Antimatter is eating my youth.

...just wanting to talk to you for a second. It's been a while since we seen each other, or at least it really seems like a long time.

Remembering back to a church-sponsored skiiing trip in January of '85.  Mom let me stack up on comics at the grocery store and I picked up "Crisis on Infinite Earths #1." The issue was framed on each cover by a piece talking about how the DC Universe was too confusing and they were going to consolidate it and "nothing would ever be the same" again.

The story had what I felt at the time were a bunch of DC second-stringers, most of whom I didn't know and had to look up in "Who's Who: The Definitive Guide to the DC Universe" (an encyclopedia in monthly installments of all the DC characters and major concepts, but only Vol 1 had come out yet). A gothy looking dude named Pariah was flashing in and out of different universes in the multiverse, and everywhere he showed up, he'd be forced to watch white antimatter ate up the place and people until he would flash out and flash in to another. It was really creepy and ominous and I wondered how even Batman and Superman would stack up against this existential threat. Pariah would pop up and have to watch as this freaky white stuff ate up everything and there was nothing left and he'd head out and have to watch it all happen to some other group of people and their universe, again and again.

Cut to last week. I was working late (big surprise) and hit the NPR website and learned Adam Yauch had died. Lately, Whitney Houston ate it and it doesn't seem too long since Michael Jackson kicked off. This stuff happens and, no offense to them, but they were pretty easy to shrug off either b/c they were on borrowed time anyhow or they had squandered their talent and mismanaged their lives and creatively speaking...well, nevermind b/c it's really mean so I won't even say it. You know where I'm going and let's just leave it at that.

But losing MCA almost moved me to tears.  I didn't know the guy and never really obsessed about him at all in any sort of youthful hero-worship sort of way, but I just felt that something was lost that will never be here again.  I mean, all of these dead celebrities are people and they leave folks behind that actually do know them and will mourn them, but this guy was different.

I was never the world's biggest Beastie Boys fan as some of my pals were, but they really did mean something to me. I wore out "License to Ill" in seventh grade in my Walkman and at summer camp. We could rap every song.  When Paul's Boutique came out, the new aesthetic blew my mind and I initially rejected it, but after a while I came to see it as the superior work that it was, and a step toward creative freedom and more importantly, a jail-break out of a very narrow and self-limiting sort of young white male persona into an infinite one, one that could grow and shift as you got older. And of course, by the time Check Your Head came out, I was a believer and admirer forever more.

They consciously made the jump from snarky meatheads to young men actively trying to create a culture, and to me that's the real boon of hip hop (not the macho swagger that gets mistaken for it). On PB, they recovered a lot of the pop culture artifacts from their childhood. It wasn't coherent, but they were creating the context of their own existence, referring to this, referring to that.

I learned that Adam was studying Tibetan Buddhism around the same time that I was studying Zen and Daoism rather intensely (though it's hard to be a Daoist in the Army) and there was some validation there. Certainly it was a jump from the beer guzzling lady-harassing dude he presented himself to be initially.  They started putting instrumentals on their albums. I'm sure there were other instances, but these guys showed you could be who you wanted to be. You could be a Jewish kid from Brooklyn but also be into hiphop; you could be a loudmouth jerk and morph into a Buddhist; you could take all the "crap" that you wasted your time on as a kid (comic books, sports, tv shows, etc.) and that really meant something to you, though you were told and sort of knew it was junk culture, and hold it close, work with it, extract the good stuff from it, and use it to make something new that expressed how you felt.  Even though it was '89, I think the 90s began the day Paul's Boutique was released. I'm not the only one who had to let it sit for a while before I could get into it, but it gave middle class white kids a new paradigm from which to live, and those of us who haven't lost our souls to work and life and all that's happened over the intervening years, it's because on some level we still live that way. I'm reading too much into it? 

Sure.

That's the whole point.

So when I read the NPR post, selfish as it was, I knew I'd never get a new Beastie Boys album again and I was sad. It was,with apologies to Hemingway, the end of something.

I hadn't bought the last two BB albums, much less even bothered to listen to them. Yep, I'm one of those people that make me cringe...not appreciating anything until it's gone and only then I celebrate it to the stars. It all rubs rawer the wound of recently losing a beloved stepfather who I know I didn't appreciate as much as I should have before he was gone, and now I'll never go over to his house and watch TV or drink a glass of sweet tea with him again. I think that's what it's really about, but it's all the same thing.

It's got me thinking about all those other 90s staples who moved me in a permanent way who I "outgrew"...the Chili Peppers, Pavement, Beck, all staples of that new paradigm of looking at the world, about as far from the Stones and the Beatles and the hippies as you can get, yet incorporating a lot of the stuff they discovered and moving beyond it into the new.  With me, it's all about the new and interesting concept, but you can't think about all this without thinking about how you need to honor the old stuff that made you, too.

And it got me thinking about you. I haven't talked to you in a while. Sometimes sheer inertia keeps me away; I'm ashamed, because it's been so long and I know it will probably be awkward and a bit painful at first. I keep waiting for the right time, for when things settle down and we're less busy, when I have something good to say to you. But I don't want to wait anymore. Let's make some time for each other.  If I don't call you, please call me and tackle me and tell me how it's all going. I miss you and all the stuff we use to laugh about, and I want to know you're ok b/c as much you might think I'm aloof and dodging you like I owe you money, I really do think about you all the time. I hope you're doing OK.

By the time January of '86 came around, they figured out how to deal with the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and the series wrapped.  Some stuff was just plain lost forever. But a lot of stuff from the various universes/old multiverse was recovered and they slammed it into one big chaotic universe and it was in this weird state of reboot/"same old, same old." A completely new place, but with the past as prologue

I don't know if it can really work that way, but I'll talk to you soon.  Please look after yourself until then.

Reed Richards is Not a ---k: Hickman's Fantastic Voyage Part One

"It's okay to be afraid.  It's ok to fail.  But to say that you're not even willing to try...that's unacceptable..."

-Nathaniel Richards to his young son, Reed-

Jonathan Hickman has only been in the industry for a few years now, but his stories are the big, big type that are why I still bother to read comics--tales of secret histories, utopias, about characters taking initiative and boldly building a future, any future, rather than meekly sitting on their hands and protecting the status quo. Not all of his stories finish as satisfyingly as they begin, but all that I have read are incredibly interesting and thought provoking.  Knowing Hickman was a "big idea" guy (having read The Nightly News and Pax Romana) and also a high detail writer (his legendary "notebook" treatments are dwarfed only by apocryphal tales of those of Moore and Morrison), I was quite looking forward to his take on that quintessential Lee/Kirby collaboration, Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four is a historically important though periodically stagnant title.  Its importance stems from the fact that it is Marvel's initial superhero title of the modern era, and so the successful run of Lee and Kirby--the longest continuous run on any title until just recently (102 consecutive monthly issues of the same writer/artist team--somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years, if you count annuals), and certainly the most creatively prolific--ensured that Marvel would become an ongoing concern.

That seminal run established the M.O. for Marvel--the idea that heroes could have distinct personalities and conflicting interests and points of view turned the dramatic dial up a few notches for what had been a sleepy children's lit subgenre, and Kirby's all-out 200 miles-per-hour visuals set the bar for the next twenty years. Since that run ended, there have been a few brilliant and fun stretches (Byrne's, Simonson's, and the Waid/Werringo run spring immediately to mind), but rarely have the creative teams recaptured the spirit of optimism and adventure of a science-loving, cosmos-exploring family in the atomic age, each one so larger than life that none can occupy the same space without high drama ensuing. 

Other than John Byrne's run in the 80s when the man had the midas touch (coming off of his Uncanny X-Men collaboration with Claremont), I never read the book much.  It always seemed based on an incredibly outdated and corny worldview. Optimism wasn't "in" in the grim 'n gritty 80s, when The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and all things Wolverine were king. Having since gone back and read much of the Kirby run, I'm astounded by how much of what's important, enduring, and distinctive about the Marvel Universe was laid down in those initial 100 or so issues.

I could never find a way "in" for the patriarch of the team, Reed Richards. He was old. (He had graying temples even in his first appearance, and smoked a pipe.) He was sort of jerky and condescending to everyone else in the book. He had stupid low-rent Plastic Man-style powers. Not only that, but he seemed more or less a living, breathing deus ex machina, as his brilliance was the solution to every problem.  And all apologies, but a guy who neglects his friends and family because his idea of fun is to slave away in a lab will likely never be cool to the young.  Like the narrative engineer he is, Hickman sets about solving this problem with a very "Reed-centric" story.

Things begin at the point of the Marvel Universe's "Dark Reign" baseline (i.e., immediately following the "Secret Invasion" event).  The bad guys are in charge of things and looking to use their advantage to smear the reputations of all the good guys and take them out of the equation.  Tony Stark is discredited, Nick Fury has disappeared, Captain America is dead, and evil nutjob Norman Osborne is running law enforcement.  Reed is at an all-time low.  He feels responsible, as he had a great deal of input leading up to this point, and based on outcomes, decisions he made in good faith made things worse rather than better.  That's not how supergeniuses are supposed to work.

[SPOILERS GALORE AHEAD--PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK]

Try as he might, he cannot see how he could have come to any better conclusions than he did.  The solution: to build a machine that gathers data from alternate realities, and pipe it into a device that extrapolates desirable and adverse outcomes, and their causes.   The data leads him to a conclusion that is disturbing. Reed has discovered that in the timestreams where he collaborated with others, disaster ensued; in the ones where/when he acted unilaterally, positive outcomes were created, without exception.  This puts a character already known for hubris in a bad spot.  Whereas he'd be inclined to compromise with others to build consensus, he now has a moral imperative not to, as false humility on his part can cause loss of life on a massive scale.

He finds out that Reeds from 140 other realities have arrived at the same conclusion. In what seems like a sure nod to Alan Moore's run on Supreme, he discovers the Council--a place where these 141 Reeds meet and solve problems on a multiversal level.

At this part, I'll just take a moment to step back and acknowledge the scale of all of this.  If Reed Richards is, as he describes himself, "the most brilliant mind in the universe," imagine the sheer brain power teaming with 140 other instances of himself would yield!  The ambition of the story  is well beyond any previous run that I have read on the book and approaches utopian fare like Miracleman and The Authority (not slight praise, I know!) Richards is going well beyond superheroics into universe building.  Together, the Council can take care of Galactus (i.e., the Marvel Universe's analog for God) problems before lunch.  Poverty and energy problems are things of the past, and with effort, they can save entire solar systems from extinction.

But as you'd expect there are flaws, and some pretty big ones at that.  For example, all members of the Council handle their Dr. Dooms in essentially the same way. Not wanting to toy with such a potentially destructive force, the solution is to lobotomize them and put them in captivity.  If that weren't enough to make Reed re-think his affiliation with them, he discovers something else they all have in common.  True enough, each version of Reed has set about the goal of "solving everything," but with that each has also made the judgement that the only way to do so is abdicating their role in their family.  As one member of the Council explains, "The work will consume you. How can we think about little things like our personal lives when the fate of all we know lies in the balance? Susan will stop understanding.  Her patience will run out as she's forced to raise the family all alone...Doesn't she deserve better? Ben and Johnny will get angry and eventually move on...Your children will resent you because you work too much and love too little..All you will have left is this."  It is then clear that "[t]he cost of solving everything is everything."  And in a character-defining moment, Reed decides this is not his way, and he leaves the Council to go back home to his wife.  The story ends with a very moving image: he returns and Sue, wearily, is still waiting for him.

Hickman has done his work and now I can really identify with Reed at this stage of my life. Certainly his is a talent not to be wasted.  However, the events in this story have calibrated the character's priorities.  There is work to be done, yes.  He will be tugged this way and that, and even though he wants to hunker down and just do what he does best and see the results, there are others he must answer to as well. Unlike his peers on the Council and unlike his own father (who makes appearances in several interludes throughout the story), Reed won't accept the compromises and expediencies that become the excuses we diminish ourselves with.  He won't take shortcuts (like lobotomizing Doom, or sacrificing time with his family for the sake of a greater sense of personal achievement).  Most importantly, he won't accept the false dichotomy of either being Great (in the sense of achievement) or being good (in the moral sense).  We can be very forgiving of this Reed. He carries a great weight, and even if he screws up by being aloof, or a workaholic, or short tempered, we know he's trying. He's trying to  do the "have it all" thing, which we know is impossible but the trying of it is worth it nonetheless.

Later in Hickman's FF macrostory, other characters take their turns at center stage (as they should in an ensemble book). Throughout, though, Reed Richards is depicted as a mature man who shoulders the burdens of responsibility but stays young by embracing possibility.  His family grows as he takes into his home those who need his help. He sees that through work and family he is building the future.  We might think, "Man, I wish I had a Dad like that."  But the far better thought is "I want to be a Dad like that."

Here's to you, Reed Richards.  You're the man.

How Not to Be a Stooge

Well, Atheist Week has come and gone (18-24 March), and the first practice of the year of the Atheist softball team I used to manage (another column, another time) is tomorrow. I figured I need to write something on that sort of theme. You can listen up, or in light of that, you can check out now, your choice. I'd say sit back down and listen to what I have to say, but hey, it's your call.

In an earlier column, I pointed out the fact that I derive major bits of my worldview from Confucianism. More accurately, I've always thought in parallel lines with that school of thought, even before I became aware of it, so when I did I was strongly drawn to it. Exactly how these things happen is hard to say. Actually, I can tell you exactly how this influence came to be, but it's not terribly exciting and I want to get to the good stuff now.

Over the years I've ingested so much of this stuff, it's just me now. It's great for the whole "having a moral compass" thing, but it's not terribly useful when trying to share or pass the ideas on. So in preparation for this column, I was looking back over one of my many different translations of The Analects, trying to find a good explanation of what about this way of thinking was so appealing.

D. C. Lau, in his introduction to his 1979 translation captures it better than anybody. He explains that at the very core of Confucian thinking lies the "unspoken, and therefore, unquestioned, assumption that the only purpose a man can have and also the only worthwhile thing a man can do is to become as good a man as possible. This is something that has to be pursued for its own sake and with complete indifference to success or failure" (12).

Now let's unpack this, because it's a huge and important idea. When beginning, there's nothing better than starting off with fundamentals and right principles, and this is ground zero. To hold the objective of being the best person you can possibly be...that is exactly what separates a serious person from the average guy. You either, in your heart, care, intensely, or you're lukewarm. You think that it is worthwhile to do the right thing as much as possible, and to always try to do it more and more, or you do it just when the act is convenient or has visibility. If you are the former, life is a frantic, restless search for how to be better, how to be more. You feverishly want to know the right thing to do, the right way to live. And if you're in the latter category, there's nothing preventing you from joining the former at some point.

The other huge point here--if you want it to count, the good you do and/or try to be has to be for its own sake. Not for show, and not for future reward. I've often found that everything has a price, but especially it's the case when tasked with doing the right thing. which could be unpopular, unappreciated, and misunderstood. If you start with this as your center, you can never go too far wrong.

Christianity in its modern generic form teaches us to obey. Indoctrination begins before you can even talk, and as you age it's very difficult to break out of it without coring a fundamental part of your identity out, sort of like drilling out too much to fix a cavity. Even if it has long since failed to do anything for you, you still go to church, pray, read scripture, just out of habit. It holds out rewards (God's grace, material prosperity [as proof of being among The Elect], and everlasting life) and punishment (estrangement from the asserted source of life [i.e., God], eternal punishment [Hell], etc). Whatever God approves of is good, and whatever he does not approve of is bad, by definition. So you want to do what God says, and you get rewarded. You definitely don't want to do want he doesn't like, or you'll get punished, and harshly. It's all about obeying and pleasing God. The scriptures harp repeatedly on behaving righteously to be pleasing to God and to receive His rewards.

All fine and dandy on paper, but in the real world we know that being good and being obedient to authority are sometimes mutually exclusive. When I'm told to do something but it seems wrong or unethical, I have to challenge that, and if my reservations aren't satisfied, I'm not doing it! I fail to obey, but I've done the right thing. If my core values were seeking approval from authority or securing a reward from myself, I'd be a much different person. I'd be less, and I'd be grossly disappointed in and ashamed of myself. I wouldn't be able to do the right thing a good portion of the time.

So you can aim low or you can aim higher. If you want to drift through life without thinking about it or struggling too much, you can be an obeyer. Abdicate responsibility for your moral choices to an abstract higher power. It seems harder, but actually it's a lot easier than to have to struggle day to day, reasoning if you have done the right thing, without the instant reset buttons of confession or being born again to erase your mistakes whenever you like. It's no fun to have to figure it out, to take the chance on being wrong, and to have to live with mistakes and go forward. Easier to buy into the franchise of thought that's already there, fully formed, ready for you to just add water and stir.

And this is why I love Confucius. You see, the source material for much of Confucian thought, the Lun Yu (aka The Analects) was not written by a supernatural being. It wasn't even written by Confucius, but rather by his students, who collected and revised his ideas after his death. You might say it's the collective document of an ideology at one snapshot in time.

As time went by, his followers could have claimed divine parentage for him. They could have usurped an earlier mystical tradition, like Judaism, and placed him at the center of its canon. They could have written in a scene of literal apotheosis before his death. They didn't. They knew to do so would be to go against everything he stood for. More than anything, Confucius wanted his students and followers to refine themselves by studying and self-examination, to become better people through their own efforts. (Part of this is to be able to read properly, which is more than ingesting ideas--it also means interpreting and critiquing them to see if they hold up.)

It was said that the supernatural is a topic he refused to speak on, and he outrightly refused to comment on life after death. To speak on these bizarre subjects would be an act, more or less, of speculation, and idle speculation is a distraction from the sorts of things you should be learning to straighten yourself out and make yourself a more substantial person. (Think about it: the fire and brimstone of hell and depiction of heaven is generally the most vivid but also the most pander-y thing about any sermon. It's a purely visceral emotional appeal that does nothing to aid your moral instruction. It's also quite circus freakshow-ish...think of how Jonathan Edwards likely had his audience eating out of his hand in sermons like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God...)

And anyhow, what did it matter? If the goal of being a good person was paramount, you're doing everything you can, anyhow. And if God exists, he'd have to be cool with that. But if not, you'd just have to stand against Him. Because right is right. Again, you're the person that does the right thing, or you're the person that panders to the bully. If the bully throws you in Hell for doing the right thing, you can easily re-imagine the scene between Thoreau and Emerson where Emerson asked him why he was in jail, and Thoreau in turn asked Emerson why he was not.

Folks will tell you that this is all garbage, that morality did not exist before Christianity. The chauvinism and small mindedness in such ideas are readily apparent, as this means all the non-Christian cultures are immoral (not just amoral). It also denies Christianity's debt to stoicism, Platonism, Judaism, and many of the mythic tropes it ripped off. And did Confucius not say, "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire"? Sounds suspiciously like he ripped off the Golden Rule...except that Confucius died in 479 B.C.

Another prong of rebuttal would say that men are innately bad, and they can't be trusted to become good without some dire punishment, that we need hell because if there were no heaven and hell, people would hedonistically and savagely behave as they wished, without consequence.

It is instructive here to consider two major proponents of the Confucian school--Mencius and Xunzi. They differed on one fundamental point. Mencius thought man's essential nature was good, but in need of refinement (i.e., study and introspection for the sake of moral instruction). Xunzi thought the opposite; man's nature is essentially evil, and is in need of moral education, else he is not to be trusted. The latter led to Legalism, which imposed harsh punishments on the people and destroyed books--so that they could not become a basis for criticizing those in power--en masse.

Apologies to Xunzi. He's a superior philosopher whose work everyone should read. But to assume human nature is bad, no matter what carnage you've seen, is flabby thinking. If you assume that we (people) can't be trusted, that means you can't even trust that very idea (that people can't be trusted), because you're a person, and you thought it. I'm with Mencius. Our nature, if it must be broken down into such dichotomous terms, is good, and we can refine ourselves and make ourselves better.

So as A-Week draws to a close, if you would, take the time and think about what you're doing for your own moral instruction and improvement. Are you an obeyer, or are you trying to be better than you are now? What's your plan for it? Do you spend the time you could be using to strengthen yourself trying to please authority and be seen as good?

No school of thought is perfect, but that's the joy of study. You take the core ideas, work with them, and make them into something that has meaning and can do something for you. Nothing gets swallowed whole without it being interpreted and revised by you into something that makes sense. It's a creative act.

And Atheists, remember that you're not off the hook by any means. No God is ok, but living without a moral code, no matter what the source may be, is nihilism and oblivion. (And looking down at others for being in a different place than you is not cool, either.) Those of us who realize there is likely no life after death, or at least in a way in which will allow us to retain our identities, should be especially sensitive to the need to not waste what time we have left to us as who we are.

No matter what brush you paint yourself with, or wherever you are, we can do a lot better. To be good is the most important decision you'll ever make, and that goodness is more real if it comes from your own will and effort, and isn't derived from mere obedience. Don't stop, and in your darkest moments, don't be discouraged.

As Confucius said, "Good people strengthen themselves ceaselessly."

You are that good person.

Do it.

Kansas is My Enemy

Another guest column from my wife, while my next one bakes in the oven a bit longer. In light of today's Elite Eight games, seems like just the right time to run it...

I’m sitting here watching the beginnings of March Madness on TV with my husband, and so I’m thinking about basketball and the role it has assumed in my life.

I’m from Alabama, and so I am, by law of the state, a football fan, specifically an Alabama (Roll Tide!) fan. Since I grew up with a father who likes other sports (not golf, not hockey, not soccer), I do know something about basketball, but I wouldn’t say I’m as comfortable with or knowledgeable about it as I am with football.

Then I got married, and I married a man from North Carolina, where it is state law to love basketball. When we first started dating I knew that I would have to get more familiar with basketball, and more okay with watching a lot of basketball in March and the early part of April.

One day my spouse and I were discussing rivalries. In Alabama, you have one rival: Auburn. And if you’re an Alabama fan, you hate Auburn. You hate people who like Auburn, you hate the city of Auburn, you hate people who attend Auburn, you hate the colors orange and blue, and you hate tigers. I think that covers it. Oh, and even if Auburn isn’t playing Alabama, you root against Auburn in whatever sport they’re playing. If Auburn is playing Florida in lacrosse, you root for Florida.

This is what my husband didn’t understand. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I root against Duke when they’re playing UNC, but I root for Duke if they’re playing Michigan State.’

‘Nope, not in Alabama. If you hate Auburn, you hate them completely,’ says I.

‘But they’re representing your state. Wouldn’t you rather a team from Alabama win?’

I just shook my head. How could I explain it? Maybe it’s that there are really only two main players in the sports world in Alabama. There’s Auburn and there’s Alabama. I mean, sure, you have UAB, but they don’t really count. But in North Carolina, you have Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest. All are reasonable contenders for basketball superiority.

Still I can’t understand how you can root against a team one day, cussing them and throwing things at the TV (isn’t that what everyone does?) and then rooting for them the next day. How fickle can you be? If I root against someone, I do it completely. They’re dead to me, in all venues.

And here’s my triumphant basketball story heralding the virtues of hating completely: When we got married, which was in March, we went on our honeymoon in Asheville, NC, and this happened to coincide with the official beginning of the basketball tournament. We watched basketball in our hotel room when we weren’t out and about touring the town. To honor the creation of our new family, my husband created the Memolo March Madness Pool (now in our 8^th season). Family and friends could enter their bracket picks and whoever won got the dough. I think only 5 or 6 people signed up the first year.

Recently, I had submitted an application to Kansas for their Creative Writing PhD program. Even more recently, I had received not one but TWO rejection letters from the school. It was like they were saying, “I know we rejected you in that first letter, but we wanted to be sure you understood that you’re really rejected. Thanks.”

Understandably, this caused me to feel a certain amount of ire towards Kansas. So, when we made our bracket picks, I picked Bucknell (I think they were 14 seed) to beat Kansas. My husband said something like, ‘are you sure you want to pick Bucknell?’ and I said something like ‘screw Kansas’ except more obscene and I kept my pick.

Then the night of the game came and we watched intently. I was more invested since we had the pool going, but I really was rooting against Kansas (see my earlier discussion of completely hating your rival). Kansas had made it to the second round every time since the 1980s, so you can understand why my husband questioned my judgement. It was a tight game, and Kansas was ahead at the half. But in the last seconds of the game Bucknell hit a shot and Kansas wasn’t able to return the favor, and the game ended with Bucknell winning, 64 to 63.

I cheered for Bucknell as if I’d gone to the school and donated money to the alumni fund regularly. The Bison were my heroes. Through them, I had beaten Kansas, and had exacted my revenge for their thoughtless and painful mailing error.

Needless to say, I won the pool that year based solely on that pick. I think I won $15.

Subsequently, I have picked whoever Kansas plays in the tournament (I will hate Kansas forever), but I’ve never been right since.

--Jenn Memolo--

Diminution

"When you're small, you spend your life crawling..."

--Morrissey--

Among the genetically-derived physical attributes for which folks are discriminated against, if I asked you to list the ones that most profoundly affected a person's life, you'd likely mention race or sex; maybe you'd try to throw sexual "preference" in there. Being short wouldn't even register on the radar.

But I'm a 5'6" male, and I can tell you I've been reminded of that fact all of my adult life, and anything I've achieved has been in spite of it. Whereas a taller person cuts an imposing figure and demands respect with much less effort, we more diminutive folk struggle not to be dismissed in nearly every possible way for a factor we can't control and that is ultimately of no relevance to anything other than being able to slam dunk a basketball with ease.

I'm certainly no self-hater--many who know me have described me as "confident-bordering-on-arrogant" (which, I'm sure, does me no favors--I should probably be more reticent and shamed by my shortness), and I personally see nothing wrong with my height and, in fact, would never want to be taller than I am. (Though I did take offense to the "life-sized" model of Alvin they had at the movie theatre last year to promote Alvin and The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. It was only three inches shorter than me. I have to call bullshit on the notion that I'm only three inches taller than a chipmunk.)

Yet, this has been a hard-fought war. For example, just last week I caught a co-worker muttering under his breath that the employee who works under me shouldn't bother to listen to what a little short guy tells her to do. In the past, people who probably considered themselves my friends have made light of my height, and at key and rather public moments (crowded bars, weddings, high school reunions) at length in unflattering ways, joking that my height was the reason why I relate well to small children, that I would need platform shoes or a stepping stool to do this or a booster seat to do that, or noting that I was a "funny little guy" (as a response to my cutting up with them good-naturedly).

Before I met my wife, who thankfully is a person of substance who treats this as the non-issue that it is, this no doubt affected my dating prospects. One girlfriend who professed to love me told me no matter what I did (exercised, worked out, etc.), I'd never be as much of a man as a taller guy, and that she felt more safe when she dated taller men than she did with me. In another instance when I was once set up on a blind date, my date spent the night being rude and unresponsive. Initially I didn't take it personally, because I figured mine was hardly the first blind date where the chemistry failed. I was deeply hurt and offended when it was later passed on to me that the date had disdainfully told her friend (who had dragged me out to meet her in the first place) that she was tempted to rub chalk on me while we were playing pool, so I'd look like the smurf I was as short as.

(If I hadn't gotten the memo before, in 2001 the message was driven home further. Being the lifelong comics geek that I am, it was impossible not to notice the instant transformation of that stud of the Marvel Universe Logan, aka Wolverine. Historically Logan was depicted as 5'2" and quite stocky, but in the wake of the success of Brian Singer's X-Men, and Hugh Jackman's sex symbol-creating performance of the character, Marvel thereafter portrayed Wolverine as the standard 6'1". It was stark and immediate; one month other characters towered over him, as they always had, and the next, he was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Captain America and the like. His incredible tenacity, indomitable personality, and prodigious abilities, though they are the very things that always defined the character, were simply not enough to make him seem sexy and to allow him to be taken seriously as a hero to the public-at-large. Message sent; message received. A pretty important beat for the character, that he would be underestimated by people who didn't know him, and would always prove to be more than met the eye, was tossed to make him more generic and "photogenic," and all the guys who can't and couldn't make it to 6'0" saw one of the few diminutive models of masculinity in pop culture snatched away for homogeneity's sake.)

It always strikes me as odd that it would be deemed socially unacceptable to make disparaging remarks about race if I were black or about my sex if I were a woman, but that bagging on someone for falling below the height average is perfectly ok. In each instance, I try to handle it with all the grace I can muster, but just what the proper response should be is hard to gage. (The instinctive response is to savagely wail on whomever has disrespected you, but that's nowhere near as constructive as it is cathartic.) Should you laugh along at your own body? ("Hahaha, I know, I'm short, it's funny, right?") Get confrontational and call them out? ("F-you you f-ing -f-er!") Ignore it? ("I'm sorry, did you say something?") Stoop to their level and identify some physical attribute they are likely to be sensitive about? ("Well, you have a stupid nose/tooth/ear.") (Others: "I apologize for my height; I'll get on some human growth hormone right away so I'm more acceptable and pleasing to you.") None of these really ring true. You have been placed in a situation where any reaction to or acknowledgement of the comment diminishes you. But ultimately the fact is, anyone who would dismiss you based on such a superficial attribute is probably not someone who has much to offer you, and so you should limit your contact with them if you can.

In the meanwhile, I have gained a lot from my shortness. Possibly in some effort to compensate and prove wrong the naysayers, I'm always trying to improve myself physically, be it with weights, running, or the speed bag, and even though I go through my ebbs and flows with exercise, the will to be better and the chip on my shoulder generally keeps me healthier and stronger than I would be otherwise. It's also taught me, as much as I can, to patiently tolerate bad behavior because it's not bad people, but rather simply human nature to look for reasons to exclude and dismiss others (as a method toward simplification), and as Confucius teaches, I should observe these tendencies in others (and their effects) so I can try to curb them in my own behavior. And so far as the group I'm in, I'm always looking at things from the outside, even if I'm really on the inside. I've come to identify with the underdog and the outsider in almost every situation, and even though it slows down my reaction time on some issues, it keeps me from doing anything too fucked up to anyone else, without solid reason. I'm not black, or a woman, or gay, or really any of the standard minorities you can instantly drum up, but I can pretty easily empathize with how they have been and are marginalized, dismissed, derided, and excluded.

Yeah, I've read all of the crap about how you're less likely to get raises, or be respected and admired, or be considered sexy, and all of the other stuff that men of average or greater height take for granted and I can honestly say that I don't feel slighted in the least. I have taken, and likely will continue to take a lot of guff for being short. But whether it's true or not, I tend to see myself as a scrapper, as someone who in reality can go toe-to-toe with anyone and who is perpetually challenging himself to grow more (ok, metaphorically, you jackass), and I also tend, because they are generally skewed by projections and divorced from reality, to mistrust other's perceptions of me. The confidence and sense of well being I feel about the whole issue are rock solid because they are hard-won and time-tested. At 5'6", I have a loving and fulfilling marriage to a beautiful and brilliant wife, a daughter whom I adore, a lovely home, and a career that's solid and that both challenges me and affords me a measure of security. I have creative outlets (writing, music). It's a good life. So it seems in truth, height's only an issue if you allow it to be.

Having said all that, if I ever run into Randy Newman on the street, I'll knock his goddamned teeth down his throat.

"You Have the Right to Remain, but Anything You Do Will Be Held Against You..."

Just had a birthday, and as usual I was fortunate enough to rake in quite a few awesome gifts. One of those (much to my wife's chagrin) was Homicide: Life on the Streets--The Complete Series. Every since I got turned on to David Simon's The Wire, I've been trying to track down anything associated with the man. He's doing journalism as fiction, speaking to today's problems in a way that highlights them through narrative but doesn't provide any answers to questions posed. Homicide is where Simon got his start on TV, and it is an outrageously rich experience, especially when put side by side with other network series, both historically and in the (police procedural) genre.

The best way to describe what makes Homicide such a high quality show is to compare it with standard cop fare like, say, Law and Order. I, like many of you readers, used to watch the absolute hell out of L&O, but as time went by, I found its stale narrative formula never did anything for me. It seems there's a set number of O'Henry-like twists that happen at very specific points of each episode. The characters are never developed well...you know a bit about them, but they're not enough like real people to actually care much about them one way or another (except for Olivia Benson in SVU, who's basically a modern saint, or Robert Goren in Criminal Intent, who is quite animated but too emotionally jacked up to really identify with). The greatest impediment to characterization is the...how can I put it and still be nice?...uh, ruthlessly economical nature of the dialogue. Every line has to be explaining some basic fact--there's no room for anything to breathe. I'm not Shakespeare myself, but I know enough about writing to know that this could be done better and that it's a tell-tale sign that the writers are just doing enough to crank out a show and meet deadlines. You can't argue with its (bland, pedestrian) record of success, but after a while you feel like you've wasted an hour of your life and gotten only just what you expected, which wasn't really much to begin with, and you may be inclined to move on to something else. I was.

Homicide, in contrast, begins with (as all decent cop shows should) the first day of rookie detective Tim Bayliss (played by Kyle Secor). This is cliche, but it's also pretty smart--it puts you right in there with him, learning the ropes, learning about the people that he works with. And the people he works with are all rather interesting. John Munch (Richard Belzer) is a cyncial-on-the-outside/marshmellow-on-the-inside misanthrope/softy that is crusty Walter Matthau-as-a-cop. This character has since appeared on Law and Order and, in a cameo, on The Wire. Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) is a tough-as-nails hypercompetent female cop who takes no crap and stands with the best of them. Al Giordello (Yaphet Kotto), is the seasoned shift commander who is an Italian-American widower. "G," as his subordinates affectionately call him, has seen it all and has still escaped with his integrity in tact. He is exactly the sort of father figure, mentor, and supervisor we all wish we had, but rarely do. Frank Pemberton (played by Andre Braugher) is one of the most dynamic characters I've seen on television. Self-contained, highly intelligent, and capable of razor-sharp disses, Herculean acts of valor, and nuclear bursts of passion, the man is a true individual and hardly ever predictable. Braugher brings just the sort of energy that Brando brought to his roles in his Elia Kazan films (Streetcar's Stanley and Waterfront's Terry Malloy), and you can't take your eyes off of him for a second, no matter what else is going on in the scene. (Fans of The Wire will see heavy shades of McNulty in this character and his outlaw "go-it-alone/win-at-all-costs" attitude.) Rounding out the cast is veteran actor Ned Beatty, who plays Bolander, a late-middle-aged divorcee who, as many others, fends off frustration and defeat each and every day (and doesn't have to squeal like a pig nor bumble around after Gene Hackman).

The show succeeds because all the characters are people, not caricatures or "types." Sure, they're exceptional detectives, but we have met them all at one point or another. Things happen to them and they change as a result. They solve crimes by following up on leads and talking to witnesses, not by camera tricks or special effects (are you listening, CSI?), and there are plenty of "idle" moments where they have a conversation, tell a story, have an argument that shows you how they came to be where they're at and how each character differs from the other. Lots of perspectives are represented, and you can more or less understand even characters you don't really like.

They are also relatable in this: they have a job to do--solving murders--that will eventually destroy them emotionally unless they find some way to become numb to it. And in becoming numb to it, they begin down the slow road of becoming numb to life. How can they win? Who wants to lose themselves to do a job well, even if the job is worth doing? As a result, most of them are divorced, estranged from their children, and have little time for family and friends. None of them is a perfect physical specimen. They don't take fancy vacations. They have money troubles, and they're ill-tempered and tired nearly all the time. Can you relate?

And this is your way in. Have you ever found yourself having to do something, having to work in an environment, where you KNOW you can't be nice? The idea occurs to you that being nice/good and being effective are mutually exclusive. The bad guys will eat you up unless you toss your white hat in the fireplace. Yet, at your core, you value being a good, moral person. What do you do? How long can you hold out? You may even find, to your dismay, that you thrive in such an environment. How long, until it changes you and strips all your good away and leaves you a bitter husk? Do you sacrifice the opportunity all for one act of nobility that, you know when all is said and done, will sink your ship? If you read noir and espionage fiction, this is all "old hat" to you, but you've never dipped into these genres, I've just lain out the welcome mat.

It took me many years, but I prefer these worlds to the spandex, consequenceless fables of infinite (but impossible) virility that super heroes represent. This the real world. These are real people, and they have real problems. What is the solution? Is it one, or are they many? Are there any? I want to see how they handle it. I want to know how they go wrong, or succeed. I want to know if there's a way out with dignity and peace of mind.

Art like this is honest in that it faces up to the fact that every day of your adult life is a Faustian bargain parlayed into tomorrow. Sure, some crime fiction goes too far into the netherworld of despair, but Homicide has just enough hope in it to hold out the possibility, maybe a fact, maybe an illusion, that if you're tough and smart enough and play your cards right, and just a bit lucky, too, even if somewhere down the line you made a deal with the devil, you just may be able to cancel that check mere moments before it bounces, and live happily ever after.

Get Margaret Atwood on the Phone

[Note: Jacques Mofeau is off but will return next week. What follows is a guest column done by Ms. Jacques Mofeau--my lovely wife. Yep, I roped her into doing one. Trying to con her into becoming a biweekly contributor...she definitely has the chops. Read on, and see for yourself.]

The other day I was on Facebook and one of my “friends” had posted this article: “Newest GOP Attack on Women: Just Say No to Tampons.” This is, of course, a farce, posted on the website freewoodpost.com, but it got me thinking. In the article (again, not real), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) (who put together the Committee on contraception coverage that received so much attention because it was an all-male panel) was quoted as saying, “It is unnatural for a woman to insert a foreign object into her body for the sake of stopping the menstrual flow. I, as well as several others seek to eliminate the sales of such objects. Women should let nature take care of itself the way that our Almighty Creator intended. To try to manipulate and control such an occurrence goes against God’s plan for women.” Okay, so that’s crazy, but not too long ago I would have said the same thing about a group of men getting together and talking about women’s contraception choices and insurance coverage.

It’s all Obama’s fault. He decided it would be a good idea for insurance companies to be required to cover payment for contraception for women. That crazy guy. How dare he show support for women and their finances. How many men have paid for any contraception other than condoms? What do condoms cost, $15, $20? Okay, so what about the Pill or the Ring? That’s more like $50 a month. The IUD? Try $1500-$2000 for a 5-year coverage. Same for the Injection and the Rod Implant. And for those done with kids, let’s not forget the $10K+ tubal ligation (heaven forbid a man get a vasectomy, which is cheaper and less invasive and safer than tubal ligation). Yes, some insurances cover portions of these costs. When I purchased the Pill, I didn’t pay $50 a pop, but I generally paid more than the cost of condoms.

So would I say that my opinion is that it’s a good thing for insurance to fully pay for contraception? Yes, yes you could say that. Let me be clear that I am biased.

Somehow, though, this turned into a thing like gay marriage or abortions. Somehow, someone got the idea that if insurance companies are required to pay for contraception, then people are being forced to use contraception.

For example, along the abortion line, Rick Santorum went on Face the Nation and said that he was against prenatal testing (or rather, he was against insurance companies paying for prenatal testing) because “a lot of prenatal tests are done to identify deformities in utero and the customary procedure is to encourage abortions.” He went on to say “that people have the right to have prenatal testing done, ‘but to have the government force people to provide it free, to me, is a bit loaded’” (Face the Nation).

To add to it, he said (not on Face the Nation, but in another speech) that the only reason Obama wanted insurance companies to pay for prenatal testing was “”Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and, therefore, less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society’” (msn.com). The implication here is that if insurance is required to pay for prenatal testing then people will be made to get the testing and, if it’s determined they have a child with disabilities, they will be forced to get an abortion.

And Santorum’s take on insurance paying for contraception? “’This has nothing to do with access,’ he said. ‘This is having someone pay for it, pay for something that shouldn’t be in an insurance plan anyway because it is not, really an insurable item. This is something that is affordable, available. You don’t need insurance for these types of relatively small expenditures. This is simply someone trying to impose their values on somebody else, with the arm of the government doing so. That should offend everybody, people of faith and no faith that the government could get on a roll that is that aggressive’” (Washingtonmonthly.com). See my previous paragraph on the costs of contraception. I don’t know about other women, but $50/month or $2000 every 5 years is not a “relatively small expenditure”.

Along these lines, there was this segment on the TODAY show (yes, I’m quoting the TODAY show) in which a panel of 2 women and one man were asked their opinions on the creation of the first male birth control pill. The two women expressed interest; again, see my paragraph on the cost of birth control. I know I think it would be nice for a man to burden some of the responsibility of contraception. The male panelist, however, said something about how he had a daughter and he’d hate for her to relinquish her power over contraception to a man who would likely be unreliable in taking a pill. Maybe this is true; maybe a man wouldn’t be reliable and maybe it’s still a good idea for the woman to take measures to prevent pregnancy. But all I could think was 1) are women so reliable? I’m sure there are women who said they were on the pill who really weren’t. And 2) I’ve never met a man who would deliberately sabotage contraception. Most men are pretty firm on not wanting to get a girl pregnant (unless they’re in a stable relationship and pregnancy has been discussed and planned).

So, what about this all-male panel that talked about the insurance-contraception issue? The premise was that these were religious leaders, and they stated they felt this issue was a freedom of religion rather than a women’s rights/contraception issue. Obama’s policy was going to force religious groups who were anti-abortion/contraception to pay for it. But what were they actually talking about? Contraception. And again, who pays for contraception most of the time? Women. I know that for many women, taking away or prohibiting insurance payment for contraception would result in women not being able to afford it, and then you’ve got more women getting pregnant when they don’t want to. Maybe that would lead to a rise in abortions? Maybe. So how was it that no one thought it would be a good idea to have a woman on that panel? Wouldn’t it be useful to have a female perspective, since women would be the people affected by this ruling, either way?

Shortly after this panel met and the feminist crap hit the fan, SNL’s Amy Poehler cameoed on the show to do a skit with Seth Meyers called “Really?” Maybe the best joke centered around Foster Freiss’ comment that when he was young, women used an aspirin between their knees as contraception. Freiss later apologized for the comment, but Poehler said in the skit: “’Well, we'd love to accept your apology, Foster, but you made a mistake -- and now you're going to have to live with that mistake for the rest of your life.’" Check it out on Hulu.com.

And let’s not forget our friend Rush Limbaugh. Of course he had to put in his two cents. Recently he was quoted as saying during a broadcast, in response to the female Georgetown student who was denied the right to speak at a one of the contraception hearings, that the student (Sandra Fluke) was a “slut” and then added “if we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch” (huffingtonpost.com). I think I must quote Seth and Amy and say, “Really??!” Using contraception makes women sluts? What about those of us who are married, in long-term, committed relationships? Just because we don’t want to be Michelle Dugger doesn’t make us sluts for using contraception.

Again, we have a man expressing his (admittedly extreme) opinions about contraception, but where are the women? Yes, the women in Congress are voicing their concerns. Congresswomen Maloney and Norton walked out on one of the committee meetings, and others have since condemned the meetings as an affront to women’s rights.

I’ve never identified myself as a feminist, per se. I’ve never protested or marched or written letters to fight for a right or freedom. I have been fortunate enough to live in an era in which women experience the full gamut of freedoms when it comes to our bodies. Despite the debates, we are allowed to get abortions in most places. We are allowed to make our own choices for contraception and family planning. I’m not saying things are perfect, but compared to how things have been in the past, I have it pretty good.

But now I’m getting worried. I read The Handmaid’s Tale. I can see how bad this could go if something isn’t done. Truth? I don’t think this debate is about the freedom of religion. I think it is about the access to contraception (and possibly, abortions). It worries me that a lot of these meetings and panels and discussions include men, but few women. It worries me that many of the Republican candidates are anti-abortion and anti-contraception (or at least anti-insurance-paying-for-contraception). It worries me that the state of Virginia attempted to pass a bill that would require a transvaginal ultrasound for women requesting an abortion and another bill that would essentially ban both abortion and the use of hormonal contraception in the state. It worries me that the Catholic church withdrew its support (financially and otherwise) of St. Joseph’s hospital in Arizona when a physician performed an abortion on a woman whose pregnancy would almost certainly kill her if allowed to continue (thewashingtonpost.com). For me, these events are akin to a women’s rights apocalypse. It did make me feel a little better when I read that the bill proposed to reverse the Obama birth control policy was defeated in the Senate, but only by a narrow margin of 51-48. That’s too close for comfort.

I may have no venue to protest, except for this article. I also have power in the form of the vote, which is still a freedom allowed to me as a woman, for now. I can only hope that this article informs the uninformed and perhaps encourages those not registered to vote to please do so, since this is an issue that will affect every woman in this country, one way or the other.

How About Let's You and Me Steal Their $h*t?

"The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!"

-Paul Revere, circa 2012 A.D.-

I was checking out my weekly pseudo-intellectual guilty pleasure, The Economist, and noticed that recently something rather significant had taken place in the pages of that publication. The magazine, in it's January 28th/February 3rd 2012 edition, began featuring a section on China--instead of just including them in the Asia section. Big deal, right? No, really, it is. The last time they did something like this was in 1941, to begin a section for The United States of America.

But really, this is no revelation to most of us. We've been reading about how we're fat, dumb, and happy, and how China is going to clean our clock in the 21st century. In lots of the public discourse, it seems we're already waving the white flag and just trying to figure out a way to manage our imminent decline.

Well, waaah. Let me just lay down and hand all my crap over to them. Yeah, right.

That's bogus and that's "small ball." For one, there are many reasons to doubt that Chinese dominance of the near future is inevitable (and I'll reserve these for another column at a later date). In fact, in the crazy world we live in, you should be as a default stance dubious about any stated inevitability that you may hear from any source. But the most important thing to keep in mind is we have a moral imperative to perform, because our way of life and the values we hold dear are worth protecting and perpetuating.

This is truly a scenario where the best defense is a good offense. Instead of sitting around, crying in our beer and quaking in our boots, why don't we steal from them things much much more important than anything they could ever steal from us.

I'm talking about moving away from the mistaken notion that China has nothing to teach us. Theirs is a rich culture. Whereas the US has been together as a coherent political unit for over 200 years, China has existed as such for over two thousand. Compared to us, everything that could happen to them has happened, and in studying their history we can learn plenty about what to do, what not to do, what works, and what doesn't.

I've been in love with classical Chinese culture ever since my late teens, and I expect to be studying China's history and philosophies until the day I die and to never ever run out of new interesting facts and concepts to learn.

I can tell you that the things that make the Han Chinese a great people are customs, traditions, behaviors, and habits of mind that could take root on American soil and likely, with some work and special attention, be adapted to make wonderful things happen here. Along with fatherhood and culture in general, this is a topic that I'll be visiting time and time again in my weeklies. In particular, here are three crucial areas where the cultural artifacts and history of the Chinese people have much guidance to offer:

1) Confucianism--ask your average Joe about Confucius and he'll get cute and spout off about fortune cookies and "Kung Fu Theatre" commercial break segues ("Confucius say..."). And that is incredibly sad, because studying the philosophies of Confucius and his disciples, particularly Mengzi and Xunzi, but also the later Neo-Confucian syncretists, can add meaning to your life and teach you a great deal about how to be a fully realized human being.

I've got a few future columns on this coming, so I won't steal my own thunder, but to wit, the basics: Kongfuzi (i.e., Confucius) was a dedicated scholar who worked diligently to preserve and interpret his culture's key texts and traditions. (That many of the classical texts survive in some recognizable coherent form is due in a great part to him.) The central problem that consumed him, as it did all of the philosophers of The Warring States era (475-221 BCE), was how could one, or many, behave in such a way that would produce a stable social order. Do we not all wrestle with this question in some form or another? For the most part, the answers he came up with dealt with one's obligations to other men and existing social institutions, and also the never-ending task of self-cultivation, of making yourself better through seeking out knowledge and using introspection and will to reform your own character.

2) Taoism--Pronounced "Dow-ism." Over the centuries, any self-sustaining culture collects folk traditions. The folk traditions of the Chinese are collected in a philosophy called Daoism. Translated texts give us insight into a Western interpretation of it, Taoism. (I'll explain the rationale for this distinction in a later column, trust me; just roll with me for now. ) So you'd think that "the collected folk traditions" of Chinese culture wouldn't really come to much as a coherent philosophy, but you'd be wrong. Taoism comes down to us not just from authors who translated Chinese into English, but also from a whole line of Neo-Confucian scholars who read the original texts, interpreted them, excised the crap ideas from them, and whipped the remaining ideas into a beautiful system where man, nature, and the heavens all work in microcosm and macrocosm. This system encompasses health, exercise, and mediation. It is practical b/c it observes without judging and draws fact-based conclusions about cause and effect. It is profound and philosophical in that there are concepts that capture ideas about Ultimate Reality, immortality, and the cyclical development of things and circumstances from generation to dissolution. The student of this philosophy gains context for himself, and an undying curiosity to learn more and to see what in life will come next for him.

The flexible and universal nature of Confucianism and Taoist concepts means that they offer a great deal to a secular person (like myself), but they are not at all hostile to the practice of religious faith and, in fact, will likely augment and enhance your appreciation of whatever religion you practice.

3) Strategy and a Long-Range View-- Earlier in this very column, this writer mentioned American values. We are proud of them, and we talk about them all of the time. And hey, it's all well and good to have values and to appreciate them, but if you truly do, you have to take action to protect them. This is not Hollywood. "The good guy" doesn't win by default.

Just because we are successful, and have been for a while, doesn't mean we will always be so. Even though we all have the will to win, very few of us have taken any time to study the basics of strategy. Mostly we examine that we are at Point A and we want to be at Point B, and we vaguely resolve to work hard to get there.

Winning and sustainment takes a lot of blood, sweat, and toil. You are much more likely to win if you are working hard, but you are almost certain to win if you are working both hard and smart, if you make and take the time to set up the playing field as you want it to be, and if you know everything there is to know about the other guy.

In Chinese history and philosophy, there is a great emphasis on observing conditions and adapting to them to accomplish an objective. Sunzi and many other great strategists (many of them Daoists) saw the value in preventing the waste of human life and other very valuable resources. All tools in the arsenal were made available, to include concealment and deception. We, with our idealistic nature, frown upon this, but we must admit that if an objective is truly worth achieving, nothing can be off the table. If we still choose to impose moral limits on our behavior, we have at least gained much from considering all options, and how they may best be deployed. Records of conflicts, strategic texts, and even games should be studied, regardless of whether we are ourselves violent people, and especially if we don't want violence. Look at the mess China was in at the time of Mao's death (1976) and compare it to where it is now. You think that just happened? No, my friend, that was the result of a plan, of many plans, and of a sustained effort toward it. You may not agree with how they do things 100 percent down the line, but aren't you at least curious as to how they got here from there? I am. You should be.

Anyhow, I hope this has given you food for thought, as it always does for me. Over time, I'll be handling these topics. I'll write about what I've learned, what I think, what I don't know but would like to know. This is fun for me. I hope it's fun for you.

Aside from my own enjoyment, though, I'm writing about these things because, let's be honest, ideas don't really belong to anybody. A good idea in one place is likely a good idea in another, and these are all concepts that inspire me and that I think we can all gain from. We are in a unique position, in that we can take their great ideas and, in the relatively free, prosperous environment that is The United States, adapt them, experiment with them, and improve upon them. Studying these concepts will make you better at whatever you do--better at work, better with your family, more whole as a person. We have the added benefit of no reverence; these ideas, useful though they are, don't come from our traditions, so whatever we can't use can go in the trash can. We can make revisions. We can add to them and make them better.

The future is not inevitable. It's time to roll up our sleeves and create the 22nd century. So instead of sitting around crying about how things aren't what they used to be, and how history's going to pass us all by, let's you and me steal their shit.