that was unexpected

I've found Junior Seau's death and the attendant discussion very sobering. I found this piece by Daniel Engber sobering as well, just in a different sense.

As you know, I have a lot of problems with the media, and my most consistent complaint is that too often, people who are paid to find out the facts don't. Instead, they accept a narrative that sounds plausible or speaks to their own biases: America used to be number one in education; digital tools make a big difference for students and schools; printed book sales are in steep decline; and so on. But I've been guilty of similar thinking when it comes to the NFL, concussions, and suicide. And Engber-- who, I must highlight, is writing for my frequent target, Slate-- takes the time to look at the evidence and finds it lacking. The narrative was just so clean, and too flattering to certain of my preconceptions. Engber:

At the request of the NFL Players Association, government scientists compared the death rates for almost 3,500 of the league's retirees to those for age- and race-matched non-athletes over the same years. The football players had much longer lives: Just 334 of them had passed away, compared with an expected total of 625.

What does this have to do with Junior Seau? The CDC study was designed to look for fatal cases of cardiovascular disease among the athletes. (It found one-third fewer than expected.) But the researchers also compiled numbers for more than a dozen other categories of disease and injury, including suicide. Former players were 42 percent less likely to die of cancer, 86 percent less likely to die of tuberculosis, and 73 percent less likely to die from digestive problems. And among the athletes who regularly played professional football between 1959 and 1988, a total of nine perished as a result of "intentional self-harm," compared with an expected number of about 22. The sample size was small, but the effect is large: Ex-NFLers were 59 percent less likely to commit suicide.

This is not to say, as Engber hastens to point out, that we know for certain in the opposite direction. But the evidence, for now, that concussions specifically and football-related injury generally are leading to suicides is startlingly lacking, given our casual certainty. I sometimes wonder if this sort of failure is inevitable these days. We rush to judgment as a matter of course. And it's not just the speed at which we communicate, but the way in which social conditioning is now omnipresent. There's so little time or space for reflection that isn't mediated through the Internet, which constantly impresses other people's opinions on us. I certainly don't envy Engber, who is likely to receive a lot of pushback and a lot of accusations of insufficient concern for these football players whose lives appear ruined.

One thing that I've been thinking about this-- suppose the evidence gradually emerges that football indeed has debilitating consequences for the large majority of people who play it. And suppose that the only way to make it safe is to become, in essence if not in name, two-hand touch. That's more plausible than you might think. Now, if the NFL was to adopt that kind of change, I think I'd respond in two ways: I'd say "good for them." And then I'd vote with my feet by ceasing to follow football. Oh, I'd last for a little while. But despite what my conscience says about the game, I just wouldn't be interested in watching a "safe" version of it. I'm already turned off enough by the sudden ubiquity of 4,000 (and 5,000!) yard passing seasons. I wouldn't maintain interest, and I doubt I'm the only one.

Given that economic reality, how long before a rival football league emerges, playing old school football? And given the money involved, how many young men would be willing to take the risks and trade their health for the possibility of wealth and fame? Maybe this is just bad faith, and I'm raising these issues out of guilt. But I can't help but think that a safe NFL wouldn't lead to the end of violent football. Football is violence, it always has been.

Update: Or take the recent calls to ban college football. I'm not a college football fan, so it wouldn't matter much to me. But does anyone doubt that a new minor/developmental football league would emerge to replace it? As long as we're not talking about actually criminalizing the game-- and as I think that the government has no business regulating the self-injurious behaviors of informed, consenting adults, I hope we aren't-- I seriously question our ability to reduce these risks.

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ah, propaganda

Over at the Atlantic, which is really working at a feverish pace to establish itself as the worst media enterprise in the world, I find this. Some self-important apparatchik name John Hudson-- seriously, peep the man's Twitter feed, it's like a parody of what it means to be white and self-involved today-- catches an Iranian news source using one of those Photoshopped images from their missile test. I'm guessing somebody at that publication was in a playful mood, but being a staffer at the neoconservative Atlantic, Hudson takes it as an opportunity to slander all of Iran. The results are as you'd expect; in the comments, for example, you've got charming people saying things like "Is there an Iranian Mensa equivalent?" See, because the brown-skinned evildoing evildoers aren't just the bad guys, they're also stupid.

The Atlantic Wire is a pretty shrewd move; it's a way for the magazine, which is well known for coordinating its opinion sections towards particular political goals, to present as news what's really commentary. Hudson is merely keeping himself employed; the Atlantic is owned by a self-described neocon and doesn't hesitate to send out Jeff Goldberg to invent wars. The shame is just that Hudson clearly thinks of himself as a super serious journalist. That he's capable of maintaining that self-delusion while spouting such absurdly biased bullshit tells you more about the media than about him. It's no surprise whatsoever that someone in comments spouts off with "Stupid F'ing ragheads;" Hudson would of course claim that he doesn't support that thought, but his post is expressing exactly that sentiment. Publications like the Atlantic are always going to provide forums for people who think of themselves as cultured to express bigotry.

The best part: the post falls under a subhead saying "Propaganda Parade." Honey, if you only knew.

(seriously, that fucking Twitter feed. It's like a very dry parody: the lame, desperately-signalling social references, the tired jokes that he obviously spent a lot of time coming up with, the "I'm totally down with the hippity-hop!" cultural anxiety, the attempt to defuse an absurdly pretentious headshot with some Photoshopping that, I promise you, he devoted an entire afternoon to....)

Update: A commenter points out that the Atlantic recently ran a positive profile of John Mearsheimer, which is definitely a cut against the magazine as neocon mouthpiece. Also, I got violently ill shortly after posting this, so if you're inclined to believe in karma....

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our drug war

I'm flipping through channels and I happen upon the show Cops at exactly the wrong time. A guy has just been caught with heroin. They're loading him into a cop car. He's weeping, saying "I'm going back to prison" again and again. He's weeping, of course, because when he returns to prison he'll be beaten and likely raped and subject to daily psychological and physical torture, from his conditions and from his fellow inmates and from the guards. And chances are very good that he was out scoring heroin because he was addicted to it the first time he went to jail and he stayed addicted while he was there and he was addicted when he came out. The cops keep insisting that he had more than was for his personal use, because they always say that; to listen to the police and prosecutors you'd think that no one has ever just been a drug user. They're all also drug dealers, always.

The more you look around in America the more you find people whose suffering is simply assumed as a part of the social fabric; it's compromises all the way around. I think about Omelas a lot.

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nota bene

Matt Langer's piece on Lindy West's piece is great. That is all.

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Ms. 21st century

I occasionally get emails from people who find my critique of the Internet generation cruel. Last week, I got an email that said point blank "what do you want people to do?"

Let me take a detour on the way to answering that.

My friend James sent me a link to this post by Penelope Trunk. It's a pretty typical screed against grad school, of the kind that you've read before and that I've critiqued before. I could rebut it; as is typical of those sort of arguments, it's long on attitude and low on facts-- facts like median income and employment rate for those with graduate degrees, etc. But honestly, why bother? It strikes me that grad school is a bad idea for very many people and a fantastic idea for a much smaller number of people. And yet I find that notion-- that some choices are good for some and not good for others, and that there is no way to sort which is which except by living those choices-- to be anathema to both Trunk's project and our culture.

Now, I could go into take down mode with Ms. Trunk. There's a lot to mine there. You'll find Trunk is something of an archetype: the person who is Winning at Life and insists on telling you. Loudly. Page after page of her blog amounts to self-justifying and self-promoting. She has launched three successful startups! She has appeared on 200 radio stations! She used to be a professional beach volleyball player! But as I navigated the site, I just got more and more bummed out, to see a person whose entire shtick is built on projecting the confidence which no one with actual confidence ever feels the need to project. Turns out that Trunk herself went to grad school. (She can't simply disagree with those who believe grad school can sometimes make sense; she must "crush" them. What does that tell you?)

There's a single lesson that I have learned more forcefully and more completely than any other in my life.

Those who try to show you that they're strong are weak.


Strong people don't talk about their own strength. Weak people do that. Secure people don't try to convince you of their security. Insecure people do that. People who love themselves don't have to prove it. People who hate themselves try to. When you get down to the root of my complaints, why I'm so cranky about Internet culture, the thing that I object to most strongly is the refusal to let other people make their own choices. And my belief is that this refusal stems from a desperate need people feel to validate and justify their own lives. I've written in defense of monogamy many times, and one point I've made over and over again is that those who attack the romantic ideal often do so because they don't like the implied judgment of other people's successful relationships. When people say, for example, "everybody cheats," what they are in fact saying is "I cheat, and I can't countenance the implied judgment that might exist if others don't." Take that perverse logic and apply it to almost everything, and you've got  something like 21st century aspirational culture.

I mean check out this post from Penelope Trunk's blog. Look at the list of what she accomplishes. I would put it to you that literally listing the reasons you feel good about yourself is a rather strong indication that, in fact, you don't feel that good about yourself. But if Trunk does it with less self-awareness than others, she is no less of a model for your typical blogger at Gawker or the Awl or wherever else. Take pop culture writing. When people talk about the AV Club, they talk about a place where people can discuss the pop culture they love. Who could argue with that idea? But when I look at the actual AV Club, I just see row upon row of people who need to let everyone know that being a fan of Community marks you as a connoisseur while being a fan of Two and a Half Men makes you a chump. Even our purely subjective aesthetic choices are not allowed to be our own anymore. If tastes are subjective and people are allowed to make whatever choices they want in the media they consume, people can't use those tastes to justify their self-conception as arty or hip or whatever. So what you get is a lot of people heaping derision on those who make different aesthetic choices. Nobody can leave other people alone anymore.

Perhaps if I thought that this all made people actually happy and fulfilled, I could let it go. But that's not what I find. I find, in fact, that the more time people spend justifying and validating themselves, the bigger gulf they feel between the self-concept they try to project and how they actually feel about themselves. It may be a cliche, and it may tiptoe up to the line of New Agey goop, but I do believe it's true: you will never achieve self-fulfillment by looking outside of yourself. Other people cannot validate you. Not that they shouldn't, but that they can't and won't. If they could, all of this manic effort to get them to would have certainly accomplished it by now. I drone on about self-pitying sci-fi fans not just because they're bullying and sanctimonious. It's also because the self-pity and sanctimony don't actually make them happy. As showy as they are in rejecting "high culture," they also yearn for validation from that culture. But that's an empty concept, and even if there were designated high priests of high culture, their approval would not make sci-fi fans happy. It comes from inside or it doesn't come at all.

If I am cruel, then I hope it is a kind cruelty, one in the service of getting past a particularly unhealthy cultural moment. For now I look out at a broader culture, made increasingly visible and explicit by the Internet, and see an army of Penelope Trunks: outwardly self-satisfied, brimming with false confidence and showy self-esteem, incapable of accepting that other people make other valid choices, terrified that someone will puncture the bubble of their self-presentation, desperate to position themselves above and apart from the same people they look to for validation, and deeply unhappy.

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I hate corruption, except for my own

So Mr. Hitler Cartoon here starts this long list of (accurate) complaints about the Beltway by saying "except for all the friends I've made...." Which, of course, is maybe the biggest problem with the Beltway: that people like Ackerman, who are ensconced in the upper echelons of power and influence in political punditry, are constantly subject to the corruption of social and professional pressures. You've heard it all from me many times before. The remarkable thing here is just that he sees no contradiction or difficulty in the fact that so many of the problems he lists are similar to that problem, or even consequences of that problem.

Of course, it's easy to complain about other people's petty corruptions. It's another thing entirely to interrogate your own. So none of them ever do.

Cocktails at Sully's tonight!

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anti-racism as social sorting

You likely have encountered this piece by Lindy West about "hipster racism." It's pretty great, in many ways, and yet indicative of the problem with a particular flavor of Internet political discourse, and if I'm right, you encountered it in a particular context, and that context is the problem.

The post gets a lot of it right, and some of it deeply, proudly wrong, and sadly its character and its positioning suggest to me that what it gets right in content is less important than what it achieves for those who tweet, share, and endorse it. Its positioning, that is, in the broader consciousness of the Internet tastemakers who are responsible for so much of what crosses your browser.

If you're like me, with a lot of vaguely leftish friends, you likely will recognize what has become a daily encounter. Someone on Facebook will post an enjoyable, aggressive piece that gets it mostly right, about racism or sexism or various other shitty attitudes. Everybody will click like, people will post their various "right ons," and in general it will all be a little orgy of feeling good. And, more, feeling better than whoever the target of the piece is. What is unclear is the theory of change, how exactly the ideas being celebrated by the people on Facebook are supposed to spread. I suppose it's possible that some apolitical people read the links and are inspired. I worry that it's more likely that the self-congratulatory aspect of these daily spectacles confirms every bad stereotype about liberals said apolitical people have ever heard.

But perhaps there's a question that preempts one about a theory of change: is achieving change really the point? Or is what's being celebrated really the people doing the celebrating? Certainly, a common thread to pieces that the Twitterati self-aggrandizingly call "real talk" is a proud ambivalence towards actually achieving anything more than being righteous. It doesn't help that so many of the venues for this kind of aggressively enlightened writing are places generally dedicated to cultural competition-- competition over art and clothes and music and style and, in general, leading the kind of aspirational life that is at once validated by all the cool kids and yet conspicuously uninterested in being cool.

On the one hand, the wedding of egalitarian politics and websites devoted to aspirational culture has resulted in a lot of funny, aggressive and liberal-ish essays being passed around between connected (and therefore loud) people. On the other hand, there is a necessary and inevitable dilution of what politics means in such a context. It's no coincidence that this subgenre is almost exclusively devoted to feel-good identity politics and barely touches actual structural change, which is messy and requires greater conviction than that which can be expressed on a Facebook wall. Worse, websites like Jezebel (which is only a convenient placeholder, here, for a broader phenomenon) explicitly and unapologetically link the conviction one feels about bands and denim with the conviction one feels about slurs, street harassment, and Islamaphobia. The question is whether that latter shouldn't be a different kind of conviction altogether. I know that those who write for and enjoy these websites would say that they of course believe that. I'm just not so sure that they can so mingle pop culture nonsense with political righteousness and maintain such a distinction in effect.

The question that gnaws at me is simple: would so many people tweet and like and share those links, if not for the culturally competitive aspect? Is the point really anti-racism, or anti-sexism, or anti-homophobia, or is yet another example of people taking psychic pleasure in announcing on the Internet the ways in which they are better than others? If Lindy West got to keep her principled opposition to racism, but was forced to do so in a way that contributed nothing to her considerable self-regard, would she still invest the effort? I have my doubts.

Which is not to say that she doesn't understand many of the phenomena that she describes, or that she isn't perceptive, funny, or politically principled. In some measure, she's all three. But I worry that her stances on various flavors of hipster racism-- which, let's be clear, really means "racism as expressed by people I and others like me feel socially competitive with, racism I live with"-- are not ultimately different from her stances on the wrong shoes, or the wrong band, or whatever random piece of personal baggage people are magnifying online today to feel better about themselves.

This is a document designed not so much to solicit a response or provoke a change as to position the author. Consider the statement "Race is one of the least complicated issues that there is," an obvious absurdity that the writer patently does not believe. (Having just written hundreds of words on the subject and all.) Such a notion would certainly come as a surprise to the myriad thinkers, educators, philosophers, and activists who have labored on opposing racism for longer than West has been alive. But then, such rhetorical aggression is largely the point. Enlightenment without provocation has such little percentage in it. Part of the point of this sort of document is to achieve invulnerability: so much chest-pounding righteousness numbs you to the details, makes you stupider and reassures you that this stupidity is actually an expression of righteous passion. Meanwhile, West demonstrates AP-test level mastery of a profoundly important Internet skill, which is associating yourself and the value of your writing with the political effort itself. The unmistakable subtext of the post is that criticizing West would be tantamount to criticizing the anti-racist effort itself. (The problem is that this defense mechanism ensures that the post's fundamental character is more about Lindy West than about the problems she identifies.) And, indeed, the showy stupidity of calling race an uncomplicated phenomenon is really preemption, a way to dare people into criticizing her post and in so doing open themselves up to the charge that they oppose its intent and not its content.

In my own life, truly critical understanding has only ever come from self-indictment. That notion, that greater enlightenment comes first from criticizing the self, is totally alien to the culture of competition that hangs around the trendy Internet like a thick fog. The needy aggression that is the default state of the paradoxically passionate and disaffected digital class, cultivated and commodified so brilliantly by Gawker Media and its sundry imitators, cannot stand the loss of regard that might come from genuine self-criticism. These days, even those sentiments that take the form of self-criticism tend, with a moment's review, to collapse into a sidelong critique of others. (JD Daniels: "I have trouble talking about books because to me it feels like narcissistic display. I’m reading this great book because I’m so great." Don't worry, JD. That's only you.) So it is all directed outward, and so attitudes as righteous as anti-racism become just more fuel for the engine of self-promotion. In fact, they are better than all of the other insubstantial bullshit that people use to compete with each other, because while such wars have to be waged secretly (the worst loss possible comes from revealing that you are invested in the fight), purportedly enlightened political aggression contains the plausible deniability of self-aggrandizement.

What is left to be decided is if anti-racist and anti-sexist goals can survive being instrumentalized. I'm a pessimist. I'll tell the truth: I felt more hopeful for the end of racism when opposing racism was an end and not a means.

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