Complaining

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain.

— Julian Baggini

Complaining is my hobby.

Sure, I could quit my hobby, but only by replacing it with an equally engrossing one.

Woodworking comes to mind.

But then I'd have to invest in a lot of fancy lumber and tools and find a place in the house to build a workshop, whereas I'm already fully equipped to complain.

Unlike woodworking, complaining also has the advantage of being a portable hobby.

I can complain any time, anywhere, about any subject you can imagine.

Despite all the possible subjects, I tend to limit my complaints to a finite set.

You could call me a specialist.

My perennial subjects are other drivers, bureaucrats, banks, phone trees, blister packaging, and auto-fill.

When it comes to complaining, many people have a much wider range than mine.

Their complaints are panoramic.

They will complain about summer days, newborn kittens, gourmet meals, world heritage sites, and virtuoso performances. 

When the market goes up, they'll complain that it was down.

When the movie was fabulous, they'll complain that it was too long.

When the line is short, they'll complain that it's moving slowly.

For these people, complaining is less a hobby than an occupation.

We call them pains in the ass.

Complaining as an art form has a spotty reputation among thinkers.

Aristotle called it "wailing" and said it was a disagreeable habit of women, servants, and "soft" men.

Seneca said it was pointless—like trying to evade taxes.

Kant thought complaining was undignified and unworthy of a gentleman. "No true man will importune a friend with his troubles," he said.

Eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison thought that complaining signaled a character defect. "It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect," he said.

But complaining has its defenders, too—especially among contemporary thinkers.

"Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be," Julian Baggini has said.

When it's not simple whining, Baggini points out, complaining can take the form of protest, often the basis of important social and political reforms.

Complaining can also relieve common miseries.  

As social creatures, according to Kathryn Norlock, we need to complain, if for no other reason than to "make the unchangeable easier for complainers to bear."

This "cathartic" variant of complaining not only provides us a much-needed psychic safety valve, but underpins many of the greatest passages of world literature, as Emily Shortslef has observed.

Through an "array of rhetorical modes and literary forms of complaint," Shortslef says, writers through the centuries have elevated complaining from mere kvetching to tragedy, giving readers the chance to contemplate the "inherent vulnerability of humans to loss and injury."

Just imagine if Job, Hamlet, Ahab, Yossarian, or Portnoy had been told never to complain.

Time Wasters

A man who dares to waste an hour of time
has not discovered the value of life.

— Charles Darwin

I recently heard the owner of a meeting planning firm say that her agency has started billing clients specifically for the time devoted to answering "half-baked" emails.

Her staff had informed her that clients had been wasting large amounts of their time with emails that were preposterous and scatterbrained, and that the situation of recent was worsening. Some clients would send more than 20 a day.

So she took steps to profit from the clients' lack of professionalism.

Workplace communication isn't easy. It takes a bit of care.

The careless communicator—too hurried to compose his thoughts, look up the answers to basic questions, or question whether an idea has the slightest merit—never seems to realize that he's squandering others' time (and his own, in the bargain).

He doesn't see that his imprecision, incaution, and indifference to others' time bear a cost, and that by robbing himself and others of time he destroys value.

I like the meeting planner's new practice. She's making lemonade from lemons, and boosting her bottom line.

As the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, "the life we receive is not short, but we make it so."

We have but a few grains of sand in the hourglass.

Can we afford to let others waste them with impunity?

Another Instance of Newspeak

California taxpayers subsidize abortion tourism.

— Brietbart headline

GOP crazies are accusing Democrats of a weird form of political point-scoring.

They're calling it "abortion tourism."

Republican Senator Steve Daines used the term only yesterday to decry a Democratic bill meant to protect a woman's right to travel across state lines for an abortion.

He claims that state-funded "abortion tourism" appeals to "greedy woke corporations," because it lowers the cost of paid maternity leave.

Some left-wing columnists begrudgingly agree with him.

Give me a break.

"Abortion tourism" isn't a thing.

It's no more a thing than "colostomy farming."

Abortion is a medical procedure. Tourism is a facet of the leisure industry.

Plastering the two terms together does not make them a thing.

It's only another Orwellian coinage.

The GOP loves Orwellian Newspeak, the language of 1984 that the ruling party in the novel created "to diminish the range of thought."

Newspeak comprised a "verbal shorthand," Orwell said, that "consisted of words deliberately constructed for political purposes."

These words packed "whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables." 

Their purpose was "not so much to express meanings as to destroy them."

When you destroy meaning, Orwell showed us, you destroy thought.

Right-wingers like Daines would no doubt deny they're using Orwellian Newspeak.

They'd insist that "abortion tourism" is merely a linguistic cousin of "medical tourism," the term we commonly use to describe international travel for medical care.

They'd insist that "abortion tourism" carries no particular judgment.

But that defense is disingenuous.

They know the term is a wry distortion which implies that the woman who seeks an abortion is frivolous—a tourist; and the abortion clinic that serves her is a leisure-industry profiteer—a Disneyland with stirrups.

When nothing could be farther from the truth.

"Words, Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "how innocent and powerless in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

Dock Boggs

In the bright sunny south in peace and content,
The days of my boyhood, I scarcely have spent, 

From the deep flowing springs to the broad flowing stream, 

Ever dear to my memory and sweet is my dream.

— Dock Boggs

I first learned of Dock Boggs from Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, the rock critic's look into the "old, weird America."

New York Magazine called Marcus' landscape the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, and anonymous poets of all stripes."

Boggs was one of the latter—a morose, hard drinking Appalachian poet who sang like his blacksmith daddy and picked a blues-style banjo in the fashion of the Black banjoists he heard in the railroad camps surrounding his home.

Boggs was born in 1898 in Southeastern Virginia and, as a young man, made a living working in the coal mines and peddling moonshine.

For three years in the late 1920s, he tried desperately to earn a living as a professional musician, entertaining at parties in the mining camps and recording 12 songs (eight for Brunswick Records in New York and four for Lonesome Ace Records in Chicago). 

But he quit music in 1929 when the stock market collapsed the parties and recording deals came to a sudden halt.

Boggs stayed out of the music business for over 30 years, until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s by the leaders of the folk revival.

In 1963, one of them coaxed the 65-year old Boggs out of Norton to play at large festivals. 

Boggs also recorded an album that year for Folkways Records in New York, and became a strong influence on Bob Dylan, David Crosby, and even the 15-year old Bruce Springsteen.

Say what you will of it, Boggs' music is raw. 

"I put so much of myself into some pieces that I very nearly broke down," he once told folklorist Charles Wolfe. 

Greil Marcus claimed in Invisible Republic that Boggs sounds when he sings "as if his bones were coming through his skin."

"If God ever requires that rocks cry out," singer-songwriter Lesley Miller wrote, "they may sound as old and earthy as Dock Boggs. 

"His banjo rings like the end of time, and his voice cries out from the deeply submerged recesses of the American heart and mind."

Boggs' old-time music is the polar opposite of today's Country, where the emotions and rural references are formulaic and trite and about as "country" as the corn pone at Popeye's. 

Boggs' characters, in contrast, are real: they're dirt farmers, hillbillies, convicts, wastrels, and murderers, all deeply afflicted by the fates they must suffer. 

Not one drives a Ram, supports our troops, or wears tight blue jeans. 

And they usually wind up vanquished, humiliated, or dead, not home on the couch with the hot wife and the football game.

"Dock deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he believed God expected of him," English professor Barry O'Connell wrote.

"Never a conventional life, his was also shaped by extraordinary gifts. Among them was an almost instinctive capacity to see and hear the events of his world newly.

"Through his music, he transmuted the everyday into something more beautiful and startling and acute than we are usually able to feel."

Above: Dock Boggs by R. Crumb.

Postscript: Listen to this lovely instrumental by Nora Brown. It's Dock Boggs' "Coke Oven March." 

Trump's Defense

They who rule unjustly and incompetently have been raised up by God to punish the wickedness of the people.

— John Calvin

As the inculpatory evidence mounts every day, it's reasonable to ask what defense Trump's lawyers will use in the upcoming trial, The People v. Donald J. Trump.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that his best defense is the one known as vis major (a tort law defense, not a criminal law defense; but what the hell).

God did it.

Arguing vis major, Trump can escape all liability for the damages to democracy that occurred on his watch, simply by blaming God.

He can put forward in his defense the writings of John Calvin, who argued in Institutes of the Christian Religion that God, not voters, appoints our leaders—both the good and the wicked ones.

Good leaders reflect God's grace; wicked leaders, His wrath; but "all equally have been endowed with that holy majesty with which He has invested lawful power."

Trump may have been a wicked leader, but God was responsible; so Trump should not be punished for his treasonous deeds.

Instead, he should be revered.

"In a very wicked man, utterly unworthy of all honor," Calvin writes, "provided he has the public power in his hands, that noble and divine power resides which the Lord has by His word given to the ministers of his justice and judgment.

"Accordingly, he should be held in the same reverence and esteem by his subjects, in so far as public obedience is concerned, in which they would hold the best of leaders if he were given to them."

Stay tuned.

A hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Above: The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin (1852). Oil on canvas. 54 x 84 inches.