A New Thing Comes to Life

Things I cannot yet discuss: the name of the movie, the work it’s based on, and why that guy did that thing in that particular way.

But, speaking as a producer of said unnamed motion picture-to-be, I can tell you that the all-important “first money” is in the bank. It’s called that because it is, literally, the first money anyone invests in the movie, and it is prized because it represents the greatest leap into the dark for any investor. For all those who follow, there is the comfort of knowing that someone else has already signaled their faith in the project via their checkbook, and that the project is almost certainly going forward. “First money,” then, represents the nudging of the boulder, the thing that frees it from stasis and starts it rolling downhill. We can now use this money to make an offer to a name actor, and once an actor is attached it becomes that much easier to close the deal with other investors. Each step forward makes the next step (slightly) easier, till the boulder acquires its own momentum and a movie gets made.

When you’re listening to a director’s commentary on a DVD, you sometimes hear a director say something like “This project took three years to put together.” It’s one thing to hear that in the abstract; it’s another thing to have to live through it. Didn’t take three years for this specific project, but it has been three years since “Zen Noir” was released in trying to get some project moving forward, dammit, and that’s been a mighty long and agonizing time.

But now we’ve got a check. And it’s cleared the bank, too. That means we get to move forward now. And soon I’ll even be able to say what and when and why and how.

That thing about that guy, however, will have to remain top-secret for forever. Sorry.

Architectural Crimes, an Ongoing Series

Spent several hours the other day at the MGM Tower in Century City. And I must say this:



Whoever designed this so-called "bench" outside the building should be strapped to said "bench" and forced to sit upon it for twelve hours. That, trust me, would be sufficient punishment for this egregious crime against the human body.

Whither Books?

I attended a conference in San Diego this past weekend, about “21st Century Book Marketing.” Inevitably, a great deal of it was about the ways in which technology is changing the book-publishing world. One speaker, Dan Poynter, flat-out said “Don’t bother going to a New York publisher,” predicting that in a few years they will all be, simply, gone, and that self-publishing, and electronic forms of books, will be the only game in anyone’s town. A subsequent speaker disagreed, saying that the industry is certainly changing but that the experience of a physical book won’t be replaced for a good long while yet.

Speaking as a person who loves books, and the physical form of a book, it is terribly hard to imagine ever abandoning that. And yet, I never thought I’d listen to music on a computer--now it’s almost the only way I ever listen to music. My CDs are all ripped, and iTunes just plays, one record after another, for as long as I want. The convenience so outweighs issues like sound quality that I really only use my big stereo in conjunction with the TV anymore. I still have all the CDs, but most of them haven’t been touched in years.

Are books following the same path? I still don't own a Kindle or any other e-reader, but I’m starting to want one, just as I once began to covet an iPod. Because I’m in the middle of five books right now, which is not at all unusual for me, and it would be kinda great to have them all together in a form that never weighs more than a few ounces. (Although it must be said--there’s some odd thing about the clutter of books that is part of their appeal. Book lovers love having great precarious piles of books in every corner. I will sometimes demonstrate to new visitors the extent of my obsession by opening the kitchen cabinets--to reveal that the top shelves, all the way around, are filled with books. Not cookbooks--theatre and film books, actually. I simply needed the shelf space more for books than for food.)

This weekend I was talking to someone at the conference (the marvelous LiYana Silver, who kinda blew my mind with her “Redefining Monogamy” ideas), and as we talked a man came around handing out copies of a novel he’d written. A physical book, words on paper. So I did what I always do, what I call the First Paragraph Test: I open to page one, read the first paragraph, and if it sounds like something I’ve read before, I abandon the book.

This book was easy. It only took four words for me to toss the book aside. “Don’t write at me,” I said to the book and by proxy its author, “if you’re not gonna do it well.” But the point here is that it’s hard to beat that particular experience. Sure you can look at previews of a book online--the Kindle offers them, in fact I’ve got the first several chapters of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions on my iPhone’s Kindle app right now—but wandering through a bookstore, letting your eye wander, picking up books that look interesting, that you might never have thought of before, then doing the First Paragraph Test with a happy result, I don’t know that there can ever be an electronic replacement for that.

Just a few weeks ago I was in Borders, wandering, and came across a book by A. Roger Ekirch called At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, and it completely caught my attention. When the power goes out I’ve often thought about the world before electric light, but the moment I saw this book I immediately had the old thought: Why didn’t I think to write that? It had simply never occurred to me that that random thought might make an interesting book. But as soon as I saw it in the store, bells went off, and the perfect rightness of the idea became instantly self-evident.

An Amazon search, or a random browse through the Kindle’s lists, probably would have never turned up this book. You can never prove a negative, can never know what you never found, can never appreciate the opportunities that never crossed your path. And I find it terribly difficult to imagine a world where I can’t wander into a bookstore and hope for something, some glorious unknown and uncontemplated something, to leap off the shelves at me.

Which leaves the publishing industry where, exactly? Well, that probably depends on how many people like me are still out there. And I’m sure someone has run a study on those numbers, but I don’t think I want to know.

The Borders at the Third Street Promenade, one of my favorite places to go wander, closed a few months ago. It lasted long enough to drive out an earlier tenant, the fabulous Midnight Special bookstore, but then even the Borders went away. This may just be a train that is already leaving the station.

Birth of a Demagogue

You may remember that I had some issues with Ayn Rand recently. My initial reaction, upon finally being exposed to some of her work, was to object vehemently, mostly on artistic grounds. I wrote a blog entry, posted it, and moved on to other things.

Then I discovered the power of Google Alerts.

Followers of Ms. Rand (you could almost call them Rand cultists) had Google Alerts set up for any mention of her name. So quite suddenly I found that my readership count increased measurably, and people were leaving comments on my post. And because the tone of my blog post was light (I believe the relevant phrase was “Ayn Rand can bite me”), these comments contained charming and insightful criticisms calling me, for instance, “intellectually jejeune.” (My new favorite phrase!)

Naturally, I immediately realized that this represented a host of new opportunities. Because what’s more fun than messing with the heads of a group of Ayn Rand cultists?

“Ayn Rand can bite me” set the tone, and I wrote a couple more entries in which I took little shots at the cult of Rand. And sure enough, my readership spike continued and the comments kept coming in. It was huge fun.

Trouble is, in order to keep the cultists aggravated I ended up writing things that I didn’t quite believe. I mostly believed them, they were in the neighborhood of what I believed, but strictly speaking, no, I was asserting untruths in order to keep the attention of the Randiacs.

Still, that “intellectually jejeune” comment stung a little. So I finally decided to stop telling lies in the name of outrageousness, and to write a thorough, essay-length critique of Objectivism. Then an actual dialogue could begin, and perhaps a real back-and-forth might prove possible with the people I had been maligning as Randiacs.

The result: crickets.

The readership spike stopped spiking. The only comments I got were from friends of mine who already agreed with me. From the cultists, nothing. Stone silence.

I joked about it in a subsequent blog. Pretended that since no one had attempted to refute my argument then ipso facto it must be considered as having been proved true, and I expected sales of Atlas Shrugged to plummet immediately. No such luck.

The more likely explanation is, per Occam’s razor, the simplest one. Now that I was no longer being provocative, no one was provoked. And to the cultists, the idea of responding to a 3,700 word critical essay was absurd in a Comments box on someone else’s blog post, so naturally none of them even attempted to.

This is one explanation for how Rush Limbaugh was born. How Glenn Beck came to be. Being as charitable toward them as humanly possible, I have to concede that once upon a time, they might have been real people with something real to say. But that they quickly discovered that real criticism vanishes into the wind, while verbal grenades draw attention and response and further attention and increased ratings and yet more attention and bigger paychecks and then more attention. And never mind if, little bit by little bit, the things they said strayed further and further from the neighborhood of truth.

Do that long enough, and eventually it does become true, because you start to believe your own bullshit. And then you’re a weeping monstrosity like Glenn Beck.

So.

Just in case my mention of Ms. Rand happened to trigger a Google alert, if you are one of her devotees, I ask only one thing: don’t bother. There’s no need to respond in any way. We’re not going to agree, so don’t waste your time. If you are one of those who believe Glenn Beck is the new messiah, and you too have a Google alert set up, there’s just no point trying to defend him here, so move on. I’m not going to say anything outrageous just for the purpose of picking a fight, and if you try to pick one I’m probably going to just ignore it. So move on. There are better things to do, and I plan to go and do a few of them.

Have a lovely day.

(Chowderheads.)

Dear Mr. or Ms. Congressperson:

Hi. Just in case any of your staffers are roaming the web looking to see what we the people think about healthcare, I thought I’d let you know what’s going on in the head of this one particular voter/taxpayer.

I don’t have a healthcare horror story to relate--I just have the sort of story that millions of us have. When I opted for self-employment I discovered in real terms what it means to no longer have the leverage provided by small-group coverage: I had no negotiating power whatsoever, and was entirely at the whim of the insurance companies. I’ve written here already about what ensued, but suffice it to say that the merest hint of a possible malady on some sort of red-flag list they keep (an MRI that proved I didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis or any other kind of arthritis, just a shoulder problem that eventually resolved itself) was enough for various insurers to refuse to take me on. I spent weeks trying to arrange coverage until I finally went to the specialist, obtained copies of my medical records, and faxed them in to prove that dammit all, I wasn’t sick. At that point, sure, they were happy to see me and I got coverage.

Two months later they nearly doubled the premium price.

And, of course, after assuring me that I would be able to stay with my current doctor, who is fantastic (and thus my first priority in arranging coverage was to stay with this guy), I called said doctor’s office to make an appointment and was told “Oh no, he doesn’t take that coverage. Hasn’t for ten years now.”

So after being harassed, lied to and conned by the insurance companies, I find myself firmly believing that a public-option healthcare plan is essential. The insurance companies have created a cartel with monopoly powers, and if the government can come in and compete with them, well hell, seems to me that’s good old capitalism at work, and I can’t imagine why all those free-market Republicans would be against it.

Oh wait a second, yes I can imagine why. It’s the tale told by Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications at CIGNA, who related to Congress and then again on Bill Moyers’s invaluable program, exactly how and why the insurance companies would rather see me die than lose an extra dollar in profit.

And so, Mr. or Ms. Congressperson, Mr. or Madame Senator, I’m putting you on notice. Specifically, Rep. Waxman, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, I’m putting you all on notice: I’m one of your voters, and I’ve decided that in the next election, I’m going to be a single-issue voter. If any of you vote against a healthcare option that includes a competitive public plan, I will in turn vote against you. I don’t care about the rest of your record or how effective you’ve been on this committee or that, I don’t care. Healthcare reform is essential for the long-term growth of the nation, and I firmly believe that a public option must be part of that reform. Give me this, or I’ll go find someone who will.

Thank you for your time. Or I should say, your staffer’s time.

A Few Years With Falstaff

Just learned that one of my all-time favorite teachers died on May 29th, so here then are a few tales about what good teaching looks like.

Bill Sharp taught at Emerson College for only about fifteen years, after teaching at Stanford and then starting the theatre program at the University of California – Riverside. But those fifteen years happened to cover the entire period when I studied there, the more happy me. What Sharp excelled at was teaching acting styles, most particularly the classics. Now, acting is a particularly difficult thing to teach--it’s too easy to fall into the trap of saying to your students “You’ve got it or you don’t.” But he focused intensively on a few key things: understanding the text, trusting your instincts, and challenging your limitations.

He was wonderful with Shakespeare. In fact, the man was Falstaff. Squarely built, a bit of a belly, a good Falstaffian beard, a booming voice when he wanted it and a beguiling sweetness when he wanted it, plus a tendency to perhaps drink too much from time to time. If I were directing Merry Wives or the Henry IV plays, I’d have cast him in a cold second without bothering to audition anyone else. So he wasn’t one of those “If you can’t do, teach” sorts of teachers—he could do, indeed, and very well. Those of us in his class were always conniving to find ways to make him demonstrate a few lines of whatever we were working on, just for the fun of watching him handle the text.

And when we were working on a piece with some complex language, like Shakespeare, his first rule was always this: never say the line till you really understand it. He would sit with us and go line by line through a soliloquy and make sure we really thoroughly comprehended exactly what each line meant, why it was there, what it hoped to accomplish. By the time he was done, our speeches weren’t that awful generalized Shakespearean wash of sound but were concrete, and specific, and rich with meaning.

As for challenging an actor’s limitations—this is the guy who cast me as Othello in a long-form collection of scenes our class presented my Senior year. Bear in mind: I am just about the least likely Othello you could hope to imagine. Iago has always been more my speed, in fact I love that part and hugely regret that I never got to play it. (Though Sharp did spend ages working with me on an Iago speech that became part of my standard auditioning repertoire--the one that ends “’Tis here, but yet confus’d: Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.”) But he wanted to push me, he wanted to see what would happen if I played a character way outside my normal range. It was essentially an in-class project with only a small audience from the other classes, so the point was not to create great art, it was to push the actors and see who could rise to the occasion. In the end I didn’t really do that great a job--but I appreciate hugely what he was trying to accomplish.

And here, finally, is a story about trusting your instincts. After I graduated, Sharp was nice enough to take on a bunch of us in his off-hours. His own personal time, something he didn’t have to do at all, but for about ten of us he decided what the hell, he’d continue working with us for a while. In that group were a couple of actors who weren’t really very good. Anyone else (me included) would say that these two just didn’t have it, whatever “it” may be, and that there wasn’t much point in spending too much time with them. Which may be exactly why Sharp included them in the group....

These two were doing the nunnery scene from Hamlet one night, and it wasn’t going terribly well. Stiff, and awkward, and dull. But at one point, Sharp noticed something, and he stopped the scene. He said to the guy playing Hamlet, “You had an impulse just then, didn’t you? You wanted to walk out of the room.” The guy nodded. “Then do it,” Sharp said. “Walk out of the room. It’s her job to keep you here, but if you have that impulse, you’ve got to honor it. Let’s try it again.” They started from the top, reached that point, there was a moment’s hesitation and then the guy really truly did walk out of the room. The girl playing Ophelia chased after him, and a moment later they returned, with Ophelia basically dragging Hamlet back onstage.

And after that, after that was one of the best versions of that scene I have ever witnessed. And for those two not-particularly-gifted actors, it was almost certainly the pinnacle of their acting lives, there in a dim room in the old Student Union at Emerson for an audience of about ten. Because Bill Sharp wanted to see every student accomplish as much as they possibly could.

I left Boston and have no idea whether he continued with the extracurricular classwork, but I know he retired in 1994, and despite the drinking he lived till the ripe old age of 84 down in Swampscott. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but I shall, this one particular time, most definitely raise a glass.

Mr. Jackson

About Michael Jackson, I only have this to say:

When I’m driving down the highway and there’s an accident, I generally make a decision to not look at it. For one thing, of course, there’s the practical side: all that slowing down and looking makes traffic impossible, even when the accident doesn’t actually block any lanes, and I don’t want to contribute to the problem. But on a human level, it just seems to me that whoever is involved in the accident is probably having at minimum a very bad day, and at worst one of the most awful days of their lives--and surely they deserve whatever privacy they can get. What they simply don’t need is all those looky-loos staring at them for their own damn entertainment value. “Thank God that’s not me!” think the looky-loos. And “Is somebody dead? Ooh, is that a corpse? Oooooohhhh.” I don’t want to contribute to that problem, either.

And certain celebrities--we all know who they are--slot perfectly for me into a category I think of as Perpetual Wrecks by the Side of the Road. Thus, Jennifer Aniston’s love life deserves just as much privacy as someone whose car got smashed. Which brings us back round to Michael Jackson, who was the King of Pop but who was also, unfortunately, the King of the Car Wrecks. I ignored the stories about his marriages, about his kids, about his various personal travails, about his court trial, all of it. It would mean nothing to him, of course--there will always be plenty of people in the world who delight in staring at the wreck--but it felt good for my soul to just leave that poor man alone.

And now he’s dead, and the world has gone a little bit crazy over it. I did not watch the memorial and frankly I can’t see why the City of Los Angeles should pay for it, but whatever keeps the peace, I guess. I’m certainly sorry he died, and I can’t help but feel a monumental sadness about that sweet kid who got so twisted by his awful life. (I also can’t help thinking that the weirder he got, the more we stared, which can only have contributed to making his weirdness get that much weirder.) All in all, then, I think it’s a better thing to just keep on driving through my own life, and not slow down to stare at the awfulness of his.

The Failure of the Demos

Good article in Time this week about the current state of California’s budget woes. And I completely agree with Mr. O’Leary on one point in particular: the state of the State of California demonstrates the failure of direct democracy.

“Democracy” itself is a Greek word, from demos or demoi, originally a phrase for an Athenian municipality but a word that came to mean “the people” generally, combined with kratos, which means power. And since they basically invented the idea, the Greeks got the naming rights. Originally, democracy in Athens was pure and direct: when a vote was to be taken, every single citizen was compelled to go to the Pnyx. (And I do mean compelled: servants would roam the city with a rope dipped in red paint, and any citizen caught wandering the streets instead of going to the Pnyx was slapped with the rope, leaving a red stripe for all to see. They called it “ruddling.”)

But of course this direct democracy was only possible for two reasons: only about a third of the residents of Athens were considered citizens, and only adult males were allowed to vote, so it was possible to cram everybody onto a hillside for the requisite speeches and poll-taking. But even then there was something called the Council of 500, a group of leading citizens who actually made most of the day-to-day decisions. So even at its birth, there was already the necessary beginning of what we now call representational democracy.

Representational democracy is what we have here in most of the U.S. We elect people who go to the state capital or to Washington and who cast votes on our behalf. We cast one vote for a representative who then casts all the others. But in California, we have found a way around representational democracy and back to something very like the original direct form, through the referendum system.

It’s been a disastrous failure. Just about every issue gets submitted to the voice of the people through a ballot initiative, often through expensive special elections where they don’t wait for a national contest to be held but instead call for everyone to come out and vote again and again. This creates voter fatigue, where turnout gets lower and lower with each special election that gets added to the calendar (particularly when no one is getting ruddled...), so that only the people fiercely committed to a particular issue actually bother to turn out and vote. Which has the effect of actually perverting democracy, because only the ideologues end up having any voice. You can end up with some mighty strange laws that way.

But to make matters worse, when one side doesn’t get what it wants, it simply creates another referendum and submits that for a new vote a year or so further on. Exactly this is happening right now with the infamous Prop 8: having lost the first round, the opponents of Prop 8 are collecting signatures to submit the same issue to the voters again, as soon as possible, so that they can try different tactics and hopefully get a different outcome. But what’s to stop the people in favor of Prop 8, if they should lose the next round, from coming back themselves a year after that? Potentially there’s no end to it, not so long as the vote-count is close. So even though I happen to be on the side of the opponents of Prop 8 and would love to see that appalling decision done away with, I just don’t see where this endless referendum cycle does anyone any good.

But of course the classic example of failed direct democracy involves Prop 13, which limited property taxes (and thereby the amount of revenues the state can generate), and declared that the state legislature cannot pass any budget without a two-thirds majority. Combined, this double-eyed whammy means that the state has a nearly impossible time raising money when it needs it, unless it goes directly to the people and asks for the passage of a bond initiative. And as we saw in the last special election, the people are perfectly willing to vote for spending for new mandated services, but they are considerably less willing to vote for anything that even remotely sounds like higher taxes.

We the people want everything for nothing. It’s understandable, but it’s also horrific from a governance standpoint. And it is most definitely related to the Era of Excess we just lived through, where people spent money they didn’t have to buy things they didn’t need and then found themselves deeply in debt, and clueless as to how they got there. (Obviously that’s not the whole story--there were plenty of corporations perfectly happy to exploit our something-for-nothing weakness. But for now, I’m focusing on our own culpability, on why direct democracy has failed so badly.) The entire global economy rode a massive bubble of imaginary wealth and has now come crashing to the ground. Because you cannot have everything for nothing. TANSTAAFL, as Heinlein was fond of saying. (See? Sometimes I do agree with Milton Friedman.)

The result of all this in California was inevitable: at some point bills would come due that the state couldn’t pay, which is where we are right now, leading to what will surely be massive cuts to all sorts of state programs. And the inevitable result of that? Every group facing funding cuts is taking to the airwaves begging We the People to demand that funding not, in fact, be cut.

It’s only a matter of time before someone writes a new referendum, whereupon We the people, upset at the loss of such things as our lovely state parks, will vote to re-fund everything that the governor has cut--while still refusing to pay for a bit of it. And we’ll blame it all on the governor, refusing to acknowledge that in reality, it’s our own fault for creating this unworkable system in the first place.

Once we’ve done that--once we’ve had one more round of demanding the restoration of our pretty little baubles without paying for it--the state will be doomed.

Finished It's Finished

Finishing a new project, even when it’s just the first draft of a new project, is a sublimely satisfying moment. So many stories never quite happen, they never quite find their way to completion, that when one of them does--even more so when it feels solid and assured, like something that was always meant to be in the world but wasn’t until just this moment--there’s really not much else on earth that gives me quite the same rosy glow.

The new play I mentioned a while back was, from start to finish, absurdly easy to write. Now, granted: I’d had the idea for a while, wrote a five-page treatment months ago, but didn’t feel like I had the time so I just let it all sit in the back of my head. Where, apparently, it percolated. So that by the time I actually did sit down to start writing, I found that it was all already there--and much more marvelously alive and entertaining than what I’d described in the treatment.

Right up to the very last scene, it kept surprising me. I’d had a vague idea of the ending but it had never quite crystallized. But as soon as I turned my attention to it, suddenly a peripheral character who had mostly served mechanical functions within the play became the perfect solution to that last scene. And then, there it was. Finished, all finished.

And because writers are necessarily paranoid, I immediately made backup copies of the file. One on a thumb drive that I carry around with me; one on MobileMe where even if the house burns down with me inside it, the play will still survive. At a moment like this, of that sublime satisfaction of completion, the survival of the work feels a hell of a lot more important than the survival of me.

A little clean-up still to do—the main character’s name changed halfway through, so it has to be made consistent, and so forth. Then off it goes to friends for their opinions, while in the meantime I put it away and don’t look at it all for a while. Then, with fresh eyes and the considered opinions of others, I’ll do a second draft, after which comes the fun part: convincing the rest of the world to care half as much as I do.

But with this story? I really don’t think it’s gonna be too hard.

(Famous last words?)

Metallic Randiacs Write Themselves

Now that that’s out of my system, time to change the subject. A lot. And frequently.

Slow Hand

Haven’t mentioned the guitar in a while, but there’s been progress. On the acoustic, I’m starting to manage picking songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends,” I’m even slowly writing a song that is called, so far, “Variations in C” because it mostly depends on my not having to move my hand from the basic C-chord position. But I’m also starting to hit barre chords with some consistency, which feels like a major hurdle. And on the bass, I’m doing a reasonable job on songs like Elvis Costello’s “Pump it Up,” which is fast and moves a lot. And I have to say that of all songs, who’d have thought I would find Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” to be so much damn fun?

Last night, though, it’s like it all went away. Both hands felt like lead. The left just seemed to lag as I tried the run at the beginning of the Nancy Sinatra song, I was just kinda staring at it and thinking “What the hell’s wrong with you?” And the right hand was similarly clumsy--the fingernails, which are not all that long, kept hitting the strings when I didn’t want them to, imparting a heavy metallic clanging sound that was just plain ugly.

Two explanations present themselves: (1) it was just one of those nights, it happens; and (2) in fact I’ve always been that bad, or worse, but at last I’ve developed my awareness enough to realize it.

I leave it to you to speculate which of those is true.

Ou est le Randiacs?

Come on, people! In previous blog entries where I barely mentioned Ayn Rand, her supporters would pop up almost instantly, telling me how intellectually jejeune I was, how I didn’t know what I was talking about and really should just shut up please. So okay, I took that as a welcome challenge and responded. Worked hard, wrote an essay I’m proud of, and with the exception of a comment from a friend of mine who already agreed with me, there’s been no response--particularly, none from the Objectivist crowd.

Can it be? Have I so completely proven my point that they’ve all just given up and given in? Fabulous! I expect to see a plunge in sales of Atlas Shrugged any day now...

Writing the Boards Again

The other day I was describing myself to someone, somewhere, and for the umpteenth time said I was “a person of the theatre.” It takes umpteen times for me to notice things, but I finally stopped and said “You know, that’s really kinda true.” A couple days later, I took a project I’ve been planning to write as a movie, and instead began writing a new play. First time I’ve done any playwriting in just about ten years.

It feels amazingly good. So much fun to stretch that particular set of writing muscles again, and to remind myself of how a stage play works, and why.

And so far? This thing is writing itself. The first thirty pages have been just about effortless, and I’m loving what has emerged to date. Even had that loveliest of moments, early on, when I put two characters on stage together, thinking I was going to write the scene one way--but as soon as they were together, they took over and the scene became a whole different thing that instantly deepened and enriched the play.

As with Thereby, I feel like I’m not the captain, I’m just a passenger on this ride. That makes me one seriously happy writer.

Ayn Rand, Part Two

I sometimes wonder whether Ayn Rand was being deliberately inflammatory when she chose “selfishness” as the lynchpin of her prescription for human behavior. It’s something we’re all taught not to be as children (when we are, of course, massively selfish), so to be told by an adult that in fact that’s just what we should be, it spins our heads around a little. Which was probably exactly what Rand wanted. Oliver Stone was, of course, trying to do exactly the same thing when he wrote Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good” speech in Wall Street, although in Stone’s case, he was laying out a position his main character would eventually abandon.

In defense of the orthodoxy, then, here I come to take on Ayn Rand. And let me begin, again, by agreeing with her on something:

To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims--by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know--is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

Clearly, then, when she advocates selfishness she is not advocating any kind of emotional selfishness where you childishly do whatever you feel like at any given moment. What she’s after is rational selfishness, where you reason out what’s best for you and then do that, boldly and without hesitation.

The trouble is, this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as socialism, in that both ignore certain inescapable facts about human nature. (And remember that Rand’s philosophy is at heart a violent reaction against socialism, born from her personal experiences with the Soviet revolution.) With socialism, people will always want to at least believe that one way or another, they’re a little bit better than their neighbor. True parity is impossible because no one would ever stand for it. Similarly, some of the people most likely to be attracted to Rand’s selfishness are, alas, also likely to ignore her distinction between emotional and rational selfishness, and decide that they’ve now got license to go ahead and do whatever they feel like at any given moment. Their actions become, to be sure, a distortion of what Rand was going for--but, perhaps because she chose a deliberately inflammatory word, Rand opens the door wide and lets absolutely everyone in, including all those who’ve been looking for an excuse to be emotionally selfish. Children, dressed as adults.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Rand doesn’t stop there.

To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

And in this manner, she attempts to abnegate the golden rule. Because if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, then there are no ethical standards at play, only individual whims, which is exactly what Rand means when she refers to “ethical hedonists.” But, speaking only for myself because I’m the only person I can speak for, my definition of how I’d like to be treated by others, and how I in turn strive to treat them, is not generally dictated by my sense of what’s pleasurable--it is in fact guided by my sense of values.

Have I just locked myself into a circular definition? In the first part of this critique I defined myself as a relative relativist, with only one absolute: the golden rule. Now I say that the test against which I measure the golden rule is my own set of values, even though, as a relativist, I would seem to have none. It’s exactly this sort of thing that drove Rand crazy...

When a “desire,” regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”)--men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests will necessarily clash.

(Here, by the way, she is directly taking on the school of philosophers known as the Utilitarians. Bentham, Mill, etc. Utilitarianism, as it happens, is a branch of what’s called Consequentialism—and I can’t help wondering whether her Objectivism is really just a different branch of Consequentialism, thus explaining her particular ire for the Utilitarians. Academic in-fighting, basically. But that’s a topic for another day.)

“The greatest happiness for the greatest number” comes pretty close to describing what lies at the heart of my own ethos, so I guess you could call me a Utilitarian. But in her dismissal of this point of view, I think she misses the mark badly--men’s desires and interests will only clash when their desires and interests are exclusive, i.e., when my desires are not the same as yours, yours are not the same as mine, and we then resort to fisticuffs to try and force the question of whose desires will win the day. But by definition, my desires also take into account yours--you can’t have “the greatest good for the greatest number” without constant attention to what others desire, and how your own desires can be slotted into those of others.

My approach, then, is inclusive; Rand’s is exclusive. I can’t help thinking that if one truly followed her approach, s/he would end up at exactly at the place Rand decries above: in conflict with others whose definition of their own self-interest, their own selfishness, does not agree with yours. Since consideration of others’ self-interest is considered harmful, then your own self-interest is all that’s left, and without that consideration of those around you, surely conflict becomes more likely rather than less. The only way around this problem would be enforced conformity: everyone on earth agreeing to the same definition of individual self-interest. And that doesn’t sound at all like the sort of freedom Rand is reaching for; in fact, it sounds like exactly the opposite.

But here’s where, for a moment, I agree with Rand again:

... no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man--or group or society or government--has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This seems self-evidently right, and for all my differences with Rand elsewhere, here we are matched up perfectly. But then she just has to take it further:

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

For one thing, she sneaks in a very sweeping declaration about property rights without further discussion of what she means (except to suggest that people go and read Atlas Shrugged). And since property rights more or less sit at the heart of every economic theory ever devised, then this particular question is of crucial importance. Not the sort of thing to be glossed over so casually.

Now on its face, the above statement about the purpose of government seems unassailable. But in short order, its ramifications are made clear:

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism--with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.

Well, I might submit that during the Eighties and Nineties, we came relatively close to uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, and the result was disastrous. Rand, however, would probably respond that it was government’s interference in open markets that produced the abuses we have all seen. Her vision of capitalism is, after all, every bit as black-and-white as her vision of everything else is: pure unfettered capitalism, utterly unregulated, or nothing. If no other rights are possible without property rights, then it must follow that property rights must be defended fiercely above all else.

I tend to feel about capitalism the same way Churchill felt about democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Rand, however, has clearly settled on capitalism as the be-all and end-all. But the trouble with any system that overtly appeals to man’s greed is that greed is a bottomless pit. You can never have enough of whatever you covet, as Charles MacKay demonstrates amply in the first chapter of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. (In which he discusses financial bubbles--remember please that he wrote it over 160 years ago, and we haven’t learned a thing since.)

Given the evidence before us with the current recession, I am more firmly convinced than ever that Rand is just plain wrong about the need for unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. What’s needed instead is managed capitalism, because otherwise you simply cannot check the greed of those who will, every time without fail, take advantage of unregulated markets to satisfy their bottomless greed. Rand might reply that the people who exploit markets and people for their own gain are simply criminals who deserve punishment, that even if they claim to be devoted Ayn Rand followers they are really just thugs taking advantage of what would otherwise be a perfectly good system.

Again, I say that this view is naïve. You simply cannot create a system that appeals to man’s greed and then tell him not to get too greedy. It won’t work. Without some mechanism that understands this, and sets limits, you will experience systemic crashes just like the one we’re suffering through now. Every time. Every. Damn. Time.

Are they criminals? Of course they’re criminals, and they deserve to be treated as such. But if markets are unregulated, how do you prosecute these people? The perpetrators of credit default swaps and all the other nonsense we’re suffering through now were behaving in a perfectly legal manner, in an unregulated sphere of the marketplace, and they came horrifyingly close to ruining the nation. (And may still --it ain’t over yet.) That is the result of Ayn Rand’s views about capitalism, which are the perfect end result of her entire Objectivist philosophy.

People have been buying Rand’s books by the thousands since the recession began. Yaron Brook, who runs the Ayn Rand Institute, recently said of this phenomenon,

As America faces a devastating economic crisis fundamentally caused by government policies, it is a hopeful sign for the future that increasing numbers of concerned Americans are turning to Atlas Shrugged and discovering Ayn Rand’s original morality of rational egoism and her uncompromising defense of laissez faire capitalism.

He’s got it completely backward. But if all these sales of her books somehow result in a groundswell movement where people actually try to implement Rand’s thinking on a national scale, well, to resort to a divinity she ridiculed, God help us.

Ayn Rand, Part One

At last, by popular non-demand, I present my critique of the ethos of Ayn Rand. All ye with Google Alerts, prepare to be offended. (‘Cause after all, no matter how reasonable I am, somebody’s gonna take offense...)

And please bear in mind that this is a blog entry, not a full-on essay. While I have in fact written point-by-point notes in refutation of (or agreement with) Rand’s various assertions, in this forum I’m only going to deal in broad strokes.

Let’s start with this: there is, in fact, a massive point of agreement between Ms. Rand and myself. In a presentation she delivered to the University of Wisconsin’s “Ethics in Our Time” symposium in 1961, Ms. Rand said:

“That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose--the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being--belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to lead is his own.

This is, in Rand’s words, a nearly perfect analogue to a principle I have often expressed (it is in fact the principal idea underlying just about everything I’ve ever written), which, in my own words, is that our lives are stories we are telling to ourselves, and that only we can tell our own stories--but that we must also resist the efforts of others to tell our stories for us. (Parents, bosses, governments, etc., it goes on all the time.)

What she and I both say, to put it yet another way, is that the responsibility for living our lives is only our own, and that when we simply follow the herd, or do what the herd tells us to do, very often we end up losing many of the things that are, or should be, most important to us.

If I agree with her on this important point, then why do I still, in general, disagree so strenuously with the Objectivist ethos? It all turns on two ideas: sacrifice and selfishness. First up, sacrifice.

As I have noted before, I believe I understand why she responded to any notion of individual sacrifice to a collective as vehemently as she did: she was born in Russia in 1905, watched the 1917 revolution unfold beneath the windows of her home in St. Petersburg, and had to endure the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy by the new Soviet government. The family fled to the Crimea, were nearly killed by bandits along the way, and when her father opened a new pharmacy in the Crimea, that too was confiscated. She escaped to the U.S. after college and vowed never to return. So obviously, she went through a long series of horrific experiences, and I cannot begrudge her violent reaction against anything that smacks of her personal experiences with a collective form of government.

After all of this, it’s no surprise that she loved the U.S. so much--and that she loved capitalism, which she elevated to something akin to a religion. It also led, I believe, to a fiercely Manichean worldview in which any sacrifice to the general welfare was deemed evil, and selfishness was elevated to the noblest of virtues.

There is a philosophical idea that I think applies here: it’s called bivalence, or “the exclusion of the middle.” It has to do with the notion that often, when trying to formulate a postulate, philosophers tend to push their ideas into either/or configurations: “Either X is true, or Y is true, but it is impossible for them to both be true.” But in the process, they end up excluding everything that might lie between X and Y. And since I am a firm believer that almost nothing in life is strictly black or white, I tend to have rather strong reactions to anyone who asserts otherwise.

(I have been accused of being a relativist, which is true enough, but not entirely true. When discussing the Terry Schiavo case with a fundamentalist Christian she trotted out the relativist argument, and asked whether I believe in anything absolute. My answer: yes, I do. The golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No surprise, Ms. Rand takes exception to this notion, which I’ll get to in a little bit.)

The either/or-ness of Rand’s viewpoint is expressed constantly:

...”society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And--since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men--this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

(And before continuing on, let me just note that the entity she calls “society” most definitely exists separate from the individual men of whom it is comprised. I’m in the midst of reading Charles MacKay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is all about the ways in which group-think differs from the ways individuals think. The famous quote from his Preface sums up his viewpoint: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”)

I would also argue that there’s nothing ethical about her assertion that some men feel entitled to “pursue any whims (or atrocities)” they wish. This obviously goes on all the time (witness almost anything in the news today, from Somalia to Wall Street), but the whole point is that this sort of behavior is not ethical. And once it’s exposed, “society” frequently gets rather upset at just how unethical it all is. Witness the current mass anger at the nation’s financial institutions. Repeatedly, masses of people have woken from their slumber and demanded that the oligarchs change their ways. (And then, just as often, the oligarchs wait for the masses to go back to sleep again and start to slowly change things back—but they can never take it all back, and in this manner, century by century, change does indeed happen.)

Rand also writes:

An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

But what about fire? Fire, by her definition, would be both good and evil, simultaneously: it furthers life by warming us when the weather is cold, and by destroying organisms in food that might threaten us. But unleashed, fire obviously threatens life when it burns your house and perhaps you inside of it. But nowhere does Rand ever consider the vast range of things that might be both good and evil, depending upon the circumstances. Either/or is the only possibility she contemplates.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand has John Galt say:

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice--and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.

So if I am not strictly rational (using only her definition) at all times, then I’m suicidal? I don’t think so. I do irrational things all the time. Lots of people do. To cite just one potent example: there was nothing rational about the hundreds of people who flocked to Ground Zero after September 11th, to try and help. Everyone knew there were toxins in the air, everyone knew there was a risk. But people wanted to help, and some have paid the price, but they felt it worth the price just to try to help. Rand would surely call this irrational and suicidal. I call it something else.

She writes,

...let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life.

This is the crux of her argument against sacrifice, and for selfishness. Since living is the only possible ultimate value for any entity, then anything that threatens that living must ipso facto be evil. She continues:

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end to itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.

(All italics, by the way, are Rand’s. Like all dogmatists, she is endlessly emphatic.)

To this I have to ask, why must this be exclusive? Why must one’s own happiness exclude any consideration of the happiness of others? Because, after all, sacrifice is not black and white. There are little sacrifices we make all the time that don’t in any way threaten our lives, and that therefore are not even considered in Rand’s ethos. A parent’s million sacrifice for his or her children is a prime example, one that most definitely leads to the continued existence of the human race as a whole and would therefore be, in Rand’s terms, most definitely good and not evil. Yet it involves sacrifice. How does she reconcile this? She doesn’t. It is never even addressed.

Rand’s hatred of sacrifice means that, if the world conducted itself according to her precepts, there could never be armies. But it also means that there could never be firefighters, or policemen. Doctors would never go near someone with a deadly communicable disease. A nuclear engineer would not make the crucial repair that might stop a meltdown. Their refusal to sacrifice would in fact result in the sacrifice of others, which is something that Rand says should never be done. This discrepancy is also never addressed. In fact, she writes...

Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value--and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

The flip side of her hatred of sacrifice is, of course, her promotion of selfishness. And since this is long enough already, I’ll save this side of the discussion for next time.

In Which Yet Another Thing is Railed Against

They bill it as a great service you're doing for the environment. Save paper! Save trees! Switch to paperless billing! Greater convenience for you, plus it's good for the environment! Win win win!

But of course the thing they really care about (and here I'm talking about anyone who sends you a bill) is that if they don't have to send a paper bill anymore, they save on the paper, the printing, the postage. It's cheaper for them--that's the only reason they suddenly care so much about the environment.

I tried to avoid paperless billing, simply because my particular bill-payment system depends on having a physical object in front of me in a particular place. The due date is written on the outside of the envelope, and once paid, it goes elsewhere. Simple, clean, effective. And if it's marginally worse for the environment, in this case I can live with that.

But when Bank of America started offering eBills, they seemed a handy way to create a backup plan. If the mail lost a bill, I'd see it when I logged onto BOA. Here's the thing, though...

Very often, in the fine print, when you sign up for an eBill through your bank, you simultaneously agree that paper bills will stop coming. This is particularly true with utility companies--they love that little trick.

Last month, after realizing that Bank of America is vicious and evil, I switched banks. All my eBills were, of course, left behind. I figured I'd just have to set up new eBilling with my new bank, which would be a pain, but it was worth it to be free of BOA.

The catch didn't occur to me till the deed was already done. How do you set up new eBilling if you don't have the account number? The account number would be written on any paper bill, but of course I haven't gotten a paper bill from those guys in months or years.

But wait, it gets better. I called the local natural-gas company this afternoon to (a) find out what the hell my damn account number is, and to (b) get them to put me back on paper billing. And what do you think they told me?

"To reinstate paper billing you'll have to contact the bank through which you instituted paperless billing." Yes, you read that right, the local utility that is the provider of the service claims they cannot send a paper bill, that I have to go through BOA to get a damn bill of any kind.

I tried calling BOA. They're closed.

I can't log in to the gas company's website, either--suddenly they don't recognize the password or user name I set up ages ago--won't even accept the account number they had just read off to me.

Paperless billing. To hell with the environment. It's only good for them, it does you no damn good at all. Don't believe the hype; a little convenience now could very well become massive inconvenience down the road.

About That Wascally Ayn Wand

So I'm still fascinated by Ayn Rand, and honest, I'm looking at the material on the aynrand.org website in the hope that I'll find some ideas that don't drive me up a wall. (Some success, but then up the wall again.) And I'll probably report on what I find sometime later. But for now, there's this--prominent Ayn Rand scholar Yaron Brook, providing a video intro to the site...

Because honest, the absolute last thing I expected was that the man would sound like Elmer Fudd...

Another Day at the Office

This might have something to do with the music video I shot a couple weeks ago. Or it might just be any typical night in Hollywood as people run from a demented clown. You decide.

Bill O'Reilly is a Smelly-Pants! (Neener Neener)

So apparently Bill O’Reilly has decided to boycott Sean Penn movies. He recognizes that Penn is a great actor but doesn’t like the man’s politics, and so he has decided to protest with his dollars, as is his right.

It’s also completely childish.

Several years back, I did the same thing. Except for me, it was John Wayne who was to be shunned. A sometimes strident right-winger who made movies like The Green Berets, I decided that the man was an ignoramus and could safely be ignored. I went on like that for years. (I wasn’t so crazy about Clint Eastwood, either, for exactly the same reasons, and stayed away from his films as well. Dirty Harry? Please.)

(There was one exception made: The Quiet Man. But that’s because the movie was set in Ireland and made by the great John Ford, so I rationalized the exception by saying it was an atypical movie more about Ford than Wayne, and in it Wayne played a man desperate for peace after a lifetime of fighting. Plus it had Maureen O’Hara and her streaming red hair, and who could resist that?)

At the same time, I vociferously stood up for Jane Fonda’s right to speak out. And Vanessa Redgrave’s. Even though I didn’t always agree with them, damn it all, surely they had the right to speak their mind like anyone else! And yet never once during that time did I stop to question my own hypocrisy.

And then I saw The Searchers. Another John Ford film, and a truly great movie. At this point I had a dilemma: in order to catch up on the ouvre of John Ford, I was going to have to watch a lot of John Wayne films. What to do? What to do? (Then I discovered that Ford was himself pretty right-wing. Curses!)

And I thought, You know, Wayne gave a pretty damn great performance in The Searchers. Can it be possible that I’ve been, o horror at the thought, a bit unfair to the man? I watched Stagecoach, with that brilliant zoom-in on Wayne’s first appearance that made him an instant icon. I began to appreciate his incredible physicality (no one else, ever, has been able to walk like that), and I began to find levels to his performances that I’d never have been willing to grant before. And Fort Apache followed, also a truly great film. And Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with one of my favorites, Jimmy Stewart. (Another dilemma: how could I reconcile the fact that I loved Jimmy Stewart but that he was great friends with both John Wayne and Ronald Reagan?)

(I even watched Dirty Harry, and by gum, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Plus of course there was Unforgiven, which in a stroke turned me around on Clint Eastwood--and which Bill O’Reilly claims is one of his favorite movies. Mine, too--see, there is room for agreement here1)

I now knew for sure that by denying John Wayne I had been denying myself an awful lot of good movies. But what about the Wayne flicks that weren’t directed by John Ford? The Shootist answered that question as well. John Wayne was a terrific actor, and I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification catching up on his movies for the last couple of years. People can have whatever opinions they want, and they can say what they want no matter what those opinions may be. And I can choose to listen or not to listen. It’s fine, I’m an adult, I can handle it.

And so we come back around to Bill O’Reilly, who is older than me and really ought to have figured this out by now. He says he’s a movie guy, he loves watching movies, and he also says he realizes Sean Penn is a great actor. So I can only say to him, Grow up already!

Wallowing in Nostalgia

My junior year of high school, some friends of mine were in a one-act called "Did You Ever Go to P.S. 43?" by Michael Schulman. In it, a woman sits on a park bench, minding her own business, when a man comes up and asks her whether she went to the school listed in the title. We soon learn that he was once a star athlete at that school who had one fantastic game, one perfect night, early on in his life--and that nothing was ever so good again. So he roams the city, asking random strangers whether maybe they were there, whether they can validate his life by remembering that one perfect night with him.

A group of people I went to high school with has slowly gathered on Facebook, over the past couple of months, and I have found myself nearly obsessed with the group. I started scanning old photos, even old programs, and of course started to actively seek out people I hadn't seen in something like a quarter of a century. A formal group got created on Facebook just for the performers at that school in certain years, which had the effect of creating an ongoing high-school reunion where only the people you liked showed up. (As opposed to the one actual reunion I attended, my tenth, where I ended up disappointed because most of the performers weren't there.)

No question, it's been great reconnecting with some people I hadn't seen in all that time; there are even a couple folks I really hadn't known that well back then, but who are now becoming actual friends, not just of the Facebook kind. The old artificial distinctions of age drop away (who cares now whether someone was a year ahead or behind?), and we can all just be people with a certain specific connection, sharing the old stories--indulging ourselves, as much as we want, in a bit of harmless nostalgia.

And as I wallow, my memory of those days has become golden. All the pictures in my head look something like this...

That's me looking goofy on the right, but smiling and cheerful, with old friends, some of whom are now members of that Facebook group. (And one of whom, Rudy Prieto, in the red shirt with his back to the camera, passed away years ago, alas.) But why shouldn't I be smiling? By my senior year, I was completely in command. I had leads in both the major shows, completely knocking it out of the park as Fagin in Oliver! The school created a closed-circuit TV system that year, so my best friend David Hernandez and I did the morning announcements as a pair of oddball TV anchors, playing as many pranks as we could possibly dream up--and since I was on TV every morning, absolutely everyone in school knew me, and said hi, and kinda sucked up in the way that only happens when you're on TV, even closed-circuit TV that never leaves that one building. Every morning I would get to school half an hour early, just so I could hang out near the Drama classroom with my friends before classes started. I was in Advanced Placement classes, got good grades, and didn't have to take math. What more could a fella want?

But here's the thing. A few days ago I wanted to look up some specific information that required pulling out the journals I started keeping my first year of high school. And there, in horrifically bad writing, was the truth of how I felt back then. Which is to say, miserable.

Every stupid little insult. Every moment at a party when I felt snubbed. Every unrequited crush. Every moment that didn't meet some unattainable standard of perfection, I dwelled on all of it, and refused to enjoy all the moments that were, in fact, pretty damn great. It was as if I were that guy in Schulman's play, who has in fact found people who remember his big game--but who has now discovered that even when he was having his great moment, he was completely unable to enjoy a second of it. Best moment of his life and all he did at the time was gripe.

(By the way--I am not that guy. Plenty of great moments since high school, thank you very much. Most recently, watching my name scroll across a movie screen for the first time, in a crowded theater, that was just plain fantastic. Plenty more of those moments to come, too--I feel like I'm only just beginning to peak, right now. So there.)

(And, of course, all of the above could also be summed up thusly: I was a teenager, and that's what we do. C'est la vie.)

Still, I can't escape the conclusion that the only reason I was miserable was because I wanted to be. And that if I'd been able to simply make the other decision, the Buddhist decision to simply be where I was and experience life as it was rather than as I desired it to be, I'd have had a hell of a lot more fun back then.

Of course it's all a vicious cycle: if I'd been able to enjoy myself a little more, doubtless there wouldn't have been quite so many stupid little insults, awkward moments at parties, or unrequited crushes. When I wrote Thereby, I discovered the one theme that has come to dominate all my work: that our lives are like stories, and we're the tellers of those stories. Whether they go well or badly is entirely up to us.

Now I learn that lesson again, through my own awful high-school journal entries. A perfectly lovely time made miserable by nothing more than my decision to be miserable. A story that could have gone so much better, if only I had allowed myself to tell it that way.

The Charter for Compassion

I could quibble. "Charter for Compassion" is a phrase that doesn't quite sing, and I think they've got the wrong word: empathy rather than compassion is what they really seem to be going for. But I like what they're going for, so to hell with the quibbling.

Well okay, a little quibbling. The OED defines compassion as "sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others," while it defines empathy as "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Certainly they're similar, but judging by Karen Armstrong's description of the Charter's purpose, empathy, which has a broader reach than sympathy, seems the more apt:

Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other, learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their grievances...

(Ayn Rand, by the way, would probably think this is all a crock. But Ayn Rand can--well, I've been down that road already.)

In 2005 I wrote a long entry here that noted my lifelong belief that our enemies are not our enemies. There seems to be something in the way I'm made, or the way I was raised, or both, that makes me distrust propaganda and dogma--and it's probably the same thing that made me an actor, that makes me a writer. After all, the first job of an actor, of a writer, is to try his/her damnedest to get inside someone else's skin, to understand someone Other and then relay that understanding to an audience.

Here's a story that Laurence Olivier used to tell. He was playing Sergius in Shaw's Arms and the Man, and he hated the character. So one night he's walking somewhere with the director Ken Tynan, and said what he thought of Sergius. "A rotten little shit," or some such language. Tynan immediately said back to him, "Well if you don't like the man you'll never be able to play him well, will you?" Which stopped Olivier cold--and made him a better actor.

So as soon as I heard Ms. Armstrong on Bill Moyers's show, talking about compassion, and the golden rule, and the audacious idea of crafting a document extolling these virtues on a global scale, trying to reinsert into the human conversation something that should have been there all along, I immediately responded. My heart sang, and I even found myself, for just a moment, thinking that maybe I could get along with Ayn Rand after all if I would just make the effort.

The golden rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I mean come on. What else is there?

A Simple Desultory Apologetic

Billy Graham?

Okay, so I got the words wrong. The title of the preceding entry, which quoted Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic" (his Bob Dylan parody), should have read: "I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded
 / Communist, 'cause I'm left-handed." I have what I call "interesting hearing"--it's not very accurate, but it sure does make the world more interesting. Personally, I think Mr. Simon should consider redoing the lyrics my way.

(Oh--bonus points to anyone who knows, off the top of their head--honor system!,--the next line of the song.)

Randiacs!

Speaking of the preceding entry, apparently there are Ayn Rand devotees who troll the web regularly, because I got responses to that entry faster than to any other entry I've ever written. I'm half-tempted to keep stirring the pot for a while, just for the fun of it, but I think it has already been clearly demonstrated that from their point of view none of my points can ever possibly be valid, and that from my point of view, they're just plain wrong.

(But no, really: are there any Ayn Rand fans with a sense of humor? They're all so bleepin' earnest!)

A Music Video?

Yes, I'll be in a music video. For a truly demented act called "Renfield." Hard to describe, but the MySpace page tells part of the tale. My friend Ezra is directing it, and asked me to be in it.

I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Which is of course the whole fun of it.

I think.

I've Been Ayn Randed and Billy Graham'ded, I'm Communist 'Cause I'm Left-Handed

I recently watched the movie version of The Fountainhead. And I think I can now say, with perfect confidence, that Ayn Rand can bite me.

Prior to this, I knew effectively nothing about Ms. Rand. I had never read any of her work, had never had any conversations about her that went beyond "You should read such-and-such." Never looked her up in an encyclopedia, never read any articles about her, never watched Biography Channel programs about her, never ran across anything about Objectivism in any works on philosophy. I had a vague sense that her work was controversial, and that was absolutely it.

So I really truly did come to The Fountainhead with an open mind. Ten minutes later...

Apparently, the history of the movie is this: the novel was very popular, so Ms. Rand was hired to write the script, and she demanded that there be no interference whatsoever with what she wrote. (Exactly the sorts of demands Howard Roark makes repeatedly.) When the director, King Vidor, trying his level best to make a movie, tried to tighten up that nearly six-minute speech she'd written for the end, Rand threw a fit, went to the head of the studio, demanded that Vidor film only and exactly what she had written, word for word, and got her way.

The result is awful. It's a bad, bad, bad movie, entirely because of the script. (I will submit that Gary Cooper's particularly wooden performance had a lot to do with his dislike of the script.) Leaving aside for the moment the philosophy espoused in the film, my initial adverse reaction was purely as a writer responding to the writing. And bear in mind, I'm not complaining because the film is preachy and didactic--I'm a huge fan of Bernard Shaw, and no one can ever say that Shaw wasn't preachy and didactic (the plot of Man and Superman is interrupted for about an hour by a speechfest called "Don Juan in Hell"). But Shaw had a sense of humor, and Rand doesn't at all. This makes a huge difference. Shaw was also a much better writer of dialogue, which is partly a function of his sense of humor, but it goes deeper than that--writing dialogue is a specialized skill, and clearly, Shaw had mastered it and Rand hadn't.

To be fair, I've still never read any of Rand's prose, and it may be that she was a good novelist but a bad screenwriter. I'm completely happy to accept, for the moment, that this is true, and to move on.

But here's the thing: the whole philosophy espoused by the movie is that the individual artist must never be interfered with in any way, that only the pure, untrampled creations of such artists can ever advance art and society. And this movie? It's a bad movie. By being left alone to create exactly what she wanted, without interference, Ayn Rand wrote a bad movie. The work itself completely undermines the very idea it seeks to advance.

Probably the reason why my dad has from time to time suggested I read Ms. Rand's work is because I seem to share her affinity for the supremacy of the artist. I am, after all, the writer of Thereby Hangs a Tale, which is a challenging novel written very much according to its own dictates, and resolutely not a casual beach-read. But at the same time, I'm also a former actor, and one thing I learned very clearly in my days on the stage is that the work isn't for the performer, it's for the audience. A bad actor is one who is only interested in exploring his own psyche onstage, which is that peculiar form of Narcissism that insists that the rest of the world watch the actor love himself.

Ms. Rand's architect, Howard Roark, continually insists that his buildings be constructed as designed, and he refuses to ever consider any other points of view about what's in his designs. (The movie stacks the argument ridiculously: opposing points of view are never balanced or thoughtful, they are only deadly literal recitations like this one: "You can't hope to survive unless you learn how to compromise. Now, watch me! In just a few short years I'll shoot to the top of the architectural profession because I'm going to give the public what it wants.") Since his opponents are all manifest idiots, there's never any real Socratic dialogue, never any attempt to play one idea against another in order to arrive at a new truth--art here is an excuse for a predetermined ideological position, which is exactly why it fails as art--and, again, undermines Rand's own purpose. Roark is that bad actor, just as Rand is--they're not actually interested in the art for its own sake, they're only interested in their own self-aggrandizing freedom of expression at all costs.

To be Buddhist about it, the thing that is most missing from Rand's work is any sense of humility. A humble artist can still insist on the importance of following his own muse without allowing it to be watered down, but the key to that is to let the work itself lead where it must, without imposing preconditions on it--without insisting that the art support your philosophy of Objectivism, for example.

Again, we come to Shaw. You might well ask, isn't that exactly what Shaw's plays did? Weren't they often just excuses for him to espouse Socialism, or some other pet theory he had? In rebuttal, I will only offer Saint Joan. The reason why it's his best play, I've often thought, is because Joan surprised Shaw--that he originally wanted to write the play for didactic reasons, but as he went along the work started to take him to different places, places that surprised him. The character came alive, and he was a great enough artist to let that happen, to let the work lead him where it would, and didn't try to wrest control of it back to his ideological purpose. That is what makes great art--being humble enough to let the universe speak to you, to accept that you are not superman, that you don't know everything, and that sometimes the work is best when you just get the hell out of its way.

Plus, there's nothing at all wrong with finding some smart people whose opinions you respect and asking them what they think of the work you've made. Thereby is definitely a better work because I sought, and respected, and incorporated, the opinions of some very smart people.

There's more. I've now read up on Ms. Rand, and Objectivism. I can certainly see why someone who was a child in St. Petersburg during the 1917 revolution would come to hate any form of collectivism, and I certainly feel some empathy for how she came to reach that conclusion. But I can also see that she swung so far in the other direction that Objectivism became one short step away from Fascism, and it now comes as no surprise to discover that proponents of laissez-faire capitalism (Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, etc.) are huge fans of Ayn Rand. Her work often appeals to just the sort of person who has no humility, who believes himself to be a superman who must never be interfered with, who feels no need to "cater to the stinking masses." Her work becomes, in essence, one of the excuses they use to convince themselves that their own personal Fascism is perfectly okay, that they best serve society by ignoring society. And that's just plain wrong. There's a balance to be struck, and it's a difficult balance to be sure--but without the essential thing, without a little humility, listening to Ayn Rand will only lead you way down a dark, dark road.

Or, to say it again: Ayn Rand can bite me.

On Slowness

In 1987, John Cage wrote a piece for organ called "As Slow as Possible." The idea is that the performer should take the title literally--that while the relationships between the notes should never change, only the performer's notion of what "slow" means would determine the final length of the piece. (In other words, a whole note is still a whole note, an eighth note still an eighth note--but how long they last is up to the artist.) Performances generally run from 20 to 70 minutes--but on February 5th, Diane Luchese gave a performance at Towson University that ran for just under 15 hours.

I love what the Baltimore Sun's music critic, Tim Johnson, had to say about this particular form of musical insanity. He "stopped by" in the tenth hour of the performance, noting that there were only a dozen audience members when he arrived, and four by the time he left. But he went on to say this:

Sustained low notes on the organ's pedals created a visceral, fundamental rumble that suggested the drone of some cosmic machinery. Dissonant chords appeared and disappeared unpredictably above that pulsating foundation--chance encounters with sonority. Almost each change in notes or tone colors seemed positively cataclysmic in this glacial context.

I've written about "deep time" before, and it seems to me this Cage piece is the musical equivalent of it. Something that shifts your perspective right round, taking you out of the go-go now and drops you into something larger and stranger and richer.

Slowness is anathema to we modern-folk, but it has much to be said for it. Just today I had to drive during a pretty horrible rainstorm, and I fast became a fan of slowness. (It had something to do with not dying.) But I find the virtues of slowness in more and more places, lately: I have become a slow reader, so that it takes months to get through a book sometimes, but your experience of a book is definitely different when you linger, and let the words work on you; and exercise is most definitely a more valuable experience when done slowly. (There's a chain of fitness clubs in L.A. called SuperSlow that operates on exactly this principle. Try it, try any exercise you do regularly, and do it at half-speed. You'll notice the difference in a big way.)

But Ms. Luchese's fifteen-hour marathon of "As Slow as Possible" is nothing compared to the one going on, right now, at the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany.

The total length of this performance of Mr. Cage's composition? Six hundred thirty-nine years.

There is a very entertaining reason for why this specific span of time was chosen, and you can read about it on the page linked above. But suffice it to say that at the church, right this very moment, a single chord is being played, on and on, and it won't change at all until July 5, 2010. And it seems to me that, aside from this endeavor being sheerest insanity, it is also madly inspiring: it takes a certain resolute optimism to believe that such a thing is even possible. It makes me want to save the world, just so that organ can continue playing for the next 600-plus years.

It occurred to me, when I first heard this story, that it would make for a fascinating documentary. So I was a little disappointed to discover recently that someone named Scott Smith has already made one. But as I was looking at his website, I clicked for a page and got the following result, which so delighted me that, without further comment, I now present it for you. Go ahead, click on it, it's worth it, I promise.

Just Because

It is in fact a picture of specific people: Burt and Stella Burbank, my maternal great-grandparents, sitting at the end of a jetty in Ohio. But it also happens to be one of the best photographs I think I've ever seen, whether I'm related to these folks or not.

Plus I just got the newest version of iPhoto, and I've been tagging things, and I can't resist putting this particular photograph out there for the world.

The Flubbing of Lines

Okay, fine. Chief Justice Roberts had 35 words to speak on Tuesday, and he got them wrong. It happens. Here's a story:

I was doing my first show as a college freshman, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I only had a small part, but it was a Mainstage show so I'd landed a big show right off the bat. Great joy to be there, and doing Shakespeare, and so forth. My character, the Pedant, was there for a bit of silliness about pretending to be Lucentio's father, etc., etc. Secondary-plotline stuff. And there was a moment when I had a long, blathering speech to deliver.

One night, I was in full blather. And the guy playing Baptista was in the moment so he did something slightly different from our other performances: he interjected a sound, just a little sound, as if the character was trying to interrupt but couldn't. That's all, not even a full word, just a little sound.

I stopped cold. Turned to him and said the decidedly unShakespearian "Huh?" Then realized what he'd done, turned back in order to resume my speech, and discovered in that moment that my brain had just lost the entire English language.

I made a succession of little strangling noises until the guy playing Baptista (hi, Jim Williams) stepped in with the next part of the scene and rescued me. Huge embarrassment yadda yadda, learning experience yadda yadda, ain't live theatre grand yadda, yadda and yadda.

This of course is exactly what happened to Mr. Roberts. Watch the tape linked above. Barack Obama thought the first phrase would simply be his name, so he started to speak, but Roberts wanted to add "do solemnly swear" to that first phrase. Obama's accidental interruption did to Mr. Roberts exactly what Jim William's interruption did to me, except that Roberts handled it better. He at least didn't forget an entire language, he just had a little wires-crossing, words-tangling adventure, right there with the entire damned world staring as his brain went blank during a moment of profound historical import.

All of which simply proves that history has a sense of humor. (Although you can see in Michelle Obama's face a strangled expression that says "This moment? You pick this moment to fuck up? This moment we've all waited for for centures? Aaaack!")

Naturally, the wombats on Fox News breathlessly asked "Is Barack Obama really president?!?!" Oh, shut up.

Inauguration Day

President Bush Goes Away
Gotta say. His farewell address the other day was the first speech of his that I've actually enjoyed. Particularly that last bit, when he said goodbye, then turned around and walked away. That part was terrific.

Historical Tides
There is a peculiar recurring theme in American history: weak, ineffectual presidents get overwhelmed by one or more crises are replaced by a strong president who seems to appear in history at exactly the right moment. I'm thinking particularly of Buchanan being replaced by Lincoln (who really came out of nowhere), and Hoover being replaced by Franklin Roosevelt. I think a lot of people are feeling the possibility that this might prove to be such a moment. The current crisis certainly has the potential to be as dire as the Great Depression, and once the election was over, with its astonishing historical implications just in terms of the nation's long racial struggle, the sense that Barack Obama might turn out to be the unlikely hero delivered by history just in the nick of time, this sense has only grown. An approval rating in the high 70s before he's even inaugurated? Unheard of.


The Size of the Crowds
I've got CNN on, and they occasionally show crowd shots. I've only got one reaction:

Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus...

But Beware Obamatry
The adoration people are feeling right now for Mr. Obama is of course dangerous in itself. It's born of economic uncertainty: everyone is feeling more than a little tenuous right now, and that's feeding this growing idolatry. (Hell, I'm feeling it too. Our funding for our next movie just dried up, barely a week before we were supposed to receive it, solely because the lenders decided to stop lending to anyone. So now we scramble, and hope fervently that money will start to loosen up a little once Mr. Obama is actually president. Which, as I write, is just over an hour from now.)

But it's inevitable that Obama will disappoint. No one has a flawless presidency, not Washington, not Lincoln, not FDR, no one. It cannot happen. And the higher Mr. Obama is lifted toward Mt. Olympus, the greater the sense of disappointment will be; the greater the attendant fall to earth.

Still...
As I watched the concert on Sunday, as Mr. Obama stood behind the speech delivering his speech to the crowds spread out across the Mall, I was suddenly struck by a notion:

Someday there's probably going to be a statue or a structure to him, right out there in the Mall. Aware though I am of the dangers of Obamatry, I'm getting a little swept up too. And he does have the potential. He absolutely has the potential to be one of the greats. Whether he'll be able to actually pull it off, well, that remains to be seen.

But now I'm going to just sit back, and watch, and enjoy this moment like crazy.

... and good riddance

Well. So that year sucked, didn't it? (Here's a European perspective.)

Over in Salon, Andrew Leonard optimistically opines that at least the world has learned its lesson. "For the foreseeable future it's going to be very difficult for a politician to argue that markets work best when the government stays off the playing field." Oh Andrew, if only it were so.

I try and keep up with opinions on both sides of the ideological divide. Bernard Shaw was famous for always subscribing to multiple newspapers, representing both the Labour and Tory points of view, because he never wanted to just be a member of the choir, endlessly preached to by people he already agreed with, instead he wanted as many different opinions as he could find, so that he could then make up his own mind. (It is, then, no surprise that he turned out to be one of the great contrarians, constantly defying people's attempts to stuff him in one ideological box or another.)

I can't be as consistent as Shaw was, mostly because the right-wing opinionators just make me mad, and I don't enjoy being in a state of perpetual dudgeon. But it's a new year, so I thought I'd take a look at what the other guys are saying about our cheery economy and what we need to do about it. Turns out Andrew Leonard can't get no satisfaction: the same voices are still repeating the same opinions, ad infinitum.

Larry Kudlow has always been unbearably smug, one of what historian Jacob Burkhardt called "the terrible simplifiers." Kudlow is particularly fond of circular arguments: proving his supply-side theories ("supply-side" being what we used to call "trickle-down economics") by referencing as proof the writings of the very people who pushed the whole supply-side theory in the first place:

Social historian and early supply-side activist Irving Kristol taught us three decades ago that the top earners are the economic activists. They’re the ones with the highest propensity to consume and invest. They’re the ones who buy the yachts, which are built by blue-collar workers. And they’re the ones who run the small businesses and provide the capital for the new entrepreneurial start-ups that are the lifeblood of the economy. It is they who energize free-market capitalism.

He does the same thing later in the same article with a mention of both Arthur Laffer and Alan Reynolds in one sentence:

In fact, lower capital-gains tax rates will raise revenues, since this is the single most sensitive tax on the Laffer curve. Indeed, many economists — including Alan Reynolds at the Cato Institute — argue that the growth and simplification effects of reducing the corporate tax rate would be revenue positive.

By only referencing as proof those who already agree with his argument, Mr. Kudlow thus presents what are really unsupported conjectures as if they were proven facts. And in sharp contrast to Andrew Leonard's optimistic hope, people like Kudlow haven't changed their tune one bit:

In fact, the GOP has a great opportunity to challenge Obama’s Keynesian pump-priming by insisting there be a major tax-cut component in any new fiscal package. Republicans shouldn’t merely push for somewhat less government spending. They have to make a bold case that tax rates matter for economic growth and job creation. They must insist that any recovery package includes this key element. Shift the debate. Say clearly that a reenergized economy cannot occur without lower marginal tax rates.

Note the constant use of italics for emphasis. This is a guy whose reckless certainty will never be challenged because his own sense of infallible rightness can never be shaken.

But even worse is Lawrence Lindsey, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who really ought to know better. Mr. Lindsey correctly predicted the stock market's tech bubble in 1996, and tried to warn the Bush administration that the Irag war would cost more than they were anticipating--a lot more. (He was fired from the National Economic Council for his efforts.)

In discussing the incoming Obama administrations plans for economic stimulus, largely through investments in infrastructure, Mr. Lindsey writes in the Weekly Standard that:

These programs also generally fail the test of timeliness. Consider the phrase "shovel ready" being used to describe many of these programs. By definition a shovel-ready project is one that state or local government has already spent a good deal of money developing and is likely to continue spending on. On the other hand, infrastructure projects that actually will produce net new spending are never shovel-ready. Most of the spending will end up occurring at the peak of the business cycle when it is not needed, not at the bottom.

Okay, an interesting point. But apparently, the only reason he said that was so that he could then say this: "By contrast, there are some ongoing federal spending programs that can be quickly ramped up during a recession. Most notable is defense procurement."

Yes, that's what we need. Apparently $507 billion (and counting) last year wasn't nearly enough. Forget all this bridge-building and road-making, things that have a long-term impact that both helps us now by creating jobs and helps us later by giving us, for example, bridges that won't fall down and kill people. Instead, we should spend yet more on bombs and bullets. Things that get expended quickly and mostly just, you know, kill people.

But Mr. Lindsey is only just warming up:

The question to ask about any infrastructure project being sold as "stimulus" is why the project hasn't been done already. The most common answer is that the state and local political process didn't find that the benefits met the costs--a sure sign that the project is not likely to pay for itself during the expansion phase of the business cycle.

No, the real reason why state and local governments shy away from infrastructure projects is because they're afraid of anything whose benefits come later than two weeks from now. And in normal economic times, when there isn't such a pressing need to create jobs, the idea of, for example, the very national energy grid that Mr. Lindsey advocates in his article is shunned because it will cost a lot of money up front but won't pay dividends until years (and several elections) in the future.

(And why do we need to create jobs so badly? There was an article in USA Today a couple weeks ago that noted that results are in for the first wave of mortgages that have already been restructured, in order to make their terms more palatable and affordable to imperiled homeowners: 55% of those restructured mortgages have also failed. Of course they have. If you don't have a job, it doesn't matter how much your mortgage bill gets lowered, you still can't pay for it.)

Mr. Lindsey, no surprise from a principal architect of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, asserts that "Permanent tax cuts offer a much better option." (And by the way: tax cuts are in fact part of Obama's total plan, but not the entirety of it. He recognizes that you can't just rely on one idea to the exclusion of all others. He is not a terrible simplifier.)

But then Mr. Lindsey completely floored me with this:

But the centerpiece of any tax cut should be employment taxes: in particular, a permanent halving of the current 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax on the first $106,800 of wages, split evenly between workers and employers. The direct revenue effect of that would be a bit under $400 billion per year, roughly in line with the present quantitative needs of the economy.

You're kidding, right? At a time when we already know Social Security is underfunded and can't possibly meet its obligations, you want to cut the Social Security payroll tax in half? But don't worry, Mr. Lindsey knows how to fix Social Security's underfunding problem: bookkeeping. Oh yes. Enjoy the following:

Since the tax cut should be permanent to have maximum effect, the biggest challenge would be how to make up for the lost revenue once the macroeconomic need for fiscal stimulus had passed. In the short run, effective fiscal stimulus requires that government revenue drop, thereby enriching the private sector, and with the Treasury making the Social Security trust fund whole by way of intergovernmental bookkeeping. Longer term, however, spending cuts or a new source of revenue would be needed.

Now look. I recognize the problems with Obama's massive stimulus/infrastructure program, most notably the inevitability of inflation somewhere down the road. And I've seen the arguments of Republicans who claim that the New Deal in fact made the Great Depression last longer, but I think David Sirota dispenses with that notion pretty effectively. But take a look at this video from Fred Thompson, in which he amusingly nitpicks at liberal stimulus plans without ever bothering to offer any alternative ideas of his own--all the while sitting in a plus leather chair in a beautiful office, paunchy and jowly, and smoking a stogie, looking like exactly the sort of fat cat who got us here in the first place.

We've got to try something, preferably a lot of somethings. Doing nothing ain't an option. (There's another round of mortgage failures coming, we know when they'll hit and we can't do anything to stop them. In other words: there's more clobbering still to come.) And doing more of the same supply-side nonsense we've been doing for the past thirty years sounds like the old definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results.

FDR was famous for just trying stuff. Anything he could think of to stimulate the economy, he did. If it didn't work, he dumped it and tried something else. So far, Obama sounds like he's doing his level best to put together a carefully-calibrated stimulus package that he can implement in one massive swoop of activity. Here's hoping that he will then have the wisdom to know when some element of that plan isn't working, and the political courage to dump that element and try something else.