Lance Mannion

The quotable Ta-Nehisi Coates: How not to be stupid

“

I've said this before but conservatives often perceive liberal attachment to diversity as a kind of "everyone's a winner" cuddle party, where we sit around exchanging rice-cakes and hating on the military. But the great strength of diversity is it forces you into a room with people who have experiences very different from your own. It's all fine and good to laugh at Sherrod Brown dancing to Jay-Z. But dude is outside his lane and he's learning something. M.C. Rove should be so lucky.

If you are not around people who will look at you like you are crazy when you make stupid claims about other people's experiences, then you tend to keep saying stupid things about other people's experiences. It is not enough to pay a political price, or even to be shamed into silence. You have to come to believe -- in your heart -- that sincerity itself is not the same as accurate information. It is not enough for you to not be "the party of stupid" or to "stop saying stupid things" you must show some active commitment toward being less stupid.

”

Read the whole post, To Stop Being the Party of Stupid You Must Stop Being Stupid, at the Atlantic.

Assuming what we assume we know we know: Reality-based non-thinking. Part Two.

This is Part Two of Three Four.  Part One is here.  Moment of self-doubt here. Based on some of the comments on Part One, I feel like I have to point out that, although I’m being critical, skeptical, and a bit cynical, I am working my way towards a defense of the Reality-based Community.

Kevin Drum knows stuff.

Everybody who reads his blog knows this. Of course he knows stuff. And he thinks about stuff. He’s a smart and thoughtful guy.

Sometimes, though, he mixes up what he thinks with what he knows.

Happens to the best of us.

Happens to the rest of us.

Happens to the me of us more than I would like or like to admit.

Sheryl Sandberg has written a book.  Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.  Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg says jump, Sandberg makes sure everybody jumps the right height and the right distance in the right direction and comes down on the right spot.  Among other things, her book offers advice to women on asserting themselves at the office.  The world needs more women in positions of influence and power, and Sandberg believes that if young women follow her example at least some of them will rise to those positions and from there they can help make the world jump to a better place.

At least, I think that’s what’s in her book.  I don’t know. I haven’t read it.  I have read a lot about it.  Mostly by women who didn’t like what Sandberg had to say in her book.  Or rather what they thought she had to say.  Most of them hadn’t read Lean In.  It hadn’t been released yet.

Boiled down, it seemed to me, their main objection was that, as far as they knew, Sandberg hadn’t written the sort of book they thought she should have written.

Other women came to Sandberg’s defense.  Sandberg had the right to write any sort of book she wanted, they said, not that they knew what sort of book she’d written either. They hadn’t read it for the same reason the first set of women hadn’t.  But they were pretty sure that whatever Sandberg had written, there was a message in it that needed to be taught and Sandberg was just the person to teach it.

What it came down to, though, was that both sides were made up of a lot of smart and thoughtful people who knew what was in a book they hadn’t read.

I noticed that the actual release of the book wasn’t followed by many blog posts, op-eds, or reviews in which writers on either side revised their initial judgments or stepped up to declare how right they’d been.

Probably this was because editors and producers decided the subject had been pretty well exhausted already.  No more page views in it.  No ratings increases.

But I knew better.

I knew that what had happened was that people in both groups realized that Lean In turned out to be what it always sounded like to me, another version of a sort of memoir a certain type of reader can’t get enough of, another How to be Me by a corporate careerist preaching a gospel of self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment through climbing the corporate ladder, this one being a little different in that the author appears to have more of a social conscience and more self-awareness than the usual perpetrators of these straight to the remainder table soporifics.

See, I knew what was in the book already too.

At any rate, as far as I know, Kevin Drum hasn’t presumed to know what’s in Lean In without having read it.

He does know something though.

He knows that CBS’ Norah O’Donnell wouldn’t have asked a man the same questions she asked Sandberg when she interviewed her on 60 Minutes this past Sunday.

This passage from tonight's 60 Minutes interview with [Sandberg] was striking:

Norah O'Donnell: You know, Sheryl, people are going to say, "Oh she's got a charmed life, She went to Harvard. She's a billionaire."

Sheryl Sandberg: Yep.

Norah O'Donnell: "And she's telling me what I should do?" Do they have a point?

Sheryl Sandberg: I'm not trying to say that everything I can do everyone can do. But I do believe that these messages are completely universal.

....Norah O'Donnell: And for those who say, "Easy for you to say?"

Sheryl Sandberg: It is easier for me to say this. And that's why I'm saying it.

Can you imagine anyone posing questions like these to Richard Branson or Jack Welch? Last I looked, they were pretty rich too, and they've also written bestselling books providing advice on business and life. Nobody ever asks them why they think they can offer advice to the masses from their lofty perches, but apparently it feels natural to ask Sandberg these questions just because her primary audience is other women…

Makes sense to me.  Except…

These are exactly the sort of questions guys who write the sort of book Sandberg appears to have written get asked.  They’re old standards.  The first question even the most gullible customer lining up at the wagon to buy the snake oil asks is How do I know this will work for me?

All those guys must have been asked variations of that question every time they sat down for an interview.

Of course I don’t know this.  I don’t have the transcripts handy and my memory doesn’t serve because, as I’m sure I’ve made clear, the subject bores me silly so any memory I have of those guys being interviewed is a memory of when for some reason or another I couldn’t change the channel.  Even so, my memory is pretty good, but it’s not so good I can remember every question asked and answered in every interview I caught in passing God knows how long ago.

And I’d bet it’s the same for Drum.

I doubt he has the transcripts handy either.  If he did any googling, he’d have probably put it in his post.  His memory may be way better than mine, but it’s probably not that good.  And, in fact, since he’s only human, whatever memory he does have of any of those interviews has probably been…emended…by the assumption that questions like that wouldn’t have been asked.

We’re very good at “remembering” what it’s convenient for us to remember.

Drum's post isn’t a statement of something he knows. It’s just something he thinks.

He has good reason to think it, based on things he and we do know.

We know women in the public eye are subjected to different standards.  We know they are patronized, that their opinions are trivialized and marginalized, we know they’re treated (and dismissed) as more emotional and reactive than men, as less logical, less practical, less intelligent.  We know that if they are young and attractive, like Sandberg, they’re sexualized and in that way demeaned and dismissed as unserious.  We know that women who resist this sexualization, either deliberately and consciously or because they just don’t fit the prevailing standards for sexy, are blamed and derided, insulted, mocked, and openly despised and attacked as if it’s their job and their responsibility to be young, pretty, charming, deferential, and willing to at least give the impression they’re open to, you know, the possibility.

We know women are discriminated against generally and more specifically on the job.  We know they are denied promotions, raises, and perks that their male coworkers receive as a matter of course.  We know they’re expected to defer to their bosses and take orders without complaint in a way the men around them aren’t and wouldn’t stand for.  We know they have their ideas stolen when they aren’t outright dismissed.  We know they’re harassed and we know that harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about asserting male dominance and often the goal is to drive them from the workplace.

We know all this happens.

And we know it happens not just in the business world but in areas that ought to be and routinely congratulate themselves on being more enlightened---academia, the sciences, the arts, the comic book and gaming communities, the liberal blogosphere.

But how do we know it?

We know because we’ve seen it happen.  The women among us have had it happen to them, time and time again.  The men among us have watched it happen.  Sometimes we’ve even made it happen or let it happen by not speaking up or by not even noticing.  All of us have read about it.  Heard about it.  There are studies!  I can’t point to any at the moment. I don’t have any copies handy.  I can’t remember any specifics.  But I’ve read them or at least read about them, so I know they’re there and I know what they show.

So we know!

And if it happens in that many other cases, then we can assume it’s happening in this one.

Probably.

Maybe.

It’s a good bet, at least.

Anyway, if it’s not happening here, it happens often enough that it might as well be, so I’m not really wrong if I talk about it as if it is happening even if I don’t know that it is.

Right?

Here’s the thing.

Much of what we know, we don’t know, we just believe. We accept it, usually without thought.

There may be lots of good reasons for believing it, but that doesn’t change what’s going on.  We’re treating an opinion as if it’s a self-evident fact.

We do this.  By we I mean people.  Our thinking is lazy and besides there are only so many hours in the day.  If we had to think everything through we’d never get out the door in the morning.  We have to make decisions based on what we know, even though we know that a lot of what we know we don’t really know.  We just assume.

And we have bad habits of mind.  We over-privilege our own experiences. We are all subject to confirmation bias.  We treat coincidence as causation.  (That last one’s the basis of all religion.)  We reflexively defend our egos and argue not about what’s happening but about what we want to happen or need to be happening to flatter our vanities and advance our self-interests.

And those of us who are politically minded have the really bad habit of applying our political beliefs as if they are scientific theories, proven beyond question and universally descriptive and prescriptive.

What Kevin Drum saw happening in that 60 Minutes interview with Sandberg might very well have been happening, but not in the way he thinks.  It might not have been in the questions themselves that the double-standard was being applied against Sandberg but in O’Donnell’s tone or in her attitude or in her eyes.  It might have been in a single, quick nod of the head or raising of an eyebrow or recrossing of a leg.  Drum might have seen right but assumed wrong.

His assumption being that he knew what was going on based on stuff he remembered and not on what he was seeing and hearing at the moment, privileging his base of knowledge over his own instincts, a common mistake among intellectuals and another form of temptation for members of the reality-based community.

We don’t just think that because we respect the facts we have the facts. We think that if we think something, believe something, know something it must be based on our stored knowledge of the facts.

It can’t be based on something so fleeting as a casual observation or---ha!---a momentary impression.

Can it?

End of Part Two.  Don’t worry I’m getting there.  Part Three is on the way.

Photo courtesy of CBS. Here’s the transcript and a link to the video from the 60 Minutes interview with Sandberg.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, published by Knopf, is available from Amazon in hardback and for kindle.

Commuting with tweeters

Some mornings Twitter is a good way to catch up on the headlines.  Other days it’s like being on a packed subway full of people who got a lousy night’s sleep and haven’t had enough coffee on their way to work at jobs they hate.

In which I find myself seeing eye to eye with George W. Bush’s former speechwriter

I’ve long believed that people’s political views are more an expression of temperament than reasoned thought.  We’re all a blend of liberal and conservative flavors and how liberal and how conservative we are depends on how much of each got poured into us at birth and what life has added to the mix or drained from it since.  I’ve got enough conservative in me to make me worry about what I’ll be like when I’m old and cranky.

Older and crankier.

David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush speechwriter and now conservative blogger at the Daily Beast, has a good helping of liberal in him for as stanch a Republican as he insists he still is.  The story goes that he let this side of himself show once too often and it got him frog-marched from the American Enterprise Institute. Frum himself denies that’s what happened.  It was a simple salary dispute. He wanted one and AEI decided they did want to pay it.  Whatever the case, it seems since he’s been blogging he’s felt freer to let his freak flag fly and while it’s more often the case that when I read his stuff I’m not out and out appalled, from time to time, and those times aren’t rare, I find myself nodding in agreement and even occasionally shouting out, “Yes! David! My man!”

Now, here’s the thing.  Having a liberal streak doesn’t mean you necessarily endorse liberal policies.  Nor does having a conservative streak mean you necessarily endorse conservative ones.  It’s simply that you can see the other side’s point.  But there’s more to it.  It also means that you can see how a liberal policy can lead to a conservative goal or vice versa.  An example of the former is same-sex marriage.  Andrew Sullivan makes this argument forcefully and often.  An example of the latter is Obamacare.  It works like this.

The vast majority of us share two broad goals, defending the status quo and expanding opportunity, the status quo being a generally well-ordered, safe, and comfortable society, in which we’re reasonably free to shoot our mouths off, go where we want, and spend what money we have as we see fit, and expanding opportunity means giving ourselves and our fellow citizens more of stake in maintaining the status quo by letting more of us share in more of the benefits of living in this well-ordered, safe, and comfortable society, although that often requires changing the status quo.

Simply put, conservatives are more inclined to defend the status quo, even if that means denying some people some opportunity, while liberals tend to want to increase opportunity even if that means disrupting some aspect of the status quo if not the whole of it.  The point is that the interests of conservatives and liberals are often the same.

So, yes, Obamacare preserves the health insurance industry and gives insurance companies a huge infusion of cash, but everybody’s insured, so everybody shares in the order, safety, comfort, and freedom provided by the status quo, which gives everybody a stake in preserving the status quo.

You can see where this is going, right?  Most self-styled conservatives these days can’t.  Many progressives can and they don’t like it.

The object of liberalism is to create more conservatives.

It should be obvious to conservatives that the fewer people with a stake in preserving the status quo the more people you'll have with reason to disrupt it. It is obvious to some conservatives. It just used to be obvious to most conservatives. In order to give more people a stake in defending the status quo, increase people's opportunities to enjoy the benefits of the status quo.

Conservatives used to see the good in spreading the wealth---in redistribution. Although Republicans have always been fond of their millionaires, they used to be almost as fond of the middle and working class. The object of economic progress wasn’t just to create and coddle millionaires. The object was to give more people the same stake in maintaining the status quo that millionaires have.  Conservatives, generally, think---or thought---this was best done on the local level and by encouraging private enterprise. But it's why there are conservatives who support expanding civil rights, strong public schools, and even--- a shocker---progressive taxation. (That's where the 47 percent comes in, Mitt.) The point is that sometimes the best way to be a good conservative is to be liberal, and once upon a time most conservatives understood that.

Here's how liberalism and conservatism are mixed up in me.  As a straight, white, middle class American male, I have always benefited from the status quo.  But being a kind, decent-hearted, well-meaning, and generous guy, I want everybody to have what I have; however, being a selfish, self-protective, and greedy guy too, I figure that the more people who have what I have, the more people I'll have on my side if somebody tries to take it all away.

At the moment, the people who are trying to take it away are rich Right Wing corporatists and their political henchmen like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Seeing this doesn't make me a liberal. You don't have to be a liberal to see that Romney and Ryan are threats to the status quo.

Defending the status quo by default means defending established privilege and more and more over the course of the last several generations the conservatism of the Republican Party has degenerated into an angry defense of privilege alone.  Any and all privilege.  White privilege. Male privilege. The privileges that come from having been born straight, Christian, and a citizen.  The privileges that come from being rich.  Especially the privileges that come from being rich.  The corporatist Right and the Religious Right and the Tea Party Right are united in a common defense of their privileges and don’t give a damn about expanding opportunity.  In fact, they look at expanded opportunities as a form of theft.  They see life as a zero-sum endeavor.

“Whenever you get something, I lose something.  However your opportunity expands, mine contracts.  Whatever you have, you’ve taken from me.”

The corporatists, the Christianists, and the Tea Party types have as their common goal a taking back of America, by which they mean a taking away of opportunity from those they perceive as having robbed them of their privileges.

This isn’t conservative.  It’s reactionary.  It’s destructive.  And it’s just plain mean.

David Frum sees that and it bothers him. In fact, it infuriates him.  And it’s the basis for my finding myself in agreement with him from time to time.

It’s why, from time to time, he can sound like a liberal…because he is being liberal.

Take for example his set of tweets last week on why he thinks Romney is losing, which includes this:

(4) How do you message: I'm doing away w[ith] Medicaid over the next 10 yrs, Medicare after that, to finance a cut in the top rate of tax to 28%?

And ends with:

(10) But voters do care about the q[uestion]: what will this presidency do for me? And "dick you over" is not a winning answer

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

______________________

Neither my liberalism nor Frum’s conservatism are all that adulterated, so although I often find myself nodding in agreement, it’s usually the case that I see his point not that we’re seeing eye to eye.  But one thing we do see eye to eye on, it turns out, is Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times.

Couple weeks back, in my post Shake every hand, kiss every baby, I mentioned, more or less in passing, how the “self-made” entrepreneurs who paraded up on the stage at the Republican Convention to congratulate themselves on their self-reliance and go-getterism and whine about how the President doesn’t appreciate their wonderfulness reminded me of Josiah Bounderby, the mill owner and banker in Hard Times who likes to boast about how he worked his way up from rags to riches all on his own while leaving out the part of his life story in which his mother beggared herself scrimping and saving to put him through school and give him his start in business.

Frum was reminded of Bounderby too and he’s devoted a whole post to the comparison and to Hard Times which he calls “a brilliant anticipation of this summer's debate over ‘you didn't build that’” and “reply to the still-recurring fantasy of ‘Going Galt’.”

“The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it…”

The quotable Ezra Klein on Romney and the 47 percent:

Still, for my money, the worst of Romney’s comments were these: “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

When he said this, Romney didn’t just write off half the country behind closed doors. He also confirmed the worst suspicions about who he is: an entitled rich guy with no understanding of how people who aren’t rich actually live.

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district…. [Romney] is a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars, and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it….

Read the whole post, What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility, at Bloomberg.

Via Brad DeLong.

With incense!

For non-Catholics who might not know, the Society is the Society of Jesus—-the Jesuits. Here’s the quotable Charlie Pierce on Paul Ryan and the Jesuits:

A long while ago, I warned Paul Ryan about screwing with the Society. The Society has been at this politics thing for close to 500 years. The Society is very good at it. They were not afraid of kings, nor of Japanese emperors, nor khans of the deserts, nor of popes back when the popes had real armies. The Society, like nuns, will fk your shit up. With incense. You think the Society’s going to shy away from a two-bit zombie-eyed granny-starver from Janesville?

Read the whole post at Esquire.

The Best Job

Long ago I came to the conclusion that John McPhee has the best job in the world.

He gets paid to go out into the woods, take a walk around, find somebody who knows those woods like the back of their hand, ask them some questions, and come home and write about it.  Sometimes the woods aren’t actual woods.  They’re basketball courts or art museums or laboratories or the cargo holds and bridges of freighters or the cabs of eighteen-wheel trucks.  But often, they’re woods.

I was never able to get that job for myself, not as a full-time career at any rate.  But from time to time I have managed to get paid to do it, take a walk in the woods and come home and write about it.  My woods have been the backstages of theaters, the broadcast booth of a baseball stadium, a recording studio, a zoo, a guitar maker’s studio.  Most of the time they’ve been the inside of a lot of smart people’s heads.

One of the best things about having this blog is that I’ve been able to do it again, take a walk in the woods and come home and write about it.  Again, the woods aren’t always actual woods. Sometimes they’ve been the cafe at Barnes and Noble or the counter at the hardware store or the line at the post office or the hallways of my kids’ schools.  Sometimes they’re the contents of a book I’ve just read or they’re what I saw up on a screen or on a stage.  Sometimes they’re actual woods.  And sometimes I find the woods close to home.  Sometimes they’re on Cape Cod or in New York City.

I haven’t been able to make a living at it, but still, I’m grateful I get to do it at all, take a walk in the woods and come home and write about.

Wait. I forgot to mention the most important part of the job.

I get to take a walk in the woods, come home and write about it, and people waiting who want to read what I write.

I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days because of what’s happened to Jonah Lehrer.

Lehrer is a brilliant young science writer who’s gotten caught plagiarizing himself for his blog at the New Yorker.  He’s been cutting and pasting passages from work he’s published and posted elsewhere into his posts at the New Yorker without telling his readers---or his editors---when he does it.

Not what the New Yorker is paying him for.

It’s not Lehrer himself or the self-plagiarism that’s had me thinking.  I routinely quote myself but I make it clear that I’m quoting and include a link to the post I’m quoting from.  And of course I’ve revisited and rehashed ideas I’ve written about before. And I regularly re-post old posts, either because they’ve become relevant again or I’m feeling lazy, but I always make it clear that’s what I’m doing.  But mainly every time I sit down to write a post, I sit down to write something new or at least to say something old in a new way.  That’s the challenge.  That’s the fun of it.  That’s the point.

At least, I thought it was the point.

But according to Felix Salmon, an economics blogger of note, and deservedly so, writing, writing anything new or old, is not the point.  Blogging, says Salmon, is not writing and Lehrer got himself into trouble by making the mistake of thinking that it is.

Blogging, according to Salmon, is linking.  Linking to things other people have written.

There’s something like writing involved.  You’re out to make your readers interested in reading what you’re linking to. This means you’ve got to give them the gist in an entertaining and lively fashion and that means you have to write.  But it strikes me as a particular form of writing.

Copywriting.

Now lots of bloggers---and this includes most of the best or most popular bloggers---do this.  And it’s a good thing.

It’s useful.

But maybe Salmon didn’t intend it, but I get the feeling he thinks that anything else is a waste of the blogger’s and the reader’s time.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

I don’t do this to be useful.

I don’t write to be useful.

But should I?

Is that what I should be doing?

Like I said, the best thing about being Lance Mannion is that he gets to go out into to the woods, take a look around, ask some questions, and come home and write about it.

He’s only able to do it though because all of you are willing to read what he writes.

For which he’s very grateful.

Thank you all.

We’re off to visit Old Mother and Father Blonde today.  We have a wedding to go to tomorrow but I’m sure that at some point over the weekend we’ll be able to get over to Valley Forge.

There are woods there, you know.

I’ll take a walk around and report back.

___________________________

The Essential John McPhee:

Pieces of the Frame.

Table of Contents.

The Pine Barrens.

Coming into the Country.

Encounters with the Archdruid.

A Sense of Where You Are.

Hat tip to Jennifer Ouelette, who blogs---writes---about science at Cocktail Party Physics.

The quotable Charles Pierce: David Brooks needs to RTFM

Apparently David Brooks thinks the United States Constitution, a purely political how-to manual for organizing and operating a strong, centralized government is a moral and economic treatise whose main purpose was to make the riff-raff aware of what they owe to their betters.  In other words, he thinks it was written by Charles Murray and not James Madison in constant consultation with Thomas Jefferson.  The problem today, according to Brooks, is that the riff-raff have gotten above themselves and need a good scolding if not a stern slapping down. How dare they think they are entitled to the easy life Brooks and his rich friends have earned by virtue of being, well, rich.  Charles Pierce has a few things to say about that but he finishes with this:

Does this person, with his vast spaces for entertainment, honestly believe that the people who depend on things like Medicaid and Social Security, and small-business loans and Pell grants, are emboldened by the circumstances of their lives? Does he believe that these people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and only asking that the system be a little bit more fair are actually as smug and entitled as every syllable he's ever written proclaims Brooks to be? All over America, people are absolutely petrified that somebody in their family might get sick, thereby bankrupting them forever. All over America, people are worried that their mortgages are laden with small-print land mines. All over America, people are living in sheer abject terror that the job will disappear, or the rest of their 401K will go up in smoke, or grandma's Alzheimer's will offer them the choice of eating government cheese or letting the old girl die in her own filth in some unregulated nursing home. These are the people that David Brooks believes are destroying the country because their unreasoning hubris prevents government from making their lives even more difficult.

Crawdaddies are always up to something

Lance Mannion at Fox Island, outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hundred years ago.

When we lived in Indiana, because, once you got out of town, there was nothing much to look at in the distance but more distance, I developed the habit of looking in close.  This was when I started stocking up on guide books, learning the names of birds and trees and wildflowers, and wandering about with binoculars, which, I know, are a tool for looking into the distance, but I mostly pointed them at nearby bushes and up into trees I was standing at the base of and overhead telephone wires and the far banks of streams I could practically step across.  Our apartment in Fort Wayne was at the edge of the city and it was a short walk out of the urban into the suburban and then into the country and farmland, which, in that part of Indiana, is usually just another word for cornfield.  The landscape wasn’t as flat as I liked to complain it was but to eyes trained by a boyhood and youth spent in the Mohawk Valley of Upstate New York, with summers in the Adirondack Mountains and along the Atlantic seashore, it was…undramatic.  I wouldn’t get very far in my walks before I was bored with the view and ready to turn around and head home.

There just is no here here, I thought, with apologies to Oakland and Gertrude Stein.

I don’t remember when it dawned on me that although the landscape might be featureless it was not lifeless and I might find my walks more interesting if I started looking at that life.

I said this was when I started learning the names of birds and trees and wildflowers.  But what really happened is that I started to see birds and trees and wildflowers.

When you are standing on top of hill, looking out over the treetops of a woods that fills the valley below, it seems enough to know that those trees are maples.  But when you are standing next to a tree you have to make adjustments in your thinking, your remembering, and your seeing, that is if you’re confronted with the fact that this tree is a maple too but it’s a silver maple and those trees you grew up taking for granted were sugar maples and there’s a difference.  There are differences.  The leaves aren’t quite the same shape.  The bark has a different texture, a slightly different color.  And if you are standing under a silver maple you are probably standing on what used to be a farm.  Farmers planted them or left them standing in their fields as shade trees.  Oh, and sugar maples are hardier.  You don’t want a silver maple in your yard.  They have a tendency to rot from within.  What looks like a sturdy old tree that could stand up to a winter gale might be as hollow as a drain pipe and ready to snap in a spring breeze and come crashing down on your house.

Similarly, I learned that what I took for flocks of blackbirds---as in birds that happened to have black feathers---were flocks of red-winged blackbirds and starlings and grackles and cowbirds, which aren’t even black but brown, the females, at any rate, males are brown-headed, and that every yellow flower in the grass that wasn’t a dandelion wasn’t a buttercup either.

These discoveries were thrilling, but since regret seems to be one of my default emotions, they also had me kicking myself.  Why hadn’t I seen any of this before?  How could I have been so oblivious?  How had I gotten so far in life without knowing that all of this was right in front of my eyes, if only I’d bothered to look?

It wasn’t Indiana that was boring, it was that I was boring myself.

Maybe I was a little harsh.  What it was, likely, was that growing up where there were bends in every road and hills on the horizons, I’d learned to be on the lookout for what was around the bend or over the hill, which was usually another bend or another hill.  I took it for granted that over there was very different from right here and, intrigued, was in a hurry to get over there to see.  It didn’t occur to me that here might be an interesting place to explore.

In Indiana, here and there were pretty much the same place.

Roger Ebert grew up in Illinois, which has even more here and less there than Indiana, so he learned to look at here up close early, mostly while on his knees or stretched out on his stomach in the grass, peering at things---squirming things, swimming things, wriggling things, hopping things, slithering things---that would go unnoticed unless you got your nose right down next to them.

In my grandmother's back yard, I spent long periods frozen in immobility, a salt shaker clutched in my hand. My Uncle Bob had treacherously told me that if I could shake salt on the tail of a Robin Redbreast, I could catch it. This kept me out of his hair. There were robins everywhere, hopping on the grass, cocking their heads to the side, listening for the slithering sound that might betray a worm. I haven't seen a robin in a long time. I suppose there must be about as many around today, but my life isn't calibrated to see them…

On your knees or your stomach, the world revealed a hidden population. One day at Dougie Pierre's house, we climbed under the bridge over the Boneyard Creek to catch crawdaddies. We did catch a couple, using a kitchen sieve, and kept them in a Mason jar full of water, where I suppose they must still be. I had waded in the Boney a dozen times and never seen a crawdaddy. After I saw them, I waded no more. They're always up to something.

If you’re in the habit of thinking of Ebert as a movie critic, you should make a point of reading his blog where you will learn to think of him a writer who happens to write a lot about movies.  This post, A natural history, is a good one to start with.  But it’s about more than robins, snakes, tomato bugs, and crawdaddies, so be sure to follow the link at the end.

Thoughtful Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe, Lincoln Steffens, James Baldwin, Carl Sandberg, Abraham Lincoln…No, this is not a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.

One of James Wolcott’s few weaknesses as a writer and blogger is his ability to summarize something he’s read, a book, an essay, a blog post, or something he’s watched, a movie, a TV show, a dance, in such a way that you feel you’ve read it or seen it yourself and don’t need to follow his link.

Yes, of course, I’m being a wiseguy. That’s one of his great strengths.  But you should still follow the links.  For instance, the link to this article in the London Review of Books, A Rumbling of Things Unknown, by Jacqueline Rose.

It’s been fairly widely accepted that Marilyn Monroe was much smarter than her onscreen persona, that in fact her onscreen persona was much smarter than her onscreen persona was taken to be by those who took it at face value.  It’s also well-known---at least I think it is---that Monroe was a voracious reader and something of an aspiring intellectual and that she was both before she met Arthur Miller, who used to be given credit for “educating” her.  But in her essay Rose makes the case that Monroe was better than smart and something more interesting than a would-be intellectual.

She was thoughtful.

And she was studious and not just of books, of life and people.

And one of the subjects she thought hardest about and studied most intently was the affinity between her personal unhappiness and the unhappiness of most people. 

Wolcott gets to the heart of the matter:

It's as if Monroe instinctively, empathetically practiced the liberalism that husband Arthur Miller grandly professed. It isn't that Miller didn't practice what he preached when it came to liberalism, but that everything with him seemed to emanate from his mountain brow; with her, injustice seemed to resound metabolically, her own inner bruising and estrangement.

Rose’s essay is a long-read but worth the time, even after you’ve read Jim’s post.

So why don’t I just send you straight to London Review of Books and skip the middle-Jim?

Because then you’d miss lines like this:

[Rose’s essay] makes a fine antidote to the candy-shop sentimentality of My Week with Marilyn, in which the best performance was given by Michelle Williams' right eye between strategically drooped blonde curls as everyone else fussed about in several coats of Masterpiece Theatre furniture polish.

And that’s all you need to know about that movie.

Links.  Wolcott’s post.  Rose’s essay.

Welcome TAPPED readers

Getting a lot of traffic from the American Prospect.  Folks clicking through from an old post of Charles Pierce’s from 2006 about the egregious and fortunately now nearly irrelevant Ann Coulter.  Mr Pierce graciously referenced a post of mine but linked to the blog and not to the post itself.  So for those of you who are wondering what that was about, here’s the link:

The King is a Fink!

Another Mannioville Daily Gazette favorite blog of the day: Edition poetical

Sherry Chandler.

Because it’s her birthday.

Because her blog is a good gateway into the world of contemporary poetry.

And because she is a poet herself.

You should buy her book, Weaving a New Eden.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Day: Drinks all around edition

Our favorite friendly neighborhood bartender is back Behind the Stick.

Besides telling great stories, Scribbler makes a heckuva a sidecar.  First round is on me.

SOPA

This blog will not be going dark today to protest SOPA.  LanceMannion.com is not anyehere near up there with Wikipedia.   Congressmen and Senators do not read my blog.  They read letters.  I wrote mine.

They also answer phone calls.

The race may not be to the Swiftest, but the blog reading is

The almost two-years gone but not about to be forgotten Al Weisel, famous in song and story and on blog rolls as the ersatz conservative blogger Modest Jon Swift was, besides being a funny man, a generous one in that he used his popularity in the blogosphere to champion the work of other bloggers and give them regular traffic boosts.  One of his best gifts to us, his fellow pixel-dappled wretches, was his year end round-up of the best posts of the previous solar circuit.   The posts were chosen by the bloggers themselves but the tedious and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome-risking work of gathering, linking, and posting was all Al’s.

Last year, in tribute to Al, Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar, took over the rounding-up.  Now, he’s back at it, having just posted the Jon Swift Memorial Round-up of 2011.

Lots of good reading there, folks, from names familiar and un-.  I recommend you visit as many of the un’s as you can.  You’re bound to discover somebody who’ll make you say, “I can’t believe I haven’t been reading this great blog all along!  Where’s that Share on Facebook button?”

Thanks, B, for taking this on again.

Blind and not blind

Steve Kuusisto, who was born legally blind and whose eyesight deteriorated over the course of his life to the point that he “saw” only memories of the little he had been able to see in the past, had an operation a couple of years ago that can’t be said to have restored his sight---because he had never been so sighted in his life.  He can now see, a wonder he is still wondering at:

But seeing anew you are no longer wandering the planet by memory. When guide dog Vidal and I walked Mannerheim Street in Helsinki we followed the vines of memory. Here is the botanical garden; here’s the city museum with its old copper doors; a path through lilacs. Now, seeing things, I discover the sighted world is more insistent and fast than the reveries of blind dream-walking. Was the world always this fast? My skin quivers, a stray piece of paper blows across the sidewalk at my feet. I want to get down on my hands and knees and grab it. I want to hold it up to the light and read with my one eye the letters that probably signify nothing. The blind self would imagine a written plea from a far island. The sighted man sees it’s just the gibberish of our economy. Up the street he goes. A teenaged boy on a skateboard flips backwards, falls on his ass, his Ipod flies into the air, his arms and legs are busy as a hundred men. His skateboard lands in a fountain. Vision tells me there’s a world unaffected by the self. I can’t tell you how thrilling this discovery is. I feel like Ralph Waldo Emerson, though without his visionary immanence--I’m not crossing the park and seeing something cosmological, instead I’m seeing the frosted leaves in early autumn and a boy flying.

The color red, Steve says he’s discovered, is “magnifying lens of god.”  Read his whole post, What does it mean to have not seen, and then see?

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Monthly Round-up: October 2011

Lot of you in the Northeast were probably in the same situation we were in the last few days, without heat and electricity thanks to Saturday’s snowstorm.  We lost power Saturday afternoon and it didn’t come back on until yesterday.  We muddled through, suffering some inconvenience but no serious damage, and I hope you can all report the same.  But no power = no internet, and that explains why no posts since Saturday.  That doesn’t mean that no blogging occurred.

Our intrepid staff of ace reporters, hard-nosed editors, and crackerjack researchers remained at their posts, 24/7.  Huddled under blankets in the dark, working by flashlights and candles, they scribbled away furiously in notebooks, the result being a big batch of posts waiting to be typed up and published.  For example:  we’ll have a couple of book reviews for you, one of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean and, for all you Terry Pratchett fans, a review of Sir Terry’s latest Discworld novel, Snuff!

There’ll be something up every day through the weekend---some days, there’ll be two somethings, so stay tuned.  Meanwhile, if you’re inclined, you can catch up with posts from October you might have missed.

A good chunk of the month was taken up with reports from the day I helped occupy Wall Street with members of Teamsters Local 455.  All the posts are collected here.  But a few of the highlights include my encounters with some of the hippie weirdos who make up the Occupy movement: an ironworker from California who’d come to New York for a job and wound up occupying Wall Street, a half-dozen or so ministers and priests, and a pair of elderly but enthusiastic Michael Moore fans, retired union members and products of Catholic schools who love Moore because, as they said, he listened and took to heart what the nuns taught him.

Yep.  The conservative concern trolls are right.  These are exactly the sort of people Democrats should distance themselves from.

The only disorderly conduct I witnessed while there was a temper tantrum thrown by a limo driver who’d just missed running down a bicycle and my own accidental visit to a strip club---all I wanted was a sandwich, I swear!

What else?  Oh, yeah.  I saw three very good movies:  Moneyball, The Ides of March, and my favorite, the Irish comic thriller, The Guard.

And I discovered that the painter Marc Chagall spent a couple of idyllic years in this area, an episode in his life that his widow did her best to keep unmentioned to the point of having it practically erased from the story of his life.  She was helped by the fact that few of Chagall’s neighbors during those years knew he was there or even who he was.

Ok, time to get typing.  A heads up, though.  As I warned back in the spring, November’s Fundraising Month. I’ll try not to be too pushy about it, but the donation button will be at the top of the page most days, so, if you enjoy what goes on here and would like to help keep the blog going strong and you can swing it, please consider making a donation.  It’d be much appreciated.

Thank you for your support and thank you for reading the blog.

Wolcott

Updated.

Those of you who’ve been regular visitors to Mannionville over the years know how much I owe to James Wolcott. 

Basically I don’t exist without Jim.

I’ll bet most of you found your way here thanks to Jim and his blog at Vanity Fair.  Whenever I pick up new readers, it’s almost always the case it’s because they followed a link from Jim.  In short, this blog is pretty much a chapter of the James Wolcott Fan Club and Mighty Marching Society.  So, if you haven’t heard it already, you''ll be happy to hear now that Jim’s memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York is in the bookstores.

It’s in the ether too.  There’s a kindle edition.

I’ve got my copy but I’m looking for a whole day to put aside to read it in one sure to be happy and rewarding go.  Meanwhile, Tom Watson, another blogger who owes much to Jim’s generosity---and there are many of us---has raced his way through his copy and posted a review.

________________________

Updated because the Merry Marchers keep marching along beating their drums and clanging their cymbals in praise of their guy: 

Film critic and novelist Tom Shone says he “tore through” Luckin Out and was “gobsmacked” by Wolcott’s command of a sentence and his subjects:

What stops his writing from descending into mere Fine Writing — or, since Wolcott is too energetic a talent for silver-birch finery, the hyper-caffeinated rock-press equivalent, distracted by its own snarl in the bath-room mirror — are his sure, unfakable rhythms, frequently reserving the most delightful sealion flips for the point at which most writers would be taking a well-earned cigarette break, and the simpatico match-up between his prose and his subjects. In each case, he locks into some obstreperous vitality in his subjects — a gnarly, wriggling life force — and then proceeds to write like a man possessed.

And our favorite film blogger, the Self-Styled Siren, on her way to a lengthy review of a new biography of legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, uses Jim’s book as her launching pad:

I cherish this book. It isn't nostalgia, that tattered paper valentine that arrives sometime around St. Patrick's Day. It's a chance to visit another world with a critic supreme, who's as generous here as he's always been to struggling writers.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Blog of the Week

Vagabond Scholar.

For a bunch of reasons, but mainly this week because it’s Banned Books Week and as he is every year Batocchio is on top of it.

In this post, he gives the overview, with useful links, deals with the banning of books by two authors in particular, Aldous Huxley and Sherman Alexie, and provides a round-up of posts by other bloggers on banned books, banning books, and Banned Books Week.

The quotable Nancy Nall: “Enjoy your macaroni and cheese.”

Our old pal Nance on Texas Department of Corrections’ recent decision not to offer condemned prisoners their choice for a last meal anymore:

We give a condemned man a choice of last meal…because we’re better than the condemned. On the last day of his life, we’re extending the little niceties of civilization as a way of showing the man about to die what he rejected. We let him meet with a clerical representative of his choice to show we live by the values we kept and he rejected.

Not any more. Enjoy your macaroni and cheese.

I’m sorry to have to note that this change in policy was instigated by a Democrat.

The Mannionville Ranch Monthly Round-up

Introducing a new feature or reviving an old one in a slightly new format, a month’s end round-up of posts from the past four weeks.  Here are a few of the things that went on here in Mannionville in August.

Started off the month on an intellectual high road with reviews of Robert Di Silvestro’s biography Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands---The adventures of that Cowboy in the White House back when he was a real cowboy in a bunkhouse---and a production of Hamlet that included an unusual casting choice that made it seem like a whole new Hamlet or at least a very different Hamlet than I’d ever seen---The rat behind arras.

On politics, I tried to imagine how a Hillary Clinton Presidency would have differed from President Obama’s and came up with one important thing President Clinton couldn’t have done as well as President Obama; it was the matter of a key cabinet appointment.   Rick Perry’s tough-talking campaign for Sheriff---I mean President---makes me think he rooted for the wrong characters when he watched Westerns as a kid.  See Rick Perry’s heroes have always been cowboys, although apparently the ones wearing the black hats.  With the Ayn Rand worshipping rich and their familiars and toadies giving the nation the gift that keeps on giving, their greed, I had to ask Where do our Galtian Overlords imagine they live?  And yesterday I came to the defense of Michele Bachmann.  No matter what her staff says, I don’t believe she thinks floods and earthquakes are funny: God is laughing but Jesus weeps.

In other news, I looked at the important issue of comic book fans who like to dress up in Princess Leia slave girl costumes in Fanboys are from Endor, geek girls are from Alderaan, I brought home a nice picture from a day trip to Lake George, and my Uncle Bill stopped by to re-make his old case for putting his favorite Yankee, Phil Rizzuto, in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

And on a personal note, Young Ken Mannion started college this week.  The prospect of his moving ahead with his life had me feeling like the World’s Most Useless Dad.

On to September!

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Day

Welcome to the folks coming over from Balloon Juice and Sarah, Proud and Tall, and thank you, Sarah, for the links.

Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish.

But not for statements like this:

I haven't had a credit card for years, because I actually live like a fiscal conservative.

We’re sure you do, Andrew.  But you know what else you live like?

A man with a six-figure income and no children.

Getting a little tired of being told by the well-to-do strolling down Park Avenue that the hoi polloi need to share in some more sacrifice and tighten their belts another notch.

Sullivan also thinks we need to raise the age of retirement.  Again not advice we want to hear from someone who can go on vacation for weeks at a time seemingly whenever he wants and who has a job he can do and do well until he’s 90, if his health allows.

One of the things that drives us nuts about Sullivan is that it’s all so personal with him.  I don’t mean he thinks it’s all about him.  I mean that sometimes---a lot of times---he doesn’t seem able to imagine that not everybody in the United States is a gay ex-pat Brit living in Washington, D.C. whose big disappointment in life recently was being turned down for a mortgage on a second home.

Yeah. Sullivan didn’t get to buy a summer house in Provincetown.  The heart heart bleeds.

So why is he our favorite blog of the day?  Not for statements like the above but because he routinely makes statements like it---wrong-headed, even dumb, sure, but personal.   The Dish isn’t about politics, economics, foreign affairs, or even religion, which he writes about regularly and on which, as with all the other topics, he imagines he’s an expert.  It’s about being Andrew Sullivan and what it’s like to think like Andrew Sullivan about a lot of things.

That’s what we like about the Dish.  It’s about Sullivan thinking about a lot of things.  Sullivan is interested in just about everything---although judging by his blog, he doesn’t go to movies or read many books; he does, however, read poetry.---and he blogs about it all.  Politics are important to him but he sees them as part of life, not the be-all and end-all.   The Mental Health Breaks and Faces of the Day and the views from readers’ windows are diversions but they aren’t his version of cat-blogging.  They are diversions from what other A-list bloggers would consider diversions if they bothered to be diverting.

Sullivan knows that diversions are an important part of life, that they are what makes life worth the trouble.

Once upon a time, when liberal bloggers’ hearts were young and light and beat as one with shared fury at George W. Bush, the editors here at the Mannionville Daily Gazette pointed out that the liberal blogosphere was sorting itself out between the “wonks” and the “writers” and we made the pitch that it would be a good idea for the wonks to link to the writers more often.  (The writers were already linking regularly to the wonks.)  We thought and still think our ability to entertain, to divert, to write about things other than politics was a strength, an advantage we have over the Right side of the bandwidth.  Over there, besides the fact that most of their A-listers can’t write, their relentless propagandizing makes them boring.  Come for the movie reviews, stay for the bar graphs, was our proposed slogan.

The wonks didn’t listen and since then they’ve grown even wonkier.  They’ve also become more self-referential and more of a closed circle.  But when they aren’t writing about politics---or economics, which they treat as politics by other means, or history, which is only interesting to them in how it applies to the politics of the moment---all they have is whatever’s their individual version of cat-blogging.

They are not very likely going devote a post to the gay origins of the high five.

Jon Mooallem traces the emergence of the gesture to Glenn Burke, a gay Dodgers player in 1977. Burke was abruptly traded to the Oakland A's in 1978, most likely because of his sexuality. But he found another home in San Francisco's gay community…

Unless they link to Sullivan.

The editors acknowledge that this post is a not very thinly disguised advertisement for the author’s own blog.

The editors also admit they are just as annoyed as you are by the use of the too precious New Yorker-style editorial We and promise not to let the author get away with it in any of our future posts.

Why I won’t be listening to Susie Madrak on Virtually Speaking tonight

Because I’ll be talking with Susie Madrak on Virtually Speaking tonight.

Tonight, Tuesday, July 5, at 9 EDT, right here on your intertubes.  Our topic is set to be What I Learned About Politics From My Father.

Long-time readers of the blog know that Pop Mannion is one of the last great New Deal Democrats.  He was the first Democrat ever elected to the town board in my hometown and he served two separate stints as supervisor, the first from 1970-1980 and the second from 1990-1998.  In his time he did our town a world of good.  The main lesson I learned from watching him was work was that I am totally unsuited to be President of the United States.

I learned a few other more useful things too.  Which Susie and I will talk about, but we’ll probably get on to other subjects as well.  Paul Simon, for one.

That’s Paul Simon the singer-songwriter not Paul Simon the late, great, bow-tied, big-eared, bespectacled Liberal Senator from Illinois.  But who knows?  We may get around to talking about him too.

So please tune in.  And call in.  The number’s (646) 200-3440.  Operators will be standing by.

Actually, I think it’s just one operator and I’m pretty sure she/he has a chair.

Here’s the link again.

Update: Thanks very much to Susie for having me on the show.  It was fun and made more so because we were joined by Claire of Espirit de l’escalier who talked about her frustrations working in local government in Ohio where the bully-boy Republican governor is telling towns they can’t do anything to fix or improve their communities if it means spending money.

If you missed the show and are curious, here you go---

Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio

It’s long.  An hour and a half.  A lot of time was taking up by me stammering.  Once again, I’m forced to face up to the fact that I apparently learned all I know about public speaking from Jimmy Stewart.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s New Favorite Blog of the Day

Sarah, Proud and Tall: Dispatches from the Shady Pines Home for the Violently Senile.

Because of passages like this:

Then I had a fling with Gore Vidal in the early 60s. Jack Kennedy seemed to enjoy Gore’s company so much that I wanted to find out what I was missing. He was fun sometimes, but I fairly quickly tired of a sex life that seemed to consist entirely of me dressing up in an army uniform while Gore wept and called me Jimmy.

That’s from a post called Friday night book post. It’s actually a review of China Mieville’s new novel, Embassytown.  The part about how Sarah had a fling with Hemingway when she was working undercover in Cuba as Castro’s mistress isn’t as tangential as you might think.

Also you should read her whole comment at Balloon Juice about a the time she was at Christmas with Ayn Rand:

Anyhow, there were just 20 of us for dinner sitting at a big table in the middle of the Pool Room. Bitsy had seated me next to her, which was fine, but bloody Ayn Rand was on the other side of me, with the usual pinched expression she always had in the company of the genuinely rich or the genuinely talented…

Around the World in 80 Tweets

I’m about a paragraph away from finishing a post about Paul Ryan and the Republican Plan to end Medicare.  You’ll be surprised to learn I’m against the plan and I don’t like Paul Ryan and think he and all the Republicans in Congress are a gang of dastardly villains.

But as important as I think it is that you learn that, I don’t want to blog about it.

I want to blog about my trip around the world.

Unfortunately, I’m not taking a trip around the world at the moment. 

Fortunately, author, editor, and admitted grumpy old man Richard Pollack is.  And he’s been blogging about it.  His blog is called You’re Only Old Once and this is his how he describes it:

In Which a Homebody of Some Standing Leaves the Comforting Embrace of New York City After Almost Half a Century and Sets Forth on a Global Expedition, With No Fixed Itinerary, No Deadline to Return, a Certain Anxiety, and One Intrepid Wife.

Right now, Pollak is in London after flying in from Istanbul.  But if you want to begin at the beginning, the trip starts here, with Pollak’s apology to Dr Seuss.

Photo by Pollak’s intrepid wife, pianist Diane Walsh.