Delighted
I’m delighted to see our president being standoffish to the pseudo-coup in Honduras. Not because I dislike the new president or like the old one. But because it shows America has finally left the Cold War mentality, when there always had to be someone we identified as “our bastard” who, however odious, would keep the place clean of Soviet spies and weapons. Those were real fears then. They’re not now.
Just as I was delighted when George W. Bush chose to overthrow a tyrant we had helped prop up, and let the dice of democracy roll in a place we could as easily have kept safe at a distance, with some ugly deals.
Probably I’m the only person alive who sees Bush II and Obama as a continuity. Not in all things important, but in the evolution of a Cold War America.
As for Honduras and its neighbors, probably it’s inevitable that they take a delayed plunge into all that silly neo-Marxist populist crap, just as it was inevitable for ethnic tensions to run red in Eastern Europe and Iraq when the lid was lifted on those pots at the end of the Cold War.
They’ll do what they’ve been yearning to do since 1945, and now we can let them romp down those foolish paths, like preachers’ kids suddenly out of the parental gaze.
New Face of Blog
“There I Fixed It” is a hilarious blog, especially for men like me who inherited a world full of practical problems our grandfathers never dreamed of, along with a mere smidgen of our grandfathers’ skill with a tool box.
But look how it works: People send in their pictures and text. The blogger assembles it and presents it. What do you bet there will be a book out with the best of it, in time for Christmas, and someone will make a nice tidy pile of money without doing a whole lot of real work.
California Budget Balancing Act
California is facing a $24,000,000,000 budget deficit. The Los Angeles Times has a handy interactive applet that allows readers to try balancing it themselves. I managed to end up with a surplus of $1 billion without raising taxes or cutting any benefits for the poor. If my plan were enacted, however, many state workers would probably walk out. Then again, our unemployment rate is almost 12%, so replacing the malcontents may not be all that hard.
“The Attention Economy”
Seth Godin is onto something I’ve been obsessed with for a while: that attention is the currency of our age, as scarce relative to the demand for it as gold, striven for, competed for, craved. It’s worth more than money — money follows it far more than it follows money — and the result is that people will give their work away for free in a bid for attention.
Instead of “follow the money,” “follow the attention.” We all have a limited amount of it to donate or spend, and everybody’s clamoring for it, bidding for it, courting it.
If you could speed up the sounds of the trees in a climax forest fighting for light, it would sound like the trading floor on Wall Street.
It explains a lot. It explains who’s successful these days, and why. (In our world of cutting-edge media, just think of the birthday twins, Limbaugh and Althouse.) There’s an art to getting attention; you probably have to be willing to titillate, provoke, outrage, or wow — something to raise your profile above the din — but there’s a lot more to it than that. One you get attention, you have to hold on to it, or rather — you can’t hold onto it — reward it so hard it remembers to come back for more. You have to make that brain wet its pants with dopamine.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. Just sayin’.
There are also people whose art is to direct attention the way cops direct traffic. They shunt it, herd it, channel it the way a gifted border collie makes a herd of sheep split, group, and flow. They are the agents, promoters, conductors, impresarios, advertisers, PR people, coolhunters, the ones the rest of us rely on to direct our attention to the oases where it will be rewarded . . . from Oprah to Instapundit.
Down in the understory of the climax forest there’s a smaller-scale attention market going on, busy as a bazaar. Technologies like Twitter facilitate the flow and exchange of attention. Why else is there such a contest for the top spots in Trending Topics? It’s not fifteen minutes of fame, or the fifteen people you’re famous to. It’s hunting or harvesting your share of attention. And on this scale, subtler qualities come into play. You can call out to the fifteen or fifteen hundred people whose attention is snagged by wit or understatement, enigma or absurdity, and they will select themselves out of the crowd and home in on you, like salmon tasting just a few molecules of their birth stream in the ocean.
Seth Godin sounds as over the moon as Silicon Valley dot-com types did in the nineties. I have no idea how you can run an economy this way, You can’t buy milk with eyeballs. Yet we are all acting as if working for attention is even more important than working for money. It’s fascinating, and I’m grateful to Godin for putting his finger on it. He’s scratched my itch.
Tom Sawyer-Worthy? [UPDATED: Weirder, Grosser]
Could I get someone to whitewash a fence for a look at that?
It demands a tall tale. All that happened, though, was that in the struggle to get J to lie down sideways on the bed instead of backwards across it — so I could get the sling for the Hoyer lift under him — he slid off onto the carpet, and then (what the hell) in the struggle to get him properly positioned on the floor, instead, I set the mobile arm of the lift swinging and it swung the point of one end into my forehead. No real harm done, no stars or birdies; just a cartoon egg that popped up almost instantaneously, like in “Popeye.” Nothing compared to the awful sundowner meltdown J had last night — agitated, paranoid, defying reality and me as its two-timing agent until, after two hours or more, he finally wore himself out. Not a trace of that today. What’s a little bump on the head?
“Make sure it doesn’t hit you again right on the same place,” J said as I worked to get him strapped to the lift and up off the floor.
“No, I’m going to make sure it hits me on the other side this time so I look like I’m growing two horns,” I said.
I pumped J up off the floor and got him on the wheelchair and we went off to get summer haircuts at Great Clips.
UPDATE: The inevitable shiner, and worse:
Counter Cultural [UPDATED]
Yesterday I was put in a position where I had to try to explain to someone why it might sometimes be a good idea to choose to do what you don’t feel like doing instead of what you do.
This is to American culture as spitting is to the wind.
We think that freedom is the freedom to follow our inclinations, and that our inclinations are a treasure map to our authenticity. Do what you feel. Go with your heart. Follow your bliss.
The result is that we dig the ruts in our brains deeper and never discover the riches off-road. We’re speeding through our own brains sealed in climate-controlled automobiles, along a self-made interstate system, from attraction to fast-food joint to filling station. What we don’t realize is that the blank spots on the map are “us,” too — parts of us our conditioned inclinations will never lead us to. Obviously we can’t discover every interest and develop every quality, so we say, perhaps too quickly, “That doesn’t speak to me,” “That doesn’t do it for me,” “That’s just not me.”
Only when we’re under compulsion — and Americans are blessed to be rarely under compulsion — do we get off our own beaten paths of reliable, repetitive pleasure (some of which are veins of creative gold, others of waste and self-destruction).
Some of the situations in which Americans can experience compulsion: prison; military service; parenthood; illness; a marriage going through a bad patch. Others? Work you hate. Work you love except when you hate it, which is whenever you start and whenever you’re stuck. Compulsion is different from risk. There are severe constraints on you when you’re climbing a rock face, but that fear and focus is often euphoric. Being under compulsion is dysphoric — at least at first. It’s the imposition of another will (sometimes your own) on your wayward wanting. Everything in you wants to bolt. Your freedom and your very identity feel threatened rather than reaffirmed and reinforced.
Sometimes staying put in those situations enriches you beyond imagining. For one thing, you discover that your identity is deeper than your preferences. For another, you discover that your preferences have been provincial. Your “weakness” for this and not that has weakened you. Your tastes have made you miss the very herb that could heal you.
This is the story of my life. The person I was trying to tell it to had already made up his mind to run rather than change. Change feels like death. It is death. But there’s an afterlife.
UPDATE: Relevant tweet: @lensweet What if we were more open to being “sent on The Way” than “set in our ways”?
Cap & Trade: Smug Alert
Don’t just stand there! Do something! Don’t worry about the economic consequences. You’ll feel so much better afterwards.
(Via Jim Lindgren @ The Volokh Conspiracy)
Apopcalypse
Arguably THE icons of the 1970s and the 1980s, respectively, within 24 hours.
Ambiance 