I'm coming back to this blog three years after the last blog post, and I just thought I'd make three comments on my older posts.
1) I finished a full draft of the book last year, and now I can kinda see the bones of a decent final product - and man it will take a lot of work to get that done.
2) I'm proud of what I wrote about the 2016 election and not voting for Donald Trump.
3) I'm embarrassed about liking Ron Paul. I never smoked pot in college, but I did get into libertarianism for a while and now it feels like a similar kind of youthful indiscretion.
New posts soon.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
New Hire
Well, I made my recommendation to the management, and they did not accept it. Donald Trump is going to be the next president. Donald Trump is going to be the next president. Donald Trump has been elected to serve for the next four years as the President of the United States. Donald Trump is going to be the next president.
Sorry to type that so many times, but I'm still pretty solidly in the denial stage.
When Donald Trump won the Republican primary, I thought that my party was broken. But I thought Mr. Trump would be crushed in the general election, that the fringe elements of the base would be properly humiliated, and that the party would be forced to examine itself and correct for a world that is increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan. I was wrong. The Republican party is not broken; it is dead. The party that organized itself around fiscal conservatism and family values (and military spending and active foreign policy and abortion and gun rights) is dead. The electoral map has changed, the base has changed, and that party has disappeared. But it has been seamlessly replaced by a new party - a party large enough to win a presidential election - that calls itself Republican but is not what I was introduced to growing up. It must have been there all along, metastasizing in birthers and the Tea Party; but I didn't want to see it. Now that it's here, however, I am trying to come to grips with it, and to understand what it is.
As far as I can tell, it is a new kind of coalition. It's a coalition that's weaker than the old one in Utah and stronger than the old one in Wisconsin, that's even less aligned with Californians and even more aligned with Floridians. It's weaker in Arizona and Nevada, but stronger in Maine and Pennsylvania.
What do I know about this new coalition, aside from its geography? Well, the one thing I know for sure about this new Republican party is that they elected Donald Trump. What does that say about the party? It's hard to generalize, especially since there are as many individual motivations for voting as there are voters; nevertheless, I'm going to try to infer a few general trends from the loudest parts of the Trump campaign and the loose collection of ideas that made up his platform. I think the result might be predictive of what this new party will stand for in the years to come (although making predictions about the future is something I'm apparently terrible at doing).
The new party distrusts the media. Deeply. Never has a candidate for president been so widely denounced by the media, including an unprecedented number of Clinton endorsements or Trump anti-endorsements from conservative newspapers. The new party does not trust these sources.
The new party hates Hillary Clinton. Perhaps even more than they hate the media.
The new party will vote for a candidate who is not easy to pin down on most issues, but whose most consistent stances include the following:
1) Mexicans take away our jobs and commit violent crimes, and no Muslim should be allowed to enter the country without "extreme vetting".
2) The Second Amendment should not be repealed.
3) Manufacturing jobs exist, are currently in China, and can be returned to the United States.
4) The US is too involved overseas.
5) Law and order is at risk in the United States, and tougher policing must be the response.
Finally, the new party has come to terms with electing a man who was caught on tape speaking about trying to sleep with a married woman and bragging about how he can get away with groping women he considers attractive. Although, given their distrust of the media, they might believe that the tape was faked, and/or that the alternative was a woman who routinely gets away with murdering people (despite being unable to get away with a private email server).
I do not belong to this new party. My registration is still Republican, but it is a symbolic gesture, an act of respect to the best parts of a flawed party that now no longer exists.
I thought the Republican party would be doing a lot of soul-searching after this election. Turns out they don't exist anymore, and I'm doing the soul-searching instead.
No wonder I can't sleep tonight.
Morning after update: I should be clear that I do not believe that all Trump voters hold the views I outlined above. I just think they represent the most likely version of what a party platform based on this election would look like. People vote for parties even when they disagree with some or most of the ideas, and I understand that. I still love you even though you voted for Trump.
Sorry to type that so many times, but I'm still pretty solidly in the denial stage.
When Donald Trump won the Republican primary, I thought that my party was broken. But I thought Mr. Trump would be crushed in the general election, that the fringe elements of the base would be properly humiliated, and that the party would be forced to examine itself and correct for a world that is increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan. I was wrong. The Republican party is not broken; it is dead. The party that organized itself around fiscal conservatism and family values (and military spending and active foreign policy and abortion and gun rights) is dead. The electoral map has changed, the base has changed, and that party has disappeared. But it has been seamlessly replaced by a new party - a party large enough to win a presidential election - that calls itself Republican but is not what I was introduced to growing up. It must have been there all along, metastasizing in birthers and the Tea Party; but I didn't want to see it. Now that it's here, however, I am trying to come to grips with it, and to understand what it is.
As far as I can tell, it is a new kind of coalition. It's a coalition that's weaker than the old one in Utah and stronger than the old one in Wisconsin, that's even less aligned with Californians and even more aligned with Floridians. It's weaker in Arizona and Nevada, but stronger in Maine and Pennsylvania.
What do I know about this new coalition, aside from its geography? Well, the one thing I know for sure about this new Republican party is that they elected Donald Trump. What does that say about the party? It's hard to generalize, especially since there are as many individual motivations for voting as there are voters; nevertheless, I'm going to try to infer a few general trends from the loudest parts of the Trump campaign and the loose collection of ideas that made up his platform. I think the result might be predictive of what this new party will stand for in the years to come (although making predictions about the future is something I'm apparently terrible at doing).
The new party distrusts the media. Deeply. Never has a candidate for president been so widely denounced by the media, including an unprecedented number of Clinton endorsements or Trump anti-endorsements from conservative newspapers. The new party does not trust these sources.
The new party hates Hillary Clinton. Perhaps even more than they hate the media.
The new party will vote for a candidate who is not easy to pin down on most issues, but whose most consistent stances include the following:
1) Mexicans take away our jobs and commit violent crimes, and no Muslim should be allowed to enter the country without "extreme vetting".
2) The Second Amendment should not be repealed.
3) Manufacturing jobs exist, are currently in China, and can be returned to the United States.
4) The US is too involved overseas.
5) Law and order is at risk in the United States, and tougher policing must be the response.
Finally, the new party has come to terms with electing a man who was caught on tape speaking about trying to sleep with a married woman and bragging about how he can get away with groping women he considers attractive. Although, given their distrust of the media, they might believe that the tape was faked, and/or that the alternative was a woman who routinely gets away with murdering people (despite being unable to get away with a private email server).
I do not belong to this new party. My registration is still Republican, but it is a symbolic gesture, an act of respect to the best parts of a flawed party that now no longer exists.
I thought the Republican party would be doing a lot of soul-searching after this election. Turns out they don't exist anymore, and I'm doing the soul-searching instead.
No wonder I can't sleep tonight.
Morning after update: I should be clear that I do not believe that all Trump voters hold the views I outlined above. I just think they represent the most likely version of what a party platform based on this election would look like. People vote for parties even when they disagree with some or most of the ideas, and I understand that. I still love you even though you voted for Trump.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Job Interview
The election is sometimes characterized as an eighteen-month job interview. Since that's about seventeen months too long, it's no surprise that we've wandered very far afield from the fundamental questions that should be asked about a presidential candidate. While this can be interesting - it's a good forum to discuss economic theories, for instance - it ultimately is a distraction from what the job is and what the qualifications should be. I'd like to take a moment to talk about the election in the context of what it is that a president actually does.
Presidents run the executive branch. They take the role of commander in chief (a role which has expanded to allow them to run entire wars without the explicit consent of Congress, more's the pity), they represent our nation at the highest diplomatic level, and they recommend legislation to Congress. They do not make laws (although they can veto them) and they certainly do not rule on the constitutionality of laws (the closest they come is in nominating Supreme Court candidates which then have to be confirmed by the Senate). So, while it's interesting that Donald Trump wants to revoke the Affordable Care Act and Hillary Clinton wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, suggesting the idea to Congress is about as far as they can go to get either of those goals accomplished.
Of course, that's a bit of an understatement. Because so much of the campaign focuses on these issues, the suggestions of a newly elected president carry the weight of the electorate, and can help Congress get moving on an issue or two. But just ask Barack Obama how long that honeymoon lasts - the answer is not much longer than the time to pass the Affordable Care Act.
My point is that the main jobs of a president are outward-facing, whether that's providing military oversight or diplomatic influence or just serving as a living symbol of America.
With that in mind, my positions on those outward-facing issues are by no means finalized. Our place in the world is a complicated issue. Having grown up with the disastrous Iraq war and the way it exacerbated the state of terrorist activity instead of curbing it, my instincts are isolationist; just leave the world alone and get back to work at being the best country we can be. I have to admit, however, that I'm glad we intervened in World War II, and that if such a situation arose again, I would hope I would have the nerve to act.
There are, however, a few issues I consider sacred. One of those is immigration. I agree with the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I feel strongly that opening our doors to immigration has been one of the principal strengths of the United States. The influx of immigration has made us tolerant, productive, strong, and populous. Where other developed countries face stagnating labor pools, we continue to grow because of immigration. It seems painfully obvious to me that the aging demographics that threaten to bankrupt Social Security could be remedied by an influx of young, ambitious immigrants. It seems equally obvious that each immigrant not only takes a job but also consumes goods and creates the need for more jobs. It's my understanding of the research that immigrants are in general less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans; it's my understanding of history that many of our great figures have come from humble beginnings and foreign shores.
But even if it wasn't good economic policy, I would still support immigration. I support it because I believe every human being who craves freedom should be welcomed to my country. I support it because the best way to lift a person out of poverty and make them a maximally productive part of the global economy is to bring them to America. I support it because I think America is almost the only country on earth where you can become truly American without having been born here, and that is something I am deeply humbled and grateful to be a part of.
Mr. Trump has recommended building a wall with Mexico; I think we should expedite Mexican immigration so that there is no need for any decent person to risk death trying to enter America. Mr. Trump has offered to ban all Muslims from entering the country in the name of preventing terrorism. To make a personal analogy, this sounds to me like trying to prevent polygamy by evicting all the Mormons (just as the vast majority of Muslims condemn terrorism, the vast majority of modern Mormons condemn polygamy, and denounce the zealous, unsanctioned sects who participate in it).
Secretary Clinton has a rather elitist take on immigration, wanting to let in educated people and continue our policy of shutting out the "huddled masses" mentioned in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. But in this election, I'll take what I can get.
Another issue I feel strongly about: not kowtowing to Russian dictators. The current administration seems rather impotent in the face of Putin's aggression, and I can't imagine Hillary will do much better. However, she isn't asking him to compromise our national security or praising him for his "strength" (I would argue that a moral person should see that the "strength" of a dictator is truly just a sign of crippling internal weakness). Again, in this election, I'll take what I can get.
The last issue to mention here is that I wish we had an honorable person to represent our nation. To discuss this in too much detail would drive this post back into the distractions from policy that have dominated this election, and will also set me up in judgement on two souls I do not personally know. I will only say, based on the information available to me, that the evidence against Mr. Trump's character is taken from his own words spoken in public and on camera, while the evidence against Secretary Clinton is indirect and centered around less damning crimes. If I must choose between a machiavellian manipulator and a narcissistic, ignorant, hateful predator (and, again, I can't in good faith claim to know for certain that's what either of them are), I think I'll take the manipulator.
So that's it. That's what I wanted to say. The job interview has gone on too long, and in the end neither applicant meets my hiring criteria. One of them seems somewhat indifferent to the things I think are important for a strong job performance; the other one hates them. I'll take indifference. I'll take what I can get. And if what I can get is someone who won't actively destroy the things I hold dear, I think that's actually worth fighting for.
Hence the blog post. And hence, more importantly, the determination to vote. This one matters.
Presidents run the executive branch. They take the role of commander in chief (a role which has expanded to allow them to run entire wars without the explicit consent of Congress, more's the pity), they represent our nation at the highest diplomatic level, and they recommend legislation to Congress. They do not make laws (although they can veto them) and they certainly do not rule on the constitutionality of laws (the closest they come is in nominating Supreme Court candidates which then have to be confirmed by the Senate). So, while it's interesting that Donald Trump wants to revoke the Affordable Care Act and Hillary Clinton wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, suggesting the idea to Congress is about as far as they can go to get either of those goals accomplished.
Of course, that's a bit of an understatement. Because so much of the campaign focuses on these issues, the suggestions of a newly elected president carry the weight of the electorate, and can help Congress get moving on an issue or two. But just ask Barack Obama how long that honeymoon lasts - the answer is not much longer than the time to pass the Affordable Care Act.
My point is that the main jobs of a president are outward-facing, whether that's providing military oversight or diplomatic influence or just serving as a living symbol of America.
With that in mind, my positions on those outward-facing issues are by no means finalized. Our place in the world is a complicated issue. Having grown up with the disastrous Iraq war and the way it exacerbated the state of terrorist activity instead of curbing it, my instincts are isolationist; just leave the world alone and get back to work at being the best country we can be. I have to admit, however, that I'm glad we intervened in World War II, and that if such a situation arose again, I would hope I would have the nerve to act.
There are, however, a few issues I consider sacred. One of those is immigration. I agree with the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I feel strongly that opening our doors to immigration has been one of the principal strengths of the United States. The influx of immigration has made us tolerant, productive, strong, and populous. Where other developed countries face stagnating labor pools, we continue to grow because of immigration. It seems painfully obvious to me that the aging demographics that threaten to bankrupt Social Security could be remedied by an influx of young, ambitious immigrants. It seems equally obvious that each immigrant not only takes a job but also consumes goods and creates the need for more jobs. It's my understanding of the research that immigrants are in general less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans; it's my understanding of history that many of our great figures have come from humble beginnings and foreign shores.
But even if it wasn't good economic policy, I would still support immigration. I support it because I believe every human being who craves freedom should be welcomed to my country. I support it because the best way to lift a person out of poverty and make them a maximally productive part of the global economy is to bring them to America. I support it because I think America is almost the only country on earth where you can become truly American without having been born here, and that is something I am deeply humbled and grateful to be a part of.
Mr. Trump has recommended building a wall with Mexico; I think we should expedite Mexican immigration so that there is no need for any decent person to risk death trying to enter America. Mr. Trump has offered to ban all Muslims from entering the country in the name of preventing terrorism. To make a personal analogy, this sounds to me like trying to prevent polygamy by evicting all the Mormons (just as the vast majority of Muslims condemn terrorism, the vast majority of modern Mormons condemn polygamy, and denounce the zealous, unsanctioned sects who participate in it).
Secretary Clinton has a rather elitist take on immigration, wanting to let in educated people and continue our policy of shutting out the "huddled masses" mentioned in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. But in this election, I'll take what I can get.
Another issue I feel strongly about: not kowtowing to Russian dictators. The current administration seems rather impotent in the face of Putin's aggression, and I can't imagine Hillary will do much better. However, she isn't asking him to compromise our national security or praising him for his "strength" (I would argue that a moral person should see that the "strength" of a dictator is truly just a sign of crippling internal weakness). Again, in this election, I'll take what I can get.
The last issue to mention here is that I wish we had an honorable person to represent our nation. To discuss this in too much detail would drive this post back into the distractions from policy that have dominated this election, and will also set me up in judgement on two souls I do not personally know. I will only say, based on the information available to me, that the evidence against Mr. Trump's character is taken from his own words spoken in public and on camera, while the evidence against Secretary Clinton is indirect and centered around less damning crimes. If I must choose between a machiavellian manipulator and a narcissistic, ignorant, hateful predator (and, again, I can't in good faith claim to know for certain that's what either of them are), I think I'll take the manipulator.
So that's it. That's what I wanted to say. The job interview has gone on too long, and in the end neither applicant meets my hiring criteria. One of them seems somewhat indifferent to the things I think are important for a strong job performance; the other one hates them. I'll take indifference. I'll take what I can get. And if what I can get is someone who won't actively destroy the things I hold dear, I think that's actually worth fighting for.
Hence the blog post. And hence, more importantly, the determination to vote. This one matters.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Altitude, Chapter One
Hi everyone! So it's been about four years since my last blog post. In the last year or so I've been working on an idea for a book and I've finally finished the first chapter. Feedback welcomed! There's a link to the pdf file (which I personally find more readable) right here. Or you can just keep reading below. Enjoy!
Chapter 1: Monday, 6:00 AM. Cambridge, Massachusetts
The red solo cup splintered satisfyingly underneath Jessica’s right heel as she passed the door of the Final Club. Behind her the shattered red plastic dispersed into the gray snow like blood splatter at an HBO crime scene, and she allowed herself a small grin. Despite the pretentious names, hundreds of years of practice, and a generous infusion of inherited wealth, the members of Harvard’s all-male pseudo-fraternities couldn’t come up with a better container with which to intoxicate themselves and their female guests than the sad plastic chalice used by every other juvenile male organization in the country.
The sun had not yet technically risen, but the low gray clouds had started to transmit diffuse light from beyond the horizon, so that the spaces in between the streetlights started to lighten. Jessica ran harder as she reached the corner of Harvard Square, her footsteps annoying the tired beggars tucked against the red brick buildings in their sleeping bags and wool hats. She liked running at this hour of the morning partly because no one was watching.
She inevitably drew stares when she ran. She was short and round, which meant that when she paused at stoplights she received the usual encouraging smiles from people who assumed she was making another unsuccessful attempt at losing weight. She didn’t mind that so much. It was when she started moving that she drew more unusual kinds of attention.
Jessica liked to run fast, and her snowman-esque physique belied her true fitness. She had run every morning for the last six years, and although her waist had never lost so much as an inch, her muscles and lungs had risen to the challenge rather splendidly. This resulted in the astonishing sight of a young, solidly constructed woman of not much more than five feet in height appearing to sprint flat out from intersection to intersection. The looks this attracted were no longer of the typical there’s-another-chubby-woman-trying-to-lose-weight-bless-her-heart-there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I-so-I’ll-give-her-an-understanding-smile variety, but instead more of the I-don’t-understand-what-I’m-seeing-here-and-it-makes-me-nervous kind, paired with some unavoidable chuckles at the surprising way in which her torso swiveled to keep up with the frenetic pumping of her tiny legs.
So she ran in the early morning, when the undergraduates were sleeping off their alcohol, the graduate students were sleeping with their foreheads pressed against their desks, and working people were trying to convince themselves that health insurance and a mortgage payment were worth waking up for. She ran fast, and she ran far. For the first five years she had taken other people’s looks a little more seriously, and had always stopped after three or four miles to avoid the inevitable cardiac explosion they predicted on their faces. But for the last year, as she’d gotten used to running in the darkened pre-dawn, she had started to go farther and farther, pushing towards some unseen limit where she would no longer be able to keep sprinting. So far it hadn’t arrived.
Today she only passed one conscious onlooker - a man in his pajamas with a crying baby strapped to his chest, wearing that look of complete desperation that new parents usually try to hide in polite company. At this hour of the morning, it was clear that he was reconsidering the enthusiasm with which he had participated in bringing this small wet sack of miserable humanity into the world. His expression changed as she passed him, through what she’d come to recognize as the seven stages of watching Jessica run: 1) good for you, tiger; 2) wait, is she really moving that fast; 3) is there someone behind her; 4) is there a ghost behind her; 5) should I also be running; 6) I really don't understand what I'm seeing here; 7) am I about to witness cardiac arrest? There were actually three more stages which Jessica was unaware of because they took place after she passed: 8) relief that I didn’t witness cardiac arrest; 9) well isn’t it a strange world, and 10) I wonder if I can tell anyone about this without sounding insensitive.
Her internal odometer was somewhere around 11 miles - it’s hard to keep track of linear distance in Boston - when she arrived home. She paused for a moment, leaning against the front door of the small house that contained five other apartments, stretching her calves and waiting for the March chill to stop the sweating, then went inside.
Five minutes later, a large black shadow detached itself from where it had been waiting under the opposite porch, and stepped into the light. The faintly glowing clouds revealed a bald head on top of a heavy black coat, but the light was not yet bright enough to illuminate the eyes. In six long steps, the head and coat reached the front door. A large hand came out, grasped the door handle, and tore it off.
Six seconds later, two thousand six hundred and fifty miles away, Bob Young went into full panic.
-
Bob was not an especially early riser, but because they were separated by two time zones he ended up waking at roughly the same time as Jessica. The circuit he had installed on the door handle had triggered a small chirp from one of the monitors in his basement as Jessica had left for her run, then chirped again as she returned. The removal of the door handle caused a third chirp, which was unexpected enough for him to stand up from his chair and look over his main monitor at the screen displaying the stream from the webcam installed on the telephone pole opposite Jessica’s house. The door sensor transmitted a single bit over a landline, while the webcam was transmitting video over a wireless connection to the neighbors, so the images on the screen were a few seconds delayed relative to the chirp. This meant that Bob got a very clear view of a massive form completely blocking the doorway to Jessica’s house. He froze, halfway between sitting and standing, as the door handle came out of its accustomed place and flew more or less directly at the camera, shaking the telephone pole when it impacted a foot or two beneath the lens. The large figure hesitated for a moment, then bent its bald head under the doorway and disappeared into the house.
While his conscious mind had been completely frozen in disbelief, Bob’s well-trained subconscious had reached out for the landline at his desk with his right hand and placed his left index finger on a speed-dial number which he had never before used. He figured he had about thirty seconds for the man on the camera to climb the steps to Jessica’s apartment. Given the delay on the feed, a third of that time was already gone. If she answered on the second or third ring, he might be able to save her life. He kept his eye on the line to the sensor attached to the inner door and hoped she wasn’t already in the shower.
-
Jessica was in the shower when the call came through. Her new phone was waterproof, though, so she was also checking her email. Her phone didn’t recognize the number and she didn’t recognize the area code, which usually was a recipe for a telemarketing call. She was enjoying the idea of a waterproof phone, though, so she answered on the third ring.
``Hello?''
``You’re about to hear a fairly loud noise.''
``What?''
There was suddenly a bang from the front of her apartment. If it had happened twenty seconds ago, she might have mistook it for the furnace misfiring, which it did regularly. As it was, she found herself unusually interested in its source. “What was that?''
``That was the sound of a man named Kroger breaking into your house to kill you.''
Jessica did not know what to say to that. Bob could hear the shower running and guessed she was on the toilet letting the water warm up. ``Leave the shower on. He’ll hear it, assume you're in there, and take approximately two minutes to check the other rooms. No time to flush. Run.” Then he hung up. In his experience of making unsolicited calls with specific advice, the next three questions were ``What?” ``Who are you?” and ``How do I know you’re telling the truth?” and the answers to those were not particularly useful for saving someone’s life. Besides, extra talking on Jessica's end would just tip Kroger off. ``Betty Lou!” he yelled through the ceiling of the basement, “Kroger just showed up at her apartment!''
``What? Bobby, if he lays a finger on her head I swear to Darwin I’m going to end both of you sorry little armpit scratchers!''
``I believe it,'' Bob said under his breath.
-
Jessica stared blankly at the phone. What was that? Who was that person? How was she supposed to know if he was telling the truth? Her head snapped up as a floorboard creaked outside the bathroom door.
The bathroom was a tiny, poorly designed afterthought. Jessica was standing in an old tub against the back wall, beneath a tiny marbled window. Directly across from her was the narrow door leading out into the living room. On the left wall was the sink. Directly opposite the sink was the toilet, situated so that the door couldn't quite open out to ninety degrees without smacking into its porcelain lip. She pulled back the curtain distractedly, letting the water splash out onto the tile, and stared at the hint of a shadow in the uneven crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. For a moment everything seemed frozen - the darkness underneath the door, the impassive porcelain sink and toilet standing impotent sentry watch, and Jessica with the phone in one hand and the curtain in the other. The only thing giving the room a sense of time was the hissing and creaking of the ancient shower as it spat lukewarm water across half of Jessica's face.
Then the floorboard creaked again, and the shadow moved to the left, towards the rest of the apartment. Jessica inhaled unsteadily when she realized that she had not been breathing. Either this was a terrible joke, or there was someone in her house who wanted to kill her. Behaving as if there was a murderer in her house when there wasn’t one might make her feel silly. Behaving as if there wasn’t a murderer in her house when there was one would make her feel dead. Ultimately, not a hard call.
Jessica knew that she was at this point supposed to become emotional, but that part of her brain seemed to be moving rather slowly. She had never been very good at feeling what she was supposed to feel, anyway. The part of her brain that was spooling up now was the part of her brain that she used most often - the problem-solving part. Jessica wrote software for a living. She liked breaking down problems into logical sections and dealing with them creatively. And she liked puzzles, and riddles, and logical games. She liked her job because it allowed her to take messy, real-world problems and turn them into rational, solvable projects. The emotional part of her brain was starting to get interested in the quality and result of the new social interaction she was about to experience - presumably consisting mainly of an informal introduction followed by an unusually intense period of interpersonal conflict - but the logical part of her brain was more interested in how a short woman with no weapons might use the next sixty seconds to effectively prepare herself for a murder attempt, regardless of the outcome. And in Jessica's world, that logical puzzle was infinitely more interesting than the social and emotional ramifications of meeting her would-be murderer.
It was a challenging puzzle. She was too wide to fit through the tiny bathroom window, and the apartment was too small to hope that she wouldn't be intercepted on a sprint to the door. Her assets included shampoo, body lotion, a loofah, a toilet plunger, her smartphone, a plastic razor, and Old Spice deodorant. Not exactly an arsenal. But she knew that her assailant would come through the door. And he - or she (this is the twenty first century, after all) - would probably assume that Jessica was blissfully unaware of what was coming. She stared at the smooth, rounded end of the toilet plunger. If only it was a little sharper.
-
Kroger quickly came to the expected conclusion that the apartment was in fact empty outside of the bathroom. He opened the fridge and found about two dozen Mexican Coca-Colas in glass bottles and nothing else. He opened one, drained it, set it down, and cracked his knuckles. Then he walked to the bathroom door and tore off his third door handle of the morning. This one broke the living room window on its way out of the building. He placed his other hand on the remaining bulk of the door and shoved it open forcefully.
The bathroom was a small affair and the shower was directly across from the entrance. Kroger had opened the door hard enough that it slammed against the porcelain of the toilet bowl, a few annoying degrees short of ninety. He covered the distance to the curtain in one step.
-
Jessica was standing on top of the toilet, dripping wet and naked with the jagged broken end of the wooden toilet plunger in one hand, when the door handle vanished. It was like that old trick where someone pulls the tablecloth out from underneath the silverware - the rest of the door seemed more or less unaffected by the sudden disappearance of the handle. It was surprising, but not as surprising as how rapidly the door swung open afterwards, stopping a few inches from her face as it collided with the toilet. Cold air from the rest of the apartment rushed in, and right behind it came a pressure wave from an enormous human being displacing about a quarter of the air in the room. Jessica took a fraction of a second to take in the vast swath of black fabric covering the enormous torso, the bald head threatening to collide with the ceiling, and the massive hands coming up towards the shower curtain. So much for the informal introduction. Time for the interpersonal conflict. She placed one foot on the wall behind her, jumped into the air with the other, and drove her shoulder into the small of the man’s back with the whole force of her diminutive body.
-
Kroger heard the motion behind him and realized his mistake. Jessica’s collision with the small of his back was unexpected but not terribly inconvenient. Normally he would have stepped forward slightly and shrugged her off, but the tub was in the way and he wasn’t sure he could get his foot up and over the edge quickly enough. The safest reaction seemed instead to fall forward and catch himself against the back wall of the bathroom. She was shoving him harder than he would have anticipated - he’d have to catch himself a little more gently than usual or else he might break through the tile. But after he had arrested his forward momentum, it should be simple enough to roll her off his back to one side, catch her as she fell, and end the game.
Kroger flung out his hands in front of him, tearing the curtain off the rod. It was only then that he was able to see the other half of the toilet plunger stuck to the back wall, jagged point sticking straight out in the approximate direction of his navel.
-
The bellow that accompanied the world’s largest splinter entering the skin above Kroger’s left hip shook everything in the room that wasn’t nailed down, including Jessica. She fell ungracefully off the broad back of her assailant and landed more or less upside down by his right foot. She rolled under the sink as he twisted around and swung wildly behind him. His fist cracked the sink over her head as she scrambled backward. She felt a flash of annoyance. It was only two days ago that she had discovered that the sink was close enough to the toilet that she could lean forward and spit into it without standing up, which had added an extra layer of convenience to brushing her teeth. Now it was broken.
That thought left her mind as a massive fist closed around her trailing foot. Her foot disappeared behind strong fingers, and she felt the bones compress painfully. She threw the other end of the toilet plunger at her attacker’s face as he started to turn it towards her, and the pressure relaxed marginally. She had soaped up generously before exiting the shower, and so when she grabbed the doorjamb and pulled as hard as she could, her foot came free. Then she was up and running for the door. She took the stairs two at a time and was out the front door and across the street before she had time to consider the social consequences of running naked through Cambridge just as the city was starting to wake up.
That thought was also short-lived, as she turned around to see her living room window explode outward in front of her attacker. He landed heavily on the ground behind her and looked up.
This was her first good look at the man who had come to kill her. She didn’t recognize him, but she hadn’t expected to - she didn’t know anyone that size. The face beneath his uncovered bald head was fairly young, and probably handsome enough in other circumstances. It was currently somewhat distorted by an ugly emotion which she interpreted as halfway between contempt and rage. He wore a black coat zipped up to his chin, covered with some kind of durable waterproof fabric. Beneath the coat were tailored slacks, newly sporting a dark stain just above the hip. Judging by the velocity with which he had just exited a second story window, she had to assume that the wound was primarily cosmetic. And then the time for evaluation was clearly over, because he was picking himself up to charge.
Nearby, Stephen Mason was opening his front door and picking up the morning paper. Jessica saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and dashed towards the Mason residence.
The situation now resembled a field test of a thousand recent psychology monographs on the inherent biases that govern our instant reaction to situations based on gender, clothing, social cues, and race.
When confronted by a naked, soapy, overweight, terrified latino woman, Mr. Mason stopped in his tracks and simply tried to articulate what he was seeing. Jessica shoved her way past him as he was stuttering ``... hairy, m-m-m-mexican'', and was well into his house before he even noticed the massive bald white man in the nice slacks charging towards him at full speed. In a weird mixture of courage and cowardice, Mr. Mason threw his newspaper at the man and then dove underneath his porch swing.
When Mrs. Mason saw Jessica charge through her kitchen in all her round, brown glory, she was holding a frying pan full of sizzling bacon. This she whipped around in between her and the crazy person dripping water on her linoleum. Jessica looked into her eyes, saw mostly hostility, and dodged left, up the stairs. Statistics are surprisingly sparse, but it does seem to generally be the case that naked women tend to get farther in public than men. When Kroger followed a few seconds later, Mrs. Mason was regretting her earlier hesitancy, and so despite his lack of nudity he received a pan-full of bacon grease in the chest, for which incivility Mrs. Mason received a rather hard shove that sent her up onto the kitchen counter.
Based on the commotion behind her, Jessica figured she had less than ten seconds before Kroger followed her up the stairs. She threw a bookcase down the stairs behind her to make it twelve. To the right was the master bedroom, To the left was Stevie Mason, the obese thirteen-year-old son of two rail-thin parents, standing at the door of his bedroom, barechested, with his mouth open, holding his pants up with one hand and holding onto his freshly washed t-shirt with the other.
Jessica grabbed his t-shirt, shoved him hard on the chest to get him out of the way, bounded across the room, threw open the window, and climbed out onto the roof. When Kroger arrived at the window fourteen seconds later, he saw Jessica taking off out of the driveway wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt, riding a stolen bicycle through the slush. He cursed, turned around, and stepped on Stevie Mason on the way back out to get his car.
-
Jessica was about two blocks down the road and starting to regret not grabbing some of Stevie Mason’s gym shorts when she heard a huge engine turn over. She glanced over her shoulder to see a low-slung black Mustang with half of the interior completely filled with large, angry psychopath. She downshifted and turned out of the street, into the Van Eyne’s lawn and through their flower bed. The Mustang quickly closed the original distance and leapt the curb just as she made it to the backyard and ducked under the swing set.
She had forgotten about the new fence. It was a short thing, only four feet high, but solid. When she had first moved to New England, she had wondered why all the fences were made out of rocks. Then she watched her landlord try to dig a hole for a new tree, and she understood. Some of the rocks from that excavation may well have contributed to her current obstacle.
She really had no idea what to do. The Mustang was coming up fast through the gardenias and there was no room to maneuver along the wall. Fortunately, while her mind was stuck her body just kept pedalling full-speed, and when she slammed into the wall she sort of automatically threw her hands out and vaulted across. Well, it was more of a flop than a vault. She would have liked for it to play out like the climactic scene in Free Willy, where the captive killer whale jumps majestically over an enclosing sand bar, gently raining cleansing ocean spray on that child actor, but it ended up more like what would have actually happened with a real orca, with the child actor crushed or eaten and the top third of the barrier demolished by the whale as it scraped its cetacean butt across the gravel and into the ocean. Not, in other words, an especially graceful maneuver. However, it did deliver her to the other side of the fence, where she scrambled on hands and knees to get away from the wall. She was anticipating a hail of rocks from the impact of the Mustang with the barrier.
To her surprise, however, she heard squealing breaks, a soft thump as the car came to rest against the stones, and a door swinging open. She scrambled to her feet and started running. She had cut through this yard on purpose - the T had a station just one more street over. Across the street and through an alleyway, she could see the entrance in the light of the rising sun. She glanced back to see Kroger's surprisingly lithe exit from the low-slung pursuit vehicle, and saw him more or less ignore the wall in his second long-legged step. He was moving fast for a wounded, garbage-truck-sized person.
But she was also moving fast, despite being built like a triple-scoop ice cream cone (coffee-flavored). The last vestiges of caring about odd looks from strangers had vanished by the second block of riding a ten-speed bicycle wearing nothing but a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, and so there was nothing to hold her back psychologically as she opened up into a full sprint across the road.
By sheer dumb luck she timed it correctly so that she just reached the other side as an early-morning cable guy drove past. David Waddel, full-time cable installation technician and part-time World of Warcraft Orc, was on pace for arriving 45 minutes prior to the window Comcast had given a sleepy family in Somerville when he came between Kroger and Jessica on a quiet residential street. The annoyed shove he received for his services moved his rear tires a full foot to the side and it took him until the next stop sign to get his van back under control. Feeling somewhat rattled, he spent the rest of the morning at a Dunkin' Donuts.
Meanwhile, Jessica was running underneath a clothesline which Kroger would temporarily wear as a waistline accessory a few seconds later. Like most people, Kroger was having a hard time processing what he was seeing. His hip was still sore, and so he wasn't interested in running faster than necessary. He had settled into an easy lope that should have caught him up to this diminutive, half-naked woman halfway down the alleyway, even with the interference of the cable van. What he saw instead was a steadily widening gap between himself and his unexpectedly quick quarry. He felt betrayed, as if the laws of physics and metabolism were trying to get away with something. Then he shook off the confusion and accelerated, the big bass drum beats of his footsteps increasing in tempo but still much less frequent than the rapid-fire rat-a-tat of Jessica's feet slapping the frozen pavement.
She hit the escalator at the top of the T station and bounded past an ancient man clinging to the left handrail. She tripped on her second bound and more or less rolled down sixteen steps, which hurt exactly as much as it sounds like it would. As she grabbed the handrail to pull herself up, she felt more than heard the impact of her oversized traveling companion with the top of the escalator.
The next part was the tricky part. She had worked it out while she was riding Stevie’s bike, and she thought it made sense. Of course, she was also spending a good portion of her attention at that time on rediscovering how to shift gears, so it was possible she had missed something important. Downstairs, a train was just pulling in.
Immediately after the escalator, the corridor took a sharp left turn, which made her temporarily out of sight for someone on the escalator. It was about ten feet from the turn to the first turnstile, and then a second escalator took people down to the main platform to catch the train. Jessica jumped over the turnstile - an adrenaline-fueled gymnastic act that she would be unable to explain under cross-examination - and then dove to the floor and crawled back to the corner where the turnstile barrier met the wall.
There was a crash as Kroger landed at the bottom of the steps, then two quick impacts as he covered the distance to the turnstiles. She clapped her hand over her mouth as that enormous back once more materialized in front of her. All he had to do was glance backward, and she would be out of ideas.
The barrier was not especially high, and she was hoping that only a small person would think of it as an adequate hiding place. The man-mountain took two more steps, then stopped and turned slightly. Her heart stopped momentarily. He was looking at the platform and at the train receiving its early-morning passengers. He hesitated for another second - a long time to hold her breath - then planted a hand on the railing and, eschewing the escalator, hopped over the edge to land on the lower level with a bang. A young man in a hoodie clapped. Jessica clambered back over the barrier and ran down the corridor to the opposite street exit, not sticking around to see if the man got on the train or not.
At the top of the exit escalator was a Starbucks. Next to the Starbucks was a narrow townhouse owned by an angry greek man named Henry. Next to Henry’s house was the local police precinct. It was now 7:30 AM. As Jessica pulled open the heavy wooden door, the clouds decided to further dampen the rising sunlight by sending down some light sleet.
Chapter 1: Monday, 6:00 AM. Cambridge, Massachusetts
The red solo cup splintered satisfyingly underneath Jessica’s right heel as she passed the door of the Final Club. Behind her the shattered red plastic dispersed into the gray snow like blood splatter at an HBO crime scene, and she allowed herself a small grin. Despite the pretentious names, hundreds of years of practice, and a generous infusion of inherited wealth, the members of Harvard’s all-male pseudo-fraternities couldn’t come up with a better container with which to intoxicate themselves and their female guests than the sad plastic chalice used by every other juvenile male organization in the country.
The sun had not yet technically risen, but the low gray clouds had started to transmit diffuse light from beyond the horizon, so that the spaces in between the streetlights started to lighten. Jessica ran harder as she reached the corner of Harvard Square, her footsteps annoying the tired beggars tucked against the red brick buildings in their sleeping bags and wool hats. She liked running at this hour of the morning partly because no one was watching.
She inevitably drew stares when she ran. She was short and round, which meant that when she paused at stoplights she received the usual encouraging smiles from people who assumed she was making another unsuccessful attempt at losing weight. She didn’t mind that so much. It was when she started moving that she drew more unusual kinds of attention.
Jessica liked to run fast, and her snowman-esque physique belied her true fitness. She had run every morning for the last six years, and although her waist had never lost so much as an inch, her muscles and lungs had risen to the challenge rather splendidly. This resulted in the astonishing sight of a young, solidly constructed woman of not much more than five feet in height appearing to sprint flat out from intersection to intersection. The looks this attracted were no longer of the typical there’s-another-chubby-woman-trying-to-lose-weight-bless-her-heart-there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I-so-I’ll-give-her-an-understanding-smile variety, but instead more of the I-don’t-understand-what-I’m-seeing-here-and-it-makes-me-nervous kind, paired with some unavoidable chuckles at the surprising way in which her torso swiveled to keep up with the frenetic pumping of her tiny legs.
So she ran in the early morning, when the undergraduates were sleeping off their alcohol, the graduate students were sleeping with their foreheads pressed against their desks, and working people were trying to convince themselves that health insurance and a mortgage payment were worth waking up for. She ran fast, and she ran far. For the first five years she had taken other people’s looks a little more seriously, and had always stopped after three or four miles to avoid the inevitable cardiac explosion they predicted on their faces. But for the last year, as she’d gotten used to running in the darkened pre-dawn, she had started to go farther and farther, pushing towards some unseen limit where she would no longer be able to keep sprinting. So far it hadn’t arrived.
Today she only passed one conscious onlooker - a man in his pajamas with a crying baby strapped to his chest, wearing that look of complete desperation that new parents usually try to hide in polite company. At this hour of the morning, it was clear that he was reconsidering the enthusiasm with which he had participated in bringing this small wet sack of miserable humanity into the world. His expression changed as she passed him, through what she’d come to recognize as the seven stages of watching Jessica run: 1) good for you, tiger; 2) wait, is she really moving that fast; 3) is there someone behind her; 4) is there a ghost behind her; 5) should I also be running; 6) I really don't understand what I'm seeing here; 7) am I about to witness cardiac arrest? There were actually three more stages which Jessica was unaware of because they took place after she passed: 8) relief that I didn’t witness cardiac arrest; 9) well isn’t it a strange world, and 10) I wonder if I can tell anyone about this without sounding insensitive.
Her internal odometer was somewhere around 11 miles - it’s hard to keep track of linear distance in Boston - when she arrived home. She paused for a moment, leaning against the front door of the small house that contained five other apartments, stretching her calves and waiting for the March chill to stop the sweating, then went inside.
Five minutes later, a large black shadow detached itself from where it had been waiting under the opposite porch, and stepped into the light. The faintly glowing clouds revealed a bald head on top of a heavy black coat, but the light was not yet bright enough to illuminate the eyes. In six long steps, the head and coat reached the front door. A large hand came out, grasped the door handle, and tore it off.
Six seconds later, two thousand six hundred and fifty miles away, Bob Young went into full panic.
-
Bob was not an especially early riser, but because they were separated by two time zones he ended up waking at roughly the same time as Jessica. The circuit he had installed on the door handle had triggered a small chirp from one of the monitors in his basement as Jessica had left for her run, then chirped again as she returned. The removal of the door handle caused a third chirp, which was unexpected enough for him to stand up from his chair and look over his main monitor at the screen displaying the stream from the webcam installed on the telephone pole opposite Jessica’s house. The door sensor transmitted a single bit over a landline, while the webcam was transmitting video over a wireless connection to the neighbors, so the images on the screen were a few seconds delayed relative to the chirp. This meant that Bob got a very clear view of a massive form completely blocking the doorway to Jessica’s house. He froze, halfway between sitting and standing, as the door handle came out of its accustomed place and flew more or less directly at the camera, shaking the telephone pole when it impacted a foot or two beneath the lens. The large figure hesitated for a moment, then bent its bald head under the doorway and disappeared into the house.
While his conscious mind had been completely frozen in disbelief, Bob’s well-trained subconscious had reached out for the landline at his desk with his right hand and placed his left index finger on a speed-dial number which he had never before used. He figured he had about thirty seconds for the man on the camera to climb the steps to Jessica’s apartment. Given the delay on the feed, a third of that time was already gone. If she answered on the second or third ring, he might be able to save her life. He kept his eye on the line to the sensor attached to the inner door and hoped she wasn’t already in the shower.
-
Jessica was in the shower when the call came through. Her new phone was waterproof, though, so she was also checking her email. Her phone didn’t recognize the number and she didn’t recognize the area code, which usually was a recipe for a telemarketing call. She was enjoying the idea of a waterproof phone, though, so she answered on the third ring.
``Hello?''
``You’re about to hear a fairly loud noise.''
``What?''
There was suddenly a bang from the front of her apartment. If it had happened twenty seconds ago, she might have mistook it for the furnace misfiring, which it did regularly. As it was, she found herself unusually interested in its source. “What was that?''
``That was the sound of a man named Kroger breaking into your house to kill you.''
Jessica did not know what to say to that. Bob could hear the shower running and guessed she was on the toilet letting the water warm up. ``Leave the shower on. He’ll hear it, assume you're in there, and take approximately two minutes to check the other rooms. No time to flush. Run.” Then he hung up. In his experience of making unsolicited calls with specific advice, the next three questions were ``What?” ``Who are you?” and ``How do I know you’re telling the truth?” and the answers to those were not particularly useful for saving someone’s life. Besides, extra talking on Jessica's end would just tip Kroger off. ``Betty Lou!” he yelled through the ceiling of the basement, “Kroger just showed up at her apartment!''
``What? Bobby, if he lays a finger on her head I swear to Darwin I’m going to end both of you sorry little armpit scratchers!''
``I believe it,'' Bob said under his breath.
-
Jessica stared blankly at the phone. What was that? Who was that person? How was she supposed to know if he was telling the truth? Her head snapped up as a floorboard creaked outside the bathroom door.
The bathroom was a tiny, poorly designed afterthought. Jessica was standing in an old tub against the back wall, beneath a tiny marbled window. Directly across from her was the narrow door leading out into the living room. On the left wall was the sink. Directly opposite the sink was the toilet, situated so that the door couldn't quite open out to ninety degrees without smacking into its porcelain lip. She pulled back the curtain distractedly, letting the water splash out onto the tile, and stared at the hint of a shadow in the uneven crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. For a moment everything seemed frozen - the darkness underneath the door, the impassive porcelain sink and toilet standing impotent sentry watch, and Jessica with the phone in one hand and the curtain in the other. The only thing giving the room a sense of time was the hissing and creaking of the ancient shower as it spat lukewarm water across half of Jessica's face.
Then the floorboard creaked again, and the shadow moved to the left, towards the rest of the apartment. Jessica inhaled unsteadily when she realized that she had not been breathing. Either this was a terrible joke, or there was someone in her house who wanted to kill her. Behaving as if there was a murderer in her house when there wasn’t one might make her feel silly. Behaving as if there wasn’t a murderer in her house when there was one would make her feel dead. Ultimately, not a hard call.
Jessica knew that she was at this point supposed to become emotional, but that part of her brain seemed to be moving rather slowly. She had never been very good at feeling what she was supposed to feel, anyway. The part of her brain that was spooling up now was the part of her brain that she used most often - the problem-solving part. Jessica wrote software for a living. She liked breaking down problems into logical sections and dealing with them creatively. And she liked puzzles, and riddles, and logical games. She liked her job because it allowed her to take messy, real-world problems and turn them into rational, solvable projects. The emotional part of her brain was starting to get interested in the quality and result of the new social interaction she was about to experience - presumably consisting mainly of an informal introduction followed by an unusually intense period of interpersonal conflict - but the logical part of her brain was more interested in how a short woman with no weapons might use the next sixty seconds to effectively prepare herself for a murder attempt, regardless of the outcome. And in Jessica's world, that logical puzzle was infinitely more interesting than the social and emotional ramifications of meeting her would-be murderer.
It was a challenging puzzle. She was too wide to fit through the tiny bathroom window, and the apartment was too small to hope that she wouldn't be intercepted on a sprint to the door. Her assets included shampoo, body lotion, a loofah, a toilet plunger, her smartphone, a plastic razor, and Old Spice deodorant. Not exactly an arsenal. But she knew that her assailant would come through the door. And he - or she (this is the twenty first century, after all) - would probably assume that Jessica was blissfully unaware of what was coming. She stared at the smooth, rounded end of the toilet plunger. If only it was a little sharper.
-
Kroger quickly came to the expected conclusion that the apartment was in fact empty outside of the bathroom. He opened the fridge and found about two dozen Mexican Coca-Colas in glass bottles and nothing else. He opened one, drained it, set it down, and cracked his knuckles. Then he walked to the bathroom door and tore off his third door handle of the morning. This one broke the living room window on its way out of the building. He placed his other hand on the remaining bulk of the door and shoved it open forcefully.
The bathroom was a small affair and the shower was directly across from the entrance. Kroger had opened the door hard enough that it slammed against the porcelain of the toilet bowl, a few annoying degrees short of ninety. He covered the distance to the curtain in one step.
-
Jessica was standing on top of the toilet, dripping wet and naked with the jagged broken end of the wooden toilet plunger in one hand, when the door handle vanished. It was like that old trick where someone pulls the tablecloth out from underneath the silverware - the rest of the door seemed more or less unaffected by the sudden disappearance of the handle. It was surprising, but not as surprising as how rapidly the door swung open afterwards, stopping a few inches from her face as it collided with the toilet. Cold air from the rest of the apartment rushed in, and right behind it came a pressure wave from an enormous human being displacing about a quarter of the air in the room. Jessica took a fraction of a second to take in the vast swath of black fabric covering the enormous torso, the bald head threatening to collide with the ceiling, and the massive hands coming up towards the shower curtain. So much for the informal introduction. Time for the interpersonal conflict. She placed one foot on the wall behind her, jumped into the air with the other, and drove her shoulder into the small of the man’s back with the whole force of her diminutive body.
-
Kroger heard the motion behind him and realized his mistake. Jessica’s collision with the small of his back was unexpected but not terribly inconvenient. Normally he would have stepped forward slightly and shrugged her off, but the tub was in the way and he wasn’t sure he could get his foot up and over the edge quickly enough. The safest reaction seemed instead to fall forward and catch himself against the back wall of the bathroom. She was shoving him harder than he would have anticipated - he’d have to catch himself a little more gently than usual or else he might break through the tile. But after he had arrested his forward momentum, it should be simple enough to roll her off his back to one side, catch her as she fell, and end the game.
Kroger flung out his hands in front of him, tearing the curtain off the rod. It was only then that he was able to see the other half of the toilet plunger stuck to the back wall, jagged point sticking straight out in the approximate direction of his navel.
-
The bellow that accompanied the world’s largest splinter entering the skin above Kroger’s left hip shook everything in the room that wasn’t nailed down, including Jessica. She fell ungracefully off the broad back of her assailant and landed more or less upside down by his right foot. She rolled under the sink as he twisted around and swung wildly behind him. His fist cracked the sink over her head as she scrambled backward. She felt a flash of annoyance. It was only two days ago that she had discovered that the sink was close enough to the toilet that she could lean forward and spit into it without standing up, which had added an extra layer of convenience to brushing her teeth. Now it was broken.
That thought left her mind as a massive fist closed around her trailing foot. Her foot disappeared behind strong fingers, and she felt the bones compress painfully. She threw the other end of the toilet plunger at her attacker’s face as he started to turn it towards her, and the pressure relaxed marginally. She had soaped up generously before exiting the shower, and so when she grabbed the doorjamb and pulled as hard as she could, her foot came free. Then she was up and running for the door. She took the stairs two at a time and was out the front door and across the street before she had time to consider the social consequences of running naked through Cambridge just as the city was starting to wake up.
That thought was also short-lived, as she turned around to see her living room window explode outward in front of her attacker. He landed heavily on the ground behind her and looked up.
This was her first good look at the man who had come to kill her. She didn’t recognize him, but she hadn’t expected to - she didn’t know anyone that size. The face beneath his uncovered bald head was fairly young, and probably handsome enough in other circumstances. It was currently somewhat distorted by an ugly emotion which she interpreted as halfway between contempt and rage. He wore a black coat zipped up to his chin, covered with some kind of durable waterproof fabric. Beneath the coat were tailored slacks, newly sporting a dark stain just above the hip. Judging by the velocity with which he had just exited a second story window, she had to assume that the wound was primarily cosmetic. And then the time for evaluation was clearly over, because he was picking himself up to charge.
Nearby, Stephen Mason was opening his front door and picking up the morning paper. Jessica saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and dashed towards the Mason residence.
The situation now resembled a field test of a thousand recent psychology monographs on the inherent biases that govern our instant reaction to situations based on gender, clothing, social cues, and race.
When confronted by a naked, soapy, overweight, terrified latino woman, Mr. Mason stopped in his tracks and simply tried to articulate what he was seeing. Jessica shoved her way past him as he was stuttering ``... hairy, m-m-m-mexican'', and was well into his house before he even noticed the massive bald white man in the nice slacks charging towards him at full speed. In a weird mixture of courage and cowardice, Mr. Mason threw his newspaper at the man and then dove underneath his porch swing.
When Mrs. Mason saw Jessica charge through her kitchen in all her round, brown glory, she was holding a frying pan full of sizzling bacon. This she whipped around in between her and the crazy person dripping water on her linoleum. Jessica looked into her eyes, saw mostly hostility, and dodged left, up the stairs. Statistics are surprisingly sparse, but it does seem to generally be the case that naked women tend to get farther in public than men. When Kroger followed a few seconds later, Mrs. Mason was regretting her earlier hesitancy, and so despite his lack of nudity he received a pan-full of bacon grease in the chest, for which incivility Mrs. Mason received a rather hard shove that sent her up onto the kitchen counter.
Based on the commotion behind her, Jessica figured she had less than ten seconds before Kroger followed her up the stairs. She threw a bookcase down the stairs behind her to make it twelve. To the right was the master bedroom, To the left was Stevie Mason, the obese thirteen-year-old son of two rail-thin parents, standing at the door of his bedroom, barechested, with his mouth open, holding his pants up with one hand and holding onto his freshly washed t-shirt with the other.
Jessica grabbed his t-shirt, shoved him hard on the chest to get him out of the way, bounded across the room, threw open the window, and climbed out onto the roof. When Kroger arrived at the window fourteen seconds later, he saw Jessica taking off out of the driveway wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt, riding a stolen bicycle through the slush. He cursed, turned around, and stepped on Stevie Mason on the way back out to get his car.
-
Jessica was about two blocks down the road and starting to regret not grabbing some of Stevie Mason’s gym shorts when she heard a huge engine turn over. She glanced over her shoulder to see a low-slung black Mustang with half of the interior completely filled with large, angry psychopath. She downshifted and turned out of the street, into the Van Eyne’s lawn and through their flower bed. The Mustang quickly closed the original distance and leapt the curb just as she made it to the backyard and ducked under the swing set.
She had forgotten about the new fence. It was a short thing, only four feet high, but solid. When she had first moved to New England, she had wondered why all the fences were made out of rocks. Then she watched her landlord try to dig a hole for a new tree, and she understood. Some of the rocks from that excavation may well have contributed to her current obstacle.
She really had no idea what to do. The Mustang was coming up fast through the gardenias and there was no room to maneuver along the wall. Fortunately, while her mind was stuck her body just kept pedalling full-speed, and when she slammed into the wall she sort of automatically threw her hands out and vaulted across. Well, it was more of a flop than a vault. She would have liked for it to play out like the climactic scene in Free Willy, where the captive killer whale jumps majestically over an enclosing sand bar, gently raining cleansing ocean spray on that child actor, but it ended up more like what would have actually happened with a real orca, with the child actor crushed or eaten and the top third of the barrier demolished by the whale as it scraped its cetacean butt across the gravel and into the ocean. Not, in other words, an especially graceful maneuver. However, it did deliver her to the other side of the fence, where she scrambled on hands and knees to get away from the wall. She was anticipating a hail of rocks from the impact of the Mustang with the barrier.
To her surprise, however, she heard squealing breaks, a soft thump as the car came to rest against the stones, and a door swinging open. She scrambled to her feet and started running. She had cut through this yard on purpose - the T had a station just one more street over. Across the street and through an alleyway, she could see the entrance in the light of the rising sun. She glanced back to see Kroger's surprisingly lithe exit from the low-slung pursuit vehicle, and saw him more or less ignore the wall in his second long-legged step. He was moving fast for a wounded, garbage-truck-sized person.
But she was also moving fast, despite being built like a triple-scoop ice cream cone (coffee-flavored). The last vestiges of caring about odd looks from strangers had vanished by the second block of riding a ten-speed bicycle wearing nothing but a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, and so there was nothing to hold her back psychologically as she opened up into a full sprint across the road.
By sheer dumb luck she timed it correctly so that she just reached the other side as an early-morning cable guy drove past. David Waddel, full-time cable installation technician and part-time World of Warcraft Orc, was on pace for arriving 45 minutes prior to the window Comcast had given a sleepy family in Somerville when he came between Kroger and Jessica on a quiet residential street. The annoyed shove he received for his services moved his rear tires a full foot to the side and it took him until the next stop sign to get his van back under control. Feeling somewhat rattled, he spent the rest of the morning at a Dunkin' Donuts.
Meanwhile, Jessica was running underneath a clothesline which Kroger would temporarily wear as a waistline accessory a few seconds later. Like most people, Kroger was having a hard time processing what he was seeing. His hip was still sore, and so he wasn't interested in running faster than necessary. He had settled into an easy lope that should have caught him up to this diminutive, half-naked woman halfway down the alleyway, even with the interference of the cable van. What he saw instead was a steadily widening gap between himself and his unexpectedly quick quarry. He felt betrayed, as if the laws of physics and metabolism were trying to get away with something. Then he shook off the confusion and accelerated, the big bass drum beats of his footsteps increasing in tempo but still much less frequent than the rapid-fire rat-a-tat of Jessica's feet slapping the frozen pavement.
She hit the escalator at the top of the T station and bounded past an ancient man clinging to the left handrail. She tripped on her second bound and more or less rolled down sixteen steps, which hurt exactly as much as it sounds like it would. As she grabbed the handrail to pull herself up, she felt more than heard the impact of her oversized traveling companion with the top of the escalator.
The next part was the tricky part. She had worked it out while she was riding Stevie’s bike, and she thought it made sense. Of course, she was also spending a good portion of her attention at that time on rediscovering how to shift gears, so it was possible she had missed something important. Downstairs, a train was just pulling in.
Immediately after the escalator, the corridor took a sharp left turn, which made her temporarily out of sight for someone on the escalator. It was about ten feet from the turn to the first turnstile, and then a second escalator took people down to the main platform to catch the train. Jessica jumped over the turnstile - an adrenaline-fueled gymnastic act that she would be unable to explain under cross-examination - and then dove to the floor and crawled back to the corner where the turnstile barrier met the wall.
There was a crash as Kroger landed at the bottom of the steps, then two quick impacts as he covered the distance to the turnstiles. She clapped her hand over her mouth as that enormous back once more materialized in front of her. All he had to do was glance backward, and she would be out of ideas.
The barrier was not especially high, and she was hoping that only a small person would think of it as an adequate hiding place. The man-mountain took two more steps, then stopped and turned slightly. Her heart stopped momentarily. He was looking at the platform and at the train receiving its early-morning passengers. He hesitated for another second - a long time to hold her breath - then planted a hand on the railing and, eschewing the escalator, hopped over the edge to land on the lower level with a bang. A young man in a hoodie clapped. Jessica clambered back over the barrier and ran down the corridor to the opposite street exit, not sticking around to see if the man got on the train or not.
At the top of the exit escalator was a Starbucks. Next to the Starbucks was a narrow townhouse owned by an angry greek man named Henry. Next to Henry’s house was the local police precinct. It was now 7:30 AM. As Jessica pulled open the heavy wooden door, the clouds decided to further dampen the rising sunlight by sending down some light sleet.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The Grass is Always More Constitutional on the Minority Side
I was walking in Jackson Hole this past summer, and as I came down the trail I passed by a pair of healthy middle-aged ladies, hiking buddies, who were discussing some recent political development. The only definite phrase I remember catching was along the lines of, "so it's not actually Obama's fault", or perhaps it was "so Obama's actually doing a really good job on [blank]". Even though I was soon out of earshot, I feel it would not be a misrepresentation to say that this was part of a larger apologetic defense of our current President - using apologetic here in the more formal sense. Her companion seemed sympathetic, so I imagine that the discourse was probably more affirmative than plaintive.
The moment must seem ordinary to most folks - I imagine that thousands of such conversations are occurring all over the country, particularly among Democrats who are preparing to rally around President Obama this November. In conversations like these, supporters step back from the imperfections of a human presidency and remind themselves of what has gone right under the current executive's leadership. Faithful Democratic supporters need to remind themselves that whatever the shortcomings of the President, real or imagined, he is infinitely preferable to an alternative from across the political aisle - that when he errs, he errs perhaps only in magnitude, and not in direction. Yes, it is a very ordinary moment - but, despite the everyday quality of it, it struck me as a revelation.
The content of that revelation was simple. I realized, for the first time, that these conversations happened among Democrats. You see, I had come of age politically around the time of the Bush re-election campaign, and I had been surrounded by similar conversations among Republicans. The economy was struggling, yes, but it showed signs of turning around. Even if it was struggling, it was more the fault of 9/11 than of the President. The Iraq war seemed to be going poorly, true, but it also seemed unwise to swap out a commander in chief in the middle of an unresolved conflict. George might have invented a few words here and there, but he got the heart of the message right even if he muddled the phrasing. And, simple as I was, I thought that these kinds of apologetics were somehow uniquely Republican. On the other side of the aisle, I could imagine the uncompromising Democrats laughing at these attempts to powder out the blemishes of our chosen favorite. Wherever my friends and family added a "but", I could see them mercilessly shredding the rest of the sentence. "Yes, the economy has struggled, but-" "But nothing! It's struggled! It's Bush's fault! Throw him out!" Or something like that.
But of course, once your own fellow is in the driver's seat, you realize he's human, and that he has to work with an often-gridlocked congress, and that whatever he might have promised you in his election speeches, he can't do any more than his best - and sometimes it seems he doesn't even do that. So now it is the Democrat's turn to say "Yes, unemployment is high, but it's stopped growing recently and is even starting to shrink a little," and "Yes, Afghanistan's a mess, but we'll get out of it soon," and "Yes, the health-care reform is a compromise, but it's certainly better than what we had before." And I'm certain that most of these are reasonable, well-founded observations. I'm certain that they have as much merit as the ones from the Republican side in 2004 - maybe more. But my revelation wasn't that the arguments are strong or weak - it's that they are there at all. Growing up in the deeply conservative land of Utah, I often wondered if perhaps the Republicans lived only by feeding themselves justifications, and that Democrats were folks who bravely abandoned compromise to live on the side of true ideals. Since there are on average no Democrats elected to public office in Utah, it was hard to find a counter-example to those stereotypes. Utah Democrats are unfortunate in that they are almost completely disenfranchised - to win as a Democrat in Utah means overcoming the fact that about a third of the electorate is probably going to ignore the campaign and vote straight Republican (an exaggeration, I hope, but that's the feeling you sometimes get). But Utah Democrats are fortunate in that, as the defeated-but-nevertheless-voting minority, they get to look at all the ugliness of state politics and say "we told you so!" with palpable superiority and ironclad hindsight. So I just assumed that we picked Republicans because we were used to it, then apologized for them in the light of Democratic evangelism, holding onto them more out of habit than out of principle.
But now it's the Republicans turn to cut off the end of sentences: "Food stamps are at record distribution levels, but-" "But nothing! Throw the bums out!" And after I'd observed that little incident, I suddenly became aware of a whole bunch of new examples of how the knife cuts both ways. A few of them follow:
The Supreme Court: I always assumed that disrespect for the supreme court, and suspicion of its unelected justices laying down sweeping edicts on the borders of the law, was the territory of conservatives only. More than thirty years later, a lot of conservatives are still mad about Roe v. Wade, and by extension Griswold v. Connecticut. But, thanks to my new-found hobby of watching the Colbert report, I've found out that Democrats hate the Supreme Court too, for things like Citizens United! I've actually heard the words "five unelected Justices" from a liberal source now, a characterization of the court that I thought came only from deep in the conservative camp. Turns out that, yes, the Constitution is a living document, and it can live in ways that upset both sides of the political divide.
Civil Liberties: I assumed that it was a uniquely Republican flaw to value safety so much that you would sacrifice sacred civil rights on the altar of the Patriot Act. But even though the Republicans are still staunchly on the side of giving the terrorists our freedoms to keep them from taking our lives, I've found out from the quirky Ron Paul campaign that even our former constitutional-law-professor President will happily sign noxious little bills like the National Defense Authorization Act into law. This one goes beyond the Patriot Act - which is saying something - to allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial and without charges. With vision like that from both sides of the aisle, I'm sure the war on terrorism will be over in a few months. And our Attorney General just explained recently how a President can kill American citizens without trial as long as the President happens to be a nice, reasonable chap like our current fearless leader. One Barack is easily worth a dozen jurors, wouldn't you agree?
Fighting Other People's Wars: In his second presidential debate against Al Gore back in 2000, George Bush said, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building". He then proceeded to try and build at least two after 9/11 changed his mind. Of course, the Democrats' record here is spotless - unless you count Libya. Whoops. A vastly different order of magnitude, but the same basic thesis.
Raising the National Debt: President Bush set records with the sheer number of dollars we raised the debt by under his term. But our current President, despite a campaign promise to cut the deficit in half ... well, you know the rest.
Now, I hope I'm not coming off as overly critical here. I'm not trying to say that Obama is the Democratic reincarnation of George Bush - far from it. What I'm trying to express is the realization - shocking to me in its simplicity - that no politicians are perfect, and that no party exactly matches what I personally believe is morally right; and the further realization that party platforms and party candidates are always compromises - that people are always more or less dissatisfied with the final result. The difference between voting for an incumbent and voting for a challenger is not the difference between being completely content with what your incumbent's done or being blindly confident that the challenger will do all he promises to do; the difference is simply whether you think you'll be less disappointed with what you think the challenger can actually do than you are with what the incumbent's actually done, or vice versa. Certainly not the stirring anthem that moves people to political fervor, but, I think, true nonetheless. Compromise is sometimes a cynical and depressing thing, but I don't know how democracy can work without it, and so I'm grateful to it. And it's humbling, and a little liberating, to know that both sides are human enough to need it. As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". And I agree.
The moment must seem ordinary to most folks - I imagine that thousands of such conversations are occurring all over the country, particularly among Democrats who are preparing to rally around President Obama this November. In conversations like these, supporters step back from the imperfections of a human presidency and remind themselves of what has gone right under the current executive's leadership. Faithful Democratic supporters need to remind themselves that whatever the shortcomings of the President, real or imagined, he is infinitely preferable to an alternative from across the political aisle - that when he errs, he errs perhaps only in magnitude, and not in direction. Yes, it is a very ordinary moment - but, despite the everyday quality of it, it struck me as a revelation.
The content of that revelation was simple. I realized, for the first time, that these conversations happened among Democrats. You see, I had come of age politically around the time of the Bush re-election campaign, and I had been surrounded by similar conversations among Republicans. The economy was struggling, yes, but it showed signs of turning around. Even if it was struggling, it was more the fault of 9/11 than of the President. The Iraq war seemed to be going poorly, true, but it also seemed unwise to swap out a commander in chief in the middle of an unresolved conflict. George might have invented a few words here and there, but he got the heart of the message right even if he muddled the phrasing. And, simple as I was, I thought that these kinds of apologetics were somehow uniquely Republican. On the other side of the aisle, I could imagine the uncompromising Democrats laughing at these attempts to powder out the blemishes of our chosen favorite. Wherever my friends and family added a "but", I could see them mercilessly shredding the rest of the sentence. "Yes, the economy has struggled, but-" "But nothing! It's struggled! It's Bush's fault! Throw him out!" Or something like that.
But of course, once your own fellow is in the driver's seat, you realize he's human, and that he has to work with an often-gridlocked congress, and that whatever he might have promised you in his election speeches, he can't do any more than his best - and sometimes it seems he doesn't even do that. So now it is the Democrat's turn to say "Yes, unemployment is high, but it's stopped growing recently and is even starting to shrink a little," and "Yes, Afghanistan's a mess, but we'll get out of it soon," and "Yes, the health-care reform is a compromise, but it's certainly better than what we had before." And I'm certain that most of these are reasonable, well-founded observations. I'm certain that they have as much merit as the ones from the Republican side in 2004 - maybe more. But my revelation wasn't that the arguments are strong or weak - it's that they are there at all. Growing up in the deeply conservative land of Utah, I often wondered if perhaps the Republicans lived only by feeding themselves justifications, and that Democrats were folks who bravely abandoned compromise to live on the side of true ideals. Since there are on average no Democrats elected to public office in Utah, it was hard to find a counter-example to those stereotypes. Utah Democrats are unfortunate in that they are almost completely disenfranchised - to win as a Democrat in Utah means overcoming the fact that about a third of the electorate is probably going to ignore the campaign and vote straight Republican (an exaggeration, I hope, but that's the feeling you sometimes get). But Utah Democrats are fortunate in that, as the defeated-but-nevertheless-voting minority, they get to look at all the ugliness of state politics and say "we told you so!" with palpable superiority and ironclad hindsight. So I just assumed that we picked Republicans because we were used to it, then apologized for them in the light of Democratic evangelism, holding onto them more out of habit than out of principle.
But now it's the Republicans turn to cut off the end of sentences: "Food stamps are at record distribution levels, but-" "But nothing! Throw the bums out!" And after I'd observed that little incident, I suddenly became aware of a whole bunch of new examples of how the knife cuts both ways. A few of them follow:
The Supreme Court: I always assumed that disrespect for the supreme court, and suspicion of its unelected justices laying down sweeping edicts on the borders of the law, was the territory of conservatives only. More than thirty years later, a lot of conservatives are still mad about Roe v. Wade, and by extension Griswold v. Connecticut. But, thanks to my new-found hobby of watching the Colbert report, I've found out that Democrats hate the Supreme Court too, for things like Citizens United! I've actually heard the words "five unelected Justices" from a liberal source now, a characterization of the court that I thought came only from deep in the conservative camp. Turns out that, yes, the Constitution is a living document, and it can live in ways that upset both sides of the political divide.
Civil Liberties: I assumed that it was a uniquely Republican flaw to value safety so much that you would sacrifice sacred civil rights on the altar of the Patriot Act. But even though the Republicans are still staunchly on the side of giving the terrorists our freedoms to keep them from taking our lives, I've found out from the quirky Ron Paul campaign that even our former constitutional-law-professor President will happily sign noxious little bills like the National Defense Authorization Act into law. This one goes beyond the Patriot Act - which is saying something - to allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial and without charges. With vision like that from both sides of the aisle, I'm sure the war on terrorism will be over in a few months. And our Attorney General just explained recently how a President can kill American citizens without trial as long as the President happens to be a nice, reasonable chap like our current fearless leader. One Barack is easily worth a dozen jurors, wouldn't you agree?
Fighting Other People's Wars: In his second presidential debate against Al Gore back in 2000, George Bush said, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building". He then proceeded to try and build at least two after 9/11 changed his mind. Of course, the Democrats' record here is spotless - unless you count Libya. Whoops. A vastly different order of magnitude, but the same basic thesis.
Raising the National Debt: President Bush set records with the sheer number of dollars we raised the debt by under his term. But our current President, despite a campaign promise to cut the deficit in half ... well, you know the rest.
Now, I hope I'm not coming off as overly critical here. I'm not trying to say that Obama is the Democratic reincarnation of George Bush - far from it. What I'm trying to express is the realization - shocking to me in its simplicity - that no politicians are perfect, and that no party exactly matches what I personally believe is morally right; and the further realization that party platforms and party candidates are always compromises - that people are always more or less dissatisfied with the final result. The difference between voting for an incumbent and voting for a challenger is not the difference between being completely content with what your incumbent's done or being blindly confident that the challenger will do all he promises to do; the difference is simply whether you think you'll be less disappointed with what you think the challenger can actually do than you are with what the incumbent's actually done, or vice versa. Certainly not the stirring anthem that moves people to political fervor, but, I think, true nonetheless. Compromise is sometimes a cynical and depressing thing, but I don't know how democracy can work without it, and so I'm grateful to it. And it's humbling, and a little liberating, to know that both sides are human enough to need it. As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". And I agree.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
How to Balance the Budget
So, America has an enormous national debt. And I don't know of anyone who thinks it's a good thing. I also think most people believe that fixing it lies in the hands of those wacky congressmen - and certainly they exert a direct influence by setting the budget and taking out loans. But both parties know that they survive by handing out money - in token sums to the poor, in defense contracts to the rich, and in countless other ways. And so, as a practical matter, I am highly skeptical of a voluntary congressional deficit reduction.
But, does it really have to be their job? If we are really put out by the national debt, I think we can go ahead and balance it ourselves. Here's how.
1. Make more money. If you make more money, you pay more taxes. Even though rich people can actually get away with paying a relatively low rate - Mitt Romney only paid 15% on his earnings last year - they still pay, in terms of sheer volume of money, a lot more taxes than poorer people do. 15% of what Mitt Romney makes in a year is a great deal more than my entire income over the last ten years. The rich pay for almost everything the federal government does. There's some folks in Congress and the White House who want to boost the budget by taxing the rich more, but while they're arguing about it we could just as easily balance the budget if more of us became rich. Two millionaires paying 15% each is just as much revenue for the nation as one millionaire paying 30%. And, as they say, two millionaires are better than one. If Americans made more money, we'd pay more taxes, and we'd be closer to balancing the budget. As I understand it, that's essentially how Clinton balanced the budget - although some of the money we paid it off with flew away again with the dot-com bust.
2. Pay Social Security taxes, but never collect. The baby boomers are going to retire in a minute here, and they didn't have nearly as many kids as their parents did, meaning that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are about to go incredibly bankrupt. Social Security, for anyone more than a decade or two from retirement, is, as I understand it, essentially a program whereby we temporarily finance the boomer generation's retirement at the expense of our own. As a practical matter, I think we'll need to have our own savings on top of what we pay into the program, and not count on Social Security being anything like secure. And if balancing the budget is your priority, then donating to Social Security and not asking for a return is one way of putting off that particular budget crisis by just a little bit longer.
I am, of course, being a little facetious here. I hope that social security can be gently defused before it blows up in our faces, and I can think of a lot of things I'm glad I spend my time doing that definitely don't make me any money. But it's just struck me recently that politicians like to take a great deal of credit for the economy and the budget, and I'm not sure they really deserve it. I'm starting to like those folks who say things might be better if the government stopped intervening, but I'm also still hesitant to say that government bears the biggest blame for things like our recession. I think we the people are the deciding factor. In terms of economic policy, our most important votes are cast by our actions. When we act to add value to the world, the economy is better off for it. And as long as we have our priorities in line, I think we're better off for it as well.
But, does it really have to be their job? If we are really put out by the national debt, I think we can go ahead and balance it ourselves. Here's how.
1. Make more money. If you make more money, you pay more taxes. Even though rich people can actually get away with paying a relatively low rate - Mitt Romney only paid 15% on his earnings last year - they still pay, in terms of sheer volume of money, a lot more taxes than poorer people do. 15% of what Mitt Romney makes in a year is a great deal more than my entire income over the last ten years. The rich pay for almost everything the federal government does. There's some folks in Congress and the White House who want to boost the budget by taxing the rich more, but while they're arguing about it we could just as easily balance the budget if more of us became rich. Two millionaires paying 15% each is just as much revenue for the nation as one millionaire paying 30%. And, as they say, two millionaires are better than one. If Americans made more money, we'd pay more taxes, and we'd be closer to balancing the budget. As I understand it, that's essentially how Clinton balanced the budget - although some of the money we paid it off with flew away again with the dot-com bust.
2. Pay Social Security taxes, but never collect. The baby boomers are going to retire in a minute here, and they didn't have nearly as many kids as their parents did, meaning that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are about to go incredibly bankrupt. Social Security, for anyone more than a decade or two from retirement, is, as I understand it, essentially a program whereby we temporarily finance the boomer generation's retirement at the expense of our own. As a practical matter, I think we'll need to have our own savings on top of what we pay into the program, and not count on Social Security being anything like secure. And if balancing the budget is your priority, then donating to Social Security and not asking for a return is one way of putting off that particular budget crisis by just a little bit longer.
I am, of course, being a little facetious here. I hope that social security can be gently defused before it blows up in our faces, and I can think of a lot of things I'm glad I spend my time doing that definitely don't make me any money. But it's just struck me recently that politicians like to take a great deal of credit for the economy and the budget, and I'm not sure they really deserve it. I'm starting to like those folks who say things might be better if the government stopped intervening, but I'm also still hesitant to say that government bears the biggest blame for things like our recession. I think we the people are the deciding factor. In terms of economic policy, our most important votes are cast by our actions. When we act to add value to the world, the economy is better off for it. And as long as we have our priorities in line, I think we're better off for it as well.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Knowing when to jump - Part 2
I think my point can be illustrated with a simple example. In my opinion, the most solid branch of science is physics, and within physics, there are few things as practically useful as the laws of motion. As long as velocities are well below the speed of light and gravity isn't tearing holes in the time-space continuum, they are as well understood and as thoroughly proven as any piece of human knowledge in the sciences.
So now take a simple pendulum - a weight swinging back and forth with no forces acting on it except gravity - like a grandfather clock. This is a classic problem from almost all introductory physics classes, and with a little geometry and a straightforward application of Newton's laws, the problem can be described very precisely with a few equations. Make some very simple assumptions based on a relatively small swing length, and you can accurately predict the motion of a pendulum for essentially ... forever. And if you actually swing a pendulum - voila! It does what you expect it to. Even for large angles, you can figure it out with enough time and trigonometry (as Michael Bolton sings, "When love puts you through the fire/ When love puts you to the test / nothing heals a broken heart like time, love and trigonometry").
But here's where it gets interesting. It turns out that if you hang a second pendulum off the first, and give it a bit swing, the problem no longer has a nice solution. We can't write down a formula for it. If you have a computer, you can fake it pretty well, but you realize that it's extremely sensitive to the slightest difference in getting started - really small changes in the starting angle or speed can lead to absolutely ridiculous, off-the-chain differences in the behavior of the pendulum ... here's a good link if you want to check this out for yourself: http://www.myphysicslab.com/dbl_pendulum.html. Pull it back and give it a big starting angle, and watch the craziness.
It's a good example of a larger principle: science is great at breaking stuff down into parts and explaining the parts really well, but when things start getting put together into systems, predictions break down. Effects like this are the reason your weatherman always manages to be wrong when he tries to predict rain a week from now, even though we have huge amounts of data and experience in predicting the weather.
Similarly, modern medicine does a great job of analyzing individual parts of the body and elements of your health, but when you slap it all together into a human being, suddenly things aren't so clear. That's part of the reason why there's a new diet out every year that works for some people, at least temporarily. It's also a reason that some Chinese medicines produce results that we don't understand. It's not that there's something magic going on - it's just that the system is way too big and complicated for us to understand precisely. Holistic medicine takes a wild guess, and sometimes it works. Scientific medicine doesn't do as much guessing, but that also means it just can't deal with systems of a certain complexity.
And now we come to economics. Economics tries to put equations on the behavior of people. This is like meteorologists trying to predict rain, except that all of the rain droplets are irrational free agents and one of them might be related to Chuck Norris. Basically, there's a really good reason why it gets the 'social' disclaimer in front of its 'science'. If physics can't predict the exact behavior of two pendulums, how can economics predict the behavior of two countries?
Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying we should throw up our hands and give up the study of money and history and psychology and statistics. I think these tools give us valuable insights, and that they do gradually approach the truth about what's going on in the world, and they deserve our best efforts. But what I am saying is that we're not there yet, and I don't see us getting there in my lifetime. Economics won't be able to tell me who to vote for, or which political party actually knows how to fix the country, or a surefire way to make a million dollars.
But, on the other hand, I'm not going to sit around paralyzed - I only get one shot at this thing called life! Yes, I don't know for sure what's right and what's wrong. Yes, even my beloved sciences are all too often inadequate to answer the most important questions in my life. Yes, all this uncertainty means I could be making huge and costly mistakes in the way I live, work, and vote. But I think that being alive is itself a call to action. I think we're put here to do things. When it comes down to it, sometimes you have to make up your mind and act on your best belief, because the rewards of doing the right thing outweigh the risks of going wrong. Sometimes, you find that your path leads you off what looks like a cliff, but you can't go back, and you can't stand still. In short, sometimes you need - to jump!
In a deep, fundamental way, life is a leap of faith. And if I had to define wisdom, I think I would simply call it ...
Knowing when to jump. :)
So now take a simple pendulum - a weight swinging back and forth with no forces acting on it except gravity - like a grandfather clock. This is a classic problem from almost all introductory physics classes, and with a little geometry and a straightforward application of Newton's laws, the problem can be described very precisely with a few equations. Make some very simple assumptions based on a relatively small swing length, and you can accurately predict the motion of a pendulum for essentially ... forever. And if you actually swing a pendulum - voila! It does what you expect it to. Even for large angles, you can figure it out with enough time and trigonometry (as Michael Bolton sings, "When love puts you through the fire/ When love puts you to the test / nothing heals a broken heart like time, love and trigonometry").
But here's where it gets interesting. It turns out that if you hang a second pendulum off the first, and give it a bit swing, the problem no longer has a nice solution. We can't write down a formula for it. If you have a computer, you can fake it pretty well, but you realize that it's extremely sensitive to the slightest difference in getting started - really small changes in the starting angle or speed can lead to absolutely ridiculous, off-the-chain differences in the behavior of the pendulum ... here's a good link if you want to check this out for yourself: http://www.myphysicslab.com/dbl_pendulum.html. Pull it back and give it a big starting angle, and watch the craziness.
It's a good example of a larger principle: science is great at breaking stuff down into parts and explaining the parts really well, but when things start getting put together into systems, predictions break down. Effects like this are the reason your weatherman always manages to be wrong when he tries to predict rain a week from now, even though we have huge amounts of data and experience in predicting the weather.
Similarly, modern medicine does a great job of analyzing individual parts of the body and elements of your health, but when you slap it all together into a human being, suddenly things aren't so clear. That's part of the reason why there's a new diet out every year that works for some people, at least temporarily. It's also a reason that some Chinese medicines produce results that we don't understand. It's not that there's something magic going on - it's just that the system is way too big and complicated for us to understand precisely. Holistic medicine takes a wild guess, and sometimes it works. Scientific medicine doesn't do as much guessing, but that also means it just can't deal with systems of a certain complexity.
And now we come to economics. Economics tries to put equations on the behavior of people. This is like meteorologists trying to predict rain, except that all of the rain droplets are irrational free agents and one of them might be related to Chuck Norris. Basically, there's a really good reason why it gets the 'social' disclaimer in front of its 'science'. If physics can't predict the exact behavior of two pendulums, how can economics predict the behavior of two countries?
Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying we should throw up our hands and give up the study of money and history and psychology and statistics. I think these tools give us valuable insights, and that they do gradually approach the truth about what's going on in the world, and they deserve our best efforts. But what I am saying is that we're not there yet, and I don't see us getting there in my lifetime. Economics won't be able to tell me who to vote for, or which political party actually knows how to fix the country, or a surefire way to make a million dollars.
But, on the other hand, I'm not going to sit around paralyzed - I only get one shot at this thing called life! Yes, I don't know for sure what's right and what's wrong. Yes, even my beloved sciences are all too often inadequate to answer the most important questions in my life. Yes, all this uncertainty means I could be making huge and costly mistakes in the way I live, work, and vote. But I think that being alive is itself a call to action. I think we're put here to do things. When it comes down to it, sometimes you have to make up your mind and act on your best belief, because the rewards of doing the right thing outweigh the risks of going wrong. Sometimes, you find that your path leads you off what looks like a cliff, but you can't go back, and you can't stand still. In short, sometimes you need - to jump!
In a deep, fundamental way, life is a leap of faith. And if I had to define wisdom, I think I would simply call it ...
Knowing when to jump. :)
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