How Much of a Wake-Up Call Do We Need?

July 4, 2020 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about our national death wish.

I’d finally gotten around to an essay about the California wildfires in 2018 and how quickly we seemed to forget about their horrors in the year that followed. It’s also because we’re now in the wake of our first mass casualties from Covid19, two terrible months after I thought we’d learned the hard way how to slow its deadly spread. Side by side, the way that many Americans exited the recent lockdowns looks uncannily similar to how many Californians fell back into the same fatal routines after its communities burned—the same reckless defiance.

I bury stories that look promising (like how disasters bring out the best or worst in us) until I can find the attention they deserve. There is always a pile of essays and news articles, along with a laptop-created document that I’ve cut and pasted together, that are waiting to be digested. Like acorns buried in the ground, these repositories are also available when I’m hungry for inspiration or more proofs that seem timely in the echoes of recent history.

Last November, a year after fires ripped through California devastating the town of Paradise (above) and many others, Mark Arax looked back at the ruination and rebuilding that followed with the reproachful eyes of an Old Testament prophet. Arax is a journalist and author of a beautifully titled book, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, that was published early in 2019, right after the firestorms were contained. Nine months later, after seeing for himself his home state’s response to the catastrophe, he wrote this essay. It’s a cri de coeur for a community he both loves and refuses to let off the hook.

Before reviewing his bill of particulars, here are some of the facts that support it.

The 2018 wild fire season was the deadliest and most destructive ever recorded in California. That year saw a total of 8,527 fires burning 1,893,913 acres. Given the magnitude of the economic and material losses, it’s a mercy that so few died: $12 billion in property insurance claims, more than 18,000 structures destroyed, and at least 85 people killed. I wrote about the Paradise fire in November of 2018 and, on several occasions since have commented about how forward-thinking Californians can be about environmental issues. So I was eager to gain Arax’s perspective as a life-long Californian on what his community did next. Much like our reckless abandon today, his account shook me by the lapels.

Arax began his survey of the recovery with a drive from north to south through the Golden State.

On the outskirts of Kern County, I crossed the Aqueduct, the 444-mile-long concrete river that moves snowmelt from mountain to farm to city and allows us to thumb our noses at nature. There I landed in an orchard that belongs to the most defiant Californian of all, Stewart Resnick. He grows more almonds, pistachios, oranges and pomegranates than any other person in the world and uses nearly as much water each year as the whole city of Los Angeles. He calls his barony—121,000 irrigated acres in the San Joaquin Valley alone—the Wonderful Company.
Three summers ago [in 2016], amid one of the worst droughts in California history, I stood in the same place and watched Mr. Resnick’s giant earth movers erase thousands of acres of nuts and fruits. Even Wonderful had gone dry, I thought. But three years is a long time ago in California. After back-to-back winters of rain, Mr. Resnick has stocked the ground with new almond and pistachio trees. Herds of agriculturalists have followed the Nut King right into the horizon.
The Gold Rush might have ended 140 years ago, but its ethos of extraction still dominates California.

Extracting instead of sustaining is some of what the state’s tree huggers—and many more of its commonsensical residents—are up against, but not all. Crossing California’s “Mason Dixon line, where the sprawl of valley farmland gives way to the urban sprawl of the Southland,” Arax views with dismay another crisis in the making because the state is a tinderbox. It is subdivision upon subdivision of new houses, that are:

marching out to the chaparral, hill and forest, straight into the path of wildfire. These are the new exurbs, kindling for the next killer blaze….
Here in the Santa Clarita Valley, I arrived just in time to see the levelers grading earth to build the first phase of Newhall Ranch. When it’s finished, it will be the largest master-planned community in California history—21,500 dwellings, seven public schools and a golf course, rising right where the 2017 Rye Fire jumped Interstate 5 and scorched the same ground.
‘We went to the county planning commission and showed them photos of people running from the fire in Pico Canyon in 2016,’ says Lynne Plambeck, a resident of Santa Clarita who’s been fighting growth in the path of wildfire for 25 years. ‘But it fell on deaf ears. It always falls on deaf ears. Until the next one.’

For more than a century, the stand-off between fire and water in California was produced by miracles of engineering that moved rain “from where it fell in the north to where the people chose to settle in the south.” The Central Valley Project in the 1940’s and State Water Project in the 1960’s “allowed California to build three world class cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego—with a farm belt in the middle that has no rival.” But now the piper is being paid, over and over again, with little or nothing being learned each time around.

[S]ince World War II, the state has [also] gone from 11 million residents to 40 million. The bulwark of dams, aqueducts, canals, ditches and levees is cracking under the demand for ever more water. That system won’t see us into a future of more nuts and houses, that’s for sure. Something will have to give. Yet no place on the map—not north, middle or south—is willing to call a truce in California’s eternal water wars.
One might have thought that the drought of 2011-17 would mark a turning point. In 2013, California received less rainfall than in any other year on record. Entire stretches of the Sierra Nevada, the state’s great watershed, were barren of snow. Real river, concrete river, the aquifer beneath our feet—each had run dry. As the farm pumps reached deeper into the earth to pull out more ancient water, the ground itself was sinking, not in inches but in feet.

They are conditions no fire can resist.

Paradise, November 2018 (photo: Mark McKenna)

Since the 2018 wildfires, the state has mostly tinkered around the edges of the next calamity, arguing about who is willing to give up their “nuts and houses” to strike a truce with nature. From the precipice, Arax found that the “ethos of extraction” still seemed undeterred by considerations of safety or sanity. Even in our most future-oriented and “progressive” state, its people can’t stop consuming or building for long enough to realize that business as usual will almost certainly be killing more of them and destroying more of their homes in the months and years ahead.

Drought and wildfire may be natural occurrences, but California seems determined to make them man-made catastrophes. Here at rock’s edge, west of the West, we live to defy our essential nature, and sometimes we die horrifically because of it.

Of course, it’s not only between fire’s insistence and water’s availability that we’ve failed to learn what the recent past has been saying to us. “Back to normal” is like an undertow that keeps pulling us in, even when its deadly consequences are still fresh in our minds. Maybe we believe that a miracle will make the outcome different the next time or that luck will forgive us our deadly habits, but magical thinking always has its consequences.

As I thought about California’s death wish, it was hard to avoid the one that America’s been fulfilling since the initial virus lockdown.

From mid-March to mid-May, many of us started wearing face masks, social distancing, and even sheltering at home to avoid infection or the risk that we’d spread the virus to others. Few of us liked it, but we changed what we were doing, adapted (at least temporarily) for the sake of our survival, and it seemed to be working.

Some of our leaders and many others of us never embraced these safeguards. As the drive to “get back to normal” intensified six weeks ago, more of us abandoned common sense along with our safety practices. The result is that after suffering 100,000 deaths during the initial two-month surge, infections and deaths are again accelerating. While a headline in yesterday’s Times read, “US Cases Soar as Leadership on Virus Fails,” it would have been more accurate to blame both poor leadership and our astonishing ability to delude ourselves that the risks producing mass casualties just 2 months ago have somehow changed.

Among 6 key nations confronting the coronavirus, this is where the United States finds itself in today.

As you can see, cases are accelerating in Brazil, the United States and India and falling in the UK, Sweden and Germany.

I saw this chart on Twitter this week with the tag, “Without words,“ like it’s an inside joke among those who track the management of nations. (And maybe it is). But it also represents our propensity as a people for hubris; another failure to find a life-saving way forward in the face of fatal threats we’d just confronted; and one more occasion for Biblical lamentation. Once again, Americans are busy turning a natural occurrence (this time, the spread of contagion) into a man-made catastrophe.

Refusing to break our repeatedly destructive patterns—it’s how Einstein defined insanity, after all—we’re taking to the streets and venting our frustrations over being cooped-up by exploding M-80’s and throwing firecrackers at one another.

A vaccine, if they find one, can’t cure us of this.

This post was adapted from my June 28, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

It’s Working That’s Essential

May 10, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Trying to identify who is (and isn’t) “an essential worker” is the wrong game to be in today. As the current upheavals are making plain: all workers are essential workers.

Everyone who wants to work in America should be able to do so because:

– the economy depends on all workers, and not just somebody’s idea about who is essential and who is not;

– economically, strong families and communities depend upon wage earners and the kinds of livelihoods that generate those wages; and

– psychologically, the well-being of families and communities derives from their members feeling like they are (or can grow up to be) productive members of these basic social groups.

As a result, if a country like the US is to thrive, its democratic institutions must ensure that the benefits of capitalism and hard work flow not only to the “factory owners” but also to everyone who wants to work in those “factories” and in the communities that sustain them.

During the bloodletting of American jobs over the past 8 weeks, the government has tried to cobble together a safety net of small business loans, stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits to protect the workforce. But every day that passes makes these efforts seem more like a fool’s errand. For tens of millions of American workers, these stop-gap measures are failing them and the anxious testimony about their daily struggles is heart-breaking proof. A labor market that was already teetering before March 1 has begun to collapse.

Over the past 50 years, the US has put economic growth (championed by the Right) and victim compensation for those that a growing economy fails to help (the band aids championed by the Left) at the center of government policies that most affect workers. As if there weren’t enough proof already, the Covid-19 crisis has revealed the bankruptcy of this approach for all but a wealthy few. It’s long past the time to make the economic welfare and psychological wellbeing of every American worker our national priority.

In the great rebuilding that lies ahead, it’s the ability to work, to support ourselves “with the fruits of our labor,” and to feel like we’re contributing to our families and communities that is essential. That means we’ll need to start treating all workers in America like they’re essential workers.

Empty the Old Glass & Help Fill a New One

Over Easter, a young Episcopal priest in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn delivered a sermon called “The World is Empty Now. How Should We Fill It?” His impassioned plea later appeared in The New York Times, which is where I read it.

Father Paulikas heralded the remarkable opportunity that’s been presented by a time when the old ways of living and working seems to be vulnerable (or breaking down altogether) and new ones that are more durable and humane can not only be imagined but also realized if we have the courage to do so.

Physically isolated and emptied of our usual lives, we are being forced to face ourselves in a way that few alive today ever have before… Having emptied ourselves, what do we really want to fill our world with once it is time to rebuild?

After the crucifixion on Friday, we’re in the empty tomb on Saturday, he said, daring to hope for the resurrection on Easter Sunday. In other words, this empty but hopeful time is an opportunity to ask basic questions about how we want to live and work tomorrow.

What does it say about our economy that it depends on the labor of people whose lives we are willing to sacrifice? Do we want to continue participating in an exhausting economic system that crumbles the instant it is taken out of perpetual motion? And what is the virtue of a desire for constant accumulation of wealth and goods, especially when they come at the cost of collective welfare and equality? These are not just policy questions. They are spiritual concerns that come into view with sharp clarity in the emptiness around them.

Since this is where we find ourselves, what should we do about it?

It Starts With Deciding What’s Most Important and All the Other Things That Aren’t

While accepting that our top and lesser priorities might be different, I tried to puzzle through the process for myself a couple of times last year as it relates to my jobs as a writer, arbitrator, citizen and member of a community where difficult choices between one thing and another always have to be made.

In a January, 2019 post, I’d recently finished Edmund Phelp’s Mass Flourishing and had just read Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. I found myself in broad agreement with how each of them viewed the challenges confronting workers today and at least some of their proposals for addressing them.

Phelps argued that for America to flourish, its workers need to flourish by taping into their native resourcefulness—the kind of free enterprise that’s been blossoming here and there since this novel coronavirus pushed us into a corner. Prior to 1970, the vast majority of workers flourished as entrepreneurs and small business owners, Phelps argued, tapping into their creativity at the front end of their work and their feelings of accomplishment at the backend for sustenance.

By giving us an opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities, work allows us to realize our potential, be proud of our abilities to provide for ourselves and our families, be similarly proud of what we’re making or doing, and be more confident when facing the future because we feel that we have a stake in it and that it is not merely ‘happening to us.’ When enough individual workers flourish like this, Phelps argues, an economy overall flourishes.

For his part, Cass argued that “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity, so it should [also] be the central focus of our public policy.” When we fail to produce enough jobs to serve that objective, the human toll weakens the nation as a whole, and tears its social fabric. To help prove his point, Cass cited studies finding that:

workers never recover economically from unemployment; that men only form families when they have work that can provide for them; that unemployment is a trigger for divorce; and that children have better outcomes when at least one parent is working. Moreover, communities where people are working are more vibrant and tend to attract more investment. In other words, communities filled with workers are good for those living there and good for everyone else too.

Before an April, 2019 post that was called “The Social Contract Around Our Work is Broken,” I’d been reading how Soshana Zuboff distinguished between the pre-1970 American economy and the roughly half-century of work that has followed in one of her essays. From say 1980 to the present, when the benefits that companies gained from pro-business policies failed to “trickle down” to the vast majority of workers, the result has been a yawning wealth gap between the top 10% and all other American workers. But this almost “feudal” system of lords and serfs was hardly inevitable.

American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it… Zuboff cites [Karl] Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved ‘the organic reciprocities’ between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

The period between 1945 and 1970 featured some glaring social and political divides, but it also saw many companies maintaining “the basic reciprocities” between them and their workers. Unfortunately, it’s a balance we’ve failed to strike since then. I’d argue that at least some of the human desperation we’ve been hearing during the current economic meltdown stems from the fact that it’s our state and local governments and not the companies we work for that have become the guarantors of our jobs.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A Smile and a Frown

In the debate over who is (and isn’t) “an essential worker,” I saw this posted on-line this week.

It’s pretty funny until you realize that it also depicts the average McDonald’s worker before his status was “elevated” by the current state of emergency. (The rake says it all, don’t you think?)

This week’s news has been loaded with reports about “disposable workers” in farming and meat processing. We’re hearing about home health workers risking their lives for low pay and seniors who have worked their whole lives moving back with their children because they could never save enough for their retirements. As it relates to work, America’s social contract has failed on nearly every front to safeguard “the basic reciprocities” between our companies and our workers.

In the emptiness of today, we have a chance to re-consider whether this is ok with any of us.

There was a report from the Brookings Institution this week arguing that “essential” workers should receive “hazard pay” during this health emergency. In a sidebar that included audio were comments from one of these temporarily essential workers. The following is some of what Matt Milzman, a Safeway cashier in Washington D.C., had to say, in the plainest of ways, about what we’ve lost but could regain:

[A]ll of these millionaires and billionaires who run these companies are thinking, how do I maintain my profits? I think there needs to be a fundamental restructuring of how we think and do things in this society that focuses on humanity. The humanity of us in the grocery stores, the humanity of the doctors and nurses in the hospital, the humanity of the people who continue to pick up your trash every day, the humanity of all people in this situation who are going in every day, risking their lives to try and carry on as normal.

If it’s working that’s essential, we should aim to recover the humanity in every job.

This post was adapted from my May 3, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a newsletter each week (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Other Wonder of Tourists and Survivors

April 5, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hello everyone. I’m mostly holding up and hope this finds you holding up too.

Recent weeks, but particularly this past one, have been like being in a foreign country while never entirely leaving the familiarity of home. I wonder if it’s been feeling disjointed like this to you.

When travel takes you to an entirely new place, you notice small differences that would normally escape your attention if you were still back home, things like the music that’s playing in the background, the odd rooflines you’re passing on the bus, or the kinds of shoes that people are wearing. With big things like a new language or culture telling you how far you’ve traveled, you can end up paying closer attention to the smaller differences too.

In an essay he wrote after bringing some of his American students to Ireland for the first time, Liam Heneghan noticed the power that tourists often bring to their observations.

A tourist generally has an eye for the things that, through repetitive familiarity, have become almost invisible to the resident… A tourist can [recognize] … the delicious strangeness of mundane things.

This past week, I’ve felt like a tourist in my suddenly strange country.

Of course, the larger changes and contrasts that shouted “Something new is afoot!” have been apparent for awhile now: how things have gotten quieter and slower, and how the promise of spring keeps contradicting the darker messengers on the news every day. But this kind of quiet and slow, when nearly everything but the march of nature has ground to a halt has, in its novelty, caused me to notice things that I either missed or took for granted as a local before. This week, it’s been surprisingly consoling and enabling to see my home country through a tourist’s wide eyes.

The first way that home had changed is how quiet the city has become. Tires skimming the streets, honking horns, helicopters over Route 1 and I-76, jets streaming towards the airport, sidewalk conversations, pedestrians on their phones, radio sounds—rap, R&B and talk shows mostly, delivery trucks, cars parking, home repairs, street repairs, neighbors coming and going, shouts from the high school’s baseball diamond, a track team running by, that ice cream truck beckoning 3d graders with its annoying song: these sounds that John Cage called the music of a city are no longer being offered in a continuous live stream, if they’re being offered up at all. Even the hourly bells from Penn Charter nearby have gone strangely quiet.

The sounds that survive are now framed by something like silence, as if puffs of snow had blanketed everything around them. For sure, it makes the sirens on rescue vehicles stand out even more, but it also delivers other bells, from that church in Germantown for example, the way they might have told an older city that it’s the middle of the day. Because kids are home from school, their laughing and talking excitedly gains my attention whenever it erupts. If I’m outside and close enough, I can hear the green light at the intersection of Fox and Midvale click. And like fleeing the urban glow can reveal the stars in a sky that’s suddenly gone dark, the bird songs and conversations have also leapt to the fore.

At the same time that we’re learning about essential and non-essential work, maybe the bells ringing, kids chirping, and birds singing are the essential sounds that were getting lost in the shuffle before.

The second way that my home has changed is how it’s turned in on itself.  What’s most familiar to me (my routines and “home-work”) have had to turn their backs, even more than usual, on everything that’s happening “outside.” It seems to me that you can view “sheltering in place” as either being banished from the wider world and losing what it has to offer or as finding a refuge and gaining something you didn’t have before. When the public world becomes a threatening reality, it almost invites you to see whether your private world can provide new sources of comfort: balms and salves that might always have been there but that you’d failed to notice.

I’d recently read that the best workshop (or kitchen or closet) is the one where you can see everything that you need to fix (or cook or wear). The advice was less Marie Kondo and more Yankee practicality, arguing that nothing that you need should ever be buried behind something else and effectively “unavailable.” In other words, the necessary tools and ingredients should always be visible and within easy reach so that they’re “on hand” when you’re ready for them.

Being a tourist in today’s strangeness has enabled me to see the necessities that had been buried in clutter until now and to identify the gaps in needed supplies that I still have to fill. With fresh eyes, I’ve been enabling a kind of preparedness when it comes to day-to-day living whose beauty had escaped me until now and (ironically) that also seems to have escaped many of our leaders as we face a respiratory pandemic without enough ventilators, protective equipment, test kits, hospital beds or medical staff “on hand” while being awash in almost everything that’s non-essential.

The sudden contrast between my public and private worlds has fostered another tourist-like appreciation too. The daily horror of a virus approaching from all directions along with our near helplessness to fend it off puts into bold relief the promise of spring that’s unfolding without any human assistance at all. With different eyes, daily miracles in the trees and on the ground that used to go unnoticed provide me with a deeper hope than even the acts of selfless heroes that life (although not as we’ve known it) will go on.

When the old, familiar world tries to return and the strangeness of the present one recedes, there will be blame enough for this to go around. The question, I suppose, is whether we all bear some of that responsibility and should get on to something that’s far more useful than finger pointing—starting right now.

As we shelter-in-place and social distance, there is another discrepancy between our old and new worlds that provides the ground for those insights. It is how much the familiar world that we used to know has slowed itself down.

There is nowhere to rush to in coming weeks and months; in a very real sense, many of us are already there. Aside from emergency medical and safety net workers, most of us have less paying work if we have any at all, which gives the days a molasses-like quality, concentrating and reserving some of our energy for later on, when it will be sorely needed to rebuild. Even with kids home from school and close quarters, we can still bring the curiosity of tourists to the slow task of contemplating how we’ll need to change our priorities if we’re to thrive and prosper in the next world.

There are easy fixes, like resolving to pay more for local workers (instead of factories overseas) to make essential supplies and then stockpiling these critical reserves. But there are more basic questions about what is, or should be, essential. If China, where the virus started, in fact suffers ten thousand deaths from this plague and America suffers a hundred or two hundred thousand, what does that say about our priorities and way of life and how we might change them going forward? In a democracy like ours, in all democracies, it is for us to decide on what we need most and how our free markets, awesome technologies and representative governments should manage our scarce resources to meet those needs.

Like foreign travel, a shared calamity like this one makes us curious about all manner of things we never seemed to notice when we trusted the familiarity of our old lives and work. Like travel, this virus and our responses to it have torn the blanket off, revealing facets of the ordinary we may have taken for granted while also forcing basic questions about how to move forward more effectively given the lessons we’re learning.

Because we’ve noticed the life force and inventiveness that some of our governors, nearly all of our essential workers, and many DIY by-standers have brought to this calamity, it’s only fair to ask whether we can find ways to harness their extraordinary energies to the energy we’ve been storing so we can build a society that can do a better job of sustaining us than the familiar one we’ve been seeing these last few weeks with different eyes?

Do we have, in Heneghan’s memorable phrase, enough of the tourist’s “other wonder” to imagine and then build a new world on this energetic foundation now that some of the fatal flaws of the world we’re leaving behind have been exposed?

Other-wonder may be this calamity’s greatest gift.  It would be a terrible shame to waste it whenever it arises during these suddenly quiet and slow days that—like the newly planted tree above—promise each of us so much.

Stay safe and in the game. I’ll see you next Sunday.

Now into the second month of this coronavirus, I’ve kept the weekly newsletter format here (from my April 5, 2020 newsletter) instead of adapting it for this post. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them later appear here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

True Greatness is Always Complicated

February 25, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After my post about Kobe Bryant two weeks ago, I heard from a number of you who couldn’t get over the accusation of rape that still metastasized in the middle of his legacy.

I’d acknowledged that Bryant was an introvert who still needed to tell his story about the struggle between good and evil inside him—and, by implication—how laudable that was. But as I read it again, the shortness of the piece didn’t do justice to the darkness in him, at least in part because so many of Bryant’s mourners didn’t seem to be grappling with his dark side at all. They were fans who had lost a hero, and for them the “Mamba” in him was mostly, if not entirely, a good thing given the adolescent ways we think about winning and sum up complicated lives while the grief of loss still stings.

So I’ve poured over the memorial articles about him, including those that Longreads (an on-line curator of stories) assembled into “The Ugliness of Greatness Reading List” about his life, his passing and our reactions to it.

After he retired from his obsession of playing basketball better than anyone, Bryant reverted to an even deeper preoccupation, making it (along with his family) into his fulltime projects. Since his retirement from basketball in 2016, a big part of his life work became telling the story that had always interested him most, so that he could profit (and others might too) from his portrayal of struggles like the ones that were inside of him. Stories about competition and the pursuit of excellence and falling along the way. Like his storytelling heroes created Darth Vader, Voldermort and Jaws, Bryant would tell stories that spoke to his alter-ego and how to hold him in check.

I thought it a worthy encore career for him (or for anyone, really), but again the short-form of my research and subsequent post didn’t remove the suspicion that this might be a marketing proposition for the Kobe Bryant product line instead of the kind of soul-searching that could impact the ways that we saw ourselves too. So I wanted to read more, and by seeing him through others’ eyes, decide whether I’d been right in concluding that there are deeper lessons in his life, in his death and in what we seemed to be taking from them.

What follows are excerpts from articles that were written about Kobe Bryant after his helicopter fell from the sky and his story risked getting lost in the shuffle of our grief. My job was easier because the Longreads editors gathered so many terrific stories, with the haunting (but unattributed) photograph up top coming from one of them: Jeremy Gordon’s “Two Things Can Be True, But One is Always Mentioned First” in The Outline.

I brought three questions with me while I read, and I’ve grouped what I discovered about Bryant and the troubling ways we process the passing of conflicted heroes under them.

What set Kobe Bryant apart?

First off, it is useful to recall the range of his excellence as an athlete. In his article in The Outline, Gordon says of Bryant:

He exemplified excellence as grim-jawed killer instinct (murder your opponents on the court), relentless hard work (practice for hours, because the sport demands it), blunt honesty (if your teammates suck, call them out), and beatific monologing about loving the game, which to him was a way of life.

Of course, as it turned out, “his way of life” was what he wanted to tell us about most. Writing about Bryant in The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas beautifully observed:

It seemed, for a while, that he only saw himself as a winner, but it turned out that he saw himself as a storyteller. At times, this quality could make him seem a little slick, aware of his own personal mythology. But as his career progressed—and as he fought back from injury after injury—he became more expansive about the narrative power of sports, its ability to transform an inner struggle into an outer one. He didn’t hide the fact that he was angry, that he could be selfish, that he was warped by his overwhelming competitive instincts. In a 2014 [New Yorker] profile by Ben McGrath, Bryant, in discussing an outburst by the football player Richard Sherman, talked about the “ugliness of greatness.

Part of it, surely, was because Bryant’s focus was narrow, inwardly focused and relentless. In his piece “What Made Kobe Different” Jonathan Abrams began with Bryant’s own words to describe his careers as a basketball player and more recently:

I have such a narrow focus. As you can see, I didn’t have much time to socialize at all. When I wasn’t training, I was writing and I was studying the art of writing, of filmmaking. My days were booked. It wasn’t that I went out of my way not to be social. It was just that I was busy preparing for what I’m doing now.

Abrams quotes Del Harris, who was Bryant’s first NBA coach, to similar effect: about his player’s isolation from others and his mesmerizing obsession with doing his best. That he was so unsocialized may also help to explain his troublingly anti-social and often predatory side.

[Bryant] never paid attention to any outside activities that I could tell. He never went out. Of course, he was only 18 and 19. On the airplane, he never had any particular fun—no cards, no video games. He was always looking at basketball things on his computer. In those days, we did not have the DVDs of games to take with us right after the game, no iPads, etc. But he had plenty of DVDs from our earlier games, or of the next team or of [Michael] Jordan. He was a total student of the game.

And, Abrams might have added, to the contributions that he wanted to make and ended up making as a positive role model, but Bryant knew there was more to his story than that.

Around the time he was charged with rape, he started talking about Black Mamba. As he explained in “Muse” (a documentary about his life), Mamba personified his attempt to channel his mean, relentless rage more productively both on the court and off of it, vividly incorporating the serpent into a personal struggle that made sense to him, and maybe to those who were watching too.

The New Yorker’s Thomas brings that story down to today as Kobe Bryant worked with his customary diligence and single focus to continue writing it.

After Bryant retired, in 2016, he made an animated movie that won an Oscar. He launched podcasts, movies, television shows. Many of them were about why he was set apart from the world, even as he tried to connect with it…Bryant’s stories involved rage and self-discipline and anger and, yes, greatness. By all accounts, he was as involved—and even obsessive—with those projects as he was with anything else.

Bryant’s need to write his story was far more than a marketing angle for an encore career. It was like he was fleshing out his character in his own morality plays.

How does public grief reduce greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place?

In my prior post, I should have set out more of the facts about the rape charges against Kobe Bryant. Here are some of them.

In 2003, Bryant was accused of aggravated assault by a 19-year-old hotel worker in Colorado. She later told the police, “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me.” A week after he was charged, Bryant gave a tearful press conference where he confessed to cheating on his wife Vanessa, but vehemently denied the assault allegation. What happened next was all too predictable for its time. Jeremy Gordon recounted what was happening in both the courthouse and in the court of public opinion:

Over the next year and a half, his lawyers attacked the accuser’s credibility by pointing out she’d had sex with another man in the week before the alleged assault, that she’d attempted suicide in the past, and that she had been initially excited to meet Kobe. (Her identity was also leaked.) Predictably, NBA fans took his side. I — and almost every other casual basketball observer from that era — can remember multiple conversations about whether Kobe had really done it, most of which concluded that he had not. (A popular line of logic: ‘Why would someone as famous as Kobe Bryant need to rape someone?’)

In 2004, the assault case was dropped by prosecutors after the accuser decided not to testify at the trial. Following the dismissal of criminal charges, Bryant made the following statement:

Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.

While Gordon read this as Bryant’s “literally admitting” his sexual assault, Ashley Reese in her “How to Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy” saw it differently. To her:

This came off as a non-apology. Sure, he acknowledged how she felt, but it still read as if her interpretation of the night diverted from reality—namely, his experience. But over 15 years later, the allegations are just a blip in Bryant’s legacy.

While they interpreted Bryant’s statement differently, both Gordon and Reese agree that everything seemed to shake out in Bryant’s favor at the time and both find it unacceptable to treat it “as little more than an aside” in his story now. When Bryant was killed in that helicopter crash, Gordon lamented the two divides that seemed inevitable on social media, between:

those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done.

Gordon went on to describe the “acceptable” trade-off for too many people this way: “what’s one maybe-rape measured against 81 points in a game and five championships? What’s the private pain of one anonymous person against the public joy of millions?”

Ashley Reese argues that the consequences extend beyond these false equivalents, recounting the experience of Felicia Sonmez, a journalist at The Washington Post, a few weeks ago.

After Bryant’s death, Sonmez posted to social media a link to a 2016 Daily Beast story titled, “Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.” For doing so and triggering a thundering backlash across the internet, she was subsequently suspended by the Post. The newspaper’s argument was, essentially, that her doing so was poor timing while people were still coming to terms with their grief.

In an argument that says a great deal about our inability to hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads at one time and our rush to black-or-white judgments, Reese wrote:

People who work at news outlets are going through these same emotions, but they have a responsibility to tell the truth. It can be hard to tell the truth sometimes—especially when it diverts from the legacy we want from a celebrity; especially one who died tragically and young, one who a city revered, one who his daughters loved and who he loved in return, one who fellow athletes looked up to. But someone has to do it, and while it should be done with care, it must be done. The fact that it cannot be done without death threats as a result speaks volumes, but none louder than when a publication that prides itself on defending the truth acts complicit in that violence.

When our public storyteller’s tell an incomplete story about a hero, they effectively reduce his greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place.

Did Kobe Bryant’s full story matter to him and to those who lived (and will continue to live) in the arms of his legacy?

The strength of Bryant’s legacy depends on what you end up believing about him, but one set of beliefs risks losing the almost Greek sense of tragedy in it.

In his Esquire farewell Charles P. Pierce talks about “the terrible irony that he died in a fall from the sky,” because (I think) Bryant’s death speaks to both the lightness of his air and the pull of his gravity. Every mythic figure like him is caught in between, inviting us to look, to never stop looking and to judge him on how he met or failed to meet his internal conflicts head-on. But those judgments are never easy. According to Pierce:

There was no way to work that night in the Colorado hotel into the biography that unspooled thereafter and came to such a sudden end on Sunday. In Massachusetts, for decades, political writers wrestled with where to place Chappaquiddick into the saga of Ted Kennedy, and too many of them gave up and erased the event and Mary Jo Kopechne. But it is 2020 now, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Harvey Weinstein is in a New York courtroom, and erasing a female victim is no longer a viable moral and ethical strategy [if it ever was]. Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.

I don’t think Bryant corrected his faults with the stories he’d already told or in a sacrificial fall from the sky. But I do believe he was still seeking redemption through his stories, bringing the obsessive introspection–that only someone like him could muster–to working through his torments and relieving his soul.

My intuition a few weeks ago was to believe in the earnestness of that quest and the more I discover about him, the more I believe that Kobe Bryant would have attempted to reconcile his demons and angels for his benefit and for ours for as long as he walked among us.

The real tragedy is that he won’t be here to keep trying to tell that story. Elemental struggles like his belong to all of us, whether we grapple with our own versions of them or not.

This post was adapted from my February 23, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Technology is Changing Us

February 4, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we change our routines in a fundamental way—either because we need that change or the interruption is foisted upon us—we sometimes experience our world differently when we return.

Glimpses of those differences are possible after vacations, but they usually need to be long enough and far enough away. These differences in perspective also need to become realizations: our conscious efforts “to capture” what our time away “was really about” and consider its impacts “on what we do next.” At this point, the contrast between before and after might be bold enough to change our outlook going forward—like eat more pasta or dance everyday—but these realizations seldom change the basics about our living, our working or how we think about them. They’re more like souvenirs.

Clearer and longer breaks between departure and return generally have a greater impact because there’s more time to ponder the differences between this new place and the one we left behind. When we return to where we started, we are able to compare how it seemed before with how it seems to us now in light of the new perspectives that we’ve gained. As a result of these realizations, we sometimes do change our basic routines or broaden our rationales for doing them.

Insights about what-came-before, what-came-next and now-that-you’re-back can be even more profound if your physical or mental abilities changed during this interval. For example, you needed a new environment because you were injured in some way or found yourself facing an unfamiliar limitation. Only after time-away were you healed enough to return to the world you had left behind. Your judgments can be more nuanced when the changes to your body or spirit have also sharpened your awareness of where you’ve been and where you find yourself now.

Insights about before, next and now might be sharper still if changes in your perceptual abilities were behind your initial departure. If, say, you’d been partially blinded and had to rely on the heightened senses that remained to “map” the new environment where you retreated and the old one that you returned to “with new eyes.”

Finally, your insights might be at their sharpest and most valuable if the world you left had also changed in some fundamental way in the months or years before your return. The heightened awareness that you gained while away would be encountering this new topography for the first time. It is this final vantage point that Howard Axelrod brings to his new book, The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age.

Axelrod’s short story is that he was accidentally blinded in one eye during a college basketball game, took the next 5 years to graduate and recover physically, and spent the two years that followed living off the grid and reorienting himself with his natural environment in the woods of northeastern Vermont. After his time away, he began a teaching career at two urban universities.

Between his partial loss of sight and his return to civilization, smartphones had not only become ubiquitous, but in startling contrast to his back-woods life, these “stars in our pockets” seemed to be changing “how we navigated the world” right in front of him. It was an insight that might not have been possible if the contrasts between the world he’d departed, the one he retreated to and the one he re-entered had been less stark, or the realizations that he took from his experiences had been less acute.

In the “cognitive environment” of northern Vermont, Axelrod deepened his sense perceptions, made lucky discoveries as he wandered in the outdoors, and cultivated a sense of curiosity and patience that had been commonplace for much of human history. He learned to pay attention to the weather, the seasonal changes, the time of day, the life of the forest around him, and realized that doing so reinforced a particular kind of “mental map” that enabled his understanding of the world and how he could find his way through it. When Axelrod returned to urban life, he realized that the smartphones people were now holding as they walked down the street or sat across from one another at lunch were changing how almost everyone—including him—understood and experienced the world. In other words, the mental map that a smartphone enables is fundamentally different from the mental map he’d been using to navigate during his time off the grid.

The message in Axelrod’s book is not that one map is better than the other. His writing is more “meditation” (as he calls it) than argument or indictment. Instead, he wants to highlight some of the complications that can arise when you alternate between how humans have always navigated their lives and work and the new ways of doing so that mediating devices like our smartphones have enabled. In a recent interview and from postings on his website, Axelrod wants to convey what happens when adapting to a new environment means “losing traits that you valued” in your first one.

Just as we’re losing diversity of plant and animal species due to the environmental crisis, so too are we losing the diversity and range of our minds due to changes in our cognitive environment.

Several of these losses are worth our noticing with him. For example,:

–Tech tools may replace natural aptitudes and weaken the memories that they depend upon. Axelrod suggests that relying on GPS to navigate undermines not only the serendipity that often comes “when you’re finding your own way,” but also your reliance on innate navigational memories so that you don’t get lost. Axelrod says:

Our memory is tied inextricably to place. In our brains, the memory center, the hippocampus, is the same center for cognitive mapping — figuring out the route you’re going to take. If we’re no longer using our brains to navigate [and] coming up with these cognitive maps, studies show that we start to have problems with other kinds of memory.

–External prompts change our attention spans. As we grow more accustomed to on-line suggestions before taking the next step, autonomous actions—including immersing yourself in an activity and entering into what psychologists call productive “flow states”—become more difficult.

What [American philosopher William] James [once] said is that an attention span is made of curiosity. It’s the ability to ask subtly different questions. Whether you’re talking about intellectual attention, or sensorial attention, if you’re looking at a tree or watching a bird. Are you asking subtly different questions? Can you ask a question about one facet and then another? It feels like you’re paying attention steadily, but you’re really paying attention to a lot of different things, driven by your curiosity.
Online, there’s always something prompting your attention. It’s like a pseudo-curiosity. It comes in and will give you the next thing to purchase, the next article to read, the next video clip to watch. You don’t have to ask the next question — it’s provided for you. Your attention span will shorten because you don’t need to ask those questions, you don’t need to drive your own attention.

–Rapid-fire “likes” on-line also requires much less involvement from us than empathy requires off-line. Axelrod notes how disorienting it can be as we shuttle between our tech-enabled environments and the rest of our lives and work, where we often need to come to what he describes as “slower” understandings of one another:

[W]hen you’re on social media, part of what’s being called for is attention that can shift really rapidly from one post to another post. And also what’s being called for is a kind of judgment: Do you like this? Do you love this? Do you retweet this? Whereas in real life, what’s called for is a slower attention, where you’re able to listen, be patient while the person is pausing, thinking, not quite sure what they’re saying. And also what’s called for is to defer judgment, or not judge at all. To have empathy. Those are very different traits, depending on which environment you’re in.

–It is hard to reconcile or internalize the different, competing ways that we use to navigate our on-line and off-line realities. Moreover, the world we experience behind the screen can become a substitute for (or even replace) the frameworks that come from navigating in the off-line world. What we risk losing, says Axelrod, are:

our connection to something larger than ourselves, our sense of perspective, our sense of what came before us or what will come after, our sense of being a part of the natural world — that doesn’t really show up anywhere on the maps on our phones.

As we adapt to a virtual world, we’re often disoriented because its cognitive maps are so different and “we’re effectively living in two places at once.” But our adaptations change how our minds work too. In what Axelrod calls “neural Darwinism,” a kind of “natural selection” also happens “on both sides of your eyes” as we adapt to living and working through our screens. “[C]ertain populations of neurons get selected and their connections grow stronger, while others go the way of the dodo bird.” In other words, the faculties that we exercise on-line grow stronger, while those from the off-line world that we rely upon less frequently weaken from disuse.

These losses are tangible: Remembering how to navigate the world without on-line short-cuts. The longer attention spans that we need for concentration. The slower attention spans we need for empathy. Perspectives that extend from the past and into the future. Feelings that we are a part of the natural world.

Our smartphones and other virtual companions are changing our capabilities in each of these ways, but like that frog in water coming to a slow boil, too many of us may be lulled into complacency by the warmth of their star-power.

Axelrod returned from the Vermont woods when the rest of us were already caught up in their magic. With the heightened sense of being human that came from his own particular odyssey, he could see more clearly not only what we’d been gaining while he was away but also might be losing as we gradually moved off our old navigational maps and started our pell-mell quest to adapt to very different ones.

The map at the top of this post illustrates how navigation, weather, visibility, air pollution—a dozen different variables—might change in light of the fires that have recently burned through much of the western US. A poor attempt at metaphor (perhaps), but many of the fires on this map also originated in northern California, where many of the technologies behind our smartphones originated.

These “stars in our pockets” with their shortcuts, search engines and diversions are causing us to adapt to the navigational demands of an entirely new environment, where the potential costs of doing so include the loss of deep-seated memory, the ability to make our own choices, and discomfort with the “slow art” of interacting with others. Because we don’t exercise these aptitudes when navigating our new mental maps, we risk losing them as we attempt to navigate the old maps of our parallel, off-line worlds.

In a December post, I shared Tristan Harris’s theory that our brains may simply not be able to handle the challenges posed by these tech-driven interfaces. Harris went on to argue that the overwhelming information they provide also produces a kind of learned helplessness in us that’s not so different from where the frog, coming to a slow boil, finds herself.

The trick, I think, is making a deliberate effort to exercise the human capabilities that enabled us to navigate the world before these awesome devices came along—not letting them atrophy—even if we have to spend some equivalent of Howard Axelrod’s time in the northern Vermont woods to come to that realization.

We may need the sharpness, the clarity, of something like his departure and return to notice that much seems to be going awry before we resolve to do something about it.

This post was adapted from my February 2, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.