Category Archives: Social comment

Social comment

We’re looking at the wrong imperial downfall model

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Of this I am convinced.

The conventional analogy most often given for the United States’ rise and (anticipated by some) fall is that of the Roman Empire. That analogy has a lot of problems. Rome began as a bucolic thorp on the western Italian coast, dominated for the first two and a half centuries by Etruscan or Etruscan-backed kings. In time it threw them off, and formed the Roman Republic. This was never a democracy as we would reckon it today, but it was a step up from despotism, and evolved over its five centuries of existence. Yes. Rome was a republic for as long as has passed for us since Cristobal Colón landed in the Bahamas and got lasting credit for discovering an inhabited continent whose land territory he never saw. (How that continent became named for a Florentine latecomer is one of history’s stranger tales. I guess ‘Vespuccia’ just didn’t have that ring to it.)

In those five centuries, Rome consolidated first the Italian peninsula, then nearby islands and territories under its hegemony. In its final century, the Republic became hegemon over the entire Mediterranean. Alexander of Macedon (called ‘the Great’) went east against Persia rather than west against Rome and Carthage, and his former eastern Mediterranean holdings fell under full Roman control about three centuries after he was gone.

Rome did not go from republic to empire in a day, nor was Julius Caesar ever emperor. In its final century as a republic, infighting grew into chronic civil war. Representative government and civil war don’t coexist very well. When everyone was ready for peace, the state bestowed upon a First Citizen (Augustus) enough power to do much as he saw fit. We tend to call this his Emperorhood, but in reality, the role took several decades to realize that title’s full implications. The Roman Empire lasted in unity (most of the time, anyway) for three centuries, until it was reorganized by splitting in two pieces: eastern (which would endure for another millennium as the Byzantine Empire, a Greek state pretending to be Roman) and western (headquartered at Ravenna rather than decadent Rome). After another century and a half, the western half collapsed under the weight of sustained Germanic and Hunnic migrations/invasions (sometimes the line grew blurry), but left the legacy of a Christian Roman imperium which European states would seek to appropriate well into the 1800s.

As an analogy for the United States, this has plenty of problems, starting with the question of splitting the nation into two self-governing halves (one surviving a long time). There’s always noise about that, but little groundswell to think it likely, and especially not voluntarily. Rome either conquered and administered territory or not, which doesn’t fit the pattern of the rise of US power. And while some take satisfaction in the common perception that the western Roman fall came about due to increased economic stratification (with many Romans seeing nothing worth defending), the record does not really bear that out. The record suggests that when Rome began losing battles, armies and provinces to numerous Germanic invaders, that turned the tax base the wrong direction at a time when that was the worst possible news for the state. If Goths occupied Thrace, not only did they stop sending taxes to Ravenna, they might demand bribes to refrain from further violence. Less money–at a time when more was needed to rebuild destroyed armies–was a self-compounding problem leading to more lost tax base. That problem was at times patched by hiring Germanic mercenaries of questionable potential loyalty, especially if used as ballista fodder. When enough provinces turned from payers to non-payers, or became money sinks, the western Empire was finished.

The rise of US global influence and domestic authoritarianism doesn’t fit most of these patterns. Illegal aliens, despite what some think, are not a good analogy for Alaric the Visigoth. And despite republican trappings, Rome had always been oligarchic and plutocratic. Rome also didn’t have allied independent states, for the most part: there were Roman provinces, and bordering lands. Rome either wanted these, to conquer and Romanize, or it did not. And as mentioned, half the Empire didn’t fall at all, and exerted itself very little to keep the other half from Germanic conquest.

Little presented, but more pertinent, is the example of Athens. Perhaps this is because Americans are more ignorant of the Athenian Empire of the 5th century BCE, and perhaps it’s our conceit: Athens’ empire was too small and brief to compare. In size, that is true. In duration, comparison is not so far apart. In 500 BCE, Athens was perhaps the first among equals of the Greek poleis (city-states). By mid-century it was an empire. By 400, it was defeated and eclipsed by other Hellenic poleis. How’d that journey go?

In 500, Athens was pioneering the basics of thimokratia (we pronounce it ‘democracy’). It had rejected the notion of strongmen ruling by force. Not long after, the mighty, enlightened and quite cosmopolitan Persian Empire sought to convert Greece (which included many dozens of city-states in the Aegean and along what would one day become the Turkish coast) into yet another Persian satrapy. Persian dominion was far better than most previous Near Eastern forms, especially the unlamented Assyrian methods, but most Greeks had zero interest in Persian overlordship. This led to the famous battles of Thermopylae (mostly Spartans on land), Cape Artemision (mostly Athenians at sea), Marathon (mostly Athenians on land) and Salamis (mostly Athenians at sea).

By 480, a frustrated Persia had shelved the notion of absorbing most Greeks into its empire, unless opportunity jumped up and bit them. From that time dated the rise of Athenian power and prestige in the Greek world. The analogy is imperfect, but we might see parallels in the burgeoning of US power and prestige as we helped the Soviets and British/Commonwealth defeat the Axis. And as Sparta had been co-belligerent with Athens against Persian invasion, so did the US join with and assist the much-distrusted Soviet Union to lay low Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy.

While Athens had rivals in Thebes, Sparta and Corinth whose power merited respect, it was the great power of its region. Athens wasn’t large enough to dominate all Greece by conquest, but it was the power with whom no one wanted to tangle–not even Sparta, a cautious place deeply concerned with keeping its slaves in check. As an ostensible peace-and-collective-security move, Athens organized many of the Greek poleis into the Delian League. I’ve been to Delos, and it’s hard to imagine those windswept ruins as a major neutral meeting and trading zone, but they once were. The idea was to arbitrate disputes, gather membership dues to deal with major problems, and keep the Persians from picking them off one by one. Seemed prudent at the time.

Athenian concepts of democracy advanced as the century reached midpoint, with free male commoners actually gaining the ability to participate in government (which is ahead of where the USA was at independence). Athenian naval vessels kept the sea safe for Athenian foreign trade. Athens grew rich and prestigious, thinking itself the apogee of human development. Persia was still a potential threat, and the Athenians’ major Greek neighbors did not trust them, but peace and prosperity generally reigned. For Athens, that became more true after the discovery of silver in Attica (the peninsula on which Athens rests).

In between speeches telling Athenians how great they were, Athenian leaders spent the silver on monumental building, fortifications and naval vessels. Athenian domestic politics became more fickle and bitter, with ostrakismos (exile by public vote) the common fate of any great statesman or general. ‘For safekeeping,’ Athens moved the Delian League treasury to Athens, and began dipping into the till. When poleis sought to withdraw from the Delian League, they learned that withdrawal was unacceptable. If Athenian soldiers came to the defense of a League member polis, they came to stay. The Athenian military budget was by far the largest in Greece.

Never an alliance of equals to begin with, this Delian League boiled down to something like Mafia protection. You paid up, shut up and did as told, or you got a lesson. Some people grumbled that the comparison to Persian dominion was disadvantageous. The Athenians didn’t listen, since that was only their jealous inferiors talking, who didn’t realize that what was good for Athens was good for all Greeks. In the Athenian mind, they were spending all this money of their own, asking a pittance from member states, and setting the perfect example of democracy. Those ingrates, who ought to be forever grateful to their obvious betters, had the nerve to complain and question the judgment of the cultural and financial paragons who had saved all other Greeks from the need to cringe and scrape before Eastern potentates.

No alliance that amounts to a senior partner expecting gratitude from junior partners for exploiting and bullying them can long endure, especially if the external threat recedes. The membership will start edging away as soon as the senior partner falters, especially if they get some form of encouragement from the senior partner’s rivals. The Mafia can crush one or three rebels, but it cannot crush them all at one time, nor can it cannot simultaneously crush them all and fight off a serious rival operation.

Hybris is a legacy from Classical Greek. As ‘hubris,’ it is one of tens of thousands in modern English. Today we define it as excessive pride, the sort that goes before a fall. In Classical times, of which we speak, the meaning differed a bit: in general terms, we might describe its Classical meaning as spiking the ball and taunting your defeated rival. Our modern definition perfectly describes Athens circa 440 BCE. Athenians believed that every polis’s most important relationship must be that with the most important city this side of Persepolis: Athens, the pinnacle of wealth, culture and power.

By 431 BCE, the Athenians had ignored the resentful side effects of hubris long enough. Sparta was not a naval power, but on land it was formidable. War came to most Greek-speaking poleis, with Sparta and Athens as the major players. Athens engaged in a far-flung and disastrous expedition to Sicily, a foreign war for wealth and power disguised as protecting an ally. Athens’ Spartan rivals found it expedient to support those ready to make trouble for the Athenian Empire, which had begun as the Delian League. Most Delian cities rested within or ringed the Aegean, and had navies in some form. In union they could challenge the Athenian fleet, without which Athens could not hold its empire.

In 404, the war drew to a close. Exhausted in every imaginable way, the Athenians lay at Spartan mercy. They were amazed when Sparta failed to treat Athens as Athens might have treated Sparta, and had treated its some of its own vanquished over the years. The thug mentality has a fatal flaw: it presumes that everyone else is a thug. When you see the powerful behave as callous, exploitative thugs, doing as they please and using others because they can, you see a hated power that dares not slip or let down its guard.

The example seems instructive, more so than that of Rome.

Human relations, Married life, Social comment

Children in the museum

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Today Deb and I decided to go Boise museuming. This is easy when there are three museums in one cluster, just across from the main library (which is itself quite nice). We were disappointed to find the Idaho Black History Museum closed on weekdays, but the Boise Art Museum was definitely open. I think both of us had hoped for more paintings and less sculpture, but it is a nice, genteel, sedate place with many exhibits and sights to take in.

I’m congenitally weak in the area of visual art, and I know it. Most of the time, I have not the faintest notion of what I’m supposed to be grasping from what I see. Doesn’t matter. To me what’s important is that we have an art museum to visit, because I believe the arts provide valuable social comment and food for thought. Whether or not I ‘get it’ means nothing; I just like that we have one, evidently thriving, and what it says about our community.

Then we went to the Idaho Historical Museum, which only had about twenty kids but they sounded like fifty. They ran around, squealed, played with the playable exhibits, and generally acted like the first-graders I believe they were.

My reaction? Hurrah.

Yes, hurrah. Yes, me who normally has scant patience for children (or childish adults).

Hurrah!

Here is the logic: I love museums. I have always loved museums. Like many history majors, I also think long-term. The desired end result is that the children associate museums with fun and happiness, because that will tend to grow into lifelong affection and support for museums. A museum already teaches them some things even at young, attention-span-impaired ages, and later it will teach them more.

When I look at the girl intrepidly trying to balance the load of her Lewis & Clark canoe, I don’t see a child. I see an archaeologist in her forties who will dream of locating and excavating Tell Akkad, and who will be well equipped to do so because she happens to read Akkadian cuneiform. And it probably all began in a museum, where she went home happy because she liked it, and kept returning as she grew to adulthood, deepening her appreciation each time, causing her to continue asking if the family could stop at museums in its travels.

When I look at the boy playing cowboy on the McClellan saddle, I don’t see a child. I see a distinguished professor of American Literature teaching undergrads to appreciate Faulkner and Twain, wearing his eccentric bow tie and engaging his class with hilarious dry wit. It began in museums, where he came to love knowledge and to value the past, and always went home feeling that it had been great fun, and can we go to more museums?

I look at the shy girl gazing upon the mining display, and I don’t see a child. I see a rangy thirtysomething geologist in jeans, developing a better way than fracking to get access to mineral resources. It all started in a museum, where she looked upon the mineral samples and wanted to know what was in them, in between playing with the stuff that’s put there for kids to play with. And went home happy, loving all museums and asking Daddy when they could go again, and could they also try some gold panning? What’s in that rock, Daddy?

All hinges upon the result obtained in youth: the museum was fun, the museum was happy, the museum was interesting. It could all be blighted away by one grouchy stare or admonition from an adult who ought to be acting more like the adult. Museums’ survival depends upon raising children to love museums, and anyone incapable of seeing that–or who thinks his or her tranquility is more important than that fundamental purpose of a museum–has missed the entire point of the exercise. Museums are not restaurants, where people spend $30-90 and have a right to expect that people either parent their children or not bring them, unless they’re prepared to pay for the meals of everyone whose experiences their kids disrupted. Museums are places where children’s dreams begin. If you love history and revere its study, a covey of children enjoying the museum is sweet music.

Hurrah for children in museums. Send some more. I hope that every time I visit one, I hear children’s joy.

Human relations, Social comment, Technology

Why computer store techs are rude

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It’s not your imagination. In the main, except for the Apple world, they really are rude. They don’t listen well. They bombard you with technical lingo that you will not understand. They don’t do it the way you asked them. And if you ask too many questions, they get increasingly testy.

Ever wonder why it’s that way? Why can’t computer stores hire competent technical people who also have people skills?

I used to sell computers. I sold PCs about five miles from the Microsoft main campus, many years ago when a 386 machine was hot stuff. I was a combatant in the trenches of the IBM/Microsoft wars. Back then, your local independent computer store had sales people and technicians, and where possible, we kept most of the techs away from the customers. It was better that way. Nowadays, however, more likely everyone in the store is a tech on some level, so you could end up dealing with anyone.

The first major thing to absorb about the computer support world is the pace of change. Imagine trying to be an electrical engineer, or an attorney or a doctor, and your knowledge set has to turn over every three years. Only the basic methodology and accumulated ‘gut feeling’ problemsolving skills remain with one; the rest becomes unimportant in three years and obsolete in about six. Not that many people can keep pace with that level of change, and most of them are socially dysfunctional because a lot of them have some personality syndrome that enables them to focus on fixing or puzzling out something for hours.

So you aren’t always dealing with highly adjusted social butterflies, and it’s uncommon to find a great tech who is also a people person. Computer store owners are small businesspeople, who pay people for a reason. The Aspie who cuts you off short and gives curt, opaque answers to reasonable questions is probably a reliable worker who generates income for the company and doesn’t steal the inventory, and the owner reasons that odds are against getting a better replacement. Plus, the owner is probably of the same personality type, and doesn’t see a great deal of value in worrying about people’s feelings. If they get it to work, or their policy protects them against having to do something, far as they’re concerned, case closed.

What is evident to me: the longer people work in the business of making computers work, the more jaded they tend to become about the public. They’ve heard all the lamentations before, and they deal with a lot of ignorance from the public. Much of the public doesn’t even see a difference between a software problem (usually created by the user, foolishly installing a wide variety of garbage and rarely bothering to invest in virus protection or backup) and a hardware issue (which is fixed, by and large, by swapping stuff out until the problem goes away); it just thinks, “So why don’t you just FIX it?” If it were that simple, they would. It often is not. However, good customer service requires one to take each customer at face value and offer a bit of education.

The service people don’t do that, because their general perception of the public is that it is too clueless to understand what they say (when in reality the problem is the service person’s poor communication skills). Why bother if people won’t understand? goes the reasoning. Another reason, more understandable, is that often it boils down to having to tell the user that s/he is an idiot. “But I LIKE my WeatherBug!” whined so many of my clients, when I told them that this noxious piece of spyware needed to go. “I never use the shutdown button,” smirked so many clients. “I just flip the switch on the surge.” Their expressions said: I’m so cute, such a rebel. No, you’re a fool, and you probably caused your own problem. “But my machine came with McCAFFee! I can’t have a virus!” Yet they never subscribed to virus definition updates, and even McAfee is better than nothing. All those discussion paths lead to the point where one must refrain from telling the paying customer that he or she did something stupid. There are only so many tactful ways to say that, and tact is not many techs’ strong suit.

What is more, most of the public won’t take advice. Shut down your machine using the shutdown mechanism in the operating system (Windows, for many). Keep a virus scanner up to date. Don’t just let everything install itself, and uninstall stuff you just don’t need. Defrag the thing now and then. Figure out a means of backing up anything you care about. One tells them all of the above, and as a staff colleague back in the dorms once said about getting residents interested in activities, “Their lips say ‘yes, yes’ but their eyes say ‘FOAD, FOAD, FOAD.'” The techs tried, and tried and tried, to convince people of the value of these forms of maintenance. After the five hundredth person listened politely, smirked a silent ‘in your dreams I’ll bother with that crap,’ and kept right on doing it the wrong way, they got tired of bothering.

So that’s what we’re up against. Socially awkward, often personality-dysfunctional people whose good advice was mostly blown off, who don’t have much respect for the public (partly deserved by said public), and who just hope to get out of the conversation as fast as possible. They are happiest when benching the machine without anyone saying, “My Internet Windows won’t download my Works documents off my hard drive, and Explorer doesn’t get my mail, and my machine is slow even though I’ve only had it for six years, and I can’t program my data off my CD. Can you just fix it?”

That’s no excuse for not listening well, and it’s no excuse for being rude. If you suck at dealing with the public, the boss should make sure you never have to. But if the boss also sucks at it, he doesn’t even realize that’s a problem.

And there you go.

Adventures, Married life, Social comment

D&J’s excellent adventures: Idaho State Capitol

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I have never before lived in a state’s capital city. For me, it has never been a casual errand to visit a capitol. Now it is–and it’s more casual than I imagined it could be.

In Boise, the Capitol is laid out at the end of a very long, straight arterial that crosses the Boise River. Unshockingly, it is called Capitol Boulevard. Few capitols are easy to miss (Colorado’s gold-leaf dome is more like impossible to miss), but Idaho’s takes the visibility cake.

It also eats your accessibility cake, at least in terms of parking. We parked at a meter one block away. From the outside, it looks like an unremarkable American capitol with the traditional central dome. Given Idaho’s mining history, I’m surprised they didn’t gold-leaf this one. Maybe they thought it was too flashy. We climbed the high stairs. The only evidence of exterior security was an Idaho State Police cruiser pulled up outside, far enough away that I couldn’t see if it was occupied. If it was, its occupant showed no interest in us. I prepared for the metal detectors, interrogation, grim-looking State Police officers demanding ID, asking our business and making sure we went nowhere unescorted by an armed peace officer.

Nothing. No one. Silence.

Not just no police; no hired security. No one. We could have stripped to the skin and reclothed ourselves at some leisure without being interrupted (although I’ll bet there’s a security cam that would have thwarted that). Just a sign letting you know that this was the Idaho State Capitol, for those incapable of figuring that out on their own, and ‘please be respectful.’ (At least they did address the issue of nudity, however obliquely.) A map placard showed you how to find whichever office you sought: Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, Governor, House Chamber, etc.

“So we can just wander around?” asked Deb.

“Yeah, evidently no one cares, but obviously we can’t go in any offices.”

“Screw that. I want to see ’em.”

“Not this again.” Deb is unshy and unprone to embarrassment. I am shy and very easily embarrassed in some ways, especially by excessive forwardness. I was in no way dressed to walk into any official office. Deb simply does not care.

A person or two happened by as we ogled the striated scagliola (a form of synthetic marble) Corinthian columns supporting the dome, the interior top of which we could see. Something up in the top looked like R2-D2, and I said so. She didn’t even call me a ‘nutburger.’ There was a lot of natural marble as well: some greyish with charcoal veining, some crimson with cream veins (Oklahoma fans might say that’s the only thing would like to remember about Boise, heh).  Credit to the designers, builders and recent remodelers: it was majestic, exquisite without being gaudy. They let the marble speak for itself.

We wandered down the east wing, then the west, where the door to the Governor’s office reception was open. No one attempted to prevent our entrance. A fiftyish bleach-blonde receptionist smiled at us while on a phone call. Immediately to our left was the Governor’s office, no one present. Farther away and to the right was a desk with a State Police officer doing something on a computer. Minesweeper, perhaps, maybe Candy Crush. Deb wandered back to his doorway and pointed to a shadow box full of bullets (not rounds) on the wall behind him. “Are those bullets that were used in action?” she asked as I winced. He said it was just a display of various calibers.

Now the receptionist was off the phone. “So is the Governor a Republican?” asked my bride. Oh, good lord. I shrank away and took intense interest in a map of Idaho by counties, made of various forms of polished stone.

It was like Deb had asked ‘Did Jesus really exist?’ The receptionist looked aghast at the question, almost drew herself up a bit. “Yes, definitely.” The Capitol needs a trap door exit capable of rescuing up hefty, bearded visiting husbands at times like this.

“You’re in Idaho now,” added a suited baldhead awaiting some form of audience, opening stigmata on the hands of Captain Obvious.

These days, you can’t get elected janitor in most of Idaho without the letter ‘R’ after your name. A dead Republican would beat a live anything else; even a Republican dog (live or dead) would beat a human from another party. If he ran as a Republican in Idaho, Charles Manson would beat Mother Teresa (unless the latter were also a Republican, or unless Charlie came out on a platform of forcible gun confiscation and raising the minimum wage). Nothing factors but the party, and the only valid platform question is the candidate’s degree of passionate gun love. The challenger who boasts about having actual sex with his or her forty-five firearms has a big advantage over the incumbent who owns and adores a mere forty boomsticks, and only uses them for boring, lukewarm, lefty stuff like hunting, fishing, biking, militiaing, self-defense and making donuts.

“Is that his office?” Deb asked, pointing. Somewhere, Captain Obvious wept.

“Yes, he’s not in right now.” So one could determine by the lack of a vaguely georgewbushian presence named ‘Butch’ behind the desk.

“What part of the state is he from?” I asked.

“Right here. Caldwell, actually,” answered the receptionist. (Only later did I read that, when popped for DWI, his earlier varioush excshuses to the nyshe offisher included a claim that he had soaked his chew with Jack Daniels. Evidently time heals these sorts of political wounds in Idaho.)

Deb’s curiosity satisfied, we wandered back down to the east wing. The Lieutenant Governor’s office had a keycard entry, making it evident that one had to have a reason for entry beyond simple sightseeing. Considering how little most lieutenant governors actually do, that seems pretentious. In Washington, we had a former Husky football coach as Lieutenant Governor for so many years that he was not so much an official, but a habit. One year, the Libertarian candidate’s platform was that if elected Lieutenant Governor, she would immediately move to abolish the office and save the state several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Delighted, I voted for her.

On our way back around the rotunda, a police officer stepped out of an elevator. “I wonder why they don’t have any security,” said Deb. “Maybe I can ask that guy.”

Oh, good lord. I whispered, “Deb, that’s not a ‘that guy.’ That’s an Idaho State Police officer.”

“I don’t care.” She means that. Over she went. “Excuse me. How come there isn’t any security at the entrance?”

The officer, a tall, close-cropped young blond, replied without missing a beat. “Because the Governor believes that this is the people’s house.” We thanked him and left. Far out in front of the building is a statue of Lincoln containing the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln is important to Idahoans. In 1863, he signed the act proclaiming Idaho a Territory. The day he was assassinated, he had considered issues related to Idaho. There’s also a statue of someone I’d never heard of, cited for ‘reimposing the rule of law.’ I’ll bet that if I looked it up, that was code for ‘busted unions by force.’ Some things don’t much change, some places. Trying to start a union in Idaho is like trying to start a gun show in England, or a pork barbecue place in Saudi Arabia.

And that was our trip to the Idaho State Capitol.

I wonder, in how many states, one can do just as we did without anyone even seeming to consider it odd.

===

I’m including a bonus section here. I rarely talk about the spam I get, because WP catches most of it. I just have to push the flush handle once a day or so. The need to approve the first post from a new commenter eliminates nearly all spam. The typical spam is either a page of Chinese characters, or a short note in bizarre English that says something like ‘I very much to appreciate your web page which is the helpfulmost and fastest of its type.’ Some are borderline gibberish. If a character gets left out, or something else screws up, one gets an illustrative view. Here’s one such that I saved:

{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4}
hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.
{It’s|It is} pretty worth enough ffor me. {In my opinion|Personally|In myy view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website owners|web
owners} and bloggers made good content as yyou did, the {internet|net|web} will bbe {much
more|a loot more} useful thazn ever before.|
I {couldn’t|could not} {resist|refrain from} commenting.
{Very well|Perfectly|Well|Exceptionally well} written!|
{I will|I’ll} {right away|immediately} {take hold of|grab|clutch|grasp|seize|snatch} your {rss|rss feed} as I {can not|can’t} {in finding|find|to find} your {email|e-mail} subscription {link|hyperlink} or
{newsletter|e-newsletter} service. Do {you have|you’ve} any?
{Please|Kindly} {allow|permit|let} me {realize|recognize|understand|recognise|know} {so that|in order that} I{may just|may|could} subscribe.

Thanks.|

You probably drew the same conclusion I did: someone’s got a spam generator, and it’s set up to vary the text just enough to elude some Googling. Somehow, the sender left off a character and it sent the template rather than the letter the template was meant to generate. The English will seem almost right, but not quite be. And now you can see how it ends up that way.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Moneychanging in my temple

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The journey of the English language is much like a walk through modern Detroit. It evolves, but never comes through history unscathed. However, of late some of the scathing is beginning to offend my delicate sensibilities.

I’m pretty disgusted at some of what the Oxford Dictionary people have now decided is all right. They have evidently decided, for example, that ‘literally’ (a word we very badly need to separate wild metaphor from candid description) really does also mean ‘very,’ since enough people misused it long enough. That’s basically the equivalent of deciding that if men can’t hit the urinal, we’ll just remove the urinal and let them miss the toilet instead. However, they aren’t the most annoying abusers of the language. Even the text generation, with ‘ur’ for ‘your’ and ‘lol’ used as a comma, aren’t the worst. They are like copious spitters on the sidewalk, throwers of chewing gum on it, and occasional urinators in the alley. They make English gross and crude, like the floor of a baseball dugout, but they aren’t really doing much damage.

The business-speak word coiners aren’t even the worst. I hate to say it, but they aren’t even that awful. I’m talking about stuff like morphing ‘downsizing’ to ‘rightsizing,’ or addiction to words like ‘best practices.’ Most of it is baloney, but the baloney is mostly heard and believed by its inventors, who do not usually take it out into polite society where it could offend cultured persons. This is like butchers putting filler into the ground meat products: it lowers the overall quality of English a bit, but rarely poisons anyone.

No, the most irritating is made-up vaguely positive-sounding terms used as the actual names of corporations. Thrivent. Meritage. Exelon. Centene. Qwest. Visteon. Agilent. Actavis. Exelis. Altria. Viacom. Aramark. Meritain. Verizon. Navistar. Celgene. Entergy. Taligent. Cingular.

Credit to JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Electronic Arts, Monsanto and even AT&T, a rogues’ gallery of the vilest: at least their names are real words that refer to some real thing, person, etc.

These invented words go into the public mind and manipulate it, and cannot be extracted. They are goosing English in the crowded bus when they know there’s very little she can do about it, molesting her dignity and personal space. They are created by people who want to create a fiction in the public mind, hopefully one at variance with the truth (that the company only cares about quality and service if faults in those areas cause corporate harm). Don’t think that corporate invented-names are picked by employee contests. No, some very sophisticated psychological and literary sellouts get involved. Above a certain level of social control, accidents become very few.

This is crap. ‘Cingular?’ Really? ‘Thrivent?’ Seriously? ‘Meritain?’

I want to say “They cannot be serious,” but I’d be wrong. They can. They are.

Social comment

What D&D meant

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Dungeons & Dragons, the original fantasy role-playing game, came out in 1974. I played it off and on for thirty-five years through four major revisions. Unless you’re that old and played the game in its early days, you may not fully apprehend its impact. Someone had better explain that while some of us are still alive.

In what we may call B.D. (Before D&D), there were two species of games. The casual species included party games like Monopoly, Risk, Life, Clue, Parcheesi and such. They were not meant to be realistic; they were just for fun, could be learned in minutes and finished in an half an evening. The serious species included strategy boardgames, mostly by Avalon Hill, Simulations Publications, Game Designers’ Workshop, and so on: mostly focused on accurate historical simulations and hypothetical wars. If you wanted to know how the Warsaw Pact might have done against NATO, or felt that Auchinleck and Montgomery were boobs, or imagined how the Canadian Civil War might go, they could help you explore. Their research was generally of high quality. The rulebooks were voluminous, but for those who put in the time and wanted to spend several weekends refighting Gettysburg at regimental level, they had you covered.

My own first experiences with B.D. games were the former as a child, then the latter in about 1975. Historical and hypothetical simulation games may have saved me from going completely mad in a small lumber town. They would, in 1981, send me to college with at least the fundamentals of an education in military history. But they weren’t the only external force that contributed to my teen sanity.

In 1974, the original D&D first came out. The publisher was a firm from Wisconsin called Tactical Studies Rules, better known as TSR. Think on that for a minute, what it says: “We publish rules. That’s it. The rest is on you. Invent the milieu yourself. Tell the story you wish, and act it out with players who do as they do.” It was a fantasy role-playing game (RPG). The most important rule, and the one that defined D&D, was a simple one: the rules were for guidance only. They were not definitive. The game referee/world creator, aka the Dungeon Master (DM), had carte blanche to change some or all of the rules at will. If players tried something not covered in the rules, the DM had jurisdiction and final say as to how that was resolved.

Suddenly, the imagination was the limit. Digest this, those of you who never knew a world without role-playing games. “Hello, Ms. DM. I would like to play as a member of this race, which has this specific character class that mixes the magic-user with the druid. Can I do this?” DM: “Write it up, with all the spells and so forth, and I’ll take a look.” Rules? Those were for the grognards who spent whole weekends refighting the Battle of the Bulge. The rules were what the DM said they were. She could invent new monsters, worlds, races, types of characters. The game was breeding future fantasy authors by the dozens.

We had never had this before. That’s why D&D was so revolutionary. It came out and said: “Play the game the way you like. If you like your DM, play in her game. If not, well, keep looking.” It unleashed thousands of youthful imaginations. Of course, society called us freaks, weirdos, Satanists (D&D had demons and devils; never mind that most players considered them enemies, not allies). Like most teen fashions, it was considered the Sure Downfall of Society. Our 1950s-raised parents had little idea what to make of it. To them, games were like Monopoly. However, if it kept their weird intellectual kids from smoking dope and getting pregnant, it had merits. Most sighed and didn’t worry about the havoc that evangelicals suggested D&D might wreak upon our youthful brains. Was it for nerds? Clearly. Anti-social nerds? Please. Let’s drive a stake through the heart of that ridiculous charge while we’re at this. D&D was social at its core, a group activity. It could not be played solitaire. It was not mainstream social, but it was social without question. It just wasn’t the sort of social that the yuppies, jocks and so forth expected of us. It brought us together with our own kind. It showed that we weren’t fundamentally anti-social; we just failed to adore the popular kids. We were social among people with whom we considered it worthwhile to socialize.

Of course, D&D inspired many other RPG concepts. Games took us to space, to dystopian post-apocalyptic eras, to the age of sail, and wherever else we might want to imagine. We grew up. We got jobs. We had kids, most of us. Many of us left RPGs behind, though some stayed with them. Those born after 1970 never knew a world without D&D, just as they would not know college without the personal computer, just as those born after 1900 knew no world without the automobile and aircraft.

Some of us knew the world before and after D&D, and experienced the revolutionary open-ended creativity that its arrival spawned. Our lives would never be the same. To grasp this is to grasp the effect of D&D on a twelve-year-old brain. Imagine being an artist with only graphite pencils and notebook paper, and suddenly being handed oil paints and canvas. Imagine making homebrew movies with old Super 8 cameras and a film splicer, then getting a modern camcorder and video editing computer. That’s the magnitude. That’s what it was like.

Of late, D&D has schismed into two versions. In essence, the owners tried to hand players a game that didn’t feel like their good old D&D. Players mainly rejected it, hewing to a competing version. Consider: it is surviving even the complete mismanagement of its owner, in some form, nearly forty years gone.

I can only imagine what the teens of the fifties and sixties did without the change in options my generation experienced thanks to Dungeons & Dragons. Those of the eighties take it for granted, something that was always there, like the telephone for me. We were privileged to watch the veil of possibility lift and drop away, and told to use our imaginations. And one day, the last of us will be gone.

Someone had to tell how it was. Otherwise, social history will lie, told by people who never felt the experience–and will get away with it, warping perception and memory. As I approach the boundary of half a century of life, that life has taught me that most of us live to see history lie about our times. Are you in your twenties? When you are my age, you will watch them lie about your times, too. By then I will be gone, so if anyone is to tell the truth, it will fall to you.

I seek no homages for us. Hey, if anyone should do homage, it’s us to Gary Gygax, who was the prime inventor of the game insofar as I’m aware. He, and those he played the game with, lifted that veil. All I ask is that the kids don’t take RPGs wholly for granted, as if they were always with us. They weren’t. Weird intellectuals were thus trapped in their own minds, forced to seek some other outlet.

None had the impact of D&D.

Social comment

When dominant powers assume that they make the rules

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My friend Adrienne Dellwo (if you are in search of fibromyalgia info, she’s the authority) today posted a worthwhile article on how Wizards of the Coast has managed to lose the Dungeons & Dragons market. For those of you who don’t want to read it or have never cared about fantasy role-playing games, a few years ago WotC decided on a complete remake of the tabletop game (which is still popular). Whether the new edition was a good one or a bad one was up for debate; most players a) didn’t think it felt like D&D, and b) weren’t very interested in repurchasing all the basic books again. It’s safe to assume the move was revenue-driven in a saturated market (declining sales of expensive source books), and one empathizes with the need to keep customers buying stuff, but planned obsolescence always creates a crossroads. When deciding whether to buy the new thing, and annoyed about it, people may decide on someone else’s new thing.

It isn’t the first time that’s happened in some way. We can learn from the trend, which spans most aspects of human life. The pace has sped up as communication and transportation have accelerated.

The Roman Catholic Church defined religion in Europe for centuries, with an authoritative hand in economic, political, military and social life. A variety of reformers decided that heresy wasn’t nearly as sinful as venal, oppressive, centralized ecclesiastical leadership, and today a good chunk of Europe isn’t Catholic–and a good chunk of what remains nominally Catholic really doesn’t care.

In the Civil War, the South starved because “cotton was king!” Thus, wealthy planters kept growing the stuff rather than food, even though getting it to its European markets was problematic. A primarily agrarian population, with a healthy chunk of the workforce that didn’t have to be away at war, found a way to starve. The South also insisted on going to war to preserve slavery, when a quick look around the world would have told them it was unsustainable. The Confederate States are no longer a country.

Chrysler, GM and Ford forgot how to make cars that people wanted to buy. Never mind: buy Murrican! In Detroit, social pressure (patriotism, union allegiance) worked. Everywhere else, people bought cheaper, more reliable Japanese cars. They still don’t get it. The American companies remain at the top of the Consumer Reports recall lists, people who value reliability buy Toyotas and Hondas, and the whole industry had to be bailed out. Detroit? Not much left of it.

IBM popularized the personal computer and set all the standards. Just eight years later, it was flailing about helplessly as it tried to dictate that the market pay double for a new architecture and operating system that were mostly incompatible with all the previous IBM stuff. Everyone told IBM to pound sand and bought Compaqs, Epsons, Acers, HPs, and ASTs running the same OS in evolutionary form. Do you own an IBM computer?

AOL looked poised to redefine the Internet. AOL startup CDs were a primary form of junk mail. For a great many people, AOL was the Internet, despite the steady grumbles of the tech-savvy libertarian-leaning old school who had thought typing Unix commands wasn’t too bad and viewed with fear and loathing the influx of screaming, clueless newbies with their text-speak and tendency to call IRC channels ‘chat rooms.’ Then AOL users began to learn about the Internet, and came to realize that AOL was now more in their way than paving the way. How long has it been since you got an AOL CD ride-along?

CNN was all the rage after the first Gulf War. Now it’s just one of three incompetent news entertainment stations. Those who want their existing perceptions reinforced now watch the version of the competition whose slant they prefer. People who plan to think read it online. CNN may still be in business, but they aren’t really in the news business, and their reputation is lower than ever.

Flush with the market dominance of Windows, Microsoft insisted on shoving a lousy web browser at its customers. It became the Web Browser Most Often Used to Download a Real Web Browser. Microsoft can still make the rules for Internet Explorer; it’s just that no one will care. Microsoft also kept repackaging a boondogglier boondoggle and calling it the Next Great Windows. Apple’s stock sells today, as I type, for $483/share. Five years ago it sold for about $160. You can get a share of Microsoft for $32/share. Five years ago, you’d have paid about $26 for it. New Microsoft product announcements don’t change much, especially as many are flops that drive the stock price backward.

SEIU, one of the dominant labor unions, truly believes that it got Barack Obama elected. It neglects to consider that organized labor, so long accustomed to having its way and having its sloganeering taken at face value, no longer has the power to get anyone elected. It has lost the battle for public influence. It has allowed its enemies to convince people that they are better off without the right to bargain collectively. That’s like convincing landowners that polluted water is actually better than clean water. Today, maybe 10% of American workers are in a union, and many of the other 90% would object strenuously to the concept.

Google perfected the search engine, then broke its “Don’t Be Evil” motto all over the place. People are increasingly open to search engine solutions that don’t feed the Google data hydra. Google Plus was rolled out to a tremendous yawn. Everything Google does raises the question: “in what way is this meant to spy on me?” No one will lament its downfall, when it comes.

USC college football had a motto: “Win Forever.” At one point, that looked likely. A private school, it treated NCAA inquiries with disdain. The resulting sanctions sent the Win Forever coach packing his bags for the NFL, led to the hire of a mercenary coach who has floundered, caused a demoralized team of stellar athletes to lose a bowl game to a team with a losing record, and lost the program its star power. Last week, USC struggled to defeat Utah State, a team with few athletes that USC would have recruited even when it wasn’t under scholarship reductions.

Adrienne commented to me: “To add to your list of companies that toppled themselves, I think the Big Three TV networks are next. When a show gets knocked off of my DVR and I can’t find it either on the network’s website or On Demand, and they don’t show it again for several months, it’s just plain stupid.” She’s got a point. The major networks have become increasingly less relevant, in large part because they’ve been difficult about content. Faux is the worst. Increasingly, the most compelling TV content is not on the major networks at all.

The American mindset continues to insist that its system is the world’s greatest, that its military might is unchallengeable, its currency is the world standard, and that every country’s most important relationship is that with the United States. This, as it: lags the developed world in most quality-of-living categories, tucks tail from Afghanistan, and tries to decide whether its worst enemy is a a) major world religion with a few extremists, b) people who want to sneak across its borders to pick fruit and mow yards, or c) two old Cold War adversaries who watch its missteps with bemused anticipation. It requires an enemy, lest its people look inward and see that its own government and corporations are a greater threat to them than all of the above in union. And in the meantime, increasingly, it fails to adjust to a changing world and falls behind, losing relevance and prestige.

Beards, Social comment

Beard comparisons and visible minority

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The other day, I was with some people I didn’t really know. Okay, I was in a community education geography class that consists of a nice elderly gentleman telling stories from his life at 1.5 mph. Which may well be very entertaining in its context, but is not what I paid $36, trekked half a mile through a junior high school, and squeezed into a child-intended seat for. But that’s why I was with people I didn’t know.

For some reason, the social necessity arose to comment upon my facial hair. I guess it’s the main visible marker for me, much more important than perhaps my education or work experience (which one might infer from my speech, but which can’t be shaved off). Black people might tell me: “Try being the only one with a difference that Norelco can’t fix.” A fair point. However, it’s not that big a novelty. I’ve heard that sentiment from minorities too: “Am I the first one they’ve ever seen?” Women, when alone in all-male groups, probably ask themselves the same thing: Why are the men all acting weird? Was the last female they ever saw, the one who squeezed them out?

No, I don’t directly compare my experience. Too much differs. But I no longer wonder why people in minority situations have made the observations they did. They make sense to me now, even after an incomplete comparison. And I’m beginning to understand why they’d rather it went away, because maybe the damn subject is just old to them. If you’re fifty and Asian, Asianness has probably come up a time or two in your life. You’ve already learned all the perceptions, stereotypes, heard reactions thoughtful and ignorant alike. Maybe you’re ready to just be Joe, rather than Asian Joe.

That said, I also don’t think it stops. Not with newly met people in visible minority situations. So that means that, until people become friends with me or I shave it off, in groups my beard is my identity. And maybe I should be grateful for that, come to think of it, because I’d rather be noteworthy for my beard than for my weight or my bizarre voice. So mostly, I’m not too annoyed, until the comparisons go to undesirable places.

You know, being compared with ZZ Top as a form of beard association wasn’t bad. I can deal with being confused with Santa. This Duck Dynasty comparison crap, however, will meet with icy and obstinate resistance. Yes, I know you like the show. No, I do not see what’s amusing about it. Yes, I realize it’s wildly popular. No, that fact has never influenced my preferences in nearly fifty years of life, unless via contrarianship. Yes, I have watched it. No, I don’t think it’s amusing. In fact, I see little difference between Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Booboo. It’s only funny because they have drawls. If you made either show with North Dakotans or Oregonians, it would be off the air, because much of our society associates a drawl with comical ignorance. (Although in Oregon, of course ‘Duck dynasty’ has a rather more different and literal meaning, one inimical to loyal Huskies.)

It’s one thing being compared to a mythical figure who brings kids joy. It’s one thing being compared to bearded Southerners whose rock band and look are so iconic that people half my age know who they are. It’s quite another being compared to a bunch of guys noteworthy mainly for making duck callers. Who even eats duck meat anyway? I assume people are not buying the duck callers so that they can feed or befriend the ducks.

Rasputin? Da. ZZ Top? Reckon so. Santa? Ho, ho, ho. Duck Dynasty? No. Just don’t.

Married life, Social comment, Sports

Our college football ritual

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It’s not very writer-nerdy to love college football. Don’t care. My nerd card has far too many punches in life for any pencil-neck to criticize. I do care about graduation rates, education, safety, and conduct within the community, in addition to football. I care that football essentially pays the way for most other sports at most schools, which has made Title IX’s equality requirements financially doable.

The NFL, I don’t much care about. Wake me up if the Broncos make the AFC Championship, especially if it’s against a real team (read: not a newfangled Southern team named after some monstrous feline).

The great thing about college football is that one can have many likes and many hates. However, one’s undergraduate allegiance is nearly always one’s home program, one’s favorite, because you are one of them. They walk the same halls and pathways, fellow participants in history and tradition. So, I like Kansas because I’m from there and my father went there, and Colorado State because both my folks went there, and varying other schools for various reasons. But even though I’m not a Washingtonian, I went to Washington, and thus for me college football begins with purple and gold.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

My wife’s varying undergrad schools did not offer football, though for many Alaskans, UW is a sort of default allegiance (and a dream academic destination), like people from Montana who root for the Denver Broncos. In any case, my enthusiasm has somewhat rubbed off on Deb. Husky football has become one of our fall rituals, something to do together. I doubt she’ll ever be a big student of the game, but sometimes this is the way for women: their psyches flex and adjust and adapt better than ours, probably one reason they live longer than we do. It has become one of our marital rituals, Husky football on TV, and she loves her I BARK FOR SARK t-shirt.

The way it works is through nachos. A lot of nachos. Pure nachismo. A whole pizza plate full of them. We make a massive plate of nachos, sit down and watch the game. I believe she likes it partly because I participate in the production (I normally am not much of a cook, though on request I will always take responsibility for providing food). I consider myself an advanced placer of tortilla chips, and am always willing to grate cheese, oil the pan, chop stuff up, whatever strong-back-weak-mind task I can do. This year (or this week, anyway), I am taking a greater role, because I’m making my version of her chorizo chile to put on the nachos. That covers the beans part, the hamburger part and the sauce part.

I do not believe in lame nachos. Nachos are the place to go all in. The only reason to stop putting stuff on top is if it will a) insulate the cheese from melting correctly, or b) cause problems in the oven by bumping against the burners or pouring off the pan. We all know that most cheese tastes better when heated/cooked. There must be no chip not coated in good things. I wouldn’t feed most sportsbar nachos to Deb’s dogs, which I don’t even like.

The general custom is to consume gallons of beer while watching football, but I don’t. It’s emotional for me, sometimes very disappointingly emotional (even depressingly, as in the Tyrone Willingham era), and for me, drinking and being unhappy don’t mix. After it’s over, of course, if I’m pleased with how things went, I’ll definitely have a few celebratory belts, but I don’t like to get really drunk even then.

We’d have people over more often (no way can we eat all that), but we have not really lived in places where there were a lot of Husky fans. Tri-Cities was hardcore Coug country, and the only reason for them to watch UW is to root against us (and even against Oregon, I don’t openly root against my host’s team…some things are best kept to oneself). Boise is hardcore Boise State country, and we haven’t yet met many other Dawgs here. So it’s not really a social tradition, more of a marital one. But it’s a good one, especially when attending games in person is now more cost- and time-prohibitive than ever. (Eight hours of driving, each way. At least one motel night, probably two. Meals. $150 for tickets. Total, maybe $700–which I read as 2/3 of a house payment. Not happening.

So Husky football returns. Go Dawgs.

Let me close with a bit of outspoken opinion on the changes in football, especially with regard to concussion prevention and increasingly stiff penalties for targeting and helmet-to-helmet hits. Yeah, I know this isn’t how we played football in high school, or when my father played in high school. However, please consider these salient realities:

  • Players are stronger, faster and bigger than before. Don’t believe me, look at the rosters then and now.
  • The impacts are harder, and have outstripped the ability of equipment to protect any part of the body completely. In any case, no protection will keep a brain from sloshing around in the braincase.
  • College is for education first and foremost. The goal is to educate young brains, not scramble them.
  • Look at the numbers in education. At some schools, enrollment approaches 60% female. It’s hard to avoid the strong suspicion that, when opportunity is equal and all is based purely on demonstrated academic merit, the women are smarter than we are. If we are on balance dumber than the women, does society need us to get even dumber through repeated head trauma?
  • Look at the later impact on families. We want our young men to grow into good men: good fathers, good husbands. Brain trauma can cause disastrous, erratic behavior, especially later in life. I’ve known of once-decent men who had head injuries and became brutal animals toward their families. With as much domestic violence as we already have, must we not do all we can to prevent more of it? Was my father’s violently abusive behavior partly a product of the three times he was kayoed playing high school football?
  • Football produces people we often admire, some of whom deserve it and some don’t. What about after football? Let me spell this out. Do you want your school’s greatest hero inducted into his school’s pantheon of standouts in a wheelchair, drooling, unable to stand up and thank alma mater and the community for the opportunity and affection? At forty?
  • We live in an era of fanatically overprotective parents. Many will not let their children play football at all. We’ll never know how great those kids might have been. Do you want to make that even worse? My father didn’t want me to play football. It went like this: “Dad, thinking of going out for football. What do you think?” “Lousy idea, son. You’ll wreck your knee, and limp around in pain for the rest of your life, like me.” This from a high school standout in a town where football was king, a lifelong fan of college football. I told him I was going to do it anyway, and he said he wouldn’t stop me, but I can only imagine what my parents were thinking when we’d kick off. I’d pick a target and ram that helmet in there. Broke the bolt holding my face mask in place one time. Hit people with it so hard that I could hear the collective feminine gasps of pained shock from the stands. May well have injured a reasonably gifted mind–for life. And that wasn’t even people hitting me. It was self-inflicted. I already have some memory issues. How much worse will they be as I age? Did I do this to myself? Will I one day find myself tending toward domestic violence I cannot control, and have no honorable alternative but to exit life on my own terms?
  • And last: it takes thirty years for us to know how bad it really is. We are only now learning how much brain damage was done to the sons of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the meantime, the hits got harder. We won’t find out until thirty years from now what it did to our current generation of young males, but we can expect it to get worse. It cannot begin to get better until we fix it, and wait our thirty years for the payoff. Those thirty years must begin now.

Against all this, the only argument is ‘the pussification of football’ and grumpy old deprecatory stuff like ‘might as well just play flag football, why even bother?’ You tell me which argument makes more sense, that or mine. For my money, if those are your responses, maybe you yourself had a few too many concussions and they’re starting to show, because the weight of all measured reason argues for taking whatever steps necessary to quit turning kids’ brains to granola.

Let me close by mentioning that this is not the first time we’ve confronted this. Do you know why the NCAA was formed? It was because, by the turn of the century (when football still looked a lot like rugby or ‘soccer football,’ as it was called), there were over a dozen deaths on the field nationally in high school and college football. Many more were paralyzed for life. Theodore Roosevelt stepped in and said, paraphrased: “Your choice. You can fix this blood sport, or I will ban it.” Roosevelt was not known as a man who ran from fights, nor discouraged physical trials of strength and guts. In fact, he was a pretty macho president. Yet in this case, he took a stand for rules changes and protective gear. Pussification? You wouldn’t say that to T.R.’s face. He heard the same complaints, and came to the same conclusion I have: if it kills the kids, or ruins them for life, it’s got to be fixed or gotten rid of.

If that means ejecting and suspending anyone who spears, targets the head or whatever, I’m for it. The alternative is the potential decline of the sport.

I want to keep our ritual. I love Husky football enough to save it.

Book reviews, Social comment

Eat, pray, love?

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This book is not the sort of travel book that draws me in, but I ended up starting to read it anyway while unpacking our library (a lengthy, back-wrenching task at our house). It is by Elizabeth Gilbert, and in case one can’t read the stuff on the cover telling one that they made it into a movie, there’s a picture of some actress on the cover. I know I’ve seen her but I don’t recognize her name. Erin Brocovic, maybe.

Eat, Pray, Love. Three things a lot of us do every day without high drama, though it’s a more promising title than Pee, Swear, Groan.

Not sure what makes me recoil from books whose titles sound like idylls. I am sure that Frances Mayes is a delightful lady. Even so, when I wrote a manuscript about travel in Ireland, my working title parodied that of Under the Tuscan Sun. It all sounds so effete, so fragile, so froufrou, so gritless. I am far too affected by names in this regard. I battle this weakness; in fact, I forced myself to read Mayes’ book simply out of respect for what I was going to parody. And it was about like I thought it was: another book about fixing up old Mediterranean properties and cooking food in them. Not a thing in the world against an author who seems like a very nice lady that can probably spend an hour preparing an artichoke in just this special way she learned from an old grocer named Beppe so that it tastes like ambrosia delivered by angels and served by cherubs, but if I’m going to read about idyllic Tuscany, my kind of travel book is Dario Castagno’s Too Much Tuscan Sun, a Sienese tour guide writing about how ridiculous some of his clients are. The highlight of the dude’s life is when his social fraternity wins an annual horse race for the first time in decades. (Imagine: “Hi, my name is Joe, and I am a Ravens fan whose team won the Super Bowl last year.”) He actually puts that in the blurb; how much class does that require? A true character, and if you think about it, a much sharper cultural portrait of his region than you imagined you might get.

So I’m not much impressed by ‘now a motion picture!’ or an idyllic title everyone’s heard of, much less a picture of a Serbian actress. Most of my travel library, most of you haven’t heard of. Imagine someone who has combed used bookstores for ten years, and in each one, has bought only the single most unique, interesting travel biography. Paul Theroux? I read a couple and liked them well enough, but he’s nowhere near as fun as Tim Cahill. Bruce Chatwin? Couldn’t tell you. I read one and nothing about it stands out in my memory, which is not true of the incredibly ballsy and laconic Tim Severin. Redmond O’Hanlon? Another one whose titles turn me off, this time for pretension. ‘No Mercy.’ ‘In Trouble Again.’ Not only do those tell me nothing, I can’t help thinking the author considers himself a vast badass. Maybe he does. Maybe he is. If so, I won’t need the title to tell me that. A real travel badass is Tony Horwitz throwing up in a bucket on a tall ship, or the Australian woman who went on a camel trip and just stopped wearing clothes at times. She has the guts to describe how she just let her menstrual blood seep down her bare thighs, out in the middle of nowhere. I forget her name, but I’m not done with my coffee and I can’t remember it offhand; I’m hiding out here from the twelfth annual 9/11 garment-rending, sort of hunkered down for the day. A search for “Australian camel travel woman” should fetch her.

At least I don’t judge the book by a cover. If Mayes had pictured a stack of hockey pucks on her cover, or a shot of herself in a bikini, it wouldn’t have changed a thing for me. Titles affect me abnormally.

Of course, you can’t review a book based on reading a quarter of it, nor merely its title, and you can’t hold against it that it was popular enough to be a movie. I fought off all my biases and started reading, because I needed something to read, and this was something I hadn’t read. So far, it’s basically: woman who serially gives too much until she can give no more, then gets all depressed about it and finally decides to spend a year doing something good and selfish for once as therapy. It’s a much better Lifetime plot than most of what they show, that I’ll grant you, because to me Lifetime movies are a steady stream of shows about women being hurt, abused, scared, cheated and killed. I’m not sure how that helps anyone to watch, but evidently those are very popular themes with some women, or there wouldn’t be a movie channel devoted to them. Then again, I’m not sure how an annual self-laceration helps a whole country, but evidently once again I’m in the minority there as well.

I’m sure the events in the book are very interesting and formative to the author, and probably to people who have been in similar situations and wished they could just hare off somewhere else for a year. To me, maybe not so much. It does beat hell out of the rest of what I’m reading around the net this morning.