Fear Itself

Let the past abolish the past when—and if—it can substitute something better.

— William Faulkner

I've never encountered the conservative's rock-bottom belief better expressed than it was by William Faulkner in his 1962 speech before the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"Let the past abolish the past when—and if—it can substitute something better," Faulkner said.

It's not our choice "to abolish the past simply because it was."

Conservatives always want to turn back the clock, without regard to whether the past was kind to everyone.

They can't help themselves.

Their brains are to blame.

Conservatives' have overactive right amygdalas, the side of the brain that processes fear.

In a word, they're chickenshits.

Holding reactionary opinions helps them manage fear.

The world is a dark, scary place, after all.

Scarcity is scary.

Disruption is scary.

Ambiguity is scary.

Hell, the future is scary.

At this moment, conservatives are even siding with Putin to quash their fear.

Any friend of Donald is a friend of theirs.

Liberals—those brave folks with the overactive left amygdalas—wonder why conservatives always choose the wrong side of history. But it's no mystery.

They can't handle fear.

As FDR said in his first inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror."

But I say, the only thing we have to fear is conservatives—reckless, feckless, unreasoning cowards.

Find some cajones, amigos.

Please.

10 Books That Have Mattered to Me

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. 

They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

– Anna Quindlen

For better or worse—mostly better—every book you read becomes part of you.

Whether treasure or trash, books can furnish pivotal life lessons.

I've learned profound lessons from trivial books; enduring lessons from ephemeral books; glorious lessons from terrible books.

And, as every reader knows, some books matter more than others: the ones that change your life. 

They startle you, consume you, haunt you, and shape your world.

Here are the 10 books that did that to me:

The Nick Adams Stories. Ernest Hemingway's coming-of-age stories deeply influenced my own coming of age, although I could not be more different from his protagonist Nick Adams. Hemingway's stories showed my teenage self the dark sides of the world that were—and are—kept secret from kids. Suffering. Sacrifice. Cowardice. Ambivalence. Depression. Addiction. Suicide. Rage. Rape. And romantic betrayal.   

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Walter Kaufman's critical biography of the German thinker drew me into the world of philosophy and "philosophical anthropology." Even though my college professors later told me Nietzsche was "adolescent," I've always liked his naive truth-seeker's attitude. "There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism," he said.

Catch-22. A high school English teacher assigned our class Joseph Heller's absurdist novel the same year we had to register for the draft. If I needed convincing I was allergic to the military, I didn't need it after reading Catch-22. Only a decade later, when I was working in an ad agency, did I learn that Heller was in fact proud of his service in World War II, and was actually writing about the bizarre goings-on in New York ad agencies.       

The Sound and the Fury. Another high school reading assignment, William Faulkner's surreal novel showed me that the past is never dead; that psychic legacies—your "roots"—shape you indelibly; that racism is unquestionably America's Original Sin; and that all well-off families must eventually rot and decay. For its literary merits and insights into people, I consider this the greatest novel yet written by an American.

Sanity, Madness and the Family. More than Sigmund Freud's, psychiatrist R.D. Laing's books captivated me during my years in college. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing presented eleven case studies of patients with schizophrenia (considered incurable at the time). He concluded from his studies that the patients weren't crazy, their families were. The hospitalized patients were just trying to deal with family pressures. In other words, even insanity is intelligible, if you listen carefully enough.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I took a semester-long course on Ludwig Wittgenstein's 150-page book, the only one published during his lifetime. Beneath its gnomic sentences lies an extraordinary—and quite mystical—worldview. According to that view, it is our language (i.e., our grammar) that lures us to many nonsensical beliefs about the world. But when we confront the world directly, our language stops operating, and those beliefs lose all credibility. In other words, speaking and thinking aren't doing. Doing is clear; it's speaking and thinking about doing that are muddy. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent," Wittgenstein concludes. 

Being and Time. Martin Heidegger's exhaustive tome furthered my grip on reality. His basic premise simple: being is time. To be human is to exist "temporally," to live out our short stretch between cradle and grave. Being is time and time is finite: it comes to an end with our deaths. If we hope ever to be authentic human beings, we must act not as lifeless robots but as "beings-towards-death" and carve some meaning out of our finitude.

The Centaur. John Updike's charming novel warmed my heart to others like no book I've read. The story concerns a sad-sack science teacher and his disappointed 15-year-old son. The shambling father lives two parallel lives, one as a small-town high-school teacher (a self-described "walking junk heap”) and the other as a centaur. While the teacher is hapless and unremarkable, the centaur is a mighty Olympian god (he's even in love with a goddess, who's also the girls’ gym teacher). Through overhearing townspeople praise his father, the son comes at last to accept his long-suffering father for who he is—without ever learning about his fantasy life as a god.

Meditations. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' Meditations provided the sort of "self-help" I needed when, at age 40, I finally read the 2,000-year-old book. A Stoic, Aurelius says that serenity only comes by withholding your judgements of people, places and things. Most troubles exist only in the mind, and are worsened by self-importance, overindulgence, and thoughtless drive.

American Pastoral. Philip Roth's fictional account of the precipitous decline of Newark, New Jersey hit closer to home than anything I've read (I grew up next door to the once-bucolic city). Successful Jewish glove-manufacturer "Swede" Levov's world is shattered when his daughter protests the Vietnam War by blowing up a local post office. The fall of Newark from great American city to cesspool vividly parallels Lev's fate as he searches the city for his fugitive daughter.

What books have mattered to you?

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Dan Pink for inspiring this post. I wonder whether he remembers providing a guest post for Goodly nearly 10 years ago?

Stupid and Proud of It

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

— Edith Sitwell

I'm patient with stupidity, to a degree, but not with those who are stupid and proud of it. That's why I'm fed up with...

• Q-Anoners
• Anti-vaxxers
• Climate-change deniers
• Opponents of CRT
• Pro-lifers
• Supply siders
• New Agers
• Fox watchers
• Ayn Randers
• Gun advocates
• Creationists
• Fascists
• Confederates
• Super Moms
• Trump wannabes
• Trump supporters
• Trump

Who are you fed up with?

Triplicate

Let's have some new clichés.

― Samuel Goldwyn

The cliché Close, but no cigar stems from late 19th-century carnivals.

Winners at the wheel of chance took home a cigar for picking the lucky number.

Losers won only the wheel operator's condolence: "Close, but no cigar!"

An inveterate loser at the game might very well get the cold shoulder from his girlfriend.

The cliché stems from early 19th-century dinner parties.

A guest who overstayed his welcome at a dinner party would be served a cut of shoulder meat—the toughest part of the animal—cold.

Being served the "cold shoulder" was a strong hint: it's time you left.

But sometimes the hint wasn't strong enough.

Especially if the guest was a smart aleck.

Another cliché with early 19th-century origins, "Smart Aleck" was the nickname the New York City cops gave Aleck Hoag, a fraudster who bilked men while they consorted with his accomplice and wife, who would pose as a prostitute.

Aleck earned the nickname "smart" when he started bragging he would no longer bribe the cops to escape arrest.

Folks ain't got no use for braggin'.

Immersion

We are fish in a bowl, dear.

― Erin Morgenstern

Most writers research a topic by turning to experts. But some take a more direct route: they immerse themselves.

• Nellie Bly, on assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1887, faked a mental illness so that she could be committed to Blackwell’s Island, a state-run psychiatric hospital with a reputation for inmate abuse. Her resulting book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, made Bly's a household name and prompted Albany to reform New York's treatment of the insane. Bly's critics labeled her the "stunt girl," but she was a pioneer in "participatory journalism."
  
  
• Upton Sinclair worked undercover in the Chicago stockyards in 1904 while researching his novel The Jungle, an exposé of immigrant life and the ghastly meatpacking industry. Two years after its publication, Sinclair’s book resulted in nothing less than the establishment of the FDA, dedicated to protecting consumers from unscrupulous food manufacturers. "I aimed at the public’s heart and, by accident, hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair said.
  
  
• Stephen Crane donned rags, slept in homeless shelters and ate at soup kitchens while he researched "An Experiment in Misery," an 1894 short story that chronicled the seedy plight of the tramps, alcoholics and drug addicts who populated New York's Bowery District. Crane said he sought to show that the "root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice," a willingness to "be knocked flat and accept the licking."
  
  
• Jack London did the same while researching The People of the Abyss, feigning poverty for seven weeks. "In the twinkling of an eye, I had become one of them," he wrote. "My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too-respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship."
  
  
• George Orwell opted to "submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side" while researching Down and Out in Paris and London in the early 1930s. He lived as a dishwasher in Paris, then as a tramp in London. The experience highlighted the cultural difference between the two cities: in Paris, Orwell wrote, he was called "bohemian;" in London, "scum." His stint as a bum awakened Orwell to his own British snobbery. "I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant."
  
  
• John Howard Griffin darkened his skin to disguise himself as an African American in the Jim Crow South while researching his 1961 book Black Like Me. He hopped a Greyhound bus and traveled undercover through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, undergoing along the way a "personal nightmare." He'd planned to spend six weeks in disguise, but only lasted four weeks before having a nervous breakdown and returning home to Texas. Unfortunately, Griffin's White neighbors weren't forgiving of his "stunt." They sent him death threats, hanged him in effigy, and forced his family into exile in Mexico.
  
  
• George Plimpton tried out for a major league baseball team that same year, while researching Out of My League, a book Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived." Plimpton's experiment led him to immerse himself later in other sports, including professional football, hockey, tennis, golf, and boxing, in order to write books.
  
  
• Hunter S. Thompson spent a year embedded in a criminal motorcycle gang while researching his 1966 book Hell's Angels. Thompson spent so much time with the gang that he was "no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them."
  
  
• John D. MacDonald wanted his 1973 mystery novel The Scarlet Ruse, to center around a swindle involving a stamp dealer, so he immersed himself in the world of stamp trading and speculation for five years. To understand stamps' value, MacDonald studied 10 years of auction catalogs, interviewed dealers and collectors, and began bidding on pricey stamps at auction, storing the ones he bought in a safe deposit box. In the process, he made a 175% return on investment. He called his immersion "adventures in auctionland."
  
  
• Barbara Ehrenreich lived in trailer parks and residential motels and worked as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a hotel maid, a nursing home aide, and a Walmart sales clerk while researching her 2011 best seller Nickel and Dimed. The experience taught Ehrenreich that no job is "unskilled" and that even the most menial ones are exhausting. She also learned that one low-wage job isn't enough, if you hope to avoid homelessness in America.

Immersion is the art of leading readers so close to a topic that they're inside it, like fish in a bowl.

For the writer, "immersion begins simply with a key question, which must be taken literally and figuratively," says journalist Patrick Walters. 

"How do I get inside?"