Mitt Romney and the Meaning of Life

The stories we like to hear reveal who we want to be. Those stories are most interesting (to me, at least) when they fall short of reality, because that's where we see the full context of forces and circumstances against which we flail and within which we define ourselves. Once again I'm especially enjoying the Republican primaries as an example of that, as the gap widens between the front-page story of a closely fought race and the slow, relentless accumulation of evidence that it will all turn out the way we always knew it would.

     While most headlines after Tuesday's primaries focused on Rick Santorum's victories and Newt Gingrich's declaration that Mitt Romney is "no longer inevitable," this Wall Street Journal article tells the story that matters: as Santorum won Mississippi and Alabama, Romney actually added to his lead in delegates. He now claims 45% of the delegates he needs to win the nomination, with a lot of huge states coming up—Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California—in which he's bound to do well. All Santorum accomplished last night was proving that he, not Newt Gingrich, is this year's leading also-ran, which by Republican tradition makes him the heir apparent for 2016 (place your bets now).

     Something similar, if not as stark in contrast, happened with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008. As the candidates took turns winning primaries, Obama's fifty-state organization quietly harvested delegates from little-watched caucuses and pushed him relentlessly toward a majority. Even in March and April of that year, when Clinton pulled from behind to win Ohio and Texas, then took Pennsylvania by nearly ten points, Obama actually netted more total delegates. Clinton won all the front-page stories as the nomination slipped steadily away.

     We love turning points: for want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, and like that. The idea that there might be one moment when a man might put his hand on the seesaw of history and tip it pleases our desire to believe that we can control our own destinies, that we aren't really already rolling like snowballs down a mountain of circumstances that built up under us before we even stopped to see what was happening. In the case of this year's primaries, the underlying circumstance is that there is a large bloc of Republican voters who prudently, cautiously, and reliably rally around the candidate who is familiar to them as the pragmatic almost-centrist who has been widely declared electable in a national race. It isn't a majority, but it's large enough that when the scary ideologues and self-financed oddballs carve up the rest of the vote—which they always will—that bloc will consistently deliver the most delegates. Mitt Romney was already in that position before the first debate.

     Of course we all have some power over our destinies; quite a bit, really, over what part of the mountain we roll down and what paths we take between rocks and whether we land hard or soft. But mostly, living in this big world is about learning to roll. For nearly as inevitable as Romney's victory in the primaries is his defeat in November. Allan Lichtman, with his Keys to the White House, once again plays the great spoiler of stories ("Rosebud's the name of his sled, by the way") by showing us how the circumstances have already piled high in favor of Obama's reelection. George F. Will has even announced to his fellow Republicans that they may as well give up on the White House and focus on taking the Senate. The Gallup Poll will bounce and shimmy its way onto the front pages many times, but the snowball is rolling.

     I will forget that many times in the next seven and a half months, however. I will forget it almost willfully, because I will want to believe that Obama's chances hang by a thread, that the fate of our nation may turn on a single debate or a deadly gaffe. I will let my alternating panic and soaring confidence drive me in my door-knocking and phone-banking, because I will believe that that one voter whose mind I change may be the nail in the horseshoe. Such stories may not reveal the truth of how life works. But they keep us connected to it.

The Narcissist Way

Continuing The Undressing of America: the coming of age of Bernard "Barney" McFadden. I'm playing here with some quasi-fictional techniques here, still developing the book's voice. I'm also seizing the excuse to post a couple of paintings by Charles Burchfield, whom I'm crazy about.

At the age of twelve, Barney began to grow. Not so much in height—he’d stop at five foot six for the rest of his life—but his shoulders broadened and his torso thickened and he discovered that he could add still more muscular power to what he had. His body was filled with new energies, too. There were stirrings of interest in girls and sex, although those still occupied only a corner of his thoughts, and the world in which he grew up hardly cultivated them. Mostly he became more restless, argumentative, and contrary. He began to question Jenkins’s commands and mock church sermons out loud. Jenkins and his wife became more convinced than ever that Barney was trouble, and sought to break him like a horse.

       In that struggle, soon after he turned thirteen, Barney found his God.

       Riding with the family back from church one Sunday, he asked Jenkins for money he felt was owed him. Jenkins refused. Barney accused him of not paying him what he was supposed to. Jenkins told him that to speak so on Sunday was blasphemous. Had he not heard the sermon just an hour before about the virtue of poverty and the evil of money?

       “I guess you know all about the evil of money!” Barney shouted. “That must be why you’re the cheapest son of a bitch in the county!”

       Jenkins’s wife blanched. Jenkins said he hoped God would strike him right there and then.

       “I’ll believe your God can strike somebody down when I damn well see it happen,” Barney said.

       Instantly, Jenkins tossed the buckboard reins to his wife and went for his whip. Barney vaulted from the wagon, paused to glare blackly back and Jenkins, and ran. He ran not in fear of the whip, he would insist later, but in fear what he might do to Jenkins in his rage. Off the road and down a slope he ran. Through a stone-littered field, vaulting over a neighbor’s fence, across a pasture pocked with gopher holes, down into a hollow at the bottom of a rise. The ground softened under his feet. Water filled his shoes. He plunged into a bog, its shallow water and soft vegetation warm in the afternoon sun.

       As the muck and water reached his knees he thought he should turn back, but he didn’t want to. He liked the warm wetness flowing over his skin, softening the hard, dirty denim of his trousers. He slogged deeper toward the center of the bog, not thinking about how he would get back out, how deep or insistent the mud at the bottom might be, wanting only to feel the water and mud surging up along his thighs. Deeper in, the water grew cooler, cold jets thrilling his inner thighs and groin. The thrill was electric. Energy, he believed, coursed from the earth itself into his limbs. His blood flowed as it never had, a warmth surged from him to mingle with the cool of the bog, the hard, hot swelling in his groin pressed against his trousers with a sweet pain. He had never felt so alive, and that life, he thought, came from the soil and the water and the whole vegetal world beneath his feet.

       Barney stopped with the bog up to his waist. He looked around himself. The sun glistened on the surface of the water. Small gnats lit by the sun zipped like fragments of lightning in and out of view. A cool breeze came from the hills, and Barney’s flesh rose to meet it in a thrill. He looked out across the fields at a world that he felt for the first time might meant him well. In later years he sought a word for what he felt and found the same one Victoria Woodhull had grown up believing was the essence of life: magnetism. A magnetic god of nature, health, and sexual energy, the earth’s “natural vitality,” ready to course through a man’s body like electricity through a wire. In that moment, in the bog, he had no words for it and no need of words.

       Eventually Barney slogged his way to dry land and hiked back to the Jenkins farm. The muck and water soaking his clothes grew cold, and his muscles tightened in anticipation of trouble with the farmer and his wife, but the memory of ecstasy sustained him. He believed he could overcome anything now. As it turned out, Jenkins contented himself with a few sharp words, a promise not to pay him any cash for a month, and a prediction that a vengeful Lord would punish his pride one day. He may have realized that Barney was no longer a boy to be physically confronted, and perhaps assumed that he would be grateful to be allowed back into the family with no severe punishment.

       He was mistaken. Barney stayed a few more weeks, doing his work in silence, and then he packed a bag and left. Early one morning without a word he finished his breakfast and walked out the door and down the path to the road. He turned west, away from the sun and toward St. Louis. He had no idea what he would do on his own in the city, but he knew he need never again serve anyone else, and he believed that he was capable, somehow, of wresting wealth and respect from the world. How, he had no idea, but he believed in his own unassailable wisdom and infinite possibility. 

       At thirteen, Barney McFadden had found a third way out of the Ozarks, a way that was not the heaven of a cruel church or the hell of the bottle. He had found narcissism.

To be continued...

We know it's just a story, but still...

The basic story for the Republican primaries seems to have agreed upon by nearly every commercial news source: Mitt Romney remains the front runner but only by a slim margin, as he fails to deliver the major victory that would "seal the deal." On Super Tuesday we heard that Romney's razor-thin victory in Ohio kept his rivals at bay but left him still vulnerable. There are horse race analogies ("by a nose") and boxing analogies ("no knock-out") and every other narrative device that presents the primaries as a series of close-fought battles, any one of which might prove to be a turning point, for a prize that might still be snatched from the favorite's grasp.

     That makes for good drama, but the reality is this: the winner will be the guy with the most delegates, and there Romney is so far ahead as to be nearly unassailable. Super Tuesday was an overwhelming victory for him as he picked up 213 delegates to Santorum's 84, leaving him with a total (according to the AP) of 422 to his nearest rival's 181. That's well over half of the 761 delegates allocated so far, which means that if Romney keeps plugging along as he is—or not even as well as he is—he'll still easily capture the majority he needs to win the nomination. By Fox News's estimate, Romney can win by taking only 37% of remaining delegates, while Santorum needs 63%.

     One aspect of the standard story is that Romney still has to "make his case" to the party's leaders with more impressive showings. It's true that in a close race, the votes of those leaders—all uncommitted delegates—might tip the balance. But it's also true that the vast majority of them have already made clear that they see Romney as the only viable choice for the general election. There is no case for him to make. Unless the Romney campaign somehow collapses completely (which it won't), the race is already over. The front runner is uncatchable.

     But we don't want that story, because we're human. We like our drama and our suspense, and we like to experience long, tedious historical processes as a series of battles and crystalline moments. We want to think that one's man blunder or another's heroic overachievement might yet turn the tide that we've seen rising all along. Which, I suppose, is why, in The Undressing of America, I'm telling the story of our transition from a culture of concealment and censorship to a culture of exposure largely in the form of a battle between a pair of willful, truculent bigger-than-life men, Anthony Comstock and Bernarr Macfadden. The great economic, technological, social, and intellectual currents that carried us inevitably along that journey are well worth explicating, and they're the bedrock of the story. But what holds my attention (and will hold yours, I hope) is the small arena of combat through which those currents are turned into human drama.

Why I Write...Today

Every few days, especially when the deadlines come faster than the words, I ask myself why in the hell I ever decided to write for a living. A rhetorical question, of course; except that I recently made the mistake of asking it in front of my therapist, who immediately responded, “Well...why did you?”

      Any simple answer seemed inadequate. That’s the thing about a long career: what drove you to pick it up in the first place may be entirely irrelevant to what keeps you doing it now. A great deal of disenchantment can grow in that gap, especially if it’s unacknowledged. I have to ask myself not just why I made that decision but why I keep making it over and over again, every day that I don’t decide to do something else.

      It was fear that got me started. When I was fourteen my mom pulled me out of school, inspired by one of her alcoholic delusions; I was ashamed to talk to my friends, and pretty soon they forgot about me, leaving me with no companions but my dog and my fantasies. Right before I turned sixteen it dawned on me that sooner or later I'd have to enter the adult world and make my own living, an idea I found horrifying. What did I know how to do but read and make up stories? So I made what I can now pass off as a daring decision but was in fact the only safe one I could think of: I was going to make my living as a writer of fiction.
      Within a few months I was back in school, although not the same school I'd left. I wanted to make friends, but I felt like such a freak that I needed something to hide behind. My new aspirations were perfect for that. To my peers I became that weird kid who was always writing, which was better than being just that weird kid. To my English teachers I was that weird kid who deserved special attention. I was very productive for my age, mostly because I was afraid to stop.

     Then things started to get better: my writing intrigued a cute and only slightly nerdy girl, who became my first girlfriend, and eventually my wife; then it led me to take a job at a used bookstore where wannabe writers were not only approved of but even given a sort of dusty glamor. Another guy at the store, Will Jacobs, talked me into collaborating with him for the hell of it, and we started reading the results to our friends. Pretty soon we were hosting parties just to give readings. Our humorous stuff went over best—I think that’s where my giddy new love of existence came through loudest. By my early twenties, writing had become my greatest source of joy.
       Fortune just kept turning her wheel in my favor. Will and I landed an agent and sold a humor book. It sold well and got us interviews and reviews all over the country. The editor of the National Lampoon called and asked us to write for him. I even quit my day job. Joy and love were rewarded.
      The trouble with Fortune is that she never knows when to stop the goddamn turning. Our second book tanked. We couldn't sell the third. We broke with our agent and couldn't get another one. The Lampoon burned us out. I couldn't even get my old day job back. Writing had become all about frustration and anxiety; but it was also the only way I could imagine to get back to the joy.

    The way back turned out to be, of all things, one of my favorite old escape routes from adolescence: I started writing comic books, and apparently I was pretty good at it. Suddenly writing meant flights to New York for editorial meetings, collaborations with great cartoonists, fans lining up at comic conventions, a strangely sweet power over the fates of my childhood heroes. My comics attracted attention in Hollywood, so now writing also meant flights to L.A. for development meetings, agents buying me breakfast, and more money than I’d ever expected to make. I don’t know if that was quite joy, but it felt good.
       Money's sneaky, though: it wants you to spend it. My wife and I bought a house, she quit work for the first five years of our son's life, then we put him in a private school. When the work slowed a bit, I was hooked like a trout; the writing had to be mainly about money. But I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't write just for money.
       I wish I could claim that at as an ethical stance, but no. I just didn't know how to write well when I didn't care about the work. So the work started to suck, and people stopped hiring me, and finally the answer to "why do I write?" became "desperation." I went kind of crazy with it, actually. I took on writing jobs I felt contempt for. I tried to make up for writing bad things by writing worse things. I discovered old child-of-alcoholic patterns I didn’t know were there. My marriage hit the rocks and so did a lot else.

       Some of us are slow learners: I was in my early forties when I finally realized that the only way to write something good was to write something I believed in. What I believed in most was my son. His mom was now working full time, and for a while not living with me, so I did a lot of hands-on parenting. Watching him deal with the struggles of kindergarten, thinking about my own childhood, I decided I had to write a book about fantasy, growing up, and symbolic conflict. 
      That book came out under the name Killing Monsters, and soon I was giving interviews, engaging in public debates, and writing articles to say things I believed about children and imagination. For the first time, I could answer “why do I write?” with “to say something that matters.”
      I decided to reorganize my life around that answer. The new work wasn't paying all the bills yet, so I kept the least demanding just-for-money work and refinanced the house to pull money out of my equity (there was a time you could do such things). I joined the San Francisco Writers Grotto to build a professional network. I wrote another book I believed in and sold the proposal for a third. I thought that by the age of fifty I might be making all this work.
      Then my son got sick. He’d been suffering from periodic migraines since second grade, but in sixth grade they turned chronic and disabling. He had a few respites over the next couple of years, but in high school the migraines came down like an avalanche, sweeping his whole life away. 
      I let them sweep a lot of me away, too. Yes, there were other issues: marriage again, money as ever, having to rethink the book after someone else published one too much like my original idea. But it was the parenting that carried me over the edge. If I wasn’t trying to help my son get to school or catch up on his work, if I wasn't talking to neurologists and homeopaths and psychologists, then I was worrying obsessively about everything I wasn’t doing. “Why do I write?” became “why can’t I write?” And that, as we all know, becomes a spiral in itself.

       Which is when I learned how much I need other people. A little band of us at the Grotto confessed our productivity issues to each other in a group we called Ass-Kickers Anonymous. I also went to real 12-step meetings for "compulsive underearners." I lined up friends to offer me incentives or threaten me with punishments for getting my work done or not. I started another book with my old friend Will Jacobs to remind myself that writing can be more play than work. I even let another Grotto member talk me into teaching classes, where I was reminded how much writing means to people who are still trying to master it.
       Bit by bit, with a lot of help, I started turning the spiral the other direction. I began to get rough paragraphs down, then rough chapters. Ideas that had once lain strewn across the chaos of my brain began to come together, and every once in a while I'd discover that a graceful sentence had somehow slipped through. Still, though, if you’d asked me why I wrote, the best answer I could have come up with was just that not writing was too frightening an option to contemplate.

      Then, this past fall, near the end of a long, hard draft of the new book, I participated in the Grotto’s group reading at San Francisco’s annual literary block party, LitCrawl. I can’t quite tell you why, but I decided to read a piece from The Beaver Papers, the humor book Will and I wrote thirty years ago that became my first published work. Reading it gave me a sense of the totality of my career, the most joyful times and the most grueling.
      Later, the Grotto gang came together at the LitCrawl after-party. At first I drifted toward a conversational clump, but I kept feeling pulled toward the dance floor. Holly Jones saw me wavering and pulled me out onto the floor. Soon a bunch of us who’d read that night were out there, celebrating our rare moment of glamor and blowing off our tension. We didn’t say a word about writing; we sang crappy pop lyrics and whooped for each other’s more ridiculous moves. But that night I had no questions about why I wrote.
     Like I say, that’s the thing about a long career. I chose writing in the first place so I could avoid other people, but I keep doing it now so I can connect with them. Tomorrow I may finally wake up and realize I have no reason to keep choosing this job. But just for today, I know why I’m here.