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Notes Of A Moderate: Thoughts On The Eve Of The Election (1 of 3)

As the election approaches, I have decided to write, in this semi-public forum, about politics. My goal is not to convince anyone of anything. My goal is, as a citizen, to impose some rigor on my own thoughts by exposing them to public scrutiny.

I am a moderate. Since that risks meaninglessness, I would define it this way:  I believe that conservatives underestimate the role of government in creating our security. I believe that liberals underestimate the role of business in creating our prosperity.

I am also moderate in that I think ideas from across the political spectrum have contributed to a society which is better today than it was a century ago.  I see political history not as a battle between good and evil, but a process of experience and correction.

From Teddy Roosevelt and his contemporaries, we have a progressive income tax, anti-trust laws, and the start of regulations to make sure the places we work and the products we consume are safe.   From Franklin Roosevelt, we have a willingness of government to carry our wounded and to mitigate the worst effects of economic catastrophe.  From the Sixties liberals—let’s say, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, the anti-war movement (and, I would add, the more thoughtful younger Vietnam-era officers such as Colin Powell)–we have a cluster of deep reforms: the Civil Rights Acts, consumer protection and environmental laws, the end of the Vietnam War and ongoing suspicion of our messier foreign interventions.

From the Reagan-era conservatives, we have an aversion to depressive marginal tax rates, a suspicion of those forms of government assistance that create more dependence than hope, a conviction that capitalism is broadly preferable to collectivism, and a heightened respect for the military and other traditional institutions.   The “we” is obviously most tenuous here.  Liberals don’t agree; conservatives may go much further.

On the other hand, Bush has added nothing to our collective sense of who we are when we are at our best.  It is not necessary to presume bad faith to draw this conclusion. I believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Rove did what they thought was best for the country. But they are that most dangerous thing: Christians who seem to think they are incapable of sin.  They tried for eight years and they failed. I don’t want anything they have to offer:  Preemptive wars,  huge deficits, lax oversight, tax breaks and other largesse to the rich, an aggressively interpreted war powers clause, closed-off decision-making, slanderous campaigning, and a smirking public presence.

Well, almost nothing: E and I have talked about how Bush is a genuinely tolerant man who appointed a Black Secretary of State, a Black Woman Secretary of State, and a Hispanic Attorney General. 

That, as the election approaches, is where my sense of our political history rests. I want much of the last century. I want almost nothing of the past eight years.

Extending the Grasp: The Art of Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext

“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped . . . “

James Wood sounds this clarion call on the last page of How Fiction Works and like the most urgent of such calls, it was floating around in the culture before Wood sounded it.

Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot was published before How Fiction Works but seems to start where Wood left off.  Not surprisingly, The Art of Subtext has a subtext: it feels like it’s really about how fiction might get the distinctive weirdness of contemporary life down on paper. It’s about the importance of listening to our narcissism, of noticing how the inarticulate create meaning, of locating the information actually conveyed by information overload,  of decoding faces in a culture both politically correct and cosmetically intense.  

Of course, Baxter acknowledges, “the topic I am dealing with is too large and too inclined to polemic, possibly, to be dealt with sensibly.” He is talking about the problem of describing faces in fiction in a time of photoshop and botox, but there is a similar ambition to his other concerns here. 

There is also a similar humility to his strategies: he uses telling personal anecdotes to start most chapters and studies particular scenes to ground and focus what could become abstract. So it’s actually meaningful when he does generalize: “ . . . the great fallacy of most written dialog in our time is that all the characters are listening.” 

The result is a rigor that goes far beyond rules. 

This and That . . . . and That and This . . . and This About That and That About This

I have stopped viewing this blog as an obligation, but I feel an obligation to announce that I have stopped viewing this blog as an obligation.  Making a living is an obligation, being a halfway informed citizen is an obligation, working on my novel is an obligation to some slightly embarassing sense of vocation, spending time with people (and dogs) is, if not an obligation,  a better and more restorative use of my time.  I notice that most of my friends with personal blogs are posting much less often--at least if the blog is not somehow linked to a greater project.

A Phone Call

Someone called me today, introduced himself and asked me if I knew x. I had a little trouble placing the name or discerning the motive of the caller, so I answered, “Yes, a little. We’ve worked on a few projects together.”  Suspicion tinctures my phone interactions with strangers. The person the caller mentioned was someone who had worked for the Los Angeles office of a Minnesota client of mine; she was on the periphery of the solar system of my life, a voice on a few conference calls, a sending address for an email with some background I needed. 

“I’m calling because your name is on her Blackberry. I wanted to let you know that she died.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. There’s a 1-888 number for more information.” He gave it to me.  At first this seemed odd, but then it seemed sensible. It saved this good man, who was doing a favor for her brother, from recounting the details of her death to everyone in her address book.  I can imagine what that might entail: I have 375 names in my contact book, plus 128 linked in contacts and 58 facebook friends, many of which overlap.  If I were to die. E would know which it would be appropriate to call, and which it would be better to email. But this woman died single so there was no one to judge nuances of closeness.

Dialing the 1-888 number, I learned that she suffered a stroke while bicycling in a charity fundraiser. The stroke was a “lingering complication” of an aneurysm she  had suffered two and a half years earlier.  “She had reached her goal of returning to the things she loved:  riding with her friends and helping other people.”   

What He Said

I rarely write about politics because such writing is divisive and fruitless and especially ill-suited to the web. But yesterday I wrote both of my Senators and my Congresswoman, so maybe it is time to write here, too.   It is time for the recreational righteousness and bogus posturing that passes off for politics in this country to stop, at least for long enough to get this deal done.  The substantive details of the rescue are too complicated to go into here, but in an eight minute segment, Jon Stewart absolutely nails the political fecklessness: McCain's posturing, the House Republicans' childishness, the Democrats' self-congratulations on a job not done,  and the preposterousness of everyone taking Rosh Hoshannah off.  "Please mention that to your previous sentence." "What is this? Tee ball? Everyone gets a trophy."  Those sentences are smarter than anything that appear anywhere else on television.

Brian Turner Reading

I have a commitment on Mondays but if you're free consider this reading: 

Iraq war veteran and poet BRIAN TURNER, author of the multiple award-winning collection "Here, Bullet," will read on Monday, September 29, at 7 p.m., at Literary Witnesses, Plymouth Congregational Church, 1900 Nicollet Ave. (at Franklin) in Minneapolis.  The event is free, with plenty of free parking.  A reception and book-signing follow the reading.  Turner will be introduced by ANN IVERSON, Minneapolis poet, teacher and mother of an Iraq-War veteran.

For a review of Turner's book, click here. 

Something Something The Pictures Got Smaller

In this tumultuous world, there was one verity: new suburban movie theaters sucked. The very word “multiplex’ conjured instant images of grease euphemized as buttered topping, the triumph of cost-benefit analysis,  philistinism in a box, theaters with the charm of cattle chutes and the wholesale destruction of everything that made movies magical.  So E and I very reluctantly drove up to Roseville to the new AMC theaters because we wanted to see Ghost Town and it was the closest place it was showing.  But here’s the deal: the new theaters in Rosedale are awesome. The seats are comfortable; they ascend at a steep enough angle so you can see; and the pictures are big and beautiful.  And after seeing the images of Central Park, and the Met, and the Upper East Side, we now totally want to go to New York again .   

The last days of David Foster Wallace | Salon Books

Link: The last days of David Foster Wallace | Salon Books. Valuable insight, also quite heartbreaking.

Sugar Dada

Saw the Flarf reading at the Walker. Dismiss them as retro-Futurists or just annoying if you want.  But after the images of unicorn boners and Grandma's labia (an interesting variation on the school of poetry/memoir some of my friends call 'Grandpa's Hands') , the evening nicely elided from attempted shock to pleasant surprise. (Also have to admit: laughed at the boner and labia poems.) The most legitimately avant thing anyone was doing was grabbing various accidental inventions and touching weirdnesses off the internet. The poor woman who was terrified that her eyes would fall out of her head stays with me.

Flarf-egnugen

This looks really fun. And in a down economy, you cannot beat the price.