essay Archive

3

On Centrism and Civility, Briefly

By
Tom OHare
– May 12, 2012

I was having dinner with my friend-and-sexual-associate not too long ago, and we got into a discussion about civility versus decency, which, if you’ve read our Inflammatory Writ, has been a hobbyhorse of the proprietors of this website for a while now. Her point was that people are more likely to take you seriously if you don’t use bad words and argue in good faith, and mine was that some people simply aren’t worth arguing with — since their minds will never change — and can simply be told to fuck off.

I understand that this opens me up to criticism from the right along the lines of, “Fuck off, libtard,” and I’m perfectly fine with that. I think that’s a legitimate criticism, all things considered. But I only think it’s legitimate because it fundamentally expresses the truth: to wit, the right-winger and I will never agree on certain issues, and there is basically no point in discussing those issues with each other. So, “Fuck off”? Gladly. Why waste each other’s time?

My audience, however, isn’t (I hope) on the fence about issues like LGBTQ rights, or global warming, or the military-industrial complex’s negative effects on American foreign policy, or the disaster that is deregulated capitalism. If you are, can I please request that you kindly fuck off? We have nothing to talk about. These issues are urgent, and I profess absolutely no regret for being earnest in my advocacy for the far left position I take with regard to each. The Overton window either moves left or right, after all. I confess to hoping that I do some small service on behalf of making our national discourse more amenable to left-wing political views.

Which brings us — AS ALL THINGS DO — to William Lloyd Garrison, who expressed my position considerably more succinctly than I’ve been able to do so here:

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. [Bold added.]

I’ve got “never give an inch” tattooed on my left arm. In one respect it is an ironic statement on the foolhardiness of brooking no compromise — which is, I would argue, the central theme of the book from which it was derived. That is, I don’t think Kesey was endorsing the notion that one should never give an inch, even if his protagonists lived and died by the slogan. But in another respect, it speaks to the meaning of core principles. What do you stand for? To what extent are you willing to back it up? And most importantly, where do you draw the line in the sand?

Ultimately, like it or not, you have to draw it somewhere. You don’t, of course, if you’re trying to make a living in the Tom Friedman/David Brooks version of the universe where intellectual consistency means a pay-cut. But you do if, like most of us, you’re simply trying to be a decent human being. To do so requires staking out positions and making arguments, regardless of how popular or unpopular they make you. Believe it or not, I have considerably more respect for a principled bigot than a pundit who tries to play both sides of an argument and ends up defending that bigot. While the bigot and I may never agree about anything, at least I know that a gentle “Fuck you” adequately expresses my point. With the pundit, one is tempted to mistake smarminess for an argument, when in actuality it’s simply a ploy to mask cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.

Taking a stand is important. Knowing what you believe in is important. Having principles is important. And, crucially now, making compromises is important, too. But with compromise, you always have to be playing the long-game, and you have to have an idea of what audience is worth playing games for. There are simply some people you’ll never be able to reach. In the meantime, never give an inch.

3

Happy “The LA Riots Began 20 Years Ago Today” Day

By
Tom OHare
– April 30, 2012

I was born in 1983, so just about the only thing I remember from the LA Riots was the famous In Living Color sketch seen below (which I would wager Hulu paid for rights to in light of the anniversary, as it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube). That this is my only memory of the riots was almost inevitable: I was eight years old when they happened and barely self-aware. But I think it also points to the fact that we never know how history will be written. World historical events are happening all the time, and though I can think of dozens and dozens that I’ve lived through off the top of my head (while assuming that I would be making the opposite point prior to, y’know, actually coming up with the list, and thus changing my mind somewhat, if not entirely, as demonstrated below), I never can tell what will be important to generations hence. What will my children’s history teachers tell them about my formative years? Will they even get that far? (Lord knows, in my own American public school education the entire latter half of the twentieth century — which is Pretty Fucking Important — was always sequestered to the last week and a half of the term, during which time most of us were thinking about summer vacation or Christmas presents, not the Cuban Missile Crisis or Vietnam or the rise of modern conservatism heralded by Nixon and Reagan [Needless to say, we never made it as far as George H.W. Bush, as being alive during the time of his administration we were presumed to have understood its ramifications.].) Am I to be their historian? I may have minored in the subject, and I may have even focused on its American aspect, but as much as it pains me to say it, I am fundamentally cynical about the whole endeavor. I know things change. I know things get faster, better, smarter. But we don’t. Email doesn’t make us more productive, it makes us more casual. Google maps doesn’t make us better navigators, it makes us considerably worse! And Siri! Don’t get me started on Siri. I’ve already seen your handwriting, and it’s atrocious. Soon you fools won’t even know how to type.

Which is of course all very hyperbolic and overwrought, as is the intention; I’m not the Luddite I sometimes claim to be. I mean, I have a blog, for crying out loud. I have an iPod, too! But for me the questions remain. How do I explain a road atlas to my children when they will never have to use one? How do I describe the transition from the 40-hour work week to the always-connected work world — how do I explain that it wasn’t always so? How can I communicate what it was like on Barack Obama’s inauguration night, in the penthouse of some schmancy hotel in Seattle for Chris Gregoire’s (D-WA) reelection party, having earlier cried (drunk) listening to Obama’s acceptance speech as it blared over loudspeakers and was projected on the big screen in a ballroom of said schmancy hotel; chandeliers and all, women with manicures in evening gowns, men with hair product and hair parted and expensive cologne and wearing tailored suits (me in a sweater over a button down, Dockers and sneakers). Then 46th floor, early for Gov. Gregoire’s party, not giving a damn about some silly state pol whose reelection gala we were ostensibly there for when a black man — a black man! — named Barack Hussein Obama had just been elected President of the United States of America. A fucking dude named that, who looked like that! In this country! And eating her hors d’oeuvres before anyone else had arrived, drinking the red wine and Red Hook, looking over Seattle, rainy and purple in the evening light, chewing on Nicotine gum, because Washington state, like damn near all of them in this godforsaken country, just can’t get sanctimonious enough. And how to explain how hopeful I felt as a Young American in an election determined in large part on the backs of other Young Americans. And how hypocritical as a young, white man to take any sort of credit for it at all. Then not caring. Not caring because we had done something for once. And I was too happy right then and there, if you can forgive me for it.

And yet how difficult and complicated things have been ever since.

Twenty years from now, when my children are teenagers and dilettantes, I only hope that they’ll be able to acknowledge that I might have something or other to say about the whole thing. About my history, about what I was aware enough to experience. I don’t know what they’ll be asking about, but I can’t say that I care. All that matters is that I have something to say. This is how history is made, after all.

Anyway, here’s that video I was talking about.

(Sorry about the ad if there’s an ad.)

1

Day 5

By
Tom OHare
– April 20, 2012

Robin is OCD, or has OCD, or whatever the preferred nomenclature is for people with obsessive compulsive disorder. At our first book sale, last September in the basement of a church where I do most of my work, she told me as much.

“I just, I go down there, and everything’s out of order and all over the place!” she said, visibly exasperated. Robin is short, wiry, and birdlike. She has a white mid-sixties Beatles’ haircut, thick rimmed shields for glasses, and she never looks you in the eye when she talks. She walks with a pronounced limp, but I’ve never asked her about it because I don’t want to come across as rude.

“We didn’t have time to organize it,” I explained at the time. This was last September, Indian Summer, a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I was telling Robin the truth. The day of the sale it was Marc and me, a chapel filled with chairs , my dungeon on the other side of the church basement stacked to the ceilings with books, and eight hours to set the whole thing up for opening night. We did not concern ourselves with putting all of the Harry Potters with the other Harry Potters. We concerned ourselves with hauling ass.

Robin was having none of it. “Listen, when I go to a book sale I don’t want to be looking all over the place trying to find what I want. That’s just crazy! I’m OCD, and I swear,” she said, shaking her head, “I just want to go around organizing everything! It’s like a madhouse down there!” At the time, I took her complaints to be a minor annoyance on an otherwise beautiful late summer day. But my boss, manning the cash register, had heard it all downstairs before me, and she had signed Robin on as a volunteer for our next book sale.

These days, Robin devotes her time to the kids’ room. She spends hours upon hours putting, say, the Full House collection of Mary-Kate and Ashley stories in chronological order. She has an R.L. Stine section, a parenting section, a boardbook section arranged according to the genus and species of the title animal. Which is to say, it is under control in the kids’ room, because Robin is on top of that shit. When we had a group of twenty Raytheon HR volunteers come in to physically put all of the boxed books on the shelves… when Robin came in the day after that, with everything misplaced and disorganized and crazy — but, crucially now, on the shelves – well, she just about fainted. And then she spent the next three days in that little 8×12 box, putting everything in its right place for the sale.

Today I put a rock between the back door and the doorjamb, not just because it’s nice out, but because Robin can’t handle stairs well and the rear entrance only has one little step. She’s due to arrive at noon, and I’ve been clearing out bins all morning, boxing things up for her to fiddle with. She doesn’t ask for much. None of the volunteers do. When my boss and I sat down with them for the first time and asked them what they might like to make their volunteer time a bit more pleasant, they were only so extravagant as to request a radio. I haven’t heard them listen to it once.

“Hey, Robin,” I greet her as she walks in. “How are ya?”

“I’m good, Tom. How are you?”

“Oh, you know. Books, books, books.”

She laughs, awkward.

“I’ve got three or four boxes waiting for you in the other room, and I’ll have another one for you before I take off for the day,” I tell her.

“Great. I guess I’ll get right to it, then,” Robin says.

When I bring the last box in for her a little while later, I notice that “The Te of Piglet,” companion/follow-up to “The Tao of Pooh,” is sitting on a table beside her purse. “This is actually an adult book,” I say.

“Oh, I know,” Robin says, trails off, and turns a bit red. I realize that she’s planning to take it home with her, and that she probably feels like she’s just been caught stealing. Let me put it to you like this: if you come to my bookstore and alphabetize books for free for fifteen hours a week, you can have a “Te of Piglet” whenever you please.

“You should check it out, I’ve heard good things,” I say. “‘The Tao of Pooh’ is supposed to be good, too.” I head to the door and wave. “Have a good weekend, Robin. Thanks for all your help.”

0

Day 4

By
Tom OHare
– April 19, 2012

I get to the main office/occasional-impromptu-bookstore around half past one. Rose is in the back room, consolidating tattered mass market paper backs into those cardboard trays beer sometimes comes in. You know the ones. The book sale we hosted last weekend kind of went bananas, and the three rooms we’ve taken over on the first floor, to flood with shelves and boxes and tables full of books, are a mess. Rose is a volunteer, probably in her 70′s, five foot nothing, round but nimble — an avid walker. I don’t really need her to be sorting through mass market paperbacks. I’d just as soon throw them all away — there’s certainly no dearth of them. But she’s restoring a semblance of order to the place, which is appreciated. And when I get to the point where I do need her to do something, she’ll do it. I couldn’t really ask for much more from a volunteer.

Rose once called me on a Friday night at around eight o’clock, just around dinnertime. I was in New York City for the weekend. I was, if you can believe it, eating dinner because, as mentioned, it was just around dinnertime. I was, moreover, eating a dinner that my, um, “friend” had prepared for me — the very first meal she had ever cooked for me, as a matter of fact. So, of course: phone number I don’t recognize from an area code in Massachusetts while I’m on a date? I better answer that call!

“Hi, Tom, it’s Rose.”

Rose, Rose… who on earth is Rose? Ohhh. Rose. ”Um, hi… Rose? What’s, uhm, up?” Waving to pretty lady across table, This will only be a second, promise.

“Well, I was thinking, I can get you all the leftover books from the library sale in Marblehead. Do you have a minute? You aren’t eating dinner or anything, are you?”

“No, yeah, no, it’s fine. I ju–”

“Well, what we could do is…”

It was only a couple minutes later, when Rose said something about how we could discuss her plan to get books “tomorrow” since I was “going to be at work” (she was thinking about stopping by the office to help set up the book sale, anyway, and why not kill two birds with one stone, right?), that I realized she probably didn’t really keep track of her weekdays all that well.

“I’m actually in New York City this weekend, Rose.” I made sure to emphasize how very weekend it was. “I probably won’t be back at work until Tuesday. But we can definitely talk about it then.”

“Oh, is today Friday already? Well, how about that, you’re right.”.

In the end the two of us did end up making the NYC-dinner-date-interrupting trip to Marblehead to salvage thirty boxes of unwanted books. I chauffeured in the company dump truck. “When you said you had a truck, you really meant it,” Rose said as she opened the door. I have rarely feared more for a person’s life than watching Rose try to climb into the passenger seat that day. It was like watching a grape trying to do the monkey bars. My plan was that if she let go of the oh-shit handle and started to fall, I’d grab her arm and hold her up. It’s only now that I realize I probably just would have dislocated her shoulder if that’d happened. Or, like, ripped the entire arm right off. You can pluck a stem from a grape pretty easily, after all.

So today, when I’ve finally finished sifting through a giant blue laundry hamper full of books and magazines books and three ring binders and books and video tapes and CDs and books, I ask Rose if she can give the mass-markets a rest and put all the non-fiction books I’ve boxed up onto the appropriate shelves in the non-fiction room. “I’ll wheel them in on the dolly and put the boxes on the tables. Can you just go through them and plop the books down where they belong?” (The volunteers have established a weird genre-bending, pseudo-Dewey decimal shelving system for the non-fiction room. I let them roll with it because it’s less work for me, and because it seems to make them happy. It’s all about the illusion of control, I guess.)

“Sure, yep. I can do that,” Rose says. And that’s exactly what we do.

1

Day 3

By
Tom OHare
– April 18, 2012

I pull into the parking lot of Marc’s condominium complex at quarter past five, turn the car off in front of the handicapped ramp, and phone him. I let the phone ring two times and hang up. This is our system. When the phone only rings twice, he knows I’m downstairs waiting for him. I see him through the double doors in his little lobby —  a cane, weathered ball cap, untucked, unkempt shirt, full white beard. As he gets closer I can make out the slightly curled upper lip, and his twitchy left eye. I unlock the door. He gets inside the car.

“Here,” he says, “I brought you something.” He hands me a 50th Anniversary edition DVD box set of some old sci-fi series I’ve never heard of, and two CDs by musicians I’ve never heard of either. “I’m telling ya, there’s always something on that bench,” Marc says, referring to the bench inside the lobby where, apparently, there is always something. “It’s a great place to pick up free books and stuff. People move out and they just leave it there.” Marc smiles at me: proof.

“Trisha Yearwood?” I say, glancing at the titles and starting my car.

“Oh, Trisha Yearwood. The country singer. I used to like her.”

I’m taking Marc grocery shopping because Marc can’t drive anymore. He fell into a diabetic coma a few months ago, and collapsed on the floor of his little condo. Marc is a lifetime bachelor who mostly keeps to himself: he laid there on his floor alone and unconscious for six days before anyone finally found him. His blood sugar was in “you should be dead” territory. It’s pretty amazing that he’s not.

Before all of that mess, he finagled his way into my life by way of my current career in books. He met my boss at a farmer’s market, told her that he used to own a bookstore in Cambridge, and said that he would love to talk to us about our book business. She agreed.

When Marc and I first met, it was at a tête-à-tête with my boss and our executive director. My first impression of him was that he was insane. But despite vague pronouncements about how, “What you should be doing is turning this [holding a book] into this [pulling a dollar bill out of his pocket],” I could tell that deep down he knew what he was talking about. I liked him. I thought he could be an asset. My executive director disagreed.

“So, what the hell was that all about?” he said after Marc had left. And it’s true: Marc’s a chatterbox and he occasionally takes a very, very long time to get around to making a point; but he’s also a guy who ran a bookstore in Harvard Square for most of his life. He knows the business, inside and out. He knows Robert Pinsky, for Christ’s sake, he went drinking with John Updike. Frank Bidart still owes him money from back in the days when he still collected books. (Bidart’s since gotten into collecting CDs, Marc tells me, showing his age.)

Marc was the guy who would stumble into my basement office once or twice a week to shoot the breeze or drop off boxes and boxes and boxes of books. I’d hear his familiar slow shuffle down the ramp to my loading area — these waltz-like, deliberate steps, pretending so badly to be reluctant — from around the corner at my desk. Then into view comes Marc. “I brought you something,” he’d say, leading me up to his van with a dolly to cart 1500 free books into the basement. He must have done this two dozen times.

He maintained that he hated books — he literally said this every second or third time I talked to him — but he didn’t hide his hypocrisy very well. Few addicts do. Marc is an old man who spent his whole life with books. Of course he hated them. Of course he couldn’t give them up.

Then one day, I suppose, Marc stopped showing up to my basement office, and that was fine, because Marc can come and go as he pleases. And then one day it became a month, by which time I’d already called our only mutual contact asking about him. He also hadn’t heard from Marc and was a bit concerned. I Googled obituaries. My bosses and I discussed sending the police to his condo to check on him. But we didn’t. I sent him a letter, telling him I hoped everything was okay. It was returned unopened.

During this time, Marc was in a coma on his living room floor, then in a hospital, and then in a rehabilitation center. He was told he might never walk again, so he walked miles and miles of laps around the hallways in the rehab facility. He was told he wouldn’t be able to eat real food again, so he worked with a speech therapist and on his own until he could. He was told he’d have to inject himself with insulin every day for the rest of his life. His doctors are now considering switching him over to a pill instead of shots.

There is the unfortunate matter of the catheter, though, and, if you’ll excuse the pun, Marc’s still pretty pissed off about that whole damn mess. We’re walking around in the grocery store. I’m putting O’Doul’s into my shopping basket.

“I wonder, if you can’t drink alcohol, if you can have O’Doul’s instead,” I say, to no one in particular.

“Nah,” Marc says. “I don’t want to drink anything that makes me have to go pee.” He squints his eyes, kicks his head left, and raises his eyebrows: You know what I mean?

“Still, you should try to stay hydrated,” I reply.

10

One Year Later

By
Trevor Macomber
– February 21, 2012

Brutish&Short turns one year old today, and while it’s beginning to toddle around okay if there’s something nearby to hold onto, I imagine the pants-crapping will continue a little longer yet. Baby steps, people, is what I’m trying to say.

Forthwith, a personal reflection.

***

Four score and whatever unit of time adds up to slightly more than a year ago, a certain foul-mouthed blogger whom I’ve known since we were six (though, to be sure, he did not start blogging foul-mouthedly until well after that) asked me if I’d like to join him and a fellow freethinker from his expat college days in co-editing a new website called…well, it didn’t have a name yet, but it would be devoted to…okay, it didn’t have a theme yet, either, but the point is, this was happening, and was I in or was I out? I waffled a bit at first, expressing various doubts — not over the feasibility of such a TBD-esque site, but rather my own ability to contribute anything of value to said. Up until that point, my primary blogging experience consisted of three years’ worth of bi-weekly poop jokes, sex jokes, and, of course, poop-sex jokes, over at my now-defunct humor site [resisting urge to name while linking to archives...and breathe], and I honestly wasn’t sure if I could maintain anything resembling a one-to-three times a day posting schedule with minimal punchlines to break up the monotony of my mostly uninformed opinionating. As an upper middle-class suburban white kid with almost no life experience who never watched the news, could give a shit about politics, thought Dave Barry was the greatest journalist of his generation, and only chose Philosophy as his college major because there were barely any in-class tests, what the hell could I have to say about life, the universe, and everything that wasn’t already being said better elsewhere?

But Tom stroked my ego, called in payment on a few chits from our rambunctious youth, introduced me to aforementioned “fellow freethinker” Ben, and before long, the three of us were regularly engaging in hour-long Skypes and G-chats about such topics as whether or not the site’s name should reflect its content: a) literally (me), b) metaphorically (Ben), or c) who gives a fuck, just pick a name already! (Tom); if anyone would ever “get” that our (never-actually-depicted-anywhere-outside-of-Twitter) mascot, Cecil, was supposed to be a leviathan — i.e., a cartoonish nod to the philosophical work from whence the finally settled-upon site name derives; and how to revolutionize the blogging world’s heretofore lazily considered but widely accepted methodology for categorizing new posts. (Sorry if that black hole brings up painful memories, Ben.)

And then…we started writing. And writing. And writing. And some days when our traffic spiked into the low four digits I thought, hot damn, we might actually be on to something here. And other days when our traffic remained in the low three digits for the second week in a row I thought, goddamn, why do we fucking bother? (Side note: I almost never swore in my writing before unconsciously starting to emulate Tom shortly into my Brutish&Short tenure. It’s more satisfying than I thought it would be…though also a complete dictional cop-out, of course.) But the truth was, it was the most I’d ever consistently written outside of work, and it was satisfying. My humor blog had been diverting, but — minus a few lucky pick-ups at established venues like CollegeHumor — inconsequential in both content, scope, and success. But B&S — we had readers — an actual audience beyond our parents and significant others who not only cared about what we, specifically, had to say on certain subjects, but occasionally even took the time to comment themselves. Did they come in droves? No. Are they ever likely to? Still no. But once in awhile, people gave a shit, and that made it all worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the giving a shit has dwindled somewhat in recent months, both from an editorial perspective and a readership one, and while I suppose you don’t need a Ph.D in physics to infer a causal relationship between the former and the latter, what else can you really expect from three late-20-somethings with full-time jobs (all of us), wives (some of us), early stage alcoholism (debatable), and a combined -$100.00 or so to show for our efforts? But nothing remains shiny for very long, and it’s once that lead-laden sheen wears off your new toy that you can really see what it’s made of. So while we reflect upon our position as the 787,000-ishth most popular site in the United States and debate the relative importance or irrelevance of 104,000+ unique visitors in 365 days in the group blogging biz, I make you this promise: if you keep readin’, we’ll keep writin’. (At least until I get that third Andrew Sullivan shoutout — then I. Am. Outta here. Also, free roast beef sandwich at Arby’s!)

Thanks. And as always (well, more or less), see you tomorrow.

~Trevor