But one thing I can say with confidence is that I don’t regret refusing to play the game.[i] I have been rejected from more things than I can count, and I am painfully aware of each and every one. Princeton: thin envelope. Rhodes: no dice. These two things are probably related. Grades do matter. And you should write application essays keeping in mind what the judges want to hear. Yet there’s something more to life than success through these narrowly defined metrics.

That thing, of course, is called actually living. Life is a beautiful, magical, and–much as we young people hate to admit it–a transitory thing.  So when I hear a freshman stressing about his summer internship plans or some sophomores trading tips about the LSAT, I die a little inside. I desperately want to tell them, loudly and with my fist clenched around their shirt: “You’re freaking 18, 19 years old. Go bond with friends over a thirty rack of natty light. Go read a great book that will shatter your worldview. Go do something, anything, except wallow in such self-imposed misery.” The point is not so much that they need to get a life, but that they have already chosen not to live one.

I can’t say I blame them for their choice; it’s eminently understandable. The presence of the meritocracy is all around us. In many ways, it is the defining aspect of our generation and of Claremont McKenna. That’s not a bad thing, but it, like anything, does have consequences. The characteristics that define CMC affect who we are as CMCers. There are clear barriers to get in here, and there are objective ways to measure how far we’ve come when we get out. Grades. Test scores. Internships. These are the symbols through which we adjudicate success in our overachiever environment.

Those measurements, however, are just one set of lines that run through the totality of life. They do not reflect the quality of our friendships, the depth of our integrity, or the sincereness of our devotion to family, God, or country; they measure everything, in short, except that which makes life meaningful. And they tell us everything about ourselves except that which will make us fulfilled to be who we are.

Acknowledging the lack of perspective I have with my brief, fake-world life, I think I’ve found my passion. I love California more than any one person should, and man is it fulfilling. So with a heap of hesitation and a dash of self-awareness, I’d like to give you some advice:

Don’t be merely a function of social exigencies.

Don’t forget to ask the big questions.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Never be entirely consumed by what people consider “practical.”[ii]

Never let people tell you to stop dreaming.

Those are the things that have helped me to start figuring myself out–to parse away the layers of norms, expectations, and lies we tell ourselves to figure what we really want. Finding that–the thing that keeps you awake night after night and for which you are willing, even happy, to work for hours on end, day after day–is a big part of what makes life worth living. Some of you may disagree,[iii] but I will say this: try asking yourself what you really, truly, deeply want out of life.  I’m certain you won’t regret it.

[ii] Please don’t take that as an invocation to become a dirty Pitzer hippie. (And for goodness sake don’t take that as anything but a playful poke at our beloved neighbor to the North.) 

[iii] Here I’m envisioning some disgusting happiness-monger saying something along the lines of “Ignorance is bliss” or invoking some sort of perpetual sensory pleasure machine. But I’m not willing to accept an existence analogous to highly evolved slime. Purpose, meaning, fulfillment, all flowing from the distinctively human capacity of cognition–those are things that are worth talking about.

Beyond satisfying the typical requirements of an elite liberal arts college, CMC deserves a president who thoroughly appreciates and is committed to what makes it special: its unique brand of liberal arts education and the intimate, nurturing atmosphere that it affords.  Crucially, this requires professors and administrators to interact with students at more than a formal level. Yet I don’t know anyone who thinks Pam Gann knows their name, let alone them as a person. Maybe it’s different for the ASCMC crowd or the hyperactive on campus, but it seems that us mere mortals don’t register on her radar.

As a part of being on the football team, I’ve been forced able to go to the IRanWithGann event the past three years at CMC.[i] Besides getting an awesome selection of free t-shirts, this has also illuminated Gann’s relationship with the student body. First of all, this is one of the few times each year that I see her walking around on campus—let alone talk to students. More damningly, at the 5K, her conversations with students always seem to be of the “What’s your name/major?” variety. You’d think at some point she’d run into a student whose name she already knew or whose major she actually remembered. It’s hard to escape the feeling that she’s there to check a box (“See Board of Trustees! I told you I care about the student body!”) rather than have a genuine interaction with students.  Perhaps, though, this is just me being biased.

I suppose that could be forgiven. Over the past four years, my love for CMC has outgrown my demands for what it does for me. But more disappointing, I don’t see that same love of CMC, that wholehearted embrace of what makes the school special, in Pam Gann.  It may sound corny, but when she talks about the school, I don’t see a twinkle in her eye. Gann speaks highly about CMC, but her comments often feel like they would fit any elite liberal arts college. She praises our small classes sizes, our great professors, our selectivity, but always seems to miss the part about things that make CMC special.

In her first convocation, Pam talked about the how CMC fits into the broader higher education landscape and the importance of branding in “outrunning” the competition. This would have been a perfect place to talk about CMC’s unique attributes. Glaringly, though, she doesn’t even allude to the special character of the school. The implication is that we’re a liberal arts school like any other, struggling to (1) to be within the group of “brand name” colleges and universities; and (2) to compete effectively within this “brand name” group for students, faculty, and resources. The same speech would have worked at Amherst, Williams, or even Pomona.

At this point in the conversation, a voice of reason will often say “Yeah, but at least she’s raised a lot of money.” That is true. But money is not raised in a vacuum, and one person is not responsible for all of an institution’s fundraising success. Furthermore, our alumni population is getting older. It seems reasonable to think that older alumni 1) have more money since they’ve been able to work more years and 2) are more likely to donate money because, to put the matter bluntly, they want to have an impact on something they care about before they die. The steady increase in annual donations in the chart below seems to evidence this story. There is more volatility after Pam becomes president, but there isn’t a marked increase in donations over the trend line.

At a personal level, I don’t have any particular problem with President Gann. She hasn’t done anything outrageous or grossly failed in her duties as president. But CMC is much more than a typical liberal arts college and deserves much more than a typical president. At a dinner honoring Gann for her ten years of service to the College this past December, former CMC president Jack Stark thanked her for what she didn’t do: change the character of the school. But I think CMC deserves better. CMC deserves a president that doesn’t make its students question whether the president cares about them. CMC deserves a President that is firmly committed to keeping CMC a special place.

Pam Gann, simply put, fails those standards. For that dinner honoring Gann, the administration tried to film a series of students being asked questions about Pam Gann’s life and what they thought about her. According to Dean Huang, they had to scrap the project, however, because apparently not enough students said nice things. To me, that’s pretty damning. Out of a school of 1200+ students, we couldn’t cobble together enough pro-Gann students to make a two-minute video. Perhaps, I’m going a bit overboard, though, and you feel that Pam Gann actually does a decent job as president. But shouldn’t CMC, as our government department would say, strive for excellence?

Caption: This graph shows the total amount of alumni giving that went into the operating budget in a given year. It notably excludes large donations that go to things like a new buildings or a new Robert A. Day Master of Finance program. Those large gifts often take multiple years to negotiate and structure and thus are affected differently by factors like the economy, alumni aging, or a new president. The purpose of this graph is not to prove that President Gann fails as a fundraiser. Rather I am merely trying to show that under this basic fundraising metric she does not surpass the trend. Following her inauguration in late 1990s, support from alumni giving has mostly kept with its rising trajectory set by earlier presidents. Thus, deciding whether President Gann is doing an exceptional job fundraising depends on the degree to which she impacted recent large donations. But to answer that, we’d need to look inside Robert Day’s head, which I, unfortunately, do not have the ability to do.

Urban Dictionary defines “hooking up” as everything from making out to intercourse, which in a sexual context, is to say anything.  The word is an empty vessel through which we can share our exploits without sharing them, into which we can pour our shame without confessing.  It allows us to simulate genuine interaction without actually having to go through the ordeal of being completely honest.

But shouldn’t we be honest, if not with each other, the at least with ourselves?  If you can’t deal with saying “I had sex with some rando last night” or “none of your goddamn business,” maybe you shouldn’t be hooking up.  Just a thought.

A more interesting question, though, is to ask what the phrase says about our sex lives generally.  Is it not indicative of a type of interaction that places more emphasis on simulation than reality?  Half the conversations on a typical Saturday night really don’t deserve the name.  Talking is less an actual interplay of ideas than an exchange of signs, decodable only in a carefully calibrated argot—what some call the game.  The words spoken and the sentences they create matter less than what they represent.  “Want to watch a YouTube video in my room?” is not a genuine request but actually a nifty and socially non-threatening way to ask the other person if they want to hook up.[1]

This raises a question: why is so much of how we pursue each other pretense and deceit?  There’s a reason it’s called the game, but why is that so especially true at the 5Cs?   Why do we grind up on each other in dark rooms, searching for a hint of a connection somewhere, somehow, as we drown in a sea of signifiers? I don’t want to moralize—and really I shouldn’t.  I just think maybe we need to take a collective look in the mirror.

I mean, why do so many of us want a normal dating scene?  And yet why is the only ostensible indication of this in articles written behind the safe ramparts of online discourse?  Why is it creepy to ask someone to hang out in your room when you’re both sober and not when you drunkenly stumble into each other at TNC?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I think I know the root of the problem: being a genuine person is hard.  It’s far easier to hope to drunkenly stumble into someone that you like on a Saturday night than ask them on a date.  You don’t actually have to show initiative, just trust to Providence and the will of Andrew Cosentino.  Of course, any missteps you make can easily be blamed on being drunk.  And any emotion you might feel can be safely siphoned into the linguistic black hole “to hook up.”  In short, our sociolingual edifice is more than accommodating.  But there’s value to that harder step.  It’s why Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living” and—I think—why there was such a positive response to Charles’ open letter.  Perhaps all of us—myself included—need to better appreciate how hard it is to forge meaning out of life, and how worthy that struggle truly is.

These quizzes offer a tantalizing prospect: a neat, clean packet of information about ourselves that we can consume at will.  In that way, they allow for the commoditization of introspection, just as Facebook generally allows for the commoditization of friendship.  We can share in a friend’s trip to Sicily by checking out their latest photos and wittily posting comments about them.  But just as Facebook is one of the defining features of our online lives, the ease it confers seems representative of what the Internet and information technology means for our lives more generally.

Instant messaging, both the cellphone and gchat variety, offer us the same ease of living.  You don’t have to go through the hassle of calling a friend or meeting them in person; rather you can im them at your leisure.

Wikipedia similarly makes life easy; it affords us the net sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.  We can stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and drop knowledge from heights only dreamed of by our grandparents.

Or take Twitter, which allows us to broadcast ourselves to the world with even more ease.  Of course, all the wild gesticulations at meaning screamed on its pages seem only to signify peoples’ inability to deal with the unbearable lightness of speaking.

If you feel like actually venturing out into the physical world, don’t worry; there’s Google Maps for that.  You don’t actually have to burden yourself with knowing where you’re going or where you are, simply plug in the address and follow along.

We spend much of our days tooling around on the Internet, living what you might call the tabbed life.  Life is light and carefree: we’re a tab away from Pandacam, a couple clicks from a sick YouTube video, and a quick alt-tab away from that essay you don’t feel like writing.  In this world, why ask the big questions?  Why question so deeply or think so hard that it hurts, that it shakes your foundational assumptions about the world?  That seems hard.  Besides, there’s Wikipedia for that.

Easily lost, though, in this sea of easy living, is the fact that life is more than mere preference satisfaction.  Life should be heavy, laden with the weight of experience and meaning.  Friendship shouldn’t have to be streamlined by a newsfeed.  A meaningful friendship implies that you’re willing to take the good with the bad, that the desire for shared experience outweighs any immediate difficulty.[ii] Similarly knowledge about a road or things in general is not only important insofar as it is useful; there is value in a familiarity with existence and there is virtue in acquiring it.  The associative connections that familiarity allows, besides nurturing analytical ability, fosters relational associations between things—that is to say meaning.  It’s hard to have meaningful relationships; it’s hard to say worthwhile things; and technology is making it pathetically easy to avoid that.

But just as life can be lived well, so too can technology facilitate that.  It is, after all, just a tool.  And what a tool: a world of information has put thought at our disposal like never before.  Just as mediocrity has never been easier, greatness has never been more attainable.  The beastly life is just a click away.

[ii] I think this is why long car trips with friends are worthwhile even though being stuck in a glorified tin can for a few hours unequivocally sucks.  The immediacy of the car forces you to bond over the shared experience.

“All the blessings and plagues exist side by side in Los Angeles. The twinkling ocean, the looming mountains, the spill of desert, the bounty of vegetation, and the creased and verdant hills are here—and so are the floods and the mudslides and the earthquakes and the wildfires. Southern California seems constantly pitched back and forth between heaven and hell.”

Returning to the fire, it seems right now that we’re on the hell side.  My Dad keeps saying that, after this year, I’ll have had the total Southern California experience: drought, fire, and flood (El Nino is looming). Interestingly, though, this wasn’t always the case.  The San Gabriel Mountains used to be covered in trees.  Then, about a century ago, Angelinos cut those forests down for timber, facilitating the winter mudslides that always follow summer fires.  We’ve since had other roles to play in cycle of fire and flood:

“For many decades in Los Angeles there was a moat of orange groves between the built-up metropolis and the mountain front. The debris flows would come down the mountain into the citrus orchards and the farmers would plant new trees on top of the debris flow. During WWII & after, the orange groves were replaced with housing.”

The California bungalow, that ubiquitous instantiation of the American Dream, paved the way for destruction.  Some might be bold enough to say  the two were linked:

“Paradise and doomsday go hand in hand. The more magnificent the expectations we have for a time and place, the greater the risk of disappointment. And one can’t divorce the traditional concept of the apocalypse on Earth from the idea of paradise on Earth. In our secular age, many forget that in apocalyptic tradition, cataclysm paves the way for a new heavenly era…

In my secular way, that’s sort of how I saw last week’s pyrocumulus clouds.  Far from being the victory of hell in L.A. over heaven in L.A., they reminded me that in a very real way, we can’t have one without the other.  The cloud is just what it looked like: two sides of the same coin; the one defines the other.  Heaven, hell.  Ugly, beautiful.  Apocalypse, paradise.  Los Angeles.”

Skipping past the uninteresting question about the necessity of duality (for example, can there be light without there being dark?), this passage offers a profound angle into the exigencies of existence and man’s social condition.  In our struggles to better humanity, we often posit utopia as our goal, but might utopian perfection be paradoxically flawed?  Maybe we need hell, not merely as an opposite to heaven, but in and of itself.

Perhaps then, Zizek is right to suggest that the proper starting point is to ask the Schellingian question:

“What if, as Schelling implied, eternity is less than temporality?  What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order to fully actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence?”[ii]

Isn’t that the point of The Fountain, ironically portrayed in its own lust for grandeur and universality?  Isn’t that the perverse realization of the Hugh Jackman’s oncologist character: that his attempts to biochemically engineer immortality and save his cancer-ridden wife have only blinded him from life’s true eternities—those moments that take your breath away.

So maybe rather than asking what an ideal utopia looks like, we should ask how to satiate that yearning for utopia, how we can forget the first question entirely—upon which we would already be complete.  At the individual level, we lionize the flawed life, as the majority of Sunday morning brunch conversations will attest to.  Is it that absurd to expect that fact to scale up to the social?

[ii] Zizek, Slavoj, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 13

I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to get over that phrase—of course, neither will Gavin Newsom.  But isn’t it fitting?  As the inevitable logical extension of liberal thought, isn’t it somehow appropriate that Gavin Newsom would spew such drivel?

The whole point of pluralism is accepting that there are competing views of the good (religions, ways of life, etc.) and that they’re ultimately irreconcilable, which is a good thing.  But by saying pluralism is so totally right (implicit in the know-it-all jackassery of his statement) Newsom is devaluing the sentiment of tolerance underlying pluralism.

This tone is the water’s edge of liberal thought: our conception of justice is so complete, our knowledge of what is right so total, that we would be remiss not to impose it upon society—regardless or rather in spite of popular opinion.  Isn’t that type of thinking what made the Warren Court controversial?  No one could argue against Brown v. Board in terms of morality, but the decision did overturn popular will—for good I should add.

You see that same confidence in the well-known caricature of the limousine liberal.   They are the watchful guardians of society, and who are we to deny them a well-deserved bit of largesse?

For a particular example, look no farther than the stimulus: a million little tweaks that aggregated say, in one solemn voice, “I know better than society.”  Each of the component policies generally makes some sense.  And that’s what scares me.  Sure we could use some more money for vaccination programs.  Preventative medicine makes sense.  Sure we could use repaved roads.  That increases fuel economy.  Makes sense.  Of course what’slost in the particular is gained in the aggregate.  The thing is so complex and convoluted that no one knows where all the money is.  And of course, who wouldn’t expect a 780 billion dollar bill shoved quickly through Congress to be good policy?[i] The point is not about whether the thing is a net macroeconomic good or ill (though whatever bs job “numbers”[ii] they end up attaching to the project should not be taken as proof); it’s that society is freaking complex, and this type of micromanagement is the height of folly and arrogance.

This isn’t an aberration.  The liberal state exists to tinker our way to perfection: a dash of environmental regulation here, a welfare to work program there.  Of course, then isn’t the only truly political task really technocratic?  We just need to use logic, reason, and rationality to refine our way to just the right amount of tweakage.

Conservatism, on the other hand, runs a different risk: that in its rejection of liberalism’s failed universality it will embrace narrow and particular views of the good.  Doesn’t conservative these days merely connote an affinity for prejudice—whether justified or not?  How else do Ron Paul, Jerry Falwell, and Richard Nixon all have a legitimate claim to the title?

So perhaps to get a cogent idea of the ideology we need to go back to the beginning, to the movement’s founder:

“The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.” -William F. Buckley, National Review Online

Holy shit: “disciples of Truth,” with a capitol “T.”  I don’t know if that’s one step from or one step past holy warrior.  And the tone of the whole thing reminds me of that half-joke that says, “Well there’s a reason it’s called the right.”  But the statement is more revealing in this sense than I think it realizes.  Not only does it capture the fundamental problem of liberalism—albeit in loaded terms—but it points to the fundamental kernel of truth underlying conservatism: it understands the limitations of the liberal state.

When conservatism talks about the importance private charity and faith-based organizations, it is exactly this sort of importance of actualizing the good that it is invoking.  The same is true when it talks about personal responsibility or family values.  Of course, it’s not any family’s values; mostly those that would satisfy what the obsessively politically correct would call heteronormativity.  Hence the movement’s opposition to gay marriage.  Yet aside from the clear problems with this (generally in the vein of conservatives claiming that gays have equal rights because they can marry a women just like the rest of us), at least conservatives are willing to take a stand for ecclesiasticism.

The truth of the matter is that “liberalism”[iii] and “conservatism”—essentially slightly different emotional outlooks within an acceptance of the Liberal State—are irrevocably street ideology, destined to be filled with nonsensical argument—whether you like it or not.  The only serious[iv] alternative in this barren wasteland of nonideas is of course that holy grail of American Politics: Bipartisanship or the Great Moderate Middle.

People act as if moderates are punters, unable to hold any convictions of their own.  But for me, being a political moderate always been a profound recognition of the ultimate absurdity of all political ideology—the belief that no one person or ideology can ever have a monopoly on the truth and a willingness to shift between them as necessary.  That may strike some as unprincipled.  But it is fact merely in the great American tradition of pragmatism, of treating the theoretical as only useful insofar as it improves the actual.  As we watch one side engage in a perverse spectacle of self-flagellation and the other impotently watch its ideals crash on the rocks of political reality, perhaps we could do worse than ask ourselves a simple question: Is this really all there is?

[ii] Right now everything you’re hearing is backtracked from a Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) Report.  They’re taking the percentage of dollars spent in a location or time period (in relation to the total amount) and multiplying that by the total estimated jobs created.  And that CEA report got its job numbers by using econometric models to forecast increased growth with the stimulus—a dangerous proposition given the historical uniqueness of the situation—and then multiplying that figure by the normal amount of jobs created per percent of economic growth.  I wish I could’ve pulled that shit in Macro.

[iii] And its cousin “progressivism.”

[iv] Communists feel free to express your token outrage.

Newly selected President Bettison-Varga couldn’t be reached for this article, but rumors are circulating that she’s planning a blowout dance party in the Scripps parking lot to ring in the new anthem.

Well actually, not really, but sometimes I wonder.(1) Personally, I’ve had enough. Enough of the ideology that lets girls plaster “You count. Calories don’t.” all over their walls one moment and then lets them play this childish game of hide the crouton. I’m tired of seeing fliers for “Wellness Seminars” next to girls with protruding collarbones. I’m disgusted at the pathetic show of friendship that Scripps girls show when they insist their friends are strong women whatever the reality. Mostly I’m disheartened because I fear that genuine acts of courage like Zoe Larkins’ will be lost in this sea of bullshit.

Isn’t there something seriously wrong with the culture of Scripps? It’s as if the college specializes in deterritorialization: universal concepts are everywhere stripped from their meaning and become free-floating injunctions. And I’m not the only one who sees this:

“What I find most difficult about Scripps women is their willingness to speak out on how terrible eating disorders are, how we should all appreciate our own bodies, how we should grant ourselves permission to enjoy food because we deserve to nourish our bodies—and yet these same women engage in disordered eating and constant exercising.” –Alicia Jenkins (in response to a post on the Voice)

Wellness blurs into disordered eating seamlessly. Extolling the virtues of a healthy lifestyle and then having a carrot for dinner has no contradiction because that pronouncement had no ontological meaning. The declaration existed purely in the symbolic – a perfect breeding ground for this kind of hyperideology. Its principles – therapeutic wellness, female empowerment, etc. – are so structured, so crystalline that the actual meanings underlying them apparently are irrelevant.

Consider the core of Scripps’ ideology: Feminism. I always thought the underlying point of Feminism specifically (and the civil rights moment generally) was that you are supposed to judge people on “the content of their character, not [arbitrary things like] the color of their skin.” Yet all too often at Scripps that ideal encapsulated in words like “Feminism” or “Freedom” is disconnected from its actual meaning and made to serve as a blunt reaction. If Scripps’ “Feminists” were really as committed to Feminism as it should be defined, they would be just as outraged at the discrepancy between the percentages of men and women going to higher education as they are about the wage gap.

In a sense, I think I can see where they’re coming from. You look at humanity’s recent history, and it’s dominated by white males. That history includes some pretty fucked up things, including the forced domestication of women. I imagine it’s easy to be consumed by the scope of that history and the magnitude of that blatant injustice. So consumed that you feel the need to fight it with everything you’ve got. That understandability, though, doesn’t make it ok.

Far from it. Besides being simply wrong, the idea that only white males are racist is totalitarian. You’ve set up strict intellectual limits around something that delineates it completely. What’s racism? It’s the pejorative actions that white males take against other races. Oh, ok. I had no idea it was that simple. Neat-o. Similarly it’s totalitarian to try to force all discourse through the lens of gender. Our world is actually too complicated for that. Though I suppose, to be fair, if they’re feeling intellectually expansive, Scrippsies will include race and other historically underprivileged groups as means to valuable insight.

Perversely, this shuttered way of thinking can come full circle and be detrimental to women’s rights. Take the following quote from the Scripps’ Voice for example:

“Many expressed a disparity between the empowerment they are supposed to feel at a women’s college, and the strong image consciousness they observe on campus. This might reflect, some students suggested, a lack of basic feminist education. Why, someone suggested, didn’t we study feminist theory in Core I?” (2)

I don’t get how any self-respecting woman doesn’t feel insulted by this statement. Are women supposed to feel less empowered when they’re not at a women’s college? Do they need the company of other women to feel that they have authority and power? Or is it just that the girls that go to a women’s college are somehow weaker, need empowering? Note too the immediate turn to Feminism. Maybe that’s actually what’s needed in this case, but I can’t help but be cynical. As empowered, strong women, might the students of Scripps College need education in something other than their gender to combat this pernicious image consciousness?2 Like maybe the superego: stop fucking caring about what other people think.

There’s an eerily similarity between this Scripps’ ideology and Tyra Banks on her show America’s Next Top Model [excerpted from a post on More Intelligent Life, an Economist publication]:

“And this is where the paradox of Tyra comes to a head. She hugs and gives rehearsed counsel to the eliminated contestant, encouraging her to still follow her dreams. But to emphasize inner strength in a game where success hinges on ten pounds or a bad photo is dishonest. Tyra has a chilling ability to shuffle among masks without acknowledging their incoherence, which is an eerie quality for a self-styled self-empowerment guru to have, since it obscures any idea of a “self” to begin with. But it is also, in a nutshell, the only learned skill that a model must possess.”

Can’t you picture Scrippsies doing the same song and dance, telling their friends to eat and be healthy, while simultaneously judging their every nutritional move in the cold war of calorie attrition? This weird ideology has claimed enough casualties. So I say enough of this mental Valium that they call wellness talks, enough of this femino-centric worldview, and enough of this cycle of bullshit generally. Scrippsies – like all budding young adults – need an education in how to live as responsible, productive, and fulfilled people, pure and simple. Feminism and wellness and all that other jazz they love up there can be a part of that, but just that: a part. Life demands and the Scripps young women deserve much more than this lame culture of broken ideals.

——————————————————————————————
(1) In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess: I read the Scripps Voice. I know, I know. But how else would I find gems like this? “It is always the time to question our policies, but now we need to do so with the expectation that the decided solution will succeed.” I mean it takes something really special to be that confident with that level of internal contradiction. Personally, I think every writer for the Scripps Voice secretly aspires to be a host on the View. But I digress.
(2) Because aren’t they supposed to be treated as members of humanity – not simply as an elaboration of a sociophysical construct like gender?

Rampant hyperbole aside, I too have my doubts about Obamacare.  Namely, how are we going to cut costs while expanding coverage?  Those new medical services aren’t going to pay for themselves.  Rather than deal with these sorts of concerns directly, the President has chosen to deal in lofty parables:

“There’s going to be some disagreement, but if there’s broad agreement that, in this situation the blue pill works better than the red pill, and it turns out the blue pills are half as expensive as the red pill, then we want to make sure that doctors and patients have that information available to them.”

Cue Morpheus and the Matrix: welcome to the desert of the health care sector.  Notably, Obama is advocating the blue pill, the one that makes you “believe… whatever you want to believe.”  Costs will be cut.  Never mind that Congressional Budget Office report.  Look at all those other countries with single payer and more universal systems that have lower costs.

What these macro international comparisons of the percentage of GDP spent on health care across various countries neglect is the very real micro problem of US government’s finances.  Simply put, we don’t got money.  And if you’ve ever seen one of those scary ass J-shaped charts of entitlement spending, you know it’s only going to get worse.  Besides, Americans like consuming things.  Why should health care be any different?  Maybe we just like consuming health care services and thus we spend more of our aggregate national income.   I’m reminded of my elderly aunt who apparently is only capable of talking about her and her friends’ health problems.

What it really comes down to is that those systems are more cost effective because they’re better structured.  But it’s not like we can just wave a magic wand and get their health care system.  Liberal pundits are worried that delay will mean no reform, but that’s not the case.  What they really mean by reform here is change.  Delay means a lessened likelihood of substantial change to the status quo (in terms of the governments’ role).  But rushing the bill increases the likelihood that not all of the several hundred page monstrosity of legalese argot will be properly vetted.  Cough, the stimulus, cough.  Rushing means we’re more likely to get a substantial change, but it’s questionable whether that will be for the good—i.e. reform.

The situation is becoming increasingly tenuous for Obama.  His original timeline is in shambles.  Obamacare is slowly crumbling in the polls; it was only with a desperate this will cost me my presidency push that Obama was able to stop Blue Dogs from killing his pet project.  But they still have serious doubts.  And that’s not to mention the Senate or the electoral implications for 2010.  Yet, in every crisis there is an opportunity.

This could be a Nixon goes to China moment.  The public thinks Obama is focused on expanding coverage to the uninsured over cutting costs by over a 3:1 margin.  Republicans and Democrats are roughly united in their belief; the discrepancy between the percentage of Republicans and the percentage of Democrats who believe Obama is focused on expanding coverage is within the margin of error.  What if Obama jettisoned the public option and the road to single payer in favor of a narrower bill focused on cutting costs and disentangling perverse incentives?  This would immediately destroy Republicans’ best argument against him (that he’s an overspending far-left liberal) and would make real his post-partisanship rhetoric in a very tangible way.

The plan could start by eliminating the subsidy to employer-based health care, which just obfuscates the costs and benefits of health insurances.  Obama’s wonky head of Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orzag, puts the issue well: “I very firmly believe that capitalism is not founded on excessively high subsidies to private firms. That is what this system delivers right now.” The now defunct wonkish Wyden bill would be another place to look for good ideas.

This could only be a victory for Obama and a much needed boost to his bipartisan credentials.  So far, his efforts at congressional bipartisanship have been mostly symbolic:

“Republicans said this White House’s effort at bipartisanship had been one of symbols — presidential calls, invitations to the White House, regular tending by such high level officials as Mr. Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff — rather than substance.
“We hear from them all the time,” Mr. Alexander said. “They said the right things. They are as cordial as you can be.”

More pertinently, how could Republican’s spin this into failure?  “Obama caved into our common sense pressure and abandoned his socialistic medicine agenda.”  Translated: “Obama failed in his pursuit of a leftist policy agenda and pursued a magnanimous middle ground.”  Sounds like a win to me.

Such a move would be the best possible type of compromise: not only will both sides give something up, but it would actually be in the best interest of the nation.  Our healthcare costs really are skyrocketing, and there’s a lot we can and should do on that front.  But it’s a bit disingenuous to conflate our broken healthcare system vis-à-vis its skyrocketing costs with the social justice question of whether we want universal coverage.  For Obama, the question he needs to ask himself is simple: do I care more about my legacy and post-partisanship or liberalism?

And where would the federal government be without California? In big trouble. For one thing, the United States would lose the substantial subsidy from our state’s taxpayers. That’s right, we subsidize you. California gets back about 80 cents for every dollar we pay in federal taxes. And, while we’re on the subject, don’t forget the damage that California, as an independent country, could do to the U.S. dollar if we started printing our own currency. The Chinese would be wise to sell their U.S. dollars and instead invest in debt issued by our new republic, which would be a better risk. Perhaps California could provide the new alternative global currency standard that Chinese President Hu and Russian Prime Minister Putin are talking about.

If California wasn’t stuck attached to the rest of the country, we’d be Sweden.  A little more exciting and dysfunctional perhaps, but Sweden nonetheless.  And regardless of what you think of the welfare state, that certainly beats our current situation.  Yet the some think that’s just the tattered remains of what once was; the National Editor of the Atlantic pronounces the Dream dead:

“It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country’s dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter…  It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and—thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine—were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost.”

No, the pundits, as usual, have to be taken with a grain of salt.  What this schadenfraude really is about is a perverse combination of angst and pent up anger towards California’s cockiness for the last hundred or so years.  The rest of the country always looked at California with suspicion: Why are they so special? What made them think they could have the best of everything?  California represented the nation’s hopes and dreams.  Just as America offered the promise of a better life for millions around the globe, so did California for millions of Americans—with the same resulting jealousies and love/hate relationship.  So now that it’s supposedly that’s over, they can’t help but enjoy it a little.  But there’s a nervousness to their laughter.

As John Hodgeman said, “It’s like they think they can Europe over there, but without taxes and clean teeth.”  But the California Dream was always a bit absurd: gold literally paving the streams, sunshine all year round, and everyone living the Good Life.  If the American Dream is to be thought as taking the ideals of European Enlightenment and amalgamating it across the very American ideology of Pragmatism, then the California Dream has taken that Dream and pulled out the rug of reality from underneath.  Why not a house for every home and a starlet in every girl?  Why not make the American Dream a reality for everyone?  There’s more than enough space here—natural, cinematic, technological—to make it happen.

But occasionally that rarefied ideal crashes into some inconvenient realities.  Isn’t that the paradox of California’s Constitution?  Seemingly everything deserves a place in the sacred document—a bit of the state for all!  The People have said spoken.  Of course, if everything is fundamental, then really nothing is.  And therein lies the hollow kernel of the California Dream—just as devoid there as in Santa Barbara’s monotonously worry-free living.  That’s why there’s no neat, easily referencible parable for it.[i] Yet as we claw desperately for social redemption, there is value and virtue in obfuscation: only there can all of humanity hope to fit.  For California’s Dream is ultimately man’s, the idea of creating heaven on earth.  That’s why there’s no need to write California off yet: there’s bound to be some earthquakes when you sublate the divine into the temporal.

In case you’ve been under a rock, last week was the 40th anniversary of man’s triumphant landing on the moon.  But the remembrance was bittersweet.  As we looked back on our past space triumphs, the yawning gap of the intervening years quickly became deafening.
Sure we’ve sent robots to Mars and done some experiments in space, but that pales in imagination.  The culmination of post-moon human exploration, the international space state, represents the worst of empty one world rhetoric.  Like the UN, it’s cloaked in lofty rhetoric and ideals but in reality mired in delay and dysfunction.  Even that mask of progress is slipping.  As Charles Krauthammer points out:

“America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.”

In retrospect, as things often are, this was inevitable.  The day after we landed on the moon NASA suffered a crisis of mission from which it has yet to recover.  We sent a man to the moon to prove to ourselves and the world that we were number one.  Tom Wolfe uses the analogy of single combat.  Russia had struck first with its champion, Sputnik, and we were symbolically powerless to defend against it.  Physics aside, they had seized the ultimate high ground.  But once we won the battle we created, there was nothing left to fight:

“Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration. What was this single combat stuff — they didn’t use the actual term — really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable … how far-seeing … but why don’t we just do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow?”

That’s the intellectual malaise we find ourselves in now that we don’t have a clear enemy.(1)  The question of why just looms.  Can’t you see we have problems here on earth? The frequent economic arguments fail; really the commercial spin-offs were never worth it.  Trying to sell a space program on the advent of Tang just isn’t going to work.  Neither will nifty solutions like auctioning off land on Mars.(2)   Yet, as my Dad put it, it’s “hard to explain that everyone watched live the ‘walk on the Moon.’”  Just as its hard to explain the sort of thing that could bring old Irish cops to tears—the sort of thing that inspired a generation to study math and science in a way that a slick ad campaign never could.

The narrow methodology of cost-benefit analysis will never come out in favor of a mission to Mars.  Its costs are too high and its benefits too unknown.  But that’s the nature of discovery.  Columbus set sail to the East by going West; George Mallory climbed Mt. Everest simply because it was there; Neil Armstrong went to the moon because a President asked him to.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

It’s easy to dismiss all this talk of discovery and the wonder of space exploration as a trite luxury given the intractable nature of humanity’s problems and the finitude of our resources with which to fight them.  But starvation, pestilence, war, poverty, and disease are not going away anytime soon.  If anything the solution to these problems lies not simply in direct and easily implemented technocratic solutions, but also in the recognition of our common humanity.  Social redemption—which is of course man’s one hope—comes not merely at through the ladle of a soup kitchen but through our shared wonder of the universe.  Pushing out further and further unites us for a brief but tantalizing instant in a common mission and reminds us of the best qualities of man—curiosity, intelligence, compassion.  Big problems like humanity’s endemic fracture require big solutions; social hope, as instantiated by such a mission to mars, may be too dear not to try.

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(1) We can’t very well go to Mars to fight terror.  Though I suppose it would have a certain poetic irony.
(2) Though there would be a certain capitalistic badassness to it.  From the commenter chernyshevsky on Democracy in America: I think the best way to finance the exploration of Mars is by auctioning off land on Mars. No one would be able to make use of their possession in the foreseeable future, of course. But I bet many people would be willing to pay just for the bragging right. Since the money would otherwise be spent on useless vanity stuff anyway, its reallocation is an enhancement to our economic potential. And when eventually humans can reach Mars will ease, it’s only fair that the descendants of those who financed the effort should benefit from the investment.