A shallow interpretation: "To Buffalo Eastward" by Gabriel Bump, Best American Short Stories 2021

I'm putting a disclaimer up front: I've only read The Great Gatsby once, in high school. I've also only read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man once, in college. I've never read Joyce's Ulysses, and from all I know of it, I never intend to. The Cliff's notes seem enough. 

That rather shabby background might seem to put me in a poor position to produce a credible reading of Gabriel Bump's short story "To Buffalo Eastward," since allusions to those three novels play such a central role in the narrative. However, I'm going to suggest that my half-assed familiarity with these three novels makes me, in fact, the perfect reader of this story.

That's because the narrative is full of characters who perform half-assed readings: of songs, of books, but mostly of people. The unnamed central character (Karen! The drinking game begins with the first story!) known only as "Invisible Man," is on their* way from northern Michigan to somewhere east of Buffalo. They're headed there after a disappointment in love. Not really a breakup, more a hoped-for, impossible dream that never fully materialized. Invisible Man was into a girl who turned out to be more interested in marrying a guy she'd been seeing. 

A journey to a destination is often the stuff of epics (like the original Ulysses), but in this case, it's something of an anti-epic. The great American travel adventure has always been about an adventure west, into the wild. Invisible Man, though, is headed back east, back past that great symbol of wild American adventure, the buffalo. IM's journey is much like their narrative--full of digressions and meanderings. They confess about their indirect story telling: "I have problems telling stories. I get on one track and backflip to another, running in the opposite direction." 

As the story slowly unfolds, IM stops at bookstores on the road and runs into a few people. The most notable of these people are the three IM meets near Cleveland, who all give names made up on the spot taken from novels. There's Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, two women who name themselves for Great Gatsby characters, and then there's a carpenter/bookstore owner/landlord who calls himself Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's esquire. (Okay, I have read Quixote with a fair amount of care, and more than once, and in Spanish, but I don't think you really need to know more than most people know about it for this story.) 

Sancho and Invisible Man are having a drink in a bar while watching a baseball game. IM narrates some of the details of the game, but manages to get the name of one of the teams wrong, calling the Twins "Minneapolis" instead of "Minnesota." When the girls enter the bar, they ask what Sancho is reading, and are told it's Joyce. "Dubliners!" one of them shouts. "Finnegan's Wake!" shouts the other. They obviously have about an English 101 knowledge of Joyce. They probably have only read the books that were assigned to them in school, which is why they give themselves names from The Great Gatsby. They have a similar reaction to Invisible Man's name. "The lights!" one of the Great Gatsby girls yells, which is about all I can remember of that novel I read more than twenty years ago. 

The Great Gatsby girls are only capable of the most cursory understandings of the texts that lurk at the back of the story. Daisy Buchanan calls herself "alone and boring," meaning the character in the book she is named for is alone and boring. Her companion complains that this is "a shallow interpretation," but all the characters are interpreting shallowly. They listen to songs on the radio, but without trying to understand what they mean: "We tried to guess the words to songs we hadn't heard before, wouldn't hear again." They go through long periods of silence because "there was nothing to know." When they pile into Invisible Man's car, they can see IM's "life laid bare for them to inspect and handle" in all the books, clothes, and trash in the car, but instead of trying to learn from what's there, they throw it into the trunk with the rest of the mess. 

Everyone ends up going to an office building Sancho allegedly owns, where they pass several more people they catch only glimpses of. The entire world continually presents them with texts they are only reading the covers of. They get high off pills Sancho gives them. They spend hours talking about relationships that have gone bad, partly through the inability to truly understand the people in their lives. This talking, though, does not lead to real connection: "We spent hours like that: talking and not understanding one another's eyes."  

It's not that the characters do not desire something deeper. They are briefly attracted to "charts and graphs and memos" they find in the office building, because through them they "felt connected to important happenings." While high, Jordan Baker dreams of going to the deepest parts of the ocean, archetypal symbol of the unconscious. She imagines a submarine, but Invisible Man thinks that "there wasn't a submarine." Even if there is really a submarine, a passageway to deep understanding, it would be beyond Jordan's ability to comprehend: "It's all scientific, these things I don't understand." 

In the end, although Daisy Buchanan has called for "an adventure," Invisible Man is the only one able to keep moving on with their journey. Why? What makes IM different? Perhaps it's IM's ability to read others a little more deeply. When Invisible Man first meets Daisy and Jordan, Invisible Man struggles "to find a difference between" the girls, but soon finds it possible to distinguish "unique lines and blemishes" between the two. 

Maybe even the mistake with the baseball team was meaningful. The team is the Minnesota Twins. It's an unusual name; most teams are named for cities, rather than states, with relatively few exceptions. And "twins," of course, are the one thing most people can't tell apart without getting to know both people really well. Perhaps the "mistake" of putting the Twins in a more specific location than just Minnesota is Invisible Man's meandering mind finding meaning, putting it in the more specific spot with more concrete meaning. IM has taken something indistinguishable and generic to most people and interpreted it on a deeper level, giving it identity it didn't have. Perhaps this tendency will eventually allow IM to give themselves identity others find it difficult to see. Not all minds that wander are lost, in this case. Invisible Man calls them "Minneapolis" because she is paying attention and wants to see the team's "unique lines." 

IM claims to have vague features that leave others confused about their ethnicity, and of course there is the issue of whether IM is male, female, or something else. IM needs a close reading to be understood. IM shows throughout the text that they have this capacity for close reading, which means that even if nobody else understands them, they will eventually succeed at understanding themselves.  

IM pays attention to details, which helps to orient her in the vastness of space. One advantage IM seems to have compared to Jordan and Daisy is that IM doesn't get swallowed up in the ocean, the thing too deep to comprehend. Instead, IM has many memories of lakes. IM's happiest memory of their recent unrequited love happened on a lake. Their first time getting high was on an island in a lake. When that happened, IM and their friends "all linked arms and looked out a broken window onto our lakes. The late-night stillness heightened our experience, as if the water was one big mirror that could swallow our souls, the ghosts inside us." . 

Daisy's ocean is an abyss that confounds her. Invisible Man's lake is a mirror that helps them see themselves. It would be easy to write off the drug hallucinations as lazy writing, as I saw someone do in one amateur review online, but it's hard to deny that these kinds of drug trips are journeys into the sub-conscious and can be disorienting in a troubling way. That journey into the mind parallels the physical journey Invisible Man is making. Drug trips are risky writing, but I believe this particular trip is consistent with the theme of the story. 

The concluding scene shows that one of the girls has scrawled "Invisible Man, make it where you're going" on IM's car window, and I believe they are going to make it. They're going to make it because their ability to distinguish, to read deeply enough to understand others and their surroundings, will keep them oriented. Even the wandering storytelling is a means of self-preservation for Invisible Man, something that keeps them moving on a journey instead of stopping, that keeps them swimming instead of sinking. 

At least, that's how it seems to me without doing any real research, which I think is how the story is asking to be read. 

*I originally read the protagonist as a woman, but Karen Carlson and Rhiannon Morgan-Jones made a good argument for the central character maybe not being a woman. I read Invisible Man as a woman because of the "take this wrench so those boys don't take advantage" passage, but Karen and Rhainnon are probably right that there are other facts in the story that suggest otherwise and that the ambiguity is probably a feature, rather than a bug. I've gone with "they/their" in this post, although I have to confess it made it difficult to write in places, because I ended up with overlapping "they/their" pairs--one for Invisible Man and one for the whole group. For Karen Carlson's take on this story, have a look here. For Rhainnon's, see here. 

The critic America deserves, if not the one it needs

I'm going to blog about this year's Best American Short Stories, although I said I wouldn't. That I couldn't. That I needed to move on from literature and do something more practical with my life. After a year or so of sticking to that resolution, though, I think that all things considered, blogging about literature in the way I do might be one of the less futile things I could do with my time. 

A lot of that has to do with what I chose to blog about, how I approach it, and how few others are doing something similar. I analyze stories based mostly on nothing more than a close reading, a passing familiarity with theoretical approaches, and a heavy influence from having listened to thousands of sermons that were built around textual analysis. My goal is to create readings of stories that intelligent laypeople can understand, enough that they feel their experience of a story was deepened by what I had to say about it. If possible, I try to find some practical application of the reading, just like a Protestant pastor would with a Bible text. If there were thousands of people doing this for collections like Best American Short Stories or the Pushcart anthology, I likely wouldn't be compelling enough to rank high among them. But that's not the case. The numbers on my blog clearly tell me that there are still people in the world reading short stories, wanting to understand them better, and finding the resources out there slim enough they're willing to spend a few minutes with me. 

Literature may not be the most important thing in the world, but if becoming better at reading fiction that tries to capture the essence of life in its exasperating emotional and psychological agony makes people a little less prone to celebrating the maudlin, the mawkish, and the banal, then it's a useful way for me to spend my time. 

So I'm going to get back at it. It's not easy for me to write critically about the stories regarded as the best produced today. On a personal level, as a writer myself, I have two reactions, which are contradictory and come to me in alternating waves. Either I feel that I'm writing stories on par with those being hailed as the best, and my exclusion from them is an injustice, or I feel that I have been left out because I'm an inferior writer and that nobody should care what I have to say about stories I'm not good enough to have written myself. 

To analyze short stories, I have to ignore both of those voices, because whether I'm a good writer of fiction has nothing to do with whether the analysis I create is worthwhile. It's no exaggeration to say that at the very least, in relative terms, my literary analysis of these stories is worthwhile, because very often it's almost the only thing out there. (Although I'm not completely alone as long as my buddy Karen Carlson is still at it.) 

People have been complaining about the death of criticism forever, as one Times Literary Supplement article pointed out recently, but if you'd like proof that I'm not exaggerating, try finding good, professional criticism of the stories I'll be blogging about for the next few weeks or months, the ones from Best American Short Stories 2021. You'll see I'm not making this up.

I can guess at a couple of reasons for this. One is that most readers of short stories are writers themselves, as everyone knows, but since writers now are told that building social networks is nearly as important as writing itself, penning anything remotely critical about another writer is a risk not worth taking. 

It's also just plain hard work. Karen introduced me two years ago to a blogger who planned to try to blog through BASS with us, but he gave up after a few stories. That was just for one volume of BASS. Reading thoughtful, challenging stories in a way that does any justice to them is not easy. Doing it over and over is grueling, and it's not like anyone's paying me for it. If there's any result of it that I hear about, it's just as likely to be negative as positive. 

Nonetheless, this is a niche fate seems to have ordained I somehow fill, though I often feel slow of speech and slow of tongue and like fate should send anyone but me to do it. The more it seems like the world may not have as long a history in front of it as I once thought, though, the more it seems to me like I ought to tend the garden I have and think less about whether it's the one I think I ought to have. 

The spring of healing: what a lackluster novel I read as a kid tells us about "America first" philosophies

I read a lot as a kid, although I may not have always read the best the world had to offer. My mom, something of an expert in early literacy, believed it was important for young people to read what they liked to read, rather than for parents to obsess over whether their children picked entirely edifying material. Therefore, I was given a relatively long leash with my reading choices, as long as I was reading something. For a few years, one of the chief sources of reading material for my brothers and me were the slightly dated copies of Sports Illustrated my grandfather brought us. I don't know where he got them, but they were free, and we all liked reading the same articles and then going over favorite lines with each other afterwards. 

When I got older, I started to get into fantasy novels a little bit. Not obsessively--sports-based reading was still my favorite--but enough that I would mix it up here and there. One series I picked up from my dad was Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It was set in a magical world with a geography very similar to Anthony's native Florida. It was also full of puns, something I found funny enough to read maybe the first dozen or so novels in the series, but eventually tiring enough I never read the many he's written since then. 

I might have begun to catch on even as a young reader that Anthony isn't a virtuoso as a writer. If I didn't then, I definitely realized it when I read of few of his novels to my son several years ago. Even my son seemed to realize something was amiss. He kind of liked the first novel, but by the end of the second, he was ready to move on to something new. 

Still, I wouldn't say that Anthony is a bad writer. He's an example of a kind of writing I have a greater tolerance for than many people in literary fiction seem to have, one with some great ideas but who is a little bumpy getting those ideas across. (One of the things that perhaps delayed my ability to get stories published was my level of tolerance in my own work for less than stellar presentation as long as the idea underlying it seemed sound to me.) In particular, I was fond of the thought experiments that appeared in his work.  

Probably the most notable thought experiments in Xanth are the meetings various mortals have with the demon who created the world. This demon is apparently locked in some kind of supernatural game with other demons, and he twice (that I read) asked mortals for help in winning his game. (If I recall correctly, Anthony admitted to borrowing some ideas for these scenes from articles he read about game theory.)

(Aside: I won't delve into the alleged misogyny in his works. I'm sure it's there, but for me to deal with it, I'd have to go back and read him seriously, something I just don't have time to do right now. It's got nothing to do with what made me remember Xanth recently.)

Yeah, like, a whole lot of puns

Reading about "realist" political philosophy brought another Xanth scene to mind

There's another, less pronounced thought experiment from Xanth that came to mind for me the other day. I was thinking about the nature of  "America first" arguments, and, more broadly, about "realist" philosophies of how a government should behave in international geopolitics. It started when I read about John Mearsheimer's belief that Western bad behavior was primarily to blame for Russian aggression in Ukraine. It echoed comments I've heard from other quarters, always coming from people who identify themselves as proponents of "realist" political philosophies. 

According to this line of thinking, the West has made a mistake trying to promote the growth of liberal democracies friendly to the West in places like Georgia and Ukraine. Expansion of the EU and NATO were needlessly poking the Russian bear, which nobody thought of as a threat prior to 2014. These analysts claim the US should have allowed Russia to maintain enough hegemony over its near neighbors for its own comfort, even if this meant letting those countries fester in a quasi-vassal state status. Even if it meant their citizens had to live under autocracy. 

Realists would argue that the reason we should have allowed this to happen, rather than attempting to bring these countries more closely into a Western orbit, was for one simple reason: it would have been in our self-interest to do so. In "great powers" politics, the U.S. should no more think of fostering friendly democracies on Moscow's doorstep than Moscow should think of placing a missile base in the Yucatan Peninsula. This just foments conflict, and conflict is bad for U.S. interests, measured--I suppose--in things like stock values and gas prices and GDP and whether people have the emotional energy to spend on some dumb event that happened at the Oscars. 

Trump was apparently influenced by this kind of thinking. His "America first" concept (I won't call it a political philosophy, because I don't think Trump is capable of sustaining any line of thinking deeply enough that it could rightly be called a "philosophy") seemed to involve a fairly straightforward, transactional calculation of debits and credits of any possible move in international politics. If something was "good" for America (according to whatever measuring stick he used for "good"), then we did it. If it was bad for America, we didn't. 

The healing spring and the complexities of self-interest

While thinking about this whole realist idea of how the world works lately, some neuron in my brain harkened back to something from Xanth. I had to get onto Reddit, find an Anthony community, ask a question, and wait a few days to fully remember what it was, but eventually, I found it. 

In the first novel in the Xanth series, A Spell for Chameleon, the main character Bink comes across a wounded soldier. He is directed by a dryad to a nearby magical spring that brings healing to those who touch or drink its waters. While Bink is investigating the spring, a finger he lost as a child is restored. However, the spring stirs to life and warns him that. "Who drinks of me and acts against my interest will lose all that I bring him." 

Seems legit. 

Bink immediately sees complications in this condition placed by the spring, because he wonders how the spring will judge actions for their effect relative to its interests. He assumes that there could be no logging or mining near the spring, because these would harm it in an immediate and tangible way. But what if a king levied a tax on lumber, and because of that tax, lumberjacks cut more wood in order to make up for lost revenue? Would the spring cause all those who had been helped by the spring to fight against the king? In fact, "...any action had widening results, like the ripples of a stone dropped in a pool. In time such ripples could cover the whole ocean. Or the whole of Xanth." Bink wonders if, should the spring's magic become strong enough, the spring might become the real ruler of Xanth. 

Bink realizes, though, that the interests of one spring are not the interests of all springs, nor of Xanth. He rejects the spring's terms and tells the spring to take its healing back. 

Bink was smart enough to realize something advocates of a narrowly defined self-interest fail to point out: that self-interest is complicated. Of course we all want what's good for us. Idealists want that, too. But what's ultimately good for us depends, often, on the unintended consequences of millions of decisions, none of which can be accurately guessed ahead of time, because the entire system is irreducibly complex. 

We have, of course, a great deal of responsibility to try to read the realities of the present, break down that which is complex, and make our best effort to calculate the effects of certain actions versus others. I myself mostly objected to the war in Iraq because of pragmatic, rather than idealistic reasons; that is, I thought the stated goals were unachievable, not necessarily immoral if they had been achieved. Right now, I'm more than half convinced the United States should get over the idealistic opposition to proliferation and accept North Korea as a nuclear state, mostly because the practical reality is that we've failed to prevent them from becoming one, so we might as well try to live with that reality. 

We have an obligation to reduce the complexity as much as we can, but at some point, we are making best guesses. A commitment to always keep recalculating for self-interest, based on new information, is a formula for being in a constant cycle of reassessment and reapplication of new strategies. That's great if you work for a think tank and you want to be producing a new calculation every few weeks, but it's bad for formulating a predictable and consistent policy.

Much more to the point than that, though, if we are humble enough to assume that we're going to miscalculate now and again and end up harming our interest in ways we didn't intend, shouldn't we do so for reasons we believe in, reasons we accept as worthy of suffering for? Rather than decide, case-by-case, whether supporting one would-be democracy or another is more trouble than it's worth, isn't it better to say that we believe, in the long run, that democracies (assuming they're organic and not something we're foisting on other countries) are worth supporting, even if there are costs? To say that in the long run, we believe that the costs of not supporting a democracy are worse? 

Mearsheimer stated that there are always practical and moral elements to politics. He said it would be great if the two always aligned, but that sometimes, a country has to accept an immoral policy because the costs of the moral policy are too great. I wonder, though, if in an irreducibly complex game, it isn't ultimately safer sometimes to take the moral route simply because it's the moral route. This is what Bink elected to do when he gave up his own physical wellbeing in order to keep from putting himself in a compromising position. (In the story, there is a twist when he makes this decision, but the point is that he was willing to make this decision.) Sometimes, the very complexity and danger of the game might make a certain moral naivete more, rather than less, safe.  

Realism in political science doesn't mean "realistic," as opposed to someone who believes in fantasy. Realists emphasize the fundamentality of conflict or competition in world events, while idealists emphasize cooperation. It's not supposed to be a question of dreamers versus realists, but I think the cognate nature of the two words has led some to believe that political realists are more grounded in the real world. In fact, though, both realists and idealists care about self-interest and are looking at the real world for clues about how to achieve it. One might say the fundamental difference between them is more one of how both come to grips with irreducible complexity.

The most realistic, pragmatic, eyes-wide-open, non-dreamy belief might be that making hard political choices for moral reasons might sometimes be the most pragmatic solution. As I've suggested before, sometimes, when faced with a decision where it's impossible to predict all the bifurcating future time lines, it might be best to rely not on calculations, but on what I've called ontological ethics. That is, when in doubt, we make decisions guided by a sense of who we are. 

We might still, of course, make wrong calls this way, but there are benefits that can accrue from making decisions out of a sense of who we are. It gives our allies reassurance that we will remain consistent even in the shifting face of events. It gives our adversaries security that they can predict our policies, making them less likely to miscalculate. It gives us an internal sense of purpose and mission. There are real, pragmatic values to these things. One could say that in the long run, moral decisions might be better for our self-interest. 

Or not. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is said to have noted, we're all dead. At some point, this experiment in democracy will fail or fade, or the multitudinous problems of the human race will doom us to extinction. If we have to go down, though, I'd rather go down for something I believe in than a wrong guess about what would have been good for us. I'd rather refuse the immediate good that seems to offer itself rather than be compromised by it. The only way to win a game of irreducible complexity, perhaps, is not to play it.  

The responsibility to live happily for others is too much to bear

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine, I've been stuck on the same bad idea: that I should go to Ukraine to help fight against the invaders. This is an inherently stupid idea, for any number of reasons. I've been having foot pain for over a year, pain doctors can't quite figure out the source of and which makes it difficult for me to walk long distances or to run any distance. Now to add to that, I'm getting a test next week to see if I have a hernia. I'm kind of old, and have a lot of miles on me. Even though I was once a Marine, I was a linguist, and don't have any advanced combat training. Even if I did, I'd have forgotten it all by now. I'd likely be in the way. Then, there are all the practical reasons, like how I'm my family's main earner and it would cause hardship if I left. Still, in spite of how terrible I know the idea is, I can't put it out of my head. Russia has invaded a country without cause, and it's now hitting civilian targets without compunction. To act like the world is a normal place right now seems perverse. 

Yet life around me does seem to be going on like normal. The weather turned warm in the last few days, and people were out biking and walking together. A few grills in the neighborhood reemerged, the scent of meat cooked outdoors mixing with the already-prevalent South Asian spices that typically fill the air in the streets around here, flooding my senses with the feeling of being surrounded by people alive and enjoying life. 

And why shouldn't they be enjoying themselves? The United States government has decided it has limited means it can take to help Ukraine without making the situation much worse. If the government is already at the end of its resources, what can any of us do? It won't alleviate suffering if we suffer, too. It reminds me of what Thae Yong Ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK who then defected to South Korea, concluded when his family decided to defect:

"I decided to claim my rights as a human being. I couldn't live as a slave any longer. Having lived my life that long as a slave was enough. I made up my mind to defect. If we defected, it would cause significant problems for our siblings and parents, but we chose to first seek freedom for ourselves. It would suffice if we lived our lives to the full for their sake" (translation mine). 

Thae was lucky, because by extreme good fortune, he was able to defect along with his wife and two children, whereas most North Korean diplomats are not able to take their children abroad with them. Still, he knew he would be making life harder for family members not lucky enough to escape. He made the decision that rather than everyone living as a slave together in North Korea, he would find what happiness he could for himself and his family, and that happiness would justify his decision. It would have to.   

We who are, for the moment, spared from warfare in our streets could choose to suffer in order to honor the suffering of others, but that would only ensure that there is only ever suffering in the world. Moreover, this isn't just something that started a few weeks ago; there was more than enough suffering long before Ukraine that anyone who was paying attention could have felt guilt over enjoying life. As you drink your coffee perusing the internet (I assume for hours and hours, because you've finally ended up bored enough to visit this blog), a child is being abused by her parents. Many children are dying of preventable diseases and malnutrition. Someone was killed by a drunk driver. Somebody who supports a family living paycheck to paycheck just lost their job. Before Ukraine, there was already Yemen. 

There is, in fact, so much suffering going on in the world at any moment, that the quest for those who are temporarily spared from suffering to enjoy themselves on behalf of those who cannot is far too much to take. None of us can possibly love life enough to somehow balance out all that suffering and make life on Earth appear to make sense somehow. 

Some people assert that the suffering of others should make me all the more grateful for what I have. On the one hand, I understand this sentiment. Knowing that innocent people are dying in Yemen or fighting for their lives in Kyiv should provide me with enough sense of proportion to be kind to the server who is running late with my order or to suffer Beltway traffic with grace. In another, deeper sense, though, the notion that because terrible things have happened to others but I personally have been spared I should therefore be grateful is perverse. 

Thankful to whom? To God? I don't have one specific reason why I'm an agnostic now. There are a whole host of reasons. If I had to pick just one, though, I think the existence of suffering might be the one I'd pick. Not just suffering, but suffering that is both broad (abundant and ubiquitous) and deep (profound and acute). Does anyone really believe in thanking God that a meteor struck the house next door and spared you? What kind of capricious lunatic runs creation like that? Not one I'd ever express gratefulness toward. 

There is a difference between acknowledging I live better than ninety percent of the globe and being thankful that ninety percent of humanity doesn't have it very good. The knowledge that human life is such a shabby affair for so many makes it much harder, rather than easier, to enjoy my relative good fortune. Certainly, it makes it hard for me to live life to the fullest on behalf of those who are barely living.  

Why I'll probably spend the last few decades of my life on the couch doing nothing

All writers have had to deal with the question of how to support themselves so they can focus on writing. The top four solutions in history have been:

1) Succeeding commercially enough to be able to support oneself. This is nice work if you can get it, but most writers, even the ones we remember through the ages, have not. 

2) Marry well. Also nice work if you can get it, and a few writers, both male and female, have, living of the fortunes of their spouses while turning their attention to writing. Most people don't manage to do this, though, so they have to rely on either option three or option four.

3) Accept a life of penury. Much like those called to religious professions might take vows of poverty, some view writing as a pursuit so serious, it requires limiting the demands of the flesh to the bare minimum. 

4) Take on all the normal responsibilities the majority of humans do, and do the best you can to write with the time and energy you have left over after all of that. 

As I've mentioned many times on here before, there was a time in my life when I really thought I was going to choose option number three. I wrote a whole personal manifesto in which I determined that lots of people can have kids, but only a few can create lasting art. Based, I guess, on the notion of scarcity, I felt like it was therefore important enough for me to devote myself to writing that it would be okay if I never had kids or found a serious job. 

I'm not sure what changed my mind. It might have been going to graduate school and realizing how few people who "did art for a living" I liked. It might have been that I got tired of leaning on family and friends who had real jobs to help me survive. Maybe it was a biological impulse to reproduce reasserting itself after lying dormant. It could have been all of these things. In any event, I quit graduate school with only a Master's and got what for lack of a better term we'll call a "real job." I've been in the "real" economy since. Mrs. Heretic and I had one biological child and adopted another. It's been rewarding in all the ways living a normal life can be. No, I wouldn't trade my kids for a novel people will still be reading a thousand years from now. 

Not for lack of trying, but I could never quite shake the need to write. I tried to become a normal person who worried about normal things, but there were two hard facts I couldn't escape: the world didn't make sense, and I felt a need to try to make sense of it. Writing was how I tried. It still is. 

A funny thing happened on the way to taking door number four, though. I meant to get the kind of job that would pay the bills and enable me to take care of family but leave me free to reserve most of my mental and emotional energy for life outside of work. That didn't happen. Well, I mean, maybe it did. Some people in my profession do seem to do their nine-to-five and then leave it at the plant. They go home and coach little league or have bowling night or whatever it is normal people do, and they don't think about work when they're not there. 

I've never been able to achieve true indifference to work. What I do has seemed important enough to me to deserve my best effort, or at least as close to my best effort as is possible to achieve at work. That's meant spending time on my own to improve my understanding of matters related to work. Mostly, it's meant trying to improve my skills in whatever language I've been translating from, because that was always the core ability I had that would make or break the quality of my output. 

I've come home from work, then, and felt the urge to keep on working. But that's not the only impulse I've felt. I also feel the impulse to work on writing, because the universe ain't getting any more comprehensible. And I also feel guilty about not being involved enough in family matters, such as keeping on my son about getting ready for grownup life. Or maybe I feel guilty about how Mrs. Heretic sometimes wants a partner she can sit down and watch television with, but I'm always off trying to fit a full-day's effort on three different things into a single day. 

Usually, this all manifests itself in one very mundane, but to me very important, question each day. What do I do with the little bit of time each day I get to call my own? Do I write? If I do, do I write fiction? Do I write for this blog? If not writing, then I should read? If so, what do I read? Should I read Korean news? A Korean fiction book? A Korean non-fiction book? What about some modern fiction in English, so I can learn from it to improve my own writing as well as better know the lay of the land in a world I want to inhabit? Or what about reading some non-fiction about a science or history or philosophy or religion topic, something to feed my soul as it grapples for answers about the world? 

None of this makes me unique, of course. Everyone has limited time and more things they'd like to do than they have time available. Lately, I've come to a realization, though, about how badly I've managed my time in my life. Not that I haven't managed to buckle down and get productive. I've done that plenty. But I keep changing my mind about what I'd like to be productive about. One week I think I should put dreams away and focus on knowing everything about Korea I can. The next I tell myself what's life for if not to follow my dreams, so I chuck work and write. Or read something completely not work-related. At the moment, I'm trying to have it both ways and read a book on religion (God's Problem by Bart Ehrman), but the Korean translation of it.  

All I've really managed to accomplish by ping-ponging back and forth between subjects in my life is that I'm okay at a few things but probably not great at any. I've suspected this for a long time, but every time I try to force myself to pick one thing to go all-in trying to master, I am wracked by self-doubt. What if I've picked the wrong thing? What if I'm putting all my effort into something I'll never be that good at? The result is that I start and stop efforts to keep moving in one direction over and over. 

Lately, I've been doing something with my free time I've never done before: nothing. I'm so exasperated with myself and my inability to pick something, I just do nothing. I fritter my precious free time away, hate myself for having wasted it, then do it again the next day. 

Essentially, I feel I've frittered so much time away that I'm now too old to become great at anything. At that point, I become momentarily frantic and start to work doubly hard to make up for lost time. Soon after that, I am overwhelmed by how hard it is to get better even when I'm trying my best, start thinking that all the effort is pointless, and I stare off at nothing for an hour until it's time to go to bed.

I usually return to the idea that what I ought to do is focus on work and other practical matters I all too often neglect. I should make money, save money, and use that money to help people who need it. It's what I settled on in my early thirties when I gave up on writing. And I succeeded for years at keeping my mind on secular matters. But I just couldn't keep that other person locked away for good. 

Some intellectual-minded people tend to look down on those who live an unexamined life. I don't do that at all. The wise preacher in Ecclesiastes--possibly the book that has dealt with how little the universe makes sense better than any other--didn't come up with much better. "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart...Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days" (Ecc 9:7,9). 

I probably still have a few more rounds of futilely cycling through trying to get better at things I think of as "important" in my life, but I'm starting to imagine the later acts of my life not involving much serious thought at all. 

Was Dark Helmet right about good and evil?

Americans are perpetually caught between their two selves. One is a happy-go-lucky bon vivant whose motto is, "Why worry?" This American is a ceaseless optimist. He's the reason stock markets continue to soar in expectation of more and more good bon temps ahead even when there are good reasons to worry. He's used to things working out for him, and he doesn't see any reason why that shouldn't continue. Even problems like global warming don't bother this guy. He figures scientists always figure problems out, and they'll eventually lick this one, too. 

The other American is an alarmist, willing to see even the smallest change from the world he's used to as the first step in a slippery slope to Armageddon. Especially if it's something he sees as cooked up by the other political camp from his own. News media, with its bad news bias, tends to feed this side of the American split personality. 

One side of the American personality wants to chug a beer and grill hot dogs on his lawn even while a nuclear missile is clearly raining down; the other wants to build a bunker and stockpile guns and ammunition when someone mentions changing rules about public bathrooms. 

Both sides reside in most Americans, and both have been evident in the past few weeks as we've watched events unfold in Ukraine. The optimistic American thinks that Putin has overplayed his hand, that all he's done is hurt Russia, reinvigorate a once-flaccid NATO, and even make America stronger. It's an incredibly sanguine way of looking at events when Ukraine's oil fields are being blown up, its dams destroyed, and civilians dying in a conflict that utterly flouts every norm we've come to expect. 

On the other hand, there's also been a lot of hand-wringing that this is the moment the whole liberal world order comes crashing down. It is proof that a particular view of the world has failed, and that we are now in an era of stark, power-based politics in which the loser will cease to exist. 

President Biden has mostly sided with the former version of events. That's probably the right thing for a commander-in-chief to do. Nobody wants a leader who will tell us we're all about to die in times of crisis. Even if Biden really, secretly feels like this is the beginning of the end, he ought to be telling us that everything is going to be alright. There's also a politically self-serving reason to frame the invasion in this way. While former President Trump is out saying...whatever it is he's saying about all of this...Biden needs to make it look like his policies have been good for American interests. So optimism is his best bet. 

I don't claim to know how this will end. It's certainly one of the most alarming events I have witnessed in my lifetime. I'm frustrated by how impotent my own country seems, how the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons is making us react very differently to this kind of naked aggression than we did in 1990 to an invasion of another country. The lesson to me seems to be that every country should have nuclear weapons or risk being invaded. 

But setting aside the specifics of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the more important general point is that US policy choices of the last 25 years do not seem to have helped promote a US world view. They do not seem to have increased the level of democracy in the world, nor helped secure peace. We have not turned from a Cold War world to a new world in which humanity, freed from focusing on war, solves the perennial evils that have plagued us as long as we've been a species. Geopolitics haven't improved anymore than anything else in the world has in my lifetime. 

I can't claim to be an expert on many things, but I am an expert on the Korean Peninsula. Would anyone say that the Korean Peninsula is in a better, safer place now than it was in 1994 when Kim Il Sung died? A series of US presidents have employed differing rhetoric, but basically the same, underlying policy: seek to isolate North Korea diplomatically and economically, then use the strength that isolation gives us to force them into concessions on nuclear issues. That plan can only be described as a spectacular failure. It has caused suffering for the already-suffering people of North Korea, and it has not, in return, brought them one step closer to freedom. 

I honestly believe that, in a choice between a flawed democracy like ours and a flawed enlightened dictatorship like Russia's or even a halfway decent enlightened dictatorship like China's, the United States is easily the best choice. It's the one that provides for the greatest level of human happiness. (Perhaps, in some ways, because human happiness isn't logical and neither is democracy.) So let's, for a moment, accept a very simplistic, George W. Bush "axis of evil" view of the world, and call us "good." 

Why has good been so bad at making the world a better place? Is it because, as Dark Helmet put it in Spaceballs, good is dumb?

The most unsettling thing in my life

I've been through four events in my life that have shaken my faith that I understood the world. The first was 9/11, the second was the election of Donald Trump, the third was the outbreak of COVID-19, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fourth. All of these events have undermined the self-certainty of my inner optimistic American. All have made me question whether a good life in a time of peace and plenty was really my birthright as an American of my era. 

None, though, have probably shaken me as much as an article by an American philosopher a friend sent me over a year ago. The philosopher is Adrian Vermeule, and the article is about skepticism in the effectiveness of free markets. That doesn't sound frightening, I know, but the article is about more than just economic markets. It's about how the entire liberal world order has been built on a faith in free markets of various types, including the economic ones, but also the much bigger "marketplace of ideas." 

Vermeule argues, very effectively from my point of view, that the marketplace of ideas does not seem to lead to the best possible idea very often. This is because idea marketplaces suffer from the same weaknesses economic ones do: they are never really as free as we'd like them to be, and they require all kinds of intervention to work as intended. Markets as described by liberal apologists are always ideal markets, Vermeule posits, and no market is ever anything like ideal. 

Perhaps his most damning argument is when he draws on the idea of free competition in courts. We believe not in a judge trying to be impartial and come to the best decision, but in lawyers slugging it out in an anything-goes-if-it's-for-the-good-of-their-client competition. A defense lawyer doesn't care if her client is guilty. She cares what the prosecution can prove. She doesn't care if the sentence for her client is best for society. That's up to society to argue for, in the form of the attorney for the state. 

Some people really believe this is the best system, but it's hard to call our system of justice highly fair or equitable or, well, just. Rich people get better lawyers with more resources, and that helps them get better outcomes. 

What reading Vermeule made me think about wasn't so much that our system of justice is unfair, but that we have extrapolated the system of everyone advocating with maximum effort for their own position to nearly everything in the rest of society. Our political system is an extension of our justice system. Nobody is capable of giving an inch of their own personal interests for the good of majority. That's not our job. It's society's job to make us give an inch. It's why every interview is so partisan. We no longer expect our politicians to demonstrate broad-mindedness. We want them to "fight for us."

It's evident now in the middle of the kind of foreign crisis that ought to make our country come together. Even Republicans who are supporting the effort to put pressure on Putin are still using the opportunity to point out that Biden is terrible at everything. Either sanctions aren't hard enough or Putin is only there because Biden isn't a macho man like Trump was. Then there's the whole insane faction that thinks whatever it is Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene believe. 

This isn't new. Almost as soon as World War II ended, the consensus in Washington broke down. James Brady explains in The Coldest War how Korea became an opportunity for Republicans to hit Democrats for being weak, a strategy it hasn't let up on since. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest examines how Democrats were so sensitive to appearing weak they violated their own sense of what was right to carry out war in Vietnam. Our own fractiousness, a product of our free market system of ideas, has led us to carry out bad foreign policy decisions in order to satisfy domestic political demands. It's why we came in with such half-hearted sanctions. Biden can't open himself up to more criticism if gas prices go much higher. 

If our system really is good, shouldn't that give it an advantage in world competition? Shouldn't leaders in the rest of the world be able to see that our way of life is, if not the best, at least the least bad, and want to make theirs more like it? But the last 25 years have been the story of the West, led by the United States, making decisions that have tended to make our way of life less prevalent rather than more. Depending on your political perspective, there are reasons to think that democracy is even under assault within the United States, let alone abroad. 

There are really only two choices here. First is that we are mistaken and our way of life really isn't the "good" one. The other is that we are good, but good is dumb. 

I think it's the second, but as for recommendations for how to make good smarten up, that's a little difficult. As much as I agree with Vermeule's diagnosis of the maladies of liberal democracy, I don't believe I can get on board as much with his recommended cures. As one Catholic friend of mine put it, "Vermeule would be fine with a dictator as long as the dictator was Catholic." I don't think the solution is to try to force some kind of idealistic consensus to once-more-prevalent ideals that many (including me) now find themselves not only unwilling but unable to believe. 

America has gotten far by figuring it out as we go along. We didn't need some hard set of idealistic principles. We're pragmatic. We're rough-and-ready. Or at least that's sort of how events have transpired to make us see ourselves. But perhaps we really do need some core set of principles we can mostly all agree on. Perhaps we do need some shared sense of identity. These are oft-quoted conservative principles, and I agree with them, although I disagree with almost every actual principle conservatives float as one we should all agree on. But it does seem that for good to survive, good is going to have to be able to at least understand what it is that makes it good. 

To do this, we need the input of both our pessimistic and our optimistic halves. We need the buzz-kill to come ruin the party for us by reminding us of the peril we are in while questions of who we are remain unanswered. We also need the optimist who believes, maybe against reason, that it can be done. As the better writer in my family, tired of hearing the military maxim that "hope is not a strategy" put it, hope is not only a strategy, it is, in fact, the only strategy. 

Whoopi Goldberg and fractured feelings about Black History Month

I swear I have never watched even ten seconds of The View on purpose. I've been exposed to it now and again in situations where I couldn't control my environment, like waiting for my car to be fixed while a TV is blaring in the waiting room. The general tone of the show falls about eleven levels below what my snobbery will allow. I'd have been totally unaware Whoopie Goldberg ever said anything about the Holocaust if Adam Serwer hadn't written about it in The Atlantic. (The Atlantic passes my snobbery test.)   

Serwer's basic argument matches the view of race I thought was the consensus among intellectuals at one point: that race isn't real, but rather a social construct people in power have invented for their own purposes, with different versions of what race means depending on the needs of people in power. 

Serwer makes his point by showing how racial stereotypes we now associate with Black people were once applied to Jews. He shows that although "Jew" doesn't make sense as a "race" according to how Americans now think of it, past dogmas of the powerful treated it and other distinctions between groups of mostly white people as real and important. We Americans tend to think of our notions of race as realer, perhaps, because they are based on visible characteristics. Yet the borders of those characteristics are not fixed, and the fact that "blackness" is so difficult to define is a good indication that it's probably not a real thing:

Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

Serwer alluded to an old article from CNN about President Obama that discussed disagreement about whether Obama was "black" or "biracial." 

Serwer might have simplified the differences between American ideas about race and past ideas, such as anti-Semitism. While "black" doesn't have defined edges, that doesn't mean the term means nothing. Africa is a huge continent, and a Dinka might not have much in common physically with an Amhara or a Yoruba, to say nothing of their distant diaspora descendants, but the term "black" at least refers to some characteristics with a scientific basis, some "material reality," like relatively more abundant melanin. There are other material traits that, at least on average, are more true about Black people than White people, such as greater bone density among Black people. While "black" and "white" are mutable terms, there is more difference physically between them than there is between Jews and "Aryans" or whatever it was the Nazis would have been comparing them to. So while the term "black" isn't perhaps a useful term, it's not quite meaningless. It bears a casual relationship to DNA.  

Nonetheless, I take Serwer's point for the most part. Race is a social construct more than it is a biological reality, and to the extent it is a biological reality, our current human social constructs bear little resemblance to that reality.  

What, then, is Black History Month about? 

Once upon a time, say, circa 1998, I felt relatively safe and secure with the understanding that race was made-up. I knew that because it had been treated as a real thing for so long, there was work to do do fix the world for people who had been harmed by old racial ideas, but I expected that one day, perhaps in my lifetime, we'd be done talking about race except as an idea people used to believe in. 

Right about the same time I had achieved this certainty was the first time I became aware of Black History Month. Although it has been celebrated since 1976, apparently, I am pretty sure the first time I took notice of it was when I was an undergrad at Walsh University in the late 90s. There was a reading at one point in the student center of great Black American writers. All the woke, liberal students were going, and since I was a woke, liberal student (although the term "woke" was still almost two decades in the future), I went, too. I remember walking away thinking that I had enjoyed hearing the words of writers like Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, and Maya Angelou read out loud, but I also wondered if that was the main goal of Black History Month. Is it primarily an "appreciation" month, and does "appreciate" in that sense mean the same thing when we talk about "appreciating" art in a gallery? Is February about admiring people who fall into the (arbitrary and made-up) category of Black person? And how does that lead to improving the lives of the people whom society (wrongly) assigns to a (made-up) racial category? 

I've learned a great deal in more than twenty years of Black History Months since then that I've found enlightening, enriching, profitable or transformative to my thinking. I've read writers I hadn't known existed, learned of historical events I'd never read about, and been challenged in the way I think about America's past. If every White American has done the same with their Februaries, then the month has doubtlessly done some good, intangible and unmeasurable though it may be, for people America still assigns to an outdated system of racial division. As a time to re-inscribe upon history the accomplishments of people who were erased from history because of fallible racial logic, it has great value. 

Nonetheless, I can't help wondering every February if the month itself contributes to perpetuating the certainty that race exists. Because Black History isn't just about rediscovering lost black contributions to history. It's a full-scale celebration of blackness, or at least a favored definition of blackness. It seeks to shine a spotlight on Black culture. But in doing so, it (and by "it," I mean the disjointed and non-coordinated efforts of media, Black empowerment groups, corporate diversity officers, social media influencers, as well as corporations looking to monetize all of this) favors some forms of Black culture and ignores others. It changes the meaning of Blackness while seeking to celebrate it. Most significantly, it demonstrates an unmistakable certainty that blackness is a real thing, not something we should put in tenuous brackets and recognize with only a healthy amount of explanation. 

One consequence of this is that Black people who don't generally live within the confines of accepted Black culture (which is now defined partly by Black people, but also by corporate America that sells Black culture) find themselves feeling like outsiders within their own racial identity. I have a black poet friend who loves anime and comic books. He teaches a college course on Batman. There aren't many people who know Black history and literature as well as he does, but he also is sometimes challenged by other Black people for not being authentically black. That is, he's being accused of not "really" being something that isn't real. One of the more prominent threads in Black American culture is anxiety among Black people about whether they are authentically and truly black enough. There's a whole TV show whose very name--Blackish--refers in part to this anxiety. Celebrating is meant to improve the self-image of the people being celebrated, but when the celebration is about a made-up thing, it can't help but cause angst for some of those the celebration is meant to uplift. 

I hate sounding like a conservative

I realize everything I'm saying is pretty close to a conservative position. Maybe I'm saying it somewhat more circumspectly than a true conservative would, but it's still pretty close to what many conservatives would express. They believe that the focus on racial inequity itself is stoking racial division in America. At least some of them hope for a post-racial America (which is exactly what I was hoping for in 1998, and this very hope made me, I thought, very woke on the subject of race). I'm not claiming they are right or wrong, but that maybe they have a point. 

On the one hand, there's a practical issue of how to effectively fight racism. There's something about bringing up racism that activates self-defense mechanisms in people. That's why the prosecution in the Ahmaud Arbery case mostly avoided it, to great effect. So one has to acknowledge at least that confrontation isn't always the best strategy. 

Beyond the pragmatic issue of how to present the ruling class with the case for racism, though, there's the issue that efforts to eradicate racism often conflate (real) racism with (made-up) race. It's not just Black History Month. It's census data asking me my race, as though this was a question with an objective answer. It's my own woke use of capital-letter "B" in "Black people," which I follow because it's what the cool kids are doing, but have reservations about. 

A lot of ways to abuse race for power

As I write in this particular February, storm clouds of war are brewing on the border of Ukraine. The West, of which The United States is still somehow the distracted leader, has been pulled into a Second Cold War with a group of autocratic states. One of those autocratic nations feels confident enough for military adventurism in part because it knows the United States is too fractious and divided internally to long hold oppose it with unity. Corporate media interests on the right are already making inroads into turning support for Ukraine into just another partisan issue. 

Those corporate interests love to keep the idea of race alive, because it gives them something to make their audiences angry about. It's not just them, though. America's foreign enemies have been making use of racial inequality in America for decades to try to weaken the country. Russian information, influence and psychological operations campaigns have been using race as perhaps their easiest ingress into American discourse. 

I don't believe anyone thinks Russia is doing this because it genuinely cares about the souls of Black folk. Moreover, I don't believe the true interests of Black Americans are advanced when Russia makes America weaker. Yes, White America needs to get its act together in a hurry, in part for its own internal security, because racial inequality is a weapon in the hands of the enemy. But Black America--and the much larger group of people who identify as "allies"-- should also recognize that even if White America did get its act together, it would likely result in political action that was compromised and full of unintended consequences that might lead to new problems. Solving problems isn't easy even when we agree they're problems. They're much more difficult when we can't agree, and the conflation of racism with race is a small contributor to our inability to agree. It's also a weapon in the hands of the enemy. 

The point, finally

I've worked most of my life in environments that mandate putting the "bottom line up front" (BLUF). I hate writing like that. I think writing should at least occasionally be a process of discovering the bottom line, and it's okay for the final product to reflect that struggle. So I'm only now getting to my point. If I were to write an LSAT-type comprehension question based on this post, one that asks, "What is the author's main point," the answer would be this: Nothing comes without costs, even Black History Month. 

Society has to make positive efforts to undo the legacy of racism, even if race isn't real. As Serwer put it: "It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false." We cannot simply end racist laws and hope that in time things will work themselves out. We have to take action. But every action has unintended consequences. If race becomes a factor in hiring or school admission, it will lead to hurt feelings from those who feel that the made-up construct of race is now working against them--whether they are right or wrong to feel that way. The downsides are not enough of a reason not to try, but we do have to realize that downsides exist.

With Black History Month, we have to be aware of how our efforts to remove the effects of racism--which is real--unintentionally extend the lifespan of the belief in race--which is not. (There's your BLUF, you bureaucratic lumpen.) The upsides are absolutely worth the downsides, but only if we are aware of the downsides and work to mitigate them. Instead, I think the current politico-cultural divide in America demands that we either accept it as an unqualified good or a damned nuisance, depending on which tribe we belong to. Unless there are other options to quasi-religious wokeness and "How come there's no White History Month?" I think I know where I'll lay odds in the coming geopolitical conflict.