Dan Riley's Blog, page 20

Hillary's Ashes

The first excerpt from Hillary’s book is out…What Happened. Great title...for the entire country in fact...because for the sane majority of us that's the first thought that crossed our minds on the morning of November 9. But from the time it was first announced, the usual suspects were already out with their torches ready to burn her ashes all over again. A number of them told her outright to just "Go away". One wag, upon the book’s first announcement, observed, “It’s the first time a book asked and answered a question on its cover”:
That lame witticism will be the least inflammatory after the book itself comes out, and Hillary’s media critics dig into it for any sentence fragment or dangling modifier that helps reinforce their persistent narrative that she is a controlling, scripted, unlikeable woman whose lifelong status at the head of the class made her unable to relate to and inspire ordinary others. They will find what they’re looking for in her book simply because they will be looking for it and have spent decades “uncovering” it even when it didn’t exist or when evidence to the contrary did exist. Those who have admired and supported HRC must accept the fact that there is a hatred of her that’s visceral, irrational and permanent, and there’s nothing to be done about it at this point. The damage has been done…not just to Hillary but also the nation.

However, I must offer a few final observations on HRC before I, for my part anyway, turn her fate over to history--which I’m sure will not only restore her well-deserved lofty reputation, but ultimately judge that when the US failed to elect her president, it failed itself for divisive, debilitating, and dangerous decades to come:
Observation #1 : The first excerpt from her book details her feelings during the second presidential debate against Donald Trump where he stalked her around the stage.

"It was incredibly uncomfortable," she said, describing the moment. "He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do?" She continued: "Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren't repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, 'Back up you creep, get away from me?' ... I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with men trying to throw me off."

As much as I agonize for her dilemma in that moment, it may have been the time for her to lose her cool…or act it at least. Hillary, like many modern Democrats with national ambitions, had spent much of the 21stcentury trying to project an image of strength by advocating for the military, while painfully dodging or finessing face-to-face combat because polling told them Americans hate political conflict. Whatever they tell pollsters, Americans elected a president who thrives on combativeness...has made a reality show of the presidency out of it. I believe Hillary would’ve benefited greatly in the bizarre atmosphere of the 2016 election by confronting Trump then and there, if just by turning and staring him down. It would’ve been a thrilling, exhilarating moment for her supporters, and it would’ve given the catty media, which trafficked nonstop in smears about her bitchiness, something real of it that she could own rather than have pinned on her. This observation is not limited to that moment and her alone. I think Democrats in general have to start coming off less compliant and accommodating…even less reasonable…at least occasionally. Trump has changed the rules of the game where now appealing to people’s better angels may not always be as effective as scaring the devil out of them.
Observation #2 --The Hillary was a bad candidate myth becomes hollower with each passing day of the Trump presidency. Her candidacy was straight out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party stretching back to JFK through Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama; and her campaign was only marginally better or worse than any of them. Beside that, her decision to run against Donald Trump’s unfitness for office rather than the 1% and the decline of the middle class was just as it should have been. As has now become abundantly clear to the media, the Republican establishment, and millions of thoughtless voters who indulged his antics while ignoring her warnings, Trump is manifestly unfit to be president and poses an existential threat to American democracy. To ignore who he was and what danger he represented in 2016 would’ve been as malfeasant as campaigning in 2000 with evidence of an imminent 9/11 attack or in 2008 with evidence of an imminent financial collapse and ignoring either. If she had spent the bulk of her campaign harping on the privileges of the 1% and chanting “millionaires and billionaires” over and over again, we would be looking at the increasingly horrifying spectacle in the White House today and asking, “What was wrong with her? Couldn't she see this coming?”
Observation #3 -- Nothing is going to change on Hillary’s upcoming media book tour unless she makes it change. She must know going in that every time she sits down with someone to discuss her book, one of the first things she’s going to be asked is whether she accepts any responsibility for the failure of her campaign. She will be asked that even though she has already accepted responsibility. She will be asked that even if she accepts responsibility in a morning interview and then again in an afternoon interview, they’re still going to want her to do it again in an evening interview. She must realize that it’s not the acceptance of responsibility they want, it’s the televised thrill of humbling her…of showing-off to their media friends…of assuring the people who send them nasty tweets about Hillary that they feel their anger. It is all performance, and Hillary has got to be ready to confront it as she perhaps should’ve confronted Trump that night…because it really comes from the same bully posturing. I hesitate to tell her what she must do (done that), because she’s had far too many damn people telling her what she should do…or should’ve done. She actually did the near impossible in winning a majority of votes over truly diabolical obstacles. But this upcoming book tour will be important…not for selling books or telling "her side of the story"…but for her to rise up out of the ashes and resume her rightful place in our national debate. She’s the last one who should be silenced because hers was the first, loudest, and clearest voice to rise up against the calamity that has befallen us, and we need her again.   

Fascism for Dummies

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…blah…blah…blah…
That’s been a time-honored sentiment for utopians and commercial jingle writers. Me? I’m too much a realist. I try to be like a good, consistent .300-hitter and not dwell too much on the 7 out of 10 times I fail. That helped immensely in my teaching days. You put your best effort out there, knowing you’re not going to reach all your students, and hope to have a lasting or at least useful impact on the ones you do reach. I’m much in mind of that reality these days when I sense that the nation is very badly in need of a remedial lesson on fascism. Every teacher--past and present--has a civic duty to step forward in service of country to try and teach that lesson.
But where to begin? The evils of fascism have been on full display for almost an entire century now…not only in classroom lectures, but in some truly great books, brilliant films, compelling TV dramas and documentaries, and painful eyewitness accounts. Yet, here we are in 2017 and so many of our fellow citizens seem perfectly oblivious to the threat and rather relaxed about what is clearly a national lurch to fascism. So the challenge is what can be said or done to reach them if they already have failed to understand what fascism is and master the elementary fact that it is not just bad for a free society, but anathema to one.
The “dummies” in question here are not the truly ignorant who are mere fish in a barrel for a well-armed comic. Nor are they the testosterone-stressed boys in the streets with their tiki torches and assault rifles. Their issues are so complex, so deeply psychological that they are really beyond any education that does not follow A Clockwork Orange methodology. 
No, the dummies in this case are the otherwise ordinary people you might run into at a neighborhood barbecue…you may have as Facebook friends…who may be the parents of your children’s friends. They are the people who a year ago were untroubled to hear Donald Trump boast, I'm the only one who can fix our problems…which is the very essence of the fascist personality. They are the ones who have time and again given him free passes--on his avowed sexual predation; his documented scummy business practices; his incessant, boldfaced lies--which is a key indicator of a people infatuated with fascism. They are the ones who say they will obediently give up their democracy if he asks them to, as half of Republicans said they will do in a recent poll. They are people content…almost satisfied…to see law enforcement come down brutally hard on minorities, allow immigrants to be stigmatized and banned without due process or just cause, and watch government take away their fellow citizens right to vote…all hallmarks of the typical fascist state.
These are people driven to a tolerance for fascism because the cashiers at their local department store say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”; because they don’t get to see as many white faces or hear as many white voices as they used to in their daily lives; because they consume Fox News every day, which is not only the nation’s chief propagator of fascism, but has been shown to actually turn people into dummies.
So how to reach them? Some of those great books on fascism, perhaps? Hannah Arendt on the “banality of evil”? Richard Hofstadter on America’s fertile ground for fascism? No…no…these people do not read…will not read. Movies then? Bertolucci’s 1900 is an epic view of the rise of fascism in Italy. The White Rose is an intimate view of living under fascism in Germany. Too foreign, though…too easy to say that’s them…that’s there…that would never happen here. Edward R. Murrow’s heroic denunciation of McCarthyism…which, like Trumpism, is a brand of fascism? But Murrow was a journalist and these people despise journalists. They think journalism should be like Fox and Friends and Hannity...something to reaffirm their ignorance.
I was in despair of ever finding a teaching tool to help me with this badly needed remedial lesson. But then I came across one of those viral links that suddenly, almost inexplicably, takes the Internet by storm. This one was for a US War Department public training film made in 1947. Coincidently titled Don’t Be a Sucker,  it was created by the “greatest generation” for “the greatest generation.” In 17 minutes it provides the easiest, most straightforward lesson on the dangers of fascism…not over there but here at home. Hard to believe that such a simple, black and white “education” film could speak so clearly and urgently to our time, but it does. So if you really don’t know what all this fuss about fascism is about or you know someone else who is, this film really is fascism for dummies.

What Makes You Happy?

Happy Man
“Tell me all the things that make you happy.” That was Lorna’s question to me at lunch the other day. It was a classic Lorna question…and she has a habit of asking such meaning of life questions at the most inopportune time…in the checkout line at the grocery store, during an intense scene in Game of Thrones, at midnight when she’s just crawling into bed and I’ve been asleep for 3 hours. This seemed another such bit of bad timing because I had just had a dreadful night in what has become a very bad month battling allergies and I was having a severe sleep-deprivation hangover. But much to the surprise of us, I immediately started to rattle off things that made me happy. It became like a reverse Tourette’s Syndrome…every happy thought I uttered gave birth to another.  I might still be there listing things that made me happy if one of those things wasn’t writing and I was beginning to feel anxious about writing these things down before I forgot them all. So I decided to cap my list at a hundred. And may I say, this was not a totally self-indulgent exercise because I realized in doing it how therapeutic it was, not only in a week when I was not feeling well personally, but a week when the world itself truly seems to have fallen off its axis. So I offer my list not so much to put others in awe of my life, but to encourage others to make their own list…kind of a don’t worry be happy exercise. This should not be like a best books I ever read list or the five famous dead people I want to have brunch with. This should just be things that put a smile on your face, a lightness in your heart, or an “Ahhh” on your mind. You’re welcome to prime your pump with my annotated list of 100 things that make me happy…NOT in order of importance…
This table, I said, looking down at the teak table where we had hosted so many guests over the years This view, I said, looking out over the poolThat hummingbird nest, I said, pointing to the nest we had watched being built in spring becoming home to a doting mother who nurtured her baby undeterred by our nearby lunchesThis lunch, I said, looking down at my tuna, tomato, pepita seed saladThat swimming pool…my own private swimming poolSkinny-dippingYou, Lorna…your daily, undiminished beauty and optimismYou, Lorna, at 17Westport summers with Lorna...burgers and onion rings at The Big Top, lasagna at the ArrowOur Westport weddingBecoming the father of daughtersDown on all fours with NicoPlaying catch with BenjaminA text from Avery on the day my mom diedMy relationship with MomFirst trip to Fenway with DadTed Williams at batLuis Tiant on the moundThe Red SoxThe Red Sox ReaderHoughton Mifflin hosting the family at Fenway in its company boxNew England roots…family, friends, Ocean Beach, Mark Twain’s HouseMark TwainBeaches…Hawk’s Nest; Carlsbad Beach; Numana, ItalyItaly…Sardinia, Sicily, Pompeii, The ParodisSkyping with Manu and familyCooking and feasting with my brothersBread and wineCleaning up the kitchen Big Chill style to classic rock…Dion, the Everly Brothers, Beatles, Dusty Springfield, MotownGreat songwriters…Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, LeonardCohen, Lennon & McCartneyDylan…the great good fortune of living in his timeLorna singing along to Linda RonstadtMy weekend-long Pandora groove: La Ronstadt, Adele, KD Lang, Joanie Baez, Eva Cassidy, Bonnie Raitt, Amy Winehouse, Van the ManSeeing Janis Joplin in concertSeeing Tina Turner in concert (on the night Janis died, alas)Springsteen’s great, incomparable "Tunnel of Love" ConcertScapbook I made of photos and Springsteen lyrics for DadArchive photos and videosMaking iMovies with my own soundtracksMy record collectionOld friends…Van Nuys, T.O., PSR (The Dan & Dave Show), GIA Older friends…EHS,UH, LHS (Church Street)A day at Mystic Seaport with Linda GademanThe Virgin Missile CrisisOldest friends…decades old (Joanne, John, Mike)Playing touch, softball, hockey and Ice Ball (!) with students and fellow teachers from LHSCatching fly balls on the runIce skating on Canaan Street LakeLiving on Canaan Street Lake..mowing all that grass, raking all those leaves, shoveling all that snowThat New Year’s full moon night on the lake with Bill & BettyVirtual friendships that nourish & flourish Virtual friendships that become real…Miguel, Andy, Kent, KimSmall world stories (new one just yesterday...blog post to come!)The Nobby Works…blogging Surfing the InternetFlying business classAll our travels togetherDavid Byrne dancingPicnickingWalking in the hillsWatching the Patriots (even 18-1 the 1 makes me smile…ruefully)Napping to the sound of our wind chime (thank you, Eileen McDargh)Sitting in the pergola taking in the view and the ocean breezeSnowcap views to the north…ocean views to the westGuilty pleasure—watching sun go down at the beach with Lorna, white wine and box of chicken tendersCappuccino in the morningPoetry…Billy Collins, "I am Not Italian", sent by Bruce MacLaren…to savor "the bitterness of its brevity"Reading…fiction and non-John Fowles…The Magus, Daniel, The French Lieutenant’s WomanReuben’s naked womenLunches with women (Angela, Kimberly, Sharon, Jana…)Mythology…Dionysus…Genesis…Matthew: 6Joseph Campbell’s workNorman O. Brown work…Love’s BodySpinelliGame of ThronesPeak TV…HBOThe SimpsonsMLB Net...Sox games for West Coast ex-patsMovies by the thousands, but always certain to make me laugh:Charles Grodin in Heartbreak KidSarah Jessica Parker in LA StoryAlbert Brooks in Lost in America & Modern Romance“I was born a poor young black boy”—Steve Martin“Serpentine…serpentine…”James Franco/Seth Rogen buddy comediesMaking and eating spinach pie every February 19Picking fresh fennel for fav recipes every springMeagan’s voicePlaying Sharkman in the pool with Dylan RileyHome schooling Gillian…the long, glorious epilogWritingRandom, sporadic responses to something I wrote from unexpected, often unknown sources (but always Samantha and Beryl)The room we never use when we doMy iPadSan Diego weatherFather’s Day calls every year from Andy McRoryBirthday wishes every year from Patricia Heller, who sat next to me in 9th grade homeroomTexted videos of NicoWoodsum family reunionsReale family reunionsThis house in all its splendorLorna's touches inside and out
MarleyA remarkably good life on balanceThe First Amendment--no, seriously it is a source of happiness; it protects the books I like to read, the movies I like to watch, the music I like to listen to, the things I like to write--so to be clear, what’s happening in Charlottesville, Virginia, right now is not an expression of the First Amendment; it is an overt threat to it.

And there you have it…if Lorna should ask what things make me unhappy, there’s the first item on my list.

Knick Knack Paddy Wagon

Pro tip: when someone hits you with an ethnic slur...
make lemonade out of it
Because I missed Donald Trump’s appalling speech (but I repeat myself) last week to the Suffolk County police, I didn’t hear him reference paddy wagons until I saw MSNBC’s Joy Reid condemn him for it the next day. In context, Trump had said, "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You see them thrown in rough. I said, 'Please don't be too nice.'"
In reporting on the comment, Reid introduced the subject by saying that most Irish-Americans find the term paddy wagon offensive. That caught my ear, not because I’m part Irish-American and did not find it offensive, but because I’m somewhat of a critical thinker and immediately thought to myself, Do most Irish-Americans find it offensive? Moreover: Domost Irish-Americans even recognize the connection between their heritage and police vans? I unscientifically concluded that neither was the case, but instantly thought this could be one of those teachable moments we’re always talking about where Joy Reid could do her viewers an invaluable service by inserting a little history so they would understand that the wagons the police used to gather up alleged lawbreakers became known as paddy wagons because most of the people who got thrown into them back in the day were of Irish descent. That, I thought, would’ve provided helpful context for her far too quick segue to the tragedy of Freddie Gray, the black Baltimore youth who died of a spinal injury after a rough ride to jail in a police van.
I don’t intend a media critique here; I know that on-camera talent such as Reid are under severe time restraints, but to me she missed a prime opportunity to connect her audience, especially its white segment, to Freddie Gray’s fate. The rough treatment he received in the back of that van and that Trump endorsed in his abhorrent speech should not be a black only thing. It was once routinely administered to whites, specifically to a white group that was the object of systemic discrimination. There needs to be shared discomfort about such societal outrages. Until you can get folks to empathize rather than just sympathize with the plight of others, they remain just “others” and what happens to them has little to do with you.
Rachel Maddow, who I watch only occasionally, seems to do a painstakingly fine job at putting most of her lead stories in historical context. Her viewers often don’t just get the news of the day, but the essential events and circumstances that led up to that news. She turns her broadcast into a mini college class...rather than assuming as Reid did that her viewers know what she's talking about. That somewhat arcane but relevant historical tidbit about paddy wagons may have been lost on Reid herself if she had not read an op-ed about it in the Washington Post that day. 
As happens, because the state of knowledge in America is currently viewed as totally fungible, that Post op-ed got slammed as “fake news” by a pro-Trump site that argued that those old time police wagons were named after “paddies”  (slang/slur for the immigrant Irish) because the Irish made up the bulk of the police force. The implication being not that the Irish were lawbreakers (a bad thing), but law enforcers (a good thing) and thus Trump’s use of it wasn’t offensive at all.
The fact that “paddy” was generally viewed as a derogatory term for the Irish would seem to undercut this interpretation, but you never know. The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame take their name from another Irish stereotype, and Irish-Americans seem to be okay with that regardless of painful personal experience. My own memories and family stories of my Irish grandfather were anything but endearing. He was a loud, short-tempered lout who regularly beat his kids. His son, my father, was constantly in barroom fights himself, which left him bloody and spoiling for more to the great dismay of my mom and me. Yet most Irish-Americans don’t have much of a problem with the stereotype as portrayed by the Notre Dame mascot: a scowling, two-fisted leprechaun.
The Fighting Irish mascot draws inevitable comparisons with the Washington Redskins logo  whenever that controversy rears its ugly head…and since football season is upon us that would be right about now. There are similar contours to the two stereotyping issues…both hearken back to darker periods in American history that most citizens would naturally like to forget…or disown. And both expose the danger of imposing partisan feelings on objective research. As with the etymology of paddy wagon, there has been significant twisting of the historical facts surrounding the word redskin to fit a political agenda. Ives Goddard, a well-respected linguist, did the most exhaustive study of the origin of the word redskin for the Smithsonian and found that according to the earliest, most reliable evidence Native-Americans were the first to use the term redskin, and used it freely along with "whiteskin" and "blackskin" to distinguish among the three races then inhabiting a continent they once ruled exclusively. Goddard traces the first known use of redskin back to an 1812 negotiation between James Madison and tribal chiefs, who used redskin in that negotiation to proudly define themselves.
There is no doubt that in time the use of redskin devolved from positive to neutral to pejorative. In a cursory view of Hollywood films from the 1930s to early 1960s, it is clear that redskin was used as racial slur. But as The Nob has examined in the past, it is not uncommon for slurs--“queer” for instance--to morph from positive to negative and back to positive again. A not unreasonable and non-racist argument can be made that the Washington Redskins have succeeded in pushing the evolution of Redskin in a positive direction. That certainly seems the view of the majority of Native-Americans, according to a comprehensive poll conducted by The Washington Post, where 90But the point here is not to make a brief for the Redskins, a team I only think about when this off-field matter comes up. As always, my concern is with the sustainability of thought, reason, rationality in our current climate of way-too-much opinion. That climate is as much in danger as our atmospheric climate is. Like the pro-Trump twist on paddy wagon, the anti-Redskin movement has been shoddy in making its counter “arguments”. They disparage the methodology of that Washington Post poll...though many who do so fully embrace WaPo polls that confirm their opinions. More damning is their dismissal of the work of a scholar like Goddard for an institution like the Smithsonian, neither of which has ever displayed any political bias. Yet one Native-American activist highly vested in the lawsuits against the Redskins reacted to Goddard’s work this way: “I’m very familiar with white men who uphold the judicious speech of white men.”
And there you have it. You argue against meticulous research by raising the scourge of white privilege. You make a case against racism by making a racist attack. You carve the path to fake history by carving up verifiable history. This is a widespread and self-destructive turn for  intellectual integrity in our time…and at the risk of inviting the opprobrium: “both siderism”…I'd say it is becoming increasingly bipartisan.
There is some real, shameful American history that needs to be acknowledged and taken as a cautionary tale. But you don’t get there by assuming a posture of moral superiority and constantly beating people over the head with it. You get there by getting inside their heads. And if you’re in the media, you don’t get inside heads...and hearts...simply by banning the word Redskin, making vague references to paddy wagons, or employing Orwellian constructions such as “the N-word.” You get there by assuming your viewers don't know all the history they need to know. You get there by taking their ignorance on good faith, rather than a cloak for racism and nativism. And you get their by continuing to educate about such significant and resonant historical incidents as the Trail of Tears, the New York Draft Riots, the Lawrence mills strikes. The big thing about teachable moments is that they require someone to do some actual teaching.
    

Narratives…Can’t Live with Them; Can’t Live without Them

History, ring your bell, 
Fare thee well, McConnell 
Pluck is the lady that he loves the best. 
Phoenix to Maricopa 
Votin' with snark and Nope-Ahh 
Maverick is a legend of the west. 
Black Jack Claymore : May I have a word? Cleaver Greene : What word? Narrative? Or some un-translatable French word?
The little bit of dialogue above is from the deliciously sharp Australian series Rake (not ever to be confused with the lame, short-lived US version). Actor Richard Roxburgh who plays lawyer Cleaver Greene absolutely excels at hitting single, solitary words like “narrative” square enough to deliver all the humor, nuance and meaning any writer could ever intend. The line is directed at his rival, Black Jack, whose his ex-wife’s lesbian lover and a political consultant prone to throw narrative around like a mantra designed to fix any and all problems. Cleaver, who’s what Bart Simpson would be if he were to grow up and take a profession (and Bart as a barrister makes perfect sense), has no use for narrative…neither the word, nor the concept. Rake the show, in fact, much like The Simpsons, plays out in a fairly anarchic environment where the subtext is always the chaos and randomness of human existence. In an episode from Season 17, Sideshow Bob asks Homer if he can tell him the story of how he came to be mayor of a small Italian village. Homer replies with: “Yes, if it has a beginning, middle, and end and I end up rooting for the protagonist.” Homer delivers the line with the same level of finely marinated sarcasm that Cleaver Greene employs in the narrative line above. Both shows insist on always going their own way and constantly push against the tropes and expectations of traditional narrative.  
I like narrative. I’ve pretty much both made a living off and lived by narrative all my life. But my recent immersion in the works of Daniel Kahneman—first, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow and now in The Undoing Project about the impact he and his partner Amos Tversky have had on our understanding of the thinking process--have shown me that my affection for and insistence on narratives only makes me one more human being hopelessly trying to impose linear storylines on arbitrary happenstance. 
Kahneman and Tversky spent most of their distinguished careers debunking the idea of narratives built on patterns that imply meaning. Their work has undermined much conventional wisdom that creates the illusion of predictability and purpose. For instance, they prove through carefully researched data that here is no such thing as a “hot hand” in basketball, the stock market, corporate leadership, Vegas, or anywhere else. If you flip a coin 100 times, there is a likelihood that at some point in your flipping you’ll come upon a pattern of, say, 2 heads and a tail three or four times in a row. That is no guarantee the pattern will continue and that you should feel confident in betting that it will. The same goes for the shooter off the bench, the stock picker, the CEO, etc. Kahneman and Tversky felt so confident in their findings that they dared to tilt at one of the prime shibboleths in Western intellectual thought, Santayana’s declaration that those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. On the contrary, found the great Un-Doers, our real problem is too much reliance on the repeatability of history…on employing the same strategies and solutions to solve problems that come at us under constantly evolving circumstances and changes in chance.
In the great counter-narrative that Kahneman and Tversky’s work provides, we are forever plugging events and incidents into our favorite narratives. This goes on every day in every walk of life, from matters both banal and serious. Here’s an example of the banal--Boston Red Sox beat reporter who has held to the not unique narrative this season that the Sox need help at third base—reported on a recent loss this way: “"Angels 3, Red Sox 2: A team that craves for more offense, particularly at third base, lost on a home run by the opposing third baseman. How's that for a cruel twist?” First off, as cruel twists go, that’s pretty small potatoes. But more importantly, it is nothing more than a damn coincidence, and a meaningless one at that, that the Sox were beaten on a homer by a rival third baseman. Only the human impulse and ingenuity for creating narrative makes it anything more.
As for a more serious example--there was John McCain’s dramatic midnight vote to kill Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare. For days leading up to the vote, which few saw coming, you could find countless and fairly consistent narratives everywhere of McCain’s career as a faux maverick who always failed to back his noble rhetoric up with action. His epitaph as a man who was less than he appeared seemed pretty firmly written in stone. Then came the vote and a major rewrite was underway throughout the Internet: The Maverick lives! He rode into town at the last minute and saved the day. Literally there were contemplations about a future McCain movie…a patriotic, Capraesque tearjerker where the wounded warrior ambles to the well of the Senate and Cato-like turns a thumb down on an odious bill designed to bring death and hardship to millions. A modestly talented screenwriter could crank that baby out in a week…all the dots are there.
But like all narratives, it is manufactured…true insofar as any narrative is true to the interconnections of the dots…the plot points. A less charitable creative force behind the film (here’s looking at you, Oliver Stone) could just as easily produce a darker narrative, one driven by resentment, vengeance, and dime-store Machiavellianism.
So it is with narrative. But as illusory and malleable as it is, it is still necessary and essential to our lives, which is why The Nob has been so partial to myth, the ancient narratives of our forebears. Narrative has always been especially important to those of the political consultant class, like Rake's Black Jack Claymore, because they shape the stories that politicians bring before the public to stir emotions and votes. It has become abundantly and regrettably clear that one of our major political parties has excelled with a steady, compelling narrative about masses of moochers living off the work of others, of immigrants and terrorists coming for our property and lives, and of a safe and stable world being knocked off its axis by rampant godlessness. It is up to that other party to come up with a more compelling counter narrative, but I’m afraid The Democrats’ newly unveiled  “A Better Deal” ain’t it. That’s a slogan and a handful of policies, but it’s still not a story. It lacks narrative pull…and as made-up fictional as narrative may be, you can’t hope to run the non-fiction world without it.

The Twitter Paradox

A few months ago I started following my Twitter feed as a way of easing myself out of the news blackout I had self imposed last November. My thinking was that taking news in 140-character bites would protect me from the bubble I ended up in after watching cable news 24/7 leading up to the election. In due time, however, I learned that there’s rampant bubbling taking place on Twitter as well, though I’m better able to observe it now than be consumed by it.
My main observation is that Twitter is a hotbed of what Daniel Kahneman describes as System 1 thinking in his essential book, Thinking Fast and Slow. As Kahneman insists throughout his book, there is not a value difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking. They’re just different and both have their place in human decision making, like low gear and high gear have different functions in operating a car. There’s nothing wrong with high gear; it’s just that if you use it in trying to climb a steep hill, you’re misusing it.
System 1 is our brain’s high gear…it gets us to decisions fast. Without that ability to make quick decisions, our species’ chances of survival would’ve been iffy given how much faster, stronger, and instinctive so many creatures around us are. Still, System 1 thinking is not without its drawbacks. The most serious is that it often prevents us from employing our more deliberative, rational, less emotional, System 2 brain. Because Twitter consists almost entirely of pure, uncut System 1 thoughts, it resembles that psychological game where patients are asked to say the first thing that comes to their minds when they hear the word…what word? Take your pick: race, rape, rage, Hillary, Russia, healthcare, Trump, OJ, Bernie bro, sexist, slut, slob, Pablo Sandoval. On Twitter you literally get to watch people following the news and instantly registering their gut reaction to it…their System 1 on steroids.
This past week gave a sobering example of the negative effect of this dynamic. HBO announced that the creators of Game of Throneswould next be producing a series called Confederate based on the premise of what if the South had won the Civil War. There’s a long tradition of such imaginings not only in fiction, but in academia as well. Sitting on my bookshelf is a fascinating history called What if wherein a number of scholars tackle the intriguing questions of what would the world be like if significant historical events had gone otherwise. Yet the Twitter reaction to Confederate was all Sturm und Drang…and this howling came most forcefully from my tribesmen on the political left. They accused HBO of trying to placate the neo-Confederates who walk among us with increasing swagger; they screamed How dare they? about the two white guys hired to tell a story about slavery; they wailed about the most tragic episode in American history being turned over to entertainers who freely traffic in sex, blood and dragons. This hue and cry rose up from the ranks of liberals who pride themselves on understanding nuance, appreciating patience, grounding themselves in reality. Yet here they were sounding every bit as hysterical as Evangelicals did years ago when Martin Scorsese announced he would be making Nikos Kazantzakis’s masterpiece, The Last Temptation of Christ, into a movie.
This is a direct result of Twitter of course.  I truly doubt that any of those from the fields of politics, punditry and sports (!) who tweeted ominously about the coming of Confederate would’ve done so without Twitter. Their interest in an upcoming TV show (and upcoming in years, not days) would’ve been nil. But Twitter gave them a means to act on a random impulse and find instant gratification for a passing aggravation. In that System 1 instant, ironically, they were mimicking a US President who they rightly mock and disparage daily for constantly giving into his impulses on Twitter.
I’m not much of one for bemoaning the evolutionary stages of human communication. Yes, the written word replaced the oral tradition and cost us some great storytelling around the campfire. And, yes, the printing press gave everyone the ability to take a book into their own private corner and killed off reading to others. And cell phones and Internet and Instagram are all changing the way we communicate before our very eyes and ears…and as Marshall McLuhan brilliantly revealed, changes in the media of communication bring changes in the meanings of communication. And so we shouldn’t be all that shocked when Twitter turns even the most thoughtful among us into System 1 shoot-from-the-hip gunslingers with opinions about a TV show that hasn't even been written yet.   
What’s more unsettling is the lack of awareness about the whole process and its import for our times. With Kahneman and his late partner Amos Tversky, we had a team as powerful in the realm of critical thinking that we would've had if Einstein and Hawking had teamed up in physics. The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Minds by Michael Lewis shows how Kahneman and Tversky’s research over 50 years undid old ideas and discovered new realities about how humans think. Their truly revolutionary findings have made profound impact in the areas of medicine, psychology, military, economics, and sport. Where their influence is notably and sadly lacking is in education, government and media. Unscientifically, I’ll claim that those three areas generate the most Twitter activity. That’s part of the Twitter paradox…the more it is used, the more its users have to subjugate their System 2 minds to their System 1 minds, thus diminishing the power of the former and enhancing that of the latter.

The other part of the paradox is that a great deal of Donald Trump’s appeal to his base is the unfiltered view they get of him through his Tweets. A recent poll suggests that the country as a whole is less enamored of his Tweet habit than his base is, but that's  mostly because they find it distracting. His base has shown consistently since his profile first went national that they like the way he says things even more than they like (or even care) about what he says. There’s the more important message for those with designs on changing the recent course of our political history and making America sane again. That message is not that “the resistance” needs better logos or ideological purity, but that it needs to communicate better to the System 1 mindset--which means less manufacturing, focus group testing of System 2 bullshit aimed at the impossible goal of pleasing everyone.
More to come on this...until then, The Nob invites you to sing along with the birdies...
  

Eulogy for My Mother

Delivered at St Patrick's Church
Enfield, CT
July 14, 2017

In the past, I’ve written quite a lot about my mother as a citizen because I believe that for her being a citizen was second in importance only to that of being a mother. She had a special talent for combining both roles, and I want to share a story with you today that illustrates that. It’s a story I’ve shared only once before--20 years ago in a book I wrote about home schooling my daughter Gillian. Even then it was a difficult, embarrassing story for me to tell.

It takes place when I was about three or four years old, and we lived on North Main Street. In nice weather my mother would set up a chair outside by our front stoop and watch me play on the sidewalk. One day a black woman walked by while I was playing. She would’ve been called a Negro or colored then, but I had no word because I had never seen such a person, and there were very few people of any race other than white in Thompsonville back in those days. Having never seen such a person, I said something about the woman to my mother that was both awful and innocent at the same time. I must note, it was not the word you may be thinking of because that word was also unknown to me at so young an age. But it was an awful thing to say, nonetheless. The black woman clearly heard what I said because she looked right down at me, but continued walking though it surely must have hurt or angered her.
In my childish innocence I had no idea of what I was saying…or seeing really. My mother fortunately did not laugh at the awfulness of what I had said because she found it cute, nor did she ignore it because it was innocent. Instead, she immediately took me by the hand, caught up with the woman, and apologized to her on my behalf. Then she took me inside, and behind our closed front door delivered to me a short, firm, but loving lesson, seizing instinctively on what we now call a teachable moment. I wish I could remember her exact words, but I was not a writer then, just a child. And as a child I only remember the big lesson, not the details. It was a lesson about human kindness and respect for others. It was a lesson that came not from my mother’s saintliness, though she was in many ways a saint, but from her common sense. Her common sense helped her see the diversity of a world I was about to grow up into, and made her want to prepare me for an existence where everyone did not reflect back to me my own identity…where I would encounter many differences in race, religion, ethnicity, politics…even a world where some people worshipped the Boston Red Sox and others worshipped the New York Yankees.

As I stand before you today, I’m 71 so that lesson has now been with me for about 68 years. It was such a simple but important lesson, and I often think, what if more mothers throughout the land and throughout the decades from the 40s and 50s through the 60s and 70s to the present day dedicated two minutes of their motherhood to teaching the same message to their children. What a richer, better, more loving country this would be. That would have been a heaven on earth for my mom…a paradise good enough for her eternal resting place.

Because we loved her and learned from her we will keep on trying.

This Unhappy Fourth

Sad
The Chinese came up with the first firearm in 1132. The Arabs developed their guns about a hundred years later. Europe finally got in on the shooting spree around 1340…and it would be Europeans who brought guns to Africa and Latin America. So the gun has been around throughout most of the world for a pretty long time…way longer than what we know and celebrate as national independence both at home and abroad. As much as the NRA wants us to believe that we get our freedom from the barrel of a gun, the cold, hard truth of it is that the gun was incidental to America’s war for independence. If the gun was at all a determinative factor, China, and the nations of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America would have been models of democracy long ago but they most certainly are not and many have not even come close.  
The historical fact is that the liberal revolutions of the late 18th and early 19thcenturies owed far more to a free press than firepower. The invention of the printing press and subsequent spread of newspapers, pamphlets and books centuries after Europe became an open carry continent is what led people to believe they--not some entrenched royalty--should have control over their civic lives. (In fact in his fascinating PBS series, How We Got to Now , Steven Johnson suggests that tea may have been more important than guns in advancing the cause of freedom in that it was while sitting around tea rooms that men began sharing the radical, disruptive ideas they read about in newspapers that would lead them to revolt). Once that idea of freedom took root, the revolutions to follow would’ve been carried out with crossbows or broadswords or slingshots…whatever means necessary. The gun was merely the tool at hand; it was the inspiration and logic provided by the printed word that galvanized the fights for freedom.
It is important to reflect on this undeniable historical truth on this most unhappy Fourth of July when we suffer under a malignant presidency that is openly and persistently at war with a free press. Donald Trump’s inability to comprehend and tolerate media criticism as the price of governing a free people should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed his litigious career and relationships built on NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). His thin skin is as prominent a personal characteristic as is his clownish orange hair. What is far more unsettling about his near daily attacks on journalists and what he calls fake news (which is actually just any news he doesn’t like) is the support he continues to maintain among his voting base and Republicans in Congress. 
His attacks reached DEFCON 5 level absurdity when he recently tweeted out a video of him wrestling a caricature of a CNN reporter to the ground and pummeling him. It was hard enough to contemplate that the alleged leader of the free world had the time and inclination to send out such an advertisement for his phony toughness. But add to it that he chose to share this bully-boy assault on one of our fundamental freedoms just days before the nation gathers to celebrate those freedoms.
It is not hard to imagine the scene that would’ve transpired if Barack Obama tweeted a video of him similarly wrestling a caricature of the NRA to the ground and pummeling it. Angry gun owners would pour into the streets threatening insurrection, and Mitch McConnell and his posse of undertakers would glumly appear before the TV cameras and solemnly intone: “The President’s assault on the Second Amendment is unprecedented and reveals his contempt for our fundamental freedoms.”
Trump, alas, attacks the First Amendment with impunity and not only escapes criticism from those sworn to uphold the Constitution, but is cheered on by those who voted for him. Trump is who he is…who he has always been…a self-absorbed conman. It has always been there for those with eyes to see and brains to think. This unhappy Fourth is not his shame, it is the shame of those who put him in office to settle their petty resentments and who take perverse satisfaction in his undoing of government. They’ve taken their citizenship and our democracy so lightly that they’re willing to stand by—silent at best, laughing at worst--as their chosen buffoon mocks, abuses, and ultimately destroys the very first and most critical of our bill of rights.   

Dear Grosser....

Readers are welcome to take the letter below in whole or in part, to customize as they please, and send it via Twitter, email, or US mail to their local grocery stores or store headquarters.
July 4, 2017
Dear WalMart, Kroger (Ralph’s), Safeway (Vons, Albertsons), Stater Brothers:
I’m standing in the checkout line of my local grocery store where I regularly go to buy food to put on the table for my family. Before I pay for my meat and milk and macaroni, I am assaulted by a bombardment of gossip, sleaze and outright lies. These destructive aspects of contemporary life are blasted at me in garish colors from the front page of the National Enquirer. It has always been there on your shelves of course, force-feeding your customers a steady diet of smears and scandals. But it has now taken an even darker turn into the lowest, most despicable form of political propaganda.
We now know from the Enquirer’s own publisher, David Pecker, that the rag’s mission is to serve the interests of Donald J. Trump. From The New Yorker (July 3, 2017 issue):

Wenner was curious to hear about Pecker’s relationship with the President. “I thought I would have to pull it out of him smoothly,” he said. “But he offered it up pretty readily, and I was all ears. He was painting Donald as extremely loyal to him, and he had no issue being loyal in return. He told me very bluntly that he had killed all sorts of stories for Trump. He hired a girl to be a columnist when she threatened to go public with a story about Donald...”

In the past week we learned that not only did Pecker kill "all sorts of stories" for Trump, but that Trump used his power to blackmail others, such as MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
It’s bad enough that the Enquirer traffics in such misleading headlines as Megyn Kelly hiding her “criminal past” (which turns out to be her own self-confessed story about shoplifting when she was 12). It’s deplorable enough that it continues to run nonstop such utterly false and vicious stories on Hillary Clinton’s as the one about her non-existant brain cancer. It’s beyond despicable that they abuse a model young woman like Malia Obama with the malicious claim that she "hit rock bottom" and was in rehab. But now that we know that all this hate, ugliness, and toxicity is in service of the boorish, spoiled, narcissist who sits in the White House, the National Enquirer has gone from being a disgusting blight on our culture to being a threat to our civic discourse and ability to self-govern. 
Your stores would never…could never…sell meat and dairy products as rotten and tainted as the National Enquirer is. But not only do you continue to sell it, you provide it with the most prominent placement in your store. I understand that you are making this foul garbage available for customers with a perverse appetite for it, so this letter is not a demand that you stop selling it. It is a plea, however, that you reposition it in your stores so it is not a constant, gratuitous insult to your more discriminating customers and vile offense to their children. If there are people who need to fill their empty, stupid lives by buying this scabrous scandal sheet, let them go find it elsewhere in your store just as shoppers for condoms and whisky do.
The National Enquirer is totally dedicated to the tastes of its unrefined readers. You do not have the luxury to totally indulge that audience, however, because your customer base is also made up of educated, perceptive and now highly activated people. Because of the atmosphere Donald J. Trump has created, we are no longer willing to let pass outrages against us as we once were, as witness by the many mass marches throughout the country since Trump’s inauguration.  The National Enquirer is clearly a handy, bully-boy propaganda tool of Trump's. If you continue to feature and promote it as you have in the past, you will be complicit in the gross civic harm it is doing to the United States, and you will be held accountable.  
Regards,Dan RileyVista, CA
  

Chocolate Cake vs. Fruit Salad

Cousin Linda's cake vs. Brother Cliff's fruit salad.
Dare you to choose.
The book of the year for me has been Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene, a Christmas gift from Daughter Meagan, who was the one to turn me on to the last big book in my life Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Like Kahneman’s book, Greene’s book provides me with an odd level of comfort in knowing that all our behaviors are not of our own volition. I sometimes prefer to believe that all the cruelty, cravenness, and outright craziness we see surrounding us every day is not all together voluntary. We are actually wired or programmed (or whatever lay expression you like) to behave in specific ways under certain circumstances, which may mitigate against some of our harsher judgments on others…and on ourselves.  
For instance, studies have shown (and this book is jam packed full of fascinating studies) that when white folks are shown pictures of black folks so quickly as to only register at a subliminal level they experience an unconscious panic in their amygdala, the emotion center of the brain. When the picture is held for just a second longer, reason starts to overcome the initial fear and the amygdala responds accordingly. Researchers speculate that what we might be witnessing here is not innate hate-based racism, but a vestige of our primitive existence when survival greatly depended upon instantly identifying members of other...possibly hostile...tribes. There would be no quicker and easier way to mark someone as “other” than by skin color.
In another study, a test group is randomly divided up into two. The first group is given 2 digits to memorize for delivering to researchers located in another room down a long hall. The second group is told to do the same, only they are given 7 digits to memorize.  In the middle of the hall is a table of snacks featuring a piece of chocolate cake and a fruit salad. The test subjects are instructed to take cake or salad for their own enjoyment on their way to the other room. When those carrying the 7-digit load made their choices, they were 50% more likely to opt for cake over salad. 
The conclusion the researchers drew from this was that the heavier memory task the 7-digit group was carrying made it more difficult for them to reason the difference between cake (possibly bad for them long-term) and salad (probably good for them long-term). The stress of remembering the 7 digits made it more natural for them to revert to more primitive thought process: cake…comfort…calories…yummy. The instinct to relieve the burden of remembering all those numbers, to boost energy for the journey down the hall, to gain instant gratification overwhelmed any thoughts of diet or health.
Of course there are other possible factors and interpretations that Greene’s report on the study doesn’t go into, though they seem well worth pondering. Off the top, I wonder how aesthetics plays into it. Did the fruit salad, say, have that limpy, unfresh appearance that we might expect of a lab salad? What was the frosting on the cake? Would results have been different between a chocolate frosting and a white frosting? Then I think, what would the results have been with different foods, but on the same principle in play: Sausage vs. broccoli…beef jerky vs. strawberry…fruitcake vs. chicken salad?
It’s also interesting to consider that although the 2-digit group may be making the healthier choice because it’s under less information overload, those in this group would have to have considerable data already in mind to properly process the alternatives before them. They would have to be able to draw upon some knowledge about the varying effects of cake and salad on the body and the long-term consequences of each. Where the 2 digit comes in to play is in allowing enough time for reason, as Greene puts it, “to free us from the tyranny of passion”.  It’s similar to the dynamic we see in the pictures of black faces experiment. Given just a bit more time to let our reason answer our fear, we achieve a less primitive state of being.    
I also love this cake/salad study because it adds greater verisimilitude to my favorite all time story, the Book of Genesis, which is also about temptation and the forbidden. All of human history has been about giving in to temptation and/or challenging the unknown. What were Adam and Eve, after all, other than history’s first lab rats? Did God really want to keep that forbidden fruit to himself, or was he just curious to see what his little creations would do?

Religion tells us that Eve sinned in using her free will to disobey God’s command. My guess is that science would prove that Eve was wired to rebel…born to be wild, as it were. How else does misbehavior come into being, except through us? And how else do we acquire it except naturally? And how else do we overcome it except the difficult, but not unnatural act of reasoning? Maybe science will one day prove that free will is an illusion, or vastly overrated at best. But it also seems to be on the way to proving that whatever demons we have within us, we also have better angels to help overcome the demons and rise above our more primitive selves.