1. I admire philosophers and artists who have taken pieces of Heidegger and tried to build off them. There are kernels of brilliance within Heidegger than have inspired Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, Dreyfus and artists like Terence Malick.  That’s a good thing, Heidegger has some useful insights amid the muck.
2. It’s nearly impossible to be a real Heideggerean. To be so, you have to agree to use his ridiculous language, accept his highly idiosyncratic views of other philosophers and take a nearly inexplicable position about waiting for gods to save us. In the end, Heidegger becomes a reverse solipsist — he believes that there are other minds, but that’s unfortunate, because he’s found the only genuine way to think.
3.  His ideas about poetry and the value of neologisms and punning make it clear than he never tried to read “Finnegans Wake.” If he had, he might have seem the futility of his quest.
4. The ultimate proof that Heidegger was not the most important 20th century philosopher is that no one is trying to adopt his “thinking instead of philosophizing” style in the 21st century. Mainstream philosophers are trying to appropriate his thoughts back into traditional philosophy, but he would have opposed such a move.
5. He misunderstood Nietzche badly and from the excerpts Richardson compiled, most of the pre-Socratic philosophers as well.

As for my current stance on Heidegger, I still admire Hubert Dreyfus’s exegesis of Heidegger on praxis over theory and the role of technology. I’m also a great admirer of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who seemed to understand what’s important in “Being and Time” better than Heidegger did. As for the rest of it — I think it’s mostly gibberish.

P.S., I wrote Harold Bloom an email about Heidegger asking for his views of Heidegger and poetry.  He thanked me for the email and wrote tersely about Heidegger “I cannot stand him.”

A description of the (contemporary human) condition could go like this: Each individual sat at a meeting point of shouted orders and appeals, the TV, the radio, the phone and cell, the billboard, the airport screen, the inbox, the paper junk mail. Each person discovered that he lived at one knot of a network, existing without his consent, which connected him to any number of recorded voices, written messages, means of broadcast, channels of entertainment, and avenues of choice. It was a culture of broadcast: an indiscriminate seeding, which needed to reach only a very few, covering vast tracts of our consciousness. To make a profit, only one message in ten thousand needed to take root, therefore messages were strewn everywhere. To live in this network felt like something, but surprisingly little in the culture of broadcast itself tried to capture what it felt like. Instead, it kept bringing pictures of an unencumbered luxurious life, songs of ease and freedom, and technological marvels, which did not feel like the life we lived.

And if you noticed you were not represented? It felt as if one of the few unanimous aspects of this culture was that it forbade you to complain, since if you complained, you were a trivial human, a small person, who misunderstood the generosity and benignity of the message system. It existed to help you. Now, if you accepted the constant promiscuous broadcasts as normalcy, there were messages in them to inflate and pet and flatter you. If you simply said this chatter was altering your life, killing your privacy or ending the ability to think in silence, there were alternative messages that whispered of humiliation, craziness, vanishing. What sort of crank needs silence? What could be more harmless than a few words of advice? The messages did not come from somewhere; they were not central, organized, intelligent, intentional. It was up to you to change the channel, not answer the phone, stop your ears, shut your eyes, dig a hole for yourself and get in it. Really, it was your responsibility. The metaphors in which people tried to complain about these developments, by ordinary law and custom, were pollution (as in “noise pollution”) and theft (as in “stealing our time”). But we all knew the intrusions felt like violence. Physical violence, with no way to strike back.

And if this feeling of violent intrusion persisted? Then it added a new dimension of constant, nervous triviality to our lives. It linked, irrationally, in our moods and secret thoughts, these tiny private annoyances to the constant televised violence we saw. Those who objected embarrassed themselves, because they likened nuisances to tragedies—and yet we felt the likeness, though it became unsayable. Perhaps this was because our nerves have a limited palette for painting dread. Or because the network fulfilled its debt of civic responsibility by bringing us twenty-four-hour news of flaming airplanes and twisted cars and blood-soaked screaming casualties, globally acquired, which it was supposedly our civic duty to watch—and, adding commercials, put this mixture of messages and horrors up on screens wherever a TV could only be introduced on grounds of “responsibility to know,” in the airport, the doctor’s office, the subway, and any waiting room. But to object was demeaning—who, really, meant us any harm? And didn’t we truly have a responsibility to know?

Thus the large mass of people huddled in the path of every broadcast, who really did not speak but were spoken for, who received and couldn’t send, were made responsible for the new Babel. Most of us who lived in this culture were primarily sufferers or patients of it and not, as the word had it, “consumers.” Yet we had no other words besides “consumption” or “consumerism” to condemn a world of violent intrusions of insubstantial messages, no new way at least to name this culture or describe the feeling of being inside it.

So a certain kind of pop music could offer a representative vision of this world while still being one of its omnipresent products. A certain kind of musician might reflect this new world’s vague smiling threat of hostile action, its latent violence done by no one in particular; a certain kind of musician, angry and critical rather than complacent and blithe, might depict the intrusive experience, though the music would be painfully intrusive itself, and it would be brought to us by and share the same avenues of mass-intrusion that broadcast everything else. Pop music had the good fortune of being both a singularly unembarrassed art and a relatively low-capital medium in its creation—made by just a composer or writer or two or four or six members of a band, with little outside intrusion, until money was poured into the recording and distribution and advertising of it. So, compromised as it was, music could still become a form of unembarrassed and otherwise inarticulable complaint, capturing what one could not say in reasonable debate, and coming from far enough inside the broadcast culture that it could depict it with its own tools.

What is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes WARLOCK one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

You can sense Pynchon’s fear of anarchism just beneath the surface of American life.  But Pynchon is deeply conflicted about anarchism. He addresses that in this quote from his introduction to the Modern Library edition of George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR:

We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time – it seems a condition of political thought in a modern super state to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.

In other words, our primal fear of anarchy is the greatest tool of authoritarians. Pynchon, like Orwell, has contempt for writers who exploit this fear.  Here he uses Orwell to bludgeon the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq War:

It has become a commonplace, circa 2003, for government employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history, trivialize truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis. Those who don’t learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes – or best of all that it doesn’t matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour’s entertainment.

Every political communicator should have a picture of George Orwell in his or her office as a constant reminder of our duty to use the language for enlightenment, not enslavement.

As a form of rebuttal to his critics, Willis filmed this Audi ad in the 1970s.  Watch the eyes throughout the spot and notice the Willis payoff.  By clothing the eyes, Willis made them more seductive.

Then shots from below in Quentin Tarantino films:

Only artists, and especially those of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself, desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes—from a distance and, as it were, simplified and transfigured—the art of staging and watching ourselves. Only in this way can we deal with some base details in ourselves. Without this art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

You might take from this quote an impression that Nietzsche esteemed actors.  That’s not the case. Nietzsche feared the growing influence of actors in culture.  Here’s one of his most powerful assertions:

The maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; above all, the great “architects”: The strength to build becomes paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with a genius for organization become scarce: who would still dare to undertake projects that would require thousands of years for their completion? For what is dying out is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope, and to sacrifice the future to them—namely, the faith that man has value and meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end he must be solid first of all, a “stone”—and above all not an actor!

So here’s my Nietzschean assessment of what’s wrong with Hollywood: the actors run the joint. And don’t get me wrong, there are some very smart ones out there who often write and direct their own works. But there are also a lot of people like Tom Cruise with lots of influence over what gets made … and who have pretty bad taste.

The basic problem is that an actor is, by definition, a cloying artist. Actors must first and always play to the mass audience, going for an effect that elicits a wild scream rather than thoughtful appreciation:

Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself? Must he not first translate himself into grotesque obviousness and then present his whole person and cause in this coarsened and simplified version?

Even when an actor plays against type onscreen, he or she never plays against type offscreen. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are always the actors central to getting a deal done. Their presenceadds a veneer of prestige that leads to Oscar nominations and more power for these actors to define the tastes of an industry.

When this type of personality, no matter how talented, becomes the driving force in managing a culture, all hell breaks lose.  That culture loses it’s ability to shape an artistic vision with effective craftsmanship. And looking back to ancient Greece isn’t a positive move either, it’s an example of how everything can fall apart:, how everyone can become an actor and lose the drive to create.

So, yes, the Academy-selected actors are correct that they have great power to shape how our culture views itself and how people envision their lives. But they’re never content to do just that. Hollywood works best where there’s a balance between vision and practicality. Today that plays out as practical movie makers who have no vision and visionary movie makers who are too impractical to play on a big stage. The only way to restore some balance — to hand Hollywood back to the architects — is to strip actors of their power.

It’s difficult for me to have much affection for anyone who writes sentences like “Being is always the being of a being.” Or nearly as ridiculous: “Dasein (or being-there) is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically (having the status of real or ultimate being) distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.” To write this poorly, one should be required to have a sense of humor. Heidegger is so humorless that he cannot fathom his own absurd obscurity.  Nietzsche psychoanalyzes Heidegger well in THE GAY SCIENCE:

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

Heidegger is fascinated with the “pre-ontological understanding of being.” To put that in layman’s terms, it’s about what exists before something exists. Yes, it’s a snake devouring it’s tail, but bear with him, for this is very serious stuff. Or is it just another version of Bill Clinton positing”what the meaning of is is”?

Think back to President Clinton’s Paula Jones case deposition for a moment. The context of that brain teasing question was a Clinton aide asking him the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky.  The President is quoted in the deposition as stating:

It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement….Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.

President Clinton actually dissected the problem at the heart of “Being and Time” — how can anyone confidently state when something is? If we’re always in a process of becoming and actions can be true in one time and not true in another, isn’t it possible to play endless language games to evade responsibility and deny ultimate truth?

Heidegger’s approach is to analyze the Dasein of life — which is German for “being-there,” or perhaps being-in-the-moment. Maybe an even more accurate description, according to Walter Kauffman, is to simply translate Dasein as God’s time. While humans may live a secular existence, God exists out of time and operates in a pure universe of absolute truth.

This part of “Being and Time” has some interesting possibilities, if you’re willing to take the leap of faith that Heidegger intended “Being and Time” to be a book of theology and not philosophy. Heidegger’s own words are contradictory on the matter (of course they are, Bill Clinton has nothing on Heidegger when it comes to the use of slippery language), but the book seems to pick up some value if you just read Dasein as God’s time.

You can still make a strong case that the origins of European languages and our understanding of every word in those languages is deeply embedded in Christianity. Therefore, all of the words that connote being in Western language presuppose a grounding in God’s time. Never mind what being and words with a family resemblance to being actually mean, that kind of exercise is just philosophers creating little problems for themselves.  What’s really important is understanding how these being words have been used and what speakers and writers through the ages intended when they used them.

What I think Heidegger gets completely wrong is assuming that people internalize some kind of definitive truth about words in the being-family. Rather, when people use being-family words, they assume a very wide approximation of meaning, not a specific meaning. For example, when I point to a patch of grass and say “your lawn is very green,” I’m not making a statement about the condition of this lawn in six months or even just at this precise moment. I’m making a statement about the condition of the grass in an approximate state of time that any fellow Chicagoan would understand as the general period of time during a year that we could expect a lawn to look full and lush. To expect more precision in our language, down to the specific blades of grass and the specific time period when I expect the lawn to remain in this state, would be to turn language into legalistic mumbo-jumbo and something unusable.

But there’s a more serious problem at the heart of “Being and Time.” Heidegger is interested in getting to the heart of what is authentic in life — how we can live in every moment of time authentically, doing something that has meaning for us.  Heidegger believes that this kind of authentic being requires being engaged in what modern psychologists call ‘flow,’ which is a state of being completely immersed in an activity, becoming one with the act.

A generation before Heidegger, Nietzsche warned about this kind of thinking in “The Gay Science:”

Artists, and especially those of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself, desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes—from a distance and, as it were, simplified and transfigured—the art of staging and watching ourselves. Only in this way can we deal with some base details in ourselves. Without this art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Nietzsche’s perspective is important, because much of the appeal of Heidegger in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and throughout the Western world in the 1950s and 1960s depended on his works tapping into this discontent with the inauthentic and “phony” modern existence. I would suggest that many people who didn’t even understand Heidegger — and might not have even read him first hand — embraced his philosophy because these ideas about the inauthentic nature of 20th century life were “in the air.”

I’ll have much more to say in the coming months about this ethic of authenticity and why I think it’s become dangerous. For now I want to return to Nietzsche’s comment because I think it offers an important alternative to what has become a crushing cliche of Western life.

Nietzsche saw in the arts an expression of higher human aspirations. Emerson, in turn, saw in the lifestyles of the very wealthy a template for what human beings should expect out of life. The focus on authenticity is always backwards looking. It attempts to find connections in contemporary life to past human behaviors and folkways. This becomes a form of nostalgic comfort.

Nietzsche and Emerson, on the other hand, were pointed forward. They did not live in fear of a transformed humanity that would break with the traditions of the past, they eagerly envisioned this break. Nietzsche and Emerson called for new religions, new moralities and new eras of human existence.

Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will pass out Oscars to yet another collection of nostalgic films musings about a more authentic past. Maybe the West thinks the future looks too bleak to confront anymore. One thing I know for sure — if we keep up this attitude and keep looking to the past for comfort, our future will be a lot less interesting and prosperous than if we moved towards it with confidence.

In addition to my Emerson writing, which will probably take up a couple days a week, I’m also planning to blog about William Gaddis’s novel “J R” in conjunction with some thoughts I’ve had recently about developing a philosophy of money. “J R” is back in print, with a new version from Dalkey Press released earlier this month. If this goes well, I then plan to blog about Gaddis’s first novel “The Recognitions” and will cover my philosophy of authenticity (which is basically opposed to the whole Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre model) but that’s well down the road.

In the meantime, I have some thoughts today about Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” and in particular his fascinating chapter 354. This chapter has stood out for me for a couple reasons.  First, shortly after the twins were born four years ago, I went on a mad reading spree about consciousness. I worked through Dennett’s strange “About Consciouness” and Hofstader’s “I Am a Strange Loop.” It was fascinating stuff, but all rather abstract for me.

This chapter from Nietzsche covers some of the same ground in a way that makes complete sense to me. That doesn’t mean his theory is true, but it certainly makes it fun to write about. The other reason why this chapter stands out is that it’s often cited as background material for Nietzsche’s famous “grain of contempt” epigram about the limitations of language.

So what’s Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness?  His starting point is that, from an evolutionary perspective, it’s probably superfluous:

The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous

After trashing Heidegger this morning, I should point out that this sounds a bit like some of the early moments in “Being and Time.” We do, in fact, walk through great portions our lives, even vital sections like work and housework, in a sort of autopilot. Nietzsche ends by asking about purpose, which is actually rare for him — he generally shies away from questions of purpose or essence. By doing so, he draws attention to the theoretical nature of this discussion.  This is not intended to be a Nietzschen observation, rather it’s a hypothesis:

It involves, it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man’s (or animal’s) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity in turn were proportionate to the need for communication.

In other words, consciousness and communications develop in tandem. As human learn to communicate, they have a greater need for a subtle consciousness, creating a virtuous cycle between expanding communications skills and expanded consciousness. This leads to more complex societies, where those with greater, more highly developed communications skills are more likely to thrive:

This need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication—as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it.

Or, in other words, consciousness is really nothing but a net of communications between people:

Consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it.

Everyone who thinks that McLuhan was a forerunner to the Internet, please take note, Nietzsche got there a century earlier. But now Nietzsche takes an interesting turn, because he’s not claiming that communications creates human thought. In fact, he argues that thought is something that exists a priori to consciousness:

Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness.

The vital elements of thinking — brain activity that regulates reflexes, emotions and all of your routine bodily functions — occurs without this wall of mirrors we call consciousness.  And all other animals have brains that operate in this manner, free of complex communications.  Continuing on, as human beings create these signs and symbols to communicate with one another, we become increasingly self aware:

The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness—which he is still in the process of doing, more and more.

Now comes the really fascinating part of Nietzsche’s argument. We become increasingly self aware, but we’re stuck with these completely insufficient symbol systems to give voice to this self awareness:

Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.” Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” that commands it—and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.

Language itself, the thing that makes us conscious humans, then becomes a mechanism for denying our individuality. It shapes our experiences to seem much like all other human experiences. This then gives rise to mistaken beliefs about the nature of reality — beliefs that we live in a world of shadow or appearance. But this dualism is an illusion created by the limitations of language:

The world of which we can become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease.

That sounds awfully pessimistic and Nietzsche ends the chapter on an even darker note:

We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.

So is Nietzsche making a claim for irrationality here?  I don’t think so.  I think what Nietzsche is saying is that we need to be aware of the limitations of discourse and reason. He’s also saying here — although he doesn’t do it explicitly — that the survival of the species may depend on our ability to keep pushing the boundaries of our language, bringing it closer to the expression of our unique perspectives on existence.

If we continue to worship a static language expressing static thoughts, we’ll become not just herd animals, but anachronistic herd animals incapable of meeting the unique challenges of a dynamic existence.

Back in 2003 and 2004, I still had some naive confidence that it was possible to write intelligently about American politics.  This blog focused on the 2004 Democratic race. It attracted several hundred readers a day eager to dissect the latest polls and debate the electability of Howard Dean. Then one day I just gave it up.  I couldn’t bring myself to write about politics anymore.  I still write sarcastic Tweets about politics, which I think is where our discourse has landed — 120 characters of obvious sarcasm and snark, an ever-scrolling reminder of our national inability to discuss governing our country outside of the ideological prison walls.

Incidentally, these walls aren’t just about red and blue America, they exists within the camps. I see it everyday in Chicago, where the ideological divide is between the establishment (whether it’s run by Daley or Emanuel) and the left-of-center protestors. On the national level, it becomes a fight between the Obama-bots and the Fire Baggers. Republicans have their own Tea Party vs. moderates vs. Wall Street vs. libertarian battles as well.

Does DFW offer a way out of the stupefying echo chambers? I’ll offer my commentary along the way.

The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil.

Anything changed? The 95 percent corruption has probably become 100 percent by now. Back then, I could write a piece for Salon.com and have a worthwhile debate in the comments section. Now, regardless of the position you take, writing for a major political journal means being firebombed with comments calling you an idiot and a stooge. People post anonymously and never return to engage — or merely ratchet up the anger if they do.

Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone.It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

Franken is now, of course, Sen. Franken, which tells you exactly where politics has gone in nine years. What DFW is calling for is hard thought, give and take and compromise. Those things will earn you a primary challenger in 21st Century American politics.

My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is.

I’m still waiting for that.  Have you ever read any of Jonathan Franzen’s political writing?  No one would call it empathetic, except maybe to trees. Everyone is caught up in the ideological drama.

Failing that, maybe at least we can help elevate some professional political journalists who are (1) polite, and (2) willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree, and (3) able to countenance the fact that some problems are simply beyond the ability of a single ideology to represent accurately.

I do believe that there are journalists who try.  The problem is this — very few conservatives agree with me. Witness Newt Gingrich’s anti-journalist rampages during the debates. They play well because conservatives call anyone not in the conservative journalistic orbit the liberal media.  At a certain point, if only liberals will take these reporters seriously, why bother trying to be even handed? Also notice my bias in this statement: I never watch Fox News and for all I know, there could be reporters on the network who are fair and balanced, (instead of “fair and balanced.”) But I’m just assuming it’s not the case.

Implicit in this brief, shrill answer, though, is obviously the idea that at least some political writing should be Platonically disinterested, should rise above the fray, etc.; and in my own present case this is impossible (and so I am a hypocrite, an ideological opponent could say).

And I cop to this as well, as anyone who reads my Tweets would attest.  My ideological bias is clear. I cannot filter out the political noise around me.

I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can’t seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration. Writing-wise, I think this kind of interior state is dangerous. It is when one feels most strongly, most personally, that it’s most tempting to speak up (“speak out” is the current verb phrase of choice, rhetorically freighted as it is). But it’s also when it’s the least productive, or at any rate it seems that way to me—there are plenty of writers and journalists “speaking out” and writing pieces about oligarchy and neofascism and mendacity and appalling short-sightedness in definitions of “national security” and “national interest,” etc., and very few of these writers seem to me to be generating helpful or powerful pieces, or really even being persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already share the writer’s views.

All true, which is why I blurt out my opinions in Tweets and try to shut up about politics as much as possible in conversations and in writing.  Why bother playing Johnny Carson to an online audience of Ed McMahons?

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.

The flossing is a good idea.  The rest of it … yeah, maybe.  I’ll probably get caught up in the political drama at some point and feel obliged to drive to Wisconsin or Iowa to “get out the vote,” whatever that means. Who exactly are these people who need a personal conversation with a total stranger before they can be encouraged to vote in a national election? I’ve done GOTV canvassing for years now and I still don’t know why campaigns do it, other than the fact that it’s always done and there are funds allocated to keep doing it.

I wish I could end on a more positive note, but I don’t see the situation improving any time soon.  What I think needs to happen in America is for conversations to start taking place out of the political arena on discrete policy issues. If we can approach issues from a “civic” frame, consider all points of view and recommend approaches without plans for political leverage, there might be an opportunity to find broadly-acceptable solutions to American problems. I’m not hopeful.