The Pitfall of Arrogance

The worst downside of arrogance is that it compels a person to sneer at that which they can't comprehend. This compulsion fortifies comfort zones, constraining growth, learning, and the ability to shift perspective. And those constrains, in turn, lead to depression. Depression's a punishment for arrogance.

Those who eagerly learn, grow, and shift don't get stuck. But the arrogant, steeply invested in their current position, are cursed to remain entrenched in their status quo, however miserable and unsatisfactory.


Not quite the same point, but the main cause for serious depression is the world's knack for offering an increasing load of evidence that you are not the hero you'd immaturely imagined yourself to be. Depression is all about over-rumination, and that is the most common rumination ("If I can't be the hero of this story, then screw it, I'm out").

LEFFtovers: The Murky Distinction between OCD and Giving a Crap

Egg white omelet with sliced grape tomatoes. Sautéed baby asparagus. Reheated garlic knot.

This was one of the easiest "9"s (re: my surprisingly non-ditzy system for rating foods from one to ten) ever evoked. And, as any chef will tell you, it's devilishly hard to deliver impressive results with unadorned simple fixings (much less LEFFtovers).

Let's focus on the reheating of that garlic knot.

We use awfully sappy language to account for the conjuring of quality. With food, the cliché is to say it's "cooked with love", evoking Valentine cards and wooly sweater cat lady hugs. Let's expunge the corny language and examine how I crushed the garlic knot reheat.

I thought about how I'd go about this, off and on, all morning. Finally, I had a clear picture in my head. And once a clear picture has appeared - which means all obstructions have been worked out - there's an insatiable drive to proceed. So I strode into my kitchen with the studly brio of a pole vaulter stepping up to the medalist's podium.

Here was the plan. I'd pop it in a toaster oven, with a square of foil perched precariously atop to protect it from burning, but leaving the sides fully exposed so they'd heat thoroughly. I also needed the heat to dry it out after 24 hours spent sliming in its oily juices in the fridge. The moment the knot looked non-slimy (and not a moment later, because it would need more oven time and I didn't want it to dry out; I needed to preserve the chewy/fluffy/crusty), I'd snatch away the foil, turn down the heat a bit, and watch like a hawk for the moment when the knot browned into exactly the Object of My Deepest Desires (the harnessing of minute care with visceral desire stokes deep creative powers). As with my bagel toasting manifesto, I'd watch like a scientist observes a crucial experiment. Mere seconds matter.

I'd prioritized my two main concerns: heat and moisture, and in a very particular manner. Cooking teachers don't frame it this way, but I bear in mind that I'm always working on a continuum, rather than toward some finish line. The garlic knot shouldn't be cold, nor nuclear hot. I didn't want it slimy, but I didn't want to dry it out.

Cooking is a matter of midpoints, not endpoints. There's no endpoint in cooking, only a "click" of the camera - i.e. plating/serving at a certain point in an unending procession of possibilities. It's like writing - one could keep editing forever, but the supposed final version is just the capture of a certain arbitrary moment. "Process", not "arrival points". Always!

If you're absorbed in nano-moments, you can choose between billions of them, each conveying a different slant of deliciousness. There is vanishingly scant middle ground between under and over, or between slimy and dry, but if you're slicing finely enough (i.e. paying extremely close attention), you have myriad choices in choosing a particular slice to capture. The choosing is an exercise of playful caprice amid deadly seriousness - an amalgamation few people can manage, which explains why food (even from highly-trained chefs) is so seldom delicious.

I've just devoted 500 words to reheating a garlic knot...after spending my entire morning thinking through the process. To most people, this would seem stark raving bonkers. I could, however, justify it by calling it an expression of love. Hey, that garlic knot was for my beloved. Nothing's too good for my darling Linda. Or Vanessa. Or whomever. Swap in a random name, and you're good to go. Suddenly, the caring seems more beautiful than bonkers. Love justifies the caring.

At least it did until a generation ago. Yesterday's "love" is today's "OCD", and I'm not being cute; it's true. "OCD" is now applied, willy-nilly, to any instance of deep caring. Einstein working on Relativity? Beethoven composing in a diaper? Ugh. OCD, man. Take a chill pill. Find yourself some life/work balance.

OCD is a mental health problem where care is lavished where it doesn't matter. Cooking and other matters of actual utility and/or creativity do matter, always. "Obsessing" over your work - whether you're a choreographer, a barrista, or a mechanic - is what elevates us from livestock. It's sacred.

Martin Luther King skewed it as more of an ego appeal, but conveyed the basic gist:

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Obsessing over your stuff is a lesser mission. Obsessing over Linda or Vanessa used to be beautiful, though it lately seems "unbalanced". But obsessing about counting every single Toyota you ever pass makes you OCD. No bueno.

Lavishing your deepest attention on your garlic knot - or whatever else you're productively working on - is the opposite of OCD, which is the trivialization of one's limited time on Earth. It's true that a garlic knot - which pops in your mouth and is gone moments later - sits on the very brink of triviality. But the garlic knot in the photo, above, was as good as it looked. Two hours later, I'm still aglow. That's proof that it wasn't trivial; that it deserved my attention; that this was no kooky waste of Earth time, but more of a legit holy mission (even if it's not as "serious" seeming a pursuit as selling your car or endlessly mentally replaying the hurtful thing your old boss said).

People with OCD needn't change their drives; just channel those drives to something productive. As with depression, OCD's a dead end where, as perspective constricts and freezes, wheels spin impotently. A depressive spins creative wheels, over-building pointless internal towers of brooding discontent. An obsessive-compulsive spins activity wheels, pointlessly over-processing some constricted slice of the world.

Those who build useful towers or execute useful actions - who power their wheels with verve, transforming solid traction into bona fide landspeed - are using those faculties in their intended manner.


I'm describing, fwiw, karma yoga. Anyone great at anything - whether they realize it or not - is a karma yogi.

See also "Explaining Steve Jobs", "Unhinged" and "Cousin Libby's Yellow Rice".

Vaccination Roll-Out

If this country had any remaining creativity, boldness, vision, and/or leadership, we'd gather all living presidents, Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, Fauci, Captain Sullenberger, and all the pharma CEOs onstage (or, at least, a Zoom chat), and vaccinate them all at the same time. Then have Beyonce sing a tune, for max attention.

This is how 1940s America or 1960s America and probably even 1990s America would have done it.


In case you missed it, I published, yesterday, "The Expert Skinny on COVID Vaccine"

Empathy Framed as Concession

This nugget got buried in a posting from last weekend.

The single most dangerous psychological tendency of our era is the deep-seated feeling that empathy implies sympathy and support. These days, to say "I understand..." absolutely conveys, to the listener, some degree of approval. Understanding is a gift one grants on the merits. It's a concession. A kiss.

This represents the very seed of evil and brutality (though it has not yet fully germinated), and I'd gladly use up a genie wish to see it go away.

Really, I believe this will be our undoing. Aliens observing from Rigel-32n will point to this subtle shift of language. It may appear to be a quirky little linguistical thing, but it's really not. This is a ticking bomb; as insidious and alarming as a whiff of gas in one's kitchen.

When did this happen? You can't deny that it has; roll the phrase "I understand him" (or "I understand where he's coming from") around in your mouth and see. How did understanding become approval? How can we possibly live on a planet like that?


Update: I just got off the phone with a 92 year old friend. I asked him "If someone during the time of the McCarthy hearings were to say 'I understand McCarthy', would that have made people assume he was sympathetic?" He answered, with great agitation, "Absolutely! Why would you want to understand somebody like that?"

So this correlation is not, as I suspected, something new. It is, however, horrendously awful (no offense to my friend, of course).

Tearing Down

If you're determined to seem great at all costs, but are unsuited to creating or fixing, you have only one possible course of action: tear stuff down.

The Expert Skinny on COVID Vaccine

Here's a free-wheeling vaccine discussion with the Slog's longtime technical advisor, who prefers not to attach his name, because, I suspect, he was writing off the cuff (as a scientist, he feels obliged to be more rigorous publicly than in informal conversations with friends).

His words weren't chosen with weighty care, and his conclusions were cheekily stated, so this might not pass muster for publication by a scientific journal. But in terms of useful savvy - a well-informed expert laying out what's really going on, in (more or less) plain language - you couldn't ask for better. It's a great read.


Me: Would you chance an airline flight post-vaccination? Or does 90% effectiveness plus undetermined length of immunity leave too much uncertainty?

Technical Advisor: Of course. Apart from the fact that I hate flying, of course.

90% efficiency is the lowball number for the leading candidates. It means that some people will still get infected, but so far none of the tens of thousands in the trials developed a serious (ICU-grade) disease. In fact one of the vaccines (don't remember which) shows so far a 100% efficiency against even moderate infection. There will be a few cases that slip through, eventually, but the probability will be far lower than slipping in the bathtub.

Length of immunity looks good so far, and will likely get better with later versions. In any case, booster shots can always be given regularly, and they use lower doses, thus minimizing side effects even further. If the virus continues to circulate, boosters may not even be necessary, as asymptomatic re-infection would self-boost the system.


Me: How does noncompliance affect this? I know we expect a certain amount, and there’s slack (especially given the surprisingly high effectiveness). But what if compliance is surprisingly low?

Technical Advisor: What kind of noncompliance, though?

Not getting the vaccine is, well, not getting the vaccine. Lots of people choose to smoke, and they die.

Not getting the second shot could be deleterious for the two US ones (so they claim, but perhaps they are just covering their asses), but it appears that the Oxford one may be able to provide most of the immunity with just the first dose (although perhaps not as robust, so more -- albeit less severe -- infections would be expected.) It's all conjectural at this point, naturally, only time will tell.

Not getting later boosters (if recommended) may vary enormously depending on the type of vaccine; long-term immunity has nothing to do with antibody persistence (which is easy to measure), it's all about memory cells (and that's rather hard to measure since it requires lengthy cell cultures, at best).

A memory cells is like a stem cell specific for one antibody; if it encounters the antigen (bug or vaccine) for which it carries the antibody instruction, it is stimulated to start dividing and differentiating into all the different types of antibody-producing cells (IgG, IgM, IgA mostly) as well as some ancillary ones, all directed against that particular antigen. In Theory, as long as there is just one memory cell left over from the vaccination, challenge with the antigen will produce a rapid response.

Boosters are more often effective than re-infection, because the adjuvants cause a non-specific stimulation of the immune system, so the vaccine is more effective than the virus (alive or dead). Still, re-tickling once in a while the memory cells by the virus will wake them up and revive that cell line.

The response speed that the memory cells afford is important, because it shortens the non-specific (interferon) immunity, which can degenerate into a massive cytokin storm, which appears to be a major morbidity factor. The faster antibodies are produced, the faster the cytokin response shuts down. Let go of the chainsaw once you've found your nail clipper.


Me: I’ll try to clarify my question. If a large segment of population doesn’t vaccinate at all, how would that affect the situation? Is vaccine-immunized herd immunity in jeopardy if compliance is even more disappointing than expected by authorities?

Technical Advisor: Oh, that. Vaccinated people are protected, unvaccinated ones take their chances. In the US, people are allowed to make their own decisions and take their lumps. We still get cases of polio, measles, etc; their choices, their lumps. And if the children die, jail the parents. (This is not specifically an American problem, BTW, over 50% of the French say they will refuse the vaccine, and nearly as many of the Swedes.) Once the vaccine is here, it's back to a matter of choice; you choose protection or you don't. If you don't, it's like smoking or not using your seat belt.

Herd immunity is a lagniappe once vaccination is available; I firmly believe that it cannot and should not be made into a major player the way it would be without a vaccine. Encourage people to vaccinate, muzzle RFK Jr and Gwynneth Paltrow, by all means, but as long as YOU get your vaccine, you're OK, and let the others deal with their choices, however stupid they are. Even Socialstyrelsen, which delights in telling Swedes how many slices of bread they must eat, is shying away from compulsory vaccination.

Note that Technical Advisor knows this because he, naturally, follows the Swedish press. In Swedish. When not translating novels into Esperanto.

Me: Going back to fundamentals, what’s the difference between Covid vaccine and polio, measles, etc, where the unvaccinated DO imperil the rest of us?

Technical Advisor: No difference. The unvaccinated polio or measles carriers do not imperil the vaccinated, they only imperil the other unvaccinated. Once you're vaccinated (and get boosters wherever appropriate) you are taken out of the pool of potential victims. It's them but not us.

Depending on the exact circumstances, there may be a small amount of (usually benign) leakage, since immunity persistence is not a precisely determined effect, but by and large, that's it. Measles epidemics happen among the unvaccinated only, which does include a lot of small children, but this virus is fortunately not targeting the very young, so that's out of the way.


Me: Huh. So the non-civic-mindedness angle on anti-Vaxxers is misplaced. I’d bet 90% believe they’re endangering the public. 

Though on second thought, I suppose it’s right because they’re essentially creating safe harbors for pathogens that otherwise might be eliminated.

Technical Advisor:

I’d bet 90% believe they’re endangering the public.

They are endangering the unvaccinated public, which does include a small number who aren't unvaccinated by choice but by necessity: people with severe immune deficiencies or on immunosuppressants in particular.

However in this particular case the two traditional major classes of undervaccinations are not relevant: the elderly, because it seems that the vaccines do work on even the very old (Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are scheduled to be among the first to set the example in Britain), and the babies are anyway not a target for the virus.

The only really problematic cohort is the transplant recipients, who already know they must be extra careful in any case, because any infection will be more severe for them no matter what. Even then, it's quite possible that some vaccines may work on them, depending on their profile of action (and here I'm totally in the dark, the intricacies of immune response are way beyond my ken).

They’re essentially creating safe harbors for pathogens that otherwise might be eliminated. 

Yes, but only for those pathogens without non-human hosts. Smallpox could be wiped out, polio should be soon, but influenza and corona viruses have huge wild animal reservoir hosts, so they will never be eliminated. 

Great short explanation by a doctor of how the vaccine works

Same doctor explains why the vaccine will work even with mutated version of COVID virus

Intuition and Lindsay Graham

I have good intuition. I usually pretty much know what a person's thinking (no need for concern; the Invisible Man watches everyone pee). It's nothing mysterious or "woo-woo". If I were Gifted With Telepathy, I'd be able to say your dog's name, and what color socks you're wearing. I'd know which number from 1 to 100 you're thinking of. But I can't do anything like that because there's no such thing as telepathy. My cheesey little trick is a higher-level feeling for patterns of attention (aka framing), and there are fewer of them in operation out there than people realize.

My musicianship took a big leap as a teenager when I realized, at a gut level, that there are only twelve notes, not a jillion. I intellectually knew this long before, of course, but hadn't fully framed it as such. All musical complexity comes down to twelve notes, combined in myriad ways.

And while twelve's a lot, it's not unconquerable. You might easily have twelve friends, and remember their respective names, histories and phone numbers. You could learn to recognize their voices, and to anticipate their reactions. So I spent a couple years making myself intimately familiar with these twelve notes - making friends with them - and then I "owned" music, in the way that only musicians do.

My standard explanation for my intuition, before I figured out a way to talk about framing, was that "people really aren't that complicated". And that's both true and false. In our thoughts, we're infinitely complicated, just like music is infinitely complicated. But in our perspective (underpinning our thoughts), we're profoundly simple. If you can glean someone's framing, you'll have a good idea of what their mind is doing.

People often make it easy by announcing their perspective from the get-go. Most people, in case you haven't noticed, belong to one of a few dozen clone lines, in terms of personality. They're playing a character they saw once in movies or on TV, or are imitating family members or friends who themselves are copying.

Just don't take the shtick at face value. Look one level beneath. A "Super Nice Guy", for example, is motivated by deep vanity and unquenchable need for admiration (which is why you can't count on such people; it's gruffly un-smiling types like me who'll actually come get you when your car breaks down. Being legitimately kind, I have no impulse to stoke an image of Super Niceness).

For more on Super Nice Guys, see my posting on autism (scroll down to the section titled "Eschewing Froth").

So, often, there's little work involved in gleaning a person's perspective. And their actual thoughts are irrelevent. With an empathic feeling for underlying perspective - and for their momentary pattern of engagement (from body english, speech patterns, etc.) - you have quite enough data. Probably too much. As I've warned before, intuition's not fun. People generally put their best foot forward; they're rarely hiding lovely awesomeness. Intuition's like sniffing someone's dirty hamper.

If you pay attention to people's tilt of perspective, intuition follows naturally. Not re: sock colors or numerals, but you can glean trajectory, if not individual nuggets.

I've just deconstructed empathy. This is what empathy is; this is how it's done. Empathy and intuition are pretty much the same function. One can't intuit without empathizing, nor empathize without intuiting. And you can't do any of this unless you're lithely free in your capacity to reframe.

So here's what I glean from Lindsay Graham, widely considered one of the most enigmatic figures in American political history. I'll encapsulate his perspective via words, but the words themselves are, obviously, mine, not his. This is my rendition of the unverbalized inclinations and trajectories I see operating behind his veneer.

Why's everybody making such a big deal? I haven't "lost my compass". I'm doing my job. I'm supporting my president, pushing for my side, and giving no quarter to my opponents. Sure, I made cutting remarks about Trump during the primaries, but that's what one does in primaries. And, yes, I pivoted to support him after he won, but that, too, is what we politicians do, whether we like the guy or not.

I'm doing the same thing I've done for my entire career. It's what every politician does. Aside from errant murmurs of disapproval, one tows the party line and keeps one's head down, whether one likes it or not. My constituents love Trump, and I represent them, so, if I don't stand up for him, they'll simply replace me. That's the proposition, as laid down by the country's founders, so why's everyone so confused and appalled?

I'm certainly not saying he's right. I don't agree that following Trump has been "just politics". I think this time's different. A line has been crossed. Politics shouldn't be about stirring up yahoos to the brink of civil war or dismantling democratic institutions and norms or abandoning every core party belief to kowtow to a personality cult. This has been an unprecedentedly deep descent into the American political abyss, but the abyss itself is not unfamiliar. Republicans have engaged in a pattern of descent behind various Dark Lords - from Gingrich to Limbaugh to Cheney to Palin. They had no choice, if they wanted careers in politics. So while I'm neither defending nor forgiving Graham, I do understand his perspective.

And, in this moment, whenever you find yourself understanding someone's perspective, angels swoon. This is why I go on and on about framing, which is the underpinning of empathy. You can't empathize if you're too frozen in your own perspective to inhabit someone else's. A frozen perspective produces contention and depression. A lithe perspective produces empathy and happiness. This is why I've been on this tear about framing. We need to understand it now like never before.


The single most dangerous psychological tendency of our era is the deep-seated feeling that empathy implies sympathy and support. These days, to say "I understand..." absolutely conveys, to the listener, some degree of approval. Understanding is a gift one grants on the merits. It's a concession. A kiss. 

This represents the very seed of evil and brutality (though it has not yet fully germinated), and I'd gladly use up a genie wish to see it go away.

Plumbing Banality

This Slog is me working stuff out...and sharing my observations with eavesdroppers. But that's not to say I'm entirely unselfconscious about doing this publicly.

My greatest fear isn't being wrong or looking dumb. It's banality. I worry incessantly about stating the obvious in a needlessly convoluted manner. Just consider this Slog's subtitle!

I once wrote a posting essentially reestablishing the purpose of glue. I left it up for amusement value - it was posted with a winking grin - but I tremble to recall it, because I'm well aware that some of my more tortured conclusions can seem like some prettttty basic common sense. I'm never unaware of this.

For example, consider my recent posting "Reframing vs Posing". I propose that a person can actually do a thing...or else just pose at having done it. Whup dee doo. For that, 1600 words? Really?

Yes really.

We wave away our meatiest realms. "Imagination" is juvenile Disney fluff. "Posing" is what pretentious people do. "Perspective" is your opinions or whatever. Boom, done. Onward. None of this affects me.

I’ll phrase this Yogi Berra style: we don't pay nearly enough attention to the stuff we overlook. Framing/perspective is so intimately familiar that we go our entire lives without considering it. But, having immersed in it extensively for a couple of years, I've been able to shed fresh light on autism, addiction, depression (here and here), and creativity. It helped me, some shmucky trombonist, to construct an original and credible theology, cosmology and quick-start guide for would-be messiahs. Framing might be banal, but plumbing it has produced a gusher of answers to eternal mysterious. Don't write off banalities!

"Being" versus "seeming" - the Authenticity question - is likewise both banal and deeply productive. It's an everyday matter seldom explored. No one imagines they’d need to struggle to distinguish actuality from posing, yet the world is plagued by massive delusion, everyone oppressed by sad movies playing in their heads. We recently added the phrase "First World/Rich People Problems" to our vocabulary (a promising sign!) but we don't yet see the full extent of it...because we're not paying enough attention there.

Sooooo.....while my recent posting "Reframing vs Posing" seemed to laboriously fixate on familiar terrain, it’s truly worth peering behind the veil. The distinction I’m drawing is not intellectual. It's practical. It's about the tone of our lives and our happiness, both of which are - surprise! - completely under our own volition.

Where do you draw the line between forgiveness and just telling yourself you forgave? The thing versus the story? It's not a pedantic distinction, though I realize it smells like philosophy:

Philosophy is abstract conceptual masturbation, usually irrelevant for everyday people. This material is anything but. All things mind-bending and assumption-challenging are not philosophy! Every "long view" is not philosophy! It's a lazy term. Like "ethnic food", it's a planet-sized drawer where we toss anything not brutally familiar. This material is too singular to sort, so into the drawer it goes. "Smells like philosophy" justifies one's retreat back to a more comfortable diet.

If we were as clear about seeming-vs-being as we think we are, this would be a very different world. We wouldn’t wonder why our declarative New Year's resolutions fizzle. We wouldn't feel angry and depressed when the universe presents evidence to suggest we're not the heroes we presume ourselves to be.

Practical benefits can be gleaned from exploring these questions. Much of our misery and bewilderment stems from our habit of confusing the two faculties of consciousness. "Thinking" is not "framing", and "framing" is not "thinking". We use cognition to fake/pose/simulate/charade. It's insubstantial commentary; a perpetual tickertape of noisy mental flotsam. But with our framing, which is way deeper than thinking, we can shift everything fundamentally. Real forgiveness, for example, isn't some dramatic interlude - a scene to play out; a string of thoughts and words. Like all reframings, it's a foundational pivot that can be executed in the bat of an eyelash with zero effort. This banal faculty we perennially overlook turns out to be frigging incredible.

If we can untangle our assumptions about consciousness, we can wield it more productively, rather than use it to make ourselves needlessly miserable amid Utopia. I’m explaining how to regain control of innate faculties, which has nothing to do with pointy-headed philosophy. Banality is juicy!

If you've recognized the breadth of creativity and insight compiled here over the past twelve years, take note that I'm freely spilling my secrets of how I did it as I go. Bear in mind that I'm not super smart. I'm nowhere near as smart as this Slog. I'm the hapless little dude behind the curtain. But reframing’s my cheap magic trick, and I’ve been framing the framing for you.

Yes, it gets wordy. Conventional perspectives must be examined and overturned before you can be coaxed into considering the unfamiliar underpinnings of the commonplace. It’s nothing scary/trippy. It feels like home, where you’ve been all along. Banal! What’s weird and creepy and stilted is the movie you’ve been pretending to star in. That’s why we all feel so ill at ease!

I'll keep explaining how you can have your output (in whatever realm) vastly exceed your ability...and be happy...and evade depression...and be free. Just grant me slack on the banality thing, ok? I promise I won't waste your time with needless convolution. If I appear to be convoluting, there's something there. So convolute with me! Let's have ourselves a Convolution!

Leaning Away From the Crack Buzz

Back in November, I posted Maybe Don't Lock Him Up

I agree with this outspokenly anti-Trump and anti-corruption former federal prosecutor that as much as we'd all thirst to investigate the Trump administration - and as convincing as some of the arguments to do so might be - in the end, not investigating would better serve the greater public good. He makes a well-rounded case for it, so please check out the op-ed (it's a very quick read) before you read my uptake (which doesn't restate all his points).

1. The very worst aspect of these past four years, psychologically, has been the fulfillment of Trump’s fondest wish: an entire nation (supporters and opponents, both) entirely obsessed with Donald Trump. We ate Trump for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The next four years can’t continue to be all about Donald Trump. We must not extend the lease on a madman's inhabitation of our psychic space.

(That said, we’ll see whether mainstream news can resist the ratings candy of his tweets and utterances as a private citizen - which they’ll no longer have a duty to report. If they do remain locked on to that stuff, we’ll see whether weary viewers can create pressure on them not to. It's not a necessity. Alex Jones, for example, has been saying horrific crap all day every day with very little of it reamplified by mainstream media. Trump could and should be relegated to similar irrelevance, though it will likely require viewer/reader/reporter boycotts to convince networks and publishers to do so.)

2. “Lock him/her up” can't become our new normal refrain. Defeat and disgrace must be sufficient (plus less publicly spectacular legal proceedings in, for example, New York State - if litigation and punishment are what you wish for this guy, fear not). As I wrote in "Some Real Talk About Face-Eating Hyenas”:

Here's a simple adjustment to avoid getting your face eaten: satisfy yourself with milder punishment for your perceived opponents and oppressors.”

I may have also offered this observation a time or two:

History always unfolds via a succession of immoderately reactive pendulum swings. Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

A week later, I turned around and posted Maybe We Should Investigate Trump

The great Rick Wilson dissents convincingly:

"Some people believe we should enter a new era of comity and goodwill... We should offer a soft landing and a gentle exit from the Trump cult, right? To this, I must issue a hearty 'fuck no'.
....
Only exposure, pain, humiliation, and (inshallah) incarceration will lead to a moment of reckoning for the GOP. It should start at the top and work down from there. ...."

I can't escape the foggy impression that there's a means for Trump and his enablers to have due comeuppance without extending his chokehold on our national attention. But I'm foggily unsure how that would happen. Like all of us, I'm numb and exhausted. I'm pretty sure Rick's right, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, and perhaps there's a way to thread the needle. Don't ask me how, but I'll let you know if anything pops up.

I'm hardly the only one stewing on this question. The Lincoln Project last night conducted a video interview with two august legal scholars, Jack Goldsmith (illustrious Harvard Law prof) and Bob Bauer (Obama's White House Council), who've written a book ("After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency") on what we need to do after Trump's gone to (among other things) enshrine into law the norms we just realized can be shit upon by presidents lacking a scruple. And they were asked this same question: "Punish the guilty?" or "Avoid the Trap of Endless Reciprocal Punishment of Ex-Presidents on the Other Side?" Their replies broke no new ground, but it's good to hear their thoughts. I've cued it right up to that point, below:


Burying my lede as usual, I'd like to share an essential thing I realized while mulling this all over.

Nearly everything broken about America is epitomized by this mode of responding:

"It's perfectly obvious: He broke laws and was corrupt. So he must be punished. Presidents are not above the law. If we don't investigate and punish now, anyone will freely do these things - and more! - in the future. It's simple!"

It's simple!

This sort of glib, cocksure, you're an-asshole-if-you-miss-the-sheer-simplicity mindset (framing!) is like pure crack for Americans on both sides of the political divide.

• Abortion's murder and murder's wrong, period. Simple!
• It's a woman's body, she decides, period. Simple!
• It's my child, I'll decide whether he gets vaccinated, period. Simple!
• People kill people, not guns, period. Simple!
• Illegal immigrants broke the law to get in, period. Simple!

A population conditioned by 10 gajillion lifetime advertisements is easily enticed by the reduction of difficult, multifaceted issues into sanctimonious axioms. It even works when the axioms are so reductive as to mean nothing at all. Millions were stirred by Trump's "Make America Great" and Obama's "Change We Need", though both were vacant (albeit stirring) pablum.

In effect, this is worse than mindless simplification. It's deeply anti-intellectual. It communicates to those trying to work through factors and subtleties, "You're allowing yourself to be distracted from the essential moral simplicity. My good old-fashioned common sense (the Right's frame) or my woke clarity and insight (the Left's) empowers me to transcend the tangly thicket you're needlessly fussing through. Shut up and go away and let my greater, cleaner, bolder sanity prevail.

"My tribally-instilled mindframe is always the higher one....self-evidently because it's mine and I'm me." This is the essence of narcissism, and, as I've said before, I've met very few non-narcissists.

"My simplistic gut instinct trumps your nuanced thoughtfulness" explains why we're anti-science. It explains why we're anti-expertise. It explains why everyone shouts each other down rather than carefully listening (I lose readers whenever I attempt to "right whisper" - to explain the Right to the Left). It explains why the Left wants everyone eschewing their views and their language to crawl up and die. It explains the Right's embrace of MAGA. Channeling gut instincts into viscerally reductive slogans smothers thought, engorges spleens, and makes everyone louder and dumber. Over time, it inevitably radicalizes people into extremism.

"We must not extend the lease on a madman's inhabitation of our psychic space" might be pithy, but it doesn't offer a sanctimonious jolt to my bone marrow, like "Presidents are not above the law!" So, for now, I'll stubbornly stick with the former.

"Presidents are not above the law" is an invitation to put away the argument and stop thinking. It's cocksure and resolute, and it brusquely side-steps all the important issues. How many consequences are we willing to suffer in hewing to a simplistic axiom (if you're on the Left, consider "Abortion is Murder!")? Do we truly want every new administration occupied for four base-stoking years with "Locking Up!" the previous one? Do we really want to enshrine Trump's politicization of the Justice Department? Is it really a great idea to stoke prospects for Civil War? All so you can cling to your marrow-jolting axiom? The human race has had a poor track record with that move.

"We must not extend the lease on a madman's inhabitation of our psychic space" doesn't make me stop thinking; it's a starter, not a closer. It side-steps nothing. Most important: it offers no crack buzz. So I'll keep leaning that way. I lean away from the crack buzz. Consider leaning away from the crack buzz! I realize this assertion is, itself, reductive and glib, but I really think we're way too hooked on the crack buzz. Sometimes it's best to just say no.


This is nothing less than a struggle toward sanity in an insane world. It reminds me of the quintessential Slog posting, "The Deeper Implications of Holiday Blues", recalling a time when I kept ping-ponging between actuality - a lovely evening spent in deep comfort and pleasure - and misery-stoking indulgent dramatic mental chatter - canned, contrived notions of what I was missing out on. It should not have been tough to distinguish the sane perspective. But sometimes one fights a headwind. Sometimes one fights a headwind.

Reframing vs Posing

I've written a lot about reframing. I've also written a lot about "being" versus "seeming" - aka posing, aka authenticity (which, btw, I believe accounts for autism). None of my writings has summed that up as crisply as my oft-repeated observation that most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

I haven't properly joined the two (reframing and being/seeming) together until now.


We can simulate reframing without ever budging our point of view. It's childishly simple: you just claim to have reframed. You say the words, think the thoughts, and call it an accomplishment. You can easily make yourself believe it. You believe lots of hollow things you tell yourself!

Let's take forgiveness as an example. As I wrote in "Liberation and Addiction" (as a recent addition you might not have seen upon first reading; I often post-polish my more ambitious posts):

A really useful testing ground for reframing is the application of Forgiveness. Not big showy huggy dramatic gestures; I mean the internal process. Shift from seeing it this way to seeing it that way. That's what reframing is, and it's stupendously, maddeningly easy (don't tell yourself a story about having done it. Don't just pose. Really actually do it!).

"Don't just pose. Really do it." One can easily say "I forgive you" without meaning it. The same pose can just as easily happen internally: "I forgive him". And the charade might be ongoing ("I forgave him"). We can carry a pose, a charade, forever ("I'm a wonderfully forgiving person").

But there is, of course, an enormous difference between rotely saying/thinking the words and actuality. That's an awfully sucky term - "actuality" - but human language doesn't offer a rich palette in this realm. Genuineness is not an issue humans consider much, so our language is parched for terms. Much as eskimos have an abundance of words for snow, humans have many terms for artifice, charade, and empty drama, but what shall we call the real thing? "The Real Thing" is an empty placeholder, an expedient means of pointing to something unnameable. "Actuality" sounds crisply scientific, but it's as vacant as a variable...and truth should be more than a variable.

This distinction is more fundamental than you'd imagine, because consciousness is bifurcated along precisely these lines:

There are two aspects to consciousness: cognition and perceptual framing. We know an enormous amount about cognition, but few of us spend even a moment considering perceptual framing. It is assumed that external factors frame our perspective for us; that it's not under our own volition.

We'd freely acknowledge that a given city block is experienced through completely different eyes, depending on, for example, whether we've just been kissed by a new loved one or been ditched by a previous one. But we assume we must wait for external circumstances to provoke emotions for perceptual shift to occur. There is no reason for this assumption. All frames are available in any moment. We just get lazy, and forget that we can actively choose.

We are wrong about both, assuming that we own our thought stream - though we obviously do not (just try to not think about the thing you're currently worried about) - while we assume our perceptual framing is imposed from without - though it patently isn't (you can't make me angry, only I can make myself angry). Our confusion about the operation of our own minds is a central problem.

I can muster the thought "I forgive you" regardless of my actual view. Genuine forgiveness is a separate action, and it's not verbal. Neither a thought nor an utterance, it's a doing. It's pure reframing. It's hard to talk about. It's just a faculty we have, though we often forget we have it.

There's another pesky factor. We confuse the action of actual forgiveness - the reframing - with anticipated associated emotion. There's a bag we carry around with us; a burdensome dramatic obligation. We can't simply forgive; first we must perform a movie scene. You know the one, where a grave-looking person stares with gloomy concern out of a rainy window while cellos moan. How can I possibly forgive him?

Poignant! But let's give that cinematic layer the easy dismissal it deserves, being nothing but indulgent bullshit. You're not in a movie. You can forgive someone as effortlessly as you can manufacture the empty thought "I forgive him"....but it involves a separate faculty. It's a shift rather than a thought.

Try it! Pick someone easily forgiven. Not your ex who said that horrible thing, or that old boss who fired you. Don't get ambitious! Think of someone more readily forgivable, and do it. I'll wait!

Don't just say the words. Feel the shift. Experience the minuscule sensation of blissful unwinding, like a knot being untied. Our bodies are programmed to reward certain choices - sleeping, eating, procreation....and forgiveness is an oft-forgotten item on that list. Why is it forgotten? Because we assume we must play out a movie scene, and it likely doesn't jibe with our current plot arc at any given moment. The fake, ridiculous, self-indulgent cinematic experience - me up there on that screen! - is, for most people, unquestionably primary. So if one fancies oneself to be in a movie, forgiveness requires a laborious rewrite.

Real forgiveness is simple and instantaneous, but it's nothing like blandly uttering the words. It's a foundational shift, easy though it is. If you want to play with this function, and explore reframing, check out the previously linked post about forgiveness.


But let's go beyond forgiveness to a real world framing example that involves interacting with another person rather than silent machinations in the corridors of your private mind.

You run a business with a critical, terrifying problem. Your tech guy crashes on the problem tirelessly, finally coming to you, eyes ablaze, with an impossibly brilliant solution. He needs to share the details, because it could only be properly appreciated if you really understoodd what he did.

That's him. Now let's swing the focus over to you. You're not a tech person. You barely understand what he's saying. Every cell in your body wants to tell him to shut up, go away, and just hook it up, now.

Let's call that management choice #1: The Imperious Asshole.

There's a second management choice: The Patronizing Asshole. You recognize that he's bursting at the seams, viscerally needing to spike the football by explaining what he did. He will resent you if you dismiss him. It will harm your relationship and deflate his morale. So you steady your gaze at him, restraining your eye roll, and nod your head engagingly as he recounts his actions, punctuating the tech lecture with eager "uh-huhs!" When he's done, you express your astonishment re: his brilliant genius, wait a couple beats, then rub your hands eagerly together saying "Well, let's hook it up, then, shall we?", patting him on the shoulders as you retreat to your office to let this annoying, overheated little geek do his thing.

There's also a third choice, which would never occur to most managers. Actually listen to the guy. Try to understand, and genuinely share his enthusiasm - not just for the fact that a solution was reached, but for what he actually accomplished in solving it. Make an effort to get a genuine sense of what he did and share his moment. This involves shifting your attention momentarily away from the big problem stewing in the gurgling acid pit of your managerial stomach. Shift to his view and be an engineer for a sec, not a manager, even if this is a realm where you're tenuous and thus vulnerable, and must allow yourself to be lectured to by your institutional inferior. You'd feel much more comfortable; more secure; more yourself by interrupting him to tell him (more or less bluntly) to shut up and just go hook up the fucking thing. But you don't. You shift over to his world, his framing. You roll with it.

#1, The Imperious Asshole, maintains his perspective tenaciously, and would snarl at the suggestion that he do otherwise. As Manager, he occupies the center of the circle. Other people must shift to share his perspective, not vice versa. This, sadly, feels to him like privilege.

#2, The Patronizing Asshole, is just as tenacious in his frozen perspective, but goes through the motions. He follows a flowchart any dumb computer could obey:

EMPLOYEE HAS NEED
EMPLOYEE IS INDISPENSABLE
POSTPONE OPTIMAL ACTION
INITIATE RESOLUTION PROTOCOL
EMULATE ENTHUSIASM AND OUTPUT SUPERLATIVE PRAISE
MONITOR FOR ACCEPTANCE
TRANSITION TO OPTIMAL ACTION WITH REITERATION OF PRAISE

#3 doesn't have a name. "The Real Thing"? "Actuality"? "Humanity"? The manager reframed - amid a crisis, too, which is extra hard given that humans abandon their values under duress. You can't name what he did. It's not something taught in business school. You can't devise a procedure to accomplish this. It's the thing computers (or people who act like computers) can't do.

Reframing is the thing computers can't do.


There's a new wrinkle these days. Managers try to add genuineness into the mix. Like a powder. They recognize (blurrily) the shortfall I'm describing, and try to fix it via extra conscientious patronization. Let's call it meta-patronization. "PLEASE DON'T THINK I'M PATRONIZING YOU," the manager pleaded, patronizingly. It's just a minor subroutine to add to the flowchart - Patronization_Erasure.

This sort of thing is a natural outgrowth of the thinking that makes corporations design products to power up saying "Hello, Jim, how are you today?" It's a way of having computers - and people who act like computers - simulate better, to hastily patch over the sticky wicket of authenticity. Authentic authenticity is scarily unthinkable, whereas contrived Authenticity-Seeming is more viable. You can develop and procedurize and test it.