Sotomayor's Aspirations

I hesitate to weigh in on Sotomayor, since there is already so much overblown and predictable garbage flying around the media about her appointment, 99% of which will be forgotten as soon as she is deservedly confirmed. Face it, the woman is an unexceptionable grind. It never seems to occur to Certain Persons that calling a Latina woman an 'affirmative action pick' just because she is a Latina woman is the definition of racism; this is why affirmative action needs to be phased out as soon as is practical. We don't need to be saddling competent people with the kind of self-doubt and social undermining that affirmative action necessarily creates.

I call her a 'grind,' however, because it is clear (as she states herself) that she has little natural oratorical or rhetorical talent. And I will probably regret this, but--am I the only person who noticed her misuse of the word 'aspiration' in her speech?

I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.

Surely, surely she meant that her mother is her life's inspiration? You can't aspire to be another person. A person can inspire you to be like them. This is a cliché, and she got it wrong.

I hope this was merely a slip due to extreme nervousness. From what I've read about her, she strikes me as far more middle-of-the-road than either the liberal or conservative factions are willing to admit. When are people going to understand that there is not a conflict between empathy and justice? A decision is only a sound one when it resonates with both the intellect and the heart.

Let alone the fact that in several of the most prominent cases being bandied about, Sotomayor has consistently erred on the side of strict, literal interpretation of the law, at the expense of the more touchy-feely outcomes. Which only points up the fact that 'conservatives' are frequently only in favor of 'the rule of law' when the rule of law favors them.

I am a Stepford Mom

Really. According to the hip, arch copy on the orange Vitamin Water bottle, only Valium-soaked Stepford moms cook breakfast.

I have nothing against Vitamin Water; I drank five cases of the stuff during my last six weeks of pregnancy. (That was the amount left over from the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival promotional samples. We would not, of course, PAY for five cases of colored water.) But people who write hip, arch copy on bottles run the danger of making Too Many Assumptions. In this case, and particularly in this economy, it is not a wise move to disrespect women who get up in the morning and pop a pan of biscuits in the oven--or muffins, or waffles, or bacon and eggs. Cooking breakfast from scratch is not hard, it is not time-consuming, and it's a heck of a lot more cost- and nutrition-effective than popping by Dunkin Donuts.

When you bake something yourself, you know what is in it. My biscuits, for example, contain organic whole wheat flour, butter, sea salt, aluminum-free baking powder, and organic milk. They don't contain high fructose corn sweetener, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, superfine white flour, processed dairy by-products, or preservatives.

(Not that 'preservatives' are necessarily a bad thing. I recently purchased a jar of marinated herring prominently labeled "No Preservatives;" the ingredients were herring, onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, spices, black pepper and wine. Somebody needs to brush up on the history of food preservation techniques.)

In the pursuit of feminist equality, we take the disrespect of 'women's work' much, much too far. I don't consider baking to be a symbol of oppression, but rather of freedom. I like to bake; in times of anxiety it calms me down. It's alchemical, and produces a tangible result, unlike the vast majority of what passes itself off as 'work' these days.

Vanity and Shame

Transcript of recent interaction between myself and Ico Gallery:

Dear Stephanie Lee Jackson,

I recently been introduced [sic] to your work online, and I must say I'm very impressed. After reviewing your website, I'm extremely interested in finding out more about you and the process of your work. I feel that your work would be a grand addition to Perceptions Of Reality, which is our September collective exhibition that uses the Surrealist ideology of entering a different cosmos, and combines it with that of abstraction and Fauvism, which in effect will create an alternate view of reality, previously unexplored by one artist. This exhibition will the inaugural exhibition in our new flagship location in our extravagant ground floor 3,000 sq ft gallery in Chelsea.

[two paragraphs of pretentious blather about "renaissance," which, in case you didn't know, is a French word meaning "rebirth."]

Upon perusal of the attached proposal, I found the real reason for this 'career opportunity': $2500 in fees. I replied posthaste.

VANITY. GALLERY.

Get a clue. And take me off your mailing list.

Vanity galleries are like Nigerian 419 scammers; usually they crawl back into the woodwork like cockroaches when confronted with the truth about their business practices. I was thus rather surprised to receive a reply.

You do realize why you're [sic] resume is non-existent, right? With an attitude like that, you will not make it in the business of art!

My first impulse was to press the 'delete' button and forget about it. But I have been making a habit, lately, of stating my boundaries when strangers try to shame me, even though this may come across as hysterical and overengaged; it is helping me eradicate the bad habit of taking jerks too seriously.

Hello, could you BE any tackier?

I know enough about the 'business of art' to know that artists who show with galleries that charge thousands of dollars in fees never get any artistic respect, and are unlikely to recoup their fees in sales, because galleries that charge fees have less incentive to build a collector base; their overhead is already covered. They also prey upon artists with 'non-existent resumes' because they are looking for the ignorant and the insecure who haven't yet figured this out, and are thus vulnerable to their scams.

Genuine, respected art dealers make studio visits, spend time getting to know their artists, and build a consistent program over time. They don't do online searches and send out flattering (at first) emails to every random artist they find. This isn't the first solicitation I've received from you; you need to keep a better database.

My 'attitude' is generally just fine, thank you very much. I am just sick of being an object of predation for every fool with an MBA and cultural pretensions. If you believe in art, put your money where your mouth is and start a real gallery. Select your artists for their skill, passion and commitment, not their economic idiocy, and treat them decently. Which means NOT charging them fees.

Good day.

This is pretty much the basic screed, which any artist ought to know by heart. What I want to point out, though, is the levers which predators of all stripes use to control people.

Note in their first contact, the fulsome level of flattery; this is the sort of thing that every adolescent assumes will come as their just due--say, when they first upload their work to Saatchi Online. You have to be working a few years, and have your illusions shattered a few dozen times, before you truly understand that nobody will EVER come across your work online, or on the street, or in a restaurant, and be so blown away that they offer you a Chelsea exhibition and thousands of dollars per piece. (Unless you are Swoon, or Barry McGee. And I'm not even sure that both of these artists are solvent.) Our culture is too saturated with images for that to happen. Plus, anyone who thinks they truly understand what an artist's work is like from an online image doesn't understand visual art at all.

Then, of course, once their cover is blown, out come the nasties: "You do know why your resume is nonexistent, right?" People who use flattery as a tool are highly prone to use humiliation as a weapon, since these are two sides of the same coin. Simply, they're trying to shut me up by hitting my most vulnerable spot.

And the reason I'm posting about this at length, online, despite the fact that it showcases my lack of career success, is that vanity and shame are the forces which keep most of us isolated, helpless, and ultimately unsuccessful. Predators can only survive when they've got a steady supply of weak, ignorant victims who don't share information. Once we learn to step outside of our egos and ask ourselves, "hey, what's this person's agenda? What's the bigger picture? Who is profiting, and who is the loser?" it makes us much harder to manipulate. Then maybe the vanity galleries will disappear--not to mention the vanity governments.

This intuition thing...

Recently, I participated in a short publicity video for Frances Largeman-Roth's new book, 'Feed the Belly,' healthy eating for pregnant women. She asked us about our pregnancy cravings; I replied that I really didn't have any. Oh, except that I ate about a half-bushel of apples a week.

Lo, eating apples in pregnancy may help to prevent asthma in your child. Interestingly enough, allergies and asthma were one of my few genetic worries about parenthood. I was hospitalized with severe asthma at the age of three, and my brother has nearly died more than once from a severe peanut allergy. I did not know about this study while I was pregnant. I just ate what I felt like eating. The body is, indeed, wiser than we know.

Math lesson

Deborah Fisher presents an exhaustive discussion of why environmentalists need to get a grip on basic math:

The harder the individual Greenmonger (myself included) worked at trying to minimize her own personal impact, the more egotistically out of touch she seemed to the people around her. The result was a vicious cycle of very little progress: scores of people who really did want to care were put off by the one co-worker who kept digging in the trash and nagging people about Vampire Power. Environmentalists became the ultimate Debbie Downers--the ones who couldn't stop reminding you that this or that product that you use every day is toxic, talking about the horrors of factory farming when you're trying to eat, or the worst--expounding ad nauseum on the benefits of not buying anything unless the canvas bag was at the ready and otherwise living difficultly. Dick Cheney's evil prophecy was more than fulfilled. Environmentalism didn't just become a matter of personal virtue. Environmentalists became Victorian scolds with a wrongly-scaled sense of their own impact on the world and an impaired sense of humor.

'Wrongly-scaled'? Deborah, you are too kind.

Recently I came across a video on Facebook, of a 12-year-old girl scolding the UN for messing up the planet. It was powerful and touching; the conversation in the comments, however, rapidly devolved into a self-righteous group bashing of those evil people who use plastic bags. Plastic bags?

Well, yes, plastic bags are a problem. They strangle sea birds, and off-gas noxious chemicals that mimic estrogen. But defining the total virtue of self and others as a function of how many plastic bags you use is both narcissistic and petty. It also shows a criminal ignorance of proportionality: the ratio of plastic bags used or not-used by a single person, to the total number of plastic bags used by the billions of people on the planet, is so infinitesimal as to approach zero. In other words, even if you never use another plastic bag for as long as you live, your Puritan self-restraint will have virtually no effect on the state of the planet.

The standard response to this is, of course, "So what? It's better than nothing." But if "infinitesimally better than nothing" is the best any of us can possibly do to save the planet, we're doomed. As Deborah so eloquently points out, spreading the news that humans are nothing but pollution machines, with virtually no power to alter their surroundings short of mass suicide, is not the best way to recruit others to your point of view.

As a new mother, I am more sensitive than usual to the plethora of disparaging comments on websites like Salon.com about People Who Breed Irresponsibly, or People Who Breed, period. I see perfectly nice women seriously worrying that they shouldn't have children because Overpopulation Is Destroying the Planet. Some people actually go so far as to verbally assault women with the temerity to write about the difficulties of supporting three children after a divorce; "serves you right," they say, "you shouldn't have had the kids in the first place."

I BEG your pardon? Rude, abusive and hateful, much?

What affects the global population rate is not the decision of one guilty, white, middle-class liberal to have a child or not; it is the rate of education of women in third world countries, or lack thereof. As the education level goes up, the birth rate goes down; it only starts going up again when the culture as a whole starts treating women as full-fledged human beings. So whatever your views on population control, the decline of Western civilization and the advent of feminism, you could do worse than to treat women as people with functioning minds, who are capable of making their own reproductive decisions.

One of the most destructive habits of human thinking, I believe, is the notion that we are just our bodies; that physical action and physical existence demarcate the limits of our sphere of influence. The truth is, our bodies are the least of us. The potential influence of our physical selves is negligible; the potential influence of our spirit is infinite.

This month in the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch writes about Rwanda's astonishing recovery from genocide, fifteen years after the bloodbath. Incredible as it may seem, hundreds of proven, confessed murderers are living side by side with the friends and families of their victims, in relative peace and prosperity. Part of what has allowed this miracle to occur is the practice of gacaca; village courts which establish a collective accounting of past atrocities by publically hearing confessions, and pleas for forgiveness.

Of course, this has not produced anything like total healing or enlightenment for the vast majority of Rwandans. It has, however, largely prevented a continuation of the violence, and laid the groundwork for a stable, prosperous society. What makes the difference? Largely, Rwandan President Paul Kagame:

...It was Kagame, of course, who had issued the order granting the killers their reprieve, so after the ceremony he called the young man over. "And I asked him, How do you manage? When you meet them, what do they tell you or what do you tell them? What is your feeling? I want you to genuinely tell me how you feel. This young man looked me in the face and he said, 'Well, President, I manage because you ask us to manage.'"

There is a fine line between totalitarianism and inspiration, sometimes a line which is externally invisible. But in any cause for righteousness, our goal should be to inspire others, not to control them.

Sociopaths and Me

Okay, so I know that 'advertises for massage on Craigslist' is code for 'freelance hooker.' That's why I don't advertise on Craigslist. I have still had more than one client who expected, and requested, a hand job; those clients get sent home with a flea in their ear. Usually I can prescreen male prospective clients over the telephone by the simple expedient of asking why they want a massage. If they say, "My back just went out, and my wife recommended you," they get an appointment. If they say, "oh, I just want to relax..." I'm booked up until the year 2020.

But the 'Craigslist killer' still could have gotten me. It is a measure of my extreme naivete that the first thing I thought was, "why would anybody try to rob a massage therapist? We're not known for carrying large sums of cash."

Actually, that was my second thought. My first thought was, "Oh, a pervert who rapes vulnerable self-employed women in hotel rooms and kills them afterward."

What a checkered life I've led.

I don't want to presume a person is guilty until it's been proven. Thus, it's difficult to comment on the interviews with all of the accused's 'friends', who say what a nice guy he is, how he smiles all the time and always says hello. But it struck me that nobody yet has mentioned any concrete good of the guy. Nobody tells the story of working side by side with him at Habitat for Humanity, or recounts how he let them crash at his place for three months when they got laid off, or helped them move at the drop of a hat, or set their broken bone for free.

No, it was all superficial. He smiled, he said hello, he went to parties and asked how you were doing. It struck me that none of the persons interviewed knew him any more deeply than that, and how it hadn't seemed to occur to them that there was any more depth than that.

Two things: one, that many or most sociopaths come across as 'really nice guys.' Sociopaths are expert manipulators. They smile, they say hello, they ask how you are. Why are more people not aware of this?

Two, that our social habits, as a society, don't encourage deep engagement with one another. To the point that most people don't even know what deep engagement is, let alone notice the lack of it.

Networking in the New Economy

Lately I've been getting a rash of press releases from galleries, arts organizations and gung-ho Emerging Artists. Some of them I've had friendly contact with in the past, but most are from people that I've either never heard of, have actively snubbed me when I've visited them in person, show work that I have utterly no interest in (Art Cars in Los Angeles?) or are located across the country in places I never visit. Evidently, these people are catching on to the fact that art bloggers, (or artists who have blogs, in my case) are gradually acquiring some of the influence that formerly was the sole provenance of art critics writing for major publications.

I would let these people know that their carefully crafted publicity is going straight into my circular file, except that I'm positive that none of them actually read my blog. They just had an office flunkey go down the list of Art Bloggers, courtesy of Modern Art Notes or Ed Winkleman, and compile the authors' contact information. Email is free, after all!

And of course, you get what you pay for.

Recently I came across a video snippet by Seth Godin, on Good and Bad Networking. He pointed out that what most of us think of as New York Power Networking is basically useless: going to tons of events, handing your business card to everyone you meet, 'friending' thousands of people on Facebook, delivering your 30-second pitch at every opportunity, compiling huge email lists and sending frequent updates.

Thank God he said it. I hate those people. I have, occasionally, been one of those people, but have never been able to sustain the momentum for any length of time. I was too aware that I was acting like too big of a jerk, and could not come close to maintaining connections in any meaningful way.

Because once you've been on these people's mailing lists for awhile, you notice that they never reciprocate. You send them a note saying "Congratulations!" with a short update on your own affairs, and they don't reply. You comment on their blog and they don't respond. You show up at their event and they're talking to someone more important than you, and fail to make introductions. It goes without saying that they'll never come to your show, refer a client, write a review, or hook you up with that agent they know. They're So Busy! Who has the time?

No, as Seth says, the kind of networking that actually works has to do with helping other people achieve their goals. It's all about making referrals, connecting people, taking an interest. If you want an art blogger to review your show, make a habit of reading their blog and commenting! If you need client referrals, make them. And for goodness' sake, if somebody does something nice for you, thank them.

I suspect that the world is changing more profoundly than most people are ready to apprehend. We are inevitably moving from a top-down, authority-driven culture to a lateral one. Large corporations are reducing their workforces and eliminating pensions; newspapers are dying; whole sectors of the economy are shriveling up and disappearing. Fewer and fewer people are going to be able to make a living from one job alone. We will be cobbling together an income from three or four or five sources, and trading assistance with peers will make the difference between solvency and starvation. It seems to me that people who 'network' with a virtual bullhorn are falling prey to the old paradigm; that all you need to do is broadcast your agenda to everyone you meet, until you meet the ONE who will make you FAMOUS. All other people only exist in order to conduct you to that one.

Well, I've got news for you; that ONE publisher, gallery, agent, investor or corporation you were depending on just went bankrupt. Other commoners are all you've got to work with. Treat us kindly.

Personal Update

No, I haven't popped yet. Mainly I'm just waddling around, baking things and waiting. But everything is Fine, I saw the midwife yesterday, I have an acupuncture appointment tomorrow and a 41-week ultrasound on Monday, just in case things haven't moved along by then. All of your support is much appreciated!

Oh, please

Go read this article: Trying to Live on 500k in New York City. Read the whole thing; it's short. I'll wait.

Sure, the solution may seem simple: move to Brooklyn or Hoboken, put the children in public schools and buy a MetroCard. But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Yes, the solution IS simple. Not just because there's no reason that the taxpayers should pay for your summer house; because a person who is responsible for managing a financial system which determines people's lives should have some CLUE WHAT PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE LIKE.

Talk about identity politics. There is no social good to be maintained by buttressing illusions of superiority in a handful of drones who shuffle numbers while other people do the work. There is, perhaps, a great deal of social good to be obtained by insisting that bankers be forced to learn to manage money.

For starters, consider this:

A modest three-bedroom apartment, she said, which was purchased for $1.5 million, not the top of the market at all, carries a monthly mortgage of about $8,000 and a co-op maintenance fee of $8,000 a month. Total cost: $192,000. A summer house in Southampton that cost $4 million, again not the top of the market, carries annual mortgage payments of $240,000.

What kind of a jackass buys an apartment with co-op maintenance fees that equal the mortgage payment? I took an open house tour this weekend of a very nice three-bedroom condo in Brooklyn, with views of lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and boats coming into the East River. The asking price was $955,000, with monthly maintenance fees of $510.74, and a projected mortgage payment after tax abatement of around $4000. This, of course, is still obscene, and I only went on the tour as a tourist, so to speak, but it's nowhere near $16,000 a month. That extra $10K or so is just a stupidity tax.

The thing is, all of the so-called hideous costs of maintaining an 'executive aura' can be avoided by the simple expedient of avoiding costs which only exist to maintain an 'executive aura.' In other words, drop your ego. The sordid truth is that nobody ever believed your ego in the first place; they're taking advantage of you. You are paying through the nose for everything you do because you are a shallow, gullible prick. And incidentally, that's also why you screwed up the financial system.

What I Think About The Shepard Fairey Copyright/Fair Use Issue

Actually, I've done my best to avoid thinking about it at all. But judging by the number of dire emails I've received, containing links to incendiary articles which I have not read, and the number of art blogs weighing in, and Facebook friends on the case, and random headlines passing across my field of vision, it doesn't seem that I can get away from it.

So here it is: I. Don't. Care. I don't care what the overarching issues are; I don't care that My Rights As An Artist May Be In Danger. This whole thing, as little as I know about it, appears to me to be cheap and asinine, for the simple reason that Shepard Fairey has already gotten mind-boggling amounts of attention and publicity for opportunistically generating a two-bit piece of propaganda in the right place at the right time. Whatever happens to him, positive or negative, is so wildly disproportionate to his original creative output that expecting me to care about his fate is to add onus to insult.

Listen: I generate my own source material. Back in the days when I worked from photographs, I took my own photographs, stacks and stacks of them. When I work from designs and drawings, they're done either from life or out of my head. I don't rip off wallpaper patterns, stock images, stencils, or other people's cultures. On the rare occasions when I generate a Celtic knot for a Christmas card, I draw it from scratch without resorting to the photocopier.

Partially because of my insistence on making original art from scratch, cheap publicity has never come my way. In this age of politically correct arts institutions favoring multicultural projects, I persist in writing artist statements and making paintings which emphasize direct personal experience, unexcused by references to Tibetan mandalas or Indian miniature painting or Chinese aesthetic theory. So far, these artist statements and accompanying portfolios have gone directly into the trash, when people making work similar to mine, which does reference these things, earn Fullbright fellowships and appear in major galleries. I don't begrudge these artists their success; many of them are my favorite artists. I merely note that they're sort of cheating.

Good Ideas, Capital, and the Crumbling of the Authority Paradigm

Conor Friedersdorf has a good idea:

Were I given my way — hey, last time I wrote an essay like this I was, so it’s worth a shot — I’d secure funding for a Web site that aggregated diverse opinions on various issues, commissioned thoughtful magazine pieces of argument and analysis… and then deliberately commissioned the strongest rebuttals, counterarguments and alternate takes, and published them all side by side, facilitating productive conversation whenever possible. (In innovative ways!) An enterprise that gave diverse views a fair shake — and earned the trust of readers necesary for its success — couldn’t be run by just one editor, so I’d set up an ombudsman blog, give access to a couple dozen carefully selected, variously minded folk who all believe in the journalistic project, and guarantee that whatever they penned would appear on the front page, as a check on the editor’s power.

I had a good idea once, too. My idea was that since artists increase property values in any given area, by attracting hipsters and cultured people with money, we should start an enterprise that consisted of moving a group of artists temporarily into fallow real estate, fixing it up, making it gorgeous, holding art events with publicity assistance from major cultural organizations, and then moving to the next space when desirable tenants were found. The radical part of this idea was that the artists would get paid to do this.

To this end, I talked with dozens of artists, event planners, lawyers, investors, businessmen, and cultural organizations. Everyone agreed that this was a splendid idea. I put together a core team of people with diverse practical skills, wrote up a business plan, ran it by some accountants, and applied for funding and fiscal sponsorship. Then all of our financial and political capital (i.e. the business/legal/cultural organization contingent) vanished without a trace.

After I got over my shell shock, I realized the obvious--that the entire foundation of our cultural economy depends on the fact that artists work for free. As much as it is politically expedient for those with cultural and financial clout to pay lip service to the idea of supporting the arts, artists, and freedom of expression, they are never going to back a project which threatens their authority.

This may go some way toward explaining why good ideas like Conor's so rarely become manifest in reality. The difference between an eccentric loser crackpot and a visionary creative mind is merely one of financing. But for every thoughtful, erudite screenplay that languishes in the slush pile, Hollywood makes ten inane, derivative blockbusters that are forgotten in two weeks; for every architect who designs an elegant, energy-efficient, sustainable building, developers put up forty more strip malls; for every thousand hard-working, skilled, reliable employees who lose their jobs, some investment banker pockets another multi-million dollar bonus, courtesy of the federal government.

As has become inescapably clear to anyone who has read a headline in the last four months, 'authority' in our society has become nearly synonymous with 'sociopaths, narcissists, pigs, sadists, and nincompoops.' And yet those of us with good ideas--those of us with skills, ethics, talent and vision--stand around wringing our hands, as we have been wringing them ever since we first graduated from college with honors, and discovered that we had a choice among sacking groceries, waiting tables, and temping.

In days past, when smart people with initiative found themselves crushed by corrupt and oppressive systems of authority, they went somewhere else. They colonized Australia, or Canada, or California. But we have no physical frontiers left on the planet, and the corruption of brainless, brutal authority threatens to destroy us. We have to find another paradigm--one that consists of action, real action, not useless symbolic statements like rallies, petitions, protests, and Marches On Washington.

Because an enormous part of the problem is that we have all been trained from the cradle to respond to authority like children. Meek submission, blind obedience, feeble protest and violent revolution are all part of the same authority-dependent continuum; they all acknowledge that the power of the violent alpha, the one with the money, the connections and the brawn, is what determines our circumstances.

So what might a trans-authority paradigm look like? Could it start with community building? Could it benefit from consensus decision-making? And how can it be financed? Consider this an open question.

Well, damn

Culture11 is going under. I'm seriously bummed about this, because lately it's been one place where I've seen smart conservative writers engaging with genuine good will and a distinct lack of petty, mean-minded sniping. It is too bad there doesn't seem to be much of a market for this.

On the other hand, I hadn't actually realized that Culture11 was, well, a business. Having been an artist for 20 years and a blogger for 4, supporting myself (barely) by any means I can, and regarding the occasional art sale or ad revenue check as an exciting bonus, it always perplexes me when people make ambitious business plans that rely on getting paid a living wage for generating intellectual property. Particularly when they've been in business for less than a year.

I wish our culture worked that way, but it manifestly doesn't. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd call a bunch of conservatives out on their naive idealism.

Question

Rod Blagojevitch is clearly insane, delusional, and a narcissistic nincompoop. Why is he continuing to garner news media attention, instead of being shot full of Demerol and confined to a locked ward?

Oh, wait, I know! Palin/Blagojevitch 2012!

To Set Away Childish Things

The time has come. Let's get going.

Once upon a time, I was looking for a roommate. I put out an advertisement for a 'mature female.' When one of the candidates arrived at the door, I was in the kitchen; it took me 15-20 seconds to respond to the doorbell.

When I was halfway to the door, the bell rang again, long and furiously. When I opened it, there stood a girl in a spiked dog collar and fuchsia hair. "You said the appointment was at 2, and it's 2 now," she whined, incensed at being made to wait those interminable 20 seconds while I traversed the length of the house.

What I did not say: "I asked for a MATURE roommate. Can't you READ??!!! Why are you wasting my time?"

Instead I invited her in, and it took her only two minutes to discover that my cats had independent outdoor access by means of a cat flap. Her cat wasn't allowed outside. "So sorry. Goodbye." Catfight avoided.

In that moment it dawned on me--immature people don't know they're immature. You can lecture them until you're blue in the face, and they just think you're being mean. Every adolescent thinks he's king of the world, and that he has nothing to learn. The best we can usually do with such brats is to fence them in, be polite, and try to limit collateral damage until they injure themselves sufficiently to inspire serious thinking.

But for too long now, our nation has been run by children, and we have not only failed to fence them in, but have neglected to define what, exactly, makes them so childish. So, in a spirit of hope, and perhaps a start on good parenting, I'm going to spell it out.

Spite: petty ill will or hatred with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart; MALICE.

Making goofy faces is childlike, not necessarily spiteful; it all depends on the context. Spite is refusing to consult an expert on a crucial issue because you need to prove something--even though that expert might be your own father, and even though his counsel could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives.

On a more mundane level, spite is the deliberate withholding of generosity, whether it be consistently interpreting other people's motives in the most negative possible light, harping on petty issues at the expense of major ones, or habitually making mean-spirited comments that impede productive communication. It is prizing one's egoistic sense of superiority over the concerns of others.

I was going to continue the list, but now that I think about it, everything else flows from this one thing. We have the choice to view other people with compassion, to attempt to understand where they're coming from, to let go of rigid expectations, or to condemn them out of hand and attack, attack, attack. We can cling to our own perspectives and try to force the world to conform to them, or we can have the inner confidence to consider other points of view. We can whine, blame, and take pleasure in the suffering of others, or we can shoulder our responsibilities with quiet good will.

The more I have read about Obama's transition process, the more I have felt--not euphoric, not hopeful--but simply relieved. During the debates, when listening to McCain go on about arcane details of international military engagements, I thought, "This guy would make a great Presidential advisor, if a temperamentally problematic President"; now, lo, Obama is asking him for advice. His appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State appears to have brought out the best in her, judging by her recent address to the Foreign Relations Committee; it productively incorporates her iron will, her ability to assimilate formidable amounts of detail, and her need to be immersed in conflict and drama in order to function. With every decision he makes, I see a renunciation of grievance and a determination to expect the best of people, tempered by a realistic understanding of our human limitations.

Because the tragedy of the Bush administration was not that mistakes were made. It was that avoidable mistakes were made, and not corrected, because the ego aggrandizement of the few took precedence over the well-being of the many. There were advisors available who knew better, at every step of the way--whether the issue was the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, the handling of the war itself, the warnings about the financial system, the handling of disaster relief after Katrina--but these people were dismissed and ignored, for the pettiest of reasons.

The Obama administration will make mistakes, because that's what people do. We, as a species, are not adults yet. We don't know everything, we're not able to divest ourselves of grievances and blame, and we haven't figured out a way to cope with the complexities of a changing world. My hope is not that Obama will miraculously 'fix everything,' which simply is not possible. It is that he will inspire us to become a little less petty, a little more responsible, and a little more forgiving. Perhaps as a nation we will start to leave adolescence behind.

The Marginal Utility of a Dollar

Thank you, thank you, thank you, anonymous donors:

It may not seem like much to you. But there's this thing about money that economists call *The Marginal Utility of a Dollar.* It describes the way one dollar means much more to someone who has only a few to begin with.

I've had times in my life when $50 didn't seem like much to me either. This is definitely NOT one of them.

Here's one of the big differences in my life a *small* amount of money just made: I can type some tonight. Why? My hands are now covered with these Lidocaine patches. My *mummy* hands. They're very expensive, nearly $400 for 2 boxes, or even more if you don't shop carefully.

My previous Medicare HMO's refused to pay for them at all, they just weren't covered. Effective January 1, I changed HMO's. This year's HMO does cover them, hooray! OMG! I've waited to get these patches for 3 or 4 YEARS, and now, suddenly, I need them far more than ever before.

However...that new HMO still wants a $20 copay.

Just a little $20 copay, right?

But when you have less than zero money, and you acquire a small sum, first you buy food. So those patches sat at Walgreen's for a week, because I didn't have $20 for the copay.

And now I have my patches, and at least for tonight, I can type.

It's so easy to give in to despair, particularly in times like these--to think, "there's nothing I can possibly do to alleviate the suffering around me, so I won't even try." It happens to me, more often than not. I read about the war in Gaza, slave trafficking in Thailand and India, brutality in Africa, the overwhelming global financial meltdown, and my faith feels like the spark left after a candle is blown out, confronting a tsunami.

Then I ask for help, and help arrives, sometimes from people I don't even know. Miracles abound.

'The Condescension of the Entitled'

Rob Horning speculates upon the evolution of 'kindness':

A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn’t register as “kindness.” When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it’s probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness—they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, “how kind of me,” how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.

Indeed. I don't encourage my friends to assist those in need out of 'kindness,' either in myself or in others; I do so because of an innate understanding that 'there but for the grace of God go I.' Aspiring to some sort of moral virtue in doing so strikes me as hubristic.

It seems obvious to me that some human beings are born with a well-developed sense of empathy; others, not so much. It seems equally obvious to me that codified moral systems, whether they be religious or secular, attempt to lay out a rule book for conducting oneself as though one were motivated by empathy, as though one's neighbor were oneself. This is why I believe that following one of these systems to the letter does not guarantee one the moral high ground, nor do I think that such system-following is the pinnacle of human morality. Religion and law are a training ground for the conscience, no more and no less.

Furthermore, I see that when a sufficient number of citizens in any society follow an empathy-encouraging moral system for an extended period of time, that society continues to extend its empathy in more pervasive ways--by setting up a universal healthcare system, for example. This is an organic process, not a revolutionary one; witness that the brutal feudalism of the Russian empire produced the brutal levelling and totalitarian failures of Marxism, whereas the gentler Christian traditions of Western Europe gave rise to more or less functional socialism. The difference, in my view, is not just one of degree but of genesis.

Moreover, the word 'kindness' itself encompasses such a wide range of acts, feelings and motivations that it is almost pointless to argue whether society is becoming kinder, or more callous. As Horning points out, kindness aligned with power produces the condescension of the entitled; kindness unaligned with power is just common decency. (via Sullivan)

Community, Please Rally Round

I have a very serious favor to ask of all my readers.

A very good friend of mine is in a very bad way. Due to a combination of severe chronic health problems, and the fact that the makers of the drug Cipro failed to warn consumers of crippling tenosynovitis as a side effect of its use, she is completely disabled and in terrible pain:

Along with the physical loss of the use of most of my fingers, my left hand, and now the right hand, is the most mind-bending pain I've ever experienced. To touch or accidentally brush against anything can make me cry out despite myself. It's the kind of pain that brings you close to vomiting, to going insane, to chewing into your own flesh like a mortally wounded animal.

Every day a new area of attack emerges. It's spread from my left hand to the right, throughout my left arm, left shoulder, left rib cage, both elbows, both knees - front and back - both ankles, both Achilles tendons, and now both feet. This morning it had hit my left lower back. Tonight, just now, I felt it pulling throughout my left leg. All these for the first time, all in the last few weeks.

At the same time, her husband is disabled because of a work-related injury after a heart attack, and both workman's comp and disability are screwing them over:

We're like so many other Americans, living paycheck to paycheck; if one paycheck stops, life can spiral out of control with horrifying speed. We're there. Walter's Worker's Comp was cut off on a spurious basis. Yesterday came a letter saying his disability claim was denied. The basis? They said his disability was from a work injury, so go apply for Worker's Comp.

Like so many others in this disastrous economy, Joe and I are hanging on by our fingernails, with the help of good credit, good health, family, friends and community. We can't wait for the government to step in and solve this; we've got to help our friends in need, RIGHT NOW. This is my friend and she is in need; I have just sent her the amount of my monthly blog income (from the Russian brides, in fact). I can vouch for her character.

Please hit her tip jar NOW. The money will go for food and medicine.