And wow, he’s gotten 31 comments at that post — probably more than he’s had in five years here!
But the Chopin competition is as distinguished for the extraordinary careers of its “losers” as it is for its winners. True, Maurizio Pollini (1960), Martha Argerich (1965), Krystian Zimerman (1975), and Garrick Ohlsson (1970) were very worthy winners. But in 1970, Mitsuko Uchida finished second to Ohlsson; and in 1955, Vladimir Ashkenazy finished second to Adam Harasiewicz — which of those last two have you heard the most of since then? Thus, it is a “competition” only in name, and really more of a stage where young pianists can be heard by audiences, impresarios, and recording companies.
It is also — especially this year, the 200th anniversary year of Chopin’s birth — a celebration of the music. Scientists tell us that, long after the demise of humanity, radio waves traveling far into deep space will be the only surviving vestiges of our civilization. It is strangely reassuring to know that Chopin’s music may be audible to some other or future life form in the universe, after our species’ presence on this planet is a dim cosmic memory. For whoever hears it, and has the heart and mind to appreciate the immaculate sublimity of a masterpiece like the C Minor Nocturne, will then know that the unknown beings through whom such beauty was made were, whatever their faults and errors, sometimes true to the great cosmic harmony.
The performance here is from the young German pianist, Andreas König.
Over the weekend we mentioned Tiger Woods, a man who was given the vast gift, training, and privilege to be allowed to live a fantasy; we now see what he has done with it. If you have read any of the gruesomely fascinating literature on Lotto winners and the destruction that their dream-come-true moment wrought amid their lives, you know some more common examples of this theme. Lindsay and Paris — this week’s tabloid creatures of fantasy’s swamp — reveal to us the glistening slime on the underbelly of the Dream. Tonight, the President whose power is drawn from the swamp of fantasy will unfurl his oratorical splendor before us in proclaiming a new era of closure, transformation, progress — as a dozen or so more flag-draped boxes are quietly shipped into the darkness behind him, out of reach of the microphones and cameras.
Every cloud must have a silver lining, our provincial wisdom declares. So every fantasy must have its feeding darkness. Natural life is clear and bright, even amid its challenges and dangers; yet, as the old Chinese poet mused some 2,500 years ago, “people seem compelled by distraction and complexity.” Even the most glaringly perfect fantasy must, it seems, carry an abyss within its belly.
It is, of course, the obsession with perfection that creates the abyss. Only the superficial can appear ideal. The imitation of Christ is a cloying veneer; the attempt to own the mylar image of the Ideal. If we could but learn to “imitate” our own true selves, the connection with the divine would take care of itself.
Another way lies open to each of us, and thankfully, it is more open to the ordinary life than it is to the golf star, the idol, or the President. We can choose to reveal and to explore the substance of ourselves, our lives, our relationships. The rewards of such a journey far exceed the tawdry emoluments of fame, power, or wealth; because this clearer and more grounded path leads out of the swamp of fantasy and into the open air of reality. We need, as individuals and as a culture, to disperse the vapid obsession over whether dreams can come true, and work instead to make reality come true.
This, incidentally, is the focus of my counseling practice. I have occasionally wished that it were otherwise; that I could offer a Secret, a Power-Belief System of such magic and grandiosity as to be like walking beside God or Oprah. But it is only like walking beside yourself. Most of my clients have found that alone to be quite renewing and liberating.
And then I see a scene such as Bubba Watson’s mean-spirited spout at a golf fan yesterday. Watson, for those unfamiliar with the game, is a long-hitting lefthander who recently lost a playoff for the PGA Championship. So he was teeing off at 17 yesterday at the multi-millionaires’ Barclays tournament (only the top 125 players are invited, and all of them are winners or consistent top-10 players who have amassed fortunes playing this game), and as his ball settled into the middle of the fairway some 300 yards away, he turned toward the group of fans behind the tee and snarled at one of them: “you just HAD to start walking while I was trying to hit?”
This guy was ranting on one of the fans whose presence is responsible for the fact that is he filthy rich while playing a game that most of us pay good money to enjoy. It was a stern reminder of the arrogance that so often is the death hiding within the Trojan horse of excess. Every one of these players on the PGA Tour behaves the same way — they are as quick with the evil eye toward their patrons as they are in pocketing the bankrolls being served them by the corporations behind the tournaments, equipment manufacturers, and miscellaneous advertisers. Watson’s behavior is quite typical of all his brethren among the country club elite. I turned off the video feed in disgust.
Incredibly, it has not occurred to a single one of these privileged little boys that it is the presence of those people who dare to walk, take pictures, or make small noises that has brought them everything they have. If I were one of these players, I would vow never to forget that, and I would give them back the only thing an athlete can offer his audience: respect.
I’m not talking about simply putting up with it; that would be a churlish acceptance, not respect. I would honor the fans’ presence by making it part of the focus of my preparation. I would practice — on the driving range, putting green, and in practice rounds on the course — with a group of folks around me snapping pictures, talking, moving, doing all the ordinary things that people do when they are outdoors on a weekend having fun. I would constantly remind myself that if my concentration and focus are so tentative and fragile as to collapse because someone near me moves a little, I am not yet a true professional. I would spend some time at pro baseball games, and observe how a hitter facing a 95 mph fastball coming toward him must focus amid the noise and movement of 40,000 fans, not to mention the often-intentional distractions of noise and movement from the opposing players in the field. Above all, I would do what I could to adjust my game to the presence of those fans who are largely responsible for my fabulous wealth and fortune.
Instead, however, they behave — all of them, from Tiger on down to the the kids who finish in the top-20 eight times a year or so and thus become millionaires by losing well — they all collectively behave, I say, like a toddler whose favorite toy has been taken away. Wealth and privilege have a way of inciting regression and reversing every natural movement toward maturity.
They also appear to make us stupid. Mind you, I have never been anything of the remotest resemblance to wealthy (except, of course, in comparison with the vast majority of the population of the so-called developing nations, otherwise known as more than half the Earth). I am merely drawing conclusions from observed experience. So when I say “stupid,” I am not talking about an intellectual failing, but a dearth of common sense, of imagination, of a real vision of one’s place within the whole as a unique but single individual. I am talking, in a word, about humility.
Wealth and privilege seem to comprise the drone missile that kills natural intelligence and humility, while also destroying or embittering other members of the family of the human self — respect for others, the senses of dignity and restraint, and the recognition that one’s wealth is part of a beneficent whole that is meant to be shared. The stupidity of excess always forgets or denies this gift-nature of fortune, marks its bounty as its own doing, and guards it like a hellhound. The gift then become a gilded corpse, and its owner a one-eyed brute for whom charity is nothing more than a mechanical, tax-deductible reflex.
Leaving the golf course, we learn today from Frank Rich that the myopic vision of wealth and its hatred-reflex toward those who are not of the country club is the prevailing darkness of the current political landscape. Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and Dick Armey represent the same churlish xenophobia toward anyone off their narrow pedestal of excess as I see among the millionaires of golf. These political owners of Washington and its media treat the commons of their world in the same way those golfers treat their fans: use them, put them on display along the roped-off fairways of the golf course or the Washington Mall or the tea party convention, and above all, collect their money. But when it comes down to brass tacks, stick them all as painfully as possible: kill Social Security, unemployment benefits, and brand everything that may help them a Hitlerian brand of Socialism, all in the name of helping Glenn Beck “reclaim the civil rights movement.” As the Times’ Charles Blow asked yesterday in an extraordinarily lucid piece, “from whom?
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One footnote on the golf side of this business, which is ironically not as clear an illustration of our theme as one might think. After a final round of 67 (again, for the benefit of non-golfers, anything in the 60′s is a very good score for a pro), Tiger said, and I quote, “a lot of positive things happened for me this week…” Obviously, he did not mean, “hey, I got divorced — cool!” Nevertheless, having been through such an experience myself (um, I mean divorce, not shooting in the 60′s), there is a certain sense of purgation, of turning a page, to the moment when a judge’s stamp is placed onto a document that finalizes the failure of a marriage. Beyond that, I cannot speak for Tiger, only for myself: divorce is a teacher, a grape of misery which must be squeezed for all the vintage of learning that it offers. If I were Tiger’s counselor, I would encourage him not to turn his back on that moment, but to drain that cup of suffering completely, and then let it go. I’m not sure he would understand, but he is fortunate in having the model of his ex-wife’s behavior, which has been exemplary (and why haven’t I heard a single sports commentator in the media say it?). Children — even very young ones — can sense how we handle adversity, and so the importance of a man’s reaction to such a moment is redoubled. In the way of Nature, learning is meant to be transmitted in the same manner as wealth: accepted as a gift, and then shared.
My blog is worth $7,903.56.
How much is your blog worth?
Technorati’s very good at telling you what your blog is worth (it’s based on traffic, Google page ranking, trackbacks, and content volume); what they don’t mention is how to go about finding a buyer. The other intriguing question raised by that item is: what actually gets bought when someone buys a blog? Presumably all the content (the database and everything in it), the domain name, any advertising contracts, and I suppose copyrights. At 8 grand, that last one would be a sticking point for me, which raises one of the more ironic controversies of the 21st century: the rise of IP (Internet Protocol) has turned IP (Intellectual Property) into a roaring, hideously complex dragon, and the only winners in this scenario are the lawyers.
Yet as I’ve mentioned many times during discussions of capitalism in general, it is not money that warps and poisons people and their inventions; it is rather the Cult of Excess, which is itself fueled by a fundamentalist fear — the belief in Lack (I can never have enough because there never is enough). Greed may beget complacency, but its engine is fear.
The Internet began simply and in relative anonymity: a bunch of scientists and academics sharing notes over computers joined by telephone lines. Nothing that would attract the attention of corporations, magnates, media celebrities, or government. Or course, corporations and government were involved: Bell’s labs and Xerox’s research facilities, along with the US Dept. of Defense were either funding or providing space and bandwidth. But it was quiet, experimental — the product of lonely propellor heads in denim rather than MBA marketers in three-piece suits. The government knew that geeks had helped before in improving the arts of war and espionage; and the corporations knew that technology often made fabric containing golden threads with commercial potential. The Internet began as this quiet and tentative experiment: just a simple and effective new way for geeks to communicate. Nothing special or exclusive about it.
And now we have a situation where money, which already controls the access that site owners have to the public, is now threatening to make that control bi-directional. If Google and Verizon have their way, the public will be under the heel of money in its access to the Internet’s content. As always with such corporate-fed takeovers, everything is smiley-faced and loaded with complacent assurance: don’t be afraid, we’re not doing anything insidious here; the darkness is all in your poor, overwrought imagination. We’re just making layers — you know, like on a cake. And it will be a beautiful cake, as pretty and harmless as Chelsea’s wedding ($5M and no, you weren’t invited).
What Goog-izon wish to make feudal and exclusive is wireless access, which is where they see the future of computing and the Internet. They appear to think that the PC desktop and home laptop will go dinosaur in favor of smartphones and iPad-like devices. So let’s leave the question of whether preferred access to the rich is permissible in that airy realm, because if you’ve read anything at all here, you know my answer to that one already; and focus instead on Goog-izon’s guiding assumption. Are they right?
Goog-izon’s vision seems to be of a future in which folks with old, “wired” tech can have the same level of access to their plebeian content as the wealthy have to their exclusive content. Everyone gets what they deserve according to what they are worth, not according to who they are. This is the guiding principle of Feudalism, its public face, and it has been so since ancient times. The hierarchy is for everyone’s benefit; the guiding presence of the Nobility is there for the good of all. It is the golden shower vision of trickle-down economics, which existed centuries before Ron Reagan was a trickle in his Daddy’s member.
It is a typically corporate world-view, because it is pathologically myopic: it so narrows the focus as to make a private obsession into a public vision. It is the same myopia that defines the message of Wall Street and its investment bankers: of course we don’t need regulation; what, after all, have we done that would require regulation? Just leave this to us — we’ll manage it so everyone benefits (never mind that their view of both “everyone” and “benefit” is limited to about 150,000 people out of a nation of 300 million).
Here’s an alternative prediction: the PC and the wired web are not going away, not retreating — not in my lifetime, certainly, and probably not even within this century. For one thing, there is the EITR issue of our time (that’s Elephant In The Room), global warming. Johann Hari’s recent review of this issue, which I would consider required reading for anyone with the mildest interest in the future of humanity at large, reveals the fissile speed at which this catastrophe is moving.
Bringing that down to the comparatively mundane level of our discussion here, it’s simple: wireless access will become ever more unreliable and sporadic on a planet choking on atmospheric carbon. I would bet a large sum that Russians with wired connections had a much easier time getting the word out about their disastrous summer than those braving the smoke-filled outdoors and its wireless currents.
The other factor here is about the devices: just because something is smaller does not make it more eco-friendly. Smartphones and iPads are throw-away devices, much more so than the PC. I have a decade-old PC and a four year old laptop which will perform virtually as well over a wired connection as the latest and hottest thing from Apple or Dell. To get them to do the same thing over wireless, I’d have to supply them with routers, 802.11n modems, and signal boosters, not to mention the necessary channels and ISP access accounts.
But that’s what it’s all about, you say: only those who can afford new tech and exclusive access to preferred channels can do wireless well. Again, there is more to that than meets the myopic eye. Which brings us to the second EITR, the global economy. As Krugman and others have pointed out in the past week, there is no recovery. People at large are spending less, and the wealthy (especially the corporations) are hoarding money. We are entering — environmentally, economically, and even technologically — an extended time of constriction, impoverishment, disparity, and revolution. There will be a broad rejection of the narrow consumerism that Goog-izon and its ilk wish to perpetuate, because experience will demonstrate all too clearly that we can no longer afford it, no matter how wealthy or otherwise we may be. Wordsworth’s famous protest — “the world is too much with us…getting and spending” — will be seen as prophetic.
The last factor is purely psychological: we can no more afford the psychology of a wireless technocracy than we can afford its Draconian and inevitably impractical economic and environmental demands. On my new assignment in academia, I’ve been to at least a dozen meetings and have yet to see anyone pull out a Blackberry and start spinning the dial with that blank stare that used to make me think I might as well have been in a padded cell as a corporate boardroom. I cannot express how psychologically refreshing and uplifting an experience this has been; to connect with people on the level of their human immediacy rather than their techno-distractions. I think people will realize — perhaps have already begun to realize — that being strung out on a smartphone or a pad is life-killing and demeaning of human dignity. I remain confident in the ability of human feeling and reason whenever these functions are allowed to co-exist in equality: people will reject being the slaves of these wireless devices just as they rejected the corporate pager in the 80′s.
That brings us back to Goog-izon’s obsession, which they style as vision: once you examine its assumptions, it is empty of all meaning and value except, of course, as an insular and solipsistic matter of material self-interest. These corporations wouldn’t recognize equality if it jumped up and bit their balls off (and again, it will).
So, shall we feel threatened or fearful over Goog-izon’s insidious assault on Net Neutrality, on equal access to the web? No: that would merely be entering their home stadium, playing on their turf. They want you to feel threatened and fearful: that’s their bread and butter, not yours. If the past three years of recession, economic collapse, and the continuing damage to the human ecosphere have not shown us, with unmistakable clarity, the depravity and heart-dead corruption of the market-obsessed mind that pervades both the corporate world and the palaces of the State, then they have taught us nothing. The Internet is a place where the supreme value of the unique individual is affirmed through his connection with the universal, with the global community; where that universal is revealed and extended through the principle of equality among individuals. Corporations and governments should have, as they did at the beginning of the Internet, a peripheral, supporting, and incidental place amid that greater reality.
If you can understand that inviolate reality, and affirm your own place within it, then you have nothing to fear from Goog-izon or its myopic vision of who you are or what the future will be like. A king can make a feudal realm out of a hamlet, a town, or even a great city or nation; but he cannot make the entire world his slave.
