I Could Never Sell

How to say, how to say…

Suppose I told you to get product placement for whatever it is you sell.  You know, get it written into a movie.  The way James Bond drives a BMW (I don’t know, what does he drive?) and drinks Absolut vodka (I don’t know what he drinks either).

We live on different planets, you and I, you would think.  You work on salary, maybe, and you sell the boss on promoting you or giving you a raise or recommending you for his job when he moves on.  Or you sell your wife on staying with you another year.  Or you sell your teenage daughter on your advice about college.  Or you sell the parking attendant on not charging more you when you’re late…  Whatever you sell.

You’re selling a story, even so.  Even if you call the story “career” or “our marriage” or “my lessons in successes” or “I’m a good customer who deserves a break.”  Even if everyone you know tells their own version of the same two dozen stories, the stories you swap at pool parties or wherever…

Or you sell reading gowns you make from silk you select in Hong Kong each year…  Whatever.

So what’s product placement for you?  How do you get James Bond to do a testimonial for you in a fast-paced action movie?  Fast-paced means no time for anything, Wham Bam Thank You M’am.  No, I don’t mean you work in accounting for a company that makes ice machines, and Bond finds his latest unlucky love in one of your top-of-the-line models, just her head…

How to say, how to say…

When I log onto the NY Times I get a full page ad for the Economist.  Skip this Ad, I click, having interviewed there unsuccessfully many years ago.  But I’m newly single again, and now a line from the ad sticks like a jingle in my mind.

A story.

“Once upon a time, there was an ambitious young man who didn’t read The Economist. The End.”

Another:

“I never read The Economist. –Management Trainee, Age 42.”

The tune is love, not money.  This magazine might win me some attention.  Help me tell people (upscale women) who I am.  Or conceal who I am, like dye for a graying beard.

That’s the kind of product placement I mean.  I’m the product.  You glimpse me for just an instant in the story of Economist, a grand story that begins in London, in 1843.

The way a ride at Disney World is an assembly line inside-out.  Instead of a conveyor of black model Ts rumbling between two long lines of solemn workers, Disney sends a conveyor of workers rumbling through the machines of, say, Mr Toad’s Wild Ride, or Peter Pan (yes, it’s been years for me, I could use a vacation, if I remembered how…)

That’s the product placment you offer your customers.  A bit part in the story you tell.  An instant, a glimpse.  You catch that glimpse of yourself in Mr Toad’s windshield…

But no, you are the product, you are not the customer.  That smart-looking young woman on the train is the customer.  She sees the Economist on the seat beside you.  Your bit part in the Economist story.  Your product placement.  If she sees James Bond with a BMW or an Absolut, she wants the car, or the drink, because the knowing Mr Bond has set the example.  But if she sees you with The Economist, she wants you, not the economic report, we are hoping.  You add nothing to the story of the Economist, but it just might add to yours.  You can afford a $100-a-year magazine, it says to that woman on the train.  Now there’s some economics you can use!

I looked a dating site or two.  It’s a full-time job, I think.  You need an administrative assistant.  But as a shortcut I look at the book or movie the woman mentions.  You can tell a lot that way.  For example, a news story I read about Glen Beck speaking where Dr Martin Luther King spoke, on the anniversary of I Have a Dream.  The analyst found the language of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) in it.  A way AA people tell their story.  Brutal honesty.  “I am an alcoholic.”  Trench warfare.  “I am 42 days sober.”  Emotion, confession, religious rapture.  “God willing, and with a little help from my friends…”

Some people like that kind of story and some don’t, Beck’s way of telling his story, his country’s story, your story.  Grandiosity, the analyst called it, using a word from the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders.  I giggled every time that word was thrown at me in divorce court.  How grand is that, eh?

I never thought I would step to Glen Beck’s defense….

Another reader with a taste for grandiosity commented under the Beck story: “And your point is what, exactly….?”  A Beck admirer, to whom such stories are not stories, but the way things are, the simple truth, God’s truth.  From your lips to God’s ear, she sighs, though probably not in those words….

Well then, the marketing:

Do we need the dating site, if we only compare her favorite book to mine, her favorite movie to mine, her kind of story to mine?  Under Movies, she loves The Insider, a rare victory against rampant evil.  Under books, The Black Swan.  A business book, yes, but a dark business book, about folly and its sorrows.  Now if only Netflix could show me photos of women who like my favorite movies…  if Amazon could show me photos of Kindle-holders who like my favorite books…  if Audible….

This I learned from Shakespeare, long ago when I thought I might teach Shakespeare all my life.  His stories are plays, and his stories are not the same from your leather reading chair to your seat at the local playhouse, downtown or on campus, in neighborhoods and worlds you rarely enter.  His stories spread through a dark theater like a public contagion, a cough, a germ, a contagious yawn, a fear, a gasp, a sadness, a silence, a longing, a sigh, a laugh of triumph, a laugh of surrender, a memory of youth, a loss you feel again, a loss to which you say Yes this once, instead of No no no, in this crowd of like souls, these strangers you know because you cannot see them but you see just what they see, feel just what they feel, and without seeing them you see inside them, different sleepers in the same dream, awake but still, side by side…

Tell what you sell in a story that lets your people see one another this way, see inside one another.  See the liking they share.

What if your phone with a Kindle book on it could show you who else on this train (GPS!) likes this book, is reading it now, deep in one of these seats, one of these strangers on a train…   And show you her photo first, you know, in case…

In case she’s as old and misshapen as you.

What if your fans and followers could glimpse one another or trade a few comments at your website?  Extras in your movie, passers-by in your story, people who like the same kind of story, your kind of story, the story they think when for an instant they glimpse your name on a label in the throng…

===

“…and anyone who tells you different is selling something.”

Lying, that is.

Selling = Lying?  How did that come to be?

Seth Godin contends with that question in his classic All Marketers Are Liars.

Let me take a shot, as a man who once thought he would spend his life teaching Shakespeare.  Because for the purpose of the moment, Shakespeare was the marketer and liar of all time.  There was indeed a historical Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet is true to him in almost no way whatever, and we are all the better for it.

Here’s a headline we can study:

Backer Has Checkered Background

Not the checkered flag of victory, either….

This is a headline from a Florida newspaper.  A witness appeared before the Florida Senate to speak in behalf of a proposed new law.  A law to protect children.  How can you lose?

Well, he can.  He has painted a target on his forehead for people who oppose the law.

A story for another day: That’s probably why many good ideas never see the light of day.  Someone is afraid to paint that target on his forehead.

Our witness is a big talker.  Head of a Los Angeles entertainment company, he says.  “I flew in this morning from Los Angeles…” he announces.  Does anyone need to know that?  What does that tell us about the proposed law?  Only that it’s a big deal, and important people will go out of their way on its behalf.  Only that.  But that could be everything.  That could be as far as anyone gets, in thinking through this proposed law.

He is also the author of a critically acclaimed book, the witness announces.  Translation: Other people think I’m great.  People who weild publicity.  Attack me and you attack them.  Bad publicity for you.

But, the news story continues, his “own story is far different from what state lawmakers were led to believe.”  You see the hand of  the editor here.  True story, wrote our young investigative journalist, but her editor, thinking of the lawyers, warned her off.  Own story, she wrote instead.  Wrong word.  Not the story he told, she means, but the story others tell of him.  Which story is his own?  TBD.

His “critically acclaimed book” is self-published, reports our investigative journalist, and has yet to go on sale.

Well, he might still be critically acclaimed….  Somewhere.  If not now, then in the future.  Or in the realm of future possibility.

That’s where sales people get in trouble.  Making authoritative statements about the future, or the realm of future possibility.  As visionaries, telling us what they envision.  Just as you or I do, on a smaller scale, when for example we announce “I’m going back to school.”  Coming from you, at age sixty, that’s a dream, maybe true, maybe not, we’ll see.  Coming from your 18-year-old who skipped a semester, it’s less of a stretch, and verifiable in some way, as for example when we ask, “Yeah?  Have you written them?  What did they say?”

Authoritative statements…  Peter Drucker said the best way to predict the future is to create it.  Put “author it” in place of “create it” and maybe that’s what authoritative means.  But no, not to our investigative journalist.  To her, authoritative means the authorities say so.  The public record.  There is no public record of the future, of course, so she means the past.  True in the past.

Sales people get in trouble (or live the dream, as the case may be) by talking about the future, not the past.

I wonder if our investigative journalist would count Fox News as authoritative?  In her sense of the word, I mean.  Giving truths about the past (up to the minute, perhaps, but still past, in a past that cannot be changed).  When Fox News reports on a rally for an obscure cause it favors, and reports “Excitement is building.  Could this small rally be the start of something big, a nationwide movement…?”  The attendance at the rally jumps steeply as a result, and the excitement surrounding it.  The odds of something big jump from you-must-be-kidding to maybe.  Fox is creating news, not reporting it.  Fox is authoritative in Drucker’s sense, then (authoring the future), but not in our journalist’s sense (the authorities say so).

A journalist would be busted for planting a child’s doll among the rubble of a bombing, snapping a photo, and adding a caption that says “Civilian casualties include an unknown number of children.”  Yet if in fact children were among the civilian casualties, that doll in the rubble might get the truth to more people.  As Shakespeare added Ophelia and her love (among other things) to Hamlet.

Where’s the lie if Fox News photographs four old ladies hanging bunting over an elementary school stage and reports “Excitement is building.  Could this be the start of something big…?”  Excitement?  Well, maybe those four old ladies are in fact getting more excited, especially with Fox News taking their picture.  The start of something big?  Well, it’s just a question.

Can a question be a lie?  Yes, if it attempts to persuade me of something the asker himself does not believe.

Fox News and sales people get in trouble the same way: announcing a vision of the future as a fact in the unalterable past;  announcing a wish for change as a change we must all contend with, like it or not.

Back to our witness and the Florida Senate.  “He’s a master con,” reports a carpenter who goes on record by name.  “I will not sit by any longer and let the guy continue to do to other people what he has already done to me and my sons.”

What terrible thing did our witness do?  He reneged on a promise: a promise to help pay $30,000 toward the return of the carpenter’s abducted children from the Philippines.

Sounds like our witness was buying publicity for his book.  And the book in turn was gathering publicity for his cause.  A good cause, maybe, let’s remember.  Maybe our witness just took on too big a cause, and could not deliver.  Maybe he meant his promise, but promised too much.  Have you never done that?  Did you deliver on the life you promised when you proposed to your wife? Do you know anyone who has?  Anyone who could?  For most of us, that’s the only visionary statement we ever make.  The only visionary moment of our lives.  Our only venture into sales.  Marry me.  Join your life to mine, take mine for yours, give yours for mine.

Our investigative journalist combs through the public records.  Our witness bounced a few checks for his honeymoon.

Our investigator interviews more witnesses against our witness.  “The idea was he had funding in place for this movie and all these parents were going to be part of it.  He was just playing to the dreams of people in a very desperate situation.”

She even interviews our witness, and gives him a chance to answer these charges.  “I have attempted . . . to the best of my ability to help educate society about the gravity of this issue,” he replied.  “I have used a substantial amount of my own resources to do this and have never earned a penny from my efforts.”

Aha.  Never earned a penny.  That we cannot abide.

Some of us a better dreamers than others.  Not because the dreams come true, but because the dreams are better.  Better as dreams.  Our witness “sent such touching, sympathetic e-mails that had me in tears,” says another accuser.  Meanwhile he sent “excuse after excuse as to why he couldn’t send the money…”  Good excuses too, I bet.  Better than you or I could do.  Not more true, but better.  Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet is better than the Hamlet you find in the public records.

Our investigator lets the chairman of that Senate committee reply too.  “I would hate to think that anybody would seek to profit off the fears and concerns of real people.”  That’s not quite what he meant, I think.  Every doctor, every accountant, every plumber in the state profits off the fears and concerns of real people.  Every lawmaker in the Senate, too.

Our witness, however, has never profited.

The doctor says “I think this will help, but I can’t promise.”  Our witness keeps promising though he has never in his life come close to delivering.  He’s selling what he doesn’t have.  A con man may sell you house he doesn’t own, and disappear with your deposit before title company prepares the closing.  But he knows he doesn’t own the house he’s selling you.  Does our witness know he does not have the future he’s selling?  Not in his future or in yours?  Not for you, nor for himself?

He’s selling a future, a wish, a vision, a belief.  Not selling it either, because he never collects a penny.  Offering it, then.  Talks big, dreams big, fails to deliver.  We only wish he had profited, and his buyers had profited.  That his wishes for the future had made some mark in the past.  Not scars, but some change for the better.

A song on the radio stirred some dream in you.  Time took you away, but no nearer that dream.  You still hum it at times.  Not once did it cross your mind to sue.

After three hours of Hamlet, or two hours of Twelfth Night, what do we walk out with?  What has Shakespeare delivered, again across four hundred years?  Besides traces in the memory, largely forgotten in an hour?  Back come those traces in some far off future, from the depths, in some dark or shining hour.  Pointing a direction, invisibly.  Pulling our steps, with the pull of a pole star we cannot see.

A better dream.

With full disclosure, though.  Always.  “We are such stuff as dreams are made on….”

We are song.

===

Here’s the picture.  This may be selling at its worst.  This may be why people of good character shudder at the question and say Oh no, no, I could never sell.

An unshaven guy past his prime is grinning up at the camera (a camera phone).  His cowboy hat reflects neon colors, blue on one side, pink on the other.

We caught him by surprise, that grin says.  He looked up from his work….

But it’s a wobbly grin.  That grin that does not get much practice.

His cowboy boots are crossed on the table beside a tall beer.  His chair is tipped back on two legs.  He has a laptop in his lap.

Does anyone put a laptop in a lap?  While tipping a chair back?

The laptop screen is dark.  The half-downed beer on the table looks warmer than the computer.

He’s wearing his cowboy hat, but he pushed it back for the picture.  Or put it on for the picture.

The picture was staged.

How hard could it be? says the caption.  You’ve seen the same caption (and that same page) many times in the last ten minutes.  Only the picture is different.  The guy.  Or gal.

You searched for something on Google and got pages and pages of the same one result.  Same page, same caption, different picture.

A friend found a business opportunity, her own business from home, and you were worried for her.  You wanted to see what she was getting into.

Will you soon see your friend’s picture in place of the laptop cowboy?  In the dozens of same pages?  The dozens and dozens of same search result?

You clicked on a link that said Don’t sign with S– before you read this.

Ah, you thought, here’s the downside, from someone who has done this.

But then you got the laptop cowboy.

OK, so you read the cowboy’s page.  S– is a scam, it says.  The soap (or whatever) won’t sell, or not much.  You make money from S– by bringing others into the business.  Let them sell the soap.  Let them recruit others to the business opportunity.

Where do you find these people?

Leads, they are called.  People who have already shown the start of an interest in buying.

You don’t want leads who want soap.  You want leads who want the soap business.  Some business from home.  Or from the barroom. A chairman business, headquartered at the nearest chair.

The laptop cowboy gives you some quick calculations.  He shows you the money from selling the soap and the money from selling the soap business.  He sounds wised up.  He’s nobody’s fool.  He learned the hard way, he says, so you can learn the easy way.

You find the same calculations on the other pages, under the other pictures.  The same calculations, the same numbers, the same font, the same wisecracks.

So the laptop cowboy learned this the hard way, did he?

Weird.  What is this?

Weirder still, you find the laptop cowboy and his crowd of clones again while researching another home business, a rival to the one your friend chose.  Don’t sign with Q– before you read this.

So if the laptop cowboy does not sell soap, and does not sell the soap business opportunity either….  No, if he sells any and all such home (or barroom) business opportunities, including rivals to S- in the same business….

Then what does the laptop cowboy sell?

Ah…  He sells you.  He sells people who want a home business opportunity.  He sells them by the thousands, lists and lists of them.  He gets less than a penny for you, but he has thousands and thousands of you, lists and more lists every week.

He sells leads.

Who buys his leads, his lists?  You do, down the road.  When you start your home business and run out of people to sell to (your mother, your aunt…) you’ll get clever and desperate and buy lists of leads to contact.  Names and numbers of people who want to start a home business.  People just like you!

How hungry would you have to be, before someone could sell you your own foot to gnaw on?

So who’s the mastermind behind the laptop cowboy?

Someone who has since been deported or incarcerated or driven underground?

No, a young Canadian who received a standing ovation and a handshake from the chairman at the national convention of the oldest and most highly respected of these home business vendors, after coming from nowhere to win their top prize.  You know the name.

Maybe he won top prize from their biggest rival the following week…

Almost enough to make you say No, no, not me, I could never sell…

===

Why so many good novels and movies about lawyers and trials?

[Robinson] now lives in The Hague and is a legal advisor to ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is on trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Robinson is so enthusiastic about his work that he has written a novel in which a lawyer represents a notorious Serbian warlord accused of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. He sells his book through his web site www.peterrobinson.com

For one thing, lawyers are storytellers.  First and foremost, lawyers make stories.  They sell stories.

A prosecutor and defense attorney offer competing stories.  Something went wrong.  Someone is harmed.  Someone’s to blame.   The story explains what went wrong, and who should put it right.  Says Lieutenant Kaffee in A Few Good Men:

A jury trial is about assigning blame.

Santiago’s dead. They want to know who’s to blame. They say [our clients] Dawson and Downey.  We say Kendrick [, their commanding officer].

Kaffee knows he can’t get his guys off unless he gives the jury someone else to blame.  In court you can’t win with a story that ends “these things happen” or “shit happens.”

The story is about the jury and the jurors too:

• You are avengers.
• You are defenders of justice.
• You are tough but fair.
• You are generous and merciful.
• You are understanding.
• You are shrewd, not sentimental.
• You have the courage to do the unpopular thing.
• You look out for the majority of people who play by the rules.
• You look out for the forgotten people.
• You look out for the misunderstood people.

The jurors get two stories, two explanations, two ways to place blame, but the jurors also get two views of themselves to choose from, two stories to tell of their duty.

In the movie The Sweet Hereafter (based on the novel by Russell Banks) a lawyer comes to a tiny town in the far north that has lost all its school-age children in one horrifying school bus accident.  The second time through the movie, when you’ve seen the bus slide off the road and across the ice of the river and then sink, you watch in horror as the bus goes from house to house that morning, picking up each child in front of each house from each soon-to-be-devastated parent.

Then a lawyer comes to town to recruit the grieving parents for a group lawsuit.  He visits them one by one and offers his condolences and offers them a story, an explanation, an explanation to be offered in court.   It’s a story of the dead children, and the story of someone to blame.   He will help them tell their child’s story, he says, and give it a new ending.  He will make sense of this, and give this sorrow an explanation and a meaning and even a remedy: someone must be made to put this right.

He offers the parents a view of themselves too, a story of themselves.  They are defending other children, children to come, even in their grief, though it’s too late to defend their own.  That’s the kind of people you are, he tells them.

Soon the town is bitterly divided about the lawyer and his story.  Some parents refuse to join his lawsuit, and try to dissuade the others.  They offer a different story of the lawyer and his recruits.  He’s greedy, an ambulance chaser, a hypocrite, a symptom of an irresponsible era that lies to itself  first and then others, that dresses up the lowest motives as the loftiest.  We aren’t that kind of people here.  You aren’t that kind of person.  Tell him no.  Tell him to go back to his kind and leave us to grieve in our way, our simple honest way.

Story versus story versus story, and may the best story win.

The lawyer and his story are put to the test at last.  A witness, one of the few children to escape the sinking bus, tells her story at a deposition, and her story assigns blame, but not to anyone with money enough to interest this lawyer, not to a state or county agency, not to a manufacturer, not to industry lobbyists at the legislature, but to the bus driver.  The lawyer packs up in defeat.

The girl is lying, and yet her lie does justice of a kind to the lawyer and to her father, who has joined the lawsuit and has big money in mind.

Her story gives the court someone to blame.  She doesn’t just blame the weather or the workings of chance.  A story for the court, she understands, must end with someone to blame.  Her account is false, but defeats the far worse account offered by the lawyer.  Her story beats his.

Her story also turns away from her father and his story.  He has been sleeping with her for years, in secret.  Her lie to the court defeats his bigger lie, and starts a new story in its place, her own story…

===

Can’t be right, you’re thinking.

Whatever you buy, you buy a story.  Whatever you sell, you sell a story.  Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the story business.

I’ve spent too much of my life in a desk chair, at a keyboard, you’re thinking.  Everything looks like stories and more stories from there.

Take the guy with the pushcart, you think, who sells coffee and rolls to people rushing for the peak trains at 7 AM.  You’re telling me he’s in the story business?  When his father started this business, you happen to know, he couldn’t count change, and he studied the coins and bills like English as a second language: the guy owes you this and he gives you that, what do you do…?  Remember the change-for-a-ten scam Ryan and Tatum O’Neal do in Paper Moon, outsmarting shop-keepers everywhere they go?

You happen to know this about the push cart man and his father?  Their story?  Maybe that’s part of why you buy from him, when you could get better coffee and rolls down the line.  You’re the same way.  You get ahead one day at a time, day after day, no skips, no jumps, just one step after another.  Same train every morning for years.  That’s your story too, and the guy’s pushcart warms you with that story on cold mornings.

A story is an explanation.  That explains it, says the first guy.  That’s no answer, says the second.  The two guys are worlds apart in their idea of what explains something and ends it.   They may become enemies over that and that alone, their idea of a good-enough or not-good-enough excuse.

“I was upset,” someone explains.  Oh, thinks the first guy, that explains it.  The hell it does, thinks the second guy.  Anyone can get upset, he thinks.  It’s what you do with it, and where it’s coming from, that’s what I want to hear.

Charles Baxter is the master at this.  In Burning Down the House he traces one era passing into another by the the kind of excuses that are fashionable from one year to the next, the kind of ending people accept as an ending.  Richard Nixon, for example, offering his story of Watergate, and his excuses, and a new generation asking “yes, and…?” because his ending doesn’t end the matter for them, his explanations don’t explain, his answers don’t answer.

“I needed money,” explains a culprit.  Yeah, one guy says, I get it.  It happens.  Not so fast, says the second guy.  How did that happen?   “I had just come down with the same disease that killed my father,” adds the culprit.  Say no more, nods the second guy.  But if the culprit said “Somehow my ship never came in,” the second guy would nod a different kind of nod, thinking,   “this guy will never have a dime and will never have a clue why not. ”

You’re in court for custody of your pre-teen daughter.  You offer the judge one story, your wife offers another.  Your story explains the way you got here, and points ahead to a better future.  So does your wife’s story.

You and your wife and the judge are in the story business.

The judge doesn’t need your whole story.  Once you end an answer with “I guess I never liked sitting at a desk,” the judge knows your kind of story, your kind of explanation, your kind of excuse, your kind of ending, and the kind of story you would teach your pre-teen daughter to accept, from herself and others.  The judge sits at a desk all day every day, long past the time when sitting hurts.  She doesn’t like it, but she does it.  She does it for you and your pre-teen daughter, when you won’t do as much for yourself.

You lose.  She doesn’t seem to be listening to your stories.  Why should she?  She knows where all your stories end…

“And that’s why…” every story ends.  Once the judge knows the ending where you stop, where you think you’ve explained and told why, she doesn’t need more of your stories.

Here’s an attorney writing about overestimating his clients and making assumptions that hurt them in court.  He defended clients who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and commited minor crimes again and again.  These are kids damaged before birth by alcoholic mothers, but they could be Charles Baxter’s first-term fiction students, who don’t know what makes a story, a start, an end, a progression.  You may never write a fictional story in your life, but…

Look what happens to your life if your story-sense is damaged, if you don’t know how to tell a story:

I assumed that my FAS client could tell the Judge what happened in a way that would make sense.

I assumed that their problems were fixable.

I assumed that after they got caught the third or fourth time for the same offense in the same circumstances, they would at least learn not to get caught.

I assumed they understood consequences: steal from cars and you go to jail.

I assumed they understood time: three days in jail is not the same as three months.

I failed to see that my client was usually the number two or three person in the group that committed the offense, but the first and only one to get caught.

I failed to notice that their crimes got no bigger over time, and no smaller either, it was just the same thing again and again.

I failed to understand that when my client left holes in his story, those were holes in his memory, in his  mind, holes where the story had fallen through.

I failed to see that the threat of jail had no effect on my client.  The main reason he didn’t want to go to jail was because he couldn’t be with his friends.  But maybe his friends were in jail too.

I failed to see that almost all the offenses were impulses of the moment, without planning or forethought.  The judge gave probation that required looking ahead and planning, arriving for appointments and following rules and such, but my clients were no more capable of planning their reforms than their offenses.

I failed to ask the mother directly about her drinking…

Until this attorney understood why his clients couldn’t tell a story, he couldn’t tell their story to the court, couldn’t explain or excuse them.

Our skills at story are tested every hour of our lives.  We are our stories.  Set to music, we are story, we are song….

When some young woman buys this shampoo instead of that, humming a tune inside, she is piecing together a script for her future, a script she offers also to men her age, mostly men she never sees but who see her hair flying like a flag with the way she strides  a sidewalk or a corridor;  a script she is making for their future together, she and some man, the right man for the part, and their children.  She can still smell the shampoo her father used when she was no taller than his knee, and the she can already smell the shampoo her first child will smell at his father’s knee, in a future she knows better and sees better than the present world coming at her every moment of every day, with all its sights and noises and smells…

===

Hi N:

Em loves to fish, but I find it difficult, nearly as difficult as meditation: my mind keeps trying to run off, like an addict for information maybe, or a word addict, craving the Internet.

No, nothing to do with Internet, now that I think of it. When I was at grad school at Princeton one year I hiked the Appalachian trail through Delaware with a friend from inner-city Chicago, and my mind went through withdrawal symptoms after all the reading. I began to read and reread every tiny word on our candy wrappers and such. Something in my mind went into reverse after the first day without input, and began to pull things from memory that I had not thought of in years.

I wonder if that’s why I love Em so madly. With no one else am I so fascinated that I can spend hours alone with her, just wondering what she is and what she will be. She and I hiked half a day on the Appalachian near home in early summer, through a swamp on wooden treads, and she darted off the trail after dragonflies and snakes and salamanders and what not. I would never let her shriek or be silly about bugs and such when she was little, and now she will hand me creatures that make *my* skin crawl.

She got off the schoolbus one day and asked me What is a tomboy? Knowing this could be a giant question to her, I answered in a breezy way that a tomboy is a girl who can do anything, girl stuff and boy stuff, depending on how she feels at the time, and will climb a tree if she likes, or shoot a basketball, and not always be stopped by a dress or a manicure that might be smudged. Sometimes, but not always.

When talk turns to vacation, I always look North, towards cold country and ice, while everyone else is looking South to hot sands.

Walking is one thing I miss most about my years in Manhattan. I walked everywhere, miles and miles. You don’t see many fat people in Manhattan. Obesity correlates with distance from urban centers and driving time, I hear, and I can believe it. I don’t care for driving, and sold my car when I went to Manhattan. My father still cannot understand that. When I was little he would pile us into the car on any pretext and we would explore the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California through car windows. He loved cars and driving. I think as a former orphan he felt the wonder of having a way to go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted….

The Internet… can, like anything, be used in behalf of the best in us or the worst, our withdrawal or our engagement. When I was a grad student at Columbia, in an apartment looking over the Hudson on Morningside Heights, I made friends with a very young Mormon couple from Utah. They were, in effect, visiting another planet. These were the earliest days of the Internet, and I had just left IBM, so I went online and found her a group that she could meet with every week, in person of course, sitting in a circle in someone’s apartment: a group of passionate knitters in Manhattan!

I saw then that the Internet would be far larger than its technology, and connect people of every kind, not just lovers of technology and loners. I write a blog subtitled Adventures in Aversion, a provocative way of saying that I look for people who see things differently than I do, or set my teeth on edge, and I don’t stop until I can see things as they do, for the moment at least, and even see me as they do…

93% of communication is non-verbal, you mention. Ouch, you’ve touched a sore spot. I was years learning that, with many bumps and knocks and stumbles. Now I’m a master at reading someone from a block away… I fought that idea (with my father, too, the psych PhD) because I’m better with words than anything else. Fear, that is. Fears shape our lives, don’t they? You’ve heard of those iPhone apps that tell you by satellite when people and places you like are nearby? I think we have something like that built into us, but in reverse. We turn our steps away from the slightest whiff of uncertainty or unfamiliarity, and begin to wear bare the same few paths through a giant teeming world. Long before any Internet or technology, right?

The Internet is only what we make it. Like anything. We are responsible.

You mention a personality test… Yes, tell me more please. I warn you though, I learned from my father (who gave me the WISC on my fourth birthday and every second year thereafter) to distrust the idea of self. I learned that not as an idea or theory, but because I saw how many different people he was in one lifetime, and I could not stay angry at him even when my sister would get angry at me for not sharing her anger, because I did not believe in “him”, he was now too far distant from the person we remembered, and from the orphan before that.

Later I knew that in myself (and would thank him for giving me the clue): in high school I could not bear to walk to the front of the class and talk about a book I had read. At IBM I flew to five states and talked half a day to standing-room-only crowds, with music and lights. I remember walking to the front one such day and thinking Wow, is this me, the guy who couldn’t give a book report?

That for me has been the greatest thrill in life, going beyond who I thought I could be, and saying Wow, is this the same guy? Because no, it’s not the same guy, it’s not me, there is no me, Me is hiding place we scrape together the way a mouse stuffs twigs and pebbles together under a rock, to dart out for its food without becoming food to a hawk. That’s what I mean when I say that I now see fears shaping our lives. First, fears shape the Me, our idea of ourselves, and make the Me into a hiding place from the big world.

So what did the DiSC say of you? Let me guess. You are a leader in the eyes of many people your age and younger and all ages. I hear that in your weekly routine. Patients looking up at you from chairs and beds, students looking down at you from amphitheater seating… You make yourself highly visible much of your time.

I got the oddest feeling once when my son, my first child, was six months old. Until then I thought he was clay that I should shape into a monument to myself. That day I saw in his eyes that someone was there already, and holding me to account, expecting more and better from me than I could yet see or suspect. Almost overnight I stopped cursing, not because I had taken an oath or made a project of it, but because I saw him trying to learn this difficult English language from me, and Damn and Shit and such are grown-up variations of Whaaa-Whaaa-Whaaa, the wails of a baby, and he didn’t need the sounds of a baby from me….

In Manhattan I led coaching classrooms for two years, training other coaches (life coaches, business coaches, personal coaches) two evenings a month for four hours an evening, sometimes in front of as many as 125, more often half that, and then coaching new coaches individually through the week. Much more challenging than lecturing for IBM, because now the topic could be anything, at any moment. I had a script to cover in the time given me, but I also took open-ended challenges and walked down the aisles from a one-foot stage with my microphone. I miss that more than anything, because I had that Is-This-Me sense of wonder about it.

Funny movie on this, though: Little Miss Sunshine….

Did I start to answer your question? Your very interesting question? So next you’ll tell me where the DiSC surprised you, if it did?

Your turn.

J-

===

Diabetes Drug Maker Hid Test Data on Risks, Files Indicate

The drug giant SmithKline Beecham found in a study as early as 1999 that its diabetes medicine, Avandia, posed risks to the heart, but it never made the information public.

– NY Times today

What’s rare now, in the tsunami of the Internet, in the Groundswell?  Honesty.  Something to trust.

As the Internet gives us more and more, more than we could ever have imagined, it takes away something too.  I’m not exempt.  Someone asked me recently why this blog is anonymous, why my name isn’t on it.  So I can tell a story about my brother if I need to, undeterred by the fact that I have no brother.

Even Steven Jobs of Apple, a hero of mine, a historical figure among us, has stumbled.  As Consumer Report (a stodgy relic of the pre-Internet era)  says:

Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that “mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

But what the Internet slays, the Internet heals.  Maybe readers of Consumer Reports and fans of the iPhone dwell in different universes, but not these writers:

When reports first started to surface of a reception flaw in the new phone, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said to a customer in an e-mail that he was simply holding the phone incorrectly. Technology writers lambasted the company for this comment.

Now that’s the Internet at its best.

My nine-year-old daughter called me one day to say that her cousin Vicki was on her bike and wouldn’t give it back.  They made a deal to take turns, but Vicki broke the deal.

I treated this as an important question.  Because it is.  I taught my daughter to say “I did it, I’m sorry” even to an angry parent or angry teacher.  That takes courage.

What would I tell her now, when someone broke a deal?  She wasn’t crying, and wasn’t raging, so I knew she had already gotten from me what mattered most in this.  I told her not to explode at Vicki, but not to make deals with her again.  Calmly tell her ‘No more deals.’

You can’t go to war against everyone who breaks their word, I told her.  You would spend your life at war with the world.   But when you find someone who keeps their word, keep that person in your life.  Think how much more we could get done if we didn’t have to double-check one another all the time, if we could take ‘Consider it done’ to the bank.  And be that person too, that other people keep in their life and never forget, because you keep your word and that’s so rare.

Whatever you sell, you sell a story.  Whatever you buy, you buy a story.  Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the story business.

And the story begins when someone remembers your words because they know you will too…

===

Lowell Bergman knew this better than anyone, as played by Al Pacino in The Insider.

More: Steven Covey on Trust…

===

Stories…

In the latest Slate Christopher Hitchens writes

Reviewing the sudden spasm of violence between the Uzbek minority and the Kyrgyz majority in Kyrgyzstan recently, many commentators were at a loss to explain why the two peoples should so abruptly have turned upon one another.   ….several reports stressed the essential similarity—ethnic, linguistic, cultural—between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek populations.

He takes his title from an explanation Sigmund Freud gave:

Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: “the narcissism of the small difference.” As he wrote, “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.”

This is worse than the slaughter of war, where Germans invade Russia, for example, and nearly two million soldiers die in and around a single city, Stalingrad.  Yes, war is a mechanized and high-tech slaughter, capable of far more damage.  But we are more horrified at the amateur variation, genocide, where neighbor turns against neighbor, without war or technology or uniforms or flags, and outsiders find it nearly impossible to distinguish one side from the other, the slaughterers from the slaughtered, as in Rwanda, where the Hutu tribesmen whispered “cut the tall trees” and took machetes to neighboring families of the Tutsi tribe, supposedly taller, and the arms and legs of 800,000 men and women and children littered the land like so much firewood.

We see war coming from far away.  Genocide comes out of hiding nearby, as near as the next street and the next day.

Religion is behind it, says Hitchens:

Visit Punjab and see if you can detect the remotest difference in people on either side of the border. Language, literature, ethnic heritage, physical appearance—virtually indistinguishable. Here it is mainly religion that symbolizes the narcissism and makes the most of the least discrepancy.

I have in mind another explanation, that gives us a clearer course of action.  Holding religion to account cannot be much easier than holding God to account, can it?  Which is just what religions themselves attempt.  No one calls his own belief “religion”.  “Religion” is your neighbor’s mistaken belief.  What step do you propose, against the mistaken belief of your neighbor?  What step that does not take the road to Rwanda, and Northern Ireland, and the Punjab?

Here’s the clue for me, but listen closely or you will miss it, just as you had to squint to see the difference between Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab.

Today is my 58th birthday, and my ten-year-old daughter called.  I have spoken to her for less than twenty hours altogether in the last twelve months, since the day after my birthday last year, because her mother asked the court to cut me off from her, even by phone.  After a year in court I have won the right to one call from her each week, when her mother dials the phone and monitors the conversation.

“I have it for a year already,” my daughter tells me.  Meaning, “I have had it for a year.”   That’s how her mother’s family says it.

Her mother’s family will say “I should have went….”  My daughter, like me, says “I should have gone…”  I was her night and day for six years.  I left her something.   “I did it, I’m sorry,” she will say.  You will never hear that from anyone in her mother’s family.

“Allright,” my daughter signs off tonight, in a tone of voice…  not a snarl… but a tone of impatience, exasperation.  I have not heard that from her before.  My heart sinks.  I rally, and I am ready for war, to win or die.  Why?

That “Allright” is the sound of her mother’s family, the story of their life.  It says “Don’t start with me, I’ve had it….”   It’s the sound of people who have been cheated and bullied forever.   Maybe they cannot stop you, but, ever irritable, they warn of such a stink that you’ll be sorry.  It’s the sound of the human stink bug, defending against predators by making itself disgusting.

Better lose to a predator than lose to your own stink, my family would say.

I am still fighting for my Em in court, going into a second year now.  Trust this process, I told her, and I hold that as a promise to be kept.   But in “allright” I heard “whatever,” I heard that she has quit following my promises, to see that I keep them.  She can live with the odds on the other team.

Is this narcissism?  A fussiness about grammar?  “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him….” said the professor in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

No, this is no small thing.  It’s a view of life and one’s place in it.  A way of standing in the world, and facing the world, and not shrinking from the world.  “A coward dies a thousand deaths…” I wanted to say, but Wikipedia corrects me.  This is Caesar in Shakespeare, in his nightgown, with his wife warning him against the dangers outside their door, dangers everywhere, dangers from his closest friends.  Stay home, she begs, weeping.  He shakes her off.  “Cowards die many times,” he says, the brave only once.  Not that she’s wrong.  In fact, his death is just an hour away, just down the street, and he knows it.  But he chooses that, in place of life behind his door, in his nightgown….

We live for our story.  We love our children above all else because they carry our story forward when we no longer can.  We love our children more than our lives, because we love our story more than life itself.

Christopher Hitchens could easily miss that, because every day he tells his story to millions.  Millions cannot.

At the end of the World Cup match the footballers pull off their jerseys and exchange colors.  Imagine an American at the Olympics handing the American flag to someone from Korea, and marching along the grandstand with the Korean flag.  Never!  But with jerseys at the World Cup it’s just possible.  Win or lose, all of them have gotten to the World Cup and played for an audience of millions.  They have their story already.

Hutus and Tutsis would die for the choice Achilles had.  Live long but unknown, or die young in a story that will be told forever.  Achilles has second thoughts when asked again in the Aeneid after a century or two among the shades of the dead.  I changed my mind, he says.  I would trade centuries of fame among the dead for a single day in a poor man’s kitchen, washing dishes in a window that faces the sun.  Easy for him to say.  He had the choice.  Not once, but twice, in two stories we are still telling two thousand years later.  The Hutus and Tutsis never had any choice but the poor man’s kitchen.  Until they turned on one another, that is.  Then what a story they became.  A worldwide wave of horror.  Even the Olympian Hitchens took notice, and looked into it.

The Hutus and Tutsis had forever worn jerseys and colors so similar that we could not tell one team from another.  No match can begin that way.  We tuned in when one side turned the colors of the other side red, blood red.

Is this narcissism?  I don’t think we understand it better by sneering at it.  What did Arjuna decide in the oldest of stories, the Gita, when he paused on the edge of a great battle against his cousins, and shook his head, and wondered what are we doing, what are we doing?  Even the gods held back, not wanting to choose sides and start the slaughter.  So the gods offered their help in a choice of two ways.  One side would get a thousand chariots, armed and manned.  The other side would get one charioteer, Krishna himself, best of the gods, to ride along and advise.  Arjuna chose the one, and left the thousand to his cousins.  But before sending his chariots against theirs, he asked Krishna what’s the point, kin slaughtering kin?  Isn’t this just such a terrible waste?

You are dead already, all you mortals, Krishna tells him.  Sooner or later.  Meanwhile, play your part for all you are worth, your part not theirs, and contend for the best death.

These oldest of stories, Achilles in the Iliad, and Arjuna in the Gita, tell of war, but war is where we choose between our life and our story.  Where are the stories of the Achilles or the Arjuna who chose life instead, and turned away from the story?

===

…dolphins are said to have names. Though whether it’s a name (a whistle that other dolphins use to address a given individual) or a personal theme tune (something the animal whistles to announce itself) is not clear.

Says Olivia Judson in the New York Times today.

Names like “Joe” and “Sue” she means, not names for subspecies like the Yangtze bottlenose dolphin.  Though one bottlenose calls another or answers another by a whistle or click, not a name anyone could spell.  Purely sound.

When one bottlenose dies, we don’t expect to hear about it in the NY Times.  Fred passed last night, survived by Jane and Ellen….  But when the last bottlenose dies, it’s news.  Here Douglas Adams tells that story at TED.  Yes, the Douglas Adams of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe.  He’s a scientist, did you know?  I didn’t.  Even when he died last year, I didn’t.  I knew he was a great storyteller.

His stories of Madagascar tell you of him.  What a world of horror he saw as a scientist.  He’s also one of the funniest story-tellers anywhere.  No accident, I think.  I laugh most when things are worst.

When Adams takes you into the horrors of the Yangtze river in the industrial era, with throbbing diesel traffic on it, you’ll be relieved that the last of the bottlenose dolphins has died since he gave this talk.  No more suffering.  The bottlenose long ago went blind, but the less he saw the more he sang.   He could no longer see or sing or hear for all the diesels.

Writes one Megan at TED:

As a student with a lifelong dream of becoming a zoologist, and an avid lover of sci-fi (and especially Hitchhiker’s Guide for its wonderful whimsy and humor)…I felt so inspired and brightly lit while watching this talk. I laughed out loud so many times. What an extraordinary creature this man was =) It’s not fair that people like him should have to pass away.

People like him?  See, we feel self-indulgent to mourn one man.  Better to mourn a kind, “people like him.”

Not everyone thought so.  One man inverted that arithmetic.  A storyteller.  He taught that one is more than many.   That near and small is greater than big and far.  He taught by stories.  Only stories.  On foot, around one small lake.  Across two thousand years, and out to every empty margin of the earth, no stories have been more told, and no name is more known.

Here’s another clue what’s unique in us, our species.  A parrot has been seen dancing to a beat.  So what?  Well, humans are almost the only species that can move to a beat.  If you were raised on Disney animation as I was, this may surprise you. It’s rare, and almost unique to humans.  The way I move to a beat might well disqualify me from the species, and I could hardly complain.

What have I just done in that last sentence?  Told you a story of me.

I think we’re onto something.

You have heard this here many times:

Whatever you buy, you are buying a story.  Whatever you sell, you are selling a story.  Whatever business you are in, you are in the business of story. A story of you, it goes without saying.

If  We are Song, then that is the chorus.

If as a species we are, above all, meaning-makers, we need words for categories and species.  If we make meaning with stories, we need names for individuals.  What an awkward word, individual.  Can’t be divided.   We name it by what you cannot do to it: divide it.

Watching the Japanese team at the Copa Mundial, I saw names I knew from American Baseball.  Different guy, same name.  Too many people, not enough names.  The problem is worse in Asia.  They accept anonymity.  They never had high hopes of naming individuals.  Makes Chinese history hard to tell.  Makes any story hard to tell.

Why would we have some core craving or drive to tell stories?  Beyond categories and species we make individuals, and we make individuals by means of stories.  This one lab rat, this one morning….   Likeness with difference, difference with likeness.  We have no story without someone to tell, someone who knows what we mean, who knows why we are making these noises in his direction. Someone of our kind, like us.  But within that likeness our story makes one of us different from another.

Why should one of us be different than another?  Or alike or together?  Why should we be at all?  No reason.  We are Song.  Sing me any song you think the world could not have done without.  As nothingness could have done well enough without something, without world.  On the contrary, with song we tell why the world, in place of none.  Every song does.  Only song can.  Song, a story sung.

Olivia’s dolphins give their names as sounds, not spellings.  As clicks, whistles, tunes.  As song.  We are surprised, because we thought only humans did.

This was Olivia Judson’s farewell column for a time.   She writes, appropriately, of her name.  Olivia.

I wanted to gripe about the fate of “Olivia.”  It used to be a rare name — which I liked.  But it is now among the most popular names for baby girls in England and Wales.  It is the name of a pig in a series of children’s books; you can even buy the stuffed toy…

She is another Douglas Adams.  Alike and different.  Unlike Douglas Adams, she is still among us with stories, laughing like he did, but in her way.  Or was, until today.

Goodbye for now, Olivia, and thank you.  Come again.  I will be watching for you.  We are song.

===

In How Pleasure Works, by Paul Bloom, you hear results from many new studies of decision-making, some done by Bloom himself, or colleagues.  After Bloom, you can never say “decision-making” without restraining a smile.  Some of Bloom’s observations are not for the faint of heart.   Recommended.

Bloom asks why a friend of his moved a framed sketch to a prominent place in her front room after finding out that it was not what the seller claimed when she bought it years before.  It was a genuine Picasso, she discovered.  Has it gotten more beautiful? Bloom teased.

But you and I can recite the answer by now in our sleep.

Whatever you buy, you are buying a story.  Whatever you sell, you are selling a story.  Whatever business you are in, you are in the business of story. A story of you, it goes without saying.

Bloom’s friend moved the picture to a place where it could start more stories.  Where its new and better story could be told more widely.

We are essentialists, says Bloom.  I think that word is a mistake.  Meaning-makers, he means, and I agree with that.  But a generation ago, the existentialists were the ones who claimed that man had a way to make meanings, if not a right and a drive.  The word essentialist would have been kept for the opposite.  For, say, the Catholic priest I greeted in the drug store the day after I walked out of his mass.  I found myself in a rally for an amendment to the constitution outlawing abortion, and I scooped up my coat and my small daughter and walked out at the next unobtrusive opportunity.  If your law were voted in, I suggested to him where we waited at the cash register, then our thoughts and votes on this question would never again count, either way.  We would have no say.  “Ah,” he said sadly, in a baritone made for the ages,  “we have no say now.”

No, he was not pouting, not talking about his view versus the views of others.  Give him more credit than that.  He meant that God long ago decided all such questions, and it was not for us to debate them one way or the other.  That is your essentialist.

To the existentialist, we are here as open questions.  To the essentialist, we are here to hew to answers given long before us.

Every question that matters was answered at the creation, and answered in a way that every human child with the intelligence of a ewe can understand, and does.  All debates are wrong.  All debates stray from right.  All of them, insofar as they are debates.  That is your essentialist.

Bloom asks why people would bid $40k for a tape measure used by John Kennedy.  Not for its virtues as a tool.  Or maybe as tool for starting stories, like a butane match that starts fires.

We are meaning makers.  Not tool makers or speech makers or word makers, but meaning makers.  We make meaning with stories.

Bloom himself has started a bigger story with that tape measure than the bidders at the auction did.  His answer is under his fingertips as he types.

I meant to ramp up to Christopher Hitchens and his article in Slate: The Narcissism of the Small Difference.  In ethno-national conflicts, it really is the little things that tick people off.

But before we leave our tape measure for hatred and war, let’s sit a moment and draw a breath.

===

Cannocks: a sneering way to spell Canucks, a nickname for French Canadians.  Sometimes affectionate, sometimes not.

Everything is sales.  Elections too.  Family Court too.

Once upon a time a man running for president and expected to win was brought down by a remark about “Cannocks”.  Actually, an anonymous letter writer quoted a spoken remark by the candidate, so the “Cannocks” spelling belongs to the unknown letter-writer in this instance.  The letter writer claimed he had spoken with the candidate in a deep south state, and asked how the candidate could understand the problems of poor blacks.  You don’t have blacks way up north where you come from, he told the candidate.  No, the candidate said, but we have Cannocks….

The letter went to a newspaper run by a fierce opponent of the candidate just two weeks before a primary election in that state, a state with many Cannocks and many high-minded people who would be troubled by a sneer directed at French Canadians or anyone else.  The editor reported the letter and the candidate overreacted.  Even people who rightly suspected the letter was forgery lost confidence in the candidate.  He was guilty of overreaction, if nothing else, and in a presidential candidate that was enough.

In the fullness of time the truth came out.  The letter was a forgery by opponents of the candidate.  He had never said any such thing.  Meanwhile, though, someone else won the presidency, and the country took a different direction.

The fullness of time did not bring forth this truth all by itself.  A rare effort did.  More often the fullness of time buries such truth forever.

I just saw All The President’s Men again, as Woodward and Bernstein (Woodstein) uncover the forgeries of Donald Segretti and his team, a team that planted false reports about Richard Nixon’s opponents in election states all over the country.  You see why Woodstein had to prove everything six different ways before the Washington Post would print it.  People can say anything.  You can start to believe it when three people who knew it for themselves come forward to say so and give their names.  Just what the newspaper skipped with the Cannocks letter.

But the truth could so easily have been buried forever.  Woodward’s source Deep Throat, we now know, was a senior FBI executive just under J Edgar Hoover.  Woodward met him at the White House when Woodward was just out of the Navy and searching for a direction.  Deep Throat was a careful investigator with nothing but contempt for newspapers and their investigations.  But in Woodward he saw his own sense of honor and careful thought. He guided Woodward through this investigation as if training him, teaching him the difference between an FBI investigation and a newspaper investigation.  Though Deep Throat disdained the newspaper Woodward worked for, he was mortally offended at a White House that would plant sloppy forgeries in sloppy newspapers all over the country. He would bring that to light if it was the last thing he ever did.

The forgeries worked so well, though, because they were so unconnected to reality. If someone accuses you of overstating your business expenses, you know how to answer.  If they accuse you of secretly fathering an illegitimate black child, how would you begin to reply?  Wouldn’t you look plenty foolish, whatever you did or didn’t say next?  The foolishness of your answer could well undo you where the sexual allegation could not.  John McCain, for example, did not take the bait when the Bush Jr campaign in South Carolina asked in push-polling “Would it matter to your vote if you knew that John McCain had secretly fathered…”.  But he lost a close vote there, after beating Bush Jr previously.  Forged charges can hurt you either way, and far-out charges can hurt you worse than believable ones.

A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer.  The Segrettis and Clawsons can easily outnumber and overwhelm the Woodwards and Bernsteins, then and now.  More easily now, maybe, in the Internet era.  We wonder how our elections can still function.

So then, what about Family Court?  What does this tell us about a custody contest in Family Court?

Aren’t the two parents candidates for heading the family and caring for the children, with campaign managers, plans, promises, and position papers?  Don’t they descend at times into negative campaigning?  Don’t sexual allegations surface now and then, sometimes poorly sourced and difficult to confirm?   Does anyone read or ask about their plans?

Yes, Family Court is the heaven where Donald Segretti and his dirty tricksters go when they die…

And we, looking for Bob Woodward on the bench, or Carl Bernstein beside us at our table, may see the tricksters make off with our children this time…

===

Everything is sales.  In hiring, you are the buyer.  In Family Court, the seller.

Say you are hiring for a mid-level position in your small company, to lead a team.

The resumes accumulate like snowfall, inches per hour.

You already have more work than you can do, without this.

The missing person or empty position makes extra work for everyone, not just you.  You’re short-handed, with too much work and too few people, or you wouldn’t be hiring.

How many candidates can you interview?  You need each candidate to meet with two of your other people too, so that’s hard to schedule.  With everyone overscheduled already, when will all three of you have an extra hour at the same time?

But you can’t cut corners.  Hiring the wrong person would make all of this worse.

Applicants don’t always understand this, but most of the risk is yours, not theirs.  If you hire the wrong person, it’s worse for you.  He can apply to dozens of other companies the next day, with  just a few missing weeks in his long career, easy to explain away to strangers who weren’t there.  But for you?  Your new hire leads a team of your good people, and you risk them too.  They are already overworked, and with no one leading them, they wonder if their accomplishments will be remembered and counted.  They wonder why you couldn’t simply advance one of them.  You don’t think highly enough of  them, they decide.   So now if you hire the wrong guy for them, you may lose some of them too.   At best they will wonder about you.  So will the people above you.

So you can”t cut corners.  If you don’t have time for this, you don’t have time for this twice.

But most of these resumes are all wrong.  Did they not read what you are looking for?   Do they just mail resumes by the dozens every day?

So you read that stack of resumes standing up.  Straddling your waste basket.  You speed read, and slide the resume off the stack and into the round file at the first mismatch you spot.

OK,  now Family Court.

The judge has your hiring problem, but worse.  Far worse.

Family Court is understaffed and overworked.  Your judge said she has 2500 open cases.  2500 positions to fill, in families like yours.  She has just two applicants for each position, but 2500 open positions.

Every time she must pick someone to head a family, she gets a stack of papers bigger than yours.  In each case, a stack bigger than your stack of resumes.  Again in each case.   Try to picture that much paper.

If you think you get bad resumes, you should see hers.

Can she straddle the round file and slide papers off the top of the stack?

No, she has to interview everyone, meet and sit with every one of them.  How is it possible?

She has an advantage, though.  She can get all the applicants together in the same interview, and let them interview one another.   She can’t just shred them herself, but she can let them shred one another.

Then she does what you do.  Skims for the first bad sign in a resume, and sweeps it into the round file.  But by then the applicant is sitting before her, in her court.  Much easier to get someone out the door, you have learned, before they get in the door.  But she has men with uniforms and guns if rejected applicants get out of hand.

Still, she has an impossible job!  How does she do it?

Maybe she doesn’t.

Who would know?

If you make the wrong hire, everyone knows.  But she’s not hiring for her court, she’s hiring for your family.  After today, she doesn’t want to see you again, ever.  “I have 2500 open cases….”

===

Too obvious to mention, maybe…

But then so is the air we breathe…

You can’t sell to someone who has no money.

Say a business lives by selling a solution to a problem.  Any problem, big or small, short or long, imagined or not…

What one problem can you not sell a solution to?  The inability to pay, to buy, to be the counterparty to a sale…

Who’s the best to sell to?   Someone successful in every way but one, one way you can help.   He has something to give.

Obvious?  But looking back I see so many times when that is where I failed.  I’m doing it again, I think, with a new client.  He is building a software training course using a software tool called (let us say) Flyspeck.  Flyspeck could not do what he needed so he invited software experts to build an extension to it.  I looked into Flyspeck and told him yes, that could be done, given a tiny missing piece in Flyspeck (tiny like the brainstem is tiny, compared say to the thigh).   So now he and I are talking with Flyspeck about adding their missing piece.  And talking and talking…

Until I step back and wonder why this thing goes on so long, with so many people, and so much talk….

People who have no way to buy tend to find one another in clusters.   As stray hairs find one another in the shower, weaving a wig on the drain cover.

If you want to feel this all the way down to a sick feeling in your stomach, watch American Buffalo, the movie version of David Mamet’s play, staring Dustin Hoffman as Teach.  Teach has not a clue, but teaches endlessly in that empty pawnshop, lecturing the last two losers who listen without throwing anything at his head, because throwing something would be more trouble than just ignoring him.

These days Teach would write a blog about selling.

David Mamet knows selling.  See also his Glengarry Glen Ross.

Flyspeck, I now see, wants to charge my client for adding the missing piece in their product.   The missing piece of their brain.  That could make perfect sense to someone with part of their brain missing.

Someone wants to borrow your donkey cart for an hour for a dollar, and you happily agree to the dollar.  When your donkey cart does not roll, however, you offer to improve it, and add whatever is missing (ready tomorrow or shortly thereafter) for an extra dollar.  Too much, thinks your renter.  He looks around for someone who can get the cart rolling for less.  He invites bids from experts.  Various candidates jostle one another to study the no-go cart, then bid to solve the problem.  From the bids of these experts your renter at last determines why your cart does not roll.  A missing wheel.

How did my client get stuck with Flyspeck?  No accident.  He’s a marketing expert, and Flyspeck asked him why their product was not selling.  But they could not pay, so they gave him a Flyspeck free of charge.  He accepted happily, getting  expensive software he could not have paid for.  Maybe I could make some money from this expensive software I got for free, he thinks.  I will use their Flyspeck myself, and tell them why it isn’t selling.

But he couldn’t.  Their cart would not roll….

How did Flyspeck find him?  Flyspeck was failing.  Why him?  He was failing.  Why me?  I was failing.  One of the seven hungry samurai, chopping wood while his sword hangs on the clothesline.

That’s just what Teach would say, isn’t it?  I’m a samurai down on his luck.  Because of the times.  Because of history.  But that’s not a samurai, is it?  A samurai is the cause of, not because of.

No one here has any money.  Not for nothing, either.  They have no money for good reason.  Each of the three consults the next about that problem, to understand it and fix it.   My nothing for your nothing.  Stray hairs in the shower, weaving a wig on the drain cover.  The pawnshop in American Buffalo.

What one problem can you not sell a solution to?  The inability to pay…

Who do you never sell to?  The guy whose problem is just one of many.  The guy with nothing but problems.  You never sell to him, but you can talk to him forever about why and why not.  He has nothing but time…

Or is this what the bottom of a deep recession looks like, to good people on all sides?

===

Why we like soccer.  Or basketball.  Or tennis.  Or [insert your own favorite here].

And why we look down on people who like soccer, or basketball, or tennis, or your favorite.

When we lose at soccer, we lose because we are not so good at soccer (unless maybe we lack the fighting spirit inside, as Mishima and others would say).

But elsewhere in life we lose because we didn’t know which game we were in.  We still don’t, mostly.

Mostly we lost when we didn’t know we were in a game, but we were.  Or we glimpsed some game around us, often behind our back, but we could never make it out.  What’s the game?  Who’s in it?  Her?  Him?  Him too?  What do they win?  How do they win….

In divorce court, for example.

In the classic Anatomy of a Murder, written years later by the attorney who won the case, Jimmy Stewart defends a hotheaded husband who killed a bartender for raping his flirtatious wife.

Is the husband rash, carried away by his own imaginings?  Is his wife flirtatious?  How much Yes and how much No was mixed into her responses to the bartender that night?

Stewart of course wants the jury to decide No, the husband is not rash, and No, the wife is not flirtatious, and did not invite any of this.

But first Stewart wants to know for himself.

He has two ways to know.  He can reconstruct that dark night weeks ago, asking people to tell him about what they saw and what they remember.  Or he can provoke this husband, and see if he is rash now, and provoke this wife, and see if she is flirtatious now.

Jimmy Stewart is broken-hearted joker.  His own marriage came apart long ago.  He does not date.  His business suffers while he goes fishing and plays jazz piano.  He catches himself making wisecracks when he asks a witness about the night of the rape and murder. Most of the time he finds it hard to take this seriously.

But before he can test the virtue of the gorgeous Lee Remick, she tests his.  He comes back to his office to find her stretched on his couch with a drink in her hand and a knowing smile on her face.  An inviting and mischievous smile, as Stewart reads it.

So, the moment of decision…

Knowing Jimmy Stewart and his career in films (It’s a Wonderful Life, Shenandoah, Mr Smith, Spirit of Saint Louis…), you know he will do the right thing and come through all dangers and temptations.  That’s why he got this part.

So you could miss the thoughts running through his mind at that moment, behind all his bumbling, when Lee Remick all but winks to seal the deal…

For her its a chance to trade up…  Dump that husband, wave her handkerchief as he goes off to the penitentiary for life, and snuggle in with Jimmy Stewart.

Stewart is thinking the same thing.  The man is no good, everyone says.  He’s doomed.  Headed for the pen.  No one can save him.  No one will blame Stewart.  Stewart has only to make a good show and let the man lose…

What would you do?

What would your lawyer do, in Family Court, in your case?

Here’s part of a famous Open Letter from a Divorce Lawyer, with all the things your lawyer will never tell you (mainly because  you refuse to hear them).

I charged the highest retainer I thought I could get. The reason I did this is that the retainer is often the only money I ever see for representing someone in a divorce case. I may try to bill you and get paid later, but many of my clients don’t pay me anything after the initial retainer, even though they owe me a great deal of money, and I hesitate to sue them for fear they will counterclaim for malpractice and drive up my insurance premiums. The fact that I have so much trouble getting clients like you to pay me what they owe me is another reason my work is so unpleasant for me.

I also will work to appear successful. I may drive a luxury car and maintain a sumptuous office, because I want you and my colleagues — especially my colleagues — to believe that I am earning lots of money. In one sense, I am earning lots of money. I charge a high hourly rate, and I have a great deal of business, so I have high billings. I also have a high overhead, however, and I have trouble getting paid. In reality, I have financial struggles just like you do.

… Over time you will begin to see how expensive all this is becoming.  You may begin to resent me, and you may place a lower priority on paying my fee.

… [At some point ] I will have spent enough time on your case to justify keeping all the retainer, and I will be afraid that I may never see any more money, so I will press you to reach agreement with your spouse.

…Remember, by then, I will want out.

…I have learned that most of my business comes by referral from other professionals, so it’s more important to me that referral sources feel good about me than that clients feel good about me. I devote lots of attention to my relationships with judges, other lawyers, and other professionals. On the other hand, I have over the years become quite comfortable with unhappy clients…

Get the message?  Your attorney has his interests and you have yours.  His interests overlap with yours in some ways (not many).  His interests diverge from yours in some ways (many).  His interests run counter to yours in some ways (most ways, when you think about it).

At some point everything in your attorney’s world tells him to defeat you, and from then on he wants to defeat you worse than the opposing attorney ever did…

He can do it too, and leave not a trace.

He can pressure you to settle at any cost.  He can pressure you to settle, and pressure you to say you were not pressured.

If you stand in the way while your attorney scrambles for the nearest exit, he can knock you down like a coat rack beside a fire exit.

Who knows your case better than your own attorney?  Who knows more about defeating you?  More than the opposing attorney could ever know…

And he will, when the money runs out.  Expect it.

Unless your guy is Jimmy Stewart?

===

Suppose science worked as justice does. Suppose we went to court to find a cure for typhoid.

Beside the attorney for the defense sits a man in a rumpled suit. His beard is going gray. Only two of his five children lived to adulthood. The other three died of typhoid.

The prosecutor trumpets a long list of personal failings in the defendant, most of which would baffle everyone who has ever known the defendant, particularly his wife and mother and grown children, but also his oldest enemies. Are we talking about the same man, they wonder.

The defense attorney defends against these charges as he has a thousand times, for a thousand other defendants. In truth he knows little or nothing about the unusual man beside him. In his early years he would have investigated his client from top to bottom, inside and out. In time he learned how little use that was, and left off.

The defendant himself does not speak, from start to finish. His attorney speaks for him.

Was he a careless father, who endangered his children? Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no…. Back and forth it goes.

This is a courtroom. A place to find wrongdoing. We look round and round for wrongdoing in this man…

If they find too little wrongdoing in you, the defense attorney explains, we must show them where else to look. They have a tiny straw basket to fill with blackberries. If our bush does not fill their basket, we must point them to another bush.

We are looking for falsehoods, not truths here, the defense attorney explains. Falsehoods on the other side, not truths on our side. If we find falsehoods at the other table faster than they find falsehoods in us, we win. False falsehoods are good enough, if we can sling them faster than the other side can wipe them off.

Are we gathering berries or slinging them, wonders the defendant.

Falsehoods about the defendant himself, knows the prosecutor, are a hundredfold more valuable than falsehoods about typhoid. Less work, to begin with. If I paste the defendant himself with falsehoods, I need not bother with falsehoods about typhoid. Any talk of typhoid itself would be difficult and unproductive here, a last recourse if all else failed.

Well, thunders the prosecutor, if this man is not a dangerous father, why are these three of his five children dead short of adulthood?

The defense attorney thunders back. Look to one Charles Chamberlain for wrongdoing. A lazy and lying assistant of a kind everyone knows, and everyone suffers from.

Charles? thinks the defendant. Well, in a way, I suppose.

I took my family on vacation, recalls the defendant, and left my assistant Charles in charge of our scientific experiment. He was to have infected an entire coop of chickens with a typhoid solution. Instead, he sneaked away on holiday himself. His last chance at love, he thought. To cover up his mistake, he infected the chickens weeks later. But the infection did not work. The chickens were out of sorts for a day or two, but recovered.

‘I must have used the wrong solution again,’ thought poor puzzled Charles. ‘I often do. I have never been good at getting these things right. Never see the point of it, to begin with. Why make chickens sick? Is there not enough sickness in the world?’

But Charles scurried to infect the chickens with a fresh dose of typhoid before I caught up with him. Again no good. The chickens were completely unphased this time. Charles was baffled, and could no longer hide the mess from me…

I was not angry with him. On the contrary, I was more pleased than he had ever seen. You have done nothing wrong, I told him, but you must tell me everything, exactly. Leave nothing out, and add nothing in. I promise, there will be no blame for you. On the contrary.

You see, I had an idea about typhoid, and causing it, and preventing it. If I was right, then Charles had not made nearly the mistakes the good man accused himself of.

Yes, I told Charles, you gave the chickens a typhoid solution, but a weak solution, late and out of date. After that we could never give them typhoid again, even with a fresh strong dose.

What a mess, Charles apologized, genuinely stricken now.

No, I told him. Look at me. My eyes were shining. Mr Chamberlain, you have cured the world of typhoid.

A rap of the gavel brings the defendant back from his memories. He may not speak here, and his attention sometimes wanders.

A great many ugly things are said, back and forth across the courtroom, but after a few days of this, neither table has pasted the other with vastly more falsehoods, and the defendant is released with a stern rebuke. The evidence fell just short of sending him to prison, he is told.

The judge glowers down from his high seat, in his black robe. ‘You have been lucky this once, Mr Pasteur, but I warn you, do not let me see you in my courtroom again. Do you understand me, sir?”

===

I was sending my Google calendar to my new Android phone and the events arrived but the tasks didn’t.  So, I thought, I need something for tasks.

What exactly is that?  How is a task different from an event?

Well, an event happens with or without you (the Yankees game today).  A task won’t (Fix Linda’s computer).

Is that right though?  That task, to fix Linda’s computer, is scheduled just the way the Yankees game is.  Linda will be looking for you Saturday at 2 or whatever.  If you do nothing, that appointment will happen with or without you, just like the Yankees game.  She will show and you won’t.

Suppose you forget Linda.  Now what makes Linda a task and not an event?  Completing, not starting.  The Yankees game will complete, and fixing Linda’s computer will not.

Actually, it’s a difference in odds.  The Yankees game might get rained out, or cut short because of a brawl or an earthquake or an assassination attempt on the governor or whatever…  But odds are good, the Yankees will finish.  It’s a lot of money to a lot of people.

What are the odds of you finishing Linda’s computer?  Not as good.  Why?  You can’t be counted on.

Will it make news if the Yankees don’t finish?  Surely.  What if you don’t finish?  Not so much, because you’ve taught Linda not to count on you.  She keeps a percentage by your name (everyone does): the odds that your words will come true.

Is that where task differs from event?   A difference in character?  An event depends upon highly reliable characters.  A task depends upon less reliable characters.  You, for instance.

An event makes news if it fails to complete as scheduled.  A task makes news if it succeeds (“Yes, Richard was here, he fixed my computer!  What?  Yes, completely!”)

So what percentage do people have beside your name?  When you promise something, what odds do they give your promise?

Maybe we don’t need a task list at all, we could put everything on the event calendar if we would complete what we say with odds of 100% or close?

Ouch, no.  We don’t want people to think twice when we don’t deliver.  We want them to take it in stride, suffer in silence, not howl, not tell anyone.  “If I do a good job for you, tell everyone.  If I don’t, tell me”.

An If list, then.  A Maybe list.  A Don’t-Squawk list.  A What-Did-You-Expect list.

I have a TODO pasted to my computer screen: “Check TODO list.”  But I don’t notice it anymore.  So I have a kitchen timer beside my keyboard.  It can’t go higher than 66 minutes.  When it goes off I click it twice to start the countdown again, and I look at my TODO list.  I don’t look again for 66 minutes.  What if I got a better timer, that goes to 999 minutes?

But I forget to set my timer.   Should I paste a TODO to my computer screen: Set TODO timer?   What odds would you give that?

So what’s a task list?  A list of bullshit events, with poor odds of starting and worse odds of finishing.  A list of good-luck-with-that events.  A list of events you’ve given yourself permission to sabotage.  A list you’ve taught others not to expect from you.

What if we made all our tasks into events?  Upheld odds of 100% or close?  Could we do it?

I tried that once, come to think of it.  Soon I wasn’t promising anything.  The answer to every request was No.  I started avoiding the requests in advance, and then avoiding the people who might make requests.

So maybe we put an event on a task list when we can’t altogether promise it but we don’t want to just sidestep it either.

A list of good intentions, then.

How good?  Depends on you, and the odds people give your intentions, your promises, your word.

Your credibility.  That’s the percentage you put by your name in their minds.  You taught them that percentage.

Think Al Pacino in The Insider, as Lowell Bergman, who lives and dies by his credibility, and defends it like his life.  His word has power.  When he gives his word, things move all over the world, big things, dangerous things.

Why wouldn’t we want that, all of us?  A word with that power?  A word that sets great forces in motion?   Well, like a big truck, all that power is expensive to run.  And if you set dangerous  forces in motion and then don’t come through, the danger comes back looking for you.

Your OK-So-I-Aint-Lowell-Bergman list, then.  Your Forget-It list.  Your Lemme-Go list.  Your Outta-Here list.

Your path to oblivion, in the fewest possible steps.

===

Next time someone tells you Sell what they want, not what they need, listen for a song running through your mind.  Who would know, if that song had never been written?

I told a never-married friend that dancing was one of my last great fears, and she wrote back that her father taught her to dance when she was small, in a small Canadian railroad town, in their front room on Coronation Boulevard.

“What difference did he make in me? He gave me confidence…”

“Wonderfully told!” I wrote her back:

The dancing and whistling, as if he had not a care in the world, and the surprise, the bravery of adopting at age 50! Yes, that’s courage of more than one kind. What will others think? What if I don’t live to see her off to college? What if I get sick, and she can’t straighten her teeth like the other girls, or go to the summer camp with her friends?

And finally, what if she never finds the man I taught her to expect?

Your story brings something back to life in people. For me, a day when Alice was seven and I was watching her for the day (and every day, and the nights between), and I was worried about money, working long hours at the computer, telling her yes, I’ll play soccer in the backyard with you, or softball, but only for thirty minutes, and only twenty minutes from now.

One of her movies played the start of Beethoven’s Fifth and I stopped. I sang it back to her and saw that she knew nothing about the music I loved because I never took time for it any more. If I died now, I thought, and she heard that I loved music, she would be caught by surprise and embarrassed, wondering how well she knew me after all; not as well as some other people in my life?

So I put the Fifth on the player and we danced a silly dance around the room for twenty minutes…

Now I leave the story here for Alice to find one day.

There might so easily never have been a Beethoven or a Fifth, or a Neil Young or Hearts of Gold, or a Cat Stevens or Morning is Broken, or a Pete Seeger or Turn Turn Turn (and some of you are seconding the motion, against this slate of candidates, and that’s just what I mean: The courage of them, to live by giving us something no one needs, that would never have been missed, had it not come to us out of nowhere).

The singers know something more that requires courage: How easily there might never have been an Alice or a me or a silly dance one day, or an earth to dance on, or a sun to light this day or any day. Who would miss them, if they had never been?

They sing in the face of that.

Knowing we are all just song, all that we have and all that we are, just a song and dance and an ooh and an ahh and a la-la-la, beginning and ending in a hmmmm behind closed eyes.

I saw a Pasolini movie about Chaucer. What do I remember? Only a beggar singing. “The only song that he did know, was O-O-O-O-O-O-O”.

I inventoried the Os twice, and twice again, to be sure we had the requisite seven, but double check me.

And because we are song, you and me both, you know just what comes next:

Dance this day, while you may, with me!

Alice? Alice? Are you there?

===

Four giant pictures appear on the auditorium wall.  You hear a gasp from the audience in the dark, like the wind from a cave at dawn.

Which of these four are you most likely to die from, asks the speaker.  In the dark, everyone picks an answer from the four horrible pictures.

Care to play?

First, though, I am not talking death today, or the odds of one death against another.  I’m looking at addiction.  Stay through death for that.  Addiction is bigger.  Longer.

1. A twelve storey building collapses onto itself floor by floor.  Earthquake.  You see children’s strollers and bicycles on some of the balconies.

2. A charred train lies twisted across the tracks, still smoking.  Explosion and fire ate out some of the walls.  Suitcases are everywhere, some opened and scattered, some smoking.  Among the scattered pajamas and hats, some for adults, most for children…  Insurgents claim credit.

3. A airliner sits nose down in shallow water, broken in a dozen places like a sliced roll of cookie dough.  Crews dragged it here from deeper water.  Where are the wings?

4. A small blue pool, too shallow for a diving board, well-kept and cleaned, sparkling in a sunny section of a shady backyard, smooth now, reflecting the back window of the house.

Why do we get this so wrong? the speaker is saying.  The nice little pool gets hardly any votes.  But your chances of dying there are worse than the other three combined.

This is Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard) at TED, with an example from his book showing how badly we estimate our happiness, or our death.

Why, he wonders, do we shudder at the earthquake, the bombing, and the plane crash, but not the asthma inhaler, when more people die of asthma that from earthquakes, bombings, and plane wrecks combined.

Because we have in mind more pictures of death by earthquake, bombing, and plane crash, he finds.  We have almost no pictures in memory of death by asthma.

We have more pictures of things that happen less (earthquake, say), because they make news.  We have few pictures of things that happen all the time (asthma, say), because they don’t make news.

We are calculating the odds of a thing (a plane wreck, say) by the ease with which pictures of the thing come to mind.  You can call up many horrifying pictures of plane wrecks, can’t you?

Yes, we have it backwards.  Would you decide whether to take a job by counting the pigeons that flew between two trees while the waiter returned with your water?  No?  But we do that sort of thing every hour of every day.  We steer our lives that way, chasing pigeons.

Now addictions.

Any chance we get addictions backwards, as we get sudden death backwards?

That mistake we would live with longer, eh?

What addictions come to mind for you?  What pictures of addiction flow fastest through your mind?

I for example know something about alcoholics and bulimics, having worked with three of the one and two of the other, for years in one case.

What a haphazard collection of pictures that leaves in my mind!

But I saw another kind of addiction, I think.  An addiction like the sparkling pool above, or asthma.  Too common to make news.  And worse than all other addictions combined.

For example, in the workaholic who said “I might be stupid, but no one can outwork me.”  I heard this from her hundreds of times over the years. She repeated it to herself every hour of every day, I suspect.  With each person she met.  Just the way a smoker would pull out a cigarette when something tough came up.  Two packs a day, or three…  Or the way an addict pops pills.

Or “Yes, I’m bad.  But you can’t hate me while I have you laughing.”

Or “Yes, I go too far.  But without courage from me you would be nowhere.”

Or “No, you hardly notice me, but only because I take such complete care of you.”

I heard people medicating themselves with such phrases, dosing themselves daily and hourly.  Suppose that’s an addiction.  Suppose that’s an addiction in everyone.  Suppose everyone has one such phrase.  An entire story in miniature.  “The story of my life…”   A fill-in-the-blanks story: Here comes __[this]__, against my weakness, but I come back with __[that]__, my strength.  Again and again and again and again…

Back to Dan Gilbert at TED for a moment.  I think another of his stories has the clue to this addiction.

You’re planning a vacation and discover that your favorite place is on sale at a fraction of the usual cost.  Usually it’s $3000 but for the moment you can get it for $500.  You discuss this with family and friends and decide to take it.  But when you call back the price has gone up.  Now it costs $1200.  You hang up in disgust.  How could the price more than double in just a day or two?

As Gilbert explains this mistake, we compare our choice now with our choice in the past.  Nevermind the past, he says.  Compare the choices you have now.

Let’s bring in Taleb (The Black Swan, Second Edition May 11) for a closer look at this.  Taleb is a Wall Street trader who studies the worst mistakes traders make (he foresaw the global meltdown of 2008).  Brainy traders look too hard for meaning and patterns and trends, he says, when they would do better to say “Who knows?”  No, I have that backwards.  Not believing, says Taleb, takes effort and concentration.  We are suckers for meaning and certainty.  We are quick to find false meaning, to make chaos and the random into trends and patterns.  It requires discipline to search for uncertainty.  Our trends and patterns give us a feeling of control, a sense of security.  Even when false.  We crave knowledge and certainty even in places where knowledge and certainty can only be false.

Taleb calls this “the narrative fallacy.”  First this, then that, as cause and effect.  Given good fortune, we want the cause;  a cause found in our own wise efforts.  Given bad fortune, we want the cause again, but a cause outside ourselves.  We dread a world of uncaused results, bad or good.  We dread uncertainty, that would leave us no control.

One thing more, though I don’t know that Taleb says this.  If I’m right he is the reason, and if I’m wrong I am the reason (see how this storytelling is built into us?!).

Given the choice between good fortune we cannot begin to explain, and bad fortune we understand thoroughly, I suspect we would choose the bad, not the good!  Why?  We are infants again, helpless infants at the mercy of mysterious giants, mother among them, if we accept good fortune we cannot begin to explain.  No thanks, we say.  Why learn to like what we cannot control, what could disappear again at any time?  We would have no say in the matter.  No, we say, give us bad fortune we can explain inside out.

What’s a loser?  Someone with so much experience at losing that he feels at home there, knows his way around there, knows every corner and cranny there, can find his way there in his sleep.  Craving control above all else, the loser looks for losing, an experience he has mastered.

Back to addiction.  Is this is the addiction behind all addictions?  An addiction to story, connecting two moments, making one moment cause and the other effect?  An addiction in everyone?  In every hour of every day, from birth to death?  And if I gather the cause of good into me, and push the cause of bad away, is this storytelling addiction an addiction to self?  Is self what I compare across two moments, looking for gain and loss to self, a trend line that takes self up or down?  Is this the addiction that raises a phantom self between me and anything I look at?

Last point for now.  Why do we find Self-Improvement so annoying?  The Secret, the Law of Attraction…  Pictures of sunsets, stars, waves on the sand…   The man who says “When you love in this way, you cannot be hurt.”

People so badly want to make the sounds of wisdom…  to make meaning…  to claim wisdom, or give a life-changing gift….  Meaning well, perhaps, they give more than they have, and we, guarding ourselves against them, can miss wisdom when it passes, when it brushes against us in passing.  Said as an equation, without the charm, the man means:  When you love in such a way that “you” is left behind, then “you” cannot be hurt.  Said that way, he cannot be wrong.

That is the secret to all self-improvement: leave “you” behind.  So self-improvement is the worst possible word for this.  First you leave improvement behind, the idea of a future moment compared to and exceeding a past moment in some way, and then you leave “you” or self behind, the thing you compared from one moment to the next.  Take away improvement and self, and what’s left of self-improvement?

That’s where the sunsets and stars and sand and waves come flooding in.  We need pictures.

We have pictures of self and its history.  Our head is crowded with them, past overflowing.  But when we look from there at a future without improvements and without self, we see… nothing.  Nothing.  We have no pictures for that.  So then it looks like death to us, empty of light and color.

Minds made for pictures, that float on a tide of pictures, must be given (for lack of anything better) sunsets and stars, sand and waves…

The movie Chaplin has Robert Downey as Chaplin trying to retell his life story (and the story of California, and the story of the picture industry) to an editor, Anthony Hopkins, who presses him with hard questions, probing gaps in the story.  Chaplin’s story is one thing to Chaplin and another very different thing to Hopkins.

How would you sense gaps in another man’s life story without bringing a strong sense of story, and life story, to your first meeting with the man?  A life story fully shaped though entirely empty?

The Little Tramp had a talent for sorrow amid joy, and joy amid sorrow.  He was always at odds with the crowd around him.  In his work he gave himself more torment than joy, making pictures to make people laugh, or cry, or rise up and cry out.  Until one phase late in life, that is, when his best work was behind him.  What of that time, the editor presses him, and Chaplin, on a long porch above Lake Geneva, with night coming, can only shrug.  When Hopkins has gone, though, Chaplin goes to his desk and writes him a note.  How tell your love story, if love begins where self and story end?

George, I’ve just written this.

The last twenty years I’ve known what happiness means.  I wish I could write more about this, but it involves love, and perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations, because it is more than one can express.

– Charlie

===

A friend urgently needs business advice.  I don’t know what to tell her.

She’s a talented graphic artist with a great new idea.  She takes a picture of you and shows you, ten minutes later, just how you will look in five years.

It’s astonishing.  People are just stunned.   I was.  I could only shake my head.

And yet for some reason her idea has not taken off.

The dating sites, I suggested.  For all the forty- and fifty-year-olds who post pictures from ten years back, and shrug, “Well, I don’t have many recent pictures. I guess I don’t get around like I used to.”

Seems like this idea would be going places, don’t you think?

Missing persons, maybe?   Where are they now, in time?   Skiptracers?

I don’t know.  I’m out of ideas.  What do you say?

===

Slate has an article on Famous Movie Scenes of Women Giving Birth.

The short version, if you’re pressed for time: Movies change, birth does not.

The comments from readers are interesting.  As Taleb (The Black Swan) might say, they make everything mean too much.  For example:

The thing I find astonishing is that the author of this slide show forgot to mention how ridiculous it is to have Katherine Heigl perfectly waxed while she is giving birth.

Do you get the feeling this reader is not astonished in the least?  She expected this disappointment?  She finds this kind of thing everywhere?  It’s a cause for her?  She’s indignant, not astonished?  Maybe even outraged, in a way that built over time?  Which is just the opposite of astonished…

Or this comment:

How can you possibly have a list of birth-giving scenes and exclude John Hughes’s “She’s Having a Baby”? That scene was beautiful and heart-breaking. Elizabeth McGovern played a loving, no-nonsense mother, and Kevin Bacon gave a lovely performance as he waited for news of the birth gone wrong. Kate Bush’s glorious music completed the scene. How you left it out is a mystery to me.

Do you get the feeling that nothing is a mystery to this reader?  Not this, certainly.  What he means:  I can’t imagine knowing so little about movies.  I can’t imagine being trapped  in your tiny mind.  I’m not properly appreciated.  I see it everywhere.

Or this comment:

Spike Lee beat Judd Apatow to the punch 20 years ago in “Mo Better Blues,” featuring Spike’s sister Joie (and her child) in the key role. Why does no one remember this?

It’s not personal.  It’s social.  A social conspiracy.  Racial…

How is this Leroy’s Lottery again?

As Dan Gilbert would say, don’t trust the ease with which one kind of picture floods your mind and another kind does not.  It doesn’t mean much.  If it did mean much, it would still not mean what you think it means, or want it to mean.

Anais Nin: We don’t see the world as the world is, we see the world as we are.

Ah, our echo again.

===

How often have we complained that TV news, all news, prefers the story it can point a camera at?

An old warehouse burns down in the night. Great footage! The cameramen love the haze in the air and the shine of oily water on pavement. They throw light so wildly against the black of night, that haze and that sheen!

So the evening news gives us four minutes of warehouse fire. But the CIA destroyed the videotapes of their guys interrogating captured terrorists. We get twelve seconds on that. Nothing to see.

But suppose the news is giving us back our echo?  Suppose we do just what they do, and we did it first, all the way back to our echoing caves?

In his TED talk, Dan Gilbert (Harvard, Stumbling on Happiness) gives an example called the Leroy Lottery.

Try the Leroy Lottery yourself.

A ticket costs one dollar and the winner gets twenty dollars. Only ten tickets will be sold. Nine people have bought tickets, and there’s one ticket left. Do you want it?

The math tells you to say Yes:

Cost: $1.00

Value: $2.00 ( $20 times one chance in ten = 20/10 = 2.00 )

Gilbert even shows you the other nine ticket-holders, your comrades and competitors.  A good group, you think, laughing and sensible, just having a little fun with this.

Most people say Yes, and take the ticket.

Then Gilbert changes the picture.  Now the other nine tickets belong to Leroy, a repulsive-looking juvenile delinquent.  He’s grinning at you in the picture.  Sneering almost.  You want the last ticket?

Now most people say No Thanks.

What’s the difference?  Not the odds.  The odds haven’t changed.  Not the equation.  The cost and payoff haven’t changed.  Then what changed so many minds?

We reason the way Temple Grandin does.  Temple Grandin is the bestselling author of Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. Abstract thoughts make no sense to her, unless she can play pictures for them in her mind.  Algebra?  Hopeless.  The math above?  Not a chance.

But she came to understand Courtesy, for example, by replaying hundreds of film clips in her mind.  Some clips she labeled Courteous, some Discourteous, remembering how the normal people around her had labeled those episodes at the time.  When someone warned her she was being discourteous, she would go off and play through those clips in her mind, and come back acting more like the ones labeled Courteous.  Over time her act got better.

Temple Grandin cannot begin to calculate the expected value of Leroy’s lottery, particularly if she wouldn’t get her winnings for a year, and must factor in the time value and the probability both.

You and I could.  If we did the calculation, we would take the lottery ticket either way, to hell with Leroy.  But show us a picture of Leroy, and most of us change our answer and walk away from the only winning lottery we will ever be offered.

Why?  Because it’s so easy to picture Leroy walking off with the winnings.  We calculate the odds like Temple Grandin does.  By how easily the pictures come to mind.

So next time you bark at the evening news for four minutes of warehouse fire and 12 seconds on banking reform, picture your dog barking at a barking dog on TV.   That’s not your dog.  He ain’t smart enough.  It’s you.

===

An update to The Web Trap, a popular article here for many months:

T’aint so.

David Brooks in the New York Times:

[Cass] Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate. Those fears were supported by some other studies, and they certainly matched my own experience. Every day I seem to meet people who live in partisan ghettoes, ignorant about the other side.

Yet new research complicates this picture….

According to the study, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users.

But the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.

People with one-sided views go looking for a good fight:

But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.

Much the way Falfa (Harrison Ford) and his Black ’55 Chevy came looking for John Milner and his yellow ’32 Ford in American Graffiti, for the showdown at dawn on Paradise Road…

Green Onions!  We love a good showdown…

===

There are no accidents.

There are no accidents?  What would Taleb (The Black Swan) say to this?  My guess:  Chase down your own failings with that view, but not the success of others.

TANA, let us call her.  There Are No Accidents.  Ask Tana about your failings.  Don’t ask her about the success of others.

Ask Tana about your failings, and she won’t let you hide, or lie to yourself, or proudly beat yourself at chess.

Ask Tana how you can make the success of others your own, though, and she will smile a pained smile, seeing into the future, where more failings of the first kind are coming your way.

None of your blunders is an accident, says Tana.  But everything you envy is an accident.

You gape at her.  “You know this for a fact?”

“Facts come out the back,” she sniffs.   “Don’t peep at my backside.  Face me.  Eyes up.  Raise your eyes to mine.  Up.  Up.  Right.  Now hold my gaze.  Ready?”

You nod.

“From views come acts then facts.  Look with my eyes, and fact will follow.  OK?

You chew your lip.

Tana puts thumb and two fingers to her lips, as if eating a cherry.  “See it in the air, and say it for others to see.  Such a wind carves stone.”

You chew your lip.

Tana lowers her hand from her mouth.  “When others follow you, fact follows too.”

You chew your lip.

Tana looks down, as if to spit the cherry stone.  “You tire me, always the same.  Learn something and show me, or don’t come again.”

Her curtain closes, her light goes out.

You chew your lip.

===

If  T-Shirts are to believed, Jung said

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

In the absence of the original German, may I suggest:

What irritates me in others is not in them but in me, and opens a way into me, where I can find what is at work inside me.

Wasn’t that what the famous rabbi meant?  Remove the irritation from your own eye, not the other guy’s.

===

An aunt of mine (and one of her three daughters) could carry a grudge across decades, like Lawrence and his camels, crossing the anvil of the Nefud to Aqaba.  If you did not make the crossing with her, carry the grudge, fall upon the sleepers in a fury and slay them, then she had a new grudge against you.

Her grudges were virtues, as she saw it.  Strength.  Character.  Weak people neglected their grudges and let them die, like houseplants they forgot to water.  These women kept the toxic leaves green for decades, to die at last with their owner.

So, sales, salesmen, marketing.

I think I have viewed salesmen as my aunt viewed me, when I would not cross the anvil with her.  Salesmen set aside grudges.  Drop them in the dust.  Let them die.  Leave them behind with a laugh.  They have no character, I would sneer.  They believe in nothing, only money…

No, they were watering a different tree.  The tree of life…

===

You are a first-term congresswoman from a remote and hard-pressed area of Michigan.  The other party thinks it can take back your seat six months from now.  They might be right.  So on break from Washington you are touring every corner of your district.  One of your staffers grew up near here, and he drove through here last week, setting up meetings at every crossroads that could pull together a dozen voters.

This could be a tough sell.  Whatever you’re selling, winners are easier to sell.  Winners expect they can make your proposal a winner no matter what, if it comes to that.  They probably can.  They have a history of that.

On the other hand, strangers to winning (losers, some would say) doubt much good will come their way from your proposal or any other.  They have often watched a sure thing come to nothing.  Whatever you’re selling, they’re not having any.

They have often seen winners walk away with the lion’s share of deals made for meerkats.  Don’t leave piles of our favorite food near our burrows, think the starving meerkats.  We won’t get it anyhow.  It just brings predators.

You look out at the room as the hour approaches and Nelson, your staffer, checks the microphone in the center aisle.  Fifteen people.  The place would seat five or six times that many.  Not bad for one of the first warm days of Spring, though.  Bad weather would bring a better turnout.

Health care clogs the headlines.  You might not get to talk about anything else, warned Nelson, your man from these parts.

You see a family resemblance in some of these faces, but for some reason they sit as far as they can from one another.  Nelson didn’t suggest that, to make the place look full.  Well, good then.  Maybe one will take your side just to spite another.

The meeting begins, and you speak into a stony silence.  You didn’t come to talk at them, you say, you came to hear from them.  You invite people to the microphone.

Nods and signals pass across the room and one after another people march to the microphone and read from papers that rattle in their hands.  Eight people in a row.  You’ve heard the same points in the same words hundreds of times.  Somehow, though, these eight people have not.  They struggle with some of the words, but soldier on.  As one finishes the next is already rising from his seat.  They are a relay team, passing the baton with precision from one corner of the room to another.  Not one of them has anything good to say to you.   They speak right past you.  They can’t imagine that you would listen anyhow, or understand them or agree.  They are speaking for the record, for posterity, for those who come after.

What was all that, you ask Nelson afterwards, in the privacy of the car.  Such fierce opinions about government subsidized purchasing pools and anti-trust exemptions and interstate uniformity!

Nelson shakes his head and looks away.

Ten days later these eight are rounded up by the FBI.  They have been building bombs.  They planned to set off an Iraq-style bomb under a police parade.  When the police came for them, they would set off more bombs in their bunkers.  The police would look like such fools.  People everywhere would rise up.  They would throw off all forms of government from here to Washington.

Nelson, you ask again, what the hell?

Look at those faces, says Nelson.  Look out of their eyes.  What do you see?

Regular checkups?  First we gotta eat regular.  Choice of doctor?  First we need  a roof next Winter, out of the snow.  Take your coverage from job to job?  What job?  Cover your kids till they’re 26?  If we knew where they were.

Look at those faces, says Nelson.  Look out of their eyes.  What do you see?

America sinking under a tide of brown and black.  As white Americans we were taught to get a job and a house before we had children.  Then health care.  But now?  What jobs?  What houses?  We aren’t having the babies we used to.  Somehow that isn’t slowing down a rising tide of brown and black babies, though.  Somehow they’re covered, they’re taken care of.  We aren’t having the children any more.  We’re falling behind.

Look at those faces, says Nelson.  Look out of their eyes.  What do you see?

America’s great days are over.  America’s great days never caught up with us, and now it’s too late.  There’s not enough for everyone.  Not enough to go around.  Not nearly enough.  America is sinking.  When a white face counts for nothing, we’ll be the first to go under.  That’s all we had.  For generation after generation that was enough, that was all a man needed.  A white face got you a place in line.  Ask all the others, the people who lost out in those days, lost out to a white face.  They haven’t forgotten.  They are long past due, and their time has come.  A black man from another country put this thing through.  The looters are coming, and by morning we’ll find the shelves empty all over America.

Hear the undead wail for the unborn.

Look into the eye of the lizard, the lizard Fear.  We are afraid to call Fear by name.  We are afraid to look there.  Fight it or flee, we call Fear a thousand other names.  We recite talking points about government subsidized purchasing pools and anti-trust exemptions and interstate uniformity.  We defend local autonomy against creeping federalism.  We praise self-reliance and denounce dependency.  We declare our devotion to the Constitution and the vision of the founders.  We proclaim America’s unique role in history, and the example we hold out to lesser nations…

The lizard blinks.   The sound is no louder than the pop of a soap bubble, but it shivers the wood of the table under our fingertips.  We leap to our feet and declaim for all we are worth, to drown that sound.

===

When I was eight my father brought home a movie.  My sister and I flattened ourselves against the nearest wall as he came through the house carrying a stack of metals cans, four or five cans shaped like dinner plates but larger, a feast for giants.  Then he wrestled a heavy projector through the halls.  Hidden inside the machine, through a side door, were a chess-playing troll and his captive, a giant moth trapped against a hot light. If you beat the troll at chess you came to the moth, but the moth struggled furiously when you turned on the hot light, flapping and buzzing against the light and throwing splinters of movie onto the far wall.  My father hung a reel of film on a high arm and fed the machine through a winding pathway of spools, spools with teeth.  Hit the lights, he would call to me across the room, and we would try again to sooth the moth.

Some movies go deeper than memory in you, and you don’t remember them when talk turns to movies, though you catch glimpses of them again years later, like the glint of a fish that breaks from the ocean on a bright lazy day.  How many such days do you get in a lifetime, bright lazy days on the ocean, when you can see across decades?

I remember seeing Hamlet kneeling at prayer in the early years of television, with his mother watching him from the doorway.  What’s he doing, I asked my father.  My mother wouldn’t know.   His father was murdered, answered my father.  His father came back as a ghost and told Hamlet.  He told Hamlet to kill the murderer.  Stop! my mother would cry.  Hamlet can’t tell if he should trust this ghost, continued my father.  Enough!  my mother would cry.  More people are watching Hamlet tonight, my father added, than in Shakespeare’s lifetime, or the three and a half centuries since.

The movie he brought home that night filled the largest room in our house, a room added at the far end of the  house, with a wall of glass doors that opened onto the pool, far from the family room where the breadbox of a television snoozed on the furniture like a pet.

I have often wondered if I give movies too much time, in place of time with the people around me.  But how much do you know of yourself or the people around you, until you have looked into far-off lives, and looked back at your life from theirs?  I was forty before I first saw Brooklyn, but I knew the place like home.  I had seen it all my life in movies.  I saw it that night, at the far end of our house in Southern California.   A jury room in New York, at the far corner of the country, with Twelve Angry Men.

My father has been that man in white in my life, the dissenting juror played by Henry Fonda, calmly insisting that things are not what they seem, they are more. People are worth more than our hasty first glance.  Worth looking into with care.  Infinite care.  Particularly where angry men differ, and show their worst.

I think that’s where my adventures in aversion began, the subtitle of this blog.  From my father, who in those same years taught me Prisoner’s Dilemma, from John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a book I still have in a box somewhere.

Sales people have always known Prisoner’s Dilemma, though not by name, and though we have despised them as tricksters for taking the form of the people around them, for putting themselves where strangers and rivals and enemies sit, and looking back at themselves from there, looking back at themselves across another man’s desk.

In Twelve Angry Men, the man in the white suit puts himself inside the mind of the Puerto Rican kid with the switchblade, and then, across the hours, inside the mind of each of the other eleven jurors.  One by one, the other eleven come over to him.

If he were selling timeshares in Costa Rica we would despise the man in the white suit, but he is selling justice, justice for every last man.

Just this week I saw a Russian remake of Twelve Angry Men, with a Chechan boy on trial for his life in a courthouse in Moscow.  It just might be better than the original.  It just might be the hope of the world.

May my daughter remember her father the way I remember mine.

===

Howell Raines, once editor of the New York Times, just blasted Fox News in the Washington Post.

I thought Raines might be just the man to make the case.  But no:

Raines:

Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News…

Readers:

You’re asking me?

Raines:

… for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Readers:

Unprecedented?  That’s bad?  We’re always watching for the unprecedented, the new, meaning an advance….

Raines:

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel…

Readers:

Clever?  That’s bad?

Raines:

Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity…

Readers:

Wow, that sounds unfair.

Raines:

…that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.

Readers:

Ah, a sentimental journey to yesteryear.  Let’s save that for someday, when we’ve won or lost the battles of our prime…

Raines:

Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence…

Readers:

If your profession doesn’t agree with you, why should we?

Raines:

…as Ailes tears up the rulebook…

Readers:

Who’s gonna cry for a rulebook and its misfortunes?

Raines:

…that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.

Readers:

We have mixed feelings about those three generations.  We’re not clear what to make of three generations of news.

Now if I were editor to Raines, I would send him back to rewrite.  You fought and won big battles in your day, I would tell him.  Pick one.  Pick the one you know best, or care most about.  A battle you won for us all.  Show us what would have happened with Fox News on the scene.  Give the story a face.  Show us a hero of ours, a hero who would have been lost.

Isn’t there a simpler case against Fox News.  Simpler and stronger?  They’re selling, but they deny it.  We don’t mind ads that pretend to be news.  That was one of Ogilvy’s great innovations in advertising, the editorial ad, with lots of words and facts, like a report.  But level with people.  Admit you’re selling.  Admit it up front.  Don’t deny it when caught.

We don’t like a guy who asks us to believe something he doesn’t believe.  If it’s not good enough for him, why’s it good enough for us?  Who does he think we are?

We would have no complaint, would we, if Fox News said Sure, we’re an around-the-clock infomercial network, a political Home Shopping Network, a QVC for people who are looking for grievances and causes of a certain kind?

We might not even complain about push-polling, if honestly done.  As in the South Carolina primary between John McCain and George Bush, where Bush supporters called voters pretending to be pollsters, and asked, would it affect your vote if you knew that McCain was hiding an illegitimate black baby he fathered?

Nice try, we might laugh, if the false pollster would come clean, and laugh in turn, and not attack us for saying No, No Thanks.

Now Fox News is all push-polling, all the time.  Nice try, we might laugh, if Fox News would come clean….

===

An easy one first.

Freakonomics goes round and round with the question When Are High Wine Prices Justified?

Do wine prices rise because of production costs?  Because the cost of making the wine rises?  In pricing them (to sell or to buy) do we start with their cost of production and mark them up?

I didn’t know some wines are much harder to make than others.  Steep slopes.  Small valleys where land is scarce.  “Ice wines and botrytized wines” for which you need advanced chemistry.  I only knew that some wines had to be shipped around the world, sometimes in their home bottles, and sometimes in bulk, to be bottled by the importer on my side of the ocean.

Freakonomics (guest columnist, I think) gives the wrong answer for the wrong reason:

To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing.  It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this.

The mistake here?  Same mistake we make at every handoff, every exchange, every trade, every transaction.  We are not pricing wine here.  We are not buying wine when we buy wine.  We are buying a prop for the long-running play Don’t You See What’s So Good About Me?  A cell phone, a house, a gym membership, a pet, a vacuum cleaner, a spatula, a tractor, a tarp, a trough…  All props for the same play.  When do we buy anything for itself, outside of its place as a prop in our play?  I’m worth it, we say.  I’ll show them.  One of these days they’ll see.

We aren’t paying for wine plus advertising here.  We are paying for advertising plus wine.  Not advertising about wine, either.  Advertising about us.  Same pitch every time.  Show them what you’re worth, goes the pitch.  Show them why you’re special.

When do we ever buy or sell anything except that story, and props for that story?  As T S Eliot said (I pull this from memory), Most of the trouble in the world comes of people struggling to give themselves importance.

Then how do they sell us anything?  By looking closely into our eyes and nodding Yes, I see what’s special about you, and one day everyone will see it, starting today, because you see what’s special about my offer, this [ fill in the blank: wine, spatula, baby crib, corn crib.... ].

Every transaction is first and last an exchange of meanings, words, and stories, with or without assorted props.

We aren’t buying what we pour from that bottle, we are buying what we pour from our mouth, the story we will tell.  We are buying something to say.  A speaking part in the play.  A few more lines for our part.  An extra chance to show the audience and critics what we’re made of.  Crappy wine works just fine for this.  See, I know crappy wine.  In case you didn’t know that about me.

DNA testing has largely destroyed our fond notions about one breed of grape over another.  Likewise race in humans, where DNA now tells us that nothing in nature supports our stories of race upon race.   So, have we thrown off those stories?   Stripped the libraries and arsenals?  Or do we still we pay in red for our stories of black and white and yellow?  For the shape and tint of the bottle and the label, around all the same blood?

In practice, we may fight more bitterly for our words and stories as DNA empties them of meaning.  I remember the owner of a liquor store in Tennessee who thumped his palm with an axe handle and instructed me that “the Bible says the blackbirds and redbirds, they don’t mix”  (sorry, I have not been able to locate the citation).  The termites of DNA were hollowing the floorboards under his feet as he spoke, under his shelves of clinking glass shapes and colored labels.  He knew nothing of DNA, but he knew blood, and mud, and the creak and crack of the boards between his blood and the mud below.  He would trade lives for hollow words, including his own;  and trade lives more fiercely for words more hollow.

OK, a harder one.

Why our irrational fear of baby-snatching is wasting money and risking lives, by Daniel Engber in Slate Magazine.  Spell it all out in your title, editors tell authors at Slate, I’m guessing.

Babies?  OK, this is wine but worse.  Here we are drunk on new life.

But it wasn’t the babies the industry was after so much as the moms.  Studies showed that women were responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the health care decisions for their entire families.  If you could get a young woman into your hospital when she was just starting a family, you’d have a shot at locking down four or five customers for life.

So began the “Maternity Wars.”  Birth centers across the country were renovated and ramped up to attract market share, and the maternity ward started to resemble a luxury hotel.

A competitive marketplace for moms has turned the baby-snatching panic into an expensive arms race: If Mercy West is using umbilical transponders, what kind of parent would risk delivering at Seattle Grace?

So praise my baby, the hope of the world and a six-decade extension to my favorite play: Don’t You See What’s So Good About Me?   Guard my baby like Fort Knox.

Are we buying the gadgetry or the story?  The story, of course.  The advertising.  The gadgets are just props, as always.

Even before the advent of high-tech umbilical tags, the likelihood of your infant getting stolen was one in 300,000, and the chance of her being physically harmed during an abduction was at most one in 3 million.

Still think we’re buying umbilical tags?  Here’s a danger with similar odds:

[In] perspective: One in 3.8 million Americans is crushed to death by a nonvenomous reptile.

We will crush to death more Americans with our story, our account of those umbilical tags, in the door to the nursery.  We paid thousands for the story, so you can damn well stand there another two minutes and hear it.

How can a story be worth everything to us?   Worth more than life?

I was the third person in the world to see my Alice (as we shall call her here) when she came into the world by Caesarian.  I have now been in Family Court for a year to see her again.  I saw Alice for an hour on her tenth birthday, at the courthouse, under the supervision of guards, in uniform and armed, and armed with clipboards so they could listen closely and write down what we say.  They listen more closely than Family Court does, to make sure nothing is said.

Why?  Am I a monster of some kind?  What’s my story?  Versus her mother’s story?

No one knows.

You see what your story is worth when you can no longer tell it.

Family Court is desperately overworked.  Family Court has no time for you or your story.  The smallest clinic in the county spends more on baby lojack than we voters budget for Family Court for the entire county.  If you want to abduct a child, then, Family Court offers your best odds: fifty-fifty, straight chance.  Get there first and you can call it, heads or tails.

Family Court is the Hall of Lost Children.  We never think our story will end there.  That’s for someone else, we think, not us.  We look down at that sleeping baby in the dark and see the thousands of places she will take us:  Carnegie Hall, El Capitan above Yosemite Valley, the Olympics in the Caucasus, by the Black Sea….

But you’ll get better odds telling your story to the clerk at the DMV.  Tell DMV about your baby, and how special she was, and what became of her.  Your girl will be crushed to death by a nonvenomous reptile before you walk across the park with her again, or she sits in your lap again, or dances with you in the kitchen, or makes French Toast for you in her pajamas…

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Where you find hate, find love, as fire before smoke, or light before shadow.

Where could Hate stage a pageant, if the sun had not chosen Something in place of Nothing?  Not for any good reason, either, when there was Nothing.  Just for Something.

How could Hate light its pageant if the sun had not chosen light and dark?  For reasons no one could see?  Again each day, despite all we see.

Love as the sun loves.  For reasons no one can see.  Again each day, despite all we see.  It’s the law.  The only law.  Keep the law of the sun.  Violators get Nothing.

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