Why Young People Don't Vote

Followup to yesterday's posting, "Why Would Democrats Sabotage Biden?", where I noted:

Ultimately it doesn't matter if Bernie people don't vote Biden. Bernie people didn't even turn out to vote for Bernie! That's why he lost!

Young people mostly don't vote, though Bernie, like every radical demagogue before him, was counting on a wave of participation by a contingent known to be far more mouthy than participative.

Why didn't the staunch Bernie fans actually come out and pull the lever for their beloved candidate? Why do young people so seldom vote, even though they're loud and energized?

On social media they feel mighty, smiting the wicked, venting their fury, and righteously delivering their enlightened message. It's like hollering into a hot microphone; a flattering echo and heft are seemingly added to their utterances. And when they attend a rally, they're more than part of a greater movement - they imagine they are the greater movement.

But voting? That's an unflattering action which reveals an unbearable truth: They're each a speck. A mere data point.


The segment that votes is old people. I used to figure it was because they have lots of time on their hands; they wake up super-early and need dull activities (mah-jongg, knitting, etc.) to fill their days before dinnertime at 4:45.

But no, that's not it. It's because they don't mind functioning as data points, having corrected the misimpression that they're starring in a cinematic experience. As I once wrote:

Maturity is the correction of the misconception that you're the protagonist in this drama.

You're not. You've never been. You're a character actor, briefly adding your bit of unique color to the action.

The evidence which accumulates to prove this only feels harrowing for those who insist on clinging to the misconception.

Old people - or, at least a lot more older people than younger people - tend to have integrated this truth. And that allows them to engage in steady, sane, unflattering actions like voting.

Why Would Democrats Sabotage Biden?

The conundrum's been eating at me.

After screaming bloody murder about Trump for three years (and appropriately so), how could the radical left imagine for even a second committing even a nuance of a whisper of an action that might harm Biden's chances of removing him?

Of course, many have done far more than that. They've noisily sworn not to vote for him, turning Twitter into a Taoist wet dream where crazy right and the crazy left find common cause in deluded cray-cray.

How can people who hate Trump so demonstratively - who prayed for Mueller, and then for Impeachment - work against the only shot at finally unseating him? I know Republicans, who viscerally oppose Biden's entire agenda, but who support him with relish. That seems a lot more to get past than "he's not my most favorite possible candidate."

I think I've got it.

Yes, they've been screaming bloody murder about Trump. But “screaming bloody murder” is their resting state.

Me? I'm not normally a screamer. So when I scream bloody murder about Trump, it's because I find him an existential threat to the republic and the world. My screaming is not just pro forma. But to radicals, Trump represents just one of innumerable furies. And they're highly adept at loathing multiple things simultaneously. Trump, Biden, and, while we're at it, this Jim Leff guy who's mocking us. Throw them all on the pile. The more the merrier.

I think I've found a way to empathize with the mindset. I often condemn the food at Olive Garden, but if one opened near me I wouldn’t protest, nor would I pressure town government to block their permit. After all, I bitch about loads of bad food…which I deem inevitable. In the end, the bitching doesn’t mean anything. I bitch just to bitch. It’s just my reflexive take on Shit World.

Just my reflexive take on Shit World.


Ultimately it doesn't matter if Bernie people don't vote Biden. Bernie people didn't even turn out to vote for Bernie! That's why he lost!

Young people mostly don't vote, though Bernie, like every radical demagogue before him, was counting on a wave of participation by a contingent known to be far more mouthy than participative.

Tuliphenge

Framing Reopening

We're currently experiencing a framing conflict, both between segments of society, and within each of ourselves. As ever, we don't frame it as framing. We stubbornly refuse to trace our thoughts backwards to their source. We just arbitrarily adopt a frame (based on tribal cues, like flocks of birds), and freeze right there for a while, satisfied that we've selected the "correct" one.

It is brutally inhumane to proclaim thousands of deaths tolerable in the interest of re-opening the economy. Life is precious. Let's not love money more than we love human beings. Let's wait and do this when we can spare every soul.

We accept 38,000 annual traffic fatalities, without flinching, as the cost of a functioning modern society. We continue to grow and serve peanuts even though the tiniest bit of one can threaten the life of .6% of our population. Two million Americans would have their lives imperiled by bee stings, but we've not only failed to exterminate the bees, we're actually distressed that they're dying out on their own.

Neither of these antithetical views is wrong. They're simply different framings, both of them obviously correct. It is unquestionably callous and inhumane to condemn thousands to death just so we can relaunch the economy. Yet every one of us is callous and inhumane in the face of thousands of actual or prospective deaths.

These aren't differing "opinions", because an opinion has built-in traction, whereas both these perspectives are easily interchanged (unless you've willfully frozen yourself). It's like owning two houses - each feels like "home" when you're in it.

I'm not saying we can believe two contradictory things at once, because we can't. We can only oscillate between the two, like choosing a framing for the optical illusion below. One or the other comes easily, but you cannot see both at once. That's the hallmark of framing: it can effortlessly shift (so long as you haven't frozen perspective) but only one can be experienced at a time. Serial monogamy!

Belief is contextual, and context comes from framing (an inner choice which we project onto outside circumstance). Beliefs, ethics, and opinions all stem from framing. Among many other things, this explains the apparent endless hypocrisy of human beings, who are actually quite consistent within each framing. And, once again, framing is easily shifted...just so long as you haven't chosen to freeze it - which I'd discourage, because frozen perspective is what depression is. The shiftiness of framing is a feature, not a bug.


Regarding the virus and the economy, what's not a matter of framing and is a matter of right and wrong is the need to proceed intelligently and cautiously, weighing all risks with thoughtfulness and responsibility. To open the economy impulsively, and without consideration of different framings, would be an abomination. That's the Centrist view (and most of the country is Centrist without realizing it).

Buried the lede again. Doh.

The Truth Doesn't Need You to Lie

Philly Joe
I sent a drummer friend a link to this rare video of the great Philly Joe Jones, god of jazz drumming, playing a gig near the end of his life (with a 22-year-old Wynton Marsalis sitting in toward the end). Jones sounds awful. Bombastic, spastically misfiring; he's all over the place (bassist Larry Ridley probably lost 8 pounds trying to hold things together). He was obviously stinking drunk, but, hey, it's Philly Joe, so this is still an important document.

The drummer I sent it to is much more reverent than I am. So when I sent it along with a note saying "I don't know WTF's going on with his playing that night", he got his back up. Philly Joe's an immortal great and he thinks he sounds fantastic.

My first thought was that my friend takes a religious view...and I'd offended his faith. But then I realized I'm the more religious one.

I believe so strongly in Philly Joe Jones' greatness that I can watch him throwing feces around a jazz club without worshipping him less. I admire him enough to view him without flinching; without airbrushing; without self-deception. I don't need to concoct a fictional, mythical Philly Joe whose every note was flawless. To do so would deeply disrespect the actual one, and I like the actual one.

The Truth is sufficient. The Truth doesn't need me to lie.

Arnie
I profiled my late musical mentor Arnie Lawrence a few years ago, and was intensely proud of the result. I felt I'd truly captured him and paid fitting tribute. I'm sure he'd have appreciated it.

People close to Arnie, however, were livid. I'd revealed flaws, and discussed missteps and dead-ends. I showed his pain, his rejection, his friction, his frustration. None of this jibed with the heroic legacy they wanted to project. They had some unrecognizable Arnie in their minds who’d subsumed and replaced the actual guy.

I was dumbfounded. Was the actual guy so unsatisfactory that he deserved burial in an unmarked grave and supplanting with a two-dimensional myth? They thought I'd disrespected him, but, from my perspective, their revisionism was tantamount to a kick in his face. The Truth is sufficient. The Truth doesn't need you to lie for it.

Trump
Whenever I see the Left exaggerating Trumps multitudinous transgressions, it drives me bonkers. Isn't the truth bad enough? The Truth is sufficient. The Truth doesn't need you to lie for it!

James Carville Slam Dunk

Carville: Look what his campaign is doing. They’re a pack of grifters. His campaign manager got two condos, a Ferrari, a yacht, a Range Rover and they’re all just fleecing the campaign. This is all about making money and they’re going in there and giving him fake polls. pic.twitter.com/Xj5Bk18GeG

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) May 7, 2020

So let me explain the beautiful operation James Carville (Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign chief strategist) is really pulling off here.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is an accidental genius. He showed up with no aptitude or experience and Trump pulled him into his band of merry mutants, dildos, rejects, loudmouths, and mooks, appointing him digital media director of his 2016 campaign, a just-pretend operation for a "candidate" in it just for some extra cachet and moolah.

Parscale - who knew? - turned out to be a natural. It's a big reason Trump won. So Trump made him campaign manager for 2020, but all is not well in paradise:

As he huddled with advisers on Friday evening, President Donald Trump was still fuming over his sliding poll numbers and the onslaught of criticism he was facing for suggesting a day earlier that ingesting disinfectant might prove effective against coronavirus.

Within moments, the President was shouting -- not at the aides in the room, but into the phone -- at his campaign manager Brad Parscale, three people familiar with the matter told CNN. Shifting the blame away from himself, Trump berated Parscale for a recent spate of damaging poll numbers, even at one point threatening to sue Parscale.

This was fantastic news. It would be great if Parscale joined the long list of legit talents booted by Trump for failure to be properly shitty/subservient. So rascals like my man Rick Wilson immediately began trying to goad Trump into booting him:

But then Carville went on MSNBC last night and showed us how it's done. He delivered his spiel with conviction because, following the first rule of manipulation and trolling, it had the benefit of incidentally being true. As Carville also notes in the interview, Trump's polling is awful, all elections since 2016 have gone poorly for Republicans, Parscale is massively enriching himself, and Trump's people are laughing at him while delivering the ego-fluffing he self-defeatingly demands. It's all true, and that's what gives it power. Hell, it took even me a minute to recognize Carville's trolling here, and I'm in on this ("crumbling empire" was some next-level brilliance).

But if the election is in the bag, one might ask, why try to goad Trump into firing Parscale? Because, as Carville also says in the same interview, "Dems don't need to just win, they must end the scourge of Trumpism" by a giant victory.

Here's the full interview:

Chefs, Touch, and Alice Waters' Credo

Over and over, one hears chefs repeating Alice Water's credo of "using great ingredients and leaving them alone," even though it's always been a lie.

No human being would ever willingly pay for ingredients that weren’t extensively fiddled with. If you merely slice a carrot and serve it on fine china, diners will not have some deep carroty experience. Not even if you steam the carrot. Or steam it and salt it. Or if you steam it and salt it and sprinkle it with marjoram and drizzle it with olive oil (though we're getting closer). You need to do way more stuff to even approach deliciousness. Culinary minimalism always struck me as a crock; a head fake.

Gastronomy is decision-making applied to ingredients. Deliciousness stems from two aspects: 1. the overarching structure of innumerable decisions being shrewdly conceived (hot fudge cod? maybe not....), and 2. the individual decisions (stir the pasta 17 times or 18 times? cut the onions 1.1" thick or 1.2"?) being harmoniously on-point.

Most people think it's about execution, but the magic is in the ongoing stream of subtle decision-making. Poor execution can be mitigated much more easily by smart micro-decisions than poor deciding can be mitigated by deft execution. This is why robots don't produce inspirational food.

"Ongoing stream of subtle decision-making" accounts for the mysterious and all-important "touch" people talk about. Touch isn't in the movements of one’s hands, which are easily imitated. It's in the awareness guiding those movements...which is unique. Subject, not object. 

Both the macro (big picture decisions) and the micro (in-the-moment decisions) are necessary. When your four-year-old prepares your breakfast by emptying out the fridge and stirring it all together, copious love might be applied at every juncture, but she lacks overall shrewdness. And a great recipe - a roadmap supplanting big-picture decision-making - lives or dies by the carefulness of its step-by-step execution.

If you haven’t invested jillions of decisions, you're just serving lifeless ingredients, and nobody wants that. Which is why I never understood why the credo of "using great ingredients and leaving them alone" is so meaningful to so many chefs. "Great ingredients"? Fine, I suppose, though I've eaten fantastic food made from humdrum fixings. But the other part seems nutty. Great cooking is the opposite of ingredients left alone. It's all about action and manipulation; imbuing raw media with the imprints of myriad micro-decisions. The more the better! That's why kitchen work is so frenetic! 

But lately I've seen the credo in a different light. Chefs don’t hear it the way I do. They take the frenetic action for granted. A violin player never questions his role of positioning notes in time and in pitch within a shrewd overall game plan. That professional proposition is a given. So what chefs are really getting at is....well, wait. Let me explain a little about chefs.

Chefs are not like you and me. First, they eat like crap. If you spot some slob shooting supermarket spray cheese directly into his mouth while driving home from work, odds are good that he's just got off his shift as a high-end chef in some shmancy eatery. Chefs patronize Wendy's, and may insist that the hot dogs at 7-11 are "surprisingly good". Two factors explain this:

1. Enough With the Food, Already
If you work around food all day, there's not much room for exuberant, aspirational chowhounding after-hours. I can relate. When I'm not sitting at a monitor drooling vacantly in tedious anticipation of the best possible next word, I write like a retarded baboon. My text messages are downright goopy. I'm the guy who doesn't use question marks, and who confuses "your" and "you're". I can turn it back on when I have to, but I'd mostly rather not.

2. Blue Collar
No matter how chefs pose and preen on TV, kitchen work is a blue collar profession. These are not Mrs. Howells, naturally drawn to refined experience. I recently wrote about how music, for all its training and supposed glamour, is a blue-collar profession  - which explains how I managed to go deaf by denying basic reality due to notions of being a get-'er-done tough guy. Both chefs and musicians talk a good game, but we’re non-lofty. 

Chefs are skewed in other ways. For example, they're hellbent on consistency. Not just in terms of quality, but also re: portioning and appearance. Me, I have fewer than seven neurons devoted to such considerations. Also, you and I are capable of shame, so we factor in health. A big reason our cooking doesn't taste "professional" is that we don't cynically pile on the grease and salt.

You don’t need to be a cynic to observe that a big part of a chef’s job is to stealthily inject pillars of salt and buckets of fat into food. That accounts for much of the added value of the very proposition of restaurants. Consider the croissant, some bygone baker's solution to the challenge of infusing the greatest possible quantity of butter into the smallest possible quantity of flour. As we customers crunch into them, murmuring with pleasure like entranced children, bakers survey us with cold, clinical eyes. The drugs have taken effect. Excellent.

Some criticize downscale restaurants for serving "greasy" food, but that just means a kitchen does a poor job of hiding it. Upscale food is even greasier, but there's an obligation to cover tracks. You can’t risk grossing out Mrs. Howell with naked truth. The mission is to get her off, via very many sticks of butter, while leaving nary a trace of the underpinning vulgarity. It's a bit like cheerful pitchers of brunch mimosas, or Mommy's big box of Chardonnay perennially in the fridge. Alcoholism may be the unspoken truth, but I’m certainly no derelict vodka-swilling lush or whatever.

All restaurant food is greasy and salty as all get out. Lousy chefs don't mind if you notice, while higher-end chefs get paid extra for furnishing a veneer of lofty cultivation, i.e. plausible deniability. 

So back to the question: Why do chefs love the notion of "using great ingredients and leaving them alone"? Here's what I‘m guessing they mean:

“Rather than cooking thoughtlessly, knowing abundant sins will be hidden beneath ponds of glistening fat and blizzards of salt, maybe I can step up and produce actual deliciousness without cynical cheats. I can work harder, investing talent, vision, and loving care in lieu of butter, lard, and sodium.”

Sure, the food would still be laboriously manipulated, primped, and processed to the nth degree. But if you eliminate the gauche shortcuts - and the contrivances required to hide their evidence - then, at least relatively speaking, you can feel that you’re letting ingredients shine. Less piggy button-pushing and more genuine art. 

There's never been any notion of rolling back to raw carrot shavings. Just rolling back to cooking as you and I have always conceived it: with real care and creativity, rather than expedient cheating. Chefs would be illuminated wizards rather than pretentious drug pushers. 

If correct, this explains why chefs raise their chins as they recite the Alice Waters credo. It's like drug lords swearing to go straight, or porn actors resolving to audition for legit roles. It's where chefs' musings take them when they're in an elevational mood.


This reads like a harsh condemnation of chefs and of the entire industry. That wasn’t my intent, and I'd fix it if I could but I don’t see how to walk it back. I actually love chefs. I love their work, and I love having my buttons skillfully pushed in any possible way (I'm both hog and Mrs. Howell). I devoted years of my life to worshipping/evangelizing/supporting all that, and don't regret it. But one can recognize hypocrisy and vulgar expedience even in beloved realms.

In fact, I suppose it took me decades to finally understand the meaning of Alice Waters’ credo because I was particularly unwilling to recognize cold hard truth. 

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

If you enjoy this Slog, you'll like "68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice" from the always-interesting Kevin Kelly, who I've been reading since his Whole Earth Catalog/ Whole Earth Review days.


Here, fwiw, are my own nubs of Uncommon Terseness (the reader who extracted them has sent me a bunch of more recent ones, but I'm having a horrible time trying to order them).

Speaking of short stuff, check out my postings tagged with "definitions".

Online Museum Collections

I wasn't aware that many great museums have put their collections online. Fun surfing (hat tip to Andrew Tobias).

The British Museum

The Paris Museum (in English!)

The Van Gogh Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Smithsonian

And don't forget the wonderful UNESCO Digital Library

Making America Great Again

Fundamentals can be the hardest to grok. The primary principle of economics still, after all these years, seems deeply counterintuitive. Even if you understand it intellectually, you probably don't feel it in your gut. Here goes: consumers lead the market.

There is absolutely a circle of supply/demand, but it's not like chickens and eggs. The circle is steeply tilted, and demand sits atop.

We are in possibly the strangest recession in all of human history. Commerce has dried to a drip but it's not due to the normal pessimism and gloom, nor are we distracted and disrupted by grand activities (e.g. preparations for war) shifting commerce to another footing. There's no footing at all, and confidence was perfectly fine until a few weeks ago. So we're like Wile E Coyote off the cliff, helplessly awaiting gravity. Business leaders are shutting their eyes, sticking fingers in their ears, and waiting fitfully.

You and I aren't just waiting, we've mostly made up our minds. When the virus comes under more control, very hard times will ensue where we won't behave normally. There will be an extended interlude as normality reboots in fits and starts, though, hey, maybe things will never go back to normal.

In both bull and bear markets, the most tenacious fountain of irrationality stems from exactly that exquisitely contagious thought: "maybe things will never go back to normal". That thought is the Great Destroyer (it's a kissing cousin to the fallacy that makes us senselessly aim for infinity.

Infinity aside, it seems a foregone conclusion that hordes of unemployed, hordes of unpaid landlords, and hordes of shuttered businesses who couldn't pay rent, will combine to create a vicious circle, dragging us all down. Inevitable!

And yet the CEO classes, again, are in Wile E Coyote mode: suspended in freefall, braced, worried, and waiting. They know what we disregard: public sentiment is everything. If we think hell inevitable, hell we shall bring. If not - if we remain partially tethered to the confidence seen before the outbreak - we'll immediately begin recovery. The key will turn and the engine will at least engage. This is what economists refer to as a "V" shaped recovery, where we immediately move toward recovery without a listless plateau. And it will be determined entirely by consumer psychology/sentiment/framing.

If the majority of the country which is not unemployed returns to buying things and doing stuff - eating out and driving cars - and the 19 million (!!!) American millionaires don't psyche themselves out by lapsing into austerity mode, the fall will be relatively mild and more swiftly self-repairing. But self-repair doesn't begin until the engine engages. And it is us who make it engage.

It's a perceptual framing issue. If we feel in the icy pits of our stomachs that we're in a depression, we'll behave in ways that drastically magnify the problem (again: vicious circle). There's little business can do to entice us unless we're willing to be enticed.

At some point, a corner is turned (it's 100% psychological, a question of framing, and it can happen anytime or it can stall for decades). The engine sputters, then fires, then recovery begins. The world always returns to some balance. We just need to release the irrational notion that perhaps things will never go back to normal.

Remember Roosevelt's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"?


So here's my proposition: There is one single thing Donald Trump is good at: selling. Salesmen are gifted at inducing certain specific types of reframings; of perceptual shifts. So, while I hate to admit it, he may be the perfect guy for the task. More so than an Obama or a Reagan. More than Roosevelt or Kennedy or Lincoln. He's the one with proven talent for inducing consumerist reframing at scale. This is his wheelhouse.

Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if Trump's the guy who saves the nation from its worst depression ever? I thought America was plenty great in 2016, but we're at a critical moment, needing to re-spark the engine of economic greatness. It's not about metrics or conditions, it's purely about psyching ourselves up and shifting our perspective. We need a salesman, and we've been cursed and burdened for three years with a master salesman whose one tool was comically wrong for the job...at least until now.


If that notion filled you with such rage and disgust that you'd root against it, then you've gone off the deep end. That's what hatred does; it makes you act against your own interest. It's one of several reasons I try not to hate, though I'd have given up fingers and toes for a change of president.

Of course, all this said, a second viral wave is likely in fall/winter, and a vaccine won't be ready until months after that, so Trump will most likely not be in office when we actually require his unique and narrow talent. So this is just speculative musing.

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