B4022-2 Moron Economics: Percentage Arguments

“‘In 1970, the top 1% of households held roughly 9% of our nation’s income. In 2005, they held 22%, the highest level since 1929.’ [quoting Senator Hillary Clinton, speaking at a technical school in Manchester, New Hampshire on 29 May 2007]” (Michael Novak. "Economic Reds: A Diagnosis," National Review, 9 July 2007, Vol. LIX, No. 12. p. 40).

Poor Michael Novak! Not only does he fall for Hillary’s faulty economic argument, but he makes the mistake of trying to respond to it. Her fundamental argument is silly. It makes little sense to respond to that silliness by trying to argue about exact numbers and percentages in order to arrive at a more palatable position. The exact numbers and percentages make little difference to an argument that’s faulty on a more fundamental basis.

Once again, for those of you of a moronic bent, the top 1 percent of households do not hold any percent of “our nation’s income.” There is no such thing as “our nation’s income.” The expression, “the top 1 percent of households,” is a statistical abstraction without any practical reference to anything existing in the real world. One could also say that the expression, “our nation’s income,” is also a statistical abstraction without any practical reference to anything existing in the real world as well. When we reduce these arguments to their simplest terms, we say “a statistical abstraction” (i. e., “the top 1 percent of households”) holds x-percent of the “statistical abstraction” (i.e., “the nation’s income”). “Statistical abstractions” holding x-percent of “statistical abstractions.” Yeah, like that qualifies as an argument worthy of response. One could make as much sense by saying “the top 1 percent of households” holds x-percent of the Web-Footed Polynomial's Dufus.

B4022-1 Moron Economics: Statistical Abstractions

“Recent incoming data, taken as a whole, have affected the outlook for economic activity and employment modestly” [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke addressing a Fed conference (Vindicator (Youngstown, Ohio), 11 June 2008, p. A10).

Well. Mr. Bernanke’s testimony would be eminently worthy of Allan Greenspan’s (his predecessor) style of speaking gobbledegook: he speaks as if his statements represent sound economic reasoning. They don’t.

Once again, “data” are statistical abstractions, and they cannot “affect” anything, particularly an “outlook.” That “outlook,” an opinion held by others about the future, is also an abstraction. So, what Mr. Bernanke is really saying is this: “An abstraction affected an abstraction modestly.” Of course, you and I recognize that last statement as utter nonsense.

When one abstracts a particular case, the resulting mental construct can be used as a means of dealing with the external world. If I say, for example, that there are “seventeen chickens sitting on the roost,” I am no longer referring to anything (chickens) in the real world. “Seventeen chickens sitting on the roost” is my mentally convenient way of sorting out the flock of chickens that I see before me. “Seventeen chickens” is my way of talking about the birds I see on the roost. As soon as I utter the words, “seventeen chickens,” I am no longer speaking about something out “there;” instead, I am speaking about my personal means of assessing the characteristics of the flock I see before me. There is no such thing, per se, as “seventeen chickens.” But we need to understand that my abstraction about the chickens, being an abstraction, becomes frighteningly similar to the “data” of our friend, Mr. Bernanke. Can any reasonable person say, then, that “data are sitting on the roost” or “abstractions are sitting on the roost?” Would it even make any sense to attempt to speak in those terms?

F2066-1 Jay & Ethel

Rod and Danny worked until 11:00 p.m. and then they headed out to Washington, D.C. They drove all through the night and arrived at 6:00 a.m.. Rod’s mother-in-law, Ethel, had a big Southern breakfast ready for them: ham and eggs, grits - the whole nine yards. As the men sat down to eat, Jay reached into a large ice bucket and brought out a bottle of champagne. Ethel asked Danny if he drank. What a question! Danny was practically a candidate for a liver transplant and Ethel asked the man if he drank. Foolishly, Danny told Ethel he could probably drink her under the table. Rod told him that he just made a really big mistake in telling Ethel that he could drink her under the table. Danny didn’t know it then, but he was about to meet a couple of real professionals.

After the champagne breakfast, Jay, Ethel, Rod and Danny headed southeast of Washington, D.C. to the Patuxent River, where Jay had his boat docked. They got on the boat and motored down the river and out on Chesapeake Bay. There was word that the “Blues” were running and Jay listened to the boat radio chatter to find out if the Bluefish were hitting on “rubber” or on “hardware.” That day the fish were hitting on “rubber” - 14" lengths of medical rubber tubing, with leaders and hooks configured to mimic an eel. They rigged their fishing poles with lead weights about 7 to 8 feet from the “rubber” bait and trolled for “Blues.” The lead weights bounced along the bottom and the tubing wove back and forth through the currents of water. The fish began to hit.

Jay yelled at Ethel to get him an Icepick. She mixed vodka with iced tea and took it to him. Then she prepared a gin and water for herself and the two of them began their fifth-a-day weekend drinking habit. Rod and Danny were drinking beer and soon found themselves pretty wasted because of lack of sleep and the inability to keep up with the advanced drinking skills of Jay and Ethel.

Jay’s boat cost more than $38,000 when he bought it in 1967. That was a time when Rod earned only about $125 per week and he thought that a boat that expensive was, well, rather extravagant. But it was a decked-out boat. Ethel went to the galley and began to cook something.

After drinking for hours, Jay turned the boat toward the shore when he had consumed his requisite fifth of vodka. Ethel matched him drink for drink, and Rod was amazed that the two of them were able to dock the boat and disembark with a steadiness that would belie their day’s drinking. Rod and Danny had a difficult time getting off the boat without assistance.

They all went to a shabby crab restaurant that looked like a highway department maintenance building: a plain concrete block building, with unpainted walls, in the middle of a crummy neighborhood. It certainly didn’t have the look of a restaurant or even the look of a place one would like to go to. The tables inside were covered with brown wrapping paper instead of tablecloths. The floor was sloppy with spilled beer and remnants of crab legs. They ordered “a bushel of crabs and a gallon of beer.” And Rod said that the crabs were the best crabs he ever tasted.

After their supper, they drove back to Washington, D.C. Rod and Danny were badly sunburned and absolutely exhausted. When they got to Jay and Ethel’s place, Danny went to the shower and Rod sat down in an overstaffed chair, waiting for his turn in the shower. He promptly fell asleep. He had intended to jump in the shower after Danny got out. But he found himself early the next morning in the same chair, fully dressed, hung-over, and still needing a shower.

There was no time for a shower, however. Jay was calling the men to breakfast, saying, “if they didn’t hop to it they would be left behind.” And he meant it. They gobbled their breakfast and drove down to the Patuxent River. Soon, they were back on the Chesapeake, “rigged for rubber,” looking for Blues. The sunlight was bright and blinding and made Rod feel even worse than he thought he felt. But Jay was calling for an “Icepick” and Ethel was starting on her day’s-long journey through the gin bottle as well. The very thought of alcoholic drinks repulsed Rod, and it wasn’t until after noon before he could attempt his first beer. Danny was a bit more aggressive than Rod and got into the beer cooler before he did.

The Blues weren’t hitting on rubber and Jay suggested that they switch to “hardware.” They used a “Tony” and had much better luck. The hours stretched by slowly, and the toll of lack of sleep and beer finally caught up with Danny and Rod. They both looked like something the cat had dragged in. Just like the previous day, when Jay had reached the bottom of his vodka bottle, he turned the boat around and headed toward shore. When they got to the dock Danny and Rod were both asleep on the cushions at the stern. Ethel looked at them and shook her head. “I thought those boys said they could drink,” she said.

B1019-1 The Magazine Ladies

For years I was sandwiched between two old ladies. On one side, there was Ruthie with her butcher string necklace. On the other side, there was the Pink Lady with her toilet paper Christmas trees. I lived between them. And I loved both of those women as dear, dear friends.

Down the street, a few doors away, in that big brick house, the minister’s widow lived among his collected sermons and her potted plants. A block away, through the alley, a retired schoolteacher named Jessie lived alone in that big house behind the manse.

What united these four women was a pile of magazines, brought to their door from time to time, wrapped in twine and given to them to recycle. Each of them lived through the Great Depression, and none of them would throw a magazine away, if given half a chance. Instead, they took these magazines and scratched out their names on the address labels and sent the magazines around the neighborhood until the pages were as curled as red oak leaves in late October.

Ruthie had often heard me clinking and clunking on my car with wrenches and bars. In the summer, when the weather was warm, I left the garage doors open, and she could hear Götterdämmerung mixed in with muted expletives and sudden bursts of rage, as a fat Brünnhilde wailed endlessly in the background.

Of course, I was that “Opera Guy” in my neighborhood, and it had often surprised me that so many people in this small town knew of this strange and lurid proclivity of mine. And by just the smallest of margins - exactly one mile to be precise - I lived on the northern edge of Appalachia, where “Grand Old” could safely precede the word Opera, but some would look with hesitant alarm if the word “Old” were missing from that appellation. You could safely love Grand Old Opry here. But you were immediately suspect if you loved Grand Opera. You might even have to register with the police as if you were given to perverted and odious tendencies.

Then, one day Ruthie appeared at my door with a bundle of magazines in her hands. Her house key dangled from her butcher string necklace, and she explained to me that she no longer lost her key now that it was tied around her neck. And not only that, but she no longer had to walk through the alley to Jessie’s house to get the spare key when she misplaced her own key. She handed the bundle of magazines to me, and she said, “There are some here that you might like.”

I untied the knot in the twine and looked through the magazines. There were the usual cooking and craft magazines and even magazines that showed a person how to take a good house and keep it. And mixed in with that curious assortment, there was a copy or two of a magazine called, Opera News. “Jessie sent these over because she thought you might like them,” Ruthie said, pointing to the Opera News.

I didn’t know quite what to say. It was true that I listened to opera. But it certainly wouldn’t be accurate to say that I’ve read about opera or studied opera. In fact, I’m probably one of maybe two or three people in the entire universe, who regularly listens to opera without any idea whatsoever what might be happening in the libretto for that opera. I am a blissfully ignorant person. Moreover, I am willfully ignorant about those libretti because I care only about the sound and music of opera, and I couldn’t care less about the story. So, you can probably imagine my immense surprise, when I watched a television production of Götterdämmerung one time, and saw those English subtitles crawling along the bottom of the screen. “Ha! So that’s what this opera is all about,” I said. My wife looked at me like I was crazy. I had listened to that opera perhaps 200 times and I knew every single note of that opera by heart. And I had no idea what the story was all about. Surely, Richard Wagner would disown me.

Then at Christmas time Jessie sent a card, along with Ruthie and her bundle of magazines, to my doorstep. Jessie explained that I probably didn’t like to read the Opera News with all those annoying peanut butter stains on the pages, and those coffee cup rings on the cover. So, she was giving me a subscription to the magazine that I might have a nice clean copy to read every month. I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned by her generosity and kindness.

What I did not know at the time was the fact that the subscription to the magazine brought me tightly into the circle of the Friends of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. And then about April, when the Metropolitan Opera boxed up its production sets and took them to Cleveland, Ohio to begin its road shows, a man called from the Opera Guild and asked me if he could put me down for $500 for “The Metropolitan.” I smiled at his naïveté. I told him he could put me down for $6.8 billion if he felt like it. He said I was a subscriber to their magazine, and I was a friend of opera, and that it was my duty to support the opera if I expected to see it continue as a cultural enterprise in the United States.

Well. Of course, I was flattered that a cultural enterprise depended almost exclusively on my efforts. But I was really helpless to do anything about it at the time. You see, I have been doing what my Appalachian friends down here call, “running my mouth.”

I had worked as a plant engineer in a large manufacturing concern. And I had seven different bosses in ten years. That may not seem to be something that’s entirely remarkable to you, even though the numbers may strike some as fairly high. Seven different bosses is actually about six more than you really should have in ten-year period. You can only play that Russian roulette game a few times before a live bullet goes through your brain. If you work for a large number of supervisors, you will eventually find one who has a distinct and utter dislike for someone like you. And Number Seven proved to be fatal to me when I “ran my mouth on the man” and he fired me.

You see, I have not been gifted with humility, common sense, or the obsequious ability to suffer fools gladly. I struggled to make myself clear. I present what I think are qualified and logical arguments to my supervisor that he might understand what I’m saying, and that he might see the point I’m trying to make. But when he digs his heels in and spouts endless nonsense, I run my mouth on him. And then I work on my resume, after he watches me waddle out the door. That’s happened enough to me in my working lifetime that I’m actually pretty good at it.

So, there I was, stretched out in the La-Z-Boy at home, resplendent with a three-day growth of beard, and in my underwear, when my friend from the Metropolitan Opera Guild gave me a call. He wanted to put me down for $500. I told him I couldn’t do that. He asked if it would be okay if he put me down for $250. “Hey pal, whatever trips your trigger. $500, or $250, or $6.8 billion. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m flat broke and you aren’t getting a dime from me. You can put down whatever you want.”

We dickered. In very short time he went from $250 to $200 to $150 to $100. And once he broke through that $100 barrier, I began to detect the gossamer twinge of sarcasm in his voice. “Fifty bucks, for crying out loud,” he said. “Fifty lousy bucks.” The staccato sound of those words went through me like well-spaced .50 caliber machine gun bullets.

Yeah. I’ll take it out of my unemployment check, Mister. And you can hold your breath waiting for it to arrive. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going out to the garage now to work on my car.

I think I’ll listen to a little Massenet today because I’m getting pretty tired of that Götterdämmerung stuff. Maybe a little Thérèsa. Huguette Turangeau in the title role. Le soir du bel été, des songes...des mensonges...

B1017-1 Beggars, MADD Dogs & Fascists Out in the Noonday Sun

Every now and then, when you sit down to eat, the telephone rings with some beggar on the other end of the phone. You listen patiently while your food grows cold. You listen patiently while some clown tries to sell you something you really don’t want. And that person - that clown - will become angry with you if you get a little short with them. It’s almost as if there was some expectation on their part that they could interrupt your day with impunity, and rob you of your supper hour tranquility anytime they wanted. Of course, you are expected to sit back and take it. I mean, excuse me, but where do they get off? Who are they?

Oh, they’ll tell you that they’re just trying to make a living. I have nothing against that. I wish them well. Hey, knock yourself out, friend. But don’t call me and destroy the peace of my home so you can go to the bank and cash your paycheck on Friday. I mean, get real.

You don’t see me doing that. I once had a job where I worked until 3:30 a.m.. I got home shortly before four o’clock in the morning, and if my memory serves me correctly, I never called anybody up and told them that I just got home from work or that I was out all night making a living. I never called to tell them that I thought they just might want to know that I had a rough night at work. Had I done that, they would have called police. The police would have arrested me for 1) telephone harassment, and 2) for waking them up during their quiet time (never disturb a fat cop at donut time).

But the beggars can get on the horn and call me up anytime they want. They can disturb my peace. They can rob me of the peaceful sanctity of my home so they can make a living. Big Whoop Dee Dee.

Or maybe those beggars will tell you that they are trying to raise funds for a very worthy cause. Oh well, that’s different. Jeeze, why didn’t I think of that? They’ll tell you that they’re soliciting funds for, say, breast cancer research. What could be more noble than that? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps if I hired six or seven of the teenagers in my neighborhood and had them call you every hour on the hour throughout the night to talk to you about breast cancer research you might get the idea that, the nobility of that grand thought aside, there’s something really obnoxious about being disturbed over and over again - even if it’s for a really good cause.

Oh, and how about those teens? Every September, two or three young girls show up on my front steps, dressed in marching band uniforms, collecting funds for the school band. Each year these beggars ask me for money so they can play in the band. And of course, I am a gigantic curmudgeon if I do not give them money so they can play in the band. But consider this if you will: when my daughter was learning to drive an automobile, did I walk around the neighborhood and collect funds so she could buy a car? No, I did not. Even the thought of doing that would have seemed absurd, not only to me, but to my neighbors as well. “Buy your daughter a car? Buy your daughter a car? Hah. You gotta be kidding. Hit the bricks, pal!”

So here’s my notion of how the world should work: if you want to play the clarinet in the high school marching band, then ask your mom to buy you a clarinet. If you need a uniform to be in that marching band, then ask your dad to buy you a uniform. Why are you asking me to spend my money for something I’m not even interested in? I cannot play an instrument. I am not interested in marching around on a soggy football field. You are the person who is interested in being in that marching band. Why are you on my front porch beating on my door asking me for money? Get your wallet out. Spend your money or your mom’s money or your dad’s money. But don’t come around disturbing me to beg money from me for something I don’t give a hoot about. Get a job and then take part of your earnings to pay for that musical instrument and that band uniform.

Okay. Okay. Put me down as one of those mean and rude persons who just doesn’t care about the rest of the world. Put me down as someone so wrapped up in himself that he can’t support these worthy causes. After all, who am I to stand in your way when you’re just trying to earn a living? Who am I to stand in your way when you’re just the 15th or the 16th person who’s been banging at my door today to collect money for some worthy cause? Who am I to get upset because my mailbox is stuffed to the gizzards every day with junk mail soliciting funds for causes that I’m not interested in? Hey, it’s all for a worthy cause. Why am I being such a heartless jackass?

Well, maybe it’s the principle of the thing. When we give that cancer envelope to a high school kid and send her around the neighborhood to solicit funds, we are not teaching her how to be compassionate, or caring, or how to be of service to her fellow human beings. We are teaching her how to be a beggar. We’re not teaching her some noble enterprise that she will be able to use for the rest of her life. We’re teaching her to become an obnoxious and hated person merely to satisfy our own personal idea of what is useful or valuable. We’re all for breast cancer research, so we enlist the youngster in our cause and send her out into the world to beat on doors even when doing so disturbs the peace of our neighbors.

Did it ever occur to you that the person down the street might not be particularly interested in breast cancer research? If you are so turned on by that breast cancer research, then get your wallet out and send the cancer researchers a couple of bucks yourself. Don’t beat on my door. And don’t make that high school kid traipse all over the neighborhood working on your agenda.

See, you got me started.

Oh, here’s a related issue. Some years ago a business associate gave me a one-year gift subscription to an environmental magazine. The magazine was beautifully printed with gorgeous pictures inside: Yellowstone Park, mountain streams, desert cacti, and so forth. It was lovely. I would look at this magazine when it came in the mail. But I was always somewhat taken aback by the magazine. It was not that I was anti-environmental person. Rather, it was because the magazine dealt with a topic that was not my personal cause celebre, much in the same way that a model railroading magazine might not appeal to someone who had no interest in model railroading. If NASCAR, to take another example, was not part of your world, then a NASCAR magazine would seem pretty inappropriate as a gift, would it not? Well, that’s what I thought of that environmental magazine: it was nice, but environmentalism was not my bag.

At the end of the year, a woman called me on the telephone to renew the subscription to that magazine. I told her that I wasn’t interested. She asked, “Aren’t you interested in the environment?” I told her that a misguided business associate had given me a gift subscription to the magazine, but it was a magazine that I wasn’t particularly interested in. Immediately she asked if I wasn’t interested in clean air. I thought that was a very curious question because who could answer that they weren’t interested in clean air? It’s almost like asking someone if they would rather be hacked to death with a machete or live to be one hundred years old. It was a loaded question. I told her I wasn’t interested in the magazine, and that I had made no statement whatever about clean air.

Well, right away she decided she was going to be one of those I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer kind of persons. She wanted to argue. She wanted to couch all of her arguments in terms of environmentalism, when I was commenting on the merits of the magazine, per se, to me as a reader. She kept going back to the clean air, pristine environment attractions shown in the magazine. I told her that was all fine and dandy. But I wasn’t interested in paying to look at pictures of clean air and pristine environments. “I can look out my back door to see that,” I told her. “Why should I pay for it?”

Oh, but she was feisty and would not let go. She kept hammering away at her basic environmental argument until I asked her if she was compensated for her telephone solicitation work. She asked what I meant by that. I said, “Do they pay you for what you’re doing right now, or do you do this as a volunteer?” She said, “I am a volunteer.” I said, “Then you are talking from a position of privilege. Someone, somewhere else is paying your freight. Someone is paying your bills and buying your groceries, because you’re sitting here on the telephone talking about environmentalism, and you don’t have to go out and get a real job to support yourself. That’s gotta be nice.” Suddenly the telephone went silent.

Isn’t that the basic problem with speaking from a position of privilege? As long as you can walk over and flip that switch on the wall to turn your lights on, you never really have to worry about the nuts and bolts of generating electrical power. So you can stand there and tell people (with cheeky impunity) that we should have renewable electric generation - wind turbines, solar panels, whatever - instead of those nasty old coal-burning plants down by the river. The fact that we cannot generate enough renewable electricity to meet our current electrical needs is beside the point. If you speak from a position of privilege, you can say anything you want - even if it doesn’t make any sense. And you can send that little girl around the neighborhood with a petition for your neighbors to sign because it’s a Good and Noble and Worthy Cause.

Please. Do not knock on my door and disturb my supper. Do not ask me to contribute to your marching band clarinet/uniform fund raiser. Shovel some sidewalks. Mow some lawns. Get a job at Burger King and use your own money to buy those things. Tell your mom to get a job so she doesn’t spend all of her time thinking up Stupid Things For You To Do, or Noble Causes For You To Espouse. And don’t call me on the telephone. I’m not interested.

It would be very easy to sit here at this particular point in time and pretend that you are dealing only with a narcissistic person. In fact, there is nothing narcissistic at all about not wanting to be interrupted at dinnertime. And I say this because if it were possible for you to be interrupted with impunity all the time, then I think you’d end up with the kind of a situation where you’d be unable to do anything on your own because some interloper would be there beating on your door and insisting that you do things on his clock and at his pace and at his time. But since when is the world structured in such a way that you are fair game for every kook that walks by and knocks on your door, or for every interloper who calls at supper time to sell you something you don’t want? Really, why would you be a narcissist merely because you wish to take a nap after lunch and have a small problem with clowns calling you up and trying to get you to buy something you really don’t want? Excuse me, but let me ask the question again, who the hell are they?

I sympathize with the woman who took her Cub Scout son around the neighborhood trying to sell some trash to people they didn’t want so the kid could go to Camp Shaganappi or whatever. I’m sure she was a well-meaning person. I’m sure that she wanted to teach her son some lessons in dealing with people who lived in the neighborhood. Perhaps she wanted to teach the boy how to sell things. Perhaps she wanted to teach him how to interact with others. Fine. But notice that this woman did not ask permission to do that. Notice that she did not ask others if they minded being part of her little training exercise for her son. Instead, the silly woman got angry, because these people - the self-serving, rotten, narcissistic miscreants - became a little miffed when she came knocking at their doors. They said rude things and maybe they got a little snotty with Mrs. Den Mother. But let me go back to my original point again: who the hell does she think she is?

Each of us holds certain opinions. Each of us finds his own opinions to be sacred and wonderful. Each of us, if we lived in a perfect world, would attempt to impose our opinion on others. Each of us would get quite upset when the rest of the world proved to be unreceptive to the merits of our opinions.

I’’m living here the edge of the world and every day some half-demented woman calls me up and wants me to support her pet project. She asks me if I would like to contribute to, say, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and then she’s suddenly disappointed when I tell her no. But she doesn’t take no for an answer, however. She wants to know why I refuse to contribute. I tell her it’s none of her business why I refuse to contribute. But she browbeats me until I tell her that I don’t like the basic idea of women running around restricting my personal freedom because some drunk driver - somewhere else - ran over a child and killed him. It’s unfortunate that the drunk driver killed the child. It’s unfortunate that the parents of the slain child have to bear the heartbreak and sorrow of that death. On those days when I feel especially persnickety, I tell the woman that I’m for drunk driving; not against it. Of course, she always expresses shock at my wholly troglodyte, knuckle-dragging attitude that I seem to have about drinking and driving. “How can you possibly say that?” she asks.

Again, to return to the central point here: Your attitudes and your opinions are, in fact, your attitudes and your opinions. They are not my attitudes and they are not my opinions. Why, to ask a specific question, should you become angry with me because you have failed to convince me of the logic and power of your arguments? Why am I considered rude because I don’t buy your silly arguments? Why am I a troglodyte because I fail to buy into your fascist arguments?

Fascist? Oh, yes. The rationale for a group like Mothers Against Drunk Driving is essentially a fascist approach to controlling the behavior of others. They never seem to be content to punish the particular person who killed a child after drinking and driving. Instead, they want to inconvenience all drivers everywhere at every time who decide to have a little drink once in a while before they drive home.

I sympathize with the poor parents of the dead child. I feel bad for them. But my feeling bad for them will not bring that dead child back to life. And restricting the behavior of everybody else because a few people drink and drive irresponsibly will do nothing for the dead child or his grieving parents. When you thrust your totalitarian plan on me, don’t get upset because I seem to be rude and uncaring. Call me rude all you want. You’re the one shoveling your trash down my throat, pal. You’re the one restricting my behavior. You’re the one imposing your agenda on my freedom. Again, let me ask, “Who the hell are you?”

So, go out and get a job. Stop trying to micromanage the world. And leave me alone. Okay? I’m trying to take a nap.

B1030-1 A Writers' Workshop

Last night I went into the city and attended a writers' workshop. Initially, there were three women (two Carols and one Gloria) and one man (Carmen), and another person (Jim) who identified himself as the "facilitator" at the meeting. Later, another woman (Lois) and another man (Billy Ray) joined our little group. After some preliminary identifications and introductions, the women began to read the things they had written since the last meeting.

Gloria, an affable and pleasant person who wrote murder mysteries, read part of a story that she had written. She had arranged sections of the story by dating them sequentially. As her story unfolded, we were treated to a long list of events that almost seem disconnected one from the other. I wondered why anyone would write fiction in that manner. Carmen read his story, and if you closed your eyes and settled back into your chair, you might have thought he was reading an extended grocery list. The Pink Carol (who wore a pink blouse) read her piece about the renter-from-hell. Like Carmen, she presented an almost endless list of overflowing toilets and dripping faucets and various rental property headaches that one might encounter with mischievous renters. The Cat Carol (who had perched a large and mangy cat on her book bag on the table in front of her, along with a token sprig of catnip) read her Civil War-era story. It, too, was difficult to follow and to understand because of its staccato cascade of data. Lois read a poem that she had written when she was nineteen-years old. The facilitator thought it read more like an essay in the poem. When Billy Ray read his poem, everyone seemed to think that his poem more poetic than Lois's poem. At least he had some identifiable, poetic elements in his piece. The facilitator shared a writing proposal with us that he had intended to send to publishers. Without actually saying so, most of the people in the group seemed to find his proposal somewhat bizarre. An extended - and almost irrelevant - discussion followed that had viewpoints diametrically opposed the viewpoint in the facilitator's proposal. He sat there and looked on helplessly as the group pawed over his proposal.

All in all, I found the writing workshop experience to be a strange thing. Everyone had put in some amount of time in preparing the writing that they brought to the meeting. And when they "put it on the table," they received those whiny and picky criticisms that more than likely made them wonder why they even bothered to come to the meeting in the first place. It was actually a sad thing to see: honest and forthright effort was seen by others, not as something bad in itself, but rather, as something that seemed to fit a different criteria in everyone's mind. It was almost as if they said, "I do not object to your renter's nightmare story because it's a story about renters. I object to it because it does not meet my requirements for stories with smooth and flowing language." In other words, the objections came down to a single, simple axiom: I do not like what you have written because you did not write it the way I would have written it. Essentially, your writing is bad because it is not my writing. Whew!

Pink Carol beamed when she told us that a piece of hers had been accepted by regional newspaper for publication. No one moved to congratulate her or applaud her accomplishment. They just sat there and looked at her. What everyone seemed to have forgotten at that meeting was the fact that people came there, not to learn how to become better writers, but to be loved for their writing efforts. They came seeking applause, not correction. I am quite sure that not a single person in that room would have admitted that fact. And I say that because not one of them asked that his piece be criticized brutally so that he could learn something. Rather, they groped helplessly for small bits of praise.

They reminded me of the youngster who lived in my neighborhood when I was growing up. He had talked endlessly about his great ambition in life to become a disc jockey. He told us how he was going to be famous and that he would be on every radio station in the whole world. Most of us just sat there and shook our heads when he talked that way. "My sisto sez I'm way-wee good at talking," he said to us. Unfortunately, he could not hear the severe speech impediment that would keep him away from the microphone for the rest of his life. Some unkind person had deluded him by telling him the story of Demosthenes running up and down the beaches of the Aegean Sea with his mouth full of pebbles in his attempt to become world's greatest orator. Hey, if it had worked for old Demo, he thought, surely it could work for him as well.

Perhaps that's the same problem that many of us have with wanting to be writers: we are blind to our own impediments and inabilities. We come seeking applause instead of instruction. We want to grow daisies in the desert.