Death in the Afternoon

Anxiety is there. It's only sleeping.

— Martin Heidegger

I'm amazed people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July—or any time of year.

Psychologists agree these sappy romances release dopamine, but that doesn't wash for me as an explanation.

Psychologists also agree our pattern-seeking brains savor the movies' carbon-copy plots. That sounds better, but doesn't go far enough.

Why do people watch Hallmark Christmas movies in July?

To keep death at bay.

As Sigmund Freud observed, death threatens us from three directions all the time: from our own bodies, doomed to dissolution; from the external world, rife with destruction; and from other people, prone to violence. 

On top of those things, we harbor an unconscious "death wish" that compels us to take foolish risks.

In the face of the threats, we're driven to escape, to experience Nirvana or what Freud calls the "oceanic sensation" of eternity.

And that, I believe, explains the appeal of Hallmark Christmas movies.

They all take place in a delusional fairytale land where no one suffers, no one dies, and nothing ever changes (except the casts, and they all look alike).

I recall from childhood devout Catholics who attended mass every day in hope of earning "life everlasting." 

In its unwavering consistency, the Catholic Order of Mass is like a Hallmark Christmas movie. But for the cast, nothing ever varies.

But old-fashioned exuberance for church-going has become quaint. 

In fact, church attendance in all denominations is cratering.

Now to keep death at bay we just turn on the Hallmark Channel. And we do so with urgency.

"If you think it through," Martin Heidegger said, "life can beautifully be called 'urgency.' But you must then agree that life's essence comprises desire, sorrow, and death—all at the same time."

When you acknowledge death is inevitable, your existence is torn in two, Heidegger believed. 

While you enjoy life's little pleasures, you can't help but be aware that time is finite and that your will has limits—even though your desires do not. 

So you waste time in flight from your awareness of death: you dissociate, daydream, drug, drink, overwork, overeat, overpost... or just dial up the Hallmark Channel. 

Then things aren't so dismal.

How Could They?

Have not other nations found great benefit from the use of slaves in repairing high roads, making rivers navigable, draining bogs, and erecting public buildings, bridges, and manufactures?

— George Berkeley

Happy Juneteenth! 

What better day than today to ask, how could White Christians have enslaved Blacks and still believe they were practicing Christians?

I think it's smart to look for answers in the writings of the most thoughtful Christians of the period.

One was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

A brilliant and outspoken Anglican bishop (and a slave-owner, as well), Berkeley shared the belief with many of his White contemporaries that obedience to God demanded you support slavery, because it was good for the slaves.

Berkeley was as conservative as they come, and not much different from today's conservatives in believing some people are bums. 

Skin color didn't much matter to Berkeley: bums in the 18th century were all the same. God made them that way.

Berkeley worried a lot about poverty and unrest in his native Ireland and in 1735 wrote The Querist, a book in which he asked, who's to blame for the fact that Ireland is poor?

His answer was clear: the bums are to blame.

Bums represented to Berkeley a dissolute, drunken, cynical, lazy and antisocial form of life. 

Forcing bums to participate in infrastructure projects was better than leaving them at liberty to wallow in their own filth. 

Forcing them to work would, in fact, give them dignity and guarantee their personal development.

If compulsory labor made them slaves, so be it. Slaves, as the Bible made clear, are just servants. Turning bums into servants served the public good, stimulated the economy, and was the "best cure for idleness and beggary." Forced labor, in fact, was a bum's way of demonstrating his or her "Christian charity."

Berkeley could justify an institution we find repugnant, because he valued an orderly Christian society—one that curbed some individuals' liberty, when that liberty hampered self-improvement.

We might call it charity under the lash, or self-help at the barrel of a gun. Whatever you call it, you know Berkeley's argument is weird and deeply flawed.

But it sounds hauntingly familiar.

One Job

Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than ambition?

― Doris Kearns Goodwin

When my last manager drove me to quit a great company, little did I know I was in the majority.

Only six months later, Gallup asked a million employees why they'd quit their jobs and found the Number 1 reason to be the manager.

Seventy-five percent of employees who quit did so from sheer contempt for bossypants.

My manager was pretentious, narcissistic and bewitched by her own—and her betters'—power. She was a vestige from an acquisition and completely unlike her home-grown, more admirable, peers. I was unlucky enough to work for her—until I quit. It was a hard choice, but unavoidable.

A manager has one job. One. That's to, as Jean-Luc Picard always said, Engage!

The managers who shouldn't be managers don't get that. They can't. They only get blind ambition.

But ambition has nothing to do with being a manager.

Manager, meaning "one charged with conducting a house of business," came into English from the Italian maneggiare in the 14th century. Maneggiare means "to handle," especially with regard to teams of horses (maneggiare came the Latin manus, meaning "hand").

A manager acts as the "hand" that guides the business. 

She's there to direct work, neither "hands on" nor "hands off."

Her handiwork should be to engage, not to command, demand, or reprimand; and certainly not to manipulate, mandate, or manacle. More like to emancipate—in Latin, "to take someone by the hand."

"People leave managers, not companies," Gallup concluded from its million-person study.

When will companies come to grips with that?

Defying Gravity

If a bridge collapses, a Mercedes drops as fast as a Hyundai.

— Al Franken

Republican dogma notwithstanding, wealth never trickles down. 

Never.

Yet, despite the fact William Jennings Bryan exposed trickle down's fallaciousness 125 years ago, Republicans insist it does.

Wearing wearisome disguises, this idiotic article of faith resurfaces every time a Republican opens his or her fatuous mouth.

But money isn't subject to the law of gravity.

When it goes up, it never comes down. 

Unless forced to.

Last week we learned the super-rich pay no taxes, reconfirming the fact that wealth never trickles down; at least, not through our tax system.

Republicans' reaction to the news: good for them! They're smart cookies!

Why anyone but a trust-fund baby would vote Republican escapes me. 

They must be brainwashed by their betters. 

As Lenin observed, "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."

The good news is: we're on the brink of another New Deal, courtesy President Biden.

Naturally, Republicans are incensed. 

It puts the Trump tax cut at risk.

"Republicans say tax cuts pay for themselves," writes Al Franken in Rolling Stone. "They never do. How about we try something that actually does work?"

Franken, like Biden, proposes taxing the rich to pay for Biden's new deal.

"Perhaps you’ve noticed that the rich have been getting a lot richer for quite a few decades now," Franken writes. "And as the rich get richer, our country seems to be falling apart."

Which, if you've been outdoors lately, you know is true.

Since Reagan's presidency, the federal government has neglected the country's infrastructure, targeting tax dollars instead to weapons and Wall Street bailouts.

As a result, dynasties—a source of power never foreseen by our Founders—have blossomed.

Biden's new deal would tax those dynasties in order to update our dilapidated bridges, roads, water mains, power plants, parks, schools, railways, and seaports—a diabolical plan, if there ever was one.

Pure socialism! scream brain-dead Republicans.

Maybe it is. But the fact remains, wealth never trickles down. 

Never.

Like gold, wealth has to be extracted.

And why not?

"The fact is that every bit of what President Biden proposes is in everyone’s best interest," Franken writes.

"If a bridge collapses, a Mercedes drops as fast as a Hyundai."

But is It Scalable?

There are no accidents in life.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I'm sick of algorithm-writers trying to manipulate me.

They suggest who I should follow (like Tomi Lahren, someone I loathe); what I should say (they autocorrect "You're my honey" to "You're my hiney"); when I should shop ("It's time to add more data"); and where I should go ("Belize awaits you!" So does Hell.).

It seems no matter where I turn, an anonymous algorithm-writer—likely to be wrong about my wants—has his grubby finger on the scale.

Even book-writers—some, anyway—are trying to manipulate me, by "click-farming" their way onto Amazon's best-seller lists.

Book-writers hire Chinese click-farms to fake Kindle downloads of their books, which Amazon counts as "sales."

A couple thousand Kindle downloads, which today would cost about $400, can put a book—even one with no previous real sales—on the top of Amazon's Top 10 charts.

The fake Kindle downloads also feed Amazon's "Books you may like," suggested purchases served by—what else?—algorithms.

Whatever became of scrupulous writers? Writers who trusted to the originality and incisiveness of their books to boost sales?

Writers of books like Being and Nothingness.

Written by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, 722-page book examines the experiences of individuals from the standpoint of radical subjectivity.

Weighing precisely one kilo when published in Paris in 1943, Being and Nothingness sprang to the top of the best-seller list, to the author's surprise.

Who were all these Parisians in the midst of the Occupation so eager to read a philosophical investigation of human existence?

They were grocers, it turned out. 

Grocers were using the book on their scales to replace the one-kilo lead weights that had been confiscated by the Nazis, to be melted down for bullets.