Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 481

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Zig: The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar," by Zig Ziglar.

 

We buried Papa November 5; I had my sixth birthday November 6, and Winnie Beth died November 7. As an adult writing this, I can’t imagine the magnitude of what my mother was dealing with. I know what it is to lose a child. My mind can’t couple that indescribable grief with the simultaneous loss of my wife. I can tell you that circumstances don’t create character, they reveal character, and what was revealed in my mother was truly a godly character. The circumstances she faced would have overwhelmed many, but as several of us children have said over the years, “Mama never took anything into her own hands.”

It was an exhausting, emotionally draining time, and being together at that sorrowful time in that one room united us into something stronger than any one of us could have been individually. Our unified grief seemed to bind our family even more tightly together. Mama began by stating the obvious. “I’m in charge now, children, and you will listen to me. We all know what we have been through. We all know how difficult this time is. Yet God is with us and will see us through! He has promised to be with us, and now we will call upon His promises.” 

Hubert, the oldest of us, jumped in, saying, “When Mother says to do something, we will do it! I am here to see to it that we all support our mother.” 

Right there in that bedroom the habit of unquestioned trust with which we had invested Papa was passed on to Mama. Mama always knew what was best. And if we tested her, the pencil-thin peach-tree switch she could readily acquire with a few fast steps down the back stairs was a reminder that her burdens required obedience and cooperation from us. Rarely did any of us go against her instructions, and, while being switched was painful and embarrassing, not once did we ever feel that we had been unfairly treated, abused, or severely punished. 

She closed our family meeting that day by saying, “Children, some people will say to you that they are sorry for our ‘loss.’ You are to say, ‘thank you.’ But I want you to understand something very important. Your father and your sister are not lost. When someone is lost, that means we don’t know where he or she is. Your father and sister are with Jesus in heaven right now. Someday we will all be there together.” 

It was comforting for all of us to hear the conviction, love, and faith in Mama’s voice as she instructed us in what was to come. It was obvious that she was counting on God to help her raise the eight children who still lived under her roof.

On September 15, 1944, at 9:08 P.M., I met the belle who would eventually become my bride. God certainly blessed me when He sent her my way. I met her in Jackson, Mississippi, at the YWCA, which was hosting a party for the sailor boys from Mississippi College and Millsaps College and the personnel from the Mississippi Ordnance Plant in Flora, Mississippi. When I walked in and saw her, I was immediately smitten. I know that God arranged our meeting because she had never been to the YWCA before, and neither had I. She never went back; neither did I. As I’ve told people for years, there was no point in going back when I had found exactly what I was looking for on the first trip!

Making headway in the speaking business wasn’t easy. It was truly tough sledding for the next couple of years. Although I was beginning to make progress, it was a very slow process. In 1972 I had been doing some training with a small direct-sales company. Our national convention was in Nashville, Tennessee. During the sessions I’d had with this small company, people kept talking about how remarkable Ann Anderson, their top producer, was. When I finally met Ann herself, she immediately started talking about Sister Jessie, an elderly black lady who had taught her many things and to whose wisdom she felt she owed most of her success. On Sunday afternoon of the convention we had some free time, so the Redhead and I drove to Tullahoma, Tennessee, with Ann. We met and visited with Sister Jessie, who said a few things that impressed me and stuck with me. Then we went back to Nashville, finished the convention, and returned to Dallas. 

When I got home, the things Sister Jessie had said were still on my mind. I called Ann and asked her to bring Sister Jessie to our home for the Fourth of July weekend to spend some time with us. I sent them tickets, and they came to Dallas. I Gave My Life to Christ That weekend Sister Jessie walked into our home talking about Jesus Christ, and for nearly three days that is all she talked about. She spoke of His love and mercy for all of mankind as the Son of God and of the great sacrifice He made on the cross to save us from sin and death. To be brief, she made a very convincing and persuasive case for me to give my life to Him. I listened intently as her words washed over me and was profoundly moved. The truth of what she said found fertile soil in my heart and turned my life around. There was grace in our home that weekend. God was present and leading us. We went to bed reasonably late that Saturday night, and I had still not made my commitment to accept Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, but what Sister Jessie said was weighing heavily on my mind. 

The next morning when I awakened, I realized with awe and surprise that I was actually now a different person. There were no bells or whistles, no flashes of light or crashing of thunder. But there was a new peace about me, and I knew that I would never be the same old Zig Ziglar again. That beautiful, clear, July 4 night as I lay out in my swimming pool, I looked up into the heavens and, praising God more than praying, said, “Lord, I know you put this big, beautiful universe together, and I know that one day you will take it all down.” At that precise instant I saw a star fall and leave a small sparkling trail in the night sky. God impressed in my own mind that he was saying, in so many words, “That’s right, boy, and don’t you ever forget it!” And I never have. On July 4, 1972, Christ asked me to come to Him, and I did. And when I made the commitment to Christ I became a new and better person. I left the old me and my former way of approaching life behind. I wanted to be like Christ, to follow Christ, and introduce others to Him just as dear Sister Jessie did for me that weekend.

It wasn’t lost on me that when I got my life in line with what God wanted, started living for Him and making Him my first priority, everything else seemed to fall into place. I believe that one of the reasons God let me struggle for forty-five years with only patches of success and accomplishments was so that my ego would not take control of my behavior. I also believe that when good things did start to happen in my life, God wanted to be sure I knew Who was responsible and that I would never be confused about their source. And truthfully, I never have been confused. Today, when I teach my advanced course in math to my Sunday school class—namely that “You plus God equals enough”—I know that I am primarily talking to me.

For several years I had been telling people that I couldn’t understand how the Redhead, who had been my wife for nearly forty years, was more beautiful to me than she was on the day we were married. Somehow, it seemed illogical that a grandmother would be more beautiful than an eighteen-year-old bride. Yet she was to me—and still is! It really baffled me because in my logical mind it simply did not compute. 

That Sunday morning in Jerusalem, God spoke to me in my spirit and said, “Let me tell you why your wife is more beautiful to you today than she was on your wedding day. I’m letting you look at her through my eyes now, and in my eyes I see perfection. She is forgiven.” I’ll never forget the experience and how profoundly it affected me—and affects me to this day. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us could see all people through God’s eyes all the time?

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 480

 

Here are a few excerpts from a transcript of a podcast I recently watched, "Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE," on the Lex Fridman Podcast.

Derek Thompson: We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It’s a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They’re good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He’s just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra’s term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft these message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.

  

Ezra Klein: Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now. So, what did Kamala Harris come in and do? She came in and raised a shit ton of money, like a billion dollars in record time, basically. She had more money than Donald Trump did, and used it to try to buy attention. What it meant for Democrats to be good at social media, is to have a good social media team. People in your office somewhere in your campaign headquarters who put out cool things on social media, good memes, and good advertisements and so on. What it means on the right to be good at social media is to be you personally good at social media, your Vivek Ramaswamy, you’re JD Vance, your Donald Trump, your Elon Musk, and what you understand is you are the product. What it means to be good at attention is you are good at attention.

 

Now, Harris, I think was actually better at some dimensions of this. They were just slightly older dimensions and people always gave her credit for, hell of a performer on the stump. She was way better on the stump than people realized she would be, and a good debater, she’d always been a good debater. She trashed Donald Trump in that debate, but she does not do social media herself at any level because she’s not going to take risks.

 

Most Democrats still live in a world where the thing that they’re optimizing for and attention is to not get negative attention. And what the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party understands, and this is truer for them than it probably would be for Democrats because for them the media is the enemy, or at least the mainstream media is etcetera, but is that attention. A volume of attention is itself good and you can only get a critical mass of it if you’re willing to accept negative attention. Agenda control doesn’t come from positive attention. It comes from conflict. You get agenda control by doing things the other side disagrees with, so they enter into functioning agreement with you to keep the thing you’re doing at the front.

 

 If you look at any family’s budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It’s housing, housing, housing, and housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate, to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability. Like if you care about the cost of eldercare, you want to make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you want to bring those rents down.

 

And so I thought as I’m zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce. In some of the most productive cities and states, often run by Democrats, we have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing.

  

Thompson: So the problem is when the reputation of a tax and spend liberal makes contact with the fact that people don’t see the results in the physical world, like where’s my money going? I have in my head something like this idea of what I call Equinox liberalism, which is to say there’s some forms of liberalism where it’s very expensive, but you see what you’re getting. Like when you spend $270 to go to Equinox for the month, right? It’s a really expensive gym bill, but people who go there seem to love it. They’re like, “The equipment is always free, everything is clean. I go into the locker room, there’s a bunch of Kiehl’s lotions to put on my face after I shower. I am getting exactly what I’m paying for. Yes, I’ll pay out the nose for a gym because I love seeing that money going to work.” And in places like Sweden, Denmark, citizens seem very happy. They’re paying much higher taxes than people are in America, but they’re seeing where the money’s going to work.

 

The problem with the liberalism that blocks rather than builds is that people don’t see the money going to work. All they see are the dollar signs being spent by government, and then they walk out of their house and they see collapsing infrastructure and they see crime and they see housing prices going to the moon. And so they think, “Wait, this social contract is broken down. You’re asking for Equinox prices, but you’re giving me a shit-ass gym and that’s unfair.” 

 

Klein: The cities are the frontier. The cities have always been the frontier, not of the land, but of the economy because the frontier of the economy is where ideas are produced and ideas, even now, even the age of remote work are produced in the big cities where people live together and they compete with each other and they cooperate with each other. And so if you gate the cities, if you make it impossible for someone making 50,000 bucks with two kids to live in the city, then what you’ve done is you’ve actually closed the American frontier. You have forced them into lower productivity places. Their children are less likely to grow up around the inventors in the cities.

 

Klein: There’s a theory here, I think that was never about efficiency. It was about deletion. He’s not trying to make things run a little bit better. He’s not trying to lower the overhead cost of government. That the theory is that in the first term, the bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It didn’t listen to him. Bureaucracy is supposed to be limbs of the President. The only way to make the federal government a neural link of Donald Trump himself, is to destroy the federal government. And then, rebuild it as that thing.

All Things in Moderation

 

As a follow-up to Monday's post, and at the risk of wading into subjects that are sure to rile folks up, I wanted to say more about this notion of the limits of tolerance. I truly do wish for people to be more inclusive and open-minded. It is in that spirit that I am nervous about a value for solidarity twisting people into such knots that they end up defending the indefensible or being unwilling to express even a shred of empathy.

Let me give what I consider to be reasonable examples although, in order to have integrity, I freely admit that others may have a different viewpoint and find me completely out of bounds:

1. It seems to me that those who are pro-choice value bodily autonomy. I don't like it when pro-life folks don't acknowledge the fundamental importance of this. I can understand why it is infuriating when anti-abortion folks are insensitive about that. On the other hand, it seems to me that those who are pro-life are horrified at how casually the extinguishing of a living object is treated. It seems inhumane when pro-choice are cavalier about this aspect of the debate.

2. It seems to me that any who wish to stand in solidarity with those suffering in Gaza are doing so from a place of expressing shared humanity and wanting the world to acknowledge that such atrocities are unacceptable. Such expressions should be given wide berth in a free society where we are guaranteed protections regarding our speech and our protests, so it is bad when instead people are muzzled and punished. Yet in that same spirit, anti-Semitic violence must also be condemned and not excused away or even celebrated, so when that doesn't happen it leaves me shaking my head.

3. It seems to me that sexual identity and sexual expression are personal matters that folks should be free to inhabit without being punished or persecuted for it. And, given our shameful history of punishment and persecution, it seems appropriate that we should go out of our way to create safe spaces and support those who might otherwise feel shunned. But surely there are ways in which we can do so without in turn offending or endangering other vulnerable groups (e.g. exposing young kids to overly sexual content). So when such seemingly sensible limits are shouted down, that doesn't feel right either.

In reality, these extremes are just that: extreme. Most of our modern discourse is civil, most of our public behavior freely acted out with no pushback or complaint. In citing these examples I do not at all aim to improperly stereotype entire groups based on a few rare cases. But I do seek to say that, a little moderation makes sense, and while I acknowledge it may be difficult to determine how best to execute that in the real world, nor do I want to excuse people being unwilling to extend grace and understanding simply because any compromise is seen as a capitulation of everything else. That seems illogical and unnecessarily cruel.

Are There Limits to Tolerance

 

There is scarcely a more sacred value in modern society than tolerance. To be intolerant is among the worst sins one can commit, worthy in most people’s eyes of condemnation and cancellation. 

I agree that we are at our best when we are welcoming, and that a spirit of exclusivity and judgment have wrought great harm on many. But, at the risk of being uncouth, I do believe there are limits to tolerance. 

I will say, before explaining further, that determining where those limits are is tricky and therefore the subject of another post. But, I don’t consider the existence of limits to be that controversial or complicated. In fact, I think most people would agree that it is essential to a free and functioning society. 

The unfortunate reality is that there exist in our world people who are prejudiced enough that that prejudice leads to unconditional hate and that unconditional hate to dangerous actions. If you are Black, female, queer, or a member of any number of assailed groups, you know firsthand deep in your soul that there are people out there whose statements and behaviors make them dangerous to you. It would not be loving to, in the spirit of tolerance, invite them into your spaces where their presence would make you feel unsafe. Nor would it be loving to, in the spirit of enforcing tolerance, reprimand you for wanting to preserve those spaces from their presence. 

Again, we can quibble with which groups warrant such grace, what statements and behaviors mark someone as dangerous, and how one would enforce keeping safe places safe. But it seems utterly uncontroversial to believe that there are groups and there are statements and behaviors, such that to erect barriers to keep certain people out is not intolerant but in fact is loving. The fact that it is, in practice, controversial to do so leads me to believe we need to have a more open conversation about liberty and tolerance and boundaries and rules.  

Recommended Reads, 53rd in a Quarterly Series

 

Books I've read lately that I would recommend:

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Klinenberg). I learned a lot from this framing, about the importance of social infrastructure and the approach we should take in protecting it.

Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (Ferriss). A sprawling compendium of powerful self-help tips.

The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life (Ankiel). "Choking" happens in so many settings, thankful for this honest and insightful exploration of why and how it happens.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Foer). Cool to test the upper bounds of our memory ability, and learn more about how to get better at it.

Water Dancer (Coates). Good fiction is beautifully written and takes us into magical places, which this did for me.

Pachinko (Lee). I absolutely loved this multi-generation drama, such that I didn't want it to end even several hundred pages later.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 479

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Bleak House," by Charles Dickens.

"Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery business?"

And of course I shook my head.

"I don't know who does," he returned. "The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It's about a will and the trusts under a will--or it was once. It's about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That's the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away."

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 478

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help," by Amanda Palmer.

People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it. 

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

I wanted to be seen. 

That was absolutely true. All performers—all humans—want to be seen; it’s a basic need. Even the shy ones who don’t want to be looked at. 

But I also wanted, very much, to see. 

I didn’t quite grasp this until I had been up on the box for a while. What I loved as much as, possibly even more than, being seen was sharing the gaze. Feeling connected. 

I needed the two-way street, the exchange, the relationship, and the invitation to true intimacy that I got every so often from the eyes of my random street patrons. It didn’t always happen. But it happened enough to keep me up on the box. 

And that’s why stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to real emotional connection. There was physical intimacy galore: I witnessed hand jobs being given under tables,2 and lots of legs and tits and more being covertly rubbed at the bar. I danced for endless hours, stark naked on a stage, and talked for even more hours with the loneliest men in the world while pretending to drink champagne. We strippers were experts in dumping our drinks back into ice buckets when the customers weren’t looking—it was a job skill you actually had to acquire working at The Glass Slipper. If I’d actually drank all the absurdly overpriced champagne (from which I earned a 15 percent cut) that was purchased for me on a good night by lonely men who wanted to chat, I would have consumed, in the course of my six-hour shift, enough to have brought me to a blood-alcohol level of approximately five-point-dead. 

Sometimes I would get home and have a nice little breakdown, having no idea what to do with all the loneliness I’d collected. I tried to capture it in a lyric, years later, in a song called “Berlin” (my chosen stripper name): 

It’s hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts 

Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts 

People would look straight into your crotch. 

But nobody would look you in the eye.

And that drove me crazy.

Asking for help with shame says: 

You have the power over me. 

Asking with condescension says: 

I have the power over you. 

But asking for help with gratitude says: 

We have the power to help each other.

Not everybody wants to be looked at. 

Everybody wants to be seen.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 477

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Pachinko," by Min Jin Lee.

Oddly enough, all the talk of his inevitable death hadn't discouraged him. He had become almost inured to death; his frailty had reinforced his conviction that he must do something of consequence while he had the time.

At the crowded bar, men were drinking and making jokes, but there hadn’t been a soul in that squalid room—smelling of burnt dried squid and alcohol—who wasn’t worried about money and facing the terror of how he was supposed to take care of his family in this strange and difficult land.

“Yakuza are the filthiest people in Japan. They are thugs; they are common criminals. They frighten shopkeepers; they sell drugs; they control prostitution; and they hurt innocent people. All the worst Koreans are members of these gangs. I took money for my education from a yakuza, and you thought this was acceptable? I will never be able to wash this dirt from my name. You can’t be very bright,” he said. “How can you make something clean from something dirty? And now, you have made me dirty,” Noa said quietly, as if he was learning this as he was saying it to her. “All my life, I have had Japanese telling me that my blood is Korean— that Koreans are angry, violent, cunning, and deceitful criminals. All my life, I had to endure this. I tried to be as honest and humble as Baek Isak was; I never raised my voice. But this blood, my blood is Korean, and now I learn that my blood is yakuza blood. I can never change this, no matter what I do. It would have been better if I were never born. How could you have ruined my life? How could you be so imprudent? A foolish mother and a criminal father. I am cursed.”

"We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.” 

“I know you didn’t want us. My brothers told me, and I told them they were wrong even though I knew they weren’t. I clung to you because I wasn’t going to let you just leave what you started. How can you tell me how hard it is to have children? You haven’t even tried to be a mother. What right do you have? What makes you a mother?”

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn't afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes--there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way--she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

What’s In My Bag

 

 

Apropos to nothing except wanting to document my golf obsession for posterity, here are some notes on what I have in my golf bag, with additional detail on what clubs I use and what distances I hit them. 

Equipment: balls, tees, gloves, ball mark fixer, brush, towel, notebook, pens

Personal care: sunscreen, body spray, gum, first aid kit, hand warmers

Clubs (14): lob wedge, gap wedge, pitching wedge, 9-iron, 8-iron, 7-iron, 6-iron, 5-iron, 4-iron, 3-iron, hybrid, fairway wood, driver

 

Yardages/uses:

Lob wedge – 30-70 depending on swing length, foot placement, and weight distribution

Gap wedge – 70-90 depending on swing length and foot placement 

Pitching wedge – 90-110 depending on swing length and foot placement (I also use this club for bump-and-runs around the green)

9-iron – 120

8-iron – 130

7-iron – 140

6-iron – 150

5-iron – 160

4-iron – 170

3-iron – 180

Hybrid – 50-150 for rescues under tree branches (using a putting rather than swinging motion)

Fairway wood – 200

Driver – 220

We All Share the Fridge

 

 Right after college I shared a rowhouse with friends, and to the best of our ability we tried to live in community, including taking turns getting groceries and pitching in to pay for them. Alas, the pull of individualism is strong at that age, as is the scarcity of cash flow, so invariably things would devolve into exceptions and carve-outs: I don’t eat meat so I shouldn’t have to chip in for the chicken breast, I used my own money for the fudge bars I like, and so on. 

This is a bad analogy, because there’s nothing wrong with co-existing in a house but having and paying for one’s own possessions. But I think about this a lot in the context of government provision of transportation, which has some private elements but is largely communal in nature. We are so car-brained in this country that we think that because we pay for our own cars and gas, public transit riders should also pay whatever fare is required to fully support the capital and operating outlays associated with buses, rails, and subway cars.

Of course, the driving analog of public buses, rails, and subway cars is roads, which are built and maintained by the public sector and used by us drivers free of charge. (Even toll roads are heavily subsidized, in terms of the share of capital and maintenance cost that is covered by our tolls.) As with most states, Pennsylvania consists of rural communities and urban communities and everything in between. It is common for rural folks to balk at having to help pay for urban transit they will never use. It is equally true that urban folks have to chip in for rural roads they’ll never use. Like my roommates, we all want to cut our own deals in our own interest, not realizing that there is benefit for all when we do certain things in community.