 400,000, in 200 countries. At the same time, IBM has whittled away its commitment to maintaining corporate infrastructure to accommodate all those employees with a place to work. In the fullness of time, at least since the 90s, IBM has slowly devolved in physical capacity such that there are offices specifically dedicated to the exclusive use of somewhere, I am guessing, between only two-thirds to three-quarters of those people. And those without a desk to call their own not only may expect, at best, to be able to say they share a “floating” workstation with anonymous others, and more often than you’d expect, to say they have no set place to work in corporate quarters at all. IBM has thus been a pioneer in “telecommuting.”

All of this advancement in employee relations was in full play when Linda became, de facto, an IBM employee. Her business card still said Lotus for a year or two, until the employees of all such acquisitions—IBM did not necessarily want to bring all of the entities it acquired into the corporate hive; some were kept at arm’s length, with the preservation of their original identities for some years—had acquired some familiarity and comfort with the differences in corporate “culture.” Eventually, however, she was a full-fledged crew member of the mothership. By the time of our own acquisition, rustic, domestic, and minuscule as it was, in rural France, flex-time and telecommuting were fully operative policies of her employer. Coincidentally—a rare happy coincidence—a digital connection to our remote, medieval (literally; the core of the house being built in the early 15th century) maison de village was not only possible, but was readily available and so, starting in early 2002, we could “jack in” to the internet, using that venerable telephonic technology called ISDN (unknown to Americans, unless they worked for a business that required connectivity in the earliest days of adopting computers for regular use). It was snail-like in speed, compared to what we are used to now, but it saved us from thinking we had made an investment in foreign real estate that we might make productive use of at best for perhaps two or three weeks a year (the time Linda felt comfortable allotting herself in one lump).

As a consequence, she could stay in touch, and in sync (one of the foremost features of Notes was the ability to “replicate” the vast database of mail messages, files, and whatever else was shared within a work group, or distributed even to the entirety of the organization; every night, your computer would sync its files and folders with the master database located god knew where on the earth) even as we otherwise vacated and temporized in our retreat in La France Profonde. Further, the French, being long since adept at unceremoniously rigging out even the most remote hamlet with modern accoutrements and conveniences, burying water and sewer mains, electrical lines, television cable and telephone wires underground, leaving an undisturbed vista more or less as it had been, though with your usual complement of internally combusted vehiclesadded, for hundreds of years since. Hence we were offered modern telephone service, of course (indeed, as a necessary requirement to getting that precious ISDN line).

So, in a quite literal way, even in quaint, bucolic, placid Fox-Amphoux, Linda was in business. And we could plan multiple visits in the course of a year, each of somewhat more open-ended duration. Further, as manager of a global program, Linda was not subject to the vagaries of what otherwise was a U.S. hegemony in terms of priority of schedules to determine when “business hours” would occur on a world-wide basis. The rest of the IBM organization, in this case, did not dance to U.S. standard time. Rather meetings were scheduled to accommodate the local host, in the case of in-person visits. Linda traveled a great deal, as a global manager, and this meant a lot of jet lag. However, increasingly, her presence in other far-flung markets were reduced in number (as a cost savings for one; as a mode of increased productivity for two) even as the number increased of plenary teleconferences, which tied in representatives of all the major markets to a single “meeting” in the ether.

The newest technology to be deployed in what was, by 2002, a mature set of Notes product features, was the ability to “text” (or “IM”, i.e., instant-message, in real time over computer lines, even as participants spoke to one another through an audio-only connection by phone. College students take for granted now the ability to continuously engage in the mischief of telling one another in remote corners of a lecture hall what each is really thinking of the lecturer droning away in the pit. So, conference participants could share untraceable confidences about someone sitting in a room thousands of miles away from each of the texting mischief-makers. All this only by way of demonstrating the ease and comfort workers felt increasingly even as they did more and more business with one another for longer and longer business “days” in a wholly disembodied way.

The old wisdom, no longer true in these days of privacy invasion by way of cookies and tracking cookies and data trails, that “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog” was already, just ten years ago, becoming, “on the Internet, nobody knows where you really are.” Freedom, of a sort. But freedom. In 2002, Linda worked as hard for her pay, but no longer tethered to a desk in a corner office on First Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She tasted that freedom for the first time, as I indicated at the start of this essay, on that evening some time ago up on the top floor of our small stone house in the south of France. During a teleconference, which had gone unusually well, one of Linda’s colleagues, in an office in the Midwest, and planning a trip to the east coast for a real time live meeting in person in the “home” office, was also wrapping up for the day (though it was 11 o’clock at night for us, and only five in the afternoon for her), and making her goodbyes by phone to the others now ringing off. She enthusiastically sent a text note to Linda, asking if they couldn’t schedule lunch for a day or two hence, and Linda informed her this was not possible as she would continue to be away. “Why, where are you going?” she was asked. And she admitted she was not going anywhere for at least another week and a half, but that she would not be there. “But, where are you then?” “In France.” The response was an exclamation of stunned surprise, as the reality in which they were all already well-immersed sunk in. More real for us perhaps, but real.

The occasion for this rumination of mine about some now quite old, and not very engaging, if thrilling at the time, benefits of the uses of technology is a revelation—yet another one, equally unsurprising—from Facebook. Facebook, that new behemoth that sprang up and grew even more quickly than the lumbering technology elders of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, et al., has admitted, just a day or two ago [see here: http://bit.ly/uvwG1T] that not only are they tracking you as you zip here and there from your Wall to those of friends, to photo albums, to apps, to Pages, from “likes” to “shares” to endless posts, and notes, and notifications. They also have built-in to every site you visit away from Facebook the ability to track those movements of yours… even if you have logged out of Facebook. Combine this with the ready knowledge, of which you should be ashamed of yourself if you are ignorant, that this same data can be localized insofar as the machine you are browsing on is concerned. So they know where you are, assuming it is you who logged in to Facebook, to pick up the bit of software that gets implanted on the computer you are using, which allows them to keep tracking you while on that same computer, and they know what you look at on the Internet, as long as any page of any website you visit has that familiar “friendly” Facebook “like” or “share” or “recommend” widget visible on the page. France, Kalamazoo, Tuscaloosa, or Tuscarora, they’ll know where you are, and that you were taking a look at Lady Gaga’s latest video, or where to buy Mrs. Renfro’s Jalapeño Nacho Slices.

As the invisible world in which we conduct ourselves, even as we think, unconsciously and unknowingly, that we are simply carrying on the same quotidian tasks in the same haunts that we have made part of our usual neighborhood circuits and circumambulations, grows smaller, down to the size of the keyboard under your fingers, in so exquisitely and precisely engineered a manner. The consequence is that you can be located as to time and place, without any extra effort on your part. There are those of you, including many among people of my acquaintance, who, unequal to the task of letting others do the work, are dedicated to the proposition that others: loved ones, friends, acquaintances, nodding buddies, vaguely familiar faces, strangers… should know where you just headed out to stock up on pizza, or have already landed, waiting expectantly for your next round of kava, and so announce it deliberately, using special apps and widgets and gizmos to pinpoint your every move.

Well, shapers of the zeitgeist, count me out. I unrepentantly deny the proposition and the opportunity to infringe on my freedom in this way. Long a believer in that old British value of wanting simply to be let alone, I believe as well that the best way to ensure that others cannot impose on me in any way, is if they can’t find me in the first place, they can’t help but let me alone. So, I’ll decide when I want to be located. I’ll decide who I’ll tell where I am.

I made my living in part for a long time at the exertions required to market and advertise clients’ products successfully. Part of whatever art there was, and obviously still is, though it is now clearly less art than mere science and technology (which I guess is part of the point of all these words), to doing so was making astute, usually semi-informed judgments (when they weren’t outright guesses) as to where to find the people to whom we wanted to deliver the message.

For the clients of Facebook (because, face it, the clients of Facebook are not the ones, the 900 million and soon to be the big B of us, who are online everyday to the tune of 500 million Facebook engagements a day; we are the product Facebook is selling to their clients) it’s a lot easier, and a great deal more precise. Facebook can tell them where you are, and who you are, and what you look at, and can make a very well-informed inference as to what you want to buy and what you’re willing to spend to do so. And much as I love to do so, I am not singling out Facebook, because there is nothing singular about these efforts. Google is at the same game. Amazon… You name them.

And that game has gotten that much more complicated, because key to it is the technology for locating you, and the ultimate advantage is in owning the means of using that technology. And the new gorilla in this ever overcrowded living room is the beloved Apple. Why? Because guess what? As you can see here: http://cnet.co/rZDfaa Apple, the immaculate, has bought the keys and the lock to the gateway between you and the freedom of knowing no one can find you.

Apples, pork bellies, coffee beans, crude oil, cocoa, and now you—commodities. Ever wonder if a pig feels free? You may begin to become aware of what if feels like. If you’ve a mind to know. Me? If anyone asks, I’m in France. Maybe.

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What a strange race we humans are: on a micro basis, disaster strikes—anywhere, no questions asked, heaven and earth are moved: miners trapped 2 miles down… we rescue them. On a macro basis, with disastrous global implications foretold, economic or climatic, and we dither, argue, bitch, cry, but do nothing remedial…countries or banks in debt? Screw them! Beats the shit out of me.

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