The Bracket Club

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not been born yet when “The Breakfast Club” was released. That was back in ‘85, though by itself the timeline is irrelevant. I mean, let’s keep it real: generational bragging rights are lame. So when the dog-whistlers at FOX News recently “outed” AOC’s celebration of the film, AOC’s reply was refreshingly well played. As dancing goes, her interpretive middle-finger to false conservatives was a welcomed breeze of fresh air in swamp-land. Her brief reenactment outside her D.C. office was a classy je ne regrette rien STFU to the rage peddlers at FOX. Way classier in fact than her freshman colleague, US representative Rashida Tlaib, with her “motherfucker” crosshairs remark. Nothing to do with the language by itself, gender, or ethnicity - Donald Trump doesn’t sound smarter when he says it either.

The reason it is relevant that Ocasio-Cortez had not yet been born in ‘85 is key context. Since we are talking about a powerful American tradition here - the induction of an incoming political freshman class - the dance bit was poetic-assist in AOC’s case. Whether she was aware or not, she was being introduced to the old Potomac Two-Step. 

Back in 1985 the Soviet Union was still a very real and present danger. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The mutually assured destruction of our planet as we knew it was something no other generation had ever experienced. It was a world gone m.a.d. indeed (we even coined a clever acronym for it). So, no: the Breakfast Club dance was not exactly the celebration of life AOC interpreted. As the language of dance goes it was a brave new wave - not quite salsa (AOC’s Caribbean roots may have betrayed her there). Our Breakfast Club fab-five were definitely not expressing sensual joy, that’s for sure. It was a time of awkwardness, a time to be tense.

As the gods of evolution would have it, the tension finally blinked. Somehow we survived armageddon. The daily threat of a nuclear holocaust stopped, sometime around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Political pundits like to credit the Kennedy-Reagan era, with fair credit where credit is due. Others may be more pragmatic, calling the Soviet collapse a failure to engage with an inevitable global capitalism. Either way there was a “roaring nineties” feeling in the air, a celebration of sorts as the world watched the implosion of the mighty Soviet. Amidst champagne and red carpets, Hollywood proclaimed that "greed is good".

Enter class warfare, back from the sidelines of nuclear preoccupation. Where there is unbridled wealth, there is greed. And where there is greed, there are tax brackets. No one really ever wonders much about the existence of tax brackets, probably for good reason (watching paint dry, etc.). But it is worth a quick reflection. Let me try to unpack it by keeping it simple: tax brackets are essentially a mathematical punishment on greed. Some American voters who have been around the block more than once might recall the flat-tax proposals, resurrected every other presidential campaign. It is typically presented as a way to fix a convoluted tax system. A system that admittedly has evolved into a god-forsaken hydra monster. Sure, those who make little enough to fit their income into a 1040-EZ form are typically not in the line of fire. But if the 1040-A does not quite cut it for you either, my condolences: off to the serpentine hydra’s mouth you go.

Which brings us back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her recent casual remark that the very rich should be subject to a 70% tax bracket. Well. If she ever wanted to be targeted as the enemy of half the people she sure is a smooth-talker. It’s not just the 1% that have rattled their sabres on that declaration of war. They have savvily enlisted an army of 49% to fight on their behalf. A 49% that, to every American liberal, remains an enigma wrapped up in a mystery, inside a puzzle. Just like a Russian nesting doll.

Unless Ocasio-Cortez learns how to dance to the awkward tension of socialized capitalism, her politics will become irrelevant in the evolution of the great American experiment. Her Bracket Club dance reduced to a less-than-memorable flashdance. Back at the Breakfast Club, (spoiler alert)... that dance ends with a fist pump to the sky. Unforgettably frozen in time. A celebration of how five corners of America walked in as irreconcilable differences, and walked out with unspoken respect for each other. It was a fist pump in defiance to all those who grift the life divisive.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

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The Raging of America

The dark side of our minds is nothing but a kangaroo court. It is a survival-of-the-fittest chamber where every second of our lives checks-in. It is where the gatekeeper of fear protects us within inches of our lives, so that we may live to see another day. 

Human DNA is coded to abhor the unknown, which explains the kangaroo courts. The vast majority of our lives is engulfed by the unknown. It also explains our love-hate relationship with science, and our radicalization of religion. We love science when it provides practical solutions to our problems. But we grow bored when it demands we don’t jump to conclusions. Which is when some turn to faith. Not the “turn the other cheek” religion, mind you. The “cut their babies in half and stone the women to death” religion. The radicalized genre, designed to fit agendas of convenience. 

Off-center politics are a fluid zig-zag between convenience and fear. It’s not that the so-called “left” and “right” wings of society don’t contribute with their share of work and basic values. It’s that their rage-filled pinball lifestyle cannibalizes the lion share of the value they generate. They create and perpetuate an anger-infested netherworld where distortion rules. 

Wing politics are ushering in a new Dark Age of humanity. A Dark Age that introduces the notion that the rich and majority are victims of persecution. A darkness that hides the reality that the poor and minorities are oppressed in part by themselves. An age that escalates an entitlement war to a crusade. A rage defined by our Hollywood romance with revenge-based justice. A dark rage that threatens way more than our lights at night if climate and energy do finally implode: it foreshadows the end of the precious gift of life in our corner of the universe. A wasted life gone dark because it could not figure out how to evolve without choking in the vomit of its own rage.

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Death of a Statesman

"The Statesmen Death Waltz"

“Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?” 

- Willy Loman, “Death of a Salesman”

Every salesperson has a Willy Loman somewhere deep in his or her heart of darkness. A frightened boy-man who understands the power of confidence, the magic of conviction. The path to success does not exclude the presence of Willy Loman in a salesperson’s soul: it merely separates those who successfully negotiated Loman’s demons at any cost from those who couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. In an imaginary sequel to Arthur Miller’s epic story, one could conceive a surreal version of It’s a Wonderful Life, but in reverse: Willy gets to find out what his life would have been if he had been a successful salesman, at any cost. In the end, he begs his guardian angel to return him to his life of anonymity. An ordinary life, as his son Biff had begged him to consider. A life where he did not sell his soul for thirty pieces of silver.  

Selling is relationship-building. Nothing more, nothing less. Barring a few irrelevant exceptions, buyers will almost always find their way to sellers they trust, or like, even if they end up paying more. The lowest bidder is a hit-and-run sub-segment of capitalism, the stuff that floats like debris but never runs deep. 

Well over a decade ago I decided that selling was at the heart of what we all do. Whether we know it or we don’t. Children sell clowning or good behavior in exchange of their parents approval. Lovers sell their best behavior in exchange for the promise  of undying love. Professionals sell a perception of irreplaceability in exchange for job security. And successful business leaders-statesmen sell whatever you’re buying. And they’re damn good at it. Believe them, nobody does it better. Nobody.

It would be a sin of false-equivalence to say that all business leaders or statesmen have sold their souls to be where they are. The truth is, we have no way of knowing the true proportion of constructive vs. destructive forces on that front. Pick your battles carefully there, and pray to the gods of mercy that you were more right than wrong at the end of your day.

Mercy being what it is, Willy Loman is not the only one that dies in the end. Destructive salesmen-statesmen sooner or later die as well. Figuratively or literally. And karma being what it is, the statesman who can no longer tell the difference between selling and lying has already been dead inside for years.

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The Demagogue’s Dilemma

The forty-fifth president of the United States is a man of few words. Literally. That much should not be considered a flaw. In fact, it can be a wonderful gift. But when you are a man that knows few words you better choose them wisely. By his own admission, one of 45’s favorite words is “hyperbole”. By his followers’ admonition, they love him no matter what he says because “he tells it like it is.” By logical omission, the world has not seen irony like this before.

Hyperbole is at essence an exaggeration. How large or small of an exaggeration depends on your appetite for the unadulterated truth. Either way, it is a distortion that contains elements of truth at the expense of tarnishing it. We may not initially recognize distortion, but if we look closer we will find it: it is the stuff that dreams are made of. It is in our fantasies and in our painkillers. Distortion is Dr. Feelgood. On the surface it is the rose-colored glasses we wear on a dreary day. But in its heart of darkness, it is the “Code Red” ordered by Colonel Jessup when we can’t handle the truth. Not all of it anyway. But filtered, medicated… distorted? Oh yeah. We want it on that wall... we need it on that wall.

If you’re lucky, a part of you may sense there’s a fair amount of distortion in hyperbole. But you sanitize it as a “casualty”. You reconcile it as a small price to pay, in an ideological war over your god-given right to believe in whatever you damn please. 

In a hyperbolic society, winning becomes everything. It consumes everything. Hyperbole is the friendly fire of your convictions. You accept that it may take down even those whom “you have nothing against”, but it’s better than the alternative. At least according to your fears. Because that twisted strand in our DNA, the one that produces fear, sees losing as the first tumble to a fate worse than death: the loss of freedom.

Losing starts when you are captured, whether figuratively or literally. If you are captured, even if you are one of the good guys, you instantly become a loser. According to the book of winning, if you were captured you really did not know how to win in the first place - otherwise you would have never been captured. It is simple, circular logic. A Machiavellian deal maker, like a good chess player, is moves-ahead of the captured loser. If he knows there’s a good chance he will be captured, the deal maker will sell his soul to avoid the fight.

Distortion carries one more side-effect that we don’t often question, much less associate with hyperbole: raising walls. It turns out we don’t just raise walls to keep people out. We raise them because we do not want others to see who we really are. Serial winners love to build walls around their promised land, purposely excluding aspects of the truth they do not like.

There are many proverbial forks-in-the road throughout our lifetime. But the sum of the crossroads that force you to choose between truth or hyperbole can amount to the Via Crucis of our lives. The truth can be cruel, painful, scary. It can trigger either a tipping point or breaking point. It is at that juncture that you forge your destiny: stick with the undistorted truth at the risk of great sacrifice, or cherry-pick it in the name of winning. There is no middle ground there. One way or another the mighty universe could not care less about your fears and perceptions. It does not see winning as truth, or truth as winning. It’s not that the two don’t overlap, of course they sometimes do. But the tragedy of human ignorance is that they don’t overlap as much as we think they do. Guys like Hitler spent years “winning”. But it is fool’s consolation to say that guys like Hitler always lose in the end. Try telling that to the millions tortured or massacred. “In the end” is an optical illusion, a mirage. If guys like Hitler always lose in the end, history would not have a propensity to repeat itself so goddamn much. Ad nauseam. 

If it’s meaningful consolation you want, consider the fact that the universe will never distort the truth. It can’t, because it’s one and the same. Our existential fork in the road is ironically simple: seek the truth at the expense of some loss, or scurry on to the promised land of winners. A safe house were you are promised protection from losing. A Pleasantville surrounded by walls made of amputated truths. 

As someone who is not a fan of distortion, I‘m forced to pronounce myself a serial loser. I have already lost much, though nowhere near as much as many others. Oh I have won much too. But regardless of my net wins and losses, I’m forced to accept that longing for the unadulterated truth doesn’t make me morally superior. I’m forced to realize that the moment I see truth-seeking as the “winning” path is the moment I’ve wandered off to a dead-end.

That’s where the tip-or-break point comes in. If you’ve managed not to break, congratulations: you have earned a rare choice in life. A chance to come closer to the truth than most mere mortals ever do.

I choose the losers. The ones that were crucified. The ones that were captured. The ones that gave more than they took, which makes them net losers. I choose the ones that don’t trickle, or worship the past. I choose the present. I choose the science of real, not the art of the deal. 

I choose the risk of losing, even though I too attended demagogue school. I choose it knowing I will never fully grasp the whole truth in my lifetime. I choose risk knowing that I will continue to win and lose my way through mortality, with no option for permanence either way. And therein lies the demagogue’s dilemma: if the illusion is good enough, is the price of real victory worth it?

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To A Tennis Player Love Means Nothing

September 4, 1957: Elizabeth Eckford, "The Little Rock Nine"

As someone who may have smashed a tennis racquet or two, I have an insight into the demons that have tormented the likes of Serena Williams and Andre Agassi. It has zero to do with social injustice, but it sure makes for a convenient distraction from accountability. 

I believe some people are turning Serena Williams into a martyr for vicarious reasons: blaming their own demons on some distant social injustice. There have been clear cases throughout history of toxic sexism, plenty to choose from. There are blatant examples of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia in our lifetime. Knee-jerking any and every dispute into a sexist, racist or xenophobic cause is emotionally unintelligent. 

Defending the angst of an ego-bruised, multi-millionaire athlete as if we were reliving the suffering endured by Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock or Rosa Parks in Montgomery is in itself toxic. Serena Williams’ could not hold a candle to a brave black girl one September morning back in 1957, as she carried her schoolbooks through an angry white mob. A mob that needed an entire national guard to stop a girl armed with only a notebook. An amazing grace of courage so that Serena Williams could one day make millions of dollars and hobnob with the top 1% of the world.

Schrödinger’s Democracy

When the US Republican Party embraced the racially inconvenienced and outraged Southern Democrats in the 1960’s, little did we know that the great party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan was selling its soul for thirty pieces of silver. It was slow cooking, but it finally boiled over in 2016. Trump’s democratic coup became transparent within minutes of his election: his was the 5th cancellation of the popular vote in US history. 

But unlike the previous ones, Trump’s electoral college victory saw an unprecedented number of cancelled popular votes: more than 2.8 million. By comparison, the previous highest cancellation was in 2000, with less than 0.5 million votes eliminated by the electoral college. It finally made a lot of Americans take notice after November of 2016: what is this thing called the Electoral College? And more importantly, why does it seem to favor a party riddled with racism and xenophobia?

Those questions should have been asked a long time ago. You would figure that after the Civil War - a bloodbath that claimed the most American lives of any war to date - SOMEONE would have said, “Hey, has everyone forgotten that this Electoral College thing is directly based on slavery math??“ 

Ah, the irony of defeat. The South actually benefited from the Electoral College math, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when their former slaves went from counting as 3/5 human to being whole. “Three-fifths human”. Let that sink in for a moment. The founders of our enlightened democracy had signed their names on one of humanity’s most influential documents, a majestic declaration that did not stutter when it stated the following words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That all men are created equal. Perhaps Napoleon & Snowball the pigs snuck into Independence Hall one fateful summer night, and upon the freshly inked declaration scribbled the words, “but some are only three-fifths human”. Or perhaps this was to be a paradoxical experiment in democracy. One worthy of inspiring Erwin Schrödinger to come up with one of quantum physics most famous thought experiments: “Schrödinger’s Cat”.  In a Schrödinger Democracy, it is possible for ALL men to be created equal, while SOME are simultaneously only three-fifths equal. 

In the aftermath of the Civil War, having lost their Schrödinger Way of Life, the South figured out a way to disenfranchise blacks for the next one-hundred years. With defeats like these who needs victories.

One-hundred years later puts us in 1965, the year after the last of the Civil Rights Acts was signed and sealed by the federal government. What was supposed to be the beginning of a brave new post-Schrödinger Democracy turned out to be, apparently, the year America ceased to be great. It was the year a political mass exodus began, when those who hated the slave-freeing Republican Party now had a new party to hate: the Black-enfranchising  Democratic Party. 

The mother of all ironies is that the party that did so much for this country, one that four-score and seven years after the birth of our nation called out the illegitimate use of the word “freedom” in our Declaration of Independence, was the same party that in 2016 set us back to 1963. 

Mystery solved. We now know what that doggone, dog-whistled year was when America was last great. In a surreal back-to-dystopia twist, Nineteen Sixty-Three was to be the last year when discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin was a God-given right. 

Let this now be self-evident, as we move on and try to make sense of this fine clusterfuck we’ve gotten ourselves into: that what could otherwise be a universal beacon of true greatness on earth, our American Democracy’s tragic flaw boils down to the dumbest of all human fears - the boogeyman of skin color.

It’s hard to judge the distance between brink and precipice - it’s not what we do best as humans. Which brings many of us to our current state of discomfort: how far or how close are we? Either way, here’s a little trail of breadcrumbs our founders left for us. It almost immediately follows their aforementioned words of wisdom that all men are created equal:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...”

Are we there yet?

Mother Should I Run for President? (A Video Blog)

Almost forty years ago, the British psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd released its masterpiece titled "The Wall". The double-album rock opera has proven ageless already, and will very likely remain the conscience of a generation for decades to come. It was not just the music, and it was not just the words. The Wall is a work of art that transcended music as entertainment. It was to be one of the world's most powerful anti-war statements. A sobering rock-lullaby that for ninety-five minutes transforms us to witnesses of humanity's worst enemy: itself.

Almost forty years later, the world seems to have forgotten the pain from totalitarian destruction, from fascism and delusions of racial supremacy. Today, not-so-small segments of so-called developed nations revisit that dark past with nostalgia, emboldened and empowered, as if it was a movement that had simply become a sleeper cell for a generation or two.

It is not the mere fact that destructive sleeper cells can lie dormant for so long that is disturbing. It is the realization that a single man can rise to power, and with a dog-whistling code awaken the hate. Every major war has a post-war dream. "The war to end all wars". This anxiety was best expressed by Pink Floyd on their last studio album, released in 1982, titled "The Final Cut":

"Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified,
Is it for this that daddy died?
Was it you? Was it me?
Did I watch too much T.V.?
Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?
If it wasn't for the Nips
Being so good at building ships
The yards would still be open on the Clyde
And it can't be much fun for them
Beneath the Rising Sun
With all their kids committing suicide.

What have we done, Maggie what have we done?
What have we done, to England...

Should we shout? Should we scream,
"What happened to the post war dream?"
Oh Maggie! Maggie what did we do??" 


- The Post War Dream

Almost forty years later, well over sixty million Americans are asking themselves the same question, like a broken record... Oh America! America what did we do??

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In His Own Words:

"Mother Should I Run for President?"

(A Video Blog)

Music by Pink Floyd: "Mother"  ("The Wall", 1979)