Retro-Journal: Across America in Late ’91

The second half of 1991, my first “semester” after college, is perhaps best captured in a vignette each from nine towns to which I traveled, each offering a possible model for my then-unfixed, then-uncertain adult life, with the first vignette involving the fear of imminent thermonuclear war.

•Washington, DC: Having been a good libertarian for two years by the time I graduated, I had developed a healthy wariness toward DC, but ironically, people fixated on the shortcomings of government often end up spending a lot of time in DC hoping to learn how to fix things. Not for the last time, libertarian business had brought me and fellow Brown graduate and ex-Film Bulletin editor Christine Caldwell to DC early in the summer of ’91 and to the apartment there of another Brown graduate, Tim Snyder (who, like Christine, would become an academic and historian), who let us stay there while he was away.

And so it was that Christine was awakened at 5:30am one morning by a caller asking “Is Tim there?” When Christine said “No,” the caller then asked, “Is it because of the revolution?” Since Tim was not one of our fellow libertarians (despite going on to write books about things like the travails of post-Communist Europe), it was unlikely that the caller was referring to our own very gradual and law-abiding efforts to abolish the government through privatization. As it turned out, what he was referring to was more of a coup than a revolution, and in the end not even much of a coup — namely, the last-gasp attempt by a few Soviet generals to seize power from Gorbachev that year, leading in short order to the rise of Yeltsin in response and the official disbanding of the Soviet Union the following year.

Not knowing at the time how things were going to work out, though, I pointed out to Christine that on the admittedly very slim chance that the coup led to political instability in Moscow that resulted in a nuclear war, DC was not the best place to be. Being, then as now, a pretty rational balancer of risks and benefits, I would never have bothered to suggest fleeing DC if we both lived there or had some other compelling reason to linger, but since we’d been planning to head north soon anyway, we got into Christine’s car and headed north — despite our friends in Providence facing a terrible storm, Hurricane Bob. If we could keep the nuclear holocaust behind us and Bob’s fury safely ahead — and if I didn’t make the mistake again of playing the Fixx too loudly (Christine’s taste in 80s-heavy alternative rock being subtly different from my own taste in 80s-heavy alternative rock, in ways that seem about as significant now as differing branches of Leninism) — we would be all right.

•Providence, RI: It was a bit odd that I stayed in Providence for a summer after graduation, given that I’d never remained in the city over vacations while in college, but I was reluctant to retreat to Norwich and my parents’ house while I was still sending out resumes in search of a post-college job, mostly to publishing companies (I’d applied to at least one in New York City, St. Martin’s Press, but was convinced simply by the postmodern clutter of the New York Times ad pages that New York was probably a noisy, hectic hellhole in which I’d never be comfortable — after all, I spent a lot of time when I was growing up visiting my grandfather’s small farm, the one my mother grew up on, and even Brown had seemed a bit big and crazy compared to what I knew).

So it was that I lived for three (undeserved) pleasant months — at least, pleasant when I managed to keep my mind off the job anxiety — in a big house with a few friends including fellow ex-Film Bulletin writer Holly Caldwell and her boyfriend Jake. Yet there were moments when even that coziness had a tinge of unspoken dread, like something out of the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, who had lived in and written about Providence (one of his best-known protagonists, from the story “The Call of Cthulhu,” was a Brown professor — but more about that in my February Book Selection of the Month essay).

For instance, it was at that house, on one of a great many evenings spent on its second-floor deck, that I — and I alone, while others scoffed and failed to see — spotted the unmistakable figure of a man known to me from a nightmarish tale told almost a half-century earlier: there, walking his dog not far from the Brown campus, was none other than Kevin McCarthy, star of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I pointed him out to the others, who failed to recognize him and said it was just some old man (or in one case said “You mean James Coburn?”). Just as he was about to disappear past the house, my frustration mounting, I shouted “Say, isn’t that a famous character actor?” to which he looked up knowingly, beamed, and waved before disappearing with his dog. No one else had seen it — and they even suggested that he probably just waved because he heard someone shouting and thought it was a meaningless hello — and in a great irony that no one but me seemed to appreciate, I was left insisting, “No! Don’t you see? He’s not just an ordinary human! He’s not like the rest of us. Why doesn’t anyone else see the truth?!” If you’re reading this, Mr. McCarthy, you understand. (And as it happens, he is now appearing as himself-fifty-years-ago in Anthony Hopkins’ time travel movie Slipstream.)

But there was another incident that occurred during our time in Providence even more Lovecraftian than the Kevin McCarthy dog-walking incident — an incident that showed just how disturbingly small and limiting our summertime world atop College Hill had become.

I was talking to yet another ex-Bulletineer, Chris Nugent, who was also living in Providence that summer, though at a different house, when the subject of baked beans somehow arose, to which I began to say “Speaking of baked beans — ” but then abruptly stopped myself, fearing to speak of the horrible memory that the subject of beans had evoked in me. “What?” Chris asked, almost knowingly. I began to object that what I had in mind was not something I should discuss, and Chris began to laugh, saying, “I know what you’re thinking of — Dear God, it’s come to this,” and I laughed too, knowing he had seen precisely what I had seen, blocks away and no bigger than a man’s hand yet on that day looming large in our tiny mental world: a piece of dog shit, lying in the summer sun on Thayer Street, that bore an unmistakable and almost unnatural resemblance to a giant baked bean: curved, perfectly smooth, perfectly proportioned. “And the thing about it was that — ” I began again, gesturing as if to suggest the unholy object’s immediate surroundings. “Yes! Yes!” replied Chris, again as if reading my mind: for the dog shit was surrounded, as if by some conscious artistic choice on the part of the dog, by a small puddle of light brown ooze that was the very image of baked bean sauce! Our four years of Ivy League education had led to this.

•Norwich, CT: Soon, though, it would be time to leave the house in Providence. I ended up being the last to depart on the final day at summer’s end as newly-returned students began swelling College Hill’s population. I awaited my parents’ arrival while the new inhabitants of the house moved in: a group of alarmingly attractive and very young-seeming girls from Brown, likely sophomores — one of whom twice, in the few hours that our stays in that house overlapped, accidentally left a door open that led to me glimpsing her naked, while the other women not only looked through a photo album of their past adventures together that included pictures of them taking bubble baths but eventually, to cope with that day’s sweltering heat, began rubbing ice cubes on each other. But I was soon headed back to Norwich, living (however briefly) with my parents again, not watching beautiful women rub ice cubes on themselves, and wondering if selling my comic book collection might generate enough money to stave off complete dependency until a job offer came along and made me less of a loser.

•On the Road I: Chicago: Having heard that employment and culture were booming in Seattle in late 1991, Chris and I soon roadtripped west, stopping along the way in Chicago where, with uncannily good libertarian timing (and thanks in part to forgetting Chicago was in a different time zone than the East), we arrived just in time to join Dan Greenberg (who was studying law at the University of Chicago for a while) in hearing a lecture by Judge Alex Kozinksi at which famed law professor Richard Epstein asked some skeptical questions. Afterwards, stymied for a long time in our efforts to leave Chicago by its confusingly loop-shaped highways, I eventually suggested to Chris, hesitantly, that in my role as navigator I’d spotted a tiny, rural-looking but reassuringly long and straight road on the map called Liberty Road that went out far beyond the dense downtown area into rural regions. “We’re taking it,” Chris said decisively.

•On the Road II: Lodge Grass, Montana: I don’t think Chris and I regretted for a moment that we were a bit behind schedule in reaching Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the mesa perhaps best known for its appearance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (itself perhaps best known for its use in the [pre-Andrew Lloyd Weber] movie of The Phantom of the Opera) was playing — part of a mix tape that also included the Cure — as Chris’s car approached the immense mesa, and the fact that it was too dark to make out the thing’s details merely made it all the more awe-inspiring as it slowly but surely blotted out a huge, monolithic area of darkness in the otherwise bountifully star-filled sky. We clambered about on the rocks at its base a bit despite signs saying the area was closed for the night but eventually beat a retreat after spotting some sort of badger or something wandering around on the rocks near us.

Unfortunately, due to an overly-optimistic turn down a road that we later realized led only into the near-void of an Indian reservation that had ostensibly, according to road signs, been an actual town called Lodge Grass, we spent about an hour seeing nothing but straight, unpopulated rural road with nothing on it except increasingly massive pieces of roadkill, which eventually led to us turning around, heading back to the highway, and traveling for several more hours, passing, frustratingly, through two towns too small to have any vacant hotel rooms before finally, well after sunrise, finding a motel. Exhausted from the drive, Chris at one point feared that he may have hallucinated an armadillo.

At some point around that day, a gruff man at a gas station, spotting the dead mink on Chris’s dashboard, asked “You trap that?” to which Chris replied that a friend had given it to him, glossing over the fact that the creature came from a vintage clothing store back east and had long been affectionately nicknamed Minky.

•On the Road III: Libby, Montana: Holly’s mother, still living in the tiny town (population approximately 2,000) where Holly had grown up, was gracious enough to put up me and Chris for a night, introducing us to her cat, acknowledging her copy of Atlas Shrugged, and recounting for us the then-recent experience of having to suspend for one day the paper route by which she earned a living because a moose, a potentially dangerous animal, was wandering the town’s only road. Roughly as libertarian as us or Holly, she complained about the EPA deliberately moving dangerous grizzly bears closer to the humans of Libby by helicopter, having decided the bears naturally belonged there. I did not fight any large animals during the trip but was stung by a bee that flew into the car, and I still have the chapstick-sized tube of anti-sting ointment that we raced to get at a convenience store as though I’d been bitten by a cobra. I have no idea whether the ointment would still be effective after all this time, and it looks far less impressive and manly than the long, rib-filled rattlesnake skeleton that sits just a few feet away in the same closet in my Manhattan apartment today — left over not from our adventures out west but from the time Chris and I ate rattlesnake at a restaurant in Providence. We were not frontiersmen.

•Seattle: We reached the city by crossing the central plain of Washington State, which is, as you may know, so completely flat and desolate that it is possible to make the mistake, as I did, of thinking that you’re riding over the top of a hill that never seems to end when in fact you are simply perceiving the curvature of the Earth at all points in your field of vision because you can see unimpeded to the horizon in all directions, unless Mt. Rainier or a nuclear power plant blocks your view (not that we passed the power plant). Incongruously, two little old ladies were seated at a roadside rest stop in the middle of all that nothingness, serving water to motorists, which was a bit like finding someone sitting on a rocking chair on the Moon.

It is remarkable what a thorough little time capsule of the 1990s my brief trip to Seattle really was. Indeed, I have often said — of a trip that, alarmingly, still feels very recent though it is now sixteen years in the past — that if the roughly two weeks of that trip had been the only days of the 90s I had experienced, I still would have had a pretty good feel for the decade:

–I talked to my father on the phone on the way there, and he suggested that we listen to the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings on the radio, to which I replied that the hearings had been fascinating — revolving largely around the question of whether Thomas was a closet libertarian, since he’d said approving things about Reason magazine, Ayn Rand, and closing government agencies — but that the hearings were now over. My father said that the hearings had resumed to allow discussion of what sounded like rather minor sexual harassment claims — mentioning porn at the office or inviting a co-worker to have a beer. I was skeptical about whether this second phase of the hearings could possibly be as significant as the first, since the important issues — the state vs. the individual and all that — had already been discussed. Soon, though, Chris and I, listening to Phase II along with the rest of the country, would be laughing at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s pained, somber references to “Long Dong Silver” and getting an early lesson in the pettiness of 90s political debate.

–In Seattle, our host, fellow Brown alum Scott Nybakken, was working in the alternative comics industry and had a coffee table festooned with “cyberpunk” magazines that proclaimed the imminent takeover of society by virtual reality (and something called the Internet, which some people in Seattle’s growing computer industry worked on). One of the magazines, Mondo 2000, also extolled a rising retro-60s/70s club scene in New York City, pointing to dance bands like Deee-Lite as exemplars (would that all 90s dance music had proven as joyous and melodic as “Groove Is in the Heart,” which also has one of the best videos of all time, as visually-startling a demarcator of the 80s’ end and 90s’ beginning as Do the Right Thing) and praising “smart drinks” and “smart drugs” that would purportedly make us all as smart as the cybergurus.

–Both Nothern Exposure (which, like the town of Libby, featured a road-wandering moose) and the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me movie were being shot in Seattle while we were there. Joined by a visiting Christine, we saw both Richard Linklater’s Slackers and the Director’s Cut rerelease of Blade Runner during my one-week stay.

–On Scott Nybakken’s car radio, tuned to KNDD “The End” (then one of the very, very few alternative rock stations in the country, along with Providence’s WBRU), we heard a new single called “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and all agreed that it had an interesting new sound (grunge) that seemed to fuse alternative rock and heavy metal — though we also thought the song sounded a little like “More than a Feeling” by Boston, and I still do.

Chris stayed in Seattle, but I headed back east, after visiting Scott and my former college roommate, Marc Steiner.

•Boston/Allston, Massachusetts: Back east, I considered following in the footsteps of some of my fellow Brown alums and seeking work in Boston, and I was particularly pleased to discover the ease with which even the members of a barely-passable rock band like Young Men Carbuncular (made up in part of associates of my old high school friend Paul Taylor, who’d by now finished Yale and started Harvard Law) could afford to live in the hip, youthful, densely populated, and slightly shabby but cute and neighborhoody suburb called Allston. I knew even then that I was sufficiently flexible and undemanding that as long as I was at no risk of starving and had some opportunity to write and/or hang out with smart, creative people, I could be happy. In fact, many of my happiest moments have occurred when I’m in a cozy and neighborhoody environment that nonetheless is somewhere I don’t quite belong — whether it was the time I strolled through a swanky, quiet residential area near College Hill in Providence and realized that the only other pedestrian around was Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, the time in Seattle that I walked about twenty miles through rolling suburban hills (somehow not getting lost) to see a store notorious for selling giant pants and then make my way over to the Soundgarden that gave the band its name, or the time I got back to the Young Men Carbuncular’s house late at night and had to climb in through a window in order to go to sleep. Barring starvation, I could be happy in these places, and I still feel like a part of my heart is in Allston. I’d go on to visit Boston many times in the next several years.

•New York City: However, it was St. Martin’s Press, somewhat belatedly, that would first offer me a job (it would last only a few months but was a start), so off to New York I went, joining Bulletineers Christine (with whom I shared my first apartment) and Laura Braunstein. Christine was working for National Lampoon and later for MTV (briefly, as is often the case with that network), making her one of the few of us to take a stab at making the comedy writing thing into a career. She followed editor Larry Doyle (whose name was known to me from his days as editor of First Comics, including my favorite comic book series for a time, Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus) as Doyle went from the dying National Lampoon to overseeing failed pilot episodes of a college version of The Newlywed Game featuring roommates, called Dirty Laundry. But Christine followed Doyle no farther. Christine loved New York and its bagels but soon moved to Oregon to be near her boyfriend Dave Whitney (another ex-Bulletineer, studying there to be an architect), leaving me in need, simultaneously, of a new roommate and a long-term publishing job. Doyle went on to become a Simpsons producer, New York Magazine editor, and now novelist, and I hope he’s happy — because in the old days he often wasn’t. Comedy is hard, even when you’re connected to the vast Harvard comedy-writing Mafia, compared to which Brown’s cabal was never more than a small circle of amateur pickpockets.

I recall Andrew Clateman, the Bulletineer who leapt out the window during a Nietzsche class, falling asleep in my parents’ living room once around 1989, sounding physically and mentally exhausted after biking from the big city to small Norwich — on the day that a thunderstorm destroyed the world’s oldest sugar maple tree in Norwich, making the front page of the Norwich paper but probably not registering in any of the papers back in Clateman’s native New York. He mumbled despairingly as he fell asleep about his own experience at MTV, when all the writers on a short-lived comedy show he was writing for, who’d been told they’d soon have contracts, were let go after the producers decided they could have guest hosts write their own material, starting with Yahoo Serious. Unless you’re Tom Wolfe, muttered Clateman as he lost consciousness, “it’s all contracts…contracts…” In a sense, I watched the comedy-writing, deconstructionist Clateman die that day, in my parents’ literally red, white, and blue rural home with its American flag and Colonial furniture. Clateman would go on to become a carpenter and home refurbisher, no longer a Dadaesque figure — at least until appearing in odd theatrical productions such as plays by fellow ex-Bulletineer Gersh Kuntzman many years later. Clateman’s brush with MTV — like the network’s blatant rip-off of a local Seattle hand puppet comedy show called Handy and Bandy created by friends of Marc — was a foreshadowing of Christine’s possible fate in 1991. After MTV requested a revised, raunchier version of the Dirty Laundry pilot, then balked at airing the result — this being years before MTV began showing softcore porn such as the series Unzipped — Doyle and company were sent packing.

For a very, very brief time before her departure from New York, Christine, Chris, and I would all live in that small apartment on East 20th St., since he had moved back east after his short stint in Seattle, perhaps a bit jealous (as a fan of Soundgarden, Winona Ryder, The Godfather, and Guns N’ Roses) that, implausibly, the G N’ R concert I’d gone to in New York City shortly after my arrival there featured Soundgarden as the opening band, random images of Winona Ryder as distracting entertainment on the big screens at Madison Square Garden prior to G N’ R taking the stage, and a moving Slash solo guitar rendition of the Godfather theme [UPDATE: An e-mail from Chris reminds me that twenty years after G N' R released "Welcome to the Jungle," it still has the power, when combined with karaoke, to induce paranoia in school officials]. New York is full of great things if you can get the timing down right and juxtapose them just so. You can’t let the postmodernism faze you. Stay flexible, in fact, and living in New York is sort of like living in nine or more cities at the same time and living as many overlapping lifetimes and narratives.

Unfortunately, one of the dominant narratives in late 1991 was the idea that we were “Generation X,” to quote the title of an influential book edited by one of my St. Martin’s Press co-workers (and his tall blonde assistant, future Times style reporter Alex Kuczynski): a generation mostly raised by Baby Boomers and now lacking either purpose or (for the first time in generations) job prospects. We were doomed, apparently. As someone with great confidence in capitalism, I never seriously believed that sort of whining, but the X-doom narrative would at least help me feel like less of an oddball when I ended up spending the first half of 1992 unemployed — but more on that in our next chapter.

Not All Cartoons Buttress the Ron Paul Campaign, Though

With early-primary voters embracing Huckabee, the later ones liking Giuliani, National Review endorsing Romney (more by process of elimination than by conviction, but we can all sympathize with that), and McCain and Thompson now largely forgotten, my one, brief wish for tonight’s final pre-primaries Republican debate is that it doesn’t go like this comic strip (pointed out to me by Jill Friedman).

I may just stop following the news until next year.

Ron Paul Picks Pope's Jewish Batman

No, you did not misread that headline. The comics site ComicMix is surveying prez candidates for their choice for favorite superhero, and Ron Paul (or a very well-informed young nerd on his staff to whom the strange task was likely delegated) quite rightly chose Baruch Wane, the Jewish, Nazi-era version of Batman created for DC Comics by libertarian writer-artist Paul Pope (and I was informed of this by Ali Kokmen of Del Rey Manga, which by the way has itself just made a deal to start producing X-Men manga — that is, comics in the Japanese style — in cooperation with Marvel Comics).

I’m largely avoiding comics blogging for several months, but this is important political news.

The best part of it all is that in the comic, Baruch Wane rescued a manuscript of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action from the Nazis, and the story took a very respectful attitude toward the book (which I, uh, confessed to not having actually read, in a recent Retro-Journal entry — though I read Mises’ Socialism and Liberalism), calling it a classic of human liberty (and thus a threat to fascists everywhere). So a vote for Ron Paul is now really a vote for Batman and a vote against the Nazis, symbolically speaking. Beat that, Huckabee!

While I think of it, this reminds me that perhaps my favorite New York Post headline of all time, for an article about some cops deciding to boycott Warner Brothers movies such as the Batman films to punish Warner for selling the Ice-T song “Cop Killer,” was: “Cops Pin Rap on Batman,” accompanied by a full-page, front-page picture of Batman. (And, no, “Cop Killer” is not technically rap, but don’t feel too sorry for poor, misrepresented Ice-T, who, I’m told, confesses to multiple unsolved bank robberies committed in his youth, without apparent remorse, in his partly autobiographical 1994 book The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a Fuck?)

P.S. The Post, by the way, has many of its infamously catchy/trashy headlines framed in its offices, including the immortal “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” And when my then-girlfriend Dawn Eden was a copyeditor there, and we differed not only about the existence of God but about the relative merits of 60s-style power pop and 80s New Wave, she wrote a headline for an article about traffic snarls caused by that year’s MTV Music Awards that said, partly as a jab to me, “Biggest Losers at Tonight’s MTV Awards: The Cars.” That’s very clever — though the Cars are still better than Gerry and the Pacemakers, in my opinion. (And there is no God.)

P.P.S. And just to get back to serious politics for a moment: you know Batman could defeat Huckabee-supporters Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent, and Ric Flair even if they all fought him at the same time.

Oprah vs. Jesus...

Santa: “Let me down! You have the wrong man!”

…Those being the two kingmakers now pushing Obama and Huckabee, respectively, toward the top of the presidential heap — with America torn in its abject adoration of both and me contemplating having to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate next year (whoever that is — but shouldn’t they just endorse Ron Paul, bylaws permitting?).

If — if! — Ron Paul doesn’t surprise everyone and get the GOP nomination, I wouldn’t necessarily want him to bolt back to the Libertarian Party and run on that ticket (bylaws permitting), especially if that risked putting Hillary into the White House over Giuliani, but I could live with Obama beating Huckabee if that were the necessary side effect of Ron Paul getting, say, a Perot-sized 15% of the vote that really attracted public and media attention to the libertarian message. I’m reminded of my friend Joe Brennan (a former Libertarian Party New York City mayoral candidate) saying that the novel Dune made him more conscious of the fact that truly profound political changes must be planned for on a centuries-long timescale.

That hypothetical 15% Ron Paul footnote might be far more valuable over the long haul than any imagined advantage Huckabee might be seen to have over Obama in the short term (and I’m honestly not even sure there is one — with Bush, some of us hoped for market-based reforms such as partial privatization of Social Security and got more of a moderate gay-baiting statist, but with Huckabee we absolutely know we’re getting a moderate gay-baiting statist who won’t bring about market reforms).

If Huckabee’s rise is really where the recent internal dialectic of the Republican Party leads — soft statism and maximum Jesusness — all I can do by way of protest (not having written my book yet) is link to this panel from some obscure cartoon that, to my mind, far better represents the brand of fusionism America really needs than the religious/welfarist slumber-of-the-American-spirit that Huckabee represents (to which I’m pleased to see the conservative standard-bearers at National Review objecting, by the way).

Wait, I can do one more thing by way of protest: recommend a gift this holiday season perfect for the Satanist in your life. That’s right, Satanist. Because whether Huckabee — or for that matter Romney — grasps it or not, our law code is indeed secular, and Satanists are full-fledged American citizens as much as a Zoroastrian like you (I’m guessing) or an atheist like me. Presidential candidates know that and shouldn’t recklessly pretend otherwise, not when there’s a populist army out there ignorant of the law who might just imagine that by electing a Huckabee they can somehow transform a diverse, continent-wide nation into a cozy neighborhood church. Worship locally (if you must), vote globally.

My gift recommendation, then, for the Satanist close to you: Sulfur, by my former American Council on Science and Health co-worker Aubrey Stimola. True, it’s just a book (like her book Nickel) about an element, not about the Lake of Fire or anything like that. But since Satan, and therefore perhaps his followers, reportedly loves sulfur, think of this gift as a good way to bring together the Satanist in your family and the science-loving adherents of “secularism,” which Romney said in his recent speech he considers a religion unto itself.

Man. I’m beginning to wish Giuliani’s capacity for belligerence would surface in a galvanizing blaze of secular New York elitism, a nationally-noticed speech starting, perhaps, with the phrase “Now you listen to me, you brain-dead hicks…” and ending with him re-dunging that Virgin Mary painting. Maybe that’s the kind of tough America needs at this juncture. Recall that Jesse Ventura, who called religion a thing for the “weak-minded,” got elected governor of Minnesota talking loudly about his fondness for whores, fishing with dynamite, and cutting off welfare. Oprah and Jesus may be ascendant at the moment, but hardheadedness will yet make a comeback.

P.S. In looking for Joe Brennan’s blog above, I stumbled across another old article of mine I’ve just added to my Bibliography links page: this National Review piece recounting the New York State Libertarian nominating convention that made a short-lived gubernatorial candidate out of Howard Stern (note: the man who probably would have been the gubernatorial candidate in the absence of the Stern juggernaut, James Ostrowski, who is mentioned briefly, is now head of Ron Paul’s New York ballot access campaign, which makes me more confident Paul will actually get on the ballot here — the LP people know how hard it is and how organized you have to be).

Retro-Journal: Beyond Brown, Early 1991

There were two very important reasons I wasn’t too nervous as the semester of graduation from Brown arrived and I faced the prospect of entering the real world: namely, my parents (who I hope are doing well today — hi, Mom!), who had not only paid for college but, simply by always being sane, low-key, and easy to talk to, had provided valuable proof for me that “normal,” in the best sense of the word, is possible.

Even after four years at Brown — and despite the fact that my adult life has in some ways followed the Brown model more than the Connecticut model — it still seemed to me that quiet, blue-collar Norwich, CT was how things are basically supposed to be, with politicized universities and noisy cities some sort of aberration. (Not that I’m complaining.) My parents have always been very good about reminding me that if the outside world gets too crazy, I am welcome to flee back to Norwich, and just knowing that gives me more than enough strength to make the fleeing unnecessary (perhaps a bit like the attitude expressed in a speech I saw this year by Fox News head Roger Ailes, who said he never really worried about failing in the world of New York media because he could always go back to his old job as a ditch-digger, “and I kind of liked it” — in other words, the “worst-case scenario” is still pretty nice, just different).

The Seavey household pets of 1991 were also the last ones I really “shared” with my parents — and mentioned in a Brown Daily Herald column (illustrated by immensely talented Brown cartoonist Brian Floca, who’d go on to be a successful children’s book illustrator) about problems that ought to be raised by animal-rights thinking, such as whether to prevent kills by carnivores like Oscar, the orange, stripy, and tank-like Seavey family cat at the time (Oscar passed away a few years after college, and, just yesterday as it happens, a more-recent Seavey family cat, the aptly-named Rickety, passed away after a couple years of coping with a Catch-22 combo of kidney and thyroid problems that were hard to treat simultaneously — her death after the past couple years still being a big improvement over the anticipated lifespan of mere days that she had when my parents found her, an emaciated stray, in the empty farmhouse, not long before it was torn down, that had belonged to my late maternal grandfather — whose nice white dress shirt I wore while hosting this week’s Debate at Lolita Bar, come to think of it, finally losing one button off the old thing but very happy to still have it around).

As noted in that same animal-rights-questioning column, Uber, the Seavey family dog (who would endure until 2005, a total of sixteen years), ate things much stranger than fellow animals over the years, including bits of brick, a staple, possibly some fiberglass and motor oil, numerous baseball caps (themselves formerly the property of my late paternal grandfather), bits of some old eight-track tapes, and the tail of a squirrel the rest of which had been eaten by Oscar (the sort of incident that makes one suspect cats are smarter, but that’s one debate I don’t want to get into).

•••

That final semester at Brown saw me make one inept stab at getting a fitting job (with most of my attention being directed at things like editorial assistant jobs in book publishing, the default activity of humanities majors across the land, which I would indeed end up doing for about the first two years after graduation, along with freelance writing work on the side), namely an effort to succeed my friend Dan Greenberg as managing editor of the libertarian-friendly journal Social Philosophy and Policy, which would have meant living in Bowling Green, OH, as Dan did during his tenure. Since I suspect life in New York has turned out to be more interesting than life in Bowling Green would have been, it’s probably just as well that (in my youthful naivete) I did things like send a handwritten thank-you letter (on blue-lined spiral notebook paper — what difference does it make, rationally speaking?) after my interview in Bowling Green that probably helped frighten the higher-ups there away from hiring me (though I’m told they still thought I was a decent candidate — the other major contender had a Master’s).

I did, however, follow Dan’s advice in using an issue of Social Philosophy and Policy as a source for my senior philosophy thesis, since both the issue and the thesis concerned evolutionary psychology — or sociobiology, as it was then more commonly called — a topic that would shape my thinking for years to come. My thesis advisor, Jamie Dreier, was one of the most pleasant and amusing professors I’ve ever had but wasn’t too impressed by my (still ongoing) effort to combine sociobiology with the arguments of economist Friedrich Hayek (Dreier himself was more of a socialist-libertarian in the European or Chomskyan sense, I believe) and asked if I was merely trying to imply that libertarians can out-macho rival philosophies. (I can now safely confess that it was me who wrote “Rawlsians do it in the original position” on the blackboard one day before Dreier got to class.)

My trip to Bowling Green had at least afforded me the opportunity to hang out with Dan, build a snowman with visiting Australian libertarian philosopher Chandran Kukathas and his then-young son, and hear the hot schismatic gossip of that period, which was the fact that formerly libertarian philosopher John Gray, an associate of the Bowling Green crowd, had turned against free markets and become, in one fell swoop, a “High Tory” adherent of rigid tradition, an advisor to the Labour Party, and an advocate of strict environmental regulations (he would, in fact, go on to write Susan-Sontag-like books describing humanity as a sort of cancer on the face of the Earth). Kukathas was referring to Gray’s combination of traditionalist and environmentalist thinking when he said “He’s gone blue-green on us,” but he might almost have been speaking of some mildly unpleasant algae. I have since come to love political hybrids and mavericks, but that early impression of Gray as something of a turncoat and disappointment has not abated.

As for Dan, he would eventually go on to work for the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Rep. Jay Dickey (R-AR), and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (Vertical-AR), among others, before becoming a state rep in Arkansas himself.

While at Heritage, Dan ended up working alongside the woman who I had spent a good deal of free time thinking about senior year: then-freshman Michelle Boarmdan, who was an Ayn Rand fan but also a Trekkie, knowledgable alternative-rock fan, jazz fan, slightly-ahead-of-her-time (and vaguely Lisa Loeb-like) fashionplate, and Nietzsche admirer who said she longed to own a cape and a bullwhip and who got along with me wonderfully but had a lingering high school boyfriend who, despite some rocky patches in their relationship, would go on to be with her for a total of nine years (during which time they’d both become lawyers), which is very impressive — and itself a sign, I think, that Ayn Rand types can be as resolute in their decisions as any rock-ribbed, God-fearing Republican out there.

(But, like me, she’d lean Republican as well, even going on to a stint as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Bush — and the administration’s chief defender in Senate hearings of Bush’s controversial albeit traditional use of “signing statements” to explain which laws he’s going to delay implementing pending constitutional review. When I asked about whether she regrets having to do something seemingly so non-anarchist, Michelle claimed her main regret was not being able to work the line “So say we all” from Battlestar Galactica into her testimony, so you can understand why we still get along.)

•••

At the end of the semester, I asked Marc Steiner — the green/moderate who’d been in my freshman dorm, had been my sophomore roommate, and senior year (to my delight) was living on the same hallway I was (after spending his junior year at Pomona) and who remained, as always, as nice as Mr. Rogers yet argumentative enough to warn me that he’d “lose a lot of respect” for me if I continued to listen to the notoriously racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, and quite beautiful Guns N’ Roses song “One in a Million” — what he planned to do, now that our senior year was finally ending. He replied, with something verging on nervous laughter, “Oh, look for a job or something, first crazy thing that comes to mind.”

Let me note again that aside from the G N’ R fascination, I am not a metalhead and indeed that year went to see Laurie Anderson and Jesus Jones (the only band to really celebrate the collapse of Communism properly, as I would note in a NationalReview.com article sixteen years later, when socialistic Hillary Clinton dared consider appropriating the song as a campaign anthem). I saw both bands with charming, bisexual, and hippie-like Deborah Gitlitz, if memory serves, who was in turn friends with Rebecca Hensler, a red-haired, sometimes mohawked campus punk whose leather jacket bore continually-changing left-wing, often pro-lesbian messages, all of which was fine with me then, as it is now, as long as it doesn’t raise my taxes or lead to a regulation. I believe Hensler went on to do both some stripping and AIDS activist work in California after we all left Brown.

More troubling to me, politically, is something like Laurie Anderson’s remarks, during her concert, about watching former East Germans rush to embrace West Germany’s malls, goods, services, and capitalist plenty. She saw it and, she said, wanted to tell them “Go back!” We have come to accept that sort of anti-materialistic remark from left-leaning pop culture figures, but they border on sadism, given what East Germans were escaping, and I wonder sometimes if history will look back and ever really understand just how smart, funny, well-meaning, and respectable the defenders of totalitarianism were.

Similarly, we all tend to look back at, say, instances of medieval tyranny and assume that the nice people back then were probably the ones who leaned most toward skepticism and (broadly speaking) proto-liberalism — when in truth, no doubt, many a warm-hearted Catholic who wanted to make the world safe looked forward to the burning of heretics. So, too, in all likelihood, will a freer future look back casually at our era and forget that it was often the creative, brainy, “open-minded” souls like Anderson who helped shore up pro-Communist attitudes among the intelligentsia, contributing in their small way to the oppression of hundreds of millions. Such a tragedy, the twentieth century. Such a tragedy, the human race.

(And I say this as someone who’s seen three Laurie Anderson concerts, loved Home of the Brave, and probably had his teenage brain shaped in an important way by her hosting of the avant-garde PBS video-art show Alive from Off-Center, which first helped me see as easily bridgeable the gap between “serious” art and the more popular New Wave and punk videos then shown on, say, Rick Ducommun’s eclectic late-night show Rock ’N’ America — but more, oh, so much more, about that in the months ahead.)

•••

I had actually portrayed Laurie Anderson on stage once, when we put on a one-time-only show called The Performance Art Film Bulletin featuring, among other things, Christine and Holly Caldwell parodying notoriously NEA-funded performance artist Karen Finley by covering one Caldwell (Holly) with chocolate while the other Caldwell (Christine, now U. of South Carolina history prof Christine Ames) read a poem called “Todd Seavey Chained” about me being raped by a Communist “illogically, illogically, illogically” (a poem that seems somewhat prophetic given an incident described in the next section of this blog entry). During the performance, I was in a sketch called “Laurie Anderson vs. Mummenschanz,” doing my best impression of the deep, synthesizer-enhanced voice Anderson often used in her shows, facing off against the famous mime troupe Mummenschanz as played by Scott Nybakken and Dan Bornstein (complete with all-black outfits and various doodads such as toilet paper dispensers on their heads), all with Dave Whitney playing notes from G N’ R’s “Sweet Child of Mine” in the background — and later backing me up in my amateurish vocal performance of the Doors’ “Lost Little Girl,” which I enhanced with a few showy paper blasting caps — a foreshadowing of my all too infrequently indulged fondness for karaoke years later.

Christine Caldwell, by the way, received during her stint as Film Bulletin editrix, which had ended the prior semester, an angry phonecall from Petra Brando (a fellow Brown student), due to Chistine’s piece saying (truthfully) that she’d long dreamt of having sex with Marlon Brando but that his daughter Petra might have to do. I still fail to see how something like that is insulting, which is why my sympathies tend to be with writers and artists instead of the people who get angry at them (I like Family Guy — and am pleased, incidentally, that the character Brian on that show supposedly went to Brown; I tried to convince Michael Malice I should be Brian to his Stewie for Halloween last year, but I’m leaping a decade and a half ahead of our story again).

In retrospect, the act of mine that probably caused the most distress during my own stint, prior to Christine’s, as Bulletin editor was another child-of-a-celebrity-related stunt, albeit not one that (to my knowledge) angered the celeb-child herself, namely the issue called L’Eau de Film Bulletin, of which every copy was doused (the key is to stack them and pour onto the side) in Tatiana perfume, named after Brown student (and later celebrity in her own right) Tatiana von Furstenberg, daughter of Diane von Furstenberg. She was a spotlight-seeker even then, though — willing to tell a class full of deconstructionists what lessons she drew from losing her virginity and that sort of thing — so the complaints came not from her but from innocent diners who wanted to read the Film Bulletin in the cafeteria (among the most important points where the publication was distributed each week) and found the stench of Tatiana interfering with their enjoyment of their meals. My apologies.

Tatiana was not necessarily the most attention-seeking child-of-celebrity at Brown, by the way. I think supermarket heir Jay Stuckey has to get the prize for that, willing as he was to show people at parties that he has three testicles. Tatiana didn’t always wear underwear, but, to my knowledge (and this is not based on direct observation), she was no mutant.

•••

I had few regrets as my class graduated, and we left the campus in the able hands of libertarian columnists like young Piper Hoffman and Jacob Levy, with the latter of whom I sat on the green one day that final semester, as part of a pseudo-event I’d organized called “Liberty Awareness Week” (mostly mainstream-libertarian but also calling, in one poster I put up, for chimpanzees to be released from zoos unless they commit crimes), administering to numerous passersby who volunteered the “Nolan Diamond” political test devised by libertarians to see how libertarian people are (as it turns out, not too — and there were no conservatives according to our sample at Brown that day). The test is also meant to get them to expand their political thinking a bit beyond the usual right-left one-dimensional spectrum by adding a second axis, yielding one axis for “personal” liberties (like freedom to use drugs, have gay sex, or read obscene materials) and another axis for “economic” liberties (avoiding having your income taxed, avoiding regulations, living without big government, trading without subsidies or tariffs or protective international rules) — which tends to land textbook-definition rightists over in the right corner, leftists in the left, across-the-board authoritarians down at the bottom, and libertarians up at the top (with a space for centrists in the middle). Your rank along the two axes is decided by a series of points-awarding questions in the two topic areas, personal and economic liberty. Not perfect, but an improvement over the way people usually think about these things.

Noel Rabinowitz, head of Brown’s Young Communist League, happened to pass by and planted his own where-do-you-fall sticker firmly at the very bottom, as if he were an across-the-board authoritarian on every issue — but he did so with as little sincerity and as much humor as he showed when he ran by and planted a sarcastic kiss on me at the end of Campus Dance the weekend of graduation, symbolically overcoming the chasm between him and his political archenemy. Since I was drunk (very unusual for me, I assure you — I didn’t drink at all until turning twenty-one just prior to senior year, since even as an anarchist since age nineteen I didn’t want to break the law any more than Socrates had wanted to, nor to embarrass those aforementioned wonderful parents in any way), I brushed it off with a slurred and magnanimous, “Ah, that Noel, he’s not such a bad guy,” but all my nearby Bulletineer/libertarian acquaintances dutifully made loud “Eyyyewwww!” noises, driven, as per their cultural leanings, more by political disgust than repulsion at an unsolicited man-kiss.

Though overwhelmingly straight, we were, after all, the same clique that had, for reasons I do not fully recall, decided to attend the final Brown Daily Herald dinner that year in drag, with me looking just a bit like Bowie in a tasteful, androgynous, borrowed, blue dress of Michelle Boardman’s and with the future Deputy Assistant Attorney General looking quite natural in a necktie and grey jacket of mine — indeed, looking oddly like her fellow Norwegian-descended Brown student Scott Nybakken, but we all try not to think about that too much.

•••

Far more comfortable with unwanted touching was a group of freshman pranksters who had declared themselves the Leo Buscaglia Love Society and run all over campus giving people, including editrix Christine, unexpected hugs, something that seemed like a harassment suit waiting to happen. One of them sat down with me in a campus snack bar one time, explicitly asking my advice, as a departing elder statesman, on how to spot rising campus celebrities in the Class of ’94. I had no useful advice — and indeed thought I was pursuing far nobler and more philosophical goals than mere fame, then as now — but together with Minnesota-spawned student Ali Kokmen (steeped in deconstructionism from being a Modern Culture and Media major yet somehow as normal and sane as my parents and, like his old friend from high school Jacob Levy, a comic book fan, indeed the comic fan to whom I sold my entire run of Jim Starlin and Peter David’s Dreadstar), I did co-create a short documentary/art film focused on the Buscaglians called Todd and Ali’s Lovehammer, the only watchable thing I produced in that class besides the black and white, silent, and very 1920-ish super-short meant to symbolically depict Holly Caldwell’s life story. For these things, I had endured that freshman-year decon theory class as a filmmaking prerequisite. (And I recently heard from one of the ex-Buscaglians, Mitch Verter, now a left-anarchist living in Canada, where he says the tendency of people to think of government as the solution to everything has him realizing he loves “Amerikkka” after all.)

Senior year also saw me writing a comic strip called Bogus University — about Brown being conquered by left-wing, brain-stealing monsters from space, since my political interests very subtly inform my art — drawn by Reid Mihalko (who’d taken time off and was graduating around the same time as me despite starting a year earlier). Reid would go on to found CuddleParty, a series of events where people do as much hugging as the Buscaglians but with a decidedly greater emphasis on consent and respect for personal boundaries (not that I’ve been to one). Reid had not only been my freshman dorm resident advisor but was the first human being my parents and I saw upon our arrival at Brown. The Buscaglians would be among the last new figures to arise on campus before my departure. In both the Alpha and the Omega of my Brown experience, then, there was love of some sort — though for me the crucial distinction between voluntary and coercive interactions would remain paramount. I’ve devoted a lot more professional time since Brown to promoting that philosophical point than to making people feel warm and cuddly, but we each have our niche.

(I also happened, one month before college graduation, to bump into Heather Shea on the main street near Brown, she being the woman nice enough in high school to ask me to the senior prom, to which I was too uptight to want to go — though, in another reminder that I am a far, far luckier man than I deserve to be, this encounter afforded me a chance to thank her, apologize for my cowardice, and make a mental note not to think solely about philosophy and such all the time, a mistake all too easy for me to make, though I’ve gotten more well-rounded with age, I think. In college, though, even getting a letter from an old high school friend telling me she’d had a dream about me recently, as I did at least once, usually wasn’t enough to make me realize maybe I should ask her out instead of examining the letter for philosophical ideas.)

Before going on in future Retro-Journal installments to describe my grown-up professional, philosophical, and social activities, though, we must, in my next installment, discuss a lightning-fast series of other stops, from DC to Seattle and points in between, that forms a sort of stepping-stone path between the Brown years and the New York years and underscores just how flexible a thing one’s future really is, if you’re willing to improvise a little.

48

The following takes place from no later than Feb. 12 through March 30, 2008:

Sutherland to Serve 48 Days for Drunk Driving

You Too Could Be a Stupid President Someday

Tonight’s Lolita Bar debaters (on the topic of the military and peace) are interesting, among other reasons, in that they’ve both worked for people who ran for president. Sarah Federman worked for the Clintons, famous for adjusting their positions to boost their popularity. John Carney worked for Pat Buchanan, who is not famous for that reason (indeed, the least accurate political prediction I ever made — on a website edited by J.R. Taylor that went on to be absorbed into Playboy.com, oddly enough — was probably my 2000 claim that Buchanan would use his newfound populism as an excuse to moderate his views and thus pick up votes). Not coincidentally, the Clintons got into the White House (and may do it again) while Buchanan never came close.

And that’s fine, but it’s a reminder that the primaries often start out with the principled, ideological candidates (for good or ill) doing well — and exciting the intellectuals, whether they’re supportive or opposed — and then, to the befuddlement of ideologues like me, the seemingly most amorphous, doubletalking, and/or bland candidates somehow rising to the top. Ideologues on both sides thus spend the year or so of the primary process thinking, “Well, the public didn’t pick my A candidate, but maybe they’ll at least pick my B choice…no, they didn’t but at least I can hope they pick C…oh, no, they’re not going to pick F are they? Why? This can’t be happening, though I guess he’s still better than the other party…sort of.” I had only just started watching Steve Forbes — who himself wasn’t quite libertarian enough for me — back around late 1998 or early 1999 when a Republican activist friend of mine first said that George W. Bush would “obviously” be the GOP nominee, and since he wasn’t then the sort of politician who intellectuals paid any attention to or who seemed to be of any particular ideological interest, I was taken aback. Then she explained to me how impressive a state-by-state “operation” Bush had even back then and I was reminded that philosophy has little to do with it.

A neat trick to pull off, if you want to be president, is to be sufficiently unprincipled that you can claim to believe — by an amazing coincidence — whatever is politically expedient while being sufficiently warm that you can emote convincingly about each position that you pick. Huckabee insists (for now, during the primary stage) he is a “principled conservative,” but by an amazing coincidence, despite a barely-articulated philosophy, he has been led to believe that (popular) conservative positions such as support for gun rights, border enforcement, Bible “inerrancy,” and opposition to the IRS are true and that (popular or at least popular in strategically valuable places) liberal positions such as environmental regulation, more education spending, farm subsidies, and taxing other people are also true. If conservatives have been widely disappointed by Bush’s performance, despite the warnings we had that he would be mushy on many issues, they shouldn’t be naive enough to think they’d be happy with a President Huckabee.

But he comes across as warm and easy-going, which may be all that matters. In fact, regardless of what survey respondents are telling callers about their reasons for suddenly liking Huckabee — such as the fact that he was a minister — I’d be willing to bet, if we had telepathy and could ever know why people really develop their political preferences, that the funny ad where he’s endorsed by Chuck Norris would be found to be key. That’s just not the sort of thing one admits during a survey — though I’ve long said that one of America’s most conservative and most libertarian traits is our fondness for the action-movie ethos that says you mind your own business until physically threatened and then shoot back, so there’s no shame in following Chuck Norris’s lead. It’s just not the sort of thing people are prepared to articulate, intellectuals having so rarely expounded upon and defended this ethos — aside from the aforementioned J.R. Taylor, of course.

So I like Huckabee being “Chuck Norris-approved,” but the thought, for instance, of having the first president (at least in the modern era, and despite Bush’s openness to discussing intelligent design) to reject evolution is troubling — he was one of the three GOP candidates to raise his hand when asked if he held that position, though he clarified/waffled with a God-plus-evolution position later, probably not the last clarifying/waffling we’ll see Huckabee do.

The press and the left, I would expect, will not forget Huckabee’s anti-Darwinianism, but as I fear politicians are increasingly aware, the public has so little grasp of science that there’s barely any downside to taking unscientific positions if those positions are important to a few of your constituents (note that even on the topics ostensibly related to his background as a minister, I do not for a moment assume that Huckabee’s position arises from pure conviction, nor should you). And it’s not just the U.S. public that’s apathetic about science, despite what you sometimes hear — Michael Malice, who by the way will be next month’s speaker at Lolita Bar (on January 2), linked to a video of a big French audience being unsure whether the Sun orbits the Earth or vice versa, a relatively simple concept compared to evolution — and a side effect of people being ignorant in general, as Chris Nugent reminds me with this (non-science-related) clip of a former American Idol star answering a geography question [UPDATE 12/6/07: And, for completeness's sake, here is Miss Teen South Carolina on geography, e-mailed to me by Reid Mihalko].

(What really baffles me about the French audience — which I’m sure is no more ignorant on the question than a U.S. audience would be — is not so much that many of them think the Sun orbits us but that they presumably don’t think the Moon does — perhaps they’ve been watching too much Space: 1999, beautiful and fast-paced though that 2001-influenced opening sequence is, and a marked improvement over the interestingly similar opening from producer Gerry Anderson’s older show, UFO, which now looks a bit like the Austin Powers version of Space: 1999. I owe Gerry Anderson a great deal: not only did he inspire me to plan a party to celebrate September 13, 1999 — which I ultimately canceled in favor of just having people go to Liz Braswell’s separately-planned Space: 1999 party, clear evidence I know nerds — but he is also the man behind my favorite show from childhood, Thunderbirds, which to my mind, thirty-four years after I first saw it, and over forty years after it aired, still has the best opening sequence in TV history.)

In any case, in this year’s variation on the usual primary-season decline in hopes and principles, I may well look back on early 2008 and think that my thoughts went something like: “Ron Paul! But if that’s not catching on, maybe Thompson — oh, I mean Giuliani, who of the three appears to be the still-viable one [and at this point, Eric Dondero gets overly excited]…oh no, I mean Romney, if I can stomach him…wait — Huckabee? This can’t be happening…” and so on until Hillary or something even worse is securely nestled in the Oval Office, and everyone I know is saying, “Well, this wasn’t my first choice, but we’ll see what happens.”

A thought that might spare intellectuals such disappointments and disillusionment in the future — or just drive them to suicide: I saw a speech by pollster Frank Luntz, and he argued that intellectuals need to get over their naive belief that the candidate’s positions matter to the public. His extensive surveying of focus groups suggests that the “Would you want to have a beer with this candidate?” personality test is by far a greater predictor of popularity, since the public can’t really keep track of even the simplest list of candidate positions anyway (and words suggestive of strong ideological positions — such as “privatize” — tend to alarm the focus groups, while words so broadly popular as to be near-meaningless, such as “family” and “work” and “democracy” are very, very popular). Both Huckabee and Hillary have learned not to get too hung up on the consistent-positions thing (Huckabee having raised taxes in Arkansas but railed against the IRS on the campaign trail, for instance), but he is generally thought to have an edge on her in the warmth department, so maybe we’ll have a President Huckabee yet, evolution help us all.

Demagoguery, Duran Duran, Elton John, and the Ideal Length

I have a lot of sympathy for Samuel Beckett’s obsession with the question of when to stop writing or speaking, of how to know when — if ever — you’ve said enough to sum things up aptly, or whether we’re doomed to keep blathering and uttering little snippets of half-meaning without really conveying the most important points.

He was mainly interested in art and emotion, but the same goes in spades for scientific and political controversies, obviously. I’m taking a brief break while putting the finishing touches on a piece meant to sum up nanotech in 3,000 words, and I see a link on Drudge to a story about CNN’s Broken Government being threatened with legal action (as most TV news shows probably should be with great regularity) for misleadingly labeling a fairly mainstream political group a “fringe militia” and for using bits of an interview with the group’s representative out of context, which is essentially how all TV news is created (with “heroes” and “villains” for a story chosen in advance of the relatively ornamental fact-gathering and those people/characters even framed and lit to subtly remind viewers who’s on which “side” — start watching for it if you don’t believe me).

Even when one means well and hopes to represent everyone/everything accurately, though (as I always strove to when I was in TV news, contrary to one sniping article in the late, unlamented Brill’s Content — as biased as any venue it criticized — by a writer named Ted Rose who went from journalism to setting up deals whereby mainstream businesses prove their green credentials by funding wind farms), there’s never time to squeeze in every footnote and counter-counter-argument imaginable, just as there’s no time at a party to convince someone who has barely heard of your political philosophy that he should adopt it after hearing a thirty-second explanation (which runs counter to what he’s been thinking twenty-four hours a day for forty years). Yet plenty of people will still demand the thirty-second explanation and then get angry when you fail to persuade them.

•••

So what’s the correct course of action? Do what most sane people do and never talk about politics or religion? Write long books that may be true but never get read? Write short articles or blog entries that risk becoming brief cheap shots? Give up on argument and just run for office instead?

My five-pronged solution right now is:

1. stick to objective scientific standards at the day job

2. blog with humor — and Responses enabled — by night

3. work on a book (Conservatism for Punks) that itself will not answer all questions but will answer many (and will address the issue raised in this blog entry at greater length, since the book will be all about the tension between long-term stability and immediacy, between richness and radical breaks)

4. socially gather with politically likeminded folk once a month to breathe the pleasant air of an environment where people can agree or disagree without feeling the pressure of having to prove which side they’re on (I’m reminded of my friend and fellow Phillips Fellow Nick Slepko’s belief that ideas spread through open-ended social networks rather than rational argument, an idea that seems increasingly relevant in an era of social-networking sites and unphilosophical distractions; as it happens, Nick may attend next month’s gathering, on the night of Jan. 16, of the so-called Manhattan Project of which I write, so if he meets enough nice people there, perhaps he can be enlisted to some new cause or opinion — and if I really, really enjoy myself at this week’s Food for Thought gathering and next week’s NYSalon event, maybe you’ll find effusive praise of environmentalists or British post-Marxists creatively incorporated into this site later in the month)

5. and, of course, host monthly live debates at Lolita Bar (like the one this coming Wednesday, 8pm, between a Clintonite hawk and a Buchananite dove), but even if hearing two sides beats hearing only one, it might be argued that shoehorning issues into two sides — when the topic might be better served by dividing it into seventeen — does violence to the truth.

I had an otherwise pleasant date more or less fall apart early in the year over the question of whether even trying to turn a complex social issue into a two-sided debate is appropriate (a question that someone who hosts monthly debates can be expected to have a personal stake in). My date was anti-debate (again, for anti-reductionist rather than dogmatic reasons) but didn’t see this as reason to soften her own positions or to treat mine as remotely plausible, of course (this is sort of a subtler, more sophisticated version of the “I’m completely open-minded about everything, but what you’re saying offends and shocks me even if half the country agrees with you” attitude common among the liberal-yet-ostensibly-apolitical folk who may well be the majority of the population in New York City, or at least common in media/intellectual circles — most of them, like my ill-fated date, genuinely nice people).

•••

But if methods of rational persuasion and debate fail us, there is always the far more popular solution of outright demagoguery. Indeed, it’s not clear that democracy can avoid degenerating into rule by demagogues — or that TV discussion shows about politics, if they are to maintain their ratings, can avoid devolving into shouting matches over the long haul (unless the whole population gets smarter, which I think can’t happen absent genetic engineering or cybernetic implants, though school choice would certainly help — advocacy of that third approach being the thing that alienated the aforementioned date).

As long as the flashy and the passionate (or the scary) is, for hardwired biological reasons, more attention-grabbing than the nuanced and cautious, what hope do we have? Will the Putins and the Chavezes and the Ahmadinejads, who talk tough but fear competition, always tend to rally the mob behind them — conveying their own fear of loss of control to the ever-paranoid mob by scapegoating foreign threats and internal traitors? Will it always be easier, say, to summon a phalanx of savages who want to murder a teacher for letting children name a teddy bear Mohammed than to get people to sit still long enough to absorb the long, rational argument for atheism they so desperately and manifestly need to prevent that sort of thing happening over and over again?

We may have little choice but to create intellectuals who recognize their demagogic power without abusing it, which will require a degree of elite moral self-discipline that we do not currently possess and that neither democracy, market pressures, nor religious passions tend naturally to create (instead spawning triangulators, advertising, and preachers, respectively), and which tradition is too slow and calcified to deploy on an urgent case-by-case basis. This is, to put it mildly, a big problem — maybe the biggest.

•••

If we nonetheless hope to go some sort of populist route, can we — should we — create a world where calming lessons about the importance of tolerance, individual rights, respect for property, and thoughtfulness itself are somehow, paradoxically, conveyed through media with the flashiness of, say, this quintessential 80s video by Duran Duran (or this similar-looking one by Elton John, one of the very few of his I like, which may in turn have been influenced by this older Rod Stewart number, in which, not coincidentally, the mob runs through the streets [but in a good way, naturally, which was not always the case with the century-ago movement that gave the song its name])?

Anyone who is inclined to think that passionate pop appeals to become politically active are plainly and simply a good idea must keep in mind how many of those Rock the Vote spokesmusicians turned out to be non-voters or even unregistered to vote — how easy would it be for one of those artists to become a dangerously ignorant — and very popular — demagogue?

And while I’m trying to second-guess the hip media elites and perhaps exaggerating their influence, is this parody of the hip New York neighborhood of Williamsburg, brought to my attention by Elizabeth Terrell of the National Taxpayers Union, fair, and does fairness even matter when you’re dealing with comedy? I think it sometimes does (even though I’m probably far more tolerant of “offensive” humor than a lot of people would be, recognizing the need for artists to have creative and experimental latitude) — but surely the hipsters are fair game.

Finally, is it better to raise these questions in a 1,500-word blog entry or a much shorter blog entry, since people or busy — or await the chance to write an even more lengthy treatise? Or just shut up about the whole thing? Like Beckett, I’m not sure (and here, ideally, there’d be a footnote explaining that I’m not saying I’m like Beckett, etc., etc.). I’m still hosting that debate on Wednesday, regardless, if you can make it.

UPDATE 12/3/07: Chavez lost the vote on revising the Venezuelan constitution to allow him to run for president indefinitely, so there are limits — and teaching Venezuelan school children to chant “Fatherland, socialism, or death!” may be beyond them — which is somewhat reassuring.  Even better would be a system where nothing the majority votes for affects the rest of the population, of course.

Rochester, NH: Visit My Grandma, Take Hostages at Hillary HQ

I can’t help but take something akin to hometown pride in seeing that the hostage situation being described on the news as I type this is occurring at Hillary Clinton campaign HQ in the cozy little New Hampshire town where my father grew up and where is located the house in which he did so, described fondly in an earlier blog entry and only recently sold by my ninetysomething grandmother as she moved into an apartment.

Needless to say, while I am pro-Grandma, I am opposed to hostage-taking, even at Hillary HQ (one man, who I hope will not turn out to be a part of the New Hampshire-focused libertarian movement called the Free State Project, claims to have a bomb strapped to him and is holding two people, from what I hear at this time). I am reminded, though, of an argument that Tom Wolfe (I think it was) once made about why people, whether New Hampshirite or Iranian, sane or insane, might do something as stupid as take hostages: not so much to have their specific demands met (in this case, a request for an audience with Hillary, as if she’s reluctant to speak to New Hampshire residents right now) but rather to assert their control over a little slice of the Earth, even for a short time, after what has often been years of feeling like they get pushed around all the time. For those few glorious hours until the SWAT snipers take you out, you’re in charge of your own little kingdom.

Those tax protesters who recently found themselves in a stand-off with police in that same state may have felt a similar rush, but of course tax-resisters (who feel taken hostage by withholding rather than feeling like holding hostages) have my sympathies in a way that hostage-takers, no matter their cause, never will.

More admirable is the simple, peaceful assertion, also popular with a variety of fringe characters of varying philosophies, that you are now a tiny sovereign nation. Jesse Walker of Reason magazine has an amusing review (fittingly, in Pat Buchanan’s decentralization-promoting nationalist magazine American Conservative) of a new Lonely Planet travel guide to Micronations, from the two-building independent nation of the Knights of Malta in (surrounded by?) Italy to a minuscule (and thus far not militarily-crushed) plot of land calling itself Molossia in Nevada (Walker also wrote the Reason article that alerted me to the existence of the neat documentary Off the Grid about other Americans who have decided to find their autonomy out in the southwestern desert — and I’m turning in an article partly about Scottish nanotech to him to edit within days, which I was thinking about calling “In a Big Country, Wee Particles,” which is a little ironic, since Scotland is itself a hotbed of secessionist sentiment, despite being bound to the rest of the UK by numerous common cultural practices, such as the deep-fried Mars Bar [brought to my attention by {CORRECTION: someone other than} Marcia Baczynski]).

Perhaps the most inspiring micronation of all, though, is Strong Badia, and one can never hear its rousing national anthem too many times.

•••

Secession of any large parts of the U.S. seems unlikely these days, but I’d be happy, of course, with a much greater emphasis on governmental decentralization, which is one reason I like Constitution/federalism-stressing prez candidate Ron Paul so much (and indeed, more than Rudy Giuliani, as clarified in the comments thread of this recent blog entry, despite the fun item you may have seen about my Giuliani sympathies on MainstreamLibertarian.com — I was visible in its [physically] rightmost column dressed in anarchist black and somewhat hastily referred to as a Giuliani supporter).

Aiding the Paul cause with homemade video ads are people like my friend Bretigne Shaffer and a young comedy folk singer (the latter pointed out to me by Dimitri Cavalli). These videos may not seem as slick as some of the (currently) more popular candidates’ — but they are much more rational, despite a few similarly anarchic themes, than this clip of a very, very angry Tokyo mayoral candidate (also pointed out to me by Marcia Baczynski). “Give me your malicious vote” indeed. If only this guy were allowed to ask a question at the next debate between YouTube and the presidential candidates (I think YouTube is well ahead in the polls, by the way — thanks in part to oddities like this marionette video for the song “Hello Everyone and Welcome to the Earth,” pointed out to me during the last Manhattan Project gathering by DJ, music historian, and arbiter of taste Irwin Chusid).

I, of course, don’t agree with the common charge that Ron Paul supporters are crazy — any more than I think all Perot supporters (like my parents, for a short time in early 1992) were crazy — just less polished, predictable, mainstream, and “Establishment” than the supporters of the blander candidates. But my fellow Ron Paul supporters can be amusing in their outsiderness, as when one sent out an angry mass-e-mail this week about a small Ron Paul gathering being asked (in perfect accordance with property rights, it should be noted) to exit a Starbucks in Chattanooga even though it was very cold outside. If this is the start of the crackdown, it seems pretty mild — then again, one could raise interesting philosophical questions about whether people addicted to the mocha frappuccino are truly free to avoid Starbucks.

UPDATE 11/30/07 4:47pm: Just to tie it all together, Jesse Walker (the reviewer of Micronations) now tells me that Eric Dondero (the guy who declares me a Giuliani supporter) reported that some guy who knew the hostage-taker went on the air to explain that the hostage-taker has in fact been involved in the libertarian movement and is also mentally ill. Lowering my PR hopes, now I just ask that he not do a Ron Paul endorsement.

Retro-Journal: Seniors and Conspiracy Theories, Late 1990

There are times that encourage conspiracy theories — times of our lives (or rather, I suspect, psychological developmental stages) as well as points in history.

College kids, or perhaps people in their early twenties or so generally, love conspiracies — perhaps because the brain, having newly turned its attention to the confusing kaleidoscope of world events, is especially eager to spot connections among those events. Or perhaps because that’s the age when people start to become more likely to develop conditions like paranoid schizophrenia. Of course, the college environment — knowing that you are part of an institution much larger than yourself that ties you, like a Celestial Order of Water Buffalo member or what have you, to both the pranks and the philosophy treatises of students long dead — is a great incubator of conspiracist thinking in itself. The idea of being part of the Secret Society of Something or Other is very tantalizing at that age. No surprise, then, that it was sometime around senior year that I started reading things like Robert Anton Wilson’s conspiracy theory-parodying (and anarchist) sci-fi work, Illuminatus and saw a performance by the obscure Church of the Sub-Genius-inspired band Slack Hammer (on top of that, as noted in my prior Retro-Journal entry, we were all watching the conspiracy-filled Twin Peaks in 1990, and some of us kept watching even after Joan Chen got turned into a doorknob; with Twin Peaks, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld all in their first seasons, it wasn’t a bad year for TV).

Then, too, my college clique, full of libertarians and comedy writers (halfway to being a real subversive cabal anyway), was living at a point in history when an Old Order of Things — the Cold War — was suddenly absent and a flurry of new possibilities apparent. Such times have always been inspirational for conspiracy theorists — as during the eighteenth century, when the aristocracy was waning and rationalist theorists were waxing.

And speaking of waxing and waning, senior year was also when, by my count, at least four comedy writers from the Brown Film Bulletin had crushes on its editrix, Christine Caldwell, who also wrote the (libertarian) Brown Daily Herald column “Wax and Wane” (she later cleverly called her column “Light, Sweet, and Crude,” around the time of the first Gulf War and much oil talk). Inspired by a joke conspiracy theory chart I drew for the Bulletin explaining how all of pop culture can be traced back to Prince (Kevin Bacon not at that time having become so dominant as the traditional hub in such games), Christine at one point constructed a “happiness theory” chart, meant to indicate where all the amorous attentions of various members of our extended circle should be directed so as to harmonize all desires — an eminently utilitarian project. And she went out with fellow Bulletineer Dave Whitney for most of the next three years, despite graduation, geographic separation, and other difficulties.

•••

Dave (who plays the guitar and has been in a few amateur rock bands), for his part, was inspired to create a chart of the rock n’ roll conspiracy, showing how various bands were connected to each other. I helped provide a link between classic rock and alternative rock bands by pointing out that Tina Turner had done a song with the Fixx — “Better Be Good to Me.” (It’s obvious if you listen — really listen for a change.) Dave and I had Martha Nussbaum’s “Philosophy of the Novel” class that semester and agreed that art sometimes captures the complexity of emotions and psychology in ways that dry philosophical and scientific explanations sometimes can’t. (I’d heard that Nussbaum converted to Judaism for a guy who she later broke up with, which, it seemed to me, ought to be an even more embarrassing experience for a philosophy professor, whose beliefs are ostensibly rational and well thought-out, than it would be for the rest of us.)

In any case, alcohol (the profane) and a secret, un-p.c. allegiance to God (the sacred) helped Christine through those emotionally turbulent times, which makes it fitting that now, seventeen years later, as a history professor with an interest in things theological, she is working on a book about the history of wine as an element of religion. The wine part I might have predicted. Given that Christine is not exactly the same kind of nerd I am (she finds They Might Be Giants annoying, as she first revealed that year, and she would claim a few years later that sci-fi by definition cannot be great canonical literature), I think her lowest ebb emotionally, when it was not yet clear if she and Dave would connect, may have come when she said that joining the campus’s nerd-filled Fantasy Gaming Society was “lookin’ better all the time.” It never came to that.

Beer — a beverage containing alcohol — also helped the atheist Caldwell, Holly, summon the courage to flirt with a handsome freshman alternative rock aficionado in her dorm named Jake Harrison, and from this shameful, cradle-robbing beginning arose a relationship that has led to marriage and two children, so while the empirical evidence provided by the two Caldwells cannot answer the question of whether belief in God or atheism is a more successful formula for life, the evidence does suggest that alcohol helps everyone. According to my journal, which is sketchy on details around this time, Dave was a road for Halloween that year, while Holly, inspired by the third and final semester of Gluck’s European Intellectual History class, went to the same party as “a profound sense of cultural crisis.”

Dave was the practical one, obviously — prone to simple, direct pronouncements then and now such as, to take examples from just one night that semester, “I’m psyched for the future…I want to have really big bookshelves…Man!! My shoes are so comfortable!” He exuded happiness, warmth, and confidence (and still does), yet during the tumultuous period when it was unclear if he and Christine would bond, the Caldwells briefly came to refer to Dave’s house as “the epicenter of evil.” (I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.)

That semester saw me cast as “Phil” on the Brown campus TV soap opera Sob Story, though I have no recollection whatsoever of whether any of my scenes aired.

•••

In the fall 1990 semester of the aforementioned Gluck class, we briefly touched on what I still think is the most vexing philosophical question and perhaps the only one that humanity may well never answer, raised by Heidegger: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And no, calling part of the something “God” doesn’t really eliminate the quandary, though for many people, that dodge seems to be satisfying.

Even Heidegger longed for easy answers sometimes, which is probably why he was a Nazi, like a few of the campus deconstructionists’ other heroes (there’s a thin line, perhaps, between the decon desire to peel away layers of civilization and the dark desire to wear black and learn how to harness occult forces the normals can’t grasp, using some form of Gnostic mumbo-jumbo — or maybe that’s just another conspiracy theory). The next (and final) semester, I’d throw a Heidegger-mocking scene into the terrible film I made when I finally got into a film production class, for which I’d taken that deconstructionist theory class as a prerequisite three years earlier. The scene just showed Scott Nybakken’s face, his mouth agape, as I intoned the narration “And now, a direct confrontation with Authentic Being.” I’ll bet Germans would find it funny.

Speaking of metaphysical questions, I somehow found time along with my homework to do some leisure reading that semester that included skeptical pro-science materialist Paul Kurtz’s The Transcendental Temptation and rationalist libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism (mainly because it turned out to be shorter than Human Action — the most important text, which I still haven’t read, of the “Austrian school” of economics — when I looked them both up in the library). The Kurtz and Mises books are still a good summary of my philosophy (toss in a David Bowie CD and a tape of Star Wars and you pretty much have the whole story). I probably should have been giving thought to the slightly more practical economic question “What will I do for a living after graduation?” I figured it’d be publishing or writing or, you know, some sort of, like, media type thing. But there was still one more semester to go before having to endure a direct, authentic confrontation with that particular problem.

In the meantime, there was that weird, distinctively senior-year sense of biding one’s time and thus being slightly bored even while anxiously seeking out things you knew you’d never get the chance to do again. Bulletineer Jay Burkholder was probably giving voice to that strange mixture of apathy and frustration when, just prior to his own graduation the previous semester, he said, “Do you realize everything is mediocre?” He was also the first person I knew to predict that pop music would all someday blend into rap-metal, which back then was as bizarre as saying that hippies and punks would someday get along or that the two Germanies would reunite.

Rudy's Wrongs

Yesterday, in plugging the debate I’m hosting next week about the military, I explained that military and security matters don’t really decide my vote, so I don’t have a strong Bush-vs.-Paul or Giuliani-vs.-Paul preference on that basis alone. Let’s assume you’re with me that far.

Lest, though, any libertarians think that casting military/security matters aside should still leave me preferring Giuliani to Paul, since Giuliani arguably has a better chance of actually implementing his agenda, I have to say that (even aside from the sometimes self-defeating and self-reinforcing quality of such strategic arguments) we should keep in mind that Giuliani is not merely a watered-down libertarian of some sort. Though I do like him in many ways, he is also the man who, as mayor for half of the sixteen years I’ve now lived in this city:

•Famously belittled a man on-air for objecting to anti-ferret regulations
•Vowed to start enforcing anti-jaywalking regulations in Manhattan, which is arguably more insane than invading Iraq
•Intervened against public art funding not in a principled way — as by announcing at the very start of his term that he’d cut all funding, or for that matter even announcing in a principled way that that he intended to be a consistent theocratic censor, which would at least have made him predictable — but by swooping in out of the blue over one rabble-irking dung-containing picture of the Virgin Mary, as if half the objects in Manhattan aren’t more offensive than that
•Constantly sued his enemies for one thing or another while mayor, a position that should involve fairly thick skin and wide latitude for critics
•Loved the drug war, but then who doesn’t these days (besides Ron Paul)?
•Used zoning laws — bureaucratic, Soviet-like zoning laws — to strong-arm half the porn out of Times Square, as I reported for Reason almost exactly ten years ago
•First made a name for himself, not so unlike autocratic current governor Spitzer, by prosecuting Wall Street crimes in a showboating, heavy-handed fashion (few things are less libertarian than cuffing insider traders to make the nab look tough, as if insider traders — who shouldn’t be arrested in the first place — are likely to use their free hand to go for a jackknife)
•Cracked down on guns — though I like the fact that national political ambitions have forced him to massage that one as “OK locally, not suitable federally,” an accidental approximation of the correct, even Ron Paul-like decentralist position on such matters.

Still, less authoritarian by the economic measures that often matter most than Hillary and more libertarian in some ways than the other GOP candidates aside from Paul. So if it’s a New York series, er, general election, and Rudy rather than Ron is the GOP standard-bearer, Rudy gets my vote.

As for what I do in the unlikely event Ron Paul jumps ship and runs as a Libertarian Party candidate: well, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it? And not just to a few cranks like me, given the narrow margins that we all know can decide general elections. Rudy, in the unlikely event you’re listening: if you dominate by convention time, it seems like it might still be wise to placate the Ron Paul faction by making him Treasury Secretary or something. (But catch me, and the non-leftist Manhattan Project club, in the back alcove of the second floor of Merchants NY bar/restaurant, 62nd and 1st, tonight from 6:30 on, if you want to discuss all that. You probably won’t be alone in having an opinion.)