Josh Cook's Blog

Reading is Resistance: The Man They Wanted Me to Be

Click here for the formal review in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

I wrote a formal review of The Man They Wanted Me to Be here, but, my source material for that review was a lot bigger and a lot messier and, well, not really a review at all. Sexton's book hit a bunch of issues and ideas that I have been thinking about and struggling to write about for several years now. (Not nearly long enough.) That bigger, messier first attempt at assessing Sexton's work ended up interacting much less with the question “Is this a book you should read?” and much more with the question “How does this help me understand toxic masculinity and through that understanding, help me help push the conversation about ending it forward?” Even though that process didn't fit in the format of a book review, I still think I hit on some important ideas through it, ideas that, at least to me, are important enough to make public, even if I don't have the resources at the moment to turn them into something worthy of the scrutiny of an editor and a publication.

But, that's what blogs are for, and, oh look, I happen to have my own blog series on my own blog about using books and reading to push the world a little closer to justice. Below is that bigger, messier attempt to better understand toxic masculinity through The Man They Wanted Me to Be and to find a way forward. It has been lightly edited for typos, mistakes, and shitty first draft prose. An edit or two I grabbed from the finished review. (Might also be interesting to other writers to compare the two versions, to see in this longer, messier version, where I'm trying to aim for the prose and construction of a review and where I miss badly.)

If it were a virus it would be an epidemic. If it were a foreign country we would be at war. If it were an alien from another planet it would be the villain in a movie. American men are dying and killing. They are suffering and making others suffer with them. Men are letting it happen. We are letting people die and kill. In Jared Yates Sexton's insightful and important book The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making, toxic masculinity is a system of absolute taboos and impossible expectations imposed on men—and through assertions of male power on everyone else--through physical and emotional abuse. Over the last few years—not nearly long enough—I've struggled directly with my own relationship to toxic masculinity and specifically with how to write about it and write at it, in ways that reduce its power. No matter where I start my floundering efforts or what angle I take into the project, I always run up against the same barrier: the men who most need to read about toxic masculinity are the least likely to. I don't know if Sexton has solved that particular problem or if that problem is solvable, but he has made an important contribution to the conversation around toxic masculinity that offers at least a starting point for our recovery from it.

The Greatest Generation is toxic masculinity's masculine ideal; they endured The Great Depression, defeated the Nazis and the Japanese Empire in military combat, and provided for their families often (if they were white of course) earning enough to buy a house and a car, feed their family, and take the occasional vacation, from a job in a manly industry like manufacturing. But this veneration of The Greatest Generation is a destructive force, one that hurts those it is supposed to celebrate and now hurts their descendants.

One of the tropes of The Greatest Generation is “Dad doesn't talk about the war.” As we learn more about PTSD, it's clear that thousands of American men returned from WWII (and Korea and Vietnam and the First Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq...) with PTSD and lived with it untreated for the rest of their lives. We celebrated their stoic silence as they suffered in silence. Or rather, we watched their attempts to cope with their suffering but refused to see it, interpreting three-martini lunches, late night poker games, spending all Saturday alone in the garage, corporal punishment, and demanding their injured sons “walk it off,” as inherent masculine traits rather than as inadequate coping mechanisms, as living up to an ideal rather than suffering from a mental illness. Toxic masculinity predates The Greatest Generation, but Sexton shows The Greatest Generation gave toxic masculinity a core to metastasize around and the fuel to supercharge its transmission.

Sexton argues The Greatest Generation's achievements were weaponized. “If our fathers and grandfathers could survive a depression, ship off to Europe or Asia, and fight the forces of fascism, then we should be capable of conducting civilian lives without complaint.” Sure, your job batters your body and mind so you feel like a crushed can every night, but your grandfather saw his best friend step on a landmine outside of Berlin and he never complained about it. But, of course, it's not enough to suffer in silence; any weakness, any failure, any instant in your life when you are not George C. Scott's General Patton is fundamental proof that you are not a real man like your grandfather. This masculine ideal has always and will always be impossible to achieve, as Sexton summarizes the work of Dr. Joseph Pick, “because gender roles are social constructs and thus impossible to fulfill, the inevitable failure to live up to them can result in psychological damage,” but the lionizing of The Greatest Generation created a specific ideal to fail against, while at the same time many of its members literally passed on their trauma through emotional and physical abuse.

Physical and emotional abuse that Sexton himself suffered at the hands of a number of the men in his life. A key part of the book is Sexton's description of this abuse as well was how he struggled to define himself against it and how, ultimately, he embodied many of the traits he tried to resist until he finally hit rock bottom and sought the professional help he needed to begin healing from his trauma. The arc of Sexton's story feels familiar. It is a narrative arch we've seen in dozens of memoirs and movies about addiction, but this is not the appropriation of a popular form. Sexton's story feels like an addiction memoir because toxic masculinity is an addiction. Sexton writes, “It permeates everything, reverberating throughout our language and tainting our power structure; it plagues every action and thought...Toxic masculinity is a chronic illness, and once we're infected we always carry it with us.”

But rather than consuming a substance, toxic masculinity, as addiction, manifests itself in performance, poses and postures of physical endurance, of willingness to engage in or actual violence, in a stoic absence of any emotion, except for anger. “John whipped and beat me when I didn't fulfill my end of the masculine bargain. If I cried, if I complained, if I was sick or if I simply felt short of his expectations, that's when I received punishment.” As children, men learn the poses and postures that get them hit or insulted and the poses and postures that don't and perform those “until there's no performance any more. There's just a man who knows no other way.” The performative nature of toxic masculinity truly hit Sexton in a breakthrough moment with his father. “The life he'd been living all these years had been one where he'd had to carry himself a certain way lest he got shit from his friends and family. Deep down, the person he was didn't look at all like the one he pretended to be.” Toxic masculinity is not something men cling to because they enjoy it; it is imposed on them by the world and their fathers until it is just easier to become that man than the person they might more honestly be, until they are addicted to the performance. /they defend it because, by the time they have their own children, they know of no other way to be.

Like many men of his generation, Sexton sought refuge from this process on the blogs and message boards of the young internet. But few, if any of those young men had the emotional tools to protect that refuge from the forces of toxic masculinity that drove them there in the first place. On the internet, no one knew how physically strong you were, if you were an athlete, if you had ever cried at a family reunion or on the playground, but instead of using that anonymity to find value elsewhere, they exploited it to ease their performance of those toxic poses and postures, creating “their own patriarchal reality that not only reinforced the old expectations but superharged them.” Instead of feeling free from expectations, they could not even stand the idea that someone might consider their anonymous online avatars effeminate, and so they used that freedom from physical limitations and consequences to relentlessly verbally one-up each other in a contest that no one could win because it could never end, performing an increasingly extreme toxic masculinity, “punishing the world while laughing to prove they're stronger than humanity,” and becoming the trolls that haunt the internet today.

Sexton's ability to perform toxic masculinity gave him access to Trump supporters that few other journalists had. At campaign rallies for Trump, attendees did not see Sexton as a journalist but as another dude and so were open around him in ways they were not for other journalists. Sexton was horrified by the racism, homophobia, and misogyny that he saw and heard at these rallies and his op-ed about his experiences at these rallies brought him to the public eye. The quality of a work of nonfiction, whether it's memoir, journalism, philosophy, cultural criticism, or whatever, is the material it gives its readers to form their own conclusions, whether readers are able to extend their understanding of the world beyond the limits of the book itself. Applying his other insights to his experiences at Trump rallies, we can reach a potentially surprising conclusion; some of that vitriol was performative, spewed by men who did not believe it, or at least not with that intensity, but were afraid their masculinity would be questioned if they didn't. Some, if not many, of Trump's supporters engaged in the same kind of pissing contest that trolls do, where the point was not to actually advance an idea but to prove how tough you, personally, are. To put this another way, there are members of Trump's base, especially men, who don't really believe in him, but feel obligated to attend his rallies, shout his slogans, and even vote for him to prove their masculinity. This is not to absolve them of responsibility for their actions and votes, but to try to define the relationship with toxic masculinity in our search for a solution.

Sexton wants to change the world. A perfect review of a book like this would be able to look into the future and see if he has. I don't know if Sexton solves that fundamental problem of audience. I don't know if the men who most need to read it, both for their own health and for the health of society, will read it. But their sons might. Their daughters might. A new football coach might. And they might find a path forward.

The first step is to just stop. Just stop beating your sons when they cry. Stop using feminine and homosexual descriptions as insults. Believe yourself when you feel like something isn't right. Believe yourself when you feel like you are acting or performing something that is not true to you. Preserving toxic masculinity takes work; relentless physical and emotional work that must envelop a child until the man they want you to be is extruded. Just stop. Just fucking stop. And the thing is, masculine men can still have everything they like about traditional masculinity. Throwing hits in hockey. Shooting powerful guns at a gun range. Pushing your body, taking some risks, late night bullshit sessions with your buddies. All of it will still be there, we just won't be able to snatch those activities from other identities who might want to enjoy them or punish our sons if they don't. And we get the ability to opt out. And we get the ability to try other activities, fashions, and experiences. And we get the ability to ask for help. Seeing toxic masculinity as a performance men are addicted to points towards the ideas needed, not just to prevent its transmission, but to enable our recovery from it. There are millions of people who have learned how to manage their addictions. We can take our knowledge of addictions, our awareness of toxic masculinity, and our growing understanding of PTSD and build something much better than we have today. The only thing we give up is the power to control what other people want from life. A power that, in truth, doesn't exist.

The Man They Wanted Me to be is limited in scope. It is rooted in Sexton's personal experience and uses that experience to guide what science, research, and other observations he brings into the book. This means the book says very little about how people of color experience toxic masculinity or about the experiences of women and people of other genders and sexualities. Sexton is open about the limits of the book and frequently clarifies when an experience is unique to white men while being careful to never center men and white men in particular as “the real victims of toxic masculinity.” But, in many ways, an important book about toxic masculinity, written by a straight white man, needs to be limited in scope because it needs to be personal.

There is a fundamental taboo against sharing anything personal, especially your feelings. In toxic masculinity, men are supposed to be invulnerable and expressing any pain (and even joy) is an act of unacceptable vulnerability. As important as the data is and as insightful as Sexton is with that data, the most important thing he does in The Man They Wanted Me to Be is break that taboo. He shares his alcoholism. He shares his eating disorders. He shares the abuse. He shares his pain. He shares the help he received, including therapy. Ultimately, this book is a permission slip. It says you can explore your own toxic masculinity. You can interrogate the men in your life. You can do the research. And you can get help in the process and that help can include professional help from a therapist or psychologist. And you can share this process with others. Through this process, unlike your father and grandfather and great grandfather who suffered in silence, forced the rest of the family to suffer with them, and passed on the suffering to their descendants, you will become a better human being, a healthier man, and help break the cycle of toxic masculinity.

Reading is Resistence: Stamped from the Beginning and Why You Should Ignore Republican Arguments About Abortion and Pretty Much Everything Else

Every now and then you read a book and the world snaps into place. What was confusing and chaotic is clear. You cannot fathom why someone would do or say something like that and suddenly you see it clearly. Your frustration and anger build, as mine has throughout the course of the administration, and especially in the last few weeks as Republicans across the country attack legal abortion, and then a book gives you a direction, gives you an explanation, gives you a technique, gives you, if not a solution, then a place to start. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi did that for me.

Kendi's powerful insight is relatively simple: the desire to protect and expand chattel slavery drove the racist ideas that became American white supremacy, not the other way around. To put this another way, slavery came first and those who benefited from it created racist ideas to justify its existence and expansion and defend it against those would abolish or even just restrain it. White supremacy then isn't really an ideology based around core ideas that then inform goals, actions, and priorities, so much as it is a system of power based around protecting and expanding the power of the descendants of slaveholders. (I'll get to how this connects to the recent string of forced-birth legislation.)

As a system of power, its ideas do not have to be logical or internally consistent. They don't have to be based in facts. They don't even have to make sense. They just need to provide enough cover to keep the system going. For example, one of the most common racist ideas created to defend slavery was that black people are naturally docile and obedient, that they actually need and love the strict leadership of their masters and that, therefore, freedom is actually bad for them. And when the Civil War started and the Union began to recruit black soldiers, a racist idea was created that black people inherently lack the discipline needed to be effective soldiers. These two ideas are mutually exclusive, but, being an internally coherent logic system was never the point; preserving the system of slavery was and if calling black people docile out of one side of your mouth and calling them undisciplined out of the other helped preserve the system of slavery, you did it. You could do it in the same sentence.

One of the questions I had, when I started Kendi was, essentially, “What the fuck is up with the 3/5 compromise? I mean, seriously, fuckin' A.” One the one hand chattel slavery was built on the idea that black people were not really human (sometimes that argument was based on the Bible and sometimes on “science.”) and thus absolutely not deserving of citizenship in any way shape or form. Every other racist idea was drawn from and circled around that core, because it is very difficult for one human being to treat another human being as a slave or to allow such treatment to happen. So, logically, given that chattel slavery rested on the idea that black people were not really human, they should not be counted towards political representation, right? Only if logic is the point. The point was protecting and expanding slavery and counting slaves towards representation did just that by creating an over-representation of slaveholders in Congress. 3/5 was just the most the slaveholding states could get out of the Northern states and still ratify the Constitution.

When Richard Nixon succeeded through the Southern Strategy he formally transformed the Republican Party into the party of white supremacy and in doing so, he transformed Republican ideology (which, honestly, was pretty fucking racist, misogynist, theocratic, and autocratic already) into an expression of that system of power. The purpose of the Republican party changed from enacting Republican policies, to expanding and maintaining Republican power. This means the only question Republicans (in power at least) pose when deciding on a strategy or policy or evaluating an idea is “Does this protect or expand the power of the Republican party?” Everything else is irrelevant.

So it is not hypocritical for them to oppose every Democrat social spending program that would uplift Americans who are not white men by claiming the federal debt and deficit are existential threats to the economy and then radically increase the debt and deficit when they hold power. The deficit isn't the point, the power is. Nor it is laughably unprofessional for them to spend 6-7 years holding show votes to repeal Obamacare without every actually creating a workable policy replacement. Obamacare as a policy was completely irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was “Obamacare” as a tool to undercut the Democrats and inspire white supremacists to vote. Nor is it preposterously short-sighed and embarrassingly uninformed about the state of the criminal punishment system to respond to the idea that prisoner should have the right to vote with “Do you want the Boston Marathon bomber to vote?” Nor is it 3/5-Compromise level illogical to count inmates who have no connections to and are denied political engagement in the communities where they are detained towards those communities' proportional representation. Does denying prisoners and other people who have been in the criminal punishment system the right to vote protect and expand Republican power? Yes, so say whatever the fuck it takes to keep preventing those votes. Does counting prisoner populations as residents in the districts the prison happens to be in protect and expand Republican power? Given that prisons are often in more white, rural, and Republican spaces and especially given that prison populations are disproportionately drawn from poor, urban, POC and Democratic spaces, hell yeah, you do.

Which brings us to the latest assault on abortion rights. Initially, the Republican party, under Nixon, embraced the forced-birth movement as a way to pull Catholic votes away from Democrats. It eventually solidified into a core current in their base, one they leverage to keep people who disagree with them about nearly everything else, checking the “R” box in every election. But at a more fundamental level, at a level beyond turning out the base, it is a way to control women and especially women of color, who, unlike white women, will be less likely to afford illegal abortions. It will trap them in unsafe domestic relationships. It will restrict their economic mobility. It will drain them of the physical, emotional, and financial resources to be politically active. It will kill them. And given that women and especially women of color vote more Democratic than men, controlling women is the goal.

The reason why none of these new forced-birth bills have any funding for say, free contraception, sex education, or childcare is that reducing the number of abortions isn't the point: controlling women is. The reason why none of these bills make any medical sense is that medicine has nothing to do with it: controlling women does. The reason no one writing these bills seems to have any understanding of the actual biological processes of birth is that actually giving fucking birth is totally irrelevant to the goal, which is controlling women. These bills don't hold men responsible for their part in unwanted pregnancies, in any way shape or form, not because the bill writers don't understand that men are responsible for unwanted pregnancies, but because they don't care: controlling women is the point.

And if this process of proposing logically incoherent, radically ignorant, and wildly unpopular policies looks familiar to you, that's because it is. The Republican party is using the 3/5-Compromise technique again, presenting absurd, nonsensical, and overtly cruel policies so that, in the end, they get as much of that control as they can.

Ultimately, until the Republican party separates itself completely from white supremacy (I, for one, am not holding my breath) you don't actually need to listen to single argument a Republican in power makes, because it is not really an argument; it is a rhetorical device employed to preserve a system of power. That's why exposing their hypocrisy doesn't work. That's why refuting their statements with facts doesn't work. That's why showing logical inconsistencies doesn't work. That's why they don't even bat an eye when they line up to call for Al Franken's resignation and then put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. That's why it's all “free speech absolutist” until it comes to people protesting them. That's why it's all “states rights” until a city acts against their racist immigration policy. That's why it's all “fiscal responsibility” until it is time to conceal the damages of your trade policies with subsidies or write a blank check for war. That's why Republicans in certain places can say “Roe vs. Wade is settled law” while watching Republicans in other states explicitly create challenges to Roe vs. Wade as established law. That's why the party of family values and christian evangelicals can elect AND celebrate Donald Trump. And that's why for ever loving fuck's sake, it is not worth it for Democrats in power to court Republican votes or defend the systems and institutions that Republicans have been exploiting for decades.

The only meaningful, effective solution to the problem contemporary Republicans in power pose to our nation and the world is to completely remove them from power at every level of government and you don't do that by playing along with their systems of power. You don't do that by working within the legislative, executive, and electoral norms they have been exploiting for decades. And you sure as fuck don't do that by treating the humanity of women and people of color as a negotiable policy. You do that by expanding the electorate, turning them out to vote, and following the leadership of those who have already succeeded at both.

It is hard to fight when it feels like you're fighting against chaos. Fuck, it's hard to do anything when it feels like you have no fucking clue why all this fucking shit is happening. And it can be even harder to pull all of that rage into something actionable when you are watching powerful white men threaten the lives of people you love. And Republicans are threatening the lives of people you love. In fact, they have already taken some. And they will take more. Luckily, we still live in a world with Stamped from the Beginning. We still have authors, historians, and thinkers like Kendi who do know why this fucking shit is happening and can explain it to us in a way that snaps all that chaos into focus. And it's not that far from focus to action.

Reading is Resistance: Lost Time

What would you do if you were in a prisoner camp of some kind, cut off from the world, with no way to entertain yourself, nothing to do with the adrenalized energy that can often keep us awake even after the most exhausting days of labor and stress and trauma? How would you pass the time? What would you do to stay sane? How would you feel human when everything around you is designed to make you feel like an object, something discarded, a piece of trash those in power saw fit to “rehabilitate?” Jozef Czapaski and his fellow prisoners in a Soviet War camp organized a lecture series, with each participant sharing something they were passionate and knowledgeable about, something that connected them to the outside world, something that shared the depth of themselves with the compatriots in incarceration. Czapski, a painter by trade, chose to lecture on In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

Despite giving the lectures by memory, with no copies of the book or any scholarship of the book to reference (or any books at all), and working from schematics that he created himself in preparation for the lectures, Czapski's presentation is extremely insightful, distilling the very essence of Proust into something that can be communicated verbally to those with no familiarity with the work. I doubt serious scholars of Proust will find anything earth shattering in Czapski's interpretation, but he does an amazing job of bringing the biggest and most important aspects of the book to his listeners. For example, he (correctly I think) describes that famous madeleine as, essentially, a set up or a foreshadowing for the moment the narrator stands on a pair of uneven paving stones and the mystery of memory—and the power that mystery generates—reveals itself to him. He also spends a fair amount of his time on what could be considered the climax of the novel, when, late in the final volume, after years of being out of society, the narrator attends a party with all of his old friends. As I remember it, the scene starts with the narrator feeling as though it is a costume party, and all of these people who were so important to his past, had come dressed up as old people. And then it hits him; they aren't in costume. They had just, like we all do, aged.

Czapski identifies something I'd forgotten about this amazing moment: the narrator sees the transience of life, sees mortality, understands at a profoundly emotional level that soon, all of these people will be gone and those who remember them will be gone and there will be essentially nothing left of the people he cared about. But he can do something. He can use his own memory to create something that immortalizes them, not as idealized images, or even as characters in the usual sense of the word, but as flawed, complicated, fascinating, and important people. And through this, after floundering around for years, the narrator discovers his purpose in life, the action that would make his life meaningful. He would save his friends and, through his exploration of memory, give us the tools we need to save ours. And, in an indirect way, give Gzapski the tools to save his own sanity and perhaps his own life.

Given the importance of memory in Proust, in some ways a lecture series based entirely on how the speaker remembers Proust might be the highest expression of the book. If memory were perfect it would be meaningless. Everything in our lives would have the same value or at least take up the same space in our brains. As the translator points out in his introduction, forgetting is what makes memory powerful. It would also be a very different presence in our lives if it were controllable, if we only remembered the memories we were specifically looking for and only when we were specifically looking for them. But memory is not perfect and often we cannot control it. The triggers that elicit certain memories are hidden from us until they happen. And it is exactly those undbidden memories that create the most powerful experiences. We are most moved and in many ways most able to learn when something we had completely forgotten comes flooding back as if we were experiencing it again. This is how we are unmoored from linear time. But that doesn't mean memory is completely chaotic or completely unresponsive.

One of the things that Czapski notes is that he remembered more and more of the book as he worked with his schematics and as he gave his lectures. The more he looked for Proust in his memory the more he found Proust. What follows is another idea about memory, different from anything directly expressed in Proust (at least as I remember it, though it's probably in there somewhere) but still akin to the madeleine and the uneven paving stones: we store much more than we realize. We don't know how much we know until we really start digging into our own memories. Fascism (and in many ways capitalism) argues that, as individuals, we are simply incapable of grandeur, of excellence, of power, of brilliance, of completeness, and it is only through the state (or through the purchase), only through giving ourselves over to the state, that human greatness is possible. But Czapski and his comrades made a powerful counter-argument in their lecture series. They proved that, even in a situation designed to crush them into a kind of singularity, they all still contained multitudes. And the point is not to admire Czapski and his comrades for their series, though it is admirable, but to realize that you are also capable. You can remember more than you think you can. You know more than you think you know. You are capable of more than you think you are. You could put up a fight in a prison camp. You can fight fascism so there are no more prison camps.

As much as the lectures themselves are about Proust and memory, Lost Time is a story about self-care. It is an artifact of survival. It is a statement of defiance. The lesson from Lost Time isn't really one about Proust or In Search of Lost Time, but that being passionate about something is a survival technique. Developing an expertise in something, in anything, is a bulwark against systems of power and powerful individuals who prefer compliance above all, who value those who do what they are told, who find ways to eliminate the asking of questions, because those systems of power cannot take your expertise, they cannot take your knowledge, they cannot take your memory. They can take everything else from you, but they can't get in your mind and excise what you know. That knowledge of furniture restoration, of string theory, of Buffy is yours forever.

What would you lecture on? And if you can't think of something, there are worse ways to spend a few weekends than developing an expertise in something that interests you.

Readers have an extra privilege. The point of books is to encapsulate our humanity in ways that make it easy for us to share with others what makes our lives worth living. Those of us who develop an expertise in books or in a specific book, also develop a constant reminder of what we put in the work for, of why we fight, of what makes life valuable, and also of how we work, how we fight, and how we make life valuable. Czapski is discussing Proust in particular, but his summation of what he believes Proust accomplished is a beautiful summation of what literature aspires to do and what we can achieve or access when we interact with literature: “With his revelatory form, Proust brings a world of ideas, to the reader, a complete vision of life that, by awakening his faculties of thought and feeling, requires the reader to revise his own scale of values.”

This post would have a very different tone if Democrats had not flipped the House of Representatives, if they had not taken back state houses and state legislatures all across the country, and if they had not succeeded with referendums as well. This sense of what we need to do, what we can do when all hope is lost is different when we have been given such tangible and immediate reasons to hope. But you could tell the history of America in the 20th and 21st centuries through the battles we assumed were over. At time of writing, Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan are using their lame-duck sessions to completely undercut the Democratic gains in their states and further disadvantage Democrats in 2020. All of our great victories and all of our great progress has eroded without our constant attention. Our gains were chipped away, our progress diminished, the passions of radical reactionaries loud enough and inconvenient enough to extract concessions from those of us who felt we had better things to do with our time and now we find ourselves in a new version of the early 1900s; African-Americans and many other people of color live in a new Jim Crow, a handful of super-wealthy people control almost the entire economy with nearly everyone else in too precarious personal circumstances to put up much of a fight, and fascism is a threat here and around the world.

I have said this in other contexts, but while I think about Czapski and his comrades in a prison camp and I think about the children and families in concentration camps, complete with numbers being written on their arms, today in the United States, I remember that we have the privilege of memory. We are not yet Germany in the 1930s in large part because we can remember Germany in the 1930s. We are pushing back against the rise of white supremacy because we remember Jim Crow and we remember the lynchings. We can remember what happened and actually do something to stop it and to change it.

And one election is not going to save the world. We have to see the 2018 mid-terms as the very first step, not just in defeating Donald Trump, but in remaking American society to live up to the promises it made after World War II and to live up to new promises we can make with our new imaginations. We have to take Czapski's lessons about books and reading and maintaining your personhood in an impersonal world, not as just a kind of defense against the dark arts, not just as a barricade against those who would invade our minds, but also as the basis for what we build next, for seeing who we can be in the future and finding a way to get there, and for describing a new and better world and what we'll do to create it.

2018 Midterm Debrief

Deep breath. We gave ourselves a chance. We did not end the Trump administration, we did not stop the rise of fascism in America, and we did not finally, finally, finally wipe out the lingering Confederacy that the Republican party has essentially become. Wednesday's firing of Jeff Sessions and installation of Trump lackey as acting attorney general make that abundantly clear. (Of course, we couldn't have one fucking day.) But we gave ourselves a chance. And with the campaign infrastructure we built over the course of this election, with some of the wins in governors races, with some of the election reforms passed by referendum, and with a more advantageous Senate map, we have a chance to really eradicate this Republican party in 2020. The Republican party has been building this particular system of power since Richard Nixon's Southern strategy and it has been successful for decades. We're not going to erase it in one election, especially when there are so many structural impediments to the type of change we seek. But we might be able to do it in in two. Deep breath.
Here are my thoughts about what happened in the mid-terms and where we can go next.
Flipped the House!We flipped the house in two distinct ways. First and foremost, there is a Democratic majority, which means that (assuming we can make it to January) we have saved Medicare and Social Security for now, as well as what remains of Obamacare, and prevented (well, we'll see what happens in the lame duck) more catastrophic tax cuts. And it also means that there will actually be oversight of this administration. There will at least be a chance at confronting and controlling the rampant corruption in the cabinet. At the very least, it's only a matter of time before Trump's tax returns become public. This was the knife-edge upon which democracy teetered and we needed to flip the House Democrat, regardless of who those actual democrats were, in order to keep us from falling completely over into fascism.
But another flip happened in the House. On Tuesday, the House took the single biggest step I think any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes, and perhaps ever in American history, towards actually looking like the population of America. There are now Muslims in the House, as there are in America, and Native Americans in the House, as there are in America, and Latinx in the House, as there are in America, and refugees in the House, as there are in America, and there are more women in the House, closer to the actual number of women in America and more people of color in the House, closer to the actual number of people of color in America. The House even got slightly queerer.
There was a time in the not too distant past when the argument that the Democrat and Republican parties were essentially the same held water, but, today, all you need is your eyes to know that is no longer the case. The Democratic Party looks like America and the Republican party looks like the Confederacy. And now the House looks more like America.

Flipped Governor's Races, State Houses, DAs, and Newly Competitive SeatsThe devastation of the 2010 midterm wasn't really in Congress, but in the states where Republicans were able to leverage the census year to insulate their power from all but the most dramatic voter uprisings. 2010, in many ways, ended up being a culmination of liberal, progressive, and Democratic neglect of state and municipal politics, a neglect that allowed Republicans to entrench themselves at all levels of state government and leverage that entrenchment to create power at the national level they would not otherwise have secured.
In 2018, Democrats, liberals, and progressives paid attention to state and local politics and it showed, with states flipping executive, legislative, and judicial branches, progressive DAs being elected, and ballot referendums successfully enacting a number of policies that will make it easier to elect more Democrats the next time around. It is going to be hard to know this and even harder to feel this in a meaningful way and even harder to feel it with the same intensity as we felt the disappointment in certain losses, but, in this election, we improved the lives of millions of Americans. We saved lives. I'll say that again, we literally saved lives.
Furthermore, even in some high profile losses, the Democrats showed the power of a run-everywhere strategy. An energetic campaign, especially one that draws on both national resources and local volunteer energy, like Abrams (who at time of writing still hasn't officially lost), Gillum (who at time of writing might actually have won), and O'Rourke, can create victories elsewhere. We can confidently attribute two flipped seats in the House to O'Rourke's campaign and maybe two more to Abrams. I think it's also fair to say that the enthusiasm for Gillum probably gave a boost to Prop 4 in Florida. Run everywhere is effective even if you can't win everywhere.
And the thing is: Independents, Democrats, liberals, progressives, democratic socialists, even some Republicans, and others want to save their fucking country from Donald Trump and his brand of white nationalist fascism so why not give all of those people the opportunity to do so by giving them campaigns to work on. When the energy is there you can create positive results beyond winning a specific seat this specific year. And now, in 2020 when the demographics will be even more advantageous for Democrats, there will be thousands of experienced campaign volunteers in every single state ready to take the lessons they learned in this election and apply them to the next one.
American Society is Center-LeftThe majority of Americans voted for Democratic governors. The majority of Americans voted for Democrats in the House of Representatives. The majority of Americans voted for Democrats in the Senate. Progressive values won races all over the country, including in red states, in the form of referendums and ballot initiatives. Medicare was expanded. Voting rights expanded. Minimum wages raised. Gerrymandering ended. Marijuana legalized.
When you add it all up, you get a population that is (essentially and, of course, not uniformly) politically center-left. You get a population that, in general, supports the social contract of the New Deal, wants to lower its insane incarceration rate, and wants competitive elections, all of which are core Democrat and center-left policies and ideologies. Why red states consistently elect representatives that specifically, even aggressively, oppose the policies the people themselves support is one of the great mysteries of American politics (if you ask me, it's a heady mix of good old fashioned American racism with Republican identity politics, but that's a post for a different time) but it still contributes to the same conclusion: by and large the American people want Democratic policies even if they don't always vote for Democratic representation.
The Polls Are AlrightFor the most part, the election looked like we expected it to look. Of course, there were some surprises both for the Democrats and for the Republicans, but, by and large, the results reflected what pollsters and history suggested: the Democrats would take the House and make gains in other places, while the Republicans would hold the Senate and maintain control in others. For some reason, we seem to treat polls as though they are predictions, when they are really just educated guesses that are useful for assessing political strategies and interesting to interact with in the same way sports statistics are interesting to interact with.
When Donald Trump won the Presidential election, defying all of the prevailing predictions, we reacted as if the very act of polling was somehow invalidated and perhaps even fraudulent. This is another example of jumping to a conclusion in a moment of trauma to find an explanation (any explanation!) for what the fuck just happened. And just like the whole narrative of the white working class and just like the narrative of the flaws of Hilary Clinton's campaign, once every vote was counted (more on this soon), once we got the full story we realized that, in fact, Trump's campaign threaded that handful of a percent needle he needed to win. Literally tens of thousands of votes in three states.
Oh, and there was a sophisticated foreign-lead misinformation and manipulation campaign that (allegedly) coordinated with the Trump campaign itself to boost his campaign. Almost by definition a this-crazy-shit-has-never-happened-before event isn't going to be factored into 538's latest projections.
Polls are not perfect and never will be, and really, aren't supposed to be. They are impressions. They are guesses. They are spectra. They are one of the many different kinds of tools campaigns can use to strategize and people can use to understand our country and our politics. 2016 was an aberration because shit happened that had never fucking happened before. And that's not the fault of polls and pollsters. That's the fault of criminals who defrauded and conspired to defraud the United States.
Results Before All the Votes Are CountedAt time of writing, the odds that Andrew Gillum actually won the governor's race in Florida continue to rise. A recount for Florida's senate seat is all but guaranteed and a recount for the governor's race in Georgia also looks increasingly likely. As the denser, more populated districts with more mail-in and absentee ballots to process continue to work through their ballots, more and more votes for Democrats are added to the totals. It's looking like the number of flipped seats in the House will land closer to 40 than to 30. And two of the three Big Emotional Disappointments on election night, might actually turn out to be Big Significant Victories.
Will that change the narrative that Tuesday was an overall disappointing performance for the Democrats? Even if they eventually hold on to the Senate seat in Florida? Even as all those Democratic votes in California keep getting piled on top of the totals?
Of course not. Once a narrative sticks, even if it is based on data that is eventually proven inaccurate it is almost impossible to change it. It gets even harder when that incorrect narrative benefits those in power (Republicans) and/or fits neatly into pre-existing narratives (the mainstream media idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party). Just like in 2016, when we called the election and drew conclusions from it before seeing exactly how many more votes Clinton received than Trump and before seeing how razor-thin his margins in the rust-belt were and before seeing the actual composition of his voters, we are likely to continue to discuss Tuesday's election is if it were something far less impressive than it was.
There is, of course, an easy way to fix this: do not release the results until all the votes have been counted. Honestly, it should be a law.
We Built the Tools, We Learned the Tricks, On to 2020Hundreds of thousands of Americans learned, over the course of this summer, the amount of and the kind of work it takes to win elections in this country. Hundreds of thousands of us have learned to canvas, to call, to text, and to organize. Democrats had to develop unprecedented capacities to absorb and deploy volunteers. Progressive think tanks pioneered new data driven fundraising initiatives, developed new Get Out the Vote techniques, and found new ways to tell their story. They found ways to replace Super PAC money with volunteer energy. (For example, I was one of a mass of volunteers who did remote data entry for the O'Rourke campaign.)
But we also know where we need to do more work. We need to start registering voters now for 2020 and be willing to spend the money and time to get them all through the registration process. We need to have the resources to respond to new Republican suppression tactics. We need to be in high schools now, because today's 16-year-olds are 2020's 18-year-olds. We need to give all those thousands upon thousands of volunteers opportunities to keep contributing to the world they want to see. We need to start organizing ballot initiatives that drive Democrat voters to the polls.
And we need to keep fighting now to even get to January. Rick Scott is calling the counting of every vote in Florida fraud. The President is moving to end the Mueller investigation. And I haven't checked the internet in a few minutes so who knows what's being cooked up for the lame duck session.
But I am not exhausted. I am not overwhelmed. I am not deterred. Perhaps the most important thing we learned on November 6 was the work is worth it. Small donations, grassroots organizing, and thousands of volunteers engaging with an aware public can overcome Super-PACs, gerrymandering, and other structural impediments to Democracy.
The work is worth it. Deep breath. On to the next fight.

Why You Should Canvas

There are four weekend days left before the election that, to me at least, will decide whether we will continue our slide into fascism or not. You should use at least one of those days to canvas for a Democrat somewhere. It could be in a swing district like ME-02, but it could also be for a sure thing, (like Elizabeth Warren) or a long shot (like Jay Gonzales). Door-to-door, person-to-person canvasing has been shown to be themost effective way to turn out votes for your candidate and if you don't like what the Republicans have been doing with their power, the best thing you can do is turnout votes for Democrats. But, canvassing is one of those activities where you get out almost as much as you put in, and whatever value you bring to the campaign, you get back in other ways. So, here are some reasons why you should canvas—on top of the whole defending the country against white nationalist misogynist fascism thing of course—for yourself, followed by a few observations from my last turfs.
A Good WalkI know this sounds like one of the hokey things recruiters will tack on at the end of a pitch, but seriously, canvassing is walking and you, you're not walking enough. Walking is good for you. Being outside is good for you and you're not outside enough either. Well, here you go: a good walk outside. For me anyway there are few activities as fulfilling as walking through a new landscape and canvassing is inherently that.
A Look Inside a CampaignPolitics is almost a parodoxical combination of the simple and the complex. You vote and a candidate wins. (Or you don't vote and a candidate wins without any input from you.) In nearly every instance you will have a choice between a Republican and a Democrat and in an even higher percentage of instances even when you have other choices, you're only meaningful choice will be between a Republican and a Democrat. (Except for you folks in Maine, who now have ranked-choice voting!) And most of us already knew which one we were going to choose, because we've been making the same choice for years. Simple.
But getting more people to vote for your candidate is a massively complex challenge that involves volunteer management, workflow, data collection, data processing, writing, editing, graphic design, coding, polling, fundraising, financial management, and more with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. When you canvas, you get a peek at all of that. You get to see what's on the walls of the offices, how many people are working, and what kind of snacks they have. From whose doors you knock on and where those doors are and the script and talking points you're given, you can get a sense of the campaign's strategy, of how big their canvassing effort is, and of who they think they can turn out on election day and how they think they can be turned out.
If you're at all interested in the mechanics of elections and politics (and you really should be) canvassing is a great way to get a glimpse of that machinery.
Get Out of Your Bubble, But Not in the Stupid Fucking Soft-Focus NYT Piece Set in a Hardscrabble Bar in Northern Kentucky Bullshit Way (Not that I Have Anything Against Said Bar & Its Kindred Bars.)By the last two weekends of the election, you will most likely be knocking on Democratic doors (at least suggested by the campaign's data), but that doesn't mean you'll only be talking to like-minded people. In fact, there's a good chance you'll end up talking to one of the (for me and probably for you) strangest animals on the planet: the semi-aware American sometimes-voter. Like, dude, this isn't Bill Clinton era political triangulation, this is children in fucking cages, this is the most corrupt administration we have ever seen, this is a President obviously aligned or at the very least amenable to some of the most repressive regimes in the world, including one was the villain in, like, half the action movies in the 80s. This is an obvious partisan hitman on the Supreme Court. This is someone who at the very least had a drinking problem in his life that he refuses to confront but is probably also a serial sexual assaulter. This is lying from the Oval Office at an unprecedented rate. This is a Republican party who's only policy commitment is keeping itself in power by any means necessary. (And they give themselves bonus points when they get to hurt people they don't like along the way.) How the fuck are you lukewarm about any of this? I can kind of understand devotees to the cult of Fox News and though I don't understand why you would ever feel this way, I at least understand why white supremacists are supporting the Republican party. Same goes for all those fucking asshole misogynist men who felt seen and spoken for by Grassley's, Graham's, and Kavanaugh's temper tantrums. I don't understand what the fuck is wrong with you, but I understand how being such a piece of shit would lead you to certain actions. But to see all of that and still think, “I just don't know?” Or, worse, to see all of that and think, “Meh?”
What this tells me is that contemporary mainstream political journalism has failed--at a level far worse than I imagined--in its primary goal of informing citizens on the state of political power in our country. In order to project some strange definition of “balance,” mainstream media has downplayed the threat the contemporary Republican party poses to America, while overemphasizing the flaws in the Democratic party. I mean, the few times I was able to discuss specific issues with people while canvassing they wanted to talk about health care, so we did. OK. Fine. In Maine, I saw an a Bruce Poliquin ad arguing that he was in favor of protecting patients with preexisting conditions, despite voting to repeal the ACA with no replacement legislation to protect the patients repealing the ACA would leave vulnerable. And this isn't isolated. Somehow, Republicans around the country are trying to run on fucking healthcare. They believe they can get away with this because they know our political journalism will not be able to respond.
A current in this failure is how “get out of your bubble” was leveraged by the right to mean, “Let another white guy from the Midwest talk at you.” Somehow, our media has allowed the right to control the debate on connecting and listening to other perspectives to somehow only mean that all liberals have a responsibility to listen to a specific range of conservatives. (And if we don't listen in the exact right way and do exactly what they ask of us no matter how damaging it might be to other populations it's our fault, not theirs if they help elect Trump and Trump-like Republicans.) Somehow, the media has helped create another one-way street in which certain white men get to talk at the rest of us as much of they want and without any meaningful responsibility for their own actions. Which is really tragic, because there are lots of different ways to get out of your bubble. It doesn't just mean talking to your political opposite. It doesn't just mean listening to someone who doesn't believe you are fully human. It doesn't just mean another fluff piece on Rust Bowl Trump voters. There are lots of different types of people you can meet and perspectives you can interact with once you're there. Political belief is a spectrum, in terms of policy and intensity and it is always good to find ways to talk to people on different parts of both spectra.
Canvassing might be the easiest way to do that.
They're All Crooks! A corollary to the “Meh,” voter is the “They're all crooks!” voter. It is undeniable that the Democratic party has its flaws and that it is influenced by its donors. It is also true, that there have been times in our recent political memory (Bill Clinton's triangulation and Al Gore's subsequent campaign) where there wasn't much to distinguish between public statements and no small amount of enacted legislation. (Again, Bill Clinton era crime bill & welfare reform and some post 9/11 security state stuff. Oh yeah, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) It is also true that there have been corrupt Democrats and that there will certainly be corrupt Democrats in the future, but there is nothing in modern memory anywhere close to what Trump and the Republicans are doing. This, of course, goes back to how “balanced” journalism works. There's a negative story about a Republican being a fucking fascist, well, run a negative story about a Democrat and present them as equal in scale even if they are not even remotely of equal scale.
I should also note, that this is a consequence of “horse race journalism” as much as it is of “balanced” journalism. In terms of what a journalist does, it shouldn't fucking matter whether Republicans claiming to protect preexisting conditions is an effective election strategy because it's a fucking lie. But, instead, the various policies and positions of both parties are presented neutrally, as being equally valid arguments conducted in equally valid ways and the only thing of interest is which one ends up more popular. So voters, especially voters who don't dive deeper than the headlines, come away with the sense that the two parties are both equally bad and so why bother. In fact, one person I talked to was visibly angry that both campaigns were “bothering” him, so he was going to vote independent. Of course, HIS name wasn't the name I had on my list, which brings me to my next observation...
Special Report for the Department of Shocking but Not SurprisingHoly shit there are still a lot of men who will not hesitate to speak for their wives. The last house I stopped at yesterday a man, roughly my age (38) saw my button and said, “We're Republicans here,” which was especially interesting because the woman's name I had on my list was, according the state registration information, a registered Democrat. For all I know, that person had honestly changed her mind at some point in her life and just hadn't bothered to update her registration. That is, of course, a “perfectly rational explanation.” But, much more likely, this guy is a fucking Republican so his family is fucking Republican and that's fucking it. There are a lot of forces, both historic and contemporary that have created Trump's 38-42% approval rating, but a big chunk of it has to be men who believe it is their right to speak for their household and Donald Trump is overtly protecting, shit, even celebrating, that power. (Should also note that “shocked but not surprised” is perhaps my most common emotion in 2018.) (I should also note that if you're not planning on voting at the moment, maybe you could just to deal this asshole a loss. You know the smugness liberals are accused of having? This fucker oozed it, but with that extra dose of 'I can't be smug because I'm a Republican' smugness. Wouldn't you like to ruin his day?)
It's All RiggedOne of the more interesting responses was someone who told me he never votes because it's all rigged. Canvassing really isn't the time for a long conversation about anything, so I wasn't able to drill down to what he actually meant, as that could mean anything from a version of “They're all crooks,” above to, “the Illuminati controls the world.” I bring him up only because, later I realized I should have said to him, “I'm not here to convince you, but, just ask yourself, who wins because you don't vote?” Seems like a pretty good question for anyone thinking of sitting this election out to answer for themselves.
Rays of HopeMy lists the past two Sundays were of infrequent voters; people who had not voted in the last few elections or in the last few midterm elections. This included Democrats, Undeclared voters, Independents, and some Republicans. This means that the campaign has the resources to go after unknowns, to expand its potential base, and to reach votes the Democrats haven't reached in the last couple of election cycles. And a good number of people I actually talked to are voting Democrat! Like, a little over a third of the people I actually talked to. Sure, that's maybe 10 people, but if you all canvas on at least one of the remaining four weekend days, that hundreds or even thousands of Democrat voters. I don't know if that's enough, but it's either do something or don't.
Canvasing Links (Because you're definitely going to canvas now.)For Jared Golden in my hometown ofLewiston, ME
All Swing District Canvassing from theBoston Area
Canvas for Democrat candidate for MAgovernor Jay Gonzalez (Because, last I checked, Charlie Baker was still fine being a member of a misogynist white nationalist fascist party.)
Swing Left National
Vote Save America
Last Weekend

Your Hero Opportunity

Most of the time, it's hard to know the real value of what you do. For most of us, we know that whatever we did today was good enough or at least not bad enough that we kept our jobs for another day, that our marriages stayed together another day, that we got the kids back and forth to school, and as important is it is to do all of those things, it's hard to know exactly whether what we said was good or just good enough, whether what we did was right or just not so wrong someone would say something about it. With the exception of professions like nurses, doctors, EMTs, soldiers, fire fighters, pilots, and a few others and very rare cases like car accidents and natural disasters, we can only guess at whether or not what we did was the best thing we could have done.
And, that's fine. For me, one of the primary skills we need to develop to live fulfilling lives is a base level of comfort with ambiguity. Honestly, I'd go even further and say some of the most destructive forces in human society, fascism, racism, theocracy, are based in creating a false sense of certainty. They are supported by and destructive because they create these certainties upon which people then live their lives, regardless of the consequences or impacts their actions may have on others.
Which is a long way to say that ambiguity is not a problem and not something I routinely try to remove from my life and my writing.
There is no ambiguity here. There is no doubt. Even in this postmodern, post-structuralist, deconstructed world, there is a right thing to do.
We've all wondered, in various lexicons and with various fantastic or realistic scaffolding, what we would do if we were put in a life and death situation, if we were given a dramatic choice, if we were called on to be a hero.
There may not be an actual ticking time bomb, their may not be flames or car chases or dearly beloveds dangling from cliffs, but this is your life or death moment, this is your hero opportunity and what you must do is clear.
You must vote Democrat in every race this election. If you always vote Democrat, if you always vote Republican, if you mix it up, if you vote third party, if you don't vote, if you've never voted before, the right thing for you to do, the heroic thing for you to do is vote for every Democrat on your ballot.
If you're reading this, odds are you already planning on doing that. I don't know if I have the eloquence and insight to breakthrough to those of you who are not already planning to vote Democrat this fall, but you can't succeed if you don't try. That said, I know there are some of you who will never vote Democrat, who will always vote Republican, and this is the part where I'm supposed to say that I respect you and that we're supposed to find common ground, but I don't, there is no meaningful common ground, and though I will applaud those of you who undertake the long and difficult personal journey away from this current incarnation of Republicanism, right now your votes are literally tearing families apart, literally destroying our system of government, literally traumatizing millions of your friends, neighbors, and family members, and literally killing people and if Fox News is protecting you from that truth my little blog post isn't going to bust in.
So I'm going to focus on three types of people who might not vote for Democrats in November.
I Oppose the Two-Party SystemHow much has voting third-party or abstaining from elections done to diminish the power of the two-party system over the last twenty years or so? How many Green Party members are there in Congress? Governors? State legislatures?
Listen the two-party system is undemocratic, has pushed American policy far to the right of the American public actually believes, and fundamentally stifles the conversation around policy and legislation, but how does helping Republicans maintain power, despite the fact that most Americans do not support the Republican agenda, push us towards a multi-party system? In fact, because Republicans are actually disenfranchising voters, specifically progressive voters, on top of everything else, empowering Republicans by voting third-party or abstaining from voting actually hinders our ability to transition to a multi-party system.
If you really want to begin diminishing the power of the two-party system, vote for very Democrat on your ballot and then do whatever you can in your state to reform your elections to include ranked choice voting or instant run-off elections. It is a popular idea, it won on the ballot in Maine, and it is the first step in breaking through the two-party system.
The Democrats Are Whores to [Insert Special Interest Here]With the exception of radical conspiracy theorists, you're also probably right. Contemporary politics is a money game and in contemporary American capitalism very few good people have the kind of money it takes to influence politics. Look behind your favorite Democrat politician and there's probably at least one really bad corporation or industry (probably pharma) donating to them.
But does that put them on par with what Republicans do? Really? Does the fact that many (but not all!) Democrats take money from problematic corporations really mean that the Trump administration is acceptable? Is your ideological purity worth all of this collateral damage?
Furthermore, as above, how does helping Republicans remain in power by voting third-party or abstaining from voting help get money out of politics? Do you see any Republicans at any level advocating for campaign finance reform? Cause I don't.
So, vote for every Democrat on your ballot this Fall and help get money out of politics by donating to politicians that reject corporate and PAC donations and pushing for campaign finance reform in your state.
I Don't CareSomeone you love does.
The most important voters in America are nonvoters, those who are eligible, but don't. There are lots of reasons for this, many of which come from structural impediments to voting (many of which are intentional) so I'm not really talking to those who are logistically prevented from voting (but let me break in here to say, do whatever you can. Lyft will take you to the polls, Get out the Vote organizations will get you there, coordinate with your boss, your coworkers whatever, because, honestly, you might not get another chance to vote.).
Whatever reason you have for not caring, whether it's that feel as though your vote doesn't matter, or that no politicians represent you specifically, or whatever is fine and I'm not going to try to argue against that idea. I don't know what matters to you so I have no idea how to make you care.
Someone you love cares. Someone you love was traumatized by what happened yesterday in the Kavanaugh hearing. Someone you love was traumatized when the Access Hollywood tape didn't end Trump's campaign. Someone you love is terrified because they emigrated here recently or are first generation or just happen to have a Hispanic sounding name and there is a real chance ICE could sweep them up. Someone you love is scared of the uptick in hate crimes, someone you love is scared of LGBT information being scrubbed from federal websites, someone you love is scared their asthma will become unmanageable if the air quality regulations are eliminated, someone you love is scared of dying from an illegal abortion. Someone you love has gained weight and lost sleep and felt a pit with sharp edges in their stomachs for what feels like forever and someone you love will never be the same again the way our grandparents who lived through the Great Depression would keep old junk in their basements because they could never quite shake the fear of bread lines.
Maybe politics doesn't actually affect you. Maybe you have good reasons to not care. Maybe those reasons are good enough for whatever logistical challenges you face to voting to count as a hassle.
Fine. Whatever.
But you are not the only person in your life. If you're not going to vote Democrat for yourself, vote Democrat for someone you love. And let's put a rational self-interest spin on this too. If Republicans hold on to the House and Senate, someone you love will look up from weeping and ask you if you voted yesterday and your relationship with them will never be the same if you say, “no.” Shit, vote Democrat for someone I love. I mean, if it really and truly doesn't matter to you, why not make my grandmother's day?
Your OpportunitySo this is your opportunity to be a hero. I won't say we're lucky to have this opportunity and I won't say we should be thankful our opportunity is so easy to capitalize on, but here it is. Our chance to do something great.
Will you be a hero?

Turinng the NHL Into a Two-Tier League

For fun, let's imagine restructuring the NHL into two-tiers, sort of like professional soccer leagues around the world. There would be a Premier League (or Prince of Wales division, see what I did there.) and a Second League (or Adams division). Reorganizing the league this way would greatly reduce the number of “meaningless games” during the regular season and reduce the value of “tanking,” while producing more potentially exciting games and more interesting interactions between the teams, and, give the league a structure for incorporating all the expansion they're desperate to do. You'll see how all of that could happen as I get in to the details.
First, some basics.
36 teams, 18 in the Prince of Wales Division and 18 in the Adams Division. Each division would be divided into an East and West conference of 9 teams each. (This will also work just fine with a 32 team league, though the playoff structure would have to be redone.) Only the teams in the Prince of Wales (or Adams, doesn't really matter to me what the premier division is called) will be eligible to compete for the Stanley Cup (more on the playoff structure soon). (Obviously, the Adams division will have it's own playoffs, again more on that later.) All the teams will play every other team in the league at least once, but no team will play any team in the other division more than twice. (With the extra game being for “natural rivalries” between teams in different divisions, say, going from this year, Calgary and Edmonton.) In theory, once this is in place, you could keep adding teams as much as you want. Just keep the PoW at 18 and stick as many expansion teams as you want the Adams division and adjust the playoff structure accordingly. In theory, you could even add another tier if you wanted to.
The draft lottery would work essentially the same as it does now, with the entire league drafting together, so the last place team in the Adams would have the best chance at the first pick. Trades could also happen between divisions (more on that later.) Every team makes the playoffs within its division with one exception (more on that later). There will be a system of relegation and promotion (more on that later). That's pretty much the basics.
Let's get into the weeds.
EXPANSIONLet's start hashing things out by getting the League up to 36 teams and dividing them into the two divisions. The league has 31 teams at the moment, so we'll need five more to get there. Here are the cities that I think should get teams: Seattle (since it seams like they're going to get one anyway), Quebec City and Hartford (since they already had teams), Hamilton (since there has been some momentum around a team in Hamilton for years now, but for some reason we care about what the Sabers think), and...
a team owned by the NHL located in some city that wins some crazy-ass year long competition. Does Montreal have room for a second team? (Maybe.) Does Boston? (No.) Could somewhere small, but with hockey history like Saskatoon (birth place of Gordie Howe) make a case? Is there another Las Vegas hiding somewhere? (Branson?) PEI? Madison? A team shared by the Dakotas? Lake Superior? New England? And if, after some reasonable amount of time (5 years, let's say), that city, can't support an NHL hockey team, well, they just hold the contest again. The operations of the team would be independent of the NHL, but the NHL could potentially use it as a kind of ambassador team. Moving it around North America (or beyond), and trying out new things (ticket packages, carbon neutral arenas, municipal stakes a la the Green Bay Packers). Maybe this makes it hard to keep top talent and compete, but, well somebody's got to be last and if somebody's got to be last it might as well be a team that is also doing interesting things for the game of hockey.
Once we have all the teams we'll need to divide them into the two divisions. So, the PoW division would be composed of the original 6, plus the next 12 teams with the highest total of regulation and overtime wins over the last, say, five seasons. Yes, this means that an undeserving team or two might get bumped for an original-6 team that's had a bad run of late, but I honestly can't imagine starting out with any number of original six teams without a shot at the Stanley Cup. If they play their way into regulation after the league has been reorganized, well, that's on them. (Every redemption story, starts with a fall.)
The long term wins total, as opposed to say, the end of season ranking, is a way to reward long term success and prevent a good franchise that just happens to be going through a rebuilding year or two from being relegated and a bad franchise that happens to get a few good bounces down the stretch from being promoted.
With the divisions and conferences set, the regular season plays as it does now, with the scheduling exception described above. Oh, and while I've got you: 3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an overtime win, 1 point for an overtime loss, and...1.5 points for a shootout win.
PLAYOFFSThe first thing one might object to, to this current structure is there isn't really a playoff race. Every team will end up in some form of playoff, either for the Stanley Cup or whatever the Adams division trophy is called. (The Kenora Cup, perhaps.) The only thing the regular season will decide, in terms of the specific season, is the seeding going into the playoffs. But that seeding will be significant and whether a franchise is safely in the PoW or in jeopardy of being relegated will be determined by their seeding. Let's see how that works.
First of all, the top seeds in the Adams East & West conferences will play the 9thseeds in the PoW East & West conferences in a one game playoff. We could have both games played on the same day, maybe a Sunday, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. This essentially creates a hockey holiday, in which pretty much all hockey fans are watching both games and both games are absolutely vital for both teams. Think of how much money the bars in Canada would make on this day. Think of the parties. Think of how much fun that would be, to be with a group of neutrals and just pick a team to root for. Think of the parties the winning teams' fans throw. Think of the parties the losing teams' fans throw! The NHL could even throw a whole bunch of weird and awkward ceremonies all over the place and it would still be about as much fun as you can possibly have as a hockey fan.
The winners of these one-game playoffs, face the 8th seeds in the PoW East and West conferences in a best of five series. The winner of that series enters the official Stanley Cup Playoffs as the 8th seed. Depending on the situation, what happens in those playoff games and in that series, could have huge implications for the teams involved, but I'll get into the more when I get to relegation and promotion. And then it's a regular 8 team playoff. 1 plays 8, 2 plays 7 and so forth.
I want to point out one other benefit to this playoff structure: ta da! We have created a bye-week at the end of the season for seeds 1-7. One of the things no one really acknowledges about the Stanley Cup Playoffs is that, often, it's the good team that happens to be healthiest that wins. A bye-week doesn't solve all of the health problems that can impact the results of the playoffs but it mitigates them, at least a little bit. Every 1-7 team will have a week to give their legs a chance to rest, to recover from small injuries, to get their goalies off their feet a little bit. And since there will be hockey going on during that time, it's not like it would be dead time for the league or the fans.
And how about the difference between the 7th seed and the 8thseed? Significant games indeed.
Most of the new significance, though, will come from the relegation and promotion system, so let's do that now. . RELEGATION AND PROMOTIONFirst of all, the Stanley cup winner is protected from relegation for two years. (Success should be rewarded.) Conference champs will be protected for one year. (So, you know, they can finally all touch the conference trophies.)
If an Adams Division team wins its way into the Stanley playoffs, it is promoted to PoW and the 9th seed of the PoW is relegated to the Adams. Now the difference between the 8th and 9th seed in the PoW conferences is massive. Furthermore, in the Adams division, the difference between 1 & 2 is huge, as 2 doesn't even get a shot at promotion. But wait, there's more.
As above, the Stanley Cup winner is protected from relegation for two years. So they are not eligible for relegation, even if they end up 9thin their conference, and even if they lose that one game playoff. If that happens, the 8th seed is made eligible for relegation. If they lose that subsequent playoff series, they are relegated instead. So, if a Stanley Cup winner struggles at the beginning of the season, the significance between 7 & 8 is huge (on top of the significance of the by-week), as the 8thseed could become eligible for relegation. But, also from above, it is possible for a PoW conference to have two teams protected from relegation in the same season; the Stanley Cup champ from two seasons ago, and the conference champion from the preceding season.
What happens if they're both terrible? And the 1 seed from the Adams beats them both. We can't have that team play the 7th place team to settle the relegation issue, as that would wreck the playoff structure. So in that (most likely) rare case, if the Adams team wins more total playoff games than the 7th seed PoW team, they are promoted and the 7th PoW team is relegated. This means, that not only is difference between 6 & 7 significant, but, we could find ourselves with two playoff series where 4-1 is significantly different from 4-0. We could also see (again highly unlikely) a conference final in which the winner is protected from relegation for one year and goes on to the Stanley Cup finals and the loser is relegated.
So, now, through this system two-tiered system, there is a huge difference between the 9th and 8th place teams in the PoW, as moving up to 8th most of the time protects you from being relegated, and there is a huge difference between 8th and 7th because the 7th place team dodges that extra playoff series and is even more likely to be safe from relegation than the 8th seed, and, in rare years when two protected teams are bad, the difference between 7th and 6th is now everything.

In the Adams division, teams that would normally be churning through their season without a shot at either the playoffs or the top draft choice, will have something to play for as the difference between 2ndand 1st will also be huge. The 2nd place team, settles for playing for the Kenora Cup (look it up!) and the first place team gets a shot at promotion.
The primary goal of this reorganization of the NHL is the create more meaningful games over the course of the season and the playoffs, and so we could see a last week of the season or even last day of the season, in which massive rewards are played for, and playoff wins that are significant even in playoff series losses. Sure, there might still be some tanking, but that would only be at the bottom of the Adams division. And you know what, that's fine. They're the bottom of the Adams division.
As you can see, promotion is actually pretty difficult to achieve. You could have a team do well for several seasons, and just choke in the one-game playoff. Likewise, you could have a team hanging out in 9thplace for awhile, getting saved from relegation over and over again by 8th place teams. Or who knows what else could happen? So, I'm also totally on board with the idea of a semi-regular reassessment of the tiers, maybe every five or six years, in which some quorum of significant members of the league (owners, managers, coaches, players, scouts, journalists, etc.) get together and, through some formalized and transparent process, consider promoting and relegating teams outside of this structure.
TRADES AND THE SALARY CAPFor the most part, trades and the salary cap would work in the exact same way they do now. (However that is.) There would be trade deadlines and trades could happen across divisions. Free agency would work the same way, though, of course, Adams division teams would have a tougher time signing top name players, but, for the most part, things would look the same. But I would introduce one wrinkle, specifically around “rental” players.
A “rental” period would be open sometime after the formal trade deadline, but, only trades between the divisions would be allowed. This would give PoW teams a chance to stock up for the playoffs AND give good players stuck on Adams division teams an extra chance to end up in the playoffs. But let's add another wrinkle. PoW would be able to include “cash considerations” in their trade, however, that cash paid to the Adams division team would count against their cap for the year. (Who knows, maybe that's how it works already. I certainly don't understand all the cap rules and well, I'm not going to look it up.) But it will be different for the Adams team.
The Adams team would tag that as cap-free salary and as long as they apply it to players salaries it is excluded from cap considerations until it is “spent.” Here's how that would work. Say a PoW team sends a prospect and $10 million in cash to an Adams team. The Adams team could then use that money to bump up the salary of a youngish top-pair defenseman approaching the end of his contract by $5 million a year for two years. Or if they think they can play themselves into promotion with one big free agent signing, they can pay someone an extra $10 million the next year without any cap consequences. You could actually see a smart GM in the Adams division, draft well for a couple of years, make a couple of “rental” trades every year for a few years and end up with enough cap free salary to build a promotion team in one off-season. The important thing about this, is it provides a way for Adams divisions teams to compensate for the natural disadvantage they have in signing free agents.
It should also be noted, “rental” players wouldn't just be for teams looking to stock up for a serious Cup run. It could also be for teams trying to jump up to 8, 7, or 6. More teams would have motivations to make some kind of play near the end of the season to protect their place in the PoW and so more of these deals would happen, redistributing a fair amount of wealth downward.
Furthermore, the fact that inter-division trading exists and that there will be some incentive for Adams division teams to trade their players in rental deals, means that Adams division players, along with playing for the success of their teams, will also, essentially, always be trying out for the PoW division. Even if your particular team doesn't have the combined talent to do anything more than languish in the bottom of the division, you don't have to. You can play your way into the PoW division and perhaps right on to a Stanley Cup contender.
ADAMS DIVISION PLAYOFFSThe Adams division will also have a playoffs, which, I think, will be great for everyone. More hockey, with more significance. Maybe there's a fan base somewhere that just needs to see playoff hockey to get excited. Maybe there's a player who will thrive in that environment but never gets the chance because he's on a shitty team. The NHL is good at trophies, so why not have another. (The Kenora Cup. I made up this whole thing, so I can name the trophy.)
The Kenora Cup playoff structure will be the inverse of the Stanley Cup playoff. If the number one seed in the division plays its way into the Stanley Cup playoffs (one-game playoff, plus best of five series) it has essentially moved out of the Adams division, meaning that its conference will now have eight teams in it and a good old fashioned 8-team playoff will start. If the number one seed does not advance into the Stanley Cup playoffs, the 8th and 9thseeds in the conference will play a best of five series to become the 8th seed and then we'll be back to the regular 8 team playoff structure.
CONCLUSION OF SORTSAnd there you have it. More significant games. More playoff hockey. More story lines. New rivalries. More fan bases will have the opportunity to celebrate a kind of success. Better teams will play each other more often. More games with playoff implications would happen. There'd probably be more trades at the deadline. And the league can keep adding teams as long as they want without potentially compromising any of that. And we get a hockey holiday. It may be an impossible dream, but it's a good dream.
Also, 3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an overtime win, 1 point for an overtime loss, 1.5 points for a shootout win. Think about it.

Sean Spicer at BEA

The Trump administration's first, definitive step towards authoritarianism was so quick, so small, so...stupid, that I think most of us missed it. Maybe we were still reeling from Trump's “American Carnage” inauguration speech or from the images of this obvious con artist standing next to President Obama or from the failure to trigger any of the constitutional mechanisms that would have prevented his inauguration or from the fact of his presidency at all or from the trauma of election night. Maybe we were thinking about how stupid we were to send money to Jill Stein for that recount. Maybe we were expecting the administration to at least try to pretend for an entire fucking day that this was going to be a real presidency with a real President. Maybe we were thinking about the Women's March, or planning our activism, or maybe, we were just expecting something else, something bigger, something more calculated, something closer to the Muslim ban, or at least something less...stupid.

On January 21, 2017, Sean Spicer, in his first official act as Press Secretary for the President of the United States of America, lied to our fucking faces. He lied about an objective truth. He lied about what we could see with our fucking eyes. He lied not for some kind diplomatic or strategic reason, not in an attempt to keep us safe from some kind of threat, or to forward some kind of policy they believed justified being dishonest with the American public. He lied to assuage the ego of a narcissist.

And nothing happened. He and the administration were criticized in the press of course, mocked in certain corners of the media, but no one involved in that obvious, profoundly stupid lie suffered any negative consequences. One of them is still president and one of them is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In some ways, the inaugural crowd-size lie was a test. Would Congressional Republicans let the President obviously lie to the American people? Would Congressional Republicans allow the institution of the Presidency and the institution of Congress be radically diminished as institutions of society and governance? Would Congressional Republicans do anything more than pay the occasional lip service to the idea of objective truth and rule of law? If they are not willing to stand up to the administration over matters of arithmetic, and say, demand Sean Spicer resign or demand the President issue a retraction, or censure the President, or ask if someone who is willing to lie to the American people about what the American people just saw with their own eyes should have nuclear codes, would they be willing to stand up to lies with more ambiguity or lies that help them advance their agenda?

We, of course, know the answer to all of these questions. Sean Spicer tested Congress and Republicans with an obvious lie and they failed the test. Sean Spicer was told to lie to the American public and he did, without batting an eyelash. And in doing so, Sean Spicer is directly complicit in the current existential threat to American democracy.

Now he wants to “set the record straight” with a new book. Which, to me, translates to, “now I want to make a ton of money on being directly complicit in the current existential threat to American democracy, while trying to extract myself from the dumpster fire that is the Trump administration by claiming I had 'concerns' or that I 'voiced objections.'” Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has regrets, everyone does things they wish they hadn't done. I think we can accept that and accept that you don't get a fucking take-backsie on abetting the rise of fascism. I mean, it's not like there was any ambiguity here. If Spicer truly believed that lying to the American people is bad (and yes, I understand that spin is a Press Secretary's job) he would have refused to call Trump's inauguration the largest in history and then would have either resigned or been fired if Trump pressed him on it. Instead, he said it, stayed at his job, kept lying to the public, and now Aunt Lydia archetype Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies with breathtaking ease.

Obviously, don't buy Sean Spicer's book. But, if you're reading this blog, I doubt you were planning on it anyway. So why am I spending my time on Sean Spicer when I could be doing, well, anything else?

Sean Spicer is going to kick off promotion for his cynical-money-grab-masquerading-as-a-redemption-tour at Book Expo America, the annual gathering of the publishing industry. Or, to put this another way: a fascist collaborator is going to shill his book at BEA.

Here is what I would like to see happen. BEA should drop him from the programming. (Maybe send event director Brien McDonald an email to that effect. brien@reedpop.com) They should issue a statement that they were wrong to invite him or to accept Regnery's proposal for the above delineated reasons and they should give that space to an author from a marginalized community or a community directly impacted by the Trump administration. Sean Spicer's presence does not “welcome a conservative perspective,” or “reflect a commitment to free speech,” or whatever other bullshit defense they'll offer for giving a platform to someone who assisted the rise of fascism by lying to the American people. Short of that, (which I honestly don't think will happen) I think booksellers, publishers, authors, readers, and everyone else in the book world at BEA, should come together and empty the trade show floor during his event. Ideally, the meeting rooms should be empty, the booths should be empty, the other signings happening at the same time should stop, and the ABA lounge should be empty. (Ideally, this should be an ABA-endorsed practice, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.) If you're an author who is scheduled to sign during his event, you should demand to be rescheduled. If you have a competing event on a different stage, you should demand to be rescheduled. (Maybe that would help increase the chances of option 1 happening.) The silence that descends upon the floor as Spicer's event starts should be the loudest statement made at BEA. Short of that, his specific event should be empty. Not only should every single seat set out for an audience be empty, but there also shouldn't be any journalists covering his event either. Sean Spicer does not deserve our attention. Perhaps, if we can't do that, it's best to make sure enough willing people attend to shout him down, so he never actually gets to pretend he should make money off of his complicity. What would twenty plus people shouting “How big was the crowd?!” throughout his event accomplish?

I'm going to be honest. I'm not an organizer, so I don't have the skills to help facilitate any of that. So far, the best I've come up with is that booksellers should gather at the entrances to the floor during his event, but there are also workshops going on, and meetings with publishers and an event called “Publicist speed dating” which I'm even signed up for.

At the very least, I don't want the book world to just shrug its shoulders. It's one thing for a fascist collaborator to try to make money by writing a book, and it's one thing for a publisher to try to make money by publishing that book, (And Regnery is a primary actor in the great conservative con) but it's something else entirely for that publisher and that fascist collaborator to center that book at the industry's biggest event and it's something else entirely for the industry to let that fascist collaborator use its platform. The book world might not be able to stop this, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it.

So, if you're reading this and you are an organizer and you'd like to help, reach out to me in the comments or on twitter (@InOrderofImport) and let's see if we can make something happen. Reach out even if you're not an organizer but hope something organized can be pulled together. If you're reading this and you're attending BEA in some capacity, maybe publicly commit to leaving the floor during Spicer's event and to convincing your friends and colleagues to join you. We don't have to commit to some huge, well-organized gesture to make a point. (Would #BEAEmptyFloor be useful?) At the very least commit to not attending his event and to convincing your friends and colleagues to join you as well. If we can't de-platform him, maybe we can at least de-audience him. (#LonelySpicey?)

There are times when I think we've got this. That the barricades are stressed but holding. That the blue wave will hit in November and crass survivalism will force Republicans to finally untether themselves from Trump. There are times when I think we'll use this trauma to break through longstanding barriers to true social, political, and economic progress, and in a decade or so, we'll end up with universal healthcare, an end to mass incarceration, a meaningful climate change strategy, massive campaign finance and corruption reform and, I don't know, maybe even a livable wage. There are other times when I think Republicans are going to roll out some kind of October surprise, they'll martial voter suppression forces and techniques in ways we are not preparing for, and their existing gerrymandering will protect them enough for them to consolidate power and finish their decades long process of turning America into a neo-feudalist state run by wealthy white oligarchs.

But the former won't happen on its own. And if the later is going to happen, well, then it will happen despite our best efforts. In the grand scheme of things, de-platforming Sean Spicer from a publishing industry event will be a relatively small victory. But all big victories are made up of small victories, just like all big lies are made up of small lies. And if there's a choice between doing nothing and failing and doing something and failing, I'm going to do something.

And Now I Own (1/9 of 1/2 of) a Bookstore

I could never save enough from my wages to buy Porter Square Books. Thanks to abysmal failure that is Republican economic policy that demolished the American middle class, I'm not sure even the nine employees involved in the recent purchase combined could have put together enough capital to secure a small business loan on just what we could save from our pay. There would have been options of course when it came time for David and Dina to retire. There's crowdsourcing (which I imagine would have been successful). And some of us might have partners and other family members who would be willing to help and maybe there would be some applicable government loans available for small businesses, but, on our salaries and wages alone it would never have been possible.

This is, in part, because bookstores, especially new bookstores, are relatively expensive to buy, even more especially in relation to their profit margin. Books are expensive, you don't really finance the purchase of an entire store the way bookstores finance purchases of books from publishers, and the profit margins of even successful bookstores mean that business loans of any significant size will take a long time to pay off. (I remember the day when the founders of PSB finally had the liens taken off of their personal homes and they would have gotten credit from publishers for their initial inventory.) But, really, as above, the Republican economic model has guaranteed most Americans have much less buying power than they used to, more of that is spent on housing, healthcare and education than it used to, and the economy is subject to recessions in ways it wasn't before we put one of those classic Hollywood conservatives in the White House. Honestly, I don't know if there is any industry in America where the wages are high enough for an employee to save up to buy the business they've spent their lives working for.

From about 1998 (or maybe even 1996) to about 2011 or 2012, independent bookstores were struggling for survival. There were a couple of times, especially around the recessions of 2001 and 2008, when it looked like independent bookstores were going to vanish completely. The wage stagnation above hurt book sales and put downward pressure on the price of books (meaning that books aren't really priced high enough to support all the people working to produce and sell them), a problem only exacerbated by the recessions. The deep discounting at first Borders and Barnes and Noble and later Amazon hurt independent bookstores even more. That Amazon was able finance predatory pricing through stock sales, tax avoidance, atrocious labor practices, straight-up losing money for a decade, and pressure on vendors while improving and developing their sales infrastructure, including Prime and their ebooks monopoly, only put independent bookstores at a greater disadvantage. But, many of us figured that shit out.

So for many stores, the long term problem they face is no longer survival but succession. Given the desire to keep independent bookstores open in general and guarantee that one's own community has an independent bookstore, and the basic economic reality above, how do bookstore owners make sure their stores pass on to committed, talented, and capable new owners? How do they make sure they don't end up just hoping for an angel investor to come in from the tech or finance worlds?

Even though David and Dina aren't retiring any time soon, they wanted a plan for succession. They didn't want to find themselves just hoping the right person could come along to make sure Porter Square Books stayed open and vibrant in Porter Square. They wanted to make sure that the committed, talented, and capable people who were already contributing to the store's success would be able to buy the store when they retired. Their solution is actually pretty simple and replicable. (more on that later.) Essentially, they loaned nine management-level booksellers the money to buy 50% of the store (at the value Dina and David originally purchased it for) and we will pay back that loan on a ten-year schedule from the profits we are now entitled to as partial owners. In some ways it's kind of like a car loan from the dealership. You get to drive the car home, even though you still owe most of its cost to the dealer itself. This deal is structured to have as little impact on our taxes as possible and, if the bookstore does well over those years, should leave us with a little extra cash after the loan payment. The financial needs of a bookstore (or any retail) in an economy in which the majority of sales happen in one quarter and the general fragility and fluctuation of yearly profits, make it essentially impossible to commit the level of cash in salaries and wages necessary for an employee to save up to purchase a store, but by redistributing the profit when it's there at the end, David and Dina can pass that money on without risking the cash-flow and stability of the store itself. And by creating what is essentially a low-interest small business loan with favorable terms they made the purchase affordable, given projected profits.

I should note, this isn't just altruism on David and Dina's part. Sure, they take home a dramatically lower percentage of the yearly profits and forfeit some of the money an outright sale would generate, but, they also save themselves the cost of retraining management-level employees and protect a substantial amount of the bookstore's institutional knowledge. They saw in their years since buying the store, a staff with a...uh...unique set of skills that contributed to the store's profitability and they found a way to protect that set of skills that keeps the store financially secure in both the short and long term. Furthermore, a big part of how independent bookstores succeed is through the relationships booksellers develop with readers over time. Any time a long term bookseller leaves, for whatever reason, and is replaced, it takes some time for the store to make up the sales lost because that particular bookseller isn't there any more to talk to particular readers. By giving us a financial reason to stay, David and Dina have saved themselves the cost of staff turnover and protected institutional knowledge and by connecting those finances to store profitability they have given us an extra reason to work for the success of the store. It's hard to know anything like this for sure, but there is a chance that, even with their generosity, they might make out ahead in the end. I know, it's a shocking, perhaps even revolutionary economic idea that if you invest in the people who generate the profit for your business in a way that also communicates how you value them, they will continue to generate profit for you instead of leaving in three years for the first available promotion at another business. Why, you could almost create and sustain an entire middle class on that principle.

Not every bookstore will be able to ensure succession this way. The current owners would have to be clear enough from debt that they could afford to redistribute a percentage of the profits. There has to be enough appropriate employees to bear whatever new tax burden might be created. The store also needs to be profitable enough so those profits can cover the loan. Of course, there are also lots of different ways to apply the idea of “low-interest loan paid off through a share of the profits.” You could sell a quarter instead of a half of the store. You could change the time frame of the loan. You could create optional escrow accounts for all employees almost like a store based social security. You could do a similar loan-profit-repayment but for the full value of the store when you retire.

But, looking at the bigger world for a moment, imagine if, instead of building a fucking personal space program and continuing to avoid taxes, Jeff Bezos established a similar profit sharing model for Amazon workers at the management level. Sure, he founded Amazon and lead it to it's present behemouthness, but eventually he is going to retire as well. Why not transition it to a partial worker-owned business? (Well, we know the answer to that: it's stock value would tank because, even though more people would make more money, it's quarterly profit margin would end up shrinking, but more on that later.) Imagine if the Waltons did that. Imagine if the Koch brothers did that. Imagine if Bill Gates did that. Imagine if we had a business model that understood and respected all the contributions made by all employees at all levels and not one that saw non-ownership, non-executive staff as just expensive overhead. Imagine if our business decisions were guided, at least in part, by relationships with the community as a whole. Imagine if quarterly profits were, I don't know, just one part of how we assess a business's success. Imagine if the primary question of business (both large and small) was “How do we continue to have a positive impact on our community while making a profit?” instead of “How can we make as much money as possible as quickly as possible and stash it in the Cayman Islands so future generations never ever ever get a chance to enjoy the social progress lead by large scale federal investment in infrastructure, research and development, and a financial safety net that gave us the opportunity to make all of this money today, and wouldn't be cool if I got to Mars before that Musk guy did so I could somehow trademark or patent or claim ownership over the idea of colonization and teraforming before any legal precedents are set, making me even more like the 'mayor' of one of those late 1800s company towns, yeah, Bezosville Mars with Oxygen Prime?” Sorry, got a little lost there.

The point is, the biggest challenges of our economy, from wage stagnation, to the rising cost of living, to climate change, to the damage done to minds and bodies by decades of 40-60 hour work weeks, are only challenges because certain powerful aspects of our economy have prioritized short-term personal profit over everything. (More on this soon.) Once you open up the goals to include say, long-term health of the business, or maintaining your quality of service to your community, or whatever it is, a lot more options for how to run the business, and how to solve problems like retaining talent and succession open up.

Stepping even further from there book world, there is this weird idea that gets repeated a lot. In some ways, it's the basis for our entire economy and now (thank you Republicans) large swaths of our government and society. It's one of those ideas that can be casually expressed in conversation and just as casually accepted. It often goes something like this, “Hey, man, people are just really selfish and there's nothing you can do about that.” Of course, there is some truth to that. I have been selfish in my life, as have you, and pretty much everyone else. But if you take a step back and look at how people interact with each other, it's pretty clear that, for the most part, selfishness isn't what drives the vast majority of us the majority of the time. From independent bookstores, to Little Leagues, to parades, to acts of generosity after every single tragedy, to the fact that almost no one shoplifts, it's clear that people, even though we can all be selfish at times, are driven by community. David and Dina's succession plan is just another example of this fundamental fact of human life. The vast majority of us, the vast majority of time, want to have good relationships with the people around us (even the strangers) and are perfectly willing to take home less personal profit to do so. I bring this up because the idea that “everyone is greedy and selfish” is a very convenient idea if you, in fact, are greedy and selfish and don't want anyone to get in your way. Too often, we let a lot of bad shit happen in our economy and our world because we have been convinced, despite the evidence we experience every single day, that humans are inherently greedy. Listen to who says this and when. Don't accept it.

So, now I own a part of a bookstore. In terms of my day-to-day life and work, this doesn't have a huge impact. I was already selling as many books as I could not just because it made sure the payroll was met, but because I think selling books is important to my community. I'll still push readers towards challenging works, works in translation, works from under-represented identities and communities and I'll still help you find the perfect airplane read (which is The Long Ships, though in a conversation with another bookseller, Signs Preceding the End of the World is actually a pretty solid airplane read, you just have to read it again a week later for the full impact.) or wordless picture book, or YA novel with a lot of feelings (like The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue and Dairy Queen) or, you know, “just a good read,” (uhh, can you tell me any more, no, OK, umm, Shadow of the Wind, I guess). But now I get to do that with, essentially, a pension fund, (one that is probably a lot more stable than anything in the stock market) the opportunity to eventually help shape the bookstore around a new vision (if it needs reshaping), and a model for making sure PSB endures when it's my turn to retire.

Are Independent Bookstores Recession Proof?

In 2017, sales were up at independent bookstores. Again. More stores are opening than closing. More stores are finding new owners or new locations. Stores are thinking less about survival and more about succession. It's damn near impossible to leave Winter Institute, the annual educational, social, and celebratory conference for booksellers without feeling rejuvenated, without feeling that the best days are yet to come, without feeling as though this network of passionate, creative, thoughtful, intelligent, and empathetic people is invincible, without feeling as though books in general and the role booksellers play specifically, is saving the world. This isn't just the afterglow of a great party (though it certainly is some of that). The sales and growth numbers don't lie. And beyond the numbers, bookstores are taking active roles in their communities in new and important ways while working on improving the flaws and weaknesses (whitenesses) in their own industry. There are data; emotional, anecdotal, and numerical that suggest independent bookselling has never been as strong as it is today and is only going to get stronger for the foreseeable future.

But.

Furthermore, bookstores are uniquely positioned to combat the rise of American fascism. Everything about Trump and the Republican party; the disregard of science, the fundamental lack of curiosity, the fundamental lack of empathy, the pathological lying, the fear of the other, the use of rhetorical tricks to avoid actually defending their terrible fucking ideas, the fragmentation of society, and the deferral to authority is combated in some way by books and literature and reading and the people who connect those books to the readers in their community. Even beyond books, bookstores offer the safe community space, the ability to be quiet for a minute, the chance to know that humans have been through worse and survived because you can look at the books from that time, that can rejuvenate one's energy for the struggle. And that's before considering the active work that independent bookstores are doing in the community. With reading series, author events, book clubs, and displays, independent bookstores are both nodes of resistance against Trump in particular and loci for the general strengthening of our social and civic institutions. We now know what happens when we drift away from the type of community independent bookstores support. It's hard to imagine us going backwards any time soon.

But.
Furthermore, it isn't just Trump and this particular incarnation of fascism. Even before Trump the lies of late-capitalism like the promise of convenience at all costs, the seduction of low prices, the safety and primacy of the nuclear family unit, were starting to erode. People who had been raised on screens were turning to books to escape them. The ebook revolution that was supposed to be the end of bookstores didn't happen. The algorithms that were supposed to remove all the guesswork of buying books were shown to be woefully inadequate. Even as it seems like all shopping is moving online, more and more people are re-discovering the value of talking to a human being before spending their money. Or maybe not spending their money. Because that's the other thing about bookstores that is something of an antidote to the emotional grinder of late-capitalism: it's OK if you don't buy a book every time you browse, every time you meet for coffee, even every time you get recommendations or conversations from booksellers. Maybe it's part of why no one makes a lot of money in books, but in a bookstore you are a human being who might buy a book, not always and only a potential purchase that must be “off-ramped” or “funneled” and “captured.” Which is not to say we don't need to sell you books, but that there is always more to your interaction at a bookstore than the purchase. As the crimes of Amazon continue apace, as the country and young people in particular become more progressive politically and more critical of late-capitalism, and as we continue to rediscover the value of community beyond our nuclear family and beyond our circle of friends, independent bookstores are poised to capitalize on those changes in ways maybe no other industry (except for maybe craft brewing) can.

But.

Furthermore, something changed when Borders closed. Before that it was easy, despite all the other closures, to assume that there would always be bookstores. Sure, maybe indie bookstores wouldn't survive, but there would always be Barnes & Noble and Borders if we need a present on the way to the party. But then Borders wasn't. And then it was clear that if something wasn't done, bricks and mortar bookselling would die. Borders owed publishers millions of dollars when it finally went bankrupt and I've always wondered what the landscape of bookselling would look like if publishers had spread that credit around to the hundreds of independent bookstores that were struggling with the predatory pricing of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon, who were trying to change their model to adapt to online sales and who just needed to get to the next holiday season or the one after that to make those changes and be newly sustainable. I don't think I'm alone in asking that question. I think a lot of people with power at publishers asked that question. So the relationship between independent bookstores and publishers changed and publishers in general started to see independent bookstores not just as one, rather small, sales channel, but as partners in the grand project of books and literature. Independent bookstores drive discovery. Independent bookstores incubate writers. Independent bookstores support the small and independent publishers that often incubate writers and publishing professionals. Independent bookstores celebrate risk. Independent bookstores sustain the conversation around books. And independent bookstores create sales that end up at Amazon. When Borders revealed that a world without bookstores was possible, publishers changed their relationship in real and tangible ways, to treat independent bookstores like partners, making the entire industry more sustainable.

But.

Furthermore, we're really fucking good at selling books now. There might have been a time when all a bookstore needed to thrive was a halfway decent buyer and the right neighborhood. But that won't fly anymore. We need to offer our community and our customers more than what they can find online. And we do. All the time. Both in person and online. Sure not every store has had to make the same adaptations to our economic reality and no store is perfect, but I'm pretty confident that you could walk into damn near any independent bookstore in the country and walk out with a book you didn't know you needed. Taken together, just about everything points to an industry that has figured out how to thrive.

But.

But books are not rent. They are not healthcare. They are not student loans that are immune to bankruptcy. They are not car payments or gas money. As vital as they are to many of us, they are still not as vital as food. I've seen others try to inject a note of caution in all this optimism around growing sales, because, maybe those sales are only growing because the economy is. Though, for all the reasons stated above, I don't think it's just general economic growth behind the growth of independent bookstores, when the economy collapses next, who will have enough money after dealing with the necessities to buy books? Who will cut down on their coffee? Their beer? Who will drop Netflix? Who will find ways to trim their phone bill, their gas bill, their electricity bill? Some will. Many will. Enough to continue the growth we've seen over the last few years? Enough to sustain the level we've reached through this growth? Enough to sustain a viable industry through to the recovery? Are independent bookstores recession proof?

I don't have an answer to this question. The recessions of 2001 and 2008 took their toll, but bookstores were able to survive. And we're stronger now than we were then, but every recession is different and, maybe I'm just being cynical, I think the next one is likely to be catastrophic. (I mean what happens when almost an entire generation gets slammed with double-digit unemployment AND cannot disburse a bunch of their debt through bankruptcy? How does an economy recover from that?) Could we survive that?

I like to offer answers in these posts, not as some kind of final say on the topic, but as a starting point for further conversation, with the assumption that by discussing said offered answer we can find our way to a better one. But, perhaps it's best to conclude this with a different question, one that contains the optimism I think we all rightly feel with a rational concern for what we could face. So...
How do we make independent bookstores recession proof?