Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

By now, food companies have our string-pulling down to a science. A vast array of popular products on the grocery store shelves and the drive-through menu are engineered to be light on the health and heavy on the flash. Delicious flavor powder! New color, now even greenier! Wait’ll you get a load of the aromatic gases emanating from these microwavable food envelopes! Advertising has become pure psychology, tugging at our long-conditioned desires. Some modern classics are the McDonald’s campaign that gives us images of happy families and their pets, running in the yard and playing sports, to the sugary refrain of “I’m lovin’ it,” or “We love to see you smile.” I fear they may have mistaken my grimace of intestinal discomfort for a smile, but I suppose that’s forgivable given the vast viewing distance from the bank all the way to which they have laughed. It now occurs to me that they are merely referring to themselves when they intone, “I’m lovin’ it,” as they watch us mindlessly gobble those irresistible fries and deep-fried chicken clumps.

Pollan tells us, in no uncertain terms. From In Defense of Food: “If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.”

When it comes to knowledge, again, I feel that we have been seduced into thinking that total comprehension is possible, because we have on our phones instant access to more information than we can cognitively handle. But there is a huge difference between information and knowledge. Tanya Berry said to me that she finds it upsetting nowadays when people look into their phones in the middle of a conversation, first because it’s rude, but second because anytime there is a question, people will now just Google the answer. Wendell chimed in and added, “They’re losing the ability to use those three beautiful words: I don’t know.”

lede

Like most humans, I am very moved by music. It can rile me up or make me incredibly happy, or it can move me to tears, all with a commensurate amount of relish. Music shared among friends and family, I have found, is one of the most powerful bonding methods we have as monkeys who can wear jean shorts and press “Play” on our music devices with our handily opposable thumbs and fingers.

Popular music nowadays is frequently quite vapid. It’s fun, sure, and conducive to jiggling one’s fanny, but the same platitudes are regurgitated in hit after hit, with all the pop and flavor of a fine sugared breakfast cereal, and with about as much sustenance. “Tonight’s gonna be a good night,” “I love you, especially your prominent hindquarters,” “Let’s get ripped and party according to our rights as free fans of country music” are just a few examples, verbatim, of songs that are making their authors millions of dollars on the music channels right now.

think about the consistency with which we Americans seem to fork over our hard-earned incomes to gargantuan corporations for goods that (a) we don’t need, (b) are poorly made, (c) in Asia, without thinking.

I want us to remember, every time we click “Buy” on our seventh pair of garishly colored Nike sneakers, the American workers who are not getting to make shoes, and the all-but-enslaved Asian children and their parents who are. Oh, sorry—Mauritius! Every choice we make in life can either support our own homes and communities or deny them.

perfectly comfortable with asking a person whom they view as good quarry, for a picture. The picture is rarely desired because the supplicant wants a nice picture of someone they admire in some way. Instead, the photograph’s value is to be redeemed, as quickly as possible, upon a social media site like Twitter or Instagram or FacePlace. It is as though our civilization is in a giant scavenger hunt, and a photograph of a person with any degree of celebrity has a point value, to be hurriedly logged, tabulated, and then left to descend in the user’s “feed,” as the hunt for more slivers of fame continues, dogged and never ending.

The second issue involves brandishing one’s phone at any sort of live event, or while taking part in any audience. It saddens me to have to include such an admonishing tone in what has been, for me at least, a pleasant sojourn together so far, but if you pull out your phone at a live event, then you are an asshole. Whether you’re taking pictures or recording or whatever else your cool apps can do now, you are decisively not playing well with others. With your selfish action, you are degrading not only your experience but the reverie of all those many people in your periphery who have no choice but to witness your gadget and your egregious lapse of attention and respect.

Holding up a phone or, God forbid, a tablet, is merely the surface of the crime, but the core of the matter is philosophically more rotten. I’ll let Jeff take over with an anecdote from a show: I was really proud of myself because . . . I thought I had come up with the most exquisite way to express how I was feeling and I actually told the person in front of me—I said, “I do want you to film this and I want you to put it on YouTube—you’re surrendering your memory to an imperfect medium. Your memory is already imperfect, but this is worse. This is worse. It’s never gonna be as good as being here with all these people, losing yourself and at the same time finding yourself a part of something bigger than yourself. You’re never going to experience that in that thing.” And it’s the only thing I’ve never seen on YouTube.

I would also just like to point out that there are no scientists handing out any brochures on any street corners, hoping to convince people that their version of creation is actually true. The scientists are at the pub watching a sporting match of “footie” whilst enjoying a pint with their mates. The difference between their relative confidence and your uncertainty, Bible-brochure-hander-outers, is that they can prove the facts of science (to put it very simply), and you can’t prove the first phrase of your claims. Please think about that. Why do you suppose some guys who wrote a Bible had the “God” character in the Bible recommend that you convince all the other people to sign up for this program? What if we pagans happen to be the absolutely most Christlike Samaritans on the planet, but we don’t believe in God? Is that not okay with you? Think

Dear Mr. Saunders, Hello! My name is Nick Offerman, and I am an actor and woodworker and writer. I am working on my second book for Dutton over at Penguin Random House, a book that will comprise a list of “Great Americans”—each person selected for his/her exhibition of a spirit of rebellion or muckraking or revolution with regard to the way we are evolving, particularly in America, toward decency (or not). I sincerely hope that the book will contain more humor than that last sentence. Other subjects will include some “founding father” material, focusing on how this whole American experiment took wing, or hoof, as well as many other political and cultural firebrands. A couple of Roosevelts, Theodore and Eleanor, Frederick Law Olmsted, as well as some modern-day achievers, like Yoko Ono, Michael Pollan, and Wendell Berry, and other artists, woodworkers, activists, farmers, and a couple of boatbuilders. I want to examine some of the good and bad effects of “progress,” from the Europeans’ conquering of North America to the plight of modern advertising/television, and how we continue to succeed or not at becoming more decent people whilst surfing a massive tsunami of technology, information, and media saturation. Looking at religion, technology, human rights, nature, guns/war, tobacco, hand-crafting, advertising . . . hopefully with a chuckle. Hilarious, right? I am quite besotted with your fiction, for its humor, intelligence, and social criticism. As such, I’d love to include...

sleuth

I don’t think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.

George shared this story, which seems to me to have laid the foundation for his ever-expanding generosity toward the human race: At Oak Forest High School, in the 1970s, the food was apparently terrible. “They had the hamburgers in the plastic bags that you would microwave and whatnot.” So the students decided they would organize a walkout. “We were very much in the thrall of Abbie Hoffman and the whole thing [re: the 1969–70 Chicago Conspiracy Trial].” So everything was set to stick it to the man on a Friday morning, but the Thursday night previous it occurred to George that maybe he would tell his dad about it, just in case. So he did. He honestly told his dad they were planning a walkout because the food was so bad. “‘Oh, yeah. Sure, that’s great,’ said Dad. ‘Could I ask you something, though?’” George said to me, “Just like Columbo.” “‘Just one thing. You’ve let the principal know that this food is an issue, right?’” “‘Nah, he wouldn’t listen.’” “‘Oh. Okay. Although you’re kinda setting yourself up a little bit. Because if you walk out and you never tried to solve the problem . . . Anyway, just think about it.’” The next morning, George went in to speak with the principal, Toby Hightower. “‘George, uh, what? What’s goin’ on?’” George hadn’t known that Principal Hightower even knew his name. He soldiered on and explained that the food in the cafeteria was really bad. “‘Well, that’s not acceptable. I’m gonna appoint you head of a commission. Now, I want you to go out to—...

Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

I think parents should buy their kids a house. They should go to college later—I think right now, they spend all their time, the first ten years of their lives working up to knowing what they want to do, so they can get a job, so they can get a house. Give ’em a house . . . it’s pretty arbitrary to go to college . . . to do what? We agreed that in most American neighborhoods, you could get your kids a fine house for the price of one year of college at a high-end school, or four years at most state colleges.

abhorrent.”

America, to me, is freedom. —WILLIE NELSON

natch)

lament

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

salient

Dear Tall Sir, 8/15/14 I want to ask you for a significant favor, and, despite our secret, long-suffering passion for one another, I mean to do so with (approximately) the same pomp with which I have petitioned Oprah Winfrey. I am working on my second book for Dutton Books . . . etc., etc. . . . looking at religion, technology, human rights, nature, guns/war, tobacco, hand-crafting, advertising . . . hopefully with a chuckle. Hilarious, right? Since my list of swell Americans must necessarily be quite subjective, I can’t help but think of you and your, frankly, carnal dance moves and the sense of humor behind which you proffer a mighty intelligence and gentle compassion. I’ll be honest: I intend to lionize you. To supplement my detailed recollection of your rippling abdominals, glistening with sunscreen in the Seattle half-light, I would love to engage you in an interview. If we can nail down a date, I thought it would be really fun to make some sort of destination or adventure out of our interview; nothing too buccaneering, per se, but someplace we’d like to go and rest our weary hindquarters and enjoy a chin-wag. Fresno, I guess, is what I’m driving at. It could be a hike, or a rooftop where Scotch is served, or it could also be your household fire pit or the ridiculously opulent hot tub at our new digs. It’s also worth mentioning that, as you may be aware, my bride, Megan, is doing a Terrence McNally revival (It’s Only a Play) on Broadway from September through the top ...

tumescent

“Think about it,” Conan said. “We couldn’t have a president like this anymore. He was an explorer. He was a naturalist. He read and wrote in several languages. He had served in war and was also a diplomat, and the list goes on and on. “And you know, the big thing we’re always trying to figure out today is ‘Who’s being real?’ Is anyone being real? . . . And, man, you know Teddy Roosevelt was Teddy Roosevelt. He was completely a sincere character, and no one’s ever doubted that. He was curious, and I love curious people. I think some of our more recent leaders have not been curious people, and we’ve suffered for it. I think having leaders today who are curious about other cultures, willing to accept that they don’t know everything, but they want to know—those are qualities that were great about Teddy Roosevelt. “The flip side is that I really believe that he was—he needed to be medicated.” His scholarly knowledge strikes me as another tangible proof that some of our most trusted and relevant televised brains (and their crack teams of writers), like Conan, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert, have a fascination with our nation’s history, particularly in the revisionist way it’s been spun for the public.

raffish

Emancipation Proclamation

“We’re like a family that fights a lot, but it’s out in the open. The scarier family is the one that pretends like there’s not a problem.” He pointed out, in reference to the recently released CIA torture reports, that while some of the activities our country gets up to may be shameful, he is not comfortable judging people in whose shoes he has not walked, and so it’s healthy to “let it bleed. Let it out. . . . That makes our country very unique—I don’t know that there’s very many other countries in the world where they would say, ‘Look what we did.’ I mean, the Japanese are having trouble acknowledging sixty years ago in World War II. We’re saying ‘We did this four, five, six years ago.’ . . . I think that’s a very positive quality that this country has; the civil rights debates and arguments and violence were all broadcast at the height of the Cold War, and it was an embarrassment to us, but . . . we let it bleed. We let it out, let people see what we are.” I said, “That’s poignant. I’m grateful for your perspicacity.”

harangues—and

You also have to remember that there’s a ton of young people out there killing themselves to go to medical school and learn how to be radiologists and physicists and to invent a better computing system—we just don’t see them, and it can make us feel like the whole thing’s going to shit and it’s the fall of the Roman Empire, but I think, No, there’s a lot of good people out there, they just don’t get as many YouTube hits. That’s the problem. It’s negative selection.

One good way to achieve that goal is by choosing to do work with people you like. You won’t always agree with them, but I believe that we humans, by definition, don’t always agree with anybody.

He told me about a time that another new, young writer on a TV show with him complained, “I don’t like it that we write this stuff, and then they change it. I don’t like that they change my words before they go on the air.” Conan replied, “Oh, you know what’s interesting? You know whose work was never changed—they never touched it, and she had complete control of everything she wrote? Emily Dickinson. She wrote it in her attic, and then she died. Probably coughed up blood and keeled over and that was it. And they found [her work] later on, and they never changed a word.”

Godspeed.

meshuggaas