A Hero's Tale

I am not at all pleased with the new series based on The Handmaid's Tale. I watched the first episode recently, and not only was the tone of the whole thing wrong, at the very end of the episode the writers made a deviation from the book that is, in my opinion, totally indefensible. (Yes, there was some yelling at the television.) Dishearteningly, I have yet to read a negative review of the series; I'm counting on Emily Nussbaum to deliver for me where no one else has. (Megan McArdle has a sharp take, which is worth reading, but she's concerned with the book, not the show.)

My main beef is this: in the book, Atwood finds everyone guilty—the new regime and the old. In the show, the Republic of Gilead is purely evil, a theocratic society radically imposed upon an otherwise virtuous and free people. In the book, Atwood is very clear that Gilead is a direct product of the free and liberal society that came before it. We often want to imagine that tyranny arrives suddenly and with no chance to avert it, but the book (and history) generally indicate otherwise. The most interesting theme of the novel is an exploration of the close relationship between freedom and tyranny, but the show ignores that. I'm sure no one wants to be accused of blaming the victim.

I ended up yelling at the television at the end of the first episode because of something else, though: the show gives Offred, the main character, a name. In the book, her only name is Offred (meaning "of Fred," in reference to the man who owns her) and the reader never learns her real name. This reflects not only the narrative intimacy of the book—it's mostly interior monologue—but also something very important about Offred herself: she could be anyone. Indeed, she isn't special in any way; she isn't particularly beautiful, brave, ingenious, or even kind. By giving her a name (and in a triumphant way), the show negates all that. It suggests that Offred is special, that she is a hero. The book is about the quiet desperation of everyday life in an oppressive regime, and there is no heroism in it. But I guess that story would not be much fun to watch on television.

And finally: no matter what the critics might say, the novel sheds no light whatsoever on Trump. (Megan McArdle covers this point better than I could.) Good novels remain good no matter who the president is. This could have been a great series, too, but it would have required the writers to trust the audience a bit more. It's really a shame that Margaret Atwood didn't insist on that.

the gospel of dave

About two and a half years ago, I was in the car with Josh one night (probably on our way back from eating xiao long bao in Rockville) when a deep voice with a southern twang came on the radio. Josh turned the volume up. "Have you heard this guy?" he asked. "You might like him."

The guy in question was Dave Ramsey, and the first thing I heard on his show was a caller asking, "How are you, Mr. Ramsey?" and Dave answering, "I'm better than I deserve." And I turned to Josh immediately and asked, "is this Christian talk radio?" And the answer was yes, it is a Christian talk radio show about personal finance. And you may be surprised to learn, Dear Reader, that I was hooked.

First, I think the Ramsey message is wonderful in its clarity: 1) don't go into debt and 2) pay off any debt you have as fast as you can. If you want to buy something, you need to save up for it and pay cash. (With the caveat that 15 year mortgages are acceptable.)

The advice is entirely pragmatic, merely with added bonus of being in line with scripture (or so Dave says). Furthermore, the Ramsey system is designed to work for everyone, no matter their location, salary, or education. Dave himself is intrinsically egalitarian and charmingly pro-free market; the people who call in to his show are earnest regular folks looking for advice about everyday money issues. I'm not the only one who has found this compelling; the show is syndicated on over 500 radio stations. (Though I guess these days that doesn't say much about your relative sanity. And I should note that a lot of people dislike Dave, too.)

The overarching argument is that if you get out of debt and stay out of debt, you will be free (and not just in the financial sense). This is the actual language he uses, too: people in debt are slaves, and people who have no debt are free. That message resonates with me, but it's incomplete. While I have no debt at the moment, and I'm very happy about it, I don't exactly feel free, either. I'm still, as Marx would say, a wage-slave. And while my white collar servitude is cushy, I will likely remain a wage-slave until I retire to my estate and live like the landed gentry of old (i.e., never).

Regardless, though, I keep listening to the show. And why I keep listening is somewhat mystifying to me. Dave's plan is very simple, and while I don't follow it to the letter, at this point I could recite the steps for you by rote. I guess I keep listening because the people who call in represent a fascinating range of American experience and they talk about money which, frustratingly, almost no one speaks about openly.

For example, just the other day I was listening and a woman called in. She is 24 years old and her husband is 25 and they have a five month old baby. They both work on the family ranch. Her question was about how much life insurance to buy. I knew the answer to the question already, but the very nature of this person is fascinating to me. I doubt that I will ever in my life meet a 24-year-old ranch hand with a husband and a baby. And then you have the guy who works on an off-shore oil rig and wants to know if he should take a job that pays him a third of what he makes now but lets him see his kids more than once every six months. Who is that guy? I will also probably never meet someone like him, and even if I did he probably wouldn't want to talk to me, much less tell me about his job conundrum.

If nothing else, Dave's show has given me some small insight into my fellow Americans, who, I'm sad to admit, often seem very foreign to me. 

lodge your complaints.

Recently, I've been out of town for a work event which I played a major role in organizing. Just for the sake of an example, let's say that this event was a 12 course dinner for 100 people, and I helped plan the menu, hire the chefs, and serve the food. After the meal, a diner came up to me to express that he was unhappy with a minor detail of the event—let's say, the quality of forks provided at the table.

The complaint was put to me this way: "I come to this dinner every year with the expectation that the meal will be of a certain caliber, and the forks this year ruined (ruined!) the meal for me. It was impossible to focus on the food while using such a terrible fork." And after assuring him that we did our best on the forks but certain compromises had to be made for certain justifiable reasons, he said, "I know, I know, and I'm sure you don't make the decisions about the forks! But please tell those in charge to consider how much the forks impact the experience of the diners here." And then he repeated himself: "I know that it's not your decision, but please just pass my message on the planners of the event."

Now, this is not the only complaint I received, and as far as the complaints went this one did not bother me very much. Despite the fact that forks usually have no bearing on the enjoyment of food—and the real subject of the complaint had zero bearing on the quality of the event—I have made peace with the fact that people have peeves and they enjoy expressing them.

What bothers me is that he didn't think I had any control over the "forks." I totally did. In fact, for this event I selected the "forks" myself. If he wanted to get the forks changed for next year, he was speaking to exactly the person with the power to change them! I was happy he didn't know this in the moment because I would have gotten another earful, but in retrospect it kind of pisses me off that he didn't think it was my fault. Not only did I have authority over the forks, I also made a ton of other, waaaay more important, decisions. And if he isn't going to blame me for the forks, then I won't get any recognition for the delicious escargot, or whatever (I'm probably stretching this analogy too far, sorry).

I just need to keep this in mind for the next time I'm held responsible for something going wrong. I'll try to remember to be happy that I'm in trouble, because it means I have enough power to screw something up.

(And now I realize that this entire post can be paraphrased by that dumb quote from Spider-Man: "With great power comes great responsibility." I am trite.)

you can call me ann

I just got an email with a signature that went something like this: 

Dolly Parton (she/her/hers)
Professional Singer
Tel: 090-0900-8888
Email: dollyland@hotmail.com

The email was not from Dolly Parton, sadly, but you get the idea.

Now, I generally don't give any thought to how people choose to sign their emails. But...I am perplexed. Why do I need to know that she is, you know, a SHE? If I were to write her back, I probably wouldn't use any gendered pronouns. "You" works quite well when writing to someone directly. Is this person assuming that we will be talking about her amongst ourselves, hence the need to specify a singular third person pronoun? Perhaps. But I'm still befuddled as to why it would matter.

I've received a countless number of misaddressed emails over the years. My last name is deceptively hard to spell, and people always get it wrong. (My dissertation advisor, bless him, never got it right once.) I'd wager that I'm called "Julie" as often as "Julia." I had an otherwise nice exchange with someone who addressed me as "Ann" in multiple emails, which was also fine. The best one ever was a student who addressed all emails to me as, "Hey you." I thought that was objectively terrible, but I also didn't bother to correct it. I figured that kid was going to have enough problems in life and didn't need a lecture from me.

But aside from naming issues, what if someone used masculine pronouns for me? Do I feel affronted at the thought? Not really. Men are people too; as long as you don't mistake me for a squirrel, I think we'll be ok.

I guess most people are not as laid-back as me about this? The person who wrote to me would probably be very offended if I presumed she was, you know, a she, but was instead a he. Maybe she prefers to be a "they"? I could manage that, but it would make grammar difficult. Is there a thing where people prefer to be "it"? That just seems too rude; I don't think I could do that. But I guess those who defer to grammar and convention are not sufficiently woke?

Frankly, being woke all the time seems exhausting. Not caring about most things has, I think, served me very well in life. I am a very well-rested person.

try not to flinch.

For one of my book clubs, I'm reading The Sellout by Paul Beatty. It's...difficult. The author himself describes his motivation for writing the book as: "I wanted to make myself flinch," and this is the perfect way to describe the experience of reading it. You will flinch. A lot. And if you think a satire about slavery—albeit a well-written, legitimately funny satire about slavery—sounds reprehensible, you will hate, hate, hate this book. If you just can't crack a smile at a good joke about misogyny or the holocaust or any other serious subject, you will loathe this book with your whole soul. And I must tell you: I do not hate or loathe this book. It's not fun to read, but damn is it funny.

It's actually the perfect thing to be reading on January 20, 2017. I'm going to wager that dark satire will be on the rise for the next few years years. I'm not lamenting this: I love satire. It's also really hard to write well, and now lots of good authors are likely to be inspired to try it. The Onion has spent many years perfecting the art, but now that reading the New York Times feels like reading like the Onion, you really need some finesse to pack the right satirical punch. I think the whole nation would really benefit from a Catch-22 for the Trump era. It would be a public service.

I've been thinking about this because I think I've offended some people lately by making jokes about life in Trump's America. This has happened with coworkers, my family, and in routine polite conversation. Usually I'm joking in order to lighten the mood away from utter despondence; I find incessant anxiety and hand-wringing to be mind-bendingly boring. But also, and quite honestly, there is just so much good material in the world nowadays. Almost any joke I hear that includes the phrase, "I have the best words," is at least worthy of a dark chuckle.

Is the world ending? Quite possibly! But as I learned from Marilynne Robinson, Dante reserved a whole circle in hell for the sullen and wrathful, those who refused to find any joy and laughter in the never-ending human farce we inhabit.

And on that very topic, The Sellout has some stuff to say about offendedness:

"What does that mean, I'm offended?" I asked the unrequited love of my life, talking to her through the panoramic rearview mirror..."It's not even an emotion. What does being offended say about what you feel? No great theater director ever said to an actor, 'Okay, this scene calls for some real emotion, now go out there and give me lots of offendedness!'"

"That's saying a lot coming from a callow farm boy who's never been offended in his life because his head's too high in the clouds."

"That's because if I ever were to be offended I wouldn't know what to do. If I'm sad, I cry. If I'm happy, I laugh. If I'm offended, what do I do, state in a clear and sober voice that I'm offended, then walk away in a huff so that I can write a letter to the mayor?"

Why I Was Never Invited to Great Books Camp

I was chuffed to read Molly Worthen's article in the New York Times about how she wants to start a great books camp for liberals. I sympathize acutely, having watched most of my grad school colleagues journey off to retreats to discuss great books with fellow young conservative/straussian/hayekian intellectuals. (They came back with such great gossip!) And I too wondered, why don't the non-conservatives throw their own book party? (And invite me!) Then eventually it dawned on me: they can't.

All great books camps are conservative (no matter what Yuval Levin says) because they are funded by people who think old books are important, even more important than new ones. This is an essentially conservative argument--studying the great books is a way to conserve certain ideas because you think they are important and perennial. If you are a progressive, even a progressive who is studying the history of political thought, you must acknowledge that new ideas are just as important, if not more so, than old stodgy ones. If they aren't, then what's the point of progress??

Cue a whole chorus of undergrads yelling, "so WHY do we still have to read Plato?!," a question I got more times than I can count. While a progressive can agree we should read Plato, he would also argue we should read everything else important, from Confucius to Rawls to Sayyid Qutb to Ta-Nehesi Coates to....infinity. Worthen includes Obama and MLK on her reading list, but I'm certain those additions would not satisfy. (Remember the controversy over the Trump syllabus? Sigh.)

So while the reading list for progressives could easily grow into the thousands and still not keep everyone happy, conservatives agree that the canon is really just a relatively short list of stuff written by dead white men. No liberal is going to sponsor a reading camp for that, unless they want to be hounded into oblivion. And it's too bad, because dead white men have written a ton of amazing stuff. Including, you know, all the foundational texts of liberal western democracy.

So while I sympathize with Worthen and also dream of starting a great books camp, until either she or I earn enough to pay for it ourselves I think we're going to be disappointed.

Relatedly: what is a person who is neither conservative nor progressive? Is that just a confused person?

Sunday Afternoon

In one of the more bizarre episodes of my life, a guy with an assault rifle walked into my favorite local pizza joint yesterday. The pizza joint in question has been the focus of crazy online conspiracy theories linked to the election. The man with the assault rifle went in to "investigate" whether the conspiracy theories were true. He fired one round before the cops arrived, and, thankfully, no one was hurt.

Josh and I happened to be in the area at the time. We saw cop cars really booking it up Connecticut Ave for over an hour and actually guessed what had happened. We had just been to this pizza place the day before. We had pizza and salad and beers, and remarked on how much more crowded it was than usual, surmising that the neighborhood had come out to support the restaurant in light of the online insanity. And the next day, somebody walked in with an assault rifle and fired.

I can't quite wrap my mind around this. Regular street crime is not something I worry about, probably because I've lived relatively closely with it my whole life. I can't excuse it, but I do understand something about the logic of it and what it feels like. But this is an adult man who, by his own admission, drove up from North Carolina with multiple weapons in his car to investigate rumors of a child sex trafficking ring run by a presidential candidate and her advisors out of the back of a neighborhood pizza restaurant. He walked into a restaurant full of children with an assault rifle because he believed this lie was the truth. This is simply beyond my comprehension. My first instinct is to make a joke out of it, it's so ridiculous.

But it's not funny. Whatever this man's individual issues, this happened because of a depth of ignorance that is terrifying. I don't see how there can be any antidote to it.