Clemenza, consigliere to the Corleone family in the film "The Godfather" says to Michael after a mob war erupts: "Don't worry...these things happen...about every coupla years or so. It gets ridda the bad blood!" It appears our federal prosecutors list of over two dozen recent indictees in Illinois politics reveals the blood-letting is upon us. And, as all Illinoisans know, it has happened here before, and as a matter of fact, it will happen again. And... the melt down is at the same time a national one. Why?
Two reasons.
First, on the local level, Illinois history has ever and always been about bribery, real estate wheeling and dealing, the selling of offices, making big money, and taking advantage when you can. Recall Sandburg's poem about the brawling city of big shoulders. Illinois politics is the politics of Chicago. The players have always learned how to play the game in Chicago. Neigboring states like Wisconsin or Indiana have no such places as Chicago. Chicago, and hence Illinois, is the power bottleneck of the this entire nation. From the very beginning, by virtue of its location, it is strategic to the politics of transportation, manufacturing, commodities, and commerce -- all the sooty, dirty-hands work of our nation that New York is too cosmopolitan to stoop to, Los Angelas is too whacked out to recognize (except in the LAPD), and Washington D.C. needs. Political blood-letting takes place precisely for the same reasons as it once did among the crime families. Power gets lopsided -- somebody's cut is too big. Somebody has to take a fall.
Second, the blood-letting is part of the system itself. Right now, as in 1930, the average citizen has reason to doubt every banker, every broker, every politician, every CEO. Just as in the Great Depression, we have found out, in the words of Studs Terkel, that the "big boys ain't so bright" after all. It is natural to feel that our basic system has failed us once again. However, it would be the same were America socialist, communist, a monarchy, or even something else!
Greed runs in HUMAN cycles, regardless of governments, Greed and ethics run courses inverse to one another. A generation or two accomplishes marvelous feats and the wealth and power of their nation grows. They spoil their children, who then come to expect advantage and want even more wealth. The prevailing social culture of shared values slowly becomes replaced with individual greed, and competition for status and power. The media feed the frenzy with images of the super-rich. Entertainment lavishes billion dollar "salaries" on the sports gladiators of the day who may be too stupid to even graduate high school. It's OK though, it's a market...like everything is a market. Those who serve others become viewed as naive suckers who don't really rate: teachers, policemen, firemen, nurses. Religion sells itself out for a political stake, and leaders suddenly don't need to have divinity school credentials any longer. Race and ethnicity is about confrontation and jockeying for power. Media exhalts in reporting this circus, not the real news, and journalism itself starts to be about "marketing," which is even taught in public school. Presidents are elected on promises to special interests. The government thinks it can throw its weight around anywhere in the world and the result will be "shock and awe."
And so here we are again. It will all happen again in Illinois, and it will all happen again in this nation, regardless of whether our country's pitifully short flirtation with a republic/democracy actually lasts even ten percent as long as the empires of Egypt or Rome or England.
Truth is, we are all learning about ourselves, who WE are behind closed doors. "F" this, and "F" that; screw those people because I deserve more than they do; I should get seven figures because he is; I can run up the charges and tomorrow be damned; everybody cheats; I'm right and you're wrong; it's not gambling...it's "gaming"; everybody else is doing it; we deserve more because of a hundred past grievances I/we have decided exist; gimme, gimme, gimme more. And if I decide I have to have more, I will demand somebody just print up some more money and bail me out. And if they won't do it, I'll elect somebody like Rod, ....who will get it done for me!
Public school teachers, have been watching corruption creep for the past 30 years as their students and their spoiled Gen X and Gen Y parents demand high grades, sue more often, and shamelessly 'work' the schooling system. Cops have watched it infect public behavior. The coming decade of fall-out from corruption creep won't surprise any of them, although they, like all of us suckers, will be the ones hurt most.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
C.S. Lewis as a response to fear mongering
Maggie Gallagher's blog today was a tirade and a hand-wringing about the fact that new "research" shows us that "The Kids Are Not OK".
I share her concern for how difficult it is for any a\children to grow up in America. I hold all survey research in high dis-regard, however, because in a media soaked world, all children now consciously know how to use institutional survey interviewing to shock, call attention to what they guess other young people are doing, imitate the day's Hollywood star-behavior, and over-state their self-appealing "badness".
The problem is indeed one faced by us all: what is reality? And, if there is a shared reality, are there any indisputable laws of human nature that we must obey? However, she makes the tired old religionist mistake in interpreting the data of the research. It starts at the beginning of her thinking:
"The postmodernist myth is that we can dispense with a shared faith in objective moral truth. Can a whole society really discard old-fashioned norms that emphasize shared values and obligations -- such as marriage -- and instead become an America that prizes above all diversity, change, taboo-breaking and values-consumption, i.e., doing whatever you think works for you?"
What on earth is "objective moral truth?" Later we get her answer:
"... parents... are trying to instill "traditional" moral values in these highly untraditional times.
We know how hard it is for parents to raise children who postpone sexual gratification until marriage (or even adulthood). Now it appears there are a large number of other moral rules our children are failing to internalize, or at least realize. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal. How many of the other Ten Commandments are we prepared to jettison because, under postmodern conditions, transmitting these values is exceptionally difficult?"
Ahhh. Objective moral truth is the ten commandments! Now we get it! CHRISTIANS have objective moral truth, but nobody else does! I guess this is because all other religions and gods and codes are false!
I have news for you Ms. G,... and probably Uncle Rush, and Justice Scalia. Young people's values and behaviors are indeed a concern, but there is not one sacred answer.
We are better off seeking the moral truths that all of the world's religions and moral philosophies have in common. Actually, C.S. Lewis once did exactly this, in a vital essay that often was anthologized in high school literature texts... that is until the Christians drove it out. The essay is called "The Law of Human Nature" In it Lewis gives us all much firmer ground for thinking about and then guiding our youth.
Here is that essay:
"The Law of Human Nature"
From Mere Christianity by C S Lewis
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised. If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong - in other words, if there is no Law of Nature - what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money - the one you have almost forgotten - came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done - well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it - and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently. The truth is, we believe in decency so much - we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so - that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. *******
SO, the issue is not handing down the ten commandments to teens in America with accompanying threats and finger wagging, but instead to get them to consider exactly what Lewis considers, and help our society, which is NOT (by some Scalia-esque definition) Christian, figure out what the common moral ground of ALL faiths and beliefs is. I do not believe this kind of thinking will be hard at all for todays adolescents. In fact, I think they (including those who were 'researched') all in fact KNOW the "laws" of human nature, and are indeed quite clear about when they are violating those laws, and are also aware of the possible consequences of their actions! However, they also know that American politicians, businessmen and women, their own parents, many religionists, and nearly all celebrities want them to do as they say, not as they do. This is as it always has been, and we needn't be wringing our hands, but fostering the dialog, being sure not to close it down with the pleasant and instructive mythology of one particular type of religion. We could start by putting Lewis' essay back in our literature textbooks.
I share her concern for how difficult it is for any a\children to grow up in America. I hold all survey research in high dis-regard, however, because in a media soaked world, all children now consciously know how to use institutional survey interviewing to shock, call attention to what they guess other young people are doing, imitate the day's Hollywood star-behavior, and over-state their self-appealing "badness".
The problem is indeed one faced by us all: what is reality? And, if there is a shared reality, are there any indisputable laws of human nature that we must obey? However, she makes the tired old religionist mistake in interpreting the data of the research. It starts at the beginning of her thinking:
"The postmodernist myth is that we can dispense with a shared faith in objective moral truth. Can a whole society really discard old-fashioned norms that emphasize shared values and obligations -- such as marriage -- and instead become an America that prizes above all diversity, change, taboo-breaking and values-consumption, i.e., doing whatever you think works for you?"
What on earth is "objective moral truth?" Later we get her answer:
"... parents... are trying to instill "traditional" moral values in these highly untraditional times.
We know how hard it is for parents to raise children who postpone sexual gratification until marriage (or even adulthood). Now it appears there are a large number of other moral rules our children are failing to internalize, or at least realize. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal. How many of the other Ten Commandments are we prepared to jettison because, under postmodern conditions, transmitting these values is exceptionally difficult?"
Ahhh. Objective moral truth is the ten commandments! Now we get it! CHRISTIANS have objective moral truth, but nobody else does! I guess this is because all other religions and gods and codes are false!
I have news for you Ms. G,... and probably Uncle Rush, and Justice Scalia. Young people's values and behaviors are indeed a concern, but there is not one sacred answer.
We are better off seeking the moral truths that all of the world's religions and moral philosophies have in common. Actually, C.S. Lewis once did exactly this, in a vital essay that often was anthologized in high school literature texts... that is until the Christians drove it out. The essay is called "The Law of Human Nature" In it Lewis gives us all much firmer ground for thinking about and then guiding our youth.
Here is that essay:
"The Law of Human Nature"
From Mere Christianity by C S Lewis
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised. If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong - in other words, if there is no Law of Nature - what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money - the one you have almost forgotten - came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done - well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it - and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently. The truth is, we believe in decency so much - we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so - that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. *******
SO, the issue is not handing down the ten commandments to teens in America with accompanying threats and finger wagging, but instead to get them to consider exactly what Lewis considers, and help our society, which is NOT (by some Scalia-esque definition) Christian, figure out what the common moral ground of ALL faiths and beliefs is. I do not believe this kind of thinking will be hard at all for todays adolescents. In fact, I think they (including those who were 'researched') all in fact KNOW the "laws" of human nature, and are indeed quite clear about when they are violating those laws, and are also aware of the possible consequences of their actions! However, they also know that American politicians, businessmen and women, their own parents, many religionists, and nearly all celebrities want them to do as they say, not as they do. This is as it always has been, and we needn't be wringing our hands, but fostering the dialog, being sure not to close it down with the pleasant and instructive mythology of one particular type of religion. We could start by putting Lewis' essay back in our literature textbooks.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The death of selling cars American style
"The price listed is the price you pay!" screams the latest TV advertising for an American car maker.
How quaint! After 25 years of already BEING DEAD, American car makers are finally deciding to sell cars like any other commodity, instead of perpetuating the cult of dishonest horse trading from 100 years ago.
Gee! Do they mean I can actually go to the car store and read the price tag without some high school drop-out sliming up beside me and leading off by asking how much I want to spend monthly on payments and whether I have a trade?
It seems so. So at the brink of bankruptcy caused by being out-classed, out-produced, out-marketed, outmoded, out of touch and out of contention, now and only now do I get the exalted privilege of seeing crap I don't want to buy with the actual prices on it?
If we ever wanted to be embarrassed as a nation in a world industry we once helped to create, no finer moment could occur as in these advertisements. Tell you what! You put the stickers on with the "actual prices, guys, but know that I still don't believe you, and I won't darken your door with even one nickel of my money. You can steal from the government for awhile before you end up going bankrupt anyhow, but you lost me and my family members forever as customers over 30 years ago. And don't blame the unions...each union member has had to put up with the same crap as all the rest of us whenever they wanted to buy the product they actually had to produce at the behest and "design" of greedy and out-of-touch management.
There is a special place in business hell for you, where you will have to drive mo-peds, live with perpetually Harley Earl, and drink only oil... in leaky wine glasses. Enjoy!
How quaint! After 25 years of already BEING DEAD, American car makers are finally deciding to sell cars like any other commodity, instead of perpetuating the cult of dishonest horse trading from 100 years ago.
Gee! Do they mean I can actually go to the car store and read the price tag without some high school drop-out sliming up beside me and leading off by asking how much I want to spend monthly on payments and whether I have a trade?
It seems so. So at the brink of bankruptcy caused by being out-classed, out-produced, out-marketed, outmoded, out of touch and out of contention, now and only now do I get the exalted privilege of seeing crap I don't want to buy with the actual prices on it?
If we ever wanted to be embarrassed as a nation in a world industry we once helped to create, no finer moment could occur as in these advertisements. Tell you what! You put the stickers on with the "actual prices, guys, but know that I still don't believe you, and I won't darken your door with even one nickel of my money. You can steal from the government for awhile before you end up going bankrupt anyhow, but you lost me and my family members forever as customers over 30 years ago. And don't blame the unions...each union member has had to put up with the same crap as all the rest of us whenever they wanted to buy the product they actually had to produce at the behest and "design" of greedy and out-of-touch management.
There is a special place in business hell for you, where you will have to drive mo-peds, live with perpetually Harley Earl, and drink only oil... in leaky wine glasses. Enjoy!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Journalism Musings
I used to teach journalism and run a school newspaper. I was trained in order to get a certificate to do this, and I was trained "old-school" by a Chicago Tribune reporter. We spent the first class doing nothing but crafting leads. We later talked about ethics, and the fourth estate, and gate-keeping, and political influences too. It was great, and one time my 18-year-old editors actually scooped all the local papers on a big story. Our school was huge; I used to remind school board members that our school paper had a larger circulation than half of all Illinois towns...and that was true!
Right now, lots of hand-wringing continues among journalism folks. They say print media is dying, they moan about the Medill school at Northwestern changing their program to require "marketing" of all J-school grads, and when each old school guy who cut his teeth at the City News Bureau dies, they bemoan the fact that there aren't any journalists like that anymore. Should we worry?
Yes and no. No because finding out the truth in the world is a built-in habit of humans, who are competitive and hate to see people lied to and taken advantage of. No dictatorship, no politicians, no religious crazies, no school authority has ever stopped investigative reporting or whistle-blowing. Of course, fascists round up the journalists and teachers first, and a lot of them may then disappear or die for the truth. Still, journalists will always exist and always find avenues to report the truth.
Yes, journalism is changing. This piece is appearing on a blog. I could start a NING that reported and shared data on any one local or even national story of interest. I can read the Sun Times online (now that newspapers have figured out that profit online is about advertising, not exclusivity/subscriptions). Print media have had to remake themselves to appear more "bite" friendly, more like TV news and WIRED magazine. Hard news coverage has shrunk in number of words per story, and non-investigative stories are collected in new ways, and often in partnerships with electronic media. The days of the paid ambulance chasers and precinct reporters have passed.
I was reminded of the thing I worry most about regarding journalism today by, no surprise, a radio talk show host. He was complaining about how we get new slogans and labels pushed on us, so that they appear everywhere. His complaint was about the phrases "Black Friday" and "Black Wednesday".
Black Friday was a phrase only known to retail management and no one else fifteen years ago. It referred to the day when any retail company shows what kind of profit they are going to take in on the busiest shopping day...the day after Thanksgiving. Black Wednesday may be, although no one is sure, a phrase coined by bar tenders for the day before Thanksgiving, which is currently reported to be the biggest drinking day of the year...outdoing even St Patty's and New Years! The radio host said that he had bartended for years (having quit only recently), and he never ONCE heard any one in the bar business use that phrase. So, how do these phrases get splashed in headlines, and reported on TV news in Chicago this week?
My answer: the media invented them.
They have to. Why? Because in the digital/internet age, news media cannot nap. News media face the constant challenge, with even fewer staff and reporters, to fill up 24 HOURS, 7 DAYS A WEEK of non-stop "news." In order to do that across hundreds of newspapers and hundreds of cable channels and thousands of e-zines and print mags, they have to keep finding something -- anything -- to grab our attention. So, the day after Thanksgiving can't simply be the busiest shopping day of the year. It has to be a story, with some 'sex' and some 'legs'. It has to have a 'hook' and the coverage has to be pushed back to the week before and forward to the week after. Last week: "How are nervous retailers preparing for the dreaded black Friday?" Next week "Black Friday is all red for terrified retailers!" There will be side stories with a local spin: "Ma and Pa grocery weathers Black Friday" and "Black Friday may toll death knell for Quackenmeyer Discount!" News media have learned from Hallmark cards. Got a slow cycle for sales? Invent a new holiday that needs cards...like "Sweetest Day." And the news media themselves will jump on it because the internet is on the phone and the crawl is crawling on the bottom of the screen. The week before: "Are you ready for your sweetest?" and the week after "Sweetest Day not so sweet for Tinkleberry's Chocolates!"
Make something where there was nothing, slogan-ize it, sell it, report on it over a cycle, keep it alive, make people believe they should care, even if they can't quite recall if the thing ever even existed before. Market it, then spin it into niche markets (is grandma sweetest on sweetest day in area nursing homes???) It can fill, fill, fill up all the time we have to fill.
And, once we have filled, filled, filled it up, we can put the the news foxes in front of the cameras and keep track of our share. Don't worry if we can't cover the wars because the military won't let us (the one and ONLY thing the American military apparently learned from Viet Nam!). We've got Black Fridays and Sweetest Day. 'Now,... is 'reporter' Susie Q. doing the background interviews for our annual two week coverage of post-holiday stress syndrome? I think she's got a doctor who claims she was the first to recognize this awful 'syndrome.' We have former guests from Springer's show who claim that the syndrome made them have affairs at work, gain 33 pounds, and run away to a motel in Duluth. Of course some geeks in the Afghan hills died today, but nobody wants to hear about that....we've got 'em conditioned to hear about THIS.'
Barnum said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the [American] people. However, I see some hopeful signs of a more critical public. One is the recent election. Voters have been spun to death, and they are sick of it. Palin's handlers made a huge mistake believing they could 'market' associations with "known terrorists" to a nation who now knows more than ever what a terrorist is (it ain't Mr. Ayers, despite his count-cultural ear rings!) The young generations of bloggers and facebookers know what's bullshit online. They occasionally laugh at, but then always expose urban myths and made-up stories. To them Paris Hilton isn't news but a geek to be joked about. The older generation shows signs it has gotten over being niche-marketed-to; witness the responses to American auto makers whose businesses really died twenty years ago telling how they are competitive in the world market! I wonder if there's anybody left, except in a few church basements, who believe Fox News is really news.
My hope is that people in America have become much more critical of media ploys to snag their attention and invent news where there is no news. When the film "Wag the Dog" appeared, it frightened me; now, I am not so frightened.
Americans may actually be getting smarter; but wait, ...no they can't be because the media keeps reporting how awful ALL American schools are, right?
Wrong.
Right now, lots of hand-wringing continues among journalism folks. They say print media is dying, they moan about the Medill school at Northwestern changing their program to require "marketing" of all J-school grads, and when each old school guy who cut his teeth at the City News Bureau dies, they bemoan the fact that there aren't any journalists like that anymore. Should we worry?
Yes and no. No because finding out the truth in the world is a built-in habit of humans, who are competitive and hate to see people lied to and taken advantage of. No dictatorship, no politicians, no religious crazies, no school authority has ever stopped investigative reporting or whistle-blowing. Of course, fascists round up the journalists and teachers first, and a lot of them may then disappear or die for the truth. Still, journalists will always exist and always find avenues to report the truth.
Yes, journalism is changing. This piece is appearing on a blog. I could start a NING that reported and shared data on any one local or even national story of interest. I can read the Sun Times online (now that newspapers have figured out that profit online is about advertising, not exclusivity/subscriptions). Print media have had to remake themselves to appear more "bite" friendly, more like TV news and WIRED magazine. Hard news coverage has shrunk in number of words per story, and non-investigative stories are collected in new ways, and often in partnerships with electronic media. The days of the paid ambulance chasers and precinct reporters have passed.
I was reminded of the thing I worry most about regarding journalism today by, no surprise, a radio talk show host. He was complaining about how we get new slogans and labels pushed on us, so that they appear everywhere. His complaint was about the phrases "Black Friday" and "Black Wednesday".
Black Friday was a phrase only known to retail management and no one else fifteen years ago. It referred to the day when any retail company shows what kind of profit they are going to take in on the busiest shopping day...the day after Thanksgiving. Black Wednesday may be, although no one is sure, a phrase coined by bar tenders for the day before Thanksgiving, which is currently reported to be the biggest drinking day of the year...outdoing even St Patty's and New Years! The radio host said that he had bartended for years (having quit only recently), and he never ONCE heard any one in the bar business use that phrase. So, how do these phrases get splashed in headlines, and reported on TV news in Chicago this week?
My answer: the media invented them.
They have to. Why? Because in the digital/internet age, news media cannot nap. News media face the constant challenge, with even fewer staff and reporters, to fill up 24 HOURS, 7 DAYS A WEEK of non-stop "news." In order to do that across hundreds of newspapers and hundreds of cable channels and thousands of e-zines and print mags, they have to keep finding something -- anything -- to grab our attention. So, the day after Thanksgiving can't simply be the busiest shopping day of the year. It has to be a story, with some 'sex' and some 'legs'. It has to have a 'hook' and the coverage has to be pushed back to the week before and forward to the week after. Last week: "How are nervous retailers preparing for the dreaded black Friday?" Next week "Black Friday is all red for terrified retailers!" There will be side stories with a local spin: "Ma and Pa grocery weathers Black Friday" and "Black Friday may toll death knell for Quackenmeyer Discount!" News media have learned from Hallmark cards. Got a slow cycle for sales? Invent a new holiday that needs cards...like "Sweetest Day." And the news media themselves will jump on it because the internet is on the phone and the crawl is crawling on the bottom of the screen. The week before: "Are you ready for your sweetest?" and the week after "Sweetest Day not so sweet for Tinkleberry's Chocolates!"
Make something where there was nothing, slogan-ize it, sell it, report on it over a cycle, keep it alive, make people believe they should care, even if they can't quite recall if the thing ever even existed before. Market it, then spin it into niche markets (is grandma sweetest on sweetest day in area nursing homes???) It can fill, fill, fill up all the time we have to fill.
And, once we have filled, filled, filled it up, we can put the the news foxes in front of the cameras and keep track of our share. Don't worry if we can't cover the wars because the military won't let us (the one and ONLY thing the American military apparently learned from Viet Nam!). We've got Black Fridays and Sweetest Day. 'Now,... is 'reporter' Susie Q. doing the background interviews for our annual two week coverage of post-holiday stress syndrome? I think she's got a doctor who claims she was the first to recognize this awful 'syndrome.' We have former guests from Springer's show who claim that the syndrome made them have affairs at work, gain 33 pounds, and run away to a motel in Duluth. Of course some geeks in the Afghan hills died today, but nobody wants to hear about that....we've got 'em conditioned to hear about THIS.'
Barnum said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the [American] people. However, I see some hopeful signs of a more critical public. One is the recent election. Voters have been spun to death, and they are sick of it. Palin's handlers made a huge mistake believing they could 'market' associations with "known terrorists" to a nation who now knows more than ever what a terrorist is (it ain't Mr. Ayers, despite his count-cultural ear rings!) The young generations of bloggers and facebookers know what's bullshit online. They occasionally laugh at, but then always expose urban myths and made-up stories. To them Paris Hilton isn't news but a geek to be joked about. The older generation shows signs it has gotten over being niche-marketed-to; witness the responses to American auto makers whose businesses really died twenty years ago telling how they are competitive in the world market! I wonder if there's anybody left, except in a few church basements, who believe Fox News is really news.
My hope is that people in America have become much more critical of media ploys to snag their attention and invent news where there is no news. When the film "Wag the Dog" appeared, it frightened me; now, I am not so frightened.
Americans may actually be getting smarter; but wait, ...no they can't be because the media keeps reporting how awful ALL American schools are, right?
Wrong.
Monday, November 24, 2008
An Education
Instead of telling schools and teachers what to do, some Americans need to spend time learning from them. They would find that the roots of the current state of America were on clear view in any local middle-class high school trying to educate the children of 'Boobus Americanus' for the past 30 years. These roots had nothing whatever to do with secular humanism, sex education, dumbing down the curriculum, or low national test scores.
Starting in about 1972, we graduated a generation that learned from the media and their parents that getting high was a norm. The parents who already smoked dope generally thought the schools should stop getting all upset about stoned kids. For example (in my school at the time) the football player smoking a joint in the back of the team bus was a typical case. The coach suspended him; but,the parents got the suspension overturned so the team could try to win a big game. After all, kids will be kids! At about this same time, the Vince Lombardi crap that “winning...it's the only thing!” was invading the mentality of all high school sports. At this time, the contests of quasi-gladitorial professional football thugs had supplanted baseball as the 'national past time”. People were amused by, but apparently did not learn from the satire of George Carlin! Also at this time, my own generation began its romance with money, at the same time that my students' parents began making a lot of it. The new attitude was exactly the one that the military-industrial complex of the '50s and '60s had dreamed of creating. You see, they had lost the social revolution, but they had learned from their defeat... and from the mafia. “Can't persuade them? Buy them all! Every person has their price. Make them an offer they can't refuse!
I saw my first “he who dies with the most toys, wins!” bumper sticker at about this time. A new generation entered high school with a new attitude toward education itself: it's for suckers ! Life is about football, fucking, and free-time. The media fed this narcissism. “Animal House” became the portrait of why anybody would want to go to college. The “term” intellectual” stopped being heard in schools or in public life. The era of the glorification of the thug was coming: mafiosi, gang-bangers, super-heroes, and the super rich guy in the Bimmer with the trophy blondes. “Pretty Woman” was real, and nobody really liked Fredo after all... By the time it appeared, kids didn't even buy the message of the movie with Michael Douglas playing the Gekko tycoon. They envied Gekko, not the Capra-esque ending in which truly good guys won. They liked Darth far better than Luke. They giggled hysterically when Indiana shrugged and shot the sword-wielding Arab guy (and now, whose still laughing???)
In classes, these students had a new anthem: do as little as you can but get into college; and from there, get rich fast and retire at 40 or even 35. Computer technology fed the new reality: you didn't even need to go to school if you could do computers. I had boys with tech skills refuse to do anything in or out of class; after all, they were going to get rich without school. School became a sort of rigged game-show challenge that all the kids winked at. Who could cheat without getting caught? Who could con their parents into bailing them out of or buying them out of any jam? Who could fuck more girls and not get any of them pregnant? Who could fuck more guys without getting pregnant? Who could con their parents into getting them not just a car, but a really cool new car? Tastes in music swung from rock to gangsta rap, and Frank Zappa was vindicated in the end: “Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit 'em in the ass!” 'Bling' started to appear glittering in the suburban hallways, as foolish little white boys pretended they might be in a gang. Winners were bullys; winners took what they needed; winners didn't care about “collateral damage,” but cared for their “bros” at the expense of all others.
Meanwhile the parents had learned that school was about demanding special treatment for their children (never mind earning or deserving that treatment). They were both busy making 10% on investments and flipping houses. Furious mothers complained to the principal when a teacher didn't return a phone call within the hour; fathers prefaced conferences by literally saying “do you know who I am”....as though that should actually matter. The old houses in the neighborhood started to be torn down; a 3-bedroom bungalow was now unthinkable. Now the right homes had three car garages and cedar-shake roofs. If a new kind of wine cooler appeared on “This Old House”, the parents had to have it. Lawn furniture, barbecues, and upscale kitchen cabinets, joined shoes and dresses in fashion cycles and constant shifts in acceptable colors. Kids knew that they would always have the newest phones, the latest MP3, and the latest $200 jeans. It became a mark of maturity for kids to spend money, not to save it, and to hang out rather than work. In the go-go economy all things and all people were now markets that needed to be marketed to.
Gen X and Gen Y came of age in a world of mandatory Ralph Lauren, Mercedes Benz, and designer clothes. To get these things, they had to have more and more; and so, the “I'm better than you because I spend more than you” attitude got applied to the business world. Get it, get it now, get it any way you can; you only need to show a quarterly gain and leverage that into a raise. Find the loopholes in the system and cheat it to your advantage. Young bosses rewarded the cheating of ever younger workers who all confessed to each other over beers in the corporate skybox what a joke school had been and what chumps the WW2 generation were. They were tired of hearing the Boomers rag about Viet Nam and social conscience. To hell with 'em! Business was now really about gaming (the new marketing spin for gambling). Some win the game, some lose the game, but always its a game and the goal is to BE the house: Lehman house, Goldman Sachs house, Fannie Mae house, CitiCorp house. Move the paper through the loopholes and never mind the regulator (teachers?) since they only envy us anyway and want a piece of their own. Everyone wants to participate in gaming, lottery dreams, six figure raises for doing next to nothing. Don't go into education....you'll have to grade papers and actually mentor kids! No, get into finance and investment banking, the new holy grails. Don't worry about journalists finding out what you are really doing each day at work....after all, they envy you too, and journalism is not abut truth seeking but now about niche marketing, ...which is to say finance and banking.
And....should you get caught, or the whole thing go sour, make sure that with your last breath, while they are re-possessing the Bimmer, find a way to make sure those God damn teachers lose their middle class salaries and 'guaranteed' pensions. Then we can still say, curled up in an evicted little ball in the driveway of the house we can't afford anymore, that they were wrong, and we were right, we were right, we were right.
Winning...it's the only thing! Learning....well, that comes a little later on .....
Starting in about 1972, we graduated a generation that learned from the media and their parents that getting high was a norm. The parents who already smoked dope generally thought the schools should stop getting all upset about stoned kids. For example (in my school at the time) the football player smoking a joint in the back of the team bus was a typical case. The coach suspended him; but,the parents got the suspension overturned so the team could try to win a big game. After all, kids will be kids! At about this same time, the Vince Lombardi crap that “winning...it's the only thing!” was invading the mentality of all high school sports. At this time, the contests of quasi-gladitorial professional football thugs had supplanted baseball as the 'national past time”. People were amused by, but apparently did not learn from the satire of George Carlin! Also at this time, my own generation began its romance with money, at the same time that my students' parents began making a lot of it. The new attitude was exactly the one that the military-industrial complex of the '50s and '60s had dreamed of creating. You see, they had lost the social revolution, but they had learned from their defeat... and from the mafia. “Can't persuade them? Buy them all! Every person has their price. Make them an offer they can't refuse!
I saw my first “he who dies with the most toys, wins!” bumper sticker at about this time. A new generation entered high school with a new attitude toward education itself: it's for suckers ! Life is about football, fucking, and free-time. The media fed this narcissism. “Animal House” became the portrait of why anybody would want to go to college. The “term” intellectual” stopped being heard in schools or in public life. The era of the glorification of the thug was coming: mafiosi, gang-bangers, super-heroes, and the super rich guy in the Bimmer with the trophy blondes. “Pretty Woman” was real, and nobody really liked Fredo after all... By the time it appeared, kids didn't even buy the message of the movie with Michael Douglas playing the Gekko tycoon. They envied Gekko, not the Capra-esque ending in which truly good guys won. They liked Darth far better than Luke. They giggled hysterically when Indiana shrugged and shot the sword-wielding Arab guy (and now, whose still laughing???)
In classes, these students had a new anthem: do as little as you can but get into college; and from there, get rich fast and retire at 40 or even 35. Computer technology fed the new reality: you didn't even need to go to school if you could do computers. I had boys with tech skills refuse to do anything in or out of class; after all, they were going to get rich without school. School became a sort of rigged game-show challenge that all the kids winked at. Who could cheat without getting caught? Who could con their parents into bailing them out of or buying them out of any jam? Who could fuck more girls and not get any of them pregnant? Who could fuck more guys without getting pregnant? Who could con their parents into getting them not just a car, but a really cool new car? Tastes in music swung from rock to gangsta rap, and Frank Zappa was vindicated in the end: “Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit 'em in the ass!” 'Bling' started to appear glittering in the suburban hallways, as foolish little white boys pretended they might be in a gang. Winners were bullys; winners took what they needed; winners didn't care about “collateral damage,” but cared for their “bros” at the expense of all others.
Meanwhile the parents had learned that school was about demanding special treatment for their children (never mind earning or deserving that treatment). They were both busy making 10% on investments and flipping houses. Furious mothers complained to the principal when a teacher didn't return a phone call within the hour; fathers prefaced conferences by literally saying “do you know who I am”....as though that should actually matter. The old houses in the neighborhood started to be torn down; a 3-bedroom bungalow was now unthinkable. Now the right homes had three car garages and cedar-shake roofs. If a new kind of wine cooler appeared on “This Old House”, the parents had to have it. Lawn furniture, barbecues, and upscale kitchen cabinets, joined shoes and dresses in fashion cycles and constant shifts in acceptable colors. Kids knew that they would always have the newest phones, the latest MP3, and the latest $200 jeans. It became a mark of maturity for kids to spend money, not to save it, and to hang out rather than work. In the go-go economy all things and all people were now markets that needed to be marketed to.
Gen X and Gen Y came of age in a world of mandatory Ralph Lauren, Mercedes Benz, and designer clothes. To get these things, they had to have more and more; and so, the “I'm better than you because I spend more than you” attitude got applied to the business world. Get it, get it now, get it any way you can; you only need to show a quarterly gain and leverage that into a raise. Find the loopholes in the system and cheat it to your advantage. Young bosses rewarded the cheating of ever younger workers who all confessed to each other over beers in the corporate skybox what a joke school had been and what chumps the WW2 generation were. They were tired of hearing the Boomers rag about Viet Nam and social conscience. To hell with 'em! Business was now really about gaming (the new marketing spin for gambling). Some win the game, some lose the game, but always its a game and the goal is to BE the house: Lehman house, Goldman Sachs house, Fannie Mae house, CitiCorp house. Move the paper through the loopholes and never mind the regulator (teachers?) since they only envy us anyway and want a piece of their own. Everyone wants to participate in gaming, lottery dreams, six figure raises for doing next to nothing. Don't go into education....you'll have to grade papers and actually mentor kids! No, get into finance and investment banking, the new holy grails. Don't worry about journalists finding out what you are really doing each day at work....after all, they envy you too, and journalism is not abut truth seeking but now about niche marketing, ...which is to say finance and banking.
And....should you get caught, or the whole thing go sour, make sure that with your last breath, while they are re-possessing the Bimmer, find a way to make sure those God damn teachers lose their middle class salaries and 'guaranteed' pensions. Then we can still say, curled up in an evicted little ball in the driveway of the house we can't afford anymore, that they were wrong, and we were right, we were right, we were right.
Winning...it's the only thing! Learning....well, that comes a little later on .....
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Car racing...what's the deal?
I have some new young friends who are now, or have been, involved with car racing. They are mostly 20-something, and at least one seems to have a future in racing. I am keenly interested in them, and eager to be allowed into their world, because I have been a car nut since I was about three years old. I wanted to be on wheels early, and none other than the Mayo Clinic actually discovered (with some medical amusement, I might add) that I have a "hole" in my head due to the fact that when I was about a year old, I crashed my ride-in-car down the full length of the basement stairs and cracked my head pretty hard. I remember nothing about it, except the sound of my mother screaming and the feeling of riding in the car to the hospital. This "hole" in the head amuses my current wife, ...and probably causes my ex-wives to nod sagely, I am sure.
But here's the thing. This car love has always been there, even despite the nose-dive down the basement steps. I think it could be that Howard Gardner needs to add another kind of "intelligence", or perhaps add a sub-set of "kinesthetic intelligence," or maybe he should start a list of genetic oddities-- the first one to be called: car racing. It is not just "racing," by the way, because joggers and party game competitors and people running the Iditerod race do these things due to, perhaps, other genetic aberrations. Even these other "racers" are often just like all the non-car racing fan humans, who simply do not get why a person would watch a bunch of people drive fast...or even worse, drive fast in themselves. One hundred and fifty miles an hour into a 90 degree hair-pin turn? Not for them! When you try to explain to them, their eyes glaze over, as though you were trying to prove the existence of trolls in a forest.
Now, not all car nuts like car racing. Collectors, fans of artistic design, and state troopers might like cars for entirely other reasons. Only racing people like racing, except sometimes in Europe, where the cultural history of this small geographical region has tied Formula racing and rallying to people's national identity and pride. Even grandmas wave Ferrari flags in Modena.
Car racing is a hard thing to generalize about, because world of outlaw race drivers live in a separate world from open wheel folks whose world is not that of NASCAR folks whose world is hardly the same as vintage car folks. They give a nod to the other guys, but really don't want to go there to do their thing. Also social class distinctions exist among the different car racing crowds. Formula 1 fan-dom in America is supposed to like fine wine more than cheap beer; NASCAR fan-dom is supposed to drink ANY beer and wear lots of sleeveless T-shirts with messages like "MOPAR" and "MILLER LITE" and "I'm the guy yer wife knew before!"; the drag race crowd drinks 5W10 and talks to piston rings...you get the idea of class biases. However, the passion and level of interest in the details of car racing is shared by all by all of them.
Car racing is a hard thing to generalize because it is sometimes hard to like even for the fans. One challenge is that everyone knows it's all about who has the most money...either of their own or donated by people who will put a decal on your car and your hat. The money aspect makes it as American as apple pie,....and also corruptible, unfair, open to cheaters and idiots,and able to be slimed by corporate types and those laundering gang money.
Then there is the hard issue of death; all drivers know and all car racing fans know that there is deadly risk in racing. The long-time fans like me know that racing can reach out and bite you...hard! I liken it to the "steppenwolf" of drivers: the steppenwolf is ever and always out in the woods, just past your sight line into the apex of every turn. He waits. He can squander time measured in years, while racers sweat to save time measured in tenths of a second. If you are a fan long enough, you'll cry on account of his sudden bite. I listened as a kid to the announcements about Glen Roberts and Tiny Lund; later in life I witnessed the end of Lorenzo Bandini and Ayrton Senna in replayed video; I was washing my car when the radio blared the methanol inferno that took Davey MacDonald and Eddie Sachs. I loved these people just as people loved Carole Lombard or John Belushi. Why them? Why now? That's racing.
So why would you like car racing, knowing these negatives, these quirks, these boundaries?
First, speed is addictive. Some people will understand this when you ask them why they ride a roller coaster and, by doing so, actually trust their lives to an engineer and a fabricator and a maintenance crew who assure the machinery won't send them flying off to their deaths. Second, cars are works of art, created out of a shared psychological understanding of how speed should LOOK. People do tend to get the art idea, because they can look at a Bugatti and understand it's shape and the relation of its shape to its purpose. Third, cars are about control. True, control freaks come in all walks of life, but for racers it is a precious gift to be able to take this artwork/automobile, go exhilaratingly fast in it, and actually control it...not just by REacting, but through knowledge of the physics of it, the machinery of it, ... and having conscious fore-thought about what each piece of race track will require on this lap, at this time in the race, in this traffic, with this tire wear, under these temperatures, knowing my fatigue level, my skill level and the enticing likelihood that I could actually win this race or place in the ranks of the top drivers on this day. Fans of racing seem to be able to put themselves out there on the track knowing and feeling what the drivers know and feel. It is the textbook definition of "vicarious" experience.
Despite the power and "high" of all this, few racers get rich racing and all racers will also need rich friends/sponsors. The fans also pay dearly to see racing live, and all cable companies know never to offer the SPEED channel for free. The money always goes ultimately to somebody else, or back into the car, and the work of racing is not only low-paying but requires gypsy blood. I watch my new friends and wonder if they understand how lonely the life they are choosing can be. Like musicians, racing people are out on the road. It's very hard to take love with you, and equally hard to keep a lover in every city. Want to have kids...OK, but will they be on the road or will you be the parent the school never sees? Odd hours, bad food, endless interstates that all look the same, close quarters with people you may not like...whether you are sick or healthy. Arrive at the gig at 4 a.m., practice at 10. Then a nap, or practice some more? Show time, and it's pouring rain. The stage is like a furnace. Everything is being delayed. Maybe I'll take the uppers after all.... "Where do we gotta be next?" The trucks' await, but the weather does not.
To me, as I watch my young friends have oceans of fun racing, and dream about their futures as drivers, the very saddest thing is related to the money. Of course money is necessary and competitive cars are expensive. But all of us worker bees in other walks of life have faced the moral dilemmas of money and the need for it and its subsequent power over our behavior. In race car driving, it goes like this: once racing has got you, every next step will require more money; more money makes you more beholden and under more pressure to do well; more pressure to do well makes you maybe, just maybe,... stay in the higher gear longer, brake a tad later, or push the pedal just bit harder. The money knows that if you risk more and, especially, if you can win, the logos and decals are on the screen just a tic longer. So the money people love risk-takers,...and they always, always want more and more and more. And every driver out there doing it for a living is experiencing the same gnawing in their gut, just underneath their exhilaration. " I've got to...I've got to."
Meanwhile, no matter what race or how many are competing, the steppenwolf has all the time in the world.
"I can wait," he whispers from the woods.
But here's the thing. This car love has always been there, even despite the nose-dive down the basement steps. I think it could be that Howard Gardner needs to add another kind of "intelligence", or perhaps add a sub-set of "kinesthetic intelligence," or maybe he should start a list of genetic oddities-- the first one to be called: car racing. It is not just "racing," by the way, because joggers and party game competitors and people running the Iditerod race do these things due to, perhaps, other genetic aberrations. Even these other "racers" are often just like all the non-car racing fan humans, who simply do not get why a person would watch a bunch of people drive fast...or even worse, drive fast in themselves. One hundred and fifty miles an hour into a 90 degree hair-pin turn? Not for them! When you try to explain to them, their eyes glaze over, as though you were trying to prove the existence of trolls in a forest.
Now, not all car nuts like car racing. Collectors, fans of artistic design, and state troopers might like cars for entirely other reasons. Only racing people like racing, except sometimes in Europe, where the cultural history of this small geographical region has tied Formula racing and rallying to people's national identity and pride. Even grandmas wave Ferrari flags in Modena.
Car racing is a hard thing to generalize about, because world of outlaw race drivers live in a separate world from open wheel folks whose world is not that of NASCAR folks whose world is hardly the same as vintage car folks. They give a nod to the other guys, but really don't want to go there to do their thing. Also social class distinctions exist among the different car racing crowds. Formula 1 fan-dom in America is supposed to like fine wine more than cheap beer; NASCAR fan-dom is supposed to drink ANY beer and wear lots of sleeveless T-shirts with messages like "MOPAR" and "MILLER LITE" and "I'm the guy yer wife knew before!"; the drag race crowd drinks 5W10 and talks to piston rings...you get the idea of class biases. However, the passion and level of interest in the details of car racing is shared by all by all of them.
Car racing is a hard thing to generalize because it is sometimes hard to like even for the fans. One challenge is that everyone knows it's all about who has the most money...either of their own or donated by people who will put a decal on your car and your hat. The money aspect makes it as American as apple pie,....and also corruptible, unfair, open to cheaters and idiots,and able to be slimed by corporate types and those laundering gang money.
Then there is the hard issue of death; all drivers know and all car racing fans know that there is deadly risk in racing. The long-time fans like me know that racing can reach out and bite you...hard! I liken it to the "steppenwolf" of drivers: the steppenwolf is ever and always out in the woods, just past your sight line into the apex of every turn. He waits. He can squander time measured in years, while racers sweat to save time measured in tenths of a second. If you are a fan long enough, you'll cry on account of his sudden bite. I listened as a kid to the announcements about Glen Roberts and Tiny Lund; later in life I witnessed the end of Lorenzo Bandini and Ayrton Senna in replayed video; I was washing my car when the radio blared the methanol inferno that took Davey MacDonald and Eddie Sachs. I loved these people just as people loved Carole Lombard or John Belushi. Why them? Why now? That's racing.
So why would you like car racing, knowing these negatives, these quirks, these boundaries?
First, speed is addictive. Some people will understand this when you ask them why they ride a roller coaster and, by doing so, actually trust their lives to an engineer and a fabricator and a maintenance crew who assure the machinery won't send them flying off to their deaths. Second, cars are works of art, created out of a shared psychological understanding of how speed should LOOK. People do tend to get the art idea, because they can look at a Bugatti and understand it's shape and the relation of its shape to its purpose. Third, cars are about control. True, control freaks come in all walks of life, but for racers it is a precious gift to be able to take this artwork/automobile, go exhilaratingly fast in it, and actually control it...not just by REacting, but through knowledge of the physics of it, the machinery of it, ... and having conscious fore-thought about what each piece of race track will require on this lap, at this time in the race, in this traffic, with this tire wear, under these temperatures, knowing my fatigue level, my skill level and the enticing likelihood that I could actually win this race or place in the ranks of the top drivers on this day. Fans of racing seem to be able to put themselves out there on the track knowing and feeling what the drivers know and feel. It is the textbook definition of "vicarious" experience.
Despite the power and "high" of all this, few racers get rich racing and all racers will also need rich friends/sponsors. The fans also pay dearly to see racing live, and all cable companies know never to offer the SPEED channel for free. The money always goes ultimately to somebody else, or back into the car, and the work of racing is not only low-paying but requires gypsy blood. I watch my new friends and wonder if they understand how lonely the life they are choosing can be. Like musicians, racing people are out on the road. It's very hard to take love with you, and equally hard to keep a lover in every city. Want to have kids...OK, but will they be on the road or will you be the parent the school never sees? Odd hours, bad food, endless interstates that all look the same, close quarters with people you may not like...whether you are sick or healthy. Arrive at the gig at 4 a.m., practice at 10. Then a nap, or practice some more? Show time, and it's pouring rain. The stage is like a furnace. Everything is being delayed. Maybe I'll take the uppers after all.... "Where do we gotta be next?" The trucks' await, but the weather does not.
To me, as I watch my young friends have oceans of fun racing, and dream about their futures as drivers, the very saddest thing is related to the money. Of course money is necessary and competitive cars are expensive. But all of us worker bees in other walks of life have faced the moral dilemmas of money and the need for it and its subsequent power over our behavior. In race car driving, it goes like this: once racing has got you, every next step will require more money; more money makes you more beholden and under more pressure to do well; more pressure to do well makes you maybe, just maybe,... stay in the higher gear longer, brake a tad later, or push the pedal just bit harder. The money knows that if you risk more and, especially, if you can win, the logos and decals are on the screen just a tic longer. So the money people love risk-takers,...and they always, always want more and more and more. And every driver out there doing it for a living is experiencing the same gnawing in their gut, just underneath their exhilaration. " I've got to...I've got to."
Meanwhile, no matter what race or how many are competing, the steppenwolf has all the time in the world.
"I can wait," he whispers from the woods.
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