The summer solstice
came and went last week without my usual low-key fanfare. I don’t ever set epic
bonfires to mark the day, or fly to the UK to watch the sunrise at Stonehenge,
or travel West to the medicine wheel at Bighorn. I’ve never hosted a human
sacrifice in a burning wicker man despite a partially Celtic heritage. Julius Caesar gave this account of the practice
in his Commentaries: “Alii immani magnitudine simulacra habent quorum
contexta viminibus membra vivis hominibus complent quibus succensis circumventi
flamma exanimantur homines.” If
your Latin is a little rusty (and I’m impressed if it’s not): “Others have
figures of great size with limbs of wicker that they fill with live people;
when set afire they are killed by being enveloped in flames.” No, none of that.
I do often have a
cookout with friends in the backyard, but hamburgers on the grill are all that
ever get enveloped in flames. Last week the weather was not cooperating (it was
cool and rainy mostly) so I let the cookout slide. But while I may not have
celebrated the day with friends and a grill, I did notice – and toasted the event
in my own private way.
This is the first truly
summery week of weather this year in this locale even though an alternate name for the solstice
(uncommon on this continent for some reason) is Midsummer. It is an odd name
since one reasonably might think midsummer should fall on or about August 7, but
the solstices and equinoxes were once considered to be the middle of their
respective seasons. This actually makes astronomical sense, but the lag between
changing insolation and seasonal weather makes the modern way of marking seasons
feel more correct down here on the ground. I’m happy to regard summer as lasting
until the next equinox: September 23 this year.
My habit of
preferentially timing my get-togethers to an equinox or solstice rather than
some nearby conventional holiday is partly practical and partly wistful. The
practical aspect is that I am not competing with parties held by others,
including one or more of my usual guests. The wistful part comes from marking the
passage of time. The analogy of the progression of the year and the passage of
life has weighed on human minds from prehistoric times to the present. Frank
Sinatra released the album September of
My Years the year he turned 50. I think 50 is more like August, but we know
what he meant: he was feeling his mortality as folks in middle-age tend to do
to an extent they hadn’t before. Robert Graves,
who always preferred to be known more as a poet than a novelist, went so far as
to argue that the cycle (or some part of it) of birth, love, aging, and death
as represented (implicitly or explicitly) by the metaphor of the seasons was
the sole subject of poetry; one can write verse about other stuff, he argued,
but it doesn’t rise to poetry. As that may be, on four days of the year I am
particularly aware of people and events no longer in my life, of those that
are, and of what may come. Too bad I’m a lousy poet.
Nonetheless, our
planet’s orbital prompts are not altogether necessary for ruminations of that
kind. Nor are they necessary for parties. Perhaps I’ll hold one on midsummer in
the modern sense, which is to say in early August sometime. I’m sure I can work
up some wistfulness about the passage of time then, too.
There is a famous 80/20 rule for governing
one’s expectations. For example, the rule of thumb is that 20% of participants
in any enterprise produce 80% of the value. Another 20% cause 80% of the
trouble. 80% of movies are disposable. 20% of college men have 80% of the
dates. (Studies actually have confirmed that last one.) And so on. It is so
much a part of our experience that we don’t usually think much about it. There
is one 80/20 split that has been causing some concern lately however: the widening
split between the bulk of the nation and the fifth of it comprising the upper
middle class.
It’s easy to hate on the 1%, at least for
99% of us. Hence, at the May Day Occupy march back in 2011 more than a third of
the marchers had incomes over $100,000, which only 8% of individuals earn. Yet
the more important divide is the top 20% of households (not individuals, though
some households are individuals) defined as those with over $115,000 in income vs. the 80% that earn less. 50%
of the nation’s wealth is owned by the 19% just below the 1% and it is the
prime beneficiary of economic growth. Political
scientists across the spectrum including Charles Murray (Harvard, MIT) on the
libertarian right (cf. his book Coming
Apart), New York Times columnist
Farhad Manjoo (see America’s
Cities Are Unlivable: Blame Wealthy Liberals on the left, and
Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution in the center (see Dream
Hoarders) have taken note. All three authors are worth a read. One
always has to give credit to someone who, like Manjoo, is willing to critique
political allies. Murray’s book is extensively documented though by design it concentrates
on white America so as not to confound class differences with ethnic and racial
differences, which are always hard to tease out from each other in the US; he
brings other groups into the graphs in the closing chapters, however, with
surprisingly little impact on the statistics. Of the three, Reeves is probably
the most broadly readable in our divided world in which too many of us dismiss
out of hand the words of those with ideologies that differ too much from our
own.
The issue all three have with the upper
20% is not their high incomes per se but
rather the barriers they place in the path of the 80% trying to join them,
particularly (but not only) by placing out of reach big ticket items such as
housing and education. Let’s take Manjoo’s primary concern, a subject with
which I have familiarity. In constant dollars food is about the same price as
in the 1950s while televisions are cheaper as well as vastly better, but the
cost of housing has soared. Housing was not always the massive expense it is
today. In 1940 the average price of a single family home in the US was $3000
which in inflation-adjusted 2019 dollars is a shade under $55,000. In the
decade after World War 2 my grandfather and his three sons (including my
father) built smallish but completely serviceable ranch houses for
nominal prices much lower than even the cheapest of compact cars today. The
homes were sold to average working people (usually single income), few of whom
had any degree higher than a high school diploma. One of these very same houses
in Whippany NJ is on the market right now priced (not unfairly) at $473,000. In
my own town my father in the early 1960s (by then no longer with my
grandfather) built slightly more upscale houses (just like the one in which I
grew up) priced at $30,000; one of those houses is currently listed at
$599,000. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the inflation multiplier
since 1961 is 8.4, meaning that in real terms the price has more than doubled.
Pretty much all of the increase can be attributed to the land rather than the
improvements. The reason? Primarily it is restrictive zoning. It is simply
impossible under current regulations to duplicate developments aimed at
ordinary middle class buyers on the scale they were built in the two decades
after WW2, so the price of properties (the land more than the improvements) is
driven up. The remaining large tracts of land in my home township recently have
been rezoned for 10-acre lots, which means each individual subdivided lot will cost
seven figures. The residents of the town have striven to ensure that no one new
will move into town unless Upper Middle Class or truly rich. It is no wonder so
many adult Millennials are still living at home with mom and dad.
It is important to note that the 80% is
not an underclass in the usual sense – a portion of it is, but there has been
no growth in actual poverty in recent decades. The large bulk of the 80% is middle
class, but it is largely stuck. Much of what ails it cannot be put specifically
on the doorstep of the 20%. For example, while children of 20-percenters overwhelmingly
are born into and raised by two-parent households, the majority of 80-percenter
children are born out of wedlock and spend at least some of their first 18 years
in single parent households. This has powerful economic consequences. The cause
of other ailments is open to debate. Male wages, for example, for the 80% (not
the 20%) in real terms peaked in 1974 and are down 20% since then; only the
influx of women into the workforce kept household income from declining. Intermarriage
between 20-percenters and 80-percenters (commonplace 50 years ago) has become
rare: college educated professionals marry college-educated professionals.
While there always have been nice neighborhoods and less nice neighborhoods,
there is a segregation of the classes like never before by zip code. The
segregation is not by race: though the 20% is whiter than America in general
(75% vs. 63%), it is increasingly diverse as the older whiter members of it die
off. The segregation is by class. The 20-percenters live next to, go to school
with, and marry each other. They live in a self-contained bubble that really is
out of touch with the rest of the country. The 20-percenters are the elites
(including news and cultural commentators) at whom average folk rail. The rise
of populism of both the right and left wing cannot be understood except in this
context.
Do you live in a bubble? Murray has a 25
question quiz available here that might answer the question: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/do-you-live-in-a-bubble-a-quiz-2.
(Full disclosure: my score was 42, a result which the quiz describes as "A
second generation (or more) upper middle class person who has made a point of
getting out a lot." That is basically right: neither of my parents
attended college and their assets when they got married at age 21 & 19 totaled
$700, so there is no “or more” to the “second generation.”)
Though the three authors write about the
US, this growing divide is a trend across the West and one that seems immune to
the differing tax and social policies of different nations. Nevertheless the authors
do have suggestions. Murray, as one might expect, concentrates on removing
the legal and institutional barriers to upward mobility including excessive
licensing restrictions, overregulation of small enterprises, and, of course, restrictive
zoning, which economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti agree by itself has
chopped 50% off GDP growth since 1964. Manjoo agrees about the zoning though we
also hear more about taxes from the left. Reeves espouses all of that and more.
Whatever response (if any) is appropriate,
acknowledging the division is an obvious first step. Reeves, once again, is the
author I recommend to most people. Reeves moved to the US from the UK in part,
he says, to get away from persistent class snobbery. He was unsettled to find
that, though class snobbery remains less overt in the US, class mobility is if
anything lower. Hence the book Dream
Hoarders. Of course, (one might note at the risk of snobbery), not all
class is about money.
The Jerzey Derby Brigade (JDB) was back
on its home track in Morristown last night for a bout against the Dirty Jersey
Roller Derby based in Metuchen, NJ. Dirty Jersey jumped to an early but modest
lead as jammers #3 Babe Brutality, #902 Lady Speedstick, and #21 Jacked Up
showed skill at evading or penetrating firm defenses. Jams by #138 Incindyous,
#3684 Californikate (in her final bout for JDB), and especially a 16 point
power jam by #8 Lil Mo Peep kept the JDB competitive. The game was notable for
a much used penalty bench, which is a common signifier of hard blocking. Blocking
strategies have evolved over the past decade with a 3-wall becoming
commonplace; it is hard to break through and encourages the opposing jammer to
take a particular path around it where the fourth blocker is waiting. Both
teams used the formation a lot, though it can be (and was) defeated by
nimble-footed skaters. The first half ended with the score at 50-87 in favor of
Dirty Jersey.
As is often the case, the second half was
more rough-and-tumble than the first as each team struggled to overtake or maintain
the lead. Takedowns were frequent with #221 Det. Sure-Block Holmes and #63
Raven Rage getting in their usual solid hits. Despite strong efforts by JDB
including a few star passes to #64 Madeleine Alfight, the overall pattern of the
first half continued in the second. Strong jams by Lady Speedstick and Babe
Brutality were only partly offset by similar jams by Lil Mo Peep and Incindyous.
Dirty Jersey expanded its lead with Thiza Glory taking the team over the 100
mark. The lead expanded as the minutes counted down. In the final jam Babe
Brutality as lead jammer, pursued by Lil Mo Peep, ran out the clock. Dirty Jersey won the match with a final
score of 99-175.
MVPs:
Dirty Jersey
#3 Babe Brutality (jammer)
#306 Pink Medusa (blocker)
JDB:
#3684 Californikate (jammer)
#206 Bow Chicka Pow-Pow
[For
regular readers, yes I missed the 5/18 JDB v. Assault City home bout. Sorry about
that. The final score for that game was 134-304 for the Assaulters.]
We
all have had the strange experience of conversing with a seemingly rational and
sane person who at some point expresses some belief that to us seems
unimaginably weird: that transdimensional reptilian aliens killed JFK or some
such thing. Most often the expressed belief isn’t so far outside the mainstream
as that, but even mainstream beliefs can seem inexplicable to those of us who
don’t share them. We like to believe (there’s a variant of that word again)
that we are logical and those other people are not. This is improbable. Even if
we happen to be right, or at least less wrong, the odds are we arrived at our
beliefs first and found reasons to justify them later. This is just the way the
human mind works; those of us with mainstream opinions come by them with few
exceptions the same way the reptilian enthusiasts do.
Michael
Shermer is a founding publisher of the magazine Skeptic. He also writes a column for Scientific American. I’d read numerous articles by him in the past.
Last week I picked up The Believing Brain
in which he explains how people are hardwired to see
patterns and agency in the world. Shermer writes
about the physiology of belief and the effects of priming, anchoring, and
pre-existing expectations. There are good evolutionary reasons for
people to be good at discerning causes, patterns, meanings, and hidden links
where they exist, but also to be just as talented at seeing and believing in them where
they don’t. Those of our primate ancestors who
concluded a rustle in tall grasses meant that leopards were lurking in there
because there was one the last time the grass rustled, for example, most often
were wrong; nonetheless, they were more likely to survive than the primates who
didn’t believe in the connection. Being credulous is less likely to get you
killed and thereby removed from the gene pool. Evolution favors belief based on
shoddy evidence over skepticism. Far from being a barrier to holding
outlandish beliefs, by the way, intelligence actually helps. Shermer argues that intelligent people can convolute,
reinterpret, and interconnect data in creative ways that dimmer bulbs cannot
match. It is especially hard to change
minds when a sense of self is tied to a system of beliefs such as a religion or
political ideology: “our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by
direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear
contradictory evidence.” The
truth, or something approximating it, sometimes can be found, however, and the
scientific method is best way of finding it. It behooves us to recall the
admonition of physicist Richard Feynman:
“If
it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key
to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how
smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with
experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
My math teacher
back in high school liked to quote Edgar Allan Poe: “Believe nothing you hear,
and only one half that you see.” This is hyperbolic (and of course logically
self-negating), but there is an underlying value to the advice. “Belief comes quickly
and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low
tolerance for ambiguity,” says Shermer. Turning skepticism on ourselves is
especially hard, but in a world increasingly characterized by true believers
(secular and otherwise) and extreme partisanship it is something to be
encouraged.
The Believing Brain is worth a read, as prods to question
ourselves (not just others) and our own belief systems usually are. Thumbs Up.
In general I
prefer horror films and fiction to be free of the supernatural. There are
exceptions, but they have to be…well…exceptional. I’ve always felt the scariest
monsters are all too human and, very likely in their own minds, not monsters. A
novel such as Jim Thompson’s The Killer
inside Me and a movie such as Kalifornia
are frightening precisely because the characters in them are credible. A
recurring figure among all too human screen monsters is the stalker, a
character sometimes motivated by material gain (Wait until Dark), sometimes by sadistic playfulness (Duel), and sometimes by romantic
obsession (Play Misty for Me). For some
reason the stalker genre was especially big in the last two decades of the 20th
century, and Greta (2018), available
on DVD, is a throwback to the style of that era. That is a compliment.
Francis (Chloe
Grace Moretz) is an innocent, but not too innocent, young woman who has
recently moved to NYC where she works as a waitress and lives with a rich young
friend named Erica (Maika Monroe). (Erica’s father gave her a loft as a
graduation present.) Francis is still shattered by the death of her mother a
year earlier and has an uncomfortable relationship with her father in Boston
because, so we learn from their phone conversations, he is moving on. Francis
does not approve. One day Francis finds a purse on the subway and returns it in
person to the owner who turns out to be an older woman named Greta (Isabelle
Huppert). She connects with Greta and they soon develop an ersatz
mother-daughter friendship. Something, however, is off, and when Francis finds
a cabinet full of purses in Greta’s home, she is shaken. How many other
purse-returners have preceded her and what happened to them? Francis tries to
break off the relationship but Greta isn’t ready to let go. Greta stalks
Francis and steadily ramps up her threats, which at first are implicit and
later explicit.
Unlike many modern
productions, the pacing of the film isn’t rushed, which works better for
building suspense. The movie is entirely female driven with men in minor
supporting roles. The director Neil Jordon (Interview
with the Vampire) plainly had fun with this film. By all appearances French
actress Huppert (Elle) did, too. The
final act is a little hard to swallow for reasons I can’t explain without a
major spoiler, but more sensible behavior by a character would have undermined the
necessary climactic tension, so this is not a fatal flaw. The movie is no
modern classic, but does what it does well enough for a Thumbs Up.
How common is
stalking actually? That depends on the definition. Internet stalking is so
common that it barely counts. Unwanted in-person attention is usually what we
mean. This is a disturbing thing to experience despite it having been the theme
of a creepy love
song by (ironically) the Police. Fortunately (if that adverb can
be used at all in this context) for most victims, the activity is far more
often annoying than dangerous, but there are enough cases of the latter to be a
cause for concern. While there already were laws against many of the common
actions of serious stalkers, several high profile crimes – most notably the
1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed fan – led in the 1990s to
specific laws against stalking per se
being enacted in all 50 states. The anti-stalking law of California, which is both
prototypical and typical, defines a stalker thus: “Any person who willfully,
maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another person and who makes a
credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his
or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family.” According to the
CDC 15% of women and 6% of men are stalked at some time in their lives. By a looser
definition of the activity, the numbers are of course higher. The motivation of
the stalker is often a romantic fantasy but there can be other motivations.
Some people just want to be associated with someone famous, for example, and
pursue a connection relentlessly. Revenge for some real or imagined slight is sometimes
a motivation. In any case the goal of the stalker is to elicit fear and/or
compliance. The self-styled romantics can be the most dangerous of the bunch. A
month prior to the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, her killer Robert Bardo had
written to his sister, “I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to
eliminate [what] I cannot attain.”
The legal definition
of a stalker may be relatively recent but the activity isn’t. History is full of examples such as the relentless pursuit in the 19th century of Lord
Byron by Lady Caroline Lamb or of Cecil Rhodes by (of all people) Princess
Catherine Radziwiłł. Stalkers often are pretty normal and rational in every way
other than their obsession. This is why neighbors and light acquaintances so
frequently are genuinely surprised when they learn of an arrest: “What? Him?” There
is no one single profile but there are some patterns in the numbers.
Unsurprisingly, male stalkers heavily outnumber women but not by so huge a
margin as one might guess: 77% to 23%. Most female victims (61%) are stalked by
someone with whom they had a previous intimate relationship. A mix of casual
acquaintances, coworkers, friends of friends, and complete strangers account
for the rest. Men by contrast are more commonly (56%) stalked by casual
acquaintances or strangers.
What to do if we
experience this? If the activity meets the California definition, definitely tell
the authorities. Even if the activity falls far short of that, tell someone.
Don’t give the stalkers the attention they desire or they (especially the
romantics) will twist your words and actions to give themselves false hope. The
“don’t feed the trolls” advice for dealing with harassers online serves in real
life, too. The good news is that 52% of stalking cases end in less than a year.
The bad news is that the rest don’t. 9% last 5 years or more. The long-lasting
ones overwhelmingly involve intimate exes who have trouble letting go. Commitment
is not always a virtue.
