Is Insta-responding Corrupting the American Character?

I watched President Obama and his town hall meeting tonight, with Anderson Cooper, and their discussion and debate with the audience about gun violence and Obama’s modest proposals on gun control. What struck me was perhaps something odd, but the more I thought about it, perhaps something important about modern political discourse: Obama’s speech was slow and deliberate and thoughtful, while Cooper’s speech was quick and pointed and glib.

I thought about Obama’s slow speaking as a way of talking in a seminar, when you have two or three hours to understand a point, whereas Cooper’s speech was on a timer, a fuse lit with seconds to go, zeroing in on a quick point, entertaining yet superficial. As a somewhat slow talker myself, I could listen to Obama, and I gave him the patience to make his point, and I agreed with much of what he said. I wondered if Cooper—representing the media and in a way how we communicate in our media culture—was more modern than Obama, but also at the root of why we in this country are less of a ‘we’ as years go by, why we talk past each other in political discourse, why we characterize opponents in stereotypes (or other facile categorizations) and caricatures. Has ‘media insta-responding,’ to coin a term, corrupted our ability to think carefully, to weigh, to consider, and even to empathize? When we know of a world that only ‘insta-responds,’ do we start basing our decisions on prejudices, stereotypes, and easily understood theories without tests in gritty practice?

Insta-responding is part of our world in a way that it never was for me growing up. We insta-respond on Facebook by pressing a ‘Like’ button, and that somehow demonstrates our political solidarity, or aesthetic preference, or temporary pleasure, or all of the above. We insta-respond through talk radio, with one voice reaching millions and pontificating on this or that current event, quickly, glibly, for entertainment as well as to score political points. And sometimes these are exactly the same: to score a quick political point is to entertain, even if your point is superficial, or based on a straw-man version of your opponent.

Insta-responding is the internet. The troll is a creature of responding fast, in every newspaper discussion page online, in any kind of entertainment forum online. When you are responding fast, and are kind of an ass, then of course you want the ability to be anonymous. So online responding has led to ‘discussion pages’ that are not about discussing anything, but more like pages of one-sentence hit pieces to vent, to smear, to feel good about yourself when you have little else to feel good about. Responding on these ‘discussion pages’ has never changed my mind about anything, has never illuminated me to a new perspective. It’s mostly invective.

Of course, where we see a constant river of insta-responding is on television, and its news, where anchors respond to events as they unfold, before they know who did what to whom, where reporters give preliminary (and often false) conclusions, but who cares? The point is to respond, to capture eyeballs, to entertain, to show the gut-wrenching images, and later, much, much later, to make sense of it all. If anyone tunes in for that more considered perspective or the matter-of-fact corrections the next day, that is. The TV crowd may already be on to the next disaster, or outrage, or political fiasco. And so the wheel keeps a-spinning!

One of the reasons TV has been the first and most important purveyor of insta-responding is because time is money on television. If you can’t speak (and respond quickly), then you can never be an Anderson Cooper. Every second of ‘no talking,’ of ‘no reacting,’ is a second when the viewer can turn away, change the channel. Advertisers hate that, and so do television executives. When we put a price on time, on seconds, and when we put that time on an apparatus called television, any reasonable person would have expected ‘discussions’ to be glib and quick and definitely entertaining, and with images that would also be arresting. A split-second of an image communicates more viscerally than anyone describing that same image. When we as a country have most of our political discourse filtered through television, what do you, as that reasonable person, think would happen to that discourse? ‘Discourse’ would become ‘talk,’ and ‘thinking’ would become ‘insta-responding.’

What kind of political candidate would be favored in this insta-responding world? Someone who would promise to bomb all the bad guys as ‘foreign policy.’ Someone who would say, “Trust me. Just don’t ask me too many hard questions and expect concrete answers.” Someone who would play to your prejudices and anxieties. Someone with all the answers, as long as these ‘answers’ are easy, digestible, colorful, and even outrageous. Someone arrogant who makes fun of complexity and thinking and any crap that keeps him from adulation, or as I would put it, a slavish insta-responding to him.

Imagine another world. Imagine a world where people would turn off their televisions, and debate outside, over cups of coffee, and not through any filters like talk radio hosts, but face-to-face. What would happen to empathy? Imagine if we had hours upon hours discussing such serious issues as gun control, gun violence, the Constitution, the United States becoming multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious as never before, and that these discussions would be done in town squares, or better, through lunches, and weekly meetings that would last until most of us got hungry. Then some of us would go out for a bite to eat. What would happen to how we see each other?

Imagine that many of us valued being alone, and bolstered our minds through reading, and reading literary fiction from other worlds, and imagine that we would take the time to read these long novels from other worlds, and so consider other viewpoints, other societies, characters radically different from us, yet complex characters surviving, failing, trying, loving. What would happen to who we would consider an Other?

Imagine, finally, that we would seek respect from others not because of the size of our biceps or how we could punch like Holly Holm, and not because we are in an SUV and angry and so we better goddamn get respect on the highway, and certainly not because we had a gun in our hand, nor money in the bank, nor a cutie in our arms. We might still need a gun to protect ourselves, and we most certainly would need a cutie in our arms for a variety of reasons, but we would not go to the gun because we demand insta-respect from innocents, and the cutie would be in our arms because we read, and are calm and reliable, and that cutie is like us, a reader, and maybe even a Trekkie or at least a sci-fi geek. We’re imagining, okay?

It’s not too late, America, to escape the Cave of Insta-Responding. Read. Think. Go talk to someone different from you and take him or her out to lunch. And respond to what you hear, but don’t just blab: write about it.

Why I Wrote From This Wicked Patch of Dust

Two days ago at the Brooklyn Book Festival a young woman came up to me after my reading, and asked me a simple question: Why did I write my novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust?  The festival was my first big event to launch the novel, and although what she asked was straightforward, the answer is anything but.  Let me give it a shot.

I wrote From This Wicked Patch of Dust, because I wanted to write about the Mexican-American border, where I grew up.  I wanted to write about the poorest of the poor in a Texas colonia, or shantytown, with a dream of becoming American.  Although the novel is fiction, my family was also dirt poor in Ysleta on the outskirts of El Paso, yet I loved my childhood.  Any voice I have as a writer is in one way or another rooted in communicating what was good, what was struggle, and what we couldn’t answer in Ysleta.

Much of our political rhetoric only caricatures poor immigrants, documented and undocumented.  There is rarely a sense of the commonality we, the more established inhabitants of these United States, share with these newcomers.  I wanted to portray characters who come to life, reach out to the reader, and find a place in his or her thoughts, emotions, and even laughter.  I hope you will see the Martínez family clearly, their warts as well as their merits, and believe in these characters.

I also wanted to focus on the dynamics of immigrant families.  If you read From This Wicked Patch of Dust you will experience the lives of Cuauhtémoc and Pilar Martínez, the parents from the ‘old world,’ so to speak, who sometimes, and sometimes do not, see eye-to-eye on whether and how their family should become American.  The children —Julia, Francisco, Marcos, and Ismael— take divergent paths to becoming American, adopt different religions or cultures, and even move to different places across the country.  The siblings are in conflict with each other, they are in conflict with their parents, yet all of them still belong to and love their family.  The Martinez family tries to keep it together as many things, including their own decisions, pull this family apart.  How do we honor who we are, how do we break away from where we began, and what does all of this mean for our families?

Another question at the heart of my novel was: How can I portray the culture of a group, not one individual, but a related group, as in a family?  That is the reason From This Wicked Patch of Dust is told, alternatively, from the six perspectives of each family member.  We live in families, yet each of us experiences being part of a family in a different way.  We are together, yet we are also apart, in a family.  What keeps us together, and what drives us apart?  That’s the drama at the heart of the novel.

How does time fragment the togetherness of a family?  This is why the chapters in From This Wicked Patch of Dust are several years apart.  Our common experiences are the bonds that keep us together for a while, but as we get older, as individuals and as a group, those common experiences become more experiences in the past.  We start living our lives apart, yet we often yearn to come back together, as adult children, as elderly parents, to that togetherness we once had.  Even though the children of Pilar and Cuauhtémoc Martínez end up in different parts of the world, so far from Ysleta in many ways beyond geography, they retain a bit of Ysleta within them.

I imagined the novel as an orchestra piece, where the different perspectives and time fragments would yield a music by the end of the novel that would give a sense to each reader of what is achieved and what is left behind after a family is gone.  Some would call this micro-history, but it is a 'private history' we all experience in one way or another in our lifetime. And this experience has so much to do with what kind of selves we become. Certainly it is a different kind of storytelling than the escapism and neat ending of a typical Hollywood movie, which encourages short-term satisfaction rather than reflection.  As a writer, I hope I have caused my readers to think.

Finally, the allegorical allusions in the novel are focused on this question: Why are we as a country growing further apart?  Why do we have less in common with each other?  Why do we see only ‘the other’ in our neighbor, or in an ethnic group not quite like us, or in a religious group not quite like us?  Admittedly, a country is not a family.  I know that.  But there is a sense when a group feels more together, and when it has ceased to be a group at all and individuals just exist next to each other, ready to take advantage of each other at a moment’s notice.

Have we reached that point in the United States, where we have little in common with each other?  Where Birmingham, New York City, and Reno are as foreign as Cairo and Tel Aviv?  There is no way empirically to prove or disprove this.  I can only point to our bitter political rhetoric, the media manipulation to promote narrow agendas and to divide us, and what I hear and see on the streets of El Paso, New York, Kansas City, San Francisco, and wherever else I travel.

What can bring us back together, if anything?  From This Wicked Patch of Dust has a tentative answer at the end of the novel.  Of course, I am always hopeful.  I will always make the effort to grapple with a question even when it is one such as: Why did you write this novel?  I must have said something coherent to the young woman at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  After I finished talking, she bought the book and asked me to sign it to ‘Meryl.’

Economic uncertainty as a political weapon

You have to hand it to the House Republicans: they have outplayed President Obama in almost every respect on the deficit-ceiling debate, but primarily in their use of economic uncertainty as a political weapon.  Republicans have set the terms of the debate, while Obama did not respond, analyze, anticipate, and attack months ago.

The president did not try to frame the debate, or lead the country to set the terms of the debate.  He did not anticipate how sophisticated, yet simple, the Republican plan against him was, and he did not counteract it before it blossomed into the near-fiasco we are facing now.

Consumer confidence and business confidence are key to uplifting an economy burdened by recession and shock.  This was the state of the U.S. economy at the end of 2008, when George W. Bush left an economic mess for Obama to clean up.  This confidence is invisible, but if it is eroded over time, people and businesses don’t invest, don’t create jobs, and don’t take risks, even if they have the money.  They hoard their cash.

After we weakly climbed out of recession with the emergency measures adopted by Obama immediately after he took office (some of these measures had been initiated by the Bush administration), I knew we were at the point where the economy would either gain momentum, or lose steam and fall back to some version of the disaster at the end of the Bush administration.

If we gained momentum, we would create more jobs, and the temporary measures which added to the deficit would be a historical footnote since the economy would grow fast enough to reduce the deficit in relation to the size of our economy.  But if we didn’t, then we would be saddled with the ‘temporary deficit,’ and a lack of jobs, and a weak economy, and Obama would surely not be re-elected.  Since I voted for Obama, I was rooting for the economy to improve, and expand, over the past two-three years.

During these past two-three years, however, I noticed something interesting.  I’ve read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal every day for decades.  I want different perspectives; I want to consider different voices.  But whereas the editorial page of the Journal has always been conservative, at least fiscally, if not socially, the front page and news pages have been a mix.  But in my opinion, not anymore.

With every slight uptick in the economy over the past two-three years, whether it was on jobs, or corporate profits, the front-page Journal articles were relentlessly negative.  Sometimes on the same story, it seemed as if I were living in two realities: what the Journal reported —the economy is awful under Obama, we are going nowhere, these corporate profits are illusory— and what the Times reported— we may be turning the corner, banks have recapitalized, companies are flush with cash.  Was the Journal being too pessimistic, or the Times too optimistic?

You could pick your facts to support either side, and that’s my point.  But why would anyone want to ‘talk down’ the economy?  I even imagined that perhaps the new Journal owner, Rupert Murdoch, had placed the kind of editors who would undermine confidence in the American economy under Obama.  But perhaps I was being too paranoid, I thought.  But I also knew such a relentlessly negative spin on anything that might improve the economy would also have an effect on whether individuals and companies spend money, even modestly, to grow us out of the deficit we incurred after we cleaned up the mess Bush left behind.  Most people in business read the Journal.

Obama didn’t help himself by focusing on healthcare reform, instead of jobs, eighteen months ago.  He didn’t help himself by not recognizing that House Republicans, after last November’s election, did not trust him absolutely, assumed he was a traditional, even radical liberal, and would not work with him.  They want him out.  Period.

As an old friend pointed out to me this summer, perhaps Obama was too young when he became president.  Too inexperienced.  Too much in belief of himself, instead of recognizing what effect he had on others, particularly on a white middle-class seeing the livelihoods slip away for their children, while this country becomes more Latino, more Asian, more Muslim, while American corporations react to globalization by shipping jobs overseas, for more profits which their investors (often ourselves) demand.

If Obama had recognized the unique ways in which he would never be trusted by House Republicans, and perhaps a great swath of the American electorate, he would have ‘triangulated,’ à la Bill Clinton, before or certainly after last year’s election.  That just means Obama would have acted as a fiscal conservative to counteract the (reasonable and unreasonable) prejudices of these Republicans and that part of the American electorate that would never trust him.  In that way, Obama would have positioned himself for reelection, in the middle of the road, which is how you win elections in this country.

When Obama ordered our Navy Seals to kill Bin Laden, that was a perfect moment of ‘triangulation’: the quasi-Muslim American president, who may or may not have been born in Hawaii, killed one of America’s greatest enemies.  You could sense when that happened that Obama’s harshest critics even tipped their hats to him, and perhaps for a moment reconsidered their zealous opposition to everything Obama.  That moment put Obama in a new light.  The problem is that Obama did not have, or aggressively pursue, enough of these ‘triangulation moments.’

If he had done that, if Obama had recognized that a significant portion of the American electorate and these adamant, inflexible House Republicans were already painting him as a stick-figure liberal who will only explode the deficit any chance he gets, Obama would have acted differently, and set the terms of the debate.  He would have gotten out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and pointed out the huge waste of hundreds of billions of dollars on defense spending, while our allies spend so little and ride our coattails.  He would have attacked government waste seriously, and closed unnecessary departments (but not the ones helping the disadvantaged or the needy).  He would have repeatedly pointed out how certain American companies pay so little in taxes, because they have sweetheart tax breaks from Congress.  He would have recognized that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played an important role in the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis at the end of the Bush administration, and how Republicans and Democrats both benefited from their political and economic ties to these companies.  Everybody in Congress was greedy when it came to Fannie and Freddie.

But Obama didn’t do any of the above, relentlessly, day after day, ahead of the curve, so that he wouldn’t be boxed in later.  He allowed House Republicans to set the terms of the debate, and responded only to what they wanted, and simply kept giving in to their demands.  And they have just kept saying no.

What I think is rarely pointed out is this: by passing this temporary, short-term increase in the debt ceiling, with deep spending cuts and another vote in early 2012 on the debt ceiling, House Republicans are using economic uncertainty as a political weapon.  The more uncertainty there is in and about the American economy, the fewer jobs will be created.  The more economic uncertainty there is in and about the American economy, the more the stock market will languish, or even decline.  And of course, the more the government is contracting before the election, the fewer jobs and services will exist in 2012.  The fewer jobs in the American economy, and the worse off Americans feel about their economic prospects, the better the 2012 elections will be for the Republicans.

They have outplayed Obama, and now here we stand on the brink of default.  We will all pay a huge price for these selfish political games.  When we ‘talk down’ the economy, when we lose our AAA credit rating, and when the dollar’s role as a reserve currency erodes, we all lose.  What happened to ‘us’?  Why are we not a ‘we’ anymore?  Who could be that transformative, adaptive figure who can still lead us to change for the better, while still making us believe we belong together as a country?

Why We Are Not A 'We'

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times is one of the most thoughtful newspaper columnists. Two days ago he wrote a piece about how the current political climate of the U.S. has taken a dangerous turn permanently delegitimizing the presidency and tacitly encouraging violence, particularly from the fringe far right: “Where Did ‘We’ Go?”

The Facebook poll asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” is the most recent example, but Friedman also mentions the crazy rhetoric of Lou Dobbs, whom I have repeatedly criticized on the pages of Chico Lingo, and too many other examples in the media, particularly in the blogosphere and cable news channels, which also hasten our downward spiral into a country no longer a community, but a country at war with itself.

But I believe Friedman does not go far enough in analyzing the ‘why,’ the reasons the United States seems more fractured than ever. Why do ‘we’ seem to be incapable of tackling problems affecting all of us without a descent into vitriol and even hatred of our opponents? What happened to compromise and practicality and giving each other the benefit of the doubt? Here are some interrelated whys:

1. We as a society do not have patience anymore. TV and visual images are in part to blame. Give your opinion in fifteen seconds, do it loudly, and that’s what we now call ‘debate.’ We have commercialized time on TV: that’s the reason for these ridiculous lightning-round debates that solve nothing, convince no one, and just end up reinforcing prejudices because that’s all the time you have on TV (the most pervasive, influential medium). Plato, eons ago, warned how the focus on images would degrade our ability to think and reason: The man or woman who focuses on images loses the highest form of the self, the thoughtful self.

2. We don’t read anymore. The market for serious books is dying. Just look at the publishing industry. In fact, what is published now is too often celebrity books, memoirs of scandal, books by pretty and famous people who have little to say beyond the adrenalin moment. Disposable literature. Our kids are not reading, but instead play video games. My kids are great readers, but it’s because I’ve kept them from turning on the TV whenever they feel like it; I’ve kept them from mainstream, materialistic American culture. “After you do your homework, watch TV for an hour, but that’s it.” I may be an anachronism, but my kids are excellent students and know who they are because of their own, real accomplishments.

3. We are a diverse culture, but now minorities possess growing power and responsibility and the traditional majority does not easily want to cede being ‘the standard,’ that is, being the face of America. Latinos, as we all know, have grown in number to become the largest minority, surpassing even African-Americans (who themselves are uncomfortable with perhaps not being the ‘official minority’ anymore). The Asian population has similarly increased. Soon, demographers predict that the traditional ‘white majority’ (comprised of families with English, Italian, Irish, German, and other European ancestry) will be the minority.

I can only imagine what these demographic trends have meant in, say, a small town in the Midwest or the South where new Latin American immigrants speak Spanish and bring strange customs to your town. The strength of New York City, where I now live, is that these cultural, religious, ethnic, racial interactions happen every day. You are not so easily susceptible to the TV or talk-radio smear that Latinos are this way, or Jews are that way, or Muslims are sinister, or strangers with accents are suspect, because you see these people every day. They may be your friends. Your kids go to school with their kids.

Prejudices based on abstractions, the raw meat of today’s dangerous political rhetoric, don’t easily take hold when you can see with your own eyes that excellent parents are in every culture, excellent friends may exist in every religion, brave characters with all sorts of funny accents ennoble you. But this is not a kumbaya moment. Irresponsible idiots also come in every shape, size, and color. But the point is that abstractions don’t work on you anymore when you actively seek out and live in diversity. You must judge the individual; you need to pay attention and listen; above all you need to have the patience to understand whoever might at first seem alien to you.

4. The United States is a mature economy, while other countries like China, Brazil, and India are gaining the kind of prosperity we took for granted. Fifty years ago, it must have been a heady time when we were unquestionably the most important economy in the world. But now that’s not true anymore. We are still the biggest, but many have caught up and surpassed our per-capita wealth. Others, the newcomers, have rapidly become significant sources of brain power, savings, and economic and military power. We can’t dictate terms anymore. Our companies have to fight it out to survive, and few have the unquestioned might of yesteryear’s behemoths. The world, most importantly, is moving away from an American-centered world economy, with negative implications for the dollar as a reserve currency.

We’ve also lost manufacturing jobs. The lowest skilled are the most vulnerable to this changing world. They are the most susceptible to zealots and slick-talking TV and radio gurus who appear to have all the answers. And many are listening, because over the years they have been trained to think ‘listening’ is just watching TV. It’s not. TV stupefies you. Period. Talk radio? Turn if off.

1, 2, 3 and 4 might lead you to think I’m pessimistic about the future of the United States. I’ll tell you how pessimistic I am. Last weekend, I went to Home Depot twice (about 30 miles total), because I had purchased the wrong-size American flag to hang next to our front door in Connecticut. Our three-year-old flag, which was faded and torn, I tucked away in my closet. I’m just gonna keep it. It fills me with pride to see our new flag fluttering amid the spectacular colors of autumn in the Litchfield Hills.

I am proud of my country. But let me give you some advice. Turn off the TV. Stop listening to Lou Dobbs, and see him for what he is: an idiot who wants to make money by making you watch him. Pick up a good book and read it carefully. Raise your children to be thinkers, to focus on their homework, to work hard. Make an effort, by picking up the phone or knocking on a door, to meet a neighbor vastly different from you, a Muslim, a Jew, a Mexicano who can barely speak English. Don’t just meet him once, but get to know the person, his kids. If his child befriends your child, and they marry (as Laura and I did nineteen years ago), work on understanding their family. Some things you will never understand. Other things you will uncannily see eye-to-eye. But no one will ever be able to tell you they don’t belong in your neighborhood.