One Way or the Other

The political weather in the contemporary USA is always stormy, but the intensity increases when candidates position themselves seriously for the primaries as they are doing now. I have no intention of commenting directly on them. The airwaves, podcast channels, and blogosphere are crowded with people doing that obsessively. There is no need to add yet one more voice to the din. Besides, I generally vote third-party, which tends to annoy my friends from both mainstream parties. Folks on both sides tell me I’m helping the greater evil win by not supporting the lesser (meaning their candidate). I don’t intend to comment on that argument here either, though in conversation I sometimes do. But it illuminates something on which I do wish to comment, which is the human tendency toward binary thinking. This is by no means confined to politics. It is just more stark in that context.

Numerous books and articles on the subject exist. Most argue, as do Jack Denfield Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieri in their scholarly paper "Transcending Polarization: Beyond Binary Thinking" published in Transactional Analysis Journal, that “individuals, groups, and larger collectivities instinctively frame their predicaments in a binary way – as a polarity encompassing a dimension of choice with two mutually exclusive alternatives” as a consequence of human (or, for that matter, mammal) evolutionary history. In a primordial environment rife with predators (including other humans), identifying something/someone rapidly as “good” or “bad” was a life or death matter: “Evolution has selected and conserved the neural machinery that supports instinctive ‘good or bad’ binary thinking, largely because of its survival value.”
 
We are capable of transcending this natural tendency and viewing the world in a more nuanced way: an oversize cortex would be a bit of a waste if we couldn’t. Not all of our judgments need be split second ones, and if we take the time we can see shades of gray. We even can step back and see colors completely outside the black-white spectrum. However, it takes an effort. More often than not it is worth that effort.
 
Though by now we should know better, it is still easy to be seduced by a binary formulation such as “You’re either with us or against us.” Well, no. Not really. Moral questions cannot always be simplified into Good vs. Evil. (Nietzsche dedicated a whole book to that one: Beyond Good and Evil, though I’m afraid I raised few eyebrows while reading it while waiting in the jury pool at the county courthouse.) A proposal is not necessarily smart or stupid – it can be a bit of both. The same can be said about a person.
 
True, like our ancestors, we still encounter circumstances when binary thought is good for us, e.g. fight or flight. Binary judgment is a quick efficient rough-and-ready way to categorize events, people, and things in our lives. After all we don’t always have the luxury of time to give every matter deeper thought. We might never get around to reacting at all were we to do that. But it behooves us to remain aware that we are oversimplifying – and polarizing. If we have the time and the patience we can do better: assuming, that is, that we want to. There is a certain amount of fun to believing that there is a clear right side and a wrong side and that we are on the right one. In some particular case we might even be correct. But probably not.

 

Benny Goodman – Gotta Be This Or That (1945)

Getting Past the Past

Of those still above ground, one of my go-to mystery/suspense authors for recreational reading is fellow New Jersey native Harlan Coben. (South African author Deon Meyer is another.) Coben has a formula for most of his novels: the comfy upper middle class suburban life of a character (usually 35-45) is thrown into crisis by some grave threat – often something reemerging from the protagonist’s past. It’s a formula that works more often than not. I most recently read Stay Close, which was adapted for a Netflix miniseries that I haven’t seen. The usual elements are there, but with more nuance than Coben typically delivers, and the book is better for it. Suburban soccer mom Megan doesn’t want to give up her American Dream lifestyle or her husband. Yet, she has some humanly mixed feelings about both. She still feels the draw of her old pre-marriage party life as a stripper in Atlantic City (to the point of visiting the club incognito), and she still has feelings for a paparazzo named Ray whom she knew at the time. Both she and Ray are haunted by a secret from those days. A murder in Atlantic City with an old familiar pattern threatens their secret and their lives.

Megan’s mixed feelings are what make her more relatable than most Coben protagonists, who tend to be single-minded defenders of their homes and families. Megan is a defender but is more complex than that. She is suffering from a midlife crisis. Most of us above a certain age know what that is like. (I certainly do.) Every stage of life has its own characteristic challenges, but the midlife crisis (usually setting in near 40 and possibly lasting to as late as 60) accompanies the nadir of the well-known happiness U-curve; on average, self-reported subjective feelings of happiness and contentment are high at 20, decline to a low around 40, and then recover after 60. The reader may have encountered articles purporting to debunk the U-curve, but they tend either deliberately to ignore the term “subjective” or to ignore the bell curve. Of course we are talking about the centerline of the bell curve; there are always going to be cheery people and miserable people on the tails in every age group, but the average still counts for something. The self-reports remain and they still fit a U.
 
The reasons for the midlife crisis are numerous, but start with the recognition that youth has passed. This involves not just the effects of physical aging but the understanding that doors are closing: time is running out to make major changes in one’s life and career. Thoughts of mortality come more to the fore, not least because many of us lose our parents at this time – or at any rate witness them getting truly old. Kids grow up and move out. Job changes (common these days) are more difficult. Responsibilities (financial and otherwise) reach their peak. While not everyone has existential crises (the “what’s it all about?” questions), many people do.
 
Responses to all this are well-known and the butt of some mockery. We may try (unsuccessfully) to look and act much younger than we are. Single people may impulsively marry, likely inappropriately and to someone younger. Married people may divorce “while there is still time.” Clothes and cars get suddenly flashy. Substance abuse may worsen. You know the drill.
 
The good news is that the bottom of U-curve gives nowhere to go but up. Those of us who get through this phase without too much damage to ourselves probably will get happier, even if objectively there doesn’t seem much reason. Health and strength may continue to decline, but after a point we just don’t give a damn – or at least we give less of one. Acceptance has much to recommend it.
 

Jerry Lee Lewis – Middle Age Crazy

Comforting Cliché's

I’ve been soft-shoeing around the edges of some of life’s vicissitudes this week. I won’t explain that further because it is not really my story to tell, but I find myself spouting a lot of clichés in consequence. That’s OK. Clichés are clichés because most of them are truisms and truisms tend to be… well… true. I remember back in high school one of my youngish teachers (perhaps 27) commenting that one of his most annoying life lessons was discovering that all the trite old sayings from his parents at whom he used to roll his eyes were true.
 
He wasn’t entirely right about that. Take Nietzsche’s “What does not kill makes stronger.” That is only half-true. Sometimes what does not kill permanently maims. Assuming a harm is fully recoverable, however, Fred was onto something.
 
My teacher was largely right however. One really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Life really is too short to sweat the small stuff. Actions do speak louder than words. We do all share a common fate. OK, the grass might not really be greener on the other side of the fence, but it sure looks that way. (Horace actually translates as “the crops are riper in the neighbor’s field,” which I like a bit better.)
 
What about clichés that are not homilies but just hackneyed turns-of-phrase such as eat one’s words, cruel to be kind, wild goose chase, be-all and end-all, heart of gold, and too much of a good thing (all Shakespeare)? In everyday conversation I don’t think they’re so bad. They convey the point in a way our listeners readily understand. Not everything we express need be creative original oratory. We can save that for our acceptance speech for... um… whatever we’re accepting.

 
Don’t get me wrong (a cliché admonition), I value creativity in expression, too, but perhaps it is more important in one’s fiction, essays, poetry, and reportage. Otherwise, it is no big offense to use clichés all the live long day (Shakespeare again).
 

Biff Rose – Ballad of Clichés (1969)

OK Boomer

A dismissal of my musical taste by a young person yesterday prompts me to expand a bit on my last blog. (I smiled at the dismissal.) 
 
Though the verbal equivalent of an eye-roll, the “OK Boomer” mantra from exasperated Zoomers is not really an insult. It may be intended as such but it isn’t, for Boomers are generally pretty secure (rightly or wrongly) in their opinions on everything from music to lifestyles. I think part of that has to do with history.
 
Contrasting generations is a pastime in all eras. The conclusions are always somewhat misleading since every age group contains people across a wide spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. But if we acknowledge that we are talking about the centerline of bell curves with tails that overlap, generational comparisons still can have merit. Some generations really are (on average) more industrious than others, or technically adept than others, or strait-laced than others, or whatever. The technological environment accounts for more of the differences than we usually recognize, argues Jean Twenge in her book Generations, which is full of arcane data and graphs. Silents (b.1926-1945), for example, grew up with radio, vinyl records, and movies. Boomers (b.1946-1964) were the first television generation. Xers (1965-1980) experienced cable TV and early personal computers in their youths. Millennials (1981-1996) grew up with the internet. Zoomers (1997-2012) grew up with smart phones. The oldest Zoomer was 10 when the iPhone appeared and the youngest doesn’t remember a time without it.

 
I don’t disagree with Twenge’s basic point. I think those technologies and numerous others have had a profound impact on the youth of each era. But I think that Boomers also have a peculiar relationship with broader history purely by the accident of their birth years. To some degree this is true of Silents, too, though their numbers are diminishing rapidly while the GI Generation is gone but for a few centenarians. Attrition is taking its toll on Baby Boomers as well, but there are a lot of us so we’ll remain a cultural force for a while.
 
The future arrived in the 20^th century. To be sure, its mechanical, scientific, and social foundations were laid centuries earlier and the above-ground framing of it accelerated in the 19^th, but the structure took real recognizable shape in the 20^th. Technology changed traditional lifestyles forever. The experience of my paternal grandfather (b. 1896) illustrates the point. He left Austria-Hungary shortly before World War 1 in a horse-drawn hay wagon. He returned to Budapest for a visit five decades later in a Boeing 707. Manned heavier-than-air flight was just a fantasy when he was born. He lived to see Gemini spacecraft orbit the earth (though he missed seeing the moon landing by a few years). My other grandparents were born in 1899, 1900, and 1900. All lived on farms for at least part of their adult lives.
 
Though Boomers experienced only the second half of the century first-hand, we personally knew those who had lived through the first half. I know the story of my maternal grandfather’s army physical for World War 1. (His induction was canceled when the war ended in 1918.) I heard about the transition from literal horse power to mechanical power; as late as the 1930s my paternal grandfather dug cellars with a draft horse and scoop. I heard all about the hardship and angst of the Depression, about my dad’s experiences in World War 2, and (from my mom) what high school was like in the 1940s. My parents played big band music on the stereo when I was a kid. I heard about rationing from those who experienced it and about genuine horrors of war from immigrant survivors of them who were friends and neighbors. All of this was from the mouths those who experienced it directly – not third-hand from literary sources – which makes it feel very real. I won’t mention the events Boomers experienced first-hand, since we spend plenty of time talking about those (often nostalgically) so there is no need to repeat all that here. The point is that none of the 20^th century seems very distant to me. I knew people who were around at the beginning of it. (I incorporated some of their recollections into my own short stories, as in How to Avoid Work and Flirt with the Butcher.) The arrival of the future between 1900 and 1999 feels personal.
 
I think this gives Boomers a sense of place in history that adds to their already high regard for themselves. It probably also accentuates in us the natural tendency of those over a certain age to be resistant to further change. We have become dinosaurs. That’s OK. Dinosaurs lasted 180 million years. They must have done something right. Theory of a Deadman needn’t worry so much.
 

Theory of a Deadman – Dinosaur

Strange Days

My mom and dad were born in 1928 and 1926 respectively, which by standard reckoning makes them both Silent Generation (b. 1926-1945) though my dad probably had more in common with the GI Generation, not least because he served in WW2. The time into which we are born does not compel us to have a particular mindset, but it does impel us. The milieu in which we grow up just seems normal to us. Indeed, we can reject the prevailing mores and world views of our generation and tribe, but to do so requires giving them more thought and reevaluation than most of us devote to the matter amid the distractions of day-to-day life. So it should be no surprise that both of my parents had views and values that today are called traditional – or by some folks reactionary. This mindset served them well in business and home life. It served my sister and me (both Boomers) even better by providing us a solid upbringing and enough prosperity to give us options in our own lives. We responded by criticizing their mindset none too politely. Youth rebellion is a constant in all eras of course.
 
I remember my mom saying to me around 1969 or 1970 that people and the prevailing social mores seemed normal and understandable to her (even if they needed improvement) until the early 1960s. “After that, everything and everyone just went completely crazy,” she said. It was a remarkable statement for someone who remembered the Great Depression and the Second World War, but I knew what she meant. There was something different about Charles Manson compared to criminals of the past. The Broadway musical Hair was very far from Oklahoma! Hippies were fundamentally different from 1950s greasers. It was hard to keep up with all the self-styled revolutions – social, personal, and political – in the 1960s. The sexual revolution, for one, was different than the plain old-fashioned cheating of earlier times. Over a very few years counterculture values had gone mainstream: they became less “counter” than just “culture.” To her and many like her it all seemed weird.
 
In 2023 I can relate better than I could then. In his book The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way...And It Wasn't My Fault...And I'll Never Do It Again, P.J. O’Rourke apologized to future generations of youth for Boomers “having used up all the weird.” He needn’t have worried. As it turns out we hadn’t come close to doing that. The 2020s are weirder than the 1960s. It is obvious in ways small and large. Unruly passenger incidents, once blamed on the pandemic, grow more frequent year by year. Americans of differing philosophies are as hostile to each other as they ever have been. The murder rate after two decades of decline (peak year was 1991) have rebounded to numbers not seen in 30 years. So too carjackings and daylight robberies. Tent cities on sidewalks – not seen even in the Great Depression – are regarded as normal. Reported mental health issues are higher in Millennials and Zoomers than any previous generation. The gender debates that occupy far too much attention would have puzzled the most tuned in, turned on, and dropped out hippie. Per capita alcohol use is up as is drug consumption – not trippy psychedelics but narcotics. Yet, despite all this, young people are delaying joining in on vices compared to Boomers and Xers. It all seems weird.

 
Perhaps none of this seems strange to those who have grown up in the last 20 or 30 years – a matter of the fish not noticing the water in which it swims. But they are strange days indeed for many of us with more miles on the odometer. If P.J. were still with us he could stop feeling guilty.
 

The Doors - Strange Days

With Bells On

I’m pretty thorough about the donating or disposing (depending on condition) of clothes I no longer use. The “if you haven’t worn it in two years” rule is a good one and most of the time I follow it. The few exceptions are items, some of them not even mine, that I’ve held onto for nostalgia reasons: my dad’s military uniforms for example. I also kept a handful of samples of some of the wilder fashions of the 60s and 70s just in case I wanted to do a theme party or some such thing. Yet, over the years they have decayed – colors fading, holes appearing – despite being unworn in a dark closet. I don’t know why, since those uniforms from 25 years earlier are still intact, but so it is. As a practical matter they would be unwearable even if they still fit (which they don’t), so I set nostalgia aside the other day and bade my sartorial past a permanent goodbye, including the green striped bell bottoms. The only bell bottoms left now in my closet are on my dad’s old sailor whites.
 
Bell bottoms used to be everywhere in my teens and twenties. This was so much the case that when they made a bit of a comeback I didn’t even notice until it was pointed out to me. They just look normal to me. This time they are primarily in women’s fashion but in the 60s/70s they were both. The pics below of myself and my sister in bells are both from 1970.

My mom and I 1970

My sister Sharon

 
The origin of bell bottoms is usually traced to the US Navy around 1800. Though not official uniforms at the time, they became common as everyday shipboard work clothes. They were favored by sailors for being easy to roll up when swabbing the deck and performing other chores. They caught the eye of someone in the Royal Navy where they did become part of the uniform. This in turn back-influenced the US Navy, which then also officially adopted bells. By the end of the 19^th century, classic blue denim bell bottom trousers were the standard US Navy shipboard work uniform. They remained so until 1999.
 
Civilian versions turned up from time to time. In the 1920s they were a minor women’s fashion trend. They often were called “yacht pants” because of the seafaring origin. They really took off with the general public, though, in the 1960s. Some publications credit the Army/Navy surplus stores, which sold cheap denim bells to impecunious hippies. Maybe. But maybe not. I remember those years, and most self-styled hippies were from solidly middle class families. They shopped more for fashion than price. Army/Navy surplus was indeed more of a thing than it is today, but I doubt the civilian fashion started there; more likely the Army/Navy stores just benefited from it. In any case, textile companies (jeans producers in particular) jumped into the field immediately. Bells, ranging from modest to bulging, had spread from the counterculture to the mainstream by the late 60s, even in semi-formal wear. It actually was harder to find straight legs – they were there but you had to look for them.
 
Precisely because bells were mainstream in the 1970s, ditching them became a statement of fashion rebellion, notably among punk rockers and their fans. By the 1980s, bells were passé though you still saw them on people who hadn’t refreshed their closets in a few years.
 
Enough years have passed for bells to re-emerge, this time without any significant social statement or context. It is just a style. Most of the US population, after all, was born after 1985 so there is no direct memory of the 60s/70s among those setting fashion trends.
 
My own bells, however, are gone. I do have “boot cut” jeans because… well… I wear boots, but the flairs on those are so trifling as to be unnoticeable with a casual glance. They will have to do.
 
 

Derek & The Dominos (Eric Clapton lead guitar) – Bell Bottom Blues

 

Festina Lente

 “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly,” said underrated philosopher Mae West.  I’ve slowed down a lot in recent years, not entirely by choice. The surprising thing is how little this has affected outcomes. It has affected the process substantially, removing much stress as a bonus. Oh, it means prioritizing: delaying or canceling some side projects rather than making frenetic attempts to multitask. The important stuff still gets done however, if anything more reliably on time.
 
There are times when hurrying is necessary. We might need to get to the airport to catch a flight or we might need to meet a deadline for a tax filing. Of course we wouldn’t be so rushed had we not so crammed our days with other busyness that we left ourselves insufficient time for those tasks. Nonetheless, we all make that mistake sometimes, so the events happen. Generally, though, rushing accomplishes little. It leads to errors (having to do something over is not a time saver) and unhappiness.
 
There is a vast literature both ancient and modern on the value of slowing down. They range from fables (you know the classic) to Zen Buddhist tracts (e.g. Haemin Sunim’s The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down) to medical studies. Corporate efficiency experts are on board too, even though some managers haven’t gotten the message. A recent article in Inc. Magazine is typical: Why Rushing Through Tasks Is Killing Your Productivity. “It's not about how much you do,” the article states. “It's about taking the time to give your best and refusing to sacrifice well-being.” In other words, doing something slowly but right is better than doing a lot of things quickly but badly – not just for you but for the company’s bottom line. Dave Mastovich, CEO and founder of MASSolutions, which he describes as a No Bullshit Marketing Consultancy, agrees. He says in a podcast titled Slow Down to Speed Up, “The myth about rushing is that if we move faster, and we move and rush, that is going to help us and save us time, when in reality, it doesn’t save us much time at all if we step back, and it definitely adds stress and impacts our health.” He further says that rushing rarely saves more than 3 or 4 percent in time while having negative effects, not just on you but on others, that more than negate any benefits.

 
In Psychology Today Susan Biali Haas M.D. describes working with clients who face burnout from their constant rushing not just at work but with their families She writes, “If you slow down and work and live more intentionally, and if you take better care of yourself, you’ll probably be way more effective. At everything in your life.” It helps ease that burnout too. She adds, “Forget the multi-tasking and allow yourself the luxury of being present with whatever you’re doing. We know from studies that multitasking doesn’t actually work.” She acknowledges that sometimes it is inescapable, but says not to allow it to become a default practice.

 
Rushing through meals is linked to obesity. There are numerous studies on this, e.g. Slow Down: Behavioural and Physiological Effects of Reducing Eating Rate published in the NIH: National Library of Medicine, which compared groups of fast and slow eaters. The abstract states, “Two hours post-meal, the slow rate group reported greater fullness (effect size = 0.7) and more accurate portion size memory (effect sizes = 0.4), with a linear relationship between time taken to make portion size decisions and the BOLD [blood-oxygen-level-dependent] response in satiety and reward brain regions.” Fast eaters ate more. That is but one health effect of rushing. Healthline lists among other physical effects of “hurry sickness” (habitual rushing) trouble sleeping, changes in appetite, fatigue, headaches, stomach issues, and decreased immune health.
 
None of this is really a surprise. All of us (well, most of us anyway) know intuitively that rushing around habitually is bad for us physically and mentally. So why do we do it? I don’t really know, but I sometimes suspect it is for the same reason some people drink or do drugs. The world is a scary and hard place in many ways – and then you die. Over-occupying oneself is as effective as getting one’s mind off all that as a double shot of Jack Daniel’s – even though, strangely enough, probably no better in health effects. Yet that is not all to the world there is (the Peggy Lee song notwithstanding). There are roses, too, and the age-old advice to stop and smell them is still good. (I won’t use the “smell the coffee” metaphor since caffeine seems to run counter to the point.)
 
As I mentioned in the beginning, my own slowdown has more to do with circumstances than any wise choices, but I notice the benefits all the same. I’m also planning a very leisurely lunch.
 

The Animals – Take it Easy Baby