Thursday Throwback

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[A new, possibly regular feature in which I select a vintage post from the archives for the entertainment of newer readers. Originally published Nov. 5, 2014.]

Last stop of the day, pulling in to fill up the gas tank. I set the pump trigger latch in place and walked around to the passenger side for something. While there, I took a moment to get my small boar-bristle brush out of the glovebox and give my beard a smoothing-down. I’ve been letting it grow for the last few months, so it requires a lot more grooming now.

“Feels good, don’t it?”

I turned around to look over at the next pump island for the source of the voice, where I saw what appeared to be Billy Gibbons dressed in biker leather, next to his beat-up old pickup.

“I brush mine like that all the time. Love it,” he said, affectionately patting the fringe of his long, grey facial mane.

“Oh, yeah,” I concurred. “I wish someone had told me about these earlier. I used to use a comb, but it made it all—” I used my hands to indicate the universal sign language for wild, frizzy hair.

He winced as if he’d seen someone brandish a set of electric clippers in his direction. “Ooh, no, never a comb, no. Always gotta be a brush.”

He made as if to get back in his truck before hesitating, his head still turned halfway in my direction, as if listening to some internal monologue. A moment later, he turned back and ambled over toward me.

“Now, look, young feller,” he began, in a friendly-conspiratorial tone of voice, “I made myself a promise a long time ago never to get involved in another man’s beardly business. You can see I’ve been around a good long while, and I tell you what, you never get over the pain of seeing a man you’ve encouraged spend years growing out his beard the way the good Lord intended, only to cut it all off because of a job or some damned woman.”

He spat to punctuate his disgust before fixing me with one steely eye from under the brim of his hat. Taking the measure of me, I thought. I kept quiet and stoically bore his scrutiny, letting my beard do the talking for me. Was that the slightest crack in his stony façade, a tiny upturn in the corner of his mouth?

It was. He grinned an almost-imperceptible grin and shook his finger at me in a mock-admonishing way. “You, though…damn it all if I ain’t a sentimental old fool, but the careful, dedicated way you wield that brush tells me you ain’t gonna go that route.”

“No, sir,” I agreed. “My woman, she loves my beard the more it grows out.”

He sighed, his breath the sound of so many hair clippings fluttering, unmourned, to the floor. “Be that as it may, son, in this world, there’s many a cold winter wind blows through a man’s life with no woman there to share it with. You treat that beard like the brother it is, because it’ll be there for you when that wind’s a-whistlin’ somethin’ fierce, no questions asked.”

Pausing to make sure his words had sunk in, he reached deep into a jacket pocket and fished something out. He held out his hand, and as I took it, he clasped his other one tight around the back and held it for a moment.

“I’m trusting you’ll use it wisely, son. Don’t let me down.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

I unclenched my hand and looked down.

Good stuff.

When I looked up to thank him, he was already gone.

The overall sleek shine, the way the potion enhances the blond hairs to glow like a golden fire, and the lively notes of pine, cedar and mint that aromatically dance around my face now are the only things that convince me I didn’t imagine the whole thing.

Some parts of this story are truer than others.

Gameswomanship

By in gender, world football No Comments

Steven Malanga:

The Women’s World Cup in soccer should be a cause for celebration, as the game’s best female players get to show off their talents in front of bigger crowds than most of them have ever played before. But it’s apparently impossible these days for players—as well as coaches, commentators, journalists, or even spectators—to enjoy a major sporting event without filtering the experience through the prism of resistance politics. And so, this edition of the Women’s World Cup, taking place in France now and continuing through the first week in July, has turned into a festival of resentment and grievance.

Too numerous to catalog in their entirety, the complaints have piled up: the women aren’t paid enough; the male-dominated media don’t pay enough attention—and, conversely, too many male reporters are covering the games; the commentary is sexist; the commentators engage in too many stereotypes; the greedy men who run international soccer don’t care whether the women succeed. It’s difficult to watch a broadcast, read a game account, scan a blog, listen to a podcast, or read anything on social media about the tournament without being reminded of all the injustices these athletes and coaches are enduring. One journalist even described the games an “act of defiance.”

Well, yes. As with most things, the games themselves are enjoyable; the commentary about the games is almost entirely worthless, which is why it’s best ignored altogether. It’s a shame that the usual culprits are determined to push a zero-sum gender-war narrative, because the women’s game will generally suffer for the comparison. I’ve been watching this summer’s tournament, as I did four years ago. As always, it’s refreshing to see the absence of the diving and flopping which mars the men’s game, and the overall surfeit of good sportsmanship is wonderful (notwithstanding Cameroon’s embarrassing display of petulance during their defeat to England this week). On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I saw such a lopsided blowout between professional teams as I did during the U.S.A.’s 13-0 humiliation of Thailand, and there’s no getting away from the fact that the women’s game is noticeably slower and basic errors are more prevalent (on the other other hand, today’s Netherlands-Japan match was as thrilling as any you’ll see, a game where it was truly sad that there had to be a loser). I have no ideological axe to grind; the reason I only tune in to watch women’s games every four years is that I simply don’t have time for more than that. With limited temporal and attentive resources to spend, choices have to be made, and I prefer to watch the more exciting, competitive games featuring the best athletes. At any rate, I think all reasonable people can agree that identity politics ruins everything.

Forward to the Past

By in technology, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere 2 Comments

Michael O’Keefe:

About a quarter of the way into her writing, Bowles invokes Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute. Pedraza’s organization “advises companies on how the wealthiest want to live and spend,” and is now benefitting from what he calls “the luxurification of human engagement.” If you’re wondering what that means, don’t feel stupid, because the dictionary doesn’t know either.

In any case, the phrase suggests that the rich now view screen-time as a vulgar leisure activity, one offered to those who can’t afford anything else. To some, digital devices now smell like fast food. Over at Quillette, Clay Routledge has written about this phenomenon. Scores of other authors, researchers, and speakers have been desperately offering their advice on this topic to anyone willing to listen over the better part of the last decade.

Other renowned philosophers have noted this: “When possessions are too common, you start selling experiences.” “[L]uxuries turn into commonplaces, commonplaces into luxuries.” There’s no point in bemoaning the frivolity of it; one might as well despair over the changing of the seasons. A highly social species needs to invent social distinctions, no matter how absurd. I’ve heard it said that the people who truly got rich from the California Gold Rush were the ones selling shovels and picks. Likewise, I think it’s time to dust off my old toys and games from the ’70s and ’80s to provide today’s well-off tots with an optimal analog experience.

Naked Isn’t a Sometime Thing, Naked Is an All-Time Thing

By in books, writing 2 Comments

The Graphic was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden, who had started life rather more prosaically some fifty years earlier as a Missouri farmboy named Bernard MacFadden. Macfadden, as he now styled himself, was a man of strong and exotic beliefs. He didn’t like doctors, lawyers, or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to bodybuilding, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and his wife frequently bemused their neighbors in Englewood, New Jersey — among them Dwight Morrow, a figure of some centrality to this story, as will become apparent — by exercising naked on the lawn. Macfadden’s commitment to healthfulness was so total that when one of his daughters died of a heart condition he remarked: “It’s better she’s gone. She’d only have disgraced me.” Well into his eighties he could be seen walking around Manhattan carrying a forty-pound bag of sand on his back as a way of keeping fit. He lived to be eighty-seven.

As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated his life to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned no idea is too stupid. He built three separate fortunes. The first was as the inventor of a cult science he called Physcultopathy, which featured strict adherence to his principles of vegetarianism and strength through bodybuilding, with forays into nakedness for those who dared.

— Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

I dare say that a full biography of Macfadden would only be a disappointment compared to this delightful little character sketch. I’ve always liked Bryson’s dry, understated wit. I especially appreciate the tricolon here: “doctors, lawyers, and clothing.” It’s followed by a tetracolon, which is often assumed to not work well for rhetorical effect, but it would probably have sounded too singsong had he followed the first tricolon with “bodybuilding, vegetarianism, and getting naked.”

Your Words, Once Heard, They May Place You In a Faction

By in fresh hell, notorious jbp, the statusphere No Comments

Matthew Walther:

I realize that I will probably be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel here. Admiral McRaven doubtless means well in a tough-talking sitcom high-school assistant principal sort of way. If he were working in a vacuum, I would say live and let live. But Make Your Bed is only one example of a flourishing genre of pseudo-hardass commentary that is exercising a massive influence over young men in the English-speaking world. Like McRaven, the Canadian academic psychologist-turned-YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson seems to be under the impression that rote performance of mundane tasks (“Clean your room” in the professor’s case) coupled with a kind of vague meta-obsession with purpose for its own sake is a catch-all solution for any number of postmodern afflictions. Joe Rogan, the tattooed podcaster whose stock-in-trade is telling his followers what they should think about whiskey and the keto diet, is another.

I have no doubt that the Petersonists are responding to a real need felt by their audience. The question is whether their answers are the right ones. I am not at all convinced that what lonely disaffected male millennials need to hear most is that performative masculinity will make them feel happy or fulfilled. As I write this, there are hundreds of thousands of American men who, under the influence of these no-BS masculinist gurus, have learned to confuse selecting the perfect razor and using it correctly with a sense of vocation. It is all of a piece with the alt-right; indeed as far as its political ramifications go, it might as well be considered the same phenomenon — a retooled social conservatism in which the issues at stake are not abortion or same-sex marriage but complaints about whining SJWs and “political correctness.” The average Petersonist is teaching himself how to use tools and getting really into evolutionary biology and lifting and will tell you all about it over a cigar or a glass of bourbon in his backyard (assuming that he has one).

One of the most tiresome things about the age of “hot takes” is what I think of as “performative quibbling” — making the most of trivial disagreements in order to distinguish oneself. As far as I can tell, the only thing that truly unites these, uh, “Petersonists” is that they put too much emphasis on the necessity and benefits of personal discipline for Walther’s taste (though they also have large audiences, which naturally stirs envy, especially among hack writers for online political tabloids). If that makes them “alt-right” — a term which has clearly become utterly worthless due to rhetorical hyperinflation — then I fear a lot of us will find ourselves classified as Nazi-adjacent before long. At any rate, Walther goes on to assure us that he does have concerns about the robustness and capability of young men today, but if he has a better answer for them than the, uh, Petersonists, he couldn’t squeeze it in under his word count. Milquetoasts to the left of him, meatheads to the right; in between, in the “reasonable middle ground,” stands our hero, thoughtfully stroking his chin, gazing off into the middle distance, sighing over the sheer complexity of it all. I’m reminded of an old XKCD punchline: “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”

A Blind Carpenter Picked Up His Hammer and Saw

By in jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Jason Zinoman:

One appealing aspect of dad jokes is how they can be self-mocking and teasing simultaneously. An ironic distance is baked into them. No wonder they’re popular among Generation X parents.

But they have deeper roots. Dad jokes tend to be clean, generic and short, requiring no context or explanation. In many ways, they are throwbacks to the days when comics leaned on bits that started with a trio of religious figures walking into a bar, or evergreen one-liners that began with, “Did you hear the one about … ?”

Professional comics once trafficked in these jokes, but they went out of fashion as stand-up became more ambitious, and also more personal, putting a premium on original material that reflected a specific point of view.

Dad jokes may not work within the context of stand-up anymore, but given that stand-up appears to be progressing toward its nadir, that’s probably not a bad thing. Political/therapy comedy is probably best suited to this histrionic age of sturm und drang self-expression, but for a placid and mature sensibility, the rococo flourishes of linguistic cleverness are good enough.

Talkin’ Real Loud, Talkin’ All About the New Crowd. Tryin’ to Sell Me On an Old Dream, A New Version of the Old Scene.

By in ohferfucksake, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

A couple years ago, I read an absurd blog post by Nathan Robinson, who is inexplicably considered one of the brightest young stars in the leftist firmament, in which he argued that the solution to the notorious material deprivation under communism was simply to…share goods more widely under the new “luxurious leftism.” No, really:

Consider this a call, then, for a truly luxurious leftism. One that does not deprive itself of the good things in life, but which shares them abundantly with all. When we say let them eat cake, we are serious: there must be cake, it must be good cake, and it must be had by all. The reason Marie Antoinette needed beheading was not that she wished cake on the poor, but that she never actually gave them any.

Indeed, ’tis a wonder no one ever thought of that before. At any rate, it was easy enough to sigh, roll eyes, and move on. Now, it seems the New York Times sees even dumber versions of that same idea as fit to print:

We can see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism, or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades and that only now are set to undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things.

To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies. This politics, which is utopian in horizon and everyday in application, has a name: Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It’s impressive that all one has to do is place the word “luxury” in front of “communism” to be given a respectful hearing. I look forward to the Times likewise granting op-ed space to someone promoting a new book on “humanitarian fascism.” I mean, what are you having trouble with? It says “humanitarian” right there in the name! Why are you so hung up on the past? Real fascism has never been tried.

Nothing makes one feel more conservative than the realization that there is no such thing as an idea too stupid or destructive to be resurrected by people who should know better but refuse to.

He Shows the Nails

By in books, environment, foolosophy 2 Comments

The drying in of the house went so fast that I remember clearly only two parts; one was the dull repetition of hammering nails into the plywood sheathing of the floor and roof. One nail every six inches on the edges, every eight inches where the plywood lay over a floor joist or roof rafter. The average small house requires over 50,000 nails. If the average nail takes five seconds to be placed and hammered in, a builder using a hammer spends seventy hours, or a week and a half, banging nails. (The pneumatic nail gun would soon do for house building what the sewing machine gun had done for sewing.) Whenever I regret that I have not personally changed the world or the nation or even my state, I think of nails in a house. No single nail does anything very important, but they must all be there. The vast masses of human beings contribute to the building of civilization as the pounders of nails contribute to the building of a house. We are necessary but unnoticed. A few people are noticed because, instead of building, they destroy. Only the very rare person changes the world with individual acts.

— Wallace Kaufman, Coming Out Of The Woods: The Solitary Life Of A Maverick Naturalist

This passage is fairly representative of what I loved about this book — the matter-of-fact, methodical, detailed descriptions of what is actually entailed by attempting to live romantic fantasies of the “simple” life, shading into broader stoic reflections by the time the paragraph finishes. This was another of those serendipitous discoveries I picked up with no expectations (or rather, one that the Lady of the House found and handed to me), but Kaufman is a fine writer, with a graduate degree from Oxford (though, as he amusingly relates early on, that did nothing to prevent him from getting “pinhooked” by a local yokel with a grade-school education when buying his land). The humor is frequent but understated. The steady loss of his romantic innocence isn’t played for cheap laughs, nor does he engage in the performative self-loathing of other “privileged” back-to-the-land types. He loves his small slice of the wilderness, but he has no sentimental illusions about the wild, as evidenced by his description of a raid by one bee colony on another (a pillage “as savage as a Viking raid or a Mongol invasion”), or his reflections on “wild” humans like Dahmer, Manson and the twentieth-century totalitarian leaders. I lost count of how many times his rhetorical ambles brought him around to deliver another deserved kick to Thoreau’s rump. But if humans are all too guilty of projecting their naive fantasies about universal harmony and easy living onto the natural world, we are also “the animal who cares about other animals,” the one “who is curious about other animals for the sake of knowledge.” We put out food and housing for them out of pleasure in their company and genuine desire to know their lives. “If there is ever a Judgment Day in which the lives of all species are judged, let this outreach count in our favor.” In a relentlessly cruel and bloodstained natural world, the emergence of such humble efforts might be the closest thing to a miracle we’ll ever know.

Desperate and Displeased With Whoever You Are

By in foolosophy, technology No Comments

Taylor Fayle:

It’s a moment that has resonated with me for over a decade, crisply illustrating our modern malaise. We want the clarity of a decision that can cut through the noise. We want some semblance of meaning that can steer the rudder of our lives. We want to hack through the commercial and technological maximalism that defines our time. In short, we want what Merton described as an ascent to the active passivity of understanding and love and the more urgent relationship that Heidegger sought with Being.

It is unclear whether we can find our way toward these lofty goals. But if we are to make this journey, then surely the first step is to clear out the invasive overgrowth of our digital lives.

“In short” and Heidegger typically do not inhabit the same sentence. Amusing paradoxes aside, when I moved out of my parents’ house at nineteen, I spent the next ten years without TV. We had a VCR for watching the occasional video, which we didn’t do often. I didn’t get a personal computer until 2003 (though a friend had actually given us a WebTV a few years earlier). Naturally, leisure mostly involved reading, though I honestly read more voraciously now, even though I’m far busier overall. Life wasn’t better or worse in my youthful Luddite phase; it was just a little different.

My then-girlfriend was (and is) a permanently dissatisfied, miserable person. Wherever she went, there she was, and she was always unhappy in her own skin. She was the type to become a proselytizing vegan, only to backslide in a big way once the initial surge of moral superiority began to fade. She was forever coming up with some radical new idea to change habits or circumstances, and forever re-discovering that none of them could make her happy. As far as I know, she still blames everyone and everything but herself for her congenital inability to be content. I would not be at all surprised to hear that she had embraced the digital minimalism trend.

She was an extreme example. I don’t dispute that many people are unbalanced and could use some strong discipline in their digital practices. But we were often inattentive and superficial long before we had smartphones to blame. “In short,” what we want is to always be somewhere else doing something else. We’re always scenting purer water not here but anywhere. Our digital dilemma is not unique, but pretending it is allows us another opportunity to stimulate our egos. Sort of like developing an addiction to likes and retweets, in fact.

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