… No, we really *are* all the same …

From Overheard in New York:

Hobo #1: Stop playing your f***ing drum, I hear it all the way over here.
Hobo #2: I was here first, motherf***er!
Hobo #3: You guys, why can’t you just play together?
Hobo #2: Nah, f**k you man! Stay out of it!
Hobo #3: You should die. You gonna die. Tonight!
Hobo #2: Are you threatening me, man?
Hobo #3 (laughing): Nah, man, I’m just a shoe shiner, but you’re seriously gonna die.

From Great moments in US Foreign Policy:

China: Stop the Capitalism now, I really mean it.
Taiwan: I was into Capitalism before you were a second world country, motherf***er!
US of A: You guys, why can’t you just play together?
China: Nah, f**k you man! Stay out of it!
Taiwan: You should die. You gonna die. Tonight! (China’s gonna kill you, but we appreciate the thought…)
China: Are you threatening me, old man?
US of A: (laughing): Nah, man, I’m just a liberty lover. But seriously. You’re gonna die.

or perhaps…

Russia: Stop playing your f***ing drum, I hear it all the way over here.
Georgia: I’m not playing a drum!
US of A: You guys, why can’t you just play together? …

My Separate Life

It is 6pm Saturday afternoon, San Francisco standard time, seventy-five degrees, sun just beginning to set behind the hills, city trading day life for night.

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My brother begins college in Atlanta next week, and my sister will study abroad in Spain this spring. My father’s parents will drive cross-country again this summer for another set of graduations, even though my grandfather broke his collarbone driving on Minnesota ice last winter. My mother’s father has been gone almost ten years, and I don’t think we spoke on the phone even once, the year he died.

We live very separate lives.

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My father once told me that while he envies me the San Francisco sun, he doesn’t think he and my mother will ever move out west. Once you put roots down, he said, it’s hard to move. Your community becomes more important than anything else. It takes care of you, it gives you context, it makes you happier than anything else.

This seems obvious, but at 25, I still can’t see myself staying in one place for long. I get itchy feet. I get tired of speaking only English. Once I know a place, I start wanting to meet another. For me, the novel has always trumped the known.

But the more people I meet, and the more places I know, the more unhealthy this nomadic lifestyle seems, as a cultural theme – even if it is a central tenet of US culture. We go away to college, and meet and make new friends – then start a job and do it all again. We change cities and friends when we change jobs, when we change careers, when it suits us, when we have to. We keep up with perhaps one in ten or fifty of the people we know well from each phase of our lives.

It seems we only find community through our children; family life forces us to ’settle down,’ to participate in the PTA, become soccer and scouting parents, grow away from distant friends with time. Children pull us together as a community in the US (“it takes a village”) and childhood is the time when individuals are most plugged into a community – until we have our own children, and unless our parents continued moving when we were young.

No surprise, then, that childhood and youth are idealized in the US; like it or not, that kind of closeness matters to us, as human beings. More than money, more than achievement, more than anything else – we need intimate, subtle, long-lasting relationships in our lives, and not (only) romantic relationships; we need the give-and-take of long-term friendships, the annoyances that come with keeping up with the Joneses (or being the Joneses), the comfort of knowing our place in a community, advice and sympathy from people who’ve seen our lives evolve. We’re tribal by nature (just think about the way your office is organized…), and we need desperately to belong to some group, somewhere.

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So we need community, but in order to have it, we must give up advancement – or experiences – that we might otherwise obtain. So we promise ourselves we’ll get back to community, or we create it as we go along.

I think TV fills in, for some; if you watch Colbert often enough, he’ll start to seem real, a friend. The internet lets you can connect across time zones, country boundaries, whatever. But it’s still not enough. Working from home doesn’t replace a physical office, phone sex does no justice to the real thing, and virtual relationships are just that.

Although they can help.

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San Francisco is a city of nomads, digital and otherwise. Most of the people I know now will be gone in a few years, if I don’t leave first, myself. Nearly everyone I know acts within fluid groups of friends. We shift in and out of each others’ lives with barely a ripple. We stand in for the friends we’ve had in highschool and in college, we stand in for family, we create context, even if that context has no depth, no background.

We seek meaning in activities, in our careers, in our romantic relationships.

And perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that. All I know is that I’m coming to believe roots matter, even if we don’t like it much – coming to believe healthy people are part of healthy communities, and that those communities are almost impossible to maintain if we keep changing location. And that the opportunities and experiences we want most are almost impossible to attain if we don’t.

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I don’t know what the answer is; I don’t know if there is one. Use your technology to maintain your community! sounds great, but I can only call my sisters so many times a week; it’s not the same as cooking dinner together on a Friday night. And phone time takes away from the real, the now.

My siblings and I want to live in the same city some day; it’s a plan, the best we’ve come up with so far. Now all we have to do is pick a city to grow roots in. I hope it will be somewhere with long, slow sunsets…

European Umbrellas and American Rowboats

I had coffee the other evening with a German lawyer. “You know,” he said, “in Germany, we don’t even have a lot of the [menial] jobs that you have here in the states. Like those people who fill your grocery bags at the supermarket – in Germany, the stores can’t afford them. A lot of the jobs in the US seem to exist just so people can work. In Europe, we take care of everyone, so no one has to have a job like that …”

It was a very European thing to say.

Umbrella

During the European Middle Ages, the elites – the monarchy, the nobility, the church – had a duty to care for the lower classes. Ideally, the nobility had a (‘God-given’) responsibility to care for the poor, while the poor had a(n equally ‘God-given’) responsibility to reciprocate – to pay taxes, to fight in wars, to support the system. These aristocracies gradually evolved into what we see today; nations requiring all children to attend state-run schools, nations in which adults pay more than 50% of their income in taxes to a state which funds their education, transportation, healthcare, retirement, and everything else.

The European states are all grown up today, but at heart, they still recall those early aristocracies. Europeans are, on average, more likely than U.S. citizens to feel the government has a responsibility to care for them — and that they in turn have a responsibility to support the government. In other words, the social net in Europe functions like an umbrella, a government hand sheltering willing dependents. In one form or another, this approach has been a sociopolitical reality in Europe for the better part of the last 2000 years. Often, it works stunningly well. For example, check this commentary on the Danish Economy, from Foreign Affairs (March/April 2008):

On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders … On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world’s second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world’s most equal income distributions. For the half of the GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment conpensation that typically covers around 95 precent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world’s most creative system of worker retraining.

So the Danish economy is some kind of Clintonian wet dream; a place where widespread government control produces a fair social scene, and – at the same time – a globally competitive economic entity. Could we reproduce this in the US? Not according to me – or to the author, Kuttner, who continues,

… with appropriate caveats, Danish ideas can indeed be instructive for other nations grappling with the enduring dilemma of how to reconcile market dynamism with social and personal security… Yet Denmark’s social compact is the result of a century of political conflict and accommodation that produced a consensual style of problem solving that is uniquely Danish. it cannot be understood merely as a technical policy fix to be swallowed whole in a different cultural or political context. Those who would learn from Denmark must first appreciate that social models have to grow in their own political soil.

The Copenhagen Consensus: Reading Adam Smith in Denmark
Robert Kuttner, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008 (pp.78-9)

Kuttner concludes that, while instructive, the Danish system and solutions can’t be swallowed piecemeal by other countries. I would add, especially in the U.S., which never fit under the umbrella model to begin with.

Rowboat

Across the Atlantic, we in the United States look at the (Western/Christian) culture we share with Europe, and want to emulate the social systems we see working so well. Socialized healthcare, tight gun control, state-supported (and limited) higher education all seem simple at first glance, and add immeasurably to the quality of life modern Europeans enjoy. We’re then disappointed when transplanted reforms don’t flower here.

Even before 1776, we were a group of pioneers, people who wouldn’t or couldn’t fit under the Old World’s Umbrella – we were landowners who wanted more than Britain or Spain or France could provide. We were jailbirds who’d decided servitude here was better than eventual freedom, there. We were pioneers who wanted more for our children – in short, the U.S. was built on the backs of misfits, rebels, individualists, and immigrants. Our culture and government have always reflected this.

Practical Implications

I”m not sure how this plays out in the Real World today; for example, I don’t know how universal healthcare for the U.S. should look different than universal healthcare in Europe. Perhaps we should drop the issue down to the state level – an individualized, grassroots approach might have the kind of effects we want. Perhaps we should open more free clinics at the lower level. Perhaps everyone should get four free visits a year. Perhaps we should pass out healthcare vouchers and let individuals choose. Perhaps we should do something else entirely.

Especially today, as we draw nearer to the 2008 elections, we must remember that the United States has a very different political birthplace than Europe, despite our many cultural similarities. We’ve always functioned under a rowboat model; in its cleanest incarnation, government on this side of the Atlantic is nothing more than transportation for the ideas and ingenuity of the people driving it – a government Of the People, by the People, and for the People, if you will.

All I know for sure is that copied solutions won’t work for the U.S., whether they’re copied from England, or Denmark, or even a near neighbor like Canada. We need solutions tailored to our culture, that takes us into account; our strengths, our weaknesses. We need solutions that take into account the millions of immigrants – legal and illegal alike – that add immeasurably to the energy and drive of this country. We need a system that takes into account our penchant for violence, our fetish for rebellion, our predilection for rugged individualists, our admiration for stupid, honorable choices, our mercantilism, our repressed hypersexuality, our need to be heard, our constant soul-searching and redefinition – as individuals, as a culture, as a country.

We need, in short, a system that is built for us, from scratch – not one adapted from somewhere else. In the United States, we’ve spent centuries learning how to row our own boat, how to stay above the flood; in the end, deserting the rowboat for an umbrella may be harder to do than to say – especially when dry land is getting so hard to find.

Knowledge is the new Information

Talk to anyone who invests in the stock market. He (or she) will tell you: success takes a lot more than just knowing the facts. These days, all the information you’re likely to use on a daily – or even monthly – basis is at your fingertips, just a search or a click away. Want to know the price of gold, who won the World Series in 1918, stock trends for Apple versus IBM, the price of mangoes in Guatemala – it’s all right there, and if you can’t find it, the odds are really good you can connect with someone who can.

Getting the facts just isn’t the issue any more.

The issue is knowledge.

Knowledge is cognition, thought, connection. It involves seeing the connections between previously (apparently) disparate, unrelated pieces of information. Success, in turn – whether social or in the business realm – is about leveraging those connections in a profitable way. In other words,

The facts: Music can be digitized. We can make very small hard drives. We can store music on them. We can use hard drives to play music on headphones.

Knowledge: those pieces fit together to make a portable music player.

Success: Steve Jobs says “hey, I bet we can sell these things”…

Netflix’s founders knew the facts – Blockbuster was charging too much for rentals, people are working longer hours, the internet was widespread enough to support the movie habits of a generation used to ipods and online networking – but putting them together – seeing the direction and the trends – that’s knowledge. They leveraged it. As of now, Netflix is trading at 30.18…

If you plan to invest in Real Estate, knowing what the prices have been, and what they are today isn’t enough. You have to take a step back and see the trends. You have to look at social pressures, jobs, the price of oil (affecting transportation costs), location, weather – on and on -

you can’t get effective leverage on a situation, however isolated it seems, until you understand the big picture.

Knowledge is the new Information

Which brings me back to the title of this post. Facts used to be harder to collect, and often the collection of facts forced one to examine and understand their connections. This is no longer the case.

When I was young, my local library had a card catalog. At thirteen I did a research project on the Great Depression. While I was reading, I had to take notes on related topics – dates, people, events – so that I could do other, more effective, searches in the card catalog. In other words, to save myself time and effort - and to research effectively – I had to understand what I was reading, while I was reading it.

In highschoool, I did another project, on the massacres in Tiannamen Square. My highschool had just begun using an internet-based card catalog. New to the internet, I “researched” by searching for keywords. I ended with stacks of unrelated material, and no idea what I should read first. I almost didn’t finish the project.

Last year, I did research on the Cold War and Terrorism. This time, I found most of my information online, in online databases and journals. I didn’t just find it, I read it online. I did read some books in hard copy, but often scanned my reading so I would have it later, no matter where I was. I didn’t complete the project (passed it along to the next research assistant), but wound up amassing thousands of pages, hundreds of articles, multiple bibliographies – and I’m still not sure that the multiplicity of information actually added to my understanding. All the information simply meant I had access to a much larger picture. More information, more timelines, more bibliographies, more, more more. However,

Reading, thinking, and writing helped me – just like in 7th grade.

And the implications are ….

So, once upon a time, knowing the facts implied knowledge of the situation – it implied an understanding of connections. Now, knowing the facts simply implies you’re good at using Google.

Furthermore, the average US citizen today has access to an exponentially larger number of facts (and/or rumors) than s/he did ten or twenty or sixty years ago. It takes time to wade through that many facts. It can be difficult to focus (raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten lost on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Amazon.com, the NYT, Wired, Wikipedia, Google maps, the IHT, the BBC, Flickr, Twitter, The Onion… I can go on and on). Our hyperlinked world is increasingly searchable. (Check out the Liquid Information project, read articles about it here and here)…

So what. Big deal. There’s more information, there’s more people looking at information, disinformation is harder and harder to pull off … can’t be a bad thing. … right?

We’re back at knowledge versus facts again. Knowledge – new knowledge, and useful or correct knowledge, is about making connections previously unseen, then leveraging them. This means you have to know what – out of all the chaos of mostly-true facts – is important. You have to know how to choose the most important data points.

The issue isn’t about which facts to keep, any more – it’s how to know which ones to ignore.

We have to train our brains to act like our eyes. Our eyes detect motion much better than stillness, largely because trees don’t jump out at us, while tigers (and the occasional snake or angry neighbor) do – and did. Knowing what was important, fast, was a survival trait.

I suspect it will soon be the same with data, if it isn’t already.

Having information just isn’t enough any more. It just means you can do a keyword search. It just means you can spell close enough to correctly to get google to spellcheck for you. It means you can use Wikipedia.

Having facts just doesn’t imply knowledge any more. It doesn’t imply understanding. It doesn’t imply you know which data points to ignore.

Ultimately, that’s the bottom line. Knowing what to ignore is as important now as knowing facts.

Information just doesn’t cut it.

Change is slow

(Written May 6, 2008)

The end of the Cold War. Germans dancing on the Berlin wall. The United States breathes a sigh of relief; The great Communist empire has fallen, now we’ve only Cuba left to deal with. How hard can it be, after all, to starve a small island nation into submission? The hippie movement – already creaking under the strain of children, jobs, real life – finally bends its knee to the inevitable; flashy technology is more addictive than hard drugs. Baby needs shoes. Bill Gates gives this talk to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo – discussing, among other things, floppy drives, and the upcoming move from 8 to 16-bit computers.

And Russia? Russia flings away its satellite states, willingly lets go her hold on the Middle East – especially Afghanistan, Russia’s Vietnam during the warmer days of the Cold War. Russia turns inward for almost 20 years, accepting a lack of dominance, a lesser place in world affairs, letting a hand – or two – go by in the great-stakes game that is International Affairs.

Fast-forward to the mid 2000’s – Russia, resurgent. In a February 28, 2008 article titled “Smoke and Mirrors,” The Economist styles Russia’s economy ‘booming,’ citing a 7% growth rate, and stating,

…Even Mr Putin’s critics are impressed by Russia’s transformation in the past few years. A country that almost went bust ten years ago now boasts a $1.3 trillion economy, foreign-currency reserves of nearly $480 billion and a $144 billion stabilisation fund for surplus oil and gas revenue. Annual growth of real incomes has been in double digits. GDP per head has risen from less than $2,000 in 1998 to $9,000 today at current rates of exchange…

Russia even ranks fourth in the world in the creation of new millionaires, and while it certainly has its share of problems – falling fertility counts, infrastructure issues, and high inflation rates among them – it’s safe to say Russia is making a strong reappearance on the world stage.

In 15 years, in other words, Russia’s transformed itself from an international pariah into an up-and-coming powerhouse. The transformation has not been easy, and could not have been made without a deliberate stepping-down, an acknowledgment that even Russia – with her power, might, and vast natural resources – couldn’t continue as she was. A Cold War analyst- Soviet Side – was quoted saying Russian politicians realized they could build bombs or they could build Russia – but that they couldn’t do both at once.

And so Russia turned inward. Millions of people suffered. Political upheaval. Social upheaval. Unrest, riots, deaths. And today, she’s stronger than before.

I think we’re rapidly approaching a similar decision point in the United States. Do we build guns, or capital? Do we build other nations, or our own?

We’re a state – not a nation. (state implies political borders; nation, emotional ones). As citizens, we’re fundamentally divided on far too many issues. The top 10% lives very well, but things are getting harder for the bottom 40. The American Dream is poised to turn into a nightmare, along with the crash of Social Security, an eventual revaluation of the Chinese Yuan, and a rise in socialized medicine. School systems are faulty at best, a breeding ground for disillusionment, at worst. None of this is to say we’re out – just that we’re down; we can’t continue to ignore problems at home, and expect those issues to be solved, as they have in the past, by our position at the receiving end of the so-called ‘brain drain’ – it’s no longer working in our favor. Indian engineers are choosing to stay in India, as conditions rise for them there.

And so: We get to choose our own fate. Here’s a thought: What if we lean heavily on China, India, Brazil, France, England, etc, to form a serious coalition on banning – and preventing the gain of – nuclear weaponry? What if we accept that we’ve made nothing but poor choices in the Middle East, and throw as much money as possible, now, at the fuel problem, pull out of the Middle East as soon as it’s economically – not image-wise – feasable. What if we turn inwards for a while, and build our infrastructure, our economy, our sense of national identity? What if – for the first time since the early 1940’s – we focus on #1? If the only thing we insist on, on the world stage, is nuclear weapons?

So we lose standing in the world economy. So we lose trade networks. So we lose influence – but much of that we’ve lost, already. We can get it all back, but not if the center is weak.

Learning to say I Love You

Language changes us.

Falar (Portuguese) doesn’t mean Hablar (Spanish) doesn’t mean Parler (French) doesn’t mean Spracher (German) doesn’t mean To Speak in English. They’re approximates, sure, but they’re not the same. Translation doesn’t do the sense of the words any justice. In English, we place the action of pleasure on the one receiving, saying I like it (when you do that). In Spanish, the responsibility lies with the thing (or person) creating the pleasure. We translate, literally, You please me (when you do that). In English, we say I love you. In Spanish, it’s backwards; Te amo. You I love.

Language itself rearranges our thinking, and therefore, the way we perceive the world – in turn, changing the way we act. Language – personified, anthropomorphized (if you will; language as an actor) – has more effect on us than just creating accents and causing trouble when giving speeches to the UN.

I heard Fidel Castro speak in Cuba, four years ago. I remember that via translation, he was boring. His ideas didn’t seem to hang together, I couldn’t follow the meaning of what he was saying. But in Spanish, he was mesmerizing; his ideas, the way he rolled his r’s. The language itself was both medium and mural, canvas, creation and creator. Did he talk about his relationship with the US? No. Did he talk about space aliens? Yes. (No, I’m not making this up). Did I agree with everything he had to say? … I was too immature to understand the context. All I can say is that never before had I seen the impact language – not just words – can have.

So does Jihad in English mean what it does in Arabic? When we say martyr here (etymology: Romans burning Christians to death in the early 100’s, Catholic martyrs dying for their faith, Crusade martyrs…) does that have anything to do with the word martyr as conceived in the Middle East? Does it mean anything at all in China? When I say wife in Spanish, I can use mujer (which English translates as “woman”) or esposa. English literally translates this to spouse – and, since it’s in the feminine form, wife. … but esposas (the plural) means ‘handcuffs’. Coincidence? And Esposar? — To be handcuffed, shackled.

In English we say “I love you” and “I love french fries” and “I love Friends.” Love means different things, in different contexts, and how do you know what weight it carries, and when? In Spanish, we say Te quiero (I love you/I desire you, from querer, “to want”) and Te amo, from amar (to love) and Te adoro (You I adore), and each word has its own history, its own weight.

Read my first long paragraph again; At the very end, I typed “In Spanish, it’s backwards.” – But is I love you backwards in Spanish, or in English?

Te quiero, mundo …

Of Ranks, Forks, and Britney Spears

“…Maybe they’d be O.K. if somewhere along the way they’d had true friends, defined as a group of people who share a mutual inability to take each other seriously…”

An article in the NYT titled “The Rank-Link Imbalance” really caught my eye. In short, it says that the training required to produce Leaders, in business or politics (and in geeks these days as well, I’d argue) produces intelligent, driven, get-ahead people who don’t know how to be human.

To paraphrase, they remember first names without effort, but can’t create/keep friendships. They know how to create a political alliance, but when it comes to, say, hitting on a woman with grace and style, they fail.

I’ve been the victim of this particular brand of nonsense far too many times, whether it’s the guy who’s pretty cool in the boardroom, but can’t hold a normal conversation, or the clumsy buffoon who assures you he’s a god in bed, and then is so insensitive a kisser, you wonder if all his other girlfriends lied to him, too…

Mostly, in my experience, these are men who don’t just miss the subtext, the hidden currents in a conversation or situation – they don’t even know the subcurrents exist. They want to talk, but they haven’t taken time away from their job to do other things, and therefore, everything’s about work; they know a lot, but not about too terribly many things. They lack social sensitivity. As the author (David Brooks) says,

…they have all of the social skills required to improve their social rank, but none of the social skills that lead to genuine bonding. They are good at vertical relationships with mentors and bosses, but bad at horizontal relationships with friends and lovers…

I haven’t gone out with any women, but I’d bet there are any number of modern women with the same issues.

This strikes a chord with me; I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about rank recently, about social or vocational climbing versus friendships, and the tradeoffs involved. I made a discovery/assumption sometime early in highschool; wealth means nothing without class, and class means a great deal more than wealth. In other words, it’s better to live frugally, but in good taste, than to win the lottery and blow everything on bigger and better Hawaiian shirts, Hollywood mansions, and giant suburbivans.

Race and class have a complex relationship in the US; the vast majority of the population shops at Walmart, works blue-collar jobs, and worries about health insurance, car payments, and a crashing economy. Then as we approach the top 1% of the 1%, wealth rises in a sharp and ever-steepening curve, until you reach the Bill Gates and Brangelina crowd, many of whom have been known to spend the equivalent of a college education on a red carpet gown. But let’s face it; after a certain point, money becomes immaterial. Certainly, millionaires and billionaires live differently, but – I’d argue – not as differently as people who make 30K vs. those who make 300K. As that curve rises, lifestyles are increasingly similar. They compress.

But humans are a tribal, stratified species. We need class and social status to tell us how to relate to one another, to tell us almost everything – from the kinds of jokes we tell to the eye contact we’ll make, the clothes we wear, the way in which we take care of our bodies. We differentiate amongst ourselves, not based on money per se, but on the status symbols money can buy. And when those symbols aren’t enough to produce strata, we call into play another set of criteria; class. Class, more or less, is inherited status. For example: having the right forks implies you have the resources to purchase them. Knowing how to use them implies stability in that inheritance (you’ve had them long enough to learn how). Knowing when to use them, on the other hand, implies a history of stability, implies one generates social standards, rather than simply acknowledging/adhering to them.

To take a more prosaic example, look at a teenage pop star like Britney Spears. Even before her devolution, you’d never put her in the same category as Paris Hilton (before her devolution, if you will). Spears and Hilton have vastly different backgrounds. Hilton’s family has owned hotels for decades; they’ve been in that top 1% for a long time – long enough for Hilton’s grandfather to have married a model (more on this in a bit), and her father as well. Hilton’s style, her body, her accent – all are the result of her family’s long acquaintance with wealth and power. When Hilton started acting badly, her grandfather disowned her; as I understand it, he said he was ‘ashamed’ of her behavior, and, in fact, she won’t receive an inheritance from him. But, let’s face it; Paris was never caught shaving her head. Her family wouldn’t let her be exploited by pimps/money-hungry ‘boyfriends,’ etc. She’s not been photographed (as far as i know?) flashing the world, time after time after time. Her relationships are public, but she’s not creating headlines every day with a pitiable custody battle. Hasn’t gotten pregnant. Wouldn’t be caught dead wearing half the outfits Spears shows in, all the time. In other words – and laugh, if you will – Hilton has an understanding of which boundaries she can push, safely, while retaining her status – and while she sets those boundaries lower than her grandfather, she’s still unlikely to start doing heroin. I submit to you that, on the other hand, Spears gained a great deal of money and status, but continued relating to it in the same way she had before she became famous. Remove the money and status, and her story looks much the same as a story we see playing over and over again on Cops. The custody battles, the screaming fights, the pregnancies, the younger sister getting pregnant, haircuts, drugs, rehab, drugs again, drinking, outfits that looked good on a seventeen year old girl looking ridiculous on a 25 year mother of two… So Spears and Hilton have similar careers, but their perception of what’s acceptable, and the kinds of actions they’re willing or permitted to take are very different.

Why? It’s determined by inherited, high-level (unconscious, if you will) behavioral norms – class, not status or wealth or power.

So am I saying that in the US, social climbing is a fallacy, that people are stuck with the class they’re born into, no matter what? Clearly, that’s not even close to true. How do people climb, socially, in the US? I’ll run over this quickly, so as not to bore the reader:

• Generationally. Immigrants work hard, their kids go to college and become doctors and lawyers, their kids are in business, and the great-grandchildren are millionaires when they’re born. Wealth and class are earned simultaneously, over several generations, and often as a group; Irish immigrants are a good example (they were the lowest possible class in NYC in the 1800’s, now everyone’s ‘just a little Irish,’ or Italians – or Indians and the Japanese. I’d argue we’re seeing a huge number of Mexican families starting this journey today.
• Marriage/Parents: Donald Trump earns a great deal of money, and marries a model 24 years his junior. Their (beautiful) child is born into a world of 5-star hotels and nice forks. Voilà le instant class.
• Instant money, the easy way: Ya win the lottery. You inherit from a grandparent ya never saw. Ya get a career selling (images of) your body. (Brittney Spears)
• Instant money, the hard way: You create a really cool business (like ebay), or inherit AND you’ve got enough brains to see the big picture, to change the way you’re seeing the world. (Bill Gates). They geeky kid creating computers in his garage is wearing power suits and handing over millions to help others. It’s the big picture thing that saves you from spending everything on nice cars.
• Education: This is a weird one; you can use education in the US to step yourself into earning more money. This is the generational approach; your father was a lawyer, so you get an MBA … the money and status increase at the same time. OR you can make a class jump without making a money jump. You can become a professor. This is, in many ways, an easier approach to class/social climbing; you don’t have to learn all the intricacies of class display and power. Professors are “supposed” to be absent-minded, right? They wear ratty clothes. They don’t comb their hair. They serve an important function; they facilitate generational climbing, and in so doing they attain an association with the rules of a higher class – even while they continue to live (as many, even most, do) outside the strictures of the white-collar world.
  • to put it more simply, your English professor, in giving up his/her life to creating culture, and to helping others take that generational step up, rises in class as well – but still walks to work every day. S/he gains status, but not (usually) money. They’re more or less outside of the class struggle. Moreover, their children will have access to everything at the university from a young age, can see the ‘big picture,’ and are better placed to have money and status, at once.

So why is the NYT article so interesting? Because, back before most universities became glorified trade schools, class was largely based on social abilities. Class was classy. Board members quoted Shakespeare at each other. Now, the MBA is more and more popular. Geeks are billionaires. The internet makes it easier and easier to make ‘instant money’ – if you follow the rules, play the game the right way, you may find yourself at the top of the Rank – but without any idea of the Links (relationships, friendships, class rules, whatever) to keep yourself there, to play at that level.

Perhaps this is why so many Harvard and Princeton grads have tried to stick their tongues in my ear….

Chess with the masters

Woke this morning and tried to tame my hair into some semblance of normalcy before heading out. As the Mop is getting longer, it tends to stay down a little better, but i think i’ve yet to go more than about 3 days without some kindly stranger (usually with lip rings, tattoos, and a neon-shaded shag) complementing me on my “70’s haircut.” I have, on occasion, been tempted to ask one of these eclectic, electric strangers out, but have thus far restrained myself.

In any case, the Mop subdued for the time being, I headed out. Russian Hill, the neighborhood I’m staying in, is about as high as you can get in San Francisco and still be “in the city.” Pastel row houses, mini-terraces, every street leading up and over into the sky. The trolley cars’ chains clink and rustle against each other underground through the night, as though somewhere deep below, it’s raining, metal teardrops on the underside of the pavement. My dreams are full of this fluid, metallic sound, and then I wake in the mornings, half-disoriented, gray-white light seeping through the windows …

Russian Hill is something like Shadyside (in Pittsburgh), but on top of a hill, with more beautiful people, more variety. I’m finding San Francisco is really an understated city; every corner contains something beautiful, but very few of the people here seem predisposed to make a huge deal of it – as though living here says enough about you, without them needing (gauche, East Coast-fashion) to make a show of it.

I walked around a bit, talking on the phone (a good friend of mine is getting married. My cousin just turned 18. My sister’s grocery shopping in Chicago, where it’s some inhuman temperature far below freezing . . . ). Then took the #19 bus to see where it went, and wound up down near the civic center. Bought some dried cherries and a stalk of sugarcane at an outdoor market – remembering eating sugarcane in India at a village where they specialized in sugarcane, the sweet taste of sugar and the acrid smell of boiled dust . . .

Walked by a set of chess boards set out on tables in the sun, near the Powell station (BART). Old men, sitting around playing chess, as I’ve seen all over the world – Argentina, Istanbul, Brazil – a group of old men, wrinkles and a sharp sense of humor. I suspect many of the great geniuses of the world are sitting on street corners, eyes wrinkled against the glare, contemplating their next move; it’s always seemed a good endpoint for me – at the end of a life, to spend time exercising the mind, talking with friends, drinking mate or coffee or tea, chewing gum, watching the world change around you.

And so i stood and watched for a while, and then I put my fifty cents in, and we played chess.

I’m not bad – and I can say that honestly, knowing that at the same time, i’m not terribly good. I’ve achieved the first level or two, see past the pieces to the moves, and past the moves to the forces, and even, sometimes, past the force to the game – but there are levels and levels up; questions of intent, not just possibility, strategy, forking moves. The hardest thing, I think, with chess, is to see the game as a fluid thing, as a war building in intensity as we talk about language and immigration, jobs and pronunciations, one guy’s three “or four” jealous girlfriends. “I play slowly,” said my opponent, smiling, “like lava flowing.” A friend of his sat down, and helped me a bit; he played like a desperate swordsman, feinting and parrying, accepting losses i’d've found too risky, and ultimately, making a win.

“You know the difference between the top and the bottom of these tables?” said my opponent.

I: “No. Tell me.”

He: “The top is for chess, and the bottom, for gum.” He stuck his, freshly chewed, on the underside, and pulled a fresh piece. I offered him a dried cherry, made another move.

The sun moved in its accustomed course. A group of young black men break danced, robot-like, on the sidewalk. A tourist couple passed, lost.

Union Square. A woman, sleek and self-satisfied as a greyhound, sat in boots, long dark jeans, blue shirt, blue hat, long dark shiny hair, reading a book. I pass a gay couple – men, black and white, like opposing sides of a coin – arguing about the best angle for a photo they wanted to take. Tourists from Europe are everywhere, especially in department stores. The city feels quiet to me, often deserted (compared to Buenos Aires). People obey traffic laws. The light is different. Perhaps it’s the Bay that muffles so much of the city sound, or perhaps there are simply less cars in this city. Maybe it’s the hills.

Whatever it is, I keep feeling I’m in some other USA, apart from the East coast, something different and unique. Another vision of what and who we could be. The rest of the world keeps saying we don’t have any culture – but I dare them to come here and say it again. I can think of far worse national fates than the US of A becoming more like San Francisco, California . . .

The Hidden Mind – Reasoning about Iranian/U.S. conflict

“The key of strategy… is not to choose a path to victory,
but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.”
(Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game)

Re:

U.S. says Iranian boats harassed warships http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22537199/

Was writing about the Iran-US conflict (my last post on this), but realized later that, while I spent time trying to talk about what is going on, I didn’t take much time to talk about why things are happening.

With an event like this, we don’t want to ask who’s telling the truth, or isn’t. We want to ask who would benefit from an encounter like this, and why.

So:

• Does US benefit from the report of this conflict? I say “not enough.” Sure, it does make Iran look that much less stable, but who’s to convince? The West, and the ’stable’ Middle East are already deeply concerned by political and religious trends in Iran. (Saudi Arabia’s reactions are good to watch, here). On the same front, the report makes the US look even more paranoid/jumpy (i.e. insecure). So we didn’t either fake this or instigate it, just because we don’t benefit enough from the report to justify the risk of our machinations being discovered.
• What if it’d gone to actual conflict? Then we stand far too much chance of things working out badly; worst-case scenario, we murder a bunch of drunk teenagers, with lots of photo ops of floating limbs. Second worse, a bunch of speedboats damage one of our warships; we look weak, have to do something about it… no matter what, this kind of conflict works out badly for the US, especially since we can’t sustain another war right now (even if another war was a good idea on any level…)

So my gut feeling here is that this didn’t originate with the U.S. and that it’s not a fake (esp. given the YouTube vid floating around).

So what about the Iranians? Do they benefit? How?

• Say they do succeed in blowing up a warship - the U.S. has a strong history of responding badly to these kinds of events. Whether or not we have the economical ‘bounce,’ we’ll go after the guy who hit us, no matter what. Iran doesn’t want a conflict with the U.S. at the moment; it has Iraq and Afghanistan as good examples of its own fate. Iran will become more confrontational when and if it gains nuclear weapons (shutting off oil sales to the U.S., perhaps?), but it’s not looking for an open fight now.
  • Also, it’s benefiting from the U.S.’s position at the moment; chaos in the region gives Iran more ’space,’ as it were. The U.S. distracted gives it time to build nuclear weapons, to build a nuclear relationship with Russia – yes, this is really, truly, happening. Iran has been funding insurgents and terrorist organizations in Iraq in order to keep us spread thin. (we’ve proven this, but can’t do anything about it).
• In other words, provoking the U.S. to an openly hostile response is not in any way in Iran’s favor right now.
• So what if the goal was to create martyrs? Aside from “then why didn’t they stick around and die?” I don’t know that one could be sure of leaving identifiable remains. Also, again, a directly hostile encounter with the U.S. could go wrong in far too many ways.
• What about making the U.S. be and look (more) paranoid? This one I would buy, except for the fact that this is already very efficiently done via insurgent funding, and at least, in that case, you can’t prove it’s the Iranians. I really do think Iran wants to lay low until it has nuclear capability; it doesn’t make sense to start a conflict. Note President Bush’s response language: he suggests the Iranians “refrain from such provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future.” They got one freebie. They might not have.

What about “the terrorists”? Wouldn’t they benefit?

Terrorist groups are being funded through Tehran. They have a haven, of sorts, in the border of a country the world community (read: the West) can’t directly influence. I don’t think any group would jeopardize that stronghold unless they were sure of doing some serious damage.

– it could have been a test run for something else, of course; a real, serious attack. One wonders…

So unless this was just a simple harassment move, (or unless they really were drunk idiots or something similar), I postulate there’s another player in the game, one who’d benefit from a U.S. confrontation with Iran.

Unfortunately, we’ve made too many enemies recently and we have too much competition (military, economic, and strategic) to allow for easy guessing/analysis this way. My parents both said – right off the bat – that Russia’s involved, but I have a hard time buying it. The Russians do produce a huge amount of oil, so they might not be as devastated by Iran’s collapse as the U.S. … but still, Russia, with Putin at the helm, has made a number of strides toward becoming an economic rather than a military giant. There also seems to be a certain amount of wary respect between the USSR and the USA; two duelists wary of returning to the field. The USSR also wants to prevent a nuclear holocaust, just as we do.

I wonder if they’d provoke us into overtaking Iran now, to prevent an eventual nuclear war…? They have been pulling the bait-and-switch on Iran on actually handing over the power plant supplies …

Russia’s been funding Tehran’s nuclear power interests; helping with power plants, etc. I don’t believe they have much to gain from a devastated Iranian economy, either. Nor do they want to go for round II with the United States. (Not yet?)

So now I’m looking for a player that’s not heavily invested in Iran, that doesn’t want to see Tehran gain nuclear capability and/or that would greatly benefit by watching the U.S. utterly bankrupt itself via one more invasion (i.e., not an Iranian ally);

The Chinese come to mind (although I don’t know much about their investment in Iran). Saudi Arabia? This doesn’t seem India’s style, and they’ve got major famine issues coming up, even as the middle class rises like a meteor. I’d say they’re too busy, and too dependent on a stable U.S., to be playing this kind of game. It’s not Brazil’s arena, either, and the E.U. (we’d all like to think) is largely past these kinds of games.

So here’s a random thought: the U.S. crushing Iran would be bad for Iran - but it’d be good for anyone wanting to unite the Middle East in some kind of Islamic Jihad. Iran’s an Islamic spiritual center, I believe. It’s basically a theocracy masquerading as a democracy (remember this slide?: Iranian Power Structure). The kind of leader or group that’d benefit from an Islamic Jihad also benefits from the U.S. looking bad, from Iran looking bad, from tensions rising, from martyrs created.

For that invisible player, there was no outcome for that little standoff that wouldn’t be beneficial. This is the invisible player for whom all paths lead to victory.

Now all we need is a name.

Politics and Policy

McCain and Obama
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html?em&ex=1199941200&en=0f58b454068ac467&ei=5087%0A

A really interesting – and nicely unbiased, I thought – look at the two front-runners as they stand. I’d recommend this article :)

The central issue in this election is the crisis of leadership. Voters are reacting against partisan gridlock. Obama and McCain both offer ways to end this gridlock. Obama wants us to rise above it by rediscovering our commonalities. McCain hopes smash it with fierce honesty and independent action.

Women are Never Front Runners

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08steinem.html?em&ex=1199941200&en=e3d49753c7f6da32&ei=5087%0A

I didn’t buy the premise of this article by renowned feminist Gloria Steinem, at first, but found myself agreeing more as time went on. It’s a neat look at the kinds of perception we take for granted, if nothing else. Check this:

THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?

.. but this is Barak Obama’s profile, just turned female. .. Interesting, no?