McCullough's John Adams: United and Apart is Best

I. United--while Divided--We Stand

Fortunately, in our home we share a love of American history--and a really, really good story--and so all have been positively glued to the HBO series based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winning biography, John Adams. The script is true to McCullough's text--he was very involved in its treatment for the screen. As I watch, I am also aware of how much more my freedom, and the responsibility to protect it, have come to mean to me as I have aged, suffered, celebrated, and lived through 9/11 and a complex war now five years running with no resolution in sight.

The "good story" that the mini-series hinges upon, is the power and paradox inherent in compromise without surrendering integrity. In other words: how to win while losing, how to be true while allowing what you oppose to transpire.

During the debate over how to deal with British King George's policy of taxation without representation in the Colonies, Pennsylvania Quaker John Dickinson made an impassioned--and impressive--case for pacifism, not insurrection. More impressive was his ultimate decision, made when he realized that he was not in the majority, to heed the advice of fellow Continental Congress delegate Ben Franklin, and "be indisposed" when it came time to vote on whether to declare war on Britain. Understanding Dickinson's anguish over what he knew would be monstrous, and perhaps useless, bloodshed--how could one not be moved?

I was. And it caused me to reflect on our current election--a process made possible by men like Dickinson and Franklin who were willing to stay with the dilemmas presented them until they had resolved them. Unlike what I keep hearing from presidential race watchers who say that we need to all just "come together" and stop the partisanship, Dickinson did not unite with his colleagues. Nor did he fight them with intimidating words or intrigue, other than to agree to be "indisposed." He also did not, at least not publicly, vilify his colleagues. He remained true to himself. He was a hero, even though he failed to stop the violence he loathed. His thoughtful maturity showed him that the world is imperfect, and that to have an open heart and mind, and to consider the views of others while still being paradoxically convicted of a Truth, was the best way to serve and protect.

Concurrent with this mini-series are the events unfolding in Tibet and one of the most arresting political moves I have ever witnessed: the Tibetan-leader-in-exile, and non-violent, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dalai Lama, saying he will abdicate his political position (albeit, remain a Buddhist spiritual leader) if his followers in Tibet do not end their violent insurrection. These are people who have been tortured, degraded, and oppressed by the Chinese for half a century, atrocities which the Dalai Lama fully knows--probably better than anyone, and yet he is choosing NOT to unite with his people, i.e., not support their choice. What a paradox! He opposes what the Chinese have done, and yet in order to encourage his people to stay unified with him in principle, he opposes them, too! What will happen? I am riveted.

Knowing that there are guns pointed at you by merciless souls...is there a right answer for how to achieve peaceful freedom in the face of them? Is freedom worth death?

Leaders have to lead and take decisive action, even when they have misgivings. The Dalai Lama has certainly made a decisive statement--what is more powerful than an ultimatum, but the actual execution of it? As for Dickinson, he eventually did support the Declaration of Independence, and the Revolution itself. He didn't condone the violence, but he saw that it was the chosen way to freedom, even if it wasn't his choice.

These men demonstrate that we don't need to all "come together" in the sense that I hear the talking heads suggest. That's for sissies. The pacivists among us, and perhaps the warriors as well, might agree that it's much safer for us to be adults, united and apart at the same time.

II. United while Divided and Standing on Fishes
I wrote this back in November 2004, after hearing John Kerry's concession speech to George W. Bush. I think it's even more true today as we scuffle through election 2008...

The defining moment for me in this year’s presidential election was when my mother, a life-long Republican who lives in a quite un-environmentally sound “McMansion,” informed me that she had joined the Green Party and was voting for John Kerry.

It made sense.

Also an avid gardener, bird watcher and “see-the-beauty” Sunday driver who, when we were kids, taught my brother and me to survive in the woods (but never to hunt), my mother recently had challenged a developer backed by the local Republican machinery and had, against the odds, won. Her efforts resulted in the patch of land in question being declared “open space,” protected in perpetuity from development.

My mother’s subsequent change of parties seemed to me a natural progression of this victory; it was not an act of spite, but a current reflection of how protecting what she loves had changed how she defined herself.

But love in action, whether it is of ideals, of country, or of home and hearth, is a shadowy thing. Sometimes, we twine ourselves tightly around what we hold dear, wringing the very life out of it until, eventually, all that remains is our own form twisted around the memory of what once was. Sometimes we call this “tradition” when what it truly has become for us is a prison of our design.

Other times, we are inchoate and uncommitted, taking our loves for granted, either because we are arrogant or because we are truly incapable of fully understanding something or someone’s significance in our lives, until the day we are thunder-clapped with regret to find that our beloved ideal, lover, homeland, what-have-you has slipped away and we are powerless to restore it to its former place.

So that what we love does not elude us, we must commit to letting the shape of what we love shift. It is as though, as the poet Rilke wrote in his poem, “Moving Forward,” we must be willing to “stand on fishes,” letting the currents flow around us and carry us deeper, ever mindful not to let them carry us away.

Ultimately, my mother is not bound by party lines. Her seeming incongruities—her conspicuous consumption of land for her super-sized home juxtaposed against her doggedness in battle to preserve an oak grove and a fox den—merely indicate she is rooted in the land of her true self: a passionate devotee of all things beautiful. By switching parties, I see my mother as digging deeper into the earth of her soul, not careening around the political landscape looking for a slogan or a candidate to define what matters to her. Other changes in how she sees herself and what choices she makes as a result might still be to come...

Senator Kerry said that in his concessionary call to President Bush, the two, “talked about the danger of division in our country and the need - the desperate need - for unity, for finding common ground and coming together."

Perhaps that “common ground” will be easier to reach if, like my mother, we are willing to first visit the interior landscapes beyond the fences of our proscribed, public identities. Perhaps for many this is “fishy” territory: a place where we fear there are too many surprises to assimilate and so would rather not tread.

Yet, coming together as a nation seems impossible if we are not wise and patient enough as individuals to know it is that interior place that is constant and true, not the boundaries we construct around it. Our convictions might not change, the way we define them probably will. This does not mean we are fractured, simply that we are alive to the currents within and committed to letting them flow.

Which brings me back to what my tree-hugging, house-proud mother’s announcement caused me to realize: we are not a nation divided so much as a nation in-between. Our unity relies not upon resolving our differences so much as living with them.

In order to protect what we love in this nation we must learn to stand on fishes.

###

Good News for Right Brainers

This just in from Booksquare:

We are in fact raising a nation of readers, writers, and publishing prospects:

http://www.booksquare.com/the-market-that-yours-to-lose/

Manga Management Redux

Shortly after I pre-viewed it from mere gleanings, not actual readings, Riverhead/Penguin provided me with a copy of Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, illustrated by Manga artist, Rob Ten Pas. (Thanks.)

Now I have some questions.

But, first, some kudos and a critical note.

Being over 40, I am old as dirt when compared to the early twenty-something audience Pink and Ten Pas intend to reach, so Manga is not my traditional vernacular. However, being the mother of a tweener, I have retrieved from the backseat floor of my car a fair amount of Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon cards; and working in the publishing industry, I have lugged home enough Manga samples from the BEA, to know what sells. Still, I wondered, why is Diana of the Chopsticks (Bunko's goddess) such a black belt b*tch? In one frame, she chucks a stapler, hard, at Johnny's head. And she is forever mangling the young man's name, on purpose, it would seem. Is meanness a Manga convention of which I am unaware, having seen only what sells, not what is Manga hardcore?

Ten Pas's Manga drawings are entertaining: just enough Westernization of the characters to feel authentically exotic without being distracted, especially if Manga isn't your thing. I also enjoyed Ten Pas's little side stories inserted through out...Bunko and Diana's synchronized kata performance between chapters One and Two being my favorite.


Perhaps Ten Pas's renderings of recognizable cultural references were intentional: was the Starbuck's in one frame a product placement? Is Bunko's bald friend an avatar of Pink pal, marketing guru, and well-known chrome dome, Seth Godin?

With Bunko, Pink and his publishing posse achieve perfect word count. It's hard to tell an effective story in few words. Ten Pas's cheeky illustrations drive the Bunko bus along, but the further an allegory aspires to travel, the wiser (and more ruthless) the edits must be.


And, while it's subtitled, "The last career guide you'll ever need," Johnny Bunko's tale is, make no mistake, absolute allegory. It's the tale of a young man in his first "real" job, hating every minute of it, and going on a Hero's Journey in search of why and how to change his predicament so that he works and lives in harmony with himself. Yay, Dan Pink. Really.

Since we've come to (somehow) operate in a world of professionals with "communications" degrees hanging on their walls and prescriptive non-fiction books about the metrics of marketing on their nightstands, anyone who wants to tell me a good story about navigating one's purpose in life by way of the constellations of commerce is welcome in my world. For a minute there, with the exception of Patrick Lencione's fans of his chirpy-but-lovable consultants, I didn't think there was anyone left who actually read prescriptive fiction.


Once upon a time (excuse the punny literary device), such stories were taught as ways we might engage our imaginations and chart our course. For that reason alone, I hope Pink's book does well. However if what Pink himself in earlier books and articles has predicted is true--that we have entered the Age of the Right Brain, then Johnny Bunko will ring true with readers.

But, will Bunko be a man for our age?

To re-cap the six tenets of Bunko's message:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It's not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

Sounds good. Harmless, even. But, as we plough the fields of our right brain, and eschew the path to Accounting, we're bound to unearth many dilemmas. Such as, are we prepared to live in a world where our corporations no longer take care of us? (Financially anyway; there is a trend towards providing immediate "quality of life" types of perks--part of the right brain infiltration.) While we are forging the smithies of our souls (a good thing), following our bliss and not our parents' advice, will we be able to support a family, much less ourselves?


In other words, thinking with our right brains requires we have a very stout heart pumping in our respective chests. That's because we will be flying without the so-called security net. Oh, wait. Enron. Arthur Andersen. Dot bomb. Okay, so it requires we ADMIT that we've been flying without a net for a decade or more now. (Stout heart and some solid stones. That oughtta do it.)


I believe Pink is right: the era of heuristic thinking has arrived. What lags isn't our longing to embrace our bliss and run away with it, it's something else--something that if we don't get it together, Bunko's journey will offer us an empty ride.

We do not have a practical system that supports our longings, no matter how devoutly and excellently we adhere to items 1 through 6. Complicating the application of Pink's advice is the bizarre twenty year social experiment we've perpetrated nationally--largely through our schools, and definitely in the media--that in fact, everything is about you.


Which brings me to my first question: are there really legion college graduates entering the workforce today who were exhorted to follow the same general advice my generation and the one before it was? Namely, as Bunko's tale recounts, "If you want to get ahead, you have to have a plan. Major in accounting. That way you'll always have a job." If so, I don't meet these people. Where are they? To be fair, I do meet young adults who have no idea what they want to do, but were actually brave enough to get degrees in philosophy or art history. Now, though, they are either too scared or too jaded by failed attempts to apply their passion in an economy that doesn't seem to have a place for them.


But I also meet many kids who seem aimless and unemployable. They didn't even get "bad" advice telling them to become IT or accounting majors. They have not been taught anything that anchors them to themselves, much less their future. They seem to have a vague uneasiness about them--as though they are aware they've somehow been ripped off. They were taught it was all about them, that the world never says "no", and yet, I wonder if what I am sensing in them is the internal question, "If I'm so special and unique, why can't I impact the world?"


They don't have any practical skills, such as how to communicate clearly or solve basic problems--essential in a customer-intense, touchy-feely world. And they know they're not going anywhere as a result. Just because we're becoming more about our imaginations, doesn't mean we don't need structures for how to interact. We need them even more!


Is this deficiency the fault of our schools? Kinda. Moreso, it's the fault of us all as societal sleepwalkers. We've allowed unevolved thinking to run rampant. It sums up this way: Me, Liberal, You Conservative. Me good, you Bad. AND...Me, Conservative, You, Liberal. Me good, You bad. Insert a little chest pounding, and you get the picture. It's a perfect canvas for finger pointing, but not actually growing our minds.

We've been so weirdly focused on the debate of who has the better solution for how to train our children's minds, that we've devolved into an adolescent us v. them, fighting over whether prayer should be allowed in schools, or to hand all questions of meaning and purpose over to the church of self-primacy. The larger question of how to offer students tools like critical thinking so they could work their own way through the human continuum seems to have never entered the debate. Thought control has been the real battle ground.


The more effective way to prime our minds would be: Me, Human, You Human. Me have power to operate somewhere on the continuum of good and bad, and so do you. Now what do we do?


That sort of attempt at citizenship has to be the ultimate goal of right brain thinking or we're screwed. The right brain being in the forefront doesn't mean we should lobotomize the left. The left brain's skills for money management and creating order out of chaos, remain important. Further, if Pink's tenet "It's not about you" is to really have any power in the world, then it will foster the understanding that it's just absurd to think that one group has the complete, right answer to anything--ANYTHING!


That goes for the trend of today's generation, being "socially aware"--especially by those kids who are aware that they want to connect to themselves and to feel meaning . How effective their attempts to apply Pink's "give back" and "leave an imprint" will be, hinge upon how integrated they are as human beings. Can they handle that the world they wish to improve is filled with villains who are also heroes and vice versa? If they've read enough allegory, and Shakespeare and other Classics--or whatever prescriptive fiction that comes from their respective traditions--while they're at it, they might have a chance. They might then even produce their own stories, a la Bunko, that record their growth in a contemporary way.


And here is my second question: are we, as right brained artisans of a new world, willing to stop characterizing Capitalism as the left brained greedy root of evil (See above "Me Tarzan, you Bonehead" example) and instead teach our right brain-dominant work force how to actually operate within Capitalism? If companies are not going to provide for our retirement as they once did for the Boomers, then what? We're either left to socialize our right brained population, or give ourselves the practical skills for managing our money, investing our money, and allowing our system to actually operate the way it's meant to: freely.


What's that old saying...the one that came up a few times during the 1787 Continental Convention...oh, right: with great freedom comes great responsibility...? If it takes the arrival of the right brain to loosen the stiff chauvinism of the left one so that we actually grow up, integrate both lobes, and follow the six steps of Bunko's journey, then The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is most definitely a relevant tale for our age.

###

If I were to Eat, Love, Pray on my publisher's dime, I would perform a spiritual epiphany, too

After resisting it for two years, reluctant to spend time reading a book I predicted would be exactly what it is, I succumbed to the urgings of several friends, and I have just finished Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Love, Pray.

I enjoyed it. But did I find it to be the de facto 21st Century spiritual journey it is marketed to be? Not so much. (As it has been on the NYT Bestseller list for scores of weeks, and has been re-printed a trillion times, I dispense with giving an overview, and write as though you've already read it since you probably already have.)

At the risk of being relegated to the ranks of legion atheists and anti-spiritualists currently stomping through American letters, (some more amusing than others; to wit, the shaggy, school-boyish Christopher Hitchens, whom, when he is not being paraded around as a cash cow carnival attraction for his publisher, Hachette's Twelve, I imagine stumbling around his home, sucking on ciggies, dressed in a coffee-stained T shirt that says "I Hate Everyone"), I would like to point out the under belly of Eat, Love, Pray.

But first, a disclaimer. Gilbert is a wonderful writer. Faced with a choice between reading Gilbert versus another writer, especially another travel writer, I would likely choose Gilbert for her companionable and witty style. As an innocent reporting abroad, she is inimitable: comical observations of the natives without diminutizing them (Peter Mayle might take note), sensual descriptions of her surroundings, and delight in her good luck to be our eyes and ears.

And, at a rather large book signing in New Jersey, where the usual hazards for authors were in place--audience members who won't cede the floor, sputtering question after irrelevant question at the author once the original has been answered, and worse, the audience member who has come to witness for one and all how much she and the author have in common, in fact, are probably soul sisters!!!--I observed Gilbert taking the silliness in stride, and with grace. I liked her from afar and would be hard pressed to believe it if she were reported to be an overbearing diva in person.

So what's my gripe?

Pilgrim Gilbert was paid to have an epiphany.

Viking/Penguin, her publisher, funded Gilbert's forays into the land of I's (Italy, India, and Indonesia). With the obligation to transform hanging contractually over her head, there was little doubt she'd morph from damaged divorcee into spiritual sophisticate. True, the arrival of Felipe in her life was a nice bit of lagniappe, and a bonus for Viking--here comes the sequel!

But, even before Felipe's arrival, Gilbert was never fully alone. Never--not that we saw. She always knew she was writing for an audience, and so, really was engaged in "performance healing".

What about all the raw, utterly raw, filth that typically gets poured forth into journals during times of crisis? The self-loathing, the anger, the abject terror, the blame, even the morbid but funny observations about ourselves? That is where the real work is done. If Gilbert's account of transformation is even remotely authentic, it must be a sanitized version of what she really penned. To be fair, who wants to buy a book of mentally torqued ravings? Viking would have revoked its advance.

But, thinking in this manner, I couldn't help but wonder if Gilbert has written herself into a trap.

How deeply could Gilbert really have delved, if at all times she was editing her experience? Similar to how studies have shown that people act differently while under observation than they do when in private, I had the sense that Gilbert's book was similar to a spiritual "reality" TV show. Had she written it as a roman a clef, with an "objective" narrator's voice offering perspective, rather than as strict memoir, I would have found it more believable.

According to promotional materials, Gilbert's sequel, Weddings and Evictions, due in 2009, is about marriage to Felipe and, among other things, about her setting up house with him in rural New Jersey. No clue about the evictions part.

As it is under contract, she will have to live up to her reputation for discovering the spectacular in the mundane. But, what happens when things in Gilbert's life get boring, as they inevitably will? No trips abroad, no Latin lover romance (she's re-married, remember), no palm reading soothsayers to explode her consciousness into enlightenment.

(One theory: as a resident of our nation's most populous-per-mile state, the only "rural" I can think she's found in New Jersey are the Pinelands, which, unless she has encountered the Jersey Devil, really makes me think she is setting herself up to test her threshold for boring. If this is indeed where she is, I suspect we will hear much about the Mullica River and the Leeds family's 13th spawn, aka The Devil, and what encountering it has taught Gilbert about herself...I could be wrong, but I am willing to bet you money...)

Reading Gilbert's lovely prose, it's easy to forget that sometimes in life, there is just nothing special about the day. Or, worse, sometimes the meaning we assign the little things turn out to be misguided, or even wrong. We don't really know until we can look back with wisdom.

This is the trap I am speaking of: all those glorious epiphanies Gilbert had...they will fade. Some of them might even become irrelevant. Then what? Will she ever truly experience her life for what it is? Or, will she have to glam it up, ham it up, in order to fulfill her obligation to sell books?
Time is an essential lens for truthful perspective. To continually give the play by play of our lives, or even the instant re-play, we can hamper our ability to appreciate the long view, the one seen only from a quiet place where editors and publishers and readers and friends are not invited.

It brings me back to the woman at the book signing who practically threw herself at Gilbert, so akin did she feel their lives to be. No, no, no. This is not possible, dear woman, whoever you are. Please pull the plug on that fantasy immediately and get back to the work of living your life.

Gilbert's journey is decidedly NOT like most of ours. She might very well be a spiritual person, but to the public, first and foremost, she is an entertainer. She has an obligation the rest of us do not: to instantaneously assign meaning to every detail--or to explain, entertainingly so--why there is no meaning in a detail. She must do this because she must sell books.

Gilbert's memoir recounts a journey, a very entertaining one, but as for the quote she offers to open her book, "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth...", it's best to remember that reality shows and reality itself do not necessarily share the same truth. That doesn't make one of them a lie, it just makes it a tad imprecise...