Protagonism Redux

In a society that extols the rugged individual who, by sheer force of character and relentlessness of will, prevails to reach the top of a chosen pyramid, it’s not surprising that so many of us are afflicted with protagonism.

Protagonism is a syndrome where I see and present the world from a heroic point of view, with myself as the fascinating individual at the center of the universe, my own actions and feelings featured in sharp relief and those of others serving as mere background color. That everyone else may feel like the protagonist of their own lives, well, what do you expect?

In cultures that view the good of every one in the community as more important than the prosperity of any single individual, protagonism is an anomaly. People in those cultures work together for the common good. In our culture we commonly think of such people as fucking losers.

The rugged individual is a pretty shitty model for our ideal citizen, though. That person is self-centered, ruthless, devoted to self above all else. He tames the Wild West, sure, and amasses fabulous fortunes that will eventually fund philanthropies, sure, but he’s, most often, basically a prick you wouldn’t piss on if he was on fire.

Think of Samuel Colt*, inventor of the Colt .45, the Equalizer. What did this innovative gun allow one to do for the first time? Shoot dependably several times in a row, instead of one shot at a time. How was this an equalizer? It made the man holding the Colt the equal of several men who were about to rush him. Say these men about to rush you were slaves, bitter about their hard lives and not afraid to die to take you with them, and you were the overseer with the whip and pistol. Well, if you could only get off one shot, chances are these disgruntled slaves would kill you. But with the Equalizer in hand, well, “how many of you boys are willing to visit Kingdom Come on the off chance you’ll be the lucky one to watch me die? Hmmmm? Ah’m waitin’….”

Celebrity culture has a pernicious effect on us winners and losers down here in the cheap seats. Do you have something to say that reaches beyond your own personality and desire for fame and fortune and into my life? Lay it on me, something I can think about later, use in wrestling with my own mind.

Are you in it strictly for my applause and admiration? Well, then it’s on you to deliver something pretty amazing every time. A lot of pressure to be amazing, seems to me.

* During the American Civil War, his factory in Hartford supplied firearms both to the North and the South. Later, his firearms were prominent during the settling of the western frontier. Colt died in 1862 as one of the wealthiest men in America.

According to Colt historian Robert Lawrence Wilson, the “lectures launched Colt’s celebrated career as a pioneer Madison Avenue-style pitchman”.^[7] His public speaking skills were so prized that he was thought to be a doctor and was pressed into service to cure an apparent cholera epidemic on board a riverboat by giving his patients a dose of nitrous oxide.

What We Are Doing Here

As a young man, tortured by much of what went on around me, I spent a lot of time alone, mulling things over. I learned to play guitar, found my way around a piano keyboard, drew, wrote– all solitary, expressive things I did in any quiet spot I could find. Outside of those hours, my life seemed to be, as Albert King sings in Born Under A Bad Sign, one big fight.

I fought with my parents whose limitations as parents left them prone to frustration and anger rather than able to guide or advise me or my sister in any meaningful way. I spent decades fighting with many of the inevitable assholes one encounters almost everywhere.

There is no shortage of angry assholes to fight with, if that’s what you are trained to do. In fact, you’ll never even need to seek them out. Bullies and jackasses will be irresistibly drawn to you in a crowd, seeming to know you are set up to struggle against them. Each one will passionately make the case that you are the asshole. It would take me decades to get enough insight into the idiocy of fighting with raging fools to start becoming a consistently gentle person.

I recall that when I used to sit down to write in my younger years I was bursting to write everything down, impatient to tell it all each time, get to the bottom of our existence here all at once. Not only is this an impossible wish, it is self-defeating.

The ideal writing session results in setting out one thing as clearly as possible, providing exactly enough detail and nuance to make the reader feel and understand that thing. In deference to the reader one also prunes away digressions, no matter how interesting the particular darling might be, if they might distract or confuse the reader. Setting out one thing clearly, to me, is a good day’s work.

I’m reminded of this after reading something a very talented young writer posted recently. It takes four or five very compelling story lines, summarizing each one in abbreviated fashion, and jams them together into one piece to tell an ambitiously global tale. Reminded me of my own long ago impulse to try to tell everything at once, get to the bottom of what our lives and the things we learn here mean, if anything.

Reminded me a tiny bit of Clint Eastwood’s latest, American Sniper, which reduces the most compelling mysteries of the story to a short vignette and a single line title at the end, while spending the rest of the time showing the simple heroism of a likable, honorable, driven man valiantly fighting to save his brothers in an unquestioned, horrific, war. We see him suddenly cured of PTSD, smiling and hugging wife and children goodbye, heading to his car. In the next frame, on black, a title summarily informs us that he was killed by one of the vets he was helping. What? Now we’re at his funeral and the credits are rolling. What? Really, Clint?

I was around when this brilliant girl began to show her prodigious talents. If I was feeling a bit more outgoing at the moment I’d reach out and invite her for a plate of dumplings. I’d offer to tell her the rest of the story, for whatever use she might make of my view. I was there on the scene from before she was born, a more or less objective adult observer, over the years her remarkable life began telling itself as a story.

I’d also advise her to wait and consider, before publishing the piece, if it wouldn’t be better written as four separate pieces, each one including all the information the reader needs to see each complex story as three dimensionally as possible. And to discard interesting side stories that distract, even alarm, the reader, and remove focus from the larger story being told.

And I’d remind her to be sure to tell each story with the satisfying amount of shading and detail she always has in her best work. I’d stress the importance of mercy to oneself when telling a story. Being unfair to oneself does not always seem unfair, but it is. Unfairness is as hard to see in writing as it is to experience in life. I really ought to call her.

Heartbreaking

What about this picture is not heartbreaking? This little girl lived in a remote rural area where, from out of the sky, a Hellfire missile, launched from a circling remote control plane, killed everyone around her.

The intelligence may or may not have been good that there were bad guys there, but the fragments of the missile found after the attack, falsely claimed by the cynical president of Yemen as launched by his government, were plainly identifiable as American-made.

Does it break your heart less to think that this little orphan girl will grow up hating the Americans who sent the drone to kill her loved ones, become a terrorist and deserve whatever fate a future administration may decide for her?

As The Walls Close In

Our happiness, or unhappiness, we are often reminded, flows directly from how we view the world. That glass– half full or half empty? Life, full of cool, even miraculous, possibilities or a grim waiting room for inevitable depressing decline and death?

Of course, this kind of either-or thinking, so prevalent in our culture, can be as unproductive as it is simplistic. It’s true we are better served taking pleasure from small things than being tormented by what Professor Bukowski astutely called “that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer, and which are always there”. But our lives here are complex and, at least for some of us, defy the kind of easy logic that tells us it’s better to look on the bright side than the dark side. Better to be active and productive, solving problems as they arise, than paralyzed by shifting, hazily understood affective disorders. These mood disorders, a quick check of the internet informs us, can not be detected by medical tests.

When I was a kid Batman was on TV, a colorful, campy live action version of the comic book. Many episodes ended in a cliff-hanger, the Dynamic Duo trapped in a room with the water rising, the floor and ceiling slowly moving toward each other to crush them, the walls, spiked with swords, closing in. Viewers were exhorted to tune in next time at the same bat time, same bat channel.

The walls closing in would begin the next episode, and just as things were a second from fatal, Batman’s ingenuity, gadgets, fearlessness and physical prowess would save the day. They’d get out of the trap and go kick the bad guy’s ass.

I struggled out into this frigid day with the image of the walls closing in. The walls are not closing in. Metaphors are one thing, the walls actually closing in are another. I did a little research to see if the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy study was still going on at a local psychiatric institute. I’d been given a doctor’s name and number yesterday, more than a month after I’d made several inquiries. I called and haven’t heard back yet, so I did a bit more research about the study on-line.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is, and I couldn’t say it better myself: a “structured, short-term, present-oriented psychotherapy for depression, directed toward solving current problems and modifying dysfunctional (inaccurate and/or unhelpful) thinking and behavior.”^[1]

I’d prefer this action oriented, insight based approach to the usual psycho-pharmaceutical one so often endorsed by well-paid, highly respected snake oil salesmen. You can read a thorough review of the effectiveness and testing of these pills here. Placebos, it has been demonstrated, are more than 80% as effective as the patent drugs for treating things like depression, dysthymia, anxiety disorder. (Which reminds me, I have to stop putting off reordering my organic placebo– it always gives me a tiny jolt of hope when I take it every morning).

I read about the study and was suddenly stopped in my tracks. The first step, after a psychological evaluation to determine your level of affective disorder, is to pop you head first into a long, claustrophobic metal tube, where amid frightful banging, your brain will be scanned to get an image of the “before” brain.

“Fuck that,” I found myself saying, shrugging out of my skin and preparing to hop on to my skeleton, waiting alertly on all fours, to gallop off screaming into the night.

The Trouble with Education

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

— H.L Mencken

I once heard a humanistic woman on the radio explain that the root of the word education is the Latin educare, “to bring forth from within.” Let me check that for you almost instantly on these here Internets:

Verb[edit]

present active ēdūcō, present infinitive ēdūcere, perfect active ēdūxī, supine ēductum

I lead, draw or take out, forth or away. [quotations ▼]
I raise up; erect.

Etymology[edit]

From Latin educatus, past participle of educare (“to bring up (a child, physically or mentally), rear, educate, train (a person in learning or art), nourish, support, or produce (plants or animals)”), frequentive of educere, past participle eductus (“to bring up, rear (a child, usually with reference to bodily nurture or support, while educare refers more frequently to the mind)”), from e (“out”) + ducere (“to lead, draw”)

Whoops. A little information, as always, a dangerous thing. I prefer the simple, evocative definition offered by that humanist on the radio many years ago. The word education, she said, is derived from the Latin, educare, which means, she said, “to bring forth from within”.

Education includes a lot of things and is used more and more interchangeably, in our increasingly materialistic, profit-driven world, with training. Making education a synonym for training reduces this wondrous exercise to its most mechanistic sense. Therein lies a big part of the trouble we encounter when trying to have an intelligent discussion about education. Defining our terms and framing a conversation go a long way toward understanding what we are actually talking about, and the defining itself is a great and perplexingly fraught undertaking.

Education, though we all know it when we are being properly educated, is as complex an idea as we can conjure. It is complicated further by being part of a partisan political debate driven by the love of money, and vindication of the philosophy of the “free market” and its propents’ relentless drive to prove the superiority of private entrepreneurial enterprise over public endeavor. Education is entangled in politics, wrapped in the tentacles of ideology, market forces and institutionalized inequality.

Discussing the proper aim of education, or even the proper meaning of the word proper, is difficult. Education in the abstract is often simplified to mean a course of study leading to a lucrative and/or meaningful career and/or a productive life. In this limited sense there are metrics that can be brought into play, data that can be massaged to support arguments and ideology. Intelligently discussing education and its ultimate goals is not the work of a moment. Nonetheless, I will try to make it that now.

There are those, of which I am a starkly cautionary example, who believe that many people are born with potentials and passions they never become aware of and so never develop, enjoy, inspire others with. The role of the teacher is to guide the student, to bring forth from within, to inspire a lifelong love of learning and self-development. The old “give a man a fish” line from Maimonides springs to mind:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I didn’t know that quote was from my man Maimonides until just now. Cool. You can learn something every day! And it is a pleasure, and a thrill. And instilling that pleasure, and that thrill, is the enduring work of our most memorable teachers.

For many, my words would mean a lot more, resonate longer and more roundly, even result in a pay check and professional status as an opiner worth noting, perhaps, if I was writing them from my study in a nice home somewhere rather than from the crowded rent stabilized apartment I inhabit, more like a demented person’s overstuffed, out-spilling closet than the den of a thoughtful person. That this is beyond the point is beyond the point.

I paint you a picture then, to make you think, and disappear into memory, like every good pedagogue should do.

A man is invited to create a showcase for the program kids come to after a day of school, where they take over a dingy public school classroom and turn it into a buzzing beehive of creativity. He is invited to do this by the woman who has witnessed this transformation weekly and smiled on it each time. The same kids who were wild and fussy during the school day are excited, focused, working together, planning, performing a variety of tasks related to a crude form of actual alchemy. At the end of each session they watch on the computer screen what they’ve made with their own hands, chuckle, remark, pack their bags and head home.

Inexperienced at presenting his idea to an audience, the man creates a fairly shabby showcase for this workshop at the request of the woman who has hired him. He muffles his written remarks, losing his place on the flapping pages each time he tries to make eye contact with his small audience of parents. He has technical problems showing the examples of student work, fumbles, bumbles, mumbling excuses during each amateurish delay.

By these failures he will learn exactly what to avoid next time, how to make this presentation effectively, but in the moment, to the people in the room, it is like watching a grown man struggle not to drown in a shallow puddle on the sidewalk. At the end of his endless fifteen minute performance few in the room have any sense that this fellow is a teacher of a certain vision who has created a simple but ingenious program to make animation that the children themselves run.

Then, after asking for comments and seeing none, he smiles and invites the parents to join their children in the creative workshop. The children leap out of their seats as though shot from guns and deploy themselves in every part of the room. Here a group draws and cuts things out, a kid works with clay, others arrange things under lights while others hover above and photograph the choreography frame by frame. Children sit at the computer, inputting frames from the cameras and starting to edit. Others put on headphones and animatedly listen back to a soundtrack they are working on.

This little demonstration of purposeful autonomy by the kids is worth the price of admission. It shows the thing itself in action, in its most elemental form. “Show me, don’t tell me,” the writing instructor always says. As for describing how the thing works, the best way is simply to show it in action. Then, as the prosecutor says at the end of the presentation of evidence and witnesses at trial: the People rest.

It should be noted that the man’s failures during his presentation are an object lesson in how people actually learn. You learn by failing, as the cliche goes. These embarrassing mistakes will not be forgotten or repeated the next time.

Swimming against the prevailing tides, beside the gigantic, ocean churning ships of wealthy and influential people like Bill Gates, the tired swimmer sputters and struggles for breath. If he can manage to keep swimming there is every possibility of his making it to a desert island where he can show the thing in action– to a group of very interested and exotic birds. Huzzah!

The Self

That voice, speaking up for your deepest beliefs, fondest hopes, telling your dreams. In the noise of the noisy world you may sometimes have to listen carefully to hear it, but don’t stop listening for it.

Rationales versus Reasons

Now, admittedly, I am a foolish idealist. I don’t say this to be cute, only to underscore that living in a world with concrete, monetizable values that override fairness, and what was once quaintly thought of as common decency, it seems foolish to me, over and over, to keep dreaming of a more merciful and equitable society. It would be different, perhaps, if I had great wealth to hire a talented team to help me market my fond ideals, but that’s a pointless thought.

In the decade before the Civil War, an unprecedented carnage not eclipsed for more than fifty years, when machine guns, aerial assault and poison gas were added to the atrocities of trench warfare, our countrymen were poised to kill each other. We are again now. Violence is the default setting in our violent nation and when one people holds another under their dirty boot long enough the only answer becomes murder. Justifiable homicide, each injured party believes righteously.

We now have a culture where each side feels, once again, as though it has been held under the other’s dirty boot for long enough. This feeling is amplified by the mass media, which does whatever it can to get people to tune in. Billions of dollars hang in the balance and truth, a slippery thing in any case, is reconciled only in the corporate bottom line.

So instead of serious discussions, and an honest search for the real reasons for our problems and possible solutions, we get rationales and overheated partisan rhetoric. Talented talking head pundits make millions of dollars to pontificate, deliver talking points and push a party line, their demographic choir lustily nodding their agreement, shuddering in disgust, pumping their fists. My foolish idealism believes, like Anne Frank, before the Nazis killed her, that all people are basically good. If they had the facts, and a bit of honesty, just a little….

Right, Dave.

I offer just two rationales, instead of reasons, that merely state a good enough excuse to do something truly inexcusable. In fairness, let me qualify that. The displacement of millions of people, the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands– not necessarily inexcusable, fair enough. But to be fair, and in the context of an unprovoked attack on a country ruled by a tyrant and massive destruction in the name of freeing them, it seems a bit hard to excuse.

Rationale for the war in Iraq:

Why Iraq? Because we and many others (Democrats too) thought he had WMD’s and because we could use a strong country in the Middle East that was sympathetic to us for their liberation.

This rationale leaves out the oft trumpeted connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which turned out to be as false as the WMD rationale. That the CIA and many foreign intelligence sources knew the reports of this connection and the WMDs were false was not seen as an impediment to the invasion of a country that would be sympathetic to us even if we inadvertently destroyed its infrastructure, displaced millions, killed many thousands, subjected it to more than a decade of mayhem, explosions, assassinations and so on, in the name of freedom and democracy… well, such are the costs of war, the price of freedom, one might rationalize.

And I am tortured by torture, as I keep saying. It makes my skin crawl that so many Americans are so nonchalant about what our government has been doing in our names. I was proud of John McCain for this speech. Here is a rationale for torture, you will notice how different it is from a good reason to torture, something that, outside of doing it to inflict maximum pain on someone you hate, I have never heard:

I don’t justify torture…water boarding isn’t torture…it’s used in the training of our troops. And we only water-boarded three people. And the times then called for enhanced interrogation methods so that 9/11 could never happen again.

A person saying this, you might think, well, you, Sir, have set up a straw man to try to prove your point. This is an actual answer to the question “how do you justify Americans torturing people?”. It seems unfair to suggest that if we grabbed this woman, shoved a bag over her head, rushed her, shackled and diapered, to a dark, coffin-sized cell and locked her in there for a few weeks she would say the same thing at the end of her little adventure. Even if we did not strip her naked, kept her cell at a comfortable temperature, left her in silence and never put a gag in her mouth, tilted her upside down on a board and poured water into the gag until the doctor monitoring the procedure told us we were about to accidentally kill her.

As for me, I just wish I had something productive to keep me busy enough not to think of these things. I sometimes envy people I know who are running at high speed all day, far too busy to ponder, more than momentarily, things so sickening, and so futile and depressing to ponder.

photograph from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is A Battlefield.

Knee Jerk

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, after the recent slaughter of two policemen by a gun wielding maniac who dashed into the subway after the murders and blew himself away, until someone on the political right would place these deaths squarely where they belong: on Hamas, angry Muslim antisemites, race-baiters and the progressives who embrace them.

Like most people, I was sickened by the news of the killings. Only in the mind of an enraged and suicidal killer could the murders of two policemen in their patrol car innocently eating lunch be justified. Nobody with any sense of decency could relate to the senseless and brutal act as anything but a senseless and brutal act, an atrocity. It has been denounced by everyone with a microphone, including the mother of Eric Garner, the man killed after being placed in a police choke hold on Staten Island.

I will say this for the extreme right, they never lose an opportunity to connect the dots, to exploit every horror to show that progressives are deluded apologists responsible for every terrible thing that befalls us here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I had an email forwarded to me just now that sits in my craw like a hairball. I kick myself for reading it. It makes the point, in the right’s typically assured way, that liberals, by caving in to their abiding guilt, forced the NYPD to stop surveilling Muslims and thus lost the opportunity to know that this killer had made reference, on Facebook, to Al-Farooq, which is a Brooklyn mosque allegedly well-known to have ties to radical Islam and terrorist plots, where, if he went there, he may well have received instructions to murder those policemen directly from Hamas.

Case closed, as they say.

Drown ’em– or at least Waterboard ’em

The U.S. Postal Service, in this instance.

“Your call is very important to us. Did you know there is a difference between Regular, Certified and Regular Certified Mail? It’s true. You can find this interesting information and much more at

http://www.gofuckyourselfwhileyou’reonhold.com

or please continue to hold while we experience more than usual call volume and wait times are expected to exceed one hour. Or visit us at http://www.suckourcollectiveass.com to learn about more ways the US Post Office is working hard to make things better for you without hiring additional qualified personnel. Please continue to hold, your business is so important to us we’ve formed a partnership with Fed Ex to serve you even better. Did you know there is a difference between Regular, Certified and Regular Certified Mail? It’s true!”

I wrote an email, to my landlord’s automated “helpline”, while listening to this over and over:

I am the tenant in apt. __ at __ _____. I left a message with Marjorie earlier today and am following up with this email. I’m working on getting my December rent check, mailed weeks ago, back to you ASAP.

The post office returned my December rent check to me on Saturday, in the envelope you provided, slightly crushed, with your address clearly visible and the stamp cancelled. (see attachments) [I sent them photos, recto and verso– ed.] They sent it back to me, instead of to you, the Postmaster said, because “We Care”. Aggravating to say the least.

I just found out that overnight UPS, via the Post Office (only way to deliver to a PO Box) is $32. I am on hold with the Post Office now, the ones who screwed this up in the first place. So far I’ve been on hold for almost 40 minutes. Now I’m five minutes into a third wait for a supervisor, requesting a voucher for the price of having this delivered. So far they’ve offered to let me stand on line at my local post office at the height of the Christmas shipping season so they can correct their mistake.

I was fairly confident the Post Office would offer no help in this matter, even before I was just “transferred” to a supervisor, and my 39 minute call was cut off.

If there is a physical office I can deliver this check to (I recall I used to send these to an address at Penn Plaza), I can deliver it to you tomorrow, Wednesday or Friday.

Please advise,

Blah Blah Woof Woof

Why torture tortures me

I should, I know, not be tormented by the arguable torture that has been done in my name. Who am I to expect to have any say in what’s done in my name, and for my own good, anyway? I am not on the battle field, after all. I have not been directly hurt by the fanatics intent on cutting my throat. Still, something just seems wrong with this picture:

It seems wrong to me, naive though it may sound, to torture a guy until he snaps and then say “see, he was just waiting to snap, faking his moderate stance but look, torture the angry fanatic just a little, not even two years locked up without charges, and the prick will go on the internet and preach jihad for no reason except that he hates our freedom, resents our ability to do whatever we want to Muslim extremists anywhere on the earth. YOU’RE DEAD, fucker!”

And then, boom, death from the sky, 500 pound Tomahawk missile, poof! There go your fiery sermons, bitch– go deflower 72 virgins, asshole. In two weeks we’ll wipe out your DNA in the form of your long-haired American son and the guys he’s having lunch with. How dare you call us murderous infidels!

And I feel a bit insane to be thinking about this at all, but more insane to think about it and not write about it. In the context of the latest tortured torture semi-revelations it seems timely to note that even just locking someone in a tiny cell without charges or access to anyone in the outside world is torture. No need for the $81,000,000 in consultant’s fees and all the tortured secret legal opinions– just lock someone in the dark for nine months, that will do it. Then, when it’s done, and they start to scream, kill ’em for screaming. It’s perfect, yo, don’t you see?