With Folktales, as with Comedy, Timing is Everything

Last week my wife Jen and I took the kids to North Carolina to visit relatives, including the family matriarch, my grandmother Bucky. Knowing my proclivity for east Carolina-style BBQ, which is vinegar-based and the champagne of BBQs, Bucky treated everyone to dinner at Bullock’s, the planet’s best BBQ joint. My younger daughters Sammi and Yael, 6 and 3, respectively, wanted nothing to do with sitting in Bullock’s dining room, so after wolfing down my plate of ridiculous BBQ, competent cole slaw and forgettable French fries (if Bullock’s ever pairs duck-fat fries with the BBQ I will be launching a campaign to convince Jen to move to North Carolina), I soon found myself minding the girls on Bullock’s front patio. The patio had an outdoor speaker, so as the girls alternated grabbing local real estate flyers and Auto Traders with jumping off the four-foot high brick wall that defined the patio’s boundary, I chillaxed to some country music. (Some, including Jen, might say that I am incapable of chillaxing, but how else should one describe obsessively stuffing the real estate flyers back into their bins, extolling Yael not to let the flyer bin door slam shut again because, my goodness, it’s loud, then racing back to the brick wall to prevent an ER visit?)

One of the great things about country music is that you can actually hear the lyrics and follow the arc of the almost unfailingly clear narratives. So when The Farm’s “Be Grateful” came on, I could hear every word:

The other day I caught myself complaining
How my boss has got me working overtime
Then the stranger who was sitting there beside me
Said, I spent all day in the unemployment line
Are there open shifts, are they hiring on
I'll work any hours even all night long
If you could put a good word in for me

Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful

We complain about how much it's gonna cost us
To fill our 20 something thousand dollars cars
And living in the land of milk and honey
It's so easy to forget how lucky we are
We can work hard and buy a patch of dirt
And on Sunday morning go to church
And pray for those who don't have it as good as you

Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
(http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/the-farm-inc/be-grateful-36292.html)

“Be Grateful” at first appears to be a retelling of the old Yiddish folktale, It Could Always Be Worse. The folktale tells the story of a poor man so overwhelmed with the chaos and stress of sharing his tiny one-room hut with his wife, their six children, and his mother that he visits his Rabbi in total despair. Counterintuitively, the rabbi instructs him to bring his chickens into the hut with his family. Befuddled, the poor man nevertheless complies. Things, of course, get worse in the hut. Upon returning to the rabbi he is instructed to bring in his goat, which leads to further misery and a third visit when he is told to bring in his cow. Finally, upon the fourth visit the rabbi sends the poor man home to put all the animals back outside. Which, as told in Margot Zemach’s version of the tale, leads to a fifth visit:

“ ‘Holy Rabbi,’ he cried, ‘you have made life so sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful… What a pleasure!’”

In “Be Grateful”’s retelling, the overworked narrator stands in for the poor man as he appears at the beginning of It Could Always Be Worse, with the unemployed, desperate stranger standing in for the chickens, goats and pigs, representing the specter of disastrous misfortune which could just as easily have befallen the narrator. It is as easy as 1,2,3 to imagine the chickens as the gutting of the narrator’s union via “Right to Work” legislation, the goats as the subsequent cut in the narrator’s hours to the precise amount that fails to qualify for benefits, and the cow as the coup de grace: the offshoring of the narrator’s job, rendering him indistinguishable from the hopeless stranger. Staring the annihilation of malignant unemployment in the face, the narrator’s 70 hour per week job suddenly seems so reliable, so doable, …. What a pleasure!

But something in the retelling is more than slightly off, in the same way that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Our first clue is that instead of inhabiting a house full of love like the poor man at the end of It Could Always Be Worse, the narrator is too busy working obligatory overtime to spend any time at home with a loved one who is thusly reduced to an anonymous “someone” who loves him. (In a real, joyful love song it would be “my baby” who loves me, or some such term of endearment.) But our best clue is that the humor of the Yiddish original, a humor found in the great irony that the only way out of suffering is through more suffering, that suffering is likely the very ground of happiness (echoing It Could Always Be Worse, the Buddha himself taught that suffering is at the very least the prior condition to liberation’s happiness), is missing. In fact, the song isn’t really a retelling of It Could Always Be Worse at all, but a cooptation of the old folktale as a decoy. In place of the original’s radical, redemptive existential humor is a thin coating of cloying treacle which tries and fails to cover a putrid core. That core is the song’s unconscious regurgitation of the fear-based message aimed directly at the shrinking middle class from the American oligarchy: If there’s safety in numbers, then you should be very afraid. But the oligarchs’ hubris doesn’t stop there. I used to think that fight or flight were the only two natural responses to fear. In fact, there’s a third option: freeze. Our direct orders are as follows: be very afraid, and keep doing exactly what you’re doing (i.e. freeze). Which is exactly what the song’s narrator does. Granted, he does go to church and pray for the less fortunate, but one gets the feeling that this prayer is rooted as much in the fear of losing what’s his as it is in compassion. In fact, the refrain’s last line, and the song’s title, makes a great deal more sense as “Be Afraid.”

As profound a tale as (the genuine version of) It Could Always Be Worse undeniably is, perhaps it is miscast in this historical moment, too prone to being hijacked by the reigning principalities and powers. In its place I suggest we turn to another story, Bone Button Borscht, a Jewish retelling of Stone Soup, which, just like the opening verse of “Be Grateful,” features a beggar. But instead of inspiring fear to dress up as gratitude, this beggar, in playfully enticing the embittered, frightened townsfolk (that’s us) to contribute their hoarded foodstuffs to the common pot, transforms fear into generosity. If there is a message for our time it is exactly this: Be generous.

There is No Do

Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that “Hell is other people.” In the ensuing years it has become fashionable to explain that the majordomo of French existentialism was misunderstood; even Sartre joined in the act:

“‘Hell is other people’ has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.” (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing-jean-paul-sartre.html)

It is all well and good to hear what Sartre really meant. But what gets lost in his explanation is the tendency of language to escape intended meaning the second it leaves our lips or, as in the case of “hell is other people,” pens. Language, like one’s children, has a mind of its own, as does every member of the audience. So when, e.g., Shakespeare has Polonius utter “This above all: to thine own self be true,” The Bard very likely intended us to think Polonius a blowhard and, above all, an asshole. Instead, it turns out that Polonius rendered the founding statement of contemporary western civilization. (Making this, rather unsurprisingly, the age of the asshole, and, at best, a lateral move from what we smugly label the Dark Ages.) Just so, Sartre’s would be pithy synopsis of the intersubjective quality of human identity must instead be taken on its own terms, i.e. as an endorsement of the brute fact of social pain.

So, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” And if hell is other people, then it’s good to be king. Failing that, one can get by as an introvert. As to the former, I recall reading an interview with Baltimore’s king of guerilla cinema, John Waters, in which he explained that the very best thing about his success was that he no longer had to interact with anyone he didn’t want to, essentially supplying Sartre with the missing second half of his formula: “Heaven is the absence of others.” Alas, each kingdom can have but one king, leaving his loyal subjects stuck with one another. Except the introverts, because, as every introvert knows, “Heaven, or at least purgatory, is hiding in plain sight where other people don’t notice you.” While John Waters lives safely behind his moat, the introvert who works at Video Americain (Baltimore’s indie video rental shop, back when such things existed) hides safely behind the counter, from where she is happy to recommend a foreign film while practicing nonattachment, which is western Buddhist for not letting the customer who ignores her suggestions and instead rents Goonies, Gremlins, and Ghostbusters in nostalgia for the eighties and in celebration of the letter g know that he has cut her to the quick. As to those loyal subjects not equipped with the introvert’s native cloaking device, let’s call them every day extroverts, they make the best of hell by forming strategic alliances based on the foundational principal that the enemy of my enemy is my friend; the plot of CBS’ Survivor franchise could be boiled down to “Hell is other people.”

We are left with three primary social entities: kings, factions, and hermits. (Introverts are just public hermits, each introvert wearing the ring that binds them all, with its power of invisibility and all of the attendant side effects.) The people who are really screwed in such a landscape are what I would call the pure extroverts. Pure in the sense that their extroversion is untainted by strategy, because of the fact that they are Bizarro Sartres who find heaven in other people. Pure extroverts are this realm’s ultimate tragic figures, quickly becoming every faction’s sworn enemy. Factions operate by a very simple logic: you’re either with me or against me. And if you aren’t my enemy’s enemy, you are mine.

Roy Rogers’ declaration that he never met a man he didn’t like would seem to paint him as the archetypal Bizarro Sartre. Except that there can be nothing tragic about a man who had his own eponymous fast food chain. (Having your own eponymous fast food chain only to see it go bankrupt, a la Kenny Rogers and Kenny Rogers’ Roasters, is, however, almost as tragic as the end of Romeo and Juliet. Strange that Roy and Kenny share the same last name, as if Kenny’s explicit endorsement of sinful wagering in The Gambler symbolically crowned him in the villain’s black cap, in direct contrast to Roy’s virgin white, karmically sealing the fate of Kenny’s rotisserie while leaving Roy to continue raking in the cash as fast as he could get his burgers off the grill.) Roy Rogers was almost certainly an introvert, i.e. he never met a man he didn’t like because it’s hard to dislike someone who you do your very best to keep at arm’s length, often by being very nice to him. Note that Roy Rogers was famously nice.

A pure extrovert would never say “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Instead, she would say “I never met a man I didn’t love,” which guarantees the pure extrovert’s inevitable tragic demise at the hands of the factions, but also marks her as simultaneously damned and holy. Damned, because kings and (typical) introverts are too busy sealing themselves off from those they don’t want any part of to offer any help, and holy because “I never met a man I didn’t love” is just another way of saying “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Loving your neighbor as your self is, of course, impossible, which means there are no pure extroverts (though my Dad came close, as does my wife), which, ironically and paradoxically, means our only real purpose rests in the effort to become pure extroverts. (Or, for us incurable introverts, fearless and visible public hermits.) In the end, then, what is required is a reversal of Yoda’s famous credo: “Try. Or try not. There is no do.”

The Question

I have many happy memories of my late maternal grandmother, Grammy: sitting on her screened-in back porch during a central Florida evening thunder shower while playing Rack-O and eating fudge striped cookies with milk; the way she described anything she didn’t like as “unique”; her delight in escorting my sister Pailin and me to flea markets and all you can eat buffets, both of which seemed to offer a bottomless satisfaction unavailable in the mid-Atlantic. But one year, upon my arrival in DeLand via I-95, Grammy taught me the art of being human.

This may or may not have been the year I dug in my heels about the plastic sheet on my bed, and then, after it had been removed, proceeded to wet the bed that very night. But it was definitely the year my mother, who typically spent the entire week-long stay with Pailin and me at Grammy and Pop-Pop’s, was away for several days, for reasons I don’t recall, but which reasons were sufficient to leave us in Grammy’s care. The most important element of which care was, apparently, to keep Pailin and me regular. Or at least me, because Grammy would daily inquire of me as to whether I had “made a B.M.”

Grammy, you see, had been a pediatric nurse. And it turns out that before the advent of modern pharmaceuticals, a pediatric nurse’s primary duty had been the intensive tracking and charting of children’s bowel movements. What else are you going to do when, e.g., you can’t do a thing in the world to prevent the children on your ward from up and dying from polio. None of which changes the fact that Grammy was my grandmother and not my nurse, and that antibiotics had already been around for decades by the time Grammy and Pop-Pop relocated to the Sunshine State. Which would have made the only appropriate response vis a vis Grammy’s B.M. check-ins a hearty “None of your business,” but for the fact that it is never appropriate to tell one’s grandmother that something is none of her business, at least if one is still wetting the bed.

Because copping to constipation was unthinkable, the consequences of which constipation were as terrifying as they were opaque, I had a golden opportunity to tell someone I cared about exactly what she needed to hear, whether it was true or completely fabricated. Dressed up for polite society, this skill is known as empathy.

But for a few geniuses or brutes, the most important question most of us can ask the world is “What do you need me to be?”

“Regular, you say? Okay, got it.”

It is only by successfully and consistently decoding what the world needs you to be that love and work even becomes a possibility. I’ve been regular now for going on forty years, gainfully employed for nearly twenty, and happily married for ten, with no end in sight now that I’ve started drinking coffee. I’d say that’s the story of my life, and that it was written in stone the second I told Grammy “Yes.”

Middle Class, We Hardly Knew Ye

I have been saving up my pennies to purchase a copy of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. By all accounts, it is a game changing exposition of what Paul Krugman in his review of Picketty’s Capital calls “a second Gilded Age,” in which, again per Krugman, “the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/)

Pope Francis essentially said “Amen!” with his recent Tweet that “Inequality is the root of social evil.”

And while Picketty and the Pope do the heavy intellectual and spiritual lifting, the New York Times runs articles titled “The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World,” reporting the following:

“As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all… Investors have taken notice of the shrinking middle. Shares of Sears and J. C. Penney have fallen more than 50 percent since the end of 2009, even as upper-end stores like Nordstrom and bargain-basement chains like Dollar Tree and Family Dollar Stores have more than doubled in value over the same period.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?_r=0)

When French intellectuals, the Pope and corporate America are all in agreement, the game is up; politicians and pundits are, of course, mouthpieces for the burgeoning family dynasties and can, as such, be tuned out when considering whether the truth is not only out there, but, more importantly, ready at hand to, as the saying goes, set us free. So, as long as we are willing to set aside e.g. Newt Gingrich’s appearances on Crossfire on behalf of the oligarchy, in which he lambasts the idea of increasing the minimum wage, we can happily report that the scales are beginning to fall from our eyes, much as they are in regards to climate change. I am reminded of Mr. Beaver’s line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Aslan is on the move.” Except there is no Aslan, just us chickens. We chickens are on the move!

As we move forward, salvaging the middle class as a first step towards, dare I say it, a classless society, we will need to figure out how we allowed all of this to happen in the first place. I believe that it has a great deal to do with the interplay between thought and language. Along these lines, structuralism has elucidated the tendency in thought to mark off the world in pairs of binary opposites. In reconsidering these pairings, e.g. male and female, straight and gay, white and black, much good work has been done in demonstrating that the binary opposites are inevitably coded re: power; in each of the three examples power accrues to the former. But binary opposites do more than establish a rigid hierarchy. Notice that hewing strictly to the listed opposites leaves no intellectual space for, respectively, the transgender, bisexual, and mixed race folk among us. Binary opposites are just as much about exclusion as they are about domination.

This comes into focus when we consider the binary opposites rich and poor. Don’t forget that the emergence of the middle class is a very recent, historically contingent event, and that the American middle class proper only ever truly existed between the twin founding events of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the end of World War II and the beginning of the end with the election of Ronald Reagan. (By “middle class proper” I mean that sliver of time when any American who worked earned a genuine living wage.) The world functioned for millennia based on the binary opposites rich and poor, and without a middle class, and would happily settle right back into that homeostatic groove if left to its own devices. Recall that Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” not “the middle class you will always have with you.”

If we are on the move, if we are going to save the middle class as the first step towards saving the world, we’ll need to pry apart the binary opposites that prevent us from even conceiving of a world minus dominance and exclusion. Perhaps the exclusive nature of binary opposites helps explain Slavoj Zizek’s observation that “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Movements like this need symbols. And note that binary opposites don’t just rule our minds, they also rule the marketplace. Think Crest/Colgate, Home Depot/Lowe’s, Walmart/Target, and Fed Ex/UPS, pairings which leave precious little space for Aqua Fresh, your local hardware store, Kmart and the US Postal Service, none of which will be in business in a decade. Of course, noticing that each of the listed pairings are actually much closer to clones than opposites leaves one wondering if our cherished freedom of choice is, at bottom, just another version of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous observation that rooting for one’s favorite baseball team is “actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.” Our way of life has come to consist of preferring Crest and Colgate to Aqua Fresh, which means we’ve built an entire civilization out of a Hobson’s choice, i.e. “a free choice in which only one option is offered.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice) That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for one particular unwanted third wheel. As we choose to create a world without outcasts, let’s all raise a glass of RC Cola!

Birds and Mosquitoes

I was pushing my three year-old, Yael, in a little red plastic car the other day, the one with the blue handle for the adult to push with, doing lap after lap in her Bubbie’s back yard. Each revolution took us past Bubbie’s birdbath, your standard white pedestal-sinky set-up. Every single time we passed the hammock and came upon the birdbath I had the very same thought, which was that although it was a lovely birdbath that was sure to attract even lovelier birds, it was, with its stagnant little pool, a perfect habitat for thousands of mosquito eggs. It is said that when the English colonists first arrived in Maryland the Chesapeake Bay was so plentiful they could they dip their hands in and pull out a fish; but while the Bay is now on life support, during Baltimore summers you can stick your hand in the air and pull out a mosquito. And while Baltimore’s mosquitoes aren’t known to carry malaria, one does have to worry about the mosquito bite equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts.

By the ninth or tenth circuit it occurred to me that the birdbath cum mosquito nursery should have its own card in the Tarot, seeing as it encapsulates the inevitability that every human effort to improve the world be fraught with unintended consequences. Look, a cardinal! Ugh, mosquitoes. Writ large, this inevitability goes as follows: Look at the standard of living in advanced industrialized nations! Ugh, climate change.

There is a small but vocal movement, some of whom call themselves future primitivists, which asserts that everything went off the rails when we abandoned hunter-gathering and took up agriculture, i.e. when we established civilization as we know it. I would note that hunter-gatherers were no less proficient at having children than their corn-fed descendants, which, as every parent knows, rendered the hunter-gatherers vulnerable to the greatest source of unintended consequences the world has known: no one ever knows what the hell their children are going to get up to.

The first law of thermodynamics holds that, in a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just changed from one form to another. The universe is an infinitely large version of just such a closed system, meaning that the total energy in the universe is constant. I’d like to suggest that the amount of good in the universe remains at a similar eternal equilibrium. The idea of such an equilibrium isn’t new, of course, and is at least as old as China’s yin and yang, the symbol for which suggests that there can only ever be as much light in the universe as there is dark. And the mechanism that keeps light and dark, good and evil in balance in our universe may very well be unintended consequences.

This balance is maintained when intentionally bad acts have unintended good consequences. To wit, Desmond Tutu’s remarkable assertion in a speech I heard him give that “Europeans brought apartheid with them to South Africa, but they also brought the Bible. We got a good deal!” But since most people, most of the time, are trying to make the world a better place, even if only for themselves or those they care about, most of the unintended consequences that keep light and dark in balance are, in fact, dark. This goes a long way towards explaining why winning the lottery is almost sure to ruin your life, and why there are so many miserable successful people, e.g. biographers for John Wooden and Bill Walsh, respectively the greatest basketball and football coaches ever, have reported that each was exceptionally insecure amidst and because of their fabulous and consistent success.

What about the unintended good consequences of good acts, when people “pay it forward,” when love spreads, not to mention the unintended bad consequences of bad acts? Perhaps unintended consequences flow out of every single act, whether malevolent or benevolent, like waves from a stone dropped in a pond. The peak of every wave is the crest of the unintended good consequences, and the trough of every wave is the nadir of the unintended bad consequences. Peak and trough mirror one another in length, and the balance between light and dark is maintained. Some quantum physicists hypothesize a universal wave function, i.e. “the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction) If the universe is, in fact, an infinite ethereal wave, then maybe the idea of waves of unintended consequences keeping the universe aligned isn’t so very far fetched.

If doing the right thing leads to as much bad as good, whither social justice? I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech:

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Like Churchill, those engaged in the fight for social justice shall never surrender. But, unlike Churchill, we shan’t go on to the end, because there is no end. Victory in one battle only assures the next. Nevertheless, we can, and must, make this better. Even if the law of unintended consequences makes the fight for social justice into a high stakes game of Whac-A-Mole.

I would close by suggesting that if you have trouble accepting the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, consider the fact that it is a world that can’t be improved upon. And if the yin-yang symbol were a glass, would it be half full or half empty?

Goodbye Selfie, Hello Thumbie!

When selfie was named Word of the Year for 2013 many folks understood it as the moment when narcissism officially became the new normal, correctly sensing that in the age of the selfie the world is diminished to background for my eternal Big Moment. Ironically, in shrinking the world down to background in order to make room for our inflated egos, the selfie diminishes the self while appearing to enlarge it. Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson sheds light on this tragedy of egos grown too big for the worlds they find themselves in:

“I claim that if you went in there (the planetarium) with no ego at all and then you saw the grandeur of the universe, recognizing that our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy, then you would see the universe as something you participate in, as this great unfolding of a cosmic story. And that, I think, should make you feel large, not small.” (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=283443670)
How, of course, can you see the grandeur of the universe when you are too busy looking at your phone for your close-up?

What we seem to have lost is the art of being part of a larger story, insisting instead on being the whole story. It is perhaps not entirely our fault, as we watch the grand narratives of democracy and equality fast approaching what feels dangerously like a point of no return. What larger story remains for us to inhabit? But still.

So, for now, the path forward is retreat, maneuvering ourselves out of the foreground. In Brian Browne Walker’s translation of the I Ching, the text corresponding to hexagram 33 opens thusly: “It is inherent in the design of life that forces of darkness and disruption come into prominence from time to time. This hexagram indicates that this is such a time and advises you to respond by quietly retreating.”

To retreat is not to remove one’s self from the picture altogether. Just so, to accomplish the retreat from self(ie)-absorption, I propose a transition to the thumbie. There are a number of crucial differences between the selfie and the thumbie, beginning with the fact that the gaze in the thumbie is once again focused outward, towards the world, such as it is. Looking out, we are incapable of staring at our navels. (If the selfie accomplished anything it was the reorganization of our anatomy, displacing the third eye from its accustomed spot with the navel, which migrated up from the belly to the middle of our brows so that we could stare at it on the screens of our smart phones and in the selfies we post to Facebook and Instagram.) Because the thumb in a thumbie can, of course, point up or down, the thumbie restores the ego from its current debased status as permanent carnival barker, “Look at me!”, to its sacred role as the seat of conscious awareness. A world of which I approve or disapprove will always be a world which pushes back, a world with too much backbone to ever play background. A world worth fighting for, which ever seems to be the only reason we were put here. Which reason was not, assuredly, to star in our own private cinema.

So take thumbies endorsing the fabulous view from the room in your historic Boston hotel. Take thumbies of your heaven sent children watching The Empire Strikes Back for the very first time. Consider giving Sy the Dog a big thumbs down for pooping in the house yet again, but then give Sy the Dog a big thumbs up because you love him anyway. Save those thumbs down for chance encounters with Dick Cheney. Most importantly, take a thumbie and tell its story without using any of the five following words: “Me, me, me, me, me.”

Building a Better Bonfire

It’s just over two weeks now since the conclusion of my favorite sporting event of the year, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which has long since been branded “March Madness.” Although “March Madness” is used as a marketing gimmick, I like its echo of the connection between the calendar and behavior. The connection is not insignificant, and would perhaps be more noticeable if we followed a cyclical lunar calendar rather than a linear Gregorian one; see the rise in E.R. admissions on nights with a full moon. And even with the marking of time as we know it, don’t all of us in the northern hemisphere, at least those of us where it’s cold enough to wear hats, go a little mad by the time the tournament starts? Channeling our seasonal affective madness into the obsessive completion of tournament brackets, a therapy redoubled by the completion of equally fantastic tax documents due to Uncle Sam right as the tournament is ending, keeps many of us functioning until mid-April, when, in most years, the sun takes over for sports entertainment life support. This year, it snowed in Baltimore a week after March Madness had crowned its champion, which felt rather like finding out that one is actually a robot.

Each March, the college basketball aristocracy are paired off with their plebeian counterparts for all of the first round games via a politically charged, pseudo-objective seeding process; when CBS is paying billions in rights fees to broadcast the tournament, the “brackets” are about as objective as the Immunity Challenges on that other CBS franchise, Survivor. The seeding arrangements make the tournament the most reliable opportunity for witnessing one of the most interesting sports fan behaviors: we always root for the underdog, unless they are playing our team.

Let’s begin with the first part of the equation, the fact that we (almost) always root for the underdog. There is, admittedly, a little of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” involved in this. As a Tar Heel fan, I always cheer for whichever team in the tournament is playing Duke. I want the Tar Heels to go as far in the tournament as possible, and, just as importantly, this needs to be at least one game further than the Blue Devils. I was just talking to my (96 year-old) grandmother, Bucky, today, and chatting about the Tar Heels’ relatively disappointing 2nd round loss in the tournament. Without missing a beat, and without any prompting from me, Bucky pointed out that while the Heels hadn’t gone far, at least Duke had done even worse, losing in the first round, sparing her from having to hear any gate mouth from the Dukies in her retirement community. Which retirement community is inconveniently located in Durham, i.e. Bucky lives on their turf. Good thing Bucky is tough as nails, in the best possible way.

But, I would venture, rooting for the underdog runs deeper than the whole “enemy of my enemy” thing. With Carolina and Duke both out by the end of the second round, I was still pulling for the 11th-seeded Dayton Flyers to win their Elite Eight matchup with the #1 overall seed and two-time national champion Florida Gators, and not just because Dayton is home to rock and roll goddess Kim Deal. (Our names either make us, or we make ourselves in their images. Just so, her shit is so legit that if she were a boxer, she would definitely be Kim “The Real” Deal. Whereas, if I were a professional wrestler, I would wear a mask and my submission move would be “The Cough Drop.”) With no dogs left in the race, I was backing Dayton primarily because they were the last best underdog left standing. And because, like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, and like everyone else in the world who roots for underdogs, there is still good in me after all.

College basketball, like the rest of America, is a landscape of haves and have-nots. The advantages held by college hoops blue bloods, the Carolinas, Dukes, and Kentuckies of the world, are legion: outsized athletic department budgets, deep pocketed boosters, constant television exposure, broad and deep fan bases, and home court cathedrals, just to name a few. In short, elite college basketball programs have a surfeit of power, and it is the responsibility of the head coach, with the full support of his athletic director and university president, to wield this power effectively enough to continually dominate the opposition. In other words, power is deployed in college basketball as it always has been in almost every chapter of human history. Cheering for the underdog, then, is an outlet for our collective instinct that this neverending story of power and its application is plain wrong. Carolina, Duke, and Kentucky aren’t evil (though we Carolina fans have fun pretending Duke is), but, in harnessing every resource to shock and awe their overwhelmed opponents, they are perfect stand-ins. (Evil = 500,000 dead in the Iraq War, all in the name of a lie. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/iraq-death-toll_n_4102855.html) Lest I be accused of “anti-Americanism,” I would ask America “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your eye?”) In always cheering for the underdog, we are constantly reimagining the world as a place where the last are, finally, first.

Except when we don’t cheer for the underdog, which is whenever they stand in the way of us finishing first. You may object that of course we root for our favorite teams against the opposition, including underdogs, because, duh, they’re our favorites. Suggesting that one refrain from cheering for one’s favorite team sounds like utter nonsense. But the fact that it sounds so nonsensical is, indeed, the crux of the problem. We so take for granted favoring our favorites (which I suppose is the very meaning of the word favorite) that we can’t even imagine doing otherwise. Which is all well and good in a basketball tournament, but which takes on new meaning when we realize that our absolute favorites, of course, are our very selves. So go ahead and cheer for whomever you please in March Madness; I would have turned on Dayton in a second if they had encountered the Tar Heels in their half of the bracket, Kim Deal notwithstanding. But understand that cheering for the underdog unless they are playing one’s favorite team is a reminder that we instinctively crave justice and equality right up to the point that it costs us something. With humans, the universal is (almost) always trumped by the particular, and “as above, so below” is replaced by “not in my back yard.” When we say “all politics is local,” we are really asking “What’s in it for me?”

We find the perfect exemplar of the tension between our intuition of the good and our instinct for self aggrandizement ready at hand in American history in the person of Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the following in our nation’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And who just as famously proved unable to give up his slaves and the wealth and sexual access they provided. Self interest blinds us to the self evident truth. The very same dynamic is in play re: climate change, where the two possible responses in play for American power brokers are 1) denial or 2) hand wringing, neither of which costs anyone anything.

Organized religion has been something of a mixed bag down through the ages, though, from where I’m standing, we are, on balance, better for it. Exactly how much better is a more interesting question. The persistence of religious belief combined with the failure of the world’s great religious traditions to collectively bring about what my faith tradition would call the coming of the Kingdom (feel welcome to substitute your own tradition’s terminology for the happily-ever-after) tells us two important things. First, that our intuition of basic universal goodness is, like the State of the Union, strong. Strong enough that the world boasts 5.8 billion religious adherents, an amazing fidelity to the good given everything we know about suffering. (Though all brands of religion miss the mark, each to a varying degree in different historical moments, they also each always aim for goodness. I take this as an article of faith, which, somewhat ironically, decreases my own faith, i.e. I no longer feel about my own religion the way I feel about my children, who I know are the best. Short of feeling this way about one’s children I don’t know how it could be possible to do everything that needs to be done for them, and, just so, short of feeling just that way about one’s religion I don’t know how one is supposed to get one’s self to church, temple, mosque, meditation center, etc. Religion that loves its neighbor’s religion as devoutly as it loves itself cannot, seemingly, survive.) And second, that however strong our sense of the good may be, our sense of self, and all of the attendant self interest, is yet far stronger. We always cheer for our favorite team. Religion may be good enough and true enough, which explains why we all believe in the good, but it just isn’t strong enough. As in strong enough to make us do the right thing when it costs us something. Because if 5.8 billion people were doing the right thing, at whatever price, the Kingdom (or whatever you want to call it) would assuredly have already come. (I use the word assuredly because almost everyone almost always doing the right thing is, to my ears, the actual definition of “the Kingdom”; it is the only conceivable “best of all possible worlds.”)

The great tragedy of religion is that it has lost its great gamble that it could, indeed, prove strong enough. Religion would remake us, one by one, as individuals and communities willing to pay the price of righteousness (funny how tainted that word sounds, as if the idea of doing the right thing has gone rancid in the sun), or, as the Quakers put it on the banners above their meeting houses, willing to take the risks of peace. A significant chunk of religious life is practice for just these risks and sacrifices, e.g. fasting on Ramadan or Yom Kippur, observing Lent, or giving away one’s good fortune to others with the out breath in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen meditation. Each of these is rehearsal for craving justice and equality deeply enough to break on through to the other side of self interest. But instead, like Jim Morrison himself overdosing on heroin, we continually hit a wall. And, we should note, we hit the very same wall, perhaps even harder, under the auspices of that religion for seculars, Marxism, the central tenet of which, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” requires at least as much selflessness as any of the aforementioned religions.

There is an old idea making the rounds again which holds that “it's institutions -- not people -- that are evil.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/noam_chomsky_was_right_why_the_koch_brothers_are_obscuring_the_real_enemy/) This observation is just slightly wide of the mark. I would say instead that 1) institutions aren’t selfish, people are, but 2) institutions leverage self interest so efficiently that they perform something of an anti-miracle, the transformation of water into wine replaced by the mutation of garden variety selfishness into evil. This distinction is critical because it informs another set of solutions. Because attempting to construct or reconstruct institutions which aren’t evil is nearly as hopeless as trying to raise entire generations of selfless individuals. We must recognize the intractable difficulty of both, grounding this insight in an understanding that the inevitability of selfish humans makes the existence of institutions that feed off of that selfishness, i.e. evil institutions, incredibly likely. But note that while human selfishness is, for the foreseeable future, inevitable, we are merely at incredibly high risk of evil institutions. We are, effectively, Jim Carey being told by the girl of his dreams in Dumb & Dumber that his odds with her are “like one out of a million.” Carey sublimely responds “So you’re telling me there’s a chance…YEAH!” So must we. Even if it makes us look dumb. The only alternatives are despair or Rhett Butler’s “I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes once they’re really lost,” though it is unclear whether the lost cause is us, religion, or both.

Our last, best, slim chance is building institutions that are neither good nor evil. Because all of the good institutions, which have tried to carry us past the threshold of self interest, tend to fail, and all of the evil institutions, which simply harness that self interest, tend to succeed. It is said that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, which holds that life is suffering, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic. We need institutions that are realistic in just this way. Realistic about both the limits of human selflessness, and the tendencies of institutions to exploit these very limits. There is at least one such human institution, namely the Potlatch:

'“In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished" Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, were observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.'(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch)

The Potlatch, of course, is no miracle cure. But in bending self interest to the good, in stark contrast to the doomed effort to transcend self interest in the name of the good, it gives us a place to start. If we can build just such realistic human institutions, I’d say our odds are at least two out of a million.

So I’m telling you there’s a chance… YEAH!!!

The Hole In Our Soul

I have just started reading Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity. It is always dangerous to draw conclusions from a 512 page book when you are just 40 pages in, but the opening chunk of Eisenstein’s Ascent is more than meaty enough to chew on, especially when amplified by some serious synchronicity (more about which in a moment). Eisenstein is right up front with his central thesis that the current global crisis, a crisis best exemplified by the existential threat of climate change yet somehow even broader and deeper, is a blending of “the story of humanity’s separation from nature with the story of our individual alienation from life, nature, spirit and self.” And, just as importantly, out of this state of alienation we have launched our twin would-be therapies, which Eisenstein describes as “the Scientific Program of complete understanding and the Technological Program of complete control.” But these therapies, far from guiding us from a state of illness back to health, are revealed as a toxic form of self-medication. Eisenstein diagnoses us, bluntly, as addicts:

“The future of the Technological Program is one where all the problems are solved once and for all. Here and now, though, we are waking up to another kind of future, and with a hangover to boot: vomit on the floor, apartment trashed, the world a mess.”

Admiring the problem, getting off on the mess, these can be just as addictive as the technology with which we’ve made the mess. It is something I guard against in writing this blog, with, I fear, mixed results. I am convinced that pessimism is addictive in large part because of how much less effort it takes. Meaningful optimism requires an increasingly steep degree of intellectual rigor, making it at the same time increasingly rare. Which makes it so thrilling that Eisenstein’s project is unreservedly optimistic, whilst, in the author’s own words, “assiduously avoiding New Age clichés.” (I have a heart full of my own favorite New Age clichés, e.g. the bumper-sticker slogan “God bless the whole world, no exceptions,” but keep them there a) because they fuel the heart-work of loving my neighbor, and b) because they are safe there from my mind, which thinks itself fully rational, making it (my mind) the ultimate emperor with no clothes. This heart-mind split sounds exactly like Eisenstein’s “individual alienation from… spirit and self.”) Eisenstein’s optimism is certified the moment he proposes an actual solution: “to abandon the program of insulation and control, and the conception of the separate self on which it rests.”

In contrasting this solution with what he terms our current “off-separation from the universe,” Eisenstein asserts that “rejuvenation and wholeness have been, and will be, the consequence of a different worldview, one that has roots in primitive culture and religion, and that is the inescapable yet heretofore generally unrealized implication of twentieth-century science.” (emphasis added) Everything Eisenstein says, or at least everything I can imagine him saying 40 pages in, hinges on that one little word: “wholeness.” Because as I read this passage the typically inaudible unfurling of my memories sounded instead like a whole tray of plates smashing to the floor in the kitchen. The noise redoubled when I got to page 19 and Eisenstein’s description of “our lost wholeness”: “It is a feeling that something is missing. Some people call it a hole in the soul.” The noise was Slovenian philosopher Slvaoj Zizek’s dramatic take on Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece.

Shel Siverstein is most famous in my household for penning The Giving Tree, a book which my wife, Jen, loathes. (Jen sees in The Giving Tree an endorsement of naked self-interest and exploitation. I must admit that I was less than impressed by the boy-who-grows-into-a-man character in The Giving Tree, especially in his bald middle age. And the tree itself seems to me sad and undignified in its giving, needy rather than gracious.) But, having never read The Missing Piece, Jen has no opinion about it, while I only became acquainted with it via Zizek’s interpretation in the introduction to his Enjoy Your Symptom! Here is the plot summary, as quoted from Wikipedia:

“The story centers on a circular animal-like creature that is missing a wedge-shaped piece of itself. It doesn’t like this, and sets out to find its missing piece, singing:

Oh, I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
Hi-dee-ho, here I go
lookin' for my missin' piece

It starts out on a grand adventure searching for the perfect piece to complete itself, while singing and enjoying the scenery. But after the circle finally finds the exact-sized wedge that fits it, it begins to realize that it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing, like singing or rolling slowly enough to enjoy the company of a worm or butterfly. It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down, and continues searching happily.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Piece_(book))

The key moment comes when “It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it.” For Zizek, this is precisely when “the it… constitutes itself as desiring subject through a lack.” If you have been reading this blog you know I have a penchant for reformulating Descartes’ cogito. So, at the risk of going to the well once too often, here goes. Zizek is essentially saying “I desire, therefore I am.” Or, since we only desire because of our constitutive lack, “I lack, therefore I am.” Eisenstein’s “feeling that something is missing,” his “hole in the soul,” is, then, simply the emotional tone and spiritual condition peculiar to a human consciousness.

Seen from this angle, The Missing Piece is the tale of Eisenstein’s longed for “wholeness” found and rejected; it is a reversal of Amazing Grace into “I once was found, but now am lost” that is, shockingly, as overflowing with gratitude as the original. Eisenstein’s pursuit of wholeness suddenly seems reminiscent of the scene in The Matrix: Reloaded when Neo learns from The Architect that the original Matrix was both a) a virtual utopia free of all suffering, and b) rejected by its human inhabitants for that very reason. The history of The Architect’s first Matrix is, at bottom, a retelling of The Missing Piece.

But if, per The Missing Piece and The Matrix: Reloaded, we homo sapiens have rejected wholeness, our preferred modus operandi is leading to another rejection, only this time it is Mother Earth herself rejecting the artificial heart transplanted smack in Her chest in the form of us “desiring subjects.” The choice between Eisenstein’s wholeness and Zizek’s lack begins to feel like choosing your last meal before execution.

It was with just such pleasant thoughts that I went to bed after reading the first bit of The Ascent of Humanity. The very next morning my work took me to a meeting held in an elementary school library, during which meeting I glanced at the bookshelf abutting our little round table. There, at eye level directly in front of me, were three copies of Silverstein’s The Missing Piece. “Aha,” I thought, “the universe is clearly endorsing Zizek, we aren’t meant for wholeness, and if we’re going to save ourselves and our planet we had better rescue desire from capitalism, perhaps beginning by collectively desiring a twenty-hour work week.” (I didn’t actually think all of this on the spot given that I was attending to the specifics of the meeting, but I could feel the thought’s “bow wave,” one of my new favorite terms and one which describes the experience of knowing what’s coming before it happens, i.e. like the wave pushed out in front of the bow of a boat. I played baseball for years and came up to bat hundreds of times, but only once did I ever have precognition of getting hit by the pitcher. Standing in the on-deck circle, I felt the wild pitch’s bow wave. Neither before nor since have I ever been struck with such vivid foreknowledge. We all know what we’re going to think next, e.g. I know that I will never vote Republican, so maybe my use of “bow wave” in reference to my thoughts is a bit of a misnomer. In any case, my wife, who knows me better than I do since her view of me isn’t clouded by my garden variety projections and denial, i.e. she sees through my bullshit, can also tell you what I’m going to think next. And she still loves me! “A man’s greatest treasure is his wife,” indeed.)

But there, just a few books down on the very same shelf, was P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, which was something of a miracle given that a book by Eastman has no business on the same shelf as one by Silverstein. Unless the books were shelved by genre instead of by alphabet, which changes the particulars but not the fact of the miracle; either way I was staring at two famous illustrated children's books that essentially tell the same story, but with much different endings. Here is the plot summary of Are You My Mother?, again quoted from Wikipedia:

“Are You My Mother? is the story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches. He does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, ‘No.’

Then he sees an old car, which cannot be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous earth mover. A loud ‘SNORT’ belches from its exhaust stack, prompting the bird to utter the immortal line, ‘You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!’ But as it shudders and grinds into motion he cannot escape. ‘I want my mother!’ he shouts.

But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The earth mover drops him back in his nest just as his mother is returning home. The two are united, much to their delight, and the baby bird tells his mother about the adventure he had looking for her.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother%3F)

The search for a missing piece is mirrored by a search for a missing mother, and both searches endure several false starts. But where Silverstein’s “It” finds the missing piece, only to throw it back and continue looking for satisfaction it doesn’t really want (thereby achieving satisfaction by never finding it, making life either a mystical paradox or absurd, which seem to be the only available choices for us desiring subjects), Eastman’s baby bird is delivered to its missing mother by its last, seemingly terrifying mistaken maternal object. As Snort, the embodiment of the industrial revolution, unexpectedly delivers the baby bird to its lost mother, one can hear Eisenstein in the background, riffing on the possibility that it is technology itself that will bring about the end of “The Age of Separation,” and deliver us unto “The Age of Reunion,” a “potential reunion that lies in the fulfillment, and not the abandonment, of the gifts that make us human.” The particular tale of separation and reunion told in Are You My Mother? is the children’s illustrated version of The Ascent of Humanity every bit as much as The Missing Piece is the children’s illustrated version of Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! I would note that in both cases the children’s illustrated version came first.

So what was the universe telling me by putting both of these books on the same shelf right in front of my nose? Presumably, if the universe endorsed either wholeness or lack I would have encountered the corresponding children’s book, but not both. And it doesn’t seem possible that the universe was endorsing wholeness and lack; we don’t live in a universe of squared circles, after all. I am, it seems, left with the work of interpretation. So… if wholeness and lack are mutually exclusive, then perhaps a semantic shift is required. A shift from wholeness contra lack to a desire born from wholeness. The latter may be just as illogical as the former, if we grant that desire is just a byproduct of lack. But perhaps it isn’t always. And what would a desiring subject constituted from wholeness even want? She would want to give and, quite possibly, create.

Some would say that God, who by Her very definition is whole, constituted us with a lack, gave us our hole in the soul, so that there would be someone to receive Her gift. For us, achieving wholeness, then, would be to join in the Divine game of creation in order that we might give. (Our giving will be nothing like the Giving Tree's; if nothing else, we won't end up a stump.) What might we make, and to whom might we give? I seem to recall something about a “five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Here’s hoping we find wholeness before we take to the stars.

Seven of Ten

In a recent Washington Post article about the most expensive colleges in the country, Catherine Rampell reports that “after subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid at each institution… seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are arts schools or conservatories of some kind.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/)

It would be easy enough to note the obvious irony in the fact that the profession which pays the least (see “starving artists”) costs the most to pursue, and stop at that. But I am going to propose that everything you need to know about art schools and, by extension, art in America, can be gleaned from that one fact. Before doing so I should note that I know as much about the ins and outs of the art world as I do about the inner workings of the Internal Revenue Service; my art diet consists of books and rock and roll (the beans and rice of the arts). This means that I am either a) free to interpret the cost of art school without the filters and biases of someone submerged in the arts, and, as such, able to see the truth hidden right in plain sight, or b) completely out of my element, and about as likely to succeed as if attempting to design and construct my own rooftop deck. I will, for the purposes of writing, presume the former; the reader is, of course, free to decide for him or herself.

Prohibitively high art school tuition operates on two primary levels, one impacting those who somehow matriculate, and the other affecting those who are essentially excluded. I will begin with the former. Setting aside the narrow sliver of the population whose parents can actually afford to pay full art school tuition, the dream of making art involves the reality of massive student loans. If your retort is “So what, I had to take out student loans, too,” recall that the art student’s loans will necessarily be the highest, and their post-graduate earning power the lowest. If you took out student loans you took out less, and you came away with the power to earn more. This is true for even the financially humble professions of teaching, social work, and nursing, and even more so for law, business, and medicine. Art school students fall prey to a quintessential double bind, their cash flow bringing to mind the old Black Flag Roach Motel tag line, “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”

This analysis is just a longer version of the obvious irony initially noted above. We don’t really get anywhere unless and until we are willing to stipulate that the price tag on art school is no accident, nor is it because it is just plain more expensive to teach art. Last I checked, pastels and clay don’t cost anymore than books or beakers, art history profs no more than their counterparts in engineering, and the computers used to make graphic designs would seem to carry roughly the same price tag as those used for typing senior theses about Proust. The price of art school doesn’t come into focus without the recognition that art school graduates, saddled with enormous debt, become the vanguard of paying the bills. Seen in this light, art school costs the most precisely because theirs is the most dangerous profession. Dangerous because the bulk of an artist’s raison d’etre is the imagining of other possible worlds, except in those cases when the artist instead exists in order to pay back six figures of debt (plus interest!). Art isn’t inherently revolutionary, just potentially so. Really existing art school exists to quell that potential.

Art school’s suppression of that revolutionary potential is reinforced by its clientele. If you are fortunate enough to attend art school, college loan debt notwithstanding, can you reasonably be expected to turn your art against the very system that upholds your privileges, since these very privileges enable your emergence as an (official) artist? Could you turn your back on the only form of externally granted status that could ever align with your deepest sense of who you are at your core, the only institution that has ever said “Yes, art is important, and yes so are you,”? (All of these things, by the bye, apply in varying degrees to liberal arts higher education, which doesn’t cost quite as much, and which allows you to make a little more, but which doesn’t change the fact that folk like yours truly are implicated by pretty much all of this. It takes one to know one.) Which makes the second level on which art school tuition operates, the exclusion of entire swaths of society from art school, equally as important as the first in the neutering of art. Because those who have the most to gain from social change, from making art that opens up new possible worlds, are those effectively excluded from making professional art. In a society where credentials are everything, art school is the keeper of cred. Street cred may help with sales of your first rap album, but it won’t help you open a gallery in SoHo. For that you need a blurb in the Times, i.e. you need to go to art school.

Many of the teachers and students in art schools would likely describe their work as exactly that imagining of new worlds which I am, a priori, denying them. I would respond that by describing their work as such they are making a sales pitch, that they actually believe it to be the truth and not a sales pitch, and that this in turn makes it a more effective sales pitch. I am, of course, accusing them of inhabiting a false consciousness, which is not in any way a new critique, but is, I would argue, no worse for the wear. Again, the reader is welcome to disagree. But if one disagrees one takes on the burden of explaining how one can make art that is both a commodity and transformational. It says here that the two are mutually exclusive.

I don’t know about your burg, but everyone I’ve ever met in Baltimore who went to MICA (the local art school), now works at MICA. And I would hazard a guess that all the rest of MICA’s alumni work at other art schools. There is an old word for toiling away one’s years in debt bondage: indentured servitude. Art school grads have simply updated it for modern times, making it permanent instead of temporary. (To get a sense of MICA qua institution, consider the following report from the current edition of Baltimore’s weekly City Paper: “In response to efforts of the art school’s adjunct faculty to form a union, outgoing MICA president Fred Lazarus and other administration officials have sent out letters urging adjuncts to vote ‘no’ and consider ‘whether you want to turn over important rights to a union.’” (http://citypaper.com/news/baltimore-city-power-rankings-1.1661057) That these “important rights” are left unspecified is no surprise, given that the only rights the adjuncts could possibly lose in forming a union are the rights to continue giving away all of their power; the aforementioned indentured servitude clearly ain’t just a rhetorical device. But the cover-up is always worse than the crime, and in covering their tracks with a bald faced lie, “The union will hurt you as much if not more than us,” MICA is no longer merely exploiting its workers, it is operating in bad faith. This is an exponentially graver sin.)

My solution: Everyone makes (free) art and no one goes to art school. It’s often said that after the revolution comes, the first thing to do is to empty the prisons. But to start the revolution, let’s try emptying the art schools. And, crucially, filling the streets with art.

Discuss Amongst Yourselves

I was struck by the following passage in Will Oremus’ recent Slate article about coffee’s “third wave”:

“Their search for a better cup has given rise to a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious. Stumptown of Portland, Ore.; Intelligentsia of Chicago; and Counter Culture of Durham, N.C., don’t just sell ‘dark roast’ and ‘light roast.’ They sell coffees like Stumptown’s Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja, which is grown by smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website. The beans come with descriptors like ‘fair-trade,’ ‘single-origin,’ and ‘shade-grown,’ and sport ‘flavor profiles’ that would make Robert Parker blush. They’re roasted and brewed with obsessive attention to details like the extraction rate and brewing ratio, which are separately optimized to bring out the best in each bean.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/crosspollination/2014/03/blue_bottle_coffee_vcs_search_for_the_new_starbucks_starts_in_san_francisco.html)

In reading this, I was overcome by two primary emotions, the first of which feelings was surprising in the way that discovering you are bleeding when you aren’t aware of a wound is. I have only recently discovered the pleasures of coffee, having for years believed that “I can’t handle coffee,” which belief ran so deep that I listed it on the “25 Facts About Me” that everyone was filling out on Facebook a few years ago. (In retrospect, the “25 facts” fad was likely a narrative ur-form of the selfie, like novels presaging movies. The book, of course, is always better than the movie, and “25 Facts” trumps the selfie. Making it doubly depressing that if I posted 25 new facts about myself every week on Facebook it would come off as raging narcissism, whereas the posting of selfies as new profile pictures is an easy ticket to 25 “likes” or more. Fortunately, I can embed all the new facts about myself I like in this blog, which is symptomatic of merely mild to moderate narcissism, and therefore well within cultural norms.) But after several slow and steady years of building up caffeine tolerance via Irish and English breakfast teas and cultivating a willingness to endure an afternoon of mild shakes and low grade anxiety (given that I felt that way all the time before giving up gluten, crashing off of coffee is sort of nostalgic), I am a newly minted member of coffee nation. (Note: If you can meaningfully apply the suffix “nation” to a term, as you can with coffee or e.g. the Red Sox, then the group in question has already lost its soul.) But I had no idea I had fallen “truly, madly, deeply” for coffee until I read the quoted passage and felt a wave of sadness as I realized it will never again be possible to simply enjoy a good, or even a very good, cup of coffee.

The Slate article focuses on Blue Bottle, a San Francisco-based purveyor of coffee that has attracted some serious venture capitalist investment. Oremus’s slant is that Blue Bottle might turn out to be Apple to Starbucks’ Microsoft. Massive and rapid growth seems a bit unlikely for a business that handcrafts each cup of coffee, a practice which, if nothing else, puts a natural cap on prospective sales, but growth, of course, is the name of the venture capital game. When pressed for an explanation of how Blue Bottle will survive the natural pitfalls of corporate expansion, Blue Bottle founder James Freeman explains to Oremus “his goal is not to keep quality constant—it’s to keep improving it, even if that means growing more slowly than he could otherwise.” (ibid) The growing slow part of the equation is all well and good, but it is the first part, the part about constantly improving the coffee, which is so sad. Because what Freeman and the entire third wave of coffee have forgotten is that a cup of coffee can only be so good. And, even more importantly, this is good enough.

If there is one cliché at the heart of late capitalism, “When good enough isn’t good enough” may very well be it. Originally intended as an ode to the pursuit of excellence, it has become a diagnosis. The original meaning, the understanding that excellence is always within reach, has been twisted into a forgetting that perfection is always beyond our grasp. “Constantly improving the coffee” is also an echo of constantly growing the economy, the failure to recognize the limits of flavor reminiscent of the failure to recognize the limits of growth. If our great wisdom traditions tell us anything, it is that this very moment, the eternal here and now, is “When good enough is good enough”; see both Tibetan Buddhism’s “Basic Goodness” and the Book of Genesis: “Then God looked over all he had made, and He saw that it was very good.” In reading about third wave coffee, one gets the feeling that on the seventh day, the barista worked straight through the night.

But, as noted, sadness wasn’t the only emotion in play as I read the quoted passage. It also felt awkward, like accidentally walking in on your roommate having kinky sex with his or her partner. In describing “a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious,” Oremus has missed the mark; third wave coffee makers and consumers haven’t found religion so much as they are indulging a fetish. To be clear, this isn’t equivalent to a straightforwardly sexual fetish as exhibited by e.g. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, whose foot fetish videos, endearingly produced with the full cooperation of his wife cum foot model, found their way onto the internet. Instead, third wave coffee is entangled in the process of sexualized commodity fetishism, a Marxist concept that sounds dense and complex, but is actually rather simple. It is, in a nutshell, an explanation of how we end up desiring consumer goods. And third wave coffee is fraught through and through with this misplaced desire.

Commodity fetishism can sound rather bland, and hardly worthy of the term fetish, until we acknowledge its sexual underpinnings. Note the difference between the two following definitions of the term:

1) “The psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value- other than the value given to it by the producers, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)

Yawn.

And 2) “Marx said that fetishism is ‘the religion of sensuous appetites,’ and that the fantasy of the appetite tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper.” (ibid)

Now we’re getting somewhere! And perhaps, seen in this light, Oremus is correct, and third wave coffee does indeed involve religious reverence. But in aiming for (sexual) self gratification, it is a debased form of religious worship. (This is not to suggest that there is anything debased about Rex Ryan’s conjugal relations with Mrs. Ryan; sexual fetishes are apples to sexualized commodity fetishism’s oranges. And if an apple a day keeps divorce away, bon appétit.) In worshipping commodities like third wave coffee, we have made a graven image out of our own desire. (Full disclosure- I have my own commodity fetishes: automobiles and, of all things, tennis racquets, which I like to justify to myself by imagining them as substitutes for lightsabers. But really.)

The old saying goes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Just so, Eros is as bound up with its opposite, aggression, as yin is with yang. Thus it comes as no surprise that third wave coffee, the new sexualized commodity fetish par excellence, is rife with aggression as much as it is with sex. The clue here is the “smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website.” To interpret the clue, we turn to Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne’s explanation of the turn from commodity fetishism to commodity narcissism:

“Consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origins of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the ‘concerned consumer’; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.” (ibid)

What is most important about both Cluley and Dunne’s description, as well as its glaring example in the form of Stumptown’s smallholder farmers’ faces, is that this is a veiled aggression. Veiled, most of all, to the aggressors themselves, who, in consuming “fair-trade” coffee not only deny their inescapable culpability in the (literal) sins of globalization, but imagine themselves as rebels against the very system that has no better symbol than a $4 cup of coffee. All of which brings to mind the conundrum facing African Americans: would you rather live where the racism is overt (i.e. the American south) or covert (e.g. Boston)? In this case, would you rather live amongst the wolves of Wall Street, or amongst the wolves in sheep’s clothing inhabiting San Francisco cafés (or your local third wave coffee shop)?

Time for decaf, indeed.