The King is Dead. Long Live the King

Pick a card!

The end of my last post alluded to the difficulties Americans have had in selecting the best candidates for elected office. Against my better judgement I have since started four different blog posts related to this topic and hope to release them for thee (I don't think my readership is plural yet) to read in the near future. The final one will include a proposal for a new form of democracy that I hope would engage more people in politics and mitigate the influence of money. Bold move, I know. 

Obviously, democracy is far from flawless in producing great leaders. You don't get to vote for an Abraham Lincoln every time you go to the polls. In the West we tend to think of democracy as one of our highest ideals, the culmination of the slow and bloody march of lady freedom against the sons of tyranny. While I admit that I tend to agree with this view, I think it is important to explore democracy's shortcomings. Blind allegiance to some of our most precious institutions is probably what keeps us from tinkering with and improving them. So in this post I would like explore some of the unappreciated qualities of democracy's long-derided wicked step-father: hereditary monarchy.

Still angry after all these years.

Democracy has been around ever since "Occupy the Acropolis" 508BC. Athenian activists only needed three days to overthrow the system and give Isagoras the boot. They established a democracy, which lasted for almost 200 years until Alexander the Great popped in for a visit. However, long before this Athenian luminaries such as Plato were already sour on rule by the people. According to Plato the biggest problem with rule by the people is the people. Perhaps he was just bitter because five hundred of the people (an Athenian jury) condemned his beloved teacher Socrates to death. But after tasting the bitter cup of watching Socrates drink his bitter cup you could excuse Plato for likening the people to a mob, too easily swayed by rhetoric and demagoguery. 

The other problem with democracy is that the people with the desire and ability to get elected aren't the ones most qualified to rule. In Plato's mind the best rulers would have been the philosophers, who were breathing the easy air of Platonic reality. Unfortunately, when these people move out of Plato's "cave" they acquire wisdom enough to avoid the meretricious charms of political power. 

A new way to kill time. An old way to be governed.

The reluctance of qualified leaders to seek office is a problem that is hard to deal with. Old school hereditary monarchy has some benefits in this regard that alternatives like democracy can't often produce, and Plato would probably agree. Democracies are ruled almost exclusively by a class of men and women who are good at rhetoric and persuasion, sophists rather than philosophers. That could be a problem, especially if you have any doubts about the morality or character of that class of men. Monarchies on the other hand have produced a dazzling array of political leaders: sophists, philosophers, and idiots of every imaginable kind. Despite the risk of bad eggs and the potential of power going to one's head, there have also been many benevolent and forward-looking monarchs. Plato thought philosopher-kings should be trained from birth partly because they would never go into politics otherwise. If Plato is right then perhaps the only way an enlightened philosopher has ever been coerced into accepting political power was by the accident of being born to a king. Monarchy is a game of roulette producing a random assortment of leaders because, as Chesterton noted in this essay, you will never find a more dazzling array of personalities than a random sampling of your own blood relatives.

Give me your diabolical, your compromised, your
huddled asses yearning to scheme freely. 

If you still find hereditary monarchy completely odious, it is worth carefully considering the alternatives we have tried since the toppling of the ancien règime 200 years ago. For example, when Russia switched its authoritarianism from a hereditary to an ideological variety almost 100 years ago, they signed a social contract far worse than the one they broke. The last hundred years has proved their error. They have experienced democratization, economic reform, revolution, and the collapse of their communist empire but Russia is still sleeping in the political bed it made during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Communism in Russia has produced the wrong kind of welfare system, one that provides political jobs for men with impoverished morals. If you aren't up for shady dealing, you'd better find another career. People who really care about Russia, like say a Solzhenitsyn, will never get anywhere near the levers of power. 

There were supposedly three bullets in this gun. Russia
should be so lucky.

If Monarchy is like a roulette table, modern Russian politics might be closer to Russian roulette. There's not much to win, but a lot to lose. In Russian roulette you have a one in six chance of getting a bullet in your brain. Not the worst odds, but it could be worse. In post-revolutionary Russia it is worse. You have more like a three in six chance of having a psycho in charge who will put bullets in many peoples' brains. In Tsarist Russia you were at least as likely to get a "the Great" as you were a "the Terrible." But since going Tsarless Russians have endured Lenin the Terrible, Stalin the Atrocious, Khrushchev the Less Repressive, Brezhnev the Megalomilitant©, Gorbachev the Pretty-good, Yeltsin the In-over-his-head, and Putin the Unscrupulous Macho-Man. Voting is not enough to undo the damage that has been done. The primary problem is that the kind of person you have to be to succeed in Russian politics precludes almost everyone who is actually qualified. Gorbachev seems to me like the best hope of Russia during this period, but his reforms were stymied by the hosts of lower-level apparatchiks, promoted I assume for their willingness to collude with the corrupt establishment.

"Fine," you say, "but that's not really an argument against democracy." I will address that in my next post, but for now I just want to show that political systems can be much worse than hereditary monarchy if they demand and engrain appalling character traits in their leadership structure top to bottom. Monarchies at least introduce a little festive randomness at the top. How much worse off would Russia be now if not just the top job, but every political job was hereditary? It sounds a little medieval, but if this rule was enforced it would stymie the development of entrenched, corrupt political cultures because of all the randomness in successive office-holders. I admit there are many shortcomings to this idea, like potential political disfunction, incompetence, and the establishment of a separate class of citizens, so it won't be reappearing in my fourth post about a new kind of democracy. However, I doubt it would be much worse than many of the "democracies" in the world today.

The Doge Abides: Leadership and Jeff Lebowski

As everyone knows, Barack Obama has not been a transformational president. He rode a wave of immense popularity into the White House, but squandered his political capital early in his administration to push through an eviscerated, zombie-like health care reform act and take the probably necessary but painful steps of bailing out banks, the automobile industry, and enacting economic stimulus. To be fair, Obama has had to deal with several once in a generation crises and some awkward albatrosses like a Nobel Peace Prize and international superstardom. Nevertheless, Obama is no Jeff Lebowski...and that's a bad thing.

Campaign manager. Check.

Of course no one would ever vote for Jeff Lebowski (the little Lebowski from the The Big Lebowski) for President and at first glance you probably couldn't think of any way you'd like Barack Obama to emulate "the Dude." However JL has one thing that BO doesn't have: according to Sam Elliot he was "the man for his time and place." Jeff wasn't the ideal man, but he was exactly the right man for navigating shallow, kooky, anything-goes Los Angeles. His degree of ineptitude, greed, passivity, laziness, connivance, compassion, and cowardliness were exactly the combination necessary to see him through the dangerous situation he was facing. He was by no means perfect, but he was the right man for the job.

Media resonance. Check.

Of course Barack Obama has a lot more than Jeff Lebowski in the way of presidential qualifications, but his enviable charm, pragmatism, and intelligence are not the combination our country needs right now. Obama understands the political landscape. He is well aware of what it takes to get stuff done in Washington. He knows how to work a crowd and convince us that we are better than we are. He is quite skilled at reading the American public, and pandering to our whims. Unfortunately, he does not seem so skilled at leading the American people, which is what we need right now. Perhaps at a time when America was less turned off by politics and more engaged that would have been ok, but right now we need a leader not a poster-boy.

We need someone to inspire us to make sacrifices because he himself is making sacrifices. We need someone to inspire us to take risks by taking real political risks himself. We need someone to believe in ideals higher than a churning economy and a polished reputation. We need inspiration to be better people than we are, but Obama (and most other fearful, poll-beholden elected officials) is like an indulgent parent treating the American people like spoiled children who want cake (read "jobs") now. Instead of coddling us and making promises about how to get us our cake as soon as possible, I would like to see a politician dare to raise the debate to a higher plane. Talk to us seriously and courageously about some bigger issues like how we really got where we are now, what pillars shaky or sturdy our economy is built on, and what kind of country we will leave for our grandkids if politicians continue to kowtow to the myopic, presentist, simplistic demands of the American people as interpreted by the pollsters (who never ask questions like "would you sell your soul for a job?").

Muscle. Check.

I don't want someone who knows how to play the game. I don't want someone who "inspires confidence." I don't want someone who looks good on TV. I just want a president who is courageous enough to make a stand on unpopular issues, to help us change our thinking even if it costs him reelection. I want a President who cares more about policy than about reelection. I want my President to convince me to embrace higher taxes (so that my grandkids don't have to pay them), to pay more for oil, gas, and electricity (by not using my tax dollars to subsidize its skyrocketing costs, both internal and external), and to support a fight for the new type of government that Mr. Obama promised (by ceasing to tolerate the increasing influence of well-finanaced special interests in the process for selecting and electing candidates for government office).

Frightening alternative. Check.

Lawrence Lessig was recently interviewed on C-span and said that when Obama received his first budget from Congress his instinct was to veto it because of the thousands of earmarks it contained. The "cooler" heads around him convinced him that it wasn't worth alienating both Democrats and Republicans by pulling such a stunt. Lessig believes that when Obama signed it he lost the moral high ground and along with it his chance to reform government. Jeff Lebowski may not have understood the budget, but he wouldn't have been nearly so calculating, political, or partisan and might have had the guts to veto it, or at least to take a leak on its rug.

My hope is that if BO wins a second term he will be freed from worrying about the next election cycle and will be able to start thinking more about his legacy, which at this point will be dubious at best. Show some real courage, Mr. President, or step aside so we can find the right person for the job. I know he or she is out there and no matter how bad it gets, I agree with Sam Elliot, "The Dude Abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowing he's out there." If we could just get him to run for office.

Love, Actually

"I see you."

“I have to warn you, I've heard relationships based on intense experiences never work.“ Those words from the movie Speed might be seen as a tacit admission by Hollywood screenwriters that 90% of what they do is bogus. All the relationships are based on intense experiences. Often the relationship is the intense experience. And it’s not just the romantic comedies. Even if we escape into the fantasy world of Avatar, we always want to bring our love baggage along with us - perhaps to see if we can gain any insights. Apparently, the love angle is an easy way for movie producers to grab us by the heartstrings and give us a cathartic release relevant to our own lives, and get fifteen bucks from us in the process.

This is not all bad, I suppose. The love stories in movies are often designed to teach some kind of lesson: money isn’t that important [see: Jerry McGuire, Trading Places], humility is a virtue [see: Good Will Hunting, Pride and Prejudice], Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams are incompatible [see: Midnight In Paris], and as I discuss below, people often must undergo profound change before they are ready for a lasting relationship [see: just about anything].

Hollywood says you're a cockroach.

There is, however, a darker side to these love stories: The message in all of these movies is “if you get your act together, you will find the most important thing in life: true love, defined as a completely emotionally satisfying relationship with another person.” There are many things unrealistic about this message, but here I would like to focus on the fact that Hollywood’s definition of love is simplistic and driven completely by our transitory emotions. These movies teach us that the truest thing we possess is our inward compass of “love” and it would be foolishness for us to do anything other than faithfully follow that compass needle in whatever direction it is pointing, without hesitation or question. Celine Dion summed it up nicely for Titanic, “love can touch us one time and last for a lifetime, and never let go till we're gone.” If that's the way it works, it sounds like what happens when a cockroach gets bit by a parasitic wasp. The fact that the cockroach turns into a docile zombie fatally obedient to the wasp may give it an excuse for its future actions, but when we humans are bit by "love" we still have some moral responsibilities. Hollywood often writes these out of the script. What good would it do to include

Let me take it one step further to make sure my point is clear. I'm not against love and I don't think it automatically makes us selfish. I even think it is beautiful how it can chemically alter our brains in wasp-like fashion (As I learned at Body Worlds and the Brain, love is kindled first by the release of adrenaline, then drug-like dopamine, and then oxytocin and vassopressin for long term bonding.) But the problem is that in happy ending after happy ending, Hollywood teaches us that life goes better if we follow our hearts, which is not true. Hollywood's "love" often looks like a categorical imperative that we ought never to contradict. On the other hand, if "love" doesn't happen to us then Hollywood's story will make us bitter and resentful.

I guess it's my turn to leave you, kid.

I’m not claiming to be a movie expert, but Casablanca is one of my favorite all-time movies and my favorite old movie. (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is second.) I like Casablanca not only because it undermines Hollywood's usual exculpation of our obsession with emotional "love," (as I will explain in a minute), but also because it seems to be pleasantly prescient about the good parts of Hollywood’s formulaic plots: To wit, for a story to really be a story, characters on screen need to undergo a significant change.

Despite being a movie written for my grandfather’s generation, Casablanca has believable modern relationships. The people act in ways that seem largely rational to me, and, I think, to most of us. Rick is jilted and self-destructive, but wants a reason to be good again. Ilsa has been faced with agonizing decisions in her life, and wants a second chance at love or to assuage her guilt for hurting Rick. Victor Lazlo is living his life in service to mankind more generally, but still trying to keep his marriage alive. What often bothers me about old movies is that the love stories rarely seem plausible. Perhaps they were plausible back then, or perhaps I can’t pick up on subtleties that would have meant more to a pre-war (or pre-method-acting) public, but these dysfunctional relationships strike me as downright bizarre. In My Fair Lady and The King and I, it is understandable why the male falls in love with the witty, plucky, compassionate, long-suffering female, but there never seems to be a moment when you can reconcile why Audrey Hepburn or whoever played Anna could ever fall in love with the raving solipsists sharing their silver screen. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers might seem tame at first glance, but the chauvinist, bride-napping plot is so bizarrely outrageous I can’t even imagine Quentin Tarantino attempting it nowadays. The African Queen is another one. I remember finding it quite upsetting that the affable and resourceful Humphrey Bogart should fall in love with the priggish (and mentally ill as far as I could tell) Katharine Hepburn. The problem with the character development, I guess, is that some gaping character flaws are never really addressed. I’m not convinced throughout these movies that the king of Siam, Hepburn’s character, or Henry Higgins ever really change. They just seem to eventually accept the persistent love offered by the sane person on the screen, which makes me question the sanity of said sane person.

Insane and the brain

So, I’m glad Hollywood followed the Casablanca model and doesn’t offer these weird romances anymore. Clear character growth is a part of the modern, scripted Hollywood romance that I find indispensable. Characters need to change, if only in their perspective, before “love” is ever going to work out. Not only that, but without characters being changed, there isn’t much point to the story. I recently read a Donald Miller book about storytelling in which he says, “in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet.” In Casablanca, Rick Blaine is clearly transformed by meeting Ilsa again and learning that she still loves him. He becomes brave, self-attuned, and decisive. Thank you Hollywood for getting that part right. Casablanca and most newer movies show characters going through intense circumstances and being changed on the other side. We love that because it reminds us that our own troubles might someday reap for us the benefit of actual growth.

But just because Rick Blaine is changed doesn’t mean that he automatically earns the right to a traditional “happily ever after.” That’s what makes the ending of the movie all the more satisfying, and this is how it completely turns upside down what we are now conditioned to expect from Hollywood. Through a chance meeting at Rick’s Moroccan watering hole, an old flame is kindled between he and Ilsa, who is now married to Victor Lazlo. We expect emotional “love” to conquer all and reunite Rick and Ilsa who were so tragically separated many years ago. But the problem is that there are actually more important outcomes at stake in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa than whether two people get to live out their fairy tale ending, and Rick Blaine is man enough to face the facts. So the most "Hollywood" of Hollywood endings (“Here’s looking at you, kid.”) turns out not to be so "Hollywood" after all. The most loving thing Rick can do is face a future without his soul mate.

That’s a risky and complicated plot twist that Hollywood likes to avoid these days. Unfortunately, the fact that they usually do avoid it means that we have a planetful of Hollywood romantics who selfishly believe that if the universe owes them one thing, it is true “love.” Not only does that lead to a lot of disappointment, but it leads to broken relationships (when the “love” doesn’t last) and to individuals who are too weak to face the world without a relational crutch.

That’s why I liked Spanglish, too. I certainly didn’t expect such a satisfying experience when someone cornered me into watching a seemingly kitschy rom com. But aside from delivering great performances (as I recall) from Tea Leoni, Adam Sandler, and even the kids, the movie took a stand against traditional Hollywood love stories by showing how following the romance (no matter how ostensibly pure and justifiable) is not always the best choice for you and those you love. The plot seemed to be setting up a straightforward opportunity for Sandler to ditch his cheating wife and follow his “love” compass into a bilingual union with his housekeeper. The title even seemed to demand it. But then somehow, the plot meandered back to the kids, and what divorce does to kids. Refusing to follow the simplistic dictates of Hollywood “love” stories, screenwriter James L. Brooks kept these pre-adolescent complicating factors in the script and denied Sandler the right to his true “amor.” I was elated at the end to see responsibility and integrity given such seats at the table in a love story.

Oh man, kids screw everything up.

Now, I have no problem with love and romance. I am thankful to still be deeply in love with the woman I married and am so glad for the romantic times we have shared, even if they don’t always feel quite as exciting as they used to. Dopamine is way more exciting than oxytocin. But I do think that we as individuals need to remember that those who sell us things, whether movies, clothes, or vacations, are not telling us truths that they are dispassionately investigating for our good. It seems that way because we feel our heartstrings being tugged, but in fact they are telling us the “half-truths” that they think we want to hear. Their truths are designed to tickle our ears rather than improve our character. They are not laboring for our benefit but for our business. Right now, movie studios are designing more intense cinematic experiences for us. Let’s remember not to give them our hearts too easily. Those intense experiences are not a sound basis for a permanent relationship.

In other words...

Rereading my last post made me realize that I may need to tweak my approach to writing. I appear to be long on ambition and short on pith. I wish I could bear to take the necessary time to cogently tie up all my loose ends. I probably should have divided it into a post on levity and a post on special interests too. I'm not even entirely clear on why I thought those two were so closely connected. I guess the very act of writing gets my imagination going and leads me off topic. At least I think I'm avoiding the imprecision, vaguery, and general slipperiness I see from the politicians and interests I'm berating.



Anyway, this cartoon from Thursday's Economist sums up many of my thoughts from my last post, except that I would probably have drawn some obsequious charlatans goading the Tea Party on and labeled them as special interest groups.

Levity is the Soul of Thought

We are being manipulated. We are all tools. We are not smart enough to have much, if any, real freewill. Powerful forces are working harder than we know to control our thinking, and too often they are succeeding. There are some that seek our money or our vote, but there are others who seek our soul.

Since it is true that we always notice character flaws much more readily in others than in ourselves, I am better equipped to explore this problem as it affects a group that has been irritating me particularly of late: the tea-party protesters.

I actually agree with a fair number of things that the tea-party movement hold dear. I like my independence. I am a lover of our country’s founding documents and a firm believer in living within our means. I even sympathize with their fear of liberal special interests and of conceit among policy wonks who think they can develop a government solution to every problem. However, when I see the tea-party slogans at the rallies and hear the calculated rhetoric of their elected representatives, I silently rage at how simplistic and deceptive the logic seems.

Populism and populist slogans are never the genuine voice of the people, but are quickly co-opted by demagogues and special interests. These political high-rollers are too obviously biased to speak for themselves, but they are spending enormous sums of money in the hopes of getting other people, people like you and me, to speak for them. The sad thing is that when we get caught up in certain causes we think we are speaking with a pure voice, which makes us all the more ardent in our tacit support of these special interests. This is true both of liberals and their teacher’s unions and conservatives and their crusade against entitlements.

Recently I watched a debate on Jim Lehrer’s Newshour where I again heard the specious GOP argument that we need to lower taxes on the wealthy because lots of them are business owners and they will start hiring people if they have more money. I suppose this version of trickle-down economics might sound good at first, but the rationale defies belief. I haven’t been to business school, but I’m pretty sure that you hire people when your business needs more people in order to operate well, not when you happen to be taking more money home in profits. I can see how business taxes can hurt business, but the idea that keeping personal income taxes low for the rich (a Republican demand that Obama acceded to in December) is going to help business is ludicrous. I kept the books at my step-dad’s machine shop for a couple of years and I know that during hard times he would actually loan money to his own company, even while the business was getting clobbered by Multnomah County business tax. It might surprise John Boehner to learn that this had absolutely no effect on whether we hired new people or not. Businesses don’t hire employees because there happens to be extra money laying around, and especially not because the owner is making a good profit. They hire workers because they have reason to think that at a given time more employees will produce more income.

We are actually electing people who are pitching stuff this inane to us on a regular basis. Why are they doing it? Because they have no shame and they know it will get them re-elected. How can constantly repeating trite, vacuous platitudes get you re-elected? Because special interests like it and will give you money for your re-election campaign. How does money win elections in a democracy? Because we are too easily manipulated by flashy advertisements and acknowledgment of our pet political issues. Intelligent people have known why since this book was published. (Um, I haven’t actually read it myself.) Mancur Olson argues that it is really hard to fight for vague public good, but special interests are very effective at fighting for themselves. In other words people lack incentive to expend energy fighting for benefits to society at large. We have much more incentive to fight for benefits for an exclusive group to which we belong, like a religion, an ethnicity, or an industry.

An especially egregious example is the insurance industry. In the first three months of 2009 health insurance companies spent millions of dollars of YOUR INSURANCE PREMIUMS lobbying congress so they wouldn’t have to compete against a government-run public option for YOUR BUSINESS. Aetna spent just shy of $1 million. Blue Cross/Blue Shield spent just shy of $2 million. Drug companies spent even more. The health insurance lobby, led by Karen Ignagni, fought hard to make sure there would be no public option. Lobbyists threw around their weight around, misrepresented the data, and gave portions of YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUM PAYMENTS to key politicians (like $2.5 million to powerful Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus) to make sure their interests as insurers took precedence over YOUR OWN INTERESTS as the insured. And the worst part of it is, they convinced millions of ordinary Americans that a cartel of for-profit insurance companies doing these kinds of things to maintain their stranglehold on the industry will serve you more ethically than the government; that it would be better for you to have a claims adjuster between you and your doctor than a government bureaucrat. Ironically, the only reason that most Americans aren’t more sour on private insurance companies is that they don’t have health problems so they don’t have to use them. Tea-partiers put up with (and even defend) government-run Medicare and Medicaid, so why not have a government option for people who don’t get sick that often.

It’s not just the private companies that are to blame though. Their relentless lobbying has a profound effect on Washington politics. According to George Crile, Charles Wilson’s career was funded by American Jews, though there were hardly any in his district who could actually vote for him. In the movie version of Crile’s book, Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, admitted that “congressmen aren't elected by voters, they're elected by contributors.” The only way that is possible is because the money is buying votes, your votes. The only reason that is possible is because we are selling our votes cheap, for the price of a few impotent words on abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, or lower taxes.

This kind of political cynicism and deception happens on both sides of the aisle and it is disgusting. However, in the case of the tea-party, I would just like to alert you that not only is the tea-party being attacked by liberals, but even responsible conservatives have had enough with their dubious logic and senseless brinkmanship. Just last week a reputable conservative magazine called down shame on them for their sophomoric recklessness and “economic illiteracy.” A conservative columnist devoted a whole column to his worries that tea-party ideologues are an internal existential threat to the Republican party that could lead to its downfall. Untethered to reality, they are “more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.” Ironically his major concern was their fanatical inability to engage in the time-honored American virtue of compromise, a foundational American doctrine that these Constitution-loving fanatics have ostensibly jettisoned along with their tea.

But the tea-party might be doing more than just abandoning core American values. They may also be jettisoning their souls. That’s because they take themselves too seriously. Despite the depressing tone of this article I believe there is one hope for the tea-partiers and every other uncompromising ideologue who is actually the unwitting political tool of special interests: levity. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but levity is the soul of thought. We must take ourselves lightly and recognize our limitations or we will begin to believe we really have a complete understanding of what is going on, which is the surest path to embarrassment. A full understanding of what is happening in politics and what we ought to do about it is light years beyond what any of us can fathom. If we are foolish enough to think we see it all clearly, we will start to believe in radical widespread conspiracies and lose sight of the real threat, which is within us. Having chosen a side we’ll view everyone not similarly aligned as a threat. Their perceived agenda will frighten us rather than inform us. Rather than judging the merits of their ideas on a case by case basis, we won’t even consider them because we have already passed judgement on the source. That’s why Chris Wallace doesn’t understand Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly doesn’t get Stephen Colbert, but it also may be why Stephen Colbert gave short shrift to Rick Perry this week, why Chris Matthews isn't known for his laugh, and why liberals rarely have much patience with religious conservatives. It’s also why tea-party wackos write impartial economic experts off as part of the liberal establishment.

I don’t dare to hope that we all will collectively plunge ourselves into analyzing every political issue, challenging every hypocritical statement, and exposing every special interest acting behind the scenes. That sounds kind of boring anyway. I think the real hangover cure after a hard night of tea-partying is a little laughter. Look at the world around you and try to find what is funny about it rather than focusing on what is tragic. We should zealously fight for what we think is right, but we will quickly get manipulated into fighting the wrong battles if we fail to love our enemies or laugh at ourselves while doing it. If you can’t laugh at the funny stuff, you probably can’t accurately diagnose the tragic. As Chesterton said, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly...Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness.” You may not like them and you may have good reason, but if you can’t laugh with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, the problem might be more internal than external.

The Decline and Fall of Every Man's Empire

Yesterday, I watched a lone wolf separate a caribou fawn from its mother and then chase it through miles of subarctic tundra until the fawn finally made a mistake, losing its footing in the rough terrain. It slowed down just enough that the wolf could catch its tuft of a tail in his jaws and pull. The fawn collapsed seeming too enervated to even struggle. As you might imagine I felt dismay and a bit of terror grip me as the wolf, also tired from the chase, caught its prey and made a couple of lazy but decisive bites into the neck and back of the fawn. I was reminded briefly how cruel and harsh nature can be, but once the Planet Earth editors thought we had seen enough, I was left with a choice: to push the unpleasant scene from my mind or ponder its significance.

I think it is hard for us to deal with the death of large mammals. Perhaps we are more squeamish than most societies. Perhaps we are more refined. Perhaps too few of us have ever looked an animal in the face before we have eaten it, or participated in the process that brings it to our table. Perhaps we too often anthropomorphize animals so that we can see our sappy selves reflected in more of nature. Perhaps we have been so domesticated by our plush surroundings that we feel safer if we can domesticate all of nature, if only in our minds.

In another scene a mother polar bear leads her two hungry cubs out toward the sea after emerging from hibernation so she can get them some food. This means she will have to stalk and kill some seals, but we root for the hunter this time, because we are as disturbed by the starvation of the hunter as we are by the death of the hunted.

The problem, then, isn’t that we care more about prey than predators, but that we have a hard time dealing with the death of able-bodied creatures, especially if it looks painful. We are much more comfortable with long, slow death from old age. Partially, this is because we know that the old have had a fair chance to enjoy life already, but mostly it is because the old seem inured to pain and psychologically prepared for death. Their slow decline has put them in a state close to death, so death isn’t such a shock. We epitomize this haunting Emily Dickinson poem.

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

The poem seems to start out hopefully. We start out seeking new experiences and taking risks in pursuit of pleasure. However, this inevitably causes some pain and soon we abandon our optimism and zeal for self-awareness, slowly giving up on life. By the end of the poem death seems like the next logical step, rather than an abrupt change.

Too often we are dead before we die. In a physical sense this is natural. We do slow and mellow as we age. But in other areas of life we adopt this attitude much sooner. It dictates some of our most pernicious collective habits. We are hazardously tolerant of slow, imperceptible, ill-defined deterioration and much prefer it to sudden, potentially catastrophic change. In the latter case the threats are obvious and easy to wrap our minds around, but in the former case the threats are harder to understand and much more tempting to discount.

Consider our driving habits. Although this is not true in other parts of the country, in the Northwest everyone who owns a large SUV (say a Suburban, Expedition, or Tahoe) has to develop an arsenal of explanations as to why they own such a large, inefficient vehicle. Certainly, there are valid reasons to own one, but I am convinced that the primary reason that suburban families drive these cars around is because they feel it is the safest thing that they can do for the kids. This may be true, but it is also possible that global warming may be a much bigger threat to their kids. People with large SUVs often scoff at global warming alarmists and feel threatened by the “liberal elite” trying to take away their freedoms. They may have a point, but a casual observer would rarely be convinced that their assurance that global warming is a hoax is based on their careful consideration of the facts and a conclusion that the case against it is airtight.

I am not taking a hard position here on what cars people should own. I am simply writing against a certain near-sightedness that seems so prevalent in the world. Many people seem anxious to define the world in simple enough terms that they can easily live in it without having to continually question their assumptions or wondering if they are breaking any important rules. We construct for ourselves a conception of reality that allows us to stop doubting ourselves or asking if we have to make any major changes. We are either too lazy or too afraid of ethical failure to allow our ethics get too complicated. We would rather continue playing ethical Minesweeper, using simple rules to mindlessly chart a course through life, than move on to a more complex game that we might not be as good at.

“Global warming can’t be a serious threat,” we tell ourselves, “because if it were, the potential for global disaster and anarchy would be so great that I would not only feel inclined to give up my SUV, but I would have to confront some smug liberals and encourage them to find a better solution than their Hyundais, which still burn 500 gallons of gas for every 700 my Tahoe burns. Next thing you know I will have to change my shopping habits and try to convince others to do the same.” That kind of introspection and potentially radical life change is scary. Truly understanding the situation is really difficult. People will probably make mistakes and look foolish while trying to figure it out. Who wants to deal with that?

The same thing is apparent in our national energy consumption. In the US we have been slow to adopt nuclear energy as the backbone of our energy production and instead have relied on coal. Many look at the potential disaster in Japan right now and think we should give ourselves a pat on the back for our foresight. We fear catastrophic nuclear meltdown- as well we should- but when did we stop counting the cost of coal power? They say about 13,000 people die per year from coal power pollution in the U.S., not to mention the tragic deaths of coal miners and the potential for long-term consequences (global warming, etc). Are we so foolish? Like a frog in a slowly heated pot will we fail to balk at the slowly rising threat around us? Maybe nuclear energy isn’t the answer, but at what point do we demand something different than coal?

Unfortunately, this usually takes a long time because it is hard to get mad about the status quo. I think that’s why I am so excited about the political changes in the Middle East. A dam has finally burst, sparked by the desperate self-immolation of a Tunisian 26-year-old. It’s not hard to protest a sudden imposition, but the slow devolution of power to aging dictators across the Middle East was hard to counteract because even if people were getting angry, they couldn’t be sure that enough of their neighbors were also sufficiently angry to risk joining a protest. But this year, they finally had their Network moment. They decided together that they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. It's like clouds. They should form whenever the air reaches 100% humidity, but water has a lot of surface tension and can’t take the first step of condensing into tiny, highly curved water droplets until there is more than 300% humidity. If it weren’t for natural aerosols in the air for water droplets to coalesce around we would rarely see rain.

So while I am thankful that the world is endowed with aerosols, Howard Beales, and Mohamed Bouazizis to spark change (usually quite a bit later than would be ideal) I would much rather that we had some collective foresight. In our democracy we don’t even need to summon up the courage displayed in recent weeks by the Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Syrians because our politicians will respond to our demands for political change and our businesses will respond to our shifting spending habits. But we do need to summon up the courage to put aside our pride and our sloth and our distractions in order to sit down and consider what is really going on in the world around us and what we ought to do about it. If we did this we might find some things to live for, to fight for, maybe even to die for and we wouldn't be so anxious to deaden ourselves to pain. Exposing and refusing to accept the long slow decline of circumstances around us will invigorate us as individuals and help us counter the natural decline going on within us. Oh that when I die my death would be a shock.

Book Review!

Yesterday I finished The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. Great book! In this book, Chabon aspired to combine the genres of noir police thriller, redemptive love story, and religio-political critique. He did admirably well on all three fronts. It is the story of Meyer Landsman, a faithless, self-destructive, but talented Jewish shammes (detective). He reminds me of the jilted Rick Blaine who goes on a bender when Ilsa Laszlo walks into his Casablanca gin joint. However, Meyer and his ex-wife are imagined in a parallel universe. It is 2008, but the Jews lost the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the flood of Jews heading for Palestine ended up settling for rainier pastures in the Alaskan panhandle, turning backwater Sitka into a metropolis of 3 million.

Since getting together, Alexis and I have read many of the same books as a way of keeping on the same page relationally. Let’s see: East of Eden, Gilead, Carter Beats the Devil, Pilgrim’s Regress, Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, The Mystery of Marriage, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and A Million Miles and a Thousand Years just to name them all. Although I recommend this for any married couple that can find books agreeable to both parties, I would have been interested in reading these books anyway. A couple of people have recently expressed surprise that I read fiction at all, I suppose because they had me pegged as a wanna-be-know-it-all who spends all his time trying to get the facts straight. Although I do have a healthy appreciation for a set of facts whittled to a fine point, I have always felt there is something more valuable, though less quantifiable, about good stories. The blunt edges of a story can’t always go straight to the heart of a matter, but can be useful for a wider variety of life-essential tasks than simply piercing falsehoods or skewering other people’s arguments. As with many things in this world, the things that most benefit us are not always the things for which we can track the benefits most easily. Neither the most important things in your life nor the most dangerous can easily be recorded as debits and credits in the ledger of your well-being.

Not only do I think this is a good book, but I would recommend it to anyone who has achieved a tenth grade reading level. It has something for everyone: action, intrigue, love, philosophy, religion, and it will help you brush up on your Yiddish. It struck me while reading it, that it could make a great movie. I just looked it up and apparently the Coen brothers think so too. The movie is in pre-production.

One thing the movie won’t be able to capture is how well Chabon crafts his metaphors. Although less-experienced writers (like myself) regularly construct sprawling, gaudy, and architecturally flawed metaphors for the sheer fun of it, Chabon attempts daring and complex turns of phrase without ever breaking the flow of the paragraph. He develops analogies that seem doomed to implosion only to shock you with how well the comparison seems to fit in once you swallow it. He is the Gaudi of the metaphor.

The great thing, though, is not just that his periphrastic pen doesn’t harm the action of the story, but that it actually enhances it. He keeps the action moving at exactly the right pace the entire novel. It’s as though he has set the cruise-control on the narrative so that no matter what he does with the steering wheel you are moving at just the right speed. In the introduction to my copy of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was described as having “perfect pitch” in a literary sense; perhaps not the most creative or brilliant writer ever, but he knew how to tell a story. Chabon does too.

I won’t give it away here, but Chabon’s plot is a great one, with much opportunity for poetic and philosophical pondering about the position of Jews in the world, the human need for redemption, and the politics of power. Chabon fills you in on just enough of these details to let you know that he has thought about them carefully, but he doesn’t weigh the story down too much with his musings. I get the impression, however, that if I sat down with some English majors we could find all kinds of intriguing parallels, analogies, and ideas tucked away in the book.

Since every good book review seems to have some kind of negative angle on the book, I will simply say that Chabon’s picture on the dust jacket bears an eerie resemblance to a misanthropic and rodent-like person I once knew. That remains my least favorite page.