Trumping the Greatest Man in the World

Posted on 7 September 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 11 minutes

James Grover Thurber—American humorist and writer, raconteur, cartoonist, staff member of The “New Yorker,” 1894-1961.
Credit: Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

I’ve been increasingly entranced with an idea for the past few weeks. It seems to be the only means of relief from a dilemma emblematic of a world now captive entirely to the phenomenon of celebrity as ethos—whereby no matter how outrageous the performance, then the greater the general admiration of the populace at large. Rather, to amend that proposition slightly, the more outrageous the performance, the greater the likelihood of an enthusiastic admiration.

We’ve had our libidos (and our ids) massaged seeing it in the gyrations, pulsations, and pelvic osculations of pop female singers. Correlative to this phenomenon are, of course, the behaviors of their male counterparts. Except to a perplexed minority, composed mostly of uselessly over-educated, hence judgmental, if otherwise well acculturated intelligent adults, the great mass of humanity comprising the U.S. population asserts itself in ever greater adulation of the likes of Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Will.I.Am., Kanye West (and, of course, Mr. West’s consort, who seems to have no visible talent, save for the highly visible product of perpetual cultivation of her womanly proportions—calibrated to some ideal that somehow consummates and amalgamates the chimerical fantasies of worshipful female perfection through several millennia and many cultures; think the Venus of Willendorf in Spandex). No matter that there are not the usual, that is the age-old, signs of attainment according to established standards of human grasping for perfectibility, in matters of intellect, creativity, scientific discovery, exploration.

What has pricked my conscience with that entrancing idea is the seeming spread of the spectacle, like a rogue virus, to other reaches of la patria Americana. Now we are seeing the phenomenon raised to a new level of art, the stakes very much higher than mere popularity. Politics. The stakes, of course: the office of the “most powerful man in the world.” I put that in scare quotes, because if it were true, President Obama would have ensured his place in history with the passage of all sorts of laws for the common good, would have brought the country back from the brink of economic ruin, if not insolvency, would have prevented unemployment from being an unmanageable scourge… But, hmmm, as they say on Facebook coyly, “wait!”

If it were not necessary for scare quotes President Bush (II) would not have plunged us into unwinnable wars for at least 11 years, at a cost of thousands of American lives, likely hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives, would have incurred what will probably amount to an unpaid debt of three or four trillion dollars for the cost of those wars. Would have ensured that the efforts of future presidents would face the intractable efforts of a Congress to do nothing that furthered any other agenda than his, of never raising taxes, even while incurring mounting levels of expense and debt.

But (yet again…) wait!

Maybe, in fact, it’s not a punch line. Maybe we are getting the equivalent, in business attire, of rap stars and reality stars and bimbos who sing in the nude while swinging on construction hooks on huge cranes to run for the office of President of the United States… Did I say equivalent?

However, back to that idea that has captivated my imagination.

Some backtracking, more than 90 years, is in order first. Among the factoids stowed away by the truly culturally literate is the year of the founding of “The New Yorker,” arguably the most civilized serial publication ever devised by humans in English—possibly in any language, but I only know two, and one of those not too well; I’m fairly confident of my judgments about the uses of the English language. Famously, among the other things that the man who founded the magazine and edited it through its first 25 or so years of development, Harold W. Ross, did was to insist that the language be used with clarity and directness, yet, with style and verve. He was accused of cultivating, if only unconsciously, an unmistakable house style that sheared all protuberances to a uniform height and filled in all voids to ensure a predictable, readily identifiable uniform surface appearance. Others would differ. But we are not here to deconstruct venerable literary edifices (and “The New Yorker” has gone on to foster the careers of a diversity of writers, each with a readily identifiable way of handling the language).

Ross was an anomaly. A true son of the Old West—he was born and spent his formative years in Aspen, Colorado, and never attended college—he was somehow also a man of cultivated sensibilities, a true urbane sophisticate, who spent most of his life in the urban milieu, yet always longing for his roots on what, at the time, was the last of the frontier. He was first, and foremost, a reporter, a newspaper man, and so he learned at the forge of hammering facts into a readily ingested narrative that provided all necessary information and no more.

Eccentric in many regards, he was, as I already said, among other things, a stickler for clear, direct, uncomplicated, if not altogether simple, writing, but with no compromise for the literary merits of the exertion required in producing the crystalline prose of which the New Yorker magazine became an avatar. A high-school dropout who became a wrangler of the wittiest and most sophisticated writers—at the inauguration of the magazine, most of them plying their craft in a humorous vein. After a rocky start, which saw the upstart publication—famously, as Ross put it in the mission statement and prospectus for The New Yorker, not intended for “the old lady in Dubuque”—almost fail; within two years of its inception the magazine had found its footing and its voice. Never wholly abandoning its intention to look at the more light-hearted facets of life, “The New Yorker” saw its way to an even greater role for humor, the same role to which so many practitioners, starting well before 1925, put it to use, from Shakespeare to Woody Allen, and that is, first, to examine and then expose the foibles of human behavior, and to cast a light into even the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Among the earliest of the greatest of its staff was a man who seemed incapable of an utterance that would not produce a laugh. He had the additional gift of art that flowed effortlessly from his pencil. Many an iconic “New Yorker” image, particularly the affable if lumbering lineaments of the great mastiff-sized dogs that were featured in many of his “drawings,” as the magazine’s denizens insisted idiosyncratically on calling what we mere mortals, savoring the fruits of such exertions, identified as “cartoons,” quickly became part of the “brand:” institutions. I speak of James Thurber, the creator of numerous fictive immortals, possibly the greatest of whom, certainly among the best known, was Walter Mitty, the everyman who stood in for all of us, harboring quixotic dreams of glory we, any of us, would never personally know. And he only knew in the darkened movie theater of his imagination.

We live in an age, three-quarters of a century hence from the birth, full-grown, of the immortal Mitty, where (with not an atom of irony detectable by the most sensitive of New Yorker critics and investigative journalists—who have examined everything it seems, from the microscopic traces of our earliest ancestors, to the methods of wild orchid thieves in Florida everglades) even Mitty-esque strivers, living their own glory-laden fantasies of triumph and salvation, can play them out on a world-stage for all to see and hear, as they mouth the soundtrack that narrates their own triumphs, as fictive as their exploits and attributes, as wistful and evanescent as their promises. I speak of course of the current crop, as well as all past crops, of would-be nominees and holders of high political office.

And the public, or some statistically measurable, if not significant, segment of it, roars its approbation, so hungry are they for a hero and a champion that their own fantasies, fed by Hollywood with a steady diet of comic book masters of the universe, have transmuted into the impossible facts of a Trump, unsubstantiated in reality, unchallenged by those whose stock in trade is challenge in the name of truth. With Biblical probity—to speak a thing is to make it true—there is no questioning of Trumpine veracity. The eternal truth will bear him out, once you stop tramping in the weeds of quibbles and details.

By his own accounts, Donald Trump is, indeed, one of the greatest of men to grace our lives. And he will provide all the information required to substantiate such a claim, while, of course, withholding all those “stupid facts”—as our recent great populist/fabulist President, born of wishes made flesh in the kingdom of imagination and legend, called them—that would only muddy the clear waters of faith.

What gnaws at so many, however, are the glaring views, sometimes only flashes and Instagrammatic glimpses, of those loutish interstices of behavior that simply persist, small, manageable fires, flaring up, then dying in the metaphorical forest of our collective inescapable quotidian, miraculously never building into the all-consuming conflagration that portends disaster for the man with the fiery-orange hair at the center of attention. Walter Mitty with a colossal ego.

By his own measure, Donald Trump, among his many claims and titles would, seemingly, be the greatest man in America, and as a consequence, America being the great country it used to be, which it shall be again under his stewardship, the once and future America: the greatest man in the world.

My man Thurber, surely a student of the vanity of human wishes, and the folly of human aspiration, in fact wrote of such a man, albeit a fiction, albeit tailored to a simpler time in our history—when heroes were outfitted in less flamboyant attire, and never of their own fashioning. Indeed, it was a time when it was expected that heroes eschewed celebrity, and more modestly accepted the praise and the accolades offered by a grateful nation, humbled in their sense of their humanity by the brave exploits of such genuine heroes. Men like Charles Lindbergh and William Perry.

These two paragons are invoked in a short story published in “The New Yorker” in 1931, written by Thurber, and set as a narrative in what was then the future (that is, in 1940) looking back on the history of events as they unfold as if they had occurred and been forgotten. All of this happened in such a way for good reason, as the secret history reveals, because the character of the title character–the story is whimsically, if not facetiously, entitled “The Greatest Man in the World”—had proven to be such a louche individual, in all respects so irredeemable, to have not only feet of clay, but about whom it might be said that his entire body, if not his very spirit were composed entirely of terra cotta.

The hero, one John “Pal” Smurch, accomplishes the unlikely feat of flying solo without stopping around the entire globe. He returns to acclaim, but as the narrator informs us, the truths about him as revealed by the press compel a resolution that is as dire as the prospect of allowing such a revelation of his true nature to reach the adoring public. I have excerpted relevant passages, culminating in the impromptu solution to the seemingly irresolvable dilemma the great and important men, whose job it is, among other tasks, to save the public at large from any awful truth. I was reminded of the dilemma as I pondered the likelihood of how the masters and mistresses of our lives, in both parties, and in all the corridors of power in Washington, in finance and in industry despair of how to solve a problem named the Donald.

The story Thurber tells opens as Smurch, an unlikely hero from the start, takes off in his little plane, outfitted with no more than a gallon of bootleg gin and a six-pound salami, launched from a New Jersey airfield into the heavens in a quest for greatness. Improbably, stories come back from far corners of the world with sightings of his small plane, and the gears of the engines of fame begin to mesh… With some elisions I have made, it continues, after his landing and his forced three week sequestration in total seclusion as powerful figures first grapple behind the scenes with their helplessness dealing with the nightmare Smurch has presented them, by his very existence and the ineluctable and unavoidable revulsion his personality inspires, and finally, in the dénouement, stumble, as it were, upon a happy solution.

…Reporters, who had been rushed out to Iowa when Smurch’s plane was first sighted over the little French coast town of Serly-le-Mer, to dig up the story of the great man’s life, had promptly discovered that the story of his life could not be printed. His mother, a sullen short-order cook in a shack restaurant on the edge of a tourists’ camping ground near Westfield, met all inquiries as to her son with an angry “Ah the hell with him; I hope he drowns.” His father appeared to be in jail somewhere for stealing spotlights and laprobes from tourists’ automobiles; his young brother, a weak-minded lad, had but recently escaped from the Preston, Iowa, Reformatory and was already wanted in several Western states for the theft of money-order blanks from post offices. These alarming discoveries were still piling up at the very time that Pal Smurch, the greatest hero of the twentieth-century, blear-eyed, dead for sleep, half-starved, was piloting his crazy junk-heap high above the region in which the lamentable story of his private life was being unearthed, headed for New York and a greater glory than any man of his time had ever known.
…
The great and important men in the room, faced by the most serious crisis in recent American history, exchanged worried frowns. Nobody seemed to know how to proceed. “Come awn, come awn,” said Smurch. “Let’s get the hell out of here! When do I start cuttin’ in on de parties, huh? And what’s they goin’ to be in it?” He rubbed a thumb and forefinger together meaningly. “Money!” exclaimed a state senator, shocked, pale. “Yeh, money,” said Pal, flipping his cigarette out of a window. “An’ big money.” He began rolling a fresh cigarette. “Big money,” he repeated, frowning over the rice paper. He tilted back in his chair, and leered at each gentleman, separately, the leer of an animal that knows its power, the leer of a leopard in a bird-and-dog shop. “Aw fa God’s sake, let’s get some place where it’s cooler,” he said. “I been cooped up plenty for three weeks!”
…
In the tense little knot of men standing behind him, a quick, mad impulse flared up. An unspoken word of appeal, of command, seemed to ring through the room. Yet it was deadly silent. Charles K.L. Brand, secretary to the Mayor of New York City, happened to be standing nearest Smurch; he looked inquiringly at the President of the United States. The President, pale, grim, nodded shortly. Brand, a tall, powerfully built man, once a tackle at Rutgers, stepped forward, seized the greatest man in the world by his left shoulder and the seat of his pants, and pushed him out the window.

“My God, he’s fallen out the window!” cried a quick-witted editor.

“Get me out of here!” cried the President….The editor of the Associated Press took charge, being used to such things. Crisply he ordered certain men to leave, others to stay; quickly he outlined a story while all the papers were to agree on, sent two men to the street to handle that end of the tragedy, commanded a Senator to sob and two Congressmen to go to pieces nervously. In a word, he skillfully set the stage for the gigantic task that was to follow, the task of breaking to a grief-stricken world the sad story of the untimely accidental death of its most illustrious and spectacular figure.

We live in much more complex and nuanced times (OK, not nuanced, but somehow we are to believe we are more sophisticated and informed as a people than we were almost a hundred years ago). No one, least of all I, a credentialed pseudo-intellectual, progressive-leaning, liberal-minded humanist, would suggest that such a quietly violent, if ingenious, solution to the Donald, an act perhaps better suited to clandestine black-ops skullduggers we are not supposed to admit our government has on its payroll, is the only solution. However, I have scoured the pages of the media, both those that are virtual and those composed of wood pulp, and nary a crackerjack strategist, opiner, or editor, nary a pundit, an analyst, or a steely-eyed, nerveless investigative reporter has come up with a better.

The New Newspeak

Posted on 24 August 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Presidential Campaign Thus Far, Late Summer 2015

Posted on 24 August 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

also posted on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smart Bitches

Posted on 17 May 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

Today, I had the slightly unusual and, admittedly, slightly queasy-making experience of seeing my name set aside in print (if we can call a blog, “print”) for praise, I guess, in a review of the book I have touted here over the past nine months, the collection of food related writing called Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal. It features, among many other contributions, a poem of mine called “How to Make the Perfect Fried Egg Sandwich.” This poem follows a brief reminiscence by the fabled food writer, M.F.K. Fisher, which ends with her aunt’s fried egg sandwich recipe (the exact opposite of mine as it is, as she admits, unchewable and indigestible). The reviewer happened to like Ms. Fisher’s effort, as who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, she attributed it to me. Several commentators chose to add their thoughts, including one who admitted never having heard of me, and several much sharper readers than the blogger noticed striking similarities to what was described as my effort, to the work, justifiably and correctly, of Ms. Fisher.

Whatever the consequences of that, it’s hardly important. But I did find one thing mildly striking. The name of the blog is “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” and is meant, I think, to be resonant with a certain spirit of the age to convey, ironically, an exactly opposite set of sentiments. The women, of course, aren’t bitches, and the books, singled out for praise, are hardly trash. It does leave me wondering yet again what exactly is it that induces women to refer to themselves, to one another, and generically and universally, and I think with an air of bravado, defiance, and rueful humor as “bitches,” whereas any such usage by men—and it is usually so in far more mean-spirited, if not downright misogynistic contexts—is excoriated and faulted to an inch of its life and rightfully. Yet, there’s that usage by women themselves, without the slightest hint that the user of the epithet is aware that this can only encourage it further.

I suggest that the sensibility intent on being hip and au courant sufficient to refer to her sisters in spirit as bitches, as a truculent badge of honor, inviting challenge, has lost its attention sufficiently to make the kind of error, inconsequential as it is, that confused the work of a male poet for an iconic female writer of deathless prose, now considered part of the canon.

I am both bemused and, yet, hmmm, I just don’t get it. Nice review though, full of solecisms as it is.

http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/books-that-cook-the-making-of-a-literary-meal-by-jennifer-cognard-black-and-melissa-a-goldwaite/

Curt Schilling

Posted on 8 March 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 6 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So long it’s been good to know ya’ — 11 February 2015

Posted on 11 February 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

I stopped paying attention to television news reporting about 30 years ago, when it was the mainstay of information for a significant number of Americans, so whether Brian Williams deserves his current treatment is, among others, not for me to say. I do know I find it strange that this sequence of events, about fairly recent past occurrences easily verified, demonstrates, with no demur from any of Mr. Williams professional colleagues, who are being stone silent, that all concerned, the newsmakers, the news reporters, and the public have a bizarre relationship with the truth, which clearly is based more on questions of attitude and trust, as opposed to proof and credibility. Why is there so much shock and dismay? What Williams fabricated, for whatever reason, is small potatoes compared to the constant stream of mendacity, fantasy, and deliberate misdirection that make up the course of what we’re told about the world daily.

Once Again Into the Björk

Posted on 23 January 2015 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

With the intention of listening painstakingly (I mean this word as literally as possibly it has ever been used) to each cut on Vulnicura, which is Björk’s newest album released two days ago, and having made it so far through most of one song I have this much to observe.

She seems to speak English as the circumstances require. I don’t know what the circumstances of recording this album may have been, but she speaks it in the lyrics (which she wrote) as if it were, say, a 27th or 32nd language, after a great many more more important ones in front of it. I guess I should say she sings them, but the singing, hmmmm, how shall I say this?… Having been given to understand that she is admired by some musicians for the extraordinary range of her voice (I could only account for previous experiences attempting to listen to her music, and about which I recall mainly very high pitched keening, and very low pitched moaning—so I guess technically it is correct to say “range” and it is also, as far as I’m concerned, appropriate to say “extraordinary;” I don’t know that I’d use the two terms together, and I know that previously I had an extraordinary amount of trouble allowing myself to use the term “singing” with regard to whatever she is doing with her voice) I thought I’d give her performing another chance.

All I can say, beyond what I’ve said, at least with regard to that first song, “Stonemilker,” which I’m supposing has something to do, at least by some law of allowing variation at one or two removes, with the expression “you can’t get blood from a stone” and so maybe the song is about something impossible that occurred in spite of expectations to the contrary, and that this something has to do with emotions (disclosure: I looked at the booklet that accompanies the album and I see that the English word “emotional” does appear at least twice in the lyrics; I had to read it, because I couldn’t quite decipher it from the sounds emanating from my high fidelity loudspeakers). In all events, just to finish my very preliminary observations, and only about one song, what the English she is pronouncing sounds like is a rendition of what a person in the process of being strangled would sound like, as the English, by way of scientific linguistic description, is at best, strangulated, very highly accented, but with no discernible roots as to the native language of the speaker.

Having listened to that much, I realized that though there have been many forays on my part, boldly and intrepidly, to make my way through an entire album in the past (Biophilia, her last album, and a masterpiece by some accounts, was simply beyond my obviously far too fragile and undeveloped sensibilities), I have never heard any recordings or appearances wherein she had a conversation with another living human creature. So I repaired as we all do in such circumstances to Youtube, and found that she had appeared and been recorded as a guest on several talk shows. One of these was British, and the other was German, though the interview was conducted in English.

I was astonished to hear her speak with a perfect British accent in the former, almost an exact rendition of the accent of her interviewer, the host of the program. I was then further astonished, listening to the German TV show, that her accent had been transfigured entirely into a German inflected sort of English, again, an exact recapitulation of her host’s accent speaking his otherwise perfectly fluent English.

It was also in this latter interview that she responded to the host’s questions about her travel through Germany by train, and she explained, when he pointed out that it was certainly to be anticipated that a celebrity of her stature might be expected to travel by plane, as she could certainly afford it, that she didn’t like to fly because, as she put it in her minuscule soprano German-inflected little girl voice, “The air pressure forces the molecules to go tiny.”

What rushed back into my consciousness, more or less simultaneously, as a kind of aggregate wave of thoughts, essentially a tsunami of cognitive energy, billions of synapses firing simultaneously, was that every previous impression of Björk to which I had allowed myself to be subjected had been exactly the same, and that is, she is clearly the most famous, and possibly the largest, dingbat on the planet.

Stay tuned, as I subject myself to further cuts on this new album.

I will try to capture my impressions, if it’s possible.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/vulnicura/id960042103

Response to an Interview with David Byrne in Salon (December 2013)

Posted on 2 December 2014 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

“Do you really think people are going to keep putting time and effort into this if no one is making any money?”

What always vitiates the value of these kinds of discussions is the emphasis is always on the economics, when, it seems to me, the real conflict is in the arena of ethics.

Where the two converge is about a cultural phenomenon, always a part of the ethos of American life, but especially since the advent of broadcast media, that is, radio and television, whereby there is an expectation of entitlement about that which is offered unbidden and is always received passively. What these media taught the entire economy and all of its constituents, but especially the largest segment, that of consumers, is that somehow what entertains them—the substance of the transaction that occurs between producers and consumers—is free, because, after they acquire access to the means of reception, it costs them nothing but time, the time of consumption. This phenomenon, and the underlying attendant matrix of the value proposition, has only intensified, of course, and likely has exponentially, if not logarithmically, multiplied since the advent of the Internet.

It’s rarely asked expressly if this is fair. I would go further and point out that except among the producers and the talent (or artists, if you prefer that terminology) this question never ever arises among the consuming population… neither expressly, or even implicitly.

And of course, culprits must always be found, without so much as lifting a finger to exercise even the most rudimentary tools of analysis. Spotify is the latest avatar of the rapacious spectre of technology, exploiting, if not virtually raping, the talent that provides the raw flesh so eagerly devoured by an increasingly voracious public. A 30-second inquiry online reveals, with figures and charts supplied by Spotify themselves (who, whatever else they may be desirous of hiding, are not hiding the gross statistics about who pays and what’s being paid). It seems that as of the latest figures, just slightly more than 20% of the listeners to Spotify are paid subscribers (why this category is always called “premium” is not only mystifying, but, as well, gets my hackles up for its small contribution to the degradation of meaning in the language). Presumably whatever other revenue Spotify receives arrives in the form of advertising, which is undoubtedly not offered at premium prices (I don’t know much, but I know about advertising, and the fact is, ironically, true premium audiences—high spending, well-heeled consumers of carriage trade products—are accessible through media that can command higher prices for such access). I have no doubt, unless the owners and management of Spotify are utterly unscrupulous, that if the ratio of paid to unpaid subscribers were reversed, there would be a lot more hard capital to distribute and there would be far less talk of how the musicians are exploited.

But people, that is, the consuming public, don’t want to pay for anything (from taxes for public services to the cost of certain consumer goods and services in the economy that have been devalued systematically because of a long history of deferred and indirect payment—for example, marketing costs are part of the purchase price; or, the entire infrastructure of the Internet, constituting a system, and utterly blind to and ignorant of the actual content of the data stream, which is the sole product of that system, is a closed economic engine, with disproportionate distribution of the flow of revenue, with the least of it going to the preponderance of those actually creating that content).

It’s always been the case, since the invention of radio, that people cannot be educated to value creative goods. As long as art is seen as a luxury (and that is its history), it will be expected that truly only the rich can afford it. If people paid for their Spotify or their Pandora, the increasing imbalance (with artists getting the increasingly smaller share of the distribution of wealth) will only worsen.

All of this is in the context of free enterprise, of course, and no one (for practical purposes) is questioning that Spotify or whoever is entitled to find a way to create a product or service that people will use, and in using it somehow will generate revenue at an acceptable level of profitability. What is not clear (as unclear as it is to David Byrne what he is actually being paid in royalties by Spotify, if anything) is whether there is a formula stipulated whereby someone knows what proportion of their subscribers must pay for the service so that artists get a fair and equitable share, given their contribution and popularity.

Finally, and I’ll say the least about this, even though there is more to be said about this than any other factor, greed as a factor is incalculable, because greed is the first thing that gets hidden, whether it’s in demeanor, facial expression, or the double-entry accounting. Eliminate greed, and you eliminate a lot of the murkiness of the economic picture. But ethics is where I started these remarks, and as for greed, the notion that “radix malorum est cupiditas” was ancient even before Chaucer immortalized it The Canterbury Tales (for which he was paid handsomely, in kind).

Social Media and the Erosion of Values

Posted on 8 May 2013 by howard

Approximate Reading Time: 14 minutes

Flattened Preferences and Decaying Judgment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1standarddeviation

for the long haul reader who likes to think

Category Archives: Zeitgeist

The New Newspeak

more often than not what you read on this blog is inspired, though I tend to think of it as provoked, by something I’ve heard or seen or read, especially on the Internet. the link below is the provocation in this case

So long it’s been good to know ya’ — 11 February 2015

Once Again Into the Björk

Response to an Interview with David Byrne in Salon (December 2013)