My Joint Address to Congress: a Proposal

Outgoing House Speaker John Boehner

Dear Speaker Boehner:

Congratulations on your newfound standing. By formally announcing your retirement from elective office, but retaining the Speakership for yourself, with its attendant responsibilities and authorities, for another month, you’ve become possibly the freest person in Washington today. You still have the ability to control legislative agendas on the House floor, you still control access to the speaker’s rostrum, but you’re forever free from looking to your next election.

You’ve used your five-year Speakership to invite many respected people, American and international, to address Congress, and many have accepted. Some such guests have been acclaimed, like Pope Francis; others have been controversial at best, like Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet you’ve nevertheless used your authority to stimulate debate and kickstart needed discussions at home and abroad. As one who fears the dominion of an unchecked executive over democracy, regardless of the party, I do appreciate an activist legislature.

Therefore, I encourage you to seize your newfound authority to invite someone to speak whom nobody circumscribed by future electoral responsibilities would ever dare invite: Me.

I’m nobody. That’s right. I control nobody else’s fate. I’m neither a head of state nor a corporate CEO, which in these days of multinational gigantism are almost interchangeable. Nobody consults me for religious, ethical, philosophical, or political guidance. This blog, which I’d hoped would be somewhat self-sustaining, has in four years barely netted the price of dinner for two. I sway the economy only inasmuch as I decide, day by day, whether to buy Goo-Goo Clusters or organic bananas.

Yet I’m a highly educated person doing blue-collar work. I straddle the line between two Americas, a substantially progressive, aggressively multi-culti academic nation versus a hard-working, despised, but nevertheless loyal world of conservatives and libertarians. I’ve seen both the offerings and the limitations each way of life offers America. And I’ve seen firsthand why the polarizing divide that reduces Washington to stunning inefficiency doesn’t reflect America whatsoever.

Pope Francis

University liberals notoriously believe that, if poor workers simply enjoyed greater “education,” they’d immediately join the revolution. As though somehow, only massed human stupidity stands between us and demi-Marxist utopia. Meanwhile, professional conservatives notoriously campaign on moral issues which whip voters into high dudgeon, then govern on economic issues that privilege the already privileged. Both sides basically treat Americans as too dim to understand their own affairs.

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself in an environment most outsiders don’t realize exists. Since I started working construction, I’ve been horrified to witness how deeply segregated the workplace is. Not just racially, though that too: we have black brickmasons, white electricians, hispanic machinists, and more. And they’re all completely male: of nearly 100 workers, I’ve seen two women. Though I’ve seen some overlap among populations, it’s mainly isolated clusters.

But no. The real segregation I’ve seen runs much deeper. It’s the complete separation of skill sets into dedicated groups, who seldom communicate, and fight over insignificant patches of territory. Communications happen between crew heads, who regularly get into heated pissing contests, mainly because they control so little that every inch becomes worth dying for. Though I’ve never seen actual fists flying, the language I’ve heard gets pretty cutting, the insults savage.

Remember the scene in Witness, when Harrison Ford joins the Amish community in a barn-raising? We not only behold him internalizing the Amish communal values of work and mutuality, we even see him sip gently off the lemonade and pass it on. I cried; didn’t you? That doesn’t happen in today’s construction environment. We must erect such massively complex buildings so fast, that huge numbers of people never talk, much less share anything.

C'mon, Mister Speaker, you could show this
guy up at his own populist game

We’re building a high school. Certainly, we want schools that enjoy quality appointments, like a good kitchen, up-to-date science laboratories, computer access, and more. But to achieve this result quickly, we’ve fobbed the actual building onto despised people: racial minorities, the poor, and people who, like me, simply bet on bad college majors. We’ve segregated people along lines more powerful, more intractable, than race; we’ve created an entire population of “menial” people for “menial” jobs.

What better opportunity than this, Speaker Boehner, do you have to address this yawning gulf in America today? This isn’t a Republican-Democratic or Conservative-Liberal issue. Rather, it exposes the unintended consequences of today’s culture. We have architects who’ve never driven a nail, laborers who have no autonomy over their labor, contractors who’ve never seen the jobsite. You could help us address this chasm, Mister Speaker, by simply inviting somebody eloquent and experienced to speak.

Death Clears Its Throat

Wendy Corsi Staub, Blood Red: Mundy's Landing Book One

Rowan Mundy has achieved the middle-class dream: handsome husband, three distinctive kids, and home ownership in her Upstate New York hometown. But for fourteen years she’s concealed the frightening day she almost committed adultery. Almost. Now somebody’s sent Rowan a reminder, reawakening long-buried paranoia. She feels her world constricting, and well she should, since her stalker has planned a bloody revenge, and the final blade will soon fall.

Wendy Corsi Staub is one of America’s most prolific authors, having over eighty titles on her résumè, including romances, YA novels, and her signature psychological thrillers. Her stories mainly focus on domestic themes. This one exposes resentments sunk deep beneath a seemingly flawless marriage. Her idea, and her opening chapter, promise smart characterization with sharp Freudian edges. Her unfolding narrative, unfortunately, makes me shout “Get on with it!”

Fourteen years ago, Rowan and a neighboring househusband, feeling trapped by suburban Westchester doldrums, commenced an emotional affair. Happy circumstance prevented them consummating their infidelity. Rowan successfully buried her indiscretions, relocated her family, and reinvented herself as a schoolteacher and mommy. But a threatening package, wrapped in a newspaper from the day she almost transgressed, appears in the mail, threatening everything she’s achieved.

Mysterious Casey somehow knows everything Rowan did. Casey blames her for, um, something, and has cultivated an elaborate revenge scheme guaranteed not only to hurt Rowan, but also humiliate her throughout her hometown. Casey has stalked Rowan relentlessly, coaxing her into snares of her own making. Until everything bears fruit, though, Casey seeks satisfaction by brutally murdering fair-skinned, redheaded single women. Women who remind Casey of Rowan.

Staub’s story begins well. The tension between Rowan’s WASPy self-recrimination, and Casey’s BTK-like cruelty, promises an interesting tale contrasting the violence we do ourselves, versus the violence we do others. Staub promises that, anyway. She could actually trim her 400-page book by nearly half if Rowan simply stopped believing she could fight her monstrous, invisible enemy single-handed, told her husband the truth, and accepted her loved ones’ support.

Wendy Corsi Staub

Instead, Rowan internalizes everything. She attempts to uncover her enigmatic stalker without telling anybody who doesn’t already realize what she’s done. This means contacting her almost-lover and the only person she’s ever confessed to, her harshly judgmental sister. She stacks lies atop other lies to prevent her husband and son realizing what she’s done. Soon she’s lying so readily, so glibly, she cannot remember whom she already told which lies.

Before long, observant readers realize the edifice of untruths she’s constructed, and the constant suspicion she requires to maintain that edifice, has become more destructive than the infidelity which never actually happened. We lose sympathy, wondering why she repeatedly compounds her predicament by adding new deceptions to old. Worse, these deceptions add no new information, simply keeping the narrative circling for hundreds of pages while advancing only incrementally.

Meanwhile, Casey’s spree becomes increasingly disproportional to Rowan’s detective work. Staub carefully prevents us learning anything concrete about Casey: between the androgynous name, Staub’s avoidance of pronouns, and Casey’s masterful disguises, we know less the more Staub explains (sorry, Laurie R. King did that non-reveal better). Only one fact remains, that Casey demonstrates skill and pleasure in murdering pretty redheads with straight razors. Are there no brunettes in Staub’s world?

Staub further slows the narration by introducing needless viewpoint characters. Though we mostly discover this story through Rowan and Casey’s eyes, Staub periodically shifts perspectives. This makes sense when, say, Rowan’s husband or son offers needed context for the ongoing story. But Staub introduces new characters, gives them long expository chronicles, permits them only minor contributions, then never uses them again. I scratch my head, wondering: “What did that contribute?”

Please don’t misunderstand. This book isn’t awful. Staub delivers moments of genuine surprise and touching character. These moments usually happen at chapter breaks, and Staub has unusually long chapters for genre fiction. This means that Staub’s most affecting moments happen sporadically, after long discursions where Rowan glumly studies her shoes and Casey foreshadows morbid carnage. The overall texture resembles long, languid hammocks between moments of remarkable humane power.

Just shy of page 200, Rowan thinks to herself “She’s never felt so alone in her life.” I realized: I don’t care. Rowan’s story starts well, but as it continues, it stops advancing. Watching her dig herself deeper, when everything would resolve itself if she’d simply tell one person the truth and accept help, gets repetitive. A story I initially enjoyed gets wearing. Simply, I lost interest and stopped caring.

This Is How Poetry Pierces Our Bounds

Martin Ott, Underdays: Poems

I immediately liked Martin Ott’s latest, deeply autobiographical poetry collection when the first poem, “The Interrogator In Retirement,” began with these lines:

He’s waiting for the reverse
metamorphosis, for the extra
feelers to fold in or fall off,
to wake one morning a man.

Ott’s unsubtle but well-placed literary reference pings off his own military career, which clearly still troubles him. But if I found these lines smart and engaging, I knew I’d love Ott’s verse just pages later, with the opening of “Survivor’s Manual to Love and War”:

Death is a loving dog
with no children or chew toys
to occupy its attention.
It will lick you into submission,
this inevitable pack instinct,
to join the vast departed.

I first noticed Martin Ott nearly one year ago as co-author, with John F. Buckley, of the collection Yankee Broadcast Network. That collection’s hilarious, gimlet-eyed angle on American celebrity culture had crafty ways of making me think it’d pander to my anti-mass-media prejudices, then upsetting my expectations in ways both shocking and illuminating. Ott, working solo, extends that tendency, but along lines more personal and melancholy than that collection permitted.

Like the best poets, Ott feels simultaneously familiar and jarring. Reading lines like “Death is a loving dog,” the contradiction between mental frames will, and should, dislodge our expectations.  Yet we inevitably recall other poets with similar approaches, like T.S. Eliot or John Ashbery, who have done similarly. If Ott plants surprising crops, he nevertheless farms well-tilled ground.

Martin Ott

Ott’s best poems have a narrative quality, a cogent through-line, once common with poets like Browning or Tennyson. But Ott combines this almost retro storytelling ability with very contemporary sensibilities about language. I appreciate this dualism, because it gives readers firm grounding to anchor their attention, while immersing us in his surprising insights. Most poets either guide us, or defamiliarize us; Ott, notably, does both:

Ten days of rain a year in Los Angeles
invokes the legend of sheathed umbrellas.
My mother once told me a story
about a boy who lost an eye
on an umbrella’s undercarriage.
Mary Poppins has proven that you can
get swept away by unbridled passion.
Is an umbrella actually an umbrella?

—”Why I Don’t Carry an Umbrella”

I once believed that poets, like Ott, whose metaphoric language and unexpected leaps reveal surprising truths, just see life differently than us readers. Perhaps, like Van Gogh, light hits their eyes in personal ways that we consumers cannot share. But reading Ott, I realized: he doesn’t see differently than me, not prospectively. He uses language to help himself see anew. He’s just invited me along for the journey.

No, Ott doesn’t contribute some unique viewpoint, so much as construct one through language. His contribution is less some pre-existing attitude, more a willingness to test his personal experiences by milling them with words, a stone-bladed metaphor excising everything ordinary from his ordeals until their truth shines through. Sometimes, as with his military career, Ott explains what truths he’s revealing. Other times, facts fall away as unnecessary trappings:

She is a whisper filtering through shadowy
office ducts, a wind chime for coworkers,
a snare drum to delivery men, a Stradivarius
to the woman in the corner office. She is
the guttural chant that drove a thousand times
a thousand workers to erect a pyramid of gossip,
a stairwell that groans a symphony of sex.

—”What is Left”

One feels, reading the specificity of images that continue accumulating, that “she” is a real person, not some agglomeration of personal stereotypes. But Ott cleaves off identifying characteristics as mere, needless facts. The truth lies beneath anything concrete we’d describe in a police report or dating profile.

That, perhaps, represents Ott’s greatest contribution. His language sometimes includes specific details—Los Angeles, Fort Leonard Wood, Naked Lunch, J.D. Salinger. Yet his language mills away accidents of form, the history of accumulated expectations. Ott invites us to join him removing everything unnecessary from experience, like Michelangelo removing everything from the marble that isn’t David. The result is both collaborative and unpredictable:

The white page is an eyeball
rolled back on the verge, glowing
with knowledge of the depths.
It is a blizzard beyond snow-
caps or celestial freeze, blinding
nothingness, numb fingers to be
cut. The white sheet fills our bed
with unwritten tomes of exploration,
fear stained into it, a serif font.

—”Ink Quake”

I love poetry that invites me on a journey. Reading Ott, I feel I’ve journeyed beyond myself, and returned refreshed, restored, new.

It's Time to Starve Donald Trump

Donald Trump in an uncharacteristically mild mood

In one of the weirder episodes this campaign season, on MSNBC last night, professional talking head Lawrence O’Donnell repeatedly interrupted an ongoing interview with writers for the National Review and Huffington Post, legitimate writers for legitimate partisan opinion journals, to report Donald Trump’s latest live tweets inveighing against Fox News host Megyn Kelly. This happened multiple times. With serious op-ed journalists before him, O’Donnell preferred to read The Donald’s tweets aloud over interviewing legitimate experts.

Sadly, despite its unapologetically weird texture, this circumstance isn’t unusual this year. Trump has openly antagonized journalists, mocked legislators, called his opponents nasty names, and figuratively shat upon his party during live televised debates. He’s gotten up onstage for supposed policy speeches and, plainly operating without a script, punted on saying anything substantive or specific. His campaign has combined the decorum of a Don Rickles routine with the coherence of a fifth-grader off his Ritalin.

The defining characteristic of Trump’s campaign, though, isn’t his slovenly bombast. It’s the legitimate news outlets’ willingness to televise, document, and reproduce his weird tirades. Trump has needed to perform far fewer speeches, town halls, and press junkets than other Republican primary contenders, because journalists interview him in his Manhattan skyscraper, and broadcast these interviews, replete with softball questions, with unedited adulation. Donald Trump doesn’t need to seek news coverage; news coverage willingly seeks him.

These same journalists then complain that other candidates can’t get coverage because Trump is “sucking the oxygen out of the room.” This expression has become cliché with repetition; everyone from Glenn Beck to Lee Camp repeats this phrase to describe the situation. This seemingly implies that Trump is something which has happened to a passive, defenseless America, like Hurricane Katrina. Fact is, Trump hasn’t sucked up the oxygen; journalists have fanned the oxygen toward him.

Trump has learned that, to get prime coverage on major news networks, he need only say something bigoted, misogynistic, or pig-ignorant. Even conservative outlets which once endorsed him, Fox News chief among them, have condemned him for race-baiting, ad hominem attacks, and dismissing women as unnecessary for their looks. But in drum-beating against him, his critics inevitably give him time more suitable for candidates who have something important to say. This narrows our national debate.

Donald Trump is a classic narcissist, a self-aggrandizing blowfish who requires validation from others, and demands our attention by doing something stupid. We all had that classmate in middle school who interrupted boring lectures by demonstrating his ability to fling paper wads with Nolan Ryan-like accuracy or fart le Marseillaise on command. Remember what happened when the teacher publicly reprimanded that kid? It provided the attention he so desperately needed. Donald Trump is that kid.

The negative reward doesn’t just cover Trump, however. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes the Availability Heuristic, a now-common principle of perceptual psychology. In brief, whatever concepts come readily to mind, whatever ideas we perceive as most immediately available, seem more relevant to whatever topic we’re discussing than ideas which require some effort to recall. Wall-to-wall Trump coverage keeps him prominent in American minds, making him and his weird opinions seem more important than he actually is.

Consider just one example. During the 2014 midterm elections, when politicians and journalists extensively covered the Ebola outbreak, Ebola ranked high on polls of priorities Americans wanted candidates to discuss. After the elections, discussions of Ebola went quiet; now the disease doesn’t even place on similar public opinion polls. Because Ebola scares sprang readily to mind when pollsters asked, it seemed a very important and urgent public policy issue, right until the moment it didn’t.

For voters who don’t follow issues closely, the more coverage Donald Trump receives, the more readily available he seems. He’s successfully pushed the term “anchor baby” from policy wonk call-in shows to mainstream news coverage, and forced other, more moderate candidates to weigh in on building border walls. The more coverage he gets, the more mainstream his opinions seem to part-time politics watchers. He isn’t just sucking up the oxygen; he’s sucking up good sense.

Our solution with Donald Trump, as with that middle school pinhead, is to stop giving him facetime. If he desperately craves attention, don’t give it to him. Treat him like mainstream media once treated Lyndon LaRouche or Dennis Kucinich, as too extreme to justify valuable print space or broadcast time. If we starve him for attention, he’ll go away, because he needs adulation, and if he needs to go elsewhere to find it, he’ll go.

Before There Was Harry Potter, There Was...

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 58
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Sparrowhawk, an arrogant young wizardry student, wanted to impress his classmates by conjuring a beautiful spirit from myth. Instead, a shadow, a nameless thing black with destruction, answered Sparrowhawk’s call, and escaped his dominion. Now scarred and barely made a journeyman wizard, Sparrowhawk has one quest, spanning the vast archipelago of Éa and beyond: find his shadow, before it absorbs his power and destroys the world.

Ursula Le Guin was already somewhat famous in 1968 when this novel debuted, targeted at the then-nascent Young Adult market. She envisioned a tale of wizards not grizzled and grey, but young, untempered, and hopeful. In some ways, Sparrowhawk presages characters like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, but with one notable difference: Le Guin posits no external villains, no Voldemort, no Sauron. Evil emerges, seeping and destructive, from within.

Born gifted on an island famous for its wizards, Sparrowhawk grew up hearing successive mentors predicting his eventual greatness. So many teachers prophesied he’d become the grandest wizard of his age, that Sparrowhawk eventually believed them. He thought himself immune to consequences. Once he learns otherwise, he spends the remaining chapters attempting to restore the balance he disturbed, learning self-control on the way.

Le Guin’s story shows clear influence from writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, writers whose conscious mythmaking had, by her time, made fantasy into a mainstream, if disrespected, genre. However, where the authors who colored her visions were Christian, Le Guin’s story reflects humanist, existential values. Good and evil are man-made categories, not eternal verities; we’re defined, Le Guin implies, not by our beliefs, but by our actions.

This places Sparrowhawk in an unusual position. He knows the myths of gods who raised the islands from the sea, but cannot rely upon them for salvation. He controls magic, and has inadvertently glimpsed the hereafter, but this offers him little comfort. Sparrowhawk’s world isn’t truly atheistic, Nature has its spirit and volition, but humans save or damn themselves. Perhaps even the gods wait upon humans for their salvation.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Proceeding episodically, Le Guin recounts the processes that nurtured Sparrowhawk’s arrogance, then the counterforces which urged him to rediscover humility. Sparrowhawk is no Harry Potter, no prophesied child of deliverance; his ethics aren’t innate. Though he first attracts mentors through deeds of bravery and self-sacrifice, he increasingly believes himself separate from humanity. He becomes more interested in burnishing his image. He proves painfully good at attracting powerful new enemies.

If one word describes young Sparrowhawk, it’d be: willful. He defies his first patient master because he desires to rush headlong into deeds of power. He studies tomes beyond his capability, perilously inviting evil into his house, to impress a pretty girl. He argues with teachers, disregards caution, and attempts to outshine more experienced students. His willfulness only increases, until it nearly costs him and his friends their lives.

Then he reverses himself. Only through suffering does he discover the far-reaching ripples his actions started, and he spends years attempting to mend what he once broke. Piece by piece, Sparrowhawk finds the wounds his shadow once opened, and strives to heal them. He knows, though, he’s approaching a catastrophic confrontation, since only blood makes true recompense for sin—"So at least his death would put an end to the evil he had loosed by living."

Nobody would mistake this novel for new. Besides Le Guin’s episodic storytelling, now frowned upon by professional writing texts and market-savvy editors, her constructed, Homeric narrative voice seems markedly dated. Nobody would write this story today, certainly not in this way, which covers nine years of Sparrowhawk’s life in ten fairly long chapters. Considering J.K. Rowling needed twice this many pages for one school year, times have certainly changed.

Yet arguably, this dated quality reflects what dedicated readers want. Publishers mass-produce paperback fantasy today, carefully designed to offer audiences minimal challenge, to pass lightly under their gaze with virtually no friction. Le Guin’s classical style, like Tolkein’s Saxon bardic voice or Homer’s long, spun rhythms force readers outside themselves. We cannot read this book lightly. She casts a spell and, using nothing more than words, we find ourselves transported, transformed.

This story of a wizard learning power first, and wisdom only latterly, arguably has greater significance now, amid our nigh-magical technological do-funnies, than when Le Guin first wrote. To understand our present, and ourselves, we sometimes must travel outside reality and glimpse ourselves only slantwise. This book offers important lessons, but it also offers engaging characters having adventures. That’s why both youth and adults can enjoy this masterpiece equally.