The Bernard Maddoff scandal didn't shock me. Ponzi schemes go way back, and they'll be with us forever. Regarding the dynamics of this particular case, J.K. Galbraith nailed it when he wrote, years ago, of the tendency to confuse good manners and good tailoring with integrity and intelligence (thanks, Economist). Maddoff made hay with his reputation, but I've known people - been people - with reputation for certain expertise, and noticed that there are no rigorous sanctioning bodies for such things. The reputation-making system can be played (see this Slog entry where I speculate that I could have invented every restaurant in my first book and garnered the same good reviews). In fact, the foundational credo of Chowhound is that one mustn't trust so-called authorities, who are so often naked emperors. Better to go out and do one's own diligence. A skeptical, intrepid attitude helps a person avoid Ponzi schemes as well as bad pizza.
My take was that Maddoff was, at some point, a guy too proud to admit that his vaunted fund was sinking, and who went Ponzi to keep up appearances. This is how many Ponzi schemes come to be, when managers scramble to hide apparent losses under new money as a temporary measure until luck improves and tides turn. It can't work - it never works - but desperate people and shnooks sometimes try. I figured Maddoff had gotten sucked in, and figured he could keep the wheels turning forever...as he nearly did. It wasn't villainous greed or a heart full of larceny so much as an egotistical need to save face and remain The Great Maddoff: big shot, at any expense. I guess the baleful tone of Maddoff's reported confession led me to this interpretation.
But this shocked me. Apparently, when it was all over, and his friends knew they'd lost their life savings and dozens of charities (some of whose boards Maddoff sat on) had gone bust, he was desperately scribbling out $173 million in checks to family members. If the guy had a mustache, he'd have twirled it.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Doc Martin
Since my IT Crowd tip seemed to be a hit, I'll hip you to my favorite current British TV series: Doc Martin (better link: its Wikipedia entry).
The set-up is this: a snooty hotshot London surgeon, likely with a touch of Aspergers, to boot, develops a mortal phobia about blood. Quits his position and takes up residence as the GP for a little village in northern coastal England, complete with his Lexus. Cultural clashes ensue. It's hysterical and touching and very very well acted and produced (beautiful photography of the charming village, as well).
Watch the first episode on Amazon for just $1.99 (c'mon, you trust me enough to blow two bucks, no?). You can see the whole first season for $10...and Amazon lets you download to your computer or to TIVO.
Watch the first episode on Amazon for just $1.99 (c'mon, you trust me enough to blow two bucks, no?). You can see the whole first season for $10...and Amazon lets you download to your computer or to TIVO.
If you get hooked, you'll need to buy DVDs for season two and season three (or get the complete set) from UK Amazon. I'll do a whole entry on UK Amazon sometime soon, but the thing to know is that they don't charge VAT tax on foreign orders, and this discount wipes out much of the shipping cost (which is non-drastic, anyway). I love UK Amazon.
Note that these are PAL, region 2 DVDs, however, which won't play on most DVD players. There are, however, a couple of workarounds).
Thursday, January 8, 2009
lyGO Visual Search
lyGO Visual Search is a new(?) search engine, still in beta, which delivers images of home pages rather than the usual texty search results.
People who like to do things visually will love it, and it's also useful when trying to re-find a site you once visited; it's easy enough to pick out the thumbnail-sized image of the home page.
Three Google Complaints
1. Google has gotten a lot more annoying helpful about offering search results from other grammatical forms of search terms. So if you're searching for, say, coffee pudding creamy, you'll have to pick through lots of search results with cream rather than creamy. The counterintuitive-to-anyone-but-a-total-geek solution: put quotes around single words where you figure Google may be inclined to be annoying helpful. E.g. coffee pudding "creamy".
Even more intrusive...I own Livewire ear buds (manna for musicians struggling to hear each other onstage), and searching for livewire yielded just as many results containing live wire as livewire. Putting quotes around "livewire" fixed it.
2. A few days ago I achieved a web searching miracle and ferreted out the English language web site of a Budapest tailor who can darn holes in wool. That may sound prosaic to you, but darning is a "lost art" in America. About a half dozen ancient ladies (they're all women) nationwide still remember how to reweave sweater holes and such, and they charge up the wazoo and boast impossibly long waiting lists. I figured there might be more such holdout craftsmen in Budapest - where I'm headed next week to try to score music gigs - and, unsurprisingly, Hungarian seamstresses tend not to have slick Web presences. If they do have web sites, they wouldn't imaginably include English translations. But: I found one! And now I can't find it again, because, like the 850,000 or so disappeared search results for "Bag of Hurt", it's been purged from Google's corpus.
3. Bag of Hurt has dropped further, to 145,000.
2. A few days ago I achieved a web searching miracle and ferreted out the English language web site of a Budapest tailor who can darn holes in wool. That may sound prosaic to you, but darning is a "lost art" in America. About a half dozen ancient ladies (they're all women) nationwide still remember how to reweave sweater holes and such, and they charge up the wazoo and boast impossibly long waiting lists. I figured there might be more such holdout craftsmen in Budapest - where I'm headed next week to try to score music gigs - and, unsurprisingly, Hungarian seamstresses tend not to have slick Web presences. If they do have web sites, they wouldn't imaginably include English translations. But: I found one! And now I can't find it again, because, like the 850,000 or so disappeared search results for "Bag of Hurt", it's been purged from Google's corpus.
3. Bag of Hurt has dropped further, to 145,000.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Climbing Ladders
Before committing yourself to climbing a ladder, it's essential to evaluate the top rung with great clear-eyed care. But almost no one ever does. In fact, I had to be taught this lesson twice.
I just fell into being a musician. I'd always been singled out for my musical talent in school, and it's easy for a kid to find himself identifying with the activity which yields the greatest academic and social success. After graduation, sheer inertia propelled me into a musical career, and it went well. Yes, I never made a lot of money, but I'd learned the trick of low overhead. Yes, I found my colleagues two-faced and cutthroat, but I recognized that it's the same in any competitive milieu. And yes, I battled with bandleaders, club-owners, and other authority figures and gatekeepers, but I recognized that this is inevitable for anyone who's creative - who insists on unpredictability. Art, if you do it right, must involve coloring outside the lines. There was a lot to love: the travel, the cultural diversity, the non-monotony, and, most of all, the satisfaction of occsaionally letting loose with unexpected beauty.
But while I loved playing music, the fabric of my life as a musician felt deeply frustrating. Ten years into my career, a jolt of clarity revealed my situation in stark terms: I was spending all my time and energy trying to persuade clueless bandleaders to hire me to play unsatisfying music with their lousy bands for pathetic pay. And while such a scenario was tolerable for a 20 year old, at 30 it had begun to rankle. So I turned pragmatic, and tried to compile a list of bandleaders I respected, whose music would satisfy, and who'd pay decently. I could think of no one.
I'd spent the previous decade a hostage to the whims of my teenaged self*, never considering what success would constitute, and whether I'd want it if I found it. Soberly surveying my situation, it was clear there was nothing for me. At least, not in being a sideman - a hired gun. One alternative would have been to become a bandleader. The prospect of stardom might seem an alluring draw, but it's an abstract notion. Stardom is an outward projection, with little to do with one's personal feelings or the fabric of one'sf day-to-day life. When vetting a ladder's top rung, the searchlight needs to be tightly focused on one's self, rather than on gloriously overblown appearances.
So I vetted. I recalled having played the European jazz festival circuit with saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, where I ran into singer/pianist Mose Allison, a jazz star, in a hotel elevator. We chitchatted, I asked where he's from. Surprisingly, I discovered that he lived minutes away from me. So I asked why I never saw him out playing in local clubs. He replied that he gets paid a great sum of money to play in New York City precisely twice per year, and, as part of his contract, he's barred from diluting his scarcity by showing his face at other times. Same for San Francisco, London, and Tokyo. Like a shark, he must endlessly keep moving.
What's more, I knew that those big, spotlit performances were high-pressure, distraction-filled affairs - the antithesis of the intimate conditions in which jazz was born and in which it still flourishes. At the time, Illinois Jacquet was granting me exactly eight bars per night to improvise a solo - to play my heart out for about fifteen seconds. Even as a mere sideman, my impossibly focused window of opportunity showed me what pressure was like.
Factor in to that pressure the rigors of touring. We'd often return to hotels too late to catch dinner, then travel at dawn, usually in cramped transportation, then linger forever at afternoon sound checks, and, finally, at the gig, our faceless audience would be a million miles away across a vast stage, and the musicians would be unable to hear each other (the soundman's invariably a whacked-out kid in a heavy metal t-shirt who knows nothing about jazz). I'd find myself in front of 3000 people in the open air in Stockholm or Nice, feeling sleepy, hungry, jet-lagged, and generally pissed off, and, hey, it's time for my little solo! My life is a numb blur, and I can barely hear the rhythm section. Am I going to dig down deep and play spontaneously - real improvisation, which involves risk-taking - or am I just going to play what I know "gets over"?
Well, ok. I took risks. Couldn't help it. But I can't say it was my best playing, or that I'd enjoyed it much, because those were not optimal conditions. They are what sidemen think of as money conditions. And money conditions are where you live once you've reached a high rung on the ladder. Plus, factor in all the bullshit and politics a bandleader must endure to score work at that rarified (financial) level. I hadn't even begun to taste any of that.
So what are optimal conditions? Playing late at night in a black bar in Jamaica Queens near the airport for fifty bucks with old guys who'd appeared on classic recordings but had faded from the scene yet still plied their trade masterfully in front of a rowdy, soulful little crowd whose attention wandered just enough to let you take crazy chances without being called out when risks didn't pan out. Mose Allison hadn't had such an experience in decades. He had "success" and "stardom", but he lived a life I'd never want. I saved myself another painful decade and chose not to become a bandleader.
So I moved more into writing. I'd been doing a column for a small newspaper with a big readership (NY Press, back when it was good), and contributing to some 'zines, and had a presence online back before there was a Web. Eventually, I was working freelance for shiny publications (Wine & Spirits, Time Out, etc), a column for Newsday, and finding that I was something of an up-and-comer on the food writing ladder. Finally, Daniel Young's Daily News restaurant review column (the "Under $25" equivalent) opened up, and I was invited to apply. I submitted samples, endured long meetings, and finally was summoned into the editor's office for the big news: "Congrats, you got the job!" The pay? "$250/week for two pieces, plus an occasional longer feature!" Expenses? "Take 'em out of the $250/week!"
Ah, the big time. Worst of all, I'd be hemmed in, forced to color very much within the lines, writing in short form for the most mainstream of mainstream publications, unable to presume any knowledge at all among my readers. I'd be forced to carefully define terms such as "ceviche" or "XO sauce" each time I used them...into perpetuity. Meddling, twitchy editors. Even well paid, a few years of this would wear me down.
I turned down the work (telling the editor I'd gone with a better offer, squeegeeing windows on the Bowery) and mostly withdrew from the freelance writing world (opting to reign in cyber-Hell rather than serve in mainstream media Heaven). I'd eked my way into the rarified heights, but didn't like the smell. For the second time, I'd climbed a ladder without considering whether the top rung was what I truly wanted.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with goalless horizontal movement through life, for those who lack the relentless ambition to climb ladders. In fact, for some people, including most artists, that works best! Ambition is slavery to an agenda. If you can be truly free and spontaneous, never looking before you leap, but diligent about lavishing care and love on all that you do (that's key!), the future will take care of itself...so long as you relinquish all preconceptions about that future. The problem is that Bohemianism can lose its appeal with age. While an unshaven nineteen-year-old with blazing eyes in a basement studio apartment comes off as a romantic firebrand, at age forty-five, the image is quite different indeed.
Most of us are at least somewhat ambitious. Yet, amazingly, we rarely stop to consider whether the position we aspire to is what we truly want. Barack Obama wept last week as he locked up his house in Chicago, and it wasn't mere sentimentality. He's not a sentimental dude.
Caveat: Equal peril lurks in over-thinking decisions and goals. There is, after all, no action that can't be ruled out via sufficient deliberation. In times of confusion or torpor, it's better to follow gut instincts rather than cool analysis, because even ill-considered action toward undesirable goals can be preferable to paralysis. But one does need to be careful about those multi-year slogs...
* - Kids ought to show at least some consideration for their elder selves, and not hostage them irretrievably to youthful ideals and aspirations. You can always remove a tattoo with lasers, but other marks are more enduringly etched. Bohemianism works best with a backup plan.
I just fell into being a musician. I'd always been singled out for my musical talent in school, and it's easy for a kid to find himself identifying with the activity which yields the greatest academic and social success. After graduation, sheer inertia propelled me into a musical career, and it went well. Yes, I never made a lot of money, but I'd learned the trick of low overhead. Yes, I found my colleagues two-faced and cutthroat, but I recognized that it's the same in any competitive milieu. And yes, I battled with bandleaders, club-owners, and other authority figures and gatekeepers, but I recognized that this is inevitable for anyone who's creative - who insists on unpredictability. Art, if you do it right, must involve coloring outside the lines. There was a lot to love: the travel, the cultural diversity, the non-monotony, and, most of all, the satisfaction of occsaionally letting loose with unexpected beauty.
But while I loved playing music, the fabric of my life as a musician felt deeply frustrating. Ten years into my career, a jolt of clarity revealed my situation in stark terms: I was spending all my time and energy trying to persuade clueless bandleaders to hire me to play unsatisfying music with their lousy bands for pathetic pay. And while such a scenario was tolerable for a 20 year old, at 30 it had begun to rankle. So I turned pragmatic, and tried to compile a list of bandleaders I respected, whose music would satisfy, and who'd pay decently. I could think of no one.
I'd spent the previous decade a hostage to the whims of my teenaged self*, never considering what success would constitute, and whether I'd want it if I found it. Soberly surveying my situation, it was clear there was nothing for me. At least, not in being a sideman - a hired gun. One alternative would have been to become a bandleader. The prospect of stardom might seem an alluring draw, but it's an abstract notion. Stardom is an outward projection, with little to do with one's personal feelings or the fabric of one'sf day-to-day life. When vetting a ladder's top rung, the searchlight needs to be tightly focused on one's self, rather than on gloriously overblown appearances.
So I vetted. I recalled having played the European jazz festival circuit with saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, where I ran into singer/pianist Mose Allison, a jazz star, in a hotel elevator. We chitchatted, I asked where he's from. Surprisingly, I discovered that he lived minutes away from me. So I asked why I never saw him out playing in local clubs. He replied that he gets paid a great sum of money to play in New York City precisely twice per year, and, as part of his contract, he's barred from diluting his scarcity by showing his face at other times. Same for San Francisco, London, and Tokyo. Like a shark, he must endlessly keep moving.
What's more, I knew that those big, spotlit performances were high-pressure, distraction-filled affairs - the antithesis of the intimate conditions in which jazz was born and in which it still flourishes. At the time, Illinois Jacquet was granting me exactly eight bars per night to improvise a solo - to play my heart out for about fifteen seconds. Even as a mere sideman, my impossibly focused window of opportunity showed me what pressure was like.
Factor in to that pressure the rigors of touring. We'd often return to hotels too late to catch dinner, then travel at dawn, usually in cramped transportation, then linger forever at afternoon sound checks, and, finally, at the gig, our faceless audience would be a million miles away across a vast stage, and the musicians would be unable to hear each other (the soundman's invariably a whacked-out kid in a heavy metal t-shirt who knows nothing about jazz). I'd find myself in front of 3000 people in the open air in Stockholm or Nice, feeling sleepy, hungry, jet-lagged, and generally pissed off, and, hey, it's time for my little solo! My life is a numb blur, and I can barely hear the rhythm section. Am I going to dig down deep and play spontaneously - real improvisation, which involves risk-taking - or am I just going to play what I know "gets over"?
Well, ok. I took risks. Couldn't help it. But I can't say it was my best playing, or that I'd enjoyed it much, because those were not optimal conditions. They are what sidemen think of as money conditions. And money conditions are where you live once you've reached a high rung on the ladder. Plus, factor in all the bullshit and politics a bandleader must endure to score work at that rarified (financial) level. I hadn't even begun to taste any of that.
So what are optimal conditions? Playing late at night in a black bar in Jamaica Queens near the airport for fifty bucks with old guys who'd appeared on classic recordings but had faded from the scene yet still plied their trade masterfully in front of a rowdy, soulful little crowd whose attention wandered just enough to let you take crazy chances without being called out when risks didn't pan out. Mose Allison hadn't had such an experience in decades. He had "success" and "stardom", but he lived a life I'd never want. I saved myself another painful decade and chose not to become a bandleader.
So I moved more into writing. I'd been doing a column for a small newspaper with a big readership (NY Press, back when it was good), and contributing to some 'zines, and had a presence online back before there was a Web. Eventually, I was working freelance for shiny publications (Wine & Spirits, Time Out, etc), a column for Newsday, and finding that I was something of an up-and-comer on the food writing ladder. Finally, Daniel Young's Daily News restaurant review column (the "Under $25" equivalent) opened up, and I was invited to apply. I submitted samples, endured long meetings, and finally was summoned into the editor's office for the big news: "Congrats, you got the job!" The pay? "$250/week for two pieces, plus an occasional longer feature!" Expenses? "Take 'em out of the $250/week!"
Ah, the big time. Worst of all, I'd be hemmed in, forced to color very much within the lines, writing in short form for the most mainstream of mainstream publications, unable to presume any knowledge at all among my readers. I'd be forced to carefully define terms such as "ceviche" or "XO sauce" each time I used them...into perpetuity. Meddling, twitchy editors. Even well paid, a few years of this would wear me down.
I turned down the work (telling the editor I'd gone with a better offer, squeegeeing windows on the Bowery) and mostly withdrew from the freelance writing world (opting to reign in cyber-Hell rather than serve in mainstream media Heaven). I'd eked my way into the rarified heights, but didn't like the smell. For the second time, I'd climbed a ladder without considering whether the top rung was what I truly wanted.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with goalless horizontal movement through life, for those who lack the relentless ambition to climb ladders. In fact, for some people, including most artists, that works best! Ambition is slavery to an agenda. If you can be truly free and spontaneous, never looking before you leap, but diligent about lavishing care and love on all that you do (that's key!), the future will take care of itself...so long as you relinquish all preconceptions about that future. The problem is that Bohemianism can lose its appeal with age. While an unshaven nineteen-year-old with blazing eyes in a basement studio apartment comes off as a romantic firebrand, at age forty-five, the image is quite different indeed.
Most of us are at least somewhat ambitious. Yet, amazingly, we rarely stop to consider whether the position we aspire to is what we truly want. Barack Obama wept last week as he locked up his house in Chicago, and it wasn't mere sentimentality. He's not a sentimental dude.
Caveat: Equal peril lurks in over-thinking decisions and goals. There is, after all, no action that can't be ruled out via sufficient deliberation. In times of confusion or torpor, it's better to follow gut instincts rather than cool analysis, because even ill-considered action toward undesirable goals can be preferable to paralysis. But one does need to be careful about those multi-year slogs...
* - Kids ought to show at least some consideration for their elder selves, and not hostage them irretrievably to youthful ideals and aspirations. You can always remove a tattoo with lasers, but other marks are more enduringly etched. Bohemianism works best with a backup plan.
Monday, January 5, 2009
New Tagline
Any thoughts on the new tagline (see header)?
As I wrote here, "the problem with versatility is that...it eventually pisses off all parties." And since this unusually free-wheeling Slog lacks an obvious organizing principle, it needs an unvarying framework to contain the wide variation.
I'm not crazy about Rabid Conciliation, though. Obviously it's a play on "rabid partisanship", but I'm not sure it works. "Rabid Conciliatoriness" would make more sense, but words like that get you beat up on the playground.
As I wrote here, "the problem with versatility is that...it eventually pisses off all parties." And since this unusually free-wheeling Slog lacks an obvious organizing principle, it needs an unvarying framework to contain the wide variation.
I'm not crazy about Rabid Conciliation, though. Obviously it's a play on "rabid partisanship", but I'm not sure it works. "Rabid Conciliatoriness" would make more sense, but words like that get you beat up on the playground.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Intuition
If intuition were real, then it would, of course, be evolutionarily adaptive. After all, a sixth sense of what's coming next is at least as conducive to survival as any of the five conventional senses.
But the problem is that it's extraordinarily squishy to try to study intuition in a laboratory. Unlike vision or hearing, it's not an always-on faculty, and it's triggered in a fuzzy way by emotions and contexts not easily simulated in sterile conditions. But there is empirical evidence to be found in our hard-wired reaction to the intuitions of others.
Imagine a group traveling on an important mission. They're lost, and unsure how to proceed at a fork in the road. One person pipes up: "I think we should go left." It's stated in a slightly blurry way, with eyes lifted upward and to the side, facial muscles relaxed, giving an impression of distant focus. It's easy to imagine a brief silence, and the group proceeding to the left, isn't it? No one would ask how the fellow knew this; it's clearly understood that he spoke from intuition.
Now replay that scene in your mind, with a slight change. Someone says "I think we should go left, " but it's stated in a direct, conversational manner, facial muscles engaged, and eyes alert and focused on the others. Isn't it likely he'll be argued with, or at least questioned as to his reasoning (and be summarily disregarded if unable to account for the suggestion)?
We have innate detectors for discerning an intuitive basis for statements from others. What's more, we have a strong impulse to value and to act upon suggestions we deem to have stemmed from intuition. Both are adaptive behaviors - but only if intuition, over long human experience, has yielded good results.
None of us has the ability to be intuitive all the time, but we are all strongly influenced by intuitive information from those around us. Why would we have developed the finely tuned ability to detect intuition, and the impulse to act on it, unless intuitive information was, more often than not, worthwhile?
For that matter, isn't it a kind of intuition that allows you to mentally play out the above scenarios, with some sense of confidence in the truthfulness of the projected outcome? Or, if you lacked sufficient intution to play it out in your mind, isn't it interesting that my account rings somehow true and convincing...because you've resonated with my intuition on this?
Or is my intuition off, and you're not buying it at all?
But the problem is that it's extraordinarily squishy to try to study intuition in a laboratory. Unlike vision or hearing, it's not an always-on faculty, and it's triggered in a fuzzy way by emotions and contexts not easily simulated in sterile conditions. But there is empirical evidence to be found in our hard-wired reaction to the intuitions of others.
Imagine a group traveling on an important mission. They're lost, and unsure how to proceed at a fork in the road. One person pipes up: "I think we should go left." It's stated in a slightly blurry way, with eyes lifted upward and to the side, facial muscles relaxed, giving an impression of distant focus. It's easy to imagine a brief silence, and the group proceeding to the left, isn't it? No one would ask how the fellow knew this; it's clearly understood that he spoke from intuition.
Now replay that scene in your mind, with a slight change. Someone says "I think we should go left, " but it's stated in a direct, conversational manner, facial muscles engaged, and eyes alert and focused on the others. Isn't it likely he'll be argued with, or at least questioned as to his reasoning (and be summarily disregarded if unable to account for the suggestion)?
We have innate detectors for discerning an intuitive basis for statements from others. What's more, we have a strong impulse to value and to act upon suggestions we deem to have stemmed from intuition. Both are adaptive behaviors - but only if intuition, over long human experience, has yielded good results.
None of us has the ability to be intuitive all the time, but we are all strongly influenced by intuitive information from those around us. Why would we have developed the finely tuned ability to detect intuition, and the impulse to act on it, unless intuitive information was, more often than not, worthwhile?
For that matter, isn't it a kind of intuition that allows you to mentally play out the above scenarios, with some sense of confidence in the truthfulness of the projected outcome? Or, if you lacked sufficient intution to play it out in your mind, isn't it interesting that my account rings somehow true and convincing...because you've resonated with my intuition on this?
Or is my intuition off, and you're not buying it at all?
Friday, January 2, 2009
The IT Crowd
The IT Crowd, a British sitcom, is so unnvervingly funny that I just paused episode one after like three minutes to rush here and insist that you view it immediately. The season 1 DVD doesn't come out till March in America, but you could always preorder...or order a boxed set of both season 1 and season 2 from Amazon UK (they're five hours ahead on the clock, but apparently several years ahead on the TV dial) for just 12 pounds - 10.42 once they drop the VAT for the international order. That's an irresistible fifteen bucks American.
You can also watch a bunch more on the Web, but anything I like this much, I definitely want to pay for. Support the creators, hopefully encourage more of same, and treasure on my shelf.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Route of Escalating Conciliation
Here's a nice editorial from Eboo Patel, founder of a nonprofit promoting interfaith cooperation. It states the same line I myself have been putting forth (not to say clobbering repeatedly) about how conciliation needs to occur at the individual level. I've emailed Mr. Patel a link to the Zeituna web site, a Palestinian/Jewish dialog project headed by my friend Laurie White. It's a great example, though obviously only a start.It seems (especially this week, with the events in Gaza) as if there's no way out of the world's various escalating spirals. The suggestion that reconciliation must come from good people on both sides of a given conflict (when they recognize that they have vastly more in common with their counterparts on the other side than they with their hateful, radicalized cohorts) rings true, but it is, admittedly, pretty abstract.
But last night I had a dream. In this dream, I was meeting with a group of Palestinians. The first thing I told them was that I'd been grieving for the innocent Palestinians suffering in Gaza.
"We're also grieving for the innocent Israelis hurt by our rockets," they replied....and so on; an escalating cascade of acknowledgments and retractions, unwrapping all previous escalations like a zipper opening, one tooth at a time.
"Well, I'm sorry the situation has left you few options but to shoot off rockets."
"There's always a wiser and more peaceful option. We despise the cynical policy of provocation. That's how our leaders work; it certainly wasn't our idea."
"But I'm sorry the Israeli leaders are so stupid and clumsy in taking that provocative bait. Their reaction causes suffering for innocents and radicalizes more and more moderates...and creates incentive for yet more provocation. But that's how Israel's leaders work."
"It's a shame our angrier cohorts have put Israelis in a defensive stance in the first place by their refusal to even consider peaceful coexistence."
"It's a shame our angrier cohorts have done the same by callously and systematically disregarding the rights of Palestinians who've lived there for centuries."
It's not unthinkable. I used to argue with my auto mechanic, Tony, regarding his bills. I always thought he was charging too little, he thought he was charging too much, and we'd heatedly counter-negotiate ("It wasn't that big a job!" "Yeah, but I was a total pain, constantly bugging you to finish quickly!" "Well, you wouldn't have had to bug me if I'd gotten to it sooner!" etc. etc.). People do this sort of thing with each other. It's the crux of human generosity. We are not entirely rational creatures, and so there are drives besides the one compelling us to maximize our own respective positions. Human irrationality, in other words, can generate conciliation just as easily as it can wreak havoc. There are cultures, for example, whose tradition of hospitality is so strongly entrenched that their soldiers welcome enemies into their tents by night to dine...and then resume fighting by day.
Of course, leaders and governments can't and don't operate with irrational generousity - though they definitely can wreak irrational havoc. But individuals quietly can. Individuals are always kinder and more moral than groups or governments.
Happy New Year, all.
Happy New Year, all.
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