Some years ago, when a friend showed me John Updike’s short story “Problems,” I loved it. The protagonist has left one woman for another, and he isn’t quite sure he made the right decision. His angst is presented as a series of math story problems. In what’s literally the final analysis, the narrator/test writer tallies up all the hero’s reasons to be happy, and then surprises the reader by asking: “Something is wrong. What is it?”
A friend of mine recently tweeted this entertaining video on how to talk to racists:
The key takeaway is the importance of focusing on actions rather than thoughts. You don’t call someone a racist, because that’s a statement about their soul that’s impossible to prove. Instead, you call out their provably racist words or actions.
It occurred to me while watching that video that the idea of presuming, or aspiring to, a safe moral separation from one’s words or actions is a very white idea. (Isn’t it?) In my more or less liberal whiteness, I sometimes feel complicit in the oppression of people whom I have not oppressed. (Or have I? By profiting from globalization? By working in advertising? By volunteering at the co-op? Who knows? It’s a complicatied world.)
The sanctity of the voting booth. I’ve heard many people say recently that many so-called liberal white people would vote for McCain in the privacy of the booth, admitting only to themselves and the machine that they can’t bear the thought of a black president. But one colleague of mine asserted the opposite: People are more progressive than they act; they want a black president but can’t bring themselves to admit it out loud; in the sanctity of the voting booth, they will reveal their best possible selves.
I’d like to propose a third hypothesis. For white people who, for whatever reason, find themselves caught between history and the future, the voting booth is a confessional. Pulling those few levers we’re given access to is a statistically insignificant act. You never know for sure if your vote is counted. You never know for sure if your friends and loved ones voted the way they claim. Hell, you could be a brain in a vat and it’s all a joke… except your vote, because that experience was already private. It was a reflexive indicator from you, back to yourself, of who you are.
My friend ame has written a great post about Thoreau’s views on voting, which were basically this: Don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s a moral act. It’s an intellectual act; abstract and somewhat masturbatory, too easy and too far removed from the world of real, physical people, their problems and choices, to be meaningful. Vote, he said, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ve made yourself a better person by doing so. You are still who you are. Your life is still your life. You are still complicit. There is no escape.
And yet, I submit that, tonight, a sea change is coming about in part because many private people, separately, went into little curtain-lined booths and took the easiest possible action, the pulling of a lever from the right to the left, in order to convince themselves that they are made of better stuff than they actually are.
The trailer’s voiceover says: “I used to be just like you. Until I met her.” The implication is that you, the viewer, would be a much more interesting person if only Angelina Jolie would recognize that you and she are meant to be together, and Morgan Freeman took you under his wing and identified the hidden skills that will make you a superhuman.
The deeper implication, the one you’re not meant to examine, is that this will never happen to you, and if there was any chance that it would, then you wouldn’t need to see this movie as a substitute.
This is a “meant for greater things” story, with the attendant fantasy of discovering that your real parents were actually much more interesting than the ones who raised you.
It’s likely that the protagonist ends up doing battle with his new mentors. That’s how this kind of story works. The protagonist doesn’t really come into his own until he takes the gifts he’s given and makes his own decisions about how to use them. Morgan and Angelina probably killed his father. The guy who is ostensibly after him in the drugstore at the beginning is probably an ally.
Someone at the executive level recently attempted to console me on my unemployment by slapping me on the back and exclaiming “You’ll be fine. You’re a commodity.”
This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to either a) be insulted or b) tell myself that he had no idea what “commodity” means. (I opted for both, actually. Wouldn’t you?)
A commodity, in the business sense, has two basic characteristics:
a) People want it.
b) They don’t want it specifically.
Take this barbershop, for example (in my neighborhood here in Park Slope). The proprietors put a poster in the window illustrating the various hairstyles they offer. But they didn’t make the poster. They ordered it from a poster company that got the hairstyles from a barbershop in Baltimore.
What’s interesting is that the barbershop with the poster in its window (here in Brooklyn) makes no effort to hide the fact that it isn’t their poster. They don’t care. They don’t think that their customers should care either. You want a haircut? They have haircuts. They are not trying to convince you that there is anything special about their haircuts. They are admitting that they are a commodity.
The thing about commodities is, people aren’t picky about where they come from. They get purchased from the vendor that delivers them fast and cheap. So if you’re a commodity, then you are in demand, but you are never in more demand than any of the millions of other people who are, for all practical purposes, exactly like you.
I guess there are a lot of people in the world who aspire to be commodities. But I’m not one of them. Are you?
Although all the speakers from the FM CM summit are listed here, their names are not really linked to their own sites. Inspired by what Creative Times did for the attendees of the Brooklyn Blogfest, I thought it would be nice to actually assemble links to the blogs (or just sites) of everyone involved, where applicable. If you find a mistake, tell me, and I’ll fix it.
Speakers who have their own blogs, in alphabetical order by last name:
Or, just use the Grazr widget below, with which you can read any feed, subscribe to any feed, or subscribe to all the feeds together as one. (You could also just bookmark this post, and check it once in a while.)
