Winners, Losers . . . And the Rest of Us
A dialogue you might enjoy listening in on. It started with a comment Ron left on the preceding post.
Ron: People don’t have a language for praising/understanding non-winners. They immediately think ‘loser’, and can’t understand people who just won’t play.
Ron: Something that has changed also is that we have given up any notion of a “good try” or “fair play” having any particular virtue. It is somewhat cynically assumed that winners “write the history” so who cares about playing fair!
I wonder how much of this “winnerism” is a backlash to an increased theraputic/egalitarian (hmmm… feminized?) culture?
The virtue of teaching people sports is that it shows you how to lose, and losing occurs a lot in life. But now we just consign losers to gehenna…
Amba: My father once pointed out that for every team that wins a baseball pennant, — ? — I don’t know the correct numbers now — 11? have to lose. He thought about writing a book called “Losing: A Baseball Odyssey.” Never did, though.
Ron: A great Hitter in baseball fails 7 times out of 10! Humbling…
But why do you think they take steroids…because a clean loser would still be thought of as a loser; we beat on winners who take drugs, but ignore clean losers. Being ignored in America is worse than being a villain.
Amba: There’s a big world of non-winners out there. We’re like dark matter.
Only the stars shine, but we’ve got mass, baby.
Ron: and Charm! and odd motion in the Z axis! err…skip that one.
Don’t Blame the Other Side.
Obama is a wimp. Or a Stalinist. Or a wimp giving the store away to Stalinists.
The Republicans are obstructionists and/or racists.
I heard both points of view expressed in Florida and they both set off alarm bells in me. But I’m having a hard time explaining why, even to myself. It’s so easy to get caught up in arguing the foreground, the content of what’s being said, when what’s wrong is so much deeper and more systemic and infects both sides without distinction.
It’s not what either side does or says, it’s the motive that poisons everything they do and say. The motive is winning. American politics has become a huge, toxic Super Bowl in which appearing to advance positions or values or beliefs is only a means to an end. The end is power. And to that end, neither side will hesitate for a moment to distort, malign, and demonize the other, whatever the cost to the country. Not only what the two parties say, but what they do, the legislation they push, the wars they prosecute, is about political calculation and spoils first, principle a distant second. Perhaps in some cases principle is “sincerely” held, but precisely because it is so form-fitted to self-interest.
The voters are far more genuinely sincere in their beliefs, and so the politicians and their media whips manipulate and aggravate those beliefs, flashing trigger symbols, arousing exaggerated fears and hatreds in order to motivate people to vote for them, or at least against the other side. Voters may believe their portrayal of the other side as unAmerican, threatening, and evil, but the primary reason Republicans and Democrats regard each other as evil is that every Democrat elected is a Republican out of power, and vice versa.
You’ll probably tell me it’s no different than it’s ever been, that this is the only game in town and we have no choice but to play it. Not having been alive in 1835 or 1940, I have no idea whether you’re right that nothing has changed. But whether it’s better, worse, or just the same as always, it is so disgusting. It is so disgusting. I don’t ever want to talk, think, or write about politics again.
P.S. Even if it is equally calculated, I’ve been impressed by Newt Gingrich’s persistent civility, fair mix of credit and criticism to his opponents, and focus on ideas. It doesn’t seem to be working for him, though. He is widely despised and dismissed. It’s almost as if people now expect their emotions to be inflamed, and perceive a more civil and cerebral approach as insincere, or bloodless, or cold. or irrelevant. I’ll repeat my observation that much of the public has become addicted to “getting off” emotionally, to that satisfying, stimulating limbic-system workout, even if nothing is accomplished, even if it is downright counterproductive.
Pope Vs. Rabbi: The Great Debate
(Forwarded as a New Year’s greeting by my German teacher, Herr Heggen. I’m in Florida, having a lovely time with a lousy Internet connection.)
The Pope and the Rabbi
Several centuries ago, the Pope decreed that all the Jews had to convert to Catholicism or leave Italy . There was a huge outcry from the Jewish community, so the Pope offered a deal: he’d have a religious debate with the leader of the Jewish community. If the Jews won, they could stay in Italy ; if the Pope won, they’d have to convert or leave.
The Jewish people met and picked an aged and wise rabbi to represent them in the debate. However, as the rabbi spoke no Italian, and the Pope spoke no Yiddish, they agreed that it would be a ‘silent’ debate.
On the chosen day the Pope and rabbi sat opposite each other.
The Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. The rabbi looked back and raised one finger. Next, the Pope waved his finger around his head. The rabbi pointed to the ground where he sat. The Pope brought out a communion wafer and a chalice of wine. The rabbi pulled out an apple.
With that, the Pope stood up and declared himself beaten and said that the rabbi was too clever. The Jews could stay in Italy .
Later the cardinals met with the Pope and asked him what had happened. The Pope said, “First I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up a single finger to remind me there is still only one God common to both our beliefs. Then, I waved my finger around my head to show him that God was all around us. The rabbi responded by pointing to the ground to show that God was also right here with us. I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us of all our sins, and the rabbi pulled out an apple to remind me of the original sin. He bested me at every move and I could not continue.”
Meanwhile, the Jewish community gathered to ask the rabbi how he’d won.” I haven’t a clue,” said the rabbi.. “First, he told me that we had three days to get out of Italy , so I gave him the finger.. Then he tells me that the whole country would be cleared of Jews and I told him that we were staying right here. “And then what?” asked a woman. “Who knows?” said the rabbi. “He took out his lunch so I took out mine.”
Going Dark [UPDATED AGAIN]
My laptop screen is, at more and more angles. Soon it won’t light up at all.
So if you don’t hear from me for a few days, that’s all it is. I have to get to an Apple Store, and my ProCare membership has expired, and I have a choice between shlepping J there with me today (2 exits down Rte. 40 in the ginormous Southpoint Mall) and throwing myself on their mercy, or going in Fort Myers, Florida on my father’s birthday Thursday. Sucks either way. …
Actually, I just learned that it sucks worse than that: it will have to be out of my hands for as much as 3 to 5 business days. It may need a new logic board or motherboard. And the hard drive isn’t backed up.
So I have to hope it doesn’t die completely and I can keep working on it with the screen partway closed, until . . . when?
THE PLOT THICKENS: It only (or mostly) happens when it’s running on battery. I plugged it in, and it stopped. WTF does that mean??
SO NOW: It’s happening again while plugged in. Go figure.
Impatience: The Road Rage of the Keyboard
From the book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life
If time is perceived as an enemy, to insist that there is value in waiting is foolish. Advances in technology such as e-mail and instant messaging all presume the question “Why wait at all?” When I started using computers, in the mid-1970, I noticed that while the programs with which I kept track of the finances of several small businesses made my work much easier, they also made me more impatient. I went from being grateful for how quickly new software could do the bookkeeping to snarling at the machine for being so slow. While I knew that my desktop Apple was many times more powerful than the first UNIVAC, which had filled a huge room in the 1950s, I failed to be grateful for the inventiveness and skill that had made it possible Instead, I sighed each time I had to wait while the machine checked a record, made a computation, or saved to disk the work I had done.
One day, when I timed one such annoying delay and found that it constituted all of ten seconds, I felt as if I had been slapped in the face and warned: Pay attention–watch yourself. And when did, I saw an idiot groaning with impatience over a tiny increment of time. Technology had made a fool of me, for a few seconds of “waiting” in computer time is no longer than seconds spent “waiting” on a magnificent, rocky beach for the sun to rise over a pearl-tinted ocean; it is only my perception that makes them seem different. And how I perceive such things is a matter of spiritual discipline.
Our perception of time is subject to technological revision, and increased speed has generally translated into a subtle diminishment of our capacity to appreciate our immediate surroundings. . . . Wendell Berry has written eloquently of pulling off the high-speed world of an American interstate highway into an Appalachian campground, and needing more than an hour to slow down and adjust to the rhythms of his own body and the world close at hand.
~ Kathleen Norris
(Makes me think about the many similarities between being online and driving. A desktop is a minivan or SUV, a laptop a sedan or coupe, an iPhone or BlackBerry a sports car. The screen is the windshield. The keyboard is the gearshift and steering wheel. The engine is your brain. Slow-loading sites are traffic jams or stoplights. Don’t you curse and swear at the keyboard or keypad just the way you do behind the wheel? The only difference is, you can’t see the competing drivers and you don’t have a horn. Maybe computers should come with horns for the self-expression of frustration, which is how drivers use them 90% of the time anyway.)
A Brief for “Ambivalence”
It’s not for everyone. But the resolved have such strong, almost unanswerable arguments in favor of being resolved; I like having a strong defense of not being.
He thinks of nothing but ‘Political Justice’ . . . I explained what I thought of Dilke’s Character. Which resolved itself into this conclusion. That Dilke was a Man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his Mind about everything. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up ones mind about nothing–to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party. The genus is not scarce in population. All the stubborn arguers you meet with are of the same brood–They never begin upon a subject they hve not preresolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you and if you turn the point, still they think you wrong. ~ John Keats
My New Year’s Resolution
Tweeted. (The Anchoress asked.)
@TheAnchoress My NewYear’s resolution was expressed in action: I got us to dojo 4 last workout of year/decade. Augur & earnest of resolve
Kind of a ritual. Just making the effort, not crapping out, gets the new year off on the right (correct) foot. Won’t give up.
What you do on the last or 1st day of year is like a Chinese fairytale about a pot that multiplies whatever you put into it.
I am pleased that I did not put laziness and reclusiveness and inertia–constant temptations–into the pot.
What are yours? Or don’t you do that? If something short of resolutions (self-improvement vows in particular may leave you feeling more wistful, cynical, or wary than resolute), it’s a natural time to think about things you’d like to improve, change, start afresh, find time for, stop putting off . . . or, as in my case, merely sustain.
Romantic Medicine vs. Utilitarian Healthcare: A Dialog [UPDATED]
UPDATE: Highly pertinent to this post is Wendell Berry’s 2002 essay “Two Minds.” While it was ironically published in The Progressive, Berry is what you’d have to call a green conservative. He talks about “Rational Mind” vs. “Sympathetic Mind” in very allied terms.
I recommend this beautiful post by James P. Pinkerton at his blog Serious Medicine. I don’t have time right now to excerpt it in a serious, bloggy way, so I’ll quickly post the brief tastes I “tweeted” from it:
The argument for heroic surgery is like that 4 sending people to the Moon.
Talmudic teaching, who saves one life saves the entire world, vs. the health-policy, quantitative way of looking at it
‘Serious Medicine’ … “is qualitative, not quantitative. The quality of mercy is hard, if not impossible, to quantify.”
“the overall romance & mystique of medicine is inherently qualitative…that’s why civilization has so revered medicine…a romantic aspect”
While not unaware of the real problem of how all this is going to be paid for, Pinkerton makes a stirring argument — human, religious, and Romantic — for saving single lives even at horrendous cost, whether at their precarious beginning (look at Charlie Miller now!!) or near their end (the example of the advanced-cancer patient in the post).
I had recently been thinking about these issues as a result of hearing about an 80-year-old with fairly advanced Lewy Body dementia (what J has) who fell, broke his hip, and is now getting hip replacement surgery. Because of the impairments that caused him to fall, it’s going to be very hard for him to rehab to the point of being back on his feet. Does it make sense to replace the hip of someone who will probably never stand again? Or is the surgery the only way of keeping him from being in intractable pain? In the old days and the old world (I saw this in Romania), someone who broke a hip was usually bedridden for the rest of his or her life, yet could last a couple more years well-tended to by exhausted family members. This man is now going into a nursing home to stay; he wife was reaching the breaking point anyway coping with his irrationality and paranoia (the latter being what J, thankfully, mostly HASN’T got). She was terrified of trying to explain to him why he had to go into a facility, and was actually relieved that he fell and broke his hip.
All this led to another exchange between me and my sistah the doctah:
A[mba]: I found this an absolutely beautiful post, if problematic. Even if you disagree with its “never give up” ethos being taken to absurd extremes, it will still make you feel good about being a doctor.
S[istah]: I confess to not being able to wade through the entire post…when I hit the religious stuff my brain shut down. even though he writes beautifully and says some perceptive things.
I read the NYT article about the surgeon and the surgery and confess that my first thought was Wow how incredible, my 2nd was what a cowboy (about the surgeon. not a fair response but an extrapolation from my own dealings with transplant surgeons who have egos as big as the great outdoors and motives that aren’t always altruistic but cravenly human), my 3rd what a waste. of time, money, resources. But how potentially amazing for both the patient and his family (i refuse to get involved with the god part).
The economization of medicine maybe does separate us all too much from the glorious ability [of] medicine to save and improve lives. But we’ve gotten way out of hand here. I can’t help thinking of what the hundreds of thousands spent on that guys surgery could have done for old people who can’t afford their basic meds and all the other medical inequities that exist. It’s obviously not a quid pro quo, I know. And you can certainly make a point that in this particular situation the surgeon was trying out techniques that may be useful in more hopeful situations. But one of the problems I see is that people (Americans specifically) have absurd expectations about health and healthcare. we’re all going to fucking die some day. we need to focus on doing the most good for the most people…not do outrageous things for the few. or we can do those things as long as the many are getting the basics.
I REALLY feel it’s all about the capitalization of health care…so much $$ is being made by drug co’s, hospitals, insurance cos, and…yes…some doctors. Until we do something about that care will continue to be insanely polar. whew. a rant.
A: I think the conservatives’ argument would be that people on the whole are not motivated to do great things simply by the fact that it’s good and compassionate and sensible to do so. They are most motivated by rewards — money, power, and fame. So if you restrict the rewards, you restrict the greatness of what will be done. Decapitalize “serious medicine” (or any other field of activity) you demotivate it. And of course you will still have greed and corruption, the monopolization of wealth by the powerful and power by the wealthy, fraud, black marketeering, etc. etc., with less ability to regulate/correct them. They would argue (despite their religion thing) that virtue and common sense are weak rewards, to which most people have to be prodded by fear (hell) and shame, or perhaps luxuries — the ultimate rewards for people who’ve already had all the other rewards, like Bill Gates and Pastor Rick Warren (of The Purpose Driven Life, who now gives away 90% of his income, so he says).
Do I agree, i.e. am I a conservative? No; just not a liberal anymore either. I’ll sadly entertain their argument (“entertain” rather than “hold” is what I do with most beliefs these days), but not being very motivated by material rewards myself (obviously, or I’d have some), I don’t get it viscerally at all. I can just see that it may be true of others. The Darwinian conservatives would just say this proves that a) I am simply not the fittest, not vigorously self-interested, not surviving, not reproducing, being eliminated from the gene pool, and b) proof that when greed dies out it is either the ultimate luxury or a symptom of vitiation or decadence. It’s the brawling “getting yours” stage that they most admire, the force that propels deprived but enterprising people out of poverty and doesn’t stop there, but goes on to build empires, empires which do great good as well as harm. I find it amusing that they can be so Darwinian and so pro-Christianity at the same time…until you observe that maybe Christianity serves its holders’ survival, optimism, will to power, and reproduction.
Possibly to be continued/updated between us; in the meantime, I hope you will jump in.
P.S. In the interests of full disclosure (lest I make myself sound like a noble failure), while not very motivated by material rewards, I’m certainly motivated by attention, recognition, admiration. Just not any good at getting them on a scale beyond the happy few.
Mexican Chicken Stew
No food feast today, although a couple of friends did stomp in out of the rain for an exchange of presents and talk-story. Chris, the Feldenkrais teacher whose avocation for years was helping out on her neighbor’s now-decommissioned dairy farm, explained how to bale hay. Kris, the residential karate student from Hawaii, showed us YouTube videos of very masculine and martial traditional hula. Chris brought us an artist’s print of the Japanese ideogram for “friend,” which touched me.
Friend.
Our food feast was Wednesday night, when the core of the karate dojo came over and I had nine to feed. Since people, including two young boys, would be sitting on the couch and eating, I wanted to make some kind of easy-to-eat one-bowl meal. For some mysterious reason, Mexican chicken stew came unbidden to mind. Encouraged and supplied by Amy (the brown belt on the other side of J in our holiday card), and loosely guided by two recipes on the ‘Net, I made the following, which was easy and absolutely delicious. The only part of it that takes any time is cutting stuff up, and it’s almost impossible to ruin. Quantities and seasoning may be varied according to circumstances and taste. This fed 9 hungry people with 2 days of leftovers for two. (Note that I cut the ingredients pretty small so J won’t choke. You could cube them larger if you want.)
5 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut small (~3/4″)
flour
olive oil
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut small
1 green pepper, cut small
1 red pepper, cut small
1 large onion, chopped
several cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 cans corn kernels, drained
3 cans black beans, drained
1 large can diced or crushed tomatoes, with liquid
cumin, to taste
cinnamon, to taste
salt to taste
cayenne or chili pepper, ground, to taste
chopped cilantro, to taste
1. Toss the cut-up chicken in a bowl with a handful of flour (adjust to amount) to coat.
2. Heat olive oil — enough to spread out and coat the bottom when hot — in a large stew pot.
3. Toss in chicken and cook at medium high heat, stirring and scraping often, for a few minutes, till no pink is showing.
4. Remove chicken to a bowl. Replace olive oil and heat.
5. Cook sweet potato, peppers, onion, and garlic, covered, stirring often, 7 minutes or until onion is translucent and soft.
6. Add back chicken. Add corn, black beans, tomatoes, 1-2 cups water, conservatively generous amounts of cumin and cinnamon; salt; and a pinch of hot red pepper.
7. Simmer, partially covered, ~15 minutes or until thick.
8. Stir in chopped cilantro; let stand for 5 minutes.
9. Taste, and add more cumin, cinnamon, hot red pepper, cilantro, and/or salt to taste.
10. Serve with sour cream, grated cheddar cheese, and cut limes to squeeze juice on top.
Excellent with any kind of cornbread.
Ambiance 