As if Per Diem were not sufficient for a world not yet fully prepared for its dubious wisdom and antic ways with the English language, I have decided to launch (or actually re-launch) a blog devoted to the subject of art. It's called Art Long, and it was originally intended, starting some three years ago, and a bit more, to be brought to the world under somewhat other auspices and by a different hand than mine. The explanation is on the blog, if you click the "About" link.

There is also a first entry, mercifully brief, and also written by another, being a short quotation from a book, a psychobiography, about Diane Arbus the troubled brilliant photographer who took her own life in 1972 and entered the canon long since. Arguably even before she died.

I'll repeat that entry here, which I will do for a while, as I begin to populate Art Long with posts. It's a way of priming the pump, to direct some sparse traffic there. I won't wear out my arm, or any other part for sure, as I pump as, at any one time, there are barely more than about 30 reliable regular readers of these posts on Per Diem. But, as the saying goes, it's a start. Not a false one, but given the numbers, a quick one.

I hope you enjoy it. It will not be like the carnival ride here, to use one of my repeated metaphors, but it should be fun nevertheless.

Here's the URL for Art Long: http://artlong.net

And here's that quotation you'll find there:

"Art is not intrinsically therapeutic. It doesn't always allow us to rise above. Instead, it can be an immersion in products of self-expression that mirror our troubles back to us so that we see them metaphorically, but still glaringly. Then it's a matter of what we do with the information, what we make of it. We can turn away again, re-repress what we've inadvertently discovered, or try some means of assimilation."

— William Todd Schultz, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, New York, 2011. P.27

by

I like to make regular and passing allusion to my tendency to write at great length about just about anything. Friends and loved ones (inevitably one and the same) obligingly and conscientiously acknowledge what is possibly a character flaw, by skirting around what might easily be interpreted by someone as thin-skinned as I can be at times as a personal injury. They point out that not many people can write, never mind spontaneously respond, as volubly, with the added ability of typing incredibly fast, faster than some people allow they are comfortable thinking about something they would then have to commit themselves to putting into words that could be repeated back to them.

Though I am mindful, somewhere in the back corridors of my mind, of the hazards of what is commonly called “popping off” or “venting” I nonetheless invariably proceed, seemingly heedlessly. In actuality I make a splint-second split-second decision, usually electing not to act at all, rather than to speak, invariably at painful length. If I decide to write something, I don’t look back. And invariably I do so, using the same, or seemingly same, convoluted, discursive, complex-structured, Latinate, digressive prose. I use every device I am at all familiar with, rhetorical or grammatical, including all the ways of setting off clauses and phrases, independent and dependent, so that sentences grow and grow, seemingly mindlessly, sometimes in a variety of directions, or with that appearance, to what looks like will be indeterminate length until they loop back and come to a conclusion, logically complete, if having all the air of a chaos demanding to be deconstructed to see if it will surrender any meaning, much like the rag-tag collection of stalwarts holding the Alamo against Santa Ana’s army of 5,000 men under arms, refusing to surrender their small redoubt even as the chapel belied a kind of vulnerability to easy assault.

Now I would never offer as a defense for the way I choose to express myself the style of much greater masters of the language than myself, or, if they prove not greater, because I prove to be none the lesser, in the long run—the run not likely to end until the regrettable day that I am no longer around to be challenged to defend myself—then at least they have proven to be more enduring, and more deserving of tolerance and dedication to the onslaughts of followers seeking to quarry sense from the deep mines of writing they have excavated, though at least, for their good sake, they don’t seem to provoke the anger and frustration that I do (from a very much smaller audience of admirers and devotees). Hence, I am mainly challenged for the length of my little exercises in rhetoric, which I humbly and modestly call essays, for that is what they are, in a great tradition, purely and simply because I do not, as the repugnant common saying goes, “getting down to cases.” I am never asked who my nobler predecessors might be, whom I, presumably, either mimic or to whom I pay homage. Surely there are none so erudite, knowledgeable and at the same time engaged in a serious way, worthy of spending their time, by my prose, to venture theories as to my possible inspirations. It would be too much to ask not only that such readers lend any of their valuable attention to my modest and undeserving efforts, but that they accord it enough seriousness of purpose, such dignity, as to embody a reflection of, dare I use the term? literary forebears.

Other than suggesting, defiantly, with a certain air of pity, that those who complain are free, in all events, not to read it, and having already acquainted themselves with the daunting task of extracting sense, if not pleasure or edification, out of my outpourings, and having persuaded themselves that whatever else they might stumble upon from me will simply be more of the same, they should altogether, henceforth ignore anything with my byline, I say nothing. Just to be safe. I abhor physical abuse.

In the earlier years of my putting my writing out there to be consumed, or having been, to be regurgitated into the metaphorical toilet, half-eaten or, more likely, merely tasted with a bite or two—notice I speak not of “digestion”— I did suggest to those who seemed even moderately literate that, clearly, they were not familiar with the work of Henry James (not that I want to make favorable comparisons between that master and my lowly self; not that my writing is remotely Jamesian, for style, not that anyone, as it turns out, is remotely knowledgeable about style and willing to engage me in conversation about it; I do have to make clear, at this point, that both conditions are absolutely necessary, as I do know people more than adequately knowledgable in the arena of style to go on, more expertly I would guess than I could) and I did that only because he was, at the time, the most recognizable of writers within the canon with a reputation for verbosity (which your garden variety reader could not see justified to any purpose, that is, to say with no appreciation for that elusive and sometimes incomprehensible quality of the written language called “style”). But there are such readers as know style and know James and at least one or two of them have done me the good grace of actually reading through an entire essay of mine. They have simply preferred not to talk about it.

It happens that, in the fullness of time, others have appeared in the literary firmament, far better illuminated, than me for certain, but also, alas for the slightly younger of the two sons of the elder Mr. William James, than Mr. Henry James, and these new constellations, for sure, studied, and usually studied assiduously, seriously, and in dedicated fashion, the subject of scholarly theses and earnest debates. A school of writing in a particular style, such as the one I have fragmentarily defined as typical of my own, has been discerned, the chief practitioner, the ascendant avatar, especially as he did his literary reputation the favor of offing himself as a very young man (48), and quite recently, which has given his canon a lift, and increased it by some multiple as his canonization (he seemed to have to endure the briefest of beatifications, but then we live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and patience, as a concept, has been delegitimized, as there is nothing worth waiting for that can’t be had right NOW, goddamnit) is a man who, when he walked the earth, was called David Foster Wallace. There is a whole assembly of writers, essentially mainly young (let’s say under 60) males, white, and all of whom seem to go by three names, much like a whole gaggle of a new generation of female movie actresses that, by definition, excludes or stops at Ms. Natalie Portman, who apparently has eschewed her middle name. It is also typical of the current lauded sensibility, which glows around the school of style in question, like an aura, that some of the most approachable—Mr. Wallace and his works were and are not always wholly approachable, as nearly as I can figure because he was a genius, unquestionably, and could speak of philosophy and higher order mathematics with equal facility, if nearly impossible accessibility to the visitor, and it is mainly his writing in these disciplines, which apparently somewhat opaquely actually purports to be about more universal and humanistic matters, more like literature, but merely in the guise of philosophical inquiry and/or mathematical analysis—of the contemporary practitioners might as easily be recognized a nominal very ordinary combination of a singular forename and unhyphenated or compounded surname. So for every Jonathan Safran Fore, there’s a Michael Chabon, indeed, for every Brett Easton Ellis, there may be half a dozen: Jonathan Franzen, Orhan Pamuk, etc., though this begins to trespass beyond the boundaries of consideration I’ve set, which is to say, the practitioners of what has come to be called a form of postmodernism, the greatest living practitioner of which, within the parameters of gender and age I’ve set, is David Eggers. Be that as it may, let me remind the reader that I am, in fact, talking about me. It’s about me, and my style. And the exemplary practitioner of that same opaque, convoluted, discursive, digressive, every technical typographic, rhetorical, scholarly, grammatical trick in the book or whatever you like to call the vehicle as long as it is constituted of typography represented technologically upon a substrate, actual or virtual is the self-same deceased individual formerly known as David Foster Wallace.

However, not really wishing to be disruptive to the reputation of formerly living geniuses, or to cause any ripples in the time-space continuum—which seems a fitting concern for anyone who takes the notion of postmodern writing styles seriously—I nevertheless finally come to the really rather simple point I wanted to make about this still living author, with no claims to any extraordinary powers of intellect or sensibility, but who has done all right, is that there is, indeed (and who else would know, but me?), a conscious predecessor. Way precedent to Mr. Wallace, or any of his tri-named or even nominally nominal confréres, or any American writer (for the idea of America may have existed, but the nation we know as the United States was not to form for 18 years after the death of my literary exemplar and inspiration) was a man named Laurence Sterne, and, more importantly, his sadly singular novel (though he wrote other important prose works), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It was published sequentially in slender nine volumes from 1758 to 1765, in which latter year, the Reverend Sterne died. It could have been, was intended to be, and should have been, of much greater length, especially when we consider—for those who have not read the work, as who has save for a relative handful of living souls in any one generation—that the novel opens with an account of the conception of the titular hero and subject (and narrator, off and on) and ends several hundred riotous, raucous and digressive pages later, in an aggregate volume with typographical tricks, printing devices, and tropes that have come, only lately, to be labeled “meta-” without our hero even having been born as yet. And so the story ends, for all eternity, or until the sun we know as Sol goes super nova and evaporates our little planet, whichever comes first.

I won’t belabor all the inspiring aspects of the novel, philosophically and otherwise. Save for this stylistic note, and my one gloss and point of observation is simple and rather brief: two sentences I can honestly say I chose randomly, these from Chapter 37, quite early in the novel as we have it, as it turns out. Don’t ask what these mean. They won’t make whatever sense they may unless you read the entire novel. But then, I write in similar fashion, however feeble and poor are my contrivances by comparison, for what I understand to be the same reasons. To keep the reader paying attention and thinking, and to read the whole bloody thing!

And so, here’s the quotation:

The doctrine, you see, was laid down by Erasmus, as my father wished it, with the utmost plainness ; but my father’s disappointment was, in finding nothing more from so able a pen, but the bare fact itself; without any of that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which heaven had bestow’d upon man on purpose to investigate truth and fight for her on all sides. —- My father pish’d and pugh’d at first most terribly, — ’tis worth something to have a good name.

Posted with Marsedit

by

This past Black Friday I wandered into the local branch of the Macy’s department store chain. It’s a small outlet in this neighborhood, in the semi-revitalized town of Ardmore on the Main Line of Philadelphia. The store is located in what has come to be called Suburban Square, a largely upscale suburban mall, built on the design I’ve come to call the Pennsylvania Model.

There are, I’ve learned since moving here permanently a little over a year ago, instances of the same shopping paradigm even in my former home state of Massachusetts, and in particular the Factory Outlet mall located in Wrentham. I won’t try my usual ploy of making like a minor league (in truth, more like a Little League) Jane Jacobs, and attempt my own half-assed version of analysis of architectural phenomena as expressions of larger social and cultural trends, currents, and indicators of the status quo of civilization as we know it here in the so-called civilized world. Suffice it to say that it’s a model for shopping, running the gamut from staples and groceries to the kind of high-end merchandise you’d expect to see—immaterial whether it’s discounted or full price, as in the spectrum from Wrentham to Ardmore, where the one serves a large swath of the dwindling middle class, and the other serves a concentrated population of consumers who can amply afford to drive the luxury marque SUV vehicles, the bigger the better, that clog the parking lot of Suburban Square for about ten hours every day. And it’s a model, it would seem, designed to inconvenience as many shoppers as possible, and increase the general pollution levels, by forcing drivers intending to shop at several stores in a session to park their vehicles serially in widely dispersed parking areas.

The larger malls of this design, which are predominant in this area of Pennsylvania, can cover vast tracts of land, sometimes across multiple criss-crossing super highways which allow transport from a widespread number of communities in all directions. Invariably, there are multitudinous anchor stores, let’s say, a Target, a Macy’s, Bed Bath and Beyond, often a hypermarket of a supermarket chain (around here it’s Giant, say, but could as easily be Whole Foods, or the truly mammoth Wegman’s), a Sears, a Best Buy… in brief running a spectrum of merchandise categories at a variety of price points. The higher end malls might even include the most prestigious of resellers, like Nordstrom or Nieman Marcus. However the latter seem to cleave to the rare mall around here that caters to much higher-income consumers in aggregate emporia built on the more centralized, atrium design villages I am used to in the upper middle class suburbs of Boston. In these, you park in one fairly accessible, central garage (they’re very often covered or underground) and you spend long periods of time shopping, knowing you will never have to brave the elements, or starve yourself, because there are better quality eateries studded throughout, or get dehydrated or thirsty for a beverage designed to slake your refined tastes, as these are served at watering holes of like distinction.

This is as opposed to the dispersed far-spread colonies of clustered storefronts of the Pennsylvania Model. In this model you see repeated endlessly a kind of mammoth strip mall looped together to form a shopping duchy or enclave, complete with its own police force, streets, lighting, etc, and all open to the weather in all seasons. If you must shop a gamut of stores, you are forced either to hike a significant distance over the fullness of time, while shlepping your purchases, or repeatedly to get in your car, cross the network of internal driveways and byways, under- and overpasses, to get to another parking ground, search for yet another empty spot and besiege the next cluster of shops. For food and drink, there are food courts in certain of these clusters, or there are free-standing outlets, of such fast-food favorites as, well, the usual suspects. Bars tend to be massive sports bars, with banks of flat screen monitors, and yards and yards of bars interspersed with high-top tables and counters, specifically designed to leave you uncomfortable enough not to want to linger past the time required to suck down a pint or two of your favorite brew, and scarf a bowl of chips and salsa, a platter of wings, or a mini-pizza or a range of equally nutritious fillers. Necessarily it can take a day just to fill the demands of a basic shopping list of needs, never mind those discretionary purchases and high-ticket items we’re hit with barrages of ads to acquire periodically.

There is, I don’t doubt, a perfectly sensible rational explanation for making the shopping experience as loathsome, costly, unhealthy and unsafe as possible. Though, with no real alternative, people are equally loathe to think about it, never mind let the thought form that there’s a perfectly good explanation as well for their normative constant state of mild vexation and frustration. My guess is that the availability of real estate across large tracts is never sufficiently timely to allow very large scale advance planning, never mind cost-effective ways of gathering titles to contiguous parcels, to allow planning on a grand centralized scale. Pennsylvania is a much larger state than Massachusetts, albeit it was settled originally at the same time. The cities are bigger, and more spread out. Where Boston is quite compact, and, because of its relatively smaller size in several dimensions, like population and land area, combined with the constraint of having been, virtually, an island until the middle of the 19th century, Philadelphia is relatively gigantic and spread out. Further, Philadelphia was always surrounded by relatively endless farmland in three directions, until quite recently, and so the population seeking to find refuge away from a decaying center is much larger and with much greater room to spread itself. But I promised not to try to be Jane Jacobs.

Having described the larger context for my highly localized observations to come, I’ve reached the beginning of the meat of my thinking. While on the impromptu shopping excursion with which I began—I was in Macy’s incidentally because I recalled having read on a corporate web site that the department store chain was an official dealer of Citizen brand watches; I was curious to see one model up close… as I expected, quite frankly, it was not an in-stock item. In store, I noticed a large display of Macy’s promotional artwork. It’s necessary to explain further, at this point, that one of the lifetime over-arching themes of the Macy’s brand is the integration of the symbol of a star, that is, a graphic representation of a star, as part of the enduring identity of the brand.

The pentangle, or five pointed star, usually in red, is festooned throughout the store, advertising, merchandising, signage, packaging, and so forth, and has done for years. The symbol is allegedly reminiscent of a star tattoo that R.H. Macy, the founder (way back when, in Haverhill, Massachusetts), had had applied to his body as a young man, working on a whaling ship. The symbol, by now emblematic, is ubiquitous. It serves as the apostrophe in the name. It is the name of the shopper rewards program. Currently it is also how Macy’s designates the designers with whom they have contracted to sell on a licensed basis exclusive merchandise in the chain’s stores and designed by those individuals.

Several individuals have famously associated their names in similar fashion with other chains. Infamously, Martha Stewart, for example, owns a brand featured at a number of chains, usually on an exclusive basis for certain categories of goods. After her felonious run-in with U.S. laws regarding conduct surrounding the trade in securities (and her subsequent prison term) the Stewart brand ran afoul for a while, especially with Kmart and its parent, Sears. Probably not coincidentally Stewart has had a prior relationship with Macy’s as well, though that specifically is not in my sights here. These are not idle associations. Stewart’s brand generates over a billion dollars a year in sales for her company. Not insignificant by any means. You might surmise, as I do, that much of this money comes out of the pocketbooks and wallets of folks somewhat less well-heeled than the 1% who have been vilified one way or another for over a year now, since some portion of the other 99% decided to target the tiny well-heeled portion of our populace for fiddling while the rest of us burn.

I guess at least part of my point is that individuals the likes of Martha Stewart are entrenched members of that 1% club by virtue of the trade they do with the great unwashed. This much larger constituency would generally include, I’m afraid, those SUV drivers in Suburban Square, or out further in the ‘burbs, and wherever they shop, Pennsylvania Model mall or the more protective and embracing confines of a more sensibly designed mall. At any time, whether interested in the goods or not, it’s a safe bet that anyone is never more than a half-hour’s ride in their vehicle from an outlet for brands styled after actual people, and not merely invented personalities. Or, I wonder, is that “merely” a false distinction.

Even as much as we may know this person or that to be a real human being, at some point in our consciousness they acquire a more mythic dimension to his or her personality or character. We already think we know who that person is, and what kind of human being they are, purely on the basis of what we can only know as a manufactured product. Either we know literally the products they have nominally designed or we know the product, the persona, that goes by the same name they do, and essentially just as consciously designed in advance and “manufactured” by means of manipulation of information about them that appears publicly. We actually know as little about Martha Stewart, for sure and for true, as we do about some anonymous soul who lives on the other side of the earth in a proverbial, clichéd teeming ghetto. The same is true of Ralph Lauren or Philippe Starck, of Kate Spade or Michael Graves.

On this particular day, that poster with the name of the Macy’s Star that caught my eye featured this photo below her name, Betsey Johnson.

I hope it’s sufficient to say, though I didn’t recognize Ms. Johnson, by sight, I did know her brand, as women within my ken are her customers by whatever remove (can we say that we are customers of an even better known brand, of far greater global reach among many consumers, namely, Apple? Of course we can). What sprang to mind, however, was a far more fictive creation, at least insofar as the gargoyle of a face with that rictus of aggressive dental work that looks to me like, to paraphrase a famous description of the Duchamp painting of “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a display in a bathroom tile showroom reminded me of anything. It was this famous image, so famous as to have attained to that ne plus ultra of hipster recognition in the zeitgeist, a universal meme.

What I found myself wondering were several connected manifold questions.

Why would someone allow herself to be so transfigured, in life, or even in a mere manipulated photograph, as to appear like a notorious caricature of an even more notorious villain (I acknowledge that to some, perhaps too many, he is still somehow a hero, a thwarted hero, but heroic for his intentions), a symbol of vengeance, if not vindictiveness? What has Betsey Johnson, the avatar of a certain standard of stylishness to do with vengeance? An inquiry into what sort of style she stands for is irrelevant to these considerations. It’s enough to consider that one of the largest retailers in the largest national consumer market on the planet has elected not only to contract for the use of her name and the resale of her merchandise, but has chosen as well, no matter what Ms. Johnson’s say may have been in the matter, to depict her in a way that I can’t help but describe as grotesque and at the same time so etiolated that it borrows conclusively and inevitably from an image that is, in addition to being global and inescapable, bound in identity with vaguely sinister, yet, we are to believe, vaguely noble causes.

It suggests that the denizens of innumerable winding and lengthy suburban driveways in their own ennoblement, sitting atop 300+-horsepower gargantuan mechanisms, each a self-contained paean to consumption, feel some kind of kinship to what is, at present, more than an avatar of pre-adolescent male fantasies of anonymous skullduggery in the larger world that otherwise renders the fantasist null and powerless, but a symbol of ultimate vindication for (literally) billions of downtrodden people who worry, not about where to spend four weeks of winter vacation in some remote corner of the globe, but worry where they will be able to seek shelter within a month, or a fortnight, or a week, or that very night. And if any of these misbegotten victims of the inequities of life in the 21st century could steal into the back or, as we charmingly call it here in the suburbs, the “way-back,” of any of these luxuriant conveyances, they would do so in an instant. And no more defense for their actions, if caught, than a grin of the same rueful force as the Old Guy himself, if not Ms. Johnson.

by

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.

by

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.

by

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