The Joy of Failure

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or, what's a heaven for?

Last night, a friend and I watched Dolemite is My Name, a movie about making a movie, Dolemite.  Afterwards we stood outside and smoked a cigarette and my friend wondered where the planets that are in alignment with the moon were.  He's kinda woo-woo and into astrology.  I pointed to the ground to the southwest and said they were set.  'How could I know that?' he asked, and took out his phone to check with an app.  I said that the moon is new, and therefore close to the sun, which had set about five hours earlier, and since it's winter it would be towards the south and not just the west.  We talked whether Venus was on this side of the sun or the far side.  (It's the far side, and I used an app for that.)  He wondered how I could know that.  I recounted the tale of my adventures as an amateur astronomer when I was in high school, of the telescopes I built and used, back in the dark ages when there were no apps for anything.  He was impressed and said that I could have been something, a reference to the theme of the movie about achievement being possible for those who really work for achievements.  I said that I had never wanted to be something, but to know something,

That statement is not completely true.  Like Dante , 'In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.'  For an unfortunately long number of years after high school I tried to be a average American husband/citizen.  Wife.  Kids. Dogs. Cars.  As Zorba would say, 'the whole catastrophe.'  Oddly, perhaps, one of the most satisfying things of that period of my life was a Jeep Wagoneer.  In McLuhan's terms, this was an exceedingly powerful extension of myself, a strong carapace.  But, alas, it was a dominatrix, costing more than I could really afford and being quite unreliable.

But, in my forty-first year, I returned to the path of an aimless wanderer seeking data.  I again made discovering facts and ideas the main occupation of my life rather than seeking 'success."

Of course, I had accumulated a lot of facts and ideas even while I was in servitude to the American dream.  There's data everywhere.  One odd piece of anecdotal data is that when my wife and I broke up, several people expressed their dismay because they thought that we were the happiest couple they knew.  I'm not sure if that meant that we were very good actors or that a lot of other people were miserable in their journeys.

It would take a few more years before I stopped feeling vaguely guilty about not being some thing and comfortable with wanting to understand things.  I supported my habits with a number of quite assorted jobs because that let me know a lot of assorted people whom I would never have met if I had stayed glued to the oculus of a telescope.  (Although now astronomers mostly look at screens much like the one I'm using to look at my 'writing' now.)

I didn't really figure out what I keep trying to do until about six years ago when I had dinner in Fayetteville with a friend from high school whom I had hardly seen since graduation.  He is very successful in his craft, has plenty of work which he enjoys, and has also made several millions of dollars along the way.  He mentioned another of our class mates whom I had found somewhat loathsome, who was now the second richest man in Arkansas.  I felt rather sorry for him.  He still has wretched taste in cigars, and he was only the second richest man.  My dinner friend , who recognized that I had not made any millions but was too polite to mention it even though he insisted on paying the bill, saying he could put it on his expense account, had a question for me.  What did I want my legacy to be.  That has proved to be a very helpful question.  I told him that I didn't particularly want to have a legacy, that in the long view of history most of what we consider are great events and great people are just blips.

But, I have thought about that question a lot, because I realize that I am on a quest that cannot be successful:  I want to understand how things work.  (At the time my friend and I had dinner, I had gone to the University of Arkansas thinking I would learn about quantum physics. Ha. Cue Dick Feynman.) Who knows:  someday human beings may understand how things work, but I certainly don't expect to live that long.  But in the meantime, I am enjoying watching the process.

I am not, however, often impressed by men who leave big legacies.  The cell phone almost certainly have been developed even if Tony Nadell had not nudged Steve Jobs to push Apple in that direction.  The theory of relativity was just waiting for someone like Albert Einstein to connect the dots left by many others whose names and equations are not famous.  And slavery in the United States would almost certainly have ended without Abraham Lincoln allowing the war that killed 620,00 people, a few of whom are buried under the snow on a hill overlooking Fayetteville in the Confederate cemetery.  (There are many more folks buried in the US cemetery, but it isn't nearly so picturesque and doesn't encourage reverie and reflection.)

Now another winter is beginning.  It is certainly far past the middle of the journey of our life.  And by the standards of becoming famous like Dolemite or making astronomical discoveries like Virginia Trimble, someone else who looked into the skies as a kid, I suppose I am a failure.

But, I am insofar as I can figure it out, living my own life.  I don't want to be rich; I have enough money even though perhaps if I were to do my life again I would have realized that I might live a long time and gather up enough gold to live in New York where I could go to the MoMA and the Guggenheim.   But even if I dd, most of my time would be spent the same way it is now in the other corner of the country.  I don't care about being famous. I just want to follow the devices and desires of my own heart, realizing that that will as often as not lead to disappointment and failure as to joy.  But why settle for being the second richest man in Babylon when I can reach for the heavens.

But I do think that I might now wish to have a legacy.  It would be to encourage any kid I meet, whatever age, to live his or her own life and avoid distractions.  Even if that kid is someone I rather loathe and who wants to be the richest man in Babylon.  It's his own life, too.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

My own complicated relationship with Facebook is very much public knowledge.  I was struck again by how weird a thing such a platform is when I opened 'my news feed' to read posts by friends which seemed to me, a boy from the South who was taught that the only proper way to play one's cards is as close to one's chest as possible, to be so personal that I found it embarrassing to read them.  (But of course I did.)

In my own journal I wrote that such posts  seem  more properly to be journal entries than news, and that although perhaps one should always tell nothing but the truth, it is probably neither necessary nor helpful always to tell the whole truth.  Besides, how one sees oneself is seldom truthful.

Also in my news feed was a post saying that Brian Acton, founder of WhatsApp, says to delete Facebook: 'If you want to have ads thrust in your face, go to town.'

When I have wanted to quit Facebook, it has never been about the ads.  The ads are almost always the best content on the platform. Ads are probably, as McLuhan claimed, the only real American art form.  I much prefer them to the angst and anger that so often appears in friends' posts.

More important than their artfulness, I would suggest, is that the adverts are a really useful kind of data about me.  In the great debate about data, I am pretty near the 'no data is private' camp.  I mean, one might like to think that one's Social Security Number is private, but the US government long ago violated the terms of use with which it was introduced, and without sending anyone an email explaining the changes. 

Facebook, Google, Amazon, and I, are all in the business of trading data.  And so are you, dear reader.  Do I need to explain this statement?  I think that I won't for now, but instead present this blog's central thesis:  targeted advertisements are a mirror of one's desires, desires one sometimes even hides from oneself.  They are data that can provide clearer understanding.  But, as is so often true, we want to kill the messenger.  In the famous case of Target sending adverts for items needed by pregnant women, it was Target who was targeted as the meanie.  But the girl who received the adverts was pregnant.

You may have watched, as I did, the Netflix movie The Great Hack, which is billed as some sort of expose of Cambridge Analytica's use of data.  What did Cambridge Analytica really do that was so heinous?  They recognized the real desires of a nation which was intent on hiding those desires from themselves.  CNN had told us that we were kind and gentle, which got more of us to watch, so they could charge more for their adverts.

Ah yes, but advertising is turning us into a nation of consumers, right?  I was amused by the coincidence of two posts on one friend's news feed. 'We are no longer bound together by religion, but by vacuous consumption addictions' followed close on the heels of a quote my friend attributed to Upton Sinclair about the difficulty of a man's understanding something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.  My friend is a priest.  So far as I know, the number of five star reviews of iPhones by verified purchasers is rather higher than the number of any reviews of heaven by verified purchasers.

Of course we are consumers.  A great accomplishment of the modern industrial society is that not only do we have enough food to consume (remember, those who don't consume starve) but that we have many other things to consume as well.  Great books, trashy art, skinny jeans, ear buds, dildos, soy milk, hymnals, iPhones, the list could go on for a very long time.


So, dear reader, the next time you have an ad thrust in your face, ask not what the ad is saying about Facebook, but what the ad is saying about you.  (Insert here your preferred quote about the value of truth.)

The Election Cults

The feardoms that are US presidential politics are upon us again.  It's a time when I stop following a lot of my Facebook friends because their posts are often embarrassingly uninformed and fearful.  I follow one Trumpeteer and one Berning Man just to remind me what it's like out there, but mostly I try to ignore as much hyperbole as possible.

I have been reminded once again of the depths of the fear that can be used to control us by watching what may be one of my favourite seasons of American Horror Story, Cult.  (My other favourite is Roanoke .)  I find it particularly intriguing that I am getting around to it as the nation descends into impeachment frenzy and anti-frenzy.  I confess that although it seems that Mr. Trump certainly did at least try to abuse the power of the office in Ukraine,  and attempted to violate the Constitution, Mr. Biden did as well.  There's no surprise there.  Almost none of the recent presidential candidates seem to consider the Constitution as more than a hindrance to their desire for imperial power.

Actually, the far more worrying aspect of the Trump presidency to me has been his nationalism, which like most of his 'policies' has been very poorly thought out.  He has done great damage to American companies who would benefit from the growing Chinese market.  Is China a less-than-perfect society?  Of course.  But it has been the inroads of international market capitalism which have made the most improvements in the conditions of the Chinese people.  Nixon may have been a crook, but he was at least a smart crook. So, while Trump tries to get the United States to build a wall, China is building Belts and Roads.

So, I want to make a full disclosure of what I would want in a candidate, and who is the constituency that I think is most important for US policy. 

I don't give diddly squat about national health care.  The United States are not very united, and with the great disparity in thought and feelings in the country, that seems just another great divider, and one which  would only add to the economic fragility of a country that doesn't even have the leadership to make a budget.  You like the health care of Sweden?  Fine.  But remember that Sweden's population falls between that of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, each of which have the resources for such care.  You worried about immigrants taking American's jobs.  Fine, but remember that the jobs taken by immigrants are almost always those progressives keep trying to legislate out of existence by raising wages, and which are being automated/roboted out of existence by technical progress.  The real crisis in jobs is not who occupies them but that the jobs themselves are changing far more rapidly than we are willing to acknowledge or know how to prepare for.

The person I care most about in the US elections is that scrawny street kid in the photo.  He is the one for whom I want there to be better opportunities, better education, better health care.  And the data, the facts of world history, make it very clear that global trade, multi-national capitalism, free markets, the very things that most of the US presidential candidates make the enemies and rail against, are the forces that really improve the situation for that kid.  And they are the forces that fuel real liberation of women, and of men, too.   I would gladly trade my medicare and border protection for that kid's future.