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:

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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¢.

The notion that Andy Warhol’s work accounts for 17% of the modern art market is so astonishing to me that I can’t quite believe it. But when the author thinks about the reasons why, he makes a lot of sense.

The starting point for any assessment of Warhol’s legacy is his instant accessibility: nobody need ever be puzzled by a Warhol—his lavish colours, his epic simplicity and, most of all, his famous subject matter. “Andy always painted famous things,” says the artist Michael Craig-Martin, “whether it was Liz Taylor or a Coke can.”

Artists can imitate his work without knowing anything about his underlying models.

’Even children love him,’ says Gul Coskun, a Warhol specialist dealer in London. ‘They stop their parents outside my shop. His pictures are big, colourful, they are not taxing academically.’

Not being academically taxing, his works are easily appreciated and even imitated by children and adults alike; and this is what makes them so imitable by the younger generation that has made an art of external tattoos that show us their unchanging desires, hopes, and opinions rather than a deeper and opaque depth that some thinkers like Jacques Derrida believe is ephemeral in the first place. In this depthless universe, Andy Warhol reigns supreme.

Unlike my academic colleagues, I have no problem with the lack of depth in the universe. To each his own, I say. Some of us are plumbers; others (like me) are authors. But I do have a problem with the superficial level at which people stop their inquiry into to the universe. Rather than exploring the universe for differing opinions (whether you position them on the surface or underneath in the depths) that might contrast with mine of so require me to remeasure my opinion against different opinions that cannot be reconciled with my opinions without leading me to contradict myself, reason, which requires of each of us to pose our opinions and meet with other contrary opinions on it middle ground, has been eliminated from the universe. In reason’s place, each of us exists as a Leibnizian monad, each with the ability to express our opinions to the world without fear of contradiction by others.

Academic Analysis of the Warhol Universe

Andy Warhol is king of this monadic universe. And here I must side with Mr. Appleyard, who does not stop at the surface but goes looking for causes of Warhol’s behavior that leads him to the core of Warhol’s appeal. As he does this, he is able to “see” what those who are mindlessly imitating Warhol’s art apparently cannot: that Warhol’s moment “is indeed over.” This is one of the benefits of academic analysis: the academic can see what others cannot. And I agree with Mr. Appleyard that “seeing” is better than not seeing and that the use of the intellect, which increases as we age if we apply ourselves to the growth of the mind, is better than “instant intellectualism,” in which we use only our our more fluid intelligence, which fades quickly well before we reach the age of thirty and well before that if we don’t practice its use (see this article on fluid and crystallized intelligence if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

In his academic analysis, he touches on figures from AbEx—I love such terms, because they are the touchstone of insiders; see my post on mos and pomos—championed by Clement Greenberg, a man who I talked about in the section “Unlimited Postmodern Art“ in my post on Poker Tales: In the City That Never Sleeps.”

He also refers to most of the thinkers that I think of when I, who have written a book called Art in the Age of Talk Radio—not not politics, which I despise because it despised me—think of the art world, including Fredric Jameson, Arthur Danto (one of my favorites, who I refer to here in the section on “Arthur Danto’s Skepticism” and here in the section on “Power”), Heidegger, and, of course, Marcel Duchamps, who I refer to here in the section “Into the Warhol(e).” (Art in the Age of Talk Radio is scheduled to be published on March 1, 2012).

In his article, Mr. Appleyard shows the causes that allowed Andy Warhol to have become a colossus in the art world by showing how he intersected with many of the trends that have come to the fore in the more general culture. Therefore, he writes of Christopher Gaillard’s reaction to Warhol’s work:

Warhol is a global commodity now. His work is certainly supported by some key players we read about in the papers, but it’s my belief that this is much more far-reaching than that. Warhol is the most powerful contemporary-art brand that exists. I think Picasso is another, it’s about sheer, instant recognition and what comes along with it is a sense of wealth, glamour and power.

Artworld insiders praise Warhol for delivering them such a powerful message for the first time in history. Mr. Appleyard opens his piece with a testament by “Sara Friedlander, the 27-year-old head of First Open Sale at Christie’s in New York” who actually dismisses the art of the 19th century, the art of the 18th, and “the first three, four or five decades” of the 20th century on account of its being too ‘elitist.’”

More penetrating critics like Mr. Appleyard step back from such blind enthusiasm for the age they live in. They complicate issues that seem so easy on their surface that they require no further explanation by historicizing Warhol as the product of causes that can be found (but only if one is looking). From his position as critic, Mr. Appleyard views Warhol as the product of construction of artifice, which can, according to Derrida, be deconstructed on the basis that artifice does not get back to the ontology (‘realness’ in the words of more than one of my students) which underlies our experience. When one engages the artworld of Andy Warhol in Mr. Appleyard’s critical piece, we find a critic who is uneasy about the ultimate value of Warhol’s status as one who stands as the last word in art, at the end of history, and thus as an out of this world “genius.” Instead of playing along, Mr. Appleyard announces that Warhol’s moment, even at the height of his fame which has delivered 17% of the modern art market to the sale of his works, “is in fact over.”

Stepping Out of the Past

This stepping out of the arena of active ideas to point out flaws in the vision of the universe that ‘lesser’ minds take to be complete and unproblematic is the role of the critic in the world today. But like Arthur Danto, who is a very smart man and who has identified the unique aspects of the art of Andy Warhol (as well as much else), Mr. Appleyard does not have a picture of what comes next. This is a function of his taking the critical posture that says that his experience is worth more than the naïve experience of ‘lesser’ readers who have not taken the time to learn about this (and often any) subject. Mr. Appleyard’s reading of Warhol places too much emphasis on the past, while not thinking as clearly about the future. That is fair, but the fault with Mr. Appleyard’s construction of his universe is that he doesn’t see that there is any problem with his backward-looking view of the world. Like Arthur Danto, he knows that the universe of learning will flow through his critical hands and not through the hands of such ‘lesser’ (because uneducated) readers.

My problem with Mt. Appleyard’s and Mr. Danto’s position is that is not always so. I never would have encountered this if it hadn’t been for the systematic exclusion of my opinions by people who thought that they already had settled solutions to the problems that we were collectively attacking in academia. The only solution that my teachers had was to yield some of their power to me, but none of their position. I was to fall in line. But I did not because I had been raised in a different environment that raised different intellectual solutions to the same problems that Derrida and Michael Bérubé (who, though I hardly knew him when I was at the University of Illinois and who surely doesn’t remember me, gave me one of the two best piece of advice I ever got while I in graduate school) and not (I would insist because I was stupid; but then who am I to judge myself in the face of so many contrary opinions). But the only solution that my academic colleagues could offer me was to follow them or they though I must have a screw loose that they thought that a little yelling at me could fix (predictably, it did not).

The process of fixing boundaries builds the walls of the Ivory Tower between those who know and those who don’t. The question is whether those who are left outside should be excluded from conversation, as I was excluded when I was in graduate school, for a broad agreement on the outlines of knowledge into which ‘lesser’ minds must be indoctrinated before being allowed to participate. This sort of protective behavior is the sort of things that grand inquisitors levied against the birth of the new in order to keep themselves in their secure place earned through their education into the status quo.

The traditional solution to entrenched power has been to overthrow the old order for a new. This is the basis of the rise of the historical model of Petrarch and his literary contemporary, Boccaccio. The rise of Petrarch’s historical model, which he and Boccaccio were the only progenitors of in 1349, had overtaken the scholasticism that had ruled the schools since the 11th century in a historical blink of an eye, so that by the 15th century the victory of humanism was complete and by the end of the 16th century, the death of scholasticism was also complete, leaving room for the rise of modern philosophy. And to this day, scholars still think of their mission as being derived from humanism, not failed scholasticism. (see Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy).

Removing the Barriers of Entry to Understanding

I would take a different tack than that of Scruton or Mr. Appleyard, both of whom I respect. Both men have written conservative assessments of the sad state of the arts and society in general, Mr. Scruton in his Meaning Of Conservatism and Mr. Appleyard in his Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts. As far as their assessment of the past, I find both right on the mark. But I differ with them (respectfully) on their assessment of the future, or rather I should say on their lack of vision about the future of art after Warhol loses his 17% of the modern art market and art travels somewhere or to someone else.

I was a conservative in the English Department from c. 1992 to 1994. I was driven to that position by the same forces that drove Mr. Appleyard to reject the leftist notion of art in 1984. I was able to finish my doctorate by hiding in plain sight in a world in which one’s political affiliations were paramount. As such, they trumped my intellectual accomplishments. So occasionally, I’d get called into someone’s office and they would grill me (or scram at me) about my intellectual leanings. I quickly learned that no one was interested in my intellect, but I also learned that no one was interested in my politics; so I learned to offer to show up for as long as it took to demonstrate my fealty to the cause. My being eager was enough to defray any interest in following up on my political positions, so I was allowed to continue with my intellectual pursuits unimpeded by political interference. And although I couldn’t really get a fair hearing within my academic department, I was able to send out conference proposals, which got accepted (I have to this day never been rejected), and I was able to boost my reputation in the English department by having presented more papers (10 original papers in 2 years, if I’m not mistaken) than any other graduate student and more than all but a few professors.

But this convinced me by 1994 that the details of my political beliefs was not all that important, and while I enjoyed listening to Milt Rosenberg on the radio railing against the liberal left’s control of academia, I realized that he had no answers to the problem of the future of art. Politics was not for me if if didn’t lead to answer that I had to questions that I had been asking since I dropped out of school looking for answers the question of the location of Joseph Campbell‘s “word behind words” in 1981. I changed my focus away from politics to what was wrong with the art world, which was supposed to capture the whole of human experience and not just those aspects that agree with their notion of what the world should hold and which it had held in an imaginary past (for my though on conservatism, see the section “What I Did to Combat PC” in which I talk about Cochrane’s assessment of the Roman folly of building a future on Livy’s idealized past in the section in a previous post). I thought I could do better.

Rather than fomenting a revolution against Mr. Appleyard and Mr. Scruton, and putting a new regime in their place (as conservatives attempted and failed to do in the 1990s when I was in graduate school), I think we should examine the building blocks of the avant-garde itself to see if the bricks which build walls that exclude ‘lesser’ minds are in fact real or whether they are themselves unacknowledged constructions by critics who want to keep themselves in power at the expense of “others” (I’ll give myself away, here; I think that they are).

The division of labor as constituted now leaves the critic on one side of the debate—whether the critic is on the inside or the outside is a matter of one’s perspective; there is no stable position in this universe). In my post on Lana Turner, I maintained that academics had separated themselves from lesser mortals by erecting a non-deconstructable Ivory Tower, entry to which was was restricted to those of superior intellect who had PhDs. This leaves insiders like Sara Friedlander not feeling any need for any wider perspective than that bestowed upon them by their position in the world. Yielding anything to people like Mr. Appleyard, who has expressed his reservations about people like Ms. Friedlander as long ago as 1984 in his Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts would only reassert the elitism that her generation—those who have not, like Mr. Appleyard (who’s 60) and myself (49), yet reached the age of 30. After all, in the critical insider’s universe, the critic has absconded from the world of active men (who are presumably searching for equality that Ms. Friedlander seems to have found immediately without all the rigamarole of history that Mr. Appleyard brings to the problem of art). This puts Ms. Friedlander in the position of immediacy, while Mr.Appleyard is in the position of bringing useless stuff to the table that would upset her perfect and equitable world should she allow Mr. Appleyard’s position any foothold in it.

So she does to him what my professors (not all) did to me when I was in graduate school: the excluded him and his ‘elitist’ art (all art preceding Andy Warhol) in order to save her hold on equality. But by a curious effect of my having abandoned politics in the construction of my aesthetic universe, I found that both Mr. Appleyard and Ms. Friedlander competing for ownership of the common ground of metaphysics. This is so common in the universe of aesthetics that many aesthetes don’t realize that art has not always been associated with metaphysics (see the table of contents of The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (Routledge Philosophy Companions) if you don’t believe me.

From this metaphysical position—the one that I had such a difficult time with in 1981 that I decided to go it alone and drop out of college rather than submitting to professors who knew no better than I the solutions to the problem of ultimate meaning but seemed far too eager to foist partial and so unsatisfactory solutions on their students from their position of power—Ms. Friedlander is left arguing that Mr. Appleyard’s position is not immediate enough, and she is willing to declare the whole history of art dead in order to sustain the integrity of her immediate metaphysical position. Mr. Appleyard is put in the position of defending his more holistic position as being better than Ms. Friedlander ‘s partial (and surely wrong) position.

So, in the situation of aesthetics, I am left with the question of which “partial” solution I should follow here: the young fresh insider who is fighting for equality but without the insight to realize her position in a larger tradition, or the old guy who is trying to reassert his power but who leaving the world of art entirely by tying Warhol himself to a tradition of inequality (and so of oppression of minorities and other underdogs). To hear Mr. Appleyard tell it, we should take the critical position, because only then can we achieve that status laid out by two thousand years of aesthetic thought (as outlined in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics) by which art is tied to the metaphysical reality that underlies changing experience.

But, as I just noted (and have noted elsewhere and often), there is no secure foundational place from which anyone can make final judgment on art or on anything else. And this is why (I suspect) Ms. Friedlander doesn’t believe in stepping out of her private preference for Warhol to a public place in which things which we believe in our heart of hearts can be argued about. It is she who is upholding the true status of aesthetics by referring art back to the only thing we can know with any metaphysical immediacy: the contents of our minds, while Mr. Appleyard is threatening her status as a creator by insisting that she is not as smart as she thinks she is at 28. But once again, I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I agree with him. But the answer is not to travel back to the font of history, as I feel that Mr. Appleyard does in his soon to be published book, The Brain is Wider Than the Sky, which is available here but not on Amazon, US.

and try to recover the metaphysical aspect that Warhol has captured without the interference of social interaction of any kind, or severing ourselves from the active community of artist by traveling aaway from the immediate world of experience, I decided to change the terms on which we believe that aesthetic systems themselves operate in spite of 2,000+ years of aesthetic history.

The General Case for Including ‘Lesser’ Minds

Rather than giving an answer to such a knotty question as to who is right (insiders or outsiders), I would raise a question about why the division between insiders and outsiders persists in Derrida’s universe in which so much else that is constructed can be deconstructed. Why should this one division remain when all else in the public space has been eroded in favor of a private (and equal) aesthetic vision? It was to answer this question that I wrote my novel Poker Tales. In it, I began my plan to realign aesthetic systems with “partial” science rather than “totalizing” metaphysics. And despite what you’re thinking (c’mon, I know you are), my system makes a lot of sense.

The origin of my idea was conceived after I left academia as a profession but continued to teach ‘lesser’ students in community and technological colleges part time on the basis that I enjoyed it (which is just selfish) and on the more important (to me, anyway) that I felt a moral obligation to teach others the skills that I had mastered. Even though I only taught writing, I did it off an on for 20 years (I quit after having had a stroke at 42, and even then I went back for 2 years before realizing that it was too exhausting for me to keep up). And because I had such a terrible experience in grad school and because I truly do enjoy teaching, I wrote a book on the subject, which I called Writing for People Who Hate Writing: A Book for the Rest of Us in order to appeal to those people who are typically left out consideration by “experts” like Arthur Danto and Ms. Friedlander, who write my ‘lesser’ students off because their thought, which they probably think is no thought at all, doesn’t agree with what their expertise tells them they should expect the arts to tell them.

I have more faith in my ‘lesser’ students than Arthur Danto has. But I have learned to recognize that ‘lesser’ readers don’t see the value of the past in an American society that has put its emphasis on the creation of new value by the imaginative use of the mind (in the words of Steve Jobs) to “show people what they want,” because only after one invents something truly new can one profit on the difference between what one knows in depth and the weaker knowledge of those who need your services but aren’t all that interested in learning how to fix pipes, as such an exchange would take away from their profitable time working as literary critics. (see ‘Why Fido Can’t Drive’ in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing

As I said the other day, I believe that Steve Jobs has delivered us into a consumer world of selfish individual monads who are willing to express their opinions but who have no idea how to compromise with others without losing sight of their principles (Mr. Appleyard is one of the lone voices that agrees with me, here). I believe that the world could use a reconfiguration of its principles so that cooperation between competing parties will be available again in the middle domain of reason, rather than the lonely domain of absolute metaphysical self-assurance. Unfortunately, the road travels over the corpse of Arthur Danto, Steve Jobs, and, yes, even Bryan Appleyard on its way back to the lost road of metaphysics. I made my case, first in my “Why Fido Can’t Drive” in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing. I continued it in my second book, the fictional work of Poker Tales. In the latter book, I attempt to show that the walls on which the Ivory Tower are built are not as real as those on the inside think before proceeding to break them down.

I then made the case for ‘lesser’ minds in the central tale (literally the tale that comes in the middle of the book; as a student of the Middle Ages, I follow Dante’s principles of story construction, which is based in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy on which I have also written part of another scholar’s work) in the middle tale of my work of fiction, the tale I call ‘Four Parisians.’

The ‘Lesser’ Artist in the Tale of the ‘Four Parisians’

In the Tale of the ‘Four Parisians’, I start out giving an account of a scholar who lives in the town destroyed by war, Boulogne-sur-Mer (‘Boulogne by the sea’ for those of you who do not think, as Goethe seems to have, that translation ruins the meaning of an artwork). I attempt to show how important history and culture are in France, as opposed to ‘present’ France, which has been destroyed by war and has been rebuilt in the Brutalist style of architecture, a cold unfeeling style that lacked the grace and elegance one associates with French seaside villages but was instead the product of cold and calculating capitalists (I know, yuck, right?).

Not that you need to know this, since it doesn’t make any difference in your reading of the story I am telling you, but I searched for a city in France that featured the same style of architecture that was suggested to me by the Brutalist architecture of the NIU arts building (where I went to school for my Master’s Degree and in which I had some of my favorite moments in spite of the unfeeling architecture that surrounded me there) and by the Brutalist concrete walls of the last community college I worked at (where I loved teaching amidst the Brutalist architecture that surrounded me there). It turned out that Boulogne-sur-Mer fit the bill. What sealed the deal for me was the presence of Godfrey of Boulogne in the city’s history. This allowed me to have the hero of the piece, Claude Pecullier, believing that his father, Jacques Pecullier (for those of you who think, as Goethe seems to have, that names matter), was not making up his son’s heritage out of whole cloth (as I had made up Claude and Jacques). Unfortunately, it was not true; and when Jacques died interred himself in the concrete he was building the replacement city out of, the only legacy he gave to Claude was his completely fabricated history of his descent from Godfrey himself.

Once again, I am drawing on my own genealogy, which ties me back to some Danish or Anglo Saxon king or other. I don’t have the Clarkson Genealogy with me, but I like to think that it’s Harold Bloodaxe. It isn’t, but it seems as likely as the actual king they tied me to. There seems to be a mania for this sort of thing in an age that puts so much emphasis on using the past to pave the way for the future (Livy-like). So Harold Bloodaxe it is.

I apologize for getting dragged slightly off my original point. You see how easy it is to get dragged off your point if you adhere to closely to supposed history, which doesn’t matter in real history.

As a result, Claude Pecullier grows up wishing more than anything to live in the past, and he flees the rebuilt Boulogne for historical and culturally rich Paris, as people have been fleeing the provinces for the city of lights ever since the birth of the modern age friends in the modern nation.

The Lack of Irony in the Tale of the ‘Four Parisians’

The tale the ‘Four Parisians’ revolves around the upbringing and subsequent life of Claude Pecullier, who grows from his perfect childhood looking out at the sea, where he dreams of things lacking in his own life the city of his birth. I tried not to use irony in my description of Claude’s relationship with his mother or his relationship with ideas. Like Claude, I respect ideas. But unlike Jacques Pecullier, I do not believe in closing the hermeneutic circle with tales of origins, which, being false, can only further hide the truth of the world from his son Claude.

The subsequent life of Claude Pecullier is therefore built on a lie, and this means that one could deconstruct both Claude and his work if one wanted to. But if deconstructing the work of Claude Pecullier on the basis of its lack of ontology (‘realness’ in the vernacular of the lesser students that I have been teaching for 20 years) is our only option, then why would anyone ever want to? For in spite of its lack of ontology, Claude has written 14 books in 14 years, and these would have to be deconstructed, as well.

This, too, comes from my experience as an educator. I am very wary of deconstructing education on the basis of it’s not being involved in ontology (‘realness’) in spite of my student’s belief that what is not immediately apparent to them is useless makework. And this is why I am writing this article in conjunction with Bryan Appleyard’s critical piece on the art of Andy Warhol. I like Mr. Appleyard’s approach to the past; it is his lack of vision about the future that I have a problem with, and the is easily remedied with a little tweaking rather that a full-scale revolution that would make all learning about past approaches, built on relative values of habit rather than permanent features grounded in ontology (‘realness’), useless. Sometimes the things most worth learning are not immediately apparent.

In my reading, not just in Poker Tales but in general, there is always an element of imagination that comes between our mind’s construction of things and ontology. In Paris, Rousseau had decided that we had been sundered from on our ontology by mechanical construction. Rousseau’s solution to this was to go back to line ourselves with nature, ontology, for those not afflicted with lesser minds). But I believe that people like Steve Jobs, who invent things and then present them to the public through marketing that they’ve never seen before, operate on the principles of imagination, while, in my chapter on the Old-Timer’s tale of his own origins in 1972, which I entitled “Reykjavík” for reasons that Mr. Appleyard is old enough to appreciate, I note that most people who make a ton of money are not the inventors, but the marketers who have the imagination to connect people’s minds with the products they have found a need for. And this is a function of the “middle space” of my precious reason, and not of Andy Warhol’s precious metaphysical realm where, it turns out, one doesn’t need any learning at all; all one need to have is one’s own being.

America, it turns out, has been the leader in innovation in the 20th century, giving the world inventions that have driven modern era like the lightbulb, electric lines, the telephone; the production line; the automobile; the airplane; the television; the transistor; the rocket ship; the computer; and all of Steve Jobs’ innovations, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. This series of remarkable and thoroughly American is the basis of my belief that culture has traveled from Paris to America. It’s on the basis of the non-foundational structure the Claude only believes that he’s reached the end of in his approach to ‘realness’ though history, but in fact he has not. America, with its kitchy art and false marketing of things we don’t need, is even less committed to science than Claude Pecullier, mandarin literary doyen of one of the most famous schools in France, is.

Imagination in the ‘Four Parisians’

Rather than attempting to crowd out the role of imagination in the world of construction, I revel in it in my Poker Tales. This reveling in imagination also accounts for the chief difference between the two oppoents in the book: Kid of 21 who flies to Las Vegas on the day after his 21st birthday, and the Old-Timer who reprts that he has been coming to Las Vegas since 1970 or 1972 (the author is not perfectly clear on that detail). When the ‘Four Parisians’ starts, the Kid has heard what the Old-Timer has been telling him about poker being a game mastered by experts in the tale of ‘Yeller.’ He takes him to mean that the Old-Timer doubts his natural natural talent and that he should go back to school to learn more of accessible reason and not let himself become distracted by his desire to win big or die trying (an American trait if ever there was one). But the Old-Timer tells the Kid that he is mistaken, that everyone is subject to superstition, even the most famous professors. This leads him to tell the story of the ‘Four Parisians’ in which they are overconfident and are thus overtaken by as ignorant an American there ever was, a man named ‘Belcher’ Owens.

The ‘Four Parisians’ come to Las Vegas with a disdain for the lesser concern with money. They come to view Las Vegas as the destination of the worst of the worst, something I dealt with previously in my post on Neil Postman. The four Parisians travel to Las Vegas because the culture of Las Vegas is the opposite of the culture of Paris, despite the fact of their similar names as the City of Lights (this small detail argues for my way of looking at the world through the mechanism of habit taking great ideas from others rather than inventing new ideas out of the whole cloth of total revolution). And so they come to Las Vegas, not to enjoy it as it is, but to enjoy it from the safe intellectual distance of the Pop Max, a postmodern conference held in Las Vegas precisely so that scholars can laugh in the face of ideas that they hold dear as representing ontology (‘realness’), but which are present in Las Vegas only in the 50-foot cardboard statues of unreal chorus girls. From this safe intellectual distance, they come, they judge, and judging believe they have conquered.

The Joks’s on Them

The problem with this and every other hermeneutic irony is that, like everyone who comes to Las Vegas, they deign to gamble, and it is then that they meet ‘Belcher’ Owens, a man as unlike Claude Pecullier as one (or at least I, the author) can imagine. When asked about the origin of his name, ‘Belcher,’ “never wordsmith himself, demonstrated his prowess in the eructative art.” This is enough to dismiss ‘Belcher’ from serious consideration for inclusion into the in the universe of Claude Pecullier.

Now this makes for an interesting problem, because ‘Belcher’s name is actually derived from one of my favorite Shakespearean characters named Toby Belch. This observation not signaled in the text. So the question becomes whether the four Parisians, who take great pride in the fact that they know more about Shakespeare than ‘Belcher’ Owens does (he vaguely remembers Shakespeare as his father’s plumber). But would it matter if the four Parisians had had that bit of meta-irony available to them? I submit that it would not. So the more important question than whether they know this is what does it mean that the author constructs Claude Pecullier and his friends; Etwas Papier (this was from the first lesson I ever had in German from James W. Marchand, the person who I dedicated my book to; it means ‘some paper’ for those of you who are not fluent in German, but need a translator); Karl Erbrechen-Schopfer (whose name is derived from Google translator, where I put in ‘vomit creator’ and got back ‘erbrechen schopfer’), and the one American who always wanted to have the gleam of intellectual achievement and so has traded in his status as a writer for television for the status of marginally ‘respectable’ writing of the Blaireau Lentement series of books, Follower Rhymes, without that bit of knowledge that ‘Belcher’ Owens is relevant to their sense of themselves as knowers of all, or whether they have been duped by the very sense of depth and historical principle that they take so much pride in? [The answer in my book is yes. In short, they are duped by believing their own press.]

This gives us various perspectives on the literature on display here. On the one hand we have creatures who are within the text. The Kid has shown up in Las Vegas because he’s rebelling against his parents who want him to go to college and have a nice happy life as an accountant. This makes him completely uninterested in Claude Pecullier. But, through a somewhat ironic irony, Claude is lashing out against the world of order (particularly capitalist order) along the lines of Derrida, a famous man who wants to destroy the old (fictional) order to rebuild the new on firmer ontological grounds (‘realness’). So in a sense, the Kid is on the side of Claude Pecullier who is on the side of Jacques Derrida despite the fact that the Kid himself doesn’t know it.

On the other hand, the Old-Timer has more control of his situation. Unlike Pecullier within his story and Derrida without, who operate as though there is nothing outside the text (hors de texte, for those of you who believe as Goethe believes that translation is something that eliminates (not just suppresses, as Derrida holds) meaning from the text), the Old-Timer is a storyteller who hides as much meaning as he reveals in telling his stories. The various perspectives on experience make it mandatory that everyone in the book investigate their experience, not against their own individual experience or against the collective community, but against the larger world. But it exactly this that not only the Kid—who let’s face it is not as bright as he thinks he is—but also Claude Pecullier and Derrida, intellectual and critical giants in the world of France, believe.

It is for this reason of his blindness to his own blind side that Claude Pecullier fails to beat ‘Belcher’ Owens in a game where the rules are not as he thinks they ought to be. And rather than going back to the drawing board and rethinking his strategy according to the (albeit relative) rules of the game that change over time, as we see in the next tale called ‘His Last Wife,’ he decides that there is something wrong with those who play such a silly game and not with his own metaphysical and aesthetic stance of distance on issues that he brings to the poker table. This is the same strategy followed by the Old-Timer’s Soviet compatriots in the “Reykjavík“ tale, where the Old-Timer opted out of the balanced position held by the press and politicians for a more profitable strategy of finding suckers who knew less about what was going on at the poker than he did. This change in strategy changed him forever to one of the 20% of winners.

In my view (and in ‘Belcher’s) there is no metaphysical strategy involved in his world after he breaks free of balance for a world of individual freedom. ‘Belcher’ devotes himself to feeding his enormous appetite, and never realizes what an intellectual giant he is confronting. And while I myself enjoy art as recreation from the world of everyday back and forth of experience, it does not dismiss artist from looking at the world as it is by allowing them to declare themselves in control of the universe on the basis of their having taken a privileged and so non-deconstructable position of aestheticism and not of their having looked at the world as is.

At the same time, the world opens up to the Old-Timer as one of the 20% for whom the world holds possibilities of success. That is not to say that he will be guaranteed his success, for even the best starting hand in Texas Hold ‘Em has a 15% chance of losing. This throws the balance that has been at the heart of educational experience since Plato (and probably much longer than that) into disarray, as men with the wherewithal to study the world as it actually operates will be in a much better position to profit from their better knowledge of the way the world works than those who hold onto deeper ideas that depend on a false sense of balance.

This is an idea that first occurred to me after I got out of school and got my first job at the age of 33 and learned for the first time of the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of peas come from 20% of pea plants, and that 80% of land is owned by 20% of the people. This throws the entire premise on which my whole education was based into disarray. And this, again, is why ‘Belcher’ Owens can beat the poor Claude Pecullier at this “silly game.” He has a marginal advantage in his understanding of how the world actually works that Claude Pecullier lacks, despite all those years of studying the the way things have been in the past.

This construction of the universe is where I disagree with Bryan Appleyard, for it seems to me that he is working (as everyone is working on both sides of the political aisle) with the notion that nature is in some way balanced and not instead a ruthless picker of winners and losers in an unfair game that human beings nevertheless cannot stop playing just because we don’t like the rules (quitting is death). But as I said earlier, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I believe that my “art” raises questions about the path before us in the time-honored tradition of raising new points that are sticking places in an otherwise smooth status quo tradition (see my article on ‘Knowledge’ in Writing for People Who Hate Writing). Unfortunately for Mr. Appleyard, I waise my flag in precislely the area where he attempts to rest: in the metaphysical still point, which I don’t believe exists without an imaginary metaphor that stands between the mind and the “truth.”

And, to be sure, I have managed to “stay away from audiences,” as Mr. Appleyard also advises on page 14 of his Culture Club, though more because I am shy and I have not yet attempted to market my work yet than that I think it won’t be a fabulous bestseller one day.

The question I raise in my book have to do with the incompatibities of the two separate systems for looking at the same evidence. In my view of the universe, there is more than enough room for Claude Pecullier’s way of thinking. It is only from his aesthetic perspective that he is incapable of reconciling his desires to the outcome of the tale. In the end, he writes his fifteenth book—after Ovid’s final book of the Metamorphoses, if anyone’s interested (and, c’mon, you and I both know nobody is)—which, though it sold the least of all of the books that the four Parisians write, earns him the Moynton Prize, which earns him a seat on the prestigious (if you live in France) Académie française as one of the Immortels appointed by the Académie française, which is all that M. Pecullier ever really wanted in the first place. So everybody wins; ‘Belcher’ wins money, and Claude wins immortality, even if in the end the author who created him out of whole cloth (that’s me) knows that it is built on a fiction.

My Art and (a Different) Andy Or Ruptures in the Experience of the (War)hol(e)

I consider the loss of balance the price of saving intellectual endeavor from the likes of Andy Warhol, who delivers a more immediate and therefore more accessible experience that nevertheless hides a substantial part of the experience of even the wisest of us—not me, who slaved away in community and technical colleges, but people like Claude Pecullier and Jacques Derrida—from us.

My chief argument in favor of my position is derived, not from a random thought that popped into my head, but from two of the most complicated arguments available to me from graduate school: the notion of a rupture épistémologique and the notion of simulacra, derived from postmodern thought of Gaston Bachelard and Jean Baudrillard (both not uncoincidentally Frenchmen ). When I think of such things, which I do more often than I ought, I wonder that Bachelard and Baudrillard exempt themselves from the possibility that their own thought is subject to rupture.

It was when I was thinking about this problem in terms of Pareto inequality, where winners continue to win while losers continue to lose, rather than the balanced nature of things that I was taught in school, that I decided to test the assumptions when they were everywhere, not just in the “other” world of folks who get left out of the picture because they don’t agree with what everyone who matters (in the world of literary criticism) knows. When the Old-Timer says to the Kid in response to his mystified questioning of something that hasn’t occurred to him (because he’s never heard the terms before) “It doesn’t matter,” the Kid should not rest content with things because he hasn’t heard them before and so ignore them and continue on his way. Instead, he should learn to confront the world, because it might not be as he (in his too passive state) thinks it is.

And this is my answer to Bryan Appleyard. I don’t want to argue with him. I want to build on his insight with insights of my own, thus saving the world from revolutionaries who overthrow accumulated and hard-won knowledge on the basis of their historical understanding that nevertheless does not reach the bottom of the assumption pile before getting turned over by people who have not even learned what people from previous generations knew until the point (where we are now) that hard-won leaning doesn’t matter in the face of much easier because much more accessible experience. That path is the path of Steve Jobs consumers, but not of Steve Jobs the producer, who works himself and others to get a product right before he introduces if to the masses for their consumption.

I want to point out that that Mr. Appleyard’s historical position will give him insight into what is missing in the lives of others but will not give him insight into what is missing in his own life. And I want to make it clear to Mr. Appleyard (on the basis of my recent experience with some of my Facebook friends) that I do not exempt myself from not knowing all and so elevating myself above others on that basis as certain rappers do. No one in the world has complete knowledge that would allow them to control my (or his) choices, not even Derrida or Eminem.

Mr. Appleyard should seriously consider my version of Nature, in which she is not balanced but instead rewards winners as those who can overcome their dispositions of how they want her to be and instead take her as she is (as an unfair mistress against whom human beings build their equitable communities in opposition to). His failure to consider my argument will not make Nature go away or make her travel down the path in which she is balanced on the basis of our human disposition that she should be so or on the basis that so many in the past have thought so.

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?

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.

Her biggest problem with the myth is that it’s, well, a myth:

And that’s my biggest problem with the myth of the extraordinary teacher. The myth says it doesn’t matter whether the crazy kid in the back makes me laugh so hard I forget what we were talking about, or two brilliant kids refuse to accept my rubrics, scrawling their long-winded objections as a two-part argument that circles over every square inch of the backs of their essays — the makeup of the class, the nature of each student and the number of students are immaterial as long as I’m at the top of my game.

She wants people to be more ‘realistic’ about how people actually behave in class and return them from their desert wanderings to the fount of truth.

In response, I thought to write Ruth a private letter expressing my ambivalence about classroom instruction in general. After it went to a half a single-spaced page, I decided to send it to her in a private message. After it went over a page and a half, I decided to post it on my blog and post a link in the comment section.

Here it is:

No version of classroom size works for everyone. Some people (including me) don’t like school, period no matter what size classroom they are in. (I’m sure you remember me as the guy who dropped out of Ripon College in 1981). I value learning, however, and after four difficult years of toiling in the fields of self-education, I went back to college searching for answers that had eluded me in my own search for answers. I had come across a problem in Joseph Campbell that I could not answer.

I ended up with a doctorate in English, but I never acclimated myself to the classroom, which for me was an area where my purpose was systematically misunderstood by people I thought should have known better. People on the Left, where I wanted to stake my claim, thought I was too conservative up because I had worked in a bank while I was out of college and couldn’t get over my academic colleagues’ hostility to the process of making and the difficulty of holding onto money; while members of the Right thought I was far too liberal. In response, the people on the Left vandalized my property and shouted my down rather than listening to my differing views; while people on the Right tolerated my views which they could not understand but which seemed to accord more with with their views than not.

I preferred working on my own. I didn’t begin to shine until I got out of the hostile University enviroment and took my act, which had no or an ill effect on my teachers from both sides of the aisle, on the road. Then, when no one had to listen to me actually expressing my views but could see my views presented in summary in the Papers Presented by Scholars in the weekly review of major conferences all over the country—I did 10 conferences in two years, more than even any professor much less any graduate student—did I get any respect within the department. Only after my advisers finally heard my defense of my dissertation (after SIX YEARS of guiding me through it) did they begin to understand my idea about how literature works.

It was too late for me. I had to endure SIX years of being accused of being a conservative and too liberal at the same time. I felt I was a man without a country the entire time I was in school. I got a job in the private sector, and found contentment AND IDEAS there that were not present in academic environment that I had so recently come from.

From my own experience, I feel that classrooms exist to create followers; the true independent is created outside of the classroom. But I am also capable of recognizing (once again on the basis of my own experience) that self-education is far too limiting to be useful to people who want to learn things in a systematic way. That is why I endured years of classroom instruction despite my hatred of it. In the end it has made me a better, if still misunderstood, person. I am still not sorry I went to graduate school, but I wish people had been more understanding of my differences and less compelled to shout me down without listening to my as-yet-still-tadpole ideas which only emerged in their full frog form after I got out of academia once again and was working in the private sector.

For my part, I do not believe that any solution will be able to close the gap between me and the most horrible parts of the educational experience. Not better teachers. Not the dismissal of ‘myths’ in favor of ‘facts.’ There will always be and inexorable tension between the priests and the outside prophets who turn over the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. And in my experience in America, everyone thinks they stand outside the circumscribed circle. In such a society, the only thing left to do is to paint the ‘other’ in the colors of the priesthood and yourself as a voice crying in the wilderness. In the end, such definition and redefinition is the pointless back and forth of politics. In such an environment, I learned to tune out the politics of Rush Limbaugh and Joni Mitchell—which I maintain are founded on ‘natural’ principles—to focus on what is unnatural in human life.

One of those unnatural things is the myth of the extraordinary teacher. Rather than running away from it back to an elusive ‘truth,’ as Ms. Herman does, I prefer to remember my professors as geniuses everyone (which I truly believe they were), even if they had no idea what I was talking about most of the time (Aristotle over Plato; allegory over symbol, ‘fiction’ over ‘fact’?). I wasn’t the best student, nor did I always have my ideas clear in my own head. It was their tolerance for my intermediate longings, not my hopeless ends—which were limited at best; I prefer to think of the approach I took to the problem of postmodernism in my dissertation as downright wrong—that makes me think so. So I get to the same truth by a different route than Ms. Herman, and I believe different things along the way, including my skepticism over her belief that it is by spending more money that education will be saved.

In my next work of fiction (Art in the Age of Talk Radio), I will attempt to declare my better beliefs (because more solidly thought out) in public once again. After 25 year of being rebuffed by both sides of the aisle, I don’t expect anyone to understand my take on the often severe limitations of learning, education, or even of autonomy that drives me back to an educational fold that doesn’t seem to want me. Conservatives will react to my extreme liberalism, as usual; while liberals can be counted on to circle the wagons around themselves in order to exclude me based on my non-canonical beliefs as they have always done.

Can’t win; still trying. Que cera.

Cheers.

My Facebook friends are constantly reminding me that Twitter is nothing but short status updates. While that is true, Twitter allows me more control over the flow of information to me than the limitation that Facebook places on me of having to personally know someone before they will allow me to follow them. I don’t personally know many poets or artists, so I can’t friend them on Facebook; but on Twitter I can search for poets and artists and I can follow them. And I do. This makes my engagement with the world of poetry much more balanced and complete than my engagement with my limited supply of people that I know personally.

This fits in with my notion of how I should engage the world. I should be able to take in all sorts of points of view and I should be able to expand of discard them based on my own experience.

But Is It News?

This brings up the question of whether Twitter is serious forum for journalism or whether it is simply, as many believe, a vehicle of personal perspective without the intermediary of any sort of editorial control. This was the subject of a Business Week forum recently. In their forum, aptly entitled “Twitter Isn’t Journalism,” Michael De Monte took the pro-position (that it wasn’t), while Brian Solis took the position of con (that it is).

De Monte writes of “Russell Williams, a former Canadian Air Force colonel”:

How did a respected base commander manage to live a double life as a sexual predator?

This question can’t be answered in 140-character chunks.

I couldn’t agree more. But even as De Monte poses the question as one of 140 characters not being enough to do the ‘full story’ of the sexually predatory base commander, he doesn’t address the role of editorial decision making in the skewing of the news away from its stated goal of being ‘objective.’

I for one don’t think that we can have a perfectly (or even fairly) objective media. I learned this from Nietzsche, who talked about all positions in the universe being motivated by interested interpreters, though I am sure that others had thought of it before and certainly since. It is one of the reasons that, though I don’t always agree with him, I respect Limbaugh for his early adoption of the principle of targeted knowledge in the age of journalistic objectivity. And it’s why I can’t agree with Rockefeller’s calls for a return to ‘fair and balanced’ news under the guise of a return to the Fairness Doctrine.

De Monte frames the question in terms of editors who come between the raw facts, which are just one person’s ‘subjective’ response to a single event, and the shaping of a story into ‘unbiased’ news story by editors and writers who collect all sorts of information from many sources. I don’t believe that any editor or writer is furnished with an unbiased mind. I wonder what he would say if I was there to ask him a question about journalistic bias. I’ll bet he would say (although I can’t possibly know) that editors and writers have been trained to put bias out of their minds. I wonder what he would say when I start laughing for ten minutes at his thoroughly naïve response. I can’t know that, either, I suppose.

I want to be clear here. Editorial bias is okay with me, because I trust myself to make my own judgments through my own (biased) mind. My mind has been trained to look for bias in myself and others and to put information on a firmer (though not completely firm) basis through gathering news from as many sources as possible. I also have been trained to be skeptical when someone tells me to trust them implicitly because they are completely honest. That may be so, but I prefer to be more cautious.

Brian Solis responds that

If we define journalism as the reporting of news, then yes, it qualifies as a new form of journalism. With every new iterative update, social graphs transform into a highly organized information distribution system that resembles an Amber Alert network for the social Web—with far greater speed, reach, impact, and resonance. To deny it is to deny the voice of humanity.

Is it merely a recitation of the facts? Only after news media catch up with the news that had already trended for at least an hour before they could respond. I call this the information divide, the time between a news event, when it breaks on Twitter, and when the news media finally reports it. This is why news teams are now monitoring Twitter streams much in the same way medical professionals monitor the pulse in the ER.

So he thinks that Tweets are matters of ‘fact’ which breaks on Twitter and the news reporters who gather and digest the news. Just the other day I had the experience of posting a Tweet on the death of Elizabeth Taylor minutes before the Chicago Tribune reported it to me. But I’m not sure that even that experience makes the Twitter universe one of facts alone.

The reason I like Twitter better than other news sources if that I can avoid the editorial processes that have come to dominate the news since the advent of Limbaugh. The problem with the news these days is that everyone of ‘us’ is following the objective truth and everyone feels that it is up to ‘us’ to defend ‘the truth’ from the depredations of ‘them’ who are not in full and complete and whole possession of ‘the truth.’ I understand that this doesn’t sound silly and foolish to others, but I gotta tell ya, it sounds bat-crazy to me. I’m with Augustine who hungered after the truth but could only find that truth through the experience of faith (not reason) in the inimitable miracle of Jesus Christ. I don’t believe in the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus (I wasn’t there so I can’t know whether it was true anymore than St. Paul or Jesus can know; that’s why they put so much faith in faith), but I am a little disturbed when someone tells me to put my faith in them rather than the experience of my own eyes.

Why I Prefer Twitter to Mainstream News Sources

I actually prefer to think of myself in the world in terms of art and poetry, which holds out the possibility of complete humanity, and not in terms of the world of politics, which points its adherents to vaunt the politics of ‘us’ as whole and complete and to decry the politics of ‘them’ as wholly wrong and possibly (probably) evil.

Having said that, I’m not sure that art holds out the possibility of announcing the future to the rest of us before we have arrived there, as the vestiges of the avant-garde of the 60s and 70s thought. Instead, art has stood on its laurels as new ideas have come without being absorbed by the art world. Such a posture makes artists of the select group that accepts the premises of the art world(s) while excluding those who do not agree. The basis of exclusion of some people—and believe me, many people don’t agree with the sometimes ridiculous conclusions of art-world insiders—turns art-world insiders from inclusive people who want more folks to appreciate art on any terms into a group of purists who declare themselves as arbiters of taste for ‘us’ who may determine matters of taste for the rest of ‘them’s like me.

This exclusion has happened to me more I would like to (or can) remember in grad school. Then, I used to couch my language in ‘politically correct’ terms. After I got out of academia, it just makes me crazy. I had also learned that there is not much you can to when you are faced with people who know they are right and that you (in this case me) are wrong. I also had learned that their opinions don’t really matter much and can easily be ignored.

The same thing has been happening with mainstream news sources who, after the arrival of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have been adamant in their insistence that ‘us’ are the ‘real’ news and that ‘them’ are not news at all. That may be but, how could you prove it except by a petitio principii (look it up here) by which you rely on your own premises. The game’s changed since I was young and there were only five English language channels on television. If you are still using principles that held true when I was a young man, then I would advise you to look more closely at your fundamental premises. They may not (I would say they aren’t) the same now as when I grew up.

I like Twitter because it allows me to move back to the center of a universe that has been decentered of self as a guiding principle. Sure, I know that Tweets are lowly pieces of unfiltered interpretations of events, but I don’t believe in uninterpreted information. I certainly don’t trust the news media to draw out the ‘truth’ through a lengthy intermediary editorial process (is it just me who finds that notion absurd?).

More likely, I feel that the New York Times will use that intermediate editorial time to align their take on the news with the liberal slant, just as Fox News will align their take on events with the conservative slant. That doesn’t make me want to give up watching either Fox News or reading the New York Times. Both have feeds that I use to monitor the news. But both are extremely focused on relatively narrow areas of life. They are centered on politics almost exclusively and that only on three coastal cities (Washington, New York, and LA). The rest of ‘them’ who have not flown from ‘flyover’ country to the coastal cities where ‘authentic being’ is available don’t get a voice in the national conversation.

That’s too bad, but ‘that’s the way it is.’

My Liberal Bent

I am extremely liberal in my social views. For instance, I don’t agree with the government’s war on drugs. I am not an advocate for any firm position, but I believe that if people aren’t going to take responsibility for their own actions then is it fruitless to have government take responsibility for them. I go so far in my thinking as to say that it would not be unfair to legalize heroin and other hard drugs on the principle that what you do in the privacy of your home is nobody’s business. Drug laws seem (to me) to weaken the American character, which is built on the most extensive rights of any nation in the world. That includes the right to make (sometimes irresponsible, sometimes irredeemable) mistakes.

I am also for liberalization of gambling on the same principle. It is none of the government’s business whether people want to gamble their lives away. And I do think that here the Pareto Principle applies. Most who gamble lose. But I also think that the instinct for gambling seems to be one the reasons that America is the most creative country in the world. Often when people gamble, they lose; but when they win, they win big. The conservative notion that others should be as disciplined as they present themselves to be are (and I have no reason to believe that they are any more or less disciplined then the rest of humanity) sets up unsustainable boundaries between right and wrong. Only the ‘us’es among us have discipline; ‘they’ do not. Thus ‘us’ can ignore ‘them.’ In my experience (but then, who am I?) this places unnecessary boundaries in the way of maximal freedom.

I make my case with musicians that I have known. Musicians are not the most disciplined people I have ever known in my life. Many smoke a lot of ‘pot’ (I am sure I am showing my age in an age when ‘chronic’ as a name for ‘weed’ is over ten years old); others, like my childhood hero Eric Clapton, have used heroin on the basis of their belief that it was only by diving to the depths of heroin use that they could recreate ‘the uncreated conscience of [their] race’ in ‘the smithy of [their] souls’ what they could not create by living on the surface.

Who am I to argue with a master artist like Eric Clapton or a master wordsmith like James Joyce? Yes, Clapton eventually realized that his drug use had unintended consequences, and he got off drugs at great expense of his time. And in both the doing of drugs and his kicking them, he wasted his time, which could have been put more profitably to creating music.

It was only after his unproductive years as a heroin addict that he realized his full potential as a musician in his return to his roots in his From the Cradle album. Action requires a level head as well as the depth of experience to flesh out the full range of human experience.

His experience parallels mine. When I was a full-time user of drugs, I was exploring the Carl Jung experience of the ‘Secret Sharer.’ Like Clapton, I soon learned that if I continued using drugs that I could explore my potential, but I couldn’t put my potential into action. So I quit drugs (and cigarettes) on June 2, 1984 at 2:30 AM. and got my life on track. I went back to school after having dropped out for four years. But I continued to draw on my experience as a former user of drugs.

This puts me at odds with conservatives, who want to enforce good behavior on those who are not as disciplined as they are and who often (not always) cannot peer beyond their too small sphere. I am no longer a drug user, but I recognize that the use of drugs can open up closed minds; I am not a regular gambler, but I recognize the need to gamble and have even authored a book on gambling, (Poker Tales); I am not a musician, but I recognize that there are other approaches than mine to the same ends. Who am I to judge others on the basis of my limited experience?

My Conservative Bent

People who use drugs often (though not always) end up as fools. They don’t start off that way; they start off looking to have a good time or (as I did) wanting a deeper exploration of their consciousness than their restricted suburban world allowed them. But eventually most of them (not all) trade their active life for a life in which they can explore more thoroughly their potential but which more often interferes with their long term prospects for putting their potential into action. And as they become more and more dependent on their need for drugs or alcohol, and they lose their original intention to explore their deeper consciousness to the animal need to feed their habit, which gradually becomes their new motivation. In losing their concentration on reason or simple fun to the animal id, people undergo a change of state that many (not all) will eventually find undesirable.

I recognize that some people will fall into the trap of drugs, as Eric Clapton did, but unlike Clapton not all will get out. And it is for this reason that I think people should educate themselves to the dangers of marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin use before they blithely get involved with them on the (false) promise that their use is a victimless crime. That is only true if you don’t count the damage to your potential, or if you’re old-fashioned to your soul. And the self-congratulatory rhetoric that surrounds drug users use won’t change the facts that you will encounter when you start doing drugs.

And (and this is important) you can’t know in advance that you will be a person who can use drugs recreationally for years without getting addicted, or whether you will be waking up a year from now looking only for your crack pipe. Only time will tell which outcome you can expect. I was always too willful to ever subsume my reason to the animal need for drugs or alcohol; and when one of my friends who was already at 18 a young alcoholic bet me that I couldn’t quit drinking for a week, I quit for two, to his regret, for he lost one of his most reckless drinking buddies. On the other hand, I was addicted to cigarettes, and had he asked me to quit those, I would definitely failed.

The lesson is this: the effects of your drug, alcohol, or cigarettes use can only be measured in time. There is no way to predict definitively in advance how you will react (though there are some indicators; having a parent who drinks a lot is an indicator that you will have a greater tendency to do the same).

My point is not to restrict your experience; my point is to recommend that you take a good hard look at your experience before you blithely jump into the unknown future and to urge you to be realistic about your real prospects. So everybody can do what they want, but there are costs to various behaviors, and you must weigh them correctly. You are not perfect.

This is what I have told my kids about my own drug use, in case you are wondering. I tell them what I have done; I leave nothing out. This includes the fun I had, as well as my reservations about the risks, which include harsh jail sentences that are much more serious than they were in the 70s when my drug use was at its peak. Having scared the crap out of them, I back off and tell them that the choice is up to them whether or not they want to do drugs themselves. (I am helped in this by being married to a church-going woman who finds that appalling, so I warn them about the possibility that she will blow up and lock them in their room forever if they are ever caught using drugs, as well).

I apply this sometimes harsh sense of responsibility to all areas of freedom. I encourage my kids to gamble, because that is the key to unlocking the American experience. But gambling could become a problem for them if they (or you, for that matter) take it too far. All musicians are gamblers; some (and I would say most) musicians don’t make it in the music business. There are many reasons for this. Some lack natural talent. Others lack drive. Some musicians get involved with drugs, which take over their existence and rob them of their dreams. The traps along the way are things that people should educate themselves about before jumping in to any effort, not just music. Life is a gamble; you only get once chance at it.

This is why I am for an armed virtue of the sort that I read about in Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations.’ Yes, when she was a young woman she thought she could travel up to the skies as her hero Du Bartas had. Eventually she realized, as apparently Du Bartas never did, that the way of imitation of God was blocked and that she would have to find another way forward. She transformed his tropes into something that she could actually live out in the real world without the interference of an impossible metaphor.

When I was in college, this stance on armed virtue put me on the wrong side of my drug-using friends, who could not understand my stance against doing drugs. They thought that my refusal of drugs was perhaps a refusal of them. I disagreed at the time, and I still do. I needed a clear head to work my way through my complicated dissertation on Aristotle and Allegorical Aesthetics (I know; how cool am I?), so I told them that they were free to use drugs in my presence, but I continue to abstain.

My drug-using friends were insecure (on account I thought of their using drugs; but I don’t actually know that), and they could not leave me to my chosen lifestyle. My attitude towards drug use was a challenge to my drug-using friends, who made it their business to convert me. One of my friends who studied the philosophy of Nietzsche under Nietzsche’s biographer, Richard Schacht (yes, THE Richard Schacht), thought I was limiting myself by not exploring all aspects of my consciousness. I calmly explained my feelings on the matter of drug use, but to no avail. My liberal wife, who is much more conservative on the use of drugs than her husband is, refused for different reasons. So for a year, my friend would offer me a ‘toke’ on his ‘pipe’ with the same expression: ‘Bowl?’ he would offer, and I and my wife would refuse. It’s been close to twenty years, but in our house, every time either she or I ask for a bowl (usually around dinner time) we repeat in our best imitation of his accent: ‘Bowl?’ Then we chuckle.

What I Want Out of Friendship

I want something more out of friendship than to be cajoled into partisan positions of left or right. I had friends in graduate school, and I was able to be civil to my friends, even when I thought they were making mistakes with their lives and while they thought I was making mistakes in mine. It was none of my business what they did with their lives, and all of us continued happily on our individual paths. Facebook, in my case, has placed an impediment in my friendships. People want more from me than I am willing to give them. When they want my friendship, I willingly grant it. When they want my allegiance, they need to earn it; and that means meeting me in the middle space of conversation where we can work things out. But, in the most political of my friends–those who post most often–they are so convinced of their position that they join groups like ‘Republicans Are Idiots And Arguing With Them Is A Waste Of Time!,’ leaving a person like me who has mixed feelings on politics to decide whether I am with ‘us’ or with ‘them.’ There is no middle ground in the age of the Internet.

Politics and Aristotle

My feelins on politics in the Internet Age has been guided by a similar experience that I had in grad school, where I studied the implications of Aristotle on the literary device of allegory (it was cooler than you think; okay, maybe it was just me). It was obscure, but I had been told to study something that no one else was studying, and one day at the beginning of my graduate career I alighted on that. And one of the most philosophical books I read in grad school was Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. In the beginning of that book, Aristotle points to politics is the end of human life.

Now, in the wake of the failure of the scholastic metaphysical perspective at the end of the Middle Ages, intellectuals had gone searching after the next big thing. They found it in Aristotle’s rational behavior, which is laid out, not in his Metaphysics but in his Nichomachean Ethics. There, he had founded his position on the basis of his (surely correct) belief that Plato’s separation of Form in a separate realm was nothing more than “poetical metaphors.”

But, further, all other things cannot come from the Forms in any of the usual senses of ‘from’. And to say that they are patterns and the other things share in them is to use empty words and poetical metaphors. For what is it that works, looking to the Ideas? And anything can either be, or become, like another without being copied from it, so that whether Socrates or not a man Socrates like might come to be; and evidently this might be so even if Socrates were eternal. And there will be several patterns of the same thing, and therefore several Forms; e.g. ‘animal’ and ‘two-footed’ and also ‘man himself’ will be Forms of man. Again, the Forms are patterns not only sensible things, but of Forms themselves also; i.e. the genus, as genus of various species, will be so; therefore the same thing will be pattern and copy.

Aristotle wanted to get back to a more secure foundation in nature and away from Plato’s interfering fictions that defined humankind in terms that could never be securely believed without an act of faith (see my old post on Plato’s Atlantis for more explanation); but he retained many of of the Greek foundations of thought in his new ‘scientific’ configuration of the universe. Part of this was his commitment to politics as the center of the Greek universe (and not the individual, which was discovered as the corrective to pagans believing that by following Socrates in suicide that they were doing God’s work and not Satan’s; in the Christian world, such an invitation to suicide was looked on as an invitation to forgo your immortal soul for a heaven that only existed as a poetical metaphor).

When I was in grad school there was another wave of the Enlightenment/Modern perspective which attempted to recenter human purpose away from metaphysics and toward a more rational and so manageable politics. But, being so systematically excluded from both left and right, I found that both shared similar positions. Both left and right were devoted to ‘natural rights.’ But I have come to believe in a more Hobbesian approach that opposes human community to nature. This is the genesis of my feeling that post-Machiavellian thinkers like Mao, Mussolini, and Hitler rely on taking credit for their own accomplishments and throwing blame off onto the ‘other.’ This may may even work for the lifetime of a dictator, but eventually the statutes of Stalin and Mao come down, because who’s the best scapegoat for the next dictator than the last, whose actions caused real pain to those people who survived the purge or pogrom.

The horrors of the 20th century were built on the natural perspective. I was ashamed of the sins of my grad school friends, who would declare themselves on the right side of history (for as Descartes says of reason somewhere ‘every one thinks himself…abundantly provided with it whether they are or not’). Then they would declare themselves against the ‘other,’ the evil ‘them’s who disagreed with ‘us.’ This turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When they would spout off about evil conservatives, they weren’t thinking that I could actually be one. Such sins were reserved for the ‘inhuman,’ the ‘other,’ the ‘them.’ And that is a large part of my decision to drop out of the search for and academic job (though that was not the only or even the primary reason). I could not get a break in such an environment in which people were declaring themselves rather than debating others.

Such a policy, which I find grounded in Aristotle’s more rational and naturalistic policy of accounting for forms in nature rather than in the world opened up to us by fiction, in fact disjoins its adherents from the ‘ends’ of humanity and places them into opposed political parties that are fighting over the same ground, leaving out the whole but difficult fount of human nature for a much more manageable position in which the ‘us’s can be distinguished from the ‘them’s in an easy (though philosophically problematical) action. This is why, in my opinion, conservatives (like Rush Limbaugh) and liberals (like Joni Mitchell) are fighting over a piece of ground based in ‘nature,’ while leaving out the ‘fictional’ constructions that (as far as I can tell) always (ALWAYS!) come between our ideals and their realization.

My take on the ‘fiction’ that my academic friends ignore is the basis of my distinction between movie death, which I love to see, and real death, which is really tragic. When my liberal academic friends would preach a bloodless revolution, I would think about just how tragic it would be if they ever got their way. Fortunately, none of them really meant what they were saying. Such literalism was for ‘them’s of the universe. ‘Us’ reserved the right to deconstruct what we had built in our minds; ‘them’ were stuck standing by whatever they chose to say.

Why I’m Taking A Break From Facebook

I have decided that my friends, once so gentle, have had their passions roused. That’s okay, because having passions is a necessary aspect of human life, but is only part of the human experience. See my Poker Tales for my take on the difference between the purely rational man as a psychopath and the emotional man who is the biggest sucker at the poker table; life requires us to maintain both in a fragile balance that few master.

So, while I believe that it is important for people to take a position within the world, rather than the starlight perspective where everything is hermetically sealed off from involvement in everyday affairs. But as far Aristotle and my Facebook friends are concerned, it is wrong to think that politics encompasses the entirety of the human experience. As someone once said,

there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I feel as though I was being asked to choose between two radically incomplete alternatives; and when in trying to assert my sense of the world as I see it, I was getting lectured by people who were not listening to my points on account of their believing that they knew both the extent of the possibilities of the world and my place in it. I was reduced to saying what the ‘them’s were saying in a universe that had no room for anything else than the one true an undoubtable position. On this account, they didn’t have to listen to what I was saying; they already knew.

I had been there before in grad school. I had dropped of academia when it became apparent that there was no room for people like me, who had some serious doubts about the rush to take on the mantle of a political posture, whether of left of of right. Having spent two years trying (and failing) to convince my dear friends, I have decided to drop out of Facebook for many of the same reason. My friendships are much (much, much, much, much) more important to me than any political stance that I or they could ever take.