Professional Left Podcast Episode 1003: Science Fiction University - Trust

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”  -- John W. Campbell Jr. 

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MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 939: Huckleberry Finn And The Sins Of MAGA

“All right, then, I'll go to Hell!" -- Huckleberry Finn

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 936: Tell, Don't Show

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." -- From Elmore Leonard's Advice to Writers

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 934: A Convo With Charlie Pierce

“'We, The People' is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other."

-- Charlie Pierce, writer

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 895: A Convo with Charlie Pierce

"'We, The People' is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other."  -- Charlie Pierce

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Whatcha Reading?

In answer to a stray question, this is one of my piles o' books that are on-hand at the moment for reference and pleasure.  Currently I'm about 4/5th the way through Raymond Chandler's short story "Red Wind".  

A few quotes from the story:

"Bright, brittle, shallow eyes like the eyes of a lizard."

"The girl floated in the air, somewhere behind him. Nothing was ever more soundless than the way she moved. It wouldn't do any good though. He wouldn't fool around with her at all. I had known him all my life but I had been looking into his eyes for only five minutes."

"His chin came down and I hit it. I hit it as if I was driving the last spike on the first transcontinental railroad. I can still feel it when I flex my knuckles."

The man could write.  

Trouble Is My Business

Professional Left Podcast Episode 891: Stories Over Statistics

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.."  -- Anton Chekhov 

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 833: The Doctrine of the Mainstream Media

"Those who tell the stories rule the world." -- Hopi proverb

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 824: Weird

"Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!" -- Bill Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.2

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Hari Seldon After Binging Season One of Foundation

#SaveThePlan

Who Killed Owen Taylor? A True Detective Season Three Explainer

My favorite film noir is The Big Sleep.  (Yes, I know the video clip is from The Maltese Falcon.  Calm down.  We'll get to that.) It's also my second (or third) favorite Bogart flick.  But for all of its crackling dialogue, dark twists and incendiary chemistry between Bogie and Lauren Bacall, the movie has one hole in the plot big enough to drive a Packard through.  From  Wikipedia:

The Big Sleep is known for its convoluted plot. During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. They sent a cable to Chandler, who told a friend in a later letter: "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either".

In some detective fiction, such as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the story is entirely about the plot.  And sometimes, as in the case of The Big Sleep, the story is much more about the atmosphere. About characters so compelling you'll follow them into danger down dark alleys and into abandoned buildings just to see where they'll take you.  Just to see of they'll survive and if, in the end, some rough justice is meted out to the bad guys.

(What do you want me to do? Count three like they do in the movies? That's what Canino said to little Jonesy.)

This is what I think Nic Pizzolatto, was attempting with True Detective Season III, which, after commanding my attention for seven episodes, reached what felt like an unfinished and unsatisfying conclusion last night.

FYI,  from here on out There Be Spoilers, so if you don't wanna look, then turn back now.

(That's one Eddie!)

However mostly I'm going to violate the First Rule of Writing (actually the Sixth) that I try to impress on students when, every now and again, I find myself in front of a classroom or seated in a writer's semicircle.  That whatever meaning or feeling you, as the writer, intended your story to convey, if it baffles your audience or flies over their head, then you're doing it wrong.

I don't care if (as I have been told by more than one student) that whatever-it-was "really happened".  If it didn't happen on the page then, for the purposes of storytelling, it didn't happen.  Instead, what you the writer are seeing when you read your own words is only half the story -- the part you actually put down on paper.  But the the rest of it?  All that vital, visceral stuff that you think is obvious to everyone?  Those are intentions and imaginings which your brain is imparting to the story, but are not actually there, alive and on the page.

And the only cure for that I know of is to let your writing cool off and come back at it with the ruthlessness of an editor who, as Faulkner said, is perfectly willing to "kill your darlings.” (Hence the typos that always frequently occasionally and charmingly slip into my blog.  This is a fast-fast, hit-it-and-quit-it medium, and since I have no editor or First Reader but myself, I rarely have the luxury of allowing my posts to cool off for a few days and then coming back at them with my Merciless Editor Hat on.  And trust me, I do have a Merciless Editor Hat.)

So I am breaking that rule in order to tell you what I think Nic Pizzolatto (who has more accolades for writing than I have pairs of clean underwear) was trying and failing to get up to with the finale of TDIII.  An explanation which sorta fits the facts as we know them.

Put simply, I think the entire season was Amelia's novel.  Her second novel.  The one Wayne knew she really wanted to write and that he told her with great tenderness she should go off and write.

Consider that, of all the professions which Amelia could possibly have, Nic Pizzolatto made her an aspiring (and, later, very successful) novelist.

Just like Nic Pizzolatto.

A crime novelist.  Just like Nic Pizzolatto.

Which means it is perfectly plausible that this whole third season of True Detective was her novel, told from her third-person nearly-omniscient perspective of Wayne's perspective.

(That's two Eddie!)

If this was the case, I don't think Mr. Pizzolatto stuck the landing.  Kinda blew it, actually.  Which is a real shame.  Not nearly as bad as "the little boy fell out of bed at it was all a dream" but I think, if this is was the particular fence he was swinging for, he could have used another couple of drafts and a couple of episodes to smooth out the truncated and jangly way he brought the story to a close.

Next time just call me, Nic.  Happy to help and my rates are quite reasonable :-)

And whether or not we ever hear from Nic Pizzolatto what he intended, I think this theory bears up better than any other explanation I've heard.

Because, when you think about it. pretty much everything we the audience actually learn about the Purcell case comes from information Amelia could have gleaned from Wayne, or (in the manner of a novelist) she "discovered" by putting her character in the right place at the right time, or making her character capable of sweet talking detectives, or having key characters (like Junian "Mr. Exposition" Watt) available to her a critical moments.

As to the rest?  The connections she couldn't have known about or the conversations she couldn't have overheard?  Or the very literary device of using as the inciting action for the entire show the arrival of a True Crime teevee show documentarian.  One who asks Old Wayne probing questions and slowly reveals to him vital and recently discovered evidence ?

Amelia invented all of that as the needs of the story dictated.  Because that's what novelists do.

Because we as readers (or viewers) know that part of the story-telling game is allowing novelists to perform all kinds of tricks with space and time and memory that we agree to judge only by their verisimilitude.  By their appearance of being true or real.

Mark Watney was not stranded on Mars, but for 369 pages I was happy to let Andy Weir let me believe otherwise.

There is no Maltese Falcon, but for the price of an hour and a half of my time, I'm always delighted to let Sam Spade, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo, Kasper Gutman and poor Wilmer spin for me a tale of the stuff dreams are made of. 

And so it is here, with the very real Nic Pizzolatto inventing a crime novelist named Amelia Reardon who is, in turn, telling us a story about Life and Death and The Harvest Moon.

As the invisible narrator of the story, Amelia-the-fictional-crime-novelist has the freedom to zoom around anywhere she wished, in any timeline she chooses.  She can go in and out of strange and dangerous places.  She can reference other infamous child abduction cases that exist in the same fictional universe.  She can afflict Wayne with a memory that fails him whenever the needs of the story require it, and she can give him a happy ending sipping sweet tea on the porch with his children, grandkids and best friend.

She can also adjust the plot so that the poetry she is reading to her class whenever Wayne drops by always matches the mood of plot.  Of all the children's books in the world, she can make it so she was reading "Jungle Book" to her children -- the story of a young man lost in a hostile jungle -- as we learn hints about Wayne's harrowing time in in the jungles of  Vietnam, and as he see him getting more and more lost in the jungle of his failing memory.

She can shape the plot so that Wayne always manages to pick up her book (which he never read) on just the right page and just the right time, just as she can shape the plot so that sex with Wayne is always earth shattering.

She can do the very literary thing of "framing" her story so that it begins and ends on the same beat:  in this case, with two kids -- a boy and a girl -- riding away from home on their bicycles.

And most tellingly, she can write herself out of the story as needed -- a main character who dies at some point during the intervening years but whose specifics are never discussed -- and then insert herself back into the story as a recurring hallucination to comment on what's happening and advance the story forward in abrupt ("Maybe Julie Purcell isn't dead!") and specific ways. 

She is Nic Pizzolatto's own "Kilgore Trout": a fictional writer invented by a real writer as a device to tell the story in the way the real writer wishes it told.

But while I applaud the effort, the result left me shaking my head.

The Wages of Sin ... Barely Cover My Bar Tab.

#TrueDetective Drops By The Walter White Memorial Desert Hostage Park and Picnic Area

Huge chunks of flaming exposition continued to rain down randomly from the sky in the final episode of True Detective Season Two. By the time the final credits rolled. whatever was plot there might have been had been was buried under an final avalanche ludicrously impossible coincidences during what should have been the climax -- you know, that part of any story when the plot points and happenstances which any halfway competent author deploys during the first half of the narrative are satisfyingly resolved and not exponentially expanded.

And whatever suspense any individual scenes may have had in the hands of some other writer was successfully dissipated with dialogue so telescopic that they may as well have dressed up the soon-to-be dead characters in Ensign Deadmeat Red Star Trek uniforms and had them announce cheerfully that they only have two weeks left until retirement.

Two spoilers below to sum up the crash site where a decent television drama should have been:

Ray Velcoro returns to his parked car to find someone has strapped a transponder the size of a WWII shortwave radio to the underside of his vehicle, with a Giant Blinky Red Light on it just in case he missed seeing it.   Rather than remove it and tossing it into a ditch, or removing it and keeping it on the seat next to him until he hits the highway and then tossing it out of his window into traffic. he drives away, presumably to leading the Bad Guys in the opposite direction of where his future baby mama is hiding out.

Then he drive halfway across the state of California with a couple of million dollars in a duffel bag and several firearms at his disposal, he starts to notice with increasing alarm the the fuel gauge is nearing the Big "E".  He manfully refuses to stop for gas at any of the Golden State's 275,000

"gas stations" because stopping for gas would, I dunno, arouse, suspicion?

I guess?

Maybe?

Instead, he drive several hundred miles out of his way so he can arrive at the exact spot where Dream Dad had warned him five episodes ago (after unfortunately not dying from a shotgun blast delivered by a character whose completely improbably existence and motives are Central To The Whole Fucking Plot, but are kept carefully hidden from everyone until the end because I dunno, Nic Pizzolatto is a terrible writer?  I guess? Maybe?) in great detail that he would be would be gunned down by bad guys among the towering redwoods.  

And thus was he gunned down by bad guys among the towering redwoods.

Meanwhile, in what may be the best metaphor for True Detectives Season Two to come out of the whole show, Jeremy from The Wedding Crashers -- 

-- is driven deep into the Walter White Memorial Desert Hostage Park and Picnic Area --

-- by a dozen Mexican cartel refugees from Breaking Bad, where -- very much like the True Detective viewer -- he is knifed in the gut for no particularly good reason and then bleeds slowly out while marching through an empty wasteland past a menagerie of characters we have never met before (including True Detective Season Two Asshole Dream Dad, who was apparently assembled from components left over from The Newsroom Asshole Dream Dad) until Imaginary Wife tells him to stop walking because, dude, you've already been dead for the last 50 paces.

Other stuff happened, but I cannot imagine why anyone would care.

I hope these fine actors fine better work, worthy of their talents.  And I hope HBO gives this format another try, this time with at least one person in the writer's room who swings enough cod to hit the fire alarm if things start to go sideways.  Like, say, me :-)

Halt and Catch Dragons

A lot of smart people who write and talk about teevee professionally have already noted the small miracle that is this season's Halt and Catch Fire.  Specifically, the fact that AMC underwrote some drastic protagonist gender reassignment, which transformed a show about underclocking male-centric dumbassery and knockoff hardware which, ultimately, no one really cared about...

...into a show about a struggling software company being run by two women out at the wild frontier of online gaming and social media.

From Grantland:

...
Thankfully, AMC did no such thing. Rather than blaming the show’s brain trust — creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher Rogers plus showrunner Jonathan Lisco — for its stumbles, the network offered a rare chance to debug and get it right. Halt and Catch Fire’s lunky title — it refers to computer code that leads to a system crash — likely didn’t help its performance in Season 1, but it did offer inspiration for one of the most remarkable turnarounds in recent TV history. Season 2, beginning Sunday night at 10 p.m. ET, is a hard reboot. Gone is the protagonists’ misplaced desire to beat Apple in beating IBM at its own game, and gone, too, is the Giant, the clunky PC that was the result of all of their uninspiring efforts. Exiled along with all of that is Cardiff Electric, the drab corporate setting that constrained the plot, and Pace and McNairy’s alpha dog vs. beta male cockfighting that defined it. It’s not that Halt 2.0 is an entirely new show: The faces and floppy discs are the same, and outside the garage it’s still Texas Forever. It’s that Cantwell, Rogers, and Lisco have rewired the mainframe to showcase the stray lines of ancillary code that should have been the focus all along.
...

What no one seems to have noticed is that, to make their product sing, AMC appears to have ported over several components from the operating system from Game of Thrones.  Not an exact match.  Not Windows ripoff of the Apple interface .  HaCF is definitely its own thing, but it's enough to make me go "huh".

Allow me to demonstrate...

To begin with, our major character is now a blond queen slogging her way through the wilderness.

For the moment, she lacks the means to fight her way to her rightful throne, but her unique gifts mark her as it's true heir.  The "Mother of Logons" (sorry/not-sorry) promises her followers freedom, but is finding that governing wisely is much harder than coding or conquering brilliantly.

For advise, she leans heavily on a loyal female confidante and subordinate --

-- and an older, battle-scarred man who lives deep within the friend-zone.  He comes with a checkered past, but is also wise in the ways of intrigue and combat and is willing to risk what life he has left to serve her vision.

She has a daring young suitor who is up from nothing, but he understands her, and damn can he handle a sword.

While she is leading an army of virginal young men --

-- she is also negotiating with a tricksie envoy from the enemy camp.  She has no reason to trust him, but perhaps this time...

There is also a bearded, acquisitive patriarch who is highly focused on his family fortune and legacy.

And a dowager queen who is kind of a bitch.

And out there beyond the squabbling and personal drama of the main characters, barely on anyone's radar, the true, existential threat moves inexorably towards our cast of characters.

Watching The Detectives

The very capable Chris Ryan at Grantland (a publication which should definitely hire me) gets it almost right:

...

True Detective needs the signifiers of our world, but not the rules. It needs the corruption, the graft, the institutions, the laws, and the crime, but that’s it. Characters on this show don’t talk like us, and they don’t act like us. They are of this world but not in this world. This is “Los Angeles,” not Los Angeles.

Once you accept this, True Detective becomes a different kind of show, and it makes a certain kind of sense...

The first part, yes; the second part, no.  So almost, but not quite.

Because right now, HBO's True Detective does not make sense.  Not yet, anyway.  Right now, it is failing on its own terms.  Which doesn't mean it will, in the end, be a failure, but at this moment it is not delivering on what it promised.

And here's why.

This is not a heist story, so there are no plans to draw or teams of expert misfits to recruit.  It isn't a crime-gone-wrong story either, or a buddy flick, or a road picture.  It isn't Elmore Leonard mesmerizing us with the folkways and conversations of C-list criminals.  It isn't Ian Fleming or John Le Carre or Graham Greene navigating the world of James Bond or George Smiley or Alden Pyle.  It isn't a Mario Puzo parade across three bloody generations of America's most infamous fictional crime family, and it isn't Arthur Conan Doyle letting us peer at the world through the cool, logical mind of the world's only consulting detective.

So if the list of all the things which True Detective is not could go on for days, then what is it exactly?

Ah.  Glad you asked.

It is a dream.  A very intense dream.  And stories which aspire to take you up into a dream -- which don't merely ask you to suspend disbelief in the way all fiction does, but which requires that you to take up the local language and rules of a dream world -- take on a very special and delicate burden.

My future colleague at Grantland points quite correctly to the work of David Lynch as the scaffolding on which Nic Pizzolatto is hanging these eight hours of television --

In the absence of the singular vision of Fukanaga and the interview gimmick, the show’s directors (so far, Justin Lin for the first two episodes and Danish filmmaker Janus Metz Pedersen for Episode 3) have turned, consciously or not, to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as a central text. Lynch’s 2001 film looked at Los Angeles — from the Hollywood Hills mansions to the sun-baked parking lots outside of doughnut shops — and saw a city that could contain infinite possibilities, horrors, timelines, and realities.

Nic Pizzolatto’s story is following suit. Those overhead shots of freeway interchanges are overused and serve mostly to transition from one scene to another, but when viewed as part of the dizzying narrative that is being assembled, they make sense. These roads are Carrie Mathison’s or Lester Freamon’s cork boards — they indicate the interconnectedness of the evil that lurks in the light.

-- but I'd like to push a little deeper for today's lesson in How To Watch Teevee Like A Snob and suggest the proper template is Franz Kafka or, better yet, Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe's, The Fall of the House of Usher, for example, is ridiculous from the point of view of a linear, plot-driven story.  No one in it is a normal human who gets up and goes to work on Wall Street or at Arby's.  Around these surreal characters, apparitions come and go, maybe.  Someone dies, maybe.  Their body is going to be kept in the house for weeks, stored for mysterious reasons in a screwed-shut coffin, in a locked copper-lined crypt below the house.  The sun never shines. A wild storm whips up out of nowhere,  The dead rise, maybe, and tear doors off their hinges, And our narrator escapes just in time to see the the House of Usher split in two by a bolt from Heaven and collapse into a dead black lake.

As a conventional work of fiction, it makes No. Damn. Sense. at all,  But as a dream it works amazingly well, because Poe was a poet who cared much more about navigating his readers from one emotion to another by carefully crafting the atmospherics to move them implacably towards a specific psychological outcome.  And so from the very start, Poe piles the adjectives relentlessly on to let you know that you are not only are in a dream, but exactly what sort of dream you are having.

In Usher, you are immediately told through imagery and interior emotional states you are headed into a very bad dream, where horrible things are likely to happen:

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain -- upon the bleak walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into everyday life -- the hideous dropping off of the veil.

And if the specific vintage of nightmare on the menu wasn't clear enough, Poe makes sure to drive the point home:

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall.

And for all of his long sentences, Poe moves his readers along through all of his horror stories at an incredibly brisk pace.   Usher is a hair over 7,000 words.  Sixteen pages.  And that's long by Poe horror standards. The Tell-Tale Heart is 2,200 words and The Masque of the Red Death just over 2,400 -- figure five pages each, give or take.  Poe could and did plot with great care when he was pioneering the consulting detective genre, for example, but his horror fiction was a different beast entirely.  Those were constructed to draw you in and move you along fast, fast, fast.  No time to slow down and admire the carpet or go through the drawers, because while his detective fiction were clever puzzles that invited readers to poke and scrutinize and solve, his horror fiction was designed as intense, immersive dreams.  And dreams unravel when you give your readers time to stop and handle the fiddle faddle on the knick-knack shelf.

(As an aside, let me underscore that the magic of this is in the words.  Which, by themselves are just...words.  Same stuff you and I use every day.  But in his stories Poe the poet selects and fits each one into place with enormous care so that, together, they drag you along towards your inexorable fate like a team of Percherons.)

The first season of True Detective got this balance between pacing and carefully deployed weirdness just right: using a few words and pictures they constructed a dream which swallows you up and bears you away towards something terrible; something which you could almost-but-never-quite feel rushing towards you because it was made out of the vocabulary of human nightmares.  

And those are the two element at which this season of True Detective is failing so far.  The pacing is arrhythmic, leaving us lingering in the wrong places (like the Sylvia Plath Bar & Grill) for too long.  And the visual and verbal cues are off:  with more than 1/3 of the story told, I still can't tell if we are observing the melancholy House of Usher from across the fields, or if we are on the causeway to the house or if we have passed through the Gothic archway and into the heart of the nightmare.  

There are still five chapters of story to tell, and I have not given up on it yet.  But we are three chapters in, and so far our storytellers have failed to create that delicate alchemy of real and surreal, inevitability and surprise. weird and mundane, out of which captivating dreams are made.  

And time is running out.

Genre Writing

It's a dirty story of a dirty man

And his clinging wife doesn't understand

His son is working for the Daily Mail

It's a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer!

Like the fantasy or science fiction genre, success in writing in the political genre does not depend on whether or not what you are writing about is even remotely possible in the Real World, but instead relies on the writer's ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre.

Time travel paradoxes must be addressed in time travel stories one way or another, because readers would revolt if t'were otherwise, and dragons dominate the culture and history of Westeros because, for chrissake man, there have to be dragons:

Phyllis Eisenstein (1946-present) is an American science fiction and fantasy author. She is a friend of George R.R. Martin's. She had a big influence on A Song of Ice and Fire when, during the earliest period of Martin writing the series, she suggested to him that he include dragons and magic when he was more inclined to leave out the fantastical elements. A Storm of Swords is dedicated to her, as Martin thanks her for making him "put the dragons in".*

This rule not only applies to what a writer who wants to sell his or her stuff within a specific market should include in their stories, but quite often there are equally inelastic rules about subject matter which is verboten.  Fred Pohl reminisces:

...Kay Tarrant had come with the job. Her official description was secretary-assistant, but as John preferred to do most of his own typing, she spent most of her time copy-editing the manuscripts he bought (and those bought by his successor, Ben Bova, as well) to prepare them for the printer.

That was not necessarily an arduous job. John did not normally go in for the kind of lavishly creative editing that characterized, say, Horace Gold’s tenure at Galaxy (and infuriated so many of his contributors), and when John took a notion to rewrite sections of a particular story to make it more like John’s image of what it should have been, he did it himself.

But Kay Tarrant, too, had impulses that went beyond the simple correction of faulty grammar, spelling or punctuation. She hated — hated! — smut. And she devoted her life to erasing every trace of it from the magazine.

This, of course, had an effect on the corps of science-fiction writers, a sadly rowdy lot. The more troublesome ones initiated a contest to see who could get something bawdy past Kay Tarrant. Many of them tried. All saw their best inspirations slain on the copy desk until George O. Smith stepped up to the plate. He won when he got past Miss Tarrant’s eagle eye his definition of a tomcat as “a ball-bearing mousetrap.”

...

Which brings us around, in a rambly kind of way, to the genre of Very Serious political writing in America.  It is a genre which is decidedly fiction and for which there are apparently no lower-limits to the writing skills demanded by the marketplace.

It also comes with a couple of simple rules which you must follow if you want to actually make a living at it and not waste your time and talent on collecting piles of rejection notices high enough to ski from.

First Rule:  Anyone even slightly the Left of the Grand Nagus is a hippie-dippie pot-head refugee from Woodstock:

The Freakification of Bernie Sanders

Shoot me.

Just shoot me right now.

These weren't your everyday Americans who came out to support Bernie Sanders on Tuesday. The self-described democratic socialist kicked off his long-shot run for the White House in his adopted hometown of Burlington, a lakeside city full of characters who might not have passed the pre-selection process for Hillary Clinton's tour of round tables...In the afternoon, a "people's assembly" of hundreds of Sanders supporters gathered in City Hall Park, where dreadlocked guitarists played in the morning and patrons browsed at the nearby Hempest, which advertises itself as the largest organic hemp product store in the world.

I don't know Jonathan Topaz, nor do I know much about his work. His bio is that of a smart, shining young man out of the Ivy League with a pretty cool name, but this passage should be a career-killer. What, pray tell, young Jonathan, do "everyday Americans" look like? Perhaps like the Duggars of Springdale, Arkansas? The hayshaking Bible-banging cultists whom I saw gather in Iowa earlier this spring? Sheldon Adelson? But Jonathan should not bear the punishment alone. Every editor, sub-editor, and researcher who read this and didn't say, "Holy hell, this is some cheap bullshit right here. It's beneath even our standards!" also should find their careers taking on water...

Second Rule:  Every problem and conflict in the Universe from entropy to the Anglo-Zanzibar war was caused by the aforementioned hippies.  If no hippies are readily available, blame The Extremists on Both Sides and move on.

The Tired Old “Both Sides Getting More Extreme” Meme

In my recent book and elsewhere, I’ve noted that the meta-narrative Republicans were promoting—and much of the MSM was echoing—during the 2014 midterms was that the Great Big Moderate Adults of the GOP had gotten the crazy extremist Tea People under control, and were ready to govern in a serious way that Serious People could appreciate. An important sub-narrative to the completely phony Republican Shift to the Center was that Democrats were moving to the left so fast that they’d probably start singing the Internationale at party events before long.

A lot of people who don’t completely buy the GOP Shift to the Center are happy to promote the false equivalency classic of Everybody’s Polarizing at Exactly the Same Pace. But there’s one species of observers who are deeply invested in the Democratic Lurch to the Left meme: Republican “moderates” who spend a fair amount of time criticizing their zany brethren and need an excuse to reassume the Party Yoke when elections come around.

Peter Wehner is one such person, and so he pens the classic so’s-your-old-man-and-actually-maybe-your-old-man’s-worse op-ed for the New York Times. Ignoring the fact that most actual lefty Democrats think Barack Obama is too much like Bill Clinton, Wehner’s case almost entirely depends on contrasting the noble centrist Big Dog (who, of course, conservatives denounced as a godless socialist when he was actually in office) with the left-bent Obama.

...

In the last 100 years, (unless you count Scientology) fantasy and science fictions stories have done no harm to anyone and have been a source of wonder, entertainment and occasional wisdom to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

In the last 30 years, the Both Siderist genre has become the foundation stone on which our Elite Media has been built, has made a few people enormously wealthy, has provided undeserved employment to thousands of hacks, con men and professional rat-fuckers and has done incalculable damage to our democracy.

And while the present condition is dire and getting worse, I take some comfort in believing that, 100 years from now, people will still be reading and loving "The Lord of the Rings" and "A Canticle for Leibowitz" while the entire corpus of Both Siderist claptrap will either be dead and forgotten, or studied with incredulity by future historians:

In Search of Historic Bobo 

If you want to start a brawl in the media scholar faculty lounge at any major university, stick your head in the door and ask them to settle the question of the historical authenticity of "David Brooks" once and for all.  Then duck, because this is the subject which has most loudly and aggressively divided students of the so-called "Fucking Crazy Years"* of American political media for the last century.

Of course as every high-school student knows, almost all of the original digital and analog records of the Guild of Pundits during that period were destroyed during the Great Discontinuity -- the early 21st century's Elite media's last ditch effort to evade accountability for their crimes.  And what few fragments we do have from that time come down to us filtered through the fun-house mirrors of surviving backups of the "fuckingblogs".  

And yet such is the enduring fascination with the fallout from those terrible, lunatic "Fucking Crazy Years" that despite the paucity of first-hand evidence (or perhaps because of it) thousands of master's theses, doctoral dissertations, best-selling "histories", graphic novels, stage plays and dirty limericks have been written about the era.  

(Artist's rendering of "David Brooks" offering a ritual "Social Security" sacrifice 

at the Temple of St. Reagan)

And as the original events have been sifted and re-sifted by popular culture, fan fiction and hermeneutics, the academic world has more-or-less evenly divided itself into two, irreconcilable orthodoxies -- the Historical Brooks versus the Fictional Brooks -- each of which finds strong support for its own theory in the literature itself.

Based on the radically divergent accounts of writings attributed to him during a single decade, roughly half of all professional media historians -- The Historicals -- subscribe to theory that "David Brooks" in an amalgamation of several real but wildly different people. The other half -- The Fictionals -- maintain that since so much of what he was alleged to have written was so obviously false and absurd, "David Brooks" had to be a literary contrivance: something analogous to Poe's nameless recounter of "The Telltale Heart" or Greta Van Sustern -- a fictional narrator whose own pathological unreliability is integral to the story...

*  Full disclosure:  Phyllis is a pal of mine.

The Kentucky Derby Is Still Decadent and Depraved

Derby Day, which means somebody damn well should light a candle for the greatest sports column ever -- Hunter Thompson's piece for Scanlan's on the 1970 Kentucky derby.

Here's a snip:

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

...

Pink faces with a stylish Southern sag, old Ivy styles, seersucker coats and buttondown collars. “Mayblossom Senility” (Steadman’s phrase)…burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why not?

The grim reaper comes early in this league…banshees on the lawn at night, screaming out there beside that little iron nigger in jockey clothes. Maybe he’s the one who’s screaming.  Bad DT’s and too many snarls at the bridge club. Going down with the stock market. Oh Jesus, the kid has wrecked the new car, wrapped it around the big stone pillar at the bottom of the driveway. Broken leg? Twisted eye? Send him off to Yale, they can cure anything up there. 

Yale? Did you see today’s paper? New Haven is under siege. Yale is swarming with Black Panthers…I tell you, Colonel, the world has gone mad, stone mad. Why, they tell me a goddam woman jockey might ride in the Derby today.

I left Steadman sketching in the Paddock bar and went off to place our bets on the fourth race. When I came back he was staring intently at a group of young men around a table not far away. “Jesus, look at the corruption in that face!” he whispered. “Look at the madness, the fear, the greed!” I looked, then quickly turned my back on the table he was sketching.  The face he’d picked out to draw was the face of an old friend of mine, a prep school football star in the good old days with a sleek red Chevy convertible and a very quick hand, it was said, with the snaps of a 32 B brassiere. They called him “Cat Man.”

But now, a dozen years later, I wouldn’t have recognized him anywhere but here, where I should have expected to find him, in the Paddock bar on Derby Day…fat slanted eyes and a pimp’s smile, blue silk suit and his friends looking like crooked bank tellers on a binge…

Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like.  I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomitting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the front of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomitting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”

...

Skills, Ctd.

This seemed like a fitting and succinct follow up to this much longer post about a) why David Brooks is an ass and, b) why the capacity to assemble words in just the right order is the most critical and least recognized and rewarded workplace skill.

(h/t Blue Gal for the pic)

Skills

David Brooks' has a shiny, new future waiting just for you!

Well, not you exactly.  You can hop the nearest ice floe and disappear into oblivion as far as Mr. Brooks is concerned.  But he does have a bright future prepped and open for business for his affluent neighbor's kids, some of his students at Yale and a few of his fellow passengers on the Acela Corridor express.

So yay!

But what (you ask) are these mad skills that are the entree to Mr. Brooks' Brave New World of Tomorrow?

And how does one get them?

And can I haz some?

The answer to your last two questions are "Magic Eight Ball says 'It's...fuzzy'' and "No", so let us concern ourselves with your first question.

But first, let me tell you a completely true story which will pay off at the end of this post...

Once upon a time, many years ago, back when I hadda full time job with a nice salary, decent benefits, an important-sounding title and a lunatic/sadist manager, I was called upon to put together a presentation for a forum we would be conducting with representatives of a friendly, foreign government.

I was on a team of three, and we each did their own little show.  Mine was so comprehensively better than anyone else's that, as we took our show on the road (all the way to D.C. and back), the other two acts in our road show fell away, and mine became "the" presentation.  Also, it stopped being "my" presentation, and became "our" presentation.

Also, because it wowed 'em, my boss benched me and he started doing the entire act, start to finish.

Then, one day, they needed to lay off staff so that more politically connected people in other departments would have a soft place to land.  Which is how -- during the week of Barack Obama's first inaugural and in the depths of the Great Recession -- I was kicked to the curb.  (Since that time I have done equally excellent work in a variety of part-time/no-benefits jobs at a considerably reduced salary, and have been laid off from each of those jobs in turn -- five times in six-and-a-half years now.)

Funny thing, though.  A couple of years back a friend of mine who works pretty high up in Chicago city government emailed me a briefing my once-upon-a-time boss had made to some Very Important People.  And lo and behold, what do I find but my little presentation, which had moved up in the world; had gotten a promotion and job security and gone merrily on without me.  Of course by then any embarrassing reference to my existence had long since been sandblasted away right down to the "Created By" tag in the file information folder, but otherwise it was virtually unchanged since the day I had brought it into the world.

So, end of that story for now, and back we go to the subject of the skills which Mr. Brooks describes in the second half of his column (the first half is about teachers and Big Data and "microgestures" and such): skills which, unsurprisingly, are either: those skills which will be of greatest value in the coming American feudal state, fulfilling the desires of a small, ruling clique who are expertly serviced by anticipatory and technologically proficient valets...or are the skills about which that small, ruling clique ruminate dreamily at cocktail parties, Aspen Institute weekends and Davos.

For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks.

I would be willing to wager my next month's salary against Mr. Brooks' salary that not "everyone" goes to conferences.  And of the small minority that do, a very high percentage are now being sent to "webinars" because they are cheap and you employer can have you at your desk working on the Markelsen report at the same time you are wolfing down some lunch at the same time you are learning about the paradigm-shifting power of whatever.

But please continue, David.

Similarly, people who can capture amorphous trends with a clarifying label also have enormous worth. Karl Popper observed that there are clock problems and cloud problems. Clock problems can be divided into parts, but cloud problems are indivisible emergent systems. A culture problem is a cloud, so is a personality, an era and a social environment.

Since it is easier to think deductively, most people try to turn cloud problems into clock problems, but a few people are able to look at a complex situation, grasp the gist and clarify it by naming what is going on.

I have watched my Liberal brethren and sisteren synthesize complex political and cultural problems and "name what is going on" for decades now, and so far the big payoff for has been that we are either willfully ignored by people like David Brooks or told to fuck off by people like David Brooks.  

So color me doubtful.

On the other hand, I am sure that this is much talked about as a desirable skill at the parties Mr. Brooks attends.  And I will keep it in mind the next time I am plunged into a power struggle over, say, the fate and future of NBC, where the millionaire titans of the digital communications industry are running through the corridors with their hair on fire screaming thought-leader gibberish while throwing every insane idea at the wall to see if anything sticks because money:

By last summer, [then-newly-minted NBC President Deborah] Turness finally came around to what others had been saying for a year: Gregory had to go. She secretly began searching for a replacement. Todd was the obvious heir, but Turness and Fili-Krushel also considered blowing up the show. At one point, they sat down with Jon Stewart to gauge his interest. “They were exploring it in the way of, ‘Maybe it’s time to do something ridiculous,’ ” Stewart told New York last year. Stewart passed, and in late July, they settled on Todd.

But so far NBC has ignored my clear and specific directives, and out here where 90% of the rest of Murrica lives and works, it is extremely unlikely that your boss (Out here in Real America we have things called "bosses", David.)  wants you to think outside the box because it is very likely your boss drew the damn box.  In fact, your boss lives in the box, along with his wife and his kids and his house and his mistress and his other house and his boat and so on.  

What your boss really wants is to be seen as innovative without actually moving the contents of the box around in any significant way.  He wants...adjectives.  He wants just enough new paint on the old box so when he struts his stuff at the next Chamber meeting, his peers will whisper, "That Joe sure is one paradigm-shifting motherfucker isn't he?"

But propose something actually and disruptively new?  Tell her something uncomfortable and true that might put a real dent in the box?

Hello unemployment!

Moving on, Mr. Brooks suggests:

Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans. This is what Steve Jobs did.

I know how attractive it must be for the newly divorced and "desperate to get remarried" David Brooks to push for quicker advancements in the field of lifelike and pliant sex robots.  But for you, the average American human middle class worker, betting your family's future on learning to anthropomorphize technology seems nuts.

Mr. Brooks continues:

Purpose provision. Many people go through life overwhelmed by options, afraid of closing off opportunities. But a few have fully cultivated moral passions and can help others choose the one thing they should dedicate themselves to.

Because if he didn't shove the word "moral" into it, how would generations unborn know David Brooks wrote it?  Also, this sounds a lot like the kind of weirdly diffracting sentence one would construct if one had spent many years as a moral scold and "disordered family" finger-wagger and suddenly had to explain to a paying audience why he was divorced.  

But hey, that's just me.  

Speculatin'.

Onward!

Opposability. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” For some reason I am continually running across people who believe this is the ability their employees and bosses need right now.

For the moral coward who made money writing long, screechy paeans to orderly families, old fashioned values, the military and economic genius of George W. Bush and the stupidity and depravity of Iraq War opponents...and went on to make even more money preaching the gospel of Both Siderism...and then made even more money writing thundering sermons on the need for Judgment, Accountability and Atonement...and then reacted to simple questions about his long, screechy paeans to orderly families, old fashioned values, the military and economic genius of George W. Bush and the stupidity and depravity of Iraq War opponents by denying he'd ever said such things...well, color me shocked that Mr. Brooks would try to use Fitzgerald's quote to make being a weasel into a virtue.

But as a skill?  Go ahead and try to earn a living out in the real world telling your boss that maybe she should do one thing...or maybe she should do the exact opposite.  Because opposability!

See you at the next job fair, moocher!

It turns out, the punchline which punctures these dreamy dreams is to be found, of all places, in the Wall Street Journal.  In an article from late last year in which we find some blunt and practical wisdom about skills for the 90% of American humans who will never make it past the gun turrets and human resources department and into Mr. Brooks' Brave New World of Tomorrow.  It seems the #1 problem with the real skills gap which real American human trying to make a living really face has nothing to do with opposability or creating lifelike sex robots who will coo over your every New York Times jot and tittle (Ohhh Mr. Brooks.  Your 251st column about Both Sides being wrong makes me soooo horny!) 

Instead, it turns out, a lot of employers are cheap bastards who -- surprise! -- just don't want to pay for what they need

...

But the fault rest with employers, not workers, says a new working paper from Peter Cappelli, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

...

Mr. Cappelli says a better explanation of the inability to fill certain jobs rests with employers themselves. The “obvious solution” to “virtually all the skill problems reported by employers is to increase training and produce the skilled workers they want themselves.”

Much of the evidence in support of a skills gap could be explained by employers who are no longer willing to train their employees or raise salaries, and instead want to be able to hire people with exactly the right skills–and on the cheap. Mr. Cappelli points to data showing apprenticeship programs are being abandoned. The number of apprentice programs registered with the Department of Labor declined to 21,000 in 2012 from 33,000 in 2002, and the number of apprentices has plunged from 280,000 from 500,000 a decade ago. If employers really faced a damaging shortage of workers, this would be an odd time to abandon programs to train employees.

Rather than facing an insurmountable skills gap, some employers may have a different agenda, he concludes: ”No doubt some component of the complaints is simply an effort to secure policy changes that lower labor costs.”

So there's that.

And also this -- the conclusion to the totally true story I started way up above.

The one skill that has been of use to me on every job I have ever had was storytelling.  

For real.  

From crafting RFPs to applying for grants to writing speeches and press releases and scripts to preparing briefing books and white papers, no skill in the workplace is both as critical and staggeringly undervalued as the ability to construct a clear and compelling narrative, targeted to a specific audience to accomplish a specific purpose.

Conquering the terrifying blank page with words in a row.  

Using those words to build a complete and engaging story in whatever time and within whatever parameters I am given.  

And doing it well, over and over again.  

This has never been the job I was hired to do, (Go look up 'Writer' in the Help Wanted.  Be prepared to laugh.) but it has always ended up as a huge "other duties as assigned" part of every job I have ever landed.  Because every organization needs this done, and damn few are capable of doing it at all, and fewer still can take policy-wonkese or clinician-speak and turn it into a story that can hold the audience's attention and move them in your direction.

Unfortunately, no matter how critical it really is to the health and success of the organization, no executive staff or HR department in modern, post-literate America has ever categorized griot as a vital skill, so be advised that being a capable and gifted writer will not save you when the terminator comes to kick you to the curb.

That is, unless you specialize in one, very specific of genre writing.  

The kind of writing that David Brooks has built a career honing to a razor's edge. 

The gentle art of telling the rich and powerful exactly what they want to hear.