Title : Divide and Conquer
link : Divide and Conquer
Divide and Conquer
So picture this: you're a refugee from Africa, you're Muslim, you're female, you're gay, and despite being terrified of dogs you adopt an old and blind dog. Oh, and you happen to be a best-selling author. Such is the beginning of Irshad Manji's new book, Don't Label Me. Here's part of her opening: A rising number of liberal democracies around the world have mega-manipulators at their helm. They wrangle the levers of mass culture, especially social media, to exploit the mistrust that already exists among people. Mistrust abounds largely because we the people have been manipulating one another, permitting out leaders to push the bar of integrity even lower. Through technology designed to meet our greed for speed, the mistrust is jacked up to emergency levels. Like the teams in a sudden-death playoff, we take refuge in our respective colors...We reolve to vanquish the other side. We widen the vacuum of public trust, invariably creating the pretext for "strong" dudes to swoop in and restore unity -- or uniformity. This is the vintage game of divide-and-conquer, expedited for our time-pressed lives. The lesson is, people are getting gamed. All of us, regardless of our teams. And our dear leaders won't stop gaming us until we stop gaming each other.Whoa, you say. But this book is actually less about politics and more about compromise and looking inward and the labels we've allowed to form our images of ourselves and others. Those of you in the U.S., just randomly picture the images that come to mind when you hear such basic descriptions as "I'm from the South," or "I'm from Iowa," or "I'm a farmer," or "Have you got any change?" What if someone mentioned that they lived on the "west" side or that they've been renting for years or that they were getting government help? Labels, all. And Manji's book got me once again thinking of how easily we can and do fall into that trap, that "game" of categorizing those around us as if our views had now become closed instead open. And it wasn't only her book, but also this comment of the generational divide as viewed by Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal: I can't get out of my head a recent tweet thread from Srinivas Thiruvadanthai, Director of Research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, about inflation and generational conflict. The gist is that a low inflation world is the ideal one from the perspective of Baby Boomers. Low inflation means their wealth is preserved and their fixed incomes go a long way. A surge in prices, particularly wages, would be a direct hit to their living standards. As such, you see very different attitudes toward government spending and so forth from the Howard Schultzes (CEO of Starbucks) of the world versus the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes (newly elected young Congresswoman). This point was echoed in a recent newsletter from Allison Schrager, who compared the legacy of the original New Deal and the current vision of a Green New Deal. FDR's version left a legacy of Social Security spending (a huge outlay to the elderly), while the GND puts a lot of emphasis on the young: free college, a job guarantee and so forth. Today's left also talks a lot about student loan forgiveness, which fits into the same theme. More inflationary policies obviously hold much more appeal to a generation saddled with significant debt so early in life, and which has relatively few assets. Obviously, in the short term, inflation will tick up and down thanks to various cyclical factors and oil and so on. But in the medium or long term, the general trend may change as one side of the battle dies out, and the other gains generational clout.
That was me, now lumped into the "older" generation with my views growing more and more calcified, a cry of "shields up" as if tightly gripping to preserve those bits of gold trinkets that the outer world has somehow convinced me are quite valuable, the gold vs. the old. I have become my parents, worried about getting too deep in debt (both personally and for our country as well) and attempting to pass on my "practical advice" to those younger. A comedian made the point in a much better way, watching his daughter listen to a song in the car, click her phone and smile, to which he asked if she had just downloaded the song (yes, she said). You have no idea how easy you have it, he told her; in my day you had to wait for the end of the song on the radio and hope, yes hope, that the DJ would tell you the title and the group because there was no "instant" information on who was playing or what was the name of the song, and of course the DJ generally would never tell you the last song and instead jump right into some ad for the local car dealer and blah, blah, blah their way onto the next batch of mindless chatter before playing another song, all of which meant that you had to drive down to the "record store" and go to the desk and ask the guy if he had the album to which the guy would shrug his shoulders and ask you to hum the song, which you would quietly, very quietly, do because there was a line behind you and even though you knew that the clerk knew the song, he would pretend that he didn't and make you keep humming more and more of the song which later in life would turn out to be by some slush group that you'd rather now forget...but at the time it seemed so important; you just had to have that song. But to his daughter, it was all nonsense because for her it was all instant; what the heck was her dad talking about? And there you go...today's politics wrapped up in a nutshell.
We cast labels onto others almost without knowing it, the news and our shiny or dented cars and where and what we eat and where we live almost broadcasting our separation and cocooning. Look at me, well not really we think, but yes, look at me and how far I've come (or not come) and isn't life grand and wonderful and well, how distant the rest of the world seems even if this globalization thing that everyone mentions is telling me that the world is getting smaller and smaller. Venezuela? Yemen? Palestine? Is that stuff really happening? Really? Oops, there's the oven dinging, telling me that dinner is ready. Hey honey, what's on Netflix tonight? It's easy, isn't it, to disappear since let's face it, we have problems of our own. True enough, and sometimes it takes humor to pop us out of our bubbles. Columnist Ian Bremmer put his spin on today's political leaders, printing what he feels they might really want to say. Here's his take on British Prime Minister Theresa May and her prediction for the year: This year, I will keep calm and carry on...Oh, who am I kidding? I resolve to take one more shot at this Brexit nonsense and, if it doesn't work, pass this utterly thankless job to Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn and see how they like it, thank you very much. Or his take on German Chancellor Angela Merkel: I resolve to hide my increasingly obvious glee at the reality that after 2021, I won't be responsible for solving Europe's problems and healing all those self-inflicted wounds anymore. Mutti out! And his final glimpse of Russian President Vladimir Putin: I will guarantee Ukraine's elections in March are an event to remember, and promise to use all my discipline and inner strength to avoid laughing at what comes next in the United States, and to find new ways to annoy Washington that are so inventive I surprise even myself.
Every picture tells a story, it's said; and so should we look at the people and animals around us and do so openly. Each of us is much more dimensional that our views. We may love or hate one thing but perhaps beyond that we are the most loving parent or the first person to respond to that person in need. This came to mind when, of all things, the London Review of Books ran a Valentine's Day "personals" competition. Wait, the LRB has personal ads, those "looking for love" ads that today's younger generation have likely never heard of, much less would consider reading (what...read something actually printed on paper??). Okay, there I go exposing my biased stereotypes again; see how easy it is. But it turns out that such ads run in The New York Review of Books as well...and why not? If you were a devoted archeologist focused on your work but maybe just a tiny bit lonely, and somehow that issue of Archeology Today has a small personal ad section, well, wouldn't meeting someone with your OCD interests both broaden your mind as well as narrow your efforts to go explore other possibilities? And what surprised me in reading not only some of the winners of LRB but later some of the other entries in NYR, was that the ads could care less about this so-labeled generation gap. Some ads were from people in their 30s and some were from people in the 70s; and many if not most were highly creative (far more so than the vacation rental ads, which proved about as exciting as real estate listings, which they were). So I'll end this discourse (and apologies but my, I do feel so much better) with just a few of the very personal (and gutsy, in my view) ads...
Bluestocking 60 seeks man. Must know his Gueplhs from his Ghilbellines (what??..turns out Wikipedia says that the feud was fueled by the Great Interregum, so there, as if that explains anything)…--Manic pixie dream geezer seeks a steady hand on the tiller (not a euphemism for money). He should have a really, really big vocabulary, second only to a kind heart. Long term instability is common now (check the statistics) so why not hook up with an overgrown waif with no future? I'm a lot of fun after the third drink...--Roller-blader looking to find a woman to rock out with. Nothing fake about this tan...--Error theorist looking for collaborator to help figure out what's important. Or just to have a drink...--Re-frocked model, charter NYR subscriber, seeks lively intelligence to share experiences of design, 2 pounds of mussels, and the music of Morten Lauridsen…--Tell me a story, my king. I will tell you a thousand. Woman in New York who obviously has imagination...--Brains, beauty & wealth. Is one of these a lie?...--Looking for an insomniac arts-lover with a plush pillow. I don't know what I am doing but I am doing it all night long...--A mediocre man with lines of genius is looking for a muse...--L.Cohen is dead so I'm free. Femme, Irish, just gone 63. Cool, classy and svelte, my ice just might melt for gentlemen callers like thee...--Female 72 with minimal rips and tears. You: Male, mostly intact with a nice shine...--Crescent City blonde, but don't call me Blanche. 30, thin, modern belle seeks intellectually attractive male for jazz, films, literature and long, rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour...--My son told me that certain butterflies drink the tears of turtles. It was a metaphor for dating in Maine. Post-masculine straight male, 50. Midwestern nice. Yes to banter, yoga in non-yoga clothes, hapless hope...--T-shirt and jeans type o'gal, 74, seeks healthy self-supporting man for companionship and affection...--Me: Old, Bold, Smart, Tart, Funny, Honey. You: no cigs, no pigs, no jocks, no crocks...--"For your age, the heyday in the blood is tame. It's humble, and waits upon the judgement." Let's defy Shakespeare. All the usual "A" attributes reliably in place.
How's that for a variety pack? In the dark of night or the light of morning, these people dug up the courage to invent and to try and re-invent their lives. But more so it gives a perspective of what may rest beneath each of us. Whatever our views or our impressions, there is more, much more to each of us. So why would wouldn't that be true of every other person or animal that we meet? As to that deficit, my generation (as Barron's recently termed us, "graybeards") is haunted by then co-President Dick Cheney telling Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in 2002, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Our country is now running an annual deficit of $1 trillion (nearly 5% of gross domestic product) and yet our current expansion is on track to become the longest on record (at 10 years that would be from the 8 years under President Obama and continuing through the 2 years of President Trump). So go figure. Maybe just as with people and generations, there's more to consider before I again lock my views and start adding more labels. Perhaps as with Scheherazade* and her fight for life in telling tales for a thousand nights, we can all become genies of our own minds and declare "open sesame"...and be amazed at what we discover.
*From the classic One Thousand and One Nights, or as is more commonly known, Arabian Nights from which we were exposed to Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin's Magic Lamp, among others.
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