Hangover

Hangover was Merriam-Webster’s word of the day today. I was struck by the first definition: “something that remains from what is past.” Further into the email, the word is glossed as “something that remained or simply survived.”

I was surprised by how many people chose to share the last entry I wrote, it being so bleak. One thing I took from that is there are more of us than I realized, perhaps, who know that no matter what Merriam-Webster says, there is nothing simple about survival. There is nothing simple about continuing to embrace the will to live.

Personally I take comfort in that. Strength in numbers.

Last night I was at a friend’s house. I only get to see her on holidays, really, and every time I go over there lately the family is larger: someone has gotten married, someone has had a baby. Now one of those babies has become a toddler, a source of much delight. His grandmother held out an animal cracker for him. He took it, then decided to give it to me. He wobbled over and handed it to me. This became a game, as his grandmother would hold out a cracker and tell him to give it to a different person each time. He would wobble over, take it, and wobble over to the person, no matter how far away they were.

This was an inexhaustible game, as most toddle-games are. There was never a flicker of irritation on his face when he was told to be a delivery man again. Nor did he laugh or squeal about it. He just took it and gave it, every time the same way. It occurred to me that if he had been faced with those million matchbox bulldozers I spoke of, he would have picked one up, moved it, and gone back for another, over and over and over. Watching him was the first time I really felt I understood the Buddhist concept of “joyful effort.”

There is also a newborn in that family. Now. There’s an old joke that people have kids so they can have something to talk about at dinner again. And I’ve made about every argument in the book against having children in a world like ours. But I cannot escape the fact that I woke up this morning with a pretty strong hangover. By which I mean there was something that was making me want to hang around, to come over again.

I realized I’d like to know what she will be like when she grows up. I’d like to watch her grow into the fine qualities of her family. I’d like to talk theology with her.

One of the Newtown-related articles that I liked best was written by Ross Douthat. He used Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” sequence from The Brothers Karamazov. It’s a passage that puts exquisitely beautiful and painful language to that question we were all asking weeks ago: why?

I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking the 20th century invented true horror, but the stories collected by Ivan Karamazov chilled even my cynical blood. A similar thing happened the other day while I was reading Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. In her discussion of Confucianism, a single sentence stopped me in my tracks: “In 260 BCE, the army of Qin conquered the state of Zhao…massacring four hundred thousand Zhao prisoners of war, who were buried alive.”

I had to read that twice.

Faced with this sort of thing, Confucians went back to a tradition started by men who “realized that the only way they could end the intolerable misery they saw all around them was by a huge intellectual effort that began with the transformation of their own selves.”

The other day, a friend asked me if I had a reason to keep living. You know, just over coffee. I thought about it, said a few things, and then said that I’d like to keep working on being a person. Because when you come right down to it, there’s a lot of work you can do there, every single moment.

It’s like in improv, which I’ve been practicing. Improv is all about the present moment, and how much work it is, really, to be in it. My teacher has this wonderful way of referring to “Partner” in the proper noun sense. She’ll say, “You really have to learn that it’s about making Partner look good. It’s about supporting Partner.” What can I do to make Partner’s work easier?

The secret you find out is that when you do that, it actually makes your work easier and enjoyable, and it makes you more present. And yes, you can both be doing it at the same time. Somehow it just works.

And when you’re at a dinner table with 7 or 8 Partners, as I was last night, there’s a smorgasbord of work to do, of support to give, of brilliance to uncover, and hangovers to give yourself.

The other day I went and had a psychic reading. You know, just over coffee. And when it was over, my reader said, “It’s 2013. No one expected us to make it this far. We really have a chance this year to show what we can do.”

I resisted rolling my eyes over over the 2012 apocalypse thing. And I’m glad I did. Because I keep hearing her say those words.

“No one expected us to make it this far. We really have a chance this year to show what we can do.”

We have remained. We have survived. We are each other’s hangovers.

Now let’s go get drunk.

Bulldozer

When I was a senior in high school, George W. Bush was laying the PR groundwork for an invasion of Iraq by lying about weapons of mass destruction. One of the idiots who sank his teeth into this bullshit was Thomas Friedman. Better safe than sorry, he said, even if there’s only a small chance that Saddam has the weapons.

I wrote a response and read it in my AP English class. I said I’d rather die. I would rather be a civilian casualty of a terrorist attack than be a participating citizen of a country that goes in and blows things to smithereens because of a CHANCE that someone MIGHT have a weapon that they COULD use.

I felt it then, when I was 18. I’m not sure, looking back now, if I really believed it, but I felt it, surely. And now at 27 I very much believe it.

Because I came home from another lovely morning at Sarah Lawrence and I saw the news about the Connecticut school shooting and I thought, okay, I don’t want to play this game anymore.

Like, you’re playing video games with your friend and you’ve been playing one for two hours and your eyes are dry and you’re antsy and bored and tired and you just don’t want to play anymore.

I don’t want to play anymore.

Last week a friend of mine posted something on Facebook, a graphic going around that essentially says if we’re going to regulate guns we should also regulate baseball bats. I found it, though I respect that person, to be completely fatuous. I responded. Others responded. He and I even apologized to each other and smoothed feathers later. No minds were changed. I probably further entrenched people who disagree with me in their own beliefs.

I led a bullying workshop in an elementary school last week. We had been told to prepare for hostile audiences, kids who were real troublemakers, etc. I in particular was sent to a class for the worst of the worst. And all of the kids were just amazingly angelic. They were all so beautiful. Heartbreakingly funny and kind and eager. Even the bad kids; they were so alive.

In researching the murder of Officer Mark MacPhail, who was killed in Savannah in 1989, I became obsessed with what bullets do to bodies. I wanted to re-sensitize myself to the idea of gun violence. What did each bullet do – to his jaw, to his teeth, his lungs, his vertebrae.

Death is something I forget about. I forget what it means to have something be alive and then not alive. I understand it as a concept but I forget really, really, what we talk about when we talk about death.

I have to remind myself.

Rachel Corrie is a hero of mine. She was a 23-year-old American activist who died in Gaza when a bulldozer ran her over. She did not believe the Israelis should have the right to bulldoze the homes of Palestinians. Say what you will about her politics, about her idealism, about her naiveté even. But sometimes I really envy her. Even her death. Because she had her bulldozer. She had it, she saw it, she knew what it was. She could stand up in front of it. And let it run her over.

And when you come home and you read about what we’re still just learning about in Newtown, and when you realize you can’t even keep up with all the shootings, and when you try to imagine what each bullet did to each little jaw, it FEELS like the walls are closing in, it FEELS like the ground is going to swallow you -

But it isn’t. The sun is shining.

You live in this limbo where you feel all of the bad things and yet cannot find a bulldozer to step in front of. Because most of the time it’s not one big one it’s a million tiny little Matchbox dozers, and you have to spend a whole lot of time and energy to get even one to change its course. And there is a nobility in that and perhaps that’s all there is and all we can do and should do.

It’s just exhausting and frustrating and sad, and a lot more tempting to throw down your controller and say, I don’t want to play this game anymore. What do you have for snacks?

Dialogue

I meant to post this before the election, and didn’t get a chance. But it’s equally relevant now, as there is a lot of gloating and glowering going around. I think we’ve all gotten tired of and perhaps been guilty of partisan snarking instead of actual dialogue. Four years ago President Barack Obama made a lot of people think he was going to put away childish things, as the scripture says (which he referenced), and get to bipartisan work.

This didn’t happen. Among the many factors, count his inexperience (and fewer favors to call in) and the Republican desire to recapture the White House, which led to Senator Mitch McConnell making that borderline treasonous statement about his only goal being the defeat of Obama.

In the last few days we’ve had a taste of that dreamed-for 2008 sunniness. Like how Chris Christie and Obama have been walking around New Jersey, getting to first base with each other. It’s unfortunate that it takes such devastation to get us to remember that we mostly want the same things. Can’t we just spontaneously remember that?

Unfortunately, Hurricane Sandy has also showed us the opposite of togetherness. You’ve probably heard the story of Glenda Moore, the Staten Island mother who lost her two boys. She knocked on doors for help as the waters rose, but was turned away. “I don’t know you,” said one person.

What sobers me about this is knowing that while I would like to think I’d help in this situation, I can’t be sure. And the truth is, for worse more than better, there are certain kinds of people with whom I am more comfortable, to whom I am more likely to offer help, for whom I will more readily open my doors. If Glenda Moore and her boys had been white?

Oof.

But here is one small effort in helping us remember that those across the aisle from us aren’t a bunch of drooling bigots or rabid socialists. I asked some friends of mine to write why they would be supporting Mitt Romney. I wasn’t baiting them or preparing to hold them up to ridicule. I was, and am, curious. Only one person took the time to really lay out his rationale. I share it here. I was surprised to see how much I agree with the sentiment behind it. I personally think those feelings could still lead someone to support Obama, but that’s interesting in itself – telling me that we support different people not because we have these wildly different views, but because we believe different men will do a better job at the same things.

So here it is, if you want to take a moment to pause and reflect, post-election. Obama said we are not as divided as this election has made us believe. I agree.

First things first, I don’t particularly like Romney. Paul Ryan has big ideas, but I’m not sure that they will ever see the light of day. So it isn’t really Romney or Ryan that I support.

You see, my family moved to the United States from the Soviet Union 22 years ago to escape religious persecution and find economic freedom. My parents took enormous risks because they wanted for their children what they could not have themselves.

Just over two decades later, my father is a successful leader in business and in the community. Three of my siblings are Georgia Tech grads, in industrial, aerospace, and civil engineering.

My point is that I am a firm believer in the American Dream, in the idea that those who come here legally, like we did, who work hard, follow the rules, avoid shortcuts, and live below their means, can reinvent themselves and experience success on a level that is literally impossible in most of the world.

I also believe that the United States is quickly becoming a nanny state, where effort, not results is what counts. We give out awards for participating in stead of winning. We are an entitled generation that believes we are due that for which we did not work.

And our government is more then willing to give us what we want but have not earned. Entitlement programs and social welfare all have a place in society and that is to help those who legitimately can not help themselves. These programs are not supposed to be a crutch for those who are unwilling to work hard.

That sounds cruel, but if my parents can move here in their late 20′s without knowing the language and go from living in a basement with a popcorn machine for heater to building a nice house in a prestigious neighborhood, all in the span of a decade, then those who were born here, learned the language from birth, and had the opportunity to get an education and work hard, well they don’t have much of an excuse to stand on.

Therefore, when our government continues to make excuses for this growing segment of our population and demands that successful people, people like you and me, people like our parents, pay our “fair share,” it makes me sick. We do pay our fair share. We go to school, study hard, and make good grades and good decisions. We work 65+ hours a week to be competitive in a global economy. We take financial risks to launch our own businesses or fund others’ ideas. We give generously to our community and to those in need. And when we reap the fruit of our labor, we are villeinized for our success.

I’m supporting Romney and Ryan not because I like them, or because I agree with them on every issue, but because I think the American Dream is dying. It isn’t dying for a lack of opportunity though. It is being smothered by the very politicians we elect to represent us. Now I don’t think that the Republican ticket will reverse this course. I’m not that foolish or naive. I do believe, however, that compared to the current administration, Romney and Ryan will at least slow the damage.

If you’d like to leave a comment in reply, please do so thoughtfully and politely.

Both sides are now giving lip service to the idea of cooperation, as we approach the so-called fiscal cliff. But we need to hold their feet to the compromise fire. For me, hearing from my un-like-minded friends helps inspire me to do so.

Sissy

I don’t care to defend myself: I watch reality TV.

I’m a writer, and I know that reality TV is not good economics for writers, and I still watch it. I know it’s partially or totally staged and edited and I don’t care. I’m fascinated by the truth of it, and it does contain a kind of behavioral truth that exists nowhere else (or everywhere else, perhaps): we all know this.

But where I’m going is to the recent episode of Project Runway. This is a show that I resisted for some time. Then I got hooked: Bravo was hip to binge TV watching even before Netflix; it’s no accident that they frequently play 10 hours of their reality shows back to back. TNT does this with Law and Order too, of course, but that show doesn’t have the competition thru-line to grab you.

And reality TV is based on competition. Even Real Housewives – I was hooked on that for a while, trying to see if the Orange County girl who was married to the cancer guy was going to get away with it – has a kind of competition. We root for certain people and not for others. And as much as I like to watch Top Chef or Project Runway for the tidbits I learn about cooking and fashion, I also very certainly enjoy seeing who rises and who falls, and seeing if I agree with Heidi Klum or not.

It’s fitting that I write this trash TV confession as the Olympics draw to a close, since I find myself watching those events and hoping for any and all American athletes to grind the Chinese into the dust. I am not a patriotic person, so this fervor confuses me in part, but a lot of it boils down to that unforgiving medal count that NBC loves to wave in front of your nose. WE MUST WIN.

This week on Project Runway, however, not one but two contestants decided that, actually, one does not have to win, in order to have an adequate life, even as a fashion designer.

And then the show devoured them.

Michael Kors, responding to the first dropout, announced, “Fashion is not for sissies!” The word sissy has a clouded etymology, but seems (logically) to have derived from sister, and thus to be particularly insulting to men. Wikipedia has a delightfully raw description of sissyish, effeminate behavior: “e.g., saying ‘mua mua’ before hanging up the phone or using creams.” Using creams? Who wrote this? Fez?

Andrea was the first dropout. She is a teacher, somewhere, which was further used against her – she’s setting a bad example by QUITTING. In the previous week’s episode, she had been paired with one of this season’s two bitchy queens, and he had, in his own words, thrown her under a bus during the critique session. And you could watch her come to the realization – thus the fascination with reality TV, it happens right in front of you – that she didn’t give a shit, really.

I looked at it a different way than the carping designers, being the 27-year-old retired teacher that I am. I thought, if I were a teacher and went on that show, I would have a lot more “fuck you” in me when it came to the judges. You know? Andrea was older, she knew what was up, she knew which way was which, and she wasn’t going to bend over and ask Nina Garcia for another.

And then another contestant left: Kooan. In the first few episodes, this guy was so weird, he was like a mix of a Tamagotchi (yeah, you had one, you big sissy, so did I) and William Hung, the American Idol “She Bangs” freak of years past. I call him a freak because that is what American Idol offered him up as. We’re all too cynical to buy the subsequent success story that they tried to hatch around his broken shell – look Ma, a record deal! He was carved up and put on a platter for us, and we ate him. And I thought Kooan was a similarly savvy choice by the producers. In the same way that The Glee Project chose to have a transgender contestant, a paraplegic, a blind man, and a girl who looked like Justin Bieber, all on one season.

But Kooan quickly retreated from his wacky persona and became very moody, especially after Andrea left. And then, despite cajolings to the contrary, including one from Tim Gunn (and it must take moxie to say no to those pursed lips), he literally bowed out of the competition. He said he knew there was another way to make it as a designer, and he was going to pursue that way.

All of this struck a chord with me since right now I have forked over money and time to put up a show at the Fringe Festival. There are all kinds of competitive instincts that come with that. There are basic ones that come up any time with the theater, and then Fringe ups the ante by offering “Best Of” awards, and “Audience Favorite” ballots for you to harangue your spectators with. Those poor folk who have already surrendered their time and money to watch you express yourself.

You can easily get caught up in it. Perhaps you should, if you want a career in this business, or any business. Or maybe that’s just a New York mentality.

It’s made me think about the one act competition that I watched as a high schooler and then participated in as a teacher. It felt awfully good to collect a second place trophy after all that toil.

But you can also look at it like Kooan did. And decide that there is another way – not only to gain success, one assumes, but also satisfaction.

Ah yes. Satisfaction. Win all the awards you want, you can still be hollow at the core. Just ask Meryl, that poor skeleton of a woman.

No but really. This is building a house with a foundation of sand.

It’s true that Andrea probably would have shown more grace and class (and perhaps integrity, the way Didion describes it in “On Self-Respect”) by announcing to everyone that she was leaving, like Kooan did. But I still think the contestants, and Michael Kors, did her greasy by treating her like a coward and a sissy. It was an abuse of the term. He should have said, “This little competition isn’t for every asshole on the street!”

Unless he was thinking of the way sisters can be, like when your big sister gracefully exits stage left and lets you have your moment. Sometimes being a sissy can be great.

As for competition, the M-W etymology for compete is enough to make you weep:

Late Latin competere to seek together, from Latin, to come together, agree, be suitable, from com- + petere to go to, seek

To seek together.

Ah, dear. We have lost the original sense. And I think that’s what the other Runway designers were responding to, when they found themselves a bit psychically dizzy from the double quittings. Why were they so upset – in reality TV competition, it’s a good thing to lose other contestants – if not because they peered into the center of their enterprise, and realized it was hollow?

I am going to finish my run in this theater festival with the words “to seek together” in my mind.

Retarded (in Georgia)

For a brief period, Georgia was the best state in the US to be retarded, at least if you were a murderer. Now it is the worst.

Drawing headlines lately, and an editorial from no less than the New York Times, is the case of Warren Lee Hill, Jr. This is what the Times wants you to know: in 2002, SCOTUS ruled that the execution of the mentally retarded violated the 8th Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The problem is how to establish mental retardation. As anyone who’s ever seen Forrest Gump knows, having an IQ below 70 is typically one of the benchmarks used.

Warren Lee Hill’s IQ has been tested at 77. If only he had Sally Field as a mama to offer her services to the parole board and knock his score down a few points.

However, the Georgia legal definition of mental retardation is more complicated than Hollywood’s, and Hill indeed was found to have “significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning.” (It does seem that his IQ has been tested multiple times, with different scores.) But the sticking point became the second prong of the definition, which requires that this subpar functioning result  in “impairments in adaptive behavior.” It has been offered against him that Hill has been able to hold a job, save money to buy a car, serve in the military, and have friends.

The jokes write themselves – for instance, are we to believe there are no retarded drivers out there? – but the fact is that the man’s life is at stake, and Georgia is being a bit of a stickler here in terms of the burden of proof applied.

There are two common burdens of proof that you hear about – proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is required for criminal convictions, and proof based on a preponderance of the evidence, which is used in civil cases and Grand Jury proceedings, among other things. Reasonable doubt means that no right-minded juror would vote to acquit; it does not mean that you are absolutely sure (you can have unreasonable doubt, so to speak), but that you’re pretty damn sure. But a preponderance is like two scales – retarded and not retarded – and even a feather more on one side or the other determines the ruling.

Georgia is the only state which uses reasonable doubt as the burden of proof for establishing mental retardation. Many human rights advocates are saying this is unfair and even unconstitutional, and they have a point about Georgia’s burden being exceptionally high. But it seems the retarded forest is being lost through the mentally challenged trees.

Consider, please, some facts of Hill’s case, as provided in a 2011 US Court of Appeals decision:

In 1990, while Hill was serving a life sentence for the murder of his girlfriend, he murdered another person in prison.   Using a nail-studded board, Hill bludgeoned a fellow inmate to death in his bed.   As his victim slept, “Hill removed a two-by-six board that served as a sink leg in the prison bathroom and forcefully beat the victim numerous times with the board about the head and chest as onlooking prisoners pleaded with him to stop.”  …Hill “mocked the victim as he beat him.”

This is not the stuff of which Forrest Gump is made.

Um, unless you remember the part of the movie where America’s Favorite Slowpoke ruthlessly beats the shit out of that douchey anti-war guy who got rough with Jenny. But in that case the honor of a white woman was at stake, and it’s well-known that white women rule the world, from beyond the grave at least.

And in fact, two non-profit types were on Georgia public radio two days ago, arguing that Hill only bludgeoned his fellow inmate to death because “he had been threatened and bullied and was really in fear for his life.” Oh shit, the b-word. Those wishing to spare the life of Warren Hill have to try to paint a picture of him as some kind of atavistic primate who doesn’t know right from wrong and blindly reacts to stimuli.

Atavistic and stimuli in the same sentence: ten points.

I don’t think the facts of the case support such an argument, and I don’t think an argument against killing someone should be founded on one either. Now, you cannot fault Mr. Hill’s lawyers for trying every conceivable approach in order to save their client, and Georgia’s super-standard of mental retardation does cry out for remedy, but it seems to me that turning anti death penalty activists into the boys who cried retard may do more damage than good. It’s the same reason that many of the millions who cried innocent with Troy Davis also missed the larger point.

There is a tide in the affairs of capital punishment, and it looks like in this country that tide is slowly rolling away from executions. Perhaps the biggest factor is the economy, since the death penalty is so expensive, but it could just be that the evolving standards of decency are making their crawl to the life without parole finish line. It is only decency, and not a better definition of retard, that will put an end to execution in this country. It will only be when we – even as victims ourselves – decide not to strain mercy but to let it fall as the gentle rain of heaven; only when we decide to recognize that every human being is more than his or her worst act.

And while we’re speaking of superlatives such as worst, I’ve always had a problem with the idea that death is the crime that deserves the worst punishment we can give. Compare Hill’s potential saving of his life with a slick tax-sheltering bastard who claims to be a job creator and abuses the English language by “RETIRING RETROACTIVELY” so as to fudge his outsourcing record. And that is only one tiny example out of a sea of white collar atrocities that we could fish here for days on end.

I don’t think Mitt Romney should be killed either, though perhaps he deserves to be tickled incessantly for a few decades. It’s the inherent flaws in any human system that sets out to rank good and bad deeds that I’m after. It’s certainly also possible that death might not be the worst punishment possible, and that life without parole is more painful, in the long run. In which case, go ahead and ask Warren Lee Hill, Jr. if he wants to live or die.

Just keep in mind he may not be fully equipped to answer the question in his right mind.

And you see I don’t just mean because he may be legally retarded. You may not have liked that I used the r-word in this post, although it is the one still used in Georgia’s laws. The CDC and others tell us that the more appropriate term these days is “intellectually disabled,” but I wanted to use retarded for another purpose.

David Dow is a Texas lawyer who recently gave a Ted talk about the death penalty. In it, he pointed out that 8 times out of 10, he can write you the biography of a death row inmate simply by knowing his or her name. He can do this because so many of our murderers share a kind of history. Abuse, neglect, early exposure to drugs and violence, juvenile detention centers – time and again these are the preconditions for murderers.

Retard is a very old word, from the Latin tardus meaning slow, and even though it is not politically correct because it is used as a slur, I think it is no exaggeration to say that the vast majority of people on death row are retarded, in that their development was slowed by a number of aggravating factors. And while this is no excuse for their behavior, we as a society will not make progress in our fight against crime until we get a better handle on just how many retards we have in this country.

The truly retarded in this country never develop a proper respect for the lives of others because they are so frequently encouraged to ignore the value of themselves. Sister Helen Prejean gave a speech in Georgia that I listened to, and in it she described how Jerome Bowden, a past Georgia death row inmate, was tested for intellectual disability. Before the test, he was counseled by friends on the row not to do too well. But he said he’d never passed any test before in his life, and this was one time he was going to show he was good enough. So he did. He got a 65. And we killed him.

And that’s retarded.

Warren Hill Jr.’s execution is currently set for Monday, July 23. An emergency appeal has been filed with SCOTUS. Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty is probably your best source for last minute actions and vigils.

Swing vote

I am remarkably shallow. In 2005, I watched some of the confirmation hearing of John Roberts (the one on the right), because I thought it would make me look and feel smart. I was instantly charmed by the man. If you have to be conservative, I think you should do us all the favor of looking and sounding like him, our chief justice Ken doll.

Had George W. Bush been John Roberts, I probably would have agreed that we should invade Iraq. Or at least given his arguments a second look. Then again, hell, I actually was so charmed by W. that if you recall I gave up my one good chance to crucify him on the cross of bleeding heart parting shots.

So it’s hard for me to be too critical when others bitch that people just vote for the more attractive candidate, or whatever superficial yardstick they may be decrying. When I think about it, most of my principles and opinions and decisions seem to have sprung pretty clearly from my environment; I fear they might as easily dissolve as Prospero’s cloud-capp’d tow’rs.

I was raised in a family affluent enough and secular enough that political opinions could be chosen like playthings. I mean there was no Catholicism, for instance, that goaded me into a one issue (abortion) voter. There was no immigration status, there was no union affiliation – you get the idea. In 1996, I was in 6th grade, and my school did a mock election based on Clinton and Dole. We even had conventions for both parties. I believe it was pure chance that made me a Republican delegate (teacher’s choice), but it could just have easily been a kind of vague attraction to Dole because I think my mother liked him, and my grandmother liked him (veteran connections), and I liked both of those women very much.

Anyway, I got a styrofoam hat with a red white and blue ribbon for the occasion, and I drew an American flag on top and wrote “Dole is the ONLY choice” around the brim. Newt Gingrich came to our school for our Republican convention. I was highly disappointed, because at the Democratic convention,  Michael Coles of the Great American Cookie Factory (running against Newt) had appeared and given all the baby Dems cookies.

Cookies are enough to win my allegiance. But blondes in sweaters need not even resort to bakery.

The highlights of my subsequent political persuasions include rooting for W. in 2000 (yes), mostly because my sister rooted for Gore, and I not only wanted to spite her, but believed she was being brainwashed by her liberal high school teachers. Then I had the same teachers, then I went to NYU, then my sister was cool again, and liberality got me in its gummy jaws and hasn’t let go.

And yet now here I am, and all that can fly out the window after a two minute conversation with a barber.

To explain:

This morning the news came of SCOTUS’s decision on Obamacare, and most everyone who had listened to any punditry was surprised to find that the individual mandate had survived. Now look, I’m not gonna lie to you. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to explain what “individual mandate” means, I’m a dead man. But I like the idea of poor people having healthcare, and I’ve decided that Obama is on that side too, so I’m with him. Also it was nice when I was unemployed to have that “under 26″ thing kick in, and I have friends with preexisting conditions who have argued quite stridently for O-care.

But for me, the exciting thing is that the swing vote on this decision was not Justice Kennedy, as everyone had expected, but the Supreme C matinee idol himself: Roberts. This makes me happy – while I blithely ignore the finer legal points at stake – because it means there is more than one meaningful vote on the Supreme Court.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, there are basically two factions on the Court: the four red guys (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito), and the blue crew (Sotomayor, Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer). It is a simplification, but not a gross one, to say that these justices tend to stick together, and that when a potentially divisive case comes before the court, it is safe to assume that they will split into these camps, leaving moderate Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan appointee, mind you) to be the chooser.

(I use the word chooser deliberately, because it reminds me of a high school conversation I once had where a friend said, “You know the expression beggars can’t be choosers? Is there ever another time to use the word chooser?” All we could come up with, being who we were and are, was Darth Vader cutting off Luke’s head with his lightsaber and saying, “Now I am the chooser.”)

Now I received that xeroxed handout in middle school social studies just like the rest of you – the one that listed all the great decisions in history that were decided by a single vote. My favorite example is that President Andrew Johnson, impeached by the House, was saved from conviction by the Senate by one vote (this version of the handout gets the wording on that a bit wrong, but bless them anyway).

The problem of course arises when you know the swing vote in advance. Many advocates and lobbyists trying to sway the Supreme Court tailor their arguments specifically to Justice Kennedy (see also gay marriage). And while there is no Citizens United equivalent for the judicial branch, meaning corporations can’t spend unlimited amounts of bucks to influence them, consider Justice Clarence Thomas. Oh, please, consider Clarence Thomas.

Thomas is married to a woman named Ginni, who just happens to be a major Tea Party figure, and happens to have been founder or CEO of several groups which lobbied against the healthcare bill, and happens to have made six figure salaries multiple times for doing so. In other words, while things may be more complicated than the “Clarence Thomas made 1.5 million” meme that’s going around, the Thomas kitty is very clearly paws deep in the anti-O-care cream.

So imagine if Thomas were the swing vote and everyone knew it?

The fact that Roberts swung and joined the blue crew works toward putting all the justices back into the game. It has to be a relief to know that all controversial legal issues in this country are not subject to the whims (and 6th grade experiences) of Anthony Kennedy.

It’s the same with presidential voting: remember how frustrating it was in 2004 to feel like your vote didn’t matter unless you lived in Ohio? Why the hell should Ohio decide who our president is? The Obama camp made it a major priority in 2008 to put all the states back into play (for about two seconds I thought even Georgia was up in the air), and politics could not have but benefitted.

Now, I was honing this blog post in my mind as I walked to get my hair cut today. My barber and I remembered each other. He asked me if I was on Broadway yet, and I asked him how the dental school thing was going. He’s set to go to NYU in August: a big deal, for which he’ll be going into debt, of course. Now, I don’t ever make smalltalk; for some reason, it terrifies me. On the day in preschool when we all learned how to use the phone, I tried to hang up on my own father. So I recount this conversation in part for its relevance and in part to celebrate that I functioned as an average human being, at least for ten minutes.

I asked him if the economy affected the dental job market, and he said the market was pretty good. But then insurance was mentioned. He said that thanks to this healthcare law, poorer people had insurance, and thus had to be treated, but the insurance companies would pay the dentists very little for the labor. He said to me that a person with insurance could come in, get $300 worth of treatment, for example, and maybe the insurance company would pay $10.

So today’s news was bad for him. Him, a working class guy who’s going into debt to try and better his life. I could feel my liberal tow’rs turning into cirrus-like wisps. I considered offering him my “what’s bad for swing votes is good for justice” argument, but figured it would be cold comfort.

I mean, if I had pitched that idea, and covered it in the syrupy timbre of smalltalk, I bet he would have agreed with me in that way that smalltalk with strangers frees us to agree with anything. In that way that, as I crossed the street to the shop, I heard a car honk its horn at another driving erratically, and then a UPS guy said to me, “if you have a handicapped sticker, you shouldn’t be able to drive, am I right?” And I instinctively laughed, even though one second later I was like, WHAT? That’s completely discriminatory. But I did not turn around and give him a piece of my mind, because who really gives pieces of mind on the street?

Crazy people.

(Remember that’s Reverend Billy, a hero of mine; a crazy one though.)

But the encounter with the barber made me wonder about how minds are ever changed. Or how minds are made in the first place. It’s no secret that we tend to surround ourselves with sources that already agree with us, that we look at news and media with an eye for how it can confirm what we already believe.

Yet we do change our minds.

So how could you define the swing voter inside of you? And if we all were honest about how our core values and diehard beliefs came about, would we start to see clear patterns and predictable schemata?

And did I write this entry solely to be able to use the word schemata?

Anyway, I encourage you in the comments to give an example of how you came to believe or support something/one, or what made you swing your vote one time. Otherwise, all we’ll have learned about will be me and my strange sexual predilections, and enlightenment is not of such silly stuff made.

First World Problems

I had thought that the tide of this phrase had long ago receded into the ocean of hashfads, but a spate of recent encounters with it have made me reconsider. Perhaps the phrase has already hit its high water mark, and the truly hip have discarded it, but that only means that it’s now trickled down into the backwaters (see also: #yolo), that it has seeped into pop culture to the extent that now even my proverbial mother can use it.

My real mother and my proverbial mother have not spoken since 1988. But that’s another story.

Another reason I decided not to write about this phrase was that my sister sent me a response to it written by the Nigerian novelist Teju Cole (which you can find in this good Atlantic piece). Cole’s argument is simple: Nigerians care when the BlackBerry network goes down, too. “First world problems” implicitly demands that the speaker to some extent has a stereotypical view of poor Africans hunting antelope on the Dark Continent.

I felt a bit affronted by Cole’s response – white-guilty, even though I already wasn’t a fan of the term – but I also thought, well, he’s done it, he’s critiqued it, he said what needed to be said, and anyway I guess it will die out soon. So for both of these reasons, I left it alone.

I have changed my mind.

First, Cole is right that the term involves a failure of the imagination. A point he does not make is that it’s a double failure, and that many of us in the first world, including me with my old flip phone not to mention the abundance of Westerners who live below the poverty line, are ALSO not affected by the BlackBerry thing. So the phrase requires you to lump all us developed folk together too.

But you know what he’s really getting at is that we’re drawing the lines of these worlds incorrectly. The term first world developed during the Cold War, and referred to the US and other capitalist countries. The Soviet Union and its Communist allies were the second world. The third world was everywhere not buddied up yet.

This color-coding of the map is enough to make one think of the Berlin Conference of 1884, where European powers agreed on which parts of Africa they each would rape, drawing national borders which lumped together disparate peoples- part of why the Congo and other countries are such bloody messes today.

So the original definition did not necessarily relate to economic prowess. The third world included Zimbabwe and India, yes, but also Ireland and Switzerland.

Then as we all know, the second world bowed out of the race, and we were left with one and three, and the terms separated countries by comparison of their GDPs. Then we realized this was mean (first implies best), and so we’ve tried on a succession of terms – Developed v. Developing, Global North v. Global South – which have either been still kinda mean, or not entirely accurate, or both. To me, a developed country is not one which holds enemy combatants indefinitely without trial, but I appear to be a minority when it comes to international name-calling.

So there is a lot of verbal handwringing over what is a very simple concept: some people have money, and many others don’t. Teju Cole wants us to see the first/third divide like one of those election night maps they have now. First you see Georgia on the map, colored in red. Then the newsperson swipes it with her fingers and you zoom in, and see that districts 1-6 are red, but 7-10 are blue. Then she swipes again and you see that your county is red but the neighboring one…you get the idea. These worlds are not defined by the borders of countries, and coexist in some cases side by side.

Okay, you get it: first world is a state of mind. Just like getting jiggy with it. But, you say, isn’t the term an empathic one? The whole point is to acknowledge that your current problem (freezing from too much air conditioning) is, in the scheme of things, not a big deal. You ought to remember the starving Indians.

True, and I think there are people who use the term this way. But I would hazard a guess that the people who know this truth (which is no great revelation), don’t need to remind themselves or anyone else about it by using the phrase. To me, there is an element of smugness that too often goes with it. It’s like there’s an invisible exclamation point at the end of it, along with cheesy “womp womp” music like that which accompanies Debbie Downer.

I do not believe that anyone uses this phrase as a whispered mantra, to quietly remind himself to be more charitable throughout the day, but that it is more often offered as a status symbol, as proof that we are in the country club of privilege and yet smart enough to realize that others have been left at the gates. I feel it embodies a kind of false humility: boy, I know I’m being a silly bitch but hey, what can you do?

And when it is used on twitter and Facebook, it seems also a demand for acknowledgement and validation. I post a minor inconvenience from my day, hedge it with #fwp, and wait for you to like me for it, both recognizing the familiarity of what annoyed me, and complimenting me for a) successfully identifying it as fitting the definition of this trend and b) knowing that others would kill to be annoyed by it.

In conclusion, we should not define the first world geographically, or by the use of expensive electronics (consider that there are more cell phones than toilets in India). You may not want to define it at all. You may want to just remember that there are serious troubles and then there are minor annoyances. Everyone in the world experiences both. You undoubtedly experience more luxury and privilege than some people in the world, so bow your head every now and then and keep that in mind. But shut up about it, or if you need to tell someone, tell children and idiots, who are the only ones who could possibly be in the dark about such a thing.