A conversation between two friends over coffee and cookies
“Gladys? Why do you have an old black rotary phone?”
“Oh, I’ve always had that phone.”
“But, such phones don’t really work anymore. They can’t do a bunch of things that push button phones do, and I imagine it makes it very hard to do basic tasks like ordering prescriptions, or even ordering pizza. Push button phones cost like 20 bucks. Why don’t you just get one?”
“No. I’ve always had that one. No sense changing.”
“But don’t you see, you are limiting what you can do and forcing yourself to do things that are way more inconvenient and time consuming?
“Yeah, well.”
“What do you mean ‘yeah, well’?” There is absolutely no logical reason to have that phone. By keeping that phone you are willfully making your life less convenient. Hell! You are probably making your life less safe as well. Something incredibly basic like dialing 9-1-1. I bet it takes 4 times as long to dial 9-1-1 on your phone then on a push button phone?
“Well, there’s nothing I can do. The phone is plugged in and working. I’m stuck with it.”
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN?! You could literally go to like any store in town and buy a new phone, plug it in and be done. It is about the easiest thing you could do.”
“Hmm.”
“My god you are exasperating!”
“OK, let’s talk about something else then.”
“Fine. Oh, I just thought of something: Don’t forget to set your clocks back an hour this weekend. It’s Daylight Savings Time. Fall back and all that.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? It’s fall and Sunday is the day we set our clocks back an hour.”
“Yeah, but why? Why should we do that?
“Because we’ve always done that.”
“But switching the time doesn’t really work anymore, it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t save energy, it doesn’t save money, it does nothing.”
“That’s just what we do. No sense changing.”
“But don’t you see, switching our clocks is an artificial construct that limits natural light and forces us to modify our schedule which is inconvenient.”
“Yeah well.”
“What do you mean ‘yeah, well’?” There is absolutely no logical reason to switch the clocks. By keeping this ridiculous practice we are willfully making life less convenient. Hell! We are making life less safe as well. Something incredibly basic like driving with less light makes the roads less safe and causes deaths on the road!”
“Well there’s nothing we can do. We move our clocks back every fall. We are stuck with it.”
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN?! We could literally just NOT touch our clocks and keep the time consistent. Doing nothing is about the easiest thing we could do!!”
“Hmm.”
“My god you are exasperating!”
“OK, let’s talk about something else then.”
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Why we love sports
This weekend, my lifelong favorite NFL team played the marquee game on Sunday and my new second favorite team played on Monday Night.
My Cowboys vs. Vikings in America’s Game of the Week and my new found focus Seattle vs. SF for the Monday Night tilt.
Both games were good, entertaining down to the wire affairs. My Boy’s lost a heartbreaker and my Seahawks won a thriller in overtime.
My wife, a long suffering NFL widow did watch a lot of the MNF game with me.
At one point, while I was (for me, fairly good-naturedly) yelling at a ref’s bad call that negatively impacted my Seahawks, she asked: “how is this fun? How is this not completely stress inducing torture? Why do you subject yourself to this?”
And the answer to that question is why we love sports.
The answer is simply this: Sports is one of, if not the only, mass appeal endeavor that a person could care about with 100 effort all the while knowing we have zero percent control of the outcome. The game has us completely in its clutches, while we have absolutely no hand in the result.
We have all the passion, with absolutely none of the responsibility. We can care about our team from early childhood to our deathbed and bare no obligation to its success and failure.
That is, as I said to my dear wife, the point.
In so much of our lives, we bare responsibility for outcomes that often are not in our control. The success of our company, the success of our children, the success of our community. We put our blood, sweat and tears toward doing a good job at work, only to be down-sized or reassigned because despite making our numbers, the corporation didn’t. Or giving our sons and daughters all the best life lessons for their journey into adulthood only to see them join a terrible SKA band and use the college savings for a van and guitars. Giving much of our spare time to rotary, or the PTA or a nonprofit only to watch our community sink further into despair.
But sports? I can live and die on the hopes of a strong-armed quarterback who spots an open receiver in the end zone with the same emotional investment I have down at the office and probably more. Yet, when my Cowboys or Hawks fail – it’s completely on them. I can curse and stomp my feet on a Sunday night and then wake up the next morning with no regret or remorse. That strong-armed quarterback missed the wide open receiver that cost us the game? Not my fault.
It’s so liberating and dare I say cathartic to care so deeply about a game, to clench one’s jaw, yell yourself hoarse, and pace the rug like an expectant father, and then – let it go.
It’s almost like our replacement for battle. All the rage and adrenaline and angst, without the threat of death, injury or PTSD.
Win or lose, I feel relaxed after a game. Sure, I might hold grudges and some anger after a loss, but I’m still much more relaxed.
Sports is riding the roller coaster at the amusement park. Dread and fear and nausea quickly replaced by calm and Zen and a giddy sense that we can’t wait to do it all again.
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Confessions of a Rookie Vegan
I’m a 52-year-old, red blooded American male and proud omnivore for 51.6 of those years. Yet, for the past several months, I have committed myself to eating an exclusive plant-based diet.
And I’m doing it for one, and one reason only.
First, what I’m not doing it for. I’m not doing it for the animals. I love animals, but I’ve been eating them since I was about two. I’ve even killed a few. No, I’m not some weak-kneed, PETA-worshiping animal do-gooder. Sure, it’s a nice side effect of veganism, the warm feeling knowing nothing on my dinner plate suffered the cruelty of factory farming, but in the end, the animals themselves don’t matter.
Next, I’m not doing it for my health. I haven’t lost any weight or felt any better as a vegan and I have decidedly not discovered newfound energy or a miraculous change in stamina or strength. I feel exactly the same. I’ve been an active person as an omnivore and I will continue that as vegan. I know, like most doctors and nutritionists know, that you can be ultra-healthy as either an omnivore or a vegan. No, health isn’t the reason.
So why?
Simple. I’m a lazy, yet hopeful environmentalist and going vegan is the easiest, yet absolutely most personally impactful thing any individual can do to assist our endangered planet.
Look, I like to try and do all the things a good environmentalist should, but I frequently fail. I drive –often for no real purpose. I shave with the water going, I turn up the heat when it’s cold and I’ll often just throw something out instead of sorting and recycling. And in many cases, my sloth stems from never really being sure that my “green” efforts were making a difference. And for someone as lazy as me, that often means throwing caution – and carbon – to the wind. Basically, I would give myself an A for intent, but a C- for execution and really saw no way of upping my environmental grade point average.
Then I saw the documentary Cowspiracy.
I won’t go into great detail about this film, but the gist of it is this: hiding in plain sight, yet often unspoken, is the fact that what we eat and how we raise it is without question the biggest threat to our planet and if we moved to a largely plant based diet, we would reverse our deadly footprint. Further, the film does a great job of illustrating the positive impact one vegan convert like me can have on the environment - today. For me, becoming vegan is actually an easier way toward green living.
After viewing the film, I felt that embracing veganism would be a giant (relatively easy) form of checking the environmentalist box. By embracing a plant based diet , I can guiltlessly drive without purpose, take long showers, buy fruit with an obscene amount of food miles….and still check the box of being a rabid environmentalist, because I’m doing the single and most measurable thing to help the environment – stop eating meat and animal products. Period.
Here are the facts, painstakingly laid out in the film: “A person who follows a vegan diet produces the equivalent of 50% less carbon dioxide, uses 1/11th oil, 1/13th water, and 1/18th land compared to a meat-lover for their food. Each day, a person who eats a vegan diet saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 sq ft of forested land, 20 lbs CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life.” I’ve never come across statistics and facts so clearly illustrated. Little old me could make a hugely positive impact on the world – right now.
Wait a second?, you might say. How can completely changing your diet be the easier path toward a sustainable lifestyle? Because, as I found out almost by accident, the only real change I had to make was rethinking the order of things on my plate. As an omnivore and the main cook in our family, I had always been conditioned to think about the meat serving first. From there, I would build out the meal, from there I would construct the shopping list. I credit my wife, who went vegan first, with simply asking the question, “why not think of the veggies first?
Need more proof about the relative ease of veganism vs. other green practices? Here’s what a meat-eating environmentalist would need to do to match my diminished environmental footprint:
- Audit all water consumption and reduce daily us by around 75 percent
- Sell the family car, purchase a bike and/or take the bus
- Purchase thousands of dollars of carbon offsets in order to replace deforested land
- Reduce all home heating and cooling to about zero.
Here’s what I have to do: buy and eat nuts, beans and lentils instead of chicken and beef.
What about taste?!, you might scream. Yes, animals taste great and no, tofu doesn’t seamlessly replace chicken in a perfect stir fry. But again, for me the path toward veganism has really been about simply re-ordering my thought process.
For example, let’s take bacon – the kryptonite of many a vegetarian or vegan. Bacon is wonderful to eat, no arguments here. But what is bacon really? Bacon is just an ideal fat and salt delivery system. And I can get my salt, my fat, and other yummy components like sugar and carbs easily from plants. The satiety from meat can be replaced; bacon replaced by salted cashews and French fries.
In closing, if you don’t care about environmentalism, this little article is not for you and you are more than welcome to grab a burger and forget all about veganism. However, if you are concerned about doing your part for the environment, yet haven’t really found your place in the cause – perhaps the plant-based way is for you. What’s great about veganism is that it offers something very tangible to both sides of the political divide. Of course, liberals can jump on board because of the environmental sustainability, but there is (pardon the pun) red meat for conservatives as well. Meat production is one of, if not, THE largest government subsidized and supported industry in the world. You hard core free market devotees should greatly appreciate a movement which aims to directly end the devil’s bargain between big government and big meat.
So if you want to help save the planet but don’t want to abandon cars, central heating and your hair dryer, consider eating your way toward a greener tomorrow.
And I’m doing it for one, and one reason only.
First, what I’m not doing it for. I’m not doing it for the animals. I love animals, but I’ve been eating them since I was about two. I’ve even killed a few. No, I’m not some weak-kneed, PETA-worshiping animal do-gooder. Sure, it’s a nice side effect of veganism, the warm feeling knowing nothing on my dinner plate suffered the cruelty of factory farming, but in the end, the animals themselves don’t matter.
Next, I’m not doing it for my health. I haven’t lost any weight or felt any better as a vegan and I have decidedly not discovered newfound energy or a miraculous change in stamina or strength. I feel exactly the same. I’ve been an active person as an omnivore and I will continue that as vegan. I know, like most doctors and nutritionists know, that you can be ultra-healthy as either an omnivore or a vegan. No, health isn’t the reason.
So why?
Simple. I’m a lazy, yet hopeful environmentalist and going vegan is the easiest, yet absolutely most personally impactful thing any individual can do to assist our endangered planet.
Look, I like to try and do all the things a good environmentalist should, but I frequently fail. I drive –often for no real purpose. I shave with the water going, I turn up the heat when it’s cold and I’ll often just throw something out instead of sorting and recycling. And in many cases, my sloth stems from never really being sure that my “green” efforts were making a difference. And for someone as lazy as me, that often means throwing caution – and carbon – to the wind. Basically, I would give myself an A for intent, but a C- for execution and really saw no way of upping my environmental grade point average.
Then I saw the documentary Cowspiracy.
I won’t go into great detail about this film, but the gist of it is this: hiding in plain sight, yet often unspoken, is the fact that what we eat and how we raise it is without question the biggest threat to our planet and if we moved to a largely plant based diet, we would reverse our deadly footprint. Further, the film does a great job of illustrating the positive impact one vegan convert like me can have on the environment - today. For me, becoming vegan is actually an easier way toward green living.
After viewing the film, I felt that embracing veganism would be a giant (relatively easy) form of checking the environmentalist box. By embracing a plant based diet , I can guiltlessly drive without purpose, take long showers, buy fruit with an obscene amount of food miles….and still check the box of being a rabid environmentalist, because I’m doing the single and most measurable thing to help the environment – stop eating meat and animal products. Period.
Here are the facts, painstakingly laid out in the film: “A person who follows a vegan diet produces the equivalent of 50% less carbon dioxide, uses 1/11th oil, 1/13th water, and 1/18th land compared to a meat-lover for their food. Each day, a person who eats a vegan diet saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 sq ft of forested land, 20 lbs CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life.” I’ve never come across statistics and facts so clearly illustrated. Little old me could make a hugely positive impact on the world – right now.
Wait a second?, you might say. How can completely changing your diet be the easier path toward a sustainable lifestyle? Because, as I found out almost by accident, the only real change I had to make was rethinking the order of things on my plate. As an omnivore and the main cook in our family, I had always been conditioned to think about the meat serving first. From there, I would build out the meal, from there I would construct the shopping list. I credit my wife, who went vegan first, with simply asking the question, “why not think of the veggies first?
Need more proof about the relative ease of veganism vs. other green practices? Here’s what a meat-eating environmentalist would need to do to match my diminished environmental footprint:
- Audit all water consumption and reduce daily us by around 75 percent
- Sell the family car, purchase a bike and/or take the bus
- Purchase thousands of dollars of carbon offsets in order to replace deforested land
- Reduce all home heating and cooling to about zero.
Here’s what I have to do: buy and eat nuts, beans and lentils instead of chicken and beef.
What about taste?!, you might scream. Yes, animals taste great and no, tofu doesn’t seamlessly replace chicken in a perfect stir fry. But again, for me the path toward veganism has really been about simply re-ordering my thought process.
For example, let’s take bacon – the kryptonite of many a vegetarian or vegan. Bacon is wonderful to eat, no arguments here. But what is bacon really? Bacon is just an ideal fat and salt delivery system. And I can get my salt, my fat, and other yummy components like sugar and carbs easily from plants. The satiety from meat can be replaced; bacon replaced by salted cashews and French fries.
In closing, if you don’t care about environmentalism, this little article is not for you and you are more than welcome to grab a burger and forget all about veganism. However, if you are concerned about doing your part for the environment, yet haven’t really found your place in the cause – perhaps the plant-based way is for you. What’s great about veganism is that it offers something very tangible to both sides of the political divide. Of course, liberals can jump on board because of the environmental sustainability, but there is (pardon the pun) red meat for conservatives as well. Meat production is one of, if not, THE largest government subsidized and supported industry in the world. You hard core free market devotees should greatly appreciate a movement which aims to directly end the devil’s bargain between big government and big meat.
So if you want to help save the planet but don’t want to abandon cars, central heating and your hair dryer, consider eating your way toward a greener tomorrow.
Monday, November 19, 2018
The Walk of Shame for Amazon Suitors
This story is fascinating and instructive. A bunch of cities whored themselves out in order to seduce Amazon’s HQ2 – only to lose spectacularly to NYC and D.C. who each actually gave away less in bribes and succor then the losers proposed.
There are lessons here.
1. Cities or states will attract major league business because of who they are not what they offer. No matter what a city is willing to do to attract the next “big thing,” municipalities rarely ever punch above their weight. Amazon ultimately choose the financial and political hub of the freaking world to locate its new corporate centers. Residents of the Columbus’s and Tucson’s and Omaha’s of the nation should take note. You are never going home with the hottest girl at the dance. So stay in your lane and set realistic expectations.
2. The clichés is true: Politicians do things that help themselves, not their constituencies. Look, we all know that elected officials are naked self-promoters, but it sometimes takes a shit show like the Amazon HQ2 debacle to remind us all. The sheer volume of public displays of prostitution by city and state officials to woo Amazon was like a red light district documentary. And the reason that seemingly normal leaders would strap on the kneepads for the online retailer? Because if they got it, they would guarantee themselves reelection and hero worship. No matter how bad the deal eventually turned out for their city, no matter how bad roads and schools and bridges got because of the massive tax giveaways – they could crow about getting Amazon every minute of every day.
3. Which brings us to this: the good leaders of Columbus and Tucson and Omaha aren’t truly stupid. They knew they had a snowball’s chance in hell of landing this whale, but they knew that they had to appear willing to pull out all the stops to try. Unfortunately in our democracy – appearance matters. City leaders have to waste colossal amounts of cash, time and resources to pitch a relocation like Amazon, because if they weren’t seen as trying, they would be lambasted by voters.
4. Another lesson: like most of us, elected officials seek the path of least resistance. It’s hard to fix the potholes; it’s hard to lower crime; it’s hard to do more and more with less and less money. And as a mayor or city councilor, you’re never going to get enough credit for those things, because despite the trends of the last 40 years, citizens still kind of expect and take for granted the basics of running a city.
5. Yet, for average citizens, the behavior won’t change. Today, a mayor or council member for any medium to large city in America SHOULD step back and realize that courting a huge business to relocate is folly. There is nothing substantive to be gain by entering into this competition. Tis far better for said politician to publically state that his or city does not, nor will not give away the store to attract a business whale.
But they won’t. They won’t do it because they want to be courted and seduced the next time a big business wants to relocate. They want to be part of the show. The show is good for their reelection. The show breaks up the boredom and tediousness of actually doing their job, of endless council meetings and discussion of potholes. Being a mayor is only fun when you get to look important and unfortunately, kissing the ass of a bigtime corporation is considered important by way too many people.
Friday, October 26, 2018
MAKING OTHERS WORSE
It’s important to understand the fundamental appeal of Trump to his base.
White, under-educated men, mostly over 40, who live in rural areas and the suburbs individually and collectively have come to the realization that they are no longer the cool kids. In every cultural outlet – TV, music, movies, and literature – it’s other members of society, the nerds, the urban hipsters, the black boundary pushers, the Latino chic, all of them are ascendant.
And that makes Joe, living a relatively secure, but anonymous life outside of Indianapolis or in rural Ohio pissed. And that anger needs an outlet. Trump doesn’t appeal to his base because he’s actually going to make things better. He can’t and they know that. What he can do is try and make things worse for those “other” groups. They didn’t flock to Trump because they saw him as a savior. They flocked to him because they believed he would give them permission to hate and strike out against those groups of people that had surpassed them in relevance.
Trumper’s are almost universally zero-sum: they can’t win unless the “others” lose and winning really means remaining the dominate and most relevant group and pushing the other groups down.
But they couldn’t do that themselves. Hell, in the very deep recesses of their brains they knew the truth: they were becoming irrelevant because they deserved to be. Their skills were atrophied, their ideas were stale and their work ethic had been dulled. They knew that among their ranks the next Mark Zuckerberg, Jay-Z, Lin-Manuel Miranda or Satya Nadella simply didn’t exist. They were beat. Progress and diversity and sheer talent had passed them by. They knew they were headed to irrelevancy and they knew that didn’t have the industriousness nor skill to reverse that trend. The needed an accelerant. Some force that would do the heavy lifting for them. Some zeitgeist-whisperer who could sell them the dream that he and he alone could hurt those talented and hardworking “others” so that they would go back to being marginalized and fearful.
In many ways, Trump is like Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys and his base are like the millions who follow the team. The Cowboys are – in terms of actual football success – a kind of league-wide laughing stock. They haven’t won a meaningful playoff game since they last appeared in a Super Bowl more than 23-years ago. Yet, the Cowboys are still one of the most relevant (and profitable) teams in all of professional sports. Year in and year out, they go 6-10, or 8-8 or 9-7 and leave millions of fans disappointed. From a purely football perspective, the Cowboys are the Arizona Cardinals, yet the Cardinals are imminently forgettable and the Cowboys are still one of the top draws every season. Why?
Because Jones, like Trump, is a master at selling the illusion of relevance. Jones, like Trump, is a savant at selling sizzle over steak. Trump has always been a pretty bad businessman and Jones has always been a pretty bad general manager. Yet, Trump has built the artifice of “Trump: Master Dealmaker” like Jones has built the artifice of the “Dallas Cowboys: America’s Team.” To their hardcore supporters, the bankruptcies, the massive debt, the unpaid bills and all the hallmarks of Trump’s besmirched business career don’t matter, just like the decades without winning, the endless poor personnel decisions, the revolving door of coaches and all the similar hallmarks of Jones’ besmirched team-building career don’t matter to fans and haters alike who watch the Cowboys on TV.
Jerry Jones, like Donald Trump has a kind of idiot savant quality where they are stupid in one thing and brilliant in another. Both men are actually pretty bad at what makes them famous, where Jones owns a professional football team that doesn’t win and Trump is a business dealmaker who’s been taken to the cleaners on multiple occasions. Yet Jones has built a brand that is unequaled in sports and Trump has created a brand that millions of people equate with ultimate success.
Like a nation that still pays outsized attention to a football team that doesn’t win, Trumpers voted for the man in 2016 because to many “deplorables” around the country, he mattered. He was relevant. And his racism, misogyny and rage against “the other” was like a hit of pure OxyContin. It felt so good to hear this master huckster say he was going to make them top-dogs once again. And he was going to do it in a mean and cruel way. He wasn’t just going to restore their relevance, he was going to kick those liberal, ethnic, educated, urban elites in the crotch.
“Make America Great Again,” is and was always going to be a dog whistle. Trump never had the talent, skill or even desire to truly make the nation as a whole better and more prosperous. What he could deliver – at least in the minds of his supporters – was the promise of cutting the “others” down to size.
And in the end, that fact helps explain the cult of Trump. To his fans and supporters – who when they are alone and look in the mirror and see staring back at them a reduced or even failed man – The Donald offers them the only hope left: the ability to drag those people who’ve surpassed them back down to their level.
White, under-educated men, mostly over 40, who live in rural areas and the suburbs individually and collectively have come to the realization that they are no longer the cool kids. In every cultural outlet – TV, music, movies, and literature – it’s other members of society, the nerds, the urban hipsters, the black boundary pushers, the Latino chic, all of them are ascendant.
And that makes Joe, living a relatively secure, but anonymous life outside of Indianapolis or in rural Ohio pissed. And that anger needs an outlet. Trump doesn’t appeal to his base because he’s actually going to make things better. He can’t and they know that. What he can do is try and make things worse for those “other” groups. They didn’t flock to Trump because they saw him as a savior. They flocked to him because they believed he would give them permission to hate and strike out against those groups of people that had surpassed them in relevance.
Trumper’s are almost universally zero-sum: they can’t win unless the “others” lose and winning really means remaining the dominate and most relevant group and pushing the other groups down.
But they couldn’t do that themselves. Hell, in the very deep recesses of their brains they knew the truth: they were becoming irrelevant because they deserved to be. Their skills were atrophied, their ideas were stale and their work ethic had been dulled. They knew that among their ranks the next Mark Zuckerberg, Jay-Z, Lin-Manuel Miranda or Satya Nadella simply didn’t exist. They were beat. Progress and diversity and sheer talent had passed them by. They knew they were headed to irrelevancy and they knew that didn’t have the industriousness nor skill to reverse that trend. The needed an accelerant. Some force that would do the heavy lifting for them. Some zeitgeist-whisperer who could sell them the dream that he and he alone could hurt those talented and hardworking “others” so that they would go back to being marginalized and fearful.
In many ways, Trump is like Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys and his base are like the millions who follow the team. The Cowboys are – in terms of actual football success – a kind of league-wide laughing stock. They haven’t won a meaningful playoff game since they last appeared in a Super Bowl more than 23-years ago. Yet, the Cowboys are still one of the most relevant (and profitable) teams in all of professional sports. Year in and year out, they go 6-10, or 8-8 or 9-7 and leave millions of fans disappointed. From a purely football perspective, the Cowboys are the Arizona Cardinals, yet the Cardinals are imminently forgettable and the Cowboys are still one of the top draws every season. Why?
Because Jones, like Trump, is a master at selling the illusion of relevance. Jones, like Trump, is a savant at selling sizzle over steak. Trump has always been a pretty bad businessman and Jones has always been a pretty bad general manager. Yet, Trump has built the artifice of “Trump: Master Dealmaker” like Jones has built the artifice of the “Dallas Cowboys: America’s Team.” To their hardcore supporters, the bankruptcies, the massive debt, the unpaid bills and all the hallmarks of Trump’s besmirched business career don’t matter, just like the decades without winning, the endless poor personnel decisions, the revolving door of coaches and all the similar hallmarks of Jones’ besmirched team-building career don’t matter to fans and haters alike who watch the Cowboys on TV.
Jerry Jones, like Donald Trump has a kind of idiot savant quality where they are stupid in one thing and brilliant in another. Both men are actually pretty bad at what makes them famous, where Jones owns a professional football team that doesn’t win and Trump is a business dealmaker who’s been taken to the cleaners on multiple occasions. Yet Jones has built a brand that is unequaled in sports and Trump has created a brand that millions of people equate with ultimate success.
Like a nation that still pays outsized attention to a football team that doesn’t win, Trumpers voted for the man in 2016 because to many “deplorables” around the country, he mattered. He was relevant. And his racism, misogyny and rage against “the other” was like a hit of pure OxyContin. It felt so good to hear this master huckster say he was going to make them top-dogs once again. And he was going to do it in a mean and cruel way. He wasn’t just going to restore their relevance, he was going to kick those liberal, ethnic, educated, urban elites in the crotch.
“Make America Great Again,” is and was always going to be a dog whistle. Trump never had the talent, skill or even desire to truly make the nation as a whole better and more prosperous. What he could deliver – at least in the minds of his supporters – was the promise of cutting the “others” down to size.
And in the end, that fact helps explain the cult of Trump. To his fans and supporters – who when they are alone and look in the mirror and see staring back at them a reduced or even failed man – The Donald offers them the only hope left: the ability to drag those people who’ve surpassed them back down to their level.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
The Tide is Turning
Watching the NBA awards on TNT tonight.
It is almost entirely black.
The hosts, the award recipients, everything. It is a show about the NBA, but really it’s a
show about the ascendency of black culture, black power, black relevance and
black celebrity.
It’s not a great show.
It's like any other awards show….boring, self-agrandizing, etc. etc. and that is the point. Millennials couldn’t care less about other
award shows. A lot care about this one. This is a kind of a big
deal.
Black culture is without a doubt the dominate arts culture
in America. It’s not even close. When I was younger, smart people would say
that black culture was ascendant. It is
no longer ascendant. It's here. It is what every
kid wants to grab hold of and make it their own.
I was also recently watching a documentary about the Lakers
Celtics rivalry. One of the subtexts of
the story was how hard it was for Boston to sell out the garden in the 1970s and
early 80’s because of the amount of black players.
It seems ridiculous today, but in less than a generation
we’ve gone from a hegemony of black athletes being a loss-leader to the
absolute need for black celebrities/athletes/leaders being associated with a
brand.
Baseball was America’s past time. Baseball is fast becoming irrelevant. Basketball and football, two sports than need
black athletes just to open the doors are so much more popular. Baseball is a white sport and is associated
with old men wearing non-ironic hats.
Baseball today only gets by because of history and
weather. Baseball only exists because of
summer days, beer and an homage to your old man.
American industry used to worry about products and services
being too closely associated with black people and black culture. Now if you want to attract white kids and
Hispanic kids and Asian kids and middle eastern kids to a mass-market product,
you HAVE to use black culture and urban hip hop culture to market it or it will
never get out of R&D.
Monday, June 25, 2018
Actually, it's good news
Positive.
There have been a spate of racial and predjudical things happening lately. White people calling the police because black people are doing things that seem (to the callers) wrong or illegal or menancing.
We know these things happened because we have cell phone video that goes viral on social media. Social justice guardians like Shawn King and there to make sure the terrible deeds get told.
A month or so ago, a woman in Oakland called police on two black men having a BBQ. She said it was illegal. And so she called the cops. It exploded. The video that the two men, and others shot, went viral. It evoked screams on white privildge. She’s now called "BBQ betty. " She is now a meme. She was mentioned not once, but twice, on Saturday Night Live.
Others have happened as well.
Some see and hear about these transgressions and get upset and depressed. They believe they represent a certain amount of backsliding of our society toward pre-civil rights racism.
I see it differently. It fills me with hope.
Now, there are so many people – white and black – who are itching to expose this racism. They are poised – cell phones at the ready – to record injustice and, much more importantly, share it with a receptive world.
Indeed Trump won the presidency and many horrible things have happened, are happening and will happen. But the arc toward justice is etched in the hard stone of history. We will get through this era, because so many people are upset and so ready to dive in.
True, we are and have always been a reactive society. We do not tend toward being proactive. Instead, something bad or untenable has to happen before we act. That is not ideal, but it does work. We see the horrible hatred, fear and ignorance of the moment and we jump into the fray
.
White people who want things to remain the way they were – where they were unquestionably at the top and they didn’t have to change their ways or their ideas – are getting smaller. They are still very large in number, but each year and each decade brings more people who are either of an ethnic or sexual identity that is ready to topple the existing order. Sure, there are plenty of young bigots, but there are more young people who simply don’t see the value in it.
Right now, to paraphrase the great Hunter S. Thompson, is where we just might be able to see where the wave crests and begins to roll back on itself. Where the old ideas of racial denial and sexual repression are permently exhiled to the minority.
Never foget…Trump is a 71 year old man, who talks like it’s 1976. His base is much older than the other side. Congress is old. Both sides.
Millenials grow up with black and brown people. Their heroes are black and brown people. They’ve already had a two-term black president. They believe that overt racism should be punished and shamed. They arent’ afraid of immigrants. They grew up with latino and black celebrities almost outpacing their white colleagues. They don’t fear losing a job to a Jose or a Jamal. They only fear losing a job to a C-12312 processor or robot.
They know that everyone has to think globablly. They are totally used to consolidation and continually corporatization. They know that in a few decades, it won’t just be companies that merger, it will be nations.
They know the wave will roll back on itself.
There have been a spate of racial and predjudical things happening lately. White people calling the police because black people are doing things that seem (to the callers) wrong or illegal or menancing.
We know these things happened because we have cell phone video that goes viral on social media. Social justice guardians like Shawn King and there to make sure the terrible deeds get told.
A month or so ago, a woman in Oakland called police on two black men having a BBQ. She said it was illegal. And so she called the cops. It exploded. The video that the two men, and others shot, went viral. It evoked screams on white privildge. She’s now called "BBQ betty. " She is now a meme. She was mentioned not once, but twice, on Saturday Night Live.
Others have happened as well.
Some see and hear about these transgressions and get upset and depressed. They believe they represent a certain amount of backsliding of our society toward pre-civil rights racism.
I see it differently. It fills me with hope.
Now, there are so many people – white and black – who are itching to expose this racism. They are poised – cell phones at the ready – to record injustice and, much more importantly, share it with a receptive world.
Indeed Trump won the presidency and many horrible things have happened, are happening and will happen. But the arc toward justice is etched in the hard stone of history. We will get through this era, because so many people are upset and so ready to dive in.
True, we are and have always been a reactive society. We do not tend toward being proactive. Instead, something bad or untenable has to happen before we act. That is not ideal, but it does work. We see the horrible hatred, fear and ignorance of the moment and we jump into the fray
.
White people who want things to remain the way they were – where they were unquestionably at the top and they didn’t have to change their ways or their ideas – are getting smaller. They are still very large in number, but each year and each decade brings more people who are either of an ethnic or sexual identity that is ready to topple the existing order. Sure, there are plenty of young bigots, but there are more young people who simply don’t see the value in it.
Right now, to paraphrase the great Hunter S. Thompson, is where we just might be able to see where the wave crests and begins to roll back on itself. Where the old ideas of racial denial and sexual repression are permently exhiled to the minority.
Never foget…Trump is a 71 year old man, who talks like it’s 1976. His base is much older than the other side. Congress is old. Both sides.
Millenials grow up with black and brown people. Their heroes are black and brown people. They’ve already had a two-term black president. They believe that overt racism should be punished and shamed. They arent’ afraid of immigrants. They grew up with latino and black celebrities almost outpacing their white colleagues. They don’t fear losing a job to a Jose or a Jamal. They only fear losing a job to a C-12312 processor or robot.
They know that everyone has to think globablly. They are totally used to consolidation and continually corporatization. They know that in a few decades, it won’t just be companies that merger, it will be nations.
They know the wave will roll back on itself.
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