Andrew Ordover's Blog: Scenes from a Broken Hand, page 10
December 30, 2023
Resolved
I was never much of a New Year’s Resolution guy. When I did bother to make promises on December 31, I managed to keep them at pretty much the same rate as everyone else—i.e., not at all. Still, the idea of looking back and thinking ahead is a nice one. I’d like to find a way to do it that’s meaningful to me—a way that might actually stick.
In Jewish tradition, the High Holy Days are meant for reflection, atonement, and cleaning the slate to prepare for a new year (the Jewish new year begins in the fall). There’s even a ritual in which you take lint from your pockets (or bread crumbs, if you prefer) and cast them into a body of water as a performance of ridding yourself of the stuff you no longer want in your life. I’ve always liked that. But the rest of the world is thinking about the turning of the year now, at the start of winter. Is there something I can make use of now, that could ground resolutions and make them more meaningful?
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Chanukah, our winter holiday, can be a strange one unless you’re a child or have children. Once the gift giving and dreidel playing is out of your life, it’s hard to know what to do with the holiday, if anything. It’s hard not to get overwhelmed by and swept up in the Christmas of it all. Which is fine. I’m used to dealing with that. But if you can get past the “Eight Crazy Nights” aspect of Chanukah, there is something serious in there that’s worth making use of as an adult.
The holiday is meant to be about dedication. The historical event it commemorates is the reclamation of the Israelites’ temple from the pagans who had taken it over and desecrated it with idols and pigs’ blood. The Israelites clean the temple, purify it, and re-sanctify it (that’s where the miracle comes in—they only had enough oil to light the lamp for day, while new oil was being prepared, but it lasted eight days). They reclaim and rededicate. They start over. So…we could use the occasion to think about the idea of dedication and reclamation in our own lives. That’s what people in the Jewish Renewal movement did with the holiday, back when I used to read about them. I always thought it was a smart approach, though I never did anything with it.
This year, with my two sons fully grown and not expecting gifts and doodads every night, and especially in the weeks after the horrific events of October 7 in Israel, I wanted to do something more real with the holiday. So I decided to use each candle—each night—as a way to think about some aspect of my life that needed focus and dedication. I figured I could use those reflections (which I posted on Threads throughout the holiday) as my new year’s resolutions.
I decided to start close and work my way outward. The first candle was all about my past. What dreams, hopes, and beliefs from my earlier years had I let slide, or allowed myself to lose? What did I need to rededicate myself to in the coming year? That was my focus for the first night.
The second night was all about present-day me: mental health, physical health, spiritual health. What was I not paying attention to while focused on wife, children, work, etc.? This was the easy one, to some degree: eat better, exercise more, lose weight, meditate. The usual New Year’s Resolution stuff. It will probably fall by the wayside before anything else, but…maybe I can try better this year.
For the third night, I focused on my future. I turned 60 this year. What things required commitment and re-dedication from me as I looked ahead and thought about what I wanted my third act to look like? What did I say to myself at my birthday and then promptly forget when things got busy?
The fourth candle was for my family. With my wife trying to get through Long Covid, with its endless fatigue and brain fog, and both adult sons living at home for the time being until they get their next steps managed, family has been front of mind for me this year. But dedication to other people has to mean more than doing what I think is best; it has to mean giving them what they need, and listening to learn what that is. I want to be better at that in the coming year.
The fifth candle was for my friends. I'm a middle-aged male, typical of my species in my lack of care and feeding of close friendships, especially with other men. I could do better. I want to try to do better. Loneliness can be a killer, and being silent or un-forthcoming in a friendly but superficial crowd isn't much better.
The sixth candle was for my community: the town I live in, the school board I serve on, the company I work for. Where is more focus, more dedication, more intentionality required of me? I did a whole presentation earlier this month for my company’s sales reps, talking about "intentionality of implementation." Where in my life do I need to heed my own words and be more mindful and purposeful for my community?
The seventh candle was focused on my country. This one was hard. I know I need to find ways to be of help and of use in the upcoming election. It’s going to be a strange and maybe scary year. I’m not sure what I have time and energy for, and what I can do, myself, to fight against the inevitable ugliness and partisanship and primal reactiveness. But I should do something.
With the final candle, I thought about the health and safety of the Jewish people, worldwide. As an American who grew up in the 60s and 70s, it’s not something I ever really worried about, or felt I had to. I grew up safe and mostly ambivalent. It took me until my 40s to feel comfortable saying “I’m a Jew" out loud. I still hesitate a little before writing about it in any public forum like this. But, again, especially after October 7 and the alarming rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric and threats, there's no room for ambivalence now. About the Israeli government and its policies, yes; about who I am, no.
Resolutions that expect you to magically become someone you’re really not (someone “better”) are bound to fail. We can only be who we are, and who we are has to be enough. But maybe if we focus on the best parts of ourselves—even if some of those parts lie latent or hidden—maybe if we dedicate ourselves to being ourselves, in the best way possible, we can have a better, stronger, and happier new year.
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December 14, 2023
My New Book!
I spent the first 15 years of my post-college life in theater as a playwright, an occasional director, and, for a while, a member of an extremely off-off-Broadway theater company. When the members of our little band started to drift away, and when new fatherhood started making financial and attentional demands of me, I put that world behind me, wondering if I’d ever return to it.
I didn’t—or, to be precise, I haven’t to date. For a while, the world of curriculum-writing fed my creative side and my storytelling urge. When that became less new and exciting (or maybe when I moved up into management and did less day-to-day writing), I started writing fiction. It let me tell stories without having to cajole actors, rent halls, and invest in costume designs and set construction. It’s very efficient.
I published my first novel, Cool for Cats, in 2011. The fun idea (for me, anyway) was to craft a fairly straightforward mystery, but to have it driven by the least hard-boiled, least detective-y kind of character I could imagine: a Jewish slacker in his 30s, raised on Long Island but transplanted to Atlanta, GA, a guy who once thought he might go to med school but instead wound up working dead-end day-jobs and playing jazz with friends on his front porch. A nice guy with no real drive or ambition, and certainly no desire to engage in physically or emotionally risky behavior. I gave him a smart, sexy wife and some cool friends to hang out with. I wanted them to feel like real people, living comfortably in a real place. People you’d enjoy hanging out with. I gave him the most anti-Raymond-Chandler-esque name I could think of—Jordan Greenblatt. I gave him every reason not to move, then set about trying to force him to move—to take a risk, take a stand, and do something brave.
I published a second novel about Jordan in 2016, entitled The Cat Came Back, in which Jordan goes back to his college campus, working undercover as a grad student, to help an administrator friend find the source of a powerful and dangerous new drug that’s preying on the student body. It gave me a chance to show Jordan dealing with his early 40s, and it also let me have some fun with college theater departments.
I did an interview for an indie-publishing support platform called Circle of Books, which you can find here, if you’re interested in more blather from me about writing.
The reason I’m talking about all of this is: I’ve finally finished and released a third novel, entitled Cats in the Cradle. And, yes, enough with the too-clever-use-of-song-titles-with-the-word-cat-in-them thing. I think I’m done. Jordan might be done, too. I’m not sure.
This one is a little darker than the first two, and it took a long time to grapple with the subject matter and bring it in for a landing. But now it’s finished, and it’s out, and I’m excited to have six or seven people read it. Here’s the description you’ll find on Amazon:
Bill and Robinette Tomlinson think their prayers have been answered when they bring two foster children into their suburban Atlanta home. But when the birth mother is released from jail and fights to get her children back, the kids don’t just move away; they disappear. And so does the mother. And soon, so does Bill. Unsure what to do, Robinette turns for help to her college friend, Jordan Greenblatt, recently retired as a private investigator. What starts as a simple favor for a friend turns into a deadly search through small, South Georgia towns and the darkest recesses of the Internet. What kind of web has trapped Bill and the children—and can Jordan untangle it in time to save them?
You can buy the eBook or paperback here. Or, if you want a deeper dive, you can go back to Cool for Cats and start the Jordan journey there, here.
Or, you know, you can pass on all of that and just read my occasional Substack posts. That’s fine by me. I’m happy to have found an open seat here in this virtual pub, even if it’s at a small table in the farthest corner. I like being what my wife calls, “the boy with the beer in the corner” (a mangling of an old Roches lyric). I’ll be here at my table, keeping an eye on the rest of you and, you know…taking notes.
December 10, 2023
New World/Old World
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
The Atlantic Magazine will be devoting an entire, upcoming issue to warnings about what a second Donald Trump administration would look like. I admire their focus and determination, but I worry that it’s going to amount to yelling into the wind. They’ve published multiple warnings, but the people whose minds need to be changed don’t seem to be reading The Atlantic.
They had a depressing little article way back in 2017 about how the idea of America—the set of beliefs that animated people like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau—appeared to be disappearing with each passing generation, leaving only a dry husk of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia in its place. It inspired me to write much of what follows below, which felt relevant enough for me to resurrect from my old Blogger site and revise.
What the 2017 article was describing was not simply a matter of history replacing Old Dead White Men with something more modern and alive and progressive. In some ways, putting those people behind us may be regressive. Thomas Jefferson may have been a racist and a misogynist and even, perhaps, a rapist. I don’t know. But in the realm of politics, he was a revolutionary, and he helped lead a revolution in thinking. His generation had its faults, for sure, but they tried valiantly to break away from old ways of doing things in the old world and build something new here. Often they were hobbled by their own limitations and blind spots. Sometimes they succeeded.
When they did succeed, they tended to piss off a lot of people—and if they were among us today, they would piss off just as many. Early on, Jefferson tried to break the whole idea of protocol and grandeur by seating foreign diplomats at a round table and serving ordinary food. The dignitaries were furious. If someone were to do that today, we’d call them a Communist. Our leaders certainly don’t do that anymore. They know we love the pomp and pageantry. We love the grandeur of royalty and celebrities and glamor. Maybe we love it too much.
F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it coming as early as the 1920s, when he wrote, towards the end of The Great Gatsby:
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away – until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
According to that Atlantic article from 2017, on a scale of 1-10, less than a third of Americans born since 1980 assigned a 10 to the value of living in a democracy (as opposed to 3/4 of those born before WWII). A quarter of Millennials said it was not important to choose leaders in free elections, and a little less than a third thought civil rights were needed to protect civil liberties. The article didn’t talk about what or who those people thought would protect their liberties, absent a code of civil rights. Perhaps they thought Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk would have their backs. Maybe they thought Donald Trump would.
There was a time—just yesterday, really—when the average person’s safety depended on his allegiance to a local lord of some kind. The lord was part of the ruling class—the strong and wealthy and well-connected. They weren’t regular people, and regular people could not ascend or aspire to their level. In some places, rulers were considered gods; in others, they simply received their right to rule from God. Either way, they owned the wealth of the country, and they owned the land of the country, and those things were carefully managed and preserved and handed down from generation to generation.
This is important to understand: the ruling class didn’t just have a lot of money; they actually owned the country. A local warlord or strongman would be given a garrison and some parcel of land by the ruler, and his job was to hold it against invaders and other evil-doers. The regular people who happened to live on those lands were under the protection of that lord, and paid for that protection with…whatever was asked of them (just as the lord owed his life to his ruler). Perhaps the lord wanted a percentage of your crops. Perhaps the lord wanted you to serve as a soldier in his little army. Perhaps the lord wanted your daughter. All fair game. He didn’t just write the laws; he was the law. If you didn’t like the way he ran things, or the level of protection you and your family were afforded, or the price you had to pay to stay within his realm…too bad. In some lands and times, he actually, outright owned you. In others, he simply had such overwhelming power over you that he might as well have owned you.
That is the way things were, with minor variations, for most of us and for most of history. The strong and the wealthy owned and ruled, and the rest of us served their interests, their needs, and their appetites. The rulers took care of the poor to whatever extent they felt it was affordable and manageable. After all, they needed farmers and soldiers. There was work to be done…and they, the lords, were the ultimate owners of that work, regardless of who did it for them. The rich assumed that the fact of their wealth was an indication of their moral and spiritual worth, and the poor were taught that their poverty was a sign that there was something wrong with them, something that their lords suffered with patience and magnanimity, as God himself did.
What worries me—what the news seems to be telling me—is that this dynamic is baked deep into our bones. Something in us yearns for the strongman, for the big daddy, for the god who rewards and punishes. Something in us hungers for absolutes, for a world of black and white in which our group, our tribe, our people, live unquestionably within the “white.” Don’t let two hundred years of self-government inspired by the Enlightenment fool you. Two hundred years is nothing and the Enlightenment is constantly under threat, even in our schools.
If you look across human history, the idea of broadly applicable civil rights is not the norm—not by a long shot. Rule of law is not the norm. Representative democracy is definitely not the norm. Even a merchant/entrepreneurial class standing between the peasantry and the aristocracy is not the norm. If we assume that these things just happen, and will always be there for us, then we’re fools. The founders of our country and their more progressive descendants fought hard to bring these things into existence.
As the authors of the recent book, The Narrow Corridor, make clear, the conditions for having a country like ours are very particular, and are historically rare. Our “new world” requires a certain amount of central government power to get things done and a certain amount of public pressure and constraint to hold that power in check. It doesn’t happen everywhere, or often.
My fear is that, if we don’t understand and value that narrow corridor, the old ways of doing things will return. We saw it creep in during the Gilded Age, only to get pushed back by a couple of Presidents Roosevelt. And again, today, it’s returning.
The strong and the wealthy want to rule; they expect to rule; they are surprised and annoyed whenever constraints are put on them; and they fight, constantly, to remove those restraints and run free. They feel it is their right (or perhaps their moral burden), as exceptional people. They work very hard to make us think that it is in our best interests, too, to let them do as they please.
It seems to me that American politics at its core is not really about liberal or conservative cultural issues: it’s really a fight between those who want to constrain wealth and power enough to allow every citizen the freedom and means to pursue happiness, and those who feel the wealthy and powerful are entitled to whatever they can take. Some people call that “class warfare,” like it’s a bad thing. But maybe it’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s the real thing.
We value the freedom to do as we please, but we also value equity and fairness. Two great ideas that fit together like oil and water. American politics is not a stable, comfy thing; it's a state of eternal dynamic tension. It was built that way on purpose.
If we value personal freedom but also societal equity, we have to find ways to balance them. And “ways” means laws. Those with wealth and power are always well positioned to acquire more of both; those with neither are eternally at a disadvantage. Where we can’t do for ourselves, the force of law has to do for us. That’s what laws are for.
We were not promised happiness, but we were promised the ability to pursue happiness, and the laws of the land exist, to some extent, to allow each citizen a reasonable shot at that pursuit. The fair and equitable pursuit of happiness, regardless of birth circumstances, has never existed without structures put in place and held in place for that purpose. Without those laws, all you can do is ask pretty please for the wealthy and powerful to help you out. And they will, gladly….for a price. The historical norm, into which we could easily slide if we’re not careful, is some form of feudalism, where a tiny fraction of the population own everything…and everybody.
Donald Trump is not really a Republican or a Democrat; he’s a feudal lord dressed in a bad suit, confused about why all the little people are getting in his way. His every action, from the way he decorates his homes and addresses his adoring crowds to the way he takes what he wants when he wants it, speaks to this self-image. His plans for a second administration make it clear.
He does not exist to serve us; we exist to serve him. The only reason for our existence is to exalt him. The giant flags with his name on it make it clear that many of his supporters are happy with this state of affairs. As far as he is concerned, the country is his for the taking—his and his family’s. He has lived this way, unapologetically, for nearly 80 years. How he managed to bamboozle anyone into believing he cared about the “common man” as anything but the raw ingredients for his next meal amazes me, but there it is.
Am I just a liberal alarmist suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Maybe I am. But if we did slide into something like an American feudalism, what would it look like?
I think it would start with some simple beliefs that already rattle around our culture—things like basic health care not being a right; the government not owing you anything; all taxation being theft; the government needing to be small enough to drown in the bathtub; the desire to be left alone, to do what we will; unfettered individualism.
Those sound very American, very cowboy-like, very freeing. And they can be freeing and desirable…as long as you have cash. You're only free if you can afford to be free.
You can already see a creeping sort of feudalism in the way we think about health care. If you're wealthy, health care is a commodity you can buy. For everyone else, it has become a gift (a "benefit") to be bestowed upon you by your employer, because it's simply too expensive for most of us to afford on our own. And you’d better behave yourself if you want to hold onto that benefit. If you don’t like that, you can go with the rest of the bungled and the botched to the emergency room and throw yourself on their mercy. Of course, if taxation is theft, and everyone has to pay their way individually, 100%, you may not have that merciful option open to you for very long. But…too bad for you. That’s life. You are owed nothing; you are promised nothing; you should have worked harder.
Roads? Schools? Protection from fire? Protection from thieves? The rich and the powerful are happy to pay for those things…for themselves. But what happens if we really buy into the idea that taxation is theft--that the Haves owe nothing to their neighbors? Those who have will retreat to their gated compounds, where the roads are well tended. They will provision their estates wonderfully. And they will protect what they have ruthlessly. After all, there are so few of the blessed inside, and so many of the cursed outside. There is no social contract; there is only you, and you, and you.
Of course, a wide range of services will always be needed within these compounds. Someone will have to sweep the streets. Someone will need to teach the children. And so on. There will be jobs to be bestowed. And one assumes there will be some level of charitable giving, as well. The wealthy aren't monsters. If giving isn't mandated by law, it will be compelled by religion or ethics or whatever.
So...the gates will open, and the serving class will be allowed in, one by one—pledging their allegiance and their service to the lord and accepting his protection in return. Of course we’ll pledge our allegiance. What other choice will we have? If we destroy the idea of a government that we select and fund, whose functions and functionaries are beholden to voters, what will we have left but a ruling class that gets to make all the decisions by itself, for itself? And for us, too, when it occurs to them. Your lord might be an actual person, or it might be a corporation, but either way, the lord will hold power and the lord will grant privileges. “Rights” will be what you earn through your loyalty and hard work. Again, Trump has made it quite clear that he views things exactly that way.
When we look around the world today, we see a lot of representative democracies, and we think, “Well, that’s just how good, sane people do things, here in the 21st century.” But this century is just a dot on a very long timeline, and our nation’s whole history is just a tiny stretch of time between dots. Electing leaders and holding them accountable to our needs and desires is nothing like the norm, historically. Assuming our leaders should be held accountable to the same set of laws as all other citizens is equally unusual. If we think it’s a valuable thing, we’d better start valuing it.
We should not assume that what we have is safe, stable, or normal. It needs constant protection. If we care about it, we have to make sure we actually understand how it works, so that we can protect it. We have to teach it to our children and make sure they treasure it. We have to be zealots about it. As unfashionable and un-ironic and un-detached as it may sound, we have to be patriots.
November 13, 2023
The Country in My Head
I’ve been thinking about the things I carry.
I’m not a pack-rat or a hoarder, but there are ideas and pieces of culture that I hold close and seem not to want to part with, even when the larger culture announces that they’ve have hit their sell-by date and should be discarded. How I think about my country (what it is and what it should be) seems to be o…
November 5, 2023
Asked and Answered
What do you hear when you walk into a classroom? What would you want to hear? Would it be teachers explaining things, or students explaining things? Would it be teachers asking questions and students answering them, or students asking and teachers answering, or perhaps teachers staying out of the conversation as much as possible, inserting themselves on…
October 7, 2023
No Real Persons Involved
In the HBO show, Succession, a corporate CEO tries to console his son after a terrible accident has taken the life of a young caterer, using language that the son has recently found in old memos excusing bad behavior of years gone by. NRPI is the acronym used in the old memos: No Real Person Involved. Never mind that in the course of business, young wom…
September 30, 2023
Seeing the World Through Multi-Colored Glasses
It’s good to know stuff. Knowing stuff is better than not knowing. Most of us take that as a pretty basic, obvious fact, although arrogant and boastful ignorance is definitely in vogue these days among some members of the electorate. But let’s not go there right now.
It’s good to know stuff. Nerd Culture is predicated on the idea that it’s fun to know ev…
September 23, 2023
My Mirror of Erised
A few nights ago, I woke up at 3AM (which happens often) and couldn’t get back to sleep after doing my Wordle and Spelling Bee puzzles. I decided to list (here) a bunch of things that I found peaceful and calming, and then think about those things until I fell asleep. I played music in my head. I imagined happy scenes from my past. And it worked. I sat …
September 9, 2023
Games vs. Playing
For almost as long as I’ve been in the Ed Biz, I’ve heard talk about “gamification,” about making learning more like a video game. There should be avatars, and challenges, and points to be earned, and levels to achieve, and ways to turn points into rewards. This is the way, I’m told. This is The Solution...capital T, capital S.
There are some basic and …
September 3, 2023
Tug of Peace
We are inheritors of the longest-running democratic republic in the world (or one of them, if you include the Isle of Man and San Marino), but we are woefully and dangerously ignorant about what it really is and how it works. The Founders who imagined this country into being were students of history, deeply read in the rise and fall of republics. Thomas…
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