I’ve been working on my next book, and I haven’t had time to write anything in months. There are two reasons for this. First, I’ve been writing an academic book, and writing non-fiction is considerably harder (for me at least) than writing fiction. I wrote my first work of fiction in just under three years (a fictional biography of Shakespeare not yet published) and my second (Poker Tales) in just under 6 months. Compare that with my production of non-fiction. It took me 8 years to write my first work of non-fiction (my dissertation), 10 years to write my second. Given the fact that it’s only taken me 1 and a half years to write my third, I think I’m making progress. (If you click on the link to my next book, you’ll find that the asking price for my book is really high. Wait until the publication date for a much cheaper paperback to appear on the Amazon site.)

But that’s not the most important reason I wanted to take time off from writing on my blog. Late last year, I noticed that I had gotten a huge spike in the number of readers I was able to attract, and for several months now, my article on Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” at the top of the list of most-read articles, replacing my excellent work on Serge Gainsbourg. This makes me happy, because I originally conceived of this blog as a place where I could take advantage of the more distributed environment in which people could publish their thoughts, and the marketplace could sort out what they wanted to read for themselves. As a competitive person who started a publishing company to publish my own works, I wanted to find an audience in that world, despite my admittedly narrow area of expertise.

In order to keep myself writing, very early on I started a weekly feature entitled “What I’m Listening to This Week.” I punctuated that very regular feature with my intermittent musings on subject like the Pareto Principle, fashion icon and rebel Louise Brooks, and the occasional work on Lana Turner’s inability to stand up. My problem was that, after waking up and writing about literature for 4-7 hours, I had no energy for writing any more on literature, a fact I noted after posting an ambitious post on how I was going to read and write on a 100 books that I had never read before. That plan went the way of my plan to post an advertisement a week.

Last year in particular, I was left with a blog that seemed to be about music only, as I had less and less time for posting about things that mattered to me. My original point in posting what I’m listening to was to challenge my studenta to keep up with my eclectic tastes, as I was teaching an introduction to rhetoric class at the time, and I wanted to demonstrate just how narrow the interests of my students really is. Most of my students believe that they have the right to think whatever they want (and I agree with them), but they attach no obligation to make themselves clear to others, as they believe that writing is a matter of conscience and that no one has the right to dictate matters of conscience to another.

There, I heartily disagree with my students, as writing takes place in a public space. In public spaces, people have different opinions than you do, and they will push back on you if you say (as one of my students actually did my first semester more than 20 years ago) that Elvis is alive and living in Kalamazoo. Lest you think poorly of me, I gave that student an A, because of his skillful use of evidence. Writing, in my opinion, is not what you believe, but what you can get your readers to believe you believe. I had to ask my student whether he believed this (he said no), and the second question out of everyone’s mouth in the rhetoric workshop that I brought it to (after “What?” when I told them the grade I had given my student an A) was the same. The fact that not one of my academic colleagues would see fit to give my student anything higher than a B (and there was only one of those, and he had to be convinced first that the student didn’t truly mean what he was saying) led me on the long path to writing Writing for People Who Hate Writing. That, too, is a story for another day.

As much as I enjoy listening to Andrea, Hungarians who play Latin music, and Yumi Arai, no one really cares about but me.

With the dramatic rise of blog viewership for things that interest me, I have decided to forgo the weekly posting of music just to keep me posting something every week. I will still post music if it has to do with cultural subjects like Nina Hagen’s false belief that she is in control (and not just insane) when she mixes her Hinduism with Christianity, Lady Gaga’s mixing of belief in the planet GOAT with a strategy to empower 12 year old girls, or the still popular post on the Ye-Ye Girls.

There is nothing like music to bring out the weirdness of culture, as people (not just my students) think that there is no push back when it comes to musical taste. More power to Lady Gaga and Nina Hagen if they want to build up their audience with a lean diet of not-too-carefully-thought-out philosophy. I prefer deeper thinkers for my philosophy, but I still like them for other reasons (like amazing singing talent) that a pure focus on philosophers can never supply.

So goodbye to the weekly diet of music for music’s sake. As I finish off my latest work of non-fiction and get back to two works of fiction in a row, I should be able to post more regularly than I have been able to in the last year.

That’s all for now.

In 2005, The Music Man was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. (Wikipedia)

It has always been my contention that my wife has never actually seen the movie, but when they showed it on TCM on Thanksgiving day, I taped it in order, as I told my wife, to steer my kids into more wholesome art than her love of Ghost Hunters that she regularly subjects my kids to. Predictably, perhaps, my younger son got bored with the movie after 30 minutes, and while my wife told me (after 25 years!) that it was “a little bit amusing,” she continued to read her ghost book, and I went upstairs and watched the rest of it by myself. And it was as wholesome and good as I remember it.

It starts out slow, but builds to its conflict of a con man who has come to town but falls in love with Marian, the Librarian. She has been seeking her love, but hasn’t found him yet. In her first song, she refers to him only as her “someone” who has yet to manifest himself to her:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC2nFFu-mj4

I told my son, who had not gotten intolerably bored by my movie that this was my favorite song, but he was halfway out the door already and make a joke about it (and me), encouraged by his reading mother. I still love it, in spite of my son’s indifference.

A close favorite came after my son had left and I’d gone upstairs to watch the movie alone. It is sung by the Buffalo Bills, who play the school board and are convinced by the con man that they can sing a capella as a barbershop quartet. After they are started singing ‘Lida Rose’ by the con man Hill, they alternate with Shirley Jones, who sings ‘Will I Ever Tell You?’ who she loves from a distance but hasn’t told of her feelings yet. The song ends with both songs being sung at once. It is fantastic, no matter what my wife thinks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrUbcXA2bik

Another favorite song of mine, is ‘Till There was You,’ which takes place down by the (also scandalous to the good people of Iowa) footbridge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDsLeVxOaU

After the movie was over, Ben Mankiewicz announced that the Beatles’ recording of this song earned more money in royalties than they had earned from the initial Broadway run. My wife did not make it to the end, so she could not be impressed with this tribute by the greatest band of the 20th century. Her loss.

Finally, we get to the showstopper, ’76 Trombones,’ which starts out with Zaneeta Shinn, the mayor’s adventurous daughter who has the greatest line in the movie (‘Ye gods,’ she keeps repeating in a phrase also scandalous to the good people of Iowa), as she is transformed from her drab dress to exciting new dress based on the entry of music into her life. She, of course, is thrilled in ways that my cynical wife, who makes me watch her favorite childhood musical, Easter Parade, not once but every year, was not. Once again, it’s her loss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QER1ddSINY

In my view (but who am I?), the cavalier attitude that we had in the 60s and 70s was not natural effect of ‘kids being kids’ but was a function of American prosperity, which kept interest rates low–we could afford it, because we were the richest nation on earth by a long shot–and college cheap. So everyone moved out of the workplace and into college, where they could experiment with drugs and other alternative experiences freely.

But that situation changed when the Berlin Wall collapsed and people around the world started competing for jobs. Soon, China had gutted our manufacturing capacity, and American business people, who had been justly mocked for their narrow-minded behavior in books like The Ugly American had to confront their limitations that had gone unchecked because everyone had been mocking Americans as the shallowest people on the face of the earth.

But we didn’t respond the shift that took place with the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, we elected Bill Clinton President, a man who presided over the last great enlargement of economic expansion that we are likely to see for a while in this county (brought about by the invention of the personal computer) but who turned our political culture away from focus on ‘reality’ to an environment where the President’s War Room could react with rhetoric to changing circumstances with rhetoric. There was no underlying ontology in the 90s, and this was due in no small way to the rise of deconstruction in academia, so the President managed to outrun his conservative opponents on the basis that he had a more agile team of rhetoricians.

But it was not just politics where people focused more on their rhetoric than the reality of the situation. American car companies continued to operate all through the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and up until today as though there was no competition in the world and the way things worked in last centuries 00s, 10s, and 20s or in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. But this is demonstrably not the case in a world in which China has taken all of out manufacturing jobs in less than ten year. The situation has changed, and with it our response should change as well.

Alas, I feel as though I’m Cassandra shouting this to a world that doesn’t listen to me (for who am I to be so bold when there are far more famous people who have large followings on both the left and right side of the political aisle?). This is why I pay more attention to business news than I do to political news (which for reasons of my own self-protection I seldom engage in, as I am sure to be misunderstood on both sides of the aisle, as I have been for 30s years now) in the first place and it is why I can profit from my greater knowledge of the facts of culture despite the fact that I don’t participate in the culture from which I profit.

Anyway, this is what I wrote in response to my friend’s naive defense of the Occupy Wall Streeters:

—–

My parents ranted at me when I dropped out of college by failing all my classes, so I have some sympathy for your rebellious position here. And I went to college for the most ridiculous thing imaginable: I have a PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Allegory and Romance from the English Department of the University of Illinois. And I would do it again in a second. But I disagree with you about the worst that can happen here.

It’s not simply a matter of letting students borrow a boatload of money and then allowing them to experiment freely. That might have been okay when you and I were kids, because my private school education (which I failed out of) cost only $7,000/year, which I financed myself through low cost student loans. With college costs rising even faster than healthcare costs and with interest rates at such prohibitive levels, the worst that could happen is bankruptcy, which entails a loss of opportunity, while not allowing you out of your one major expense (as student loans are exempt from default even during bankruptcy restructuring). This is a program that virtually guarantees perpetual slavery to one’s debt and loss of opportunity to travel freely and independently. This is why students in the Occupy Wall Street movement are so upset by the notion that they will be enslaved by debt and will not have the opportunities that we, who grew up before the explosion of tuition prices and student loan interest rates, had.

While I agree with you about the decline of general earning potential, individuals who have learned things that others don’t know will always be able to make money on the basis of the difference between their knowledge versus that of others. The greater the differential, the greater the profit, whether you’re a plumber selling your services to literary critics or (in a far less likely case) whether you’re a literary critic who is selling your services to plumbers.

This means that it no longer enough to have been to college and to have studied the liberal arts, since liberal arts majors need to be retrained after they get out of school into the way that the world actually works and not how those within the ivory tower think is ought to work. In an era where the President seems to be announcing that 9% unemployment is the new norm, liberal arts majors will go without jobs, since there are other in the world who have not been so idealistic and so will not require such (expensive) retraining. It’s no wonder that they are members of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, since they have been the most screwed by the choice they made to study what used to be considered essential to a full life.

But situations change, and when they do, our obligation is not to continue on the paths that have worked for their parents (equality of choice leading to unlimited freedom) but will not work for them (where the exercise of unlimited freedom in education may lead to slavery to debt).

I personally find this sad, because it leaves students in MBA programs, who stand to make the most money (because they have made the best choice in their education as it pertains to making money) feeling as though ethics courses (which are supposed to tie the specialist education back to more general principles) are impediments to getting their share of and increasingly limited amount of pie. In my experience, they generally laugh (and not all that quietly) at their idealistic ethics professors. But the liberal arts bear a lot of responsibly for this state of affairs. After all, they are supposed to be people who look at the “whole” of life, but by excluding that part of life that revolves around the human desire to make money out of the advantages provided by their education (which in their idealism they dismiss as greed) they lose the name of action (to quote some poet of other) and rest firmly within the prison house, not of nature (as another poet said), but within their own misconstrued picture of the world by which they walled themselves off in an ivory tower in the first place.

The world has changed more than you think. In today’s environment, you have to study not just things but the right things, or you will be left behind paying for your education without the means to travel and experiment as we could when we were young, while others who make money from the few jobs remaining in this country (many of which are on Wall Street) after the sweeping away of manufacturing jobs by Chinese firms will still have the opportunity to do just that. This is why, in my humble opinion, it is a mistake for academia to exclude capitalism from the universe. This is like excluding liquor from legality, as they attempted to do in prohibition. It looks great on paper, but the human animal wants what the human animal wants, and no mere law will tamper with the underlying cause of that behavior. There’s more in heaven and earth (to quote my favorite poet again) than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

If not, they will suffer. And I’m not saying that if your kids choose correctly that they will be guaranteed an income sufficient to meet their increasingly large needs. There are no silver bullets (never were). But I would say that as a parent, you would do well to educate them about the realities of the world, which are not as we grew up with them in the 70s and 80s and are not as they still remain in my beloved humanities. A humanities education builds character, but it does so in a vacuum created outside of the real world in an ivory tower whose walls are built on principles that are not as real as those inside think they are.

My 2¢.

—–

I have been thinking that the Occupy Wall Streeters are risking the pool of money that supports the system they are trying to save, since the 1% pay 40% of the taxes in this country. I told one of my friends my fear that unless we get buy-in from those who have money they will simply take their money and leave, as they have already done with jobs in a post-Cold War world in which (for the first time in history) we live in a world in which producers of value have choices of where they want to do business. He said (and I quote) “Let ‘em go.”

I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution, as it would destroy the longed-for solution. In order to avoid that, you have to take their money before casting them on the sands. That would require an executive order, since you and I both know that the Congress will pass a Constitutional amendment that would make it okay (and I hope, my friend Adam, that you wouldn’t want that).

The globalization of the American economic model makes a huge difference in our approach to our once local problems.

First, in a global economy in which everyone wants what we have, countries will increasingly realize that it is the principle of unlimited freedom to experiment that has made this country produce the telephone, the automobile, jazz, the television, the transistor, the rocket ship, and the personal computer. These inventions have made fortunes for those who were the first to market, and it has been the historical role of government to put the brakes on corporations by standing in the way of untrammeled greed. But they have tilted our economy away from our egalitarian ideals, held by the Founding Fathers on both sides of the aisle (Jefferson and Hamilton both held to egalitarian ideals) and towards the inequitable distribution of incomes. The Occupy Wall Street movement is geared towards rectifying such imbalances based in our more egalitarian nature.

That sense of balance has been maintained in the 20th century (before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) by government, who stood for equity in a world governed by selfish greed AND we were one of the few countries in the world who took seriously freedom to the extent that we enshrined it into the Constitution in the First Amendment. It was this freedom to innovate that has propelled America to the top of the societal heap, as people were content to develop useless things like Pet Rocks to sell to other people (or suckers, as we called them when I was a kid).

But at the same time, it’s important to remember that most producers fail (99%?), but a very few produce outsized incomes (like Steve Jobs’) on the basis of their unique insight into how the world actually works, as opposed to how the majority of people think it works. Rather than inventing another outsized innovation ourselves, the rest of us then invest in their companies, so all boats rise, although at different rates.

This is how America spreads its wealth to the innovators and not to the permanent political class, as happened in the Soviet Union. This is the subject of the chapter “Reykavík” in my work of Poker Tales, where I problematize American culture and attempt to solve American problems on their own terms rather than running to France, as so many academics have done (a notion that I take up in the chapter entitled “Four Parisians”). I fail, but my work stands as an invitation to try a solution based in America rather than France, which has its own problems with cultural integration but being far away such problems are not as apparent to Americans as they are to those who live within French culture itself.

This is also a huge difference that made us unique during the American century, when IN THEORY most countries were following a more democratic model of communist distribution (including my childhood hero, Jean Paul Sartre). We were developing not just a different system, but a more efficient system of distributing resources that did not get clogged up in government but circulated more freely. The byproduct of the American form of organization was the creation of unequal wealth for individuals but also of the wealth that has driven even Communist China to imitate our path to riches and to abandon their communist colleagues, the Soviets, who had seemed to all but a few to be winning right up to the moment when they capitulated.

This was, of course, another instance of the few triumphing over the many that made America great in the first place. I realize that this will make me appear as an apologist for American exceptionalism in Adam’s eyes, but I’m not advocating any such position. The world has changed, and changed drastically, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. China is taking our jobs away, because they are not bound by the rules of what Jameson called late-stage capitalism. The Chinese can raise the income of their people a lot by paying them what would be a low wage in America. So they do. That means that producers of value (including Steve Jobs, who played a key role in building our narcissistic culture in the first place) have a choice of where they want to make their products that they did not have when America was involved in the Cold War.

Both parties in the current debate are looking at the world through Cold War eyes. The conservatives are looking through the lens of having been excluded from the debate in which the baby boomer were claiming they represented everyone in the world (or at least those who mattered; this ended up giving us a culture of “beautiful people by the end of the 70s), while the conservatives have now been given a voice by Rush Limbaugh, who continues to be mocked by the old-line media. This continues the Cold War process by continuing with its old-line models long after the Cold War has ended.

The same is true of the Left, which has looked backwards to the turn of the 20th century for a Progressive model that had guided America through the Cold War. In their quest, academics (the branch of the left that I am most familiar with) have embraced a French-style deconstruction that levels out inequalities as the result of a limited scientific mind that people with “higher” consciousness (you know, the ones who do not suffer like Liu Shaoqi from false consciousness). His makes the academic left so sure that they are smarter than the idiot right that they can easily give up looking at the world for the way it actually works because they know how it works. Their only goal is to make it conform to their preconceptions. This forces the left into an “us” or “them” position that I outline in another blog post (but let’s be honest, who’d want to?).

In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, that was a great model, but history moves forward and often in unforeseen directions (again, see my post on Steve Jobs). We do not now live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt, and so the key to the future is not to take pride in our a priori belief in our knowledge of the historical past that has brought us to this moment, as both Limbaugh and Obama do, but to study the present for clues to where the market is headed and then place your bets and hope and pray that you had enough information to make the correct choice. There are no absolutely correct choices in the American cultural model, only better and worse choices. Adverting to France won’t change that, either. It will just make you an inflexible member of a society in which prizes go to the nimble.

So nothing changes in the world in which deconstructionists tell us that there is no ontology to our rhetoric and by this we can create any life we want for ourselves (and which I, as a writer who does not have to toe the party line like those samizdat authors in the Soviet Union had to, appreciate). This should tell the deconstructionists that there is something wrong with their system of belief (but once again, they baffle me and continue to launch attacks at their enemies from a firm ground that they would deny to anyone else; what is the nature of this ground, I continue to ask, except that nothing has ground, in which case why do we need to be attacking others who have as much right to their opinions as anyone else (that is, none at all)?).

In the world we live in today, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a host of other nations are competing with us for a share of pie that for all but the last decade of the 20th century we had to ourselves. That fact has put the two strains of American culture, which sat side by side throughout our history, into higher relief: capitalist inequality by which our nation got to be the richest nation in the world which other cultures still follow and our Constitution’s guarantee of liberty got to be the model for the United Nations Charter in spite of us being mocked every year, month, and day of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The change in our position from laughingstock to the leader of the free world has meant that our culture, which not only we in America but the French have had serious reservations about following ever since its founding, will be followed, while the French, masters of Europe from the Age of Charlemagne has fallen by the wayside (the exact date was June 22, 1940 when Paris officially fell to the Nazis). Rather than going back to France for old ideas, the Chinese will suffer the same fate as we in America have, as well as gaining the same rewards. We as progressive Americans need to rethink the American social compact on its own terms to take into account global competition that has opened up such a breach in our culture that had remained in an uneasy compact government and capitalism for most of our history.

Without such an insight into our true place in the world (unmediated by French and German thought) I truly fear that America could lose our richest people to an-as-yet-not-present nation that has the wherewithal to invite our most innovative (and so wealthiest) citizens with the prospect of unlimited freedom, low taxes and easy corporate culture that does not make war on its most successful members.

But so far, all I see in Occupy Wall Street is anger, albeit entirely justified anger, without a plan of action. That doesn’t mean I don’t support them; nor does it mean that they won’t get a plan of action. But it does mean that without a plan of action, their project will fail, as it has taken hold of only one of the two pillars (equality) that have made American society the envy of the world, while leaving those (capitalists) with the most liquid assets free to seek a rent-free life where they can be included in the conversation about their fate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrP7-1q6Nao

Jobs became famous for wanting to change the world, and he did so many times, marketing a scientific innovation invention by made by others that he had seen at Xerox PARC, the graphics based computer, with its mouse and its more intuitive design, to the masses. But that’s what happens to those who are business innovators. They take ideas from others and market them better than anyone else. Then, after their innovation is followed by others, they claim credit for the innovation itself. This is why, after Bill Gates copied Steve Jobs’ copying of Xerox PARC ideas, Jobs claimed that his invention had been stolen by his lifelong rival, Bill Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative,” he said, “and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”.

But Gates took Jobs’ idea for the graphical user interface marketed to the masses, leaving Jobs’ company as a niche company which charged higher prices for the premium of owning an Apple computer. As the company settled into a state in which the company dominated only 5% of the market, Steve Jobs got fired as CEO. He went on to found NeXT Computers, as well as giving a small company called Pixar some startup capital which will with which they experimented and eventually produced the first all digital film, Toy Story.

These things would’ve been enough to secure his legacy as one of the great technology leaders at the turn-of-the-century, and yet his greatest contributions to technology were still to come. After Apple failed to win its share of the mass market, Jobs was invited back as CEO. He quickly got the company into the black and then with his experience designing high end graphics workstations gleaned from NeXT Computers invented the iMac, followed by the iPod, still the most popular MP3 player in the world. He changed the distribution system of music from record stores to an online based music distribution system with iTunes. He changed retailing, by opening up a line of Apple Stores, a store that has the highest sales per foot of floor space of any company in the world. Then, he finally got the recipe right for a shift away from the personal computer to a cheaper computer that people had been trying to invent for years with only limited success when he introduced the iPad.

As he did so, his company, which he had rescued from being in the red and so from potential oblivion, became briefly the most valuable company in terms of market capitalization in the world.

Me and Jobs as Products of the 60s

Steve Jobs is only seven years older than I am, but he and I are both the products of the 60s. We both went to college; we both dropped out. When he was in college, he took a class in calligraphy, which he later credited with his obsession with fonts in his Mac OS. I, too, took a class in calligraphy (it was called paleography when I took it) when I was in graduate school, but have nothing to show for in except for a story that no one wants to hear about how I learned to instantly determine which font (of 30 – 40) I was looking at through a decision tree that I made in class. As a result, Steve Jobs died infinitely wealthier than I ever hope to be.

I can’t decide whether this matters. Nobody pays any attention to blog, but I write it without any expectation that anyone will be interested in what I am writing, being more interested in expressing my thoughts on what matters to me. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was a cultural leader. When he spoke, people listened, because he was an oracle of the future. Listening to what Jobs had to say gave people insights into their own future that they lacked on their own. This is how a community is built, whereas my approach to my blog involves me in quite of selfish blowharding that is not reflected in the larger culture. This thought was on my mind when I took off blogging for the summer. Unlike Steve Jobs, I have no desire to make money with my blog or my writing. I write my books because I want to read them and no one else in the culture is writing what I want to read.

My success as an author cannot be measured in monetary terms; and although I often have to explain to others the selfish philosophy that governs my life as a writer, I don’t regret the course my non-remunerative life has taken. I live happily with my wife, and she and my kids are all that has ever mattered to me. I spent my youth chasing idealist dreams, and I pursued them into graduate school. My life after graduate school meant learning about how business works, and it turns out is not at all how they told me that the world works was in graduate school. As a result, I went to work as a minor cog in the world dominated by people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and companies like Wal-Mart, who had mastered the way the world in actuality.

I originally decided to go into academia because I wanted a quiet life or I could be in control of my destiny. When I realized that academia and I have different sets of values, it and I parted ways, as I turned to entrepreneurship, which I learned about when I was reading my hundred books on business, marketing, finance, etc. I was happier doing this that I ever was in academia, which put limits on my ability to think outside the box despite their belief that they (academics) were the only people who could think outside boxes. I learned a great deal when I was reading about business, including my insight (derived from Pareto, but like Jobs I’ll be happy to claim invention) of the basic inequality of nature, which contradicted everything they had taught me in graduate school. I took a job as a temp, got hired full-time as a secretary, got promoted based on my skills as a programmer to market analyst, quit that job for a job in the field I got my promotion for (which I rightly perceived as my skill as a computer programmer, not for my remedial skill as a marketer), and eventually went to work for myself as an independent contractor. There, I was happier than I had ever been in grad school, where people had attempted to keep me in line by constantly testing my political allegiances. I would still be an entrepreneur if not for my having had a stroke in 2004. So I changed my profession again. I founded a company, and I now view myself as an entrepreneur of ideas gleaned from my own attempt to integrate my academic experience with my business experience, which I package in my books.

On the basis of the difference in outcomes between myself and Steve Jobs, it might seem unfair for me to poke holes in the thoughts of a man who is among the last great American entrepreneurs (so far), but this is exactly my intention in this post.

Going Back to School

The chief difference between myself and Steve Jobs (in my humble opinion) is that he went to work after dropping out of college, whereas I felt that work was less fulfilling. I read incessantly when I was out of college, and when I went back I found that I was better read than almost all my classmates. But what I was missing, and the reason I went back to college, was a sense that I had not been able to give myself a well-rounded education when I was out of college. I had encountered Joseph Campbell, who was the first of many comprehensive thinkers about the world when I was out of school; but Campbell left me with some deep questions about how I could resolve the world I lived in with the world of “the word behind the words,” which he pointed to as having answers that words themselves could not get to. This seemed to me to take me out of my independent and individual self and impose upon me a requirement that I alienate myself from myself an instead grasp a new set of principles based in our common inheritance with no guarantee that I would ever be able to get back from the division-less area in space back to my individual self. The whole thing requires that I believe that the “higher” construction is real and not a delightful but impossible fiction. Unfortunately, I could not believe this, and I went back to college looking for answers to what appeared to me to be unresolvable questions. I was sure that someone knew.

It turned out when I went to grad school that others had discovered a similar gap between words and what they refer to as soon as I got into graduate school. Derrida’s work fascinated me, and I attempted to work it into the knowledge that I built up over two years working in a local bank. It turned out that I came to a different conclusion than my academic colleagues, many of whom had never had any business experience. For them, going into business meant simply a capitulation to greed; and more than once I had a conversation with academics who believed that they could have gone into business and made money, but they had pursued a “higher” calling whose point of pride was that they had made a conscious decision to turn away from making money altogether.

I’ve always been very wary of such professions. In my own life, I’ve attempted to learn about business, because my parents told me that I should learn enough to follow all of the things they reported on in the news. This involves a smattering of national and local politics, sports, weather, and of course, business. When I was young I never really cared much for sports, and weather was something, as Mark Twain once said, there’s not much you can do about changing. Politics and business, on the other hand, require a good memory for past behavior and the inability to predict future behavior based on your deeper knowledge of the past. This makes both politics and business appropriate for intellectual inquiry.

In the 1990s, when I was in graduate school, New Criticism, with its sense that aesthetic objects were to be counted for as “autotelic” objects without reference to culture or any other external factors, was waning. In its place came a New Historicism, which made culture the static metaphysical object in the universe and the individual as being in negotiation with something larger than themselves. But with the switch from autotelia to negotiationata, I still perceived a problem in the resulting configuration; for it seemed to me that this same problem existed with culture has had existed with the metaphysical individual at the center of the aesthetic universe. No one could say what the boundaries were for culture anymore than they could say what the boundaries of the individual were.

Being a new idea competing with an older idea, people in academia were sure that they had finally reached the Promised Land. Having gotten there, there was no more reason to explore the world for cracks in their own configuration the world; all that remained do was to cleanse the academic world of those who did not believe as everyone in the academic world believed. So this demotion of the individual played out in the world of politics, where two opposing points of view were posited, and through election one won out. Academics secured the election which had taken place within their ivory tower by declaring within that ivory tower a state of permanent revolution, and only one side (the left) could perceive the “truth.” This made it very difficult for me to ask questions about things that had already been decided on; and it made me into a creature of the right within academia, because only someone on the right could ask questions that involved the resurgence of an idea as old as individual liberty without negotiation with larger collective forces. And within the medieval period, which sported more conservative scholars, I was thought to be too liberal in my desire to throw open all things medieval to the forces of Derrida’s corrupting vision of society. I was firmly on the left, as far as most of my medieval professors were concerned.

I find it endlessly fascinating what happened in academia in the 90s. Rather than looking within their ranks for cracks in their system, academics started to displace the frustrations they had with their own “perfect” system onto business people, excluding them, who in turn had dismissed academic thought as a useless pursuit and who (according to my academic colleagues) were more concerned with their own greedy point of view than with collective action. This placed “them” by definition far from the “truth.” But, at the same time as my academic colleagues were making the case for the absolute exclusion of business people from the universe of wisdom, even a cursory reading of the logic of definition would convince anyone that definitions are relative, not absolute. In my opinion, my academic colleagues had made an unacknowledged switch, which I am in the habit of calling the Absolute-Relative Switch. In such a switch, you reserve relative constructions to your party (this can be done on the left and the right), while maintaining that the other party means what they say absolutely. This is the stuff that radio partisans thrive on, but academics and those on the left are not immune to such a fallacy.

Now in my world, businesses always been excluded from liberal arts on the basis of the study of business not fitting in with the standard configuration of the universe given to us by academia. In academia, some people have knowledge, while other people don’t. This is the way that classrooms work: teachers have knowledge, while students are (or should be) in class to learn what their teachers have spent a lifetime learning. This makes it possible for academics to congratulate themselves on pursuing a higher calling, while demonizing their students, who are not thought to be as serious about the “higher” calling of the life of the mind as their professors are. But this is only true if a professor has a secure position in the world and not one of many relative positions that one could take. This would destroy the classroom setting by making the distinction between teacher and student a completely arbitrary thing, so my academic colleagues maintain their absolute positions on some things (like the importance of knowledge and of the importance of teachers who pass on the accumulated knowledge to their students) in an otherwise arbitrary universe in and on which business people operate.
I just didn’t think that my academic colleagues, who had walled themselves off from society by relying on a firm (read: absolute) boundary between themselves and the world that they judged without wanting to be judged, were correct in their assessment of how easy would be to make money in the world should they have chosen the path that they dismissed as only the path of greed. I found them to be as greedy (not more or less so) than their fellow men who stood outside their arbitrarily constructed walls.

My experience with business has been that business is organized on different principles altogether. Whereas academics can elevate themselves up to a higher world while dismissing the lower world as being one of “greed” in a bit of what we academics used to like to call a synchronic analysis, business people have a more diachronic analysis of their position in the universe.

And here’s the rub. If you follow my link under diachronic analysis, you will find that it leads to the notion of “historical analysis.” Looked at from this academic point of view, it appears that business people are shallow thinkers who think in “lower” terms, while academics pursue a set of “higher” values. This accords with Aristotle, who said in Part IX of his Poetics that “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” This, too, reflects the academic position that the first thing one needs to do to seek the “truth” is to abandon one’s attachment to one’s individual life and instead tend to a “higher” truth. According to this model, the business person has no notion that there is a “higher” world that could be pursued if only they would give up their base and debasing focus on themselves at the expense of their betters, who have turned away from selfish greed.

In many senses, my academic colleagues are correct. [See my the first point in my article on Rush Limbaugh, who dismisses Darwin as one of the two worst thinkers in the history in favor of a (presumably static world in which things don’t change beyond a certain point).] But that is beside the point. The academic view point is limited to thinking about the past, as the indication of diachronic linguistics reference to “historical linguistics” ought to tell us. In such a universe, there is no room for thinking about the future. As a result, academics tend to believe that the future will come out of present experience, as I note here, and the disallow all other changes and ideas that do not pass through their hands.

But there is another problem with the academic construction of the problem: the problem is that such a “higher” truth based in “historical linguistics” might be a fictional construction. And here I perceive the difference between academic thinkers and business people. Academics spend a great deal of time thinking about the historical past but cannot tell with certainty what the future will hold except that it must of necessity come out of the historical experience that only academics have fully grasped. Business people, despite not being very good academic thinkers, spend a lot more time thinking about the future than academics do, because success in business involves having a new vision that has never been thought of in the past. So the past is a deep and detailed record of things that have happened; but I learned in my year of 100 books that it is useless to concentrate on the rise of railroads except as a model of the past. New ideas come from thinking outside the box, which academics are all for; but only to the extent that they are included in the final box that thinkers end up with. If not, they, like all dictators before them, will stand in the way of progress.

In my Poker Tales, I note some serious limitations of this model, which seem more appropriate to a European sensibility than to an American one. In particular, I noted the difference between European and American models of culture in my chapter on “Reykjavík” and later in my chapter on the “Four Parisians” who come to America with some high-minded ideals but who get taken to the cleaners by the absolute fool “Belcher” Owens because they are not looking at the world as it is, but as they would like it to be. America works because we have a model of how the world works that is more efficient than older European models because it does not hold on to any residual metaphysical constructs but allows prices to run free on the basis of two cooperating people involved in a transaction without any metaphysical guide that would prohibit setting of the (not a) just price. It was my aim in writing Poker Tales to rehabilitate aesthetic culture on the American model, which (like my point in graduate school) is built on no solid foundation whatsoever but only on the basis of someone’s being at the forefront of something so obvious while being at the same time so brand new that no one has ever seen it before.

On the Cutting Edge

In that respect, Steve Jobs is on the cutting edge of societal evolution. He has stepped outside the box and sees a world that other people can only follow once he has seen the way forward. In that respect, he is the upper 1% of the 1%. He’s a leader who was able to adapt because he dropped out of school and went his own way. On his death, he has been hailed as a hero, the latest (and everyone hopes not the last) innovator in a world of followers. This is the basis of his belief that collective behavior is not responsible for new ideas; it is only a brilliant mind that can see farther than others can: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” he once said.

Occupy Wall Street

At the moment that Jobs died, we had reached reached a pivotal moment in American history. As wealth has grown, the difference between the wealthy and the poor have grown. This has given us Barack Obama, who wants to redistribute wealth on more equitable lines. I am all for this, as huge relative differences in wealth lead to different interests in each party and a lack of social cohesion around common goals (this is why I voted for him). But Obama has attempted to redress the problem by using the academic viewpoint of Saul Alinsky, a man who is for the “real” people as opposed to the abstractions of big corporations. This continues the historical and so academically respectable position of excluding big business from the more noble goals of fighting for the little people. So deeply ingrained is this way of thinking that all of my friends on Facebook with few exceptions are clamoring to support Occupy Wall Street this week.

That’s fine, but it is in their surety that the past will dictate the future that I find troubling. Three of my friends have ignored my warnings about their misunderstandings of the business mind that they wish to exclude from the conversation on account of their being greedy SOBs who are not thinking about the collective good. Rather than take heed to my warnings, they stop communicating with me (I am sure they are thinking that there’s something wrong with me and are too embarrassed on account of my having evil (not just different) views on the subject; but that is perhaps my own paranoia talking, and I can’t really know this). Although they won’t say it to me personally on account of their having grown up in a gentler age, I am convinced that each of them is thinking “he’s one of them,” the “other,” whom the Occupy Wall Street folks continue to (very selectively) target. This indicates to me that their targets are more political than philosophical, but when I attempt to engage them on their to my mind errant philosophy, they either shut down, or they confuse their public professions of loyalty as being no more than private expressions of their own preferences and ask me to shut my pie hole, because they was just expressing their thoughts. This makes me the bad guy who is stepping on the untrammeled right of free speech; it is only when I stop objecting to their misconstrual of the philosophy that underlies their protests that free speech can again take center stage. Objections themselves have become reasons to support what “us” have always supported and to label as “them” what “them” object to, securing the “us”‘s position from ever being subject to a philosophical challenge. “Us” knows what “us” knows, and we like it that way.

As I say, I don’t have a problem with anyone’s public expressions of their view, but I do have a problem if you express your views but do not allow others to disagree or question you on your views. This was what happened to me in graduate school; and while I could have maintained my position as an outsider on the inside, I thought it would have been more work than it was worth to me personally. I, like the Old-Timer in my Poker Tales, went away and did my own thing without regards to the consequences to the collective needs of a society that had made it perfectly clear that my services (being so definitively “other” in the world of ‘us-or-them’) were unwelcome. I, like Steve Jobs, dropped out of college once more and went to work in the private sector, where I had no other obligation than to meet the needs of my customers through my superior knowledge of obscure things.

Steve Jobs as Master in the World of Niche Marketing

My desire to pursue my own goals at the expense of the collective goals is parallel with Steve Jobs’ individual goal that made him a leader among economic producers in this economy. Jobs has been the most successful exploiter of niche markets in which the consumer stands still, while the producers have got to be nimble marketers in order to meet the consumer’s changing needs. I trace the development of a divide between producers and consumers in my essay on Wal-Mart economy in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, where I point out to the young consumer who wants a job in the productive society that writing is important in the world of production, but that it also requires a very different skill set than is required of you as a consumer of products marketed to you.

And to be clear I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Steve Jobs. But there is something wrong with Steve Jobs as a producer of metaphysical value. Metaphysics has been the principal on which we have hung our collective notion of art and aesthetic value. We see people all the time posting their thoughts on poetry and art, and in almost every instance people are trying to peer through and beyond reason to a whole and complete thoughts on which they can hang their whole and complete person. At the same time, people tend to find flaws in their whole and complete personae. In this, I thought, was the lesson I’ve learned from Derrida and his followers. There is no center at the center of ourselves. We will always be looking to maintain our sense of ourselves, while knowing that if we ever stop and find the center, that we’ve made some sort of mistake. This is the point I made a long time ago talking about Nina Hagen.

It is in the middle space, between extremes, that I find the approximation to the “truth.” Such is the nature of “truth” that it must be passed through imaginative re-creation in our minds before we can get to the truth. And the universal nature of imaginative interference means that we can never (never, never, never, never, never, never, never) get back to the ontology of truth. No one, not Joni Mitchell or Rush Limbaugh, has found it as it in in its ontological perfection. It is, in my opinion, the weakness of both sides that they think they have come to the end of the road of “truth.” This is a too-easy solution in which “us” are in possession of “truth” and it is only “them” that stands in the way of forming a more perfect society. This seems to me to be the product of a specialist society in which no one knows the truth but in which at the same time everyone thinks that someone else knows the truth.

Limbaugh’s hero, William Buckley once wrote “Someone somewhere remarked that Erasmus was probably the last man on earth about whom it could more or less safely be generalized that he knew everything there was to know.” He then goes on to qualify his remark: “By ‘everything’ was meant everything in the Western canon.” This leaves out all the “other” cultures that didn’t participate in Western culture. And it was in precisely those “other” cultures that Steve Jobs placed his emphasis. But he, too, thought that there was an “end” to human problems when he contracted cancer. Like Steve McQueen before him, he chose to undergo more experimental treatments that were aligned with his own mind’s orientation to the world than more traditional Western treatments. Jobs apparently believed his doctor when he told him that “he was either going to be one of the first ‘to outrun a cancer like this’ or be among the last ‘to die from it.’” He, like Limbaugh’s hero, was an idealist who thought that it was possible ever to have known everything. Buckley had displaces “all-knowing” into the past. Jobs, being a business person, placed it into the immediate future, perhaps just out of reach but still graspable.

The reality of both positions is far grimmer. Sometimes perfectly good people (like me) are fine, and then they fall over, having had a stroke at 7:00AM, right in the middle of a semester in which I was doing what I thought was good work of teaching people an introductory class in writing at a local community college, rather than a class at an Ivy League school on the works of allegory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (my academic specialty). Such things are random, and would be completely unnecessary in a rational world. But the world is not rational. How we deal with that fact tells us a lot about ourselves and our culture. In America, we tend to displace the faults of the world onto “other’s” in order to maintain our sense of ourselves as whole and complete persons. It is for this reason that Steve Jobs, despite all his brilliance, could not surrender his body to be opened up by others, and so (perhaps) died sooner than he would have had he followed a more scientific route to health.

Some folks surrender themselves to God, who is thought to be all-powerful. Others scapegoat “others,” rich people, or poor people, or blacks, or whites, or people who believe in ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ causes. But nobody, apparently, has decided that there always will be room for improvement in our relation to an evanescent “truth” that flits away each time you attempt to grasp it. My “middle way” is my attempt to keep open the avenues of truth in a universe where everybody has their version of the “truth,” and that having their own private verion of “the truth” is good enough for them. But such a system rapidly becomes one of autonomous and private monads who do not grasp themselves but only others as in any way limited. When I or anyone else attempts to challenge their most intimate and personal ideas, they can do no more than object to my bad faith.

I don’t resent Steve Jobs’ vision of the universe; his is one of many. But he made his money appealing to consumers who took him at his word and believed that they can have things delivered to them without having to look at the universe themselves for new ways to make money on their own. This consumer orientation is responsible for the utterly irresponsible demands of those members of Occuy Wall Street who are demanding a free college education that will continue the academic policies that make it possible in the first place for students not to understand how the producer end of the supply and demand chain actually works differently from the consumer end. Such a position will inevitably lead to a decline in productive workers (as it already has in the Jobs generation, as model producers are being freshly minted in China and the other BRIC countries but not in America itself) in favor of consumers who take no care for the very different skill sets required to make them into productive workers.

Like my experience in academia, I conceive of the problem differently, and I get frustrated sometimes by my lifelong friends’ inability to see things as I do. I put them down to having been raised in a “culture” that Steve Jobs is largely responsible for. But as I have said before, “culture” is a choice as much as it is a metaphysical boundary of experience. And I, like Steve Jobs, have no obligation to participate in it but to transform it from a different (not necessarily a better) position. But, unlike Steve Jobs, I recognize that there can be enormous consequences to taking personal choice too far. At some point, our rhetoric runs up against reality, and when that happens, something’s got to give. In every case in recorded history, unknowable reality trumps the knowledge of the wisest among us, no matter how shallow or deep the knowledge that each of us carries around with us on a daily basis.

That makes it doubly or trebly or infinitely more important that we don’t lose ourselves in our own conceptions of how we want the world to be and try to transform it in our own image, but instead concentrate on how the world is and then react after the fact. This is the lesson that education should teach us. It is at that point, when we get so full of ourselves, that we should remember our forefather, Socrates, who said that his wisdom consisted of his knowing nothing. Sadly, however, the lesson of Socrates has been attacked by Nietzsche, who hated Socrates for his position that he knew nothing; and by his modern predecessor, Rousseau, who thought, like the Occupy Wall Streeters still think, that is only the consequence of mankind’s having fallen out of alignment with our original natures, which were once at one with nature’s equitable distribution of resources.

Such a position only makes sense if it is true. And the “truth” is not for Occupy Wall Street crowds to know without a conversation with those who think differently (as I do) than they do. As I note in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, conversations take place in the “middle space” between two people who have firm opinions on how the world works. When they disagree, each should go back to their corner and rethink their position in relation to the different position that the other has taken. After considering one’s position, one should go back to the “middle space” and try to make their case again, taking in all the points that their opponents have made that seem good to them and dismissing with carefully wrought arguments those that do not measure up.

This is precisely what is not happening in American “culture” today. Both sides come to the table with their positions set in stone and expect the “other” position to budge. When they do not, each side is assured that their position is more secure, while the position of the “other” is not just different but “evil.” Holding such atomic (monadic) positions, moreover, requires no education. Instead, it is the sort of “instant intellectualism” that is available to everybody of all classes (as Descartes says, everyone knows that there is nothing wrong with their own thought).

In my universe, nature is not equal in the first place. It seeks to eliminate the strong and eliminate the weak, as Darwin (who Limbaugh dismisses as one of the two worst thinkers in history) was the first to discern, and which Pareto first noted as a systematic feature of the natural universe. If I am right about Pareto’s having a better vision of the universe than Rousseau, then people like Obama and his college-educated followers in Occupy Wall Street are wrong to attempt to build a human society along the lines of nature in the first place.

Conservatives abandoned education after they couldn’t get heard in the 1990s during the PC decade. Steve Jobs, too, abandoned education after he found that it was too constraining. The reaction I would have expected to this was for academics to rethink their positions in terms of their shrinking manifest. I stuck it out, because I have always believed that the better-educated mind was the superior mind but with the reservation that no one knows what the future holds.

I managed to make it through graduate school to the end, but only by ignoring people who demanded my submission to their political construction of the universe but who were not really interested in much more than my submission to their power. Having passed through an environment that others find so toxic relatively unscathed, I have not lost my enthusiasm for education. But I think that my experience has changed my opinion of the world. I do not believe that politics is important at all. I do believe that philosophy is more important than ever. And I believe that both of these positions have no place in the world of American culture as it is currently configured.

I hope to change that through my art. But, then, as I have often asked on these pages: Who am I to be saying any of this when so many famous people in the past and the present have achieved fame saying different things, while I rest content in my suburban home, poor and far away from New York, Washington, and LA, where the real work of building “culture” takes place?

Everyone (including me) believed this when I was in graduate school, but it put a premium on aligning oneself with Derrida’s skepticism. Those who believed in skepticism were in the know (and what a contradiction is implied in that formulation!) and could be allowed into the academic inner circle. All my professors attempted to do with me the entire time I was in graduate school was to lecture me on my own misbehavior based on my own misconfiguration of the problem. In their minds, Derrida had solved a problem that had bedeviled a lot of the best literary critics of the previous generation. And who was I, after all, to question them or Derrida? When I continued to ask thorny question (like how it was possible to know anything in a universe in which all our knowledge of anything can be deconstructed), I was shunned as an unbeliever (another problem in a skeptical universe; who gets to call it art in a relative universe but those who are in positions of power already? I have discussed this here, if you’re interested). See 1:20 in the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY

When I was in graduate school, I had no answers to my belief that something was wrong in the graduate school universe, and I wrote my dissertation more in the spirit of inquiry into method than actually answering the questions I was raising. It wasn’t until I got out of graduate school and started reading old books in my now abundant leisure time that I found what I had been looking for all along, and in the most unlikely place. Augustine, who I had been avoiding along with Plato on account of his reputation in D. W. Roberston, Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer, had held the answer all along. I change it a bit in my work, though.

Both of my latest works are separate attempts to answer my graduate school critics by deconstructing deconstruction on the basis of my new found confidence in a world that persist in spite of academic doubts about its existence (I’m quoting myself here; weird). In my work of satire, I make the case that artists and literary critics, and not the usual scapegoat of the bourgeoisie, have placed their spears in the shifting ground of a deconstructable universe as though they had found solid ground. Within the world of fiction, I point to some of my favorite works of fiction that have led artists and critics to set up as arbiters of faith in a thoroughly deconstructable universe. Only artists and critics are exempt from deconstruction, and they get quite upset when someone tells them that they are not.

In my work, I point out as gently as I can (because I modeled my main character on myself) that his youthful dreams of transcendence are totally unrealistic. But he refuses to see the world more realistically, as my antagonist, who is also based on another aspect of myself, does. In the end, neither of those two me-based people have the answers to the question of transcendence.

Gentle Giant’s Mr. Class and Quality

As a result of my thoughts in recent weeks, the lyrics to this song, Gentle Giant‘s ‘Mr. Class and Quality,’ have been on my mind. In them, the writers give vent to their feelings about the limitations of the bourgeois “middleman” who travels within strictly restricted boundaries. Their feeling is that the “middle” is nothing more than a detour from the “end” of literary experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNzZ7RXQtM

Look around my rooms and see the prizes I have showing
Working hard to build my life and plan the way I’m going
House and car and pretty wife – they’ve all been won by knowing
All been won by knowing
All been won by knowing.

Paperwork, white collared shirts – where would we be without them
Man of class and quality – I never shout about them
Choose my friends for my own ends. You can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them.

Middleman sees straight ahead and never crosses borders
Never understood the artist or the lazy workers
The world needs steady men like me to give and take the orders
Give and take the orders
Give and take the orders.

The bourgeois man has trophies of his accomplishment (“prizes I have showing”) as the result of his “hard work” and his “planning.” But, as everyone knows or should know, life throws us curves out of left field. It is in our reactions to unforeseen events that we should measure a man, and not on the basis of how much “paperwork” a man wearing “white-collared shirts” who “never crosses borders” has managed to fill out in his lifetime.

The moral of the song is that people who think they know based on giving and taking orders have not reached true knowledge, because the path that they have taken leads one down a path without looking for or thinking about other ways of looking at the world. The bourgeois way of “knowing” is contrasted with the more open knowing of people like “us,” who embrace the very pleasures of not knowing what is coming next. This, in the 1960s was equated with freedom. And if, like me, you were alive in the 1960s and were under 30 years of age, you could partake in the new world. And if you were over 30, you could partake if you gave up your attachments to things like order and solid middle class values. But some people wouldn’t budge, and they became the enemies of right-minded thought.

My Name Is Nobody

That is essentially the plot of Sergio Leone’s My Name Is Nobody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RYq1PLdT0s

In that film, Leone pays a final tribute to his beloved Western genre, even as he kills it. My Name Is Nobody is the story of an aging gunfighter (played by Henry Fonda) who meets a young gunfighter (played by Terrence Hill). When he meets the young man, the old man takes it as a challenge. He is prepared to fight it out once more, but the under-30 Nobody (played, as I said, by Terrence Hill) has other plans for Henry. Rather than making him into a martyr, Nobody plans to make Henry into one of the greatest heroes ever by having him kill more men than have ever been killed in a single gunfight before: the 150 members of The Wild Bunch (the title of another Western by Sam Peckinpah; Leone loved Peckinpah; see this clip for Terrence Hill’s homage to him in the film). He succeeds, and this move takes Henry Fonda out of his ordinary life day to say life as a gunfighter who is constantly meeting up with people who want to kill him and transports him to the realm of heroes. Only then can he live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet.

In my opinion, Leone thought he was transporting his linear heroes of his youth into a more timeless universe of art. When I was a young man (in the 60s and 70s), I, too, want to live in that timeless universe of poetry, much as Yeats transported himself from the daily back-and-forth of existence to an existence in which he could be at one with himself as a golden bird singing songs to drowsy Emperor (see my post on Creed’s Higher), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen that such a world can only exist in fiction.

If I wanted to recreate it in fact, I would have to pretend that I, like Yeats, wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. This is my opinion of many of the most strident people in academia. It’s not that they don’t mean well (they do), but they do not acknowledge any change of state in their reconfiguring their universe from one based in reality to one based in an unrealizable fiction.

My Post-Academic Life

It was not apparent just how big a break this involved with the premises I had been working with for my whole life until I was out of graduate school school. Then I took some time to read 100 books on all aspects of business, reasoning that I knew nothing about how business works. I was stunned when I realized that the premises on which I had been working within academia were not the premises that obtained outside of academia. I was shocked, but I was also curious. Realizing that I hadn’t been all that happy in academia in the first place and realizing that there were few jobs available anyway, I decided to take my chances on becoming an entrepreneur, where the rewards were better and the pressure put on me to conform was significantly less.

I have never had a problem with my academic friends, who seem to me to have a far deeper and broader appreciation for life than someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has a more commonsense approach to money than those who believe that “others” pursue money for its own sake; but within academia, I was viewed only as the sort of person who must be lectured to. If I wouldn’t listen to reason, I would be (and should be) tossed aside for more reasonable men who had the sense to agree with what everyone was saying about artistic experience. When I got out of academia, I was subject to criticism by conservatives (and even my own dear lovely and far too liberal wife) as being too liberal on some topics. As I’ve said before, this has left me feeling as though I’m a man without a country. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with my free thoughts, and I found that within and without academia, free thought comes with a steep price after all.

My Novels and Books

I’m willing to pay that price, because I know that it is the price of freedom, and America’s greatness in the world has been fixed to our ability (until the recent death of Steve Jobs) to come up with new ideas (telephones, automobiles, jazz, airplanes, transistors, rock and roll, computers, rocket ships, rap, etc. have all been American led inventions). In my work, I want to bring America back from the artistic abyssal world of Nobody to the world of time, in which Creed can return again and again (and even again, if necessary) from the static and so impossible world of Nobody’s unity to a world in which people have to live their lives one moment in time without convenient refuge in a world of fiction that can never be in fact.

I Come Through

It has taken me years to get to the point where I feel I have a new idea that everyone is unconsciencoiusly aware of of but no one has yet expressed. Because of this this, I expect to be misunderstood by anybody who reads this far (and let’s be serious, nobody will), but my world of temporary fiction also finds its ground in the 1960s, in which Paul McCartney and the Beatles could sing ridiculous fantasies about women who came in through the bathroom windows (not as people are supposed to through doors but who did not have enough sense to know that her version of reality is distorted by an also magical silver spoon (not gold, as it was in Yeats’ poem). This version is by Joe Cocker, because, let’s face it, that guy can sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXh2gnasw0

When the young woman comes in through the bathroom window, she wanders by her own lagoon (a Spenserian argument if there ever was one) but she, like Redcrosse, is a baby in her own mind, being young enough to still be sucking her thumb and so not old enough to have discarded the silver spoon that covers her ignorance of the way the world actually works. The way the world actually works is through time, as Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, and Tuesday’s on the phone to Wednesday, all the way back to Sunday, when the whole cycle starts all over again (it never gets back to me, as Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake didn’t either). This reminds my over-trained literary mind of the reference to the omphalos in James Joyce’s other masterpiece, Ulysses in which he imagines the impossible dream of being able to get back to Eden through his mother’s mother’s mother…until he gets back to the historical Eve from whom all women sprang.

It doesn’t work; and the reason is quite clear to anyone who has never read a book in their life. It doesn’t work because it is patently ridiculous to believe that unseen things do exist (like imaginary chains that link us back through our mother’s womb to Eve) while seen things (like the beach to which Stephen closes his eyes to in order to imagine such nonsense) do not. But because they have long histories in literary history, those who dedicate their lives to reading frequently think that they indicate a deeper purpose of meaning in the universe and not just nonsense. This is because James Joyce said so, and he was a genius, and geniuses wouldn’t say such things unless there was more than a kernel of truth in what he ways. This is also the reason that the worst offenders in this respect are not the ignorant with their abundant common sense, but airy academics, who believe that what they read in texts must somewhere exist in the real world and cannot be a complete fantasy. Charlie, in the fantasy above, was right when he complains that there is no such thing as a candy mountain. For not believing his senses, he is punished with the loss of a kidney.

I obviously disagree with my academic colleagues and friends, but then who am I do contradict so many great and powerful thinkers?

I object to being so placed by people who are more set on their own configuration of experience than on what I am actually saying, but after 30 years of being misunderstood I have come to expect it. Nevertheless, I don’t feel that I am obligated to be saying things just because I am misunderstood to be saying them, so I press forward.

Today’s Mission

Today, I want to explain my attachment to business news, rather than MSNBC or Fox News, as my main source of information about the world. Like a lot of my intellectual opinions, this has to do with my graduate school experience. I watch both both Fox and MSNBC, because I truly believed my elders when they told me that it my obligation as citizen to inform myself on the issues of the day. This is why I listen to Rush Limbaugh, as well. It has always seemed to me that not listening involves missing not one of but the primary driver of political culture in the last generation. It would be like trying to explain the ecosystem of MP3 distribution without any knowledge of Steve Jobs or Apple. You could do it, but you would be missing the primary driver of change in that system.

This is not how people react in the Age of Limbaugh. Rather than listening to all sources of news, people choose their news. This is, I think, of the rise of new media, which, unlike traditional media, can appeal to individual people on the basis of their own preexisting predispositions. That is a good thing in general, as it gives people a deeper appreciation of people who can reach others in the world who share their deep interests. I, for instance, subscribe to a medieval list server that connects me to medievalists all over the world. It would not be possible to have had a conversation with someone New Zealand who shares my belief that Aristotle was much more important than medievalists give him credit for, as I once did after the Internet was invented.

But such depth of experience comes with costs. It has turned people inward to feed their own predispositions and leaves those who are not in the inner circle feeling slighted and somewhat offended that people are texting with their phone rather engaging those in their immediate proximity. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and my father thought that the Pepsi Generation was too self-involved. This trend inward has continued, as niches get broken down into more and more detailed segments.

The news is fairly latte in this process. After Rush, Fox News came to fill what turned out to be a major niche of those folks who were not hearing what Rush thought was the ‘other’ point of view. So now, the choice people make between Fox News or MSNBC is a matter of individual preference. A liberal will watch MSNBC to the exclusion of Fox News; a conservative will watch Fox News to the exclusion of MSNBC. Each will see the other as ‘other,’ and their feelings will be supported by the vitriol that spews from each for the other. This transforms the ‘other’ from a principle of difference over similar arguments into the intrusion of evil into the pure sphere of well-intentioned but misunderstood people. Rather than getting along. Each party feels obligated to rid themselves of the evil in their universe in order to recover their otherwise pure community.

That seems to me to be a very harmful effect of a general good. Cultures eventually balance such over-reaching, but that does not mean that the individuals who make up that community realize their small part in the larger picture. This means that all those young women who breast implants or who get tattoos on their lower backs will grow old in an age in which people who have enormous breasts and back tattoos are mocked by the young who think that enormous fake looking breasts and back tattoos are disgusting things that only pornstars have. I have been saying this to my wife for years, as this is what my father complained about in the 1960s, where he wanted his son to have short hair in a world in which everyone had long hair. Culture won over individual. My wife, however, doubts me. Go figure.

Academic Arguments

This style of thought is supported and even encouraged in academia, where arguments that rely on a secure environment in which to make judgments have given way to a less structured environment in which structure is associated with control and constraint, while freedom from constraint is associated with ‘doing your own thing.’ This is opposed by conservatives, who still hunger for stability in a world of change. This is the reason that I think I got in so much trouble when I was in graduate school. I agree with liberals that there is more than way of looking at the world, but I do not agree with the conclusions that my academic colleagues have drawn from their experience with the loosening of interpretation away from the secure moorings of New Criticism.

My academic colleagues were still suffering from the legacy of existentialism, which proposed that all we had to do to be authentic was to do our own thing. At first, the culture divided people into an ‘in culture’ and an ‘out culture.’ The ‘culture’ was named The Pepsi Generation. But the trend did not stop there, and soon people were dividing their culture into smaller and smaller niches.

Academia, too, grew away from a sense that the needed one ‘master narrative.’ Instead they decided to throw interpretation to Reader Response Theory, which as Wikipedia says “stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader’s role in re-creating literary works is ignored.” I support such developments in academic criticism over New Critical methods, and if these two poles were all there was to this problem, I would side with open reader response over closed New Criticism. But these do not appear to me to be the only choices.

The Business Response to the Same Phenomena

In the business world, which I had experience during the 4 years after I dropped out of college and during which time I discovered the postmodern problem, and to which I went back to after graduate school, they thought differently about the world. They were not as skeptical of knowledge as they were in the academic world, and thus they were not as worried about the mind’s ability to engage the world. While I respect the fact that philosophers have come to realize that there are problems with the modern world’s configuration of aesthetic experience (see Roger Scruton’s Short Introduction to Modern Philosophy, #7 on my list of my current favorite books, as well as my references to Scruton in my take on modern art).

Never a skeptic myself, I have always been drawn to answers to skepticism, which are rare. This is why Augustine’s Works appear as #13 on my complete list of my favorite books, and why Charles Norris Cochrane’s work appear as #3. Both give answers the skeptical question that appear to my academic colleagues in the work of Derrida.

In business news, they are not nearly as skeptical of the mind’s connection to the world as they are in academia, and this is one of the reasons that I have been so comfortable in the business world. But it is not a matter of their being ignorant of the mind’s connection to the world or of being too confident in it. In response to the mind’s tenuous connection with the outside world, which skeptics had located in Plato, business people did away with such definite connections. They transferred their allegiance from the secure authentic individual who could lead markets based on their deep sense of history to more passive sense of following after changing markets. Such market behavior cannot be predetermined by historical precedents. It could only be partially determined after the fact by those who are not swayed by their rhetorical constructions of how they want the world to appear to them. All the business person has to go on is the market price. In a world where “Price is truth”–one of my favorite saying in economics–no one has a firm grasp on truth. That changes one’s attitude from being a person who’s in control of one’s own life, which is given to them as their birthright, to a role of follower of the ups and downs of a wavering price-truth.

This makes sense in the business world, because markets change direction, and what the market is doing today it may not be doing tomorrow. This is why every ad says ‘historical performance may not be indicative of future results’ and why it is so important that each person takes responsibility for their own action and not rely on other people when it comes to making money. The way to do this is not to feel that someone knows what is happening in the market and we put our faith in them to guide us through the labyrinth of choices secure in the knowledge that someone knows.

I’ve talked about this before in my discussion of Cramer v Stewart. Jon Stewart thinks that Jim Cramer has insider answers which he has been withholding from the public. While I agree that Cramer outright lied to Stewart, I don’t think that anyone has definitive answers to where the market is headed. Moreover, I believe that even Wall Street analysts whose job it is to watch stock and evaluate their behavior tend to travel in packs. As Ann Coulter has pointed out in her latest book, Demonic, packs tend to react on emotional impulse rather than thinking for themselves (she thinks that this is a feature of the Left in a 2-dimensional argument and not a general feature of humanity, as I do). This is why it is a a good idea to get your own information before making a random bet. Betting is for suckers. The universe is not perfectly random (as Rush likes to quote Dick Gephardt, who once said that the rich were merely ‘winners of life’s lottery’; I maintain that winners often (though not always) work hard to accumulate wealth), nor are our choices infinite, as it is common to think in English departments these days. Poor choices are likely to result in our loss of opportunities.

Poor Choice in the English Department

I view this more than a personal choice in a universe in which we make choices from an infinite store of possibility, as my English teacher thought in the 1990s. Some choices are really bad, like the student who offered the following explanation of Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping on a Snowy Evening’: ‘it’s about Santa Claus.,’ she said. I’m not a cynical man, and I have heard a whole lot of clichés like this from cynical English teachers who swear that things like this are as common as and regular as a bear urinating in the woods. Not being as cynical as such teachers, I am more likely to equate it with the far more unlikely Pope-Bear switch in the woods, but I swear that this happened in Craig Abbott’s English 200 class.

Frost was not thinking about Santa Claus. Dr. Craig Abbott was one of my favorite professors, but he was so disgusted by this answer that he let our class go early that day. His problem was that he had no answer to the problem of reading other than to give us his expert opinion. But, as those people in the 60s had recognized, his pursuit of his own authority was the surest way to control over others. He didn’t want that, either (and for the record, neither do I), but he had no other choices available to him than to throw the field open to his poor misguided student and allow her to have her opinion. That was not an option for him (or for me. See my Writing for People Who Hate Writing if you’re interested in my solution the problem of my 20 years of encountering these types of readers).

Now if Dr. Abbott had read my Poker Tales ((c) 2007) back in 1986, he would have known that there are other ways of looking at the world that do not divide the world into ‘us and them’ along the 2-dimesional lines of Pink Floyd. Unfortunately, I hadn’t figured out my answer to this problem, yet. But when I did, I put it like this: In poker, as in the stock market, we don’t get do-overs (which Michael Moore is after in his public statements). We make our bets and hope that we are correct. Even stock market geniuses like my favorites Gil Morales and Chris Kacher, authors of Trade Like an O’Neil Disciple: How We Made 18,000% in the Stock Market and founders of the stock advisory service Virtue of Selfish Investing, a service to which I subscribe, make mistakes in their stock picking.

In the 3-dimension world that I outlined in my Poker Tales, knowledge will not give you a winning hand every time, but careful attention to the cards your opponent holds in his hands will make you a winner more often than a loser. And means that we need to curb our outburst at others who don’t agree with us every issue, accusing them of bad faith (born from false consciousness in many cases).

A Better Way

A better way to resolve these debates, if you ask me, is not to continue in a behavior that systematically alienates people by deciding that they are either with us of against us, but instead to reevaluate our entire configuration of the universe we now live in but which those of us old enough to remember know we have not always lived in. This will allow us to come together in the middle, where cooperation and reason have always resided.

When I was in my conservative phase (1992-1994), I stopped subscribing to Time Magazine and started to read Business Week. Business Week, as opposed to Time had an obligation to focus on the future, because if they focused on the past they would be out of business. Information about the past is available to anybody with access to a library. But access to the future is up for grabs. There is only one Steve Jobs, only one Bill Gates, only one Jeff Bezos. These are not just ‘winners in life’s lottery.’ They are members of the entrepreneurial class. But lest anyone think that I a blind optimist about being an entrepreneur, I can’t forget that for every Jeff Bezos, there are a hundred thousand people who fail in business.

The most successful entrepreneurs are those with a little bit of education (Gates and Jobs dropped out of college; Bezos was a Princeton graduate), a little bit of knowledge about how the world works, and a much (much much much) better idea about how to accomplish the same tasks in a more efficient manner. They must not only invent a better imaginative construction, they must implement their solution in the real world. That is a far different thing than is pursued in the halls of academe, where Derrida teaches us that enything that can be constructed can be deconstructed. In academia this puts a premium on not taking a position but instead trying to appeal to everyone with every sentence we utter. For those of you who have not had the experience of academia, you see this every time a fashion designer starts talking. They say things like ‘It’s a cool look that uses hot colors’ (is it hor or cool?) or ‘It’s a high fashion look that uses the look of grunge’ (is it high fashion of low?).

The key to realizing what is going on in the fashion world is to realize that everybody is attempting not to alienate anyone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if the business press took the same tack as a fashion designer, no one would watch them. That is the difference between an aesthetic position, which attempts to be all things to all people by aligning itself with the metaphysical tradition, and a scientific business position, which does away with not only the metaphysical position, but all interest in the microcosm’s reach for the stars of the microcosm. These positions have been failing since I was born in the 1960s.

This state of aesthetic affairs is not yet complete. I would go so far as to say that it never be. The problem I see in my academic colleagues is that they have not yet come to terms with their helplessness before the future. Despite their deeper sense of history and (dare I say it?) tradition, they have not enough of a sense of the possibilities for a a very rapid change in the immediate future. See my argument with my Facebook friends over my believe that the ‘warfare’ in class warfare will caused the beleaguered few who nevertheless pay 80% of taxes to take their money and leave this country. If I am right, it will be the end of America in the face of globalization. Democracy will be the cause of it, and will get the lion’s share of the blame in autocratically-governed countries like China. Now I have to say that I am not certain that this is the only imaginable future. I am sort of shocked by one of my most liberal friend’s response to my argument: ‘Let them go.’

Even Fox News, which is the flavor of the day on the left and the right (albeit for different reasons), is still too wedded to the notion of ‘fair and balanced‘ news. This, too, will pass, as all ideas once powerful ideas fail. With fall of Fox, MSNBC will pass away as well, as people start thinking of the universe in way that are now ignored and perhaps unthought of by the current crop of very smart and otherwise wise members of the intellectual class.

My point is not to resign from life because we know we are going to die. That, it seems to me, is an apt metaphor for how deconstruction sucks the life away from its most virulent adherents (academics) while giving them confident that they are better than everyone else because they don’t belief that they are competitive. They flee to a position where they think they will be safe from deconstruction. And yet, Derrida warns us not to behave in the way that most of his followers are behaving. They ignore things that don’t accord with their own beliefs about how they want to be.

But it is not okay to ignore things just because they don’t fit in with your or my view of how we wish the world to be. That only leads us to the Land of Cockaigne (for those of you with a medieval bent to your thought) or to the Big Rock Candy Mountain (for those of you with a more American bent to your thought), pictures of fantasies without any underlying reality. And no one wants that, especially not someone like Derrida, who believes that the best criticism comes from being able to unearth things that have not been obliterated from the universe but merely suppressed by acts of raw power, awaiting an insightful critic to dig up from the margins things not apparent to those who stand at the center of things.

In the meantime, I prefer watch CNBC’s specialist knowledge about business, which is scientifically-based (with all the good and bad that science brings to news) to Fox News or MSNBC’s competition for who can be more partisan in a two-dimensional univers or CNN’s competitive hook, which is apparently to be even more ‘fair and balanced’ (and less committal to any position) than the rest of them.

My 2¢.

The Touchstone of Alienation in Plato’s Cave

I had dropped out of college in 1981 because I had been reading books like D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and was being told by my professors that books like these hold the key to life. But I had found an impenetrable metaphor at the heart of literary works. I dropped out of college because I naively thought that my teachers at Ripon were simply naïve. I went to work reading Joseph Campbell, who held answers to the urgent questions that I had about the connection between the metaphor and reality.

My thinking about Joseph Campbell led me very quickly to his belief that the “truth” could be found by shifting away from true belief into the “Word Behind Words.” But I had questions. How would I know when I had arrived there? What if the word behind words was just an illusion? Wouldn’t I be giving up my solid beliefs for chimera? This led me to posing the question differently while I was out of school than the same questions were being asked within the academic grove. Not being able to solve the question, I went back to school after four years of working. While I was an undergraduate, I had no problems at all. I was a star student. But when I got to graduate school, I was alienated from this generally-accepted point of view for the simple reason that I could not agree with my academic colleagues that their shift from individual reality to a more prefect reality was indeed tenable.

I had found a flaw in Joseph Campbell’s system of thought. He was telling his readers that they must give up their beliefs in order to embrace all beliefs; for it was there that the mind had expressed itself most fully. This sense of alienation from one’s childhood beliefs becomes the first and necessary step on the way out of ignorance of the Platonic Cave and into the sun-like bliss of true knowledge. Once again, those who actually believe what religion is telling them to do are fools, while those who embrace a new and thoroughly metaphorical religiosity are closer to ‘the truth.’ But I was searching after some way into the metaphor of reality to make it real in fact, and could not be satisfied with my teachers’ profession of faith in themselves that could after all be wrong, as it relied on belief in a metaphor to keep things stable. What was the difference between Campbell’s metaphor that people were invited to belief in (but not too much that they excluded the beliefs of others) and true belief, I asked myself?

I had other problems with the prescribed academic regimen. While I was out of school, I worked in a bank, and there I met people who were not intellectuals like I aspired to be butwho appeared to be rich and happy. Such people, Milosz was assuring me in his work The Captive Mind, were so ignorant that they did not know that they were unhappy. The key to their salvation, according to Milosz and Campbell was to give up their naïve beliefs in money and Christian religion and join the community of happy and poor non-believers who could recognize the achievements of ‘other’ civilizations and whose ideas were more total and therefore more free. I thought that something was missing, not in the Western mind, but in the intellectual life that could only make itself ‘whole’ by jettisoning money, belief, and individuality for a more comprehensive system of poverty, non-belief, and collectivism.

I was committed to learning ‘the truth,’ but I could not get past the bridge of metaphor that stood in the way of my mind’s engagement with reality on my own terms. Believing (naively, it turned out) that someone in academia knew what I did not about how to bridge the gap between my mind and Campbell’s ‘word behind words,’ I went back to college, figuring that someone could answer questions that I could not.

Alienation in College

I was quite happy in my undergraduate experience, but my experience in grad school was extremely difficult. I was made the scapegoat on the first day of class, when I told the teachers in the required class on How to Teach Writing that I was planning on teaching outlining in my writing class. My teacher told me that that was the way Nazis taught. This made no sense to me. I put it down to the small mind of my teacher, who was teaching at an insignificant Midwestern university.

Not being one to back down in the face of threats, I pushed forward. On the day I was being observed for the first time, I dared to teach a single day’s worth of grammar on the use of a semicolon. I thought I was making my initial position clearer to a teacher who had not understood my original point on the first day of class and didn’t actually think it was that bid a deal. I was wrong. After class, I met with my teacher who screamed (I am not exaggerating; I wish I was) that she could not understand why I continued in my obstinacy, that she “could not understand what [I was] doing,” and her repeated allegations that I was a Nazi. given in increasingly elevated and shrill tones. I thought I was teaching nothing more than how to use a semicolon. (Maybe I’ll write up my lecture for you to review soon).

This was an important moment in my intellectual development, because it forever closed the door on my being comfortable with the Left’s approach to intellectual things. I took the position that I had gone to a substandard university and that when I got to a better university that I would be able to make myself understood. But, as it turned out, things were worse at the University of Illinios. Though I was able to negotiate through the politically-correct atmosphere of the university, I was forever confined to the outsider-looking-in status. That was not a position I was comfortable with. I always had pursued academia on account of role models like Cary Grant’s incompetent but brilliant paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby, the incompetent but brilliant scholars of Ball of Fire, and Fred MacMurray’s absent-minded professor in The Absent-Minded Professor. I thought that I, too, was smart but did not fit in to any social community, and I was looking to fit in in a community of misfits like me. When they rejected me, I dropped out of my search for an academic position, although I maintain few hard feelings over my treatment in academia.

This was not always the case. As I have told you before, after the initial rise of talk radio, I was briefly enamored with conservative positions on the issue of political correctness until I realized that conservatives had a lot of complaints about the problem of political correctness but no solutions except that they be included in the academic conversation. But they were not willing to do the work of working out a new solution to the problem of politics. The most telling case of this came when Stanley Fish was arguing with Dinesh D’Souza on the merits of Jacques Derrida’s work. Fish asked D’Sousa if he had even read Derrida, to which D’Sousa replied “No.” That was the moment when I was forever done with conservatism as a forward-looking movement. He should have better prepared. Instead, he was simply looking for the too-easy answers that had been given to literary problems in an earlier generation. Fish, on the other hand, could have been a little more accepting of complaints about the lack of internal consistency in his thought that D’Sousa had located. By putting D’Sousa off to a very difficult author, Derrida, he had also deferred answering the quite reasonable question put to him by his opponent. What were the ‘words behind the words’ that Fish was pointing to?

Divisions Arising

In my thought, we could do better than Fish’s deferral of methodological questions that only put conservatives on the defensive. As intellectuals, we need to answer all questions directly, or admit that we don’t know the answers. In my opinion, Fish is attempting to answer questions at the same time admitting that he doesn’t have answers of his own. Instead of facing the limitations of his own thought, Fish is dismissing D’Sousa as not worthy of consideration because his opponent has not read the documents that he (as an insider academic) has deemed important. He is able to set the ground rules on which the battle will be won. When the conservatives wouldn’t play, academics dismissed conservatives as conservatives had dismissed academics.

This, in my opinion, has led to a division in this country between two positions on the location of the “truth” without any sort of system for sorting out truth from falsehood. When Rush Limbaugh proclaims that he is telling the “truth,” he must dismiss those who oppose him as “liars.” The same thing is true of Al Franken, who professed to be telling people “the truth,” while accusing his opponents of being big fat idiots. In such an environment, how are we to discern who is right and who is wrong except by going back to our own assumptions. Peolpe on the Left will agree with Franken. People on the right will agree with Limbaugh. Since we live in a a culture that places so much emphasis on self-determination, +our position”—whether left of right—must be good, while “their position” must be not just different but morally reprehensible.

Good and Evil in the Land of Plenty

Morality is one of those things that people use to exclude others from their own firmly-held circles. This holds true in high school cliques as well as the ‘highest’ circles of philosophy. This sort of moralizing behavior leads people to do two things. First, they are confirmed in their belief that their beliefs are the only beliefs. The second follows from the first: having such conviction in their beliefs upheld, “others” must be convinced, or they will be excluded from discussion and quite possibly from humanity itself. There is no room for compromise in such a universe: only tests of belief.

I find this to be true of political commentators on both sides of the aisle. On the left, Paul Krugman, whose columns I regularly read, believes that his way has been stifled, not by any flaws in his own reasoning, but by the right’s systematic opposition to spending more money to fix the economy. If only the right would get out of the way, then Paul could have his perfect dream realized. And who are we, who don’t have a Nobel Prix to argue with someone who has on? His contempt for my centrist beliefs doesn’t make me dismiss him from the universe of possible beliefs, but it does make me question his own assumption that he has all the answers he thinks he does.

The same phenomenon affects the right. Rush Limbaugh believes that moderates are fools who won’t commit. Jonah Goldberg doesn’t trust people like me who are seeking a different way (see this video where I believe he makes the case for dismissing those who lack ideological purity; I must confess that I have not watched the video to make sure my stroke-addled mind is remembering where he said this; I am no more than “mostly-sure”). Ann Coulter, one of my favorite columnists on account of her acute and biting humor, believes that independent people like me are fools who won’t commit to her perfectly-reasonable-and not-in-any-way offensive positions. I may always agree with her, but it is hard to dismiss her without running the risk of appearing monumentally stupid. For some reason, the committed liberals who populate the new media have no problem doing this. This results in the loss of their status as holders of both sides in a ‘fair and balanced’ position.

In such a universe of commitment based on a priori positions made before a person picks up a newspaper columnist and reads what the columnist has to say, decisions about what to watch or read in a universe of 500 cable television channels and the infinite sources of Google News are now made on the basis of our assumptions about what we want the world to be, and not on the sometimes unbearably difficult resistance of the world to our ideologically-purified positions that only hold up as long as there is an enemy in place to stand as scapegoat for that which our ideology cannot comprehend. Not that there is a lot of room for me, but I would make a different case.

My Approach

My approach, which I plan on publishing in my forthcoming novel Art in the Age of Talk Radio, is more radical than either liberals or conservatives can imagine. This ought to continue my record of being misunderstood by both liberals on the Left as being firmly on the Right (on account of my ‘irresponsible’ sympathy for money as the primary motivator of human behavior) and by conservatives on the Right as being too liberal (on account of my ‘irresponsible’ libertarianism on social issues).

As I said in a previous post, I managed to avoid the political pressures placed upon me to conform by agreeing to be tutored in department-authorized political posturing—no one was actually interested tutoring me; they just wanted to make sure I wasn’t teaching outside the proscribed limits—and I managed to get through my academic life relatively unscathed. I went through graduate school alienated from both parties, pursuing my own a-political agenda. But, since I was looking to be included in the community of Ball of Fire outsiders, I didn’t relish the prospect of standing to one side as a lone prophetic voice crying for justice in the wilderness.

Because of this, I was for a long time one of those people who could not be satisfied with the (I thought man-made) boundaries erected by academics as a way of justifying their existence in a world apart from the ordinary world of money and monetary value. While is was in graduate school, this made me part of the ‘other.’ I was one of ‘them,’ and no one had to listen to me (and believe me, they didn’t). They already knew that their position was secure. Thus, their only obligation was to lecture me into the ‘truth’ and to wait for its power to dawn on me. When I wouldn’t instantly agree with their positions, I was tagged as a problem. When I fought back, I was tagged as an enemy who must be defeated. There was never any sense that anything I had to say was worth listening to, as only harm could come from listening to a different point of view. It was best to stay away from me.

This was not true of all my teachers, though it was true of 98% my fellow students. My advisers could operate in a world in which I was trying to do something new, even if I could not explain myself perfectly yet. But I had to travel outside of my protected academic enclave at the University of Illinois to make myself heard, because I literally could not get a hearing (fair or otherwise) within the ivy-covered walls of the UIUC English building. They were consumed by the fact that Michael Bérubé was on the cutting edge of societal evolution, and they posted an article of his published in the Village Voice, ‘the definitive source of information for news, music, movies, restaurants, reviews, and events in New York.’ (far away from the rural community of Illinois, from which Bérubé eventually fled) on the wall for all to see. He has prospered in ways that I have not. He is currently the First Vice President of the Modern Language Association and is scheduled to become President in 2012 (see the opening paragraph of ‘Party business’).

I personally like Bérubé, and I said so when I wrote him a letter when I first started my blog. I told him that he gave me some of the best advise I ever received about how to proceed if I couldn’t get a job in the loathsome environment of the academic environment of the 1990s. I will be forever grateful to him. Nevertheless, I could not get behind his intellectual configuration of the universe that was posted on the wall for all to see and follow. In my Art in the Age of Talk Radio, I will give my answer to Bérubé’s from the position of perpetual outsider to his position as perpetual insider. I will send him a copy, as well.

Differences in Personal Lanscapes

Unlike Bérubé, I dropped out of the search for professorial work after it became apparent to me that, however much progress I had made outside the walls of academe, inside I was going to be a perpetual outsider. So I gave up my academic dreams and went to work, where I encountered a new wrinkle in the intellectual landscape: the Pareto Principle. After I had a stroke, I went to work digesting all the implications, both good and bad, of the idea that nature is not just at all but is wildly unfair in its distribution of its gifts.

This includes the gift of a life in academia, which I so much wanted but which I realized was out of my reach, particularly after Michael Bérubé appearance in the 1998 in an article titled ‘Frumpy or Chic? Tweed or Kente? Sometimes Clothes Make the Professor‘ in the Chronicle of Higher Education in a bright (I mean BRIGHT) blue jacket, confirming that I had been naive to believe that the ‘frumpiness’ of Gary Cooper’s academic colleagues and that I had sought out in academia was hopelessly out of fashion. The beauty of the beautiful people was in. I don’t hold grudge, but the life of a perpetual outsider was not for me.

Anyway, that’s off the point. The Pareto Principle, which I learned about outside of academia, seemed to hold the source of a radically new way of looking at nature where both Rush Limbaugh on the right and Joni Mitchell on the left have placed their foundational beliefs. My argument with both of them, and with the more intellectual Czeslaw Milosz and Michael Bérubé, stems from my alienation from both sides of the political argument when I was in graduate school.

That is the basis of the argument that I have bben attempting to make among my friends, and which I will continue to make in my Art in the Age of Talk Radio. Wish me luck.

I began writing this book in the spring of 1989 at the beginning of my graduate education. As followers of my blog know, graduate school did not go well. I was called a Nazi (I wish I was exaggerating) on the first day of day for volunteering that I like to outline my papers before I wrote them, and it went downhill from there. I started writing it after I had a conservation with one of my favorite English professors, and I could not believe that he was so idealistic. I recreated it almost exactly in the introduction to the novel, and it has not changed in more than 20 years.

The rest of the book has gone through a myriad of changes, which paralleled changes in my political outlook. Originally, I was a liberal. After getting accepted to the University of Illinois, I changed my political orientation to conservative for a couple years. I gave that up before I got out of graduate school on account of Limbaugh’s anti-intellectual approach to the problem of political correctness.

In my latest incarnation of my book, I place myself outside the political fray as a disinterested party. But that’s not how I expect to have my book received. My experience in graduate school leads me to believe that the left will peg me as a partisan of the right, while the right will peg me as a partisan of the left. This state of affairs has endured for 30 years, and had left me thinking of myself as a man without a country.

I never intended to publish this (or any other) book until I had a stroke which forced me into the position of having to choose something I could do to keep myself busy during long days. Not being able to stand up for more than five minute and not being able to remember my own thoughts long enough to get to the end of a sentence, I decided to begin writing as therapy. I never expected to recover enough to finish anything, much less a whole book. But I did finish, not one but 5 books so far.

I have been wary of publishing my thoughts, because of my experience in grad school. I don’t like being characterized like this, and this is why for my first book, I wrote a ‘silly book’ on the American game, because I thought that no one would ever read it and if they did no one would take offence to such a silly book of stories. But this book is my baby, and so I spent a lot of time thinking about I could present myself as a disinterested party, and not a virulent adherent of the opposing party (the proverbial ‘other’). I had done it in grad school; why could I not do the same thing now.

So my first test came recently, when I answered my good friend’s post asking for people to gather together around President Obama’s new jobs plan and tax Wall Street. I had some questions for my friend, and suspecting that she would put me in the same box that I always get put in (she’s left, which means that I’m a partisan of the right), I ventured an opinion. In the end, I think it went well, although I got the usual ‘not-with-us-must-be-against-us’ response. I put only that which I wrote, not wanting to embarrass others (it is enough that I embarrass myself).

Letters to a Friend

I applaud your seriousness, but I have some serious reservations about our President (for whom I voted). But rather than getting worked up about them, I prefer to poke fun at serious people from the margins, and that is why I write amusing (and I hope funny) books like Poker Tales.

I understand the passion for politics in this country, but I can’t participate in it (other than voting) since I got screwed in grad school. I’m extremely conservative on financial issues (which liberals just don’t understand) and extremely liberal on social issues (which conservatives just don’t understand). Maximal freedom is what makes this country great, and the more opinions the better, even wrong opinions like mine.

But since this country is made up of two parties (what we used to call in grad school a ‘binary divide’), and since it was required that I declare myself, each side of the grad school binary divide considered me a member of the ‘other’ party. This made me feel like a man without a country, but unlike the guy in that story, I long ago abandoned politics and country.

There are some serious implications that I have been dealing with since I decided to drop out of binarily-ordered society. This is why I write books. You can read a fictionalized (and I hope funny) version of my dilemma in Poker Tales in the story called ‘Reykjavik.’

In case you’re worried about my lack of seriousness, I am just finishing up a serious scholarly book on Spenser’s Faerie Queene on the same subject. In that book, I divide the universe into three parts (which we used to call a ‘triad’ or a ‘trinity’ in grad school). I find that I occupy what I call ‘the middle space’ (a quote from The Faerie Queene) all alone. I like it that way.

As you can see, I don’t take myself very seriously (after all, Who am I?). I am trying to make my non-violent personality clear to my friend. But my gentle friend has lingering questions, which she expressed in a sports metaphor:

I do have trouble, imagining, given many remarks and tales from or about others, that there is a middle ground available for occupation by just one! If so, then, I guess there is a sports complex where all of these grounds are situated, offering acreage for at least a few others who do not align with the far coasts of theoretical polarizations.

That is a good point, and it has made me rethink a position that I had taken in my forthcoming book on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Her assumption is that there is no unoccupied ground in any argument. But I disagree. I tried to make my the case in the following post:

You are not the only person who’s had problems with my position. Nobody understands the world the way that I do. I was driven to my position by my inability to find a place for my ideas in the world as it’s been constructed since the Enlightenment. Reading works of the Dark and Middle Ages—works that by definition have been excluded from consideration since the Enlightenment—I discovered my position.

To be clear, I don’t expect anybody to believe me after 30 years. That is why I’ve set up my own company to publish my work (even my scholarly work). But I actually do believe that eventually people will see that I am correct. I liken my system of thought to the old book Flatworld (Lineworld? Planeworld?) in which people live on a two-dimensional plane and some enterprising person looks above and sees a hithertofor unknown third dimension to experience. Folks in the 2-D world either can’t see the third dimension or when they encounter the third dimension attempt to fit it into their 2-D model.

I maintain that the 3rd dimension is real and that it played an enormous role in the construction of the philosophical universe before it was wiped out by the Enlightenment that brought us Adam Smith’s capitalism and the American Revolution in the pivotal year of 1776, both of which were constructed on binary principle that eventuated in divides between rich and poor and the choice between Republicans and Democrats.

Of course, I could just be an idiot.

My 2¢.

Before my friend could respond, one of her friends decided to query me on my ‘fiscal conservativism.’ He gave me a binary choice between two alternatives: ‘One way to understand “fiscally conservative” it that that the books must be balanced over the business cycle. (Me.) Another way is that the federal government must be shrunk. Which are you?’

I responded as follows:

Thanks for the reference to Flatland. I believe that balancing the books is responsible business practice, but I don’t believe that this is in any way ‘natural.’ On the contrary, if it was ‘natural,’ people would have been doing it forever and not just in the modern age. As far as siding with the GOP, who follows ‘fair and balanced’ FOXNews or any of the other networks who claim that they are the ones who are really ‘fair and balanced,’ give me a break.

To understand why I don’t believe that balance is in any way ‘natural,’ see my blog post on the Pareto equation. http://william-heise.com/2010/03/23/tales-told-out-of-school/ I think this is a problem.

What I meant by fiscally conservative is that I don’t believe that I am obligated to participate in culture to understand its role in other people’s lives, so I play the stock market and I win more than I lose. That makes me part of the 20% of winners in the stock market (and that is a classic Pareto distribution, after all) and not one of the losers. Most of my academic friends in the humanities would be losers in this equation (although happily, because they conceive of money in idealistic terms as not just bad but metaphysically evil).

In my Poker Tales, I explore the implications of a character who drops out of the Cold War world of 1972 to explore the (decadent) game of poker rather than staying in a binarily-ordered universe that offers an increasingly stark choice between individual (American) and collective (Soviet) models of social organization. His ultimate message to his opponent is that winners win, while losers lose, and you had better be on the right side of the equation or you will be a loser yourself.

That’s a disastrous outcome for a society built on freedom AND equality, because it offers an infinitely open society for freedom-seekers, while offering a steep hill for collectivists like [our mutual friend], who want us come together over our increasingly inequality. I’ve come to believe that you can’t have both, and America is traveling the road of individual decadence rather than collective action in spite of our election of the collectivist Obama without taking seriously other models (like mine or the GOPs).

As far as my model goes, models are only as good as their ability to predict the future and to make a model of the present. My model predicts the slipping of the status of collective action towards individual freedom. With that comes Paris Hilton as a collective role model, while deep thinkers who used to be models for our behavior (and still are to some) are relegated to back rooms to argue out minutiae in increasingly irrelevant detail (see the “Four Parisians” in my Poker Tales). I still take the minority position that deep thinkers are more worthwhile than the democratically elected cultural collective, but I am in the minority.

I don’t like it, but this is what my model is telling me.

On the continuing questions to my model, I responded:

My friends call me Bill, and I consider both of you my friends. I hope what I am going to tell you will not be offensive, as I have no desire to fight with anyone, much less my friends.

I don’t think it’s a great idea to raise revenues to balance the budget, as it will take away from economic growth, leaving us in a state similar to Japan for the last 20 years of maintaining artificial wealth of an oligarchic few at the expense of the many. Cutting a government that is living beyond its means and shifting the burden of growth to the private sector is a much better solution in spite of what some would say is a lot of corruption in the private sector. Government is equally corrupt, so it doesn’t make much sense to take away from the private production of wealth to a corrupt government to redistribute wealth to those who have no incentive to work. This will take away from the production of private wealth. Being a wealthy country has its own privileges and not having wealth carries its own punishments, as we are seeing in the continuing decline of America to China in the post-Clinton age.

People who don’t work should not be able to vote for a share of the product of other people’s hard work, as it takes away the incentive of people to work hard for their gains if they can do no work and reap similar rewards. It took me ten years to learn how to invest in the stock market and to able to make money consistently. I spent a lot of non-tax-deductible money on a library of books, and I lost money consistently until I found out the secret. No one in the government expressed any concern over my losses. But the government was very interested in collecting taxes on my winnings. This makes them unequal providers of protection in my universe. I take all the risk; they take a piece when I win and leave me alone when I lose.

The government is a useful parasite who provides a useful service but who eats away at his host because he thinks he, and not the private individual, is at the center of existence (just as every organism thinks they are at the center of the universe). Individuals, though limited are capable of making better and more nimble decisions than bloated bureaucrats are because they taking risks that the government does. The government’s 1-way view of the world is extremely self-serving. Even Obama’s push for collective action to even out the wealth distribution in terms of social inequity can be put in terms of a (thinly disguised) grasp after the wealth that others have earned through hard work. Hard work, not economic equality, should be the goal of the American people. If you want a share of wealth, you should be forced to find out how the world of money works (and a lot of this is like learning how sausage is made; it’s an ugly thing that doesn’t correspond to how with how idealists would like the world to work).

Having said that, I would point out to conservatives that it is the private sector’s short term focus on making money that gives us the people’s love/hate relationship with the wealthy Paris Hilton at the expense of more collective cultural action. The GOP’s desire to give us more private wealth will only perpetuate the current trends towards what Limbaugh considers decadence. I think that the world needs a better solution than the ones being offered today.

This last point is import to me, because it is only here that I start to make my case for myself as a thinker. I find it surprising that no one ever asks me how I make money in the stock market, but they don’t. I like to think it’s because I am such a fascinating conversationalist, but I know better (and so do you). My friend, for instance is much more concerned that I am making the case that I look at the world through a different lens than she does. This offends her ‘can’t-we-all-get-along’ mentality. I respond thus:

In my perception of the 2-D universe, people operate on absolute structures of is/isn’t, yes/no, this/that without any incentive to compromise. When two parties arrive at differing positions, both believe that their position is ‘true.’ This leaves all other positions as ‘false.’ So people like Rush Limbaugh hold their opponents as liars who are only interested in using rhetoric to persuade people of things that are against their better interests. The same thing is true of the Left’s answer to Limbaugh, Al Franken, who accuses Limbaugh of being a ‘Big Fat Liar.’ How are we to determine the truth in such an atmosphere in which two people claim that they hold the truth EXCLUSIVELY?

In America today, people decide who to believe on the basis of their upbringing, not on any rational consideration. Democrats and Liberals decide on the basis of what their parents supported and the listen to Franken and believe that the ‘other’ party is the party of liars. Republicans and conservatives listen to Limbaugh and believe that the ‘other’ party is the party of liars. There is no room to compromise. And where could someone compromise with someone who embodies a position that is not just different but EVIL? Having been on the outside of both positions for 30 years (not by choice), I find myself looking for a solution in which I can at last belong on the inside.

My triadic solution to this problem is laid out in my forthcoming novel, Art in the Age of Talk Radio, where I propose two Noyes (no-yes) brothers who operate on binary principles without any a) any sense that something is missing in their own configuration of the world and b) with an absolute sense that there is something wrong with the position of ‘others.’ Neither position wins in the end.

I wrote more after both responded. My friend was concerned that I was dictating her belief to her, a distinctly un-American thing to do. I assured her that I had no such intention. In fact, I thought that this conversation was going better than I imagined it would, even though my friend’s friend had said he found nothing in my thought that he hadn’t seen on the MotleyFool website. I wrote to my sincere friend first:

First, I want to reassure you that I’m on your side in this debate. Secondly, I don’t believe that I have any right to dictate anyone’s else’s beliefs to them, the more so because I studied English literature in grad school. What I want from someone more than anything else is someone to take my arguments seriously and not put me into a ready-made box that they feel I belong in but that I do not. That’s what I found in my academic career, where people put a position in front of me and expecting me to adhere to it on its face because THEY cannot find anything wrong with their arguments. That is the definition of ignorance.

I can find contrary arguments and evidence, and scholars who seriously hold those beliefs. I don’t profess to know anything (I’m like Socrates in that) and I desperately want to believe in someone who can hold a mirror up to my beliefs and show me where I am wrong. Your argument that my beliefs make for a ‘hostile environment’ for the poor is just, but my response is to educate the poor so they can fish for themselves and not to give up a piece of my fish that I earned through my own education and hard work.

My only obligation is to teach others my small and definitely not important bit of information to help them get along better in their lives, which I have done for twenty years in my spare time. But in my experience not everyone is willing to study and learn, and as a result some people get better results from their education, and as a result get more pieces of the pie. We need education to teach the valuable lesson that everything people want they can get from themselves if they work at it as well as the corollary lesson that this is not guaranteed. Making a lot of money involves taking risks, and taking risk involves a heavy percentage of people will fail. Not trying is akin to taking a shortcut through somebody else’s garden while at the same time eating the fruit of their labor. That only leads to creating a society of thieves and beggars, as the gardeners give up working and start receiving the benefits of other fool’s abhor.

Liberal arguments, which I say again that I support, don’t hold up as well as liberals think they do (neither do conservative arguments). Rather than looking to a past, as Limbaugh (to 1950s conservatism) and Obama (even further to turn of the 20th century progressivism) are doing, the next generation of liberals should think about fixing the weaknesses in their arguments that they seem to know not of. If they do not, then the current path of the country towards the have-nots admiring the haves (like Paris Hilton) will continue to the detriment of American culture.

But what is far worse for this country is that the rich, who have more liquidity than the poor and who make up only 20% of the population in the Pareto equation but have 80% of the wealth, will simply leave this country and go to someplace that will tax them less. We have already seen how rapidly job situation is deteriorating in the face of rapidly changing conditions. The same thing will happen to our rich people if we can’t get them a better reason to stay that won’t impede their earning power. To be clear, I do not like the situation, but I am not in control of the government, and no one is or can be in charge of the economy.

In the end, I just don’t think any humanly-devised argument can hold up under pressure that can be brought to bear on it. This is why Galileo and Copernicus show up to change the game with new ideas that take into account ALL of the pieces of the puzzle and not just those pieces that appeal to the old and fat office holders of the Church. They rapidly overtook the backward-looking Church in spite of all their power and wealth and the fact that they regularly burned heretics on the square. Ditto Bill Gates and powerful and wealthy IBM, although to be fair that happened without anyone getting burned. Power and wealth don’t matter in the face of a new imaginative construction that better explains the world. Old ideas fall as soon as a new idea emerges. I am trying (by no means succeeding) at looking forward through the prism of history which teaches that all ideas eventually fail and not at the world from a tarnished prism that has been looked through for a hundred years or longer.

That is why science puts forward hypotheses that only stand until someone comes along with a better explanation of phenomena. That’s what happened to Aristotelian physics after Newton came along, and it’s what happened to Newtonian physics after Einstein came along. And it is what will happen after a new thinker comes along with a better solution to problems that explain more evidence than can be explained now. Though new ideas start out as avant-garde ideas, they end up a last century’s ideas, as Limbaugh and Obama’s ideas currently are.

I say again, Ruth, that I’m on your side. But in the 2-D universe, I’m afraid—I live in fear, but I am by means sure—that both you and Peter will have pegged to the ‘other’ side of an ‘with-us-of-against-us’ 2-D argument. This is what happened to me over and over (and over) in grad school, and scars that open up don’t always heal properly. It is why I appeal to people on the middle ground between the two poles where I can get a fair hearing and be heard, not in your house or on mine but on a neutral middle ground that I identify as the third pole in my triadically-constructed universe. It is also why didn’t write a book for 30 years. It’s also why after I started writing that I wrote a humorous book, because I want to have friends more than I need to hear myself speak. (You can laugh; I know that’s a funny sentiment from someone who is verbose as I am).

Cheers!

A Lesson for the Curious

My profession that ‘I’m like Socrates’ is in no way supposed to make others feel that I am superior to others. I thought about making it clear that in likening myself to Socrates that I was making the same case I make in the classroom when I teach them Plato’s Ion. I first taught the shortest dialog in the Platonic corpus in 1991. When I was teaching at the University of Dayton in 1994, my advisor was stunned that I could teach my students such a complicated dialog as Ion and that my students could remember it and have an intelligent discussion of it without being prompted. This convinced me further that I was a good teacher and that it was just in Champaign that I couldn’t get a fair hearing due to the politically correct fervor there.

The lesson consists of my having my students to read Ion. Then I ask my students to decide who wins the argument between Socrates and the idiot Ion. They all choose Socrates (every time I have taught it, which must be more than 20 times). But when I ask them whether they actually believe in the metaphor by which Socrates describes the chain of being that descends from Zeus on high, through a mystical muse, through the empty vessel Ion, to a responding audience, my students always agree that Socrates is an idiot if he really believes such nonsense. Then we get involved in a discussion intended to pull apart the assumptions that govern our acceptance of Socrates over Ion, as well as our acceptance of our own minds over the authority of Socrates.

Anybody could have seen this, but it turns out that only I could see this (admittedly minor) point at the beginning of my class. I was able to lead my students through this discussion, because their alliegience is to aligning their minds with the truth (like Socrates intends to do) and not to an over-inflated sense of the power of their own rhetoric (like Ion does). It doesn’t matter that Socrates fails to align himself with truth. Then we get into a long discussion on the nature of truth.

My friend’s friend wasn’t interested in this (I’m not shocker, are you?). Instead, he had some questions about my belief in an alternate future.

I believe that this is likely in the long term, as redistributive tax policy will squeeze out the rich.

I have a fantasy (based on my reading of the history of Italian city states, where the modern world based in a new democratic society grew up between the two warring empires (Papal States and the Holy Roman) who were fighting over Superpower control just as the Soviet Union and the US had been fighting in the modern day) that this will be in a 0-infrastructure society that is not invested in the modern world and so not invested in accretions of modern error as both American parties are. I would put the most likely place for the next revolution on the margins of current society. Maybe somewhere in central Africa.

On my friend’s asking for clarification and simplification of my argument. In response, I wrote a two part answer:

PART I: Those who defend the poor AT THE EXPENSE OF THE RICH need to find an argument that is not so hostile to rich people if they want to retain them in this country. The liberal left is pursuing a perfectly justifiable program of asking people to pay their fair share, but there are two problems with it. 1) It is a completely politicized argument based in Limbaugh’s (and his ilk) overwhelming sense of patriotism. This will fade when Limbaugh fades (or dies). 2) There are other countries in the world than America in a way that there were not during the Cold War (The BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China). None of them have followed the American model of freedom combined with low taxes; but when one of them does, it won’t be long before the rich apply for exit visas from high tax America. At that point, liberals will have killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. I’m not saying I like it; I’m pointing out how I feel human nature works in a philosophical sense.

PART II (last one): My 3-D argument is not meant to imply that I see more than you, or even that I see better than you. My 3-D way is a way of dividing what everybody sees in a new way. It’s like Freud who could see things that others could not in the world due to his new way of looking at things. At first he was the only person who thought that way (a position I take for myself), but when people began to see the value in Freud’s way of looking at the world, he got followers. Then he got too many followers. Then someone came with a better way, and no one studies Freud any more. I feel that I have a better system of looking at the world, but every insane person in the world thinks his system is better than any other system. I have no followers (nor do I particularly want any; for all I know, I’m an idiot). I just feel it’s a shame to have people locked in a 2-D world of haves versus have nots. There has to be a better way.

Peter: That’s why it’s is still a fantasy. But fantasy can become reality awfully quick. Look at the rapid rise of Bill Gates in the face of all of IBM’s power and money. They virtually controlled the computer industry in the year that Gates and Allen founded Microsoft (1974). It took IBM’s complacency in the face of a changing vision of the world to shift the ground. The same thing is happening today with American complacency in the face of China’s aggressive challenge after they learned the lesson of the Cold War—as American’s apparently didn’t—that we live in a competitive world. That, like the rise of Bill Gates to prominence, has taken a breathlessly short time. China is still a Marxist state and is not a likely candidate to steal Americans, but it is only a matter of time before someone realizes that they, too, can reap enormous benefits by relaxing taxes and increasing freedom far beyond the increasingly Europeanified America. Other countries are flooded all the time with workers seeking better jobs and conditions (e.g. look at Ghandi’s experience in Africa at the beginning of his movie). It’s just a matter of time before we see white-collar flight from this country. Not advocating; just saying.

I then addressed my friend’s suspicions that I was a cranky m*****f***er.

I know I should shut up, but it seems I can’t help it. Although I wanted nothing more to be a ultimate insider, after 30 years of being told ‘No, you can’t write that’ (with harsh comments in the margins), I have become comfortable writing as a perpetual outsider. What other choice have they given me? But, as I am constantly saying on my blog, Who am I to argue against you or Freud or Socrates or Marx or Descartes? To each his own is my motto. But just because I have a different point of view that doesn’t mean that people need to be mean. That is my chief complaint about ‘with-us-or-against-us’ 2-D thought.

I continued, after she made an ‘with-us-or-against-us’ argument with the implication that I, not being of of us, must be one of them. I disagreed, pointing to one of my primary sources for my ideas:

The 2-D ‘us-or-them’ division isn’t real in the first place, so if you think that Obama is going to take the opposite tack and reverse course, it isn’t going to happen. Politicians are drawn to the middle of debates, as even Richard Hofstadter, one of my favorite authors (assigned to me in a college history class) understood.

http://www.amazon.com/American-Political-Tradition-Men-Made/dp/0679723153/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315839985&sr=1-4

Read his Introduction on Amazon if you want to understand why things don’t change in the midst of politicians promising ‘hope and change’ and why I am so pessimistic about working for change within the system. Hofstadter’s belief is that politicians are drawn to the underlying ideals. In my opinion, even a revolution isn’t enough to change the direction of a society once it has set its course.

I continued by attacking my friend’s complacency that was based (in my opinion) on her Enlightenment foundational though that holds that there is nothing new in the universe that hasn’t been discovered yet. This is the cause of a large part of the problems that I had in graduate school, and it is what I have been working on remedying ever since I had my stoke. I corrected her as gently as I could:

Cooperation is valuable and necessary, but your sharing society won’t bring back jobs from China; and jobs matter because that’s how we get the money to pay benefits to others less fortunate than ourselves (like the 16% of people who are unemployed). This isn’t the Cold War anymore, where everybody had a different agenda than the American one. America won the Cold War because our way of sorting resources worked better than any other system in existence (see my Poker Tales for my explanation of how resources are sorted in America). Our system accorded to basic human nature better than any other existing system. EVERYBODY has always wanted what we have, and after the fall of communism EVERYONE in the world (except a few rouge terrorists) is competing with America for jobs because ours is now seen as the only way. It won’t be forever, since the problem you’ve identified of unequal distribution of resources is a very real problem that could destabilize not just our society but any society.

That’s not to say that someone couldn’t find a better way (that was my original point, you know). Nor should we stop looking for a better way, because the inequities that you are concerned about make for an unstable society. So I’m not arguing, as I suspect you think I am (it’s happened to me before; in fact it happens to me every time I make this argument), for the status quo. I am arguing that we need to take our obligation to compete more seriously than we do. But we don’t want the society that invented the electric light bulb, the telephone, automatic refrigeration, the phonograph, the automobile, the automated assembly line, the toaster, the transistor, the rocket ship, the computer, and the Internet to fall by the wayside because we are too lazy to realize that our society isn’t perfect. But knowing that (and I believe that almost everyone knows that) and taking action to fix it without breaking it further (my complaint with President Obama) are two very different things. This isn’t the Cold War, and our way is not the only way forward anymore.

Conclusion

I was done, and I had exhausted my correspondents, but I got this nice letter from my friend about a week later. In it, she seems to have actually taken my advice seriously and has cut back on her partisan rhetoric. I am shocked and will immediately warn that no one takes me seriously and neither should she.

So maybe there’s hope for me after all. This has given me confidence to put out the press releases that I have been working on all summer in support of my novel, which I had expected to go as things with me always go (that is to say wrong). Wish me luck.

I work on a fairly rigid schedule, dedicating myself to writing for the first four to six hours of my day. In my books you can see the depth (or shallowness) of my vision of what it means to be a writer. After those early morning forays into writing, I am exhausted. Now I had continued to write with less energy about whatever is on my mind at the moment. When I was working on the fiction of Poker Tales, I was thinking about Neil Postman, and I used the opportunity to throw together my thoughts on why it was that he thought so little of the culture of Las Vegas. In the process of working on that essay, I figured out the difference—essential if you want you understand my approach to ‘truth’ through an intermediary fiction—between me and thinkers like Postman.

But working on something as imposing as The Faerie Queene, the second longest poem in the English language—the first is Byron’s Don Juan; I find it funny that the two longest poems in the English language are unfinished—I find myself with no energy for writing anything more about writing. So I gradually dropped promised works on writing such as my promise to treat 100 novels (I think I got through three) and my critical review about what I think I thought I was doing in Poker Tales. This last project has been bugging since I dropped it late last year, and I think I will have to finish it soon.

I kept writing about ‘What I am Listening to This Week’ because this was really easy to write, and it was fun after a morning of writing about writing. Just before my 49th birthday, I started to get discouraged that I would be perceived as a weak thinker as I continued to write on music while neglecting deeper topics. So I started thinking about giving up my blog for a life of peaceable silent bliss.

Two factors made me rethink my strategy. First, after only a month, I missed writing something once a week at least. Never underestimate the vanity of writers; we all want to talk all the time. But more importantly, my son started to get interested music. What’s more frightening was that he started asking me for guidance. I told him that I thought his friends, who listened to popular music and not obscure Koln Concerts from the 1970s and extraordinarily popular things like yodeling 12 year old girls, were probably better judges of music than I could ever be. He listened to me, and that is always a good thing.

My method of listening, which I developed in the 1970s listening to The Who and Led Zeppelin, was to crawl out of the narrow tastes of my father, who preferred to listen to pre-war jazz and who declared on the day that the Beatles had broken up (the second most iconic musicians of the 20th century preceded only by Louis Armstrong) said only “Good!” (My father was a reasonable man and when he finally heard the Beatles on the radio he found (surprise, surprise) that he actually liked them).

When I was attempting to impart some of the musical wisdom that I had learned at the cost of great effort on my part, my son broke my heart and said that (and I quote his exact words, though the punctuation is all mine) “I hate the Beatles!”

‘O tempora, o mores,’ I said to myself. In Latin it means, ‘WTF!? No son of mine can hate the Beatles!’ (it’s admittedly a loose translation; for a better translation, look it up on Wikipedia, where it has its own page; if you don’t know what WTF means, it too has its own Wikipedia page). What can I say, I got me some culture; it’s my curse. But he is still insisting that he hates the Beatles.

Now I am not going to challenge him with questions that I learned in my youth could bring the whole house of cards down around my son, questions like “Have you ever heard the Beatles?” or “Have you heard any of my favorite songs, songs like ‘Money,’ ‘The Night Before,’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ ‘Across the Universe’ (a song that I was recently shocked to learn that my own wife had never heard of before; ‘O tempora, o mores!’ I say again) or any of the hundreds of other excellent songs they recorded in a brief span of ten years (I have long maintained that the Beatles are the only group never to have recorded a bad song). What sort of parent would I be if I, as the oak in the fairy tale, said something like that to my tender reed of a son? So I simply expressed my astonishment with a “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” followed by a “You’re an idiot!”

My son is going through a rough patch in his life. His tender body has been overwhelmed by hormones, and that makes him unpleasant and unusually crabby. This is killing my wife, who got used to having a loving child; but having been overwhelmed by the same excess of male hormones in my life, I have more sympathy (as you can see by my tender handling of my son’s tender reed feelings). And this is why I’m going to start my regular blog with ‘What I am Listening to This Week’ again. Because eventually I hope that he will get over his crabby insistence that he knows everything and start to listen to his parents’ superior knowledge of the world of music and, frankly, everything else.

I have to say that if I were a betting man—and I wrote a book of Poker Tales as the expression of my understanding of the American Dream—I would bet against myself here. Unfortunately, I am not a betting man. I wrote my book in praise of the rewards of following the American Dream (as opposed to following the Soviet Dream of promoting excellence in chess) but also as a warning about the pitfalls of following the American Dream. So I will continue to slog through the process of writing my blog, and will eventually get back to writing about the last 3 novels on my list of six, but that’s all. And I will continue until I am done with my expositions of all my Poker Tales.

After that, we’ll have to see what the blog holds for me and for my son who doesn’t like the f#$*%@g BEATLES!