Dan Riley's Blog, page 13

My Little Town

Home for the first five years of my life.

In my little town I grew up believing God keeps his eye on us all 
And he used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall my little town
Coming home after school
Riding my bike past the gates of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging out shirts in the dirty breeze
And after it rains there's a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It's not that the colors aren't there
It's just imagination they lack
Everything's the same back in my little town
In my little town I never meant nothing  I was just my father's son Saving my money
Dreamin’ of glory
Twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun
Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town

                                                                            --Paul Simon

I’ve had some reason to be nostalgic about my little town these days. First, I just finished writing a book where my little town of Enfield (aka Thompsonville) plays a major role. Although I knew much of the town’s history that I used in my writing, my research still revealed some things I didn’t know and gave me a greater appreciation of the town’s history and how emblematic it was of America’s first few centuries. From war and peace with the local Indian tribes that inhabited the area before the white man arrived to its central roles in the First Great Awakening religious revival, the Underground Railroad, and as supplier of munitions for the Union army in the Civil War. From the boom times of industrialization that lifted up the Northeast in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies to the crushing blow of the bust when industry chased cheap wages to the non-union South. From the heady days of being at the forefront of the craze in sprawling shopping malls to the hollow sound of folded retailers and vast expanses of un-leased commercial space. Enfield has been through it all.  In addition to my book research, I was just sent a link to this video on the town. It’s really rather haunting. There is not a scene in it that I was not intimately familiar with as a boy growing up in Thompsonville. On the one hand there’s something sad, almost tragic, about the video…on the other I remember so keenly walking those streets in good times and bad and never once wishing I lived somewhere else. I didn’t know anywhere else of course, so that made it easy. But even now, looking back, having travelled much of the world, I can honestly say I can’t imagine coming of age anywhere else but Thompsonville. It’s as much a part of me as my own skin. I can relate to every word of that Paul Simon song, but none more than these:It's not that the colors aren't there
It's just imagination they lack
The most startling thing in that video for me is the picture of the first home I ever lived in for the first 5 years of my life…an apartment actually. It’s the picture at the top of this blog post. We lived on the first floor, and I remember my father taking me up to our neighbor’s on the second floor. The neighbor had a daughter my age and a .22 rifle, and the two fathers would take us out on that back porch overlooking the town pond to watch as they shot rats scurrying along the shore. That may not be the most enchanting of childhood memories, but it’s a vivid one. And I realize that’s why I loved growing up in Enfield so much. In addition to its not unsubstantial history it was full of vivid memories. With age, it's probably as true for Paul Simon now as it is for me...there's much more than the dead and dying in my little town. World famous singer Paul Robeson also lived in my little town.
As irony would have it, one of the few blacks to live in Enfield lived in
one of the town's grandest houses. Robeson plays a prominent role in
my book, "Now Playing Black Panther."

NPD, Part 2

In an earlier post on Narcissistic Personality Disorder I refused to draw a link between this individual dysfunction and mass movement dysfunction because I wasn’t well enough versed on it. Since then, I’ve done a bit of research and learned a little something about Collective Narcissism. Allow me to cite this very heavily sourced Wiki passage on what it means:

An important characteristic of the leader follower-relationship are the manifestations of narcissism by both the leader and follower of a group.[18] Within this relationship there are two categories of narcissists: the mirror-hungry narcissist, and the ideal-hungry narcissist—the leader and the followers respectively.[18] The mirror-hungry personality typically seeks a continuous flow of admiration and respect from his followers. Conversely, the ideal-hungry narcissist takes comfort in the charisma and confidence of his mirror-hungry leader. The relationship is somewhat symbiotic; for while the followers provide the continuous admiration needed by the mirror-hungry leader, the leader's charisma provides the followers with the sense of security and purpose that their ideal-hungry narcissism seeks.[18] Fundamentally both the leader and the followers exhibit strong collectively narcissistic sentiments—both parties are seeking greater justification and reason to love their group as much as possible.[1][18]

 To simplify and underscore Wiki reproduces this chart:
We cannot keep going on about the dangers of those alienated from normal human behavior by NPD without acknowledging that such mentally unhealthy people do not operate in a vacuum. There are both victims of their all-consuming self-absorption…and enablers of it. At the time of that post five years ago when I begged off going after the avid and frightening followers of a leader afflicted with NPD, I didn’t realize how much analysis and literature existed on them. Here’s a partial list of references cited in a psychoanalytical abstract titled, Narcissistic Leaders and Their Victims: Followers Low on Self-Esteem and Low on Core Self-Evaluations Suffer Most. 

Narcissism, a personality trait characterized by grandiose and overly positive self-views, is not only rising in Western individualistic countries (Twenge et al., 2008; Twenge and Foster, 2010), but also appears to be societally valued as evidenced by narcissists’ emergence as leaders (Brunell et al., 2008; Nevicka et al., 2011a; Grijalva et al., 2015a). The reason for this is that narcissistic individuals possess many characteristics that people associate with a prototypical leader (e.g., confidence, extraversion, dominance; Smith and Foti, 1998; Judge et al., 2002; Kellett et al., 2006; Paunonen et al., 2006). Furthermore, narcissists’ charm, humor, enthusiasm and often attractive charismatic vision (Galvin et al., 2010; Goncalo et al., 2010) engender positive first impressions (Back et al., 2010), which can facilitate successful appraisal in selection contexts and help narcissists rise to power.

Note the dates in those references. Like the references in the passage above about Collective Narcissism, they pre-date the current outbreak of Trumpian uber-NPD. So this is not a case of psychology trying to fit our political times, but rather an unhealthy, unwholesome, wholly undemocratic mental state now fully manifesting itself in our politics. Christopher Lasch was tracing the history and aspects of America’s creeping narcissism as far back as 1979 in his classic study, The Culture of Narcissism, where he wrote:

A number of other observers had come to similar conclusions about the direction of personality. They spoke of a collapse of “impulse controls,” the “decline of the superego,” and the growing influence of peer groups. Psychiatrists, moreover, described a shift in the pattern of symptoms displayed by their patients. The classic neuroses treated by Freud, they said, were giving way to narcissistic personality disorders. “You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias, and familiar neuroses,” Sheldon Bach reported in 1976. “Now you see mostly narcissists. 

If these observations were to be taken seriously, the upshot, it seemed to me, was not that American society was “sick” or that Americans were all candidates for a mental asylum but that normal people now displayed many of the same personality traits that appeared, in more extreme form, in pathological narcissism. Freud always stressed the continuity between the normal and the abnormal, and it therefore seemed reasonable, to a Freudian, to expect that clinical descriptions of narcissistic disorders would tell us something about the typical personality structure of a society dominated by large bureaucratic organizations and mass media….

In this week of mourning the passing of George H. W. Bush a great many folks from my particular political tribe have rushed forth to damn the 41stPresident at his death with the charge that he among others of his ilk (i.e. establishment Republicans) paved the way for the pathology that is Trump. Well, true that…about as true as might be blaming me for killing a butterfly back in grampa’s garden when I was a boy. We can make anything we want causal if we put our minds to it. But playing cause and effect with politics is a fool’s game…if not a scoundrel’s. One can hardly ever resist being partisan, superficial, and obtuse at the high cost of overlooking more cellular, complicated, and (what’s that word?) nuanced factors. My comrades may not like to hear it but tying the racist Willie Horton ad from the Bush campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988 to the rise of Trump in 2016 is as simpleminded as those New York Times visits to the heartland trying to tie economic stress to Trump’s rise. It’s superficial. Not that racial and economic fears don’t help fuel the collective narcissistic view that inferior others are getting more than us at our expense. But race and economics are merely the devilish details of the dysfunction. The real determinative dynamic at play is the one going on between an id that claims it can solve all problems, knows all the best words, is stable genius, and can shoot someone on 5thAvenue and get away with it and the collective that has a scary spiritual void at the secret core of its small life that Narcissistic Personality Disorder expands and fills with resentment, anger and delusions of grandeur. 

NPD, Part 1

Get this:

Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and the severity of symptoms vary. People with the disorder can: 

·        Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance
·       Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration
·       Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
·       Exaggerate achievements and talents
·       Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
·       Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people
·       Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior
·       Expect special favors and unquestioning compliance with their expectations
·       Take advantage of others to get what they want
·       Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
·       Be envious of others and believe others envy them
·       Behave in an arrogant, haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious
·       Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office

Remind you of anyone you know with his finger on the nuclear button?
That breakdown of NPD symptoms is from the Mayo Clinic online where you can go to find symptoms for the flu, scabies, or irritable bowel syndrome, so there’s nothing particularly clinical or proprietary about it. Two of the three most popular posts in the near 10-year history of The Nobby Works have been those when I wrote about narcissism here and here. At the time, I chose as our two most notable public narcissists Bill O’ Reilly and Ted Cruz, with Breaking Bad’s Walter White serving as the perfect fictional model of narcissism in extremis known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. An awful lot has happened in the five years since those posts…with the emphasis on awful. O’Reilly and Cruz have been eclipsed in their public displays of narcissism by the dark star that is Donald Trump. There has never has been an NPD sufferer quite like him and never has the entire world been so vulnerable to the impulses of such a dangerous mind (and, yes, I’m aware of the rogue’s gallery of madmen history has presented us with, but none of them have had such far-reaching power over both innocent others and a cult following of ominous proportions). 
What’s frustrating to a frightening degree is that the media, which is clearly aware of Trump’s unstable mental condition, continues to tiptoe around it. About a year ago some outlets dared to broach the subject but were scared off when decorum fetishists who abound in politics and media questioned whether it was right or fair to discuss the psychological state of a public figure if a) one were not a professional psychoanalyst and b) if you were in fact a pro but had never examined the patient personally. That pretty much closed the discussion. Now we’re faced with the increasingly exasperating and essentially useless political reporting that continues to assess Trump’s behavior as if he were of sound mind: Why does he repeat these words over and over again? What’s behind this rally? Who is he secretly signaling this time? Where’s his red line on tariffs? On Mueller? On government shutdown? On taxes? On the courts? On immigration? 
In March 2015 Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz seized control of a passenger plane with 144 passengers on board and crashed it into the French Alps, killing all on board. One can discuss all one wants about the weather, the pilot’s training, the possibility of a terrorist attack, a flock of seagulls. But it all becomes meaningless once it is revealed that Lubitz had suicidal tendencies and was declared unfit for his job by his doctor. That is the factor that overrides all others when discussing that crash. Trump’s mental state trumps all other factors when discussing his conduct as president. To assess his performance in terms of ideology, politics, strategy…even race and economics…overlooks the most salient fact that his wholly (ho-ho) nonpartisan mental condition causes him to act the way he does. Any useful reporting on Trump should not begin with him as a Republican or a rich man’s son or even a racist. It must begin with the fact that he has the most acute case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder ever witnessed in an American public figure, certainly any president. 
In a recent, typically earnest yet willfully clueless discussion, an MSNBC panel tried to decipher meaning in this quote from an interview Trump did with the Washington Post:

One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

The panel, with a few nervous laughs, noted how nearly incoherent and simpleminded the statement was, and then averred to how scary it was to have so much power invested in a sub-literate human being. But illiteracy is the least of the problems. It’s a good bet that most of the panel read Dr. James Hamblin’s exasperating article in The Atlantic, Is there Something Neurologically Wrong with Donald Trump? In it Hamblin carefully tracks Trump’s speech pattern over the years and shows that he didn’t always speak in such a jumble. He used to be considerably coherent, on point and far less juvenile in his elocution. Though the decline in speech facility speaks to a mental condition other than NPD, Hamblin concludes his otherwise thoughtful piece by reinforcing media timidity in discussing the real Donald Trump: 

Indeed, thousands of mental-health professionals have mobilized and signed petitions attesting to Trump’s unfitness to hold office. Some believe Trump should carry a label of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or both. The largest such petition has more than 68,000 signatures—though there is no vetting of the signatories’ credentials. Its author, the psychologist John Gartner, told me last year that in his 35 years of practicing and teaching, “this is absolutely the worst case of malignant narcissism I’ve ever seen.” 

Many other mental-health professionals are insistent that Trump not be diagnosed from afar by anyone, ever—that the goal of mental-health care is to help people who are suffering themselves from disabling and debilitating illnesses. A personality disorder is “only a disorder when it causes extreme distress, suffering, and impairment,” argues Allen Frances, the Duke University psychiatrist who was a leading author of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which was the first to include personality disorders. 

(snip) 

After more than a year of considering Trump’s behavior through the lens of the cognitive sciences, I don’t think that labeling him with a mental illness from afar is wise. A diagnosis like narcissistic personality disorder is too easily played off as a value judgment by an administration that is pushing the narrative that scientists are enemies of the state. Labeling is also counterproductive to the field in that it presents risks to all the people who deal with the stigma of psychiatric diagnoses. To attribute Trump’s behavior to mental illness risks devaluing mental illness. 

Judiciousness in public statements is only more necessary as the Trump administration plays up the idea of partisan bias in its campaign against “the media.” The consistent message is that if someone is saying something about the president that depicts or reflects upon him unfavorably, the statement must be motivated by an allegiance to a party. It must be, in a word, “fake”—coming from a place of spite, or vengeance, or allegiance to some team, creed, or party.

The big bloody irony in that reasonable, measured conclusion by the good doctor is that it underscores in bright red why NPD is such a damnable personality disorder. Inevitably the one with the disorder succeeds in convincing those who are normal that the problem is with them. It is a why some analysts will only treat NPD in teams of two to defend against the patient’s highly developed skills in manipulation. By playing into the NPD victim’s vision of the world, you cede the vision to him. Of course he’ll dismiss you as fake…of course it’ll demean your profession…of course it’ll cost the victims of other mental illnesses...of course it’ll be seen as a value judgment and partisan bias. By the time you’ve disarmed yourself by seeing yourself as the NPD sufferer sees you, he’s won; you’ve lost. That’s why it’s the most diabolical personality disorder under a darkened sun, and we as citizens and especially our media have to start treating it as such...not avoiding it. 

Next week NPD Part 2, wherein The Nob looks at the worshippers of this darkened sun.    

Who Are You?

The always-provocative daughter, Gillian, put the question to me recently: Who is your intended audience for the Nobby Works? It shouldn’t have been as provocative as it was because I’ve been a writer for publication for most of my life, and one of the first things you learn is that to get good at it you really have to know who your audience is. And that’s not a thing to be settled on your first publication. Your audience is constantly in flux…and if you write in the corporate world as I did for many years your audience can change multiple times in the course of a day…customers, vendors, investors, board members. With my more personal and intimate writing, I often settle on someone in my life as the ideal audience…someone who might have particular interest in the subject of my writing…or authority on it…or whose taste in writing is so good that I want to try and satisfy it. I imagine there have probably been a half-dozen individuals who have played the role of secret reader in my writing career. One of them became the early muse of The Nobby Works when after a year or more of listening to my life stories she suggested I write a memoir. That was at the peak of the vogue in memoir…so not a bad idea commercially. But it also just was when my curiosity about the world of blogging peaked, and so the suggested memoir became a realized blog. Although my friend, Angela, would be the personification of The Nob audience, I increasingly tried to project her qualities onto a larger audience. So in its ideal state I imagined my readers were like her—placing a higher value on substance rather than snark (the lingua franca of the blog world), possessed of a catholic (small c) curiosity about the world and a shared sense of irony-infused humor about human existence.That has been the image of my audience that I’ve carried around in my head over the nearly 10 years of the blog’s run, and I’ve been pretty comfortable writing for such an esteemed group…regardless of how small it may be in reality. But that’s not what Gillian was getting at with her question. She was trying to help get me more focused on what my audience was actually like rather than what I imagined it was like so I could target appeals for more readers more purposefully. A Google or Twitter search for “people like Angela” was unlikely to get me far in this regard. So in an attempt to answer Gillian, I decided to work backward…instead of my ideal audience, I decided to assess my real audience…the audience that I know for a fact actually reads the blog. 

Thanks to Google Analytics, here are some of the things I know: Traffic to the blog usually spikes on Thursdays whether I’ve posted anything or not…no surprise there since I generally try to post on Thursdays People on average spend about a minute-and-a-half at the blog, which makes sense since that should be about the time it takes to read my typical posts of about a thousand wordsReaders come mostly from the US, but I have an international audience as well, with two disturbing data points: 1. most number of readers outside the US, as I’ve noted before, come from Russia 2. despite my obsession with Italy and large number of posts that are Italian related, my readership out of my ancestral homeland is 1%“Likes” tell me nothing about my audience. I can post for months on end without attracting a single “like”, and then out of the blue a post such as last week’s on Connecticut tobacco work attracts nearly a hundred “likes”. What’s behind that? Subject matter? Link placement? A quirk in the universe? If I knew, I would definitely replicate it week after week, but I haven’t a clue.On the other hand I can clearly see how I just got a spike on a post from 2012. Someone on Twitter had asked people to list a line from a movie that had particular personal resonance, and I responded with “The fall alone will kill us” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with the link to the post. As the title of that post says, Nobody Knows Anything.I know I have a loyal following of readers who regularly let me know that they’re keeping up and engaged with my posts despite how difficult Google's Blogger comment function makes that. No one of them is more engaged than dear old friend Samantha who quite often emails me long, beautifully written responses to my posts that deserve a blog of their own. Then there’s Lorna, my most prized reader, who tries to make a point of reading each post before Sunday breakfast, so we can talk about them. She pays me the highest compliment one can get from a partner of more than 50 years when she says, “Every time I read your blog, I learn something new about you.”Which brings me to my audience of one: me. I admit it. I write The Nob mostly for myself, but not out of some hungry ego. Trust me, you can’t keep an ego properly fed on a week when you attract just 50 readers and no “likes”.  My motivation week after week is to apply my research and reason to a neatly crafted short essay on a matter that concerns or amuses me. I look forward to midweek when I take an inventory of all that I’ve read and heard and seen in the past few days and begin selecting the topic that’s compelled me the most. Then I take that topic and see what I can do about communicating its meaning to me to unseen others with words and music and graphic and links. It’s an invaluable creative and intellectual exercise...a truly regenerative one...and I couldn’t imagine living through this stage of my life without it. So there you have it. Who are you? Who is my audience? Random Russians, loyal old friends, passing strangers, the hip, the thoughtful, the patient and passionate, my wife and me. Pass it on. We're here every week. 

Tobacco Road N.

LB Haas tobacco farm, cir. 1950 (my first employer)
Very good (albeit virtual) friend Gary Popovich recently described my home state of Connecticut as "the land of steady habits". There's some truth to that. Unlike its famously liberal neighbor to the north, Connecticut never had any witch trials. Unlike its more sophisticated neighbor to the south it never boasted to the world that "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere". And unlike its more adorable little neighbor to the east, it's never turned governance over to an endless parade of low-rent mobsters. When extraordinary things happen in Connecticut, that reputation for steady habits creates an odd bit of dissoance between the place and event.
I once blogged about my college years in
My new book, Now Playing Black Panther, draws quite a bit on the much overlooked history of my hometown, Enfield, Connecticut...like much of the state, a key player in the War Against Southern Secession. You can still raise eyebrows by telling folks that Hazardville--a major division of Enfield (and most appropriately named)--was the main supplier of gunpowder for the Union cause. You can also raise eyebrows by telling folks that Connecticut, especially the Connecticut River Valley at the north end where Enfield is located, was a key producer of tobacco before, during and after the Civil War. 

Connecticut shade grown tobacco was so notable that a major Hollywood movie was made about it in 1961...which would be exactly one year after I had my own up close and personal experience with working in the tobacco fields. Tobacco work was the first real, paid work many of us growing up in the area could have. We got what were called our work papers after turning 14, which allowed us to do farm labor. It was truly awful work and I freely admit I didn't last long. A bus collected us in downtown and delivered us in the very early morning hours to the farm. We immediately got down on all fours and started making our way through the rows of tobacco plants. Within an hour our pants and hands were caked with mud from the morning dew. It was back breaking work and there was no respite until lunch...and even that was no respite for the newbies. Every lunch hour the older boys would grab one of the rookies and take him behind a barn for an initaition that consisted of stripping him down and rubbing his body down with gritty, sticky tobacco leaves, turning him brown with tobacco juice and miserable for the work to come in the afternoon sun when the muddy dirt of the morning became hot and dusty.

Against this background it is little wonder that most of my fellow white suburban kids didn't stay long in the tobacco fields...the romance of Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens notwithstanding. A conceit of my new novella is that there is a dialog that goes on between time periods...centuries...that ought not be ignored if we want to avoid falling into that trap Santayana warned us about--repeating past mistakes. Connecticut tobacco in the 1950s provides a very good example. Then, as now, American kids, mostly white though not exclusively (and less and less so), do not want to do hard manual labor. They have neither the stomach nor the need for it. That is why immigrant labor...legal or not...is so necessary for providing the food for our abundant grocery store shelves and our pantries of conucopia.

Back when I was bailing out of my work as a field hand it was common for the tobacco growers in our area to send buses to the American South to import what were called "Negroes" (especially Negro children) to pick the tobacco to fuel that major segment of the Connecticut tobacco industry. I was paid 75 cents an hour for my considerable time and labor. I suspect the imported black kids were paid somewhat less since the practice with most migrant workers then and now is to include the shacks that the farm provides for housing as part of the compensation. Anyway, that all plays into Now Playing Black Panther, if just obliquely. There is one detail of that era that came up in my research that I could not fit into my book,however, but it's too extraordinary in that way that happenings in Connecticut tend to be extraordinary in spite of those steady habits. Among those black kids who rode the buses north to work in the Connecticut tobacco fields was none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. 

So there you have it...me and my friend Martin...first job...working tobacco. And to shrink the degrees of separation even more...Martin and I both went on to pursue degrees in theology. He made his decision while picking tobacco in Simsbury, Connecticut, and I sealed mine by doing my missionary work at the Simsbury Methodist Church. Ho! 

Now excuse me...I just know there's a Nobel Peace Prize for me buried somewhere in all this. 

Tangled Up in Blue

Through a simple twist of fate and Lorna’s forever love, we spent last Election Night at a Bob Dylan concert at the Johnny Mercer Theater in Savannah. Since I did not want to spend the evening watching Steve Kornacki do his whirling dervish number crunching act while trying to spin earthshaking significance out of early returns from Iowa’s 5th district, getting away from the TV for the night was always, as they say in politics, in play. So I was already prepared to break out a jigsaw puzzle to get me throught the night...but a Dylan concert on a night like this? Absolutely, sweet Marie. 
Bob was great...better than I anticipated actually. His trademark growl was full throated, his classic mumbled delivery was measured, his band was tight and out of sight, and his setlist was outstanding up to and including “Blowin’ in the Wind” which made up a two song encore with Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River”. I took the inclusion of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to be Bob’s subtle commentary on the current political situation.
The prevailing metaphor for the midterm election of 2018 of course was a wave not a wind. Would there be a blue wave of sweeping Democratic gains was how the national media framed it. Anything less than a wave was going to be a loss and another shocking triumph for Trumpism. By the time we got home from the concert, the news was all about the wave that wasn’t. Within 24 hours, the Democratic electoral showing had been demeaned and belittled by the media with a cattiness it seems to reserve for leftish political efforts. The blue wave was mocked as a “spalsh of blue”, more indigo than blue, or “not a wave” at all declared James Carville glumly. While the media was chewing over the metaphor, the results were continuing to come in and the numbers were pilining up in the Dems favor, making Dylan, as usual, the prescient one. The answer was indeed blowing in the wind...in the uncounted, uncollected, uncorrupted ballots that would accumulate over the next 48 hours and certify this as the biggest “wave” election of the last 50 years. (And no matter how much I sympathize with the media in its current struggles to combat an authoritarian presidency, its insistence on creating narratives and forcing its reporting to fit those narratives is maddening and counterproductive to the goal of reestablishing a credible, national source of objective news if not truth.)

In 1988 Theocrat Pat Robertson ran for the Republican presidential nomination. His bid got off to a promising start with a second place finish in the Iowa caucus, but crashed and burned in subsequent primaries. From that experience, the religious right in concert with the corporate right made a conscious decision to build political power from the bottom up, rather than top down. That 30-year effort has been remarkably successful, taking over local school boards, state legislatures, and congressional districts. It’s given them inordinate control over the national political agenda and now the Supreme Court. 

The best results to come out of this midterm election is that Democrats are now positioned both tactically and attitudinally to do the same kind of bottom up building. Much of the gloom that clouded the early analyses of the progressive showing in this election was due to the Dems propensity for being star struck. The apparent defeats of rising stars Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke in Texas had magnified significance because Dems, whether they admit it or not, don’t have the patience or imagination for small ball politics. To keep with the baseball metaphor, Dem politics have always been about the three-run homer. But this election has changed that...and largely due to the 3 fallen stars, Abrams, Gillum, and O’Rourke (two of which may yet rise again in this cycle...and Beto has probably secured himself a spot on the Dem 2020 ticket). None of the three relied solely on charisma, though all three had plenty of it. They all did the grunt work of registering new voters and getting them to the polls that is necessary to building a lasting and effective political infrastructure. Regardless of the final vote count in this election, Georgia, Florida and Texas are in better shape for subsequent progressive challenges, as are states throughout the Midwest where simllar nuts and bolts politics took precedence over the consultant-driven, poll-focused bullshit of the past that has rendered the Democratc Party a motley crew of divergent, sometimes contrary interests.Whether there is a blue wave to come in the future, we'll leave it to cable news producers to ponder to the level of their pay grade. What's clear now is that the country is sufficiently tangled up in blue.

I Wanna Take You Higher, Part II

Give me a TTGive me an RRGive me a UUGive me an MMGive me a PPWhat’s that spell?Trump!What’s that spell?Trump!What’s that spell?Trump!There were two notable sing-alongs at the historic Woodstock rock festival of 1969. One was Sly and the Family Stone’s exhilarating performance of "I Wanna Take You Higher", which I focused on in Part I. The other of course was Country Joe and the Fish’s rousing I Feel Like I'm Fixin’ To Die Rag introduced by the "Fish Cheer"--which went slightly different than my paraphrase above (though T-R-U-M-P and F-U-C-K are interchangeable in a non-sexual context). Before I go further in placing the "Fish Cheer" in the context of a Trump rally, let me declare my undying love for Country Joe’s Woodstock performance, which is delivered with more wit and charm than has ever been apparent at any Trump rally. That being said, there is a key aspect of it that bears comparison with Sly’s sing-along for what they both portend for the future of American democracy.The stark difference between the two songs is clear in the titles alone. One wants to help you get ready to die—as at a Trump rally, stoking peoples’ fear and anger for confronting a mortal enemy; the other song wants to take you higher—as at a church service, spiritually binding people together for community and higher purpose. One wants to stop a war; the other wants to promote peace. One is nihilistic; the other is inspirational. It’s a significant matter of emphasis…not just lyrically, but tactically. It's the difference between the inherent narcissism of taking to the streets singing "I Ain’t Marching Anymore" to marching with “We Shall Overcome” solidarity on your lips. Advanced neuroscience studies consistently show that we are not the wholly rational beings that the so-called reality-based side of the political spectrum would like to believe we are. We are largely emotional creatures, and our intellects have all they can do to keep up. This is critical in the current political environment where one side…the dominant right side of the political spectrum…is almost entirely driven by emotion. It’s negative emotion to be sure, but it’s still emotion powerful enough to motivate behavior, such as voting or mass shooting. The other side seems to be constantly casting about for an overriding, powerful emotional message. When pressed for their message during the current midterm election campaign, Democrats usually fall back on providing healthcare--specifically as it relates to pre-existing conditions--as their defining message. But healthcare is a policy, not an identity-shaping, movement-making emotional message with a shelf life beyond any single election cycle. In Jonathan Haidt’s  The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion he makes much ado about Emile Durkheim’s 3 circles of religion, illustrated below.
According to Durkheim, those three circles--believing, belonging, doing—are the essence of religion. Anti-religionists will, as always, be quick to focus on some of the more arcane and bizarre of those beliefs, the occasions of intolerance in that belonging, and the malevolence of some of that doing. And though religions are burdened with the weight of all that, the greater mass of believers, as Durkheim and subsequent modern studies reveal, adhere to religion for the sense of community and higher purpose it gives them. That is something for those of us with a more leftist, secular mindset to consider as we struggle to survive these dark authoritarian times and emerge from them with not just renewed political power but with a vision for the future beyond November 6, 2018. In going against liberal orthodoxy here, I’m not only turning to religion for help, but to long-time Republican strategist Steve Schmidt. Watch this video clip where this traditional small government Republican suggests that Democrats look back to Bobby Kennedy for how to elevate our politics to higher ground. From Deadline: White House, the most sane show on cable television
At one time an “argument for better” and for using government to accomplish better would’ve seemed quaint. Now, after decades of “Government is not the solution; government is the problem” and “The era of big government is over”, this suggestion is damn near radical. So radical that we watch establishment Democrats and their consultants cower from the idea. But the thing is, if you’re the party of government--and Democrats are the party of government whether they come from North Dakota and West Virginia or New York and Californian--they best be making the most of it...not running away from it. And how hard can that be? How hard can it be to go before any electorate anywhere and promise to deliver a government that’s there for them when the flood waters rise, when diseases become epidemic, when Wall Street goes recklessly wild, when food and air become toxic, when old age and failing-health threaten survival? How hard can it be to defend a government that’s constitutionally committed to the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? How hard would it have been to say, “The era of bad government is over” rather than blame big government? As I said in Part I, forging a unifying, uplifting message doesn’t come easily for a political party predisposed to champion individual rights, diversity, and nuance. But we have abundant empirical evidence that tells us that at some point, a movement needs a transcendent, emotional message in order to cohere and succeed. It is no mystery why African-American women are the foundation of the Democratic base…they are also the most religious so they understand at their core the meaning and importance of believing, belonging, doing. 

For Your Consideration

What happens when the hottest movie from 2018 mysteriously takes over a small town theater in 1954? It explodes on the family friendly fifties with disruptive force. Disneyland, the rise of TV, the decline of movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, young love, forbidden love, the Catholic Legion of Decency, the ambitions of Richard M. Nixon, the suffering of Pat Nixon, the suffering of Paul Robeson, the Bush dynasty, the Dulles Brothers, the fever dreams of J. Edgar Hoover, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Edward R. Murrow, Ike, the Kefauver hearings and the depravity of comic books, the Superman complex…all the familiar signposts of the era confront a new signpost up ahead known as Black Panther. It plays on a continuous loop, creating a panic that spreads from small town America to the White House. President Eisenhower forms a special task force to get to the bottom of the subversive film. Under the direction of ever-vigilant Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the investigation disrupts the lives of two young lovers and sparks murder, racial tensions and H-Bomb anxieties. Black Panther’s journey back to the past has the cultural impact of a meteor hitting earth and burying a large, hot vein of Vibranium-strength truth beneath the United States, forcing a heart-to-heart dialog between the 20thand 21stcenturies.  It's the ideal gift for everyone on your holiday shopping list, especially Baby Boomers, movie buffs, Black Panther fans (and those who never saw Black Panther), US history junkies, political satire savants, lovers of short books, fans of funny books, and connoisseurs of fine literature everywhere. And it's now very affordably available here. (5-Star reviews accepted.)

I Wanna Take You Higher

My nonfiction reading this year has primarily consisted of psycho/social science-based books that might help explain how we got to this fractured place where we are as a society and what our prospects might be for getting ourselves (back?) together. The most recent of those readings is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve tried blogging about such books in the Nob before, though they are so rich and complex and somewhat maddening that they overwhelm any effort at summary in a thousand-word essay. Haidt, for instance, has a lot of useful stuff to say about our current political divide that could apply to the upcoming election. But as I contemplated blogging about it, I saw valuable blog real estate being given over to extensively quoted passages from him rather than any original observations from me, and so I concluded that my readers might be better served by a simple link to his book. But then the damndest thing happened. I had recorded the 4 ½-hour director’s cut of Woodstock and have been re-watching it a bit at time over breakfast each morning. Most serendipitously, I had just watched one of my favorite acts from Woodstock, Sly and the Family Stone, doing “Higher” as I was listening to Haidt’s chapter on what he calls “The Hive Switch”. At the risk of dropping a few of those long passages here, let me try to make the connection. In that chapter Haidt draws on the early work of historian William McNeil whose reflections on the marching drills he was made to do as a young recruit in World War II led him to conceptualize something he termed “muscle bonding”. McNeil discovered that once he broke through the boredom barrier of the drills, he realized a personal enlargement that allowed him to lose his sense of self and become one with his unit. In his later career as a historian he theorized that past military successes, especially those that involved victories by outmanned forces, were due largely to the degree that the armies achieved muscle bonding.  Haidt then marries this military analysis to a far different cultural analysis by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Dancing in the Streets. Like me, Haidt is a bit daunted by the task of summarizing Ehrenreich, but I’ll rely upon him to explain the essentials of what she says about European encounters with the dancing habits of the “less civilized” world:

…Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances…with disgust. The masks, body paints, guttural shrieks made the dancers seem like animals. The rhythmically undulating bodies and occasional sexual pantomimes were, to most Europeans, degrading, grotesque and thoroughly savage. The Europeans were unprepared to understand what they were seeing.  As Ehrenreich argues, collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal biotechnology for binding groups together. She agrees with McNeil that it is a form of muscular bonding. It fosters love, trust, and equality. It was common in ancient Greece…and in early Christianity, which she says was a dance religion until dancing in church was suppressed in the Middle Ages...If ecstatic dancing is so beneficial and so widespread, why did Europeans give it up? Ehrenreich's historical information is too nuanced to summarize here but the last part of the story is the rise of individualism and more refined notions of the self in Europe beginning in the 16th century. These cultural changes accelerated during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Here’s where Sly and the Family Stone comes in (and much to my surprise, this is my second post based on a Sly song). Please watch this clip from their performance at Woodstock and notice how decades before Haidt and Ehrenreich and their books, Sly (Sylvester Stewart) is confronting head on the resistance of the self. How he attempts to cajole a crowd of 400,000 “do your own thing” obsessives to get over themselves for a brief bit of muscle bonding:

And you see what usually happens is you get a group of people that might sing. And for some reasons…they won’t do it. Most of us need approval from our neighbors before we can actually let it all hang down. We want to do a sing-along. Now we know that a lot of people don’t like to do it because they think that it might be old fashioned. But you must dig that it is not a fashion in the first place. It is a feeling. And if it was good in the past, it’s still good...It’ll do you no harm.

Okay, it's maybe not as erudite as Haidt and Ehrenreich, but it's intuitive as hell…and Sly underscores the message by delivering it to a drum beat and "savage dancing" that would have so scared those early Europeans. It still does, in fact. At least it scares their descendants. This is no mere cultural curiosity; this exposes the paradox at the heart of our crisis in democracy. We could never have conceived of and implemented democracy if we hadn’t realized the self…one man, one vote as it were. But our primal existence was more hive-like…the mass of humanity united in support of a queen...a monarchy…one ruler over all. People increasingly inclined to support authoritarian leadership as we are witnessing all around us is not unusual. Democracy…self rule…is what’s new and challenging in the evolution of human society. It requires more work…and more faith and trust in our fellow citizens. And that’s the paradox…a society built on extolling individualism becomes more resistant to collectivism, even when collective action is needed to defend and protect individual identity.Further along in Haidt, he tells how in Ehrenreich’s quest to solve this paradox, she embraced the work of Emile Durkheim who put forth the theory that humans are Homo Duplex…we exist at both the individual and collective level. From this, Haidt proposes his theory of hive switching…where we make a transition from striving for ourselves as individuals to striving for success as part of a group. He uses examples from the students he teaches at UVM who regularly switch from competing against each other for grades to bonding with each other to cheer on their football team.The need for hive switching seems painfully obvious in the political context. At some point there has to be some sacrifice of individual desires and some muscle bonding to succeed as a group. But a group, say the Democratic Party, which is dedicated to extolling diversity, protecting minorities, and advancing individual rights has a tougher way back to temporary but necessary hive behavior. It is certainly tougher than it is for a group dedicated to rallying around family, flag and God, regardless of how phony that dedication may be. So what’s to be done about it? How are people constitutionally opposed to the hive mentality supposed to assume it when their survival depends upon it? 

As I feared, this stuff isn't easily addressed in one blog post, so that's going to have to be a question for "I Wanna Take You Higher" Part II. 

Alzheimer's--Variant Not Detected

Falling away from herThe most common impression of 23 & Me, the genetic lab that tests private individual’s DNA for a fee, is that it’s a service for exploring one’s ancestral roots with a potential for revealing long-lost relatives…or totally unknown relatives. More naïve and fanciful customers might even be looking to find a link to the royalty they’ve always believed was part of their lineage. I’ve written on this aspect of 23 & Me previously. With zero expectation for such a thing, I even found my link to "royalty". Apparently on my father’s side I am descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, king of much of what we know as Ireland in the 4thcentury. I’m guessing from his name and what I know of monarchial history, he was just a very successful thug. So I’m unimpressed.There’s another aspect to 23 & Me findings—its health reports--that may not be as colorful, but every bit as revealing and impactful as the ancestral reports. These reports range from the trivial to the deadly serious. In the trivial category I was amused to learn that I did not suffer from misophonia, a hatred of chewing sounds. And I was relieved to learn that a old pal John Douglas was not crazy for refusing to eat cilantro because he maintains that it tastes like soap. “Cilantro Taste Aversion” is a real thing…a trait I’m happy to say I do not share with John.    In the deadly serious category, 23 & Me can predict with relative certainty one’s vulnerability to a handful of frightening diseases, chiefly Parkinson’s, cancer in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and Alzheimer’s. I should say that I got more than my money’s worth from my report when it gave me a clean bill of health on all three of those…or in the scientific and legally qualified language of 23 & Me: Variants not detected. I was especially pleased at the Alzheimer’s news because my greatest fear in life-- much more than death--is and always has been losing my mind. I’d rather die in a plane crash than lose my wits (you didn’t hear me say that, God). Most fortunately I’ve been spared any first-hand experience with Alzheimer’s. The closest I’ve gotten to it is watching my all-time film goddess, Julie Christie, deteriorate in her most heartbreaking role in Away from Her. So this report gave me enormous relief over the anxiety that would build up every time I walked into the pantry and forgot why. That's a problem…but in the world of Alzheimer’s sufferers it’s what might be called a first world problem.However, one cannot consume all this DNA-generated data without losing one’s mind to Twilight Zone or sci-fi thinking about it. In both scholarly and entertainment literature as well as TV and movies there has been speculation for decades as to what will happen when such genetic information becomes widely available. Will insurance companies get the green light from bought-and-paid-for politicians to raise rates or cut coverage for those with a genetic variant for Parkinson’s? Will scientists, often accused of playing God, be able to isolate certain disease-bearing genes and help us “breed” our way out of them? Between those two highly controversial alternatives, both bound to tear society apart even more than it is, what happens on a more intimate and immediate level? A couple I once knew suddenly found themselves in living hell when he developed melanoma. Over the course of his losing, two-year battle against the inevitable, she faithfully stood by him, caring and loving every step of the way. After he died and she fell in love with another man, one of the first things she did was take him off to be fully tested for melanoma. She was determined never to relive the awful experience. And who can blame her? Love may conquer all, but when it comes to sickness and death it’s probably a much closer and painful contest than we like to think.As genetic testing becomes more commonplace, how much will it become part of the courting and mate selection process? If you lost a parent to Alzheimer’s and lived through the pain of that, how likely are you to enter into a long-term relationship with someone whose report comes back: Variant detected?  Brave new world is no longer a cliché or mere cultural reference point; ordinary, low-cost DNA testing is making it a profoundly expanding reality.