I am certainly a hypocrite. There's no question about that. But I'm still entitled to my thoughts and opinions, even if they contradict my actions. Sometimes a compelling idea outstrips the operating system of the brain that tries to install it. So you get some cognitive dissonance, some contradictory behavior. And it's not unbecoming. It's not annoying. It's inspirational.
I occasionally eat pizza that's been left on the counter overnight. Despite this, I still believe I am an inspirational figure. A figure who has done some reading, checked his sources, and just wants to pass on that information. But it's information no one (especially my wife) wants to hear. She may be able to shut me up on this topic in the house, but she can't stop me from blogging about it.
I can find nothing to contradict this Golden Rule of food safety. Despite this, I am BANNED from discussing this topic in my house. Censored! The Danger Zone!
For the record: it's not a sin, it's not a waste, it's not a criminal offense. If food has been in "the danger zone" for more than two hours-- and the "danger zone" is defined as 40 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit-- then you should toss it. Your food has become a Petri dish of exponential orgiastic bacterial procreation. The bacteria population on this food is doubling every twenty minutes.
No one wants to hear this. Including my wife. Everyone wants to "pack up the sandwiches" that have been sitting out for five hours (slathered in mayonnaise) because it would be "a waste" to throw them away. And no one wants to read (or hear) about exponential bacteria growth. And you can't smell bacteria, even when they're hastily copulating.
Bacteria going at it . . .
Though I know this rule, I admit I'm a bundle of contradictions. I eat food off the floor; I double dip chips; and when I'm at a barbecue, I certainly eat food that's been sitting out too long. But when I do this stuff, I do it with the knowledge that I'm rolling the dice. And I know what the result might be. My wife should know as well. We lived in Syria for three years, where food safety is not a priority, refrigeration is poor, human excrement is used as fertilizer, the water is not particularly potable, and fly-covered meat is often displayed hanging in the window of the store.
Some Syrian meat just hanging out . . .
We suffered every kind of intestinal distress in the book. I got giant intestinal roundworms. We had frequent bouts of diarrhea. But those memories have faded from my wife's mind. I have included some bonus photos of Syrian butchery and meat at the end of this post (they are not for those with a weak stomach) to show you how lucky we are to have such hygienic food in America. I doubt my wife will look at them or take them to heart.
My wife thinks it's strange that I'll scoop out some yogurt into a bowl and then realize I have to feed the dog, so I'll put the yogurt into the fridge for the few minutes that it takes to feed the dog. I don't want the yogurt to to get warm while I'm doing the chore. She thinks I'm insane. I think I just truly appreciate the miracle of refrigeration. In the good old days, people used to die from drinking milk.
The people in the English department are split on this. Some people are grossed out by food that has been left out. Stacey just doesn't care. She'll eat fried chicken that's been sitting on an end table all night (being licked by her dog). Her opinion: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I get it, but I need to do more research on public opinion. I need talk to some of the science and health biology teachers and see what they think.
But like I said, I'm a hypocrite. I'm not afraid of being critical of other people who I think are behaving too obsessively about food safety.
The Illustrative Anecdote
Thursday night, a bunch of us were sitting outside at Pino's, quaffing beer and bourbon, eating gourmet chips ( provided by the Deatz . . . thanks Deatz!) when a woman walked up to the table and offered us fresh baked cookies. They were leftovers from a political function happening inside. You shouldn't take candy from a stranger, but this woman seemed trustworthy.
Everyone grabbed a cookie. And then things got embarrassing. My friends were just bonkers for these cookies. Grown-assed men, giggling over treats. It was weird and sad and silly. Pathetic, really. Especially because when I bit into my cookie, I realized those dark blobs weren't chocolate chips, they were raisins. It was the most deceptive (and disgusting) of cookies: oatmeal raisin. Yuck.
But everyone loved them. I couldn't harsh the buzz. I couldn't criticize the cookies. The guys were writhing in ecstasy while stuffing chunks of raisin-laden oatmeal into their pie-holes.
So I palmed my half-eaten cookie, reached into the gourmet chip bag for a chip, and left it behind. Voila! Now I didn't have to explain why I didn't finish my cookie. It was hidden in the chip bag. The chips were pretty much finished. Everyone's hunger was sated. No one would ever find me out. I didn't have to go on some weird rant about expectations and raisins. I could let the party continue, unimpeded by my grouchiness. Like a child slipping vegetables into his napkin and then surreptitiously tossing the napkin into the garbage, I had-- rather immaturely-- disposed of something I found unappetizing, without causing a scene.
The guys went inside to hear the band, leaving Paul and me at the table. We chatted for a bit, and then Paul reached into the gourmet chip bag for a chip and he pulled out my half-eaten cookie. He was disgusted. Appalled. I had contaminated the entire bag of chips! It was like I put my whole mouth in the bowl!
I mocked him for his squeamishness. We were at the pub! It was men's night! We were drinking and eating! It was my half-eaten cookie, not some random, unknown entity. Me! My mouth germs were fine!
Paul wasn't having it. And while I continued to berate him, I understood his position. Because I am a hypocrite.
Bonus Photos
Proceed at your own risk . . .
Eid al-Adha in Damascus
The next day, the flies came in droves . .
It's hard to find fresh camel head in Jersey
How long can you leave a cooked head at room temperature?
In December, SNL aired a sketch about the band Weezer. Some folks are sitting down to what looks to be a lovely holiday dinner party, but then the music algorithm randomly spits out Weezer's cover of "Africa." The quintessential Weezer debate ensues. Leslie Jones and Matt Damon get into it, vehemently. If you're a Weezer fan of a certain age, then you've tread this ground before. And if you're not, then the debate probably didn't make much sense. The rest of the dinner party can't understand why Damon and Jones are getting so hot and bothered. The best line in the sketch might be when Heidi Gardner asks: “Is this a thing people care about?”
The Atlantic promptly posted an article called "The Saturday Night Live Sketch That Sums Up All Online Discourse." The author, David Sims, completely mischaracterizes the piece. He tries to glean a general, modern lesson from the particulars, and he bungles it. His big takeaway is this:
If you know Weezer’s back catalog intimately, every silly reference made in the sketch lands, but if you don’t, it’s still effective. Because above all, this is a sketch about the way some people discuss almost anything these days—with feigned politeness immediately escalating to personal cruelty. Though part of the joke was that this Weezer disagreement was playing out at a dinner party, I was immediately reminded of so much online discourse, where part of the point is coming up with the most extreme reaction possible.
No offense Mr. Sims, but you can burn in hell. And drink my hot blood. This sketch isn't about how people argue online. It's not about "feigned politeness escalating into personal cruelty." The emotions here are totally valid, because Damon and Jones are arguing about something much more profound than Weezer. Deep stuff. They know it. I know it. And my buddy Kevin knows it. We've been having this identical argument since 2005. Since long before online discourse. Pre-Twitter. The Age of Myspace.
Is This a Thing People Care About? Yes!
Kevin and I have been having this very same debate since Weezer released their fifth album, Make Believe. The one with "Beverly Hills." Yuck. "Beverly Hills," which features on-the-nose lyrics, an awkward faux hip-hop delivery, and a talkbox solo. I pronounced the album terrible. I swore I would never listen to the band again. Kevin kind of liked it. He didn't love it, but he also didn't consider it the end of times for Weezer. He was more forgiving than me, but I had my reasons. I knew better. I had been burned before.
And so the debate began. A debate much bigger than Kevin and me, a debate much bigger than the cheesy crap that Weezer started to produce, a debate much bigger than all of our meager and insignificant lives (whether we have a 90210 zip or not). People will be having this debate far into the future. Kevin and I might download our consciousness into the singularity and continue this debate until the sun burns out (which you will see would be highly appropriate). Intelligent carbon-based life-forms on other planets are having this debate right now. It's a discussion about the permanence of character and identity. It's discussion about the possession of an eternal and everlasting soul. Where lies your essence?
In this debate, I always play the role of Leslie Jones. To infinity and beyond. And Kevin will eternally be Matt Damon. It's a post-modern musical version of Sartre's "No Exit."
Here's a quick synopsis of the two positions. They are, of course, allegorical.
Matt Damon takes the stance that Weezer is "doing some cool things right now." He's looking forward to the release of The Black Album. Leslie Jones does not agree. She believes the band "hasn't had a good album since Pinkerton . . . in '96." She believes that all "real" Weezer fans know this. The two of them get deep into the band's discography. Matt Damon presents himself as open to the band's new music. He listens to all of it. He's "ride or die." Cecily Strong says, "For Weezer?" She doesn't get it. She doesn't know what they're really talking about (but she shouldn't feel bad . . . neither does David Sims, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic)
Damon labels Leslie Jones "a purist" because Jones only truly respects Weezer's first two albums (Blue and Pinkerton). Like me, she will deign to "go all the way up to The Green Album" (which is Weezer's third album). The rest of their material is "corny." I agree.
Matt Damon tells her to grow up. Stop living in the past. Jones calls Damon a "grown ass man" and chastises him that he should know better. He should be able to recognize good art and bad art. Things get pretty heated and both Jones and Damon behave badly, but this is not about online discourse and the lack of civility in conversation. This is about something bigger. Something that excuses bad behavior. Something scary and frustrating and philosophical. Also, I can't begin to explain how accurately this reflects the argument Kevin and I have been having since 2005, since Make Believe. It's almost like the sketch writers have been listening on on us.
A Magical Moment of Consensus
Things don't end well-- Damon storms out-- but there is a magical moment just before Damon leaves when Jones and Damon's sentiments align. Damon yells, "Can we all just agree that Weezer is the best band of all time?"
Everyone else at the dinner party yells "No!" aside from Jones, who says: "Yes!"
Watch and see (go two minutes and 53 seconds in).
This is why they are so passionate. They both truly, sincerely loved Weezer. Damon still does. Jones is conflicted. She qualifies her statement: "And then they became the worst band of all time." Damon still loves Weezer, while Jones loves what Weezer once was.
But aren't they the same thing?
Possibly. But probably not. We're talking about one of the stickiest philosophical dilemmas. A dilemma that involves consciousness, identity, art, and creativity. A dilemma that smacks of the infamous Ship of Theseus, but with something more malleable. You.
Are you your past self? What kind of relationship do you have with your past self? Is your brain the same brain you had in the past? Is your body the same body you had in your past?
This is why you have to excuse all the anger and arguing in the skit. Jones is reckoning with the fact that we have no soul, that we have no essence. There is no true identity. The old Rivers is gone. Damon is hanging on, but some part of him must realize that this is disturbing reality is true. Jones has simultaneously lost her faith in Weezer and in the divinity of the human soul.
Supposedly, most of our cells renew themselves every 7 to 10 years, but not the neurons in our cerebral cortex. We're stuck with them for life (and this is why we can get dementia). Other brain cells regenerate. But-- more importantly-- every time we remember something, that memory changes. Every time we recall something, we revise that thing. So in the biggest sense, our brains are not the same as they once were. Our memories do not accurately connect us to our past, they are creations of our present self. Yikes. The old Rivers Cuomo has been replaced, cell-by-cell, revised memory by revised memory. He's a living version of the Ship of Theseus. We are looking at a Doppelganger, a facsimile. Jones is not fooled. Damon is (or perhaps he doesn't want to grapple with this reality).
Is Weezer still Weezer? They've had a few line-up changes, including the loss of bassist Matt Sharp and the addition of guitarist Scott Shriner. But they are mainly the brainchild of Rivers Cuomo. Leslie Jones claims to know Rivers Cuomo "better than he knows himself." And she knows that he is no longer the Rivers Cuomo that produced Pinkerton and The Blue Album. She truly believes that Make Believe is make-believe. It's not genuine Weezer. I agree with her. Matt Damon is not so sure. He thinks Rivers is still Rivers. He's "into the new stuff." He encourages Jones to grow up and listen to some of it. He tells her that "she doesn't understand what Rivers is going through right now." He believes Rivers will suffer the ordeal, endure the crucible, and emerge hardened, annealed and even better than before.
What happens to our identity and our ideas over time? Do we have any sincere connection to our past selves? My guess is not much. I think we are always in flux. I am nothing like my twenty-two year old self. That guy was an asshole. He was also quite fast. But our athletic ability inevitably declines (except for Tom Brady, who -- according to my sources-- drinks a protein shake each morning laced with the blood and stem-cells of precocious toddlers).
While we physically decay, there's a case to be made that we should be getting better at things like music and drawing and writing and art (until we get dementia). Our artistic and cerebral skills should improve over time. But this doesn't always seem to be the case. Where is the Weezer that Leslie Jones once loved? And why hasn't the band improved with time, like a fine wine? Should she have the childlike faith that Matt Damon has? Faith that the past Weezer will return triumphant? Or is her skepticism more grounded in reality. I side with Jones. For whatever reason, Rivers is no longer (and will never be) his past self.
Jones and Damon are arguing over the existence and essence of the human soul. Is it eternal and unchangeable? Unable to be destroyed? And does it still reside within Rivers Cuomo . . . or did it evaporate when he moved to Beverly Hills? Was the soul of Rivers Cuomo make-believe all along?
Miles Davis said, "the key to creativity is a bad memory." I understand what he means. You have to keep changing, you can't get too attached to the past. Otherwise, you'll simply repeat it, in less and less sincere forms. You'll plagiarize yourself. You'll lose your soul. You'll sell your soul. I tried to find that quotation online-- to make sure Miles Davis said it-- and I had some trouble. I've been saying it to my Creative Writing classes for twenty years, but all I could find was this odd web page about painter Paul Solnes. So who said it? Perhaps Miles Davis. Perhaps not. But whether he said it or not, he lived it. Miles Davis constantly reinvented himself. The key to creativity might be to embrace the fact that we have no true essence, and we've got to keep moving on.
In 2012, David Remnick wrote an article about Bruce Springsteen, called "We Are Alive." Bruce had just turned sixty-two and Remnick marveled at his ability to produce new and relevant material. Bruce keeps figuring out how to remake himself. But the best thing in the article was what Remnick said about The Rolling Stones. I love The Rolling Stones. I love entire albums by The Rolling Stones. Some Girls and Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. So many good songs on those albums. Remnick said that The Rolling Stones are now merely a high-end Rolling Stones tribute act, though they contain the same humans that were in the actual and legendary band. This may be the perfect example of the Ship of Theseus dilemma as an identity conundrum:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. (David Remnick)
Most of The Rolling Stones are still alive, the same guys who wrote "Sway" and "Rocks Off" and "Dead Flowers" and "Gimme Shelter." Brian Jones died in 1969, just after he was booted from the band. Mick Jones didn't play with them for a long while, but other than that, they are intact. And all they can do is perform their old songs. Why? Why can't they occasionally write an amazing song? Why aren't they who they once were? It's frustrating and disturbing.
Remnick does raise the point that perhaps the Stones are mailing it in. They only get together for the money. This makes sense. he's probably right. But you'd think they would still want to write a few great songs when they do get together. Perhaps that is impossible without self-reflection, progress, and process. While Bruce Springsteen keeps evolving, the Stones became "curators" of their past.
Weezer is another story. Rivers Cuomo is working his ass off. He's got plenty of process. He's trying his damnedest to evolve. Listen to Song Exploder 70: Weezer for the details on how he wrote "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory." Understanding all the work he put in makes me almost like the song. Almost. But it's still not "Surf Wax America." It's still ersatz.
Cuomo has spreadsheets of lyrics broken down by syllables and accents and prosody. Everything's tagged and searchable. He can "search for lyrics with five syllables and an accent." He's got Spotify playlists of cool old songs; he collects these songs and ruminates on them and finally dismantles them, unravels the chords progressions and the melodies so that he can transform the bits and pieces into something Weezer. He sings his guitar solos first. He eavesdrops and writes stream-of-consciousness journals and has been using the methods in Julia Cameron's classic book on creativity: The Artist's Way.
So why can't he knock it out of the park? Why can't he make another BlueAlbum?
I think I have one possible answer.
Jonah Lehrer wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2012 entitled "Groupthink." In it, he skewers the "brainstorming myth," the idea that spewing out a bunch of ideas is a valid path to creativity. There's something wrong with the "no wrong answers" approach. While it's fun to push for quantity over quality, and it feels positive to encourage freewheeling associations and censor all criticism, these methods don't produce good results. There's been plenty of research on this subject, and apparently working in a more critical environment is a better way to produce good ideas. There needs to be some constructive feedback and debate. Dissent is important; Charlan Nemeth discusses this in "Freakonomics Episode 368: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?"
The Lehrer article summarizes a research experiment designed by Brian Uzzi that explains a critical element in the creative environment necessary for achievement. Uzzi uses the idea of a "Q reading"-- which is basically how long and how well members of a team know each other-- to assess success.
Uzzi focused his study on Broadway musicals, which he calls a "model of group creativity." He studied the Q reading of Broadway musical teams from 1945 to 1989 and he discovered something exceptional. Broadway actors, producers, choreographers, lyricists, and stage managers tend to work together over and over. Broadway musicals are expensive. There's less risk if you know the members of your team. What Uzzi found was that teams with very low Q readings-- teams of artists that didn't know each other at all-- those teams were destined to fail. Q readings in the middle, teams comprised of a variety of relationships-- some old, some new, some in between . . . when the team was acquainted, these plays did the best. And when the Q reading was very high, when the team had worked together many times, then the chance of success went down again.
Total strangers don't work well together. People who have known each other so long that they can't criticize each other without taking umbrage and offense, they don't work well together either. In that middle ground, however, when people are professionally acquainted but not overly familiar, those teams succeeded.
The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” (John Lehrer)
I think this often holds true for bands. Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life is a comprehensive and vivid depiction of post-punk Q readings. A band's first album is usually made after many months of touring and practice, so the band has gotten to know each other quite well (usually because they've been living in a van). But they're not so well acquainted that they can't surprise each other. First albums are often good because the band is in that sweet spot of the Q reading. They know their band mates well enough to debate and dissent, they can recognize the good ideas and toss out bad ones. As time passes, it's often all downhill. The Rolling Stones are no longer professionals in a working band. They are long-time friends. Once things get too comfortable (unless there's a major change, such as Johnny Cash working with Rick Rubin) then it's just going to be more of the same.
Why Is There No Sequel to The Big Lebowski?
Perhaps this is why the Coen Brothers can't make another Big Lebowski. It's why Pavement couldn't make another "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." Once in a while, an artist creates something new and unusual and awesome deep in their career. Willie Nelson made Spirit and Teatroin the late '90's. Who knows what got into him? Maybe it was the weed. Radiohead does their best to break new ground with each new album, but most people still prefer The Bends and OK Computer. And these exceptions are the rare counter-examples that prove the norm.
This truism, that artists often peak somewhere in mid-career, seems to hold true for individuals as well, perhaps because every individual artist is ensconced in a nest of relationships and stimuli. Every human is part of a team. And when that network gets old and hackneyed, then things get stale. It's why Liane Moriarty's middle books (Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret) are so damned good, and why her latest (Truly Madly Guilty) just seems to just be checking the "Liane Moriarity" boxes. It seems derivative. It's why Thomas Pynchon can't do it again.
It's tough to be your past self. It's even tougher to beat your past self, to out-compete that person. Especially when your audience is no longer their past self. They are older and smarter and more experienced. As Heraclitus said, "You never step in the same river twice."
Ride or Die For Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
My buddy Kevin is something of a completist. He reads all the Michael Pollan books. He listens to all of the Weezer and Radiohead albums. He collects things. He still plays Strat-O-matic baseball (and Strat-O-Matic hockey . . . Strat-O-Matic hockey?) He buys the physical cards every year for his Strat-O-Matic sports, even though he doesn't roll dice any longer. Even though the game is now computerized. He's ride or die for Strat-O-Matic.
Kevin feels the same way about Weezer and Michael Pollan. He's a fan of the artist. I'm a fan of the art. Once I don't like the art, I defect. I love Life's Rich Pageant and Murmur, not the band R.E.M. It's because I learned my lesson early on. More on this later. I hate R.E.M.'s Out of Time, even though it was made by the same humans that made Reckoning. "Losing My Religion" is the worst. The fact that Michael Stipe wrote "Talk About the Passion" and also wrote "Losing My Religion" has made me lose my religion, made me lose my belief in an eternal soul.
Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
I'm the opposite of a completist. I only want to listen to the best things. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, but I might never read another Michael Pollan book again. That was his high point. I'd rather listen to first-rate jazz than second rate Weezer. I'm a grown-ass man! I'm logical about it. Old R.E.M. is slightly better than old Weezer, and new R.E.M. is slightly better than new Weezer, but I'm not going to spend my time listening to new R.E.M. because it's slightly better than new Weezer. Instead I'll listen to first rate something else. I'll move on. In this case the newer stuff-- whether it's Weezer or R.E.M.-- is ersatz.
Kevin is loyal and faithful and believes that his favorite artists are still his favorite artists. They can do it again. I'm not so sure. I think we're a constantly changing-- our cells, our memories, our routines, our thought patterns-- and we are surrounded by a constantly changing collection of people. It's really hard to replicate a particular time and place. This may also point to the impossibility of loving a Weezer album again. I am a different person. I'm not in my twenties. I'm not childless and open to the infinite possibilities of the universe and both overly-confident and slightly scared of what that means. Pinkerton really nailed that feeling. But now I'm a grown-ass man. Perhaps that kind of music could never speak to me the way it did back then.
When my wife and I lived and taught in Syria, I played a lot of music with my friend Matt. We both loved Pinkerton and so we learned a bunch of those songs. They were hard to play and sing. Weird chord progressions and some high notes. Weezer was still rolling along. The Green Album had just come out and it was short but good. Catchy and driving. We were young and without children, living in a foreign country, and when we played "The Sweater Song," everybody sang along. It's a time in my life that's impossible to replicate, and it would be silly to think that it's even possible to do so. Matt and I were on exactly the same page, musically. We were in a "strange and distant land," a weird holiday of sorts. Weezer was our common ground.
When Weezer's time was over, I had no problem abandoning them. I may have learned to defect so readily because of what happened when I was a teenager. I had a comically traumatic experience with my favorite band: The Cult. The Cult were the masters of creative transformation. The real version of Spinal Tap. They began as The Southern Death Cult, a goth/post-punk band in the spirit of Bauhaus. Then lead singer Ian Astbury teamed up with his artistic soulmate, Theater of Hate guitarist Billy Duffy and they stripped their name down to The Cult. In 1984, they put out the Dreamtime, a weirdly awesome brew of apocalyptic Wild West riffs, Native American chants, and tribal rhythms. A year later they released the cerebral-sounding college rock classicLove: an impeccably produced collection of droning, ethereal guitars and wailing reverb-laden vocals. The album with '80's anthem "She Sells Sanctuary." I totally dug that album, but the The Cult's next move separated them from the other alternative post-punk bands of the time. They hired Zodiac Mindwarp's Kid Chaos on bass, teamed up with producer Rick Rubin, and made Electric, a raw, stripped down freight train of a record. It was 1987. I was 17 years old, and the album spoke to me and my friends. We felt wild and violent and unhinged, and so did this album. We loved it.
I was ride or die for The Cult
This was one of the reasons I couldn't talk to girls. I really wanted to ask them whether they preferred the celestial sound of Love or the crisp overdriven guitars of Electric. The production values of Steve Brown or Rick Rubin. I wanted to know their opinion. It was a litmus test. Kind of like The Weezer debate. But this was not a thing most people cared about. Certainly not most girls. The only people that cared were my high school buddies, who liked The Cult as much as me. And we loved Electric. We loved moshing at the shows, we loved when Ian Astbury-- drunk-- clambered to the top of the speaker cabinet at the Felt Forum and couldn't get down. It was Spinal Tap embodied. Billy Duffy kept on soloing on his giant White Falcon Gretsch hollow-body guitar, hanging it over the crowd so you could touch it while he played, soloing and soloing until the roadies got Astbury down.
Then I went to college, and my freshman year The Cult released Sonic Temple. It was 1989. They got yet another drummer-- Mickey Curry-- and a new big-time producer: Bob Rock (who has produced acts such as Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, the Offspring, and David Lee Roth). I heard a couple singles from the new album on the radio and MTV-- "Fire Woman" and "Sun King"-- and while they sounded a bit over-produced, they still rang true, they still passed as genuine Cult songs (if a bit cheesier than the old stuff). I heard Astbury in an interview and he said he wanted to make "sonic landscapes," like the Fleetwood Mac song "The Chain." That sounded fine to me. "Sun King" certainly did that.
I bought the album on CD, though I didn't own a CD player yet. I could see the writing on the wall for cassettes (but I couldn't fathom that vinyl would make a comeback). My buddy Whitney and I went into a friend's room who had a CD player. Whitney knew I was a diehard Cult fan. He listened with me and watched me nearly shit my pants when I heard the corny strings at the start of "Edie (Ciao Baby)" and the goofy organ at the start of "Sweet Soul Sister" and the abominable a capella chorus at the start of "Wake Up Time For Freedom." I was disappointed. But I hadn't yet become a defector. I blamed Bob Rock. I enjoyed what I could from the album-- mainly "Sun King" and "Fire Woman"-- and waited patiently for the next one. I was young and dumb and optimistic.
Before Ceremony came out, in 1991, I made the absurd decision to have the logo from the Electric album tattooed on my ankle. I was ride or die for Electric. I liked it that much. And I had faith that The Cult would return triumphant.
Then I listened to Ceremony, and it broke me. I realized that these were not the same dudes that made Dreamtime, Love, and Electric. Nor was I the same person. I realized that, in fact, people weren't people at all; they were conglomerations of memories and molecules in a particular matrix of time and relationships. There was no continuity to anything. Ceremony was so fucking bad. It was derivative. It consisted of mashed-up versions of every lousy Cult song, squashed together, with cheesy super-slick production. Self-plagiarism of the worst kind. I defected. I learned my lesson. I eventually covered my Cult tattoo with another absurd tattoo (grist for another post).
By 1991, R.E.M. was dead to me as well. While I could tolerate a few songs from their 1987 effort Green, it was the same routine and timeline as Sonic Temple and Ceremony. "Stand" was "Wake Up Time For Freedom" awful, but "Pop Song 89" and "Orange Crush" were fun. But Out of Time, that whole album seemed ersatz to me. Not genuine R.E.M. I heard "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People" over and over on the radio. I was angry. I realized you couldn't go back to Rockville. What the fuck? What had happened to the artists I loved?
And then I got over it. I moved on. I discovered new stuff: Cake and Wilco and Ween and Beck and Underworld and Crystal Method and Tribe Called Quest. I got into jazz: Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and Charlie Parker and Jimmy Mcgriff and Jimmy Smith. I went back to old familiar stuff and realized I liked it more than I thought: The Rolling Stones and The Talking Heads and The Cure. I got into hip-hop beyond The Beastie Boys. I learned to find new art-- or art that was new to me-- instead of relying on my old favorites. Why bother being loyal when the cards are so stacked against success? Rivers Cuomo sang it on Pinkerton:
Why bother? It's gonna hurt me.
It's gonna kill when you desert me.
This happened to me twice before
Won't happen to me anymore.
Weezer
I'm no longer angry. I learned not to be offended when an artist I liked produced something shitty. That artist is no longer the artist they once were. It's not a betrayal. You're different, they're different, everything is different. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince got it exactly right when he renamed himself. I'm happy that people can come together at all, in any time or place, and create something of significance. It's really hard. And it can't last. Everyone has to be in the right space. There's some real vitriol out there about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer, but I'm just glad they made the Blue Album and Pinkerton (and the Green Album is decent, I just gave it another listen). You can't expect much more.
I was lucky enough to move in lock-step with The Cult and some other bands-- including Weezer-- for a few years, for a few albums. But what are the chances for that to continue? For you and the artist you love to evolve in the same way, so that you enjoy everything they make? Slim to none. It's just not feasible, for a variety of reasons. I was fourteen when The Cult made Dreamtime, and investigating punk-rock and goth and underground music. It was a perfect fit. A year later I had picked up the electric guitar and the droning riffs on Love were intriguing. Every budding guitarist in the '80's who liked alternative music learned the opening to "Rain" and "She Sell Sanctuary." And when I was seventeen and full of testosterone, The Cult put out Electric. Perfectly appropriate for me and my buddies. These albums are touchstones of time as much as they are of sound. They moved in parallel with my aesthetic sensibilities. That was a happy accident.
Our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us.
There's a fantastic artifact from The Cult discography symbolic of this theme: that our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us. The Cult recorded an earlier version of the songs that eventually became the hard-driving Electric. These tracks are called The Manor Sessions. They were produced by Steve Brown, the same guy who produced Love. If you like The Cult, then these are fascinating tracks.
It's the songs from Electric but they sound like B-sides from Love. The band decided these recordings didn't reflect their new direction. They enlisted Rick Rubin and made the "real" version of Electric. And it was all about the production. If The Cult had stuck with Steve Brown and made another album that sounded like Love, I would have liked it. I like The Manor Sessions. I would have liked The Cult, the same amount that I liked Jane's Addiction and Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden and The Cure and Danzig. A lot. But I wouldn't have gotten a Cult tattoo. That Electric album that spoke to my me and my friends in a very special way when we were high school seniors, when we were drinking beer, driving around, doing vandalism-- that album almost didn't exist. You can actually hear what it could have been. If this had been the case, we would have driven slower and done less vandalism. Maybe we would have been more cerebral and sensitive. We certainly would have been different. It makes me realize a piece of art is so dependent on the circumstances. It's a product space and time and relationships. It's a miracle that it ever works at all, that a bunch of sounds could mean so much. And it's greedy to think that it can be repeated, especially by the same humans at another time, in another place, when everything is different. Weezer is never going to make another Blue Album, and that's okay.
I'm doing something annoying and pretentious right now, but it fits perfectly with this philosophy. My family is taking a trip to Costa Rica this summer, so I started brushing up on my Spanish. This led me to search for some great Latin American alternative albums. I stumbled on some fantastic stuff. Cafe Tacuba's highly regarded Re. Los Amigos Invisibles' funk album The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera. Soda Stereo's alternative classic Sueño stereo. And Jessico Megamix byBabasónicos (a band regarded as the Argentinian version of Beck).
Listening to this music is like stumbling on buried treasure. These are the best albums by these bands. You can tell they are in the Goldilocks Zone for Q reading and creativity. It's a real treat. And I'm learning some interesting Spanish idioms (such as Cómanse a besos esta noche. . . you can eat kisses tonight?)
So no more ride or die for me. I'd rather listen to some nearly incomprehensible first rate Latin American music than second rate stuff from my favorite bands. I've embraced the Miles Davis philosophy. I have a shitty memory, and it keeps me moving. I'm not going to wait for lightning to strike twice when I can search for a fulgurite.
I'd like to apologize to David Sims for "escalating to personal cruelty." I don't actually want him to burn in hell . . . but I do want him to read this and understand the true significance of the SNL Weezer sketch, and the true significance of the Weezer debate. It's about the continuity of our identity, and the truth might be disturbing. There might not be any continuity of our character. Our soul might be an illusion. There's an up side to this. Change is not only possible, it is inevitable. I'm in a better place now. I've dredged up lots of memories, and my brain has revised them. I've listened to a bunch of old music and it's made me nostalgic. I'm nothing like the guy who started writing this post. That guy was a little disappointed with Weezer. That guy was angry at David Sims. That was my past self. But nearly six thousand words later, this new guy, this new Dave, he knows better.
You're about to order some Bangin' Shrimp at your local Ruby Tuesday's when the old ladies in the booth next to you rip off their wrinkled faces, revealing that aliens live among us. You tell your server you're going to need a moment, stare into their big wet reptilian eyes and-- depending on where you born and how you were raised-- select one of the following options:
Approach them with sincere and open armed curiosity.
Run! And contact all the authorities . . . the FBI, CIA, KGB, MSS, Mossad, PETA, etc.
Drop to your knees and pledge obeisance to your new overlords.
Apprehend the undocumented interlopers and relocate them to an internment camp.
Clarification: Zombies vs. Aliens
The zombie apocalypse has a universal quality to it. It doesn't matter where you were born or how you were raised. We all know how it will go down. Around the globe, little bands of survivors will wander around, scavenging food and bashing brains.
But with aliens, it's up in the air. First contact narratives reflect the collective subconscious of the culture that creates them. Alex Graham's renowned "Kindly take us to your President" New Yorker cartoon from 1953 depicts a simpler time and a more trusting America. If the aliens weren't talking to a horse, then they'd be making a reasonable request.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a moderate conservative who continued the New Deal, expanded Social Security, funded NASA, opposed McCarthyism, integrated schools, and built the Interstate Highway System. The joke wasn't on the President, it was on the aliens. They were asking a horse! That horse doesn't know President Eisenhower! Today, the caption would be very different (perhaps the horse would reply, "He's not my President" or "Sure, he loves fake news!" or something equally bi-partisan).
"Kindly take us to your President!"
I recently digested three excellent first contact stories, each from a different cultural perspective:
Representing the liberal American democratic techno-state: Hank Green's novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Hooray for the liberal American democratic techno-state! If you're reading this blog then I'm assuming you are extremely familiar with this cultural milieu and the human rights/political stance inherent within it.
Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem hails from China; the story begins during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and heads into what is probably uncharted ideological, political, and philosophical ground for most Westerners.
District 9 is a 2009 South African sci-fi movie directed by Neill Blomkamp. It's streaming on Netflix right now . . . if you haven't seen it, watch it. It's awesome.
The arc of each of these three earthlings-meet-aliens narratives reveals just as much about the culture of the humans making first contact as it does about the desires of the aliens. All three present the same scenario: humans learn that they not alone in the universe, nor are they at the top of the technological totem-pole. They also learn that the aliens possess thoughts and emotions that might be slightly inscrutable to human reason. How folks handle an existential bombshell like this depends on their culture. And how authors portray how folks handle an existential bombshell like this depends on what culture the author is from. It's far more philosophical than a zombie apocalypse. The zombie apocalypse is pragmatic, which is why people love to imagine it. Food, shelter, weapons, and watching loved ones transform into slobbering ghouls. First contact is profound (at least Stanley Kubrick thought so . . . he thought it was so profound that it's almost impossible to watch 2001 in its entirety unless you're in an altered state . . . that's what you get when you make a first contact film in 1968).
What happened to the plot?
An Aside: Real Science Fiction vs. The Other Stuff
Before we dive in, I'd like to assert that District 9, The Three-Body Problem, and An Absolutely Remarkable Thing are "real" science-fiction (by my definition anyway). This is important. It means these stories go beyond the human, beyond character. This is normally a terrible idea. Characters are what makes stories great (e.g. Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling, both of whom used derivative plot elements to get the ball rolling, but excelled at creating fantastic characters). Plots are a dime a dozen. So real science-fiction is a risk because the setting has to become more than a plot device. It has to become the focus.
Certainly, sci-fi has some tried and tested working elements; it's usually speculative and contains themes of technology and alternative history, but more importantly-- the great risk of real science-fiction-- is that the setting is the main character. There might be actual characters, but you don't care about them as much as the setting. Brave New World is the perfect example. No one cares what happens to Bernard and Lenina, or even John the Savage. We're entranced by the world. There was no reason to make sequels to The Matrix. I refuse to watch them. I don't give two shits about Neo and Trinity. The real love story in that movie is between the alternate apocalyptic reality and the matrix. That dynamic is far more fascinating than the fact that Keanu Reeves is "the one." Cypher's choice is the sci-fi version of Sophie's choice. Which world does he love more? Ursula LeGuin's The Ones That Walk Away from Omelas is the extreme version of this principle, the story that tests the boundaries of convention. There is no character but the setting: Omelas.
So Star Wars does not qualify as "real" science-fiction. You could make it a Western and the themes would remain the same. Fathers and sons, good and evil, darkness and light. Horses instead of Tauntauns. Tonto instead of Chewbacca. E.T. is barely sci-fi. E.T. himself is more of a religious figure, and the story is about how individuals-- his child disciples and the others-- relate to him.
One more stick and it's perfect . . .
Close Encounters starts to grapple with how the government and the world would handle first contact, but it's more the story of the disintegration of a family because one of the members experiences an incredible event and that alienates him from his wife and family (we watched it a few weeks ago and my son Ian said he would help me if I started building a giant dirt and brick mountain in the living room, instead of splitting town with mom).
District 9, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and The Three-Body Problem are different. You might enjoy and root for some of the people involved, but these characters all pale in comparison to the detail and attention given to the worlds in each.
Let's Relocate to District 9
Just scrawl on the dotted line.
You might argue that District 9 is character driven (at least the second half). Wikus begins as a tragically bureaucratic anti-hero out of a Kafka novel who transforms into an actual warrior-hero (and there's even a bit of intergalactic romance at the very end) but truth be told, the real stars of the film are the South African government bureaucracy, the prawn relocation camps which have gradually devolved into metaphorical apartheid slums, the forcible relocations, the alien biotech, and Multinational United (the insidious quasi-governmental weapons manufacturer/mercenary task force the government hires to move the prawns). The impact of the film comes from the world and the message it delivers: your culture will steer how you treat aliens. If you are prone to apartheid and relocation, you will use these tactics on the newcomers. And once they are ensconced in that system, it will be hard to treat them as citizens of the universe.
An Absolutely American Thing
If you live in a polarized country where half of the nation is concerned with identity politics and the other half wants to wall off and defend the country from any change in identity, then this is going to be a major influence on how immigrants from the stars are treated. Especially if this country is essentially democratic, and the citizens possess freedom of speech and unlimited internet access.
This is the world of Hank Green's new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. He tackles first contact from an emergent bottom-up viral media stand-point. Because this process is relatively democratic and unstructured, it inevitably pits the liberals against the conservatives. People think how they want to think, and then have the the capability to express this on a grand stage. They choose sides.
April and "Carl"
At the start of the story, sixty-four hulking alien statues miraculously appear in urban areas across the globe. Late one night, April May and her art school buddy Andy stumble upon the New York statue and film an empathetic and welcoming YouTube video, in which they name the statue "Carl." The video (and the nickname) goes viral. April May becomes the self-deprecating, self-aware, and self-consciously-famous narrator of our first-contact-experience. Not only is April May special, she's extra-special. Extra-terrestrially special. She's also emerged as the most important person on earth. The alien visitors chose her and so did the internet, and then-- at least for most of the story-- she uses her special status to stay several steps ahead of the government, her fans, and a political faction called the Defenders. She is constrained by nothing. In District 9 and The Three-Body Problem, all roads lead to authority. And authority controls decisions and destiny. But not in America. We don't need no stinking badges!
Meanwhile, things get very binary between the liberals, who want band together as one human species and solve all the puzzles the alien force has presented (in a shared Dream) and the Defenders, who are xenophobic and pragmatic and defensive. It's a bit of a political caricature of America, but it works, especially since this book is probably geared for precocious YA readers. We get democracy of thought at its best and worst. Individuals making decisions that have real impact. It's such an American perspective. The enemies of global cooperation are a large amorphous binary faction and from this mentality emerges some awful individual action. Terrorism. It's a simple way to view the world. There's us and them, the liberal and the conservatives . . . and even individual conservatives might have some good ideas, but some of them get carried away and take things too far and try to take matters into their own hands. It's a tale of individual fame and knowledge, and how that can get amplified by feedback loops and viral media. This is what Green gets best . . . and so the science and technology and viral nature of ideas and fame in our world is just as strange and speculative as the world of the shared alien Dream. They are both portrayed in loving detail, and make up for the fact that April May is a mildly annoying representative of the the liberal American democratic techno-state.
I also love that April May's trusty sidekick is Robin, the personal assistant/handler assigned to her by her ruthless publicity agent, Jennifer Putnam. April May and Robin, modern superheroes endowed with the power of millions of YouTube followers and the aegis of robots from space. America: we are an absurd society, a silly superpower.
Life is More Than Humanity
In stark contrast to Hank Green's ode to the power of individuality, we have Cixin Liu's depiction of China. The novel begins during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A physicist is being beaten to death because he inserted Einstein's Theory of Relativity into his physics curriculum. The current regime regards Einstein as an American Imperialist who helped build the atom bomb, and so not only is Einstein the person anathema, but his ideas are heretical as well. He did not fit properly into the Revolutionary Ideology, and so both the idea and the individual bearing the idea are quashed. In this society, you are defined not as an individual, but by which government (or anti-government) faction you belong to.
In this top-down system, it's not possible for an individual viewpoint to go viral. April May is not possible. In fact, it's not even possible for disembodied ideas to go viral. The top-down influence can oppress and dismantle actual ideas. We first see this with the government and the various intelligence agencies, but then we learn that the alien forces also have the power to destroy ideas and impede science. Liu sees this in Chinese history, and assumes that aliens would use the same strategy. The aliens do not choose an individual, ergo there is no April May. They examine systems. Democracy of thought does not win out in this world. Killings are utilitarian and without empathy. They are done with a cost/benefit ratio in mind, whether it's a spouse, a rival, or someone who possesses information . . . computation trumps individuality. Some factions even consider the entire human race expendable for the greater good. Ideology creates morality, and individual morality is rare.
It's difficult or impossible to operate outside this top-down sphere. The only one who has some success is the hardboiled detective Shi Qiang (who goes by the nickname Da Shi). He's earned his individuality though, by brutal and pragmatic success within the police/counter-terrorism force. He's proven himself indispensable.
Thank God for Da Shi. He's the only way into the novel for someone like me. I'm not Chinese, so understanding this totally ideological, utilitarian perspective is a stretch (although I enjoyed the historical/political parts of the book immensely . . . they are just as strange as the sci-fi portions). And, I regret to admit, that I'm not that interested in the stars. Black holes, three-body star systems, light speed . . . I should be more curious, but I'm not. I'm interested in other life forms, but the vast expanse of space leaves me cold. I'm not profound enough to contemplate it. I like when creatures move around, procreate, evolve, eat each other and have sex.
So Da Shi is a breath of fresh air. Here's some archetypal Da Shi dialogue. He's talking to nanotechnologist Wang Miao. Miao has been experiencing some hallucinatory events involving the background radiation of the universe that is making him question the fundamental laws of physics.
"You're saying the universe was . . . was winking at you?" Da Shi asked, as he slurped down strips of tripe like noodles.
"That's a very appropriate metaphor."
"Bullshit."
"Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance."
"More bullshit. Come, drink!"
Wang finished another shot. Now the world was spinning around him, and only the tripe-chomping Shi Qiang across from him remained stable. He said, "Da Shi, have you ever . . . considered certain ultimate philosophical questions? For example, where does Man come from? Where does Man go? Where does the universe come from? Where does it go? Et cetera."
"Nope."
"Never?"
"Never."
"You must see the stars. Aren't you awed and curious?"
"I never look at the sky at night."
"How is that possible? I thought you worked the night shift?"
"Buddy, when I work at night, if I look up at the sky, the suspect is going to escape . . . to be honest, even if I were to look at the stars in the sky, I wouldn't be thinking about your philosophical questions. I have too much to worry about! I gotta pay the mortgage, save for the kid's college, and handle the endless stream of cases . . . I'm a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass . . ."
The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
I love the fact that Da Shi lives in this very hardcore-sci-fi novel. He's a reminder that when the aliens come, most of us are going to have to go on living our lives. Business as usual. So how we treat the aliens will be constrained by the limits of our culture. I can't imagine that we'll treat them any better than we treat our own citizens with opposing political views, that we'll treat them any better than those who try to immigrate to our country without permission, or that we'll treat them better the members of our society who propose controversial ideas. We'll probably treat them worse than those people . . . because, when the aliens come, most of us will root for the home team (but not everyone . . . if you read The Three-Body Problem, you'll run into the Adventists, who think the human race might be expendable).
If you don't feel like reading Cixin Liu's trilogy, you could simply wait for Amazon to make the series. Supposedly, they're thinking about plunking a billion dollars down for the rights. I hope they get it done before the aliens actually arrive.
If you really want to hate Donald Trump-- but you don't want to get on your moral high horse and repeat a bunch of stuff everyone knows-- then the new Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk is for you.
First let's state the obvious. There's no question that Trump is morally repugnant, a racist who hates folks from "shithole countries", a laughingstock and a pussy grabber; Trump used campaign money to pay off a porn star and he has a twisted infatuation with Vladimir Putin, a leader that meddled in our election and is rumored to kill journalists and political opponents. His toxic tweets undermine the mission of our government, his lies foment discord, and he believes he's above the rule of law. He struggled to condemn white supremacists and Nazis, and he had trouble praising the recently departed John McCain. He separated families at the border. He's not loyal to anyone (including U.S. intelligence agencies). He mismanaged a crisis in Puerto Rico, and his version of Yule Tide cheer is to shut down the government. He's a gross human. You can go on and on with this kind of character assessment/assassination, but where does it get you?
Michael Lewis does something different in his new, rather short and slightly fragmented book. Lewis gives us a number of factual, quotidian, and concrete reasons to hate Trump. While it might not be as groundbreaking and perfectly written as his classic works (e.g. Moneyball, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, and The Big Short) it's probably more important. First of all, it's timely (the book sprang from articles he wrote for Vanity Fair). It takes a fairly apolitical look at what's happening right now in several departments in the United States Government (The Department of Energy, The Depart of Commerce, The USDA, and the NOAA).
Do Conservatives Think Michael Lewis Is Part of the Liberal Media Conspiracy? Maybe Not?
The second reason the book might be bigly, hugely, and powerfully significant is that Michael Lewis is so well regarded-- both as a journalist and as a writer-- that conservatives might actually read this book. If they do, they will learn something: the American government is great. Not the bipartisan political side of the government, but the mundane departments within the government and the people within these departments. The people who do the things that markets will never do. The people that insure the safety of our electrical grid; the people that contain and monitor all the nuclear waste we've created; the people that collect data on weather and soil and oceans and tornadoes; the people that fight wildfires; the people that concern themselves with the nutrition and health of our impoverished children; the people that monitor the safety of our food and livestock.
Donald Trump, mainly through incompetence and corruption, has managed to severely undermine these departments. And Michael Lewis doesn't even write about the EPA. This might be for political reasons-- the EPA seems to strike a really nasty chord with many conservatives (mainly because many conservatives-- especially in the energy sector-- don't believe externalities should be monitored, they want to do as much damage to the environment as possible, especially if it helps them to make more money . . . and then, they espouse, someday in the dystopically flooded and polluted future, the market will magically clean things up). It's impossible to be apolitical when you start talking about Trump, Scott Pruitt and the dismantling of the EPA. It's egregious. I think Lewis wanted this book to be politically palatable so he avoided this truly hot button stuff. Or he's writing another book.
Anyway, here's what Lewis does explain. When you take over the government, you are legally required to prepare for the transition. You need to appoint 700 people to very important government positions. Many of these positions aren't particularly political. They are positions involved with health, disease preventions, pandemic readiness, data collection, wildfires and nuclear waste, and R & D project management. Trump has done an utterly abysmal job with these appointments. He's appointed business people with conflicts of interest, unqualified friends, Trump loyalists, and-- disturbingly, in hundreds of positions-- no one at all.
You need to read the book to get the full ramifications of this very measurable, very factual incompetence. Lewis doesn't need to get into Trump's character all that much. He simply portrays his brash idiocy in contrast with the professional dedication of these often brilliant, mission-driven government employees; these people who make America great despite Donald Trump. The people who keep our technologically depend infrastructure working. If you think you're some kind of Ron Swanson-esque rugged individualist, then get real. Our government employs 9000 people to keep a glacier sized underground mass of nuclear waste from poisoning the Columbia River. Your gun, your tools, and your wood stove can't protect you from that.
Here's are some highs (and lows) from the book.
The Unlikely Hero: Chris Christie . . .
I'm a public school teacher, so I hate Chris Christie as much as the next guy, but juxtapose Christie with Trump and Christie comes off looking like a gentleman and a professional. Christie took on the responsibility of convincing Trump that in the unlikely case that he won the election, he had to actually prepare to run the government. It was his legal responsibility to create a transition team, and the Obama administration had prepared the best government transition protocol in history (although Lewis commends the Bush administrations protocol as well). Trump-- who apparently had no victory speech written and didn't really believe he was going to win-- told Christie that he was "stealing my fucking money" because Christie used it for the transition team, which investigates potential appointees. Trump told Christie that if they won, they could leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition themselves. Then Trump fired Christie, probably because Christie prosecuted Jared Kushner's father in 2004.
Trump was quite determined to not learn anything about running the government, and also determined to not hire anyone who could help him with this task.
The Chief Risk Officer's Take on the Risky Business
John MacWilliams, DOE chief risk officer during the Obama administration, outlines the top five risks that government agencies monitor and maintain.
Theft, loss and/or detonation of a nuclear weapon
North Korea
Iran's nuclear program
Failure of the electrical grid (through disaster, attack, espionage, etc.)
??????????
The fifth risk is the one we can't conceive. The unknown unknown. The problem with these risks from a cognitive perspective is that we can't accurately measure their probability. Trump's lack of appointments may increase the likelihood of a nuclear disaster from one in a million to one in 10,000. That's an exponentially huge increase, but most people will shrug their shoulders at it.
What's the difference? They're both big numbers.
Humans are awful at judging risk. We're more afraid of sharks than we are of french fries. And we have no heuristic method to add up all these small increases in risk and understanding the overall implications. But the truth of the matter, is that every day that goes by without some sort of major disaster in our infrastructure is a testament to our government.
MacWilliams explains the consequences of Trump's proposed budget cuts: ARPA-E loans, climate research, national labs, and the security our electrical grid will all suffer.
All the risks are science based. You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.
This is the part of Trumpism that's most disturbing and difficult to conceive: the dismissal of science. I know it's tied in to the hatred of elites and Hillary Clinton, that trusting scientific results is somehow akin to trusting the government and the liberal media conspiracy and the deep state, that trusting science will grant the pointy-headed social engineers the power to tell people what to do and how to live. It's true that science may occasionally do these things. Science now tells us that smoking and soda and having a gun in the house are really bad for us, that factory farming is an environmental disaster, and that cows and coal are contributing to global warming. Economists tell us that immigrants are good for the economy. These are inconvenient truths. It's fun to smoke and drink soda and eat burgers and shoot guns and hate immigrants. So Trump supporters don't want to hear it and they cover their ears.
I also understand that science is bringing the robots and factory automation. Destroying traditional industry. It's also measuring the externalities that businesses don't want to deal with. And it's increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots. The nerds are winning. The Trump supporters struck back at this. So I get it.
Big Pharma is big science, and Big Pharma certainly contributed to the opioid epidemic. Many people in this country feel they have no control over their life, and they are probably right to think this. They might be addicted to opiates, or in an area that has been left behind. Most American don't have one thousand dollars socked away in case of crisis. These same people have access to the internet and see everyone surpassing them, and wonder: what has science done for me? What has the government done for me?
These are the people that need to read this book.
Weirdest Trump Appointee: Brian Klippenstein
To head up the USDA transition team, Trump appointed one man: Brian Klippenstein. A really strange choice. Klippenstein ran an organization called Protect the Harvest, which basically "demonized institutions like the Humane Society." Klippenstein's group worried that if people got too concerned about animal welfare, we would stop eating animals.
Here's what Lewis has to say:
One of the USDA's many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and it maybe wasn't the ideal place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare.
After Klippensteins's appointment, data disappeared. This has been the case in several departments. The USDA suddenly purged all the animal abuse records. There was public outcry and some of the data has been re-posted, but the most important and specific stuff seems to have gone missing. And to access this data, which was public and accessible, you now need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.
The restored records represent a minuscule portion of the 17-year database, and they exclude thousands of inspection reports on puppy mills, private research facilities, and zoos that constitute the public record of commercial animal abuse. Since February 3, those reports have been accessible only by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, a byzantine process that can take months or even years.
What the fuck?
Does Trump Understand Irony?
No way.
Here's an example:
But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what happened.
Do rural Trump supporters understand irony? I hope so. Because they fucked themselves.
Does Barry Myers Understand Irony?
Probably less so than Trump. Or he's an amazing actor. No section of the book will make you angrier than "All the President's Data."
Barry Myers is the CEO of AccuWeather. AccuWeather is the Myers family business. Lewis explains that since the 1990s, Barry Myers (with a "straight face") has argued that the National Weather Service should be "with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property were at stake."
And even when human life is at stake, Myers is hesitant to let people rely on the National Weather Service.
This should piss you off. What should piss you off even more, is that AccuWeather bases all its forecasts on data it receives from the National Weather Service. Data it receives free of charge.
Rick Santorum, a recipient of Myers's family campaign contributions, tried to codify this inanity into law in Pennsylvania. Lewis starts to lose his generally objective tone:
Pause a moment and consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.
The lesson here is to get your weather from weather.gov. That's what I do. No ads. Same information. Straight from the source. If the law Myers lobbied for would have passed in Pennsylvania, then the website would have been blocked there.
Barry Myers is the ultimate symbol of Trump's bizarre business forward political corruption. Everything about what it is to be a Trumpian conservative is rolled up into this appointment, and this part of the book-- while not quite as exciting as the possibility of a nuclear disaster-- is really educational and really really ire-inducing. Don't read it before operating a motor vehicle.
The Takeaway
The end of the book focuses on the people who collect and utilize data for the government, how incredibly valuable this data is for everyone-- citizens, researchers, scientists, and private businesses, and how a new conflict greater than bipartisan tomfoolery is jeopardizing the system.
The NOAA website used to have links to weather-forecast. Now those links have been buried. This is why:
The man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should pay him for it. There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn't between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.
I'm a public school teacher. I'm in it for the mission. I generate a lot of good ideas every day, and so do my colleagues. I can't tell you enough how smart, dedicated and professional most of them are. We share these ideas with each other. There's no reason not to. We don't get paid more for having better ideas, but it feels good to have them. It feels good to be a better teacher. It increases your status in the eyes of your friends, colleagues, and students. America has grown so cynical that a good number of people don't believe that people like this exist any longer. They view the government as a stupid bloated nefarious system that begets and pays itself. This book might remind them otherwise.
1) people who fill their gas tank as soon as it gets a bit low;
2) people who drive around on fumes as a matter of course;
and I am one of those people who fills their tank as soon as it gets low-- it's bad for the car to drive with very little gas in the tank: you could burn out the fuel pump and you could kick up sediment (and, of course, you could actually run out of gas and have to freeze your ass off walking to the nearest station) but my wife is one of those people who is always driving around on empty (or even below empty) and while that's normally her business (sort of, because her car is the second most expensive item we own, after our house) sometimes it impinges on my life; Friday, we planned on swapping cars so that she could drop the van at the shop, which is right by her school, so they could put on the snow tires-- and my wife would get a ride to school (the shop is less than a mile from her school) and I would drive her car to my place of work; we made this plan last week, and so on Wednesday, I prepared the van for the swap-- I took out all the soccer equipment and stowed it in the shed-- and then I took the snow tires out from the crawl space (always a difficulty for me because you have to crouch down-- I often hit my head-- but I must point out that I did this chore without my wife's assistance) and I rolled the tires from the backyard to the driveway and put them in the back of the van so we were all prepared for the car swap and Friday morning I got up early, got ready for school, spent some time with my wife in the kitchen discussing the consequences of the FCC's rash and partisan decision on the future of net neutrality, and then hopped in the car-- the correct car, my wife's car-- to execute the final portion of the car swap, the actual swapping, but as I was driving out of town, I noticed that the gas meter was below empty . . . and I was running a little late because of our discussion about net neutrality so I didn't have time to stop for gas-- so I got pretty irate, mainly because my wife has a short commute, so she must have been running low on gas all week, but didn't prepare as considerately for the car swap as I had done and also because it's bad for the engine to run on empty, which I know she does-- she's an incorrigble low gas driver-- and also because I almost got stuck in a massive traffic jam, there was a helicopter hovering over Route 1 and the entire road was shut down and some of the overflow traffic was spilling on to Route 18 (and if I had taken Ryders Lane, I certainly would have run out of gas) and so I called home-- this is the danger of cell-phones, everything happens in real time before you have a chance to cool off, and got Ian to put Catherine on the phone and then I expressed my views on leaving someone a car with no gas in it for a car swap and then when I got to school, I did some research and sent a text describing just what could happen to the engine when you drive on empty and then I conducted an impromptu seven hour poll: I asked all my classes and every teacher I encountered if they ever drove on empty, and I'm happy to say that the results were slightly different than I thought: I began with a rather sexist hypothesis that this was a woman thing, and that women didn't understand the mechanics of an engine, but found that the split was fairly even-- wive's complained about their husbands, women admitted that they were risk-takers, men confided that they were on empty right this very moment, a woman whose father was a mechanic brought up the possibility of burning out the fuel pump, some people said they just hate getting gas and want to do it as little as possible, some people wanted to see just how much it cost to fill the entire tank . . . people were vehemently one side or the other-- people who didn't drive on empty thought that it was insane to do so-- that's my camp and my metaphor is toilet paper, there's very few things in life that you can directly gauge-- your gas tank is one of them and the amount of toilet paper left on the roll is another . . . when the roll gets low, you get more rolls of toilet paper and put them in the bathroom, you don't wait until there's one square left-- that's a disaster waiting to happen and it's a situation that's easy enough to assess and remedy . . .anyway, I don't think there's any way to change people on this issue and I'm not going to try (but I will check my wife's car the night before we do a car swap and if it's on empty, I will just go and get gas, and try not to lecture her about fuel pumps and sediment and frost bite).
Here are some podcasts that will twist your sense of morality back unto itself:
1) This American Life updates the noted George Saunders short story "Pastoralia" in Act Two of episode 623: We Are in the Future, the rest of the episode is trash, so head straight to "Past Imperfect" . . . it's thestory of an African American woman (comedian and actor Azie Dungey) who played the role of a slave at Mt. Vernon, George Washington's estate in Virginia, and the difficulties and disparagement she suffered as a consequence of this oddly symbolic position-- a sole black woman representing all 316 slaves that Washington owned; tourists struggled with this reminder of reality (thought it was sorely lacking in numerical accuracy) and the moral of the story is that none of us are over the past, and none of us are able to get over it, white and black alike, so we're going to have to have some frank discussions about what went on back there in the mists of time and how we're going to portray these folks that we all have in common;
2) Episode 792 of Planet Money, "The Ransom Problem" presents a wicked dilemma that combines Catch 22 and Hamlet's most famous soliloquy . . . when you've been abducted by terrorists demanding ransom, and you have to decided whether "to pay or not to pay"; the U.S. and Canadian governments refuse to pay kidnappers, while many European nations will foot the bill . . . and while in a utilitarian sense, it makes sense not to pay ransom, because you don't want to incentivize abduction, this tactic doesn't seem to be working . . . anyway, this episode will run you through the wringer, you'll change your position several times, and by the end you won't know what to think or do . . . not only does the podcast deal with the economic implications of ransom, it also tells the entire wild abduction story of Amanda Lindhout . . . and it all happens in less than 20 minutes;
3) the wake of a flood is probably the worst time to discuss the cockamamie flood insurance policies in our country, because you're bound to come off a bit callous and unfeeling, but the folks at The Weedsand Slate Money do a great job of being informative, empathetic, and knowledgeable about what we need to do in the future to amend the absurdity (not that it will ever happen).
It's ethically gross and difficult to stomach, but the most strategic way to prevent disaster with North Korea is direct contact and diplomacy-- we've got to treat Kim Jong-un like a real world leader, or at least pretend to do so-- because the possession of nuclear weapons commands this treatment, whether we like it or not . . . the possession of a nuclear weapon breaks down whatever ethical system you're using to solve the problem (aside from utilitarianistic realpolitik) because problems at the end of the spectrum nearly always break down categorical principles . . . very few people get hung up on whether a human or an amoeba possess more civil rights, but when you get to the fringe and compare the consciousness of a healthy chimpanzee and the consciousness of 97 year old man on life-support, things get more difficult . . . no one wants to abort and kill an eight month old baby, but the consequence of using a morning after pill is something more difficult to define . . . torture is most definitely wrong, but if you need a piece of information to avert nuclear war, then things that might be normally considered morally repugnant might be heroic . . . it's these places, moral quandaries at the edges, where ethical systems break down; there's nothing that feels morally right, and you just need to figure out things on a case by case basis; North Korea is one of these problems-- threats are useless because the ball is literally in their court-- we're the good guys and we don't use nuclear weapons cavalierly, sanctions don't work when the leadership of country doesn't care what suffering their citizens endure, and brinksmanship is too risky because it could cause a nuclear disaster, or a breakdown of the regime, in which nuclear weapons could get into random hands or disappear or worse . . . so it's time to suck it up and do what's right, even though it feels very wrong, because it's existential crisis and we've only got one earth, there's no control group, no A/B testing, and we can't risk it (unless, of course, you're some kind of religious nut, who truly believes in the afterlife . . . then you can pursue your principles without fear, punish the wicked as a matter of recourse, and know that all things will be sorted out during the rapture).
