The Least Passive People In America

I just spent the most remarkable evening, among the least passive people I've seen. Deep in the wild heart of Lawrence, Kansas, I witnessed two groups of people not content to receive pre-packaged culture, so they made their own. In some ways, it ratified ideas they have percolate, unvoiced, inside my head for years. In other ways, it upended my expectations, and I may never be the same again.

In the first part of my evening, I participated in a painting session. About 32 people gathered in a storefront studio with photographs of their pets, and turned their images into acrylic-on-canvas memorials to how much humans can love small animals. For only about $25 per head, the participants, mostly but not exclusively white women, received paints, prepared canvases, and guidance from experienced artists to recreate their fuzzy or feathered buddies for posterity.

Then, still flush from the creative moment, my companion and I hurried across town to a downtown watering hole where, every Sunday afternoon, nearly two dozen musicians, a group as racially and sexually diverse as their famously polyglot town, gather for a three-hour Celtic music jam. At its peak, the jam included eight fiddlers, four guitarists, two banjos, three percussionists, two flutists, and a concertina player.

The two were very different experiences. The former was scheduled, with a fixed start and end time, a buy-in cost, and designated professionals. The latter was more free-from, with skilled and unskilled players drifting in and out throughout the night, and no definite leader. Some of the musicians, like some of the painters, were appalling compared to others. And both events created venues for undiscovered and unpolished, but gifted, artists waiting for guidance to great accomplishments.

Yet they had more in common than their differences. Both allowed people who almost certainly did something else for a living, people who, I'm sure, don't identify themselves as "painters" or "musicians," to create something worthwhile together. Simply sharing a space and a goal gave their lives shape and definition, even if only for three hours. For that time, they weren't consumers, mere statistics in someone's supply-side graph. For that time, they were creators.

I did it myself. Acrylic on canvas.

Watching these events unfold (and, in the former case, participating), I remembered back in college, when my friend Roger and I led our small prairie town's local pub quiz. For nearly five years, we led what I believe to have been Nebraska's first and, for many years, only British-style pub quiz. At our peak, we filled a good-sized bar, in a moderately prosperous university town, from wall to wall, two Tuesdays per month.

Yet we never achieved my goal, to cultivate a maker culture in our town. Because Roger and I stood before the assembled crowd, engaging (admittedly good) banter into the microphone, while the crowd watched and listened, our making remained one-sided and hierarchical. The few occasions we had balls enough to relinquish the Mike to crowd members, a whole different vibe developed. Yet I lacked perspective enough to recognize what happened.

Until now.

Roger, who is from Scotland, used to mock Celtic music, claiming he moved to the American prairie to escape what he called "deedly-deedly-dee" music. Yet hearing that music created before me, I realized why Celtic music tends toward repetition: because it's not meant to be heard, unlike Anglo-American pop music. It's meant to be created and, if necessary, constantly re-created. No wonder the earliest Irish albums were just live recordings of pub-house craics.

I love attending concerts, and travel to the Kansas City area to attend big-ticket live concerts two or three times per year. But watching the Celtic music crowd, I realized I wasn't seeing a concert. In a concert, the musicians face the audience, who face the musicians, reinforcing a strict hierarchy of makers and consumers. The effects be entertaining, but ultimately dehumanizing. At the Celtic event, the musicians crowded the room and faced one another, creating a truly small-d democratic experience.

Besides concerts, I've long enjoyed museums, poetry slams, and community theater. All reward a maker culture, and encourage people to participate in culture creation... to a point. Unfortunately, all three also enforce a division between artist and audience. Having witnessed two truly participatory creative experiences, I can't shake off the gap between these and what I've seen elsewhere. Sadly, I have no easy solutions. I just have a vision for a society that demolishes the wall between active creator, and audience.

If you need me, I'll be studying chiaroscuro and practicing my mandolin.

One Man's War on the Homefront

Arnold L. Punaro with David Poyer, On War and Politics: the Battlefield Inside Washington's Beltway

Second Lieutenant Arnold Punaro took a bullet in a distant Vietnamese valley, and woke up with a Purple Heart pinned to his hospital pillow. Having joined the Marines fresh from college to avoid getting drafted into the Army, he always considered himself a short-timer, but now he had a permanent reminder of his tour. After snagging a graduate degree on the GI Bill, he accepted a job for long-serving Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, and his adventure continued.

With a secondary title like “The Battlefield Inside Washington’s Beltway,” I anticipated a scholarly analysis of the intersections, and disconnections, between American political process and military action. Unfortunately, no. I might’ve enjoyed such a book, but this is Arnold Punaro’s memoir of stumbling into the halls of power, almost by accident, if his stories hold water. If you can clear away expectations generated by the somewhat misleading title, this is a fairly interesting read.

Much like his joining the Marines, which he did simply to avoid something worse, Punaro’s entry into America’s political establishment was more fluke than design. He answered a flyer hanging at the University of Georgia for senatorial interns, because the woman he loved was working in Washington. Senator Nunn, a young upstart then, needed office staff from his home state. And Punaro’s journalism degree made him valuable back before social media set America’s political tone.

Eventually, though, this accidental job became an important calling. Senator Nunn, a famously convivial speaker and ambitious personality, became the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and having a Purple Heart on his staff became a priceless asset. Punaro quickly became the Senator’s right-hand man on all matters military. His life’s circumstances, which seemed like chance at the time, conspired to make him insanely powerful, without ever running for office.

Punaro, with ghostwriter David Poyer, writes in a linear, straightforward manner, like somebody telling stories over drinks. He occasionally tosses out flashbacks or peeks ahead, but his story unfolds mostly in sequence. Brief interruptions from his wife Jan, who exerted powerful but not always intentional influence over his life, have a sort of “Now honey, tell it right” quality which increases the personal texture. This isn’t a polemic; it’s an engaging story between trusted friends.

Arnold L. Punaro

Punaro’s career has caromed between categories of public service. Despite leaving the Corps, he remained a reservist, and was mobilized during Desert Storm, making him an important living link between two eras of American military history. He eventually achieved the rank of Major General and, after leaving Senator Nunn’s office, took a prominent billet at Quantico. I don’t fear revealing this, since Punaro’s service is public record; but his storytelling gives events life.

Not surprisingly, Punaro’s encounters with power include some pretty notable names of his generation. From Richard Nixon to Dan Quayle, from Scoop Jackson to Dick Cheney, Punaro name-drops encounters with men (mostly, indeed, men) whose names became synonymous with power politics and American history. Sometimes he underplays them for humor: he subtly pretends nothing unusual matters about rubbing shoulders at Quantico with a lowly Marine captain named Oliver North. We wait for the other shoe to drop.

It may surprise nobody who’s read memoirs like this before, that Punaro’s life trajectory culminates in private enterprise. Now CEO of a public policy consultancy, Punaro has cultivated a media presence, of which this book is only the latest component. Surprisingly, his business ventures have dealt more with budget and technology than defense, a fact one has to Google, since Punaro’s final chapters compress the last twenty years into eighteen pages. Weirdly enough, self-promotion requires unexpected modesty.

Although throughout this book, Punaro essentially markets himself as product, his prose doesn’t have the huckstering feel of other books by professional consultants I’ve read recently. He shares lessons he’s learned, lessons that have made him practical and non-ideological in an increasingly bifurcated political scene; but I never get the “Gimme a buck for the white paper” vibe. He just comes across like a guy whose seemingly uncoordinated life choices paid off in understated success.

Punaro tells his story to make himself sound remarkably like the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker profile, the fortunate brother whose combination of preparation and luck led him to fortune. Punaro’s behind-the-scenes influence spans decades, and he himself is an example of America’s possibilities and perils. Though I admit, I might’ve liked more insight into the intersection between military and public policy, Punaro’s own experience within the field is both engaging and eye-opening.

If You've Become Uncomfortable In Your Comfort Zone...

Andy Molinsky, Ph.D., Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge, and Build Confidence

Back in the Paleolithic Era, having a fairly small comfort zone probably made good sense. Fearless people likely got eaten by lions. But today's relatively lion-free environment makes hugging our comfort zones perilous and constricting. Our reasons for avoiding uncomfortable situations are as numerous as our tactics. But the short-term stress relief robs us of long-term opportunities. Sadly, just telling ourselves to get out of our comfort zones doesn't work.

Brandeis organizational psych professor Andy Molinsky has dedicated years to studying this conundrum, and published dense research project on the topic. Thankfully, this book avoids the scholarly jargon of such papers. Writing with business professionals, job interviewees, and students in mind, Molinsky crafts a nuts-and-bolts explanation of why we have comfort zones, why we should step outside them, and how to achieve that seemingly impossible goal.

Permit me to paraphrase Molinsky, without giving anything away, since he says everything better, and in more detail than I could. We have five basic mental justifications for our comfort zones: because whatever makes us uncomfortable feels inauthentic or immoral, may make others perceive us as incompetent or unlikeable, or it really shouldn’t be our responsibility anyway. Molinsky identifies these five causes from both academic research, and in-person interviews.

Once we recognize which principle, or combination of principles, hold us back, we have three tools available to re-stack the deck in our favor. Molinsky calls these tools Conviction, Customization, and Clarity. This means we believe whatever makes us uncomfortable still really needs doing; we can organize how we handle our circumstances to minimize discomfort; and we have enough self-awareness to face our challenges without them breaking us.

It really is that simple, though like most simple explanations, it’s really not that simple. Molinsky wouldn’t have written a 250-page book if he could’ve written a fortune cookie. His book combines psychological research with field interviews, demonstrating ways people have allowed their comfort zones to constrain them, and how applying these simple principles has transformed their lives. If Molinsky’s interview transcripts are credible, “transformed” isn’t an exaggeration.

Andy Molinsky, Ph.D.

Molinsky puts his most important points in this book’s first half. Though he’s guilty of a little throat-clearing in the earliest pages, he mostly gets down to brass tacks, combining his measured principles with stories that serve as object lessons. His stories are often very personal, yet concise in structure, without excessive rumination. They demonstrate how people got out of their own paths and stopped being their own worst obstruction.

This isn’t a book of straightforward exercises. I admit being disappointed by that, as I’d expected something like Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct, which combines high-minded theories with road-tested exercises for beginners. Molinsky compares this book to a free-form recipe, where rather than fixed measurements, we have a broad outline of what the finished product could look like. We simply have to interpret freely, putting our stamp on the recipe.

Not that Molinsky prescribes no concrete actions. As a sometime writing teacher, my favorite involves describing your own situation, in writing, in third person. Crystallizing ideas into words, Molinsky demonstrates, frees people to act, besides having quantifiable physical health benefits, according to one of his sources. So we have concrete actions, just no step-by-step journaling procedures. That probably works better overall, but requires your effort to get started.

Reading this book, I see myself, and other loved ones besides. As we get older, as we own more stuff and have more responsibilities to family and community, our comfort zones contract. Mine has become strangling. But Molinsky demonstrates we needn’t risk everything we treasure, to venture outside ourselves. By understanding why we’ve become so risk-averse, and applying Molinsky’s Triple-C approach, we’ll find doors opening immediately.

This book probably belongs on the same nonfiction-as-self-help shelf as Malcolm Gladwell and James Duhigg. It has the same purpose of taking known, well-studied science, and turning it into actionable advice. But unlike those other writers, who attempt to disguise their self-help as journalism, Molinsky, a working research scientist, doesn’t pretend his advice is anything but advice. Like Daniel Kahneman, he comes right out and says: Do This.

I’m still working to incorporate this book’s advice into my thought processes. Because this book really is about me, and people like me, it presents an opportunity to stop my decline into stultifying comfort. If you’re like me, and you probably are, this book is for and about you. Please grab this opportunity to turn your life into something greater. I already feel energized, knowing this exists.

Two Stories to Every Side

An ancient sculpture believed to
represent Protagoras the Sophist

The claim that “there are two sides to every story” dates back over two millennia, to ancient Greece. It is generally attributed to Protagoras the Sophist, who taught legal argument in ancient Athens. We cannot know this, however, since little of Protagoras’ own works have survived; he’s best known for the Platonic dialog in which Socrates mocks him for that claim. Socrates asserts this claim means Protagoras thinks truth doesn’t exist, and philosophy is futile.

That isn’t what Protagoras means, however. Like all Sophists, Protagoras’ chief interest wasn’t in knowing objective reality, but in staging arguments in court. Ancient Athenian democracy was far more litigious than today’s supposedly sue-happy society. Sophists taught citizens, who were expected to represent themselves, how to take facts which actually exist, and find the interpretive framework that most completely explains them. In other words, he taught citizens to argue from evidence, without making anything up.

This remains what we do today, in multiple forms of argument. In a murder trial, the defense may formulate claims that the defendant didn’t kill the victim, or that the prosecution’s case doesn’t hold water. If the defense claims the murder just didn’t happen, and the victim remains alive and productive, they’ve essentially surrendered all claims to seriousness. Serious argument starts with the position that reality exists. Without that, no other meaningful claims are possible.

Likewise, scientists may argue about, say, the universe’s background radiation, or Global Warming. These arguments start by acknowledging that the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station have observed background radiation in manners consistent with mathematical predictions, or that globally, the ten hottest years on record have all happened since 1998. These facts exist. Anybody who crosses their arms, stomps their feet, and says reality didn’t happen that way, loses the right to participate.

This should be uncontroversial. We all have eyes and fingers through which we recognize the world. Anybody who studies psychology knows that the evidence of our senses isn’t always reliable, but when a robust consensus of skilled professionals, working within their areas of expertise, produce thoroughgoing evidence that something exists, that summers really are measurably warmer than they were when our parents were this age, or that universal background radiation exists, we have to trust.

Things aren’t always so simple, certainly. A person can only get murdered once. Prosecuting attorneys cannot bring claims that this murder is consistent with other murders enough to be considered a murder (except when linking multiple deaths to one serial killer, which is far less common than TV would imply). In that case, we use whatever evidence we have, to create a persuasive story. And our opponents will use matching evidence to create their counternarrative.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, during
his first official press conference this past Saturday

If police have security camera footage of me entering the victim’s workplace one hour before co-workers found the body, I may have reasonable explanations for this. Perhaps I owed the victim money, and showed up to pay. Perhaps I simply intended to do business, and my proximity was coincidental. And I could completely render the evidence innocuous by saying, hey, I work there too. Of course I showed up; I had a shift that day.

I cannot, however, say the evidence doesn’t exist. If I say there’s no such photo after you’ve already seen it, you’ll know I’m lying, and everything I say becomes questionable. We’ve all had the schadenfreude, while watching TV news or documentaries, of seeing a person confronted with evidence contradicting everything they’ve just said, watching the mental hamster wheel turning as they try to invent, on the spot, reasons to distrust the evidence of your senses.

If I say something doesn’t exist, and you have evidence demonstrating it does, that’s not another side to the story. That’s not merely a case of “everyone’s entitled to their opinions.” And it’s certainly not “alternative facts.” If you have something concrete to demonstrate that my facts don’t support the explanation I’ve constructed, you must say something. You cannot simply say it ain’t so, you must demonstrate this. Whoever brings evidence, simply put, gets believed.

I confess a certain antipathy toward “two sides to every story,” even though I believe it’s true. When people say this, they almost never mean they have persuasive counterevidence that dismantles my argument. They preponderantly muster this bromide to keep a controversy alive after all evidence has submarined it. And that’s arguing in bad faith. If we cannot first agree that reality exists, we have nothing more to say. That’s not counterevidence, it’s a lie.

America and the Amazing Two-Headed President

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 78
David Orentlicher, Two Presidents Are Better Than One: the Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch

Let’s start with a statement Americans of most political stripes will find agreeable: our Presidency currently doesn’t work. Policy positions emerge from the Executive Branch fully formed, and Congress essentially rubber-stamps them. Having one key decision maker leads to bad decisions, as in Bush’s torture memos, or Obama’s unsanctioned drone strikes. Every President since at least Nixon, and arguably most since Andrew Jackson, have exceeded their office’s Constitutional remit.

Like Barack Obama, David Orentlicher is a Constitutional scholar and sometime elected official. He examines multiple suggestions to offset what he calls “the imperial Presidency.” From the Constitutional Convention of 1789 to the present, scholars and jurists have called for executive committees, Parliamentary organization of the executive, or triumvirate power. Orentlicher notes the promises and shortcomings of every suggested reform, and puts forth his own: America needs a two-person Presidency.

Like most scholars, Orentlicher makes his point early, giving us his core outline within the first two chapters. After that, he spends the rest of the book deepening his claims, dismantling anticipated counter-arguments, and placing his position in a historical perspective. Admittedly, this doesn’t make for gripping beach reading. However, it postulates an interesting, and possibly workable, solution to the impasse dogging American politics, an impasse likely to get worse.

By vesting executive authority in the top two vote-getters, requiring two different political parties, Orentlicher suggests we’ll offset our government’s current aversion to consensus. If legislation requires two signatures for ratification, if moving troops requires two commanders’ authority, if executive orders require agreement of two, politically unaligned, Presidents, hasty actions become untenable. Presidential self-aggrandizement, currently widespread and worsening, is minimized by separating the person from the office.

Whatever party loses the White House is reduced to breaking everything in Congress. Republicans obstructed everything Obama attempted, and at this writing, Democrats promise the same treatment to Donald Trump. This reverses the Founders’ expectations, as expressed in Federalist 70. Having experience with powerful, capricious state legislatures, Madison and the Founders wanted a one-person President to offset a dictatorial Congress. Unfortunately, they shifted the nexus of authoritarianism without fixing it.

Other possible solutions exist, Orentlicher admits. Switzerland has a seven-member executive council. Britain’s Parliamentary system diffuses authority across the Cabinet. And many U.S. states have unbundled executive authority. However, on the federal level for a global superpower, Orentlicher demonstrates, such solutions create new problems. By keeping Presidential authority unified, but bifurcating the office itself, we retain the Presidency’s nimble nature, while dismantling the link between individual and office.

Orentlicher admits multiple serious reasons a small Executive Branch remains necessary. What psychologists now know about human decision-making tendencies recommends a small group. A large Congress makes decisions too slowly, while a one-person Presidency permits precipitousness and unconscious bias: every President since Nixon, for instance, has violated the War Powers Act. Two people can, hopefully, make decisions and reach consensus quickly, while minimizing the tendency toward haste.

I admit initially fearing a bipartite executive would basically enshrine the two major parties in Constitutional law. Orentlicher offsets that fear quickly by noting that, if America elects both Presidents simultaneously, voters might stake their conscience on a longshot third-party candidate, hoping not for a win, but a robust second-place finish. This might dismantle the current winner-take-all system that has kept two fossilizing parties in power since the Civil War.

Also, I have concerns about requiring the Presidents to be of different political parties: this would write parties into the Constitution for the first time. In his farewell address, George Washington warned against the overweening authority parties, which he called “factions,” could create. In Congress now, we see legislators clearly more loyal to party than to their constituencies. Orentlicher doesn’t resolve my doubts; this may remain an important debate point.

Prospects for enacting this policy solution are currently distant. Orentlicher admits this, noting that Americans historically like strong, unifying leaders. (Consider the market’s worship of hero CEOs.) However, if Americans can overcome their reluctance to amend the Constitution, this proposal has potential to offset the accumulation of authority into one office that we’ve seen over several decades—accumulation currently paying off by handing that authority to Donald Trump.

Orentlicher doesn’t promise his proposal will solve every American governmental problem. We’ll still face demagogues, bomb-throwers, and ideological impasses. But it potentially remedies a problem which the Founders largely failed to anticipate. It makes America’s Executive more reflective of America’s plural character. And it frees us from the belief that, whatever President gets inaugurated, we’re never yoked to one individual’s vision.