Dan Riley's Blog, page 41

White Lies, Black Lies, and 50 Shades of Gray Lies, Part II

Before the Nob got caught up in the spirit of auld lang syne and started waxing nostalgic, it was trying to plumb the depths of human duplicity, starting at the shallow end with white lies. White lies are, by general consensus, harmless lies…or they should be. If they’re not, they fail to be white lies. A white lie: “I was just thinking about you.” Another white lie: “I’m feeling great.” Yet, another: “I’ll be there in a minute.” The white lie is marked not only by harmlessness, but by banality and commonality. White lies roll off our tongues without even a blink from our conscience…or our fellow humans. White lies bond us in a way, and ironically give the lie to the moral absolutists among us who contend that any and all lies are damnable…usually while dabbing themselves in the deceit of perfume or underarm deodorant. 
In Part I on this subject, I categorized the Santa Claus story as a white lie, which was a lie in itself…or a misstatement or half-truth or let’s just say I misspoke…whichever euphemism gets me by without having to admit to lying.  The Santa Claus story falls into the grandest category of lies…the cultural lie or myth. These are the stories/legends/tall tales…oh, hell, lies…cultures tell to idealize themselves or envision a glorious future or manifest their fears. Paul Bunyan, Horatio Alger, Santa and Satan are obvious examples. Our fiction, or the lie as literature, is a great source of such myths, from Homer’s Ulysses to James Joyce’s Ulysses to 2001: A Space Odyssey (and some would argue they are the same damned story told in three different ways, and if a story has a grip on a culture like that perhaps there’s more truth to it than not). History is also a great source of myth, once we mythologize historical figures by burnishing them to a superhuman sheen. Jesus raising the dead is a myth (we’d like to believe in a hero who saves us from death). Columbus proving the world is round is a myth (we’d like to believe in a hero who saves us from the demons at the edge of the earth). Washington never telling a lie is a myth (we’d like to have leaders that always tell us the truth). Myth reveals a truth about a culture inaccessible through any other means than made-up stories. I’m very much a fan of myth, but like all the categories of lies beyond white lies, it is not without its danger point. The myths of Aryan Supremacy or American Exceptionalism, for a couple of examples, are myths, but hardly harmless ones.  
On the next level of lie is what I call the BI-lie—the Best of Intentions Lie. If not the most harmful category of lie, surely the most insidious because the BI-lie requires the liar to first be convinced that the lie is for the good of others. Often it is; sometimes it isn’t, but the distinction may lie only in the eyes of the beholder. A flight attendant who lies to the passengers that all is right with a flight she knows to be in trouble may have the best of intentions in trying to calm fears, but may be depriving loved ones in conveying last words to one another. The same for a doctor of a doomed patient who wants to spare that patient excessive mental anguish but may be costing that patient valuable time in getting his affairs in order. Government officials routinely engage in such lies to save their populations from panic even though the people may have very good reasons to panic over their finances, health, or well-being. BI-lies are often small bore…one human to another with the modest intent of boosting the morale or courage of the other: “That dress looks great on you, sweetheart” or “Look, dude, I’m sure she’d love to have you ask her out.”
The masturbation lie is not the same as self-delusion. The first we willfully tell to satisfy ourselves; the latter is a condition we have little control over...and in extreme cases requires therapy. Typical masturbation lies this time of year are, “I’ll start the New Year’s diet tomorrow” or “I’ll start exercising as soon as the weather gets warmer” or “I’ll start learning Italian seriously this time!”  Not all together harmless either: “I’m going to confess to my role in the George Washington Bridge traffic fiasco as soon as I run out of close aides and associates to throw under the bus.”
Which leads us to the passive lie…or Silent Lie (Si-Lie™). This is where you let others lie for you when they assert things you know to be untrue, but you neither confirm nor deny them. In the best of circumstances, you just keep your mouth shut and leave the listener to sort through the ambiguity. If pressed, however, you give a non-response response:

 Q: … have you asked from your staff if there are any other cases of political retribution conducted during your campaign…?
GOV. CHRISTIE: Well, listen, again, let me say this: Clearly, that's the tone of those emails. But …the other part of this that just shocks me is as I've said to you all many times before, Mayor Sokolich was never on my radar screen. He was never mentioned to me as somebody whose endorsement we were even pursuing. … Now, we pursued lots of endorsements during the campaign from Democrats, and we didn't receive most of them… I don't remember ever meeting Mayor Sokolich in that -- certainly I never did in that context. I don't ever -- I'm sure I met him at some point in an event in Bergen County, but I have to tell you, until I saw his picture last night on television, I wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a lineup….

And so the question as to whether there were ever any other acts of retribution stumbles off to where good questions go to die.Lies to conceal malfeasance or public shame are different not just in degree but in kind from lies to advance a strategy. Let’s call these Competitive Lies. They are commonly employed by the intelligence community, the military, sports teams, and corporations.  I happen to have a favorite football team that is famous for, among other things, lying on its weekly, league-mandated injury reports. The team shamelessly lists players as “questionable” or “probable” that it knows for a certainty will be playing the upcoming game. I never lose a wink of sleep over this moral transgression, nor would I if a company I had stock in misled its competition into thinking it was doing R & D in one direction, while actually doing it in another. On a larger, weightier stage, no one but transparency fetishists would argue with a nation’s right to lie to protect state secrets, troop movements, or investigations into criminal activity. 

In his definitive account on society’s sometime need for deceit, The Varnished Truth, David Nyberg writes that even our legal code makes exceptions for lies called puffing and chaffering. Nyberg quotes legal scholar Charles Wolfram on these exceptions thusly:

Some deals are too good to be true, and some representations are too preposterous, jocular, suspicious, or trite to induce reasonable reliance. A measure of salt is required particularly if the person making the representation is one of adverse interest, as will ordinarily be the case in negotiating. ‘The habit of vendors to exaggerate and of purchasers to depreciate the value of the articles which they are selling or buying is well known.’ Both contract and tort law recognize loose but not terribly broad categories of these conventionalized lies upon which no one may rely in determining to enter into a contract…Such misstatements excepted from creation of liability are known as puffing or chaffering. The exceptions are based on assumptions about human behavior in business dealings and on ‘reasonable standards of fair dealing.’ For both purposes judges draw meaning in part from what they believe to be prevailing market practices. Those practices do not always insist on the truth.

Of course, the craven mortgage lender could read into this a right to puff and chaff a mortgage contract where the 6-point fine print conceals all the devilish details, and fiendishly sit back watching a poor sap sign his life away because he ignored the burden on the buyer to beware. That seems to be a good place for a society as a whole to intervene…for a society to decide that it’s not really in pursuit of happiness if it's allowing legions of ordinary citizens to be played for saps…for a society to decide that it wants its prevailing market practices regulated enough to allow a little less of a comfort zone for liars.   
In Part III, The Nob goes into the heart of darkness…The Black Lie.  

Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot: It's a Question

Should old acquaintance be forgot,and never brought to mind?Should old acquaintance be forgot,and old lang syne?CHORUS:For auld lang syne, my dear,for auld lang syne,we'll take a cup of kindness yet,for auld lang syne.And surely you'll buy your pint cup and surely I'll buy mine!And we'll take a cup o' kindness yet,for auld lang syne.CHORUSWe two have run about the slopes,and picked the daisies fine ;But we've wandered many a weary foot,since auld lang syne.CHORUSWe two have paddled in the stream,from morning sun till dine† ;But seas between us broad have roaredsince auld lang syne.

Like most everyone else, I’ve heard Auld Lang Syne at least once practically every year of my life. I never read the lyrics until this year though, so it’s the first time I realized that the two opening lines are phrased as questions, rather than conditions. In other words, it is not a case of if old acquaintances are forgotten; it is a case of do I, through my own volition, forget old acquaintances. Do I choose to purge from my heart and my mind those who once occupied a prominent place there?It makes for a much harsher take on relationships, which under the conditional interpretation of the lyrics merely implies the obvious—that relationships often fall victim to the vagaries of individual lives. We move, change jobs, remarry, win or lose, etc…and any or all of those can have a negative impact on our relationships, even those of longest duration or deepest feelings. But to willfully purge a relationship…or even ask if one should be purged...takes it to a whole other level. It turns the relationship question into the classic stock market question—should I buy or should I sell?Oddly enough, this mercantile view of relationships comes down to us from Robert Burns, one of the most romantic figures of the 18thcentury, and it greatly informs Facebook, the social arbiter of the 21stcentury. On Facebook one chooses willfully to “friend” or (more to the point) ”unfriend”…to buy or to sell a relationship. It is a calculation: is this someone I want in my life--even at a distance--or is this someone I want out of my life?Part of me wants to believe that the question mark in Burns’s lyric is one of those errant punctuation marks that gets recklessly added to a piece of work as it passes down through the ages and was not Burns's doing. I like to think that Burns was too much the poet to put so much emphasis on the deliberateness of relationships. He was, after all, a major influence on three contemporaries I greatly admire—John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Bob Dylan. Still, if you read through the rest of the lyric after the two opening questions, you see an undeniable strain of bittersweet there of a relationship gone bad. Is not George's killing of Lenny in Of Mice and Men the ultimate unfriending?  Is not Holden Caulfield's contempt for all whom he meets an act of determined forgetting? And Dylan very well could’ve read Auld Lang Syne before he sat down to write Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (“But goodbye’s too good a word, gal/So I’ll just say fare thee well”).
It’s all an illusion of course. We don’t march in and out of relationships at will, as much as we sometimes may try. We may friend some and unfriend others, but in the end our feelings for others rule the day...and our memories. That’s why I link here to Dan Fogelberg’s Same Auld Lang Syne, the tale of two people who obviously chose at one point to unfriend each other (well, one of them did anyway), only to find out many years later how strong feelings linger.Happy New Year to all readers of The Nob and deepest thanks for your support in 2013. 

White Lies, Black Lies and Fifty Shades of Gray Lies, Part 1

Megyn Marie Kelly was in the news much too much before Christmas for making a fool of herself. And it pains me to say this because I have a daughter named Meagan (without the gynecological spelling twist), I have a mother named Marie…and Kelly/Riley are practically indistinguishable after a few beers on St. Patrick’s Day. But there the woman was with her law degree no less declaring that Santa is white. Period…end of story, or so she said with a journalistic certainty which would’ve made Edward R. Murrow green with envy. Folks higher up the food chain than I have already pilloried her for this nonsense, here, here, and here.
But what fascinated me more about this story is that it is about a make-believe character, one of the two most famous make-believe characters in the universe, who nonetheless are able to stir human emotions, move masses of merchandise, and alter relationships. The Nobby Works long ago established its interest in deception as a natural and indispensible aspect of existence for animal, vegetable, and (in the case of pleochloic rocks, my gemi-wizards) mineral. The Santa Claus story is one of those deceptions—unlike, say, hiding in the bush—that is unique to humans for not being related to a survival instinct. It is a willful act of deceit that so separates us from other species that it requires a distinctive category of its own called the lie. The lie can be further broken down into subcategories…white lies being the lowest…if you’re rating them from least to most harmful.
Though the least harmful, white lies are in many ways the most perplexing lies. First off, they’re perplexing for our friends the absolutists (see Trocmé), who believe all lying is wrong all the time, and yet being human they cannot avoid telling white lies just to get through a normal day. They’re also perplexing for people with the best of intentions, like moms and dads and elementary school teachers who rely on white lies--like Santa keeping a list and George Washington never telling a lie--in order to impart lessons on the importance of honesty. They’re perplexing, too, because in telling them and feeling not just all right in telling them, but often fully justified in telling them, we help create an atmosphere for younger generations where lying is part of the culture they’ll be growing up and in to…where even their most trusted authority figures…parents and teachers...will lie to them. In drug terminology, white lies are threshold lies that help pave the way for the more harmful and addictive lies people tell.
On the other end of the spectrum are black lies…or, as the Bible puts it, bearing false witness against thy neighbor. The most obvious example being that you take the witness stand against someone and accuse them of a crime you either know for a certainty they didn’t commit or have serious doubts they committed. Lawyers, of course, try to impeach such witnesses by asking them questions to weaken their credibility.
HEPBURN(to SERPENT)Now, sir, we heard you testify that life's been pretty rough on you since that fateful day in the Garden, is that not correct?SERPENTWell, I've had my share of hard knocks. Yes.HEPBURNYou stutter?SERPENTSomewhat.HEPBURNYou have an uncontrollable swearing habit?SERPENTRegrettably.HEPBURNYou have lousy taste in clothes?TRACY(rising)Objection.JORDANSustained.HEPBURNAnd all these afflictions you blame on God?SERPENTHe cursed me.HEPBURNSo you said.(checking notes)Cursed you to spend all your days down on your belly, I believe.SERPENTVery unpleasant. Specially on hot asphalt.HEPBURNYes, I'm sure. But tell us, did my eyes deceive me or did we not see you walk into this courtroom on your own two legs?SERPENTNo.HEPBURNYou didn't walk into this courtroom?SERPENTI did, but not on my own two legs.(lifts legs over witness stand)Prosthetic devices.(looks to GOD)From the Humane Society.HEPBURNVery deceptive.TRACY(rising)Objection, Your Honor.JORDANThey fooled me, Mr. Tracy. Overruled.
Anyone can get caught up in a web of white lies; it is a wonder that any good citizen can step down from the witness stand without having the cloud of perjury hanging over. I mean couldn’t you just impeach any mom or dad giving testimony by asking them if they ever told their kids that there was a Santa? Wouldn’t that do the trick for challenging the veracity of the testimony? After all, if you can show that a witness lied to his children, wouldn’t it follow that he would lie to a jury?  And what would become of a lawyer who pursued that line of questioning? Would she be laughed out of court or be immortalized in law journals forever? Could she recover, as Megyn Kelly tried to do, by reframing her errant blondness as a joke?
Hard to tell, because our tolerance for lies shifts with the circumstances and who it is that's purveying the lie. If we have a special fondness for the liar (“I did not have sex with that woman”), we give him a pass. If we’re unaffected by the lie (“If you like your current insurance, you can keep it.”), we brush it off.  If we’re too lazy or stupid to process knowledge, we blindly accept the lie (“Global warming is a hoax”).
In his outstanding book on deception, The Varnished Truth, David Nyberg sums up the prevalence and necessity of deception in human intercourse this way:

“Deception is not merely to be tolerated as an occasionally prudent aberration in a world of truth telling: it is rather an essential component of our ability to organize and shape the world, to resolve problems of coordination among individuals who differ, to cope with uncertainty and pain, to be civil and to achieve privacy as needed, to survive as a species and to flourish as persons.”

We live in a world drenched in deceit, and we learn to accept it and navigate our way through it at an early age. Santa Claus is important to that process not because he’s white, but because he’s the white lie manifest. Perhaps Megyn Kelly will make a New Year’s resolution to pull her pretty little head out of her white racist ass and commit some of her very valuable broadcast time in the coming year to discussing serious stuff. In the meantime, The Nob will continue to explore the role of deceit in our lives. In part II of this post, we’ll examine some of the many shades of gray lies that exist between the black and white ones.    

Channel Master

"We're not having much this Christmas, but at least we have our health." I don't know for sure if my mom was the first ever to utter those words, but she certainly repeated them enough to claim ownership…every Christmas as I recall. Whether by clever parental design or not, it had a chilling effect on our Christmas lists. My brothers and I knew enough to keep our expectations low. That is until the Christmas of 1958 when I succumbed to the allure of wretched excess. I was idling time with my father while he was picking up our TV from repair when my eyes lit upon a red Channel Master transistor radio. It was love at first sight, and I can tell you quite honestly at the further end of the life cycle that no object of desire…no house, no car, no computer, nothing…ever obsessed me the way that radio did. More so because I knew its $15 price tag would put it well out of range of my parents' gift budget (for those doing the math at home, if you buy one of four boys a $15 gift, then you have to buy all four boys a $15 gift, and before you know it you're up to $45…more than half a working man's take-home pay in those days).

Still, I became just like that kid in Christmas Story lusting after a Red Ryder BB gun. I did everything in my limited powers to campaign for the radio. I left cute notes around the house: Don't let this Christmas be a disaster/Buy Danny a Channel Master. I drew up plans for earning money that mostly consisted of returning bottles to the grocery story for 2¢ each ($15.00 ÷ 2¢ = 750 bottles!). I openly pleaded and secretly prayed (I may no longer have believed in Santa, but I still believed in God, the Super Santa). The folks never provided a hint that I was getting through…Dad was not working overtime, Mom was not taking in laundry. My importuning seemed to be falling on deaf ears.

Indeed, on Christmas Eve, surrounded by open gifts and discarded wrappings, there didn't seem to be any "seeming" about it. It was clear that all I'd get for that Christmas would be disappointment. And then my father asked me to go fetch his cigarettes off the piano (note here: our piano was green…and not a seasonal evergreen or rich jade green, but a very puky lima bean green…Dad was inspired to do things like that on occasion). I couldn't help notice there was an unopened gift sitting next to his ashtray and cigarettes and dumbly announced it, still in shock from my recent letdown. My parents did their best Lunt and Fontaine and feigned surprise: "Oh, really? Where'd that come from? Who's it for?"

As I opened it, I opened up the tear ducts and out came a gusher I've been hard pressed to duplicate since. What's more, soon everyone in the family was joining me in a massive sob fest, even my younger brothers who at that point didn't know a transistor radio from a pop-up toaster. We cried and cried and then laughed at ourselves crying.

Soon thereafter, I was the freest boy in Thompsonville, Connecticut. That little radio put me in touch with a world so big and wide and utterly engaging. The music that came through on AM radio was the single most liberating experience of my life. The universality of that experience was captured by a boy about my age half a world away who would grow up to write a song about it. In the Days Before Rock 'n Roll Van Morrison rhapsodizes how the wireless brought Fats and Elvis, "The Killer" and Ray Charles to his ears and expanded his universe. Every night I would fall asleep with that transistor resting on my chest and the earplug channeling melodies about countless teenage romances and news of the latest dance crazes.

When the snow cleared, I strapped the Channel Master in its leather case onto the front of my bike and peddled all over town, every bit the sport as those guys in that Corvette on Route 66. Up Brainard Rd toward Shaker Pines Lake ("Let's Go to the Hop"), around the bend onto N. Maple ("Lonely Teardrops"), past the tobacco barns ("Secret Love"…Parrish!), by the tennis court in Hazardville ("It's all in the Game"), down South Road ("Teen Beat"), to Raffia Road ("Patricia"), to Post Office Road ("Runaway"), onto Enfield Street and past the Paul Robeson house ("Summertime and the livin' is easy…), back onto Brainard Rd and home ("Travelin' Man").

So much of what I was to become I owe to that radio…and count myself lucky that at such a young age I was seduced by music rather than a BB gun. My parents tried capturing the emotional lightning in a bottle a second time when three years after giving me the Channel Master they gave me a bigger version of it for my birthday. I must say the look on my face when I opened it probably struck them with the same level of disappointment I had experienced on that Christmas Eve when I didn't think I was going to get what I so dearly wanted. The new one was too big to sit on my chest at night and too big to strap to the front of my bike. And truth be known, I was getting too big for the bike as well, and would soon be making up poems and devising money-making schemes to get a car.

There will never be a Christmas like that one where the gap between desire and possibility seemed so immense. Certainly not this Christmas. This Christmas I have as many material possessions as any sane man should ever want, but my mom does not have her health…and no amount of pleading or prayer is going to change that.

Out with the Old/In with the New

"Play casts a spell over us; it is 'enchanting,' 'captivating.' It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony."       --Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1944

I am now into my fifth month of “retirement,” and lucky me I’m still doing what I’ve been doing pretty regularly for pay and for free since I was 13--writing, which means it’s a retirement from drawing a paycheck only (unless I count my Social Security check, which I may do if only to piss off those citizens whose heads explode at the thought of their tax dollars going to anything other than buying new battleships and prisons…but I digress…). 
One of the odd things about this retirement--other than the fact that I’ve spent just about all of it with my leg in a cast—is how much of it I’ve spent thinking about the working life. That is due, I suspect, to the fact that in my final two years of traditional employment, my company was involved in an excruciating and expensive effort to retool itself, which led me to write a book about the experience. The post-retirement launch of that book has kept my head deep in the work world (at grave expense to my golf game and fishing I might add…if I actually golfed and fished, but I don’t). I find myself thinking about the labor situation—both retrospectively and speculatively--because truly we are at a crossroads in regards the relationship between labor and management. At its most extreme, we now have corporate shareholders pining for a day when the companies they invest in are fully supported by the cheapest third world labor available or robots. What happens to the increasing number of skilled unemployed workers seems to many of our business leaders and politicians to be somebody else’s problem.
At the not so extreme end, we have companies, like the one I worked for, struggling to find their way in the new global economy and reduced to grasping at straws. As glad as I am to be out of the labor market, I’m disheartened to see the frustration and desperation that’s currently driving it. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were more jobs for more people, but an increase in the availability of jobs would only exacerbate the secondary labor problem, which is the quality of the modern working life. Currently that quality is being seriously degraded because a shortage of jobs means it’s a buyers’ market, and there’s really nothing quite like having the upper hand to bring out the very worst in management. The prevailing attitude toward workers is, You’re lucky to have a job, so don’t complain.
But even in the best of circumstances, all but the most enlightened management has been inclined to view workers as cogs in a wheel, which is why management approaches to productivity have focused on time and motion for more than a hundred years. The varying approaches have been dressed up with different jargon over time, but they all come down to the same thing--getting more out of fewer workers, better and faster.
The latest incarnation, which has particularly dominated my mind, is lean. For months now, the Nobby has been promoting Look Before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad—A Cautionary Tale , a book which makes a critical appraisal of one so-called lean transformation. But even Look Before You Lean’s scathing review of an actual (as opposed to theoretical) lean process at work never goes so far as this joint Japanese and American report, which accuses lean of introducing karoshi into the Japanese culture that spawned lean. Karoshi means death from over work. The authors of the article conclude:

The myth of … ‘lean production’ as the inevitable wave of the future has been widely promoted throughout the world by both the Japanese government and corporations and their followers… 

The risk factors in [such] work organizations should be studied both in terms of work intensity, the magnitude of working hours, and its effects on skill discretion, decision authority and workers’ social support. 

The real danger is that [this] may be a kind of work organization ‘Trojan Horse.’ Since it is often posed as a seemingly progressive change away from the authoritarian management style… and towards participation and team work, its anti-democratic implications have been well disguised. Health researchers and occupational health professionals should view the current popularity of …lean production techniques with some skepticism.

The authors are right in that lean advocates aggressively promote their hobby horse as the steed all businesses should ride into the future. Business has been seduced by the myth of the lean, mean fighting machine for decades, so it is no surprise that it continues to buy whole hog into a process with a dubious track record.
This can’t continue, however, and it won’t. Every day there is more and more exciting new research put out there, pointing us to more sophisticated answers to our problems. One of the pioneers of such research is Jane McGonigle, the professional gamer from Cal Berkeley who has studied how game playing can have a profoundly positive impact on society. She writes: 

Those who continue to dismiss games as merely escapist entertainment will find themselves at a major disadvantage in the years ahead, as more gamers start to harness this power for real good. My research over the past decade at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for the Future has shown that games consistently provide us with the four ingredients that make for a happy and meaningful life: satisfying work, real hope for success, strong social connections and the chance to become a part of something bigger than ourselves.  

In a good game, we feel blissfully productive. We have clear goals and a sense of heroic purpose. More important, we're constantly able to see and feel the impact of our efforts on the virtual world around us. As a result, we have a stronger sense of our own agency—and we are more likely to set ambitious real-life goals….Research shows that gamers spend on average 80% of their time failing in game worlds, but instead of giving up, they stick with the difficult challenge and use the feedback of the game to get better. With some effort, we can learn to apply this resilience to the real-world challenges we face. 

Imagine a workforce that is satisfied, hopeful, tightly-knit, dedicated, and resilient! The tried and tired time and motion approaches to improving productivity in all its various disguises will soon be obsolete, as business leaders—only the visionary ones at first--finally realize that the way forward will not be found in the industrial past. Motivating workers for much of human history has been a pretty brutish science. Neuroscience, game theory, the avatar studies the Nob delved into last week all hint at a time when employees might fully immerse themselves into their work as a state of bliss rather than stress. It will come as employers make the difficult transition from ticking their employees off to understanding what makes them tick.

Spoiler Alert!

One of the reasons I love watching foreign films is that you can discuss them at cocktail parties without having to punctuate every plot point with Spoiler Alert! That’s because chances are good that the people you meet at cocktail parties (nowadays at least) have no interest in watching foreign films. It is with this in mind that I commence to write freely about the most recent foreign film I saw without too much worry about spoiling it for most of those gathered around this virtual cocktail party known as The Nobby Works.
The film is called The Big Picture (not to be confused with the excellent Christopher Guest film of the same name). This is a 2010 French production starring Romain Duris as a loser named Paul. In an American film, of course, Paul’s status as a loser would be conveyed by a conspicuous lack of material comforts. Because it’s a foreign film, however, the concept of loserdom is a little more sophisticated. Paul has a beautiful wife, darling children, a luxurious home, and he’s a partner in a law firm. In the US, he would be free to tool around town in his BMW shouting out the windows, “I'm #1!” and no one would say a contrary word to him. In a world foreign to American culture, a man might very well sense that he’s a loser because he’s lost at his core. That’s Paul, and if he had any doubts about it, his wife Sarah confirms it for him by telling him he's a loser for giving up on his dream of being a photographer to accept the easy law career that was dropped into his lap. Sarah’s disappointment in Paul drives her into an affair with Greg, an actual working photographer with far less to show for it than Paul does for his sell-out. Having more toys doesn’t save Paul from a jealous rage, however, and in a nasty confrontation with Greg, he accidently kills him. To make a long enjoyable story short, rather than accept the consequences of his violence, Paul dumps Greg’s body in the ocean, fakes his own death, and runs off to Hungary with Greg’s identity and his camera. There, under the guise of his former rival, Paul finally finds personal liberation and stunning success as a photographer.
I love the story for so many reasons. For one it was a retelling of one of my favorite short stories from my school days, Clothes Make the Man, about a would-be burglar who’s made to dress up like a cop to stand lookout for his gang. He is so taken by the role that he ends up arresting his buddies. More to the point of this blog, there’s this from our man Norman O. Brown:  “Personality is persona, a mask. The world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation: [quoting Erving Goffman] ‘The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die: it is dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.’”
The idea that we are not locked into a personality, a character, a destiny is not just the stuff of movies, short stories, and Love’s Body, there is empirical evidence that remaking ourselves all over again is not limited to the Great Gatsbys among us.  In fact it seems that choosing a new persona may be as simple as choosing a new avatar for our Facebook page. In their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler report on a game exercise conducted with avatars of varying heights. People who were given avatars of taller stature were more aggressive, less giving, and overall more confident in how they played the game. Those assigned shorter avatars exhibited quite the opposite characteristics. Christakis and Fowler write:

More remarkably, virtual world interactions can carry over to the real world. After playing the game with randomly assigned avatars, people who had been assigned attractive avatars showed more confidence in the real world. In one experiment, they were shown pictures from an online dating site; volunteers who had been assigned attractive avatars felt more certain that attractive people would be interested in dating them. These kinds of effects even raise therapeutic possibilities. Perhaps using avatars to act out roles (such as being disabled) in virtual environments could increase empathy for those who are disabled. Or, imagine assigning attractive avatars to people with low self-esteem or distorted body images to allow them to experience the world differently.

Those examples are just a few of the possibilities avatar research could open up for us. Give a slow student a genius avatar. Give a grumpy employee a sunny avatar. Give a narcissist a humble avatar. And then stand back and watch society evolve for the better. 
Perhaps.
Except for the fact that the science isn’t there yet, the biggest obstacle to such a utopian experiment would be this precious view we have that every human, like every snowflake, is unique. There were a couple of celebrity stories that fleshed this view out recently. When Paul Walker died very young in a car crash on a California highway this week, there were more than a few comparisons of his death to that of James Dean. Such comparisons immediately drew outraged blowback: “How dare you? Don’t ever mention Paul Walker of Fast and Furious in the same breath as James Dean of Rebel Without a Cause!”
Then there was Jon Stewart’s very curious decision in mid interview to show Jennifer Lawrence a picture of a young Helen Mirren and ask her if she didn’t think they looked alike. Ms. Lawrence, although clearly taken aback by it, did not hesitate to reply no to the question. Stewart, oddly persistent in this miscalculation, raised the same question two nights later with his guest Ian McKellen, who also let him know, ever so gently, that he was off his rocker. 
Well, the thing is, of course, if you believe in archetypal personalities, as I do, Paul Walker is indeed another coming of James Dean and Jennifer Lawrence is indeed another coming of Helen Mirren…despite the petty details of their resumes. As Nobby writes:

“…personalities are fixed by archetypal persons and situations: the voices coming through the mask are always ancestral voices. The masquerade or carnival is a danse macbre, a visit of ancestral spirits, represented by authorized bearers of their persons. The life of the clan consists in the perpetual reincarnation of ancestors—a reincarnation achieved by magic, by imitation (identification), by dramatic representation.”

The big spoiler alert here is that we’re not as unique as we think we are. We’re all just wearing masks that generations upon generations before us have worn. And what’s more, we each have a closet full of masks available to us to change into at will. So, like Paul in The Big Picture, if you don’t, say, like wearing the mask of a loser, you can change it.

Pope Goes After the Weasels

The first Pope in my lifetime was Pius XII, a man whose picture could be used in the dictionary to illustrate the word “austere” (also, perhaps, could be used to illustrate the adverse effects of celibacy). Nonetheless, as grim a visage as he presented, he was a big deal in the Catholic household where I was raised just because he was the Pope. History wasn't as charitable, however, downgrading his legacy for his silence on the great moral issue of his time…the Holocaust.

When Pius XII was succeeded by John XXIII the sense of uplift was palpable. Not only did John XXIII offer a philosophical break with much of the papal past, but the man exuded kindness and concern and was more often than not photographed smiling. The fact that this Vatican makeover took place almost simultaneously with the White House makeover ushered in by the Kennedys is one of those neat little historical coincidences that leads certain folks to believe there really is some kind of grand design to it all-- which works only as long as you don’t think of all the many more times where it doesn’t work.
Ironically, John XXIII, who I admired then and admire still, actually helped free me from my seemingly inextricable bond to the Catholic Church by announcing the Second Vatican Council and opening the church to a long overdue self-examination. In effect he made questioning, skepticism, and doubt un-sinful. And in my case anyway allowed me to follow my mind where it might lead, which as it happened was out the doors of the Catholic Church.
John Paul II had a similar impact when he traveled to Poland in 1978 and inspired the Polish people to reexamine their relationship with their communist oppressors. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has written: “When Pope John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport he began the process by which communism in Poland – and ultimately elsewhere in Europe – would come to an end.”
The point is that sometimes words and gestures matter, especially when the circumstances are ripe for change. We seem to be at another such juncture now, and fortunately—most surprisingly—appear to have a Pope rising to the occasion. It is clear to our most astute economists, our boldest politicians, and our wisest rich men that capitalism has become untethered, and that wild, unbridled capitalism is every bit the danger to democracy as communism ever was. 
And to be clear…capitalism and democracy are two entirely different things. One is an economic system and one is a political system. We have this Pope now who gets that. Evangelii Gaudium, his recent Vatican statement on the threat unregulated capitalism poses to the creation of a more humane and democratic society, is unambiguous, as demonstrated in these excerpts:

“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems...I am interested only in helping those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking which is more humane, noble and fruitful, and which will bring dignity to their presence on this earth...Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

Wordsmith that I am by inclination and profession, I am particularly fond of his choice of “crude” and “naïve” to describe the character of those who contrive to turn niggardliness into a virtue. Describing corporate leaders who sit on trillions of dollars rather than invest in the society that allowed them to make that money as “job creators” is the obvious example of the crudity to which the Pope refers. Those who fall for such propaganda and pass it on as gospel truth are the most obvious example of the naiveté. 
When Stuart Varney of Fox business news went after the Pope for his statement, he added a third trait that characterizes the fetishists of utterly free markets—stupidity. Varney said, “Capitalism, in my opinion, is a liberator. The free choice of millions of people is the essence of freedom. In my opinion, society benefits most when people are free to pursue their own self-interest.” Of course anyone with a ninth grader’s command of history knows that unfettered capitalism has brought us slave labor, sweat shops, child labor, 80-hour work weeks, toxic rivers, polluted air, and government corruption.” It hasn’t liberated anyone other than those with the most money. 
Varney further said, “I go to church to save my soul. It’s got nothing to do with my vote. Pope Francis has linked the two. He has offered direct criticism of a specific political system. He has characterized negatively that system.”
And there you have a cabbage brain in full flower…a man with his own show on a business channel--shoveling the slop of his opinions out daily to gullible viewers--believes that capitalism is the American political system. Capitalism, of course, would like to be the American political system. Chase, and Goldman Sachs, and Walmart, and frickin’ Fox itself would love to own our ballot boxes and post their logos on them and charge us to vote, but until they finally succeed in buying up every single one of our legislators and judges, democracy still has a fighting chance.
I suspect that those who see what amoral and undisciplined capitalism is doing to our democracy feel as those living in communist Poland felt in the 1970s—that the tyranny of the absolutists was too overwhelming to overcome. But along came a Papal visit, some well-chosen Papal words, and suddenly a movement was born that overturned an alleged historical inevitability. The same thing may happen again. This Pope, like all great leaders, does not have to be perfect in every way. He just has to come along at the right time and seize the moment…and this is what I call seizing the moment:

No to an economy of exclusion Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the 'leftovers.' 

No to the new idolatry of money One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

Speaking of words, I haven't used this one in earnest in about 40 years, but I use it in earnest here…Amen.  

Thanksgiving 6S

Due to three years' exposure to the transmogrifying work methodology known as lean, I feel compelled to eliminate the waste from my list of things to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. So, implementing the lean process known as 6s, herewith the five items I will not be thanking God for this year.
Tomatoes . There are allegedly six of them sitting in our refrigerator at this very moment. They are firm, red, and utterly tasteless. This is what the American tomato has come to, which is all the more the shame because the tomato, surprising to many, is native to this land of ours. It was our ripe tomato that launched a thousand and one pasta dishes in Italy. Interesting literary note…when Salman Rushdie—no slouch as a writer—submitted his manuscript for The Enchantress of Florence to his publisher, it was a sharp-eyed copyeditor who told him he couldn’t have his characters dining on tomatoes because as of the 15th century tomatoes had not yet arrived in the (ho-ho) Old World. Anyway, it’s the Old World that still does honor to this most versatile of fruits. In this country, the tomato is one more piece of mass-produced garbage designed for the eye rather than the tongue. To paraphrase Randy Newman, Only God can make a tomato; only man can make it taste like sawdust. The Second Amendment . Speaking of the Old World, I actually found myself defending the right to bear arms in Europe once. This was in the midst of the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney reign of dumb cum evil. Living under a presidency you don’t trust will cause the paranoia to strike deep and into the most rational of minds it will creep. So I am not totally without empathy for my heavily-armed conservative brethren. The difference is that although the Bush presidency helped me appreciate how one might contemplate a resort to arms, it never drove me to actually resorting to arms. I’m proud to say I was able to endure that eight-year abomination that was the Bush presidency without so much as picking up a Guns & Ammo magazine, let alone an actual gun. Call me crazy, but I just couldn’t get myself to the level of hysteria where I could see myself storming the White House with an AK-47. The French and Italians who listened to my defense of the Second Amendment on the grounds of the hallucinatory need for local militias to resist an oppressive federal government got a hearty laugh out of that. “Wasn’t that your Civil War?” they asked. Indeed it was. Dixie local militias against Yankee local militias. The sorry truth is, local militias haven’t been any use whatsoever against foreign invaders or autocratic rule since before the Civil War. In fact, if we add the 750,000 Civil War dead to the hideous spate of mass killings in just the past few years…from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook, we can see that government-sanctioned, well-armed local militia is a delusion most macabre. Worse, it is far from done doing severe damage to our national peace and tranquility. So pass the gravy and screw the Second Amendment. Capitalism . This Frankenstein monster of an economic system has tossed our sweet, curly locks democracy into the lake. With the Supreme Court declaring that corporate entities, wholly comprised of legal documents and ledger balances, are entitled to the same rights as flesh and blood human beings; with Congress designing laws to the dictate of corporate lobbyists; and with ordinary citizens alternately quaking in awe or fear of their corporate masters, the founding dream that withstood burial by international communism is now an innocent little drowning victim. Unlike people, capitalism is soulless and heartless. Its unbending guiding principle is the profit-motive. Without the people’s will to regulate it, it will do what it has done—create a gap between the have lots and have less that is simply unsustainable for any society that wishes to be anything more than Saudi Arabia with free porn.      Freedom . Just another word for nothing left to lose? If only. It is now the most bullshit word in the American lexicon… used by Wall Street greed heads to justify their ongoing pillage of the American economy; used by NRA gun nuts to rationalize armed assaults on our shopping malls, college campuses, and elementary schools; used by military recruiters to seduce 20-year olds into giving up the best years of their lives for the chance to shoot and be shot at by exotic people in foreign lands; used by niggardly politicians to justify taking food and healthcare away from their most needy citizens. People give up their freedoms every day…when they get married, take jobs, buy airline tickets, get drivers’ licenses. The idea that freedom is this absolute value stretched from sea to shining sea that every American lives for and is willing to die for is the biggest lie we tell ourselves as a nation. If it meant all that much to us, we wouldn’t have spent the last 20 years handing it over like lunch money to schoolyard bullies. 
Black Friday . Standing in line at midnight on Thanksgiving outside Wal-Mart waiting for a bargain on tomatoes and assault rifles would pretty much epitomize this entire post. So, no, I won’t be giving thanks for Black Friday either.

The JFK Blog Post

The Virgin Missile Crisis, bonus excerpt.

Marty had explained his missing earlobe to his parents by saying that a rat had attacked him in his sleep. He knew that his mother’s reaction would be sheer hysterics, followed by the reconversion of his room into an attic space. He accepted that because he knew it was the price he had to pay for never telling the real story of his missing earlobe. He also knew that sharing a room with his little brothers again would be of mercifully short duration since he would soon be moving off to college.
It was at college, sitting in a freshman Poli Sci class listening to a lecture titled “The End of Irrationalism” slightly more than a year after Earle Graham had shot him in the ear that he heard that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot John F. Kennedy. Marty’s immediate thought was that JFK’s wound, like his own, would be of the flesh wound variety.
But it was not. And neither Marty nor America would ever be the same again; although Marty, having only his own mental health to tend to, handled it better than America did. 
The country at first could not do enough to express its grief over the loss of its young President and went into a paroxysm of worship that bordered on necrophilia. Marty’s hometown of Hazard was typical. Before the ghostly riderless horse had made its way through the streets of Washington D.C. for JFK’s funeral, the Hazard Board of Education had met to change the name of Hazard High to John F. Kennedy High. And even the town’s Polish population went along without complaint (though board member Bradkowski wondered aloud--and in vain--if it might not be a good opportunity to change George Bernard Shaw Elementary to Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz Elementary). The Town Council quickly followed suit, and before the late President’s eternal flame had even burned a week, Hazard had renamed Main Street John F. Kennedy Street and added a John F. Kennedy Way, a John F. Kennedy Ave., a John F. Kennedy Drive, a John F. Kennedy Circle...Square...Bridge, and Tunnel, which was in reality a short underpass beneath I-91 on School House Road where Marty had first laid eyes on his hero.
And what went on in Hazard was duplicated throughout most of the country, except for Texas where the President had been shot and JFK Wanted for Treasonposters had been passed out on the streets of Dallas the day before. That Texan resistance to sentimentality--indeed that Texan hatred of JFK--would be emblematic of the swing in emotions that would sweep the nation in subsequent years when the jackals came out to gnaw over the corpse of the President’s legacy. Soon no villainy was too heinous to nail to Kennedy: murder...abortion...drug and spousal abuse...negligence...fraud...cowardice. Treason seemed the least of it as Camelot morphed into Babylon. It was indicative of how the cold-blooded killing of the charismatic young leader had unhinged the nation. 
The portrait of America from November 22, 1963 forward was that of a nation, to put it kindly, disoriented and dysfunctional: assassinations, school shootings, open carry, stand your ground; Mai Lai massacre, Manson Family, Jonestown; arms for hostages, Neocons, mission accomplished; Love Story, The Love Boat, Love Canal; "I am not a crook;" "Mistakes were made," “I did not have sex with that woman;” AIDS, anthrax, assault rifles; Beanie Babies, Black Fridays, junk bonds, too big to fail; World Series Game 6 1986, pubic hair in the Coke can 1991, 9/11; Patriot Act, drones, NSA; Krispy Kremes, cheese stuffed pizza, double bacon cheeseburgers; going postal, road rage, fair and balanced; War on Drugs, benign neglect, gerrymandering, voter suppression; OJ Simpson, Rush Limbaugh, Octomom.

Even the Jesus of Marty’s youth got sucked into the swirling, murky vortex of self-loathing and self-delusion. The one-time champion of the meek and poor and outspoken advocate for loving thy enemies was hijacked by religious zealots and political con artists who totally perverted him. The holy figure Marty had prayed to nightly as a boy for help in becoming a better human being got turned into a partisan shill for greed, militarism, and bigotry. One day when his mother asked why he stopped going to church, he bitterly answered, “Why bother? You just pick a Republican politician and pray to him.”       
Although Marty’s despair at the country’s direction was not a mortal wound to his lofty ambitions, it did cripple them considerably and for many years he had to content himself with a small-is-beautiful approach to life. He finished his schooling, launched a law career, rooted for the JFK High football team coached by his brother Tony, and watched brother Mickey play MacArthur Park on the Mike Douglas Show with Uncle Carlo’s world famous "Four Accordions of the Apocalypse."
As part of his personal therapy for dealing with the great trauma of his youth, Marty tried to keep his surviving shreds of idealism alive by revisiting Camelot periodically. In 1997 he virtually got invited behind its closed doors when the Kennedy Tapes were released containing hundreds of hours of transcripts of what exactly JFK was saying and doing during those heart-stopping days in October 1962 when the world was on the brink of nuclear disaster and Marty was frantically trying to bed Lisa Graham. 

Marty immersed himself in the tapes--in both their written and audio form--and was struck by how very much his hero JFK had been exactly as Marty would have wanted him to be: open; reflective; slow to anger; receptive to humor-- even under the worst of circumstances; charitable to his adversaries; demanding of his advisors; humble in the face of the test history had given him, but confident that history had chosen the right man for the test. Far from being the reckless fatalist of revisionist history, he appeared to be the most restrained man on the planet.

The Big Gooey Center, Part II

There are a number of popular works that treat "the mass" as character...some negative--Day of the Locusts (mass as mob), Invasion of the Body Snatchers(mass as pod people), A Face in the Crowd (mass as suckers); some positive—Spartacus("I am Spartacus" "I am Spartacus" "I am Spartacus") Network ("I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore") It's a Wonderful Life (community action). In modern political speak, the mass is more commonly referred to as the Center, especially since the mass as envisioned by Karl Marx has been largely co-opted by consumerism. And political ideologues of both the left and right have pretty much given up hope on the Center. Check out the various left and right blogs and you find that they both use the same demeaning term in describing the Center--sheeple. This is understandable for the right since its authoritarian underpinnings never had much use for the masses anyway. But it's outright bizarre for the left to be so dismissive of the vox populi. After all, if you're left wing and you’re not a populist, then you're an elitist, right? Marx himself--had he been living today--probably would’ve fallen into the lazy blogger habit of shouting into the deepest valley to elicit the strongest echo rather than toiling away in some library trying to reach an audience beneath his contempt: “Workers of the world, you blight; there’s nothing so loose as your brains.”
For my money, the two best pop culture treatments of the centrist condition are High Noon and On The Waterfront. In High Noon, Gary Cooper cannot get the townspeople—the centrists—to rally to his side to confront the bad guys arriving on the noon train. Like all good metaphors, High Noon is highly fungible. Marshall Will Kane could be Ted Cruz trying to round up his senate colleagues to defund Obamacare. He could be Al Gore trying to motivate the masses to take on global warming. In the end, the hero is let down by those who refuse to do their part out of cowardice, indifference, or conviction that it’s not their job. Brando's Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront gets better results, but not without paying a heavy price. He is out of the classic American hero mold--reluctant and flawed. But he’s out of Christian mythology as well—he has to suffer in front of their eyes before the masses get the courage to act on their own. 
As to which of these versions of the Center will prevail in our current political climate, the Pollyanna in me says that in due time, we will see Ted Cruz, like Joe McCarthy before him and the thuggish politics they represent, broken. And he will be left like strong-arm Johnny Friendly in that clip from On the Waterfront, howling in vain, as the nation turns its back on him, "Where you guys going? Wait a minute! I'll remember this! I'll remember every one of you! I'll be back! Don't you forget that! I'll be back!" It may require a Terry Malloy or two to make a bloody stand to do it, but I believe it will happen.
Paradoxically there is no middle ground in these melodramas of the Center. Our popular culture, at least, is bereft of any stories where ordinary people—centrists, moderates…sheeple, if you must--act prudently for their common good. In our myths and legends they always need a crisis to crystallize their risk and role. In reality, centrists don’t always need to have their hair set on fire in order to do the right thing. All over America masses of ordinary citizens support public education, common green spaces, recycling, Social Security, Medicare. They support these things in large numbers regardless of whether they personally have any use or need for each of them individually. Most people get what a collective effort it is to be a country, and reject the every-man-for-himself ethos that drives The Tea Party. Even that most famous rallying cry of The Tea Party--"Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!"--speaks volumes in favor of commonwealth over selfishness…albeit, ironically.
The innate reasonableness of the center is evident in The New American Center poll that put ideological purists on the left in such a tizzy. Just a casual reading of the poll’s findings reveals these things about our fuzzy friends the centrists: “The Center wants a tax system and an economy that ensures the wealthy pay their fair share and polluters pay for their mess.”“Even though about a third of those in the Center own guns, an overwhelming plurality have no problem with background checks.”“The Center strongly favors government intervention that ensures everyone has their basic needs met (such as food and health care) and has a fair shot at earning a decent living.”“The center would really prefer that the government leave the rest of us alone (especially when it comes to our personal lives).“Religion is not a major part of the Center's life, and it firmly believes that religion has no place in the public sphere."It may not exactly be a portrait of Sweden or Denmark, but that’s a national profile reasonable liberals should be able to live with. There’s plenty to work with there, and as the poll concludes, the Center is up for grabs. With characteristic American pragmatism, according to the poll, the Center is willing to go outside the box to make things work, even to the extent of tweaking the Constitution or twerking the Bible. And ideology be damned. So what is it about this poll that has put my fellow lefties' teeth so much on edge? Well, part of it is this centrist affinity for pragmatism. Hard lefties, like hard righties, prefer ideological purity. Whatever works does not really work for ideologues as political philosophy since it occasionally puts precious principles at risk. Beyond that overriding factor, there are some specific findings in this poll that the left finds hair raising, such as:“Though a clear majority of the Center is strongly in favor of marriage equality, half also registers concerns about changing the definition of marriage.”“There is huge support among the Center for requiring voters to present an ID at the polls.”“The center wants the federal government to spend less, go easy on regulation.”“There also happens to be a clear lack of support in the Center for issues typically related to diversity.”“Support for abortion—but mostly during the first three months.”Unlike my fellow travelers on the left, I tend to take a glass half-full view of such findings. People expressing “concerns” does not bother me. I expect people, especially self-described centrists, to have concerns, questions, reservations--that by definition is what centrists do. As for the voter ID question, as I said in last week's post, my guess is that most centrists see this as a pro forma matter and not a racial matter (though, for the record, I should say that it is most definitely a racial matter--by, of and for racists; because centrists don’t quite see it that way is, I believe, more a matter of messaging than bigotry). I’d put the center’s suspicion of regulation to an item-by-item test before dismissing it as soft on exploitation. After all, the Center is fore-square against polluters. (And if Eliot Spitzer had not been distracted from his brilliant career as a regulator, government regulation would probably be held in higher esteem than it is today.) The Center gets cover on its attitude toward diversity issues since the poll also reveals that, “support for affirmative action and immigration reform on the Left is soft—a bare majority supports both causes.”

As I write this, the center’s equivocation on abortion—supportive in the first trimester; much less so thereafter—is about to come in for some clarification. Senator Lindsay Graham, the ultimate caricature of a centrist, has just introduced a bill to outlaw abortions nationwide after the first twenty weeks. Aside from being a craven effort to save his pink little electoral ass among his party’s fundamentalist base, the move forces centrists to resolve some of their ambivalence. On the one hand, they don’t much want to see abortions after the first trimester; on the other, they don’t want government intruding in their personal lives. It’s time for the Center to decide—however reluctantly--which of those two incompatible desires it holds most dear.


It is also an interesting test for my fellow lefties who can barely deign to admit the existence of an American electoral Center. They can continue with their truly myopic centrist denial and let that little twerp Lindsay Graham win this one, or they can reach out to centrists both in and out of office and make the case for defeating this bill. Planned Parenthood makes no litmus tests and needs the support of all those focused on the big picture of the nation's future, rather than the little picture of their own vanity.