There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. The debate over healthcare has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.

I’d like to record some thoughts about President Obama’s recent interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier¹ before they’re lost down the memory hole.

Above all else, what struck me was Baier’s tenacious fixation on what could be called the process of healthcare reform. Which is to say, the closed-door meetings. The numbers. The kickbacks.

Baier repeatedly asked the President about particular things included in the gargantuan, 1990-page House bill, and did so in the terse insider-speak preferred by insiders and conspiracy theorists. Things like, “So the Connecticut deal is still in?” And, “OK, the Florida deal, in or out?” Obama seemed rankled by this crass oversimplification of things. So was I.

But in the wake of the so-called Cornhusker Kickback, such catchall terms have gained significant currency—especially in the cable news format, where making use of shorthand to describe incredibly complex concepts makes sense. It also makes sense in a blogging format. After all, I’ve done it here. I cannot reasonably expect a reader who has not followed the issue these past six months to understand nonsense like ‘Cornhusker Kickback.’ And I can’t spare the vertical space to treat this post as if it the very first dispatch from the center of the HCR storm.

Which is why the notion that a short television interview—an interview in which journalist and subject spent the full 19 minutes in antlers-fully-locked position—would be sufficient to explain a 1990-page bill, not to mention the flurry of developments that have emerged since HR2932 was unveiled in November, is absurd.

An example. Baier asked Obama to answer some viewer-submitted questions. Here’s one sent by Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: “If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?”

A political science professor could spend a semester lecturing on such a subject, no?

There was a time when Obama would have relished such an opportunity. His professorial bent has been well-documented. He spent much of 2009 referencing how to bend the cost curve, and how to close the doughnut hole. But the 2010 Obama has made a return to the spirit of the bill. He has made an effort to channel the sort of anecdotal electioneering that the Republicans have made famous. Rather than force people to consider an abstract whole, Obama has chosen to ask them to simply consider themselves.

Of course, the Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve turned their focus to the trees, as it were, instead of the forest. Human misery has been displaced by budgetary paranoia.

There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. I believe we’ve reached that moment. The healthcare debate has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.² It can no longer be unpacked or disentangled.

Where do you go from there?

In essence—and this is the point I’ve been approaching, slowly—the conflict is really over how easily the nuts and bolts of the issue have been slipped into a black box. Republican leaders have been quick to observe that the bill’s deliberations were supposed to have been televised on C-SPAN. Instead, they lament, much of it has taken form behind closed office doors.

It was a nice thought. However, considering the decentralized and often concurrent nature of such meetings, filming it all—and cutting the mountain of footage into a format understandable by human beings—would have been, at best, a logistical nightmare. At worst, it would have been impossible.

Black boxes are inherently polarizing. You either understand the appeals and shortcomings—i.e. average people do not need to replace the hard drive of their iPhone—or you reject the very notion of trusting that there are planets spinning outside the scope of your personal narrative.

Never has that juddering tension been more keenly felt than during Wednesday’s interview.

1. Video (Part I, Part II); Transcript [↑]
2. I’ve hit on this issue in a previous post. [↑]

Craig Mod’s recent essay, Books in the age of the iPad—I recommended that you read the whole thing now before pushing on—raises some interesting points about the philosophical challenges and opportunities introduced by the iPad and its ilk.

I thoroughly enjoyed his insights. I’m on the edge of my seat, here, imagining how Mod’s concept of vertical chapters might be realized.

But I couldn’t help but be vexed by an offhanded remark he makes in his introduction:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Anyone who buys books will probably understand what he’s talking about. Even while running your eyes over the shelves at a bookstore, it’s not impossible to fantasize about which books you’d proudly keep on your bookshelf when you’re finished and which ones you’d probably resell on Amazon¹—the fact that you haven’t actually read any of the books you’re judging notwithstanding.

Of course, physical dimensions are a helpful guide; he doesn’t explicitly write it, but the throwaway/airport/beach paperback is often a mass market paperback. In case you’re not familiar with the terminology, close your eyes and visualize a novel from any one of the genres—romance, science fiction, fantasy—that have always been relegated to the critical ghetto. Note the diminutive 4×7 cover, the thick binding, the cheap paper. It’s an unmistakable image.

Despite the fact that I’m just as priggishly dismissive of such books as the next guy,² I can’t help but disagree with Mod’s assertion that they are expendable.

As is the case with TV, it’s the tremendous profits from the popular stuff that subsidizes the high-investment/low-return niche stuff. To lose mass market paperbacks—worthless or not—is to lose a large chunk of revenue. Which translates into a loss for all professional publishers and writers and a grievous blow for the ones with limited commercial appeal.

Though Mod’s publishing credentials are infinitely more impressive than my own (as in, he has actually published books), I worry that he’s mistaking ‘foundation’ for ‘dead weight’.

With large publishers scrambling to rebuild the bottom line, would it really be a stretch to imagine that a printed version of Infinite Jest—the weird, sprawling, annotated, 1104-page masterpiece—would never see the light of day? Or that a person would need to barter a kidney to get his or her hands on one?

There’s simply no telling whether an ebook model would suit the mass market format. Though Apple and Amazon will have no trouble matching the basement-level pricing scheme, one cannot look past the fact that getting them into the casual consumer’s hands will first require getting a $250+ device into the casual consumer’s hands.

It seems to me that the path of least resistance (and thus the most likely next step) will be the opposite of what Mod suggests—to send the niche publications to the ereaders and continue to sell the mass-market stuff for as long as the demand holds out.

The shortcomings of such a reality are apparent. Compiling a worthy bookshelf is, to the devoted aesthete, one of the unmatchable joys of life. Physical books can be lent to friends and colleagues, or dog-eared, or forgotten in airplane seat-backs. Losing these small things will be a bitter pill to swallow.³

There’s no questioning that the iPad will do for boutique publishers roughly what the Internet did for graphic designers and software engineers. Which is to say, in a decade, small publishers might find their thoughts drifting to how they ever got along without it. That’s the core of Mod’s essay, and I can only echo his hopes that it will become a reality.

But because the niche typically encounters tremendous resistance when it tries to cannibalize the mainstream—for the mainstream would probably rather just stop reading than read more challenging things, if forced to choose between the two—it seems a little shortsighted to cheer the possibility of a large-publisher apocalypse between then and now. There are few who would profit from it.

1. Or box up and abandon on the front steps of the library on a dark and stormy night [↑]
2. Disclosure: I recently bought the mass market version of Carl Sagan’s excellent Cosmos. [↑]
3. Though I suppose it would be somewhat less so if it were coupled with some sort of receptacle system—perhaps a network of drop boxes in public spaces, wherein readers could leave their ‘disposable’ books to be repulped and recycled [↑]

I’m a little late to this party—this graphic was released on Tuesday—but I figure that people who aren’t Facebook Fans of the president or readers of the Daily Kos¹ should see it too:

1. Or people who watch or read news of any kind [↑]

The following is a list with an aim is to make you a better painter or artist in general.

PRACTICE!

Draw every day all day and then some more. Get a sketchbook, use it. Use it often.  Set up a space for the sole purpose of art. paint there, draw there, live there.

More →

Jacob Weisberg‘s latest piece in Slate (the provocatively titled Down With The People), published this past Saturday, has been in heavy rotation these past few days.

And rightfully so. The subhed:

Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.

At first blush, it’s tough to disagree. And Weisberg offers some pretty compelling (anecdotal) proof of his theory—namely, that many Americans seem to be ruled by their emotional brains when it comes to passing judgment on federal policy. How else to describe the ongoing erosion of the wide-ranging support for 2008′s supremely popular stimulus checks?¹.

Not to mention the absurd shift from demanding increased regulation of the financial industry in 2008 and growing leery of it by 2010.

Weisberg offers up the case of Senator Scott Brown, perhaps the most chronologically accessible avatar of this country, materializing before out eyes, that “simultaneously² demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems.”

Weisberg wisely resists speaking in absolutes and offers no remedy. I’m not so sure there is one, short of either (a) leashing public figures with something more potent than implied dignity³ or (b) making hundreds of millions of people smarter.⁴

Nevertheless, I believe that what Weisberg has offered is a false dichotomy. Far more nefarious than an exploitable, restless, vindictive and contradictory electorate are the people who have managed to yoke it. People like Brown, Sarah Palin and Roger Ailes, who continue to ride the upswell of deranged populism.⁵

A more immediate example: an editorial in today’s New York Times describes how Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told Politico, with disturbing candor, that he wants to “block financing for civilian trials of terrorism suspects⁶ so Republicans can brag about it this fall.”

So it’s difficult for me to place the bulk of the blame on Dumb America for allowing itself to be steered, because that allegory requires the existence of coachmen, flailing away with rhetorical whips.

I think that Weisberg fails to give them the attention they deserve. Certainly, a large number of Americans want—paraphrased from Weisberg—for government to address modern issues while simultaneously shrinking, spending less and reducing their taxes.

But you can’t buy a fantasy if nobody’s selling it.⁷ Can you?

1. I suppose it’s tough to stay behind tax-subsidized free money once they’re two years behind you and only getting further away [↑]
2. And perhaps unintentionally [↑]
3. Probably unconstitutional. [↑]
4. Impractical. [↑]
5. Watch Palin’s speech at the First National Tea Party Convention. [↑]
6. Read: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [↑]
7. Ex: Mickey Mouse was not born through intuitive, popular consensus. He was offered to us. [↑]

Ed: The following memo was found taped to the door of the janitorial closet.

TO: You
FROM: Me
DATE: Saturday – November 14, 2009
SUBJECT: Phase I COMPLETE

Phase I of the development of the Tags page is complete: effective immediately, it exists. Which means I can now strike another tiny-feature-that-I’ve-been-putting-off-for-months from my to-do list.¹

This is an historic—hold on a minute. Why are your eyes glazed over?

1. More importantly, it means I can put that lousy jquery menu to rest forever. As it should be. [↑]

On November 9, 1989, an East German spokesman named Günter Schabowski accidentally announced on live television that all East German citizens would now be allowed to travel without restrictions. Effective immediately. The swell of German people—from points both East and West—who soon converged at the Berlin Wall took the guards completely by surprise. They were as confused as anybody else. They swung open the gates.

As the story goes, Günter hadn’t been to work that day. Party officials, who had just finished hashing out a new policy meant to relax (in orderly German fashion!) the prohibition on travel for East Germans, called a press conference, stuffed a memo in Günter’s hand and pushed him out in front of live television cameras.

They hadn’t meant for him to use a phrase like effective immediately. But Günter somehow misunderstood what was written on the memo, and did. And the wall was crushed to pieces and the pieces were then sold to tourists and collectors. Which, I suppose, represents the ultimate symbolic victory of capitalism.

That’s why today—the 20th anniversary—is a great opportunity to stop and think about the enduring power of mythology.

We’re taught in our anthropology classes that mythmaking comes as easy to we humans as eating and sleeping and other, less printable pursuits. And they’re right—it does. Nobody teaches us the rules for wielding metaphor. Every human child grows up with the capacity to use similes, to understand books and movies and television. Though there are, perhaps, infinite levels of such understanding, the underlying principle is undeniable: we are not strictly mathematical creatures. And even the most well-trained eggheads are at a loss to explain why.

Why, for instance, do Americans fawn over Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño? After he died in 2003, something like eight of his novels have been translated to English—most of them coming after the translation of The Savage Detectives became a smash hit with critics.

Call it sour grapes, but Horacio Castellanos Moya, one of Bolaño’s friends and contemporaries, wrote in this month’s issue of Guernica that there’s something a little disingenuous about how American publishers have turned Bolaño into an industry:

The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.

Moya explains that the endlessly marketable Bolaño pictured on dust jackets of his newly published books—the scruffy, long-haired revolutionary poet from the 1970s—is not an accurate picture of the Bolaño who wrote the novels he’s best known for. Moya knew Bolaño to be a quieter, family-oriented man. But the latter wouldn’t exactly excite American imaginations. In this era of Hollywood-made Che Guevara biopics, there are few things hotter than bottled revolution.

And then there’s the case of Aravind Adiga. The White Tiger, Adiga’s first novel, won him the 2008 Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world. Global fame followed—except for in Adiga’s native India, where the book received a lukewarm response.

In both cases we’re left with a curious disconnect between success in one’s own culture and success in a foreign one. Call it Big In Japan Syndrome—the old gag that an unexpected cult following in backwards little Japan is a sort of consolation prize among bands and actors for whom greater success has proven elusive.

Of course, the Western literature market isn’t exactly the bush leagues. Dollar for dollar, there’s little doubt that we Westerners spend more money on books than anybody else in the world. So when a foreign-born author is abstractly plucked from his or her own culture and aggressively sold here—to people who will literally buy whatever they’re told—it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Call it village-pillaging.

Which somehow brings us back to the Berlin Wall.¹

As Michael Meyer wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last week, Ronald Reagan did not tear down the wall. The famous speech—Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev!—was delivered in 1987. Which, if you’ve paid attention, was two years before the wall came down. Which isn’t to say that Reagan did nothing. His chummy relationship with the Saudi royal family proved instrumental when it came to starving the USSR of oil revenue. And the Afghanistan quagmire, which Reagan’s CIA helped exacerbate, certainly did not help. And then there’s the Marshall Plan. Economic containment. The Bomb.

But the USSR did just as much to defeat itself. After the Soviets built an empire on a one-dimensional oil economy and maintaining one of the largest standing militaries in history, successful revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania—not to mention the protests at Tiananmen Square—the bottom simply fell out.

So we must resist the urge to construct simple narratives from unbelievably complicated events. The full picture is one of infinite nuance. As Meyer describes it:

Americans have never bothered to understand how, exactly, it ended. Rather than appreciating its complexity, not to mention the element of chance, we credited ourselves with unambiguous victory.

In closing, all of this seems to beg the question: do we have the ability to just appreciate things as they are? Can’t we judge Bolaño and Adiga on the merits of their respective works? Can’t we just acknowledge that the Berlin Wall fell not because of a stubborn American president, but also because of decades of horrific institutional decay?

I’m not so sure. Here’s what I do know: last week, I bought the three-volume special edition of Bolaño’s 2666. I, too, have a weakness for mythology.

1. Trust me. [↑]

In The Rebellion Within (published in the June 2, 2008 issue of The New Yorker), Lawrence Wright describes the known life of Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif—known in some circles of the extremely secretive jihadist underground as Dr. Fadl.

Fadl, an extremely gifted Islamic scholar, met Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1977 while both were attending medical school in Cairo. Within a decade he found himself at the ground floor of the Jihad movement. As a matter of fact, he literally wrote the book on the subject.

Two of Fadl’s texts, The Essential Guide for Preparation and The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge, became (and probably remain) cornerstones of the training and indoctrination of Al Qaeda recruits in the power vacuum of post-Soviet Afghanistan.

Much happened in the following decade. On the sprawling list of Topics Most Americans Ought to Familiarize Themselves With, 1990s-era Afghanistan is certainly near the top. The meteoric rise of the Taliban and the fast polarization of Islamic politics, I should not need to remind you, remain era-defining issues.

But there are lengthy books for that, written by people with so much storytelling ability that I, in comparison, look like a kid scribbling with crayons. I recommend going all-out with Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars.

Anyway, here’s how Fadl ended up¹: In October 2001—seven years after he cut ties with his extremist past and took up supposedly earnest work as a surgeon—was arrested by Yemeni secret police and thrown into an Egyptian prison with a life sentence. Since then, he’s mellowed out, renounced violence and become a vocal opponent of Al Qaeda.

If you’ve got an hour to kill, it’s a great read.

1. Bury leads, much? Why yes. Yes I do. [↑]

Congrats, Bill Owens! May your career of meddling with your own party’s agenda be long and fruitless.

Check out this map of NY-23 from The Swing Vote Project. It helps you get some perspective on how unlikely this was:

An interesting note: based on Nate Silver’s analysis, Owens seems to have carried all three of those pink counties.

So this wasn’t a really situation where more liberal-leaning counties dragged the rest along. As a matter of fact, it seems like Owens performs better the farther North you go. Which couldn’t be further away from my own forecast.

It will be interesting to see where the stragglers fall in line.