Fans, Freedom, and Frustration

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a "Bono Moment" in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2's lead singer. Check it out and come back here. Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation. he may be being a fan, but he hasn't lost his mind. The female is being...a groupie, I guess. Though the groupies I've met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it. In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things. The fan reaction---mindless adulation bordering on deification---looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion. Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant. You can see the same thing in politics. To a lesser degree with less public personalities---writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there's a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies...) and other creative types---but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives. I've never had this happen to me. I'm not sure if I'm grateful or resentful---having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don't know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing. But it's appealing the same way porn is---something most people, if they're at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over. I know I would not find it very attractive now. When I was twenty-five? You betcha. Bring 'em on. But if I'd had that then I think I'm fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly. I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person---emphasis on Person---and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after. (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can't provide.) But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art. The two are inextricably linked. Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating. The notion that the talent "arrives" and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it's not one I'm particularly in sympathy with---it all happens in my brain, it's definitely mine---but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true. Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work. There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it's done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being. To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising. For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that. But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner. A prisoner of other people's expectations. Those expectations always play a part in anyone's life, but certain aspects---the most artificial ones---get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration. Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female. No, he doesn't stop being Bono, but it's almost as if he says "Oh, it's time to do this sort of thing now" as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk. Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she's feeling right then is her's and to claim it is artificial is wrong. Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she's In The Moment, the emotions are real. If he'd ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan's part. [more . . . ]

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Court reporters and multitasking

If you are one of those people who finds it difficult to multitask (I am one of those), you might appreciate this story involving court reporters. I work as a lawyer during the day, and quite often I need to take depositions, which are reported in real time by court reporters who use a special keyboard to take down every word of the deposition. The best court reporters are truly incredible to watch. To be a court reporter, you need to take down at least 200 words per minute without mistakes. You would think that trying to take down every word spoken by everyone in a room would completely occupy your working memory, but good court reporters can do their work proficiently with mental processing capacity to spare. Last week I spent an entire day taking depositions. After the depositions were finished, I asked the court reporter what she was daydreaming about. She smiled, because she knows that experienced court reporters are perfectly capable of daydreaming about such things as grocery shopping or going to the beach at the same time that they are taking down every syllable of every word spoken in the room. I asked this particular court reporter how often she has to go back and look at her transcript to see what was being said, because she was thinking about something else at the time she was taking down the testimony. She told me that she was once working for a judge who was going to sentence a man convicted of murder. The big question that day was whether the man would be put to death or whether he would get a life sentence. This court reporter was assigned to preserve all of the court proceedings regarding this momentous sentencing. After she was done taking down the testimony, and after she left the courtroom, someone asked her whether the judge sentenced the accused to death. This woman hesitated before replying that she did not know, even though she was a court reporter. To find out, she went back to her tape (the strip of paper on which the court reporter's keyboard prints out the testimony), and looked for the critical part. She found out that the judge had actually sentenced the man to death, but she had no memory of this. I asked her whether she is ever asked to read back testimony during a court proceeding or deposition at a time where she became nervous that she might not have been accurately taking down the testimony. She stated that this never happens, and that she is always confident that she's taking down the testimony accurately. If something starts going wrong, her full consciousness kicks in and she deals with the unusual situation fully aware. She has never been caught not taking down the testimony accurately. I find it pretty amazing that someone could have their working memory so thoroughly occupied in the linguistic sense, and yet be able to think about other things. It's even more amazing that when the court reporters daydream or think, they are often doubly-employing their linguistic abilities. It just seems like this would be impossible, but it's commonplace. Most of the court reporters today use a special stenographic keyboard, but there are a few who speak into something that looks like a muzzle. They hear the testimony in the courtroom with their own ears and simultaneously speak those words into this muzzle-device which is recorded by a tape recorder. In short, they "shadow" the testimony with their own voice. Later, someone types out that the court reporter's words into a transcript. I've spoken to some of these muzzle-device court reporters over the years, and they to tell me that they are able to think about other things were daydream while they are taking down the testimony. If you are wondering why we even have court reporters, that would be a good question. The main advantage is that when you have a court reporter, you have a person who is in a position to swear to the accuracy of the transcript, indicating who said exactly what. A tape recorder would simply record the sounds, and might not accurately pick up the exact words that were being spoken (for instance, because someone is mumbling or gesturing). When these sorts of things happen at a deposition, human court reporters ask the witness to speak up or to state their testimony in words rather than gesturing. This makes for a more accurate and more readable transcript. That said, some courtrooms are now employing tape recorders in lieu of court reporters.

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What we need to do differently when we talk politics

To the extent that society can be understood as a big family, psychologist John Gottman has important suggestions for improving our communications. Based on his track record, Gottman is someone to whom all of us should carefully listen. His techniques have allowed him to predict with 90% accuracy which newly marriage couples will still be married six years later. Gottman describes many of his techniques in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, a 1999 book that has enriched the lives of countless married couples trying to get back on track. In this book, he demonstrates that there is no better way to destroy a working relationship than to employ the following four techniques, which he labels “the Four Horsemen”:

A) Attacking another person's character or personality; B) Showing contempt through such things as sneering, sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eye-rolling, mockery and hostile humor. C) Defensiveness that proclaims that “The problem isn’t me, it’s you.” And D) Stonewalling: tuning out completely.
When I read this list, it struck me that these four techniques precisely describe the state of political dialogue in this country. These are also the techniques by many of the people who conduct interviews in the media. Think, for example, of a typical Bill O'Reilly interview, though O'Reilly is merely one of the more egregious examples. Many news programs expect and encourage conflict in an attempt to keep the audience mesmerized so that the network can sell more advertisements. The resulting conflict commonly manifests itself through these four above-mentioned techniques. It is critically important to note that none of these techniques is necessary, no matter who the other person is and no matter what he or she is saying. Smart and disciplined people don't stoop to these techniques. Period. Here's another important cause of communication failure: In functional relationships, the parties communicate at least five times as many positive ideas as negative ideas to one another. Consider that the ratio of positive to negative in public forums is probably the reverse of the minimum optimum. In most contemporary forums where political ideas are discussed, it is a rare bird who dares to admit that one's opponent has any decent ideas at all. Instead, we hear the parties villainizing each other and attempting to totally destroy each other ideas. Success is all too often seen as publically demonstrating that the other person, almost always termed one's "opponent," is an idiot. In short, the way we publicly attempt to communicate with each other regarding the important issues of the day has been scientifically demonstrated to be a guaranteed formula for failure. What is the solution? For starters, it would require that we stop using the above techniques when we attempt to communicate. In fact, until we call a cease-fire regarding these four techniques, further attempts to communicate will only exacerbate conflict and paranoia. Until we change the way we attempt to talk with each other on many news programs, it would be better if we stopped talking at all. That's how bad things have gotten.

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Guerilla Politics With Style

Over on his blog, Whatever, John Scalzi does an interesting analysis of just what Obama is doing with FOX News. I'm heartened by the idea that he's playing the GOP in their own game of unfitness-by-association-with-a-label and winning, especially when it doesn't actually appear that that's what he's doing. You would think that the bloviations of such methane-rich mineral deposits like Rush Limbaugh would long since have caused people who might have basked in the eerie swamp-glow of Republican ascendancy to hide themselves from public view, but instead they are forming ranks. If Scalzi's take is correct, they are simply moving into their own corner, isolating themselves, and making it easy to identify them. Those with any brains have begun to distance themselves, and the more FOX bleats about Obama This and Obama That the less sane they all look. Still, the hard core of the GOP is still driven by ideologues who have a hard time understanding that not only are there other viewpoints but that some of them might make sense. Since that ideology is but a short space away from a belief that whether any other viewpoint makes sense or not it doesn't matter because Jesus is coming back "real soon now," they are utterly hamstrung. For years some of them have surely known that they needed to get rid of that wing of the party, but they couldn't do it without sacrificing seats in Congress. Now they'll be forced to not only rid themselves of that, but also disavow their cheerleading section. It will be a long road to recovery, but once they admit they are no longer in control of their own lives, that a higher power must be appealed to, that they have to turn this around one step at a time, we should then stop picking on them. In the meantime, may I suggest no quarter. But let us not get ugly about it. Let's take a page from our president and gut them with style.

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