Winter Break update

It's been difficult finding the time to read, mull over, and write, about blog-worthy topics (especially given my high standards) since I've been home from school. As you can tell, the previous effort was a product of inebriated angst, and should probably be stricken from official record. But I am not one to censor. Let it stay. 

One issue that is fresh in my mind that deserves some discussion is more empirical than based off of rigorous assessment. Earlier in the break my family and I traveled to Manchester, Vermont, to stay at a posh 'Hotel & Spa,' an overpriced haven for the well-to-do (whose ranks do not seem to be dwindling at all) nestled in the Green Mountains on the fringes of a quaint town. 

The patrons of this pretentious rusticity were of an especially interesting ilk. Their glances were, rather than looks of acknowledgment, appraisals of worth. I felt like an especially crude and shaggy (a haircut is way overdue) piece of meat upon making eye contact with those present. Walking into a room, sitting down to eat, was more of a show for these people (think: 'see and be seen') than simply an act of rest or nourishment. 

Moreover there was a forced patience that regulated intra-patron and patron-staff interaction , an elaborate anachronistic dance of accommodation and acquiescence that made most conversations beyond trivial. Civility trumped reality. I preferred to stay silent and beyond the bounds of such customs. 

I found it repugnant to be around, and was glad to only have stayed for two nights. Please note that my family and I were able to afford the great luxury of such company because of the benefits accrued from years of credit card purchases (AMEX's 'Starwood Rewards Points'), in addition to newly acquired inheritance. While briefly in their midst, I vehemently deny membership or association with those materialist and insecure wealthy. 

Aside from this brief journey into the hideous and fabricated world of the elite, I have been biding my time by entering the mind of the late-DFW. Infinite Jest is a complex but brilliant piece of writing. The world he has created in the novel is illuminating and exciting, and I am still not yet half done. Reading this book is a humbling experience. As a writer I can only strive to match the verbal acuity DFW brought to bear. 

In closing, today is the final day of 2008. If it is your custom, I hope your Resolutions represent a subjective improvement upon the life you are living, and will come to make you a happier, healthier person. Be they 'moral' or not, let them be true for you.  

Hell

has broken through. We've been unable to hold them back. To tell you the truth, they've been encouraged in. Women.

CATO? Fail.

I was in the car today for far too long, driving back to NY a day early (to avoid the impending snow storm), and was killing time by listening to an interesting talk radio program. Yes, I listen to talk radio. Not religiously, but around D.C. you are likely to come across something interesting and thought provoking, as was the case this time. But enough of my rationalizing. 

The CATO Institute, a libertarian, a pro- free market think tank, was either presenting a report or just having a panel discussion (the signal cut out before I was able to uncover the underlying purpose of this event) where experts were sharing some of their thoughts on the (you guessed it) financial meltdown. (Note: I am going to avoid using the term "financial crisis" at all costs. Lets see how creative I can get). 

The one "expert" whose presentation I was able to listen in its entirety was categorically criticizing Keynesian economics. For those of you who have not taken ECON 101, John Meynard Keynes was a British economist who founded a profoundly important and influential branch of economics that has guided economic policy for much of the last 100 years. Keynes challenged the long standing belief in the power of the "invisible hand" to guide the market. He felt that as opposed to guide, this hand strangles the market. Man's unwillingness to manipulate the economy had consequently brought it to its knees in 1929. 

Keynes felt that the government was in a perfect position to influence how the market functioned, typically by debt-fueled spending in certain strategic sectors. As the only institution with the ability to print and dole out legitimate dollars, he believed it ought to use this power to its advantage. 

Anyways this guy went through every major implementation of Keynesian policies in the past century. Disabusing me of a long held belief, he showed that the economy under FDR (a big proponent of Keynes) did not improve from the failed era of Hoover, his predecessor. Even at the end of the 1930s, the economy had yet to recover from the crash of 1929. We must therefore attribute the economic turnaround to WWII. 

After sharing some other examples demonstrating his eery and esoteric historical acumen, including the ill fated Japanese Keynesian experiment in the 90s, this guy showed his true colors when he dropped a concluding bomb out of the blue, "the government isn't the solution to the problem, its the cause of the problem."

What? Hold on for second. I, just having taken statistics, with the "3 elements of causal inference" ingrained into my being, recognized immediately that this man had done a terrible job of proving causality. 

His point about Keynesian economics having an overblown historic legacy was well taken. But it is difficult to jump from this to the conclusion that we ought to not allow the government to intervene into the economy. 

The under-performance of Keynesian reforms does not mean the government has no place in the economy. A more reasonable conclusion would have been to discredit Keynesian policy itself --which is importantly (but apparently for some people, not obviously) just one type of government-driven fiscal policy. Ultimately this expert failed to consider the full gamut of known and yet-to-be-discovered economic policies involving governmental intervention that might prove to be an effective catalyst of economic growth. 

In these twisted and fearful times, (in addition to laying off of grandfather's hooch when loaded weapons are within reach) we ought t0 not let historical examples condition our considered response. While yes, we must learn from history, we also should recognize the uniqueness of this situation and be open to any solution with the promise of working. But by declaring "the government is the problem," this expert was unknowingly letting his CATO colleagues contaminate his cerebrum, and shutting the door on a slew of policies that -- like WWII in the '40s -- might prove to be the economic defibrillator we need. 

Adding Permanence to Policy

This months Harper's features a report by Nobel-winning economist Joe Stiglitz on the deep and gloomy fiscal ditch this administration has dug for our country. If I could sum up the article with one simple, curt quip, it would be this: things do not look good.

It is difficult to take this inauspicious financial forecast lightly. Stiglitz has one of the world's best minds on this subject, and was surprisingly overlooked as an Obama cabinet appointee (as lamented by many liberal bloggers).

While reading his analysis I could not help but notice an underlying problem with the way fiscal policy is implemented in this country. A product of our rotating democratic system, we cannot help but have mutant policies-- grotesquely different than their original form-- persist throughout consecutive administrations . The brain child of President A will -- regardless of how "good" of an idea it is-- never make it through to President B without at least some minor tweakings. I believe it is this tweaking that is partially to blame for the current financial mess.

Stiglitz mentions that research exists revealing the unfortunate fact that if Clinton's fiscal policies had continued on to this current day, we would be facing a much more managable crisis. But they didn't. Incoming administration wonks had the green light to take a perfectly reasonable set of policies-- policies which are largely responsible for the fiscal (and therefore overall) health of our society, re-work them in accordance with their own ideological preferences, and undermine gains previously made.

I understand why it is important to have general and frequent elections. At the same time, there ought to be some type of way to make certain types of policy untouchable for a certain amount of time, unless some serious reason warrants its reversal. In these instances the parties involved could take it up with the Supreme Court. My roommate, a future lawyer, noted that to work, my plan may require a Constitution amendment. Well Hell, if that's what it took to end racial segregation, or the disenfranchisement of women, then that's what its going to take to put our country back on a consistent economic path of growth. I'm okay with that.

When it comes to controversial topics like appropriate fiscal policy, each consecutive administration will inevitably be filled with minds that think differently-- that have a range of ideological beliefs about the proper and relative roles of government and the economy, of the best way to capitalize on and sustain economic growth, etc. These beliefs are reflected in the policy decisions made.

My proposal is this: When a certain type of policy is implemented, it ought to trigger a shield of immunity that protects it from being changed by the upcoming administration for a certain amount of time. This way-- and particularly with fiscal policy-- our government will enable the effects of a tax cut/hike (to take a simple example) to be evident, rather than co-opt a reasonable policy in mid-stream, predict its failure, and change it accordingly.

Afraid of being bound to suffer from an unquestionably bad policy? Thank this system for enabling you to even deduce the policy's merits. Because we were able to give the policy time and judge its merits cautiously, you can be sure that it will not be repeated.

Rather than being governed by a series of counterproductive, conflicting policies, shifting from one administration to the next, we ought to demand that certain policies (particularly with regards to fiscal health) be immune from this flawed revolving door process. A certain permanence to them would be a sign of prudential governance, and while there will be people who argue that this undermines our democratic system, my answer for them would be similar to a phrase offered by Mussolini that I am particularly taken with:

"The sanctity of an ism is not in the ism; it has no sanctity beyond its power to do, to work, to succeed in practice. It may have succeeded yesterday and fail tomorrow. Failed yesterday and succeed tomorrow. The machine first of all must run!"

Our machine-- capitalism-- is suffering from serious mechanical failure. It needs more than an oil change; the engine itself has seized. Something is needed to make the machine run again. If that means stealing a play from the dusty and unfairly disparaged playbook of fascism, then so be it. Look at where capitalism has gotten us. Are we so transfixed with the idea of potential earnings that we are blinded to some of the more obvious flaws of this system? Or, can we eliminate the subconscious connection between "governmental control" and "loathsome" that has pervaded our system, and enact policies designed for relative permanence to give them the time they need to work (or fail)?

At least then it will be the flaws of the policies themselves that cause failure, and not the capricious but doomed efforts of transient, trigger-happy politicians tweaking the prescription for an already- healing (or even asymptomatic) system.

Last Minute Push to Make Things Worse.

As if eight years of Bush policy wasn't enough, the administration is hard at work to push through last minute changes that will deleteriously alter the policy environment facing the incoming administration. Fueled by an unprecedented productivity explicable only by chemical dependence or a sheer malevolence towards the democrats replacing them, the executive branch – in two instances that I have been able to identify – is acting to intentionally complicate the world Obama will inherent as steward next month.

In one case, the New York Times reported that innocent, nature loving campers will no longer be safe from gun-toting, maladjusted hill-billies while enjoying time in national parks throughout the nation (that just so happen to be located in states with conceal-carry laws).

"The Bush administration has rushed through a last-minute gun rule that is the antithesis of common sense. The Interior Department published a rule last week that will allow loaded, concealed weapons in nearly all of this country’s national parks."

A warning, then, to our green friends: please do not make any sudden movements while in the park that might be interpreted as threatening. Avoid climbing any trees to enjoy a more expansive view, else you might be mistaken for some type of rodent. Also, make sure to dress very conspicuously (think- bright pastels), so as to never provide a nervous freak with an inkling of suspicion that you might not be human-- but rather some tasty mammal deserving of a bullet in it's fur.

The Times sums up the problem in a far less sarcastic manner:

"The parks were set aside to preserve their natural beauty and provide enjoyment for visitors. Loaded guns — concealed or unconcealed — are completely inconsistent with that purpose and with the enjoyment of visitors who do not wish to come armed."

I foresee stories of happy hippies, fresh out of school and interested in exploring the wilderness, shot down while tromping naked through the woods by some paranoid Trucker who took his kids to the park to "see the trees" but decided it might not be safe, and packed some heat.

(Side Story: The Trucker hears some rustling in the woods after finally stepping foot outside of his vehicle following hours of enjoying the sights through the murky glass of his windows. He quickly reaches inside his vest for 'Ole Betsy, his greased up .45. Catching a flash of some movement, he senses danger -- fueled by an urge to set an example for his terrified children, cowering in the back seat ("What is it Paw? A Coon?!"), he takes aim, fires. Screams of terror echo through the trees back towards our dead-eye Trucker. I didn't think Coons made noises like that, he thinks. Rabid? No, just High.)

Come on people. Is there really a need for our enlightened citizenry to be carrying around concealed weapons in national parks? While visitors to these protected places of tranquility once only had to worry about packing up their garbage to avoid inquisitive and hungry bears, one's chances of leaving the park in a body bag has risen exponentially by allowing this law to go through.

In a second (and more daunting) instance of Bush-induced obfuscation, Harper's reported that Obama's promises to shut down habeas-less Guantanamo and return some legitimacy to the term "a nation of laws, not men," have been given a serious setback by recent legal activity within the Department of Defense.

"Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, 53, a lawyer and Air Force reservist who as the top legal adviser and chief administrator of the trials, has managed to put 17 complex war crimes cases on the docket in less than 18 months. Now, Obama’s promise to shutter the facility seems to have spurred Hartmann to even greater activity. Motions and hearings are currently underway in at least half a dozen cases, and this week Gitmo authorities will host an emotional, made-for-TV moment: the first-ever visit to the trials by families of the victims of Sept. 11. Meanwhile, Hartmann’s office confirms that more terrorism trials will be announced sometime before Obama’s inauguration."

While surely one must commend the DoD for giving detainees the ability to have their cases heard in court, the fact that trials are all being initiated under the auspices of Guantanamo closure lends a firm sense of triviality and pretense to the proceedings. Dissenters of this newfound activity, DoD logic goes, cannot help but think that those detainees must be given the opportunity to stand trial, and hence must support continuation of Guantanamo's operation until these cases have been closed.

Unfortunately for the DoD, we have a free press that can see right through these specious acts of Justice who witness a palpable fear initiated by their concluding way of life that has, prior to now, given soldiers and interrogators the ability to live in relative immunity of accountability.

"After years during which prisoners were held without trial, the question is whether this surge in prosecutions and publicity is a case of due process finally starting to work—or a hurried effort designed to tie Obama’s hands as he tries to shut the facility. Once they are under way, Obama could find it politically and legally difficult to stop the controversial proceedings or shift them out of Guantanamo."

By all means, these detainees should be given the chance to have their cases heard by a judge. Those that have plotted to harm Americans should be punished. But this last-minute scramble should not delay the closing of Guantanamo. That place is the relic of a bygone era, a tribute to a way of life that Obama's election has ushered back to the Dark Ages, where it belongs. Let the detainees be held and tried in U.S. Federal Court, where all will serve as judges of the facts that have up until this point, ostensibly justified their indefinite yet scandalous detainment.

The Bush Administration, in these two instances, is perpetuating its legacy of incompetence unnecessarily-- ensuring hints of its tainted influence stick around like a foul taste lingering in the mouth of all who consume politics.

Mouthwash will hopefully come Jan 20.

Hopefully Specious Relationship

Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote, the largest majority earned by a presidential candidate since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent. This factoid has been spread extensively, reiterating the historic and uprecedented nature of Obama's victory.

One factoid that has not been spread as liberally (although I don't read conservative blogs, and this is likely something they'd point out) is the shameful fate of LBJ. In 1968, just four years (or one presidential term) after his landmark victory, he didn't even run for re-election because his popularity had sunk to such low levels.

Apparently, we must be wary to conclude that the initial wide margin of victory enjoyed by a president necessarily means that he will enjoy support throughout his administration or that he will continue to represent the will of those who have overwhelmingly elected him. Indeed, if history is any indicator for the future, popular presidents must not abuse their mandate and consider their initial popularity to provide them with a carte blanche to pursue pet policy interests motivated by the blind assumption that this popularity will persist indefinitely.

LBJ was doomed by Vietnam. Now, there is clearly no shortage of potential policy blunders for Obama to stumble into that will seal his fate and have historians consider him to be just another one-term wonder. I hope this does not happen, but I must acknowledge that it can.

Conflating Civil and Gay Rights

My cynical nature has long been countered by the optimistic hope that our (global and U.S.) society is characterized by continual progress, which has been most evident in the increasing acceptance and tolerance of all mankind. Consecutive generations of Westerners have had to confront the challenging and unsettling thought that people unlike them in some way are not somehow worse. A person's merit, not some other trivial quality about them, is all we should refer to when assessing their quality. First it was non-Men; then, non-Whites; now, non-Straight or non-Binary Gendered.

The fate of today's version of this acceptance battle has, to a certain extent, been put in the hand's of voters-- largely in the form of referenda. One of the more notorious of these instances of participatory (perfect?) democracy is Proposition 8, a law that Californians' passed this past November 6 which banned same-sex marriages.

Has my cherished progress been stifled? How could California -- the land of shaggy-haired surfers, hippies, Milk, and San Francisco -- be so intolerant? Adding insult to injury, it has been discovered that a preponderance of Black Californians voted for this banishment. This constituency, benefiting perhaps more so than any other from our society's historic widening of the franchise, ironically sealed the fate of Gays who wish to enjoy a similarly innocuous extension of equal rights.

Caitlin Flanagan, in a recent New York Times op-ed, attempted to wrap her head around this apparent paradox, and implicates the church -- an all-too frequent limitor of equal rights -- as a key player in convincing blacks' that Gays, unequivocally hell-bound, do not deserve the legal (and moral?) rights offered to those married by the State.

Flanagan considers this defeat of Prop 8 to be evidence of a precariousness, lingering under the surface of a strong political alliance between liberals and Blacks-- the same alliance that was largely responsible for the election of our upcoming president.

They came to the polls in record numbers to support Barack Obama, and they brought with them a fiercely held and enduring antipathy toward homosexuality: 7 in 10 blacks voted in support of traditional marriage.

While I would not go so far as to say Blacks should ignore their Church-- as religion does provide the foundation for many important lessons of morality-- they should most definitely not ignore the lessons of history. However "morally or sexually repugnant" (Flanagan's words) our Black Americans consider Gays to be, they must not be so ignorant as to forget the great distances they have come, and the importance of extending equal human rights to those worthy of the distinction "human."

In Flanagan's opinion, this fissure could be the first of many emphasizing the inherent difficulty of "creat[ing] a vast utopian society forged of many previously disenfranchised groups."

Perhaps instead of solving the economic crisis, or ending the Global War of Terror, or signing onto a binding climate control treaty, the maintenance of this alliance will be the most politically trying -- and important -- task of President-elect Obama, as he seeks to continue enjoying the support of all types of Americans.

Trenchant Thoughts on the Crisis

Concern with the economy should not be a function of how much value one has invested in it at any given time. In other words, its a weak excuse to believe that because one doesn't have a diversified portfolio, one shouldn't care about the economic crisis. This is because it affects us all, no matter what we do or where we live. I believe that most of our apathy and exasperation concerning this current meltdown stems from the way that it's presented to us; we are confronted with a gigantic, technical beast that only 'experts' (our modern equivalent to intellectual Knights in Shining Armor-- or better yet, mystic Merlin living in The Tower) can tackle.

This is unfortunate. Like I mentioned in my first post, our economy is ultimately a product of human action. Any anthropomorphic treatment it receives ("the market did this") only fuels this opacity and contributes to the feeling of helplessness that I believe is pervading our society.

Seeking to get a better sense of economic forces, taking college (and graduate) economics courses introduced me to some of the fundamental concepts of our economic system; notions that I believe should be mandatory for any undergraduate education (particularly the inevitable and perpetual battle between supply and demand). Even so, dialogue surrounding this crisis is replete with concepts that only a certain segment of the population understands (a segment that ironically is largely to blame for this shitshow). Talk of credit default swaps, mortgage backed derivatives, etc., only serves to widen the disconnect that exists between the people at the helm of the economy and those most affected by it.

A recent article recommended to me by a fellow minion-intern that was published in The Atlantic takes on this crisis from a unique perspective. It is better than anything I've read dealing with subject, if only because it avoids the technical jargon that often pervades economic articles.

Henry Blodget, an ex-financial investor turned journalist, was around for bubbles of yore (particularly the internet one that exploded at the turn of the century). His discussion centers around the nexus of economic and psychology, two disciplines that I believe are not mutually exclusive; any discussion of economics must be firmly based in an understanding of the psychologial factors that guide those who navigate through and control the market (see Herbert Simon and bounded rationality).

Blodget explains that bubbles-- including the housing one-- are an inherent quality of capitalist economies:

But most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational—or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t. And markets are ultimately about people.

After taking us through a not-so-hypothetical example of a couple victimized by the appeal of a quick buck in real estate, Blodget provides prescient insight into how we can learn to live with and accept the flaws of our capitalist system; flaws that must be understood and embraced by our incoming presidential administration if we are to have any hope of overcoming them in the short term.

Moreover, these skeletons in the closet of capitalism should be acknowledged by every person fearful of what is almost inevitable thought nowadays-- the world crumbling upon itself, and life as we know it ending -- if only to reassure us that things are not as unprecedented as they seem.

By clearly indicating that this mess was made by man, and not some intractable problem, Blodget's story of the crisis is one of the few even tangentially optimistic pieces out there on economics today.

Thanksgiving Recap

Several excellent experiences over thanksgiving break. Although lasting one day shy of a week in length, I was reminded of how unsatisfying my current living/life situation is.

Maybe it's my dislike of DC, or my seemingly never-ending enrollment as a graduate student, or the fact that it was a vacation, but spending time with my old friends and family in and around NYC is just a lot cooler than what I normally do every day.

The play, which I refer to in the previous post, was excellent, as to be expected. We sat in the front row (why my dad got these tickets, one can only guess), which turned out to be annoying because of the sheer number of cross-stage conversations that were going on. At certain intense exchanges, I found myself turning my head back and forth constantly, as if I were watching an exciting game of tennis.

During intermission an older gentleman who was there with his wife asked me out of the blue what I thought -- whether the play had made an impression on me thus far, or whether I was affected by it. I said No, that I hadn't, and followed up with asking if this was necessary for the play to have some quality to it. He seemed to feel that it did-- that the value of art could be found in its effect on the onlooker. And consequently, because of this lack of a palpable influence the play was thus far having on him, the man was dissatisfied with it.

I agreed with his interpretation, but after some thinking believe that he was looking for the wrong effect. Watching a Chekhov play is not like watching a Michael Bruckheimer movie. It's quality is not gleaned from loud explosions or passionate love scenes or violent confrontations, but the subtle idiosyncrasies of its characters. Their endearing flaws illuminate those that we hold, and their implicit, pervasive presentation is what gives Chekhov his brilliance.

The old man wanted to be affected -- he wanted to be moved. This is not asking too much of Chekov, but we must ask to be moved differently than we have been accustomed as children of materialism. The qualities of Chekhov's characters can tell us about ourselves. Though he doesn't ask us to change them, he does provide us with a mirror through which we can see that it might be valuable to do so.

Some great writing

So my family and I are headed to NYC to watch the modern rendition of Chekhov's Seagull on the day after Thanksgiving.

I have read some Chekhov in the past, largely due to the high praise he received from Cornel West, one of the best minds of our time (whom I saw speak a few years ago and was totally blown away), and who considers Chekhov as one of his prime inspirations (alongside Marx). This acclaim comes because of Chekhov's focus on the plight of the common man; his ability to reach deep inside the psyche of seemingly normal people to illicit great descriptions of emotion and empathy. When I read Chekhov I can't help but feel a deep and affected connection for all people around me, as his intricate descriptions of their thoughts and feelings illuminate our shared plight. The term 'common man' really becomes something of a misnomer with Chehkov because of his baroque characterizations of people. I like the idea of thinking of mankind in this way, as I too often catch myself in moments of cynicism.

He is known as one of the greatest short story writers to have ever lived, and in preparation for the trip to see his play I have been re-reading some of his stories published in English. One of which, The Lady with the Little Dog, is one of his best known, and contains a paragraph that is pretty magical. I read it yesterday and would like to share it with you:

"In Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked down on the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, while clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves of the trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer here. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection. Sitting beside the young woman, who looked so beautiful in the dawn, appeased and enchanted by the view of this magical decor-- sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky-- Gurov reflected that, essentially, if you thought of it, everything was beautiful in this world, everything except for what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher goals of being and our human dignity."

Now read that again. Let it sink in.

It's not so much an exalted description of a peasant or laborer, but a narration of a scene by a man whose thoughts take him to beautiful heights. Chekhov's ability to weave in pictures of a landscape with impressive philosophy makes for a fantastic passage.

I hope that he is able to convey these literary skills in his play. God knows the setting won't be as nice, but the dialogue should leave room for his brilliance and connection to people and their thoughts to shine through.

Obama Nation

Well, He did it. No one thought He could.

But can He really deliver? Are the problems we face too insurmountable?

I suppose only time will tell.

One piece of advise, and a caution.

First, (and obviously) we all witnessed a transformational election. But in what sense was it transformational? Men and women who were once apathetic were drawn into the political realm. Non-whites, who forever have viewed this nation of the 'free' as a nation of constraints and barriers, have been given a reason to aspire for something greater (Or, in His terms, a reason to 'hope'). This was possible not only because of His inspiration rhetoric or positive message, but because of the unprecedented grassroots campaign that His team created.

The question then becomes -- what to do with all this?

If I were in some position of power, I would make it a priority to capitalize on both of these trends. There is a movement behind the Obama camp. A movement that should not end with the candidate's victory. Instead, it must be institutionalized into something that can provide a highway of desires, interests, programs, and questions, to the White House. This kind of movement-- embodied in the momentum that Obama gained up until Election Day, could become an amazing political asset that no president has wielded before.

Second (speaking of institutions), it is important to recognize that change is not imminent. Our government was created to mitigate it-- indeed, we are forever teathered to a Constitution that limits the potential scope of government by empowering our minority political parties with tremendous power. While Obama (and McCain for that matter) both claimed to be agents of change, it will be important for the American people to not become too disaffected when our problems remain. Things in politics take time. They will not always resemble the exciting and turbulent campaign months, and if we can be patient, and if Obama can somehow perpetuate the momentum that carried him into the office he will soon enjoy, then everything will be OK.

David Foster Wallace commencement speech

I came across this recently and found it to be especially powerful; it is one of the few speeches I've read in recent times that has compelled me to sit back and reflect. Enjoy.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Man as the source or result of civilization?

My friend Tom (who as of now and other than me is this blog's sole contributor) raised an interesting question that I would like to take a stab at: are humans the source or result of civilization? As is typical with these chicken-and-egg type questions, I think it is impossible to choose one or the other, so I will go ahead and say "both." I am actually reading a book on this right now (which makes me an expert, right?) that traces human history in an attempt to show that the globalizing, interconnective impulse (which has yielded our globalized world) has been with us since we gained some extra brain faculty as homo sapiens. What our ancestors did profoundly impacted the way our society works now. If you're familiar with path dependence then this should be nothing new. Why is it that we have QWERTY keyboards, when they are a less efficient option than alternatives? Why was VHS chosen when the alternative (which escapes me) was also more cost-effective? 

Certain decisions made in the past, by man, have given us the civilization that confronts us daily. 

Now surely man had no part to play in the ecological evolution of the world, up to a certain point. The big bang, ice ages, meteor impacts, etc., all happened and will continue to happen regardless of our choosing, like the shifting tide. We once lived in a world where all risk was exogenous-- it came from our interactions with and inability to overcome nature. Now we have created a world where much of the risk we face is manufactured-- it is a result of our willingness to build factories or surf on the internet or drive a motorcycle. 

Civilization is inherently a man-made thing. While at first our products were much more bound to satisfy the environmental constraints we faced, now we can often scoff at what might have not been created naturally and manufacture a world to our liking. We live with the products of what our forefathers made, and have no choice but to, but we can also set out to build upon this  civilization given what we know now, and work to improve what we were born into . 

First Presidential Debate

Very unimpressed with the performance of both candidates. Neither answered the questions asked, but only recited policy positions regarding the themes of the questions. Once you begin to notice this tendency of politicians, watching these things becomes virtually unbearable. I realized that looking into Obama's eyes feels a lot like being hypnotized, and am unsure if that is a good thing. I am sure of one thing however, which is that I am completely unwilling to once again sign over the executive branch to a member of the McCain generation. Their time has come and gone, and their tainted worldview has left us with enough problems. The last thing we need is their creeping senility to influence political events. Ultimately it is time for them all to recognize where they belong, which is vegetating slowing in their local nursing home. 

This thursday's VP debate should make for some fantastic television. My hope is that they engage in this terribly awkward culture debate about the merits of being a hockey mom versus an eastern yuppie. Surely politics is not above that; DeTocqueville would be so proud. 

Welcome

As the title of my new blog suggests, this is a place for thinking out, and sharing, thoughts that you might not normally have a forum for releasing. I would insist that the topic of these thoughts are limitless; only the expanses of our mind can serve as a wall to block where this cranial exploration may take us.  I've been a pretty quiet person for most of my life (after a brief period of early talking-- as my mother likes to say, "what happened to that boy?!") and have been described as such several times recently. I would like to think that this blog isn't a rebuttal to them, but I suppose in some shape or form it is a reaction. It is to say, just because I don't vocalize thoughts, doesn't mean I don't have them. Initially the topics will naturally be limited to what I think about on a daily basis-- politics, philosophy, art, music, movies, relationships (or in my case the sheer lack of them)-- I would ideally like this to be a place where one can come and learn about the ideas that are floating around in the heads of others. If there is any hope for our flawed species in this toxic era of our brief existence, it exits in our willingness to set aside our differences and understand one another.  At the core of my belief here is that we-- sharing in a humanness-- are essentially alike. The things that separate us-- religion, race, background, etc., are constructed and ultimately malliable divisions that need not exist. In fact, when it comes to this type of forum, I would demand that they not.  Perhaps we will never really agree with eachother, but then, let us agree to disagree. Let us at least share the excess of our introspection; the overflowing sludge that pours forth from this crazy brain organ to bless the world with the mark of Man. 

I suppose I will go first.  I have been thinking a lot lately about the financial crisis. I suppose everyone with at least some stake in the market has. While the money I have there is really nothing to be proud of, my fear (and I think the pervasive one that is prompting this to be such a massive deal) is that things will spiral out of control and we will end up in some Kevin Costner Postman world too soon-- or worse yet, A McCarthian Road world. Thinking about the financial crisis, at least in my mind, quickly devolves into this crazy fragility fear-- that our precious day-to-day existence is really founded on such a shaky foundation. Like, when the electricity goes out. How the hell do we deal with that if it happens for days at a time? What if everyone simultaneously loses electricity? The other day I was walking to school from my bullshit internship and there were a group of people in the park handing out free "are you prepared?" t-shirts. On the back was a top-10 list for things you need in the event of a disaster. It included stupid, random things like "a first aide kit" and "three days worth of water" and "special medications." Thinking about people reacting rationally in the event of a disaster in which such a list would be necessary is so unrealistic. People can't even act civilly in the event of a newest yearly tickle-me-Elmo toy coming out at Christmas time. How can we expect them to do so when their whole world crumbles from beneath them? I think that an accurate top-10 list would resemble something like:

1- a handgun

2- ammunition

3- you get the idea

It's times like this I'm happy that I live with gun owners.