Someone here in Cairo taught me a really useful term: "Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome". Usually, it refers to Westerners who think that they can swoop in with romantic ideas and solve the Arabs' problems for them, but around here I've heard people using the term differently. It describes those guys - and they're usually guys - who come to an Arab country for a while and start to act and talk like they understand the Arabs and can move effortlessly in their culture. They're something between an Orientalist and a hipster. "Oh, yeah, man, I just love talking to coffeehouse guys, you know, regular people. That's the real middle east." The guys who are always eager to explain some phenomenon with "well, in Arab culture..." As in, I was sitting in a room full of foreigners and unthinkingly crossed my legs, when some, umm, helpful young man still in undergrad told me I needed to break that habit because, "in Arab culture, pointing the bottoms of your shoes at people is considered really rude".
Gee, thanks. I had no idea.
I don't mean to be too harsh on these guys, or rather, I do, in that Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome is something I'm vulnerable to as well, something I need to be on the lookout for. It's a useful name for a set of bad habits that I can be more vigilant against when the phenomenon is named rather than nebulous. I have a know-it-all streak, and a show-off streak, and, well, if I'm not careful I could wind up being one of those guys who goes around bragging about how they found a sufi concert in some backalley cafe in a poor part of town, and they were totally the only foreigner in the room (someone actually said this to me). Nobody wants to be that guy, and the expat scene in Cairo seems to be crawling with them.
There's another facet to this, which is a subject for another post: part two in the 'expats behaving badly' series. I've only been here a week and a half, and I already have more stories than I wish I did.
What, you wanted pictures? Well, my pictures so far from Egypt are stuck on my camera thanks to a dead cable, which I need to get around to replacing, but just for your trouble, here's a couple pictures from Lebanon that I had lying around. The top one is the sea castle, an old crusader fort in Sidon, and the lower one is the temple of Jupiter in Baalbek, a massive Roman site, all lit up for an oud concert I went to.
Pictures when my cable is liberated. Aside from finding the expat scene kinda smarmy, Cairo is unbelievably awesome and there's much to say.
Yesterday, the day before I left town, Philadelphia got nailed by the worst storm I've ever been through. It came out of nowhere. One minute it was 95 degrees and sunny, the next it had completely clouded over, hail was falling, and 60 mph winds (or so the news later said) were whipping through the city. And then, almost as suddenly, it was gone. When I walked through the park 10 minutes later, the farmer's market vendors were still there, stunned, soaked, and hiding under their canopies. They hadn't even managed to pack up their veggies in time.
My neighborhood was trashed. Branches everywhere, and a number of trees, some of them very old, knocked down and pulled out by the roots. They tore up the sidewalk on their way down. The very center of Penn campus looked, well, like a hurricane hit it. It'll literally be years before some of that grows back.
If you're superstitious, that's a very ambiguous omen to begin a trip on. It's not an obviously negative sendoff, just a melodramatic one, sort of like Philadelphia slammed the door behind me.
Besides, it'll be a while before I see any rain again.
In 12 hours, my plane takes off. I'm going to Lebanon first for a couple months - long story, which I'll tell when I'm not in a rush to get out of here - then Egypt for 1-2 years, to do my dissertation. This is a qualitatively different thing than the other two times I've been in the region. It's longer for one thing - I'll really be living there this time. I already stored or sold my worldly possessions, and I moved out of my apartment. Cairo will be as much 'home' as anywhere is right now.
It all feels more serious somehow, not least because once I get to Egypt, I need to start, you know, doing a dissertation. A pretty ambitious one (I just passed the prospectus defense on Wednesday).
I still, of course, plan on it being an adventure.
So, I've been really busy/productive in the last month since I've posted. For one, I seem to actually have a dissertation now, one that I like, and my advisors like. I'll probably be able to defend the proposal in the next few months, and then I'll be ABD (which is academese for all-but Dissertation i.e. you have cleared all PhD requirements except the dissertation itself. Or as middle easternists say, `abd al-Dissertation. Which, uhh, I guess isn't very funny if you don't know Arabic).
For another, I just got the word that I won a bunch of grant money, so I will be hitting the field. This time, it's the real thing. Not some summer Arabic program. I'll be doing a bunch of advanced Arabic study to get myself to the point that I can read scholarly work, but mostly I will be there doing my actual dissertation research.
For at least a year. Maybe two if I can win another grant, like SSRC or a Fulbright, or one of the more obscure sources. I'm still floored by this. Like, I'm hitting the field. For real. And I'm going to be gone for 1-2 years.
So, yeah, next stop, Cairo. A couple of other cities in the region may be involved - Beirut, Bahrain possibly - but the bulk of the research is going to be done in Egypt.
Since last June, I've lost something like 50 pounds. I work out five times per week; I do yoga, a lot. I'm pretty sure I'm in the best shape of my life. There is a longer post I want to write about all of that. It's been a strange year, health-wise.
What the blogpost reminded me of is that I have this recurring nightmare that despite all of this, one day I'll go in to see a doctor who hasn't read my history, and they'll start in on me about my weight anyway, even though I'm now at the top end of normal BMI for my height. See, I've had bad experiences with doctors about my weight. They've had this tendency to ascribe absolutely anything and everything to needing to lose weight, and at least once, it's caused them to miss something that was actually wrong - it turns out that my back pain wasn't the result of being heavy, but the result of a serious congenital deformity. And they didn't believe me enough to even bother with an x-ray until I lost weight. So, I cringed when I read of a study that lent evidence to my impression that doctors were taking my concerns less seriously simply because I was overweight. The dehumanization can be subtle, but it's very real, and I've experienced it. It's not about doctors saying "you should lose weight" - that's part of their job - but about them turning your size in the most salient thing about you, and making all kinds of implicit assumptions about your character based on it.
But now that I'm not really overweight anymore - something I'm still afraid to say out loud, for fear that I'll jinx it somehow - I still have a complex left over from fighting an uphill battle against being treated like an object of disgust. Try second-guessing yourself to death, wondering whether nothing is wrong, or your doctor is giving you the blow-off because, subconsciously, they find your body gross. That's what I've dealt with my whole adult life. Thus my nightmare, I think: I have this terror that no matter how hard I've worked, and no matter how my body actually looks right now, all I'll ever be, to doctors, myself, or anyone else, is fat.
Edit: From the comments section, something that really struck home with me:
I had a moment of shock last month, when I realized how deeply the anti-fat messages run, when I had a sinus infection.
My husband was pressuring me to go to the doctor about it. (I literally couldn't go for the first two weeks I was sick, because of Snowmageddon DC.) Eventually I burst out with, "They'll just tell me it's my own fault, for being fat, and send me home." Because that's my experience with doctors. Everything I've ever gone for, no matter what the cause or symptoms or my family history: "Lose weight."
I lost 50 pounds over two years -- I'd now consider myself 10-20 heavier than I'd like to be, but in the "acceptably fat" range of society -- and the problems didn't get better. Fancy that. But I did go to the doctor, got told I had all the classic symptoms of a sinus infection, and had 10 days' worth of amoxicillin. So at least I'm learning. ;)
In general Ta-Nehisi's comments section is good, by blogospheric standards. Read as much of it as you dare.
There are a lot of people and groups out there whose agendas I oppose, sometimes bitterly. I'm less opinionated than some, and a heck of a lot less opinionated than most of the people who go into my particular line of work: I don't have strong feelings on cap-and-trade, for instance. I just sort of shrug diffidently when asked what I think about whether big or small government, as such, is preferable - the question just isn't as interesting to me as others. And, like Randall Munroe, some days I just can't bring myself to get upset about copyright law. In a political science department, where the TAs routinely argue day in and day about the specifics of policy towards Iran, I often feel apathetic.
But still, there are things I really care about; things I'm willing to fight about. With most, I've had to discover that I care about them. Coming from a middle class life, there were few problems that I could really say were immediately and pressingly relevant for my own well-being. Most causes were at least one level of abstraction away from my daily life. Some of them, the most flatly ideological "what-kind-of-society-should-we-be-making?" stuff, were several levels away. Lots of middle class people get really into that - most of the really extreme extremists in history weren't poor and desperate; they were comfortable and a little bored - but my temperament, for whatever reason, isn't like that. It's a choice for me, almost conscious effort, to care about things.
And not unreasonably: It's such a huge undertaking to make even a little difference about anything at all that I've always felt like I had to choose my issues very carefully, because I thought, and still sort of think, that it's a deeply vain affectation of the chattering classes to have a well-developed opinion about some issue you don't plan to do anything about. Most of us will not spend our lives on activism. We'll be doing jobs that keep the world going 'round some other way, and maybe donating money or volunteering a little on a small list of things we care strongly about. There isn't room for much more in most human lives. Outside of that very limited sphere of activism, what good is knowing what you stand for? What good does a strong opinion actually do, other than provide intellectual stimulation and occasional spirited conversation? If it's a general sort of keeping-your-mind-sharp thing, that's fine, but that alone doesn't justify being (intelligently) opinionated as anything but a direct personal virtue, about on par with going to the gym regularly and eating a balanced diet.
There are downsides to this line of thought. It encourages quietism, for one thing. It is absolutely a reflection of my comfort, wealth and social-capital that I have the luxury of not caring very hard about certain things. If neither of us devotes much of our limited effort and resources towards alleviating poverty, but you have a strong moral stance on it while I do not, which of us is really the less mature one? I don't know. You could also accuse me of not sharpening my intellectual faculties by avoiding so many of these questions, but there I'd say you're off the mark: I invest plenty of energy in sharpening my mind, just not often on what other people think the big questions of the day are, and even less often on the sorts of questions that require you to have a yes or no, for or against, This or That Should Be Done type of answer. Aside from all my other complaints against the practice, declaring yourself to be on this or that side, or that something is good or not, gets very boring very fast. I think colinmarhall posted something to this effect a while back.
But there seems to be a pleasant side-effect to my way of thinking. Because opinions don't come to me easily - because I have to wrestle to develop them, rather than have them come to me by the reflexive moral instincts most people seem to have - I'm less likely than most people to write off my opponents as evil or, worse, illegitimate.
I draw a very sharp distinction between a legitimate enemy and an illegitimate one, and I'm very, very, very cautious against even accidentally painting an enemy as illegitimate except in pretty extreme circumstances. You can be my enemy, even my bitter enemy. I can be completely dedicated to utterly defeating you and every aspect of your agenda, but I would not cast you as an enemy of humanity who is making an argument that Should Not Be. It takes more empathy than I have to really grok the anti-gay crowd and how they see the world, and I've already devoted time and money to beating them back, but I would not say that they, as a phenomenon, are wrong. Only that their stances, underlying philosophy, worldview and agenda are wrong.
The distinction can get subtle, but it's important. It's so easy to say that you are fighting against someone who's evil or stupid. It's even easier to think that, because you're fighting (metaphorically) to the death, you are fighting against something that shouldn't ever have been in the world, an agenda that should not be pushed by a group that should not be. It's easy to say that someone isn't just wrong but illegitimate, that it's not ok for them to even make their argument. But it's disfiguring. Making someone into the enemy of humanity, rather than just your enemy, makes them, well, inhuman. And the effects of dehumanizing your enemies are, you know, bad. Especially in what claims to be a democracy.
This post has a part 2, which will be written in a day or two, and will go under a friends-lock, because it contains some comments about teaching, and I don't want that public.
Here in Philadelphia, the snow wasn't as crippling as in DC. The city got a foot or so, the suburbs a bit more. That's not enough to paralyze the city, but it's more than enough to be very pretty, and very, very fun.
Instead of doing anything remotely productive or useful today, I went out into the snow, despite not having proper winter boots - you don't really need them in Philly, usually - and down to Clark Park, which is just down the block from me.
Normally, I hate crowds (I know, I know, a city person who hates crowds; I'm perverse), but it turns out that sledding and General Winter Fun is one of those things that gets better, not worse, when you live in a dense-ish urban neighborhood and there's only one decent sledding hill, a big basin in Clark Park. Everyone was there: people I see randomly on the street, little kids and their parents, crust punks, Ubiquitous West Philly Hipsters who were enjoying the whole thing ironically, even a few brave Penn undergrads. Real snow comes here so rarely, it was like a carnival. I helped someone shovel out his car; a little kid very magnanimously let me use his little orange sled.
I stayed out as long as I could, until my totally-not-suited-for-snow shoes got soaked through and I couldn't feel my toes anymore. I complain endlessly about winter, but snow is one of the few bright spots, especially around here, when it happens infrequently enough that it's an exciting treat (as opposed to, say, Wisconsin, where it's about as remarkable as a sunny day in Los Angeles). If it's going to be freezing, at least let there be some snow. It adds some fun and beauty to Philly's otherwise bleak and draining winters.
I only wish I could find my camera. Well, trust me: it was delightful.
I didn't mean to spend a shade over a month with no updates. So much for being good about updating over break - blame my comprehensive exams, which were every bit as stressful and unpleasant as I thought they would be. Well, I'm back now anyway. I hope the internets didn't break while I was gone.
One more piece of meta-LJ from me for the next little while, I promise: Around 2005, I started posting to this journal much more regularly, and my friends-list exploded. The explanation I usually give to non-LJ people for what I found so engaging was that it was the only place I was able to find a community of people who combined two things that were important to me, but didn't coincide much in my fleshy life: geeks, and gay people (mostly men).
The queer-nerdy-Jewish axis on LJ has been much commented on before, and it was pretty much a revelation to me at the time. I knew gay guys at Oberlin, but I was unlikely to have much else in common with them. I knew lots of geeks and nerds, but there was only one other queer guy in that circle, and he kind of scared me. What I found here was that when I found not just gay geeks, but enough of them to get past critical mass and make a community, it was a qualitatively different experience from knowing, say, one or two geeky gay guys. I could talk about queer things in a geeky way, and vice versa, and have a whole community, a whole discursive sphere as we pointy-headed theorists say, who got it. Having that much critical mass made my f-list a space I could inhabit, a place I could identify with. I figured out more about myself and how I see the world, and more quickly, than I ever expected.
There was a vibe that really felt like home to me, and what was so awesome about the thing is that we created it, casually, effortlessly, without any fanfare, and it rocked my world. Well, now that particular revolution is over, and in any case many of the gay geeks of lj-land have moved on to greener pastures.
Such is the way of the internet. But, I miss having spaces like that. My life is more compartmentalized than I ever remember it being. I once got entirely too excited after meeting another political scientist who played role-playing games, because it was that rare an event. I have some very good friends, but when I think of the communities I'm a part of, the atmospheres that could be spaces in the way LJ was a space during the golden age, I come up blank. Somewhat surprisingly, social scientists share few of my interests. I find most of them upsettingly normal. They often self-identify as nerds, but their definition is, uhh, different from mine.
It would be weird - awesome, but weird - to find a community that combined all of my various interests and identities, but this level of compartmentalization has gotten out of hand. So, perhaps I should quit whining and build my own: even if it doesn't include everything - that particular club would probably have just one member - it would be nice to have some community that I felt more at home in, rather than sharing exactly and only one thing with it (and feeling like a weirdo otherwise). Even two-identities-in-one-community, like LJ was for me, is a vast improvement over single-interest communities. But how does one build an online or offline space like that? Last time, I just stumbled onto one, but now it seems my luck is running out. It should be a really straightforward matter - start a group, do networking until you meet others like you. But the more I try to think about what such a thing would look like, the more opaque the question gets.
I was sixteen and a junior in high school when Columbine happened. For me, hearing about it was one of those flashbulb memories, where you remember all the little details of exactly what was going on when I saw the news; people talk about the Kennedy assassination the same way. I was in Quiz Bowl practice. We were getting ready for an online tournament called Knowledge Master. I don't know why we turned on the news, or who told us to, because we were in an otherwise-isolated English classroom after school, but I remember Paul, our team captain turning on the TV right to the channel showing coverage of a school shooting.
It wasn't the first school shooting that had happened in the country - those had started when I was earlier in high school. I remember that they hadn't yet started when I was in middle school, because I was always grateful that I was born a few years too early to get into trouble for my 8th-grade habit of doodling my school building being gorily blown up by a hail of bombs in the margins of my notebook.
But, this one seemed to be more important, though I'm not sure why it seemed that way early on. Maybe it was the scope of the thing. Maybe I'm projecting later memories back onto the moment - or maybe the media treats every shooting like it's going to be a big deal, and one of them finally was. I don't remember feeling shaken, but I think Paul was. I think he knew people in Littleton. Not for the last time, I wondered how I would react in a school shooting. For years, I would have daydreams of being the one to bravely lead the rush against a would-be shooter. I wondered if I would ever get over being in a school shooting, and if I would be scarred by seeing my and my friends' shell-shock broadcast on national TV in, as William Gibson once put it, some vast and deeply personal insult against any ordinary notion of interiority. No doubt, if it actually happened, I would have been cowering under a table, like everyone else.
In the days that followed, there were a series of bomb threats and copycat massacre threats called into schools all over my county, and one bomb threat accidentally called into a grocery store with the same name as a high school. All were fake, but all were pleasant distractions - every time a threat was called in, they had to evacuate the building as a precaution and sweep the place. It was a beautiful spring that year, so we all loved the chance to just relax in the sunny fields instead of being in school. No wonder there were so many bomb threats.
There might be some people reading this who were a bit too young to remember the cultural reaction in the months after Columbine, breathless stories about kids in black trench coats and Marilyn Manson turning sweet teenagers into monsters. The evangelical cult status of Cassie Bernal, "the girl who said yes", took time to really spread, and the drama that ensued over the story's debunking came even later than that. In the immediate fallout, I remember that some wanted to blame guns, others wanted to blame culture, and just about everyone agreed that more vigilance was needed, whatever that meant. It's from this era that we got bizarre zero-tolerance policies about toenail clippers in school and the like.
But what I remember most clearly from the fallout was the part that seemed most present in my own life: in all of the talk about Columbine, I remember a very clear subtext that the targeted victims had been good, popular kids, athletes and cheerleader types, and the killers had been marginal and bullied. It turned out the story was more complicated than that - I direct you to the obsessively-reported Columbine by Dave Cullen - but that was the narrative at the time. The narrative struck home for me because it wove so perfectly into my own persecution narrative. It was easy to read such a killing as the act of teenagers who had been exposed to hell day in and day out while authority figures did nothing to help and defended their persecutors as 'good kids', finally fighting back. Of course the world would react with horror - horror at the thought of their victims finally standing up for themselves. After all, who were all these authority figures but jocks and cheerleaders, all grown up? Naturally, they would try to put the misfits everywhere back in their place by using Columbine to stigmatize misfits even further.
Looking back on this line of thought, it was pretty over the top, but not completely crazy. Because in all this talk about Marilyn Manson and needing more 'vigilance', authorities at my school and at other schools really did begin to fear that they, too, had shooters in their midst. They created a watch-list that authorized all manner of surveillance and harassment - you know, to make sure they catch signs of trouble. And what got you put on that watch list? Wearing too much black, being associated with certain subcultures, the anonymous tip of another student. The latter thing, in particular, created an atmosphere of fear. I know of at least a few people who wound up on a watch-list because someone maliciously told the authorities some tall tale about them.
I stayed off the list, but not all of my friends and acquaintances had my talent for appearing harmless. It wasn't just a stigma the school created. It was a new category of student, one who is automatically suspect, who needs to be monitored, who is, without having actually done anything other than not fit in very well, already a quasi-criminal who does not get the benefit of the doubt. Needless to say, this policy was not used only to stop school violence. Like any watch list, it turned out to have more mundane disciplinary uses.
I can't point to anyone's life who was ruined by this policy - aside from a couple of kids getting suspended for having nail files in their backpack, which probably made college applications a bit harder. Nor can I think of official action pushing an otherwise good-but-marginal kid into actual delinquency. So it's not like my high school turned into an Orwellian police state in the wake of Columbine. But it was hard not to read the immediate fallout as reinforcing our own little, petty, teenage status structures, which could be cruel enough without any help from terrified authorities.
P.S. I'm in San Francisco for the next month or so. Normally, I go into radio silence this time of year, but this time, I'm going to try to be more active. Let's see how I do.
With my dad, I have exactly the opposite of the problem most men have with their fathers: he and I only seem to be able to talk about things that are really important. Imagine the stereotypical, kind of WASPy father-son relationship, only able to talk about sports and the stock market. Not me. I can tell him when I'm in trouble. I can come to him with any kind of concern. I didn't bat an eye about coming out to him when I was just fifteen. If I'm upset about something, I can vent my spleen at him, and while he will sometimes obnoxiously try to solve the problem for me, at least I know I can talk to him about it. It's just that outside of solving pressing problems and dealing with important stuff, we barely have a relationship.
I was talking to my mom about this over a bowl of Pho a week ago, when I went back to DC for Thanksgiving. My mom and I don't have this problem. Anyone can talk to her about anything. If my dad is the one who's more likely to understand and deal with something, my mom's the one who's more likely to actually make you feel better after talking. Back in High School, my friends would call my house, and when I picked up, they'd ask to talk to my mom. She's a great listener - I learned my best listening skill from her: whatever someone is telling you, repeat it back to them in your own words, as best as you understand it. In the worst case, they'll correct you if you've misunderstood. On the average case, they feel listened to. In the best case, the person you're talking to will find what you've just said very insightful. That logic, though, is mine. My mom, unlike me, doesn't use that trick for such calculating reasons. She just listens.
"I think you're both very frustrated that you don't have more of a relationship with each other", she said carefully.
"I don't even know what I would talk about with him in a normal conversation! What does he talk about when he's just, you know, talking?"
See, he's a great problem-solver, but he tends to treat just about anything I bring him as a problem to be solved. So, after about age 12, I stopped telling him much about the incidental details of my life. And this, in turn, reinforced the notion that I only talk to him when it's serious, so he tends to treat anything I say as serious. We have very little foundation for being able to talk casually.
Later that day, my dad suggested we go out for brunch together, before I took the train back to Philadelphia. It was my mom's doing, I'm sure. The timing was too good.
"I know I'm not good at just listening," he told me. "Even though I know it's true, it still seems alien to me that people want to talk about their problems just to talk. I want to help. I want to do something about it. I'm not good at just empathizing - it doesn't come naturally to me like it does to your mother".
He'd never talked quite like that before. I know he's aware that his zeal to help isn't always well-received - that's been made very clear to him by me and my mom over the years. But he hadn't put his perspective so clearly before.
"I mean, sometimes, you need to show some sense of understanding, or empathy, or something like that before you just solve a problem," I said. "Especially an emotional one. If I come home and say 'I'm worried about failing my comprehensive exams', sometimes the best response isn't to tell me how irrational my fears are. Even if you're correct, telling me so doesn't necessarily make me feel less anxious. Instead, it makes me feel anxious and irrational. Sometimes, you just need to talk through the crazy.
"Besides, you always say you want to help people solve problems, but sometimes you have to show some empathy in order to make someone feel like you're solving the problem together, rather than just having you swoop in and solve the problem for them. I don't think any adult likes being made to feel that way."
That seemed to hit home, apparently. After that, he opened up. We talked about things from my childhood, how proud he is that I'm so much less emotionally awkward than he was at my age, family stories, a hundred-year-old dispute his whole side of the family had about some ancestral money, everything. It was the most freely we've talked in years. On that whole dimension of our relationship - his tendency to treat things like an exercise in problem-solving - has genuinely gotten better.
But I can't help but notice that really, what we were doing was solving a problem: the problem of his tendency to treat things as problems, and my tendency to withdraw as a result. I still wonder, when I return home for the annual family latke party next week, just what he and I will be able to talk about.
Quick note: My computer seems to be dying. So, if I'm less than around for the next little bit, that's why. I'll be back in a few days once I've either gotten this fixed, or gotten a new machine.
Until Tuesday, I'm in Boston for a conference. So if I'm relatively unresponsive, that's why. I shall return, hopefully with stories. Conferences tend to produce, well, the kinds of stories you want to put under a friends-lock. And I'll just leave it at that.
I discovered science fiction when I was about ten. And I do mean discovered. Somehow, I made it ten years without the term or genre entering into my consciousness. My parents had no interest in such things, and somehow I had never picked up knowledge of its existence from friends. And unlike many sf and fantasy fans, I don't remember making up science fiction-esque stories on my own. Aside from some superhero comics, and Back to the Future II (which gave me nightmares), what's now called 'speculative fiction' just wasn't in my world.
Browsing around the public library randomly sometime in the fifth grade, I came across this:
The cover was different on my edition. Mine had a neon diner sign, lit up at night, much like this one:
It was a series of parallel universe stories. Like a story of a widower who goes from universe to universe (vainly) looking among infinite parallel universes for a reality in which he had died and his wife had lived, that sort of thing. I remember reading it, and I was completely hooked. More than hooked: it filled a deep desire - for more worlds, more possibilities, speculation embedded in things that are both familiar and alien - I didn't even know I had. It was like my world got bigger.
"I didn't know you could do that" has become one of my highest pieces of praise for something. It indicates that, after encountering it, my world is bigger or richer, usually both. I said something like this in an email to cobalt999 (whose correspondence with me has turned out to be great fuel for posts):
You know when you discover a new taste? I don't just mean learning that you like something you'd previously never heard of. I also mean you always knew about something, and you knew that lots of people liked it, but you never liked it and never saw the appeal, or what were its characteristics that would be appealing. And then, suddenly, you do. It's like a magic eye puzzle: in retrospect, it's hard to see how you didn't notice the 'right' way. Most people experience this with food, because their palates become more sophisticated with age, such that things that taste way too strong when you're 10 seem nuanced and complex when you're 20. But I've been having experiences like that with all sorts of things lately. They make the world feel richer and a little bit bigger - not just new experiences, but new kinds of experiences.
Or from the same letter, about some music he had sent me (successfully getting me to understand and love electronic dance music):
Sometimes, when I'm learning to listen to new genres of music, how they move, I'll have this experience: I can listen to a song and it leaves no impression. I barely remember hearing it. The only metaphor I can think of is that there are lots of surfaces, sheer, that I can't get a handhold on, so I never really get a sense of the texture of composition of the thing. My guess is that I don't know the music enough to know what to listen for, or how to listen. It's the same reason people who don't know a lot about deserts say that they look stark and dead, but if you have a bit of training, you can see that most of them are teeming with activity. And then, for no reason at all, one day, sometime between the third and nth time I hear it, the song clicks. I hear it, and it's remarkable, like a glimpse of a different world.
I'm sure that science fiction book wasn't my very first encounter with world-expanding experiences. As a kid, they happen to you all the time and you never even notice. Part of being a kid means that your world is always getting bigger, very fast. I think, though, that the book was the first such experience I recognized and intellectualized. There was a whole new sphere of things I suddenly wanted. I identified - and still identify - as a reader of speculative fiction, in no small part because it is the genre (or series of genres, really) that most consistently shows me something altogether new and strange, stuff that makes me unable to see the world the same way afterwards. And you should seek out things that make your world unfamiliar to you. It keeps you young.
This has been on my mind because, after 16 years or so, I finally found that book again. When I read it the first time, it changed my life, but I forgot the author and title immediately. I'm an ungrateful little reader, I know. Last week, I was playing around on Google, and I found the right combination of keywords to lead me to Crosstime Traffic. It arrived in the mail yesterday, and I sat down to read it, terrified that it wouldn't have stood the test of time.
It's good - or, at least, the first few stories I got through before I had to go back to grading students' exams. Not only are most of the stories well-done, they contain shockingly many of the tropes I still love today. The content of those stories, and what I see in them, is for another post, I think. I'm going to go get that book now, and see how the rest of those stories stand up, and maybe, hopefully, have one of them blow my mind a second time, no doubt for a different reason. Any old thing can blow your mind once - the very best things, though, can do it again and again.
I think I was five years old, maybe still just four, when I was taken to see a therapist. Her name was Joan, and her specialty was family and couples therapy. She had helped my parents out a great deal, before I was born, and I think she was the only therapist they knew and trusted. So, they took me to her.
I remember this sitting room, with beige walls and very neutral paintings and a table, where I sat, drawing. My parents were in the other room, talking to Joan. I don't remember being told to draw, but I must have been - I don't think I ever did it of my own accord.
I drew a hamburger in four colors. By little kid standards, it was a good but not great drawing, but when Joan walked into the room, she complimented me on it anyway. "My saba [grandfather] was a painter", I remember telling her, and she agreed that the talent must run in the family.
I remember that moment, sitting on a black leather seat, drawing and discussing that hamburger, so clearly. It's more sensual than almost any of my memories from that time. It's hyper-real. I have a few childhood memories like this, that have a dreamy quality to them that's full of longing and resonance, like they're more real than actual memories. I can still picture the hamburger.
Years later, as a teenager, I was told that I was taken to see Joan because I had threatened to kill myself, something I have no memory whatsoever of actually saying. I don't even remember feeling particularly sad - Joan, apparently, agreed; she thought I didn't really mean it. All I remember is that room, that chair, and my real-as-a-dream hamburger.
A few days ago, oslo posted a lovely entry that, among other things, informed me that Carl Sagan's poetic, could-never-possibly-be-made-today miniseries Cosmos is currently free on Hulu. I'd never seen it, and since I don't want my geek license revoked, I've been watching it. Even the stuff that comes off as cheesy-earnest is beautiful. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone, even if you don't have warm and fuzzy childhood memories of it.
But sometimes the LJ effect is cooler than just being directed to a neat cultural product. Sometimes those products converge, even obscure products. So imagine my delight at finding amurderofcows twitter-embedding these strangely hypnotic mashups of Carl Sagan and some other similarly poetic scientists being fed through an autotuner.
And the topic of that second video, appropriately: We are all connected.
People make fun of Livejournal as a kind of blog-junior for angsty kids, or at least they did during LJ's heyday, which, people keep telling me, is now over. You know, it had a reputation as the sort of place to put bad poetry, or 3,000-word incoherent whining about how the world doesn't understand you. "If I cut you, do you bleed Livejournal posts?" a character on Something*Positive asked a girl who was being a drama queen. Blogs are supposed to be what you write when you've grown up and don't want to write navel-gazing emo LJ posts anymore.
But this seems shallow and caricatured to me. Confessional writing is a deep, old genre with a perfectly respectable pedigree, and some of the best modern writing came out of it. Think our generation invented the convention of blathering our innermost thoughts to the reading public? Nope. In the 18th century, at the height of the Enlightenment, it was common practice to read people's personal letters out loud at salon gatherings. Not just famous people, either (though the famous Rousseau-Hume flamewar did make the rounds at any salon worth attending), but regular old bourgeois folk would do this. It was about confessing, sharing and coming to understand their interiority and their intimate passions. And this was the golden age of reasoned discourse, or so we're told.
There's lots of ways to write non-fiction, and lots of ways to write blogs. There are pundit blogs, specialist knowledge blogs, hobby blogs, scholarly blogs and no doubt more categories. And at least for me, what kind of writing I do is a conscious choice. Each way is a very different kind of self-presentation, and I get something very different out of those different kinds of writing. Writing a blog dedicated to political commentary and analysis would scratch a very different itch than, say, a blog dedicated to some of my stranger philosophical interests. And each requires a different way of thinking about the craft of writing, too. If you think 'writing' is a generalized skill that applies in the same way in all contexts and genres, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
But it's hard to talk about this stuff in the abstract. So, here's my story of finding my writer's voice (see, I'm confessing. It's ok. Augustine did it too, and it got him sainted): I'm really good at analytic writing, and I'm really good at thinking in terms of abstract concepts. It's always been easy for me to move in and out of some pretty heady ideas without getting my levels of analysis confused. What can I say? I was a grad student waiting to happen. And you do get a lot of praise for that particular skill when you're in school. Or I did, anyway. But purely conceptual arguments have a way of going in circles. Even with very powerful logical and conceptual tools, you get bogged down in the arbitrariness of definitions, operationalizations, and even dodgier things. I turned away from pure theory for this reason, even if I do have the knack for that kind of writing and the formal, reasoned, confident rhetorical style that goes with it.
Ok, so I'm not a philosopher. Lots of people aren't. But it eventually became obvious that what I'm after is more specific than just 'not purely theoretical'. A professor gave me a very good piece of advice. On some question you're interested in and have read a lot about, compile a list of books that you actually like, rather than books that are 'useful', or 'important to know', or 'field-defining', or other euphemisms for "books you hate but have to read anyway". And then, figure out what those books have in common. And when I did this, I realized that what these books had in common was a good story. There was something compelling about the specific story being told, rather than the theoretical take-home point. During this period, I wrote a letter to the artist formerly known as cobalt999 that contained this:
I think of the books I've learned from and really admire, and virtually none of them are primarily conceptual. They're books where theoretical points have emerged from trying to study an actual problem. Example: I had to put together a syllabus for a class I called "Religion and Politics in the Middle East". I came across dozens, dozens of books that claimed to think through something like: what is the interaction of religion and politics? Can they coexist in a democracy, etc? And most of them were just awful - I would cite them as part of an intellectual phenomenon to be studied, but I wouldn't assign them to anyone. The juicy stuff all came from books that were about what actual religiously-oriented political groups were doing (sometimes in social-sciencey semi-controlled comparisons, sometimes written by humanists). There's theory and occasionally even philosophy, but it's emergent on the story being told. Increasingly, that's the direction I'm going in.
There's something essential to me about a good story, and about starting from that story when you sit down to write. I only know a few ways to write well that don't have some story at their core, and I usually hate doing most of those kinds of writing. Punditry is like this - even if there is some story going on, it usually gets completely lost in the, umm, punditizing. The story becomes instrumentalized. I've got nothing against punditry as such - done right, it's a time-honored kind of political rhetoric and polemic. I just hate doing it in its pure form because of the way it turns absolutely everything that isn't nailed down - logic, a story, human events - into a tool to make a point. Or if you're not a pundit, more dispassionate and less political analysis also tends to become unmoored and unsatisfying to me when it's centered too much around abstractions like "deterrence", "regional hegemons", "realists versus idealists", and so on. This is why I don't write a standard political blog - either as pundit or analyst, those seem to be the primary forms they lend themselves to. Insofar as there are blogs I love, they tend to be the ones that deviate from these trends. I suppose I could try my hand at such a blog, but the weight of genre inertia would be against me.
And the last component of my story is, uhh, me. Not everything I write has to be about me - honest! - but I dislike the pure third-person, because as a rhetorical choice it creates an impression of objectivity that, at least with the kinds of subjects I tend to write about, is simply and manifestly false. Even at my most analytical and abstract, it's been pointed out that my best writing always has something personal about it. Something that's recognizably "me". One colleague calls it a "personal tone", even when I'm writing about land reform in Egypt.
Such is my story anyway. I've come to discover a kind of writing I really like doing, and this is why I keep coming back to Livejournal. The confessional, personal style that LJ is known for works really well with my preferred blend of ideas and stories, in which the ideas emerge from the stories, rather than stories serving ideas. I can guess at why LJ encourages more intimacy than standard blogs - friends lists, and the way that comment threads are visualized make things feel like a more intimate conversation than in most blog formats I come across. And that intimacy is important. It's what makes LJ what it is.
Livejournal isn't my only outlet for that blend of the personal, the narrative and the analytic. If LJ dies, I won't be Forever Denied An Outlet For My Thoughts. But there's a particular version of this blend - closer to the confessional end of the spectrum - that I haven't been able to pull off anywhere as well as I've pulled it off here. The strange intimacy of the form, full of confessions to a finite list of people you feel so close to even though (or maybe because) you may never have met them, enables something I adore. So, for now, as long as I have such things to say, I keep coming back. Long live the next LJ golden age!
I can only think of two Jewish rituals that ever affected me or made me feel anything like what religious people describe when they talk about why their religion speaks to them: one is Kol Nidre, the other is Havdalah. This probably isn't a coincidence. Both are moody, melancholy and full of foreboding.
For those not in the know, Havdalah is the ritual that is done at the end of the Sabbath. It marks the end of a holy period, and the return to workaday life. There are two special items associated with Havdalah: a decorated box full of aromatic spices, and a braided, multi-wick candle. It's a very sensual ritual, lots of minor-key singing, the spectacular candle, the smell of the spices, and, of course, wine.
I have a very strong childhood memory, I must have been about nine years old. The Hebrew school teacher let me into the synagogue's storage closet to get some construction paper for a project. While I was rooting around - what child wouldn't seize that kind of opportunity to explore? - I found the spice box, wine goblet, and the Havdalah candle just sitting there, carelessly dumped into a cardboard box on a shelf, next to a bag of plastic silverware and some paper plates. I remember thinking they looked so sad like that. I never looked at the ritual the same way again; in a very small way, I was disenchanted. In later years, when I was in charge of planning the services for the kids, the disenchantment was much worse. I could see all the little gears in the experience spinning, and it felt about as numinous as fixing a loose floorboard.
I still have trouble going backstage without feeling disenchanted. As you get older, it's something you're expected to do more and more. You can't just attend services anymore, you're supposed to help organize them and put them on. There are all sorts of experiences like this - haunted houses, graduations, any kind of show for kids, running a retail store, initiating fraternity brothers, an actual, you know, play - that require you to go backstage. At some point, you're in charge. You're the experienced person in the room, and the show must go on, even if the process of putting it on makes the event feel hollow to you. This always bothered me - isn't there some way to go backstage, which, after all, someone has to do, without the experience losing its magic?
Lately, I've been thinking about just that - enchantment, wonder, and excitement for performers and organizers, not just spectators and children. Seeing how things really work feels like it should make the experience more exciting and interesting, not less. Havdalah promised mysteries whose answers were actually interesting, not a pile of ritual implements in a box. And yet not everyone feels that sense of disenchantment that I do when they see the backstage in all its grubbiness. They don't feel that the experience has been hollowed out or robbed of its power. Or if they do, they tend to keep that thought to themselves.
I'm curious to hear your experiences with these things, O readers, if you're still out there. I have thoughts of my own, but that's another post.
I've been on a really long break from posting here. And I'm mostly glad I did, even though it seems that a decent fraction of the community I had built here has evaporated and stopped posting, no doubt for some of the reasons I stopped for a while.
But I feel like I have things to say again, and they seem livejournalish somehow. There's a kind of writing, some fusion of intimacy and ideas, that always seemed to work here and nowhere else. Something about the format, or the specific people I met here. In any case, it's a kind of writing that I miss doing. So, I'm back for now. First post goes up tomorrow.
1. Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life you're curious about. 2. Leave your requests as comments to this entry. 3. Please look at the previous requests so as to not do repeats. 4. I'll snap the pictures and post them in future posts.
Last June, I saw a play called "Nixon's Nixon" at a local theater near where I grew up (the Round House, for you suburban Marylanders out there). It imagined a late-night conversation between Nixon and Kissinger in the hours before Nixon finally resigned from office. The conversation went through recollections, anecdotes, impersonations of foreign leaders, justifications, rants, pleading, until Nixon finally accepted his fate.
I love stories like that, little intimate peeks into the interior spaces of life, in between more earth-shaking events.
Which has me wondering, at 2:38am Eastern time, how soon-to-be-former-President Bush is spending his final night in office. It would be great material for a story: the President, unable to sleep, stalking the halls of the White House, reflecting on the last eight years, maybe pondering a few last-minute pardons. I want to imagine him sleepless, full of anticipation. I want to imagine that the man has some kind of interiority. I want to imagine him, just once, like me, kept awake at night by his thoughts.
But I have a suspicion that that's not what's happening at all. Everyone says that Bush isn't a reflective guy. He isn't exactly dumb, but he doesn't like to dwell, and he doesn't like to examine anything, especially himself, too much. Honestly, could you imagine him, wandering around the West Wing late at night, maybe talking to an advisor or two, asking those restless, searching questions that only come after midnight?
Chances are, Bush is already in bed, having been there since his usual bedtime, sleeping like a fucking baby. And that, among many reasons, is why I'll be very, very happy to see him gone.
Back in middle and high school, there were certain kinds of music that I hated for what I used to think was a bad reason: the people who listened to it were a bunch of tools.
Remember all of those popular kids who started wearing flannel shirts and growing their hair out when Nirvana got big? That started happening a couple years before I hit middle school, so by the time I got there and saw the entire popular crowd talking about how much they loved Kurt and how alternative they all were, I thought Nirvana - and grunge generally - must be music for vapid conformists. And indeed, when I first heard them sometime in seventh grade, it all just sounded like a bunch of screaming and banging on things. It sounded rebellious, but the vast majority of the people who listened to it were so un-rebellious that I figured that the grunge scene's non-conformist 'authenticity' must have just been a marketing gimmick.
But a few years later, when the popular crowd had cut their hair and moved on to the glossy pop music that was more appropriate to their station in life, I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on the radio, now divorced from the social context in which I first heard it. It was incredible. Incredible! I re-listened to all the stuff from Nevermind and In Utero, and I couldn't believe it - the stuff probably wasn't as fresh and original as it sounded before years of imitators had poured its themes into the groundwater of alt-rock's repertoire, but it was raw, beautiful, wounded and angry and bitter and vulnerable. I loved it.
So why the change? It could be that my tastes had evolved and I'd finally gotten in touch with my inner angsty grungeboy in the intervening years, but I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so is that this keeps happening, and it keeps happening irrespective of genre or style. Just a couple weeks ago, I listened to some songs by Sublime, a band I had forever associated with this one guy in math class who used to torment me, and it was unbelievable. Never heard anything like them. Or a few months ago, I finally figured out what the big deal with Phish-style jam bands was - I had previously dismissed them because of my exasperation with a certain kind of pseudo-hippie that stalked the dorms of Oberlin. I'm sure that, any day now, I'll develop an ironic-nostalgic appreciation of the Backstreet Boys and start liking mid-90s hip-hop.
It happens again and again, and the only thing that remains constant in all of these situations isn't some aspect of the music itself: it's not that I like more complex music as I get older, or more dissonant music, or anything like that. The only constant is sociology of that music's consumption: it used to be adored by people I thought were tools, and now, after a few years, it isn't.
I said at the beginning of this post that I used to think that disliking something because of its social context was a bad reason not to like something. There's a word for people who like music only before it gets popular or after it isn't anymore, and it's not a nice word: hipster. I don't quite fit the hipster mold - I'm overweight; I don't wear vintage anything, have no trust fund, hate PBR, and I am in fact capable of experiencing joy unironically. Nor do I listen to a lot of indie music (though perhaps I will in a few years, after the hipsters are done with it). But when I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I seem to share their knee-jerk distaste for popular stuff. I don't make an ideology of it like a lot of people do - there's nothing more tiresome than listening to someone go on and on about how they don't like 'mainstream, corporate, soulless, etc etc music' and prefer the old stuff, which, always, inevitably, totally sold out right about when the speaker turned 25. And I really hate so-bad-it's-good ironic appreciation of things. But, I tend not to like music while it's still popular.
That was a hard thing to admit. Conventional wisdom has it that people who think like this - people who are influenced by the social context of music so much that they can't appreciate the music itself - are shallow, the scum of the earth, the worst kind of hipster. "You're like a worse version of Hitler!" I can imagine you all thinking. But I think that's wrong. Lovers of no-longer-popular music - hated by all, parodied by Stuff White People Like - may just be on to something.
We know that the immediate context in which you hear music is important - we call it atmosphere. And it's not just lighting or the punk-rock-in-a-Starbucks effect - the people around you affect the experience, too. If you don't believe me, listen to "Bad Touch" by the Bloodhound Gang with your grandparents in the room. Meaning that the situation does matter - music isn't just notes and tone color and dynamics. This much is, I think, pretty uncontroversial.
But if that's true, is it really such a crazy leap to imagine that the broader social context of music is - and should be - a part of the experience? The best analogy I can think of is to fashion - an arena that also, perhaps tellingly, routinely goes through 'vintage' and 'retro' moods. Clothing styles are chock full of the aesthetics and tics of the culture (or subculture) that created them. That's why fashion never seems weird at the time, but years later, looking at old pictures, you seem ridiculous. When you're no longer immersed in the culture, that culture's likes and dislikes are really obvious. I'm pretty sure this is what cultural studies types mean when they say that fashion is like an encyclopedia, chock full of information about the cultures that produced it.
So why not with music? Is it so weird to think that the kinds of people who listen to music, the ways they listen to it, the ways they dress to reflect its style, become bound up in the experience of the music itself? I bet when you hear, say, a Nirvana song, the flannel-soaked fashion style pops into your head pretty quickly. But years later, you can look back on it with the perspective of someone who doesn't have to deal with that subculture on a daily basis, and can finally hear the music with fresh ears.
Or maybe even a little better than fresh, since (and I think this isn't controversial) the musical fashions and conventions in a song have probably also gone out of date. Which lets you see the distinctiveness and inventiveness - the stylishness - of musical choices that used to be invisible to you because they were everywhere, part of the air and the drinking water of pop culture. And now they're not.
People who like vintage things often tell me that they like some particular era because it seems so stylish. Maybe they mean something like what I've been talking about. It's possible that, at least for some of us, something is at its most stylish after its cultural moment is over and its distinctiveness no longer rendered invisible, or hidden beneath the sociology (and obnoxious members) of the culture that produced it.
Just a note: I'm in San Francisco, where I'll be staying for the next month or so. I haven't exactly been active on el jay lately, but I'll be even less active now. This semester, well, I'm glad it's over. I need the break.
If you're in the area and would like to meet up, drop me a line.
You can blame aaangyl for this post. I made a quick comment on Twitter and she demanded that I explain myself in some suitably public forum. I don't want to make a habit of being one of those "blog about the latest headline" LJers. Just to cleanse myself after this, I might write something agonizingly introspective and angsty, or something about obscure childhood memories, or some little patch of the Middle East you've never heard of. Or, you know, something, just to break this pattern of talking about... headlines.
What I said was that I'm not exactly impressed or pleased with this news that Clinton's going to be the next Secretary of State.
It's not just the usual argument, though that one's crossed my mind too: She's shown in the Senate that she's really good at Getting Shit Done policy-wise, but she doesn't exactly have a diplomatic background. There are going to be enough sharp learning curves in this administration without some heal-the-coalition appointee with no particular background in the job becoming a major diplomatic player. And then there's the fact that her Presidential campaign didn't exactly inspire confidence in her ability to run a factionalized organization - she had a bad habit of letting turf wars simmer, and that's, you know, bad for an organization like the State Department.
But my bigger concern is this: Clinton doesn't expect this to be the last, or most important, job she'll ever have.
So, let's think of this in terms of some basic incentives that are common enough to bureaucratic politics. She wants to do well at being Secretary of State, but much more important from her perspective is to make sure that the conventional wisdom knows she did a good job. Meaning, we should expect showmanship, and possibly even undermining political objectives from the President that she feels won't make her look good enough, or don't give her enough credit, or whatever. Instead of someone loyal to the President, the State Department will be run by an ambiguously friendly rival.
And the President won't be able to do much to stop it, if she chooses to do something that will make her look good while undermining the President's policy goals. His strategy seems to be to reconcile with his former opponents. Remember how well that worked out for Caesar? He's signaling - and this may simply be true - that he lacks the strength or will to govern without the help of his rivals. Maybe he's doing it because he honestly, ideologically believes in that different, non-divisive kind of politics he was always talking about, or maybe he's just weak. Either way, the price of this reconciliation is granting them - and in this particular case, Clinton - a degree of autonomy that we wouldn't expect him to give to a loyalist. If he wants Clinton's co-operation, he's going to have to let her pursue her own objectives - to an extent - within his administration.
I suspect that that situation will, in some politically sensitive issue or other lead to 'message discipline' problems, or a situation in which the President and the Secretary of State find that their interests - and their preferred solution - don't align. And, well, do you think Clinton is the sort of politico to sigh and take one for the team?
Maybe I'm wrong and Obama's advisors thought it would be better to bring her into the administration (and thus give her a stake in its success) rather than leaving her in the Senate, but for any number of reasons, I fear it'll lead to some unhelpful drama in the future.
Edit:dubaiwalla informs me that John Bolton said more or less what I was thinking, but a lot more succinctly: you shouldn't hire anyone you can't fire.
Well, that would have saved me a few hundred words. Logorrhea strikes again.
I'm happy Obama got elected. I won't gush on here - for that, you would have had to see me last night, when it became clear that Obama was a lock. Suffice to say I feel pretty good right now (modulo the proposition 8 disaster in CA). Just a quick note to add to everything else, a little request for our President-elect:
Don't get shot.
I'm not especially worried about that happening, in the way that many people I know are. Sure, there are white supremacists and other dead-enders who would want probably want to kill the guy, but it's not exactly my biggest fear for the upcoming administration.
I only mention it at all because I see how excited people are right now, especially a lot of people my age. They feel, umm, hope. Optimism. A vague sense that their dreams are possible. It's not always rational and in fact my cold, scholarly side finds it a bit annoying, but it's here, in big doses.
And then I think back to my parents' generation. I think seeing all of those dashing, charismatic young leaders killed before their eyes - two Kennedys and a King - is a really big part of why they're so messed up. I wouldn't say that hippies would never have happened if Kennedy hadn't been shot, but I will say that a lot of boomers' screwy emotional scars - their weird, cyclical but always self-righteous relationship with idealism and cynicism - has some sort of origin in the assassinations of the 60's.
I don't want that to happen to my generation. I hope Obama does good things, maybe great things, in his time in office. But if not, if we're going to have our innocence and hopes broken, I want my generation's disillusionment with him to come from honestly trying to implement an agenda, and seeing it not quite work out because our (still sort of vague) ideals have run up against an un-cooperative reality. That's how it often works, and in a way it's very healthy. Done right, it's where wisdom comes from.
And even if done wrong, I would much, much rather our disillusionment come from that than an assassin's bullet. I'm sort of fond of my generation, sometimes, and we already have the Bush years messing with our collective psyche. I want Obama to succeed - to do well and to do good at what certainly seems like a very crucial juncture. But if that's not in the cards and we have to get our dose of disillusionment, I'd much, much rather see our charismatic post-Bush redeemer figure fail than see him die on us.
Posted on 2008.10.29 at 22:04 Current Mood: vicariously jubilant
Philadelphia hasn't won any sports titles since the eighties, and this city loves its sports. I wanted the Phillies to win, mostly because this town has low self-esteem, and I'm for anything that'll make people walk a little taller. Besides, the sociologists tell me that sports provide all sorts of social cohesion functions.
I didn't need to watch the game to know that the Phillies won the world series. First I heard my whole block erupt in cheers, then the low boom of fireworks going off all over the city. Some boys have set themselves up on my corner cheering and encouraging passing cars to honk. Ambulances and firetrucks are driving in circles with the sirens on, their drivers waving Phillies hats out the window.
And that's my relatively sleepy part of West Philly. South Philly must be burning to the ground.
Edit: And West Philly being West Philly, they've broken out the drums. It's going to be a wild night.
Barack Obama, a presidential candidate I'm happier about supporting than the other two I voted for, is winning at the moment. But I don't actually believe it, not for a second.
I don't mean that I have cleverly seen something in the tea-leaves that makes me so damn sure he's going to lose. I'm not the first, or probably even the hundred thousandth person to recognize that there are a lot of things that can happen in the next month to cut into that poll lead: the McCain campaign could find a trope that resonates well, random world politics could intervene, Obama could mess up, the poll numbers could turn out to be inflated (Wilder effect, and all that). There are all sorts of ways the campaign could turn around, so it's not like my pessimism is completely unfounded.
But none of that is what I'm talking about when I say I don't believe that Obama will actually win. Even if Obama were leading by 30 points and McCain had just been caught on tape fellating dead boy hookers while chanting "Hail Satan, death to the Impostor Christ" in English and Arabic, I'd have trouble believing that Obama would really win.
I honestly have trouble believing that anyone I support could actually win anything. After all, I like him, so the median voter must hate his guts.
I think this is a common feeling among those of us who find ourselves, for better or for worse, supporting Democrats: The country is against us, and if anyone to the left of center actually gets elected outside of a liberal enclave, it's because we've eked out a tactical victory, this time, and even then only by watering down our positions and/or wrapping ourselves in a cheap populism. Not because the country is with us. Instead, it's very much an 'us and them' dynamic, even if we have to get 'them' to vote for 'us' now and again.
Maybe someone else has had this feeling: when I hear someone talk about "the people", I don't think they're referring to me. I don't know how to identify with that category - it connotes something other than an overeducated gay urban secular Jew. And that problem has bedeviled progressive politics for as long as I've been watching. Even when 'elite' urban or suburban lefty types talk about the working classes and minorities, about creating opportunity and fairness for those who have been denied it, the rhetoric (and the sentiments behind it) treats those people as, well, those people, with all the externalizing connotations of that phrase. They're votes to be mobilized, interests to be brought into the tent, but not actually people we identify with. We're happy to speak for them, but we're intensely uncomfortable speaking with them. The old accusation of elitism is true in this sense, I think.
My political coming-into-consciousness happened right around the 1994 Republican takeover of congress. True, there was a popular (if embattled) Democratic president I was fond of, but even at that age I was pretty clear that he was surviving by triangulation, co-opting what Republican ideals he could and playing a careful, tactical balancing game. A pundit, I forget which one, called it 'the defensive crouch'. For as long as I've been paying attention, it's felt like even when Democrats win, it's been through clever maneuvering in a game where the other side has a practical monopoly on popular consciousness. To confidently, straightforwardly advocate a liberal agenda has been unthinkable in national politics.
Maybe this feeling is still true, and the zeitgeist is still against 'us'. It's possible that if Obama wins, it will have been a mix of tactics, luck, and exasperation with the Bush years: a vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats. But it's also possible that the country isn't so inimically hostile, and that we're wrong to think of politics as "us versus the masses". No matter how much we've been telling ourselves otherwise - in jokes about ignorant hicks and in laments about the Unstoppable Republican Propaganda Machine - maybe Republicans don't have an ideological monopoly on what Middle America is or what it wants. People might actually be voting for Obama because they like what he has to say about the kind of country we should be making for ourselves. If that's true, it will bring up hard questions for those of us whose political identities are based on being, if not exactly outsiders, then at least somehow out of the mainstream.
Or, Obama could lose after all, and we'll go back to our defensive crouch, secure in the feeling that the country really is against us. Between those two possibilities - losing or having to face the thought that those people might not be so alien to us after all - I'm honestly not sure which would be harder for me and some of my self-styled 'progressive' friends to swallow.
It occurs to me that some of the people who read this know a thing or two about economics and/or the business world. So, I don't normally use the journal for this, but I've been trying to sort through explanations of the events of the last week (firm collapses, government bailout, etc), but without the background knowledge, I'm having trouble "evaluating the arguments" as we pointy-headed academics say.
Specifically, I'm hearing about two stories. One is the Libertarian Rage version (seems popular on the Left, too): "The bailout is awful, because it amounts to nationalization, and in any case it rewards firms for taking insane risks, when really the market should be punishing them."
The other is: "Yes, but if the government hadn't stepped in and done this, we would all be screwed, the next Great Depression would be upon us, etc".
Neither says much about the effects of any given action, except in ideological and/or hysterical terms.
It's hard to get a sense of what the consequences of the bailout actually are expected to be. What's at stake here, in other words. Surely there's more than the two schematic stories I just told, right? Right? Feel free to tell me what I'm missing.
I'm told that Harvard students, when they want to sound modest, say that they go to school "in Boston". That way you don't sound like you're name-dropping. I've never met any Harvard students who actually do this, but I only know about half a dozen Harvardians, so it's not a great sample. I asked one friend about it, and he says he doesn't do the "in Boston" thing because in a way it's even more pretentious than just saying you go to Harvard. It's a kind of conspicuous modesty, showing off that you're a little embarrassed by your fancy elite education while still getting to let your audience know that you go to an elite school. It's like trying to have it both ways. Saying "I go to Harvard" has the advantage of being more straightforward.
I was getting some work done in a Starbucks today - I'm in Gaithersburg right now1 - and business was slow, so one of the barristas started talking to me. He asked what I was doing and I explained I was finishing up some stuff before school started. "I'm a grad student up in Philadelphia," I explained.
He pressed and asked, "which school?", so I responded that I go to Penn.
"Ohh, I see," he said. "Princeton students say they go to school in New Jersey, Harvard students just say 'in Boston', so you're doing the same thing. No need to act modest about it."
And I felt like a jerk, because that's not why I say "in Philadelphia". It's not about trying to seem modest. It's the opposite. See, if I lead straight off by saying "I go to Penn", people will assume I mean Penn State, and will usually say something like "go Lions!" and I have to correct them.
I hate that. I have no problem letting random strangers know I go to a fancy-sounding school. On the contrary: I'm a really insecure person and I love throwing around what little cultural capital I have. I just don't want to have to be a jerk about it by correcting them. "No," *tongue-click* "not Penn State. Penn, the ivy". That makes people feel like I'm an asshole.
So, when I lead by saying "I go to school in Philadelphia," and then explain that it's Penn, I've found the extra geographic cue makes people (on the average) more likely to figure out that I go to the snooty private school, not the giant state school. I'm not trying to sound like I'm downplaying the snob factor - I'm just trying to make sure they understand I'm being snobby on the first try!
1Sorry, DC folks. This is not a social visit. I really, really, really don't have the time. (return)
A lot of people are getting twitter, and I've been feeling the peer pressure to try it. I'm not sure if it's actually worth my time, or whether I'll find it useful and/or entertaining, but I'm at least willing to give it a shot for a few weeks. So, expect periodic tweets.
People tell me that the year I'm about to do at Penn is traditionally the hardest: you're still taking classes, you're TA-ing for the first time, and there's a scary set of pass-them-or-we-throw-you-out comprehensive exams at the end (the failure rate on one of them is about 30%, but you do get a second chance before they boot you out).
So, I figure I should post those pictures of summer camp Middlebury before I get sucked into the work, work, work routine.
