Category: Rants

I assume that most of the like, seven people who read this thing are similar to me demographically: plowing through their 30s or 40s in the wasteland of the economy we thought we would live in as children. On the very off chance that anyone who sees this is young enough that his or her course through life has not yet been cast in stone, here is the sum of what I've learned in life. I wish someone had told me this when I was a teenager. Maybe it will be useful to you.

As a young person – and by that I mean, when I was in high school and college – adults told me that if I tried really hard at the correct things I would be successful in life. Be smart, work hard, and don't succumb to the temptations of idleness and fun. Accordingly I never did anything fun.

You are reading the word "never" and thinking it is an example of a writer using poetic license. But I am quite serious. I had no friends in college or high school. Never went to a party. Never got drunk. Never dated (not that it was an option). Never blew off a class. Never went out. I just studied and studied more and kicked the ass of every course or standardized test I came across. And all along I was assured that this would lead to great success eventually.

Here is the thing. None of that is true. I was lied to. And by the time I figured that out it was far too late. Let me tell you a secret about this country: it's not all that different than medieval England in terms of its social classes. Either you were born into money and your life will turn out fine no matter what you do or you were born without it and your life will pretty much be mediocre or shitty no matter how hard you fight it. Oh, you'll be comfortable. You'll make enough to live indoors and drive a functioning car.

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You'll just never be happy because you will be dependent on a paycheck and whatever you have to do in order to get it will probably be miserable. The only people who get to be happy are the ones who have enough money that they don't have to do things they know they will despise in order to get paid.

So as much as it irritates me to deal with students who refuse to put the slightest bit of effort into their educations, in reality they are all far smarter than I was. Either they are wealthy and no matter how badly they fuck up they will make five times what I ever will and will live great lives or they are plebeians who might as well get in all the fun they can in college before they begin their forty years of soul-crushing drudgery.

That's the great American myth: that working hard gets you anywhere. It doesn't. Working hard makes someone else a lot of money off of your effort. You just end up tired and frustrated. The kids you knew in college with the trust funds and the summer homes in Aspen run the world no matter how hard you work. They make money by exploiting you and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it because you don't have a giant pile of money that allows you to walk away from things you find repugnant.
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People used to tell me I was smart. Since I didn't figure any of this out until I was in my 30s, I guess they were wrong. Don't make the same mistake. You'll end up waking up one morning to realize the depths of your personal and professional failures, and that it's too late to do anything about them. I promise you'll kick yourself for not having at least the memory of good times to remind you that even if everything is drudgery now, you had fun when the opportunities arose.

Out of the thousands of things I've learned, this is the only one that I think anyone else might benefit from hearing. Regrets are the worst things, and once your life is pretty much over they will pile up at a rate you can scarcely imagine when you are young and full of optimism.

Another day, another person with hands in the air doing nothing that could even remotely be construed as threatening or illegal being shot dead by a cop. The professional cop apologists will behave as they always do, dragging out the dead man's apparent criminal record (conveniently ignoring the number of complaints filed against the officers involved, as their histories are never relevant) and noting gravely that he did something the cop told him not to do and therefore he merited the death sentence. You know, like it says in that one part of the Constitution: "If you don't do what the police tell you, they get to shoot you.
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" I think it's in Article IV.

The question that needs to be put to the cop apologists out there is: What could a police officer do that you wouldn't argue is justified? Since no matter what the police do the same people always leap to their defense with the same excuses, that suggests the statistically impossible reality that nothing the police do is unjustifiable. If their beliefs were based on any kind of objective reality there would have to be at least one instance in which we could all look at police actions and say "Yeah, that's totally unacceptable.

Clearly over the line." There would be some historical example they could point to and say "This is the limit of what I can make excuses for.
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"

Since they can't, the rest of us can safely ignore their tired routine as the ramblings of authoritarian-follower personality types claiming to create the appearance of logic in what for them is really a matter of blind, unwavering faith.

Being asked to give the response to the State of the Union address is the political equivalent of Al Neri inviting Fredo Corleone to join him in a fishing boat on a quiet, remote lake. More than one Budding Career on the national stage has arrived stillborn during SOTU responses, with Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio being prominent examples. Nobody watches it, nobody talks about it unless you fuck up or look like a death row prisoner giving his last interview (Rubio), and its content is usually little more than a short, petulant tantrum about whatever the President just said. It is the worst job in American politics.

Terrible SOTU responses are the norm; the speaker inevitably looks like he or she is being forced to do it at gunpoint. There is no audience, just one person in an empty room in front of what looks like the old Masterpiece Theatre library backdrop. It combines the juvenile trash talking of a pro wrestling promo with the frightening sterility of a terrorist beheading video. I cannot imagine an environment designed more completely to ensure failure. I haven't seen every SOTU response ever, but I do know for certain that I have never seen a good one.

Most of them would have to improve considerably to qualify as Terrible.

Every year I think it can't get any worse or more ridiculous and almost every year I am wrong. On Tuesday evening we were subjected to Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who has been in the Senate for all of two weeks, giving a speech that made Jindal's "Kenneth the Page" impression look like an FDR Inaugural. It is clear why Republicans are so over-the-top patriotic, as in any other country someone like Ernst would be a minor bureaucrat at best, pushing papers around at the DMV or night-managing a KFC. In the United States she gets to be a Senator.
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What a country.

This is a speech written by idiots for even bigger idiots, delivered by a suit so empty that she looks totally unaware of how much she is embarrassing herself.
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The text is so ludicrous and fake-rustic that she is to be commended for keeping a straight face throughout, and the only question anyone could have at the end is, "Why is she talking to me like I'm four?"

The only logical explanation for this kind of performance art is that the political class is engaged in a concerted effort to make Americans cynical enough to stop paying attention to politics altogether. It's working.

Plenty of observers have noted in recent years that Martin Luther King, Jr. is slowly being turned into some kind of benevolent and harmless Santa Claus figure as his life and death recede farther into the past. The majority of Americans today weren't alive during King's lifetime. They didn't see segregation and the lengths to which southern white people went to maintain it. Sure, they've probably read about it (not that kids are learning much about it these days) but we're starting to see the effect of generations of kids growing up with the pre-Civil Rights Movement south as a historical abstraction rather than a direct experience. As the many lamentable events of 2014 highlighted, for most white Americans the only race problem this country has is that black people don't work hard enough or they demand special treatment. And MLK becomes an increasingly confusing figure as more time passes and more ignorant people, willfully or otherwise, clamor to take ownership of his legacy.

To a young adult today, he is a guy that has a street named after him in the second-most neglected neighborhood in every city and a big, pleasantly chubby man who had some kind of dream that apparently worked out fine. Oh, and he was a Republican.

Last year was a banner one for showcasing how deeply divided and, frankly, fucked up America and Americans are about race. We have a system and a culture that demonizes, marginalizes, and institutionalizes black people in too many ways to count.

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We collectively see black men as shiftless layabouts who spend their days selling drugs and planning to do violence to white people, while black women are welfare-mooching baby factories with incomprehensible names. White society passes these lessons down from one generation to the next, and since the mainstreaming of the lunatic conservative fringe in the 1990s we've increasingly raised people to believe that all of our past issues with race (which really weren't that bad!) were resolved in 1964. Since then the red carpet has been laid out for black Americans, who through a combination of moral lassitude and government enabling have instead chosen to leech, pilfer, and violate the society that so generously welcomed them.

As I watched what happened in Ferguson, NYC, Cleveland, and too many other places to count last year – and particularly watched how white people reacted in many cases with an amount of bile and racist invective that would have made a 1920s Klansman blush – I wonder if America's race problem is actually worse today than it was when Martin Luther King lived. Sure, we no longer have segregated theater seating and public bathrooms. But back in the days of Jim Crow, society didn't even bother to pretend that black people were equal or treated equally. Somehow the widespread perception among whites today that black people (and other people of color) are treated equally despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary has made things worse. We've traded brutal, immoral honesty for a delusion that has made us more bitter by the day.

I can't seem to travel without incident.
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The concept of purchasing a plane ticket, having the plane depart at the scheduled time, connecting to a different but equally punctual flight, and then arriving when scheduled simply does not exist in my world (And flying from a podunk airport, neither does the concept of a direct flight). I will spare you the details but an itinerary claiming to get me to New Orleans at 3 PM on Wednesday ended with me crawling into my room just short of midnight.

After a full day of exasperation and three different flights out of Atlanta to New Orleans either missed or too full to accommodate me, the folks at – oh, I don't want to use the name of a real airline here so let's just make up a name for the worst goddamn airline you could imagine, something like "Delta" – finally crammed me onto the last plane of the day. Having already been delayed nearly six hours, during which they didn't so much as offer us a bottle of water, I was supposed to be happy about this.

Having complained (predictably and loudly) about the experience on the internet, several of my friends texted me when I finally got my ass on an airplane to express something to the effect of, "Finally, some good news!" The idea that I was going to be taken to my destination rather than having to sleep on an airport floor and be taken there tomorrow was certainly welcome news.
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But is it good? How is it good that I got dicked around all day until the airline finally agreed to do what I paid them to do?

Now I know what my friends meant and clearly I was reading too much into the choice of words. Here they are talking to a person with debilitating depression who tends to spiral when bad things start happening; of course they are going to direct me toward the most positive way to look at the situation. But I spent the next hour or so (thankfully airborne) thinking about that. When people say "good news" in this context it is only true in the sense that the news wasn't even worse. It's not "good" per se. What they meant was, "Isn't it great that the airline didn't screw you even more than they already have?"

Yes, it is. But that isn't what "good" is.

It occurred to me just how much of this kind of satisficing we are bombarded with these days, especially since the Great Recession began in 2008. "Good" is now defined as "better than the worst things could possibly be." Your boss works you like a dog and pays you terribly? It could be worse! You could have no job at all! Be happy about having a job! Don't want to vote for a pathetic excuse for a Democrat? Well the GOP is even worse! You paid for something and got shafted? Well be glad XYZ didn't happen, that's even worse! You know, because as long as things could conceivably be even worse they are now, by definition, good. Or what passes for good.

It's like we've thrown up our hands collectively and admitted that we have given up on the idea of having anything that's actually Good in this society and now we simply pick the best of whatever shit options are available and call that Good. Good no longer means Good; it means Better Than. It means you could have it worse.

Obviously I am loopy from making an 12 hour trip out of a 4 hour one, but when I thought (too much) about it I realized just how pervasive this kind of thinking is. In my own life and throughout our culture. We've sort of accepted that everything will be at least kind of shitty because, frankly, we've ruined most of the things that used to be great about this country far beyond any hope of repair. So we are constantly encouraged with this overarching take-what-you-can-get mentality in the hope that people are dumb enough not to notice that nothing is actually any good anymore.
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A good candidate is one who is less repugnant than his opponent. A good school is one that is dysfunctional rather than really dysfunctional or physically dangerous. Good customer service is waiting on hold for 45 minutes to have your problem kinda sorta dealt with rather than being completely ignored. A good job is not having no job.

Herbert Simon called this kind of behavior "satisficing", the tendency not to hold out for the absolute best but instead to set a bar and take the first option that is over it. It's not inherently a depressing mentality, at least not until you realize how far you have to lower the bar before anything can clear it.

In one of its better recent episodes, Frontline looked at the rise of solitary confinement in American prisons. Like so many other mindlessly punitive and counterproductive aspects of our justice system, solitary confinement exploded in popularity during the Reagan years. The rationale sounds good on the surface – to remove inmates who are so violent and dangerous that the staff and other inmates are not safe around them. The problem, as the medical profession has known for well over a century, is that solitary confinement makes people insane. Like, really insane. And quickly. Take a superficially normal person, seal them in a box with next to nothing to do, surround their cage with other solitary inmates of dubious mental fitness, and wait about two months. See how normal they are then.

Our correctional and justice systems have been flawed for generations. In the last three decades, however, things have gone from flawed to irreparable. The bad ideas and the institutional pathologies have compounded one another as one harebrained Tough on Crime scheme after another – each chosen not because evidence suggested they would be effective but because they made old, wussy elected officials look Tough – was implemented to disastrous effect. It's hard to pinpoint just one factor as the predominant cause of the overcrowded, back-breakingly expensive mess we now have: abandoning the concept of rehabilitation in favor of a Dickensian punitive approach, mandatory minimum sentencing, the War on Drugs, the collapse of the manufacturing base in the 1970s and 1980s (When the factories and mills disappear, the prisons never fail to open up in their place), laws that target the poor and are designed to keep them trapped in the criminal justice system in perpetuity, the inability of convicted felons to get jobs and loans…take your pick. It is any of those and all of them.

If it feels like nothing we try to reform the prison system works it is because it is too far gone to be reformed. Sometimes I feel like the only thing we can do is burn it down to the ground and start over from scratch. It sounds like a desperate solution because it is, and if it sounds like a joke it's not. If nothing can fix this mess, then let's take everyone who hasn't committed a violent felony, release them, wipe the slate clean, and start over with a prison system that does something beyond warehouse the poor and ensure that everyone who leaves prison does so more violent, angry, and socially maladjusted than when they entered.

While the correctional systems in other countries are not flawless, the U.S. system stands alone among its peer nations for the dysfunction in our courts and prisons. Our prison system more closely resembles Mexico or Brazil than EU nations, Canada, or Japan. We are doing so many things that don't work that changing any single one is like bailing out the Titanic with a bucket. So we keep doing the things we know don't work – solitary confinement, for example – because we can't think of anything better or we lack the political will and intelligence to implement useful changes. It is fitting that so many Americans believe Criminals are beyond redemption since that phrase describes the prisons that hold them perfectly.

A few months ago you may recall that rioting in Ferguson, MO was followed almost immediately by a large riot at, of all things, a Pumpkin Festival at Keene State University in New Hampshire. This happened for two reasons. One is that God loves us and has a sense of humor. The other is that white college kids like to go crazy and destroy lots of property and it's cool because Kids being Kids, amirite?
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Of all the sarcastic commentary comparing media and public reactions to the two riots, this tweet was my favorite:

It came to mind immediately when I saw this recent bon mot of brilliance from Rupert Murdoch:

We have this remarkably silly tendency to refer to all minority groups – ethnic, racial, religious, etc. – as a cohesive and organized group. It is an extension of the Well They All Look the Same! mentality, and it is not worth stating that it is deeply flawed logic to assume that everyone who is black or Muslim or Asian or Latino believes the same things. But if that isn't ridiculous enough, we take it one step farther and assume that they are somehow collectively responsible for one another's behavior or have control over what their fellow humans do.

I can't tell you how many times over the years I have had the conversation where I press other white people to explain what exactly The Black Community is. Like, do you think they all have a meeting every week or two where the grand Black Strategy is plotted? Do they have some kind of quasi-parental control over one another, not to mention a highly efficient information distribution system that instantly tells them "Brian in Fresno robbed a gas station – someone get on his ass!" I like to ask Black Community enthusiasts, what should you and I be doing to stop serial killers? Aren't nearly all serial killers white men?
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We, as pillars of the White Dude Community, are clearly responsible for their actions. Perhaps I should Speak Out Against serial killing, just to make sure people know it's illegal and not cool.

Granted, mocking the words of Rupert Murdoch is an exercise in harvesting low hanging fruit. It just baffles me how people who say things of this sort expect "Good Muslims" to stop small groups of committed and fanatical terrorists from behaving as committed, fanatical terrorists? The absolute best argument that could be made would be some sort of slow, indirect process of trying to identify every radical cleric (How would this witch hunt be executed? Some would be terribly obvious. Most wouldn't.) and then engaging in some sort of ecclesiastical politics to get them removed. Of course that is impractical even if the Muslim Community, spread across a hundred countries and representing every language, social class, and different interpretation of Islam on Earth, could organize at their weekly meetings and decide to do it.
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The truth is that Good Muslims have as much ability to combat Islamic terrorists as you and I do.
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As much as any person, Muslim or not, does. I would not roll my eyes if someone argued, as many did after 9/11, that Islamic states and governments should take more responsibility for terrorist activities that may happen within their borders. That is because governments are organized, structured toward making decisions and executing them, and possessing of a security apparatus that allows them to take action against violent people. The Paris attackers trained in Yemen, which is widely understood to have slid toward anarchy and failed statehood in the past two or three years. To propose a productive solution, one might suggest that the Arab League or a comparable organization take some sort of action to increase the strength of a legitimate government in Yemen.

No, that would involve too much thinking. Let's just tell all of The Muslims that they're responsible.

In case it isn't blatantly obvious to anyone who reads this, I'm going to clarify in advance that I don't minimize the violent deaths of 12 people – police, journalists, and a maintenance worker – in Paris today.
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Any and all deaths from violent crime are sad, pointless, and tragic in my view.

But here we are, another week and another mass shooting. Only the presence of some novelty to the story – it didn't happen in the United States for once, and the assailants had political motives rather than being the usual disgruntled, angry, and usually white males lashing out at the world with their guns – has made this a Big Story. Mass shootings have become so common that they don't even make the main headlines anymore. They've become the kind of thing that gets mentioned on page 3 or that gets 90 seconds in the middle of the broadcast, before weather but after traffic.

What I don't understand, at the risk of accusations of "politicizing" the event, is why I am supposed to be more angry or more interested because this particular mass shooting was done by radicalized Muslims with a vendetta against a media outlet. If it hardly makes waves anymore when some American white kid brings a gun to school because Reasons or some angry grunt kills a bunch of his coworkers, why should this make any? If deaths by senseless violence are tragic – and they are – then they should be relatively equally tragic. Whether the victims are factory workers, high school students, edgy journalists, or completely random people milling about in public their deaths are a pointless tragedy.

It's not that I'm not saddened and angered by what happened in France.
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It's that I resent the implication in the media coverage that I'm supposed to be more upset or this is somehow a bigger tragedy because Free Speech and Muslims.
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If someone walked into a Walmart in the middle of nowhere and shot 12 people today, would the right wingers be at a boil right now? Twelve deaths by gunfire are excused away when they occur in the context of domestic politics, yet if some Muslims who just returned from Syria are the killers everyone is whipped into a frenzy. That, to me, makes no sense whatsoever.
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Mass shootings are so common that someone who pays attention to the news only casually will miss most of them these days. This one will be a Big Story, though. That's what bothers me. Lots of people are getting shot and killed for no good reason. Either we care or we don't. It makes no sense to care a lot about some and barely notice others.

In the era of downsizing, we all secretly fear our employers discovering that we are expendable. You take a couple of weeks off for a vacation, family leave, illness, or whatnot and the company finds that things worked just as well without your presences as they do when you're around. Of course in a bad job market this is possible because some other poor sap got stuck with all of your responsibilities in your absence without any additional compensation. Imagine if instead they found out that 90% of what you do is completely unnecessary. The company has been paying you to spend 10% of your time running payroll and the other 90% writing songs on the accordion. When you're absent, suddenly they realize that maybe a company that makes HVAC equipment doesn't need an accordionist at all.

Even if 2/3 of the work you do was found to be superfluous, the logic of the free market would have your employer showing you the exit door in short order. The situation is different in the public sector where people are harder to fire, but you would expect roughly similar logic to apply. So sometime in the next week I'm assuming we'll see about half of the NYPD laid off.

Using a technique as old as organized labor (or even disorganized but disgruntled labor) the officers of the NYPD have been engaged in a slowdown, although some media incorrectly call it a "work stoppage." They're showing up to work but making only arrests deemed "absolutely necessary.
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" Which, you know, raises the question: How many arrests have they been making all these years that don't meet that standard? Has the largest metropolitan PD in the country not basically admitted that the vast majority of the arrests they make have almost no bearing on public safety?

Simply put, if the NYPD could cut its arrests by 60-80% without adversely affecting the city – and by all accounts New York has hardly noticed the difference – why in the hell haven't they already done it?

A police slowdown does not prove, as cops might wish, that America turns into Thunderdome without them. It proves that they're making an awful lot of arrests and issuing a huge number of citations that collectively accomplish absolutely nothing beyond raising money and trapping people in the Sarlaac pit of the justice system? To the first point, did anyone notice during the Michael Brown ordeal that the Ferguson PD gave out ten thousand more arrest warrants in 2013 than there are people in Ferguson? Ten thousand. Start with one non-violent crime, let the administrative fees and fines pile up, and the next thing you know you're wanted. The police then set out to arrest you because you haven't handed over enough money from the last time they arrested you. Repeat ad infinitum.

State and local budgets are pinched, your State Legislature doesn't have the political balls to raise taxes, and there are huge surplus populations that the economy decided it doesn't need and who need to be warehoused or at least Kept in Their Place. So the police do the municipal version of a bake sale, except instead of cookies they hand out thousands of expensive fines for petty crimes.
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Those who pay are a lucrative source of income, essentially off-the-books tax collection. Those who don't pay – well, there's another bucketful of violations you can use to drown them.

Ideally this would be a Teachable Moment for our society, an opportunity to reflect and ask ourselves some important questions about what we value.
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Is it possible we have too many laws?
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That rabid enforcement of those laws isn't making us any safer? Are candy-assed old white legislators trying to look tough by passing the most punitive laws they can imagine doing more to harm our cities and towns than the crimes themselves? Have police departments completely lost focus on the meaning of "public safety" in favor of writing as many citations and making as many arrests as possible? Light bulbs should be appearing over our heads, collectively: "The cops stopped making most of the arrests they make and it hasn't made one goddamn lick of difference. What the hell have we been doing all these years??"

That's a pipe dream, though. Some people know perfectly well, though they would never admit it, that they see rounding up poor people as the entire point of law enforcement. Keeping the dark people and the mulleted hillbillies away from our nice homes on whatever pretense can be concocted is precisely what the police are supposed to do. How depressing it will be over the next few weeks to realize that for some of our fellow citizens will applaud when the NYPD resumes the majority of arrests deemed unnecessary when they want to make a political statement.